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Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Breakups, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

When Neil Sedaka recorded "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" many years ago, he surely did not envision that the lyrics would be an apt prophecy for a logological exercise. Each of the "equations" presented below results from the dissection of a single word into two different sets of shorter ones. For example, CARDAMOM, an Indian spice, can be fractured into both CAR + DAM + OM and CARD + A + MOM.

Class Of 13, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

The grid contains exactly 13 nodes and 13 lines. Each node is on three lines and each line lies on three nodes. In addition there are exactly 13 letters and each letter is used exactly three times to trace out the 13 lines. We propose several puzzles and games that use this grid.

Puzzle: Down But Not Out!

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 46, Number 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue including the table of contents.

Literally Speaking

Word Ways

A Crossword Puzzle.

Seesaw Alphanumerics, . Anil

Word Ways

In traditional alphanumerics the values (alphabetical order) of the letters are added up to get the value of a word. Longer words tend to have higher values. A different approach which will eliminate that skew is to value words by alternately adding and subtracting their letter values.

Historical Folklore Challenge, Daniel W. Galef

Word Ways

In the small north-German hamlet of Dustig-am-See, now long-since absorbed by the industrial sprawl of Bremerhoben, oral historian Joseph Liedermeyer records the following planting chant and children's rhyme (circa 1530), in celebration of the sowing of row upon row of corn, brought over the Atlantic during the Columbian Exchange, the remarkable fortitude of which allowed it to thrive in almost any ground, even in the tarry bogs that historically surrounded Dustig, thus granting the village a new industry and even modest renown through the end of the Holy Roman Empire.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Magic Telepathy Via Adonis, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

The Main Effect: A magician and his assistant will utilize a volunteer from the audience for a demonstration of long-range telepathy.

I Wroted Up This Ditty, And Sanged It Nice An' Pretty, Daniel W. Galef

Word Ways

I do not believe that the following class of words (if it even is a class) has yet been described: verbs, the simple past tense of which is also homonymous with, or at least homophonous, with, the simple present tense of a different verb.

A Quiz, Ann Rulon-Miller

Word Ways

A quiz.

From Nowhere (Erewhon) To New Zealand, Jason Lofts

Word Ways

in 1996, having been in self-imposed exile from New Zealand for 11 years, I penned an anagrammatical poem NEW ZEALAND and published it as a postcard (8 lines of silver lettering on glossy black card). Apart from a mention at the time in the New Zealand News UK, a British weekly for Kiwi expatriates, it went unnoticed until 2002, when -despite its imperfections- it provided a quirky supporting act to the serious literary stars Samuel Butler and Janet Frame in "From Erewhon to Nowhere: A Leitmotif of New Zealand Poetry?", a scholarly contribution by Peter H. Marsden on pages 365-376 …

Funny Business, Andy Liu

Word Ways

If two businesses join together, they may be able to do so under a catchy name. For example, a dentist and a manicurist can form a business that they call Tooth and Nail. Find the names of the following businesses. The number of letters in the pair of words is given as a hint.

Word Ways: Making The Alphabet Dance (Part One), A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

When I was a boy, wordplay took two forms: solving puzzles created by other people, and solving puzzles proposed by Nature (for example, searching for all words having a specified property). I was attracted to both of these, but more strongly to the latter; this chapter describes the particular forms these enthusiasms took.

Literally Speaking

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

Russian-English Homoglyphs, Homographs, And Homographic Translations, Tristan Miller

Word Ways

A homoglyph is a letter whose visual form is more or less identical to that of a letter in some other alphabet. For example, the Cyrillic uppercase letters A, B, E, K, M, H, O, P, C, T, Y, and X all resemble letters from the Latin alphabet (though they do not necessarily have the same sound values).

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors and back cover.

Compositional Process Of "Through The Looking Glass", Philip Smith

Word Ways

To begin my composition, I started with the chess board that the whole Through the Looking Glass is based on. Since a chess board is eight squares by eight squares, I decided to base my composition off of an octatonic scale, a scale that contains eight notes rather then the traditional seven of a major or minor scale.

Computational Representation Of Linguistic Semantics For Requirement Analysis In Engineering Design, Alex Lash

All Theses

The objective of this research is to use computational linguistics to identify semantic implicit relationships between text-based relationships. Specifically, natural language processing is used to implement linguistic semantics in requirement analyzers. Linguistic semantics is defined as the meaning of words beyond their string form, part of speech, and syntactic function. Many existing design tools use part of speech tagging and sentence parsing as the foundation of their requirement analysis but ultimately use string algorithms to evaluate requirements. These string algorithms cannot capture the implicit knowledge in requirements. This research compares five methods of requirement analysis. A manual analysis provides the …

Visual And Linguistic Influences On Public Perceptions Of Swine Confinement, Arthur Leal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to analyze the visual and linguistic characteristics of online (YouTube) videos and electronic newspapers, identifying relationships with positive, negative, and neutral attitudes toward swine confinement.

This study followed a content analysis design. Two coders, trained to an acceptable level of agreement (κ = .68), examined online videos and electronic newspapers, assessing linguistic and visual images used in relation to attitudes toward swine confinement. A series of search terms deemed suitable for this study's objectives were employed in multiple search engines, and 48 articles and 157 videos were coded for content.

Results from this study showed that …

Development Of A New Experiment Demonstrating Categorical Perception, Kelsey Montzka

Student Research Initiative

In this project, we have created an online portal containing a multi-faceted demonstration of categorical perception. We utilized the 2I2AFC (two-interval, two alternative forced choice) stimulus presentation method which should elicit more categorical results from students, helping to better demonstrate the phenomenon (Gerrits & Schouten, 2004), and provided different acoustic cues illustrating CP. In addition to illustrations of CP for F2 formant transition, the new online portal is used to illustrate voice onset timing (VOT; the cue that distinguishes between the sounds [b] and [p]), as well as how contextual factors and participants’ linguistic backgrounds affect CP. The contextual factors …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

An Interdisciplinary Approach To Documenting Knowledge: Plants And Their Uses In Southern Greenland, Simone S. Whitecloud, Lenore A. Grenoble

Dartmouth Scholarship

Local Greenlanders assume that traditional knowledge of plant uses in Greenland has been lost due to extensive Danish contact and modernization. We used an interdisciplinary approach to reconstruct this lost knowledge: the biologist provided botanical identification, plant uses, methods of collection, preparation, and storage, while the linguist provided access to the linguistic identification of the plants, both in Greenland and in a pan-Inuit context, and access to the historical documentation. We conducted open-ended and semi-structured interviews at two sites in South Greenland to document plant names and uses. Our findings indicate that local knowledge of is greater than believed. We …

7 A&S Faculty Honored With Emeriti Association Induction, Ohio University College Of Arts & Sciences

All Forum Articles

No abstract provided.

Delay Of Principle B In Spontaneous Speech, Kelcie Burns Reid

Honors Scholar Theses

There is a debate over whether children exhibit a delay in the development of Principle B, one of three chief binding principles. The present study examines spontaneous speech data from nine children and identifies Principle B errors in third person pronouns. The study uses spectrographic analysis on a sample of utterances to determine the frequency of cliticized pronoun use. The results found that children do not make Principle B errors in spontaneous speech, and that they do not use shortened pronoun forms more often than fully pronounced pronouns.

It's A Big World After All ... The Pitfalls Of Digitizing And Describing A Linguistics Project By Non-Linguists, Ramona Holmes, Krystal E. Schenk

UTA Libraries Staff Publications - Archive

A digitized collection of linguistics recordings made by Jimmy G. Harris, a former employee of the United Nations who worked for several decades in many far-flung parts of the world. The recordings are unique, capturing languages and dialects from speakers in currently politically unstable countries where field work is difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, since the recordings were made from the 1960s to the 1980s, they also represent a unique capture of these speakers during a specific time. Adding this digital collection to our institutional repository posed some unique challenges, including reel to reel capture of sound from materials that …

Associative Processes In Statistical Learning: Paradoxical Predictions Of The Past, Jennifer Patricia Provyn

Psychology - Dissertations

The ability to process sequences of input and extract regularity across the distribution of input is fundamental for making predictions from the observed past to the future. Prediction is rooted in the extraction of both frequency- and conditional statistics from the distribution of inputs. For example, an animal hunting for food may consistently return to a particular area to hunt if relative to all other areas visited, that area has the highest frequency of prey. In contrast, humans asked to predict the next word in a sentence must make a prediction based upon higher-order regularities rather than simple frequency statistics …

Anagrammatical Poem, Jason Lofts

Word Ways

A poem.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 46, Number 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.