I noticed on previous trips to Graz that there's some cute curiosities to the Graz (and Austrian dialect). For instance, words that have "ei", in hochdeutsch are pronounced like the diphthong 'i' in "mine" (/aɪ/. But here it's still quite separated as consecutive vowels: an /e/ or /ɛ/ followed by /i/. So "zwei" (two) is /tsfei/ rather than the more ( Read more... )

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12774Read more... )

In CMU alumni's recent newsletter, I read a piece about Duolingo, a free language-learning app. While reading the article, I learned the following useful tidbit: Initial funding came from Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm with technology investments that include Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga and actor-producer Ashton Kutcher.
I ( Read more... )

When I got to Lille, I decided to walk to my hotel. Bad decision. It started pouring and even though I had an umbrella, I got pretty soaked. I arrived at the hotel at 11:45am, which was lucky since the receptionist was getting ready to go on her two hour lunch break. I got even more lucky because it turned out my room had already been cleaned so I ( Read more... )

He is not the bop-bop you're looking for...

Christian and I stopped at our awesome video rental on the way home from food shopping in order to get their much-needed and much-appreciated iced coffee (I swear, I've never had iced coffee this good, which is why we keep getting it). While we were waiting, we noticed that the barista was reading Enderton's A Mathematical Introduction to Logic, ( Read more... )

Christian's probably going to be invited to this conference in Lyon next July about endangered languages, which is appropriately called "Langues en danger". There's little information on it online and they haven't made many preparations yet, so I offered to make a poster. ( For some reason they rejected it... )

Today we saw perhaps the best use of bad English during our entire stay in France. We passed by a store selling tuxedoes and classy men's suits that was called... New Yams. As if that weren't enough, their motto was L'envie de séduire. Yes, when I'm on a fancy date, I can't imagine anything sexier than saying, "I want to seduce you with my New Yams ( Read more... )

Conference has been going well so far. Today Nathan gave a talk on his genus of numerical semigroups research. Apparently one of the Duluth REU students solved the main conjecture, but the proof is so complicated that no one has gotten through it yet to check that it's correct. Today was also the first of three lectures by the organizer, Nathanson ( Read more... )

In all my experience with French people and French discothèques, I came to the very early conclusion that French people don't know how to dance and they don't even really know good techno from bad techno. The music's all equally exciting and their dancing involves a lot of rocking to the slowest possible beat, like everyone is swaying with the ( Read more... )