A pretty little raven at the bird band stand
Taught them how to do the bop, and it was grand.
They started going steady, and bless my soul,
He out-bopped the buzzard and the oreo.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo" 
is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo" 
> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

  I'm not sure what is more puzzling, your seeming inability to do an
online dictionary search, or your eagerness to admit it publicly.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 08/07/2011 10:31 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
>> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?
>
>    I'm not sure what is more puzzling, your seeming inability to do an
> online dictionary search, or your eagerness to admit it publicly.

And how do you think I know it's a kind of biscuit? :-P

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 08/07/2011 10:31 AM, Warp wrote:
> > Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
> >> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
> >> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?
> >
> >    I'm not sure what is more puzzling, your seeming inability to do an
> > online dictionary search, or your eagerness to admit it publicly.

> And how do you think I know it's a kind of biscuit? :-P

  Not from an online dictionary, at least. (Google != dictionary.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> A pretty little raven at the bird band stand
> Taught them how to do the bop, and it was grand.
> They started going steady, and bless my soul,
> He out-bopped the buzzard and the oreo.
>
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

*Correct* lyric:
"... the buzzard and the *oriole*."

Avian theme integrity maintained.  ;-)

Best Regards,
Mike C.

Post a reply to this message

>> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
>> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?
>
> *Correct* lyric:
> "... the buzzard and the *oriole*."
>
> Avian theme integrity maintained.  ;-)

OK, so what the heck is... oh, that's interesting... there's actually a 
kind of bird called an oriole. In fact, *two* kinds, one in the Old 
World and one in the New World. I wonder which one the song refers to?

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> A pretty little raven at the bird band stand
> Taught them how to do the bop, and it was grand.
> They started going steady, and bless my soul,
> He out-bopped the buzzard and the oreo.
>
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

not simply an obscure brand:  a very delicious one.

Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't stand
poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...

Post a reply to this message

Le 2011/07/08 05:08, Invisible a écrit :

> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

How can you call Oreo an "obscure brand of biscuit"?!?!
It's probably one of the most archetypal biscuit you can find, toggether 
with the Whipet ;P

Post a reply to this message

On 7/8/2011 12:34 PM, Alain wrote:
> Le 2011/07/08 05:08, Invisible a écrit :
>
>> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
>> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?
>
> How can you call Oreo an "obscure brand of biscuit"?!?!
> It's probably one of the most archetypal biscuit you can find, toggether
> with the Whipet ;P

Do you live in Quebec?  Around here I'm only used to "whippet" referring 
either to the dog or to getting high on nitrous oxide from whipped cream 
containers.

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> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an 
"oreo" is an obscure brand of biscuit.

Between this and "die," I'm thinking we must have grown up on different 
planets.

  - Slime

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On 09/07/2011 05:16 AM, Slime wrote:
>  > Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an
> "oreo" is an obscure brand of biscuit.
>
> Between this and "die," I'm thinking we must have grown up on different
> planets.

Or maybe just different regions of the same planet where local dialect 
and vocabulary varies? :-P

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On 7/8/2011 3:08 AM, Invisible wrote:

>
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?

Oreo is also derogatory American slang.

Post a reply to this message

On 7/11/2011 7:29, Tom Galvin wrote:
> On 7/8/2011 3:08 AM, Invisible wrote:
>
>>
>> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can determine, an "oreo"
>> is an obscure brand of biscuit. So... WTF?
>
> Oreo is also derogatory American slang.

I had an entire explanation of that typed out, until someone said "No, 
oriole."  :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Slime <pov### [at] slimelandcom> wrote:
> Between this and "die," I'm thinking we must have grown up on different 
> planets.

  If the plural of "die" is "dice", then is the plural of "lie" "lice"?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/07/2011 07:18 AM, Warp wrote:

>    If the plural of "die" is "dice", then is the plural of "lie" "lice"?

No, see, you're thinking that the English language follows some kind of 
*logic*.

It doesn't. It's purely a random historical accident. :-(

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> No, see, you're thinking that the English language follows some kind of 
> *logic*.

  The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.

  For example, how do you pronounce the word "read"? Impossible to say all
by itself. It depends on the context. (Or, more precisely, it depends on the
tense of said verb, both present and past tenses being written identically
but pronounced differently.)

  In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
before in your life, nor know what it means.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 12/07/2011 09:09 AM, Warp wrote:

>    For example, how do you pronounce the word "read"? Impossible to say all
> by itself.

As well as "read" being pronounced either like "red" or like "reed", I 
also love how "reading" and "Reading" are also completely different.

>    In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
> context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
> before in your life, nor know what it means.

Now, see, this is how an alphabetic script is supposed to work. That's 
the whole idea. The fact that English is a random mixture of a dozen 
incompatible languages with no rhyme or reason such that it fails this 
basic definition is another matter...

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >    In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
> > context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
> > before in your life, nor know what it means.

> Now, see, this is how an alphabetic script is supposed to work. That's 
> the whole idea. The fact that English is a random mixture of a dozen 
> incompatible languages with no rhyme or reason such that it fails this 
> basic definition is another matter...

  Btw, Spanish is another language where you know how to pronounce written
words unambiguously, even without context or previous knowledge.

  OTOH it's slightly "inferior" to Finnish written language in that some
letters have different pronounciations depending on the surrounding letters
(which is something almost completely inexistent in Finnish; AFAIK there's
only one such case). The pronounciation of complete words is still completely
unambiguous, though. It just means that there's no full 1-to-1 correspondence
between letters and how they are pronounced.

  (Written Spanish is also slightly "wasteful" in that the letter H is
completely silent, making it kind of obsolete. It's also a common source
of grammatical mistakes because the pronounciation of the word does not
indicate the presence of the letter. Also, there are words which differ
from each other only in whether they have an additional H or not, which is
confusing and a source of even more grammatical mistakes.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Le 2011-07-12 04:34, Warp a écrit :
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>>>     In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
>>> context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
>>> before in your life, nor know what it means.
>
>> Now, see, this is how an alphabetic script is supposed to work. That's
>> the whole idea. The fact that English is a random mixture of a dozen
>> incompatible languages with no rhyme or reason such that it fails this
>> basic definition is another matter...
>
>    Btw, Spanish is another language where you know how to pronounce written
> words unambiguously, even without context or previous knowledge.
>
>    OTOH it's slightly "inferior" to Finnish written language in that some
> letters have different pronounciations depending on the surrounding letters
> (which is something almost completely inexistent in Finnish; AFAIK there's
> only one such case). The pronounciation of complete words is still completely
> unambiguous, though. It just means that there's no full 1-to-1 correspondence
> between letters and how they are pronounced.
>

How does Finnish deal with foreign words?  For example, the "ch" in many 
words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

>    (Written Spanish is also slightly "wasteful" in that the letter H is
> completely silent, making it kind of obsolete. It's also a common source
> of grammatical mistakes because the pronounciation of the word does not
> indicate the presence of the letter. Also, there are words which differ
> from each other only in whether they have an additional H or not, which is
> confusing and a source of even more grammatical mistakes.)
>

While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of spanish is limited to having a 
Latin-American neighbor and having been to Mexico a few times.  I may be 
totally wrong.
-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> How does Finnish deal with foreign words?

  How does any language deal with foreign words?

  Most loanwords are "finnishized", in both pronounciation and writing
(spoken Finnish doesn't have nearly as many phonemes as many other languages,
including English, which means that most finns can't even pronounce many
English words correctly because of lack of practice).

  If a foreign name cannot be changed (eg. because it's a proper name, eg.
the name of a person or a company), then it's just written as it is (if the
name happens to have some letter not in the Finnish alphabet, then how it's
dealt with varies from medium to medium and person to person).

  Country names are usually "finnishized", with rare exceptions. Other
foreign place names are usually not, but writte as-is, with the exception
of some very known very old place names, like some ancient cities. (Eg. the
city of Rome is written in Finnish as "Rooma". If the city had been founded
last year, it would probably be written and pronounced as-is, ie. "Roma".
Another example is London, which is "Lontoo" in Finnish. If it were founded
today, it would be just "London" in Finnish too.)

  This actually causes some awkward things. For example, to a Finn,
"New York" is not pronounced as it is written. And if you tried to
pronounce as it is written, it would be very awkward and unnatural. It's
known enough that most people get the English pronounciation at least
approximately correctly. It's much harder with lesser known place names.
(Britons would have a fun time watching a Finn trying to pronounce
"Worcestershire".)

>  For example, the "ch" in many 
> words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
> etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

  Common terms are rewritten and the pronounciation made more Finnish.
(Psykologia, kaaos, stokiometria, kemia.)

> While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
> still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
> Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
> doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

  Ok, the H can cause a slight change in rythm in some situations, which
makes it distinguishable from a similar situation without an H. Still feels
a bit "wasteful", though.

  I have never heard "hombre" pronounced any differently from (the
fictitious word) "ombre". (I have lived in Spain for 12 years.) I don't
know if it's different in Latin America.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/07/2011 12:32 PM, Warp wrote:

> (spoken Finnish doesn't have nearly as many phonemes as many other languages,
> including English, which means that most finns can't even pronounce many
> English words correctly because of lack of practice).

Egg flied lice, anyone?

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On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:

> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't stand
> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...

As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)

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Le 2011-07-12 10:52, Invisible a écrit :
> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>
>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>> stand
>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>
> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)

And the difference is?

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On 12/07/2011 04:22 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> Le 2011-07-12 10:52, Invisible a écrit :
>> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>>
>>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>>> stand
>>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>>
>> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)
>
> And the difference is?

Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.

Post a reply to this message

On 12-7-2011 10:09, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> No, see, you're thinking that the English language follows some kind of
>> *logic*.
>
>    The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.
>
>    For example, how do you pronounce the word "read"? Impossible to say all
> by itself. It depends on the context. (Or, more precisely, it depends on the
> tense of said verb, both present and past tenses being written identically
> but pronounced differently.)

How about 'leading', is that always pronounced the same? You might think 
that is a leading question, but I always had a suspicion that in 
typography it might be pronounced different because of a different, 
heavy, origin.

... GIYF, yes that seems to confirm my suspicion.

There are brilliant poems and songs about consistent english 
pronunciation, I am sure they have been pointed at before in p.o-t

-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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On 12-7-2011 13:32, Warp wrote:
> Francois Labreque<fla### [at] videotronca>  wrote:
>> How does Finnish deal with foreign words?
>
>    How does any language deal with foreign words?

We do it different. We import English (and other) words as is and they 
are pronounced as much as possible like in the original country. That 
becomes fun if it is a verb. Take for instance that you want to say that 
you saved data. Although we now have a Dutch word for it often the word 
'save' is used here too to describe this action. 'save' is in 
pronunciation close to the dutch 'zeef', the present perfect of which is 
'gezeefd', hence we say and write that 'we de data hebben gesaved', so 
we have an english word with Dutch inflections. That means that in the 
middle of a word we switch pronunciation rules from dutch to english and 
back. Even if the english word contains e.g. vowels that would be 
pronounced different in Dutch, like in this case.

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Le 2011-07-12 11:59, Invisible a écrit :
> On 12/07/2011 04:22 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> Le 2011-07-12 10:52, Invisible a écrit :
>>> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>>>
>>>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>>>> stand
>>>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>>>
>>> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)
>>
>> And the difference is?
>
> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.

And poetry can't?

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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>> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.
>
> And poetry can't?

I can only say this: I've yet to find any poetry that evokes anything 
other than boredom. This does not preclude the possibility of good 
poetry existing; it just makes me rather disinclined to search for it.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 7/12/2011 1:09, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> No, see, you're thinking that the English language follows some kind of
>> *logic*.
>
>    The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.

It's also the only language I know where the accent (as in stress) moving 
from syllable to syllable changes the parts of speech of the word.

We will progress, and thereby make progress.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/12/2011 1:34, Warp wrote:
>    Btw, Spanish is another language where you know how to pronounce written
> words unambiguously, even without context or previous knowledge.

That's because in the 1600's (1670? 1640?) one of the bishops basically said 
"Screw this - here's how people will now spell stuff in spanish..."

> between letters and how they are pronounced.

Technically, there isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence between letters and 
characters, either.  "ll" is one character, yes?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/12/2011 4:32, Warp wrote:
>    How does any language deal with foreign words?

You haven't looked into Chinese a lot, have you? :-)

>    If a foreign name cannot be changed (eg. because it's a proper name, eg.
> the name of a person or a company), then it's just written as it is (if the
> name happens to have some letter not in the Finnish alphabet, then how it's
> dealt with varies from medium to medium and person to person).

In Chinese, they pick characters that are pronounced similarly but have a 
particular meaning. For example, "coca cola" in Chinese might be spelled in 
a way that sounds like "coca cola" and means "tasty sweet water" or some 
such. Something that always amuses me.

They do this with famous people, too.

> (Britons would have a fun time watching a Finn trying to pronounce
> "Worcestershire".)

Everyone has fun watching people say that one. ;-)

There's a saying in the USA:
In Texas, "yep" is three syllables. In Boston, "Worcestershire" is one.

>    I have never heard "hombre" pronounced any differently from (the
> fictitious word) "ombre". (I have lived in Spain for 12 years.) I don't
> know if it's different in Latin America.

The only time I've heard the "h" pronounced there is when it's a Latino 
person making fun of a non-Latino. Sort of like a black man distinguishing 
"nigger" from "nigga" or something.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Le 2011/07/12 11:59, Invisible a écrit :
> On 12/07/2011 04:22 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> Le 2011-07-12 10:52, Invisible a écrit :
>>> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>>>
>>>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>>>> stand
>>>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>>>
>>> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)
>>
>> And the difference is?
>
> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.

Poetry can also be in a totaly unknown language, even an imaginary one, 
and be delightful.

In this case, for both lyrics and poetry, it's the rythm and sound 
aesthetic that count, not the meaning.

Anyway, lyrics ARE poetry! If you add music to any poem, it becomes a song.
Pure poetry is recited, lyrics are sung on a melody, with or without 
instrumental music.

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Le 2011/07/12 17:32, Orchid XP v8 a écrit :
>>> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.
>>
>> And poetry can't?
>
> I can only say this: I've yet to find any poetry that evokes anything
> other than boredom. This does not preclude the possibility of good
> poetry existing; it just makes me rather disinclined to search for it.
>

Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Technically, there isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence between letters and 
> characters, either.  "ll" is one character, yes?

  In my experience the practice varied. *Technically* speaking, at least
according to archaic Spanish grammar, "ch" and "ll" were their own
independent letters of the alphabet. In practice, however, you nowadays
seldom see them written separately in alphabets. In my experience this is
happened first to "ll", and then to "ch" (sometimes in some alphabets you
could see "ch" as its own letter but not "ll"). I don't know how official
this is, but in practice they have lost their status as separate independent
letters. (Possibly the popularization of keyboards has helped this, although
I think this trend started earlier.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.
>
> It's also the only language I know where the accent (as in stress)
> moving from syllable to syllable changes the parts of speech of the word.

There's an urban myth that in Chinese, the pitch of the word dictates 
which word it is...

Post a reply to this message

> Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.

Yes. And typically not a very good one.

(If you actually sit down and think about it, it's surprising how many 
songs have lyrics which don't actually /make sense/ either.)

Post a reply to this message

On 13/07/2011 01:33 AM, Alain wrote:

> Anyway, lyrics ARE poetry! If you add music to any poem, it becomes a song.

Interesting fact: Take Growltiger's Last Stand, by T. S. Elliot. It's 
fairly boring. Get Andrew Lloyd Webber to set it to music, and suddenly 
it's an epic masterpiece.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.
> >
> > It's also the only language I know where the accent (as in stress)
> > moving from syllable to syllable changes the parts of speech of the word.

> There's an urban myth that in Chinese, the pitch of the word dictates 
> which word it is...

  I'm not sure you have go the meaning of "urban myth" right.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 7/13/2011 0:57, Invisible wrote:
>> Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.
>
> Yes. And typically not a very good one.
>
> (If you actually sit down and think about it, it's surprising how many songs
> have lyrics which don't actually /make sense/ either.)

My favorite: Yes' "Roundabout"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKqrC9cT_s

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/12/2011 17:33, Alain wrote:
> Anyway, lyrics ARE poetry! If you add music to any poem, it becomes a song.
> Pure poetry is recited, lyrics are sung on a melody, with or without
> instrumental music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZyNKrYo9I4

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/12/2011 23:57, Warp wrote:
> but in practice they have lost their status as separate independent
> letters.

I'm not surprised. I learned this in high school back in the early 70's. :-)

 > (Possibly the popularization of keyboards has helped this, although
> I think this trend started earlier.)

I don't think it's keyboards as much as it is collation by computers.

For example, it used to be that you'd sort Orwell's 1984 under the O's, 
because it starts with "One". Nowadays, libraries have a separate section 
for books that start with digits, because nobody wants to support 
traditional collation in a computer.

I suspect the same is true of Spanish. Who really wants to sort "ll" after 
"lz"?  Words starting with "ch" should come between "cg" and "ci", right?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/13/2011 0:54, Invisible wrote:
>>> The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.
>>
>> It's also the only language I know where the accent (as in stress)
>> moving from syllable to syllable changes the parts of speech of the word.
>
> There's an urban myth that in Chinese, the pitch of the word dictates which
> word it is...

The same sound has up to four different tones possible. That doesn't make it 
unambiguous, tho. For each sound+tone, there's still dozens of meanings you 
need to disambiguate, even if it's written.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/13/2011 9:31, Darren New wrote:
> I don't think it's keyboards as much as it is collation by computers.

Kind of related, but think about how Chinese dictionaries get sorted, given 
that each word is one character and there are tens of thousands of 
characters in the language, since Andrew brought up chinese to start with.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Invisible escreveu:
>> Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.
> 
> Yes. And typically not a very good one.

precisely, yes.  Lyrics is typically a bad poem relying on bad music and 
sugared chorus to try to make any impact at all.

That sad, the very name lyrics reminds of the old musical instrument -- 
the lyra, with which poets sang their muse-induced poetry.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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Orchid XP v8 escreveu:
>>> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.
>>
>> And poetry can't?
> 
> I can only say this: I've yet to find any poetry that evokes anything 
> other than boredom. This does not preclude the possibility of good 
> poetry existing; it just makes me rather disinclined to search for it.

lucky you that I've done it already:

http://news.povray.org/povray.off-topic/thread/%3C4e0cf0cb%241%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=363745&moff=10

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On 13-7-2011 18:26, Darren New wrote:
> On 7/13/2011 0:57, Invisible wrote:
>>> Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.
>>
>> Yes. And typically not a very good one.
>>
>> (If you actually sit down and think about it, it's surprising how many
>> songs
>> have lyrics which don't actually /make sense/ either.)
>
> My favorite: Yes' "Roundabout"
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKqrC9cT_s

What about Leonard Cohen? I often find it very hard to make sense of his 
lyrics. He started out as a poet and it shows. Although often a single 
sentence does not make sense in it's context, the whole still conveys a 
feeling. That and that he had no choice but to be born with a golden 
voice makes it interesting to listen to him.

On a related topic, I am sort of glad his manager ran away with the money.


-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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Invisible escreveu:
> On 13/07/2011 01:33 AM, Alain wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, lyrics ARE poetry! If you add music to any poem, it becomes a 
>> song.
> 
> Interesting fact: Take Growltiger's Last Stand, by T. S. Elliot. It's 
> fairly boring. Get Andrew Lloyd Webber to set it to music, and suddenly 
> it's an epic masterpiece.

funny poetry not really my thing, much worse travestite in bad music.

-- 
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On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:02:46 -0300, nemesis wrote:

> Invisible escreveu:
>> On 13/07/2011 01:33 AM, Alain wrote:
>> 
>>> Anyway, lyrics ARE poetry! If you add music to any poem, it becomes a
>>> song.
>> 
>> Interesting fact: Take Growltiger's Last Stand, by T. S. Elliot. It's
>> fairly boring. Get Andrew Lloyd Webber to set it to music, and suddenly
>> it's an epic masterpiece.
> 
> funny poetry not really my thing, much worse travestite in bad music.

I was going to say, "Andrew Lloyd Webber" and "epic masterpiece" create a 
fair amount of cognitive dissonance for me - those two things don't 
really belong in the same sentence, IMNSHO.

Jim

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On 13/07/2011 07:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

> I was going to say, "Andrew Lloyd Webber" and "epic masterpiece" create a
> fair amount of cognitive dissonance for me - those two things don't
> really belong in the same sentence, IMNSHO.

Yeah, weirdly a couple of people have voiced this incomprehensible 
opinion...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> There's an urban myth that in Chinese, the pitch of the word dictates
>> which word it is...
>
> The same sound has up to four different tones possible. That doesn't
> make it unambiguous, tho. For each sound+tone, there's still dozens of
> meanings you need to disambiguate, even if it's written.

The writing system has over eight million characters, and it's *still* 
ambiguous?

What the hell do Chinese people *say* to each other?! o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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