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Jul. 15th, 2002 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vyvyanxNice weekend. On Saturday we went and picked up the suit from AE Clothier and went to the Midsummer Dinner in the evening. Started with drinks in the cloisters in Nevile's Court, chatting to A and his guest, and to a past fellow who I met at the beer festival. Meal itself was excellent; my neighbour (apart from G) was Dr Weeds, who's a great chap for conversation, very friendly. The vegetarian alternatives were particularly good that day, and there was brie with raspberries after the pudding! Mm. And of course much nice wine and port. Then to Master's Lodge for more drinks, where G obtained a cuban cigar he hasn't got round to smoking yet. The Master's garden and bowling green were illuminated, and open to all that night, so we wandered round them for a bit. G and A thought the red and green illuminations were rather tasteless, but I thought they were great. (Still, people always tell me I have no taste :-)
The bowling green is in a secret location between Trinity and John's; before I saw it, I never realised that that region of Cambridge even existed. It has the tallest hedge I have ever seen in my life along one side.
So, pleasant feast, though G and I had a strange and difficult conversation afterwards back in my room, about, um, far future plans and possibilities. Sort of ok now, but I'm still rather worried about it.
Yesterday I wrote a silly perl script to convert ASCII IPA (as seen, for instance, in the lj of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaet_ipa) into standard English spelling. An almost entirely pointless exercise, since anyone writing English text in ASCII IPA will also be able to write in conventional English spelling, and will have some good reason for presenting their text in IPA. Really I just wanted to write this script to see how well it would work. I wrote the corresponding (and I think, rather more useful) script a couple of years ago, to convert normal English text into ASCII IPA. It works pretty well - its main problems are with stress, and the indeterminate phonetic value of a few sequences like "ow" - compare "now" and "know", or better still, "row". But if you pronounce the output, it sounds comprehensible nearly all the time. Converting in the other direction is rather trickier - an output is produced which can be understood quite well by a non-IPA reader (tested on G), but a large number of words are misspelt,
according to normal conventions. This is largely because there are multiple possible spellings of particular sounds - the sound [i:] in the middle of words can be spelt either "ee" or "ea" (and rarely "ei" or other possibilities) with approximately equal probability - there's no phonetic conditioning for the choice, because it results from a merger of two Old English vowels. The vowel [9:] has even more possibilities: "or", "aw", "au", "our", "oor", "ough", "augh" - all resulting from consonant losses and vowel mergers over the last millennium. Basically, a lot of information is lost when you go from English spelling to IPA, and only a small amount needs to be added - hence automatic conversion will inevitably be more successful in one direction than the other.
In the afternoon, we went back to G's, and he cooked a great spaghetti carbonara (with quorn sausages), before embarking on his newly-arrived game: Omikron (or, The Nomad Soul). I watched him play it for several hours, and suggested various things too. It's a great game, combining an elaborate adventure plot (with puzzles to be solved, items bought, found or stolen, places discovered etc) with first-person shooter elements (shooting enemies, negotiating obstacles, jumping over or into things, swimming, climbing etc) and also containing Nintendo-style martial-arts sections. The graphics are amazingly beautiful and detailed, the soundtrack is by David Bowie and is awesome (the game actually contains three concerts by Bowie that your character can go and listen to!) - basically, it's an amazing game, and I'll probably play it once G's finished it.
This morning I got up too early and walked back to college to pick up the suit and return it to AE Clothier's in time. Now I shall do something _worthwhile_. Honest.
The bowling green is in a secret location between Trinity and John's; before I saw it, I never realised that that region of Cambridge even existed. It has the tallest hedge I have ever seen in my life along one side.
So, pleasant feast, though G and I had a strange and difficult conversation afterwards back in my room, about, um, far future plans and possibilities. Sort of ok now, but I'm still rather worried about it.
Yesterday I wrote a silly perl script to convert ASCII IPA (as seen, for instance, in the lj of
kaet_ipa) into standard English spelling. An almost entirely pointless exercise, since anyone writing English text in ASCII IPA will also be able to write in conventional English spelling, and will have some good reason for presenting their text in IPA. Really I just wanted to write this script to see how well it would work. I wrote the corresponding (and I think, rather more useful) script a couple of years ago, to convert normal English text into ASCII IPA. It works pretty well - its main problems are with stress, and the indeterminate phonetic value of a few sequences like "ow" - compare "now" and "know", or better still, "row". But if you pronounce the output, it sounds comprehensible nearly all the time. Converting in the other direction is rather trickier - an output is produced which can be understood quite well by a non-IPA reader (tested on G), but a large number of words are misspelt,according to normal conventions. This is largely because there are multiple possible spellings of particular sounds - the sound [i:] in the middle of words can be spelt either "ee" or "ea" (and rarely "ei" or other possibilities) with approximately equal probability - there's no phonetic conditioning for the choice, because it results from a merger of two Old English vowels. The vowel [9:] has even more possibilities: "or", "aw", "au", "our", "oor", "ough", "augh" - all resulting from consonant losses and vowel mergers over the last millennium. Basically, a lot of information is lost when you go from English spelling to IPA, and only a small amount needs to be added - hence automatic conversion will inevitably be more successful in one direction than the other.
In the afternoon, we went back to G's, and he cooked a great spaghetti carbonara (with quorn sausages), before embarking on his newly-arrived game: Omikron (or, The Nomad Soul). I watched him play it for several hours, and suggested various things too. It's a great game, combining an elaborate adventure plot (with puzzles to be solved, items bought, found or stolen, places discovered etc) with first-person shooter elements (shooting enemies, negotiating obstacles, jumping over or into things, swimming, climbing etc) and also containing Nintendo-style martial-arts sections. The graphics are amazingly beautiful and detailed, the soundtrack is by David Bowie and is awesome (the game actually contains three concerts by Bowie that your character can go and listen to!) - basically, it's an amazing game, and I'll probably play it once G's finished it.
This morning I got up too early and walked back to college to pick up the suit and return it to AE Clothier's in time. Now I shall do something _worthwhile_. Honest.
I'd be interested to see that script.
Date: 2002-07-15 05:15 am (UTC)Re: I'd be interested to see that script.
Date: 2002-07-15 08:12 am (UTC)Re: I'd be interested to see that script.
Date: 2002-07-15 08:24 am (UTC)Yes, I'd seen the wordgen script before. It's quite fun.
ipa2mne does work reasonably well, doesn't it? I just tried it on most of kaet_ipa, and the worst thing it did was "pirreards", which I don't think I'd have managed to read as "periods" without context. Mostly it's very comprehensible. Cool.
Re: I'd be interested to see that script.
Date: 2002-07-15 11:14 am (UTC)