roomthily

Grimm’s Fairy Tale Metrics

Metapho.rs mapping metaphors of the ‘x is the y of z’ variety

conorhoughton:

This evening the twitter celebrity @MooseAllain retweeted mainly English, particularly Wessex/Cornwall, regional names for woodlice. They are amazing. I have tried to make a map of the results. The word sizes are chosen to make the words fit and the locations are approximate and I just couldn’t get “Snarly-Grocklemice” to fit in Cornwall. Outside the map, slaters is apparently also common in Northern Ireland and clocks elsewhere in Ireland and they are called potato bugs in Canada and rolly pollys or pill bugs in the US.

The tweets have now been storified:

http://storify.com/mooseallain/pea-bugs-slater-and-monkey-pigs

[The word “bishy barnabee”, from Norfolk, has been removed; it seems it is actually a local word for ladybird

http://www.norfolkdialect.com/glossary01.htm

and has an amusing etymology

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-guddle-through-the-dialectal-wordbank

(Thanks for @stancarey and @boswellaffleck for this last bit).]

feltron:

IS THE NEW

The project documents every instance of the phrase “is the new” encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device.

superlinguo:

I’ve finally finished what started out as my Easter weekend craft project!

I cross stitched the pulmonic consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It ended up taking so long not because of the individual characters but because it took forever to grey out the areas that aren’t physiologically possible. 

If you’re not familiar with the IPA I’ll give you my patented 30 second lesson. The vertical categories vary by the place of articulation - that is where in the mouth they are made. The first are ‘bi-labial’, made with the lips. The ‘p’ and ‘b’ are more or less exactly as you make them in English, by time you get to the question-marky think you’re at your glottis, where you make sounds. If you say ‘uh-oh’ that gap in the middle is a glottal stop. See, you make them without even knowing! Good work you! On the horizontal the difference is manner of articulation - that is how you make the sounds. The first ones are ‘stops’, which you make by closing your mouth fully at some point and releasing it.  below that are nasals, such as ‘m’ and ‘n’ and ‘ng’ in English. And so on. A chart with all those labels can be found here. Linguists, and especially phoneticians, use these symbols to accurately represent the same sounds across many different languages.

Next I’ll have to start on the vowels!

moritzheller:

Inspired by visualizations of particle collisions at LHC CERN, wordcollider accelerate two phrases against each other on a collision course. The collision split the words up in their letters, their elementary particles, so to speak. After collision, wordcollider visualize a signature for each letter, based on their phonetic characteristics.

Wordcollider is the result of a processing workshop with Steffen Fiedler. steffenfiedler.com/

music by “Epic Soul Factory”
jamendo.com/artist/Epic_Soul_Factory

Disappearing Languages (highlighting UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day 2011)

by National Geographic