whdc/showerthoughts

showerthoughts's Issues

American English has 4 vowels underlyingly

Background

The usual story is that American English has 14 or so vowels counting diphthongs but not counting syllabic r, and that they are all distinct phonemes. They are organized by vowel height and backness. For pairs that have approximately the same height and backness, linguists posit the tense/lax distinction, which results in the following chart:

            front front back  back   
            lax   tense lax   tense
 ---------- ----- ----- ----- -----
 high       ɪ     i     ʊ     u      
 high-mid         eɪ          oʊ     
 low-mid    ɛ           ə     ɔ      
 low        æ                 ɑ      
 ---------- ----- ----- ----- -----
 diphthongs aɪ ɔɪ aʊ          

Three diphthongs don't fit this scheme, so they sit below the chart.

This analysis is unsatisfying. There are too many random holes in the table. Lip rounding seems to be distributed randomly among the back vowels. Why are high-mid vowels the only diphthongs in the table? And if we extract them from the table, we can't compose them from the monophthongs that remain in the table. More generally, why does English have the diphthongs that it has, when so many more seem possible?

A phonological vowel chart

My analysis starts by arranging the same 14 vowels like this:

 ɪ    i         
 ɛ   aɪ   aʊ   æ
 ə   eɪ   oʊ   ɑ
 ʊ   ɔɪ    u   ɔ

Row indicates how the vowel starts.

• Row 1: vowels start front/high.
• Row 2: vowels start front/low.
• Row 3: vowels start back or center, without rounding.
• Row 4: vowels start with rounding.

Column indicates how the vowel ends.

• Column 1: vowels are monophthongs, ending as they begin, fairly close to mid/center.
• Column 2: vowels end front/high.
• Column 3: vowels end back/high with rounding.
• Column 4: vowels end low.

This leads to positing that American English has just four underlying vowels, namely, those in the first column. The rest of the chart is just the same four vowels joined to different off-glides:

 ɪ   ɪj  
 ɛ   ɛj  ɛw  ɛʕ
 ə   əj  əw  əʕ
 ʊ   ʊj  ʊw  ʊʕ 

The /j/ and /w/ off-glides are probably not too controversial. It's not a stretch to believe that these phonemes correspond to positional targets for the organs of articulation, which can be (more or less) freely composed with the four starting points, which are represented by the four underlying vowels. Treating the pharyngeal approximant (/ʕ/) as an off-glide seems a bit more exotic, especially as we are used to thinking of the low vowels (cat, cot, caught) as monophthongs, but:

• The vowel in 'cat' is usually not a monophthong. For most Americans it starts front/mid before gliding toward low/center.
• The vowel in 'caught', where it hasn't merged with 'cot', is often not a monophthong either. As a Californian, I notice only when I hear a New Yorker say "cwaffee", but I believe there is some gliding whenever this vowel is realized.
• The vowel in 'cot' is basically a monophthong, but that's like how the vowel in 'beet' and 'boot' are also monophthongs, despite the underlying glide in each case. I posit that the glide so similar to the underlying vowel that either (1) gestural blending results in a true monophthong or (2) it's very hard to hear the dynamics of the speech gesture.

Gaps that might not be gaps

There are two holes in the chart. If we fill them in, we get:

 ɪ   ɪj  ɪw  ɪʕ
 ɛ   ɛj  ɛw  ɛʕ
 ə   əj  əw  əʕ
 ʊ   ʊj  ʊw  ʊʕ

Do these occur in real speech? And if so, wouldn't they deserve equal billing with the other sounds in the chart?

I believe that in the case of /ɪw/, this is true. In undergrad linguistics, we are taught that the sound [ju] in 'cute' or (sometimes) 'Tuesday' are two phonemes. But this implies that there must be a rule that if /j/ is wedged between a consonant and a vowel, the vowel must be /u/. It is more parsimonious just to treat /ju/ as a single phoneme, in which case we might transcribe it as /ɪw/ just to stick with the vowel-glide scheme in the other diphthongs. And now that it fills a gap in the chart, we have even more reason to want to do that.

As for the other gap sound /ɪʕ/, it brings to mind articles by William Labov where he finds that the first vowel in 'man' and 'planet' may be pronounced differently, one with a higher start than the other, which may imply that, at least regionally, the sound inventory is expanding to fill the awkward paradigmatic vacuum as "short a" splits into two phonemes, /ɛʕ/ and /ɪʕ/.

Underlying vowels and phonological reduction

If you plot the four underlying vowels by backness and height, you get:

ɪ       ʊ
  \   /
    ə
  /
ɛ

These are all fairly central sounds. I believe it's uncontroversial to say that any surface vowel that reduces, reduces to one of these four sounds, and may further reduce to [ə]. I lack the chops to prove that this is simply a matter of deleting the off-glide from the underlying representation, but if this turned out to be true, it would be evidence for this analysis.

Rhotics

Coda /r/ is as sonorous as any off-glide in English, and possibly more, which tempts me to posit that /r/ is itself an off-glide. Thus, it combines with the 4 vowels to produce:

 ɪr  'beer'
 ɛr  'bear'
 ər  'burr'
 ʊr  'bore'

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to maintain that 'fire' and 'sour' are disyllabic. But arguing that 'poor' is disyllabic is harder, so how do we distinguish its representation from 'pore'? Sure, they're homophones for many Americans, but not for perhaps most. Maybe we could just transcribe 'poor' with /ʊwr/ and move on? In any case I admit that rhotic syllables don't support this analysis perfectly.

Orthography

English orthography is a mess, but also incredibly resistant to reform. This analysis gives some insight as to why this may be so.

Any sensible reformer would want to stick with Latin vowel letters for writing vowel sounds, using vowel-vowel or vowel-consonant digraphs where necessary. But the four-vowel skeleton of English has the wrong shape for that. In particular, /ə/ and /ɛ/ map poorly onto 'a' and 'e', since if we map by backness, then 'a' = /ə/ and 'e' = /ɛ/, but if map by height, then 'a' = /ɛ/ and 'e' = /ə/. I claim that this causes any Latin-based transcription scheme to feel wrong. For example, suppose one proposes:

 ɪ   ɪj  ɪw             i  ii  iu
 ɛ   ɛj  ɛw  ɛʕ         e  ai  au  ea
 ə   əj  əw  əʕ         a  ei  ou  aa
 ʊ   ʊj  ʊw  ʊʕ         u  oi  uu  oa

Note the ungainly chiasmus of e-ai and a-ei in the middle-left of the square. Why should 'a' by itself be a mid-height sound, but front/low in 'ai' or 'au'? If we try to fix this by swapping 'a' and 'e', English spelling would be more internally consistent, but so unfaithful to Latin letter values that no one could accept it.

Meaning without God

Theists often assert that without God, life can have no meaning.

I hold that meaning, like beauty, justice, love, and so many other things, emerges from our circumstances. We are sensing, thinking animals that need to make a lot of good decisions in order to survive and reproduce. That causes us to pay attention to some things (that's meaningful!) while disregarding other things (that's meaningless!). It also causes us to associate things with their uses or consequences. And that's meaning. Of course it is possible for individuals to give up on meaning. It's all meaningless! It's just cold, hard, physics! But these people don't survive and reproduce as well as others that saw meaning in things, so we're left with a population of human beings that mostly feel that life is full of meaning.

This theory of meaning has some explanatory power. It easily explains why most people tend to say that their family, and in particular, their spouse and children, are among the most meaningful things in life. This is the only way things can be if meaning serves the cause of the proliferation of our genes.

People rate as meaningless things like video games and narcotics, or more precisely, the excessive consumption of such things, because they lead to poor reproduction potential. It's comical when put this way, but it's obviously why people say "I'd never date that guy because he's a total geek/stoner/etc".

People assign great significance to beauty, even though moralists, both religious and secular, discourage it. Beauty is an indicator of reproductive fitness, either directly or as an indicator of wealth, and as long as those correlations exist, beauty will continue to be a weighty concept.

Since many things relate to survival and reproduction, meaning spreads to many things: a job, a hobby, a movie, a book, a friendship, a conversation. We don't have to posit that a person experiencing a meaningful thing is thinking that moment about survival or procreation — that would be absurd. But the things that, on one level, are the meaningful things in life, are on another level, its substance.

People are social animals of the highest order, so we invest a lot of significance in every aspect of culture. This somewhat loosens biology's grip on meaning, because it means that some notions of meaning can propagate memetically, leaping from one individual to another without the need for biology to confirm that there is survival value in such ideas. But such things — let's call them fashions — are not guaranteed to stick around for a long time, and they often strike later generations as quaint or ridiculous.

A special case of this is language. Words are mostly arbitrary associations between sounds and things, but so useful that they tend to have pretty long lives, and they seem such a fixture of life that no one finds them weird — until times change and the word falls out of style. Today if I call someone a hlaefdige, it would certainly not be taken as a compliment, though in Old English it meant 'lady'.

Words are memetic and life is genetic, but the impermanence of words mirrors the impermanence of meaning itself. When our circumstances change so greatly that we are no longer quite the same species — if we are lucky enough to get to that point — we will surely find different things meaningful.

Now, a theist might say: if this is all there is to your account of meaning, then you are missing the forest for the trees. Don't you see that ultimately, meaning arises from the nature of God, who spoke the world into existence? And I accept that this is a possible explanation of meaning. In fact, you could just take my account of meaning, and append "... and God made it that way," and you'd be a theist, but it'd be clear that you don't have to be a theist in order to partake in meaning.

As for whether theism provides a better account of meaning, I don't think so. One can attribute all kinds of things to the nature of God, even when constrained by a scriptural tradition. A good theory is like Cinderella's glass slipper: it's hard to alter and it miraculously fits something else. The diversity of theistic thought and expression makes it clear that theism is not like that.

Of course the real reason theists connect God and meaning is not that they seek a descriptive theory of meaning. Rather, they preach a prescriptive theory of meaning that is backed by divine authority. Their audience might not perceive that meaning is emergent, and might gladly accept a prescriptive theory, along with the God that prescribes it.

Maxims

Shortcuts are what make art possible at all. You can't ship an actual universe.

The Empathy-Candor-Dynamism analysis of Bojack characters

While reflecting on people in my life, I realized that the kind of friendship I most desire is with people that are empathetic, candid, and dynamic. I also realized that on most days, I'm pretty mediocre on all three; and also that for much of my life, I've been attracted to people who are also pretty mediocre on these axes.

Then it occurred to me that it would be fun to analyze characters from Bojack Horseman in terms of these traits. So first let me roughly define them.

Empathy combines perspective taking and compassion. When empathetic people meet others, they can figure out more quickly what others want and feel. The also instinctively align with others, so as to make mutually beneficial outcomes possible. My working metric for empathy is:

• 5: Curious about, and aware of, other people's state of mind. Reacts compassionately.
• 4: Good at picking up emotional vibes. Reacts inconsistently.
• 3: Picks up on the obvious. Typically no reaction or a much delayed reaction.
• 2: Ignores the obvious. Reacts corrosively when emotions finally do intrude.
• 1: Inconsiderate to the point of cruelty.

Candor combines self-knowledge and outspokenness. Candid people strive for a true picture of themselves, and have the courage to communicate it. My metric:

• 5: Self-aware, unself-pitying, and expressive.
• 4: Has decent self-knowledge, and blunt.
• 3: Can identify big personal issues, but reticent.
• 2: Afraid to confront self, and consistently makes excuses for self.
• 1: Actively believes that there is nothing wrong with self, and is consistently furtive or insincere.

Dynamism is one's ability to change oneself. Dynamic people recognize the need to change and cultivate a taste for changing. My metric:

• 5: Actively reflects on the benefits of changing, enjoys the challenge of changing, and changes.
• 4: Will actively change for specific reasons, like wanting to preserve important relationships.
• 3: Rolls with the punches. Does not dread change, but changes passively.
• 2: Dislikes change, and avoids thinking about it. Would rather change one's environment or friends than self.
• 1: Terrified of change. Would rather let one's life be completely destroyed, or see one's loved ones suffer.

So where do Bojack characters fall on these axes?

Bojack himself is 1/2/1 in Seasons 1-3. He is totally lacking in empathy: he is a dick to Todd, awful to Princess Carolyn, oblivious to the emotional lives of his random hookups. As for candor, he is far too kind to himself, though not to the point of delusion. He's not dynamic at all. He is crippled by his fears and lets his life slide downhill instead. In later seasons, he improves to 2/3/2. In pursuing a friendship with Hollyhock, he may have reached 3/3/4.

Mr Peanutbutter is 4/3/2. As a Labrador retriever, he is naturally gifted at picking up on people's emotions, but his response is inconsistent. For example, he knows when his friends need him around, but he couldn't help abandoning them at a party. He also knows that he has issues, at least to the extent that he calls himself an "old dog" that can't change; but he's bad at confronting negative feelings, which makes him pretty static. He managed to go through three marriages without changing!

Diane ranges widely. She is 5/5/4 on a good day or 2/2/2 on a bad day. She's very empathetic, especially with Bojack, and she's usually unsparing with herself. However, when she came back from Cordovia, she was paralyzed by despair and sank to near-Bojack levels of dysfunction (and this is what they bonded over). She also hit a low when she was presented with the Belle room, and let her despair override any appreciation for Mr Peanutbutter's feelings or intentions.

Todd starts out at 3/3/3 as a slacker on Bojack's couch, but he matures and seems to reach 5/5/5 by the end of the show. This seems to reflect an optimism about Millennials. Gen Xers are portrayed as stunted or insecure, while Todd and other Millennials are merely inexperienced and are less constrained by emotional scars.

Princess Carolyn is 5/4/2 throughout the show. As a species of house pet like Mr Peanutbutter, she is instinctively empathetic, and due to her gender or her relationship with her mother, she is more consistently compassionate. However, she can't break her habit of relying only on herself, so she passes on what might have been a good relationship with the mouse, showing that she would rather change her environment than herself.

Bojack is the only show I know of that coopts the TV sitcom trope of characters never changing (think Seinfeld or Simpsons) by rooting the stasis in the characters themselves. The characters of a typical sitcom stay the same because producers believe that audiences would be unhappy with change. There is no story-intrinsic reason for the stasis. In contrast, the show Bojack makes it clear that the characters resist change as a function of their psychological makeup, while the audience hopes that they get around to becoming better and happier people. The sitcom trope is a comment on why Bojack characters are static: like the audience that sitcom producers have in mind, Bojack and friends cling to familiarity of their habits of thought, at the expense of everything else.

Coping with colds

My totally unscientific method for surviving the year-round onslaught of cold viruses.

(1) No sugar.

(2) Grapefruit seed extract.

(3) Sudafed.

(4) Nyquil cold for sleep.

(5) Flonase.

(6) Sauna.

(7) Tylenol

(8) Chia seeds

Review: Tim Keller's Making Sense of God, Chapter 1

Background: My brother-in-law, a preacher, gave me this book on my 41st birthday. Having been nonreligious for years, I welcome the chance to reflect on religion.

Chapter 1. Isn't Religion Going Away?

Keller wants to convince you that religion is "by no means a dying force". The obvious thing to do is cite demographic trends, which he does. He also discusses the limitations of secularism and science, and for good measure, describes mystical experiences had by nonreligious people. None of this causes me to grow more interested in religion, for reasons that I'll explain.

Demographics

I have great confidence in demography — it's as close to an exact science as any soft science. So when Keller says that unbelief is on the wane, I'm inclined to believe it. The web corroborates: religiously unaffiliated people will go from being 16% of the world population in 2016, to 13% in 2050, according to one fine, randomly-selected piece. This may surprise most educated Westerners, whose notions of global demography tend to be wildly off (see here) but it doesn't surprise me. Nonetheless, it has no implications for my religious life. I defer to people in their realms of expertise. Most people, religious or not, are muddly on religion, and it won't matter that there are more of them.

Secularism

Keller criticizes "strict secularism", which he defines thus:

Strict secularism holds that people are only physical entities without souls, that when loved ones die they simply cease to exist, that sensations of love and beauty are just neurological-chemical events, that there is no right or wrong outside of what we in our minds determine and choose.

But this notion is a straw man, and I doubt Keller could find anyone to defend it cogently, even though many including myself would say things that come quite close. My credo, styled the same way, would read:

The laws of physics seem to apply fully to people's bodies, and there is a good correlation between what is happening in the brain and what a person experiences, though there is no generally accepted theory of the subjective aspect of consciousness.

When people die, it is as if they are gone forever. If they still exist in any way, it is impossible to prove it.

Love and beauty are emergent phenomena with objective and intersubjective dimensions. Our sensations of love and beauty are just one aspect of love and beauty.

Right and wrong are also emergent phenomena. They are contextual, so may vary over time and place. They are not so arbitrary that any system of morality can be made to work in any situation.

Now this, I'll admit, is boring and woolly. I posit various things on the basis of limited insight, and plead ignorance on big questions. To be honest, I get the sense that there are lots of profundities in things happening right around me, right under my nose even, that I will never glimpse. But even if I never achieve enlightenment, I don't go off the deep end either. My outlook isn't solipsistic or nihilistic. I have goals, victories, setbacks, moments of fulfillment, and yearnings that might never be fulfilled. And there are lots of nonreligious people like me!

Keller seems to operate on the premise that there is a stark choice to be made. If you don't like strict secularism, then you have to accept a supernatural and transcendent reality as a basis for your beliefs. He seems to ignore that a relatively stable middle ground exists, and that to myself and many others, it is reasonable and laudable to dwell there.

Science

Keller's treatment of science is glib and unbecoming of a religious leader. He has me nodding along when he writes:

Social sciences may be able to tell us what human life is, but not what it ought to be.

But a few sentences later he writes:

The dream of nineteenth-century humanists had been that the decline of religion would lead to less warfare and conflict. Instead the twentieth century has been marked by even greater violence, performed by states that were ostensibly nonreligious and operating on the basis of scientific rationality.

Here, ostensibly is a weasel word. What matters is whether the Nazis were actually operating on the basis of science, not whether they or others thought they were. Ostensibly religious people do all kinds of horrible things, and I generally don't blame religion when that happens. So why insinuate that science or lack of religion is implicated in the case of, say, Nazi atrocities? On the basis of his own remark that science cannot tell us what ought to be, he should be looking for a culprit other than science. And it's not as if tons of ink hasn't been spilled on what drove the Nazis or other mid-century aggressors. My position, for what it's worth, is that the Nazi's florid ethnic nationalism sprang from Romantic notions like Volksgeist and from a basic human instinct toward tribalism, rather than from Enlightenment ideas of any sort. Keller doesn't have to agree with me, but he should seek out some real insight, rather than suggest guilt by association.

At this point, Reader, you may feel that I am too fussy. Why pick at the well-meant words of a decent man that wants to make other people happy? The reason those words upset me, is that ideas matter. And we really ought to figure out what ideas drove the Nazis, because ideas like that tend not to die. Rather, they feed on the blood of vigorous nations and weaken them, each time renewing their fine appearance in order to seduce even greater nations, such as America in 2018. And switching metaphors a bit, it's as if Keller were shown a police lineup, and he pointed out the wrong guy on purpose because, well, nobody liked that guy. Keller knows that his target readership consists of urbane, college-educated Americans that were taught to be suspicious of science by their liberal arts professors, and the chance to take science out was too good to pass up, even if the true culprit gets to walk.

Mystical experiences

This chapter featured a large cast of nonreligious people that have had mystical experiences, or who through contemplation had become more open to the existence of a supernatural or transcendent reality. I was especially impressed by Barbara Ehrenreich's account of her transfiguration at age 17, which led her into "the great plain of history" and caused her to become a social activist. Ehrenreich writes really well, and Keller does himself credit by quoting her a lot. But this kind of thing doesn't really affect me, for many reasons:

• I'm not a "strict secularist", so I'm already open to the existence of other realities.

• My assumption is that these people were experiencing the same kind of altered mental state that could be induced by drugs, and I (and probably Keller too) would not hold that drugs are a portal to an alternate reality of any sort. In an altered mental state, physical reality is not being registered, but neither is any other sort of reality, though the experience might still be meaningful and life-changing.

• Even if these visions were of a transcendent reality, it's not clear what the consequences should be. Even genuine Christians get to allegorize and soft pedal the New Testament's injunctions to forsake parents and siblings, or give away all of one's wealth. A vision might tweak my value system a bit, but mundane things like parenthood have changed me much more.

Parenthood really has changed me. I would say that I am generally a clumsy person with jerky movements, but somehow, when I'm around my kids I move slowly and almost gracefully. It feels almost as if the air around them is viscous. I think about my kids constantly, and when I don't, what often happens is this: in the middle of concentrating on work or something else, it would cross my mind that I had kids, and a second later my heart would swell and I'd think, "Holy Shit! I can't believe I'm so lucky!" I'm sorry about the choice of profanity, which I consider truly inelegant, but somehow it's the one that always fires on these occasions. I sometimes reflect on the fact that there are drugs like heroine that are so potent that a few uses can rewire the brain so that one's natural affection for kith and kin fall away; and the thought that I could look on the faces of my children and feel nothing, terrifies me more than death itself. All of this is to say, to heck with mystical experiences. I've thrown my lot in with my family, my friends, and whatever part of humanity I will have the fortune to meet. I will reckon with an alternate reality when I exit this one. It will happen soon enough.