The Allusionist interviews David Peterson
The latest episode of The Allusionist interviews David Peterson, who’s probably best known as the creator of the Dothraki language in the TV series Game of Thrones. And what an interview it is!
…Common Voice dataset released!
Mozilla have just released their transcribed, public domain Common Voice dataset (read: spoken corpora). And with the English portion alone (yes, it’s multilingual) weighing in at a hefty 22GB, it’s nothing to be sniffed at.
…First impressions: Mycroft voice assistant
I don’t get voice assistants. Telling computers what to do using my voice has never really appealed. Sure, they’re cool. And I admit they’re also super useful for some people. Just for not me. In spite of this, I’m fascinated by the speech recognition and text-to-speech software behind these assistants, which, quite frankly, is incredible. Of course, it isn’t the most efficient way of interacting with computers, but when it works it’s magical.…
My 2019 Reading List
With the new year comes a new resolve to start a list of all the books I want to read. Until now, the approach has been to keep a haphazard list in my head. Unfortunately, this mental list is generally inaccessible when it comes time to choose something new to read.
…QWERTY hurts while kana charms: Changing my keyboard layout to type in Japanese
The past few months I’ve been hitting the kanji study hard. Between the two web-apps I use, I’ve regularly been reviewing at least a couple of hundred items a day. What this has really driven home for me is that QWERTY is just not a great fit for typing Japanese. Sure, it does the job, but it feels a little… off. Like wearing your belt one hole too tight. Off-balance almost.
…Off to ProsLang!
Currently writing this from Chūbu Airport, before I head off to Proslang, a speech prosody workshop being held at Victoria University of Wellington. I’ll be giving a poster presentation this Friday. For anyone interested, I’m making a copy of it available here, which should go up in the next couple of days.
…Cold facts?
The growing influence of English is a threat to Icelandic, according to an opinion piece in the The Guardian by Icelandic crime fiction author Ragnar Jónasson. Should we, or more importantly Iceland, be worried?
…Sucker for etymology
Heading into work this morning, I read an excerpt from Rose George’s new book Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood on the Guardian. This particular section of the book documented the author’s visit to the “UK’s only leech production business.” Personally, I had no idea there was still a market for medicinal leeches in the UK, but by the sounds of it business is pretty good.…
Building a standalone IPA keyboard: Part 4 - Putting it all together
Aw. Yiss It’s done! I did the thing! Keycaps landed a little while ago and after a little fiddling around I had a finished IPA keyboard in front of me. Stoked. For anyone interested in the details, I’ve written about the final steps below. A closer look at the keycaps I was more than a little apprehensive before the keycaps arrived. While I was reasonably confident they’d be fine, I couldn’t help but wonder……
For goodness shake
Visiting the ubiquitous Japanese coffee chain Komeda’s the other day, my girlfriend noticed something odd about the menu.
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