In linguistics, a suprafix is a type of affix where a suprasegmental change (such as tone or stress) modifies an existing morpheme’s meaning. In many languages, they are used to differentiate between otherwise identical lexemes, but in some they are used derivationally or inflectionally.
An example in English is the creation of initial-stress-derived nouns, as with produce: /prɵˈdjuːs/ being a verb meaning to create or to bring forth, and /ˈprɒdjuːs/ being a noun referring to farm products, especially fruits and vegetables.

-Wikipedia: Suprafix

The nouns resulting from suprafix are called initial-stress-derived nouns, and they’re more common than you might think.

Generally speaking, English doesn’t pay much attention to inflection on the grammatical level. While inflection changes meaning all time time in English, such as when we change tone at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, these are changes in pragmatic meaning. There are relatively few cases in English where inflection changes the grammatical form or meaning of the word. There are around 170 verb-noun/adjective pairs like these.

This phenomenon is different from ablaut (sing/sang/sung), which also changes grammatical meaning, and from near homophones like desert/dessert, which mark differences in lexical meaning. What I’m interested in here is pairs of forms for which the IPA phonetic spellings would be identical, but for which the placements of stress effect variation in grammatical meaning––usually between noun and verb.

Here are some examples:

Some of the above, like “ally” aren’t really observed in English anymore, even though there was originally a noun/verb inflectional distinction between álly and allỳ. The difference in the pronunciations of consonants in /ˈrɛfjus/ and /rɛˈfjuːz/ results from English sound rules regarding stress. It should still count.

A foray into political blogging

Tuesday election in Massachusetts was a remarkable triumph of democracy and, consequently, a case in point for why democracy it is a dreadful idea:
There was actually quite a high turnout for an off-season election, and the margin of victory was healthy. This is to say that the ratio of people who actively chose Brown as their senator to people who chose him through complacency, is rather high. Further, I don’t think Massachusetts voters were “duped” into voting for Brown. They elected him because they are dissatisfied with the governance of the last 11 months and, quite frankly, I don’t blame them.

That I think they’re foolish is neither here nor there, because I was quite certain of that even before they elected a male Palin. Mobile that they are, they voted out of frustration, and in solidarity with a candidate who shares with them, if nothing else, a similar sense of frustration. It’s no accident that Brown was campaigning on “Change.” If this country had seen it in the past 11 months, the results would have been different.

So the indignant can blame “stupid voters” if they like, but these are a given, as far as I’m concerned. If I had my way the state legislatures would still be electing representatives to Congress. Even were that the case, however, still we would have the issue of Democrats’ seeming inability to accomplish anything of note, their erstwhile filibuster-proof majority notwithstanding. So I just can’t get myself worked up over their being one more Republican in the Senate, because I have no confidence the Democrats would have been able to do anything more with a compatriot in his place. So, not only am I angered and ashamed to have to face the foolishness of my Commonwealth––something I’m generally able to avoid doing––but these feelings actually outweigh those concerns I have about the political repercussions of the election.

Many will be familiar with this rant:
I blame the system, arguing that, were we all thinking as reasonable republicans, we would be electing representatives based on our expectations that they would represent our interests well in Congress. I argue that the problem with this democratic mindset is that people identify with traits and beliefs, not with a candidate’s perceived ability to represent his constituent’s interests.

But in this case we are seeing an especially (though not uniquely) Democratic permutation of this cancer:
Even without a supermajority, Republicans were able to legislate more in a month than this Congress has in a year. I argue that this is in part because, remarkably enough, Republicans are more republican or, it clearer terms, they are more parliamentary. Given their marching orders, they deviate considerably less. Democrats seem impossibly fixated on being democratic about everything, including legislation. But if anything in this bloody country is supposed to be republican, it’s the legislature! The town hall meetings cum tea parties, the incessant committee drafting and debating… This is Athens!

Forgive me my rant, and take away from it a modicum of fear to temper frustration.
I know that overeducated American liberals and conservatives alike were wagging their tongues about the dangers of Athenian democracy and the slippery slope of weak republics even before there existed a government on this continent about which to worry. Likewise, I know that intellectuals have brayed about the decadence of Capitalism for a good fifth of a millennium now.

But isolated moments of populist democracy like the one we witnessed yesterday, they highlight for me all of these greater issues.
Democracy has never, at any point in time, worked well or sustainably vis-à-vis the maintenance of a liberal society. And the trend toward popular democracy couldn’t be more obvious in this country.

Benjamin (r-MA)

From BBC on the death of the last German WWI veteran:

“The German public was within a hair’s breadth of never learning of the end of an era,” wrote Der Spiegel, until someone updated his death notice on the internet encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia.

In its obituary for Kästner, Die Welt noted: “The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting.”

Link to Wikipedia article.

Germany has no organization that keeps records of or on its veterans. That follows. A German Veterans Association? – it wouldn’t go over so well. Still, what an interesting phenomenon.
Japan has shrines to war dead and there are fracases about them all the time.
“In Germany, in this respect, things are kept quiet - they’re not a big deal.” - Peter Kästner, the soldier’s son (BBC).

Unicode 5.0 is finally out, and it includes full support for Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform characters.

Download the ZIP file containing CuneiformComposite 1.001

UPenn’s Cuneiform Digital Library (CDL) site shows further instructions on how to download and activate the new composite package, but all you have to do is download the above and double click to install in your Fontbook.
Apple’s Character Palette (q.v. earlier post) doesn’t permit direct input to documents yet, but you’ll be able to view, copy, and paste the characters.

Finally.

Привет, мои друзья.

Russian bombers have flown to the US island of Guam in the Pacific in a surprise manoeuvre reminiscent of the Cold War era.

Two Tu-95 turboprops flew this week to Guam, home to a big US military base, Russian Maj Gen Pavel Androsov said.

They “exchanged smiles” with US pilots who scrambled to track them, he added.

That from the BBC. So much for assuming those are Yankee vapor trails.

One can’t help but marvel at the resilience of some Roman Infrastructure and, at the same time, be astounded that most regions proved totally incapable of maintaining them in working order.

Below is a view of some of the impressive remains of the 192 towers and 11 fortified gates that once defended Constantinople’s western approach against Avars, Crusaders, Arabs, Rus’, Bulgars, and against the Turks for centuries. Once they did finally fall to the Ottomans in 1453 they continued to defend the that Empire for 400 years.

The walls, stretching 5.5 km from the Golden Horn all the way to the Sea of Marmara, were built (A.D. 412-422) by the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II.

Their two-curtain construction, in addition to strengthening defenses, allowed the area between the two ramparts to be used for troop movements.

From Wikipedia:

The walls were built of alternating layers of stone and brick in two lines of defense which adjoined the ditch. The Inner Wall (ἔσω τείχος or μέγα τείχος, “Great Wall”) was a solid structure, 5 metres thick and 12 metres high. It was strengthened with 96 towers, mainly square but also octagonal or hexagonal, 18-20 metres tall, every 55 metres. Each tower had a battlemented terrace on the top.

The Outer Wall (ἔξω τείχος or “Proteichisma”) was built 15-20 metres from the main wall, creating a space between the two walls called perivolos. The Outer Wall was 2 metres thick at its base, and featured arched chambers on the level of the perivolos, crowned with a battlemented walkway, reaching a height of 8.5 metres. (…) The Outer Wall likewise had 96 towers, square or crescent-shaped, situated in the middle distance between the Inner Wall’s towers.

The moat (σούδα) was situated at a distance of about 15 metres from the Outer Wall, creating a terrace called parateichion, where a paved road ran along the walls’ length. The moat itself, which could be flooded, was about 20 metres wide and 10 metres deep, featuring a 1.5 metre tall crenellated wall on the inner side, serving as a first line of defence.

Below, Byzantium’s aqueduct– built by Emperor Valens in the late 4th century– which faithfully supplied the city with water until the late 18th century.

The aqueduct with double-tiered arches, which stretched across the little valley between two of the city’s seven hills (Fatih and Süleymaniye), was originally over 1,000 m long and 26.5 m high in the middle. The impressive structure, still intact, has today a length of 971 m and a maximum height of only 20 m, since the surrounding ground level has risen 6 m. It was used during the Ottoman period for one branch of the Halkalı water supply system and repaired during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) and later of Mustafa II (1695 - 1703).

I can’t think of anything that was maintained or repaired in Western Europe. At least, nothing leaps to mind. Please comment if you can thing of any examples of things like this.

According to the BBC story on the response to the newly released film 300,

“Javad Shamaqdari, a cultural advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said [the new film 300] was “plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization”.

He branded the film “psychological warfare” against Tehran and its people.

view the trailer for the film

I think it’s unlikely that Holywood is conspiring with the Bush administration to demonize Iranians, but I do think that it reflects a very unhealthy trend in our society when we can’t create villans that aren’t the embodiment of pure evil and corruption. It seems it’s not only our world that’s moving toward extremes, but also our imagination of it, and of our history.

Depictions of conflicts between Greece and Persia have varied over the centuries, but it would seem that in no period has the depiction of the Persians been more demonizing than in our own.
The Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. was one of the first seeds of this theme, an heroic story of the early wars the Greeks fought with Persia. But the campaigns of Alexander the Great, 150 years later, also forever changed the region’s attitude toward Greco-Persian relations, contemporary and historical.

The ‘Alexander Sarcophagus’ in İstanbul’s Arkeoloji Müsesi, thought to have been built for King Abdalonymos of Sidon, depicts Alexander the Great winning a victory over the Persians. Dating from the last quarter of the 4th century B.C., the relief was probably sculpted within decades of Alexander’s death in Babylon (323 B.C.). What this proximity– temporal and, relatively speaking, geographical– to the events it depicts may lend to the depiction of characters is open to debate but, irrespective of this discussion, it would seem that this depiction is evenhanded, even if it shows a Persian defeat.

Alexander, shown in the panel above, is presented similarly to the Persian King Darius, shown in the panel below.

Download the full-size JPG (11.2 mb)

Darius and the Persians may be distinguished by their characteristic headgear, also visible in the (Roman copy of a) late 2nd c. B.C. painting by Apelles or Philoxenos of Eretria.

With this above as primer, let’s consider the newly released film 300.

Cynthia Fuchs’ review of the film (which, I admit, I’ve not yet seen), rips in on aesthetic and cultural levels, easily extrapolated to the historical.

The Persians in the film, she explains, shown as black, misshapen, and “Oriental”, which she describes as “identified by music cues and ninja-style outfits, complete with silver masks”, are a far cry from the heroic but doomed soldiers in the above images.

“Xerxes (RODRIGO SANTORO) vents his rage at the losses sustained by his army while facing 300 Spartans
The Spartans’ chief enemy, the king of the Persians and so set off as Leonidas’ opposite, is a giant named Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, digitally enlarged and boom-voiced), a self-proclaimed god-king with an affection for mascara and facial piercings. His abs are not nearly so defined as those of the Spartans!, suggesting that he spends his time not working out but instead wallowing in a perverse and girly way. Insisting that the Spartans! and Leonidas in particular kneel before him, Xerxes recalls Jaye Davidson’s Ra in Stargate, evoking manly men’s anxieties about transsexualism and unfathomable desire. (All this deviance is made manifest during an orgy scene presided over by Xerxes: lesbians dance and kiss, a hunchback traitor gets some, and the much-displayed skin is overwhelmingly dark: the lack of imagination that goes into this demonization is depressing.)”

So what about the response from Iran? Again, Mr Shamaqdari:

“American cultural officials thought they could get mental satisfaction by plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization,” he said.

“Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture.

“Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies.”

This seems unlikely. Nevertheless, the issue of polarization– in our politics as well as in our ability to conceptualize politics and the world– is a very real one.

“The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004 is an innovative online exhibition presenting more than 250 television commercials from every election year beginning in 1952, when the first campaign ads aired, and including ads from this year’s campaign. Users can watch nearly four hours of TV commercials and explore the expanding world of Web-based political advertising. The site includes a searchable database and features commentary, historical background, election results, and navigation organized by both year and theme.”

Pennying is a simple drinking game popular among students at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College, Durham, Bath, Exeter, York and Bristol. Unlike most drinking games, the rules of pennying are almost never explicitly declared to be in force; rather, by putting oneself in a social situation involving the consumption of alcohol, one is implicitly subjected to the rules should a “Pennying” situation occur. This state of affairs is most likely to be enforced at dinners known as Formal Halls where cheap wine is drunk and it is common for complete strangers to “Penny” each other.

Accepted rules of pennying: