The wardrobe in the bedroom

The wardrobe in the bedroom: an interesting article in John Wells’s phonetic blog, about juncture or syllabification and how it influences the difference between pairs such as nitrate and night rate or great ape and grey tape.

With a side discussion on how some (including Prof. Wells and I) pronounce words such as bedroom, beetroot, and wardrobe as if be-droom, bee-troot, and war-drobe (or bedr-oom, beetr-oot, and wardr-obe, if you prefer) rather than bed-room, beet-root and war-drobe, while other, similar words such as headroom often do not receive such treatment (and again, I happen to follow Prof. Wells in this).

This is possibly connected to the age of acquisition of such words (bedrooms are a much more common topic of conversation for children than headroom) and/or the degree to which such words are felt as being a single word rather than a compound.

Visit from Daša

Daša, a friend of mine from Slovakia whom I met through Postcrossing, visited Hamburg last weekend and I had the chance to meet her again. Yay!

Random memory: MIT’s web site

I remember that when I first got onto the Internet, MIT’s official web site was at web.mit.edu, while www.mit.edu was the students’ association or something like that: certainly associated with MIT but the site wasn’t the main MIT web site.

Now, though, both URLs show the same web page. I suspect that nowadays, when people guess at URLs and type them in directly, rather than following links (as was envisioned in the early days of the Web), having a main site that is not at www. is simply not viable.

I has a chop!

A while ago, I found a Postcrossing user who lives on the Pescadores (Penghu Islands) near Taiwan Island, and asked them whether they would swap postcards with me.

She agreed, and so I sent her a postcard (with Krtek the Czech mole, I think).

A couple of days ago, I got a notification in my letterbox that there was a registered letter waiting for me at the post office (since the postman hadn’t encountered anyone at home when he tried to deliver it). Strange, I thought: who could have sent it?

I went to pick it up today and it was from Kate! Inside were not only a viewcard of Tongpan Island (with a distinctive look due to the basalt columns on it) and some bookmarks from Tungpan Artist Village, but also a chop with my Chinese name on it! What a surprise!

Now I need to find some red stamp ink, I suppose.

The chop is made of 文石, Kate said; Perapera-kun says that’s aragonite, though a quick google gave me the impression that on Penghu (or possibly in Taiwan in general), that term may refer to something else.

So! I has a chop.