Talk:2657: Complex Vowels

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 22:03, 11 August 2022 by 172.70.91.80 (talk)
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Spoken symbol bears resemblance to 🜏, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%9F%9C%8F

Not really, it's closer to 'əG.' 172.69.33.25 01:15, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Looks like ꬱ to me. Plus some diacritics sprinkled over it, of course. It does look similar to 🜏 when you include the zalgo. 172.71.98.99 06:53, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

sscchhwwaa is easy, say it like the x in "fire" and the silent p in "bath"172.70.85.13 21:42, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

What? There is no 'x' in "fire." 172.69.33.25 01:17, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Ideas: bellows-, reed-, and lucite-based voiced phone production tracts typical in science museums; diphones as an alternative to phomemes (a diphone is the second half of one phoneme followed by the first half of the next -- NOT two adjacent phomemes as the Wikipedia article claims. Two adjacent phomemes are a biphone, not a diphone); the relationship of the position of the tongue in two dimensional place × closedeness space to the fundamental and second formant frequencies of speech audio; diphthongs; cepstral representation such as mel-frequency ceptstral coefficients; and Zalgo text IPA. 172.70.206.213 22:41, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Roger. 172.69.33.149 03:25, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

The vowelspace is depicted in two dimensions for convenience, but it has at least three dimensions. Look at the IPA vowel diagram (already added to this page). The third dimension is roundedness.

Yes, of the lips; apart from the two dimensions (out: place, and up: closedeness) of the tongue. 172.70.206.95 22:59, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
Does roundedness also involve the tongue and cheeks to any extent? 172.69.33.199 23:36, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
I wonder if Randall is doing this similarly to the way physicists present space-time diagrams with only 2 dimensions of space. We can visualize 3 dimensions using projections on 2-dimensional images, but it's hard to visualize 4 dimensions. Barmar (talk) 15:18, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

This linguist character has appeared 3 times now. Will there be a new character page dedicated to Gretchen or "The Linguist"? 172.69.33.225 00:21, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I second this motion. 172.69.248.149 18:59, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Can someone please create and paste in a zalgostring for the fancy 'əG' ligature shown twice in the comic? 172.70.211.134 01:10, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Is this another example of Randall trolling Explainxkcd as in 2619: Crêpe? 172.69.33.37 01:45, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Someone please remind me how to Zalgo a top horizontal bar over √-1. 172.70.211.134 02:34, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Slow way = Windows Character Map --> Group by: unicode subrange... Group By: Combining Diacritical Marks. 6th character from the top left (U+0305:Overline) yields √-̅1̅.
Fast way = HTML character entities, {character it combines with}&#{character number code}; (773:Overline) yields √-̅1̅
Ignore other codes as they are either non-combining or have height relative to combining character (ie Macron) -- 172.69.70.201 04:35, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Are you sure? Those aren't wide enough to connect along the top for me. 172.69.34.10 07:57, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I don’t think what Randall is trying to do is provide a “roundness” dimension, but that’s how the explanation reads to me right now (“such” a dimension, e.g.) Szeth Pancakes (talk) 05:13, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed - rearranged it a bit to deal with the real-life dimensions first, then be more explicit that the proposal is to add to the existing dimensions in a way analogous to how imaginary numbers expand the domain of real numbers. 172.70.91.128 08:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Being an Englishman of a certain age, I had a panic flash back to the ITA. Arachrah (talk) 12:55, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

What was wrong with the Independant Television Authority?
(Seriously, though, the Initial Teaching Alphabet was very bad... It insisted that "book" had a different vowel in it to "up", contrary to everyone's experience, including the teacher who tried to use it. - Ironically, though, when a few years later we were in 'big school' and being taught our first French lesson we got confused by being told at the very start that the words "un" and "une" (written on the board) were the equivalent to the English word "uh" (spoken)... Uh? What's "uh"?... "You know, as in 'uh book', 'uh table', 'uh chair'...") 172.70.85.13 14:37, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
I'm curious how you pronounce them if they *aren't* different vowels: is it uhp and b'uhk (^p and b^k in IPA), the Near-close near-back rounded vowel (not sure how to describe it or get the upside down omega to render, or something entirely different? 172.70.131.126 21:57, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Blast from the past! I remember ITA from when I was in elementary school on Long Island in the 60's. In my later years I frequently confused this with IPA. Barmar (talk) 15:18, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Not sure what the text "There is one unique such function and the new mathematics is consistent." - in current version, with similarly bad historic variations - is supposed to mean. The point of sqrt(-1) is that it never had a valid result on the Real number-line, and only by imagining a non-real dimension can you start to work with such a number (alone or in combination with real values) with a consistency that allows even nth-roots and exponentiation. The "unique (...) function" bit sounds strange. And note that -1 does not have a single unique root (which I can't help feeling is what is trying to be said, still)... its two roots are i and -i, for much the same reason that sqrt(1)=±1. But maybe the statement I'm wondering about is written under some branch of functional number-theory that I'm not familiar with, so could the relevent editor(s) please do it in a way that won't so confuse/trouble me or mislead others? 172.70.91.80 22:03, 11 August 2022 (UTC)