Southern Swedish Phonology and the Little Black Dress.

It is surprisingly difficult to be creative and motivated to document that creativity while working 40-50 + hours  a week, juggling three part time jobs and keeping track of their respective schedules. Surprisingly difficult for me, at least. I thought the banality and mindlessness of minimum-wage labour would leave my right brain hemisphere completely unbounded and bursting with creativity and innovation! Nothing intellectual, academic, or artistically expressive to interfere and compete with my spare time activities - a clean separation between mundane real life and the artist's colourful, chaotic studio. I even thought my part time job slaving would trigger that creativity, in the sort of dark way that depression or drugs or childhood abuse does to the generic writer/ painter. Anyway. I will try to make sure to squeeze out whatever energy and creativity I have left at the end of the day to do something wortwhile.

Yesterday I was browsing through my linguistics folders and reminded myself that I want to do some phonology work, specifically examine the Southern Swedish/Scanian use of  rhotics. (r) Basically, the Scanian dialect has two variations of the "guttural R" which is one of the more prominent features of the dialect which separates it from the Standard variety. (The guttural R is also found in French, German, and Danish)  The Scanian dialect realises the R either as a uvular trill, or as a voiced/voiceless uvular fricative. The difference is slight, but noticeable enough if you listen closely. The uvular trill is displayed here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7267825/swedish1_tre.wav and the voiced uvular fricative here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7267825/swedish1_nar.wav (And yes, that is my voice) Now, what I want to find out is whether or not these two allophones (varations of the same sound) are complementary -that is, whether they occur in different contexts in a word, or if they appear  randomly. For example, can the r in the word "tre" (three)  also be realised as a uvular fricative, or is it always a uvular trill?

I will have to collect some sort of data to examine this. I can't really use myself, not objective enough! I might post a facebook request to my friends, asking them to record a list of words containing R. I wonder what level of enthusiasm I can encounter from such a request. Poor friends!

In the very present, I am working on designing a pattern that will allow me to sew this dress:

It's Audrey Hepburn's classic black satin dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Why? Because  Halloween is coming up and I suddenly think I have the sufficient sewing skills.

Installation Art - Literally.



The first thought that entered my mind when I saw this painting was - 'Oh, I wonder what medium this is. Digital or traditional? Oil? Acrylics? Coloured pencil, perhaps crayon?' It certainly wasn't -'Oh, was this painted on a canvas, or on a human being?'

Yes, that's right. This piece was shockingly not done on a two dimensional surface;  it was painted onto a person, in a painted environment, as part of an installation series by artist Alexa Meade.

The results are astounding, and the photographs could fool anyone. In some of the pieces you can distinguish the "realness" of the women's hair, but as for the skin and the clothes and the surroundings - flawless.

Take a look and marvel at the rest of her series here