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Saturday, November 11, 2023

Crusades Study Post #1


Crusades Post #1

Background of the Crusades 

Prior to the First Crusade 

Pagan cults were widespread throughout pre-Islamic Arabia till Muhamed united the Arabian clans under monotheism and propelled the Islamic conquest of Arabia.

The Pagans of Mecca are conquered in 630 and the Ka'bah now becomes a site for Islamic worship not pagan worship.

Islam spreads throughout the Middle-East and Europe.

Expansion under Muhammad, 622-632(Brown)   Expansion during the Rashidun Caliphate (Orange), 632-661   Expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 (Mustard).


Muslims were largely tolerant of Judaism and Christianity dignifying them as "people of the book"

Differentiations between Sunni and Shia

Sunni traditions, Muhammad left no successor and the participants of the Saqifah event appointed Abu Bakr as the next-in-line (the first caliph).

Shia believed that only decendents of Ali (Muhamed's cousin and the first convert) and Fatima (Muhamed's daughter) could be the caliph.



Thursday, November 2, 2023

On Morphemes and Phonemes

Phonemes

Words are composed of phonemes (the smallest distinct unit of that can be segmented into speech), Phonemes are abstract units of sound in a language. Examples include  /p//b/.


Phonèmes

Les mots sont composés de phonèmes (les plus petites unités distinctes qui peuvent être segmentées en parole). Les phonèmes sont des unités abstraites de son dans une langue. Des exemples incluent /p/, /b/.



English Phonetic Alphabet 











The French Phonetic Alphabet 








Morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning that compose words.

 

Morphology can be 

Isolating (Analytic language) in which a morpheme per word ratio is close to one, and with no inflectional morphology (the modification of words as they pertain to grammatical categories) whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples include Mandarine Vietnamese and Yoruba. Because of the lack of inflection, word order and context are important in deriving meaning. They do not use bound morphemes. 

English is mostly analytic but has some fusional elements.







Fusional languages (Synthetic) use a complex system of inflection and affixes to encode multiple grammatical features within single word forms. The level of morphological complexity and the degree of synthesis are key factors that differentiate these language types. Examples of this include Arabic and German. On the extreme end is Mohawk which has a very high morpheme-to-word ratio. 


En Francais 


Alphabet phonétique anglais


L'alphabet phonétique français


Morphèmes


Les morphèmes sont les plus petites unités de sens qui composent les mots.


La morphologie peut être isolante (langue analytique), dans laquelle le ratio morphème par mot est proche de un, et sans morphologie flexionnelle (la modification des mots en ce qui concerne les catégories grammaticales). Dans le cas extrême, chaque mot contient un seul morphème. Des exemples incluent le mandarin, le vietnamien et le yoruba. En raison du manque de flexion, l'ordre des mots et le contexte sont importants pour dériver la signification. Ils n'utilisent pas de morphèmes liés.


L'anglais est principalement analytique mais comporte certains éléments fusionnels.


Les langues fusionnelles (synthétiques) utilisent un système complexe de flexion et d'affixes pour coder de multiples caractéristiques grammaticales dans des formes de mots simples. Le niveau de complexité morphologique et le degré de synthèse sont des facteurs clés qui différencient ces types de langues. Des exemples incluent l'arabe et l'allemand. À l'extrême se trouve le mohawk qui a un ratio morphème-par-mot très élevé.




























Monday, August 7, 2023

Week of July 31

 Week of July 31

Music 

Travis Scott-UTOPIA (2023)

UTOPIA by Travis Scott is an album in the same light as Kanye West's DONDA. With images of a dark, drugged-out often soulless twisted paradise. Utopia is diverse, bloated, and some of the songs stick. Though many songs have superfluous segways and the gimmick of beat switching can be tiresome, and Travis Scott is not the most interesting rapper, the album has some decent tracks, most notably, the jittery boom bap hellscape HYAENA, the dreamlike soothing ballad MY EYES whose additional crooning by Justin Vernon and Sampha weave more subtle beauty than any Travis Scott song has ever done. MELTDOWN, is a decent song that involves one of the many beat switches in the album. FE!N is a psychotic nocturnal nightmare appropriate for a cemetery rave.


Aphex Twin-Blackbox Life Recorder 21f (2023)

The song and video to this is quite the cerebral experience. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Ue_P7vcRE&pp=ygUKYXBoZXggdHdpbg%3D%3D


Film and Television

Alfred Hitchcock-Psycho (1960)

What a marvelous feat in suspense.


Friday, August 4, 2023

Songs I like

 Songs I like 

The Nightcrawlers - Transsonic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzFfCJyusmc&pp=ygUXdHJhbnNvbmljIG5pZ2h0Y3Jhd2xlcnM%3D


Mamane Sani -Salamatu 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzKGFm30SEo&ab_channel=NigerMixChannel


Forest Swords- Ljoss 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5JEd4KWW5M&pp=ygUGTGpvc3Mg


Monday, July 31, 2023

Week of July 24

 Week of July 24

Music 

Daliborovo Granje - Hainin (2020)This band is Croatian, they play psychadelic and prog rock. Sometimes it verges on the heavy. Their tunes have been in my ear this week.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neh4ZAGBdUs&pp=ygURZGFsaWJvcm92byBncmFuamU%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odmYh_68sHg&t=326s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC4XpHEd35M&pp=ygUIbmF4YXRyYXM%3D

I have recently become aware of this song by Aphex Twin. It's a great piece of IDM and electronic music. The percussion and the synths steal the show, they are really the only things going on but the simple melodies and drum patterns that he uses blend in and out and warp into a hypnotic yet complex song. The song is nocturnal and subtly industrial like much of his work.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZVZgCrHy5E&ab_channel=AphexTwin-Topic


Literature

The Queen of Spades-Pushkin (1833)

This short story is a wonderful tale of the seemingly rigid and principled engineer Hermann who becomes enticed to gamble only after attaining knowledge of the predestined winning hand. He attains this knowledge by infiltrating into the life of an old woman who later shares the winning hand with the young man in a dream. As the man becomes enamored with the prospect of winning, he disregards love and becomes enveloped in greed only to lose his fortune. Magic Realism is employed in this narrative through the blending of the supernatural and the real.

Film and Television

The Barbie movie is a bright, occasionally funny, confused mash of feminism and existentialism. Was it about motherhood? The issues with patriarchy? About existentialism? You can interpret however you want, but in its most apparent purpose, the film was a 2 hour long attempted rebranding of Barbie as enforced by the movie's Mattell meta-narrative and the extensive self-referential humor, which can only be zoomed out and interpreted as a real-life marketing ploy. Feminism and existentialism are useful ornaments to give this story a sense of emotion. The performances and the visuals are well done and cartoonish for the most part but can become cloying. In the end, the Barbie movie feels like watching Mattell pull its pants down and act a fool in an act of bombastic marketing only to realize at the end of the movie that all while you have been laughing you yourself have been pantsed and 15$. poorer.

5/10.

Kyle Maclachlan), Mother (Dorothy Vallens; Isabella Rossellini), and Father (Frank Booth; Denis Hooper)
Laura Derne's character can also be seen in a romantic Triad with Jeffrey and Dorothy as well as Jeffrey and her Boyfriend Mike, furthermore, Dorothy's actual family triad between her husband and her son is rendered fractured in the story. 










8/10

 


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