Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics
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<Notes><![CDATA[
Xholon
------
Title: Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics
Description:
Url: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/03/28/votes-and-vowels-a-changing-accent-shows-how-language-parallels-politics/#more-1237
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My Notes
--------
To run the simple app that's part of this workbook::
Click the Run button above.
Click the Step button in the overlay. Do this six times to see the 6 steps in the vowel shift.
Julie Sedivy, a cognitive scientist at the University of Calgary, writes in Discover Magazine, about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. This change in the vowel sounds of some 34,000,000 people in the Inland North region of the U.S., has been extensively studied by linguist William Labov at the University of Pennsylvania. In a vowel shift, one vowel changes which then forces another vowel to change, and so on, until the entire system of vowels rearranges itself. Think of it as a chain reaction.
The Wikipedia article about the vowel shift includes an SVG image that I will use to animate the steps in the shift. See ::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift
Julie Sedivy goes on to discuss the political and social aspects of the sound shift.
]]></Notes>
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print "Northern Cities Vowel Shift"
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svg.find("path#path5055"),
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nextVowelShift++;
if (nextVowelShift >= maxPaths) {
nextVowelShift = 0;
}
}
}
// call the function every time step
nextInChain();
//}
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All original content Copyright © 2012 Ken Webb