tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48969918304125449952024-03-08T10:21:14.673-08:00The NAPA blogDevoted to publicizing and improving the Nearly Anacrophonic Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA).Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-57280926573157550062009-10-30T13:18:00.000-07:002009-10-30T14:10:40.042-07:00Initial letters in the newsIt's not exactly anacrophony , but the initial letters of words are in the news, thanks to Governor Schwartzenegger's <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/MNBN1ABKB8.DTL">recent veto message</a>. That's close enough to the topic of this blog to make a comment!<br /><br />In all the news reports, there are various estimates for the probability that Schwarzenegger's message happened by chance. Let's look at a very restrictive version of the question: How likely is it that the initial letters of seven words taken at random from English language text will spell out ‘f— you’?<div><br /></div><div>The numbers that have appeared in the press are questionable. Even in those cases where people have taken into the fact that some letters are more common than others, they haven't taken into account that these are <em>initial</em> letters.<div><br />So what are the frequencies at which letters appear as the initial letters of words in written English? I had no idea. So I downloaded plain text versions of two books from <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> and analyzed them. The two books were <em>Phineas Finn</em> by Anthony Trollope and <em>Following the Equator</em> by Mark Twain. After some editing (to keep ‘Chapter XXI’ from adding to the count for the letter X, for instance), I saved the books as .txt files and ran the following command (all on one line):<br /><blockquote><code><br />cat *.txt | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | awk '{for(i=1;i<NF+1;i=i+1) alpha[substr($i,1,1)]+=1} END {sum=0; s = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"; for(i=1;i<27;i+=1){sum+=alpha[substr(s,i,1)]}; print sum; for(i=1;i<27;i+=1) {c=substr(s,i,1); print c " " 100*alpha[c]/sum}}'<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:16px;"><br /></span></code></blockquote><br />I found that the letters C, F, K, O, U, and Y appeared at the beginnings of 3.6%, 3.5%, 0.7%, 5.9%, 1.0%, and 1.5% of the words in these books, respectively. Using these figures, it appears that the likelihood that the seven letters in Schwarzenegger's veto appeared by chance is about 1 in 1.3 trillion.<br /><br />State government letters are neither Trollope nor Twain, but these numbers are certainly better than saying that the probability is 1 chance out of 26<sup>7</sup>.</div></div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-51192030250013386362009-09-19T10:23:00.000-07:002009-09-19T10:24:12.812-07:00Introducing the NAPAWelcome!<br /><br />After weeks of preparation, the Nearly Anacrophonic Phonetic Alphabet is ready to be presented to the public. If you haven't already, visit the <a href="http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~however/NAPA/">NAPA home page</a> and the <a href="http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~however/NAPA/design.html">NAPA design page</a> to find out what this is all about. And please leave comments with suggestions for betters words.<br /><br />Again, welcome!Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-48471609804164910962009-09-19T10:20:00.000-07:002009-09-19T10:22:41.400-07:00GuestbookWelcome to the NAPA guestbook. Leave general comments here. If you have a suggestion about an individual entry of the NAPA, it might be more appropriate to leave it as a comment on the post of that entry — see the sidebar for the correct link.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-7852816341635616652009-09-15T23:51:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:08:30.986-07:00The letter AThe code word for the letter A is <i>aural</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A more common homophone: <i>oral</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-71177988110657173412009-09-15T23:50:00.004-07:002009-09-19T00:10:37.569-07:00The letter BThe code word for the letter B is <i>bdellatomy</i>.<div><br /></div><div><i>Bdellium </i>would be another choice, but the OED lists it as non-naturalized.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-90407572703455227742009-09-15T23:50:00.003-07:002009-09-19T11:33:56.649-07:00The letter CThe code word for the letter C is <i>ctenoid</i>.<div><br /></div><div>Other choices: <i>channukah</i>, <i>czar</i>, or the remarkable <i>cnicnode</i>. This last was coined by a mathematician, and seems less natural than <i>ctenoid</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, the OED indicates that <i>chthonic</i> should be pronounced with an initial <i>k</i> sound.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-76396504595759774532009-09-15T23:50:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:16:31.942-07:00The letter DThe code word for the letter D is <i>djinn</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A homophone of <i>gin</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-28721674960184693242009-09-15T23:49:00.004-07:002009-09-19T00:17:03.413-07:00The letter EThe code word for the letter E is <i>ewe</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A homophone of <i>you</i>. Other options for E include the various <i>eu- </i>words.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-58675744073726746332009-09-15T23:49:00.003-07:002009-09-19T00:15:08.935-07:00The letter FThe code word for the letter F is <i>fantasm</i>.<div><br /></div><div>This is one of the three words that makes the NAPA only <i>nearly </i>anacrophonic<i>.</i></div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-62804511271038782132009-09-15T23:49:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:16:14.606-07:00The letter GThe code word for the letter G is <i>gneiss</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A homophone of <i>nice</i>. Other choices for G include <i>gnu</i>, <i>gnat</i>, and <i>gnome</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-16710214176369218262009-09-15T23:48:00.002-07:002009-09-19T00:17:44.123-07:00The letter HThe code word for the letter H is <i>heir</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A homophone of <i>air</i>. </div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-61522387260866823352009-09-15T23:48:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:18:38.532-07:00The letter IThe code word for the letter I is <i>ingénue</i>.<div><br /></div><div>Other possibilities for I include <i>irk</i> and <i>Iatmul</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-80822704142177910462009-09-15T23:47:00.004-07:002009-09-19T00:19:58.222-07:00The letter JThe code word for the letter J is <i>jipijapa</i>.<div><br /></div><div>The OED includes fewer words than you might expect that have an initial J pronounced as H. I chose this one, instead of a more common word like <i>jicama</i>, because it's so fun.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-59206742398327866362009-09-15T23:47:00.003-07:002009-09-19T00:20:27.956-07:00The letter KThe code word for the letter K is <i>knead</i>.<div><br /></div><div>A homophone of the more common <i>need</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-76673290183505995502009-09-15T23:47:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:21:24.250-07:00The letter LThe code word for the letter L is <i>llareta</i>.<div><br /></div><div>The letter L is the only letter for which I had to resort to Webster over the OED. If you have any better ideas, please post a comment!</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-9941259069765277692009-09-15T23:46:00.004-07:002009-09-15T23:47:00.801-07:00The letter MThe code word for the letter M is <i>mneme</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-23784405737704394472009-09-15T23:46:00.003-07:002009-09-18T07:39:47.408-07:00The letter NThe code word for the letter N is <i>ngoma</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-17071717872715282382009-09-15T23:46:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:25:25.690-07:00The letter OThe code word for the letter O is <i>oneing</i>.<div><br /></div><div>Other options include <i>Oaxaca</i>, <i>oenology</i>, and <i>one</i>. It's tempting to have <i>oenology </i>be a word in the NAPA, but <i>oneing</i> won out. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>One</i> was a contender, and it has the advantage of being a homophone, but it is <i>more</i> common than its homophone <i>won, </i>and that defeats the whole purpose.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-789631766422752002009-09-15T23:45:00.004-07:002009-09-19T00:28:03.607-07:00The letter PThe code word for the letter P is <i>pteris</i>.<div><br /></div><div>This is a homophone for <i>terrace</i>. There are many other P words to choose from, including the various <i>ph</i>-, <i>ps</i>-, and <i>pt</i>- words, but the only other homophone I could come up with was <i>psylla</i>, which is homophonic to <i>Scylla</i>.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-15890668437487631752009-09-15T23:45:00.003-07:002009-09-15T23:45:47.447-07:00The letter QThe code word for the letter Q is <i>qi</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-37652760979144853852009-09-15T23:45:00.001-07:002009-09-19T00:29:17.389-07:00The letter RThe code word for the letter R is <i>rath</i>.<div><br /></div><div>This is a homophone of <i>wrath</i>. It's another example where I had to resort to acrophony.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-58566607915705559492009-09-15T23:44:00.002-07:002009-09-19T00:30:26.795-07:00The letter SThe code word for the letter S is <i>segar</i>.<div><br /></div><div>The third acrophonic word in the NAPA. I considered <i>sgraffito</i> and <i>seidel</i>, but <i>segar</i> seemed best.</div>Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-1733536265344690192009-09-15T23:44:00.001-07:002009-09-15T23:44:49.300-07:00The letter TThe code word for the letter T is <i>Tlingit</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-14855156802257882432009-09-15T23:43:00.002-07:002009-09-18T07:41:14.493-07:00The letter UThe code word for the letter U is <i>uakari</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4896991830412544995.post-44243885703676206822009-09-15T23:43:00.001-07:002009-09-15T23:43:46.354-07:00The letter VThe code word for the letter V is <i>voetganger</i>.Everett Howehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05011605014202742052noreply@blogger.com0