For your reading pleasure,

I promise that this entry will not be depressing. If you're not me. Um... it'll still be boring, though. There's nothing much I can do about that.

Anyso, I have for a long while been endeavoring to learn myself to sing "Con Te Partiro" in Italian. You know, it's the song the blind guy sings. I kept putting it on hold because it's hard . Seriously. The song starts out with 24 words sung in less than 10 seconds. In Italian! I just could not get it. This, even after looking at all the words and understanding what they mean and crap. Still, no go. So, last night, I decided that I'd help myself out and give me some lexical transcription to go along with the orthography. Translation: I sounded it out.

After doing this, I discovered something neat. Phonology isn't bullshit! The theories and crap that I learned about actually have real world applications, in ways that calculus never has! Suck it, math department! What am I going on about? Well, I had been transcribing words like "te" and "che" as "tay" and "kay", respectively. Um, that's an approximation. I can't figure out how to use IPA in my little box. This, to my English speaking ears, was quite regular, since English (or at least, American English) is just chock full'a dipthongs. However, in Italian, what you say is what's written. (Um... unless there's two "zz"s or a "g" in there. Have I mentioned that I don't really know anything about Italian except how to curse someone off in entertainingly vulgar ways?) There are no dipthongs. "Te" is properly transcribed as "teh", or, [voiceless alveolar plosive][schwa]. And what I was at first writing would, to the Mediterranean ear have been "teh-ee", which is how I realized that there was a contrast between words like "se" (seh) and "sei" (seh-ee), which had been confusing me before. I'd been trying to say "say" and "say-ee " or some nutty thing.

What does this have to do with my crappy singing? Aha! Morae. Syllable weight. The theory goes that syllables are broken down to units of weight, called the mora. If it has more than um.... two morae or something (leave me alone, I forgot) then it's a heavy syllable. All of my dipthongin' was creating all sorts of heavy syllables all over the place, where as Andrea was unencumbered. In the first line, I had added 4 morae. In the second line, I added four more. In those initial ten seconds, I was inserting 8 extraneous um... beats, or something like that. The kicker? After having identified and isolated the problem, I can now sing the troublesome lines with relative ease.

And here I thought I was studying useless  stuff. [rolleyes]