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While analog and digital TV signals are coexisting and most people still have analog TVs, it appears that most TV programs are being made with EIA 608B (analog style) captioning and those captions are mechanically translated into EIA 708B (digital style) captioning. I've seen a lot of garbled...

Could've fooled me. FCC 00-259 mandates support of EIA 708B closed captioning for all digital TV (which includes HDTV; not all digital TV is high definition, but all high definition TV is digital) on any television with a display that measures more than fourteen inches on the diagonal. Look on...

You might want to ask your friend whether the Cherokee language was a language before Sequoyah invented a syllabary for it. ASL doesn't have tenses, but does have a way to indicate when things happened. A Japanese speaker might say that English is a language for barbarians, because it doesn't...

Check them out at www.resellerratings.com. You can look up what people have had to say about doing business with them. BTW...lots of good discussion of components and such here, but no mention of the tools (screwdrivers and such). A small thing, but it would be frustrating to get all your...

This thread on Slashdot asks the question "How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?" There are the obvious stupid references to the Who's Tommy, but I hope that some serious discussion will come out of it. I mention it in case others here...

I have some problems with dexterity. 1. I have a hard time getting my fingers into the "R" handshape. Once in class I used the other hand to move the middle finger over into position when fingerspelling. It got a laugh from the teacher, but I'd like to be able to do better. 2. My left hand...

I bet if you asked an English teacher, he or she would say that a lot of hearing people have never quite understood the rules associated with the English langauge either. :)

With all due respect, things have changed in English rules. (We both agree that vocabulary has changed a lot; people have made up or borrowed lots of words for English over the years, unlike, say, Icelandic, which really hasn't changed much since the Eddas were written.) One example that I...

Since my job has had something to do with captioning, I've taken to leaving the home TV with caption display on, even though I'm hearing. It's been a highly educational experience! One thing I've noticed is a local station generating captioning for its news from the teleprompter text. I...

What's weird is that often when songs go from one spoken language to another, the lyrics in one language typically don't have a thing to do with those in the other. The tunes get reused, but the lyrics don't, and the new lyrics are totally unrelated to the originals. Some examples: "My Way"...

OK... I have indeed now seen digital TV closed captioning. (In the example I saw, there wasn't a heck of a lot of difference between some of the fonts...but that may be just as well, because a bunch of the captioning seems to just be converted 608-style captioning in all caps, and if you learn...

Eh? You can't tell the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants by lip reading; "b" and "p", "t" and "d", "s" and "z", "f" and "v" all look just alike. Have someone mouth "mat", "bat", and "pat" in a random order and see whether you can tell which is which.

X-Y dictionaries for any languages X and Y necessarily have problems, because different languages divide reality up differently. If you look up "water" in a Japanese-English dictionary, you'll see "mizu"...but Japanese has a separate word for hot water, "yu". English "run" could be "move quickly...

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. Every time I've started to learn a new (to me) language, spoken or signed, I feel VERY awkward! (Alas, in the case of ASL, I still feel awkward, because I haven't pursued opportunities to use it and have thus forgotten a lot. :()

You can, but unless you planned ahead and left some space on the hard drive not being used by Windows (probably NTFS) partitions, you'll have to resize those partitions to leave space for Linux to use.

Well... yes and no. I can certainly say it's easy to forget if you don't make a point of using it! (This is the voice of sad experience.) Aside from languages designed to be easy, like Esperanto, "easy" effectively means "like a language I already know." Signed languages are very different in...

Very good points; thank you! I do have one question.... Jack Seward, in Japanese in Action, mentions a post-WWII stereotype of the US soldier who speaks Japanese using feminine vocabulary and constructs because he picks it up from a (female) Japanese paramour. (Imagine a foreign man picking...

I wish I could! I'm in the same boat you're in. Not sure what similarities with Spanish you see--maybe the adjective after the noun thing? OTOH, there's also the general -> specific pattern that I've read about, which would seem to conflict with the other. (There are more blue things than any...

Constructed languages have a history of failing when one person tries to keep control over them. Volapuk was an invented international language that was very very complicated, but still was quite popular for a time, until some of its proponents decided it should be simplified. Its inventor...

A VCR records the whole TV signal, which would include the "vertical blanking interval" (the time when the electron beam makes its way back from the bottom of the screen up to the top, at least on CRTs). CC is transmitted in "line 21" of the vertical blanking interval; the VCR records it and...