Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological figure. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which came to life; the general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea, first presented in 1871. Shaw would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and its film version. Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito Pagliardini, but above all, the cantankerous Henry Sweet. Shaw read it to famed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell in June, she came on board immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production.
Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translation by Shaw's Viennese literary agent and acolyte, Siegfried Trebitsch. Its first New York production opened on 24 March 1914 at the German-language Irving Place Theatre, it opened in London on 11 April 1914, at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's His Majesty's Theatre and starred Mrs. Campbell as Eliza and Tree as Higgins, running for 118 performances. Shaw directed the actors through tempestuous rehearsals punctuated by at least one of the two storming out of the theatre in a rage.'Portico of Saint Paul's Church' – 11.15 p.m. A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Among them are the Eynsford-Hills, superficial social climbers eking out a living in "genteel poverty", consisting of Mrs. Eynsford-Hill and her daughter Clara. Clara's brother Freddy enters having earlier been dispatched to secure them a cab, but being rather timid and faint-hearted he has failed to do so; as he goes off once again to find a cab, he bumps into Eliza.
Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world. Shortly they are joined by Colonel Pickering. While Eliza tries to sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that a man is writing down everything she says; the man is a professor of phonetics. Eliza worries that Higgins is a police officer and will not calm down until Higgins introduces himself, it soon becomes apparent that Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics. Higgins tells Pickering that he could pass off the flower girl as a duchess by teaching her to speak properly; these words of bravado spark an interest in Eliza, who would love to make changes in her life and become more mannerly though, to her, it only means working in a flower shop. At the end of the act, Freddy returns after finding a taxi, only to find that his mother and sister have gone and left him with the cab; the streetwise Eliza takes the cab from him, using the money that Higgins tossed to her, leaving him on his own.
Higgins' home – the next day As Higgins demonstrates his phonetics to Pickering, the housekeeper Mrs. Pearce, tells him that a young girl wants to see him. Eliza has shown up, she tells Higgins. He shows no interest. Higgins claimed. Pickering makes a bet with him on his claim, says that he will pay for her lessons if Higgins succeeds, she is sent off to have a bath. Mrs. Pearce tells Higgins that he must behave himself in the young girl's presence, meaning he must stop swearing, improve his table manners, but he is at a loss to understand why she should find fault with him. Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father, appears with the sole purpose of getting money out of Higgins, having no paternal interest in his daughter's welfare, he sees himself as a member of the undeserving poor, means to go on being undeserving. With his intelligent mind untamed by education, he has an eccentric view of life, he is aggressive, when Eliza, on her return, sticks her tongue out at him, he goes to hit her, but is prevented by Pickering.
The scene ends with Higgins telling Pickering that they have got a difficult job on their hands. Mrs. Higgins' drawing room Higgins bursts in and tells his mother he has picked up a "common flower girl" whom he has been teaching. Mrs. Higgins is not impressed with her son's attempts to win her approval because it is her'at home' day and she is entertaining visitors; the visitors are the Eynsford-Hills. Higgins is rude to them on their arrival. Eliza soon falls into talking about the weather and her family. Whilst she is now able to speak in beautifully modulated tones, the substance of what she says remains unchanged from the gutter, she confides her suspicions that her aunt was killed by relatives, mentions that gin had been "mother's milk" to this aunt, that Eliza's own father was always more cheerful after a goodly amount of gin. Higgins passes off her remarks as "the new small talk", Freddy is enraptured; when she is leaving, he asks her if she is going to walk across the park, to which she replies, "Walk?
Not bloody likely!" (This is the most famous line from the play, for many years after the play's debut, use of the word'bloody' was known as a pygmalion.
National Diet Library
The National Diet Library is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the National Diet of Japan in researching matters of public policy; the library is similar in scope to the United States Library of Congress. The National Diet Library consists of two main facilities in Tōkyō and Kyōtō, several other branch libraries throughout Japan; the National Diet Library is the successor of three separate libraries: the library of the House of Peers, the library of the House of Representatives, both of which were established at the creation of Japan's Imperial Diet in 1890. The Diet's power in prewar Japan was limited, its need for information was "correspondingly small"; the original Diet libraries "never developed either the collections or the services which might have made them vital adjuncts of genuinely responsible legislative activity". Until Japan's defeat, the executive had controlled all political documents, depriving the people and the Diet of access to vital information.
The U. S. occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur deemed reform of the Diet library system to be an important part of the democratization of Japan after its defeat in World War II. In 1946, each house of the Diet formed its own National Diet Library Standing Committee. Hani Gorō, a Marxist historian, imprisoned during the war for thought crimes and had been elected to the House of Councillors after the war, spearheaded the reform efforts. Hani envisioned the new body as "both a'citadel of popular sovereignty'", the means of realizing a "peaceful revolution"; the Occupation officers responsible for overseeing library reforms reported that, although the Occupation was a catalyst for change, local initiative pre-existed the Occupation, the successful reforms were due to dedicated Japanese like Hani. The National Diet Library opened in June 1948 in the present-day State Guest-House with an initial collection of 100,000 volumes; the first Librarian of the Diet Library was the politician Tokujirō Kanamori.
The philosopher Masakazu Nakai served as the first Vice Librarian. In 1949, the NDL became the only national library in Japan. At this time the collection gained an additional million volumes housed in the former National Library in Ueno. In 1961, the NDL opened at its present location in Nagatachō, adjacent to the National Diet. In 1986, the NDL's Annex was completed to accommodate a combined total of 12 million books and periodicals; the Kansai-kan, which opened in October 2002 in the Kansai Science City, has a collection of 6 million items. In May 2002, the NDL opened a new branch, the International Library of Children's Literature, in the former building of the Imperial Library in Ueno; this branch contains some 400,000 items of children's literature from around the world. Though the NDL's original mandate was to be a research library for the National Diet, the general public is the largest consumer of the library's services. In the fiscal year ending March 2004, for example, the library reported more than 250,000 reference inquiries.
As Japan's national library, the NDL collects copies of all publications published in Japan. Moreover, because the NDL serves as a research library for Diet members, their staffs, the general public, it maintains an extensive collection of materials published in foreign languages on a wide range of topics; the NDL has eight major specialized collections: Modern Political and Constitutional History. The Modern Political and Constitutional History Collection comprises some 300,000 items related to Japan's political and legal modernization in the 19th century, including the original document archives of important Japanese statesmen from the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century like Itō Hirobumi, Iwakura Tomomi, Sanjō Sanetomi, Mutsu Munemitsu, Terauchi Masatake, other influential figures from the Meiji and Taishō periods; the NDL has an extensive microform collection of some 30 million pages of documents relating to the Occupation of Japan after World War II. This collection include the documents prepared by General Headquarters and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the Far Eastern Commission, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Team.
The Laws and Preliminary Records Collection consists of some 170,000 Japanese and 200,000 foreign-language documents concerning proceedings of the National Diet and the legislatures of some 70 foreign countries, the official gazettes, judicial opinions, international treaties pertaining to some 150 foreign countries. The NDL maintains a collection of some 530,000 books and booklets and 2 million microform titles relating to the sciences; these materials include, among other things, foreign doctoral dissertations in the sciences, the proceedings and reports of academic societies, catalogues of technical standards, etc. The NDL has a collection of 440,000 maps of Japan and other countries, including the topographica
Joseph Wright (linguist)
Joseph Wright FBA was an English philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University. Wright was born in Idle, near Bradford in Yorkshire, the second son of Dufton Wright, a woollen cloth weaver and quarryman, his wife Sarah Ann, he started work as a "donkey-boy" in a quarry at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened. He became a bobbin doffer – responsible for removing and replacing full bobbins – in a Yorkshire mill in Sir Titus Salt's model village. Although he learnt his letters and numbers at the Salt's Factory School, he was unable to read a newspaper until he was 15, he said of this time, "Reading and writing, for me, were as remote as any of the sciences". By now a wool-sorter earning £1 a week, Wright became fascinated with languages and began attending night-school to learn French and Latin, as well as maths and shorthand. At the age of 18 he started his own night-school, charging his colleagues twopence a week.
By 1876 he had saved £40 and could afford a term's study at the University of Heidelberg, although he walked from Antwerp to save money. Returning to Yorkshire, Wright continued his studies at the Yorkshire College of Science while working as a schoolmaster. A former pupil of Wright's recalls that, "with a piece of chalk draw illustrative diagrams at the same time with each hand, talk while he was doing it", he returned to Heidelberg and in 1885 completed his PhD. on Qualitative and Quantitative Changes of the Indo-Germanic Vowel System in Greek under Hermann Osthoff founding the field of scientific study: English dialectology. In 1888, after his return from Germany, Wright was offered a post at Oxford University by Professor Max Müller, became a lecturer to the Association for the Higher Education of Women and deputy lecturer in German at the Taylor Institution. From 1891 to 1901 he was Deputy Professor and from 1901 to 1925 Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, he specialised in the Germanic languages and wrote a range of introductory grammars for Old English, Middle English, Old High German, Middle High German and Gothic which were still being revised and reprinted 50 years after his death.
He wrote a historical grammar of German. He had a strong interest in English dialects and claimed that his 1892 book A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill was "the first grammar of its kind in England." Undoubtedly, his greatest achievement was the editing of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, which he published between 1898 and 1905 at his own expense. This remains a snapshot of English dialect speech at the end of the 19th century. In the course of his work on the Dictionary, he formed a committee to gather Yorkshire material, which gave rise in 1897 to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, which claims to be the world's oldest surviving dialect society. Wright had been offered a position at a Canadian university, who would have paid him an annual salary of £500 – a generous salary at the time. However, Wright opted to stay in Oxford and finish the Dialect Dictionary without any financial backing from a sponsor. In 1925 Wright was the inaugural recipient of the British Academy's Biennial Prize for English Literature, awarded for publications in Early English Language and Literature.
Wright's papers are in the Bodleian Oxford. In 1896 he married Elizabeth Mary Lea, with whom he co-authored his Middle English Grammars, she wrote the book, Rustic Speech and Folklore, in which she makes reference to their various walking and cycle trips into the Yorkshire Dales, as well as various articles and essays. The couple had two children -- Mary -- both of whom died in childhood. Wright and his wife were known for their hospitality to their students and would invite a dozen or more, both men and women, to their home for Yorkshire Sunday teas. On these occasions Wright would perform his party trick of making his Aberdeen Terrier, lick his lips when Wright said the Gothic words for fig-tree – smakka bagms. Although Wright was a progressive to the extent that he believed women were entitled to a university education, he did not believe that women should be made voting members of the university, saying they were, "... less independent in judgement than men and apt to run in a body like sheep".
Although his energies were for the most part directed towards his work, Wright enjoyed gardening and followed Yorkshire cricket and football teams. He died of pneumonia on 27 February 1930, his last word was "Dictionary". In 1932 his widow, published a biography of Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright. Wright was an important early influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, was one of his tutors at Oxford: studying the Grammar of the Gothic Language with Wright seems to have been a turning-point in Tolkien's life. Writing to his son Michael in 1963, J. R. R. Tolkien reflected on his time studying with Wright thus: "Years before I had rejected as disgusting cynicism by an old vulgarian the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright. ‘What do you take Oxford for, lad?’ ‘A university, a place of learning.’ ‘Nay, lad, it‘s a factory! And what’s it making? I‘ll tell you. It‘s making fees. Get that in your head, you‘ll begin to understand what goes on.‘ Alas! by 1935 I now knew that it was true. At any rate as a key to dons‘ behaviour."In the course of editing the Dictionary, Wright corresponded with Thomas Hardy.
Wright was admired by Virginia Woolf, who writes of him in her diary that, "The triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly f
Cent (music)
The cent is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Twelve-tone equal temperament divides the octave into 12 semitones of 100 cents each. Cents are used to express small intervals, or to compare the sizes of comparable intervals in different tuning systems, in fact the interval of one cent is too small to be heard between successive notes. Alexander J. Ellis based the measure on the acoustic logarithms decimal semitone system developed by Gaspard de Prony in the 1830s, at Robert Holford Macdowell Bosanquet's suggestion. Ellis made extensive measurements of musical instruments from around the world, using cents extensively to report and compare the scales employed, further described and employed the system in his 1875 edition of Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone, it has become the standard method of comparing musical pitches and intervals. Like a decibel's relation to intensity, a cent is a ratio between two close frequencies. For the ratio to remain constant over the frequency spectrum, the frequency range encompassed by a cent must be proportional to the two frequencies.
An tempered semitone spans 100 cents by definition. An octave—two notes that have a frequency ratio of 2:1—spans twelve semitones and therefore 1200 cents. Since a frequency raised by one cent is multiplied by this constant cent value, 1200 cents doubles a frequency, the ratio of frequencies one cent apart is equal to 21⁄1200 = 1200√2, the 1200th root of 2, 1.0005777895. If one knows the frequencies a and b of two notes, the number of cents measuring the interval from a to b may be calculated by the following formula: n = 1200 ⋅ log 2 Likewise, if one knows a note a and the number n of cents in the interval from a to b b may be calculated by: b = a × 2 n 1200 To compare different tuning systems, convert the various interval sizes into cents. For example, in just intonation the major third is represented by the frequency ratio 5:4. Applying the formula at the top shows that this is about 386 cents; the equivalent interval on the equal-tempered piano would be 400 cents. The difference, 14 cents, is about a seventh of a half step audible.
As x increases from 0 to 1⁄12, the function 2x increases linearly from 1.00000 to 1.05946. The exponential cent scale can therefore be approximated as a piecewise linear function, numerically correct at semitones; that is, n cents for n from 0 to 100 may be approximated as 1 + 0.0005946n instead of 2n⁄1200. The rounded error is zero when n is 0 or 100, is about 0.72 cents high when n is 50, where the correct value of 21⁄24 = 1.02930 is approximated by 1 + 0.0005946 × 50 = 1.02973. This error is well below anything humanly audible, making this piecewise linear approximation adequate for most practical purposes, it is difficult to establish. One author stated; the threshold of what is perceptible, technically known as the just noticeable difference varies as a function of the frequency, the amplitude and the timbre. In one study, changes in tone quality reduced student musicians' ability to recognize, as out-of-tune, pitches that deviated from their appropriate values by ±12 cents, it has been established that increased tonal context enables listeners to judge pitch more accurately.
Free, online web sites for self-testing are available. "While intervals of less than a few cents are imperceptible to the human ear in a melodic context, in harmony small changes can cause large changes in beats and roughness of chords."When listening to pitches with vibrato, there is evidence that humans perceive the mean frequency as the center of the pitch. One study of modern performances of Schubert's Ave Maria found that vibrato span ranged between ±34 cents and ±123 cents with a mean of ±71 cents and noted higher variation in Verdi's opera arias. Normal adults are able to recognize pitch differences of as small as 25 cents reliably. Adults with amusia, have trouble recognizing differences of less than 100 cents and sometimes have trouble with these or larger intervals. A centitone is a musical interval equal to two cents proposed as a unit of measurement by Widogast Iring in Die reine Stimmung in der Musik as 600 steps per octave and by Joseph Yasser in A Theory of Evolving Tonality as 100 steps per equal tempered whole tone.
Iring noticed that the Grad/Werckmeister and the schisma are nearly the same and both may be approximated by 600 steps per octave. Yasser promoted the decitone and millitone. For example: Equal tempered perfect fifth = 700 cents = 175.6 savarts = 583.3 millioctaves = 350 centitones. The following audio files play various intervals. In each case the first note played is middle C; the next note is sharper than C by the assigned value in cents. The two notes are played simultaneously. Note that the JND for pitch difference is 5–6 cents. Played separately, the notes may not show an audible difference, but when they are played together, beating may be hea
English Phonotypic Alphabet
The English Phonotypic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed by Sir Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis as an English language spelling reform. Although never gaining wide acceptance, elements of it were incorporated into the modern International Phonetic Alphabet, it was published in June 1845. Subsequently, adaptations were published which extended the alphabet to the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish and Sanskrit languages. Third Revised Proposal to encode characters for the English Phonotypic Alphabet in the UCS, October 18th 2011 Completion of the Phonotypic Alphabet Extension of the Phonotypic Alphabet
Henry Sweet
Henry Sweet was an English philologist and grammarian. As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic languages Old English and Old Norse. In addition, Sweet published works on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in language and the teaching of languages. Many of his ideas have remained influential, a number of his works continue to be in print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities. Henry Sweet was born in St. Pancras in London, he was educated at King's College School, London. In 1864, he spent a short time studying at the Heidelberg University. Upon his return to England, he took up an office job with a trading company in London. Five years aged twenty-four, he won a scholarship in German and entered Balliol College in Oxford. Sweet neglected his formal academic coursework, concentrating instead on pursuing excellence in his private studies. Early recognition came in his first year at Oxford, when the prestigious Philological Society published a paper of his on Old English.
In 1871, still an undergraduate, he edited King Alfred's translation of the Cura Pastoralis for the Early English Text Society, his commentary establishing the foundation for Old English dialectology. He graduated, nearly thirty years old, with a fourth-class degree in literae humaniores. Subsequent works on Old English included An Anglo-Saxon Reader, The Oldest English Texts and A Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. Sweet, like his contemporary Walter Skeat, felt under particular pressure from German scholars in English studies who state-employed and accompanied by their comitatus of eager graduate students, "annexed" the historical study of English. Dismayed by the "swarms of young program-mongers turned out every year by German universities," he felt that "no English dilettante can hope to compete with them—except by Germanizing himself and losing all his nationality."In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe.
He followed up with the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch, subsequently adapted as A Primer of Spoken English. This included the first scientific description of educated London speech known as received pronunciation, with specimens of connected speech represented in phonetic script. In addition, he developed a version of shorthand called Current Shorthand, which had both orthographic and phonetic modes, his emphasis on spoken language and phonetics made him a pioneer in language teaching, a subject which he covered in detail in The Practical Study of Languages. In 1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford; the Sounds of English was his last book on English pronunciation. Other books by Sweet include An Icelandic Primer with Grammar and Glossary, The History of Language, a number of other works he edited for the Early English Text Society. Sweet was closely involved in the early history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite the recognition he received for his scholarly work, Sweet never received a university professorship, a fact that disturbed him although he was appointed reader.
He had done poorly as a student at Oxford, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, he failed to make every effort to gather official support. His relationship with the Oxford University Press was strained. Sweet died on 30 April 1912 in Oxford, of pernicious anemia. In Who's Who, 1911, Sweet gave his recreations as: Climbing, chemistry, alphabets, in boyhood. Sweet has retained a reputation as "the man who taught Europe phonetics", his work established an applied linguistics tradition in language teaching which has continued without interruption to the present day. A bibliography and Collected Papers were published by H. C. Wyld. In the preface to his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw, after describing Sweet, stated that " Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible, it holds annual colloquia, publishes the journal Language and History. Charles Leslie Wrenn,'Henry Sweet', Transactions of the Philological Society. 45, pp. 177–201 Henderson, Eugénie J. A. ed..
The indispensable foundation: a selection from the writings of Henry Sweet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0194370394. Anthony Philip Reid Howatt, H. G. Widdowson. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-442185-6; the Henry Sweet Society Works by Henry Sweet at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Henry Sweet at Internet Archive Works by Henry Sweet at LibriVox Anthony Philip Reid Howatt, H. G. Widdowson. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-442185-6. Henry Sweet's The Principles of Spelling Reform An Anglo-Saxon primer Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. Cornell University Library Digital Collections
