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109 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
109 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4002
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Title: HPR4002: Today I learnt - 2023-11-24
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4002/hpr4002.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:28:02
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,000 and 2 for Tuesday the 5th of December 2023.
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Today's show is entitled Today on Learn 2023-1124.
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It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 8 minutes long.
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It carries an explicit flag.
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The summary is, some odds and ends I learned today.
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Hello everyone, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
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My name is Dave Morris.
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Today I've got a show which I've entitled Today I Learned by the date which is 24th of November.
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So what's it about?
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I'm saying in the notes here that I enjoy finding out about things and now that I'm retired
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and have been for 14 years, seems shorter actually, but anyway I do have some time to
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research things so I find something that interests me than I go hunting, lose loads of time during
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the day in Wikipedia or whatever, but that's one I enjoy.
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This show is being put together because HBR, the project, is going through a phase where
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the queue can get very low.
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It's not too bad just now, I think we've got at least a week ahead of us with shows,
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but it has got very very low and we've had to resort to the reserve queue from time to
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time.
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So I thought if I put together some short shows that I could throw together quickly, then
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I could contribute more easily to this problem, not contribute it to the problem, but against
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the problem.
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Maybe if this is of interest, it's an idea that's of interest other people can contribute
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and we can make a series of it or something.
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So the plan is to keep details to a minimum, provide a few links so if you want to dig
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deep, you can, but unlike many of my shows where I cannot stop digging, I end up spending
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weeks preparing something that doesn't last very long.
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It's probably not all that interesting, but it's just a sort of mania that I suffer from.
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So I've got three things that I want to mention, three things I have learned.
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First one is, is the word learnt, L-E-A-R-N-T, or learned, L-E-A-R-N-E-D, well both are
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acceptable, both of the past tense and past participle of the verb to learn, I'm not going
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to go into the grammar of this, you can dig deeper if you wish.
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So learnt, ending with a T, and T is an older form which is still quite common in British
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English.
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It's the one I tend to go for because I'm old, learned is more common in US English, but
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it's becoming popular in the UK.
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It's been acceptable for a long, long time.
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It's not the one that my brain goes to, a couple of links, grammarist, it's a good
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source, and there's a BBC question and answer thing that I found as I was searching.
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I'm sure there's tons more, but I'll leave that up to you.
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The fact that I called this today I learnt is okay, even though I might look a little
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bit weird here.
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It's also spelt, S-P-E-L-T, which means past tense to spell, it's also type of flour,
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anyway, you know, for making bread and stuff.
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Second T-I-L is the French word for piggy bank.
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Why did I come across this today?
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Well I want to YouTube channel from a Canadian woodworker who produces English and French versions
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of his episodes.
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The latest one is about making a wooden piggy bank.
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I don't watch the French ones, but I do read the titles.
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The French for piggy bank is T-I-L-I-L-T-I-L-I-L.
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I learnt French at school, I wasn't much good at it, but I've never come across the word,
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not too surprisingly.
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So my questions were, where's it come from and how do you say it?
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I found a witchnery page, which I've linked to, and it's a word, because it's a weird
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word.
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It's on a matter-peak, you know, a word that's meant to sound a bit like the sound that
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it's describing, like crash or bang or splash, maybe, yeah, and it represents the rattling
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of coins.
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Now there's audio on the witchnery page, witchner is a great source of information, by the way.
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There's audio on the page showing how to say it, demonstrating this.
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There's also an IPA version of the pronunciation, where IPA is the international phonetic alphabet.
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So that's my, that's a Q for my third T-I-L, and it's about pronouncing IPA coded words.
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So there's all this stuff that you might have stumbled upon, which is strange symbols
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that show how to pronounce stuff.
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I've seen it many times, and I've tried to decode it, and you really have to dig fairly
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deeply to find how you say each word, each letter I mean.
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So the IPA form of T-I-L has got, I can't read you the symbols, because it's got characters
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from various Latin alphabets, there's an upside down R for the French, and it's often
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written in square brackets or in enclosed in slashes.
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I've used the slashes here just to follow witchnery.
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If you're interested in this, then you can find out about the IPA, and there's a link
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to the international phonetic alphabet, and also the group that manage it.
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That's all beside the point, and it's one of those sort of rabbit holes that I could run
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off down for ages, but anyway, I was doing this a few months ago, and wondered how, how
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do I actually find an IPA code thingy, and get a good idea of how to say the word?
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And I was hunting around, and I came across a site, which is called IPA Reader, I found
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various things where you could feed them paragraphs of English, and other languages, actually,
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which would then generate the IPA for them.
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This is for teaching English as a second language, in many cases, but the majority of them
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seem to cost money, but I didn't see many free ones that seem to be useful, but that
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doesn't get you to the point pronunciation.
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IPA Reader does go to the site, which I've linked to, obviously, and paste the IPA codes
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without the limiters into the form, then select a reader voice, and click read.
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And I found that some of the voices is a little bit strange, there's one that seems to
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be running too fast.
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I'd like Brian, the one called Brian, who speaks British English, but then I probably
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would, wouldn't I?
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But it seems fine.
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So have a look at this, because I've got this bookmark now, so I go there whenever I
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come across a bit of IPA that I can't work out and find it to be an extremely good resource.
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It probably doesn't cover everything, but it seems to be pretty effective.
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So that's the end of my today, I learned list, and maybe I'll come up with another one
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you know, I'll make it too, I don't know, probably never do another one after this.
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Hope you found it interesting, and bye bye.
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You have been listening to Hecker Public Radio, and Hecker Public Radio does work.
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself, if you ever thought of recording
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a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
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Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
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and our Sync.net.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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License.
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