2008年11月14日 星期五

Marcus Terentius Varro


Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC – 27 BC), also known as Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus, was a Roman scholar and writer.He studied under the Roman philologist Lucius Aelius Stilo, and later at Athens under the Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon.

Steinthal



Heymann or Hermann Steinthal (born at Gröbzig, Anhalt, May 16, 1823; died at Berlin March 14, 1899) was a German philologist and philosopher.



He studied philology and philosophy at the University of Berlin, and was in 1850 appointed privat-dozent of philology and mythology at that institution. He was a pupil of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose Sprachwissenschaftliche Werke he edited in 1884. From 1852 to 1855 Steinthal resided in Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of Chinese, and in 1863 he was appointed assistant professor at the Berlin University; from 1872 he was also privat-dozent in critical history of the Old Testament and in religious philosophy at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. In 1860 he founded, together with his brother-in-law Moritz Lazarus, the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, in which was established the new science of racial psychology. Steinthal was one of the directors (from 1883) of the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund, and had charge of the department of religious instruction in various small congregations.

Democritus


Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος, Dēmokritos, "chosen of the people", aka The Laughing Philosopher) was a pre-Socratic Greek materialist philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace ca. 460 BC - died ca 370 BC). Democritus was a student of Leucippus and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable, indivisible elements which he called atoma (sg. atomon) or "indivisible units", from which we get the English word atom. It is virtually impossible to tell which of these ideas were unique to Democritus and which are attributable to Leucippus.

Krates


Krates
Crates, of Mallus in Cilicia (modern day Southeastern Anatolia Region, Turkey), was a Greek language grammarian and Stoic philosopher of the 2nd century BC, leader of the literary school and head of the library of Pergamum. His chief work was a critical and exegetical commentary on Homer. He is also famous for constructing the earliest known globe of the Earth.

He was born at Mallus in Cilicia, and was brought up at Tarsus, and then moved to Pergamon, and there lived under the patronage of Eumenes II, and Attalus II. He was the founder of the Pergamon school of grammar, and seems to have been at one time the head of the library of Pergamon.

He visited Rome as ambassador of either Eumenes, in 168 BC, or Attalus in 159 BC. Having broken his leg and been compelled to stay there for some time, he delivered lectures which gave the first impulse to the study of grammar and criticism among the Romans.

Aristarch


Aristarch

Aristarchus or Aristarch of Samothrace (Άρίσταρχος, 220?143 BC?) was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.

He established the most historically important critical edition of the Homeric poems, and he is said to have applied his teacher's accent system to it, pointing the texts with a careful eye for metrical correctness. It is likely that he, or more probably, another predecessor at Alexandria, Zenodotus, was responsible for the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each. According to the Suda, Aristarchus wrote 800 treatises (ὑπομνήματα) on various topics, all lost but for fragments preserved in the various scholia.

Accounts of his death vary, though they agree that it was during the persecutions of Ptolemy VIII of Egypt. One account has him, having contracted an incurable dropsy, starving himself to death while in exile on Cyprus.

The historical connection of his name to literary criticism has created the term aristarch for someone who is a judgmental critic.

2008年11月5日 星期三

Homer

Appendix447-448
(names searching)


荷馬('`Oμηρος,約前9世紀前8世紀),相傳為古希臘遊吟詩人,生於小亞細亞失明,創作了史詩伊利亞特》和《奧德賽》,兩者統稱《荷馬史詩》。 沒有確切證據證明荷馬的存在,所以也有人認為他是傳說中被構造出來的人物。而關於《荷馬史詩》,大多數學者認為是當時經過幾個世紀口頭流傳的詩作的結晶。

荷馬時期(西元前12世紀——西元前8世紀)
  荷馬時期是根據荷馬史詩的作者名字來命名的,也就是氏族社會末期。荷馬時期為希臘神話的形成期,也是造型藝術的萌芽期。荷馬時期最早的造型藝術作品是幾何風格的陶瓶,造型簡樸,大小不一,多用於敬神和陪葬。即使是雕刻作品,也多為幾何形的,沒有細節刻畫。因此,這一時期又被稱為“幾何風格時期”。 這時,希臘半島的人民繼承和發展了原始人積累的習俗及對世界的想像,他們的文化遠不及深受古埃及和兩河流域影響的海島上的愛琴文化成熟。盲人詩人荷馬把幾百年以至上千年來廣泛流傳的民間傳說、歌謠、關於對天地起源、歷史未來、人生嚮往等神話整理出兩部不朽的文藝作品,也就是這兩部作品為後來希臘美術的發展方向奠定了基調,成了希臘美術取之不盡的素材和源泉。



2008年10月29日 星期三

LB092-094 晟維

LB91-94 晟維
(Chapter 3, Section 3)
We cannot state exactly the number of muscles that are necessary for speech and that are active during speech. But if we consider that ordinarily the muscles of the thoracic and abdominal walls, the neck and face, the larynx, pharynx, and the oral cavity are all properly coordinated during the act of speaking, it becomes obvious that over 100 muscles must be controlled centrally. Since the passage from any one speech sound to another depends ultimately on differences in muscular adjustments, fourteen times per second an "order must be issued to every muscle," whether to contract, relax, or maintain its tonus. From Fig. 3.6 it is clear, however, that the readjustment does not occur simultaneously for all muscles but that various groups of muscles have characteristic timing; some are active shortly before the acoustic onset of a phoneme, some during, and some shortly after. Thus we gather that the rate at which individual muscular events occur (throughout the speech apparatus) is of an order of magnitude of several hundred events every second. It is evident that the activation of so many muscles in such a short time span cannot depend on volition alone. There must be some automatisms—whole trains of events that are "preprogrammed" and run off automatically. Automatic sequences such as these are called synergisms; they form the basis of all motor phenomena in vertebrates. The physiology of speech production would be very simple if every phoneme were associated with one and only one pattern of muscular interaction. However, this is not what we find. The muscular activity associated with one phoneme is influenced by the phonemes that precede and follow it. Thus the motor patterns that we must investigate here are complex motor configurations that extend over relatively long periods, as in the duration of a syllable or word.

我們無法精準地將說話所需要的肌肉及說話時所用到的肌肉一一地列舉出來。但如果我們把胸壁及腹壁上普遍的肌肉都考慮進來,還有頸部和臉部、咽、喉及口腔等在說話時能精確地相互合作的肌肉,很明顯地,有超過一百條肌肉必須受到中央控制。因為任何一段語音基本上都依靠肌肉不同的調節,每秒有十四次的「指令必須傳達至每條肌肉」,不論是要收縮、放鬆或維持緊張度。從圖3.6可以清楚看到,儘管每條肌肉的調節並非同時發生,而是不同的肌肉群所特有的時間控制,有些肌肉在一個音素的聽覺開端前一段短時間就開始動作,有些同時,有些則在一段短時間之後。 因此我們推想所有發聲器官裡每一個獨立肌肉事件的發生,就如同每一秒內有好幾百個重要事件的命令。很明顯的,要讓如此大量的肌肉在這麼短的時間內啟動,並不能只依靠意志。一定有某些自動現象存在:一連串「預先程序化」的事件自動自發的進行著。這樣自動化的順序稱為連合作用;此作用形成脊椎動物動作現象的基礎。如果每一個語音音素只跟一個肌肉相互作用模式有關,那麼言語產生的生理學就再簡單不過了。但是,這並不是我們所尋求的。一個音素所涉及的肌肉活動會受到該音素的前一個及後一個音素影響。我們在這裡必須探討的動作模式是複雜動作型態,其可擴展至相當長的一個時段,如一個音節或一個詞彙的長度。


The intricacy of the problem becomes apparent if we draw an analogy between the sequence of events during speech and in drumming with the fingers on a table top. Both proceed at a rapid rate, but when we drum out a melody with our fingers, it does not matter in which order each finger falls on the table. The easiest is to use a single order, letting the small finger always be the first and the index always the last. But in speech production the order of activation and precise timing is of paramount importance.
這個問題的複雜性可藉由「說話中事件發生的順序」與「用手指敲擊桌面」兩件事的比擬,而變得顯而易懂。這兩件事都以高速進行,但是當我們用手指敲擊桌面的時候,手指敲擊的順序並不重要。最簡單的方式是:從小指到食指依序敲擊。但是在言語產生的過程中,動作的順序及精確的時間點便有最高的重要性。

(3) Ordering of Articulatory Events
(3) 發聲事件的順序

The problem of order in speech and language is not confined to articulation. We can speak of an order of events at the level of perception of acoustic phenomena, of articulation, and of nerve impulses. The perceptual order of speech sounds need not be identical with the order of acoustic correlates (we may ignore or fail to hear certain acoustic phenomena); the order of acoustic events need not be identical with the order of motor or articulatory events (movements occur that do not produce sound or sound-changes); the order of central neuronal events may be different from the order of peripheral motor events. (Certain nervous impulses must be initiated in advance of others because traveling time to the periphery is longer for some pathways than others.)
言語及語言順序的問題並不侷限於發聲過程。我們可以談論接收聲學現象的事件順序、發聲的事件順序及神經脈衝的事件順序。言語的接收順序似乎不必與聲學相關的順序一致(我們可能忽略或聽不到某種聽覺現象);而聽覺事件的順序也不必與發聲事件的動作順序一致(動作的發生並不會產生聲音或改變聲音);而中央神經事件的順序,可能也和半腦動作的事件順序不同。(特定的神經脈衝必須先於其他的神經脈衝,因為半腦的巡迴時間對某些途徑來說比其他的更長。)

Figure 3.7 shows the spectrogram of a male speaker saying the words "Santa Claus." No matter how carefully or how often we listen to these tape-recorded words played back at the original speed, we always hear a clear-cut sequence of phones, one beginning at the termination of the previous one. However, the graphic representation demonstrates that, acoustically, phones overlap. The initial portion of a vowel may bear the acoustic clues of the stop-consonant preceding it; the last portion of the lateral /l/ may have the vowel coloring of the next sound; or, in general, vowels and consonants influence each other acoustically (Delattre et al., 1955; Stevens and House, 1963). Thus the onset of a phone is different when defined acoustically than perceptually, with the acoustic onset often preceding the perceptual one.
圖3.7為一名男子說「Santa Claus」的聲譜圖。無論多小心的重複聆聽以原速播放的錄音,我們總能聽到清楚的語音順序,後一個的開頭接著前一個的結尾。然而,圖3.7卻顯示語音有聲學上的重疊。在母音開頭的部分,帶有前一個塞音的聲學跡象;而/l/最後的部分則受到下一個音的母音影響;或者,一般而言,母音和子音在聲學上互相影響(Delattre et al.,1955; Stevens and House, 1963)。所以,一個語音的開頭在聲學及聽覺上有所不同,而聲學所定義的開頭總在聽學之前。

There are many articulatory events, or more generally, motor events, that leave no trace on spectrograms. Figure 3.6 based on work by Stetson show this very clearly. Before the onset of phonation, muscles in the abdominal and thoracic wall and in the larynx have to assume certain positions, with some of these events preceding the onset of sound by 100 milliseconds (msec) and more. Also during those silent periods which appear as short blanks on spectrograms a great many movements are performed, particularly by the tongue, which must get into position for alveolar or palatal stops (d, t, g, k) or which gets ready for the production of the next vowel.
有許多的發聲事件(或更廣義的說,動作事件)並不會在光譜圖上留下遺跡。圖3.6依據Stetson的研究顯示了這樣的現象。早在發音的開頭之前,腹壁、胸壁及咽喉的肌肉必須擔任特定的職位,而某些發聲事件在聲音的開端前100多毫秒(甚至更長)之前就開始了。同時在無聲的期間(也就是聲譜圖上空白的部分),許多動作已經開始,尤其是舌頭的動作,因為在發出齦顎塞音、軟顎塞音及下一個母音的發音前,就必須在發聲位置上。

(FIG 3.6)
FIG. 3.6 Earlier observations on the relationship and timing of certain muscular activities and sound production.(After Stetson, 1951.)

圖3.6 有關特定肌肉的活動及語音的產生之間的關係及時間點的較早的觀察。.(根據 Stetson, 1951.)
(FIG 3.7)
FIG. 3.7 Perceptually, speech sounds seem to follow one another like a train of independent speech segments. Acoustically, however, there is considerable overlap. (a) Spectrogram of the words Santa Claus. Vertical lines mark acoustically differentiated segments. (b) Assignment of phonemes to acoustic segments.(From Fant and Lindblom, 1961.)
圖3.7 從感知方面來看,語音似乎像是獨立語段一長串的連結。然而,從聲學角度來看,語音之間存在著相當大部分的重疊。(a)「Santa Claus」的聲譜圖。重直線標示出聲學上相異的語段。 (b)音素在聲學上分段的配置。(節自Fant 及 Lindblom, 1961.)




(Vocabulary Searching)
thoracic 【解】胸的、胸廓的
abdominal 【解】腹的、腹部的
tonus 【生】緊張度
magnitude 巨大,廣大[U] / 重大,重要[U] / 量;大小;強度;音量[U] /【天】星等(指星的亮度)[C] /【地】震級[C]
volition 意志;決斷力 / 選擇;決定

synergism【醫】(各種藥物的)連合作用 /【宗】神人協力合作說

configuration結構;表面配置 /【心】形態 /【天】行星的方位;(地球表面的)外貌