Search Results

The Irish Role in the Origins of the Old English Alphabet: A Re-assessment

Patrick P. O’Neill

in Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings

This chapter re-examines the role of the Irish in the origins of the Old English alphabet. There are many theories about the Old English alphabet's origins. These include those contained in Karl ... More

This chapter re-examines the role of the Irish in the origins of the Old English alphabet. There are many theories about the Old English alphabet's origins. These include those contained in Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik and E. Sievers and K. Brunner's Altenglische Grammatik, which both offered the view that the model for the Old English alphabet was the Latin alphabet. But the first work to cover Old English orthography was Alistair Campbell's Old English Grammar, which rejected the notion that the Latin alphabet which underlay the Old English alphabet was the one taught by the Irish.Less

The Ad Hoc School

Christopher Cannon

in From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400

Little data survives on the nature of medieval schools prior to the fourteenth century, but all the surviving evidence suggests that such schooling was informal in the broadest sense: it took place ... More

Little data survives on the nature of medieval schools prior to the fourteenth century, but all the surviving evidence suggests that such schooling was informal in the broadest sense: it took place in a priest’s home or a nook in a church; it was usually a kind of tutorial rather than anything like a “class.” Surviving schoolbooks suggest a similar sort of improvisation, for, while historians have often said that here was something like a medieval “textbook” for elementary learning, the contents of these books is eclectic. All this informality carried over directly to what the schoolboy was taught, since he was equipped with rules so that he could begin to write Latin sentences of his own. Where these sentences were in verse rather than prose, the schoolboy was taught to invent his own poems not by technical manuals (“arts of poetry”) but by the simplest exercises of basic grammar.Less

“Against My Estimation”: Ciceronian Decorum, Stoic Constancy, and the Production of Ethos

Joel B. Altman

in The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood

This chapter pursues the historical development of ethos and tracks the interlocking destinies of Iago and Othello to the site where Shakespeare is most likely to have encountered them in their most ... More

This chapter pursues the historical development of ethos and tracks the interlocking destinies of Iago and Othello to the site where Shakespeare is most likely to have encountered them in their most complex form—the writings of Cicero, which combined elements of Peripatetic, Stoic, and Academic philosophy, and were part of the sixteenth-century English grammar school curriculum. More particularly, it suggests that Shakespeare was also influenced by the neostoic writings of his contemporaries. By following this itinerary, a new insight is developed into why Iago could seem “a man that's just”—and why “Othello's occupation's gone” when he answers “yes” to his own rhetorical question, “false to me?”Less

Anna Botsford Comstock—Childhood and Girlhood

Anna Botsford Comstock

Karen Penders St. Clair (ed.)

in The Comstocks of Cornell-The Definitive Autobiography

This chapter discusses the childhood and girlhood of Anna Botsford Comstock, recounting the story of her family and heritage. Her parents' earlier marriages complicated Anna's relationships and ... More

This chapter discusses the childhood and girlhood of Anna Botsford Comstock, recounting the story of her family and heritage. Her parents' earlier marriages complicated Anna's relationships and greatly enriched her life. Anna was taught to work early, and she learned to sew before she was four years old and to knit when she was six. In Sunday school, she asked puzzling questions, which were answered by some quotation from the Bible, instead of reasonably. Thus, Anna came to regard the Bible as a refuge for ignorance and a stifler of reason, a prejudice that remained a secret in her mind until after she too reached the age of reason and came to realize its majesty and beauty. The chapter then looks at Anna's experience studying English Grammar, which she hated until she came to appreciate it after she studied Latin. She also attended a “select school” in Otto wherein she took a few drawing lessons. When Anna was fourteen, the teacher in the primary room of their village school took ill and had to leave six weeks before the term ended; she was asked to take her place. She then attended “Chamberlain Institute and Female College” at Randolph and started for Cornell University in November of 1874 wherein she studied both botany and zoology.Less

Performance of the Speech Recognizer and Parser

Ronnie W. Smith and D. Richard Hipp

in Spoken Natural Language Dialog Systems: A Practical Approach

The results of the experiments reported in the previous chapter were independently analyzed in order to measure the accuracy of the speech recognizer and parser. A summary of the key results of ... More

The results of the experiments reported in the previous chapter were independently analyzed in order to measure the accuracy of the speech recognizer and parser. A summary of the key results of this analysis follows. • On average, one out of every three words emitted by the speech recognizer was in error. • On average, three out of every four sentences contained one or more speech recognition errors. • In spite of the high speech recognition error rate, the meanings of the spoken utterances were correctly deduced 83% of the time. • Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, it was found that dialog expectation was helpful only as a tie-breaker in deducing the correct meaning of spoken utterances. . . . The remainder of this chapter describes the analysis in detail. The performance measurements of the speech recognizer and parser were computed from transcripts of 2804 individual utterances2 taken from the second and third sessions of the 8 experimental subjects. No information from the pilot subjects or from the first session with each subject was used in this analysis. Information about each utterance was collected and converted to a standardized, machine-readable format. The information that was collected follows. • The sequence of words actually spoken by the user. These were manually entered by the experimenters based on the audio recordings of the experiment. • The sequence of words recognized by the speech recognizer. This information was recorded automatically during the experiments. • The set of up to K minimum matching strings between elements of the hypothesis set and dialog expectations, together with an utterance cost and an expectation cost for each. (See section 5.8.5). • The final output of the parser. • The text spoken by the dialog controller immediately prior to the user’s utterance, and notes concerning the user’s utterance which were entered by the person who transcribed the utterance from the audio tapes. This information was used to assist in manually judging the correctness of each parse. . . . After the above information was collected and carefully audited to remove errors, the following additional features of each utterance were computed through a combination of automatic and manual processing. Less