Down the Rabbit Hole

For the past few days, I've been reviewing English grammar. No, I'm not prepping for a language exam. Rather, I was working on a side project about natural language processing. This project involved reading about different parts of speech (POS)... nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections, and conjunctions. In calculating the importance of individual words from over 5000 summaries of scientific articles, I learned that I could actually choose which POS I could include in the analyses. For example, I could remove many conjunctions and prepositions because they appear too often in text, thereby not important (at least in the context of determining what the article is all about). For the purposes of my little side project, I opted to keep nouns only; after all, I was looking for popular keywords from a relatively big body of work on a specific topic. Singular and plural forms of nouns introduce sparsity in the analyses; I could minimise sparsity by ...

A year after Lola Bats passed on to the next life, I'm sharing the eulogy I wrote and read by Anna. I wasn't able to fly to the Philippines to attend her funeral because I just arrived in the USA and I was in the midst of school admission interviews. --- Lola Bats, as her grandkids fondly call her, lived a very long, fun-filled life. I may have lived only in the last third of her life but it will take me a while to get used to the fact that she is no longer with us. All of her grandchildren each had a special relationship and unique experience with her. For a few minutes, let me share some of mine. Let’s start with food… Anna, Biboy, and I used to spend our summer holidays in Padre Garcia. Lola would typically wake us up early in the morning and herd us off into the vegetable patch to pick fresh patani , sitaw , and kamatis . These were some of the ingredients for bulanglang , a vegetable soup she often paired with pupur , which are deep-fried vineg...

As a kid, I used to go to the perya  in Sta Cruz, Laguna each year to try my luck at ring toss and colour games, feast on typical street-food fare, and to ride the rickety Caterpillar with my maternal cousins. When I went to the California State Fair in Sacramento with my paternal cousins this year, I realised that it's the first time in my whole entire life that I've gone out with them to the  perya , and the Californian version at that. It's definitely bigger, brighter, and wilder than the town fiesta fairs and UPLB 's annual Feb Fair . The large parking lot in the California State Fair reminded me of the huge parking lots at the  hot-air balloon festivals I've attended in Pampanga, sans the lahar dust that made my car look like espasol  at the end of the day. The state fair's parking lot was a preview to the immense size of the fairgrounds. Once inside the fair, our first order of business was to eat. A food promenade featured typical fair food: co...

Is there such a thing as a "better" English accent? This question popped up in my head when I heard a fellow Filipino proclaim that her English accent is better because it's "American". Obviously, she has not taken into consideration the diversity of North American dialects. Canadians have their own accents (as I learned eleven years ago when I was mistaken for speaking like one ) and the U.S. has a plethora of different dialects that correspond to different accents. Reading up on the topic, I learned that the U.S. can be divided into phonetic regions : rhotic accents (which means that the /r/ sound at the end of syllables is pronounced) are found in General American and Mid-Atlantic English while non-rhotic accents (think British and Australian accents) are found in Eastern New England, New York City,  and Coastal/ Lowland Southern English; the Texan accent is an example of Inland/Mountain Southern English; and Western American accents are quite diverse bu...