Defining simple procedures
Spoonerisms
Despite
the unpredictability of their occurrence, slips
of the tongue are often understandable as systematic modifications of
words. A Warden of New College, Oxford (1903-1924) made a name for himself (and
for one particular type of lapse) by 'accidentally' transposing the first elements
of words in phrases. The dear old queen would become by pure chance The
queer old dean and a student might be called over the holes
because he had hissed his mystery lesson and tasted the whole
worm. The Warden was called Spooner and such trans-word transpositions
are known as spoonerisms.
Spoonerisms are really transpositions of sounds
rather than letters and in the examples the spelling was remodelled to cope
with the fact. You will have
noticed that istory was respelled ystery when m
replaced the word's original initial h. You will notice
also that it is not just any kind of word which seems to be affected by these displacements;
nor is it necessarily truly adjacent words which trigger the lapse.
A spooner procedure
For the moment, however, forget these niceties and attempt to define a procedure
spooner :word1 :word2 so that spooner
"lame "toad
will output the list [tame load] (and choose
any other word pairs carefully so that the spelling works out correctly). The
body of definition can be handled in one single line with just
one instruction beginning with the command op
and using the operations word, list,
first and butfirst.
Afterwards,
or perhaps
before if it helps, draw an instruction diagram to show how spooner
works.
If you get really stuck, click here for a clue (or two).
A modified version of spooner
When everything is running well, you might like
to try changing the definition of spooner so that, instead of
two separate words, it takes a single list of two words, e.g. [tame load],
as input. A variant of this (from the programmer's
point of view but not the user's) is to define a new, higher-level procedure
which also takes a two word list
as input but then calls up your original version of spooner,
separating the two words in order to provide the necessary two inputs.
Secret languages
Genuine
slips of the tongue - real mistakes - often follow
the spooner pattern, though it is more than likely that Spooner himself had
his tongue in his cheek and his eye on the outcome. For quite overtly deliberate
distortions we need to turn
to secret languages. Many secret languages and indeed many more
innocent word games are based on reconstructing word forms in accordance with
quite simple rules, adding, deleting and moving sounds or letters. For that reason
you can usefully treat them as source of ideas for LOGO procedures. It is
true that to translate a whole text into a secret
language will require not merely the conversion of words but also the conversion
of sentences, but even if, right
now, you restrict your attention to words alone, the procedures you develop
can be thought of a tools for future use in some more complete translation environment.
You will simply be programming bottom up.
Pig Latin and a pig of a procedure
Make a start by trying
to write a procedure pig which takes one input (called
:word) and outputs the input word in its Pig Latin form.
What does this mean? Well, in Pig Latin, the initial consonants of words
are moved to the end where they
are supported by the addition of a vowel or diphthong (to make an extra syllable).
A LOGO system, for example, becomes an OGOLAY ystemsay.
Again there are some complications which you can temporarily ignore by just
using words which begin with a single written consonant.
A pig dialect
You could also experiment
with a Pig Latin dialect in which final consonants are moved
to the front and followed by supporting vowels, so that Pig Latin
becomes Gipi Nalati.
Making the support vowel copy the following vowel is not easy given the
slim resources at your disposal. Why not suppose, however, that the vowels are
simply chosen at random from a list called - with little imagination but valuable
transparency - "vowels. For this you
will need pickrandom, below.
Pickrandom
Define
pickrandom (copy the procedure
from here if you can't remember
it), then test it with various inputs. Next, in order to make sure that you know how
its component expressions work, take the body of the definition
to pieces and experiment separately with the
procedures it uses, i.e. item, random,
count and their inputs. If you try repeat 50 [pr random
5], for example, it should become reasonably clear why we need
to add 1 to
the output of random in order to make pickrandom
work correctly.When you are happy with pickrandom use it to create a new procedure
toss.up which randomly outputs heads or tails,
and another throw.dice (assuming a pair of
dice) which outputs anything from 2 to 12.
Work
out the structure of an expression - using pickrandom - which will output a list
of two elements, the first being
any letter of the alphabet from A through J, the second any number between
1 and 10. Such lists could obviously identify cells in a 10 X 10 grid - remember
Battleships?. Use your expression to define a procedure get.cell
which outputs randomly a cell position from this virtual grid.
Ron Brasington
Department of Linguistic Science
The University of Reading
Reading
UK
E-mail: ron.brasington@rdg.ac.uk