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Supports Spotify — totally getting one of these
Where do ‘mama’/’papa’ words come from?
The sounds came first — as experiments in vocalization — and parents adopted them as pet names for themselves. If you open your mouth and make a sound, it will probably be an open vowel like /a/ unless you move your tongue or lips. The easiest consonants are perhaps the bilabials /m/, /p/, and /b/, requiring no movement of the tongue, followed by consonants made by raising the front of the tongue: /d/, /t/, and /n/. Add a dash of reduplication, and you get mama, papa, baba, dada, tata, nana. That such words refer to people (typically parents or other guardians) is something we have imposed on the sounds and incorporated into our languages and cultures; the meanings don’t inhere in the sounds as uttered by babies, which are more likely calls for food or attention.
(tags: sounds voice speech babies kids phonetics linguist language)
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‘A fast build system for Docker images’, open source, in Go, hooks into Github
England opens up 11TB of LiDAR data covering the entire country as open data
All 11 terabytes of our LIDAR data (that’s roughly equivalent to 2,750,000 MP3 songs) will eventually be available through our new Open LIDAR portal under an Open Government Licence, allowing it to be used for any purpose. We hope that by giving free access to our data businesses and local communities will develop innovative solutions to benefit the environment, grow our thriving rural economy, and boost our world-leading food and farming industry. The possibilities are endless and we hope that making LIDAR data open will be a catalyst for new ideas and innovation.
Are you reading, Ordnance Survey Ireland?