layam in human expressions

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 03 Apr 2011, 22:51

I do not know where this one belongs: Tala, Technical section, Lounge Humor or what.. Or even there will be interest to have a thread for it. Decided to punt it and put it in here. Mostly in humor..

Have you noticed the layam in common expressions we all make?

For example, among Tamilians, common expressions are 'ai yai yo', 'ada da da', 'ada da da da', etc. .. that is trisram, chathusram and kandam isn't it?

Then there is the 'tch tch' or 'tch tch tch', 'tch tch tch tch' or 'tch tch tch tch tch'. It is hard to write down what I have in mind, hope I managed to communicate it to some extent.

Any others?

gee · Post by **gee** » 03 Apr 2011, 23:08

There is always the "OH HO!" or "AH HAH!" or the abbreviated "OHHH!" and "AHHH!"

gee · Post by **gee** » 03 Apr 2011, 23:09

i can see oh ho and ah hah being recited in tisra or chatusra nadais

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 04 Apr 2011, 03:56

Nice observation on the existence of metric temporal structure in non-verbal vocalizations. VK, we could easily make this a very technical discussion

Pratyaksham Bala · Post by **Pratyaksham Bala** » 04 Apr 2011, 04:12

balE, bEsh
mm..hoom (not enough or 'ivan tERamATTAn')
aDaDA, or aDeDE (when you see someone just missing something - missing a catch!)
CHa! (when you miss something that can't recover -- dropped a coin in the drain or missed a bus)
CHI!(exclaim in disgust)

Do these expressions used in conversation come under this discussion?
mm? (you don't agree; but pretend that you don't hear)
gnu..........................! (when you don't agree, but do not wish to contradict)
OhO? (Is that so?)
hIhi (how about tips?)

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 04 Apr 2011, 04:38

PB, Good ones.. As "Gee" said, these can be rendered in different naDais, possibly changing the meaning!!
MV, your description sounds like the title of a conference research paper!!

Nice...Yeah, take it in the technical direction if it merits it.

Just a bit on the events that led me to thinking about this..

Two of us were about to start a leisurely walk in the forest preserve to celebrate India's world cup win..... really to get out of the sleepy mood, having woken up so early.

I: Oh, I forgot my cell phone.
Other: Go get it (from the car)
I: No, I left it at home
O: adadadada
I: hey, that sounds like Khandam
O: What!!

gee · Post by **gee** » 04 Apr 2011, 04:57

vasanthakokilam wrote: I: Oh, I forgot my cell phone.
Other: Go get it (from the car)
I: No, I left it at home
O: adadadada
I: hey, that sounds like Khandam
O: What!!

lol! hahaha nice. Try saying the following in chatusra nadai adi tala:

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water"

make "water" two separate syllables. Then say it in tisra, kanda, and misram nadais. You look crazy to the unknowing eye, and you have fun at the same time

VRV · Post by **VRV** » 04 Apr 2011, 08:43

The year 1989, Venue: San Diego State University
My dear departed guru Shri Palghat Raghu and I were in class with about 8 students. One of the students Ken was having a hard time reciting
"Thari kitha Thalangu Thom, Thalangu Thom Thalangu Thom" This was a teermanam he wanted to play for a concert that evening. No matter how hard he tried he was unable to play it, because he could not mentally visualize the time. Shri Raghu changed the teermanam to
"Thari Kitha Goodafter Noon, Goodafter Noon, Goodafter Noon".

This helped the student internalize the time and play it well.

Vinod Venkataraman

mohan · Post by **mohan** » 04 Apr 2011, 08:54

VRV ... Good one!

arasi · Post by **arasi** » 04 Apr 2011, 09:04

A good one Vinod, just like this thread.

Spring cuckoo,
i don't know how you think up these things--I know, I know (what's this?) take a walk in the park, take a walk in the park (what's this?) and as gee's name goes, gee! (what's this?). Where's all this going to lead us? To the lab in a lap, to the woods for our own good (what's this?).
pArttu naDa! pArttu naDa!
varavillayA? varavillayA?
It's not just us, the older set that tends to repeat itself--naDais do too--there! I do know something about them

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 04 Apr 2011, 21:34

Arasi: Nice.. That sounds good and poetic ( and rap-able

).. I do not think I got all of what you may be saying there, a lot of poetical poDi usually passes me by.

Regarding substitutable words, after our baseball-cricket conversation, I was reading the topic title "yeh garv bharA " as Yogi Berra

VK RAMAN · Post by **VK RAMAN** » 04 Apr 2011, 21:40

yeh garv bharA - http://www.acidplanet.com/components/em ... 029&T=9302

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 04 Apr 2011, 21:44

VRV,
A very interesting anecdote! It goes to really show what a great teacher he must have been. He gets into the student's head, which is hard enough to do in a normal setting, but this is about doing multiple mental somersaults to understand that the problem is due to the foreignness of the sound and that the way he pronounces these sounds is not exactly what the student hears. This is a huge difference practically, but a very fine idea to conceive.

srikant1987 · Post by **srikant1987** » 04 Apr 2011, 21:47

VRV, thanks for sharing this. This indeed speaks more than a rave review for PRR's vidwat and his great teaching! Sadly, I now have access only to these -- I never heard him in person.

But it is nice to see that now Vasanthakokilam too is beginning to hear CM even in routine conversations!

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 05 Apr 2011, 03:38

Now eduppu has a role to play in changing the meaning of these expressions.

"AH HAH!" on samam is a neutral acknowledge and appreciation of something.
"AH HAH!" on arai eduppu is an exclamation, uttered when a light bulb went on

venkatakailasam · Post by **venkatakailasam** » 05 Apr 2011, 04:48

It may be out of place for a "non technical" man like me : but I remember reading some where :
layam - denotes the inherent rhythmic content of the music
Mere ly producing sound cannot be construed as layam.
It has to have the potential to creativity and has to adapt itself to rhythmic thala

venkatakailasam

VRV · Post by **VRV** » 05 Apr 2011, 10:32

srikant1987 wrote:VRV, thanks for sharing this. This indeed speaks more than a rave review for PRR's vidwat and his great teaching! Sadly, I now have access only to these -- I never heard him in person.

srikant1987

After reading your post, I got to thinking of my time with Raghu mama. The man was an inspiration to everyone, young and old.
The place: Bombay, The year Summer 1983. To escape the Madras heat, Raghu mama would make his annual pilgrimage to Bombay, to teach a group of about 15 students at the "National Center for the Performing Arts". The brain behind this teaching endeavour was the late Shri CV. Narasimhan (father of mridangist Bombay Balaji).

Each day by 8:00 AM Raghu mama would be ready for all of us and would impart his knowledge for a solid four hours. I had a personal relationship unlike anyone else. After all students left at around 12:10, Raghu mama and I would take my Enfield bullet bike and go to the grounds besides EROS Cinema, to watch the Dosa vendor make Dosas for about 100 to 120 office going folk. The inspiration Raghu mama derived watching this vendor was unprecedented. He would say, " Paru Da Vinod, Ida Dhan Vidwat. Yepadi Dosai Vakha ran Paru"

At around 1:30 mama and I would enjoy the vendor's dosai and head back to NCPA. I distinctly remember that Summer when mama coined his famous korvai

Thadi Thakitha Thaka Dhin tha Tha Dhim, Tha Dhim, Tha Dhim. I am fairly confident the credit goes to the Dosa vendor. That Saturday at Shanmukhananda Sabha the concert was by

Palghat KV, Narayanaswamy
Shri TN Krishnan
Palghat Raghu

I picked him up in my motor cycle, mridangam strapped to his shoulder, wanting to avoid the Bombay traffic, mama and I arrived at the Sabha. I had the opportunity to be on stage with him that evening. Raghu mama tells me Talam nanna poddu Da. Inneke Dosai variety mari naan korvai variety Poddarain.

The main was Kiravani Ragam (Kallike Unde) and sub main was Mohanam (Yevaru Ra Ninnuvina)and the RTP was the famous 4 Ragam pallavi. True to his word mama put 27 variations of Thadi Thakitha Thaka Dhin tha Tha Dhim, Tha Dhim, Tha Dhim. This korvai on You Tube was coined on that day. Here is the link. Hope you all enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9usmhZojjNE The korvai begins at about 5:12 to the end.

After the concert, we drove back to NCPA via the maidanam, checked out the dosa vendor, chatted him up, ate some unbelievable idlis and retired for the night.

Srikant, you opened up a part of my life I had forgotten. What a loss to the musical community, What a loss to students of Mridangam. One and only one The Great Palghat R. Raghu

Vinod R Venkataraman

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 05 Apr 2011, 11:36

>Talam nanna poddu Da. Inneke Dosai variety mari naan korvai variety Poddarain.

Nice..

I can hear that in my head in his voice with the right touch of humor.

VRV, thanks for the recollections. Quite enjoyable.

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 05 Apr 2011, 11:43

Vinod, wonderful anecdotes! thanks for sharing these.

cienu · Post by **cienu** » 05 Apr 2011, 17:20

That was a nice recollection VRV. Thanks for sharing .
Thari Kitha Good afternoon, Good afternoon, Good afternoon is addictive indeed

bilahari · Post by **bilahari** » 05 Apr 2011, 19:29

VRV, thanks a lot for these wonderful anecdotes about PRR! And VK, thanks for opening up this interesting thread! In fact, there is layam in the very partitioning of words into syllables, and inflections of these syllables, too! And there is melody in intonation! So in that sense, music is a very natural extension of spoken language.

srikant1987 · Post by **srikant1987** » 05 Apr 2011, 19:48

bilahari wrote:So in that sense, music is a very natural extension of spoken language.

Aren't we lot supposed to believe music came before spoken language, now?

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 05 Apr 2011, 20:02

Srikant, Bilahari: it is equally likely that spoken language evolved from musical rhythms. However the scientific community is very divided on the origin of the relationship between the two.

The Chomsky-Steven Pinker (MIT Linguistics) school would have you believe that music is an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language. Essentially their theory is that rhythmic entrainment to a musical beat relies on the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning. However, the discovery of timekeeping circuits in even more primitive invertebrates suggests that rhythm came first, and the complexities of spoken language emerged from this "basis function" if you will.

However, there is no doubt that spoken language has a rhythmic structure and the metric that is found in compositions reflects the rhythmicity of language. For example, composers in syllable-timed (for e.g. French) and stress-timed languages (English) use different rhythmic signatures in their compositions that reflect the natural rhythms of their language.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 05 Apr 2011, 22:04

Mahavishnu: Now I fully understand what you meant by taking it in a technical direction.. You made me look up syllable timed vs stress timed.. Wow, there is so much stuff there.

I see parallels to our numerous eduppu discussions and packing more swaras in the same beat ( naDai changes of the speed change kind ) etc. What about our Indian languages, which category they belong to?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMM5eCvi8w ( the dog, chase, cat example at the end is quite illustrative and similar to what happens in musical rhythm, it looks like )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think ... -languages

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think ... ress-timed

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 05 Apr 2011, 23:17

VK: I am refraining from taking this in a geeky direction, since we might lose many discussants from this wonderful discucssion in the process. But now that you asked... Much of what I know is from the work of a phonetician called Elinor Keane at Oxford. See full paper here: http://las.sagepub.com/content/49/3/299.abstract

I am not sure about Telugu, but Tamil is a language that is considered "diglossic", it has very well accepted formal and colloquial versions, each with a legitimate cause for existence. The two versions differ in terms of their lexis, morphology, and segmental phonology. It is likely that their temporal characteristics would be rhythmically different. In terms of music, tuning a piece by Kamban into a musical metric/nadai would be quite different from tuning a piece by, say, Vairamuttu, atleast in theory. But somehow this is not true in reality (This is me, not Smt Elinor's work).

People have tried to describe the global temporal characteristics of Tamil in terms of rhythmic class: it has been variously described as syllable-timed, stress-timed, neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, and moratimed like Sanskrit [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)]

Keane says that there are several issues may have contributed to this confusion. first among them being the inherent difficulty of assigning a single rhythmic description to Tamil. Temporal characteristics are determined by a complex interplay of factors, not only phonological properties but also speaker- and rate-specific phonetic implementation patterns, which are responsible for variation within a single language.

The typical methodology to characterise a language is to compute something called a pairwise variability index (PVI). In a stress-timed language, every adjacent stress will be long and short. In a syllable timed language, the dependency will be nested over larger time scale (what it takes to complete a syllable not just a phoneme, and this could vary greatly). So a syllable-timed language would have a greater PVI value. Computations of this inded, over a corpus of text and recordings of tamil speakers has been inconclusive.

To relate this to my previous post, Ani Patel in San Diego has discovered that composers who are native stress-timed language speakers show the same PVI in their musical compositions. The same pattern does not hold for composers who speak syllable-timed languages.

To go back to your early observation at the top of the thread... I hear musical phrases not just in conversation/spoken language but in sounds from inanimate objects too. Just listen to your tumble dryer more carefully the next time you do laundry!

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 06 Apr 2011, 07:07

Ramesh (Mv),
I do not understand "rate-specific phonetic implementation". What rate are we talking about here

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 06 Apr 2011, 08:10

Ranganayaki: My answer to your question with minimal geek-speak.

All words are phonologically represented in a lexical system. This is true across languages. For example, take a word like "pazham" (meaning fruit). In order to implement this word in speech, you need a phonetic implementation rule.

The speech articulators need to know how to time the onset of /zh/, when saying "pa". The rate of articulation makes a great difference to the way a word sounds (pazham, pAzham, pazhAm are different because of vowel elongations created by inter-syllable timing). Take the word, tulip, for example. When you articulate this, your lips make an anticipatory rounding gesture (shaped to say u) even before the beginning of voicing. Seriously, try this in the mirror and you will see what I mean. My undergrads are usually quite floored by this example.

The rate of speech production influences phonetic implementation in tamizh. The articulatory gestures for Merry, Mary, Marry and Marie (like the biscuit) or pseudohomophones like "towed" and "toad" vary in the rate of phonetic implementation. In the case of the pseudohomophones, the difference is very very subtle but it still exists.

Spoken tamil articulation can greatly change vowel duration, consonant closure duration and voicing into consonant closure. If you articulate /zh/ very fast, you will end up with sounds like /y/ or /l/ thus rendering the word pazham as palam or payam (as in elandampayam). All three pronunciations are observed in colloquial tamil. With even faster articulation you get spoken variants of the word that sound like elndampyon (to be pronounced creatively like a Jayalalitha song from the late 50s). Thus tamil is more vulnerable to changes in phonetic implementation than many other similar languages, even from the Dravidian family. There are several reasons for this, but I promised to keep this relatively geek-free.

vgovindan · Post by **vgovindan** » 06 Apr 2011, 08:28

Take the word, tulip, for example. When you articulate this, your lips make an anticipatory rounding gesture (shaped to say u) even before the beginning of voicing.

Our forefathers seem to have understood this. Though my point may be taken as 'irrelevant', I will hazard to place it here. This forms part of 'nAda' ('sphota') theory (vAda). Sound (Sabda) has been classified as 'anAhata' (natural) and 'ahata' (man-made). In 'ahata', the sound production has been stated as four-staged. The seed-less state of sound (parA), the seed state (paSyantI), explicit (vaikharI) and intermediate state between 'seed' and 'explicit' (madhyamA).

What you are referring to as 'curving of lips' should come in the category of 'madhyamA'. For further references you may refer to 'sphOta vAda' and lalitA sahasra nAma.

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 06 Apr 2011, 08:43

Govindan sir, this is fascinating. I will try to dig up references for what you have mentioned.

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 06 Apr 2011, 09:03

This is very interesting to me. So can we say that this readiness to implement is what causes accent differences in foreign speakers of a language, because the non-native speaker has his own set of contexts for each sound and when one context is created (by speech as one invidividual phoneme in the non-native language), it triggers readiness for the most likely phonetic implementation in the native language, which prevents an authentic accent and makes it obvious that this is a non-native speaker. Am I making any sense and have I understood you?

keerthi · Post by **keerthi** » 06 Apr 2011, 15:13

The sphOTa theory of articulation of speech and Abhinavagupta's pratyabhigna darshana, are rich material for the modern cognitive scientist, especially the cognitive linguist (the non-computationalist, non-AI kind).

There are a few scholars who are making intelligible progress, by looking at the pratyabhignA and sphOTa accounts, and checking these ideas against the cog-ling notions of perception and conception and usage.

The four stages of speech - parA, pashyantI, madhyamA and vaikharI, can be read this way -

parA is the transcendental ever-present inclination/ ability to articulate,

pashyantI is when the concept is seen i.e, visualised/ conceptualised.

madhyama is when the thought is clothed in words, but at the mental plane.

vaikhari is gross speech, in the form that is perceived by the listener.

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 06 Apr 2011, 18:10

Ranganayaki: You are right, except I wouldn't use the term readiness. Non-native accents come about either due to improper or biased phonological representations (many Germans do not hear the distinction between /v/ /w/) or also due to implementation which is at the level of phonetic execution. First time English speakers have difficulties saying "lieu" in French, possibly due to problems at both levels.

Keerthi: Do you know cognitive linguists that work in this area that are aware of sphOTa theory? I know many who work on Indic languages, but none that are aware of any Indian intellectual work on the topic. Are you a cognitive scientist yourself?

arasi · Post by **arasi** » 06 Apr 2011, 19:35

Mahavishnu, Govindan and keerthi,
Even for a non-academic, this is all fascinating!
As a parent who has heard her children who grew away from India and from a tamizh speaking country--they listened to tamizh which they heard spoken by their parents and other tamizhs whom they had met here and there--I can add this (a lay person's experience, of course: how they're governed by the language (or accent) of the language which surrounds them. With our children, their tamizh sounded slightly different after they had moved from England to the US! Even when they speak tamizh now, it is still there. Those who had grandparent (s) living with them were much better, of course.
I see this even in my cousin's children who were not born here but migrated to the US in their primary school years many years ago after learning tamizh of much better quality (as compared to tamizh in tamizh nADu now where words are often pronounced incorrectly). They are very fluent, of of course. Even with them, I find their stress on syllables to be slightly different!
Then there are other children in the extended family (younger ones) who were born here but have been exposed to tamizh more by frequent visits to India and longer stays there. Parents of children who were born in the sixties and early seventies (as with us) did not go to India that often and were not exposed to the language in its natural surroundings. These days, youngsters who are learning CM and bharatanatyam in a serious way, spending months (years) in India speak a much better tamizh, as far as intonations and sticking with the natural flow of words is concerned. Take a simple word as 'AmAm' and see how they pronounce it, whether they say it quickly or elongate it while they linger on in their delivery! You may also see subtle differences in the californian and east coast kind

Our fellow member and young musician Sandeep Narayanan (a Rasikas.org member too) comes to mind. I heard him for the first time six or seven years ago in the season, liked his music and noted that his accent (in singing) was a bit John Higgins-ish. There is no trace of it now!
No technical stuff, the above, scholars--but a bit of my own limited experience ...

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 06 Apr 2011, 19:59

Very interesting, Arasi. I think these are all great resource material for a researcher to put under a model/theory. Before the jet age and the age of migration, a lot of these kinds of real life social experiments were far and few. Now that these are all possible, examples you cite ( some of which I have observed as well ) provide some clues to what may be going on. A similar example I heard from a friend of mine is, an American family moved to China and raised their kids there. These kids speak accentless Chinese but speak English like how a Chinese person would. He said it is quite humorous to hear that.

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 06 Apr 2011, 21:05

VK - going back to your original question - about rhythms in expressive language - shorn of all geekese ( I am speechless by Ramesh and Keerthi's inputs

) - emotion plays a role in how the syllables are broken up, right? As kids, we could always tell how much trouble we were in by how the epithet 'toDappakaTTai' was enunciated...I do not know if that is something that fits into your original ayyayO example...

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 07 Apr 2011, 01:44

Nice pun, Ravi. All this talk about speech production makes you speechless

I always knew "paNNisai" was one of your specialities.

Arasi: We have a young one who goes to French immersion school (quite common in Canada); He speaks English outside the house and Tamizh at home with me and Tamizh/Hindi with his mother. We discover crazy linguistic interference effects all the time. Strangely enough, the kids that learn both Indian and Western systems of music, seem to seamlessly move between the two worlds; Sheet music vs notated south Indian music. That is the topic of another thread!

keerthi · Post by **keerthi** » 14 Apr 2011, 20:23

[quote=mahavishnu]
Keerthi: Do you know cognitive linguists that work in this area that are aware of sphOTa theory? I know many who work on Indic languages, but none that are aware of any Indian intellectual work on the topic. Are you a cognitive scientist yourself?[/quote]

Firstly, sorry for the late response. I forgot all about my post on this thread.

Mahavishnu,

I know of impressive work by scholars trained in philosophy, who are trying to examine the sAnkhya and navya nyAya taxonomy of the world, where they gloss over these aspects of speech, including sphOTa.

There is amazing work by distinguished intelligible philosophers (those do exist) like Arindam Chakrabarti (univ of Hawaii) and B.K.Matilal, where they haven't looked at indic philosophical and metaphysical systems merely as ornamental studies of historical and ornamental value, but have examined the methods of these traditional schemes in light of modal and formal logic.

There expositions of Indian epistemology is very accessible and makes for good reading. Their emphasis is not on the things that a cognitivist would look for.

However, I doubt if any linguists , and more importantly if any cognitive linguists have tried to make a serious study of sphOTa. BhartRhari's vAkyapadIya - an important treatise of Indian linguistics does concur with the sphOTa, and there are whole droves of scholars - linguists, psychologists and philosophers writing about it, [as a google book search will reveal] but no cog-ling work, to the best of my knowledge.

In response to the second question,I am a sheep in wolf's clothing - a molecular biologist with half burnt bridges trying to learn cognition science. My supervisor is a cognitive scientist, but I still feel like a bit of a fraud calling myself one. Will become one, surely..!

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 14 Apr 2011, 21:07

Keerthi, thanks. That was very illuminating. I was not aware of any analytic work on Indian epistemology; as you say most of the treatments of Indian ancient texts reek of orientalism. Even the word "Indic" gives me the heebie-jeebies.

My graduate advisor dabbled quite a bit in cognitive linguistics, mostly at the word recognition level. This was years ago, some of it rubbed off on me, but clearly not enough. Advisors can have such a long-lasting influence though, almost like gurukulavasam.

Molecular biologist with half-burned bridges? You have the perfect background for cognitive science

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 15 Apr 2011, 02:16

mahavishnu wrote:Molecular biologist with half-burned bridges? You have the perfect background for cognitive science

Which part - the molecular biologist part, or the 'burnt bridges' part? All in 'speechless' jest, of course!

mahavishnu · Post by **mahavishnu** » 15 Apr 2011, 03:40

Ravi, This is just one of those made-up rules. Given the newness of the field (~25yrs), most cognitive scientists (especially linguistics types) were doing something else before they came to the field. Word is that disgruntled physicists and biologists make great cognitive scientists.

We cognitive neuroscientists need something to do with our time, so we make up and adapt silly jokes like this below. All in garrulous jest

How many cognitive linguists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Nine. A semanticist to write a paper on the meaning of "a lightbulb", a semiotician to write a paper on the symbolic content of a lightbulb, a journal editor to point out that not everyone would agree that a semiotician is a kind of cognitive linguist, a Chomskyan to set the switch to on or off, a phonetician to select the sound to make when you screw the lightbulb in, a Neogrammarian to reconstruct the dead bulb from all the burnt out ones, an experimental psycholinguist to test complex transfer phenomena before attempting a changeover, a discourse analyst to record, transcribe and analyse the previous seven as they argue in the dark, and a pragmaticist to find the right words to persuade the building's janitor to change the bulb this week.

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 15 Apr 2011, 13:43

LOL! I think the joke will take on a lovely sheen if accompanied by the best of Bavarian spirits....

srikant1987 · Post by **srikant1987** » 15 Apr 2011, 13:50

Here's another light-bulb joke I really like.

Q: How many theoretical physicists specializing in general relativity does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Two. One to hold the bulb and one to rotate the rest of the universe.

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 15 Apr 2011, 18:26

I still can't resist contributing my favourite. Sorry it is art- rather than science-oriented...

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Fish.

arasi · Post by **arasi** » 15 Apr 2011, 22:15

And not chips?

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 15 Apr 2011, 23:02

Certainly not!

We are talking surrealism here, arasi... get a grip!