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56-496: A spoonerism is an occurrence of speech in which corresponding consonants , vowels , or morphemes are switched (see metathesis ) between two words of a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and priest William Archibald Spooner , who reportedly commonly spoke in this way. An example is saying "blushing crow" instead of "crushing blow", or "runny babbit" instead of "bunny rabbit". While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of

112-584: A cha-cha-cha class, and they married in Bloomington in September 2012. Hofstadter has composed pieces for piano and for piano and voice. He created an audio CD, DRH/JJ , of these compositions performed mostly by pianist Jane Jackson, with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur, and Hofstadter. The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot." Hofstadter explains in

168-419: A syllable : The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that is easiest to sing ), called the syllabic peak or nucleus , is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the onset and coda ) are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of

224-455: A 'hypodeemic nerdle'; a television announcer once saying that "All the world was thrilled by the marriage of the Duck and Doochess of Windsor"; and during a live radio broadcast in 1931, radio presenter Harry von Zell accidentally mispronouncing US President Herbert Hoover 's name as "Hoobert Heever". Consonant Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than

280-477: A Busman's Holiday... An article in the Daily Herald in 1928 reported spoonerisms to be a "legend". In that piece Robert Seton, once a student of Spooner's, admitted that Spooner: ...made, to my knowledge, only one "Spoonerism" in his life, in 1879, when he stood in the pulpit and announced the hymn: 'Kinkering Kongs their Titles Take' ["Conquering Kings their Titles Take"]...Later, a friend and myself brought out

336-519: A book of "spoonerisms". In 1937, The Times quoted a detective describing a man as "a bricklabourer's layer" and used "Police Court Spoonerism" as the headline. A spoonerism is also known as a marrowsky or morowski , purportedly after an 18th-century Polish count who suffered from the same impediment. Most of the quotations attributed to Spooner are apocryphal; The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd edition, 1979) lists only one substantiated spoonerism: "The weight of rages will press hard upon

392-559: A combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" [t] . In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted. Some pairs of consonants like p::b , t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis , but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction. Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts: Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced , to the left are voiceless . Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible. The recently extinct Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants;

448-527: A consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich for example has /tʃ/ and /kʷ/ but no plain /k/ ; similarly, historical *k in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to /kʲ/ in extinct Ubykh and to /tʃ/ in most Circassian dialects. Symbols to

504-468: A course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly touted AI projects and overall approaches". For example, upon the defeat of Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue , he commented: "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent." In his book Metamagical Themas , he says that "in this day and age, how can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers

560-570: A radical change in technology and culture), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April 2000, he organized a larger symposium titled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil , Hans Moravec , Kevin Kelly , Ralph Merkle , Bill Joy , Frank Drake , John Holland and John Koza . Hofstadter

616-530: A strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems . Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to one. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs

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672-401: A vowel. The word consonant may be used ambiguously for both speech sounds and the letters of the alphabet used to write them. In English, these letters are B , C , D , F , G , J , K , L , M , N , P , Q , S , T , V , X , Z and often H , R , W , Y . In English orthography , the letters H, R, W, Y and the digraph GH are used for both consonants and vowels. For instance,

728-469: A vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna ( ἡμίφωνα 'half-sounded'), which are the continuants , and áphōna ( ἄφωνος 'unsounded'), which correspond to plosives . This description does not apply to some languages, such as the Salishan languages , in which plosives may occur without vowels (see Nuxalk ), and the modern concept of "consonant" does not require co-occurrence with

784-431: Is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the [j] in [ˈjɛs] yes and [ˈjiʲld] yield and the [w] of [ˈwuʷd] wooed having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the [ɪ] in [ˈbɔɪ̯l] boil or [ˈbɪt] bit or the [ʊ] of [ˈfʊt] foot . The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying

840-420: Is a set of 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot . In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as " pilingual " (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he has studied comes to 3.14159 ...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages). In 1999, the bicentennial year of

896-667: Is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us". When Martin Gardner retired from writing his " Mathematical Games " column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–83 with a column titled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself that has an online implementation. One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned

952-563: Is less common in non-rhotic accents.) The most frequent consonant in many other languages is /p/ . The most universal consonants around the world (that is, the ones appearing in nearly all languages) are the three voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , and the two nasals /m/ , /n/ . However, even these common five are not completely universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert , including Arabic , lack /p/ . Several languages of North America, such as Mohawk , lack both of

1008-625: The Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. Hofstadter was born in New York City to future Nobel Prize -winning physicist Robert Hofstadter and Nancy Givan Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University , where his father

1064-514: The Taa language has 87 consonants under one analysis , 164 under another , plus some 30 vowels and tone. The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal. For instance, nearly all Australian languages lack fricatives; a large percentage of the world's languages lack voiced stops such as /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ as phonemes, though they may appear phonetically. Most languages, however, do include one or more fricatives, with /s/ being

1120-537: The 3 December 1950 episode of The Jack Benny Program , Jack mentions that he ran into his butler Rochester while in his car that was on a grease rack. Mary Livingston was supposed to say "How could you run into him on a grease rack?" but flubbed her line with "How could you run into him on a grass reek?" The audience laughed so much that Jack was unable to reply as the show ran out of time. Spoonerisms are used sometimes in false etymologies . For example, according to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann , some wrongly believe that

1176-426: The 80-odd consonants of Ubykh , it lacks the plain velar /k/ in native words, as do the related Adyghe and Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as Xavante and Tahitian —which have no dorsal consonants whatsoever—nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: most of the few languages that do not have a simple /k/ (that is, a sound that is generally pronounced [k] ) have

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1232-644: The College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). In 1988, he received the In Praise of Reason award, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry 's highest honor. In 2009, he

1288-561: The Congo , and China , including Mandarin Chinese . In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/ , and spelled that way in Pinyin . Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels". That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow

1344-467: The English word butterfly derives from ' fl utter b y' . As complements to spoonerism , Douglas Hofstadter used the nonce words kniferism and forkerism to refer to changing, respectively, the vowels or the final consonants of two syllables, giving them a new meaning. Examples of so-called kniferisms include a British television newsreader once referring to the police at a crime scene removing

1400-598: The Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin , Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin . He has translated other poems and two novels: La Chamade ( That Mad Ache ) by Françoise Sagan , and La Scoperta dell'Alba ( The Discovery of Dawn ) by Walter Veltroni , the then-head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. The Discovery of Dawn was published in 2007, and That Mad Ache

1456-455: The Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert M. French . The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models include Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in

1512-693: The alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled ⟨th⟩ in "this" is a different consonant from the ⟨th⟩ sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are [ð] and [θ] , respectively.) The word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant- , from cōnsonāns 'sounding-together', a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon (plural sýmphōna , σύμφωνα ). Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna ( σύμφωνα 'sounded with') because in Greek they can only be pronounced with

1568-470: The brain." In Gödel, Escher, Bach he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a " strange loop ", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback that Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of

1624-678: The character "Dr. Chandra" as being caught in a "Hofstadter– Möbius loop". The movie uses the term "H. Möbius loop". On April 3, 1995, Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com . Michael R. Jackson 's musical A Strange Loop makes reference to Hofstadter's concept and the title of his 2007 book. The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available): Hofstadter has written forewords for or edited

1680-494: The concept of superrationality (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and the self-modifying game of Nomic , based on the way the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher Peter Suber . Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush until her death. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children. Carol died in 1993 from

1736-452: The damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire, " A Person Paper on Purity in Language " (1985), in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language; Hofstadter published it under

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1792-666: The employer" (instead of "rate of wages"). Spooner himself claimed that "The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take" (in reference to a hymn) was his sole spoonerism. Most spoonerisms were probably never uttered by William Spooner himself but rather invented by colleagues and students as a pastime. Richard Lederer , calling "Kinkering Kongs their Titles Take" (with an alternative spelling) one of the "few" authenticated Spoonerisms, dates it to 1879, and he gives nine examples "attributed to Spooner, most of them spuriously". They are as follows: In modern terms, spoonerism generally refers to any changing of sounds in this manner. Writing in tribute for

1848-414: The inaugural Ronnie Barker Talk , Ben Elton wrote: What an honour. I grew up loving Ronnie Barker and can only hope the news that I am to give a talk in his name doesn’t leave him spitting spiritedly splenetic spoonerisms in comedy heaven. He once proclaimed, "Hey, belly jeans " When he found a stash of jelly beans. But when he says he pepped in stew We'll tell him he should wipe his shoe. On

1904-636: The labials /p/ and /m/ . The Wichita language of Oklahoma and some West African languages, such as Ijo , lack the consonant /n/ on a phonemic level, but do use it phonetically, as an allophone of another consonant (of /l/ in the case of Ijo, and of /ɾ/ in Wichita). A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound , such as Makah , lack both of the nasals [m] and [n] altogether, except in special speech registers such as baby-talk. The 'click language' Nǁng lacks /t/ , and colloquial Samoan lacks both alveolars, /t/ and /n/ . Despite

1960-449: The letter Y stands for the consonant/semi-vowel /j/ in y oke , the vowel /ɪ/ in m y th , the vowel /i/ in funn y , the diphthong /aɪ/ in sk y , and forms several digraphs for other diphthongs, such as sa y , bo y , ke y . Similarly, R commonly indicates or modifies a vowel in non-rhotic accents . This article is concerned with consonant sounds, however they are written. Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of

2016-452: The microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry. Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach but also present in several of his later books, is that it is "an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in

2072-479: The most common, and a liquid consonant or two, with /l/ the most common. The approximant /w/ is also widespread, and virtually all languages have one or more nasals , though a very few, such as the Central dialect of Rotokas , lack even these. This last language has the smallest number of consonants in the world, with just six. In rhotic American English, the consonants spoken most frequently are /n, ɹ, t/ . ( /ɹ/

2128-408: The nerd culture that centers on computers". He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology", but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he was pleased about that, but that he himself has "no interest in computers". In that interview he also mentioned

2184-650: The nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as church in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, /ˈtʃɹ̩tʃ/ , or a rhotic vowel, /ˈtʃɝtʃ/ : Some distinguish an approximant /ɹ/ that corresponds to a vowel /ɝ/ , for rural as /ˈɹɝl/ or [ˈɹʷɝːl̩] ; others see these as a single phoneme, /ˈɹɹ̩l/ . Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of

2240-502: The number of letters in any one alphabet , linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ⟨ch⟩ , ⟨sh⟩ , ⟨th⟩ , and ⟨ng⟩ are used to extend

2296-408: The preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language. As a consequence of his attitudes about consciousness and empathy, Hofstadter became a vegetarian in his teenage years, and has remained primarily so since that time. In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two , Arthur C. Clarke 's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey , HAL 9000 is described by

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2352-585: The pseudonym William Satire, an allusion to William Safire . Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized. The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, including patterns in Frédéric Chopin 's piano music (particularly his études ),

2408-584: The right in a cell are voiced , to the left are voiceless . Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible. Legend: unrounded  •  rounded Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness , analogy-making, strange loops , artificial intelligence , and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won

2464-425: The sudden onset of a brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme , when their children were young. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name. Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul". In 2010, Hofstadter met Baofen Lin in

2520-576: The syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil [ˈbɔɪ̯l] . On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes [ˈjɛs] . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/ , so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/ , beet would be /bii̯t/ , and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/ . Likewise, foot would be /fut/ , food would be /fuu̯d/ , wood would be /u̯ud/ , and wooed would be /u̯uu̯d/ . However, there

2576-553: The tongue, they can also be used intentionally as a word play . The first known spoonerisms were published by the 16th-century author François Rabelais and termed contrepèteries . In his novel Pantagruel , he wrote "femme folle à la messe et femme molle à la fesse" ("insane woman at Mass, woman with flabby buttocks"). Spoonerisms are named for the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden from 1903 to 1924 of New College, Oxford , who

2632-643: The trill [r̩] and the lateral [l̩] as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels ). In languages like Nuxalk , it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of 'syllable' applies in Nuxalk, there are syllabic consonants in words like /sx̩s/ ( /s̩xs̩/ ?) 'seal fat'. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ 'to build' and /ps̩ks̩/ 'to pull'. Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features : All English consonants can be classified by

2688-487: The ultimate tool for exploring their essence?" In 1988, Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas, Victim of the Brain , based on The Mind's I . It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work. Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (a hypothetical moment in the future of humanity when a self-reinforcing, runaway development of artificial intelligence causes

2744-446: The world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels , semiconsonants , or glides . On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of

2800-525: Was a professor, and attended the International School of Geneva in 1958–59. He graduated with distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1965, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, where his study of the energy levels of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field led to his discovery of the fractal known as Hofstadter's butterfly . Hofstadter

2856-459: Was allegedly susceptible to this mistake. The Oxford English Dictionary records the word spoonerism as early as 1900. The term was well-established by 1921. An article in The Times from that year reports that: The boys of Aldro School, Eastbourne , ... have been set the following task for the holidays: Discover and write down something about: The Old Lady of Threadneedle-street, a Spoonerism,

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2912-502: Was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit , held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt that the singularity will occur in the foreseeable future. In 2023, Hofstadter said that rapid progress in AI made some of his "core beliefs" about the limitations of AI "collapse". Hinting at an AI takeover , he added that human beings may soon be eclipsed by "something else that

2968-550: Was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988, Hofstadter returned to IU as College of Arts and Sciences Professor in cognitive science and computer science. He was also appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but has said that his involvement with most of those departments is nominal. Since 1988, Hofstadter has been

3024-737: Was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 2010, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala , Sweden. At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell coauthored a computational model of "high-level perception"— Copycat —and several other models of analogy-making and cognition , including

3080-424: Was initially appointed to Indiana University's computer science department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which he called "artificial intelligence research", a label he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and

3136-556: Was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay "Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation". Hofstadter's Law is "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." The law is stated in Gödel, Escher, Bach . Hofstadter's former Ph.D. students include (with dissertation title): Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with

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