User talk:David G Brault

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Welcome!

Hello, David G Brault, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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[edit] Pauli exclusion principle

Hi,

You placed an "insufficient context" tag on Pauli exclusion principle but failed to describe the problem on the article talk page. The article seems to be reasonably clear and straight-forward to me, and so I can't guess how to fix it until you make clear what it is that you find lacking. If you cannot describe what the problem is, then please remove the "context" tag. linas 13:51, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image copyright problem with Image:Inuit 1.jpg

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David Brault Brit Lit Period 4B The Wife of Bath’s Tale

The Wife of Bath is not just named the Wife of Bath, her name is Alyce, or, as we say today, Alice. In the story, she first gives a long, rambling preamble which is part sermon that preaches the virtues of unfettered sex and bitterly denounces anyone who advocates chastity, and part rather shocking confessional in which the “experienced” Wife of Bath tells about her five(!) husbands, how they treated her, and how she treated them. She uses a lot of Bible verses, refuting the rather ambiguous to say the least “argument” made by Jesus going to the wedding at Cana (he only went once, which is supposed to mean that one should only marry once) and Jesus’ totally unambiguous statement to the Samaritan woman that although she has had five husbands, the man who she is married to now is not her real husband, which means that her real husband is the original man that she married. But the Wife of Bath has the nerve to argue with the explicit statement of Christ himself, citing God’s command to multiply, and the example of the polygamous, but virtuous Solomon, among others, to justify her marriages. She sort of garbles the Bible and what the stories mean, but she’s very likable because of the charming way that if she wants a story to have a certain meaning to it, she just slaps that meaning on it. Her first three husbands, she says, were good, and her last two were bad. Her first three husbands were old and mostly impotent, despite the Wife of Bath’s concerted efforts. Therefore, she mocks them heartily and constantly scolded them for all of their faults. She even tricks them by saying that she is going out at night for the purpose of checking up on their infidelities, she instead goes around during this time having her own. She says that the idea in her husbands minds that she was checking on her husband’s infidelity is one of the few things that she did which made her husbands happy. This is pretty evil of her, don’t you think? After this she has two husbands that are ”bad”. Her fourth it kind of seems like she “did in” because she wanted to marry number five. It’s not actually spelt out that she killed her fourth husband, but I think that that is what Chaucer was trying to say. It does say that she wasn’t sad to see him dead. She liked her fifth husband best because he was the best in bed (the most energetic and enduring) , and furthermore that he was very smooth and charming. However, he didn’t seem to love her much. She says that that made her love him more. He would always read from a book full of extremely anti-women stories. This made Alice really angry and so one day she ripped out three pages that he was reading from. Now naturally, this made her hotblooded husband # 4 mad, so he hit her, and they fought until # 4 punches her brutally on the head and she falls on the ground, as if dead. Now, naturally, this makes him repent, so when she awakes, feebly crying that she just would like to kiss him in case she dies, he feels so bad that he lives for the rest of his life in doting obedience to his wife, which is the way Alice thinks all husbands should act. The genre of the tale she tells is often considered Breton Lais. A Breton Lais is a type of story from the region of Brittany in France. In generally concerns things such as elves, fairies, King Arthur, and magic. Some people say that it is not actually a Breton Lais, but if it’s not, I don’t know what it is. In it, a knight of King Arthur rapes a virgin, so he is therefore sentenced to death by King Arthur. But Lady Guinivere, Arthur’s queen, gives the horrible knight a temporary reprieve of one year and one day and the prospect of total forgiveness if he will tell to her what it is that women want. If he cannot find out in a year and a day his reprieve will end and he will be executed for his crime. He travels around the land looking for a good answer, but he finds none. When the time is nearly up he has nearly given up, until the answer is given to him by what is known as a “loathly lady”. She gives him an answer in return of the favor of “whatever she wants”. The knight goes to Guinevere and tells her the answer, which is that “Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee as wel over hir housbond as hir love”. But then he has to marry the loathly lady. At first, he is totally disgusted by her age, her ugliness, and her low birth. But she speaks to him so purely on these topics that he repents saying this. Being a magical creature, she then gives him a choice: He can have her loving, and ugly, or else beautiful, and troublesome. He leaves the decision up to her, the correct response, so she rewards him by being both beautiful and loving and he is obedient to her from then on. And this further elucidates the character of The Wife of Bath, because it shows her view that men should obey their wives. Because she believes this, she finds this a good story to tell the other Canterbury pilgrims.

The greet vuwall sheeft

This paper is about the Great Vowel Shift, during which people rather suddenly and dramatically (over the course of one hundred years, between the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare) started pronouncing their vowels quite differently. Ant then it just as suddenly stopped. English speakers are still dealing with the results of the this event to this very day.


   Before I really get into this paper, I feel a need to define the word “vowel” a little bit more clearly. Basically, the word “vowel” has two closely related meanings. The first is “a class of speech sounds in the articulation of which the oral part of the breath channel is not blocked and is not constricted enough to cause audible friction” and the second is “a letter or other symbol representing a vowel -- usually used in English of a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y” (Webster’s 1977). The fact that there are two meanings for the word “vowel” makes it possible for a vowel shift to occur in the first place. Now, the English language has five, and sometimes six letters used for writing vowel sounds. However, when it comes to sounds, English has got no less than  twenty different vowel sounds, with twelve “pure” vowels and eight “diphthongs”, which are “mixed” vowels formed by quickly gliding between two pure vowels. However, there are pure vowels found in diphthongs that are not found in the English language by themselves! An example of a diphthong is found in the standard American English pronunciation of the word “day”. Although it might seem that this is one sound, it is actually two: Say it very slowly to hear the two separate sounds. The first pure vowel in “day” is “et”, as in the French word for “and”. The second pure vowel in day is the sound “ee.” Together, these two pure vowels make up the diphthong sound in “day.”


Now, when I am doing this, I am having a great deal of difficulty in writing these vowel sounds for you. Why is this? It is because English is does not have a logical way of using letters to represent its words. To use the proper term, the phonetics of English is so complex so as to seem almost entirely random. To be aware of this, consider this sentence: “Though he would cough and hiccough at the plough till his throat was rough, he always just fine in his bed, which was on a bough overlooking the lough.” I say again: English does not have logical phonics. In this sentence, the letter combination “ough” stands for 6 different, almost totally unrelated sounds. So how are we to know which one to use? Everyone knows the answer to that: They must be memorized by pure brute force. Now, most native speakers who learn to read and write English lo longer have any problem with this by the time they get to high school, except in the rare case of certain unique, rare words like “chough” (it’s said “chuff”). However, for the dull student, or the foreigner, these illogical spellings can seem like a horrible punishment that nobody deserves.


So, why is English so sadistic in its unphoneticness? It truly is a rather special case. No other language that is written with an alphabet, not French, which is almost as bad, nor any of the other alphabetic languages in the entire world except Irish Gaelic, has as illogical a way of spelling words. (Britannica, 1972) Well, partly, it was the Great Vowel Shift that did all this to the language. Without these sorts of phenomena such as vowel shifts (which have happened in other times, in other places as well, such as the Southern Vowel Shift (The Suthuhn Voll Sheift)

The Great Vowel Shift was an event during which, over the course of a hundred years, people slowly but surely began to say their vowels totally differently.

I want to write a paper on why this happened, but I find myself in the position of wishing to explain just exactly what vowels are in the first place, because they are very complicated. In fact, part of the reason that vowels are so complicated in the first place for me to explain in writing is that the great vowel shift happened. You see, the great vowel shift happened at the exact point in history that


and the fact that it conveniently had to happen at the exact same time that spellings of words and the way that their vowels were written was getting standardized (due to the spread of the printing press)


In the Great Vowel Shift, “ah” became “ai”, “ai-uh” became both “eeh” and “ai-eeh”, the unfortunately exclusively Australian English sound found in the second parts of the words “hair” and “there”, which sounds like the British sound used in “feet” which sounds kind of like “eeh- stop-suddenly-as-if-choking ”

Works Cited

Ackerman, Robert Great Vowel Shift. Online. 12 Dec 2006. <http://asstudents.unco.edu/faculty/tbredehoft/UNCclasses/ENG419/GVS.html>.

Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003.


Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue. New York: Harper, 1990.

Menzer, Melinda J. What is the Great Vowel Shift?. 2000. Online. 12 Dec 2006. <http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm>.


P, Si. “English Language” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ed. James L Garvin. 14th ed. Chicago: Wiliam Benton. 1972.


Wolf, Henry B., ed. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1977.

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