Friday, December 19, 2008

Non-Food Post - Reviving a Literary Meme

I remember a meme running around the Interwebs a while ago, that asked you to pick up the nearest book at hand, go to the 123rd page, find the 5th sentence, and then post the following three sentences. Here's mine:
The allomorphs of a morpheme are in complementary distriubtion or free variation, that is, in noncontrastive distribution. The allomorphs /-s/ and /-z/ of {noun pl.}, for example, are in complementary distribution. /-s/ occurs after voiceless sounds as in caps /kæps/, and /-z/ occurs after voiced sounds as in cabs /kæbz/.
This is from A Linguistic History of English by Robert A. Peters (thanks, Mom!), a book I'm sure that nobody but me would bother reading unless required to.

Anybody want to join in? I don't like 'tagging' people, so if you want to participate, please leave a comment.

Look forward to seeing what you guys are reading!

1 comment:

Bob said...

I'll play along, but the closest book doesn't have 123 pages (plus it's a cookbook, so probably doesn't count) so I'm grabbing the second closest book. The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan.

"Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that knowledge should be rewarded with torture and death were unlikely to help those accused of witchcraft.

Burning witches is a feature that Western civilization the has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In the last judicial execution of witches in England, a woman and her nine year old daughter were hanged."

Hm. Cheerful stuff. I'll post it up on my blog later, gotta go eat dinner now. Fun meme!