Transcriptionist

[Gribble]

So last summer I gave up a perfectly good career to go back to school full-time. I've been paying my bills working overnight at a hotel. By work I mean I come in, spend about an hour printing and filing documents, then I sit in the back and tackle my schoolwork. Not bad. Pay sucks and I'm exhausted, though.

Well, I've stumbled upon the perfect job for me. Transcriptionist. Maybe you've noticed them before. Transcriptionists work with deaf students to transcribe either word for word or meaning for meaning what a teacher is saying. So basically I'll have a laptop connected to a deaf student's laptop and I'll be providing captions in real time, as well as voicing said student's questions.

I'll only be working part-time instead of full, I'll be able to cover all my necessities, and when I am working I'll be doing so in the classroom, gleaning what morsels I can. Beats the pants of becoming a TA and it's something to do until I've got a doctorate. I'm very, very excited. This could only get better if I could find a deaf student with my class schedule.

Not only is it awesome for the above reasons, but let's face it, what girl wouldn't get wet for a guy who makes his living helping the handicapped? Fuggin A, bitches.

[Sonrisa]

ha, i know a lot of deaf people

[doppelgaenger]

That's pretty cool, 'transcription' reminds me of what I'm doing in my free time - I'm writing a fictional language based off a loose theory I've formed. Basically, I divided consonants down the middle, threw out the ones I hate, and added some from other languages that I find aesthetically pleasing. Basically, 'muffled' sounds become positive attributes, and 'unmuffled' sounds become negative attributes. I grouped voiced and voiceless consonants together for other specific uses.

so positive attributes/consonants would be:
š ž þ ð ç ǧ j w m n ŋ (and the negative attributes corresponding below)
s z t d k g a*h r f v
*since j palatalizes vowels and makes them softer, the corresponding negative attribute would be a glottal stop before a vowel.
(also š = sh, ž is s as in pleasure, þ and ð are voiceless and voiced th, ç and ǧ are glottal uvular trills voiceless and voiced respectively, and ŋ is ing)
notice, there is no L, P, or B as well as a few other sounds...

I also applied a similar division to vowels, but I won't get into that because I'm still working on that.

So basically, words with positive meanings (moral good, catering to human needs, etc) will be formed with the positive attributes and vice versa. The complication comes with ambiguous words and syntax (I.e. how to structure a sentence with this? Should I add imaginary grammatical cases to make it complicating?)

My reason for doing all this is pure entertainment. I know, I'm crazy. I really like the sounds on the top line, though. I think they are very seductive, and I am trying to creating an aesthetically powerful language for writing lyrics. My goal is to renovate alliteration and rhyming schemes without all the cliches.

Right now I am working on conjugation and personal pronouns. I am making the language highly inflected, to increase the poetic nature and eliminate prose.

Here's an example of what I have:
Þe šīþa ǧuwežeþ ŋīþ. (positive)
thea shitha ghuwezheth ngith
(I am a good man)
Ta sitea gihazetr fedre. (negative)
(I am the root of all evil)
(see how one they are similar, but one is more pleasant to the ears, like a whisper?)

Same verb, plural conjugation:
šije žīþeš
shiye zhithesh (you are pl.)

mejeðeþ ma jawīþa šīþam
meyatheth mo yawitha shitham
warm here water is (literally) The water here is warm.
faedet fa akhetu sitaf
cold the poison burns (literally) The water is deathly cold.
(already starting to look like alliteration )

[Lipp]

I'm doing something similar as an 'Academic Support Worker', part-time while studying. Basically I just assist deaf/blind/impaired students in terms of note-taking at lectures/tutorials, getting around, helping them research, scanning and processing their reading packs so that they can be listened to and such things.

It's a good job since it's at uni, good pay and flexible hours. Problem would be that it's scattered according to need (one hour here, two hours there), and while it can be easy it can also be a royal pain - for example writing down all the notes for a completely deaf student during an extremely fast-paced non-stop 2 hour programming tutorial in a field that you have no clue of what they're on about but still gotta be clear and accurate.



Learn to type like a motha****a if you have to provide captions in real-time.

[Gribble]

I blew their socks off with the typing test. They wanted 65WPM, I gave them 110.