How to differentiate between MORE similar flags!

The first part of this post has recently become my most popular blog post -- wow! So in honor of that, here's a few more similar flags and how to differentiate between them for all you amateur vexillologists out there.

Senegal and Cameroon

 These two have given me quite a bit of trouble, but I eventually came up with a little trick: The flag of Senegal has a green star which I associate with the "g" in Senegal. Then Cameroon has the yellow star.

Somalia and Vietnam

So this one's pretty easy and clearly just comes down to the colors. Blue and white is Somalia, Red and yellow is Vietnam.

Bahrain and Qatar

These two flags are very similar, and these two countries are similar as well, both small nations in the Persian Gulf. Again, it comes down to color. Bahrain has the normal, bright red, while Qatar is more burgundy.

Guinea and Mali

These two countries which border each other in Western Africa have easily mixed up flags. When seeing one of them I usually first identify it as either Guinea or Mali. If the first color is a bright green, it's Mali. There's no cute little trick for this one.

Liberia, Malaysia and U.S.A.

Clearly the same basic layout for these three flags, but they're not difficult to tell apart. Liberia, whose flag was actually based on America's, has only one star. Malaysia's has the crescent and star. And the U.S. flag is the U.S. flag.

Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Yemen

These countries are all located in the same part of the world and all share the same red, white and black stripes in their flag. Yemen has the plain stripes, but the other three have a different design in the middle. Egypt has the gold eagle, Iraq has the green script, and Syria has two green stars.

El Salvador and Nicaragua

These two Central American countries have strikingly similar flags. Although they both say the name of the country in the gold print around the crest, that's cheating. So other ways of determining the difference are that El Salvador has a slightly darker blue than Nicaragua, and the crests are different. Nicaragua doesn't have anything outside its triangle, while El Salvador's is framed with plants and flags. So you can tell the difference without having to get close enough to read the words (which is cheating anyway).

More things that make me irrationally angry

As part two of my first needlessly impassioned post, here are a few more things that make me irrationally angry.


1. Eye rhymes

I have hated this for as long as we have been forced to read bad poetry in school, and as of recently I have a name for the thing I hate so vehemently.

Eye rhymes are the completely awful thing where two words look like they should rhyme (are spelled similarly) but do not in fact rhyme. ("Love" and "move"; "pain" and "again" are some that come to mind.) They lead to incredibly awkward moments when reading poetry aloud and that just shouldn't happen.

Plus, it seems kind of lazy. You've chosen to be a poet -- think of a word that actually rhymes, thank you.

2. The Mercator projection...

...and it's wide-spread use centuries after its invention. It makes Greenland and Antarctica unsightly huge and has led to a lot of misconceptions about the relative size of countries and continents. #StopTheMercatorProjection2k14.

3. When people have their windshield wipers on the highest speed even though it's hardly even raining.

Seriously. These people need to chill.

 4. When every word in a title is capitalized.

Such as in a newspaper, magazine, or website. There's literally no reason to do that. Don't do that. Especially when the title is particularly long, like most of my blog post titles. It just leads to a lot of arbitrary rules about capitalization. Write it as if you're writing a sentence and spare yourself the trouble (and spare me the aggravation).

5. Corps bands

I was raised in a proud Big Ten, showstyle tradition. I bonded with my other band members by mocking corps bands at competitions and parades. When I was forced to work alongside several corps bands and even march in that style on my senior year Florida band trip I was devastated. The prejudice is strong, and perhaps unfounded. But these are irrational irritants, after all.

The IPA is pretty cool

During the recent phonetics unit of my really fun linguistics class this semester, we studied the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.

Using a set of standardized symbols, one can phonetically transcribe words and sounds of any language in the world. And once you learn IPA, you could, in theory, correctly pronounce the words and sounds of any language.

Of course, sounds that aren't used in your native language will be difficult to pronounce and some sounds are quite simply harder than others. For example, the English "r" (transcribed [ɹ]) is found in very few languages around the world and is objectively a difficult sound to produce. This explains why it's a sound that many native English speaking children pick up later than other sounds.

Even if a sound takes some practice to be able to produce, one can understand how to make any sound using a few descriptors.

For consonants, these include voicing, manner and place. Consonants can be either voiced or voiceless. To demonstrate this, make an "s" sound and then a "z" while holding your finger to your throat. (Don't whisper either -- everything's voiceless when you whisper!) You should feel your vocal cords vibrating on the "z" and not on the "s." Voicing is, actually, the only difference between these two sounds. They both have the same manner (fricatives) and place (alveolar).

Here are all the consonants in English:

Once you understand where in your mouth the places refer to and how to control voicing and manner, you can make sounds that don't appear in English using the three part description.

For example, if you want to say [ɣ], which appears in Spanish and other languges, you just have to know that it's a voiced, velar fricative. This is most similar to an English [g] so essentially, you make a [g] except instead of performing a stop (a complete blockage of air) you nearly close to airflow, but still let some through.

Vowels, on the other hand, have a four part description, that basically all have to do with where your tongue is: its height, backness, and tenseness, and then the roundness of your lips. There are fewer options here. [i] such as in need is high, front, tense, unrounded. [æ] as in apple is low, front, lax and unrounded.

So if you want to pronounce the vowel [ʏ], which is used in French and other languages, you know that it's high, front, lax and rounded. You move your mouth accordingly and you get something similar to this sound. With practice, you could get it down without having to think through it every time.

Lastly, IPA just looks cool and I enjoy writing random words in IPA when I'm bored in class. Here's a few names, words and phrases. See if you can guess what they are!

[dʒɛni əbɛɹi]

[pɔlɪtɪks ænd ʌðɹˌ θɪŋz ðæt doʊnt mæɾɹˌ]

[lɪŋgwɪstɪks ɪz supɹˌ fʌn]

[mɪnəsoʊtə]

[bɹeɪkɪŋ bæd]

[oɹndʒ ɪz ðə nu blæk]

[mʌmfɹˌd æn sʌnz]

[hæmlɪn junɪvɹˌsɪti]

[θeiŋksgɪvɪŋ]

[kɹɪsməs]

[wɪntɹˌ ɪz kʌmɪŋ]

IPA is concerned only with how most people actually pronounce words. Spellings and "proper" pronunciations are not considered.