This episode is dedicated to the men and women of our Armed Forces and First Responders. Whether you are currently serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated. It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear. And I for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting what many of us take for granted. So thank you. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode... At the Michigan Paragon in 2022, I met author Greg Lawson and was really impressed with his body of work. I asked if he wouldn't mind if I narrated a couple of stories of his and he generously agreed. So tonight, I share two stories from his book Diaries of a Paranormalist Encounters with Death. If you want to read the entire anthology, I've placed a link to it in the show notes. We'll begin with a story called The White Lady of Consale and then I'll follow that up with The Spirits. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for a merchandise, my newsletter, Twitter contests to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Near the River Bandon and the county of Cork is the town of Consale, Ireland. Reaching out toward Consale Harbor is a beautiful spit of land now holding the remains of a 17th century fort known as Charles Fort. Built by the English, it was a formidable, star-shaped structure designed to ensure the English maintained rule over their Irish counterparts. Now, as they did then, the Irish did not care to be ruled by Englishmen, so much that clans actually allied with the Spanish to keep the Britons out. This of course didn't go so well for either the Irish or the Spanish and ultimately English soldiers were garrisoned at Charles Fort to maintain control in the region. My visit to Charles Fort was not long, however. Maybe because I'm a former military man or have a reverence for battlegrounds, my experience there impacted me. While the fort itself has a lengthy and formidable past, housing political prisoners and being the location of several battles, it now serves as a reminder of what Britain once was, but maybe more of what love once was. You see, there was a commander at Charles Fort, a Colonel Warinder. Appointed as the fort's commanding officer and governor and under threat of imminent attack, Warinder was a staunch tactician and severe disciplinarian. He personally ensured all his officers and men adhered to exacting protocol both on and off duty. But he was also the father to a beautiful young girl whom he had raised right there in Kinsale. Her name was Wilful, a popular name at the time, and she had fallen in love with one of the English officers garrisoned there, a Sir Trevor Ashhurst. Tall and handsome, Ashhurst was a distinguished soldier and a son of a fine family. After the insistence of a formal courtship, the two young lovers were betrothed to be married, and all was well. Both Trevor and Wilful were never happier. As you can imagine, an affair such as this, the Colonel's daughter marrying an English officer fueled excitement within the fort and the town of Kinsale. It was the grandest event of the year, possibly ever at Charles Fort. Pomp and Circumstance were the order of the day, and in the custom of both the English and the Irish, there were endless formalities as the dignitaries and guests arrived at the sprawling fortification. Soldiers relieved of their duties mingled with the residents, mainly the young women as the people of Kinsale flooded through the open gates, gleefully taking in their surroundings. Both a military band and a local group of minstrels entertained the crowds throughout the afternoon, and there were never-ending toasts to the beautiful bride and her groom. Soon the attendees were seated and a local priest performed the ceremony. With no conflicts or condemnations, the ritual was concluded with the priest presenting to the congregation Mr. and Mrs. Trevor Asherst. With the crowd on their feet, Trevor and Wilful had to fight their way back down the aisle through the throng of these laughing and back-slapping well-wishers, both English and Irish alike. After a brief adjournment, the bride and her groom joined the revelers in the main hall where they feasted and drank, accepting tributes and toasts with open arms and full glasses. They danced and hugged and made promises to old friends and new. They looked into each other's eyes while dancing or went across the room and they saw their future. They saw their happiness. Everyone did. That afternoon would be forever in their minds because they lived a lifetime in those few hours. With evening approaching, Trevor and Wilful took their leave of the congregation. They said their goodbyes to the nobility that had graced the affair. They hugged and kissed their family and friends. They accepted compliments from these servants and soldiers. Then, arm in arm, they strolled along the protective walls of Charles Forte toward the farthest lookout position, with their final intention in mind, the bridal suite. As they reached the point, they stood staring south across the bay. On the far side, the last of the sun's rays reflected of the green rolling hills, shimmered off the blue silver-tipped waves and shone gold on the limestone ramparts and guard turrets looming far above the rocky shore of this cold and formidable sea. There, alone and along the outside wall, Wilful saw a spray of beautiful blue flowers clinging to life. Trevor saw them too, although his vision was somewhat impaired from the day's festivities. It was at that moment he realized Wilful had no bouquet. His bride, his beautiful Irish flower, had no bouquet. Immediately, he exclaimed he would retrieve it for her. Stepping over a cannon emplacement he reached from the wall, but slipped, almost falling onto the rocks many feet below. Wilful, laughing and grabbing onto the back of his coat, held at bay her young gentleman as he leaned across the battlements. A century standing guard at his turret, saw Trevor's attempt and instantly offered his assistance to the newlyweds. He was aware that Trevor was too intoxicated to make a perilous climb down to the flowers and offered to do it for him, if Trevor would only stand his watch while he was at the task. The couple gladly accepted. Trevor took the man's musket and watchcoat and Wilful observed intently as the soldier ran down toward the front gates to locate a length of rope to descend to the flowers. Several minutes went by, then half an hour. The couple couldn't understand why the man had not returned and it was impossible for Trevor to inquire since he could not leave his post without being properly relieved. As the sun sank and darkness cloaked the fort, Trevor kissed his wife and sent her on to the bridal suite. Meanwhile, he stood his watch, waiting for the soldier to return or at the very least for someone to relieve him. While he could have very easily called out to another soldier standing watch for liberation, he did not wish to get the young soldier in trouble for not returning. Even though he was a commissioned officer, he did not dare call out in order to avoid any confrontations with the sergeant to the guard. There was only one real problem with this idea. It was that this was Trevor's wedding day, a wedding day filled with not only festivities but with too much wine as well. And as the wine grappled within him, Trevor decided to sit down in the sentry turret. Soon, after leaning on his benefactor's firearm, he was asleep. On the other side of the fort, clinching on his pistol belt, Colonel Warander prepared for his nightly perimeter sentry inspection. Closing his logbook and securing the door to his office, he began walking the fortress' perimeter expecting the customary sentry challenge of who goes there from each post in turret. All was well, until he approached the turret overlooking the point. Here, he did not receive the challenge. The Colonel stepped closer and clicked his boot heels on the cobblestones as a warning to the lookout. But still, no response. Losing his patience, the Colonel stepped to the narrow turret entry. There, shimmering moonlight glinted off a pristine and well-oiled musket barrel. The glow illuminated the slumped form of a man's sleep on watch. At that time, Colonel Warander did what any commanding officer would have done, catching a sentry asleep at his post. He withdrew his revolver and shot the man then and there through the heart. Mortally struck, the man's body simply rolled forward and onto the ground, dead, with the musket clattering at his side. The Colonel yelled for the sergeant of the guard who quickly responded with a picket of men bearing torches. After hearing the gunfire, others joined them as well. One of the soldiers was ordered to take the place of the dead man and the others were instructed to take the body to the courtyard for display in accordance with the protocol for summary executions. It was then, as they rolled him over, that Colonel Warander saw Trevor's face. And it was then that behind him he heard his daughter's voice asking what had happened. Where was Trevor? He did not move. He could not face his daughter. Often in such confusion, time seems to slow. Things that normally go unnoticed are clearly apparent. Sight is acute. Sounds are crystal clear. It was at this time the world was witness to this young girl's heart as it was crushed from her body, driving out a wail of terror and pain unrepeatable. A solitary shadow moved between the men, the outline of her shawl silhouetted by many torchlights. It was willful. She briefly hesitated, then grasped her husband's lifeless form. In a moment she was at the wall, blood on her hands and bosom. The men heard the sea breeze catch a flutter in her thin bridle gown as she cleared the wall and with that final step joined her groom in death. Colonel Warander, the governor of Charles Fort, county of Cork, town of Kinsale, returned to his office. He sat at his desk and made his last journal entry. I have been relieved. It was there with his revolver. He shot himself. When I visited Charles Fort, it was this tragic tale that particularly struck me. The story's skeleton provides the structure for the legend of the White Lady of Kinsale. You'll hear differing versions of the story depending on whom you ask, and the variety is just as diverse as the versions of the haunting you will be told. There are dozens of White Lady legends throughout the world. The White Lady in the lake of Durant Eastman Park, Rochester, New York, wandering about looking for the body of her daughter. The White Lady of Porchester Castle, seen retracing her steps, trying to retrieve her fallen child. And the White Lady of the Berliner Schloss or Berlin Palace, possibly Countess Kunigunda of Orlemunda, who was tormented by the fact that she had murdered her young children in order to marry Albrecht of Nuremberg. These and many more led people across the world to report such White Lady experiences. As a lifelong military man and law enforcement official, I provided the above rendition of the story that made the most sense to me, based on the common theme of the many accounts, military protocol, and the particulars of the location. In some forms of the story, the flowers were reported as white. I however saw only blue spring squill growing on the battlements during my visit, and they are the most common flowers to grow in dry, rocky coastal areas of Ireland. In some versions, the Colonel is the one that issued the challenge to the Sentry. However, this is not proper military protocol. The Sentry should be aware enough to detect an approaching person and issue the challenge first. In another account, Wilful awakens during the night only to find that Trevor had been shot dead and had her father had thrown himself over the wall. In her distress, she then casts herself over the wall. However, I do not believe Wilful would have fallen asleep before Trevor returned to their bridal suite, but that could just be the romantic bias in me talking. Also, the cowardly action of the Colonel killing himself before Wilful takes her own life does not sit well with the description of this career officer and strict disciplinarian. In my personal opinion. In one account written in The Worldwide Magazine, the Colonel's surname was reported as Brown, and that he shot his son, not his new son-in-law. In the book True Irish Ghost Stories by St. John Seymour and Harry Nelligen, they tell of possibly the first sighting of the white lady in 1815 by a garrison officer. Described as a woman in her wedding dress, the vision disappeared when the officer tried to get a closer look. And still, even the explanations for the hauntings vary in type and location. In some hauntings, the entity assumed to be Wilful is a wraith intent on punishing any officers for the death of her groom. In others, she is a caring ghost in her flowing wedding dress, protecting the soldiers from falling asleep on duty. But in any of these stories, three facts remain true. One, Trevor is shot and killed. Two, Wilful commits suicide. And three, Colonel Warander commits suicide. These are the constants. I believe it was the turret at the southmost point that was the location of this heartbreak. I watched as a solitary gull rode the sea breeze in front of the empty battlement and swooped now and again in front of it as if to confirm the post was abandoned. I stood there as long as I could, trying to make sense of it all, before I was forced to move on. That seems to be the real theme for any human endeavor, to create a sense of logic and clarity of purpose. For in this life, it is proper and correct that we should lose everything. That is what happens. In all of this, it is my belief that these three souls pass on wisdom for all who care to listen. The themes of that wisdom seem to suggest you should not be hasty in making your decisions, be soundly responsible for your actions you take, and make every moment in your life count. Every moment. Up next, it is another story from Greg Lawson's anthology of true creepy tales with a story called The Spirits, when Weird Darkness Returns.  But suddenly, you get that feeling you are not alone. You don't know what might be under the bed, or in the closet, or in the attic, or in the room with you.   That is just one more reason to have Weird Dark Roast Coffee in the cupboard, because you just never know when you might need it. Weird Dark Roast Coffee contains deep notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of sinister sweetness. Each bag is fresh roasted to order by Evansville Coffee, and delivery is free for your first order. Just use the promo code Weird, you can find a link to it at WeirdDarkness.com. Grab a bag before something else grabs you from the dark. Under the cummer of darkness, we had slipped the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier up the East Lama Channel between George Island and up Lake Chow Island, then rounded Green Island to finally drop anchor near the mouth of Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong. When morning came, the occupants of that city were surprised with an aircraft carrier just offshore and 6,000 sailors coming to town with a month's paycheck in each wallet, assuming they had not spent it on junk food or lost it gambling on the way. This was my second shore excursion on its British territory and one of my favorite destinations, friendly people, inexpensive beer, and no shortage of places to go and things to do. Something I learned early on while traveling in Asian countries, people do not like talking about the paranormal. It seems to me many believe the more you talk about it, the more likely you will fall victim to it. The most information I received from the local people I was able to speak with was in Hong Kong, probably because of the extended British occupation and the necessity of the people of Hong Kong to learn English. In my normal fashion, with a little research in the Nimitz Library, yep, it has a library, I already planned my destination and arranged my shore liberty for the entire four days in port. Another sailor had charged me $70 for him to cover the day of my duty watch and it was worth it. In my readings on Chinese myths and legends, there were two specifically that intrigued me. One was the Shugai. The Shugai, or Souls of the Drowned, are literally the spirits of people who have drowned and are waiting for living humans to come near the place they drowned so the Shugai can drown them as well. Since at that point in my life I had experienced two near-drowning incidents, the Shugai caught my attention. A legend such as this would have wide acceptance on Lake Travis where I currently patrol and conduct underwater recoveries. Many of the drownings at Lake Travis occur at the same places where previous drownings have taken place, leading to the belief there is something more at work here. The other was the hungry ghosts.  And like most other cultures, some Chinese have the belief that departed souls, whether in the form of ghosts or wraiths, return from the dead to haunt a certain location, complete some unfinished task, or terrorize the living. Some Chinese believe demons and other spiritual entities that have never been human and that influence or exercise power over people. Then there are the mythical monsters that serve both good and evil purposes. As you can see, westerners have quite a bit in common with easterners. I made my way off the gangplank and into the throng of the mass exodus of the ship. Soon I found myself stepping off a ferry and onto a commercial pier in Victoria City. After a brief check by the customs authority and navigating my way through the sailors, police and prostitutes, I was at a booth along Belcher Bay, buying a jetfoil ferry ticket to my destination goal, Lantau Island. The jetfoil ticket was a little more expensive, but I had never ridden on one, so I decided to go for it. It was completely worth it. The boat was fast and rose above the choppy waves, giving an incredibly smooth ride. Lantau Island was actually my second choice. My first choice was a former British military officer's barracks named the Murray House, located in central Hong Kong, a business district in the heart of the city. I was incredibly excited about this very historic and haunted location. It was reported that during World War II, the Japanese had occupied Murray House for almost four years. During this occupation, it was reported that the Japanese used the location as a detention center and reportedly tortured and murdered many prisoners there. Some prisoners were reported to have committed suicide rather than face the Japanese torture techniques. In the 20 years after the war, countless sightings, strange experiences and unexplainable sounds were reported by the government workers assigned to the officers within the structure. So much that in the early 1960s, government workers requested and received approval for the Murray House to be cleansed through the means of exorcism. On May 19, 1963, 90 Buddhist monks gathered at the Murray House for 10 hours and conducted the exorcism ceremony. During the ritual, a list of names of those known to have died through the atrocities committed there were written onto tablets and before midnight taken outside and burned. But the more I researched, the more I learned. An additional exorcism was conducted in 1974 that was actually televised. Then, unfortunately, in 1982, the Murray House was dismantled block by block and stored. It wasn't until 2017 that I resurrected my fascination with the Murray House and learned that in 2001, the Chinese government rebuilt the Murray House in Stanley, a city south of Victoria. It now serves as a shopping destination. As my second choice, Lantau Island is the home to three things I was interested in. Houlin Buddhist Monastery, the Shaolin Wushu Martial Arts Center and Fanlau Fort, an outpost to combat piracy in the early 1700s. As we approached the island, I was surprised to see how mountainous it was. While there were a lot of signs of human occupation, houses, businesses and roads, the entire island seemed to be covered in lush vegetation. Once off the pier, I grabbed the bus to the monastery. Other than a British couple, I was the only Westerner on the bus and no one would sit next to me. This made the trip a little disturbing and sort of comfortable all at the same time. But the drive was gorgeous, with beautiful flowers and strange birds everywhere. Once at the monastery, I signed in and took the general tour. I was disappointed to find out the monastery was founded only in the early 1900s. However, the architecture was interesting and I was able to see the sculptures of the three Buddhas past, present and future. The part most interesting was that the monastery had recently started construction of what they would be able to boast as the largest Buddha in the world. A complete contradiction of Buddhist dogma, but great for tourism. After the tour, it was early afternoon and I got a bus heading for Taiou Fishing Village and the Shaolin Wushu Cultural Center. While the landscape was amazing, the bus ride was horrific. My experience was bloated with bad roads, smelly occupants and a bit car, bus sick. Dusk was upon us as we arrived and I grabbed the first motel I came to and went straight to sleep. The following morning, I hired a taxi and arrived at the Shaolin Center before 7am. I wanted to make sure I arrived early and did not have to rush. Sadly, when I went to check in, I realized the school started at 5am. I should have known. For the next three days, five hours each day, I endured an introduction to Shaolin Kung Fu. Being a martial artist and having a black belt in Taekwondo, I thought it would be relatively easy. I was wrong. I knew nothing compared to these masters who not only studied the art, but also lived the philosophy. I was assigned to a monk who was not only a teacher, but a tour guide as well. Over the next three days, 5am to 11am, we became friends. However, I never had more bruises on my body in my entire life. We began with animal forms on the first day, the tiger, dragon and crane and continued them along with the intense power and stretching exercises. To spiritual Chinese people, most animals are symbolic of something in their life. Each can mean something important. The tiger symbolizes power and energy, the dragon is strength and good luck, and the crane longevity in peace. The odd thing was that while the physical demands of Kung Fu are challenging, it was the meditation that I found most difficult. The search for the spirit. Forcing my mind to be clear of all thought, devoid of any internal dialogue yet at the same time, being aware of every sense and everything around me was impossible for me to attain in such a short time. The deep level of understanding and lucidity of the mind is impossible for some to accomplish in a lifetime. The sentiment experience gave me a sense of clarity that I feel is a key for true paranormal investigators. It gave me a way to reach out without relying on gadgetry and truly listen and feel the world around me. I didn't really know what to expect from the center, however, I was not disappointed. That afternoon I left the center to explore on my own and research the area for any weirdness. While there were many people to speak with, they were mainly interested in U.S. currency, not sharing credible information about local legends or hauntings. The one subject that did reoccur with the people I met was that of the hungry ghosts. Everyone basically expressed these the spirits of people who did something wrong or behaved badly when they were living. I also got the impression that many Chinese did not like the word ghost, but more often referred to the departed as their ancestors. This led up to them telling me about the hungry ghost festival every August. Essentially, when I gathered from what I was told, this festival is a Chinese Halloween for adults. A very simplistic view, I know, but probably pretty accurate. One old woman operating a small shop was very helpful. She lived through the Japanese occupation and had fled from village to village to stay away from the soldiers who I believe she said eight people. Seriously. She spoke very broken English, but that seemed to be what she said. However, she did like Americans very much. I spent several hours talking with her. She asked what I was doing on the island and asked about my plans. I told her I had visited the monastery, the Shaolin Center, and tomorrow I had plans to see Fanlau Fort. Immediately, she stopped and asked why. I explained to her that I visit battlefields and forts for a hobby. Once again, she asked me why. I tried to explain that many of the men that influenced my life served in some branch of the military and it was kind of my way to keep those warriors' memories alive. She said I should not go to the fort. I asked why. I tried to get her to be specific. However, all I could get from her was that it was not a good place and that nothing good ever happened there. She told me that pirates lived there and many died there. This supported a little of what I had read about the fort. There was about a 10-year period where a group of pirates took over and occupied the fort, but it was retaken thereafter. She said that many years ago she had gone by the fort and she knew it was a bad place. I told her I needed to go and that I was sure everything would be alright. With that said, in the next 15 minutes the old woman equipped me with everything I needed for my visit to Fanlau Fort, a cloth package of cooked rice, a lighter, a lotus candle, three plastic bowls, three kinds of beans, and a stack of paper play money. It only cost me $17, probably a day's wage for her. I gave her a $20 bill which she conveniently stowed away and I never saw the $3 in change. We said our goodbyes and I continued my village exploration until dark. The following morning I was at the Shaolin Center on time. I sufficiently exerted myself attempting to perform in the way my body was never intended, then I finally found myself in the back of a clean, semi-new taxi heading to Fanlau Fort. By map it was only a few miles away, but by road it took us what seemed to be an hour to travel, maybe 10 miles. When we arrived there was no one in the vicinity, either because it was the off season for tourists or because it was in the middle of the week. I didn't know. As we neared the fort there was a large construction area along the roadway that appeared to be new apartments of some kind. They appeared finished, however, they were not occupied and looked to be falling into disrepair. The taxi driver pulled off the shoulder of the road and stopped. He said, Fanlau. I asked for the visitor center. He pointed to a trail off into the brush. A wooden sign with Chinese markings stood to one side. He pointed to the trail, Fanlau. I was not about to get robbed or murdered on this island. I stared at him in the rearview mirror. He opened his door and got out. He motioned for me to do the same. I grabbed my backpack and got out. He motioned for me to follow him down the trail and I did. It wound back and forth through the undergrowth until we came over a small rise. There the trail straightened and led down to the square walled fort with the remnants of several other attached spaces. What remained of the fort were nothing more than a series of walls and some foundation. But as described, it overlooked the southern point of Lantau Island at a height of about 400 feet above the sea. At this point I tried to tell the taxi driver I'd be spending the rest of the day here and that he could go. Once he understood, he made me understand that there would be no way for me to get back because there are no other taxis in the area. We did some humorous though highly unintelligible negotiations and it seemed we agreed on him staying the rest of the day for $40. After we agreed he went back to the taxi and I assumed took a nap. I on the other hand explored the ruins. It was obvious that the site had been looted by the locals over the past hundred years. Any roofing material, wood and much of the rocks used to construct the walls were gone. The government had obviously come in and cut away the surrounding vegetation but done little else. Within the walls there was not much to see so I did two widening circles of the perimeter of the fort. Anyone with the understanding of warfare could see why this location was selected for the fort. With suppressing the threat of piracy, its number one priority, this fort was positioned in such a way as to see the approach of any ship from miles. However, due to the fort's placement on the hill and being relatively small, it would have been of little use if several ships decided to lay siege. There were several trails leading away from the fort that seemed to all weave themselves around and back up to the roadway. I sat down and surveyed the site. It was picturesque, luscious green vegetation, a calm blue sea and bird songs all around me. I decided to walk contours on both sides of the crumbling fort. I was searching for anything unusual and of course, where there was human occupation, there would be graves somewhere. After close to two hours of walking back and forth, I found two depressions that appeared to be the approximate size for a human body but nothing else, other than a little blue, almost black magpie that followed and watched me. There were no human markings, signs or anything else of immediate interest. I wished I had brought a metal detector with me. I was disappointed with the lack of physical evidence of some battle or death here. On the surface, the fort just seemed to be nothing more than the fragments of an old building. My intuition was telling me more. I have been to many famous haunted places, places that have a legitimate claim to the paranormal and I felt nothing. Van Lau Fort was not one of these places. It was no woman in white story, no details of a heinous murder or horrendous torture, no tombstone marking a mass grave, but I felt something. Something was there at Van Lau Fort. I headed back to the interior of the fort and sat on the southernmost wall. I decided to practice what I was learning at the Shaolin Center and dropped my backpack. I sat down and tried to clear my mind. The little bird landed on the rocks near me.  He was not impressed. He jumped to another rock. I relaxed and I tried to push all of my responsibilities away. I closed my eyes and tried to get the Nimitz out of my mind. Home out of my mind. Traffic, berries, aircraft, taxis, money, time, all out of my mind. I tried to listen to the land. I tried to listen to my gut. I tried to hear with my feelings to reach out to someone, anyone that may be there. Maybe an hour went by when I got an overwhelming feeling that I was being watched. I opened my eyes and the bird was now on the ground hopping around. Everything else was the same. Everyone has had the feeling of being watched. Many people have talked with me about it, the feeling that someone or something is staring at you. I had been paranoid before thinking that someone could be watching me, but this feeling was different. This feeling was not something voluntary, not something pleasant. Like the old woman had said, nothing good ever happened here. I got to my feet. It was difficult because part of my legs and feet had fallen asleep. I may have fallen asleep during my meditation as well. The sun was still just above the horizon but was falling fast. I decided to head back, but then I remembered the hungry ghosts. I opened my backpack and took out my offering, a cloth package of cooked rice, a lotus candle, a lighter, three plastic bowls, three kinds of beans and a stack of paper play money. The bird jumped up on the wall and watched. I sat the bag of rice on a flat stone nearest the southwest corner of the fort's wall, placed the three bowls beside it along with the play money. I heard footsteps behind me and looked back. It was my taxi driver walking across the interior yard down to me. He looked perplexed as he watched what I was doing. I smiled at him and continued. I opened the first package of beans and started to pour them into one of the bowls. The driver made a sound, and I saw he was shaking his head. He squatted down next to me. I don't know what he was thinking as to why I was performing this ritual, whether I had a loved one recently die or was trying to appease the dead. In any case, he motioned that he would show me and that he pointed up to the bird and smiled. He said a word I assumed was the name of the kind of bird and then handed me back the cloth of rice and the three bowls. He pointed at the lighter and then the candle. I let the candle. He motioned that I used both hands and placed the rice on one side of the candle. Then, with both hands, placed a bowl down. He showed me how to pour the beans into my hand from the bag. Then, using both hands, pour them into the bowl. Then again with the other beans. Then again with the last beans, lentils I think. The candle was now surrounded north, south, east and west with edible offerings. Finally, he motioned for the money. I repeated their placement as before with both hands. He knelt down next to me and waited for me to get into that same position. I did. He leaned forward and closed his eyes. So did I. I don't know what he was thinking or what I was supposed to think, but while we knelt there, the fear went away. Paranoia went away. It was like a bubble formed around us. I felt compassion for those sailors that approached these shores, for those soldiers assigned as the watchers of the fort and for the dead that may have spent their last moments on this same soil, staring and seeing this same sky for the last time as everything faded, as sound faded. After many minutes my taxi driver rose to his feet and I joined him. We walked silently to the car and the bird followed. I last saw him sitting on a branch as we drove away. I fell asleep on the way back to the motel. Years later, after doing some research on Chinese folklore, I found out that blue or green birds the King Yao were the special messengers of the Queen Mother. My little bird may have simply liked tourists, he may have been protecting his nests, or he may have followed me for other reasons. Now that 25 years separates me from whom I was then, I wish I would have been more attentive to that one and only thing at Fanlao Fort that seemed to want my attention. The problem with being a paranormalist is that there is never enough time. The tiny signs or fleeting experiences are in the actions and situations you are not necessarily looking for or expect. Most times they are impossible to document, impossible to qualify, often times impossible to explain. What I do know is that we do not have to travel around the world to find these signs or have these experiences. The spirit is everywhere. The dead are everywhere. They are in your town. All you have to do is look. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. And please leave a rating and review of the show in the podcast app you listen from. Doing so helps the show to get noticed. You can also email me anytime with your questions or comments to the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That's also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for the email newsletter to win monthly prizes, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Plus, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story or call the dark line toll-free at 1-877-277-5944. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The White Lady of Consale and The Spirits were both written by Greg Lawson from his book Diaries of a Paranormalist Encounters with Death which I've placed a link to in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright Weird Darkness 2022. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Matthew 6 verse 25 Therefore, I tell you do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food and the body more important than clothes? And a final thought from Brad Sugars. Words can inspire, thoughts can provoke, but only action truly brings you closer to your dreams. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.


So yeah, thanks for hosting this. I have been working for the past couple of years with my colleagues at the University of North Texas Computational Linguists and Information Science professionals, professors in those two departments, as well as our own linguistic computational linguists. And so some of the things we've been looking at are my own flex projects for Matei and for Lamkang and kind of trying to think about how to bring them up to a level where as we add more languages that we would be able to do comparison between them faster and then facilitate better descriptions of those languages themselves and also newer languages that we can add in where a lot hasn't been described yet but with some connected text we could speed up annotation and know where the differences are. So in thinking about that, we started thinking about the importance of kind of standardizing our not necessarily annotation but at least having a thoughtful process in how our inner linear gloss texts are created. And this has been done many times before, but it's been done from a really higher level. Like for all of linguistics, we would like to create standardized annotation schemes. So NSF has funded things of that nature. And they've always sort of crashed because not totally, but they haven't taken on because communities of users have their own ways of doing things. And within those communities, individuals have their own way of doing things. And so I thought it would be really useful to start from like a smaller group of people. And so why not start with us if we have only 50 languages and only a handful of researchers. Why not look at our IGT and see what we can do with trying to standardize some of those processes. So I had some of my students work with me, specifically Mary Burke, who's a PhD student at UNT in the Information Science Program, Concentration and Linguistics. And we did sort of a survey of several of the already published grammars and descriptions of South Central languages that are existing. And we tried to see what the similarities and differences were for some of the major grammatical constructions that we see them repeated over and over. David just covered several of them already. But we know that IGT is useful both in the analysis stage and in the presentation stage. So in the analysis stage, we use it right from the get go. We record things. And now with types of software that are present, like Flex and Elon, we're able to first use programs to do quick transcription. I use say more these days more and more because I can train speakers to use it with me. And then we get time aligned transcriptions that we can then either throw into Elon or throw into Flex. And I mentioned this because these software packages often constrict or guide the way we're annotating things. So we use it for those. And as we're parsing, the programs help us keep track of what we're doing and help us kind of look back and see what we've done before and improve our parses. But they also are restrictive of how much we can move things around. We have to make certain decisions based on dashes and equal signs, which are the kind of the basic units of divisions that they allow us. So we can do prefixes, suffixes. We can do enclitics. And there's a way of also noting circumfixes. We can do dashes to do that. Dot, dot, dot, the parentheses to do that. OK, so each of these things seem to feed into the other. We have free translations that help us with the word glosses and so on. So the interlinear gloss text, even at the very beginning, helps us with analysis. And we're making decisions as we go along. And that's a really crucial thing to remember that in these software packages, they don't help us save, I would say, 50% of the decision making that we're doing. Like, what are the constituents? Where does the noun phrase begin and end? Which is the auxiliary? And it doesn't help us save a lot of that because of the way that they're made. So we'll talk about that a little bit. So at the end, we might end up with something like this with these different lines of glossing. Some people have fewer. Some people have less. But it'll be familiar to you what this looks like. So each of these pieces holds a lot of grammatical information. And we'd like to see that as we're working in cookie chin, that we have some similar sorts of reflections of those analysis that come out of these decisions that we make. I know you've probably already looked at a flex before, but I wanted to point out that the way we spell things and the way we gloss things, we can use the concordance program to really help us with the analysis. We can use the lexicon to go back and check on what we're doing, make sure we have standardized kind of spelling. So anyway, that's the whole analysis stage. IGT is great for that. We've also talked, I think, in the field about how using both experimental data and connected text data is important. So there are all these reasons why we want to encourage people to be collecting inner linear gloss text. Then in the presentation stage, we're right now looking at how having kind of good IGT can help with creating pedagogical materials. And so if you have something which is very detailed, and so let me just show you an example of that. For example, I've got this very short story, which you all must have something like this in your collections. So it's very repetitive.  Repetitive kinds of simple sentences that can then be pulled out and put into children's books or into teaching materials easily. You can also use the inner linear glosses for more detailed kind of grammatical inspection. So I was just talking to Linda about this yesterday, how can we speed up creation of pedagogical materials? So if we can have a more standardized way of doing our IGTs, then perhaps we can build to the templates for going to these collections and saying, here are some lesson plans based on your inner linear gloss corpus. So if we have the same kind of lines of analysis, we could then maybe use that for pedagogical material creation as well. So what I wanted to just do with you, because I was told half an hour, so I've got only about half an hour's worth of material here. So we're going to look at how we have made these kinds of decisions in the things that have already been published in terms of whether an item is an affix, demruder, clutic, is it clear? How have we made those decisions? What are the implications of the ways that we've put compounds down in our IGT, reduplication and so on? So let's take a look first at something we just talked about, semantic change or grammaticalization. So in Lamkang, for example, you can have, as you see on the left hand side, you can have these things like Yong and Hung and Hung as main verbs. So you can also have them as you see on the right hand side as prefixes. And so I am indicating this with this conventional distinction of either writing something in lower caps and saying this is a lexeme versus in all caps saying this is actually a grammaticalized piece of the grammar. So this is something that immediately then sets this apart from its role as a lexeme and reduces the amount of freedom that it has in constructions of what kinds of NPs it can take in grammatical structure and so on. It's really just a bound morpheme. We see this as something that should be standard, but actually it is not and it's quite different in different things. So here is an example from live from, this is not really fair to Ken Van Bik because it was an unpublished handout that he used in Dartmouth when we came in to do grammar overview there. So in his analysis or what his presentation suggests is that come and down here are both sort of on an equal footing and that they are, one is not a prefix, but it's supposed, it may be, it's supposed to be a compound or maybe it's a sequence of serial verbs or there's some grammar that's reflected in the way that this is glossed and so we would like to perhaps then in our code book of how to do IGT directional verbs and the way that we're going to talk about them should be standardized or could be easily standardized I think with just a little bit of discussion of where we'd want to use our caps and where we might use the lower forms. Let's see, how about this one? Same here, right? Or here we do have adverb.directional, did I make a? The gloss for decaf is missing. That's what it is. Okay, so go down. So the adverb. It should be somewhere right here. It's the cool part. And the go is. We have, the go should be right here? The go is the color part. And so if you, decaf is a separate form. So we have a, a separate form. Decaf is the down part. No, it's the down part. Oh, okay. The color is cool. Color is cool. Okay, let's look a little bit at reduplication now of which there is a lot of variety and variation in the way that we represent these things. I just put up the lamkang verbal complex because I know that many of us have seen something similar of this sort. And for lamkang, you can find right here in zone six reduplicated forms that are acting as kind of, you know, adverbial intensifiers. But the verb root itself can also be duplicated. And so let's take a look at how that looks. So this one is put, put, put, put, which means kissing someone. So, so repeatedly kissing, you would say put, put, put, put. And, but it has the participant markers here. Oh, this is actually just the cheek that's being kissed, right? So put, put, put, put, and then you have, you have a kind of the inflection coming right to the end of it. So the way that we've selected to show that this is different is by using this M dash, but in most of the cases that we've seen, we have to do this manually after we pull it out of the program. We can't use this inflex, so we can only use a regular dash, which immediately is not giving what we want. You know, that's not, this is really one form. So I know that Zachariah, for example, you selected, and I think you as well, to just write things of this sort together as one form. So that's one thing that we could also do. Look at this re-duplicated form in, in Lumpkang. So you get advante, advante in. So you've got a very large chunk of it. That's zone one, zone, zone two. And, oh, this is actually the main verb, the one, and then, oh, sorry, T is the main verb. So you've got zone two, you've got the verb root, all of that copied, and then seven, zone seven at the end. So we want to show that this is not a compound, it's not a re-duplicated form, and we need to find a way to figure out how to do that. So that's, that's that. And here's the one where I was showing how zone six is copied. So you've got Chen, and then Dok Dok Dao, and Sek Sek Rao. So there, it's right in the middle, and again, we're trying to use that M dash to show how that happens. So, okay, here's how it's done in Mizo. And you'll see, this is unfair in a sense that these are really legacy materials. These were done in the 1980s, and so we don't expect them to have the same sort of sophistication in the glossing paradigms because they were done with typewriter or whatever. So there are going to be differences there, but it's very interesting to see how, what are all the choices that could possibly happen. So, very, very, so I would like to point out a couple of additional things on this one, which is gloss exactly according to meaning. Gloss in a more abstract way as in intensity, intensity, as you say, on the right-hand side. And then here, of course, is a completely different type of form, very much like the put-put-put-put-asura-asura. So we've got, just write them separately in this case. There's that Mizo. In Daichin, we find here yet another way of doing it where it says you have intensifier and then vary, which is giving us sort of a meaning for what the first one is and what the second part means. There is a dash on the baseline, but in the gloss line, you've got a colon giving you the meaning for the whole thing. So this is one possibility where we could say what the super category is and then what the meaning might be. So, but we don't have that standardized yet. We're still kind of playing with that. In Kumi, we've got then what you had called the verb classifier. So the whole thing is written together as one and then the whole thing is just called a verb classifier. The meaning of it is not given as we had in Daichin. So that would be something that you'd want to get from the gloss, I guess, from the free translation. It's not, no, that's true. The meaning there is big. What? The meaning there is big. The meaning is big, right, right. But I would probably find many things than glossed as verb classifier, augmented a verb classifier and they wouldn't just all be foo-foo. There may be others that are like that, too, right? So, and they would all mean big. They would all mean basically. So in a way, humanism is elements, right? Or law, right? I mean in a funny way, but kind of. Yeah, I mean, just OGVCL is an open class. I mean it's not a, you know, it's hundreds of elements, so. And they would all have pretty much the same meaning of, but phonologically, we. The points that are OGVCL all have the central sense of largeness of a participant. And that would be much of some additional lexical. So the choice would, and that would be a perfectly reasonable choice to say that this is what we want to do. And is it possible for us to see more of a general use of it in the other languages of the family would be, it would be useful to do that. So in Kiao, we see similarly things written as one form. And so in the glittering leaf part, for example, you have yao, yao, and then you have the ah, which may be a separate morphine there, but. Yeah. And it's so written. And then. Yeah. But here, they're written, yeah. So the bok in the, in the phong phong ah, what is the bok mean? Is that the inner part? That's the white part. Yeah, white. Yeah, okay. So phong phong, awesome. Okay. And then you have similar to our pot-pot, the kissing one. You've got kong pe, kong pe, but this may be more of a, is it more of a, like a serial or a sequence of actions or kept doing it more aspectually? Yeah. So it's slightly different in meaning. So perhaps when we have these differences in usages, we also want differences in the way that we're doing it. When you're strengthening in salvage, salvage at it, like going, going, going, going, going. Something is like something like that, so. Doing the same thing, good. Yeah. So there would definitely be. And then in the some of, in Anolaga, we see something like a, the main verb and then the verb and then the copied form called re-duplicated form. So that. So what is that? I don't know. Do you recognize this? It's from, yeah. Yeah. Like what the function is or? Yeah, it seemed like. Maybe, yeah, it's an expectation, right? Do not, do not, do not keep doing it or do not keep speaking. I really, does it, does it. We're turning to you. It's like, I don't know anything about it. I'm not my brush. So, in something I give that talk about verb, that verb meaning intensive verb. And that looks like that. Oh, with the not on the, but then this is. Like a copy of last argument. Really don't, I mean it's similar, but it's not the same function. It's just intensification. But it's verb, not verb. And that's what you, that's what you said maybe. Yeah, verb, not verb. But that looks like it, I don't know. Well, it's an imperative. All right. So I feel like this should be fairly easy to do by just gathering all our examples and figuring out like exactly how we want to do this and then giving a guide to those who are new researchers who are just starting out on IGT. And I want to just talk about that briefly when we get to the end of the presentation. Then stem alternation. Similarly, there are a variety of different ways in which we're indicating those. So we have to the Roman numeral, old school here, we have B, and then we also have, don't mark the A. So, or have a set that just don't have any marking on it. Maybe those that have no variant shown, it may not mark that. It's really hard. Because sometimes, yeah, sometimes a lot of them don't have it. And sometimes they might have it, but you just don't have it in your dataset. You don't know whether it's a follow-up. They probably have it, but you don't even want to do it. It may be a tone or, yeah, people are not able to do it. So what do you do with those, right? We have Arabic numerals for the MISO. And then we do have the three here, which I believe is for those where there is no variant so that it shows with the three. But sometimes there's also three forms. Yeah, just put them, give them some. There's some that have three forms, right? With the aspirate or something, that's fine. Okay, so that should be, again, fairly easy for us to figure out what to do with. And then when we say we don't know, can we mark that or what should we do with those? Or do we just mark them unmarked? What if you have a default of not marking? Okay. Otherwise, I think as a, if you have the dataset that you have, and if you don't know, you don't know, and if you're being made to feel that every item is defective, that can be pretty depressing. Don't put question marks on everything. But then we just have to agree that the unmark doesn't mean it's actually unmarked. It means we don't know. Yeah. So, yeah. And I think that's quite a good default. Yeah. Because at least it would never work to have a thing to speak about myself and one language. Have a chance to speak and let your language be the default for everybody at once. You set the rules for all. So this is a pretty standard. We use a dash for the affix. We use an equal sign for an inclinic. But we do have some things that are sort of hanging out. Here's something interesting, though, which is not, this is orthogonal, parallel, but which is that we have a difference of analysis here where Pavel analyzes these very close constructions in Lumpkang and Anunnaga, where he has the neg as a bound morpheme. And I've analyzed it as an auxiliary. And so I think there's some room there for some discussion on what are the things that have a status as auxiliaries? How do we decide that they are? What are the kinds of things? So that we have this kind of standardized idea. I can't use the word standardized. It's more really throwing out the data and saying, what are your arguments for making this an auxiliary? How come it's different from what I've got, what were the changes that caused that? Because they're so close geographically. It's just making sure that you do it in a transparent way so that people have a good chance of recovering your intentions and your decision making. Yes. And for me, the thing was that after the root, you can get inflection. You can get plural marking. And so it seemed like a logical break because each of these things, the negator and the root, were behaving as if they were able to take inflection. And so it seemed like there was a break there more logically made the description much easier than having inflection and derivation interweaved. But then in the, again, sort of, I would say, legacy materials, as well as some more modern things, we have these things that are hanging out that have no dedicated structural kind of assignment. And so there are these particle-type things that maybe they're meant to be particles. Maybe they're not meant to be particles, but they certainly look like it from the IGT. And I would like to know, I have an inquiring mind. I would like to know, what are they? Are they or aren't they? And so there's one here. There's this one here that's actually, Ken Mumbic actually calls this a verbal particle and these nominal particles. And that would be fine. We just want to know what that qualifies. How do you qualify for that? And that means whatever Ken thinks, Mattisoff thinks particle is. So they're, okay. So we're gonna find out what Mattisoff thinks the particle is and give it an idea. So because it makes a huge difference computationally. Whether there's white space or no white space. And so to us, it may be, well, I understand what this is a particle. But if I hand it to a machine, it wants to know if there's no dash, does it something different? If there's an equal science, it's something different. And if there's white space, it's something different. So we want to know what that value is and how we're supposed to be treating it if compared to another language, a related language. So, okay. Person indexation, we already saw this. This is my person indexation. The way I do it is totally controlled by flex because in flex you do, it says like, it says S colon third. So you still use a subject and object. It doesn't use agent and patient. And a lot of us don't use flex. So we, or we manually enter it in flex. I use the automatic. I call something inflectional. As soon as I call it that, it pulls up a menu and then I can select from it the different combinations. And then it gives me a templatic assignment for that morphine. So I'm controlled by that. Others are not. So if we want to be able to compare across our corpora, we would want to discuss like, so what do you think the best way is to do this? And we just all do it. I think this is a very simple fix. It's just a discussion fix. And because all the languages are basically doing the indexation in very simple ways. So flex forces you to think about things in terms of subject and object? If you want to. Possible parameters. If you want to select from that. Okay. But you can think outside of the predefined. Yeah. You don't have to, but you can put. Okay, good. I find one of the, I'll say that for discussion at the end. Later. So here's in dye, subject agreement. First singular, I guess. Is that what AGR? I think that was what it means. Here's Tadov, where we have two equal sign, or what they equal being that the verbative is a clitic. And then here is kind of an odd thing here in the prefix part of it, or the prefix part of it, but we then equals here. I guess saying that this is not a prefix, but in a click, or maybe it's a zero. Don't know if that was on purpose. So that was one part. Finally, I think subordinate clauses. So in subordinate clauses again, we have a large range, and I think we can simplify and we can really do a better job here. We have some that are these particle type. We have some where we're actually defining the semantics of it, we'll say it means wild. And this is again the Miso, so it's kind of, let's go to a more modern here. And then in the lie one, in that handout, from the handout again, we've got again a description of exactly what it means, which is after it doesn't tell you the category. But in the dye chin, it has this interesting thing of having subordinate colon and then giving us, so it has the super category and then the actual definition, which may be a useful way of like our comparing if I just wanted to compare between Monsang, Anala, and Lungkang, if everything was marked as subordinator, that would make it much easier for me to pull them all out, rather than just looking for where it said wild. In Hiao, this was really, I just wanted to stop and talk about this example. I know this was sort of an example that's not exactly from IGT, but this particular type of thing like the bracketing, we think in these terms while we're creating our IGT, but we can't save it anywhere. So one of the things that I would, and I actually went to SIL and talked to folks there, I was advocating for including inflex, several additional lines of annotation where I could actually go in and put in things like thematic role. I'd like to put in things like what is the discourse value of this particular NP? Like is it previous mention? Is it old mention? You mentioned, because all of that has implications for the kind of marking, or is it gonna be zero or what have you? But again, our software currently restricts us from recapturing or capturing the kind of information we're processing while we're doing our IGT. And so it is, I think there's a huge room for improvement there. But that's what you've done here is that you've gone and put in brackets, which is very useful for somebody trying to understand and also very useful for a machine that's going in and trying to look at what is the non-phrase structure like for South Central and so on. But right now you can't really do that. You'd have to give it a lot of extra information because we have so many NPs that are missing as well. And so being able to put that in our glossing would be great. So here we have again, this is actually just giving us the semantics rather than the category. Okay, so that was for that. And this is actually going to a completely different topic, which is the derivational morphology. And I haven't dealt with this enough, I think, but we all know that there's the zone in our verb right after the stem and before the inflection where there are a bunch of different derivational morphemes that can occur. And they look similar and I don't know, David, did you ever catalog a number of those derivational morphemes? I've seen a list of them somewhere. And so it would be nice to like maybe do a huge old spreadsheet with some of these meanings and the actual morphemes and see which languages they show up in. And could we in some way standardize some of these terms that we use to talk about those derivational morphemes? Maybe we can, maybe we can't, I don't know, I don't think we've tried it and it's possible, okay. So I think I've discussed white spaces somewhat. So the way we write things is really important. And I think, Zachary, you've done a really great job in your thesis where you've got the top line is, I think the writing system, the second line is the IPA with the dashes in there. So we can ignore the orthographic line when we're doing our computational work. We can go to the second line. So if we could kind of agree to do something of that sort or if we could be cognizant of the fact that working off of orthography is very confusing for somebody who's trying to use the spaces between the words to define this as a unit and to tell a Python script, this is a unit when actually that's not the unit but this is the unit. So the writing systems that we use are all buried in the way that things are lumped together or separated and so our IGT should preferably go through something other than those or should include something other than that. This seems to be a combination of, because we've got an equal sign here but then this guy here is sitting on by himself. All right, I won't do anything with that but just have one example of that. I'm not sure how many of you have examples of this sort but for serialization, did you have a dash and sure. Okay, so I'm gonna wrap up now because I wanted to just point out a couple of things while finishing up. This has been tried before for doing standardizing. So all that we've looked at right now really has to do with assigning structure to the morphology, dash, equal sign, space and then we looked a little bit at glossing conventions but there has been a whole movement for glossing conventions, this general ontology for linguistic description that was funded by the National Science Foundation and is now defunct. The last kind of update was done in 2011 where there was kind of a forum where you could go in and say, oh, gold ontology for linguistics description community, you have a list of all of the different ways that people can gloss words but I found a new morpheme and you don't have that. So this person for example, Christian says, I found something that I would like to call the pre-inventive case for Etruscan and here are the uses of that and please add that to your list of what's available. So what I'm saying is what I'm advocating for is a gold but a gold for our community. Like what is the gold ontology for south central description? And we can have variation but we would have a kind of a code book for people who wanted to do their glossing and who were just starting out. Those of us who've been glossing for a while maybe are reluctant, like I do it this way, I'm gonna keep doing it this way but what I'd like to keep in mind is that, well, here's what I'd like to keep in mind. I'll come back to the other things in just a second. So what I'd like to keep in mind is this third point right here is responsive methodology which is the fact that as those of you who've gone to Niels know, there are so many native speaking linguists that are now wanting to work on their languages. And in India, the way that people have been doing grammars has been sort of using these templates that come out of the Central Institute of Indian Languages and it would be really nice to encourage them to do more interlinear gloss texts so that they're very challenged to get at the genius of the languages that they're working on rather than copying languages that already exist and saying, well, I found the seven cases in the language or whatever it is that they might do. And so if they're given a template for how to do that, if they're given a code book for how to do that, this would make it easier for them, it would make it more kind of accessible and it would be a kind of typological instruction as well. You may find verb serialization, you may find verb stem alternation, you may find these different kinds of grammatical categories that we've discussed exist, but with IGT and guide to that, that would make it possible. Also, more and more the technologies for cross-corporate comparison and intra-corporate comparison are becoming available. And so if we can be more systematic in the way we do this, then I could compare with Kumi and Mizo and Lai and for the next language that I work on, I could do a much faster analysis and I could see how, say, Hiao and Kumi and Lemkang all work with respect to pre-verbal directionals. And then I could write a script that would tell my, tell the process that I'm going through that hey, here's a corpus of unanalyzed texts, here are all the verbs, everything before the stem is open game for looking for directionals and go look for it. And so if we've analyzed things pretty much the same way, then that makes that writing of that script much easier. So this is what we're looking at now is that my Mayte IGT and my Lemkang IGT are way off because I did them at very different stages. And so they've been a great playground for my colleagues to look at and say, if we could do some kind of standardizing between them, it would make for much faster, faster use. So let's look at these quotes and then we will finish up with that. So this is from Benner. After language transcription and annotation, the data formats and annotation standards vary widely and this hinders data mining and hypothesis testing. So data formats, we're now all going into XML, so that's great, but we can go even further in making our XML look more like each other's XML because that would then make this new process of data mining that's happening. I think not a pie in the sky dream, but something that we could really apply and do more historical work and all the kinds of works that we wanted to faster. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.


They're off for the second running of the multi-mile. As expected, rough entry goes for that lead. The three-year-old ability in the green with the red cap races out wide. Charging through, that's Mamma Mia in the white cap, and Mamma Mia now shows good speed and has that lead on the run down the back stretch, racing toward the six. Mamma Mia out in front. She's my destiny racing right there on the reel as they rake their way now, run away Algo and Mahogany right up with those, rough entry hidden from view, racing out wide of horses. Mojito the gray races up next. Ability on the outside. I am Fred as they leave the five. In behind those, that's American tap. Atomica has a lot of work to do, along with is that a fact? They are joined at the hip. Monimizer races up next as they go. Charging now inside the last half of a mile. Perfect rule left toward the back of the field and the gray Duke will be running late as usual as they charge toward the final three in the multi-mile. It's the Philly Mamma Mia. She's brave on that lead. Rough entry now sent in chase by a leperu as they're about to arrive at the 516th. Watch ability closing in on the green silks. Mahogany is also budding to the boil, but they're into the lane and still they have not been able to head Mamma Mia here. Now is rough entry and rough entry grabs the lead. Mamma Mia fault is down against the rail. Ability is warmed up for run, but it is rough entry and Julian leperu. This is the multi-mile and rough entry and Julian leperu begin to streak away from them. Inside the final 16th, it seems to be all over. Rough entry, the foreign invader and Julian leperu take the second running of the multi-mile. Ability is second. Mamma Mia, is that a fact? His fourth and perfect brew is fifth.