September 2020: Crash Course Linguistics starts

Crash Course Linguistics videos started coming out this month!

This is a project I’ve been working on all year along with many excellent people, and I’m excited that the videos are finally getting to be seen, especially in a year when so much education has moved online. Stay tuned for all 16 of these 10-12 minute intro linguistics videos on Fridays until early 2021, except some holiday Fridays.

We’re also putting out accompanying issues of Mutual Intelligibility with each newsletter, thanks to Liz McCullough, featuring other resources and activities from around the internet, including practice problems (often from the linguistics olympiads).

• Preview trailer for Crash Course Linguistics
• What is linguistics? Crash Course Linguistics #1
• What is a word? Morphology, Crash Course Linguistics #2
• Morphosyntax, Crash Course Linguistics #3

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about who you are in high school, linguistically speaking, an interview with Shivonne Gates, and the bonus was about pangrams, going beyond “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and into more obscure words and other writing systems.

Media:

• USA Today – feature – 9/28
• Technocluture – review – September issue
• NPR’s Weekend Edition – mention – 9/5
• KCCU – feature – 9/5
• Carpe Librum blog – review – September

Selected tweets:

• What if we framed it as “playful” rather than “ungrammatical”?
• pre-sert (it’s dessert but before the meal)
• A whole lot of people telling Philip Pullman to read Because Internet, in surreal moments
• “why don’t we just communicate with images” “well,,,,”
• Several further experiments with the “hallway track” online
• you are blick, I am bnick
• the months of the year (metric system) (an ever-increasingly bizarre thread)
• words are just meat twitches
• masknunciation

Selected blog posts:

• Practical advice for if you want to start a podcast – An advice post on Superlinguo which I co-sign (unsurprisingly, as we have a podcast together)
• Gestural theories about the origin of language
• Linguistics jobs: at the American Anthropological Association
• More experiments with online events, this time in a newish platform called Gather

This month’s image is from a much-needed, distanced visit to the sea in the first half of the month.