Category: quarterly

This summer I spent time with Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Italian, Latin (unexpectedly!), and… well, okay, kind of all of them, at least in museum exhibit form.

So I did what any linguist would do and made myself into a guinea pig, comparing four different language learning strategies on four languages to see what happened. I’ve written up an Introduction/overview and some highlights and troubleshooting. 

On the same trip, I made appearances at some events:

• The World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in Glasgow, Scotland, on a panel about languages as world-building
• The Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting in Helsinki, Finland, where I didn’t present but I especially enjoyed the special outreach session, Communicating linguistics research: results and prospects.
• A colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL) in Tartu, Estonia
• An event with translator Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez and journalist Elena Álvarez Mellado for the launch of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página in Madrid, Spain, which is now available at Pie de Pagina, Casa del Libro, and elsewhere

The Spanish translation isn’t the first one for Because Internet — it’s already available in Japanese (Filmart, Amazon.co.jp), Chinese (Taobao), and Korean (Aladin.co.kr, Kyobo) — but it was the first one into a language I understand and where I happened to be in the right location to meet the translator, so that was really cool! The publisher also localized the title (arroba is the Spanish word for the @ sign, so it literally means @language) and the social-media-post-inspired cover art is a fun new direction compared with the classic blue and yellow of several other editions! 

In non-travel news, the podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.

Lingthusiasm

This season’s episodes included some great grammatical phenomena, a look behind the scenes at one of my collaborations, and the classic philosophy of language thought experiment with merch to match.

• The perfectly imperfect aspect episode
• The best and worst comparatives episode (bonus)
• Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!
• Don’t you love to do a “do” episode? (bonus)
• Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!
• Behind the Scenes on the Tom Scott Language Files (bonus)

The experiment? Suppose you’re in a field with someone you don’t share any languages with. A rabbit scurries by and the person says “Gavagai!” You probably interpret that as referring to the rabbit, rather than just to the rabbit’s ears, or the act of scurrying, or, as memorably put by WVO Quine, “un-detached rabbit parts” — but why? Listen to this episode to find out…

…or enjoy the merch, available in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black. 

New favorite data

People continued to produce wonderfully unique utterances:

• I don’t get people’s interest in the horse-drawn carriage that has gotta be one of the worst possible animals to be drawing a carriage like how in the heck is a half ton animal with hooves and such terrible limb dexterity going to ever finish an entire drawing of such a mechanically complex thing I- (structural ambiguity)
• Jesus Christ, the fireflies in Brooklyn walk?! (structural ambiguity)
• I didn’t even know they could drive. (structural ambiguity)
• I wonder what a bobcat orders at Starbucks. (antecedent reference ambiguity)
• Pass the mayo: Condiment could help improve fusion energy yields (novel sentence)
• Local man fond of linguistic garden path sentences friends to hearing his boring puns (garden path)

They also continued not producing “abso-jesus-lutely!” — but why?

Bluesky and blogs

• I made a linguistics starter pack on Bluesky — if you’re thinking about joining, this will populate your feed with a few active linguists, which will in turn help you find others 
• Etymological epiphanies from all over: nookie, cookie, bacon, parasol, parachute…
• A little shoutout on XKCD’s What If? video
• The historical dictionary of science fiction and fannish words in the OED
• A Chicago Manual of Style section on punctuating with emojis. “Usage varies widely, however, so editors should query before making wholesale changes”
• French as it’s taught versus French as it’s spoken
• A word for “wet with air”

I visited the linguistics museum Mundolingua in Paris and took this photo of a literal Indo-European family tree: