News

August 2022: redesigning the International Phonetic Alphabet (to put in your pocket)

gretchenassistant

This month, we rethought the structure of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Okay, let me explain.

The IPA is typically presented in a chart that shows the sounds of languages of the world arranged in two dimensions: from top to bottom as the mouth is more and more open and from left to right as the sound is produced from the front of the mouth to the back. It’s elegant, it’s informative, it’s a highly familiar reference diagram for linguists. So my cohost Lauren Gawne and I thought it would be nifty to create a more aesthetically attractive version of this already really neat technical diagram which is typically presented in rather boring technical greyscale, as practical-yet-elegant merch for our podcast, Lingthusiasm. Almost a year ago, we sent off an email to our resident artist, Lucy Maddox….and now, finally, here we are.

In the process, we’ve learned a whole lot about the history of the International Phonetic Alphabet (longer version in the thread below!)

We’ve also realized that we have some questions about parts of the IPA chart layout that we’d been taking for granted. For example: why is there a third chart for the non-pulmonic consonants like clicks and implosives, when they have the same places of articulation as the main, pulmonic consonant chart and could surely just be rows there? And, wouldn’t it be sort of nifty to put the vowels back in the same chart as the consonants again, when they used to hang out there for decades? This started as an art project, but any good art also provokes…questions. Longer version and speculations in this blog post.

At any rate, here’s what it looks like when we put all of the symbols on the same chart!

An abstract, minimalist* rendering of the International Phonetic Alphabet as a grid of white, sans-serif letters on a midnight blue background, with no row or column headings. Bright green is used as an accent colour, for solid green circles around the voiceless consonants; white circles with green font for the rounded vowels, and narrow green borders around the lateral sounds. There’s a small lingthusiasm logo in the bottom corner and a translucent “demo” watermark splashed in the background. *Yes, we know there’s a syntax theory called Minimalism as well, which this has no real relationship to because it’s a different subfield. Consider it a bonus easter egg!

We also thought, wouldn’t it be ideal if this eclectic nerd art IPA design came in a convenient format for carrying around with you? One that might even be useful for other purposes? So we’re getting it imprinted onto microfibre lens cloths (useful for cleaning glasses, sunglasses, camera lenses, and phone/computer screens). The thing is, lens cloth printing companies only take orders in the hundreds or preferably thousands, so we’ve decided to place one massive order for everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast tier as of October 5th, 2022. This is our most popular tier, which also gets you our whole archive of monthly bonus episodes and access to the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server — if you’ve been on the fence about becoming a patron, now would be a really good time for it. (Higher tiers can get several lens cloths, if you want spares or to share with friends.)

Here’s more about the IPA redesign and here’s the link to get it by becoming a patron if you’re already convinced.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was Episode 71: Various vocal fold vibes (curious about what some of those circles mean on the IPA chart? This episode will help you with that!). The bonus episode was Bonus 66: Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science.

Technically speaking, next month’s bonus episode is an interview with Lucy Maddox about the IPA chart redesign and being a linguist/artist but we’ve made that bonus episode free for a limited time until the IPA lens cloth special offer is closed on October 5th, so you should go listen to that now if you’re interested!

I also finished the #103papers project this month, reading 1 paper each for the 103 languages identified by Kidd&Garcia in the top 4 journals about child language acquisition. More on the big picture from what I learned later, but in the meantime, here’s a neat thing I learned:

LingComm, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication, has put out its participant/volunteer survey for the next conference in February 2023. I’m not organizing it this year, but this year’s committee is fantastic and I look forward to seeing there many linguists who do communication with broader audiences and journalists, podcasters, youtubers, and other communicators who do linguistics — if that’s you, do check it out!

At the end of the month, I headed to Chicago for a double feature: in August, participating in Ada Palmer’s Renaissance papal election simulation (description at Part 5) and in September, WorldCon/ChiCon8, about which more next month.

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This month’s image is a summary of what’s going on with the IPA lens cloth situation, for those who don’t like big blocks of text.

What if the International Phonetic Alphabet looked like weird nerd art? Get this design (arrow to previously-described abstract IPA demo) on a handy-to-carry lens cloth (image of those microfibre cloths you clean glasses with; these are not the actual cloths but just to give you an idea of the genre). (Tiny abstract drawing of Lauren & Gretchen silhouettes from the website.) We're placing one bulk order for everyone who's a Lingthusiast patron or higher as of October 5, 2022. Sign up at patreon.com/lingthusiasm

July 2022: In which I get my brain scanned!

gretchenassistant

This month’s Lingthusiasm episodes were a special double feature from my trip to Boston to get my brain scanned and finally discover whether I am one of the extremely special left-handed people who has their language centres on the right or both sides of the brain instead of the left. Spoiler: I am not, mine is on the right, just like most other people, left- and right-handed.

However! It was still really neat to take off all my metal items and go in the massive magnet that is an MRI machine and hear about language in the brain with Ev Fedorenko and what specifically was being tested in the experiments I participated in, with Saima Malik-Moraleda. (You can listen to the episodes in either order, depending on how much you like ~suspense~)

The #103papers reading project is still (still!) going on, in which I finally got through the enormous Indo-European section and learned some things about languages like Lazuri:

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This month’s image is a picture of my brain doing language!! Okay, admittedly, it looks a lot like all of the other brain scans that people get, but this one’s mine!!!

Left hemisphere of Gretchen's Brain from an MRI observing language and the brain. (Assorted red and yellow blotches around the top curve of the temporal lobe, on a grey brain scan image.)

June 2022: Modals and a cool linguistics paper

gretchenassistant

This month I attended a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation, where I was on panels about swearing in science fiction and fantasy and the delightful Steerswoman books, as well as doing a dramatic reading from Ryan North’s Romeo and/or Juliet book.

Some linguists got very excited about a very cool linguistics paper by the late Anne Cutler, which I won’t spoil (because it really does have spoilers, but trust me you don’t need any particular linguistics background to get why it’s cool) and as a result we also managed to track down Anne Cutler’s Christmas Letter, which is mentioned in the paper. (The full twitter thread, linked to from below, is also worth reading afterwards.)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was What we can, must, and should say about modals. The bonus episode was There’s like, so much to like about “like”.

I did a thread about how we approach a topic like modals which traditionally has a lot of associated terminology for a Lingthusiasm episode:

I also spent the entire month in the Indo-European section of the #103papers reading project. (And then some – 39 Indo-European languages in this sample.) Here’s a paper about Italian with very charming examples:

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Written Chinese “Biang”

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This month’s picture is Because Internet hanging out at the staff picks section with some book friends at my local independent bookstore, Argo Bookshop! Argo’s owners were linguists in a previous life and it’s well worth a visit if you’re in Montreal.

A signed copy of Because Internet hanging out on the staff picks shelf of Argo bookshop.

May 2022: 10th blogiversary and Japanese translation of Because Internet

gretchenassistant

In May, I hit my 10-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic. I celebrated with two linkposts, one of the usual highlights from the past year and another, shorter post of more zoomed-out highlights from the past decade.

I participated for the second year running as a contestent in Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

Promotional graphic of Gretchen as a contestant for Webster's War of the Words virtual game show, including logo, headshot, and bio.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages. The bonus episode was What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow, an edited recording of our online liveshow from April.

It’s delightfully surreal when an author whose books you’re enjoying also likes your book!

The #103papers project continued, in which I read one paper per language for the 103 languages identified as having papers published about them in the four major child language acquisition journals, based on a survey paper by Kidd&Garcia. Here’s a bit from a paper about Greenlandic showing that kids love morphology!

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This month I received my author copies of Because Internet in Japanese, translated by Toshio Chiba, which kept the bright yellow/blue cover. You can get it at Filmart or Amazon.co.jp.

Image of Japanese editions of BECAUSE INTERNET on top of blue fabroc covered in symbols. One copy is in its yellow dust jacket; one shows the blue cover inside the jacket.

April 2022: #103papers, Lingthusiasm liveshow, and LingComm Grantees

gretchenassistant

This month, I started a new reading project! It’s inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia that came out last year, and which surveys the languages represented by all of the papers published in the four main child language acquistion research journals. Kidd & Garcia find that these journals contain papers about 103 languages; while this number is small compared to the total number of languages in the world (over 7000) and even the number of languages typically found in other cross-linguistic studies (the language maps at WALS often report data from 400-1200 languages), it does make for a relatively manageable reading list.

So that’s what I’m doing: reading one paper per language from this list, and posting a screenshot of the abstract and a my own tweet-length summary in this thread on twitter. At the rate of one paper per day, not quite every day, it’ll probably take me about four months. I’ve been missing going to conferences and finding out what people are working on in an informal fashion, which is different from diving in the literature to try and find out something specific for a lingcomm project, so this is an attempt to “refill the well” a bit.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was What it means for a language to be official. The bonus episode was Bonus 62: Approaching word games like a linguist – Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular. We did a Lingthusiasm liveshow online via the Lingthusiasm Patron Discord! It was great to see everyone (about a hundred people!) in the chat in real time, as well as everyone who messaged us questions and sweary anecdotes beforehand.

We also announced the winners of the LingComm Grants, giving out a total of 5 Project Grants (including the Kirby Conrod Project Grant for projects related to gender and lingcomm) and 12 Startup Grants. You can see the full list of grantees here, and stay tuned for more about their exciting linguistics communication projects as they get to work on them in the coming months.

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This month’s image is from a short trip to Boston this month, featuring Because Internet hanging out the media section of Porter Square Books.

A well-stocked bookshelf labelled "media" featuring Because Internet in the bottom left corner and other many books (A few: The Hype Machine, How to Do Nothing, Twitter: A Biography, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information)

March 2022: PIE Day and Memory Speaks

gretchenassistant

Here are some Pi Day (3rd month, 14th day) facts about the PIE (Proto-Indo-European). Both of these guys were named William Jones, confusingly enough.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word order, we love (transcript). The bonus episode was Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics. The deadline for the LingComm Grant applications was March 31st, so next month we head into reviewing the proposals!

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This month’s image is of the excellent book Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy, which I greatly enjoyed reading! It’s a really interesting combination of pop science book and memoir, which we don’t see enough of in pop linguistics.

February 2022: Teaching with Because Internet survey and Lingthusiasm liveshow in April

gretchenassistant

I set up a survey for anyone who’s been using Because Internet for teaching – put in what you’ve been doing and I’ll compile and share it with other instructors!

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Knowledge is power, copulas are fun. The bonus episode was Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ – Dispatches from the Unicode Conference.

We also announced a Lingthusiasm liveshow in April, a sweary liveshow about swearing, taking place on the Lingthusiasm Discord. Plus: a longer descriptive post about the LingComm Grants, of which there are now several more thanks to people who supported them!

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This month’s image is brought to you by linguistics takes on the Roses are Red poem.

Valingtine Poem on a gradient green to blue to purple background. Roses are red Violets are blue Ideas are green And colourless too #valingtines

January 2022: LSA, LingComm Grants, and spectrograms

gretchenassistant

I started the year at a rather surreal LSA 2022, the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which I’d hoped to attend in person in Washington DC but moved online at the last minute, along with what seemed to be most of the other attendees. It was nonetheless nice to see people virtually as well as help judge the Five Minute Linguist competition again.

This month we also announced the return of the LingComm Grants, small grants to help fledgling linguistics communication projects get off the ground, sponsored by Lingthusiasm and several other generous contributors. We first ran these grants in 2020, and it’s been great to see that people are still enthusiastic about them.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Making speech visible with spectrograms, for which we did a special video segment where you can see the spectrograms as we make them! The bonus episode was a chat where we interview each other about seasons, word games, Unicode, and more updates coming on Lingthusiasm.

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This month’s photo is Because Internet hanging out in the history and culture section of Librarie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal.

BECAUSE INTERNET sitting atop display books.

December 2021: pigeon calls and a bookmas tree

gretchenassistant

This month, I did a virtual event with Argo Bookshop where I talked with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching (I am especially pleased with the “linguistic tie-in” portion of the event where I got Rosemary to teach me how to make various pigeon calls and the audience played along, very much vibes of intro phonetics class).

I did an interview on the Notion podcast with Devon Zuegel. Here’s a quote from that:

“If you see it as, okay, language is always a moving target, it’s a living thing that exists in the minds of living beings, and nothing about human life or human society, or human culture is exactly the same from one generation to the next, and language just comes along as part of that.”

Notion: Gretchen McCulloch talks about why we talk the way we do online

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Where to get your English etymologies. The bonus episode was Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory.

I also went to WorldCon in Washington DC this December, which I didn’t join in time to be on any panels but I did meet several people who liked Because Internet and signed books for them!

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This month’s image is a charming bookmas tree from Etat de Style, a bookstore in Montreal.

Stacked book tower covered in holiday lights, pinecones, and ornaments.

2021 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

Media

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

  1. What is linguistics?
  2. What is a word? Morphology
  3. Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
  4. Syntax 2:
  5. Semantics
  6. Pragmatics
  7. Sociolinguistics
  8. Phonetics 1: Consonants
  9. Phonetics 2: Vowels
  10. Phonology
  11. Psycholinguistics
  12. Language acquisition
  13. Language change and historical linguistics
  14. World Languages
  15. Computational Linguistics
  16. Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Conferences/events attended:

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events. 

  1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
  2. Designing online conferences for building community
  3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
  4. Hosting online conferences for building community
  5. Budgeting online conferences or events
  6. Planning accessible online conferences

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Books and more

Helpful threads

Linguistics fun

General fun

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I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

Linguistics jobs

Linguistics fun

Languages

Meta and advice posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.