Tag: linguist humour

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.

It’s my third blogiversary! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts:

Explanations

• Why the schwa is so great
• Why do we say “big red barn” but “red big barn” sounds wrong?
• How do you rhyme in a sign language?
• What is a word?
• Ikea’s bookbook, soy milk vs milk milk, and like-liking. What’s going on?
• The language of poetry (me on Schwa Fire)
• How does overtone singing work phonetically?
• Why swearing is just like saying “please” (sort of)
• A Linguist Explains the Syntax of “Fuck” (me on The Toast)
• Your mother tongue has a lasting effect on your brain — even if you don’t remember it
• Why lipreading is hard
• To what extent is music language?

Linguist Humour

• Highlights from a game of linguistsagainsthumanity
• this is a wuge.
• Linguistics Georg-ian
• One wug. Two ___. Red wug. Blue wug.
• A linguist walks into a bar. (More advanced version: A maximal projection walks into a v bar…)
• Nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill
• All about that richness of the base
• Highly implausible vowel inventories, from least to most ridiculous
• xkcd on quotative “like”
• Linguistics Gothic
• IPA emoji

Anti-prescriptivism

• What we think of as “good” English is the English historically spoken by people with the most power.
• What makes a word “real”? (gif version)
• Did a key witness in Trayvon Martin’s case talk funny, or could we all use some education?
• Texting as amateur peer writing practice (xkcd)
• Why grammar snobbery has no place in the movement
• Young women shouldn’t have to talk like men to be taken seriously
• Language is open source
• Habitual “be” in African American English

Language activism

• Codeswitching is a sign of fluency, not a deficit
• “Children as young as five are punished for speaking African languages, indigenous languages and mother tongues at school.”
• Language revitalization and technology
• Britain’s first baby to be registered with a sign name
• Should people learn Indigenous languages that aren’t part of their heritage?
• Indigenous language dormant for more than 100 years revived
• Skwomesh language revitalized by First Nations youth through DIY immersion

Linguistics and pop culture

• Look at all these ducks there are at least ten (Gricean Maxims and duck gifs)
• Singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song and trochaic tetrameter
• Free “tudoring” and a moist owlet: the 5 “t” sounds in English
• What tense should you use to talk about time travel in Back to the Future?
• I analyzed the linguistic aspects of every single episode of Cabin Pressure, a very linguistically clever BBC radio comedy.
• NPIs explained using Mean Girls references (follow-up on FCIs)
• IPA Scrabble pictures

Internet Language

• What’s up with exclamation!compounds?
• Final hanging “but”, final “but”, “so” and “or”, final comma
• (Problems with) Internet slang meets American Sign Language
• e.e. cumblr (tumblr-speak as postmodern poetry)
• That way we’re all writing now
• no punctuation is funnier
• When you can and cannot even
• NOPE, tildes, and twitter dialects
• Will we all be speaking emoji “language” in a few years? Nope.
• Internet language, pictures, and emoji
• Tweeting with an accent
• Some data on “u” vs “you” as a formality distinction

Gender pronouns

• A linguist on the story of gender pronouns (me at The Toast)
• Practice with pronouns
• Over half of languages do not have gendered pronouns
• Conjugating singular they
• If pronouns are a closed class, how is it that people are inventing new ones?

Things about languages

• Gothic katakana
• Why Hangul (the Korean alphabet) is awesome
• Linguistic tips for fake-pronouncing any foreign language
• Multilingual sign language dictionary
• Faire smashy-smash or fucking shit up? The complications of bilingual profanity
• Why are written French and spoken French so different? (follow-up on French fanfic)
• Ingressive “yes” in Swedish and some English dialects
• Why the English progressive is interesting
• Will linguistics help with language learning? / Will learning a second language help with linguistics?

Linguistics videos

• LingVids, a joint project between me and several other linguists
• The first video in my collaboration with Tom Scott
• This syntax series from University of Edinburgh and of course the ongoing videos from thelingspace.

#lingwiki

• Explanations of ergative/accusative, Optimality Theory, and perfect vs perfective
• How to participate in lingwiki editathons from afar, report from the first #lingwiki, report from the second #lingwiki (upcoming editathon on May 31st!)

Resources

• How to explain linguistics to your friends and family
• Linguistics jobs resource roundup
• How to find a topic for your linguistics paper
• List of linguistics conferences, especially those focussed on undergraduates/students
• How to type IPA on your phone (Android/iOS)
• Linguistics resources for high school teachers
• Teaching linguistics to 9-14 year olds: ling camp week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4.
• An eight-part series on teaching yourself to draw syntax trees: start here for an overview or here to dive right in
• Advice for writing pop linguistics articles and how pop linguistics differs from teaching and pop science
• I made an FAQ and did an interview with Unravelled

Haven’t been with me this whole time? It’s okay — you can see the highlights of year one and year two right here.