Strange ideas I sometimes have

I was chatting to a class about dialects of English the other day, and how some are so different as to almost boarder on being non-mutually comprehensible.

How excellent and interesting it would be to get two disparate groups of English speakers - for maximal difference let's say northern Scottish and Indian - and get them to work together in a situation where there is no standard English. I wonder if they would try and drift towards a dialect that is not native to any of them, or create a pigeon/creole? I think it would be excellent to have a Creole where the superstrate and substrate languages are both English. I got terribly excited about the idea but the students didn't appear to take to it as much as I did.

My IPA craft project

I don't normally cross-post content here and over at Superlinguo but I'm so excited that I've finally finished my Easter craft project that I want to share it with everyone.



I cross stitched the pulmonic consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It ended up taking so long not because of the individual characters but because it took forever to grey out the areas that aren't physiologically possible.

If you're not familiar with the IPA I'll give you my patented 30 second lesson. The vertical categories vary by the place of articulation - that is where in the mouth they are made. The first are 'bi-labial', made with the lips. The 'p' and 'b' are more or less exactly as you make them in English, by time you get to the question-marky think you're at your glottis, where you make sounds. If you say 'uh-oh' that gap in the middle is a glottal stop. See, you make them without even knowing! Good work you! On the horizontal the difference is manner of articulation - that is how you make the sounds. The first ones are 'stops', which you make by closing your mouth fully at some point and releasing it. below that are nasals, such as 'm' and 'n' and 'ng' in English. And so on. A chart with all those labels can be found here. Linguists, and especially phoneticians, use these symbols to accurately represent the same sounds across many different languages.





Next I'll have to start on the vowels!

Drag Queen Linguist Names

Today I thought I'd kick off the Friday blog shenanigans again and share with you some linguistics based drag queen names I came up with while killing sometime yesterday. Linguistics is certainly not short on technical terminology to draw upon - and for any terms that might not be familiar I've included a web link, usually to Wikipedia.

Anne Affra (anaphora)
Jenny Tive (genitive)
Alla Tive (allative)
Mera Tive (mirative)
Len Ishon (lenition)
Elle Ipsis (ellipsis)
Al Veola (alveolar)
Cardinal Vowels (cardinal vowels)
Sir Kumfiks (circumfix)


As you can see, there's almost a whole family's worth of Tive. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below!

New Month

Happy October!

I've found today's date extra amusing for data collection...

Every day when I record I upload these recordings to my computer. There I keep track of all the meta data (date, place, speakers, content - all very important stuff).

One very important thing with lots of files is keeping naming conventions consistent. My system is to put the date, backwards to keep everything in order, and the file number, because often I'll make more than one recording across a day. And so perhaps now you know why I'm so amused by today. Yup, doesn't take much to keep me amused - the first file recorded today I got to name:

101001-01

Am also greatly looking forward to Sunday week...

Holiday!

The Handsome Penpal and I are taking a couple of weeks off and heading over to New Zealand. I'm declaring the adventure an internet free zone and so will have to save up all my Kiwi language anecdotes for a post-trip post.

For your amusement in my absence, I've listed a few of my favourite language-related blogs. If you have any you like to read and think I should add to my RSS list let me know in the comments section below!


Language Log - A swarm of top notch linguists, you'll be hard pressed to not find something to tickle your fancy.

Fully (Sic) - Linguistics news with an Aussie accent.

Literal-Minded - If you like taking things to their logical conclusion.

The Visual Linguist - This is new to my blog roll, but is written by a guy interested in the multi-modal linguistic communication of comics. How could it not be awesome?

Johnson - Named for Samuel himself. The Economist gets on board the linguistics train. For those that like their copy editing with lashings of reality.

lolPhonology - How all linguistics should be taught...

PhD Comics - Not about linguistics per se, but an occasionally frightfully accurate depiction of the life of a graduate researcher.

100th post, chapter to bed, and secret codes

It is the 100th Lozguist post, which is a rather exciting milestone for a project that I thought was mainly going to be used as a way of convincing my parents that I was alive while on fieldwork. But I've enjoyed continuing to post on my return, and I hope you've enjoyed continuing to read.

Another celebratory milestone has just been reached today; I've just finished the draft of the final chapter of the sketch grammar! Granted the whole document is full of things like 'find a better example', 'find a better reference', etc. but knowing that there is a bit over 20,000 of stuff written is comforting, and I have a rather clear idea of what I need to do to fill those holes.

In the wider world, United States Cyber Command have created a flashy new logo with a secret code in it! Cryptologists and linguists have a long history together, in fact sometimes figuring out the structure of another language feels like you're code breaking... Shame on The Age though for implying that nerdy and cool were mutually exclusive categories!

A Weekend at the Beach

I'm getting in early with this week's post, as I'll be away tomorrow and for the rest of the weekend. I'm off to the NSW central coast for a weekend with my project team. It's something like school camp, but much more nerdy, much more fun and no one to tell us to go to bed at 9pm.

I'll be showing the team what I've been up to for the last year, which is somewhat nerve-wracking and exciting. Exciting, because this time last year I had nothing, or less than nothing, to show them, and this year I've got lots of my own data. Nerve-wracking because showing people your analysis - even a tentative one - is always stressful. Fortunately they're all very nice people so I won't be too worried.

And in language news this week, we see that computational manipulation of language can actually have some good.

Dictionary Fail Fail

Headline making news from LexicographyLand this week:

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/australian-physicist-spots-dictionary-error-20100511-uusm.html

Gasp! Egads! Someone found an error in the Oxford Dictionary and now the world as we know it is about to end!

Who would have thought that a dictionary with over 301,100 main entries compiled by mere mortals (and the mentally unstable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne) would have an error! I would be impressed if we only found one.

Colourful Results

The team at xkcd have published the results of their massive colour name survey (be warned, some of the language results is a little colourful!):


http://blag.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/


Names for colours are not the same across different langauges, some languages for example don't have separate names for what we call blue and green (these are called 'grue' languages), while some may have more specific basic colour terms than we have (Russian, for example, has two different basic blues they distinguish which we'd just call 'light' and 'dark').

Lots of work has been done by linguists over the last forty years looking at colour term variation - but the volume of data collected in this online survey is staggering. over 5 million colours were named over almost a quarter of a million individual sessions. And because they are free of the pressures and constraints of institutionalised research they've made the data available for you do play with at home!

The only real variable they've examined to date is gender, but given that participants were asked to give their native language as metadata there is potential for some cross-linguistic analysis.

Some Random Thoughts

This semester I've been tutoring for an undergraduate semantics course, which has been a whole lot of fun. I really like semantics (basically: word meaning) because everyone has an opinion on what a word means, and sometimes hold to that quite passionately.

The first assignment involved discussing the word 'random'. Random is a great word to discuss in semantics because it's recently been getting a workout in colloquial senses such as:

"Everyone at the party was dressed so randomly"

"Zomg last night I got so drunk I made out with some random"

What concerned me in the assignment were the number of people that said things like 'their clothing was not worn with equal chance of all items of clothing being chosen and therefore this is not a legitimate use of the word.' It scares me that people can't see a colloquial usage of a word as legitimate - considering that more people probably use it more often in more contexts than the statistical sense.

What really concerned me about some people's analysis is that they tried to argue that the statistical sense of random precedes the more general sense of being without observable pattern or explanation to the speaker. A cursory read of the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the earliest citation for the general sense is 1655 while the first for the specific statistical sense is 1884( http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50197140?query_type=word&queryword=random&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=P1mJ-ljjtMe-14068&hilite=50197140 ).

It's one thing to make close-minded judgments about language use, it's another thing to be too lazy to consult a dictionary...

Ask a Linguistic

Friday post is on a Saturday today. Friday has become cake day in our office, which can hamper productivity levels for things like working and blogging...

Recently, an email went around the department from a television producer looking for someone with a TV friendly personality and a savvy knowledge of linguistics to be a regular guest on a show that's in the pipeline. They had put the call out for a "Linguistic".

Now, people who are practitioners of linguistics call themselves linguists, I don't know anyone who would refer to themselves as a linguistic.

English has a full and rich collection of derivational morphology - that's the collection of affixes you can stick on words that makes them change a little in their function, and normally changes their word class (inflectional morphology makes tenses and plurals and what-not). So someone who teaches is a 'teach-er', someone who dances is a 'danc-er'. But English is very god at not been consistent across the board with this, a butcher doesn't butch, someone who judges isn't a judger, and philosopher doesn't really philosoph.

Calling someone who works on linguistic things a linguistic is following one expected pattern - you have people that can be a medic, psychic and diabetic. They're strange because -ic things normally act as adjectives, but they can occasionally be nouns. Still, I think it'll be a while before I start referring to myself as a linguistic on my resume...

The awkward turtle

This week's random Friday post comes back to an old pet topic of mine - gesture. It also comes back to a rather new pet topic of mine - no longer feeling particularly young.


a while ago language log had a post about the word 'awkward', looking at its current usage and how it's extended its meaning and application of late:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2154


One thing that caught my attention was how the phrase 'awkward turtle' has been coined, as though it were some kind of aquatic guardian of unfortunate situations. Invoking the 'awkward turtle' is often accompanied a symbolic turtle gesture with one hand placed palm down over the other hand, also palm down, and the thumbs are rotated to represent a swimming turtle. Most interestingly, now this gesture is performed without speech.

Interestingly, although the origin of this gestural practice is said to be in US colleges, the gesture is not actually the American Sign Language (ASL) sign for turtle, this is:

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/t/turtle.htm


Apparently the 'awkward turtle' sign is actually ASL for platypus, although I can't find a picture to attest to that. The sign though, is the Auslan sign for turtle:

http://www.signplanet.net/SubTools/SubSignSingle.asp?SignID=259


I thought it was a pretty cute gesture, and I thought I'd ask my little sister if she'd heard of it. The reply was an exasperated sigh and an incredulous stare, as though I must be living the life of a hermit to not know about the awkward turtle. Yup - I now know only what's hip if a bunch of professors half way around the world inform me .

He is a total douche....

Now I've been home for a while and am no longer living in my very insular little Nepali Linguistics universe, I thought I would try and make an effort to post every Friday-ish on general linguistic topics that tickle my fancy.

This week's has occurred because my sister has taken to using the phrase 'douche canoe' as a term of disparagement, and the other week I was reading a column in the Good Weekend where someone was referred to as a 'douche banjo' (at least I think it was banjo, I'm still trying to track that one down if anyone out there keeps old copies of the paper floating around).

I am more than familiar with the offensive term 'douche bag'. A douche bag is actually an item of medical use - it's the bag on the douche (itself taken from the French for shower) where fluid is kept. The whole get up is to clean out any bodily orifices, although people generally seem fixated on the vagina (as usual).

The Oxford English Dictionary gives its usual useful but dry definition as:

2. (b) U.S. slang, a general term of disparagement, esp. for an unattractive or boring person;


I'm not sure that captures it for me - I tend to use it more for idiots that are trying to punch above their weight and failing miserably, often while drunk. Also, unlike the OED, I'm quite happy to use the word douche in isolation as still mean basically the same thing.

But until a couple of weeks ago, I'd never heard any combination other than douche bag. My unprofessional opinion is that 'douche bag' was picked up as a term of insult, reduced to 'douche', then people forgot that a douche bag was a read piece of medical equipment, and began assuming it was just a random conjunction and added what they felt like.

Does anyone else use douche canoe, or douche banjo? Or are there any other wacky combinations that you use? Also, does your definition of douche differ from mine or the OED?