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04:45:33 [Tristan]: well if you used words like god meant them to be word, there'd be no problem [ view | more ]

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Category: linguistics

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most quoted re "linguistics": Jonathan North Washington (84), Tristan Alexander McLeay (49), other (42), professors (37), Abe Solomon (22)

other categories found with "linguistics": language (96), gradschool (67), sadness (62), phonetics (61), wisdom (32)



Viewing 246 of 1466 Result(s)
[ sort: date / rating, ↓ ]


[link] heard: 21 November 2015
[edit] added: 14 December 2015

"What about the grammars that don't allow it at all? Like ours. ... Like mine."

native intuitions on Turkish syntax
turkic, sadness, linguistics, syntax
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 18 September 2015
[edit] added: 14 December 2015

"Well, Jonathan's excellent at writing twol, and I'm pretty good at hassling Jonathan to do stuff."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 18 September 2015
[edit] added: 14 December 2015

(23:19:57) Flammie: is yandex those guys who asked me for a full-form list of all finnish word-forms

...

(23:21:28) Flammie: I generated some 2 TB until something broke on the then lousy linguistics cluster from csc.fi

(23:26:04) firespeaker: Flammie: did you send them the 2TB file?

(23:26:36) Flammie: I aksed for instructions on doing that, didn't get replies anymore

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 7 July 2015
[edit] added: 7 July 2015

"I've gotta remember to type ‘optimality theory’ before I google ‘domination latex’."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 November 2013
[edit] added: 7 November 2013

Толгонай: "На русском есть неправильные глаголы что ли?"

me: "Да, конечно, почти все. Дай любой глагол, я покажу тебе."

Толгонай: "Брать."

me: "Брать - беру́ - берёшь - брал. Видешь?"

Толгонай: "Seems normal to me..."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 15 October 2013
[edit] added: 15 October 2013

"Поэтому language is живой!"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 May 2013
[edit] added: 1 May 2013

(00:15:16) alexr: ... but it's looking like -- and this is kind of interesting -- using an HMM is actually slightly worse than always just taking the most-frequent-translation.

(00:16:04) [jonathan]: HMM?

(00:16:08) alexr: hidden markov model.

(00:16:36) [jonathan]: ah

(00:17:14) [jonathan]: hrm

(00:17:17) alexr: No, hmm.

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 15 March 2013
[edit] added: 15 March 2013

(13:11:51) spectie: қ:ғ {а}: ь: {☭}: >: {S}: ы: ь:ь {n}:н ы: __HFST_TWOLC_.#.

(13:12:00) spectie: uh oh, communism in our transducer

(13:17:45) selimcan: Фонологи всех стран, объединяйтесь! :)

Fran and Ilnar commenting about the Kazakh transducer
puns, phonetics, linguistics, programming, kazakh, russian, SSSR, politics
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 February 2013
[edit] added: 1 February 2013

"But you don't have languages where, for example, sonority behaves as a prosodic feature. So you don't have languages were some words are like [waə̃wə̃wʊɑ̃ə̃ɑ̃] and others are like [pskxə̥ɸhtʰɯ̥kʰɯ̥]."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 February 2013
[edit] added: 1 February 2013

"So Korean dramas are all the rage in lots of countries in Asia. And in China, when they imitate this recurring phrase from the Korean dramas—[Korean...], ‘I love you’—because that's what they do in Korean dramas, they love each other—they repeat it with an affricate."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 February 2013
[edit] added: 2 February 2013

I feel like asking linguists to also be not-racist, not-clueless, and good prose stylists shouldn't be too much to ask. But apparently...

in response to "For example, some Arabic languages such as Farsi include a phonological contrast between the voiced velar stop /g/ and a voiced uvular stop /G/ that does not contrast with /g/ in English (Maddieson, 1984)."
academia, writing, racism, sadness, linguistics, insightfulness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 16 December 2012
[edit] added: 16 December 2012

(21:39:17) firespeaker: but it's worth seeing what the people who've spent time on this think

(21:39:23) spectie: aye

(21:39:25) firespeaker: "particles" is probably not the way to go

(21:39:41) spectie: "particle" stands for "defeat"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 December 2012
[edit] added: 6 December 2012

(13:40:56) spectre: there is a special place in hell

(13:41:04) spectre: for linguists who design orthographies with the ' character

(13:41:53) spectre: (a) letters, (b) punctuation

(13:41:58) spectre: and ne'er the twain shall meet

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 August 2012
[edit] added: 12 August 2012

(16:55:49) [me]: btw, I've noticed that voicing typos aren't as uncommon as one might thing

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 24 July 2012
[edit] added: 24 July 2012
Ain't my job to save languages. Talk to the speakers who don't want to use them any more. It's their fault. *points*
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 2 July 2012
[edit] added: 2 July 2012

you remember what i am talking about? i thought that the song was about michael jackson, but they were just using the future tense ;)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 30 April 2012
[edit] added: 30 April 2012

(17:15:49) spectie: what's the frst rule

(17:15:52) spectie: of turkic language grammars ?

(17:17:16) spectie: the first rule is

(17:17:27) selimcan: hargle bargle

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 April 2012
[edit] added: 9 April 2012

"We have vowel harmony; it's great. I like it, I love it!"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 28 March 2012
[edit] added: 28 March 2012

me: "Hm, this talk looks like it's going to be about how some researchers make animal communication look more similar to language than it is."

Tolgonay: "‘Meow.’ What did I say?"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 18 March 2012
[edit] added: 18 March 2012

(04:14:07) نىكو: cypriot also has no question particle

(04:14:10) jonathan: oh???

(04:14:18) jonathan: (pun not intended)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 22 January 2012
[edit] added: 22 January 2012

Jonathan: "Yeah, I've found that a lot of linguists aren't good at dealing with computers [e.g., writing transducers]."

Fran: "And most computer people aren't good with linguistics."

Jonathan: "Yeah, there aren't many who can cross over to the other side well. I think most of us are sitting in this room."

Fran: "And the other's coming on Tuesday."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 26 December 2011
[edit] added: 26 December 2011

(17:30:52) spectie: you know, ((we) = you) could write a better bashkir grammar than the one in TTL

(17:30:55) spectie: in a week

(17:31:31) firespeaker: I'm aware, but I don't know bashqort

(17:31:47) spectie: neither do the people writing the grammar!

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 13 December 2011
[edit] added: 13 December 2011

(16:44:52) spectie: :((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

(16:45:00) spectie: ^-- this is my non-crazy turkologist deficit face

(16:45:08) spectie: it looks like my multiple-encoding file face

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 December 2011
[edit] added: 9 December 2011

(03:08:57) firespeaker: it's like there's 3 or 4 different encodings being used here

(03:09:01) spectie: :(((((((((((

(03:09:08) spectie: this is my multi-encoding file face

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 December 2011
[edit] added: 1 December 2011

(16:57:49) zfe: we are gonna call gel-sin jussive

(16:58:01) firespeaker: zfe: call it what you want I guess

(16:58:16) zfe: science and scientific method won again

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 31 October 2011
[edit] added: 31 October 2011

(18:42:02) spectie: Flammie, did you get the abstract in on time ?

(18:43:42) Flammie: I did, though it was kindof short and wishywashy

(18:43:52) spectie: you should have seen mine and firespeaker's

(18:44:50) firespeaker: we didn't even read ours

(18:44:52) spectie: yeah

(18:45:11) firespeaker: and I think it just sounds like a bunch of disconnected facts about Kyrgyz morphology

(18:45:19) firespeaker: and phonology

(18:45:33) firespeaker: which is basically what talking to me sounds like I guess

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 15 July 2011
[edit] added: 14 July 2011

(02:11:24) Gekz: You are overcomplexifying irrelevance

(02:11:29) Gekz: so this is what linguistics is

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 8 July 2011
[edit] added: 8 July 2011

(03:31:47) spectre: i don't like having the negative morpheme in different places

(03:31:56) firespeaker: but this is Turkic

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 March 2011
[edit] added: 4 March 2011

Traci: "So yeah, you should submit to the Online Working Papers!"

Elijah: "You see, that has the word ‘work’ in it..."

Aaron A: "We should rename it ‘Relaxing Papers in Linguistics.’"

Traci, Aaron, and Elijah
gradschool, linguistics, puns, sadness, time
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 13 January 2011
[edit] added: 16 January 2011

CB: "There's one rule about language comparison—"

Niko: "Don't trust a Russian?"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 11 December 2010
[edit] added: 11 December 2010

me: "it's completely predictable"

me: "which isn't what most linguists would expect"

Baatar: "or isnt what they would predict"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 17 September 2010
[edit] added: 17 September 2010

[Niko says something syntactically odd in English]

[Everyone pauses and frowns, including Niko]

Niko: "Eh, L9 interference."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 23 April 2010
[edit] added: 23 April 2010

"‘Мен кеттим. Вернусь on Sunday,’ деп айтты."

And they say people code switch to mark discourse edges or to indicate other meaning....
linguistics, kyrgyz, russian, language, turkic, multilingualisms
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 8 February 2010
[edit] added: 8 February 2010

(21:43:46) Aaron B: and H&R are like "um, you got peanut butter in my chocolate; NO, you got CHOCOLATE in my peanut butter"

(21:43:51) Aaron B: except they don't like Reese's

(21:44:04) Aaron B: so they're grumpy about it

(21:44:19) Aaron B: basically they're like "phono is a completely arbitrary, abstract computation system; anything else = lame"

...

(21:46:37) Aaron B: lol, sorry

(21:46:50) Aaron B: sometimes i need to anthropomorphize complex theoretical issues

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 17 November 2009
[edit] added: 17 November 2009

(20:07:46) [redacted]: there is not one single redeeming quality about the interface

(20:07:49) [redacted]: except that you can see it

(20:07:53) [redacted]: like, that it's not covered in black

(20:07:57) [redacted]: that's the only redeeming quality

(20:08:00) [redacted]: that you can see it

Abe Solomon's complaints about Praat's interface
linguistics, computers, insults, sadness, programming, phonetics
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 21 October 2009
[edit] added: 21 October 2009

(04:31:14) kesuari: i could've sworn that on the heirarchy of cool letters, ø was way higher than ö

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 16 October 2009
[edit] added: 16 October 2009

"So if you encountered a strange dialect of English on some island where they don't do flapping, ..."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 29 September 2009
[edit] added: 29 September 2009

(23:41:30) [redacted]: i have to present 30-40 min on "the status of your qualifying paper" for our qual paper workshop

(23:41:44) [anon]: the status of my QP is "ummmmmmmmm"

(23:41:51) [anon]: it's hard to hold that out for 30-40 min

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 26 September 2009
[edit] added: 26 September 2009

"The letter ‹q› is just hanging around waiting for English to gain uvular stops."

Övgönxüü on spelling reform
politics, phonetics, klingonisms, coolness, linguistics
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 20 September 2009
[edit] added: 20 September 2009

"Journal of Germanic Linguistics uses a modified LSA style that requires full first names instead of initials. I mean, there's apparently more than one Suzuki out there writing on Linguistics. If there's more than one Suzuki, think about names like Smith!"

John H.G. Scott
academia, badness, linguistics
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 11 August 2009
[edit] added: 11 August 2009

(20:06:04) kesuari: i wish someone would work out a universal definition of word, and make english orthography agree with it

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 30 July 2009
[edit] added: 30 July 2009

(23:26:35) kesuari: "Use boldface for certain forms in Oscan and Umbrian, and to distinguish Gaulish and other forms originally written in the Greek alphabet." i don't suppose you have any idea why?

...

(23:30:58) kesuari: (actually, that's pretty ironic: using bold instead of italics for italic languages like oscan and umbrian)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 21 July 2009
[edit] added: 20 July 2009

(01:03:16) kesuari: it's very difficult to say "psycholinguistics" differently from "psycho linguistics", and a lot of people think that's an apt description of me/what i do

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 21 July 2009
[edit] added: 20 July 2009

(01:06:43) kesuari: (there's some people who manage to study the psycholinguistics of generative grammar, but i think that's like studying the physics of alchemy)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 28 May 2009
[edit] added: 28 May 2009

me: "What happened to that banana?"

my mother: "They missed with the flame thrower they were using to kill the bugs."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 28 April 2009
[edit] added: 28 May 2009

(15:29:05) kesuari: it referred to using powerpoint on a mac

(15:29:20) kesuari: *"it"

(15:29:47) kesuari: (ironically, i'm currently reading a paper about pronoun resolution)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 19 April 2009
[edit] added: 19 April 2009

(15:56:08) Aaron B: being a syntactician for the year is messing up my brain

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 11 March 2009
[edit] added: 11 March 2009

prof. Kara: "Benjamin, what's regressive assimilation?"

...

prof. Kara: "Well, you could say, when the Chinese borrow from the Tibetans, for example."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 26 February 2009
[edit] added: 26 February 2009

(20:47:07) Michael T: well every dictionary needs a little chuvash

(20:47:08) Michael T: that's a feature

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 31 January 2009
[edit] added: 31 January 2009

(18:02:22) [Tristan]: i think slang is just a word for colloquial words, at least in colloquial speech

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 13 January 2009
[edit] added: 13 January 2009

(16:45:41) kesuari: there's a whole ton of different types of most linguistic things

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 16 December 2008
[edit] added: 16 December 2008

(17:29:30) Michael T: vowels are always plotting against me.. especially ɯ. you never know what ɯ is thinking.

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 29 September 2008
[edit] added: 29 September 2008

(22:50:20) Aaron B: i'm trying to right the wrongs committed to the world with my undergrad thesis

(22:50:32) Aaron B: by writing something that actually makes sense, on basically the same topic

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 16 September 2008
[edit] added: 16 September 2008

One note on Imart's grammar: when I said it was hard to use in class today, I meant it--there are no page numbers, but instead about 3500 bullet points, and the index is too short to have anything useful in it.  But at the same time, it is very thorough on a lot of critical issues, and by far the best existing reference on the language.  I wish I'd had access to it as I was learning the language, though I guess using my "teachers" as elicitation subjects to figure out some of this stuff developed useful skills.  And no doubt built character and grew hair on my chest.  Just like trying to find something again that you read in Imart's grammar if you didn't bookmark it.

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 14 September 2008
[edit] added: 14 September 2008

"Have at least one other obsession than linguistics."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 September 2008
[edit] added: 14 September 2008

"You have to like what you do. There's really no other reason to study linguistics."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 25 July 2008
[edit] added: 24 July 2008

(01:54:44) [me]: (i.e., it's not so much rule-based (=something you can learn))

(01:54:53) [me]: ((...easily))

(01:55:06) Almar: you learnt russian

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 22 July 2008
[edit] added: 22 July 2008

(13:28:05) Brenda: can i be a subject? i promise i have a highly unique dialect in Kyrgyz

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 19 May 2008
[edit] added: 19 May 2008

(19:23:46) [me]: stressed and unstressed clitics are used that way

(19:23:53) [me]: at least in AmE

(19:24:11) kesuari: well yeah, they're used like that here too --- but they shouldn't be

...

(19:24:29) [me]: now you're just being a perscriptivist

(19:24:50) kesuari: of course i am: i'm advocating spelling reform

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 18 May 2008
[edit] added: 18 May 2008

(16:29:31) kesuari: i learnt the names "asterix" and "obelix" long before i learnt what asterisks and obelisks were, and the common nouns are just weirdarse variants of the characters

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 17 May 2008
[edit] added: 17 May 2008

(17:23:23) [me]: "More data would have to be gathered to determine what the underlying cause of these dichotomies is"

(17:23:37) [me]: (is there anything you'd change with that?)

(17:24:31) kesuari: (yes, of course i would; i find academic written language and the spoken language that is essentially its read version incredibly hard to understand)

(17:24:49) kesuari: (but unfortunately making it just normal english wouldn't be thesis-like enough)

(17:24:50) syljwesandhr: (so what would you change?)

(17:25:11) kesuari: "if we want to work out what actually causing these differences, we'll have to get more data"

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 17 May 2008
[edit] added: 17 May 2008

(17:34:35) [me]: yeah, if the number on the two sides of a copula are different, lots of languages have issues with determining which form is right :-P

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 16 May 2008
[edit] added: 16 May 2008

(13:27:47) kesuari: i don't entirely no

(13:28:01) Jonor Thwash: you don't entirely no what? ;)

(13:28:40) kesuari: i don't entirely no why we maintain this farce of an orthographical system

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 May 2008
[edit] added: 12 May 2008

(17:40:43) kesuari: my dialect has everything to do with syntax ungrammatical?

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 May 2008
[edit] added: 12 May 2008

(22:54:40) [me]: /r/ → [j] → ∅

(22:55:33) Aaron B: ??

(22:55:41) Aaron B: whatʼs the second arrow mean?

(22:56:08) Aaron B: /input/ -> [output] -> telepathy?

(22:56:18) Aaron B: that would explain the sound/no sound alternation...

...

(22:57:12) Aaron B: if that's the case, then there might be a weird kind of suppletion thing going on

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 12 May 2008
[edit] added: 12 May 2008

(23:17:03) [me]: ROFL

(23:17:08) Aaron B: ?

(23:18:29) [me]: just the way you talk about phonology

(23:18:38) Aaron B: how's that?

(23:18:45) Aaron B: like it's baseball cards?

(23:19:01) [me]: hah, no, like the actually processes are people

(23:19:08) Aaron B: oh, they totally are

(23:19:12) Aaron B: that's how i understand things

(23:19:18) Aaron B: segments are "doods"

(23:19:21) Aaron B: processes are things doods do

(23:19:41) Aaron B: constraints are like guys with whips

(23:19:55) Aaron B: bein' all like "dood, do this or i'll whip you"

(23:20:00) Aaron B: but then higher ranked constraints have bigger whips

(23:20:15) Aaron B: and are like "yeah, i know the dood to my right is going to whip you, but imma whip you harder if you don't satisfy me"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 May 2008
[edit] added: 1 May 2008

(16:27:22) kesuari: is *that* what causes that bug?

(16:27:27) kesuari: i hadn't worked it out yet

(16:27:30) kesuari: but you could easily be right!

(16:27:33) [me]: that's what I assumed it was

(16:27:36) [me]: and of course I'm right

(16:27:50) kesuari: including about all the contradictory things you might've said about l/n?

(16:28:02) [me]: that's all just theory

(16:28:07) [me]: there's no way to be right for sure ;)

(16:28:21) kesuari: but if you contradict yourself, you must be wrong

(16:28:32) [me]: no, just stating theories

(16:28:32) kesuari: especially if you begin the contradiction by saying "oh, i was wrong before"

(16:28:39) [me]: have I said that?

(16:28:42) [me]: .. probably actually

(16:28:43) kesuari: i don't know

(16:28:45) kesuari: i'm assuming you have

(16:28:50) kesuari: because it makes my theory make you look bad

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 22 March 2008
[edit] added: 24 March 2008

me: "What's that called when you express things with sounds?"

Austin: "You mean speaking?"

Jonathan meant interjections, or something, but Austin made an accurate generalisation..
misunderstandings, linguistics, language, phonetics, stupidity
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 2 March 2008
[edit] added: 5 March 2008

[ўзбекча менен кыргызча билген Араб менен сүйлөшкөндө]

Гүлмира: "А казакча билесизби?"

Араб: "Жок."

Гүлмира: "Бирок казакча менен кыргызча почти бир тил."

Араб: "Разница бар!"

Гүлмира: "Ии, кечиресиз. Разница бар десеңиз, сизге ишенем."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 28 February 2008
[edit] added: 28 February 2008

(18:50:47) [me]: y'know is jɨnəʊ̯

(18:51:13) [me]: that's weird though, because it doesn't follow the ə/ɨ generalisation for me

(18:51:31) [Tristan]: clitics don't in general

(18:51:42) [me]: oh yeah, the ɨm/əm contrast..

(18:51:45) [Tristan]: kill him ~ kill them is a ɪ/ə minimal pair

(18:52:05) [Tristan]: usefule to know as the indisputable overlord of the whole world

(18:52:24) [Tristan]: and especially useful for one of his minions

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 26 February 2008
[edit] added: 26 February 2008

(13:53:57) kesuari: now you're getting stupid

(13:54:15) [me]: no, I'm actually trying to get it to go one step further

(13:54:20) [me]: in a scientific way, not a silly way

(13:54:41) kesuari: for you, i think there's little difference anyway

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 25 February 2008
[edit] added: 24 February 2008

(02:14:04) Jóhann: dude, can you stop being a language nerd like me for one second and enjoy chauvnistic jokes? :D

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 25 February 2008
[edit] added: 24 February 2008

(02:21:33) Rianna: i'm hungry for something, but i'm highly unsure what

(02:22:20) Rianna: but i dunno, i don't wanna cook up pea soup now

(02:22:40) [me]: well, bawırsaq might be good

(02:22:46) [me]: I had some really good boorsoq today

(02:23:01) [me]: bog'irsoq isn't too hard to make

(02:23:05) [me]: I have a recipe

(02:23:09) [me]: though I've never actually tried it

(02:23:19) Rianna: mitä vittuu toi o?

(02:23:30) [me]: a type of fried dough / bread

(02:23:31) [me]: kind of

(02:23:37) Rianna: hahaha

(02:23:38) Rianna: nice

(02:23:41) [me]: ?

(02:23:50) Rianna: you answered my question :-p

(02:23:54) [me]: ..?

(02:23:55) [me]: so?

(02:24:08) Rianna: it was in another language..?

(02:24:13) [me]: oh shit

(02:24:15) [me]: wtf

(02:24:19) [me]: okay

(02:24:26) Rianna: i just asked you what the fuck is that

(02:24:30) Rianna: and you just answered that

(02:24:30) [me]: I guess I'm just used to guessing what people are saying half the time anyway

(02:24:46) [me]: don't really pay attention to how they say it unless I'm in linguist mode

(02:24:47) Rianna: you should put that on your quotes page to show off your mad skillz

(02:25:16) Rianna: you're a....demigod among linguists, Jonathan

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 21 February 2008
[edit] added: 21 February 2008

(17:26:23) [me]: well, the ranking of constraints in America right now is something like Security >> Freedom

(17:26:59) [me]: and that's Security[National], not Security[Personal], mind you

(17:27:15) kesuari: (in australia: IDon'tCareButIVote >> *)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 15 January 2008
[edit] added: 15 January 2008

(22:36:56) Rianna: well...i mean, look at our orthography...it's weird but we know what to say

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 22 December 2007
[edit] added: 22 December 2007

(20:44:48) Michael: man.. that'll suck when computational linguists have to start getting AI subjects approval

(20:45:21) Michael: "I didn't mean to unplug my computer!! honest!"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 17 December 2007
[edit] added: 17 December 2007

(17:04:21) kesuari: (and also, not even irregularity is regular, so there's going to be some regularity somewhere)

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 17 December 2007
[edit] added: 17 December 2007

(17:01:15) kesuari: nothing's regular in english, not even irregularity

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 7 November 2007
[edit] added: 7 November 2007

Tristan: "It's weird hearing you say /o/s correctly when you speak other languages [Russian, Kyrgyz]."

Jonathan: "Why's that?"

Tristan: "Because you don't normally pronounce them right in English."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 7 November 2007
[edit] added: 6 November 2007

Tristan: "[pæ̃ː]."

Jonathan: "[pæ̃ ]. It's short."

Tristan: "French is stupid."

Jonathan: "Why?"

Tristan: "Because it's not like my dialect of English."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 November 2007
[edit] added: 6 November 2007

"If they wanted it to be pronounced [latkəz], they should've spelled it ‘lutkers’."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 2 November 2007
[edit] added: 2 November 2007

"It sounds like if you had a lisp in this language, you'd end up saying something you didn't want to say."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 31 October 2007
[edit] added: 31 October 2007

"I don't think they issue ethics approval based on whether it's more ethical than things that're more fun."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 24 September 2007
[edit] added: 16 October 2007

Баха: "Ты исследователь?"

Jonathan: "Да."

Баха: "Или шпион?"

Jonathan: "Ладно, я шпион."

Баха: "Где ты учился тогда?"

Jonathan: "Назвается ‘Шпионский Институт Америки.’"

Баха: "А! Мы всегда знали!"

Jonathan: "Ты знаешь как сокращается называние этого института? C.I.A.—‘Шпионский Институт Америки.’"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 August 2007
[edit] added: 6 August 2007

(17:36) [Tristan]: oh. i'd just kinda come to assume it was an american vs real english distinction

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 August 2007
[edit] added: 1 August 2007

(03:42:49) kesuari: nothing backs up like chiselling a great big stone

(03:43:57) kesuari: i sometimes reckon i should do that: go carving runes somewhere in the bush

(03:44:55) kesuari: not runes per se; i mean some form of phonetic alphabet that looks like runes and is similar enough to the latin alphabet or germanic runes to be decryptable

(03:45:17) kesuari: or maybe i'll do it a bit less phonetic just to give the future linguists a bit of fun

(03:45:43) kesuari: can't be too trivial or else i'll be the Orrm of the 21st century

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 August 2007
[edit] added: 1 August 2007

(03:26:05) kesuari: in a thousand years, when english has divided into many languages and tehy've all had spelling reforms, they'll divise a "standardised spelling" for classical english

(03:26:52) kesuari: because the current spelling will been seen as "irregular" and "hard to read", "a poor guide to pronunciation" &c. they will probably also add diacritics so we can tell which vowels are long and which are short, which e's are silent and which are pronounced etc.

(03:27:09) kesuari: much like we do to old english

(03:27:33) kesuari: only, for a non-linguist of the 20th/21st centuries, it'll be hard to read because we don't expect it

(03:29:08) kesuari: and because no-one can seriously expect any of our recordings to last until then and because linguistics texts will largely have been lost to time as they weren't reproduced enough, people will have debates about quite how various aspects were pronounced

(03:30:10) kesuari: they'll reconstruct a language that includes the "bath/trap" split, f'instance

(03:30:24) kesuari: and have trouble reconciling it with the other germanic languagse

(03:32:45) kesuari: but, of course, english retained *þ and *w so it's obviously conservative: it must've been that german and even icelandic lost the original æ/ɑ distinction

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 20 July 2007
[edit] added: 20 July 2007

"Chomsky would always cut people's feet off so he didn't have to step on their toes."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 18 July 2007
[edit] added: 18 July 2007

(21:43) Tristan: you realise of course that what you're doing here is filing bugreports for linguistic theories, which are kind of like computer programs

(21:43) Tristan: so the "maintainers" are probably going to call you mad

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 12 July 2007
[edit] added: 12 July 2007

[English department turns off lights and opens door because it's hot out]

[Confused undergrads misconstrue this to mean they're closed, so English department puts up sign]

Sign reads: "We're open. Come on in!"

Jonathan: "Hey, you ended a sentence with a preposition! Two even!"

Secretary 1: "… Oh no!" [tears down sign]

Jonathan: "Yeah, what'll people think of the English department‽"

Secretary 1: "Yeah, we have to fix that!"

Jonathan: "How're you gonna fix it?"

Secretary 1: "… Uhm… We could maybe leave just one preposition? ‘We're open; come in.’ But no, I guess we need to get rid of both. ‘We're open; come!’"

Jonathan: "Yeah, that might work. Good thing we caught it!"

Secretary 2: "Yeah, they're going to shame me and fire me tomorrow when they find out about this!"

[Jonathan tells Joyce the story]

Joyce: "You shouldn't mess with people like that."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 2 June 2007
[edit] added: 2 June 2007

shit-giving is really a huge problem in grad school

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 29 May 2007
[edit] added: 29 May 2007

"‘Venus’ and ‘venerial’ are related. Venus is the Goddess of love, and venerial diseases happen when you're looking for love in the wrong places."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 28 May 2007
[edit] added: 28 May 2007

me: "Yeah, it's Low Germanic, but not Northern."

Derek: "Huh? Is it a language named after some city or something?"

me: "Nope, it's named after a continent."

Derek: "A continent?!"

me: "Yep. Go back to your room, continue grading, and in 30 seconds you'll figure it out and be like ‘Dammit!’"

(16:51:22) Derek: LOL

(16:51:24) Derek: you bastard

(16:52:04) [me]: told you :-P

(16:52:22) Derek: *shaking fist*

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 25 May 2007
[edit] added: 25 May 2007

"There's light at the end of the tunnel for your Masters, and then you realise that it's just the light between tunnels."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 12 May 2007
[edit] added: 13 May 2007

"I had no idea that linguistics was such a witty field."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 7 May 2007
[edit] added: 7 May 2007

(00:11:39) kesuari: anyway, on notes unrelated, have you got anywhere a list of soundchanges from some earlier form of the language to kazakh/kyrgyz?

(00:12:09) [me]: no, but I could make one really quickly

(00:12:22) kesuari: could you?

(00:12:31) kesuari: there needs to be a turkic romlang

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 May 2007
[edit] added: 6 May 2007

Hamit aka: "I think Uzbek is the hardest—Uzbekistan is so small, and yet there are so many dialects of Uzbek. Xinjiang is big, but there are only three dialects of Uyghur. And Kazakhstan is huge, but there are no dialects."

Stefan: "Yeah. Russian's the same everywhere."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 30 April 2007
[edit] added: 30 April 2007

(03:59:35) kesuari: how many ways does greek have of writing /i/!

(03:59:53) kesuari: it’s like the saw english "ough" and thought "hey, we can do that ... in reverse"

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 25 April 2007
[edit] added: 25 April 2007

Joyce: "Now I'm really sorry for referring that woman to the Tlingit wikipedia article. It makes it sound terrifying."

Jonathan: "Why's it terrifying?"

Amy: "Because she's not a linguist, and every ejective possible doesn't sound like a good thing."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 24 April 2007
[edit] added: 24 April 2007

(02:13:14) kesuari: who who knows what xml and tex is doesn’t know what syntax is?

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 23 April 2007
[edit] added: 23 April 2007

"I'm not like you. I got all these vowels from my parents… and some consonants from these Klingons."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 20 April 2007
[edit] added: 22 April 2007

(00:04:32) kesuari: eü -> ew is nothing...

(00:05:04) [me]: actually, not's not true

(00:05:45) [me]: didn't you look at that chart I sent? ;)

(00:06:29) kesuari: oh, w desonorises!

(00:06:32) kesuari: that’s awesome

(00:06:32) [me]: yeah =)

(00:06:42) [me]: I remember noticing that about 2 years ago

(00:06:46) [me]: and coming to the same conclusion

(00:07:00) kesuari: lol. yeah, your opinions are contagious or something

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 19 April 2007
[edit] added: 19 April 2007

Jonathan: "Four languages: America never expects anything close to that."

Joyce: "Yeah, we don't even like dialects."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 11 April 2007
[edit] added: 11 April 2007

Jonathan: "Maybe they just think that */p/ turned to /b/ in Germanic. But it only went half way."

Derek: "Yeah, that's how they got þorn."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 11 April 2007
[edit] added: 11 April 2007

Derek: [ftktp]!

Jonathan: "What's that?"

Derek: "Probably Berber."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 10 April 2007
[edit] added: 10 April 2007

me: yeah. I'ma work on my thesis 'til then I guess. gaah

Michael: yes. i told don the other day that i stopped pronouncing it as "thesis" .. or at least in the way suggested by spelling and my prior knowledge of the word

instead i just replace it with a random expletive

anyway. back to the $&#*

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 5 April 2007
[edit] added: 5 April 2007

(00:42:03) Derek: I found a way to explain language change to our students

(00:42:31) Derek: Languages start out cool and get less cool with time, unless the change involves gaining velars or uvulars

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 3 April 2007
[edit] added: 3 April 2007

Jonathan: "So I was working on my thesis the other day, and I had to read through all this stuff."

Stefan: "Dude. You're in grad school. You're working on your thesis. And you had to read stuff? No way!"

Jonathan: "No, but like, I have to read through all this stuff to get data from it."

Stefan: ...

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 31 March 2007
[edit] added: 1 April 2007

HS: But how did [G] become [g]? I thought usually the trend is the other way round.

Tristan: There’s no accounting for tastes :)

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 26 March 2007
[edit] added: 26 March 2007

Jurgen: "So I don't mess it up, how do you pronounce your name?"

Dan: "Dan."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 20 March 2007
[edit] added: 21 March 2007

(22:39:59) [me]: like, Proto Turkic has very few colour words

...

(22:41:03) [me]: *sarg = yellow

(22:41:11) [me]: not sure where that's from, actually

(22:50:40) Derek: I went back in time and told them that word

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 15 March 2007
[edit] added: 15 March 2007

"It was cool, you know? I got intimate with her voice, or something."

phonetics projects bring you close to your informants..
scariness, inappropriateness, sadness, relationships, linguistics, sex, papers, phonetics, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 13 March 2007
[edit] added: 13 March 2007

"Unfortunately, all my finals [for grading] for [anonymous class] look good so far."

anonymous expects (and hopes for?) very little from her students
misfortune, sadness, college, linguistics, non-p.c.ness, grades, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 March 2007
[edit] added: 1 March 2007

"It was funny when Derek had a question, you could tell—it was like watching a puppy. ‘Got a morphology problem boy?’"

Sarah comments on Derek at the review session for our students
child-like, linguistics, people, humanity, animals, stupidity, gradschool
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 1 March 2007
[edit] added: 1 March 2007

Jonathan: "Kazakh isn't that hard—I don't know why all the materials that teach it are so bad."

Ardak: "I think it's because the Soviet system made things unnecessarily complicated."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 10 February 2007
[edit] added: 11 February 2007

(17:44:13) Jade Solitude: Looks like something only a Linguist, Anthropologist, or Folklorist would be interested in. =þ

(17:44:49) [me]: or any other scientist ;)

in reference to new statistics features on quotes page
linguistics, anthropology, science, quotes, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 29 January 2007
[edit] added: 11 February 2007

"Kazakh is sweet piece of cake comparing to Russian.. Russian is even more harder than English..."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 23 January 2007
[edit] added: 23 January 2007

(00:45:36) [me]: I think I'd summarise Hawai'ian as (C)V

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 January 2007
[edit] added: 13 January 2007

"His father's like ‘Don't fly too close to the sun Icharus.’ And he's like ‘This freakin' rocks! Woohoo!’"

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 12 January 2007
[edit] added: 13 January 2007

Meghan: "People used to throw batteries at me because they thought I was gay."

Julia: "And they thought you needed the batteries why?"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 10 January 2007
[edit] added: 16 January 2007

"I'm a fan of the syllable; I believe in the syllable, but some people don't."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 7 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"We don't just want you to think that we're software designers with no understanding of theoretical linguistics. Then you wouldn't sit next to us in the coffee shop, and that would be bad."

Jason Riggle, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
caffeine, insults, computers, programming, linguistics, people, conferences, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

Ray: "Phonetics can be a turn off."

Mark: "Depends on how you teach it, Ray."

Ray Jackendoff and Mark Liberman, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
phonetics, conferences, insults, sadness, college, linguistics, professors, gradschool
[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 6 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

Ray: "Most of these people [taking intro to linguistics] won't become majors—"

Mark: "And shouldn't."

Ray Jackendoff and Mark Liberman, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
conferences, insults, sadness, college, linguistics, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

Mark: "From your mouth to God's ear."

linguist: "It's an Indian mouth—he won't hear."

Mark Liberman and a woman with a good idea, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
linguistics, religion, sadness, conferences, non-p.c.ness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 5 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"And you're going to think, ‘Oh, the big thing is OT Pragmatics—I should do that.’"

Mark Aronoff, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
wisdom, weirdness, linguistics, conferences, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 5 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

me: "That's an abstract?!"

anonymous: "It's a very abstract..."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 4 January 2007
[edit] added: 13 January 2007

[Jonathan shows Aaron a book on Qaraqalpaq written in French]

Aaron: "This orthography is.. what?"

me: "Inconsistent."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"[In phonology,] you can't just say ‘Oh, that's PF.’"

Paul Kiparsky, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
conferences, irony, insults, wisdom, linguistics, tautologies
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"Why do we keep weird strong verbs around for thousands of years?"

Paul Kiparsky, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
linguistics, wisdom, conferences
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"Linguistic theory is your friend."

Bruce Hayes, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
conferences, wisdom, friends, linguistics, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 January 2007
[edit] added: 9 January 2007

"I myself am a theoretical phonologist, but in the late '80s, my eyes were beginning to glaze over and I was saying ‘I don't care where to hang [lateral].’"

Bruce Hayes, at the 2007 LSA annual meeting
phonetics, linguistics, sadness, wisdom, conferences, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 December 2006
[edit] added: 9 December 2006

(02:00:05) Colum: well I did study for the final but I didn't know what I was studying so I don't consider that as "having studied"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 3 December 2006
[edit] added: 3 December 2006

(00:32:14) Colum: [...] I like the super abstract it-is-there-because-chomsky-says-it-is-there syntax.

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 December 2006
[edit] added: 2 December 2006

"Let's call this the Chomskian response; no linguistics talk is complete without a massive quote from Chomsky."

[massive Chomsky quote appears on slide]

Laura, in her colloquium talk
linguistics, wisdom, sadness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 December 2006
[edit] added: 2 December 2006

"I don't even know how high that number is—it's one of those numbers with letters in it that I don't understand because I haven't taken math since high school."

Laura, in her colloquium talk
sadness, math, linguistics, school, gradschool
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 27 November 2006
[edit] added: 27 November 2006

"Languages are big."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 20 November 2006
[edit] added: 20 November 2006

"This is not a non-word! [xkɬpltθkʰft] is a non-word."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 16 November 2006
[edit] added: 16 November 2006

(03:17:16) [me]: never heard of æ tensing? ;)

(03:17:55) Qatharsis: D'oh, of course. It's the opposite of q crumbling. ;)

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 13 November 2006
[edit] added: 14 November 2006

"When you put people in a booth like that, they're desperate to please you. Unless they're a psychology undergrad—then they might be trying to mess with you."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 1 November 2006
[edit] added: 1 November 2006

"They're called anti-formants, kinda like matter and anti-matter. Except if they meet, there's no explosion. And you can't make a space ship engine with them. You can't travel at light speed by going 'ananana'."

Richard talks about nasals.
linguistics, star-trek, physics, weirdness, phonetics
[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 1 November 2006
[edit] added: 1 November 2006

"It's like a James Bond movie: 'A Pure Tone Rings Forever.'"

Richard talks about nasals.
linguistics, movies, weirdness, phonetics
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 23 October 2006
[edit] added: 25 October 2006

"For this speaker, odds are he's never going to reach 500Hz, unless he's getting run over by something."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 16 October 2006
[edit] added: 17 October 2006

Richard: "They did a spelling reform and got rid of all those extra circonflexes."

Jonathan: "Really? Did it apply to Canadian French?"

Richard: "Nothing applies to Canadian French."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 21 September 2006
[edit] added: 23 September 2006

"Most of the students just want to learn what's going to be on the test, get their grade, and then they want to move on to finance, or business, or biology—you know, whatever isn't linguistics."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 13 September 2006
[edit] added: 12 September 2006

00:52:28 [anon]: you should try to watch a portuguese speak ... seriously. old people are impossible to understand because they are all drool-y and then they don't move their mouths, and you can't understand a word... it sounds like muttering; just a wall of sound

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 6 September 2006
[edit] added: 6 September 2006

22:05:17 [Jess]: guess what i learned today

22:05:26 [Jonathan]: what?

22:05:36 [Jess]: the difference between competence and performance~!!!

22:05:53 [Jonathan]: so what's the difference?

22:06:29 [Jess]: narrow-minded wanna-be scientist linguists and bullshitty humanitarian science-doesn't-exist anthropologists?

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 2 June 2006
[edit] added: 2 June 2006

"Greek and Latin show ablaut as well, but not as strongly as Germanic. No pun intended."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 31 May 2006
[edit] added: 31 May 2006

00:35:39 [Aaron]: ok, it is [+bedtime]

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 30 May 2006
[edit] added: 31 May 2006

Jurgen: "Promiscuity means ‘proximity’ in French."

Jonathan: "It would."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 30 May 2006
[edit] added: 31 May 2006

"It's necessary to separate ‘French’ from what I call ‘Non-French.’ There's a dichotomy and I think a lot of people who study Romance linguistics don't realise this."

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 27 May 2006
[edit] added: 27 May 2006

Rianna: "I don't even speak Danish!"

Jonathan: "Have you ever studied Danish?"

Rianna: "No, but still… I can't even read it. Out loud."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 27 May 2006
[edit] added: 27 May 2006
"It's really weird to see a ‘y’ used like a /j/… It throws me in English."
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 9 May 2006
[edit] added: 29 May 2006

Sharon: "So now there's this book on Iraqi Arabic with MP3s."

Noah: "I'm sure the army's all over that."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 4 May 2006
[edit] added: 4 May 2006

"There's another French politician who[se name] has to do with nasalisation!"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 4 May 2006
[edit] added: 4 May 2006

"Maybe you should implement the medieval system, where if one of the grad students misbehaves, they whip one of the undergrads."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 30 April 2006
[edit] added: 1 May 2006

"Positing *o is like positing Ident-Germanic and saying that among Uralic languages, Finnish has it most highly ranked."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 28 April 2006
[edit] added: 28 April 2006

"This guy could kick your ass—he's a muscle-bound semanticist."

Jason Kandybowicz in reference to David Schueler
conferences, machoism, ghetto-talk, sketchiness, linguistics, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 27 April 2006
[edit] added: 2 May 2006

"Is this divided into mes+es or mese+s? This is what grown people spend their time on."

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 27 April 2006
[edit] added: 1 May 2006

"French can be said to be ‘oxytonic.’ Not to be confused with ‘Occitan.’"

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 27 April 2006
[edit] added: 1 May 2006

"In French, we'll find out that it underwent two phases of apocope; I had a student once who said, ‘this sounds like the apocalypse.’"

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 25 April 2006
[edit] added: 27 April 2006

"Please, no more climatology."

Jurgen, in response to a question about sound changes in French being perhaps due to the colder-than-Rome climate
linguistics, french, language, weather, science
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 25 April 2006
[edit] added: 27 April 2006

"There's some sort of weird issue between the Papuan part and the New Guinea part—you know, local geopolitical stuff."

in a presentation in Areal Linguistics
provincialism, badness, linguistics, non-p.c.ness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 20 April 2006
[edit] added: 27 April 2006

"There's really no solution to anything."

Jurgen, pointing out that linguists make a living by redefining things and solving nothing(?)
linguistics, wisdom, gradschool
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 18 April 2006
[edit] added: 27 April 2006

"Who could judge whether this is right or wrong in… not well known languages?—let's put it that way."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 17 April 2006
[edit] added: 18 April 2006

14:50:30 [sn withheld]: is it bad when I'm bored enough that getting to use the word 'efficacious' - in a hyphenated appositive no less - makes me happy? (as does using a hyphenated appositive to note the use of a hyphenated appositive)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 29 March 2006
[edit] added: 29 March 2006

02:35:08 [Tristan]: i hope your health insurance covers your tongue

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 25 March 2006
[edit] added: 25 March 2006

04:21:06 [Tristan]: /me wonders how it shows for jon when he deso it

04:21:24 [me]: it just starts with "/me" and looks like a normal message otherways

04:21:38 [me]: (including your weird metathesis typos)

04:21:47 [Tristan]: llo

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 23 March 2006
[edit] added: 23 March 2006

22:03:31 [me]: :-P

22:03:43 [me]: (I started to type :-P as 'th')

22:03:54 [me]: (which was weird. but that's how I'd pronounce it)

22:03:59 [Laura]: WHAT?

22:04:05 [Laura]: th=smiley face?

22:04:09 [me]: no.

22:04:11 [me]: pronounce :-P

22:04:21 [Laura]: "smiley face"

22:04:22 [Laura]: OH

22:04:25 [Laura]: pffft

22:04:28 [me]: no

22:04:31 [Laura]: no?

22:04:32 [me]: stick your tongue out

22:04:38 [me]: no ffs if your tongue's out

22:04:39 [Laura]: pbpbpbpbpbp

22:04:51 [me]: no ps or bs either

22:04:59 [Laura]: Absolutely it's a BP

22:05:17 [Laura]: The sounds of someone blowing a raspberry sounds like a p or b to me.

22:05:25 [me]: technically it's lingua-labial

22:05:36 [me]: yeah, but in this case your tongue is involved

22:05:40 [Laura]: a TH sounds is made by blowing air over over your tongue.

22:05:52 [Laura]: Maybe mrmrmrmrmrmrmrmr

22:05:59 [me]: no, an /h/ is made by blowing air over your tongue

22:06:08 [Laura]: But i like pbpbpbpbpbpbpbp

22:06:15 [me]: but you can do that without your tongue

22:06:20 [Laura]: Yes.

22:06:26 [Laura]: True.

22:06:38 [Laura]: But it's the same sound!

22:06:42 [me]: thbt might be better

22:06:48 [Laura]: Ok, ok.

22:06:55 [Laura]: It's understandable.

22:07:07 [me]: so that's why I started writing it as 'th'

22:07:10 [me]: instead of :-P

22:07:12 [Laura]: heh.

22:07:25 [me]: that conversation is almost worthy of my quotes page

22:07:38 [Laura]: pretty much.

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 18 March 2006
[edit] added: 18 March 2006

03:36:29 [me]: cardinal vowels are so wrong

03:36:44 [Tristan]: oh, yeah, they're quite arbitrary

03:37:58 [me]: very franco-centric, though, if you ask me

03:39:24 [me]: btw, Kazakh has aspirated voiceless stops

03:39:27 [me]: go figure

03:39:40 [me]: but those voiceless stops voice and fricativise on occasion :)

03:40:11 [Tristan]: the primaracy of voice distinction in stops is also very fraco-centric :)

03:40:28 [Tristan]: maybe the americans should make their own freedom phonetic alphabet :)

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 18 March 2006
[edit] added: 18 March 2006

03:04:45 [Tristan]: i don't think there's much bush could do to cause the necessary change in system that'd result in the english dialects splitting up

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 10 March 2006
[edit] added: 10 March 2006

"'How'? You're asking the wrong guy—I'm not a class-VII expert."

in reference to Germanic strong verbs
germanics, delusionalism, linguistics, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 3 March 2006
[edit] added: 4 March 2006

"If a layman gets confused, I sort of don't care."

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 28 February 2006
[edit] added: 5 March 2006

"Regularity is a different kind of thing from a thing."

prof Zagona… not sure what she was talking about
philosophy, weirdness, linguistics
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 26 February 2006
[edit] added: 26 February 2006

18:05:22 [Tristan]: "songs about diachronic OT phonology"? you're mad.

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 23 February 2006
[edit] added: 23 February 2006

05:23:50 [me]: (I'm rather fond of pre-revolution Russian. It's almost proto-eastern slavic)

05:24:29 [Tristan]: yeah, well just wait till the english languages break up, our spelling will be proto-english :)

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 20 February 2006
[edit] added: 20 February 2006

20:58:04 [me]: *moves to Iceland*

20:58:15 [Tristan]: what, you can do that just by saying it over IM? :)

20:58:27 [me]: hey, it was a performative sentence :)

20:58:40 [Tristan]: iceland has the 7th highest GDP per capita, apparently

20:58:46 [Tristan]: performative?

20:58:52 [Tristan]: (is that a word?)

20:59:04 [me]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative

20:59:08 [me]: wikipedia thinks so :)

21:00:20 [Tristan]: hm, interesting, so by saying "*moves to iceland*" it actually caused you to move to iceland? :)

21:01:15 [Tristan]: *moves to iceland*

21:01:20 [Tristan]: nah, didn't seem to work :(

21:01:29 [Tristan]: obviously not a perfomative in my dialect :)

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 16 February 2006
[edit] added: 16 February 2006

"You've got the 2nd sound shift here with a vengeance."

prof. Voyles on Züritüütsch
language, linguistics, craziness, conspiracies, germanics
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 16 February 2006
[edit] added: 16 February 2006

"You could ask if the laws of motion are constructed online as an object is falling."

prof. Zagona on the nature of I-language and the mind
linguistics, physics, science, scariness
[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 14 February 2006
[edit] added: 16 February 2006

"If language were perfect, could it be used for lying? …That's too hard."

prof. Zagona on humans not being suited for communication
linguistics, language, philosophy, deepness
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 12 February 2006
[edit] added: 12 February 2006

06:11:54 [Aaron]: does this make sense:

06:11:55 [Aaron]: For the sake of differentiating between participants in the pre-recorded conversation (e.g. those who sat in the recording studio and conversed) and users who have downloaded and listened to the audio file via a technological media, the terms “participants” and “users” will be used throughout this paper, respectively.

06:12:48 [me]: yes, that's perfectly clear [to me]

06:13:00 [Aaron]: shit

06:13:03 [Aaron]: if it's clear to you

06:13:07 [Aaron]: then nobody else has a chance...

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 February 2006
[edit] added: 9 February 2006

05:11:37 [Tristan]: and i would think that if you need to tell people to distinguish two symbols it's usually an indication that you shouldn't be :)

in reference to the American English phonetics custom of distinguishing /ə/ and /ʌ/ based on stress
linguistics, wisdom, phonetics
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 6 February 2006
[edit] added: 6 February 2006

03:47:04 [Tristan]: i thought yiddish was ei > ai, ii > ei

03:47:16 [me]: that's possible. what's your source?

03:47:28 [Tristan]: my possibly faulty brain

03:47:37 [me]: well, where'd you get it before that

03:47:41 [me]: cause that sounds basically right

03:47:59 [Tristan]: my possibly faulty brain is getting a DNS resolution failure on that.

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 2 February 2006
[edit] added: 2 February 2006

05:43:39 [Tristan]: and why is equality suddenly intransitive?

05:43:47 [me]: because evilness is bivalent

05:44:24 [Tristan]: the valency of evilness has no meaning wrt the transitivity of equality.

05:44:50 [Tristan]: if FOO's transitive, then if a FOO b and b FOO c means a must FOO c, simple as that

05:45:56 [me]: nope

05:46:09 [me]: that's only in standard western lgoic

05:46:36 [Tristan]: you will confuse everyone if you don't use standard western logic!

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 2 February 2006
[edit] added: 2 February 2006

02:26:13 [me]: meh. I'll do this later

02:26:29 [me]: more food

02:26:43 [Tristan]: food's always good

02:27:01 [Tristan]: that's why people spelt "food" and "good" with mostly the same letters, even tho they don't rhyme

02:27:23 [Tristan]: this nonsense about "phonetic drift" and "irregular splits" is just that.

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 2 February 2006
[edit] added: 2 February 2006

01:33:23 [me]: the commercial right before that one just now was a girl with a perfectly standard my-generation american accent, and I was admiring her very clear vowels. Enough so that I downloaded Praat.

01:34:11 [Tristan]: you're kidding me?

01:36:01 [Tristan]: "check out this girl's formants!"

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 30 January 2006
[edit] added: 30 January 2006

06:28:24 [Tristan]: so what, you're saying that if the russians had've invaded australia & america, they'd try and pretend we spoke different langs? :)

06:28:35 [me]: yes

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 17 January 2006
[edit] added: 17 January 2006

Prof. Voyles: "Let's get rid of the /ð/ in this example…"

me: "No, you can't do that—it's attested!"

prof. Voyles decides not to like Bashkir data, and I plea with him not to change the language
gradschool, germanics, omnipotence, sadness, linguistics, language, phonetics, turkic
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 8 January 2006
[edit] added: 8 January 2005

16:02:46 devnullpenguin: they really shoulda called it phonology phest tho

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 7 January 2006
[edit] added: 8 January 2005

"Phonology happens."

Mark Aronoff in response to a comment on his presidential address at the 2006 LSA conference
linguistics, science, wisdom, time-travel, conferences
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 5 January 2006
[edit] added: 12 January 2006

"Speakers can't converge on a common rule because no one knows what anyone else is doing."

Jeff Mielke, in a talk on the English /r/ at the 2006 LSA conference, in reference to the fact that there seem to be 8 or 9 acoustically equivalent production strategies, each with its own allophonic variation.
insanity, linguistics, insightfulness, conferences
[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: 26 November 2006

(21:46:21) [me]: (yes, linguistics is science—it's predictive)

(21:46:50) [Aladnsane]: Then tell me how my ancestors will say 'indifferent' 500 years from now.

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 27 December 2005
[edit] added: 27 December 2005

My father: "I ate breakfast for a whole year."

Hannah: "Yesterday."

my father trying to give an example in a conversation on aspect
stupidity, language, linguistics, food
[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 8 August 2005
[edit] added: 8 August 2005

[02:51] Aaron B : you should get a cool linguistic alias

[02:51] Aaron B: like, you know how weathermen always just "happen" to have a geological reference in their names?

[02:51] Aaron B: around me we have "johnny mountain"

[02:51] Aaron B: and "dallas storm"

[02:51] Aaron B: you can be like...

[02:51] Aaron B: "jon minimality"

[02:52] Aaron B: or like "Al O. Phone"

[02:52] Aaron B: (short for Albert Optimality Phone)

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 8 August 2005
[edit] added: 8 August 2005

[02:50] Aaron B: well, by "famous" i mean "famous within the field"

[02:50] Aaron B: aka "my research funding hasn't been cut more than 70%"

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 31 July 2005
[edit] added: 31 July 2005

"Yes! I have crushed another hope of innovation!"

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 25 July 2005
[edit] added: 25 July 2005

[17:03] Aaron B: *dork*

[17:03] Aaron B: not that that's a bad thing, mind you

[17:03] Aaron B: given, i heard a radio ad and thought about phonological queues

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 6 July 2005
[edit] added: 6 July 2005

Aaron B [20:47]: in *america* we don't have an "h"

go to any store

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 10 May 2005
[edit] added: 4 July 2005

(01:30:22) [redacted]: from now on, all adjectives will be in the form [+crack]

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 19 April 2005
[edit] added: 19 April 2005

(04:10:01) [me]: you mind/want your name cited?

(04:10:23) [me]: (by default, I'll say "Examples from personal communication with Christian Thalmann, 19 April, 2005.")

(04:11:17) Qatharsis: Cool. :)

(04:12:05) Qatharsis: Though "Christian 'm4st0r of teh univers' Thalmann" would be more proper. ;)

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 12 April 2005
[edit] added: 12 April 2005

(23:26:57) Ian: so what was that book that fucking chomsky would be more useful than?

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 12 April 2005
[edit] added: 12 April 2005

(00:05:16) Jess: fucking chomsky would be more useful than this book

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 March 2005
[edit] added: 11 March 2005

Jackendoff: "Somebody washed [the board] with something wrong."

McIntosh: "Well, I wanna wash it with them."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 1 March 2005
[edit] added: 1 March 2005

(21:14:41) Laura C: I have a feeling even most linguists won't look at a misspelled of ROFL as RORL and think it's alot like ARUAL

Laura to Jonathan, who said "aural"
linguistics, typos
[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 8 February 2005
[edit] added: 8 February 2005

Jonathan: "The founders of modern anthropology and modern linguistics were both secular Jews."

Vickie: "The founder of modern psychology was a secular Jew."

Jon: "The founder of Christianity was a secular Jew."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 11 December 2004
[edit] added: 11 December 2004

"First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech nothing because I no verbs."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 8 December 2004
[edit] added: 10 December 2004

"I appreciate sound changes—I'm talking about duck lenition!"

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 26 October 2004
[edit] added: 26 October 2004

"That's what I'm saying! Definitions can't be defined. ... As such."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 12 October 2004
[edit] added: 12 October 2004

"I syntaxed that bad, didn't I?"

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 6 October 2004
[edit] added: 20 October 2004

"Repetitions of sounds, words, morphemes, blah blah blah."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 6 October 2004
[edit] added: 6 October 2004

(01:11:36) Matt S: Lemurs stole my syllabery.

(01:11:42) [me]: ?

(01:11:56) Matt S: They tricked me, they said they just wanted to borrow it, and now they're all, like, "What syllabery?"

(01:12:05) [me]: oh?

(01:12:18) Matt S: Yeah. Well, just wanted to let you know to be on the lookout.

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 2 October 2004
[edit] added: 2 October 2004

"PHO-NOLOGY. Starts with Vietnamese soup and ends with `nology'."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 24 September 2004
[edit] added: 24 September 2004

(05:05:48) Jade Solitude: Brilliant thoughts of mine:

(05:06:01) Jade Solitude:

(02:02:05) The Jade Knight: Hey, I've got an idea!

(02:02:37) The Jade Knight: The next international language adopted by the world ought to be an interlang made out of conlangs!

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 4 September 2004
[edit] added: 10 September 2004

"Are you TAing any business yet?"

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 3 September 2004
[edit] added: 10 September 2004

"There are languages in 34 instruc—"

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 2 September 2004
[edit] added: 10 September 2004

"Languages are always playing with themselves."

Arteta, my Spanish prof
language, linguistics, sex, spanish
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 9 May 2004
[edit] added: 9 May 2004

Jonathan: "Fingers are not articulators!"

Aaron: "...Yes they are."

[Aaron again says [sʌmθɪŋ] using his fingers to open his mouth to avoid saying [sʌmpθɪŋ]]

Aaron: "You can't speak English without using your fingers."

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 20 March 2004
[edit] added: 22 March 2004

"You didn't know that song was in 6-4, did you? You say pətejɾəw; I say pətejɾəw and pətɑɾəw. You say təmejɾəw; I say təmejɾəw and təmɑɾəw."

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 20 March 2004
[edit] added: 20 March 2004

(18:35:14) [me]: well, I am going to go play DDR in an hour and a half...

(18:36:11) Qatharsis: Putting on bland brown pullovers and pronouncing /a o u/ as /Q 9 u-/? ;-)

(18:36:56) Qatharsis: Can't help but parse that as East Germany.

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 16 March 2004
[edit] added: 16 March 2004

(01:24:40) [me]: trees are your friends :)

(01:24:48) Jackie: trees kick my ass

(01:24:50) Jackie: over and over again

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 29 February 2004
[edit] added: 29 February 2004

Jonathan: "But then why does /ʔəɾə-/ become [pɾi-]?"

Aaron & Amanda: "`Price'. That's English."

Jonathan, helping Aaron and Amanda with phonology homeowrk
linguistics, slowness, stupidity, phonetics
[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 11 February 2004
[edit] added: 12 February 2004

"Asian food is like Cajun food, but without the /k/.... Using that fact you can derive the taste of /k/."

[comment] [rate] 5/5


[link] heard: 9 February 2004
[edit] added: 10 February 2004

"I'm saying i ~ ɪ; you're hearing the airhead."

oberon learns phonetics
linguistics, food, weirdness, phonetics
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 2 February 2004
[edit] added: 2 February 2004

(04:17:24) Kesuari: o ... kay... i have come to the conclusion that you, sir, are insane, and forget the difference between yourself and the rest of the world :)

Tristan, in reference to Jonathan after he rambled about Turkic orthography for a few minutes
compliments, wisdom, scariness, insanity, craziness, insults, linguistics, writing, gradschool
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 31 January 2004
[edit] added: 1 February 2004

"If he put a good on that paper, then you could take a piece of paper and wrap doodoo with it and turn it in and you'd do pretty well."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 26 January 2004
[edit] added: 26 January 2004

"My mittens I can totally type with them on"

Aaron learns about the north
weirdness, computers, weather, bad-ideas, typos, linguistics
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 17 January 2004
[edit] added: 17 January 2004

(06:02:06) Kesuari: (there is, i think, a certain amount of regular voicing and devoicing of stops and /tS/~/dZ/ (which might better be called /c/ and /J\/ even if that isn't their phonetic rendition) IMD. I have heard that it's not uncommon in AuE for voiced stops to be totally unvoiced and unvoiced aspirated, though i'm not sure if that's true for me.)

(06:02:44) [me]: that's like Werner's law

(06:03:03) Kesuari: or the second sound shift of german.

(06:03:19) Kesuari: which is like Werner's

(06:03:40) Kesuari: also fits into this neck of the woods better e.g. chinese and many other asian langs

(06:05:30) [me]: English:PIE::Australian English:Proto Germanic

(06:05:33) [me]: or at least in 2000 years

(06:06:02) [me]: lord help us if Middle English becomes proto-World

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 10 January 2004
[edit] added: 10 January 2005

"American Tongues sounds like a porno."

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 22 November 2003
[edit] added: 23 November 2003

(18:43:06) Mark: There comes a point where you can reduce anything to anything. I mean, reconstructions of reconstructions of reconstructions - they're building a PIE in the sky

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 15 October 2003
[edit] added: 15 October 2003

(18:53:42) Оберон: finding and translating russian biographies is easy with my intelligent dictionary/encyclopedia combination

(18:53:56) [me]: oh?

(18:54:00) Оберон: Yeah

(18:54:44) Оберон: It even translates non word-for-word

(18:54:55) Оберон: so you don't get weird artifacts from literal translations

(18:55:03) [me]: is it called Anna?

(18:55:17) Оберон: ...maybe...

(18:55:36) Оберон: I just heard a bunch of bangs from my common room

(18:55:42) Оберон: followed by "Yarr" and "Die"

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 11 September 2003
[edit] added: 20 October 2003

"Jackendoff. That was the link between drinking and Flash in the Night."

someone at bbr... forget who
ddr, linguistics, brandeis, weirdness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: 3 September 2003
[edit] added: 4 September 2003

Jonathan: "That was an appropriate response. We said 'Russian' and he said 'ew' and moved his finger away lest it become contaminated."

oberon: "Yeah, wouldn't want it to become genitive."

[comment] [rate] 4/5


[link] heard: 30 July 2003
[edit] added: 30 July 2003

(13:11:20) Qatharsis: Your languages suffer from inbreeding, it seems.

(13:12:55) [me]: inbreeding?

(13:14:59) Qatharsis: They're all each other's brother's offspring, and the replicative deficiencies show.

(13:58:39) [me]: there's no inbreeding in the Tēlvo languages

(13:58:47) [me]: no more so than there are in any other language

(13:59:06) Qatharsis: They just look like contorted copies of each other. =P

(13:59:26) Qatharsis: And they develop pathological spelling freakages.

(14:00:07) [me]: what??

(14:00:37) Qatharsis: I mean, accented l? Hello?

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: 22 July 2003
[edit] added: 22 July 2003

(03:43:48) Casoar: apparently there is no suprise

(03:43:50) Casoar: surprise.

(03:44:04) Casoar: stupid silent r. silent ahs shouldn't be spelt

(03:44:20) [me]: then don't spell them :)

(03:44:33) Casoar: okay, i won't then :)

(03:45:15) Casoar: if i can remembe not to spell them. i'll probly foget half the time though. unless the word in question is suprise, when i won't so much foget not to foget as not foget to remembe

(03:46:40) [me]: what??

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 7 July 2003
[edit] added: 7 July 2003

(22:54:31) [Vickie]: it always annoyed me that the american school system completely ignored studying english the way they study biology

(22:54:45) [Vickie]: dissect the hell out of it

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 30 June 2003
[edit] added: 30 June 2003

(18:43:02) [Shreyas]: i like that the first six messages of the proto-uralic thread were from people with first names starting with j

(18:43:25) [Shreyas]: hm, that's not the thread

(18:43:29) [Shreyas]: but there was such a thread

(18:44:24) [Shreyas]: oh, it was the feature geometry thread

(18:44:34) [Shreyas]: still going strong...8.

[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: 6 May 2003
[edit] added: 6 May 2003

(22:22:26) VerdanTForesT: ok, time for some histizzorical linguistissizin'

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 4 May 2003
[edit] added: 4 May 2003

(13:28:38) Kathryn: well, i'm going to shower so i can reconstruct proto-romance

[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: 10 March 2003
[edit] added: unknown

(2.5) extreme tabooing in Aboriginal languages (Trask 1996):

a) In 1975 tribe member named Djäyila died, verb djäl- "want" became taboo, was replaced with duktuk- (borrowed from a neighbouring language)

b) In 1950 tribe member named Ngayunya died, pronoun ngayu "I" was tabooed and replaced by nganku; a subsequent death made nganku taboo, and therefore ngayu was revived

Handout in historical linguistics, 10.Mar.2003
language, linguistics, weirdness
[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: 19 August 2003

"They are not interested in many things which are interesting. And that's the American way."

Vitaly V. Shevoroshkin, referring to American linguists
wisdom, politics, linguistics, people, provincialism, patriotism, sadness, indifference, insults
[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: unknown

[17:24:29] Verdant Forest: I think Russian is more lustful than French. French plays hard to get.

[comment] [rate] 3/5


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: unknown

[21:09:30] Verdant Forest: ooh i want to go to the mentality of apes too

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: 19 August 2003

"Needless to say, a poem in any proto-language translated into one of its decendants after ten or fifteen millennia have passed, will no longer rhyme."

Robert Wright, in his article "Quest for the Mother Tongue", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1991.
linguistics, language, randomness, obviousness
[comment] [rate] 2/5


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: unknown

"I didn't know people didn't speak Latin until you all started telling me all the time, and then I was like, 'Whoa, no one speaks Latin anymore! Whoa, it's a dead language! That explains so much!'."

Kathryn has a midlife crisis.
sarcasm, linguistics
[comment] [rate] 1/5


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: unknown

[18:18:48] LunaCamilla: hard core isn't even a verb!

[comment] [rate] no rating


[link] heard: unknown
[edit] added: unknown

"WHOA! If you say, 'Fucking fuck the fucking fuckers,' 'fucking' is used as two different parts of speech!"

Saying this he was about as elated as I've ever seen him when not drinking Orangina.
sex, linguistics
[comment] [rate] no rating