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."
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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."
(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
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*
"I had no idea that linguistics was such a witty field."
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."
[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."
(02:13:14) kesuari: who who knows what xml and tex is doesn’t know what syntax is?
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."
me: "That's an abstract?!"
anonymous: "It's a very abstract..."
"Greek and Latin show ablaut as well, but not as strongly as Germanic. No pun intended."
"Repetitions of sounds, words, morphemes, blah blah blah."
"Asian food is like Cajun food, but without the /k/.... Using that fact you can derive the taste of /k/."
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.
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."
(17:04:21) kesuari: (and also, not even irregularity is regular, so there's going to be some regularity somewhere)
"There's light at the end of the tunnel for your Masters, and then you realise that it's just the light between tunnels."
(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"
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 $*
HS: But how did [G] become [g]? I thought usually the trend is the other way round.
Tristan: There’s no accounting for tastes :)
(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
"Kazakh is sweet piece of cake comparing to Russian.. Russian is even more harder than English..."
Ray: "Phonetics can be a turn off."
Mark: "Depends on how you teach it, Ray."
"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'."
Sharon: "So now there's this book on Iraqi Arabic with MP3s."
Noah: "I'm sure the army's all over that."
"Maybe you should implement the medieval system, where if one of the grad students misbehaves, they whip one of the undergrads."
"Positing *o is like positing Ident-Germanic and saying that among Uralic languages, Finnish has it most highly ranked."
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
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.
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!"
16:02:46 devnullpenguin: they really shoulda called it phonology phest tho
My father: "I ate breakfast for a whole year."
Hannah: "Yesterday."
"PHO-NOLOGY. Starts with Vietnamese soup and ends with `nology'."
(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"
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."
(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
(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"
"You have to like what you do. There's really no other reason to study linguistics."
shit-giving is really a huge problem in grad school
"I'm not like you. I got all these vowels from my parents… and some consonants from these Klingons."
"It was funny when Derek had a question, you could tell—it was like watching a puppy. ‘Got a morphology problem boy?’"
"His father's like ‘Don't fly too close to the sun Icharus.’ And he's like ‘This freakin' rocks! Woohoo!’"
"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."
"Languages are big."
"This is not a non-word! [xkɬpltθkʰft] is a non-word."
(03:17:16) [me]: never heard of æ tensing? ;)
(03:17:55) Qatharsis: D'oh, of course. It's the opposite of q crumbling. ;)
"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."
"For this speaker, odds are he's never going to reach 500Hz, unless he's getting run over by something."
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."
02:35:08 [Tristan]: i hope your health insurance covers your tongue
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 :)
18:05:22 [Tristan]: "songs about diachronic OT phonology"? you're mad.
"You've got the 2nd sound shift here with a vengeance."
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 :)
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 :)
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.
"Phonology happens."
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."
"I appreciate sound changes—I'm talking about duck lenition!"
"That's what I'm saying! Definitions can't be defined. ... As such."
(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!
"There are languages in 34 instruc—"
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."
(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
"They are not interested in many things which are interesting. And that's the American way."
(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?
[17:24:29] Verdant Forest: I think Russian is more lustful than French. French plays hard to get.
"My mittens I can totally type with them on"
(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
"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."
"If a layman gets confused, I sort of don't care."
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 :)
"You could ask if the laws of motion are constructed online as an object is falling."
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.
"Speakers can't converge on a common rule because no one knows what anyone else is doing."
[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%"
"Yes! I have crushed another hope of innovation!"
[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
Aaron B [20:47]: in *america* we don't have an "h"
go to any store
(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. ;)
(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
"I syntaxed that bad, didn't I?"
(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.
"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."
(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.
(01:24:40) [me]: trees are your friends :)
(01:24:48) Jackie: trees kick my ass
(01:24:50) Jackie: over and over again
Jonathan: "But then why does /ʔəɾə-/ become [pɾi-]?"
Aaron & Amanda: "`Price'. That's English."
"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."
(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??
(22:22:26) VerdanTForesT: ok, time for some histizzorical linguistissizin'
(13:28:38) Kathryn: well, i'm going to shower so i can reconstruct proto-romance
00:35:39 [Aaron]: ok, it is [+bedtime]
"Is this divided into mes+es or mese+s? This is what grown people spend their time on."
"French can be said to be ‘oxytonic.’ Not to be confused with ‘Occitan.’"
"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.’"
"There's really no solution to anything."
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
"Regularity is a different kind of thing from a thing."
"If language were perfect, could it be used for lying? …That's too hard."
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
(01:30:22) [redacted]: from now on, all adjectives will be in the form [+crack]
"I'm saying i ~ ɪ; you're hearing the airhead."
(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
(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.
"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!'."
Prof. Voyles: "Let's get rid of the /ð/ in this example…"
me: "No, you can't do that—it's attested!"
(17:01:15) kesuari: nothing's regular in english, not even irregularity
Tristan: "[pæ̃ː]."
Jonathan: "[pæ̃ ]. It's short."
Tristan: "French is stupid."
Jonathan: "Why?"
Tristan: "Because it's not like my dialect of English."
"If they wanted it to be pronounced [latkəz], they should've spelled it ‘lutkers’."
"It sounds like if you had a lisp in this language, you'd end up saying something you didn't want to say."
"I don't think they issue ethics approval based on whether it's more ethical than things that're more fun."
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.’"
(17:36) [Tristan]: oh. i'd just kinda come to assume it was an american vs real english distinction
(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
(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
"Chomsky would always cut people's feet off so he didn't have to step on their toes."
"‘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."
(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
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."
(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
Jonathan: "Four languages: America never expects anything close to that."
Joyce: "Yeah, we don't even like dialects."
Derek: [ftktp]!
Jonathan: "What's that?"
Derek: "Probably Berber."
(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
Jurgen: "So I don't mess it up, how do you pronounce your name?"
Dan: "Dan."
"It was cool, you know? I got intimate with her voice, or something."
"Unfortunately, all my finals [for grading] for [anonymous class] look good so far."
(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 ;)
(00:45:36) [me]: I think I'd summarise Hawai'ian as (C)V
"I'm a fan of the syllable; I believe in the syllable, but some people don't."
[Jonathan shows Aaron a book on Qaraqalpaq written in French]
Aaron: "This orthography is.. what?"
me: "Inconsistent."
"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."
Ray: "Most of these people [taking intro to linguistics] won't become majors—"
Mark: "And shouldn't."
Mark: "From your mouth to God's ear."
linguist: "It's an Indian mouth—he won't hear."
"And you're going to think, ‘Oh, the big thing is OT Pragmatics—I should do that.’"
"[In phonology,] you can't just say ‘Oh, that's PF.’"
"Why do we keep weird strong verbs around for thousands of years?"
"Linguistic theory is your friend."
"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].’"
(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"
(00:32:14) Colum: [...] I like the super abstract it-is-there-because-chomsky-says-it-is-there syntax.
"Let's call this the Chomskian response; no linguistics talk is complete without a massive quote from Chomsky."
[massive Chomsky quote appears on slide]
(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.
"It's like a James Bond movie: 'A Pure Tone Rings Forever.'"
"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."
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
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?
Jurgen: "Promiscuity means ‘proximity’ in French."
Jonathan: "It would."
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."
"There's another French politician who[se name] has to do with nasalisation!"
"This guy could kick your ass—he's a muscle-bound semanticist."
"Please, no more climatology."
"Who could judge whether this is right or wrong in… not well known languages?—let's put it that way."
"There's some sort of weird issue between the Papuan part and the New Guinea part—you know, local geopolitical stuff."
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)
"'How'? You're asking the wrong guy—I'm not a class-VII expert."
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...
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!
[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)
(23:26:57) Ian: so what was that book that fucking chomsky would be more useful than?
(00:05:16) Jess: fucking chomsky would be more useful than this book
Jackendoff: "Somebody washed [the board] with something wrong."
McIntosh: "Well, I wanna wash it with them."
"American Tongues sounds like a porno."
"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."
"Are you TAing any business yet?"
"Languages are always playing with themselves."
"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."
"Jackendoff. That was the link between drinking and Flash in the Night."
(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
(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
[18:18:48] LunaCamilla: hard core isn't even a verb!
"WHOA! If you say, 'Fucking fuck the fucking fuckers,' 'fucking' is used as two different parts of speech!"
[21:09:30] Verdant Forest: ooh i want to go to the mentality of apes too
Meghan: "People used to throw batteries at me because they thought I was gay."
Julia: "And they thought you needed the batteries why?"
(22:36:56) Rianna: well...i mean, look at our orthography...it's weird but we know what to say
(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!"
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: ...
(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 :)
(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 >> *)
(02:14:04) Jóhann: dude, can you stop being a language nerd like me for one second and enjoy chauvnistic jokes? :D
(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
(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
me: "What's that called when you express things with sounds?"
Austin: "You mean speaking?"
(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
(17:40:43) kesuari: my dialect has everything to do with syntax ungrammatical?
(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"
(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
(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
(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
(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
(13:28:05) Brenda: can i be a subject? i promise i have a highly unique dialect in Kyrgyz
(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
"Have at least one other obsession than linguistics."
(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
(17:29:30) Michael T: vowels are always plotting against me.. especially ɯ. you never know what ɯ is thinking.
(16:45:41) kesuari: there's a whole ton of different types of most linguistic things
(18:02:22) [Tristan]: i think slang is just a word for colloquial words, at least in colloquial speech
(20:47:07) Michael T: well every dictionary needs a little chuvash
(20:47:08) Michael T: that's a feature
prof. Kara: "Benjamin, what's regressive assimilation?"
...
prof. Kara: "Well, you could say, when the Chinese borrow from the Tibetans, for example."
(15:56:08) Aaron B: being a syntactician for the year is messing up my brain
(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)
me: "What happened to that banana?"
my mother: "They missed with the flame thrower they were using to kill the bugs."
(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
(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)
(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)
(20:06:04) kesuari: i wish someone would work out a universal definition of word, and make english orthography agree with it
"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!"
"The letter ‹q› is just hanging around waiting for English to gain uvular stops."
(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
"So if you encountered a strange dialect of English on some island where they don't do flapping, ..."
(04:31:14) kesuari: i could've sworn that on the heirarchy of cool letters, ø was way higher than ö
(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
(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
"‘Мен кеттим. Вернусь on Sunday,’ деп айтты."
[Niko says something syntactically odd in English]
[Everyone pauses and frowns, including Niko]
Niko: "Eh, L9 interference."
me: "it's completely predictable"
me: "which isn't what most linguists would expect"
Baatar: "or isnt what they would predict"
CB: "There's one rule about language comparison—"
Niko: "Don't trust a Russian?"
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.’"
(03:31:47) spectre: i don't like having the negative morpheme in different places
(03:31:56) firespeaker: but this is Turkic
(02:11:24) Gekz: You are overcomplexifying irrelevance
(02:11:29) Gekz: so this is what linguistics is
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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!
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."
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?"
"We have vowel harmony; it's great. I like it, I love it!"
(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
(04:14:07) نىكو: cypriot also has no question particle
(04:14:10) jonathan: oh???
(04:14:18) jonathan: (pun not intended)
[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."
you remember what i am talking about? i thought that the song was about michael jackson, but they were just using the future tense ;)
(16:55:49) [me]: btw, I've noticed that voicing typos aren't as uncommon as one might thing
(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
(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"
"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]."
"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."
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...
(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! :)
(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.
"Поэтому language is живой!"
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..."
"I've gotta remember to type ‘optimality theory’ before I google ‘domination latex’."
"Well, Jonathan's excellent at writing twol, and I'm pretty good at hassling Jonathan to do stuff."
(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
"What about the grammars that don't allow it at all? Like ours. ... Like mine."