firespeaker.org

"The stupidity that goes on in the humanities is beyond words."

"Oh, you don't know what open quotient is? You know most things."

"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]."

JH: "Well, this was accepted to a major international conference, so it can't be useless."

RS: "Wrong."

"If we put it in the carrier sentence first, we might have confounding variables—like thinking."

Orgil: "...and I don't get as much of an Anthropology perspective from prof. Atwood and prof. Kara—my advisor, and the other great Mongolist in the—"

other student: "—world."

CB: "Niko, are you straight on your paper?"

Niko: "Yeah. But that's the only thing I'm straight on."

"What we need is a friendly rogue nation."

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

Niko: "Don't trust a Russian?"

"You know, I feel sorry for his parents. Can you imagine the amount of money and energy they've wasted on sending him here?"

Багш: "Дөрөвдөх өдөр IMUд хүн бүр хүхдүүд хайртай гэдэг кино болно: Everybody Loves Babies."

Мөнх-Эрдэнэ: "Яагаад?"

Чулуун: "Okay, so the second group will just be two lines behind the entire song. Does that make sense?"

[everyone nods]

Чулуун: "Okay, so, first group? Second group?"

[pause while everyone looks around]

Багш: "Баатар!"

"As a consequence, Postmodernists' judgment about the invalidity of judgments must also be invalid, but the idea of criticizing Postmodernist dogma does not seem to be popular among them."

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

...

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

"Have at least one other obsession than linguistics."

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

Лазат эже: "‘Тийишүү’, мисалы, бир бала кафеде отурганда бир кызды көрөт. Кыз ага жагат. Ал кыз менен сүйлөшөт, ‘Окуйсузбу, канчанчы жылкысыз’ деп сурайт. Бала кызга тийишет, бирок аны экинчи жолу көрбөйт."

мен: "А өзбөк кино болсо, экинчи жолу точно көрөт."

"‘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."

Chuck: "There's Low German forms, Middle High German forms, Upper High German forms, and even Anglo-Frisian forms. This is weird!"

Derek: "Maybe a non-native speaker wrote it."

Chuck: "Or they had some pretty heavy stuff back then."

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

"I haven't read this in years. When I first read this in Old High German, it had just been written."

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."

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

Dan: "Dan."

"So if you thought the answer was something other than two, and didn't say it because everyone else said ‘two’, that was probably a good idea."

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

"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."

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

[massive Chomsky quote appears on slide]

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

"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."

"I thought, ‘Wow, another weird side effect of my cold medicine: olfactory hallucinations.’"

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

"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'."

"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."

Jonathan: "You can write s/he."

Jurgen: "And if you add the neuter pronoun, you get a funny sort of word—I'm not going to say it."

"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."

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

Jonathan: "It would."

"I'm just going to write it, because it's easier than spelling it."

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

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

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

Jurgen: "You know, some people say I'm hard—I don't think I'm that hard."

Jonathan: "Well, you're flexible."

classmate: "You're the xantham gum of professors."

Avram: "Flexible, but still with integrity."

"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.’"

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

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

"Please, no more climatology."

"There's really no solution to anything."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't swallow endings, Scott. Otherwise you'll be getting fat."

Jonathan: "It's funny; you said you were worrying about American life before you came to America; I worried about Kazakh life before I went to Kazakhstan."

Zaure: "But you have reason to worry about Kazakh life."

"You are not the only victim of the Russian language."

"The raw act of boy fellating man would not go down well in mainstream America. No pun intended."

"Dem totns gelt. I'd like to get my hands on dem totns gelt, yo?"

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

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

"Is Brandeis's registration system useful and helpful to use? Only if you're on drugs."

McIntosh: "Naked mole rats—that sounds like a sitcom!"

Jackendoff: "Not `naked mall rats'?"

McIntosh: "That's pay-per-view."

"Er hot andere fish to fry."

"You know, why do all the buildings on campus have people's names on them? They didn't give that money out of the kindness of their heart. They wanted their name on a god-dammed building."

"The Turks are the borg of the Mediterranean. `Resistance is futile,' you know?"

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

"Languages are always playing with themselves."

"Zuxt oys in a verterbux - I'm not responsible for the meaning of German words."