SFALingBlog

De-stressing fun with Google Translate

2012-05-08T10:18:00.003-05:00

Floating around Facebook is a photo (as far as I can tell, Adam Port is the beginning of the sharing thread and so should be credited for this) that instructs you to copy and paste the following text into Google Translate:

pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk

Once you paste it into the box, you need to click on "German" as the source language and then hit the symbol for listening to the text on the German side (not the side that translates it into English). You should see this screen:

The purple circles mark the areas you need to pay attention to--make sure the source language is German and click on the circled symbol to listen to the text read aloud.

It just might put a smile on your face as you're swamped in finals week...

Written Language and Brain Processing

2012-04-03T07:44:00.006-05:00

A colleague shared the following article that appeared on Science Daily with me: "Brain's Involvement in Processing Depends on Language's Graphic Symbols."

In the article, researchers claim that Arabic takes longer to process because it cannot be processed unilaterally in the brain; that is, it requires both the left and right hemispheres to communicate in order to process language. What's interesting is that the study compared English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Both Hebrew and Arabic are written from right-to-left and both omit vowels (which are represented as diacritics in the orthography) for native writing. It doesn't surprise me that perhaps English is processed differently, but it does surprise me that Hebrew and Arabic are processed differently. That leaves me to wonder if it is the actual shapes of the letters in the orthographical system that lead to different processing.

The article ends with this thought:

Thus, the question is again raised as to whether in the modern world those who speak certain languages have an advantage over those who speak other languages...

I'd think the next step is to test native Arabic speakers who are fluent (or extremely proficient) in English or Hebrew to see if they still use both halves of the brain to process a language that native speakers can process unilaterally. (And vice versa--study how native English or Hebrew speakers process Arabic.) After that, naturally, it'd be interesting to see how other orthographical systems are processed.

Women as Linguistic Pioneers

2012-02-28T08:39:00.000-06:00

A colleague shared a link with me this morning from The New York Times for an article on linguistic innovation: "They're Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve" by Douglas Quenqua. The article focuses on how many people tease young women for the way they speak--whether it's using like as a filler or using creaky voice to end a statement; and yet, many of those same things young women are teased for become linguistic markers in English at large. The following few paragraphs portray nicely what the whole article is about:

“If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation.
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,” said Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.”

I urge you to read the original article, as there are other very interesting insights throughout it. While the article (and the linguists quoted in it) cite young women as linguistic innovators, what is perhaps more intriguing is that no one knows why. The article offers several theories, but I'm not sure we'll ever be able to pinpoint the exact reason why these linguistic phenomena catch on like they do and why (or how) young women start many of them in the first place.

What do you think?

Spotlight on Linguistic Tools: Syntax Tree Generator

2012-02-26T08:46:00.002-06:00

A fellow linguist recently shared a link with me for another online tree-diagramming program--one that I think is definitely more user-friendly than the other online programs that I've tried out. It is the Syntax Tree Generator. The Help page states that the program works best with Google Chrome--I've tried it on Firefox, Safari, and Opera without any issues. If you are on Google Chrome when you go to the website, you'll see a screen that looks like this:

Initial screenshot of Syntax Tree Generator

The screen changes just a bit if you use other browsers (e.g., the sliders for font and spacing are boxes for numerical inputs), but the overall design is still the same. The text box at the top is where you put in the information that dictates what the tree will look like.

Text box for diagramming

The sentence in the above screenshot is what you see when you first go to the website. You can play with that sentence or put in your own new sentence entirely. I'm using my own sentence for the examples below.

The basics of this program is the use of bracketing to mark constituents and embedding. The mother node label is the first entry after the open bracket, and a space after that label will result in a branch to a daughter node. The cool thing about this online program is that the diagram on the page follows what you type in the text box in real time. In other words, as you make changes, the diagram changes along with what you type, and you can see if what you type is what you had intended for the diagram.

One of the first features that is handy is the ability to diagram with triangles, which is indicated by the asterisk (*) after the mother node; for instance, if I type in [S* The dog is sleeping], I get this diagram:


[S* The dog is sleeping]

If there are no brackets within the original set of brackets, there will be no daughter branches. If you take out the * after the mother node, the triangle will turn into a single branch:


[S The dog is sleeping]

Again, the program reads whatever comes directly after the opening bracket as the mother and anything following it as the daughter. Even though four words (with spaces) follow the mother node, there is only one branch because there is only one set of brackets.

By adding brackets, you can add more daughters to diagram; the following diagram is made with the input [S [NP* The dog] [Aux is] [VP sleeping]]:


[S [NP* The dog] [Aux is] [VP sleeping]]

Now the mother node S has three daughters because there are three sets of open and closed brackets inside the S brackets. Each of the daughters in this example have only one branch (or one triangle). Each daughter can be expanded by adding more sets of brackets within it. The following diagram is [S [NP [Det The] [N dog]] [Aux is] [VP sleeping]]:

[S [NP [Det The] [N dog]] [Aux is] [VP sleeping]]

The difference with this diagram is that the NP node has been expanded to have two daughters; that's because the NP brackets now have two sets of brackets--[Det The] and [N dog]--inside.

Nodes can also be "uni-branching", as in the following diagram:

[S [NP [Det The] [N dog]] [Aux is] [VP [V sleeping]]]

In this case, the VP node now has the daughter V, which then branches down into the text node sleeping.

By using the bracketing method, sentences can get more and more complex. Again, the wonderful thing about this is the real-time diagramming that follows the input in the text box. Whenever you have a diagram you want to use in a document, simply right-click the image and copy it. Then you can paste the image into any document you need.

Another nice thing is that you can download the app for offline use by going to the Wiki page and clicking on the download link. After downloading the .zip file and unzipping the file, you'll see the following in the downloaded folder:

Downloaded folder for offline use

Click (or double-click) on the index.html (which is highlighted in the image above), and an offline version of the webpage will open. It's routed through your computer files, so you have full usage of the program without needing internet access. You need all the other files in the folder in order for the program to work without being online, so you need to keep all those together.

Have fun diagramming!

Updated note: The designer of this app updated the look, so the screenshots are a bit dated. The new look is incredibly sleek and even more user-friendly. I highly encourage you to check out its new look: http://mshang.ca/syntree/.

Linguistics, Science, and Critical Thinking

2012-02-18T10:03:00.001-06:00

In the urge to make sciences and critical thinking more fundamental in our education system, I hope administrators, curriculum writers, and teachers see the potential (and importance) of using linguistic principles as a conduit of teaching critical thinking skills. Over at the Language Log, there is a great post today about teaching science through language.

My students know how passionate I am about telling anyone who will listen that linguistic study really complements any major and profession--this is just one more example of how linguistics can stretch is interdisciplinary reaches.

Spotlight on Linguistic Tools: Linguistics Online Playgrounds

2012-02-02T10:02:00.000-06:00

Linguistics Online (or 'LiOn') is a website that was developed as an online supplement for linguistics students at Utrecht University. One of the components of the website is the Tool Playground; in the Tool Playground are two incredibly valuable resources for many linguistics students: the IPA Keyboard Playground and the Treebuilder Playground.

The IPA Keyboard Playground is exactly what it sounds like: another online IPA keyboard. The keyboard is organized in the consonant and vowel IPA charts but doesn't have all the diacritics and more obscure IPA symbols (like those for clicks). Since many students don't necessarily need the extra IPA symbols, this keyboard is more streamlined for ease of use.

LiOn IPA Keyboard Playground screenshot

When using the keyboard, you can (as with other online keyboards) simply type into the text box (which for this one is situated between the consonant and vowel charts, which helps to visually separate the two). When you need a symbol you can't type, you simply click on its button in the chart, and the IPA symbol will be inserted where the cursor is. When you've finished with what you'd like to type, you can then copy and paste the text directly into your document on your word processor of choice.

The layout of the IPA Keyboard Playground is accessible and visually appealing. The text box isn't as large as the text box for some of the other online IPA keyboards, but often when we're typing in IPA, we're typing one line or one utterance (or even one word) at a time, so you may not find that to be a downfall. If, however, you want to enter multiple lines of text in IPA at once, you won't be able to put in a line break in this keyboard. Remember that online keyboards are all about functionality--you may find that you like to use one online keyboard for one task while you prefer a different one for another task.

The Treebuilder Playground is also what it sounds like: an online tree diagramming (or tree building) program. This online system is not as intuitive or user-friendly as the downloadable TreeForm software; however, it may be more accessible to many students than the online phpSyntax program. When you go into the Treebuilder Playground, you'll see this:

LiOn Treebuilder Playground

The program automatically starts you with a top node of S; however, if you want to diagram something else--like a morpheme tree, for example--then you simply need to click on the box with the "E" (if you look closely, you'll see it actually says "Edit"). In edit mode, you can change the text for the top node. Every time you edit a node, you have to click on the green checkmark that appears next to the editing text box. Otherwise, it won't save any changes you made.

To add nodes below the top node, click on the "L+" or "+R" in the box. For the first node you add, it doesn't matter which of those you click. When you go to add a second daughter node, though, you need to decide if you want it to the left or right of the first one. As you add nodes, a tree will begin to form in the area above the top node box:

LiOn Treebuilder Playground: Building a diagram

As you can see in the screenshot above, the building space retains all the node boxes that you add--you can continue modifying the tree by adding more or taking away any existing nodes. When you add new nodes, make sure you are adding to the mother node--the trees in this program are built top-down. Once you've finished your tree, right-click on the tree diagram above all your nodes, and click on "Save image as..." to download the image to your computer. You can then insert that image into your document, like so:

LiOn Treebuilder Playground: Diagram

Again, this is more intuitive for many people than the system utilized by phpSyntax (with embedding through bracketing), but if you're able to download software, I still highly recommend using TreeForm. The LiOn Treebuilder Playground is a very handy tool to utilize, though, when you don't have the ability to download software (like when you're using a computer in the library).

The Tool Playground area of LiOn has many more useful tools that you may want to explore--it also has exercises for learning linguistic concepts, which is a nice feature for anyone learning more about linguistic analysis.

Updated Ling Minor

2012-01-15T13:15:00.001-06:00

If you check out our Ling Minor page, you'll notice there are a few changes. We submitted this modified minor in August to the university. It is still awaiting state approval, but we wanted to update the blog to share with you our vision for an updated program. If all goes well, the modified minor will be effective Fall 2012.

Hardest Language to Learn?

2011-12-13T09:00:00.000-06:00

One of the first questions linguists get asked is "What is the hardest language to learn?" Or, to be quite honest, the question often comes out as "What is the easiest language to learn?" Either way, though, the questions are based on the same premise: that there are languages that are easier/more difficult to learn than others.

My answer is typically the same--it hovers somewhere around "all languages have their own unique difficulties." However, if the person who is doing the asking is actually interested in having a linguistic conversation, I like to bring up the fact that some languages may appear easier or more difficult to learn, depending on their native language. For example, as a gross generalization, if your native language is English, it will be easier for you to learn another Indo-European language like Spanish or German than it will be to learn, say, Mandarin Chinese.

I had never seen someone break languages down into difficulty by the estimated required hours to become proficient in the language until I saw this picture below on 22 Words:

Chart from 22 Words

The entire chart assumes a native English speaker is the one learning a new language and then breaks the target languages into three groups. What I wish could be conveyed by the chart (but the chart would quickly become less of a graphic and more of a document) is what features of the languages were used to determine whether a language is closely related to or significantly different from English, how the number of hours were calculated for how long it takes to reach proficiency, and how proficiency is defined for this chart. I don't quite agree with the groupings--for instance, I have a hard time believing that--for the purposes of this chart--Hindi would be in the same level of ease for an English speaker as Polish.

What do you think? Can we group languages by difficulty of learning according to native language? If so, do you agree with the image above?

What the ....?

2011-12-06T09:00:00.000-06:00

The post title sums up my reaction to the first time I saw these two sentences, both of which are supposedly sentences in English:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

The first sentence relies on three different senses of the word buffalo: the city Buffalo, NY; the noun (the large mammal that once roamed the prairie freely); and the transitive verb, which according to my Mac dictionary means to "overawe or intimidate (someone)." The Wikipedia article on this sentence provides the background and some syntactic trees for the sentence, but I'll give you a shortened rundown here:

Let's start at the beginning: Buffalo buffalo work together to mean the NP "buffalo that are in Buffalo". This NP occurs three times in the sentence:

[Buffalo buffalo] [Buffalo buffalo] buffalo buffalo [Buffalo buffalo].

The remaining instances of buffalo in the sentence are the verb form. The first instance of buffalo as a verb is working with the NP [Buffalo buffalo] to modify the first NP [Buffalo buffalo]. You might reword the entire first part of the sentence (this will take care of the first five instances of buffalo):

The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo...

Now the sentence is finished off with the transitive verb and its object, which also happen to be the buffalo in Buffalo:

The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo buffalo the buffalo that live in Buffalo.

Is it a sentence? Sure. By loose-ish standards. Is it a good English sentence? No. Why would Buffalo buffalo be buffaloing other buffalo that live in Buffalo two times over? That just doesn't make sense. So while it is syntactically possible, it's semantically void of really meaning anything. While it may not be a sentence you'd want to use in an everyday conversation, it is a sentence you can wow your friends with at parties. Just think of all the debates you can get into once you proclaim, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is too a sentence in English!

The second sentence from above only works with added punctuation. In fact, its Wikipedia article states that this sentence shows why punctuation can be necessary in some sentences to understand meaning. The sentence with its appropriate punctuation looks like this:

James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

Obviously, there was some sort of test, in which James wrote "had had" on the paper but John wrote "had", and the teacher preferred "had had" as the correct answer. All this took place in the past in a situation that required the past perfect to show that the activity was finished, thus leaving us with the seemingly (yet not) redundant pairing had had. In everyday speech, we often put the first had into a contraction, which sounds way less odd: I'd had three bananas before I realized that two would've been enough. That sentence just as easily could have started out with I had had three bananas... and been grammatically sound. That's what happens when a verb that has been grammaticalized as an auxiliary remains a main verb--have as an auxiliary (or helping verb) no longer has anything to do with its use as a main verb that usually (and loosely) shows some sort of possession (though "possession" doesn't even come close to fully describing the use of have as a main verb).

Again, is it a sentence in English? Yes. Is it one you're likely to come across? Not unless you're a teacher that left a blank on a test that should have been filled in with had had instead of had.

Do you know of any other crazy examples of sentences like these that people use to show off the oddities of language and syntax?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

2011-11-30T09:00:00.000-06:00

What does it mean for a word to be beautiful? That question is what Robert Beard (Dr. Goodword) tackled when he compiled the list of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language.

After looking through the words, I am guessing he was going for sound and not meaning; otherwise, words like beleaguer and untoward surely wouldn't have made the list. But there must have been more than just sound being considered because words like bucolic and ripple just don't sound any more "beautiful" to me than other words that didn't make the cut.

I would imagine that most people would find less common words to be more beautiful than more common ones (after all, people tend to be more attracted by the things they don't encounter as often), and many English speakers would probably find borrowed words more beautiful than native Germanic words (I'm going with the foreign-is-exotic-and-thus-beautiful theory on that one). I've long been fond of words like facetious, quotidian, felicity, draconian, stygian, inveigle, fastidious, melodic, and phenomena because of the way they roll off the tongue--their meaning doesn't add beauty or intrigue (especially words like quotidian, stygian, and draconian), but they sound nice to me. It's entirely subjective, though--I can't say why one word sounds "pretty" but another doesn't. And the words that sound pretty to me probably don't sound pretty to other people. All these examples are of English, yet other languages have words that can be deemed as more beautiful than others by its speakers or by its learners. I rather enjoyed saying αληθεια and αμαξια while learning Ancient Greek (pardon my lack of diacritics on the words)--even moreso than the other words I learned.

If you read the description that's on the website, Dr. Goodword wants to help people beautify their language use, and yet I'm not sure what it means to have beautiful language. What do you think? Can words be beautiful? And if they can, what makes one word more beautiful than another? And, more importantly, what words do you find "beautiful"?

Crazy Measurements

2011-11-22T09:00:00.000-06:00

Americans have long been the oddballs in the measurement world with our inability to accept the universal measurements like grams and meters, preferring instead our feet and inches and pounds. In fact, if someone tells me something in 3 centimeters, it won't mean much to me until they say it's just over an inch. You can tell me you ran 10 kilometers, but I won't really be impressed until I figure out that's just over 6 miles. We like our measuring units that we've grown to love even if we don't fully understand them (what's an acre, anyway?).

I'm rather fond of our measuring system, but I might be willing to add new units of measurement to that system, especially if they're anything like these that were posted on the Mental Floss blog. Now I can say, with pride, that I am roughly one smoot tall. That sounds so much cooler than 5'7".

Conlanging, how I love thee

2011-11-17T09:00:00.000-06:00

Since I was a kid, invented languages have been near and dear to my heart; in fact, I attempted to invent my own language (with very little success) when I was young, and then I grew up to teach a course on invented languages, for which I finally invented my own language. In the spirit of sharing the love of invented languages, I am sharing these six very cool websites about or promoting invented languages:

The first five are about specific invented languages while the last link is for anyone interested in becoming a conlanger (that is, someone who invents languages (or constructs them)). There are many, many more websites about invented languages, but these are some of the most helpful for anyone interested in a specific language or in what goes on behind the scenes with inventing a language.

As I'm closing this post, I realized I focused solely on creative invented languages, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention that some languages were constructed to serve as auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto. While such languages are interesting in their own right, I think the fictional languages have more life because they're meant to reflect an entire culture of a fictionalized civilization. I will also say that while I have never learned to speak any of these languages, I can spend hours learning about them metalinguistically without once getting bored.

British vs. American

2011-11-15T09:00:00.000-06:00

The other day I stumbled across the Best of British website, which provides a rather large list of British slang words defined for us Americans who don't know how to speak British. Some of the funniest ones were blow me and blow off, but there are some other great entries. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's great fun to go through.

The website reminds me of when Ellen Degeneres had Hugh Laurie on her show and held a contest of sorts to see who could understand more slang--Hugh gave Ellen examples of British slang, and she had to guess the words' meanings; Ellen gave Hugh examples of American slang, and he had to guess the words' meanings. You can see the video below, or you can go here and see it on YouTube.

So let's table ideas on slang words and waffle on about sweet fanny adams until we're zonked or until some bladdered tosser who's legging it brasses us off by interrupting our chin wag. It'll be awesome! (Anyone who's British can feel free to openly mock my inability to apply newly learned slang correctly.)

Let's verb that

2011-11-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

A poem has been floating around in cyberspace about the "Verbing of America" with examples of verbalized nouns. The point of the poem is to show how enigmatic our language is in selecting which nouns can be used as verbs, and if they are used as verbs, what their meaning will be. I highly suggest reading through the entire poem; an example stanza is below:

If when we change a noun to verb
To come up with our `verbing,'
Why can't I, when I'm using herbs,
Refer to it as herbing?

It is rather intriguing to think of what can or cannot be used as a verb. I can friend someone (i can even unfriend someone), but I don't think I can boyfriend or husband someone. I can Facebook someone, but I can't Twitter or MySpace someone. I can Google a word or topic, but I can't Yahoo or Bing anything. I can Netflix a movie, but I sure wouldn't Blockbuster a movie. I can DVR or Tivo a show, but I never VCRed anything when I recorded shows via a VHS tape (for that matter, I've never VHSed anything).

It's no wonder non-native English speakers get lost in our vocabulary. These examples (and so many more) show how arbitrary the process is in deciding which nouns can be functionally shifted to be used as verbs.

What other instances of verbed words can you think of?

How linguists play telephone

2011-11-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

Do you remember that classic game of telephone that most of us played when we were younger? It's that game where one person starts by whispering a line into someone else's ear. It could be something like I think she needs to wear a blue blouse tomorrow. It gets whispered from one person to the next until it reaches the last person in line, who says what (s)he heard out loud to the rest of the group. By the time it gets to the end, the sentence might have turned into something like She sees a blue mouse and wants to borrow it. Usually some of the same sounds stay in the words, but it's difficult to hear someone whispering in your ear, especially when there are usually anticipatory giggles erupting all around you as the other kids are waiting to see what the sentence will turn into. If you've never played it before, you should give it a go. You never know what stress relief playing a game of telephone might bring.

Pamela Fox, who must be a linguist--or at least must be one at heart, came up with a new version of telephone: Translation Telephone. When you go to the website, you'll see a text box; type a sentence into that text box and hit the "Go!" button right next to it. Your sentence will be translated (by Google Translate) into a different language and then from that language into another language, and from that language into yet another language... until it has been translated into 20 different languages. After the 20th language, it will get translated back into English for your amusement. Keep in mind that the chain of translation is being done by a machine, so it's not perfect, and also keep in mind that the translation is going from language to language and not from your original sentence into 20 different languages. Along the way, your sentence is going to get, um, misshapen, if you will. By the time your sentence comes back out of the translation telephone game, it will most likely look quite different.

For example, I typed the following sentence into the text box: I just drew a ghost for my son on his paper, and he colored it black. I waited (with some anticipatory giggling) and watched as it went from English to Catalan to Chinese to Albanian and on and on until it was finally translated back into English. The end result?

I have my thesis, my son, his spirit, and he was black.

After laughing, I can go back and trace through the languages I know enough of to see where the sentence started going wrong (ghost, as you might imagine is translated quite differently, depending on the language). You can see the whole train of translation here. Every time you do a translation, the languages and order of those languages will differ, which makes this even more fun.

What makes this priceless is that no machine will translate perfectly from one language to the next and that no two languages will word a sentence with the exact same words that have the exact same meaning, leaving some ambiguity for the next translation.

After you do some translation telephone games of your own, you should share your end results in the comments so we can all get a laugh!

Fun with punctuation?!

2011-11-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

I can't even say how happy the (nonstandard) interrobang makes me. Who knew punctuation could be so much fun‽

Punctuation is only peripheral to the study of linguistics--punctuation is really just a standard set of conventions for breaking up and marking written language. While punctuation may not be central to linguistic study, it is interesting to see how the conventions of punctuation change and to find possibilities for new punctuation marks.

For example, I'm not sure when the current love affair with exclamation points began, but I see more and more students thinking academic writing can be spiced up by an exclamation point or three and that question marks are frequently followed by exclamation points. I also like how things......... that have no need of ellipses........ receive more than their fair share!!!!! Punctuation appears to be one more way people are playing with trying to put more contextual (or perhaps perceptual?) meaning into written language.

I don't know if the interrobang will ever become standard, but it would be handy if it did. It makes the punctuation at the end of a surprising question much more efficient.

It's always the linguists...

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, David Chess wrote what appears to be a blurb of a science-fiction type story, in which things are going wrong, and it can all be directly blamed on the linguists who taught a culture concepts they had previously had no words for; you can check out the short story/blurb here. What I love about his post is that he explores this notion of whether or not people can think about concepts they have no words for. If a language has no word for yellow, does that mean they can't see the color yellow? If a language has no word for kazoo, does that mean they cannot fathom an instrument that makes noise by humming into it? Then again, since English has no word for bakku-shan, does that mean we can't envision a woman who is only pretty when being looked at from the back? (You can check out this article for other cool words English needs.) How much does our language and its words say about us and the way we think?

If you're interested in this, you might also be interested in the course on Language and Culture in the spring.

Want a linguistic challenge?

2011-10-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

There is an annual International Linguistics Olympiad, and they are kind enough to share their problems with the public (once they've been used, that is). If you're up for a challenge, you can head over to their website and start with the sample problems and then move up to the archived problems. There are some neat data sets you can work on--I'm tempted to put a whiteboard in the hallway with a problem written on it Good Will Hunting style.

Psych's Last Night Gus

2011-10-24T15:59:00.001-05:00

On the latest episode of Psych, the main characters (Shawn and Gus) have the misfortune of finding themselves in a Hangover situation--they wake up one morning and can't remember anything that happened the night before.

As the episode unfolds (and as they figure out what happened the previous night), Shawn and Gus start doing something that is quite linguistically interesting. They talk about themselves in the third person and differentiate between "last night X" and "today X", like in the following examples:

Last night Gus had some serious game.
I just want to know what line last night Gus laid on her. I need last night Gus, Shawn.
Last night Shawn was all evolved and mature and not a commitment phobe. Today Shawn is very much a commitment phobe.
Last night Gus had it right.

Normally, when English speakers refer to something specific about last night or yesterday or last week, we use the possessive, as in last night’s game or last week’s show. In the examples above, though, the speakers do not use the typical X’s construction; instead, they use the bare NPs last night and today to modify their names and to differentiate between the person they were last night (i.e., the person they became while drugged) and the person they are normally (i.e., the person they are back to being today). In all of the examples above, the speaker is referring to himself; therefore, Gus is speaking about himself when he uses the phrase last night Gus and Shawn is speaking about himself when he uses the phrases last night Shawn and today Shawn.

It is more typical to find utterances like these with a first-person pronoun, like in the future me will be happier or the old me was uptight. But it somehow makes it funnier that they use the third person to refer to themselves instead of using last night me or today me in these utterances. Even not considering the pronoun versus third person referent, it’s interesting that they use a specific date for the construction, since this construction is normally found with a more general time frame like the future you or the young me. We normally don’t attach specifics like last night and today. Then again, in this situation, it’s appropriate to attach specifics since last night Gus is not another way of saying the old Gus--Gus recognizes that he doesn’t typically “have game.” The only version of himself that has game is the one who was drugged the night before.

Juliet, another character, does use a first person pronoun when referring to another version of herself and Shawn in the future:

I don't want the future us to be dictated by something that last night Shawn said.

She is the only person to use the phrases last night Shawn and today Shawn other than Shawn himself. There is a difference in meaning by what she says here than what she would have been saying had she said, “by something you said last night.” She is recognizing that last night Shawn is not who Shawn normally is; if she had used “you said last night” instead, she would have been implying that who Shawn was last night is the same person he is today. In most cases, that would be a perfectly normal assumption; in very few cases do we change personalities overnight. It’s all very metalinguistic.

In another instance, Shawn uses you in another interesting way when he tells Lassiter (another character) to:

take a swim in lake you.

This example differs from the ones above because it draws a parallel between names like Lake Erie or Lake Watonga and replaces the end with a pronoun to refer to the metaphorical "lake of Lassiter-ness." I can't think of many more examples like this--if you can, please let me know.

And the following is a fun, yet unrelated, example:

...only younger and cuter and less murderer-y.

Shawn uses the above phrase to describe how a girl who grows up to be a murderer looks in an old picture.

Along with Modern Family, Psych is one of my favorite shows for language play--many episodes have Shawn making new words like murderery and shenanigan for the viewers’ entertainment.

I have a lexicographical dream

2011-10-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

I came across this video on Ted the other day, which I label a sort of "I have a lexicographical dream" speech:

Do I even need to say how much I adore Erin McKean after watching it? Students who've taken any of my classes know that my dream job is that of a lexicographer, and she made the job sound even more amazing than I already thought it was. She has an interesting question that doesn't quite get answered (nor could it in only 15 minutes) about what the dictionary should be in terms of format and usefulness. It sounds like she leans more towards a corpus format with the ability to search for a particular word and see examples of its uses in actual written or spoken language data. However, it would need to be more than that because dictionary users would still need a sort of summary to provide the overall theme of data examples, most common definitions, and usage notes for the words. There must be a better way to make the dictionary so it can be more useful, but, wow, that's a daunting task to compile examples, usage notes, pronunciation, and more, especially if you're trying to do that for every word in the English language.

I've seen several online and electronic dictionaries that are trying to become more than just a paper dictionary on screen, such as Wordnik, but I haven't seen one that does it all. Earlier I wrote a post about dictionary and word apps for the iPhone/iPad, and I still use all those apps because not a single one has everything I want. Each one has at least one unique feature that makes it so I have nine apps and three bookmarks for online dictionaries on my iPhone. Have you found any one website or app that is your one go-to source for your electronic dictionary needs?

Must Read: Letters of Note

2011-10-21T11:15:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday, the Language Log had a post called "Dejobbed, bewifed, and much childrenised" that I absolutely adored. It was based on a post they had seen in the Letters of Note website--a website I hadn't heard of before reading that post.

This morning I finally had some downtime to go check out Letters of Note, and I am fascinated by what's there. The website collects and posts personal letters (from what I've seen, all written in English) that are "correspondence deserving of a wider audience." I have tried and deleted several of my attempts to describe the types of letters on the website; I'll settle for saying that the letters are too diverse to categorize and are incredibly interesting to go through. The "Dejobbed, bewifed, and much childrenised" letter is worth the perusal alone, but you should also check out "My belly is too much swelling with jackfruit" and "It's more likely that I was doing 911km/h" if you're in the mood for a light pick-me-up. Then again, if you'd like something more serious, there are letters that are sad, sweet, nostalgic, and uplifting.

I think the website (and eventual book) is a beautiful nod to the dying breed of handwritten personal letters, and it's making me want to go grab some stationery and start writing some of my own Letters of Note.

Spotlight on Linguistic Tools: Two More Online IPA Keyboards

2011-10-20T12:46:00.001-05:00

I had previously talked about TypeIt's online IPA keyboard on this post. Since that post, the TypeIt keyboard now has an option for a full IPA keyboard, which is exciting for anyone who needs to type with more than just those IPA symbols found in English. You can go directly to that keyboard by following this link. When you go to the website for the full keyboard, you will see the following:

IPA TypeIt Full screenshot

In the above picture, you'll see the setup is the same for the English keyboard--there is white space for typing, which you can do with the keys on your computer's keyboard, and then you click on the special symbol you need to insert it into the text. Next to last row of options, you might notice that it says "more." If you click on that, you will get two extra rows of IPA goodies to type with:

IPA TypeIt Full: Extra rows

For all of the diacritics that get added above or below symbols, you will need to type the symbol you want it added to first and then hit the diacritic button. For example, if I want to do a voiceless [r], I need to type r into the text box before hitting the voiceless diacritic so that I get [r̥]. If you're trying to use a diacritic that connects two symbols, type in the first symbol, hit the diacritic button and then type in the second symbol. For instance, if you're typing in a diphthong for [eɪ], you should type an e first, hit the overhead arch, and then type in the next symbol to get this: [e͡ɪ].

That keyboard is still an excellent option for anyone wanting to use an online IPA keyboard; however, it isn't the only option. There are two more online IPA keyboards I've come across that I quite like since writing that post.

1. Weston Ruter IPA Keyboard
This online keyboard works exactly like the IPA TypeIt keyboard--it provides you with a text box that you can type in using your computer keyboard, it provides you with buttons you can click on to get the IPA symbols, and you can easily copy and paste what you have typed into your document. The difference is in the layout. The Weston Ruter keyboard is laid out like the full IPA chart, as partially seen in the screenshot below.

Weston Ruter IPA Keyboard screenshot

It's impossible to get the entire page into one screenshot, so I highly suggest you go to the website and play with it to see if you like the layout. The text box at the bottom of the screen doesn't move--what does move is the upper part of the screen, where you can scroll through the consonant chart, non-pulmonic consonants (like clicks and implosives), vowels, and diacritics. The diacritics work like the ones described above: you must type in the symbol first and then click on the diacritic you want to go with it.

I really like the Weston Ruter keyboard because I am so used to working with the IPA chart that it's easier for me to see what I need on the chart. The one thing I'm not so fond of is that the whole chart doesn't fit nicely (no matter how much I zoom out on the website) onto one screen, and having to scroll back and forth can get annoying.

2. IPA Character Picker
This online keyboard is my favorite of the three. It's not my favorite because of features--all three keyboards work in the same way, all three allow you to choose font and other specifications, and all three have a copy-and-paste capability for importing text into your document. Again, the difference is in the layout. When you first go to the IPA Character Picker website, you'll see this:

IPA Character Picker screenshot

The default screen is an IPA chart with special characters and diacritics below the consonant and vowel charts. However, if you prefer more of a keyboard feel, you can click on the keyboard option and see this:

IPA Character Picker: Keyboard layout

Now the symbols are laid out to match where they would typically occur on a QWERTY keyboard. That might help people more unfamiliar with the IPA charts--and some people might just prefer the look and feel of an actual keyboard. If you still want more options, you can click on the font grid option for this layout:

IPA Character Picker: Font grid layout

The screenshot above is zoomed out quite a bit to get the whole grid on there. If you're used to looking at how unicode character grids are organized, you might prefer using the font grid layout to the other two.

I like this online keyboard for its variable layouts, but even more than that, it does something quite cool and handy (especially if you're just beginning with the IPA and trying to learn all the symbols). When you mouse over a symbol, you'll see a description like this pop up at the top of the screen:

IPA Character Picker: Symbol description

In the screenshot above, you can see that a description pops up for whatever symbol your mouse is hovering over; in this case, it's the unvoiced postalveolar fricative, which also goes by the unicode number 0283, which can also be called "Latin small letter esh". You learn the IPA description, the unicode 4-number description, and the "street name" of the symbol all in one go.

I now give the IPA Character Picker as my site of choice to my students. However, I think it's good to have options, and so I still recommend you take a look at all three and decide for yourself which one works best for you.

SpecGram Seeking Submissions

2011-09-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite ways to kill a little time while remaining linguistically active is perusing the Speculative Grammarian, an online journal for satirical linguistics. In other words, it's a journal for linguists to poke fun of the field while also writing about real things. You might think of it like the linguistics version of The Onion.

Besides the awesome articles and fun linguistic-related puzzles, the Speculative Grammarian is also cool because it accepts articles from anyone who has a good idea for a linguistic-related article. You don't have to be a top scholar to have good ideas for a humorous article on linguistics--you just need knowledge of the field and a sense of humor.

If you have an idea for an article, you should go to this link and follow the directions there. While you're there, you should most definitely check out the Linguistics Career Chooser--especially if you're a minor wondering what to do with your background in linguistics (and in need of a laugh).

"What Does English Sound Like to Foreign Ears?"

2011-08-10T09:15:00.000-05:00

A student sent me this link to a website that has a collection of fun linguistic-y videos, one of which is a video that has a hilarious rap (performed by Italians) that is supposed to be in English. What they are speaking is not English, yet it simulates what English sounds like to them. And, I must say, they are doing an excellent job--my brain was trying to figure out what they might be saying as I listened (even though I knew full well they were not speaking in English).

After you watch that video (and all the other fun ones on that page), feel free to give a big thank you to my awesome students who send me links to fun websites.

Typography, Language, and Fun

2011-07-27T08:42:00.000-05:00

I have long been a fan of the written word, and artists are taking the written word to the next visual level in videos like these:

If you liked that one, other videos like that can be found here.

If you really pay attention, you'll notice that all the videos take aspects of the words themselves and the context of what's being said to create the visual artistry of words. It's linguistics in action. And I love it!