There's a new facebook (can I safely start writing 'FB' at this point?) application called "Which phonologist are you?" developed by Dániel Szeredi. Here's a direct link. When I saw the first question (see image above), I yelled out 'Run screaming from the room!', which confirms that I'm no phonologist.Now I know for sure all that the local sound people (well, maybe not ALL) are taking it. Results I know of are the following, in alphabetical order: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Juliette Blevins, Paul Boersma, Joan Bybee, Jonathan Kaye, and Paul Kiparsky.*
If you're a theoretical linguist, you can probably match those to the answers for one of the questions:
After you chuckle at the questions and answers, you can't read anything into such a creation. Still, that's a pretty interesting snapshot of the current landscape in phonological theory. No McCarthy or Hayes or Steriade? Maybe that's yesterday? Does Kaye count as a Toronto School connection? I know, I know, it's just another FB quiz, but ...* With six answers and the template of a FB quiz, this should be exhaustive, in fact. But four B's and two K's? Now, that's an odd distribution.
5 comments:
I found the range of possible answers, along with the results for many of my facebook friends, to be highly entertaining and frankly sometimes pretty accurate, despite the lack of certain phonologists from the possibilities.
Can I be Halle or Jakobson? I'd even be content with early Kiparsky (but not late Kiparsky).
Do you have a direct link for the application? For some reason searching Facebook Applications for "Which phonologist are you?", or any valid substring thereof, does not yield any results.
Thanks,
Aaron
Yeah, Adam, it's a hoot for sure ... gaps or no. And StrandPrep, yes, you're Halle for a day. Aaron, thanks for alerting me. There's a link in the post now and here's the url:
http://apps.facebook.com/qwhich-phonolo-cdbdb/?start=1&target=home
hey there, thanks for blogging the quiz, I made it, it was quite fun, but you can't include everyone, it took me MUCH more time than it should have... McCarthy, Hayes or Steriade (and many more) are definitely not yesterday, maybe sometime somebody will deliver justice for them. (I think I included Steriade for the first try but found out she would be too much for now :)
I chose the range of answers to entertain my friends, so I chose people we met recently/some of us adore for some reason/some of us do not adore for some reason, and there are some insider jokes as well, but I'm glad people have fun with the quiz.
Cheers,
Daniel
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