Prepositioning ...

This blog is literally all about verbing. And we've talked some about nouning. But today's Bizarro takes us to a whole nother lexical category ...

Speculative Grammarian: The book

Shout it from the rooftops. Or just do like me and go stand on a street corner waving a Bible and scream it: 

The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics is out!

We were fortunate enough to get an advance copy back in the summer, all 360 freakin' pages of it, by Trey Jones, Keith W. Slater, Bill Spruiell, Tim Pulju and David J. Peterson. That copy has been closely guarded, and passed from hand to apparently increasingly grimy hand.*

At Team Verb, we're all pretty pumped about this. Or as one colleague put it:

This goes on the new MA reading list. Hell, this IS the new MA reading list.

Given that the old reading list consisted of stuff written between the Rig Veda and Bloomfield's Menominee Grammar, it would be a step forward, but can't you imagine the prelims: please open the Essential Guide to p. 194, and let's discuss "Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are they ever!"**

And we're not the only ones excited about it. The 'advance praise' up front contains some names:

“Ever wonder why Vikings torched scriptoria? This kind of thing.”
     —E. V. Gordon
“Contains more than 100 basic words.”
     —Morris Swadesh
“Same reference as linguistics; different sense.”
     —Gottlob Frege
“Two uvulas down, way down!”
    —Sapir and Bloomfield, At the Bookstore

Seriously, this volume has not only a real place in the field, it also continues an important tradition. I keep Studies out in left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley (originally published in 1971 and republished, as pictured here, by Benjamins in 1992) on my desk at all times. I regularly give students the "supplementary glossary of linguistic terminology" from that. As much fun as wabiawization and haspiration are, you don't forget pheresis and apocop after you see the list. But it needed updating. The Essential Guide has six pages of "self-defining linguistic glossary" ... a bit of overlap with Studies, of course, but tons more stuff and covering a lot of the field:

• It’s a cleft that this sentence is.
• Je puedo Europanto sprechen.
• I can see that eyewitness evidential myself.
• Something’s gonna undergo grammaticalization.
• The Gricean Maxim of Quantity (“Information”) did that thing the other day, with the guy from that place.
• She looked at the zeugma with suspicion and magnifying glass.

And of course "Semantic bleaching is literally terrible."

The bulk of the texts is built around subfields —sets of pieces on typology, syntax, phonetics, whatevs. Richly illustrated even. I'm guessing anybody who reads this will find plenty of nuggets that they can enjoy and use.

I literally just ordered four fresh, clean copies of it and you can too, here, for $12.99 U.S.

* To the one who spilled what was obviously Hopalicious on page 95: I know who you are and disapprove as much of you wasting good beer as defiling this book.

**Actual article on p. 194, by April May June. I think I know a guy who dated her way back when.

Linguistics flowchart: What field?

This is floating around fb at the moment (yes, click to embiggen). ... I saw it first on the Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft page. The poster itself is from Cascadilla, the only source a linguist needs to stay stocked with excellent posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers and gifts. This is on their CafePress link as a poster. I only today saw the 'Loose lips make bilabial trills' poster. 

But somehow, the chart doesn't help me ... I want to do basically all of it.

0ld p30p1e & l33t

xkcd makes, as so often, a great point:

Yeah, a weird place for language use. Next time you hear somebody bitching about texting and leet speak ruining English, maybe they're a 17-year old libertarian?

But more seriously, Wonkette has a piece showing almost exactly what's in the comic. If you go here, you'll see that the speaker of the House in Michigan texted this:

“Can they get the paperwork to u and u get to me …"

And the speaker eventually got this response from a state representative (no, not a senator; that would be too perfect):

"All will then b perfect!”

Wow. (Click the link for politicians txting, stay for the stunning moral bankruptcy.)

PS: Given where a lot of Rs are at now, Paul is hardly a 'real choice'. If you want an alternative to Obama and Romney, that's probably more like Jill Stein.

Linguistics joke

Thanks to a non-linguist, Celia Boone, for this.

Are you a language hippie?

This got passed along last night: So you know a linguist by Jodie Martin of the University of Adelaide. Check it out.

Very nice.

Etymology man

You'll see this everywhere, but still ... today's xkcd. Click to embiggen.

Syntactic judgment (day)

Found this on Facebook posted by Matt Pearson and attributed to Leston Buell... had to repost for the broader Mr. V audience!

Tense, moody AND irregular ...

Look, I know that the Log has cornered the market on these images, but we GOTTA cover this one.

Frank & Ernest rule the world

Somebody gave me this last night ...

(Here's the link to the real version … in color, even!)

A lot of American English speakers don't produce an actual 'n' in a word like can't. We instead nasalize the vowel, [kæ̃t], sometimes also with a final glottal stop instead of the 't'. The story is that this happens when the nasal is followed in the same syllable by another consonant, so that you have an 'n' in can but not can't. But in Atlantis, some of us can flap the 't' and so don't have a full nasal here either. (We don't lose the contrast, just the 'n': nasalization on the vowel keeps antic versus attic clear.)

In other words, some of us DO have a lost consonant of Atlantis. Kinda.

V Bar: Watering hole for syntacticians

Some of our readers no doubt know that there's a watering hole for syntacticians in Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport. A reader has sent along this image of it ...


Makes me thirsty, but I'm not sure if Merge translates here into shaken versus stirred.

A big tip of the bowler, or more modern headgear, to PTR.

History of English in 10 minutes

Has this one hit the language blogs?



Big tip of the era-appropriate headwear to John from the Literacy Blog.

Pirate linguists: Chickens on Thanksgiving

It's an oldie-but-a-goodie I guess, but one of our contributors passed this along from a student yesterday ...

The dangers of phrasebooks, The Onion's take

That is:

Ambassador Holding Phrasebook 'Pretty Sure' She Just Strengthened Ties With Pakistan

See here for full story.

Ünited Stätes

This week's Onion runs with the above legend across the top. In the print issue, they re-run an oldie but very goodie from 1997:

Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts

WASHINGTON, DC—In a move designed to make the United States seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," Congress officially changed the nation's name to the Ünited Stätes of Ämerica Monday. "Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, the Ünited Stätes is not to be messed with," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the Ämerican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. A new national anthem is also in the works by composer Glenn Danzig, tentatively titled "Howl Of The She-Demon."

Finally, an issue I agree with Inhofe on.

Low Back Merger humor

When Jon Stewart declares something the "most immature montage ever", he's certainly got our attention here in Verbville. So, the president of these United States argued a few days ago that we should support weatherization. Building on 'cash for clunkers', and the fact that much weatherizing is done with a caulk gun, this was labeled 'Cash for Caulkers'. As someone with a robust distinction between /a/ and /ɔ/, I never would have thought to see this as grade school joke material, but lo and behold, if you have the low back merger (pronouncing 'cot' and 'caught' the same, for example), this is the old comedy goldmine …

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Most Immature Montage Ever - Cash for Caulkers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

H.T. to R.C.

Rob Brackenridge, the t-shirt

Well, didn't make it to the Rob Brackenridge show as planned last night — turned out to be a bumpy week in Verbville, but at least one contributor did and said it was great. They alerted me, in fact, to the t-shirts he's selling (here):


I'm never really comfortable with any of the word plays on Ebonics, but I suppose the name of our state calls out for it.

O.M.G.: Rob Brackenridge in Madison!!!!

My heart is palpitating or however the heck you spell it. Just learned that Rob Brackenridge is IN MADISON, WI for the next few days. Can't miss this one!!!!

Rob did a brilliant podcast for the Wisconsin Englishes Project and has a ton of fans in the area. Here's the 411 on the gig.

On learning the alphabet …

The Onion is so smart …

Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded For Memorizing Primitive 26-Character Alphabet

Christopher Pierson, a glassy-eyed, slothful lump of a child who still watches cartoons despite being tall enough to reach a polymer-injection molding station, was endlessly praised Monday for recalling the scant 26 letters in the American alphabet.

Pierson reportedly rattled off the short series of guttural vowels and lumbering, artless consonants after 10 minutes of prompting, a feat that—judging from his overly indulgent teacher's reaction—must rival the great triumph of launching a satellite into orbit. Though witnesses said the unremarkable 4-year-old may also have slurred the letters "L" through "O" into one continuous stream of nonsense, he somehow avoided immediate expulsion and reassignment to a rural millet farm. …

Warner then gave the boy a star-shaped sticker, explaining that he had learned the unsophisticated system of characters containing no ideogrammic compounds or transformed cognates more quickly than she'd expected.

I'm just sorry that they didn't riff a little on how badly the alphabet represents the sounds of English.

Prosody matters!

I mean it really matters … the Onion reports that:

Nation Descends Into Chaos As Throat Infection Throws Off Obama's Cadence

Key quote:

Many say they fear that without Obama's strong, yet compassionate, vocal cadence, the entire country will crumble into dust—leaving only the ashy remains of a once powerful Western empire.

And oh yeah, experimentalists may want to compare notes with these researchers.