"A new Tower of Babel, but from cheese"

Alexandra Petri has some images at WaPo (here) with some Venn humor. The link is to "Things Newt thinks about" — Newt, food, grandiose ideas — with the intersection of the last two being:

 Let's construct a new Tower of Babel, but from cheese.

Just a little break from all the lingua-blog posts about the piece in Science Times about young women's language, including vocal fry.

Linguistics tattoos, etc.

Science Times now has an online slide show about science tattoos, here. The author of the piece, Carl Zimmer, long ago did something on linguistics tattoos, featuring a tiny glottal stop (here). A couple of years ago, a bunch of posts on lingua-blogs and elsewhere mentioned other linguistics tattoos, including an IPA vowel chart on the Log (here).

The slide show reminded me, though, that I occasionally hear people talk about linguistics tattoos and other graphics associated with our field. The image here is of a bowling shirt from a bowling team that some UW–Madison grad students started some years ago, The Gutturals. It's the IPA symbol for an epiglottal plosive, a prototypical guttural. (I don't know if they got a lot of gutteral reactions, though, or even guttural reactions.)

So, a question, gentle readers: Aside from t-shirts, what's your favorite image of linguistics in a non-linguistics context?

Old school translation humor?

The recent passing of Eugene Nida has gone more or less unremarked on in linguistics blogs, at least those that I follow. It has been huge news among missionary types, judging from a quick Google search. This reflects his career, I suppose, but he actually did do real work in linguistics — the image is the cover of a book he published with the University of Michigan Press.

While there's a lot of importance to be said about missionary linguistics and probably about his role in it, I'm not going to deal with that now. I have far less significant stuff in mind.

The NYT did a long obit on Nida (here). They  laid out his contribution to translation as being in his “dynamic equivalence” or “functional equivalence” approach, that is, the effort to provide idiomatic translations rather than literal, word-by-word ones. I don't know the history of translation at all, but he certainly wasn't the first to do this by any stretch. But again, my purpose is a lower one.

The obit ends with this note:

Translated back into English, some of the Bible passages produced using Mr. Nida’s method yield a resonant poetry. As The New York Times reported in a 1955 article about his work, “‘I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’” 

Is this a print instance of what some now call 'BabelFish humor'? Or a sophisticated statement about metaphor and language change (since it's within a small region)? I'm going with colonialist-era exoticization of languages/cultures readers don't have any clue about.

Earthquake humor?

On the Randi Rhodes show just now, the guest host is Nicole Sandler was just reading tweets about the east coast earthquake. In the hope that there weren't serious injuries or damage, here's a language-related bit of humor:

I was rotf, but not l-ing.

I don't know why, but it seems funny.

xkcd on stage

I almost missed this xkcd, Open Mic Night, and containing these two panels. The first one, I still can't bring myself to laugh about, but it's classic xkcd, and linguistic.

The second one, well, I confess that I didn't get it at first. Had to look it up, basically. Hey, so I'm not a programmer.

We will get back to actual linguistics soon, but we're all wound up here about the beginning of the semester …

Failed linguistic humor: "sexual linguistics"

It turns out that one of the core reasons that the bloggers who make up Team Verb tend to maintain our thin veil of pseudonymy is simple: Fear of the failed joke. But take heart, fellow Verbs, things could be worse:

The Weekly World News (yes, they still exist, on-line), just ran this piece:

BRITISH ACCENT NO LONGER SEXY, STUDY FINDS

Read it and weep quietly. Or read the comments and maybe chuckle a little. Or, if you get the joke, please clue me in.

Vocabulary hoax humor, best ever?

Wonkette continues its hilarious and über-snarky Palin coverage, with a current focus on Levi Johnston posing for Playgirl magazine. (Am I the only one who thought that died in the 1970s or something?)

As discussed here long ago, Wonkette has a riff about the whole Palin crew as "snowbillies". Playing on that, a commenter, pampl, has posted this comment:

The Wasillan language has over a dozen words for meth-dealing pseudo-in-laws.

The story is here, but I caution you that if you click there, you'll see more of Levi than you ever wanted to. (Seems like a safe assumption, but maybe I'm wrong.)

Image from here.

In layman's terms

The numbers that shape our world, from the Onion:

Not quite how language acquisition works ...

but I'm really glad my parents didn't try it ...


Follow this link to see the rollover.

So, which phonologist ARE you?

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.

Speech synthesis and the Simpsons

OK, here's the rare case where I'm unwilling to assume that the writers for the Simpsons had full knowledge of just how funny something was. I was talking about speech sounds yesterday in class and paraphrased this opening bit from Nittrouer and Lowenstein's 2008 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America:

Perhaps the trouble all started in 1944 when Frank Cooper and Al Liberman decided to build a reading machine for the blind. At that time they adopted what Liberman would later call the “horizontal view” in his book, Speech: A Special Code 1996 . According to this view separate segments are aligned in the speech signal in a linear fashion, strictly auditory perceptual processes recover the acoustic character of each segment, and cognitive processes then translate those acoustic descriptors into phonemic units, void of physical attributes. Assuming this much about the acoustic speech signal, Cooper and Liberman turned their attention to what they saw as the truly difficult problem: optically isolating the letters on the page that would need to be converted into acoustic segments. But their own experiments soon revealed the intractable problem that listeners are unable to recognize separate acoustic elements presented at a rate replicating typical speech production.

A student started grinning immediately. When we reached an appropriate pause, I asked what was up and he said that there was a Simpsons' episode ("Smart and Smarter", it turns out) where Maggie gets a toy. Here's a key passage (from here):

Homer: Look what they sent over. A talking dealy. His name is Phonics Frog.
(Homer presses A, B, and C)
Phonics Frog: Ah-Buh-Cuh…
(Homer types his name)
Phonics Frog: Huh-Oh-Muh-Eh-Ur
Homer: That's me! Huh-Oh-Muh-Eh-Ur.

Of course, HeiDeas covered this (here), quite reasonably under the rubric of 'hooked on phonics, but the thought of 1940s speech science matches the Simpsons is nice. Just don't let me get started on the South Park "Hooked on Monkey Fonics" episode.

More Fourier fun!?!?

What a way to end the year. I liked this xkcd even before seeing the rollover, even before I saw the reference to Fourier transform.


The rollover is:

Cuttlefish and language as a uniquely human property

Now, hold on just one second there, xkcd. That you can train cuttlefish to kill physicists, well, I could almost kinda buy that in a cartoon. But that you can teach them to talk about it?*

*Check out the rollover. It may suggest another language connection.

lol cat: Scrabble edition

Much like with opacity, I keep swearing I'll never post about lol cats again, but I keep doing it. This pic — sent along from G.T. (who gets the ht) via J.S. — is at least relevant to dialectology, sociolinguistics and language change …


Yes, I'll return to finish up the opacity deal, although I'm starting to feel a lot like the Tommy Lee Jones character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, at the end of No Country for Old Men: Tired of all the bloodshed and unable to understand the level of violence around me. (And I can't believe I missed that Eric's DEE comment was specifically about phonological patterns.)

Language decline = threat to democracy

This just passed along by a regular reader.


We've all gotten used to the cries about the decline of language and the decline of civilization, but this one sounds a kind of unique note. Yeah, whatevs.

The Onion does German?

America's Finest News Source, onion.com, has long played with German-language stuff. I've always assumed that about the names of the founders, the Zweibel family, which has gotta be German Zwiebel 'onion' with a little orthographic play.

So the next-to-last-item below isn't a shock:

But when you get to the horoscopes, I'm baffled by this:

Wundt, first off, presumably counts as a psychologist (a founder of the modern field, in fact) and I thought he trained in the natural sciences. (No time to check right now.) So, he's a philosopher only in a very broad sense. Is this some really smart allusion to XPhi? The rest were more prototypical philosophers, and German-language ones, I'll grant, but Heidegger was born in September of 1889, so not a "19th century" philosopher in any usual sense.

Wtf?

More gibberish in the comics!

You do read Tom Tomorrow, right? (If not, I'll forgive you if you quickly click here and start seeing what you've been missing.) His latest strip, in that link, contains another gibberish reference! I've shown that frame on the right.

I'm not sure this helps with the P.S. Mueller strip from a couple of weeks back, but ...

Gibberish

So, we've had some discussions in the Verb family about what this means … any ideas?