Humans Who Read Grammars

Hola, it's memes time! Not any memes, memes that are particularly entertaining and interesting to linguists and that are created by linguists. If you like 'em, spread 'em! There's two sources of memes for linguists that I'd like to tell you about: Parkvall's Lingvistiska Samlarbilder ( Book of Faces and Tumblr)    Kittens and Linguistic Diversity ( Book of Faces ) Parkvalls samlarbilder The idea behind Parkvalls Samlarbilder is quite simple, "samlarbilder" means "collectors/trading cards" in Swedish and the cards feature something that is of significant value to linguists. Below are two more examples, the Berlin & Kay results for a few languages and the cover of the first edition of Saussure's famous work (as compiled by his students) which is foundational to much modern linguistics. The above to cards features quotes by Mr Chomsky and Mr Chimpsky, two rather talented primates :). If you want to know more about the inter...

I'm reading Holisky & Gagua (1994), a grammar sketch of Batsbi. I just came across this sentence, "the words said by him remained toast". I like it, a lot. I take it that despite some sort of condition or expectation, the words he said remained to best be described as speeches or hot white bread. Like some sort of uncle at a wedding who never stops talking once he's got the space. There is no more context, so all we can do is speculate. Batsbi [bbl, bats1242] is spoken at the dot on this map below and transitivising affixes, inclusive pronouns and aorist. References Holisky, Dee Ann and Rusudan Gagua. 1994. Tsova-Tush (Batsbi). In Rieks Smeets (ed.), North East Caucasian Languages Part 2, 147-212. Delmar, New York: Caravan Books.