Humans Who Read Grammars

Hello readers of Humans Who Read Grammars, As well as writing on this blog, I also work with the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL*). The IOL is a contest for students of secondary school from all over the world where they get to compete in solving linguistic puzzles. Normally in order to explain what the contest is all about I send people to the page with old problem sets,  but there's a hip IOL-meme page that's produced some very apt memes that may do a better job at explaining the contest to linguists. I'll paste them in below. ( Remember how we started as a meme-based blog for typologists? ) I recently made a post on our blog over there about the dominance of European countries in the contest and language diversity . For that post, I derived a little data visualisation of speaker populations per language (based on the 19th edition of Ethnologue) with infogram . I thought y'all might like it as well, so I'm sharing it here too. By the way, if you...

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...