Humans Who Read Grammars

AllThingsLinguistic on tumblr just posted something brilliant: an online game of Proto-Indo-European Hangman! So, language families are groups of languages with a common ancestor, that most old language is known as the proto-language. The word family is often used both to refer to the top-level-grouping and sometimes also lower levels. I prefer using it only for top-level, but hey that's me. There's been roughly 27 proto-languages reconstructed at that top-most level. It should come as no surprise that Indo-European is one that we know the most about. The study of languages history and reconstruction is within the field of Historial Linguistics. It's an area where the debates can get unusually intense, for example like when Burushaski was suggested as being IE and not an isolate. (Isolate = language with no known living relatives.) As an illustration of the field: Ethnologue counts 130 families, Campbell (2007) 350, Nichols (1992) approx 300, WALS 212 and finall...

 You find it here!   A while ago I made a post helping people with the jungle of linguistic terminology by listing some resources and adding some commentary and reflections on the topic. It was in relation to AllThingsLinguistics tumblr-crowdsourcing-drive improving the linguistics-explaining resources of the internet, particularly on Wikipedia (you can read more about it on the tag lingcrowd ). I've now moved that post to the blog here, under a permanent heading called " Help! I don't understand linguistic terminology! " I've added more stuff, go have a look! In particular I've added reflections on what "true definitions " are, framework/model/theory-neutrality, why this all matters to typology etc. In relation to those thoughts I feel compelled to repeat this first-world-problems-meme we made for an old tumblr post . Happy terminology-defining and critical-typological-thinking everyone!

(Re-blogging from the blog of the IOL (International Linguistics Olympiad ), with added gifs ^^! The IOL is a contest for secondary school students in linguistics, read more here .) All the problems from the 12th International Linguistics Olympiad that took place in Beijing this July 2014 are now up on the official IOL-website ! The problem set is multilingual, as it has been since the start in 2003. This year we have 16 different languages: Bulgarian Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian. We are, as always, extremely grateful to and impressed by  the Problem Committee and the Jury. The problems are not written wholly in one language, but in a kind of “solverese”. If you want to read more about how that works, read this: Derzhanski, Ivan (2013) Multilingual Editing of Linguistic Problems, In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Teaching NLP and...

Also applicable to when you yourself set up a research plan and devoted too little time to the phase labeled "data collection".

This is actually an old post by Suzanne back on tumblr , but since we've invited some more fieldworkers to join us here on blogger I figured this deserved a re-post :)!

There's this thing called the International Linguistics Olympiad , one of the authors of this blog - Hedvig - just so happens to be one of the organisers. It's for students of secondary schools in lots of different countries, they all compete in there national contests and then we all meet in the summer for the big international show-down. This years contest in Beijing recently finished . The problems are all based on insights of linguistics, it's kinda difficult to explain - why don't you just have a look-se ?  It's a cool contest, one of the cool things about it is that everyone competes in different languages. The problem set and the Jury's correcting work is all multilingual. You can read more about that here . Well, well. Anyway. The news-worthy part is that IOL has increased its internet  presence . Now, there's a regular webpage  a blog a  facebook page  a tumblr aaand  a twitter Puuh!  So, if you guys enjo...

I've got something for those of us who enjoy satirical linguistics (looking at you  speculativegrammarian ) and/or jokes based on adventures and anxiety during grad school (looking at you  whatshouldwecalllinguistics  &  @researchinprogress ). Two comedy gems from the Gothenburg! First, we've got "Conversation as Paranoia" by Hugh Aelgh from 1976 ( free original PDF here  and  digital specgram-version here) . There we can learn the 11 principles of paranoia. It starts with: This paper has arisen as a direct reaction to Allwood 1976. In his thesis, Allwood tries to show that human beings are rational and cooperative and that this is particularly true of them when they talk. This, of course, is utter nonsense. Such an absurd view can only be the result of the author’s complete neglect of all serious research in the study of human behavior, such as the work of S. Potter and C.N. Parkinson. I now want to show that human communication behavior ...

These are linguistic trading cards that were made by  Mikael Parkvall,  there's a whole great collection of them. I'll put up some more under the tag "lingvistiska samlarbilder" ("linguistic trading cards"). They are in Swedish, but I think you don't need no Google translate to figure out "citat av X". I'll put up the ones that will be understandable to you (I'll leave the Swede-internal jokes ^^)! These two features Noam Chomsky and  Nim Chimpsky . Nim was one of many chimpanzees that we have tried to teach some kind of language similar to humans. You can read more about him, the studies and controversies  here . The name is, as you might have guessed, a pun on the name of the famous linguist Noam Chomsky who has, among other things, claimed that there are features of human language that other primates cannot acquire. In particular we are talking about the doubly articulated nature of the language system, i.e. ...

We're on blogger now, too! We've been at tumblr now for a while, as Humans Who Read Grammars (popularly misunderstood as "Humans Whore Ad Grammars", what ever that means ^^). Now we're going to move posting of originals to blogger , under the same name. Posts here will still get to our tumblr and twitter. This is not a huge change, don't worry. It'll mainly make it easier for non-tumblrers to participate in discussions, and we get more formatting options. If you're on the blogger site and what to read older post by us: go to the tumblr. In particular, check out the tag Free Online Linguistic Databases and Goodie From Grammar Reading .   We'll continue writing posts about topics relating to linguistic diversity, documentation and description! Hurray! 

HOLD ON, NOT TRUE!  THERE'S LOTS MORE OLD POSTS ON TUMBLR FROM BEFORE WE MOVED TO BLOGGER.   YOU FIND 'EM HERE:  humanswhoreadgrammarsbeforeblogger In particular, we recommend checking out the tag  Free  Online Linguistic Databases  and  Goodie From Grammar Reading .  Have fun!