Memes for linguists!

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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:

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 interesting life of the chimpanzee Neam Chimpsky, go here.



 The cards are created by Mikael Parkvall, lecturer in linguistics at Stockholm University (and my teacher and former supervisor). They're funny and illustrative. He's a well published linguist, and also does intelligent and popular books for the public. One book by him you might like is "Limits of Language - Almost Everything You Didn't Like about Language and Languages".

The cards are in Swedish, but most often easily understood by non-Swedish speakers. In this blog posts not in english are tagged "not English", posts in Swedish are tagged "på svenska".

 Kittens and Linguistic Diversity
Readers of this blog are already familiar with the these, for a while we set up an automatic feed from them but then we decided to close the tap as it got slightly too exciting ^^! The idea is quite simple, but nonetheless brilliant, take an interesting utterance from a grammar of a foreign language and pair it with a picture of a cat that fits. The creators of these masterpieces are the linguists Ekaterina Sergeeva, Anna Alexandrova, Luca Ruggeri and Hilário De Sousa. Here's a recent example by Luca:

Hewitt, B. G. 1995. Georgian. A Structural Reference Grammar. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, p. 88 #Georgian #Kartvelian#InterrogativeParticles #SPECTRE #masdar
Hope you enjoyed this, and do tell your friends about these two so we can spread the joy!

Bis,
Hed



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