Humans Who Read Grammars

People love languages; there are many game shows on TV which are language-based.  Most language quiz shows test contestants on their knowledge of the broadcasting language itself. For instance, English-language channels testing contestants on their knowledge of the English language and English literature: Wheel of Fortune ; e.g. CBS News Have you seen quiz shows on TV where they quiz contestants on languages other than the broadcasting language (or some major international language)? Wouldn't it be cool if there are quiz shows on TV where they test contestants on languages that are rarely or never broadcasted?  Here I will talk about the "dialect quiz shows" in China, which I think can be emulated in many other parts of the world. These shows are entertaining for the general audience (if done right), and can help raise the interest in regional languages. (In this blogpost, there are many pics/gifs of people struggling and failing. They are not suggesting that...

A typical recording situation from my own fieldwork.  Melenesa (my research assistant) and Ta'alolo (one of my informants) in Neiafu-Tai village on Savai'i, in Samoa. Keeping on the theme of linguistic fieldwork (see Jeremy's previous post about his fieldwork experiences here here and Jesse's post about measuring nasality with earbuds here) , I've also got something for you! Two colleagues of mine in the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity project, Eri Kashima and Mark Ellison, have figured out a neat way of saving time on segmenting up sound files for transcription. Linguistic fieldwork is so much more than just the time spent in the field site, when you come home there's a lot of work that needs to be done with annotating your files, segmenting them up and in different other ways preparing them for the analysis you want to do. Yours truly, handling transcription files in ELAN in her office in Coombs, Canberra. One thing that takes a lot of time, a...

Nasal leakage: It's a real condition affecting field linguists around the world. Does the language you work on have nasal sounds? Rhetorical question! Of course, it does! Even if nasality is a non-contrastive feature of a language, air finds its way out through the schnoz one way or another during language production [ WALS; nasality ] . There's no stopping the all-knowing nose . While the burning question on everyone's mind is, if the magnificent bone structure of Worf's forehead is connected to his nasal cavity, what kind of resonance can we expect, there's a more pressing issue here (yes, really). A survey of 372[1] grammars listed on the Grammar Watch List of the Association of Linguistic Typology revealed that empirical bases for claims regarding nasality are virtually non-existent. In cases were nasality was described, they were solely based on impressionistic observations. The reasons for this in the past had often been just; equipment for ...