Wikipedia has a list of names for generic/unknown people used in different countries. Apparently John Doe isn’t used much outside the U.S.
Some favorites: Don Nadie (”Sir Nobody”, Argentina), Marko Marković and Petar Petrović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Jos Bleau (Quebec), Joe Borg (Malta), and Johnny Foreigner (UK).
I had a teacher in high school who […]
As you may or may not be aware, I’m taking a class this summer to learn ASL (it’s a lot of fun). In order to fulfill the “Deaf culture” requirement, this Sunday I want to a Deaf church.
Inter-community Church of God is a non-denominational Protestant church, which serves hearing people, Deaf people, and their […]
I got the following IM today:
“I traded the permanent parking spot for the bigger bedroom”
My first thought was “why would you get rid of the bigger bedroom?”
Apparently the natural reading of this sentence is that the speaker originally had the parking spot and then got the bigger bedroom, but I can read it either way. […]
Several years ago (in fact, I think it was 2004), I went to BUCLD with JonW. The BU linguistics club was selling t-shirts that read (approximately) [aj <3 lɪŋgwɪsts].
I almost hesitated to buy one, because of the spelling of “linguists” — I pronounce it as [liŋgwɪsts] (=”[leen]guists”, for my non-IPA-reading friends), whereas the […]
I like this (possibly fake?) iPhone ad, for obvious reasons. Click the image to go to the video. (Also, props for including ASL among the languages represented.)
“Bilingual countries don’t work”
- Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo
Guess he’s never been to Canada… Or Belgium… Or Luxembourg… (the list goes on…)
Starting in the fall, I’ll officially be a PhD student!
On Friday, I took a trip down to scenic New Brunswick, New Jersey to visit the Linguistics Department at Rutgers.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled to take a 6am train, but at least the scenery was pretty:
In spite of the early morning travel, I had a great […]
Very interesting things are said when people don’t think you can understand them.
The other week when I was at UMB to meet with Luis Alonso-Ovalle, I overheard two custodians engaged in the following conversation, translated from the Spanish.
BoingBoing recently linked to the “book of record” for the time capsule buried at the 1939 World’s Fair, meant to be opened 5000 years later, in 6939.
Of course, the most interesting part for me was the section attempting to teach English to the future-Earthlings. It details the sounds and syntax of “1939 English”, includes […]
Mark Liberman finally put up the slides from his LSA talk, The Future of Linguistics.
I think they’re an interesting read, even (and perhaps especially to non-linguists. Liberman’s narrative is full of wonderful anecdotes, and explains why linguistics is in the state it’s in, and what can be done to change it.
Pop Psych is huge. […]
A tree made with qtree
So, I’ve been playing a lot with LaTeX the last few days (brought on, in part, but the LSA conference), and I’m really starting to like it.
You can see the results of my playing here (pdf).
Aside from being able to easily typeset really pretty trees, tables, and OT tableaux, a really […]
Well, I survived my first LSA conference! In fact, I’d go as far as to say I did more than survive - I even had a good time and learned a few things!
The Tensor organized a little linguablogger meetup, and even though I don’t fall into that category, housing JonW has certain benefits and […]
As linguists deal with language on a daily basis (well, to be fair, I should hope that most people use language daily, but you know what I mean), they were bound to come up with some pretty crazy terms to describe things. I’ve started collecting some of my favorites on the wiki. Linguists, […]
I have decided to run a little competition here on AB.C.
The following statements all came from one professor during a linguistics course. Try to guess what the prof was talking about when each of these was said. The winner gets no prize! Leave your guesses in the comments. Some of these […]
Not fickle courses, mind you. Just that the tests are fickle, and there will be something about courses in this post.
I may be influenced largely by the fact that I’m taking the GRE (or as Danny called it, the ToD) on Friday, but I’m even further convinced than before that standardized testing is a […]
As The Tenser points out, there’s some new planet-renamin’ afoot.
The dwarf planet formerly known as Xena (you’ll see why it’s bold in a second) is now known as Eris (the goddess of strife). Makes good sense for the dwarf planet that caused the whole pluto-naming ruckus, right?
XenaEris’s moon has been named Dysnomia (Eris’s daughter. […]
You know the phrase, from Scooby Doo, “I would have gotten away with it to, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids…”?
Well, as I was running that phrase through my head (don’t ask, I do that sometimes with random phrases), I came up with a question.
Please comment here and tell me which of the following […]
A few days ago, I talked about some language podcasts. One of the Word Nerds commented on that post, and I replied.
That whole “conversation” got me thinking about blogs, the internet, and connectivity in general. It amazed me that I was able to write about something, and the creator of that particular something […]
Wanted: a good language podcast that doesn’t just talk from a prescriptivist perspective.
I listen to two language programs - The Word Nerds (”A weekly podcast about words, language, and why we say the things we do) and A Way With Words (”A humorous and instructional joyride through the English language”). They’re both pretty funny, […]
And that debate is accessible, even to non-linguists.
The internet was a-buzz recently with reports of the Aymara people, and their weird time-space paradigm (the report claims that they see the “future” as “behind” and the “past” as “in front”).
Linguists generally follow the maxim people who say that some language is unique for this or that […]