![GROJ SALE. Thanks to Anna. [x]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4td0qU9Ss1qimy20o1_400.jpg)
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From here, via Language Log:
The traditional example for this ambiguity is “German teacher” — though in the case of “Vampire Detective” there’s some disagreement about whether the difference is an ambiguity or a vagueness.
At college, one of the improv groups had a sketch that they’d do every few years, with one guy talking about “my old girlfriend,” with all of his friends guessing which ex he was talking about, until he wheeled in an old lady, his girlfriend. I always liked that one.
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Survey!
Native speakers of American English and survey enthusiasts! Complete this survey! Help a linguist out! So sayeth Language Log:
If you’re a native speaker of American English, a Dutch linguist needs your responses to an accent questionnaire:
In this questionnaire we will ask you as a native U.S. English speaker to rate the pronunciation of different speakers, some of whom were born outside the U.S. We ask you to rate how native-like the pronunciations are. While we offer a set of 50 speech fragments, you are free to rate as few or as many as you’d like (of course we’d prefer more, but there is no required minimum).
As you may be aware, I like regional speech more than many things, so I am pretty excited about this.
ETA: AHHH it has my favorite speech sample!! I am going to do all 50 samples, I can tell…
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Silly German ad that I may have posted before! (At the beginning, the older guy is showing the younger guy what the various things are and basically says that he’s in charge of fielding life-saving calls or something. The gist: it’s his first day at the job.)
Reminded of the video by this post at Language Log, in which there is also discussion of why some languages substitute [s] vs. [t] for [θ].
Also, nice Beethoven.
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Shakespeare: original pronunciation
- Original (“original”) (well ok I guess it is actually original here) pronunciation is so interesting! We do lose things with our contemporary pronunciation.
- Historical linguistics is a thing I want to learn more about.
- Can I just point out how GREAT and CUTE and INCREDIBLY NERDY this father-son duo is, getting really excited about rhymes and puns and words? AHHH.
I almost took a class on the history of the English language this semester, and I kind of wish I had, because it is pretty neat, except that it was an English (not ling) class and pretty much entirely busywork, blerg.
People are surprisingly free with barefaced lies when the topic is language. […] I realize you may say, “Oh, where’s your sense of humor? It was just a joke.” But hold on: A random factual lie doesn’t count as a joke. Jokes are humorous. There isn’t any inherent humor in a direct assertion of an empirical falsehood in a context where the addressee lacks immediate sensory evidence of its falsity. Suppose I say, “Every shirt in my closet is green.” A good laugh? Surely not. It’s false, and could easily be discovered to be false by looking in my closet. But that doesn’t endow it with the status of humor.
To credit the comment with cracking a joke we’d have to posit a weird and novel genre of humor where there’s no setup or punchline and it isn’t funny, you just tell a flagrant and pointless lie.
And we don’t need to posit such a genre. The domain of language already provides plentiful evidence of barefaced nonhumorous lying that in other domains might get you ridiculed or jailed.
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HA! Re: the X words for snow horsehockey. See also “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” by Geoff Pullum. Ahhh, Geoff Pullum. Also, this is from my thesis advisor, laughing forever…
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I AM BA’MAN.
from smbc
I always learned that there weren’t glottal stops, but unreleased t’s. That’s always how I transcribe them. Have I been doing it wrong all this time?
Good point, I think it varies among speakers? I think I tend to say an unreleased /t/ more, but I’ve heard glottal stops as well.
Source: praying-semantist
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graduate [from]?
Poll time! Do you say graduate or graduate from? As in, I graduated college yesterday vs. I graduated from college yesterday. Along with your answer, please tell me your age and where you grew up.
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![My [θæŋk ju] card for my thesis advisor! (I cut out the letters on the cover of the card, if you can’t tell.)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3vaxt8wI21qimy20o1_500.jpg)
My [θæŋk ju] card for my thesis advisor! (I cut out the letters on the cover of the card, if you can’t tell.)
Photo reblogged from Joy is in the ears that hear with 22 notes
Google Ngram Viewer display of the relative popularity of the spellings “tomorrow” and “to morrow” in written English in the scanned Google Books corpus, 1800 to 2000. Gosh, it’s almost as if language can change over time!
Now that’s crazy talk! :)
Source: books.google.com
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