Speculative Grammarian Podcast

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIX — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Madalena Cruz-Ferreira for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss the fact that German speakers can’t say “squirrel” and whether “modulo” is the nerdiest preposition. Finally, they give more Prescriptivist Confessions.

Variation in the English Indefinite Article; by Tim Pulju; From Volume XVI, Number 4, of Psammeticus Quarterly, August 1989. — The problem of variation in the English indefinite article between the forms “a” and “an” has long vexed linguists. In his 1933 classic, “Language”, Bloomfield cited this case as an example of free variation at the morphological level, saying, “There seems to be no principled basis for predicting which form occurs in which contexts.” This solution was accepted by the neo-Bloomfieldians in general. (Read by Trey Jones.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVIII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics; and then he sticks around for the rest of the podcast, again. They also discuss otovermology and whether Burushaski is Indo-European, and interview Tim about his early days with SpecGram.

Hunting the Elusive Labio-Nasal; by Claude Searsplainpockets; From Volume CLI, No 3 of Speculative Grammarian, July 2006. — The now well-known clicks found in certain African languages must have come as quite a shock to the first European linguists who heard them. Many of the sounds were familiar, of course, but the idea that they could be a component of language had to have been hard to believe. Even now the languages of Africa have secrets to share—note the recent addition of “right hook v” to the IPA as the symbol for the “labiodental flap” found in numerous African languages. (Read by Claude Searsplainpockets.)

The Language of Prehistory; by Merritt Greenberg and Joseph Ruhlen; From Volume CLI, Number 4 of Speculative Grammarian, October 2006. — Sticks and stones may break my bones and words used to hurt a lot, too. (Read by Keith Slater.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics; and then he sticks around for the rest of the podcast. They also discuss aggressiveness in teenage girls caused by the character limitations of social media and the information density of various languages, as well as exploring a number of phonetical things you know that you may not know that you know.

Descriptivism X!; by Ldaxin Kushtaka; From Volume CLX , Number 4 of Speculative Grammarian, January 2011. — Most practicing linguists (and even many who have gotten pretty good at it) will declare a philosophical allegiance to descriptivism, while harboring a number of prescriptivist pet peeves. Even the Managing Editor of Speculative Grammarian has admitted “a strangely compelling need to abandon my Descriptivist Idealism in favor of Prescriptivist Tyranny.” (Read by Trey Jones.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVI — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Scott Yarborough for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss doing NLP “from scratch” and automated news story writing, as well as exploring a number of language-related conspiracy theories.

Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (Review); by Robert E. Lee; From Volume XVI, Number 3 of Psammeticus Quarterly, May 1989. — This slim volume, first published in 1957 and occasionally reprinted since then, has attracted surprisingly little attention in linguistic circles. It is unfortunate that this is the case, for in the book Chomsky proposes a truly innovative approach to syntactic problems which have plagued linguists since the days of Bloomfield. (Read by Keith Slater.)

Book Review: Point’s A Grammar of the Lederhosen Tai; by Enrich Barbarosa del la Boca, Ph.D; From Volume CLII, Number 1 of Speculative Grammarian, January 2007. — After her landmark lexical study of the Frog-eating Aika in 1999, this year Point has given us another extensive monograph on the Migratory Tribes of Thailand. While other minorities in Thailand are torn between integrating into the larger society and maintaining their unique cultural identities, the so-called Migratory Tribes have completely isolated themselves from the mainstream. (Read by Keith Slater.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Scott Yarborough for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss bio- and linguistic diversity, the likability of simple names, and give high-quality sample answers to common linguistics comprehensive exam questions.

Review of Pulju’s An Optimality-Theoretic Account of the History of Linguistics: Past, Present, Future; by TJP, Lecturer in Linguistics and Classics, Dartmouth College; From Volume CLI, Number 2 of Speculative Grammarian, April 2006. — It is a great sorrow to those of us who remember the glory days of Psammeticus Press—those fabled days when it was the leading linguistics publisher in the world—nay, what is more, in the entire history of the world—it is, I repeat, a great sorrow to us to witness the depths to which the beloved imprint has sunk with the publication of this lamentable volume. What could have possessed PsPress’s current chairman K. Winnipesaukee Slater III, a meek man, to be sure, and mild, but still a reputable scholar, and not, so far as we know, entirely devoid of common sense nor of the finer aesthetic feelings, to defile his company’s good name by foisting upon an unsuspecting public this lunatic political screed thinly disguised as a bit of historico-linguistic scholarship? (Read by Joey W

The Collected Wisdom of Linguists, Part Γ; by The SpecGram Council of Sages; From Volume CLXIV, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, May 2012. — In this third of three installments, we share with you the proverbial wisdom of ancient sages of philology and linguistics, honed and refined through the ages by the folk wisdom and common sense of the masses. Should you sense a contradiction, recall also that “Proverbs run in pairs.” (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Gabe Olsen for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss how our brains make other people less boring, the likability of left-handed- vs right-handed-typed words, and a book about hyperpolyglots.

Is Translation Possible? The Answer Rhymes with Noh; by Trent Slater; From Volume CLVIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, February 2010. — While translation studies continues to grow as a field, with benefits being felt not only in applied linguistics but also in the world-at-large, one obvious fact continues to be overlooked. Scholars who pore over the results of the process called “translation” omit to tell their readers of the theoretical questioning of the very object of their study. Put another way, while everyone is busy examining “translations,” no one bothers to ask whether translation is actually possible. (Read by Trey Jones.)

Reconstructed Proto-Franco-Sino-Indonesian: Eleven Examples; by Tim Pulju; From Volume XVI, Number 3, of Psammeticus Quarterly, May, 1989. — In 1986, I published in Psammeticus Quarterly (Vol. XII, No. 4) an article entitled “Similarities in Form and Meaning in French, Chinese, and Indonesian,” which noted several similarities in form and meaning in French, Chinese, and Indonesian, and suggested that someone do further research to determine whether the languages were genetically related. (Read by Keith Slater.)

The Collected Wisdom of Linguists, Part Β; by The SpecGram Council of Sages; From Volume CLXIV, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2012. — In this second of three installments, we share with you the proverbial wisdom of ancient sages of philology and linguistics, honed and refined through the ages by the folk wisdom and common sense of the masses. Should you sense a contradiction, recall also that “Proverbs run in pairs.” (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Gabe Olsen for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss chimpanzee gestures and the shutter-upper gun, and indulge in more Prescriptivist Confessions.

The Collected Wisdom of Linguists, Part Α; by The SpecGram Council of Sages; From Volume CLXIV, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, February 2012. — In this first of three installments, we share with you the proverbial wisdom of ancient sages of philology and linguistics, honed and refined through the ages by the folk wisdom and common sense of the masses. Should you sense a contradiction, recall also that “Proverbs run in pairs.” (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.)

Spaghetti or Lasagna for Linguists; by The LSA Committee on Comestibles in Linguistics; From Volume CLXIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, November 2011. — In order to understand various types of linguists better, we conducted a controlled experiment. Very simply, we asked each linguist “Do you want spaghetti or lasagna for dinner?” We think the replies we got are instructive, and so we are sharing them with you. (Read by Elliott Hoey.)