Speculative Grammarian Podcast

Linguistic Emissions Reduction Sought; by SpecGram Wire Services; From Volume CLIII, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, September 2007 — Sanaa, Yemen—Tempers flared at global climate talks today, as environmental and linguistic concerns met head-on. The dispute is about so-called “inefficient articulations,” which detractors say increase the metabolic cost of speaking, while offering no linguistic benefit to speakers. These articulations, such as the large transition between the uvular [q] and palatal [i] in the Arabic surname Sadeqi, require more metabolic energy than most other segmental transitions, and are contributing to global warming, detractors say. (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.)