Arnold Zwicky's Blog

My adventures in Music with Linguist’s Names recently led me — see the comments here — back to Dick Dative and the Experiencers (Charles Ulrich and friends), from the distant past. Ned Deily has now transformed my old 45 rpm vinyl recording into sound files (and cleaned up the sound a good bit), so now you can appreciate them too.

(Ordinarily I don’t post sound files, for fear of life-destroying legal consequences, but in this case there seems to be no copyright, just two songs recorded for fun — on the ad hoc label Allophone Records — for the enjoyment of linguist friends.)

You can hear “Please Mister Postal” (all example sentences certified as genuine, lifted from Paul M. Postal’s writing) by clicking here.

And you can hear “Colorless Green Blues” (based on Chomsky’s famous invented example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, now over 50 years old) by clicking here.

This entry was posted on July 6, 2010 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Language and music, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.