While we slog through grading for Winter Quarter, two cartoons today: a Zits and and a Pearls about keeping secrets, or at least trying to.
Archive for March, 2014
Keeping secrets
March 24, 2014Breakfast around the world
March 24, 2014On Playbuzz on the 8th, this piece, “Here’s What Breakfast Looks Like Around The World: You should totally plan your next travel destination according to this list”, by Ariel White. Beautiful food photography, but very strange text.
My Hobby Comics
March 24, 2014Some bounty from the Stanford Linguistics in the Comics freshman seminar, a collection of xkcd cartoons with subheaded metatext “My Hobby”, searched out by Kyle Qian. Kyle found about 1,300 xkcd cartoons online, 36 of them subheaded this way, and he posted 7 of them with discussion. (I’ll put off posting about his comments until he gives me permission. The cartoons are in some sense public, but Kyle’s analysis is certainly not.)
Multiple puns
March 23, 2014From many sources, this Scott Hilburn cartoon:
A pile of related puns, on “Amazing Grac e”.
Sunday melange
March 23, 2014Four recent cartoons, from several sources and of very different tones: a Bizarro, a Zits, a Doonesbury, and a Paul Noth New Yorker cartoon:
hentai
March 22, 2014Mountain Man Linguistics
March 22, 2014A recent appeal from grad student Paul Reed:
I am a PhD candidate at the University of South Carolina. I am a sociophonetician, and my research focuses on varieties of American English in the Southern United States. My dissertation investigates the vowel and intonation systems of Appalachian English.
… I am working on a project with Dr. Stan Dubinsky and I am writing to see if you would be willing to take a few minutes to take some surveys to help facilitate our research (the links for which are included at the bottom of this post in no particular order). [details on Reed’s Blogspot site, link above] The experiments that we’re asking you to participate in are part of a project aimed at finding out more about how the English language works, (in particular) examining how Modern American English is perceived. Each survey involves rating sound clips based on the acceptability of various sentences and should only take about 15 minutes to do.
I’m happy to pass this request on, but my main interest here is in the label Appalachian English.
Another three for the weekend
March 22, 2014Three more cartoons, on varied topics: a Zippy, a Zits, and a Pearls Before Swine:
Another from Jane
March 22, 2014(Not really about language, but yet another quotation from Jane Austen, this time from a letter of March 23, 1817. Thanks to Chris Ambidge.)
The repetition of /ɪ/ in sick and wicked is nice.
Original pronunciation
March 21, 2014Many people have written to me recommending a video by David and Ben Crystal on the “Original Pronunciation” (OP) of Shakespeare vs. the Received Standard pronunciation we’re become accustomed to in performances of the Bard of Avon. Fascinating stuff, treated in a Language Log posting by David Beaver of 9/7/13: “Rot and Rot (a really, really rude sex joke)”.
Note that “Original Pronunciation” doesn’t mean the first there was, because that would take us back to Old English and Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European and beyond (insofar as we can imagine beyond). And the terminology is misleading because it suggests that there was only one pronunciation for the characters in the Shakespearean canon; there was unquestionably variation in the pronunciation of characters according to their place in society. But the OP label does highlight differences between current performance practices and the ones of Shakespeare’s time.
However, my point here is not to revive this discussion, but to note that one of my correspondents refers to the variety in question as ancient English, a label students of mine have often used for what is technically Early Modern English (not oven Old English). Well, it’s old, really old, so it must be ancient.