Gretchen McCulloch's Blog, page 3
September 14, 2022
August 2022: redesigning the International Phonetic Alphabet (to put in your pocket)
This month, we rethought the structure of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Okay, let me explain.
The IPA is typically presented in a chart that shows the sounds of languages of the world arranged in two dimensions: from top to bottom as the mouth is more and more open and from left to right as the sound is produced from the front of the mouth to the back. It’s elegant, it’s informative, it’s a highly familiar reference diagram for linguists. So my cohost Lauren Gawne and I thought it...
August 24, 2022
July 2022: In which I get my brain scanned!
This month’s Lingthusiasm episodes were a special double feature from my trip to Boston to get my brain scanned and finally discover whether I am one of the extremely special left-handed people who has their language centres on the right or both sides of the brain instead of the left. Spoiler: I am not, mine is on the right, just like most other people, left- and right-handed.
However! It was still really neat to take off all my metal items and go in the massive magnet that is an MRI machine...
July 15, 2022
June 2022: Modals and a cool linguistics paper
This month I attended a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation, where I was on panels about swearing in science fiction and fantasy and the delightful Steerswoman books, as well as doing a dramatic reading from Ryan North’s Romeo and/or Juliet book.
Some linguists got very excited about a very cool linguistics paper by the late Anne Cutler, which I won’t spoil (because it really does have spoilers, but trust me you don’t need any particular linguistics background to get why it...
June 15, 2022
May 2022: 10th blogiversary and Japanese translation of Because Internet
In May, I hit my 10-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic. I celebrated with two linkposts, one of the usual highlights from the past year and another, shorter post of more zoomed-out highlights from the past decade.
I participated for the second year running as a contestent in Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.
The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages. The bonus episode...
May 17, 2022
April 2022: #103papers, Lingthusiasm liveshow, and LingComm Grantees
This month, I started a new reading project! It’s inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia that came out last year, and which surveys the languages represented by all of the papers published in the four main child language acquistion research journals. Kidd & Garcia find that these journals contain papers about 103 languages; while this number is small compared to the total number of languages in the world (over 7000) and even the number of languages typically found in other cross-ling...
April 10, 2022
March 2022: PIE Day and Memory Speaks
Here are some Pi Day (3rd month, 14th day) facts about the PIE (Proto-Indo-European). Both of these guys were named William Jones, confusingly enough.
pi day PIE facts https://t.co/vn1NWyS9TF
— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 14, 2022
The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word order, we love (transcript). The bonus episode was Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics. The deadline for the LingComm Grant applications was March 31st, so next month we head int...
March 10, 2022
February 2022: Teaching with Because Internet survey and Lingthusiasm liveshow in April
I set up a survey for anyone who’s been using Because Internet for teaching – put in what you’ve been doing and I’ll compile and share it with other instructors!
Do you tell students to read Because Internet?
— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) February 14, 2022
Would you like to help other instructors?
By popular request, I've made a quick survey about how people teach with Because Internet!
If we get enough responses I'll compile it into a helpful summary post!https://t.co/NxqialNqXv
The...
February 10, 2022
January 2022: LSA, LingComm Grants, and spectrograms
I started the year at a rather surreal LSA 2022, the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which I’d hoped to attend in person in Washington DC but moved online at the last minute, along with what seemed to be most of the other attendees. It was nonetheless nice to see people virtually as well as help judge the Five Minute Linguist competition again.
This month we also announced the return of the LingComm Grants, small grants to help fledgling linguistics communication project...
January 4, 2022
December 2021: pigeon calls and a bookmas tree
This month, I did a virtual event with Argo Bookshop where I talked with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching (I am especially pleased with the “linguistic tie-in” portion of the event where I got Rosemary to teach me how to make various pigeon calls and the audience played along, very much vibes of intro phonetics class).
I did an interview on the Notion podcast with Devon Zuegel. Here’s a quote from that:
“If you see it as, okay, language is always a moving ...
December 31, 2021
2021 Year in Review
2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)
I was honoured to be the recip...
