Status Updates From An Introduction to Language

Rereading this in preparation for grad school. Love all the comics but parts of this are super dry and a tad confusing.

I know I'm supposed to think prescriptive grammar is wrong, but IT JUST FEELS SO RIGHT.

It caused me reasonable alarm when most of language creator David J. Peterson's online posts came across as gibberish to me since I used to study language and I had a fair grasp of most concepts.

I don't really have the time and resources to go back to school so I resolved to get a decent book on linguistics and try to re-learn what I can on my own.

Linguistic competence refers to one's knowledge of a language, while linguistic performance refers to how one uses this knowledge. In this way, my stay in Germany improved my linguistic performance greatly while only marginally improving my linguistic competence.

So. We meet again, diphthong...

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense. -- Leigh Hunt, 'On Talking Nonsense,' 1820

Whom are you? said he, for he had been to night school. -- George Ade, 'The Steel Box,' in Bang! Bang!, 1928

So concerned was Kilwardby with Universal Grammar that he excluded considerations of the characteristics of particular languages, which he believed to be as "irrelevant to a science of grammar as the material of the measuring rod or the physical characteristics of objects were to geometry." Kilwardby was perhaps too much of a universalist.

Ch7

I can't believe I've finally finished!

Only one chapter left only one chapter left!

Computer processing of human language is possibly the most boring thing I've had to read in this book.

I only just now had to read the introduction. Uni is weird.

Phonology is just weeeird.

Phonetics is actually really interesting.

I love how HP references keep popping up. "The girl that professor Snape loved married the man of her dreams."

So far I'm really liking this. Really interesting and yay comics + Harry Potter. And the writers have actually got humour, so it's not that dry to read.