2 years of All Things Linguistic
Thursday marked the second anniversary of All Things Linguistic. Since I post daily and so much has happened since then, I have a LOT of favourite posts! Here are some of them.
Phonotactics, or why Spanish speakers drink Esprite (with follow-up)
Giving a shit about negative polarity items (examples from Parks & Rec)
Jabberwocky: How do you translate a word that doesn’t mean anything?
Contrastive focus reduplication (the difference between milk and milk milk)
How did John Travolta get from Idina Menzel to Adele Dazeem?
Why didn’t “fetch” happen?
Why the Korean alphabet is brilliant
A discussion of types of writing systems, such as abugidas and syllabaries, including Devanagari and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
Beatboxing written in IPA
How to remember the IPA vowel chart
A detailed explanation of sonorants, obstruents, and sonority
The pin/pen merger in Fangirl (with response from Rainbow Rowell)
How linguistics is like coding
28 tips for doing better in your intro linguistics course (plus bonus parody tips for doing worse)
Hyperbolic “literally” is actually fine
Why do we get confused about “you and me”?
8 myths about language and linguistics
How to do an Australian accent
Talking Canadian - an old but good documentary on Canadian English
Teaching codeswitching in American schools
Accents in the British Isles (see notes for comments on accuracy and lack thereof)
How Canadians really pronounce “about” (for Grammar Girl)
Old-school British vs American accents (for The Toast)
Dialects of Sign Language: Black ASL
Double modals: You might could like them
Every argument you’ll ever need for singular “they”
Inventing nonbinary pronouns
What does “she” in science fiction tell us about languages on Earth?
Linguistics Hulk on twitter
We’re up all night for linguistics (a Get Lucky parody)
Negation in Welcome to Night Vale (which was also my first appearance on Grammar Girl)
On the invention of Parseltongue
There is a Noam Chomsky garden gnome
What if punctuation came with sound effects and gestures?
Linguists Against Humanity
We also talked a lot about expletive infixation (how de-fucking-lightful!)
Who are the science communicators for linguistics?
We had a tumblinguist meetup at the LSA in Ann Arbor
I started compiling linguistics videos as I came across them (especially by Tom Scott and DS Bigham)
Many things on because x: where it probably came from, why it’s not a preposition, when it won Word of the Year, and when I talked about it on CBC Spark.
What makes an effective synonym for Benedict Cumberbatch? (my first article for The Toast)
The grammar of doge for The Toast, from which came this quote post (which currently has just over 13.7k notes, what?). The French doge example and why no one knows how to say “doge” were fun too, as of course was talking to the BBC about it.
Assorted other internet linguistics:
What makes a good fandom pairing (ship) name?
Gender differences in emoticon usage
On adding a period after a text message
Elaborate ways to lose your ability to even
The stylistic effects of strikethrough
Slides from a keynote I gave about internet syntax
What makes a socially successful Facebook status? (At least in 2009)
What do we mean by “the fandom”?
Series: the protolinguist series was mostly last year, although the master post came up this year. This year I also started the linguistics jobs series, which is a still-ongoing collection of resources and interviews.
Looking forward to another year with you all!