#ling blogging

[flockofdoves]

niche and petty annoyance but the intersection of pop internet linguistics and all the various ways people always talk about noam chomsky (some very stupid and nothing, some very justified. recent news obviously justified) leading to people who clearly don't know shit about linguistics celebrating daniel everett as an awesome linguist who epically took down chomsky. what are we doing.

[flockofdoves]

YAYYYY plot relevant phonology in hunter x hunter. sooo fun

i compared the japanese raws and english and idk if the japanese really seems to be saying theres phonemic tone in the kakin language like the english translation says? i would love also bringing tonology into it (and could be wrong, my japanese isnt very good) but it kind of just reads like different vowel diphthongs and triphthongs plus distinct consonant sounds that all arent distinguished in whatever language(s) kurapika speaks all go into conjugating gender in kakin

my guess of the distinctions in woble’s name would be /p͈/ for the first mentioned version (like a tense stop in korean with a short lag VOT) and /ʋ/ for the second (although second could also maybe be /v/) not sure about the neutral one though since that isnt elaborated

[flockofdoves]

people on the internet are always so #I F*cking Love Linguistics and then i look at the thing they’re referring to and its just like. wordplay

of course its not Not linguistics related anything surrounding language could be, but its disappointing to me.. like aw this could be a lot more interesting if we went beyond the surface level of just ‘this is a thing that happened and it happened in the process of communication’ in our observation of it

[flockofdoves]

commenters on r/englishlearning annoy me so bad. so many people assuming like just by nature of being a native english speaker that their 2 cents will be valuable at any given time even when their comment ends up being actively confusing and misleading from their lack of background in any linguistic knowledge and assuming their own dialectal features are much more wide-reaching/standard/neutral than they actually are

like i always refrain from commenting because i have very little background in the pedagogy side of things which i feel is pretty important even in lots of casual contexts too. but like. i guess when i think about it i at least have taken classes about TESOL before and have been a TA and tutor in ESL classes for adult immigrants before so there's at least a mild amount of experience of that side of things that could inform more linguistics-driven comments i might want to contribute

[flockofdoves]

my gf found some youtube shorts weve been watching tonight where someone uses a linguistics background to figure out where people are from in the us which is very fun thats exactly the type of thing i would love to try to do if i had the stomach/charm/dedication to be a youtube/tiktok personality

butttt the combo of my specific interest in dialectology and especially knowledge of us english dialectology and being from rhode island and having the final project i ever worked on in undergrad being about rhode island english dialectology and reading like 5 different books specifically about new england dialectology for that

even though i like the videos i kind of keep getting annoyed every video with the lack of a cot-caught merger being used to rule out new england (and this specifically being said to be merged in the caught direction throughout new england) thats just not true that is conflating northeast new england dialects with all of new england!!!!

horrible contrarian in me who wants to submit a rhode island accent to see what happens

[flockofdoves]

most reactionary and pretentious mood i regularly find myself in without wanting to is just seeing how people talk about language on a random day and its just so wrong im like. okay everyone lets all stop talking about language for a while until the standard for how we talk about it is at least slightly better than whatever this is

[flockofdoves]

i think my biggest take that i know doesnt hold up to any scrutiny but i still cant help but get so annoyed about is that i think everyone (especially when written from the perspective of an english speaker) needs to stop doing awful attempts at spelling out word pronunciations and just needs to fucking learn IPA.

or at least learn a little bit about other dialects [of english] and stop centering whatever regionally dominant dialect they speak as the fucking center of the world and some neutral standard that everyone can understand a pronunciation reference to

[flockofdoves]

what if linguists called it the cock-caulk merger