Tessera

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Huge thanks to the Surrey Morphology Group and especially @erichround.bsky.social for the incredibly enthusiastic welcome and interest in the the life cycle model and Latin phonology over the last couple of days! Many many terrific and immensely valuable discussions and interrogations 🙏

Ranjan Sen@ranjsen.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Looking forward to giving talks and chatting to people at the fabulous Surrey Morphology Group www.smg.surrey.ac.uk over the next couple of days. Here to discuss the life cycle of phonological processes - my favourite 🤩

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Looking forward to giving talks and chatting to people at the fabulous Surrey Morphology Group www.smg.surrey.ac.uk over the next couple of days. Here to discuss the life cycle of phonological processes - my favourite 🤩

Home - Surrey Morphology Group

smg.surrey.ac.uk

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Looking forward to giving talks and chatting to people at the fabulous Surrey Morphology Group www.smg.surrey.ac.uk over the next couple of days. Here to discuss the life cycle of phonological processes - my favourite 🤩

Home - Surrey Morphology Group

smg.surrey.ac.uk

Joshua J. Friedman @joshuajfriedman.com · 2y ago

Sad news from the linguistics community: the great sociolinguist William Labov has died at age 97 languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67399

Screenshot of post on Language Log:

Bill Labov
December 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman under Obituaries, Sociolinguistics

William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.

Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation.

For now, a warm memory. One night over dinner Bill said that when he wrote he liked to imagine a scholar in the library, perhaps in some faraway place or distant future, opening one of his books and finding a useful insight, just as he had from scholars before him. We got to see him receive news about such an occurrence one evening at that same table: a guest hand-delivered, from the hills of Sindhi-speaking Pakistan, a sociolinguistic book inscribed with thanks for his insight, inspiration, and example.

Here’s a favorite picture of Bill turning to say goodbye one Thanksgiving afternoon. Farewell, dear friend.

Photo from Language Log of William Labov, dressed in sneakers, a blue nylon-and-fleece jacket, and a distinctive fur hat

Anna P. Judson @annapjudson.bsky.social · 2y ago

An @xkcd.com for #langsky 😄 xkcd.com/3025

Phase Change

xkcd.com

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Yes indeed! The slipperiness of syllables makes them a lot of fun 🤩 Some great work on syllables from a really wide range of perspectives in this volume (including a diachronic chapter by me at the end 😁) brill.com/edcollbook/t...

Handbook of the Syllable

"Handbook of the Syllable" published on 20 Dec 2010 by Brill.

brill.com

Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 3y ago

I love it when people discover that common linguistic terms are surprisingly slippery

Mark Dingemanse @markdingemanse.net · 2y ago

I remember when writing this bit on pain interjections I thought, somebody should check this at scale Well, turns out it works like this in >150 languages! Consider it checked. Congrats to Maïa Ponsonnet @acwiek.bsky.social et al. for a cool paper pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art... covered in SciAm

In this spirit, Dingemanse (2023) suggests that
“some interjections can be linked to ancestral vocalizations
or bodily responses. Pain interjections provide an instruc-
tive example. Most spoken languages appear to make avail-
able a pain interjection that has as its nucleus and prosodic
peak an open central unrounded vowel. It is hard to escape
the conclusion that such forms harken back to a common
mammalian pain vocalization (Darwin, 1872; Ehlich,
1985).”

Ouch! Linguists find universal language for pain

language science @priap.bsky.social · 2y ago

Move over bouba-kiki! New study on crossmodal iconicity shows [r] = rough and [l] = smooth, even in langs that conflate them. The results show "that speech sounds are not just acoustic objects, but they also have a texture and a shape to them". #iconicity 🐦🐦

The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages

Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study

pubs.aip.org

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Looking forward to this festive occasion today! 50th anniversary of the Oxford Comparative Philology Seminar. Happy memories and old friends! www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/events/2024/...

50 Years Comparative Philology Seminar | Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Comparative Philology Seminar at Oxford, an afternoon celebration will take place on Tuesday 3rd December 2024 in the Sultan Nazrin Shah Auditorium at Worcester College, Oxford OX1 2HB.

ling-phil.ox.ac.uk

Dr Lucie Fremlova 🍉🌻🦋@inclusivelucie.bsky.social · 2y ago

There are approximately 7,000 languages in the world. All languages transmit information at a similar rate (39 bits/s). Languages spoken faster have less information density per syllable, according to the findings of a recent linguistic study of 17 languages. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche

Human languages encode similar average information rates (~39 bits/s) despite their remarkable differences.

science.org

Ranjan Sen@ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

National Linguistics Day (UK) - Tue 26th Nov! www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin... Spread the word about what an exciting discipline it is to study! Some ideas on how to participate at awareness-days.co.uk/awareness-da... #NationalLinguisticsDay #Linguistics please share!

National Linguistics Day - November 26th. Let's get people thinking, talking and learning about the science of language!

David Adger @davidadger.bsky.social · 2y ago

Computational Linguistics job (Assistant Prof level, permanent) at our lovely linguistics department in Queen Mary. We're starting a new MSc in Lings and AI. Deadline Jan 5th, interviews late February. linguistlist.org/issues/35-33... #linguistics please repost!

LINGUIST List 35.3363 Jobs: Lecturer in Computational Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

linguistlist.org

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Hope everyone is getting over yesterday's wild linguistic celebrations! 🥳 😜 Thought for today is Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero's (2020) wonderful observation on abstraction and micro-/macro- detail in theorising, which keeps coming back back to me... (1/4)

Ranjan Sen@ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Happy National Linguistics Day! 🥳 To celebrate, I plan to read some work outside my own area of expertise today 📖 😊

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Happy National Linguistics Day! 🥳 To celebrate, I plan to read some work outside my own area of expertise today 📖 😊

Ranjan Sen@ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

National Linguistics Day (UK) - Tue 26th Nov! www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin... Spread the word about what an exciting discipline it is to study! Some ideas on how to participate at awareness-days.co.uk/awareness-da... #NationalLinguisticsDay #Linguistics please share!

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

National Linguistics Day (UK) - Tue 26th Nov! www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin... Spread the word about what an exciting discipline it is to study! Some ideas on how to participate at awareness-days.co.uk/awareness-da... #NationalLinguisticsDay #Linguistics please share!

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

#linguistics #englishlanguage #phonology #history

Ranjan Sen@ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Terrific event at the York Theatre Royal yesterday showcasing the work of the A Voice for King Richard III project. The speaking Richard was stunning! Huge congrats to the many talented teams and individuals involved (15th-cent pronunciation courtesy of David Crystal). news.sky.com/story/king-r...

Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)@adamcschembri.bsky.social · 2y ago

A high school teacher and Cambridge University lecturer, Rebecca Mitchell, wants to make 26th November the first National #Linguistics Day in the UK. I think this is a great idea, and really want to support it, but I have only just heard about it! www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin...

National Linguistics Day — Linguistics HQ

linguisticshq.co.uk

Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 2y ago

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Ranjan Sen @ranjsen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Terrific event at the York Theatre Royal yesterday showcasing the work of the A Voice for King Richard III project. The speaking Richard was stunning! Huge congrats to the many talented teams and individuals involved (15th-cent pronunciation courtesy of David Crystal). news.sky.com/story/king-r...

King Richard III given Yorkshire accent using state-of-the-art technology

Richard III was king of England from 1483 until his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. More than a decade after his remains were found in a Leicester car park, an expert team has managed to recr...

news.sky.com