A language is a system of discrete infinity, a procedure that enumerates an infinite class of expressions, each of them a structured complex of properties of sound and meaning
—
Linguistics and Brian Science by Chomsky (via smokethenmirrors)
In which Noam puts on his theoretical computer science hat…
[Linguistics] Guidelines for the Behavior of Graduate Students
1. The IPA symbol for a bilabial click is not called “the cervix,” even if it really looks like one. ʘ ʘ ʘ ʘ ʘ
2. Students must not giggle every time someone says “labial.”
3. Students are not allowed to start a letter-writing campaign demanding enfranchisement for voiceless phonemes.
4. Students must remember that the IPA only covers the sounds the human mouth can make.
5. Students are not allowed to ask the “cute” TA to produce difficult phonemes for them… slowly… over and over again.
6. “Only prats use Praat” was never funny, and still isn’t. Especially if the faculty use Praat.
7. There is absolutely no mystical significance to the fact that the IPA symbol for a voiced palatal implosive slightly resembles the helix symbol from the TV show Heroes. ʄ ʄ ʄ ʄ ʄ
8. Students are not allowed to erase everything on the vowel chart besides /a, e, i, o, and u/ and insist that the TA “teach the controversy.”
9. Students are not allowed to turn in papers written entirely in IPA.
10. Students may not be excused from discussions of tonal languages because they are tone-deaf.
11. There is no diacritic for “drunken voice.”
12. Students are not allowed to color in the “blank” areas on the vowel spectrograms.
13. Students are not allowed to convince wide-eyed, trusting first-years that the nasal ingressive voiceless velar trill will be officially added to the IPA chart next year.(from John Wells’s Phonetic Blog.)
#linguistics has become everything I imagined it could be.
hiddieman: Minimal pears.
I do believe that all ho’s can’t fuck with me and it seems that apparently that they just wanna be me …
In “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals”, Alan Turing remarks that “mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.
—
This Turing quotation is how I’m starting my personal statement for grad school.
Linguistics relies on intuition and analytic insight, but intuition in linguistics is the ultimate source of knowledge. The competence-performance division means that speakers may not always produce perfect, well-formed utterances in practice but they can always judge well-formedness using their intuition. Since linguistics is interested in modeling linguistic competence, intuition is a weird blackbox that we can draw on for empirical information, but ultimately we want to reverse-engineer and understand the intuition-blackbox and this is where ingenuity comes into play. The confluence of intuition and ingenuity is what makes the field so elegantly robust and pleasantly difficult.
Now, I just need to capture these ideas in a succinct, engaging and substantively self-disclosing manner.
words of the year, words of the decade
Sent a few nominations to the American Dialect Society’s word of the year and word of the decade poll.
For 2009 words, I chose birther, tea party and beer summit on the grounds that a person sent in time from 2008 might not comprehend a sentence like “birthers held signs at the tea-party protest”. One might say “beer summit, how dated!” which is the point of these things: WOTY for 2005 was truthiness, 2006 plutoed (nowadays we’d probably say plutowned), 2007 subprime, and 2008 bailout.
For decade words, I chose the adjective meta which is very zeitgeisty (and diagnostic) for the “hip young people online” subculture to which we all deny being a part of. I also picked meme because I was thinking about meta and then I remembered that Xzibit “yo dawg” meme which is meme about things being meta (how “meta”). No real chance in hell for these tetragrams (at least against blog), but I wanted linguists, lexicographers and philologists of all stripes to think about them.
I still have to come up with more interesting words to send in, so I’m opening this up to answers and I’ll send in whatever submissions I get. For the record, tweet and tw- appeared on the 2008 list.
What words can you think of?
The Chomsky Hierarchy:
- Noam Chomsky
- @FakeChomsky
- Gnome Chomsky
- Nim Chimpsky
Image via inky, Noam with Gnome.
eush:
Cut me some slack, I’m only a fake linguist! This one is good so far, and right at my level, but I am wary of any book with Internet shoehorned in the title.
Tristn, what books would you recommend for someone interested in linguistics and language but with not much formal training?
To be fair, I only ragged on Crystal because I had to write reviews of three of his books and Language and the Internet was just depressingly superficial and dated. He would get stodgy about how there’s too much crap on the internet, and he practically worshipped Wired and hackers. It was a Gen-X mess.
Crystal still is a good place to start (it didn’t get that nice Penguin edition for nothing), as is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. My big kick as of late has been Douglas Hofstadter though he’s more about cognition and formal structures than language. You could also look for the Language Log’s book Far From The Madding Gerund at your library. If were ruling out formal textbooks, Wikipedia of course is good.
eush:
Today’s LAX reading material.
(Not pictured: bags of airport candy, bottle of Coke, immeasurable amounts of dread for the massive workload that awaits me when I get home)
Crystal? Oh eush, pobrecita… Okay I jest. He’s in a hard place trying to convey linguistics to both lay readers and language scholars. His stuff is readable and smart but can get superficial, as in the For-Dummies-esque Language and the Internet.
New Mission
Goal for immediate future is to research and compose an original writing sample for grad school applications since the last paper I wrote in theoretical phonology now strikes me as spirited and hearted in the right place but vulgarly naive in some of the specifics. Thus I’ve decided to review the literature surrounding the computational complexity of Optimality Theory (OT). OT is basically the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” constraint-satisfaction theory of phonology where for a given underlying form, infinitely/indefinitely candidate surface forms are generated and filtered out according to an ordered list of constraints. Put another way, all possible outputs are run through a series of gauntlets and the one that comes out in the best shape is the winner and selected as the output.
The literature consists of proofs that OT is NP-complete and responses to the effect of “ur doing OT wrong”. We’re doing NP-complete proofs in my theory of computation class, so I get to capitalize on and reinforce my knowledge in complexity theory. The formal mathematical reasoning and fine-grained scholarship serve my ultimate rhetorical goal of trying to get accepted, but the exercise will not be trivial as I can study the intricacies of a theory maligned across the board in my linguistics department. So that’s good and I feel good about it. My main issue for writing therefore is coming up with something original to bring to the table. Right now, I’m considering a direction along the lines of “computational intractability is not the end of world; mental representation is.”
