Tag Archives: linguistics

On Linguistics and Public Outreach

Earlier in the week A couple weeks ago, I posted three questions about science communication in the field of linguistics: Who is the Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson of linguistics? In other words, who do we have in linguistics … Continue reading

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Statistics Aren’t Enough

There’s a cute quip: statistics don’t lie. There’s an accurate quip: statistics don’t lie, given a well-trained model and a large enough sample. With statistics on your side, you can be 99% sure that you’re right. Unfortunately, people who are … Continue reading

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A Big-Ass Chart of Indo-European Languages

Other people make and eat massive amounts of food over the Thanksgiving weekend. I did that, too, but I also made a chart. A big-ass chart. There are many ways to chart a language family. You can do the traditional … Continue reading

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The Language of Science: it’s OK to be prescriptivist

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Tumblr lately (I also post a lot of these blog posts on Tumblr, so yay!—built-in audience). To my surprise, I’ve discovered a not insignificant number of linguistically-oriented people on there. We talk … Continue reading

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Bad Linguistics: purist fallacies

Linguistics is often misunderstood. It’s not a subject that gets taught in eighth grade, so the only people with much experience in it are specialists who pursue it in post-secondary education. As such, a number of fallacies persist among the … Continue reading

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U guize u guize i found the gratest thing!!!11

To paraphrase the dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding: give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is… Hebrew? Enter creationist linguistics. It hasn’t been a thing since Noah Webster in … Continue reading

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Research update #2 and the Softest Hard Science

I’m writing an annotation specification. If that sounds really tedious and science-y, it probably is, but I think that when most people think “linguistics,” the first free-association word isn’t “science.” But depending on how you look at it, linguistics is … Continue reading

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Holy crap, I want to work on this!

UC Berkley is welding two of my linguistic loves: large amounts of data and dead languages. I have to try and bring this kind of thing to Brandeis. We love large amounts of properly formatted data. I’ve always had a … Continue reading

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Sexist pronouns

There’s a problem with English.  Okay, there are lots of problems with English, from a spelling system that hasn’t been made sense since the 15th century to an undue love of Latin grammatical standards in a language that wasn’t made … Continue reading

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