they/them, 24 | atp it's really just the man from u.n.c.l.e interspersed with linguistics and germanposting | and the odd bit of music | and some art (actually a lot of it) | and
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We hear from people a lot who are enthusiastic about linguistics, and many of you have been trying to get other people in your life also into linguistics, which is amazing!
Whether it's linguistics fans trying to articulate their (our) excitement to family and friends, linguistics academics trying to spread the word to future students who might want to take a linguistics course, or when we go to in-person conferences and events and we're trying to explain why people might want to listen to a whole half hour of linguistics enthusiasm every month, we've been feeling a need for more ways to bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world.
Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen's and Lauren's and producer Claire's and editor Leah's friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately [although a few of our friends would like it pointed out that they've been into zines since earlier zine waves. you're very cool and we appreciate you.]
So we're hatching a new project: Lingthusiasm Zines!
Basically, we make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines for free, and then people can have them floating around on your coffeetable, bulletinboard, break room table, outreach events, wherever you're looking for eye-catching pick-up-able objects to help get people interested in linguistics. And then we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!
All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We're making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!
Zines are DIY and participatory, so we're also hoping to encourage other people to make linguistics-related zines and help people find other linguistics zines that exist!
We've already heard from a few people who have made linguistics and language-related zines (check out these mini minorized language books in zine format on the Endangered Language Project site).
We've done one lingcomm through zines workshop at a linguistics conference so far (LabPhon), and have another lined up (NWAV), and we've heard from some linguistics profs who are excited by the idea of using zines in teaching as well! You can see (and repurpose) Linguistics Communication through Zines slides here.
Let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media if you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose!
Okay, we've made you wait long enough. Wanna see some zines?
Which shape is bouba and which is kiki?
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes. Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
What's this gesture called?
The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these “emblem gestures." Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling? Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Stay tuned for more Lingthusiasm zines in the future! And thank you to all our members on Patreon who got to see the zines early and gave us many helpful comments! It's thanks to the support of our community that we're able to make fun free linguistics resources like this.
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I'm curious: which book did you just finish that made you reblog the 'man are there some bad books out there' post? if you want to confide. if you don't, maybe you could tell me your favourite book instead? I'm still looking for something to tide me over the semester break :D
oh god I'm going to have to out myself here as an enjoyer of trashy murder mysteries. but the one that i just finished was "how to solve your own murder" by kristen perrin which was. annoying, to say the least
i think i probably have three favourite books:
"everyone in my family has killed someone" (and its various sequels) by benjamin stevenson, which is an australian book about a guy who writes guides on how to write murder mysteries accidentally getting involved in a real one
"several people are typing" by calvin kasulke, which is a short book about a guy who's consciousness gets trapped in the workplace messaging platform (slack)
and "house of leaves" by mark danielewski. which is just really good and everyone should read it at least once
ohhhhhhhh thank you! ngl, the premise of that first one actually sounds fun, maybe I'll pick it up just to see HOW annoying it is. but I'll definitely look for 'several people are typing' because that sounds absolutely incredible.
if you like murder mysteries, you might enjoy 'A Fatal Crossing' by Tom Hindle? it's a locked room mystery taking place on a ferry crossing the Atlantic Ocean that also involves art theft and one of the most batshit insane plot twists I've ever read. (tbf people either hate or love it, but it certainly makes for entertainment either way.)
reblogging this again because i just finished "and then things went dark" by bea fitzgerald and it was a FANTASTIC dark satirical thriller/murder mystery book that i highly recommend if you can get your hands on it
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hello :) do you feel like answering questions 14 and 17 of the book ask game, by any chance? 👉👈 (about your top 5 children's books and your stance on dog-earing, that is)
Hi ty!!!!!!! :D
14. do you ever mark/dog ear books you own? I do this sometimes with my paperbacks, I like my books to looked lived in. I occasionally write in them too, and underline in all my books.
17. top 5 children’s books? when I was a kid I used to read almost exclusively historical fiction, most of which has likely not aged well. With that in mind, these were some of my faves:
–the american girl Kaya, Addy, and Samantha serieses
–the Grandma's Attic series by Arlela Richardson
–Someone Named Eva
–The Whale Rider
–A Picture of Freedom: Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl
–Red Scarf Girl
–Tangled Threads: a Hmong Girl's Story
–The Hobbit
–Tuck Everlasting
i need to get off tumblr i’m at the aquarium admiring the fish and my brain goes “posts that make you want to get in the water” what are you talking about. these are live fish in the room with you. what post.
Very interested to hear about your linguistics paper, if you'd like to expound 👀👀👀
gahhhhhh ABSOLUTELY YES, I cannot tell you how happy I am to have sparked your interest <3 it's rather... extensive, so I'll put it under the cut for the convenience of ppl who put up with the linguistics side of my blog rather than enjoy it hahahaha
since I'm a Master's student still, with very limited means to do research (and only basic statistical knowledge at this point, though I'm working on it), I just need to preface this for the sake of scientific integrity: I'm on shaky ground and I do not claim I have solved the mystery of language. BUT I recently had a little breakthrough with extremely interesting results that could be super cool in a certain linguistic niche if I got to run the experiment again on a larger sample of speakers and actually managed to replicate my first result.
so, besides my first love, phonetics, I do work on morphosyntax, specifically on German prepositions. I've been working my way through SO MANY corpora of German over three years now, and I began to notice that the younger the data got the odder things became, until online corpora from 2020 onwards were suddenly completely inexplicable to me. seemingly out of nowhere, people had begun to vary prepositions in previously unquestionably standard, well-established collocations. and since I'm a linguist, incidentally in dire need of a research project that would earn me course credit in the double digits at the time, I decided to ask why.
with the respective course being funded by a scholarship, that ALSO meant sudden access to previously unavailable, advanced survey design and statistical software, as well as departmental support to recruit participants. long story short, I ran an experiment that got completely out of hand sample size-wise (and probably took 20 years off my life in trying to finish it by the deadline, given that I got so deep into it I basically wrote a second Bachelor's thesis), but the results were so cool!
essentially I had people choose German prepositions for certain constructions and also tell me their age and level of contact with English. the more English-affiliated the participants (and, usually then, the younger), the more they chose structures parallel to what would have been the literal equivalent in English. (e.g., the German standard is "erzähl mir davon" - "tell me about it", with "davon" really translating into "of it". but people with lots of English contact preferred to say "darüber" - which happens to literally mean "about it". just one example of several.) this must sound like a no-brainer, initially.
BUT. the thing is. they were doing the entire thing (a 20-minute survey!!!!) in German. they never even activated their English competence. there was nothing that should have primed them to do this, but they were STILL consistently choosing the literal translation of an ENGLISH prepositional construction when there was a perfectly well-established, standard German option right there. (and they knew that one too, I tested that. they simply didn't like to use it.)
and THAT'S the really cool thing about it. because it's an indicator that the omnipresence of English has begun to cause structural changes in German grammar that actually get entrenched in speakers mental representations, at least when they are in a lot of contact. it's structural, because the shift also fucks up the German case-system, which requires different case with e.g., "über" and "von". it's also systemic and habitual rather than contextual, since it seems that immediate contact with English isn't required, so as long as overall, long-term exposure is high enough. people either generally adopteded that new structure or not.
and again, that may sound like a no-shit-Sherlock moment when you're a layman but there is a CENTURY worth of linguistic literature on lexical influence of English on German, loanwords and calques and the like, but only ONE (1) reference that properly touches upon grammatical influence so far. a lot of older sources even claimed that German was 'immune' to structural shifts lmao. and my study wasn't like, completely airtight, but it was large enough to not be immediately dismissed as 'inconclusive', and it actually lines up with that one (1) other source to suggest we've reached the point where English has become lingua franca enough to finally leech into German grammar.
which, lastly, I am so incredibly obsessed with mainly because I have pointless discussions about 'aNgLicIsMs rePlacINg oUr bEauTiFul geRmAN lAngUage' every day with people who believe they are linguists simply because they can speak. I cannot wait to see their faces when I tell them that English might actually be 'replacing' not only vocabulary but also syntactic structures.
(PSA: there is no such thing as 'language degradation', scientifically speaking. it's ALWAYS xenophobia, ageism, traditionalism, conservatism, classism, or any combination thereof. always. language change is value-neutral. languages simply cannot change 'for the worse', because linguistic features only survive in the long run when they fulfill a purpose, or at least they will die pretty quickly if they truly make communication less efficient (which, incidentally, loanwords or shifts like these do not).
yes, language death is a real threat for minority languages, and concerns about English being set as a global norm are legitimate from a sociopolitical standpoint, but neither of these worries has any relation to natural language change in a stable, non-threatened, even legally established national language that makes up 90% of non-online communication - like German in Germany. it annoys me to no end. but I digress.)
anyway. it's preliminary evidence by a nerd with a mere Bachelor's degree. I'll need to see whether it actually holds with improved methodology and larger samples in the future (and if I don't get the 'go' for my other Master's thesis topic, I'll probably do exactly that to finish my degree). but it IS something new. and I'm ridiculously proud of it.
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this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
theartofmadeline
areudirty
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
