zezzyland is a magical place

hollytheterrible:

This is what happens when I listen to Bela Bartók’s opera about Bluebeard for several days on repeat. I make strange illustrations apparently. It truly is some beautiful, but haunting stuff. 

Art Details:
Colored pencils, prisma markers, acrylic paint, and ink on brown sketchbook paper. 

~Holly The Terrible

wtfduolingo:

This is the only thing I need to learn how to say. Ever. :p

allthingslinguistic:

allthingslinguistic:

SpecGram, the satirical linguistics journal that I may have posted a comic or dozen from on this blog, is now selling a book! From their website: 

For decades, Speculative Grammarian has been the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—and now it is available in book form!

The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major developments in linguistic theory, significant expansion in language description, and even some progress in getting a few members of the general public to realize that the term “linguist” is not defined as ‘someone who works at the UN doing simultaneous translation’. Speculative Grammarian is proud to have been a part of these changes. And now, in our humble yet authoritative opinion, the time is ripe for the appearance of an anthology containing the most important linguistics articles to have appeared in SpecGram in the past twenty-five years. 

As with much satire, the more you know about various linguistics theories, the more you appreciate the various ways of making fun of them, so I probably wouldn’t recommend it for very beginner protolinguists (although you could perhaps gauge your learning by how many of the jokes you get?) but if you like the articles and cartoons on SpecGram in general, then this is a great collection of the best ones, which can get buried in the monthly issues on the website. And if you’re not sure if you like the articles in general, then browsing the website is a pretty easy way to find out. 

The review copy that they sent me (which was incredibly cool of them: anyone else want to send me free linguistics books? I’m writing book reviews anyway) had 360 pages, and even though I’ve been reading SpecGram for several years, there was plenty of material that I hadn’t seen. I’d recommend flipping through it rather than trying to get cover-to-cover in one sitting, since it’s quite a lot. I was going to say it would make a great coffeetable book to impress your ling friends, but alas it’s only available as an ebook at the moment. [Edit: I’ve actually learned that it’s only available as a physical book, so the coffeetable recommendation stands.] It’s a bit of a pity that the graphics have all been converted to black-and-white for printing though.

One of my favourite articles that I hadn’t seen before was a collection of linguistics nursery rhymes, by Yune O. Hūū, II: 

There was an old linguist who studied ǃXóõ.
It had so many phonemes,
she didn’t know what to dóõ.
After ignoring the clicks,
phonation, and tones,
She said at last,
“That’s not so many phones!” 

Low, low, lower your vowels,
Until  they all agree.
Assimi-latory, assimi-latory,
They’re now in harmony!

/ini˥ mini˦ maɪni˧ mo˨/
Catch a phoneme by the  /to˩/
If it rises, mark the /ton˥ /. 
/ini˥ mini˦ maɪni˧ mo˨/ 

There’s also an entertaining choose-your-own-career-in-linguistics game interspersed among the articles, help for people addicted to morphemes, useful* advice for funding your linguistics research, and lots more. For a slightly more tongue-in-cheek review, check out this one from Replicated Typo. Or see the table of contents and a sample of the book here by clicking “peek inside”. 

speculativegrammarian is now selling its compilation book, reviewed above, as an ebook, in addition to the original paperback, and they’ve very nicely offered a discount for readers of All Things Linguistic! So if you go to this link, you can get the ebook for only $4.95 instead of $5.95. 

Of course, if you come visit me, you can read it for free, but it will probably cost most of you far more than $4.95 to do that, and anyway that would end up being quite a long lineup. So I’d suggest you just get the ebook, and I’ll keep having conference meetups wherever possible. 

(via allthingslinguistic)

(via trumpetangst)

this position I’m in tho

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