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TIL my favorite clause separation device is popular

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I would like to know this too.

Genuine question for academics out there:

How do you know the difference between “this topic interests me, I could probably read a book about it and be satisfied” and “this topic interests me, I should pursue a graduate degree focusing exclusively on this”?

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Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?

Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.

Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?

This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.

If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.

I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.

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I am realizing that this blog is just a really chaotic stream of reblogs so far. I should probably write one of those self-introduction sticky post things at some point, but am struggling with the energy to synthesize anything right now. Hopefully will get a roundtuit eventually...

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I might be stealing ideas from this now (if I find the spoons to actually implement them 🥴).

Didn't plan on being this sort of person either but they can sort of snowball once you let in more than, like, two.

Language Learning Plan as a student starting his first year of university in September :)

Posting mostly for my own benefit - bear in mind that for Italian Mandarin and Urdu I'm sort of past the stage where I can study it like an A0-A2 learner

SUMMER

French: leave it for now. I'm already fully fluent in French (been speaking French since I was 5 and have lived in Francophone environments though it is still my second language) so for 2 months it'll still be fresh in my mind and mouth. [Still planning a trip to a French-speaking location though so I guess that counts?]

Italian: work through my Italian verb drills book to learn and refresh verb tenses and pick up verbs along the way. Read 2-4 Italian news articles a day

Mandarin: write one journal entry a day. Circle words I don't remember how to write and highlight words I had to look up.

Urdu: 2 italki lessons a week. Chat with my grandparents 3-5 times a week. Review vocabulary words from the notes from my teacher. Read Urdu fairytales. Hopefully learn nastaliq writing.

Punjabi: practice ONCE a week with my grandparents by going through my 1000 Punjabi words book with them.

UNIVERSITY

French: good question... I definitely want to maintain my French in the long term since I've worked so hard for the proficiency I have now but I'll less outlets to speak French now.

Italian: relegate to maintaining mode. Read one Italian news article a day.

Mandarin: hopefully meet more Mandarin speakers at university (there's a club) and enter a Mandarin speaking contest to force myself to study. Probably continue with my journal

Urdu: continue with italki lessons, talk with grandparents as possible. Maybe watch Urdu dramas if I feel proficient enough.

Punjabi: Sparingly review words I learned over the summer, maybe have my Urdu tutor switch to Punjabi if I by some miracle feel confident enough in my Urdu at any point in the year. That would be amazing but I just need to hustle up I guess...

German: start. I'm taking a first-year German class and I'll just do my homework and study up as necessary. Also revisit Plautdietsch when I get interested enough.

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Take Your Fandom to Work fic sounds like something I need to read

this is frying me so bad

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Source

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Also, about that last reblog... Having posted something related to my ED/ARFID/food issues, even on an anonymous site where no one I know irl should ever see, is lowkey so terrifying.

Seriously, like... it shouldn't be a big deal but the fear is VERY MUCH there and I'm still freaking out a bit rn. So much built-up shame and pain and trauma (which I won't try to get into now). But on the other hand, connecting with other people who share these experiences can potentially help. (It feels partially nice in this moment at least, through the fear.)

So I am resisting the urge to hide and delete the thing and run away. Eff society for making us feel ashamed. Eff the ableist people who traumatise us because they don't understand or care to try.

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ugh this!!!! ridiculous utter failure. so, so, utter. in a manner that would be humorous.

New cooking show idea:

5-star chefs vs people with ARFID

Should be fun seeing the chefs try to make something great and amazing and then utterly failing because the customers have ARFID and can't enjoy half of the shit they're given lmao

(and please have me as the first customer)

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Wait me too. Actually, I sort of have a thing about picking them up during finals weeks specifically (okay it's happened twice). And it's always a relatively impractical or unrealistic-for-me-personally-to-learn-to-a-usable-level one (looking at you Welsh). My hypothesis is that it's a craving for novelty/stimulation as part of the stress response.

I know I'm struggling when I start eyeing a new language to learn.

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Not sure what exactly I did to get the tumblr algorithm to start giving me posts in French, but now I know the word for "boogers." Yay?

Régulièrement je me dis qu'il faut que je sois une citoyenne responsable et qu'il faut absolument que je m’intéresse à la politique française.

Mais là, on vient de m'envoyer une vidéo d'une ministre en train de manger ses crottes de nez à l'assemblée nationale et j'ai jamais été aussi ravie de ne pas avoir la moindre idée des fonctions de cette pauvre femme.

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In praise of niche papers

Mark Dingemanse's blog post "In praise of niche papers" is a lovely way to share academic influences. It got me thinking about some of my favourite papers that I love and cite, and which I'm always surprised to see aren't as highly cited as some other work by these authors. So, to follow Mark's lead, here are two niche papers that are very close to my heart:

Kendon, Adam. (1978). ‘Differential perceptual and attentional frame in face-to-face interaction: two problems for investigation’, Semiotica, 24/3/4: 305–15.

Adam Kendon's contribution to the Gesture Studies literature spans four decades and many of his research papers are foundational texts across a range of topics. This is one of Kendon's least cited works. It's also one of the earliest experiments on gesture perception I've come across. Kendon used a film projector and played a speech by a speaker of Enga in Papua New Guinea to a group of English speakers, looking at what people attend to in gestures. It was the model we used for Gawne and Kelly (2014) (discussed below).

Hostetter, Autumn B., Martha W. Alibali, and Sheree M. Schrager. (2011). ‘If you don’t already know, I’m certainly not going to show you!: Motivation to communicate affects gesture production’. G. Stam and M. Ishino (eds), Integrating Gestures, pp. 61–74. John Benjamins.

I love this experiment so much: people gesture the same amount if they're doing an activity helping or competing with someone, but the size and usefulness of the gestures are different. If you're competing against someone your gestures are smaller and less informative. People, so sneaky. I absolutely made sure to get a reference to this into Gesture: A Slim Guide.

Mark suggested in his post that people share niche papers from their own research. Here are two of my favourite papers of mine that aren't cited that much, but made me very happy to have out in the world:

Gawne, Lauren, and Barbara F. Kelly. (2014). Revisiting “Significant Action” and gesture classification. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34/2: 216–33.

This was the first research project I ever run, and (imo) a nifty modern replication of Kendon (1978) discussed above. People generally agree with Gesture Studies researchers on the minimum definition of what a gesture is, but they ascribe communicative intent to a much wider range of actions. Also, I did this research back in 2007 as my honours thesis project, but it took us another seven years to get this through to publication.

Gawne, Lauren, Barbara F. Kelly, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Tyler Heston. (2017). Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions. Language Documentation & Conservation, 11: 157–89.

This project surveyed 100 descriptive grammars: 50 published grammars and 50 PhD dissertations. There's lots of good work about how we should go about doing descriptive grammar work, but very little of this is actively discussed or described in the genre of published works. It's been almost a decade since we published this work. I'd like to think that people aren't citing it because they're just quietly improving the way they talk about methods and data in their descriptive grammar writing.

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This is extremely true. Welsh plurals are weird and I love them. But wait, there actually is an interesting explanation for the last part…  collective-singulative nouns !!!

As you point out, the pattern where the "plural" is shorter, like seren -> sêr, tends to happen with nouns where you often find a bunch of them together, such that it makes sense to refer to them collectively as a single group or unit (e.g., a skyful of stars, a forest of trees, a bundle of root vegetables, a… whatever the heck you call a group of bees?). These can be described as "collective" nouns, and their non-collective forms are called "singulative" (I guess to distinguish them from the singulars of true plural nouns?).

According to this perspective, these ones of the weird "plurals" aren't really plural forms at all - they're collective forms. And because people are more likely to need to talk about many of them collectively than one alone, they actually have a perfectly good reason to be shorter than their corresponding singulative forms ( see Zipf's law of abbreviation ).

Nothing can prepare you for welsh plurals

Apple? Afal. Apples? Afalau. Two Apples? Dau Afal. Many apples? Llawer o afalau.

Ah okay so you add '-au' to the end unless there's a number since obviously 'two' is plural so you don't need to mark it. But 'many'? Nah you have to mark it then... that's learnable.

A school? Ysgol. Schools? Ysgolion.

Ah... okay sometimes the plural ending it '-ion' not '-au'.

A cat? Cath. Cats? Cathod.

Ah so '-od' is also an ending...

A star? Seren. Stars? Sêr.

A carrot? Moronen. Carrots? Moron

Ah so sometimes the plural is shorter and removes an '-en'... (typically with nouns that are more commonly said in plural)

A dog? Ci. Dogs? Cŵn.

A leek? Cenhinen. Leeks: Cennin

What the hell are we doing now guys?

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A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history

Lingwiki is the name used for an informal network of people and events with the aim of improving the representation of linguistics on Wikipedia. Whether it’s people sharing their edits via a hashtag, informal online editing events, or dedicated workshops and catered edit-a-thons, lingwiki aims to improve linguistic contributions to the open access encyclopedia, which is the largest reference work in history. 

2025 marks ten years of lingwik. I like round numbers, documenting informal histories and lingwiki, and so I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by sharing the parts of the lingwiki story I am familiar with. I link to Gretchen’s All Things Linguistic blog posts about lingwiki throughout this post, but you can read them all here too.

The first lingwiki event was held at the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) 2015 Annual Meeting in January 2015. This event was run by Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen was heading towards the end of her MA and thought this event would be a good opportunity to both get involved in the LSA and improve the quality of public information about linguistics. Gretchen had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but realised that improving the quality of linguistics content was a task too daunting for one individual, and that a better investment of her time would be increasing the number of linguistically knowledgeable volunteers with editing skills who could contribute.

Prior to the first lingwiki event, in August 2014 Gretchen ran an online call for people to edit key linguistics pages of Wikipedia, a project she called Crowdsourced Linguistics. I participated, with a longer blog post on ergativity and edits to the Ergativity page on Wikipedia. During this online exercise, it became apparent that people were interested in editing, but wanted more training and support (technical and moral). Wikipedia edit-a-thons were an existing model Gretchen could emulate in a space for linguists, and she’d had experience attending a couple of Art+Feminism edit-a-thons in Montreal. Having many people in the same space (physical or digital) to collaboratively edit Wikipedia has many advantages: there’s help to get new editors set up, people around to help you troubleshoot any advanced editing problems, models for new ways of helping to improve linguistic content, and a sense of camaraderie. Events also help people who are willing editors, but struggle to set aside the time in busy schedules to do the work. At the time, Brice Russ worked at the LSA in PR, and reached out to Gretchen to talk about how the LSA could support this project. That's how the first in-person edit-a-thon came to be at LSA. The fact that LSA were able to comp Gretchen’s registration also made a difference to helping a junior person who was new to lingcomm attend LSA.  

Changing the name from Crowdsourced Linguistics to lingwiki for the first in-person event made the aims clearer, and #lingwiki was a useful tag for social media spaces. It is also an early example of Gretchen’s knack for branding linguistics projects. In keeping with the networks she had, alongside the LSA in-person event, Gretchen also reached out to other online lingcomm creators to run parallel events. I was in Singapore at the time, and ran an event for staff and students at Nanyang Technological University the same week, and also monitored Twitter traffic during the LSA event. I had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but these lingwiki events were the first time I committed to systematically improving and creating articles with an understanding of the processes and policies of editing on the platform. The benefit of these events is that they attract many new to editing Wikipedia, but also some people with experience, so that there’s support beyond the main facilitator. 

The first lingwiki not only served as a model of this kind of event for linguists, but also for the kinds of editing work that Wikipedia needed, and very much still needs. There were four main types of editing work laid out in the slides. The first type of editing is improving stubs. Stubs are short articles where the page has been created but there’s very little information. WikiProject Linguistics estimates there are over 2,600 linguistics stubs. This is twice as many as there were in 2015, since it’s a lot easier to start a page than to edit it up to a level of quality, but they’re also a great place to start since any additions will be an improvement. The second type of editing is improving the description of the majority of the world’s languages. All languages with an ISO 639-3 code have an automatically generated Wikipedia page, but many of the world’s languages, even those with descriptive grammars to reference are still stubs. The third type of editing is translating posts from one language to another. There are many stubs on English Wikipedia, but there are 341 other currently active languages, many with even less linguistics than the English Wikipedia. If you have the skills, translation from one Wikipedia to another is an excellent way to get linguistics topics to new audiences. The fourth type of editing is creating or improving biographies of linguists, especially those in demographics that are under-represented on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Rose-Marie Dechaine at the first lingwiki, Gretchen learnt about the process of applying for grants from WikiMedia to run events. This allowed Gretchen to run events in 2015 and 2016 including at the LSA Summer Institute in Chicago. From 2017-2021 Gretchen collected feedback from participants for events that she ran. Across a range of online and in person events at conferences, summer schools and universities the survey was filled in 242 times. Participants improved pages across a wide range of topics in linguistics, and mainly worked on stubs (40%), biographies (29%) and underdocumented languages (25%). Over half of participants had never edited Wikipedia before, but over three quarters (77%) of participants were keen to continue to participate in ongoing edit-a-thon events and almost two thirds (62%) were open to continuing to edit even without events. For people at these events, it was the first lingwiki for 81% of survey respondents. When it comes to lingwiki participants, the majority were grad students (46%), followed by undergrads (18%), profs (14%) and non-academic linguists (9%), a reflection of the kinds of venues where these events were run. 

The original slide deck from the first event has been enriched and translated over the years, but still lives at bit.ly/lingwiki. Lingwiki became a staple of the LSA annual conference schedule (Gretchen’s reports from 2016, 2017). When I moved to the UK we ran monthly lingwiki events at SOAS from 2015-2017 (with a pizza budget thanks to WikiMedia). Off the back of the positive reception for lingwiki, LSA has become a partner of WikiMedia, with quite a few linguists using Wikipedia editing as a practical classroom project across a range of linguistics courses. Gretchen and I ran workship on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages, and several editing events, at the language documentation summer school CoLang 2016 in Fairbanks Alaska. More recently, the LSA Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) has been running edit-a-thons for the last five years with the targeted aim of improving the diversity of Wikipedia biographies, and the LSA Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) have run Pride Month edit-a-thons too. Sunny Ananthanarayan, one of the organisers of the COZIL events was joining lingwiki events before even starting linguistics undergrad studies, one of the many lovely examples over the years of lingwiki being a self-propagating collection of events thanks to an enthusiastic and engaged linguistics community.   

I have spent a lot of my editing time on a couple of key topics. I started with a focus on improving the biographies of Australian linguists, especially women. Around the time we were at CoLang I also made sure that language pages linked to relevant archives, cross-linking all of the languages in PARADISEC and Kaipuleohone at the time. The page I have worked on most extensively is the Yolmo language page, a Tibetan language in Nepal that was the topic of my PhD research. I also published a version of the work on that page as a WikiJournal of Humanities paper, which has been a useful way to translate the time spent editing Wikipedia into something legible to my institution, in much the same way handbook chapters are.  

Lingwiki has been an important thread across the years I was a precariously employed and often uprooted early career researcher. It’s the first project Gretchen and I schemed on, and the reason we got to meet in person for the first time at CoLang in Alaska. This is very much the history of lingwiki as I see it, but as someone who is used to editing Wikipedia, I’m also used to valuing the contribution of many others as well, and I’m sure there are people who have taken lingwiki and made it their own in their institutions, organisations and classrooms. Neither Gretchen nor I get the chance to run edit-a-thons very often anymore. I use Wikipedia as an informal learning activity across a number of subjects. I also made edits occasionally. I still believe it’s one of the most powerful ways all linguists can improve public understanding of linguistics. 

You can edit Wikipedia using the lingwiki slides as a quick-start guide, or you can use the slides to run your own editing events. With the internet becoming more of a series of closed off social media gardens, and the ever-present problems with the reliability of information online, Wikipedia feels like a more important resource than ever. Improving Wikipedia is one of the best, enduring ways for you to positively improve public knowledge about your topics of linguistic interest.  

Lingwiki slides: https://bit.ly/lingwiki 

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New quest unlocked.

You need to be looking for sewing and drawing tutorials in Spanish, to watch baking tutorials in Russian or read the wikipedia article about the insect you've just discovered on your balcony in German ! You cannot watch Peppa pig in your target language forever.

Will knowing how to say "aiguille à tricoter" in French be useful for your exam ? Probably not, but who cares ? You're listening to spoken French AND you're learning a manual skill !

Youtube is full of wonderful tutorials in many languages, everything is there just waiting for you ...

And why stop at manual skills ? Philosophy ? History ? Astrology ? Hop hop hop, in your target language ! Want to learn something about Egypt ? The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has a coursera course on it.

"But I won't understand anything" I personally prefer to understand 20% of a lecture about a sacred temple in the middle of the desert than understand 60% of the most boring standard "what do you like to eat for breakfast" textbook learning material.

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I also literally was just looking for something like this. Stumbling across random humans on tumblr is apparently so much more helpful than the google algorithm.

words to use instead of ______

"Very"

Mild: clearly, decidedly, distinctly, markedly, considerably, notably, largely, recognizably, especially, indubitably Moderate: especially, surprisingly, substantially, uncommonly, chiefly, incredibly, obviously, unmistakably, considerably, awfully, wonderfully, particularly Bold: profusely, unequivocally, strikingly, astonishingly, exceedingly, absolutely, exceptionally, extremely, unquestionably, vastly, incontestably

"A Lot" (time)

Mild: often, oftentimes, sometime Moderate: frequently, usually, various, generally Bold: regularly, recurrent, persistent

"A Lot" (size)

Mild: many, much, several Moderate: numerous, bountiful, considerable Bold: multitude, profuse, vast

"Big"

Mild: sizable, ample, large, considerable, great, above average, important Moderate: ponderous, significant, crucial, vast, copious, magnificent, substantial Bold: enormous, immense, colossal, extensive, endless, paramount, boundless, prodigious, imposing, gigantic, voluminous, limitless, essential

"Small"

Mild: slight, limited, trivial, minor, light, puny, superficial, undersized, dinky, negligible, faint Moderate: scant, petite, inconsiderable, microscopic, dwarf, unsubstantial, minimum, miniature, tiny Bold: insignificant, minute, meager, infinitesimal, ineffectual, undetectable, inconsequential

"Good"

Mild: acceptable, favorable, agreeable, pleasing, satisfactory, satisfying, super, able, relevant, accomplished, efficient, reliable, ample, useful, profitable, adequate, adept Moderate: great, honorable, admirable, commendable, sound, splendid, superb, valuable, wonderful, worthy, clever, proficient, qualified, apt, skillful, thorough, wholesome Bold: excellent, exceptional, gratifying, marvelous, reputable, stupendous, superior, exemplary, virtuous, expert, solid, advantageous, flawless, extensive, perfect

"Bad"

Mild: cheap, dissatisfactory, faculty, off, mean, wrong, unpleasant, unwell, low, grim, sour, regretful Moderate: careless, defective, inferior, imperfect, deficient, rough, ill-suited, inadequate, unsatisfactory, delinquent, sinful, unruly, wicked, rancid, grave, harsh, terrible, downcast Bold: awful, unacceptable, corrupt, dreadful, putrid, erroneous, detrimental, ruinous, vile, villainous, diseased, adverse, evil

more words to use instead other words to use instead even more words to use instead

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