derzwiebel-blog - Tumblr blog

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By Tom Gauld

http://tomgauld.com/art-for-sale

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The Superlinguo Linguist Job Interviews master list

This is the fourth year I’ve been running the Linguist Jobs Interview series. There are now over 40 interviews to date, with people who studied linguistics - be it a single undergraduate subject or a full PhD - and then gone on to careers outside of academia.

Although I ask the same questions each time, I get very different answers. For some people, linguistics is directly applicable to their daily work, while others find that the general skills they learnt can transfer to other careers.

I update this list at least once a year. For newer interviews, you can browse the Linguistics Jobs tag on the blog!

The full list of Linguistics Job Interviews (to April 2019):

Interview with a Lexicographer

Interview with a School Linguist

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer

Interview with a Language Creator

Interview with a Translator and Business Owner

Interview with a Standards Engineer

Interview with a Conductor

Interview with an Accent Coach

Interview with two Communications Professionals

Interview with a University Course Coordinator

Interview with a Think Tank Researcher

Interview with a Museum Curator

Interview with a Communications Consultant

Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Interview with a local radio Digital Managing Editor

Interview with a Senior Content Project Manager at Transparent Language

Interview with a Freelance Translator and Editor

Interview with an Apprentice Mechanic

Interview with an Educational Development Lecturer (and Linguistic Consultant)

Interview with a Client Services Manager

Interview with an English Foreign Language Teacher

Interview with a Speech Pathologist

Interview with a Computational Linguist

Interview with a Tour Company Director

Interview with a Copywriter and Brand Strategist (and Fiction Author)

Interview with a Language Revitalisation Program Director

Interview with a Media Language Researcher

Interview with an Editor and Copywriter

Interview with a Humanitarian Aid Worker

Interview with a High School Teacher

Interview with an Interpreter

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a Data Analyst

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Being a linguistic nomad, challenging though it might be, helps me to sustain myself as a storyteller, and gives me an additional mental flexibility, freedom of speech and a sense of connectivity that is not reduced to national boundaries.

My attachment to my mother tongue is emotional; my attachment to English is cerebral. I feel like I need both to balance myself. Over time, I have also realized that if there is melancholy, longing, sadness in my writing, I find it easier to express these in Turkish. But when it comes to irony, satire, sarkiness, I find it easier in English. The word “irony” does not even exist in Turkish.

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@pennylanious

swedish language history voice: sometimes i just get in the mood to loan some low german words

a calculation of the origin of the voculabary of the swedish language.

it goes:

42% “original” swedish vocalbury*

30% german loanwords

9% latin and greek loanwords

1% french loanwords

1% english loanwords

0,5% loanwords from other languages

*that is, words that has existed in swedish/old norse for hundreds of years. they are still considered arvord if they were loaned into swedish once upon a time, but it happened way back in such case. or something like that, i had hard time grasping the lingustic details of this concept.

hansaetic league brings the german loanwords

that most of those german loanwords come from interaction with hansaetic trade people, who spoke low german. low german happen to be very closely related to swedish, and the low german of the hansaetic league back in the day, even more so closely related to swedish. what i am saying is, something it is hard to tell the difference between a german loanword and a just plain swedish word because…. well, it nearly the same language back in the day.

this too, i guess, is mayor reason why we have so many german loanwords. picking up loanwords from people selling stuff you have never seen before, but which speak a language you can ALMOST understand, is very easy thing to do. that is a guess, but, they often had hansaetic league enclaves in swedish cities back in the day, so i assume those city living swedes interacted with lots of low german speaking people during the height of hansaetic league trading.

source

https://www.sprakbruk.fi/-/lanat-och-arvt-i-svenskan

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What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week’s episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding.

We’re really glad to be back and sharing stuff with you all again! Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

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oh my god, how is this real lol? (check out the Twitter thread, it immediately gets worse, too)

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“#natsoc”

Nazi scum still alive, active and well on Tumblr.

@staff

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Somebody else has probably already shared this on tumblr, but it’s too useful to not share again. This site has a “talking” IPA chart! Just click on any individual symbol, and a voice will read it to you.

Source: The University of Victoria

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Episode 14: They, Them, Theirs Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast. The podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: And I’m Megan Figueroa. Carrie you just tweeted something amazing from our Vocal Fries Twitter.

Carrie Gillon: Might be one of my favorite tweets of all time. So I don’t know who this is but someone tweeted about how they’re in this all day meeting and someone just didn’t want to say quote Get your shit together. And so he said Get your poop in a group.

Weiterlesen

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Who’s In A Name?: Top 10 Unisex Names by Year & Gender-slant

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why are bats called bats?

because they look like flying mice [Danish: flagermus, German: Fledermaus, Luxembourgish: Fliedermaus, Swedish: fladdermus]

because they look like half mice and half owl [French: chauve-souris]

because they look like half mice and it’s not 100% clear what the other half is [Ladin: utschè-mezmieur, Catalan: rat-penat, Lombard: mezzarat]

because apparently they make a flap flap noise [English: bat]

because they’ve got badass leather wings [Gaelic: sciathàn leathair, Old Norse: leðrblaka]

because they look like cute nocturnal butterflies [Maltese: farflett il-lejl]

because they’re probably, like, blind mice [Serbo-croatian: sismis, Portugese: morcego, Spanish: murcíelago, Arabic: khaffash]

because they fly at night [Italian: pipistrello, Slovenian: netopir, Polish: nietoperz, Greek: nykterides, Farsi: shab parreh]

So bat literally means flapper. You’re welcome.

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Help spread the Lingthusiasm for our second anniversary  🎧💚🌱

November is the second anniversary episode of Lingthusiasm!

This time two years ago, we were a top-secret project that no one had listened to yet, and this time last year we’d just started asking for your anniversary recommendations. It went so well the first time that we’re aiming to thank even more people this year!  

Now, we’re a full-fledged podcast that people have described as “incredibly well-researched and fun” and “like I’m listening in on a conversation between two of my most interesting friends.” Here’s a list of episodes so far:  

Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace

Pronouns: little words, big jobs

Arrival of the Linguists: Review of the Alien linguistics film

Inside the Word of the Year vote

Colour words around the world and inside your brain

All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet

Kids these days aren’t ruining language

People Who Make Dictionaries - Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper

The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency

Learning languages linguistically

Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean maxims

Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions

Talking and thinking about time

Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test

Vowel Gymnastics

Translating the untranslatable

Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions

Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary

What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

This, that and the other thing - determiners

When Nothing Means Something

Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz

Every word is a real word

We’re really proud to have brought you a second year of indie linguistics podcasting, including transcripts, and even to have commissioned lingthusiasm art and created two liveshows thanks to our patrons! Here are the bonus episodes that our patrons make possible:

Swear words and pseudo-swears

How to get even more linguistics: our favourite books and other resources

How to sell your linguistics skills to employers

Behind the scenes on doggo linguistics

You and me and octopodes: hypercorrection

ig-Pay atin-Lay and more language play

How to become the go-to person among your friends for language questions: doing linguistics research

So, like, what’s up with, um, discourse markers? Hark, a liveshow!

Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument

Liveshow Q and eh

We are all linguistic geniuses - Interview with Daniel Midgley

Creating languages for fun and learning

The grammar of swearing

The poetry of memes

Linguistics grad school advice

Forensic Linguistics

Homophones, homonyms, and homographs

Emoji, Gesture and The International Congress of Linguists

Hyperforeignisms

Bringing up bilingual babies

To celebrate two years of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting, we’re aiming to spread the linguistics enthusiasm even further, and we need your help to get there! Here are some ways you can help:

Share a link to your favourite Lingthusiasm episode so far and say something about what you liked! If you link directly to the episode page on lingthusiasm.com, people can follow your link and listen even if they’re not normally podcast people. Can’t remember what was in each episode? Check out the quotes for memorable excerpts or transcripts for full episode text.  

We appreciate all kinds of recs, including social media, blogs, newsletters, fellow podcasts, and recommending directly to a specific person who you think would enjoy fun conversations about language!  

Arriving on this page because a friend sent you? (Thanks, friend!) You can click on any of the episode links above to listen right now! The episodes can be listened to in any order, so just go for whatever catches your attention. For mobile listening, you can subscribe in iTunes/Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, rss, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you didn’t get around to listening to a couple episodes when they came out, or you’ve been following us on social media and haven’t gotten around to listening yet, now is a great time to get caught up!

Write a review wherever you get your podcasts. The more reviews we have, the more that the Mighty Algorithms make us show up to other people browsing. Star ratings are great; star ratings with words beside them are even better. (While you’re there, maybe hit the stars for other podcasts you like too?)

All of our listeners so far have come from word of mouth, and we’ve enjoyed hearing from so many of you how we’ve kept you company while folding laundry, walking the dog, driving to work, jogging, doing dishes, procrastinating on your linguistics papers, and so much more. But there are definitely still people out there who would be totally into making their mundane activities feel like a fascinating dinner party about how language works, they just don’t know it’s an option yet. They need your help to find us!

If you leave us a rec or review in public, we’ll thank you by name or pseudonym on our upcoming special anniversary post, which will live in perpetuity on our website. If you recommend us in private, we won’t know about it, but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction (and feel free to tell us about it on social media if you still want to be thanked!).

Stay Lingthusiastic!

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Quirks of the Croatian language #3

The word “pain” (bol) is gender-fluid. If you are experiencing emotional pain it is classed as feminine, while physical pain is masculine.

Ljubavne boli - lit. pains of love. The suffix i indicates feminine pl.

Bolovi u leđima - lit. Pains in the back, - ovi is a masculine pl suffix

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“Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law”

— F. de Saussure

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Lingthusiasm Episode 23: When Nothing Means Something

When we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’t often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisingly often throughout our linguistic system, from the micro level of an individual sound or bit of meaning to the macro level of sentences and conversations.  

In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about four different kinds of linguistic nothings: silence in between turns, silence in between sounds, invisible units of meaning, and invisible words. (Officially known as turntaking, glottal stops, zero morphemes, and traces.) 

We also announced some details about our upcoming liveshow! Our last liveshow was in Montreal where Gretchen lives, so it’s only fair that our next official show is in Lauren’s hometown of Melbourne! It’ll be sometime in November. Stay tuned for the exact date and venue - you can sign up for Lingthusiasm email updates if you want to be sent it directly  bit.ly/LingthusiasmEmailList  

Gretchen will also be around for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Summer School in Canberra and the annual Australian Linguistics Society conference in Adelaide. If anyone else in Australia wants to invite her to anything in November or early December 2018, now’s your chance! 

This month’s bonus episode was an inside view into the linguistics conference circuit which Lauren and Gretchen are recently returned from, featuring emoji, gesture, and the International Congress of Linguists! Support the show on Patreon to get access to this and all 18 bonus episodes. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Of speaking and silence

How We Talk (Nick Enfield) (Superlinguo review)

See a glottal stop in an MRI (click the ʔ under ‘glottal) (John Esling, Dani Byrd)

Hawaiian language (Wikipedia

Aleph (Wikipedia)

Hamza (Wikipedia)

Null morpheme (Wikipedia)

Indonesian plural

Pāṇini and zero morphs

Pāṇini (Wikipedia)

Ella Minnow Pea (Superlinguo review)

Ella Minnow Pea (All Things Linguistic post)

Lingvids video on trace blocking

The Ling Space video on trace effects

Wanna Contraction (by Prof. Yehuda N. Falk) (PDF)

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening, and stay tuned for a transcript of this episode on the Lingthusiasm website. To received an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, our production assistants are Celine Yoon & Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

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A very long list of linguistics YouTube channels and other free online videos about linguistics

Want to teach yourself linguistics on youtube? Looking for online courses about linguistics? Want to supplement the linguistics resources available for your linguistics class? Here’s an extensive list for you to pick from, with a few notes on style and content. 

General linguistics youtube channels: 

NativLang (animated)

Xidnaf (animated)

The Ling Space (person talking with a bit of animation, see also their summary post)

David J. Peterson’s conlanging youtube channel (person talking)

Arika Okrent (whiteboard videos)

Groups of videos or short series on specific topics: 

Tom Scott’s Language Files (person talking with graphic effects)

Artifexian’s conlanging videos

North Caroline Language and Life project

Common sounds in Australian Indigenous languages

Verner’s Law and how the Germanic languages developed from Proto-Indo-European (person talking plus animation)

How to apply for a Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) grant

Videos illustrating Gricean Maxims  

Cuando Muere una Lengua / When a tongue dies - Videos in Mexican Indigenous languages from the project 68 voces (68 voices)

Christmas-themed stories told in ASL by an adorable child (ASL Nook)

Individual interesting videos: 

Do Sign Languages Have Accents? 

Sign Language Isn’t Universal

A cute video about doing linguistic studies with children (and a puppet) from the University of Connecticut

Structural Ambiguity (LingVids) and an example from Animaniacs

How English Sounds to Non-English Speakers  

Prisencolinensinainciusol (fake English song)

Is Cereal Soup? and Zipf’s Law from Vsauce 

The Dangerous Ambiguity of Prepositions

Can You Speak Emoji? PBS Idea Channel

World-record fast talkers (and how that works in the brain)

Crash Course Psychology: Language

How much information? (Veritasium)

Cross-sections of the head or vocal tract while speaking: 

Music video (Better Man Than He)

ArticulatoryIPA: many individual short videos of specific sounds showing them produced in the vocal tract 

eNunciate: ultrasound videos of the inside of the mouth superimposed on the side of a speaker’s face 

X-ray gif and animated gif

Beatboxer in MRI machine (plus IPA)

Two videos of the inside of the vocal tract (note: kinda gross)

Structured series or online course, introduction to linguistics: 

Introduction to Linguistics (TrevTutor - whiteboard, Khan Academy style)

Another intro linguistics series (DS Bigham, person talking)

The Virtual Linguistics Campus at Marburg University (person talking)

“Miracles of Human Language” (on Coursera from Leiden University)

Structured series or online courses on a specific topic (might be useful to follow some of the intro material first): 

Phonology (TrevTutor)

Mathematical linguistics (TrevTutor)

Syntax (TrevTutor)

A syntax series following the chapter structure of a free online syntax textbook (University of Edinburgh)

Sign Language Structure, Learning, and Change (on EdX from Georgetown University, in ASL with English subtitles and voiceover)

Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages (on EdX from the University of Adelaide)

Long videos (documentaries or lectures): 

The Linguistic Society of America’s youtube channel has both public lectures from prominent linguists (tend to assume some background knowledge of linguistics) and some recordings of professional development webinars, such as how to write an abstract

The Five Minute Linguist talks: 2017 and 2018 (one long video of many short, engaging talks about linguistics)

Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

MIT OpenCourseware: Listening, Speaking, and Pronunciation lectures

Introduction to Optimality Theory in Phonology (UC Berkeley)

Rising voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi, a documentary about revitalizing the Lakota language, in full on youtube (it’s just under an hour long)

A classic documentary on Canadian English

The Adventure of English (BBC documentary series)

A few linguistically-relevant TED and TEDx talks (NOT a complete list): 

Endangered languages: why it matters (Mandana Seyfeddinipur)

Deaf children need sign language (Drisana Levitzke-Gray)

Robots talking with Robots - How Lingodroids invent their own language (Janet Wiles)

Four reasons to learn a new language (John McWhorter)

Several short language-related videos from TED-Ed

American and British Politeness (Lynne Murphy)

Hacking Language Learning (Conor Quinn)

The linguistic genius of babies (Patricia Kuhl)

What makes a word “real”? (Anne Curzan)

Redefining the dictionary (Erin McKean)

See also my linguistics videos tag for an automatically-updated list of linguistics videos, often from sporadically-updated or smaller channels. 

For more documentaries and longer videos about linguistics, most of which aren’t online, see A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes. 

For more resources to learn linguistics, including linguistics podcasts, blogs, books, and other advice, check out How to teach yourself linguistics online for free. 

Know of something that isn’t on one of these lists and should be? Feel free to let me know!