Katie's excellent post here is getting a lot of people either purposefully or ignorantly misunderstanding the point. At the risk of over-explaining, I'm going to go through this. /1
First of all, a horse is not a chair. Everyone agrees on this. No one is arguing that a horse is actually a kind of a chair. That's the point. /2
May 4, 2022 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
There's been some grumblings online about Scots not being a "real language", and notably that it has the "same grammar" as English. Let's examine this claim in detail. Time for a thread! TL;DR the grammars are different. /1
By "grammar", linguists usually mean all the rules of the language, including rules of pronunciation and conversation. But in popular use, "grammar" just refers to morphosyntax, so that's what I'll be focussing on today. I'm also not going to mention, lexical differences. /2
Feb 14, 2022 • 11 tweets • 7 min read
Many of followers are not UK academics, so here's a quick 🧵 on why higher education staff across the UK are on strike this week (and beyond). There are two big issues at play here: (1) pensions, and (2) the four fights. #UCUstrike#OneOfUsAllOfUs /1
Pensions: there have been some major proposed cuts to our pensions. These are largely based on a valuation of the pension fund carried out in March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, when markets were volatile. #UCUstrike#OneOfUsAllOfUs /2
Aug 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Great thread here on ambiguity and interpretation in language and how we can often talk past each other despite using the same words.
Some of my own observations (I'm not a semanticist so these are a lot less insightful than Lelia's comments):
The prevalence of coronavirus in our lives also means that the word "symptoms" alone often means "Covid symptoms".
May 25, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I haven't posted about my research in a while (because pandemic, whee), but I'm pleased to share "Graph-theoretic Properties of the Class of Phonological Neighbourhood Networks", to be presented at CMCL: aclweb.org/anthology/2021…
The paper outlines the beginning of a research agenda in the formal properties of phonological neighbourhood networks, which is a representational tool for looking at how lexical structure is organized.
Mar 30, 2021 • 27 tweets • 7 min read
This is a great question, and a good topic for a Tuesday afternoon thread about etymology. Buckle up! /1
All else being equal, we generally expect words to be similar between related languages. However, there are always times when words shift in meaning, perhaps becoming more or less specialised than they used to be. /2
Jul 14, 2020 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
German and English words are usually pretty similar. Maus~mouse, Milch~milk, Wasser~water, sechs~six, Vater~father. But the German word for horse, "Pferd", is nothing like English. What happened? A thread. /1
English and German both share a common ancestor, which linguists refer to as "Proto-Germanic", spoken around 2,000 years ago in the north German plain and modern-day Denmark. Other Germanic languages include Norwegian, Dutch, Gothic, Faroese, and Afrikaans. /2
Apr 3, 2019 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Fun fact: The word "bear" is originally "the brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the bear's true name. Time for a thread about animal name taboos! /1
The Proto-Indo-European word for bear was *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, literally "the destroyer". This is reflected in modern French "ours", Greek "arktos", Sanskrit "ṛ́kṣa", Persian "خرس", and others. The name "Arthur" comes from the Welsh form. /2
Aug 12, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Has anyone else noticed how a great many problems in academia and academic publishing today are due to the use of publications as a measure of research productivity? A thread:
Using journal "prestige" (or IF) to assess research quality, rather than the attributes of the research itself, increases their value of established journals and publishers. This leads to those journals playing a gatekeeping role rather than a true peer-review role.
May 15, 2018 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Okay, this is a pretty amazing auditory illusion. Here's what I think is going on. In the first syllable, there's only one major spectral peak below 2.5kHz. It has a wide bandwidth, which is consistent with an F1 and F2 very close together: an /ɑ/ (for "Laurel"). /1
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The higher spectral prominence dips down about halfway through the word, between the two syllables. If the lower spectral prominence is F1 & F2, then the higher one must be F3. A low F3 = /ɹ/! Given the overall frequencies, the voice sounds male. /2
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