Huge thanks to the Surrey Morphology Group and especially @erichround.bsky.social for the incredibly enthusiastic welcome and interest in the the life cycle model and Latin phonology over the last couple of days! Many many terrific and immensely valuable discussions and interrogations 🙏

Looking forward to giving talks and chatting to people at the fabulous Surrey Morphology Group www.smg.surrey.ac.uk over the next couple of days. Here to discuss the life cycle of phonological processes - my favourite 🤩

Looking forward to giving talks and chatting to people at the fabulous Surrey Morphology Group www.smg.surrey.ac.uk over the next couple of days. Here to discuss the life cycle of phonological processes - my favourite 🤩

Please could you add me? Thanks!

Screenshot of post on Language Log: Bill Labov December 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman under Obituaries, Sociolinguistics William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side. Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation. For now, a warm memory. One night over dinner Bill said that when he wrote he liked to imagine a scholar in the library, perhaps in some faraway place or distant future, opening one of his books and finding a useful insight, just as he had from scholars before him. We got to see him receive news about such an occurrence one evening at that same table: a guest hand-delivered, from the hills of Sindhi-speaking Pakistan, a sociolinguistic book inscribed with thanks for his insight, inspiration, and example. Here’s a favorite picture of Bill turning to say goodbye one Thanksgiving afternoon. Farewell, dear friend.

Photo from Language Log of William Labov, dressed in sneakers, a blue nylon-and-fleece jacket, and a distinctive fur hat

Sad news from the linguistics community: the great sociolinguist William Labov has died at age 97 languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67399

Phase Change

An @xkcd.com for #langsky 😄

xkcd.com/3025

Yes indeed! The slipperiness of syllables makes them a lot of fun 🤩 Some great work on syllables from a really wide range of perspectives in this volume (including a diachronic chapter by me at the end 😁) brill.com/edcollbook/t...

In this spirit, Dingemanse (2023) suggests that “some interjections can be linked to ancestral vocalizations or bodily responses. Pain interjections provide an instruc- tive example. Most spoken languages appear to make avail- able a pain interjection that has as its nucleus and prosodic peak an open central unrounded vowel. It is hard to escape the conclusion that such forms harken back to a common mammalian pain vocalization (Darwin, 1872; Ehlich, 1985).”

Ouch! Linguists find universal language for pain

I remember when writing this bit on pain interjections I thought, somebody should check this at scale

Well, turns out it works like this in >150 languages! Consider it checked. Congrats to Maïa Ponsonnet @acwiek.bsky.social et al. for a cool paper pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art... covered in SciAm

The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study

Move over bouba-kiki!

New study on crossmodal iconicity shows [r] = rough and [l] = smooth, even in langs that conflate them.

The results show "that speech sounds are not just acoustic objects, but they also have a texture and a shape to them".

#iconicity 🐦🐦

#linguistics #philology #indo-european

And a raised glass to the enduring memory of the wonderful Anna Morpurgo Davies 🍷

Looking forward to this festive occasion today! 50th anniversary of the Oxford Comparative Philology Seminar. Happy memories and old friends! www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/events/2024/...

There are approximately 7,000 languages ​​in the world.
All languages ​​transmit information at a similar rate (39 bits/s).
Languages ​​spoken faster have less information density per syllable, according to the findings of a recent linguistic study of 17 languages.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

LINGUIST List 35.3363 Jobs: Lecturer in Computational Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

Computational Linguistics job (Assistant Prof level, permanent) at our lovely linguistics department in Queen Mary. We're starting a new MSc in Lings and AI. Deadline Jan 5th, interviews late February. linguistlist.org/issues/35-33... #linguistics please repost!

Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2020. The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 121. 1–32. DOI: doi.org/10.5334/gjgl..., pp. 23-24

'In particular, successful accounts of macroscopic facts typically ignore much of the available information about the corresponding micro-states, precisely because a key measure of their explanatory success is the extent to which they incorporate only causally efficient factors.' (5/5)

'Crucially, the latter shows that the temperature of a gas depends on the speed distribution of its molecules, but not on their positions or directions of travel... Choosing the right idealization is often crucial to making progress towards solving a scientific problem.' (4/5)

'The macroscopic behaviour of gases is described in terms of properties such as temperature, pressure, volume, and amount of substance. Under certain conditions..., the relations between these variables are excellently approximated by the ideal gas law' (3/5)

'It would be wrong, however, to expect that, every time we roll back abstraction and idealization in the study of sound change, we will receive an immediate pay-off in the form of models of greater explanatory power. An example from physics will serve to make this point.' (2/4)

Hope everyone is getting over yesterday's wild linguistic celebrations! 🥳 😜 Thought for today is Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero's (2020) wonderful observation on abstraction and micro-/macro- detail in theorising, which keeps coming back back to me... (1/4)

Ah - still great as you say! Like the book 😁

Happy National Linguistics Day! 🥳 To celebrate, I plan to read some work outside my own area of expertise today 📖 😊

National Linguistics Day - November 26th. Let's get people thinking, talking and learning about the science of language!

National Linguistics Day (UK) - Tue 26th Nov! www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin... Spread the word about what an exciting discipline it is to study!
Some ideas on how to participate at awareness-days.co.uk/awareness-da...
#NationalLinguisticsDay #Linguistics please share!

#linguistics #englishlanguage #phonology #history

A high school teacher and Cambridge University lecturer, Rebecca Mitchell, wants to make 26th November the first National #Linguistics Day in the UK.
I think this is a great idea, and really want to support it, but I have only just heard about it!
www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin...

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

King Richard III given Yorkshire accent using state-of-the-art technology Richard III was king of England from 1483 until his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. More than a decade after his remains were found in a Leicester car park, an expert team has managed to recr...

Terrific event at the York Theatre Royal yesterday showcasing the work of the A Voice for King Richard III project. The speaking Richard was stunning! Huge congrats to the many talented teams and individuals involved (15th-cent pronunciation courtesy of David Crystal). news.sky.com/story/king-r...