yagoda languagehat.com Strong Language EditorMom Christopher Culver’s Linguistics Weblog Preparing to study Mongolian from Krueger’s An Introduction to Classical (Literary) Mongolian (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 3rd edition 1993), I’ve been re-reading the Routledge Language Family Surveys volume The Mongolic Languages ed. Juha Janhunen. Below are some musings on and follow-ups to trivia within. Examples of some crucial [Khalka] consonant contrasts: ad [at] ‘demon’ vs. at [aʰt] ‘castrated camel’; dal [taɮ] ‘seventy’ vs. tal [tʰaɮ] ‘steppe’. So modern Mongolian is one of those languages that, instead of a voiced–unvoiced distinction in dentals that I could actually pronounce, has an aspirated–unaspirated distinction that I’ll never get down. [Turkic borrowings in Mongolic] often show a specialized meaning, whereas the native [Mongolic] words have a more general semantic profile, cf. e.g. The ordinary Chuvash word for ‘hair’ today is ҫӳҫ. That Bulgar Turkic had a cognate word for ‘throat’ showing rhotacism is attested by Chuvash пыр id.
Wug Life Rachael Tatman has an interesting post weighing the pros and cons of doing a PhD in linguistics. She comes down on the “no” side, because the academic job market is terrible and “grad school is grueling”: You have to have very strong personal motivation to finish a PhD. Sure, your committee is there to provide oversight and you have drop-dead due dates. But those deadlines are often very far away and, depending on your committee, you may have a lot of independence. Another blog post, by Tal Linzen, answers yes: Between academia and the private sector, recent graduates from top linguistics programs don’t seem to have a very hard time finding full-time employment. […]The big “but” here is that linguistics has several subdisciplines, some of which are closer to the humanities and others closer to the behavioral sciences and computer science.
An American Editor Lingua Franca In the greatest English theatrical comedy of the 19th century, a peculiar series of events involving an infant and a handbag are the subject of an 11th-hour confession by one of my favorite literary inventions, a governess named Miss Prism. There are many reasons to love Miss Prism, among them the fact that in her youth she wrote a three-volume novel. Like all of Oscar Wilde’s creations, she has more than a bit of the playwright in her (Miss Prism is given to saying things like “I speak hort… A new semester of classes started at German universities this week, which means I’ve spent the last few days asking fresh rounds of students about their language goals. People sometimes take my skeptical comments on animal-language news stories (“Dolphin Talk and Human Credulity,” for example) as evidence that I regard animals as inferiors. In truth, the only animals I had showed contempt for were the bipedal primates who write science stories for newspapers. Entries in the 2007 AP Stylebook
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