Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity

Category: Fun

  • Playful iconicity: Having fun with words

    What do words like waddle, slobber, tingle, oink, and zigzag have in common? These words sound funny, but they are also iconic, with forms that resemble aspects of their meanings. In a new paper we investigate the link between funniness and iconicity in 70,000 English words. “This is play” The starting point is a theory about metacommunication: some words (or signs) are more striking than others in terms of…

  • Micromoments in music

    This post originated as a twitter thread. 1 One of my favourite micromoments in music: the creak at 1:15 in Old Folks by Miles Davis. Perfectly timed with an inbreath, I always imagine Davis leaning back in his chair, pure concentration building up for the next lyrical phrase. 2 Another musical #micromoment — the signature…

  • Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

    Summary: Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof. Et Al and Dr. A. Author, whose profiles I created following Scholar’s recommended settings (and a bit of manual embellishment). If you…

  • Taal in de reageerbuis

    Taal in de reageerbuis

    Gek op cross-overs van kunst en wetenschap, muziek en experiment? Ik ook. Daarom organiseer ik met mijn collega’s Tessa Verhoef en Seán Roberts een experiment op het Discovery Festival in Amsterdam — hét festival voor interessante kruisbestuivingen, rare muziek, en nieuwe experimenten. Ons experiment is vermomd als game en, afgaand op de pilots die we…

  • Better science through listening to lay people

    Slides for a presentation given at the ECSITE 2013 Annual Conference on science communication. I spoke in a session convened by Alex Verkade (De Praktijk) and Jen Wong (Guerilla Science). The other speakers in the session were Bas Haring on ‘Ignorance is a virtue’, and Jen Wong on ‘Mixing science with art, music and play’. We…

  • *Grammatically judgements

    I stumbled on a paper which is titled (according to the journal metadata and countless secondary sources) Grammatically Judgments and Second Language Acquisition. Read again if you didn’t spot the grammatically error in there. I was just about to add it to my Zotero collection of articles with recursive titles1 when I decided to check whether…

  • Bourdieu’s food space, updated

    Food writer Molly Watson from Gastronomica provides us with an update of Bourdieu’s food space, where different types of food are arranged spatially along two dimensions: economic and cultural capital. The beautiful illustration is by Leigh Wells . Note the four versions of “homemade pickles” appearing in all four regions of the chart. Molly Watson…

  • The Albert Einstein Award of Excellence: another ABI scam

    Last year’s post on the Great Minds of the 21st Century award continues to attract attention from people who want to find out more about the American Biographical Institute (ABI) and its vanity awards. Surprisingly, there are still people clueless (shameless?) enough to list vanity scams like this on their CVs. Thankfully, the ABI decided…

  • The clay tablet tradition of African comparative linguistics

    Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls within the ‘clay tablet’ tradition of African comparative linguistics, and, like other things in the same tradition (Meinhof, Greenberg), it has the properties of being inscrutable and yet at the same time, in broad outline,…

  • Basquekpafu

    There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way…

  • Great Minds of the 21st Century: an ABI scam

    Just got this letter, on official-looking paper with an official-looking stamp: Dear Mr. Dingemanse: You have been nominated to appear in Great Minds of the 21st Century, a major reference directory including just 1,000 of the world’s top thinkers and intellectuals. (…) The ABI is contantly engaged with research centers throughout the world as well…

  • Some miracle of cloning

    “See what I just did? Made another me.” Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37. There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd’s (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why ‘culture is essential’ (the chapter title) and…

  • People are animals (sings the Isakpolo bird)

    It is no news that people are animals, especially not this Darwin Year. But normally that something we say of ourselves. Wouldn’t it be rather more interesting if another member of the animal kingdom would weigh in on the matter? It happens in Kawu, where I am right now for fieldwork (hence the silence on…

  • Scandalised missionaries and quite a new class of priests: some unforeseen effects of early missionary efforts in the Gold Coast

    In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin in the 1870s and 1880s. The document is clearly based on some dead serious German reports from around the same time, but it is written in a dry tone with barely submerged irony as only…

  • Semantic cookies

    Semantic cookies are sold in Akpafu-Mempeasem, central Volta Region, Ghana (among other places) Fieldwork sessions on lexical semantics have become a lot easier since I found these cookies. I came across them in a small and dusty store in Akpafu-Mempeasem, my fieldwork hometown of all places. Semantic cookies are made in Turkey by a company…

  • The Hidbap language of PNG

    Mt. Iso in PNG, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Diuwe is spoken between sea level and the first isoline at 100m, Hidbap between the first and the second isolines. This week, the language of the week at Anggarrgoon is DIY, also known as Diuwe. Claire Bowern, noting that the only…