phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

Shortly after I wrote about the spelling Moertley Crueh on Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page, I received e-mail from two readers of phonoloblog, both suggesting the same explanation for the mysterious r in Moertley. (more…)

Not long ago, I upgraded phonoloblog to WordPress 1.5. A positive upgrade overall, but as Geoff Pullum has noted several times over on Language Log, upgrades are sometimes also downgrades. The result in this case was that all registered phonoloblog authors were downgraded to mere “user” status (except me, because I’m not only an author, I’m also the owner). Basically, this meant that most if not all users couldn’t publish posts directly. I’ve now fixed this, I think, but let me know if I didn’t — and my apologies if you’ve been wanting to publish a post and found that you could only save a measly draft.

Eric’s posting Phonology continues to get no respect had the same effect on me as a madeleine on Marcel Proust. All of a sudden I was back in 1995, and Luigi Burzio’s book Principles of English Stress was lying on my desk. A syntactic colleague entered my room, saw the book, took it in his hand and commented: "Why would a well-known linguist now want to write on stress?"

Arnold Zwicky made a quick Language Log post this morning, pointing to the Wikipedia page on heavy metal umlaut. A highly edutaining page, especially if (like me) you’re at that special intersection of “Linguistics Geek” and “Music Nerd”. But there was something specific there that caught my phonologist-eye:

At one Mötley Crüe performance in Germany, the entire audience started chanting “Moertley Crueh!”

Where does that [r] in “Moertley” come from? (more…)

An interesting-seeming call for papers came out over LinguistList today, for a workshop in Berlin in December called Descriptive and Explanatory Adequacy in Linguistics. (Abstracts due Sept. 15.) I should have known, though, that “Linguistics” in this context means (only) “Syntax”. (more…)

Yesterday afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered, Alaska Public Radio Network’s Gabriel Spitzer reported on the “whistling culture” of the St. Lawrence Island Yupik Eskimos. (There’s apparently an annual festival of whistled languages being held this weekend in the Turkish town of Kuşdili (ş = IPA [ʃ]); don’t know whether this town name is morphologically decomposeable, but I do know that dil is Turkish for ‘language’.) (more…)

A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts on neighborhoods for languages with contrastive segment length. The issue is that calculating the number of neighbors for a given item presumably would net different results based on how you conceive a geminate: is it a pair of segments, or is it a single segment? I had thought that the geminate-as-single-segment approach would generally provide a higher neighbor count, which preliminarily is supported by an artificial trial.
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If you’ve taught (or taken!) an introductory linguistics course lately, and spent any time discussing onomatopoeia and the arbitrariness of the sign, then you’ve probably talked about how speakers of different languages make different animal sounds. And, if you bothered to do a quick Google search for “animal sounds” or “animal noises“, then one of your first few hits will have probably been Cathy Ball’s really fun and excellent Sounds of the World’s Animals website. This site is constantly under development, accepting contributions from readers, and has been up (and recognized with various awards and such) since 1996 1995.

Which is why I was surprised to hear this story on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday this morning.

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Speaking of the Optimal List: I forgot to cross-post here one of the very first non-ROA announcements that came through when I decided to turn the list into an announcement-only venue. It’s an announcement for a new book series, Advances in Optimality Theory, edited by Ellen Woolford and Armin Mester. Two books have so far been advertised to appear in the series, both phonology-related: Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory (by John J. McCarthy, May 2006) and Optimality Theory, Phonological Acquisition and Disorders (ed. by Daniel A. Dinnsen & Judith A. Gierut, December 2006).

Tonio Green has just posted a complete draft of his interesting book Phonology Limited on the Rutgers Optimality Archive. For those of you who do not regularly visit the Archive or subscribe to the Optimal List — the latter having become pretty much just an announcement list for new postings on the Archive — the abstract for the book is copied below.

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