daakureisaiko:

(via allthingslinguistic)

gavinverhey:

I hiked to Machu Picchu! For the strenous, two-day hike that retraces the Inca’s footsteps, my guide told me to bring only what was absolutely essential… butI couldn’t help but make room for one tiny little exception.

Pokemon Art Challenge #771: Pyukumuku, the Sea Cucumber Pokemon

istodayajewishholiday:

Yes, today is Rosh Chodesh Sh’vat, the first of the month of Sh’vat!

alwaysalreadyangry:

OK OK OK Ann Leckie’s new fantasy novel The Raven Tower is fuuucking amazing. 

- very good mystery plot 
- LOTS of political machinations
- queerness and the hero is a trans man 
- warring gods
- linguistics and lots about the start of language and societies that I was really into???
- friendship 

also like. the plot just had me clutching at my FACE and gasping a lot. it’s so so so clever and good and i am tired and incapable of writing a proper review rn (maybe soon). IT IS SO GOOD. it’s out next month and it has my strongest recommendation!!!!!!!!

(via annleckie)

allthingslinguistic:

superlinguo:

This year I’ll be putting academic work on the back-burner, and working on a personal project: raising my own tiny human (project start date: imminent!). 

I’ll still be blogging here weekly (or weekly-ish), and Lingthusiasm podcast episodes will stick to their regular schedule. Thanks to the slow pace of academic publishing, I’ll also be sharing some of my research as it’s published throughout the year.

Below are some of the top Superlinguo blog posts from last year, all the episodes from the podcast, and a continuation of what is now an annual tradition, sharing my top 10 things from the year.  

Five things I’m looking forward to in 2019

1. Lingthusiasm continuing two episodes a month, including some video episodes on the horizon
   
2. Sharing various articles that are under review, or about to go in
3. Seeing what happens on the collaborative projects I’ve left to tick along
4. Continuing to work with RNLD, this year I’m stepping up as Secretary of the organisation
   
5. Sleep deprivation
   

Top Superlinguo posts of 2018

• [ə̞̃ə̃ə̝̃] - That’s the way you mumble ‘I dunno’, and it has implications for the nature of meaning
• Indigenous Weather Knowledge - Bureau of Meteorology
• New Paper: Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
• New Open Access Publication: A Guide to the Syuba (Kagate) Language Documentation Corpus in LD&C
• ASL Signbank: An online dictionary of ASL signs
• Don’t run towards the fire (the on-going problem with emoji directions)
• Communicating colours using black and white - a new app with a new perspective on language evolution
• Four new Language Contexts papers in LDD: Paluai, Vatlongos, Malua & Te Reo Māori o te Pae Tonga o te Kuki Airani
  
• The Swadesh 100 list as emoji
• Top five linguist pregnancy announcements
• Lingthusiasm, listed by subfield - a handy resource for teachers!
  

There were also 11 new additions to the Linguistics Jobs interview series, where I interview people who studied linguistics and went on to varied careers. In 2018 I interviewed a standards engineer, a language creator, a conductor, an accent coach and more!  

Lingthusiasm podcast links for 2018

Lingthusiasm continued to grow in 2018. We now regularly do a free full episode every month, and thanks to our Patrons we do a full bonus episode too. We get to keep the show running without ads, continued to add merch to the store (Space Babies! Kids clothes!), and we did two live shows, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney. In 2019 keep an eye out for some of our first video episodes!

Lingthusiasm main episodes:

1. Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test
   
2. Vowel Gymnastics
   
3. Translating the untranslatable
   
4. Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions
   
5. Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary
   
6. What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles
   
7. This, that and the other thing - determiners
   
8. When Nothing Means Something
   
9. Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
   
10. https://lingthusiasm.com/tagged/episode-25/chrono

Bonus episodes:

1. We are all linguistic geniuses - Interview with Daniel Midgley
2. Creating languages for fun and learning
3. The grammar of swearing
4. The poetry of memes
5. Linguistics grad school advice
6. Forensic Linguistics
7. Homophones, homonyms, and homographs
8. Emoji, Gesture and The International Congress of Linguists
   
9. Hyperforeignisms
10. Bringing up bilingual babies

Support the show on Patreon to access the bonus episodes.

My Top 10 Things of 2018

1. Lingthusiasm continued to grow! We released 12 free episodes, and 12 bonus episodes, and reached key funding goals which meant we’ll be doing a video episode about gesture in 2019 and we also did…
   
2. Two Lingthusiasm live shows! Gretchen came to Australia in November and we did live recordings of the show in Sydney and Melbourne.
   
3. I teamed up with 13 other linguists, many of them key figures in the field over the last few decades, to write the article Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field. It was published in Linguistics at the start of 2018, and went on to become the most downloaded article of all time in the journal.
   
4. I published A Guide to the Syuba (Kagate) Language Documentation Corpus in the journal Language Documentation and Conservation. Almost a decade after I started working with Syuba speakers, it has been great to write a definite guide to the Open Access collection.
   
5. I published my first article in Gesture! This is my first paper on gesture use in Nepal, and I’m stoked that it is in the flagship journal of the field. Contexts of Use of a Rotated Palms Gesture among Syuba (Kagate) Speakers in Nepal
   
6. The Language Contexts series in Language Documentation and Conservation continues to grow. We started this article series in 2017, and had 4 new additions in 2018. This series provides an avenue for publishing information about the contexts in which a language or variety is spoken.
   
7. I had my first year of working with RNLD as a board member. Excited to be stepping up as Secretary of the organisation in 2019 (once the bub and I are ready) - with exciting news for the organisation on the horizon.
   
8. I made it to my first LSA! The Linguistics Society of America conference is by far the largest conference I’ve ever been to. I presented a paper on gesture and evidentiality, and Gretchen and I ran a panel on linguistics podcasting.
   
9. I continued a whole bunch of great collaborations. I’ve been working on different projects with many excellent humans including Suzy Styles, Andrea Berez-Kroeker, Helene Andreassen, Chelsea Krajcik, Barb Kelly, Kristine Hildebrandt, Amos Teo, Rael Stanley, Ruth Gamble, Gerald Roche & Alex Davis.
   
10. In the last couple of weeks of the year I launched a new podcast series! Research in Focus is a podcast from La Trobe University’s Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area, featuring 20 minute interviews with researchers about their work. I came on board as interviewer and producer, and had a great time getting to operate a studio panel and chat to excellent colleagues about their work. The first three episodes are up now, more coming every fortnight for the first few months of 2019!
    

See also:

• Superlinguo 2018
  
• Superlinguo 2017
• Superlinguo 2016

I am very pleased to share this onesie saying “Mum’s little longitudinal language acquisition project” (in Lingthusiasm green, natch) which I made for @superlinguo and her upcoming tiny human! 

Pokemon Art Challenge #770: Palossand, the Sand Castle Pokemon

Pokemon Art Challenge #769: Sandygast, the Sand Heap Pokemon

sophieakatz:

…and arbitrary borders assigned.

Another New Year’s Eve and Day have come and gone, and I find myself feeling… nothing significant, to be honest.

This might be because I did not stay up until midnight. I did not spend the evening partying. I had to get up and go to work in the morning. I’m not in school anymore, and my work doesn’t give me a winter break. For me, these days could have been any other day of the year, except for the sound of fireworks from sundown onward.

Which gets me thinking – New Year’s Day really could be just any other day of the year. We only celebrate it on January 1^st because Julius Caesar thought it was a good idea. He could have pointed at July 1^st and called that day the beginning of the year, and it would just mean people in the northern hemisphere could get away with wearing t-shirts instead of winter coats on the holiday.

Keep reading