May 2022: 10th blogiversary and Japanese translation of Because Internet

Hello!

In May, I hit my 10-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic. I celebrated with two linkposts, one of the usual highlights from the past year and another, shorter post of more zoomed-out highlights from the past decade.

I participated for the second year running as a contestent in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages. The bonus episode was What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow, an edited recording of our online liveshow from April.

It's delightfully surreal when an author whose books you're enjoying also likes your book!

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Extremely amusing to see this lovely review from Lois McMaster Bujold of Because Internet on the same weekend as I was devouring two novels and a novella from her Vorkosigan saga! (I've been utterly incapable of putting them down, send help)

goodreads.comLois Bujold’s review of Because Internet5/5: Well. That was excellent. “Friendly, familiar, foreign, and near,” as the tourist ads for Canada used to say, by turns informative and hilarious. The distinction between formal and informal writing seems endlessly useful. The chapter on emoji linguistically analyzed as gesture was certainly a…

The #103papers project continued, in which I read one paper per language for the 103 languages identified as having papers published about them in the four major child language acquisition journals, based on a survey paper by Kidd&Garcia. Here's a bit from a paper about Greenlandic showing that kids love morphology!

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

In a half-hour recording of a Greenlandic 2 yo, he appears to have acquired way more morphemes (up to 4-5 affixes after the stem) than typically described for languages with fewer morphemes, suggesting improved ways of counting Fortescue 1984 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01… #103papers

Selected tweets

• tabook

• language map

• Sanskrit two-dimensional alphabet

• generational email anxiety

• misled (pronounced mizzled)

• colorless green ideas slep furiously (AI art edition)

• French facts you probably didn't learn in school

• ancestor book Woman on the Edge of Time

Selected blog posts

• A Decade of All Things Linguistic

• 10 years of All Things Linguistic

• Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host

This month I received my author copies of Because Internet in Japanese, translated by Toshio Chiba, which kept the bright yellow/blue cover. You can get it at Filmart or Amazon.co.jp.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen