shit_linguistics_profs_say epitome of incomprehensibility "Sentences are so powerful...and rich...and filled with wonder and stuff like that." "Notice I didn't kill any of you when you pronounced your words differently." 220926 ... e_o_i "Trees are just another way of erasing symbols." (It made sense in context.) "Set theory is the basis of all math, which is the basis of all science. So set theory is the basis of everything." "A little pretentious, but grammatical." 221008 ... e_o_i "It's like, 'Look, the subject was here! And it left its scarf behind!'" 221115 ... e_o_i "We sort of ended at babbling." (Language Acquisition, so it made sense in context.) "Vowels are...tricky." "How are you supposed to know who's got the banana, as it were?" 230214 ... e_o_i Morphology edition: "Compounds are just weird." "I'm a mouse-infested person, myself." (Context: whether people said "mice-infested" or "mouse-infested".) "This is assuming that linguists know what words are, which has NOT been proven." "You can split heads apart." (In morphological trees.) "No one does an entire tree in distributional morphology!" 231214 ... e_o_i Now that I'm done with my (own) classes...History of Linguistics edition! (Taught by the same prof as morphology, but it seems he had more fun with this class.) "That's why we only have a two-part definition of the sign [while the ancient Greek Stoics had three], because we're not as concerned about the chair Zeus is sitting on." "Varro - not as influential as he should have been." "Don't ignore the older ideas that seem dumb...they may not actually be dumb." "Which is why we don't think about some languages being better than others anymore! This is such a bad idea!" "Who's right? Neither of them are right. All of this is B.S." "Late 19th century - the Neogrammarians. Kind of a big deal." "Must be another pattern." "If you're going to be a historical syntactician, you have to be a good syntactician first." "Sapir is going to build on the typological work of Schleicher and Humboldt - but not be racist about it." "The weird things are irregularities and...weird things." [About Leonard Bloomfield] "In fact, he was very not-crazy." "We're definitely going to see Chomsky today." "Bloomfield revolutionized syntax, but refused to draw lines." "No happy little trees for Bloomfield." "That is how one does a linguistics." "Chomsky was just as much of a bully as Bloomfield." "That is the person Chomsky wants to study - unfortunately, that person does not exist." "So, Skinner decided he was a linguist..." "Two syntacticians walk into an X-bar..." (A linguistics dad_joke if there ever was one: X-bar is the pattern many syntax trees are based on.) "Everyone got aboard the Chomsky train, because this generative linguistics field was HOT." "You still had some structuralists doing structuralist things." "We now have feature geometry and it is glorious." 231219 ... e_o_i Old Egyptian edition, part 1: "I'm a historical linguist, so my natural inclination is to turn to the dead." "You don't have to hear what speakers are saying. Because they're dead. They're quiet." "A nice dead language with lots of problems." "...because everyone else is a moron, except me." "Even when linguists write grammars, things are hazy and screwed up, so when non-linguists write them - it gets very confused." "I was a hippie, and hippies were into Egyptian mysticism." "'Brusher of the king's teeth' - yeah, that's a title." "There's a king whose mother's name was 'Mrs. Hippo'" [denebet, word for female hippopotamus - the "t" ending is feminine] 240115 what's it to you? who go blather from