The trouble of being a linguistics student is that you can never escape your work. Language is all around us, and you never know when some tiny pronunciation change, speech error, or other bit of language is going to stop you in your tracks and put you back into Linguist mode. Mind you, I really don’t mind being in linguist mode, so it’s really only troublesome when you have to explain your sudden linguistic elation to your friends who have no clue what you’re talking about.

I’ve been slowly making my way through the several-thousand-page series of Star Wars: New Jedi Order books. They’re certainly an entertaining read, and a great way to relax after analyzing language for a decent part of the day. The other day, I was reading Star by Star, one of the books in the New Jedi Order, and had one of those “linguist moments”.

Throughout the Star Wars extended universe, there is frequent mention of the Ysalamiri lizard. This lizard is unique in that, in the Star Wars galaxy, it can completely negate the effects of the Force in a small bubble around it. Its presence is frequently used as a plot device, but they never once show up in the movies.

My problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce their name, and none of my usual sources had a pronunciation guide. There are two options, based on the spelling and my particular reading of the word:

1) yi-sal-a-mee-ree (IPA below)

Yis

2) i-sal-a-mee-ree (IPA below)

is

Because the letter “Y” can be either a vowel sound (“fishy”) or a consonant/semivowel (“yet”), we can’t be sure just from looking at the word which one we’re talking about.

However, as I was reading through the book, I had a sudden “Aha!” moment and all became clear.

I’ve talked about the alternation between “a” and “an” before, and it’s a very cool phonological quirk of English (a quirk caused by rules governing the sound system). The rule states that “a” becomes “an” before a spoken vowel. So you have “a key”, “an object”, and, because it starts with a glide, not a vowel, “a university“.

I stumbled across this passage in “Star by Star”:

… Jaina glimpsed a lizardlike shape clinging to the back of the tree… “An ysalamiri,” Jaina said loudly.

“An ysalamiri”! Because this rule is pretty consistent throughout the language (and adding an “N” isn’t a typo likely to survive editing), we can now safely assume that “ysalamiri” is pronounced with a vowel at the beginning of the word (option two, i-sal-a-mee-ree). We can’t be sure whether that vowel is the same as in “beat” or in “bit”, but hey, every little bit helps.

So, much like the Force, Linguistics is everywhere, in all endeavors, academic and recreational, big and small. Now, I just need to learn to use Linguistics to lift an X-Wing. Maybe I could turn a lightsaber hilt into a voice recorder…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Created Languages, Language in Fiction, Phonetics and Phonology | 3 Comments


I’m not really sure what to make of this. It’s a video, made by an autistic woman, telling her take on language, the world, and the views of others. It’s around eight minutes, but I think it’s also worth it:

Here’s a link to the video on YouTube

As I said, I’m not really sure what to make of this. It’s a really beautiful video, and is exceptionally well made, far above the normal YouTube fodder. It also has a very interesting take on language, what constitutes language, and the sociolinguistics of Autism. If this is, in fact, a genuine look into the autistic mind, I’m very impressed, and I’ll definitely be thinking about language in a whole new way.

However, my internet cynicism is a bit too harsh for me to take this completely at face value. It doesn’t have any of the features of an “amateur video”, and as I said, it’s really a cut above 90% of what’s on YouTube. If this were to come out as something done by a few art students for notoriety, I’d be disappointed, but not shocked.

If this is everything it says it is, I have to thank the creator. It’s both brave and powerful, and exceptionally well done. It’s always good to have your worldview tweaked a little bit, and this video definitely did that for me. I hope it affected you as well.

(Also, as a note, you’ll notice that I’m not embedding the YouTube video in the page as many site do. I’m sorry for the (slight) inconvenience, but I think it’s the best choice for accessibility, compatibility, and the aesthetics of this site)

Tagged with Notes, Sociolinguistics | Leave a Comment


So, I’ve discussed language change before, and I think it’s a really fascinating area of Linguistics, as it’s a good reminder that Linguistics isn’t just studying the past, but also the future. I made a few predictions about language change in English a while back in this post, and one of those predictions has just come to life again for me. In that post, I said…

However, it will happen. In the same way that “whom” is gradually fading from use, [usage of 'their' as a gender neutral pronoun] will fade in.

For as long as I’ve been looking, I’ve maintained (along with others) that “whom” is rapidly fading from use in the English language.

What is ‘whom’?

‘Whom’, for those of you who never had this pushed on you by your High School English teacher (or have replaced it with usable information), is/was both a relative and interrogative pronoun in English. It can be used in sentences such as “For whom were you looking?” and “The police are searching for the man whom Mike Tyson attacked”.

Where most people falter is differentiating it from “who”. Let’s talk about some terminology real quick so I can give it a nice, thorough, linguistic description:

In grammatical descriptions, there are several different ’semantic roles’, played by the different actors in a given sentence. The ‘agent’ is the person or thing that initiates the action (the dog in “the dog bit the man”). The ‘patient’ is the person or thing that is affected by the action done by the agent (the man in “the dog bit the man”). In all ‘transitive’ sentences, involving some sort of action done to somebody by somebody else, there is both an ‘agent’ and a ‘patient’.

Let’s make a sentence: “Janet Reno saw the penguin”. In that sentence, ‘Janet Reno’ is the agent, and ‘the penguin’ is the patient. Let’s ask some questions using that statement. In order to ask a question about it, we need to insert a question word (who or whom) in place of the part we want to ask about. So, if we want to ask about the agent in English, we use “who”, but, to ask about the patient, we use “whom”. We’d end up with either “Who saw the Penguin?” or “Whom did Janet Reno see?”. We could also go all out and say “Who saw whom?” So, in summary, in the glory days of Whom, we used “who” to replace the agent in a sentence, and “whom” to replace the patient.

Whom am I calling obsolete? Whom.

However, that’s rapidly going out of style. It’s not unusual to see “Who did you see?” or “Wait, who shot who?”, and really, “whom” shows up rarely in everyday usage. How rarely? Well, in the EnronSent Corpus of Enron’s corporate email, it shows up 991 times out of 13,810,266 total words. Compare that to 11,789 times for “who”. Of those 991 times, there are many “incorrect” uses (“This template is for participants, whom will be kept confidential at all times.”)

Many people don’t know when it’s actually supposed to be used, and even those who do are very seldom able to use it without seeming pretentious (or worse). Personally, I can’t imagine walking up to a girl in a bar and saying “You’re the girl for whom I’ve been waiting all my life”. So, whom is on the way out.

However, today, I saw something completely new. This was a headline submitted to fark.com today:

Submitter confuses golf story for NBA story, left confused as to who shot whome

The usage is actually classically correct, but the spelling isn’t. The submitter seems to have the idea of when to use it, but it’s gotten so rare that he or she (they!) haven’t gotten used to the usual spelling.

So, when everyday people stop using a term or grammar point, stop seeing it, and stop understanding how it works, it’s only a matter of time before it’s on its way out.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ‘whom’.

PS: For those not familiar with the headline’s reference, it’s a play on Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” sketch which is definitely worth a read.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Change, Language Usage | 2 Comments

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