Comments on: The double-edged sword of Linguistic passion

By: Sean Panick

Sean Panick — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:15:56 +0000

Yeah I do that a lot too. Like sometimes when singing alng to a song or listening to peope talk I just transcribe it into APA in my head. My friends generally just ignore me now. I remember when I took phonetics and we were learning about the glottis. I never thought about my own glottis more in my life. I thought abou it so much I could feel it….very strange. Every ancestry phonetics and phonolgy I’ve also noticed I make weird pronunciation and stress errors. Phonetics and phonology made me worse at speaking my own language!

By: Audrey Hosman

Audrey Hosman — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:41:25 +0000

Hi! I’m very interested in languages and hope on being an interpreter one day for English/Russian and maybe German. And like you I have linguistic moments where I start thinking about how someone just said something and repeating it, quite embarrassing :p Anyways, I have a question that I thought you could probably answer. The other day I was listening to a song in Spanish, and there was a word ending in ‘ada’ (I can’t remember the word now…haha) but later at night I was lying in bed thinking about it. I knew that in spanish a ‘d’ between vowels is soft, more like /ð/ but I was thinking about it, and realized it sounded like /ð/ but without the tongue touching the teeth, instead just going between (Dental approximant?). Is that true? I tried looking online for a description of the pronunciation of a spanish soft ‘d’ but didn’t find anything. And I was also thinking, it would probably be the same as the L-like Danish ‘d’, like in ‘med’

I discovered your site about a month ago, and loved it. I read just about all the posts that day! I look forward to any new posts. :) -Audrey
p.s. Вы еще часто говорите по-русски?

By: Veronica

Veronica — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:32:00 +0000

Very interesting…I speak Russian, English and Spanish so I often catch myself analyzing the grammar and the differences of the three languages as they relate to each other…my friends think I am a nut!

By: Sharkbait

Sharkbait — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:41:45 +0000

Haha. I relate to this completely. And I remember the 502 errors especially prevalent during the time I took this Metaphor class at Berkeley. It got in my head and changed the way I heard and processed every conversation henceforth. It was mindblowing to say the least, but my friends had to suffer through my ridiculous tangents as I tried to explain why I was tripping over a word somebody had just used, or why I couldn’t finish my sentences.

I love linguistics.

By: kyte

kyte — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:11:05 +0000

Oh my… its been years since I studied Linguistics but I know exactly what you mean. And it doesnt stop, just because you don’t do anything significant with the knowledge… you still get the 502 moments YEARS later.

By: Damien Riley

Damien Riley — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 23:20:49 +0000

I hear you!!! As a 4th grade teacher with an MA in Language, Writing, and Rhetoric, I am always finding these amazing connections in teaching language. Most of the time I have to keep quiet because it would throw the lesson off. Like for example, the other day I was explaing “went” as the past tense of “go.” I was showing the how ridiculous of an irregular form that was. In my mind I saw the Spanish “fui” as the past tense of ir. I was just in my own world for a minute.

So anyway, I hear you.

By: john patrick 吉平

john patrick 吉平 — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:14:13 +0000

Thanks for this post! I used to be a linguist once!

I posted my own reflections on this over at my site, mostly about how when I make observations as a linguist, people tend dismiss them, because they don’t really listen to language on the same level as we do.

By: PC

PC — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:24:34 +0000

I have these 502 Error moments all the time. Last night I was sitting around drinking beers with some friends, and someone happened to say “bagels,” but pronounced like ['bɛgəl] instead of ['begəl]. Everyone kind of noticed it and was poking fun at her, but while they all just started talking about other words they said differently from one another, I sat there muttering “bagel” “bagel” “bagel” “bagel” with various vowel heights, under my breath, staring into space. When someone catches you doing that, what can you say? “Oh, I’m just trying to figure out what her vowel space looks like.” Yyyyyyeah. Luckily I mostly hang out with musicians/non-academics, so I’m something of a novelty to them anyway, and they just sort of wave it away as me doing one of my silly linguistics thing again.