July 3, 2011 @ 10:28 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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In the most recent SMBC, a clever teacher outsmarts herself:
July 3, 2011 @ 10:28 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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Spell Me Jeff said,
July 3, 2011 @ 11:52 am
If these students could pull this off, they could pull off the real thing.
My students can't do either.
Erik Zyman Carrasco said,
July 3, 2011 @ 12:01 pm
The comic is phenomenal, but I couldn't help wishing some of the words had been more morphologically realistic (like mutuodialogtion and sonocommunicessence).
Mr Fnortner said,
July 3, 2011 @ 1:06 pm
Anti-yes as a verb: brilliant.
Aaron Toivo said,
July 3, 2011 @ 2:22 pm
I just don't envisuate how this dialect could materialesce, but at least the enjoiety of manufunct pseudothesauricals is quite diverting.
Erik Zyman Carrasco said,
July 3, 2011 @ 4:52 pm
↑ So much win.
Lauren said,
July 3, 2011 @ 5:12 pm
My favourite new lexical item is 'half-fortnight.' I would like to think that the girl in the last panel is submitting an 'applicatrix' because their new language is not only full of new vocal but has some kind of elaborate gender agreement for possessed nouns (a hypothesis clearly not upheld by any of the other utterances).
Laura said,
July 4, 2011 @ 5:51 am
Apologies to the massive majority that already knows of Stanley Unwin, but for those that don't: his close-but-not-quite language, which this is very reminiscent of, was used to great effect in the Small Faces album Ogden's Nut Gone Flake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpu6kjrsvk0
Mary Bull said,
July 4, 2011 @ 1:53 pm
Thank you for that link, Laura. My first time to hear of Small Faces or hear them. I added this performance right away to my list of YouTube favorites.
And, consequently, I have now demonstrated to all my Facebook "friends" that, nearly 500 years after a couple or three of my earliest known genealogical forebears departed old England for the American Atlantic coast, I still, on this 2011 Independence Day, have yet to sever all my ties to merry old England.
Skullturf said,
July 4, 2011 @ 3:34 pm
"Half-fortnight" is indeed awesome.
I seem to recall on a cartoon show, perhaps Futurama, a character saying
"I feel as though I have not eaten in a onemonth."
gnaddrig said,
July 5, 2011 @ 5:12 am
Ach, da kommt der Meister!Herr, die Not ist groß!Die ich rief, die Geister,werd' ich nun nicht los.
Ah, here comes the master!I have need of Thee!from the spirits that I calledSir, deliver me!
(from J. W. Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" – "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", English translation found here)
Tom Heehler said,
July 10, 2011 @ 6:02 pm
Isn't speechitating similar to thesaurisizing? For instance, let's say a scientist uses a fancy word to coin a term in order to bestow an air of legitimacy to that term – like, say, “recency illusion.” I mean let’s be real guys, that’s just a fancy way of saying “the illusion of recentness” which is just a fancy way of saying “ignorance of history.”
My next-door-neighbor’s kid is a good example. He just loves that song Pretty Woman by Van Halen. So imagine his surprise when I told him that it actually dates back Roy Orbison. I suppose you could call that “recency illusion,” but me, I just think the kid’s stupid.