The examples linguists use
My apologies to all my readers, I just haven't had all that much time to blog since I started grad school, though I have a lot of things I'd like to blog about! (I'll be making time after finals week next week to catch up on my posting.) Thanks to the Nom Nom Linguistics Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called Linguistics Sample Sentences: http://lingsamplesentences.tumblr.com/ Here you can see a selection of the weirdest / funniest / slightly more obscene examples that linguists use to illustrate various points about the grammars of other languages. Sometimes linguists need these 'weird' examples to see how a language performs a certain function. Sometimes these examples highlight how creative the speakers of a language can be. And sometimes linguists just choose the weirdest examples for comic relief. (Because talking about grammar.) In general, I'm told we sound like a violent bunch. If we're trying to study something l...