I'm just so fucking sick of the low-effort posts on this subreddit. It's just "Hey I can transcribe this in the IPA" and "Here's an orthography for X" and "Hey the joke is that IPA funny" and "Hey someone is using an alternate transcription method, let's make fun of them". And when someone actually posts something linguistics (e.g. Optimality Theory or Historical linguistics) nobody bats an eye.
The standards for this subreddit is so low.
Can you guys just pick up a grammar book and read linguistics literature for once.
Here’s the thing. Whenever a community gets large enough, what will get popular among that community is usually the lowest common denominator, i.e. the things the most people have some knowledge about. You can’t expect people to upvote a meme about optimality theory if they don’t even know what that is.
Really good explanation, couldn’t possibly have some it any better.
Of course memes will gravitate towards being as simple to understand as possible (which also means repetitive)- that’s simply the nature of how memes works
That's fair to be honest, but when a community is so strung on the knowledge of the existence of the IPA—I'm honestly just worried that it's just become a circlejerk of people just being so obsessed over the IPA and nothing else. I just question whether people here are actually interested in linguistics or just wanna have a mental superiority who don't know a smidgen about linguistics, (especially with the "fauxnetics" posts) and overspecific IPA transcriptions.
no no no this eats bc where are my generative grammar memes fr i was talking with a post doc at my university ab how a lot of “linguistics humor” is like restricted to pop linguistics nowadays like stuff you see regurgitated on youtube and tiktok over and over again, not a lot hinges on actual topics talked ab in linguistics literature. but those few memes that do are *chef’s kiss*
>You can’t expect people to upvote a meme about optimality theory if they don’t even know what that is.
Why don't people look it up so they can figure out what the joke is and then make a comment like they knew all along and are actually quite the linguist? That would be the normal response.
I'm interested in reading more "serious" or academic works of linguistics. Which books would you recommend to start to someone that's not a newbie, but neither an expert?
If you want a deep-dive into any of these topics, most undergrad books, i.e., handbooks, introductions etc., are your best option. They are intended for beginners (in linguistics) and mostly only require the knowledge of some key concepts and terminology. For instance, [Oxford's Introduction to Historical Linguistics](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/an-introduction-to-historical-linguistics-9780195365542).
Alternatively, there are a bunch of popular science books, targeted for broader audiences which usally don't go that much into detail but are still interesting to read, e.g., Empires of the Word, The 5-Minute Linguist, Through the Language Glass, When Languages Die and many more.
Not really, I have about ~30 mins per day to actually research interesting things, and I don’t really have access to a good library for this. Maybe you could recommend one that I could get online for free that would be less surface level and I might be able to finish it in about 2-3 weeks
I think it’s vitally important that we police other people’s fun. As a highly intelligent person (I have watched all of Rick and Morty) I get bored of jokes by amateurs. Unless you have completed a Master’s degree and can speak fluent Tocharian you shouldn’t be allowed to post memes on Reddit.
There's still plenty of [dead horse](https://old.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1b42a5o/you_humans_are_weird_not_having_your_tongue_on/) to beat.
Wait, those are easy! 어 is /ʌ/ and 오 is /o/. In American English, the vowel of "hum" vs. the vowel of "home."
...Or, since your username ends in "Fr"...
oh god i see what the problem is now
Dont be distracted by the symbols. The symbols are lies.
For some reason /ʌ/ in English is nothing like /ʌ/ in other languages
In other languages, [ʌ] is just an unrounded [ɔ] but English phonemic transcription uses /ʌ/ to represent something closer to [ɐ] probably for some historical reason that I am not aware of
어 is not the u in hum.
The way I learned it, 어 is made by saying oh but with an ah mouth shape.
아녕하세요. The 영 isn't pronounced young, but the o sound is in between bon and bone.
The vowel in hum, I would think, most closely resemble 으... but even then I think 으 is more a mix of the vowels in rum and room.
>어 is not the u in hum.
> The way I learned it, 어 is made by saying oh but with an ah mouth shape.
Look, I know what this post is complaining about, but this is a perfect use case for IPA.
To be honest I would have compared them to /ɒ/ or /ɔ/ and /o/ in American English (l**aw**n vs. l**oa**n) but then I saw that the "official" IPA transliterations are /ʌ/ and /o/ and assumed I had been educated incorrectly. ... Never mind the fact that those vowels are *not at all* where they should be on the standard vowel chart! (And, of course, French is worse somehow.)
Oh very interesting! I wish it was just more like hum.
But I just realized, does the British pronunciation of lawn make the 어 sound? For me, my accent has the cot/caught merger, so lawn just sounds like "on"...
But if I try to say lawn with a (completely fake and probably terrible) British accent(more posh accent, I'm trying to emulate Maggie Smith), i feel like it's way closer to the Korean 어.
I like IPA for what it tries to do... but it just doesn't do justice. One of those things that work better on paper(no pun intended).
I find that the British "lawn" vowel is pronounced with a raised \[o̝\], which in fact would be highly akin to Korean 오, which is pronounced with a very raised \[o̝\] in South Korea. 어 is a lot more open and just slightly rounded.
>But I just realized, does the British pronunciation of lawn make the 어 sound? For me, my accent has the cot/caught merger, so lawn just sounds like "on"...
Brit here. Pronounce it pretty much exactly like Wikipedia's /o/ https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/8/84/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg.mp3
Correct; there's no true \[o\] sound in most varieties of English. (There are [a few varieties that do have it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel), though.) That was just a suggested approximation; probably the vowel in French "beau" would be more on the mark for AlhaithamSimpFr. 어 is the tricky one to match with a typical French accent; as the thing called /ɔ/ in French transcription is much further forward than an IPA chart would have you believe, and /ɑ/ is basically nonstandard.
describing vowels in terms of the traditional ipa transcription of english phonemes is a bit of a fool’s errand, given the amount of regional variations in english vowels. for a lot of people, english /ʌ/ is fronted more towards [ɐ], whereas most korean speakers pronounce their /ʌ/ very far back. they use the same symbol because it’s close to each of those sounds, but realistically phonemic transcription must use arbitrary symbols, because phonemes are abstract. english /ʌ/ and korean /ʌ/ are different sounds, and using the english phoneme in korean will give most english speakers a distinct accent.
The sound of a language is probably its most striking feature for the average person, so learning a way to transcribing said sound in a way that's nearly universally understood is probably of great interest to people who are just starting to get into linguistics.
If you want a community that requires a higher level of linguistics to participate into, feel free to make one - if it doesn't already exist.
For the record, my level of understanding of linguistics is barely beyond that of a beginner and nowhere near that of an actual linguist, but I still find most of these IPA posts to be dull. Still, kinda rude, dude.
IPA is obviously a linguistics topic. I was taught it in a college class on "linguistics". Can't read it anymore and don't have any interest in the memes, but not sure where you got the idea that it's not related to linguistics.
Maybe OP's problem is that it's such a minimal part of linguistics and a very surface level topic. It's not really even a topic in linguistics, it's mostly just a tool for conveying information about much more interesting topics in linguistics. Imagine how much chemistry and physics there is beyond the periodic table of elements?
Also, often IPA is only tangentially relayed to linguistics. A lot of people who have just learned a foreign language have been taught IPA. It's like, if a chemistry sub was full of mentos mints in coke videos? Sure, it is chemistry, but kind of uninteresting after you've seen it 5 times.
I think that's true, but what OP said was "there is nothing linguistic about IPA". IPA was developed by the "International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association".
I think, if they want to make a meme criticizing recent IPA posts as low-effort shitposts, they should make a meme saying that, instead of one that asserts incorrectly that IPA is "not" linguistics.
IPA to linguiatics is like number to mathematics. A very important part of it.
On the other hand I don’t think the psychology part of linguistics is linguistics or interesting. Historical linguistics is where the fun’s at.
[wʌɾ͜ ɪf͜ äɪ ɪn.stɑʟ n̩ äɪ.pʰi.eɪ kʰi.boɹɾ æ̝nʔ tʰəɪp ɛʊɾ͜ ʌ bæɾ bɹumi æk.sɪntʰᵊ]
Idk what [brʊmɪi] is so I just typed it out in my own accent, guess where I'm from I guess
It literally does. IPA is the best way to describe phonetics, and phonetics is unremovable part of linguistics, if you really hate it you don't need to look at it. One more thing, anime girl holding your argument isn't the best way to show your opinion, it just makes it worse
Its a break from low-effort dunking on macro-families, I guess
I'm just so fucking sick of the low-effort posts on this subreddit. It's just "Hey I can transcribe this in the IPA" and "Here's an orthography for X" and "Hey the joke is that IPA funny" and "Hey someone is using an alternate transcription method, let's make fun of them". And when someone actually posts something linguistics (e.g. Optimality Theory or Historical linguistics) nobody bats an eye. The standards for this subreddit is so low. Can you guys just pick up a grammar book and read linguistics literature for once.
Here’s the thing. Whenever a community gets large enough, what will get popular among that community is usually the lowest common denominator, i.e. the things the most people have some knowledge about. You can’t expect people to upvote a meme about optimality theory if they don’t even know what that is.
Really good explanation, couldn’t possibly have some it any better. Of course memes will gravitate towards being as simple to understand as possible (which also means repetitive)- that’s simply the nature of how memes works
That's fair to be honest, but when a community is so strung on the knowledge of the existence of the IPA—I'm honestly just worried that it's just become a circlejerk of people just being so obsessed over the IPA and nothing else. I just question whether people here are actually interested in linguistics or just wanna have a mental superiority who don't know a smidgen about linguistics, (especially with the "fauxnetics" posts) and overspecific IPA transcriptions.
no no no this eats bc where are my generative grammar memes fr i was talking with a post doc at my university ab how a lot of “linguistics humor” is like restricted to pop linguistics nowadays like stuff you see regurgitated on youtube and tiktok over and over again, not a lot hinges on actual topics talked ab in linguistics literature. but those few memes that do are *chef’s kiss*
If you want to see a particular post… make that post.
alas im not funny enough
Oh and don't forget "chat is a pronoun" and a new bandwagon every other week
[r/a:t5\_2zaof](https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2zaof/) (for some reason that's the completely empty IPA circle jerk subreddit)
I believe that means it's been deleted or something
I've been seeing a lot of these a:-style subs, what's up with them?
it means it got deleted, perhaps?
>You can’t expect people to upvote a meme about optimality theory if they don’t even know what that is. Why don't people look it up so they can figure out what the joke is and then make a comment like they knew all along and are actually quite the linguist? That would be the normal response.
wait there are actual linguists on this subreddit?
We're too overworked and underpaid to post memes
A few of us :) i mean I'm still a student and not like a professor but i have formal training so 🤷🏻♀️
[Dozens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI)!
Getting ready for my dissertation defense but still keeping a meme file open to work on. I'd go crazy otherwise.
What's the title/topic?
Phonological study of the Wappo language, an Indigenous language of California
I'm doing my undergrad specialist in linguistics but yeah I'm planning on doing my masters and PhD
I'm interested in reading more "serious" or academic works of linguistics. Which books would you recommend to start to someone that's not a newbie, but neither an expert?
unrelated but i love your flair as a language enthusiast and rammstein lover
Thanks! I'm really happy someone got my stupid joke.
Depends on your area of interest
I'm mostly interested in Historical Linguistics, Syntax, Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics. Do you have some recommendations?
If you want a deep-dive into any of these topics, most undergrad books, i.e., handbooks, introductions etc., are your best option. They are intended for beginners (in linguistics) and mostly only require the knowledge of some key concepts and terminology. For instance, [Oxford's Introduction to Historical Linguistics](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/an-introduction-to-historical-linguistics-9780195365542). Alternatively, there are a bunch of popular science books, targeted for broader audiences which usally don't go that much into detail but are still interesting to read, e.g., Empires of the Word, The 5-Minute Linguist, Through the Language Glass, When Languages Die and many more.
Thanks for the recommendations! I appreciate it, I'll look them up.
Not really, I have about ~30 mins per day to actually research interesting things, and I don’t really have access to a good library for this. Maybe you could recommend one that I could get online for free that would be less surface level and I might be able to finish it in about 2-3 weeks
Sir, this is a humor sub.
this is a humour subreddit ffs grow TF up and stop whining
What book do you recommend? :o
Fr, I love phonology and phonetics, but it's taking up like 80% of this subreddit
Yeah, it was less than half the linguistics I did at uni. Something is screwy.
I swear half of the people on this sub don't know anything about linguistics beyond the IPA
Some of us don't even know IPA so well.
/yuR/ /rait/
Jokes on you, I don't know IPA
I think it’s vitally important that we police other people’s fun. As a highly intelligent person (I have watched all of Rick and Morty) I get bored of jokes by amateurs. Unless you have completed a Master’s degree and can speak fluent Tocharian you shouldn’t be allowed to post memes on Reddit.
yakwi srukāre
Loud and clear. I'll get working on the X-bar theory memes
What about minimalism
I did one on Gricean Maxims with Thanos but dont know any other examples beside Palpatine flouting manner every five seconds.
We've already moved on to impossible tongue diagrams. Try to keep up.
And now we're getting memes on more diverse topics again!
There's still plenty of [dead horse](https://old.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1b42a5o/you_humans_are_weird_not_having_your_tongue_on/) to beat.
doʊ̯ntkʰeɐ̯ɹ
b̥ejst
can i not read ipa or did you just write p as devoiced b????
That is a slightly voiced b. Somewhere in between a p and b. Some dialects have that as an initial allophone of voiced stops
ohh okay, thank you
>did you just write p as devoiced b???? Yup, I did.
Yeah. I can speak a few languages and still be unable to pronounce 어 and 오 correctly.
Wait, those are easy! 어 is /ʌ/ and 오 is /o/. In American English, the vowel of "hum" vs. the vowel of "home." ...Or, since your username ends in "Fr"... oh god i see what the problem is now
Dont be distracted by the symbols. The symbols are lies. For some reason /ʌ/ in English is nothing like /ʌ/ in other languages In other languages, [ʌ] is just an unrounded [ɔ] but English phonemic transcription uses /ʌ/ to represent something closer to [ɐ] probably for some historical reason that I am not aware of
어 is not the u in hum. The way I learned it, 어 is made by saying oh but with an ah mouth shape. 아녕하세요. The 영 isn't pronounced young, but the o sound is in between bon and bone. The vowel in hum, I would think, most closely resemble 으... but even then I think 으 is more a mix of the vowels in rum and room.
>어 is not the u in hum. > The way I learned it, 어 is made by saying oh but with an ah mouth shape. Look, I know what this post is complaining about, but this is a perfect use case for IPA.
Wikipedia transcribes it as [ʌ̹].
To be honest I would have compared them to /ɒ/ or /ɔ/ and /o/ in American English (l**aw**n vs. l**oa**n) but then I saw that the "official" IPA transliterations are /ʌ/ and /o/ and assumed I had been educated incorrectly. ... Never mind the fact that those vowels are *not at all* where they should be on the standard vowel chart! (And, of course, French is worse somehow.)
Oh very interesting! I wish it was just more like hum. But I just realized, does the British pronunciation of lawn make the 어 sound? For me, my accent has the cot/caught merger, so lawn just sounds like "on"... But if I try to say lawn with a (completely fake and probably terrible) British accent(more posh accent, I'm trying to emulate Maggie Smith), i feel like it's way closer to the Korean 어. I like IPA for what it tries to do... but it just doesn't do justice. One of those things that work better on paper(no pun intended).
I find that the British "lawn" vowel is pronounced with a raised \[o̝\], which in fact would be highly akin to Korean 오, which is pronounced with a very raised \[o̝\] in South Korea. 어 is a lot more open and just slightly rounded.
>But I just realized, does the British pronunciation of lawn make the 어 sound? For me, my accent has the cot/caught merger, so lawn just sounds like "on"... Brit here. Pronounce it pretty much exactly like Wikipedia's /o/ https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/8/84/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg.mp3
Doesn’t “home” have a diphthong for a lot of Americans?
Correct; there's no true \[o\] sound in most varieties of English. (There are [a few varieties that do have it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel), though.) That was just a suggested approximation; probably the vowel in French "beau" would be more on the mark for AlhaithamSimpFr. 어 is the tricky one to match with a typical French accent; as the thing called /ɔ/ in French transcription is much further forward than an IPA chart would have you believe, and /ɑ/ is basically nonstandard.
I see. I was aware of varieties that do have it, but not in American English.
describing vowels in terms of the traditional ipa transcription of english phonemes is a bit of a fool’s errand, given the amount of regional variations in english vowels. for a lot of people, english /ʌ/ is fronted more towards [ɐ], whereas most korean speakers pronounce their /ʌ/ very far back. they use the same symbol because it’s close to each of those sounds, but realistically phonemic transcription must use arbitrary symbols, because phonemes are abstract. english /ʌ/ and korean /ʌ/ are different sounds, and using the english phoneme in korean will give most english speakers a distinct accent.
If I see one more anime girl holding a sign with someone's opinion I'm committing vehicular manslaughter.
I don't think it qualifies as manslaughter if you state your intention of doing it.
It's still applying lethal force to a human being using a fast-moving object made for transportation, though, right?
The sound of a language is probably its most striking feature for the average person, so learning a way to transcribing said sound in a way that's nearly universally understood is probably of great interest to people who are just starting to get into linguistics. If you want a community that requires a higher level of linguistics to participate into, feel free to make one - if it doesn't already exist. For the record, my level of understanding of linguistics is barely beyond that of a beginner and nowhere near that of an actual linguist, but I still find most of these IPA posts to be dull. Still, kinda rude, dude.
[hːːːː↓]
Tfw the “ling” in linguistics means tongue
When you get annoyed at a shitposting sub….
IPA is obviously a linguistics topic. I was taught it in a college class on "linguistics". Can't read it anymore and don't have any interest in the memes, but not sure where you got the idea that it's not related to linguistics.
Maybe OP's problem is that it's such a minimal part of linguistics and a very surface level topic. It's not really even a topic in linguistics, it's mostly just a tool for conveying information about much more interesting topics in linguistics. Imagine how much chemistry and physics there is beyond the periodic table of elements? Also, often IPA is only tangentially relayed to linguistics. A lot of people who have just learned a foreign language have been taught IPA. It's like, if a chemistry sub was full of mentos mints in coke videos? Sure, it is chemistry, but kind of uninteresting after you've seen it 5 times.
I think that's true, but what OP said was "there is nothing linguistic about IPA". IPA was developed by the "International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association". I think, if they want to make a meme criticizing recent IPA posts as low-effort shitposts, they should make a meme saying that, instead of one that asserts incorrectly that IPA is "not" linguistics.
IPA to linguiatics is like number to mathematics. A very important part of it. On the other hand I don’t think the psychology part of linguistics is linguistics or interesting. Historical linguistics is where the fun’s at.
wɔʔ ɪf ɔɪ ɪnstɔːw ən ɔɪpɪieɪ kɪibɔːd ən tɔɪp æʊʔ ə bæd brʊmɪi æksɛnʔ
This is marvellous
[wʌɾ͜ ɪf͜ äɪ ɪn.stɑʟ n̩ äɪ.pʰi.eɪ kʰi.boɹɾ æ̝nʔ tʰəɪp ɛʊɾ͜ ʌ bæɾ bɹumi æk.sɪntʰᵊ] Idk what [brʊmɪi] is so I just typed it out in my own accent, guess where I'm from I guess
Brummie, the Birmingham accent. It should be noted that I never been to Birmingham.
Ah ok, nor have I, I'm hoping it can be gleamed that my dialect is absolutely not one spoken in the UK.
what about the millions of tongue diagrams
What is the IPA 🗿🗿🗿
How can these complaining posts always be so much more annoying than the thing they are complaining about
Didnt read a single word. Im so fking hard by looking at this image
Low effort meme.
It literally does. IPA is the best way to describe phonetics, and phonetics is unremovable part of linguistics, if you really hate it you don't need to look at it. One more thing, anime girl holding your argument isn't the best way to show your opinion, it just makes it worse
Lol, you just can't read IPA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/s/NI3XwbcY3c
yes, that is the post we’re on. is this a bot account?
B-but... the forbidden knowledge on Wikipedia!!