Welcome to Friday Night Linguistics ...

... brought to you by Sheri and Jason Wells-Jensen

We are Friday Night Linguists. We are fascinated, amused, and charmed by many many language-related phenomena. Not all of these, alas, fit neatly into our day jobs as academic linguist, webmaster, library student, part-time musician, or full-time parent. There are just too many.

So here they are, partly so we can keep track of them ourselves and partly in hopes that there are other Friday Night Linguists out there who might find them amusing. These offerings fall into a couple loosely defined categories:

• Popular and accessible discussions of research topics in language science
• Resources we always wished someone would give to us for teaching introductory linguistics or phonetics (mainly cool sound samples) that we finally just went and collected ourselves
• Analysis problems in an undisciplined and chaotic variety of natural and constructed languages
• Odd topics that come up around our kitchen table during Friday Night Supper - Friday Night Supper is a meal (held on any night of the week as it turns out) where people get together, eat, play and discuss the world. Countless million-dollar business innovations, paradigm-shifting art projects, leading-edge research institutes, and best-selling book ideas have been hatched, eagerly argued over, and heartlessly abandoned around our kitchen table. It's time someone at least wrote a few of these down.

So, for your amusement ...

Now!

• Link to the Uke-tastrophe a soon other fabulous ukuleleic resources.
• A wide and growing variety of language structure problems at the Linguistic Resources Page including morphology, phonology, transcription in natural and invented languages.
• Samples of the voices of prominent people at VoxDB - the voice database
• Sheri's guide to language creation, for the Tolkien (or Okrand, or Elgin, or Esperantist) in all of us
• All about speech errors at the Slips Pages
• Speech errors from the third of the three 2012 presidential debates with explanations and commentary.
• How does a soloist sing a duet? Jason's brief treatise on throat-singing for linguists
• Grade Three Braille
• The braille song, by Innocuous Mustard ©2009
• Speculative Grammarian Podcast Page (If you say you found this link on our page, we will, of course, deny it. If you are in any way associated with the really smart people who sign sheri's paycheck, we feel it worth pointing out (shrilly if necessary) that the Sheri Wells-Jensen who sometimes pops up on this podcast really has to be a different Sheri Wells-Jensen than the one you know...
• Try searching for J and the Fictones on the podcast page above, though.
• An example of a Northern Plains shibboleth
• An example of register shifting in action.
• An example of the T/V address continuum in action!
• An example of rapid speech with and without phonological processes.
• Sheri plays with Perl:
  • Musings about english Word Frequency
  • Wavelength, pitch and the lenghth of common objects: How Tall is B Flat...

Coming soon!

• Real-life examples of words and sentences in click and tone languages
• A synopsis of the syntactic ambiguity of "A brief treatise on throat-singing for linguists"
• and much, much more !!!

Usefulnesses

• A Clean YouTube Interface