Spaghetti or Lasagna for Linguists—The Leftovers

LSA Committee on Comestibles in Linguistics

As a follow-up to our recent survey of linguists and their preferences with respect to Spaghetti and Lasagna, we asked several more academics about their pasta preferences. For better or for worse, budget constraints dictated that the survey be conducted at a multidisciplinary humanities function held at an unnamed university. Some of the respondents were less candid and seemed to feel the need to expound upon the topic rather than answer the question, possibly because news of the experiment was leaked by some undergrads working as servers.

Also, several non-linguists felt compelled to butt in and respond as well—particularly the drunkenly noisy contingent of translators seated near the linguistics department tables. Since we accidentally paid for their responses to be transcribed along with the rest, we’re including them here.

Colonial Theorist: I prefer spaghetti in order to reverse or question the hegemony of lasagna.

Interpreting Theorist: Sadly, we don’t have a method to test the difference between either pasta yet but we can tell you that lasagna is hot and spaghetti looks like worms.

Anthropologist: We’ve found in a remote village in Calabria an interesting merger of both types, namely a pasta which has the flat features of Lasagna, but measures up to two metres in length. It is usually wrapped around the main dish.

Chomskyan Linguist: The theory of pasta establishes that a principled, non-zero subset of the structural characteristics of spaghetti are specified by a Universal Chef, and thus the Universal Chef explains spaghetti. There may be some other discipline that addresses lasagna, but I rather doubt it would be interesting, and it certainly wouldn’t be explanatory. I hope the kitchen doesn’t have another performance error like they did last week.

Contact Linguist: Italian pasta has had a strong influence on all European cuisine, to the point of mixing with indigenous sauces.

Experimental Phonetician: The cooking time of spaghetti has a mean of 9.56 minutes (σ=1.456 minutes) and of lasagna a mean of 7.43 minutes (σ=0.467 minutes), and this difference is significant.

Gen Ed Instructor in Linguistics: It’s harder to screw up spaghetti, so we’re going with that.

Hjelmslevian Linguist: The frikadeller, please.

Indo-Europeanist: We can reconstruct a mixture of coarsely ground wheat and water from both modern forms.

Experimental Indo-Europeanist: Could we try to cook this reconstruction?

Neurolinguist: Hard to tell. I’m not getting an N400 from either of them, and no P650 either. But now that I think of it, that spaghetti is looking a little too brain-like, so I’m going with the lasagna.

OT Syntactician: Whichever one doesn’t violate *Expensive and *AteItYesterday, in that order. (Ranking is reversed for full professors).

Ph.D. Supervisor: I don’t care about spaghetti or lasagna, what I want is a completed thesis!

Philologist: The first attestation of spaghetti in Italian recipe manuscripts dates back to the 12th century, whereas lasagna only appears during the course of the 14th century.

Professional Translator: That depends, which one pays more?

Staff Conference Interpreter: I just eat what I am told.

SpecGram Editorial Team: Can I get spaghetti served in a double-dot wide O thong?

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