There once were some NLP nerds
Who cried out, “Grammar’s all for the birds!
It’s stats for the win,
Chuck syntax in the bin,
Put it all in a big bag of words.”
—Pete Bleackley
I’m told that language documentation
Is the field of linguistics’ salvation.
No more too-abstract classes!
Now we teach for the masses!
I suspect ’tis just a passing fad-ation.
—Morris Swadesh III
My tom said to me one dark night,
“I think that you aren’t very bright,
“The field that you study,
Is complex and muddy,
And your Catalan verbs still aren’t right.”
—Sheri Wells-Jensen
Avram Noam Chomsky
Liked some ideas he
Got from Harris and transformed
To a norm.
—Mannfrum van Tuckett
I once had a girlfriend named Candy.
Who lived near a beach, very handy!
But each time she called me
Her phone voice appalled me
Because all her tones came out sandhi.
—Zac & Tel
There once was a linguist whose strong point wasn’t brevity, man I mean he could go on for a while!
This unfortunate state of affairs meant that the Poetic-Society of Longenbrook put him on trial.
“End this limerick forthwith,
Or your membership’s pith
Because it’s going to—and already has—overstepped the sentence length required to fit the limerick style.”
—Callum & Virginia
