As fond as I am of linguini,
Or caviar served on a blini,
Whenever I lack
A linguistic snack,
I find that you can’t beat Pāṇini.
—Pete Bleackley
There once was an old corpus builder
Whom the Web both perplexed and bewildered:
“Though the data is vast,
Still I hope, at the last,
When it’s tagged it’ll all be familiar.”
—Morris Swadesh III
There once was a budding morphologist,
A systematic phoneme apologist,
Until an obscenely rich base
Spat eighty nulls in his face
And now he’s the optimal nihilist.
—Mannfrum van Tuckett
A PhD student called Emma
Was caught in a velar dilemma:
Her terminology prof
Had a nasty old cough
But all she had was the juice of a lemma.
—Vlad the Inhaler & Gott. A. Chestikov
My work on a language near Jatobal
Found [ɪŋkər] to all roots is addable.
What for theory it shows,
And as food for thought goes,
I must say is just ɪŋkər-edible.
—Pumptilian Perniquity
Beware of those friends who are faux,
Those words that you think that you knaux:
Eagles don’t cluck.
But en igel* will suck
Blood from an arm, a leg, or a taux.
—Margeaux Boudreaux
* Swedish “leech”
