A Venery of Terms—Part I
Collective Nouns for Linguists
X. Altaysh & Uvlarr Ksss
X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies
Of course one may refer to a group of linguists as “a group of linguists”, but then one clearly misses out on the subtle distinctions between kinds of linguists, and the generic joy of collective nouns—a topic in which humans take all too keen an interest.
Gaggle is probably never entirely amiss when referring to an excess of linguists (generally held by civilized folk as more than three in any one location; perhaps four if the host is generous and the ventilation is adequate). Finer distinctions and greater euphony are to be had with the proper terms of venery, however.
We have opened the vaults of our athenæum so that we may share our trove of collected collective treasures. As with any linguistic act, the venereal human tongue is endlessly creative, and thus many groups have multiple collective nouns.
The first part of three is presented below.
- A collective of advisors
- A chorus of audio-lingualists
- A pod of cetaceanists
- A wug of child language researchers
- A disjunction of classical generative phonologists
- An asterisk of comparative linguists
- An algorithm of computational linguists
- A relay of conlangers
- A body of corpus linguists
- A cobweb of cranberry morphologists
- A genre of discourse linguists
- A serendipity of emergentists
- An index of ethnomethodologists
- A grunt of evolutionary linguists
- An adjudication of forensic linguists
- A Compoundnoun of Germanists
- A paradigm of grammar-translation instructors
- A tree of historical linguists
- A review of journal editors
- A syntagm of lexicologists
- A lingo of linguists
- A c-command of minimalists
- A horde of Mongolists
- A mass of noun morphologists
- A scan’d all of neurolinguists
- A stratum of optimality theorists
- An abecedarium of orthoëpists
- A set of parametric grammarians
- A cackle of phoneticians
- A charm of pragmaticists
- A sweater vest of professors
- A profit of publishers
- A curlicue of rhetoricians
- A ⟦semanticists⟧
- A ∃x∀y (INGROUP(y,x) → SEMANTICIST(y)) of formal semanticists
- An echo of semioticians
- A handful of sign language linguists
- A palatalization of Slavicists
- A satire of speculative grammarians
- Ā of syntacticians
- A nonsense of theoretical linguists
- A /traʲb/ of transcribers
- A harmony of Turkicists
- A world of universal grammarians
- A quiver of word-grammarians
More to come...
