A Venery of Terms—Part II
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 second part of three is presented below.
- An abugida of Amharicists
- A herd of auditory phoneticians
- A babble of child language researchers
- An equivocation of Chomskies
- An embodiment of cognitive linguists
- A folder of computational linguists
- An array of computational linNULL POINTER EXCEPTION
- A stratum of contact linguists
- A corpus of ditto linguists
- A salad of cranberry morphologists
- A revitalization of documentary linguists
- A mission of endangered languages fieldworkers
- A borrowing of etymologists
- A collection of fieldworkers
- A continuum of functionalists
- An empty nucleus of government phonologists
- A branch of historical linguists
- A *bhn̥dh- of Indo-Europeanists
- A chain of lexicographers
- A society of linguistic anthropologists
- An n-gram of machine translation developers
- A circle of minimalists
- A category of morphologists
- An underlyingness of morphophonologists
- A bellowing of optimality theorists
- A tableau of optimality theorists
- An alphabet of orthographists
- An archive of philologists
- A cluster of phonologists
- A context of pragmaticists
- A chant of prosodists
- A distribution of quantitative linguists
- Une agglomération of Romance linguists
- A cup of semanticists
- A modality of semioticians
- A cllctv of Semitic scholars
- A 群 of Sinologists
- A cohort of sociolinguists
- A lie of statisticians
- A part of speech to text engineers
- A sesquigroup of Tibeto-Burmanists
- A repetition of translators
- A family of typologists
- A deviation of variationists
More to come...
