It wasn’t the first morpheme cut
that made me a linguist.
That was merely an analytical baby step.
The moment is clear—
the first time I made a word
out of analyzed bits
and realized
the power and delight
of stepping into another language with no more than ten fragments of meaning.
Suddenly I could think a Swahili thought,
imagine that I shared a tiny piece of a million Swahili minds.
From then on
I could no longer retreat to one beautiful language,
for beauty no longer had limits.
—Morris Swadesh III
TA for Ling 101
Fresh-faced frosh evoke
Kindness, warm benevolence—
’Til one called me “ma’am”.
—Lauren Ipsum
Statistical rigor’s no relevance
When linguists are taught to weigh evidence:
You just use a trained monkey
Or humanities flunkey—
With SPSS they’ve much the same referents.
—Pumptilian Perniquity
When I’d tasted my grandmother’s pastry,
I asked, “How could you say this is tasty?”
For so’d said my dad,
And since smells that are bad
Are smelly, he was wrong prima facie.
—Hester Fester-Münsterfenster
fusional schmusional
polysynthetic pre-
cision and recall for
parsing impress
implementational
ease just assign every
word in the input the
POS S
—Andrew Lamont
