Quicklinks:
Webex Room: weekly live seminars Mo. 16:00–18:00
Schedule: weekly readings, videos and homework
Course Bibliography
Next Videos:
Morphology I
Morphology II
Morphology III
Updates
The usual updates are here. Everything is linked above or in the syllabus. Homework is updated with answers. The transfer tasks are going very well! Good job and keep up the good work. Below, as usual, there is more tasty linguistics for all of you who can’t get enough.
Bonus
Some of you have troubles with hearing and imagining vowel sounds. Here is a fun tool to play with. You can move around the tongue and see what happens. You can also make consonants.
Maybe a bit late, but you were asking for a good way to enter IPA characters.
Click here for an open source project that allows you to type IPA by clicking on the chart. Then, all you have to do is copy/paste. I am planning on a video (eventually) to demonstrate some other good ways to handle IPA characters, but meanwhile, this is enough for most people.
Rhythm: If you have ever wondered why English is full of schwas (ə), you might find it interesting to look at rhythm. There is a strong connection between English weak forms and its stress-timed rhythm. This video has a decent explanation, but few examples. Unfortunately, most other videos I’ve found on the subject get the linguistics behind it horribly wrong (if you find something nice, let me know). You can search for more information with the keywords: stress-timed, syllable-timed, English weak forms.
We usually don’t have the time to get into it during this class, but it is very interesting for those of you who want to improve their accent. As a German speaker, you might not be aware of weak forms and as a native speaker of Spanish, Russian, or French, practicing stress-timed rhythm might improve your accent a lot. Or maybe you want to improve your Spanish and need syllable-timed rhythm in your life. 😉
Bonus bonus: Frank Zappa—The Dangerous Kitchen
This song is not only hilarious and extremely difficult to learn and play even for expert musicians, but it is also a nice demonstration of the innate rhythm of English. Zappa wrote it to sound more like casual conversation than singing. You can see very nicely which syllables are long and which are short if you know the absolute basics of reading sheet music (the more bars on the notes, the shorter!). At least in the weird talky bits.
