[234/365] weird nerd art for a weird nerd

[cosmolinguist]

Last night's bedtime conversation included the mention of German as a lingua franca. diffrentcolours said he just likes any time a "lingua franca" is something other than French.

"Well it wasn't French anyway," I said even though I know he knows this. "It was Frankish."

D mused, "I wonder if that Frank is related to 'let me be frank'."

"I do not know." I was still holding my phone (which had showed us an old IPA chart that had started this part of the conversation), even while I was now the little spoon.

"it's only my sleepy wonderings," D said. "You don't have to look it up."

"Too late," I said.

Short silence as I skimmed a paragraph. Then I said "Sort of."

"Okay, that's good enough!" D said and turned the light off. I put my phone down and laughed.

It's something I appreciate so much when he does it: when I ask him some no-doubt horrifyingly dim question about computers or something and I can see him thinking okay how many big steps back do I need to take to simplify this sufficiently? And he's very good at getting that about right, which is nice because I get overloaded and frustrated very easily by information I don't know what to do with. The least I can do is offer him the same in return.

After all, it's a Gricean maxim...as he knows well because that is a linguistic thing I've rattled on about in some detail and he likes it.

Anyway that whole conversation started with me being so goddam excited about idea of an artful minimalist version of an IPA chart, including the vowels and the non-pulmonic consonants!!!

And then the inspired idea of putting it on a glasses cloth! Now I medically require one of them.

The inclusion of the non-pulmonic consonants is a big deal. They're usually off in their own chart on their own page or tucked away underneath what I realize I've ended up thinking of as the "proper" chart. Maybe this is because they have to be, like that strip of the periodic table that floats around at the bottom, but maybe it's because of racism.

On this subject, Gretchen says

I think one of the cool things art can do is help us think about familiar things in new ways, and for me seeing an IPA chart that puts the clicks, ejectives, and implosives (which just so happen to not be very common in European languages) alongside all the other consonants is a thing that made me think “huh, maybe putting all the non-pulmonics in their own special area was kind of a eurocentric decision and we could instead decide to not do that.”

I'm so excited for these things to exist.

Comments

[sfred]

<3

[andrewducker]

I got momentarily confused there, and thought that "Lingua Franca" was related to Frank Grice. Thankfully I deconfused myself quickly :-)

And I agree about working out how to explain things - I regularly have to work out how far to backtrack, and whether it's actually worth doing.

[ivy]

I would not have been able to leave it at "sort of", hahaha. (As the asker. I could as the explainer.) Y'all have excellent right-sizing communication skills.

I now want more cool-design glasses cloths!

[silveradept]

That's a really interesting minimalist IPA chart. And for someone who understands the IPA at a linguist level, I'll bet having a handy reference available like that is going to make a really good party trick / conversation starter.