Party Games for Linguists

I recently encountered the following party game: Mumbo Jumbo, based on trying to pronounce a word while wearing a mouth-stretcher. Basically, you wear a mouth-stretcher, and then you are asked to read out a phrase. Your teammate has to figure out the phrase you're trying to say. 

The mouth-stretcher means that you cannot make labials. Of course, the words are selected to take advantage of this limitation as much as possible, asking you to make phrases like 'the moose makes molasses.'

But if you know about phonetics, you should be able to figure out a way to get around this limitation. For example, you could use a substitution of [n] for [m] since both are nasals: 'the noose nakes nolasses.' 'nakes' and 'nolasses' aren't words so hopefully your interlocutor will take advantage of error correction to figure out that the words are 'makes' and 'molasses.' 'noose' is a real word, so they may need to try twice to get the phrase correctly.

Similarly, what about something like 'feel the breeze'? [f] and [b] are not available to you. You know [f] is a fricative, so maybe you think to go with 'seel' as a substitution. But 'seal' is a real world and that might confuse your interlocutor. You could try a voiceless 'th' instead, which is more similar to 'f' anyway (as f-substitution shows). This produces the nonsense word 'theel', which hopefully your interlocutor will correct to 'feel'.

How about for communicating 'breeze'? You have a few voiced stops you can use like [g] and [d]. If the plastic mouth extender isn't totally rigid, you could also take advantage of the McGurk effect to move your mouth down as if making a [b] and then producing a [g], hoping that your interlocutor will take the hint that the labial movement matters.

While this game is based on using a plastic prop to force your mouth into not producing labials, I feel like you could extend the concept for linguists as a party game. How about a game where you cannot use stops? Or no alveolar consonants?

I've written about another game where knowledge of phonetics can give you an edge - karuta, a Japanese card game.

Podcast Appearance: "In a Manner of Speaking"

Hello, happy to report that I have made another appearance on Paul Meier's fantastic podcast, "In a Manner Of Speaking"! Paul, Cameron and I discussed British and American accents in popular music, which is a topic that I've been interested in discussing for a long time. I hope you'll listen and enjoy the podcast; we had a tremendous time making it.

Blog Update Schedule

Since September 2017, I've been updating posts to the site monthly. This was a way for me to both continue making content for the site to keep it on people's minds, and a deadline that would force me to work on content so things didn't slip out of my own mind. I used to be able to do these updates monthly with the occasional "no update this month" post.

My life has changed substantially in 7 years. I don't have the same free time that I used to. I've also felt that I've exhausted a lot of the "easy" material to write about in the past, and what I do still want to write about is very challenging. I have a Dialect Dissection I've been working on for years that involves analyzing hundreds of hours of audio. I want to complete these projects! However, I don't have the same amount of light material that I used to have that I could publish monthly. It would distract me from these projects to have to come up with something random to publish monthly. And this has led to the endless stream of "no update this month" posts, which I feel bad about posting and must be uninteresting to readers, who have no reason to care about how busy my personal life is or isn't.

Moreover, while I take a lot of pride in this site, it does not make me any money. This sounds silly, but it's a serious consideration on what I spend my time on. Time spent on this is time that could be spent on other things that do reward me monetarily. I've considered starting a Patreon or something like that for two reasons - one being financial (more money = more incentive to work, more books and articles I can buy, maybe even people I could hire to assist with some of the most tedious work), and the other being that having patreon exclusive material could give new material and leads to investigate from people who are also interested in linguistic analysis and who like what I've done on the site. I don't know if there's enough interest for a Patreon at the moment, and I would need to think seriously about how to make it worth patrons' while. I don't want to make a commitment I cannot meet.

As such, for the time being, I've decided to lift the restriction on this blog that I will be publishing monthly. I'm happy to have been able to do it for 7 years, but things have changed, and I feel this restriction is more a source of stress in my life than it is something that inspires me to focus on the site. I will update when I have a new article, or when I have observations, or some major progress on a big project. I hope to break the mold in my head that tells me that I should only post "serious" observations, as that has been something that slows me down tremendously when writing. I still think a lot about linguistics, but I feel that some of the articles on here have set a big standard for me that is difficult to continually meet. I would like to throw that off somehow and write even observations that are very small, as that is how you build up to big articles.

Thank you to everyone who has visited the site so far. I plan to continue writing for Ace Linguist until I just have no ideas anymore, and thankfully I still have many ideas. :)