Speculative Grammarian Needs You

A few years ago, I found myself thinking, "Children don't know any linguistic theory when they learn to speak." Then I imagined the sort of person who thought they jolly well should do. I sent this in to Speculative Grammarian, and I've been writing for them ever since. Indeed, I've now written so much that as of the November issue, I've reached the dizzying heights of Contributing Editor.

However, it's not just about me contributing — we're always on the lookout for fresh blood, as Count Dracula said. So, if you've ever fancied writing something funny about linguistics, send it to us. Unlike Dracula, we don't bite.

<;p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hey Linguists! Got a paper to write — or many papers to grade — this weekend? Looking for a way to procrastinate? Work on something for SpecGram! Articles, reviews, letters, poetry, cartoons, ads—we want it all! https://t.co/ihxFbSMlXf (You can also help by sharing this call!)

&mdash; Editors of SpecGram (@SpecGram) October 4, 2019

Introducing Emily - my latest Fantastical Device

Emily is a semantic recommendation system for blogs that I've been working on. If you give it an Atom or RSS feed from a blog, it will create a feed of items from other blogs that hopefully match your interests.

It does this by using significant associations between words to infer your interests. Suppose a randomly-chosen sentence from your blog has a probability P(A) of containing word A, and a probability P(B) of containing word B. If there were no relationship between the words, we would expect the probability of a sentence containing both words to be P(AB)=P(A)P(B). If there is significant information contained in the relationship between the words, they will cooccur more frequently than this, and we can quantify this with an entropy, H=log2 P(AB) - log2 P(A) - log2 P(B)

Emily uses the strengths of these associations to calculate the similarity between two blogs. Then, if you post an article that makes your blog more similar to somebody else's blog than it was before, that article is recommended to them.

This has been an interesting project for me. I've learned about Google App Engine, pubsubhubbub and Atom. What I need now is for people to try it out. I'm looking forward to when Emily starts finding things for me.

Speculative Grammarian

Speculative Grammarian is the premier scholarly journal in the neglected field of satirical linguistics. I first heard about it from a friend on the Conlang Mailing List, and thought it would be fun to get involved. Eventually, I came up with an idea and sent it in.  A year ago today, it was published. Since then, I've contributed another article, some letters to the editor, a couple of answers for the Specgram Linguistic Advice Collective, and set the ball rolling on Linguimericks (Linguistic Limericks).

I've got a couple more things in the pipeline. If you think jokes about linguistics would appeal to you, take a look. Try to see if you can spot my articles (they're mainly written under pseudonyms).

Historical Trivia -Speculative Grammarian is named after a school of Mediaeval philosophers who believed that language held a mirror (Latin speculum) to nature.