I made another silly linguistics comic that only true linguistics nerds will fully appreciate:
“Linguémon: Linguistical Monsters!”
If you’re an aspiring linguistics nerd who didn’t get all these references, here’s some homework to help you understand all this. For a more details, click the links to go to a full explanation of each topic being referenced here.
The Wug Test
The Wug test was designed by psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason. In this test, children are shown pictures of a creature with nonsense name (originally a blue bird called a “wug”). They are then shown two or more of them, and asked to describe what they can see. The test is formatted as:
“This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.”
The usual response for English speakers is “there are two wugs”. This shows us that children innately understand that a regular plural can be applied to an unfamiliar word.
Toki Pona
Esperanto is perhaps the most well known conlang (constructed language), being spoken by thousands of people around the world. It was designed as a neutral international language, although it is sometimes criticised for being derived mostly from colonial European languages.
Toki Pona is a conlang designed by linguist Sonja Lang, using words from a wide rage of sources. Toki pona is intentionally limited in its construction, having only 150 or so total words, and only 14 sounds. It is intended as a minimalist language as well as being a fun and cute-sounding language. The idea is that speaking and thinking in Toki Pona will help simplify and declutter our thoughts, and generally aid positive thinking. This idea draws from the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
Toki Pona derives its vocabulary from a wide range of global languages, as well as many borrowings from Esperanto. I actually have a bunch of images about Toki Pona under construction, so stay tuned for that.
Linguistic Recursion
Linguistic recursion is the ability to embed clauses to form complex layered sentences. For example in English we can say “The cat sat on the mat,” but you can also expand it with recursion: “The cat that the dog had chased sat on the mat,”. Linguistic superstar Noam Chomsky proposed recursion as a universal feature of all languages. Doubt has been cast upon this idea however, as the Pirahã language of Brazil seems to lack recursion entirely.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The Sapir Whorf hypothesis, also called linguistic relativity, was put forward seperately by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf in the early 20th century. Simply put, it’s the idea that the language we speak impacts the way we think about and perceive reality. It comes in two flavours:
The weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests the language we use influences our perceptions. There is some evidence for this. The classic example is that speakers of languages that have one word for blue and green finding it harder to recognise differences of shade between these colours.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more controversial: it suggests that the language we speak actually limits the thoughts we are capable of thinking. This was famously used in the world-building of George Orwell’s 1984, in which a conlang called Newspeak is designed to make revolutionary thoughts impossible. This form of linguistic relativism is rejected by most linguists.
The Bouba/Kiki Effect
This effect is about the way certain sounds seem to be associated with certain shapes, regardless of the language spoken. All over the world, people are more inclined to label a rounded soft shape as “bouba”, and a spiky hard shape as “kiki”. The potential causes of this are still being explored.
Duolingo
I mean… everyone knows that Duolingo is now right? Well, if you don’t, maybe it’s because you’re reading it in the far distant future where only a small handful of scraps of data of the old world have survived, including this article, but no other references to Duolingo. In that case: Duolingo was a website and app humans used to learn different languages in a fun gamified way. Duolingo’s mascot was a passive aggressive owl called “Duo”.