The Permanent Ad Hoc Committee presents

Ad Hoc Language Puzzles and Fun

Beginners' Puzzles

Origins

The Abstract for my talk,
"Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me This Before?"
Subversive Linguistics in the 21st Century.
Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication
LANG 319, University of North Texas, Denton. 5 PM Thu 12 April 2012
The UM Term Paper I stole it from: "Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me This Before? Language Science in K-12 Education", by Melissa Demyanovich, April 2004. Residential College/Linguistics 334: English Grammar and Writing
(NB: Mel has married and changed her name; I know how to contact her. Convince me that you need to contact her and I'll pass on your request.)
The Origins of the Permanent Ad Hoc Committee, in the Olden Days of 1973.

Conlangs

Phonetics, [fnɛɾɨks], /fənɛtɪks/

A Modest Proposal, containing
- the English phonemic alphabet, from Kenyon & Knott, plus
- a phonemic transcription of Good Night Moon
Transcription exercises and information, mostly English.
- A Few Aphorisms by various authors.
- The Sea Serpent and The Scorpion, both by Will Cuppy
- A Mystery Text
- How to pronounce Latin (two ways)
- Another Mystery Text

Turkish

: Turkish is a synthetic agglutinative language, with standard SOV grammar. It is very different from English. Here are five puzzles and some handouts and solutions.
: If you get through these, you will understand how Turkish Vowel Harmony works. This is a topic, and a phrase, that is so arcane it functions as an ingroup marker for linguists and other cool people; nobody else has ever heard of "Turkish Vowel Harmony".

Lushootseed

: Lushootseed is a Salishan language of Washington State. Like all Salishan languages, and indeed like all languages in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund, it is polysynthetic, which means it is just about as different from English as it can be.
Here are seven puzzles made from Lushootseed sentences; these are not simple. But they are fun. If you get through these, you will understand inflection.

Last modified June 29, 2014