Apparently, talking about what makes a language hard to learn can be kind of a downer, so I thought I'd try to lighten the place up a bit by sharing some of the linguistics jokes I know.
Feature Checking
The first one I remember hearing was in a minimalist syntax course I took during my undergrad (so you know it's going to be funny). Actually, I'd have to explain a lot of fairly uninteresting theory for this joke to even make sense that it probably isn't even worth it. Here goes anyway. One aspect of minimalist theory is called "feature checking." It's been a while, so I had to look it up on Glottopedia (which is the linguist's version of Wikipedia), but it's basically where two elements that share a feature "check" each other in order to eliminate the feature in one of them. That probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but for the sake of setting up a joke it's more than you need. The way it does this is called "percolating." So one day we were sitting in class, diagramming sentences, and someone called out, "A good pick-up line would be 'I'd percolate to check your features!'" We all laughed, though I'm sure our professor groaned and rolled his eyes since he'd probably heard the same joke every semester.
Greek
I promise the next one will be (marginally) funnier. Whenever someone finds out I have a degree in linguistics they inevitably ask how many languages I know. "All of them," I nonchalantly reply, "except for Greek."
They'll follow up by asking how do you say [something] in [some language], like "How do you say 'pencil' in Swahili?"
To which I reply, "Eh, it's all Greek to me," followed by an awkward pause, then, "but seriously, I speak Spanish and Hungarian."
The problem is, in preparing to visit Athens last year, I actually learned some Greek, so the joke doesn't quite work anymore. Still, I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of that joke. Probably the only one I've gotten more mileage out of is one Istole borrowed from my friend Dave back in high school. Whenever someone would come in a room and ask if we knew where someone was, we'd reply with, "He ran off saying something about a treasure map and a waterfall."
The Fourth Floor
This next one isn't so much a joke you can readily use as a funny story that happened to me from a few month ago. To give a little background, one of the most famous sociolinguistics papers ever written was by William Labov, titled "The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores" (I was actually surprised to find a copy of the whole article online here for free!) Many people know that in a New York accent people will frequently drop the letter "r" when pronouncing words like "car" or "floor." William Labov wanted to see to what degree social class affected whether people dropped their r's or kept them. So he went into a handful of New York department stores based on what social class usually frequented them. Saks Fifth-Avenue was the highest ranking, followed by Macy's, then S. Klein. He'd go into each store and interact with the employees, asking which floor something was on, trying to get them to answer him by saying the words "fourth floor." He'd then lean forward and say, "Excuse me?" so that they'd repeat themselves. In each case he would note whether they pronounced their r's or not, ultimately to find that, yes, social stratification did have an effect on the way people talked.
So a few months back, my wife was at the mall looking for a particular item. A saleswoman suggested she go upstairs to a store on the fourth floor to look for it. When my wife told me about this later, I got really excited and asked, "Did she say fourth floor or fouhth flooh? Cause we should probably call Bill Labov." Then I just laughed and laughed, all by myself of course, because no one else around me could possibly have gotten it.
Do you speak...?
The last joke I'd like to share is one I actually use every semester with my students. It looks a little intimidating because there is a lot written in other languages, but in each case it is just the question "Do you speak [whatever the language is]?" in that particular language. It goes like this:
As I already said, I usually share that joke with my students during the first week of class. I then ask them why they think I shared it with them. The answers they usually come up with have to do with how important English is in the world today, or that Americans don't bother to learn other languages, to which I say that those are good ideas, but not really what I was getting at. After a couple of minutes I make the following declaration: "It's a joke. I shared it with you to make you laugh." I let them think about that before continuing. "You've all been in school too long. You think that if a teacher puts something up on the board there must be some deeper meaning to it. If I had shared this with you at the mall, you wouldn't have said to yourself, 'That's funny, but what am I supposed to learn from it?" Of course, I then change directions and actually use the example to teach them something, which is that all writing has a purpose. The purpose of a joke is to make you laugh, not to make you learn. The purpose of a recipe is to teach you to cook something, not to make you laugh (at which point I pretend I'm reading a recipe, laugh hysterically, and say "Eggs"). So what is the purpose of an essay then? There's more to the conversation than this, but I'll save that for another blog post.
Having put all of these in writing, none of them seems terribly funny. Perhaps I need some new material and should come up with a punchline to "Why did the linguist cross the road?" or "How many polyglots does it take to screw in a light bulb?" If you can think of an answer to those, feel free to share them in the comments.
Feature Checking
The first one I remember hearing was in a minimalist syntax course I took during my undergrad (so you know it's going to be funny). Actually, I'd have to explain a lot of fairly uninteresting theory for this joke to even make sense that it probably isn't even worth it. Here goes anyway. One aspect of minimalist theory is called "feature checking." It's been a while, so I had to look it up on Glottopedia (which is the linguist's version of Wikipedia), but it's basically where two elements that share a feature "check" each other in order to eliminate the feature in one of them. That probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but for the sake of setting up a joke it's more than you need. The way it does this is called "percolating." So one day we were sitting in class, diagramming sentences, and someone called out, "A good pick-up line would be 'I'd percolate to check your features!'" We all laughed, though I'm sure our professor groaned and rolled his eyes since he'd probably heard the same joke every semester.
Greek
I promise the next one will be (marginally) funnier. Whenever someone finds out I have a degree in linguistics they inevitably ask how many languages I know. "All of them," I nonchalantly reply, "except for Greek."
They'll follow up by asking how do you say [something] in [some language], like "How do you say 'pencil' in Swahili?"
To which I reply, "Eh, it's all Greek to me," followed by an awkward pause, then, "but seriously, I speak Spanish and Hungarian."
The problem is, in preparing to visit Athens last year, I actually learned some Greek, so the joke doesn't quite work anymore. Still, I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of that joke. Probably the only one I've gotten more mileage out of is one I
The Fourth Floor
This next one isn't so much a joke you can readily use as a funny story that happened to me from a few month ago. To give a little background, one of the most famous sociolinguistics papers ever written was by William Labov, titled "The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores" (I was actually surprised to find a copy of the whole article online here for free!) Many people know that in a New York accent people will frequently drop the letter "r" when pronouncing words like "car" or "floor." William Labov wanted to see to what degree social class affected whether people dropped their r's or kept them. So he went into a handful of New York department stores based on what social class usually frequented them. Saks Fifth-Avenue was the highest ranking, followed by Macy's, then S. Klein. He'd go into each store and interact with the employees, asking which floor something was on, trying to get them to answer him by saying the words "fourth floor." He'd then lean forward and say, "Excuse me?" so that they'd repeat themselves. In each case he would note whether they pronounced their r's or not, ultimately to find that, yes, social stratification did have an effect on the way people talked.
So a few months back, my wife was at the mall looking for a particular item. A saleswoman suggested she go upstairs to a store on the fourth floor to look for it. When my wife told me about this later, I got really excited and asked, "Did she say fourth floor or fouhth flooh? Cause we should probably call Bill Labov." Then I just laughed and laughed, all by myself of course, because no one else around me could possibly have gotten it.
Do you speak...?
The last joke I'd like to share is one I actually use every semester with my students. It looks a little intimidating because there is a lot written in other languages, but in each case it is just the question "Do you speak [whatever the language is]?" in that particular language. It goes like this:
Two Americans were sitting on a park bench enjoying their afternoon when an Arab gentleman came to them to ask a question. Though well-traveled, unfortunately, this man didn’t know any English.
“هل تتكلم العربية؟” he asked. The two Americans looked confused, so the man tried again.
“Savez-vous parlez français? ” he said, but the two Americans still didn’t understand.
“¿Saben ustedes Español?” the man grew more frustrated, so he tried every language he could think of. “Говорите ли вы русский язык? Sprechen sie Deutsch? क्या आप हिन्दी बोलते हैं? Biliyor musunuz Türkçe? Esetleg tudtok magyarul? 你的说中文吗? Μιλάτε ελληνικά?!?” Outraged and out of ideas, the Arab gentleman left.
A few moments passed and the first American turned the other. “Do you think we should maybe learn a foreign language? It seems like it’d be pretty useful.”
The second American, however, disagreed. “What do you mean, useful?!? That guy knew at least ten languages and it didn’t do him any good!”
As I already said, I usually share that joke with my students during the first week of class. I then ask them why they think I shared it with them. The answers they usually come up with have to do with how important English is in the world today, or that Americans don't bother to learn other languages, to which I say that those are good ideas, but not really what I was getting at. After a couple of minutes I make the following declaration: "It's a joke. I shared it with you to make you laugh." I let them think about that before continuing. "You've all been in school too long. You think that if a teacher puts something up on the board there must be some deeper meaning to it. If I had shared this with you at the mall, you wouldn't have said to yourself, 'That's funny, but what am I supposed to learn from it?" Of course, I then change directions and actually use the example to teach them something, which is that all writing has a purpose. The purpose of a joke is to make you laugh, not to make you learn. The purpose of a recipe is to teach you to cook something, not to make you laugh (at which point I pretend I'm reading a recipe, laugh hysterically, and say "Eggs"). So what is the purpose of an essay then? There's more to the conversation than this, but I'll save that for another blog post.
Having put all of these in writing, none of them seems terribly funny. Perhaps I need some new material and should come up with a punchline to "Why did the linguist cross the road?" or "How many polyglots does it take to screw in a light bulb?" If you can think of an answer to those, feel free to share them in the comments.
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