You know you're a linguist when...

[psycholinguist]

Meme-time! (Some good further examples are listed here.)

...you get excited about unattested words.

...you think everyone should have to learn to use IPA.

...after a semester of syntax, you no longer have any reliable internal grammaticality-judgments.

...you randomly change the language-settings on your Facebook/LiveJournal account just to see what the sites look like in other languages.

...you misspell the last name of the chair of the psychology department at the University of Toronto as 'Praat'.

...you realise in the middle of a lecture that for the last twenty minutes, you've been mentally analysing your professor's dialect and haven't paid attention to a single word that he or she has said.

Continue!

[ellbell]

lol! I love the last one. I spent a lot of my language change class transcribing my professor's Chinese-Canadian accent.

[barredell]

You get in contact with someone whose facebook profile you happened upon (but whom you've never met) solely because their 'about me' section included the phrase: "when people mess up comparatives and say 'so...as' instead of 'as...as'"

(e.g., 'she is so tall as her mother' vs. 'she is as tall as her mother')

(anyone one here do this? want to tell me about it?)

And my grammaticality-judgments are shot. There are some readings in semantics that I just can't get, either.

[liszt85]

I don't know about being a linguist, but being a physicist interested in linguistics, I've had random thoughts during a lecture on synonymy about how graded synonymy can be analyzed by making a 3D plot (where axes are contexts, magnitudes of synonymy and the set of synonymous words ) and the magnitudes are related to the extent of synonymy and then analyzing the distribution of points using a multifractal spectrum so as to arrive at a computational method for assigning a numerical value so that this then can serve as a basis for comparison between groups of synonymous words.

I'm not sure if this makes a lot of sense..the magnitudes have to be assigned using judgment tests and I have no experience in research design (in a linguistic setting). So this might not be all that practical. I should probably have stuck with Physics but I decided that interdisciplinary work would be most satisfying to me. I hope it turns out that way. :|

[Dinali]

(e.g., 'she is so tall as her mother' vs. 'she is as tall as her mother')

I've never heard this. Where does this happen?

[barredell]

Anywhere before the turn of the 20th century, as far as I can tell from my trawling about on Google. Which is why I want to know whom this girl is talking to (and if they'd talk to me, too).

[Dinali]

Anywhere before the turn of the 20th century, as far as I can tell from my trawling about on Google. Which is why I want to know whom this girl is talking to (and if they'd talk to me, too).

Maybe the Kentucky upcountry? Various dialects up there count among the most conservative in the language. They retain forms that died out hundreds of years ago everywhere else.

[fuzzylogician]

...you save forum posts/chats/news articles because you think about writing your next paper about a quirk you found in them.

...you pester friends and family to know if said quirk is something they find grammatical and would use in a sentence.

...you notice ungrammaticalities in your own speech and wonder how to analyze them.

...you find sentences just fine that your friends shudder at.

...you can typeset IPA characters in LaTeX by heart.

...you own a LAMBDA CALCULUS ROCKS T-shirt and a set of matching lamdba earrings.

[barredell]

Maybe the Kentucky upcountry? Various dialects up there count among the most conservative in the language. They retain forms that died out hundreds of years ago everywhere else.

I should look into that (I'm actually from KY...not from that area though. I have to say that the river county dialects in my part of the state are absolutely fascinating and, as far as I know, haven't been studied too deeply. Linguistics in your own backyard ftw.

Also, fuzzylogician: you have a lambda calculus shirt? That's amazing! I have a shirt (actually from a computer programming site of some sort) that says 'Semanticist' in block letters. I love it but will keep it under wraps until I've earned my semanticist rights in grad school, heh.

[Dinali]

I should look into that (I'm actually from KY...not from that area though. I have to say that the river county dialects in my part of the state are absolutely fascinating and, as far as I know, haven't been studied too deeply. Linguistics in your own backyard ftw.

There was a guy in my high school who was from Eastern Kentucky. He had the following pattern of second person pronouns:

Sing/informal: thee/thee

Sing/formal: you/ye

Plural: ye/ye

People made fun of him a lot (not me, I thought it was awesome), and he made obvious attempts to drop the "thee," and only used it if he got excited about something and forgot. He was never able to change any of the three "ye's" though. He had other very distinct grammatical stuff going on, as well as a pretty thick accent that sometimes made him hard to understand. The bad thing was that he was a very nice, very intelligent guy, but he'll be stereotyped as a dumb redneck all his life because of that accent.

[pangur-ban]

(e.g., 'she is so tall as her mother' vs. 'she is as tall as her mother')

(anyone one here do this? want to tell me about it?)

This sounds okay to me in a negative sentence: 'She's not so tall as her mother' seems fine, but I wouldn't say 'she is so tall as her mother'.

Also, I wonder if a German influence would create this.

[Dinali]

This sounds okay to me in a negative sentence: 'She's not so tall as her mother' seems fine, but I wouldn't say 'she is so tall as her mother'.

Yeah, the negative sounds okay to me too. I'd be more inclined to investigate an Irish influence though, since Irish-English tends to use "so" more liberally than others.

[dutchie]

Also, I wonder if a German influence would create this.

Using "so" probably has some root in German. In Dutch, at least, you can say

"Ze is zo groot als haar moeder" = She is as tall as her mother.

Or

"Ze is niet zo groot als haar moeder" = She is not as tall as her mother.

P.S. I have a t-shirt that says "Frege is my homeboy"

[barredell]

You guys are great - thanks for all of the suggestions!

[Dinali]

If it's German find someone from Cincinnati and see what they think. There's a lot of German influence there, most famously the Cincinnati "please."

[pangur-ban]

The German I was thinking of would be (and this is quite possibly wrong; my German sucks)

Sie ist so gro

[liszt85]

Some Indian English usages:

1) She is too good yaar. (She is very good, mate!)

2) I am not remembering now what she said. (I don't remember what she said) Effects of a direct translation from regional languages which use present continuous forms.

3) I am going to hostel. (omission of definite articles, quite common with Indian students. Hindi: "Mein hostel jaa raha hoon" which literally translates to "I hostel am going" which leads to "I am going to hostel")

[verazu]

Chinese doesn't have the definite article either, only bare nouns. But very different from Indian students, Chinese students tend to overuse the definite article. There is always a "the" before noun phrases.

But I think a more severe language problem for Chinese is inflection, though the inflection in English is not rich at all.

Some Indian English usages:

1) She is too good yaar. (She is very good, mate!)

2) I am not remembering now what she said. (I don't remember what she said) Effects of a direct translation from regional languages which use present continuous forms.

3) I am going to hostel. (omission of definite articles, quite common with Indian students. Hindi: "Mein hostel jaa raha hoon" which literally translates to "I hostel am going" which leads to "I am going to hostel")