Links

Overview Day

• Look at the L&C course from Spring 2013 to see what was covered then and grab some of the resources.
• Check out the webpage for the course on lego robots at Saarland University. See videos of the lego robot bartender we saw in class.
• Create fun (though mostly useless) word clouds with Wordle.

Text and Speech Encoding

Writing Systems

• Browse the world of writing systems at Omniglot.
• Get to know the International Phonetic Alphabet.
• Language Log explains what is great about Hangul.
• Read about the Tengwar writing system Tolkein devised for languages of Middle Earth.
• Check out the Hanzi Smatter blog to see why you should know your Chinese before getting tattoos with Chinese characters.

Speech

• Text-to-speech from IBM.
• Hear the Radiolab episode about music and language.
• Check out a tutorial on speech.
• Aphex Twin likes to embed images in some of his songs, and create sound via those images. look for the face in the spectrogram for “Equation”, starting at 5:25.
• Read or listen to the Skeptoid episode on reverse speech and sound pareidolia (Also, check out visual pareidolia with seeing faces in all sorts of places.)
• The one and only Benny Lava song. Also, see this line-by-line linguistic discussion of the misheard Tamil lyrics as English.

Forensic linguistics

• Geoff Nunberg’s commentary about counting “I”’s in politicians’ speeches.
• Read James Pennebaker’s book The Secret Life of Pronouns.
• Read this discussion of a linguistic analysis of Iggy Azalea’s “blaccent”.
• Try out the Google n-gram visualizer for yourself.
• Check out a basic k-means demo.