This series ended on July 31, 2022. All 1:1 and group chats related to this series are disabled 7 days after the last session.
Series Details
About
[Schoolhouse Summer Camp]
Linguistics is the science behind human languages, which we of course use all the time. In this series, we will cover a variety of fascinating concepts, tools, and trivia.
Examples:
- Concept: "Minimal Pairs" - Some languages care about certain sound distinctions while others don't, e.g. "ta" and "tha" in Hindi.
- Tools: Why do vowels sound different from consonants? Praat plots a spectrogram of your speech so you can visually see the difference.
- Trivia: English and the Austronesian language Mbarbaram both use the word “dog” to refer to canines.
Tutor Qualifications
I double-majored in Linguistics
✋ ATTENDANCE POLICY
You are free to attend/skip whichever sessions you want.
Dates
July 3 - July 31
Learners
41 / 50
Total Sessions
4
About the Tutor
PL
DT
Teaching Saturdays at 9am US/Pacific. I’m a software engineer and a former CS TA in college. Looking forward to helping you achieve your learning goals and appreciate the usefulness of what you’re learning!
View Dickson T's Profile
Upcoming Sessions
0
Past Sessions
4
3
Jul
E
Session 1
Enrichment
Intro to phonetics:
- Which part of your mouth produces which sounds
- International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
- Minimal pairs.
- Phonological rules. Example: When do English vowels become nasalized?
- British, New York, Boston accents
10
Jul
E
Session 2
Enrichment
Phonetics II:
- Physics of sound, as it applies to linguistics
- Praat spectrograms
17
Jul
E
Session 3
Enrichment
Intro to syntax:
- Syntax trees
- Natural language processing (NLP) demo
31
Jul
E
Session 4
Enrichment
Linguistics stories/trivia
Student presentations: Bring some story/trivia to share.
Signup sheet (only sign up if you are 100% sure you will attend this session): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZJmj0kIrNI_fYG3kBG9jw5QdfWIlQs1spioV2BQiA74/edit?usp=sharing
Examples:
- English Great Vowel Shift
- Language acquisition (babies, adults)
- Story of Nicaraguan Sign language
- Mbarbaram "dog" and other false cognates
- Piraha language
- Tones (e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese)
- Mythological story (e.g. Native American, etc.)
- ???