From the Archives!—Jungftak Feathers—The SpecGram Archive Elves™ SpecGram Vol CLXX, No 3 Contents Thirteen Untranslatable Words—Michael Covarrubias

Abundant Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)


gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers
by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This 44th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test Question—Phonological Patterns

The word ten can be pronounced as transcribed* below, in these utterances:

ten dots[ten]
ten bins   [tem]
tens[ten]
ten cots[teŋ]
tenpins[tem]

Describe the pattern that you observe in the data.

Answers—Part 1


More to come...



* The interested and/or confused reader may note that, as becomes apparent through the various scholarly works published from time to time in an outfit attracting international attention such as ours, our linguistic brethren across the big pond are not only separated from us by a common language, but also by a common transcription system. Thus, caveat lectortranscription contents may unsettle during shipping overseas. —Eds.

From the Archives!Jungftak FeathersThe SpecGram Archive Elves™
Thirteen Untranslatable WordsMichael Covarrubias
SpecGram Vol CLXX, No 3 Contents