It is very common in Japanese schools to have a “three-modifer motto” or slogan. For example, the Takarazuka Revue was given the motto, "Modesty, Fairness, Grace" by Kobayashi Ichizo. 

What school mottos can you remember?
Please look up the English word equivalents to your Japanese words.

Being a part of a family often leads to a private vocabulary of invented words and phrases that only those in one’s own household may understand. Looking at the following examples, do any words or phrases come to mind? Please write some Japanese words or phrases you don’t mind sharing. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/family-secret-language-familect/618871/

Listen carefully to the list of Fakemon names that you hear. Each name will begin with the letters S, T, K, Z, or P. Attempting to spell the name that you heard, write the name (or at least the first letter) into the Fakemon category that you think is the most suitable (e.g., “T” for “Tulker”). 

This activity draws inspiration from Science Friday and articles on Pokémonastics by Kawahara, S., Godoy, M. C., & Kumagai, G. (2021). English speakers can infer Pokémon types based on sound symbolism. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 648948.

Why do you think these occur? Please search and choose at least three eggcorns that interest you using the database, making note of your impressions and discoveries: https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/30/410504851/eggcorns-the-gaffes-that-spread-like-wildflowers

Using the NASA website, look up, listen, and then write up to three world music pieces included on the Voyager record. Then, make your own new suggestion for a piece that you think represents the human condition.

This exercise was inspired by the book, Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (2021) by Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, as well as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech: 

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

One of the fascinating changes in the history of English has been the decline in the frequency of “nominal adjectives”, or the use of adjectives as nouns. 

Adding “the” makes these adjectives become nouns. Take a look at these examples on LanGeek:

https://langeek.co/en/grammar/course/884/nominal-adjectives

Knowing any language makes us susceptible to humorous mistakes. William Archibald Spooner was an Oxford professor and dean who these “sound transpositions” have since been named after. Why care about native speakerism?

https://www.igroupjapan.com/actfl-lti-25-examples-of-spoonerisms/

Try your hand at the following activities by following the instructions and listening to the recordings from the Voices of Berkeley Project on phonetics and exercises on dialects from American English (2015).

This first set of standard activities in linguistics were developed by On the Same Page affiliated with the Voices of Berkeley Project. 

Website Copyright, Regents of the University of California (2011). 

Retrieved on March 13, 2024, from: https://voicesof.berkeley.edu/geekout.php.

Next, please go to Exercise 10.4 at the link below, and mark the continuum for Rex O’Neal. 

The three recordings are available here: http://www.americanenglishwiley.com/ex-chapter-10.html

This activity is adapted from the student exercises in Chapter 10, “Dialects and Style” in American English: Dialects and Variation 3rd Edition (2015) by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling. 

Website Copyright, North Carolina State University. Retrieved March 13, 2024.

This activity was inspired by The Five Clocks (1962) written by Martin Joos. 

The American linguist, Martin Joos (1907-78), classified many ways that we systematically and unconsciously shift our speech based on the setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Joos

For the quiz, remember to check this short summary video on the sociolinguistics of verbal cues by Tom Scott on YouTube.