Jekyll2026-04-12T18:29:34+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/feed.xmlFernanda BarrientosFernanda's page, with a focus on linguistics but also a bit of this and that // This page was created with Jekyll.Vuck foicing: The imbordance of FOD2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:002026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/liguistics,/phonetics,/cursed/screenshots/2026/04/12/the-imbordance-of-FODI don’t remember how I stumbled upon this question on Quora that changed my brain chemistry. Always happy to show it to my students whenever the occasion arises. And another linguistic hill I’m willing to die on: we should teach pronounciation and VOT to language students when learning Germanic-to-Romance or vice versa.

]]>Hello, {name}, your grade was {grade}2025-07-20T00:00:00+00:002025-07-20T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/python,/teaching,/programming/2025/07/20/hello-name-your-grade-is-gradeDuring term time, it’s all fun and games until you need to communicate your students their final grade before uploading it to the system. I don’t know if I’m taking it too seriously, but unless we’re talking about a course with more than 20 students, I like to give them several assessments throughout the semester instead of a one-or-nothing final exam. Of course, more work for me (yay?), but some tasks can be automatized. I will talk about a script that automatizes the grading of IPA transcriptions later, but for now, I have a script for the email problem.

My script needs a .csv file with your students’ names and grades. I had three small assignments (whose average is worth 20% of their final grade), a midterm (30%), and a final exam (50%). You will also need to create an empty folder for the output.

The script also performs some calculations, i.e. the average for the assignments and the final grades. And this was quite annoying, as the German grading scale goes from 1 to 5 (where 1 is the best grade) and there’s no such a thing as e.g. a 1,4: You can only have a 1,0, a 1,3, a 1,7, a 2,0, and so on. The script takes care of this by pushing a potential 1,4 into a 1,3, etc. The cutoffs are set at .15, .5, and .85 (but I moved it to .88 because I can’t be that evil).

The script spits out a bunch of .txt files with your students’ first names as filenames, and their grades neatly listed. Since I have trust issues I didn’t want to make this so automatized as to directly sending the emails without me obsessively checking them before hitting send (and also because I couldn’t be bothered this time).

Happy emailing!

]]>Weird flexes in linguistics II: Ceci n’est pas un pied2025-07-19T00:00:00+00:002025-07-19T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/linguistics,/cursed/screenshots/2025/07/19/weird-flexes-in-linguistics-IIThe bizarre moment when Scopus miscategorized the LabPhon journal.

]]>Weird flexes in linguistics I: The giraffe2025-06-14T00:00:00+00:002025-06-14T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/linguistics,/cursed/screenshots/2025/06/14/weird-flexes-in-linguistics-I
  • Author: The participant had one heck of a long neck.
  • Reviewer 2: Sorry Author, but you can’t write that.
  • Author: ok, then let me rephrase it:

    • ]]>    Vowel synthesis with Praat via Table objects2025-06-02T00:00:00+00:002025-06-02T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/praat,/programming/2025/06/02/vowel-synthesis-with-Praat-via-Table-objectsI wanted to create a grid covering the entire acoustic space for a voice with an f0 of about 220 Hz. The annoying option consisted of creating 8 continua in the script with a formula, but it turns out that there is a super easy way to create a ton of vowel sounds with Praat that doesn’t involve hard-coding of variables within the Praat script (this is already quite awesome, but it can be even better).

    The task: create the following stimuli.

    After recording myself (the 220 Hz are from my voice) I could determine the F1 and F2 values for the cardinal vowels of my Praat-synthesized clone. Then a fairly simple R script that makes use of the expand.grid() function created the entire grid in Bark steps (I worked this out in a bit of an awkward way by converting the cardinal vowels to Bark, then creating the grid, and then converting everything to Hz). After interpolating F3 and F4 values in a somewhat sketchy way, the .txt file with the dataframe can be read by Praat as a Table object, which can be fed to the script with the KlattGrid.

    The script selects the Table (which needs to have F1 and F2 Hz values and bandwidths) and then loops through every row to get F1, F2, and bandwidths before creating the KlattGrid, and that’s pretty much it.

    The results were quite satisfying. I don’t know exactly what tributed to the success, but here is a couple of new things that I tried this time:

    • Add a synthesised /b/ in the KlattGrid script before the vowel (yas, ecological validity and all that).
    • Add a convincing pitch contour.
    • Derived the correct bandwidths for each formant (this will require an entire post).

    You can find the script here.

    ]]>    Linguistic hills2025-05-25T00:00:00+00:002025-05-25T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/linguistics/2025/05/25/linguistic-hillsThese are some of the many linguistic hills I’m willing to die on:

    • Linguistic theory is shamefully monolingual.
    • Prosodic words are not isomorphic with morphological words.
    • Late learners of a foreign language will be forever imposters (some of them are great ones, though).
    • We know squat about morphology.
    • X-bar theory has no psychological reality.
    • A good model of language change should model not just change, but also stability.
    • We should pay more attention to learnability.
    • We. Do. Not. Diss. Other. Linguistic. Disciplines. Please.

    What are yours?

    ]]>    50 words for snow2024-10-21T00:00:00+00:002024-10-21T00:00:00+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/linguistics/2024/10/21/fifty-words-for-snowA few weeks ago, someone who is not related to linguistics asked my opinion on the idea that some languages lend themselves to express certain things better than others and mentioned the well-known cliché about the Eskimo and their 50/100/150 words for snow. After explaining without getting into much detail that this is actually a myth (this was a conversation on WhatsApp, so not a great medium for communicating linguistic concepts), I wanted to learn more about it. Was Pullum’s essay on the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax the last word on the subject? Apparently not.

    One way to see it, is that the question lacks an important common ground for understanding, which is: what is a word? Knowing that words may be formed by more than one single morpheme, and that some languages really like their polymorphemic words (polysynthetic languages is the right term for this), you eventually realize that our concept of word is more language-specific than you think. Meanwhile, it seems that there has been even more research done saying that Boaz was right, which is mildly amusing since it looks like the crux of the controversy went somewhat over their heads.

    At this point, I still want to know how many root morphemes they (whatever flavor of Eskimo–Aleut) have for snow. It seems like it’s… two or three. Either way, it’s less important if we take into account that some of these words do not necessarily refer to snow as “a type of snow that has such-and-such properties”, but as a means for building something and whatnot (e.g. “building material for houses”). I am too lazy to start looking at Eskimo-Aleut grammars, though the phonology looks pretty cool with those velars and uvulars. For the time being, I might give non-linguist Kate Bush’s take on the issue a go.

    ]]>    Trying Jekyll2024-10-13T20:48:35+00:002024-10-13T20:48:35+00:00https://pandabar.github.io/nerding/2024/10/13/welcome-to-jekyllI had my website on Github, which I kept updating manually. Since I had plenty of verbose HTML, at some point I just stopped updating it. So now it seems that with Jekyll I can do things slightly faster while still on GitHub, but the learning curve so far has been quite steep. The great thing about it is that I can use Markdown for both pages and blogging, which is a wonderful thing. Let’s see how this goes from now on.

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