These are linguistic trading cards that were made by Mikael Parkvall, there's a whole great collection of them. I'll put up some more under the tag "lingvistiska samlarbilder" ("linguistic trading cards").


They are in Swedish, but I think you don't need no Google translate to figure out "citat av X". I'll put up the ones that will be understandable to you (I'll leave the Swede-internal jokes ^^)!

These two features Noam Chomsky and Nim Chimpsky. Nim was one of many chimpanzees that we have tried to teach some kind of language similar to humans. You can read more about him, the studies and controversies here.

The name is, as you might have guessed, a pun on the name of the famous linguist Noam Chomsky who has, among other things, claimed that there are features of human language that other primates cannot acquire. In particular we are talking about the doubly articulated nature of the language system, i.e. the smallest meaningful units (words, morphemes) consist of sequences of units without meaning (phonemes).

Nim did not prove that he could master this. He did, however, talk a lot about fruit.
The linguistic trading cars are, as I said, the creation of Mikael Parkvall is a lecturer at the department of linguistics at Stockholm University. That's where I was educated, that's where I grew up as a linguist. It was a great place to grow up academically, I'm forever grateful to everyone there. 


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