Despite thinking what I’m about to do is a go0fy waste of time and almost* entirely useless, I am, indeed, about to do it.

Here are three wordclouds from my term papers for the three classes I took this semester, along with their working titles.  (The titles they ended up with were less interesting/less accurate, fwiw.)  Nothing about the three of these is really astonishing, though I wish there were more synonyms for ‘derivational morphology’ because it’s quite a mouthful and really hard to avoid in a paper about, you know, derivational morphology.  That the word ‘though’ appears so much in that paper is mostly a tribute to my bad writing, but some of that size in the cloud might be the result of the conflicting conclusions I was trying to come to.

Sociophonetics: ‘In Which I Write About Watching The Daily Show a Lot.’

Morphology. ‘A Half-Baked Analysis of Suffixes in Some L2 English Corpus’

Formal Approaches to Language Acquisition: ‘A Surprisingly Rigorous Analysis of a Whole Lot of Estonian L1 Data That Might Actually Be Worth Reading’

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Yesterday I asked:

‘Exit’, first syllable: someone you used to date,or what chickens make?

— brett royal (@brettroyal) May 13, 2013

The responses I got were split 50-50, if you ignore the handful of people that have bizarre pronunciations that don’t fall nicely into either category. Since I had a pretty small number of people responding, most of whom were linguists and thus, you know, kinda weird, I figured I’d look a little wider. Checking Forvo.com, I found, again, an even split. Still, asking linguists and whatever folks actually choose to submit their pronunciations to an awesome website is still pretty weird.

SO I checked for occurrences in natural speech, looking at all the corpora here. Unfortunately ‘exit’ isn’t super common, so I was only able to find a handful of tokens. Anyhow, I continued to find a 50-50 split, more or less. Maybe younger sounding people are a bit more likely to be voiceless? I checked the speech synthezisers at dictionary.com and m-w.com. Both of them list both voiced and voiceless variants, but only the former actually synthesized both types. PRETTY COOL.

Anyhow, at this point I’ve spent about two hours JUST TODAY, not to mention nearly 15 minutes last night worrying about this, and it’s summer time, so, you know, come on. So, in summary, here are a bunch of people saying the word ‘exit.’