Hi from Nepal! I'm fine! It has been amazing to see, smell, hear and feel the revolution all around me. While sheltering, made this interactive map of the languages in Nepal. (Sorry it loads slowly.) A beautifully multi-lingual nation! #nepal lislab.shinyapps.io/LanguagesInN...

BREAKING: ICE is sending Russian dissidents back to Russia. When the dissidents arrived in Russia, the Russian authorities were given documents relating to their asylum applications in the US which under US law are confidential. This seems to be part of a secret agreement between Trump and Putin.

Update from Nepal: Social media is shut down, including Facebook, IG, WhatsApp, and YouTube (!). TikTok and Viber still work. Officially it’s because these apps haven’t registered with the government. Local people are saying it’s to prevent political organizing prior to the election.

Today I met Dipak Tuladhar, who started a pre-school for Newar children in Kathmandu in 2003. After meeting with success, he has developed schools in other towns, and has been working with local leaders across Nepal to expand the concept to allow more kids to learn in their mother tongue.

Things that have gone in garbage trucks in sweeps in San Diego: - All bicycles regardless of condition. - Painstakingly reacquired ID documents. - Urns with human remains. - Tents with people in them.

Semantics teachers! The Fall 2025 version of "Invitation to Formal Semantics" is now available. It has major changes to Chapters 1-5 driven by new exercises and visualization of cases. Solutions to exercises soon available upon request. eecoppock.info/bootcamp/sem...

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center. www.wthr.com/article/news...

At least 159 Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death amid Israel's ongoing siege blocking most humanitarian aid from entering the territory. Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to kill scores of Palestinians on a daily basis, including at food distribution sites widely described as "death traps."

New blog post: decoding the first line of a traditional Newari counting riddle. Punchline in the image. sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/... Watch Nepal Bhasa language activist Sunita Junu and her daughter recite this beautiful call-and-response text: www.tiktok.com/@sunita.junu...

I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip. TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu. sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...

*Queen* Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, wrote that "it is the Judiciary’s duty to check ... lawlessness, not expedite it."

Is it illegal to deny inmates the ability to call their lawyers and families by refusing to provide PIN codes? (Setting aside the issue of whether they have earned their five dollars at a dollar a day of prison labor for the five bucks it takes to call home…)

Most inspiring story I have read about our current problems. Want to copy!

Day-drinking on July 4th and working through the holiday like a true American

Languages of Nepal with beautiful scripts: (i) Nepal Bhasa, which has been written using Ranjana and other scripts of Nepal Lipi (along with the Hindi script Devanagari); (ii) Gurung, with a very round script. (Tim Brookes, Atlas of Endangered Alphabets)

How can we be detaining people whose asylum cases are pending??? Completely psychotic even if you think that people who enter illegally should be deported.

Songwriters, set this article to music pix11.com/news/local-n...

Can somebody please invent and distribute a scam filter for elderly people with dementia? My mom has already lost 11k this year and they say the average is 30k a year. They have small cities of fraud farms in India, growing and growing in the satellite images.

It's wrong to send Americans to an overseas megaprison. It's wrong to send non-Americans to an oversea megaprison. It's wrong whether they committed a crime or not. It's wrong whether they have been sentenced for a crime or not. Cruel and unusual punishment is wrong. Concentration camps are wrong.

Boston protest pictures — yes let’s get creative!!!

Working on protest sign ideas

Free Mahmoud! Please consider signing this petition. actionnetwork.org/letters/dema...

Does anyone have a copy of the Sesame Street archives? americanarchive.org/special_coll...

Does anyone have any thoughts or information on why you can't say "the speed limit is 55 divided by one hour"?

Hot take: “descriptive linguistics” is as silly a concept as “descriptive biology”. Likewise for “theoretical”. In science you need data and you want to understand it at more than a superficial level, so these are both critical components of the scientific process.

Boston University Linguistics is accepting applications for the MA program until March 15! If you know any undergrads who are passionate about linguistics, please let them know about our program! Info about the program here: www.bu.edu/academics/gr... Link to apply here: www.bu.edu/cas/admissio...

Sometimes I wonder, does he genuinely think he has better ideas for how to run things or is he actually evil? Now we know!

Isn’t “own” a really weird verb to use in describing the relationship between US and Gaza? That’s what private citizens do. Countries “take over”, or “control” territories and then there’s a part-whole, not owner-ownee relationship. Right? Do we “own” Puerto Rico?

Have to say the whole “Nobody elected Elon Musk” line really rings hollow after Trump said in broad daylight “but then they rigged the election”, explaining why they’d be there at the Olympics.

Granted, it is high time we started focusing on the real problem: white males

Got the flu, invited Mr. Mouse to sit in on my lecture on semantic relations. He did great.

If Serbians can rise up and protest en masse against self-interested heads of state who sell out their people, why can’t we?

Mass protests in the streets of #Belgrade today as a general strike is taking place all over #Serbia 🇷🇸. For weeks now the country has been gripped by anti #Vucic protests, following the deathly canopy collapse in Novi Sad which killed 15 people.

Biggest thieves of the century rounding people up and putting them in prison for shoplifting

Donate to Wikipedia. Do it today, and every time one of the broligarchs has a tantrum because he can’t buy it

We really need to build these hyper-aggressive white males a playground somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. They can just play paintball all day and get it out of their systems.

Our paper is out! Helena Aparicio and I were fresh-faced and innocent when we first started this project back in 2017: escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9... Title: Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail

"Hey Liz, can I actually email you for the slides, because I heard from a lot of people that your talk was amazing." -Person to me after my plenary at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024. Slides dropping right here! eecoppock.info/ac2024-ho-co...

Working on a taxonomy toxic communication patterns: 1. invalidating the other’s feelings (telling people they shouldn’t feel the way they do) - [crying] / Why are you crying - You can’t be sad about it Better: express understanding that people do feel the way they feel, and don’t judge it

Hello BlueSky people! Does anyone know of a theoretical linguistics book publisher other than Language Science Press that will accept a LaTeX manuscript and use it for the proofs?

Hi linguists! I’m looking for recent examples of a fragment (in Montague’s sense, but not necessarily including any semantics) of English or any other natural language. Just any example of how to write out the syntax. Thanks for any leads!

Hot take: The distinction between "familiarity articles" and "uniqueness articles" is a very very popular distinction without an empirical difference. Any place a familiarity article is *predicted* to be possible, a uniqueness article is too and vice versa. Am I wrong? eecoppock.info/Coppock-defn...

Very interesting question raised by one of my students in her final paper: What’s the difference between a dogwhistle and an inside joke? Do people have thoughts on this? Would be grateful for literature recs.

Semantics teachers! The Spring 2024 edition of “Invitation to Formal Semantics” is now up at: eecoppock.info/semantics-bo... This release includes important fixes in Chapters 6, 12, and 13. Feedback remains very much appreciated as always!

Now out in Natural Language Semantics: Some rock-solid arguments that degree abstraction *does* exist in Mandarin after all. It was a delight working with BU PhD student Ying Gong on this.

Today I had an experience I’ve never had before: silently rejoicing that there are 10 more pages of this student’s final paper to read, two pages in

Hi, I heard there was a block party happening on BlueSky.