‘Time and thyme are not homophones’, a 2008 article by Susanne Gahl published in Language, reports a frequency effect differentiating the durations of homophones, for example, time vs. thyme. The article is of fundamental theoretical relevance, as the finding reported has significant implications for research on homophones and the effects of frequency in general. As I show in the present paper, however, the main analysis in Gahl 2008 does not provide quantitative evidence for the effect. The same is true of a follow-up study (Gahl 2009). I provide here a reanalysis based on the original data set, which shows that the frequency effect reported in the original article is real.

This article describes how students can be introduced to the basics of linguistic analysis using personal, product, and place names as data. I outline several areas of linguistics that can be effectively taught at an introductory level through name data and provide examples of accompanying in-class and take-home exercises. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that the everyday familiarity of names and the ready availability of name data combine to create a class that not only engages students but also teaches them practical data-analysis skills.

This work explores the effect of ease of articulation on speech by examining the rates at which various consonants occur in word lists representing thousands of languages. The data reveal that obstruents produced with oral obstruction closer to the glottis are less likely to be voiced when contrasted with their counterparts produced in the anterior region of the vocal tract. While this finding is explainable via previously documented aerodynamic factors, these new data suggest that such factors may have a more powerful influence on speech than typically assumed. The pattern in question is evident even after controlling for the relatedness and areal proximity of language varieties. This study isolates and quantifies the decrease in consonant voicing associated with the reduction in size of the supralaryngeal cavity.

This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the development of a wide range of new approaches, conceptual and technological, to the problem of documenting them. We review these approaches and the manifold discoveries they have unearthed about the enormous variety of linguistic structures. The reach of our knowledge has increased by about 15% of the world's languages, especially in terms of digitally archived material, with about 500 languages now reasonably documented thanks to such major programs as DoBeS, ELDP, and DEL. But linguists are still falling behind in the race to document the planet's rapidly dwindling linguistic diversity, with around 35–42% of the world's languages still substantially undocumented, and in certain countries (such as the US) the call by Krauss (1992) for a significant professional realignment toward language documentation has only been heeded in a few institutions. Apart from the need for an intensified documentarist push in the face of accelerating language loss, we argue that existing language documentation efforts need to do much more to focus on crosslinguistically comparable data sets, sociolinguistic context, semantics, and interpretation of text material, and on methods for bridging the ‘transcription bottleneck’, which is creating a huge gap between the amount we can record and the amount in our transcribed corpora.