Linguistic Emissions Reduction Sought

Published: July 3, 2015, 12:08 p.m.

Linguistic Emissions Reduction Sought; by SpecGram Wire Services; From Volume CLIII, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, September 2007 \u2014 Sanaa, Yemen\u2014Tempers flared at global climate talks today, as environmental and linguistic concerns met head-on. The dispute is about so-called \u201cinefficient articulations,\u201d which detractors say increase the metabolic cost of speaking, while offering no linguistic benefit to speakers. These articulations, such as the large transition between the uvular [q] and palatal [i] in the Arabic surname Sadeqi, require more metabolic energy than most other segmental transitions, and are contributing to global warming, detractors say. (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.)