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Will Bennett

@wmgbennett.bsky.social
182 followers 202 following 410 posts

Linguist, professor, Africanist, aspiring mad scientist/inventor/youtuber/occasional shitposter. Interested in meaning, sounds, the navigation therebetween, and how that all plays out for humans across history and geography.

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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 6h
“Why are you even on LinkedIn in the first place, though?” Filing this in the faq with the other frequently asked questions.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Part two
How does the Onsal cavity even be a cavity without surrounding tissue?This one reminds me of the Tully MonsterFor some reason all the MetaAI diagrams look like this, with muscles, weirdly serene eyes, and looking like they are trying to scream but are not able to
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Every year in my intro phonetics class I like to do an assignment that @ludling.bsky.social devised, where they have to draw vocal tract diagram, and genAI a diagram, and compare them. Here are some of my favorites among the incomprehensible horrors submitted. #🗣️💬
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Yo hive mind: do we have the technology to search audio for a specific spectral signature? If so, how? I feel like an LLM* ought to be good at a task like “listen to these four hours of wav files and give me a timestamp of every point where intensity at 8Khz exceeds a specified threshold.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This is an under voiced take that is completely spot on
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
groundup.org.za/article/chil... What a horribly horribly bleak situation. Just as I was getting to the end, one of my undergrads wrote to apologize for handing in their assignment late because they were stuck getting back from chemotherapy. Eish.
groundup.org.za
Children are dying in pain because our palliative care is so poor
Damning report from World Health Organisation confirms what professionals already know
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
@strictscrutiny.bsky.social @openargs.bsky.social
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Reposted by Will Bennett
Emily @emilydawn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
@hockeyviz.com I found some beautiful data viz for you
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Dear law podcasters: there is no country called “Eswitani”. Or “eswihani”. It’s Eswatini, as in “the place of the Swati people”. Like Swaziland. The vowels don’t magically jump around just because you suck at geography.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Fai’ do do is clearly from the old Semitic radical FD, in the jussive imperfect
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Little known Snapple fact: Cajuns are not originally from Louisiana, and the clue is in the name. Cajun is a shortening of ‘Akkadian’, which reflects the group’s history of being forcibly resettled from Mesopotamia by the French after the fall of Sumeria. #cuneiformdelafayette
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
When a university says “we are committed to constructive engagement”, that usually means “you can email us and we will ignore it”
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
My health insurance sent a text message to remind me about ADHD awareness month. They categorically refuse to cover ADHD medication for adults.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Erratum: Doke used numbers in his textbook of Zulu grammar. But with 1 for the top of the range, 9 for the bottom, and with the numbers furigana-style above each syllable
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I am familiar with this only from Chinese (and osmosis of the convention therefrom). My preference used to be superscript numbers after the syllable. But now my worsening vision questions the merit of superscript when none of the numerals look too much like any IPA.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Coral reef morphology
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
❤️🐋
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
What a profoundly terrible excuse for a “grant”
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Reposted by Will Bennett
Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
did they say grad school was a good investment
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Said dog apparently tried to dig a tunnel under his Land Rover
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“I don’t know if dogs can be on the spectrum, but your dog is” -a literal biologist
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
What kind of monster puts condensed milk into a cheese sauce meant for fried chicken? Just gross.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Even NEW ZEALAND has better trains than America. Think about that for a second.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Our new paper we’ve been trying to finish since 2015 is finally out: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2... 🗣️💬
tandfonline.com
On the productivity of length-based alternations in Xhosa noun class prefixes
Noun classes in isiXhosa are each associated with specific prefixes on the noun stem. Some of these noun class prefixes exhibit length-based allomorphy: they take one form before multisyllabic stem...
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The existence of Bouillabaisse implies that one can be Bouillacringé
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Reposted by Will Bennett
Kate Elliott @kateelliottsff.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I recommend this entire thread, and you'll understand why when you get all the way through it. A lovely analysis of human communication.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Way to go Jesse!
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I just got an email from an “AI writer”, which profiles itself as “Victoria Chase, a writer tracking the last two speakers of a dying language”. 🗣️💬 What in the #freshaihell is ilands.ai? They are asking for whether the people we recorded during fieldwork have died yet. Unconscionable lack of tact.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Please everyone join me in welcoming “grok” to the list of words that are their own antonyms
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I’m actually more of a secular mantis myself
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I thought I had a joke about Mbabaram canines being good dogs, but it didn’t stand the test of time
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I guess the thing to learn from RFKj is that Kennedys either die young or live long enough to become the villain
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The new Infowars has delivered the most brutal satire I think I’ve ever seen.
youtu.be
CONSERVATIVE HERO: Lucas Reilly Is FIGHTING For The 2nd Amendment
YouTube video by InfoWars
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
The Bennett (No relation) et al 2009 salmon poster remains one of my all time favorite academic pubs. prefrontal.org/files/poster... Q: how much of the hype around AI is basically this kind of error writ large?
prefrontal.org
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... Note to self: share this link with the next person who tells you prompt engineering matters for anything
aclanthology.org
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Squiii.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Apparently my lecture yesterday got tiktok’d by one of the students. Let’s see if I get fired for *checks notes * “playing the pink trombone “
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The South African Library for the Blind thanks you for watching
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Anyway the France-Spain referee used to be a professor of organic chemistry, so…..
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
The trouble is the obvious way to show this empirically would involve being mean to parrots, and I don’t think that’s going to pass ethics review
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Hypothesis: real parrots are actually way more deterministic than stochastic ones (ie LLMs)
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
once I bought an electric toothbrush advertised on some podcasts. Shipping was delayed so long I assumed it wasn’t coming and did a chargeback. And then one day it arrived! Free toothbrush! Two root canals and thousands later, I found out quip was a scam. This is a tweet about LLMs.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Cooked: “Good luck” Overlooked: “May all of your errors be grammatical”
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Hey Claude, give me a function that explains the relation between tokens and wickelphones
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Fkn bullshit
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Me, watching soccer: oop, sorry, I guess I conceded that goal because I looked away at the wrong moment
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Yellow cards for both coaches. You love to see it. Go Paraguay! #theotherguaysturntowin
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Go Black Stars 🇬🇭
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
This many choices is way above the threshold of usefulness, Google
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