We've chronicled the ups and downs of Jeopardy's handling of linguistic topics, which seems to have improved, and recently they've had entire categories devoted to linguistic topics, as on December 14th, when two of the categories were "Suffixes" and "Let's Learn Hebrew",but they've reached a new high: one of the contestants is a linguistics graduate student.He's Kevin Holbert, who won two games before losing today. You can check out his performance at the Jeopardy Archive. Alex Trebek chatted with him about his work on Khoi and San languages, in the course of which Holbert actually got in a good description of the production of clicks, for which Khoi and San languages are known. To my amazement, Trebek spontaneously (that is, not in imitation of Holbert) produced several clicks!
Posted by Bill Poser at December 19, 2007 11:13 PM