Language Log

Uh-oh! A friend of mine who recently looked at the websites of the Departments of Linguistics at both the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania just pointed out to me that each of them claims to be the oldest department of linguistics in the USA. This is bad. Language Log is headquartered on a server at Penn. Now we don't know whether our home is the oldest department of linguistics in the USA or not.

Today marks the beginning of Open Access Week, and last week's announcement about changes to the Linguistic Society of America's publications program was like an early OA Week present. Some highlights:

• All content published in Language will be made freely available on the new LSA website after a one-year embargo period.
• Authors who wish to have their content available immediately, either on the Language site or on other websites, may pay a $400 article processing fee to do so.
• The contents of Language will continue to be immediately available to LSA members and to other subscribers of Project MUSE.

Information about more Open Access goodness to come at the LSA's Annual Meeting in January here.

There is a movement called Vietnamese2020 that aims to substantially reform the writing system by the year 2020.  The main change would be to group syllables into words.  As the advocates of this change point out, most words in Vietnamese are disyllabic (the same is true of Mandarin).  The proponents of the reform believe that, among others, it would reap the following benefits:

1. achieve greater compatibility with the needs of information processing systems

2. comport better with the findings of cognitive science

3. put the kibosh on the false notion of monosyllabism, which they say is unnatural and does not exist in real languages

Eric Baković has noted the happy confluence of the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association, both scheduled for January 3-6, 2013 at sites within reasonable walking distance of each other in Boston. (The LSA will be at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, and the MLA at the Hynes Convention Center and the Sheraton Boston.) Eric has plugged the joint organized session on open access for which he will be a panelist, so allow me to do the same for another panel with MLA/LSA crossover appeal. The MLA's Discussion Group on Lexicography has held a special panel for several years now, but many lexicographers and fellow travelers in linguistics have been unable to attend because of the conflict with the LSA and the concurrent meeting of the American Dialect Society. This time around, with the selected topic of "Digital Dictionaries," the whole MLA/LSA/ADS crowd can join in.

The 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is scheduled to be held in Boston, January 3-6, 2013. As it happens, the 128th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association will also be held in Boston on the same dates. The LSA and MLA have planned a number of joint activities for meeting attendees.

The LSA's Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals (CELxJ) will sponsor an organized session on Open Access publishing, to be held at the LSA on Thursday, January 3, 4-7pm. In addition to yours truly, our confirmed panelists include:

• Ellen Duranceau (MIT Libraries Program Manager for Scholarly Publishing and Licensing)
• Kai von Fintel (MIT Linguistics, founding co-editor of Semantics & Pragmatics)
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA Director of Scholarly Communications)
• Alyson Reed (Executive Director of the LSA)
• Stuart Shieber (Harvard Computer Science, Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication)
• Lindsay Whaley (Dartmouth Linguistics, founding co-editor of Linguistic Discovery)
• Vika Zafrin (Boston University Institutional Repository Librarian)

I hope that anyone planning to attend the LSA or the MLA will make time to attend this important and timely session. Building on its efforts with eLanguage, the LSA has recently committed to extend the range of the journal Language to include online-only, Open Access material; a business model for supporting Open Access publications is currently under consideration and will be available before the panel meets. The MLA Convention's Presidential Theme is Avenues of Access, including Open Access and the future of scholarly communication. The efforts on the part of both of these organizations to increase public access to scholarly work will be among the topics under discussion in this session.

Check this space soon for more/updated information. [ Update, 10/2/2012 — abstracts for the session are now posted. ]

To help bloggers everywhere celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, in keeping with our annual tradition, we present once again the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates:

In TLAPD posts from earlier years, you can find instructions for the more difficult task of talking (as opposed to typing) like a pirate; the history of piratical r-fulness; and other goodies: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, … and then we kind of lost the thread.

There's actually some serious historical linguistics (and cultural history) involved here, as discussed in "R!?", 9/19/2005, and "Pirate R as in I-R-ELAND", 9/20/2006. And some pop culture  ("Said the Pirate King, 'Aaarrrf'", 9/27/2010), and even a bit of mathematical linguistics.

A brief news flash from Edinburgh: at the Winter Graduation Ceremony on Wednesday 28 November the University of Edinburgh will be conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters upon Eric P. Hamp, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, for his contribution to linguistics and in particular to Celtic linguistics and Celtic studies. Hamp has been major figure in etymology and historical linguistics for decades, and is deeply versed in Indo-European languages in a way that few modern linguists are. He has done important work on other language families too, has done fieldwork on Amerindian languages. It is good to see this recognition of his excellence not just by the linguists at Edinburgh but more generally by the university as an institution.

According to a petition posted 6/14/2012 at GoPetition, Dr. Muhammad Ali Salmani-Nodoushan faces the death penalty in Iran on three charges:

1. Conversion to Christianism;
2. Persistence on New Faith;
3. Pro-human rights activity

The annual begging posting for that admirable resource, the Linguist List. Some details, including the portmanteau metafortress, on my blog, here.

Time to celebrate the appearance of the last volume (5) of the Dictionary of American Regional English! Brief account on my blog, here; more extensive account on DARE's site, here.

A video of Nina Fedoroff's opening address at AAAS 2012 is available here (starts at 40 minutes in). I thought it was very interesting. She gives an inspiring account of the difficulties that she overcame in becoming a scientist, starting with getting pregnant and dropping out of high school at 17; she explains some fascinating things about the nature of transposons and the history of their discovery; she presents a strong case for the importance of GMOs and related interdisciplinary science and engineering in adapting to climate change; and she ends with an interesting tour of international science diplomacy.

Although the video presented through membercentral.aaas.org, I believe that it's outside the paywall.

(Please don't complain about the spelling of welcome's. Everybody make's mistake's.)

This morning, here at AAAS 2012, I'll be attending a symposium on "Teaching Science Through Language", organized by Anne Lobeck. The abstract:

There is a need for highly effective science education and for more successful ways to teach scientific inquiry. Work on language can play an important role in developing the concepts and skills necessary for understanding how science works. Language provides a wealth of data available from the students themselves — data with questions that beg to be asked, making everyday phenomena surprisingly unfamiliar and requiring explanation. Linguistics is at the core of cognitive science, offering incomparable ways to understand the nature of the human mind. The biological capacity for language appears to be shaped in part by genetic information and in part by information gained through childhood experience. Scientists have sought to tease that information apart, and this work has yielded good explanations in some domains and a body of understanding that can be made accessible to middle school and high school students. This symposium presents examples of linguistic puzzles that can be integrated into existing school curricula and that enable all children to understand elements of scientific work quite generally and to discover their own intuitive knowledge of language. (For example, how do we know that greebies is a noun in The greebies snarfed granflons, but a verb in Lulu greebies me?) All of this can be done without labs or expensive equipment by involving experimentation, observation, and testing of hypotheses.

I'm at AAAS 2012 in Vancouver BC, and as soon as I can get out of the section officers' meeting (which started at 6:30 this morning), I'm going to head over to the symposium on "Endangered and Minority Languages Crossing the Digital Divide", co-organized by David Harrison and Claire Bowern.