Language Log

The Simile of the Week award (it's a bit early for Simile of the Year) goes to Matt Taibbi, who in a spectacularly delicious piece of political feature-writing described observing the Republican party's primary process as "like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift." As Alice said about the Jabberwocky poem in Through the Looking Glass, "somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don't exactly know what they are!"

These days, newly published books often get promoted with video trailers, and there's one that just came out for Michael Erard's Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. In keeping with the book's theme of hyperpolyglottery, Erard rounded up speakers of different languages to create a multilingual reading of a story told in his book. (Direct link here — that's me at 1:05.)

And there's a contest! Here are the details from the trailer description:

How good are you at identifying spoken languages? I asked friends from all over to say one line of a story about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, and all the lines are assembled here. Send an email message with 1) the name of each language and 2) in the order in which they appear to info@babelnomore.com, and I'll put your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Babel No More. Deadline is February 23.

I'll keep the comments closed until the deadline to keep anyone from divulging the names of the languages. Good luck!

At some point around lunch time today, our filter nabbed its 2 millionth spam comment:

For half a century, the annual Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics has featured interesting presentations on a topical theme.  GURT 2012, to be held 3/8/2012-3/11/2012, on the theme of "Measured Language",

…will bring together researchers presenting replicable methodologies for quantitatively analyzing different facets of language, with an emphasis on sharing and incorporating perspectives and findings across a diverse range of linguistic inquiry.

In the April 3, 2011 issue of the New York Times Book Review, I appraised Jonathon Green's wonderfully comprehensive three-volume reference work, Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS to its friends). I concluded the review essay thusly:

It's a never-ending challenge to keep up with the latest developments in the world of slang, but that is the lexicographer’s lot. Green plans to put his dictionary online for continuous revision, which is indeed the direction that many major reference works (including the O.E.D.) are now taking. In the meantime, his monument to the inventiveness of speakers from Auckland to Oakland takes its place as the pièce de résistance of English slang studies. To put it plain, it’s copacetic.

Now, at year's end, it turns out that Green's plan to make GDoS available online has run into some trouble. He asked me to post the following appeal on Language Log, responses to which should be directed to him (email address below).

'Tis indeed the season to announce seasonal schools. From Monday 1/9/2012 to Friday 1/20/2012, the University of Maryland’s NSF-IGERT program in Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity will be holding Winter Storm 2012,

"a FREE 2-week intensive training session for language scientists. It takes place on University of Maryland campus, Monday through Friday, January 9 -20. Daily activities include a morning course on data analysis with R software, advanced R sessions, faculty lunch talks, professional development series, special interest groups, and so much more!"

You can register here.

’Tis the season to announce seasonal schools. Geoff Pullum announced a short course on grammar for language technologists as part of a winter school in Tarragona next month, and Mark Liberman announced a call for course proposals for the LSA's Linguistic Institute in summer 2013. But what if you can't make it to Tarragona next month, and can't wait a year and a half to get your seasonal school fix? Well, I have just the school for you!

Yes, as Mark reveals, we Language Log writers sometimes leave our custom-designed luxury tower block at One Language Log Plaza (which, regrettably, exists mainly in the realm of our imagination), and get out there into what we refer to as "the real world", to teach courses. Not just in the regular linguistics programs of our home universities, but in summer schools and other events where we can lecture to a wider cross-section of the linguistically interested public. For example, are you a student broadly interested in computational linguistics and (ideally) resident in continental Europe? Quite probably not, in which case this particular post is not for you. But if you are, read on for a brief announcement about a course I'll be offering this coming January in the delightful coastal town of Tarragona in eastern Spain.

Every other summer, the Linguistic Society of America holds a sort of summer school, traditionally known as a "Linguistic Institute". The 2011 Linguistic Institute was held at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the 2009 Institute was at University of California at Berkeley; the 2007 Institute was at Stanford; and so on. The courses at each Institute are taught by faculty from around the country and around the world, and the students are similarly diverse. Enrollment is open to all.

The 2013 Linguistic Institute will be held at the University of Michigan, 6/24/2013 to 7/19/2013. Its organizers, Andries Coetzee and Robin Queen, have issued an open "Call for Course Proposals", inviting members of the public to add to the existing list of proposed courses by suggesting "exciting, dynamic courses … that are devoted to new lines of inquiry".

Ben Zimmer was on NPR's Morning Edition today — "American Dialect Society To Choose Word Of The Year":

Lovers of the English language are coming together to select the coolest word or phrase. Last year, app was voted the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Now that group of etymologists, writers, historians and other language experts are considering new words for 2011. Linguist Ben Zimmer talks to Renee Montagne to offer his picks for 2011.

AAAS 2012 (the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) will take place February 16-20 in Vancouver. The business meeting of Section Z, Linguistics and Language Science, will be on Friday, February 17, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. in MacKenzie Room 1 of the Fairmont Waterfront.

The best part of AAAS annual meetings, in my opinion, is the extraordinary selection of symposia. At the 2012 meeting, there will be four symposia of particular interest to readers of this blog.

If you're not following Geoff Pullum's Lingua Franca contributions at the Chronicle of Higher Education, you should.  His most recent column: "Mistakes Are Made (but Using the Passive Isn’t One of Them)", 10/1/2011.

There's an unusual event this week: Mark Liberman and I will both be present at the same conference, the annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain at the University of Manchester (UK, not NH). We plan to have a session (between 1pm to 2pm on Thursday 8 September, in the St Gabriel's Dining Hall in Oxford Place) devoted to Language Log and linguistic blogging. I think it's true to say that in the whole of the eight years since Language Log was founded, despite our having produced a book of Language Log posts together, Mark and I have never previously shared a platform — this will be the first time. But the real biggie is bigger than that: Mark has been invited to the LAGB meeting to give the prestigious Henry Sweet Lecture for 2011 on Wednesday night (September 7).