Language Log

At some point early in the morning of September 1, 2011, we logged our millionth spam comment:

Unfortunately, I didn't get a screen shot until this morning, so the counter is up to 1,008,782, and I similarly failed to put procedures in place to determine which spam site actually placed the millionth feeble attempt.

Fans of Geoff Pullum will want to read his contributions to the Lingua Franca blog ("Language and writing in academe") at The Chronicle of Higher Education. So far there's just one: "I Wish I'd Said That", 8/26/2011.

This is what the local TV and radio programming was like around here through Saturday night and Sunday morning:

Well, that and occasional tornado warnings…

Ben Piché has written to let us know that the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad, hosted this year by the USA, at CMU in Pittsburgh, is getting underway. Ben, one of our UMass linguistics alumni, is presiding over the admissions desk at the IOL (note the international word-order). Ben writes:

We're still setting up here on campus, and the competition hasn't formally begun yet, but we're hard at work scheduling programs and activities for the participants. We hope that this will be the best IOL yet!
http://www.ioling.org/
http://www.twitter.com/ioling_official
http://www.facebook.com/pages/2011-International-Linguistics-Olympiad/230095130337783

Every other year, the Linguistic Society of America has a sort of combination summer school, conference, and party known as a "Linguistic Institute". The 2011 edition will take place July 7-August 2 on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and there's still time to register.

The Boulder Institute features more than 120 terrific visiting faculty from all over the world,

I've been to three of these frolics, and they were among the most enlightening and enjoyable experiences of my professional life. Martha Palmer, who's running the show this time, sent a notice featuring one aspect of this year's institute:

I'd like to draw your attention to the International Linguistics Olympiad's "Call for Donations and Sponsorships".

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has now announced the roster of newly elected members, with six linguists (of various specialties) in the group of 212:

In Social and Developmental Psychology and Education: Melissa Bowerman, Michael Tanenhaus

In Archaeology, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, and Demography: Penelope Eckert

In Philosophy and Religious Studies: James Higginbotham

In Literary Criticism (including Philology): Peter Culicover, Jay Jasanoff

(None this year in Neurosciences, Cognitive Sciences, and Behavioral Biology, though there are linguists in that section too.)

Yes, the category stucture of the Academy is odd. Occasionally it gets jiggled, but it never becomes particularly satisfactory.

It's that time of the year, and Linguist List is begging for money to keep its services going. Unlike Language Log, Linguist List has a staff (enthusiastic grad students), because it couldn't possibly do what it does without one. Check out the site, and donate here.

Small donations are very much welcome. If you have currency exchange problems, mail Barbara Partee or me.

Many changes in store for the New York Times Magazine, including the elimination of the "On Language" column — announced in a graceful valedictory column by Ben Zimmer here.

Howls of dismay, from me and many others.

Many expressions of concern for Ben, who (after all) makes a living from work like this (while writing for free for Language Log and ADS-L and the like). No doubt he'll find other venues and continue to flourish. May it be so.

But, to my mind this is a great public loss. Thoughtful and well-informed writing about language will of course continue to be available in many places, especially on the net (contending everywhere with masses of graceless, ignorant material), but the New York Times has an especially prominent role in informing and enlightening the public, and Ben's voice on this platform will be very much missed.

The second issue of Popular Linguistics Magazine, a new online venture edited by DS Bigham, has hit the intertubes. The first thing readers may notice in the February issue is that complaints about the site's inverted color scheme (many voiced in the comments here) have been taken to heart: the magazine is now displayed with the familiar design of black text on a white background. As for content, Black History Month brings an interesting trio of articles: "The Diversity of English in America" by Simanique Moody, "The Mysteries of the N-Word" by Janet M. Fuller, and "Word on the Street: Blogging on African American English" by Renee Blake & Cara Shousterman (the last one reporting on the student-run blog, Word: The Online Journal on African American English). And there are various other lagniappes, including the editor's suggestions for enriching English snow-cabulary. Table of contents is here.

It has just become a whole lot easier to search the world's language archives.  The new OLAC Language Resource Catalog contains descriptions of over 100,000 language resources from over 40 language archives worldwide.

This catalog, developed by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), provides access to a wealth of information about thousands of languages, including details of text collections, audio recordings, dictionaries, and software, sourced from dozens of digital and traditional archives.

OLAC is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.  The OLAC Language Resource Catalog was developed by staff at the Linguistic Data Consortium, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and the University of Melbourne.  The primary sponsor is the National Science Foundation.

This weekend, here at Penn, there's a workshop on "New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research", organized by Jiahong Yuan, Andreas Stolcke,  Suzanne Boyce,  Francesco Cutugno, Sarah Hawkins, and me. The call started this way:

The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in computation, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger.

A new online venture has just been launched: Popular Linguistics Magazine. From editor DS Bigham's welcome message to Volume 1, Issue 1: