Language Log

Magdalen Kelantumama telling the story Murtankala, The Woman Creator, Tiwi language, Australia, Darwin Fringe Festival, July 2017.

2019 is UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. How do we celebrate linguistic diversity and recognise the people who are keeping endangered languages strong? Inspired by the work of Joanna Macy, we have developed a format for storytelling in the original languages. While listeners don't understand the individual words, they get the message:

Speech does not consist of words alone… it consists of utterance – an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being – the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. With an emotionally-laden utterance the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. –Oliver Sacks

And the message isn't just a story to be translated and digested, as though language were merely a tool for communication, and linguistic diversity no more than a barrier to be overcome through translation. Audiences experience Language as art, music, spoken soul. The thread of each story linking us back to the ancestors. Language connecting people to country. Each language a treasure for the whole of humankind. A language's emblematic stock of untranslatable words.

Today, speakers of endangered languages are found in urban centres across the world. This presents an opportunity to gather and listen to them, embrace the diversity in our midst, and create new ways and new places for people to belong. A special reward awaits: we all come to belong in our place in a new way.

The good news is that the world is still home to 4,500 vigorous languages. Celebrate with us, and throw a language party!

We have had several posts about Dungan on Language Log:

"Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13)

"'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14)

"Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)

See also:

Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform.

Omniglot

The reason I have been interested in Dungan for the last four decades and more is that it constitutes prima facie evidence that a Sinitic language that had never before been written in Sinographs can be written in an alphabetical script, even without the indication of tones.  Relying on separation of words with spaces, punctuation, etc., the Dungans have used their script to write poetry, essays newspaper articles, and so on.

[Below is a guest post by Matt Goldrick on behalf of the Linguistic Society of America]

Over the past decade the lack of transparency in research – and its implications for the reproducibility of research findings – has been a major focus of scientists and funding agencies (see previous discussions on LanguageLog here, here, here). This has led to many exciting developments in the social sciences including the founding of no-fee platforms for sharing and pre-registering studies (e.g., the Center for Open Science, AsPredicted) and new professional sciences promoting transparent, open research practices (e.g., the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science). These positive developments have, unfortunately, lead to an overzealous reaction from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) which is likely to hamper basic science (more info below). The LSA, in partnership with other research organizations, is asking for your help in pushing back against policies that could hamper the work of NIH-funded linguists.

[Forwarded from James Heilpern]

Call for Papers: The Fourth Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference

Deadline: October 10, 2018

Event Date: February 7-9, 2019

Location: Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

Organization: Brigham Young University

Contact: James Heilpern, heilpernj@law.byu.edu

BYU Law School is pleased to announce the Fourth Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference, to be held in Provo, Utah on February 7-9, 2019. The Law School seeks original proposals for papers to be presented at the conference, addressing a broad range of topics related to the emerging discipline of Law & Corpus Linguistics, including (but not limited to), applications of corpus linguistics to constitutional, statutory, contract, patent, trademark, probate, administrative, and criminal law; philosophical, normative, and pragmatic justifications for the use of corpus linguistics in the law; philosophical, normative, and pragmatic criticisms of the use of corpus linguistics in the law; best practices and ethical considerations for the use of corpus linguistics in trial and appellate advocacy; potential applications of corpus linguistics in legislative, regulatory, and contractual drafting; corpus design, especially as it relates to the building of future legal corpora; Law & Corpus Linguistics and statistics; and sociolinguistic insights drawn from corpus linguistics, especially as it applies to the relationship of racial, ethnic, or linguistic minorities to legal and government institutions.

The proposal deadline is October 10, 2018. Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 750 words, an outline of the proposed paper, and complete contact information. Please send materials to James Heilpern at heilpernj@law.byu.edu.

PLS RT. NEED HELP. Looking for people who speak Meso-American indigenous languages (e.g., zapotec, nahua, ma'am, quich'e, maya, mixe, mixteco) to translate remotely (via telephone) for immigrant families speaking with their lawyers. Email support@l4gg.org.

— #L4GG (@lawyers4goodgov) June 22, 2018

Please spread the word.

At some point early in April, the LLOG Facebook page stopped getting automatically updated with links to new posts. Thanks to Ben Zimmer, this has been fixed, and at some point soon, we'll try to restore FB links to the missing posts.

No, not polyvinyl chloride. This is the (first run of the) Prosody Visualization Challenge, organized by Agnieszka Wagner, Anne Cutler, and  Grażyna Demenko, in association with Speech Prosody 2018.

From Bjarke Frellesvig (University of Oxford), Stephen Wright Horn (NINJAL), and Toshinobu Ogiso (NINJAL):

We are very pleased to announce the first public release of the
Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ). We will be grateful if you
would circulate and share this information as appropriate.

The corpus is avallable through this website: http://oncoj.ninjal.ac.jp/

In an evening session on March 24, at the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington DC, there was a surprise announcement: publication of Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, edited by Haun Saussy.

At least the announcement was a surprise to Victor. According to this blog post at Cambria Press,

The evening began with short speeches about new books by Shen Jiawei and Mabel Lee, Albert Welter, Jonathan Stalling, Megan M. Ferry, Christopher Rea, Liu Jianmei (and Mabel Lee), and Carolyn T. Brown.

Then Professor Haun Saussy was asked by Toni Tan, director of Cambria Press, to come up to speak. While Professor Mair was aware that Professor Saussy was working on an edited volume, he had no idea that this was a festschrift being put together in his honor and that it would be unveiled that very night. So when Toni Tan asked Professor Saussy to take the stage, Professor Mair was under the impression that Professor Saussy was coming up just to say a few words about the forthcoming book. Little did he know that he would be presented with the highly anticipated top-secret volume that was the talk of the AAS.

It's here. Not the car battery, and not another one of the movies, but the First DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge and the associated Interspeech 2018 special session.

As discussed in "My summer" 6/22/2017, I spent a couple of months last summer in Pittsburgh working with a couple of dozen other people on a workshop project with the title "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech", whose primary focus was automatic diarization: determination of who spoke when.

The opening and closing presentations for this workshop are available here — see also "Too cool to care", 8/12/2017, and Bergelson et al., "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech: JSALT 2017", ICASSP 2018.

On the weekend of January 19-20, 2018, there was a Tangut Workshop at Yale University.  Organized by Valerie Hansen and sponsored by the Yale Council of East Asian Studies, this was an intense, exciting learning experience for the 35 or so people who were in the room most of the time.

Many readers may be scratching their heads and asking, "Tangut?  What's that?  And why should we at Language Log be concerned with it?"

Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes come from a speech he delivered at a retreat attended by staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina, one year before he was assassinated:

“We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” (King 1967)

The people have spoken. At the American Dialect Society annual meeting in Salt Lake City (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America), the 2017 Word of the Year has been selected, and it's fake news. (Yes, yes, we all know that's technically two words, just like dumpster fire, the choice for 2016. The "word of the year" can be a lexicalized phrase: see my response to Geoff Pullum on this point back in 2011.)