Language Log

On April 19, the Linguistics Department at UC San Diego (aka the Extreme Southwest Wing of Language Log Plaza) hosted a special event as part of our celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Department.

The event was entitled Linguistics Goes to Hollywood: Creators of the Klingon, Na'vi and Dothraki Languages, a panel discussion featuring Marc Okrand (creator of Klingon, Star Trek), Paul Frommer (creator of Na'vi, Avatar), and David J. Peterson (creator of Dothraki, Game of Thrones).

"MIT and Haiti sign agreement to promote Kreyòl-language STEM education", MIT News Office 4/17/2013:

MIT and Haiti signed a new joint initiative today to promote Kreyòl-language education in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines, part of an effort to help Haitians learn in the language most of them speak at home. […]

The idea that more Haitian education should occur in Kreyòl is a longtime belief of MIT linguistics professor Michel DeGraff, a native of Haiti, who has contended that Kreyòl has been improperly marginalized in the Haitian classroom. DeGraff’s extensive research on public perceptions of Kreyòl, and on the language itself, has led him to assert that its perception as a kind of exceptionally simplified hybrid tongue, in comparison to English or French, unfairly diminishes the language.

The initiative is meant not to replace French, DeGraff added, but to help Kreyòl-speaking students “build a solid foundation in their own language.”

The technology-based open education resources, he noted, are meant to promote “active learning,” as opposed to drill-based rote learning techniques.

The initiative is being funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by MIT.

And how long would it take to read them all out loud?

Randall Munroe answers these questions today at xkcd's what if? page — the answer involves Claude Shannon, a rock 100 miles wide and 100 miles high, and a very long-lived bird (or perhaps a reliable species of birds). You should definitely read the whole thing.

I've recently learned that there's a field called "Science of Science Policy", parsed as [Science of [Science Policy]] rather than [[Science of Science] Policy]. The Wikipedia article on the subject says that

The science of science policy (SoSP) is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that seeks to develop theoretical and empirical models of the scientific enterprise. This scientific basis can be used to help government, and society in general, make better R&D management decisions by establishing a scientifically rigorous, quantitative basis from which policy makers and researchers may assess the impacts of the Nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise, improve their understanding of its dynamics, and assess the likely outcomes. Examples of research in the science of science policy include models to understand the production of science, qualitative and quantitative methods to estimate the impact of science, and processes for choosing from alternative science portfolios.

The same article also observes that

The federal government of the United States has long been a supporter of SoSP.

In other words, the federal government has a Science of Science Policy policy.

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.

I just really like this sentence from the Baltimore Orioles' Nolan Reimold, who is recovering slowly from a herniated disk in his neck. "I can do pretty much whatever minus not being stupid." I find that a great sentence that could be used in a lot of situations, e.g. retirement …

No big linguistic point. Just three nice little dialectal variants in a row — that use of "whatever"; "minus" in place of "except for", and the inclusion of "not" in such a context. I think they've all been discussed in posts at one time or another, but this three-in-a-row is a gem, plus [oh, there's a 'plus'; I'm infected] I love the sentiment.

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. ]

I was unaware until today (thanks to Paul Carter for the link) that at the Congress Dinner of the 2nd International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, in London on the 25th of July 1935, the assembled phoneticians heard toasts to the King and to the phonetic sciences, and a recitation, and a phonetic experiment, and Daniel Jones's performance of Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" in the original Middle English, and a demonstration of sign language, and finally the distinguished phonetician and linguist Harold E. Palmer took to the floor and performed a spectacular song that began:

I wish to be the pattern of a modern phonetician
To know the sounds of languages, and also in addition
The sum of their varieties, ancestral or collateral
Arranged upon the triangle, the square or quadrilateral . . .

You can read (or sing) the lyrics in full on this page. The tune, of course, is Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General". I just wish I'd been there. But I was born several decades too late.

Language Log readers who have not seen The Very Model of an Amateur Grammarian on "The Stroppy Editor" should check it out. Sing it (or imagine it sung), fairly fast, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I am the very model of a modern major-general" from The Pirates of Penzance — the same tune that Tom Lehrer used for his astonishing accomplishment in performing to music the entire list of elements in the periodic table of the elements.

A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line:

This was, of course, the scond in a series, preceded by Erotic Grammar and followed by Erotic Rhetoric…

One month after it was created (on May 13) and a week before it will be closed to signatures (on June 19), the White House Open Access petition (which I pointed Language Log readers to on May 23) now has 26,768 signatures — 1,768 more than the 25,000 threshold! By my calculation, the average rate was over 1,190 signatures a day from the first to the 25,000th signature (by "David L" of Holmdel, NJ, who signed on June 3 — three weeks after the petition was created); after that, the rate dropped to just shy of 177 a day. No reason to slow down the pace now! If you agree with the petition, please sign it and/or pass it on to your agreeable friends — send a strong message to Washington that "[e]xpanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our [public] investment in scientific research."

The young man doing 24 accents of English in this video is in fact a remarkably talented dialect mimic.