Language Log

[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett] On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his chair. Lévi-Strauss tried to revive him, but to no avail. The founder of American anthropology died of a heart attack, in […]

For Language Log readers able to get BBC television broadcasts, at this BBC page you will find details of a Horizon documentary on BBC 2 TV, scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) night, about why humans talk and where linguistic ability came from, with footage not only of the Grand Old Man of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who […]

While people are discussing the label polymath in another thread (which reports that the polymathic Noam Chomsky has been cited as, in descending order, a philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, and author, but not as a linguist), a letter to the New York Times Magazine (October 18, p. 12, from Andrew Charig of Middlefield, Mass.) […]

A note from Bob Ladd: Yesterday I received a complimentary copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's foray into general magazine publishing.  One of the feature articles was entitled "The last days of the polymath?", with profiles of a few people who "know a lot about a lot" and ruminations on the age of specialisation.  The […]

According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009: In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. That would be $4,623.51 per editor-year,  if none […]

A few weeks ago, Maureen Dowd fantasized about a secret Google team trying to simulate her in software ("Dinosaur at the Gate", 4/14/2009): When I ask [Eric Schmidt] if human editorial judgment still matters, he tries to reassure me: “We learned in working with newspapers that this balance between the newspaper writers and their editors […]

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009.  It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html.  (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have […]

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely […]

Paul Armstrong has reminded me of the Authors@Google videos (available on YouTube) — videos of authors talking at Google on their recent books. At least five are of interest to linguists: Noam Chomsky (4/25/08) Erin McKean (3/29/06) Geoffrey Nunberg (10/12/06) Steven Pinker (9/24/07) John Searle (10/30/07) [Added 2/2: Ray Jackendoff (8/30/07) George Lakoff (7/12/07) George […]

Which employers are looking for linguists these days, and what kinds of linguist are they after? The usual assumption is that linguists are employed almost exclusively in academia, and that they are generally engaged in esoteric theoretical work. I've long suspected that this is not completely true, but I'd never really looked into it. Facing […]

Two recent Zippy strips with some linguistic interest. The first seems irrelevant until the last panel, when we get yet another reference to Noam Chomsky in the popular media. (See this posting by Mark Liberman, with links to some of these earlier postings. Zippy throws in a Chomsky reference now and then, as here and here.) The […]

I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds." I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. […]

The Guardian interviewed Dan Everett while he was in the UK recently for lectures in Edinburgh and London, and has published a piece about Dan and the Pirahã. The Language Log fan who was the first to point it out to us (thanks, Rachele) asks about its example of recursion. It says: Chomsky … recently […]