The Linguist’s Calendar: December 31

President Quezon

December 31
 
1937: President Quezon proclaims Tagalog the official language of the not yet independent Philippines.
 
1975: France passes a new language law, the Loi du 31 décembre 1975 relative à l’emploi de la langue française.
 
1997: The United Bible Societies report, that “at least a Portion of the Bible” has now been translated into 2,197 languages.
 
2000: SIL International President Emeritus Kenneth Lee Pike dies in Dallas.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 30

December 30

1997: Yugoslav riot police are called upon to disperse students demanding Albanian language rights in Kosovo.
 
2001: The peace treaty in Afghanistan after the fall of the Talibans is delayed because of problems with translating it into Persian, the second biggest language of the country.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 29

Guatemala City

December 29  
1975: In Britain, Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay acts are passed. Their consequences include the replacement of “firemen” by “fire fighters”.
 
1995: Within two years of its introduction, the Karakalpak alphabet is revised.
 
1996: The civil war in Guatemala ends with a peace treaty which specifies, among other things, that 23 different indigenous languages be used in education along with Spanish.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 28

December 28

1989: Publication of Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language in paperback.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 27

Demonstrating for independence, Catalonia

December 27

1942: Cognitive grammarian Ron Langacker is born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
 
1945: A couple of months after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spelling reform advocate George Bernard Shaw writes to the Times claiming that the omission of the final, silent <b> in bomb, and similar reforms, would save a lot of time and bring major economical benefits.
 
1996: The Catalan government decides to support the use of Catalan in communities outside of Catalonia.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 26

December 26

1992: Niger’s new constitution declares French the country’s official language.
 
2001: The web site yourdictionary.com publishes its word-of-the-year list, including the first ever ”suffix of the year”, -stan (as in Afghanistan).

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 25

Willard Van Orman Quine

December 25 
 
1932: Ken Pike applies to the China Inland Mission, but is turned down.
 
2000: Death of Willard Van Orman Quine.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 24

Carol Schatz and Noam Chomsky

December 24

1949: Noam Chomsky marries Carol Schatz.
 
1974: Edward “Ned” Maddrell, the last native speaker of Manx, dies.
 
2004: Frisian is recognized as co-official on Germany’s Heligoland island.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 23

Jean-François Champollion

December 23 

1790: Birth of Jean-François Champollion, who played a major role in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 22

Franz Boas

December 22 

1845: The voice synthesizer Euphonium is demonstrated to the public in Philadelphia. Using reeds, bellows and chambers to simulate the anatomy of the human speech organs, it is said that it could produce 16 syllables.

1942: Franz Boas dies.

2000: Vietnam announces that eleven different minority languages will be broadcast on National Television in addition to Vietnamese.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 21

Macquarie University

December 21

1940: The Société Genevoise de Linguistique is founded in Geneva, Saussure’s home town.
 
1996: Algeria’s law n° 96-30 declares that all communication with authorities, companies and associations be in Arabic, although the use of French or other languages is permitted in international contacts.
 
2000: Through the journal Nature, phoneticians of Australia’s Macquarie University let the world know that British Queen Elizabeth II’s speech has, over the past 20 years, drawn closer to colloquial London English and further away from Received Pronunciation.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 20

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr

December 20

1934: Death of Russian/Soviet linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr.

2000: After examining linguistic evidence, the British Court of Appeal overturns the conviction of Iain Hay Gordon, sentenced for murder in 1953.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 19

Finnish parliament

December 19

1927: Language usage in the Finnish parliament is fixed by law, and deputies are allowed to use either Finnish or Swedish.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 18

December 18

1987: The Perl programming language (developed by a linguist) is born.
 
1995: Andrew Spencer’s Phonology is published by Blackwell.
 
1996: The school board of Oakland, California, votes to recognize “Ebonics” as a minority language. Thus begins a heated debate in the USA on whether African-American Vernacular English is a language in its own right, or simply a dialect of English.
 
2002: The “International Language Week” begins today. It occurs annually in the third week of December.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 17

Monaco

December 17 

1832: After a brief exposure to a language of Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin comments that it “barely merits classification as an articulated language”.
 
1962: A new constitution of Monaco declares French as its official language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 16

Giuseppe Mezzofanti

December 16

1843: Italian cardinal and polyglot Giuseppe Gaspare Mezzofanti becomes an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

1882: Ferdinand de Saussure becomes assistant secretary of the Société de Linguistique de Paris.

1999: Andorra promulgates the Law on the organization of the usage of the Official Language, that is, Catalan.

2003: Joseph Mesa is arrested for two murders. He pleads insanity, blaming the murders on voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, these were not literally speaking voices, but gloved hands urging him to kill—in American Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 15

Vilhelm Thomsen

December 15 

Esperantists all over the world celebrate in memory of Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, born on this date in 1859.
 
1893: Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen announces that he has deciphered the Orkhon inscriptions, making it the oldest known Turkic text fragment.
 
1990: Inauguration of the Linguist List.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 14

Norwegian parliament

December 14 

1921: Birth of James Deese, author of Psycho­linguistics (1970).
1951: Norway’s parliament decides to create a Norwegian Language Council.
 
1960: Britain’s first Professor of General Linguistics, John Rupert Firth, dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 13

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

December 13 
 
1897: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz become corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1949: The Public Health and Local Government Act of Northern Ireland forbids street signs in Irish.
 
1989: The first ever (according to the choir) concert sung in sign language is performed at the Gwyn Town Hall in West Glamorgan, Wales.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 12

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

December 12
 1857: German linguist August Schleicher becomes a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1890: Logician and semanticist Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, also known as the inventor of Categorial Grammar, is born in Poland.
 
1913: First official use of Hebrew as a language of instruction in Palestinian schools.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 11

Roger Brown

December  11 
1990: A resolution of the European Parliament establishes the status of the Community languages and Catalan. 

1997: Death of American child language acquisitionist Roger Brown.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 10

Lila Gleitman

December 10

1904: With the ban on printing in Lithuanian recently lifted, the first daily newspaper in the language, the Vilnius Žinios begins publication.
 
1929: Birth of psycholinguist and language acquisitionist Lila Gleitman.
 
1996: A Unicode standard is proposed for writing Solrésol, one of the most eccentric artificial languages there is.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 9

Franz Bopp

December 9

1853: German linguist and Sanskritist Franz Bopp becomes a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1986: The Swiss Canton of Fribourg decides that real estate ownership registers must be in the language of the municipality concerned.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 8

Tok Pisin the Easy Way
by Frank Mihalic

December 8

1966: The first linguistics class in Bolivia is held at the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Lingüísticos in La Paz.
 
2001: Death of Frank Mihalic, compiler of the first Tok Pisin dictionary.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 7

Noam Chomsky

December 7

1928: Birthday of none other than Noam Chomsky.
 
1993: The Philippine Islamic Abu Sayyaf guerrilla releases field linguist Charles Watson in Manila. He had been kidnapped three weeks earlier on the island of Pangutaran.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 6

Mary

December 6

Declared “Plain English Day” by the “Plain English Network,” a British group which aims to improve communication from the government to the public.
 
1868: Death of August Schleicher, the man behind the Stammbaumtheorie.
 
1877: The first sound recording of human language is made, as Thomas Alva Edison recites ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ into his phonograph.
 
1995: Press Secretary Mike McCurry in a White House Press Briefing uses an exceptionally long word: flocci­nau­cini­hili­pili­fi­ca­tion.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 5

Louis-Lucien Bonaparte

December 5

1858: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and prince of France, becomes an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1948: A church service interpreted into a sign language is televised for the first time (from St Matthew’s Lutheran Church for the Deaf on Long Island).
 
1996: A new law passed by the Iranian parliament bans the use of non-Persian words and names in the country.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 4

William Labov

December 4
1880: Having been a member for a few years, but only a recent immigrant to France, Ferdinand de Saussure starts taking active part in the activities of the Socété de linguistique de Paris.
 
1893: German linguist Friedrich Karl Brugmann becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1927: Birth of William Labov.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 3

Trento province

December 3

Celebrated as the Day of the Basque language (Euskararen Eguna) since 1947.
 
1876: August Leskien becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as does Elias Lönnrot, standardizer of Finnish.
 
1993: A new law is adopted by the Italian government, intended to protect the Ladino-speaking minority of the Trento province.
 
2002: The South African government announces that, to facilitate things, each department should choose one of the eleven official languages as its one and only working language. Critics believe that this is a first step towards an English-only policy.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 2

Desmond Derbyshire

December 2
 
1906: Antoine Meillet becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
1985: The Summer Institute of Linguistics this day publishes Desmond Derbyshire’s extensive treatment of the Amazonian language Hixkaryána.
 
1999: The Swedish parliament gives official recognition to five minority languages: Standard Finnish, Meänkieli Finnish, Saami, Romani, and Yiddish.

The Linguist’s Calendar: December 1

Woerdeboek van de
Nederlandse Taal

December 1

1930: The Prague Linguistics Circle is formally founded by Roman Jakobson and fourteen of his colleagues.

1998: Dutch and Flemish lexicographers publicly present the final and complete version of the Woerdeboek van de Nederlandse Taal, the biggest ever Dutch dictionary. It has taken a century and a half to produce.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 30

Abraham Kaplan

November 30

1950: Abraham Kaplan of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, completes a seminal study on the role of context in machine translation.
 
1976: A Mexican law bans non-Spanish advertising in the capital area.
 
1993: Phil Resnik and five of his colleagues are granted American patent no. 5 267 345 for a “Speech recognition apparatus which predicts word classes from context and words from word classes.”
 
2001: Linguistics enter the world of sports equipment manufacturing as Adidas in Pusan (South Korea) unveils what is claimed to be the fastest football ever made. Its spectacular speed is said to be due to its “syntactic surface.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 29

Ramallah, Westbank, Occupied Palestine

November 29

1922: The British mandate authorities recognize Hebrew as the official language of the Jews in Palestine.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 28

Edward Sapir

November 28

1915: A disappointed Alfred Kroeber reports to Edward Sapir that he cannot find any relationship between Zuni and other American Indian languages.
 
1980: Tahitian is for the first time recognized as the official language (along with French) of French Polynesia.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 27

Ken Pike

November 27

1948: Ken Pike’s third child and first son is born in Santa Ana, California.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 26

Ferdinand de Saussure

November 26

1857: Birth in Geneva of Ferdinand de Saussure, “father of modern linguistics,” just in case you didn’t know. Not celebrating this is not an option.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 25

Eduard Sievers

November 25 

1842: The British Philological Society holds its first meeting.
 
1850: Birth of Eduard Sievers, German phonetician and philologist.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 24

Alvin Liberman

November 24 

1916: Birth of Frank Mihalic, compiler of the first Tok Pisin dictionary.
 
1967: Alvin Liberman, Franklin Cooper, Donald Shankweiler, and Michael Studdert-Kennedy publish their classic article “Perception of the Speech Code” in Psychological Review.

1982: Basque and Spanish are both recognized as “official” languages of the Basque country, while giving only the former the status of “proper language of the Basque country.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 23

Latin mass

November 23

1964: Latin is abolished as the official language of Roman Catholic liturgy.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 22

November 22

2001: John McCarthy’s book A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory is published.
 
2002: At the NATO summit in Prague, the organization’s other official language, French, is used for once. The reason is that the French names of the participating countries permits the unwanted guest, Ukrainian president Kuchma, to be placed further away from the representatives of Britain and the USA, the countries most opposed to his participation.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 21

Alfred Kroebe

 

November 21 

1800: The Société des Observateurs de l’Homme releases its psychological verdict on Victor the feral child: “enfant idiot.”
 
1918: Edward Sapir writes to convince Alfred Kroeber that Salish must be related to other languages of North America, although no suitable relative has been found as of yet.
 
1991: Closing of the fourth Sommet de la Francophonie in Paris, which was attended by 50 more or—in many cases—less French-speaking countries.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 20

René Descartes

November 20 

1629: In a letter to Pierre Mersenne, René Descartes describes his idea of assigning a number code to all concepts. This would allow translation where two persons don’t share a common language. The writer’s message, converted into numbers, would allow the receiver to simply substitute for the number the lexical item in his own language. 

1889: Ferdinand de Saussure takes a sabbatical from Sorbonne, and is replaced by Antoine Meillet.
 
1916: Birth of Charles Osgood, inventor of semantic differential technique.
 
1975: The International Circle of Korean Linguistics is founded.