The Linguist’s Calendar: June 18

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

June 18

1816: Gallaudet and Clerc set sail from Le Havre (France) bound for New York to open a Deaf School, and thereby introduce French Sign in America.

1928: The “Terry expedition” sets out to chart some little-known territories in Australia. Among other things, it produces the first known documentation of the Warlpiri language.

1936: Mangei Gomango has a vision of an orthography, the Sorang Sompeng, for Sora, a Munda language of India. His orthography is still in use today.

1977: Marc Okrand, later of Klingon fame, defends his PhD thesis “Mutsun Grammar” at the University of California at Berkeley. The now extinct Mutsun was a variety of Costanoan once spoken just south of San Francisco

1952: Organized by pioneer Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, the first ever conference on machine translation kicks off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1996: Rwanda adopts English as its third official language. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that a country which has not been under Anglophone occupation does so.

Marc Okrand on Klingon:

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