The Linguist’s Calendar: July 31

July 31
 
1896: A journalist of the Turkish newspaper Terakki writes an article in which he suggests that profane writing be in Latin, rather than Arabic script.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 30

Ludwig Zamenhof

July 30


1905: Ludwig Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, enjoys a lunch in the Eiffel tower.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 29

Sri Lanka

July 29

1987: Sri Lanka grants co-official status to Tamil.







EXTRA for today, from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

Most Bilingual Publishing

For the countries for which official UNESCO statistics on the subject are available, Sri Lanka is, by quite some margin, the country in which the largest proportion of all publi­ca­tions are bi- or multilingual—25%. Canada, Yugoslavia, Mauritania, and Ukraine follow, and only in sixth place do we find South Africa—the country in the world with the highest number of official languages (see p 24). Alas, it is uncertain precisely what UNESCO means by “a bilingual publication.” Sri Lanka lacks bi- or multi-lingual books and newspapers but government’s written communications with the public are all trilingual (Sinhala, English, Tamil) as are electricity and phone bills, and the packaging of most local goods.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 28

Geoff Pullum

July 28


1970: Geoff Pullum is awarded a Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English at University College London.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 27

Eugenio Coseriu

July 27

2001: The Gaelic League of Ohio inaugurates its local Irish Language Weekend.
 
2001: At his 80th birthday, Eugenio Coseriu is awarded the Gran Cruz de Alfonso X el Sabio, the highest Spanish cultural award.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 26

Esperanto Studies

July 26

 
1869: In England, the Disestablishment Bill was passed, officially dissolving the Church of Ireland. Organized opposition to this legislation by time coins a word widely believed to be the longest in the English language: anti­dis­esta­blish­men­ta­ri­a­nism.
 
1887: The first Esperanto textbook is released on this date.
 
1941: Benjamin Lee Whorf, who formulated the strong version of the notorious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, dies in Connecticut.
 
1950: Upon his death, George Bernard Shaw leaves a will which devotes money to the design and propagation of a new English spelling. Shaw—who was incidentally also born on this day—also has another linguistic connection, in that he made Henry Higgins—the main character of his play Pygmalion—a phonetician.
 
1999: The first issue of Esperanto Studies is published by Bambu Publications in Bulgaria.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 25

Statue of Victor, St-Sernin
sur-Rance, France

July 25  
1799: Three hunters come across the feral child Victor in a forest in southern France. They capture him, but he later manages to escape. Victor is one of the most well-known cases of a child growing up deprived of language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 24

Mali

 
 

July 24

1986: In Mali, a decision is taken to establish the Direction nationale de l’al­pha­bé­tization fonctionnelle et de la linguistique appliquée. Its goal is to make people literate in the mother tongues instead of—as has hitherto been the case—in French only.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 23

John Prescott

July 23

1833: Jean-François Sudre, inventor of the artificial language Solrésol, presents his creation to the press and to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts

1999: The BBC reports that in a survey of more than 100 writers, actors and journalists, British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wins the title “The public figure who most mangles the English language”. The poll respondents consider current English “riddled with misplaced apostrophes, split infinitives, clichés, American forms, and political correctness.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 22

Antoine Meillet

July 22
 
Spooner’s Day is said to be celebrated on this day, I’m just not sure by whom. In any case, it commemorates the birth of Reverend William Archibald Spooner, the king of slips-of-the-tongue.
 
1922: Nikolai Trubetzkoy writes a letter to Antoine Meillet about palatalization in proto-Slavic.
 
1933: The French-Armenian inventor Georges Artsrouni patents a translation machine.
 
1960: Mouton offers to publish Chomsky’s The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, but the negotiations come to nothing.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 21

Ferdinand de Saussure

July 21
 
1877: Ferdinand de Saussure gives a lecture on Indo-European vowels before the Société de Linguistique de Paris.
 
1890: The First Annual Convention of North American Volapükists is announced.
 
1918: Upheaval of the Russian ban on Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals.
 
2001: Israeli syntactician and captain of the reserve, Idan Landau, again becomes a free man, after having been imprisoned as a result of his refusal to serve in the occupied territories.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 20

Morris Swadesh

July 20

1794: The revolutionary government declares that official announcements in newly constituted French Republic must be made in French, and in no other language. The punishment for not abiding the law is six months  of imprisonment.

1913: Edward Sapir writes in a letter to Paul Radin that he now “seriously believe[s] that Wishosk [=Wiyot] and Yurok are related to Algonkin”.
 
1946: In New York, Andrew Booth meets Warren Weaver for the first time. Although they do not discuss the subject on this particular day, their contacts is later to lead to the first relatively functional machine translation systems.
 
1967: In Mexico City, Morris Swadesh passes away.
 
1994: The parliament of Tajikistan rejects a proposal to grant co-official status to Russian.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 19

The Rosetta Stone

July 19

1799: The Rosetta Stone, an essential key to the decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is discovered near the Nile.
 
1973: In the New York Review of Books, Noam Chomsky provides a reply to the criticism delivered a couple of months earlier by George Lakoff.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 18

Nikolay Yadrincev

July 18 

1889: On a field trip to Mongolia, Nikolay Yadrincev discovers rock carvings which later prove to be an 8th century Turkic language. The discovery of so-called Orkhon inscriptions mark the start of scientific comparative Turcology.

1906: American linguist and politician Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa is born.
 
1966: Belgium passes a law on the use of languages in national administration.
 
1982: Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson dies in Boston.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 17

C P L P flag

July 17

1915: Birth of Madeline Tomer Shay, to become the last native speaker of Penobscot.
 
1996: At a meeting in Lisbon, the Lusophone union Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (C P L P) is formed by seven Portuguese-speaking nations.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 16

Otto Jespersen

July 16
 
1860: Otto Jespersen, Danish linguist and Anglicist, and inventor of the artificial language Novial, is born.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 15

Kazakh President
Nursultan Narzarbayev

July 15
 
1949: Warren Weaver issues a memorandum in 200 copies on the progress in machine translation made by Andrew Booth. This is the first time that the possibilities of machine translation reach anyone outside the innermost circles of this pioneer project.

1997: President Nazarbayev signs the new Kazakh language legislation, according to which Russian is not an official language of the republic, but that it nevertheless may be used as such (!).

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 14

James Matisf

July 14

1937: Sino-Tibetanist James Matisoff is born
in Boston. 

2001: As a natural step towards full
national independence, 
the Institute of Linguistics is
officially inaugurated at the 
National University’s new campus
in Dili in East Timor.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 13

Curly Bowl by
Madeline Tomer Shay

July 13 

1900: A French government decree “accepts the use of pas alone [i.e. without an accompanying ne] as the general sentence negator”.
 
1933: Birth of Beatrice Tugenhat Gardner, who, along with Allen Gardner, taught American Sign Language to the chimpanzee Washoe.
 
1993: Death of Madeline Tomer Shay, the last native speaker of Penobscot.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 12

Kemal Atatürk

July 12 

1922: The English architect and decipherer of the Linear B writing, Michael Ventris, is born.

1932: Kemal Atatürk founds the Turkish Linguistic Society.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 11

Azerbaijan

July 11  

1939: Azerbaijan officially adopts Cyrillic script for the writing of Azerbaijani.
__________

EXTRA for today from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

Most Popular Writing Systems

The vast majority of the world’s literate people use writing systems of European or Chinese origin. Counting only those able to read and write (numbers usually available only at the country level) and the writing system in which they are most likely to have learned to do so, we arrive at the following, very approximate, figures: Roman 42.5%; Hànzi 26.2%; “Indic” 16.7%; Arabic 6.7%; Cyrillic 5.5%; others 2.4%.
 

Hànzi is the writing system used for Mandarin and other Chinese languages, and which also provides the backbone of Japanese writing. “Indic” here refers to both direct and indirect descendants of the Brahmi script. These include the writing systems used for most languages of India and adjacent countries as well as much of south-east Asia. “Others” include other scripts in current use such as Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew (related to Arabic), Greek (from which the Cyrillic script stems), Korean, and Amharic.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 10

Michael Ventris

July 10 


1952: Michael Ventris announces his conclusion that the hitherto mysterious Linear B inscriptions represent a form of Greek.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 9

Idan Landau

July 9
 
1858: Franz Boas is born in Germany.
 
2001: Idan Landau, Israeli syntactician and captain of the reserve, is imprisoned for 14 days for refusal to serve in the occupied territories.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 8

August Leskien

July 8

1840: German linguist August Leskien is born.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 7

Canada’s House of Commons

July 7


1969: Canada’s House of Commons approves equality of French-English language across the country.
 
1971: The Californian confined child “Genie” moves in with her teacher, Jane Butler.

 
EXTRA for today from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

Oldest First Language Learner
There are reports in the literature of people having come into contact with a human language at ages as high as 21 (Jean of Liège, 17th century), 22 (the Sow-girl of Salzburg, early 19th century) or 23 (the Wolf-child of Kronstadt, late 19th century).

None of these cases, however, are well documented, and we know virtually nothing about how much language—if any—they acquired. Among the scholarly documented cases found after the onset of puberty, most, such as “Genie” (“discovered” at the age of 13), have not managed to learn any language well.
 
A possible exception is the legendary Kaspar Hauser, who was first exposed to lan­guage at age 16 in 1828, and who is reported to have learned to speak very well (but then, he is in some reports credited with some rather super­natural talents).

Sudam Pradhana, found at the age of 24 in Orissa, India in 2001, had originally learned to talk, but had forgotten this skill during his eleven years in the forest.
 
A 17-year old neg­lec­ted boy encountered in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2005, “could not talk, but only grunt”.
 
Since both these two cases are so recent, there is at present no information available on whatever linguistic progress they may have made.
 
An obvious problem in all feral child cases is that it is difficult to tell to what extent the failure to acquire language is due to a child having passed the critical period for normal first-language learning or to the psychological traumas connected with their unusual experience of childhood.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 6

The ECTACO Partner EY800 - English <-> Yiddish
Talking Electronic Dictionary and Audio PhraseBoo

July 6
 

1999: The language technology enterprise Ectaco releases an English-Yiddish Electronic Dictionary.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 5

July 5
 
1726: Peter, the Wild Boy of Hanover, is baptized in London.

1998: A new language law is passed in Algeria, emphasizing Arabic as the country’s sole official language.

2004: In his farewell address as the chairman of the African Union, the Mozambican president creates quite a fuss by addressing the meeting in Swahili. Despite Swahili being the most widely understood African language, the official languages of the African Union are Arabic, French, English, and Portuguese.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 4

David Abercrombie

July 4

1992: Death of David Abercrombie, a major figure in British phonetics.

__________
EXTRA for today from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language: 

First Chatterbot

The first computer program to handle human language in a way that enabled it to communicate with humans was Eliza, so named after the character in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza would mimic Rogerian psychoanalysis, in which the psychiatrist would ask questions based on the what the patient was telling. Under some circumstances, Eliza could make the user feel s/he was really having a meaningful conversation, although the endless repetitions and loops soon became rather annoying. In reality, of course, Eliza never “understood” any of the input provided, but simply matched it to certain predefined patterns.

Example of a conversation with Eliza

Eliza: Hello. I am Eliza. How can I help you?
Me: I don’t feel well.
Eliza: Why do you not feel well?
Me: Everybody hates me
Eliza: Surely not everyone?
Me: Well, most people, at least.
Eliza: Please go on.
Me: You know, they never understand me.
Eliza: You like to think they never understand you, do you not?
Me: That is certainly not the case.
Eliza: Does it please you to believe that that is certainly not the case?
Me: Not at all. I want you to help me.
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
Me: You know, I’ve already been to a bunch of shrinks, but people keep telling me you’re the best there is. So I’m hoping you could provide some guidance. So can you help me?
Eliza: Does that question interest you?
Me: I wouldn’t have come here if it didn’t.
Eliza: Do you wish that it didn’t?
 

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 3

Slovenia

July 3
 
1997: Slovenia signs the European charter on regional or minority languages.
 
2004: This year’s Finnish dialect speaking championship is held in Merikarvia.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 2

Ferdinand de Saussure

July 2
 
1907: Ferdinand de Saussure becomes professor of linguistics at the Université de Genève.
 
1949: Spanish Vasconist Koldo (Luís) Mitxelena marries Matilde de Ilarduya.

EXTRA for today, from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

Amazingly, when the Swiss hear the name de Saussure, it is not primarily Ferdinand that springs to their minds, but rather his great-grandfather, the geologist Horace-Bénédict, who in 1787 became the third person to climb the highest of the Alps, the Mont-Blanc.

Several other members of the family have also made a name for themselves in various disciplines, including Ferdinand’s own son who introduced psychoanalysis in Switzerland.
 

Other members of the clan became renowned agronomists, entomologists, chemists and botanists.

The Linguist’s Calendar: July 1

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr

July 1

1912: Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes an ordinary academy member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

1952: The BBC broadcasts Deciphering Europe’s earliest scripts, in which Michael Ventris’s cracking of the Linear B writing a month earlier is first announced to a wider audience.

1966: The department of linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles is officially founded.

1990: Harvard University Press publishes Phil Lieberman’s The Biology and Evolution of Language.

1993: Ken Pike is awarded the Doctor of Philosophy, honoris causa from Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany

1997: Hong Kong University gets a linguistics department.

1999: The Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation begins the first regular televised news broadcast in Creole, the only language understood by the entire population.