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| Sputnik 1 |
October 4
1914: Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy gets married in Moscow.
1957: The first man-made satellite is launched. For two reasons, this event is often mentioned in linguistics textbooks. First, overnight, it introduced the word Sputnik in scores of languages. This word is therefore mentioned as one of the rare examples where the appearance of a certain word can be dated. On October 3, few people had heard it, the next day it was part of the vocabulary of most westerners. Secondly, the shock experienced by Americans when realizing that other nations were as technologically advanced as theirs is often said to have provided the real impetus for the start of computational linguistics and machine translation—few American scientists knew any Russian, and could thus not keep themselves updated on the developments in Soviet research.
2001: Turkey announces constitutional changes, which, among other things, are to lead to an end to the ban on Kurdish language usage in media.
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