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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 19

John Ohala

November 19 

1992: Copenhagen University gives phonetician John Ohala an honorary PhD.
 
1998: A new minority language is officially born in previously monolingual Portugal, as its national assembly recognizes the status of Mirandese.
 
2002: The applicant countries participate in a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and for the first time in the history of the European Union, simultaneous interpreting is provided in 23 languages.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 18

Parliament Building, Liechtenstein

November 18

1988: Lithuanian is declared the only official language of the not yet independent Soviet Republic of Lithuania.

1997: Liechtenstein signs the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages, but declares that it does not have any minority languages.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 17



Panbanisha

November 17
1794: The revolutionary government of France decrees that all education in the republic be in French only—at least in theory. Recourse to local language is tolerated when necessary.

1985: Birth of Panbanisha, the equally language-apt sister of Kanzi the Bonobo.

1999: The UNESCO decides to make February 21st the official “International Mother Language Day”.


The Linguist’s Calendar: November 16

M13 star cluster

November 16
 1974: A puzzle for future Alien linguists to solve, a message containing information on mankind and the planet we inhabit, is broadcast to the M13 star cluster, 50 000 light-years from us.


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

TALKING TO ALIENS 
In the late 18th century, the Genèvoise spiritist medium Hélène Smith (nom de plume of Catherine Élise Müller) held séances for her friends. In altered states of consciousness, she told her audience about her previous lives, some of which included space travel. During a visit to planet Mars, Smith claimed to have acquired fluency in Martian, some of which she wrote down in an exotic-looking script.

Unlike many other such samples, Smith’s Martian was highly structured and regular. Its consistency convinced some that her language was not mere glossolalic gibberish, but a true language—possibly even real Martian. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out that not only was the “Martian” phonology identical to that of Smith’s native French, but the grammatical structure of the language was also such that there was a one-to-one correspondence between French and “Martian.” Clearly, the language Smith had allegedly acquired during her trips to Mars was but an amateurish relexification of French.
 
While this, the best known case of alleged extraterrestrial communication, turned out to be a fake, alien communication strategies is a most serious field of research. Earthlings have several times sent messages in which we tell a little about ourselves into outer space, hoping that somebody Out There might receive them and understand them. But how should we compose our message in order to facilitate comprehension by whatever intelligent life forms there may be beyond our solar system? I will not try to summarize the state of the art of this research here, but would like to recommend McConnell (2001), which provides a most interesting discussion of the subject.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 15

Janis Joplin

November 15

1969: Janis Joplin is arrested for using vulgar and indecent language onstage.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 14

Rasmus Rask

November 14

1832: A week before his 45th birthday, Rasmus Rask dies of tuberculosis.
  
1993: Field linguist Charles Watson is kidnapped by the Islamic Abu Sayyaf guerrilla on the Philippine island of Pangutaran.
 
1998: Congo-Kinshasa presents a suggested new constitution, in which not only French, but also English, is recognized as an official language.
 
2002: Despite its unwillingness to include Swedish Sign among the country’s officially recognized minority languages, Sweden’s parliament today launches a new version of its web site, in which parts are translated into Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 13

Iain Hay Gordon

November 13

1952: Patricia Curran’s dead body is found in The Glen, in Northern Ireland. A confession, which a linguistic analysis later found to be false, imprisons Iain Hay Gordon for 48 years, until he is declared innocent in 2000.

1991: The new Ukrainian citizen law makes knowledge of Ukrainian a prerequisite of citizenship.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 12

Central African Republic

November 12

1912: The colonial authorities in Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic) forbid the use of native languages in schools, since it is thought that this might interfere with their acquisition of French.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 11

Antoine Meillet

November 11

1866: Birth of Antoine Meillet.

2003: After an exchange of letters, Merriam-Webster (see Nov. 2) responds that ‘McJob’ will indeed be included in the next printed edition of its dictionary.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 10

Larry Trask

November 10

1944: British-American historical linguist and Vasconist Larry Trask is born in upstate New York.
 
1993: While not an EU member state, Norway promises that it will give its Saami-speaking minority the same rights as minorities within the EU.
 
2003: After demands from a certain fast food chain, the word "McJob" is deleted from the web edition of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 9

François Lenormant

November 9

1883: Death of François Lenormant, the first (in quite some time, that is) to understand the Akkadian inscriptions from Mesopotamia.

1943: Lebanon launches a new constitution, in which both French and Arabic are recognized as co-official. The situation lasts for less than a month, when Arabic alone is declared the official language of the country.

1984: In the continuing debate on the need for a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in English-speaking, linguist Steven Schaufele of the University of Illinois suggests borrowing hann from Old Norse (which has already contributed they and them to English).

2003: Clinton Neakeahamuck “Lightning Foot” Wixon dies in Massachusetts. Wixon is thought to have been the last native speaker of Wampanoag.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 8

Cardiff

November 8

1923: Welsh is broadcast for the first time by 5WA in Cardiff.
 
1962: Belgium defines its four linguistic zones: Flanders (Dutch), Walloonia (French), Brussels, (bilingual), and a tiny German-speaking area in the east.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 7

Franklin D Roosevelt

November 7
1942: A US president gives a speech in a language other than English for the first time. Franklin D Roosevelt addresses the Vichy troops in North Africa in French, urging them not to resist allied landings and to fight the Nazis.

1970: At a Phnom Penh conference, it is suggested that the “excellent linguistic rules” of Khmer are far superior to those of any other human language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 6

Finland

November 6

Finland Swedish day: Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority celebrates itself.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 5

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky

November 5

1881: Ferdinand de Saussure starts teaching Comparative Germanistics at the École des Hautes-Études in Paris.

1896: Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is born. Vygotsky left a remarkable imprint on the study of child language acquisition.

1995: The Kasbe (Luo) language of Cameroon falls into obsolescence, as its last speaker, an old man known as Bogon, dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 4

Colorless Green Ideas
Sleep Furiously

November 4

1970: At the age of 13, the most well-documented language-deprived child, “Genie,” is discovered and taken care of in Arcadia, California.
 
1992: A new Lithuanian regulation states that place-names in the country should be in Lithuanian.
 
1994: First public preview of the Human Language trilogy—a film series on linguistics intended for laymen (but with a heavy Chomskyan bias!). On this day, the first part, called Colorless Green Ideas, is shown at Boston University.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 3

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

November 3

1891: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and Prince of France, dies.

1929: Death of Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, forerunner of the structuralist school, and accredited with launching the term “phoneme”.

1967: A young Háj Ross, clad hippie-style, protests against napalm production, a picture of which winds up in Time Magazine.

1998: Alaska makes English its official language of government despite protests.

2000: Death of Charles Hockett.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 2

November 2

For Croatians, this is the Anniversary of the Croatian Language, commemo-rating the orthography of Ivan Broz.

1949: Timothy Evans of London "confesses” to having murdered his wife and child, for which crime he was hanged. Linguistic evidence later casts doubt on the confession leading ultimately to a posthumous pardon.

2003: McDonald’s demands that ‘McJob’ be removed from the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The word has come to be applied to low-paid, unqualified employment, but McDonald’s claims copyright, having registered McJobs as the name of its internal training program.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 1

November 1

1928: The Turkish parliament passes law 1353 on the use of the Latin alphabet in Turkey. This is actually but a recognition of the state of affairs—Turkish authorities have in fact used Latin script for more than a month.

1941: The American Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center begins teaching. The institute subsequently developed into the world’s largest foreign language institute.

1997: The most extensive description ever of the artificial language Lojban, The Complete Lojban Language, by John Woldemar Cowan is published.

2004: The Michel Thomas Language Center reports—not unexpectedly—that multilinguals are better paid than monolinguals. More interestingly, it also suggests that speakers of more than one language are perceived as sexier.