Friday, August 31, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 31

Moldova

August 31


This is Limba Noastra (our language) day to Moldovans. Since 1989, it has been a national holiday to commemorate the reintroduction of the Latin script, which occurred in that year. August 31, 1989 was also the day when an amendment was added to the Moldovan constitution, recognizing the identity between Moldovan and Romanian. The Romanian dialect spoken in Moldova was proclaimed a language in its own right during the Soviet régime, in order to minimize demands for independence or retrocession.

1944: This day marks the culmination of the Estonian Swedish exodus, as 632 individuals flee to Sweden. The Swedish-speaking population in Estonia, which has lived there since the 13th century, is virtually extinct by the time the world war is over.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 30

Lucien Bonaparte

August 30
 
1800: Victor the feral child meets French minister of the interior, Lucien Bonaparte.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 29

Murray Emeneau

August 29

Telugu Language Day is celebrated in Telugu-speaking parts of India.
 
1911: A speaker of Yana, later known as Ishi, is encountered in Oroville, California. Until this date, the tribe and the language had been believed to be extinct for several decades.
 
2005: Probably the oldest linguist in the world, Murray Emeneau, dies in Berkeley, California, at the age of 101.


Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 28

University of Cenderawasih


August 28
 
1922: The Department of Philippine Linguistics is founded at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City.
 
1994: In the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Hans Karlgren proposes the introduction of hen (from Finnish hän) into Swedish as a gender-neutral pronoun.
 
1995: At the University of Cenderawasih in Jayapura, the first International Conference on New Guinea Languages and Linguistics is held.

Monday, August 27, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 27

August 27

1987: A feral child, in this case a young girl raised by pigs, is reportedly encountered in China.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 26

Quebec


August 26

1977: The provincial parliament of Quebec adopts bill 101, which makes French the only official language of the province.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 25

The Teletubbies


 

August 25
 
1902: The first Arabic-language daily newspaper of the USA begins publication.
 
1997: The BBC reports that the characters of the popular children’s show The Teletubbies are to use a more adult-like language after complaints that their childish speech might influence or deteriorate that of their viewers.

Friday, August 24, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 24

Vanishing Voices


 

August 24

1983: In a letter to his former teachers Tom Wasow and Ivan Sag, Stanford linguistics graduate Christopher Culy reports from Mali that Bambara might match the description of a context-free language.


1995: The Uzbek alphabet is revised.
 
2000: Vanishing Voices, a book on the earth’s decreasing linguistic diversity, is published by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 23

File:Chicago Tribune Building.jpg
Chicago Tribune Tower

August 23
 
1975: In the ongoing debate on epicene pronouns in English, Christine Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, in the Chicago Tribune suggests the forms ey, eir and em.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 22

Christine Ohuruogu
August 22
 
1846: The first attestation of the word folklore appears in a review by Ambrose Merton (a k a William John Thomas) in the Athenaeum. The work reviewed is one of the folktale collections by the Grimm brothers.
 
1915: Ishi, the last speaker of Yana, has to terminate work with linguist Edward Sapir, as he is hospitalized anew.
 
2001: The Michelin group of France receives WorldLingo’s Multilingual Email Award. WorldLingo regularly tests various major companies’ ability to reply to email sent in foreign languages, and Michelin managed to provide an answer in German in just one hour and 17 minutes.
 
2004: Christine Ohuruogu runs for Britain in the Athens Olympics. Being one of the world’s fastest linguists, her 51-second dash gives her the fourth place in the women’s 400m semi-final, an event for which she took the gold medal in 2008 and the silver medal in 2012.
 
2005: National Punctuation Day in the USA, initiated by Californian Jeff Rubin, who wants to “remind people that punctuation wasn’t invented solely to put sideways smiley faces in e-mail”.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 21


Vladislav Illich-Svitych

August 21
 
Feast day of Pius X, the patron saint of Esperantists.

1966: At an age of merely 32, Nostratist figurehead Vladislav Illich-Svitych dies in an automobile accident.
 
2002: Bror Rexed, the man held responsible for the introduction of du (T-form) rather than ni (V-form) in Swedish, passes away at the age of 88.

Monday, August 20, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 20

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/spacecraft/voyager.jpg
Voyager II


 

August 20


1935: SIL founder Kenneth Pike visits Mexico for the first time, together with his future wife.
 
1977: The Voyager II is launched. In an attempt at extra­terrestrial communication, the spacecraft contains recordings in several human languages, and a metal plate with pictograms on it.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 19

Stephen Wurm
August 19

In New Zealand, this is ”Aphasia and Language Disorders Awareness Day”.
 
1922: Austrian-Australian linguist and polyglot Stephen Wurm is born.
 
1989: Opening of the IPA convention in Kiel. The association’s centenary is celebrated by a revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
 
2000: The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina abolishes the constitutional articles declaring only Bosnian and Croatian official in the Federation and only Serbian in the Republika Srpska.

Friday, August 17, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 17

Michael Halliday



August 17
 
1875: Death (in Cape Town) of Wilhelm Bleek, the “father of Bantu philology”.
 
1987: At the 8th World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Sydney, Michael Halliday is honored with a two volume festschrift, Language Topics.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 16

Portrait of Victor
the wild child

 

August 16
 
1800: At 10 p.m. Victor the wild child arrives at the deaf school in Paris.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 15

Larry Hyman


 

August 15

1877: A letter from inventor Thomas Alva Edison to TBA David, president of Pittsburgh’s Central District and Printing Telegraph Company includes the first written attestation of the word hello.
 
1975: In the search for a gender-neutral pronoun to replace he and she, H R Lee of Virginia proposes se ([si]) in Forbes.
 
1981: Phonologist and Bantuist Larry Hyman gets 5,000 American dollars to investigate the prosodic structure of Luganda.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 14

Movie poster for Windtalkers,
Hollywood's take on the
Navajo Code Talkers
August 14
 
This is National Navajo Code Talkers Day in the United States, commemorating the Navajos who used their language as a weapon against the Japanese during World War 2.
 
2001: Ectaco, Inc. releases a speech translator. Weighing only 110 grams, the device is claimed to be able to translate spoken English into spoken French, Spanish or German.






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

AMERICAN INDIAN CODE TALK

Following a suggestion from a Philip Johnston, who had grown up in a Navajo reservation in Arizona, the American military in early 1942 hired a number of Navajo speakers for use as radio-telegraphists. Even if Japanese cryptographers could crack an ordinary code, chances were slim that they would be in a position to first crack the code, and then find somebody to translate the message from Navajo to Japanese.

The Navajo code-talkers were first used in battle on Guadalcanal in August of 1942. Not only was the code more difficult to crack for the enemy, but the Navajos were also more efficient, as they had the knowledge of Navajo in their heads rather than in a code book. In addition, even in the unlikely case that the Japanese should learn to understand Navajo, it would be impossible for them to imitate it with a native-speaker accent, and thus the risk of receiving fake messages was minimized.
 
The success was such that the code-talkers had their own body-guards, assigned to protect the valuable pool of competence.

In order to adapt the Navajo lexicon to the realities of modern warfare, words for various birds and fish were drafted in to serve as designations for aircraft and warships. Names for foreign nations were also coined, and ‘Australia’ was Cha-yes-desi, that is ‘rolled hat’, while ‘Britain’ was Toh-ta or ‘between waters’, and France Da-gha-hi—‘beard’. Other items for which Navajo lacked words were conveyed letter by letter in English, because Japanese overhearing the communication might get a clue as to the content of the message by understanding the English words. The spelling, however, was such that Navajo words were used for the initial letter of the corresponding English words. Thus, dze stood for the letter e, as the Navajo word means ‘elk’. In order to avoid repetitions, which might facilitate things for enemy code-crackers, the most common letters had two or three Navajo counterparts. In this way, the name Guadalcanal, which contains four instances of a could be rendered as klizzie, shi-da, wol-la-chee, lha-cha-eh, be-la-sana, dibeh-yazzie, moasi, tse-nill, tsah, tse-nill, ah-jad, with only one repetition. The whole chunk translates into English as goat, uncle, ant, dog, apple, lamb, cat, axe, needle, axe, leg—in other words ‘Guadalcanal’. The Japanese never did succeed in cracking the code.
 
Much of the code-talker activities were classified for a long time after the war, but they did get a late recognition as the National Navajo Code Talkers Day was proclaimed on August 14, 1982 by then American president Ronald Reagan (a local Navajo Code Talkers Day had been declared in New Mexico already on April 10). In 2002, the Hollywood film Windtalkers, starring Nicholas Cage, was made on the theme, and a monument to the Navajo language warriors has been erected in Phoenix, Arizona. Perhaps the surest sign of the veterans’ popularity is that the very phrase “Navajo Code Talkers” is now a registered trademark of the Navajo Code Talkers’ Association.
 
It should be noted, finally, that American Indians (in that case Choctaws) had been used for these purposes already in the First World War, though their history is less well documented. Also, even though the Navajos were the most numerous, members of other nations, such as the Comanches, also saw action in this role during World War Two.
 
A similar practice has been documented in South America. During the Chaco war against Paraguay in the early 1930s, the Bolivians used Chiquitano as a secret code.

Monday, August 13, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 13

Select Cafe, formerly
the Hôtel Bergerhoff
August 13
 
Since 1955, this day marks the beginning of the Philippine Linggo ng Wika, or National Language Week.
 
1908: At the Hôtel Bergerhoff in the Neutral Territory of Moresnet in eastern Belgium, the statehood of Amikejo, the world’s first (and only) Esperanto-speaking country, is proclaimed.
 
1971: Jean Butler’s application to adopt the 14-year old language-deprived child “Genie” is rejected, and instead, she is turned over to David and Marilyn Rigler, her new foster parents.
 
1982: The Comparative Syntax Festival begins at the Universität Salzburg, Austria.
 
2003: Amerindianist Marianne Mithun becomes an honorary doctor at La Trobe University, Australia.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 12

ECTACO Partner EAl900 Grand - English <-> Albanian Talking Electronic Dictionary and Audio PhraseBook with Handheld Scanner
Ectaco, Inc. English-Albanian
bidirectional dictionary


August 12

2002: Ectaco, Inc. launches an English-Albanian bidirectional dictionary for use with the handheld Palm computers.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 11

New Netherlands



August 11

1628: Pidgin Delaware is attested for the first time, as the Dutch minister Jonas Michaëlius writes a letter from New Netherlands (now New York), saying that the natives seem to address Europeans in a reduced version of their own language.

Friday, August 10, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 10

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/83/Hoxie.gif
Hoxie Simmons
August 10 

1963: The Oregonian language Galice becomes extinct with the death of its last speaker Hoxie Simmons.

 



RAPID LANGUAGE DEATH
Sometimes, languages die not because their speakers desert them, but simply because their speakers die, and in such cases, language death can of course be even more drastic.
One well-known case is that of the Californian language Yahi. The number of Yahi dwin­dled from 1 900 in the mid-1840s, when the gold rush began, to about 100 two de­cades later. In 1912, Ishi, the last speaker of the language was encountered, and after ha­ving been donated (sic) to a museum, he became quite famous. But since his death in 1916, the language is completely extinct. California was the linguistically most diverse re­gion in North America, and in 1800, this state alone contained about 100 languages. Half of these still have a few elderly speakers, but not a single one is learned by children, mea­ning that the pre-Columbian languages of California will soon be completely extinct.
Ishi—the last speaker of Yahi
Another example of this is the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, who were decimated from an estimated 19 125 in 1786 to a mere 1 039 a century and a half later. Today, only a few hundred speakers remain.
In South America, the Amazonian language Júma had 300 speakers in 1940, but in the 1990s, their numbers had dwindled first to seven, and then to a mere four in 1998. The language is obviously facing extinction.
Even more dramatic is a case from the rain forests of Ve­ne­zuela, where explorers unknowingly brought with them an in­flu­enza virus while passing through a small village on the banks of the Coluene River. Less than ten people survived the tra­gedy, and with them, the Trumai language fell into desuetude.
For similar reasons, another South American language, Bora, saw its number of speakers falling from 15 000 in 1915 to a mere 427 twenty-five years later. It did not die out, however, but partly recovered, and now has almost 3 000 users.
The case of Tamboran is even more extreme—indeed as dramatic as language death can possibly be. In 1815, a volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa killed every single speaker of the language.
Again in South America, the number of Nambiquara speakers was estimated at about 20 000—50 000 at the beginning of their contact with western civilization in 1911. Gruesome epidemics had by the mid-20th century reduced this number to 500. The current number is above 800, and even though knowledge of Portuguese is improving, children still learn their ancestral tongue.
These examples could be multiplied, but the most well-known, and one of the most spectacular examples of genocide-related language death, is that of the language or languages of Tasmania. The island is thought to have had about 4 000 inhabitants when the first Europeans arrived. The British began settling the island in 1808, and twenty years later, an organized genocide began, as the governor declared war on the Aborigines. Martial law allowed anyone to shoot and kill natives found in settled areas, and ethnic cleansing was taken one step further as chains of people swept across the island looking for survivors. In 1835, thus after less than three decades, the Aboriginal Tasmanians were virtually annihilated, and in 1847, only 47 survivors were left. The British, on their part, had suffered 183 casualties.
Today, a couple of thousand Tasmanians claim aboriginal descent, but they are of mixed origin—the reputedly last full-blooded native Tasmanian died in 1876. In any case, the Tasmanian language or languages are long forgotten, and only poorly documented.
 

Thursday, August 9, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 9

Kemal Ataturk teaches Latin script
August 9
 
1816: Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc arrive in the United States, where they subsequently lay the foundations for the American Sign Language.
 
1896: Birth of Swiss child language investigator Jean Piaget.
 
1928: Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk announces his decision to switch from Arabic to Latin script.
 
1940: Death of Rudolf Thurneysen, one of the first to apply the newly established principles of historical linguistics to Celtic languages.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 8

Flag of South Africa



August 8
 
1996: The South African langtag (Language Plan Task Group) commission submits its final report the government. This results in the adoption of no less than eleven official languages in the following year.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 7


Bowlingual


 August 7

1973: Ugandan dictator Idi Amin proclaims Swahili as the “national language”.
 
2001: The Japanese company Takara releases a device called “Bowlingual,” which is said to translate dogspeak into human languages. Attached to the dog’s collar, Bowlingual analyses the dog’s barks and growls and delivers them to the owner clad in Japanese or English words.

Monday, August 6, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 6

Moncton, New Brunswick

August 6
 
2002: After a unanimous city council vote, the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, declares itself Canada’s first officially bilingual city.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 5


Aasen visittkort 1881
Ivar Aasen


August 5 
1813: Ivar Aasen, the creator of Nynorsk, is born in Ørsta.
 
1890: James Edwin Danelson sends out a circular regarding the formation of a Volapük club in New York.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 4

August 4 

1994: France passes the much criticized so-called Loi Toubon, which regulates the use of foreign languages in France.

Friday, August 3, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 3


Mont-Blanc


August 3 
1787: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Ferdinand’s great-grandfather, ascends Europe’s highest mountain, Mont-Blanc.
 
2002: The Turkish parliament votes to end the ban on the Kurdish language.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 2

Raymond de Saussure

Raymond de Saussure





August  2
 

1884: In The Critic, the word thon is proposed as a gender-neutral pronoun to replace the he and she of English.
 
1894: The Saussures are blessed with a boy child. The son, named Raymond, later becomes a renowned psychoanalyst.
 
1972: Creation of the Tahitian Academy, whose aim it is to “safeguard and enrich the Tahitian language”.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: August 1


Merritt Ruhlen’s
The Origin of Language


 

August 1
 
Beginning this day, the Welsh celebrate their one-week Welsh language festival called National Eisteddfod.

National alphabet day in Azerbaijan, commemorating the replacement of Cyrillic with Latin script in 2001.
 
1996: Merritt Ruhlen’s opus on Proto-World, The Origin of Language is published.
 
1998: Introduction of the German spelling reform.
 
1999: The Chung-Yuan Christian University of Taiwan establishes a Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies.
 
2005: After a period of transition, the new German spelling officially replaces the old orthography.