The Linguist’s Calendar: February 28 (w/ February 29 bonus!)

Philippine stamps commemorating
the Summer Institute of Linguistics

February 28 

1759: Pope Clement XIII authorizes Bible translation into various languages.
 
2003: The Philippine postal services release a series of stamps commemorating the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

February 29 
1956: The National Assembly of Pakistan decides that the state languages of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 27

S.I. Hayakawa

February 27
1897: Alfabetarja e gjuhës shqipe, the first school book in Albanian, is published in Istanbul.

1953: A proposal to simplify English spelling passes its first test. by 65 votes to 53, in the British House of Commons. Remarkably, the bill receives support from government and opposition parties. One Conservative supporter is James Pitman, grandson of Isaac Pitman of Pitman Shorthand fame.

1969: It is decided to establish a Division of Linguistics and Language Training at York University in Toronto.

1992: American linguist and politician Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 26

Republika Srpska seal

February 26 

1994: A new alphabet for the writing of Karakalpak is adopted.
 
1998: The Constitutional Court of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina abolishes the 25 June, 1996, law prescribing the Ekavian variety of Serbo-Croatian (the one used in Serbia) in schools, administration, and the media. The Jekavian dialect used by most Bosnian Serbs may now again be used.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 25

David Dalby

February 25  

1977: Ebo Hawkson, Ghana’s deputy chairman of the National Commission on Culture, makes a speech in which he urges Africans to make ex-colonial languages their own by not always following European norms.
 
1988: The Canadian Supreme Court concludes that all provincial laws of Saskatchewan are void, having been written in English only, rather than in English and French. A hastily adopted additional bill is necessary in order to restore the validity of Saskatchewan legislation.
 
2000: At the Expolangues exhibition in Paris, David Dalby launches his Linguasphere Register—an Ethnologue-like comprehensive survey of the world’s languages.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 24

February 24 

1835: The first Indian language monthly of the United States, the Siwinowe Kesibwi (Shawnee Sun), begins publication.

1950: Birth of syntactician and computational linguist G. J. M. Gazdar.

1964: Noam Chomsky begins a series of six weekly lectures at the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton.
 
2002: The Israeli postal authorities issue a stamp honoring the Ladino, i.e. the Judeo-Spanish language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 23

Ken and Evelyn Pike

February 23 

1945: Ken and Evelyn Pike have a second daughter.

1948: At the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in Karachi, Dhirendranath Datta argues for the use of Bengali in the assembly alongside English and Urdu. This arouses exceptionally strong feelings among the delegates.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 22

Jean-François Sudre

February 22
 
1835: Jean-François Sudre again demonstrates his artificial language Solrésol publicly. This time, he silently communicates with blindfolded students in order to demonstrate the language’s usefulness for the deaf-blind.
 
1913: Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.
 
1999: The Bulgarian government recognizes Macedonian as a language in its own right, rather than a mere dialect of Bulgarian.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 21

February 21

In November 1999, this day was declared by the United Nations as the official “International Mother Language Day” to be celebrated worldwide. The day is chosen in honor of the “Language martyrs” of Bangladesh, and has been celebrated locally since 1953, the first anniversary of their death.
 
1828: Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper printed in an American Indian language, begins publishing.
 

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 20

Slovak government parliament building

February 20

2001: The Slovak government signs the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.
 
2006: The University of Venda in South Africa’s Limpopo province opens a Tshivenda Language Research and Development Center.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 19

August Schleicher

February 19

1821: Birth of August Schleicher, the man behind the Stammbaumtheorie.
 
1888: Otto Jespersen receives a letter from Vilhelm Thomsen, who suggests that Jespersen should concentrate on English language and literature.
 
2001: In New Delhi, the internet provider Rediff announces that it is now able to handle no less than eleven Indian languages.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 18

February 18

2006: Anticipation rises in the media, as English is about to receive its one millionth word. At least, that is, if you’re prepared to trust the US-based Global Language Monitor. According to their count, English contains, as of this day, 986,120 words (“plus or minus a handful”). In contrast, the company reports that there are ”fewer than 100,000 words” in French.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 17

Saint Mesrop Mashtots

February 17
 
440: Death of Saint Mesrop Mashtots, the monk who is accredited with having invented the Armenian script and helped establish Armenia’s golden age of Christian literature.
 
2004: Opening of the Punjab Mother Language Festival 2004 in Delapur, a “festival to celebrate linguistic diversity and rich literary and cultural heritage of the Punjab.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 16

Sheikh Mujib-ur Rahman

February 16

1795: American congress decides to publish federal statutes in English only, rather than, as had been proposed, in both English and German. It is this vote which is believed to have given rise to the legend of German nearly becoming the official language of the United States.
 
1952: Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman starts a hunger strike in support of the demand of Bengali being made the state language of East Pakistan.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 15

Friedrich August Wolf

February 15 
 
1759: The German classical philologist Friedrich August Wolf is born.
 
1878: In a paper presented to the Philological Society in London, Rev W. E. Cousins decisively demonstrates the Austronesian affinities of Malagasy.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 14

Louis the German

February 14  

842: Charles the Bald and Louis the German swear the Oaths of Strasbourg, thereby producing what are usually considered to be the first texts in these two languages.

1941: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article “Languages and Logic” to Technological Review.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 13

February 13 

1834: As the first issue of Ka Lama Hawaii leaves the printers, Hawaiian joins the group of languages in which newspapers are published.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 12

Andrew Booth

February 12  

1948: Andrew Booth sends his first report on his work on machine translation to the Rockefeller Foundation from which he receives his funding.
 
1998: Alija Izetbegovic appeals to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court of to abolish the articles declaring only Bosnian and Croatian official in the Federation and only Serbian in the Republika Srpska.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 11

N'Djamena, Chad

February 11 

1943: The Swedish School Teachers’ Written Language Committee suggests a spelling reform, which is met by stiff public opposition.
 
1992: A 12-day sociolinguistic survey is begun in a number of villages in central Chad by SIL and the Institut Supérieur des Sciences et de l’Education.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 10

Timothy Evans

February 10  

1965: After examining linguistic evidence, British authorities conclude that Timothy Evans’ murder confession was probably a fake, and a year later, pardoned him. This was 15 years too late; Evans was hanged in 1950.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 9

February 9

2000: The Taiwanese minister of education declares that the study of minority languages shall be obligatory in Taiwanese schools from the following year.
 

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 8

George Lakoff

February 8

1864: Beginning this day, lectures are regularly given at the Société de Linguistique de Paris.
 
1973: In an article entitled “Deep language” in the New York Review of Books, George Lakoff attacks Noam Chomsky.
 
2002: A new PhD program in linguistics, available from the autumn of this year, is approved by the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees. This university is unique in having a sign language as its main medium of teaching.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 7

Jerrold Katz

February 7

1639: Work on the French Academy’s Dictionnaire de la Langue Françoyse begins.
 
1987: Riots erupt in South Korea after the death in of Park Chong-Choi, who was suffocated during police interrogation. Park studied linguistics at the Seoul National University.
 
2002: Jerrold Katz dies from bladder cancer in New York at the age of 69.
 
2006: Publication of the first dictionary of Angolan Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 6

Steve Briers

February 6
 
1927: Estonian national broadcasting corporation Eesti Raadio transmits its first program in Esperanto.
 
1928: Nikolai Trubetzkoy presents his first paper at the Prague Linguistics Circle. It is entitled “Alphabet und Lautsystem”.
 
1990: Welshman Steve Briers, the world’s fastest backwards talker, accomplishes a backward recital of the lyrics of the Queen album “A Night At The Opera” in 9 minutes and 58.44 seconds.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 5

Quang Phuc Dong

February 5
 
1835: The French music journal Le Pianiste is delighted about Jean-François Sudre’s creation of Solrésol, an international auxiliary language based on music. In the journal, Sudre is hailed as the Gutenberg of his day.
 
1967: Quang Phuc Dong of the “South Hanoi Institute of Technology” (S H I T), alias Jim McCawley, submits the final version of "English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects" to a Festschrift devoted to—Jim McCawley. The paper is a study of the syntax of the word "fuck," and includes some memorable example sentences.



2003: The Russian Duma passes a law which outlaws the use of foreign words “where suitable Russian ones exist”.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 4

February 4

1800: Victor the feral child is transferred from St-Sernin to the deaf school in neighboring Rodez.
 
1809: Birth of Arthur J Johnes, who 35 years later wrote Philological Proofs of the Original Unity and Recent Origin of the Human Race, Derived from a Comparison of the Languages of Asia, Europe, Africa, and America; being an inquiry how far the differences in the languages of the globe are referrible to causes now in operation.
 
1939: Death of Edward Sapir.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 3

George Miller

February 3

1920: Birth of George Miller.

2001: Student Benjamin Varner is found dead at Gallaudet University in Washington, The arrested murderer Joseph Mesa blames his action on voices in his head. Being deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging Mesa to kill—in American Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 2

Sotiris Bletsas

February 2  

1786: William Jones delivers his famous Third Anniversary Discourse as president of the Asiatick Society of Bengal. It is here that he makes public his ideas about Latin, Greek, Gothic, and other European languages being genetically related to Sanskrit and Persian.
 
1887: The USA prohibits the use of Native American languages in schools .
 
2001: Sotiris Bletsas is given a 15-month suspended jail sentence by a court in Athens after having distributed a leaflet claiming that there exist linguistic minorities in Greece.

The Linguist’s Calendar: February 1

Koasati Grammar,Geoffrey Kimball

February 1

1991: A new Koasati Grammar by Geoffrey Kimball is published by University of Nebraska Press.