The Linguist’s Calendar: March 31

Yuri Knorosov

March 31   

Australia’s “Assembly of First Nations” celebrates the “Official Aboriginal Language Day”.
 
1966: The Haut Comité pour la défense et l’expansion de la langue française is created.
 
1999: Death of Yuri Knorosov, decipherer of the Maya script.
 
2002: A Swedish government-appointed commission reports on the possibilities of strengthening the position of Swedish vis-à-vis English in that country.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 30

March 30 

1937: Otto Jespersen is widowed, as his wife Ane Marie dies.

2000: The Michif Working Group holds its first meeting in Saskatoon to discuss the possibilities of reviving this unique intertwined language.

2000: Alexandra Aikhenvald’s typological survey of classifiers is published.

2006: The first (pre-publication) copy of Mikael Parkvall’s Limits of Language is purchased by Oliver Wilke of Bad Arolsen in Germany. 

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 29

March 29   

1955: A Dano-German convention on the linguistic rights of the German-speaking population in southern Denmark is signed.
 
1997: Asialex (Asian Association for Lexicography) is founded in Hong Kong.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 28

Max Planck Institute for Psycho­linguistics

March 28 

In 1954, this day marked the start of the Philippine Linggo ng Wika, or National Language Week. In 1955, the celebrations were moved to mid-August.
 
1980: Opening in Nijmegen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycho­linguistics.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 27

Larry Trask

March 27 

1869: The Société de Linguistique de Paris decides to publish a newsletter.
 
2001: Eight people die in Belgium’s worst railway crash for 25 years. Language difficulties are later shown to be the cause of the tragedy—a signalman had received warnings in French, but he himself spoke only Dutch.
 
2004: After a two-year illness, British-American historical linguist and Vasconist Larry Trask dies at the age of 59.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 26

Confederation Bridge,
New Brunswick, Canada

March 26  

2000: End of Provincial French Pride Week in New Brunswick, Canada.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 25

Ishi

March 25 

1916: Ishi, the last speaker of Yana, dies of tuberculosis in San Francisco.
 
1930: For the first time ever, the session of the Prague Linguistics circle is open to the public, who get to hear Roman Jakobson talk about “Linguistic questions in the work of Masaryk.”
 
2005: Nederveld Associates Inc. presents a plan to build a new town in South Dakota, designed specifically for sign language users.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 24

Mancheste, UK

March 24 

2001: Deaf people in Manchester march for the recognition of British Sign language as an official language of the country.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 23

Borðoy, Faroe Islands, Denmark

March 23  

1948: Faeroese is declared the “principal language” of the Faeroe islands.
 
1997: At the initiative of the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages “European Language Day” is celebrated for the first time. This event is not to be confused with the “European Day of Languages” of 2001, although in that particular year, the festivities are merged and held on September 26.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 22

March 22 

1945: The Arab league is founded. Today, it groups 22 Arabic-speaking states.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 21

Shah Reza Pahlavi

March 21
 
1924: First US foreign language course broadcast by New York’s WJZ radio.
 
1935: Shah Reza Pahlavi asks the international community to use the name ‘Iran" instead of "Persia." The new name means "Land of the Aryans."
 
1948: At Maidan Racecourse in Dhaka, Urdu is—despite Bengali protests—declared the one and only official language of both east and west Pakistan.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 20

Geoff Pullum

March 20    
 
The Journée de la Francophonie, celebrating the cooperation between French-speaking countries, is observed world-wide since the first meeting between Francophone heads-of-state in 1970 in Niamey (Niger).
 
1978: “Genie” is transferred back to her biological mother.
 
1997: Geoff Pullum sends a letter to the Economist with “a meaningful contiguous minimal word quintuple—7-character words, no less”—“I can’t recall a blinder blander blonder blender blunder.” This referred to an error in the Russian petroleum industry, which resulted in crude oil from different oilfields becoming mixed together into a single light-colored blend. Pullum adds that his letter “could have placed the Economist permanently in the linguistic book of records,” although, he complains, “there isn’t one.” If only he knew.
 
2000: Beginning of Provincial French Pride Week in New Brunswick, Canada.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 19

Elias Lönnrot

March 19 

1884: Elias Lönnrot, standardizer of Finnish, dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 18

Leonard Bloomfield

March 18    

1909: Leonard Bloomfield marries Miss Alice Sayers of St Louis.

1997: The Netherlands officially recognizes Frisian, Yiddish, Saxon, and Limburgian as minority languages.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 17

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 17 

2000: The Institut national de la langue française publishes Du Féminin, which includes recommended usage of female titles.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 16

Karl Brugmann

March 16   

1849: Birth of Karl Brugmann, neo-grammarian and comparative linguist.
 
1931: The Dutch language lovers’ society Genootschap Onze Taal is formed.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 15

Roman Jakobson

March 15 

1849: Italian cardinal and polyglot Guiseppe Gaspare Mezzofanti dies.
 
1939: Just before the Nazi occupants arrive, Roman Jakobson leaves his home in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and flees to Denmark.
 
1969: MIT Press releases a paperback edition of Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 14

Rudolf Thurneysen

March 14 

“Native Language Day” is a national holiday in Estonia, where linguistic rights are denied to the third of its population with the “wrong” native language.
 
1857: Birth of Rudolf Thurneysen, one of the first to apply the newly established principles of historical linguistics to Celtic languages.
 
1901: Publication of the first issue of Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen.
 
1902: Danish newspaper Politiken coins bil for "motor car." While most European languages took their word for this from the beginning of Latin or French automobile, Norwegians and Swedes have since 1902 followed the Danes in using the last part of the same original word.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 13

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

March 13   

1519: European study of Mesoamerican Indian languages begins, as the Spanish encounter and question their fellow countryman Jerónimo de Aguilar, who, as a survivor of a shipwreck has learned Mayan.
 
1845: Birth of Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, forerunner of the structuralist school, and accredited (albeit wrongly) with having launched the term “phoneme.”
 
1938: Kremlin makes Russian a compulsory school subject in all Soviet republics.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 12

Alexandra Y Aikhenvald

March 12 
 
1881: Turkish language reformer Kemal Atatürk is born. He replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet.
 
1998: Russian-born typologist and field linguist Alexandra “Sasha” Aikhenvald becomes a naturalized Australian.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 11

George Bernard Shaw

March 11 

1914: George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with a phonetician as one of the main characters is performed for the first time in the author’s home country. Its original premiere took place in Vienna.
 
1986: The French language law of 1975 is supplanted by a new decree, intended to lead to the “enrichissement de la langue française."
 
2000: Edgar Polomé, who—among other things—established the first linguistics department in Belgian Congo, dies in Houston, Texas.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 10

Nim Chimpsky

March 10 
 
1876: First electronic transmission of human speech as Alexander Graham Bell on the telephone utters “Come here, Watson, I want you” to his assistant.

1897: Antoine Meillet gets his PhD.

2000: At the age of 26, Nim Chimpsky dies of a heart attack in Tyler, Texas.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 9

View of the city of Lviv (Lvov)

March 9  

1950: London van driver Timothy Evans is hanged for the murder of his wife and child. Linguistic evidence later suggests that he was in fact innocent.
 
1956: Hellenist and comparative linguist Paul Kretschmer dies in Vienna.
 
2000: Hundreds of nationalist protesters in the Ukrainian city of Lviv (Lvov) demand the closure of all Russian-language publications. Others in Kyiv (Kiev) urged that Russian be banned from television as well.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 8

August Schleicher

March 8 
 
1827: Birth (in Berlin) of Wilhelm Bleek, the “father of Bantu philology.”
 
1850: August Schleicher becomes Professor of Classical Philology and Literature in Prague.
 
1866: The Société de Linguistique de Paris is officially founded.
 
2001: Southampton’s mayor marks the European Year of Languages by releasing 500 helium balloons outside the city’s West Quay shopping center.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 7

Nikolai Y Marr

March 7 

1714: The peace treaty of Rastatt between French King Louis XIV and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI is signed in French. This is allegedly the first time that a language other than Latin is used for the text of an international treaty. For another two centuries, French continues to be the foremost language of international diplomacy.
 
1909: Nikolai Y Marr becomes adjunct of the Historical-Philological Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 6

March 6  

1947: Andrew Booth meets Warren Weaver again, and the Rockefeller Foundation provisionally agrees to fund machine translation research.

1995: The Estonian parliament agrees to designate all languages other than Estonian as “foreign languages.” A third of all Estonian residents are insolent enough to have acquired one of these as their mother tongue.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 5

March 5    
 
1990: Withdrawal in Bulgaria of laws aimed at the linguistic discrimination of the Turkish-speaking minority.
 
1996: Today’s New Zealand census is the first ever to include a question on language. It turns out that 95% of the population are Anglophones, and that they constitute one of the least multilingual populations in the world.
 
2001: The state of New York adopts English as its official language.
 
2006: The final in this year’s African Championship in French Orthography (La Dictée d’Afrique) takes place in Benin. Among the twelve teams is one from officially Anglophone Nigeria.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 4

Warren Weaver

March 4 

1832: Death of Jean-François Champollion, who played a major role in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

1947: On this day Warren Weaver, director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, writes to the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener that “I have wondered if it were unthinkable to design a computer which would translate. Even if it would translate only scientific material (where the semantic difficulties are very notably less), and even if it did produce an inelegant (but intelligible) result, it would seem to me worth while”.

1968: Mauritania declares Arabic as co-official alongside French.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 3

March 3  

1894: The USA’s first Greek-language publication, the New York Atlantis, begins.
 
1930: Nikolai Y Marr becomes vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
 
1997: The first-ever International Colloquium on Gur Languages is held at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 2

Navajo Code Talkers Monument

March 2  
 
1989: The Navajo Code Talkers Monument is erected in Phoenix, Arizona.
 
2003: The first International Symposium on Taiwanese Sign Linguistics is held.

The Linguist’s Calendar: March 1

March 1

1983: Russ Rymer publishes a book on “Genie,” the confined child of California.
 
1987: The Nordic Language Convention comes into force. It allows citizens of these countries to use their respective mother tongues (provided it is Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic or one of the two standardized varieties of Norwegian) in contacts with authorities in the neighboring countries.
 
1995: Randy Harris publishes The Linguistics Wars on the history of linguistic disagreement in the past couple of decades.