The Linguist’s Calendar: April 30

Norbert Wiener

April 30 

1943: Otto Jespersen, Danish linguist and Anglicist, and inventor of the artificial language Novial, passes away.

1947: In a reply to Warren Weaver’s letter of March 4, Norbert Wiener replies that he is skeptical about the possibilities of machine translation.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 29

Mikael Parkvall

April 29 

2006: The original edition of Mikael Parkvall’s Limits of Language is published this day.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 28

HMS Bounty

April 28 

1789: Twelve of the crew members of HMS Bounty stage a mutiny that is to lead to the creation of a new language. They settle on the uninhabited Pacific island of Pitcairn, where their descendants still speak Pitcairnese.

1908: Foundation of the UEA, the Universal Esperanto Academy.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 27

Koko

April 27 

1971: British police remove Welsh demonstrators from the entrance of a courtroom after they disrupt proceedings inside. Put on trial are eight members of the Welsh Language Society, accused of “conspiring to damage, remove or destroy” English-language road signs in Wales.

1996: The North American language Quinault becomes extinct with the death of its last speaker, Oliver Mason.

1998: In the first inter-species internet chat ever, Koko the gorilla answers questions from the curious public. Her performance disappoints many.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 26

Algerian Parliament Building

April 26 

1968: A government decree requires that all Algerian officials master Arabic.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 25

Roger Brown

April 25 

1925: Child language acquisitionist Roger Brown is born in Detroit.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 24

Benjamin Lee Whorf

April 24 

1869: A monsieur A Dufriche motions that the infamous second article of the constitution of the Société de Linguistique de Paris be revoked. The second article was the one which banned discussion on the origins of human language, as well as proposals for a new international auxiliary language. Dufriche’s motion fails, and the article therefore remains in vigour.

1897: Benjamin Lee Whorf, who formulated the strong version of the notorious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is born in Massachusetts.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 23

Michael A. K. Halliday

April 23 

1801: Jean-Marc Itard publishes his book on Victor, the feral child of southern France. Dis­ap­poin­ting­ly, Victor never learned to speak.

1925: British neo-Firthian linguist Michael A. K. Halliday is born in Leeds.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 22

Bertil Malmberg

April 22 

1913: Birth of phonetician and Romanist Bertil Malmberg.

1991: Esperantists gather in the village of Kelmis in Western Belgium to honour the state of Amikejo. In the early 20th century, the former Neutral Territory of Moresnet, in which Kelmis is located, turned into the Free State of Amikejo—the only known state with Esperanto as its official language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 21

Otto Jespersen

April 21 

1899: Otto Jespersen is elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 20

Jules Gilliéron

April 20 

1879: Jules Gilliéron submits his thesis on the dialect of Vionnaz.

2000: Michael, partner of Koko, and one of the few gorillas to have learned American Sign Language, passes away at the age of 27.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 19

April 19 

1928: The last fascicule of the Oxford English Dictionary is completed. The entire work is not published until 1933.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 18

April 18 

1861: Paul Broca performs an autopsy on an aphasic who had died the previous day. He thus “discovers” the area in the brain in which much language processing is done, and which is now named after him.

1949: Leonard Bloomfield, who in his 1933 book “Language” set the standards of teaching in linguistics for decades to come, dies in New Haven.

2002: China announces that it plans to spend about 1 million dollars on preserving the Nüshu script, unique to the Hunan province and used only by women.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 17

April 17

1998: The First European NLP Forum Conference begins in Copenhagen.

2001: The idea of writing Limits of Language is born.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 16

Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy

April 16  

1890: Russian structuralist Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, one of the founders of the Prague school is born in Moscow.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 15

Nikolai Miliutin

April 15  

1755: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is published.

1817: The first American school for the deaf opens at Hartford, Connecticut. Thomas Gallaudet is its principal, and Laurent Clerc its only teacher. It is through this school that French Sign is introduced into the New World, where it eventually morphs into American Sign Language.

1864: The Russian administration in Lithuania plans to introduce the Cyrillic alphabet. In a letter to the governor-general of Vilnius, statesman Nikolai Miliutin writes that “Our alphabet will finish what our sword has begun”.

1958: The European Community decides that all the official languages of the member states shall also be official languages of the Community.

1966: As one of the last institutions to surrender, the Swedish supreme court opts to no longer use plural forms of verbs, a feature which has been absent from spoken Swedish for centuries.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 14

Roger Brown

April 14 

1828: The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary is published as The American Dictionary of the English Language.

1852: Birth (in Mühringen, Germany) of Maximilian Berlitzheimer, founder of the Berlitz Language Schools.

1917: Death of Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto.

1925: Birth of psycholinguist Roger Brown.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 13

Dr. Syntax

April 13 

1814: A racehorse tastefully named Dr. Syntax runs his first race. He subsequently wins the Preston Gold Cup for eight consecutive years—a record that remains unbeaten to this day.

1897: Otto Jespersen marries Ane Marie Døjrup.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 12

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

April 12 

Feast day of St. Zeno, patron saint of children with speech-learning difficulties.

1950: Joseph Stalin is convinced by a meeting with Armenian linguist Arnold Chikobava that Nikolai Marr’s ideas on language evolution are wrong.

1963: Polish logician and semanticist Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, also known as the inventor of Categorial Grammar, dies.

1968: The world’s first international conference on pidgin and creole languages in Mona, Jamaica, closes.

1993: A new alphabet for the writing of Turkmen is adopted. Among the usual Latin character set, it also includes the curious symbols <$>, <£> and <¥>.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 11

Rasmus Rask

April 11 

1797: British naval forces deported 2,248 Garifunas (or “Black Caribs”) from St Vincent to Roatán island in present-day Honduras. So begins the presence in Central America of a black people speaking an Amerindian language.

1861: An aphasic patient named Leborgne, but better known as “Tan” (since that was pretty much the only syllable he was capable of uttering) is brought to Paul Broca. After the patient’s death on April 17, Broca identifies the language center of the brain which still bears his name.

1919: Odense (Denmark) names a street after Rasmus Rask. He was born in Brændekilde, 15 km away but within the limits of the municipality.

1980: Legislation makes Norway officially bilingual in Bokmål and Nynorsk.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 10

April 10 

1982: New Mexico Governor Bruce King declares a Navajo Code Talkers Day. A little later, US President Reagan announces a nationwide counterpart.

1991: The MIT Press releases a paperback reprint of Chomsky & Halle’s classic The Sound Pattern of English.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 9

Ken Hale

April 9 

Death of Michael Agricola (in 1557), the first to translate the Bible into Finnish, is celebrated as the Finnish Language Day—a public holiday. Elias Lönnrot, standardizer of this language, was also born this day in 1802.

1955: Ken Hale says “yes” to his Sara.

1981: Nature publishes a 207,000 letter description of the nucleotide links making up human mitochondrial DNA, which later makes it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest word there is.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 8

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 8  

1970: Czech Indo-Europeanist Julius Pokorny, mainly known for his voluminous etymological research, dies in Zurich.

1982: John Wells’ four-volume Accents of English is published.

2002: The Algerian parliament decides to give official recognition to Tamazight, the language of its Berber minority.

2002: The first ever African-medium daily in South Africa is launched. Isolezwe (‘the eye of the Nation’) is entirely in Zulu.

 

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 7

Holger Pedersen

April 7

1867: Danish linguist Holger Pedersen is born.

1906: A governmental decree is signed on modernizing Swedish spelling. Among its more notable features is <v> rather than <fv> for /v/.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 6

American School for the Deaf,
Hartford, Connecticut

April 6 

1830: Thomas Gallaudet, who introduced of French sign language to the USA, resigns from as principal of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford.

1921: Death (in New York City) of Maximilian Berlitzheimer, founder of the Berlitz Language Schools.

1990: Canada’s Northwest Territories’ official language usage laws are revised.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 5

Tidaholm, Sweden

April 5 

2001: Most of the pupils of a school in Tidaholm, Sweden, participate in a manifestation against foul language. After having written down the nastiest words they could think of, the pupils and their teachers set fire to them in the school yard.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 4

Paul Broca

April 4

1861: Paul Broca attends a talk by Ernest Aubertin at the Société d’Anthropologie which inspires him to research the localization of language in the brain.

2001: The Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore launches the “Speak Good English” campaign, aimed at eradicating the local variety, called “Singlish.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 3

Alan Turing

April 3

1952: British mathematician Alan Turing, without whom computational linguistics might not be, is convicted of homosexuality.

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 2

April 2

1998: The constitutional court of Rwanda declares that the constitution should be in Rwanda, French, and English, and that in case of conflict, the Rwandian version should be given priority.

 

The Linguist’s Calendar: April 1

Peter Stephen Duponceau

April 1

1844: French linguist Pierre Étienne (a k a Peter Stephen) Duponceau, to whom we owe the term “polysynthetic,” dies in Philadelphia.

1886: In Paris, a decision is taken to publish a small journal about phonetic transcription and the teaching of foreign languages. This journal is one of the forerunners of today’s Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

1887: Leonard Bloomfield, who in his 1933 book Language set the standards of teaching in linguistics for decades to come, sees the light of day in Chicago.

1936: Orissa is recognized as a separate state—the first one in India to have its boundaries defined on linguistic grounds.

1956: Noam Chomsky completes the preface of his classic Syntactic Structures, although the book is not published until the following year.

1993: Ron Wardhaugh’s textbook Investigating Language is published.

1994: Raymond Rising of the Summer Institute of Linguistics is kidnapped in Colombia by six members of the FARC guerrillas.

2000: The Enigma machine exhibited at the Bletchley Park Museum in south-eastern Britain is stolen. Work on cracking the German Enigma code involved plenty of linguists (and mathematicians) during the World War II, and their work contributed to the foundation of computational linguistics.

2005: Norwegian daily Bergens Tidende reports that the uvular realization of /r/ (which is common in the area where the paper is published) is harmful, and even capable of shortening one’s life by 12 years! The amazing results derive from a study of 40 000 Frenchmen, published by Avril Premier in Journal of Linguistic Medicine. But then, this is the first of April . . .