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| 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.
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 . . .
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