Saturday, June 1, 2013

The Linguist's Calendar: June 1—the final (and first!) entry

Note: This final entry is a re-post of the first entry and brings us full circle; the Linguist's Calendar from Mikael Parkvall's great book, Limits of Language, is now posted in its entirety. To view a date of interest, navigate the Blog Archive to the right.

June 1

1940: Evelyn Pike gives birth to a daughter, the first child of linguist Ken Pike.

1952: Michael Ventris produces the last of his Work Notes, where he first reveals his find that Linear B is a written form of Greek.

1981: The first English language daily newspaper in the People’s Republic of China, the China Daily, begins publication.


1987: Stanford University Press publishes Joseph Greenberg’s controversial Language in the Americas.


1991: Geoffrey Pullum’s entertaining and oft-cited The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language is published by the University of Chicago Press.


1993: Within the Lojban movement, a language reform known as The Great Rafsi Reallocation goes into effect.


1999: The Nepalese Supreme Court rules the use of minority languages in the country’s administration “non-constitutional and illegal.”


2002: For the first time since its inception in 1996, the Terralingua organization, promoter of linguistic and biological diversity, gets an office, located in Washington.

Friday, May 31, 2013

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 31

Photobucket
Bolivian Parliament Building
May 31 

2001: A new Bolivian penal law authorizes the use of an interpreter in cases where the defendant does not speak Spanish.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 29

Jacques Chirac, the former French president, could face alleged embezzlement charges
Jacques Chirac
May 29 

1996: In a speech in Quimper, Brittany, French president Jacques Chirac admits that France might sign the European charter on minority languages.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 28

user posted imageMay 28 

1863: At Antoine d’Abbadie’s place, messieurs de Cliarencey, d’Abbadie, Cliodzko and Selicebel agree to found a linguistic society. This later develops into the famous Société de Linguistique de Paris.

1915: Birth of Joseph Greenberg in Brooklyn, New York.

1945: One of the last strongholds of number inflection in the Swedish verbal system falls, as the major Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå begins using singular forms even with plural subjects.
 

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 27

Karl Bühler
May 27 

1879: Birth of Karl Bühler, the German psychologist to present his “Organon” model of language in 1934.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 26

File:Kaspar Hauser.jpeg
Kaspar Hauser
May 26

1828: The feral child Kaspar Hauser is discovered in Nuremberg, Germany.

1998: In a manifestation called the “National Sorry Day,” Australia offers an apology to the Aboriginal population for the policy (lasting into the early 1970s) of removing children from Aboriginal families to Anglophone households. Among numerous other disastrous outcomes, this policy was responsible for the extinction of many Aboriginal languages.