The Linguist’s Calendar: September 30

Brugge, Belguim

September 30

1920: In the wake of the First World War, Belgium abolishes the linguistic rights of its German-speaking minority. German regains its co-official status twelve years later.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 29

Elizabeth Elstob

September 29

1693: The first known female Anglicist, Elizabeth Elstob, later to write The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue is born.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 28

September 28
 
1995: The Minimalist Program becomes available in paperback. 

2001: Eric Plunkett is found dead at Gallaudet University in Washington, where he was a student. Upon his arrest, the murderer Joseph Mesa later blames his action on voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging him to kill—in American Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 27

Noah Webster

September 27

1790: Lexicographer Noah Webster is urged by his friend Daniel George to compile a dictionary.
 
1998: In a referendum, 56,4% of the voters in Schleswig-Holstein vote against the introduction of the new German orthography.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 26

Flag of the European Union

September 26

2001: As a part of the European year of languages, the European Union organizes the European Day of Languages throughout its member states.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 25

Palace of Europe in Strasbourg

September 25

1995: Hungary ratifies the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.
 
2003: Russophone Latvians protest outside the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg, seeking official recognition of the Russian language by the Latvian authorities.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 24

Basil Bernstein

September 24 
2000: Basil “restricted code” Bernstein dies at the age of 76.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 23

Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan

September 23
 
1989: The not yet independent Kyrgyzstan declares Kirghiz its one and only official language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 22

September 22

1990: Steven Woodmore sets a new (though not uncontroversial) world record in speed talking. On the British TV show Motor Mouth he recites a piece of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 56,01 seconds, yielding an average rate of 637,4 words per minute.

Steven Woodmore in action:

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 21

Antoine Meillet

September 21

1936: Death at the age of 70 of Antoine Meillet in Châteaumeillant.
 
1938: In the Liverpool Echo, a Gregory Hynes proposes "se," sim" and "sis" as gender-neutral pronouns to replace he, she and their variants. Exactly half a century later, Eugene Wine of the Miami-Dade Community College in Florida suggests "e," since other pronoun forms “have already been reduced to a single vowel sound.”

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 20

Yang Huanyi

September 20
 
1863: Death of Jacob Grimm.
 
1884: In The Current, Emma Carleton suggests "ip" as an epicene pronoun in place of he and she.
 
1916: German linguist August Leskien dies.
 
1952: The South Carolinian language Catawba, dies with its last speaker Sallie Brown Gordon.
 
2004: Yang Huanyi, the last competent user of Nüshu, dies in Changsha, China. Nüshu was a script used exclusively by women.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 19

Willie Brown

September 19

1921: Birth of psycholinguist Eric Lenneberg.
 
1997: During the International Congress of Esperantists in San Francisco, mayor Willie Brown declares an “Esperanto Day” in the city.
 
2000: The Municipal Assembly of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, decides to tolerate the use of the city’s main vernacular, Ronga, both within the assembly itself, and in contacts with citizens. Hitherto, only Portuguese had been allowed.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 18

Steven Pinker

September 18

1954: Steven “Language Instinct” Pinker is born in Montreal.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 17

Cardinal Mezzofanti

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 17
 
The saint of the day is St Hildegard of Bingen, who died on this date in 1179. She is one of the official patron saints of linguists.
 
1774: Birth of Cardinal Mezzofanti, legendary Italian polyglot.
 
2005: In Lautoka, Fiji, the first of a series of workshops are held whose goal is to produce the first dictionary of Fijian Sign.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 16

Dan Everett

September 16

1940: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article “Linguistics as an exact science” to Technological Review.
 
1991: George Miller is awarded the National Medal of Science by American President George Bush Sr.
 
1994: On the Linguist List, Dan Everett announces the discovery of a hitherto undocumented speech sound, a voiceless dental stop articulated simultaneously with a voiceless bilabial trill. He came across the sound in the Amazonian languages Wari’ and Pirahã.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 15

Henry Sweet

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 15
 
1845: Birth of Henry Sweet, English linguist and phonetician. Sweet was the real-life model for Henry Higgins of Pygmalion.
 
1975: In what is surely one of the more facetious attempts to coin an epicene pronoun to replace he and she, Joel Weiss of Northbrook, Illinois blends he, or, she and it into h’orsh’it.
 
1999: The Turkish government’s Directorate General of Press and Information reports that Turkish is now spoken by no less than 200 million people, making it the 7th language of the world in terms of number of speakers. Most non-Turkish estimates put the number at slightly more than 60 million, putting it in 19th place among the world’s languages.
 
2002: Parliamentary elections in Sweden. The liberal party Folkpartiet gets a surprisingly high percentage of the votes, due to their proposal that knowledge of Swedish be a prerequisite for citizenship.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 14

Franz Bopp

September 14

This is the birthday of two major figures of 19th century German and international linguists. In 1769, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt is born in Berlin, and in 1791, Franz Bopp is born in Mainz.
 
1999: The Nepalese capital Kathmandu is brought to a standstill by a strike provoked by a ban on the use of ethnic languages in official work.
 
2005: In Ho Chi Minh City, the first ever dictionary of Vietnamese Sign is published.

A Klingon

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 13

2004: Germany’s Deutsche Welle adds one more language to the 30 already used for broadcasting—Klingon.








EXTRA for today, from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

A bit of geekology: who on earth speaks Klingon?

We know that Klingon is the language of an alien warrior civilization, but who on earth speaks Klingon? Well, not only is Klingon rare in having a linguistics journal and other semi-academic infrastructure devoted to it. It is also a rare conlang in that it has been studied from a sociolinguistic point of view—there are at least two such Klingon studies.

In part, these confirm the stereotype image of Klingon speakers—77% are male, most work with computers in one way or the other, and the largest group is in their mid-twenties. Depending on how prejudiced you are, you may be more surprised to learn that when it comes to marital status, a minority (less than 40%) are single.
 
In addition to Klingon (and, of course, languages such as English, French, German and Spanish), almost a fifth of the respondents in one survey also speak another artificial language—including two who have created their own conlang.
 
As mentioned above, I know of no cases of nativization of Klingon, but who knows what the future has in store? In Hermans’ (1999) thesis, almost two thirds of the (human) Klingonophones do want their children to learn the language . . .
 
At the risk of perpetuating the impression that only oddballs take interest in Klingon, it is difficult to leave out the news report from Portland, Oregon, where the health services in early 2003 advertised for Klingon speakers. The reason was said to be that some of the patients of the county’s mental hospitals would speak nothing but Klingon to the staff. By law, the authorities are therefore compelled to provide Klingon-English interpreters. In reality, however, the Klingon interpreters have yet never been called into service.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 12

Peter Mark Roget

September 12

1869: Peter Mark Roget—after whom the Roget’s Thesaurus is named—dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 11

N. Chomsky

September 11

1956: This is the second day of a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, organized by the Special Interest Group in Information Theory, and it is the event that Miller (2003:142) has referred to as the start of the “Cognitive Revolution." One of the participants is a certain N. Chomsky, who delivers the outline of his coming debut Syntactic Structures.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 10

Chomsky’s Reflections
on Language

September 10  

1976: John Searle reviews Chomsky’s Reflections on Language in the Times Literary Supplement.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 9

Grace Murray Hopper

September 9

1945: The word “bug” gets a new application when U S Navy Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper finds an actual bug stuck in a computer relay.
 
1975: English ethnographer Eric Thompson, who succeeded in deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 8

Edward Sapir

September 8
 
Declared by UNESCO as the International Literacy Day.
 
1865: Mikhail Muraviev, governor-general of Vilnius officially outlaws the use of Latin characters in the printing of Lithuanian. In practice, this means a ban on Lithuanian print.
 
1914: In a letter to fellow lumper Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber wonders if there is no way of relating the extinct Beothuk to some existing family, so that the number of language families in North America can be reduced even further.
 
1945: The 26 500-page original draft of the Korean Big Joseon Language Dictionary resurfaces. It had been seized by the Japanese during World War II.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 7

The Magnetic Fields

September 7

1999: American band The Magnetic Fields releases the album 69 Love Songs, featuring the song "Death of Ferdinand de Saussure."

2002: Eugenio Coseriu passes away in Tübingen, Germany, at an age of 81.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 6

September 6 
1956: The English architect and decipherer of the Linear B writing, Michael Ventris, dies in a car crash, at a mere 34 years of age.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 5

Esquema de la máquina diccionario
de Troyanskii (1933)

September 5

1933: In Moscow, Petr Petrovich Smirnov-Troyanskii patents a translation machine.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 4

Browning, Montana

September 4

1911: Ishi, the last speaker of Yana, who has miraculously survived the extermination of the rest of his people, is donated [sic] by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the University of California Anthropology Museum.

1930: The first conference on Plains Indian Sign begins in Browning, Montana, attracting members from 14 different tribes. This is probably the world’s first conference on a pidgin language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 3

Hans Conon von der Gabelentz

September 3
 
1874: German linguist Hans Conon von der Gabelentz dies.

1999: In Moncton, New Brunswick, 52 heads-of-state are welcomed by secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali to the Eighth Conference of the Francophonie, that is, the association of French-speaking countries. Or perhaps rather, more or less French-speaking countries, as Albania and Macedonia, desperate for international friends, are admitted as associate members.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 2

Charles E. Osgood

September 2
 
1957: Together with George Suci and Percy Tannenbaum, Charles Osgood publishes The Measurement of Meaning, in which the connotative meanings of words are investigated.
 
1961: Ken Hale fills the position of assistant professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Illinois in Urbana.
 
1993: A new alphabet for the writing of Uzbek is adopted.

The Linguist’s Calendar: September 1

Randy LaPolla

September 1 

1904: Helen Keller graduates cum laude from Radcliffe College at age 24. She is, so far as I know, the first tactile signer to do so. Her reading was done through Braille script, and the lectures were spelled into her hand by her assistant. After graduation, Keller became a well-known socialist agitator.

2000: Randy LaPolla gets a grant to compile a dictionary of the Chinese language Rawang.