The Linguist's Calendar: January 31

Mustafa Kemal teaches the latin alphabet

January 31 

1932: The final step in Turkey’s transition from Arabic to Latin writing is taken.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 30

Benjamin Lee Whorf

January 30

1940: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article “Science and linguistics” to Technological Review.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 29

Ascensión Solorsano
de Cervantes

January 29  

1635: Cardinal Richelieu founds the Académie Française to safeguard the alleged purity of the French language.
 
1930: Death of Ascensión Solorsano de Cervantes (aged 74), the last speaker of Mutsun, a variety of Costanoan once spoken just south of San Francisco.
 
1999: Portugal passes a law recognizing the linguistic rights of its Mirandese-speaking community.
 
2003: After being threatened by a boycott, Microsoft Corporation agrees to publish an edition of the Office software in Nynorsk, the other standardized variety of Norwegian.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 28

Michael Ventris

January 28
 
1951: Michael Ventris produces the first in a series of Work Notes, in which he describes his progress on the decipherment of Linear B.
 
1993: Puerto Rico accords official status to both English and Spanish.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 27

Bertrand Barère

January 27   

1794: Bertrand Barère presents a report on languages to the Revolutionary Convention in Paris, in which he argues in favor of a French-only policy: “The first two National Assemblies have already spent far too much on translations of laws into the various tongues of France. As if it were up to us to maintain the barbarous jargons and crude dialects that cannot but serve the cause of fanatics and counter-revolutionary elements!”
 
1970: Founding of the Sociedad Española de Lingüística.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 26

Anti-Hindi Agitation of 1965

January 26 

1850: First German-language daily newspaper in the USA begins publication.

1884: Birthday of Edward Sapir.

1965: Rioting erupts in India after Hindi having been declared nation’s official language.

2005: In a refugee camp in southern Sweden, 20 Liberians riot on realizing that they have come to a country where English is not spoken natively. “We can’t learn Swedish”, they say, and demand being taken to the USA.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 25

Karel Čapek

January 25 

1921: Karel Čapek’s play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) premieres in Prague, and includes the first use of the word robot.
 
1939: Birth of controversial Australianist Bob Dixon (in Gloucester, England).
 
1967: From this day, Swedish laws no longer contain plural forms of verbs, long since absent from spoken language.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 24

Luxembourg Parliament building

January 24 

1984: New Luxembourg language law recognizes three languages: Luxembourgeois, French, and German.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 23

Svenska Dagbladet logo

January 23  

1948: Swedish gets a new word as Prof. Ture Johannisson proposes in Svenska Dagbladet that the shorter ‘plast" be used instead of the English loan "plastic."
 
1998: The German government recognizes four official minority languages: Danish, Frisian, Sorbian, and Romani.
 
1998: After having been presented with strong linguistic evidence, Ted Kaczynski confesses to being the infamous Unabomber terrorist.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 22

Morris Swadesh

January 22
 
1909: Morris Swadesh is born in Holyoke.
 
2000: Turkey signs the European Minority Language Convention.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 21

Flag of Equatorial Guinea

January 21   

1969: The IASS-AIS (International Association for Semiotic Studies—Association Internationale de Sémiotique) is officially established in Paris.
 
1998: Equatorial Guinea adopts French as its second official language.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 20

Saxony Government Palace

January 20  

1999: The German state of Saxony confirms the right to use Sorbian, in public as well as in private.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 19

Victoria Fromkin

January 19   

1939: The first session of what became known as “the Monster Study” is held by Mary Tudor of the University of Iowa. The experiment aims at making orphan children stutter in order to test a theory that stuttering is caused by people in the environment.

1999: At its 656th meeting, the European Union Committee of Ministers decides to officially proclaim 2001 the “European year of languages”.

2000: American linguist Victoria Fromkin draws her last breath.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 18

Lucy

January 18 

1779: Birth of Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget’s Thesaurus.

1965: Birth of Lucy, the chimp taught American Sign Language by Roger Fouts.

1968: In a letter to Noam Chomsky, Jim McCawley assures the addressee that “There is no truth to the nasty rumor going around that the CIA is subsidizing my research in hopes of thereby diverting your energies from [protesting against] the [Vietnam] war”. 
 
2000: The commission on “Japan’s Goals in the 21st century,” a consultative body for the prime minister suggests that English be given official status in Japan. Not unexpectedly, the proposal turns out to be highly controversial.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 17

Charles Hockett

January 17 


1837: Birth of François Lenormant, the first (at least in quite some time) to understand the Akkadian inscriptions from Mesopotamia.
 
1916: Charles Hockett is born.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 16

Queen Isabella

January 16

1492: The first grammar of Spanish is presented to Queen Isabella.
 
1907: Saussure begins his course in General Linguistics at Geneva University.
 
1952: New Dutch Bible translation is completed.
 
1991: The Algerian government outlaws the use of French in official contexts.
 
1995: New Hawaiian constitution declares that both English and Hawaiian be regarded as official, with English, of course, being slightly more so . . .

The Linguist's Calendar: January 15

Jorge Sampaio

January 15
 
1961: Knut Bergsland and Hans Vogt submit their classic article “On the Validity of Glotto­chrono­logy” to Current Anthropology.
 
1999: Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio promulgates a law stipulating that Mirandese (which one might argue is a dialect of Spanish) be the official language in the region of north-eastern Portugal where it is spoken.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 14

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr

January 14

1912: Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes extraordinary academy member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

1987: In Seoul, 21 year old Linguistics student Park Chong-Choi is suffocated during police interrogation for alleged pro-communist activities. Understandably, this leads to the country’s biggest demonstrations for six years, involving hundreds of new police arrests.

2001: 9th Inuktitut Language Week celebrated throughout Nunavut Jan. 14–20.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 13

Paul Passy

January 13

1795: In the USA, a parliamentary vote gives rise to the urban legend that German was about to become the country’s official language.

1859: Birth of Paul Passy, French linguist and phonetician, and—not least—the founder of the International Phonetic Association.

1877: A young Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure gives his first talk to the prestigious Société de linguistique de Paris.

1900: Emperor Franz Joseph decrees that German be the language of the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. 

1926: Roman Jakobson makes his first presentation at the Prague Linguistics Circle on the subject of “sound laws and the teleological criterion”.

1943: Spanish Vasconist Koldo (Luís) Mitxelena is released on probation from his political imprisonment.

2000: Death of Alvin Liberman.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 12

Mary Haas

January 12

1912: Birthday of American linguist Mary Haas.

2000: The First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa begins at the University of Cape Town.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 11

French parliament

January 11

1951: Law no. 51-46, better known as the loi Deixonne is passed in France. Concerning the teaching of minority languages, its aim is first and foremost to promote French, though it also speaks of protecting regional languages.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 10

Erwin Reifler

January 10

1846: August “Wave Theory” Schleicher defends his PhD thesis in Bonn.

1950: American sinologist Erwin Reifler produces a 55-page study on machine translation, in which he for the first time formulates the concepts of pre- and post-editing.

1963: In Oregon, a Mr Wolverton Orton dies, taking the Takelma language with him into the grave. A remarkable aspect of his language was the grammaticalization of the word for ‘vagina’ into a preposition.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 9

Togo

January 9

1905: Count Zech, governor of Togo, forbids education in any non-native language other than German.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 8

Victor

January 8  

1800: The language-deprived “wild child” Victor, found in southern France, is transferred to a M Vidal in St-Sernin,where he stays for less than a month.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 7

Ben-Yehuda

January 7  
1858: Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman, better known as Ben-Yehuda and the reviver of Hebrew, is born in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky.
 
1927: Never before has spoken language crossed such a vast distance—the first transatlantic phone call is made between New York and London.
 
1954: At the IBM headquarters in New York, state-of-the art machine translation is demonstrated, as a computer manages to achieve a somewhat crude translation of a number of Russian sentences into English.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 6

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr

January 6
 
1865: Birth of Russian linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 5

Ivar Aasen

January 5 

1945: At the opening session of the 19th Annual YIVO Conference in New York, Max Weinreich presents the paper which, when published, contains the first known use in print of the classic aphorism A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot—i.e., a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
 
1996: A monument to Ivar Aasen, the creator of Nynorsk, is unveiled near the central railway station in Oslo.
 
2001: Four people are charged with public order offenses after a rally in Cardiff by the Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 4

Jacob Grimm

January 4  

1785: Jacob Grimm, one of the Grimm brothers famous for their fairy tales, but also a linguist, is born in Hanau (Germany).
 
1813: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and prince of France is born.
 
1894: In a letter to Antoine Meillet, Saussure underscores the importance of politics and external history in historical linguistics.
 
2002: At its San Francisco meeting, the American Dialect Society votes daisy cutter (a large bomb that explodes a meter or so above the ground) as the euphemism of the year.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 3

January 3 
 
1938: BBC begins broadcasting in foreign languages for the first time. The emissions are in Arabic, and directed towards the Middle East.
 
1960: Italian presidential decree no. 103 permits the official use of French, German and Slovenian in parts of Italy.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 2

Charles Lindbergh

January 2 

1935: The trial begins in New Jersey of Bruno Hauptmann, accused of kidnapping and murdering the 19-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh, the US aviator. Found guilty, he was executed in April of the following year. The case against Hauptmann included (much questioned) linguistic evidence.

The Linguist's Calendar: January 1

Seren Gomer

January 1 

1814: The first Welsh language newspaper, the Seren Gomer, begins publication.

1824: The Camp Street Theatre becomes the first to offer plays in English in New Orleans.

1997: A new South African constitution comes into force, making South Africa the first country in the world with eleven official languages.