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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 31

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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 30

Louis Hjelmslev

May 30 

1965: Death of Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 29

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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 28

May 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.

 

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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 26

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.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 25

Minsk, Belarus

May 25

1917: The town of Minsk in Belarus gives official recognition to Yiddish. The special status of Yiddish in the republic is later manifested in the coat of arms, which bears the inscription “Workers of the world, unite” in Russian, Belarusan, Polish, and Yiddish.

1925: Otto Jespersen gives his last lecture at the University of Copenhagen.

1948: Andrew Booth’s computer intended for machine translation experiments is de­mon­stra­ted to re­pre­sen­ta­tives of the Rockefeller foundation, which finances the project.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 24

Fidelia Fielding

May 24

The Day of Slavic Writing is a national holiday in Bulgaria, to commemorate the invention of St Cyril and St Method in the 9th century.

1873: In a talk before the Société de Linguistique de Paris, A Dufriche-Desgenettes makes the first documented use of the word phonème.

1917: A Russian orthography reform is officially accepted by a Special Meeting of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

1936: At the Shantok Burial Ground in Uncasville, Connecticut, a monument is erected to Fidelia Fielding (1827–1908), the last speaker of Pequot-Mohegan.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 23

Big Bill Neidjie

May 23  

1947: Typologist Bernard Comrie is born in Sunderland, Britain.
 

1998: Founding of the Linguistics Society of Taiwan.

1999: Closing of the first international conference on language teacher education at the University of Minnesota.

2002: The Australian language Gagadu vanishes as the only remaining speaker Big Bill Neidjie draws his last breath.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 22

Zellig Harris

May 22 

1992: Chomsky’s mentor Zellig Harris dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 21

Monument to the
Estonian Language

May 21

1994: Solemn inauguration of the monument to the Estonian language in Kadrina, Estonia.

2002: Joseph Mesa is convicted for the murder of two of his classmates. He is sentenced despite his plea of insanity, according to which the murders were inspired by 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: May 20

Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn)

May 20

Eliza Doolittle Day, encourages “proper use” of language.

1980: Francophone Québec votes in favor of remaining a Canadian province.

1999: Opening of the first international conference on language teacher education at the University of Minnesota.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 19

May 19 

1859: Paul “Broca’s area” Broca holds his first meeting together with the Société d’Anthropologie, which he has just founded.

1965: Publication of Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

 

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 18

May 18 

1842: At 1 p.m. in the rooms of the Statistical Society, 4 St Martin’s Place, London, the Philological Society is founded "for the investigation of the Structure, the Affinities, and the History of Languages; and the Philological Illustration of the Classical Writers of Greece and Rome."

2001: The “Plain Language Group,” appointed by the Swedish government, arranges a conference on the theme “Plain Language Opens Sweden.”

 

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 17

Mary Haas

May 17 

1996: Death of American linguist Mary Haas.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 16

Eugene, Oregon

May 16

1998: The first American “Linguistic Olympics” takes place in Eugene, Oregon. The competition had been held in Russia since 1965.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 15

Carl Wernicke

May 15 

1848: Carl Wernicke—who later identifies “Wernicke’s area,” an important language center of the brain—is born.

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 14

Swedish parliament building

May 14 

Sign Language Day in Sweden, commemorating the official recognition of Swedish Sign by the parliament in 1981.

1978: The replacement of English he and she with an epicene third person pronoun is much discussed among the pages of the New York Times. Most noteworthy of today’s contributions is that from Lawrence Ross of Huntington, New York, who offers sap (from homo sapiens).

The Linguist’s Calendar: May 13

Franz Boas

May 13 

1876: Ferdinand de Saussure joins the Société de Linguistique de Paris.

1942: Franz Boas gives his last public lecture.

2000: First international conference on Kurdish linguistics kicks off at the University of Kiel, Germany.