The Linguist’s Calendar: November 7

Franklin D Roosevelt

November 7
1942: A US president gives a speech in a language other than English for the first time. Franklin D Roosevelt addresses the Vichy troops in North Africa in French, urging them not to resist allied landings and to fight the Nazis.

1970: At a Phnom Penh conference, it is suggested that the “excellent linguistic rules” of Khmer are far superior to those of any other human language.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 6

Finland

November 6

Finland Swedish day: Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority celebrates itself.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 5

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky

November 5

1881: Ferdinand de Saussure starts teaching Comparative Germanistics at the École des Hautes-Études in Paris.

1896: Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is born. Vygotsky left a remarkable imprint on the study of child language acquisition.

1995: The Kasbe (Luo) language of Cameroon falls into obsolescence, as its last speaker, an old man known as Bogon, dies.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 4

Colorless Green Ideas
Sleep Furiously

November 4

1970: At the age of 13, the most well-documented language-deprived child, “Genie,” is discovered and taken care of in Arcadia, California.
 
1992: A new Lithuanian regulation states that place-names in the country should be in Lithuanian.
 
1994: First public preview of the Human Language trilogy—a film series on linguistics intended for laymen (but with a heavy Chomskyan bias!). On this day, the first part, called Colorless Green Ideas, is shown at Boston University.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 3

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

November 3

1891: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and Prince of France, dies.

1929: Death of Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, forerunner of the structuralist school, and accredited with launching the term “phoneme”.

1967: A young Háj Ross, clad hippie-style, protests against napalm production, a picture of which winds up in Time Magazine.

1998: Alaska makes English its official language of government despite protests.

2000: Death of Charles Hockett.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 2

November 2

For Croatians, this is the Anniversary of the Croatian Language, commemo-rating the orthography of Ivan Broz.

1949: Timothy Evans of London "confesses” to having murdered his wife and child, for which crime he was hanged. Linguistic evidence later casts doubt on the confession leading ultimately to a posthumous pardon.

2003: McDonald’s demands that ‘McJob’ be removed from the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The word has come to be applied to low-paid, unqualified employment, but McDonald’s claims copyright, having registered McJobs as the name of its internal training program.

The Linguist’s Calendar: November 1

November 1

1928: The Turkish parliament passes law 1353 on the use of the Latin alphabet in Turkey. This is actually but a recognition of the state of affairs—Turkish authorities have in fact used Latin script for more than a month.

1941: The American Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center begins teaching. The institute subsequently developed into the world’s largest foreign language institute.

1997: The most extensive description ever of the artificial language Lojban, The Complete Lojban Language, by John Woldemar Cowan is published.

2004: The Michel Thomas Language Center reports—not unexpectedly—that multilinguals are better paid than monolinguals. More interestingly, it also suggests that speakers of more than one language are perceived as sexier.