Fieldwork and the movies (1): Indiana Jones

Back in February I was part of a panel at the Rice Linguistics Society meeting on linguistic theory and fieldwork and their relations. My talk was comparative in nature and focused on the contribution to the field of certain important figures; Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Gregory House. Over the next few weeks I will [...]

Word of the year

I was pretty uninspired by this year’s word of the year candidates, so I’m going to be proactive about next year’s word.I have a candidate for a new word of the year, one that I made up a while ago. It will be of use for anyone in the NE US at the moment. It’s
snow [...]

LSA Bloggers report

LanguageLog unfortunately seem to have been too busy basking in the glory of their award to hang out with the rest of the linguabloggers, but we had a fun lunch as usual despite their absence. Featured topics included the Word of the Year (and the fact that a fair number of the nominations were phrasal, [...]

Language of the week: the Niger-Congo language Basque

No comment except to thank Glossographia for the link.

Australian folk language policy (2):

Australia prides itself on its pluralism (any other readers here grow up with We are one, but we are many…?) in many facets of life, but not in language. Why is this? Why is Australia apparently so threatened by multilingualism? (I find this genuinely puzzling, maybe some anthropologist can explain it…) 
To all those people who [...]

Australian folk language policy (1): the failure of monolingualism

When Kevin Rudd came to power nearly a year ago, many of us linguists thought we might get a better deal for language in Australia. After all, it’s not every day that monolingual Australia elects a prime minister who is fluent in Mandarin. I think some of us assumed that Rudd’s sensitivity to multilingualism might [...]

my inner Turkologist

Friends will know that I am a closet Turkologist, and I had occasion to check out Yale library’s comparative Turkic grammar collection yesterday, and of course to compare it to Harvard’s. Harvard’s is highly oriented towards German Turkology, although there’s a fair amount in English too.
The location cheat sheet at the front of the stacks [...]