Mr. Verb

Some readers of this little corner of the cyberverse may be interested in SayWhat: The people's video dictionary. Its founder describes it as a video version of the Urban Dictionary, which seems true enough.

Would be nice to have a little info about who the speakers are, e.g. where they're from and date of the recording.

Does anybody besides me remember Lexical Morphology?  I guess I'm thinking about it because I just finished teaching intro to morphology.  Just heard this on the radio yesterday:  "... a very high uninsurance rate" - !!!  Classic bracketing paradox:  -ance has to be level 1 (luxury ~ luxuriance; predominate ~ predominance); un- is level 2.  But once -ance attaches, you have a noun, and besides Un-Cola and a few other advertising terms, un- doesn't attach to nouns.

Slight digression:  which un- is this?!?  It doesn't seem like the un- that attaches to verbs because it doesn't mean reversal of action.  So it has to be the one that attaches to adjectives.  But of course insurance isn't an adjective either.  Some weird back-formation from uninsured?

Yikes.  Morphology.

PS Google search for uninsurance:  91,600 results.  The world has gone mad - mad, I tell you!

Need some good news? Then check out this story. The Dictionary of American Regional English is STILL surviving for now. I mean, it's to the point of funding for a few months driven by a GoFundMe campaign, but as our University is being plowed under and the field we've grown in is being salted, I take real inspiration in a small unit that is still alive on the softest of soft money.

If you can, PLEASE help them out. Do what you gotta do: check the couch cushions for change, sell some plasma and pawn your banjo. Just help these people out.

And as it happened, a member of Team Verb just reported by email that he'd had a discussion this weekend with somebody about the use of 'mango' for 'green pepper, bell pepper' in Ohio. DARE, of course, has the answer: The term is actually used for a whole set of kinds of peppers, and apparently tied to pickled versions of them at some point: "the East Indian mango (Mangifera indica) was at first known only as a pickle; the “mangoes” illustrated here were made in imitation of that imported delicacy". How cool is that?

See the DARE map below.

Been a brutal year here in Wisconsin, as the state and the university are being steadily and intentionally destroyed.

So, some good news is welcome: Paul Reed, one of the rising stars in the fields of American dialectology and sociolinguistics, is back at blogging, here. Check it out and keep an eye on his work ... you'll be glad you did.

And it does look like Wisconsin could use some help in the University challenge.

One of our contributors noted a while back the discovery of new Gothic manuscript material (here).  The scholars who've done the deciphering and interpretation contacted Team Verb and offered to send us copies of a couple of their articles on the subject, which have arrived:

• Finazzi, Rosa Bianca & Paola Tornaghi. 2014. Alcune riflessioni sul palinsesto gotico-latino di bologna. Intorno alle saghe norrene, ed. by Carla Falluomini. 229-265. Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Osro.
• Finazzi, Rosa Bianca & Paola Tornaghi. 2014. Gothica Bononiensia: A new document under linguistic and philological analysis. IJGLSA. 19.1-56.

As the length of the articles suggests, these are meaty, detailed analysis of the small amount of material found, including painstaking comparison to previously known Gothic material. The authors make the simple but important point that while one could before doubt how much of the bible had been translated into Gothic, we've now got evidence that at least a lot of the Old Testament was translated.

There's all kinds of stuff in there that specialists can go to town on — like new evidence for productivity of some prefixes (in the Italian article) — but I found it pretty striking that there is material is very relevant to Gothic phonology even, with new evidence on syllabification based on where line breaks are written, and hints on other matters, like a spelling for expected <ϸs>.

But above all, how tantalizing is it to think that the corpus of a language like Gothic is not actually closed …

Very nice!

My dad has had to listen to me talk about linguistics for over 30 years now, but the other night he asked me what linguists say when people ask why it's important to maintain, revitalize, and reclaim languages.  It was probably on his mind because of McWhorter's recent column on the topic.  I told Mr. Verb about the conversation and he said I should post something about it.  I certainly don't pretend that my answer is anything new - lots of people have said this - but it's worth repeating.

So first, there's the linguistcentric reason: if all these languages die, what the heck are we going to do with ourselves?  But only linguists care about that one.

Second, people often say that languages express unique worldviews ... well, yes and no.  I do agree with McWhorter that this can lead to the "when a language dies, a culture dies with it" mentality - which I've always found quite offensive towards groups whose languages are dormant.  Having met a lot of incredible language activists at the 2013 DC Breath of Life whose languages are no longer spoken (or just beginning to be spoken again), I can tell you that they are totally still culturally connected.  (See here for the 2015 BoL.)

But the third reason is social justice: colonization has caused loss after loss after loss.  If I can put my energy into trying to prevent a further loss, then I should do it.  As Crawford (1995) put it, "After all, language death does not happen in privileged communities.  It happens to the dispossessed and disempowered, peoples who most need their cultural resources to survive."  I've always thought that was such a good quote.

P.S. "Linguistic Justice is Social Justice" - see Colleen Fitzgerald's excellent post on this topic too.

Somebody just told me about looking through the lists of original members of the Linguistic Society of America — they'd talked to someone at another university who'd actually investigated this in detail for their institution. The list of original members is published in the first issue of Language, 1925, and includes everyone who had joined before the end of March of that year. I thought, "oh, great, I'll write a little quiz post asking who can guess the Wisconsin foundation members". Well, I checked out the list and the Wisconsin folks are probably not familiar to a lot of people, even those who know the history of linguistics on campus.

• Prof. A. G. Laird, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. (Greek)
• Dr. Raphael Levy, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisc. (Romance Langs.) 
• Prof. Antonio G. Solalinde, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisc. (Spanish) 
• Miss Else M. Saleski, Madison, Wis. (German, Univ. of Wisconsin) 

These were important figures on campus. Laird was editor of the Classical Journal 1907-1909, and Solalinde directed the dissertation of Lloyd Kasten, later a key figure in linguistics and philology on campus. Saleski, who went on to teach at Downer College (now UW–Milwaukee) and elsewhere, is mentioned in Julia Falk's Women, Language and Linguistics.

There's a great new project on the development of English in Chicago. It's the Chicago Dialect Project. Check it out on Facebook here. And here's a link to the blog associated with it, which doesn't have much on it yet but will.

Say what you will about the Bears and the Cubs, they have a pretty interesting dialect down there in that part of Flatlandia.

Hello one and all, and happy new year!
The Sociolinguistic Events Calendar (http://www.baal.org.uk/slxevents.html) is now bustling with events across the world, and has also been linked to by a number of event organisers, including NWAV: http://linguistics.utoronto.ca/nwav44/. Meanwhile the synopsis on academia.edu is apparently in the top 3% of viewed pages this month (http://academia.edu/9619924). My co-calendariser - Jonathan Kasstan - and I are overwhelmingly honoured by all this success, acclaim and esteem, which has helped us keep plugging away at it, but... we are kinda getting a little overworked with it all. Help us! We're looking to recruit volunteers to help keep this resource going, since it's not altogether clear how long we can keep going just the two of us.

We're hoping to gather a team of about 5-7, thinking that one person could cover the various calls that come up on each day of the week. The commitment per person would be about half an hour a day (plus an hour or so of initial training on how events are formatted in the calendar). The daily workload is manageable, but pretty constant - although I suppose it'll vary depending on the time of year (there probably aren't so many calls in the summer for example).

Please please get in touch if you'd like to step up to this exciting level of responsibility and celebrity :)
Dave

--Dr. Dave SayersSenior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, UKHonorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK (2009-2015)[email protected] | http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers 

Pass the word ...

Next Thursday afternoon at the Portland meeting of the LSA, there will be a special session on the Publishing Process, cosponsored by the Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals and the Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (Troy Messick, Chair). There will be brief remarks by a set of editors, but most of the event will be a chance to ask questions about publishing in linguistics journals. 

Whether you can be there or not, you can participate … via comments on the LSA's facebook page or via twitter with the hashtag #LSApubs.  Materials from the session will be posted online afterwards.

People are talking today, rightly, about John McWhorter's piece in the NY Times, "Why save a language?".  But a similar question is treated beautifully in a piece by Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins and colleagues (University of Victoria) in the Times Colonist, "Language a strong symbol of cultural identity". It treats revitalization efforts in British Columbia. Here's the punchline:

Supporting the health of these languages is … one way to support and strengthen the well-being of individuals and communities, and to support education and economies.

Language is, in the relevant sense here, very local, and the focused perspective of this piece makes it particularly valuable. But especially relevant for us here in Wisconsin is the partnerships between linguists and communities in revitalization work.

It's important to have good answers when the why-save-a-language stuff comes up (and it does), but the hard work on the ground here is far more important.