Events this week (4/26 – 4/30)

This week is jam-packed with linguistic goodness! A quick synopsis: Wednesday, 4/28 8pm, 716 Philosophy Hall: Come discuss, debate, and meet new people at an open forum on Daniel Everett’s controversial research on the Piraha language, presented in conjunction with the Philosophy Forum. More information here. Thursday, 4/29 4pm, 1512 SIPA: NYU’s David Poeppel on [...]

4/30: Oscar Lee Symposium

Also on Friday the 30th: OSCAR LEE SYMPOSIUM OF UNDERGRADUATE EAST ASIAN STUDIES: A half-day conference featuring undergraduate research and discussion on East Asia Friday, April 30 1-4 PM KENT 403 PANELS: 1:15 PM – (Mis)Communication: Media and Audience in Japan and China Mia Lewis, “”Painting Worlds with Word: Ateji in CLAMP’s Manga” Sayuri Shimoda, “Thought Control [...]

Hanging from the language tree

A recent issue of the Columbia Magazine has an article on Columbia professor Herb Terrace and his work on communication and cognition in chimpanzees. Terrace is best known for his role in the Nim Chimpsky experiments, which sought to settle the question of whether chimps could acquire human language. From the article: Terrace, a young [...]

Bridging ten millenia

Slate ran an article a few days ago on an interesting linguistic problem: how do we communicate with distant future generations? The problem is simple enough: every country in the world that has the resources and the expertise to harness the power of the atom (whether to produce energy or to build bombs) is churning [...]

Language families, human families

Razib Khan over at ScienceBlogs has an excellent post today on the relationship between population genetics and the spread of languages around the globe. He gives a wide background of the anthropological, linguistic and biological research behind what we know about the evolution of the world’s languages. Razib quotes a 1997 paper by L. L. [...]

Links

This article from the BBC showcases a gadget that seems almost too good to be true: a pair of glasses that translates overheard speech and projects subtitles directly on to the viewer’s retina. NEC said the Tele Scouter was intended to be a business tool that could aid sales staff who would have information about [...]

Claude Piron on Esperanto

Claude Piron, psychotherapist, professor, prolific author, and former UN and WHO translator, shares some of his experiences in international communication and discusses the international language Esperanto. Thanks to Brian Barker for the link. Want to learn Esperanto? Find out more here, here, and here.

The death of language?

BBC News reports on the state of endangered languages around the world: an estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by [...]

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

An article by Columbia professor John McWhorter appears in the Fall 2009 edition of the World Affairs Journal. “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English” takes a broad view of the process of language death and the rise of English as a dominant global tongue. From the article: “…the going idea among linguists and anthropologists [...]

The View from Hamilton 7: inaugural post!

Olá a todos! Today’s post is the first installment of our new series, The View from Hamilton 7. Starting now, TVFH7 will bring you the latest linguistics news, personal commentary, travel stories, book reports, research analysis and more – all reported, written and researched by CLS members. If you are interested in contributing to The [...]