This week: Julia Hirschberg and Trace Foundation lectures

This week is just packed with linguistics goodness: Julia Hirschberg will be speaking this Friday, 3/26, and there is a series of lectures at the Trace Foundation downtown, starting on Friday and continuing on Saturday. First, Professor Hirschberg’s lecture: Friday, 3/26 3pm Hamilton 709 Knowing When to Speak: Turn Management in Spoken Dialogue Systems Julia [...]

Overview

Dear linguists, Here’s wishing you a delightful spring break, wherever you’re going (or staying)! For your reading pleasure, here’s an overview of upcoming events: March 26-27: The Trace Foundation: “Minority Languages in Today’s Global Society: Perspectives on Language Standardization.” The lecture will focus on Tibetan, Kurdish, and Hungarian. March 26: Professor Julia Hirschberg, Computer Science [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

SAIVUS

SAIVUS is an online non-profit organization that teaches Native American languages currently spoken within the United States. Founded in 2008 by Mathias Bullerman, a student linguist at Rutgers University, it provides comprehensive grammar tutorials, word lists, practice exercises and other materials vital to modern language survival and health in order to help Native American people [...]

Another update on The Linguists

As previously mentioned, this documentary is screening at Rutgers University this Saturday (April 25), and will be followed by a discussion with one of the linguists from the film. But, for those of you who can’t make the screening, the full film is also available to watch online (and free!) here.

The Linguists

Indie documentary The Linguists chronicles the global adventures of David Harrison and Greg Anderson, as they travel around the world racing against time to document vanishing languages. In the rugged landscapes of Siberia, India, and Bolivia, their resolve is tested by institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest. Click here for the Linguists website and the [...]