Thanks to all those, either in the comments or elsewhere, who helped with additional suggestions for my Lexiculture project for my undergraduate course this fall. I now have over 50 words on my long-list for the students to choose from, which should be enough, but more ideas are, of course, welcome, especially if I decide I want to assign this project multiple years.
Author: schrisomalis
Anthropologist, Wayne State University. Professional numbers guy. Rare Words: http://phrontistery.info. Blog: http://glossographia.com.
The language politics of math and maths
Combining two of my favourite passions, mathematics and linguistics, in a fascinating social analysis of prescriptivism, national identity, and scientific vocabulary, is this video from the Numberphile Youtube channel, entitled, ‘Is it Math or Maths?’
Numberphile regularly features short, popular videos about interesting mathematical stuff, mostly at a layperson’s level. This video features Dr Lynne Murphy, who teaches lexical semantics at the University of Sussex, and blogs about American/British English differences at Separated by a Common Language.
For the record, as a Canadian, I say ‘math’ but I also say ‘zed’, because that’s the way we roll.
Light Warlpiri: not a new mixed language
Today the science news outlets are abuzz with the claim that a newly identified mixed language has been identified in Australia, Light Warlpiri, based on a press release from the Linguistic Society of America, which is reporting a new article by Carmel O’Shannessy entitled “The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language”. The article in the Examiner is the best of a mixed bunch, but you need to overlook the unfortunate header describing it as the ‘newest language on earth’, which isn’t even remotely true. But as we’ll see, even the more modest claims in the press release and news articles are misleading.
Warlpiri itself is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in northern Australia by several thousand people, and is one of the better-known and less threatened (though still endangered) languages of Australia. Light Warlpiri is spoken by about 300 Warlpiri people in one community, Lajamanu; it mixes English, Kriol, and Warlpiri, with an English verb structure and a Warlpiri and Kriol noun structure, and some elements all its own. Mixed languages are not creoles (take note) – without going into a long digression, creoles emerge in situations where speakers do not have full access to one of the source languages. Mixed languages are created in highly bilingual situations – most speakers of Light Warlpiri also speak Warlpiri, Kriol, or English (in some combination). Mixed languages can arise (which is what seems to have happened here) when code-switching (which happens in nearly every bilingual speech community) becomes formalized as a set of linguistic patterns.
However, beware! Light Warlpiri has had a Wikipedia page since 2008 , and Carmel O’Shannessy first identified it in an article ‘Light Warlpiri: A New Language‘, back in 2005 in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and identified it as a mixed language. According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited 40 times to date. This is hardly a new discovery. I get why O’Shannessy is still calling it a ‘new mixed language’ in the article – it’s new-ish, in the sense that it’s only been around for roughly 40 years, and its discovery is new-ish, in that it’s only been known to linguists for fewer than 10 years. I’m trying not to be pedantic here: it’s not like this has been known for decades, so in some sense it is ‘new’. But reading the press on this, you’d think that no one had ever heard of Light Warlpiri until today, which is totally false.
O’Shannessy’s new article, which is the one that the LSA press release is touting, is a fuller description of the grammar and history and identifies a new class of auxiliary verbs and some other features in Light Warlpiri that differ in structure from any of the source languages. This is pretty neat, and is certainly a new discovery. There may be some broader implications for understanding the development of certain features cross-linguistically, as the press release suggests. But this is not a new language, nor is it newly discovered, nor newly identified as a mixed language: the article is not making these claims. In this sense, the LSA press release is quite misleading, and the news articles that are based on it are spreading this misinformation.
Lexiculture redux: new adventures in teaching linguistic anthropology
Just about three years ago, while teaching my undergraduate Language and Culture course, I ended up poking around the etymology of the word honk and turned up some neat things, leading to the germ of an idea for a student project that I ended up calling Lexiculture. That term, I did a test run with my students, using the word ‘chairperson’ as a really interesting in-class exercise, and then got to work putting it together as a full class assignment in the fall of 2010. This was considerably advanced about a month later at the Language, Culture, and History conference in Wyoming, organized by Leila Monaghan, and discussions I had with many of the participants there about how to think about the linguistic anthropology of English words: moving beyond lexicography and etymology towards a real integrated approach to language and culture using words.
When I ran this in 2010, I introduced Lexiculture using an in-class exercise where we jointly researched the surprising history of the local term Michigan left. I then put together a list of projects for them to choose from (or let them choose their own) and set them to work. I was working under a few impediments: I had never done this before, so I was sort of muddling along. I didn’t give the students quite enough guidance to undertake research projects with good results. At the time, I couldn’t find a good text to help the students conceptually or methodologically. So it turned out to be OK, and we got some good results (I especially liked student papers written on the words wife-beater, bitchin’, and ketchup/catsup) but it wasn’t a complete success. In 2011 I was on sabbatical so I didn’t teach that course, and in 2012 (my last year prior to submitting my tenure file, which is happening now), I decided to focus on some research projects (wisely, I think), and to make the course a bit more traditional.
Well, now it’s 2013, and my tenure file will be set in stone by September, and instead of kicking up my feet and phoning in the last 30 years of my teaching career, I figure it’s time to dust off the notes and put Lexiculture back together. I’ve had the great fortune to have found a wonderful short, inexpensive text: How to Read a Word
So here are a few of the words / topics on my list for this year:
Information Superhighway: I want to know how this transformed from an index of the speaker’s technological knowhow in the early 1990s, to a sign of outmodedness a decade later.
Stalemate: I want to know by what process this chess term became figuratively adopted for a situation where victory is impossible.
Uppity: What is the metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of this word in, by, and around African Americans, both in the 19th century and today?
I have a longer list, but I need more, and here’s how you could help. I’m looking for more English words or phrases that students could research and that could help illuminate something of social significance. Some basic requirements:
– The topics need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800, the full-text searchable databases / corpora that the students will need are relatively few and inaccessible.
– While the papers will focus on single words or short phrases (i.e. the sort of things that can be researched readily without too much training), I’m not just interested in etymology, but rather, in words or phrases that have cultural significance or whose contextual importance has changed over time.
– The words/phrases could be primarily analyzable quantitatively (using corpora, Google Ngram Viewer, etc.), qualitatively (broader social analysis or close reading of specific textual examples) or both.
– The words/phrases can’t have been over-researched – e.g., tweet and LOL and cool have been researched in such detail that there’s too much risk of plagiarism and not much interest in it for me.
Any ideas for suitable words or phrases would be appreciated in the comments below. So tell me: do you have a great idea for some lexiculture?
Ward Goodenough (1919-2013), RIP
Ward Goodenough, whose contributions to anthropological linguistics and cognitive anthropology influenced all of us who followed in his footsteps, died a week ago. You can read his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, or see tributes from Rex at Savage Minds and Mark Liberman at Language Log. I didn’t know Goodenough, although I do know some of his students, so I’ll let others speak about his influence. New students in the field will probably never hear of him, alas, except perhaps through his now-famous definition of culture as “the things one needs to know in order to meet the standards of others” (1981: 50). I’d also direct you to his short monograph, Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology
Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1970. Description and comparison in cultural anthropology. Chicago: Aldine.
Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1981. Culture, language, and society. Menlo Park, Calif: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.
Glossographia 