Category: Linguistics

Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 2 (Spring 2010)

The links below lead to abstracts of papers from the 2010 edition of my senior/graduate course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are junior scholars at Wayne State University, including both undergraduate and graduate students. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at the critical juncture over the next week, when the authors will be making final revisions to their papers.

Anton Anderssen: Exceptional Musical Ability within a Framework of Metalinguistical Ideologies about Swedish Language
Ami Attee: I See What You’re Saying: The Communicative Functions of Hand Gestures
Brandon Davis: Language Variation: A Case Study of the Island of Tanna, Vanuatu
Andrea DiMuzio: Writing History in Formative Mesoamerica: Connecting History and Social Stratification in Four Ancient Scripts
Kate Frederick: Losing Power: The Effect of Language Loss in Native American Communities
Margaret Gale: It’s About Time
Mark Hill: The Implications of Gender in Patient-Physician Discourse
Emily Jelsomeno: Bitch, Nigger and Gay: Exclusive Language? The Semantic Shift of Pejorative Words and Reclamation
Frankie Johnson: Gender-Specific Honorifics in Japanese: A Comparative Study
K.A.L.: Dubbing and Subtitling in Europe: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Cultural Implications
R. LaPorte: Bosnian Language and Ethnic Identity
Kathryn Meloche: On and About Glass Bottles—the effects of technology on the evolution of bottle language
Cherry Meyer: The De-centering of Standard English through Indigenous Postcolonial Poetry
Evelyn Postell-Franklin: Mixed Messages: discourse trends in the hip-hop era
Melinda Pye: Infant Baby Talk: Is it an Effective Device?
Georgia Richardson-Melody: A Worldview Lost in Translation: Issues with Translating Ayurvedic Science into a Biomedical Worldview
Jennifer Rivera: American Sign Language and the influences of Computer Mediated Communication
Leah R. Shapardanis: What do whining dogs have to do with universal grammar?
Graham Sheckels: A Discourse Analysis of Runic Messages in Two Media
Joseph A. Sindone III: Linguistic and paralinguistic cues of text-based computer-mediated communication and their associated social processes
Claudia Voit: Reassessment of the Maya Verb Root, K’al

Counting change: the anthropology of numerical notation

(Not sure if any of my readership is in the Detroit area and might be able to attend, but just in case…)

Counting Change

The anthropology of numerical notation

Stephen Chrisomalis
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Monday, April 5, 12:30 – 2:30 pm
McGregor Conference Center, Wayne State University, Rooms B & C

In his new book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2010), Stephen Chrisomalis presents a linguistic, cognitive, and anthropological history of written numeral systems, comparing over 100 different systems used over the past 5,500 years. He invites members of the community of scholars and the public to join him for this book launch and luncheon.

In this lecture, Dr. Chrisomalis aims his work on numerals at the heart of anthropological theory, seeking to refigure thinking about historical processes in the social sciences. As the integrative core of the social sciences, anthropology has an obligation to compare processes of change across time and space. The richness and time-depth of the evidence in Numerical Notation stand in opposition to narrower visions of anthropology as the study of contemporary life.

Free and open to the public
Lunch will be provided to all guests
Discount flyers for Numerical Notation will be available

Download flyer
Campus map

Language evolution lecture

I’m here at the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Society for Anthropological Sciences joint meetings in Albuquerque, NM. Tonight we will have a keynote address by Nobel laureate / polymath Murray Gell-Mann on ‘The Evolution of Languages’. I’ll be very interested to see what Gell-Mann has to say on this issue that is close to some of my own research interests. Stay tuned.

Paleo-Eskimonymy

I don’t normally get too uptight about the names that archaeologists give to ancient humans: Lucy, Otzi, ‘hobbit’, whatever. However, I have a quibble about “Inuk”, the 4000-year old Paleo-Eskimo found in Greenland in the 1980s, and whose DNA was recently sequenced (see the article here from today’s Nature, and a good news story about the discovery here).

The main discovery of this paper (confirming decades-old archaeological thinking about Paleo-Eskimo peoples), derived from DNA taken from strands of hair found in Greenland is that “Inuk” is certainly not Inuit. In fact, he is only very distantly related to the modern peoples of the North American Arctic, and is in fact genetically more closely related to the modern Chukchi, Koryak, and Nganasan of northeastern Siberia. And hence my quibble: “Inuk” is the Inuktitut word for “person” (its plural, Inuit ‘people’, is the well-known ethnonym), and thus they’ve given him a name that doesn’t fit with his ethnolinguistic heritage, and indeed runs counter to the core argument of the study. Given that many Yupik (Alaskan natives, speakers of Eskimo-Aleut languages) find the label “Inuit” inappropriate, one could argue that it’s even more inappropriate to give it to this poor fellow who almost certainly spoke a completely unrelated language. Of course, no one spoke Chukchi 4000 years ago either.

Anyway, anyone want to bet how long it takes before someone starts talking about the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis in relation to this find?

No country for old tongues

Attn:
Discovery News
BBC News
et al.

We all know how obsessed you are with the oldest of anything. But please, stop. You are doing a grave disservice to languages by saying things like ‘A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever’ or ‘Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.’ This is utter nonsense, even if you find a scholar to tell you otherwise. All languages are always changing, and although some may change more rapidly than others, the idea that a language could persist essentially unchanged for multiple millennia is pure bunk. The idea that we can assign exact ages to languages (other than recent inventions) is even more ridiculous. The only ancient languages are the ones actually spoken in the past, and all currently spoken languages have equally long histories. It is a great tragedy that the Bo language has gone extinct, as it is when, every other week or so, another language goes extinct on this planet. It is a tragedy regardless of how long the language has been spoken, because it represents the end of a particular part of the modern world’s cultural diversity. Your attempt to sensationalize this story by exoticizing indigenous peoples as primitives lost in time is unwelcome and counterproductive. Let me help:

The Bo (Aka-Bo) language was a member of the Northern branch of the Greater Andamanese language subfamily. With its extinction, only one Greater Andamanese language, A-Pucikwar, has any remaining known speakers, and it is highly endangered. The ten Great Andamanese and three South Andamanese languages are all related to one another, although the exact relationships among them remain unclear, but there is no known relationship between the Andamanese languages and any other languages of the world. Their importance for linguistics is that they may represent descendants of the languages of the original migrants to the Andaman Islands many millennia ago, and if we were able to reconstruct the Proto-Andamanese language, potentially to better understand the population and migration history of the Indian Ocean. Their importance for their remaining speakers is inestimably greater.