Skip to content
Home » Archives for AAA Web Admin » Page 23

AAA Web Admin

Petition on Haitian Kreyòl

Posted for: Michel DeGraff, MIT Linguistics & Philosophy

Dear friends and colleagues,

We ask that you please take time to read, sign and distribute Professor Yves Dejean’s urgent public petition about school reform in Haiti.

The petition is available online at:

http://ayiticheri.com/rebati/

Bad Words

Why I find “geek”, when used as a slur, more offensive than words which may commonly be viewed as quite foul and offensive.

South African languages

About the vuvuzela term: first, the suffix -ela is an “applicative” extension in isiZulu. The suffix “ela” means “an action… performed for, on behalf of, or in the direction of something or someone” (Mbeje 2005:229). Second, there are a large number of ideophones in isiZulu (in fact, the term was first invented as a grammatical category for the linguistic analysis of isiZulu). An ideophone is basically type of onomatopoeia. Thus the term “vuvuzela” can be understood as ‘the thing with which you make the vuvu sound for someone or something’.

North American English Dialect Survey

From Claire Bowern:
Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for phonetic analysis. If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit our web site.

Idioms are hard

Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, has apparently upset some Americans with his reference to “the small people.” My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.

University of Arizona Department of Linguistics’ letter to state lawmakers

The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.

Linguistic anthropology roundup #6

In this edition of our bi-weekly Roundup: the satirical journal Speculative Grammarian tackles fieldwork; the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is discussing a resolution condemning Arizona’s new immigration law; work summarized in Science Daily suggests that loss of hearing in one ear affects children’s scores on language tests.

Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #5

Fifth linguistic anthropology roundup, by Leila Monaghan

Linguistic Diversity

Linguistic diversity has been in the news in the last few weeks in a couple of different guises.

First, there was an article about the many languages of New York City (particularly Queens)

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.
Just starting are Twitter adventures: Twitter.com

As you have only 140 characters per tweet, twittering has some very arcane ins and outs.