Thursday, March 11, 2010

LINGUIST list challenge ... help historical linguistics!

If you read this blog, you almost surely use the LINGUIST list too. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary of serving our field — and anybody with internet access who has any vague or passing interest in language.

More immediately, they've embarked on a big fund drive to support their operations. This year, they're doing a Linguistic Subfield Challenge. Here's the current subfield snaphot:


Me, I'm a historical guy, and therefore deeply disturbed to see that we're lagging behind both syntax (now in the lead) and language acquisition. If you love language change, or reconstruction or dead languages, please help us boost our totals. Sure, phonology's just fine and I like morphology too, but we have to win this.

Please donate! And go, historical, go!

4 comments:

GAC said...

I do not use the LINGUIST list. You and the Language Log guys often mention it without giving any links, so I assumed it was a "professionals only" thing.

Joe said...

Wow, really? You gotta check it out.

Sure, there's a ton of Inside Baseball going on, and if you're not in the biz, you're not the kind of person who'll give to the fund drive, but it's a super cool site. Tons of software, links, and an outrageous number of posts on all kinds of topics.

Enjoy!

Unknown said...

I'd say we're doing pretty well given how often i"m told that no one does historical these days :)

Mr. Verb said...

Historical is a thriving field. I'm SURROUNDED by historical linguists at Wisconsin. Or maybe under siege is the better way to put it.