Praat 5.2

How cool is it to be a linguist? A really key piece of software is available free and constantly updated and refined by its creators. Yup, Praat. 5.2 has just been released.

The pink mouth with the thing below is it the icon. I thought for a time that the thing was a disconnected tongue but figure now it must be an ear. Maybe it's a cubist motif?

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities?

This is far from my life, but it's sure funny ...

How to ban Spanish?

According to the Onion's National News Highlights:

AUSTIN, TX —After Texas Board of Education members were told many Spanish words come from the Muslim conquest of Spain, they finally gained the support they needed to ban the language forever.

Seriously, can't you imagine people making the argument?

I don't see it on their website, but maybe it's been pulled for newer stories, like:

"My Opponent Knows Where Washington Is On A Map; I Don't, And I Never Will" by Ron Johnson.

Bonka sugar

Talk about random ... I'm in the Madrid airport waiting for a connection and grabbed a cup of cafe con leche. Maybe it's the jet lag, but the packet of sugar cracked me up. It's Bonka brand. In the old days, and maybe still, 'to bonk' in cycling meant to run out of energy badly and suddenly. Kinda like the crash you might get after eating a bunch of sugar. I'm sure I've seen this brand before but never made the connection.

Or maybe it's just the jet lag.

Higher Ed reform

The proposal is so disingenuous that you can't really talk seriously about the substance, but Tom Tancredo, candidate for governor of Colorado, is out there claiming that you can save a ton of money on the state budget without blinking:

Tancredo supports a range of fiscal austerity moves. They include: …

•Amendment 23, which guarantees minimal funding for K-12 education, must be repealed.

•Requiring higher education professors to spend 30 instead of 13 hours a week in the classroom would save $60 million.

•Eliminating the "master's degree bump," the automatic salary increase that comes with the graduate degree, would save $158 million.

Just thinking of the second point, I wonder if he's factoring in how many grant dollars would be lost? It looks like just the University of Colorado at Boulder brings in a fair bit. According to a report from here:

The University of Colorado continues to be a national leader in research funding by attracting $711.5 million in FY2009 … .

Font humor

I was cleaning out the old junk folder and found a real message that had ended there. (Happily, that's so rare these days that I don't check constantly anymore.) Anyway, h.t. to j.c. for a message that contained a suggestion for a bit of font humor. If you love Comic Sans, this may make your day.

Me, I'm mostly stunned at that people can hate a typeface. (Google 'Comic Sans' if you doubt it!)

What would you pay to have a few brews with Comic Sans and Papyrus? Seriously.

More academic misconduct, ancient edition

Wow. Here we are, still reeling from the Marc Hauser scandal, and thinking about the implications for other scholarship that built on his work. And now comes something bigger, way bigger in the academic world. According to the best print news outlet in these United States, a group of historians have admitted that they "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece.

Sure, they were trying to "advance their careers", but:

"One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago," Haddlebury said. "One thing led to another, and before you know it, we're coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad."

"That was a bitch to write, by the way," he continued, referring to the epic poem believed to have laid the foundation for the Western literary tradition. "But it seemed to catch on."

I'm shattered. And bracing for the proverbial other shoe:

"It would be a shame to see humanity abandon achievements such as heliocentrism and the plays of Aeschylus just because of their origin," the statement read in part. "Moreover, we have some rather disappointing things to tell you about the pyramids, the works of Leonardo da Vinci, penicillin, the Internet, the scientific method, movies, and dogs."

"Language ‘found’, doubt creeps in"

You've read the reports by now about the recent discovery in northeast India of a previously unknown Tibeto-Burman language, Koro, by David Harrison and Gregory D.S. Anderson. (If not, here's one of the stories.) I didn't post about it because, I guess, I didn't have anything to say on the subject. But I noticed something that kept bugging me a little: It's somehow weird to talk about the "discovery" of a language. These folks certainly have long known that they talk very differently than others around them. And it doesn't sound like this is a secret language in any sense, so that neighboring groups must have been aware of this too. Koro was really unknown to, say, the compilers of Ethnologue, making this a more limited discovery than news stories seem to imply. (As a curiosity, Ethnologue lists three languages called Koro, from the Ivory Coast, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. I wonder if there are other names that could refer to four completely different languages.)

The Telegraph of Calcutta is running this article, including this bit:

the Assam chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) has disagreed with the report, saying Koro was not an unknown language in the region and linguistic experts were aware of existence of the language, adds our Guwahati Bureau.

Dinesh Baishya, the convener of the state chapter of Intach, told The Telegraph that an international conference on endangered languages of India last year discussed the language.

I have no idea what the facts are here, and it doesn't change the actual situation in substance, but it seems plausible that local organizations in Assam would have known about the language. Happily, at least we can be pretty sure that this won't become a Tasaday-like story.

Update, 6:00 pm: According to this AP story, Koro is a "hidden" language, and David Harrison says that "Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language". I'm curious to hear how that works … extremely little contact with speakers of the (apparently distantly) related language?

They won the game, did the Giants

I've been laughing, um, *with* one of the announcers for the Brewers all season because of a construction he uses all the time, and I started writing them down just for fun. He constantly says things like this:

Boy, he's got a quick release, does Jonathan Lucroy.

He's got that curve ball back, does Gallardo.

Sometimes the subject is omitted in the first clause:

Hit 232 this year, did Eric.

Sometimes it's just a right dislocation:

His velocity's been up, Cole Hamil's.

But generally it has the 'do' support. And then last night I heard it from one of the announcers for the Giants game:

He went around, did Juan Uribe.

So what is this when it has the 'do' support? Is it just some weird sports-announcer-speak? This isn't a construction I'm familiar with...