4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas

Had never actually been to Iceland (beyond the airport) but am here now for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík. Amazing in every way ... and the weather has been mostly better than in Madison. I can't believe I'd never been to Iceland before.

In September, there will be another chance for some readers of this blog to come to this amazing place, namely the 4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas. The deadline for abstracts is coming up (May 31st), but it's a reasonably low-key event and lots of cool stuff was presented at all three of the previous ones. It'll be in the building pictured below, which really does look like that.

Be there or be square.

DARE, safe for the moment

You've seen the news by now — anywhere from the Log to the local news —that the Dictionary of American Regional English has secured enough funding to keep going. The good news actually trickled in over a couple of weeks but it's all come together now. A lot of people on campus, in the American Dialect Society and in the broader community of linguists and lexicographers and friends of DARE stepped up big here.

But keep sending them money! (There's a 'donate' link on the site.) Add a zero to the DARE gift you put in your will. Or two zeroes.

Morphology FAIL

I was on the train today (yes, a train, here in America!) and caught sight of this billboard.  It was for a car, maybe a Buick???  Well, I was so riveted by the bizarreness of the morphology that I didn't really register the product (one of the many ways the billboard failed, I guess), but here's what I did catch:

flexible nimble luxurious-ble 

 I mean, I mean, wait, nooooooooooooooooo!!!  That just does not work, in so many ways!

Good clean fun

I've been a little surprised in the past that this blog has been nominated for awards like the one below. Don't get me wrong, it's cool and all, but we aren't really about language learning.  In fact, we don't fit any category I've seen on any of those contests. If you're into it, please go vote, but until there's a category 'good clean fun', we don't stand a chance ... .

We guess, I suppose, brush up on the old amo, amas, amat and give it a shot next year, but I think we all like our amateur status.

HPSG Man, by the Dead Tongues

Wow. Via Twitter, thanks to Jason Baldridge, retweeted by the one and only Ben Zimmer.

#lingchat

It seems pretty clear that our readers are overwhelmingly on Twitter — we've been exactly as slack about getting followers on Twitter as we have about getting people to read this little corner of the web, which is to say we've done nothing whatsoever beyond tweeting and posting occasionally.

Twitter is generally pretty entertaining and occasionally professionally interesting. For instance, over the last week, a couple of nice conferences have been basically live-tweeted.

But I haven't seen real progress on making it a more systematically useful tool. There's an effort afoot now that create a forum, #lingchat. It's just getting rolling, but could become an interesting forum.

Check it out.

I heart baseball

So glad that it's baseball season finally.  Not just for the game - also for the wonderful announcers.
Tonight's gem:

He's gonna nonchalant a ground ball.

 Ahhhh.  I love baseball.

The Dictionary of American Regional English needs your help. It's serious.

Here's a line you should never, ever read in the paper:

Editor Joan Houston Hall said she’s issued layoff notices, effective July 1, to the staff of the respected dictionary, which includes more than 60,000 words compiled by UW-Madison researchers during the past 48 years.

A funding crunch — Hall figures it will take $250,000 to keep the same staff through the end of the year — has hit just as the dictionary embarks on its digital future, sending Hall into a frenzied push for new grant money and staffers into a panicked state that could cause them to reach for a whoopensocker.

The only-in-Wisconsin word means “something extraordinary of its kind, especially a large or strong drink.”

It's now or never. You can go here to donate: http://dare.wisc.edu/.

Linguistics flowchart: What field?

This is floating around fb at the moment (yes, click to embiggen). ... I saw it first on the Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft page. The poster itself is from Cascadilla, the only source a linguist needs to stay stocked with excellent posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers and gifts. This is on their CafePress link as a poster. I only today saw the 'Loose lips make bilabial trills' poster. 

But somehow, the chart doesn't help me ... I want to do basically all of it.

How dare you!

The napkin that the flight attendant handed me with my coffee on my flight to San Francisco yesterday had a Seagram's logo on it, along with this:

It's good to be you.TM

That's ambiguous!!!  I took it the wrong way at first: I thought they were saying they enjoyed being me, which I was a little offended by.

I've been trying to figure out how to describe the ambiguity. I suppose we could say there's some ellipsis:

It's good [for us / for you] to be you

and the ambiguity comes from what your interpretation is of the elided/omitted subject of "be you".

I'm glad they trademarked it.  Wouldn't want anyone stealing that slogan!

ConLangs make TED: Dothraki

Some folks here have been talking about David Peterson's recent TED talk on constructed languages, here. I didn't know about the Language Creation Society. More generally, TED is a kind of interesting gauge on what's popular, and I'm always curious about when they cover language/linguistics and why.

To the image below, I'd just say, maybe, maybe not.

HT to KW. 

"Irritating nouns-as-verbs"

Henry Hitchings has a piece in the NYT this morning called "Those Irritating Nouns-as-Verbs", here. It's about stuff of the type "do you have a solve for this problem" and "let's all focus on the build" (his examples). I was all set for a rant about peevology and how nouning is just as fun as verbing, but it's much less peevologically driven than I first assumed.

Still, the real value in the piece, I'd say, is Grant Snider's graphic, starting with the title.