Claire

This paper was a labor of love, scraped together from scraps of spare time over the past year. I have lots of people to thank. Of the folks I know are on Bluesky, a huge thank-you to @lisafdavis.bsky.social @chirila.bsky.social and @spinfocl.bsky.social!

In honour of our recent crossover episode with @dannybate.bsky.social of the A Language I Love Is.. podcast, tell us about a language that you love!

(Or several languages you love, I know it's hard to pick!)

Congratulations!!!

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

The guest on the latest episode of Lingthusiasm is talking about all these topics I really like, and he seems to know what he's talking about

Me too!

My wonderful friend Ruth has restarted her blog! Highly recommended

Hello again!
Re-starting this blog after nearly three years! Looking forward to talking about children's books again!

bsky.app/profile/chir...

Summary of funding opportunities including key dates.

We're accepting applications for a wide range of funding opportunities, including our new two-year Archives Training Fellowship for MLIS or doctoral graduates!!

Please share with your networks, and consider applying.

www.amphilsoc.org/cnair-fundin...

✨ Last Thursday's Linguistics Colloquium ✨
Thank you to Claire Bowern (Yale University) for presenting "When sound change does (and doesn't) happen". Stay tuned for the next event in our Fall series!
Next up: Athulya Aravind (Yale University), Oct 16. Don’t miss it!

How language exposure helps children and adults learn languages. Includes examples of how to increase language exposure inside and outside of the classroom t... Increasing language exposure: working with a linguist

New video on language learning and how to increase language exposure! Fourth in a series by the Fieldwork Group at Yale about how linguistics could support community-based language projects. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkwm...

Remembering Stephen Anderson

Here is a remembrance of my colleague Steve Anderson, former LSA President, longtime Department Chair, and so much more: ling.yale.edu/posts/2025-1... #linguistics

It's irritating that they describe the effects of his racism as limited to causing controversy within science and reputational consequences for himself rather than giving an immeasurable boost, false veneer of legitimacy, and idiot-friendly prestige to modern scientific racism and eugenics.

Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment Spurred by a recent report on sexual harassment in academia, our columnist revisits a historical case and reflects on what has changed—and what hasn’t

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).

Everyone has an accent!!!

Rosalind Franklin died at 37 of ovarian cancer attributed to radiation exposure from the methods she & her assistant used to photograph a cross-section of the DNA double helix.

Meanwhile, Watson won a Nobel off that work & survived to the ripe old age of 97 by simply: stealing those notes!

"At present, affordable mobile technology makes it easier for many communities to self-document their languages. Welcome to the new world of mobile documentation or mdocumentation! In one such project, Nubian heritage language learners took over the task of documenting their heritage language after following a language documentation training delivered by the School of Oriental and African Studies along with the Nubian Languages and Culture Project.14 Keep in mind, however, that such options are not available to remote communities that lack access to landline and mobile internet connections. This was still the case in the late 2000s in the community of Santa María Ixcatlán in Mexico, where I collaborated to document Xhwani (Ixcatec). Once language recordings have been made, how can one store and preserve them in the long run? When I started making recordings of Nashta, the language of my ancestors, I used minidiscs (remember those?). From minidiscs I moved on to CD-ROMs. Please, tell me if your computer can still read CD-ROMs, let alone minidiscs. The answer is most likely no. The ultrahype technology of a given moment in time becomes obsolete one decade later. So if I store minidiscs in my office closet, chances are I’m not really helping with archiving since as the years go by the format becomes obsolete and transfer to new formats more challenging. I’ve also heard of horror stories where colleagues stored their audiotapes at home, and when they passed away, their descendants unwittingly threw them away."

A horror story in six words or less: Your cassettes were unwittingly thrown away.
Happy belated Halloween! 🎃
#langsky

a picture of Plovdiv

The deadline for Evolang 2026, the International Conference on the Evolution of Language, has been extended to November 3rd.
Do consider submitting, it's my favourite conference and will take place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the age-old "city of the seven hills"! #language #linguistics

Cover of a book titled “Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for Indigenous Language Revitalization” and edited by Amalia Skilton, Ryan E. Henke, and Melvatha R. Chee. The cover shows the green silhouette of the Americas north of Panama, with a blue background of a word cloud of words in 7 Indigenous languages.

Out next month! So excited for the whole world in 🐦🐦 and language #revitalization to read what our authors have to share!

Remembering Stephen Anderson

Stephen Anderson was an exceptionally clear thinker (who I have constantly, absolutely, and very productively disagreed with). There are few linguistics works that I have read as many times as his "A-Morphous Morphology", an absolute treasure

Thanks to our colleagues at Yale for this obituary
🐦🐦

A selfie of me in a crappy vampire outfit from Spirit wearing a piece of paper with a diagram of a mereology structure as used in semantics papers on count vs mass nouns

Happy Halloween from Count Noun! 🧛

What is Acoustic Phonetics? Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies the sound waves produced when we speak, analysing how vocal vibrations travel through the air.

Learning about acoustic phonetics shows that normal conversation is actually an amazing process, as our brains quickly decode thousands of sound signals every time someone speaks to us.

https://aboutlinguistics.com/explore/what-is-acoustic-phonetics

#Phonetics #Linguistics #Languages

a peek through fall foliage to some people at the University of Pennsylvania, photo by Eric Sucar

Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship.

MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior.

Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

Mary D'imperio has a lovely work on this, from 1978: voynich_manuscript.pdf share.google/hLRDIXdImc2e.... There is also voynich.nu, which Rene Zandbergen has put together and has more recent discussion

Unless you're Australian

15 essential tasks GPTs can do for journalists No, AI cannot replace original journalism. But it can remove some of the everyday tedium so you can focus on what you do best

This is a list of ways to do a really shoddy job as a journalist. As a friend just said to me, if you get AI to summarise a big report you’re almost guaranteed to miss any story that might be lurking in the detail. www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-can...

Linguistic Diversification and Rates of Change: Insights From a Diverse Sample of Sociolinguistic Studies Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community l....

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features.
Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Interesting! I need to look more but one thing is that the pyramids are of different parts of the plant, so it might be less meaningful than first appears