Andrew Garrett

how many r's in rearrange? ChatGPT said: The word rearrange has three r’s. You said: Are you sure? ChatGPT said: Yep — here’s the breakdown: r e a r r a n g e 1st letter: r 4th letter: r 5th letter: r So that’s 3 r’s in total. You said: How about blueberry? ChatGPT said: blueberry has three r’s too: b l u e r b e rr y 5th letter: r 8th letter: r 9th letter: r

It's a very capacious word.

and about language & politics (Talking Power, 1990; The Language War, 2000). For an oral-history interview see: 150w.berkeley.edu/sites/defaul... 2/2

Robin Lakoff

My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/

Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86

"Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86"

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...

Photo: "Mary K. Gaillard in 1985, four years after she became the first woman hired by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley."

"During the early part of the twentieth century, names seemed among the most stable topics that anthropologists could study. Numerous scholars such as Edward Sapir (1924), Elsie Clews Parsons (1937), and Alfred Kroeber (1909) all published works on naming; the latter subsequently provided a controversial eponym for the anthropology building at the University of California, Berkeley (Garrett 2023). Their motivations were multiple, if overlapping, in situating naming as a systematic, patterned, and accessible code for understanding cultural practices. Perhaps more dutiful than later literatures in producing inventories, glossaries, and lexical explications of names, such scholarship professed a fundamental importance of the name within social practices. To take just one text as an example from this era, Franz Boas’s (1934) Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians describes how Kwakiutl naming practices allowed people to meaningfully orient them- selves to the spaces they inhabited, in addition to dutifully providing a glossary of names, their linguistic structures, and a set of topographic maps."

From Scott MacLochlainn, "Naming and Namelessness", Annual Review of Anthropology (@annualreviews.bsky.social‬)

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Entirely selfishly, I'm also pleased by echoes of work I've done: "Convergence in the formation of IE subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology" (2006); "Descent and diffusion in language diversification: A study of Western Numic dialectology" (with Babel, Houser & Toosarvandani, 2013).

"Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations", abstract: "Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending directly from the Malayo-Polynesian node. This research argues that the evidence for those large subgroups does not stand under scrutiny. Rather, the distribution of innovations throughout the Malayo-Polynesian region suggests that those innovations spread within a large network of dialects. That network, here dubbed the “Late-Malayo-Polynesian” network, replaces discrete higher-level nodes in the classical model of Austronesian linguistic relations."

Awesome new @diachronica.bsky.social article by @austronesianist.com: "Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations"

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Excerpt from Garrett, "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall" (2023): "The American exceptionality claim was reiterated by Meillet and Cohen (1924:9) and explicitly critiqued by Bloomfield (1925a); see Goddard 1996, Campbell 1997, and Mithun 1999 on relationships among Native American languages, and Golla 2011 on California. Claims of Australian exceptionality by Dixon (1997, 2002) have been effectively rebutted by many scholars (e.g., Bowern and Koch 2004, Bowern et al. 2011, McConvell and Bowern 2011). Common to both claims was an assertion that sociohistorical language dynamics in more recently colonized areas of the world are fundamentally different from those in Africa and Eurasia."

Great! I registered this because it could sound like an Australian exceptionality claim (which I'm sure it isn't), and I'm attentive to such claims.

Relatively little sound change that produces new phonemes: Can you say more? (I'm wondering if you feel confident that it's so, and then if it's so why it should be so.)

Seems like his wikipedia page is unusually laudatory. We should all have PR teams!

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go - with intro

Hard to choose just one ...

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

LINAm 14: The Languages of the Coast of California North of San Francisco A.L. Kroeber

I was unaware that LINCOM reprints out-of-copyright books at exorbitant prices, including half a dozen books by A. L. Kroeber (among others in the "Americana" series). These are almost all accessible as PDFs elsewhere (e.g. digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/82624).

lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709...

Opinion | Why Does Anyone Think Trump Will Uphold His End of a Bargain With Columbia?

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. A scholar of genocide comes to a painful conclusion about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” writes Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

Gene Buckley

A touching piece by Rolf Noyer in memory of our colleague and friend Gene Buckley, who died in June and will be very deeply missed.

www.ling.upenn.edu/news/2025/07...

No, I do not (attach any implications to the choice). I have occasionally written "proto-" but usually write "Proto-".

This is very distressing news! So sorry for all Gene's friends and family.

"Andrew Garret[t]'s book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023), provides an illuminating analysis of how anti-historical this process is. In effect, it positions anthropology outside the present, and deflects attention away from ongoing engagements with the material record by contemporary communities."

From Howard Morphy's Afterword ("After Marcus") to Marcus Banks's "Understanding Social Images" (2025), with reference to "the danger of locking the resources of anthropology into the 'presentist' moment of the critique [of anthropology]."

Concentration Camp Labor Cannot Become Normal

"With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States."
snyder.substack.com/p/concentrat...

Prof Skocpol making a crucial point here. The centralized police. And then the lawless quasipolice who guard the camps. Trump’s death bill moves the US towards those two thresholds, well known from Germany in the 1930s.
talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/criti...

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

And the list is mind-boggling: Statistics, Spanish, Earth Science, and on and on.

The Library of America edition of Always Coming Home (left) and the Harper Perennial edition of Always Coming Home (right).

“If the engine of narrative is conflict, then what happens if a story organizes itself around another center?” Shruti Swamy asks in the introduction the the 2023 Harper Perennial edition of Always Coming Home (right).

Image from Alito majority opinion, a page from "Born Ready" showing a child looking happy, with text: "For the first time, my insides don't feel like fire. They feel like warm, golden love."

Two reactions: (1) Alito has really gone off the deep end (a while ago, I suppose); (2) The books he writes about, including this one, look really good!

It's possible that we disagree, not sure, but I only suggested the first of these things (Spanish is Romance), not the others ("with a more significant tie", etc.). All models of diachrony, including the arboreal one, are abstractions that are useful for some purposes and not others.

It's true that lg contact used to be deprecated as "noise" to be excluded from analysis, but for ~50 years the interplay of descent & contact has been a central research Q in the field. Saying that Spanish or French is not a Romance lg seems as misleading as saying it is unaffected by Arabic, etc.!

Thanks. I agree with you in the terms that you put it, but phylogenetic trees in historical ling refer to reconstructed languages, not "race[s] of people". It sounded like you might be saying that diachronic tree models (as opposed to other models of diversification?) are necessarily "race science".