Andrew Garrett

Text from a judicial opinion: "Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, 'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time."

Awesome passive-aggressive brackets! (The original failed to capitalize "Zeitgeist".)

Source: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Ursula K. Le Guin, wearing a white button-down shirt, sits amid a pile of cushions, resting her head on her fist. Image by Marion Wood Kolisch | Courtesy Portland Art Museum

This fall brings not just one but two exhibitions about Ursula and her work.

In Portland, A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 31st at Oregon Contemporary.

In London, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 10th at the AA Gallery.

She Held Her Baby for an Hour. Then the State Took Her Away.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/w...

Also not said in the letter: "therefore also we chose to turn in the Berkeley faculty, staff, and students who anybody ever complained once about, so the government can deport them or whatever"

"1.Background. Few episodes in the history of American anthropology and linguistics are as disturbing as the treatment of six Inughuit (Polar Inuit) people brought from northern Greenland to New York City in 1897 at the behest of Franz Boas. Living in the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place, later dubbed Thule by Knud Rasmussen, Inughuit people were objects of fascination for Americans and Europeans. This was partly due to their environment (with its three-and-a-half-month winter night and seven months of solid sea ice) and proximity to the North Pole, but also because of their apparent isolation. Inughuit people occupy “an island in an ocean of ice” (Gilberg 1984:577) and were thought to have been unaware of other people before the arrival of European explorers. In short, they were exemplars of the ethnographic fantasy of “uncontaminated” indigenes."

I'm very proud of this paper, now published in Anthropological Linguistics: "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)," a study of the earliest substantial documentation of Inuktun (NW Greenland) and what it shows about Inuit dialects and change.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

Opinion | When Universities Become Informants A practice from the McCarthy era makes an ugly return.

"It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

www.chronicle.com/article/when...

UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move Prominent professor Judith Butler among students and faculty investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’

"[T]he decision to send the information to the Trump administration was made by the University of California’s systemwide general counsel. ... Berkeley’s counsel declined to share with [Judith] Butler the contents of the files."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Cover of the book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. Shows hands in blue latex gloves scratching off letters from a white wall

In finally finished reading The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall by @andrewgarrett.bsky.social cover to cover and wooow, it's so good!
Big recommendation for all linguists, anthropologists, ethnologists, Ursula K. LeGuin fans and everyone else!
So many things 100% relevant to my work to reflect on

Thank you, I'm really flattered!

The most important news from today's reshuffle:

www.bpr.org/2025-09-01/t...

You should! It was great.

Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley Description: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - UC Berkeley   Position Description: The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has been authorized to make an appointment in Language Revitalization. The position will be filled at the rank of assistant professor (tenure-track). Duties will include teaching (up to three courses per year); undergraduate and graduate advising and supervision of student research; development of a successful and origin

Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

a thought i have reading @clintsmithiii.bsky.social’s wonderful piece is that one reason the administration wants to erase any mention of the worst of our past is because it is intent on recapitulating those atrocities www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

My memory of Malcolm Margolin is of his generosity. Once, speaking of Leanne Hinton, he said, "She makes me proud to be a human being."

Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Come be my colleague! UC Berkeley Linguistics has a tenure-track position in language revitalization.

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05022

They have a strong record of supporting Indigenous applicants (including in linguistics, though the bulk of grants are in science fields). You can see all past grant recipients here: www.amphilsoc.org/grants/lewis...

Bill Labov: Looking Back, Looking Forward Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into word....

Another lovely Labov obit by @betsysneller.bsky.social @laurelmack.bsky.social and Meredith Tamminga. This one takes a birds eye view of how Labov has contributed to where the field is going, which is a nice forward-looking complement to Eckert's obit onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I share your intuition, and surely it has been rare, but interestingly it is also documented continuously from the late 1500s to the present. (Ryland, 1780: "He searched up all the Hebrew copies he was able, and burnt them.")

www.oed.com/dictionary/s...

There's an unsurprisingly icky obituary at the icky "Heritage and Destiny" site. ("He founded Northern World, a cultural, non-political Journal of North European Friendship, with the particular goal of promoting reconciliation between the closely related nations of Northern Europe.")

Oddly, Wikipedia doesn't even note Pearson's death (though it was a couple of years ago).

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...