Of all the people in the lab whose native language is not English, only one* speaks an Indo-European language (German). We have:
Yesterday was good in many, many ways. Primarily, I attended a talk at UC Boulder by Adele Goldberg, which was excellent. She argued clearly, presented an interesting but convincing account of the facts observed in her studies (hear that, Chomsky? Real data!) and also presented a theory that seemed maybe, just maybe, implementable in the context of Machine Learning. This is all good.
Further, though, I got to have a bit of a talk with Leah, whom I’ve not talked with in too long, and also, finally, saw a red fox here—actually, two! That is what I call an evening.
If I didn’t have to head off to work shortly, I’d write more. Ask me about any of these things, and I’ll gladly elaborate.
One quick note before I go to bed: I have just discovered that one of my idols, C.J. Cherryh* is on the board of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, the product of a near-idol of mine, Nicholas Ostler. And, of course, it is not just the conjunction of two people of Coolness, but also that they overlap in the domain of endangered language activism. Too much for me to handle!
Also worth noting, all of them have rather outdated-looking sites, except Ostler, for whom I cannot find a personal site at all.
* Cherryh is actually responsible for my interest in linguistics. Lon story short, her introductory Latin lessons caused me to act on my passive earlier interest in Latin, which in turn got me interested in making up languages, which in turn got me interested in seeing how human language actually worked. And here I am today.
…which I keep wanting to type as “piranha”.
A mysterious commenter known only as “X” posted a link to this abstract. I didn’t approve the comment, as the poster was too mysterious, but the article looks interesting, though in a somewhat dubious location on the internet.
However, one thing mentioned in the abstract seemed worth noting in particular: Everett makes many claims about how this one thing he sees in their culture (the Immediacy of Experience Principle, or IEP — gotta have your TLAs!) leads to all these grammatical features, or lacunae, really. However, he provides no evidence of a general correlation; the linked-to article purports to show that there are other cultures with the same sort of “IEP” that do not have similarly constrained grammar. That’s just the sort of research I want to see regarding Everett’s claims.
So, I am reading Dan Everett’s very interesting book Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes. His data and observations I trust very much, but his analyses are bizarre, as the following indicates: [Read more →]