Of all the people in the lab whose native language is not English, only one* speaks an Indo-European language (German). We have: Turkish Finnish Tamil Chinese (I’m not certain what specific languages Xin and Wei speak) * I say this a bit preemptively; I’m not certain what Dhaval’s native language is. I had assumed it’s …
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 …
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 …
…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 …
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: Continue readingPirahã