The LINGUIST List

Announcing the Launch of the Endangered Languages Project!

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Anna Belew

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), a joint project by the LINGUIST List and the University of Hawai’i Manoa, launched as part of the Endangered Languages Project, developed by Google.

(www.endangeredlanguages.com)

The ELCat project aims to compile the most reliable, up-to-date source of information about the world’s endangered languages. For more information on the ELCat research project, visit the LINGUIST List ELCat project page or the University of Hawai’i's ELCat project page.

We’d love to hear feedback from users! Send your questions or comments to elcat [at] linguistlist [dot] org.

Posted in LL Main | Leave a comment

The new Quick Reference Guide to LL-MAP

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Matthew Lahrman

In preparation for the 2012 Language Mapping Workshop, the LL-MAP team realized that we needed an answer to the question–”How do I use the most basic features of the LL-MAP Map Viewer?” As a quick (and visual) answer to this question, the team has created the Quick Reference Guide to LL-MAP!

First unveiled at our workshop, now you can enjoy it too! This incredibly useful guide features numbered boxes designating the most important parts of the LL-MAP interface and a key to the features listed in these boxes. By following the order listed on the map and using the map key on the next page, users can now easily and quickly navigate the LL-MAP interface and grasp the most essential features of LL-MAP.

While we worked tirelessly in preparation for this workshop to enumerate all aspects of LL-MAP in our help pages, we have now highlighted the most essential features of LL-MAP in our Quick Reference Guide so that you can start using LL-MAP now. Haven’t used LL-MAP before? Start using the Quick Reference Guide and you’ll be up to speed in no time. And if you’ve already been viewing the maps in this wonderful project, you may want to use the Quick Reference Guide to make sure you aren’t missing out on any of the great features that LL-MAP offers for your research or teaching needs.

Posted in ILIT, LL-MAP | Leave a comment

Congratulations to the 2012 Golden Pig and School Spirit Award Winners!

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Anna Belew

Remember the LingQuest Graduate Tournament, wherein schools around the world contended for the honor of Top Donor of Fund Drive 2012? You may recall that the University of Washington took top honors, with an astonishing $4205 in donations; the University of South Carolina wowed us with their enthusiasm and their 34 individual donors.

We’re pleased to give you a sneak peek of their prizes– to the University of Washington goes the prestigious Golden Pig Award, and the University of South Carolina will receive the coveted School Spirit Award! Behold, in all their glory, the first annual LINGUIST List award plaques:

Congratulations, UW and USC! We salute you and thank you for your support (especially grateful are our interns, who you’ve helped fund!). Perhaps these can be the first in a long line of trophies to line your walls…

Posted in LL Main, Of interest to Students | Leave a comment

LINGUIST List Summer Internships Begin!

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Anna Belew

The LINGUIST List has offered summer internships to linguistics students since 2007, when our now-Associate Project Manager Matt Lahrman was the first-ever LINGUIST intern (how far and how quickly he rose!). Ever since, LINGUIST List has chosen a few promising students from around the world to join us for a summer, learn about linguistic technologies, and gain firsthand experience working on LL projects. Internships are one of the programs we fund with the money raised during Fund Drive – so thank you, LINGUIST List donors, for helping us bring these interns on board!

We’re delighted to tell you that this year we’ll be hosting an unprecedented nine summer interns due to additional funding from the National Science Foundation. Our first intern joined us on Monday, and the 2012 internship cohort will continue arriving until June; stay tuned for an upcoming post introducing this year’s LINGUIST interns!

What have past LINGUIST List interns said about their experiences? Here’s a sampler:

“I really like the people here. We’re all interesting, smart people and we genuinely like to be here together. Also, we get to work on great projects.” -Danielle St. Jean, 2009 summer intern and subsequent LINGUIST editor

“The intern program at LINGUIST allows you to explore and develop your interests, and find ones you never knew you had.” -Danniella Hornby, 2010 summer intern and current LL Publications Editor

“I greatly valued the camaraderie between workers in the office and having the chance to bounce ideas off of each other in each of the projects. I also enjoyed the problem solving aspect of my work, specifically the foresight and creativity necessary to digitize complex maps.” -Christine Evans, 2011 summer intern and current Fulbright scholar

If you missed your chance to intern this summer, never fear: you’ll get a chance next year. The call for 2013 interns will go out this fall; see the 2012 call for interns here.

Posted in LL Main, Of interest to Students | Leave a comment

Announcing the LINGUIST List Amazon store!

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Anna Belew

http://linguistlist.org/store

The LINGUIST List Amazon store has made its debut! Users can browse linguistics books by category, as well as essential electronics like audio recorders and hard drives. Best of all, every purchase you make through the LINGUIST List Amazon store contributes a small donation to LINGUIST, at no additional cost to you!

Update: We now have stores for several countries; save money on shipping by shopping the store closest to you!

USA: http://astore.amazon.com/linguistlist-20
Canada: http://astore.amazon.ca/linguistlistc-20
Germany: http://astore.amazon.de/linguistlistd-21
France: http://astore.amazon.fr/linguistlistf-21
United Kingdom: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/linguistlist-21

We do not yet have stores in Japan, China, Italy or Spain, simply because we
have not yet received permission to open a store in these countries. But
we will certainly add them when the opportunity arises.

Happy shopping, and thank you for supporting LINGUIST List!

Posted in LL Main | Leave a comment

Upcoming Events: LL-MAP Workshop, Presentation by Dr. Maƚgosia Ćavar

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anna Belew

This Friday, LINGUIST List is hosting two special events:

Friday, 4/13, 11 am – 1 pm: The LL-MAP Scholar’s Workbench Workshop will introduce attendees to using the LL-MAP interface and Scholar’s Workbench tool, including tutorials on how to map your own data. The workshop is open to the public, and will be held at Eastern Michigan University’s Halle Library, room 111. If you’d like to attend, please register here:

http://llmap.org/llmap-flyer

Friday, 4/13, 1:30 pm: ILIT faculty affiliate Dr. Maƚgosia Ćavar will be presenting a talk at LINGUIST List entitled On the influence of L1 on L2 perception: The case of tenseness contrast in American vowels. This will also be open to anyone– if you’re in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, you’re invited to attend! For those unfortunate readers who can’t make it to Michigan, we’ll be recording Dr. Ćavar’s talk and making it available online.

We hope to see you on Friday!

Posted in LL-MAP, Of interest to Students | Leave a comment

Huzzah! We Conquered the 2012 Fund Drive!

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Anna Belew

Good news, everyone: Fund Drive 2012 is over!

With the help of the LINGUIST List Advisors, who in the eleventh hour ponied up the remaining funds, we made our goal! We can all breathe easy, knowing that we have the ability to continue our operations for another year, and that we can continue funding the graduate students who run LINGUIST List (they’re surprisingly resistant to being chained to their desks as free labor).

We’d like to give special thanks to the following folks:

Sociolinguists everywhere, winners of the Battle of the Fields!

It was neck-and-neck for a while, with Syntax in the lead for weeks, but Sociolinguistics rallied at the last minute and pulled ahead for a final tally of $9296! Bravo, sociolinguists!

Graduate Tournament winners:

The University of Washington, whose 50 donors* contributed an astonishing $4205, is the winners of the First Annual Golden Pig Award. Well done, Huskies!

The University of South Carolina, recipients of the School Spirit Award with an amazing 34 donors! Way to go, Gamecocks!

And all hail the top donors in each region:

North-West University (Africa)

University of Toronto (Americas outside US)

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Asia)

University of Cambridge (Europe)

Bar-Ilan University (Middle East)

University of Melbourne (Pacific)

*We wanted to spread the glory around a little bit, and to recognize USC’s fighting spirit, so we’ll be awarding them the School Spirit trophy with a nod to Washington.

Our limerick contributors!

Special congratulations to Brenda Boerger, Ultimate LINGUIST Limerick Champion– check out her winning entry! Thanks to all of our ingenious subscribers who sent in limericks. You can view all of their poetic masterworks over in the Limerick Museum!

And most of all we thank all of our donors, everywhere.

Thanks for making this the best Fund Drive ever. We hope you had fun (we sure did), and that you know how much we appreciate your support.

Posted in Fund Drive, LL Main, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Publications Manager Danniella Hornby Explains the True Meaning of Fund Drive

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Anna Belew

I first joined The LINGUIST List as an intern in the summer of 2010,
and often heard the other students and employees trade horror stories
of “Fund Drive” and how difficult and exhausting it can be. They all
worked so hard and wanted to find new and creative ways of encouraging
people to support the work that they loved to do; work that benefits
everyone in the linguistics community. At the time, I didn’t
understand what Fund Drive was or why it was so important. But now -
two years and countless LINGUIST projects later – I walk into the
office every day and I understand. Please give something to support
our organization today:

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

The LINGUIST List has provided me with experience and skills and
allowed me to work alongside the most motivated and hardworking
students I could imagine. But most significantly, it has opened my
eyes to the importance – and necessity – of free and accessible
resources.

I missed my opportunity to write to you during the 2010 Fund Drive -
if I had, I would have said that I hoped you would consider supporting
a fantastic organization, because working on grant projects and
editing Ask-a-Linguist questions had already opened my eyes to what a
valuable resource the LINGUIST List is. Last year, I wrote to you as a
bright new graduate student and a new editor of Journal Calls, and
hoped that you would feel my excitement at having returned to
LINGUIST. This year, as the Publications Manager at LINGUIST, I write
to you in the hopes that you will appreciate what a valuable training
ground LINGUIST is and how dedicated we are to what we do.

I know that when my time at LINGUIST and at EMU comes to a close,
there will be new interns and new graduate assistants who are eager to
step up and continue the work that we all do and love at LINGUIST
List. By donating to the fund drive, you can help ensure that, each
year, students will continue to have this opportunity.

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Sincerely,
Danniella Hornby
Publications Manager

Posted in Crew Letters, Fund Drive, LL Main | Leave a comment

Linguist of the Day: Martin Haspelmath!

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Anna Belew

We’re delighted to announce that our latest Linguist of the Day is Martin Haspelmath! Dr. Haspelmath is best known for his work in comparative syntax, morphology, language contact, and linguistic universals. His tale begins:

I find biographies of people, and especially of linguists, a fascinating subject, and I think it’s a wonderful idea to ask linguists how they got into the field. But my own story does not really contain any surprising elements, at least at the beginning: I got fascinated by languages early on, beginning with a Spanish course on the West German radio (“Vamos a España,” a very easy course in 20 lessons of 15 minutes each, geared to tourists) that I listened to when I was 14 years old…

Does Dr. Haspelmath’s story contain surprising elements after the beginning? You bet! Read on at the Hall of Heroes…

Posted in Fund Drive, LL Main, Of interest to Students | Leave a comment

Upcoming Language Mapping Workshop: An Introduction to the LL-MAP Scholar’s Workbench

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Naomi Palosaari

The Institute for Language Information and Technology (ILIT) at Eastern Michigan University invites any interested students and faculty for a mapping tutorial on April 13, 2012, at 11:00 a.m. in Halle Library Room 111. This tutorial will introduce the LL-MAP database and provide a hands-on demonstration of the LL-MAP Scholar’s Workbench.

LL-MAP (Language and Location: A Map Accessibility Project, llmap.org) is a database of maps with geospatially-referenced information about existing languages. LL-MAP also includes a user-friendly online interface which organizes linguistic, geographic and social sciences information into customizable map layers. Scholars and students can use the newly-updated database interface to query and compare language maps, draw new hypotheses about language, layer different maps together, and even share a map on Facebook!

Another feature of LL-MAP that has recently been released is the Scholar’s Workbench. In this workspace, scholars can upload their own data or use existing datasets to create new maps showing their hypotheses about linguistic phenomena. In this workshop, we will be demonstrating the possibilities of this dynamic and user-friendly uploading facility. In a hands-on demonstration, participants will go through the process of turning data into a language map by uploading a data set as well as styling and describing it.

Registration is free but space is limited. Please go to the following web address to register:

http://llmap.org/llmap-flyer

For questions, contact Amy Brunett (brunett@linguistlist.org).

Schedule:
April 13, 2012, 11 AM –1 PM
Halle Library, EMU, Room 111

About the LL-MAP database…..11:00-11:15
How the Scholar’s Workbench works…..11:15-11:30
The Uploader in action: Hands-on demo…..11:30-12:30
Questions/feedback…..12:30-1:00