Linguistics Department News (Calques)

Recent Stories

Garrett in Bancroft Library Roundtable series

October 6, 2024
At 12 noon on Thursday, October 17, in the Bancroft Library Roundtable series, Andrew Garrett will present a Zoom talk “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall — Indigenous and University Histories in Bancroft Collections.” Register at ucberk.li/kroeber. Abstract:
"Much of Andrew Garrett’s book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, 2023) is grounded in The Bancroft Library’s collections relating to anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber; Kroeber’s family, including his second wife, Theodora, and his daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin; his colleagues, students, and collaborators throughout California; and Phoebe Hearst, who directed and funded his work. In this presentation, Garrett will talk about a few of the archival objects — manuscripts and photos — that had a significant impact on how he framed his argument about Kroeber’s documentation of Indigenous stories."

Linguistics events this week (October 4-11)

October 3, 2024

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm

    NELS practice talks:
    1. Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ] (Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
    2. Person hierarchy effects from φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva (Wesley dos Santos)
    3. The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian (Akil Ismael & Jessica Göbel)

  • Phorum – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pmMarko Drobnjak (Univeristy of Ljubljana): VOICE: Verifying How Speech Perception Shapes Credibility in Legal Contexts – A Statistical and Experimental Approach with Future Machine Learning Potential
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Oct. 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
    Conversation hour: learn to make (Turkish) coffee and tea in Ladino! (snacks included)

  • LRWG – Wednesday, Oct. 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley) with a workshop on "Creating mini zines for accessible language materials"

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 11 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Travis Major (USC): TBD
  • Phorum – Friday, October 11- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Modeling stochasticity, gradience, and domain effects in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony with Gestural OT.

Berkeley linguists at NELS55

September 30, 2024

Several UC Berkeley linguistics faculty and students will present at NELS 55, to be held at Yale on October 17-18, 2024.

  • Hannah Sande, plenary talk on "Discontinuous harmony in Guébie: Consequences for cyclic spellout"
  • Amy Rose Deal and Zachary O'Hagan, talk on "Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity"
  • Elango Kumaran (former Berkeley undergraduate linguistics major), talk on "No categorical gang effects"
  • Akil Ismael and Jessica Göbel, poster on "The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian"
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski, poster on "Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ]"
  • Wesley dos Santos (PhD 2024), poster on "Person hierarchy effects from Φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva"

Congrats, all!

Script Encoding Initiative awarded Mellon and Internet Society Foundation grants

September 28, 2024

The Script Encoding Initiative led by Anushah Hossain and Deborah Anderson was awarded two grants this summer to continue its work on making writing systems available on digital devices. A four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation will support research on over twenty writing systems that are not yet incorporated in the Unicode Standard, a widely-implemented communication standard. A second two-year grant from the Internet Society Foundation will support science communication projects to demystify SEI’s work on language technologies for public audiences. Visit SEI’s websiteto learn more about their work.

Icons from 17 unencoded scripts from SEI's roadmap. Twelve historic scripts are highlighted in purple and five living scripts are in pink.

Hyman and Nichols co-edit volume on language change

September 26, 2024

Larry Hyman and Johanna Nichols, together with several co-editors, have published a volume on "Language change for the worse" with Language Science Press. The full citation is below. Congrats!

Enke, Dankmar W., Hyman, Larry M., Nichols, Johanna, Seiler, Guido, Weber, Thilo & Hölzl, Andreas (eds.). 2024. Language change for the worse. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 33). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5116353

CLA Updates

September 26, 2024

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • We've accessioned digital copies of 18 wax cylinder recordings held by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology as part of our efforts to finish digitizing the collection of wax cylinders at UC Berkeley (see here for more details).
  • Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach (PhD 2022) has accessioned a new, large collection of audiovisual recordings, transcriptions, and notes of elicitation sessions and texts related to Yaeyaman languages and Yonaguni (Japonic; Japan), based on work conducted in the southern Ryukyu Islands between 2012 and 2017.

Linguistics events this week (September 27-October 4)

September 26, 2024

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

  • SSCircle – Friday, Sep 27 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley), "Boundary glottals and A'ingae information structure: A morphological argument for a discourse feature hierarchy"
  • Phorum – Friday, Sep. 27 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4-5pmAlexia Hernandez (Stanford) on "The role of experience on the cognitive underpinnings of linguistic bias: An interdisciplinary investigation of Miami-based Cuban American speech"
  • Fforum – Wednesday, Oct 2 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    TBD
  • SSCircle – Friday, Oct 4 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    NELS practice talks
  • Phorum – Friday, Oct 4 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4-5pm
    Marko Drobnjak (Univeristy of Ljubljana): VOICE: Verifying How Speech Perception Shapes Credibility in Legal Contexts – A Statistical and Experimental Approach with Future Machine Learning Potential