News

All News

April 7, 2020

Survey receives "Documenting Endangered Languages" grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities, through its "Documenting Endangered Languages" grant program (in collaboration with the National Science Foundation), announced today that it will fund a project to be administered by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (PI Andrew Garrett, $332,762): "Archiving legacy documentation from southern California and the southwest: Toward a new collaborative model."

This two-year project will catalog, digitize, and describe sound recordings and paper materials assembled over many years by Berkeley professor emerita Leanne Hinton, Margaret Langdon (Berkeley PhD 1966), Frank Lobo, and Pamela Munro, making them accessible where appropriate in the California Language Archive. A key element of the project is collaboration with several Indigenous communities to create a model of co-curation and community-based description of materials we catalog. The grant will support a full-time postdoctoral position in the department to coordinate and supervise all the work.

April 6, 2020

Garrett publishes plague poems

Andrew Garrett channeled some of his pandemic-induced stress into a creative work written over spring break: a short satirical edition of poems minimally adapted from the ancient Greek poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus in the form of a book of poems by his and Leslie Kurke's cats, also named Sappho and Alcaeus, together with full scholarly apparatus. Primarily of interest only to classical philologists, Poetarum lesbiorum carmina pestilentialia ("Plague poems of the Lesbian poets") can be read as a lovely printed book or in proof here.

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Augmenting our activities with work that can be done from home, we've digitized 120 color slides from Harvey Carlson's 1984 fieldwork on Aikanã (isolate; Brazil). We also redigitized over 100 prints scanned at higher resolution. Carlson (d. 1994) received a BA from our department and also worked for many years in the Berkeley Language Center, whose recording studio is named in his honor. He was inspired to do fieldwork in Rondônia after taking a seminar titled Indian Languages of South America from visiting professor Aryon Rodrigues in the winter 1983 quarter.

April 3, 2020

Linguistics events this week (April 3-10, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Fieldwork Forum: Wednesday April 8 - Zoom link TBA - 4-5:30pm
    Ruth Rouvier (UC Berkeley): Exploring emotion in Yurok language reclamation

March 30, 2020

Iquito-English Dictionary published

An Iquito-English Dictionary was recently published by Ediciones Abya Yala and Cabeceras Aid Project, compiled by Lev Michael and Christine Beier on the basis of the linguistic and cultural knowledge of Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma. Ronald Sprouse played a key role in preparing the dictionary manuscript by further developing a script originally created by Berkeley grad Greg Finley to generate a LaTeX file from the FLEx XML database file. A blurb is available on the Calques site.

McLaughlin published in Langages

Congratulations to Mairi McLaughlin (Department of French), whose article "La représentation de l'oral dans la Gazette d'Amsterdam à la fin du XVIIIe siècle" (On the representation of spoken language in an historical French-language newspaper) has just appeared in Langages. Read it here!

March 27, 2020

Linguistics events this week (March 27-April 3, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Fieldwork Forum: Wednesday April 1 - Zoom link: TBA - 4-5:30pm
    Alternative summer arrangements amidst COVID-19

  • Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday April 1 - Zoom - 2-3pm
    Using historical documents with language learners in revitalization (Discussion of Warner, Luna, & Butler, 2007 and Begay, Spence, & Tuttle, unpublished, led by Edwin Ko)

March 25, 2020

Sande, Jenks, and Inkelas published in NLLT

Congrats to Hannah Sande (PhD 2017), Peter Jenks, and Sharon Inkelas, whose article "Cophonologies by Ph(r)ase" has just appeared online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Read it here!

March 23, 2020

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Christine Sheil (PhD 2016) archived a new collection of sound recordings of 18 elicitation sessions on Scottish Gaelic (Indo-European; Scotland), stemming from her dissertation fieldwork there in 2013 and 2014.
  • Wilson de Lima Silva (Arizona) archived a new collection on Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), based on fieldwork in the Cidade de Deus neighborhood of Manaus, Brazil during his MA research at the University of Utah in 2004. There are sound recordings of elicitation, reading, and texts, as well as derivative materials like MA coursework and previously published booklets.
  • We archived a new collection of sound recordings and written materials related to Chungli Ao (Ao; India), which derive from the 2008-2009 graduate field methods course (Linguistics 240) co-taught by Alice Gaby and Lev Michael, with language consultant Moa Imchen. The students in the course were Alex Bratkievich, Daniel Bruhn (PhD 2014), Ramón Escamilla (PhD 2012), Lindsey Newbold, Hannah Pritchett, Marilola Pérez (PhD 2015), and Russell Rhodes. Prof. Gaby is now at Monash University in Melbourne. We're grateful to undergraduate student Ellis Miller, who's working as an LRAP apprentice in the Survey this semester, for making the content descriptions for the items in this collection.
  • Steve Parker (Dallas International University & SIL International) archived a new collection of field notes and sound recordings of Panobo/Huariapano (Panoan; Peru). Dating from 1991, these are the only known sound recordings of Panobo in existence, the language being thought to have no more first-language speakers. The consultant was Arquímedes Sinuiri Nunta.

March 19, 2020

Shen presents at CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing

Alice Shen presented a talk at the CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, which was entirely online this year. The title of her talk was "Asymmetric processing costs in the auditory comprehension of Mandarin and English bilingual sentences." You can read more about it here.

Rybka and Michael paper in Journal of Historical Linguistics

A paper by recent Berkeley Linguistics post-doc Konrad Rybka and Lev Michael, entitled A privative derivational source for standard negation in Lokono (Arawakan), has appeared in the pages of the Journal of Historical Linguistics. Congrats!

March 13, 2020

Linguistics events this week (March 13-20, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

March 6, 2020

Linguistics events this week (March 6-13, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Breath of Life 2020 issues call for linguistic partners

Leanne Hinton writes:

Big Give is coming next week!
Big Give is an online fundraising tradition that began in 2014, giving alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends the chance to come together on one day to show support for the Linguistics Department specifically, and the Berkeley campus generally.  Big Give begins at 9pm on Wednesday, March 11, and runs through 9pm on Thursday, March 12.  Watch for our emails around that time---you might even be able to help us win extra money in the hourly contests!
Welcome Katherine Hilton

Belatedly, welcome Katherine Hilton!

Dr. Katherine Hilton has joined the linguistics department this semester as a temporary lecturer teaching Ling 100 “Introduction to Linguistic Science”.  Dr. Hilton earned her PhD in 2018 from Stanford, and now lives in Berkeley.  Her dissertation was entitled “What does an interruption sound like?” (committee: Rob Podesva, Penny Eckert, and Meghan Sumner), so she might be paying close attention if she hears you interrupt someone.  She has an impressive teaching history at Stanford both as a TA (Phonetics, AAVE, and Language and Society), and as an instructor of record (Intro to Linguistics, Language and Society, and Discourse Structure).

You’ll see her holding busy office hours in Dwinelle 1224.

 Welcome Katherine! 

Ko receives FEL grant

Congrats to Edwin Ko, who has just been awarded a Foundation for Endangered Languages grant for his project entitled Development of Northern Pomo language revitalization camps!

February 29, 2020

Bardagil organizes Manoki language school

Postdoc Bernat Bardagil writes to share that he has just organized the 2nd Watjuho Ja'a School, an intensive language school for the Manoki language, a variety of the isolate language Mỹky. It took place at the village of Cravari, in western Mato Grosso, Brazil.

Manoki language school

February 28, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Feb 28-March 6, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Linguistics Department Colloquium - Friday Feb 28 -  Dwinelle 3335 - 3-5pm
    Stephanie Shih (USC): Lexical classes in probabilistic phonology
  • Phorum - Monday March 2 - 1303 Dwinelle  - 12-1pm
    Matthew Leonard (UCSF): Dynamic Brain Networks for the Perception and Organization of Speech
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday March 4 - 1303 Dwinelle - 4-5.30pm
    Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley): Publishing based on fieldwork
  • Practice talk - Wednesday March 4 - 1229 Dwinelle - 11-12:30p
    Ruth Rouvier (Berkeley): "My language saved my life": Identity, Wellbeing, and Language Reclamation
  • Practice talk - Wednesday March 4 - 1303 Dwinelle - 2-3:30p
     Julia Nee (Berkeley): Language revitalization is about more than language: the role of community building in revitalizing Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec

February 25, 2020

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010) archived a new collection on Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan; CA, OR, ID, NV), based on 10 years of research with elders Grace Dick, Leona Cluette Dick, Morris Jack, Inez Jim, Elaine Lundy, Edith McCann, Harold Miller, and Jimmy Nez, and in collaboration with Molly Babel (PhD 2009) and Michael Houser (PhD 2010). The collection consists of 281 recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation (as he writes, with a focus on "nominalization, clausal embedding, clause chaining, and aspect"), and texts. The project grew out of Andrew Garrett's 2005-2006 field methods course on the language.
  • Conor Daly (PhD Slavic 1991) archived a new collection on Ninilchik Russian, a variety spoken on the Kenai Peninsula and surrounding region of southern Alaska. Based on fieldwork in July and August 1985, the collection consists of conversations, interviews, and linguistic work with 25 people.
  • The five notebooks comprising Marvin Kramer's (PhD 2002) field notes from summers 1968 and 1969 on Kutenai (isolate; British Columbia, ID, MT) are now available (Kramer.002.001-Kramer.002.005). The consultants were Ambrose Gravelle, Catherine Gravelle, and Frank Whitehead. (Thanks to Alex Elias for assisting us in scanning these!)