The jobs area of the LINGUIST List is a place for companies and universities to post job announcements. This is one of the busiest areas of the listserv. Over 10,000 jobs have been submitted over the LINGUIST List to date. Clare is our primary editor tackling this task with support from Sarah. This week’s fun fact is going to shed a little light on the variety of submissions we receive.
As I’m sure you know, linguistics touches on a large number of other fields.
Linguists are doing linguistics in jobs all around the world, interacting with people working in other disciplines daily. This is apparent by the job submissions we receive.
The graph below shows the 32 top department names for job submissions along with how many jobs these departments submit to us. This was created by querying our database for the top 50 most common and then manually combining ones that were the same (e.g. Department of Linguistics and Linguistics Department were both changed into Linguistics).
That’s quite a spread in different areas you all are working in!
Maybe you’re someone who found a job by using the LINGUIST List or maybe you fund the right candidate because of posting with us. If you appreciate the work that we do to bring job postings to you, please consider donating at the funddrive page.
Today we are rolling out another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes for this weekend, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before Friday, Apr 6.
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From Springer:
A hardback copy of “English Medium Instruction in Higher Education in Asia-Pacific” edited by Ben Fenton-Smith, Pamela Humphreys and Ian Walkinshaw (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319519746) AND 4 issues of the Language Policy journal (volume 16 issues 1- 4)
A hardback copy of “Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres” edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319545547) AND 4 issues of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation (volume 51 issues 1 – 4)
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Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing until midnight on Thursday, Apr 5. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:
In addition to the one-time donations to our Fund Drive, you can also become a recurring donor and support LINGUIST List on a long-term basis. Find out how by following this link:
And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!
There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!
Earlier in the Fund Drive, we shared some interesting statistics about EasyAbs, the free service we provide for conference organizers. In the last ten years, over 1,300 conferences have used EasyAbs, with over 75,000 abstracts submitted in that time!
Today we would like to share with you the testimonials of real-life conference organizers who used EasyAbs to make their job, well, a little easier! We want to keep providing this valuable service in years to come, so please, if you haven’t already, visit our Fund Drive homepage. We need your help to reach our goal in order to fund EasyAbs and continue to support conference organizers like those below:
We used EasyAbs to manage the submissions and reviews of abstracts for the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, 2016. We were under funding constraints for the conference, so having this freely available service was extremely helpful. EasyAbs was, indeed, easy to use, for those who submitted abstracts, for the reviewers, and for us as we prepared the conference program. EasyAbs streamlined the review process significantly. We are grateful that The Linguist List provides this wonderful service.
– Mary Grantham O’Brien, University of Calgary; Tracey Derwing, University of Alberta & Simon Fraser University.
I was pleased with my experience using EasyAbs for managing abstract review. The website is easy to interact with and the folks at LINGUIST List were prompt and helpful whenever I had questions about the site. I will certainly use it again.
– Samson Lotven, Indiana University
I’ve found EasyAbs to be an enormously useful tool when organising conferences. Being able to manage the various aspects of abstract reviewing on one site has made the process very efficient. I’m grateful to the LinguistList for offering us the service without charge.
– Beth Hume, University of Canterbury
It is very useful for a conference organizer to be able to widely advertise an upcoming event on Linguist List. Just a simple e-mail to the editors will do to spread the news to the linguistics community. The EasyAbs service deserves its name because it makes it really easy to organize the practicalities around conference abstracts, both for organizers and participants.
In particular, organizing the Nordic Prosody XII conference 2016 I enjoyed the quick and smooth help from the list’s conference support!”
– Wilm van Dommelen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
We have used EasyAbs for our last two international conferences at Lancaster University. It works very smoothly, and has been ideal for our needs in dealing with quite large numbers of submissions and the subsequent review process. We are really grateful for the provision of such an effective system made available to the linguist list, and beyond, and we profoundly hope that it continues to be a service to academics in our community – we’d like to use it again for our next meeting!
– Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University
We have used EasyAbs for several conferences now and we would use it again. EasyAbs is a great tool, easy to handle and free, which might be especially important for the organisers of smaller conferences such as ours.
EasyAbs is perfectly integrated with the LinguistList conference services which helped us along the entire way from conference announcement to the call for papers and the whole abstract submission and review process, to finally announcing our programme on LinguistList. What’s particularly useful about EasyAbs is that organisers and reviewers have independent access to the abstracts and you can easily organise double-blind reviewing by assigning and e-mailing reviewers etc. You can send Accept/Reject mails directly from the facility and it even offers sample letters (which may help especially when you aren’t a native speaker of English).
We think EasyAbs is a great service to the linguistics community. We would recommend it to anyone organising a small- to medium-size conference.
– Andrea Ender and Irmtraud Kaiser, Universität Salzburg
I really recommend EasyAbs. It is an easy to use platform and the support is great. It has made it much easier for us to upload and review abstracts for our conference.
– Julia Miller, president of AustraLex
The Arabic Linguistics Society has benefited tremendously from the Linguist List’s free EasyAbs tool in vetting abstracts for its annual symposia. The system is user-friendly for the conference organizers, the authors, and the reviewers. This takes, without a doubt, a lot of labor behind the scenes at the Linguist List, and for that, we are truly grateful.
– Hamid Ouali (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Executive Director of the Arabic Linguistics Society
Easy Abs is a unique facility offered byLinguistList. From the very first moment I undertook the organization of an international conference and judging by the clear and neat way LinguistList’s website is organized, I trusted Easy Abs for a smooth conference program outcome. Easy Abs facilitates abstracts uploading and the process of reviewers’ selection, accelerates the review and notification process, as well as the final program organization. All in all, Easy Abs helps even the most hopeless conference (or event) organizer become the greater conference (or event) host! Try it!
For several years, we have featured linguists with established careers and interesting stories to tell. This year, we will also be highlighting “Rising Stars” throughout our Fund Drive, undergraduates who were nominated by their mentors for their exceptional interest in linguistics and eager participation in the global community of language researchers.
Selected nominees were asked to share their view of the field of linguistics: what topics they see emerging as important or especially interesting, what role they see the field filling in the coming decades, and how they plan to contribute. We hope you will enjoy the perspectives of these students, who represent the bright future of our field.
Today, we are featuring Becca Peterson, a sophomore at Northeastern Illinois University with a special interest in sociolinguistics and language attitudes. She is the author of the award-winning short play “Talking the Talk,” whose story hinges on “socioeconomic, racial, class, and regional communication disconnects (and connections) among four speakers of differing varieties of American English.”
There are already numerous linguistic shifts and notions of awareness in terms of political correctness that pertain to the English language. We see this awareness when we think about the heightened awareness of gender as a non-binary entity of the human condition and the increased use of gender neutral pronouns. Many people are practicing these linguistic changes based on their own value of inclusivity that in turn shape language. In decades to come, my conjecture would be that a normalization of gender-neutral pronouns will occur not only in English but in some other languages as well.
A linguistic ‘hot topic’ that I personally would like to see emerge is how sexism is ingrained into the English language, both colloquial and formal. In the media and in casual conversations, it is often normalized to refer to women using animalistic terms such as ‘chicks’ and ‘bitches,’ or infantilizing terms like ‘doll.’ We often hear of both men and women being referred to by the term ‘bitch’ when that person exhibits a particular state of emotionality; but having emotion is a human characteristic and not one exclusively of women. However, people use the term in a derogatory sense to shame men and women for displaying emotion by using a strictly female term, as ‘bitch’ refers to a female dog. Many times, also, women’s occupational titles include their gender – such as with the terms ‘actress’ or ‘waitress’ – which seems to me irrelevant to a woman’s ability to hold and excel in any occupation. I do not believe that it is at all necessary to make the distinction that the person holding the job is a woman.
Another topic in linguistics that I feel is very important is the dismantling of the idea that certain dialects are considered to be more standard or have greater prestige compared to others. Dialects, regardless of which, have a structure and certain logic to them that makes each unique and conveys a sense of identity about the speakers of that dialect. There is no ‘standard’ English dialect, and believing that there is such a thing perpetuates stigmas against speakers of other varieties. Prescriptivist attitudes of language emerged in order to separate social groups and assign a greater value to individuals who learned, wrote, and spoke using prescriptive grammar. I would like to see this fallacy that speakers of certain varieties are inherently uneducated fall off and for a more descriptive view of English grammar to be accepted, particularly in academic environments where students’ adherence to prescriptive grammar is often held to a greater importance than students’ ideas and creative accomplishments.
As a creative writer myself, I attempted to bring this destigmatization of so-called ‘non-standard’ dialects to light in a play that I wrote called “Talking the Talk.” In the play, there are two characters in a hospital waiting room, one who speaks African-American English dialect and one who speaks a variety of Appalachian English. While both characters speak the same language, they have trouble communicating with and understanding one another due to their dialectical differences, particularly in terms of the slang they use. At the end of the play, the doctor’s character, who speaks in some highfalutin medical jargon, is introduced to give the impression that she is highly educated, but then she ends up making some very miniscule grammar mistakes that prescriptivists would criticize. I think the meshing of these three characters in the end conveys my point that dialect is not an indication of education or prestige.
I am an aspiring English teacher and I am fortunate to be able to work in an environment where these conversations about language are relevant. Having an awareness of how language might convey certain values is important, and the great thing about the English discourse is that if the language we use does not match our own values, we can modify our language use and in turn shape the language. Languages naturally evolve in order to reflect the people who speak it as well as their morals and values, so the power is not in the language itself but in the speakers of the language. I intend to instill in my students a sense of awareness and mindfulness regarding language.
If you have a student who you believe is a “Rising Star” in linguistics, we would love to hear about them! We are still accepting nominations for exceptional young linguists. Please see the call for nominations for more information: https://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-831.html
If you have not yet–please visit our Fund Drive page to learn more about us and why we need your help! The LINGUIST List relies on your generous donations to continue its support of linguists around the world.
Looking back over many decades of passion for linguistics and phonetics, it turns out that there are not as many steps as one might think from a first degree in literature and philology, emphasising structural, hermeneutic and biographical methods, and thorough acquaintance with the history of the Germanic languages from Indo-European to the 20th century, to research on computational language documentation and computational phonetics, particularly prosody, on the other.
For example, the rhymes and metrical patterns of lyrical poetry have been a source of metaphors for terminology in phonology (for example ‘metre’, ‘metrical phonology’, ‘iambic’ and ‘trochaic’ stress patterns, ‘rhyme’, ‘anacrusis’) for a long time. And not only do the deep-to-surface rules of generative and post-generative phonologies tend to mirror many of the sound change rules of philology, the ‘Junggrammatiker’ of the late 19th and early 20th century were no slouches when it came to formal descriptive precision. Ferdinand de Saussure, too, our semiotically oriented structural linguistic grandfather figure, was most well-known in his time for his work on Indo-European vowels and laryngeals. Leonard Bloomfield worked in remarkable transdisciplinary environments: from philological studies in Göttingen to cooperation with expat Vienna logician Rudolf Carnap in Chicago, whose background in the Vienna circle of logicians and linguists links up with the Prague school of linguistics, particularly Trubetzkoy’s logical theory of binary oppositions, and thus, via Roman Jakobson, linguist and literary scholar, with late 20th century Bostonian linguistics. Optimality Theory, too, is a practical application of set-constraining ‘generate and test’ pattern matching search algorithms in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.
The symbiosis of hermeneutic literary studies, logic and speech analysis which these scholars practised has inspired me in different ways during my linguistic career, leading to a synthesis of Hallidayan and Chomskyan views of language as a finite stack of ranks from discourse to the speech sound, together with semantic-pragmatic and prosodic-phonetic interpretations at each rank (Rank-Interpretation Theory).
The interdisciplinary environment at Bielefeld University and lengthy involvement in international projects (especially SAM, EAGLES, VerbMobil, DoBeS, E-MELD), as well as appointments in several African countries, in India and in China, has created many opportunities to meet and work on these topics with stimulating colleagues of many persuasions in many corners of the world (yes, the world is a polyhedron in my computational cosmology) and to indulge my interests in literature (check my #haiku tweets and choupub ebooks) and music (check tumblr) with colleagues and students, as well as notching up a current total of 114 co-authors, Erdös #4 and (particularly proud of these) awards for linguistic and phonetic cooperations with Ivory Coast and Nigeria. Naturally I’m looking forward to many more such transdisciplinary and transcultural cooperations with fruitful interchanges of data, description, documentation and computation, and – most of all! – to the ever rewarding interactions with speakers of fascinating languages, the real sources of our dedication to language and speech.
Part II: How Human is Alien Language? Science Fiction, Klingon, and Language
This year’s Fund Drive theme is linguistics and pop culture, and to that end, we’re running a short 3-part series about Constructed Languages, one of Pop Culture’s most enduring linguistic artifacts. Part I dealt with the early years of creative language construction, focusing mainly on the man who started it all–J.R.R. Tolkien, philologist and mythos-maker. Part II deals with Fantasy’s daring cousin, Science Fiction, and the role played by ConLangs in the creation of science-oriented narrative and philosophy.
From my first college years, when I told people that I was studying linguistics, I always got those inevitable questions. Question One is obviously, “how many languages do you speak?” but of course, the follow-up is always: “what kinds of jobs are there for linguists?” My answers vary, but usually land somewhere near “Linguist IS a job.” Nevertheless, people are often curious if I am interested in working for Hollywood–in training actors in dialectology, or in working on inventing languages for the movies. There’s a reason for that question, and the reason is Klingon.
Klingon is probably the most famous Science Fiction ConLang. It started as a fictional language for the use of aliens in Star Trek, and has become a pop culture phenomenon unlike any other. You can find Klingon on DuoLingo. I kid you not.
Klingon is mentioned in the TV Show version of Star Trek, but is not spoken on screen until Star Trek: the motion picture (1979). At the time, Klingon was not a ConLang but essentially alien-sounds without deliberate form. From there it was developed, regularized, and built up until it could be used for actual communication. It was officially described by Marc Okrand in 1985, who designed it starting from the sounds made up by James Doohan (the actor who plays Scotty) for the first lines of Klingon dialogue.
Mark Lenard, who played Klingon Captain of the battlecruiser IKS Amar, pronounced the first Klingon Words on screen–which were made up by James Doohan
Klingon’s most interesting features, in my opinion, are phonological. Because it was designed to sound “alien,” Klingon has many typologically rare and marked features. It had to be possible for a human vocal tract to produce, so it couldn’t reach the Alien heights of Arrival’s incomprehensible alien sounds, which do not notably resemble human language at all, in terms of strangeness to the human ear. Nevertheless a wide range of places of articulation, with unexpected unevenness suffice to make Klingon rather typologically unusual. There is only one sibilant, but there are plenty of voiced and voiceless fricatives and stops–so far, not so strange. (It was designed to sound “guttural,” so there are a collection of “guttural”-sounding fricatives and affricates.) Uvulars include stops and affricates. In terms of uneven phoneme sets, Klingon includes voiceless aspirated alveolar stops like English… but the voiced alternate is retroflex. In Klingon, there is a voiced labiodental fricative, but no voiceless alternate. To my mind, this is a smart strategy–by definition and nature, no speech sound, no matter how typologically marked, is “alien,” and any alien ConLang designed to be spoken by human actors must be composed out of speech sounds. So the creators, namely Marc Okrand, decided to use the phonological paradigm itself alongside the selection of phonemes. The gaps in the phoneme set do more to make the language strange than the presence of typologically marked sounds. The strangeness of Klingon is, so to speak, more in its phonological negative space than its positive space. According to Okrand, this is very much intentional–he used the phonological space to create a sound system that deliberately violates the normal phonological patterns and tendencies of human language.
But hey, I’m no Klingon expert. Let’s let Marc Okrand, who is also responsible for creating Star Trek‘s Vulcan language, tell us about it. Check it out:
Like Tolkien’s Elvish, Klingon became the first of a new genre. Where Tolkien invented fantasy languages deliberate crafted to have the realistic features of human language, to have diachronies and dialects and variants and contact-phenomena, Science Fiction ConLangs are more often created to sound as unlike human language as possible. To that end, a focus on phonology makes sense. Unusual syntactic features or semantic features may be present in your SciFi Conlang, but who’s going to notice them, or find them strange? Klingon has grammar, morphology, syllable structure, and other complexities, but beyond the writing system and phonology, most listeners will never know what makes the language complex. Nevertheless, as evidenced by DuoLingo, the language has a popular following and is one of pop culture’s most widely spoken, widely studied, and well-beloved ConLangs. But it’s far from the only one. I love Star Wars, and it would be a mistake to totally leave out mention of the language use of the Star Wars franchise, such as its constructed script Aurebesh, but Klingon’s far-reaching influence is too important to the history of ConLangs, and truly deserves the space.
Milo James Thatch, Movie Linguist(ish), played by Michael J. Fox. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember the plot of this movie, but I do remember loving this guy.
Other SciFi ConLangs include Barsoomian, from 2012’s John Carter of Mars, and Goa’uld, the fictional language of Stargate, SG1. Marc Okrand also developed Atlantian for the Disney movie Atlantis: the Lost Empire, which is not like the other SciFi ConLangs mentioned here in that it was developed for a Science Fiction movie, but to be spoken by human characters, not aliens.
Dr. Daniel Jackson, Movie Linguist, played by Michael Shanks, has the dubious honor of being probably Tumblr’s favorite linguist. Pretty sure he’s the same archetype as Milo Thatch?
The nature of your SciFi language will vary based on your needs. Are your aliens human-like, or are they cosmically impossible beings from beyond perception? How much is the audience meant to identify with them and empathize with them, and is your ConLang meant to act as a barrier or an aide in creating empathy? As previously mentioned, the language at the center of 2017’s Arrival is essentially so alien it cannot be comprehended by humans and the main character Louise Banks must find a way to work around the spoken language (she focuses on the set of circular ideograms which were invented for the movie and which are primarily aesthetic in nature). The creators of the film and its language are welcome to correct me on this, but to my knowledge the ideographic writing system used in the movie is not actually a usable ConLang.
However, in James Cameron’s Avatar, the alien language is designed for a decidedly human-like alien people, the Na’vi. Suitably, Na’vi is not designed with the same strategy as Klingon. James Cameron himself started the work on Na’vi language early in his conception of the project. However, the bulk of the ConLanging work was done by Paul Frommer of USC Marshall School of Business and Edward Finegan of University of Southern California. Cameron’s initial list of words were reportedly phonologically similar to Polynesian languages, and the linguists worked from there to develop sets of phonologies with different features–among them a tonal system, a system with ejectives, and one with contrasting vowel lengths. Notably, these may sound strange or “exotic” to the English-speaking world, but are nonetheless not like Klingon’s mismatch of alveolars with its retroflex voiced alternate. Tonal systems and length-contrasts are certainly not typologically rare! The phonological choices–and again, phonology is going to be the most or even only salient feature of a ConLang to the majority of the audience–invoke human speech and there is nothing about Na’vi that sounds to my ear especially “otherworldly.” But that’s the point. The language in Avatar is like its people–essentially human, and designed to be empathetic to a human audience. I can’t say for sure whether this was Frommer and Finegan’s goal in the design of Na’vi, but I think it’s fair to say linguistic realism was important. There’s no emphasis on creating a language that sounds impossible to humans, and instead a realistic language is designed–but in the case of language, “realistic” means “human-like.” Language is also meant to be a feature of the movie’s world, (same goes for Klingon), not the primary object of investigation.
Neytiri, alien bilingual, played and motion-captured by Zoë Saldana. The Na’vi were designed to feel realistic and human-like.
And that brings us back to 2017, and our most recent intersection of speculative fiction and language. Arrival won’t get much space here because its language is not a ConLang (as far as I know) in the truest sense, but I would be remiss if I didn’t bring the subject of SciFi and Language to bear upon the inspiration for the Fund Drive theme: the unusually great year for language in the movies that was 2017. (At least something was great about 2017, right?) In Arrival, the goal is the opposite of Klingon or Na’vi–the language of the Heptapods is not usable to humans, and the language barrier is among the chief obstacles of the movie. It’s not human-like, it’s not easy to empathize with, it’s not even pronounceable. The movie makes language, in a strange way, both its primary protagonist and its primary antagonist. Instead of defeating the antagonist, Louise Banks, the movie’s linguist-hero, overcomes her own struggles to understand it, by using the unique approach of a linguist to the subject of language; she both uses language to achieve empathy with the Other and overcomes the barriers of language by understanding it. And that’s pretty cool, if you ask me.
Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is probably Hollywood’s most realistic Linguist.
Please feel welcome to add your thoughts–did you ever design a ConLang for SciFi? Tell me about it! Do you know more about the ones under discussion here and want to share your knowledge? Did I leave anything out, or make any errors? Are there any less famous SciFi ConLangs that deserve more attention?
Most importantly, of course, don’t forget to Click Here donate to the LINGUIST List! We’re at just over 20% of our goal. We’re here to facilitate the worldwide conversation between linguists and to provide invaluable resources to the linguistic community. The LINGUIST List not only provides and manages enormous amounts of data and resources for academic linguists, but supports young researchers who otherwise would not be able to fund their studies.
(Speaking of young researchers, keep an eye out for our next featured undergraduate in the Rising Stars series we are running for this year’s Fund Drive, which spotlights remarkable students nominated by you, the subscribers and supporters of LL! Our last spotlighted student was Carlotta Hübener at the University of Hamburg.)
The third and final part of the ConLangs series will deal with the latest wave of ConLangs, including Dothraki and Valyrian. See you next time!
–Sarah Robsinson, Publications Editor
on behalf of the LINGUIST List team
For several years, we have featured linguists with established careers and interesting stories to tell. This year, we will also be highlighting “Rising Stars” throughout our Fund Drive, undergraduates who were nominated by their mentors for their exceptional interest in linguistics and eager participation in the global community of language researchers.
Selected nominees were asked to share their view of the field of linguistics: what topics they see emerging as important or especially interesting, what role they see the field filling in the coming decades, and how they plan to contribute. We hope you will enjoy the perspectives of these students, who represent the bright future of our field.
Today, we are featuring Carlotta Hübener, a senior at the University of Hamburg. She is most interested in morphology and syntax, having written her BA thesis on the German linking element -s- and its role in disambiguating compounds.
Language has fascinated me ever since I started to talk; however, the immense importance of language did not become clear to me until I started my university studies. Human language is an incredibly valuable asset, particularly with regards to its cognitive, social, cultural and historical aspects. Language allows us to make inferences about how human thinking is organized. Syntactic regularities often reflect human priorities. A striking example of this is the influence of the animacy hierarchy in various grammatical areas. Frequently, animate or even human referents assume a special grammatical role, for example, they may be preferred to inanimate referents in syntactic orders. (Conventionalized) metaphors are another example for the interplay of language and cognition. It is believed that they reflect existing presumptions or human thinking, and vice versa, shape human perception.
My personal interest: Grammar
So far, my studies have been focused on grammar from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. My particular interests are morphology and syntax, together with their interfaces. Empirical methods are indispensable to investigate these subjects. It is invigorating to learn more about the way people use linguistic structures, how they are modified over time and how people generalize over them or render them unproductive. In addition, linguistically doubtful cases are highly appealing to me as they often indicate language change, and point out limitations to the production and processing of language.
I would like, with my work, to contribute to bringing syntactic irregularities into sharper focus. In this way, new perspectives may be opened on linguistic phenomena which were previously neglected or even considered as fully discussed. It is really exciting to investigate how prototypically transitive scenarios are morphologically reflected. In my undergraduate thesis, I was able to show, with the use of a questionnaire, that the linking-s in newly coined German compounds has a disambiguating effect because it supports transitive interpretations.
Perspectives to linguistics
The ever-increasing production of written language data, such as online magazines, forum discussions, chats etc. will extend the possibilities of corpus linguistics. These empiric resources will allow researchers to use digital corpora more comprehensively than before. Advances in computational linguistics will hopefully allow automatic tagging systems to be improved. This will, in turn, simplify the processing of large amounts of linguistic data. Large and current corpora will allow the change in language to be recognized faster and to be described more accurately. This may also serve as a starting point to examine rare linguistic phenomena, which may otherwise have been overlooked.
Interactive end devices are, increasingly, becoming a part of daily life. Their use leads to an increasing demand on communication. The most immediate form of communication still is human language, hence, computational linguistics is increasingly being challenged to simplify natural man-machine communication, i.e. making it as easy as communicating with other humans. To this end, language must be represented digitally. Like that, digital avatars and machine-translation systems could be substantially improved.
As a whole, linguistic research and its subdisciplines encompass countless interesting possibilities. Surely, interdisciplinary research will become increasingly important for further progress. Science and particularly language belong to the general public. Access to current scientific results must be simplified. This includes digital provisioning of results as well as matching their formal complexity to the needs of the general public. Naturally, this should lead to an increasing exchange of ideas between researchers and the interested public. In this way, linguistics will continue to contribute to enlightenment and hinder potential misuse of the force of language as commonly found in hate speeches and fake news.
If you have a student who you believe is a “Rising Star” in linguistics, we would love to hear about them! We are still accepting nominations for exceptional young linguists. Please see the call for nominations for more information.
If you have not yet–please visit our Fund Drive page to learn more about us and why we need your help! The LINGUIST List relies on your generous donations to continue it support of linguists around the world.
Today we are rolling out another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes for this weekend, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before Friday, Mar 30.
Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing until midnight on Thursday, Mar 29. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:
In addition to the one-time donations to our Fund Drive, you can also become a recurring donor and support LINGUIST List on a long-term basis. Find out how by following this link:
And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!
There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!
We’re writing to thank you for your generosity so far in our Fund Drive: we have passed 20% of our goal! We have received donations from over 150 users, 77 universities, 30 countries, and linguists in a wide variety of subfields (currently led by Computational Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Syntax)!
We are passionate about our role in the world-wide linguistics community, a role that we have played for 28 years. We now have 30 000+ users who range from fledgling linguistics students to distinguished, life-long contributors to the field, and we are proud to provide services that meet various needs for users all along that spectrum. Whether it’s a new job, a promising conference call, or a particularly interesting new book, we want to be the place you find it.
But to achieve that end, we need your help. Although we never charge our readers for the information we provide, our operation isn’t free. We rely on the generosity of our users to fund Graduate Assistants, programmers, summer interns, IT infrastructure, and so on. Without your donations, the LINGUIST List would simply not be possible.
If just 1 in 10 users would donate $10, we would reach our goal and end the Fund Drive TODAY. We could get back to doing what we do best: serving linguists around the globe. So please, if you haven’t yet––please visit our Fund Drive homepage to learn more about us, and why we need your donation.
For this week’s spotlight on pop culture linguistics, we’ve decided to talk about the proud history and modern practice of constructing languages to fill fictional worlds—so don’t look out for Esperanto, or any other language constructed with the intention of filling the real world.
We’ll be handling ConLangs in a three-part series, because, well, we’re passionate about languages, fiction, and the role that language plays in the imaginative lives of people and cultures.
Part I: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Invention of Invention
Like many English-L1 linguists, the world of J.R.R. Tolkien was my first introduction to linguistics–and to ConLangs. My father read aloud to me from the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings when I was eight years old, and by the time I was fifteen I was attempting my own first constructed languages. (They were bad.)
Although J.R.R. Tolkien was not the first person to attempt constructing a language—that honor goes to the ancients, who constructed languages not for fictional speakers but for the purposes of philosophy, cross-linguistic communication, and aesthetics—his groundbreaking ConLangs can be credited with beginning the rich new era of 20th and 21st century language-creation. Tolkien was a philologist and a professor, who spent much of his time immersed in the same kinds of texts that linguists and philologists today work with, but his efforts at ConLanging began when he was only a child of 13 or 14 years. Elvish languages—of which there were several—and their accompanying writing systems were among the first things he imagined for his epic world-changing mythos. In fact, one could say he created his mythos to give a world to his languages, to give them native speakers and L2 speakers and pragmatics and conversations, to launch them into life, rather than creating his languages to populate and enrich his world.
His first Elvish language (though not his first ConLang) was called Quenya, which was inspired in the early stages by languages he was familiar with, in particular Finnish.
Galadriel, played by Cate Blanchett in the movies, is a powerful Elvish woman, though not technically a queen, and a speaker of Tolkien’s ConLangs Sindarin and Quenya
He was so taken with Finnish that he immediately implemented features of Finnish grammar and phonology into his ConLang, to the extent that a hundred years after he began his work, I can still remember showing my friends a song in Finnish and having them comment, “that’s beautiful. It sounds like Elvish.”
According to one of his letters—dated 1964 and a large portion of which was published in now out-of-print issue 17 (2007) of Parma Eldalamberon, a fan magazine devoted to Tolkien’s ConLangs which has been involved since 1992 in the project of editing and compiling of Tolkien’s linguistic papers with the permission of his son, Christopher Tolkien—the influence of Finnish was initially considerably more extensive, but later trimmed significantly in what became Late Quenya. Elements he borrowed from Finnish and that remained in Late Quenya included syntax—lack of grammatical gender, and parts of the case system, including what appears to be the inessive case with the ending -sse (rest in or at), and the inflectional ending -nna (movement toward) and -llo (movement away from), cases which were borrowed from Finnish, though I can’t say whether the actual phonological representation of them came from Finnish too or was invented by Tolkien to fill a grammatical category—and phonological, such as the absence of a voiced stop series, except in NC clusters in which the stop undergoes voicing assimilation toward the voicing setting of the preceding nasal. (Any Finnish speaking readers are welcome to comment on the case endings, which I had a hard time identifying! Are the case endings themselves borrowed, in your opinion? Edit: commenter Edouard Kloczko was happy to confirm that the cases are borrowed–Finnish adessive -lla becomes Quenya -llo, inessive -ssa becomes -sse.)
In another letter, this one found in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (2000, edited by Christopher Tolkien), he described Quenya as having many “phonoaesthetic” influences, including Finnish, Latin, and Greek.
(“Phonoaesthetic” is an excellent word and we should keep it.)
The Tengwar is an Elvish script that were influenced by Satari, a script invented by in-universe linguist Rumil
As Tolkien’s ConLangs developed, he developed the world if Middle Earth around them, to accommodate a diachronic vision that included contact-induced language change, diachronic shifting in phonology and semantics. Tolkien even got metascholastic and included a scholarly tradition of philology among the Elves themselves. There were Elvish linguists in his world! Like Rúmil the Elvish philologist who was the invented inventor of one of Tolkien’s invented scripts, Sarati—’later Tengwar’. Tolkien created other scripts like Cirth, Quenyatic, and Gondolinic Runes. There were even families of related languages with shared ancestral roots, and eventually it all led to the world’s first Mythopoeia. The man, the myth-maker, and pop culture’s first ConLanger.
What are your favorite ConLangs, and Conlangers? Are there any you’d like to see us talk about? Have you ever constructed one, or been hired to construct one? Tell us about it in the comments! Send us your favorite examples! And don’t forget to donate to support the LINGUIST List! We are so grateful for your support over the last three decades–you keep us afloat!
–Sarah Robsinson, Publications Editor
on behalf of the LINGUIST List team
