Monthly Archives: May 2009

AAA Meeting Abstracts online? Only viable if it’s Open Access

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The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts. As they write,

Specifically, we’re investigating posting the 2007 and 2008 AAA annual meeting paper abstracts, which would be posted exactly as they were submitted to AAA and would not be interactive, although they would be searchable. Posting these two years is a substantial project, because the combined total is nearly 7,000 specific abstracts.

Obviously, this would be an interesting resource. With a fulltext search you could track down previous research on your topic of interest, find potential collaborators, or just look up specific abstracts to refresh your memory of a talk. Besides, these abstracts are a record of the collective effort of AAA members; it is somewhat of a letdown that hitherto they have only been available in a bulky printed booklet obtainable at the meeting. Continue reading →

How is Sotho siks! doing?

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In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a gesture:

There is an interesting and amusing case of the coining of an ideophone from the type of gesture used. The gesture for running is clenched fingers, outstretched thumb pointing upwards and wiggled from side to side in imitation of the swaying of the body as the weight is transfered from the one foot to the other. Normally it is the right hand that is used. By coincidence, the thumb of the right hand represents the number ‘six’ in counting on the fingers — counting beginning on the small finger of the left hand, and ‘crossing over’ from the thumb of the left hand (five) to the thumb of the right hand (six). From this has come the ideophone siks in Sotho! This refers to running, especially fleeing from something:

a-re síks
he did this: siks!
he ran away

Kunene calls this an ideophone for structural and semantic reasons: it occurs in the same syntactic slot (introduced by re like most ideophones) and it vividly depicts an event. A footnote however reveals ‘Restricted to relatively few people, it is true, but there all the same.’ The question is: does anyone know whether the form has caught on and has been used more widely? I’ve looked around on the web, but googling for short words like that seems hopeless.

References

  1. Kunene, Daniel P. 1965. The ideophone in Southern Sotho. Journal of African Languages 4: 19-39.
  2. Kunene, Daniel P. 1978. The Ideophone in Southern Sotho. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
  3. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Some miracle of cloning

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See what I just did? Made another me.

“See what I just did? Made another me.”
Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37.

There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd’s (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why ‘culture is essential’ (the chapter title) and noting the influence of Darwin’s population thinking on biology, there is the following remarkable aside:

[I]f through some miracle of cloning Darwin were to be resurrected from his grave in Westminster Abbey, we think that he would be quite happy with the state of the science he launched. (p. 5)

Note how that statement in one breath essentializes biology (Darwin = his genes alone) and totally ignores culture (Darwin’s clone = Darwin now as then).

It would be a great miracle indeed if the encultured product of a cloning operation on Darwin’s remains would view Darwinism as ‘the science he launched’ and be happy with it!

References

  1. Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by genes alone. How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard

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Dashboard Post-it is a simple plugin for WordPress 2.7 and higher that allows you to leave yourself or other authors a note on the dashboard. It is implemented as a configurable dashboard widget, so you can collapse it, move it around, and edit it as any other dashboard widget. It will accept plain text or (sanitized) HTML. Only users with the capability “Edit dashboard” can edit the note.

As of today, Dashboard Post-it is available for download at the WordPress plugin repository. Screenshots and installation instructions can be found over there.

I wrote the plugin for my own use. There are alternatives, but since some of them stopped working after the changes to the Dashboard in WP 2.7 and others are not widgetized, and since this is a much requested feature, I decided to submit the plugin to the repository.