A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the developers, Han Sloetjes and Aarthy Somasundaram. One of its major features is a whole new user interface for high-speed transcription. This interface is the outcome of a process of user consultation and usability testing at the MPI for Psycholinguistics led by Mark Dingemanse, Jeremy Hammond, and Simeon Floyd in close collaboration with the ELAN developers Han Sloetjes and Aarthy Somasundaram. In this post we outline the most important features of Transcription mode. Continue reading →
Last year’s post on the Great Minds of the 21st Century award continues to attract attention from people who want to find out more about the American Biographical Institute (ABI) and its vanity awards.
Surprisingly, there are still people clueless (shameless?) enough to listvanityscamslikethis on their CVs. Thankfully, the ABI decided to nominate me again this year, this time for another honour: the Albert Einstein Award of Excellence for 2011, no less. Here’s an excerpt from their letter: Continue reading →
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.
Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language of Perception project. This special issue, edited by Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, also features two articles on ideophones: one by Sylvia Tufvesson and one by yours truly. Continue reading →
This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. It was translated from German into English by Mark Dingemanse in 2009. Continue reading →
Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following:
Il faut donc guetter les expressifs et les attraper au vol ; mais dans le feu de l’action et de la discussion animée où ils naissent, qui aurait le culot d’interrompre tout le monde afin de pouvoir vérifier une voyelle, un sens, une intention? — Gérard Diffloth, 2001
The LSA asks its members in a survey to choose the most important papers in Language, 1925-2000. Have you ever wondered what might be the most cited ones?
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is currently doing a member survey to collect suggestions for an anthology of the most influential and significant articles published in Language. From the survey:
For each volume of the Anthology, we are seeking input on those articles which represent the best scholarship published during that particular period. By “best,” we mean the most influential, the most cited, the most visited in JSTOR, and those considered a must-read for students and scholars of the discipline.
The survey includes some data that is normally hard to come by: most viewed articles from the JSTOR archive of Language. Since I think we can learn some useful things by crowdsourcing this data, I have put it in a publicly editable Google spreadsheet called Language Anthology data. Continue reading →
This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org, a site that will be the home of online supplementary materials to go with my PhD thesis, The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu.
There isn’t all that much to see yet, but I did upload some pictures of Kawu and some enticing figures from the chapter on the pile sorting task to whet the appetite of you ideophone afficionados out there. More details soon!
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,” he said, “he gets to middle age — and by the way, he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he’s almost fifty — a guy like that at last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights torque wrench — no, you moron, the other one.”
Summer Job, by Richard Hoffman. From the bundle Gold Star Road, Barrow Street Press 2007. Spotted on Michael Agar‘s home page and also seen on the Poetry Foundation.
I keep forgetting the kind of simple edits that are so trivial to make in CSL styles. Here I catalogue a few, for my own benefit and hopefully also useful to others. Continue reading →
