Wordorigins.org

In a very unfortunate and short-sighted fiscal decision, King’s College London has decided to eliminate it’s chair in paleography, the study of ancient writing and manuscripts. No other British university treats paleography as a distinct discipline and the decision will have far-reaching negative impacts for a host of academic fields.

To an outsider paleography may seem like one of those fuzzy, arcane academic disciplines that has little value to anyone else. Furthermore, it attracts few students and generates little in grant money and can be seen by accountants as a cost rather than a “profit center.” But this is a false assessment of the field’s value. Paleography is the foundation for a host of academic disciplines: literature, religion and theology, history, linguistics, ethnic and cultural studies, and more. Any discipline that requires examining old documents needs paleography.

And ironically, paleography and manuscript studies are now, perhaps for the first time ever, incredibly valuable in their own right and not just for the support they provide to other fields. We are in the midst of an information revolution, going from print to digital media. The last time humanity faced a similar revolution was 600 years ago during the transition from manuscript to print media. While the modalities are different, many of the basic problems and questions facing us in this transition are the same as those created by Gutenberg’s invention. And the digital media of the internet shares many features with the manuscripts of a thousand years ago—copying, subtle alterations in copying, multiple versions, mash-ups, anonymity of authors and more were all features of manuscript culture. Understanding how the transition to print occurred centuries ago may be critical to how we make the transition to digital media.

The Guardian has more.

The BBC reports the death of Boa Sr, at 85 years old the last native speaker of the Andaman Islands language of Bo. She was the last native speaker of the tongue for at least thirty years.

What I’m not sure about is the hype about it being an “ancient” language. It’s not like the language that Boa Sr learned as a child would have been intelligible to someone from 70,000 years ago. In a way, every language is equally as old. But if the language remained fairly isolated for all those millennia (doubtful), it might have elements that trace back that far. But even if so, I’m not sure how you could divine any cogent information about language development from it.

(Hat tip to the Slog)

In general I’m skeptical about the ability to resuscitate or revive dead languages, but this is an interesting case. NPR reports on the efforts of the Chitimacha tribe in southern Louisiana to revive their language—the last native speaker of which died in 1940. There are about 1,000 Chitamacha tribe members, which is a small, but not impossibly small, group in which to keep a language alive.

It’s not clear from the story how many members of the tribe speak Chitimacha as a second language, or their degree of fluency. This would seem to me to be the most critical element in the prospects for the language’s revival. Evidently the language is pretty well documented—including sound recordings from the 1930s—so this is not a case where we are about to lose all academic knowledge of the language. And the software company that makes Rosetta Stone translation products is doing a lot of pro bono work, funding it and providing the preservation and instructional technology—a great example of good corporate citizenship.

The NPR piece also calls Chitamacha a sleeping language, a term that I hadn’t heard before. It sounds better, at least, than dead language.

(Hat tip to the Lousy Linguist)

This week’s NY Times “On Language” column is by Ben Zimmer and is all about crash blossoms.

[23 Jan] Admit it. We’ve all done it; scour the dictionary for titillating and sophomoric definitions relating to sex. Nick Martens discusses the joys of vocab porn and the OED. (Hat tip to languagehat.)

And Lisa Berglund over at the Dictionary Society of North America blog covers one school board’s overreaction when a ten-year-old looked up “oral sex” (Horrors!) in a classroom dictionary.

[28 Jan Update: The dictionaries have been returned to the classrooms, but students will have to have permission slips signed by their parents in order to use them. It what is perhaps the saddest note to this story, not a single parent, pro or con, showed up at the school board meeting when the issue was discussed. The LA Times has the updated story here.]

An thought-provoking piece on the financial structure of the poetry market by Patrick Gillespie, a Vermont poet.

I don’t agree with everything that Gillespie says, but he certainly gives one a lot of food for thought. The string of comments at the end are well worth reading too.

Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, has an “On Language” column in the NY Times on cinematic misquotations.

The National Geographic reports on a slate writing tablet found at Jamestown, Virginia that has clues about the early settlers’ communication with the local Algonquin Indians.

Hat tip to the DSNA blog.

This Washington Post article really captures the spirit and atmosphere of the American Dialect Society’s word of the year selection. Dan Zak obviously has a keen eye for the human aspects behind a story.

It has a couple of faults. Normally, any article that quotes Paul J.J. Payack as some kind of expert isn’t worth the reader’s time, but in this case the strength of the rest of the article overcomes this lapse in judgment. And he gets the title Jesse Sheidlower’s excellent book wrong. It’s The F-word, not F***. (I’ll bet someone told him the book was titled “the F-word” and he took that to be a euphemism on the speaker’s part, and then there was a failure to check his facts. One of the problems with laying off copyeditors is an increase in factual errors in reporting.)

The accompanying video is kind of interesting. It’s various linguists talking about their personal choices for word of the year.

On Friday, 8 January, at its annual meeting in Baltimore the American Dialect Society voted for tweet as the word of the year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade.

The “word” in word of the year is interpreted as “vocabulary item,” and phrases are also in the running. The word does not have to be new, but only newly prominent or notable during the past year. While informed by academic expertise, the selection is done in and for fun and is not an official induction of words into the language, but as an appreciation of the diversity and inventiveness of the English language.