King’s College Axes Paleography Chair

10 February 2010

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.

Last Speaker of Bo Dies

5 February 2010

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)

Resuscitating Languages

3 February 2010

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)

Vocab Porn & Dictionary Banning

28 January 2010

[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.]