Monthly Archives: January 2008

The Linguists Premiere at Sundance

THE LINGUISTS, the first documentary supported by the National Science Foundation, was selected to world premiere in the newly minted “Spectrum: Documentary Spotlight” category at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The trailer is at http://www.thelinguists.com. One of the linguists featured is our very own Gregory Anderson (UofC PhD 2000). Here’s a brief description provided by Ironbound Films:

“It is estimated that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century.

THE LINGUISTS follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India, and Bolivia, the linguists’ resolve is tested by the very forces silencing languages: institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest.

David and Greg’s journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at risk when a language dies.”

Updates from Tom Wier

Tom Wier, who’s visiting the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig this year, sent us the following updates:

“I have recently given two talks:

(1) “The Typology of Tav-constructions and the Person-Role Constraint in Georgian” at the Ditransitives Conference at the MPI-EVA in Leipzig, 23-25 Nov 2007.
(2) “Polysynthesis in Caucasian Languages; or, What is Polysynthesis?” at the Caucasological Conference at the MPI-EVA in Leipzig, 7-9 Dec 2007.

I have also been asked by Martin Haspelmath to teach a course at the Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity, which I’ve entitled “Feature Hierarchies in Natural Languages”:

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/08_springschool/files/courses.html“