Monthly Archives: April 2009

Spring and colloquia are in the air

Spring 2009 colloquia are off and running. This full and final season of talks in the 2009 colloquium series began on April 2 with by MIT’s Adam Albright on “Rabbitometry vs. rabbitography: phonetic faithfulness and affix-by-affix differences in derived words.”

Coming up in the following weeks are several other fantastic speakers, including

April 30: Teresa Satterfield, University of Michigan

May 14: Nick Fleisher, Wayne State University

May 21: Ryan Shosted, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

May 28: Shigeto Kawahara, Rutgers University

June 4: Rob Podesva, Georgetown University

Per custom, colloquia are held on Thursday afternoons at 3:30 in Cobb 201. We look forward to these visits, and hope many of you will join us!

Chicago alumni goings-on

Chicago linguistics alumnus Aaron Griffith, now a lecturer at the University of Vienna, had his article, “The animacy hierarchy and the distribution of the notae augentes in Old Irish,” published in the December 2008 issue of the journal Ériu. Aaron’s recent conference presentations have included “Raising of *e to *i before *µ in Old Irish” at the Sound of Indo-European conference in Copenhagen this month, and “pro in Old Irish,” presented at the Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics conference last month in Arizona.

In addition, alumna Arika Okrent has a book coming out next month on created languages. The book, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, is published by the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Random House and is set to be released May 19.

QP success!

Congratulations are due to Jasmin Urban and Malcolm Elliott for their recent QP defenses!

Jasmin successfully defended her first qualifying paper, “Towards a unified theory of questions: What open questions can tell us about what questions mean,” on April 7.

Meanwhile, Malcolm passed his second QP, titled “Seeming and Believing: A look at perception verbs and evidential doubt in English.”

Both can now breathe a little easier and bask in a job well done!

Friedman: here, there, everywhere

While in Macedonia this year on Fulbright-Hays and Guggenheim grants, Slavic linguistics professor Victor Friedman has still managed to faithfully update us on his prolific activities abroad. Here’s what he’s been doing:

Recently published articles:

  • “Turkish Presents in Romani Dialects.”  Turcological Letters to Bernt Brendemoen (Festschrift), ed. by É. Csató & al. Oslo: Insitute for Comparative research in Human Culture. 2009. 109-121.
  • “On the origin of final -e in the plural of the verbal l-form in Macedonian: Possible Contact Influences.”  Juzhnoslovenski filolog, Vol. 64, 2008, 531-534.
  • “Determination and Doubling in Balkan Borderlands,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol 28, 2006, 117-130. [published 2009]

Recent talks given:

  • “Multilingualsim in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia-Current Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future,” Institute for Slavic Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, 9 February 2009.
  • “Language Politics and Language Policies in the Western Balkans: Infinitives, Turkisms and Eurology,” Kennedy Institute – Free University of Berlin, 11 February 2009.
  • “On Defining the Sprachbund: Areal vs. Typological Linguistics in the Balkans and Europe,” University of Potsdam, 12 February 2009.
  • “Bucephalos as Trojan Horse:  Competing Discourses of Autochthony in the Republic of Macedonia,”  Institute for Southeast European Studies, Free University of Berlin, 13 February 2009.
  • “Dialectology, Typology, and Areal Linguistics,” Linguistics Department, University of Manchester, 24 February 2009.
  • “Makedonski kako slovenski i balkanski jazik [Macedonian as a Slavic and as a Balkan language],” opening lecture for post-graduate students in Macedonian Studies, University Sts. Cyril amd Methodius of Skopje, 28 February 2009.
  • “Makedonija i Evropa od lingvistichka gledna tochak (Macedonian:  Macedonia and Europe from the viewpoint of linguistics).” Public lecture sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Philological Faculty, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, University of Skopje, 13 March 2009.