Lingoblog

The funeral of a language: The burial of Tevfik Esenç and the Ubykh language

19/06/202312/11/2019 by Peter Bakker

In June 2018, I (Peter Bakker) interviewed Ole Stig Andersen about the day he attended the funeral of Tevfik Esenç, the last man to allegedly speak the Ubykh language. It was October 7, 1992, 26 years earlier, that the funeral had taken place. In fact, Ole Stig Andersen had wanted to write himself about this funeral of a man and his language for Lingoblog.dk, and he wanted a text in at least three languages: Danish, English, Turkish. The text would have to be published together with the unique pictures he took of the funeral, and that have never been published or shown before.

He wanted to write no fewer than four articles in this connection: about Caucasian languages, about Caucasian … ↪

Researchers hiding in fear of GDPR

15/06/202329/10/2019 by Anon.

GDPR – business or pleasure?
Do you remember GDPR (or, for mnemonic assistance, Gitte and Per)? This is one of three posts on the EU law that everybody feared last year: What did we think it was, what is it, and what effects has it had?

In the weeks before 25 May 2018, I received up to thirty e-mails a day (yes, I have too many accounts at webshops and social media) with similar text: “We are updating our Privacy Policy”.

… all on occasion of GDPR, EU’s new data law, which Lingoblog has written about here and here.

The many e-mails made me think if I ought to send a similar one out to all of my … ↪

Reviving an indigenous language: an interview with Daniel Huircapán

15/06/202324/09/2019 by Sofia Navarro Beck

In August this year I read an article in the Argentinian newspaper Página 12 about the National Conference of Indigenous Languages held in Argentina. Unfortunately, the article was quite lacking in information about the Conference itself and about the linguistic work done by Daniel Huircapán, who was mentioned in the article. I thought this was too bad, because his work sounded very interesting – so I decided to contact him myself by email. On the 3^rd of September 2019 I did a Skype interview with Daniel Huircapán who is a member of the Günün a Küna indigenous community in Argentina. He is one among a small group of people (mostly natives) who since 2007 have immersed themselves in the … ↪

The Voynich manuscript: the decipherment of ms. 408

15/06/202310/09/2019 by Peter Bakker

Last year I was contacted by someone who claimed to have deciphered the Voynich manuscript. This manuscript is one of the big enigmas of medieval history and, for that matter, linguistics. No one has yet been able to decipher it, and many have tried. It is written in a totally unknown script in an unidentified language.

The manuscript is more than 500 years old. It has been publicly available for a century, and now it is also available online. Nobody has been able to translate the manuscript; there have been many proposals, but all have been rejected. People have claimed it could be written in a form of Hebrew, in a Romance language, in an earlier form of Romani, an … ↪

A report from the “They, Hirself, Em, and You” Conference: “Nonbinary pronouns in research and practice”

15/06/202303/09/2019 by Ehm Miltersen

Back in June this year I attended a conference titled “They, Hirself, Em, and You: Nonbinary pronouns in research and practice”. It was a very giving experience, and the conference was quite unique both in terms of scholarly topic and with regards to more interpersonal aspects, so I’ve been asked to write up a brief account of the event.

The conference, in shorthand referred to as THEY2019, took place on June 11-13^th 2019 at Queen’s University in the city of Kingston in Ontario, Canada. The topic was that of (quoting from the conference website) “nonbinary gender in language, particularly in pronouns”. That is, the work presented at the conference was concerned with language used by and about nonbinary … ↪