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Sally Thomason
Sarah Grey Thomason (known as "Sally") is an American scholar of linguistics. She is a prolific contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences. She was named the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1999, and received the highest honor granted by the University of Michigan to its faculty by being named the Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics in 2016. She was also Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2010 to 2013. She is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Historical Linguistics, as well as part of the advisory board of the Journal of Language Contact. Sarah Thomason is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics and typological universals. Thomason has worke ...
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Evanston, Illinois
Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, Wilmette to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Evanston had a population of 78,110 . Founded by Methodist business leaders in 1857, the city was incorporated in 1863. Evanston is home to Northwestern University, founded in 1851 before the city's incorporation, one of the world's leading research universities. Today known for its socially liberal politics and ethnically diverse population, Evanston was historically a dry city, until 1972. The city uses a council–manager system of government and is a Democratic stronghold. The city is heavily shaped by the influence of Chicago, externally, and Northwestern, internally. The city and the university share a historically complex long-standing relationship. History Prior to the 1830s, ...
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Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families ( comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a t ...
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Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ...
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Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) is a nonpartisan, non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey that aims to strengthen American democracy by “cultivating the talent, ideas, and networks that develop lifelong, effective citizens.” It administers programs that support civic education and engagement, leadership development, and organizational capacity in education and democracy. In June 2020, the Board of Trustees of the foundation voted unanimously to remove Woodrow Wilson from its name citing his racist policies and beliefs. In November 2020, the organization was renamed ''The Institute for Citizens & Scholars''. History Early years (1945–1957) The first Woodrow Wilson Fellowships were created by Dr. Whitney "Mike" Oates, a Princeton University classics professor who served in the Marine Corps during World War II. During his tour of duty, Professor Oates realized that many of his brightest undergrad ...
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Xenoglossy
Xenoglossy (), also written xenoglossia () and sometimes also known as xenolalia, is the supposedly paranormal phenomenon in which a person is allegedly able to speak, write or understand a foreign language that they could not have acquired by natural means. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (), "foreigner" and (), "tongue" or "language". The term ''xenoglossy'' was first used by French parapsychologist Charles Richet in 1905. Claims of xenoglossy are found in the New Testament, and contemporary claims have been made by parapsychologists and reincarnation researchers such as Ian Stevenson. Doubts have been expressed that xenoglossy is an actual phenomenon, and there is no scientifically admissible evidence supporting any of the alleged instances of xenoglossy. Thomason, Sarah.Xenoglossy" In Gordon Stein. (1996). ''The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal''. Prometheus Books. Two types of xenoglossy are distinguished. Recitative xenoglossy is the use of an unacquired language ...
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American Speech
''American Speech'' is a quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society, established in 1925 and currently published by Duke University Press. It focuses primarily on the English language used in the Western Hemisphere, but also publishes contributions on other varieties of English, outside influences on the language, and linguistic theory. The current editor is Thomas Purnell (University of Wisconsin–Madison). The ''Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca'' considers it a "consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information" and states that "though it is scholarly and research based, there’s a surprising amount of information that is intelligible to anyone, even without special training in linguistics." History The journal was established in 1925 by Kemp Malone, Louise Pound, and Arthur G. Kennedy "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers", and was inspired by H. L. Mencken. According to Mencken: ...
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Skeptical Inquirer
''Skeptical Inquirer'' is a bimonthly American general-audience magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) with the subtitle: ''The Magazine for Science and Reason''. Mission statement and goals Daniel Loxton, writing in 2013 about the mission and goals of the skeptical movement, criticized the idea that people wanted to read about the paranormal, Uri Geller and crystal skulls not being relevant any longer. Paul Kurtz in 2009 seemed to share this sentiment and stated that the organization would still research some paranormal subjects as they have expertise in this area, but they would begin to investigate other areas. S.I. "has reached an historic juncture: the recognition that there is a critical need to change our direction." While editor Frazier did expand the scope of the magazine to include topics less paranormal and more that were an attack on science and critical thinking such as climate change denialism, conspiracy theories and the influence of the ...
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Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or falsifiability, unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to Peer review, evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing Hypothesis, hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited. The demarcation problem, demarcation between science and pseudoscience has scientific, philosophical, and political implications. Philosophers debate the nature of science and the general criteria for drawing the line between scientific theory, scientific theories and pseudoscientific beliefs, but there is general agreement on examples such as ancient astronauts, climate change denial, dowsing, evolution denial, ...
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Language Log
''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search frequently serves as a corpus to test hypotheses about language. Other popular topics include the descriptivism/ prescriptivism debate, and linguistics-related news items. The site has occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language. Denham and Lobeck characterized ''Language Log'' as "one of the most popular language sites on the Internet". it received an average of almost 21,000 visits per day. In May 2006 Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum published a compilation of some of their blog posts in book form under the title ''Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log''. Specialties ''Language Log'' was started on July 28, 2003, by Liberman and Pullum, a linguist then at the Universit ...
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Pend D'Oreille
The Pend d'Oreille ( ), also known as the Kalispel (), are Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau. Today many of them live in Montana and eastern Washington of the United States. The Kalispel peoples referred to their primary tribal range as ''Kaniksu''. Their traditional territory comprised the drainage systems of the Flathead River, Clark Fork, and Pend Oreille rivers. It extended from roughly present-day Plains, Montana, westward along the Clark Fork River, to Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake in Idaho, and the Pend Oreille River (''Ntxwe'', meaning "river") in eastern Washington and into British Columbia (Canada). They lived in many bands — originally, probably eleven — in their historic lands. They are generally divided geographically and culturally in two groupings: * the "upstream people" or Upper Kalispel (or "Upper Pend d’Oreille") are commonly referred to as the Pend d'Oreille. They were also known as ''Kullyspelm'' or ''Ql̓ispé'' ("Camas People"). They ...
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Montana Salish
The Salish or Séliš language , also known as Kalispel–Pend d'oreille, Kalispel–Spokane–Flathead, or Montana Salish to distinguish it from other Salishan languages, is a Salishan language spoken (as of 2005) by about 64 elders of the Flathead Nation in north central Montana and of the Kalispel Indian Reservation in northeastern Washington state, and by another 50 elders (as of 2000) of the Spokane Indian Reservation of Washington. As of 2012, Salish is "critically endangered" in Montana and Idaho according to UNESCO. Dialects are spoken by the Spokane (Npoqínišcn), Kalispel (Qalispé), Pend d'Oreilles, and Bitterroot Salish (Séliš). The total ethnic population was 8,000 in 1977, but most have switched to English. As is the case of many other languages of northern North America, Salish is polysynthetic; like other languages of the Mosan language area, it does make a clear distinguish between nouns and verbs. Salish is famous for native translations that treat all l ...
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Linguistic Universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages. Though there has been significant research into linguistic universals, in more recent time some linguists, including Nicolas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, have argued against the existence of absolute linguistic universals that are shared across all languages. ...
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