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In order to consolidate the workload into a more efficient board, the duties of Social Chair and Webmaster have been delegated among the five officers.

This upcoming year will be the third year of BLing’s successful operation. We hope that you will continue to support us as a member of the linguistics community.

Our Speaker: Professor Kendra Willson
Topic: Icelandic Nicknames

Kendra Willson is an Assistant Professor in the Scandinavian Section at UCLA. She works on Old and Modern Icelandic language, literature, and culture and Nordic language history. She has written on Icelandic nicknames, language politics and syntactic change in Icelandic and other Nordic languages.

When: Wednesday, May 5th, 6-8pm
Where: Campbell Hall 2122 (Second floor conference room)

We will be accepting candidacies for officer positions for next year (2010-11). Please attend the meeting if you would like to be considered.

Our Speaker: Professor Pat Keating
Topic: “Pitch and Voice Quality Variation in English and Mandarin”

Professor Keating is a professor in the Linguistics Department, as well as the Director of the UCLA Phonetics Lab.  She specializes in phonetics and her current research pertains to the linguistic uses of phonation across languages.  She teaches Ling 103 (Intro to Phonetics), 104 (Experimental Phonetics), 120A and 165A (Phonology I and II), 130 (Lg Development), and many graduate proseminars.

When: Wednesday, February 24th, 6-8pm
Where: Campbell Hall 2122 (Second floor conference room)
What to expect: An excellent talk on phonation variations, uber fun social activity, food and drinks, chatting with fellow BLingers, and FUN.

Topic: “Discourse, Sentence Intonation, and Word Order”

Professor Yokoyama is a professor and the Chair of the Applied Linguistics Department at UCLA.  Some of her research interests include functional syntax and semantics, discourse grammar, Russian intonation and word order, gender linguistics, and folklore.  She teaches courses within the Applied Linguistics Department as well as GE courses, particularly in functional grammar and gender linguistics.

The main site for MIE, Dnghu.org gives a comprehensive overview of the language and its international “revival” effort. That particular word is used because, of course, PIE is considered to have ‘died’ out thousands of years ago. Their main goal, while lofty, is admirable—they hope to facilitate “the adoption of Modern Indo-European by the European Union as its main official language”. Not just one of its official languages, the official language. Although Esperanto, the internationally recognized success story of conlangs, has failed to gain such a status even with its purported upwards of 2 million fluent speakers, MIE does have a significant advantage in that it wasn’t just kludged from a random assortment of living languages, it was assembled from the very history of the languages that we all speak in a way that couple produce very little, if any unnatural bias (one of Esperanto’s failures was its inaccessibility to East Asian languages, African languages, etc.); that is, it doesn’t claim to be any more than a language reconstruction of PIE languages, while Esperanto tries to be but can never be truly “international”.

Quiles and Batalla have put out a massive, 800-page grammar to the Modern Indo-European language, that has sold 45 copies within the first month of release, spectacular for such an esoteric subject and even more so for a book that is readily available for free. You can find a PDF download of it at the following link: http://dnghu.org/en/Grammar-Indo-European-Language/

Our Speaker: Anoop Mahajan
Topic: Graduate School admissions

Anoop Mahajan is the Chair of the Linguistics Department as well as a professor of syntax. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate classes. If anyone will know about how to get into grad school, it’s him.

When: Wednesday, October 21st, 6-8pm (Tomorrow)
Where: Campbell Hall 2122 (Second floor conference room)
What to expect: A brief social activity, an excellent talk on grad school applications and admissions, food and drink, a chance to talk to your fellow Blingers, and a post-meeting study session. And also FUN.
Social activity: IPA hangman (A BLing favorite!)