• Alan Allport graduates from Penn in August, and will probably be lecturing there throughout next year as well as preparing his dissertation for publication and looking for a permanent job. He's got a research-related blog called War Starts at Midnight.
• Alan Hogue started graduate school at San Francisco State about a year ago. He reports that he's studying the "interface" between semantics and syntax, in particular investigating English verb typology as it relates to the kinds of syntactic environments a given verb can appear in, and hopefully developing a better account of exactly how verb semantics (and ultimately sentence-level semantics) effects syntax.
• Martha Bridegam is working on a book about the long-term history and politics of the Tule Lake internment camp site. She's thinking of combining personal and professional blogging in a single new site about housing and homelessness. Martha still posts at Demi-Semi Blog, and can occasionally be spotted at alt.books.george-orwell.
• Graeme Burk continues to work as a writer and communications professional in the non-profit sector in Toronto, and has been working at getting some screenplays produced. He recently contributed to a couple of reference books on Doctor Who, and is getting married in 2008. Rumours abound that he might get his weekly web column relaunched later this year.
• Bobby Farouk has been writing fiction at MRBFK for a couple of years now. It's pretty good, so you should check it out.
• Ben Brumfield has been working on a software project for collaborative manuscript transcription, and has been pitching in on his wife's project, Dressr.

Based on a quick skim, it's an engaging read. Unlike much modern interreligious dialogue, the participants here trade barbs and insults with each other while debating the real differences between their faiths. They acknowledge a shared, absolute morality which they each appeal to, while making essentially pragmatic points in their own support.

Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists. These are not generally accepted by historical linguists, who long ago developed but largely rejected a dating method known as glottochronology. Geneticists have recently plunged into the field, arguing that linguists have been too pessimistic and that advanced statistical methods developed for dating genes can also be applied to languages.

Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.

[snip]

Germanic is usually assumed to have split into three branches: West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch; East Germanic, the language of the Goths and Vandals; and North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages. Dr. Forster’s analysis shows English is not an offshoot of West Germanic, as usually assumed, but is a branch independent of the other three, which also implies a greater antiquity. Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, Dr. Forster estimates.

Historians have usually assumed that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain when the Romans arrived. But Dr. Oppenheimer argues that the absence of Celtic place names in England — words for places are particularly durable — makes this unlikely.

If anyone can explain to me why the sections I highlighted make sense, I'd appreciate it.

Salomo Birnbaum's Die Jiddische Sprache (1974) is a product of a nation grappling with the war. Much of the book concerns itself with linguistic questions that are essentially political in nature. "Was aber bedeutet Volksgeist?" is not the sort of thing you see in most grammars.

While I'm disappointed in Die Jiddische Sprache as a tool for teaching myself Yiddish, the digressions and ruminations are fascinating. In the introductory page on das Umschriftalphabet, justifying Birnbaum's unfortunate choice to transliterate Yiddish into Latin characters, he starts by answering a question that had never occured to me:

Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters. The fact that it is materially a Germanic (i.e. Indo-European) language does not imply that the Hebrew (i.e. Semitic) alphabet is unsuitable for the purpose — completely apart from the fact that the alphabets used for German and the majority of the Indo-European languages are from the same Semitic source.^*

---

* Latin letters actually stand much closer to the paleo-semitic alphabet than do the Hebrew. In Hebrew, no one sign is identical to the paleo-semitic equivalent, but this is the case with almost half of the Latin alphabet. H, L, O, Q, and Z are the same; with A, E, K, and N only the direction is different; and with D, M, and T the difference is so small that the connection is evident at first sight.

(My translation. Original below the fold.)

I have done very little reading outside my work these last months. In Oman's Dark Ages I have come up against a thing I had almost forgotten since my school days — the boundless self-assurance of the pure text book. "The four brothers were all worthy sons of their wicked fathers &mdash: destitute of natural affection, cruel, lustful, and treacherous" — Louis the Pous was "a man of blameless and virtuous habits" — tho' every other sentence in the chapter makes it clear that he was a four leter man. "Charles had one lamentable failing — he was too careless of the teachings of Christianity about the relations of the sexes". It is so nice too, to be told without a hint of doubt ho was in the right and who was in the wrong in every controversy, and exactly why everyone did what he did. Yet Oman is quite right; that is the way — I suppose — to write an introduciton to a subject. . . . I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with, there is always such a difference.

To the best of THE SCRAPBOOK's knowledge--which is pretty good, but not infallible--the phrase originated with Leonard W. Hall, a onetime Republican congressman from New York and chairman of the Republican National Committee during Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term in the White House (1953-57).

via HNN

The best strike story I have heard is about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington for Bristol, first stop Bath. When it reached Bath half an hour earlier than normal express time, every single passenger got out of that train and refused to enter it again. Apparently the genius on the engine had just opened the throttle full, said to the stoker, "carry on", and left the rest to fate.

She'd dislodged more than teeth; Sid's determination drained away when the crockery landed in his pie hole. Or maybe he sensed the difference in these tears and those that fell at Janet's time of the month or when her lotto ticket struck out, and felt sorry for her. Whatever the reason, he comforted her, though he blotted his lips in her hair while he massaged her spine, but she couldn't really hold that against him. His long fingers touched each vertebra as though he were tuning her, high notes to low, except for where the missing finger should have hit. As reckless with a chopsaw as he was with words.

When he ran out of keys he picked her up by the cheeks and snugged her into him and carried her to the bedroom. Her heel hit the dryer's doorhandle as he wedged her back the narrow hall, and it thunked onto the swelled particleboard floor like someone had dropped a tangerine, and she wished she had a tangerine. The dryer was broke too, along with her last flowerpot and Sid's straight pretty teeth, and she'd have to go to the laundromat. She didn't have a thing fit to carry clothes in, and she wasn't going to walk along the road carrying Sid's undershorts.

Then they made love. Sweet love, where she nibbled the ruptured lips and felt the broken tooth stubs with her tongue and sampled his blood as if he were a honeysuckle and she a bee, and fun love, where the trailer rocked until she heard Sidemore's chain rattle out from underneath the bedroom. He'd sit outside slumped and dejected until they settled down, then he'd rattle back in.

Maybe they shouldn't post excerpts.

In retrospect I’m self-critical about that. I now think people like Mary Kaldor (from Helsinki Citizens Assembly) and Joanne Landy (of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy) — among others on the Left — were spot on in simultaneously opposing U.S. militarism and supporting democratic dissidents and human rights activists in Eastern Europe. I retroactively stand with them and wish I had been with them at the time.

Maybe this is just a longwinded way of saying "I was wrong," but it seems to me that Postel is almost projecting himself backwards in history to be on the winning right side.

The parity between the parties, unprecedented in the South's history, was neatly symbolized by the total tally of state legislative seats in the old Confederate states after the 2004 elections: 891 Democrats, 891 Republicans.

As we now know, the green grass surrounding projects, even if well maintained, becomes dangerous ground because nobody has a reason to spend much time on it, and nobody walks on the promenades among the identical project buildings because they don't lead to a workplace or a movie theater or a shoemaker or a dollar store or a place to buy a cup of coffee or a newspaper. Jacobs adds the only-obvious-when-noted insight that awful boring uniformity is the near-inevitable result of any attempt to place large numbers of people on a finite piece of land that also must have some required percentage of green space around it.

Have other folks here read this nicely entertaining book? It's tremendous. She was the dean of all the Little Old Ladies In Tennis Shoes who fought to save U.S. neighborhoods from sweeping notions of urban renewal all through the twentieth century. Like Orwell, in a way, she had the courage to turn uncredentialed crankiness into a virtue rather than a liability, and the writing skill to get away with it.