• Last night at the Anthropology Meetings, ongoing in San Jose (see below), Penny Eckert participated in a Council on Anthropology and Education panel on `dangerous intersections' (Your guess is as good as the Sesquipeditor's...). Today, she gave a talk entitled `Ethnography and Variation'.
  
• Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, and AB. For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.

Stanford took NWAV by storm this year. Here's a shot of just some of the home team (including Stanford alum Angela Rickford (front and center) and former Stanford faculty member John Baugh (between Penny and Angela)), submitted by our reporter Lars Hinrichs, in the field in Columbus. Notice that the woman in the center of the back row appears once again to be our own Ms. E. Norcliffe, no longer in Mexico (Chiapas, as it turned out, according to the findings of the official departmental investigation). Remember -- you can escape from Palo Alto, but you can't hide from the roving eye of the New Sesquipedalian...

• The following piece was first published in the November 19, 1992 issue of the Sesquipedalian. (Well, more accurately, it was stolen from the UCSC newsletter, The Village Idiom, which first published it in Spring 1991.)
  
  Discussing his collection of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, Geoffrey Pullum reports:
  `A more extended philosophical presentation of the same sort can be found in Bill Bryson's recent book The Mother Tongue. Bryson (presenting no references at all) makes some dramatic claims about several other languages, too. We summarize them in this table:
  
  

  LANGUAGE	WORDS FOR	NUMBER
  Arabic	camels	6000
  Araucanian	hunger	`a variety'
  Eskimo	snow	50
  Italian	pasta	`more than 500'
  Kilivila	yams	100
  Maori	dung	35
  Tasmanian	trees	one for every type of tree
  		but no general term

  
  `Yes, that really does say Tasmanian at the end there. Yes, we know, it is well known to students of Australasian indigenous languages that the Tasmanian languages are essentially unrecorded, the entire aboriginal population of the island having been exterminated between 1800 and 1830 without a single grammar or dictionary having been drafted; Bryson's source has to be communing with the spirit world on that one.'

• FRIDAY, 17 NOVEMBER

  • American Anthropological Association Conference

    all day at the San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
    

  • A Lunch with a Dan from IBM

    If you're interested in learning more about the new IBM search technology technology that will be showcased in the Linguistics special event at 3:30 (and installed on a cluster machine this afternoon) come meet one of Daniel Gruhl and Daniel Meredith. Meet at 1 PM in the department.
    

  • Speech Lunch

    12:00-13:00 in the Phonetics Lab (Bldg. 420 basement).
    (Try to arrive a couple minutes early to avoid the long noon line at the Thai Cafe). Topic to be announced [watch this space].
    

  • Philosophy Department Colloquium

    15:15 in Building 90, room 92Q
    Agustin Rayo (MIT)
    On Specifying Content
    

  • Friday Cognitive Seminar

    15:15 in Bldg 420, room 050
    Idriss Aberkane (Stanford Psychology)
    `Concepts, an approach to the theoretical and observed limits of minds'
    

  • Linguistics Department Special Event

    15:30 in MJH 126
    Daniel Gruhl and Daniel Meredith (IBM)
    `Supercomputing Technology for the Web'
    
    [Editor's Note: This technology is supposed to include unlimited regular expression searching of the whole internet, expanding search capability to deal with punctuation, capitalization, morphology, etc...]

  • UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Colloquium

    16:00 in Baytree Conference Room D
    Idan Landau (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
    Two Routes of Control: Evidence from Case Transmission in Russian.
    

  • Weekly Social

    17:00. In the department lounge. Gourmet delights from the Social Committee.
    
  
  
• SATURDAY, 18 NOVEMBER

  • American Anthropological Association Conference

    all day at the San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
    

  • TRilateral phonology weekEND (P-TREND)

    All day in 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley.
    P-TREND is a one-day workshop on phonetics and phonology that includes presentations by students and faculty from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.
    
    


• SUNDAY, 19 NOVEMBER

  • American Anthropological Association Conference

    all day at the San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
    

  • TRilateral syntax and semantics weekEND (S-TREND)

    All day in 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley.
    S-TREND is a one-day workshop on syntax and semantics that includes presentations by students and faculty from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.
    
    
  
  
• MONDAY, 20 NOVEMBER (Yes, in the Thanksgiving Break!)

  • NLaSP (Natural Language and Speech) Colloquium

    16:15pm -- 17:30pm. Room TBA.
    Dan Bohus (Carnegie Mellon University)
    Belief Updating in Spoken Language Interfaces
    


• THURSDAY, 23 NOVEMBER

  • HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

    to all from the Sesquipedalian staff...

• For local linguistic events, always consult the Department's event page, available RIGHT HERE
  
  
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquiped recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
  
  
• What's happening at UC Santa Cruz? Find out HERE.
  
  
• What's going on at UC Berkeley? Check it out HERE.
  
  

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