19th Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore

The 19th Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore will take place at The University of Chicago in Chicago, IL, USA, April 25-27, 2014.

Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday, November 15, 2013

Acceptance Notification Date:15 January 2014

The conference organizers are now accepting proposals for papers that treat some aspect of Balkan and/or South Slavic linguistics, literature, or folklore, including culture. Abstracts should be maximum one page, including examples and bibliography, 12-point font, at least 1" margins, and should not contain name(s) or affiliations(s) of the author(s).

Abstracts should be submitted as an email attachment in PDF format to Meredith Clason. The paper title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information should be given in the body of the email. The abstract itself should have only the title.

Questions about the conference may be directed to Meredith Clason.

Save the dates!

The 19th Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore will take place at The University of Chicago from April 25-27, 2014.

More information will be available soon.

Questions may be directed to Meredith Clason, Associate Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies (CEERES) mclason [at] chicago.edu

Balkanisms Today

This conference organized by the International Committee of Slavicists (Commission for Balkan Linguistics), the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna will take place in Vienna on 3-5 September 2010. For more details click here.

LSA Summer Institute

Sally Thomason at Language Log reports about the cool things one could learn by participating at the LSA Linguistic Insitute. I am only quoting the Balkan connection to her report:

"...I learned a whole bunch of fascinating things: about the Doutai speakers (NW New Guinea) who suppressed their language's implosive consonants for several weeks while Mark was studying their language (a phenomenon reminiscent of Dan Everett's experience of living three years among the Pirahas in the Amazon before they stopped suppressing their linguo-labial stops in talking to him); about plugging in typological features — word order, consonant types, etc., etc., etc. — to biologists' statistical models and coming up with areal rather than genetic groupings in known cases (e.g., Rumanian grouped with Slavic rather than with the rest of the Romance languages)..."

To what group a language ends up belonging depends a lot from what "typological features" are plugged in. The Warnow, Ringe, Evans, Nakhleh approach, using a Swadesh list and a few morpho-phonological features, put Albanian in quite a variety of linguistic neighborhoods. However, the list of features for Albanian was not very representative and seemed to be constructed from the Toskë dialect instead of Gheg which has more archaic features). I remember that there were a few dubious words in the Albanian Swadesh list (e.g. claw is thua instead of kthetër, pierce is ther instead of shpon, etc.).

I hope the Romanian list of features was better constructed.