Claire
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chirila.bsky.social
Claire
@chirila.bsky.social
660 followers 520 following 650 posts
Prof of linguistics. 🇦🇺/🇺🇸; Australian languages, historical linguistics, Voynich Manuscript
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chirila.bsky.social
My wonderful friend Ruth has restarted her blog! Highly recommended
November 13, 2025 at 11:21 PM
Reposted by Claire
booksforourkids.bsky.social
Hello again!
Re-starting this blog after nearly three years! Looking forward to talking about children's books again!
Stopping. Re-starting.
I last posted on this blog nearly 3 years ago, which is a long time by most considerations. Many things combined to make me stop, or prevent me from restarting in the last 3 years, but I’ve kept this blog at the back of my mind and wanted to come back to it. It was never intended to be a place to go for the latest releases in children’s literature.
booksforourchildren.com
November 13, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Claire
wrooth.bsky.social
We're accepting applications for a wide range of funding opportunities, including our new two-year Archives Training Fellowship for MLIS or doctoral graduates!!

Please share with your networks, and consider applying.

www.amphilsoc.org/cnair-fundin...
Summary of funding opportunities including key dates.
November 12, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Claire
gccunylinguistics.bsky.social
✨ Last Thursday's Linguistics Colloquium ✨
Thank you to Claire Bowern (Yale University) for presenting "When sound change does (and doesn't) happen". Stay tuned for the next event in our Fall series!
Next up: Athulya Aravind (Yale University), Oct 16. Don’t miss it!
September 30, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Claire
lxgonetocanada.bsky.social
New video on language learning and how to increase language exposure! Fourth in a series by the Fieldwork Group at Yale about how linguistics could support community-based language projects. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkwm...
Increasing language exposure: working with a linguist
How language exposure helps children and adults learn languages. Includes examples of how to increase language exposure inside and outside of the classroom t...
www.youtube.com
July 20, 2024 at 6:02 PM
chirila.bsky.social
Here is a remembrance of my colleague Steve Anderson, former LSA President, longtime Department Chair, and so much more: ling.yale.edu/posts/2025-1... #linguistics
Remembering Stephen Anderson
ling.yale.edu
November 9, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Claire
michaelhendricks.bsky.social
It's irritating that they describe the effects of his racism as limited to causing controversy within science and reputational consequences for himself rather than giving an immeasurable boost, false veneer of legitimacy, and idiot-friendly prestige to modern scientific racism and eugenics.
November 7, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Claire
meadekrosby.bsky.social
Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).
Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment
Spurred by a recent report on sexual harassment in academia, our columnist revisits a historical case and reflects on what has changed—and what hasn’t
www.science.org
November 7, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Claire
isabelott.bsky.social
Rosalind Franklin died at 37 of ovarian cancer attributed to radiation exposure from the methods she & her assistant used to photograph a cross-section of the DNA double helix.

Meanwhile, Watson won a Nobel off that work & survived to the ripe old age of 97 by simply: stealing those notes!
November 7, 2025 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Claire
violetters-zye2.com.br
A horror story in six words or less: Your cassettes were unwittingly thrown away.
Happy belated Halloween! 🎃
#langsky
"At present, affordable mobile technology makes it easier for many communities to self-document their languages. Welcome to the new world of mobile documentation or mdocumentation! In one such project, Nubian heritage language learners took over the task of documenting their heritage language after following a language documentation training delivered by the School of Oriental and African Studies along with the Nubian Languages and Culture Project.14 Keep in mind, however, that such options are not available to remote communities that lack access to landline and mobile internet connections. This was still the case in the late 2000s in the community of Santa María Ixcatlán in Mexico, where I collaborated to document Xhwani (Ixcatec). Once language recordings have been made, how can one store and preserve them in the long run? When I started making recordings of Nashta, the language of my ancestors, I used minidiscs (remember those?). From minidiscs I moved on to CD-ROMs. Please, tell me if your computer can still read CD-ROMs, let alone minidiscs. The answer is most likely no. The ultrahype technology of a given moment in time becomes obsolete one decade later. So if I store minidiscs in my office closet, chances are I’m not really helping with archiving since as the years go by the format becomes obsolete and transfer to new formats more challenging. I’ve also heard of horror stories where colleagues stored their audiotapes at home, and when they passed away, their descendants unwittingly threw them away."
November 1, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Claire
symbolicstorage.bsky.social
The deadline for Evolang 2026, the International Conference on the Evolution of Language, has been extended to November 3rd.
Do consider submitting, it's my favourite conference and will take place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the age-old "city of the seven hills"! #language #linguistics
a picture of Plovdiv
October 28, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Claire
amaliaskilton.bsky.social
Out next month! So excited for the whole world in 🐦🐦 and language #revitalization to read what our authors have to share!
Cover of a book titled “Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for Indigenous Language Revitalization” and edited by Amalia Skilton, Ryan E. Henke, and Melvatha R. Chee. The cover shows the green silhouette of the Americas north of Panama, with a blue background of a word cloud of words in 7 Indigenous languages.
October 30, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Claire
hagenblix.bsky.social
Stephen Anderson was an exceptionally clear thinker (who I have constantly, absolutely, and very productively disagreed with). There are few linguistics works that I have read as many times as his "A-Morphous Morphology", an absolute treasure

Thanks to our colleagues at Yale for this obituary
🐦🐦
Remembering Stephen Anderson
ling.yale.edu
October 31, 2025 at 2:04 AM
Reposted by Claire
lingdustin.bsky.social
Happy Halloween from Count Noun! 🧛
A selfie of me in a crappy vampire outfit from Spirit wearing a piece of paper with a diagram of a mereology structure as used in semantics papers on count vs mass nouns
October 31, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Claire
aboutlinguistics.bsky.social
Learning about acoustic phonetics shows that normal conversation is actually an amazing process, as our brains quickly decode thousands of sound signals every time someone speaks to us.

https://aboutlinguistics.com/explore/what-is-acoustic-phonetics

#Phonetics #Linguistics #Languages
What is Acoustic Phonetics?
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies the sound waves produced when we speak, analysing how vocal vibrations travel through the air.
aboutlinguistics.com
October 31, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Claire
pennmindcore.bsky.social
Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship.

MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior.

Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...
a peek through fall foliage to some people at the University of Pennsylvania, photo by Eric Sucar
October 27, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Claire
brokenbottleboy.bsky.social
This is a list of ways to do a really shoddy job as a journalist. As a friend just said to me, if you get AI to summarise a big report you’re almost guaranteed to miss any story that might be lurking in the detail. www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-can...
15 essential tasks GPTs can do for journalists
No, AI cannot replace original journalism. But it can remove some of the everyday tedium so you can focus on what you do best
www.journalism.co.uk
October 3, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Claire
johnbasil.bsky.social
Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features.
Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Linguistic Diversification and Rates of Change: Insights From a Diverse Sample of Sociolinguistic Studies
Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community l....
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
September 29, 2025 at 7:11 AM
Reposted by Claire
prisonculture.bsky.social
As an archivist, this keeps me up.
conradhackett.bsky.social Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · Sep 14
LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later.

Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website.

Many implications for knowledge 🧪
A line chart showing that 38% of webpages from 2013 were no longer accessible one decade later.
September 14, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Claire
lakinopitheque.bsky.social
Arrêtez-tout !
Mon truc c'est l'alchimie médiévale, pas les herbiers... Mais... Ne peut-on voir une ressemblance entre ce dessin dans une marge du Livre des miracles de Sainte Foy (MS022, XIe-XIIe s. Sélestat) et les plantes imaginaires du fameux manuscrit Voynich ?
#medievalsky
September 12, 2025 at 4:32 PM
Reposted by Claire
betsysneller.bsky.social
I am so grateful to the editors of Diachronica for letting me write this piece in memoriam of Bill Labov.

And so grateful that they let me write what I most wanted to - a piece about Bill's *goodness*, his love for humanity, and how those things *resulted in* what we think of as his genius

🐦
September 10, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Claire
hiphilangsci.bsky.social
A great opportunity to (re-)listen to episode 38 of our podcast, in which James McElvenny (@jamesmcelvenny.bsky.social) speaks with Dan Everett about the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce.

🎙️ hiphilangsci.net/2024/04/01/p...

#Histlx
September 10, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Claire
benzimmer.bsky.social
The @wired.com video that @mixedlinguist.bsky.social and I did a while back on the life cycle of slang got featured today on @upworthy.com! www.upworthy.com/linguists-ex...
Linguists explain why some slang words come and go quickly while others have staying power
​"On fleek" was a flash in the pan, but "cool" has stuck around for nearly a century.
www.upworthy.com
September 10, 2025 at 2:04 AM
chirila.bsky.social
Artificial intelligence will never be a good substitute for genuine stupidity
September 9, 2025 at 10:43 PM