Andrew Garrett
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andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Andrew Garrett
@andrewgarrett.bsky.social
1K followers 540 following 280 posts
Linguist @ UC Berkeley. Language documentation, archiving, and historical linguistics. "Basic Yurok" (2014) and "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, memory, and Indigenous California" (2023). Running; semi-competitive age-grade racer.
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andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Awesome passive-aggressive brackets! (The original failed to capitalize "Zeitgeist".)

Source: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Text from a judicial opinion: "Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, 'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time."
September 19, 2025 at 6:05 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
I'm very proud of this paper, now published in Anthropological Linguistics: "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)," a study of the earliest substantial documentation of Inuktun (NW Greenland) and what it shows about Inuit dialects and change.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...
"1.Background. Few episodes in the history of American anthropology and linguistics are as disturbing as the treatment of six Inughuit (Polar Inuit) people brought from northern Greenland to New York City in 1897 at the behest of Franz Boas. Living in the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place, later dubbed Thule by Knud Rasmussen, Inughuit people were objects of fascination for Americans and Europeans. This was partly due to their environment (with its three-and-a-half-month winter night and seven months of solid sea ice) and proximity to the North Pole, but also because of their apparent isolation. Inughuit people occupy “an island in an ocean of ice” (Gilberg 1984:577) and were thought to have been unaware of other people before the arrival of European explorers. In short, they were exemplars of the ethnographic fantasy of “uncontaminated” indigenes."
September 15, 2025 at 1:42 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
It's a very capacious word.
how many r's in rearrange? ChatGPT said: The word rearrange has three r’s. You said: Are you sure? ChatGPT said: Yep — here’s the breakdown: r e a r r a n g e 1st letter: r 4th letter: r 5th letter: r So that’s 3 r’s in total. You said: How about blueberry? ChatGPT said: blueberry has three r’s too: b l u e r b e rr y 5th letter: r 8th letter: r 9th letter: r
August 8, 2025 at 12:50 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/
Robin Lakoff
August 6, 2025 at 12:46 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
From Scott MacLochlainn, "Naming and Namelessness", Annual Review of Anthropology (@annualreviews.bsky.social‬)

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
"During the early part of the twentieth century, names seemed among the most stable topics that anthropologists could study. Numerous scholars such as Edward Sapir (1924), Elsie Clews Parsons (1937), and Alfred Kroeber (1909) all published works on naming; the latter subsequently provided a controversial eponym for the anthropology building at the University of California, Berkeley (Garrett 2023). Their motivations were multiple, if overlapping, in situating naming as a systematic, patterned, and accessible code for understanding cultural practices. Perhaps more dutiful than later literatures in producing inventories, glossaries, and lexical explications of names, such scholarship professed a fundamental importance of the name within social practices. To take just one text as an example from this era, Franz Boas’s (1934) Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians describes how Kwakiutl naming practices allowed people to meaningfully orient them- selves to the spaces they inhabited, in addition to dutifully providing a glossary of names, their linguistic structures, and a set of topographic maps."
August 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Awesome new @diachronica.bsky.social article by @austronesianist.com: "Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations"

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
"Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations", abstract: "Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending directly from the Malayo-Polynesian node. This research argues that the evidence for those large subgroups does not stand under scrutiny. Rather, the distribution of innovations throughout the Malayo-Polynesian region suggests that those innovations spread within a large network of dialects. That network, here dubbed the “Late-Malayo-Polynesian” network, replaces discrete higher-level nodes in the classical model of Austronesian linguistic relations."
August 1, 2025 at 11:57 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Great! I registered this because it could sound like an Australian exceptionality claim (which I'm sure it isn't), and I'm attentive to such claims.
Excerpt from Garrett, "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall" (2023): "The American exceptionality claim was reiterated by Meillet and Cohen (1924:9) and explicitly critiqued by Bloomfield (1925a); see Goddard 1996, Campbell 1997, and Mithun 1999 on relationships among Native American languages, and Golla 2011 on California. Claims of Australian exceptionality by Dixon (1997, 2002) have been effectively rebutted by many scholars (e.g., Bowern and Koch 2004, Bowern et al. 2011, McConvell and Bowern 2011). Common to both claims was an assertion that sociohistorical language dynamics in more recently colonized areas of the world are fundamentally different from those in Africa and Eurasia."
July 29, 2025 at 8:48 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
From Howard Morphy's Afterword ("After Marcus") to Marcus Banks's "Understanding Social Images" (2025), with reference to "the danger of locking the resources of anthropology into the 'presentist' moment of the critique [of anthropology]."
"Andrew Garret[t]'s book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023), provides an illuminating analysis of how anti-historical this process is. In effect, it positions anthropology outside the present, and deflects attention away from ongoing engagements with the material record by contemporary communities."
July 8, 2025 at 4:06 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Two reactions: (1) Alito has really gone off the deep end (a while ago, I suppose); (2) The books he writes about, including this one, look really good!
Image from Alito majority opinion, a page from "Born Ready" showing a child looking happy, with text: "For the first time, my insides don't feel like fire. They feel like warm, golden love."
June 27, 2025 at 3:34 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
The nerd in me is also especially pleased by the final paragraph:
"This is a long, demanding, scrupulously documented, and physically attractive book, which includes eighty illustrations, thirty pages of footnotes, seventy pages of references, and a twenty-eight-page index. It is very much worth your full attention."
June 19, 2025 at 1:51 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Delighted by Margaret Thomas's review of my book, in "Language" 101/2 (2025) 406-410

doi.org/10.1353/lan....
"Andrew Garrett presents this book as a study of the legacy of the University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist and linguist Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960), backlit by an event that took place on the Berkeley campus between July 2020 and January 2021. That event was the formal erasure of Kroeber’s name from a building that houses the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, and associated classrooms and offices. G’s book is also a judicious reflection on the professional responsibilities of linguists and anthropologists who have documented Indigenous American languages, as well as on the relationships between people who moved west to settle in what is now California and the Native people whose lands they seized or settled on. Much of it is painful reading. All of it is meticulously researched and beautifully presented."
June 19, 2025 at 1:16 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Pleased by @jamesmcelvenny.bsky.social's review of "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California" (2023), now published in "History of Humanities" 10 (2025)

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Our own historical moment is characterized by an intensive reckoning with past injustices and their ongoing effects. But this reckoning requires a deep understanding of history; otherwise it risks turning into mere scapegoating of individuals and can easily be co-opted by latter-day settler-colonial institutions to whitewash their reputations. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Garrett offers a superb demonstration of how sympathetic but critical engagement with the past can be done."
June 17, 2025 at 12:33 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Seems true www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/t...?
NY Times headline: "A.I. is getting more powerful, but its hallucinations are getting worse" AI hallucination: Question to chatgpt "Tell me about the author of 'The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall'", followed by hallucinated answer "The author ... is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a prominent Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician, and activist. She is well known for her work in Indigenous studies, decolonization, and resurgence theory. Simpson's work blends storytelling, poetry, academic theory, and activism. She often explores themes of Indigenous identity, colonialism, land, and resistance. 'The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall' is a piece that critiques the colonial legacy of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, particularly in the context of Indigenous erasure and the institutional violence of anthropology. It reflects her broader focus on reclaiming Indigenous knowledge systems and challenging settler colonial narratives."
May 5, 2025 at 1:10 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Couldn't be happier for Leslie Kurke (not on here, sensibly), one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (www.amacad.org/news/new-mem...), and in great company!
Some new members of AAAS: Anderson Cooper, Ava DuVernay, Danny Glover, Leslie V. Kurke
April 23, 2025 at 4:44 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
My review of James McElvenny's "A history of modern linguistics" (2024) has appeared in Language 101 (2025) 195-199.

doi.org/10.1353/lan....
Last two paragraphs of review: "Throughout the history of modern linguistics, there has been a tension between technical precision and the broader dimensions of language research. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in M's words, 'comparative-historical linguistics … became increasingly narrow and technical in scope, concentrating ever more on the minute details of grammatical forms' (14). August Schlegel in 1831 mocked this 'Pedanterei', while others supported 'the scientific study of languages for their own sake' (35). More than a century later, in a 1955 letter to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (a former president of the Linguistic Society of America), his daughter Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that contemporary linguistics seemed 'self-contained' and 'very narrow' (her emphasis); he responded that 'precision has become an obsessive end in itself' for many linguists.4 Plus ça change: the story of linguistics has always included the challenge of finding distinctive, effective analytic tools that will lead to new ideas about a phenomenon, language, that matters to everyone and affects so many aspects of human life. All too often, we are disciplinary gatekeepers while asking outsiders to be interested in our work. I recommend A history of modern linguistics to colleagues and students in linguistics and all allied fields. This book as a whole has a big story to tell, but it will also reward selective reading. Whatever their goals, thoughtful linguists will find questions of interest and echoes of the present day in James McElvenny's lively, stimulating discussion of our past."
March 26, 2025 at 11:52 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Here's an intro linguistics slide I am using this week that has this (depending on whether you include sound changes as rules). The implicit comparison is mainstream English in which all the words shown underwent the English vowel shift (but in the other order).
Class slide "Sound change over time" showing two sound changes that must have occurred in this order in the dialect of Windhill, Bradford, Yorkshire: iç > i: > ai.
March 18, 2025 at 4:56 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Intro Linguistics, UC Berkeley. "What language(s) was/were spoken in your home when you were young?"
Word cloud of languages. The largest is "english", the second and third largest "mandarin" and "spanish", then "cantonese", "hindi", "korean", and many others.
February 28, 2025 at 11:39 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
My own attempt didn't seem so plausible.
I'm a linguistics professor. Make up 5 things I accomplished at work last week that they can't really verify. Keep it brief. ChatGPT said: Developed a new theory on syntax that challenges traditional generative grammar models. Secured a grant for research on endangered languages in Southeast Asia. Gave a guest lecture on sociolinguistic dynamics at an international conference. Discovered an unpublished manuscript by a linguist from the 18th century in the university archives. Created a linguistic corpus of regional dialects that will be used for future computational models.
February 25, 2025 at 1:58 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
In my Intro Linguistics class we started talking about words and word structure today. I give them attendance polls most days; today I asked them to type in their favorite word in any language. They gave me permission to share this with you.
Word cloud of dozens of words. The largest are banana, plop, and potato.
February 11, 2025 at 1:50 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
I don't think anybody would find this upsetting. On the contrary.
UC Berkeley Warn Me notice: "Please note this message may contain information that some may find upsetting. Community Advisory: Possible mountain lion cub sighting On 2/3/2025 at about 7:15pm a community member was walking on the trail near Canyon Rd, when she saw what she believed was a mountain lion cub. She immediately left the area."
February 6, 2025 at 2:14 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
I am very sad to learn of the death of Ian Maddieson (on Sunday, Feb. 2). He was a creative thinker, an inspiring linguist, and a wonderful colleague who made a big difference to me intellectually and personally.
Ian Maddieson
February 5, 2025 at 3:44 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Another site showed me this from 4 years ago, a most memorable (and for me impactful) day at the University of California. I later gave away the K, but I like the picture, showing me and the elided K overshadowed by a very much non-elided H (for Hearst).
Two photos at the University of California, Berkeley (headed "Your memories from Facebook"), one of a worker removing the letters from the unnamed Kroeber Hall, one of me holding the K in front of a banner, featuring a large H, advertising the Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
January 26, 2025 at 9:17 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
An LLM summarized my book! (I saw this on ebay.) This is a great summary of some other book that has little if anything to do with mine. Apparently that other book examines the impact of a building on the study of linguistics.
"UNNAMING OF KROEBER HALL is a thought-provoking exploration of language, identity, and cultural heritage through the lens of a specific architectural space. The book delves into the historical significance of Kroeber Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, examining its impact on the study of linguistics and anthropology. Garrett presents a critical analysis of naming conventions and the politics of language, inviting readers to reflect on the power of names and how they shape our understanding of culture and place. The narrative is rich with personal anecdotes, academic insights, and reflections on the evolving relationship between language and identity in contemporary society. Through this work, readers are encouraged to reconsider the implications of un Naming and the deep connections between language, history, and the environments we inhabit."
January 17, 2025 at 6:10 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Hey, my book got its first Amazon review!
mitpress.mit.edu/.../the-unna...
Amazon book review: "Fascinating read with creative meticulous research An excellent deeply researched account of Kroeber’s collaborative work with Native people and also a searing indictment of UC Berkeley’s hypocrisy. Garrett takes seriously that the building’s name caused pain to Native people because of Anthropology’s bad history in relation to settler colonialism. But he shows UC Berkeley administrators took the opportunity to displace attention to their ongoing complicity in settler colonialism and their ongoing lionization of big campus donors like the Hearsts and Strauss and who did far worse things Berkeley does not deplore. They made Kroeber a convenient scapegoat given his anti-racist work and work on behalf of Native land claims in courts—he was certainly better than they are and better than the rich donors are who they continue to celebrate like there’s no problem there. This book is also a great read and I enjoyed it a lot."
January 13, 2025 at 4:50 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Thank you for sharing this. The whole article (which I had never read) is really interesting for its many glimpses into different phases in linguistic and other history!
"In linguistics an upheaval also took place in the 1960s with the spread of the transformational-generative (TG) movement. During its early years I welcomed the trend for bringing a fresh approach and vitality to the discipline. But I soon had increasing doubts about its beneficial potentialities. It became TG policy to pour abuse and ridicule on 'taxonomic' and other linguistics that did not follow TG doctine. The confrontations began to take on the emotional tone of a religious war, and I was reminded of Bloomfield's observation on the harmful intrusion of the odium theologicum in scholarly discussions. During the decade of rapid university expansion most of the new and growing departments of linguistics were captured by TG linguists, and many linguistic journals gave all or most of their space to papers on TG theory. Several generations of students were led to believe that linguistics had no history, that nothing worthwhile had been accomplished until the advent of TG linguistics. Their training failed to introduce them to the wide range of linguistic activities from which they could choose the fields that would fit their interest and temperament. But, fortuntely, enthusiasms and fashions in linguistics, like language itself, cannot escape change. In the last few years the dominating influence of TG linguistics has been dissipating, and a healthier eclectic spirit is discernible today."
December 23, 2024 at 1:14 AM