Last year, I made a post where I discussed the possibility of using a new LJ community, glossographia, for my language-oriented posts to the Phrontistery, while retaining forthright for other purposes. My concern at that time was that readers of the Phrontistery were using the blog for one reason while all my LJ friends were there for different reasons. Ultimately, no one on my friends list really cared one way or the other so I scrapped that idea.

Now I am in a slightly different situation, namely that I'm about to be employed as a linguistic anthropologist at Wayne State, and my thoughts have been turning to the notion of academic blogging. It's something I've wanted to try for years, but the lack of stability in my employment situation coupled with the various business of life (e.g. Arthur, the job search, etc.) stood in the way. But starting in the fall, I'll be on a reduced teaching load for two years and won't have to spend hundreds of hours putting together job applications, and I'll be re-defining my academic work in any case. I've also seen some of the success junior scholars have had with academic blogging, and I have a big advantage, namely a well-established site in the Phrontistery.

I started the Phrontistery as a Geocities site way back in 1996 (alas, there is no web archive of those early days¹, although the 2001 version here has a similar homepage). At that time I had just started grad school, and envisioned the site as a general resource not only for obscure word lists, but more generally for essays and written material on linguistics, history, archaeology, and social theory. This was of course before there was a word 'blog', and I certainly didn't know what I was doing. Over time, the 'word list' function became more important on the site, although never its exclusive role.

So now, here we are 12 years later, still in the same city (after a brief hiatus), but worlds apart, and am seriously thinking of re-tooling the Phrontistery to be once again (if it ever was) a true thinking-place, by which I now mean an academic blog where I would post on issues close to my research and teaching interests. There are a few interesting linguistic anthropology blogs out there, but the 'market' certainly isn't saturated by any means. In fact some of the issues I'd want to deal with - literacy and writing systems, cognitive anthropology, language and prehistory - are covered poorly if at all.

So I'll be starting a new blog on the Phrontistery (probably using Wordpress) over the next few months. This journal isn't going anywhere - for everyday purposes, LJ will still be my home and the forthright journal will remain active. Beyond that, though, one option would be to maintain two language-related blogs (one for English wordplay and the pronunciation polls, and the other for academic matters) and another would be to simply have a single blog serving all these functions. I'm leaning towards the latter option, but I'm also cognizant that the average Phrontistery visitor may not have a great deal of interest in my ruminations on academic matters. I'll figure that out once we're settled in Windsor.


(1) In its earliest incarnation, the site would automatically play a MIDI version of Handel's 'Harmonious Blacksmith', which would then restart every time you clicked on a link. I kid you not. That only lasted a very short time, thankfully.

Tags: lj, phrontistery

I admit that writing a 'how to find me' post that will only be read by people who have already found me may seem counterproductive, but just to clarify, for those who are uncertain how best to reach me online:

I am available on Livejournal (of course). I can always be reached at my livejournal.com email address, which redirects to my main email, or of course you can comment on posts.

You can find me on Facebook under my real name, Stephen Chrisomalis. I made a decision long ago that I didn't really want to hide my identity, and that trying to maintain a true pseudonym online was ultimately inimical to my privacy. So you can find me there. I use FB mainly to keep in touch with various people who aren't on LJ; all my main blogging goes on here (at least right now). It is to some extent a professional presence insofar as I have some of my better / more interesting students on my friends list over there.

I am always accessible at the Phrontistery and at my phrontistery.info email address, which is currently my main email. It isn't going anywhere.

I use Stumbleupon, where my username is the same as here. I have a huge backlog of interesting sites that I've been meaning to bookmark, blog about, and add to an as-yet-solely-conceptual blogroll.

I do have various other email and internet accounts (gmail, hotmail, Sympatico mail, some blogging accounts, social bookmarking, librarything, etc.) which are dormant, being used as placeholders, or otherwise generally defunct. I don't check them or use them regularly, and they aren't reliable means of reaching me.

I don't give out my phone or home address openly but they aren't hard to find if you know my name. In any case they will be changing shortly due to my upcoming move.

Tags: lj, phrontistery
Current Mood: crappy
Current Music: Metallica - Orion

This term, my students and I engaged in a collective bibliography assignment entitled Bibliorama!, in which we independently collected bibliographic sources on the subject of Paleolithic numerals/tallies/calendars. I have now collated the students' projects (and my own 'grading key') into one large file into the Paleolithic Notation Bibliography. I have also taken the opportunity to re-organize the Phrontistery sidebar to group together all my various materials related to my academic work on numeration, giving it a more prominent place on the site. Let me know what you think!

Tags: language, phrontistery

In the field of popular books on words and language, there are literally hundreds of titles out there to choose from, and inevitably some of these are going to be real stinkers. As the Christmas season approaches and the waves of holiday shoppers flock online to purchase books for their loved ones, I figure that it behooves me to offer up a few suggestions for aficionados of really well-written, intelligent, accessible, and sensible books for the non-specialist lay reader. I am happy to recommend these books, all of which I own and treasure. As I am an Amazon.com associate, I receive a commission on any purchases made after clicking through the images or title links below (even if you purchase different books than these!) which helps to keep the Phrontistery replenished with bandwidth and ad-free as always. (Sorry to those of you who buy through the various international Amazons; it doesn't work through them.) So if you have been thinking about supporting the Phrontistery, this is one way you can do it that doesn’t cost you anything!

The Stories of English by David Crystal. The key here is the plural noun in the title; this expansive and scholarly yet readable volume is a linguistic history of Englishes over the past two millennia, in all their diversity. In place of the hoary narrative of the linear progress of the language to the modern standard, Crystal lucidly shows that the present dialectal diversity of worldwide English is not unique, and that the notion of a pure or proper language is essentially mythical. Combining a chronological focus with a series of interludes and asides, it is easily readable in small chunks (or in fact in any order). The Stories of English is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in linguistics or history.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner. This remarkable little book with gorgeous production values is an accounting of probably the greatest English philologist ever, J.R.R. Tolkien, who also wrote some sort of novel, I believe. In all seriousness, The Ring of Words highlights Tolkien's unique position in the history of 20th century philology and lexicography, covering his early work on the Oxford English Dictionary, his professional career as a philologist, and finally a set of remarkable word-studies detailing the influence of the first two aspects on his literary output. In particular, Tolkien's true love for English, and his use, reuse, and manipulation of words to serve his artistic goal of true fantastic sub-creation, emerge fully through this short yet remarkable book. I recommend it very highly to anyone who has ever enjoyed any of Tolkien's output.

Ballyhoo Buckaroo And Spuds by Michael Quinion. Since 1995, the British lexicographer Michael Quinion has authored the electronic newsletter World Wide Words, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the origins of words and phrases or in neologisms. In this book (entitled Port Out, Starboard Home in the UK edition), Quinion turns his attention to folk etymologies, breaking down the nutty and not-so-nutty myths about the origins of words and phrases with unmatched authoritativeness. The strength of his work is that even when he admits (as he often must) that none of the available explanations for a phrase's origin suffice, one is nonetheless captivated by the process by which lexicographers investigate such matters. Highly recommended for anyone who speaks the English language!

Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum. First of all, if you're not reading Language Log, the authoritative linguistics blog founded by this book's authors, why aren't you? This attractive volume is a compilation of many of that blog's posts over its first years, edited and presented in dead-tree fashion, but loses nothing of the (sometimes cantankerous) personalities and passions of the authors, both senior and eminent professional linguists, in this transformation. In fact, LL has become an important resource for linguists, a sort of Notes & Queries for the postmodern age, truly advancing the discipline, while remaining accessible even to those who have never studied linguistics professionally. Moving beyond the sterile prescriptivism of grammar and style manuals and the facile word-lists of many popular linguistic books, Far from the Madding Gerund is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in linguistics or grammar.

The Rise and Fall of Languages by R.M.W. Dixon. This is the only strictly academic volume on the list, but is entirely accessible to anyone with even a modest knowledge of linguistics. Dixon's book applies anthropological perspectives to historical linguistics, arguing from his empirical work in Amazonia and Australia for a social perspective on language change. He presents a serious challenge to the unquestioned primacy of language-family 'genetic' models of language change, and offers instead a model based on the 'punctuated-equilibrium' model drawn from evolutionary theory. Most importantly, Dixon's short volume comes with a moral imperative, demanding that the goal of recording endangered languages during this period of massive language death be given serious attention. Highly recommended to anyone who has taken an intro to linguistics course.

Tags: language, phrontistery

I've just added a page to the Phrontistery with links to all the pronunciation polls to date, as well as the analytical essays on each, from corollary to process:

Pronunciation Polls: Master List

Tags: language, phrontistery

I have just added a major new glossary to the Phrontistery: Unusual Animals, defining 320 unusual English words for different animal species and types. This was a heck of a list to put together, but well worth it in the end. Unlike some lists, I can't just look for words with a common suffix or letter pattern. You can't even reliably search for keywords in definitions (a word for a type of fish, for instance, may be described without the use of the word 'fish'). Eventually I ended up plugging through Wikipedia links for names, then confirming these with a couple major dictionaries (Merriam-Webster, OED, AHD, etc.), which was time-consuming but rewarding. I also wanted to make sure to have a decent sample of words starting with each letter of the alphabet, because apparently public school teachers enjoy assigning their students to do reports on unusual animals. Strikingly, x, q, and z weren't especially hard; rather, my search strategy resulted in few weird animal words starting with e, f, n, and v. I have no idea why this should be.

One of the fascinating things about the list, to which I refer briefly in my introductory paragraph on the new page, is the wide diversity of languages from which these words originate. The explanation for the phenomenon is simple enough - Westerners often give new species names that local or indigenous people use, rather than developing completely new ones. But so many of these languages, like Evenki (from which we get pika) and Gamilaraay (spoken by only three people, but from which we get both budgerigar and galah) are virtually unknown except to specialists. Tupi has given us more animal words than any other American language - from capybara, cougar, jaguar, piranha, tapir, and toucan, just to name some common ones - and is today completely extinct. It would be erroneously Anglocentric to see the value of these languages only in their contributions to ours - but these words, in some cases, are almost all we have left, and tell us a lot about the history of language contact over the past half-millennium.

On a lighter note, I must note a heavy bubaline bias in this new glossary. For some reason, more species of antelopes have received odd English names than really ought to be the case, and there are something like 40 species listed on the new page. Partly you can blame South Africa for this, since it is both English-speaking and antelope-abundant. But antelopes are plentiful throughout the Old World, and there are other weird mammals in plenty of African countries, so who knows?

Anyway, this list is doomed to be incomplete, but then, completeness isn't even a remotely potential goal when there are over one million animal species and more being discovered all the time.

Tags: language, phrontistery

I have just added a new glossary to the Phrontistery: Stones and Rocks, with words containing the element 'lith'. And also some silliness in the introductory paragraph.

Tags: language, phrontistery

I have just made some additions (and a few stylistic changes) to the Sottisier, with the weirdest and wackiest e-mails I've received at the Phrontistery over the past year or so.

Tags: language, phrontistery

I seem to be having a problem getting the Phrontistery indexed in Google. Here's what I know:

- It was indexed prior to all the nastiness of last fall, and had very high search rankings on various keywords, including #1 on 'phrontistery'. So the problem is not something that was wrong prior to my site going down.

- At some point in December, the Phrontistery was apparently de-indexed on Google - that is, even the dummy site that was put up in place of my site was not listed.

- When I got control again around Christmas, I wasn't initially worried; I figured I would need to wait until the next major crawl, which as I understand it can be a couple of weeks.

- I did the Google Add URL function over a month ago, and I read somewhere that verifying my site at Google Webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview) helped tip Google off to sites needing indexing, so I did that also, but still nothing.

- So, the site is still not indexed at all in Google. Even though plenty of sites still link to http://phrontistery.info , doing a link search (i.e. 'link:http://phrontistery.info') returns no results. Similarly the site search function 'site:phrontistery.info' returns no results.

- I am however listed in Yahoo Search, and in other search engines. So whatever is wrong seems to be Google-specific.

So, oh mighty friendslist, is it possible that Google has somehow blocked or banned my site from being indexed? (I presume that if so, this would be related to the dummy site situation from last year). And if so, can I somehow find a way to get re-indexed? If not, is it just that I have not waited long enough?

Tags: phrontistery

Happy New Year 2007, and an especially happy new year to those who are reading this through the Phrontistery home page. Starting today, I will be featuring a blog on the Phrontistery in place of the old home page layout. Longtime readers will also note that there is a new header at the top of every page. All of the other pages, including the International House of Logorrhea and the Compendium of Lost Words, are accessible through the sidebar on the left-hand side of the Phrontistery pages.

Since 2002, I have been using the Livejournal blogging service to post my thoughts on all sorts of topics, including, of course, ones related to language. Over that time I've written literally thousands of words of language and wordplay-related content there that have not been readily available to readers of this site. It's all found in the posts below, and in the weeks to come, I hope to have new material that I will post here. I will also use this new feature to inform you of site updates.

I've often toyed with the idea of having some sort of message board or forum on the Phrontistery. Ideally I want people to come back frequently to see if there is anything new, but I haven't been as diligent as I might have been in putting together new content. Unfortunately, open message boards require a lot of maintenance and care (e.g., to deal with spammers and off-topic content), and I simply don't have the time to manage such a monstrosity. So I think a blog a happy medium - I can make posts and, if you have a Livejournal account, you can comment on the posts. If you want to get in touch with me, email is still the best way, however.

Tags: language, phrontistery