When Languages Die: The Extinction Of The World\u27s Languages And The Erosion Of Human Knowledge

In When Languages Die, K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. Languages are the accretion of thousands of years of a people\u27s science and art - from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The author shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we face a massive erosion of the human knowledge base. The global abandonment of indigenous languages will bring a massive loss of accumulated knowledge and culture - this book argues for the irreplaceable nature of these unique knowledge systems and the urgency of documenting them before they are lost forever

Anthropological Linguistics (LING21, ANTH020N) Syllabus

Anthropological Linguistics course description:Communication and culture mutually define one another across communities worldwide. Human linguistic diversity, language contact and language change, and face-to-face communication continue to be key areas of inquiry for both linguistics and anthropology. Colonialism, globalization, mobility, and new technologies are changing the way we transmit and conceive of cultural knowledge, community, and our selves and the natural environment. In this course we draw attention to codeswitching, creoles, language endangerment, and constructed languages as reflections of our changing societies. We also address the ethics of fieldwork as a means of investigating these important social phenomena at the interfaces of language/ecology, language/identity, Global North/South

Getting Started With COCA

In this assignment, students will learn basic methods in corpus linguistics, an emerging field at the intersection of humanities and quantitative social science. They will learn how to search large English language corpora (e.g., the 900 million word Cambridge International Corpus) to look for otherwise hidden patterns of language use. They will be able to track the emergence of new words, shifts in meaning in existing words, and note the obsolescence of some words. They will interpret their findings in light of how language usage reflects societal attitudes and social change

Do ‘Fat Tails’ Matter in GARCH Estimation? Stock Market Efficiency in Romania and the Czech Republic

The use of the GARCH-class of models is commonplace when examining stock market returns. In this paper we use data on stock markets in two transition economies to demonstrate the importance of using the correct GARCH specification. When returns are characterised by ‘fat tails’ or kurtosis the use of a GARCH-t specification is appropriate. Returns in Romania are symmetric, but characterised by kurtosis. Returns in the Czech Republic are normally distributed. Using a standard GARCH specification leads to rejection of the null hypothesis of market efficiency in Romania, whereas this null hypothesis cannot be rejected using the GARCH-t specification. The null hypothesis of efficiency cannot be rejected in the Czech Republic using either specification. Thus, we find that the presence of ‘fat tails’ can have important implications for inference in the analysis of stock market returns.GARCH, transition, stock market efficiency

Minimum wage setting and standards of fairness

We examine the setting of minimum wages, arguing that they can best be understood as a reflection of voters' notions of fairness. We arrive at this conclusion through an empirical investigation of the implications of three models, considered in the context of policy setting by sub-units in a federation: a competing interests group model; a constrained altruism model; and a fairness based model. In the latter model, voters are interested in banning what they view to be unfair transactions, with the notion of fairness based on comparisons to the "going" unskilled wage. We use data on minimum wages set in the ten Canadian provinces from 1969 to 2005 to carry out the investigation. A key implication of the models that is borne out in the data is that minimum wages should be set as a positive function of the location of the unskilled wage distribution. Together, the results indicate that minimum wages are set according to a "fairness" standard and that this may exacerbate movements in inequality.

A COMPARISON OF THE SIZE AND LOCATION OF AGRIBUSINESS INDUSTRIES FOR LOUISIANA AND ITS PARISHES: 1982-1992

The objective of this study is to measure and analyze the effects of structural change in the agribusiness sector on parish economies in Louisiana. Specific objectives are: (1) to measure changing patterns of employment in Louisiana's agribusiness sector, (2) to analyze the impacts of structural change on the contribution of agribusiness to total employment in individual parishes, and (3) to identify any rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural shifts in the geographic location of employment resulting from structural changes in agribusiness industries.Labor and Human Capital, Agribusiness,