ASLIP Annual Meeting 2001

     MINUTES

April 21, 2001
African Studies Center
Boston University
Boston, MA
 

The meeting was attended by: John D. Bengtson, Ronald Christensen,  Murray Denofsky, Harold C. Fleming,  Frederick Gamst, Mary Ellen Lepionka,  Daniel F. McCall, Michael Witzel.

CURRENT BUSINESS

Elections:
11 members of the Board of Directors were elected:
Anne W. Beaman, Allan R. Bomhard, Ronald Christensen, Gyula Dôcsy, Murray Denofsky, Harold C. Fleming,  Frederick Gamst,  Kenneth Hale, Mary Ellen Lepionka, Phillip Lieberman, Jan Vansina

The following officers were elected for the next year:
President:  Michael Witzel
Vice-President: John D. Bengtson
Secretary-Treasurer: Peter Norquest

Secretary-Treasurer's Report:
M.Witzel  relayed the Secretary-Treasurer's report, sent by Peter Norquest by e-mail as he could not attend the meting this year.

On the basis of votes mailed in, Merritt Ruhlen and Ofer Bar-Yosef were the top two vote-getters for the Council of Fellows, and will replace the deceased members (Igor Diakonoff and Karl Heinrich Menges). Vyacheslav Ivanov was third in the voting.

As of April 2001, the Secretary  had cut 25 members and two institutions that had not paid since 1997. We have gained nine new members in the last year, and two others have recently contacted him about joining. Twelve members and one institution that have not paid since 1998 will be dropped if they do not respond to the next dunning. The financial situation will allow for printing MT and the brochure.

Vice-President's Report:
John Bengtson reported on the progress of our journal Mother Tongue. The 2000-2001 issue, Mother Tongue VI, was in preparation, and includes:   articles in Memoriam  of Roger Wescott, Cyrus Gordon, and Joseph Greenberg; articles  discussing 'Paleolinguistics: The State of the Art and Science' (in memory of Roger Wescott); a discussion of Austric with L.V. Hayes and others; and book reviews. (This issue of Mother Tongue has since been completed and has been distributed to members)
 
 

President's Report:

Our  recently deceased members
Cyrus Gordon
Joseph Greenberg
Scotty MacNeish
Roger Wescott
were remembered.  Obituaries are  to appear in MT.

A number of recent developments and prospects were reported.

* Printing of the Brochure, was delayed for financial reasons; it will be printed now and distributed to some institutions and libraries. Members are requested to ask for copies to do some advertising of their own.

* As for the Newsletter, John Bengtson is to include a report of the Moscow Conference,  Announcements of meetings are to include NAACA and regional meetings of the LOS.  M. Witzel briefly reported on a special Burushaski session at the Montreal ICANAS conference last August that brought together a dozen of specialists.

* ASLIP Web site
The Long Ranger web site is up to date for the past seven issues. Earlier past issues will follow. The online Newsletter can remain open to the public for free. For continuity, it is better to publish it in smaller installments  on the web, to be augmented between issues; they can then include  for instance, to include members' new news.

* The Mother Tongue e-mail list : In LR 33, a summary of past discussions will be published; it has been prepared by Mary Ellen  Lepionka. Randy Foot will summarized the syntax discussion later on. The list has now moved to Yahoo.

*  Data Bases
The new ASCII-like encoding system, 'Unicode',  allows  phonetic transcriptions of most languages and, at the same time, the standard representation of written languages in their original characters. It is now included in the new Macintosh Operation System (OS X), and it has been available for the PC for some time. Hopefully, people will make use of it to replace our unwieldy ASCII-limited (7  bit character)  transcriptions on the web and in email.
 The Whitehouse and Bomhard fonts are to be added for the creation of a database that everyone can use and can connect to by hyperlink.
 P. Whitehouse has offered to make his database collection available (see LR 33). LV Hayes' Austric data can be scanned in as pdf files, which then remain under his control.
 The Starling database for Altaic, Dravidian, etc., can already be accessed easily  by ASLIP members via Starostin's website (via our web site).The same applies to the one for Indo-European run by S. Lubotsky at Leiden;  they can eventually be hot-linked to our emerging database  (P.  Whitehouse); we  can also add a database on (already existing) relevant texts and links to such texts.
 Highly "intelligent", multi-purpose  search engines should be  included, such SIM developed by Australia's RMIT  SIM; unfortunately it is very expensive. John Gardner and M. Witzel have set up a prototype for such work, using mapping procedures,  at a private computer company. More news will be reported as we progress.
 It was suggested by members that we will create a list of language families on web site and add relevant links, lists of prominent experts, etc.

* Fund raising
 On fund raising, the M. Witzel  reported on 'footholds' on the East and West Coasts. It is hoped that these may lead to funding for ASLIP and related activities. He outlined a program for attracting funds for the creation of an institute that would establish and manage a universally accessible global database of facts relating to long-range comparisons.
 It was suggested  that we also can use a Keyword Search facility to all relevant sources, including private foundations, for free from Linguist.
 

DECISIONS

 It was resolved at the 2001 Annual Meeting of ASLIP to publish the brochure developed last year, work on developing a mailing list and recruiting new members, deliver the Long Ranger Newsletter by email and on the website, and attend to the distribution of reprints of past issues of Mother Tongue long requested by certain new members.
 To be added to the mailing list are the University of Chicago, MIT, institutions in Japan, Australia and the UK., and the University in Leiden.

NEW BUSINESS

 Hal Fleming reported on his visit to Joe Greenberg in California just prior to his death. A conference, in his memory,  and a memorial volume, inspired by his work at Stanford (M. Ruhlen) are planned for next year.
 Hals' African conference,  originally planned as a  back-to-back conference with the  Harvard Central & South Asian Workshop in May, had to be postponed. Or it may be substituted for  by one of the AAPA to be held  in Buffalo, NY next April: this is a symposium headed by S.O.Y. Keita, which will cover the same elements that were  to be included  in the Gloucester conference.
 It was suggested by members  to have an ASLIP conference attached to other conferences, such as those of the Society for the Origin of Language, or the meetings of societies  such as that of those of Linguistics, Archaeology, Anthropology, etc.
 Members are encouraged to inform  the Secretary about their participation in such conferences so that we can organize a get together or a para-session devoted to ASLIP matters.
 

 Hal also reported a new discovery on  Shabo, a hunter-gatherer society living within a society of hunter-gatherers with a little agriculture (SW Ethiopia). Their language  does not seem to be related to any other one; sometimes it was thought to be a very old branch of Nilo-Saharan (or even of  S. Cushitic), but with old borrowings from Omotic (or cognates?), Cushitic, Surma, and others. The East African 'Bushmen' (Hadza and Sandawe) and the  unclassified Kado also are geographcially close. In other words, Shabo is situated at the crossroads of several major families, and  close to the suspected original home of Homo Sapiens before the migration out of Africa. Unfortunately, some genetic researchers recently walked right by the Shabo, as they were not allowed into their precise area.
 Murray Denofsky reported briefly on his paper, 'Iconicity and Language: Phonetic Symbolism of the Occlusivity Symbol,' publication forthcoming. This paper is in search of universals supporting the concept of pan-language (e.g., open sounds = open staces; occlusivity = nasals and stops), particular sound symbols for contact, density, and other qualities.
 Michael Witzel announced a 'Fourth Pillar' of long range linguistic comparison, mythology (linguistics, archaeology and anthropology, and population genetics being the other three pillars).  According to him (see now MT VI), a comparison of whole mythologies reveals global patterns that closely relate to global distributions of languages. One pattern, termed Laurasian, spans, e.g., Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India,  Japan, Polynesia, the  Americas, and includes a chronological structure of myth from creation to destruction with tales of origins, the flood, killing the dragon,  and 4 or 5 generations of deities and heroes, and a final destruction of the world. -- A second pattern, including, e.g., Australian, sub-Saharan African, Papuan, and  Andaman mythologies, does not include most of these elements but has its own commonalties. The two chief explanations for resemblances among myths--diffusion and psychic archetypes--in most cases cannot satisfactorily explain the distribution of these two patterns, but linguistic affinities very likely can. He proposes that, using  the major (often 'official') myth systems  as well as some folktales, the local patterns can be predicted on the basis of the model.
 

CURRENT BUSINESS

The outgoing President, John D. Bengtson, was warmly thanked for his successful four years of dedicated service. He offered to stay on as Vice-President and editor of MT, and members agreed.

Elected Officers of ASLIP: Michael Witzel, President; John D. Bengtson and Roger W. Wescott, Vice-Presidents; Peter Norquest, Secretary-Treasurer.

Elected Members of the Board:
O. Bar-Yosef, A. Beaman, A. Bomhard, R. Christensen, G. Décsy, H. Fleming, F. Gamst, M. E. Lepionka, Ph. Lieberman, J. Vansina.

Nominations for Council of Fellows:
As Igor Diakonoff and Karl-Heinrich  Menges have passed away since our last meeting, new elections to the Council are necessary. Michael Witzel will solicit nominations from the membership, and elections to vacancies in the Council of Fellows will be done by mail/email at a later time.
 

DECISIONS

Resolved: ASLIP will begin a monograph series with papers by members, per Fred Gamst's suggestion. These brief voluntary papers will be copied and stapled as special supplements to the journal. They will be listed in the journal, in the newsletters, and on the web site with an abstract and an order form, where they can be ordered and mailed as single copies for a fee (to be determined). The Secretary-Treasurer will manage the copying, mailing, and record keeping.

Resolved: ASLIP will seek funding to establish an Institute to collect databases relating to  historical linguistics and language origins. These databases will be made comparable or usable comparably, prepared electronically, and made available to scholars worldwide. Paul Whitehouse will play a central role in this project.

Initial requests for funding for conferences will be a step in  the quest to establish an Institute. For example, small workshops and seminars (perhaps organized by macrofamilies) could be held to identify, discuss, and solicit the data that will be housed at the institute. Funds could cover travel for invited principals.

The point was raised that ASLIP's Institute could be specifically and explicitly linked to equivalent database projects in archaeology and genetics, including the human genome project.
 

DATA BASES

To begin with, Paul Whitehouse is willing to type up and collect  word lists for the projected database. We should also link up with the extensive etymological databases of Sergei Starostin at: http://starling.rinet.ru/
We will offer to publish word lists that authors have been holding privately (for example, L.V. Hayes' Austric lists, see his announcement in http://204.156.22.2/cgi-bin/demogate/mothertongue/lwgate/MOTHERTONGUE/).
 
 

THE NEWSLETTER

Name of Newsletter:  We discussed and decided to keep Roger Wescott's suggestion of The Long Ranger for the newsletter to distinguish it from Mother Tongue for the journal.

Distribution of Newsletter: The Long Ranger will be made available for free on the ASLIP web site, with the options of receiving it in a pdf or a text format. It will also be available in hard copy for a fee ($10 was suggested).

Content of Newsletter: The Long Ranger will be geared more toward members, including news and announcements of members' activities; events of interest to members; and anecdotes, jokes, or cartoons submitted by members.
The News portion of The Long Ranger will contain brief summaries of news from Science, Nature, Scientific American, and other mass media. Members are encouraged to provide copy for this feature, which should be sent to Michael Witzel.
 

THE JOURNAL

Status of Journal: Mother Tongue V is coming out in  July under the aegis of Vice-President John D. Bengtson who has agreed to continue as editor.

Distribution of Journal:
We will look into the possibilities of letting a publisher take over the publication and distribution of Mother Tongue. Institutional membership will be targeted ($100 was suggested. Individual membership remains  $25).  The journal now has 225-250 subscribers, including 12 institutions.
 

CONFERENCE

Hal Fleming will organize an Africanist  conference at Gloucester in May 2001. M. Witzel  proposed to link, in item if not in location, this with the Central/South Asian Round Table that has been held twice now at Harvard. From these workshops,  a more general ASLIP conference may emerge in the future.
 

PROMOTION
Advertising and Promotion: ASLIP will have a brochure as developed earlier in ASLIP's history in conjunction by  M. E. Lepionka with Allen Bombard.
 

INTERNET PRESENCE

ASLIP now has two internet presences. Its web site is at: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/aslip.html
with links to the old issues of the Mother Tongue Newsletter (now Long Ranger), and our journal, Mother Tongue.  The Newsletters will be put on the web retroactively, issue by issue, as the opportunity arises (so far, issues 25-27, 30, 32 are available). The journal will only  be represented by Summaries and Indexes (by Mary Ellen Lepionka).

The other web initiative is the Mother Tongue mail list and discussion forum, at:
http://204.156.22.2/cgi-bin/demogate/mothertongue/lwgate/MOTHERTONGUE/
where past discussions can be viewed.
Request to join the list should be sent to the web master
John Robert Gardner, who hosts the list for us at his Indological web site (vedavid.org), at: atman@vedavid.org or directly via:
http://204.156.22.2/cgi-bin/demogate/mothertongue/lwgate/MOTHERTONGUE/subscribe.html
Our thanks go to Randy Foote who has taken the initiative, in February, to invite people interested in the origin of language to join.  Mary Ellen Lepionka has proposed to summarize some of the discussion for the next issue of  Long Ranger.
 
 

Peter Norquest                   tel: 520-903-0648
ASLIP Treasurer                 e-mail: Norquesp@U.ARIZONA.edu
1632 Santa Rita Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85719
U.S.A.