Lingformant update

Filed under: Lingformant

On July 24th 2006, Lingformant will be one year of age. Its babbling stage is almost over by now, and the acquired vocabulary ought to be roughly around 50 lexical entries. We are all eagerly waiting for it to utter its first word any moment now.

As the father of Lingformant, I am very proud of my creation.

During this one year Lingformant has gone through one name change (from LanguageNews), one domain name change, two server switches, as well one design modification. It also went from no advertising to a lot of advertising to a little advertising to no advertising again. I made a grand total of four dollars fifty-three cents from six months of ads.

The only part that actually remained from the first incarnation was the original engine that powered Lingformant. And now I have decided to change that, as well. (Actually, what I really ought to be doing is writing my master’s dissertation.) To bring Lingformant more in line with my other web projects such as my general blog, my literary awards news service and my Akira Kurosawa news and information website, I have now converted Lingformant into a WordPress powered website. It also seemed like a good opportunity to mess around with the site design while I was at it.

I have tried to make the switch as smooth as possible. The old RSS Feed URL still works (or at least it should), but you may want to update it to one of the new ones found at the “RSS Feeds” section. Those of you who are receiving the news entries via e-mail, you have been taken off the old Mailman list and put onto the new state-of-the-art list powered by a WordPress plugin. Unfortunately, sending batched digests is no more a possibility, so from now on you will be receiving each news mail separately. I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

The biggest change, however, must be the ability for users to leave comments on the news entries. I have no idea whether there is any real interest in such a feature, but as it is included in WordPress, it felt like a good idea to leave it on. So, if you feel like leaving a response to any of the news posted here, now you can. (Note that your first post will be moderated to prevent spamming.)

During this one year, I have also learnt a good deal. One is that there are perhaps less people out there interested in a service like this than I originally thought (my estimations are that reader numbers are currently at around 100, and have been there for the last half a year or so). Perhaps I am just not as good a self-promoter as I thought I was.

I have also learnt that linguistics is not extremely well handled by the media, with relevant news stories generally belonging to one of the following two categories:

1) Discoveries about language made by and reported by non-linguists, and with very little actual understanding of what our current understanding is about how language works. Often involving chimps, dolphins, whales, dogs or birds.

2) Reports about new discoveries and theories about how the brain functions, again from and by non-linguists.

In addition to these two, there is of course a continual flood of articles about the status of a language in one country or another, reports about how English (or some other language) is deteriorating, changing its spelling, or acquiring its millionth or billionth word. Most of these I do not include here for obvious reasons.

That the number of articles actually written or even peer-reviewed by linguists is so low has been something of a surprise to me. In fact, it is alarmingly low. (But Mark Liberman’s recent post at Language Log perhaps offers something of an explanation.)

All in all, I have enjoyed seeing Lingformant grow and evolve into what it is now. I hope that you have found it useful as well and that the toddler’s next year will be as good as the first one was.