Conference on Key Words in Contemporary Poland, Warsaw, Poland, October 20-21, 2016

7378053300_abbd41d46c_mOn the 20th and 21st of October, 2016, the University of Warsaw will be holding a special conference on “key words in contemporary Poland.” With invited contributions from computational linguistics, lexicography, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, the focus of this scientific summit will be international selections for the “word of the year.” The conference languages are Polish, German and English.

European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) Name Database

6755068753_6e8558ae43_mThe European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has recently released a multilingual onomastic resource for the names of persons and organizations. The JRC-Names database provides lists of these name types and their many spelling variants (up to several hundred for a single personal name) and includes multiple scripts (e.g. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc). The resource is the by-product of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications, which has been analyzing up to 300,000 news reports per day, since 2004.

The JRC-Names resource and accompanying software are available for download as text.

The new Linked Data resource, accessible through the European Union’s Open Data Portal, also offers supplementary information (e.g. frequency counts, historical onomastic background information, etc.).

The new Linked Data edition is available through a SPARQL endpoint and via a RDF dump. It is registered on the datahub.io portal as JRC-Names.

Additional information is available on this page of EU Open Data Portal.

eLex 2017, Leiden, Netherlands, September 19-21, 2017

25223843056_0dde3a7d76_mFrom the 19th to the 21st of September 2017, the 5th biennial conference on electronic lexicography (eLex2017) will be held at the Holiday Inn in Leiden, Netherlands. The aim of the conference is to investigate state-of-the art technologies and methodologies for automating the creation of dictionaries. Attendees who are interested in presenting a 25 minute conference paper are invited to submit an abstract of between 300 and 500 words (excluding references) by the 1st of February 2017. The abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair.

5th International Summit of the Book, Limerick, Ireland, November 2-3, 2016

3790507327_d665c4b67f_mRegistration is now open for the 5th International Summit of the Book in Limerick, Ireland. The summit will take place from the 2nd to the 3rd of November 2016. The event will be in the 4 star Limerick Strand Hotel. The purpose of this year’s Summit is to provide a forum for discussing the development of books into electronic formats and the subsequent impact on reading, addressing the tole of book translation in the preservation and transmission of culture. Among the list of scheduled speakers are John Van Oudenaren (Director, Scholarly and Educational Programs, The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and Director, World Digital Library) and Dr. Sandra Collins (Director of the National Library of Ireland (NLI).

Onomastics Workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Zurich, Switzerland, September 10-13, 2017

18030017158_b49c6b94c6_mWhen a new person, place, thing, or idea is introduced into a language community, it is customary that the language users develop a name to designate the newcomer. Two of the most common linguistic strategies for developing names are borrowing preexisting names from other language communities and forming entirely new names. From the 10th to the 13th of September 2017, a workshop will be held in Zurich, Switzerland on the historical interaction between borrowing and word-formation in naming. This workshop will be held as a part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE). The deadline for abstract submissions (max. 300 words, excluding references) for the workshop is October 25, 2016.

Emerging Scholar Award Submissions due November 14, 2016

ANS Logo final 1 img onlyPresenters for the 2017 ANS Conference who are eligible for and interested in applying for the ANS Emerging Scholar Award (ESA), should have received all pertinent information.

The information is also available here: ESA Application Invitation

Emerging Scholar Award Submissions are due Monday, November 14, 2016.

Please send submissions to both ANS President Dr. I. M. Nick (mavi.yaz@web.de) and this year’s ESA Chair, Dr. Jan Tent (jan.tent@mq.edu.au).

The Trumptionary

donald_trump_august_19_2015_cropped2The English language is evolving. In the Trumptionary posts (part 1 and part 2) the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses words we’ve coined based on Trump’s name and some of the things he has said this election season.