Looks like I may have spoken too soon a few weeks ago- Yesterday the Icelandic Meteorological Office recorded two earthquakes underneath Eyjafjallajökull's larger brother (sister?) volcano, Mýrdalsjökull. You might want to keep an eye on recent seismic activity here, and brush up your Icelandic pronunciation.
In other news, there is an interesting article over at MIT News profiling the life and work of Morris Halle and one of his former students who is now also a Phonologist at MIT, Donca Steriade. The background of the article is the current debate between two competing models of how the mind turns thoughts into speech sounds and vice versa.
Halle himself revolutionized the way linguists thought about this problem in the 1960's, but starting around the 1990's a new group of researchers, including Steriade, began to create an approach that differs significantly from Halle's ideas. The article illustrates the differences between the two groups' beliefs as well as their common ground. It was nice to be reminded of the human side of the type of heated academic argument that a bored classmate of mine (probably more accurately than not) once called "cage fighting for nerds."
Monday, June 14, 2010
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