Opening of the National Museum of Language

I had the opportunity yesterday (April 29) to visit the National Museum of Language (NML) in College Park, Maryland (U.S.) by invitation for a special preview day. The museum opens to the public formally on Saturday, May 3. The name gives the impression that it is government-owned, like the various other "national" museums and galleries …

“The World of Soy” due out soon

The World of Soy, a new volume of articles about the uses of soybeans in various parts of the world, is nearing publication. It is edited by Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney Mintz, and the publisher is the University of Illinois Press (UIP). This is the result of a project that goes …

Economics of language and the “long tail” effect – part 2

On the Wikinomics blog, Dan Herman responded to my discussion of use of the long tail model for languages. He raised some interesting points that I'll come to in a moment. Part of the reason I posted on the long-tail concept is that I believe it will be useful in various ways to analyzing the …

Economics of language and the “long tail” effect

"The economics of language has been neglected and deserves much greater attention," wrote economist Donald Lamberton in a book he edited in 2002. That may not have been too much of a revelation at the time - only a few years earlier (1994) another economist, François Grin, wrote that this field was tolerated "as an …