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SamuelJBeer

@samueljbeer.bsky.social
297 followers 267 following 590 posts

Assistant professor of linguistics, Metropolitan State University of Denver. Where does language data come from and where does it go?

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Reposted by SamuelJBeer
Anna Belew @nabelew.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ah, we're back to "the U.S. linguistic security apparatus must revitalize endangered regional language isolates as a layered security measure" well boys let's revitalize all the languages we tried to eradicate so that they can advance our efforts to eradicate OTHER people
smallwarsjournal.com
Centauri, High Valyrian, and Klingon: Why Advanced Encryption Standards Cannot Replace Low-Density Human Dialects
The U.S. linguistic security apparatus must revitalize endangered regional language isolates as a layered security measure.
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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 29/09/2026
Professoring is so weird, like I took a bunch of classes in linguistics and then I taught a bunch of courses in linguistics and then wrote a two-hundred page thesis in linguistics and now like a quarter of my job is just making decisions about university and departmental curriculum
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Moose
A moose chomps at autumnally yellow brush while vague clouds and mountains recede into the distance below
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SCP @10-5.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It’s actually discouraging how much of the discourse gets diverted to “AI good or AI bad” when the obvious and more pressing issue is “AI *companies* are definitely bad”
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
On the one hand, it is emphasized to me daily that I need to be including more “career readiness” in my courses (often evidently euphemistic for AI). On the other hand, AI people are exclaiming that they don’t know their address and act confused about how one could survive a single day sans Claude.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
We can make and comprehend (beautiful, justified) sentences (that I maybe never want to know the back story of) that have never before been uttered.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
A lovely trait of language is that w can produce and comprehend novel combinations of words, cursed combinations never before uttered.
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Anna Belew @nabelew.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Go check out @geraldroche.bsky.social's review of @sophiasgaler.bsky.social's "How to Kill a Language" for a surgical dissection of the history of language oppression denialism, clear and informed reminders of its political nature, and a buncha links to good research (incl. by @chirila.bsky.social):
theconversation.com
Languages are disappearing, and the problem is political
Language loss is often a reluctant choice made to escape violence, not a willing choice made to gain benefits.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
There were still pretty flowers in Dobërdol, Albania yesterday.
A landscape of flowers in front of a mountain. A big yellow flower is ethereally blurred in the foreground. Smaller pink flowers behind it are either in sharp focus or blurred as they flow in the wind. Behind there is a grassy slope with a rocky summit beyond.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Master and C-Commander: the far side of the node.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
The New Forest (est 1079) is a lil bit magical.
A radiant white horse shines amid lush greens of ferns and pine trees. Tall white and brown tree trunks loom in the background.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Perfect conditions in Kampinos Park Narodowy today.
A double track path winds into the forest. At the edges of the path, dense undergrowth gives way to trees. 50 meters or so ahead, the path bends to the left just at the foot of the pale bark of a birch tree, which contrasts with the dark greens of the rest of the image.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The letter that this is taken from is particularly juicy—it is Driberg’s account to his mentor of the circumstances that led to Driberg’s removal from the colonial administration. This episode, which has some deep lore, has been written about in eg Abraham 2010, Collins 1983, Daniel 1986.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Isaac Schapera to Brenda Z. Seligman 23 August 1928 Dear Mrs. Seligman, Please forgive me for not having returned your paper before now, but shortly after I reached Piddington I managed to develop a rather severe cold which kept me in bed and effectually prevented me from doing any work at all.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
“I had a bad time just before Christmas with my teeth or much of this information would have been sent to you earlier. Yours very sincerely, C. G. Seligman” (Seligman to Driberg, 7 January 1924)
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I’ve been doing some work with archived papers from early 20th century British colonial administrators/ethnologists. Much like us, they are continually apologizing in correspondence for their delayed replies. Poor health is routinely offered as an excuse. A slowly developing thread:
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Another confusing phenomenon is when people interpret threads like this good one/just this post as saying “there are no possible uses of systems sold as “AI” and anybody who finds any such thing useful is a fool”. Arguments from/about usefulness could be a thing! But they aren’t mentioned here.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Went to the LSE archive to look at the Seligman collection with my most specific question being “When did Jack Driberg visit the Nyangi to collect the data in his 1932 paper “Lotuko Dialects”. And behold:
Handwritten letter from J Driberg to CG Seligman dated 11.11.(19)26:

“Dear Seligman, 
The following are the details of my projected expedition for which you asked me: — 
1. The Nyangeya in the NE frontier of Uganda__a small hill tribe of a few hundred families. They have not been observed & it is doubtful how they should be classed, but they would form an admirable study of a complete & small entity.”
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Mid-1920s consonant chart (from an unidentified German?) tailored to Bantu languages. From the London School of Economics’s Seligman collection.
A huge table. At its top is the label “Tabelle der Gebrauchlichsten Bantulaute” (table of the most common Bantu sounds). Rows are by place of articulation (including separate rows for complex articulations), and columns are by manner (including eg prenasalization, fortis v lenis, etc).
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
I approve of Pembrokeshire.
A woman rides a bike through rolling fields growing emerald green with spring growth. Before her, a road dips down a hill and then wins gently into the distance.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
The trails around Bristol are so lush right now.
Three cyclists ride over a dirt road through a tunnel of ferns into a beam of evening light Three cyclists ride by a wall of indistinct green foliage. The photo is blurred except for the lead cyclist’s arm and wheel—it gives the effect of speed and motion. Two cyclists ride over a rocky road into a dense tunnel of trees.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
If somebody who wanted to better understand a field that I had worked in dug into sources in a paper that I was an author on and found that we had flagrantly misrepresented the contents of a paper, or had cited something that didn’t exist, I would contact NASA and ask to be launched into the sun.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Having taken a look at the original paper that the NYT writeup is based on I’m confused about the interpretation of causation. The claim is that the fact that humans use more child directed speech than other primates is evidence that CDS “played a critical role in the emergence of human language” 1/
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
A lot of how we talk about languages (and families and death and extinction) is rooted in underspecified metaphorical conceptualization blending source domains of sexual reproduction (where if the parent is gone, it’s dead) with mitosis (parent cells are essentially sublimated into offspring)
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Gareth Roberts @garicgymro.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵
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Josef Fruehwald @jofrhwld.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
sorry, i work at a university in a red state, and it’s illegal for the women & gender studies faculty to spend research money to attend their conferences. what in the fuck are they talking about
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
What a snug little fit in my History of the English Language syllabus there is for this, right after Ngũgi and Achebe 👀
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Sandra Jansen @sj2915.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
I can see why people are not interested but lobbying leads to influence. A ‚we are better than this‘ is not going to cut it.
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Anna Belew @nabelew.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
i’ve just come back from 4 language revitalization conferences in 3 weeks and one takeaway I’m chewing on is that no one, from any country, identified working with state-level policymakers on language rights as a priority area Pretty much everyone framed gov/policy as something to evade and survive
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
My very special History of the English language class got me a very nice card, and one particular student really got to the heart of things.
A card. Most of it is blurred out, but one message written on the card says “Thanks for not mogging me.”
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Slander! At the brewery
A very dubious man stands in front of a flag that says “”Bad day to be a beer”. The man’s last name is beer, and he perceives the flag to be a slight on the entire village of Trub, Switzerland.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Language allows us to produce and comprehend cursed sentences never before uttered. 🐦🐦
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
“But what are you gonna do with linguistics after you graduate!?”
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Diachronica journal @diachronica.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Diachronica gets a paper bump every (northern) summer, and we're seeing submissions pick up. This year, there are many more submissions with AI involvement (declared or undeclared). Here's a brief thread about why the vast majority of such #linguistics papers won't make it past my desk:
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Annika Tjuka @annikatjuka.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Database update 🌐 We launched a new version of CLICS 🚀 - the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications clics.clld.org The paper introducing the new version is available here: aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-ma...
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Discussions on Legacy Materials is here to teach our community to imagine a world where conferences are robustly chandelierer. Grab your befuddling archival language data and join us next April (in Passau!), everybody!
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Thomas Van Hoey 司馬智 @simazhi.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Discussion on Legacy Materials 3 Group pic #DiLegMa3
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Thomas Van Hoey 司馬智 @simazhi.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
@samueljbeer.bsky.social showed us the problems that even a single 107-word wordlist can bring , how to contextualize it, and how to recontextualize it. It’s worth it to halt and break your head for a while over a small detail like a punctuation mark. #dilegma3
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Arne Rubehn”Digital Scholarly Editions of Austronesian Legacy Materials”. Rubehn presents a model for producing interoperable wordlists from legacy hard copy format to a standardized format, including records of all representational choices. #DiLegMa3
A man in front of a window gestures at a screen while delivering a presentation.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Shobhana Chelliah “Creating Access to Edward Hillard’s Mizo materials through keywords from a controlled vocabulary.” Chelliah works with CoRSAL, an archive of South Asian/adjacent languages. It’s a struggle to create a controlled vocabulary with sufficient but not excessive granularity! #DiLegMa3
A woman gives an academic talk while standing in front of a window.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Peter K. Austin “planting linguistic legacy materials: some cross-disciplinary possibilities” in the mid-19th century, Ferdinand von Mueller solicited and curated a massive collection of plant specimens gathered by amateur naturalists. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
A man delivers a presentation in front of a fancy window.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Chelliah and Borch (see alt) “Challenges and network building in the creation and use of the Akha legacy collection”. Inga-Lill Hanson is a Swedish anthropologist who collected loads of recordings and notes from Akha in Southeast Asia. #DiLegMa3 (1/4)
Shobhana Chelliah and Søren Borch present for coauthors Jose Benavides and Mary Burke   Borch points at a screen while Chelliah manages the computer.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Luca Ciucci: “A morphological analysis of 19th century Zamucoan varieties.” Zamucoan is a small language family spoken on the border of Paraguay and Bolivia. Two languages persist today, but there are 18th century Jesuit-produced records of a third Zamucoan language. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
A man gestures at a screen while giving a talk.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Joanna Dolinska: “Dagur language - the history of documentation of the easternmost Mongolic language”. Dagur lacks a standard orthography, but has variously been represented with Manchu, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
A woman gestures at a screen while giving a talk in a room with big fancy windows.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
J Drew Hancock: “Legacy Materials and the Reconstruction of Cáhniks”. Oral history, archaeology, and existing historical linguistic publications give different accounts of Cáhniks (Caddoan) origins. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
A man gestures enthusiastic toy while giving an academic talk in front of fancy windows.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Oliver Mayeux “a When is a legacy material not a legacy material? Reflections on hoax grammars”. In the 1880s, Jean Parisot published a series of analyses of the “Taensa” language in Louisiana. It was subsequently declared a fraud by Brinton, and years of controversy ensued. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
A man gives a talk in front of big red drapes
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
We’re being iconic about expressives in Paris. #DiLegMa3 🐦🐦
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Kaijun Sheng “Legacy materials in Shanghainese and their contribution to the study of ideophones” The first substantial lexical documentation of Shanghainese was published in 1894/6 by Paul Rabouin. Kaijun Sheng collected ideophones from Rabouin’s dictionary as older Shanghainese #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
A man presents a talk in front of some red drapes and a window.
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SamuelJBeer @samueljbeer.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Aynur Kadir and @markturin.bsky.social : “Designing an archive at a distance” on stewardship and mobilization of multi-script Uyghur collections. Presents a cultural archive orbiting around imprisoned scholar Rahile Dawut’s cultural documentation. #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
A man and a woman present a talk in a fancy room. On a screen is an image of a woman with a video camera.
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