I wonder whether we might conceive of an Erdős number for linguistics?
In mathematics, one's Erdős number is the number of degrees one's publication record is removed from Paul Erdős, a prolific mathematician who published circa 1,500 articles. Erdős has an Erdős number of zero; any of his co-authors have an Erdős number of 1; any of their co-authors (who have not directly co-authored with Erdős) have an Erdős number of 2 etc.
Only, on what premise would it be done in linguistics? If it were calculated by publications radiating outwards from one individual, who would that individual be? A foundation figure such as de Saussure - who did not have a long publication record, however, or a more recent figure such as Chomksy? My Chomksy number has a certain ring!!
Or, because we're all about the data, would we calculate a language number instead, based on the language(s) we've worked with most? Taking perhaps English as 'zero', we could count outwards in degrees of 'relatedness', or number of branches removed on a genetic family tree. Only, the world's languages do not constitute a single language family - how would we calculate outside Indo-European? And arguments and changing analyses about degrees of relatedness would mean these numbers would forever need updating.
What about a number from the Ethnologue statistical summaries? Or, a number based on the UNESCO 9 criteria used to measure language vitality? Any thoughts?
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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4 comments:
I'd advocate for humility for linguists who work on Indigenous people's endangered languages. I don't want to look like I'm showing off or getting too much kudos for the work I do on what are essentially other people's languages.
Am I being a bit rough? (hope I'm not offending you mami - just giving my opinion...)
No, no. None taken! And I'd agree.
Tongue-in-cheek: Maybe we could have an endangered language number, where the number represents the number of languages you've *saved*!?
:)
It sounds like it's just "six degrees of separation" with Erdos always being at one end of the chain.
I don't see linguists wanting to measure their proximity to or distance from the same particular person, but it might sometimes be useful to see how a particular person's research is related to a particular theoretical stance or to other people's research by seeing who they have co-authored with. So you might when discussing someone's work say that that person has a D. Hymes number of 4 and a Halliday number of 12 or something like that.
It seems like there might be a facebook analogy here, waiting to be pointed out.
Cool, thanks mami.
I still dream of the day when linguists get competitive over things like - who's taught the most people to read and write their languages, who's developed or supported the most/longest running language programs, who assisted the creation of the most jobs related to language work, who's dictionary/grammar/learner's guide had the greatest input (at all levels) from members of the language group etc etc etc.
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