LINGUIST List Special Issue: Fund Drive

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List Special Issue: Fund Drive 

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
	 Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin-Madison
	 Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
	 Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org>  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:51:12
From:  linguist [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: It Is Time to Give Back!


Dear LINGUIST Subscribers,

I remember some years ago when I wrote, "Each year around this 
time we do something that all of us at LINGUIST dread: we begin 
our annual fund drive. We often have fantasies that, one day, a 
wonderful and magical creature will arrive at our door-step, and 
endow the entire operation from the funds derived from the huge 
wealth her bestselling linguistics book has produced."

Well, some years have passed, and despite all our wishes, despite 
all the candles we have lit to appropriate deities, no such 
person has appeared. Yes, it is rather inexplicable, given the 
vast sums that linguists receive for their latest work on 
Anatolian laryngeals or clause reduction in New Guinea, but there 
it is: we're on our own.

So we're going to have a fund drive yet again, but we promise: 
we're going to try as hard as we can to make it fun. We have 
one advantage, of course: we have an extraordinary group of 
students, who might have a decent career in cartoon production 
or animation, were it not for the fact that for some inexplicable 
reason they love linguistics. I've never been able to understand 
why we all find trees and phonology and words and sound-change or 
whatever so fascinating, but we have a shared addiction, and 
addictions are expensive, as you know. And the truth of the matter 
is that, like all addicts, our students just want to be able to 
continue to work on their shared love, and that requires a salary, 
even if a minimal one, enough to keep the heating on and to pay 
for the power their laptops need. And that's where you come in, 
for it's the annual fund-drive that pays the students. Not one 
penny of it goes to me or Helen, or any of the people who have 
actual jobs here: every penny goes to the people who maintain 
the site. People often say nice things to me and Helen about 
LINGUIST, and we are always happy to hear them. But the fact is 
that most of the real work is done by those student members of 
our team. It's they who keep LINGUIST running. And this is no 
small job!

We think we've done rather a lot with the money you've given us 
over the years, and for rather a long time. We have so many 
services that have been built by your donations: a job site which 
is the largest in the discipline, a conference & calls pages that 
advertise almost all conferences in linguistics, a searchable 
linguistic book database, the MultiTree database and search 
facility that stores hypotheses about language relationships and 
displays them as trees, the LL-MAP site for geolinguistics... I 
think we've done a lot in the time we've been around. Somehow we 
have to preserve all this, and for that we need your help.

Of course, this is a judgment you, not we, must make on this 
issue. But I think you would find it difficult to find another 
discipline which has anything like LINGUIST. We can't help feeling 
a little proud of it, even though we are well aware that it could 
be improved in many ways. But the LINGUIST organization tries to 
do as much as it can for the discipline, and this is one of the 
reasons why we have to support so many students. Running a website 
that is as edited and complex as LINGUIST takes a lot of resources, 
and a lot of people. LINGUIST is no different from the discipline 
of which it is a part: we don't have a lot of money to play with, 
and we need your support.

So we'd like to ask you, once again, if you would be so generous 
as to support LINGUIST again this year. Remember: every penny is 
an investment both in the discipline's present infrastructure, 
and in its future wellbeing.

Donate at:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm


Anthony