31.2875, Fun Facts: A Fund Drive Retrospective

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2875. Wed Sep 23 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2875, Fun Facts: A Fund Drive Retrospective

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Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:06:49
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Fun Facts: A Fund Drive Retrospective

 
Thirty years ago, Anthony Aristar and Helen Dry sent out the first issue of
the LINGUIST List, reproduced below. Much has changed since this message went
out. They spoke of a “linguists’s name server”, later realized as
linguistlist.org, now one of the oldest continually running websites online.
The early list served as a discussion forum and also welcomed announcements
for jobs and conferences; now, the Linguist List is the premier site to list
job searches, conferences, publications and other opportunities in all fields
of linguistics. 

But much has stayed the same. We remain “a forum for the discussion of those
issues which interest professional linguists.” The list really did “acquire a
life of its own”. Today, as before, the list is maintained by linguists for
linguists. All linguist list administrators, editors and site developers are
professors or graduate students in linguistics.  Our continued funding relies
on the contributions from linguists like you, and we thank all of you for your
decades of support.

Stay tuned to see more interesting issues from the LINGUIST List archive, and
please visit funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate to help us reach our funding
goals. In the wise words of our founder in 1990, “To this end, we earnestly
ask you all to begin contributing, and aid therefore in the continuance of
LINGUIST.”

Read our first issue here, or see it in full in our archives:
https://linguistlist.org/issues/1/1-0/ 

--

Thursday, 13 Dec 1990
Anthony Aristar, University of Western Australia
ANNOUNCING THE FORMATION OF LINGUIST

We would like to thank all of you for replying to our request for support in
setting up a linguists list. We received a far larger number of replies than
we had expected, and, as a result of that considerable support, the
powers-that-be have agreed to fund the list, which has been called "LINGUIST".
[…]
All public messages received will be archived, and ultimately become available
to subscribers through an archive server. We hope to add further
services--e.g. a linguists' name-server--as disk-space and time becomes
available. […]
…the goals of the list: to provide a forum for the discussion of those issues
which interest professional linguists. It is most emphatically our intent that
the list not acquire an ideological or theoretical bent of any kind
whatsoever. As of this moment, and by dint of historical accident (i.e. we
volunteered), the two editors are:
Anthony Aristar: University of Western Australia
Helen Dry: University of Texas at San Antonio
Let us say in ending that making a list of this kind a success depends
crucially on initiating an ongoing dialogue between participants. Once this
dialogue has been properly begun, the list acquires a life of its own, and
little further effort is required to maintain its existence. To this end, we
earnestly ask you all to begin contributing, and aid therefore in the
continuance of LINGUIST. Most particularly we ask you to begin the practice of
directing all linguistically relevant public announcements to this list, and
to ask your department to do so too. This list is the appropriate place for
job and conference announcements as well as for ongoing discussions about the
discipline.
- The Editors







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