LINGUIST List Special Issue: The Circus has arrived in town!

Mon Mar 10 16:17:44 UTC 2008

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
         <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: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:13:42
From:  linguist <linguist at linguistlist.org>
Subject: Why do we need your help?

Dear Subscribers:

This is LINGUIST List's seventeenth year of operation. And-you guessed
it - this month is the beginning of our thirteenth Fund Drive. Those
of you who have lived in the United States know that non-profit
organizations like Public TV, Public Radio, and, yes, LINGUIST List,
have to depend on subscriber donations for a large portion of their
operating expenses. But Public TV and Radio are partially subsidized
by the government: LINGUIST List is not. We mention this because every
year we receive a message or two suggesting that we apply for
government money instead of depending on donations.

Alas, in the American system, such funding isn't available for
institutions like LINGUIST List. We do get office space and server
support from Eastern Michigan University; and the English Department
(in which the Linguistics Program is housed) generously supports two
graduate assistants, who each work 20 hours a week. But if you have
looked at the LINGUIST List website recently, you know that two grad
students working half-time for 8 months a year couldn't possibly
maintain our services.

Most of our standard posting services-e.g., jobs postings, conference
and call postings, book postings, book reviews-require at least two
students. The Jobs category alone has had well over 650 postings this
year, and a large proportion of these 'routine' postings require email
correspondence with the submitters. We even classify all postings by
linguistic subfield and subject language in order to make them more
easily retrievable and more useful to you. We take pride in meeting a
48-hour turnaround time on all postings, which means that some
students have to be available on weekends and holidays. And LINGUIST
is a year-round operation. For the year 2007, we posted close to 3,900
issues for you to read-at your leisure, of course!  And we archive all
our postings so that you can easily search our site for past messages.

But posting is just part of what we do. Our website has over 2000
pages which have to be maintained and updated for missing or bad
links. Reflect for a moment on what these pages contain: information
on 18,040 linguists (many of whom move often!); publications that
include 6,700 book notices, 1520 dissertation abstracts, 2010 book
reviews, 1970 academic papers, and 520 journals. We list the websites
of 490 publishers, 180 professional societies, and maintain a database
of 130 linguistics mailing lists and their discussions. Finally,
there's our searchable database of information on more than 7,000
unique languages and their families.

This past year, we have been developing several new services that you
should know about. One of these is a free abstract submission and
review service designed especially for organizers of small
conferences. This will enable organizers to customize an abstract
submission template to fit their needs, and link it to their
conference website. We'll host the resulting abstract submission and
review facility for free, and give them a service that normally only
the bigger conferences can afford.

Another new service, currently under development, is our "Student
Portal." This is designed for students who are interested in human
language. It will provide future linguists with a broad range of
information on the discipline and show them how to pursue it as a
career: how to find appropriate programs, how to pay for one's
education, how to improve one's academic writing and presentation, how
to find the right research tools and resources and good career
counseling. It will even give information on the best ways to find a
job.

A third service under development is a facility for advertising
linguistic internships.  Similar to our Jobs postings, this will be a
list of current linguistic internships available around the world. It
will even include a few summer internships right here at
LINGUIST. This service will feature an upload function for students
who wish to provide resumes, giving both employers and potential
interns an easy place to exchange information.

Some supporters have asked us-very politely-why it takes so many
graduate students to run LINGUIST. If you look at the large number of
things we do, you can see why.  Other supporters wonder whether we
have other external means of support for the work we do. We are proud
of some of the external grants that LINGUIST has received over the
years: a Sun Microsystems server equipment grant, for example, as well
as several National Science Foundation grants that have helped us
develop our web infrastructure. This is one of the reasons why we have
a sophisticated database, search facilities, and mailing list
software. We also received the 5-year E-MELD grant, Electronic
Metadata for Endangered Language Data, which was aimed at developing
linguistic infrastructure for the discipline, and in particular for
those involved in endangered languages work.

As generous as this support has been, however, it only builds
facilities which we must then support all by ourselves. It does not
support the many graduate-and some undergraduate-students who do all
the hard work, nor for the training they receive.  For seventeen
years, LINGUIST has been dedicated to providing our email and website
services to linguists across the world without cost to the users. And
we are determined to keep it as a free service to you. But this
doesn't mean that the services themselves don't cost money!

Your support is helping produce the next generation of linguists,
linguists who not only have a good grounding in linguistics, but who
are especially sophisticated in the use of language technologies and
tools that will ultimately contribute to preserving knowledge of the
world's languages and linguistic structures. We are very proud indeed
of how many of our bright and dedicated LINGUIST assistants go on to
enroll in Ph.D. programs at some of the world's best graduate schools.

So, once again, we are asking those of you with the means to do so to
contribute to the LINGUIST List 2008 Fund Drive. Remember: all of your
support and donations go exclusively to paying our graduate students
for their work at LINGUIST. It goes to those who most need it, and who
are the future of our discipline.

Anthony & Helen 

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This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $60,000. This money will go
to help keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors
for the coming year.

See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out our
Fund Drive 2008 LINGUIST List Circus and join us on our many shows!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so,
go to: https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on
how to donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit:
http://linguistlist.org/donate.html

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University
and as such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is
a registered 501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is
38-6005986. These donations can be offset against your federal and
sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers only). For more
information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will
match any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this
entails your contacting your human resources department and sending us
a form that the EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your
employer. This is generally a simple administrative procedure that
doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without costing you an
extra penny.  Please take a moment to check if your company operates
such a program.

Note: the donors' names are appended to every fund drive message sent
to the main list.  You can also see the list of all donors by clicking
here:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/contributors2008.html

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!

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