Intel has opened laboratories with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Washington. The moves are part of a broad trend that has industry paying universities to do long-term research, says an article in The New York Times on Sunday. The computer-chip maker hopes to learn more about scientific and technical advances that could affect its business years down the road, according to the article.
Andrew A. Chien, Intel’s director of research, is quoted as saying, “Their researchers work on frontiers, in unexplored territory. We want explorers.”—Andrea L. Foster
9 Responses to Intel Looks to Universities for ‘Explorers’
jffoster - May 7, 2012 at 8:26 am
Very appropriate for a Blog Group called Lingua Franca. A couple of observations, both minor with respect to the main thrust of your article.
1 lingua franca is historically from Italian, not Latin. If we are going to use the foreign plural, then it makes more sense to use the Italian plural lingue franche. However, the Anglicized plural, ’lingua francas’ is quite common not only in common use (to the extent the term is in common ordinary use at all!) and in Linguistics.
2. “Pashto reminded me of Russian, with its clicks and guttural consonants” I can guess what you have in mind by “guttural consonants” but can not imagine what “clicks” might refer to. Linguists usually use “click” to mean ‘imploded stops’, as found in the Khoisan languages of Southwest Africa. Russian certainly has nothing like that and so far as I can determine, neither does Pashto. One might use the term loosely for glottalized stops or the like, but I dont think Pashto has those either though it does have a couple of glottals.
Pashto and Punjabi are related in the Indo-Iranian group of Indoeuropean languages, but Punjabi belongs to the Indic Subgroup and is more closely related to Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu. Pashto is in the Iranian subgroup and more closely related to Persian (Farsi), Tadjik, and the like..Note too that the closely related French and Spanish don’t sound very much alike, .expecially to a person who speaks neither. (For the record, I speak both and they still sound different to me and I configure my mouth and intonation patterns differently for each.)
hlandecker - May 7, 2012 at 9:01 am
Thank you jffoster. I’m the moderator/editor of LF. Because our house dictionary, Webster’s New World, is silent on the plural of “lingua franca,” I looked elsewhere. Merriam-Webster offers both the Anglicized “lingua francas” and “linguae francae” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca). Since M-W and Lucy are sources I trust, I’d like to leave it as she wrote it, but your point about the Italian plural is correct. Thanks for your comment and for reading Lingua Franca.
marcleavitt - May 7, 2012 at 1:25 pm
I think this is a thoughtful treatment of a part of the world which has great significance for us now, and about which most Americans, the intelligentsia included, have very little knowledge. It was a crossroads of civilization long before Alexander, and it remains so. Excellent piece!
toorie - May 7, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Urdu is ‘a mish mash of Hindi and regional dialects’? I’m sorry but that sentence tells me a whole lot about how informed this blogger is and how inflected by a peculiar Bollywoodesqu Indo-centrism. Urdu is a language with an incredibly rich literary tradition which predates Hindi. What is understood as Hindi today comes out of a shared legacy with Urdu through a language which used to be called Hindustani, but was essentially Urdu. It was ‘split’ from that tradition in the late 19th century as part of a movement spearheaded by Hindu nationalist groups. Since this history is an integral part of the language politics of the subcontinent that the writer visited, she should at least have bothered to google it or look it up on Wikipedia. The Chronicle continues to disappoint in its choice of bloggers.
yabba - May 7, 2012 at 2:54 pm
re: lingua franche
I’ve discovered that I can tease my wife, who works officially in linguistic academia (I just write and translate and enjoy a spot of linguistics on the side) by saying corpuses instead of corpora.
Anyone else say corpuses?
Lucy Ferriss - May 7, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Sorry you find the comment uninformed, toorie. My investigation was not into language per se in Pakistan. The colloquial expression I used to describe Urdu is, verbatim, the description given me by Punjabis in Lahore.
mbelvadi - May 14, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Grace under fire, umm, flame. Thank you Lucy for modelling good comment etiquette.
emriddle - May 15, 2012 at 12:07 am
Calling any language a “mishmash” is not considered respectful or accurate by linguists. (All human languages are very structured systems with their own rules.) In a blog with “language” and “politics” in the title, it is especially relevant to consider the social and political ramifications of ”mishmash” as a description. The fact that one or more Punjabis in Lahore used this description is not surprising. People in general have many prejudices about language(s), as they do about many other aspects of humanity. Being able to speak a language does not automatically confer upon a speaker objectivity about the language or its use.
duppy_conqueror - May 17, 2012 at 3:15 am
I think you are very brave to be visiting the border areas near Afghanistan at this point in history, and I’m sure your hosts could sense your respect and appreciation of honor. I always regretted not going when I had a chance years ago. I know it’s not the main idea here anyway, but there are in fact languages which are “mish-mashes”. Modern English comes right to mind.