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I’m hoping to get feedback about your experiences or advice regarding using Kager’s OT textbook, along with McCarthy’s Doing OT. Some background about the course I’m planning for: it’s a grad course that follows up a data-analysis and argumentation course in which we used Understanding Phonology (2nd ed., Gussenhoven and Jacobs), and didn’t really get into OT, which we’ll be doing this semester. I’ve used the Kager text before, and am planning to go through a chapter a week, then move on to articles that apply OT to various subfields of particular interest to our students (variation, change, acquisition, contact), and students will do problem sets at first, along with article reviews and then a final research project. I’ve never used Doing OT, and so wonder about your all’s experience with it, if you’ve ever used it in conjunction with the Kager text (interleaved, one after the other, ?). Any other input, advice, etc. would be much appreciated!

I just discovered this amazing online script for LaTeX users that converts your hand-drawn symbol into the appropriate LaTeX command (it also tells you which package you need to load to have access to the command, which for many people, may be the more useful function). The character recognition is very accurate in most cases, especially for math symbols, but of course, the more training it receives, the better the results will be.

It’s clear that the IPA symbols haven’t been trained very much yet. I’ve already noticed improvement just from my own limited training on ɒ, which wasn’t on the short list at all the first time I tried it, and now frequently appears as the number one choice after a few trainings. So pick your favorite IPA symbols and get to work!

Ultrafest V will be held March 19-21, 2010, at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. Deadline for abstracts is September 10, 2009. (Hard to believe there’s already been IV others, isn’t it?)

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The good folks at CUNY Phonology Forum continue their climb up the prosodic hierarchy with their latest effort, the Conference on the Word in Phonology, to be held January 14-16, 2010, at the CUNY Graduate Center. The deadline for abstracts is October 18, 2009.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The seventh Old World Conference on Phonology will be held in Nice, France, in late January 2010, with a thematic pre-conference workshop on Templates and phonological theory. The deadline for abstracts is September 15, 2009.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Special issue on Phonological models and experimental data, co-edited by Coetzee, Kager, and Pater. See the TOC here.

In case you hadn’t heard, NELS 40 will take place at MIT, November 12-15, 2009. They kinda took this over at the last minute so things are progressing a little more slowly than usual, but they’ve just announced one of their two planned workshops: Phonological Similarity: Perceptual and Articulatory Bases and Links to Grammatical Mechanisms. Abstract deadline: August 21, 2009.

Greetings, all two readers of phonoloblog. It’s been a long, long while, and for that I apologize. I’ve been pretty busy with various things, like this, for instance. And while I was busy, I was caught with my pants down: my claim to the phonoloblog.org domain name expired, and before I could even become aware of it, this douchebag snatched it. If you count yourself among my friends, you will bombard this person with obscene messages until s/he relents. Or, you will convince me that I can live with phonoloblog.com, phonoloblog.net, or even just good ol’ camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog — which is, after all, free as in beer.

Apologies (perhaps too late) to those of you who may have had your bookmarks and subscriptions set to phonoloblog.org. Please use camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog from now on, no matter what, and you should be fine.