John M. Lawler

  Welcome.   I am a linguist, a general practitioner of linguistics, and I have a rather expansive definition of what that includes.

  A New page -- New as of April Fools' Eve, 2012, at any rate; this is a Beta version, subject to change in the immediate future, of which this is the first and only notice -- about doing something to ameliorate the "anxious cluelessness" about language that is the end product of modern Anglophone education.

  A fairly recent page created for the 2011 NorWesCon 34 Fantasy/Science Fiction convention. It's got my credentials, the handouts from my talks there, and some other links to the stuff I talked about. And a link to my NorWesCon talks from 2010.

  Another fairly recent page, consisting of teaching materials in historical linguistics and etymology, from my UM freshman class A World of Words, and my HyperCard stack (remember HyperCard?) of the same name. Graphics, lists, exercises, poetry, texts, etc. about Greek, Latin, English, and Proto-Indo-European.

  And, as long as I'm on the subject, here's a less recent page created for my colleague Haj Ross, to house his papers (on both syntax and poesy, plus Selected Short Subjects) in electronic form.

  As of June 1, 2009, I am retired from the faculty of the Linguistics Department and of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor, and have "gone to join the Emeritooni", as our Departmental elders call it. I was on the faculty at Michigan from Fall 1972 thru Spring 2009, for a total of 37 years of professoring. I'm still alive and healthy, however, living in Bellingham, WA, and I still teach the odd visiting course at Western Washington University there. This web site and my email address are permanent (or at least as permanent as I am), so feel free to use them to contact me, and drop in if you're in the area (here's a link to my business card, with local contact information).

  One of the things I did to prepare for retirement was to finally get around to scanning all of my publications that weren't already in electronic form and putting the lot on the Web. There are a couple more I still have to find copies of, but pretty much everything I've ever written is now available, free (with a money-back guarantee, subject to the usual disclaimers) right here. Enjoy (if possible).

  From now on I will be spending most of my time in Bellingham WA, getting a rain tan, writing sporadically, travelling when we can (photos of our recent trip to Hawai'i here) and publishing or reading papers on this and that, here or there, now and then, masha'allah. While I'm on the subject, here are a couple of bitmaps of pictures that I've taken of Bellingham and the Northwest, suitable for screen wallpaper:

  I've moved URLs several times, so if you've gotten here unexpectedly by trying to find the LSA Ebonics Resolution, the Language and Gender Syllabi, the Chomskybot, my grammar pages, monosyllable database, Gödel, Escher, Bach, A World of Words, Grimm's Law, Haj Ross's papers, or anything else that's not my home page, then look below and, insha'allah, you'll probably find what you're looking for. Some of these pages are linked behind the scenes, in various ways and to varying degrees. Some navigation aids are provided, but what you make of it is up to you, as usual (in case you're confused -- or even if you're not -- here's a list of my most-requested pages over the last ten years).

Things I told you you could find on my Website:

    Book     Software     SIL Linguistics fonts     English Grammar and Usage     Phonosemantics     Coursepacks from Intro Ling
    Questions I get asked         Things I've written recently       Linguistic humor and satire     Valhallacon linguistic resources
    Website Stats     Classes I teach     Curriculum Vitae     Publications     Retirement     Haj Ross's Papers
  • Office Phones:

  • Stats:
        As of July 1999, I've completed a whole year at the present address, and can once again compile statistics on site usage. There were about 100,000 hits (file requests) during the last Fiscal Year (7/1/98-6/30/99) total on all the files on my site. This has grown and stabilized to around 10,000 hits per month. Here's a list of the public files on my site with their individual counts, and an Excel chart of the year's information delivery stats.

        I was flabbergasted to find out that, since this site is largely a text site (it sports one JPEG and one GIF, but that's it), the sum total of all these hits is about one and a half GIGAbytes of words, many of them of my manufacture, off the shelf, down the tube, out the door, sopping up bandwidth while hanging ten over the surf, depending on your metaphor choice. As Brooks says Ovid says, "Adde parvum parvo, magnus acervus erit" ('Add little to little and there will be a big heap'). This could serve as well as anything to show that Ovid anticipated the World Wide Web.

        Interestingly, the most frequently requested file last year was something I only helped write (along with several hundred other linguists in the room), the Linguistic Society of America's Unanimous Resolution on the Ebonics flap, with an appended Bibliography of authoritative resources.

    Addendum, 2003
        Here are the stats for Website www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ as of January 1, 2003: 
                       Hits (Individual File Requests)
   -----------------------------------------------------------------
   Total 7/99-12/02  1,050,278    Latest year 1-12/02        445,923
   Mean monthly         21,600    Mean monthly latest year    37,160
   Latest month 12/02   35,504

                        Gigabytes Transferred
   -----------------------------------------------------------------
   Total 7/99-12/02     40.8075   Latest year  1-12/02      14.06483
   Mean monthly          0.7557   Mean monthly latest year   1.17200     
   Latest month 12/02    1.211
    And, here's a report of my most-requested pages in the ten years between 1998 and 2008.
    Enjoy.     The rate is accelerating, and we're now receiving around a half-million hits a year.
        Here's an Excel graph of the history, for those interested.
    Last change 3-31-12   John Lawler