Greetings BULA! 

Coming up soon, Professor Höskuldur Thráinsson from the University of 

Iceland will be giving two talks, both of which are sure to be interesting. The first is Friday (Apr 20, 3pm) 

on writing systems, and the second is Monday (Apr 23, 7:30pm) on language change. Abstracts of these 

talks are below.  The talk on Friday is sponsored by the Geddes Lecture Series, and the talk on Monday is 

sponsored by the BULA. Don't forget to RSVP on Facebook and check out our website bula.bu.edu.

See you there!

James Geddes, Jr. Lecture Series

Höskuldur Thráinsson

"When Is Orthography Optimal?"

Speakers/Writers often complain about the orthography of their language and claim that it is too 

complicated and does not make any sense (cf.  George Bernhard Shaw's claim that one could argue for the 

spelling "ghoti" for the English word 'fish'). But if you were to design an orthography for a language, what 

would be your main considerations? In the 12th century an anonymous linguist designed an orthography 

for Icelandic and wrote a paper about it (the so-called "First Grammatical Treatise") explaining his 

decisions using amazingly modern methods. In the middle of the 19th century a group of philologists and 

historians designed an orthography for Faroese, partly using very different arguments for their decisions. 

This paper compares these two sets of arguments and discusses what we can learn from them about the 

nature of orthography in general.

The BU undergraduate Linguistics Association* presents:

Höskuldur Thráinsson

"How Do Languages Change?"

Do speakers gradually change their language over the course of their life or do languages mainly change 

as a result of incomplete acquisition by children? This talk reports on a research project where speakers of

Icelandic have been interviewed/tested over a long period of time (some of them were first interviewed 

over 65 years ago) in order to determine how and to what extent they have changed selected aspects of 

their language, both phonological and syntactic. The results suggest that there may be structural limits to 

the ways in which adult speakers change their language and that certain aspects of language may be more 

susceptible to gradual change in real time than others.

*Partially funded by the undergraduate student fee.