Can't somebody make George Lakoff go away? He is a rude, lazy, fame-seeking pseudoscientist whose books try to recycle a few lame ideas into some sort of authority on political thought. His linguistic work has fallen off (though that's no great loss) and all he does now is mold the conjecture that he spouts in his linguistic work into pop-psychology. Please stop buying his books. All it does is feed his ego and help him to justify his laziness as a scholar.

No doubt that Berkeley's odd economy and business policies contributed to this. But I have to say that the Telegraph Ave. Cody's staff was so rude to me on multiple occasions a couple of years ago that I intentionally started shopping elsewhere and am not really sad to see it go. Keeping the hipsters behind the registers from casually insulting the customers might not have broadened their customer base as much as internet sales would have, but it would have given a greater percentage of the very diverse, literate population of Berkeley a reason to prefer the local bookstore experience to internet shopping. Amazon.com has never insulted my appearance within my earshot or laughed at my queries, and the experience I've missed out on by shopping online from a nearby cafe instead of at Cody's is one I'm happy to forego. And I imagine I'm not the only member of the book-buying public for whom Cody's was an uncomfortable place. Long live friendly local bookstores, but the only tragedy involved with Cody's closing is that yet another storefront in downtown Berkeley will be bleakly vacant.

These are maybe too cute for feline consumption, but I think my cat would go crazy for the petrie dish 3-pack of mini-neurons.

I know that August Dvorak, the namesake of this keyboard layout, was American by at least a generation or two. But it seems ironic to me that there is no Czech version of the Dvorak keyboard (Dvorak, with a hacek on the "r" and a long "a", being a Czech name). As someone who switches frequently between keyboard layouts for different languages (including Czech), I think that any efficiency gained by switching to Dvorak would be quickly negated by having to use QWERTY keyboards for other languages or having to use multi-key keyboard shortcuts to insert non-English characters.

Back to the gadgets.

I have an Olympus WS100 in addition to my Marantz. It is a cheaper handheld than the D2, and I am sure that its internal mic is not as good as the Olympus D2. I have used my Olympus in situations where I want a less conspicuous recorder (e.g. in conversational settings where a big mic in the middle of the room would change the comfort level of speakers). I usually work with a single speaker at a time and I have found that after some initial laughter and awkwardness, most people forget they are wearing a head-mounted mic. I use the (discontinued) AKG C420, which has proven to be surprisingly durable. It is less conspicuous than a hand held mic and has the benefit of maintaining a fixed position near the speaker's mouth and out of their airstream. Of course for languages with more robust speaker populations than the one I work on, it might make more sense to find an inconspicuous way to record multiple people at once.

The real reason I rarely use the handheld Olympus is that it records in .WMA format. Even if this format isn't too lossy for you, it has major compatibility issues, and it makes it very difficult to work with these files using sound analysis and editing programs. The other issue I have with the Olympus is that its recording time is limited. I can put a 12G card in my Marantz and be o.k. if I need to record a lot of sessions and am unable to set my computer up to dump data every couple of hours. I bring both into the field, but I always end up using the Marantz.

I am not a phonetician, so I don't do a lot of acoustic analysis. But I operate with the philosophy that if I archive the best possible recordings, then other linguists who may want to do phonetic analysis will be able to use what I have done and that the recordings I make will be maximally useful (in terms of ease of use and quality) to the communities I work in.

I should also add that all of the Marantz PMD660 recorders I have worked with (both Oade Bros. mod and unmodified versions) were purchased in the last 6-8 months. I am probably less sensitive to preamp hiss than journalists are, but perhaps Marantz has recently improved the 660.

Well put, Verafides.

I, too, am a linguist who does fieldwork on an endangered language - an indigenous language of California with fewer native speakers left than the fingers on one hand. I was happy to see that an article on language documentation made it onto BoingBoing. I too use a Marantz PMD 660, with a head-mounted condenser microphone. I know that many linguists use Marantz recorders with the Oade Brothers mod, and I have used both modded and unmodified PMD660s. There is a little improvement in the preamp hiss with the Oade Brothers mod, but I have found that using a condenser mic with either a modded or unmodded PMD660 produces superior recordings (in terms of noise) to a dynamic mic with either version of the recorder. When I bought my own recorder I skipped the mod and spent my money on a really nice condenser mic, and I don't regret it. In any case, the little, more affordable Marantz recorder is incredibly far superior to the minidisc recorders and magnetic tapes that were common in the field just a few years ago, so as a poor but dedicated field linguist I am counting my blessings.

I'd like to respond to Heteromeles, as well. It is true that each linguist goes to the field with personal interests, pet projects, and a sense of what is the basic information that should be documented first so that something useful survives of an endangered language. Many of our ideas of what information should be acquired first are shaped by what previous generations of linguists have done. For example, many linguists collect lists of words designed by M. Swadesh for lexicostatistics, even though lexicostatistics is mostly considered obsolete. Yet having lists of semantically similar words in many languages is still quite useful, so the practice continues. It is always difficult to decide what sort of information to gather first - especially in a language that is losing ground quickly. A lot of linguists are happy to document anything that is volunteered by their consultants, including extensive lists of flora and fauna terms. I have even known linguists who have consulted with specialists to scientifically identify the species named by speakers, and linguists who couldn't take botanists into the field but have brought back some specimens, labeled with their native names. We are aware of the gaps in our knowledge, but we are only human. I am sure that the sensitivity of linguists to what sort of information is culturally and scientifically valuable varies from researcher to researcher, but none of us is working to exclude information from the records so I think it is a bit unreasonable to blame linguists for the loss of information that happens as languages become obsolete.

Heteromeles must also consider that native names for different species, and even the ability to distinguish between some of those species, are part of the great mass of cultural knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation in many cultures. When the breakdown in the generational inheritance of this information starts causing the language to be lost, it also frequently causes cultural knowledge like names for different grasses to be lost. A child who learns English in school and has little interest in speaking the ancestral language is likely also to shop at the grocery store instead of participating in the traditional subsistence methods for which botanical terms were previously very important. In many cases, the information which would be so dear to Heteromeles is lost before linguists even arrive on the scene.

As far as preserving the technical botany lexicon -- Heteromeles, if you feel so passionately that this is a problem akin to language endangerment, then the solution is to teach this terminology to your son, make recordings, and write down everything that you can so that some interested person down the road might be saved some effort in recovering it. If that wouldn't help to solve your problem, then you are probably not the last speaker of a dying language -- you are just in the same boat as every researcher whose field is underfunded.