Letters to Language
Rent from DeepDyve- Letters to Language
[Correction]
Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.
Length of review process
August 19, 2004
To the Editor:
I recently had the surprising and annoying experience of having to wait for twelve and a half months before I received a first decision after submitting a paper to a high-prestige linguistics journal. If I had known that the reviewing process can take that long for that journal, I would probably have submitted my paper elsewhere. So knowing the average reviewing time of a journal is important information. In Language, it is sometimes mentioned in the Editor’s Department (and was recently said to be about four months). It would be good if other journals were similarly explicit about their reviewing speed. It would be even better, however, if readers didn’t have to believe the Editor’s average figures, but if they could see for themselves, that is, if every published article contained the first-decision date, in addition to the received and accepted dates. This would require very little additional work and almost no additional space, and if a leading journal like Language adopted this policy, it could become widespread practice. So please consider making this slight change to Language’s policies. Reviewing speed is an essential ingredient of journal quality. To assess journal quality in an objective way, readers need the full details.
Sincerely,
Martin Haspelmath
[haspelmath@eva.mpg.de]
Editor’s reply
The length of the review process and length of time to ultimate publication (which depends in part on the review process and in part on an author’s ability to make revisions in a timely manner) are both of great concern to me. This suggestion seems an eminently reasonable one, and the added scrutiny that it affords into the process, as well as the very useful function of alerting readers to the timeliness of the published material, is certainly welcome. Readers should note that we have adopted this practice, beginning with this issue.
A nomenclatural desideratum
October 20, 2004
To the Editor:
In my book notice of Darya Kavitskaya’s Compensatory lengthening (Language 80.3.626, 2004), I pointed out that Farsi and Persian are two names for the same language. In the course of my remarks, I also mentioned two language families: Gur and Voltaic. Not known to me then (and also unknown to Kavitskaya) was the fact that these two are also names for the same language family. Someone should publish a definitive list of all the languages/dialects/language phyla/families with alternate names, since no one linguist could possibly keep abreast of this. SIL International’s Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com) is the best source known to me that deals with this problem in nomenclature, but in looking up Afroasiatic, for example, we find only the older hyphenated designation Afro-Asiatic. The alternate names for this language family are not listed: Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, Lisramic, Erythraic or Erythrean, Afrasian, and Lamekhite (in this connection, see Alan S. Kaye and Peter T. Daniels, ‘Comparative Afroasiatic and general genetic linguistics’, Word 43.3.429–58, 1992, especially pp. 430–32). Although [End Page 1] Ethnologue is certainly a fine beginning, what I am suggesting the field needs is a definitive, cross-referenced dictionary of languages/dialects and language families/phyla for all of the alternate names and the historical circumstances of their usages.
Alan S. Kaye
[akaye@exchange.fullerton.edu]
Editor’s reply
Sounds like an interesting idea to me; any volunteers?
Reply to Eska and Ringe
October 27, 2004
To the Editor:
The September 2004 issue of Language included an extended commentary by Joseph Eska and Don Ringe (‘Recent work in computational linguistic phylogeny’, Language 80.569–82) on a recent article by Peter Forster and Alfred Toth (‘Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient...
