Our chancellor sent us this list of organizations providing direct relief to Haiti (via the Association of International Education Administrators). Or if you are interested in helping immediately, then you can text "HAITI" to "90999" and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts. Or text "YELE" to "501501" and a donation of $5 will be given automatically to Yele Haiti to help with relief efforts. The transactions will be charged to your cell phone bill (via Chancellor Tom George).
Action Against Hunger
American Red Cross
Beyond Borders
CARE
Direct Relief International
Doctors Without Borders
HED
International Medical Corps
International Relief Teams
Meds and Food for Kids
Mercy Corps
Operation USA
Oxfam America
Partners in Health
Save the Children
Stop Hunger Now
UNICEF
World Concern
Yele Haiti
Friday, January 15, 2010
List of Organizations Providing Direct Relief to Haiti
Monday, January 04, 2010
Friday, January 01, 2010
New Year's Day Scam
Mel, Angie and I got a text from someone we don't know. We decided to play along, by which we mean that we completely ignored standard grammar and spelling conventions and adapted to the guy's favorite topics. We attempted a teenage equivalent of a Turing test. The guy is under the impression that he is texting a male friend. Here is how the dialogue went:
Nathan (the name comes up later): I am completly gay guys just to let you know
Us: Congratulations! Who are you?
Nathan: Lol this is nathan ryan patient sent that
Us: How is your patient? Happy new year (explanation: we parsed this wrong. We thought his name was Nathan Ryan and that his patient sent it)
Nathan: What
Us: Sorry I forgot about that. Long day of drinking. How is he doing anyways. LOL
Nathan: Good i guess lol
Us: What did you do for new year's lol
Nathan: Hung out wit him got high
Us: Do you have pictures?
Nathan: No why
Us: Sorry I thought it was a party or something. So he stole yr phone?
Nathan: Ya lol and sent that to almost everyone on it
Us: OMG, that's so funny. LOL. New year's resolution?
Nathan: No dont have one hbu
Us: Get high more often
Nathan: Cool thats a good one
Us: What are you guys doing tonite?
Nathan: Nuthen sitting hear
Us: Is Ryan there?
Nathan: No if went good
Nathan: I ment home
Us: Going over there later?
Nathan: No
Us: Was there anyone else there yest. New year's hook-up? LOL
Nathan: No it was gay we couldn't find anywhere to go
Us: I hooked up w the hottest shit ever omfg (explanation: we are trying to find out what sex we are. 'Shit' is gender-neutral. We are hoping he would respond with 'who was she?' or 'who was he?')
Nathan: Cool who was it
Us: I don't even know there name wuz
Nathan: Lol thats awesome
Us: How is John doing? (Explanation: we were trying to get more information out of him)
Nathan: Jhon who
Us: I fucking forget his last name, but u remember that one time, that was so funny
Nathan: No what time lol
Us: Can't believe you don't remember, you were so fucked up, omg that fucker is so funny
Nathan: Lol that might be why I cant remember lol what happend
Us: Omg you puked so hard, it was hillarious is Ryan still hanging w that hot blond chick? (Explanation: we saw a facebook picture of some Ryan Patient but it wasn't even his)
Nathan: Idk
Us: Man she was hot. What's up tomorrow?
Nathan: Practice
Us: Cool, where? (Explanation: we are trying to figure out which kind of practice)
Nathan: School
Us: Shit oh right, what's up after that?
Nathan: Idk hbu
Us: Heard about a party, not sure yet, wanna go?
Nathan: Ya sure
Us: Wanna smoke a fat blunt
Nathan: Ya
Us: Do you still c what her face
Nathan: What
Us: John told me y hooked w sm hottie, but prob he just being gay
Nathan: Ya lol if is
Us: Can't believe y didn't get any last night, WTF
Nathan: Lol
Us: What happened at last practice?
Nathan: Nuthen we went longer than the jv but all we did was go live
Us: See y 2morrow prob. Gotta go
Nathan: K
Saturday, December 12, 2009
PhilPapers Survey: Classical or Non-Classical Logic?
First, as many commentators on the web have pointed out, philosophy undergraduate students often mistakenly believe that if you adhere to classical logic, you are required to treat corresponding English expressions accordingly, for example, they believe that you are required to treat the indicative conditional as a material conditional. Sometimes their logic teachers are responsible for inducing this belief in them. In any event, this belief often motivates undergraduate students (and some graduate students) to reject classical logic, or at least it has motivated many of my undergraduate students. What were the numbers, then, for undergraduate students? Hugely different from the target group: 37.3% accept or lean towards classical logic, whereas 26.7% accept or lean towards non-classical. But there is still a majority for classical logic.
Second, and more importantly, I would have thought that the target faculty had interpreted the question: "Logic: classical or non-classical?" as meaning "What do you believe is the correct logic for reasoning?". If you have a consistent premise-set, you will do well if you reason according to classical logic. But if you have an inconsistent belief-set, you will do terribly if you reason according to classical logic. Hence, classical logic cannot be the correct logic for reasoning in general. But perhaps the question was predominantly read as meaning: "What do you believe is the correct logic for reasoning, given a consistent premise set?". And, I am sure there are other more sophisticated ways of reading the question that can explain the attraction of classical logic.
Third, it's surprising that the numbers for the "other" category were so high. When I have talked to people in the target faculty about logic, a fair number have been sympathetic to logical pluralism. A common view is that we cannot narrow down the number of correct logics to one. But the question wasn't about whether or not we can narrow down the number of correct logics to one. The question was about whether classical or non-classical logic is correct in some respect, which was not specified. Perhaps if you are a logical pluralist, you will answer "neither". But even those who are logical pluralists could have read the question as "What do you believe is the correct logic for reasoning given some arbitrarily chosen premise set", in which case "non-classical logic" would have been an appropriate answer.
These are some of the reasons I was surprised by the results for the logic question. I want to raise a different, but not unrelated, point. At first I was very surprised that so many philosophers don't have determinate views about core issues. I think this mostly explains my errors in the metasurvey. But, on second thought, this is probably not what is going on. Rather, what is going on is that most questions have readings that will make a fair number of philosophers with determinate views say "other". The issue came up on the message board on PhilPapers discussing the surveys. David Bourget was surprised by the results for mental content. David Chalmers responded that one could hold that internalism about mental content is correct and yet think that some mental content is wide. But I bet some philosophers who hold the same views as Chalmers answered "other" to the mental content question, for this exact reason. I did not do that myself, but I considered doing it. In fact, for all of the questions, this sort of ambiguity may have explained the high numbers for the "other" category. For example, for the logic question, people might have thought that if they picked "classical", they would rule out the possibility that it sometimes might be preferable to reason in accordance with non-classical logic.
One final point: I have not yet mentioned the growing interest in the logical paradoxes as a factor. The logical paradoxes are sometimes used to motivate non-classical logic. However, it is not obvious to me that a significant number of philosophers take the paradoxes to motivate non-classical logic. Whether the paradoxes do do this is a very interesting and difficult question. It cannot be answered without saying what we mean by "correct logic". Perhaps languages come with a consequence relation. If this is so, then the Liar paradox may well be used to motivate the view that the consequence relation in English is non-classical. But there are lots of other options too. A recent attractive view is that the semantics for English, despite being inconsistent, is classically closed (variations on this view are held by, e.g. Kevin Scharp, Doug Patterson, Kirk Ludwig and Matti Eklund). Personally, I am more attracted to non-classical inconsistency views. I do not think non-classical inconsistency views entail dialetheism. I think one can take English to be inconsistent, closed under a paraconsistent consequence relation, and yet hold that all contradictions are logical falsehoods (but not logical truths). In terms of the "other" category on the survey, I suspect that if the growing interest in the paradoxes had any influence on the results at all, then it would have been in terms of placing more people in the "other" category.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
PhilPapers Surveys: Preliminary Results
The preliminary results of the PhilPapers Survey and Metasurvey have now been made public. I will have more to say about these results shortly.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Deadline Extended for Philosophical Survey
The deadline for the Philosophical Survey and the Philosophical Metasurvey has been extended to Tuesday Dec 3, 2009. You can read about the surveys here.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Philosophical Survey
David Chalmers and David Bourget are conducting a philosophical survey on people's views on philosophical issues. You can read about the survey here. Note that the closing time for the survey is November 23 at 7 AM New York time. So today is your last chance to complete it.
Journal Survey
The Northern Institute of Philosophy plans to run a journal dedicated to the publication of short philosophical papers within the core areas of the analytic tradition. They are currently conducting a short survey to determine whether there is general interest in a journal of this kind. The survey can be found here.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Pre-Central Workshop
The Philosophy Department at Northwestern will hold a one-day Epistemology conference, on the theme of the Epistemology of Testimony, on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 (just before the Central APA). The conference is free and open to the public.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Survey on Publishing
Sally Haslanger has created a survey on publishing. She will be on an APA panel in NY to discuss publishing issues, and would like to have some data to discuss. It should take about 10 minutes. It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out. You can find the survey here.
Monday, November 02, 2009
The Reasoner 3(11)
The latest issue of The Reasoner is now freely available for download in pdf format here.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The 2010 Synthese Conference: CFP
Two news items from Vincent Hendricks:
(1)
On April 15th and 16th of 2010, the Synthese Conference will take place at Columbia University. The 2010 edition of the Synthese Conference will focus on the theme of epistemology and economics. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of interaction between epistemology and economics: traditional topics in epistemology, such as the analysis of knowledge, have found a significant role in the study of interactive decision making, while traditional topics in economics, such as the analysis of rationality, now figure prominently into certain areas of epistemology. We anticipate that the conference program will include slots for five invited papers and at least five contributed papers. Every paper that is presented at the conference will be considered for the special issue of Synthese that will be based on the conference theme of epistemology and economics. The list of invited speakers is still being finalized. In the meantime, we encourage submissions for the contributed slots. Submissions should be relevant to the conference theme of epistemology and economics, broadly construed, and should satisfy the usual guidelines for submissions to Synthese. Submissions for the contributed slots must be received no later than February 1, 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be made by February 20, 2010. All submissions should be sent to synthese.conference.2010@gmail.com .
The Synthese Editors-in-Chief: Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks and John Symons
The Local Organizing Committee: John Collins, Haim Gaifman, Jeff Helzner and Philip Kitcher
(2)
Vincent, who is Professor of Formal Philosophy at University of Copenhagen, has taken up a permanent position as Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Northern Institute of Philosophy
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
22nd European Summer School
The website for the
22ND EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL OF LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION
ESSLLI 2010 / UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN / DENMARK / AUGUST 9-20, 2010.
is now available here.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Philosophiles on Wild Rapid in the Colorado River
This is too good not to post:
Kent Bach and his wife Claire on the wildest rapid in the Colorado River. Their J-boat comes into view at the 3:06 mark.
Kent and Claire are sitting high and right. At the 3:44 mark, you can see Claire, on the right side of the raft, getting jerked backwards when she loses her grip during their dive into a big crater. No more telling me that philosophers of language are unadventurous!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Entry on Descriptions
I have uploaded my entry on Descriptions for Oxford annotated biblios to my website. If you have any comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to email them to me.
Monday, May 25, 2009
FoodTongue: Interview with Alan Huang
Alan Huang is a three- (soon to be four-) time alum of the Canada/USA Mathcamp, where the language FoodTongue started about five or six years ago. Alan learned FoodTongue just prior to his first Mathcamp, and he helped create the most recent dictionary, which is more or less all written in FoodTongue.
Brit: Hi Alan! In a sentence or two, what is FoodTongue?
Alan: Depending on the speaker, it's either a bold experiment in language design or a creative specimen of Mathcamp randomness (or an unnaturally long-lived bad idea, for certain non-speakers).
Brit: Can you tell us a bit more about the entries in the lexicon of FoodTongue? Is there a purely conventional connection between the symbols of the language and the entities referred to? Or is there a system or pattern which you follow when new words are introduced? Or is there an even closer connection between the symbols of the language and the entities referred to than that?
Alan: There's no general rule by which words are related to their meanings. Speakers are free to create any new words they need to express ideas, and the methods by which foods have been chosen include sound in English or other languages (lobster), properties of the food (popsicle), specific references (pie), related words (ketchup/mustard), themes (names of games), and randomness (Ice Cream).
Many words are thus easier to remember than if meanings were attached to random food names. Occasionally conflicts arise, but as FoodTongue evolves, ambiguous, hard-to-remember, and uncommon words tend to be replaced. The system also works well without a central authority -- the dictionary may be the closest FoodTongue has to one, but it's designed as a wiki so that it can respond to changes in the language, as opposed to instigating them.
Brit: What is the syntax like? Is the syntax that of English? Or does it have its own syntax? The phonology obviously must be that of English.
Alan: First of all, there's no inflection in FoodTongue, since there aren't many endings to add on to English nouns. (The obvious choice is to pluralize, but that has not been used yet. There has been discussion on grouping related foods; for example, if grape is a verb, raisin could be the future tense. But that was deemed infeasible.) So FoodTongue usually follows normal English word order (subject - verb - object, preposition - noun, etc.), and everything else (such as tense, number, and person) is done with separate words. However, grammar is still quite free-form as long as it's understandable, and speakers may have different styles based on preference or other languages they know. For example, a sentence that literally means "want have" would be understood as "I want to have it". A special case is music and poetry (of which there do exist FoodTongue examples). Since FoodTongue words tend to have more syllables compared to English translations, words are often omitted or moved to fit the meter.
Brit: Can you ascribe propositional attitudes to others in FoodTongue? You mentioned "want"-reports above. What about other attitude ascriptions? For example, can you say "I know that p", "I believe that p", "I hope that p", "I love that p", etc? More generally: is there a way of expressing tense and modality in the language? Can you talk about what once were the case but is no longer? Can you talk about what will be the case? Can you talk about what is merely physically, metaphysically or logically possible? Can you talk about what is logically impossible? If so, how do you do that?
Alan: All such constructions are usually just implemented with subordinate clauses, e.g. "I want that you be here". There are words for verbs like "think", "know", "love" and helpers like "should", "can", "must", which can be used with such clauses (or independently). Essentially everything else that's possible (and I don't know if some modals are in concise ways) is done explicitly, with words like "maybe" and "in the past" / "now" / "in the future". For example, "it PAST be, but NOW not" means "it was once the case, but no longer", and "not can be that..." means "it is impossible that".
Brit: Do you have ways of expressing indicative conditionals (e.g., "if John is home, then I will pay him a visit"), subjunctive conditionals (e.g. "if I had been a Mathcamper, I would have known FoodTongue"), conditional probabilities (e.g. "the probability that it will rain given how clowdy it is is 0.8"), etc?
Alan: There is no distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals; the difference is determined through knowledge and context. Probabilities are expressed by modifying "maybe", e.g. "if he NOW not be here, he big-maybe small-FUTURE be" would be understood as "if he is not here now, he will probably be here soon", but whether he is here now (and whether the speaker knows) is unstated.
Brit: Could you also say something about indexicals ("I", "now", "here"), demonstratives ("this", "that"), quantification ("there is an ...", "for all x") and anaphora (e.g., "A man entered the door. He took off his hat") Do you have a word referring directly to the speaker or the time of speech? Do you have words that refer only when accompanied by a demonstration (e.g. by an index finger or a gaze). Can you quantify over things as in "there are at least 30 people who are fluent speakers of the language"? Are there anaphors that refer to an entity already referred to, as in "The TV is in the living room. But it is broken".
Alan: There are words for "I" / "you" / "he/she" (plurals are formed by prepending "all"), "in the past" / "now" / "in the future", and "here"/ "there". Demonstratives are handled by "here" / "there" or by the word for "one", which serves generically either to specify or to refer to nonhuman objects ("one book be good; one be big and" means "this book is good; it is big also"). Humans are referred to by the pronoun "he/she". All of these words can also be specified nonverbally (e.g. a gesture in person, or a picture in a blog entry).
There is one relative pronoun ("that") and one interrogative (which can take a noun, as in "what person"). Quantifiers are expressed with "be x that y" and "all x y". When referring to mentioned entities, "one" and "he/she" may be omitted if understood. For example, "should talk he/she; be here" could mean "you should talk to her; she is here".
The word for "and" has several other meanings, including "add", "also", "so", "then", and "more". Comparisons and such use "and" (in the sense of "more") and/or an adjective or adverb followed by the relative pronoun (acting as "than"). For example, "and that 30" means "at least 30"; "and big that Dan" or "big that Dan" means "bigger than Dan". It sounds confusing as I write it, but in practice it's quite natural.
One caveat -- numbers. Usually, all numbers greater than four are lumped into "many". Thus, "at least 30 people speak FoodTongue" would simply be translated "many person talk food-tongue". When relatively small numbers must be named, as in specifying Mathcamp 06 / 07 / 08, the numbers will be added together ("four and two", etc.). There is a base-five system that uses zero through four, but it's not really in common use.
Brit: How is the language used? Is it used only in writing on certain internet sites? Or is it also spoken when you meet other speakers of the language?
Alan: FoodTongue is probably most often spoken on the Internet. Speakers often make blog entries or have IM conversations containing (or entirely in) FoodTongue. However, it may also be heard whenever speakers meet in person -- likely math and science competitions, university events, and Mathcamp itself, where it's seldom difficult to find someone speaking or teaching FoodTongue.
Brit: What was the reason for inventing the language? Was it started as a kind of experiment? There is something very secretive about the language. What is that all about?
Alan: The language started at Mathcamp 2004. I was not there, so my source is the first FoodTongue dictionary, distributed in that year. One evening, at a gathering of campers, the idea came up of trying to communicate entirely with food words. Soon the campers formed a basic vocabulary, and began teaching others. At that first meeting it was decided, as noted in the dictionary, that FoodTongue should not when possible be explained in other languages, which has remained a central principle. So it's not that the language is being kept secret, but that questions asked about it often cannot be answered.
Brit: Why have a principle to the effect that FoodTongue should not when possible be explained in other languages? Was it because you wanted the language to develop naturally?
Alan: As I said, I was not present at FoodTongue's creation, but I suspect that because it grew out of a suggestion to communicate entirely with food words, there was a desire to maintain that ideal by not bringing in other modes of verbal communication. As Waffle [Eric Wofsey] said, "The goal of Food Tongue is not to be understood. The goal is to communicate within a restricted framework." Or perhaps there is a tradition at Mathcamp to confuse people by not explaining things (but also to willingly demonstrate for those who show interest). Whatever the case, those who have learned FoodTongue since its inception have also been willing to continue upholding the principle. I think that as it's often brought up as a matter of following the spirit of the language, there's an element similar to suspension of disbelief, where speakers agree to abide by the rules or risk breaking the experience. It should also be noted that there is no restriction on discussing FoodTongue in other languages, only on explaining individual words.
Brit: So how did you manage to acquire FoodTongue prior to your first Mathcamp? Did you have a mentor?
Alan: The best way to teach FoodTongue without violating its spirit is in person, because gestures and other nonverbal communication are allowed. I was taught it before Mathcamp 2006 by a friend who had gone in 2005, and he demonstrated many of the words for me (for example, pointing at his watch to show the word for time). I should note that the *new* dictionary is written in FoodTongue -- the first dictionary, which I mentioned before, has two-way translations between English and FoodTongue. Clearly, this violated its own principle, so it was decided (I believe) that the dictionary should only be used by fluent speakers, as a reference. (The stated goal of the dictionary was to reunite some dialects that had arisen, for which breaking the principle was useful.)
Brit: What do you use the language to talk about? All sorts of topics? Math? The language itself?
Alan: FoodTongue generally doesn't have the vocabulary needed to delve deep into any field (although agglutination and calquing may produce approximations), but anything it has words for (or that words can be created for) is fair game, from talking about school to playing a card game. If anything, FoodTongue is particularly suited to Mathcamp culture; some words (grapefruit, smarties) refer to concepts specific to Mathcamp, and a few of those have become the primary means of naming those concepts (meatloaf, starfruit), at least among my friends. In practice, conversations may switch into and out of FoodTongue regardless of the subject at hand (or for gratuitous Mathcamp references).
Brit: How many people would you say master the language? Or is it hard to say? Can anyone join the forums where the language is spoken?
Alan: This is a tough question, and I doubt anyone has an accurate count. I personally know at least 30-40 people who would answer to their FoodTongue names; of those, up to a dozen are in my IM contacts and regularly converse with me in FoodTongue. But these are mostly Mathcamp alumni from 2007-2008; I know next to nothing about those from 2004-2006, and I'm also not the best-connected in my corner of Mathcamp. In theory, there's nothing preventing anyone from learning FoodTongue. However, the three main barriers are knowledge, interest, and teaching.
First, FoodTongue has probably spread little beyond Mathcamp, so many people who may be interested have never heard of it. Second, although many speakers try to teach friends the language, they are unfortunately often uninterested. Finally, as I noted, FoodTongue is best taught in person, and very difficult otherwise unless pictures are used (assuming the principle is adhered to). Most teaching thus goes on at Mathcamp, where each summer a handful of campers learn FoodTongue from alumni. This seems sufficient to keep the language alive, and indeed it shows no signs of dying just yet, but it is still limited in its reach.
Brit: It is obviously fun to learn a new language and to be able to speak a different language. But do you think that FoodTongue might also serve any practical purposes?
Alan: I have not seen any uses of FoodTongue for which it is particularly suited. That said, I think generally FoodTongue has as much practical use as any other natural language. It has sufficient vocabulary to describe everyday life concisely, especially at Mathcamp. But FoodTongue is probably spoken more for its principles and for itself than for any external purpose. Speakers enjoy being part of the community and communicating within the restrictions -- which is good, because short of aliens visiting Earth who share none of our physical features but somehow eat the same foods, I can't think of any situation in which it would uniquely useful.
Brit: Do you know of any other languages which are like FoodTongue? How does it compare to international languages like Esperanto? How does it compare to secret codes used throughout history by e.g. intelligence agencies?
Alan: So first of all, FoodTongue is certainly not an international language. It's spoken by people who already know English and much of it, from the vocabulary to word order, comes from English. The words are easy to learn because they're English food names, and the meanings are easy to remember largely because they have associations in English. (Of course, it's possible to create foreign equivalents by translating all of the food names; for example, "Pomme langue baguette-langue" is a valid sentence in French FoodTongue.)
I think the property that mapping a subset of a language (food words) into a complete language in itself sets FoodTongue apart from many languages. It may be similar to some codes, but it's not suitable for secrecy as it is -- many words are easy to figure out, and even if disguised as a grocery list it's usually obvious there's a hidden meaning. FoodTongue is probably most similar to games played by children in which they redefine words (for example, Tolkien's Animalic).
Brit: I once compared FoodTongue to so-called Lagadonian languages in which objects, properties, reletions etc. are names of themselves. Obviously, FoodTongue is not a Lagadonian language. However, I wonder whether there is any interesting similarity between FoodTongue and Lagadonian languages? Any thoughts?
Alan: As I noted before, it's possible to translate all the food words into another language, while expressing the same ideas. There may have been some dispute over the issue, but my view is that FoodTongue is theoretically independent of the words used to express it. That is, the concept of me is expressed by the concept of apple, not the English word "apple" (or the French word "pomme"), even if the concept was apple was chosen to represent the first-person pronoun because of associations of the English word "apple". It is thus possible to create a salad that's a valid FoodTongue sentence, though it may be a rather weird salad. Although the foods are abstract -- the concept of me is represented by the concept of apple, not a specific apple -- this interpretation is similar to the original Lagado, in that representations of concepts are not tied to any specific spoken, written, or physical form.
Brit: How do you predict that FoodTongue will evolve in the future?
Alan: As I understand it, after FoodTongue was invented at Mathcamp 2004, almost nobody learned it in 2005, but it became much more popular in 2006. In the first dictionary there are many words that have fallen out of use (some of which have been redefined), and there are many words that I use for which it includes no equivalent. Unlike with natural languages, once campers leave the population (graduate from Mathcamp), they maintain contact with friends from camp. A possible scenario is that every few years the FoodTongue spoken at Mathcamp will have shifted, and the alumni from those years as they move on will still speak it as they did as campers. So while the language continues to evolve at camp, multiple age-separated groups of speakers will form, still mutually intelligible but with visible differences in vocabulary and perhaps philosophy. I don't know how likely this is, though.
Brit: Do you have any advice to people interested in learning the language?
Alan: The best advice to people interested in FoodTongue is to contact someone who knows it. The wiki is designed so that it's possible to learn from scratch entirely using that site, but it's much easier to have a speaker walk you through (preferably in person). One of the things I learned from making the wiki is that there are significant numbers of people even at Mathcamp who are interested in the language but have not had a chance to learn -- so talk to a speaker, or someone who can refer you to one.
Brit: Thank you, Alan! To the interested reader: You can contact me via email if you want me to pass on your contact info to a speaker. No anonymous requests will be considered.
