Sinn und Bedeutung 30 was held at the University of Frankfurt in September 2025. Professor Coppock presented on Friday. Title: Unifying arithmetic and mereological division. Abstract here. A longer version of the talk was presented at the University of Chicago in October. Slides here.
So there I was, collecting data on reduplicated numerals in Newar, with Dipak Tuladhar’s very generous help in introducing me to Newar speakers, when I got a text from a friend of mine who has colleagues in Nepal, warning me that WhatsApp would soon stop working at midnight that night. I went to the hotel […]
To learn about reduplicated numerals, I decided to use a setup with a Google Slides document with pre-loaded sentences and images that we could type into. I recorded the screen on the laptop and filmed the session using an iPad. Here is a shot from the iPad, with Riden Maharjen and Dipak Tuladhar. To […]
I presented the counting riddle that Sunita Junu had published on Tiktok with her daughter to Dipak Tudladhar. I asked if he recognized it. Dipak told me that it reminded him of a song that he had learned when he was young! I asked him to write it down for me and translate it. I […]
Here is Dipak Tuladhar in his office with Newar curriculum that he developed. It was fascinating and inspiring to meet Dipak Tuladhar, who founded the Modern Newa English School in Kathmandu in 2003. It was the first minority language preschool in Nepal. At the time when he started, children were forbidden from speaking anything but Nepali in […]
I learned how to type in Newar! Dipak Tuladhar taught me. No more studying long tables to find a match and copy-pasting. No more Google Lens to grab the character. Typing any letter, like a boss, even ones with ligatures (which are apparently called half-letters). The easiest way to type on a computer is with […]
Nepal Bhasa language teacher/activist Sunita Junu, who can be found not only on Facebook but also on TikTok, has posted a video with her daughter reciting this Newar counting riddle. @sunita.junu एकमोहर एकमोहर – एकरुपैया हामी दुइजना – बेरियौँ नि ऊ त्यो मान्छेले – हेर्यो नि पुरानो घर – भत्कायो नि बगलामुखी महादेवको मन्दिर – […]
I am going on sabbatical this fall, and I’ve decided to visit Nepal! Why Nepal? It sits at the crossroads of several different language families, the two biggest being Indo-Aryan from the west and south, including the national language Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language (closely related to Hindi) Tibeto-Burman (part of Sino-Tibetan, more closely related to […]
Prof. Coppock was among the keynote speakers at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024. Her talk was entitled “Metrology and Mereology”. Download the slides from the talk here. Here is the abstract: This talk is about metrology and mereology. Of these, the latter is more familiar to formal semanticist, and, in conjunction with event semantics, has been of […]
On Friday October 18th, we will have our first meeting of the African Linguistics Club, with a talk by Ousmane Cisse and Elizabeth Coppock on the X-woo-X construction in Mandinka, an interesting way of expressing distributivity through reduplication. The talk will take place in the African Studies Center’s seminar room at 232 Bay State Road, […]