Languages and Linguistics

My early life was shaped by the fact that my father, a diplomat, was moved every three years or so to a new post. Generally, one three-year stint was spent abroad, and the next was spent in Washington. That led me to be born in Venezuela, and spend over three years each in Guatemala and Chile. It so happened that when I was old enough to learn to read, I was in Guatemala, and was exposed to Spanish as well as English.

This made a profound impression on me: Spanish was so easy to read, because each letter has (essentially) one sound. Once you learned what a letter was, that's what it was. English just didn't make sense (or is it sence?). Each sound could be represented several ways, and each letter and combination of letters had lots of possible readings. I took it quite personally, at the age of six, and my mounting frustration expressed itself as a desire to understand how language really works, and how it might be possible to express it best in writing.

I didn't actually begin to make progress in this effort until high school. By then I had been re-taught Spanish in Chile (I forgot Spanish each time I had a three-year stay in the US) and had started Latin and French at The Grange School, a British institution in Santiago. When I got back to the US, I continued all three languages at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where thanks to my dear Spanish teacher, my interest in linguistics was encouraged. This dear lady, Juanita Jenkins, was a native of Donostia (San Sebastián) in the Basque country of Spain; her enthusiasm, sharp wit, and intellect, did a lot for all of us - and there were a couple of other returnees from Santiago in the class: Tessa Chao and Signe Ecklund.

But it is to J. R. R. Tolkien that I owe the most direct inspiration to continue with linguistics. It was in my first year at BCC (tenth grade, 1962) that I read The Lord of the Rings and, like many of my generation, was completely captivated by the wonder, the colour, and depth of invention. For me, the realistic treatment of linguistic detail rang especially true, and I was drawn into the Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, and their writing systems. From my immersion in these two languages, I developed my first understanding of phonetics and a delight in caligraphy. Over the next four years, I developed several systems of spelling for English using both Cirth ("runes") and Tengwar. The latter were always more appealing to me, because they were more graceful and more flexible in how the vowels were represented, and because they allowed more caligraphic variation.

When I got to college (at Wooster, Ohio, in 1964), I found that my favorite weekend relaxation was to bury myself in the Andrews Library (new at the time) and read about the phonology of different languages. I flirted briefly with Chinese, and at greater length with the languages of India. I seriously considered majoring in Cultural Area Studies of India (but I left it to my daughter Marjorie - she studied Telugu and Urdu in Hyderabad on an anthropology major from Wooster).

I ended up majoring in Linguistics - thinly disguisted as English, since there was no "linguistics" major available. Wooster has the wonderful idea that everyone should do some research on their own, so for both my junior and senior projects I was able to work on linguistics.

All my projects were under the tutelage of Paul Christiansen, and I flourished under his gentle guidance. The first junior project involved reading a series of Middle English texts to which Dr. Christiansen pointed me, and discovering the attitude to the English language underlying each. During this period after the Norman conquest, English moved gradually from its status as a series of dialects spoken by a defeated people, to a national language with its own respected literature.

The second project was all of my own invention. I was curious about whether sounds - the simple vowels and consonants - have a generally understood meaning or feeling of their own in all, or most, languages. This idea is known as "phonetic symbolism," and I was surprised what a large body of research in linguistics, but primarily in psychology, was relevant to the topic. I was determined to carry out experiments in which native speakers of several languages would give their reactions to a wide variety of sounds, so I recruited my friends, especially the foreign students, to spend a half hour or so in the language lab listening to a tape I had prepared, and filling in a questionnaire. This was a lot of work, but the real problem came once I had all the questionnaires in hand and had to translate them into meaningful results. I tried several techniques involving calculators, but ended up realizing that I couldn't do what I wanted without the aid of computers. One of those little decisions that change one's life. I had to end my paper inconclusively, and took a class in FORTRAN II, the most advanced computer language available at Wooster in 1967. Even after successfully writing a program to calculate the mean and standard deveation of all the responses, I was left without a really satisfactory conclusion. If I had time, I'd be tempted to go back and see what conclusions I could dig out of the data now...

My final project - Senior Independent Study - was a study of spelling systems in a wide variety of languages. Lots of work, and lots of fun. It took me to the Library of Congress as I tried to get information about early spelling systems in the Ojiway language, among others. I was able to articulate a conclusion about ideal spelling systems: the right spelling system for a language is like the right wife for a man - it depends on chance, personal tastes, and love. Funny thing about that...I married Martha a few days after turning in my project. (Which, by the way, was the longest IS project written that year, and I got a prize for it. Hah!)

After Wooster the Army loomed large, this being 1968 and the Vietnam war in full spate. I volunteered for the draft as a conscientious objector, and for service as a medic in Vietnam. I felt that was where God wanted me to go. Apparently he did, but he didn't want me there for long. I was pretty badly burned, and evacuated exactly a month after arriving - not long enough to learn any Vietnamese, though I did try to study it. During the Army time, Martha and I seriously considered Bible translation as a career. We felt we needed some graduate school, so after my stint at Walter Reed hospital, we headed out in 1970 to the Univeristy of Michigan, where Kenneth Pike was chairman of the Department of Linguistics.

Since this has rambled on long enough already, I'll compress my ten years at U of M... I did lots of stuff, much of it not directly concerned with linguistics. I purposely chose a dissertation topic which I could easily leave when I was done: the phonology of sibilants and fricatives (sounds like s, sh, f, th and more). It proved fascinating, and I felt that without using computers, again, I wouldn't be able to get more than a subjective view of the topic. It took me years of work with computers to get what I wanted, but I did in the end. The only thing was, I had prepared myself to become a computer specialist as much as a linguist, and when it turned out the Bible translators didn't want us, it was much easier to get a job with computers than with linguistics.

So here I am, teaching about computers and not about languages. I miss linguistics, though the rich and ever-changing computer scene leaves me little time for regret. Still, here are some neat places you can go to find out more about languages and linguistics on the Web:

Electronic Mailing List on Linguistics

Published by our neighbors, Eastern Michigan University and Wayne State University.

Ethnologue Database

Tons of information about all the languages of the world

SIL Home Page

The Summer Institute of Linguistics is probably the largest organization devoted to the study of languages you never heard of. In addition to language information, this site gives you access to lots of language-study software, fonts, and more.

John Lawler's annotated interesting linguistics places

John is one of my former profs at U of M, and a great guy. He's always bubbling over with the fun of learning about language and its odd quirks, and this L O N G jump-station with tons of comments (many irreverent) is a great place to start.

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