Re AN native speaker/scholars

[Paz B Naylor]

Dear John:

Thank you for a well-thought, reasoned, and lucidly articulated response.

I agree with the points you brought out and hope that the light they shed
on the matter will eventually bring about the desirable results.

It was nice to hear from you, in any case.

Warmest regards,  Paz




On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, John Myhill wrote:

> In response to Paz' posting:
>
> Frankly, the situation is a disgrace to linguistics. If anything, my impression
> is that the situation regarding Austronesian languages is considerably
> BETTER than for most other non-Indo-European language families. My
> impression is that, in general, the reasons are:
>
> (1) In many cases, there are just plain very few native speakers who are
> adequately trained.
>
> (2) Established non-native-speaker language specialists, perhaps jealous of
> their turf and concerned that the presence of native speakers in respected
> positions might undermine their authority and expose their own
> less-than-perfect knowledge of the languages they are supposed to be
> specialists in, are generally in no rush to train and promote
> native-speaker specialists.
>
> (3) Native-speaker specialists, however intelligent and well-trained they may
> be, tend to simply have different research agendas than outsiders (e.g. they are
> more likely to be interested in applied issues than in reconstructing the
> proto-language), and it is outsiders who are running these conferences.
>
> I myself have on several occasions studied languages such as Chinese and
> Indonesian in situations where the American Ph.D. 'specialist' running the
> program simply and obviously didn't know the language very well at the
> level of
> speaking it colloquially, would give confusing, contradictory, and often
> transparently incorrect explanations of grammatical and phonetic phenomena,
> and then fly into a rage when I went to the native-speaker teaching assistant
> to get a straight story and bring it back to the class for confirmation.
>
> So in terms of when the situation will get better, I would say:
>
> (1) When more native-speakers take the initiative to get trained themselves
> and direct their interests towards the research projects which are
> interesting
> to Americans and Europeans, and
>
> (2) When Americans and Europeans learn the languages well enough not to feel
> threatened by native speakers who are at an equal professional level.
>
> John Myhill
>