Fieldwork today

[Allan Wechsler]

Earlier today I sent a cynical message, but I want to add this:

Doing real linguistic fieldwork is a dream of mine that I will
probably never be able to satisfy -- I have two kids to raise and send
through college, and at forty I cannot justify quitting my job and
going to grad-school, even assuming I could get in somewhere.  (A
decade ago I tried.  Allow me to assure you that a passion for the
data is just as insufficient at that stage of the career as it is
later.)

So, at best, I hope to experience linguistic fieldwork vicariously,
through the kind of writing Nancy Dorian was encouraging.  If you
write it, I for one will read it.  In the meantime I settle for
pestering my foreign colleagues for sentences.  The Malayalam-speaker
down the hall has agreed to have lunch sometime -- but I don't think
she knows what she's in for.

-A

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