26.1297, Introducing Our First Featured Linguist of 2015: Picus Ding

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1297. Mon Mar 09 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1297, Introducing Our First Featured Linguist of 2015: Picus Ding

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Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2015 13:15:55
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Introducing Our First Featured Linguist of 2015: Picus Ding

 
Dear subscribers,

We are pleased to present you our first featured linguist of the 2015 Fund
Drive: Picus Ding! Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities
with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

Picus Sizhi Ding

Entering the field of linguistics in the early 1990s, I consider myself to be
one of those growing up professionally together with the Linguist List. When I
first learned of the List, which was precisely in the form of a mailing list,
the kind of excitement I felt was about the same as I first discovered
linguistics as a discipline.

Born in a Hokkien family in Rangoon at a time when overseas Chinese in
Southeast Asia strongly upheld their ancestral language as part of their
identity, I spent several years of my early life as a bilingual child in
Hokkien and Burmese. Then my family moved to Macao and I grew up bilingually
in Cantonese and Hokkien. The only foreign language taught in most schools of
Macao in those days was English. I started to get interested in Mandarin
around Grade 7, with exposure to its pronunciation mainly via pop songs such
as those sung by Teresa Teng. In my final year of high school, Radio Macao
launched a series of mini-programs for learning elementary Portuguese, I
learned a little bit out of curiosity. In retrospect, there has always been an
interest in languages in me. This explains my immediate decision on electing
linguistics as my major when I discovered it on a long list of majors
available in some universities in North America. For variegated reasons, I had
moved and studied in the states, Canada and Australia, but my field of study
remained intact. As a result, I have received all my three degrees in
linguistics, each from a different country. (...)

Read the rest here:
English version: http://goo.gl/6PRsgN
Chinese version: http://goo.gl/7IHC6k







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