26.1681, Presenting Our Next Featured Linguist: Thomas Ede Zimmermann

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1681. Mon Mar 30 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1681, Presenting Our Next Featured Linguist: Thomas Ede Zimmermann

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Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:11:25
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Presenting Our Next Featured Linguist: Thomas Ede Zimmermann

 
Dear subscribers,

We are pleased to present you our featured linguist Thomas Ede Zimmermann for
Fund Drive 2015. Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with
a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

Thomas Ede Zimmermann

I was born and raised in the industrial city of Hannover, (then West) Germany.
I was 15 when I decided to become a linguist. Here is how. Having entered the
Oberstufe – the final phase in the traditional German grammar school – in the
summer of 1970, I began developing a mild form of future angst: only 3 years
to go until the Abitur (= German high school diploma) and no long-term plans!
My parents, both non-academics, were not very helpful in this respect, trying
to push me in the direction of German studies. Since I wasn’t sure whether
this is what I would want to spend my life with, I decided to find out by
browsing the local bookstores and came up with a pile of publishers’
catalogues of books for first-year students of Germanistik. I made my
selection of the hottest titles, 4 volumes of a History of the European Novel
among them, and returned to the bookstore to find that the only available book
of my choice was the one with he catchy title Language, Thought, and Reality
(or rather, Sprache, Denken, Wirklichkeit), by famous hobby linguist B. L.
Whorf (as I know now). I bought it, read it, and … wanted to become a
linguist! This was not so much for the (apparently mis-analysed) wonders of
the Hopi language. Rather, what impressed me most was something Whorf used to
illustrate his more than debatable claims on the subtle influence of grammar
on our thinking: the structure of possible monosyllabic words of English,
which he presented in one neat formula! I immediately forgot about the
literature part of German studies and went to the local library to get hold of
any linguistics textbooks I could find – not many, and all of them with a
strong structuralist flavour (which was of course, not for me to discern).
(...)

Read more: 
http://blog.linguistlist.org/?p=2103

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