31.3356, Featured Linguist: Bonny Sands

Tue Nov 3 03:40:23 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3356. Mon Nov 02 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3356, Featured Linguist: Bonny Sands

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Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2020 22:37:43
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Bonny Sands

This week, we are happy to bring you the work of Professor Bonny Sands for our
Featured Linguist!

--

The mostly blue-collar suburb on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon where I
grew up was not the best place for a hopeful polyglot in the 1970s and early
'80s. Today, the area has many shops, churches and other establishments with
signs in Russian, Korean, and Spanish. Back then, classmates who used
languages other than English in their homes were small in number, and, with
the exception of ASL, I don't recall any languages being shared at school
much. Looking back, I can see that I missed opportunities for learning about
other languages and cultures; I failed to pay attention because English
dominated the linguistic landscape. I tried learning about languages from
books but rarely got past the sections on pronunciation which inevitably had
something about the vowel in "caught" being different than the vowel in "cot",
which made absolutely no sense to me.

When my older brother Ron took French in high school, he taught me and my twin
sister a few words and phrases such as "Fermez la porte!" when we were still
in grade school. I still remember being fascinated that the French word porte
was like the word 'portal' that I knew from watching Star Trek. Just about my
only exposure to African languages at that point would have been Lieutenant
Uhura speaking a few words of Kiswahili in a Star Trek episode. (I was
definitely a nerd before that was a cool thing to be). In middle school, I
liked to read the dictionary and find more about the roots that connected
different words together. I sought out books such as Mario Pei's "The Story of
Language" and Isaac Asimov's "Words from History" to learn more. When this
same brother brought home a course catalog from the University of Oregon, I
studied it, imagining all the things I might get to learn about one day. I
came across this thing called "Linguistics" and learned that was a major where
you could learn about all of the languages of the world. How fun! You wouldn't
have to be limited to a single language! When it came time for me to think
about college, I narrowed down my choices by only looking at ones that had a
Linguistics major. When I took Introduction to Linguistics the first semester
of my Freshman year (with David Odden, at Yale University), I was pretty much
hooked.

Of course, being a linguist is not the same as learning to speak many
languages. I love learning about languages even more than I love learning
them. I really wanted to be a historical linguist, given my interest in
etymology, but didn't know how I could do that given my lack of
language-learning achievements at that point. I took Historical Linguistics &
Intro to Indo-European with Stephanie Jamison, which I loved, but never having
studied Latin, Greek, etc. I didn't see how I could specialize as an
Indo-European historical linguist. I had a lot of great classes as an
undergrad that allowed me to learn about languages as diverse as Pangasinan,
Icelandic and Classical Chinese. I learned about syntax, language acquisition,
field methods, etc. but besides historical linguistics, the other subject that
really grabbed me was phonetics. The time I spent with a speech therapist as a
child learning how to correct a lisp taught me early on about my alveolar
ridge, and how to listen to myself and adjust my pronunciation. I loved
learning about ejectives, implosives and clicks in Louis Goldstein's phonetics
class and about patterning of sounds in Pam Beddor's phonology class. Even
though I have an abiding interest in prehistory, I wanted to study living
languages, since there's something about teaching your mouth to move in a
different way that is so much fun. (Like watching a ballet dancer on "So You
Think You Can Dance" learn to dance hip-hop, or seeing a b-boy tackle a jazz
number).

My specialization in African linguistics was due in large part to the fact
that Kiswahili was taught at Yale using a method called soft-immersion. Having
failed to become fluent enough after four years of study (with all A's!) to
pass an advanced French class, I knew I'd never become fluent in another
language without learning through immersion. My Junior year, I took Kiswahili
at 9am, then went straight to German at 10am. The languages were so different
and taught in such different ways that I never got them confused and I was
happy to make up for lost time in learning languages. I don't have any
extraordinary talent for language-learning but just put in the time to acquire
the skills needed to do fieldwork and to read the literature in at least one
part of the world.

I was excited by the choice of Kiswahili. I felt it was wrong that my
schooling up to that point had taught me so little about Africa and I had (and
still have!) a strong conviction that every adult should know basic facts
about different parts of the world -- such as, what languages are spoken
there. About a third of the world's languages are in Africa, so even as a
supposed expert, I find myself in a (blissful) constant state of learning.

My two years of Kiswahili (plus a summer-abroad in Kenya) was enough for the
label "Africanist" to be bestowed upon me when I started grad school at UCLA,
despite having done relatively little to earn it at that point. I happened
upon the study of clicks for my MA thesis when Peter Ladefoged suggested I
work on some recordings of isiXhosa that Rosalie Finlayson of UNISA had sent
him. He and Ian Maddieson had a series of NSF grants that resulted in their
book "The Sounds of the World's Languages", and they took me with them to
Kenya and Tanzania to record words of the click languages Dahalo, Hadza and
Sandawe. I returned to Tanzania to continue working on Hadza (resulting in the
sketches in Routledge volume "The Khoesan Languages", ed. Rainer Vossen).
Since my dissertation work (supervised by Tom Hinnebusch and Ian Maddieson)
showed that Hadza is best viewed as a language isolate, I shifted my research
focus to Khoesan languages in the Kalahari Basin, where I could collect data
for historical reconstruction and phonetic description. I conducted fieldwork
on languages such as Nǀuu, ǂHoan, and varieties of !Xun with colleagues Amanda
Miller, Chris Collins, Levi Namaseb, Andy Chebanne, and others. Some of these
findings are published in the book "Click Consonants", published by Brill.

These days, I am transitioning away from fieldwork and trying to focus on
publishing more. I've enjoyed expanding my knowledge of African languages to
be able to write surveys on topics as diverse as: "Language revitalization in
Africa", " The sounds of the Bantu languages", "Tonogenesis", and "Tracing
language contact in Africa's past".

Linguistics as a discipline still has so much to learn from Africans and
African languages. It is a deeply rewarding area of study and I encourage
everyone to seek to know more about this large and important part of the
world.

--

Thanks for reading and if you want to donate to the LINGUIST List, you can do
so here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

All the best,
- The LL Team

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