Blue Devillishness

[rf87]

This is a response to Clark Troy's posting and since I am new on the list I
haven't quite learned to read the directions for replying and posting. I
think I've already sent this to him and tried to send it to the listserv. If
that got through and this is a second time, sorry for the inconvenience.

Bob Fradkin

 ----------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 97 13:22 EST
From: Robert_A_FRADKIN at umail.umd.edu (rf87)
Subject: Re: Blue Devillishness
To: clark troy <mct7 at columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.95L.970310170253.5834A-100000 at kiaora.cc.columbia.edu>

Dear SEELANGS,

On the Duke program, I just spent the weekend there and it is still alive.
Edna Andrews is the mainstay of the language and linguistics program and
they have an MA. The doctoral students currently working will be able to
finish. Thomas Lahusen is still there, but one of the linguist slots has
been vacated and will not be refilled, and one of the literature people is
leaving and will not be replaced.There is still a tenure track Asst. Prof.
in lit. and two other PhD lit+lang people. The dept. was almost pressured to
merge with Germanic but the dean finally saw that no "world class"
university has such a merged entity and that it would not only make them
look bad but hurt the chances for various funding sources.

A propos of mergers, though, let me mention what happened here at U. of
Maryland a couple of years ago. There had been a Germ/Slav dept. here for
ages. There was also a "Hebrew and E. Asian" dept. The Slavs and the Asians
saw that they had more in common in terms of language teaching goals, not to
mention their common status as LCTL. So the Slavs left the Germs alone and
joined the Asians, forming "Asian and E. European Langs+Cults." This is not so
much a merger as a deliberate reorganization to the assumed advantage of all
parties. So far it seems to be working. (Those of you who know me know that
this was an incredible stroke of luck for me since I was hired here in 1995 to
direct the Hebrew program, but I can still actively maintain my Slavic
contact.) In fact, I took the opportunity to offer a new undrgrd. course,
"History of the Alphabets," an intro. linguistics course where the EEur and
WAsia (viz. hebrew) elements in the dept. get a chance to explore their odd
common graphic heritage, namely, the development of alphabetic writing from
Phoenician to Greek/Latin/Cyrillic on the one hand and Hebrew/Arabic and
ultimately the whole of India and SE Asia, on the other. This also gives a
chance to discuss the literacy-religion-history connection in the context of
linguistics, esp. with regard to enforced spelling and script reforms, as in
the Sov. U.

I will refer to this course again in a later posting related to last week's
discussions of outreach and the Slavic Linguistic Task Force (of which I
chair the Subcommittee on the Media).

Slavolingually yours,

Bob Fradkin
Dept. of Asian and E. European Langs.
Univ. of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-4831
tel. 301-405-4250
fax  301-314-9841
e-mail rf87 at umail.umd.edu------------ End Forwarded Message -------------