Re AN native speaker/scholars

[John Myhill]

In response to Paz' posting:

Frankly, the situation is a disgrace to linguistics. If anything, my impression
is that the situation regarding Austronesian languages is considerably
BETTER than for most other non-Indo-European language families. My
impression is that, in general, the reasons are:

(1) In many cases, there are just plain very few native speakers who are
adequately trained.

(2) Established non-native-speaker language specialists, perhaps jealous of
their turf and concerned that the presence of native speakers in respected
positions might undermine their authority and expose their own
less-than-perfect knowledge of the languages they are supposed to be
specialists in, are generally in no rush to train and promote
native-speaker specialists.

(3) Native-speaker specialists, however intelligent and well-trained they may
be, tend to simply have different research agendas than outsiders (e.g. they are
more likely to be interested in applied issues than in reconstructing the
proto-language), and it is outsiders who are running these conferences.

I myself have on several occasions studied languages such as Chinese and
Indonesian in situations where the American Ph.D. 'specialist' running the
program simply and obviously didn't know the language very well at the
level of
speaking it colloquially, would give confusing, contradictory, and often
transparently incorrect explanations of grammatical and phonetic phenomena,
and then fly into a rage when I went to the native-speaker teaching assistant
to get a straight story and bring it back to the class for confirmation.

So in terms of when the situation will get better, I would say:

(1) When more native-speakers take the initiative to get trained themselves
and direct their interests towards the research projects which are
interesting
to Americans and Europeans, and

(2) When Americans and Europeans learn the languages well enough not to feel
threatened by native speakers who are at an equal professional level.

John Myhill