AN native speaker/scholars

[Richard McGinn]

	Continuing Paz's and Wolfgang's and John's discussion, I know three
Indonesian linguists trained at the best theoretical programs in the U.S.
who raised great hopes for all of us, but when they returned to Indonesia
their Ph.D.s were treated as mere titles (gelar), and they became deans,
and were never heard from again.

	A second half of the problem probably may lie in the extreme difficulty
(perhaps impossiblity) of maintaining a theoretically-oriented research
program when working in isolation from like-minded linguists, given the
volitility of the field.  I know know other Indonesian linguists with U.S.
Ph.D.s, trained in descriptive linguistics and typology, who remain active,
and who have (and continue to make) important contributions to our
knowledge of their native languages including Malay (Bahasa Indonesia).

Dick McGinn



At 01:38 PM 2/22/00 +0200, John Myhill wrote:
>Continuing Wolfgang's point: I am not an Austronesian specialist myself, I am
>more or less a typologist, and it is my impression (as I alluded in my last
>message) that Austronesian linguistics is BETTER in this respect that many
other
>language areas, e.g. Native American languages, Australian languages, North
>Caucasian languages, Altaic languages (other than Turkish), Khoisan
>languages,
>Nilotic languages, Afro-Asiatic languages (other than Hebrew and Arabic),
>Niger-Congo languages, Sino-Tibetan languages (with the possible exception
>of Mandarin Chinese, but even there I'm not sure)--all of these fields are
>dominated to
>a truly unhealthy extent by non-native speakers in a way worse than
>Austronesian is. It is really only European languages, Japanese, Korean,
>Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, a number of languages of India (Tamil,
>Hindi, Kannada, Bengali), maybe Thai, where native speakers have as much of
>a role in leading the field as would seem reasonable.
>John Myhill
>
>That doesn't mean the situation in Austronesian shouldn't be imp
>
>