R.S. Richmond biographical details

[RSRICHMOND at aol.com]

Hello everyone! I'm providing the requested biographical details on joining
the Endangered Languages list.

I'm strictly an amateur - someone with a lifelong interest in languages. I'm
a physician (pathologist) in rural Tennessee. 

I majored in German at Harvard in the late fifties. I studied with James W.
Marchand, who has done a lot of work on Gothic, and informally with Charles
A. Ferguson, from whom I first learned about - what else - diglossia.

I have some access to one endangered speech community, the Eastern Band
Cherokee, who remained behind in western North Carolina when the rest of the
Cherokees were removed to Oklahoma in the 1830's. The Eastern Band (Katuah,
Qualla Boundary) form of the language differs considerably from that spoken
by the Western Nation in Oklahoma. - Is anyone from that speech community on
this list?

I promise to behave myself - I have no ideological or religious axes to grind
(other than the passionate conviction that languages ought not to die, and a
certain hope that Greenberg and Cavalli-Sforza are right!)

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville TN USA