25.1745, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Stephen Morey

Tue Apr 15 15:13:15 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1745. Tue Apr 15 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1745, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Stephen Morey

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Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:12:35
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Stephen Morey

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During the past nine weeks we have been sharing the most inspiring stories
from linguists all around the world with our readers and subscribers. Today we
are completing our journey with a truly motivating and encouraging story from
our Featured Linguist Stephen Morey. Read below how Stephen became a linguist!

How I Became a Linguist by Stephen Morey

I have just returned from my twentieth field trip to North East India,
documenting and describing the Tai, Singpho and Tangsa languages spoken in
Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, in the parts that border Myanmar.

Although I grew up in a monolingual community I’ve always been fascinated by
different languages. As a teenager I wrote to the late Dr. Adam Murtonen at
Melbourne University asking how I could go about learning ancient languages:
Hittite, Assyrian, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian. He advised me to learn
German first, because so much literature on these languages was in German.
This advice disappointed me, and while I did learn a bit of German
subsequently, I have never learned Hittite, well not yet.

Around the same time, feeling that someone who lives in Melbourne should know
about this area, I went to the State Library of Victoria and copied out by
hand word lists from books about Aboriginal languages, particularly Victorian
Languages: A Late Survey by Luise Hercus. I met Luise about 30 years later and
have been delighted to work with her on projects to combine her knowledge
gained from native speakers of Victorian languages with the 19th century
written records .

At age 16, however, I was seduced by music, specifically the mandolin, and for
a decade and a half I concentrated on learning, and then performing, teaching
and researching this instrument. Some friends and I formed a group to play
mediaeval music, joined by Kate Burridge, singer, hurdy-gurdy player and
Morris dancer. I used to listen with fascination as she told us in the coffee
break at our rehearsal about her day job: linguistics, and her coming book on
euphemism. So when in the early 1990s I developed some physical injury in my
hand and had to abandon mandolin, I went to Kate to find out what linguistics
was.

I had a year before I could start a University degree. I had researched my
family history and learned that some of my ancestors were among the last
speakers of Cornish; and then I learned that you can study revived Cornish and
so with my spare time (not too much of that these days) I learned Cornish by
Correspondence and passed the Gorsedh exam after which I was invited to become
a Cornish Bard. It is an inspiration to put more effort into language
documentation that my own ancestors spoke a language that was lost. But
European languages were not really what I was looking for. By chance, one day
I was marching in a huge demonstration against the policies of the then
government and I met an old friend. “What are you doing, Gareth,” I asked and
he answered “Learning Thai”. At once I decided to learn Thai as well.

After several years of a double major in Linguistics and Thai, I got me an
overseas study grant for a semester at the Prince of Songkla University in
Pattani, Thailand. I took three subjects (all taught in Thai), Principles of
Thai Language, Thai Dialectology and Malay language (Introductory).

My dialectology teacher, Dr. Thananan Trongdi, had heard that my wife and I
were planning a trip to India. He said, “Why don’t you go to Assam, there are
Thai people there.” I thought Assam was closed to foreigners, as indeed it had
been, but by October 1996 it was open and we went there, armed with a name:
Nabin Shyam. On the day we arrived and met up with him, he said to us that he
would be going to his home village in three days, if we wanted, we could come
too. So on the night of 21st October 1996 I spent my first night in a village
in Assam: Ban Lung Aiton village in Karbi Anglong District. More than 1000
nights in at least 40 villages over 20 field trips have followed that night!

The Tai people in India have their own writing system; it is based on the Shan
alphabet which is itself based on Burmese, but it is unique. We had visited a
second village, Namphakey in Dibrugarh District, and there I had mentioned to
my hosts that I had learned how to make fonts (I called it ‘computer printing
block’). Nobody in the village and ever seen a computer at that time, but they
gave me a hand-copied book and a request to make the font. Back in Australia I
thought it would be a good PhD project to learn about their language. So a
year later I returned, with the font made and a laptop to work on. There
followed 5 years in which I studied the Tai languages, then two fellowships
over 4 years to work on Singpho, and for the last 7 years I’ve concentrated
much of my effort on Tangsa.

Recording devices have changed much in that time. At first, with only my own
resources to cover costs, I had just a small cassette player of dubious
quality. Over the years sound recorders have changed from Cassette through
Minidisc and Microtrack to the Zoom H4n and video from those with cassettes to
those that use SD cards. I’ve recorded songs and stories and linguistic
information in 5 Tai varieties, 4 Singpho varieties and (at latest count), 32
Tangsa varieties. Although the Tai varieties are all mutually intelligible,
and the Singpho ones more or less so, the Tangsa varieties are very diverse
and it remains a huge task learning enough about each variety to really
understand what’s going on. The immense task of transcription, translation,
analysis and archiving is ongoing and will go on for a good deal longer!

All along I’ve had two special interests: manuscripts and songs. Of the three
groups I’m working with, the Tai have a long written tradition. Tai Phake and
Tai Aiton communities still contain people who can read manuscripts, though
not too many in the Aiton; but the Tai Ahom language ceased to be spoken 200
years ago, and the manuscripts, which are different from those of the Phake
and Aiton, are hard to interpret. The problem is like this: Tai is a tonal
language, with perhaps 5 tonal contrasts likely to have been present in Ahom.
But tones are not marked and so a single written word can have many meanings.

Song language, in all three language groups, is equally challenging, differing
in form from the spoken language to a lesser and greater degree. It has been
very exciting to record songs, to learn about the context, and then record an
explanation of their meaning and try to translate it all.

In North East India there are usually not places to stay in villages apart
from someone’s house. So I’ve got to know many families in all the different
communities that I have stayed in. Because I’m trying to learn as much as I
can about the languages, it may sometimes seem to my hosts that I’m always
working (it certainly seems so to me at times!). I have found that I can only
really enjoy sitting and chatting with people when I have got good enough at
the language to be able to chat easily. In my more recent work on Tangsa,
because of its huge diversity, this hasn’t really happened, and these days the
younger people are usually more fluent in English and so we end up using that.
I wish I could learn each Tangsa variety to the level I learned Tai Aiton, but
that would take several lifetimes.

Stephen Morey

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1745	
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