25.989, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Nick Evans

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-989. Thu Feb 27 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.989, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Nick Evans

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Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 13:14:32
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Nick Evans

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Today's Featured Linguist of the Pacific region is Nicholas Evans from
Australian National University. Find out below about his life adventures as a
linguist.

How I Became a Linguist by Nick Evans

It took me a long time to realise I wanted to become a linguist. I had a
resolutely monoglot childhood in 1960s Canberra, Australia's 'bush capital',
and can't even remember hearing any language spoken but English. Nor was
school any better when it came to languages: the teachers were dogmatic types
who obviously couldn't speak the languages well and were irritated by
why-questions. So like my fellow nerds at Campbell High School I took science
subjects and when it came to uni studied biology and psychology.

During my third year at the Australian National University (ANU) I had a spare
slot in my degree and decided to take first year Russian - mainly so I could
read Russian literature in the original. For the first time I experienced what
it could be like to learn a foreign language from a teacher  (Prof. de Bray)
who could lay out its individual logic. He placed great stock on students
getting a good pronunciation, and in week two we had to hand in an account of
all the phonetic realisations of Russian vowel letters under different stress
conditions. This wasn't the last time I benefited from a teacher with what
many would think were unrealistic expectations - I don't think any of us had
studied phonology before, but somehow that planted a seed in me.

In my fourth year, as I was finishing off my honours in psychology and feeling
less and less that I wanted to continue with that, two things made me change
course.

One was a fourth-year course I took on the psychology of language. Another
demanding lecturer (Dr Trotter) set us one whole linguistic classic book per
week - I lapped up John Lyons' Theoretical Linguistics, and Whorf's Language,
Thought and Reality crystallised my feeling that studying languages could
offer a much more direct route into other thought-worlds than the
methodologically overwrought and conceptually oversimplified approaches of
psychology.  (That was what I thought then - now psychology has become much
more interesting.) But the most decisive reading was Chomsky's review of B.F.
Skinner's Verbal Behavior. I'd had far too much behaviorism during my
psychology courses and hated its corny reductionism. Reading Chomsky's deft
disembowelling of Skinner's position made me want to get seriously into
linguistics.

Around the same time was that a friend of mine, Cliff Goddard, suggested I
come along to one of the classes  on Aboriginal languages taught  by Prof. Bob
Dixon. The students had a page of Yidiñ text to translate and analyse before
the class with the help of a glossary and the grammar taught so far. Bob stood
up the front, playing little snatches of Yidiñ on a reel-to-reel recorder,
while a story of two brothers and the origins of death, order and chaos
gradually took shape in the process of analysis.

Hearing the Yidiñ-speaking voice come out of that recorder was a decisive
moment in my life. I had never heard an Aboriginal language before and was
completely hypnotised by its sound. I think most Australians grow up with an
aching sense of unconnectedness to their land, stemming from the invisibility
and inaudibility of Aboriginal culture and the brutal way it was swept aside
by the British colonisation process. So there was something deeply and
indefinably fascinating about the conjunction of the storyteller, his
language, Yidiñ culture, and the whole process of making sense of what he was
saying. That one-hour class decided me on the spot that I wanted to study
linguistics, and focus on Aboriginal languages.

I went on to take a coursework Master's in linguistics with some brilliant
teachers - Bob Dixon, Anna Wierzbicka, Bill Foley, Tim Shopen. Lecturers often
came to each other's courses, and most classes had a broad mixture of
participants ranging from first years to distinguished visitors. This lack of
status-consciousness was an educational blessing: it's very hard to write
linguistics until you know how to argue in a more oral setting. Learning from
the cut-and-thrust between the more seasoned members of the class was about
the best way imaginable of getting into the subject.

We got a lot of Australian and Papuan problem material - often composed
straight from the lecturer's field-notes. A key part of the training was the
range of language-focussed courses on offer - especially for Aboriginal
languages, which had three semesters' worth of offerings, and which really
trained us to put together what we had learned and apply it to a real but
exotic language.  But the part of the departmental ethos which I most
appreciate, in retrospect, was the confidence to find our own solutions to
crack new codes in our own way, without being bound too much about the latest
theoretical fads and how they said languages should work.

For some perverse reason, after finishing my thoroughly enjoyable Master's
training, I decided I wouldn't keep studying.  I think I was just sick of
being a poor student. Meanwhile  I had been offered a job teaching English in
Beijing, accepted it, and bought a suit in readiness.

But that's not what life intended for me. I was two days off flying to China,
when Bob Dixon rang and called me in for a chat. He'd received a letter from
Mornington Island in northern Australia, asking him to find a PhD student to
work on the Kayardild language. Ken Hale had recently been on Mornington to
present a draft Lardil dictionary, the fruit of fieldwork he'd done there.
Kayardild speakers, concerned at the fate of their own language, had wanted
him to work with them on their language. He'd told them he wouldn't have time
himself, but that through Bob Dixon he'd find a PhD student to do it. I
thought it over: Mandarin was hardly in danger of disappearing, while
Kayardild was on the ropes. Pretty much on the spur of the moment I told Bob
I'd take up the offer, pulled out of the Beijing job at the last minute, and
applied for a PhD scholarship.

In the Australian system then you just dived straight into your thesis without
coursework. So a couple of months later I took a series of flights from
Canberra to Mornington Island, flying in on a vintage DC3. It was a strange
place. Somehow I had expected a lush tropical island. But it was more like a
bit of savannah plonked into the sea, not far offshore from the unpromising
saltpans running back from the Gulf of Carpentaria. There was a strong odour
of inadequate sanitation, mixed with mangrove-wood smoke from cooking fires
and what I later came to recognise as the smell of turtle and dugong fat. A
winter wind blew off the sea, but it smelt of the desert not far to the south,
rather than like a sea wind.

Late that afternoon on the beach I finally got to meet the Kayardild men, who
had been out spearing fish until then. Traditionally monolingual, they were
lousy language teachers. (Five years later when I began work in the polyglot
universe of Arnhem Land I realised how unusual that was in Aboriginal
Australia.)  They fired words and sentences at me at machine-gun speed, all
talking at once, working their way through my body-parts which they grabbed
one by one. It was hard to write any sort of transcription in the
circumstances. So much sand and ash was blowing around in the wind that I
didn't want to take my Uher reel-to-reel recorder out of its case.

Despite their lack of pedagogical technique I warmed to them immediately.
Their tribal leader Darwin Moodoonuthi and his wife May had missed out on
having children of their own. Like many in their generation  the trauma of
their forced relocation from Bentinck to Mornington Islands had taken its toll
on their fertility and they welcomed me into their lives as a son. They became
my second father and mother.

In this way I was immediately welcomed into the Kaiadilt world, without
emotional reserve. That open-hearted reception was crucial in getting me
hooked as a field linguist. I think it's important for linguists to learn the
languages they study on as many fronts as possible - simultaneously trying to
figure out the structure through elicitation, building up a corpus to replay
and trawl through endlessly while it slowly sinks in, but also trying to speak
and hear it as much as possible. Usually the speaking part lags far behind -
especially when the language is on the retreat and there are few people to
speak it to - but if you don't work at that, your teachers don't get the pride
and encouragement that always brings out the best in a teacher. And you won't
get inside the language, or notice all the unofficial things which show you
how it really works. Yet  if I don't feel close to people emotionally, I find
it very hard to learn their language: it starts to feel coldly technical, or
even like satirical acting, rather than like the natural and loving emulation
that makes learning a language from our family so easy.

Kayardild is probably the most unusual and interesting language I have ever
worked on, from a grammatical point of view. But my Kayardild teachers weren't
very good at explaining what things meant. Mostly this was because there were
very few bilinguals. The whole population had gone over very quickly from
speaking Kayardild to speaking English, so there were only a few people who
could speak both. But it was also because they just weren't traditionally
interested in language difference. Later, when I've worked in Arnhem Land and
in New Guinea I've encountered a very different situation: people who were
very used to learning many languages, and fascinated by fine differences of
meaning that made their explanations a delight.

Nor did Kayardild people like doing very structured work - they were just too
anarchical. So in some ways I developed bad habits for a while, of not pushing
for every combinatoric possibility or asking for acceptability judgments. It
just never worked with them, or else they just assented to everything I said,
so that I didn't trust the results. This made me something of an extreme
inductivist during my Kayardild research, an approach that only worked because
the social setting was so conducive to language learning. Perhaps because it
was my first field experience and had the open identity you have in your
twenties, I developed a very strong secondary ethnicity as a sort of Kayardild
person. But you have to beware of taking that too seriously and tread a
tightrope there, accepting people's invitations into their lives and doing
what you can to help from your outside perspective, but accepting that
indigenous people have enough outsiders trying to usurp their rights.  So even
while trying to fit in linguistically and culturally as much as possible, you
should never kid yourself that you're more than a privileged outsider who
doesn't have your family hurt by alcoholism or early deaths and who hasn't had
to deal with generations of disenfranchisement.

Since my PhD I've often gone back to Mornington, working up a dictionary and
revising my grammar for publication, following up on other more subtle
questions. But the number of speakers has just gone on dwindling to the point
where most are now in the graveyard by the sea. When I first went there in
1982 there were about forty speakers, aged forty and up.  The language was
exuberantly bellowed out every day, especially in the women's camp on the
beach.  Hearing it spoken has increasingly required special orchestration, and
now even the old ladies who spoke it well in 1982 use a pretty attenuated
version, by habit of having to communicate with younger people who don't
understand the full form of the language. It's still possible to get the odd
new word, but impossible to get at complex grammatical patterns.

I've just given one part of my fieldwork experiences and one part of my career
- working on Kayardild has led out in all sorts of other interesting
directions (typology, historical linguistics, semantics...). My other
fieldwork experiences in Arnhem Land and Papua New Guinea have each had their
own stories. And working on little-known languages is only one part of the
total challenge of our field.

Linguistics has a unique but unfulfilled destiny, as the most scientific of
the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences. Our quest for meaning
within and across languages is intimately tied in with our quest for meaning
in life more generally. Linguistics is also a field with a thoroughly
democratic appreciation of human creativity - as well as an ability to give
voice to every one of the world's cultures. With the right balance of
humanistic insight and scientific rigor, it has the potential to reach what
Ortega y Gasset referred to as the revelation of the secrets that peoples and
epochs keep from each other and which contribute so much to their dispersion
and hostility - in sum, an audacious integration of humanity[1].

When I started into my PhD, or even when I finished it, I don't think I was
conscious of where it would lead me, or how much my encounters with my
teachers of Kayardild and later of other languages would change my ways of
looking at language and at life.  Nor was I even thinking about where it would
lead, professionally or intellectually. I was just pulling a thread which I
found intriguing, and the more I listened the more interesting things were
there to be discovered.

[1] Ortega y Gasset (1937), Miseria y esplendor de la traduccín. La Nación
(Buenos Aires) May-June 1937; translation mine.







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