25.1350, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Eitan Grossman

Thu Mar 20 14:30:50 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1350. Thu Mar 20 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1350, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Eitan Grossman

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Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 10:30:22
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Eitan Grossman

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Today we are going to meet our next Featured Linguist Eitan Grossman from
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Read below his story on how he became a
linguist.

How I Became a Linguist by Eitan Grossman

I grew up in a small town in New York, and like a lot of North American
eighteen-year-olds, I went to college right after finishing school. Focusing
on languages and literature, the one class I took in a particular brand of New
England linguistics was enough to turn me off. As it turned out, the American
college experience wasn't meant for me, and neither was America, and I quickly
found myself living in Israel. I waited tables, served in the army as an
infantry soldier, worked in a screw factory, and milked cows, among other
sundry jobs, none of which I was particularly good at. After a few years, I
was good and ready to go back to activate my brain a bit. Up until three weeks
or so before I was supposed to begin my BA, I was convinced that I was going
to be a water-and-soil engineer. How this idea got into my head remains a
mystery till today. But over the summer, I got my hands on (and actually read)
de Saussure's Cours, which had been recommended to me by an English professor
years ago. This led to reading Chomsky'sSyntactic Structures and Langacker's
Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Although I didn't really understand any of
them, I did understand that I was going to be a linguist, which pretty much
scuttled my dreams of building irrigation pipes in exotic places.

I began studying linguistics and Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
focusing mainly on Semitic languages. I can only describe the experience as
electrifying. Now, I should say a few words about the linguistics department
at the Hebrew University which was a bit of an oddity, at least from the point
of view of most North American linguistics programs. The oldest linguistics
program in the country, it was firmly European structuralist in orientation
and the studies were based on the intensive study of quite a few languages. In
my first year, I studied Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, and a lot of Hebrew,
including the ridiculously difficult course in niqqud, the science (or art) of
vocalizing an unvocalized Hebrew text. The theoretical and methodological
courses embodied a particular blend of structuralism, typology, and
functionalism, but also medieval Arab grammarians, Romance philologists, and
the rock stars of 19th and 20th century linguistics, those nonconformists Otto
Jespersen, Edward Sapir, Hugo Schuchardt, Hermann Paul, Joan Bybee, and T.
Givón. My teachers in linguistics were Ariel Shisha-Halevy, Eran Cohen, Lea
Sawicki, Moshe Taube, Orly Goldwasser, Gideon Goldenberg, Dana Taube, Olga
Kapeliuk, Nimrod Barri, Anbessa Tefarra, and others, many of whom are still
friends and mentors in various ways.

I came to Coptic, as it happens, in a fairly invisible-hand way. I had to pick
another language in my first year, and my choices were either Syriac Aramaic
or Coptic. Not knowing what to pick - being equally and completely ignorant
about both language - the BA advisor told me that I should go to the library,
open a book, and see which struck my fancy. The Syriac script - which to my
eyes looked like a lot of squiggles - send me to the warm embrace of Coptic,
with its more reasonable Greek-based alphabet.

The first year course in Coptic was probably the most challenging course I
took in my entire BA. The professor, Ariel Shisha-Halevy, was - and is - a
radical thinker, who showed me that most of what I thought I knew about
language was just a collection of prejudices. I don't want to eulogize someone
who I still see often, so I'll just say that I kept studying Coptic because I
wanted to keep hearing what Shisha-Halevy had to say. I also ended up studying
Welsh, Irish, Greek, Somali, Yiddish, Ge'ez, Sidamo, and a little Swahili and
Polish, but I was mostly focused on Ancient Egyptian in all of its phases.

I wanted to keep studying, which meant I had to do some more degrees. I was
lucky enough to come into the field of Egyptian linguistics when a lot of the
established scholars were a bit tired from some titanic clashes about the
nature of the Ancient Egyptian verbal system. This meant that those of us
working on the later phases, from Late Egyptian to Coptic, could work on new
topics, and I think that our teachers were happy to encourage us in this.
Also, a lot of us were reading functionalist and typological literature, which
gave us a different perspective. All in all, the community of linguists
working on Ancient Egyptian and Coptic is a tremendously exciting and
supportive one, and it's a privilege and a source of ongoing happiness to be a
part of it.

In the end, I wrote a dissertation about an undescribed Coptic dialect, but
since I wasn't exactly in love with the subject, I spent a lot of time working
on other topics, mostly related to language variation and change, such as
language contact, grammaticalization, dialectology, and historical
sociolinguistics. I was lucky enough to meet (and correspond with) fantastic
scholars, who were really generous with their time and encouraged me in every
imaginable way, and even though I worked on a weird dead language and didn't
speak the right lingo, took me seriously (I think).

I did post-doctoral research in Liège, Be'er Sheva, and Jerusalem. For the
first year and a half, I shuttled every two weeks between Liège, where I was
working, and Jerusalem, where my wife and kids had to stay. Not an easy
period, and one that left a pretty massive carbon footprint, but a wonderful
one nonetheless. On the one hand, the stress of being uncertain about one's
future is tough. On the other hand, I could basically do what I wanted in
terms of research, and I was lucky enough to find remarkable partners with
whom I could talk endlessly - and eventually write - about the questions that
have come to occupy me for most of my waking hours, and some of my dreams: why
are languages the way they are? what is the relationship between form and
function? what is the role of listeners in shaping linguistic form? why do
languages change? A lot of the work from this period, much of it joint
productions with Stéphane Polis and Sebastian Richter, is still in
preparation, in print, forthcoming, and most of all, staring me down from the
hard drive of my computer. At the moment, I'm in the middle of my first
large-scale typological project, which deals with the typology of adposition
borrowing.

I now teach linguistics at the Hebrew University, where I give courses in
historical linguistics and typology, as well as various phases of Ancient
Egyptian. I have to admit that the course I enjoy teaching most is the
introduction to linguistics: first year students often have the best
questions, the ones that still trouble most of us.

Studying a dead language attested for more than 4000 years is pretty different
from working on a living oral language. First of all, there's that pesky lack
of native speakers. But it means embracing working on a corpus, which I think
is a good thing. It also means that you get to look at really long-term
diachronic changes, which is also a good thing.

Here are a few wet-behind-the-ears words of advice for my fellow rookies.
Linguistics is a fantastic field, but it's also a tough one, and a thick skin
helps. Make the most of opportunities. Write about things that really excite
you. Be generous to others. Change your mind once in a while. Don't be afraid
to be intellectually incorrect.

Eitan Grossman

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