27.1706, Featured Linguist: David Adger

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1706. Tue Apr 12 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1706, Featured Linguist: David Adger

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Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2016 14:17:18
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: David Adger

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers,

We are pleased to present you our next featured linguist, David Adger, for
Fund Drive 2016.

Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

----------------------------------------------

A few months ago, I was asked by a TV programme to make up a language for
their monsters to speak, and with that, my linguistics life completed a cycle.
When I was about 11 or so, I grew fascinated with language, mainly from
reading Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, a book I still completely love.
Le Guin envisaged a world where the words actually created the reality, and
every single piece of existence had its own particular name. Fascinated by
this idea, and already developing my inner language geek, I started making up
languages to explore whether they could work like that. To do this, I had to
learn how real languages actually worked. At school, they just taught French
and German (and later some Latin), but my local library (sadly closed this
year because of government cuts) was full of teach-yourself books on weird and
wonderful languages, as well as some pretty impenetrable linguistics books. I
think the librarians were a bit perplexed by a twelve year old taking home
tomes on philology and grammar he couldn't possibly understand. They were
right, I didn't understand them at all, but I was so hooked by that point,
that I read them anyway, and I guess some stuff sunk in. I remember winning a
competition for local schools at St Andrews University, when I was about 16,
and buying, with my£20 prize, second hand copies of Chomsky's Syntactic
Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (which I still have). Again, I
wasn't really able to understand these books in much depth, but the idea that
you could use rigorous, mathematical, means to try to get under the skin of
language was, and still is, just endlessly fascinating to me.

(...)

Read more:

http://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-david-adger/






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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1706	
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