27.1470, Featured Linguist: Gary Holton

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1470. Tue Mar 29 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1470, Featured Linguist: Gary Holton

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Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 13:47:12
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Gary Holton

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers,

We are pleased to present you our second featured linguist, Gary Holton, for
Fund Drive 2016.

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

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

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

My interest in linguistics arose during a sea kayak trip through Eastern
Indonesia. Paddling slowly along the coast I picked up bits and pieces of
languages that I heard along the way and became fascinated with the ways the
languages changed from village to village. This was my first real exposure to
“small” languages—languages with only a few hundred or few thousand speakers.
These small languages evolve to meet the needs of communities, binding
speakers to their environment. At the same time these small languages are
almost everywhere under threat of being replaced by languages of wider
communication.

The Linguist List has had a formative influence on my career. When I entered
graduate school in the mid 1990’s the field was in a state of upheaval. After
a couple decades spent developing theoretical models of language competence,
many in the field had only recently (re-)awoken to the problem of language
endangerment. However, just as the field began to re-engage with language
documentation we were faced with an unprecedented transformation in digital
technologies. During this Digital Dark Age technologies evolved so quickly
that I was using a different recording device with every field trip. As each
of these devices became obsolete the data they recorded risked becoming more
endangered than the languages on those recordings. What was the point of doing
all this documentation of endangered languages if we weren’t able to preserve
that documentation? When I started my first job at the University of Alaska in
1999 I arrived with boxes filled with cassette tapes, DAT tapes, MiniDiscs,
CDs, DVDs and other proprietary digital recording technologies. As I continued
to do field work this mess only got worse. Clearly I needed to find a better
way to deal with digital data. You might say that documentary linguistics as a
field needed to get its house in order.

(...)

Read more:

http://blog.linguistlist.org/uncategorized/featured-linguist-gary-holton/






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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1470	
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