30.1080, Featured Linguist: Ghil'ad Zuckermann

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1080. Mon Mar 11 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1080, Featured Linguist: Ghil'ad Zuckermann

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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 13:52:03
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Ghil'ad Zuckermann

 Featured Linguist: Ghil'ad Zuckerman

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, 3 April 2019

I was born in Tel Aviv and grew up Eilat, the southernmost city of Israel. My
father was an Italian Jew who survived the Second World War in Italy and then
arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1945. My own first memory is being rushed
to the shelter during the Yom Kippur War (October 1973). As a child growing up
in Eilat I experienced 'Othering' (defining oneself vis-à-vis the other) every
day, looking at the spectacular, albeit inaccessible, unreachable, mountains
of Aqaba, Jordan. 

In 1987, I hosted Yitzhak Rabin (then Israel's Defence Minister) in Eilat. He
arrived there on the Day of Youth in Power, when I served as elected mayor.

During that year, in 1987 I left Eilat for the international boarding school
United World College of the Adriatic (Collegio del Mondo Unito dell’Adriatico)
in Duino, Trieste, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy. It was my first time overseas
and since then I never stopped travelling all over the globe; the college has
changed my life.

I returned to Israel in 1989 and served in the Israeli army, followed by
studies at Tel Aviv University’s Inter-Disciplinary Programme for Outstanding
Students. 

My dream to look at Eilat from the OTHER side of the bay was fulfilled in 1995
– after Jordan (Hussein) and Israel (Rabin) signed the peace accord. Rabin was
assassinated in November 1995, and left Israel for a doctorate at the
University of Oxford in 1996. 

>From Oxford I moved to Cambridge but in 2001 I fell in love at first sight
with Australia, when I was invited to deliver a public lecture on what I call
the Israeli language (the result of the Hebrew revival) at the University of
Sydney. At the time, I was a visiting professor at the National University of
Singapore, while on sabbatical from the University of Cambridge. I returned to
Singapore and Cambridge, but decided to look for an academic position in
Australia. When I arrived in Melbourne in 2004, I asked myself how I might
contribute to Australian society that was hosting me so graciously. 

I identified two pressing in situ issues: 
the exasperating bureaucracy (there are democracies, and then there are
aristocracies; some people might define our Israel as an adhocracy; modern
Australia was founded as a bureaucracy, and today is a professionalized one);
and 
the suffering of the Aboriginal people. 
I said to myself: How could an Israeli professor assist in reducing Australian
bureaucracy?!? I decided to invest my efforts in the Aboriginal issue.

Had I been a dentist, I would have tried pro bono to improve dental health
among the Aboriginal people. I once offered a toothpick to an Aboriginal
friend of mine after I shouted her a tender angus steak, to which she replied:
“What is this?” “It is a toothpick”, I said. “I don’t have any teeth”, she
retorted. (I had not noticed that she had chewed the steak with her gums.) 

Had I been a psychologist, I would have tried to assist some Aboriginal people
break their addiction to alcohol or smoking. But I am a linguist specializing
in the revival of Hebrew and the emergence of the Israeli language, a hybrid
language based on Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. 

So, I found a fascinating and multifaceted niche, in a totally virgin soil:
applying lessons from the Hebrew revival to the reclamation and empowerment of
Aboriginal languages and cultures. I decided to act in three fronts: macro,
micro and “MOOCro”: 

In the macro: since 2004: establishing “revivalistics”, a global,
trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation (no
native speakers, for example Hebrew, and the Barngarla Aboriginal language of
South Australia), revitalization (severely endangered, for example
Shanghainese, and Adnyamathanha of the Flinders Ranges, South Australia) and
reinvigoration (endangered, for example Welsh, and Te Reo Māori in Aotearoa,
i.e. New Zealand). 

In the micro: since 2011: reclaiming the Barngarla Aboriginal language of Eyre
Peninsula (e.g. Galinyala = Port Lincoln; Goordnada = Port Augusta; Waiala =
Whyalla; all in South Australia). This is not a laboratorial enterprise. In
2011 I asked the Barngarla community if they were interested and they told me
that they had been waiting for me for 50 years. How do I – a Jewish Israeli,
son of a Holocaust survivor – help Aboriginal people undo what I call
“linguicide” (language killing) done by English colonizers and reclaim the
Barngarla language? By means of a dictionary written in 1844 by a Lutheran
Christian German, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann! This is, then, a patently
cosmopolitan enterprise.

In the MOOCro, so to speak: since 2015: creating and convening a free MOOC
(Massive Open Online Course) entitled Language Revival: Securing the Future of
Endangered Languages. So far I have had 12,000 learners from 190 countries
(including Syria and Afghanistan). 

I have detected three types of benefits of language revival:
The first benefit is ethical: what is right: Aboriginal languages are worthy
of reviving, out of a desire for historic social justice. They deserve to be
reclaimed in order to right the wrong of the past. These languages were wiped
out in a process of linguicide. I personally know dozens of Aboriginal people
who were “stolen” from their parents when they were kids. I believe in what I
call “Native Tongue Title”, which would be an extension of “Native Title”
(compensation for the loss of land). I propose that the Australian government
grant financial compensation for the loss of languages – to cover efforts to
resuscitate a lost language or empower an endangered one. In my view, language
is more important than land. Loss of language leads not only to loss of
cultural autonomy, intellectual sovereignty, spirituality and heritage, but
also to the loss of the “soul”, metaphorically speaking.

The second benefit for Aboriginal language revival is aesthetic: what is
beautiful: Diversity is beautiful, aesthetically pleasing. Just as it is fun
to embrace koalas (in the hope that they have had their nails cut short) or to
photograph baby rhinos and elephants, so, too, it is fun to listen to a
plethora of languages and to learn odd and unique words. For example, I love
the word mamihlapinatapai, in the Yaghan language, spoken in Chile’s Tierra
del Fuego archipelago. The word is very precise and to the point in its
meaning. Any attempt to translate it cannot be performed in fewer words than
the following: “a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will
offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer
themselves”. Despite the fact that any word in a language is translatable,
there is a difference, at least aesthetically, between saying mamihlapinatapai
and saying “a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will
offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer
themselves.” As Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he
understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that
goes to his heart”.

The third benefit for Aboriginal language revival is utilitarian: what is
economically viable: Language reclamation empowers individuals who have lost
their sense of pride and at times even the reason to live. This wellbeing
empowerment can save the Australian government millions of dollars that would
otherwise need to be invested in mental health and incarceration. Not to
mention the various cognitive and health benefits of bilingualism. For
example, native bilinguals are cleverer than themselves as monolinguals;
native bilingualism delays dementia by more than 4 years. 
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann’s forthcoming book, Revivalistics,
Cross-Fertilization and Wellbeing: Awakening Hebrew and Other Sleeping Beauty
Languages, is in print with Oxford University Press. 

Professor Zuckermann’s brief bio:
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (D.Phil. Oxford; Ph.D. Cambridge, titular; M.A.
Tel Aviv, summa cum laude) is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at
the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is a chief investigator in a large
research project assessing language revival and mental health, funded by
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). 
He is the author of the seminal bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A
Beautiful Language; Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in
Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), three chapters of the Israeli Tingo
(Keren, 2011), Engaging – A Guide to Interacting Respectfully and Reciprocally
with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their Arts Practices
and Intellectual Property (2015), the first online Dictionary of the Barngarla
Aboriginal Language (2017), and Barngarla Alphabet Book (2019). He is the
editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (2012), Jewish Language
Contact (2014), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology
of Language, and the co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival (2014). 
He is the founder of Revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry
surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. In 2011
he launched, with the Barngarla Aboriginal communities of Eyre Peninsula,
South Australia, the reclamation of the Barngarla language. 
Professor Zuckermann is elected member of the Australian Institute of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the Foundation for
Endangered Languages (FEL). He is President of the Australian Association for
Jewish Studies (AAJS) and was President of AustraLex in 2013-2015, Australian
Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011, and Gulbenkian Research
Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge in 2000-2004. 

He has been Consultant and Expert Witness in (corpus) lexicography and
(forensic) linguistics, in court cases all over the globe, e.g. the
Philippines, Singapore, USA and Australia. 
He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai International Studies
University and taught at the University of Cambridge, University of
Queensland, National University of Singapore, Middlebury College (Vermont,
USA), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University, Shanghai
International Studies University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, University of Haifa, and Miami University (Florida). 

He has been Research Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science; Rockefeller
Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy;
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Israel
Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Institute for
Advanced Study, La Trobe University; Mahidol University (Bangkok); Tel Aviv
University; Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies
University; and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo, National Institute for Japanese
Language and Linguistics, Tokyo. He has been Denise Skinner Scholar at St
Hugh’s College Oxford, Scatcherd European Scholar at the University of Oxford,
and scholar at the United World College of the Adriatic (Italy). 
His MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Language Revival: Securing the Future
of Endangered Languages, has attracted 12,000 learners from 190 countries
(speakers of hundreds of distinct languages):
https://www.edx.org/course/language-revival-securing-future-adelaidex-lang101x
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news79582.html
http://www.facebook.com/ProfessorZuckermann


Check out the LINGUIST List's full post (including pictures and videos of
Professor Zuckermann's work on linguicide and revitalization) at the Linguist
List Blog: https://blog.linguistlist.org/
Donate to the LINGUIST List here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

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--The LL Team



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