33.3498, Field Linguist Spotlight: DeLancey

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3498. Thu Nov 10 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3498, Field Linguist Spotlight: DeLancey

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Date: 
From: Billy Dickson [billyd at linguistlist.org]
Subject: None


Professor of Linguistics, Scott DeLancey

Given the theme “Return of the field linguist”, I guess I’ll talk
about how “the field” is often where you find it. But first maybe a
little about why I went looking.

When I was trying to decide about going to university, after a “gap
year” or so as a wandering hippy, my father (an English prof) gave me
his copies of both Sapir’s and Bloomfield’s Language and suggested
that that might be something I’d like. I read them both and decided
that indeed that was something worth going to college for. Cornell in
those days had a very self-consciously Structuralist department
(Hockett was still there), so I was brought up to be suspicious of
that newfangled stuff coming out of MIT (as indeed I still am). The
Linguistics major required study of a non-European language, and since
I started college in the middle of the year, I had to wait until
summer to start a language. Cornell had intensive summer programs in
Chinese, Japanese, and Tamil, in rotation. My freshman year it was
Chinese, so that’s what I started, and that’s how I ended up in
Trans-Himalayan. I took several Classical Chinese classes from Prof.
Mei Tsulin, who convinced me of the need to know something about Tai
languages in order to understand the early history of Chinese. So
after I graduated I joined the Peace Corps and went to Thailand to
teach English and learn Thai. I was teaching in Phrae, and nearby was
Ban Dong, one of two villages where the Ngwi language Mpi is spoken,
and my first fieldwork experience involved bicycling over to Ban Dong
to collect Mpi vocabulary.

After Thailand I started grad school at Indiana, where I could study
Tibetan. But even more exciting,  my advisor, LaRaw Maran, was a
Kachin from Myanmar, and from my first semester there he started
teaching me all about Jinghpaw. (This is sort of an inversion of the
traditional concept of “fieldwork”, as the source for the language I
was studying was formally my teacher. On the other hand, whatever the
formalities of the situation, if you don’t see the person showing you
their language for your research as your teacher, you’re doing it
wrong).
That was my introduction to “hierarchical” verb agreement, which has
fascinated me ever since. I also started working with some local
Tibetan refugees on the Lhasa variety, including Thubten Anyetsang,
whose Little Tibet restaurant in Bloomington is worth a trip, and who
first introduced me to the real world of evidentiality. My first job
after the Ph.D. was at Colorado, where again there were local Tibetan
speakers to work with. During my second year at Colorado Tom Givón,
just hired at Oregon, called me up to recruit me to the program he was
building there.

In the meantime my sister had been working in the Northwest
Territories on Native issues, and had married John T’seleie in
Rádeyîlîkóé/Fort Good Hope. So the summer before I started at Oregon I
took my family up to Rádeyîlîkóé and spent the summer studying K’asho
Go’tine (then called the “Hare” dialect of “Slavey”) with Therese
Pierrot and Vicki Orlais. It was Vicki who first explained mirativity
to me (“lõ is there because you didn’t know”), although it took me a
few years to understand why that was important.

In Oregon I met Yungdrung, who was finally able to get across to me a
dim understanding of the Lhasa Tibetan evidential system (among many
other things). I also met folks from the Umatilla, Warm Springs, and
Klamath Tribes, and began to think both about these languages and
about language revitalization, which at the time was still more a
dream than the reality which it has become. One of my favorite
memories is when my sister and brother-in-law came to visit and I took
John out to meet Archie Benn, one of the last first-language Tututni
speakers. When I told them that we linguists considered their
languages to be related they were both quite skeptical, but after a
fascinating couple of hours of exchanging vocabulary they convinced
themselves that, indeed, they were linguistic cousins. Later during
the 1990’s the Klamath Tribe officially introduced me to Celia
Langell, the last person I know of who remembered a lot of
specifically Modoc forms.

And, of course, speaking of “the Field”, we have to talk about Field
Methods classes, which for so many of us are so much more than just
classes. My first Ph.D. student, Carol Genetti, found her dissertation
project in Tom Givón’s FM class on Newar. In Nepal Carol met a Sunuwar
speaker, Tangka Raj Sunuwar, brought him back to Oregon to study
English and work with us for another FM class. Sunuwar is a Kiranti
language, along with Jinghpaw one of the four subgroups most essential
to the comparative morphological reconstruction of hierarchical
agreement that I did for my dissertation, and at last I had a chance
to hear a Kiranti language myself.

In 2006 Gwen Hyslop attended the first Northeast Indian Linguistics
Society (NEILS) conference in Guwahati in 2006, presenting work on
Kurtöp from another Field Methods class. Gwen’s enthusiastic report of
the conference inspired me to attend the next one, where I began work
on Bodo and started to make the contacts which have allowed me to
conduct and supervise fieldwork across Northeast India. On my first
visit my host, Prof. Jyotiprakash Tamuli, asked me to do a
demonstration field methods class for his MA students, and that’s how
I was introduced to the Bodo language, and met Prafulla Basumatary,
who served as our speaker. The Northeast is astonishingly
multilingual, with well over 100 languages representing four major
families. As a result university students as well as community
language activists have a very enthusiastic interest in linguistics.
When in India I spend far more time helping these folks than chasing
down data myself, with the result that whenever I visit there are
young linguists lining up to show me what they have found – the field
is brought to me.

My favorite story along this line starts with my long-term conviction
that a postverbal 2nd person agreement form found in some NEI
languages was cognate with a 2nd person prefix found elsewhere in the
family. (When I tell this to outsiders I have to find some way to
convince them that this was important to me, but you will all
understand). To prove the point I needed a language with a postverbal
form that was demonstrably derived from an auxiliary construction. I
suspected that such a language might turn up in Manipur. In 2009 and
then again in 2010 I was invited to give a set of lectures at Manipur
University. The second time, when I walked into the Linguistics
Department, Prof. Yashawanta Singh gave me a copy of his
just-published grammar of Koireng, which as it happens has exactly the
form I was looking for. Literally moments later Prof. Madhubala Devi,
the department head, handed me a dissertation which one of her
students had just written. It was Hemabati Kongkham’s grammar of
Moyon, which also had exactly the form I was looking for. The next day
a PhD student, Koninglee Wanglar, invited me to come to his village in
Chandel talk to the elders about language development. One of the
elders, Egbert Khartu, had written and locally published a grammar
sketch of his language, Monsang, which also had the evidence I needed.
So in the end I was able to prove my point without needing to do any
direct fieldwork on my own.

Recently I had a chance to go “back” to two fields I had only known
from books. Besides Jinghpaw and Kiranti, two other essential
witnesses for my comparative dissertation in 1980 were Rgyalrong, in
Sichuan, based on a field description by Jin Peng, and Chepang, in
Nepal, based on fieldwork by Ross Caughley. During the teens I had an
undergraduate student, Gyu Lha, from Sichuan, whose first language was
a close relative of Jin’s Rgyalrong. And I had a Ph.D. student,
Marie-Caroline Pons, who was writing a grammar of Chepang. In the
winter of 2019 I visited both Gyu Lha in her home village in Aba
Prefecture and Marie-Caroline at her field site in Chitwan, and so was
at last able to actually meet people who speak two more of the
languages which were so essential to my reconstruction work back at
the beginning 40 years ago.

If you are reading this – and certainly if you have read all the way
to the end – then surely I don’t need to convince you of the value of
the Linguist List to all of us. Why not make a contribution now?



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