In which I tell you a Secret
You know, I spend all my time working on Blogamundo, but there is another linguistic endeavor else I really want to get into some day, and that’s to do fieldwork on an unwritten language.
Which is why Eric Bacovic’s post on language documentation over at Language Log caught my eye.
It’s always seemed to me that “field work” (a term I’ve never liked) is the quintessential linguistics task. But alas, I never really have, to speak of. UCSD students, it seems, are luckier in this regard, as the article Eric points to describes:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It can be a highly theoretical field, and a minority of linguistics graduate programs in the country require hands-on courses in documenting and unraveling little-studied languages.
Somehow I managed to miss out on Linguistics 140 at Berkeley. I did take John Ohala’s phonology course, where we all interviewed a speaker of some language, and then wrote a description of the sound system of their language. That was my absolute favorite class–I must have driven the poor exchange student down the hallway well-nigh insane with my semester’s worth of pestering about the sounds of Japanese. Forgive me, Ayumi Taniguchi, wherever you are.
But Mary Haas was right: to really study a language, you have go the whole nine yards, and that means producing a dictionary, a grammar, and finally some texts. Sounds about right to me.
But who knows, maybe some day I’ll go back to school or figure out how to get a grant or something and then do some real fieldwork.
Man, that would be fun.
2 comments.
Technorati tags: Fun, linguistics
Are you sure the only reason for pestering Ayumi was linguistic?
I agree about Field methods classes - best class in linguistics - I managed to take them three times - and now have the pleasure of offering them (when we can get the students and the funding for the language teacher!).