Roads Not Taken
Jul. 6th, 2008 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI just finished reading Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language - a fascinating book, and one which I intend to review soon - and fell to ruminating on my erratic training as an amateur linguist. If you're willing to endure a bit of autobiography, it's under the cut; if not, well...
I don't know just when I got interested in languages and linguistics. I know that I had had at least a glancing encounter with Esperanto by the time I was eleven or so, and had taught myself the IPA by about the same time, but other than that I can't pin anything down.
Be that as it may, when I enrolled at UC Santa Barbara in the fall of 1975, I took up a double major, in mathematics and linguistics. My first formal linguistics course was Linguistics 20, Introduction to Linguistics, taught by not-yet-Klingon Mark Okrand. After that, I plunged into the major courses: phonetics and phonology (which I aced; I was the only one in the class who could hear the difference between Finnish 'hk' and 'kk'), syntax (entirely devoted to the now-discredited theory of Transformational Grammar), and semantics (a readings course, devoted to Austin's How to Do Things with Words). At this point things were interrupted: my mathematics adviser, the late Paul Halmos, persuaded me to drop linguistics so as to focus on mathematics and graduate a year early.
I did take one more class in linguistics, on California Indian languages, taught, again, by Okrand. I didn't get to the two-term course in historical and comparative linguistics or the field methods class. The linguistics I've learned since has been haphazard, picked up from books I've chanced on in one or another bookstore, or - more recently - from recommendations on the various linguistics blogs I frequent. The odd thing is that the parts of linguistics that interest me the most, these days, are parts that were not covered in my formal education. Pragmatics: Grice's seminal work was only a few years in the past when I was in college, and probably would not have been discussed in an undergraduate course. Pidgins and creoles: Bickerton was developing his controversial theories at about that same time. Typology and universals: Greenberg's work on word-order was only about ten years in the past, and Berlin and Kay half that, even if I had taken the hist/comp course. I don't know whether cross-cultural semantic studies like Levinson's Space in Language and Cognition (reviewed here) were yet in vogue.
All of which comes to my mind because of Deutscher's work. A good bit of it, especially in the early part, was already familiar to me, at least in broad outline, but much was new, and the details were absorbing. I have no idea how much of it was, in the '70s, or is now standard fare in courses in historical linguistics; and I wonder how much I lost by following Dr. Halmos' advice. (I have some idea what I gained, and what-might-have-beens are pretty useless, but even so...)
I don't know just when I got interested in languages and linguistics. I know that I had had at least a glancing encounter with Esperanto by the time I was eleven or so, and had taught myself the IPA by about the same time, but other than that I can't pin anything down.
Be that as it may, when I enrolled at UC Santa Barbara in the fall of 1975, I took up a double major, in mathematics and linguistics. My first formal linguistics course was Linguistics 20, Introduction to Linguistics, taught by not-yet-Klingon Mark Okrand. After that, I plunged into the major courses: phonetics and phonology (which I aced; I was the only one in the class who could hear the difference between Finnish 'hk' and 'kk'), syntax (entirely devoted to the now-discredited theory of Transformational Grammar), and semantics (a readings course, devoted to Austin's How to Do Things with Words). At this point things were interrupted: my mathematics adviser, the late Paul Halmos, persuaded me to drop linguistics so as to focus on mathematics and graduate a year early.
I did take one more class in linguistics, on California Indian languages, taught, again, by Okrand. I didn't get to the two-term course in historical and comparative linguistics or the field methods class. The linguistics I've learned since has been haphazard, picked up from books I've chanced on in one or another bookstore, or - more recently - from recommendations on the various linguistics blogs I frequent. The odd thing is that the parts of linguistics that interest me the most, these days, are parts that were not covered in my formal education. Pragmatics: Grice's seminal work was only a few years in the past when I was in college, and probably would not have been discussed in an undergraduate course. Pidgins and creoles: Bickerton was developing his controversial theories at about that same time. Typology and universals: Greenberg's work on word-order was only about ten years in the past, and Berlin and Kay half that, even if I had taken the hist/comp course. I don't know whether cross-cultural semantic studies like Levinson's Space in Language and Cognition (reviewed here) were yet in vogue.
All of which comes to my mind because of Deutscher's work. A good bit of it, especially in the early part, was already familiar to me, at least in broad outline, but much was new, and the details were absorbing. I have no idea how much of it was, in the '70s, or is now standard fare in courses in historical linguistics; and I wonder how much I lost by following Dr. Halmos' advice. (I have some idea what I gained, and what-might-have-beens are pretty useless, but even so...)
