Joanna Hlavacek reports for LJWorld.com on a heartening development:
[Andrew] McKenzie, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, recently secured a grant from the federal government that will allow him to continue his great-grandfather’s work in preserving the Kiowa language — a pressing need, McKenzie says, as the number of fluent Kiowa speakers dwindles by the year.
“Languages only exist in our minds, so once those speakers leave us, they take the knowledge with them, essentially, unless that knowledge is preserved through documentation,” says McKenzie, who began formally studying Kiowa about 20 years ago. “In that sense, the documentation becomes essential because it would allow the language to survive into the future.” […]
Earlier this month, McKenzie learned he’d won a three-year grant from the Documenting Endangered Languages program of the National Science Foundation. The $112,000 award will allow him to “fill a gap” in the study of Kiowa grammar, work his great-grandfather started as a kid passing notes in his native tongue — speaking Kiowa was strictly forbidden at the boarding school he and other Native Americans were forced to attend — during class to his girlfriend, funnily enough.
That early system devised by Parker McKenzie became the basis for methods still used today, though there’s no consensus on the matter, McKenzie says. The Kiowa tribe has never voted to designate an official writing system.
I’m glad the NSF has gotten more sensible about how they spend their money; forty-five years ago, they blew a bunch of it sending me to grad school in linguistics, and all they got for it was this blog. (Thanks, Trevor!)
I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say we are very grateful to the NSF, though perhaps some might feel that they should have spent a little more on the Hat and a little less on Noam-ero Uno and friends.
What ever happened in those grad school days? I’ve read this blog for 10+ years and feel I have only one or two paragraphs of LanguageHat bio 🙂 Weren’t you in math, once, too?
I was! I was a math major in college (at Occidental) and expected to be a mathematician, but (as I’ve said somewhere) math is a mountain that is easy to climb until suddenly it isn’t, and I’d had an easy ascent until somewhere in sophomore year when a) it started getting hard (this is the point in letters home from would-be ballplayers when they say “Today they started throwing curve balls”), and b) the math department insisted on my taking more and more calculus courses, which I hated but which were supposedly practical, and fewer courses on supposedly useless things like number theory, which I loved. So since I liked languages and had gotten to know people in the Languages and Linguistics department, I switched majors and never looked back. (Indeed, I now find specialized math articles pretty much as impenetrable as if I’d never taken a course.)
In grad school I had a ball studying languages (Homeric Greek! Gothic! Old Irish!!), but when it came time to stop taking courses and start writing my dissertation, the fun stopped and the hell began. I sweated out a couple of years of it and, after spending a year teaching linguistics and English at the college level and realizing I hated teaching, I dropped out and never looked back. After several years of crappy minimum-wage jobs (during which I never once regretted leaving academia — that’s how hellish it was), I got into proofreading and then editing and then learned about blogs and here we are.
I love both calculus and number theory, but I have to concur that the former is far, far more useful than the latter.
Yeah, but usefulness has never meant much to me. In fact, I naturally gravitate to the most useless topics (Old Irish!).
You need both (and many other things) to study the Riemann hypothesis, the Holy Grail of mathematics (at least since Fermat’s last was proven, but likely even before that).
I read “McKenzie” and immediately wondered if he was related to Parker (having read Laurel Watkins’ grammar); then read great-grandfather and thought “Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni,”
http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/dharbour/Watkins-Harbour-McKenzie-Orthography.pdf
You need both Gothic and Old Irish to work on the Riemann hypothesis? I can understand needing Old Irish, but as far as I know Gothic is only required for working on the Documentary hypothesis.
The Riemann Hypothesis is much more important than Fermat’s Last; the main importance of the latter was the amount of machinery that was developed by people trying to prove it. (The machinery turned out to be useful for lots of other things.) There are quite a number of theorems which begin, “Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis is true, …”.
Me, I do classical Euclidean geometry. It’s a quiet place, but there’s still some interesting stuff to find.
You can use ‘Ellenic, Hebrew, or many others instead of Gothic. The important thing is that you avoid losing and/or transposing digits, which is a problem with Roman and/or Arabic numerals.
Just to make sure everyone reads this 30-page paper on “The Linguistic Genius of Parker McKenzie’s Kiowa Alphabet”:
“(Dr)” would be Dr. h. c. in German usage for example.
And in the end it all fits on an English typewriter, except for the macron for vowel length.
That’s ‘Ebrew nowadays (cf. Ivrit not *Hivrit; written in Hebrew script with an ayin /ʕ/, the historic voiced pharyngeal fricative). But thanks for the clarifications.
This bein’ a heducated blog, comments are velcome in ’Ellenic, ’Ebrew, or of course the King’s Hinglish.
Heggzackly.
“Edge and og”.
There used to be a quite useful dictionary (sadly there was no verb conjugation or noun declension help) out of the University of Oklahoma; it is “gone” as of late 2017, but can still be found via the https://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/collections-and-research/native-american-languages/map-of-oklahoma-languages/kiowa-language/ if you look on the wayback machine.
Perhaps it might have been privated for exclusive tribal use
I was a math major in college (at Occidental) and expected to be a mathematician, but (as I’ve said somewhere) math is a mountain that is easy to climb until suddenly it isn’t, and I’d had an easy ascent until somewhere in sophomore year when a) it started getting hard (this is the point in letters home from would-be ballplayers when they say “Today they started throwing curve balls”)
Douglas Hofstadter has an eloquent description of this (in the form of a response to a letter from an 8th grader), including a baseball riff:
One of the things you learn is that there is always someone smarter than you – maybe older and better informed, maybe younger and a natural, maybe a specialist with deeper background… it’s a community, people age, it’s not a contest…
Math is a language like many another, but it’s not at all a spoken language…
I’d say the part about jobs, especially secure and decently paid jobs, is a contest.
One of the things you learn is that there is always someone smarter than you
Yup.
With the internet and all, there are fewer small ponds to be the biggest fish in.
With the internet and all, there are fewer small ponds to be the biggest fish in.
There are more small ponds than ever before ! It’s easy to jump from one into another, as between goldfish bowls. For a goldfish that might seem like sailing the seven seas.
But the global village never arrived. The internet is just a bunch of yokels who think they’ve hit the big time.
I suppose there’s a question of how long you stick it out in the minor leagues before concluding it’s not going to happen. I knew a guy in college who went on to get a Ph.D. in math and then spent on the order of a decade scuffling around in a series of temporary non-tenure-track junior gigs at various universities before at some point giving up pursuit of that career path a few years before he hit 40. I have no idea whether he ultimately couldn’t quite hit the Abelian-group-theory equivalent of big league pitching or just couldn’t manage the office-politics side of what it takes beyond pure technical chops to land one of those secure and decently paid jobs.
Andrew McKenzie was interviewed by the Vocal Fries podcast in 2019 (transcript). He was then writing a reference grammar of semantics for Kiowa, covering e.g. quantifiers, modals, and evidentiality. At about 58:30, there’s this exchange:
Followed by what sounds to me like a diss against the Bloomfield/Sapir school for being bad at documenting semantics, but maybe I’m confused.
a diss against the Bloomfield/Sapir school for being bad at documenting semantics
So valid …
Bloomfield’s Menominee Lexicon is a mere 289 pages. and Sapir’s dictionary of Southern Paiute is just a sketch, at 215 pages. (Yes, I just counted.)
It’s hard to keep up with these modern technical usages. Perhaps dictionaries don’t come under “semantics.” Syntax, perhaps?
If he’s complaining about their treatment of quantifiers, modals, and evidentiality and the like being less thorough than it might be nowadays, well, yeah. Bloomfield and Sapir were really crap at Powerpoint presentations, too. Happily, there has been quite a bit of research into such things since 1949 that McKenzie could look at.
It must be very satisfying to know all about “how syntax works.” Even if that’s just the easy bit of linguistics.
McKenzie has a presentation and a sample chapter, linked from his web page.
The fact that he’s Parker McKenzie’s great-grandson biases me to respect him by default. Although he regards himself a formal semanticist, his chapter is quite readable, unlike the dismal style I associate with that tradition.
I think that what I’m finding objectionable is the way he implies that
(a) “semantics” is something quite separate from syntax (and lexicon)
and
(b) the great “structuralists”* just ignored it, for ideological reasons
Of these (a) is obviously false. Of the list on p3 of his presentation, every item is one you’d expect to see treated under “syntax” (or even “morphology”) in a comprehensive modern descriptive grammar, except “lexical semantics” (and parts of even that are likely to be included.) Banning meaning from syntax is Chomskyan, not structuralist.
And (b) is also false, as he kinda-concedes on p10, an exercise in misdirection meant to create the idea that what’s he’s doing is some sort of radical new departure rather than (valuable) additions to an old but happily still-developing tradition begun by – Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield.
There is a sort of kernel of truth in this; if you look at one of the grammatical descriptions created in the Heroic Age of structuralism, they are long on phonology and morphology but very skimpy on syntax. Quite a lot of what in a modern grammar would be treated as syntax is scattered among the morphology parts, but the fact is that the modern focus on syntax didn’t really get started before people started reacting to Chomsky’s work (as I’ve said before, though his own work is meretricious, he really did indirectly cause a lot of progress to be made in linguistics.)
But the idea that the structuralists were comparatively weak in this area because ideological hangups got in their way is an amazing misreading. (It could hardly survive any actual reading of Sapir; and although Bloomfield does make some rather startling Wundtian pronouncements like the one McKenzie cherry-picks, his actual practice of linguistics was quite another matter.)
It’s like saying that the reason that the great nineteenth-century engineers didn’t build electric railways is because they were obsessed with steam and disliked electricity.
I really don’t like this running down of great pioneering forebears to make your own work look more original and more significant than it really is.
He seems to want to invent Functional Grammar, but he’s arrived too late by some decades. (And Construction Grammar is going to be the Destiny of Grammar, anyway.)
* Scare quotes because lumping Bloomfield and Sapir’s approaches together is historically illiterate.
If you don’t believe that semantics “is something quite separate from syntax (and lexicon),” you probably don’t hold yourself out as a specialist in it as a coherent/discrete subfield of academic linguistics. Any such purported academic subfield is predictably going to self-select for scholars who think it’s an actual thing. I recall being vaguely suspicious of the claims of such distinctness and autonomy during the formal semantics class I took as an undergraduate way back in 1985, but that was to be quite frank the semester in which I was most distracted from my nominal academic work by the numerous other pleasures of undergraduate life* so I’ve never been super-confident how well founded my judgments from that period on scholarly disputes actually are.
*That Semantics class was taught by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donka_Farkas, and given those other distractions any ongoing failure on my part to appreciate the glories of formal semantics should not be specifically blamed on her.
@ DE : agree, giving the devil his due :
…. as I’ve said before, though his own work is meretricious, he really did indirectly cause a lot of progress to be made in linguistics…
but perhaps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_culpa ?
The parallel had occurred to me …
(It still surprises me that quite intelligent people can’t grasp that good consequences sometimes arise from bad things, and that it doesn’t mean that the bad things were actually good in retrospect.)
I think even my damning-with-very-faint-praise-indeed is a bit unfair to Chomsky. He had some genuinely very interesting ideas initially. They didn’t actually work out (for reasons which are also interesting), but unfortunately his own response has been to progressively empty his theories of actual content while attempting a kind of scorched-earth policy during his retreat.
Ah, he’s trying to get funded.
@ DM : indeed !
My impression is that ANC may have more or less created the academic/economic basis for a great part of this country’s cog sci institutions (but I’m no expert and would be interested to know of any serious work in intellectual history about such matters..).
I suspect a lot of future scientific funding opportunities will be devoted to UFO studies, homeopathic medicine, attempts to communicate with planet Xenu, get those NeoSF proposals Chatted up ASAP…
We obviously need a big and lavishly-funded symposium on Chomsky, Theodicy, and the Inscrutability of Both Historical Causation and Divine Providence (Not to Mention the Disbursement of Academic Funding). “It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!”
Sounds like one of those academic-spam emails inviting you to chair a highly prestigious symposium in China.
(In fact, I might incorporate it into an automated reply to such emails, on the same principle as someone I used to know who replied to all unsolicited phone calls with “I am so glad you called! Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb, brother/sister?”)
Chomskidicy may have some mileage in it as an academic discipline. I can already envisage my own pioneering contributions to this exciting new interdisciplinary field. Hatters have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor here. Let’s go for the burgeon!
felix culpa
Felix had a guilt complex.
Felix maxima culpa.
And Oscar tried to knock it out of him.
That’s not what I mean; I mean that research gets funded if it’s “innovative”, not so much otherwise.
I believe C got a lot of electircal engineering money back in the day so as to make machines talk and was a pretty successful rainmaker but maybe that’s an issue for a forensic anthropologist…
The bod on this hiphilangsci podcast
https://hiphilangsci.net/2024/09/01/podcast-episode-41/
says it was military-funded, and attributes ANC’s weird obviously-counterfactual views on syntax and meaning to a sort of willed dissociation whereby he convinced himself that Real Linguistics could never be of any practical assistance to the US War Machine.
It’s a cute idea, but it seems like an unnecessary hypothesis to me. Quite apart from the whole attributing-convenient-subconcious-motives-to-others thing, which seems to me to be not much different from astrology unless you’ve got some actual concrete evidence. Psychoanalysis-at-a-distance. Meh.
My hypothesis is that our friend was traumatized by a C+ in Calc II because he had trouble with change of variables in integration – which is all about composing and manipulating transformations, and is a good example of the kind of thing Chomskyan syntax can describe.