You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]
💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.
Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package.
The senders: the Finnish-French linguist Riitta Välimaa-Blum (RVB); and the Chinese-American linguist Zheng-Sheng Zhang (ZSZ). (I’m Swiss-American, but two generations in; in contrast, RVB started in Finland and ended up in Nice, while ZSZ started in China and ended up in San Diego).
Meanwhile, they were exact contemporaries in grad school at Ohio State. Right up to their doctoral degrees (well, yes, this is mostly about me me me):
RVB: OSU PhD in linguistics, 1988: Finnish existential clauses — their syntax, pragmatics and intonation (Mary Beckman, adviser; plus committee of Michael Geis, Brian Joseph, and Arnold Zwicky); it’s the intonation part that made Mary Beckman a good choice of adviser
ZSZ: OSU PhD in linguistics, 1988: Tone and Tone Sandhi in Chinese (Arnold Zwicky, adviser); sandhi, of all sorts, is a lifelong concern of mine, from my 1965 dissertation on Sanskrit in generative phonology though more recent work on what I call shapes (meanwhile, ZSZ did some really cool descriptive work on tone sandhi)
They’re friends with one another, obviously. And they are both really nice people; I am delighted to have them as friends. (If I say that you’re really nice, it’s a high compliment, a judgment on your character. I have no better descriptor, though I do understand that this one is insipid)
Multicultural and multilingual. We have now slipped into the world of linguists — my colleagues and my former students — who are complicatedly multicultural and multilingual and have fascinating life histories. I have, in fact, a gigantic store of such people. Just one more: the Armenian-(French) Canadian Luc Vartan Baronian, who’s appeared many times on this blog.
And then we come to people whose multiplicity defeats the framing of a formula. Just two examples, one from a former student, Bruno Estigarribia, who’s now Argentine-American, with a bunch of other stuff hanging off that; another from my late colleague (and the greatest of the champions of my career, from 1966 on) Ilse Lehiste (it starts with Estonian-American and then explodes into some sort of lattice).
In the beginning. How did I get into this world?
Go back with me now to my childhood in West Lawn PA, a solid working-class planned community in Pennsylvania Dutch country, minutes from farm and forest (though further away from my summer farmwork), but with exceptional schools and easy access to the city of Reading. I was an eerily smart kid, devouring book experiences of the world, developing enthusiasms for places and ways of living I’d never experienced first-hand. Notably the five countries of Central Asia (the -stans): Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhistan. I think it started because I was enchanted by the names in the old list of Soviet Socialist Republics, but I ended up fascinated by life on the high desert. And by the idea of trading posts as places of cultural exchange.
Back as a teenager, I knew that I would be going away, that I wouldn’t stick with the newspaper work I was doing then. I wasn’t at all naive; I could get around New York City by myself, and I saw plenty of raw public life in the Reading area (the Mafia in operation, prostitution, sexual violence, and much more) through my reporting.
But NYC, a great global city where different national cultures, subcultures, and languages clashed and meshed, was a beacon. I wanted that. I wanted immersion in variety, wanted to live surrounded by all that jazz. Among people who could do all sorts of things that were beyond me: fabulous things, outrageous things, edgy things. Running towards the fire.
Sometimes you can get what you want (not just what Mick Jagger thinks you need). I did. I started studying languages and cultures from all over the world, took grad students from everywhere (see above), some of them working on their own languages, some on others in the field, celebrated holidays with them, eventually traveled for my research. Reworked published descriptions. Collaborated with colleagues in analyzing data from many languages. Went to their lectures. It was pretty much my dream.
And I got paid to do it. It’s all part of what professors are expected to do for their wages! (And, to return to the beginning of this posting, more ordinary workers are not) Lucky bear Arnold.
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