Stories of a life, part three Ron Scollon first draft April 2008
This file continues the stories. ‘Part three’ doesn’t have any meaning except that it consists of stories 31 through 40.
I Could Be Bought
I gave a talk a few years ago at the Department of Linguistics of my old 3-time alma mater, the University of Hawai’i. Mostly I talked about our variety of academic activities over the years since we’d left Honolulu. People were quite interested and then Byron Bender, the long-time Chair of the Department – also known to some as the ‘Big Chairman’ – asked the first question: ‘This is very interesting and important work, but do you consider it linguistics?’
Kenneth Pike was often asked whether he was a linguist or a missionary translator and his answer was that he was a mule. Sometimes he felt like he was a horse and sometimes he felt like he was a donkey. I don’t think he ever said whether linguistics was the horse or the donkey. And I don’t think he ever mentioned that a mule is a sexual neuter who can do a lot of work but who produces no progeny.
So what am I?
I’ve found it interesting over the years that some of the things I’ve done have required an answer to this question of identity and some haven’t. I don’t think anybody ever asked me, ‘Well, are you a guitarist or aren’t you?’ They might say, ‘Could you play something for me?’ Bud Carpenter didn’t ask me if I was or could be a stone mason. He told me to get some rocks and build a small retaining wall behind the garbage cans at the back of the kitchen. So I built the wall somehow and then went on to build a lot of other ones. They were still there the last I googled ‘Silver Cliff Ranch’ and looked at the pictures. But that’s a very different focus. It’s a focus on what you can do as opposed to what you claim to be. Maybe linguists can’t really do anything and so there’s nothing they can show for it.
If I make the mistake of saying I’m a linguist, the next thing someone asks is, ‘How many languages do you speak?’ That’s a fair question, really, because that’s one meaning of the word. But an academic linguist isn’t any more likely – these days – to speak a lot of languages than a zoologist is likely to be a frog or a salamander or an elephant or whatever other animals he or she studies. I can say approximately how many languages I’ve studied; I’ve studied 14 languages: German, Latin, French, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Kosraian, Gwich’in, Chipewyan, Hupa, Navajo, Tanacross, Koyukon are the main ones, but I’ve also studied bits and pieces of dozens of other ones.
Elsewhere I’ve written about my mother’s Aunt Maybeth and all the other aunts and uncles and cousins who were missionaries and they were at least practical linguists. And I’ve also written about the missionary conferences where as kids we met so many missionaries and even missionary linguists like Kenneth Pike. But so did George Dila and my sisters and Schneider because we were all in these things together. And none of them are linguists. Far from it.