In this interview, we talk to Nick Thieberger about the value of historical documentation for linguistic research, and how this documentation can be preserved and made accessible today and in the future in digital form. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 35 Crane, Gregory, ed. 1987–. Project Perseus. Web resource: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ Gardner, Helen, Rachel Hendery, Stephen Morey, Patrick McConvell et al. 2020. Howitt and Fison’s Archive. Web resource: https://howittandfison.org/ Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, George Aaron Broadwell, Michel R. Oudijk, Laurie Allen, May Plumb, and Mike Zarafonetis. 2016. Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec, first edition. Web resource: http://ticha.haverford.edu/ Takau, Toukolau. 2011. “Koaiseno”, in Natrauswen nig Efat, Stories from South Efate, ed. Nick Thieberger, pp. 88–90. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Open access: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/28967 Takau, Toukolau. 2017. “Koaiseno”, in recording NT1-20170718. https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/NT1/items/20170718 Thieberger, Nick. 2017. Digital Daisy Bates. Web resource: http://bates.org.au Thieberger, Nick, Linda Barwick, Nick Enfield, Jakelin Troy, Myfany Turpin and Roman Marchant Matus. 2022–. Nyingarn: a platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages. Web resource: https://nyingarn.net/ Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). https://www.paradisec.org.au/ Transcript by Luca Dinu TT [singing]: Koaiseno koaiseno seno, nato wawa nato wawa meremo… [00:13] JMc: That was the late Toukolau Takau from Erakor village, Vanuatu, singing Koaiseno, a song that’s part of the folktale of the same name. [00:24] The recording of the song is stored in the PARADISEC digital archive, which we’ll talk about later in this episode. [00:31] Links to the recording and the complete story are included in the bibliography for this episode. [00:38] I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:47] Today we’re joined by Nick Thieberger, who’s Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. [00:55] Among his many interests, Nick works extensively with archival data, both contemporary and historical. [01:03] We’re going to talk to him about how historical data can inform present-day linguistic research, [01:09] and what we can do in our present to ensure that it becomes the most productive past of the future, if I can put it that way. [01:17] So Nick, you’ve been involved in a number of projects that make historical sources in Australian languages accessible to present-day communities and researchers. [01:27] The most significant of these are perhaps the Howitt and Fison Archive and the Digital Daisy Bates. [01:34] So can you tell us about these projects? What historical materials did you work with, [01:40] how did you make them accessible to people today, and what are the use of these materials today? [01:48] NT: Yeah, so these are a couple of major projects, and in some ways they were testing out a method for how to work with historical manuscripts. [02:01] I was only slightly involved with Howitt and Fison, but I ran the Digital Daisy Bates project, so maybe I’ll talk about that one. [02:09] Daisy Bates recorded on paper lots of information about Australian Indigenous languages in the very early 1900s. [02:18] So in 1904, she sent out a questionnaire, and that was filled out by a number of respondents. [02:23] And so there were in the order of 23,000 pages of questionnaire materials sitting in the National Library of Australia and two other libraries, [02:35] the State Library of Western Australia and South Australia. And so they were fairly inaccessible. [02:39] I’d worked with them, and I realised that they were very valuable, but they were really difficult to work with because they’re just all on paper. [02:48] So I thought it’d be interesting to try all of this methodology that we have with the Text Encoding Initiative and all these ways of dealing with texts and manuscripts. [02:58] So I worked with the National Library of Australia, and that took a bit of time because they’re a big institution and these things take time. [03:05] But it took about eight years, really, of getting the approvals from the National Library and also getting them to digitise these papers. [03:14] And they did that from microfilms, so not going back to the original papers, but… Because it was just much cheaper and easier to run the microfilms through and digitise them. [03:23] So then we had the images, and this was going back a while now, and OCR, optical character recognition, wasn’t very good for these typescripts. [03:33] So I sent them off to an agency to get them typed and then put them online. [03:39] And the idea, the principle behind this too, was that we should have an image of the original manuscript together with the text, [03:46] because, if you like, the warrant for the text is the original manuscript, and separating them, which is something that we’ve done a lot in the past, [03:55] we’ve gone in, found manuscripts, extracted what we think is the important information, reproduced it in some way, but then there’s no link back. [04:04] And so people can’t retrace your steps, [04:07] and if you’ve made some errors or just you’ve made some interpretations that they don’t agree with, there’s no real way for them to correct that. [04:15] So Digital Daisy Bates put the page images online and it put up the text, and you could then search the text, [04:24] and for every text page that you found, you retrieved the page image as well. [04:30] It’s been up online now for quite a while, and it’s had many, many users. [04:35] I think one of the exciting things about doing this sort of work is that once you prepare material in this way, you don’t know what uses people will make of it. [04:45] And one of the big target groups for this was Aboriginal people who wanted access to materials in their own languages, and that was satisfied. [04:55] But I was finding biologists who were finally able to search through 23,000 pages of Bates’ materials for plant and animal names. [05:06] Before, they were having to look through paper, and basically it defeated them, I think. [05:11] They were really not able to do it. [05:13] JMc: And all this material is still up online and available for anyone to use. [05:18] NT: Yeah, it is still up online and available for anyone to use. [05:21] And, you know, one of the issues with a lot of this is, what right do I have to put this online, and what changes digitisation makes, what changes it can make to the nature of the material. [05:36] So while it’s on paper, it’s got its own inherent restrictions. [05:40] You know, you can’t easily get access to it. [05:42] Once it’s online, it’s much more easily accessible. [05:45] So I was a bit worried with Daisy Bates. [05:47] This is mainly Western Australian material, and it represents dozens of languages and a huge geographic area. [05:55] There would be people who would feel perhaps aggrieved that they may feel some ownership of the language and not want it to be put online, [06:05] but I also recognised the value of putting it online. [06:10] So there was a risk. [06:11] And I think we have to take these risks. [06:13] I don’t think it’s very fruitful to say, “Oh, there’s a risk that somebody will be offended, so I won’t do this,” [06:20] because really, my experience with Daisy Bates is that everybody, all the Aboriginal people who’ve used it, have really valued being able to use it and finding materials. [06:29] And they can download this stuff and use it themselves as text. [06:32] So we have to be a bit less cautious. [06:35] I mean, obviously, we have to be cautious and we have to be respectful of the people represented, [06:40] but if I were to try and get permission from every Aboriginal person who’s got an ancestor in those papers, it would be impossible. [06:49] It would just, you know, it would stymie the whole project. [06:52] And on top of that, how can you go to people and say you want permission to do something when they don’t really know what you’re talking about because the papers are in the National Library in Canberra? [07:00] So putting the papers up and using a takedown principle, so saying, “If you’re aggrieved by this, please get in touch with me and we can take it down if necessary,” I think is a much more productive way of dealing with these papers. [07:14] JMc: Yeah, so it’s a very fraught situation in Australia in the moment, isn’t it? Because, I mean, these documents were produced by a member of the colonial settler population, Daisy Bates, who had very strong colonialist views, [07:31] but what she was documenting were the culture and language of Indigenous inhabitants of the country. [07:38] So the question is, yeah, who does it belong to? And what is even contained in these documents? [07:44] Is it Daisy Bates’ image of what she thought was the culture and language of these people, [07:49] or is it something, you know, some actual essential property of their culture and language that has in fact been recorded and belongs to them? [07:58] NT: Yeah, exactly. [07:59] And, I mean, as you say, Daisy Bates is quite a problematic character in Australian history. [08:04] She’s very well known. [08:06] And she did have very strange views, idiosyncratic views, and quite conservative from our perspective today. [08:13] In some way, you know, she would be a candidate for cancelling in the way that other historical figures have been. [08:21] But I think in all of these cases, you really have to weigh up the total person and the total legacy and not just say, “Well, you know, they did one thing that I don’t like, and therefore I won’t use any of the materials.” [08:35] And, as you say, there is a lot of material here which is neutral to some extent, it’s not her interpretation. [08:43] These were questionnaires that she sent out that had in the order of 1,000 prompt words and sentences. [08:48] So this is primary material. [08:50] Of course, it’s handwritten. So we have to interpret the handwriting. [08:54] But it’s not as potentially florid as some of her other recording, which is really it is her interpretation, and she did have some rather peculiar views. [09:05] But even there, knowing her views, you can strain out the essential or potentially the more ethnographic or historical detail from this material. [09:18] So, you know, I do think it’s important to do this and I do think it’s important to take risks in putting this material online. [09:26] Doing it, you know, talking to Indigenous people about it and knowing that they value it. [09:33] So, I mean, obviously, if there’s something that’s really offensive or that encodes some ceremonial event that is clearly not for general consumption, then you wouldn’t put that online, but that’s not the case for most of these materials. [09:49] JMc: You’re also a pioneer of ensuring that more recent materials are properly archived. [09:55] So probably from the mid-20th century up to the present. Your greatest contribution here would be your work at PARADISEC. [10:03] So can you tell us what PARADISEC is all about, and what value do you think the materials that you’ve archived there will have in the future, and can you also tell us what the particular challenges are that you’ve faced with the material that is archived at PARADISEC? [10:19] NT: So PARADISEC is the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures. [10:24] It’s a project that’s been going for 20 years that I’m currently leading, but, you know, had worked on for 20 years and it was established by Linda Barwick and me all that time ago. [10:38] The aim of PARADISEC was to digitize analog recordings. [10:44] So recordings made by field workers in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, mainly in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia and Southeast Asia, that were not being looked after by any other agency in Australia. [10:59] So we have National Film and Sound Archive and National Library and so on, but because these materials were not made in Australia, it wasn’t part of the role of these agencies to look after these recordings. [11:11] So we started digitizing the recordings, and we just kept going and getting bits and pieces of funding from various places, Australian Research Council in particular. [11:21] And now we have in the order of 16,000 hours of digital audio, a few thousand hours of video. [11:30] It’s a huge collection and it represents in the order of 1,355 languages. [11:38] It’s an enormous range of material that’s in there. And this is song, it’s oral tradition, it’s elicitation, it’s all kinds of things. [11:48] So the problem we set ourselves to solve was: how can this get back to the source communities that it came from? [11:56] Because we take it as part of our responsibility when we make these recordings that we will look after them and that they will go back to the communities, and in a lot of ways, the people we work with understand that when we’re working with them. [12:09] They understand that they are talking to the future, they are talking to us as custodians of this material for future generations. [12:17] And I think we’ve fallen down a little bit in our practice as linguists, musicologists, ethnographers, [12:25] in not really making proper provision for looking after this material and ensuring that it does get back, if not to the source communities, [12:34] because these are small villages in remote locations, but nevertheless to perhaps the national cultural agencies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and so on. [12:44] And that’s what we’ve been doing. [12:45] So one of the big challenges then is, well, finding the tapes in the first place. [12:49] Often they’re deceased estates that we’re working with or retired academics who feel the weight of this often. [12:57] They feel the weight of all of these recordings. [12:59] They understand that they should have done something with them, but there was no, to be fair, there usually was nowhere for them to actually deposit these materials. [13:07] So we’re providing that for them. [13:09] In general, the tapes are in pretty good condition, so it doesn’t take a lot of effort to digitize them. [13:14] But in having done this, we’ve established lots of relationships with these cultural agencies in the Pacific, and a lot of them have tapes as well. [13:21] And that’s where our effort is going now as well. [13:25] And that is working with the Solomon Islands National Museum, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, and digitizing tapes for them. [13:31] But in this case, often the tapes have been stored in the tropics. [13:34] They’re mouldy, they’re dirty, and they require quite a lot of work to make them playable, and no one is funding this work, so we have to do that on whatever funding we can put together. [13:45] But it is really valuable because the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, for example, has 5,000 tapes sitting in Port Vila, in a country that’s prone to earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis. [13:59] It’s got the lot. [14:01] And the potential for this stuff to be lost is really, is very real. [14:05] So working with these agencies is important and finding more and more of these tapes. [14:09] We run a project called Lost and Found, where we invite people to tell us about collections of tapes, [14:15] and they put that into our spreadsheet, and then we try and tee up some funding wherever we can, [14:20] through the Endangered Archives Program from the British Library, the Endangered Language Documentation Program, and so on. [14:28] JMc: So I guess there’s also a technical problem that once you’ve digitized these analogue tapes, [14:34] how do you ensure that the data formats don’t become obsolete, and that there isn’t data rot on the archival copies? [14:44] And then when you’re returning things to communities, how do you ensure that people in the communities can actually play back what they’ve recorded? [14:51] I guess there are many greater challenges with audiovisual material than with old archival material that’s on paper, [14:59] because all you have to do with paper is ensure that it is kept dry and out of sunlight. [15:05] NT: Yeah, indeed. So for storing this stuff and making sure that it’s going to last into the future, we adhere to all the necessary standards. [15:13] So this has all been done by others, obviously, so we follow the same standards. [15:18] And one of those standards is that you always digitize to a standard format, the European Broadcast Wave format, which is a WAV file. [15:27] We make MP3 versions, so they’re compressed versions, and MP3 we know is a proprietary format, [15:33] but for the time being it seems to be a format that works, and that’s the format that people can play relatively easily. [15:41] We have backup copies of the whole collection in different locations. [15:45] We have one in Melbourne, and the collection itself is in Sydney, and it’s in two locations in Sydney as well. [15:51] So we make provision for all of that technical backup. [15:57] We do checksum… So, checksums are checking the integrity of each file, and we do a checksum run through random parts of the collection every day, [16:06] and that points to anything that may have bit rot. [16:09] We haven’t actually encountered bit rot yet, but we know that it could be a thing. [16:14] And finally, getting it back to the right place, that’s really a big challenge. [16:18] So we do send hard disks back to these locations when we’ve digitized the tapes, and we have a catalogue, [16:26] and we keep a piece of whatever catalogue entry there is for an item, for a tape or whatever, [16:33] we put that together with the files, and we send that back to the cultural centre so that there’s contextual information with the files. [16:41] Files on their own are very difficult to interpret, so at least having that with them. [16:46] We’ve also experimented using Raspberry Pis, which are small computers that have a Wi-Fi transmitter in them, [16:54] and they cost a couple hundred dollars, and you can put all the material relevant to a particular place on a Raspberry Pi, [17:00] take it there, and then people can access that on their mobile phones, [17:04] and that is probably a better way of them accessing this material, because often they don’t have computers, [17:11] USB sticks and hard disks aren’t that relevant to them. [17:15] So we’ve been experimenting with that, as I say. [17:17] We’ve done it in a few villages. [17:19] We’ve done it in Tahiti, we’ve done it in the Western Desert in Australia, where people can then just access material on their phones, [17:25] and it does look like a good model, and probably the way to do this in future, [17:30] but it requires the local cultural centre to have this running there as well, [17:36] so yes, it sounds great and it does work, but it’s not necessarily going to work for a long time into the future. [17:43] We’ll see. [17:45] JMc: So your latest project is the Nyingarn repository. [17:49] So can you tell us what the purpose of the Nyingarn repository is, and how it builds on your previous work? [17:56] NT: Yes, so when we talked about Daisy Bates and the Howitt and Fison project, [18:00] these were particular projects designed around a set of material, [18:06] and as I said, experimenting with how to put that online and make it accessible, [18:10] and I think what that taught me and the team that I’m working with was that it works very well, [18:17] and it would be great to have a way of just adding more and more manuscripts to that platform, [18:24] and that’s what Nyingarn is. [18:25] So Nyingarn is… It’s a three-year project, we’re currently just at the end of the second year, [18:31] and the idea is that you should be able to take any digitized manuscripts, [18:35] put them into the platform, and it will try to OCR them, [18:41] or you can also put an existing transcript into the system as well, [18:45] and we’ve got a few different pathways in for different kinds of transcripts, [18:49] and the idea is that this will just grow as a platform with more and more manuscripts, [18:55] and it’s working very well. [18:57] We have at the moment about 350 manuscripts in our workspace, [19:03] so we distinguish a workspace, which is where all of the transcription [19:08] and sort of enrichment of the manuscript is, and then the next step is a repository, [19:13] which is where it goes once we have a fairly stable version of it, [19:19] and that’s where we allow people to search and do other things with it. [19:23] We did set ourselves the task also of getting permissions [19:27] from current language authorities for these documents, [19:31] and as we said earlier, it’s quite a sensitive issue in Australia, [19:36] and we recognize these sensitivities, so we don’t want to just be putting manuscripts online, [19:42] even if some of them have been in the public domain for some time. [19:46] We recognize that Aboriginal people have been disempowered for so long [19:50] that we don’t want to compound that, but the exciting thing is that there are a lot [19:55] of young Indigenous people in Australia now who are desperately looking for things to do, [20:00] and especially on the east coast of Australia where languages, [20:04] really the speakers of those languages suffered the initial onslaught [20:09] of the European invasion, and so that’s where the languages have not been spoken [20:14] for the longest, and people are trying to go back to these original sources now [20:17] to recover their languages, and so they recognize the value of Nyingarn [20:22] as a way of doing this transcription and then being able to use the manuscripts, [20:29] the text of the manuscripts. [20:31] So it’s a fairly simple idea. [20:34] You take a manuscript, you get a textual version of it, [20:38] and then you do something else with it, but actually making transcripts [20:43] of manuscripts isn’t that easy if you don’t have a good system for it [20:46] because you very rapidly start losing track of which page is related to which piece of transcript and so on. [20:52] So the simple technology does allow – it facilitates this transcription [20:58] and then further use of the materials. [21:01] So it’s exciting to see it working. [21:04] At the end of the project, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has undertaken to take the repository and host it there, so we hope that it will keep going into the future. [21:16] JMc: Do you see any international application for Nyingarn? [21:20] NT: Well, it’s all in GitHub. [21:22] It’s there if anybody wants to use it. [21:24] We actually – when I was doing this, I was looking at international models, [21:28] so there’s Project Perseus in Europe, which is all the sort of classic [21:32] Greek-Roman texts, and in the United States there’s Ticha, [21:37] which is, it’s working with a particular Zapotec canon of classical materials, [21:43] and it uses a similar sort of approach to what we’ve built up with Nyingarn. [21:49] So, yes, I think it’s very – it’s logical that it should happen. [21:53] I’m sort of – I was a bit astounded that there wasn’t a way [21:58] of looking at these texts up until now, but nevertheless, [22:02] I hope that this will continue into the future. [22:05] JMc: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [22:09] TT [singing]: …koaiseno seno, nato wawa nato wawa meremo, koaiseno seno.

In this episode, we talk to Mary Laughren about research into the languages of Central Australia in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the contributions of American linguist Ken Hale. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 34 Hale, Kenneth L., and Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi. 1958. Warlpiri elicitation session. archive.org Laughren, Mary, with Kenneth L. Hale, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, Marlurrku Paddy Patrick Jangala, Robert Hoogenraad, David Nash, and Jane Simpson. 2022. Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Publisher’s website Comparative historical reconstruction in Australian languages: Hale, Kenneth L. 1962. Internal relationships in Arandic of Central Australia. In A. Capell Some linguistics types in Australia, 171-83. (Oceanic Linguistic Monograph 7), Sydney: Oceania (The University of Sydney). Hale, Kenneth L. 1964. Claassification of Northern Paman languages, Cape York Peninsula, Australia: a research report. Oceanic Linguistics 3/2:248-64. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Phonological developments in particular Northern Paman languages. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 7-40. Canberra: AIAS. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Phonological develpments in a Northern Paman languages: Uradhi. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 41-50. Canberra: AIAS. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Wik reflections of Middle Paman phonology. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 50-60. Canberra: AIAS. Syntax of Australian languages Hale, Kenneth L. 1973. Deep-surface canonical disparities in relation to analysis and change: an Australian example, 401-458 in Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. by A. Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton. Hale, Kenneth L. 1975. Gaps in grammar and culture, 295-315 in Linguistics and Anthropology, in In Honor of C.F. Voegelin, ed. by M.D. Kinkade et al. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. The adjoined relative clause in Australia, 78-105 in Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, ed. by R.M.W. Dixon. Canberra: A.I.A.S. Hale, Kenneth L. 1981. Preliminary remarks on the grammar of part-whole relations in Warlpiri, pp. 333-344 in Studies in Pacific Languages & Cultures in honour of Bruce Biggs, ed. by Jim Hollyman & Andrew Pawley. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. Hale, Kenneth L. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1.1(January/February):5-47. Universal Grammar and Language diversity Hale, Kenneth L. 1996. Universal Grammar and the root of Linguistic Diversity. In Bobaljik et al. (eds), 137-161. (Originally given as Edward Sapir Lecture at 1995 LSA Linguistic Institute, Albequerque, New Mexico.) Students supervised by Hale with Doctoral Dissertations on Australian languages Klokeid, Terry J. 1976. Topics in Lardil Grammar. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Legate, Julie Anne. 2002. Warlpiri: theoretical implications. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Levin, Beth Carol. 1983. On the Nature of Ergativity. 373pp. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, M.I.T. Chapter 4: ‘Warlpiri’, pp.137-214. Nash, David G. 1980. Topics in Warlpiri Grammar. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Pensalfini, Robert. 1997. Jingulu grammar, dictionary, and texts. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Simpson, Jane Helen. 1983. Aspects of Warlpiri Morphology and Syntax. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Students from other Universities influenced by Hale’s work on Warlpiri Larson, Richard K. 1982. Restrictive modification: relative clauses and adverbs. Doctoral dissertation, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Madison, Wisconsin. Lexicon Project & Native American language dissertations. Fermino, Jessie Littledoe. 2000.  An introduction to Wampanoag grammar. M.Sc. MIT. LaVerne, M. Jeanne. 1978. Aspects of Hopi Grammar. PhD MI Platero, Paul. 1978.  Missing nouns phrases in Navajo. PhD MIT White Eagle, Josephine Pearl  . 1983. Teaching scientific inquiry and the Winnebago Indian language, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. PhD. Other references: Bobaljik, Jonathan David, Rob Pensalfini and Luciana Storto. 1996. Papers on Language Endangerment and the Maintenance of Linguistic Diversity. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 28). Cambridge Mass. Carnie, Andrew, Eloise Jelinek and Mary Ann Willie. 2000. (eds). Papers in Honor of Ken Hale: Working paper in Endangered and Less Familiar Languages 1. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics). Cambridge Mass. Simpson, Jane, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin and Barry Alpher. (eds). 2001. Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages. Transcript by Luca Dinu KH: The following are utterances in Warlpiri spoken by Kenny from Yuendumu. [00:09] Head. [00:10] KWJ: Jurru, jurru. [00:12] KH: He hit me in the head. [00:14] KWJ: Jurruju pakarnu, jurruju pakarnu. [00:17] KH: Did he hit you in the head? [00:18] KWJ: Pakarnuju, pakarnuju. [00:19] JMc: What you just heard was an excerpt from an elicitation session with the Warlpiri man Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi, speaking Warlpiri, recorded in 1959 by the American linguist Ken Hale. [00:34] I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:43] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:46] In this episode, we embark on a series of interviews in the history of Australian linguistics by looking at the 20th century research into the Central Australian language Warlpiri, and in particular the role played in this research by the American linguist Ken Hale. [01:04] This topic is not only of great historical interest, but also currently quite newsworthy. [01:09] The Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary, started by Ken Hale and worked on over a period of over 60 years by him and his collaborators, both Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri, appeared just at the end of last year. [01:23] To tell us about all the research initiated by Ken Hale and continued by his students and other associates, we’re joined by Mary Laughren, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. [01:35] So Mary, to get us started, could you perhaps tell us how you got involved with Central Australian languages and Warlpiri in particular? [01:46] ML: Well, I did my undergraduate studies in Australia at the University of Queensland but then went to France, and I did my postgraduate work at the University of Nice. [01:57] The subject of my dissertation was a Senufo language from the Côte d’Ivoire, [02:03] which would have been about 1973, [02:06] I think my doctoral dissertation was presented. And then I got information actually from my mother. She had seen an advertisement for five field linguists to go to the Northern Territory to support the very newly inaugurated bilingual education programs. [02:26] It didn’t say where you would be, apart from some place in the Northern Territory. I’d never visited, I didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded quite an adventure and interesting thing to do. [02:39] So I applied for one of those positions. [02:42] And in 1975, I came back from the Ivory Coast, Côte d’Ivoire, to Australia and went to the head office of the then Northern Territory Division of the Australian Department of Education. [02:55] So it was the Labor government under Whitlam, and particularly his education minister, Kim Beazley Sr., [03:03] who inaugurated these bilingual education programs in communities where people requested to have their own language used in the formal education programs. [03:15] So I found myself in Darwin, and there was a sort of an advisory committee had been set up to advise the government on bilingual education and how it was progressing and how to go about it, etc. [03:30] It just happened that very shortly after my arrival in Darwin, [03:34] there was one of these meetings of this committee, and a linguist, Darrell Tryon, had visited Yuendumu on his way to the meeting and had been very heavily lobbied by Warlpiri people there that they really needed a linguist. [03:48] So I just happened to be this spare linguist that was sitting around Darwin. [03:53] And that’s really how I was sort of sent to Yuendumu, which I liked the idea of a lot, because I didn’t particularly want to be in the sultry tropics, [04:04] and I quite liked the idea of being in a desert community. [04:10] JMc: On a day-to-day basis, what was it that you actually did as a linguist in the community? [04:14] ML: Well, it really depended on what state the linguistic documentation was at and some of the linguists who had similar positions in other places. I mean, their job really was to do sort of really basic research on the language and to devise a writing system. [04:31] Now, fortunately, Ken Hale and other linguists had worked on Warlpiri before me and certainly, you know, Ken’s fantastic work, [04:40] and there was already a practical orthography, and there were already materials being produced to use in school programs. [04:51] So I was sort of ahead of the curve. [04:53] So what I really did, apart from trying to learn the language as best I could, [04:59] was work with young Warlpiri people. Both assistant teachers and special positions had been set up for people as literacy workers, I think they were called, to help produce these materials. [05:13] So they were often recording stories from other people in the community, [05:19] but then writing them down. [05:20] So these were people who were really quite literate in Warlpiri or various degrees of ability, of course. [05:28] And so I worked very carefully with them and also with the teachers to see what they thought was going to be helpful in the classroom, [05:36] and we sort of tried to produce materials and look at the whole range of education that you could do [05:43] in both Warlpiri and English, so whether it was mathematics or the natural sciences, as well as initial literacy. [05:50] It has to be said that this was 1975 when I went to Yuendumu, arrived in Yuendumu. [05:56] The school, I think, had only been set up about 1950. [05:59] In fact, the settlement was the same age as me. [06:02] It was created in 1946. [06:03] So, you know, formal schooling was really, you know, incredibly new. [06:09] And we’re talking about very, very impoverished communities. [06:14] I mean, I had come from West Africa, and I just couldn’t believe the standard of living of Warlpiri people, you know, or people throughout Central Australia in particular. [06:26] I’d never seen, you know, such poverty, such, you know, terrible living conditions. [06:31] You can imagine that formal schooling, in a way, didn’t have a lot of sort of relevance, in some ways, for people’s way of life, which was really a struggle to survive in many ways. [06:45] But before I came to Yuendumu, when I was still hovering around the office in Darwin, another linguist, Velma Leeding, [06:55] who had formerly worked for the Summer Institute of Linguistics but had then become a departmental linguist working on Groote Eylandt in particular, [07:05] She came to me and she said, “Oh, if you’re going to Yuendumu, you need to write to this professor, Ken Hale,” [07:13] which I wisely took her advice, looking back on it. [07:16] And I did, just to say, you know, “Here I am, this random person going to Yuendumu, and, you know, I’ve been advised to write to you,” and he wrote back. [07:26] And that’s how we started sort of a correspondence. [07:30] In those days, of course, there was no email or anything like that. [07:33] So, you know, written correspondence. [07:36] JMc: Okay. So literacy had a function too in connecting linguists. [07:40] ML: It had a function in connecting linguists. That’s right. [07:43] Absolutely. [07:44] And one of the fantastic bodies of materials that I found in Yuendumu was a photocopy of Ken’s field notes from his 1966-’67 field trip to Australia. [08:00] and where he did a lot of work, really in-depth work on Warlpiri with a number of Warlpiri men from different regions, [08:06] so covering different varieties or dialects of Warlpiri. [08:11] And when I found these, I started reading through them and working besides other Warlpiri speakers, including elderly people [08:24] who came in who were just interested in, you know, having a chat and stuff. [08:29] And so I was able to ask where I didn’t understand things, I wasn’t sure of things or whatever. [08:36] And that was a really good way of getting into Warlpiri and learning more about Warlpiri. [08:42] And it’s really his collection from ’66, ’67, and the earlier work he did [08:50] with people like Kenny Jungarrayi Wayne in 1959, ’60, that have really… plus some other materials of his, and as well as a lot of other material as well. [09:02] But his material, in a way, is really the core of the information in the Warlpiri dictionary. [09:09] JMc: OK. So his first trip to Warlpiri country was in ’59–’60. [09:13] Is that correct? [09:14] Ken Hale’s first trip was in ’59–’60. [09:17] LM: Yeah, Ken Hale’s first trip to Australia, I think, was in, yeah, ’59–’60. [09:22] So he had a grant. [09:25] He was at the University of Indiana where he had done his PhD, and he got a grant to come out to Australia, [09:33] I think very much encouraged by the Voegelins. [09:36] Carl Voegelin had been his supervisor, [09:39] and wife Florence was there, and he was encouraged to come to Australia and got this grant, sort of arrived in Sydney and went and met Elkin at the University of Sydney and Arthur Capell, and Arthur Capell was very excited about his coming here. [09:59] Arthur Capell was really a linguist and often called the father of Australian linguistics [10:05] Elkin was, I think, less welcoming. [10:08] There was this sort of idea that different people sort of, you know, had exclusive right to different languages, and really wherever Ken thought that he might go, he was sort of blocked, in a way. [10:20] But in the end, he said, “Well, let’s just… We know that people in Alice Springs speak Aboriginal languages,” [10:26] so he went to Alice Springs and started working [10:30] with people on the Arandic languages, which to my mind are incredibly difficult languages to work on. [10:38] But in almost no time at all, he had gone round to various communities out from Alice Springs and really did some very exciting documentation of different varieties of Arrernte and also was able to see the connection. [10:54] So one of his first interests, I guess, was really historical-comparative work. [10:59] And he did, you know, really interesting work on the relationships between these various varieties of Arrernte. [11:06] But then he met Warlpiri people, of course, the Warlpiri people living in the area of Alice Springs, within Alice Springs. [11:15] And so he started working on Warlpiri at that time as well. [11:19] JMc: And can you just fill us in, [11:20] what is the genetic relationship like between Warlpiri, Arandic languages and Luritja? [11:26] ML: They’re all Pama–Nyungan languages, but they belong really to different sub-families, if you like, of the Pama–Nyungan group. [11:33] So you’ve got the Arandic languages, and Warlpiri is really part of a Yapa, Ngumpin–Yapa group. [11:41] related with languages further west and further to the north. [11:45] Warlpiri is the most southern of that group of languages. [11:48] And then Luritja, to the south of Warlpiri, is one of the Western Desert languages. [11:53] Of course, the Western Desert languages are spread over a very, very large area of Australia, into Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. [12:01] JMc: Now, you mentioned that the documentation that Ken Hale produced became the heart of the Warlpiri Dictionary, [12:08] but could you say a little bit more also about his other connections to the community? [12:13] Was he involved in these 1970s efforts to boost bilingual education, for example? [12:19] And did he have other connections to the community itself? [12:23] ML: Yeah, very much so. [12:25] So he had spent time in Yuendumu, and [12:29] he was asked by the government before these programs were actually officially introduced — so very soon after the Whitlam government got power — [12:40] he and Geoff O’Grady, with whom he had worked and done a very large field trip in 1960, they were asked to write a report for the government about the feasibility of bilingual education and also how it might be implemented, [12:58] which he did. [12:59] So that was actually very, very influential, and they made quite a number of recommendations, very concrete recommendations. [13:07] And I know that that was held as sort of a blueprint really by the NT division of the department, which had the job of implementing these programs. [13:17] So when Yuendumu school got the go-ahead to start doing bilingual education, the local store, which was called the Yuendumu Social Club, raised the money to bring Ken Hale out, and he prepared a number of really useful materials: a syllabary, a basic, what he called an elementary dictionary of Warlpiri. [13:38] He gave classes to a whole lot of young adults who had had some schooling in Warlpiri writing system, etc. [13:48] So that’s why when I arrived in ’75, there were all these people who were quite adept at writing Warlpiri, which was fantastic. [13:55] So, yes, he did things like that. [13:58] And he went to the various Warlpiri communities sort of running these little courses, [14:03] and people were still speaking about that experience, you know, many, many, many years later [14:09] and how they enjoyed that and what they’d got out of it. [14:13] And just when I went back to Yuendumu in March for the launch of the Warlpiri dictionary, a man came up to me and he said, “Yes, I remember Ken Hale.” [14:24] JMc: So what would you say were Ken Hale’s main contributions to the development of linguistics? [14:30] Was he mainly a data collector, or was he also a theorist? [14:34] ML: Well, he was both: his ability to record and to learn languages, and to hear the fine phonetic detail, to work out the phonology of a language. [14:50] And I think some of the languages that he worked on in his first trip, like the Arandic languages and [14:56] languages in North Queensland that have had lots of phonological changes historically compared to more conservative languages like Warlpiri and the Western Desert languages and many others is really quite phenomenal, really, to have that sort of ability. [15:12] So he had that extraordinary ability, and he had sort of worked out a method of initial elicitation, which was not only to get words and basic morphology, certainly to get that, [15:26] but also other, he was interested also in grammar, in syntax. [15:30] So he had a very, very sort of interesting way of proceeding with his elicitations. [15:37] And because he was so good, in very, very short amounts of time, he was able to collect an enormous amount of data, and data which is very reliable, you know, phonetically reliable, phonologically reliable, morphologically and all the rest of it. [15:51] So he… [15:52] Even though he may not have worked, done further work on lots of the languages from which he collected data, other people have certainly been able to work on that language, and you’ll often find in dictionaries and grammars and all sorts of things [16:09] an acknowledgement that a lot of the basic materials actually come from Ken Hale’s field notes, as well as having the best of the training an American university could give at that time in linguistics and linguistic theory, methodology. [16:25] He also had a background in anthropology, [16:28] and that really comes through in his understanding, for example, of the complex kinship systems and kinship terminology, particularly thinking of the Warlpiri tri-relational kinship terms, the way in which even the grammatical parts of a language are manipulated in respect speech registers, etc., is really incredibly good. [16:52] But he was also very, very interested in modern theories of linguistics. [17:00] I think just his knowledge of so many languages, he could appreciate the diversity that you get in languages, but also the sameness that you get. [17:12] Anybody that works on a lot of languages, you keep coming back to the same things, the certain sort of constraints about a system that’s learnable by human beings. [17:22] And I think he contributed quite a lot through his work, [17:27] for example his work on non-configurational languages, looking at languages like Warlpiri with their relatively free word order or phrasal order. [17:38] His work on the Lexicon Project, for example, which he set up with Jay Keyser at MIT in the 1980s, I think was very influential. [17:48] JMc: There’s some key words there, “a system of constraints learnable by humans,” and even the name of the institution, MIT. [17:57] So Ken Hale was, of course, a professor at MIT, [18:01] and that’s the home of generative linguistics. [18:04] And generative linguists are often characterized or perhaps caricatured as being interested only in inventing new theoretical devices on the very thin empirical basis of their intuitions of English, maybe with a few other major European languages in the mix. [18:20] So how did Ken Hale, who was a confirmed field linguist, fit into this scene at MIT? [18:27] Did the data that he brought back from the field feed into the further development of theory, [18:32] and is it inaccurate to say that MIT linguists are not interested in typological diversity and empirical data on the languages of the world? [18:44] ML: Yeah, I think that idea that MIT people are only there [18:50] inventing theories out of some work on English is completely ridiculous. [18:56] It’s just completely wrong. [18:58] I spent quite an amount of time at MIT working with Ken in the 1980s and followed the work of various people and graduate students working on a whole range of languages, from American Indian languages to Asian languages, [19:16] a variety of European languages, languages from all over, including Australian languages. [19:21] So Australian PhD students like David Nash, Jane Simpson, and American students like Julie Anne Legate, for example, worked on Warlpiri with Ken, people working on Leerdil and other Australian languages. [19:34] But yeah, at MIT people were interested in languages generally, you know, and were looking at the similarities and differences across a whole range of languages. [19:45] I mean, I met students from China, from Japan. [19:48] So I think that’s just a ridiculous, as you said, it’s a sort of a caricature, and I think it’s got no evidential basis whatsoever. [19:57] So, Ken actually didn’t go to MIT till after his second field trip to Australia when he was invited by Morris Halle to join the department there. [20:06] So his initial work was really out of University of Indiana. [20:10] JMc: OK. And why did Morris Halle want Ken Hale at MIT? [20:16] ML: Because he’d heard about this very brilliant linguist, and he wanted the best at MIT, [20:23] and so he invited Ken to consider joining the department. [20:30] Ken Hale once said to me that… Actually, he wrote a really interesting paper and he gave it as the Edward Sapir Lecture at the American Linguistic Institute in 1995, [20:42] and I think it’s called something like “Universal Grammar and the Roots of Linguistic Diversity.” [20:48] That paper sort of… I reread it today, and it reminded me of something he once said that you could look at any one language, and you could probably find out most of what there was to be found out about human language. [20:59] Right? [21:01] If you go deep enough into the language. [21:04] But of course, some languages are much more overt in some of the characteristics of human language than others, right? [21:10] So there’s much more sort of surface evidence there for certain characteristics. [21:16] And I personally think that that’s probably very, very true. [21:20] But by looking at a diversity of languages, you can both confirm hypotheses, clearly [21:26] — so one often finds things that are just so similar across languages, even though on the surface they look to be very different; they’re certainly not related historically — [21:38] and the other thing about the diversity, of course, you can find counterexamples. [21:42] So to any theory, you know, [21:43] if it’s not something that you can find some counter-evidence for, [21:46] I mean, the theory, of course, is not tenable. [21:49] So, you know, that’s part of his interest was really both confirming and disconfirming, if you like. [21:55] And I think the work that he did on bringing to prominence languages with very free word order, and not just Warlpiri, but other languages from around the world that had much more freedom of word order, apparently, than English, [22:09] I think led to all sorts of very interesting work that was done on languages by linguists from all over. [22:17] JMc: You mentioned that word order in Warlpiri is a lot freer than in a language like English, for example, [22:23] and I believe one of the parameters of universal grammar that Ken Hale proposed was this non-configurationality parameter. [22:32] ML: Well, I think the w*, that you could put things in any order – although, of course, [22:39] Ken knew very well that even in Warlpiri, there were certain ordering constraints. [22:44] And I think his idea, sort of throwing out these ideas, other people sort of took them up and also looked for explanations for, why are there languages that are like that and languages that aren’t like that, [22:57] and what is the real difference between them? [23:00] How do we characterize one language as opposed to another? [23:04] Where do these differences spring from? [23:08] And various people have come up with various proposals, etc. [23:12] So I think that was really Ken’s sort of ideas, which came out of his fieldwork, but also out of very deep reflection about language and on the basis of knowing lots of different languages very well, was really to throw out ideas, to throw out sometimes sort of initial explanations or characterizations of the problem, if you like, for linguists to solve, for other people to really get their teeth into. [23:41] And I think it was very similar with his work in the Lexicon Project, where he was really interested in that relationship between semantics and syntax, [23:50] where the certain types of meaning, or the explanation of meaning, sort of constrained the syntax and the relationship between levels of languages. [23:59] And that really spawned a lot of really great work by a whole lot of people addressing this question of this interaction between syntax and semantics, [24:09] what constrains what. [24:11] JMc: OK, excellent. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:16] ML: My pleasure. [24:20] JMc: We’ll close now with an excerpt from a recording of a Warlpiri song sung to the melody of “Freight Train”. [24:27] The Warlpiri lyrics are by Ken Hale, and this performance of the song is by Warlpiri teachers in Yuendumu in 2009. [24:35] Wendy Baarda is accompanying them on guitar. [24:37] [music] [24:41] Singers: [singing in Warlpiri] [24:54]

Exploring the formalist aspects of linguistic work by Sapir and Bloomfield, and the evolution of their methods into distributionalism. Focus on abstract systems and patterns in linguistics from Neo-Grammarians to modern linguists.

In this episode, we discuss the leading American linguist Leonard Bloomfield and his connections to the psychological school of behaviourism and the philosophical doctrines of logical positivism. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 32 Primary sources Bloomfield, Leonard (1914), An Introduction to the Study of Language, New York: Henry Holt. archive.org Bloomfield, Leonard (1926), ‘A set of postulates for a science of language’, Language 2, 153–164. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 128–138.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1930 [1929]), ‘Linguistics as a science’, Studies in Philology, 553–557. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 227–230.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language, New York: Henry Holt. archive.org Bloomfield, Leonard (1936 [1935]), ‘Language or ideas?’, Language 12, 89–95. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 322–328.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1938), Linguistic Aspects of Science (= International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 1, no. 4), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carnap, Rudolf (1931a), ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache’, Erkenntnis 2, 219–241. (English translation: Carnap 1959 [1931].) Carnap, Rudolf (1931b), ‘Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft’, Erkenntnis 2, 432–465. (English translation: Carnap 1934 [1931].) Carnap, Rudolf (1934 [1931]), The Unity of Science, trans. Max Black, London: Kegan Paul. (German original: Carnap 1931b.) Carnap, Rudolf (1959 [1931]), ‘The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language’, trans. Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, ed. Alfred Jules Ayer, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 60–81 (German original: Carnap 1931a). Hockett, Charles F., ed. (1970), A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. archive.org Verein Ernst Mach (2006 [1929]), ‘Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: der Wiener Kreis’, in Wiener Kreis, ed. Michael Stöltzner and Thomas E. Uebel, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, pp. 1–29. Watson, John B. (1913), ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it’, Psychological Review 20, 158–177. Watson, John B. (1926), ‘What is behaviorism?’, Harper’s Magazine 152, 723–729. Watson, John B., and Rosalie Rayner (1920), ‘Conditioned emotional reactions’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 10, 421–428. Weiss, Albert Paul (1925), ‘One set of postulates for a behavioristic psychology’, Psychological Review 32:1, 83–87. Secondary sources Hatfield, Gary (2018), ‘René Descartes’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/descartes/ Hiż, Henry, and Pierre Swiggers (1990), ‘Leonard Bloomfield, the logical positivist’, Semiotica 79:3/4, 257–270. Leahy, Thomas Hardy (2018 [1987]), A History of Psychology: From antiquity to modernity, New York: Routledge. Stadler, Friedrich (2011), Studien zum Wiener Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English translation: Stadler 2015 [2011].) Stadler, Friedrich (2015 [2011]), The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism, Vienna: Springer. (German original: Stadler 2011.)

In this episode, we explore the historical background to linguistic relativity or the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 31 Primary sources Boas, Franz, ed. (1911), Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part I, Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Google Books Carroll, John B. (1956), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. archive.org Chase, Stuart (1938), The Tyranny of Words, New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. archive.org Hoijer, Harry (1954), ‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, in Language in Culture: Proceedings of a conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture, ed. by Harry Hoijer, 92–105, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. archive.org Korzybski, Alfred (1933), Science and Sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics, Lancaster: International Non-Aristotelian Library. archive.org Mandelbaum, David G., ed. (1949), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press. archive.org Ogden, Charles Kay (1933 [1930]), Basic English: A general introduction with rules and grammar, London: Kegan Paul. Ogden, Charles Kay and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1956 [1923]), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul. (Reprinting of tenth edition with finger: archive.org) Sapir, Edward (1907), ‘Herder’s Ursprung der Sprache’, Modern Philology 5:1, 109–142. Sapir, Edward (1921), Language, New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. archive.org Sapir, Edward (1923), ‘An approach to symbolism’, review of Ogden and Richards (1923), The Freeman 7:22, 572–573. (Reprinted in Mandelbaum 1949, pp. 150–159.) Sapir, Edward (1929), ‘Foundations of language’, International Auxiliary Language Association in the United States, Inc.: Annual Meeting, May 19, 1930, New York: IALA, pp. 16–18. Sapir, Edward (1929 [1928]), ‘The status of linguistics as a science’, Language 5, 207–214. (Reprinted in Mandelbaum 1949, pp. 160–166.) Sapir, Edward (1949 [1924]), ‘The grammarian and his language’, in Mandelbaum (1949), pp. 150–159. (Original published in American Mercury 1 [1924], 149–155.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956 [1940]), ‘Science and linguistics’, in Carroll (1956), pp. 207–219. Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956 [1941]a), ‘The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language’, in Carroll (1956), pp. 134–159. Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956 [1941]b), ‘Languages and logic’, in Carroll (1956), pp. 233–245. Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956 [1942]), ‘Language, mind, and reality’, in Carroll (1956), pp. 246–270. Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956 [1950]), ‘An American Indian model of the universe’, in Carroll (1956), pp. 57–64. Secondary sources Darnell, Regna (1990), Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist, Berkeley: University of California Press. archive.org Deutscher, Guy (2010), Through the Language Glass: Why the world looks different in other languages, New York: Random House. Hirschkop, Ken (2019), Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on language as social theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joseph, John E. (1996), ‘The immediate sources of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”’, Historiographia Linguistica 23:3, 365–404. (Revised and expanded version in Joseph 2002, pp. 71–105.) Joseph, John E. (2002), From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays on the history of American linguistics, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Koerner, E. F. Konrad (2002), ‘On the sources of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, in Toward a History of American Linguistics, ed. E. F. Konard Koerner, London: Routledge, pp. 39–62. Lee, Penny (1996), The Whorf Theory Complex: A critical reconstruction, Amsterdam: Benjamins. McElvenny, James (2014), ‘Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy’, Language Sciences 41, 212–221. McElvenny, James (2015), ‘The application of C.K. Ogden’s semiotics in Basic English’, Language Problems and Language Planning 39:2, 187–204. McElvenny, James (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McElvenny, James (2023), ‘Gabelentz’ typology: Humboldtian linguistics on the threshold of structuralism’, in The Limits of Structuralism: Forgotten texts in the history of modern linguistics, ed. James McElvenny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–101.

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In this episode we talk to Andrew Garrett about the life, work and legacy of American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber achieved a number of firsts in American anthropology: he was Boas’ first Columbia PhD and the first professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. But Kroeber is not only of historical interest. The recent “denaming” of Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley illustrates the clash of the past with our present-day social and political concerns. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 30 Primary sources Dixon, Roland, and Alfred L. Kroeber. 1913. New linguistic families in California. American Anthropologist 15:647-655. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1907. Shoshonean dialects of California. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 4:65-165. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1907. The Washo language of east central California and Nevada. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 4:251-317. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1907. The Yokuts language of south central California. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 2:165-377. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1917. The superorganic. American Anthropologist 19:163-213. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1919. On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes of fashion. American Anthropologist 21:235-263. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1923, 2nd edition 1948. Anthropology. Harcourt, Brace. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Smithsonian Institution. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1952. The nature of culture. University of Chicago Press. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1976. Yurok myths. University of California Press. Kroeber, Alfred L., and George William Grace. 1960. The Sparkman grammar of Luiseño. University of California Press. Kroeber, Theodora. l961. Ishi in two worlds. University of California Press. Kroeber, Theodora. 1970. Alfred Kroeber: A personal configuration. University of California Press. Secondary sources Buckley, Thomas. 1996. “The little history of pitiful events”: The epistemological and moral contexts of Kroeber’s Californian ethnology. In Volksgeist as method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. and George W. Stocking, pp. 257-297. University of Wisconsin Press. Darnell, Regna. 2021. Genres of memory: Reading anthropology’s history through Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and contemporary Native American oral tradition. In Centering the margins of anthropology’s history, ed. Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, pp. 201-217. University of Nebraska Press. Garrett, Andrew. 2023. The unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, memory, and Indigenous California. MIT Press, in press. Jacknis, Ira. 2002. The first Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905. American Anthropologist 104:520-532. Kroeber, Karl, and Clifton Kroeber, eds. 2003. Ishi in three centuries. University of Nebraska Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2004. Indian uncles. In The wave and the mind: Talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination, pp. 10-19. Shambala. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:20] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:24] In this episode, we continue our exploration of Amercanist linguistics in general and the Boasian school in particular through a conversation with Andrew Garrett, who’s professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. [00:40] Andrew is going to talk to us about Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber achieved a number of notable firsts in American anthropology. [00:49] He received the first doctorate in anthropology from the program that Boas set up at Columbia University, which we discussed back in episode 28, and he was the first professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. [01:03] Kroeber’s not only famous in the world of anthropology, but also fame-adjacent in the real world. [01:10] His daughter was none other than the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin — the K stands for Kroeber. [01:19] And Kroeber is a figure of immediate contemporary relevance. [01:24] His name connects the historical concerns of our podcast with the social and political concerns of the present day. [01:32] For several decades, the building that houses the anthropology department and museum at UC Berkeley was called Kroeber Hall, in honour of Alfred Kroeber. But in January 2021 the building was denamed as part of an ongoing effort by the University of California to remove from the campus the names of historical figures whose legacies do not accord with the present-day values of the university. [01:59] Andrew Garrett supported this denaming of Kroeber Hall, but not without critically engaging with the process and with what it says about our understanding of history. [02:10] Andrew’s critical energies have brought forth a 400-page manuscript which will be published next year by MIT Press under the title The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory and Indigenous California. [02:27] So to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about Alfred Kroeber? [02:31] Who was he, and how did he end up in California, and what were his achievements, if we can put it that way? [02:38] AG: Kroeber was born in 1876 in the U.S. [02:44] His grandparents were all born in Germany. [02:47] His father came to the US as a young child, and his mother’s parents were born in Germany, so German was not only his family background but actually his household language. [02:58] His first language was German. [03:00] The first book that he read, apparently, was a German translation of Robinson Crusoe. [03:04] He grew up in New York in a kind of, I guess, humanistic German-Jewish environment and went to Columbia College in Columbia University in the late 1800s as a student of literature. [03:20] He got an undergraduate degree in comparative literature, and that would have been his trajectory, except that he encountered Franz Boas. [03:27] He took a seminar from Franz Boas which he described later as transformational and as having adjusted his trajectory towards anthropology. [03:37] That seminar was oriented towards text explication, and Kroeber described it afterwards as very similar to what the classical philologists will do with Greek or Latin texts, except these were texts with Native American languages, and Kroeber just loved figuring out language, so he got into anthropology through linguistics and text work. [04:03] The first text documentation that he actually did was in New York working with the Inuktun language recording linguistic materials and texts. [04:13] So as you said, he was Boas’ first Columbia PhD student. [04:17] He wound up in California because the philanthropist and extremely wealthy heiress Phoebe Hearst, who lived in San Francisco and was the mother of the famous – or infamous – William Randolph Hearst and the widow of the mining magnet and U.S. Senator George Hearst. She had developed an affiliation with the University of California, which was then transforming itself from a local college to a research university, and she was very interested in having a place to put all of her collections that she was assembling, in the way that many late 19th and early 20th century wealthy people were doing. [05:01] She was interested in Egyptology and ancient art and native art in the US, and so she funded archaeological expeditions and purchased huge quantities of antiquities and Native American art and, as I say, she wanted a place to put them and therefore endowed a new museum and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, and they therefore needed to hire somebody to do that work. [05:32] And there was a conversation between Hearst and some of her friends and the people in charge of the University of California and Boas, and Kroeber, being Boas’ first Columbia student, got that job. [05:45] So he had actually come to California in 1900 for a temporary position and then went back to New York, and it was in 1901 that he came to California permanently, as it turned out to be. [05:57] You asked about his accomplishments, and it’s very complex, I think, because he was in an anthropology department for his whole career, he’s known today by most people as an anthropologist, but at the time that he started, anthropology and linguistics were not so separated as they are now, and I think many people saw at least some parts of linguistics as being part of anthropology. [06:22] That was certainly how he was trained. [06:24] In the first decade or 15 years of his career at Berkeley, most of the work that he did was linguistic in nature. [06:33] It was work that we would now call language documentation, recording as many languages as possible in California, transcribing texts, publishing text material, and doing all of that with the with the goal of trying to understand the linguistic landscape of California. [06:50] California has more linguistic diversity in it per square mile, I guess, than any place in the Western Hemisphere, and there are about 98 languages, Indigenous languages, and they belong to 20 or 21 unrelated language families. [07:08] So the map is very messy, the relationships of the languages are… were unclear, and part of his interest, like the interests of many people at the time, was to try and understand history through linguistic relationships, and so figuring out, kind of doing the primary documentation of languages and figuring out their linguistic relationships was a major goal. [07:32] And some of his most important publications in the first decade of the 20th century were identifying language families and proposing relationships and subgrouping within language families kind of with that in mind. [07:46] He also, in the last decade of his life, after he retired, kind of returned to that primary, again, what we would call language documentation – basically, working with the material that he had collected early and had languished and trying to prepare it for publication and so on. [08:02] So his career is very much sandwiched by linguistic work. [08:07] He was actually a president of the Linguistics Society of America at one point. [08:12] He did quantitative historical linguistic work before lexicostatistics and glottochronology. [08:19] So he’s kind of underrecognized for his linguistic contributions partly because of the substance of his anthropological contributions. [08:27] He turned towards what I now would think of as kind of more core anthropology concerns in the early to mid-1910s. [08:37] He went through a period of writing a number of papers that were substantial contributions against eugenics and what we might now call anti-racism against, you know, the pre-Second World War eugenics movement that was so popular in the U.S. and Europe, which was kind of, I think, for him, all about separating the alleged biological basis for human behaviour from the cultural basis for human behaviour and focusing on cultural properties as opposed to biological properties. [09:07] And that in turn led him to a series of publications, which is probably what he’s best known for in anthropology, though I’m not an anthropologist, publications about the nature of the “culture”, quote unquote, culture areas, change in culture over time, what are all the properties of quote-unquote “cultures”. [09:31] He was very interested also in taking the kind of diachronic anthropological lens and looking at European and Asian cultures in a similar sort of way. [09:43] JMc: Yeah, so it’s interesting that he has quite a similar origin story to Edward Sapir, who also was at Columbia to study German and then had a conversion in a seminar given by Boas, but I guess Sapir is remembered more today as a linguist than as an anthropologist. [09:59] AG: Yeah, that’s right, even though they both had very interdisciplinary interests, and they both wrote about literary topics and cultural topics and linguistic topics, but yeah, as you say, Kroeber really is seen as being on the anthropology side and Sapir’s seen as being as being on the linguistics side. [10:19] Kroeber was not a great linguist. [10:22] He didn’t have a wonderful ear, he didn’t have that ability that Sapir had to just transcribe with amazing accuracy languages that he did not know for page after page, so Kroeber is a much more problematic figure as a linguist to work with, and unlike Sapir, who wrote many excellent grammars, Kroeber never really finished very many of the grammatical projects that he worked on. [10:49] He was more of a survey linguist in California, I would say, than a finisher of grammatical descriptions, and Boas often criticized Kroeber for that. [10:59] Boas thought you should dig deep into a language, and Kroeber, I think, felt that his obligation at a public university in the state of California was to assemble information about all of California’s Indigenous peoples and languages, so he would work for two days with a person from this dialect, and for three days with a person from that dialect. [11:22] JMc: One aspect of Kroeber’s attitude towards the Indigenous people in California that he was studying that’s perhaps problematic today is that he subscribed to a kind of cultural essentialism, and this is actually an attitude that came from Boas, which Boas inculcated in all members of his school. [11:42] The Boasians thought that there’s something like the pure cultures of Native American peoples which had been irrevocably corrupted by the encroachment of European colonial civilization. So a consequence of Kroeber’s attitude is that he pursued what was called memory ethnography, and this has also been called salvage ethnography. [12:05] So memory or salvage ethnography is the effort to try and unearth this putative pure culture to find out what life was like in the olden days before the arrival of white colonists. [12:16] So what influence do you think this attitude had on how Kroeber approached anthropology, and in what ways could his attitude be problematic, would you say? [12:27] AG: That’s a very interesting question. [12:30] I think that… I mean, you describe it exactly rightly, and I think that that approach that he and others at the time had had, in a way, both pros and cons. [12:42] One thing to be said about it is that it’s not peculiar to the relationship of academics or writers to Indigenous cultures outside Europe, but it comes out of this 19th century Romanticism that was also applied equally well to European folk cultures – you know, the idea that there’s an “essential” quote-unquote, I don’t know, Lithuanian or German or Irish culture, and that, you know, that, too, should be quote unquote “rescued” before modernity destroys it. [13:16] That kind of movement, I think, was present in Europe before it was applied to the cultures of other parts of the world, but it certainly is true that Kroeber did exactly what you say. [13:28] From the present-day point of view, it’s kind of strange to think about the methodology that he used. [13:34] There was no participant observation. [13:37] Nowadays, one thinks of the way that you learn about cultural practices being going to live in a place and either engaging in or at least watching the practices that are going on around you, and Kroeber instead went to a place, tried to find the most knowledgeable elderly people and ask them how it used to be. [13:58] So, you know, “How did you do this ceremony 50 years ago or when you were a child? What kind of songs did people sing?” etc. [14:06] So that clearly gives you a very mediated perspective on the way things were. [14:14] You’re learning about things that people remember and that will be colored by the way that they remember things. [14:22] For him, I think, the goal was twofold. One was, exactly as you say, they had this notion that there was such a thing as an authentic or essential Indigenous culture and that the goal was to try and figure out and record information about the authentic one, not the contaminated one, and the old people, of course, would have a better knowledge of the authentic culture. [14:46] For Kroeber, also, part of the goal was diachronic, and so he, unlike Boas, was very interested in reconstructing the diachronic relationships of languages and also the diachronic relationships of cultures, and therefore the further back you can go in getting information, the closer you are to sort of figuring out the history of things. [15:11] It’s the same logic as underpinned European dialectology at the same time. [15:17] You go out and interview not the young people in the city, but the old farmer who remembers the vocabulary that he learned 80 years ago, and that gets you closer to the allegedly original dialect forms. [15:31] So I think it’s the same kind of reasoning. [15:33] JMc: Perhaps it fits with this logic that there’s an onslaught of modernity that is sweeping away these traditional cultures. [15:41] AG: That’s exactly right, I think. [15:43] So he, like Boas and others of that era, I think we’re very concerned the way that they would advertise the project to philanthropists and university leaders was always about, “Cultures are dying. We need to record information about languages and cultures for posterity,” meaning elite white Euro-American posterity for academic culture before they die off, etc., and that was the language. [16:14] The constant assumption was that Indigenous people were about to vanish and this work needed to be done immediately before they vanished. [16:23] It’s quite striking to me how similar the discourse that Boas used or Kroeber used in 1900 or 1901 to the discourse that linguists use 100 years later and 120 years later about having to do this work urgently before things disappear, and I think in anthropology, as you kind of implied, in anthropology people have moved on from that attitude that what needs to happen is to record the old ways before they’re gone. [16:52] I don’t think anthropologists now think of their project in that way at all, whereas linguists do still often think of their project in exactly that way as, “We need to go and record things before they are gone.” [17:03] So yeah, that meant that Kroeber, that approach colored all of his documentation. [17:09] It meant that he recorded traditional narratives, ceremonies, song, culture, verbal arts that he considered or that his consultants considered to be older ones, but he didn’t record how people talked in then present-day bilingual communities. [17:28] He didn’t write about language mixing. [17:31] He didn’t write about discursive practices that Indigenous people use in interaction with white people. [17:38] He didn’t – intentionally – write about ways in which language was changing. [17:45] In fact, sometimes he would even suppress ways that language is changing, so he would sometimes, if people code-switched into Spanish, when he published he would sometimes omit the Spanish because that was not part of his goal, which was to reconstruct, you know, the original style of speaking. [18:05] So occasionally, that would even… He would wind up presenting a misleading version of the way things were in the service of trying to characterize the way things used to be, so that has led to the criticism, which is quite justified, that he and others neglected present life – that is, then-present life – of Indigenous people, which is both, you know, creates a lot of gaps in terms of just understanding linguistic and cultural practices of the time. [18:38] And it has been said that that also contributed to the public feeling that Indian people were quote-unquote “vanishing”, because what was being recorded was just the vanished part of the culture and not the thriving part of the culture. [18:53] So that’s certainly problematic, and as I said, many people have criticized Kroeber and the Boasians for that aspect of their work. [19:02] JMc: You think that present-day linguists’ attitude of trying to record endangered languages before they disappear and also the practice of language revitalization – that is, trying to bring back languages that are no longer spoken – do you think that these are equally problematic to the sort of attitude that Kroeber and Boas manifested 120 years ago? [19:25] AG: That’s a very interesting question. I think that many of the practices of linguists today are unintentionally similar to some of the practices of Kroeber, so linguists often are interested in the code, not the social behaviour around the code or the social significance of the code. [19:49] We’re interested in documenting the structures, and so that can lead linguists to a bias against code-mixing and other kinds of linguistic behaviour that are dynamic linguistic behaviour that seem to kind of cut against the linguist’s perception of what the code is. [20:13] That is to say, I think linguists do, sometimes even today, implicitly have a language a puristic language ideology that can manifest as an interest not in recording language behaviour or language practices in general, but in recording this one code as opposed to this other code or a mixed code or inter-language behaviour or hybridization or what have you. [20:41] I think there are linguists today still who have that presupposition and whose work is therefore potentially limited in that way. [20:50] As to the question of language revitalization, that’s also an interesting question, but I think that language revitalization movements mostly come from within the Indigenous communities, and so these are not outsiders – generally – telling Indigenous people, “You need to talk the way that your grandparents talked or the way that your great-great-grandparents talked,” but it’s typically Indigenous people saying, “We want to reclaim this knowledge that our parents had or our grandparents had and that we didn’t have enough access to.” [21:25] It is certainly true that the question of authenticity and purism can come up in that context and internal to the dynamics of any revitalization situation, there will be participants who have a puristic approach who only want to do things the way it used to be done, and there will be participants who have a more hybridistic approach or who are more tolerant of change or mixing or what have you, and those different participants can in some cases be different Indigenous stakeholders, or in some cases it’s the linguist who’s the purist and the non-linguists who are kind of more open, or in some cases it’s the other way around. [22:10] So I think, certainly in revitalization situations, it’s important for all the participants to kind of be aware of what their own language ideologies are and how purism and eclecticism play into the choices that they make. [22:25] JMc: Going back to Kroeber, one striking episode in Kroeber’s life is his relationship to the Yahi man generally known as Ishi. [22:35] Kroeber’s treatment of Ishi is one of the key points on which he’s been criticized recently, so can you tell us what the story with Ishi is, and what would you say about Kroeber’s role in this story? [22:49] AG: Sure. [22:50] Ishi was a man, as you say, a Yahi man. [22:55] Yahi is a dialect of the Yana language and the Yahi people and Yana people live, or lived, in north central California. [23:05] Ishi was a man who had lived outside of white control or US government control as most Indians did –most Indians lived under US government control in some form – and he had lived outside of US government control for his whole life, approximately 50 years, until 1911 when he walked into the town of Orville. [23:29] He had actually been in plenty of contact with white people living on the margins of their society, but he had not been in a reservation or in, you know, under the management of the US government as many Indigenous people were. [23:45] So he walked into Orville, California, in 1911 speaking only the Yahi language, which nobody there could speak, so no one could communicate with him effectively. [23:56] Kroeber and his colleague T. T. Waterman had been looking not for Ishi himself but for Ishi’s people for several years because there had been lots of stories about these people who, you know, lived out of the forest and were so-called quote-unquote “wild.” [24:16] There had been a lot of anecdotes about them and people who had encountered them, so Kroeber and Waterman had been kind of looking for them for a while and suspected when Ishi walked into Orville that he was one of them. [24:29] So Waterman went up there with a word list from the language to verify, if he could, that, that was actually the language that he spoke and discovered that it was, and they got permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to bring Ishi to San Francisco to the museum, which is where the – San Francisco is where the UC anthropology museum was at the time. [24:53] So their interest in doing that at that time was clearly what we would now call exploitative or extractive. [25:00] They were interested in him for the knowledge that he would provide to researchers, and that’s why they brought him to San Francisco. [25:08] Between 1911 and 1916, he lived – as did other museum employees – he lived in the museum of anthropology, in a room there. They had rooms, had one or two rooms for their, some of their employees. For those four and a half years, I guess, that he lived in San Francisco, [25:26] he worked mostly as a janitor and kind of general helper in the museum, for most of that period, for the first seven months. [25:36] He also did demonstrations, cultural demonstrations, on Sundays where he would do flint cutting or bow making or some other kind of traditional cultural activity, and either an anthropologist or an Indigenous person would stand up and say in English what he was doing. [25:54] So Kroeber has been criticized for using Ishi as a research specimen. [26:03] There’s a long tradition of Indigenous people being exhibited in museums, and critics have sometimes said that Ishi was exhibited in the museum. [26:14] People have occasionally referred to it as indentured servitude or slavery, which seems inaccurate to me. [26:19] Ishi frequently said that he preferred to live there. [26:25] He was often asked whether he would rather go live in a reservation or go back and live where he had come from, and he always said, no, that he wanted to live where he did live. [26:35] He had a pretty active social life. [26:37] He spent weekends at people’s houses, and he had dinner with lots of friends, and went to movies, and went on weekend vacations out of San Francisco and hung out with kids really, really frequently, so he had a very busy life. [26:54] They did documentary work with him off and on, so in 1911 they did a lot of language and text recording with him, and then again in 1914 and 1915, but mostly not during most of the years that he was there. He just lived and worked in the museum. [27:11] As you say, nowadays Kroeber is often criticized for prioritizing research over Ishi’s human interests, and there is, as I said, absolutely no question that his initial engagement with Ishi was entirely research-oriented or extractive. [27:32] In a way, I think that is often true today in linguistics, at least. [27:36] So I have encountered many situations of a linguistic field methods course where a faculty member says, “Oh, I’ve heard that there’s a speaker of such and such a language. We definitely need to get that person to be involved with our field methods course because that language is so interesting,” which is the same kind of prioritizing the research goal over the interests of the person or the community. [28:00] So it’s another way, I think, in which those attitudes are not gone. [28:04] I should also say Ishi died of tuberculosis in the museum, or in the hospital next door, so that’s another aspect of the criticism, that he came into a city got tuberculosis eventually, and died of tuberculosis. [28:18] Tuberculosis was endemic at that time and Indian reservations were filled with illness, unfortunately, and the US healthcare system for Indians was terrible, so it’s also not exactly clear that he would have been healthier in the reservation. [28:34] JMc: And of course, Ishi wasn’t his actual name, was it? [28:37] AG: Good point. [28:38] That’s right, [28:38] Ishi is the Yahi word for “man.” [28:40] He chose not to reveal his name, so people called him Ishi. [28:45] JMc: So if we come back to the denaming of Kroeber Hall, you’ve supported this process of the denaming or unnaming of Kroeber Hall, but at the same time, you said, and I’m quoting here from an open letter that you wrote to the committee that performed this denaming, you wrote that “Focusing on Kroeber distracts us from honest self-examination, suggesting that our problem lies with a single villain rather than being what it is: foundational and systemic.” [29:17] So can you tell us what you mean by this? What are the foundational and systemic issues, and what would an honest self-examination look like? [29:25] AG: I should say first that the reason why I was in favour of unnaming the building, why I thought it was a good idea, is that there are really two issues at stake when people talked about whether Kroeber Hall should be unnamed. [29:42] One issue was, what did the historical guy Alfred Kroeber do, and how do we understand that in the context of his time, and what are the pros and cons of all of the work that he did? [29:53] And the other issue is, how does the legacy of salvage anthropology, as you described it, how does that legacy hit Indigenous people today, and what does it mean for Indigenous people to walk into a building that has Kroeber’s name on it? [30:09] And regardless of the first question, the answer to the second question is that the legacy of early 20th century anthropology has brought a tremendous deal of harm and pain to Indigenous people. [30:22] The University of California has not, over many years, has not been supportive of Indigenous people, and so people, you know, walking onto the University of California campus and walking into a building called Kroeber Hall that houses the main campus institutions that are about the relationships between the university and Indigenous people, those people felt a weight of pain because of that name, which is independent of what Kroeber did or did not do, and there’s no reason for people entering the University of California, Berkeley, campus, there’s no reason for them to have to feel that way, and there’s no reason for us to have buildings that evoke any kind of feelings of exclusion or pain. [31:06] So to me, it seemed completely reasonable to change the name for that reason alone. [31:13] As for your question about foundational and systemic problems, what I meant by saying that there’s a foundational problem is that the University of California was built not only literally on Indigenous land, but built with the profits of the exploitation of Indigenous land. [31:35] All of the early donors to the University of California were San Francisco and California elites. [31:42] The way that white people in early California made their money was from the Gold Rush, which is to say either directly or indirectly from killing and displacing Indigenous people from their land. In some cases very directly, so the Hearst money, which was the kind of – Hearst was the largest donor to the University of California – the Hearst money comes from mining, which is about pushing Indigenous people off their land and exploiting its resources. Even people who themselves didn’t directly exploit Indigenous people were bankers or involved somehow in the support of miners. [32:23] So the university was set up by a community of individuals who, of course, had good intentions – educational intentions, etc. – but individuals who had profited immensely by the displacement and eradication of Indigenous populations, and their cultures and their languages. [32:45] Pointing to Kroeber and saying he’s the problem, in my opinion, was a way of distracting us all from this more foundational problem, which has not really been acknowledged by the university. [32:58] It remains systemic in a lot of ways. [33:02] There are not really strong systems in place yet to support Indigenous students or faculty or staff, although things are changing, but slowly. [33:12] There are not strong systems in place to support the relationship between the university and Indigenous people of California outside the university – although, again, things are changing, and it goes at different rates in different parts of the campus. [33:27] But the university’s rhetoric remains the rhetoric of a settler colonial institution, so just the ideology that California was the wilderness, that California was the frontier, that the university was established by settlers and pioneers for their families. That rhetoric – and, you know, that was historically true – but that rhetoric remains part of the constant rhetoric of the university’s own self-presentation. [33:59] In your self-presentation, every time you say “This is a university that was set up by pioneers or by settlers to ensure good education for pioneers and settlers,” you are excluding the Indigenous people whose land they settled. [34:14] So I think that a more honest self-examination would not single out a particular academic who was actually mostly quite supportive of Indigenous people, but would look at the people who provided the money to, you know, put in place the institutions that enabled that research. [34:33] JMc: Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. [34:38] AG: Sure, it’s been a pleasure. [34:39]

In this interview, we talk to Marcin Kilarski about the history of the documentation and description of the languages of North America. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 29 Primary sources Bloomfield, Leonard. 1946. “Algonquian”. Linguistic structures of native America ed. by Harry Hoijer, 85-129. New York: Viking Fund. Boas, Franz & Ella Cara Deloria. 1941. Dakota grammar. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office. Deloria, Ella Cara. 1932. Dakota texts. (= Publications of the American Ethnological Society 14.) New York: G. E. Stechert. (Reprinted with an introduction by Raymond J. DeMallie, 2006, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press). Deloria, Ella Cara. 1988. Waterlily. New edition, 2009, with an introduction by Susan Gardner, a biographical sketch by Agnes Picotte and an afterword by Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen & John Heckewelder. 1819. “A correspondence between the Rev. John Heckewelder, of Bethlehem, and Peter S. Duponceau, Esq. corresponding secretary of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, respecting the languages of the American Indians”. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1.351-448. Edwards, Jonathan. 1788. Observations on the language of the Muhhekaneew Indians: In which the extent of that language in North-America is shewn, its genius is grammatically traced, some of its peculiarities, and some instances of analogy between that and the Hebrew are pointed out. New Haven, Conn.: Printed by Josiah Meigs. (New ed. by John Pickering, Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1823; Repr. in American Linguistics, vol. I. London: Routledge, 1997.). Eliot, John. 1666. The Indian grammar begun: Or, an essay to bring the Indian language into rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them. Cambridge, Mass.: Marmaduke Johnson. (New ed. with an introduction by John Pickering and commentary by Peter S. Du Ponceau, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 2nd series, vol. 9, 247-312, Boston, 1822; Repr. in American Linguistics, vol. I. London: Routledge, 1997). Gallatin, Albert. 1836. “A synopsis of the Indian tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian possessions in North America”. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 2.1-422. Hewitt, J.N.B. 1903. “Iroquoian cosmology: First part”. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1899-1900 21.127-339. (Issued separately, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904). Hewitt, J.N.B. 1928. “Iroquoian cosmology: Second part”. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1925-26 43.449-819. (Issued separately, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928). Hewitt, J[ohn] N[apoleon] B[rinton]. 1893. “Polysynthesis in the languages of the American Indians”. American Anthropologist 6:4.381-407. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1893.6.4.02a00050 Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 2013. Nordamerikanische Grammatiken. Edited by Micaela Verlato. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Jones, William. 1788. “The third anniversary discourse, delivered 2 February, 1786”. Asiatick Researches 1.415-431. Powell, J[ohn] W[esley]. 1891. “Indian linguistic families of America north of Mexico”. Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1885-86 7.1-142. Sagard, Gabriel Theodat. 1632. Le grand voyage du pays des Hvrons, situé en l’Amérique vers la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la nouuelle France, dite Canada. […] Auec vn Dictionaire de la langue Huronne, pour la commodité de ceux qui ont à voyager dans le pays, & n’ont l’intelligence d’icelle langue. Paris: Chez Denys Moreav. (Repr. as Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons, suivi du Dictionnaire de la langue huronne ed. by Jack Warwick, Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998; Transl. as The long journey to the country of the Hurons by H. H. Langton, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1939.). Spencer, Herbert. 1884 [1876]. The principles of sociology. Vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton. (1st ed., London: Williams & Norgate, 1876.). Secondary sources Kilarski, Marcin. 2021. A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America. Amsterdam: Benjamins. McElvenny, James. 2019. “Alternating sounds and the formal franchise in phonology”. Form and formalism in linguistics ed. by James McElvenny, 35-58. Berlin: Language Science Press. Merriam, Kathryn Lavely. 2010. The preservation of Iroquois thought: J.N.B. Hewitt’s legacy of scholarship for his people. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Mithun, Marianne. In press. “Native American languages at the threshold of the new millennium”. Handbook of North American Indians ed. by Igor Krupnik, vol. 1: Introduction Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Steckley, John [L.], ed. 2010. Gabriel Sagard’s dictionary of Huron. (= American Language Reprints Supplement Series 2.) Merchantville, N.J.: Evolution Publishing. Thomason, Lucy. 2022. “26,000 pages of thoughts in Meskwaki by Meskwakis: The National Anthropological Archives’ Truman Michelson collection”. Paper presented at the Joint Session of the Linguistic Society of America and the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, D.C., 6 Jan., 2022. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1896-1901. The Jesuit relations and allied documents: Travels and explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The original French, Latin, and Italian texts, with English translations and notes. 73 vols. Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows Brothers. Trudgill, Peter. 2017. “The anthropological setting of polysynthesis”. The Oxford handbook of polysynthesis ed. by Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun & Nicholas Evans, 186-202. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199683208.013.13 Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:20] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:25] In the previous episode, we spoke about Franz Boas and his contributions to the study of American languages, and of the development of the modern fields of anthropology and linguistics in America more generally [00:38]. In this episode, we’re going to zoom out and take a panoramic view of the documentation and description of the Indigenous languages of the Americas. [00:48] To guide us through this topic, we’re joined today by Marcin Kilarski, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Poznań. [00:57] Marcin has just published a book on the very subject of this episode, his 2021 A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America. [01:09] So, Marcin, can you draw back the curtain for us on the grand vista of the description of the languages of the Americas? [01:16] When did the documentation and description of American languages start, and are there identifiable periods and schools in the study of American languages and, if so, what are their defining features? [01:30] MK: Hi, James. [01:30] Thanks for having me. [01:31] So, the description of North American languages has a long history going back to the first word lists of St. Lawrence Iroquoian, a Northern Iroquoian language that was spoken along the St. Lawrence River, and which were compiled in the 1530s. [01:47] And these were followed during the 16th century by vocabularies of languages belonging to the Algonquian and Eskimo-Aleut families spoken in North Carolina and on Baffin Island, respectively. [01:59] So, we are looking at nearly five centuries of documentation and description, and what can be described as a complex, heterogeneous tradition that is only marginally shorter than the study of Mesoamerican languages, and includes several local or ‘national’ traditions such as the French, British, and Danish traditions. [02:18] Note by the way that I’m using the term ‘North America’ with reference to the Indigenous languages and cultures north of the civilizations of central Mexico. [02:26] So, three periods are usually distinguished in the history of the Americanist tradition. [02:31] The first period extends from the 1530s till the late 18th century. [02:36] It is often referred to as the missionary period since most scholars who worked on the languages were missionaries, but the languages were also described by explorers and other scholars. [02:45] Since the period covers over 250 years, we can distinguish several phases within it, depending on the time, location, and richness of scholarship but also the background of the commentators and the phenomena they were concerned with. [02:59] Thus, the 16th-century word lists that I’ve mentioned were followed by grammatical descriptions of Algonquian and Iroquoian languages in the 17th century, including the reports from missionaries in New France that were published in the Jesuit Relations and the grammar of Massachusett by John Eliot, published in 1666, and finally grammars of Greenlandic and vocabularies of the languages of the Southeast that appeared in the second half of the 18th century. [03:28] The second much shorter period extends from 1788, that is, from the publication of the grammar of Mahican by Jonathan Edwards, Jr., till the 1840s, a decade that witnessed growing institutionalization of scholarship in the United States, and the establishment of several societies, such as the American Ethnological Society and the American Oriental Society, both founded in 1842, as well as the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846. [04:00] For many reasons, this short period deserves to be treated separately. [04:04] Several original descriptions were published in this period, including the grammar by Edwards that I just mentioned, together with editions of earlier studies published by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and John Pickering, both of whom corresponded with Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose grammars of Massachusett, Mahican and Onondaga have recently been published. [04:25] These scholars made an important contribution to linguistics. [04:29] For example, Jonathan Edwards proposed in a lecture given in 1787 that Algonquian languages are related as “dialects of the same original language”, and this happened before the publication in 1788 of the famous statement by Sir William Jones about the common source of Sanskrit and European languages. [04:51] Our present understanding of polysynthetic languages largely derives from this period, as it was Du Ponceau who introduced the term ‘polysynthetic’ with reference to a manner of compounding or combination of concepts that are expressed in other languages by several words. [05:08] According to him, this was a common characteristic of “all the Indian languages from Greenland to Cape Horn”. [05:15] And finally, the third period extends from the mid-19th century to the present. [05:21] In the context of the institutionalization of linguistics and anthropology in the mid-19th century, one should also mention the Bureau of Ethnology, founded in 1879, and subsequently renamed as the Bureau of American Ethnology. [05:36] Seminal contributions were made in this period to the classification of North American languages by Albert Gallatin and John Wesley Powell. [05:44] Powell himself saw Gallatin’s “Synopsis of the Indian Tribes” as the beginning of a new era. [05:50] In turn, the arrival of Franz Boas in the United States in 1886 can be said to mark the end of the shift in American linguistics, and the beginning of a continuous tradition that lasts to the present day, and encompasses the work of Boas and his students, in particular Edward Sapir, as well as such scholars as Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Hockett. [06:11] The research carried out in this period reflects the preoccupations of earlier scholars, which can be described as the defining features of the Americanist tradition. [06:20] These include an emphasis on fieldwork and collaboration with Indigenous consultants, together with the early inclusion of women scholars such as Erminnie Adele Smith and Alice Cunningham Fletcher. [06:32] Viewed from the present perspective, Marianne Mithun, in her paper on “Native American languages at the threshold of the new millennium”, found in the forthcoming volume 1 of the Handbook of North American Indians, concludes that “the Indigenous languages are now cherished more than ever across North America”, with extensive work on documentation, description, maintenance, and revitalization that is often carried out in collaboration between Indigenous consultants and outside linguists. [07:02] JMc: So what challenges did scholars coming from European grammatical traditions face when they were describing the languages of the Americas? [07:11] MK: So, what I’ve tried to do in my book was to trace the history of the description of these languages through the lens of some of their most characteristic features, including the sound systems, morphology and syntax, and the lexicon, and focusing in each case on the challenges that scholars have faced. [07:28] Although we deal with different kinds of issues regarding different components of language structure, in many cases the challenges are interrelated. [07:37] In the first place, up until the late 19th century, describing sounds in unwritten languages was hindered by an absence of basic tools and terms such as methods of phonetic transcription and an understanding of phonemic contrasts and different types of variation. [07:52] This had consequences for the description of languages with phonetic inventories that were both more and less complex than those found in European languages, and which in both cases were evaluated in terms of typical European inventories – or rather, alphabets, due to an orthographic understanding of phonology. [08:11] Several enduring motifs can be distinguished in phonetic accounts, for example the notion that sounds lack consistency or fixedness. [08:20] The motif goes back to Gabriel Sagard’s account of variation in pronunciation in his Huron phrase book of 1632, where he mentioned an “instability of language”. [08:32] According to John Steckley, Sagard in fact recorded not only distinct dialects of Huron but speakers of another language, St. Lawrence Iroquoian. [08:43] However, his comments were frequently mentioned in reports on languages viewed as ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’. [08:48] As you showed in a recent paper, published in 2019, this interpretation was eventually dismissed by Boas as an effect of the native language of the commentators. [08:59] And finally, inaccurate phonetic analysis made it impossible to describe the structure of words, and, since the languages have complex polysynthetic morphology, to understand how they express lexical and grammatical meanings. [09:12] So, morphology and syntax pose another challenge, and here we need to emphasize the degree of complexity that we’re dealing with in most North American languages. [09:22] In a paper in the 2017 Handbook of Polysynthesis, Peter Trudgill has usefully collected expressions that linguists use to describe the complexity of polysynthetic languages, including the adjectives ‘exuberant’, ‘daunting’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘legendary’. [09:38] Considering the fact that even with the terminological baggage that we’re now equipped, the analysis of polysynthetic words is a difficult task, it’s amazing how well some pre-20th-century scholars coped with it, including the first grammatical accounts from the 17th century. [09:54] For example, French missionaries working on Huron described it as complex and beautiful: Jean de Brébeuf in his 1636 Relation referred to the variety of what he called ‘compound words’ as “the key to the secret of their Language”. [10:09] Gabriel Sagard made similar comments about Huron, but future readers of his phrasebook preferred to cite his more negative evaluations of the language such as his reference to “a savage language, almost without rules and likewise imperfect” and also his comments about the lack of consistency in pronunciation. [10:33] Similarly to the effects of inaccurate phonetic analysis that I’ve mentioned, inaccurate morphological analysis hindered the description of lexical meanings. [10:42] In a common motif, verb forms expressing grammatical meanings were interpreted as ‘different verbs’ or ‘different words’. [10:50] This allowed further reinterpretations, where languages such as Cherokee were attributed with an abundance of specific terms as well as a lack of generic terms, both assumed characteristics viewed as evidence of their ‘poverty’. [11:04] Such evaluations of Cherokee are common until the 20th century and complement a related notion according to which the languages lack abstract terms. [11:13] Challenges in descriptions of vocabulary are also illustrated by the Eskimo words for snow, a paragon example of sloppy methodology that encapsulates several typical features of the examples that I discuss in the book. [11:27] These include complex life cycles in their history, a rhetorical versatility that allows commentators to employ them as evidence of often contradictory claims about the languages and their speakers, and finally a certain timelessness of linguistic examples and the related stereotypes of the speakers that are disconnected from their present nature. [11:46] JMc: Can you tell us what linguistic scholarship or linguistic innovations, if I can put it that way, were made by speakers of American languages themselves? [11:56] So one famous example is perhaps the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. [12:02] Could you tell us about this and other comparable efforts? [12:05] MK: Yes, you’re right, the Cherokee syllabary is the most famous example. [12:10] It’s amazing how quickly it was adopted by the Cherokees in the 1820s and how it contributed to a rich literary tradition and a sense of national identity. [12:20] Several periodicals were printed in the syllabary, one of which, the Cherokee Advocate, was published with one break up until the early 20th century. [12:29] The syllabary is also familiar to non-linguists: street signs in the syllabary are part of the linguistic landscape in North Carolina and Oklahoma, and most users of Apple computers are familiar with the Cherokee font that has long been supplied with the operating system. [12:44] It’s worth looking at the historical context of the development and history of the syllabary. [12:50] In 1838, most Cherokees who were still living in their traditional homeland in the southern Appalachia were forcibly removed to what is now the state of Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, which resulted in a heavy loss of life, similarly to the other forced removals of the other so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast. [13:10] There are many poignant reports of the removal, for instance by the missionary Daniel Butrick, who accompanied the Cherokees on the death march. [13:18] It’s also striking to compare the literature printed in the syllabary with the contexts in which the Cherokee language was typically mentioned in European publications in linguistics, ethnology, and sociology in the second half of the 19th century. [13:34] If we look at these surveys, for example The Principles of Sociology by the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, we’ll find a reference to the Cherokees as one of the so-called “inferior races” that are not capable of abstract thought and so their language abounds in specific vocabulary. [13:50] This is one of the common misconceptions I’ve mentioned earlier. [13:54] But apart from the Cherokee syllabary, there were also other writing systems that were developed indigenously. [14:00] There is, for example, the Great Lakes Algonquian Syllabary. [14:03] I only mention it in my book, but Lucy Thomason recently gave a paper about it at a session documenting the contribution of the Smithsonian Institution to American linguistics. [14:13] There is a large corpus of literature in Meskwaki written in the syllabary, known as papepipo, which was collected for the Bureau of American Ethnology by Truman Michelson, and is now found in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. [14:28] The manuscripts have been a source of grammars, dictionaries and collections of stories compiled by several generations of scholars, for example Bloomfield’s 1946 sketch of Algonquian. [14:39] As for linguistic work by Indigenous scholars, I’ve already suggested that collaboration with Indigenous consultants can be seen as one of the defining features of the Americanist tradition. [14:50] One should mention John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, a part-Tuscarora staff member at the Bureau of Ethnology, and later the Bureau of American Ethnology. [15:00] Hewitt initially worked as a consultant to Erminnie Smith, but later became an authority in Iroquoian studies. [15:06] He’s now mostly known for his two-volume “Iroquoian cosmology”. [15:10] Hewitt was a very gifted linguist but unfortunately, he left little published theoretical work, basically one paper on polysynthesis published in 1893. [15:19] His uneven career at the Bureau has been attributed to various factors, including a lack of a college education, his Indigenous heritage, poor communication skills and attention to detail as well as the negative response to his paper on polysynthesis by Daniel Garrison Brinton, professor of archaeology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and president in 1894 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [15:48] An apt description of Hewitt’s status was given by William John McGee, Hewitt’s mentor at the Bureau, who described him as “handicapped by unsatisfactory literary methods and practically no ability to express himself orally” but second only to Franz Boas among American scholars in his linguistic knowledge. [16:10] And finally, there are Indigenous scholars who worked with Boas, including William Jones, whose work on Meskwaki was continued by Truman Michelson after Jones was killed while doing fieldwork in the Philippines. [16:23] More well-known is Ella Cara Deloria, who worked with Boas until his death in 1942, and with Ruth Benedict till her death in 1948. [16:34] Her writings fall into three categories: linguistic, in particular the collection of myths and tales Dakota Texts and the Dakota Grammar, which she co-authored with Boas, as well as ethnographic studies and a work of fiction, the novel Waterlily, published in 1988. [16:52] These works were written for different audiences, lay and professional, but all result from her wish to preserve and disseminate knowledge about her people, as documented by herself in conversations and interviews. [17:05] In summary, Indigenous scholars have made an important contribution to linguistics, which, however, remains poorly known to a wider audience. [17:14] There are many scholars whose life and work deserve interest, and it seems it’s now time someone told the story of nearly five centuries of Indigenous scholarship, in a way, to go beyond what I have tried to in my history of European and American scholarship in general. [17:30] JMc: Well, thank you very much for this tour of Americanist scholarship. [17:34] MK: Great, thanks. [17:34] I really enjoyed it. [17:36]

Franz Boas, a groundbreaking figure in American anthropology and linguistics, and Ruth Benedict, a key cultural anthropologist, delve into the fascinating dawn of American linguistics. They discuss Boas's transformative approach to documenting indigenous languages and his challenge to evolutionary frameworks of his time. The dialogue also highlights the clash of phonologies, examining Boas’s critiques of earlier anthropologists and his pivotal contributions to understanding sounds across cultures. Their insights illuminate the lasting legacy of Boas and his students in language sciences.

Peter Trudgill, a renowned sociolinguist, shares fascinating insights on how community structures shape language. He discusses the emergence of linguistic complexity, using ancient Greek as a case study and illustrating how language contact can either simplify or complicate language. Trudgill contrasts modern perceptions of human societies with realities of the past, emphasizing diversity in pre-modern communities. He also explores the nuances between linguistic categories and native understandings, shedding light on the importance of preserving endangered languages.