Ideas
bringing lingustics to columbia
Print“I have a general theory that some languages are much less complex than others,” John McWhorter explains, “which goes against a kind of gospel that was created at this university that states that all languages are equally complex. That notion comes from work done here by Franz Boas, the anthropologist, in the late nineteenth century.” McWhorter, a linguist and recent addition to the faculty of Columbia University, is naming but one of the many distinguished linguistic Professors who were involved with in the once-illustrious department of linguistics at Columbia. Yet Columbia has been without any formal linguistics department since 1989, and in addition to overturning some of the work done by Franz Boas, McWhorter hopes to lend his assistance in reconstructing a linguistics department at Columbia.
The linguistics program at Columbia has become more fully developed since the special concentration in linguistics was approved in 2006, and this spring Hyung Young Kim and Matt Clements will be the first two Columbia College students to graduate with a major in linguistics since the 1980s. Both are graduating with an independent major in linguistics, following in the footsteps of current juniors Grace Zhou and Hannah Wells who successfully petitioned for an independent major in the fall of 2007. Their efforts led Alan Timberlake, the current head of Columbia’s linguistics program, to petition the university administration to allow for a general major in linguistics late in 2007, but the request was rejected on the grounds that the future sustainability of the program is doubtful. Nevertheless, the program has remained able to attract student interest, and the possibility of developing a full major or department in the future is not out of the question. Though he finds nothing particularly wrong with the current situation, Timberlake notes that Columbia “could have a decent purely undergraduate program by making two faculty appointments.”
For now, the program is holding off on making any appointments, in part because of constrained funding due to the current economic crisis. One potential appointment is McWhorter, who previously held a tenured position at Berkeley and specializes in creoles and pidgin languages. This past fall, McWhorter received an adjunct position through the Harriman Institute and next fall he will teach a lecture on sociolinguistics.
McWhorter is more forceful than Timberlake in his indictment of the current status of linguistics at Columbia, declaring: “a real university in 2009 has a department or at least a very strong program dedicated to the scientific study of language.” McWhorter is anxious to lend his assistance in expanding the offerings and opportunities in linguistics at Columbia, in part because he hopes that a new department would be well-poised to address some of the issues he is currently studying. The faculty members and students in the linguistics program as it exists now have shown strong a strong aptitude for linguistic research, most of it with a sociological or anthropological bent. Faculty member Boris Gasparov is working on a book that would argue for idioms and stock phrases as the basis for creativity in language. Kim and Zhang have both used their linguistics training to do research abroad. Kim has studied regional varieties of Arabic in Egypt, and Zhang has worked with speakers of a minority language in Southwestern China.
McWhorter’s current research coheres well with the sociological and anthropological emphasis of Columbia linguistics. He hopes to demonstrate that some languages are less complex than others, and that phenomenon does not occur by accident, by focusing on a species of early humans known as Homo floresiensis. Discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores, the diminutive H. floresiensis skeletons were immediately likened to the hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Some researchers believe that despite their small size (average males likely stood 3’7’’ tall) and limited cranial capacity, members of the species demonstrated complex behavior, including the use of language.
The status of H. floresiensis is controversial, with some scientists even disputing that they represent a distinct species. McWhorter, however, is more interested in suggestions that these creatures survived until fairly modern times, recently enough, he believes, to have had a lasting impact on the languages currently spoken on the island of Flores. He has noticed that the languages spoken on the perimeter of the island are all relatively complex, but that those spoken near where the H. floresiensis remains were found possess some of the simplest grammatical machineries he has ever seen. McWhorter’s hypothesis is that the “hobbits” were linguistically substandard. They simplified the languages of the island and became the model for how those languages are spoken in parts of Flores today.
McWhorter’s hypothesis may never be proved, but he remains hopeful that more research will confirm his position and that these discoveries will help introduce linguistics to the general public. And as interest grows, he and others such as Professors Timberlake and Gasparov hope that Columbia University will once again allow students to translate that interest into a degree.
26 March 2009
vol. 6, issue 7
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