The first year course in Coptic was probably the most challenging course I took in my entire BA. The Syriac script – which to my eyes looked like a lot of squiggles – send me to the warm embrace of Coptic, with its more reasonable Greek-based alphabet. Not knowing what to pick – being equally and completely ignorant about both language – the BA advisor told me that I should go to the library, open a book, and see which struck my fancy. I had to pick another language in my first year, and my choices were either Syriac Aramaic or Coptic. I came to Coptic, as it happens, in a fairly invisible-hand way. My teachers in linguistics were Ariel Shisha-Halevy, Eran Cohen, Lea Sawicki, Moshe Taube, Orly Goldwasser, Gideon Goldenberg, Dana Taube, Olga Kapeliuk, Nimrod Barri, Anbessa Tefarra, and others, many of whom are still friends and mentors in various ways. The theoretical and methodological courses embodied a particular blend of structuralism, typology, and functionalism, but also medieval Arab grammarians, Romance philologists, and the rock stars of 19th and 20th century linguistics, those nonconformists Otto Jespersen, Edward Sapir, Hugo Schuchardt, Hermann Paul, Joan Bybee, and T. In my first year, I studied Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, and a lot of Hebrew, including the ridiculously difficult course in niqqud, the science (or art) of vocalizing an unvocalized Hebrew text. The oldest linguistics program in the country, it was firmly European structuralist in orientation and the studies were based on the intensive study of quite a few languages. Now, I should say a few words about the linguistics department at the Hebrew University which was a bit of an oddity, at least from the point of view of most North American linguistics programs. I can only describe the experience as electrifying. I began studying linguistics and Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, focusing mainly on Semitic languages. Although I didn’t really understand any of them, I did understand that I was going to be a linguist, which pretty much scuttled my dreams of building irrigation pipes in exotic places. This led to reading Chomsky’sSyntactic Structures and Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. But over the summer, I got my hands on (and actually read) de Saussure’s Cours, which had been recommended to me by an English professor years ago. How this idea got into my head remains a mystery till today. Up until three weeks or so before I was supposed to begin my BA, I was convinced that I was going to be a water-and-soil engineer. After a few years, I was good and ready to go back to activate my brain a bit. I waited tables, served in the army as an infantry soldier, worked in a screw factory, and milked cows, among other sundry jobs, none of which I was particularly good at. As it turned out, the American college experience wasn’t meant for me, and neither was America, and I quickly found myself living in Israel. Focusing on languages and literature, the one class I took in a particular brand of New England linguistics was enough to turn me off. I grew up in a small town in New York, and like a lot of North American eighteen-year-olds, I went to college right after finishing school. Read below his story on how he became a linguist. To help us keep these services available in the future, remember to donate and help support.Īs our Fund Drive is traveLING to North Africa and the Middle East, we are going to meet our next Featured Linguist Eitan Grossman from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Remember, these services are available to the linguistic community by your donations.
So once you’ve finished your research, how can you use LINGUIST to make the most of your career? Stay tuned for the next letter on LINGUIST’s resources for professional development. In fact, all of our projects can be used to gather information, and generate and support language hypotheses: If you’re doing language documentation research or your research is more technical in nature, you should visit our Academic Papers and Dissertation Abstracts.Journals listings and their Table of Contents.Books (and Reviews of many of these books).If you think someone may have already asked a similar question, check out Summaries to see if our readers have provided a response.įor general research needs, LINGUIST features a Publications Area where you can find bibliographic resources: Queries: You can submit research surveys, tests, and ask for resources relevant to your research here:.LINGUIST offers several features you can use to reach out to the linguistics community as you conduct your research. As a researcher, there are a lot of ways to formulate research questions and gather linguistic data.