3 lives touching many

The picture above is of a Pame woman weaving.

What a great weekend.  There's nothing like face-to-face meetings with friends that you haven't seen for a while.  A group of 4 linguists sitting around visiting for 4 1/2 hours is some kind of experience.  We have been doing that on a regular basis since the year 2002.  It's good to see how each of us has taken the schooling that we have received and applied it in our vocational endeavors over the last 7 years.

The phonologist among us has lived with a group of indigenous people in the central region of Mexico working to preserve, at least for the historical record and hopefully in reality as well, the language of about 6,000 speakers of Xi'iuy (pronounced Shi-yu-ey).  He has worked diligiently to reduce that spoken language to writing.  He invented a new system of writing, since they had none, with the speakers of Xi'iuy.   Those people are now a very proud people to have a written language.  Believe it or not, these people have no adjectives in their language.  Discoveries like this make lingusitics so stimulating.

The Semitic/Semantics scholar among us is working hard to keep people trained in linguistics to send them to the field and continue working among people who have either no written language or only crude writing systems.  He has fought ill health to stay at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics just so he can teach Amharic, the predominate language of Ethiopia, and semitic semantics and a few sociolinguistic courses to kindred spirits to keep his learnings alive.

The discourse analysis scholar among us is about to depart to Nigeria after making his mark on the TESOL program at UT Arlington.  He will be teaching in a graduate institute in Nigeria to thirsty souls who want to learn how to analyze their own language more systematically.  Many of those languages don't have very many speakers of them.  Some don't have a written code.  I look forward to the articles he will write in the future about applying discourse analysis to some very obscure languages.

4 1/2 hours with these guys makes my head spin.  I love their stories.  I admire their accomplishments.  I am awed by their ambitions.  I am privileged to associate with people who help so many others in ways that few people can.  My hat is off to my 3 good friends.  I wish them a prosperous future and look forward to our next meeting next February.  As a really special friend of mine would say, "U Rock, guys!"