“Wandering through the Exotic”
Phi Kappa Phi Initiation
April 5, 2002
by Dr. Ronald Schaefer

Phi Kappa Phi inductees, Phi Kappa Phi members, distinguished faculty and guests.

Thank you for that introduction.

I would like to thank the officers of Phi Kappa Phi for inviting me to speak this evening. I am honored to be here. And I am flattered that anyone would think I might have something to say to such a distinguished group. No one was more surprised than I by the committee’s selection.

So why are we gathered here, taking up valuable time on a Friday evening? I am sure those of you being inducted tonight know a variety of extremely useful ways to spend a Friday night. Sitting here listening to a professor probably does not rank very high on your list of Friday night activities. I know I should be doing house clean up tonight with my wife. She warned me that my talk had better be interesting since I am getting out of the housework, at least until tomorrow night.

So with that warning in mind, what I will try to do is briefly examine why I think I am here, you are here and then try to bring these two strands together.

Why am I here? I think there are probably three reasons.

One probable reason is because I was not on the selection committee. I have never heard of an academic committee selecting one of its own. Of course politicians do this all the time. An academic committee would not have selected one of its own. And even if it had dared nominate me, I feel assured I could have talked the committee out of its selection. But since I was not on the committee, I am here.

A second reason I surmise I was selected was because I often appear to be away from campus. Frequently I am off some place, especially when committees do their work. Perhaps my grandmother was right. May be I do have sand in my shoes. Or may be it is just a case of athlete’s foot.

Before I condemn myself further, let me try to provide a rationale. In our academic assessment of human cultural evolution we have come to favor complexity. We admire cultural traditions like the Romans that build roads, bridges and aqueducts. Humankind as a sedentary creature capable of constructing complex material culture impresses us. So we value societies with highly developed agricultural systems, intricate urban schemes and complex technology. The author Bruce Chatwin has an interesting take on this fascination with the sedentary in his book “Songlines.” The book deals with how Australia came to be from the aboriginal point of view. It is fantasy, myth and a lot of walking as the hills, mountains and valleys get sung into being. Chatwin contrasts humans as sedentary beings with humans as nomadic movers, born to wander and search. We often assume that the nomad is looking for the next valley for his flocks or herds. But what if the searching is a permanent condition, and the herds of cattle or flocks of sheep are only the immediate expedient for what is a more permanent wandering state. For Chatwin, sedentary humankind is almost an aberration from our true nomadic nature. In other words a nomadic existence is not a bad thing.

I confess that I find myself a nomadic wanderer, at least a mental wanderer. I am curious about people, about why people do the things they do. I am not a home body, as my wife will surely attest this evening. I find myself constantly on the intellectual move (instead of at those committee meetings).

I think there is a third reason I was selected. No one seems to know what I do. I am a member of the English department here at SIUE but I do not teach literature. I know nothing about how to discern the post-modern textuality of Ralph Elison’s “invisible man,” deconstruct “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” or assess Freudian interpretations of Shakespeare’s “love’s labors lost.” All of that sounds interesting but I do not know how to do it.

So if I am not a professor of literature, what do I profess as my occupation? Well I am a linguist. Not that that helps you any. In the popular imagination there seem to be two candidates for what linguists are.

One popular image of the linguist is Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady fame. You remember Henry; he conned all of London society by getting Eliza Doolittle, whose native accent reflected the cockney accent of England’s lower social classes, to speak with an upper class London accent. Henry was a phonetician, someone who pays attention to how words are pronounced. Apparently phoneticians walk around listening to the vowels and consonants of their fellows and thereby determine where they were born and where they grew up. In fact in this country before World War II there was a great deal of interest in dialect geography and there were people who could do the things Henry Higgins did. Now we all sound the same, regardless of where we grew up. Well maybe that is not so true of people who grew up in Boston. Regardless, I am not a phonetician.

Another image of the linguist in the popular imagination is someone like William Safir of the New York Times or Edwin Newman who worked for CBS Broadcasting. The St. Louis Post Dispatch has its Morton Freeman column in the everyday section. Steven Pinker calls these folks language mavens. The linguistic equivalent of Miss Manners. People of this ilk are fond of telling the rest of us how we should use the English language. They don’t want you to boldly go where no man has gone before, instead they want you to go boldly where no man has gone before. It seems to me we are going to get there one way or the other but they want us to say, more often write, according to their rules. I realize that it is important that we communicate effectively with one another but I have no talent for telling people that it isn’t a preposition we should end a sentence with, especially when that is what we do all the time in our speech. So I am not a language maven.

Ok, if what I do fits neither one of these creations of the popular imagination, what is it that I do? How many different kinds of linguists can there be? Well you have probably heard about the book “The Professor and the Madman,” written a few years ago by Simon Winchester. It tells a story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be, you know that monster of 20 volumes of English words that we never consult. Regarding the book, I think most normal people would identify with the professor. Well, you have probably guessed it. I find myself identifying with the other main character in the book, the madman.

We might assume that the professor did all the work in compiling the ode. It is a natural assumption, a professor is supposed to do that kind of work. In fact, however, two madmen did most of the real work. Both were locked up in insane asylums, although it took the professor a long time to realize this. A hazard of his profession I am afraid.

These two madmen spent hours mulling over words, word meanings, quotations, and trying to figure out just what words mean. They kept file cards to keep track of their work. Sounds like an easy task. But try it. Just take the simple word “take” in English. In Samuel Johnson’s lead up to the ode he included 113 different meanings for the transitive verb “take”. Just for good measure he also included 21 different meanings of its intransitive cousin.

Luckily I work with a language in Nigeria that does not have a “take” verb. Instead, it has a score of verbs that have more complex meanings like “take a liquid in a small container such as a cup” “take a liquid in a large container such as a bowl” “take a single heavy object” or “take multiple heavy objects” or “take one from an array of similar small objects.” And more. All get translated with English “take” because English does not have verbs that translate what these verbs mean.

Some people consider languages like this exotic. If so, then I consider myself a cultivator of the exotic. Sometimes I think exotic means confusing. Languages of the kind I work on are exotic only to the extent that they appear confusing to the outsider, to the extent that we do not understand the system of principles and rules according to which they operate. This is the outsider’s perspective. To the insider, however, such languages are not confusing; they are coherent. They manifest understandable principles and rules that seem natural and inevitable and interconnected. It has taken me twenty years of research and study to find the insider perspective. It is possible for an outsider to become an insider.

Well, this is what I do. I conduct linguistic research on a small, obscure language spoken in a part of the world most of you probably never heard about. I know that there are not many tourists there. It is a language that does not have many speakers, they have no fancy technology and very little cultural complexity of the kind that would attract our interests. These people and their language have been around for a long time but it does not look like their language will be here for much longer. Children are learning some form of English instead of this language as their mother tongue. There is a whole way of life that is quickly disappearing, kind of like the world your grandmother or grandfather created for you with their stories about how the world was when they were growing up.

Don’t ask me why I find the language of these people fascinating. It is so different from the English language I grew up with. I guess I am in a permanent state of wonderment about this language, about why it doesn’t have prepositions or why its adjectives are actually verbs. All kinds of exotic things occur in this language and each one intrigues me. Perhaps that is why I am here: because I cultivate the exotic.

Why are all of you inductees here tonight? You certainly have been in your classes and most everyone knows what you do. It seems that we may be opposites.

It is easier to understand why you are here. You have been to your classes, read the class syllabi, completed the required papers, conducted the needed experiments, and done all the other things to make yourself academically successful. You have found your comfort zone in the academic world. We certainly want to recognize your achievements tonight. I applaud each and every one of you for your steadfast determination and your quick intelligence.

All of that is about the past however. Grade point averages are useful, but only as an index to something more. I hope that your grade point average is a symbol of your survival skills. Not those survival skills pop culture plays out on TV. I hope it is a symbol of your ability to learn about new things, new ways of doing things, but most of all about ways of learning about people.

Our society values people primarily as consumers. We live in a society that says if you wear Ralph Lauren shirts, put on Guess jeans and carry Gucci handbags, you will be happy. Of course we all need to wear something. But people are more than consumers. People, particularly people living in other cultures, are an endless source of ideas different from our own. They are a source of the exotic.
Most of you have lived in Illinois your entire life. There is a great deal to learn in Illinois and a great deal to see and discover. But I believe you can appreciate it even more if you step out of Illinois. Cultivate the exotic, challenge your academic comfort zone.

If you still have time as a student in the humanities, take a class in the sciences. If you are studying to be a scientist, make the effort to take another course in the humanities. If that sounds just too ludicrous, find a subject in the humanities or sciences about which you know very little. Challenge yourself.

And I strongly urge you to look for opportunities to learn about the world and its people. Participate in a study abroad experience if you are still an undergraduate or join the Peace Corps if you will soon finish your undergraduate career. By whatever means, get yourself to another country, hear another language, participate in another culture.

Now more than ever, it is important for Americans to understand how different the world actually is. I learned much about what it means to be an American as a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan where I watched James Dean's films at the US Information Service and had the time to read the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the substantive novels of Dostoyevsky.

Don’t be fooled into accepting a narrow view of the future. You might think that what you know about chemistry, art or music will be important in the future. That this body of information will somehow allow you to define your place in the world and to assist you in securing the jobs of the future. I suspect that will not be the case. Instead, it will be what you know how to do with chemistry, art or music that will be important. Knowledge skills, not accumulated knowledge, will be the hallmark of the future.

All of you are aware that there is more to university life than grade point average. Let the university continue to help you to find out who you are, and what you want to do with your future. And let the world beyond our borders help you find out who you are and who you want to become. So I urge you to leave your comfort zone, engage your life and wander through the exotic.

Thank you.