Everett!!

So, the reason I haven't blogged for a while is because I was almost solely responsible for Dan Everett coming to campus (the Pirahã guy from the New Yorker article:)


As you can imagine, this was somewhat stressful- add all the usual endless worries about logistics to the fact that most of my professors seem to think his claims are totally wrong. I haven't really taken enough syntax to be able to tell. But, the event went off almost totally successfully. He's a great speaker and a helluva guy to hang out with for several hours at Crane Alley.... during which time he and my syntax professor almost got into fisticuffs over whether absolute, immutable truth is a useful notion. I had been worried that my professors would be too harsh on him, but I forgot to take into account the fact that he LOVES pissing people off, and can talk circles around most people in an argument.

Another thing Everett said is that all good linguists need to do fieldwork, which is kind of exciting because there's been a lot of press about languages on the brink of extinction lately. I like learning languages and don't mind living in questionable conditions, so it makes me think that there will actually be necessary work available to do when I graduate (I don't define publishing obscure research papers as necessary work)... but what kind of linguist does fieldwork? There's no "field linguist" branch. Anyway, something to think about.

We found out Everett has a popular level book in the works, and people have bought rights to do a documentary on him (as soon as the Brazillian government gets over thinking that he might be a racist and lets him back into the country.) So if this guy is the next Stephen Pinker, you can say you heard about him from me first! If he's not, at least we had an interesting couple of days with him.