everything else is obsolete

[sabinetzin]

[DW only]

So, anatsuno asked me what made me want to be a linguist. You can ask a thing! I will answer it!

The simple truth is, everybody wants to be an Egyptologist.

When I was a tiny Sabine, I used to devour books and TV shows and everything else about ancient Egypt. I developed opinions on the monotheism argument and railed at people who believed in that Fingerprints of the Gods bullshit, and I must have been sort of hilarious, but I didn't give a shit, because I loved it. And the part I loved the most was the writings- it fascinated and pleased me that we had so many documents that we could just pick up and read and know these people through; not only that, we could intuit things about their culture by what they didn't say. Language is reality; that's not a theoretical statement to me, that's something that's just intuitive, that I've always known.

So I went to high school and dicked around trying to decide what to do- I wanted to be a chemist, I wanted to join the FBI, I wanted to work for the Foreign Service. And when I went to college, I initially majored in music, my great lost love, because it was a do/do not kind of thing- I could change majors from music, but if I changed majors to music at any point, I would essentially have had to start college over again.

So I did that for about two years, and hated it and was miserable, and I finally sucked it up and changed my major to anthropology.

I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist, so I studied a bunch of bioarch and learned all about symbolic architecture and cave archaeology, and I went to the field and just hated it. Part of it was because we found fuck all (except for so, so much gravel) in an entire month of digging, so it was hard work for nothing, but it was also because I can't wrap my mind around it. I've taken a whole year of graduate level osteology classes, and I'm pretty good at differential diagnosis, but ask me to side a bone and I'll still doubt my answer, no matter if I've got Bass sitting right in front of me.

Linguistics isn't like that- I grok it. I had a class once where Samy Alim (who's pretty much the best) spoke, and he said, "I love my data! I love it! It's right there! Somebody said it!" and that's exactly how I feel about it. I can put my hands on it and know it and grasp it in a way that I just can't do with anything else.

So I ended up on Mesoamerican linguistics totally on accident. I got to college and realized that there just wasn't any good work for me left to do in Egyptology- everybody reads Egyptian, and everything good has long since been translated. I figured, though, that I'd still work on Old World stuff- I wanted to do near Eastern or European stuff.

So me and my dude at the time signed up for this class on Celtic archaeology. We both went to the first class... and it was so ridic that we both dropped it immediately. He went off and took something else, but I had to take another anthropology class- and what was at the same time, but Maya archaeology.

So I signed up, and coasted through the first few weeks, because I played SO MUCH MAYAQUEST when I was a little Sabine (and my mind was BLOWN when I realized the experts you consult in that game are real anthropologists, some of whom I, like, know now). Then we got to the writing system, and that was it, y'know? Nothing had ever caught me like that before- it was so easy, it just made sense. The interaction of the iconographic system and the writing system just blew me away- and the writing system was like nothing I had ever even encountered before.

So, I basically decided to be a linguist because nothing else fits me like linguistics does. There's nothing else that I really believe in; it's what gets me out of bed in the morning, and for me, things like that are in very short supply.

Comments

[senmut]

That's an awesome post. I think it is why my interests drifted from Egypt to Sumer, to be honest, when it comes to Ancient History.

[anatsuno]

Yay, my question got answered! :D
Very interesting post, thank you muchly.

I completely get the 'stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning' aspect. Those things ARE rather rare. *hugs*

[beccastareyes]

As a fellow academic, I can totally did 'my work gets me out of bed in the morning'. I once said if I couldn't do anything in the physical or biological sciences, I'd pick up and become a linguist, because I was a total Archeology and Language nerd as a kid. (As is, I'll just keep going to Matt's* 'amateur glyph-reading lunches' during the summer, though we're talking about switching and learning Sanskrit over the next summer instead.)

* We have two post-docs named Matt in our group. One is a total archeology/linguistics nerd**, to the point when we saw that a Boston museum was doing an Egyptology exhibit a couple of days ago, when we were in Boston for an astronomy conference, my adviser said 'we better not tell Matt, or we'll never see him again'. (Matt actually said he was planning on going anyway, but after the conference.)

** Among other things. He's got a pop-science book out called 'The Age of Everything' about how scientists date things, based on a series of lectures he gave as a postdoc. One of them is 'figuring out how the Old Kingdom aligned their pyramids using precession of the equinoxes'.

[bironic]

That is a totally cool Sabine story.

p.s. Relatedly, ask Dee to tell you what her Mr. called you the other day.

[sabinetzin]

Now you've made me curious. ::goes to ask::