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C'est passionnant d'être passionné

1998; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/sihols.88.11sam

0304-0720

William J. Samarin,

Social Sciences and Governance

1 If my family does not approve using these words for my epitaph, let them be recognized retroactively as the slogan of my linguistic career: for example, "Field work is characterized in one word..; it is fun" (Samarin 1967:vii).The phrase in my title, however, was discovered only in 1994, while improving my French by reading advertisements at train stations we were stopping at or passing by.(I was so captivated by the words that I failed to see what was being advertised.)The words can, of course, be 'translated' in one of its senses for the person who is not familiar with French: 'It's fun being enthused' (in colloquial English).metaphor or analog of the linearity manifested in the argumentation of a scholarly essay, at least, the kind I admired as 'Bloomfieldian' and later discovered as Aristotelian.In any case, I feel esthetically about scientific exposition as I do about neatness and simplicity.My parents tell me that by the time I reached the kitchen in the back of the house after entering the front door, as a child and adolescent (the eldest of seven children), everything would be in order.I feel best when my environment, outside as well as inside, is uncluttered.I have always been a clean-desk man.Our house, as my mother would say, is "'maculate."It is quite possible, therefore, that science for me is as much a way of putting things in order as it is a means to provide me with adventures in discovery, which is not to say that orderliness is requisite in science, as I see from some of my illustrious friends and acquaintance.If from my mother's family, the Kornoffs (an anglicization and abbreviation of a four-syllable name), I inherited both an enthusiastic and boisterous manner of speaking and an artistic sensibility, although Mother with too many children had time only for crocheting and tending a few plants outdoors, it was from my father, a somber Samarin, that I inherited my inquisitiveness.Because he had no education and had to support a large family through the Great Depression, this was never developed in a formal way.Here is an example I observed on a long trip in California he had made before: he quietly calculated how much mileage he could save by 'cutting the corners' of the highway on turns.This attention to details made him the fastest broom-maker in Southern California: twenty-nine to thirty-two dozen brooms a day.Father, however, was not a model for neatness and orderliness.From my mother also I must have inherited an appreciation of the exotic.This trait, however, was not allowed to flourish in an ethnic community where the United States was divided between 'us' Russians and 'them' Americans.But of the few girls during my high-school years I was interested in, and only at a distance (being a pimply, very shy, stammering, bookish, and introverted young man), one was Tomoko, a quiet, studious Japanese-American, and the other Kathleen, a cute, light-skinned African-American.(Theodore Roosevelt High School was the most cosmopolitan of all the high schools in the city, and this fact was enjoyably celebrated on our annual International Day.) Unlike my father, who dealt in business transactions with any kind of a person when peddling brooms -speaking over a fence of ethnic distinctiveness, so to speakmy mother seemed to be oblivious to ethnic distinctions in spite of the community's sanctions against unnecessary fraternization with outsiders for fear of exogamous marriages among the young.In this social and familial context there was little opportunity to encounter and experience the exotic except through reading and eating (always clandestinely) Mexican and Chinese food ('kosher' I always hoped!).My father for years teased me about having almost turned into an Eskimo when I learned about them in grammar school.The Greeks were my heroes, and like so many others more advantaged than I, I also discovered novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and many other classics for children and young people.How this happened in a community in whose homes one never saw reading material either in Russian or English (nothing but an opened Russian Bible, prayer book, and song book on the dining-room table, the 'altar' of every home), I do not know.Children, moreover,were not allowed a lot of free time: there were always household chores; even better was a job that could add to the family's income.My several jobs included peddling brooms from door to door in residential areas and in grocery stores all over the city (on foot, of course), selling ice cream in a cart that I pushed around the city, and newspapers at the corner of Seventh and Mateo streets in the industrial neighborhood on the west side of the Los Angeles River.Many people in our community actually believed that too much studying was bad for the brain.(Molokans excelled in sports, not in academics.Therefore, in spite of my father's having mentioned a career as a professional of some type, possibly only on one occasion, there was no encouragement or praise for excellence in our family.)Reading, nevertheless, was a passion: I read even as I walked to school and at every opportunity during school hours.A really marginal person was I in coexisting but disparate societies.On occasion I had lonely adventures in the expansive empty lots of an industrial area in 'Flats,' where horned toads and lizards abounded.These were also Elysian fields for boys who wanted to do battle in friendly gangs, very different from those now dominating their 'turfs' where housing projects have obliterated most of my childhood's landmarks.Objectivity and criticality were qualities for which I seem also to have been programed.Education during the Depression and World War Two was not very good in Boyle Heights.Nonetheless, by the time I was eighteen I had my own ideas about life as a Molokan from asking questions and observing the behavior of others in our ethnic grocery stores, bakeries, butcher shops, and the religious services I was obliged to attend.as I recall.At this very Bible school -of all places imaginable!-1 was introduced to linguistics but not a career as linguist.In my fourth and final year I took a one-semester, elective night-course in phonetics with Kenneth L. Pike, motivated by what I had heard about what the Summer Institute of Linguistics was trying to accomplish in the world through its affiliated organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators.Pike was in Southern California, on leave from the University of Michigan, when he was translating the New Testament into Mixtec, a language spoken in southwestern Mexico.This was 1947.He did not, as he never did to my knowledge, accommodate himself easily to the ignorance of his audience.(For an interview with Pike see Kaye 1994.)By this time we decided, my fiancée and I, to take SIL's summer course at the University of Oklahoma, both of us hospitable to the idea of becoming Bible translators with SIL. 2 Pike lectured on phonetics and phonemics with the zeal and seriousness of a prophet and Eugene A. Nida both on morphology and syntax and also on anthropology, no less fascinating for being taught with wit and humor (Nida 1991).(Through all my younger days Nida was a faithful and helpful kôyà 'maternal uncle,' noted for, among other things, never failing to reply to a letter and doing that promptly). 3All the laboratory sessions and tutorials were conducted by 'members,' as they call themselves, of SIL.These teaching assistants, all of whom had had field experience, mostly in Mexico, were devoted to their tasks and were excellent pedagogues: the training in phonetics was superb, arguably the best that one could get in North America at that time.Moreover, we profited from lectures by guest speakers such as George L. Trager and Paul Garvin.During the eleven-week session I had my first field experience, working on Comanche for ten days with an informant.(This was an obligatory part of SIL's summer session.)But being a member of SIL, my wife-to-be and I decided, was not what we wanted.The ironic thing is that the principal reason was that SIL's work, as presented by K. L. Pike in a lecture to prospective candidates, did not appear to have the combination of evangelistic and linguistic ministries of which we had formulated for ourselves a certain model. 4However, we, 2 The courtship took place while we were students at Bible school.The marriage was strongly opposed by my parents, because she was not a Molokan, and considered ill-advised by my future mother-in-law, because I was not 'Anglo' enough! (Or was I not yet enough of an 'American' as Ruth's father, Fernando Varela da Costa, an immigrant from Portugal?)My wife has found the learning of languages disagreeable and has been only a spectator to my enthusiasms.In Africa her principal role was that of teacher.As the wife of an academic she was handicapped by dyslexia in participating in any way as a collaborator in my work, a practice more common than academic history has hitherto sufficiently documented.More important was keeping me alive (for which see below). 3William Smalley once informed me that Nida kept a file of anecdotes and jokes for his public lectures.The one I remember was what a missionary among the Ituri pygmies told an anthropologist: "You're concerned about the CULTURE of these people; we care about their SOULS."Her husband was a classmate of mine in Bible school.