(Half) A Life Story and the Evolution of Language

It's like one of those days in China, where someone whom you catch a glimpse of every few days is one of the most important person in that field of studies in the world.

Went for a Lang Soc talk by Prof Jim Hurford without knowing who he is. (Opps!) But it was all fun again and I could see how the undergrads would really enjoy the Prof's lectures.

Prof Jim titled his story "Lucky Jim", after a supposedly famous novel, and used his life story as the parallel outline of the general linguistics field , the emergence of Evolution of Language as a field of studies and how the linguistics field has evolved in the last 45 years.

To demonstrate how lovely a lecturer he was, here's 2 pictures of what he did as an opener.

Prof Jim demonstrating how lectures were carried out in the past. He asked students to imagine lecturers writing all the logic statements in semantics line by line while they lecture. And how they had to copy furiously the spoken words from 2 hour lectures, in those days without any copier device.  

Prof Jim demonstrates how technology advanced and we moved into the OHP times.

Of course, he moved on to a ppt presentation later on. ( and oh, those chalkboards in this LT are controlled by automation buttons, so that you can lever them up all the way) . He told of days when they had no audio recording devices and all that you bring to the research field site to record the sounds of languages are your ears and your mouth, which were well-sync with the other research team members using Daniel Jones' Vowel Cardinal system, and the pen and paper for transcription...

I love it the way he told his story, as if he was narrating a folklore to his grandchildren, anecedoting it and drawing moral of the stories at the end of each section. His life was peppered with surprises as he took chances that came along and he made good out of them with some beliefs. Just to share some of his moral of the story here:

1. Learn all you can from other's work
2. Read widely outside your own subject and try to make connection
3. Teaching can interact productively with research
4. Don't always resist being pushed into things by other people. It can turn out well.

The last line seems to be speaking to me. I had heeded this kind of advice once and it led me to Edinburgh eventually, reading this subject, instead of translation. The second advice also serves as a good reminder for me, that while being out here for a year, I should do all the things which I didn't have time for back home.