Intellectual

I'm not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, the brightest candle in the box, the strongest timber in the forrest or whatever they say in your region of the country or world.

I'm no intellectual. Yeah, I'm taking a few graduate courses, but I can't say I'm all that fond of them. Maybe if they were about phonology and morphology instead of abstract theories about anthropology and how to do language survey. Because I know those things. I understand phonemes. They directly relate to something I understand. Phonetics, sounds I can perceive with my auditory nerve, graph on paper, or (in a sign language sense) form with my hands.

I don't understand computer systems or how you program an iPad program to be a cutesy Inuit girl or a Japanese puppet. Last evening, I attended SIL's weekly colloquium which is an academic lecture by a special guest about some project or research they've been working on. The first two summers at SIL I didn't usually attend colloquium because I didn't understand what people were talking about. Er, maybe I did, but only to a very small and shallow extent. I was fascinated by this summer's first colloquium based upon data from an Asian language of Myanmar. Tone of the language reflected patterns that are common in African tone languages. Not Asian languages. Excitement!

But I digress...
Last evening, our speaker was a professor from UND (Dr. Tim) who talked about technology (particularly for the iPad) that's used for language acquisition for children. A number of us had brought other things to study or glance at while the talk went on. We all thought it would be boring. We never touched our materials. Dr. Tim's presentation was fascinating. Everyone's lungs was filled with the inflation of awe. It was exciting and fun! None of us, or very few of us, at SIL would have even thought of using programs like that as a language tool or how to implement it.

Are programs ready for use directly on the field? Certainly not. Is it a starting point? Absolutely.

I really enjoyed Dr. Tim. I was impressed by the amount of respect he showed for Albert (the SIL director) and SIL in general. A number of people asked him questions during the Q&A afterward that he couldn't answer. His way of thinking was slightly different. Of course, he's never been on the field in third world countries or undertaken a term of literacy, but he recognized them as important and appreciated our input.

There's usually a snack 'n' chat time after the Q&A. Lo and behold, Jim Waters who teaches the Morphology and Syntax course for Package A (1st summer) came up to me and asked me what my plans were. Now, I have a lot of respect for Jim. He's one of the calmest guys you'll ever meet, super sweet, loves his wife, loves Jesus, loves linguistics, and has a doctorate.

I'm slightly intimidated by instructors/consultants/doctorates because I don't want to look stupid. I've gotten okay with handling these people in a one-on-one setting. During my talk with Jim, who should walk up to join our conversation of Kieth Snider. Now Kieth has spent most of his life working with tone in African languages. He's the sole teacher of SIL's class on Tone which is offered every other year. He received his doctorate in African Linguistics from Leiden University (for those of you who don't know, Leiden is in the Netherlands). Crazy smart Canadian.

Now it's both of them and me. I figured, "I could learn some pretty interesting things from these guys." I proceeded to ask Kieth a question I had for a class I'm taking. Before Kieth could answer, Jim asked me if I had met Jim Roberts. Yeah, I'd met Dr. Jim Roberts, the linguist from Chad who always has an enthusiastic tone in his clear voice, loves to crack jokes and be the first to laugh at them with his hilariously fake sounding yet genuine laugh. I suddenly realized that these three men were all wanting to know what I was taking and what I planned to do and why. Three of (what I consider) the best minds in linguistics in all of SIL gave me their attention. To say I was slightly nervous would be a bit of an understatement.

I thought more about this encounter afterward. None of the men I've mentioned above think of themselves as anything spectacular or special. At SIL, everyone is on a first name basis. That goes for the director as well as for the children. Doctorates with big egos don't go for that type of stuff (believe me, I've seen them). Each one of these guys started out in Linguistics 101 or got their undergraduates in something totally different before they discovered linguistics was their calling. These are all men who've spent blood, sweat, and tears in the African or South American sun analyzing syntax and tone so that other people could learn about The Son.

Maybe intellect is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly have more education than many unliterates around the world some of which I'll come in contact with one day. But if these men aren't classified as intellectual, I don't care much to be an intellectual either. I do hope to earn a masters degree some day or maybe even earn a PhD, but I hope to be like these men: Nerds with words who love Jesus.