Somehow: A Retrospective

Twenty-two-year-old Savannah hated phonology. Thirty-two-year-old Savannah wants to do research in phonological typology. What happened? Somehow, phonology morphed from that thing that I hated studying to a fascination with tone. More, on tonight’s news.

Today I ordered my final textbook (used) for class, called simply Phonological Typology. This is a branch of typology (the application that deals with language structure, similarities, and differences, and comparisons) that is tragically understudied. What I love about cognitive science is there is no shortage of blank spaces on the map. I truly feel that the mind is the greatest frontier because it will keep growing, keep evolving, keep opening up new secrets for the rest of my days and the rest of humanity’s time on this mortal sphere. And beyond that. Then you get a topic of cognition that is so rarely probed as phonological typology, and you cannot help but gush.

Somehow, I became a fan of language, but then I realize that there was never a time that I wasn’t. It is not a love of words alone, but a deep Querencia with the landscapes of syntax, the rolling hills of morphology, the liquid rivers of sounds and gestures. Truthfully, I cannot recall a time when language wouldn’t be my given profession. My mother even named me because she thought it was an ideal name for a writer. All of this builds up inside you, such that you are honored to read these texts by the likes of Croft and Bybee and are moved to tears by the beauty of what you study. Just as I get emotional in natural history museums, I get sentimental, wistful, loose as a bit of wind growling through the trees when I read about language and cognition. It is a gift to possess a mind, especially one that you have to fight for.

I think I got a B+ in phonology when I took that class as an undergraduate. I wasn’t a particularly gifted student, at least not until I got a bit older and more intellectually mature. A few months ago, I spoke with Kateland about what it means to be in our thirties, and she very wisely explained why she loved this time of our lives: “It’s like a sweater that finally fits,” she told me. And I knew then exactly what she meant. With a combination of medication and growth, mixed in with the action of my fighting for my education, I feel the materials of linguistics sitting cozily on my shoulders as though they were little birds come to sing with me. I get the work a lot better, even though I still don’t know what Langacker means by a “low-level schema.” At this stage in my life and my career as a linguist, I can greet the lessons like old friends who have just ended a long separation.

I checked out some interesting books from Zimmerman Library on Cognitive Grammar and signed languages, as well as on the phonologies of languages throughout Asia and Africa. The latter is a big chunker, and I have been taking note of what it says on tone. Tonal languages tend to cluster, you see, Reader. Do they exist on a spectrum? It is a mystery for me to unravel.

At the same time as this quest is ongoing with graduate school, education, querying, applying for jobs, etc, I am rebuilding every part of my life. It feels that I have spent the past decade fighting for my own mind and now it and I get to proceed as one to the next phase. Being a linguist is an exciting and attainable prospect now. I won’t just have a job, but a career. I want to be a professor and researcher. I want to always be hungry for the little gears of language, the kind that I stick in my mouth without chewing. It is what I enjoy the most about writing, too, the organizing of words on a page, sorted by color and texture and taste. This was always my destiny, I try to remind myself that, and that this act of rebuilding is a happy one. I couldn’t be more ecstatic, more interested in transcending even myself.

Owning a mind is so fun.

On the practical side, I am cruising through ten or eleven textbooks. It’s a bit like being rehydrated as I highlight the concepts that I had forgotten about with a blue pen or the things that I might explore in more depth in pink. And as happy and in love with my work as I am, I do feel a smidge worried that I will crash and burn because linguistics can be hard! And my morphology textbook is seven hundred pages! I’m going to need a bigger boat. I am currently reconfiguring that boat.

Also on the practical side is my studies of Spanish, which are progressing enough that my Abuelita has gotten me hooked on telenovelas, continues. I feel a bit of a fraud because I don’t speak all the languages I wish I spoke. I spend my free time with Arabic and Persian, the ones who started it all. How can I be a linguist if I don’t speak Classical Nahuatl, I cry. Some call this imposter syndrome; I worry that I am not up to the task of running wild and free with language. And yet, I get up, I make my tea, and I work because that is what one does when one has a passion for something that is so profound it creates a big black blanket of gravity, bends the mind to its will.

I’m aware that this wee blog post is bouncing around from topic to topic. It may not be the most polished piece, but it is what I am thinking in this moment, that I am enjoying reading these books and working new vocabulary into my well of Spanish. I’ll go on.