The Polysynthetic Language Whisperer

Gather round, children. It’s time for a story of language documentation and preservation, of semantics, of morphosyntax (which this jester will be taking as a graduate student this fall, by the way). That’s right, it is time to reflect honestly on where we’re going and where we’ve been and, most important of all, on the people to whom we are indebted for their kindness, expertise, and brilliance. Yes, as promised, we are talking about the incomparable Dr. Axelrod.

In all seriousness (I’ll put the children away), I have been ruminating a lot on what I owe this incredible person, a Virgil to my ridiculously wayward and undisciplined Dante as I navigated throughout all of undergaduate years. Dr. Axelrod kindly listened to my attempts to link semantic analysis with avant-garde films (turn up for The Blood of a Poet), my endless questions on every topic related to anything in this field of linguistics. In particular, with the avant-garde film project, I worried that I was grasping at straws, yanking out fleeting meanings, but Dr. Axelrod quietly reassured me that it was a decent question.

I’ve known her for ten years now, and Dr. Axelrod has recently written me several letters of recommendation. It is thanks to her that I can even study language at the graduate level. I’ve written previously about how I feel better prepared to tackle the topic than I did ten years ago when I was fresh out of undergrad. I’m not certain why, perhaps it is just intellectual curiosity. After all, upon completing a test in Grammatical Analysis my sophomore year of college, I doodled an elephant on the test’s white space, its little trunk pleading with the professor for mercy. Oy. Drawing elephants on a test is not something New and Improved Savannah the Linguist would do, and I owe a lot of that growth in mindset to Dr. Axelrod.

Everything I know about polysynthetic languages, I learned in Dr. Axelrod’s morphosyntax class, the one I took as a twenty something who couldn’t tell the difference between an agglutinating language (“Turkish is an agglutinative language,” bleated the Old and Not Improved Savannah the Linguist, as though that would get her a foothold in the world of morphological processes that she knew this one fact about Turkish) and a polysynthetic language. I know that that sounds boring to some people, but I took what she taught to heart and started studying Nahuatl with a lookout on its complex morphology.

To this day, I love Nahuatl. A brief and funny story here: I took typology as an undergraduate, too, and was so intrigued by some arcane concept of Nahuatl grammar that I stewed on it all throughout the class, only to scuttle up to the front of the class to talk to the professor afterwards and tell him my big epiphany. Face completely flat, he said, “That’s what I was just lecturing on.” It was a wonderful thing that I had such an incredible professor but Old and Not Improved Savannah the Linguist was obviously walking around in a state of disorder.

I still laugh about this.

The bottom line here is that I am grateful for the people who have guided me. I aim to be a professional Linguist, complete with capital L. If that dream ever comes true, Dr. Axelrod’s mentorship would have probably been the reason for that. I’m coming to the end of this miniature dissertation here, but thank you to Dr. Axelrod for always looking out for me and checking to see that I am not still rambling about The Blood of a Poet.

Thanks for being a great linguist and an even greater friend.