A Life of Language

Abstract

This is a truly overwhelming experience. Since I am not a cat, I expect to have one lifetime in which to achieve anything, one award for it at the most. So this is it, and I am honored and humbled and, of course, delighted. It is wonderful to be among so many of the friends that have enriched my life in so many ways. Thank you for permitting me to feel, for some short moments, that one or two of the things I have done may be allowed to count as accomplishments. There is only one thing that gave me pause for a moment when I heard about the award, and that is its title. But my concern was soon put to rest when I checked up on the previous three recipients and found that, as far as I could tell, they were doing quite well. If you will forgive me, I will tell you a little about this lifetime, such as it has been. After all, as I have said, one has but one chance for such gross indulgence. The ambiguities that are a linguist’s constant companion, were with me from the start for, if I say I was born in London, then do I mean that the place where I was born was part of London at the time of my birth, or that it is part of London now? In fact, only the second proposition is true. I was born in 1935 in Edgeware, which was in the county of Middlesex then, but was later absorbed by London for reasons that I believe to be unrelated. The first event that lodged in my memory was the declaration of war in 1939. I had no idea what it meant, but everyone took it so seriously that it made some kind of impression on me even at the age of four. London was bombed a lot, and Edgeware a little. My mother was afraid of the bombing, but I found it fun. My father was never afraid of anything. He was an inspector of schools and was charged with evacuating children from London. I was sent to a variety of places but invariably returned to London after a few weeks because my mother could not stand to be away from the excitement of the capital for more than a few weeks, even if it did mean being bombed. We went to Dorchester, and Devizes in the west country and I encountered new kinds of vowels, and discovered that syllables could end in an ‘r’. I started mimicking people and learning to associate the way people talked with where they came from. We went to Leeds, in the north country and I learnt how diphthongs could become monophthongs and how to tell whether a person came from Leeds or Bradford, despite the fact that these cities are barely fifteen miles apart. People told me I was destined to become a linguist. I did not know what a linguist was and it turns out, in retrospect, neither did they. One of the places I was sent to avoid the bombs was Llambadarn, a small village in southern Wales where only Welsh was spoken. The idea that there could be a place where people did not speak English had not occurred to me before, and it fascinated me. One of the things I regret about the experience still today is that my mother could not