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IN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT RANKIN

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Oral History Project

Endacott Society

University of Kansas

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ROBERT RANKIN

B.A., French and Spanish, Emory University, 1960

M.A., Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1968

Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1972

Service at the University of Kansas

First came to KU in 1969

Acting Assistant Professor of Linguistics, 1969-72

Associate Professsor of Linguistics, 1972-78

Professor of Linguistics, 1978-86

Professor of Russian and East European Studies, 1990

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AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT RANKIN

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Q: I am speaking with Robert Rankin, who retired in 2005 as Professor of Linguistics at the

University of Kansas. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on March 30, 2006. Where were

you born and in what year?

A: I was in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 1939.

Q: What were your parents’ names?

A: My father was Harvey Walter Rankin and my mother was Helen Ingle Rankin.

Q: What was their educational background?

A: My dad was a professor—I don’t know what rank—of botany at Penn State when I was

born. He had a master’s, an ABD, from Cornell. His specialty was phytopathology,

plant pathology. My mom had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago.

Q: You said he was a professor.

A: He was a professor at that time. He had been in the military. He had fought in World

War I and World War II. So in the period preceding World War II he was an instructor,

professor, whatever, in botany at Penn State. But after World War II he went to work for

the Georgia Department of Agriculture at the University of Georgia as a research plant

pathologist.

Q: Was your mother employed?

A: Not until the kids left home, at which point she did some work as a librarian.

Q: Did you have brothers and sisters?

A: Yes, I have a younger brother, four years younger than I am, James Rankin. He has a

Ph.D. in physics. He is in theoretical physics. But because of the job market in

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theoretical physics in the 1970s, he has spent most of his life doing computer work. He

did a lot of computer consulting for some of the largest financial institutions in New York

City, Republic National Bank, Barclays, City Bank, this sort of thing. So he’s the son

who made the money. I’m the one who was paid a little bit to do what I enjoyed doing.

Q: So you didn’t grow up in the town where you were born.

A: I grew up all over. Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, was merely the closest hospital to State

College, Penn State, at that time. But during the years of World War II my dad moved us

around three different places in Pennsylvania plus Albany, New York, and Alexandria,

Louisiana. Then after the war we moved to central Florida, to a little town called

Arcadia, Florida, where he worked briefly for the American Red Cross, and then to

Tifton, Georgia, which is about 200 miles south of Atlanta, where the Coastal Plains

Agricultural Experiment Station is. I started fifth grade in Georgia and graduated from

high school there in Georgia.

Q: When you were in elementary school did you belong to groups such as Boy Scouts or Y

or things like that?

A: Oh, yes. I was a Cub Scout, then a Boy Scout and then an Explorer Scout. I did that for

a time while I was in junior high. I never had the ambition to advance very far in the Boy

Scouts. I wasn’t one of those Eagle Scouts. I just enjoyed myself and had fun. We’d go

camping in the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia down among the alligators and

water moccasins.

Q: Oh, really?

A: Oh, yes. Lots of fun.

Q: That doesn’t sound like a good place to be.

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A: It’s great fun. If you are in a cabin, it is okay.

Q: Then you went to high school in Tifton, Georgia.

A: My graduating high school class is holding its 50th reunion this year.

Q: Was that just called Tifton High School?

A: That’s right.

Q: Since you went into the study of languages as an adult, did you start studying languages

when you were in high school?

A: I studied French in Tifton High School. That was the only language offered in Tifton

High School in those days. They offered French and Spanish given by the same teacher.

I wanted to take Spanish, so I signed up for it. We went to class the first day. There was

me and about eight or nine very cute girls. The teacher said, “Which language would you

all like to study, French or Spanish?” For Spanish there was one hand that went up,

mine. For French all the rest of the hands went up. So I studied French.

Q: Did you know people who spoke other languages?

A: Not really. I guess I got into the study of languages through the short wave radio

listening hobby.

Q: Were you doing that while you were in high school?

A: I was doing that while I was in high school. I was one of those geeky kids who got his

ham radio license before he got his driver’s license.

Q: So you could hear people from other countries.

A: Yes. I could even talk to them.

Q: If you could understand them.

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A: Well, a lot of them spoke English. Then as I went to college and did study Spanish

finally and Portuguese, I used to practice by getting on the radio talking to people in

South America. So that helped a lot. But it was really hearing those voices coming from

Europe and Asia and all these places and wanting to understand everything that

everybody said that sort of piqued my interest.

Q: Did you have influential teachers in high school?

A: Oh, yes, I suppose I would have to say that I was strongly influenced by my French

teacher and a couple of English teachers. I was always more interested in the mechanics

of English grammar and dialects and how the language worked much more than I was in

English literature or American poetry.

Q: That would be unusual, I would think. Most people hate the study of grammar.

A: Yes. One of my friends once likened it to eating dry sand with a spoon. But it was really

interesting, and I simply stayed with that interest, I guess.

Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities?

A: Not much I don’t think. We didn’t have a radio club, but there were four or five other

guys who were interested in the same sorts of things. I tried out for basketball because I

was a tall kid. I was a Yankee kid, of course, in South Georgia. I had the reputation of

being the Yankee kid in school. I don’t know what the difference was. Perhaps it was a

nutritional difference. But I was about six or eight inches taller than almost anyone else

in my class. So although I could shoot the basketball fairly well, I never really did work

up the stamina to go running up and down and up and down the basketball court. I never

really indulged much in sports.

Q: Did you have jobs after school or in the summer?

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A: Most often I worked for my dad, in the sense that as an experimenter his work involved

experimenting with various plots of different crops. You’d spray two rows with one

insecticide and then skip two rows and then spray two more rows with a different

insecticide. This would go on up and down the fields. After that, of course, you would

pick the tomatoes or the cucumbers or the watermelons or whatever it was and tabulate

how each pair of rows came out. Thus you’d get some idea of how efficient these

insecticides were. I did a lot of that kind of field hand work for something like 35 cents

an hour.

Q: Did you have honors in high school?

A: You know, I don’t remember. I don’t think we had anything quite like that. We had

something like an honors list at every report card. Periodically, I’d get my grades up high

enough to make that list. The rest of the time, not so much. I have to admit I didn’t do a

lot of studying. I was able to kind of get by. It’s unfortunate. Everyone regrets that

attitude later in life. I spent more time on ham radio than I did on long division, let’s put

it that way.

Q: When did you graduate from high school?

A: 1956. That’s the 50th

anniversary this year.

Q: That’s right. I suppose it was always assumed that you would go to college?

A: I think that my parents did assume that, and I think I must have too. I was pretty naïve

about it all.

Q: Did you go to college directly after high school?

A: Yes. Again, I was interested in languages. But I didn’t really know what a language

major would entail. I was pretty naïve about it all. Two years of high school French

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prepares you for some things, but it didn’t really clue me in to what college would be

like. It was my parents who pretty much picked out the college they could afford to help

me with. I attended Emory University, which is in Atlanta. I was a French and Spanish

major.

Q: Did you have influential teachers in college?

A: Oh, yes. Various and sundry of them I can remember. I can remember quite a number

from college. Some were in the language field, others in history, geology, political

science. I was interested a little bit in lots of things. I was never a very good

mathematician. Actually, I should say that I was never very good at arithmetic. I made

silly mistakes in arithmetic. This was before the days of calculators, that don’t make

mistakes. Other than that, everything was pretty interesting.

Q: You lived in Atlanta then.

A: I lived in Atlanta, mostly in dormitories during my college years.

Q: Did you have jobs while you were in college?

A: I worked in the Emory University language lab playing tape recordings for students of

various languages.

Q: Oftentimes now students of languages may go somewhere in the summer to a different

country to study for a while. Did you do that?

A: I did not in college. I probably should have tried to do that. It wasn’t something at that

time that I or my parents thought was financially feasible. But they were willing to send

me to summer school in New England at Colby College to study Russian. Emory

University did not offer Russian at that time. This was the early 1950s. They just started

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offering Russian as I left in 1960. So in the summers of ’58, ‘59’ and ’60 I went to Colby

College and studied Russian intensively in the summer.

Q: Why did you want to study Russian?

A: I wanted to study every language. I felt that if there was any problem getting jobs, that

knowing Russian in the early years of the height of the Cold War would make me eligible

for various sorts of government jobs, if nothing else. And it is also an interesting

language. It is just a fascinating language. It is very different from English.

Q: Or from French or Spanish.

A: Precisely.

Q: When did you graduate as an undergraduate?

A: In 1960, a regular four-year college stint, in other words.

Q: What did you do after that?

A: I wondered what to do after that. I got a job for one year at a French language institute

that was being held under a government grant, I think from the Office of Education, at

Emory University. They were holding an intensive French institute there. I got a job

with them working in their language lab, essentially as I had in the preceding years. I did

that for a couple of quarters. Then I took some graduate courses in Portuguese and

Italian and a little more French for a quarter and then decided on graduate school at the

University of Chicago in linguistics.

Q: How did you happen to pick Chicago?

A: Well, my mom had graduated from Chicago, as had her younger brother. They both told

me that would be a great place. And I was also able to get a scholarship at Chicago.

Q: What was your major as a master’s student?

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A: That was really my first contact with the discipline of linguistics. Before that I had just

been studying particular languages and particular language grammar and a hefty portion

of French and Spanish literature and that sort of thing. I have to admit that I never felt at

home in literary criticism. I think that my professors at Emory would probably have

agreed with that. One of them told me at one point, as he put it, that he thought I had

“never really lost my literary virginity.” So I wasn’t a very good literature critic. I

wasn’t terribly interested in the study of literature per se, the novel, drama, poetry, etc.

It’s fun to read things but not as a professional critic, I felt. So really I was interested in

getting away from language and literature and more into the technical aspects of language

per se. That’s what linguistics is about. So I really began my linguistics at the University

of Chicago as a grad student. My language background stood me in good stead, but I

really began linguistics in Chicago.

Q: Did you do a thesis as a master’s student?

A: I did. Actually, I really wrote my master’s thesis quite late. I had finished all of my

Ph.D. course work and spent two years overseas before I actually wrote a master’s thesis.

I sort of wrote the master’s thesis to make myself eligible for jobs above the bachelor’s

level. But I was really working towards a doctorate all along. At the University of

Chicago the master’s degree is sort of the consolation prize for people who don’t pass

their doctoral prelims.

Q: I see.

A: So I hadn’t written a master’s thesis. I had taken several years worth of work there in

linguistics. And I had begun the study of the Romanian language, which, of course, is

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related via Latin to French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. It is the least studied, I

suppose, of the romance language family.

Q: Is that why you chose it?

A: I think that was partly it. Partly it was just more exotic. And I’d studied Russian, and I

knew there were influences of the Slavic languages on Romanian, since it is almost

surrounded by Slavic-speaking countries. Id’ studied Romanian for a couple years as a

grad student and applied for a Fulbright to go to Romania, which I did. I got the

Fulbright and went for two years. After the first year I renewed the Fulbright for a

second year. This was mid 1966 to mid 1968. These were the years of the infamous

Nicolai Ceausescu in Romania. It was a Communist state.

Q: But the U.S. government let you go.

A: Oh, yes. The government actually at that period of time was trying to wean Romania

away from the Warsaw Pact, away from the Soviets. So they actually encouraged

Americans to go there. The Romanians seemed to be up for this idea of encouraging

contacts with the West during that period also. So they were actually quite good to me.

They let me travel all over the countryside with my tape recorder and record Romanian

dialects. That’s sort of what I did while I was there for the two years.

Q: Were you connected to the university there?

A: Only peripherally. I’m not quite sure what institutions I was connected with there. It was

sort of amorphous. I think as a graduate student they considered me to be attached to

their Institute of Phonetics and Dialectology. It’s a branch of the Romanian Academy,

their Academy of Sciences. But I was eligible to take courses, if I wished, at the

University of Bucharest, which is the largest university, the state university. When I

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visited other parts of the country, I would work with professors from the University of

Klouse, which is in the northwest of the country, Transylvania and the University of

Yatsh, which is in the northeast of the country in Moldova. So basically I think they

considered me to be loosely attached to universities. But I wasn’t in a degree program at

any of the universities. I was doing research with the Institute of Phonetics and

Dialectology.

Q: So you traveled around talking to Romanian people. You must have been a curiosity to

them.

A: Yes, I suppose so. Of course they hadn’t really been able to travel in the West since

1948. That meant that most of them had never been outside Romania.

Q: And there were probably not very many U.S. people who went to Romania.

A: There were very few, actually. And they were eager to meet Americans. I think my

experiences were quite uniformly good. I didn’t experience any of what you would call

anti-Americanism. But I could say that for most of Eastern Europe. I traveled fairly

extensively across Hungary. I also traveled a little in Bulgaria. All of those were behind

the Iron Curtain at the time. The people there were always just inevitably pro American.

I would have to say much more so than the French, the Italians, and the Germans.

Q: So then you just continued on for your Ph.D.

A: That’s correct. I returned home in 1968. At that point I had gotten married in 1966.

Q: What is her name?

A: My wife’s name is Carolyn. I met her in Chicago.

Q: Was she at the University of Chicago also?

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A: She was interestingly enough at the Chicago Theological Seminary. It’s a seminary run

by the United Church of Christ, of which she was a member. It is immediately adjacent

to the university campus. The students in the seminary are eligible to take graduate

courses at Chicago and vice versa, for people who are interested in such things. I have to

admit I was never very interested in theology. But since the seminary was so close to

campus, I managed through a friend to be able to get a room in the men’s dormitory of

the theological seminary. So I was right next door to my classes. I was closer than

anyone living in university dorms. So I met my wife in the dining hall of the theological

seminary. She stayed with that for a little less than a year and had to have shoulder

surgery at one point because she had a joint problem. She kind of dropped out of the

seminary, but she and I stayed together. I must have met her in 1964 and we got married

in 1965, September 11th, (9/11) 1965. We never forget our wedding anniversary any

more. She accompanied me to Bucharest, Romania. But when we returned from

Romania, it was time to make a little money to help us stay alive. So I sat down and

wrote a master’s thesis for the department just to make sure I had a master’s degree in

hand.

Q: What was it about?

A: It was on Romanian dialects, as you might expect, mostly pronunciation, grammar, that

sort of thing, regional differences.

Q: Even though Romania is a fairly small country.

A: Yes, it had a population of a little under 20 million at that time. Still, though, historically

it was not a united country until quite recently. The northwestern portion of the country,

Transylvania, was part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The southern part of the

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country was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The northeastern part of the country,

Moldova, or Moldavia as it is sometimes called, was sometimes under the Turks,

sometimes under the Russians, sometimes under the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

What this meant was that since Romania had had a lot of internal political borders over

time the language had become quite distinct in the different historical regions of the

country. So that made it pretty interesting to study.

Q: Did you have influential teachers at the University of Chicago?

A: I studied under Eric Hamp, who is, I suppose, one of the world’s best know specialists in

Indo European languages, the family of languages in Europe that goes back some 6,000

into prehistory. I suppose he was probably the most influential. I also studied with a

Romanian exchange professor, Emmanuel Vasiliu, who came to Chicago while I was a

grad student and from whom I learned my Romanian. They were both very influential, I

would say. Vasiliu was an influential scholar in Romania and Eric Hamp is really

internationally known.

Q: So you returned from Romania and finished your master’s thesis and then went on to

finish your Ph.D.

A: That’s right. In 1968 I started applying for jobs. The late sixties would have been just

about the end of the period when you could apply for jobs and expect to perhaps get one

at a major university without having finished your Ph.D. yet. In other words as an ABD,

all but dissertation. I hadn’t finished my dissertation, but I applied to a variety of

universities and got the usual long list of, “Were terribly sorry and good luck” letters. A

friend of mine from Romania, who is a history professor at Emporia State, had written to

me and said he thought maybe the University of Kansas might be looking for someone

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who knew Romanian because they had a very active Soviet and East European Studies

program here under Ozzie Backus at that time here at KU. So I had written to Soviet and

East European Studies here at KU saying my friend in Emporia, Glen Tory, suggested

that I write to you, blah, blah, blah. It turned out the Linguistics Department here was

recruiting for a junior faculty member, in fact for a couple of junior faculty members at

that time, or at least a couple of faculty members. It turned out that Soviet and East

European Studies really wasn’t terribly interested in getting a Romaniest at that time.

But they forwarded my dossier over to Frances Ingaman in the Linguistics Department

and they wrote and asked if I would be interested in coming for an interview in

linguistics. This sounded like a great idea. So I interviewed here at KU in I suppose

April of 1969 and amazingly got the job. I still hadn’t finished my Ph.D. In fact, to

make a confession, I hadn’t started writing my dissertation really.

Q: What was it eventually on?

A: It was eventually on Romanian dialects. You would probably call it a continuation of my

master’s project pretty much, but much more inclusive. So I began teaching here in

August or September of 1969.

Q: Had you taught as a graduate student?

A: I had been a T.A. as a graduate student at Chicago. What that meant at Chicago was that

basically I graded papers, I ran laboratory sections for courses that had a lab, sort of

problem-solving courses, data problems in languages where you ask the students to take

this bunch of sentences from Qurundi or some language they had never heard of and

figure out how to do present tense, past tense, future tense, all those sorts of things. You

know, sort of elements of grammar. The students have to figure all this out and then you

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help them with it and grade them and all that kind of thing. Plus, I had lectured a few

times on the Romance Language family. But being a T.A. at Chicago didn’t entail

teaching full courses. So this was really my first time teaching a whole course of my own

here at KU.

Q: You came at a very interesting time.

A: Oh, boy. Well, of course having come back from Eastern Europe in 1968, that was the

year when most of the campuses in the United States were really in an uproar over the

war in Vietnam.

Q: Was that true in Chicago?

A: It was very true of Chicago. So I had come back right into the middle of that. It was

totally unexpected because when I left in 1966 there was no such thing. Things were

very quiet yet. I came back in 1968 and here were all these young leftist radicals raising

cane on the University of Chicago campus. Coming from the Ceausescu regime in

Romania and having crossed Hungary just as the Soviet tanks were massing on the

Hungarian border to invade Czechoslovakia, I didn’t have much sympathy with the leftist

students in Chicago, I’m afraid. I was really not at all sympathetic. But I got back to

Chicago and it was during that autumn that the Democratic Convention in Chicago

engendered all those riots and the rock throwing and police riots.

Q: That’s right.

A: I was pretty shocked by it all, I have to admit. But then it was sort of over in Chicago. In

early 1969, which was my last year there while I was applying for jobs, early 1969 the

administration kind of got fed up with their radical students and expelled 18 or so of

them. Things quieted down very fast. At that point, of course, I left and came to KU,

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just in time to catch the action here. As it ended in Chicago, it began in Lawrence. So I

got to relive all of that.

Q: Were your students here involved in those kinds of things?

A: I think not too much. They may have been sympathetic. There was a lot of upset over

the war in Vietnam and that sort of thing. And it is understandable that students who

were eligible for the draft might be a little upset. That’s quite natural. But I don’t think

my students, for the most part, were the troublemakers on the Lawrence campus. The

only radical student in the Linguistics Department that I was acquainted with was one of

my students, actually, who wrote her dissertation under my supervision later on. She was

one of the original founders of the group that called itself the February Sisters. Do you

know of them?

Q: Oh, yes.

A: Karen Lupardis was one of the original February Sisters in 1971, I think it must have

been. But by and large the linguists were a pretty staid bunch.

Q: What building was the department in?

A: Blake Hall. Since I came here Linguistics has always been in Blake Hall, although I

think before that it was…What is the building where Wescoe Hall is now?

Q: I don’t know.

A: That was before my time.

Q: Mine too.

A: When I came here they were just building Wescoe Hall. I think where the English

Department was at one time was where Linguistics began. But they had moved

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Linguistics to Blake by the time I got there. We shuttled back and forth between the third

and fourth floors.

Q: What was your title when you came here?

A: At that time they had a rank called acting assistant professor, which means an assistant

professor who hasn’t finished his Ph.D. yet.

Q: I see.

A: They also had a rule that ABDs who came to KU to teach had to finish their dissertation

within three years or they got kicked out. It was three years, finish or out. My chair at

that time, who would have been David Dineen, who was on joint appointment between

linguistics and French, he called me towards the middle part of my third year here. That

would have been late ’71, autumn semester of ’71. He said, “Bob, we’d really like to

keep you here, but you have to finish your dissertation this year. To make another

confession, I pretty much hadn’t started it.

Q: Oh, my.

A: I knew what I wanted to say. I had done the research. I had the field notes from

Romania and all the material. But as for sitting down and putting pen to paper, I hadn’t

done that really. So basically that gave me one semester to finish it.

Q: While you were also teaching.

A: While I was teaching. Actually, I took half time leave from teaching. I taught one course

in the spring of ’72. In January of ’72 I started coming in after supper every night and

staying here until 1 in the morning writing a dissertation with a pencil and a yellow pad.

Q: You didn’t use a typewriter?

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A: I wasn’t comfortable composing at the typewriter. So I would hand write everything and

between me and my wife, the two of us typed it on the department Selectric. My dad

down in Georgia, who was still alive at that time and who never finished his own

dissertation—he was an ABD all his professional life—said, “Son, just sit down with

your pencil and write two pages a day, just two pages.” He said, “In two or three months

it will add up and you will be done.” So that’s exactly what I did. I sat down and wrote

two pages faithfully every night, six nights a week and in last spring I was basically

pretty much finished. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I told my advisor, Eric Hamp, back

in Chicago by mail. I said, “I think I will be ready to defend about mid July.” He wrote

back and said, “That’s all very well, Bob, but I’m going to be in Bulgaria in July. I’m

leaving May 8.” So I defended May 7th

at the University of Chicago.

Q: Were you successful?

A: I was successful.

Q: Do you have children?

A: No, we don’t have children. That’s a regret, I would say. During the early years, you

know, everybody is a novice at having children. But I just didn’t feel ready. And my

wife was teaching school out at Wakarusa Valley School. She had taught in Chicago.

She taught first or second grade in one of the project schools in Chicago, a rather

dangerous place. She had also taught at the diplomatic school in Bucharest, the

American Embassy School. So she had a lot of experience. She was teaching and I

didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of having kids. After that, she decided to go back to

school and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, of all things. So it just never quite worked out.

We probably should have.

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Q: What classes were you teaching at KU?

A: I taught a large variety of linguistics courses. I’d have to look at my vitae. As I recall,

there must be 20 or 25 different classes that I taught over the years.

Q: Did you specialize in particular languages?

A: Yes and no. A sort of long story begins there. When I came here my plan was to

continue my work in Romance linguistics, especially Romanian, but also French,

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and some other minor Romance languages. And I did that.

I wrote some papers for journals and conference papers, that sort of thing, in the early

seventies. In about 1972 or so two friends of mine here, both linguists, scholars, and

students of Native American languages, kept nagging away at me. Dale Kincaid, who

was with the Anthropology and Linguistics Departments here, and Dale Nicklas, who

was with the Anthropology Department here were both very influential in my career.

They said, “Bob, you know it’s the duty of every American linguist to learn at least one

American Indian language.” I would laugh and say, “Oh, come on. I didn’t spend all

that time studying those Latin verbs and French, Spanish, Italian and what not just to try

to learn Navajo or something.” But they kept it up. One summer, actually the summer of

’72, my dissertation was being professionally typed in Chicago and I had to be here to

proofread it. So I had to be here all summer. I volunteered to teach our field methods

class in linguists. This is a class in which the students are confronted with a language

which they know absolutely nothing about. Their job is to figure out as much of the

grammar of that language as they can in one semester just by asking a speaker of that

language to translate from English into his native tongue. Dale Nicklas knew two

speakers of Choctaw who worked at Haskell (American Indians). He talked them into

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helping me out with that class. So they came in every afternoon during that summer. We

would meet with this class of 15 people maybe. I just got fascinated with this language.

It was totally different from any European language I’d ever studied, different from

Russian, different from Turkish, different from any language.

At that point my other friend, Dale Kincaid, said, “There are these four or five

languages spoken by tribes related distantly to the Dakota Sioux who live in Nebraska

and northern Oklahoma around here. No one has ever done any grammatical work on

those languages. There are no dictionaries of any of them. You could do a lot of good

work if you got together with speakers of those languages and did some of that.” I was

still skeptical because I had studied all these European languages. But in early ’73 I did

go down to Oklahoma and visited the Quapaw tribe and discovered there were only one

or two people left who could speak that language. All the rest of the speakers had died

out. Their sons and daughters had not learned the native language. They had only

learned English. So I began interviewing the remaining couple of speakers, made tape

recordings and ultimately worked up a dictionary, a good, hefty dictionary. It’s about

4,000 separate entries, I think.

Q: For a language that nobody was interested in speaking.

A: Well, it was dying out. Since no one was interested in learning it or speaking it at that

point, if linguists and anthropologists and what not were ever going to know anything

about that language, someone had to do this. Someone had to document the language.

The last speakers of Quapaw passed away soon after that.

Q: Was this a written language?

A: It was not a written language. It is written if I write it.

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Q: Okay. But these people were not writing.

A: No, their written language was only English. After the last speakers of Quapaw became

unavailable, I moved on to the Kansa language, which, of course, was spoken by the Kaw

nation or the Kansa tribe right here along the Kansas River originally when the first

settlers came. They were moved to a reservation at Council Grove early on and from

there to another reservation in north central Oklahoma north of Ponca City. I’ve spent

most of my research time and research efforts since that time, about 1974, working on the

Kaw language. There were still about three or four fluent speakers of the Kaw language

in 1973 and 1974. I did a lot of interviewing and recording with them and have been

working on grammar and dictionary materials for the Kaw language ever since then. So

basically what I did in 1972 before I was even an associate professor or before I had

tenure here at KU was kind of just toss aside 10 years of study of Romance languages

and dedicate myself to a completely new discipline, a completely new set of languages

doing the sort of very basic work with grammar, vocabulary and what not that had been

done 500 years ago for Spanish and French.

Q: Are these languages as complicated as English or the Romance languages?

A: No, they are quite different from both. The vocabularies are of course totally different.

These Siouan languages, Quapaw and Kansa, although they are quite similar to each

other, are extremely different from English and from European languages generally.

These particular Indian languages, for example, always place the verb right at the end of

the sentence. So they talk like Yoda, the figure from “Star Wars.” They are just quite

different. So I kind of changed horses in mid stream and really never looked back.

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You asked about the courses I taught. In a couple of instances I did teach about

those particular Indian languages. I also gave Field Methods several more times with

speakers of Choctaw and speakers of Muscogee-Creek. I had one speaker of the Kiowa

language. So basically my concentration since the mid seventies has been Native

American languages. I also taught work in comparative linguistics, historical linguistics,

phonetics, phonology.

Q: What is phonology?

A: It’s the study of how sound systems operate, the different kinds of speech sounds that are

used in different languages, that sort of thing, and the way they pattern in languages. It’s

kept me busy.

Q: Are the Indians interested in preserving their languages?

A: I don’t think they gave it much thought at all in the early days that I was doing that work

in the 1970s. I think they were all aware that there were only a handful of people left, a

handful of elders who still knew the language. But, you know, I guess it is true that you

don’t miss what you don’t know. I think people who grew up in those communities had

just turned out as monolingual English speakers. Some people, I’m sure, were interested

in their native language, but that would be like me, for example, my ancestry was

Scottish. I might be interested vaguely in Scots-Gaelic or something like that, but it is

just sort of a vague interest. My wife came from a German family. Her mother spoke a

little German. Her grandmother spoke fluent German, but my wife is not really interested

in German. So I think it was really the consciousness-raising efforts of some Indian

groups in the 1980s that began to bring about this renaissance of interest in the tribes in

their native languages. Well, of course it is too late in many ways. The Kaw or Kansas

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language is now gone. The last speaker, Mr. Pepper, died in the early 1980s, I think

about 1982. Maudie Row, the woman I recorded most of my material with died in 1978.

So the language in now gone and the Quapaw language is now gone. About half of the

Native American languages once spoken in North America are now gone. A lot of the

others are very endangered. The tribes are now very conscious of this, whereas in the

1970s there was not very much interest. The Kaw tribe has a language project that I am

an advisor to. I could rattle on all day about this.

Q: That sounds very interesting.

A: It’s been fascinating.

Q: Are they trying to teach the language?

A: They are now. The Kaw nation hired a young linguist from the University of Oklahoma

to come up and work up teaching materials for them so that they can teach the language

in the schools and catch the kids when they re young and able to learn languages easily.

That’s a trait that pretty much ends about the age of puberty. After about the age of 12 or

14 people get to be like you and me, and then learning languages is like pulling teeth. It’s

a lot harder. But little kids can pick up languages just like that.

Q: But you’ve learned a lot of languages as an adult.

A: Yes, I pretty much dedicated myself to it. Maybe I had good luck learning them in

college because I was just more immature.

Q: How many languages do you speak?

A: What do you mean by speak? My fluency varies quite a bit from language to language. I

never really did learn to speak any Native American language because of the languages I

was doing my work with, there was hardly anyone left to speak with. The people I was

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working with were all in their 70s and 80s while I was in my 30s. I learned to speak

halfway decent French, Spanish, and Romanian. I can make myself understood and get

along in Portuguese and Italian and a little Russian. I studied Turkish, but I wouldn’t

claim to really know it very well.

Q: That’s quite a few.

A: That’s quite a few, but then again that’s what I did for my living. So if you compare it

with a literary scholar, it’s like a scholar who knows a lot about 18th century French

literature. Maybe he’s pick up 17th century French literature, which is different, and

Medieval French literature. Every discipline has various aspects that you master more or

less of.

Q: Then at some time you studied or did you teach in the Anthropology Department?

A: Actually, I mostly sat in on North American Archeology and Plains Archeology classes.

Q: This was in connection with the Indians you were studying.

A: That’s correct. That would have been back about 1990 maybe or 1991. I worked with Al

Johnson in Anthropology, North American Archeology. Then the following semester

when I was no longer on the intrauniversity professorship, I sat in on Jack Hoffman’s

course on Paleo Indians or the original peopling of the Western Hemisphere. I talked to

various of those classes briefly. I didn’t teach a course over there because linguistics and

anthropology have always been so closely allied. We usually have people on joint

appointments between linguistics and anthropology. I did a little lecturing for them and

wrote a couple papers out of that experience with the archeologists trying to correlate

linguistic information with archeological history to help the archeologists establish the

tribal identities for particular archeological sites, that sort of thing. Sometimes you can

26

use linguistic evidence to help with that. Right now during my retirement I’m sitting in

on an ethno-botany course taught by Kelly Kinger from the biology program. That

involves a certain amount of Native language study too. He’s looking at medicinal food

plants as used by the Native tribes. I comb through my vocabulary for terms that relate to

medicinal plants and food plants. We’ve done a little coordinating there too. So I’m still

keeping busy in my old age.

Q: Did you have a sabbatical at any time?

A: I had several sabbaticals on and off. They involved continued field recording of the

Kansa language down in Oklahoma and work on my Kansa dictionary. I didn’t begin

work with computers until the 80s. By that point I sort of dedicated myself to doing a

computerized dictionary, which I did for both Quapaw and Kansa. You can search it

using the computer. It just takes you right where you want to go, zip, zip, zip. I think my

next sabbatical was probably in 1986 or so. I was at the University of Colorado that year.

I’d begun a joint project with several linguists studying this particular family of Siouan

languages, a joint project sponsored by NSF and NEH through the University of

Colorado to do a comparison of all these related Siouan languages. Whereas there only

seven or eight Romance languages, there are about 16 different Siouan tribal languages.

We got specialists together for most of those languages. I was one of three people

selected to be senior editors on a comparative Siouan languages dictionary. So I spent a

sabbatical doing that and a bunch of other summers in addition to it into the 90s. That’s

kept me quite busy.

Q: You’ve talked about writing papers. Did you ever write a book?

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A: Well, I haven’t actually sat down and published a book per se, but I have these dictionary

manuscripts of course, typescripts, printouts, whatever you want to call them for two

Siouan languages that I had done field recordings for, Quapaw and Kansa. I also have a

dictionary that I did up from manuscript materials from the Smithsonian Institution that

were collected on an extinct Siouan language called Ofo that was spoken down in

Louisiana and Mississippi until the early part of the 20th century. There were some

materials collected from that that were never published or were not published in a

linguistically analyzed and sophisticated form. So I have another sort of monograph

length treatment of Ofo. These are all on computer. These are all large computer files. I

have not actually sent those off to any academic press. Then there is the comparative

Siouan dictionary. The last time we printed that out it printed out to about three reams of

paper. It’s monstrous, but it is not in published form yet. These things take a long time,

unhappily. A little over a year ago I applied along with the Kaw Nation in Oklahoma, the

Kansa Tribe to NSF and NEH and the Smithsonian that were jointly offering what they

called DEL (documenting endangered languages) fellowships. I was successful in that

application. So both I and the linguist at the Kaw Nation got a grant for this year from

the National Endowment for the Humanities to finish up the Kaw dictionary once and for

all and for me to actually finish putting on paper a grammar of the Kaw language. My

counterpart in Oklahoma is working on taking the materials that I’ve produced and

turning them into teaching materials at the same time. We have taken the recordings that

Mrs. Roe and Mr. Pepper made for me back in the 70s and we’re cutting those up so that

we have sentences in computers. These are sound files. We are working this out so that

a student can get a lesson. He can click on a sentence or a word, and he can hear a Native

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who is now long gone pronounce that word fluently in the language and imitate the

pronunciation. So these Indian elders who died in the 1970s or the 1980s are still

teaching their language.

Q: Were you ever involved in administration, such as being chairman of the department?

A: Thank heavens, no. I’m afraid I shirked that kind of thing pretty much. You know how

it is. Some people at KU are comfortable doing a lot of committee work and enjoy it and

do a good job at it. I was never one who was terribly comfortable with it and didn’t enjoy

it. I don’t know if I would have done a good job at it or not. I served on a number of

graduate research fund committees over the years. I think I did that about five times. I

served on the intrauniversity professorship selection committee the year after I did one of

those in 1991. This would have been about 1992. My last year or two here I was

appointed to the College disciplinary committee. That was a revelation.

Q: Really? How so?

A: Well, it was just a revelation. I guess that the students who study linguistics, you know,

if you’re going to study something that exotic, you must be pretty dedicated. So

linguistics never tended to attract a lot of students who tried to take short cuts, or who

would cheat a little bit.

Q: So that’s what this disciplinary committee involved.

A: The college disciplinary committee, the cases I heard, involved cases of plagiarism,

mostly in the English Department. The English Department comes down really hard on

that. They don’t care for that at all. So when they catch a student turning in an essay that

somebody else wrote, or these days was discovered on the internet.

Q: I’ve heard that’s the way they do it now.

29

A: That’s the way is done. I think that every case that I was in on, that I was one of the

three-person hearing committee for, involved internet plagiarism.

Q: What do you do with students who do that?

A: Well, there’s a series of sanctions, depending on the seriousness of the offence and

whether it’s a repeated offence or first time and how serious it really is. I think most of

these cases they try to resolve inside the department. But if the student is not willing to

accept the sanction that the professor and the chairman of the department believe would

be the right one, then the case comes to the disciplinary committee. We hear the

evidence and we hear the student and the professor. They tell us their sides. At that point

I think there is a generally agreed upon hierarchy. It can involve getting a failing grade

on that exercise. It can involve getting a failing grade in the course. It can involve a

suspension. It can involve dismissal. I think suspension was the strongest sanction that

the committee I was on ever decided on. This was for a fellow who cheated on not one

but four essays in a row. You’d think he would have learned his lesson the first time.

Q: Have you had honors at KU?

A: I’d have to think about that. All this stuff must be on my vitae somewhere. I guess I was

nominated for a couple of teaching awards. I was nominated by one or more students for

the HOPE award once. I didn’t make the list of finalists or anything like that. I was also

nominated for one of those chancellor’s things where they surprise the professor in class.

I can’t remember the name of it. I suppose in a sense I was honored by my profession in

that the professional organization of linguists who work with Native American languages,

The Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. This is a society

with about 1,000 members. So you can say that there are 1,000 linguists in the world

30

who work on Native American languages of North, Central, and South America. I’ve

served on various committees in that organization. I was elected vice president in 1996

and president in 1997. I suppose you’d have to consider that an honor. I felt honored. I

was honored two or three different times by the Kaw Nation in Oklahoma and presented

with blankets at a powwow. They awarded me their tribal medallion, medal, last year.

It’s very nice of them. I’ve tried very hard to do good things for them, and they’ve done

good things for me. I’d have to say that my relationship with the Indian people has

always been very cordial and very productive.

Q: Have you had outstanding former students who have gone on to greater things?

A: I like to think so. I’ve had several students who have become scholars in their own right,

who give papers at conferences, who write articles. One of my students, Laura Watkins,

published a book on the Kiowa language. She’s gotten more of her grammar written than

I have. But, yes, I think all of my students who have applied for jobs and wanted jobs

have been able to get them and are doing well in them.

Q: Have you been involved in community activities in Lawrence?

A: Not a whole lot. There may be things that I’m not remembering that will occur to me

after I go to bed tonight. I’ve been associated with the amateur radio group here in

Lawrence on and off while we lived in Lawrence. But in 1990 my wife and I moved up

to Leavenworth County. I’m a volunteer there for the county emergency management

services, mostly because I have two-way radio equipment that doesn’t depend on the

telephone line or on commercial services. So that if there is an emergency in which

communication is needed but the computers fail and the state system goes down, then

31

we’re available for that. I sometimes do tornado watches for them too. So I am a tornado

spotter in my spare time.

Q: Does that mean you just go outside and look to see what you can see?

A: I’m assigned a particular hilltop location in Leavenworth County that I am supposed to

drive to and report from.

Q: What do you plan to do in retirement?

A: Oh, boy. So far I’ve been busier than when I was teaching. I do have this NEH grant this

year through next July via the Kaw Nation to complete my Kansa language grammar and

to get the dictionary in shape to publish. I’m working away at that. It may or may not be

done by July. But surely it will get done. We are still completing work on the

comparative Siouan dictionary. I’ve got tons of stuff to do, lots and lots of research

projects to be completed. If I am able to complete those, there are plenty of others to

begin and then complete. I’m lucky as a linguist. All I need in my retirement to continue

my research is essentially a pencil and paper, right? At worst all I need is a computer.

And I have a couple of those, of course. Linguistics is a discipline where you don’t need

extensive laboratory equipment, at least I don’t. So I’m not really forced to go fishing, or

something like that. But basically it is my intention to continue my research as long as I

can. And, as I say, I am sitting in on courses occasionally. I’m sitting in on Ethno

Botany this semester. I may pick another one next year.

Q: what is your assessment of the Linguistics Department or KU, past, present, hopes for the

future, that kind of thing?

A: Well, that sort of thing is always difficult to say from my own microcosmic point of

view. I think we’ve had a pretty successful linguistics program here. It’s not one of the

32

larger ones. We have about eight faculty members on and off. It varies from year to

year. But I think we cover the territory of linguistics pretty well. And I would have to

say, unlike some other linguistics programs I could name and unlike some other

departments, I think all of our Ph.Ds who have wanted to get jobs and have applied for

jobs have gotten jobs. That’s always a good thing. It’s not a good thing if you run a

department for years and years and your students go begging after they graduate. That

wouldn’t be good. So I’d have to say we’ve done pretty well at that. I believe our

department has gotten something of a name for its work with Native American languages.

We’ve had some prominent graduate students, some of them my graduate students and

some of them Professor Yamamoto’s graduate students. He’s jointly between linguistics

and anthropology. Some of them are Dale Kincaid’s graduate students and some of them

Cliff Pie’s graduate students. But we’ve had a number of good graduate students and

good scholars among the faculty in Native American languages. I hope they’ll keep that

up. I retired now. Professor Kincaid left for the University of British Colombia a

number of years ago. Professor Yamamoto is in phased retirement now. So we are all

sort of treading off this path. I hope the department will continue the emphasis. But all

in all I am pretty satisfied with the linguistics program here. I think KU is a good

university. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a good, general education at the

undergraduate level. At the graduate level, of course, it depends very much upon the

department. It always does. It depends upon what your interests are. But KU has some

very good, well-known graduate departments. So I leave KU with a generally positive

feeling.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

33

A: I’m sure I’ll think of something when I go home and lay my head on the pillow tonight.

But I can’t think of anything right at the moment.

Q: Okay.