Why I haven’t posted for nearly two years

It’s nearly two years since I last wrote a post. Why?

As my readers (if there are any left) may remember, I’m a retired academic, a linguist—specifically, a historical linguist. I’ve been finishing off a large research project into the history of Pacific languages, which has been published volume by volume over the years since the first volume appeared in 1998. The project has been the work of three of us, but one of the others has a challenging health condition, and so I have been finishing off the sixth and last volume. Some months ago I finished the last chapter. The extended concentration and focus that has kept me from writing even occasional posts is over. There’s still a way to go with re-reading, editing and formatting to be done, but that only means bits of short-term concentration that allow me to fit other things in between. 

You may be asking yourself, Why does he carry on with this stuff? He’s been retired for nearly fourteen years now. There is a reason. I love my research and I love sharing it with others. Like a good many scholars and scientists, I find this world, its people, its nature, its scenery, and the universe of which we are a tiny part, utterly fascinating and worthy of learning more about—not for myself alone, but also for those who follow. And like, I think, most Christian academics, this fascinating world, this scintillating universe, thrills me because when I contemplate it, I am filled with awe before the great God who created it, as well as you and me. 

I’m a linguist. At least since 1957, when Noam Chomsky published his Syntactic Structures, linguists have been battling each other as to how one should describe language, how it works, and how it changes. How come? Specialists in other disciplines seem to share a common framework, but not linguists. A reason for this is that it is really difficult to characterise what language is. We tend to think of it as a ’thing’. But it isn’t. It’s a means of composing our thoughts and feelings and of sharing them with others. Does it reside in our heads? Yes, otherwise we couldn’t think with it. But it resides in the heads of a whole community, and if it isn’t used in the relationships among its speakers, it dies. A language is also shaped by its community, and changes because its speakers change it, whether unconsciously or deliberately. And children learn the community’s language with seemingly little effort (but adults typically need far more effort to learn a new language!).

Language is part of the wonder of being human, and it’s small wonder that we linguists can’t agree on the basics, as language is not something that sits still and allows us to observe it. Human beings are wondrously complex, made in the image of God (who communicates with his people through language too) and language is an aspect of our God-given complexity. Linguistics may entail analysing a language and writing its grammar, or studying how human beings speak (biology and phonetics), or trying to figure out how language works in the brain (psychology, cognitive science, neurology), or investigating how people use it in oral communication (sociolinguistics, sociology), or trying to reconstruct the history of a group of languages (historical linguistics). No linguist can embrace all these disciplines, and it is difficult not to be in utter awe of language itself, of the amazing beings who use it, and of the God who made them.

My own specialism is the last of those I listed—historical linguistics, particularly of New Guinea and the Pacific. Historical linguists, alongside historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists, investigate human history and human prehistory. Prehistory is the period in any society before there were written records. In much of the Pacific, prehistory ebded only in the nineteenth century. How one researches the prehistory of languages is a story I won’t try to tell here (there are excellent books about it). I just want to say that if you research the (pre)history of a group of languages, you are also researching a major portion of the (pre)history of their speakers, and that is a dimension of the amazing inhabitants of God’s fascinating world which I find continually exciting. The people whose languages I study were the first people, from around 1200 BC, to reach the islands of the Pacific beyond New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. That took sophisticated canoe-building technology and almost unbelievable navigational skills, yet theirs was a stone age culture. Let no one kid you that our human ancestors were less intelligent or less inquisitive than us. They weren’t.

1200 BC, of course, is very recent in the whole span of human history, our knowledge of which has increased exponentially in the first two decades of this century. Recently, my wife Ingrid and adult daughter Pip and I (Ingrid and I are around eighty) happened to watch a recorded episode of the Australian TV program Back Roads. Each episode visits a remote area of Australia, where the presenter introduces us to local characters and gives us a sense of the history, geography, agriculture/industry of the place. We enjoy it. This episode took us to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The northern end of the Flinders is seven or eight hours drive north of Adelaide. The Flinders are one of the most rugged parts of the continent. We were taken first to Wilpena Pound, an area surrounded by a girdle of mountains where the tourist centre is now run by members of the local Aboriginal tribe, who have roots in the area going back tens of thousands of years. Then to Blinman, a now tiny settlement with a nineteenth-century copper mine and a steam train, all that is left of a major railway junction. Then finally to Arkaroola in the northern Flinders, where Reg Sprigg, a man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge (he studied zoology, geology and oceanography) established a wilderness sanctuary in 1968. We were shown the vast, bare and extremely rugged mountains of the Flinders, the rare rock wallabies that inhabit the sanctuary, and Reg’s shared discovery, on a nearby cattle station, of a rock layer from a 55-million-year-old sea bed, complete with the fossilised undulations that are characteristic of sand underwater. When each piece of the surviving layer is flipped over, one sees the imprints of the creatures (trilobites?) that had become buried in that sand. And, along with the presenter, the three of us were utterly blown away by the sheer dimensions of what we had seen in those thirty minutes and the manifestation of the hugeness of God’s glory in his creation.

That’s why I keep doing research.