Date: 04-Apr-2006
From: linguist <linguistlinguistlist.org>
Subject: Dr. Ljuba Veselinova on Her Return to LINGUIST
Dear LINGUIST List subscribers,
I would like to start with a long overdue THANK YOU! The donations of many of you
supported me when I was an MA student and LINGUIST List editor from 1994 through 1997.
Thanks to your generosity I was able to enter the world of UNIX and the world wide web,
work in an exciting and ever changing environment such as the LINGUIST List, complete a
master's degree and finally, see a country that had long been completely inaccessible
for me. A big and hearty THANKS goes to all of you!
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria.
As a child I traveled regularly to Algeria where my parents worked for a long time.
French was the first foreign language I came to speak. English followed somewhat later
after much painful, and my parents would add, expensive, tutoring. I started college in
Sofia as an English and French major, but soon decided that those languages were way too
common, in that they were spoken by way too many people. Scandinavia appeared satisfactorily
exotic to me, so I took Swedish more or less due to sheer accident. After a couple of
scholarships to Sweden, I ended up settling down there. Once in Stockholm, I discovered
that linguistics can give me access to many more "exotic" languages that I could possibly
ever attempt to learn and even suggest ways for explaining them. After completing my BA
in linguistics in Stockholm, the strong nudge of a friend and my growing interest in
technology made me apply for the LINGUIST List fellowship when it was announced for the
first time. And lo and behold, I found myself in the Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor area in
Michigan.
I doubt that the LINGUIST List moderators, Helen and Anthony Aristar, knew what they
were getting into when they initiated the fellowship and brought a foreigner such as
myself to the US. With me they found themselves fulfilling multiple roles: they acted
surrogate parents, boarding school managers, driving school coaches, university
professors, and mentors in a very general, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough,
very generous way. Back then, LINGUIST List was at the very initial stages of its
development, but I think anyone would agree that even at that stage, the enterprise was
already demanding a rather high toll for its smooth running.
In 1994, LINGUIST List was a distributed listserv-based mailing list moderated with
great care and sparse funding. The listserv computer was in Texas A & M and we were
connecting to it via a simple telnet session. All work was done directly at the command
prompt in an UNIX environment, and learning my first UNIX commands made me feel like a
geek. The daily routine consisted of sorting mail, editing messages, composing issues
and mailing them out, all of this spiced up with a lot of correspondence in between.
While these tasks may sound mundane at first, each and every one of them was actually
fascinating in its own way. Through mail and correspondence, I came into direct contact
with most (if not all) authors of the hefty books on my reading lists. Having to edit
their messages was scary and enthralling at the same time. Looking back at those days,
I now can see that only ignorance allowed me to ask someone whose textbook I was
currently reading to please, please change the wording of their message, for politeness
purposes. But apart from the direct contact with linguists, there was another
awe-inspiring aspect of the work: namely the fact that the messages I put together were
instantly being distributed to a very large number of people, who in many cases knew a
lot more about the issues I was posting on.
Sometime in early 1995, we heard that somewhere on the internet there was something
called hypertext transfer protocol and a mysterious language, HTML, associated with
it. We were told it wasn't hard to learn and indeed, it turned out not be. So the first
LINGUIST List website site was created but back then its functions were limited which
is not surprising given the state of art of the world wide web.
As more and more people were finding their way to LINGUIST List, and the amount of
accumulated information (conferences announcements, dissertation abstracts, book ads,
student support ads, job announcements, summaries of discussions, I hardly need to
enumerate all those here) was outgrowing manageable limits, it became apparent that
for all of it to be useful and accessible to linguistic community, it had to be
searchable. A grant proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and at the time when I was leaving in 1997, the proposal had been funded for a year
and work on it was in progress. LINGUIST List was still supporting one student based
on subscriber's donations.
In 2006, only 9 years later, LINGUIST List supports 25 students at 3 different
universities. As the NSF funded EMELD project draws to an end, two other large scale
projects are about to start. In addition to being information collector and
disseminator, LINGUIST List is now developing tools for field linguists, housing
metadata for language archives and working on search tools for these archives and
databases. The students who work on LINGUIST List learn database design, SQL and
ColdFusion. They are wizards at dynamic HTML and before long they will be learning
various applications of geographical information systems in linguistics. They
are living personifications of enthusiasm and when the need arises (which does
happen), they will work day and night to get messages posted on time, complete a
project or meet a deadline. It is a pleasure to walk into a populated LINGUIST
List meeting where so much is going on and everyone has something to report.
Dear subscribers, your contributions are funding an extremely reliable discussion
forum with high standards, a truly unique searchable data repository for linguistics
and an evolving school for language technology. Please help all of this to continue.
LINGUIST List is by now an essential tool for linguistic research and its students
need you!
Thanks for reading this far. And thanks again for supporting me through a degree
and indirectly, for the time I was able to spend in a truly awesome country!
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Helen and Anthony for the
affection and care they have shown to me, and for their limitless devotion to the
profession without which neither LINGUIST List, nor its achievements would have
been where they are. In contributing, you will help expanding their vision even
further.
Sincerely yours,
Ljuba
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