Dear subscribers,

We are pleased to present you our first featured linguist of the 2015 Fund Drive: Picus Ding! Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/


Picus Sizhi Ding

Entering the field of linguistics in the early 1990s, I consider myself to be one of those growing up professionally together with the Linguist List. When I first learned of the List, which was precisely in the form of a mailing list, the kind of excitement I felt was about the same as I first discovered linguistics as a discipline.

Born in a Hokkien family in Rangoon at a time when overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia strongly upheld their ancestral language as part of their identity, I spent several years of my early life as a bilingual child in Hokkien and Burmese. Then my family moved to Macao and I grew up bilingually in Cantonese and Hokkien. The only foreign language taught in most schools of Macao in those days was English. I started to get interested in Mandarin around Grade 7, with exposure to its pronunciation mainly via pop songs such as those sung by Teresa Teng. In my final year of high school, Radio Macao launched a series of mini-programs for learning elementary Portuguese, I learned a little bit out of curiosity. In retrospect, there has always been an interest in languages in me. This explains my immediate decision on electing linguistics as my major when I discovered it on a long list of majors available in some universities in North America. For variegated reasons, I had moved and studied in the states, Canada and Australia, but my field of study remained intact. As a result, I have received all my three degrees in linguistics, each from a different country. (...)


Read the rest here:
English version: http://goo.gl/6PRsgN
Chinese version: http://goo.gl/7IHC6k