While I am currently a colleague of Doug’s, I was once a student of Doug’s. I did my undergraduate degree at SFU, and while there, had the crazy idea to take advantage of the Western Deans agreement and take a course at UBC. This was somewhat unusual for an undergrad, and it was a very long bus ride!, but for some reason (which I really can’t remember) I thought this was a good idea. The course was ‘Field methods in phonology’ and it was taught by Doug. Oh, and it was actually a grad course. I’m pretty sure he had to give me permission to do this, which he clearly did. I was super intimidated to take this course! I was a lowly UG, from the lesser institution of SFU, and it was taught by a famous linguist! (Backstory: I had some ‘connections’ to Doug that likely made this possible. Or maybe not, maybe he would have let me in anyway? I’ve never asked.)
So I show up for class on the first day and it was just me and two MA students. (I think there was one other student registered, but they didn’t show up.) One of the two UBC MA students was William Turkel, who went off to MIT to do a PhD, so, like, a totally unintimidating classmate…. There was also Doug, and the language consultant, a women who, if recollection serves, was a staff member at UBC, and more importantly, a speaker of Babungo.
(Although I might be misremembering the language, mixing it up with the language I chose as my ‘language of the semester’ in my ‘languages of the world’ course at SFU. The more I think about it, the more I think it was the language I selected for my languages of the world course because I can see the book cover in my head, and we were not allowed to access literature on the language for the field methods course. This fact is relevant because it would have lead to a quite different experience, especially in the first month, had I been able to seek out information about the language from other sources.)
About a month into the semester, things were going along well. We were eliciting lots of nice nouns and verbs with different inflections, feeling like we were starting to get a sense of some allomorphy, even if we didn’t understand any of it yet. The three students were bonding over our shared excitement at figuring something out, in our enjoyment at exploring a new language together. And then, Doug casually asked us a question: ‘You guys are remembering to note the tones right?’ (The specific wording is lost to the sands of time, but this was the gist of what he asked.) We three looked back and forth at each other. ‘Tones? what tones?’ We hadn’t any inkling that there were tones! The other MA student, a Cantonese speaker, was as shocked as Bill and I were. And she said she really couldn’t hear the tones, no matter how hard she tried. (In the end, I think we were all equally good, or equally bad as the case may be, at hearing the tones.)
Needless to say, my final paper was NOT about tones. It was about prenasalized stops and whether they were better analysed as one or two segments I believe. Bill’s was about ideophones I think (which, it turns out, feature in a recently submitted paper from my lab, things have a way of coming around again). I think the other MA student may have written about tones, though, as she seemed determined to show that, as a speaker of a tonal language, she could figure them out.
I am so glad I made the crazy decision to take that class, and so glad Doug was crazy enough to let me in. It helped me get to where I am today. This story has a point though, and it is: you may have to wait, but if you listen, Doug will say something, said in his own subtle way, that will change the way you are looking at something.