NAM DEOKHYUN

[nam dəkʰjən] (Dokyon)

Any languages interest me of which I am little informed. It is obviously essential even when one looks into a particular language to retain cross-linguistic perspective and try to keep clear the position of the languages at issue in the context of the world's languages from different angles to be a linguist in a genuine sense, namely, in the sense of approaching the internal structure and state of affairs of differences and similarities found among human languages through comparison on the basis of theoretically-defined concepts.

My main concern lies in the domains of morphosyntactic phenomena and I'm particularly working on head-marking-like typologies like applicative constructions and construct-marking constructions.

Being interested in such grammatical phenomena rarely found in socially-widespread languages makes a linguist all the further away from the everyday world. When it comes to languages, what ordinary people think of immediately is daily communication and languages familiar with them or national languages of some major countries like English or Japanese. Many of those who are highly fond of learning (or teaching) foreign languages are not aware of or are not interested in how joyful and meaningful it is to study and explore grammars while they sometimes describe her/himself a linguist. In that way, even educated mind's interests in languages fall in many cases under the domains of vocabularies, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics or applied linguistics concerned with socially-major languages, which is very natural, in that minority languages and phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic aspects of languages suffer from a greater difficulty to attract public attentions than minority ethnic groups, architectures of cars or microwave ovens, bahits of different kinds of animals or the expansion of the universe. It is hardly deniable that linguistics or language science is characterized by its higher and harder barrier against public approches than have many areas of natural sciences (especially applied stuffs). To the majority of people language is no more than a means of communication, cultural thing or obliged school subject.

To be noted, vocabularies (lexicological studies), semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics are absolutely among the domains of linguistics and should be on agenda on a par with those getting less public attentions: phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. However, to the extent that linguists are humans before being linguists, it is totally natural if they feel the former series of domais more familiar with or closer to themselves than the latter ones and are thus more likely to specialize some of the former or enter the world of linguistics with a view to doing so in the first place, as if linguistics were defined as such a thing (typical of undergraduate students), apart from rather complex theoretical or philosophical approaches to the former domains like formal semantics. If linguists do not take care of the latters, who will? I wonder what positive effects would be brought if linguists tried taking seriously the situation presenting the difficulty with which the domains virtually irrelevant to everyday lives get public interests, had more interests in such domains themselves and were more interested to spread and explain in person the existence and attractiveness of those much less popular but purer topics in linguistics to non-linguists, undegraduate students and even younger ones.

I appreciate descriptive grammars, lexicons and ethnographies as achievements by field workers. Some physical issue makes it difficult for me to go for a long-term field research. I wish to deepen my knowledge on each language and ethnic group one by one through reading even if that is by no means sufficient to prevent discontentedness of experts of the particular language.