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115 appendix a Lecture Introduction “The Life of the Ant” Note: This is a transcription of the introduction of the speaker. The introduction was given in English. Good evening and welcome. I’m very pleased to introduce Dr. David Margolin, the last in our series our—of presidential lectures at our university . The series has been produced and underwritten by the National Science Foundation and it’s meant to support interdisciplinary, scholarly dissemination of information, um, on a national level. David Margolin, our speaker, is a liberal arts scholar in the truest sense of the word. He’s dealt with the problems and issues of interdisciplinary studies throughout his academic career and tonight he’ll be talking about the life of the ant, just one of his many varied interests. David Margolin currently teaches in the Department of Linguistics at our university. His current research focuses on community issues, revitalization of native languages, and the linguistic structure of those native languages. To date, Dr. Margolin has studied twenty different languages, providing documentation of the linguistic structure and the social attitudes that the speakers of these languages have toward their own languages. In this sense his work has been invaluable for linguistic understanding. A couple of years ago, Dr. Margolin had the opportunity to go to Honduras in Central America and to study two different systems of communication that he found there. One of these was the Tawahka language of Honduras spoken by approximately 25,000 people in that country. At the same time that he was involved in doing community research and trying to help this group of people preserve their language in the written form, he also took the opportunity to study the communication systems of ants. Tonight he’ll be talking to us about the life of the ant and perhaps he’ll give us some insight into how our language systems and our communications systems have things in common across species. Please welcome Dr. David Margolin. ...

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