What is time (and why should linguists care about it)? Supplementary materials

Remarks Introducing Brian D. Joseph & His 2020 Presidential Address to the LSA January 4, 2020 Richard D. Janda (IU Bloomington) Tonight’s speaker is like Aurēlius Augustīnus—better known as St. Augustine—in his fascination with the issue of time. In about 400, Augustine asked these four temporal questions: Quid est enim tempus? Quis hoc facilē breviterque explicāverit? Quis hoc ad verbum dē illō prōferendum vel cōgitātiōne comprehenderit? Quid autem familiārius et nōtius in loquendō conmemor āmus quam tempus? ‘So, what is time? Who will have easily and briefly explained it? Who will have understood it to [the point of] offering a word about it, or in thought? Yet what do we recall more familiarly and more knowingly in speaking than time?’. It makes sense to introduce this paradox in Latin, since it was taking high-school Latinclasses that can be said to have started Brian Joseph on the path to becoming a historical linguist and, eventually, to taking the helm of the LSA. Yet it could also be speculated that there is a genetic component to this: Harriet Joseph was a Shakespearean scholar who published a book on a manuscript written in Latin by the Bard’s son-law, John Hall, that was later translated into English— but with omissions which Prof. Joseph filled in from her own familiarity with Latin. Edward Joseph was also an intellectually curious scholar, one who contributed to the psychoanalytic literature on the author Joseph Conrad, on twins, and on the consciousness of being conscious—and he was elected President of the American Psychoanalytic Association once and the International Psychoanalytic Association twice: definitely a respected leader. Moreover, Brian Joseph grew up in a family that, on both sides, traces its roots back to the Québec of the early 1800s. If you’re wondering whether they were successful, consider this: the patriarch of the Josephs in Canada, Henry Joseph, had a string of fur-trading posts where John Jacob Astor worked for him! Still, none of this was really necessary for Brian to become a historical linguist known for his insight into the languages of Greece and neighboring areas, or for his insistence that diachrony includes the study of ongoing language-change in the present. In my small overlap with Brian’s years teaching at Ohio State and at Linguistic Institutes, I’ve been impressed with his sometimes explicit but mostly implicit advice to students that it makes sense to focus on one particular nonnative language (along with your native tongue), rather than fixating on a theoretical issue and then trawling the languages of the world for ones that bear on that issue. He doesn’t say it exactly this way, but the upshot is: Go to a language, and it will tell you its problems. In President Joseph’s case, Greek has been good him, and he has been good to Greek. Not only did it lead him, already as an undergraduate at Yale, toward Hellenic and Indo-European linguistics; it also, through shared interests, introduced him to the person whose husband he became , and, with a little stretching of the imagination, could be said to have led to Mary Clark and Brian’s sons traveling with them in Greece and adjacent countries, and to one son’s now living in Greece with a diplomat spouse (again that Canadian connection) and with children who are being or will be exposed to Greek at school. That their other son is an economics professor has a Hellenic Supplementary materials for ‘What is time (and why should linguists care about it)?’, by Brian D. Joseph. Language 96(4).908–37, 2020. connection only via the etymology of economy as oiko-nom-ía ‘management of a house(hold) or budget’, I’ll admit. In addition, not all students of Greek expand their horizons to the Balkans as a whole, but Brian did, and that fact has inspired other historical linguists, as well as synchronic linguists who focus on language contact. President Joseph has called the Balkans a laboratory for linguistic change, and by that he means not just in an abstract sense, but also in terms of a place...