Linda: Well, I thought about the question, and I realized that there were essentially four books that I had as a kid that got me started in languages, and I still have two of them. I forgot to bring them up so that I could show them to you. I don’t remember which ones I acquired first, so I’m just going to mention them randomly. One was a children’s encyclopedia that focused on world languages and cultures, and for each language and culture that it covered, it showed you how to say things in each language. They had about five different words that they listed for each language, like “hello,” “thank you,” “house,” and so on. That information from that book actually proved useful to me at one point because when I was in second grade, we got some new students at our school who spoke Portuguese. Because of the encyclopedia, I knew that the way to say “hello” in Portuguese was “ola,” so I was able to say hello to them, and we spent several minutes just saying “hello” back and forth in Portuguese. It wasn’t much, but it kind of got things started for the kids there.

The second book that got me interested in language was a book of poetry called “Happy Days” by the poet Ogden Nash. Nash was famous in the early 20th century as a humorist who specialized in poetry. His poems frequently appeared in magazines like The New Yorker. What he was especially known for was making forced rhymes by using altered spellings or pronunciations of words. For instance, in his poem “The Rhinoceros,” it goes, “The rhino is a homely beast for human eyes. He’s not a feast. But you and I will never know why Nature chose to make him so. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros! I’ll stare at something less preposterous.” A lot of his poems were short, and because they were short, they were easy to remember. So I had a whole lot of fun memorizing them.

The third influential book that I had as a kid was a children’s book titled “There Is a Dragon in My Bed.” The book takes two kids on a humorous trip to France via a cruise ship and teaches them how to say various sentences in French, such as “There is a dragon in my bed” when one of the kids discovers a dragon in her bed, or “Sir, it is raining, monsieur” after one of them falls into a fountain in Paris. It had some wonderful illustrations to go along with the book. It was just a really cool little book. And then the fourth book that led me toward languages was a book about dinosaurs. Part of the information included in the book were not only the names of the dinosaurs but also what their names meant. I think that kind of helped push me toward the realization that words can come from other languages and that things can be named from words in those languages that show some sort of meaning. I suspect that may have triggered the question that has lived in the back of my brain for as long as I can remember: “Why is it called that?”

Linda: I think humor is a powerful tool for exploring language and culture because it allows us to connect with people on a very human level. Humor transcends language barriers and cultural differences in a way that few other things can. When we laugh, we share a common experience, and that can break down barriers and create a sense of unity. In the context of language, humor can help us understand the nuances and subtleties of different languages and cultures. It can also provide a window into the past, showing us how people thought and felt in different times and places.

For example, the Philogelos, which is considered the world’s oldest joke book, gives us a glimpse into the humor of ancient Greek and Roman societies. By studying these jokes, we can learn about their values, their social norms, and even their language structures. Humor is a universal language that can bring people together and help us appreciate the diversity of human experience.

Linda: Well, when I started studying Latin, they hadn’t developed what they know now as the whole language system. The way that I was taught Latin was that you started off by learning different parts of speech, like nouns, and then how the various parts of speech were put together to show meanings. For instance, in Latin, nouns have what are called declensions. In other words, the endings change in order to alter the meaning of the word slightly. I found that very helpful, actually. I think for some people, Latin serves as a good starter language.

One of the reasons why that is the case, I think, is because with Latin, since it is a dead language, there’s no big emphasis on learning to speak it or write it. The main emphasis is on learning to decipher meaning, so people don’t feel as daunted trying to learn Latin as they would with a modern language that you need to learn not only to understand but to read and write as well. Latin also has a very regular structure. That means that once you learn what a root word’s basic meaning is and how the ending changes to affect that meaning, it’s very easy to decipher what the word’s meaning is and to apply the rules for one word to other words that fit into the same category.

For people who are comfortable mastering knowledge by learning a set of rules like that and then seeing how the rules apply in other situations, Latin and ancient Greek, and even Old English, since they all do the same thing, are a lot friendlier than modern languages where you’re under pressure to be able to generate original thoughts and ideas in that language. As far as the relevance of Latin and Greek to modern linguistic studies, linguistics is fundamentally a science.

For anybody who is a native English speaker or a speaker of most of the modern European languages, the vocabularies used in the various sciences in those languages are largely based on Latin and Greek. By whatever historical coincidence, the people who developed and created the terminologies used in the various sciences were predominantly European, and so their default languages for defining and expressing scientific ideas were to go back to Latin and Greek.

So anybody who’s planning to pursue linguistics or any of the STEM fields is going to find that the terminology for whatever area of knowledge they’re studying is going to have a large degree of Latin and Greek-derived words in it.

Jill: Hmm, yeah. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about how we worked on this exhibit for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

So, just a little background: to make this dictionary, the people at the University of Wisconsin at Madison sent out field workers all across the country to collect data about people’s language. They had a regular newsletter for this dictionary and this effort.

And this is probably, like, you know, 50 years later, someone went around and collected the memoirs of those field workers.

So, we were working, collaborating with the people at the University of Wisconsin. We were looking at these memoirs and thinking, “Wow! That would be so great if we could share them.”

That’s when Linda came up with the idea, I believe, for making them into a graphic story, graphic novel type of presentation.

I think the wisest thing she did in getting ready to do that was to make a storyboard, like a narrative with each panel of what the illustration would be, and then the text that would go with that illustration to illustrate a stage of this story that the person was telling. And so, we were looking for images from that era of the mid-sixties, you know, that would kind of inspire her drawings.

I think Linda did so much research on that before she even put pen to paper.

Linda: We did our best to find photographs of the people that were roughly contemporary with them at the time that they were doing the research. And so, I would base my drawings of the field workers on those photographs to try and make them look as authentic as possible.

Jill: Yeah. So, I mean, that’s the desire to make it as historically accurate as possible. But at the same time, integrating what they were saying about the language that they were collecting. You know, there are certain words that are used in one part of the country that are not used in another part of the country.

And so, by making those storylines and putting the pictures with it, Linda captured that adventure, that sense of adventure that these field workers had as they went around the country and visited these little towns and tried to convince people to talk to them and spend a week of time with them, answering their 1,600-word questionnaire.

Linda: Well, I’m hoping that I can continue building up the Philogelos collection because there are still more jokes that need cartoons. I’d like to see us work on the languages of science exhibit and plan to eventually turn it into a virtual field trip similar to our Puerto Rico virtual field trip. We need to expand on the jokes exhibit because we want to add more languages, if possible. I think the intent is also to include a short section on humor theory and brief biographies of famous joke tellers and comedians, like Laurel and Hardy.

Another idea that I’ve had floating around in the back of my mind for a long time is someday maybe doing an exhibit on comic books, comic strips, graphic novels because they kind of represent an intersection between using words and art to get their point across. And oh, I think somewhere along the line there are plans to develop an exhibit on proverbs and maxims and old sayings from various cultures. That’s something we need to have happen because it’s something you’re going to find in just about every language and culture on the planet.

Linda: Same thing, you know, practice, practice, practice. Find out what it is that you want to get involved in. Learn about it. No, you know, learn something about what it takes to get into the field. Like being an intern for the National Museum of Language.