Conversation with a Philologist
People familiar with my work already know how fondly I speak about Edwardsville, a small town in Southern Illinois, and the three years I spent there as a scholar and student. It was, after all, the subject of my first poetry collection Edwardsville by Heart. What I have not always spoken about are the many people I met there who made a significant impact on my life and career, and partly because of whom I am who I am today.
One of them is Douglas Simms (Ph.D.), a professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, currently the chair of the department. When I first met him in 2009, he was a professor of German Literature, and also the director of the Foreign Language Training Center (FLTC, which we then simply called “Lab”) where students spent about an hour each week to learn and practice languages. He was friendly and knowledgeable. We had occasional conversations and participated in a number of departmental events. He always struck me as deeply passionate about not just the language he taught, but languages in general.
Doug got his Ph.D. from the University of Austin and has taught at SIUE since 2004.
In 2010, shortly before I returned home for the first time, I was offered a space in the Master’s degree program at the Department of English at the same university. But I would not be able to pay for it without a university job. I applied for a graduate assistantship at the FLTC, and then left the country. In July, I got an email that I had been offered the job. I was able to return to there and complete my grad school because of this generosity.
In this conversation, I talk to him about philology (literary or classical scholarship of languages), language teaching in today’s climate, the state of academia in general, SIUE, memories, and other issues of shared interest.
I enjoyed the conversation very much, and I’m happy to share it with you.
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I just realized, a few minutes ago, that you’re one of the people I know obsessed with languages, whom I haven’t had the chance to talk to for the benefit of the public, or even for myself. Do you remember when/where your obsession/interest started?
My interest in languages began in High School. I had a very encouraging teacher who was supportive, not just of learning the language, but also learning in general. After three years of studying German in High School, I was able to study abroad after that and my interest continued to grow.
Why did you choose German at the time?
I’d had Spanish in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. For whatever reason, I essentially failed Spanish in the eighth grade. Consequently, I was not going to go down that path again. My older sister had taken German at our High School, and really liked the teacher. My sister recommended it, and I gave it a shot.
One of the most enduring images I have of you is you in one metal jacket from the middle ages in front of the class. I had walked in by mistake into the wrong class, and there you were. It was one of my first weeks at SIUE, and I remember thinking “wow, he does take his language teachings seriously!” What was that class about, and do you remember the incident?
I have to admit that I do not remember you popping into the class. However, this was something I used to do for my German literature course, when we covered a piece from the 9th century called Das Hildebrandslied. There is talk of armor in the text, and because movies and TV strongly influence what students’ imagination of what armor is, I would wear that so they would be more aware of the differences between popular media and historical realities. It also allowed us to dramatize a literary work. When dealing with a 1200-year-old text, bringing it to life makes a stronger impression than just looking at words.
Are there more costumes in your wardrobe, and do you still occasionally show up as a medieval soldier?
Only one other. When I teach the “Ship of Fools” (a work from 1494 by Sebastian Brandt) I put on my academic robes and a fool’s cap (also called a cock’s comb). The first type of fool addressed by Brandt in the work is himself, as an academic who has a lot of books, but who has not read or understood them.
I have not put on the metal jacket for about five years. It belongs to a friend of mine, and the whole piece weighs about 20 kg. There is a lot of advance preparation needed, and when I teach courses back-to-back, it is very difficult to put it on quickly.
I know you taught German — if I remember correctly — but you also seem obsessed with Old English, and the medieval times in general. Is this the case? And where did that come from?
My interest in medieval languages started in 1993. I was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Before leaving a friend of the family asked whether I was planning on studying modern German literature or medieval literature. The thought had never occurred to me that I could study medieval language and literature. My personality being what it is, I opted for the more unusual choice and enrolled in a course on medieval German literature from the High Middle Ages. We spent a semester learning 12th-century German and translating it into modern German.
Upon returning to the United States, I wanted to continue my study of Middle High German, but was thwarted, because my university did not offer such courses. The next best thing I found was a senior-level English course in Old English. At the time I was a sophomore, and the professor did not want to let me take the course at first. However, because I was fluent in German, and because Old English shares a lot of grammatical similarities with German, I found it quite easy. By the end of the semester, I was tutoring the graduate students in the course.
Of course, I could not stop there. I began learning Old Norse (Old Icelandic) and Latin. I completed a minor in English with an emphasis on Medieval Studies. One of my German professors showed me a pamphlet from an American university that offered a Ph.D. program in Germanic Philology, and from that point, I decided that I was going to become a professor in Germanic linguistics and philology.
You told me that you lived in London as a kid. Did that have anything to do with it as well?
I think my time spent as a kid in the mid-1980’s had a tremendous impact on my life. Above all else, I was able to experience places and cultures beyond what I would have in the U.S. My parents made sure we traveled as much as we could, so I had a chance to see most of Western Europe by the time I was twelve. Being over there also gave me a different sense of time and history than most Americans have, I think. We had class field trips to Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s, to where King Charles I was beheaded. I lived near the city of St. Albans. The abbey there was first constructed with a grant from King Offa of Mercia in the eighth century. Close to the abbey were ruins of a Roman amphitheater and hypocaust, Queen Boudica fought a major battle there against the Roman invaders, and it had been an important city for the Catovellauni tribe of Britons before that. On other school trips, I was able to touch megalithic monuments and burial mounds of the Neolithic. This time scale was real. When I read about medieval cathedrals, I knew what it was like to walk in a Gothic or Romanesque church, how they smelled and how they felt.
Sounds magical. How long did you live in the UK?
I lived there from 1985–1987. It was a relatively short period of time, but very influential on me.
When did you get to Edwardsville? Did you grow up around there? And how did you get into SIUE as a teacher?
Part of what brought me to England also took me around the country. I grew up in several areas in the U.S.: Chicago, Dallas, and Newark, mostly. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. So much so, the one place I have spent the most time in Edwardsville.
I came here shortly after I completed my doctorate at U.T. Austin. I had a short stint as an instructor for the Dept. of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, but in 2003, I saw the opening here at SIUE and applied. I have been here since 2004 and will continue on as I can.
What is your research interest?
I have a diverse set of research interests. Many of these do not accord to academic units, which is why I am a professor of German who has a strong interest in Old English, for example. My main focus is the history and development of languages like English, German, and the Scandinavian languages, especially in their earliest written forms and their pre-history. I find early texts fascinating and the tools need to read ancient texts. Very often we need to do a lot of interpretation of these manuscripts and inscriptions, and I enjoy the puzzle. In addition to historical linguistics and philology, I have a strong interest in the poetry of this time. Mostly I have been interested in the structure of the meter of Old English, Old Saxon, and Old Norse poetry, but one cannot study that without knowing the literature in a broader sense.
What do you think the evolution of languages — or even the changes in the literature of those times to the literature of today — can teach us today about how we use and approach language?
One person who taught me a lot of what I know about Old Norse poetry said something once that has stuck with me. She said that there are two things you learn from studying earlier periods of time: you learn how different they were from us, and you learn how just like us they were.
The study of literature, regardless of its geographic, chronological or linguistic origin, should be encouraged. It all has an ameliorating effect upon us. What drew me to the study of older literature, though, is the difficulty, the directness of connection with the text, and the freedom one builds as an independent thinker. We are too alienated from the author as modern readers of modern texts. It is not as obvious to us that the text we read was a copy of thousands, produced by a publisher, upon the direction of a gaggle of editors, sometimes a translator, before we can reach back to the “original” text of the author. The earlier texts, by contrast, have to be wrestled with in order to gain their knowledge in a completely different way. The skills one needs to do this are liberating. By understanding and identifying the influence of the editor and the translator, I can accept or reject their fiddling with the text based on a set of higher principles and call their changes to the text into question when I have solid reasons to do so. In this fashion, I could choose to read the medieval manuscript directly, rather than a translation or edition of the text.
What, if you were asked to give a summary, would you say is one thing you’ve found the most fascinating from your years of poring through old manuscripts, languages, and histories?
The most fascinating thing for me, and one which I have a scholarly interest in now, are those places in a text where scribes made mistakes. One can find a single letter, poorly written, and one can reconstruct the actual pen-strokes the scribe made, see where they messed up a letter, and delight in the way in which they tried to repair the letter. Not only can I view the very act of writing by the scribe, but in many cases, I can get an indirect glimpse at the text he was copying. They have been dead for more than a thousand years, but these moments are resurrected in the act of attentive reading. Returning to the earlier question of what one learns, one can see that the imperfection of texts was not a hindrance to reading. I often make the analogy today with reading texts via mobile phones, that one has to have the ability to critically identify misspellings and the interference of autocorrect in order to get to the “intended” text. These skillsets are identical.
I work at the British Library now, where I regularly come across lots of historical materials, and people who have spent their years hunkered down in these texts, figuring things out of old manuscripts. It sounds like both a dream job and a labour-intensive effort of trying to piece history together with only a little piece of it visible to you. It must be both fun and tiring at once?
It can be grueling in large doses, but the gains made from an interesting discovery are addictive. Philology, to give an often paraphrased statement by Nietzsche, is the art of reading extremely slowly. We often think of the “meaning” of a text to be encoded by the words and sentences, but so much contextual information can be found in the minutiae and sometimes the seeming detritus of scribal errors.
What has been your most memorable experience so far as a university professor?
That is hard to choose. There have been many. In the past couple of years, I have had great experiences working with very talented students. Two have gone off to pursue graduate-level degrees at other, bigger institutions. Not many students go on to pursue that line of work. It is reassuring for me to know that a student can come to SIUE and, with proper focus, support, and ambition can go on to pursue further, deeper studies.
From 2010 to 2012, when I worked at the Language Lab, you were — for the period — the Director. I thought it was a very neat arrangement to have students do some extra hours out of class to improve their language skills. Do the responses by students who used it give you the impression that the Lab is playing the role designed for it?
The role the lab is playing has changed since you were with us. So many textbook publishers equip their textbooks with electronic ancillaries, like electronic work-books, which enable students to engage in computer-assisted language learning from anywhere they have internet access. I think the language lab’s role is changing, for all language labs, not just ours.
I see. What has been the notable changes in its purpose and form?
We are at a crucial turning point, I think. Our Language Lab arose in a pre-Internet world. Even while I have been at SIUE, the spread of high-speed internet access has made coming to the Language Lab for internet access less of a focus of our mission. We have been working hard to turn our focus away from computer-aided language learning per se in the lab, toward a laboratory that is designed to bring human beings together with the proper technology and setting. Computers are wonderful and the Internet enables so many ways to make connections with the wider world. We need to fight the urge to let computers do the work that should be done through human to human contact.
What else has changed in the university, or in the Department of Foreign Languages since 2012?
We have made a few changes at the university and the Dept. of Foreign Languages since 2012. There is a new General Education plan followed by many students as they work their way towards a Bachelor’s degree. The University has recently moved up in its Carnegie-Mellon ranking as well.
This is great!
As always happens, the persons have changed. We have new faculty, some have retired, and many administrators in the upper levels of the University have changed. However, many things remain the same. We reside in the same section of Peck Hall, we have the same day-to-day interactions with students. You might be amazed, however, to see that the goose population is less troublesome than it had been when you were with us.
Ha ha. About the geese, I will need to see that to believe it. I used to have some perverse pleasure in watching, from my window at Cougar Village, students being attacked, and going out of their way to avoid the conflict, because of the birds’ protected status. I even wrote a poem in my book about Cougar Village Deer, inspired by that experience.
I have learned a lot about the behavior of Canada geese since living and working here. I see the natural ebb and flow of their moods. In Winter one can go by, close even, without fear of attack. Then they pair up and seek out prime nesting sites, one needs to give a little more space. Then the eggs are laid, and one better not approach within a couple of feet, lest the partner not seated on the eggs go after you. Woe be unto him who ventures close to a gosling! If I had my way, we would switch the SIUE mascot from the Cougar to the Canada goose…so vicious, so protective of its young, so fearless of creatures bigger than they.
I agree about that mascot change. I’ve never seen a cougar in Edwardsville.
Slight change of topic. The first time I heard of this German war movie Das Boot was at SIUE. I never quite saw it while I was there, but I have had the chance to do so many years later. There were many other classic language movies we had there in the lab. How were they chosen to be acquired? And what has been student attitudes to them?
Our professors often requested certain movies to be purchased and made available to students. Some students are surprised to find these offerings, and I think many are pleasantly surprised when they watch them to see how wonderful many of these films are.
I learnt just today that you became the Head of Department after a while, and you’re still in that position as at this moment. Congratulations!
Thank you. It has been a rewarding experience. I’ve learned much more about the workings of the Department and the College of Arts and Sciences, and it has been a pleasure to serve my faculty and students in this capacity.
In your experience first as a teacher and now as an administrator, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing language education in the United States? And how can the challenge be met?
The biggest challenge has been to fight the idea that we can rely on the rest of the world to learn English. This is not new. Similar challenges are faced in the United Kingdom as well. As more of the world make themselves better equipped to work in an anglophone world, we risk allowing ourselves to become lazy and entitled with respect to other languages and cultures. The best way to counter that is with education at all levels, not just at universities. Beginning earlier on in public schools and teaching children foreign languages from an early age would pay dividends for our nation’s ability to empathize with other peoples and cultures in the rest of the world, I think.
Are there some languages with more patronage than others? Which are they and why, in your experience, do you think that people are drawn to them?
In some ways, yes, to be sure. As I mentioned before, English seems to command a lot of users across the world because of the economic forces associated with it. I think we have seen this at many times and places in history (like English nowadays, or Latin during the Roman Empire). At other times, language serves as a uniting force among people for other reasons, like religion (I think of the way in which Arabic unites the Islamic world here). The downside is that other language communities risk abandoning their languages in favor of larger, more prestigious, or economically more profitable languages.
Speaking of which, Oxford English Dictionary recently added a whopping 29 new words from Nigerian English into its lexicon. It’s not the first time they’ve expanded the language with input from Nigeria (“Dashiki” and “Oba” have been in the dictionary since 1972 and 1982 respectively), but this is the first time on that scale. It has generated a lot of positive ink in the Nigerian and global media, but I’ve wondered if we are not celebrating the wrong thing. While this development shows positive growth in the power and influence of English in the world, it does nothing to empower the local languages in Nigeria itself.
This is an issue I recognize. I find myself also recognizing the amount of privilege within myself as a linguist and a native speaker of Mid-American Standard English. It is all too easy for me to become clinical and distanced. Because I am, as a historical and comparative linguist, familiar with the evolution of languages over the time-scale of millennia, I know that the only constant is change. At some point, the heyday of English will come to pass. The next lingua franca will emerge to replace it, and we will have this same situation once again with a different set of circumstances. Babylonian displaced many languages in the Ancient Middle East, then Aramaic, Latin gobbled up many languages in Europe and around the Mediterranean, French once commanded considerable prestige in Europe and its colonized regions. Eventually, new linguistic phenomena will arise, and they will be fascinating in their own rights. All this is easy to say….when one’s own language is not endangered. This is the clinical, privileged perspective I have to acknowledge. One thing I hope to pass along to my students is that they recognize the linguistic validity of other languages. I wish I knew what the answer would be in order to empower other language communities so that the language and its culture can pass on to future generations. I am glad to see that there are movements out there, such as your Yorùbá name project, among others.
This interview has been mostly questions to me, but I would really like to hear what your perspective is. What do you see as the most crucial factors in empowering smaller language communities in Nigeria (and elsewhere)?
Attitude is a big factor, surprisingly. You’d have thought it would be access. The idea of English language supremacy still runs very deep — even among speakers of endangered languages — that it negatively affects the efforts to empower them. To give you an example, when the Nigerian English accent on Google was released last year, there were people who didn’t like it precisely because it was “Nigerian”. And we’re talking about a variant of English spoken here. It’s the same kind of attitude — usually worse — that you get when you mention education in the mother tongue or any suggestion about empowering local languages to deal with modern realities. I have encountered this in many ways, usually from people you would assume are otherwise smart/educated. Here and here are some of the recent conversations we had on the matter. The ethnic and political suspicions underpinning Nigeria’s social reality — some derived from real historical precedents — also makes it hard to make a case for diversity without raising eyebrows about social/political domination or inequality. I explored this in an oped in 2018 and in a twitter thread earlier this year.
Recently, I was reading this Inaugural Lecture by Paul Christophersen, written in 1948, about the future of smaller languages in Nigeria. Let me quote a relevant part, where he was talking about the creole in Guyana and the fact that the society had dropped its original languages for a type of language resembling English but quite: “…there is no suggestion that Nigerians should abandon their vernacular languages in favour of English. If anything like that were ever contemplated, my advice would be that it must be done slowly, very slowly. It must be allowed to take several generations… If it happens quickly, the result may… mean a violent break with the past and may lead to national self-extinction…” It seems, in the end, that this was exactly what we did — violently abandon our own languages for English through successive government policies, and now we are stuck in this limbo (from where something will likely eventually emerge, but which has neither totally benefitted the languages of the country nor made us more competent English speakers).
Now language growth, evolution, diversity, endangerment, death, extinction, etc, are a fact of life, easily seen in other parts of nature. We are not always empowered to prevent an imbalance that messes with our hopes of a utopia where nothing bad ever happens. But we are here in the world, with varying competences. Just accepting that things must happen as they’ve been set by a higher force is something that runs against our modern sensibilities. So I have approached the task I’ve been given, with the skills I have, with a realization that we can only do so much. Ultimately, people themselves will have to want to use these languages for them to survive. Nigeria is an especially complex place, with over 500 languages, with some already extinct even. What technology does is provide means to circumvent the formal channels of school and government policies, and let the people themselves decide how to use their languages. If we create web tools for young people on whom the survival of languages depend, and make the tools accessible and easily adapt to different languages, maybe — just maybe — more people will use them to make their own languages thrive and survive. Technology itself cannot do anything about the personal attitudes where resistance remains.
The alternative avenues for expression, like the internet, do change the parameters of how smaller language communities can find a voice. I will be eager to see how this unfolds in the coming years. Of course, we will also need to fight for equal access to these points of expression for all, whether urban or rural. I agree about attitude being key. As an undergraduate, I had a course on language death, and one of the key points of transmission we discussed was use of language in the home between adults and children. But I also see that the parents’ attitude toward their language will also leave an impression on their children.
In today’s America, with the rise of right-wing fervour, especially with immigration, has there been any particular challenges on campus with teaching foreign languages, especially languages like Spanish?
Fortunately, I have not encountered any such difficulties on campus. However, I think that courses in foreign languages are a great tool for fighting xenophobia and racism. It is true that we teach grammar and technical elements, but we do much more. We teach culture, empathy for others, cultural awareness, critical thinking and self-awareness in what we read and what we discuss.
As a medievalist, though, I have found an increased need for teaching medieval studies because of right-wing abuses of history. Too often, right-wing radicals and white nationalists in the United States and in Europe, make use of fabricated, idealized notions of the Middle Ages to suit their own agendas. What we find in the study of the Middle Ages is that nations and nation-states were not ‘pure’ ethnic and linguistic blocs which the Romantics and colonialists of the 18th and 19th centuries would have us believe. There was international trade, there were people of color in Europe who made important contributions to the history and culture of Europe.
This is a good point, something I have noticed even in our own way of speaking about African and Nigerian history. For some reason, we seem to erase all the uncomfortable parts, and idealize the past to a point of unreason. Looks like we need more people teaching history this way, with a real spotlight on the complexity of the time. But how do we get it funded, or get students interested?
This has been an important point with many this past year in Old English studies. If you have the time, I recommend looking at the debate regarding the term “Anglo-Saxon.” There is a push to abandon that term, because it has become adopted by white-nationalists and other racist groups. I support that change. Part of what I do to get students interested is to first make them aware of the problem. The problem has existed for quite some time, and we need to get the word out and call out the racism when we see it. These problems extend far beyond terminology. There are long-standing systemic problems in academia that need to be fixed. It is up to scholars in my field to pursue the funding and for us to model and perpetuate a new mode of scholarship.
Budgeting, I believe, is also one of the biggest issues in public education — not just in the US, but in Nigeria as well. As the head of the department, how do you balance the dreams and ideas you have with the priorities of politicians who can, from far away, mess with the best-laid plans?
I am a fan of cheap solutions. I have the advantage, compared to chemists or other professors who need labs, that, in the end, I could teach outside while writing with a stick in the dirt. For my field, I think that returning to essential notions that foreign-language education and the values of the liberal arts can be accomplished through increasing human-to-human interaction. We should change our expectations that throwing money at technology might not pay the dividends we hope. Investing in people rather than things is important. Finding money to help students study abroad should be a priority. Although, I have little control over political influences on NEH grant availability or funding for foreign-languages coming from the federal government, I can influence small-scale decisions. I can avoid expensive textbooks for my students, I can find free resources, open-source software solutions, and I can direct them to sources of funding, encourage them to apply, and to write them recommendation letters in support.
I followed the news about each Fulbright Scholar to SIUE for many years, but I haven’t been up to date lately. Is Yorùbá still being taught at the Department?
We have been offering Yorùbá every year since you have been gone, except for one (for reasons beyond our control). Still by visiting Fulbright scholars from Nigeria.
Have there been demands for any other Nigerian languages? One of the things people often asked me while I taught Yorùbá there was “Why not Igbo?” another Nigerian language. “Why only Yorùbá?”
There have not been inquiries for other Nigerian languages. I recently received a map of the languages of Nigeria from a former student, and it hangs on my office door. I can see the areas where the 500 or so languages of Nigeria are spoken. I would love for our University to be an institution where we could offer Yorùbá and Igbo and Hausa, and many of the other languages one encounters there. We are still building our Yorùbá program. I would be afraid that by offering other languages of Nigeria, we would risk reducing the number of students who take Yorùbá, which would put our offerings in danger of too little enrollment.
We seem to share a love for Word With Friends, the phone app. I love it because of the instant nature of it, which saves the time one would have used to calculate scores on a real scrabble board. You have beaten me too many times to count. I’m curious about what drew you to it, and what you’ve learnt over these years of playing it.
A friend introduced me to the game many years ago. What I have learned is that it is not always one’s knowledge of the language that makes for a good player…it depends on one’s understanding of the game and its algorithms. Much can be gained by knowing which two-letter words are accepted by the computer, and to avoid getting mad when it rejects a perfectly suitable and valid word.
I have begun allowing students in my German courses to use the German version of Words with Friends for their studies. I know of a few instances where students have started conversations with the other person in German and have really interesting interactions with native-speakers using what they have learned of the language in class. This, I think, is a perfectly valid use of the target language.
Ah, that is a great idea. I haven’t played it in any other language. Would be nice to see how it will work in Yorùbá — if they ever come around to making it.
So, what is next for you after your tenure as the Head of Department?
I plan on returning to the faculty of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature as a regular professor. There are new courses I would like to design, and there ways in which I would like to build the German program which require time and devotion. And, of course, I am looking forward to continuing my research. Currently, I have been engaged in a study of ninth-century scribal practices in a certain manuscript which I would like to finish and publish.
That sounds fascinating. If I come to Edwardsville today — not just the university, but the town and surrounding areas — what changes do you think will surprise me the most?
The city has authorized more retail development closer to SIUE. I think you would be surprised at the two new hotels across from the University, as well as the blocks of retail space and apartments/condominiums that are being built where once there was a corn field.
Ouch. I don’t know I’d like this new change, but I’m curious to see it. It was nice to chat with you, Doug.
It is always a pleasure. I was so glad to read your poetry in “Edwardsville by Heart,” when it was published, and I continue to be amazed that SIUE has a connection with you. You are making an impact for Yorùbá and Nigeria, and I have heard others from Nigeria speak about you with great admiration and respect for all you have been doing.
Thank you very much. I remember my time in Edwardsville with lots of fondness, and I’m glad to have been able to contribute, in literature, to the memorialization of the town for future visitors. Also happy for the positive responses to the book. It was always a risky proposition to write about someone else’s hometown with a foreigner’s eyes, but I seem to have escaped unscathed.
I should also thank you for giving me a job at the FLTC in 2010. Wouldn’t have been able to get my MA without it.
I look forward to a pint of beer or so with you when next I’m in town.
I look forward to it as well.
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This is the third in this series of public conversations I’m having with friends, mentors, colleagues, scholars, and enthusiasts, about our common obsessions. It is preceded by Conversation with a Conlanger and Conversation with a Polyglot.
