A pedantic correction (but it's still a good story)

[Paul Kiparsky]

Thanks to Cal Watkins and Byron Bender I now have a more authentic  
version of the story, as good as we are likely to get.  It happened  
at Columbia University on the late 40's.  The language was Russian,  
the student was Robert Austerlitz, the teacher was Jakobson, and what  
he said was "Try to understand!"
Watkins did indeed take a class conducted in Russian from my father  
at a Linguistic Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, but at the time he  
did understand Russian.

What is surprising is that Austerlitz, who was fluent in 13  
languages, from Finnish to Gilyak, did not know Russian...

As Jean-Luc Chevillard said: The more languages one knows, the better.

Paul




On Mar 5, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Allen W Thrasher wrote:

> Thanks, Paul.  I'm virtually certain I heard it as Polish, which as  
> I was explaining to Bob Goldman, made the story even better.  Maybe  
> it got transformed before it got to me, rather than by me.
>
> Allen
>
>>>> Paul Kiparsky <kiparsky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> 3/5/2009 6:35 PM >>>
>
>>
>> There was another one I heard about Roman Jacobson.  When he first
>> came to the U.S., his English was insufficient for lecturing, so in
>> his first class he said, "Does everyone here know Polish?"  One shy
>> student at the back timidly raised her hand saying she didn't.  He
>> leaned over the podium, spread out his hands, and said, "Vell, TRY."
>>
>> Si non e vero, e bien trovato.
>>
>
> It was my father, Valentin Kiparsky, not Roman Jakobson.  The
> occasion was the 1952 Linguistic Institute at Bloomington, Indiana.
> The language was Russian, not Polish.  And the student was male.
>
> ...ben cambiato, anyway.
>
> Paul