more good stories

[George Thompson]

Dear List,

Regarding the good stories that have been told recently about great 
scholars like R. Jakobson, V. Kiparsky, R. Austerlitz and Cal Watikins, 
I have an anecdote that may amuse some list members.   Some ten years 
ago I found myself giving a series of talks on Sanskrit and Indian 
Culture sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council.  By chance, 
one of the attendees at these talks was the granddaughter of Charles 
Lanman, who faithfully attended, along with her husband, the entire 
series of nine weekly talks.  I was struck by the fact that Lanman's 
granddaughter, herself then perhaps in her 70's, was very pleased to 
know that I had been introduced to Sanskrit literature by means of her 
grandfather's Sanskrit Reader, but also by the fact that she herself had 
not seen a copy of it since childhood.  Since I had several copies of 
Lanman's Reader in hand [I used to buy up all copies that used to appear 
in the Berkeley bookstores when I studied there], I gave her one as a 
gift.  This led to an extensive discussion of Lanman's impact on early 
American Indology, which his granddaughter was eager to learn about. 

Since I was planning to give a paper at the AOS conference in Baltimore 
in that year, I promised to solicit stories of Lanman's career at 
Harvard for her.   As it turns out,  Cal Watkins was a great source of  
Harvard folklore regarding Lanman and his [literally] subterranean 
contacts with Henry Clarke Warren, etc., which delighted  Lanman's 
granddaughter and her family in general [as she told me].

The point is that I think that someone should sit down with Cal Watkins 
and get him to record all of the Sanskritist and IE folklore that he has 
privy to.  It would greatly enlighten us about the formative period of 
American Indology.

Best wishes,

George Thompson

Paul Kiparsky wrote:

> 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
>