BHS GRAD FINDS HIS HOME IN LINGUISTICS AT BERKELEY
By Angela Green, BGSU intern
John Sylak, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of only a few people interested in Lak, which is a language spoken by over 150,000 people living over 6,000 miles away.
A 2003 Bluffton High School graduate, Sylak graduated from The University of Chicago with a degree in linguistics and is currently working toward a master's and eventually a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I do phonetics, which is the sound side of linguistics," Sylak said. "It's called phonology. We work with all kinds of languages. We don't have to learn to speak them. If you tell someone you're studying linguistics they automatically ask how many languages you know. My goal is to study uses and to find similarities between languages of the world."
Sylak first became interested in linguistics while he was in high school.
"In high school, I liked Latin," said Sylak, "then my family hosted a Japanese foreign exchange student and I tried to learn Japanese. I really liked learning different languages."
Sylak even taught himself a J.R.R. Tolkien language - The Elvish language of Quenya, which is modeled after Finnish.
"I can't speak the language from 'The Lord of the Rings' anymore," he said, "but I could probably still translate it. When I applied to University of Chicago you could send supplemental material with the application and I translated a poem into Quenya and wrote it in both Elvish and Latin letters."
Sylak has studied four years of Latin at Bluffton High School, two semesters of Vietnamese at Bluffton University while he was still in high school, three years of Russian at the University of Chicago, one year of French , the Romani language for a quarter at the University of Chicago and Lak for his undergraduate thesis.
Sylak minored in Russian at the University of Chicago and can read scholarly linguistic book in Russian. The area of Russia he studied was the Northeast Caucasus Mountains, and more specifically an area of Russia called Dagestan, which means the land of mountains.
A part of his linguistic major was to do year of studying a non-Indo-European language or take a quarter studying the structure of a non-Indo-European language. He chose to study the structure of Lak, a non Indo-Europena language spoken in Dagestan that is not related to Russian.
"It's roughly the same as Czechian," said Sylak. "In the United States there is only one person who studies it."
That person is Victor Friedman, Sylak's advisor at the University of Chicago.
"I wrote my bachelor's thesis on Lak verbal morphology," he said. "It's about all the different endings on verbs and different combinations. There are about 150,000 and 100,000 are used in Dagestan in Russia."
Overall, Sylak enjoyed attending the University of Chicago.
"I loved it," he said. "I felt it gave me the best undergraduate education I could get. I loved the city of Chicago as well. The campus was gorgeous. It feels like a medieval castle because it has a lot of gothic architecture. They have a really good linguistics department, which was the reason I chose to go there."
Sylak is continuing his education at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently in a year-long field methods course studying a form of Qu that is called Imbabura Quichua.
"We're studying differences in languages," he said. "We study as if we're going to some remote location and don't know anything about it. We get a word list with simple terms like the weather, body parts or family relations and we ask them how to say the words."
He said this trains students to document endangered languages. People have to learn about them through their existence in old field descriptions. He said people discovered Native American languages like this though Lewis and Clark journals.
"We pick an area to see what languages were there or may be still there," Sylak explained. "Then you have to find speakers of the language and go in with recorders and notebooks and try to document and learn enough to write a grammar of it."
Sylak is also enjoying studying at Berkeley.
"It's a really great place," he said. "The campus is huge. It goes up into the Berkley Hills where there are redwood tresses and eucalyptus. It's intellectually stimulating and really liberal. The people are really entertaining."
Sylak has many plans for the future.
"One summer I want to go to Dagestan and conduct field research," he said, "specifically to find out more about pharyngealization. It's when root of the tongue comes into contact with the pharynx. It's kind of complex."
He would like to apply for a grant through the National Science Foundation to go to Dagestan.
"There's a professor in Southern Russia that would like to see more research done on Lak," said Sylak. "I would be conducting the research alone."
He would also like to become a linguistics professor.
"If that doesn't work out I'll probably go into working with languages on computers," he said, "like improving search engines and spelling and grammar on processors and in cell phone texts. Also with speech technology such as text and speech synthesizers."
After living in different parts of the country, Sylak has come to miss Bluffton.
"I miss Bluffton sometimes," he said. "I have to represent for Ohio out here. People talk fast in general here and I miss winter."
He also appreciates the teachers he learned from in Bluffton, especially Dan Westner at Bluffton University.
"He was really inspiring to me," Sylak said, "and helped show how culture can influence language."
