Jokes in the Joos Papers
Linguists can be quite funny: If you want to get good at wordplay, it helps to know a lot about words. My archival excursions into the Martin Joos Papers over the last two weeks suggest that in-group humor was an important way for mid-century linguists to consolidate disciplinary identity.
I had originally intended to devote this post to a comparison of Chomsky’s original M.A. paper on the Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew with the revised version of December 1951. The latter, which differs considerably from the draft Chomsky deposited at Penn about six months earlier, has been widely discussed in the historiography of linguistics as a potential precursor to the formulation of generative grammar (see Koerner 2003 and references therein). More about that soon.
But a circuitous chain of citations extending backwards and forwards from Chomsky’s M.A. paper led me to the Martin Joos Papers—a very rich and, I would venture, under-appreciated collection held at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Joos (1907-1978), a professor of German and Linguistics who spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served in key roles with the Linguistic Society of America, the “Committee on the Language Program” of the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Applied Linguistics. Thanks in part to his leadership, these institutions became deeply symbiotic, and they supported the remarkable growth of American linguistics in the postwar era.
Talk of “disciplines” and “institutions” may sound stuffy, but there is a lot of joking around in Joos’ manuscript collections. The letters he received from Bernard Bloch (1907-1965) and Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982), in particular, show how humor—what Mara Beller has discussed within the framework of “jocular commemoration”—can be just as essential to the formation of disciplinary identities as funding structures and canonical texts.
Letters between Bloch and Joos, for instance, play with a novel English orthography that Joos was developing during the 1930s in lighthearted and unpredictable ways. In several letters, Bloch would try the writing system on for size, making fun of the difficulty he had in doing so, and ultimately settling for captions to his marginal cartoons in the International Phonetic Alphabet instead.
One such drawing makes the tension between (white) insiders and (racially othered) outsiders explicit. It caricatures Joos with a small straw hat atop a pillowy coif giving instructions to a shorter man. The shorter man has his eyebrows raised in a questioning way, pronounced cheekbones, and trim facial hair surrounding a noticeable underbite. Both men are holding shovels, and the caption reads: “Mr. Joos trying out his new system of English orthography on the hired man.” With this drawing, it seems that Bloch meant to question the idea that “pure” linguistics might be widely “applied,” a goal that defined much of Joos’ career.
The letters between Joos and Yuen Ren Chao (who often signed his initials “Why. Are. See.”) similarly bonded correspondents together through a shared love of sound and an appreciation for the absurdity of English orthography. Chao was a remarkable polymath, widely remembered for his 1922 Chinese translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In one mimeographed circular, he described a fictitious rare find he had made on the occasion of the Lewis Carroll centennial in the Widener Library at Harvard University. Though Chao said his intention was to “look up some points of punctuation in “Jabberwocky,” he found that the original “uncorrupted” text was the story of “Jakobsony” (a play on the name of the Prague Circle structuralist, Roman Jakobson):
…to my great surprise and delight, I discovered an earlier text, all in Lewis Carroll’s characteristic handwriting, of which the usual version as I had always known it seemed to have been a badly corrupted caricature. No wonder Humpty Dumpty had to go to great lengths in his belabored etymology when he tried to explain non-existent words like brillig and wabe: Now, with this original before me, what could be more rational than a boodberg writing Chinese homophones in the wade system of romanization? (Being a Looking-Glass creature, Humpty Dumpty was not aware that b was simply the mirror image of d.) I had to copy the poem in a hurry with paper and penzl, as it was nearing closing time and I had to stop. What mough remained to be discovered had to be left to future adventures. Here, then, is the original uncorrupted text, rediscovered by me and published for the first time, of—not Jabberwocky—but: JAKOBSONY.
The poem itself, reads as follows, with thinly-veiled references to Harry Hoijer, Einar Haugen, Murray Emeneau, Roman Jakobson, Martin Joos, Kenneth Pike, Adelaide Hahn, Mary Haas, Carl Voegelin, Eric Hamp, Albert Marckwardt, Archibald Hill, Erwin Reifler, Thomas Sebeok, Freeman Twaddell, Franklin Edgerton, Robert A. Hall, J. Milton Cowan, George Trager, Fred Householder, Henry Gleason, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Bradley Holmes, Leonard Bloomfield, Hans Kurath, Alan Corré…in other words, the better part of the linguistic firmament in the middle of the twentieth century.
Two original mimeographed versions of this (along with the above quotation) can be found in the folder tentatively labeled “Chao” (by my count, folder 21) in Box 1 of the Manuscripts contained in the Martin Joos Papers, Mss.Ms.Coll.22, at the American Philosophical Society. The collection has not been processed yet, so this filing may change. This is my transcription.
My own adventures in the wonderland of the Joos archive have helped me better understand such institutional matters as, e.g., the specific impact of the NDEA (see previous post) on the Center for Applied Linguistics. To be sure, budgets and memoranda abound. But these readings have also clarified how important humor (even if we may find it objectionable) was to the disciplinary identity of key actors in the development of twentieth-century linguistics. In addition to communicating this basic observation, I hope to have shed some light on a very useful, if easily overlooked, collection that will surely be of interest to practitioners, historians of linguistics, and historians of social science more generally.
Works cited:
Beller, Mara. 1999. “Jocular Commemorations: The Copenhagen Spirit.” In Osiris 14: 252-273.
Chomsky, Noam A. 1951. Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. University of Pennsylvania [thesis].
Koerner, E. F. K. 2003. “Remarks on the Origins of Morphophonemics in American Structuralist Linguistics.” Language & Communication 23: 1-43.
