Where are the
Ghost Linguists?
Δρ. I.C.
Дедпи Пол, Þн.δ.
Over fifteen years ago, my friend and mentor—Dr. F. Ang Bangah, Ph.D.—published his seminal article, “Where are the Vampire Linguists?” (SpecGram Vol. CLVII, No. 2, 2009), in which he interpolated the plain facts presented in the HBO documentary television series True Blood into a call for leveraging the innate and explicit linguistic and anthropological knowledge of vampiric informants who are hundreds or even thousands of years old.
Dr. Bangah initially opened the Vampiric Linguistics Advancement Department (V.L.A.D.) at the University of Ultrasylvania at Erdő-elve to much fanfare. Eventually, however, his funding was cut and the department was closed, in large part due to the controversy surrounding his consideration of the idea that the last few speakers of a language could be “turned” as a way to stave off language death by staving off personal death—an idea that he never explicitly supported, mind, but merely deemed worthy of careful ethical thought.
Since then, my friend and mentor Dr. Bangah has himself passed into the Great Beyond, his dream reduced to a fading memory among his close friends and most trusted colleagues. However, upon seeing recent installments of the BBC One and CBS documentary television series, both named Ghosts, I was struck with a similar realization that ghosts who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago—and who have silently observed linguistic and cultural change over such spans—could provide similar value as informants to that of the vampiric volunteers Dr. Bangah sought.
Armed with this concept—and, I like to think, a bit of inspiration from the Other Side from Dr. Bangah—I have established the Center for Paranormal Avantgarde Research Advancing Nonliving Orality, Orthography, Reconstruction, Morphophonetics, Acquisition, & Historical Linguistics—known more familiarly as the P.A.R.A.N.O.O.R.M.A.H.L. Center. The somewhat unconventional acronym is a nod to Dr. Bangah’s deep and varied interests, as well as his somewhat unconventional pronunciation of the word paranormal, one of the few words where his subtle Romanio-Hungarian accent was detectable.
While a ghostly census is even more difficult than a vampiric one, we may a priori assume that the nonliving include a roughly proportional number—perhaps modified by a time-dependent decay factor—of speakers of any given languages—extant, endangered, or extinct. And while no one would suggest attempting to turn a living speaker into a ghost as a means of language preservation, death eventually comes for us all, and so we can certainly discuss with speakers of endangered languages ways to prepare for their possible enghostification in a way that maximizes the value of their native speaker knowledge for future scholars, researchers, and revivalists.
Interested parties—including scholars, speakers of endangered languages, vampiric or ghostly informants, spirit mediums and other ghostly interpreters—are welcome to contact me at the P.A.R.A.N.O.O.R.M.A.H.L. Center.
For reasons of phonetic and moral clarity and workplace safety, we advise necromancers, ghouls, liches, mummies, and zombies to seek other avenues of contributing to the sum of all undead knowledge.
