Abstract
Donka Minkova is a distinguished research professor at UCLA, working on English historical phonology, meter, dialectology, and syntax (https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/minkova-donka/). Her publications include The history of final vowels in English (1991); English words: History and structure (2009); Alliteration and sound change in early English (2003); A historical phonology of English (2014); the collection Phonological weakness in English. From Old to Present-Day English (2009); and the co-edited volumes Studies in the history of the English language: A millennial perspective (2002); Chaucer and the challenges of medievalism (2003); Empirical and analytical advances in the study of English language change (2008); and Verse structure and linguistic modeling (2022). She is currently working on a chapter for the New Cambridge history of the English language and a book entitled Early English verse structure. The following interview was conducted in person in June 2022. The text has been edited.
I’m so pleased to be interviewing you.
I’m so grateful that you agreed to do so.
And I’m glad I get to find out the answers to some things I’ve always wanted to know. I think people might want to know a bit about your origin story as a linguist. So what did you study as an undergraduate?
It’s a long origin story. Growing up in Bulgaria, language was always a topic of family conversations because my great grandfather was from Kyiv, and my grandmother, who was a teacher, was bilingual. So she read to us as children stories by Pushkin in Russian. I still remember some opening lines from Pushkin in Russian from my childhood. My mother had started as a Classics major at the University of Sofia before she went to medical school in Istanbul studying in French and Turkish. My father got his medical degree in Germany. They both had good Latin. My sister, a professor of chemistry, is fluent in Russian, French, comfortable with German, and yes, post-1980, also with English.
So, foreign languages were held in high regard in the family, but there was no English, no English books in the house, no one had studied it. There was a brand-new English Language High School (Първа Английска Гимназия) in Sofia, and I wanted to apply for it; I had the grades, but my parents stopped me—admittance was based on party affiliations, we had none, they wanted to spare me the disappointment. My “regular” high school was solid; I was already fluent in Russian and German, I took some extracurricular Latin, and started going to evening classes for adults to study English. I was always fascinated that Солнышко светит,
The language-based classes at my first alma mater were a joy. All undergraduate programs in pre-Gorbachev Bulgaria, no matter what the major was, required four year-long courses in History of the Communist Party of the USSR, History of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the like, the only non-top grades on my Sofia University transcripts. English kept me keen on learning. By the third year I was hooked on grammatical issues. The most dreaded hurdle for a degree in English in Sofia was “Historical Grammar,” a class taught in four semesters by Professor Marco Minkoff (no relation, just a namesake), who had written the textbook and who read the lectures, while the sections were covered by Dr. Andrey Danchev. It was largely Indo-European to Germanic philology presented in structuralist terms, heavy emphasis on sound change and morphology, very little syntax, weekly translations from Old and Middle English into Modern English. I loved it, how all that connected to German, Slavic, Present-Day English was challenging and engaging. Most of my peers disliked it. One lecture I still remember to this day, it was on the gs in Old English. There are three types of sounds covered by the insular letter <ᵹ> in Old English and the letter yogh <ȝ> in Middle English. It happens that gǎz [gǝz] in Bulgarian means “bottom” and, well, “bottom” is the polite gloss—gǎz is not a word for the classroom. Barely stifled snickering all around. The professor is talking about palatals and velars, the class is giggling. So “the Old English gǎz” became the unofficial moniker for the Historical Grammar requirement.
All this was parallel to studying Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and in the summer of the 3rd-to-4th year we had to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I did. How much I absorbed is a different question, but I put in the effort, and I was spending more time thinking of the language than of interpretation. I also had a second major: German philology, but, unfortunately, I did not have to have Old High German, since a second major was optional.
So that’s how I got into English, but the resources were limited. My family was supportive. My father’s most memorable present for me—I must have been a second-year student—was a Cassell’s English dictionary. It was second-hand and I know he paid a lot of—then—money for it because new English books in Bulgaria were unavailable. It was the first English-English dictionary that I had ever possessed, I treasured it, and I cherish its tattered pages to this day. My sister traveled to Warsaw for a conference and brought back Vanity fair and The Pickwick papers—the best presents ever! There were English books in the university library that one could borrow, for two weeks, messy and dog-eared. There was a single “foreign language” bookstore in Sofia, mostly East German publications, and they occasionally had reprints of some of the classics—the beginning of my treasure trove of English books. As an undergraduate I got a summer job as a Reisefürerin/travel guide out of Leipzig during the international bookfair (Die Leipziger Buchmesse), and I went berserk spending all of my summer earnings on second-hand English books, stuffing them in a new cheap cardboard suitcase which fell apart as I was getting out of the tram on my way to the Leipzig train station to return to Sofia. By the time I got all pieces tied back together I arrived on the platform to watch the once-a-day train pull out, with me holding a ticket in hand and a visa expiring that evening. It was some trip home. This is a whole lot of personal history, but I don’t think that this journal has interviewed an East European Anglicist; maybe we can keep peeping behind the iron curtain?
What was your first job after university?
I was still a student when I started my first “real” job. The University of Sofia’s English Department at the time offered the option of either graduating after the 4th year after passing all required classes, or staying for a 5th year and writing the equivalent of an MA thesis. I chose the thesis option, on the Ormulum, a late twelfth-century, 20,000-line translation of the scriptures in regular seven-foot iambic meter and a unique spelling system. At the same time there was a competition for a translator and radio announcer in the English section of Radio Sofia; I applied for it, and I got it. There were about five of us working from roughly 3 pm to 11 pm. We were given news and articles in Bulgarian, we had to translate them, a supervisor made sure the translations matched the original text, and then we recorded the daily program, occasionally also broadcasting live. This was 1966, and in the office we were given access to “western” press; it was my first exposure to The Observer, The Economist, Time magazine. We were also encouraged to listen to the BBC World Service. I was doing this for two years, and my English started catching up with the twentieth century. Gradually I was allowed to do my own reports on theatrical events, the Sofia Zoo, concerts. I interviewed prominent visitors: the sculptor Henry Moore, the ballerinas Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Alonso, the novelist C. P. Snow, the author of The masters and The corridors of power. It became an interesting job; I was seriously considering journalism as a career. I was also trying my hand as a translator; so, I translated a book by a British author called Arnold Haskell. He had visited Bulgaria, and I had been his interpreter, traveling with him and his wife around the country and telling them about the history of the country. He was the director of the Royal Ballet School in London. Back in England, Haskell (1966) wrote a book called Heroes and roses: A view of Bulgaria. I translated it into Bulgarian; it was commissioned by a government-regulated “official” publishing house. And then there was one sentence in that book which ran “if the Soviet Union has a cold, Bulgaria sneezes.” That killed the publication of the book; only bits and pieces were published later in a Sunday paper.
During that time there was also a television show in Bulgaria which was called English by TV: lessons given by a talented high school teacher; she was sparkling in front of the camera. The show was enormously popular, and I was one of the four recurring characters in it, so I had a television name, Jane—“Jane” gave me some special moments of being in the celebrity sun when somebody on the tram would say, “Oh, you’re Jane,” and people would turn their heads and smile.
Did you find that through the experience of being a translator you gained any insights about language?
Yes, especially lexically: I was still learning English, and to this day I read with a pencil in my hand, I look up new words, I pay attention to idiomatic expressions, novel ways of putting things. My first job made me more comfortable with the differences in the verbal system and the word order in Bulgarian and English. There was also copycatting: if something in an English text appealed to me, I looked for a way to put it in my own translation or writing.
So from English by TV to deciding to pursue a PhD: tell me the story of that journey.
I was in Radio Sofia from 1966 through the beginning of 1969. I have to remind you and readers that in August of 1968 the Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to Alexander Dubček’s “Prague Spring.” That was the end of liberalization, a political watershed for all of Eastern Europe. Practically overnight things changed at Radio Sofia. No more foreign press for the English language section. Big Brother’s eyes were everywhere, increased censorship and paranoia. Employees were screened much more closely and were expected to join the party: I was “invited” to join in, and I didn’t want to. I had excuses, family history of 1949-1953 deportation; my husband-to-be had been a political prisoner during Stalinism. I wanted, I needed another job.
That September the English Department at the University of Sofia announced two lectureships. An academic job felt like a wild fantasy, oh so desirable. I applied: two written exams, four hours each. I reached the final interview—another kind of grueling experience, but I got one of the lectureships, initially teaching English to students in the School of Mathematics, future physicists and chemists.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia triggered purges in all institutions that were considered ideologically dangerous, and the university was one of them. The English Department’s founder, Professor Minkoff, was “retired.” Six of my more senior colleagues who were deemed potentially ideologically undermining the department’s party line were transferred to other institutions. One of them was Andrey Danchev, who was teaching Historical Grammar, an excellent scholar, at first the only PhD in the department. Andrey’s father had been а Prime Minister prior to 1944. Andrey had changed his surname, he was carefully apolitical, but he was still sent to another institution where he didn’t have to teach, so he worked on Bulgarian-English contrastive studies until he and the others were allowed back in the University after 1989. Someone had to teach Historical Grammar, Andrey had taught me, he was supportive, I had my Orrmulum thesis. I ended up taking on both the lectures and the seminars for this most dreaded class in 1970. It was an uphill journey, but I have taught History of the English Language (yes, HEL), or some aspect of it, for five decades, and I always learned something new; my last class at UCLA was on March 12th, 2020.
Tell me how you got to Edinburgh.
The British Council was generous in providing the English Department in Sofia with some academic fellowships. Those went to pre-selected people: important resolutions started with the Party committee meeting in advance separately; then they reported to the full faculty to tell us what they deemed to be the best decision. The more “deserving” people had already been to Britain on long-term fellowships, or to the US to teach Bulgarian (Slavic, at UCLA). I had been teaching in English in the Department of English at the University of Sofia dutifully between 1969 and 1977; nine years into my lectureship my turn came for a five-month (1978-1979) Visiting Scholar position to Great Britain funded by the British Council. A big, lucky break.
I chose Edinburgh as the place to go for someone interested both in Middle English and in phonetics, phonology, general linguistics. At Edinburgh English “language” had the privilege of an independent department, different from English “literature.” Roger Lass, a leading scholar in English diachronic phonology, was in the Linguistics Department; Charles Jones and John Anderson were teaching the “latest” in English linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic in the English Language Department. Edinburgh was the home of the “Middle English Dialect Project” and hosted the Linguistic atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) with Angus McIntosh in charge and a distinguished list of famous contributors, including Margaret Laing, who later headed the team producing the Linguistic atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME)—more on these resources below. Trite as it sounds, it was a dream place, and it became my beloved second alma mater.
What was it like to arrive in Edinburgh and be in this completely different environment?
Memorable, to say the least. I had to leave my two sons, aged six and seven with my mother and sister, arrived in Edinburgh on a cold and rainy late September day, made my way to a B&B on Dalkeith Road in the Old Town. At breakfast the next morning I tried to talk to my fast-talking, loose-dentured, kindly-smiling hosts, both of them speakers of broad Glaswegian. They seemed to understand me, but what they were uttering was a foreign language blur, a word here, a word there. What a lesson in English after one has been studying, translating, and teaching that “same” language for twenty years!
My Edinburgh University hosts were most welcoming—and spoke English(es) that I could follow. I sat in on classes in phonetics with Elizabeth Uldall and David Abercrombie (UCLA’s Peter Ladefoged’s Doktorvater), in Middle English by Angus McIntosh, in generative phonology by Roger Lass, History of English by John Anderson and Charles Jones. My office-mate Heinz Giegerich and I spent hours figuring out metrical phonology, Chomsky and Halle (1968), Halle and Keyser (1971); I exchanged letters with Robert Burchfield, the then Editor-in-Chief of the OED. The library resources had my head spinning. I felt like a first-year student: bliss, except I missed my kids, but I kept myself very busy. One vivid memory is of me walking back to my digs after weeks of digging into data, going down the Mound on South Bridge after sunset, but still rosy clouds, and it hit me that, typically, the cases of open-syllable lengthening in Middle English shared schwa loss, the germ of my first real research paper (Minkova 1982). I decided to look further into final schwa loss and started collecting more data. Also, while I was there, I saw a flyer announcing a one-year Honorary Fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). Roger Lass encouraged me to apply; I did, with trepidation, both because I was unsure that I was up to it, and because I was potentially going over the heads of the screening authorities in Bulgaria—this kind of application could not have been submitted from Sofia without prior approval.
The IASH Fellowship was awarded to me for 1980-1981, but it was an “honorary” fellowship; it was for scholars whose institutional salaries would cover their expenses. The award was also prestigious, so that the Sofia University leadership did not stand in my way: they granted me a year’s leave without pay. The fellowship provided me with a shared office, library privileges, and a monthly stipend of £100. I lucked out with the housing, renting the attic of a house of a retired Edinburgh professor of psychiatry and his mathematician wife, wonderfully kind landlords. I could not live on my Bulgarian salary; my colleagues in English and Linguistics made me an Adjunct Visiting Lecturer teaching Middle English and the sections for Roger Lass’ lecture course in phonology. The plans were in place: I was going to take my two sons with me, but then the rise of the Polish Solidarność (“solidarity”) in August 1980 resulted in a renewed tightening of the exit visa rules. After three months of knocking on multiple Interior Ministry doors, explaining the situation again and again, a really grueling stressful time, I was offered a visa for myself and for one son. Which one? I could not make that choice: my family banded together again; they would take care of the boys. I would be away for eight months instead of twelve. I traveled alone to Edinburgh at the end of November 1980 where colleagues had been taking turns to cover the classes I was supposed to teach. The next eight months were fiercely intense: teaching, learning, collecting data, writing a first draft of my PhD thesis on a borrowed German typewriter, making friends for life, writing letters home and amassing presents for my sons.
What was your dissertation about?
The dissertation topic came from class preparation. There was no PhD track in the Division of Classical and Modern Philology in Sofia; one had to work on one’s own, choose a topic and take qualifying exams in the chosen subject, in Russian, and in Marxist philosophy. The research area was up to the individual, and I was determined to stay away from literary scholarship. I toyed with toponymics, then with the language of Old English legal documents, but I was also teaching English phonetics, and I kept going back to sounds and their history. Teaching Bulgarian students about the history of a language whose spelling is mainly etymological—Bulgarian matches letter-to-sound for stressed vowels and consonants—is a challenge and an open invitation for discoveries: a stream sounds different from Struma, a big river running from Sofia to the Aegean Sea, but if the students hear that IE *srou-mo becomes Germanic *straumaz, and Old English stream, Middle English [strɛːm], today’s stream, they get curious to know more, at least their instructor did. I was also finding it quite a struggle to teach the history of a system in which vowel length matters—Bulgarian has no vowel length—and there seemed to be so much to learn there: tell a tale, dell and dale, graze the grass; why were none of the then Bulgarian holidays holy?
Such questions kept the class awake, but I was feeling inadequate. I had said everything I could say about the Ormulum given the scarcity of sources. There were some good Russian factual textbooks on the history of English. But the lack of access to new research from English-speaking countries was a barrier. There was no easy access to international linguistic journals. Reading German helped a lot—the history of English has been a central scholarly enterprise in Austria, Germany, the Nordic countries since the late eighteenth century. Our library had pre-WW2 valuable philological publications in German, but the theoretical clock stopped somewhere between Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.
How did you end up at UCLA?
I was teaching and finishing my dissertation in Sofia 1981-83 when in the spring of 1983 I had a letter from Roger Lass, saying that his former PhD student from Bloomington, Daniel Calder, then Chair of English at UCLA, had asked Roger to recommend someone for a one-year visiting position to teach required courses in the History of English, Old, Middle, Early Modern English, Structure of English. Roger Lass had put me at the top of his list. It was a stop-gap measure—several previous assistant professors in what the English Department identified as “Philology” had not made tenure. The position was not advertised nationally, they had to act fast, and I received a fax inviting me to fill it. I said yes, provided that I was allowed to leave the country with my sons. The offer of an annual salary of $21,000 sounded to me like a promise of luxury accommodation, no financial worries; I would only be concerned about parenting, teaching, research. Once again, the exit visa problem loomed large. Chance, good luck, or some deity helped: my documents were criss-crossed with the dossier of a pre-approved colleague in the English Department in Sofia, who also had two sons and was going to teach Bulgarian in the Slavic Department at UCLA 1983-1985. The Personnel Department at the University had a new head as of August 1983, August is vacation time, the Interior Ministry people did not catch the duplication, and our exit visas were approved. We kept mum about it until the very last minute, filled one suitcase, two junior backpacks, and the big passage into the new world started. Over 24 hours, first jumbo jet, first time in the USA. Ten frantic days before I would be in the classroom: finding accommodation, applying for some kind of ID, getting my sons enrolled in school, meeting colleagues, opening a bank account—I had arrived on $150 in cash, all that a Bulgarian citizen was allowed to take abroad at the time.
What was the UCLA English department like in those days?
I was unfamiliar with the US educational system; I knew nothing about California’s university system or the way academic titles, appointments, and promotions worked. I came as a last-minute one-year visitor, and my contacts had been with the Chair, the Vice Chair, and the Administrative Manager—they were extremely kind, solicitous, encouraging: it was a really friendly welcome. I was given a desk in a shared office with a recent PhD student, a lecturer in eighteenth-century literature. In 1983 there was no English Department female faculty member who was also a mother, let alone a single East European female. People were curious, cordial, considerate. I was invited to social occasions, but I had no idea what the huge English Department at UCLA was like academically: I did not participate in faculty meetings until much later.
The UCLA English Department had always had faculty with knowledge and interest in philology, teaching the history and varieties of English. William Matthews was a leading specialist in Middle and Early Modern English, the world’s authority on Cockney, Western Secretary of the American Dialect Society 1950-1975. Robert Stockwell taught in the English Department before he co-founded the UCLA Linguistics Program, then Center, then Department, from 1960 to 1966. Some colleagues were doing philological work as part of their editorial work on Middle and Early Modern English texts. Heavy emphasis on the literary heritage and the tradition of close reading meant that all of my literary colleagues in the 1980s had had extensive philological training. Students, both undergraduate and graduate, were expected, indeed required, to learn what an early text meant before they started interpreting what it meant. Philology was respected as an important component of a degree in English, mostly as it pertains to and advances a deeper understanding of the textual message.
My first quarter of teaching in a US university was no bed of roses. Condensing my four-semester HEL course for students who had had English phonetics and lots of grammar into a 10-week/40-hour course felt draconian. The big surprise for someone coming from tightly controlled, step-wise degree programs was that not just eager undergraduates, but also bright, eloquent, widely read graduate students balked at the mention of “front vowel,” or “adverbial modifier,” or “parataxis.” Gradually my classes became a mixture of introductory linguistics, social history, and philological information. Along with the learning curve in the classroom I had my parental duties and worries. I had no car; I did not drive. Other parents, now life-long friends, in the faculty housing that I was renting helped with transportation to and from my sons’ school, and I was reciprocating by looking after four and sometimes six kids most long afternoons.
In the fall of 1983 my department initiated a search for a position in English Language Studies. I applied—a single-page cover letter, a single-page CV, a come-what-may move. At that time my older son started having bouts of nausea when jogging or at school; initially I was told that it was psychosomatic; he did not speak the language, all he needed was antiemetics. That was unhelpful. I switched my insurance to UCLA. On January 3 1984 he was diagnosed with malignant medulloblastoma, the next day he was in surgery for nine hours, days and days in intensive care, and when released from the UCLA hospital he could not walk without support, could not push a button, school was out of the question. In the middle of juggling teaching, administering steroids, taking my son to radiation treatment, chemotherapy, I was invited to give a job talk. Luckily, my study of open-syllable lengthening in Middle English was something empirically and analytically new, it was a good choice of topic, I was comfortable with the questions, the teaching record was good, and I was offered a tenure-track position. I learned later that there were eighty applicants for the open-rank job, and that the first offer went to Richard Hogg, one of the most productive, theoretically informed and innovative Old English and HEL scholars. Richard and his family decided against moving to LA, so I was given a chance to stay and maybe make tenure.
I was overjoyed, but the hurdles did not go away. As the end of the 1983-84 academic year approached, my one-year visiting scholar visa was about to expire. I needed to extend it, and then it turned out that when I was entering the US in September 1983, the border patrol officer in Newark had stamped my passport with some code which translated into “Communist Party Member.” This was apparently something they did automatically to anyone entering from Bulgaria. My then Chair, Daniel Calder, sought the help of the legal advisers in the UCLA Office of International Students and Scholars. They were kind, caring, helpful, extending our visas twice, until 1986. Then the big crunch came: that type of visa was no longer extendable; I could no longer be on the University payroll. I had to apply for a green card, but the US and Bulgaria had signed an agreement that any visitor seeking to outstay their visa had to return or leave the country and apply for a new visa or for a green card only after a year. We could not go back to Bulgaria—I had no job there any longer, and in Bulgaria I had already been declared невъзвръщенка, “a non-returnee,” a categorization carrying a stigma for my family and a guarantee that I could never be given an exit visa again. I was considering going to Mexico with the boys for a year, but I did not have the money, my son was still being treated with growth hormones. It was not an option. The English Department’s administration had their hands tied—it would be illegal for them to keep me on the books. However, some exceptions were allowed for grant-holders. Two amazingly resourceful people, Daniel Calder in English and Peter Ladefoged in Linguistics, concocted a scheme: I would be paid out of Peter Ladefoged’s grant as a language consultant for my “extraordinary, irreplaceable knowledge and skills in Bulgarian,” and the English Department would “hire” someone from Linguistics for the same amount. It worked! At the same time the University started an application for me to be exempt from the requirement to return to Bulgaria on humanitarian grounds. This application was approved by the US authorities, but the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior did not respond—they did not deny it, nor did they approve. Gorbachev and Glasnost were already in the news, but it was not until November 1989 and after the fall of the Berlin wall that I was allowed to apply for a green card—we got our green cards and we became US citizens eleven years after coming to the US, in 1994.
This is how some big historical changes punctuated my professional trajectory, making excursions into personal history as much part of it as the scholarly retro- and pro-spects.
Did you ever face skepticism that someone from Bulgaria was teaching about English in the U.S.?
No, my colleagues showed mostly curiosity, and so did the students. Some did not know where Bulgaria was on the map; my Slavic surname led many to assume that I was Russian, and a very friendly colleague kept putting National Geographic issues with articles and pictures from Hungary in my mailbox. I did encounter some skepticism directed more towards the line and significance of philological and linguistic inquiry (“Here is the lady who studies the loss of final <-e>, ha-ha”) rather than towards a non-native speaker’s ability to teach and research English. Philology was perceived as sufficiently different from literary studies; it also had the somewhat intimidating aura of being “science-like,” and we know about the now happily outdated rift between “arts” and “sciences.” Being a non-native speaker was often a bonus in the classroom: mentioning that my native language was Bulgarian put many of the first-generation American students at ease.
What did you teach at first?
I had to teach two undergraduate classes, usually HEL, the Structure of English, Linguistics in Relation to Literature, a new one for me, and three “philology” graduate classes. One philology class was required for the BA, and the PhD program originally required two, then one, then none of the philology courses. In the 90s we needed more undergraduate Chaucer offerings, and I agreed to teach The Canterbury tales. The prospect of teaching Chaucer as literature was daunting. I spent a huge amount of time overpreparing, but in the end I enjoyed the Tales so much and learned so much that I kept teaching the class until we had a better-prepared medievalist on board.
The teaching load for assistant professors was five courses per year; tenured faculty taught four courses. This changed in 1990, the year I got tenure, with every faculty teaching the same load. Assistant professors were peripheral—we could not participate in hiring and promotion of tenured faculty. None of the assistant professors who were already in the English Department when I was hired made tenure. I am so glad to say that subsequently the UC system introduced many special support programs, and there have been huge improvements in the way we treat early career colleagues and recognize the demands of establishing an academic career, especially combined with parenting. It is also the case that graduate schools do a much better job of early professionalization: PhD students come out with impressive academic portfolios. I had no clue to how the system worked, no insight into the discussions surrounding tenure, but it was clear that the process was rigid and unforgiving and there were multiple levels at which the decision had to be sanctioned. I was very apprehensive; I believe that I was the first professor in the Department’s history whose English was non-native. I was also the English Department’s only faculty whose job description was to teach various aspects of language, and whose research focus was on the linguistic aspects of language change. There was no room for slacking, and there was the great opportunity of “further education,” so the UCLA Linguistics Department became my third alma mater. I was a regular at the weekly colloquia in Linguistics, trying to understand, absorb, and eventually apply different analytical ideas to my philological data.
What were the main questions and trends at that time?
Within English, I was doing my best to help students see structural patterns in their texts, using Traugott and Pratt’s (1980) Linguistics for students of literature. For the Middle and Early Modern English classes the emphasis was primarily on grammar, vocabulary, structural differences between today’s/their English and the English of the texts they needed to read and interpret. My HEL course was organized somewhat unconventionally: already in Sofia I had started slicing up the entire material into language levels—instead of going from Old to Middle to Early Modern English, I was teaching English historical phonology, morphology, syntax from Old English all the way into Present-Day variants, with an overview of external history and vocabulary change. I mostly taught from handouts, using textbooks and companions for textual examples and exercises.
The main questions that I wanted students to ask and I tried to answer were what, when, why, especially the why. System-internal structural causality was, and still mostly is, a secondary concern in the traditional philological textbooks in my field. This is not to say that there were no novel and exciting approaches to key issues in earlier English: I found Lass’s (1987) The shape of English: Structure and history and his (1994) Old English excellent and yes, provocative, resources for teaching and research. Hogg’s (1992) A grammar of Old English, is a model of an exceptionally thorough empirical and theoretical coverage of the segmental phonology of the period, and along with the equally thorough morphology coverage in Hogg and Fulk’s (2011) A grammar of Old English: these two volumes have proven indispensable for my work in the last three decades. Ritt’s (1994) Quantity adjustment was an early, inspiring, solidly quantified, forward-looking, and conceptually compatible with Optimality Theory account of some of my favorite topics. This is just a small sample from an aspiring linguist in a literary department where the focus was on opening up the canon of literature to be taught, and after 1994 philology was no longer required for a degree in English. Jumping ahead, I am happy to say that I have never had a lecture class or a seminar canceled—there are always students at all levels curious to know more about their language.
Trying to keep up with a field that was evolving at a breathtaking speed, I made time to sit in on classes in linguistics taught by Ian Maddieson, Bruce Hayes, Paul Schachter, Tim Stowell. Robert Stockwell, whose Ph.D. thesis had been on Chaucer’s phonology, was also teaching specialized topics in the English diachronic linguistics, and we had started collaborating on some research projects. Our first joint paper “The English vowel shift: Problems of coherence and explanation” (Stockwell and Minkova 1988), now a “classic,” I guess, taught me about how demanding and how much slower collaborative work can be, about heated scholarly arguments even with students and colleagues present; some may remember the light-hearted Mockwell and Stinkova reference to our joint publications. In the early 1990s Robert and I were asked to write the “Prosody” chapter for Bjork and Niles’ (1997) Beowulf handbook, and that was a big challenge since neither of us had written on Old English meter. We were both completely awed by the meticulous detail and the solid philological arguments in Fulk’s (1992) A history of Old English meter, which continues to be an indispensable resource in my research to this day—both of my copies are solidly and happily dog-eared. I had inherited the Old English graduate class from Daniel Calder, who passed away in 1994, and I was getting more and more interested in metrics as a branch of linguistics that bridges formal and literary properties: from phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, to esthetic and socio-cultural value and interpretation.
So, early English prosody, i.e., syllable structure, syllable weight, word- and phrasal stress, became a new trend both in my teaching and in my own research. How does one reconstruct prosody in a dead language? Orthographic records are not of much use, and there are no contemporary commentaries; meter and its “rules,” usually intuitive, come to the rescue. Ever since that first sally into meter for the Beowulf handbook, I tend to put new questions through the prism of meter and new angles keep appearing. This was also an auspicious development pedagogically: I started teaching a seminar on early English versification, which was a welcome offering both for the department’s medievalists and for many students writing poetry and interested in formal poetics.
Another new direction in my pedagogical and research interests was prompted both by the general broadening of the scope of topics addressed under the umbrella of “history of English,” and by UCLA’s history, location, and demographics. The last volume of the massive 6-volume Cambridge history of the English language is titled English in North America (Algeo 2001). My own training in early English cut off at around 1800, and American English was only mentioned in connection with “archaic” features preserved by the original settlers. I had, of course, expanded the references to features identified as North American in my HEL classes, but the next step was to teach the history and varieties of American English. I had a lot to learn; I reached out to UCLA’s Otto Santa Ana for guest lectures on Chicano English and Marcyliena Morgan—she was still at UCLA—on African American English. Those offerings were very well received by the students; they seemed keen on understanding variation and change and many of them later enrolled in the HEL class. All my subsequent HEL classes included options for term papers either on the student’s own variety of English, or analysis of the use of varieties in literature, so there were concrete benefits of discussing “Englishes” rather than just “English” for an audience of diverse English speakers studying literatures in English.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century computers entered our scholarly and personal lives rapidly; thus another innovation in my field was the rise and fast development of corpus linguistics. For HEL, the most significant first step into the world of digitization was the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (c. 750-c. 1700), initiated in the 80s and originally directed by Matti Rissanen and Ossi Ihalainen at the University of Helsinki (The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts 1981). Other English historical corpora followed, including the Dictionary of Old English Corpus launched in 1997 (Dictionary of Old English Corpus 1981), the online Middle English dictionary, also launched in 1997 (Middle English Dictionary 1952-2001), and we also have the Linguistic atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME 2013) and the Linguistic atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME 1986), now revised for digital access (E-LALME 2013), to mention just a few of my most frequently visited bookmarks. And how can one teach HEL or do research in diachronic English without the OED? Again, work in diachronic corpora has blossomed, new corpora continue to be created, offering complex search capabilities that one could not previously imagine and enabling quantitative tests and reconsideration of established historical accounts.
Another major shift in the field has been the broadening of the areas to include more and more syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics. Ten out of the eighteen studies in the volume from the First International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-1) in Durham in 1979 address phonological change; the 36-session program for the hybrid ICEHL-21 in Leiden (June 2021) included two sessions on phonology, two sessions on spelling; other sessions’ headings were “Corpus-based studies,” “Englishes,” “Specialized discourses,” “Speech act analysis,” “Language and identity,” “Pragmatics,” and “Textual pragmatics.” I am happy to add that of the four Workshops two were on more traditional topics: “Graphic literacy in the history of English” and “The evidential value of verse vs. prose in the historical reconstruction of speech” (which I organized). All in all, the spread of research topics is much more wide-ranging; the balance is no longer heavily in favor of sound-change.
Do you think students should be required to study the history, structure, or varieties of English?
Yes! Yes! I believe that if someone’s degree includes the word English, they should have basic competency in the structure and history of the language. In my experience, second-language speakers are already interested in broadening their knowledge about English, but sometimes even otherwise very sharp, well-educated native speakers baulk at the idea of a curricular “requirement.” Most high schools apparently already overlook “language” education in English, and what the next generation of school teachers will teach hangs on what they themselves learned in college. A “requirement” might contradict the notion of “liberal” education, but exposure to the past and the rich diversity of the language we share today is very important socially, cognitively, analytically. It combats prescriptivism and hostility to “otherness” in speech, it raises awareness of the subtleties of both written and oral communication, and it develops analytical skills. Ideally, students come out of it as better readers, listeners, thinkers, speakers, writers. Everyone has a body: we learn and know about our bodies’ origins, their structure, their differences, their changes. As speakers of English, we should know about its origins, structure, differences, changes. A degree in English is a step into the professional world of education, media, law, social work, medicine, you name it. Language does not stay still, and a command of its history, structure, varieties will pay high dividends in any society.
Your first linguistics book came out in 1991, The history of final vowels in English.
Yes, the whole area of unstressed vowels and their evolution was an early interest of mine; the standard reference books’ coverage was brief and seemed superficial, mostly pointing out the orthographic significance of final schwa loss. There had been no attempt to address the issues in greater depth. My dissertation was on schwa loss too, but as it often happens, the dissertation and the book are quite different except for the literature survey. Thirty years later I am still interested in the topic, and what I learned writing it has been very helpful in further research on early English prosody and meter. And the “book” on schwa loss isn’t closed yet—disagreements continue and I am now inclined to allow a broader time bracket for the change depending on text type and manuscript history.
How did you get into studying alliteration?
The longer I was teaching and researching Old and Middle English, and the more theoretical analyses and debates brewed in linguistics, the clearer it became to me that the whole business of the early poets’ intuitions about similarity deserved attention. Comparisons between the practices in early and late Old English, and between Old and Middle English alliterative verse allowed interesting conclusions about the time line of affrication as in [k] > [ʧ] (kirk ~ church), initial cluster simplification as in knight and gnat, and preservation or loss of initial [h-]. I had been digging into it for years, the result was well-received, but there is so much more to explore there.
Another major book of yours came out in 2014, A historical phonology of English. How did you strike a balance between presenting a synthetic overview of the topic versus emphasizing your own interests?
I am not sure I managed to strike that balance, but I tried. The original typescript was another 180 pages long, so I had to cut, cut, cut. I decided to move some of the material, mostly my own commentaries and further questions on debatable issues, to the free online Companion, and I am glad the publisher agreed to it. Looking back, identifying the areas that need further research is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book, and subsequent publications by colleagues address some of the questions asked in it, and so do many of my projects in the last ten years.
You’re the co-author of a popular textbook, English words; history and structure. What do you think is the role of a course like that in students’ education?
That textbook came out of my classroom experience. Robert Stockwell had been offering a similar undergraduate class in Linguistics. In the late eighties I needed the extra income and started teaching a summer class in that subject first for Linguistics, later cross-listed with English as a general education class as a regular academic year offering. After trying several other sources as textbooks and teaching mostly from handouts, Robert Stockwell and I came out with the book’s first edition, and later, when Robert was already ill, I prepared a second edition. It is an attempt to go beyond the traditional descriptive approach to classical roots in the English lexicon and give the students a first look into ways of understanding, analyzing, and possibly predicting phonological and morphological change. That latter part goes beyond the scope of vocabulary enrichment/SAT-preparatory work. The book is still used. It is not ideal by far: it is too “soft” for formal linguists, too “hard” for non-linguists, and it is not sufficiently “classical” for classicists. When I was approached for a third edition, I felt that life’s too short for another big commitment.
What are some of the biggest things that you think the academic public (non-specialists) gets wrong about the history of English?
That’s a tough one. Well, I have heard non-specialist academics say that Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote in Old English, so Old and older are merged. My colleagues who teach and study only modern literature, and often graduate students who are already teaching undergraduates, seem to perceive the current state of the language as something either “bad,” or “permanent.” “Bad” does not mean second language speakers’ obvious lexical or grammatical misuse, but the perception that ongoing change equals deterioration is common. Knowledge of the history of English combats resistance to language change triggered by social changes and globalization. As for permanency, any even modestly educated person knows that earlier English looked and sounded different, but the sense that, say, President Obama’s elegant prose will be as effective in three hundred years is often also there. It may or may not; it will certainly be “archaic.”
Something I’ve noticed about your career, with the conferences you go to and journals and volumes you contribute to, is that you’re really part of a community of those who work on the history of English, around the world but especially in the US.
Yes, the community of English historical linguists is very much part of my life and career. I have always found conference presentations and participations motivating. Without the urgency of a potential public embarrassment I tend to turn my attention to other matters; everyone has heard conference dud papers, not excluding your interviewee’s, and the threat of it gets me all fired up, working on the presentation until the last minute. I think that many of what later turned up to be good ideas were conference-related.
My first international conference was the 1979 ICEHL1 conference in Durham. The idea for that first gathering was to create a forum for historians of English who were also very involved with theoretical linguistics. That was a time when language scholarship was focused so deeply on theory that philological facts could fall by the wayside, and ICEHL attracted scholars who were eager to get data and theory mutually informed and informative. The trend continued: ICEHL 22 will be held in Sheffield next year. I have presented new research at twenty ICEHLs—the only one I missed was ICEHL16 in 2010 in Hungary—my husband’s health was too unstable for me to travel. The ICEHL conference has no link to an organization, it is handled by a local committee, it does not have a journal associated with it, but it is very highly regarded in our community. The ICEHL meetings and volumes are trend-setters, and they have grown in scope and prestige; for me they are leaders in the HEL field.
One reason why my name is associated with the HEL community in North America is that, following some conversations with University of Michigan’s Anne Curzan in 1999, I applied to the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of English, and the Department of Linguistics for some funds towards a conference on “Studies in the History of the English Language.” The ambition was to reinvigorate academic and pedagogical interest in diachronic English and reassert the relevance of this traditional field in the rapidly changing humanistic curriculum in North America.
SHEL1 happened in May 2000: eighty participants, mostly from the US and Canada, but also from Austria, Finland, Holland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. Eleven presenters and session chairs were UCLA faculty or former graduates. You can see that I am quite proud of this propitious start of what has continued to gather HEL researchers and educators: SHEL-12 was a very successful meeting in Seattle in May 2022. At SHEL, a relatively small conference, my favorite type of meeting, reuniting with the organizers and the participants is like reuniting with extended family. I have presented papers at every SHEL, and at times I feel that I have become one of the “venerable” SHEL people—well, the older you get, the more “venerable” you become. Mind you, that does not stop my dear colleagues from putting me through the mill with grilling questions, and I am always grateful for that input.
On a different note, the volume that resulted from SHEL-1, subtitled A millennial perspective, was also my first experience in writing a proposal for an edited volume, corresponding with the authors, learning to negotiate the often rocky path of editorial “donkey” work, as I started to refer to that aspect of my commitment to the field. In addition to the meetings in person: ICEHL, SHEL, The International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), The Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC), all great venues for sharing work on older English, I have tried to contribute to the community by editing and co-editing four collections on various aspects of English. In the last two decades I have also been involved in the smaller community of scholars working on verse, and a special issue of English Language and Linguistics on verse structure and linguistic modeling co-edited by Chris McCully and me is coming out as we speak (Minkova & McCully, 2022).
What are some of your favorite books or articles that you’ve read lately?
Under “lately” I would include the “can’t-do-withouts”; I am standing on so many shoulders, can’t even start naming them. They keep coming: Fulk’s (2018) A comparative grammar of the early Germanic languages is a good example of a manual so comprehensive and so thoroughly Fulkian in its hundred pages of small print references and word indices that I wish I had always had it on my shelves. “Favorites” includes also numerous handbooks and paper collections, journals, a hopelessly long list. I recently read How dead languages work by George (2020) and admired the clarity and breadth of the coverage. The most recent [A] history of English, the 2022 HEL introductory text by Mísa Hejná and George Walkden seems to me to be the ideal approach to bringing the present, the past, and current linguistic theory together in the classroom. I am sure we share the experience of such books—they are rarely, if ever, read cover to cover, unless you’re the editor. We go to books selectively for specific chapters, sections, contributions; it is very similar to reading articles.
Where would you like to see the field go next?
Many of the desiderata are already in place: English corpus linguistics is going strong; access to diachronic databases makes our hypotheses quantitatively testable, allowing the application of new theoretical models to written language material. HEL is already enriched by studies in sociolinguistics, language contact, dialectology, pragmatics, stylistics. Indeed, the broad scope of articles in the Journal of English Linguistics is a prime example of the variety of areas and approaches that the field needs to encompass. Given my personal research interests articles such as Li, Gut, and Schützler (2021) “
What are you working on currently?
I am preparing the materials for a master class for the seventh international summer school in diachronic linguistics in Athens in July. My immediate and most urgent research projects are three. First comes a now pandemically overdue “English phonology” chapter for the first volume, edited by Laura Wright (forthcoming), of the massive six-volume New Cambridge history of the English language (Wright, ed., forthcoming). The chapter is twice the size of most other contributions: it will be about fifty printed pages. This is both a bonus and a challenge: it is more than an overview, but less than a research monograph. I am half-way there, trying to be informative without duplicating the original Cambridge history of the English language material. I am doing my best to cover this century’s huge body of research, and I am also tweaking existing accounts, including a deconstructive proposal on “homorganic cluster lengthening” whereby an etymological short vowel is lengthened before two consonants with approximately the same place of articulation: blind [blɪnd] > blind [bliːnd] “blind,” gold [gɔld] > gold [gɔːld] “gold,” compared to German [blint] “blind,” [gɔlt] “gold.”
A more modest urgent project is a presentation on morpho-phonological and lexical characteristics of Middle English consonantal codas for the ICOME-12 meeting in Glasgow in August 2022; the “big” picture is an attempt to establish how far back cluster simplification goes, and why some clusters are more stable than others, but for now I am narrowing the focus on <-ng>.
I am also four chapters into an all too ambitious book on Early English verse structure. I am running late with the submission of the typescript to the publisher: such massive undertakings are hard to tackle by a single author, and the pandemic did not help. With luck it should be out by the end of 2023.
Before we turn off the microphone, Kie: I want to say “thanks” to the JEngL Editors for the honor of inviting me to give this interview; it has been a pleasant and also emotional trip into my past. To you, Kie, student, colleague, co-author, neighbor, treasured friend, and now an interviewer, I am grateful for taking on this extra role, for structuring the probing inquires, and for your kindness, patience and good humor, as always.
It’s a tremendous honor. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m so happy to have played a role in making this interview with you available to the field.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
