“I was 12 when the Wall fell, I remember the day clearly. My father is a historian – for him the event was both of personal and professional significance, because he saw history happening right before his eyes. Being an academic, he was one of the few people in the GDR who were allowed to travel. He had seen a lot of the West, and he understood better than most people what was happening. It made him unhappy, because while he thought critically about the socialist system as it was, he was in favor of a social society. Therefore, he harboured hopes for the social experiment of Eastern Germany. When the Wall fell, he knew, before many other people realized, that the so-called reunification was not actually a merging of two countries, but one country swallowed up by another. Eastern Germany would give up everything it had built, including things that were actually better than in the West, like the recycling system and the educational system.”

“There were many things wrong with Eastern Germany, but I think for children it was a very good place. Here in the Netherlands, kids grow up with the idea that you have to fight your way into society, because there are few jobs and a lot of competition, you have to do your best, etcetera. In the East, you were raised with the idea that the world was waiting for you, that you were needed and wanted, to build the society. That is a fabulous thing for a child. My father saw those good things, so he was very unhappy that people just threw those things away, without looking back, and basically ran away. We saw this running away literally, because we lived on a road that led to a border crossing; we saw many people that were just leaving everything and everybody behind.”

Learning Dutch

“I was still in Berlin when I started learning Dutch. I practiced with reading children’s books, which I love anyway, so it was combining two hobbies. One of the authors I read avidly was Thea Beckman. She writes mostly historical books, and uses quite old-fashioned vocabulary. I knew all sorts of words like ‘poorter’ or ‘trekschuit’, before I could even order a beer. I didn’t realize which words were old-fashioned, so I started saying ‘sedert’ and ‘drommels’ until people laughed and corrected me. That is the funny part when you learn a new language from books: words are not flagged for register.”

“The most difficult thing to learn for me was not the Dutch grammar, but the phonology. The “ui” was dreadfully difficult; in the beginning I didn’t even hear when I was doing it right or wrong. I practiced a lot to train my ear. It is important for me to get rid of my accent, because even though I do not particularly mind being German, it is just one part of me. People tend to reduce you to very visible, or in this case audible, characteristics. So when they know you are German, they think they have learned something about you. I want people to look deeper than that.”

“In my research, I am looking into what is so difficult about the Dutch gender system. You would think it should not be too hard to learn, but children take up to seven years to figure it out. There are studies on a Bantu language that has around seven genders, but children manage the system at three. I have ideas about why this is so. When investigating gender, people have always looked at rules: why does a particular noun belong to a particular gender? But how do children figure out these rules, what is the evidence for the child? I think all of this depends on how much marking there is in a language: how many words provide information about the gender of a noun? How often is a child reminded of a noun’s gender?”

“Rules are not visible – the only thing you can learn from are words and the markers they carry. And this Bantu language happens to have lots of these markers. So the child has an easier time to learn this particular system because there are so many reminders. Dutch gender markers are less clear. This is what I will look into: what is the role of the visible markers of a particular distinction? I think they are crucial in what is difficult for a learner. The funny thing is that a complex system with a lot of distinctions can actually be less difficult than a simpler-looking system like Dutch.”

Simple, complex, difficult

“Linguistics has suffered from the idea that we should not call languages simple, because that would sort of imply that some languages are primitive: it was almost forbidden to say or think this, and to investigate it. For that reason, we currently have little knowledge about linguistic complexity. In the last ten years, people have felt freer to investigate this. Sometimes languages look awfully simple. Take Riau Indonesian; it is so simple that you wonder how it is functioning. On the other hand they have found languages like Archi, a Daghestanian language, that, as far as morphology is concerned, is so incredibly complex that you wonder how it can ever be learned.”

“In my project I will investigate a number of languages. If I am right, there is a certain type of language you should not find. You should not find a language that has many genders, but few gender markers. For example this Bantu language with the 7 genders should not work if it had the morphology of Dutch, because its gender system would be unlearnable. I will try to find a correlation between the complexity of grammar and the amount of marking.”

Bits and pieces

“ ‘Taalportaal’ is another project I am currently involved in. It is a big online grammar for Frisian and Dutch, with basically everything we know about these two languages. We pull information from the linguistic literature and rewrite it for the web. It has to be very well structured, short, with a lot of examples, a lot of connections between them. Together with prof. Geert Booij and dr. Ton van der Wouden I’m doing the Dutch morphology part. It is very nice work, because – for a change – it is about making something rather than finding out about something. ‘Taalportaal’ includes the whole morphology of Dutch. This is a lot of information – to make sense of all the bits and pieces we need to cut longer texts into smaller parts, and arrange them in a very large network. This is interesting and fun to do.”

“I think there is a great problem we all have in linguistics: building bridges between our models and the things that happen in the mind. We have no idea how this works; we do not even know how a single phoneme is represented in the brain, much less how grammar is represented. So, on the one hand, theoretical linguists are working on better models; on the other hand psychologists are getting all kinds of empirical evidence. I think we should all listen to each other very closely. But it is very hard to keep up with the field because it is so alive and the literature is so vast.”

Beauty

“Research is a very cerebral, rational activity. But as a person you have other sides as well. My passion for photography has to do with the appreciation of beauty. Of course, I can appreciate a beautiful theoretical model or beautiful data, but I can appreciate visual beauty in a different way. I enjoy singing because it is very physical, very direct, close to the creature, not entirely rational. Doing these things, photography and singing, gives me a feeling of completeness. Unfortunately I am only a moderately good singer. In another life I would like to sing professionally, though I probably would miss being a scientist.”

“These days I am communicating a lot with Ray Jackendoff, who has ideas about how the unconscious is doing a lot of the work for us, even where we think we are thinking rationally. His idea is that you get a feeling for what is a good theory, a feeling for what is right, or could work. Just like a mechanic can have a feeling for how an engine works, while I only look at the engine and do not see anything. Jackendoff thinks you train your intuitions as a scientist: the more you read, work, observe other people and learn, the more your subconscious is trained to aid you in your work. I totally believe this; you will never be able to observe it, but I think all of us know this feeling of ‘this must be right’. I am very open to using this feeling, even if in the end you should be able to rationalize your gut feeling, of course.”