Shamiram Barooshian
“On June 17, 1929, this airline’s first passenger flight left Dallas,
making stops at Shreveport, Monroe, and Jackson. Thirty seconds, good
luck,” says Jeopardy! host, Alex Trebek. Then the music starts: that
ubiquitous tune signaling impatience, waiting and mounting pressure.
Peter Guekguezian is one of the contestants on the June 19th
broadcast of the popular game show. Guekguezian is a linguist from
Fresno, Calif., and a defending Jeopardy! champion, having won $18,401
on the previous show. This time, he is up against a history instructor
from Tucson, Ariz. and a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y., whose score going
into Final Jeopardy! is almost double.
Guekguezian feels the pressure and writes, “Southwest.”
Guekguezian went on to play twice more for a total of four games—and during his three-day winning streak, he earned $44,800.
He describes the airplane carrier question as one of the most
memorable of his Jeopardy! run, and speaks with excitement about the
experience:
“The other contestants and the production crew are all very
intelligent, really nerdy, very funny. You have a good time there, ”
Guekguezian says. He had auditioned three times for the show before
being placed into the contestant pool. When he was called in for the
show, he had a month to prepare: practicing with quiz games and
reviewing almanacs, studying how to wager, and also preparing mentally
for those high-pressure moments of competition.
Also of use to Guekguezian during the game was his PhD in Linguistics
from the University of Southern California; knowing a little bit about a
lot of different languages and etymologies often helped in parsing the
clues.
“I speak some Spanish, some Armenian, a little bit of French…and I
have a working knowledge of the two languages I’ve done a lot of
documentation on.”
These are Chukchansi Yokuts, a Native American language spoken in the
central valley of California, and Saisiyat, a language spoken in
Taiwan. Both are what linguists call endangered languages,
or languages that are at risk of being lost in the near future.
Languages can become endangered for different reasons, but the two
Guekguezian studies are endangered because of colonization and
displacement of the speakers.
In the fall, Guekguezian will head to the University of Rochester for
a postdoctoral fellowship. In addition to continuing his research
there, he plans to participate in a project aimed at using computational
methods and natural language processing to make the collection and
transcription of endangered language data more efficient.
Another endangered language Guekguezian is interested to explore at
some point in his career is Armenian. He hopes to get funding to attend
the Armenian Linguistics Conference in Yerevan this October to meet with
other attendees about efforts to preserve varieties of Armenian that
are less common.
“It’s a crisis that we don’t talk much about as a people: what’s
going to happen to people who speak non-standard varieties of Armenian?”
Guekguezian nasks. He says many of the languages and dialects of
Western Armenia are already long-gone, while some still exist in places
with enduring Armenian populations, such as Kessab, Syria. With those
languages, we lose characteristics of those villages, and old-world
Armenia.
Even Western Armenian is in what Guekguezian calls a “precarious
position,” because there are no monolingual speakers—most speakers of
Western Armenian also speak Arabic, English, French or Spanish, among
others. To make sure these dialects survive, he says, we have to create
spaces for the language to be spoken—and encourage its transition from
generation to generation.
“It’s hard to pass on a language,” says Guekguezian, “One parent has
to speak that language to the child most of the time in order for them
to have a good grasp of it. They have to be able to speak to other kids
their age. It has to be a functional language. Children are smart…if
they can get by with a different language, they’ll learn that one.”
Guekguezian faces a similar challenge in his own life. Though he says
he speaks very basic Armenian, he is working to pass the language on to
his two-year-old son.
“He knows a few words. He can understand quite a bit,” says Guekguezian. “I’m giving him the foundation as best I can.”
"The Armenian Weekly," July 12, 2017
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