Linguistics

Those pictures of the montagnards brought back memory of an american linguist who was my linguistics professor in the Dept. of English, Faculty of Letters, U. of Saigon. He earned his doctorate in the field by spending several years living and studying their ancient languages in their own lands. He knew their languages so well that he frequently made the whole class crack up when he uttered some phones that only him could reproduce faithfully. Toward the end of the Free Vietnam era (April 1975), his class got cancelled all of the sudden because he failed to show up to lecture. We found out that he'd left for the US. We quickly and sadly realized that the capitulation of Saigon was imminent.