Acknowledgments

For sustenance: In the spring of 2003, expected funding for a sabbatical year suddenly vanished. Panicked, I responded to vague rumors I had heard about the largesse of the Max-Planck Institute, and made a distraught appeal to Bernard Comrie. His protocol-waiving response was instant. The first draft of this book was accordingly completed while I was a visiting resident scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, in 2003–4. My profound thanks go to Bernard and to the staff there, for their unforgettable generosity and hospitality.

For correction, and reading portions of this manuscript that trespassed on their areas of linguistic expertise, my thanks to Mark Dingemanse, Martha Ratliff, Jeffrey Heath, Bernhard Wälchli, Paul Newman, Philip Jaggar, John Hutchison, and James Stanford. For helpful leads on Indo-European, Hungarian, Chinese, Ndyuka, Supyire, and ASL, my thanks to Jay Jasanoff, Istvan Kenesei, Edith Moravcsik, Sandra Thompson, Norval Smith, Robert Carlson, and Sherman Wilcox. In writing about gesture for the first time in my life, I am especially grateful for the generous and stimulating scrutiny of David McNeill, who read both the original book proposal and the entire final manuscript for Cambridge University Press.

For the inspiration of their example, I salute:

David Huntley. He was the first linguist I ever knew, and fifty years ago he taught us all (it was an obligatory course, for Russian majors) Old Church Slavonic. Asked once what was the use of linguistics, he answered that if he had been an incompetent engineer, he could have designed a faulty bridge and been responsible for the deaths of hundreds. But as an incompetent linguist, he inflicted nothing worse than boredom for any of his mistakes. He was more than crazy enough and brilliant enough to compensate for the inherent tedium of OCS;

Ken Gregerson. It was nearly forty years ago, on a cold winter night in Winnipeg, that I heard him present a talk on sound symbolism in Rengao, a paper that is cited here as Gregerson (Reference Gregerson1984). It was then, and still is now, the most electrifying talk I have ever heard.

Joseph Greenberg. It was a mere thirty-odd years ago, while I was avidly pursuing him to contribute a talk to a conference I was convening, that we met at his office. He had just read Darmesteter, of whom I had never heard, and enthusiastically introduced me to La vie des mots. He was like a kid with a new toy.