Jerrold M. Sadock
E-mail: j-sadock@uchicago.edu
Phone: (773) 702-8526
Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago
How did you become interested in your area:
I have been interested in languages since I was 13. I discovered linguistics in college through poplularizing books and found that the University of Illinois had a vibrant new
program through a friend in philosophy.
What brought you to the University of Chicago:
In 1968 there were very few Ph.D.s in linguistics and a great demand for them. I got an unsolicited call from Jim McCawley while I was on a Fulbright lecutureship in Israel. He asked me if I would consider a job at the U of C, and being a native South Sider, I said, "Where do I sign?" (or words to that effect.)
How do you feel a student should approach an interdisciplinary program such as this:
My personal feeling is that every student ought to have a home department in one of the existing disciplines: history, philosophy, divinity, literature, and so on.
What type of student would benefit working with you:
Someone interested in Yiddish and the history of the Jews in early modern Germany.
What advice would you give an incoming student interested in your particular field:
He or she should have a serious main area, German, or Americanist studies, or Comp Lit would be the most obvious choices. Without that, expertise in Yiddish will provide you virtually no opportunity for gainful employment.
What courses will you be teaching:
I will not be offering any courses in Jewish Studies next year, which, by the way, will be my last year of teaching before retirement.
What are you working on/publications:
I've been working on a book on the history of "West Yiddish", the language of almost all Jews in Germany up until the Jewish Enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.