Andrew Garrett

@andrewgarrett

Linguist @ UC Berkeley. Language documentation, archiving, and historical linguistics. "Basic Yurok" (2014) and "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, memory, and Indigenous California" (2023). Running; semi-competitive age-grade racer.

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Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· 14d

In our era of conflict and tension, let us remember a kinder age when academics expressed only admiration and fond regard for their colleagues. Behold the correspondence of anthropologists Paul Radin and Carl Voegelin.

"Dear Carl: As usual your mental processes are difficult to follow. You ask me politely whether I wish to edit a perfectly inconsequential little manuscript like the Otomí & yet you send off without first consulting me, a rather consequential manuscript, the Patwin, to Harris. How come? [...]
Let me make myself clear upon this point. I do not recognize your right to do anything with the Boas' mss except return them to their authors upon demand. I feel sufficient wrought up about the matter to make it a public issue. As far as the Patwin mss, or any other of my mss, is concerned, I shall proceed to do exactly what I please in the matter and make my own arrangements about publication. I fortunately have a copy of the Patwin ms. So don't worry about it at all. It is my ms and it has only that status. There is no such thing as status in the Boas collection. Apparently power has gone somewhat to your head although you always had the possibilities of developing into a semi-fascist.
If I seem to be sharp, indeed oversharp, I do so deliberately so that you can pull yourself out of your subjectivistic haze and realize that you are living in a world of human beings and not in one composed of pseudo-logistic constructs á la Zelig Harris and some of the other contributors to the linguistic journal.
Apparently the same haze that is so evident in your Hitlerite disposal of properties made it impossible for you to understand the few questions I put to you in my letter. I did not ask you to look at my other linguistic mss. I asked an entirely different question, one in which I thought you would be interested. Apparently you were not, for I give you credit for understanding English. So forget all about my mss, those you have or those I have. I shall not let them have any further connection with you.
[] Paul
My best to Erminie. You certainly are lucky to have a wife who is not a logical positivist!"

A typed letter:

"December 22, 1945

Dr. Paul Radin
2731 1/2 Dwight Way
Berkeley 4, California

Dear Paul:

Thanks for your spirited letter: it was just like having a visit with you in Berkeley.

I agree with your statment concerning the rights of authors. I sent your Patwin manuscript to my friend Harris who has much more editorial experience than I have and asked him to serve as editorial consultant on your Patwin, and to enlist Lee as an additional consultant. I do not feel competent to pass judgment on all manuscripts I see; it is out of this feeling of a lack of competence that I send manuscripts to editorial consultants. The only thing I can hope to gain by this procedure is linguistic insight, --certainly not power over manuscripts; such power remains in the hands of the authors, just as you say it does.

Erminie was properly complimented and sends you her love, and I mine.

As ever,
C. F. Voegelin"

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 21

Anna Morpurgo Davies would have been 89 today. I still miss her! What I wrote for the 10th anniversary of her death is here: philsoc.org.uk/media/2024/0.... (Photo by John Ohala, LSA Linguistic Institute, UC Berkeley, 2009.)

A woman with glasses and brown hair speaking and gesturing in front of a chalkboard with Luvian written on it.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 11

Alfred Kroeber was born 150 years ago today. We had a picnic!

A grave marker ("Alfred L. Kroeber, 1876-1960") near the base of a tree and surrounded by a cake (with "ALK 150" written on it), flowers, and a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Apr 2

Andy Pawley's recent passing led me to read this memoir article, which I highly recommend. I have always admired his work, but this essay made me see him as the kind of linguist we should all hope to more like. nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...

Photograph of Andrew Pawley (a smiling bearded man)

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Mar 24

I was surprised that @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social celebrated Charter Day yesterday with rhetoric suppressing the presence of Indigenous people. My take in my 2023 book is here too.

UC Berkeley: "On this day in 1868, Gov. Henry Haight signed an act catalyzing the audacious idea that California should have a great public university - one that would serve equally the children of immigrants and settlers, landowners and industrial barons."

Another webpage celebrates “the audacious idea that California should have a great public university—one that would serve equally the children of immigrants and settlers, landowners and industrial barons” (UC News 2018). Not served, it seems, are the children of those whose land was taken.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Feb 22

The last lovely paragraph of a short obituary of the anthropologist Robert Lowie www.jstor.org/stable/43643...

In person, Lowie was fundamentally unassuming, slightly shy,
affectionate to family and friends. He claimed little, made his own
way, took with fortitude and serenity what fate dealt him. He was
candid, incorruptible, and loyal; it did not occur to him to scheme
or to suspect it as possible in his friends. His life flowed amiably and
cheerfully. Passions rarely shook him; his work pace was even and
cumulative. Although he did not return to Europe until 31 years after leaving it in boyhood, he remained a scholar in the old European tradition: respectful of learning in itself, imbued with its dignity, unexpectant of worldly rewards. Humane in attitudes, sedentary in habits, he was fond of discourse with intimates, and given to analysis but not argument; and he possessed the gift of true conversation, stimulating, gentle, wide-ranging. He is missed by all who came to know him. - A. L. Kroeber

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Feb 9

Apply now to participate in the 2026 Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, held at UC Berkeley and sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival in collaboration with @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social! www.aicls.org?page_id=566

Participants at the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Dec 22

I forgot this item, maybe my favorite: Alfred Kroeber's (and then Ursula's) pencil case. In my imagination these are the very colored pencils that decorate so many Kroeber manuscript pages.

A pencil case with colored pencils, annotated with the initials and dates of two owners: "A.L.K. 1876-1960, U.K.L. 1929-"

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Dec 21

Some highlights from today's visit to "A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin" @oregoncontemporary.bsky.social in Portland, Oregon. A great show!

Robert Spott with young Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, probably 1933

Juan Dolores with young Ursula Kroeber, late 1930s

Small rock, labelled "Vincennes 2-III-54" (March 2, 1954)

Drawing of four cats by Ursula K. Le Guin, with words: "CATS, identification chart: Leonard, Neko, Philip, Bonzo"

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Dec 18

TIL that Theodora Kroeber invented lexicostatistics. OK, an exaggeration, but in this 1926 paper she ("T. K[racaw] Brown") & coauthors counted Polynesian culture traits & worked out culture pairs w/ more matches than chance predicts & which are therefore closest. www.jstor.org/stable/661296

Figure from Clements, Schenck & Brown, "A New Objective Method for Showing Special Relationships" (1926), showing Polynesian cultures with more resemblances than predicted by chance

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Dec 12

My book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023) is now open-access to read or download: escholarship.org/uc/item/59w3... Thanks to @mitpress.bsky.social, where you can still buy lovely print copies (mitpress.mit.edu/978026254709...).

Cover of Andrew Garrett's "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California", with a picture of the first letter of the word Kroeber being removed from a wall

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Dec 12

I had a good time today looking at various @ursulakleguin.com "A Wizard of Earthsea" memorabilia in the Parnassus Press records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

Line drawing by Ruth Robbins of a falcon and a tower in the background. Study for A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Parnassus Press records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Typescript of A Wizard of Earthsea [originally: of the Isles] by Ursula K. Le Guin. Parnassus Press records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Cover study by Ruth Robbins, showing a dark-skinned map looking away, for A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Parnassus Press records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Line drawing of a part of the map of Earthsea, for A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Parnassus Press records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Nov 23

Alfred Kroeber (d. 1960), w/ colleagues who predeceased him, Robert Lowie (d. 1957) & Paul Radin (d. 1959), & their wives Luella Lowie (d. 1970) & Doris Radin (d. 1991). Three German-Austrian-Polish-American students of Boas, once colleagues and now neighbors. Sunset View Cemetery, El Cerrito, CA.

Andrew Garrett sitting next to headstone of Alfred L. Kroeber, 1876-1960.

Headstones for Alfred L. Kroeber, 1876-1960; Robert H. Lowie, 1883-1957; and Luella Cole Lowie, 1893-1970.

Headstones for Paul Radin, 1883-1959; Doris Woodward Radin, 1901-1991; Robert H. Lowie, 1883-1957; and Luella Cole Lowie, 1893-1970.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Nov 17

Linguist / anthro types: I've been thinking about writing more personally than the usual academic piece, about "fieldwork" experiences & how they've changed me, my relation to my discipline, etc. I'd love to find models of any kind & places that might publish such writing. Cat photo for attention.

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Sep 19

Awesome passive-aggressive brackets! (The original failed to capitalize "Zeitgeist".) Source: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Text from a judicial opinion: "Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, 'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Sep 15

I'm very proud of this paper, now published in Anthropological Linguistics: "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)," a study of the earliest substantial documentation of Inuktun (NW Greenland) and what it shows about Inuit dialects and change. muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

"1.Background. Few episodes in the history of American anthropology and linguistics are as disturbing as the treatment of six Inughuit (Polar Inuit) people brought from northern Greenland to New York City in 1897 at the behest of Franz Boas. Living in the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place, later dubbed Thule by Knud Rasmussen, Inughuit people were objects of fascination for Americans and Europeans. This was partly due to their environment (with its three-and-a-half-month winter night and seven months of solid sea ice) and proximity to the North Pole, but also because of their apparent isolation. Inughuit people occupy “an island in an ocean of ice” (Gilberg 1984:577) and were thought to have been unaware of other people before the arrival of European explorers. In short, they were exemplars of the ethnographic fantasy of “uncontaminated” indigenes."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Aug 8

It's a very capacious word.

how many r's in rearrange?

ChatGPT said:
The word rearrange has three r’s.

You said:
Are you sure?

ChatGPT said:
Yep — here’s the breakdown:

r e a r r a n g e
1st letter: r
4th letter: r
5th letter: r

So that’s 3 r’s in total.

You said:
How about blueberry?

ChatGPT said:
blueberry has three r’s too:

b l u e r b e rr y

5th letter: r

8th letter: r

9th letter: r

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Aug 6

My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Aug 2

From Scott MacLochlainn, "Naming and Namelessness", Annual Review of Anthropology (@annualreviews.bsky.social‬) www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

"During the early part of the twentieth century, names seemed among the most stable topics that anthropologists could study. Numerous scholars such as Edward Sapir (1924), Elsie Clews Parsons (1937), and Alfred Kroeber (1909) all published works on naming; the latter subsequently provided a controversial eponym for the anthropology building at the University of California, Berkeley (Garrett 2023). Their motivations were multiple, if overlapping, in situating naming as a systematic, patterned, and accessible code for understanding cultural practices. Perhaps more dutiful than later literatures in producing inventories, glossaries, and lexical explications of names, such scholarship professed a fundamental importance of the name within social practices. To take just one text as an example from this era, Franz Boas’s (1934) Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians describes how Kwakiutl naming practices allowed people to meaningfully orient them- selves to the spaces they inhabited, in addition to dutifully providing a glossary of names, their linguistic structures, and a set of topographic maps."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Aug 1

Awesome new @diachronica.bsky.social article by @austronesianist.com: "Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations" www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

"Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations", abstract: "Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending directly from the Malayo-Polynesian node. This research argues that the evidence for those large subgroups does not stand under scrutiny. Rather, the distribution of innovations throughout the Malayo-Polynesian region suggests that those innovations spread within a large network of dialects. That network, here dubbed the “Late-Malayo-Polynesian” network, replaces discrete higher-level nodes in the classical model of Austronesian linguistic relations."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jul 29

Great! I registered this because it could sound like an Australian exceptionality claim (which I'm sure it isn't), and I'm attentive to such claims.

Excerpt from Garrett, "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall" (2023): "The American exceptionality claim was reiterated by Meillet and Cohen (1924:9) and explicitly critiqued by Bloomfield (1925a); see Goddard 1996, Campbell 1997, and Mithun 1999 on relationships among Native American languages, and Golla 2011 on California. Claims of Australian exceptionality by Dixon (1997, 2002) have been effectively rebutted by many scholars (e.g., Bowern and Koch 2004, Bowern et al. 2011, McConvell and Bowern 2011). Common to both claims was an assertion that sociohistorical language dynamics in more recently colonized areas of the world are fundamentally different from those in Africa and Eurasia."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jul 8

From Howard Morphy's Afterword ("After Marcus") to Marcus Banks's "Understanding Social Images" (2025), with reference to "the danger of locking the resources of anthropology into the 'presentist' moment of the critique [of anthropology]."

"Andrew Garret[t]'s book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023), provides an illuminating analysis of how anti-historical this process is. In effect, it positions anthropology outside the present, and deflects attention away from ongoing engagements with the material record by contemporary communities."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 27

Two reactions: (1) Alito has really gone off the deep end (a while ago, I suppose); (2) The books he writes about, including this one, look really good!

Image from Alito majority opinion, a page from "Born Ready" showing a child looking happy, with text: "For the first time, my insides don't feel like fire. They feel like warm, golden love."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 19

The nerd in me is also especially pleased by the final paragraph:

"This is a long, demanding, scrupulously documented, and physically attractive book, which includes eighty illustrations, thirty pages of footnotes, seventy pages of references, and a twenty-eight-page index. It is very much worth your full attention."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 19

Delighted by Margaret Thomas's review of my book, in "Language" 101/2 (2025) 406-410 doi.org/10.1353/lan....

"Andrew Garrett presents this book as a study of the legacy of the University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist and linguist Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960), backlit by an event that took place on the Berkeley campus between July 2020 and January 2021. That event was the formal erasure of Kroeber’s name from a building that houses the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, and associated classrooms and offices. G’s book is also a judicious reflection on the professional responsibilities of linguists and anthropologists who have documented Indigenous American languages, as well as on the relationships between people who moved west to settle in what is now California and the Native people whose lands they seized or settled on. Much of it is painful reading. All of it is meticulously researched and beautifully presented."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Jun 17

Pleased by @jamesmcelvenny.bsky.social's review of "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California" (2023), now published in "History of Humanities" 10 (2025) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

"Our own historical moment is characterized by an intensive reckoning with past injustices and their ongoing effects. But this reckoning requires a deep understanding of history; otherwise it risks turning into mere scapegoating of individuals and can easily be co-opted by latter-day settler-colonial institutions to whitewash their reputations. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Garrett offers a superb demonstration of how sympathetic but critical engagement with the past can be done."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· May 5

Seems true www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/t...?

NY Times headline: "A.I. is getting more powerful, but its hallucinations are getting worse"

AI hallucination: Question to chatgpt "Tell me about the author of 'The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall'", followed by hallucinated answer "The author ... is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a prominent Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician, and activist. She is well known for her work in Indigenous studies, decolonization, and resurgence theory.

Simpson's work blends storytelling, poetry, academic theory, and activism. She often explores themes of Indigenous identity, colonialism, land, and resistance. 'The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall' is a piece that critiques the colonial legacy of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, particularly in the context of Indigenous erasure and the institutional violence of anthropology. It reflects her broader focus on reclaiming Indigenous knowledge systems and challenging settler colonial narratives."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Apr 23

Couldn't be happier for Leslie Kurke (not on here, sensibly), one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (www.amacad.org/news/new-mem...), and in great company!

Some new members of AAAS: Anderson Cooper, Ava DuVernay, Danny Glover, Leslie V. Kurke

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Mar 26

My review of James McElvenny's "A history of modern linguistics" (2024) has appeared in Language 101 (2025) 195-199. doi.org/10.1353/lan....

Last two paragraphs of review: "Throughout the history of modern linguistics, there has been a tension between technical precision and the broader dimensions of language research. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in M's words, 'comparative-historical linguistics … became increasingly narrow and technical in scope, concentrating ever more on the minute details of grammatical forms' (14). August Schlegel in 1831 mocked this 'Pedanterei', while others supported 'the scientific study of languages for their own sake' (35). More than a century later, in a 1955 letter to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (a former president of the Linguistic Society of America), his daughter Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that contemporary linguistics seemed 'self-contained' and 'very narrow' (her emphasis); he responded that 'precision has become an obsessive end in itself' for many linguists.4 Plus ça change: the story of linguistics has always included the challenge of finding distinctive, effective analytic tools that will lead to new ideas about a phenomenon, language, that matters to everyone and affects so many aspects of human life. All too often, we are disciplinary gatekeepers while asking outsiders to be interested in our work.

I recommend A history of modern linguistics to colleagues and students in linguistics and all allied fields. This book as a whole has a big story to tell, but it will also reward selective reading. Whatever their goals, thoughtful linguists will find questions of interest and echoes of the present day in James McElvenny's lively, stimulating discussion of our past."

Andrew Garrett@andrewgarrett· Mar 18

Here's an intro linguistics slide I am using this week that has this (depending on whether you include sound changes as rules). The implicit comparison is mainstream English in which all the words shown underwent the English vowel shift (but in the other order).