Let's Talk About Me*
Welcome to my webpage. I'm a linguist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
specializing in the morphology of American Indian languages. I have worked on
Chalcatongo Mixtec (Otomanguean), Ojitlán Chinantec (also Otomanguean),
and Karuk (Hokan, spoken in Northern California). I currently work on Menominee,
and am helping out with the tribe's language preservation and maintenance programs.
Marianne Milligan and I are currently working on a dictionary of Menominee,
in fact.
I got my degree at UC-Berkeley in 1987, and my dissertation
was titled "Morphology and Cliticization in Chalcatongo Mixtec." I
was in the English Department at Purdue University for seven years before coming
here in1996 (here being the glorious University of Wisconsin-Madison). I'm also
the project director for WILMA (Women
In Linguistics Mentoring Alliance), which is now a web-based program. There
you have it.
*There was a goofy pop punk song in the early 80's
called that...
P.S. The artwork that you'll find on many of my pages (including
this one) comes from the Mixtec codices. There are about 10 codices (depending
on how you count), which constitute all we have left of a once-thriving pre-conquest
writing system. I've been learning a bit about their decipherment--it's really
fun stuff. (Just as an example, in the image above, the dots at the top and
left side are part of the counting system, and the things they're attached
to are day names--these are the birthdates of the people depicted (and these
birthdates are used as names, so it represents their names as well). You can
tell these three are men, by their clothing (most noticeably the ends of the
white loincloth sticking out). They're standing on little boats or something
in a river--bodies of water are always depicted in cross-section, which I
find really bizarre. There's tons of other stuff that experts can read here,
but unfortunately I'm not one of them.)
Back to Monica's homepage
This page last updated:
8/30/05