摘要：From childhood I was always fascinated by linguistics even though, until I was twenty yearsold, I did not know there was any such thing. I read all the foreign language grammars in ourlocal library, and collected as much information as I could find about the languages of theworld. I studied French, German and Latin at secondary school, and asked for Teach YourselfSpanish and Teach Yourself Malay as birthday and Christmas presents. As – like other youngpeople in the 1960s – I then hitch-hiked round Europe, I got interested in languages Iencountered like Flemish, Luxembourgish, Plattdeutsch, Swiss German and Macedonian aswell as Italian and Greek. When I left school I went to Cambridge University to study Frenchand German, even though I was not a naturally gifted practical linguist and hopeless as a literaryscholar. One of the most important things ever to happened to was therefore to find, quite bychance, in theModern Languages Library, a copy of Hockett's A course in modern linguistics. I realised, as Iturned the pages, that this was what I wanted to study.
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