ABSTRACT
In his introduction to Bloomfield's posthumous grammar of Menomini (Bloomfield, 1962), Charles Hockett recounts Bloomfield's stratagem for the documentation of the endangered languages of North America: as linguists each of us should take a vow of celibacy, not teach, and dedicate the entirety of our summers to fieldwork, and our winters to collating and filing our data, year after year. With such dedication, Bloomfield speculated, we could each hope to do an adequate job of documenting three languages over the course of our professional lives. Upon being reminded of this anecdote not too long ago, a frustrated Algonquianist remarked, “Yes, and now that we have computers, it's down to two languages apiece!” Computers certainly present a mixed blessing: at the same time that they allow us to perform tasks such as querying and sorting the reams of data that we typically gather in extended periods of fieldwork, they also structure the ways in which we address these data, and often become petulant intermediaries that distance us from the very languages which we seek to describe. The amount of time required to learn the intricacies of software can have a significant impact on our time. Yet, properly used, computers can provide us with the means of documenting languages at a level of detail and sophistication that would have made Boas swoon.
