Marc L. Greenberg

"Marc Greenberg" redirects here. For the American psychologist, see Mark T. Greenberg.
Marc L. Greenberg
A middle-aged man with a moustache smiling slightly
Greenberg in 2007
Born (1961-11-09) November 9, 1961
Hollywood, California, U.S.
Known forContributions to the study of Slovene
Spouse
Marta Pirnat
​
(m. 1988)​
Children2
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
ThesisA Historical Analysis of the Phonology and Accentuation of the Prekmurje Dialect of Slovene (1990)
Academic advisors
Academic work
Discipline
Sub-disciplineSlovene dialectology
InstitutionsUniversity of Kansas

Marc Leland Greenberg (born November 9, 1961) is an American linguist and Slavicist, best known for his contributions to Slovene, particularly the northeastern Prekmurje dialect. He has taught at the University of Kansas since 1990 and focuses primarily on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. His 1990 dissertation on Prekmurje was later reformulated and expanded into a book, earning him a prize for "Best Book in Slavic Linguistics" from American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) in 2002.

Greenberg is a staunch advocate for foreign language learning in the United States, founding the University of Kansas's School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in 2016 to promote that effort. He has established two academic journals and chaired the executive board of the Slavic Linguistics Society, during which he championed and promoted open access publication. In 2019, he was elected the first non-Slovene to be Ambassador of Science and Scholarship of the Republic of Slovenia. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics since 2021.

Early life and education

Marc Leland Greenberg was born on November 9, 1961, in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, the son of a furniture store owner.[1] The family has long-standing roots in the city; his grandfather was a news reporter covering the police in the 1920s.[2] His great-grandparents, many of whom lived well into his adulthood, were from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary, and spoke both Yiddish and the languages of their respective native countries.[3]

Shortly after Greenberg's birth, the family moved to Whittier, California, where his brother Phillip was born in 1963. The family then moved to West Los Angeles five years later.[4] Growing up in a city he has described as defaulting to "an ahistorical, monocultural, future-oriented, materialistic culture of vanity and self-indulgence", Greenberg viewed linguistics as an opportunity for personal "reinvention" from that norm.[4] Unable to travel, he engaged his interest in languages through stamp collecting, remarking that the diversity of languages he found on the stamps helped to break up "monotonous Californian life".[5][3] He and a neighborhood friend listened to foreign radio stations, and Greenberg used the more multicultural neighborhood of West Los Angeles to try and teach himself German and Russian.[3]

Greenberg first received his bachelor's degree in Russian literature in 1983 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating magna cum laude.[6] There, he learned Russian, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.[3] He received his master's degree in comparative Slavic linguistics the following year from the University of Chicago and returned to UCLA to complete his doctorate, focusing on Slavic historical accentology and dialectology.[7] There, he studied under Henrik Birnbaum, Pavle Ivić, Ronelle Alexander, and Alan Timberlake.[8] Ivić directed Greenberg to the work of the Dutch linguist Willem Vermeer, who had done substantial dialectology work in Yugoslavia, and Vermeer began mentoring Greenberg on his linguistic fieldwork in Slovene.[9]

During the 1980s, Greenberg traveled across Eastern Europe, studying in Communist Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.[6][10] His first trip, in 1982, was to Leningrad State University, followed by Charles University the following year, where he met his future wife Marta, a Slovene.[11] After he was given a Fulbright fellowship in 1987, Greenberg traveled to Amsterdam, staying with Vermeer shortly before moving on to Yugoslavia. Greenberg later described the stay as "formative", believing he "had found his tribe" when Vermeer informed him that historical-comparative dialectologists were "the lunatic fringe" of Slavistics.[12] With an additional grant from the United States Department of Education, Greenberg completed fieldwork for his dissertation in Yugoslavia between 1988 and 1990.[8][10] His thesis, A Historical Analysis of the Phonology and Accentuation of the Prekmurje Dialect of Slovene, earned him his doctorate in 1990.[6][8] When Slovenia declared its independence, Greenberg advocated for its recognition in the United States.[13]

Career

Greenberg's linguistic interest has focused largely on the Prekmurje region of Slovenia.

Greenberg has been a professor at the University of Kansas's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures since 1990, serving as its chair from 2000 until 2011.[6][14] Following an expansion and revision, his dissertation was published as a book in 2000 as A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language.[6][15] The book was recognized as the "Best Book in Slavic Linguistics" by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) in 2002 and a Slovene translation was published the same year.[6][10] Greenberg later joked that he was glad the award had been given, as it justified "the seven-year-long torture" of producing it.[5] He attained full professorship in 2001.[16] Greenberg mainly teaches historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.[16][8]

Aside from his regular linguistic work, Greenberg co-founded the academic journals Slavia Centralis, which he named and served as its first linguistics editor, and Slovenski jezik/Slovene Linguistic Studies, co-founded with Marko Snoj.[17] Greenberg has also chaired the executive board of the Slavic Linguistics Society.[16][14] His leadership in both his journals and chairmanship has focused largely on the accessibility of science by promoting the use of open access among publications.[16][14] Greenberg was a founder of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kansas in 2016 and serves as its director. The school promotes the instruction of foreign languages across the United States, for which Greenberg has long been a vocal advocate.[16][15] Though he began doing editorial work for the project in 2016,[2] Greenberg has been the editor-in-chief of Brill's Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics since 2021.[10][18] Feeling that his later career has been "preoccupied by administrative duties", he has opined that the encyclopedia has allowed him to reengage with modern scholarship.[19]

In 2021, Greenberg published a translation and expansion of Avgust Pavel's Hungarian-language book Vend nyelvtan, a 1942 grammar of the Prekmurje dialect of Slovene.[20] Though the manuscript was more-or-less complete by 2005, it remained unpublished and a Slovene translation was published in 2013. Greenberg remarked that the Slovene translation "came in very handy" because he was working off of a shoddy photocopy and the Slovene translation helped him to adjust linguistic nuance he had been uncertain about.[20] In an interview for the Slovene magazine Porabje, Greenberg expressed that he considers Prekmurje to be both a language and a dialect of Slovene, arguing that it is a Slovene language rather than a part of the Slovene language.[20] He calls this unique, remarking that it is "a phenomenon of its own".[20]

Recognition

In 2017, Greenberg was elected a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.[8][10] For his contributions, he was honored with a Festschrift entitled V zeleni drželi zeleni breg ('In a Green Country, A Green Hill'), a pun on his surname,[a] in 2018.[21][10] The following year, he was made the ambassador of science and scholarship of the Republic of Slovenia, its first non-Slovene member ever elected to the position.[8]

Personal life

Greenberg is married to Marta (née Pirnat), who teaches Slovene at the University of Kansas.[13] The two met in Czechoslovakia in 1983.[22][6] Though they originally communicated in Czech, she sent him a Slovene–English dictionary after they were engaged and began writing him letters in Slovene; he remarked of the change: "If I wanted to figure out how much she loved me, I had to figure out what was written in her letters."[5][22] The two married during Greenberg's Fulbright scholarship in Yugoslavia, with their first child, Benjamin, born in Ljubljana in 1989.[22] Greenberg has two children, both of whom speak Slovene fluently.[23]

In addition to Slovene, Greenberg speaks Croatian, Czech, and Russian, all of which he learned before he learned Slovene.[10][5] He is also able to read and engage in limited conversation in Albanian, German, French, Italian, Turkish, and Yiddish.[10] Aside from his linguistic endeavors, Greenberg is an accomplished multi-instrumental musician, playing classical guitar, Russian guitar, and the lute in shows across the United States and Europe.[13][3]

Selected works

References

Notes

  1. ^ Zeleni breg is a rough Slovene translation of Greenberg.[10]

Citations

  1. ^
  2. ^ a b Greenberg 2024, p. 227.
  3. ^ a b c d e Greenberg 2020, p. 138.
  4. ^ a b Greenberg 2020, p. 137.
  5. ^ a b c d Pomurec 2013.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Dickey & Lauersdorf 2018, p. vii.
  7. ^
  8. ^ a b c d e f University of Kansas n.d.
  9. ^ Greenberg 2024, pp. 223–224.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i Šabec 2020, p. 277.
  11. ^ Greenberg 2020, pp. 138–139.
  12. ^ Greenberg 2024, p. 224.
  13. ^ a b c Čobec 2019.
  14. ^ a b c Šabec 2020, p. 278.
  15. ^ a b Šabec 2020, pp. 277–278.
  16. ^ a b c d e Dickey & Lauersdorf 2018, p. viii.
  17. ^
  18. ^ Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online 2021, § About.
  19. ^ Brill 2021.
  20. ^ a b c d Mukič 2020.
  21. ^ Dickey & Lauersdorf 2018.
  22. ^ a b c Greenberg 2020, p. 139.
  23. ^

Sources

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