Author Archives: Rich Rhodes

Richard Alan Rhodes (born 1946, Abington, Pennsylvania) is an American linguist specializing in indigenous languages of North America and Mexico. He has done extensive fieldwork in Ojibwe (an Algonquian language), in Métchif (a.k.a. Michif) (a mixed language), and Sayula Popoluca (a Mixe-Zoquean language). He is best known for his work on Algonquian which includes a major dictionary encompassing the two dialects Ottawa and Eastern Ojibwe (Rhodes 1985) and many articles on points of syntax. He is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and has had visiting positions at the University of North Dakota, at the Karl-Franzens Universität, Graz, Austria, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Money, money, money

August 6, 2010 – 7:07 am

This has been a crazy spring and summer — I’m involved in two book projects and I’m still working part time as a dean dealing with student issues. And the dog, sweetheart that she is, still takes up almost two hours of walking time a day. So I haven’t had a lot of time to devote [...]

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Conferring a degree

January 12, 2010 – 7:30 am

When Nick Bailey asked if I would be on his doctoral committee, I leapt at the chance. I have known Nick for about 25 years now. The story is long and somewhat complicated, but suffice it to say that we met in Germany through a mutual professional acquaintance, and only later discovered that we shared [...]

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I want a 4G translation

January 2, 2010 – 8:31 pm

A couple of days ago I was out walking our dog, Pixie, when I ran into a neighbor and long time friend, Russ, who was out on a walk. Russ and I have known each other for more than 20 years. We met when I first started going to Berkeley Covenant shortly after moving to [...]

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Why do we make pastors translate?

December 12, 2009 – 12:14 am

I’m here in Austria at the moment visiting the two sets of friends I have in Graz. One set are associated with the Linguistics department at the Karl Franzens University, including my colleague of longest standing, Bernhard Hurch, who holds the chair, and is arguably the most insightful German-speaking linguist of his generation — and [...]

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OK, Mr. Schlafly …

December 8, 2009 – 12:57 am

I guess I’m one of those terrible professors mentioned in the last post — after all I teach at Berkeley, that notoriously liberal institution, and I think there are serious problems with important conservative ideas about Bible translations, like how you translate ἄνθρωπος and ὕιοι. But let me tell you about what I did today. [...]

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Thinking about Scripture

November 23, 2009 – 3:19 am

Last month I posted about trying to listen to Scourby reading the KJV , and how distracting it was working out what Elizabethan prose meant in expository texts (i.e., the epistles). This morning one of our readers took me to task. He argued that just because the KJV is hard to understand is not a [...]

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Hi-tech meets the KJV

October 13, 2009 – 7:01 am

So I haven’t been too anxious to post while I’m in the middle of teaching a class about English Bible translation because I don’t want the students reading my reactions online. I’ll have things to say next semester. However, I got something for my birthday last month that has revolutionized my life — an iPhone. [...]

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Five works that changed how I read the Bible

June 21, 2009 – 6:38 am

Since no one over here at BBB is likely to get tagged by the theologically oriented Bible bloggers on the meme of books that influence how we read the Bible, I’m going to jump in on my own. With some justification, literature types view us linguists as mere word-mechanics. We’re excited by the details of [...]

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What’s in a name?

May 3, 2009 – 2:09 am

If you’re anything like me, you shudder as you remember your parents yelling out your full name. Richard Alan Rhodes, come here this very instant! Vocatives—those expressions used to draw the attention of the intended addressee or to direct an utterance at a particular addressee—are not well understood by linguists. Vocatives can take the form [...]

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Seek ye first the kingdom of dog

February 18, 2009 – 11:36 pm

The Rhodes family acquired a new dog about four months ago. It had been about a year and a half since Whiskey died and Mary declared it time. Pixie is a 15 month old Lab mix. We got her from the Hayward Animal Shelter after a couple of weeks of to-ing and fro-ing. It turns [...]

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