Podcast episode 51: Martin Haspelmath

In this interview, Martin Haspelmath talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current state of the field.

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Intro and outro: Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G major, Prelude. Recording from Wikipedia.

References for Episode 51

Dryer, M. S., et al. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. München: Max Planck Digital Library. http://wals.info/

Haspelmath, M. 1993. A Grammar of Lezgian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Haspelmath, M. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663-687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021

Michaelis, S. M., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M., & Huber, M., eds. 2013. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: MPI für evolutionäre Anthropologie. http://apics-online.info

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:14] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:22] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discussed. [00:26] Today we’re in Leipzig with Martin Haspelmath at the Max Planck Institute, [00:32] and we’re going to continue our series of oral history interviews [00:36] by asking Martin about his career in linguistics [00:40] and his contributions to typology, [00:43] and how he sees the past, present, and future of the field. [00:47] So my first question to you is, can you tell us how you got into linguistics? [00:52]

MH: Yes, so thank you for having me here. [00:58] I got interested in languages rather early on, so I was already a linguist later in high school. [01:06] I was interested in Latin and Greek, [01:10] and even in Egyptian hieroglyphs, because there was a museum of Egyptian in our town, [01:17] and I also had some interest in Polish, [01:22] because my mother spent her childhood in Poland as an ethnic German, and so I started studying Polish a little bit, rather early on. [01:32] So yeah, I was interested in languages very early, [01:36] and I was very happy that I had the chance to continue to do linguistics. [01:41]

JMc: So did you speak any Polish at home? [01:43]

MH: No, my mother didn’t speak Polish later on. [01:46] It was only in her childhood, and then the ethnic Germans had to leave Poland, [01:52] but it was an important heritage language for me, because my mother told us a lot about her Polish fatherland, as she said. [02:03] So she came to Germany in 1945 and felt a little bit as an outsider, [02:09] and, yeah, they had lived in Poland for many generations. [02:14] My grandparents even knew Russian, because they had gone to a good Russian school before 1914. [02:20] So Slavic languages are in that sense a family heritage, not that these languages were spoken. [02:27]

JMc: So how did you then transition from this general interest in languages to the actual academic study of linguistics? [02:36]

MH: I studied at the universities of Vienna and Cologne, and first I was very interested in historical linguistics, [02:44] so I was fascinated by the unification that was offered by the study of ancient Indo-European languages in historical-comparative perspective, [02:55] reconstructing sounds and morphological patterns to Proto-Indo-European. [03:03] I had gotten into that even in my later high school years, and I first thought I was going to be an Indo-Europeanist, [03:12] but then things changed. [03:15] My first two years at the University of Vienna, I was doing Indo-European linguistics, [03:21] and it was interesting, but there were very few students, and the professors were very conservative and not so cool somehow. [03:32] And there were two visiting professors from abroad [03:36] who were teaching strange things such as Russian-style syntax — it was Igor Mel’čuk — and Greenbergian universals, typology. [03:50] So I took a course from Edith Moravcsik from the University of Wisconsin, who had worked with Joseph Greenberg in the Stanford Universals Project, [03:59] and so I had known about formal syntax and Indo-European linguistics earlier, [04:06] but I really learned about typology and universals only at the university through Edith Moravcsik, and I was fascinated. [04:15]

JMc: And you made a career out of it. [04:17]

MH: Well, it took a while. [04:20] I went to the University of Cologne, because that was a place where typology was supposedly strong, [04:28] but I was a bit unsure for a while, but then I got a chance to spend two semesters as an exchange student at the University of Buffalo in the United States with Joan Bybee, [04:39] and Joan Bybee had a kind of real typology project, and she involved me in it, [04:45] and so I realized that, yeah, not only I loved it, but there were also some people who thought I could do it well. [04:53] And so Joan Bybee was a very important person who supported me later on, [04:59] and then I had a chance in 1990 to work on a European typology project with Ekkehard König, [05:08] funded by the European Science Foundation, studying European languages in typological perspective. [05:15]

JMc: So what is typology, then? [05:18]

MH: Well, comparing languages that are not necessarily related in ways that potentially lead us to universal generalizations. [05:30] Of course, if we study just European languages, then that’s not universal enough, but I felt that in the 1990s, certainly that led to a lot of new insights that hadn’t been there before. [05:44] So linguistics in earlier decades was mostly focused either on the historical study of particular languages, [05:54] or since the 1960s, in the Chomskyan paradigm, on, yes, speculative ideas about universal grammar and formalization, [06:07] and, yeah, the Chomskyan approach didn’t appeal so much to me. [06:13] And also in the 1970s and ’80s, it was not very comparative yet, [06:18] so I kind of really loved the comparison of European languages that, you know, allowed me to look at patterns in Icelandic, in Albanian, in Maltese, in Estonian, [06:35] and, you know, compare all these little languages and try to see what they have in common, and then maybe later on to broaden that to a global scope. [06:46] But in the 1990s, it was still the European pattern for me. [06:51]

JMc: So what exactly is it that you’re comparing? [06:56]

MH: Well, in the 1990s, we were comparing adverbial clauses, for example, or comparative constructions or indefinite pronouns. [07:06] So we were comparing various morphological and syntactic patterns, regardless of their historical relatedness, [07:16] and often we found that they were similar not because they were inherited, but because they had borrowed patterns from related languages. [07:27] So my dissertation was on indefinite pronouns — you know, things like ‘somebody’, ‘something’, ‘anybody’, ‘anything’. [07:38] You know, English and German are very similar. [07:41] Many words are similar, you know, ‘house’ [Haus] and ‘shoe’ [Schuh], [07:44] and other words are sort of very clearly kind of borrowed, [07:50] like Tisch and table, borrowed from Greek and Latin, and so on. [07:54] All of that was well known, but, you know, why does German have jemand, and etwas, and irgendjemand and irgendetwas? [08:03] So these patterns were not clearly historically related, they were much younger, [08:12] so I was fascinated by this, and often these younger patterns had geographical dimensions, [08:19] so languages spoken in similar areas were often similar in ways that people hadn’t looked at before. [08:28] So we were doing European areal typology, looking at similarities in geographical terms that people hadn’t seen before. [08:37] So that was really a new thing in the 1990s, and I was part of it, and I called it Standard Average European, and it became well known, but it was sort of discovered accidentally. [08:49]

JMc: But, I mean, there was areal typology and the idea of diffusion before the 1990s. [08:55]

MH: Yes, but it was not mainstream. [08:58] There was a little bit of it. [09:00] The diffusion was being studied primarily by dialectologists, so typological areal diffusion was really a new thing. [09:12] Johanna Nichols wrote her book on Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time in 1992, and before Johanna Nichols, Matthew Dryer wrote his famous article on large linguistic areas in 1989, [09:29] and our work on European areal typology in the 1990s was really part of a kind of larger real movement. [09:39] Clearly, there were earlier things. [09:41] There was the idea of an Indian, South Asian linguistic area, there was the idea of Mesoamerican linguistic area, but those were not larger movements. [09:55] They did not immediately spark larger research efforts, whereas in Europe, there were many linguists, [10:02] also related to the funding by the European Science Foundation, [10:07] and, actually, one of the outcomes of our European typology project was that when the funding came to an end in 1995, exactly 30 years ago, [10:18] the Association for Linguistic Typology was founded, coming out of this ESF funding initiative. [10:26]

JMc: So a moment ago, when we were talking about what typology is, about the ultimate aims of the field, you mentioned universals. [10:34] So do you mean sort of universals in grammar, like in language structure? [10:38] Is that the ultimate aim of typology, to discover what the possible range of languages is, [10:44] or is it to look at these mechanisms of diffusion? [10:48]

MH: Well, the universals were certainly a very important goal in Greenberg’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. [10:56] So in 1978, Greenberg had edited four volumes, universals of human language, and that coincided more or less with the Chomskyan interest in universals. [11:08] So in the ’60s and ’70s, certainly there was some universals research, and in the United States, you know, work by Matthew Dryer and Johanna Nichols, and also Joan Bybee, [11:19] and Tom Givon was an important member of that community. [11:24] They were doing sort of empirical universals research, so they had not focused so much on areal typology. [11:34] So I was interested in both of these things, [11:36] but I felt that the areal typology was this new thing that we had discovered in Europe and that we were pushing, [11:43] and this then also led me to ask whether there could be areal typology on a global scale. [11:51] So when I came to Leipzig in 1998, to the Max Planck Institute, I said, “Let’s expand this and have a world atlas of language structures.” [12:02] And I was extremely fortunate that this Max Planck Institute was founded, and there was funding. [12:11] Bernard Comrie was the director, and he thought that was an excellent idea. [12:15] He was part of this Greenbergian American typological movement, and we said, “Let’s study universals from an areal-geographical perspective, and let’s make a world atlas of language structures.” [12:30] And what we discovered with this atlas, I think, was this massive areality worldwide. [12:37] Maybe we didn’t discover new universals. [12:40] Greenberg was actually pretty good at discovering universals in the ’60s. [12:45] And we also, I think, showed that some of the later attempts at finding universals were a bit naive. [12:55] You know, things like the null subject parameter or all kinds of other ideas, [13:00] how word order correlations could be extended, for example, to phonology, you know — many of these did not… actually found confirmation. [13:12] But what we did find was that there was a lot of areality, a lot of geographical structure that needed to be taken into account. [13:21]

JMc: So do you think that areality is like a confounding factor for historical-comparative, for genealogical relationships? [13:29] Would you say that there are two kinds of relationships, sort of historical-comparative on the one side, and then there’s areal, and they’re sort of interfering with each other? Or… [13:39]

MH: Yes, absolutely. [13:40] So there are really three reasons why languages can be similar. [13:45] One, that they’re related in the genealogical sense, that they belong to a language family, [13:52] that they share features because they inherited them from a common ancestor. [13:57] Another one is that they borrowed them, or that they have similar features because other languages in the area have similar features. [14:06] So, you know, like in the Southeast Asian languages, they all have SVO order, subject-verb-object, they’re all kind of isolating, they have tone, and so on. [14:17] So that’s the areal factor. [14:19] And then the third reason for similarities is that they’re just human languages, and human languages just are like that, [14:29] are like that because there’s general universal tendencies. [14:35] And if we want to find the universal tendencies, we first have to take into account the other two potential factors. [14:45] And from the perspective of the universals, yes, we can say they’re confounding factors, [14:50] that we have to somehow, you know, using statistical methods, you know, first eliminate and then find the universal tendencies. [15:02]

JMc: You said there were several massive areas in the world that you’ve discovered through the World Atlas of Language Structures project, [15:09] so how many of them are there? [15:12]

MH: Well, we found that there’s a lot of areality in the sense that many large-scale patterns. [15:21] So earlier, as I had mentioned, people had noted that South Asian languages are rather similar [15:28] regardless of whether they belong to the Indo-European family, or the Dravidian family, or the Munda family. [15:35] They all seem to have a kind of common general pattern. [15:42] People had noticed similarities of Mesoamerican languages. [15:46] People had noticed some similarities in Australian languages and so on. [15:53] So all of these were known, [15:55] but with the World Atlas of Language Structures, published exactly 20 years ago in the summer of 2005, [16:04] we saw that the majority of our world maps showed some areal effects, [16:11] or seemed to show some areal effects — not all of them, but many of them. [16:16] And there were new areal effects, there were some confirmations of earlier patterns, but also a lot of new areal effects. [16:23] And I think we’re still only beginning to understand what these mean, because the problem is that they don’t always form isoglosses. [16:34] Sometimes they do. [16:37] So for the Caucasus, for example, all these languages have ergativity, they have ejectives, they have certain other valency patterns that are striking, [16:54] but then many other things are not shared by the Caucasian languages, [16:58] but they may be shared by languages in the Caucasus and elsewhere, [17:05] or only by some of the languages in the Caucasus and some neighbouring languages. [17:09] So there are many cross-cutting isoglosses, and I think we don’t understand it very well, [17:14] and we have to be careful not to be led to premature generalizations [17:21] by maybe cultural stereotypes. [17:24] Maybe people think, “Oh, South Asia, oh, it’s kind of a cultural area, so we only cherry-pick those features that those languages share.” [17:33] I think that has sometimes happened, [17:35] and maybe even my work on the European linguistic area was, in a way, influenced by European cultural stereotypes, so I’m a bit critical of that now. So… [17:51] I mean, certainly, the idea that Europe is a sort of, you know, common culture, you know, we have the European Union, [18:02] and at the time I thought, “Oh, it’s wonderful, European unification, and now we can show that the European languages also share more than we thought they did,” or so, [18:14] and there was a certain danger of ideological bias in that now, so I’m a bit critical of that now. [18:20]

JMc: Have you noticed sort of subareas within the European languages? [18:24]

MH: Yes, there are subareas, and people have talked about Circum-Baltic similarities, [18:30] people, of course, for a long time had talked about similarities in the Balkan languages, [18:35] but there were also other ideas, for example, similarities, Circum-Mediterranean, right? And similarities in Northern Eurasia in general. [18:50]

JMc: You’ve talked about WALS a lot, about the World Atlas of Language Structures. [18:54] Would you say that that’s your greatest contribution to the field? [18:58]

MH: Well, it’s certainly what I’m best known for, [19:03] but it’s really the Max Planck Institute’s contribution, Bernard Comrie’s contribution, because I had a unique possibility here. [19:12] We had this very generous funding. [19:15] Yeah, I enjoyed bringing all these people together, but the community existed, [19:24] so, you know, basically Greenberg created it in the 1970s with a Stanford project, [19:32] and, yeah, then we collected together all those people that were already doing typology, mostly in Europe. [19:43] Somehow it’s also interesting, historically, that the worldwide cross-linguistic research that was happening in the ’70s and ’80s in the United States [19:54] became more popular in Europe in the 1990s, and so we had people like Leon Stassen, and Anna Siewierska, and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, and Östen Dahl, and so on, [20:07] so typology was already then, in the 1990s, when we started in 1998, [20:12] was a European thing, and I helped bring these people together, [20:16] but also Matthew Dryer and Bernard Comrie. [20:19] David Gil was also very important, and yeah, I had the most time to put it all together also, but it wasn’t really my idea. [20:35] Maybe my biggest intellectual contribution was a more philosophical one. [20:42]

JMc: Yeah, tell us about it. [laughs] [20:44]

MH: Since it’s a podcast not only about history, but also about the philosophy of language sciences, [20:50] I’m happy to talk about that, namely, my interest in comparing languages [20:57] led me to wonder increasingly about how language description and language comparison are in tension with each other, [21:07] and for a long time I hadn’t seen this problem, [21:11] but I saw it around 2010 when we were doing the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, [21:21] because that was a related endeavour, but it was a different one. [21:27] It was, we brought together people who already were typologists, [21:32] and who had already solved the problem of the jump from particular languages to comparing. [21:40] They had looked at grammars and put together comparative studies, [21:46] but when we did the APiCS, [21:48] we brought together 75 teams of scholars [21:53] who were studying pidgin and creole and mixed languages, [21:57] and that was really challenging. [22:00]

JMc: OK, so what exactly is the tension between description and comparison? [22:06]

MH: We drew up a questionnaire, and we asked them, “How is this particular feature behaving in your language?” [22:14] So we asked them, for example, “What is the order of the adjective and noun?” [22:19] “What is the structure of ditransitive constructions?” [22:23] “What is the pattern of numerals, of cardinal and ordinal numerals? [22:28] “What is the pattern of, you know, various morphological systems, tense and aspect?” and so on. [22:39] And then sometimes they asked us hard questions. [22:42] For example, they asked, “What exactly do you mean by an adjective?” [22:46] Right? So, in the earlier typology, these questions also came up, [22:51] but they were resolved by the typologist in reading the grammar. [22:58] With the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, we were actually discussing with our authors, [23:03] and they weren’t typologists, and they sometimes criticised us. [23:07] They said, “What do you mean adjective? [23:09] This is not an adjective in my language.” [23:12] So we had real debates going on, and that really helped me to understand [23:18] that there was a real deep tension. [23:21]

JMc: OK. And how do you resolve the tension? [23:24]

MH: So I made a proposal in a paper published in 2010; actually, the first version was 2008. [23:30] So we started with the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures in 2007 or so, [23:36] just fairly quickly after the World Atlas of Language Structures came out. [23:40] And my proposal was to resolve it by saying that the descriptive categories that people use for describing and understanding particular languages [23:50] are different from the categories that we use for comparing languages. [23:55] So I said comparative concepts are different from the language-particular descriptive categories, [24:00] and later on, in order to drive this point home, I suggested that we should even have terms like g-linguistics for general linguistics, comparative linguistics, [24:11] and p-linguistics for particular linguistics. [24:14]

JMc: But exactly how does this work, this contrast between comparative and particular categories? [24:21]

MH: People are not always happy about it because they think that, or many people think, that if you compare languages, [24:33] you should make use of the descriptive categories that each linguist set up for describing their language, [24:41] or if people are just, you know, like fieldworkers, for example, and describe a particular language, [24:46] then they want to make use of the concepts that the typologists are using, because often these are very prestigious, [24:54] so they read work by typologists and want to make use of them. [24:59] But what I’m telling them is, “No, don’t do that. [25:04] Make up your own categories. [25:05] Be inspired by what the typologists do, but don’t think that you can take their concepts off the shelf to describe your language. [25:14] Each language should be described in its own terms,” as Boas emphasized in 1911. [25:24]

JMc: But do you think that that means that languages are then incommensurable, [25:27] like that the project of comparing them is just impossible? [25:32]

MH: No, obviously not. Obviously, I’m saying they can be compared. [25:37] I think Boas and some of his successors realized that comparing them is more difficult than people had thought, [25:46] but Boas himself was very interested in comparing languages and cultures. [25:51] He just didn’t think it was so easy. [25:53] He just thought that each language should be first described in its own terms and respected [26:02] and should not be described from the European perspective. [26:08] So Boas himself did not embark on a large comparative perspective. [26:13] He was concerned with different things. [26:16] He was in the 1920s fighting racism in North America [26:20] and did a very good job of that, I think, [26:24] and also some of his students did not engage in large-scale comparison. [26:29] So Sapir and Bloomfield did not do a lot of comparison. [26:35] They were concerned with other questions. [26:37] But I think that the concepts that were developed, especially by Bloomfield, are still very good concepts for comparing languages. [26:48] So, you know, Bloomfield was very careful to use novel concepts for comparing languages. [26:56] So, for example, to say that the morpheme — or the morph, as I would say — is the basis for comparing languages and not necessarily the word, [27:07] because words are something that we get from our spelling, [27:12] but not all languages have writing systems, or they have different writing systems. [27:16] Therefore, using the morpheme, the minimal unit of form and meaning, is a better foundation for comparing languages. [27:25]

JMc: You talk about describing the language in its own terms, but I guess this very process of doing the description, [27:32] like, the grammarian or the linguist brings along their own categories. [27:37] Like the structure doesn’t exist in the language as such, it’s something that the linguist creates through their description, wouldn’t you say? [27:46] Or another way of putting it, would it be true to say [27:49] that there are an infinite number of possible descriptions that could be made of a language? [27:55] An infinite number of valid descriptions, like it could be described in many different ways, and they would all be valid, [28:01] and the differences come from the grammarian who does the description, rather than being inherent to the language? [28:07]

MH: OK, that’s another interesting question that I haven’t written about, because it may be even more frustrating for language describers. [28:19] And as a typologist, somebody who sits at their desk and makes use of the work of the fieldworkers, [28:26] I have enormous respect for the fieldworkers, [28:29] and I know that they often invest a lot into finding the true categories of the language. [28:36] Now, what you’re saying is that perhaps there are multiple correct ways of describing a language, that there is not one true set of categories. [28:47] And I haven’t pushed that. [28:49] I think you’re probably right, [28:51] but more importantly, there are also many wrong ways in which a language can be described. [28:57] So if a fieldworker finds one way of describing a language that’s not wrong, that’s very valuable and very important, [29:08] because the biggest problem is the wrong descriptions of languages, wrong ways that come about from our negligence or even our carrying over our preconceived ideas. [29:21] So I think for the fieldworker, really, the most important task is to find one correct way of describing a language that is not unduly influenced by other considerations, [29:36] such as other well-known languages or preconceived theoretical ideas or whatever. [29:43] So that’s already a tall order for every fieldworker. [29:47]

JMc: But do you think that it would be putting the philosophical question to one side if you say, “We’ll just accept that there could be other descriptions, but we’ll go with this one because that’s the one we have”? [30:00]

MH: I’m agnostic in that regard. [30:03] I’m really a g-linguist. [30:05] I’m not a p-linguist, [30:07] And if somebody says, “But no, my description is really the true description of this language,” then I will not argue with them, [30:18] because what I’m really interested in is in what the speakers of this language do, [30:25] what I have to know in order to learn the language, [30:28] and if their description is one of the many correct ones, that satisfies me, I take that information, I put it into my typological database, [30:41] transforming their language-particular descriptive categories into my comparative concepts and trying to extract cross-linguistic generalizations and ultimately, hopefully, valid universals. [30:55]

JMc: So we’ve talked about the past of typology, your own contributions to the field and of the MPI here. [31:01] How do you see the future of typology? [31:04] Where’s it going? [31:07]

MH: Typological linguistics (comparative linguistics, as I like to call it), will always be of interest to people, to linguists. [31:21] Of course, the future of linguistic diversity does not look very good, because bigger languages are getting bigger and bigger, [31:29] and smaller languages are getting smaller and are less prominent. [31:34] And I think the future, looking to the next 50 or 100 years or so, [31:41] clearly is a dramatic loss of the smaller languages that are influencing us right now. [31:48] We’re still all looking at Australian languages that will be gone in a couple of decades. [31:53] But people will always be interested in diversity, there will always be diversity, there will always be migration, [32:01] there will always be people wondering how Chinese and English compare, [32:05] certainly over the next 100 years, [32:08] and people are already substituting the kind of loss of dialectal diversity, for example, by invented languages, [32:19] Right? So there’s a lot of conlanguages or popular media, there’s Klingon and so on. [32:28] So I have no worry that people will not be interested in linguistic diversity and will not wonder about them, [32:36] and whether they will build on this sort of research that we are doing right now in 50 years’ time, I have no idea. [32:44] Maybe they shouldn’t, because maybe we have gone in the wrong direction, I don’t know. [32:50] Looking at the past, 200 years ago, typology really arose from German Romanticism. [32:58] And German Romanticism had some strange ideas about isolating and agglutinating languages. [33:06] They had the idea that some languages were superior to others, for example. [33:11] You know, some of these were adjacent to racist ideas about some races being superior to others and so on. [33:20] So hopefully we are a little better than people who started the whole enterprise, [33:28] but we are in a way still building on those earlier enterprises. [33:32] So this is for me really a sobering thought, [33:36] and the fact that my ideas about European areal linguistics [33:43] were influenced by my ideology about European unification, again, [33:49] makes me a bit sceptical that all our current ideas are really on the right track. [33:56] So my experience of being in the field for 40 years has taught me to be a bit humble. [34:05]

JMc: I actually really loved you saying that your ideas about the European linguistic area being influenced about your belief in European political unification, because that sort of reflexivity is exactly what this podcast is about. [34:20] That’s what I spent all my time doing, and you’ve done my job for me. [laughs] [34:24] That’s great. [34:25] And the one last thing I wanted to ask you is that, [34:28] quite apart from this purely academic work, [34:31] you’ve also done a lot of work on building up the scholarly infrastructure of the field, [34:36] in particular, being one of the founders of Language Science Press, which is a scholar-run open access publisher. [34:43] So what motivated you to do that, and how do you see that project going? [34:49]

MH: Well, what motivated me is very easy to say. [34:53] My first book, Grammar of Lezgian, was published in 1993, and I was very proud of it, [34:59] and when I saw the price tag of 299 Deutschmarks, which is about 150 euros, I was totally shocked and I realized that nobody would be able to afford it. [35:12] And ever since 1993, I thought something needs to be done about it, [35:19] so when the opportunity came up to do something about it when I was established as a typologist [35:24] and my colleague Stefan Müller in Humboldt University Berlin said, “Let’s do something like this,” I said, “I’ll be part of it.” [35:34] Yeah, I had no teaching obligations here at the Max Planck Institute, plenty of free time. [35:40] I thought, “Let’s do it,” [35:43] and I was very happy that it became a big success, also because Sebastian Nordhoff joined the project and is still doing a very good job of it. [35:56] Again, I don’t know what the future will be. [35:58] I would hope that in the future all scholarly publication will be done by the scholarly organizations themselves [36:07] and we will not give so many profits to these big multinational companies, [36:18] but that’s ultimately a political question. [36:21] Our funding will have to come from public funders, from governments, basically, [36:30] and they will have to decide. [36:33] And until fairly recently, there wasn’t so much interest in a more reasonable scholarly publication structure. [36:46] There was a lot of interest in open access, [36:48] but also open access is not very reasonable [36:50] as long as open access is still controlled by private funders [36:56] who extract a lot of money from the scholarly organizations. [36:59] So I think we really have to push the idea that scholarly publication is part of the scholarly process [37:06] and should not be done by outsiders who extract money from it, [37:13] but I don’t have any resources for that left. [37:21] I leave that to the others and now I concentrate again on my scholarly work. [37:26]

JMc: OK, great. [37:27] Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [37:31]

MH: Good, thank you for having me. [37:33] [music]