One of our guests on the Scholarly Panel is Dr. Peter Unseth of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics in Dallas.
Pete Unseth likes to tell stories about growing up in Japan, then near Lake Wobegon, MN, and living as an adult in Ethiopia for a dozen years and now 20 years in Texas. He’s Texan enough to tell the story about the dumb fool who went and hit a five foot rattlesnake with a four foot stick, but not enough Texan to say “I’m fixin to” or “I might could be able to do that”. He enjoys the softer side of human language, teaching sociolinguistic topics, dealing with comprehension and emotional solidarity with languages, such as in literature. He studies proverbs from around the world, and also their use in stories, such as Lewis creating 10 proverbs for The Horse and His Boy. In pondering some stories to prepare for this conference, he was surprised that he has found that reading some tragedies has also been uplifting. He has also found some stories so powerful that he can only read them when he can concentrate in quiet for prolonged blocks of time. Favorite authors include Sigrid Undset (similarity of last name may have something to do with it), Dr. Seuss, Elizabeth Goudge, Helen MacInnes, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and his own imagination. But that’s another story…
