March 21, 2007

OWU’s Don Lateiner is Spell-Binding!

Don Lateiner was “not terrified, but puzzled” as March 3 approached. What should a professor of humanities/classics say to a group of Indian American students and their parents at a spelling bee workshop? The program at Dublin Public Library was a project of the Columbus chapter of North South Foundation, an Indian American organization whose more than 60 chapters in the U.S. and Canada promote scholastic excellence both by sponsoring academic contests here and awarding scholarships to qualified students in India.

The daylong workshop was designed to help prepare children for NSF’s annual spelling bee, which will be held August 25 in Columbus. In past years, hundreds of students have advanced to final NSF competitions in spelling, vocabulary, math, geography and other subjects. The purpose of such contests, according to the NSF Web site, is to encourage excellence among the children of the Indian American communities in the U.S. and Canada.

The students who filled the Dublin library’s meeting room ranged from kindergartners to eighth graders. Most of their parents — as Lateiner describes them, “spelling bee moms and spelling bee dads” — stayed in the room as Lateiner, OWU’s John R. Wright Professor of Humanities/Classics, launched into a discussion of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language.

Described by an Internet site as modern language’s “ancient linguistic ancestor,” PIE was never recorded and no longer exists. However, evidence of it is seen in the many similarities of geographically distant languages: “One, two, three” in English is “unus, duo, tres” in Latin, “heis, duo, treis” in Greek and “odin, dva, tri” in Russian, for instance.

Lateiner wrote *PIE on the board, explained that it was an acronym, and asked a volunteer to spell “acronym.” He went on to discuss the asterisk that precedes the acronym — it’s a linguistic symbol indicating a hypothesized form — and soon the students were making the connection between “asterisk” — a star-shaped symbol — “aster,” — a star-shaped flower — “astronomy” — the study of stars and other celestial objects, and so on.

“This really is too abstract for a first-grader,” Lateiner says, but every audience member listened attentively.

“They were unfailingly polite,” he says.

He kept students involved during his two-and-a-half-hour session by tossing them regular spelling challenges: fricassee, weird, etymology. The students tossed them right back, often correctly.

“They all seemed to me to be on the road to becoming good spellers,” Lateiner says. “There were some wonderful spellers there.”

Lateiner agreed to speak at the workshop in spite of being on sabbatical largely because of a family appreciation of spelling contests. His now-grown sons both were involved in spelling bees, and his wife is interested in the competitions too — so interested that she was among the organizers of a Delaware community spelling bee last July that benefited the city schools levy.

Because he was speaking to Indian American students, Lateiner focused on Indian American words and also American Indian words, such as “chocolate,” “skunk,” and “raccoon.”

The English word “bangle,” which has Indian origins, led to a discussion of “bagel” and seemingly irrational differences in spelling that do in fact follow rules. In this case, the rule is that Teutonic words tend to be spelled “el,” as in “kernel” and “pretzel,” but words from Latin/French tend to be spelled “le,” as in “castle” and “crucible.” But don’t get too comfortable, because exceptions — “roundel” and “trundle,” for two — exist.

Powell resident Uma Venkataramen, whose fifth-grade son attended the workshop, says Lateiner held the attention of everyone in the room, from the youngest children to the teenagers.

“He could express himself so well,” she says. “He catered to all the audience … I cannot say enough about how much people liked him.”

Venkataramen, who invited Lateiner to speak, says he was the first college professor to address an NSF spelling bee workshop. She added that Lateiner’s decision to discuss Indian American and American Indian words was inspired.

“You say something about your own mother country and it gets people interested,” she says.

Perhaps to encourage those who might consider spelling for its own sake less than fascinating, Lateiner confided that he has collected money on spelling bets three times. He offered his student audience the chance to spell each of the words: “weird,” “inoculate,” and “millennium.” They handled the first two so readily that Lateiner feared his point would be lost, but “millennium” drew at least twenty misspellings, including not only the predictable wrong number of l’s and n’s but also creative variations involving additional syllables. Ultimately, Lateiner said, spelling well enhances communication. “The goal is to express yourself with accuracy, vigor, beauty, and persuasiveness,” he told the students.

Likely it was Lateiner’s own talents in the areas of accuracy, vigor, beauty, and so on that persuaded Dublin NSF officials to invite him to serve as the students’ spelling bee coach. Lateiner doubts his schedule will allow such a commitment, but he asked for a written description of the position and is thinking it over. After all, spelling bees run in the family, and it may be a once-in-a-millennium offer. That’s M-I-L-L-E-N-N-I-U-M.

— Margo Bartlett