A man of many words
A man of many words
词汇达人
Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. Brian Sietsema 有一个最喜欢的词。令人惊讶的是，他竟然能从中只选出一个。在斯克里普斯全国拼字比赛（Scripps National Spelling Bee）——这可以说是世界上同类比赛中最负盛名的一项——中，他是参赛选手们信赖的对象，负责确认发音并解答有关词源的问题。
The story of how the word earned the top spot on his personal list may well mark the beginning of his unique career path as both a linguist and a Greek Orthodox priest. In third grade, Sietsema ventured to a garage sale at a friend’s house with 50 cents in his pocket and picked out three books that struck his fancy. Although they were priced at 50 cents each, his friend’s mother said the books he’d chosen were on special and sent him home with all three, including a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories called Masterpieces of Mystery. 这个词是如何在他个人的榜单上占据首位的，这或许标志着他作为语言学家和希腊正教神父这一独特职业生涯的开端。在小学三年级时，Sietsema 揣着 50 美分去朋友家参加车库旧货甩卖，挑中了三本让他心仪的书。尽管每本书标价 50 美分，但朋友的母亲说他选的书有优惠，便让他把三本全带回了家，其中包括一本名为《神秘杰作》（Masterpieces of Mystery）的埃德加·爱伦·坡短篇小说集。
Knowing it contained macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his own mother told him he’d need to wait a few years before reading it. Naturally, he started it right away. As he read “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Sietsema was baffled by the main character’s description of arriving at the moon in a balloon. Pfaall reported tumbling into a crowd of people who were “eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo.” 由于书中包含像《泄密的心》这样阴森恐怖的故事，他的母亲告诉他，得过几年再读。不出所料，他立刻就开始读了。当读到《汉斯·普法尔的无与伦比的冒险》时，Sietsema 被主角描述乘坐气球抵达月球的情节搞糊涂了。普法尔写道，他跌跌撞撞地闯入一群人中，这些人“斜着眼看着我和我的气球，双手叉腰（a-kimbo）”。
Sietsema had never encountered the word akimbo (with or without a hyphen) and asked his parents what it meant. They didn’t know, and it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary. The question also stumped his teachers, and the dictionaries in his classroom and the school library were no help either. “For years, I didn’t know what this word meant,” Sietsema says. It stuck in his mind that there was a word out there that he, his parents, and his teachers didn’t know. Sietsema 从未见过“akimbo”（无论是否带连字符）这个词，便问父母是什么意思。他们不知道，家里的字典里也没有。这个问题也难倒了他的老师，教室和学校图书馆的字典也帮不上忙。“多年来，我一直不知道这个词是什么意思，”Sietsema 说。有一个连他、他父母和老师都不知道的词存在，这件事一直萦绕在他的心头。
He thinks it wasn’t till he got to college that he finally found a dictionary with the answer: The moon dwellers in Poe’s story had been standing with their hands on their hips, elbows turned outward. “I credit that puzzle with getting me into dictionaries and being curious about etymology,” he says. It kindled a fascination with words—and an abundance of curiosity—that would shape his life’s trajectory and work. 他认为直到上了大学，他才终于在一本字典里找到了答案：坡故事里的月球居民当时正双手叉腰，手肘向外。“我把这归功于那个谜题，它让我开始查阅字典，并对词源学产生了好奇，”他说。这激发了他对词汇的痴迷，以及那份塑造了他人生轨迹和工作的强烈好奇心。
Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sietsema attended a Dutch Reformed Christian school and recalls taking part in only one spelling bee, in second grade. It was in the 1970s, when everyone was hooked on phonics—so he overthought the sounding-it-out implications when asked to spell “of.” “I spelled it U-V, and of course, I was wrong,” he says. Sietsema 在密歇根州大急流城长大，就读于一所荷兰归正会基督教学校，他记得自己只参加过一次拼字比赛，是在二年级。那是 20 世纪 70 年代，当时每个人都沉迷于自然拼读法，所以当被要求拼写“of”时，他过度思考了发音的含义。“我拼成了 U-V，当然，我拼错了，”他说。
At the time, he thought he probably wanted to work in the church—when he painted himself as an adult for a class project, he dressed his grown-up self in a cassock. But after taking a class in nuclear chemistry at the local junior college in high school, he decided his backup plan was to become a nuclear engineer. So when he went to the University of Michigan, he enrolled in the school of engineering. While he did well and liked his courses, though, he soon realized he felt called to a career in the church after all. 当时，他以为自己以后会去教会工作——在一次课堂作业中，当他画出成年后的自己时，他给画中的自己穿上了圣职长袍。但在高中时参加了当地社区学院的一门核化学课程后，他决定将成为一名核工程师作为备选方案。因此，当他进入密歇根大学时，他报读了工程学院。尽管他成绩优异且喜欢这些课程，但他很快意识到，自己最终还是渴望投身于教会事业。
Sietsema (a.k.a. Father Mark) presides at the 2025 Holy Friday evening service at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Lansing, Michigan. As part of that service, he sprinkles the congregation with rose-scented water, which delights the children. “It’s like a one-sided water fight in church,” he says. This service culminates with a procession in which a symbolic tomb is carried around the outside of the church. Everyone who attends takes part and leaves with a flower. Sietsema（又名马克神父）在密歇根州兰辛市的圣三一希腊正教会主持 2025 年圣周五晚间的礼拜。作为礼拜的一部分，他会向会众洒下玫瑰香水，这让孩子们非常开心。“这就像在教堂里进行一场单方面的打水仗，”他说。礼拜的高潮是游行，人们抬着象征性的坟墓绕教堂外围行走。每一位参加者都会参与其中，并带着一朵花离开。
Switching to the college of literature, science, and the arts, he chose the studies in religion major, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary freedom it offered to take classes in literature, art, and more. He also tucked in courses that would fulfill seminary prerequisites such as knowledge of the biblical languages, studying ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek as well as modern languages that might come in handy for theological scholarship (Dutch, Swedish, and modern Hebrew). 转入文理学院后，他选择了宗教研究专业，利用该专业提供的跨学科自由，选修了文学、艺术等课程。他还选修了满足神学院先修要求的课程，例如学习圣经语言，包括古希伯来语和古希腊语，以及可能对神学研究有用的现代语言（荷兰语、瑞典语和现代希伯来语）。
Being in Ann Arbor gave Sietsema “a different understanding of the wideness of the Christian world,” as he puts it, and he gradually became less sure about which church he wanted to work in. As he neared the end of his fourth year at Michigan, he still needed a few more pre-seminary courses—and it dawned on him that he’d taken an “awful lot” of languages and thoroughly enjoyed them. So he stayed on for a fifth year to study linguistics as well as German, ancient Aramaic, and modern Arabic. 在安娜堡的生活让 Sietsema “对基督教世界的广阔有了不同的理解”，正如他所言，他逐渐对自己想在哪个教会工作变得不那么确定了。当他在密歇根大学的第四年接近尾声时，他还需要修几门神学院预科课程——他突然意识到自己已经修了“非常多”的语言课程，并且乐在其中。于是，他留校读了第五年，学习语言学以及德语、古阿拉姆语和现代阿拉伯语。
One of his professors encouraged him to go to grad school and insisted that he apply to MIT, which was considered the top linguistics program in the country. To his surprise, he got in. Sietsema calls his four years at MIT a great adventure: “If I could relive them, I would empty out my bank accounts to do so.” 他的一位教授鼓励他去读研，并坚持让他申请麻省理工学院（MIT），该校被认为是全国顶尖的语言学项目。令他惊讶的是，他被录取了。Sietsema 将他在麻省理工学院的四年称为一场伟大的冒险：“如果能重来一次，我愿意倾尽所有积蓄。”
At MIT he worked with Morris Halle, one of the leaders in generative grammar, which Sietsema describes as a working model of the “chemistry” of language—the parts and processes that form the building blocks of verbal communication. Halle and others had developed counting procedures (akin to measured time in music) that help explain stress patterns (that is, which syllables might receive emphasis by varying such things as stress or pitch). 在麻省理工学院，他师从生成语法领域的领军人物之一莫里斯·哈勒（Morris Halle）。Sietsema 将生成语法描述为语言“化学”的工作模型——即构成语言交流基石的各个部分和过程。哈勒等人开发了计数程序（类似于音乐中的节拍），有助于解释重音模式（即通过改变重音或音高等因素，哪些音节可能会受到强调）。
Building on that work, Sietsema’s dissertation proposed that the division of words and phrases into metrical units similar to musical measures can be used to predict where high and low tones fall, which he demonstrated in the tonal patterns of four Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania. At the time, research in this area was seen to have implications for creating natural-sounding machine-generated speech. 在这些研究的基础上，Sietsema 的论文提出，将单词和短语划分为类似于音乐小节的韵律单位，可以用来预测高低音调的位置，他在坦桑尼亚使用的四种班图语的声调模式中证明了这一点。当时，该领域的研究被认为对创造听起来自然的机器生成语音具有重要意义。
Sietsema calls Halle “a wonderful mentor,” and the two played well off one another. As he was sweltering in his Central Square apartment while printing the final version of his dissertation, Halle called and asked him to stop by. Knowing that Sietsema read Hebrew, Halle, a Latvian-born Jew who’d learned Engl… Sietsema 称哈勒为“一位出色的导师”，两人配合默契。当他正在中央广场的公寓里一边忍受酷热，一边打印论文的最终版本时，哈勒打来电话让他过去一趟。哈勒是一位出生于拉脱维亚的犹太人，他曾学习过英语……