Izabella Czyzewska: Linguist wins Silver Medal

By Frank Kuin

Linguistics and Classics graduate Izabella Czyzewska, who will be awarded the Governor-General’s Silver Medal at Convocation, has been described as a “natural scholar.”

Czyzewska is receiving a double Honours degree with great distinction. In addition to the Silver Medal, which she will receive from the Governor-General herself, she has also been awarded the Classics Books Prize, the Modern Languages and Linguistics Plaque, and the Tobias Medal.

“I’m so honoured, I can’t describe it. I’m really happy and surprised, and very proud of my achievement,” Czyzewska told Thursday Report.

“She has an innate knack for scholarship,” added Linguistics and Classics Professor Annette Teffeteller, who supervised Czyzewska’s Honours work on the ancient Hittite language. “She’s going to have a brilliant academic career.”

Czyzewska arrived in Montreal eight years ago from her native Poland not speaking a word of English. Not content to read children’s books to learn the language, as was recommended to her, she started with the collected works of William Shakespeare.

“It didn’t present too many problems,” she said.

Miserable in a bakery job, she decided to “rise and succeed” by pursuing her love of languages and ancient culture, instilled by her parents, who used to give her books on ancient cultures when she was growing up.

She found a fertile ground for her passion at Concordia, where she was inspired and encouraged by her professors, she said. In one instance, she was moved to tears by a reading of a passage of the Iliad by Classics Professor Catherine Bolton.

A self-described “ambitious perfectionist,” she took on an honours essay topic of great weight and controversy: the question of whether the ancient Anatolian world of the second millennium BC had a direct influence on ancient Greek culture.

Working with fragmented and sketchy linguistic evidence, Czyzewska argued that scribes from the Hittite world were actually present in Greece in the second millennium BC, bringing the near-Eastern tradition to Greece as a basis for Greek mythology, religion, and literature.

“Some scholars still refuse to believe that,” she explained. “They want to believe that Greece just sprang up by itself. This is not true; the Near East and Hittites influenced Greece a lot.”

Czyzewska will remain at Concordia for two more years to pursue her MA. After that, she hopes to do a PhD at Oxford, London or Chicago, the top universities in her field, and then go on to be a professor in her own right.

For her MA, she will be analyzing so-called Oracle Texts, ancient prophesies that are little understood by scholars. “My professor asked me, ‘All these scholars were not able to understand these texts, and you think you will do it?’” Czyzewska said. “Well, I can try.”