GoKawiilIn 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. 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.” 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. 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.
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.
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.
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. COURTESY OF BRIAN SIETSEMA
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).
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. 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.”
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). 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-
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