So—after my last post I got asked to speak in front of the Board of Regents (and it’s a tense time up here—Alaska’s a countercyclical state, so while everyone else is doing well financially, we’re having budget panics), plus I’m wrapping up loose ends before my trip to Germany next week (I’ve mentioned that before, I think), so a lot to catch up on.
So first, since some asked, what linguistics is: Lots of linguists describe it as the study not of specific languages, but of Language generally. I find that opaque, so instead I like to say that if you were going to teach a robot to hold a conversation with you, you’d have to teach it all sorts of stuff: What sounds to use from among all the possible sounds humans can make (for spoken languages—for signed languages, how to combine them into meaningful units (not just words, but also things like the plural -s or -ing or un- or whatever), how to combine those units into words—heck, you have to even teach it there are are such things as words!—and those words into phrases and clauses, how people take turns in conversations, rules of politeness, the fact that you have to leave some things unsaid but be explicit about others, the way conversations tend to keep a particular topic flow but still have room for drift, and so on. All these things (and more!) are the sorts of things linguists look at. For my part, I’m a sociolinguist, so I look at the fact that we don’t always say the same thing the same way all the time, both at a micro level (which is most of what I do) and a macro level. The micro level is things like that fact that both bat and ban contain a short-a, but the precise pronunciation of that same sound is different in those words for most speakers of North American Englishes,* or that really, if you say the word cat twenty times, you’ll pronounce it very slightly differently each time (since language is an analog rather than a digital system). At the macro level, the example I like to give is that if in some bizarre parallel universe a student wanted to complain about one of my classes, they might do so over pizza and beer in a friend’s living room late of a Friday night, and they’d use certain sentence structures, they’d use certain pronunciations, they’d assume certain bits of knowledge on the part of their hearers, they’d follow certain politeness conventions, they’d use certain words—but if they were giving the same complaint to me in my office, everything would be different, from the sentence structures to the pronunciations to the assumptions about what their audience knows to the politeness conventions, and most certainly the words they’d choose!
- Yes, I wrote English**es**. It's just something linguists do, since there are a lot of different ways of producing English, and among native speakers of the language, at least, they're all fully systematic and therefore complete (but nearly utterly overlapping) linguistic systems—thus, English**es**.
(And I’m enjoying the NACLO love.)
@mdcmom: My 15-year-old wants to do industrial design, so furniture making—or at least, telling other people how to make furniture—may be in her future. (Her dream job is to be a designer for Ikea—the challenge of making something usable that also fits into a flat box appeals to her.)
PE requirements: That’s the one thing that my oldest doesn’t like about Mt Holyoke, that they require 4 units of physical education. I think it’s a useful thing to require of students, though—exercise helps with both mood and academic ability, after all. Much better than where I currently work, which not only doesn’t have such a requirement, but even severely limits counting physical education credits as free electives.
I think i am getting a small glimpse of our summer/fall weekends and evenings – ugh!