It is 7:15 am. I have spent the entire night analyzing the pronominal marking on verbs in Hyow, a language in Bangladesh that about six people speak. The bitter part of me understands why so few people speak it; who the hell wants to learn a language where in some cases pronoun systems can be completely collapsed?
Soon I shall begin my epic paper on the Abercrombian foot. Abercrombie was a linguist guy who came up with this idea on stress and intonation patterns in English. Problem is that stress and intonation aren’t the same thing, so Abercrombian foot = crap!, but it’s still interesting to write about.
Oh, and if you search “Abercrombian” you will get the odd website talking about how “Abercrombian Fitch” sucks. I weep for the future.
Then I shall move on to my epic paper of the history of homosexuality in Russia. I have nicknamed my straight best friend Pushkin because of this paper- the real Pushkin, while living in exile, wrote a letter to a gay friend of his that contained a hilarious poem about the guy’s inability to get a date while living in exile. Pushkin invited the guy over but said that if he came Pushkin was going to be guarding his ass. Pushkin was a cool guy. Sashka, my best friend, is quite like him mentality-wise. It fits.
On Tuesday the essays are due and I’m finally finally free. This is like living in a pressure cooker.
This post is brought to you by blue corn tortilla chips, Jack Daniels Hard Cola, and no sleep whatsoever.
One of my teachers is a bitch about exams. he says that he will tell us what’s on the exam and in the same breath rapidly fire them out at us. then he tells us he won’t repeat what he just said. Such a bitch.
one of my teachers is such a bitch about exams. first he will tell us what is going to be on it and in the same breath be rapidly firing out what will then telling us he won’t repeat what he just said.
Good luck, andygirl. I was going through the same thing (well, sans Hyow verbs) the first week of May and am very empathetic to what your life is like right now. Get a wee bit of sleep and go back to slaying those essays and exams. Summer awaits you on the other side.
I just remembered David Abercrombie’s Introduction to General Phonetics from my own linguistics days, is all … still got that one lurking on a bookshelf somewhere.
I went to sleep at 8 in the morning and woke up at 4 pm. Now I am sitting on the porch of my frat house with my laptop, a glass of whiskey, and an oil lamp. The campus is quiet.
Today after I wake up I will begin to write about my dear Mr. Abercrombie. I don’t know if there’s enough whiskey in the world.
You’re just now getting to finals? Good lord y’all get out late. I’ve been done for a month, and start summer session on Monday.
I’m mourning the end of break here (especially the part about not having had a car for the last week of it).
Best of luck on all of it though. I love the wireless internet that we have on campus - it makes a little less painful to be studying on pretty spring days when you can take the laptop outside.
Ah, just wait till you go for your doctorate, andygirl. I have spent the last 20 weekday evenings in a row working on the damn thing. And I only started my course seven years ago.
I have pen and paper ready to write down two paragraphs on the “slow Reformation” historians’ views on the impact of the English Bible between 1525 and 1547. I will include at least 15 references. I read 20 books for this section. Two paragraphs.
How does that work? How the heck do you manage to squeeze the contents of twenty books into two paragraphs? More important, will I have to do the same for my PhD, or is this just the result of your bizarre and twisted major?
Mr. Excellent: This is what happens when you are writing on a subject that hasn’t had a book-length study written about it since 1953…even though every major historian in the field has written just a bit about it. (FTR, my thesis is on the impact of the English Bible in East Anglia between 1525 and 1553. The introduction is a bibliographical exposition of the major writing on the field.)
BTW, I just finished writing those two paragraphs. No, that’s not a miracle, I had the outline and all the references sitting on my desk, so it was a simple matter to fit them all together. Plus, the fact that I lay awake thinking about those two paragraphs all night. I’m sending the section to my supervisor tomorrow. This is only the fourth time I’ve re-written this part of the introduction in seven years, so…
Robot Arm, you will be please to know that I am listening to a lot of Nields as I work. My official soundtrack for finals is basically the Nields, Gaelic Storm, Great Big Sea, Liz Phair, and Nice Shoes, a feminist a capella group from Mt. Holyoke. Throw in some death metal for variety, and therein is the stuff with with I write papers.
The oil lamp is my own personal touch. Daowajan gave it to me, and I rather enjoy taking it on the porch on nice nights. I think that classicists would balk at my lack of a wispy nightgown, but whatever.
As an added bonus of oil lamp ownership, passers by occasionally wander over and enquire why someone has a bong on the porch, which amuses me to no end.
Duke, I am going to be getting a doctorate one of these days as well. I want to Be A Linguist ™. I’d like to teach and work with endangered languages; we’ll see where that gets me. Being a ling major is definately the way to get the ladies, I think- people are in awe of my pocket IPA chart. I’m a junior, and am starting to think about grad school… Eek. Also, EEK.
One downside of finals would have to be that it is now socially acceptable to reek. Walking in the library is an aromatic experience, and one of my housemates, who is not the best of friends with soap and water under the best of circumstances, has a cloud around him that could stun a yak.
I feel compelled to tell you all that Mr. Abercrombie is very, very British. This amuses me to no end, because the book of his I am currently reading is essentially a big speech that I can imagine him giving in BBC English. Good times.
One of the funny things about being a linguist is that you overanalyze a lot of what you say. And you pick up random dialect features. I now say ‘about’ like a new englander, ‘one what’ instead of ‘one who’, and have occasional unexplained vowel shifts.
