I be here. But after an undergraduate degree in linguistics I went on to other amusements. Though I was explaining about proto-Indo-European to a relative the other day, and had a sort of deja vuey feeling as I explained about fer-, bher- and ber- being the same word, and what with Grimm’s Law etc., just fascinating stuff, and my relatives eyes glazed over in that haunting way I recall so well from my youth. And that’s just the diachronic stuff, which your average relative finds a lot more engaging than whether you can put “that” at a given point in a sentence.
I see mention of bitch clauses but not of fuck insertion.
Almost a simulpost, but not really, even though both include “fuck.” I refer to the syllabic stress rules that explain why you can say “unbefuckinglievable” easily but “unbeliefuckingable” hardly works at all.
Oooh, oooh! I was actually at a party a few months ago where this was mentioned! Or was it the Great Vowel Shift. Either way, I think I’m the one who mentioned it. Why, no, I don’t go to a lot of parties. Why do you ask?
When I was in grad school, the French-Italian Department I worked for had three separate “camps”: the Italians (who were mostly Italians there to teach Italian language classes to the small minority of undergrads who chose to take Italian for their foreign language credits), the French lit students, and the French Linguists. I remember sitting in the lounge one day discussing SVO vs SOV languages, and throwing around phrases like NP, VP, and PP with other French linguists for a syntax class we were currently taking. The French lit and Italian students just kind of stared at us, then pointedly ignored anything we were talking about, since it was obviously a “foreign” language that they knew nothing about.
As for my relatives, as soon as I told them the title of my dissertation (“The syntactic structure of Romance causative sentences”), I saw the glazed-eye look and rarely bothered to explain more than the essence that it was a study of how French language expressed the idea of making someone do something for you.
Given that you’re doing Chomsky stuff, that’s a bit of a given. Heh.
My undergrad was a bit unusual because it managed to be in New England and teach Chomskyan syntax, but they only did that because it’s the dominant theory, not because they believed it. All and all the experience was very centrist, which I think was very valuable to me.
I studied Swahili structure in a syntax class that I took for my MA. Didn’t really learn any vocabulary, but you’re right that the language is pretty neat.
I was able to explain to DD that Swahili is a Creole language, and what that meant. She thought it was really cool, too. What she really thinks is cool, though, is that she can say things to us (her father and me) without us having a clue what she’s actually talking about, since neither of us speak Swahili at all. The turn-about, though, is that DH and I can have entire conversations about her in French, and she doesn’t understand a word of it.
She also wants to learn ASL. Her younger brother is hearing-impaired, and was virtually deaf until he was nine months old. We used basic ASL with him until he was about 2yo, and was able to communicate more effectively with English. She remembers most of that vocabulary, though, and wants to learn more. She can’t quite understand the topic-first syntax, though.
I sympathize. I’ve tried several times explaining to my relatives exactly what linguistics is and have accepted the fact that they think I’m going into translation. Now that I’m in grad school I’ve had to tell my parents in complete honesty with no arrogance at all that, for example, they won’t understand the the syntax presentation I gave the other day.
Well that brought back memories. I was in grad school at a party where there was a roaring debate about the Great Vowel Shift and why it happened, and I thought: I gotta get outta here!
So I went into advertising, where I got to experience roaring debates about which was the better material to stick copy onto boards, sprayable rubber cement (there’s another name for this, I know), or wax. Big improvement. (Obviously I didn’t get into advertising at a very high level.)
PS–I thought a razzberry was a plosive, not a fricative.
I’d like to announce that it’s 12:41 and I can’t sleep, because I’ve been lying in bed trying to reconstruct the pronunciation rules for the symbol “g” in Old English, based on the first four lines of Beowulf. Time to consult references, methinks… I have a long day tomorrow and need my beauty rest.
And why it sounds even better to say un-fucking-believable.
“Fucking” insertion is used as an example of English infixation which, while common in other languages, is non-existent in English. The interesting property of inserting “fucking” into multisyllabic words in English is that it has to occur between prosodic feet.
Sacramento: Sacra-fucking-mento is okay but Sa-fucking-ramento and Sacramen-fucking-to are not allowed.
BTW andygirl, good luck with Phonetics. It is probably the most important thing to be good at for a field linguist (unless, of course, you have a partner who does all of the transcribing for you!!!).
Gotta agree with this. I’ve got a master in linguistics that I’ve never used, but I seem to recall that developing an ear for phonetics was really important. You can also get really technical and do the whole acoustic phonetics thing. A couple of times I actually got to work in an acoustic phonetics lab. It was so cool!
For all I know, Mae West may have been a linguist, and a cunning one as well, but the line was spoken by Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.
