Beginning-of-quarter update
Mar. 30th, 2006 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaCurse and bless the fundies department! They offer the coolest classes, two of which I was wild to take: War and Peace and Ulysses. They met at the same time, so I could only take one. I decided to take War and Peace. Except that there were 67 people for 25 slots, and fundies and social thought majors were given first preference, so even though I'm a graduating fourth year I had no seniority. Okay. That kind of stinks, but I can deal. So the next time I went to Ulysses, only to discover that since I wasn't registered I couldn't take the class, since I had missed the first day! Argh! Argh! Argh! I'm now taking instead Medieval English Literature, which is in fact a great deal of fun, but it still rankles that I, who have about as much seniority when it come to class sign-up as just about anyone on this campus, was shooed out of not one but two classes! It hurts! It offends my sense of what is right in the world.*
Russian is Russian.
Historical Linguistics looks to be great fun. The lecture are a bit dry, but the more I read about the topic, the more I love it. It's the restrictions that I love, on a theory that cannot stand alone just as theory, because it is based not on our ideas of languages as they exist in general, but rather on how languages change. And the only way to get any examples of language change to base a theory of language change on is to look at real languages, both in their modern forms, in their older forms, and then to compare them with related languages to come up with a proto-form. So by default it's much more applied than general synchronic linguistics. Of course, the corollary is that since we have only attested changes to deal with, the field is a great deal less applicable to modern languages once everyone has agreed (more or less) on any one theory. It's rather like astronomy in that way: we can look at all the info we have, but until a star decides to explode, we have no living data to work with. But then, I think of all the physical sciences I thought astronomy was the coolest. And paleontology, which is a bit of a closer analogue.
And the Medieval English lit class is great. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to look at a text and just play with all the various things the author could be implying, hinting, saying straight out, being ironic about (that's a single verb in Russian: Иронизировать, which we totally need in English. Russian has an awesome way of making transitive verbs from latinate loan words: add овать to the ending, and you're set. Symbolize: символизировать. analyze: анализировать. Actually, those are the only ones I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure there are others.), alluding to, or maybe significantly not touching at all.
So, yes. Classes are classes, and they are very good this quarter. Just, ergh! My pride hurts. I worked hard to be a fourth year, and now I'm not getting any of the perks! Grr!
*Alas, I don't think that this sense of injustice will be helpful to write about in my writing sample on why I want to work for the Prison Law Office in San Quentin.
Edit 10:20 pm I am absolutely astonished. I'm also reminded of that West Wing episode where some congressman offers to give Josh the winning vote he needs for a bill in exchange for $100,000 to study prayer research. Josh is tempted, but in the end realizes that he's a fool for even considering it. And yet our government has spent more than $2.3 million on this research since 2000. Hmmm. What happened in 2000? Oh. Right. Y'know, I'm aware that the NYTimes is playing the liberals for all they're worth, but I'm still going to go along with them and be upset. Oh, Josh, where are you?
Russian is Russian.
Historical Linguistics looks to be great fun. The lecture are a bit dry, but the more I read about the topic, the more I love it. It's the restrictions that I love, on a theory that cannot stand alone just as theory, because it is based not on our ideas of languages as they exist in general, but rather on how languages change. And the only way to get any examples of language change to base a theory of language change on is to look at real languages, both in their modern forms, in their older forms, and then to compare them with related languages to come up with a proto-form. So by default it's much more applied than general synchronic linguistics. Of course, the corollary is that since we have only attested changes to deal with, the field is a great deal less applicable to modern languages once everyone has agreed (more or less) on any one theory. It's rather like astronomy in that way: we can look at all the info we have, but until a star decides to explode, we have no living data to work with. But then, I think of all the physical sciences I thought astronomy was the coolest. And paleontology, which is a bit of a closer analogue.
And the Medieval English lit class is great. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to look at a text and just play with all the various things the author could be implying, hinting, saying straight out, being ironic about (that's a single verb in Russian: Иронизировать, which we totally need in English. Russian has an awesome way of making transitive verbs from latinate loan words: add овать to the ending, and you're set. Symbolize: символизировать. analyze: анализировать. Actually, those are the only ones I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure there are others.), alluding to, or maybe significantly not touching at all.
So, yes. Classes are classes, and they are very good this quarter. Just, ergh! My pride hurts. I worked hard to be a fourth year, and now I'm not getting any of the perks! Grr!
*Alas, I don't think that this sense of injustice will be helpful to write about in my writing sample on why I want to work for the Prison Law Office in San Quentin.
Edit 10:20 pm I am absolutely astonished. I'm also reminded of that West Wing episode where some congressman offers to give Josh the winning vote he needs for a bill in exchange for $100,000 to study prayer research. Josh is tempted, but in the end realizes that he's a fool for even considering it. And yet our government has spent more than $2.3 million on this research since 2000. Hmmm. What happened in 2000? Oh. Right. Y'know, I'm aware that the NYTimes is playing the liberals for all they're worth, but I'm still going to go along with them and be upset. Oh, Josh, where are you?
