CLS!

[philena]

If I had known about it earlier I would have volunteered to help out; as it was, I mooched appallingly (heheh . . .), eating cookies, drinking coffee, going to talks and collecting hand-outs from the speakers. Although some of the lectures were interesting, all were significantly over my head, and during the question-and-answer period Saturday, there was one fellow, about 3,409,872,589,624,098 years old, who was clearly an Indo-Europeanist, probably because he had grown up speaking it, and he would make the most tangential references to the actual talk and then waddle on off to talking about Indo-European roots, which had no reference to the lecture just given. The speakers all nodded politely and waited for him to be done (which sometimes took as long as the talk they had given had taken) and then said stony-faced, "that's interesting. I'll be sure to think about it." The last time this happened one of the women in the audience turned to the moderator and made "cut him off" gestures, and I heartily agreed with her.

My favorite talk was about historical tone changes from Middle Chinese to Old Mandarin, and it was very good, at least as far as I was concerned. It was clear, simple, didn't try to tackle too much at once, seemed intuitively correct, and looked a great deal like something that I might be able to write next year. In a way, it was almost an inspiration to write a BA, as long as I could be sure that no more would be expected than something like that. Comprehension will do that to one, I find. I'm gettin sick of not understanding what's going on in class and during lectures and in my articles! Why can't everyone be like the nice Chinese woman, and make sense?