the_izit

Wow, PETA--your ad campaign is totally ridiculous.

W00t! I'm in at UCSB!

Won't know about funding until March, but it's a good way to start out the process. :D

Every once in a while, I learn new Polish words from my friends here.

Today, I learned some interesting words via a word game in Psycholinguistics.

/lupavəkɔtʃe/ & /kupavlɔtʃe/

Which apparently means, 'magnifying glass in a cat' and 'flying crap'

Two phrases that everyone really needs to know in a new language, huh?

̃̃~~~

Otherwise, life has been a little crazy-busy (nothing new there).

I had a conference presentation in late October that went pretty well, and Josh and I are starting to make plans for the trip to Hawai'i in March. I've been a little stressed because work's been very busy, and classes have been intense this semester. On top of all of this, I'm working on applications for PhD programs. One of the people I was going to ask for a letter is in West Africa until mid December. Luckily, there were people here who were willing to fill in.

I'm not really sure how good my chances of getting in anywhere are. My GRE score was really good, I have good grades and pretty good experience giving my short time in the discipline. But who knows. :) I'm not going to get my hopes up too much. Worst case scenario, I just reapply next year. Josh has a good job here, and I can always stay at LINGUIST another year if need be.

Oh yes, and there was a bit of drama with my mom. She actually hung up on me when we were talking about Thanksgiving plans. I haven't talked to her on the phone since. I don't like being manipulated. I have enough to do.

I've been happily taming a pair of white kitties. Let me know if anyone needs/wants a cat! They're adorable and love being held.

Alright, I have miles to go before I sleep, so I'll sign off for now.

Happy Falling Mongoose Day everyone!

I got the holiday another follower today :D

 I'm just bubbling with excitement over Ojibwe. I went through colors with Howard today and they're really complicated! They mark at least number (sing. or pl.), class (inanimate or inanimate), whether it's small or not, and the fact that the thing has the color (something vaguely like 'it has the color of'). This complexity is just from asking questions like "yellow leaf" and "brown bear".

zashkwa-n-z-oq pq-oq anmak-ing
green-animate-has the color-plural bear-plural germany-in
There are green bears in Germany

I didn't ask if there were small green bears in Germany...I may open class like that this week. :) That will be hilarious. "So Howard, how do you say "There are small green bears in Germany"."

I can't wait to get to more!

Oh, and Howard has been giving us all nicknames. Evelyn is 'anmaqwe'/German lady, Susanne is nango~s/star (she kept asking him about that word), Hunter is 'gise nene'/hunting man, and I am now 'nibishqwe'/leaf lady (I brought in lots of leaves to test color with). It's actually quite appropriate and it's much better than what Matt had suggested. 'senis wopune qwe' which literally means little white rock lady, but is more of a drug reference.

Back to work!

So for my field methods class this semester, we're working with Ojibwe. Our consultant, Howard, is a real ham.
Happy Friday--here are some words and  funny phrases.

Greetings:
Anii- 'hello'
paamaapi wina- 'see you later' (just paamaapi is fine too)
E~h- 'yes'
qa- 'no'

Phrases:
wanEsh En dapiEn? - 'why are you laughing?'
miishkO~s mAchidOn- 'I'm growing pot'

Stephanie wanEsh En dApiEn?-"Stephanie, why are you laughing?"
zam kchE Ochi kta~shing ja wisnE- "Because there's a big fly on your nose eating"

(apologies for modified IPA  A is a middle a sound like in "ahhh!" a is a back a like british "father", E is the sound in 'set', O is more or less like the o in 'old' and the ~ indicates that the vowel is nasal (all vowels are partially nasal before n or m, but yeah...) oh and the q sound doesn't occur in English--push the normal k sound back further in the throat. :) )

I'm up too late, but I'm getting things accomplished. :)

1) 4 pg outline of Linguistics/Shakespearian English talk done
2) Emailed two teachers about outline
3) outlined personal statement
4) have most of a draft done
5) sifted through two hours worth of library search results and picked out the few things I need to copy before I leave

All this while feeling the after-effects of a "vegan" sandwich.

Today, we got up very early and drove four hours over to the village of Tanacross (pop. ~130). We watched Rick (one of Andrea's friends who works for the Nat'l Weather Service) work on transcribing a story with an elder. The story was from the Healy Lake dialect of Tanacross (yes, the language has the same name as the village), so she was stumbling over a few terms. She stopped at one point and said "tail people? I have no idea what they are". After lunch, we went to another elder's house and Irene asked her friend about the tail people, and she went into a 30 minute story about the particular incident involving the tail people. Apparently, it's a small segment of a story that takes all winter to tell. We, not being familiar with the culture or the story, were completely confused by the time we encountered a guy/fox who kept being killed, but then his tail would go fly off and he'd be back the next day...Some guy had two wives and one was killed...

It didn't help that I'd had a big lunch and nodded off during the last 5 minutes of the story, but at least everyone else was lost too, so I didn't feel too bad.

After that, we went to talk to a woman at the Tetlin Wildlife Refuge about some GIS stuff and then drove all the way back home.

I have pictures on facebook now that I have my laptop cable again. (Though it arrived 6 days after it was supposed to and appears to have gone through the wash...)

I felt really bad all day though. It was/is Josh's birthday and I was out of the reach of cell phone service for all but a few minutes of the day. I was thinking I'd at least have it in Tok (town outside of Tanacross), but alas, no. I was able to send him a brief text when I had service in a random spot in the mountains and another quick one in Delta before service cut out again, but no actual conversation.  I had tried to arrange some nice suprises since I couldn't be with him today, but it sounds like nothing worked out as I'd hoped.

I'm ready to be home. I feel guilty about not being home this summer. I've learned a lot (and now have a good start on research for a master's thesis), but I feel like I've really missed out too.  I really need to pick a research topic that'll keep me closer to home.

Only 10 more days until I'm back home.

And I only have two conferences outside of Michigan this next year: LSA in San Francisco first part of January and then there's a Language Documentation one in Hawaii in mid-March (both of which should be paid for).

Apologies as usual for the ramblings...

Too awesome.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/2510906/The-Guinea-Pig-Olympics.html

It's been a busy week. Come to think of it, most weeks this summer have been pretty busy. I think I've caught that from my dad--I don't sit still and not do things well. :)

Anyway, we've been working in the archive cataloging maps and popping in and out of the CLIP conference (Climate, Language and the Indigenous Perspective). The archive map files are a mess, and it soon became obvious that the contributors to the archive (mostly linguists from UAF) are pack rats. We started to see three, four, or even five copies of the same Forest Service map and zillions of photocopies of others. I think the best map was the one from 1967 detailing the counties and cities that officials from Poland, Czechoslovak, and a few other countries couldn't visit. They included random places like Iosco Co, and Marquette Co.

The conference has been really neat too. I've never had the chance to meet many Elders before. Today, during the Elder's Panel on climate change, I really liked what one in particular had to say.  He said that a lot of the problem with Western thinking is that we value our academic knowledge above Nature and above Humans. This is probably nothing new to a lot of you who are in academia, but the context he put it in was fascinating. He talked about the caribou herds and how they, like the deer herds back home, are severely overpopulated. Again like the deer, it's the government policy that keeps the herds inflated so that the hunters can shoot the caribou. "Western Thought is killing the caribou" he said. Our manipulation of the system is "challenging the Creator". I found this slightly reminiscent of the "we shouldn't play God" argument, but it didn't come across as nearly as judgmental. He was encouraging thought behind our actions. "It's not the knowing, it's remembering the question that counts".

 I noticed that he used the word 'take' when he referred to native hunts and 'kill' when he talked about Western hunters. It makes sense. We tend to be hunting for the sport of it; the meat is of secondary importance, if really used at all. When they kill an animal, it's so they can feed and cloth their families.

I'm not going to be totally down on Western culture--I definitely like things like cake, domestic cats, and trombones, but I think there's a lot to be learned from listening to other peoples' perspectives.

In other news, it looks like this will be a two-fall year for me. In the three days I've been here, I've seen the trees go from completely green to becoming tinged with yellow. Apparently fall comes a bit earlier here. :)

Okay...It looks like some severe rain is coming this way. I should get back to my dorm.

I made it to Fairbanks this morning at 2am.

It's beautiful here. The fields of spruce and aspen trees in front of the mountains is amazing. Today was so clear we could see all the way to Denali (Mt. McKinley).

The archive work looks to be interesting. There is a lot of material and a lot of maps in variable condition to sift through.

I've been up since 6am, so I'm a little sleepy now. I may try to wake up in the middle of the night to catch the meteors and the aurora, but we'll see if that happens.

I left my laptop cord at home, so Josh is sending it to me. Luckily, there's a pretty nice computer lab here.

Still need to think of a thesis project....

Okay, so I've been home for less than a week and now it's time to pack up again.

The last bit of my class (or as Josh called it "a hard life tanning and partying" which is definitely not true :o) ) went pretty well. I worked with Luiza on a presentation on Taziff's speech. His vowels are undergoing a merger and that made transcribing his speech really difficult. He would insist on a certain 'correct' pronunciation, but would often use two or even three different vowels. Examples of vowel mergers in American English would be people saying 'cot' and 'caught' or 'pin' and 'pen' the same way.

Anyway, that went really well. The trip home was pretty uneventful except for the very beginning. We were borrowing a friend's car so that Fatemeh could drive us to the bus station. Andrea lives less than a mile away and it took Fatemeh just about an hour to find her place. I'm not that good with directions, but we'd walked to Andrea's at least three times before, it's right across the street from the pool we used for a month and after you get out of our complex, you only have to make one turn. Luckily, I had built in a little extra time so we made it to the bus station just fine.

This week, I've been recovering from jet lag, getting the car fixed, purging random clutter from the apartment, doing laundry, taming the jungle that my garden turned into, and of course enjoying my too brief time with Josh. 

Monday night I leave to go to the Alaska Native Languages Center in Fairbanks for almost three weeks. I'm looking forward to working with Andrea (same one as mentioned above) and Hunter. There's also going to be a conference on Native Languages and Climate change going on that first week, so I'm excited to sit in on a few sessions of that.

I'm sad that I'll be gone for Josh's birthday this year. He was gone on a job interview on mine, so I guess it balances out. :) I'm going to leave him some sort of suprise though. }:D

Random Fact: North Pole, AK is just 10 mi outside Fairbanks, so I may just go pay Santa a visit

So. I'm in the middle of transcribing right now. I could post something serious.....or I could give you animal sounds.

The cow (nika) says "mmmm"
The dog (ngla) says "who who"
The cat  (gon33) says "miao"
The owl (mbui) says "kuku kudukudu"
The goat (dj3) says "b3b3b33"
The bush fowl (k0k0y3) says 'k0kw33 c0kw33"

(the 3 being the short 'e' like in 'set' and the 0 being a short 'o' sound like in 'caught')

Mende is a tone language and I didn't give you the tones....

Okay....

You win....

Here they are for the animal names (not really relevant for the sounds)

/ high tone
\ low tone

ni\ka/
ngla/
go/n33\\
mbu\i/
dj3/
k0\k0\y3/

I'm so grateful Josh was able to come out for the weekend. With the wildfires still going he even got to experience a few of the power outages we've been having.

What we did this weekend:

Hiked to the top of the Santa Ynez mountains with roommates (had some help from a car).
Visited the Old Mission in Santa Barbara
Got a new board game and played it (incorrectly at first) :)
Went sea kayaking and saw sea lions and dolphins!
Went on a lot of walks
Ate nice food (including coconut ice cream)
and just enjoyed being together

We have a walk in closet in the apt we're staying in. Since Josh had to leave so early this morning, I went in there to read/wind down so the light wouldn't  keep him up. Though I ended up crying myself to sleep. I'm so happy he was able to come; it makes the distance easier knowing that he knows where I am.  But it's still so hard... I really wanted to just pack up and go home with him this morning...

This class has been good for a lot of things. There are lots of US languages in need of documentation. I think I'll try to pick one close to home so I don't have to travel too much. :)

Today was the first day of the Field Methods portion of my summer workshop. I had my doubts about the instructor, but I think it's going to be a good deal more fun than I thought.  I'll try to post some examples of Mende later.

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July!

So some of you may have connected the two facts that I'm in Santa Barbara and that there's a big wildfire also in Santa Barbara.

I'm safe.

There's a big airport and lagoons between me and the fire and the policemen patrolling last night said that we should be fine here in Isla Vista ( part of Goleta).

I must say it's pretty weird having ash falling out of the sky like snow and watching the flickering red glow of the fire in the mountains.

That, and the power keeps going out...

Welcome to California, I guess.

Nothing says 'irony' quite like getting six sets of coupons for free chicken sandwiches/biscuits along with your vegan cookbook.

Thank you Amazon for adding a welcome bit of humor to my day.

Well hello again!

Like usual, it's been a long time since I wrote and I've been quite busy.

I finished my semester and have managed to maintain my 4.0. I really struggled with my phonetics project because the class was so often cancelled that I really didn't have much of an idea what I was doing or what I should be looking for. However, I did really well (and learned a lot) in my Language Documentation Technology class. It's always satisfying to finish a course that was hard, but you really felt like you really came away being more capable than before.

I signed up for fall classes and I'll be taking a Field Methods course, Phonology, and Psycholinguistics. I'm particularly excited about psycholinguistics because the brain is so weird and cool. :) Language is weird and cool too, so it should be a fantastic course. It looks like I'll have Historical Linguistics and Syntax in the spring semester (maybe I'll get to take Old English too if they offer it...).

This summer is going to be unbelievably busy. At the end of June, I'll be heading to Santa Barbara for a 6-week field-training course. I only have a week and a half between InField and my Alaska trip. Hunter (co-worker), Andrea (former LL-crew/PhD student) and I are going to Fairbanks to do some work on Ahtna (Athabascan language) for the Alaskan Native Languages center. It'll be a really valuable experience education-wise, but I'm really sad that I'm going to be away from Josh for so long. Plus, I'll only have two or three days before the semester starts. Whoo!

Needless to say, as I prepare to apply to PhD programs next year, I have a lot of research to do over the summer. Ania, Evelyn and I have been working on the web display for the Biao Mien Lexicon. The only documentation on this language is 3,000 notecards! We're trying to get the information out of the database into a clear, useable web display. Unfortunately, this has been much more difficult than anticipated. Hooray for data inconsistencies...

***
Gardening has been going well. I have a bunch of seedlings in the ground already and I'll be planing a few more during the next week. It's been a little cold, so the seedlings haven't been growing much. Hopefully, the weather will warm up and they'll start to flourish.

Oh! Josh and I were wandering around the adjacent park and we saw thousands of trilliums! A lot of them have blushed pink as well, so you have a gorgeous carpet of white and green flecked with a beautiful deep pink. A week ago there were a ton of white and yellow trout lilies as well. :)
***
In more mundane news, Josh and I have been rearranging our apartment. We've manage to make it look a lot more spacious. Today, I'm working on getting the kitchen and basement in shape. I'm going to try to create a sewing/painting area in the basement. This will probably involve getting rid of some of the extra furniture we have in the basement.

We went to Ikea last weekend to get some sheets for my mom's mother's day present and we bought the
world's best chair. We almost fight over it. :) Considering how laid-back the two of us are. That's saying something!

Oh, and Josh starts his new job tomorrow. :) He's excited about it. I'm really bummed that my camping trip to the U.P. fell through, but at least I'll be here for Josh's first week.

****

Anyway, since I'm only working 20 hours this summer, hopefully I'll have the motivation to write more :)

~S

I'm done with phonetics! Hooray!

Great subject.

Worst class in quite a while.

I woke up to birds singing today, and I can see the daffodils (that I thought I dug up) poking their leaves through the soil by the house.

Spring is coming!

One of my grandmothers died this weekend. Apparently she'd been in the hospital with pneumonia... I'm oddly not too upset about it. She was my grandpa's second wife and even though they married long before I was born, I always got the impression that I was one of his grandchildren, not hers. So it goes, I suppose.

A little closer to home, my poor tail-less gerbil Arthur died. I noticed Friday that he was unusually quiet and he felt very thin (his cagemate seemed fine and well-fed). I put some tissues over him to keep him warm, but I didn't think there was much else I could do for him. Later that night I saw that Firbolg had buried him. Josh and I took him (Arthur) out of the cage and Firbolg has been looking for him since.

I'm procrastinating my ELAN transcriptions, so I decided that it was high time for me to update people on what I'm up to.

Had a fun New Year's Party.
Went to Chicago for the LSA Conference (apologies to Chicago friends for not saying 'hi' the conference was much busier than I expected)
Classes started. I have two this semester. Language Documentation Technology and Experimental Phonetics. Both have been pretty neat so far.
Work's been very busy--but pretty rewarding. I'm learning how to do HTML and XML. :D
Went up to Cadillac a few weeks ago. I tried Cross Country Skiing for the first time and didn't totally suck! (I only fell four times in over two hours, pretty good for someone who's never really done any downhill skiing)
Had a new Linguist List crew member stay with us for a week while she found a place. She's from Germany, so it was probably nice to be in an American home for the first bit of the transition.
I'm applying for INFIELD-a 6 week workshop/field training program at UC Santa Barbara this summer. Not too much hope of getting in, but it would be a great opportunity.
I'm also (hopefully) in the running to be one of the student workers going to Alaska this summer to work on maps of the Dena'ina language project.

This upcoming week, Josh and I are going to go see a play (courtesy of a Christmas present from my sister and b-i-l).

I also got a random e-mail last night asking me to play 3rd bone (jazz orchestra) for a charity dance gig. I'm incredibly excited about that. I haven't been able to play all year and this will be a lot of fun. Dances have always been my favorite performances, especially when the alcohol is flowing freely. Towards the end, people are always hilarious and very appreciative. :)

Though Josh got into the CHI conference in Florence, I don't think I'm going to go join him as we were planning. It'd be about $2000 for the vacation, and I think I'd much rather go on a nice camping/hiking trip than jaunt around Europe my last week of classes.

Any good suggestions?

I still want to go to:
Olympia Nat'l Park
Isle Royale (again!)
Pictured Rocks
(heck, anywhere in the UP)
Boundary Waters
Newfoundland/Nova Scotia (Beth's pictures were so awesome, they made me really want to go)

And to Beth, Becky and Kristyn--when are people free this summer? Our Christmas visit was way too short. :)