numbers

Linguist talk seems to center around statistics and numbers. Or, if you walk past a marker board that a linguist has marked, you may see a sentence like 'Joe walked down the street.' Then you'll see the same sentence in various forms and divisions. How can we call that sentence "well-formed"? Wouldn't we all like to know.

I decided that my 'Language and Identity' class was misnamed. It should have been 'Language and Sexuality.' I've really been surprised that so many (i.e., all) of the lectures have centered around various transgender groups and ways that we express sexuality in language. I suppose the fact that many languages have a grammatical gender may have something to do with it. Anyway, I thought the class would have covered very different ground than it has been covering.

I've been pelted with a lot of statistics, too, in all my classes except for morphology. Sociolinguistics is a lot of stats and psycholinguistics is too. I realized that I start getting bored after a while in my 'Language and Thought' class because we have already looked at 50 bar graphs and have 20 more to go. In fact, many of the questions in that class are just about the behavioral tests that were done and how a control was used for a particular study, and if this or that was accounted for, etc., etc.

Despite the complaints, I am glad I came here. I have a tendency to get ideas in my head---vague ideas, mind you---and think they exist somewhere in reality. Unfortunately, it takes a good splash of reality to wake me from my dream. I have really enjoyed being in California and meeting and talking to people from all over the world. I don't know where else I could have found such a diverse combination of people. And, while I'm glad I came here, I am ready to be home now. One week to go still.

Tomorrow I'm going hiking with some friends. Hopefully I'll live to tell about it.