Latin and klingon

Coglanglab wonders why Latin is popular, when reading about schoolchildren learning Latin. I wonder why not? Latin provides a good base for French, Spanish and (of course) Italian. And if you’re planning on any career where knowledge about anatomy is necessary, already knowing Latin makes it easier to remember where and what for example the plica vocalis are.

Still not sure about Latin? Why not take a stab at Klingon! Yens Wahlgren says that more and more people are finding it hard to cope in everyday life when not knowing Klingon. Yens has written a BA thesis in sociology about Klingon: Klingon as Linguistic Capital. Even though I’m slightly sceptical about the necessity of learning Klingon to function in my day-to-day life, I might head over to the Klingon Language Institute to see what I can pick up…

New worlds, new words

Since I started going back and forth to Gothenburg for my studies, some new words have crept into my language. For example: to 17.25 means to get the 17.25 train from Gothenburg to Lund (”att 17.25:a” in Swedish).

In the latest issue of Språktidningen (”The language magazine”) there are some examples of “academic talk”, such as

• “extensive social interaction” – people are meeting
• “an enormously complex and heterogenous process” – something hard that I’m not able to/can’t be bothered to explain

On that note: now I’m going to digest some audiovisual information, i.e. watch TV.

Scientific thinking

Summer has been good, and now I’m back to work since a few weeks. I’m planning and writing papers and trying to “think like a scientist”, which for me means, among other things, not to jump to conclusions, and to question causality. For example, if a and b happen at the same time, does this mean that a caused b to happen? Or that b caused a to happen? Or was it just a coincidence?

A few weeks ago a Norwegian dissertation got quite a lot of media coverage here. It’s a longitudinal study about eating disorders in adolescents and young adults, and the results that most newspapers grabbed onto was that girls with eating disorders get better if they move in with a partner or if they have a child. However, no one seems to question cause and effect. What if women with eating disorders were able to be in a long-term committed relationship because the severity of their eating disorder was lessening, and not the other way around? And it seems quite plausible that it’s easier for women with less severe eating disorders to become mothers, since anorexia can negatively affect ovulation and hormone levels.

But I may of course be wrong; I haven’t read the disseratation, and the author may have good explanations about why he believes that relationships and parenthood reduces eating disorders, and proof that the relationship or parenthood occurred before the reduction of the eating disorder.

Anyway, according to Wired, my way of thinking is old-fashioned:

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot. (“The End of Theory” by Chris Anderson)

I’m not so sure about this though. Sometimes you need a question to make sense of the answer, which may or may not be 42…

Not selling my life

When reading about this guy who is selling his life, I feel really happy that I don’t have any urge to do the same! My first term as a doctoral student is almost over, and I’m already looking forward to next term.

Soon I’m going away on vacation. My husband and I are going to two weddings, and then we’re off to Ireland for a week!

Just for fun

I added a photo blog today – I’ve been uploading some photos to Flickr and I thought I’d link them to my blog.

Now and next term

I’m still working on my first essay, and I’ve got two more to write this summer. I’ve had some other things on my mind as well – I got married three weeks ago! I had a hard time concentrating on my essay the weeks before the wedding, but now I’m almost back on track.

I was asked a few months ago if I would like to teach next term, which I would. So I will be teaching parts of two courses, and that will be fun (I hope!).

The Swedish chef: from Norway?!

In Språktidningen (”The language magazine”) there is an article about the Swedish chef in The Muppet Show. Tomas Riad, a professor at Stockholm University, has taken a closer look at the tonal accents in the chef’s “Swedish”. The intonation reveals that the Swedish chef is neither from southern Sweden nor from Dalecarlia, but that he might be from Stockholm or Gothenburg. What may come as a surpise, is that the intonation contour in his speech suggests that he might as well be from Norway. See for example Tomas Riad’s “Remarks on the Swedish tone accent typology”(pdf) for more about tone accents in Swedish.

For more fake Swedish, check out the Bergman parody De Düva. The language consists of English words, -en verb endings (as in German) and some Russian influences. But Swedish – I’m not sure…

A lot going on

The central part of my life right now seems to be train rides… Since the university where I study is 2,5-3 hours by train from here, and I go there at least twice a week, I spend 10 hours or more per week on the train. The key to successful studying on-board the train is quite simple: block out as much as possible of the environment by listening to music in earplugs.

SJ InterCity train, photo by Kasper Dudzik

I’ve got some new software on my computer: Papers, Skim and LyX. I’m using LyX to write my course paper and so far I quite like it. I haven’t used LaTeX before so I’ve got a lot to learn. I don’t know if LyX is the best text editor to use, but I’m trying it out.

Redecorating…

…or spring cleaning, call it what you like. I was in the mood for a new theme

Um

I’m once again amazed by the fact that other people are interested in the same linguistic details I’m interested in. Sometimes they’re so interested they write a book about it! Michael Erard has written the book “Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean” which I bought and started reading yesterday.

So far I’ve only read the first chapter and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.