Suboptimist

So, it turns out that Ishtar was a whore.

I’ve been very slow at updating. What is it now? 7, 8 days since I’ve updated last? Sorry. Busy, and all, and not in an posting mood. By the way, congratulations to Lameen for finishing his dissertation.

The University of Utah linguistics department generally keeps one or two experts in residence per given discipline (though sometimes several). There is only one expert phonetician, and she is on sabbatical. The next person who could do it, who is actually a phonologist, is also on sabbatical. With whom does that leave us to teach us phonetics? A semanticist. Perhaps this is the reason I don’t like phonetics, as I don’t have an instructor who is very enthusiastic about the topic either. On the other hand, I enjoy syntax, perhaps because the instructor loves what he does, a feeling which influences his students.

My anthropology class is…underwhelming. It has the potential to be interesting, especially considering it deals with the ancient Near East, which is of particular interest to me. However, after we finished our (very brief) section on language, I find myself wanting to put sticks in my eyes after the first of three hours. Perhaps I have heard that Ishtar’s orgasms were compared to earthquakes too many times, or perhaps hearing a Polish woman talking about Sumer and Akkad for three hours is intrinsically boring. I don’t know.

Anyway, let me show you something that came up on a recent Syntax take-home exam. The exam is turned in, so I imagine it is okay to show you. Basically, the question asked students to argue why C-command is needed for binding, not precedence (or the opposite). Some sample data was given, and this is what I want to bring attention to:

His_i yearbook photo gave Tom_i the creeps.

In this example, ‘His’ is referring to the same thing that ‘Tom’ is. To me, this doesn’t work, nor can I think of an instance where this would work. If ‘Tom’ were not referring to the same thing as ‘His,’ I would have no problem with it. Does anyone else find the sentence odd?

On a different note, this is one of the two worst weekends to drive in downtown Salt Lake City. With LDS General Conference going on, the traffic is horrendous. It took me 30 minutes to drive three miles last night, since I chose (foolishly) to drive home through downtown. There is no room in downtown Salt Lake to build a large parking garage or bridge to keep the roads clear, and even if we could, it would ruin the city. The only solution would be to encourage conference attendees to park in Sandy and take the light rail downtown. Somehow, I doubt that would happen.

In my search to uncover a method to the madness of in-game communication in World of Warcaft and other online game communities, I found another person interested as well.

This specialized leet-speak functions in the very same ways that any other dialect might—it includes and excludes
and it is made to fit its purpose. I’m interested in the why and how of all of this. Who does it include and exclude and why, and what is that purpose and how, exactly does it fit it? And, finally, how has it evolved from basic netspeak to leetspeak, in the context of chatrooms to early MOOs to the MMORPGs it currently takes place in?
Studying all of these things may serve to validate leetspeak as something beyond game-talk. I don’t intend to represent it as its own language in the way that Ebonics is a, more or less, newly recognized language. Instead, I want to argue for it as a dialect within the English speaking Internet world. In this way, I am arguing for the importance of gaming and the gaming community as a reflection of our society.

An anthropologist may also find this interesting. Or not. Maybe I am just wasting my time. I think I will go back to the book I was reading about Akkadian.