Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

The comparative method used in historical linguistics to determine direction of sound change/reconstruct a proto-language’s phoneme inventory is a long and laborious pursuit. It is actually pretty fun, though. It’s like working out a big puzzle, though I occasionally run into issues in organizing data properly, leading to my confusion.

I walked into my historical linguistics test today feeling really, really nervous. I was behind from my recent hospital visit, had no time to study, and already had to ask Dr. Campbell to accept my homework a week late. I almost knew with certainty that I was going to fail. It turns out the test was really easy, and the comparative method part wasn’t large enough to confuse me (25 cognates spread across three really, really closely related and geographically isolated languages). I think I nailed it. Now to finish for my other test tomorrow…

So, I was in the hospital the last couple of days. Long story. The most interesting part was that I got so dehydrated as a result of what put me there (probably gastroenteritis) that I needed 5 bags of IV fluids to get me to pee at all, and what I did pee was minuscule. They admitted me after I visited the ER because the problem was likely exacerbated by Crohn’s disease. I also had really low blood pressure. I already have pretty low blood pressure (in the 90/50 area), but apparently I was down to something in the neighborhood of 75/34. Despite all of that, I don’t think it was entirely necessary to keep me there for two days. It was embarrassing to have nurses coming in to check on me, when they probably had people who really needed it. I missed three classes, all of which were important, along with Model Arab League.

I still have a headache and some minor gut pains, but otherwise I am recovering alright.

My most recent assignment for historical linguistics was on analogical change. Part of the assignment required me to note examples of analogical change around me. Some of the examples I cited included things friends and I say. Well, mostly friends who are node-members say these:

· Succumb/succumbed/succumbed becoming succumb/succame/succame on analogy with with come/came/came.

· Ding/dinged/dinged to ding/dang/dang (or dung) on analogy to ring/rang/rung.

· Sacrilicious as a blend of sacrilegious and delicious. This is used to denote something that is remarkable, but perhaps also a sacrilege. I don’t know who came up with this originally, but it’s wonderful.

· Mayhaps as a blend of maybe and perhaps.

· To recreate, backforming from recreation.

Other analogical changes used commonly:

· Gruntled backforming from disgruntled.

· Thusly as a hyperrcorrection.

· Lead/leaded/leaded leveled from lead/lead/lead. This is highly used, but also highly stigmatized.

Any other examples from English or other languages?

While were at it, Dr. Campbell spoke with us today about the difference between a dialect and a language. Dialect is notoriously ill-defined. There are a couple of definitions used: dialects are mutually intelligible; a language is a dialect with an army. These seem to apply in some cases. The latter applies to Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, for example, but they both have their own armies (and independence for that matter). A similar situation is Dari and Farsi, which are mutually intelligible, but Farsi is the official language of Iran, while Dari is spoken in pockets within Iran.

The picture becomes really clouded when speaking about Arabic. Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic are not mutually intelligible. Morocco and [Syria, Lebanon, Jordan] have their own nations and militaries, yet both are called dialects of Arabic. Further complicating the picture is what my structure of Arabic professor said to me: dialects share underlying representations (at least phonologically), but I wonder how many underlying representations are shared between Moroccan and Levantine.

I got really sick last week, keeping me out of commission from Wednesday night until about Saturday afternoon. Now, after getting over whatever the hell got me last week, I am weakened and open to whatever is going around now. I predict a few weeks of low-level illness coming my way. So…yeah…I never got around to updating. In other news, feeling too poorly to put up with teaching my community education class, I sent out a mass email to the students saying not to come. The email was returned, so now my class probably thinks I am a bad teacher. Yeah, this week is starting on the right foot, alright.

In other news, the University of Utah has passed accreditation, which is a good thing, because it means that when I graduate, my diploma will be somewhat meaningful and appear marginally legitimate. I can only imagine how embarrassing it would be to the state of Utah if its flagship university failed to meet accreditation standards. I would never stop hearing about it from my elder sisters who attended the school to the south.

Of course, passing accreditation doesn’t come without strings attached. The school has 2 years to implement a number of changes recommended by the accreditation board, including the implementation of a formal policy for evaluating and hiring auxiliary faculty (faculty not in tenure-generating positions).

Wow. Imagine if the University of Utah would start hiring fantastic professors and offer them tenure. I am thinking of a particular Arabic and linguistics professor who is leaving as she was offered a real job at Georgetown. In fact, I am thinking about nearly the entire Middle Eastern language faculty at the U. The only language that will survive is Persian.

Perhaps a conditional accreditation will encourage the U to start putting students ahead of prestige.

Now, for a list of things that need to go:

· Underage college students who bitch about Utah’s alcohol laws. You’re under 21, so you can’t drink anywhere in the US. Shut up.

· People insisting they take me drinking on my 21^st birthday. I am still not interested.

· The Utah state legislature.