Here’s………… London.

It has been a while since I have updated, so here’s a brief summary.
I finished my last semester at University and passed with an 8 (out of 10) overall, aka I’m pretty pleased and proud of myself.

And as of today, I am embarking on a new journey since I was due for a much, much needed break.
Today, around 2, I arrived at St. Pancras Station, London.
As I passed through customs, live piano music welcomed me to my new home + a very excited hostmom who walked up to me fast paced and planted three solid kisses on my cheeks (as the Dutch tend to do). So it’s safe to say, my start in London started out quite well!

Then.. the tube.. I have heard of the horror of the tube.
The impossibly busy tubes inside of which people could seem to miraculously squeeze themselves into empty spaces that weren’t even there before..
It was around three.. so not exactly a busy time.. generally speaking.. alas the Tube did not agree with that.
But maybe that was because of the Piccadilly Line, who knows.. (I certainly don’t as I’m quite the noob around here).
We had to change lines into a quiet tube line, or I’m guessing as the population in this one was about 1/50 in comparison with the Piccadilly one.

When we got to our destination, we had to walk for a couple of minutes (5 or 6) to get to the house. It looked a bit like they only moved in there a couple of weeks ago (from the inside), but when inside the house was very homely with carpet, really soft and lovely carpet, everywhere (except for the ground floor). One of the kids opened the door with a balloon in her hands saying “Sorry you’re leaving”.. not too sure what to do with that but she thought it was funny, and tbh I did too. The other girl was a bit more shy and she shook my hand saying Hi without looking me in the eyes but eventually she was the one that asked her older sister if “The new au-pair could also come play”.. my heart at that moment just about melted.. Another plus was that they made cupcakes!!! That is always quite the welcome in my book. So far, so good.

About twenty minutes later, the hostmom, G- (the middle child) and I went out to pick up the youngest at the day care. Before we picked B- up, we went to Halfords to bring a bike with two flat tires. Apparently, it is not done to fix a hole so replacing the inner tire (or whatever they called it) is what is most appropriate. Also.. something I did not know.. is that bikes do not come with actual bicycle lights front or back (as a Dutch person this is extremely shocking). Some bikes have reflectors, but that is about it.. There were two bikes which had lights but that is apparently something up and coming in the London world.. Guess the Netherlands are quite ahead in that respect.. nice to know!

Onto meeting B-, the first thing, as two-year-olds do, was scream “Mama, mama” all cheerfully running towards his “mama” and looking a bit funny at me and hiding his head in his mommy’s neck and between her legs or just generally behind her so that he could sneak peeks at the new person that is to become a part of his life for a bit less than a year. After that we walked or more or less jogged to keep up with B- who was running about the sidewalk and preferred not to hold hands in general but let his mommy hold his hand when crossing the street (progress!).

When we got home, B- eagerly ran up to his “papa” like he hadn’t seen him in ages. It was all very touching (no lie, my heart melted again). At a certain point, the girls were watching a movie on Youtube and the little guy was cycling about the room at a high speed and I was trying to stop him from cycling into a wall or into his sisters so I stopped him with my feet and hands.. he absolutely loved it and kept cycling towards me faster to test my reflexes (which are awesome.). After that he decided to play a game of “Fall”, which basically means jump off the couch onto the couch or fall down on the carpet.. all the while hysterically laughing his little butt off. So I reckon he’s warming up to me already :).

As for my room, it’s pretty sweet and big and lovely, lovely carpet that is pure heaven for my feet. Not really a proper closet, but tbh I didn’t bring that much. I made my bed and brought my minions and my sleeping monkey (Yes, I sleep with stuffed animals.). Oh! Did I mention I also have an awesome bathtub that is the right size for me, well now I did! ❤ So much love for that.

So.. as far as the first day goes here in London.. Chez Hostfam V-.

Success!

From Letters to Legislature

Late Modern English letters

Do you love 18th/19th century letters and/or documents? Do you love to transcribe?

If you answered Yes, then the Transcribe Bentham Initiative might be just up your alley!

Transcribe Bentham is an initiative started by University College London, with the mission to make available the transcripts of Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, (and relations) that UCL has in its possession. The initiative is managed by UCL’s Bentham Project and Digital Humanities, and aided by the Computer Centre of UCL.

The transcriptions are made by volunteers, such as Iris (co-writer to this post and fellow Linguistics student at Leiden University) and myself, and checked by editors who check whether they agree with the transcription and re-read it for spelling errors and whether you used the right codes, as there are special codes such as “<lb/>” as enter and “&amp;” for an &.

The transcriptions themselves range from letters to the family, to official…

View original post 369 more words

More on Austen..

Due to many deadlines and a fantastic, but quite taxing, Winter school in Amsterdam on Linguistics, I have not been able to update, so I hereby apologize for that!

One of my papers was, of course, on Jane Austen’s language (which is why my previous posts were on analyzing her use of hyphenations, swearing and taboo words). My topic was Austen’s use of interjections over the course of her writing career (from age 11/12 till 41).

If you don’t know what interjections are, you probably do know a couple of them and use them occasionally (or even, quite frequently). Ever heard of the phrase, Oh My God! (or shortened OMG!, ), Interjections, as defined by Ameka (2006: 743), are words or phrases that express the mental state or reaction towards something, be it present in speech or in the non-linguistic environment (for example, something unexpected happening). The interjections I focussed on were the primary interjections (such as Oh! and Ah!) which are little words or sometimes called ‘non-words’ as they are syntactically independent and non-elliptical (understandable out of context) (Ameka 2006:744).

As I was analyzing a Grammar from the late 18th century (A New Grammar of the English Language by Daniel Fenning), to see what interjections were perceived of during Austen’s time, I stumbled upon a wonderful interjection that might sound familiar to those that have seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, namely Heigh-Ho! Which, according to Fenning’s Grammar, meant that the speaker vocalized languor (OED: mental suffering, state of longing, or weakness of the body/fatigue), which probably in the case of the dwarfs would probably refer to fatigue after a hard working day (or well, that is my inference).

But I digress, my study was on several interjections used by Austen that I discovered in a preliminary search: Oh, Ah, Ha, Ho, Phoo, La, Psha, Hush, Hum, Humph. These instances were manually analyzed, as well as by the use of WordSmith Tools, to see the frequency per text and in that way, over time as well, as I had ordered the texts from earliest till latest. What I looked at was the interjections over time (as I expected them to increase as Austen’s ear for the idiosyncracies of language would mature over time), and in male and female speech as females generally tend to be more emotive in their speech and therefore, I’d expect them to use more interjections.

What I found was the following:

Interjections	Oh	Ah	Phoo	La	Ha	Hush	Humph	Hum	Psha	Ho	Total
The Visit	4										4
L&F	12	4									16
J&A	4	2									6
Evelyn	2										2
LC	4	5									9
Catharine	41										41
Lady Susan	3										3
S&S	70	9		6		1		1		1	88
P&P	96	5		3							104
NA	78	7						1	2		88
TW	9	2	2					1			14
MP	79	8	4		4		1				96
Emma	193	48			2	4	4	1			252
Persuasion	56	9	4		2						71
Sanditon	17	2									19
Total	668	101	10	9	8	5	5	4	2	1	813

What this shows is that, in terms of variety, Austen tends to get more variable over time (as her works are ordered from earliest till latest) and only after her Juvenilia (her early work untill Catharine), which I took as a cut off point, do more interjections occur that are not oh and ah, but these interjections (which are probably the most basic and most used ones) are used the most often even in her later work, oh being the most frequent of all. 

Emma, as can be seen, uses interjections the most, even when normalizing the data (so that texts that are shorter or longer are equalized (mathematically) in length so that the results are comparable), Emma still stands out, at least in Austen’s published works as well as her post-Juvenilia work (1.54 instances per 1,000 words).

Even when, looking at male compared to female speech, Emma still stands out:

	LS	S&S	P&P	NA	TW	MP	Em	Pers	San
Male		10.2%(9)	3.8% (4)	14.8%(13)	71.4%(10)	23.2% (22)	25.8% (65)	18.6% (13)	52.6% (10)
Female	100% (3)	89.8% (79)	96.2% (100)	85.2%(75)	28.6% (4)	76.8% (73)	74.2% (187)	81.4% (57)	47.4% (9)

Here you can see that, Emma stands out in terms of the novels/stories that have females as the most interjection using persons. Sanditon and The Watsons clearly stand out as males using most of the interjections, but these two texts are both unfinished which might have influenced the result. It could however be that, in the published novels, female speakers use more interjections because they have more dialogue.

To check this, I separated Emma (as well as Northanger Abbey as interjection usage was the second highest in the normalized data), in terms of male and female speech.

The normalized data of Northanger Abbey show that female speakers (4.37/1,000) use more interjections than male speakers (0.79/1,000). Moreover, hum is only used by men and psha is only used by women. Emma also shows that female speakers (3.63/1,000) use more interjections than male speakers (1.99/1,00o). However, the difference is less so than in Northanger Abbey. When we look at the most frequent interjections, oh and ah, we find that Oh is a predominantly female interjection (3.10/1,000 to male use 0.94/1,000), and ah more frequent for male speakers (0.77/1,000 to female use 0.47/1,000).

As I was dividing the text, I came across another ‘non-word’, hey.

“A pretty good thought of mine- hey?”  (Northanger Abbey)

Which only occurred twice, and was only used by men.

Something else that struck me was that La, just as Psha, was only used by women. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary explained why, La is in fact the female affected pronunciation of Lo! (JohnsonOnline, s.v. la int.) as in Lo! and behold, and lo does not even occur in Austen.

“Oh, la! here come the Richardsons.” (Sense and Sensibility)

“La! You are so strange!” (Pride and Prejudice)

(Note: For those familiar with BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet’s line in the first episode is therefore not an accurate one as she exclaims the following: “but lo, there in the very next, nothing would please him but to stand up with Jane again”)

After the more statistical data, I turned to more qualitative data and analyzed the interjections in their sense, both in the OED and Johnson’s dictionary. Phoo and Humph were the only two interjections which did not occur in Johnson‘s dictionary but they did occur in the OED, expressing  something from rejection to disgust to relief (s.v. phoo int.) and doubt or dissatisfaction (s.v. humph int.). Most interjections can comprise several and quite diverse expressions of mental states and reactions, and so further analysis should be done to see in what way the many ohs and ahs differ in terms of pragmatic and collocational use (which I would very much like to do for my master thesis). Phoo was also the one that only occurred as Phoo! Phoo!, which I called a ‘twinterjection’. Hush, hush, for example, also occurred but it also occurred as a single interjection:

“The most unaccountable business! But hush, hush!” (Emma)

“‘Hush! they will hear you.” (Sense and Sensibility)

As you can see, even something as small as primary interjections or something regarded as ‘non-words’ can yield interesting results, and their occurrences in several dictionaries and Fenning’s grammar also show some insight into these quite telling parts of speech!

References:

Ameka, F. K. (2006). Interjections. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language & linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 743-746). Oxford: Elsevier.

Austen, J. (1789-1817). The Visit; The Watsons; Love and Freindship; Jack & Alice; Evelyn; Lesley Castle; Catharine, or the Bower; Lady Susan; The Watsons; and, Sanditon. In L. Bree, P. Sabor, and J. Todd (Eds.) (2013). Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works. Clare­mont: Broad­view Editions. 58-385.

Austen, J. (1795-1816). Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park; Emma; and, Persuasion. Retrieved from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ 

Fenning, D. (+/- 1800) A New Grammar of the English Language… . ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). Gale Cengage Learning. URL: http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/ecco/start.do?prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=leiden.

JohnsonOnline. (1755). A dictionary of the English language: A digital edition of the 1755 classic by Samuel Johnson. URL: http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/.

Jonker, D.E. (2014). Phoo! Phoo!: Interjections in Jane Austen’s Works. Leiden University course paper.

OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. URL:http://dictionary.oed.com/.

Hyphenation Continued.

Hyphens, quite intriguing little symbols, don’t you think?

For those familiar with Pride and Prejudice or the relatively ‘older’ way of speaking English, know that at a certain point certain numbers were said the other way around: one-and-twenty instead of twenty-one.

I went into research mode (obviously) and asked myself when Jane Austen used which way of writing numbers or whether she actually used our modern day way at all. Similar to the other Austen posts, I used the amazing tool, WordSmith Tools (to which I am very much addicted). Since there are a lot of numbers, I decided to go about this in what I would like to call a relatively time-saving way.

Using the lovely Concord tool and typing one-*/two-*/three-*/four-*/five-*/six-*/seven-*/eight-*/nine-*/*ty-* .

Just for clarity’s sake, I’ll explain the syntax quickly.
/ = search for multiple items at the same time
* = search within a word

NOTE: Be sure to put your settings so that a hyphen is included in a word and not taken as a word separator (which is the standard setting).The reason why I used *ty-* is to search in a more time-saving way for twenty, thirty, forty etc. instances.

Check the data (105 hits). Not only numbers can have *ty-* in it nor does three-* only give three-and-twenty etc. results, for example.

Examples that don’t match the written numbers that I have mentioned before going on this quest are:

1. two-penny : “…the two-penny post…” (Sense and Sensibility, 2x)
2. three-shilling : “…as large as a three-shilling piece.” (Persuasion)
3. empty-headed : “…but as empty-headed as himself…” (Pride and Prejudice)

(total of irrelevant hits: 12 (2x two-penny; three-shilling; three-deckers; 3x three-quarters; vanity-baits; pretty-behaved; pretty-spoken; empty-headed; and nine-hundredth)
This leaves you with 93 relevant hits in total!

41 of these instances are *ty-* ones and 39 begin with a number under 10.

So Jane Austen does use both! But, does she use them in the same novel or context? Or is it that, for example, one publisher preferred one of the hyphenations over the other?

Sense and Sensibility (6), for example, only writes it the twenty-one way: thirty-five (4), twenty-four, thirty-six.

Persuasion (24), on the other hand, uses both styles:

fifty-four, twenty-nine, nine-and-twenty, sixty-two, two-and-twenty, twenty-two, seven-and-twenty, eight-and-thirty, four-and-twenty (3), twenty-four (3), twenty-three, five-and-thirty, eighty-seven, seven-and-twenty, one-and-thirty, ninety-nine, three-and-twenty, five-and-twenty, eight-and-twentieth, five-and-twenty.

Both styles also occur quite near one another as well:

“He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them.”

Northanger Abbey (4) and The Watsons (1) are like Sense and Sensibility since it only uses the twenty-one variety as well. Pride and Prejudice (10), Mansfield Park (20) and Emma (28), however, are like Persuasion in that they use both styles.

Does this mean that the form of one-and-twenty does not exist in Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey?

Since twenty is used the most, I used Concord to search for instances of and twenty. And Lo’ and behold!

Sense and Sensibility (9) does have instances of the one-and-twenty variety, but without the hyphens!

“…not more than six or seven and twenty…”
“…any young man of five and twenty…”

Northanger Abbey (8) also has instances of this variety:

“…four or five and twenty…”
“…only three and twenty miles!”

The Watsons does not have any occurrences of and twenty, but and thirty does occur:

“…only five and thirty minutes…”
“…of five or six and thirty…”

The Watsons is actually an unpublished novel… Could this indicate that Jane Austen preferred to write the one-and-twenty instances without the hyphen?

I took a quick peek at the manuscripts and the first quotation she actually wrote: five & thirty, and for the second one: 5 or 6 & 30.

Did Jane Austen only use the & sign instead of writing it in full? Or did she prefer to write numbers as numbers and not written out in full?

A peek at her manuscript does show that she did use instances such as one and twenty, but only (as far as I looked) without hyphens!

But this is all for now! If you wonder about certain usages of Jane Austen, please let me know so I can research some more (if I can’t think of anything else to search myself ;-)).

(De)Hyphenation in Jane Austen

In Jane Austen’s time (1775-1817), spelling was still variable as can be seen by her idiosyncratic spellings such as freind, adeiu, beautifull, and wellcome. Whether to hyphen or not to hyphen was not fixed as it is (to a certain extent) today. So I figured, why not look at Jane Austen’s hyphens. Is she regular in terms of when she uses it or does she vary as people do still today? Or do certain words get hyphenated later on or whether certain words undergo dehyphenation?

Let’s find out!

For the purpose of this small research, I looked at the prefixes (or they could also be seen as compound part 1, but I will refer to them as prefixes) well-, ill-, and good-.

I went about this in the following way: I used the Concordance function in WordSmith Tools using the word search syntax well-*/well^*/ill-*/ill^*/good-*/good^*. For explanation’s sake, / allows you to search for multiple words at the same time, * allows you to search for everything that is within the word (i.e. good* will find goodbye, goodness, goody), ^ allows you to search of a specific character of the alphabet and whichever symbols you allow inside a word (a hyphen and an apostrophe, for example). The corpus existed of the works of Jane Austen written by her (accessed through http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html and Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works by Bree et al.), i.e. not the published novels.

Well

Almost all of the instances (13 out of 19) of well are written with a hyphen: for example,

“It is well-known…” in Lady Susan,

“a well-bred Man.” in Evelyn,

“well-penned Note.” in Love and Freindship.

The instances of well without a hyphen are wellcome (3 times), wellfare, wells, and wellbehaved.

The only instance that, considering her earlier instances of well-, would be expected to be written with a hyphen is wellbehaved. This instance occurs in Jack and Alice. This is one of her early stories which she wrote when she was fifteen (1790). It could be that afterwards. she learned about the hyphenation process which could indicate that she wrote Jack and Alice before Love and Freindship as in this text, well only occurs with a hyphen.

Ill

Most of the hits of ill occurred without a hyphen (20 out of 34): for example,

“the long illness..” in Lady Susan,

“which she illustrated with…” in Catharine, or the Bower,

“what an illiterate villain..” in Love and Freindship.

In the case if ill-, you find the following instances:

“accuse her of ill-nature and…” in Lady Susan,

“They were really ill-used.” in Sanditon,

“naturally ill-tempered and Cunnin” in Lesley Castle.

This time around, we found instances of both ill-nature and illnature (even in the same text! Lady Susan), ill-suited and illsuited (in Sanditon and Evelyn,respectively). The ill‘s that would have been expected to be written with a hyphen are illdisposed (The Watsons), illsuited (Evelyn), illhumour (Catharine, or the Bower), and illnature (Lady Susan). It seems that in this case, there does not seem to be a certain pattern as The Watsons was written at the latest date of the texts exemplified (sans Sanditon). It does seem that by the time that Sanditon was written (she started writing this near the end of her life), there are no more ‘mistakes’ in terms of hyphenation.

Good

Most of the instances are, again, written without a hyphen (24 out of 32): for example,

“…nice little goodhumoured Woman…” in The Watsons,

“…speech, was too goodtemper’d…” in Frederic and Elfrida,

“…of propriety and Goodbreeding…” in Catharine, or the Bower.

Hyphens occur in instances such as,

“…a good-looking young Man…” in Lesley Castle,

“…a mere good-tempered…” in Love and Freindship,

“…a good-natured lively Girl…” in Catharine, or the Bower.

What is interesting is that in Sanditon, you only find goodnatured or goodnature and not good-natured, and goodbreeding but not good-breeding. In the Watsons, there are no hyphenations with good either, this may indicate that by the time that Jane Austen wrote the Watsons she already deleted the hyphen when good was attached to either a noun or a past participle (-tempered, -natured).

It might be that she already put a space in between good and the following word and a quick peek into goodnature(d) and good nature(d) shows that they both occur. Not in the same place though! Good-natured occurs in Catharine, or the Bower and Lesley Castle, good nature in Catharine, or the Bower, and goodnature(d) in The Watsons and Sanditon.

It all seems a bit irregular, but later on she does appear to be somewhat more consistent. This sure would be interesting to research some further but as I do not have the time for this as of yet, I might consider another time.

Swearing and Taboo in Jane Austen’s Works

Ever since September 2013, I have delved into the world of Jane Austen and her language. Both in her published novels and her manuscripts available through the amazing website: http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html.

During class last week, we talked about swearing and taboo words in Jane Austen and that there is this idea that there is no such thing as these concepts in Jane Austen. However, in my search of interjections throughout Jane Austen’s works, I came across instances where intercourse was the topic of the conversation. Intercourse as a word appears as well but back in Jane Austen’s time this referred to conversations and the act that we can denote by it nowadays.

While looking through the interjections, I came across La. Since I had never seen this interjection before, I looked it up in the OED and found that it meant the following: “An exclamation formerly used to introduce or accompany a conventional phrase or an address, or to call attention to an emphatic statement. In recent use, a mere expression of surprise.”

I stumbled upon this interesting conversation between Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Anne Steele:

“I do not understand what you mean by interrupting them,” said Elinor;
“you were all in the same room together, were not you?”

“No, indeed, not us. La! Miss Dashwood, do you think people make love
when any body else is by? Oh, for shame! – To be sure you must know
better than that. (Laughing affectedly.) – No, no; they were shut up in
the drawing-room together, and all I heard was only by listening at the
door.”

Aha! Jane Austen refers to intercourse as making love! Using a program such as WordSmith Tools you can look through a huge amount of data in a simple way. By running a Concordance search (where you can see the words in their context), I found a total of 8 instances (3 in Pride and Prejudice, 2 in Sense and Sensibility, 1 in Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Lady Susan).

So what about cursing?

When looking through the exclamation marks to find interjections (by using *! in Concondance), I came across Oh! D – in Northanger Abbey. Lo and behold! Swear words! Swear words in Jane Austen!:

‘Ah! Thorpe,’ said he, ‘do you happen to want such a little thing as
this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.’
‘Oh! D – ,‘ said I; ‘I am your man; what do you ask?’
And how much do you think he did, Miss Morland?”

~~

“Thank ye,” cried Thorpe, “but I did not come to Bath to drive my
sisters about, and look like a fool. No, if you do not go, d — me if I
do. I only go for the sake of driving you.”

John Thorpe seems to be the only person to curse in Northanger Abbey and a friend of Thorpe’s described by him as a “Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow“. In Mansfield Park, Mr. Price is the only one to ‘curse’ as well. He, as so eloquently can be formulated, takes the Lord’s name in vain:

The Thrush went out of harbour this morning. Sharp is the
word, you see! By G – , you are just in time!

~~

But, by G – ! if she belonged to _me_, I’d give her the rope’s end as long as
I could stand over her.

This use of God is not necessarily meant as a curse but it carries a negative undertone which is why, in this case, God is written as G – (originally G–, i.e. G followed by a dash). Compare this with Mansfield Park’s Edmund use of God:

“Thank God,” said he. “We were all disposed to wonder, but it seems to
have been the merciful appointment of Providence that the heart which
knew no guile should not suffer.

Here using God is clearly not meant in a negative way but in a positive way and is therefore written in full and not censored just as G– and D– had been as is demonstrated above.

Are there any more taboo words in Jane Austen? Which taboo words or swear words were there back in the late 18th and beginning of the 19th century? How about taboo and swear words in other works around that time? Were it predominantly men that used it as well? Or gossiping women talking about making love? 

It might be an interesting subject well worth looking into!

Much love!

References:

Bree, L., Sabor, P, and Todd, J. (2013). Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works. Claremont: Broadview Editions.

Jane Austen’s works were accessed through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

OED Entry: La, int.

Les études

As most of the people in my life do not know, I’m taking a language course in French at the Talencentrum in Leiden. Our teacher is pretty awesome and has an amazing accent for someone who isn’t a native speaker (and I can tell since my mom is a frenchie).

The classes are every thursday from 20.15 till 22.00 (usually till 22.15 because she is so excited that she just continues…). Last week, we were dealing with the Imparfait and the Passé composé which are both a past tense form. The only difference lies in the fact that the Imparfait is used when describing something, to give a reason for something, something that is habitual, whereas the passé composé is used for things that have finished already so usually with a past tense marker in the sentence like hier (yesterday) or where the time of an action is provided … pendant vingt minutes (so that you have been there for the past 20 minutes), or where there is a change in state. 

At least… If I understood this correctly *thinkyface*

But our teacher promised to bring copies of French for Dummies which explains the difference between the two tenses particularly well. So let’s hope I will get it!

Anyways.. We had to write a news report in French about something.. And I didn’t do it because basically.. I’m lazy as ****. So I had to do it for this week, YAY for teachers \o/.

This is what I wrote:

Un peu bizarre

Nous savons que les Américains sont un peu bizarre, mais ce rapport est trop fou.

En Mardi le neuf Octobre, il y a eu une compétition de manger dans la Floride du Sud. Les participants n’ont dû pas
manger des hot-dogs ou des gâteaux, mais ils ont dû manger des cafards. Le gagnant, qui a gagné un python, est mort peu de temps après sa victoire. Les médecins ne savent pas quelle est la cause de la mort, mais comme les autres participants ne sont pas malades, les médecins croient que les cafards ne sont pas la cause. L’organisateur de la compétition n’est pas dans le pétrin parce que les participants devaient signer une renonciation pour joindre.

For those who know French.. is it okayish when looking at the grammar? because I suck at all the tenses and if no-one responds well then no-one does and I’ll just ask my teacher to check it ^^!

Anyways! I’m off to bed \o/

Que ta nuit soit belle et remplie de douceur,

Much Luv et des gros bisous

To Phonology or not to Phonology

One of the courses for me this year is Approaches to Diversity. Every week we get a little taste from another field of Linguistics! In our first week we had Sociolinguistics by the wonderful Prof. Ingrid Tieken, which was followed by Computational Linguistics (or, well, the name on the syllabus was complexity) introduced to us newbies by Dr. Cremers (another awesome human being). Last week, we had a course on Language Contact by two teachers who both have Maarten as their first name!

This week.. We are introduced (or, reintroduced) to Phonology, the study of sound systems. And all of a sudden, I missed my old Linguistics classes in my English Bachelor at Leiden University (where I am now doing my Masters as well). While the professor, Marc van Oosterdorp, was off rambling (as professors and teacher or anyone that is somewhat older than 30/40 tends to do), I was thinking of Star Wars again.

But then again, when do I not think about the awesomeness that is the Force. The professor was talking about the battling forces in our head trying to determine between faithfulness and markedness. For those that don’t know what this means, look it up ^^.

Nah, Faitfulness is when you try to speak to the underlying form as much as possible and thus, enunciate as clearly as possible (well it is more than that but this is sufficient, I think). Marknedness is when we deviate from that faithfulness like devoicing a consonant that was voiced which is the case in Dutch when a word ends in a d. In English, this is not the case (or well there is final devoicing but not as much as there is in Dutch that it actually sounds like a /t/). In other words, the English are pretty faithful!

But to get back to my Star Wars thoughts, while the professor was talking about forces I wrote down: “The force is strong when speaking to your mom”. Oh! How I love assonance! As for an explanation to this quote, When we talk to people we feel comfortable with, we let our guard down in terms of pronunciation. We get lazy and start doing phonology.

So for those haters that are all: I hate phonology!

Too bad for you! ‘Cause you’re doin’ it evry day!

Luv.

May the Forces of Phonology guide you.

\o

Sup.

Only made this for a course I am taking in my Linguistics Research Master (uhu, fancy). Might as well go with the flow and write whatever you peeps are probably not interested to know :D!

(It rhymes, therefore it is true.)

Enjoy or not!

You have been granted a choice.

Luv.