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.