What's in a name?

I’ve written many articles and papers with this title, the best of which was a linguistics paper about American English dialects.  But this post will discuss the name of “linguist.”

I brought this up in my previous post, how I would someday like to attain the title “linguist.”  Well…

Sorry, I’m going to have to back up a bit.  Beginning again.  This was the first week of school.  Monday and Wednesday are dedicated to my education major.  I’m in a second grade classroom in the morning doing student teaching type things.  The afternoon is occupied with first my “Diversity and Descrimination in the United States” course and then “Social Studies Education in Elementary Schools” (Monday) or “Elementary Multilingual Education” (Wednesday).  Tuesday and Thursday are my linguistics days.  I start with “English Grammar and Syntax” (requirement for minor.  a prerequisite my counterparts took years ago), then “Languages in Contact.”  Tuesdays I follow these with “Morphology” and then work with my Mayans on the dictionary.

SO! On Tuesday I was in my English Grammar class and my professor asked a question, probably something about “who likes grammar?”  Now, truthfully, readers, how many of you like grammar?  Well, I raised my hand.  My professor, Prof JA (one of my favourite people, not to mention professor in the world) said “Of course, the linguist does.”

Did you catch that!?  I got called a LINGUIST!  By a linguist, no less, which gives it credibility!
That’s not the only reason I’m excited.  Today the same professor approached me before class and began discussing her current research project with me (about knitting communities) and said that they have a teeny tiny bit of money to hire a student and would I be interested?  YES!  OF COURSE!  So now I have TWO (count them, TWO!) linguistics projects!  I get to work with BOTH of my beloved ling professors (Prof JA and Prof JG) and do what I love!  (The upside of Prof JA’s project, I do also get paid.  Lovely!)

Well, I have to get back to paying attention to class.  More later.  I have much more to say.  But I had to share my excitement!

(Originally published on another of my blogs: http://linguist.tumblr.com)

Background!

I’m a student of linguistics, hoping to one day earn the full title LINGUIST.  At present, I’m part of a team documenting a Mayan language; we’re creating a click-and-hear dictionary online.

Tonight was one of our meetings.  That “our” means me and my Mayans (N, C, & D).  Sometimes we’re joined by a fellow ling-nut, Jax.  Tonight, our Prof JG also joined us.  (Next week our semester starts, at which point it will be the above group and possibly two more, KayL & Elsie.)

Last week, we stumbled across /blue/ in the dictionary.  When I pulled up the entry, my Mayans started talking amongst each other in Spanish (I get about every tenth word) and their Mayan language (which I get about every thirtieth word).  They asked if we could cover “blue” next week.  So today we started covering “blue.”  In actuality, we covered green and red and a bit of blue and black.

But what made it really fun was that Prof JG was there and we covered uvular fricatives and uvular trills.  We had a lot of laughs and it was excellent.

Well, that’s where we are up to this point.  This is going to be my journey through this semester while I take morphology and languages in contact.  It’s also going to track my personal project over the semester…me and my Mayans.

(Originally posted on another of my blogs: http://linguist.tumblr.com)