I’m currently in the lab scanning a chapter of Plains Cree Morphosyntax by Amy Dahlstrom. I have to return the book today, but I still need the chapter for my Typology paper. Luckily, my scanning work for JSTOR trained me to be pretty effective at doing something else while scanning books.
For my final paper in Typology, I’m looking at obviation in North American languages. Each class member picked a language to look at in terms of word order, agreement and transitivity. For better or worse, I picked Plains Cree because I wasn’t allowed to work with a language that I had worked on before. I wanted to stay within Algonquian in an attempt to only work within one language family for the semester.
Like many linguists, I’ve always been good at picking up languages. Verbs have tended to give me a little trouble though, so the Algonquian languages frustrate, amaze and intrigue me. Instead of making me want to work on something easier, the frustration just makes me all the more determined to figure things out. Luckily, in addition to the books, I have Howard to help me if I get really stuck. He doesn’t know much about the linguistic aspect of his language, but he’s so passionate about the spirit of Anishinaabemowin. And he’s such a joker. There’s nothing like learning how to say things like “leave me alone, I have a hangover!”, or understanding what he usually means when he says “miishkons” to brighten your outlook on the language. Plus, it’s the language of my home as well. I’m of mostly German heritage, but my home is Northern Michigan.
(almost halfway done scanning!)
I can’t wait for this book to be returned. Not because I don’t like it, but because of where it’s returning to. I did some work at the Alaska Native Languages Center in the early Fall, and this book happens to have come all the way from the Fairbanks Library. I’ve hidden a note inside for one of my friends up there to find. I hope that it won’t fall out in transit.
Work on my thesis has been painfully slow. With all the traveling I’ve been doing, I’ve had a hard time keeping up with my three classes this semester, let alone working on my project. I did take a little time on one of the flights this past weekend to look through one of the books I have. I’ve almost finished with Brent Berlin’s seminal paper on folk taxonomies, and it’s really exciting to see some of the principles playing out in the names.
The most obvious one so far has been this morpheme ‘min’ or ‘miin’ that shows up in pretty much all of the fruit names. ‘min’ or ‘miin’ by itself just means blueberry, but you get other fruits like ‘mishiimin’ (raspberry) ‘demin’ or ‘odemin’ (strawberry), and even ‘mishiimin’ (apple). My favorite revelation on the plane ride was that the word for wine [zhomnabo-unsure of spelling, I've just heard it] probably a reduction of [zhomnamin] (grape) and [waabo] (water). The next question for Howard would be what the word for ‘grape juice’ would be.
According to a creation myth I found, the Creator divided up the world into flowers, trees, vegetables, and grasses (I should double check on ‘grasses’). I’ve been looking through the book seeing if the generic word for tree [tik] shows up in many tree names. I may have to look a little deeper phonologically with that one though because the plural sounds a bit different [tegwok]. At any rate, I look forward to resuming that project when I’m done for the semester.
The conference in Hawai’i inspired me to look further into the use someone like me (with a biology background) can be to the discipline. I may look into the different resources out there for gathering and identifying plants in the field. I may try to pull in some of my botany friends in on that one.
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As far as decisions for grad school go, I think I’m leaning towards one school finally. I visited Oregon this past weekend and talked to a lot of students. I’m won’t give away too much either way right now. I’m very glad I’ve had the opportunity to visit Oregon and UCSB. I’ve enjoyed meeting the professors and students at both places and I look forward to seeing them again at conferences and perhaps even working with them in the future.