"Icelandic is a very exoskeletal language -- you can see everything in Icelandic." 
-- Prof. Elizabeth Cowper, Syntactic Theory Lecture

Remember how I kept muttering about endocytose being a back-formation from endocytosis? Well, dictionary.com has confirmed my suspicion.

I'm going to be honest, I'm pretty ecstatic about having spotted this one. I have a soft spot for back-formation -- it's such an interesting process.

You see, we use this verb often; and everytime I've heard it, I've thought to myself  "that is one beautiful back-formation" and I've felt myself deriving it each time I've said it -- it's breathtaking.




Note, this derivation first took place before I was born, so I likely didn't produce it de novo but, as I said, I feel myself taking 'endocytosis' and clipping it whenever I use the verb, and that was what first made me suspect that it was a back-formation.

When I was in grade ten, I was taking a beginner dance class as one of my credits (art school, right). The strange thing about this class was that it included many girls I had never met before -- this turned out to be a result of their tendency to take applied level classes (while I took academic). Possibly they planned to attend college, but I was given the impression that it was a strategy for avoiding difficult homework. (Not that they were lazier than I was -- I wasn't really into homework either ... I just wasn't willing to base on laziness decisions that would affect my future quite so drastically).

Anyway. These girls spoke differently from how I spoke. They had slang words and phrases that I was unfamiliar with (and not terribly fond of). One such word was custy, an adjective meaning 'gross, unlikeable' -- often used when they were talking about women they had distaste for. When it was used as a noun, it would undergo zero derivation: custy, (pl. custies) -- here it was used slightly differently, between friends ("Let's get going, custies.")

My friend Hendrik hypothesized its origin -- disgust. Often, notice, pronounced /dɪˈskʌst/ (di-skuhst): they were clipping the word and endowing it with a different derivation pattern.

lex. category	standard eng.	vernacular
v.	disgust	---
adj.	disgusting	custy
noun.	---	custy

They were also keeping the devoiced velar stop /k/, not reverting to the original /g/ which had become devoiced as a condition of its environment (after the /s/).

Which brings me to my next observation -- I didn't think about it much at the time, but the gust part of disgust is associated with taste, enjoyment, gusto. Strange that it should have come so far from that meaning.

"... on the basis of this information, we can actually figure out how genes are organized in the genome, and we can do this simply by letting organisms do what they like to do, which is to mate ... And then what we like to do, which is to use simple genetic knowledge -- we can actually map a genome, and create a road map for constructing an organism."

--- the brilliant Malcolm Campbell in lecture.

My littlest sister A. is reading a novel about vampires. She seems to be enjoying it - not generally one to read avidly, she has devoured 200 pages since Christmas. The book is Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. It is, apparently, a best seller, much acclaimed, etc. etc. and there is a movie being made from it, starring many good-looking thespians. I suppose I shouldn't criticize anything that gets her reading - but you just know I'm about to.

By A.'s age I had read Interview with the Vampire, if not a few other Vampire Chronicles as well (and went on to read 10/12, mostly during high school). Having a predisposition towards books featuring vampires, I did, on Christmas day, glance through the book A. is now mired in. Here is what I encountered in the second paragraph:

"I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me."

This paragraph stirred three urges in me:

1. Shut the book. (I did)
2. Write a better vampire novel.
3. Figure out exactly what stirred urges 1. and 2.


3. ( Wherein I deliberate over petty details and ultimately read too deeply into this poor sentence )

2. ( Wherein I explain this urge a little more thoroughly  )

1. ( Wherein I conclude )

- the roman alphabet
- metric
- the Milky Way
- public school? (flawed but beneficial)
- circulatory, nervous etc. (ie. Major Organ)

semantics questions how a person can understand the meaning of a sentence which he or she has never heard before. this is much different from how one understands words, as you must memorize their meanings (though the process divining their meanings from context is worth a look, I think).
"Human beings constantly mistake the symbol for the thing with the thing itself," professor hallman explained to us. "whatever the word squirrel means, it is not that meaning." since in semantics we study this relationship between symbol and thing, it is important that we do not make this mistake.
one exception to this is "word". "word" is exactly what it says it is. or, in the notation we were taught, [[word]]=word - as opposed to word as in [[lick]]=lick. professor hallman used a word in bold to symbolize the actual object or event, lick for example. which is amusing, because he is still using a word to symbolize the thing. [[lick]] means "the denotation of lick". (he actually used lick as an example, which wasn't so interesting until he seemed slightly embarrassed about his choice and said "I don't know why I wrote that." makes you wonder.)
I found further amusment in statements like "we use the word denotation to mean 'means'." This is the way it goes, though, when one uses language to describe language. It feels silly. I feel like we should be drawing pictures or doing EEG scans, not muddling ourselves up by using what we study as we study it.
negative sentences were also a point of interest. hallman often gets caught up in the finer details of negative sentences (as he did with "that particular absence of cat wore a hat" for "no cat wore a hat") Yesterday it was "there is a relationship between moritz and the sandwich, but is it not an eating relationship" for "moritz did not eat the sandwich". these elaboration seem to compose a great portion of the  lecture.

I at some point hope to develop poetry which is "informed" by linguistics, but I'm still gathering knowledge.

last night I had my first linguistics lecture of the new year. this unit we will study syntax - "the science of grammar".

syntacticians are primarily concerned with what makes one sequence of words grammatical and another sequence of words simply gibberish. hallman explained that it is not meaninglessness that indicates non-grammaticality, but non-grammaticality which causes a sentence to be uninterpretable. in some cases a sentence can me meaningful yet non grammatical (eg. "which book did she criticize the person who wrote?"). the opposite can also be true, in the case of noam chomsky's 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously'. I had to bite my tongue when hallman stated that it was impossible to be both green and colourless. interestingly enough, wikipedia has a small discussion on this, giving three alternated phrasings of this sentence:

"nondescript, immature ideas have violent nightmares"
"Newly formed, bland ideas are unexpressible in an infuriating way"
"unimaginative environmentalist ideas are unpopular"

we also encountered "three travelers from syria wore a hat", which is perfectly grammatical but slightly funny. hallman also became sidetracked discussing the sentence "no cat wore a hat" & whether or not "no cat" is a noun phrase. ("that particular absence of cat wore a hat" & "that particular emptiness which is catlike wore a hat"). there was a lot of hat wearing (or not wearing) going on.


during this class, poetry was brought up for the first time (unless you count the first lecture when hallman included "a course in poetics" in a list of things which lin100 is not). the question concerned poetic license, and the answer wasn't all that interesting; I simply enjoyed the mention of poetry because I do spend most of the two hours in lecture thinking about poetic possibility.

I just caught myself going through, aloud, the various ways one might inquire "should there be a double bond there?" that could denote different meanings. eg.
"should there be a double bond there?" , "should there be a double bond there?" "should there be a double bond there?" etc.

though that last one came close to what I was looking for, it was a little bit ambiguous.

I settle instead upon "shouldn't there be a double bond there?"


And yes! Upon referencing the textbook, there should  be a double bond there! Good call.

"while the steering gear box valve rack guide screw is a type of screw, it is not a screw for the steering gear box valve rack guide." -Peter Hallman, Lin100

Linguistics is the kind of class which includes frequent moments of enlightenment. The definition of a word, though, was disappointing, to me:
"A stress domain which is capeable of standing alone and contains only one primary stress."
I just feel like a word is so much more - but I forget myself. This is science, after all. And I am a scientist.

The highlight of last week's class came when a question was asked about inflectional affixes in old English, and Peter Hallman, saying he "had to read the entire old-english canon at some point in [his] academic career" tried his best to answer and then inquired were "there any ond-english specialists here." In response to the ensuing laughter, he said "You'd be surprised. They're around."
I suppose this was interesting to me because it is so far removed from my other studies. I can garentee that there are no old-english majors lurking in con hall during biology, organisms in their environment or sitting up on the balcony in the medical science aud. during organic chemistry. We're all too young. There are only young people in the life sciences. We haven't had time to accumulate specialties, let alone old-english specialties. It's so obscure, and I have not an inkling what becoming an old english major would entail, making it a mysterious concept. I know what it means to study life science. There is nothing mysterious about it.

When the class drew to a close people began packing up their bags & Hallman looked at the clock "Oh, " he said. "I thought I had thirty seconds left, but I don't."

this is mostly for a. rawlings, but I decided it warranted an entry.

the word:

(seen here spelled phonetically, as in the text)
belongs to a tonal language, Sarcee (you'll have too look it up, I don't know anything about it).

Depending on what tone it is given, it can have three different meanings:

high - moth

middle - snare

low - sleep

"Who did you admire the person who sat next to?"


Consider that sentence. Carefully. Professor Peter Hallman came up with it as an example as what you cannot say. He means you actually can't (as opposed to splitting your infinitives, which is something you can do). "and I'll bet no one had to tell you that you couldn't say that," he added.
But read the sentence again. Whoa. My brain just has this block up and I can't quite decipher what exactly is being asked. Even though I know because he told us.

So, Intro. to Gen. Linguistics is going to be a blast. It is going to be so awesome. The professor started off by explaining what a language is. "No man invented language," he said. "Language is a naturally occurring object like trees and tectonic plates and chemical elements." He's a funny man, when it comes down to it. It's partially the way he speaks. He emphasizes more words in a given sentence than actually need emphasis.

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As for family pictures, do you remember when I recounted our weekend of excess in bellville?
Well, emilystar has at last posted the pictures that she took that weekend, and they are so awesome that you simply must have a look.