The odd morphology of remembering and forgetting

I realized that the verbs for forgetting and remembering have odd morphology.

oblīvīscor, ī, —, oblītus sum – to forget
—, —, meminī – to remember

That forgetting should be deponent doesn't surprise me given the origins of Latin's deponent. It is somewhat a folly that happens to you by you. Easily explainable with the stop at middle voice before heading off to deponent. But why on earth should the verb for remembering be odd? It's only perfect?

Yeah, I've seen the explanation in Gildersleeve's. I'm not sure I buy it 100%.

Anyway, just one of those I was in the shower realizations.

Utopia as a political attack

So this is the result of my discourse analysis class. It might be the best class I've ever taken. Don't get me wrong, the other classes in the program so far have been good and useful, but discourse analysis might be one step better than that. Better even than the Coastal Ecology of the Florida Keys class I took as an undergrad.

Of course it could just be that I had the chance to talk about Utopia.

More's Utopia as a political attack on Henry VIII of England by Peter Sipes

Discourse analysis

So I'm taking a DA class this semester.

I'll be honest: the formal linguistics stuff fascinates me. I'm only interested in the applied insofar as it relates to acquiring language. Particularly L2 and L3. But I've been taken by discourse analysis. The first thing is that it is hard. Not in the sense of hard science, but difficult hard. The reason is two-fold.

I'll get an example that is based off of what I'm doing. I'm fiddling with More's Utopia right now. The main angle I'm working on is that Utopia is a political attack on Henry VIII, which was not a safe thing to do. So the first trick is to show that it's a political work rather than religious. So I've done a frequency analysis of the vocabulary. I feel pretty confident that Utopia is political in nature. Why? I've compared vocabulary frequency of Cicero's de re publica against Utopia. A lot of the frequencies for critical words line up pretty nicely. Especially "publicus" and "magistratus". It's a nice sleight of hand trick. So now that I feel I've established Utopia as a political work, I want to show how More deals with Henry. Mostly I'm going to cast it as a politeness thing. By putting social distance between Utopia and the king, More increases his safety.

So as you can see, it requires a lot of clever work to make a good point. You can't screw around with sloppy thinking. Except that they do. By which I mean dragging in that old scheißkopf, Karl Marx. Marxism is a terrible political philosophy that put too many people on the wrong side of the dirt in the 20th century. If that weren't enough to discredit a philosopher, I don't know what would be. But yet I keep seeing his name dragged up as if he had something useful to say. And that just makes me angry. And this is the second class I've seen a book mention him, so it's not exactly accidental.

Anyway, I wish there were a less ugly philosophy to analyze some of this stuff from. Maybe we need a Misesian angle. I'd tell you how I'm the one to develop it, but I'm not.

Of articles and names

So in syntax class we've talked about how names in English don't (usually) get determiners and keep their usual sense.

*The Peter writes this blog.

We don't like that in English. Except for one person. Dwayne Johnson's persona: The Rock. How do I know? Wait.

Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?

I thought so. And since Peter means rock in Greek (ὁ Πέτρος), you can just call me the Rock when you see me. 

The nature of the lexicon

So last semester when I was as busy as you can get, I wrote a paper. I think it's kind of interesting. The idea here is that I'm looking to do my thesis on the nature of word frequency in people's heads. This paper is a bit of foundation for the differences between L1 and L2 speakers and their mental lexicons. This paper will probably be the back third of the literature review section.

Lexicon and automaticity by sipes23

Determiner in Latin

So we explored English determiners in syntax class last week. Dull dreary stuff, but completely necessary to the machinery of language. One of the rules in English is that you can't put two determiners onto one noun. That is

*this the cat

is no good. And it set me to thinking. Latin obviously has neither definite nor indefinite articles. But it does have demonstrative adjectives and other similar sorts of things. Which further set me to wondering whether Latin had a rule against two determiners on one noun. Some very cursory searches have led me to realize that

nullus ille

isn't an attested construction. But

ipse ille

is attested, though really uncommon. I'm wondering if I can fiddle with the results enough to see if the pronomial sorts of things aren't in complementary distribution.

Yet another thing to think about for future research.

Milestones in FLA: Modals

Yes, today Little Boy (2;11—22 days shy of his birthday) made a jump. Or at least the first time I heard him use it and made note of it. Today he made use of an English modal: could.

We were picking up Little Girl from school, and I asked him if he wanted to play at the playground. It was blustery and cold, so he said

I wish I could.

They grow up so fast. 

Summer's over

That's right. The fall semester started up this week. I'm taking two classes.

Sociolinguistics is the first one. It's going to be one of those mixed-feelings classes. On the one hand, it's going to be filled with cool stuff about how people use language in (sub)cultures. On the other, it's got a project which is geared toward those of us who are extroverts. I am not. (In case the blog title didn't give it away.)

The other is multiple language acquisition. Due to some academic acrimony from before my arrival at Northeastern, the linguistics department did not have a class in second language acquisition. Well, the prof figured a way around that problem. Second language is verboten? We make it multiple language. Problem solved. This class should tie in nicely with the vocabulary acquisition class I took over the summer.

Semantics don't apply to me

A dialog at home:

Little Girl (to Little Boy): You're a child.
Little Boy: I'm not a child, I'm a <his name>.

I've also heard this which kid substituted for child. There are two interesting things here. One, Little Boy seems to have figured out that kid and child refer to the same set of people—and that set does not include him. I'm not sure if ego-centrism plays into this situation or if it is some odd generalization problem with the word. The other thing I noticed is that he is "a <his name>". I wonder why he's using an indefinite article there.

eBook preview for Utopia

Since I knew you were dying to see it: here's a preview of the eBook for More's Utopia. Right now I'm charging $1.99 for the PDF, which strikes me as lame and necessary at the same time. Lame because paying for files sucks. Necessary so that I can get a handle on how much interest there is for this idea. All that said, I tried to set a pretty high preview percentage—30%, which is more than Scribd had it set at—so that you can get a pretty solid idea of what it is. And so that if you need it for research purposes or something, it's there for you. You can still get hardcopy at Amazon. But I'll tell you how to get a free copy below the preview.

Utopia by OpenSourceClassics

Ok, so if you're still reading, you want in on some sweet free book action. Here's the deal: first five people who live in a country served by Amazon (North America or Western Europe if memory serves), who e-mail me will get a copy to review. Here's the hitch: you've got to have a blog OR be willing to put your review on Amazon (and I'd really prefer that OR be and AND). You can get in touch with me via my profile which is somewhere on the right-hand side of the blog.