school: languages,
study abroad, research, quotes...
I'm currently a graduate student in the
Ph.D program in Linguistics at
the University of Pennsylvania (no,
not Penn State). I did my undergraduate education (major in Linguistics,
minor in Ancient Greek) at the University
of California, Berkeley - Go Bears! - and before that I was, just like
Kevin Costner, a Villa Park High School Spartan. Oh, and there was also
UC Irvine, where I took my first Greek
class (Ancient Greek, of course).
So you're a linguist, huh?
Well, how many languages do you speak? Everyone asks that. The answer is, of course, we don't speak them, we only study them. We pick at tiny pieces of them and make generalizations. One that I especially like to pick at is Basque, which is spoken by not quite one million people in and around the Pyrenees mountains of northeastern Spain and southwestern France. Other languages I've studied at some point are Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Icelandic, Medieval Welsh, Uighur and Chinese (Mandarin). Most of these are dead anyway, so noone speaks them, not even me.
Study Abroad
After I graduated from college, I spent a year in the Basque Country to learn Basque and Spanish. What I actually did was travel around alot, and if you want to read about it, check out the travel section of my web page. Last summer (1998) I went to Italy to study Italian and take art classes. The summer of 1997 I went to southwestern France (Pau) to learn French. Both times I ended up doing alot more traveling. In France I was enrolled through the University Studies Abroad Consortium which is a very good program and I recommend it. The Italian Studies Summer Institute in Florence is also a really good program, but being sponsored by an Ivy League university, it's rather expensive.
Research Interests:
Good question. I was a budding Indo-Europeanist at Berkeley, but that has changed (don't spend a year in the Basque Country if you're planning on being an Indo-Europeanist). Right now I'm interested in what happens when you put people speaking different languages on the same piece of land. Sometimes you get some pretty weird stuff going on. My master's thesis is on code-switching, which is when people who speak more than one language use both of them at the same time.
Interesting quotes:
Know an interesting quote or snippet of pseudo-English? Send me email! Here's some of the stuff I've seen lying around:
"There are no bones in ice cream." - profound statement of the day
"Stupid girl I like her that way." - mug decoration from Taiwan
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." - U2 song
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."
- some Bloom County strip (remember them?)
"As cheap as life is, corpses are worth even less." - Immortality Inc.
"Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth..."