Linguistics and a Word Fest

Hi All!

Yesterday I dove into my homework for my classes. Because I am pretty much a geek, I actually LIKE doing homework. It is interesting to me (unless it is just worthless "busy work") and I enjoy the challenge of learning something new. Even presentations are a challenge as I attempt (normally successfully) to work everything I know and/or have learned into the required time frame and format.

My homework last night involved reading. One chapter in the Deaf Culture book and one chapter in "the green book." The Deaf Culture book was fine. In fact, it was pretty enjoyable since the book is research but is presented in a narrative style which makes the material easy to read and interesting. I whipped through that chapter and half of the next in no time at all.

The "green book," however, is a different story. The "green book" is a book of grammar and history of ASL. Chapter one is entitled "What is Language?" Doesn't that sound exciting? Even that title didn't deter me in my mission to read the chapter. But then I hit the content . . .

The entire chapter is 13 pages long and I have gotten through 5 of those pages. Each page is a dense collection of technical linguistic terms explaining the characteristics of language. English and various other languages including German, Latin, Russian, and Mandarin are compared and contrasted with ASL for each of the characteristics.

Doesn't that sound like fun? I stopped when I hit the characteristic that a language must have relatively arbitrary symbols. My mind just couldn't take it anymore!

I will read on later today. Or maybe tomorrow. . .

All of this linguistic reading led to a fun "word fest" with my mother last night. I called her to tell her about my "fun" reading and we ended up brainstorming words. The favorites turned out to be pejorative and mollycoddle. I thought they were neat! It was also a lot of fun just finding different words in the dictionary (the new electronic one Hubby got my for Christmas) and the thesaurus (also on the electronic dictionary). I do have to wonder though - do other people do this kind of stuff?

What is YOUR favorite word?

Trisha

Voice Update: Pretty good. Speech yesterday went well. Susan confirmed that my throat was a bit "crunchy" and managed to get in there and work a lot of it out in a pretty brief massage. She said that my voice was doing pretty well considering that I was sick last week and am dealing with allergy sinus drainage and sneezing, etc. I am to continue my routine of exercises and massage.