So here I sit in my little verandah, enjoying a fan, a cup of tea and some no-bake chocolate oatmeal "cookies", with some good music, reading some good foodie blogs. Not a rumble of a generator or a house-mate in sight :) Not that it's a terrible thing to live with people, but, well, it has been... um... well... longer than I can remember since I've been home in the evening by myself. It's nice to be able to listen to music without wondering if I'm bothering anyone, and stick my stinky feet up on our little wicker couch without worrying about offending anyone. Really nice and peaceful tonight. I got to do my little happy dance for the generator this evening, because at 7:51pm, the city power roared to life!
So all in all, these little things are making me happy tonight.
I also had a surprisingly good day. There is a visiting linguist here from a university which is not in this country, and he is studying one of the languages in this country. Speakers of this language have organized themselves into a Language Development Association, and organized themselves to bring this linguist here to give a few lectures and work with them on looking for some ways to improve the writing system. J and I were invited from our organization, and I had in mind to just go for the opening this morning, just to say we'd been there, done that, since we were invited, after all. But in fact, once this linguist started talking, I found myself strangely engaged in the day! He had a lot of really interesting things to say, in general, about morphophonemic orthographies (as that's what he's proposing for this particular language) and gave a lot of interesting examples and data from languages such as Hebrew and Japanese. And he spoke mainly from a readabilty point of view - trying to convince the gathered crowd that morphophonemics can help speakers of this language read more fluently.
He built a very good case, and I think he's convinced me. He also had a lot of discussion in his presentation about the differences between spoken and written language and all that sort of thing. Really good stuff. I felt like I was back in University again, which was a really nice change of pace from some of the other crazy stuff that's been going on around here lately.
However, I am not the one he's gotta convince of the beauty of a morphophonemic orthography! He had a tough crowd there today, and he was talking in some serious linguistic terms. I'm not sure everyone in the room was keeping up with him, either. Near the end of the day, there was more of a discussion of the specifics of his proposal, and phew, man, tough crowd. There was some seriously heated debate! And, well, quite frankly, this linguist has his opinions and is pretty set in his opinions, so he was being pretty tough right back to these big guys from this language community. It was interesting to watch, to say the least....
Anyway, tomorrow there will be more of the same, so I think I will go back for another round. It's the final day of the workshop with this linguist, so we'll see if they make any progress. At the very least, the lunch and snacks were pretty good, so at the very least, I'll get a bit of a good snack out of the deal!
So all in all, these little things are making me happy tonight.
I also had a surprisingly good day. There is a visiting linguist here from a university which is not in this country, and he is studying one of the languages in this country. Speakers of this language have organized themselves into a Language Development Association, and organized themselves to bring this linguist here to give a few lectures and work with them on looking for some ways to improve the writing system. J and I were invited from our organization, and I had in mind to just go for the opening this morning, just to say we'd been there, done that, since we were invited, after all. But in fact, once this linguist started talking, I found myself strangely engaged in the day! He had a lot of really interesting things to say, in general, about morphophonemic orthographies (as that's what he's proposing for this particular language) and gave a lot of interesting examples and data from languages such as Hebrew and Japanese. And he spoke mainly from a readabilty point of view - trying to convince the gathered crowd that morphophonemics can help speakers of this language read more fluently.
He built a very good case, and I think he's convinced me. He also had a lot of discussion in his presentation about the differences between spoken and written language and all that sort of thing. Really good stuff. I felt like I was back in University again, which was a really nice change of pace from some of the other crazy stuff that's been going on around here lately.
However, I am not the one he's gotta convince of the beauty of a morphophonemic orthography! He had a tough crowd there today, and he was talking in some serious linguistic terms. I'm not sure everyone in the room was keeping up with him, either. Near the end of the day, there was more of a discussion of the specifics of his proposal, and phew, man, tough crowd. There was some seriously heated debate! And, well, quite frankly, this linguist has his opinions and is pretty set in his opinions, so he was being pretty tough right back to these big guys from this language community. It was interesting to watch, to say the least....
Anyway, tomorrow there will be more of the same, so I think I will go back for another round. It's the final day of the workshop with this linguist, so we'll see if they make any progress. At the very least, the lunch and snacks were pretty good, so at the very least, I'll get a bit of a good snack out of the deal!
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