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Today, in classes	Aug. 4th, 2009 @ 12:28 pm

Part One: :lol:

Note: I only ever use "lol" ironically.

Dealing with acoustic analysis of sounds, we have a vowel space chart on which to place a sound.

1) The axes are labelled wrong.

2) The lecturer tells us to place a sound of 579Hz on an axis labelled 0.3 - 0.6 - the chart does not actually indicate that it's labelled in kHz.

3) The chart doesn't match what we know at all. After we raise this as a question, the lecturer blinks a bit and then realises what we mean. "I'm so used to using this..." None of us can see how this data relates to our understanding of vowel articulation at all

Finally he just holds up his hands and says: "Wait. Just wait. We'll find another vowel, and plot that on here, and then you can start to see..."

His wry comment: "So much for the concrete approach."

It does start to make more sense, at least for me; some of the rest of the class struggle because they don't seem to know the IPA chart very well.

Part Two: Grow Up

Start of the lecture in Language Learning and Applied Linguistics. Three students next to me are chatting. I ask politely that they be quiet, as I'm trying to hear the lecture. They grow quieter, but snigger at me, and whisper and giggle for several minutes more.

This is university, kids. If you don't intend to shut the fuck up at lectures, don't come. Nobody's checking attendance, nobody cares if you're not here, but the rest of us will be irritated if you're drowning out the lecturer.

Part Three: Where Is My Damn Wi-Fi

SNAP access continues to be borderline at best in ALR6 and in FOX LT. It's annoying. But after this lecture I've got a couple of hours to kill, so I'm going to go find somewhere with better access while I do some work on my essay, which I need to get finished as soon as I can - it'll be a relief to get that done, for a range of reasons (including being able to devote unfettered obsession to linguistics for the semester). My basic plan involves maintaining linguistics at minimum levels to avoid falling behind for this week while I write my essay, by which point I'll also start to have enough data to be able to do real analysis of my Field Linguistics data, anyway.

We're discussing prototype theory for categories; someone suggested "penguin" as an exemplar of "bird", which is unusual. I wonder if it has a correlation with geekiness - that student has a netbook running Linux...

Of course, prototype theory actually works pretty well, too, for Chas's contention that Border Collies are the best and most "real" dogs.

I'm only vaguely paying attention in Applied Linguistics, still, because language acquisition is something I've looked at quite a bit. The content here isn't that new to me.

Hee, talking about how children can infer meaning incorrectly from context. My family has a story of this, from the time I, aged about two, watched my mother put her coffee down on her rollykit and declared: "Look! Mummy is using her rollykit as a radio!"

Because we had an ancient radio - about a foot and a half high, made of wood - that was used as a side-table of sorts. The only side-table in the house, really; it was positioned between my parents' chairs and they put their drinks on it. Therefore, apparently, "thing you put drinks on" was "radio" in my forming lexicon.

Another interesting familial anecdata point on child language acquisition: my older sister did not go through a babbling stage. She was a quiet baby. I babbled early and a lot.

I was speaking in complete sentences by my first birthday; my sister spoke later, and didn't speak clearly until she was about three. Only my parents could understand what she was saying, where I could talk even with strangers pretty much from the get-go.

Babbling is believed to the stage where the child is learning to articulate sounds. Articulation is tricky; by babbling, the child's brain learns to articulate consistently through practice and repetition. My sister apparently struggled with this, whereas I had no trouble at all.

I'm also, to this day, good at articulating unusual-to-English sounds. My sister to this day cannot roll her 'r's despite having spent the first four years of her life in a linguistic environment where doing this was common. I was 18 months old when we left, but I can roll mine - which is handy, because there's a sound in Sharchopka which appears to be a voiced alveolar trill simultaneously with a uvular fricative - the French "r" Edith Piaf made famous on its own - and I can pronounce that, which, as far as I can tell, makes me unique amongst my classmates.

My tongue vibrates in complex ways.