![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dammit, brain
Sep. 2nd, 2009 12:58 amSometimes, I wonder if linguistics is what I want to do. Am I making the right choice? Will I regret this later? I ask myself. (tbf, this has more to do to with my inability to let any moment for self-doubt self-reflection pass than anything else.)
And then I spend a couple hours reading a book** about artificial languages, and then a few hours more digging through the citations*, and I go, yeah, okay, this is what I want.
*Look, they were talking about native speakers of Esperanto. Native speakers! of an artificial language! I spent much of the next few chapters wondering about how that worked and whether the native speakers spoke differently than non-native speakers, and what parts of speech changed, and whether it was similar to the process of creolization of a pidgin (except it's creolization of a language!), and when I saw there were citations I pulled up JSTOR and LLBA so fast, you have no idea.
**The book is called "In the Land of Invented Languages", by Arika Okrent, and I'd tell you it was delightful, but I'm pretty sure I'd say any book on this topic was delightful even if it were in fact terrible. Not that this book is, I think, but I will admit that I am in a bad place to judge its broader appeal. (I will say that I found its tone very refreshing, in light of recent events - Okrent approaches some rather offbeat subcultures and treats them with respect and interest, to the point of making friends, going to conlang conferences, and learning good chunks of Klingon and Esperanto. protip: if you want to do social science and market your book to the general public, this is how you should do it. koff koff.)
And then I spend a couple hours reading a book** about artificial languages, and then a few hours more digging through the citations*, and I go, yeah, okay, this is what I want.
*Look, they were talking about native speakers of Esperanto. Native speakers! of an artificial language! I spent much of the next few chapters wondering about how that worked and whether the native speakers spoke differently than non-native speakers, and what parts of speech changed, and whether it was similar to the process of creolization of a pidgin (except it's creolization of a language!), and when I saw there were citations I pulled up JSTOR and LLBA so fast, you have no idea.
**The book is called "In the Land of Invented Languages", by Arika Okrent, and I'd tell you it was delightful, but I'm pretty sure I'd say any book on this topic was delightful even if it were in fact terrible. Not that this book is, I think, but I will admit that I am in a bad place to judge its broader appeal. (I will say that I found its tone very refreshing, in light of recent events - Okrent approaches some rather offbeat subcultures and treats them with respect and interest, to the point of making friends, going to conlang conferences, and learning good chunks of Klingon and Esperanto. protip: if you want to do social science and market your book to the general public, this is how you should do it. koff koff.)