So I guess I'll start off by introducing myself, though the only people who are likely to read this blog are people I already know. My name's Aaron, I'm from San Francisco, California, and I'm currently working on my MA in linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I'm a Bahá'í by religion, and did my year of service in La Paz, Bolivia, from July 2006 to July 2007.
As far as linguistics goes, my interests are firmly in the anthropological side. I'm primarily interested in historical linguistics, especially language contact, and in endangered language revitalization, which I plan to make a career of. What I am not interested in is theory, though I have adopted the Functionalist/Cognitive approach over the Formalist/Movement-Based/Chomskyan approach. Seriously, though, I find questions of (psycholinguistic) theory generally tedious and uncompelling, especially compared to my real passion for historical reconstruction, classification, and language contact phenomena. If I could get away with it, I'd be content with merely collecting the data, leaving others to interpret how it contributes to our Theory of Language, but apparently that's unacceptable - at least for a master's student.
Anyway, I know a lot of linguists are irked by the public perception that a linguist is someone who "knows lots of languages", but I in fact pride myself on being a polyglot, since it's made so many aspects of my life (not the least of which my linguistic work) easier. I am a native speaker of English, and speak Spanish at very close to native fluency. In descending order of competence I also speak Italian, German, Arabic, Portuguese, and French. I'm currently learning Navajo, and I'm familiar with Latin, Dutch, and Aymara. I would like to learn Mandarin, Persian, and Quechua as well.
I intend for this blog to focus mostly on linguistics, but I'll have commentary on history, current events, religion, and other topics as well. I'll try to update it at least once a week, maybe twice, so check back if you're at all interested in anything I end up rambling on about. Finally, I'm also an amateur SF (speculative fiction) writer, so if you like soft science fiction, historical fiction, and alternate history fiction, I'll have some of my shorter work on here at some point too.
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3 comments:
I look forward to reading your posts! At some point you will have to explain to me again, what is the difference between the Functionalist/Cognitive approach over the Formalist/Movement-Based/Chomskyan approach? I've already forgotten.
I also applaud your interest in applying your skills to endangered language preservation. To me, theory is only as good as the good it can do in the world.
If your interested, check out my blog, it contains a lot of random stuff though lately mainly creative writing endeavors and essays. the address is
emmanuel9.blogspot.com
Yeah, I'll elaborate some soon about the differences in the two approaches, but that's covering quite a lot of ground, so if you're really interested I can direct you to some books on the topic.
I completely agree about practicality, which is probably why theoretical discussions just seem tedious to me - if we're not actually going to do anything with theory, other than elaborate more theory, then what's the point?
I'll check out your blog, too. Shall I link to it?
I'd be open to reading a book about the difference between the two approaches, as long as it isn't too long or complicated, I am a layman you know. Feel free to link to my blog if you'd like, its up to you.
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