Education in America

[thebigcheese]

Wow. Very cool, Katya! Linguistics actually sounds like an interesting field. Are you the patron saint of languages too?

Fun times! And I should say that you caught several adverbs I missed in my first reading, so I definitely had the advantage of making you go first. Now I will probably dream of adverbs, tonight.

I think I was dreaming of adverbs last night. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I read through that dumb paragraph to catch all of those...but hey, at least I learned something!

[Tao]

... we were encouraged to find bolder ways of emphasizing our points (stronger verbs) instead of just saying that something is "really really ridiculously" whatever...

My mother is an English major and one of her English professors taught that whenever you are tempted to use the word 'really' to instead use 'damn'.

Was this at BYU? I've heard the same story from someone else.

Nope, it was at a small college in western Nebraska. The correlation makes me wonder if there isn't a central individual whom they were both cribbing off of. (Odds of this NE professor ever being at BYU: slim-to-none)

[C is for]

It's possible.

[Katya]

Wow. Very cool, Katya! Linguistics actually sounds like an interesting field.

I find it fabulously interesting and would love to go on for an MA.

Are you the patron saint of languages too?

Ummm, yes! I'm the patron saint of everything! (Especially humility.)

Fun times! And I should say that you caught several adverbs I missed in my first reading, so I definitely had the advantage of making you go first. Now I will probably dream of adverbs, tonight.

I think I was dreaming of adverbs last night. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I read through that dumb paragraph to catch all of those...but hey, at least I learned something!

No joke. I know that paragraph way too well, now.

[Katya]

I can't believe you just said "spudly" on a public forum! [gasp!] I am soooooo offended.

I apologize. I should at least have written it "sp*dly." Or maybe referred to it as "the S-P word."

[Marduk]

"the S-P word" is a show on lifetime, I believe. It follows a farming family that migrated to Idaho from California and is discriminated against for all their "fancy new-fangled farmin' techniques" and "potty mouth" (mostly use of the S-P word.)

Katya, I apologize, I missed your point. You say that your point was to suggest that the average native speaker of any language is inferior at analysis of that native language, whereas I took your point to mean the overall analysis in any language is more difficult due to not being standardized. The first one is certainly much more tenable than the latter.

[Katya]

. . . whereas I took your point to mean the overall analysis in any language is more difficult due to not being standardized.

No, certainly not. Although it presents an interesting question of whether certain types of analysis would be easier in languages that are highly inflected. I.e., if you speak a language where adjectives agree with the nouns they modify, it's going to be pretty easy to pick out adjectives, generally. (I had a professor in college who was a native Dutch speaker and he used to say he had a hard time reading English when he was tired because he couldn't pick out the verbs.)