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I don’t have anything specific I want to write about, so I’m just going to start typing and see where I get. I can’t promise not to edit, though.
1) I got home this evening to find that Clementine, whom I had left in the kitchen instead of in her crate because I felt sorry for her (oh, the irony), had escaped the baby gate, gotten into my bedroom, and TORN THE PLACE APART. I seriously cannot see my floor for all of the clothes, yarn, scraps of toilet paper, fabric, bobbins, socks, beads…wow, I have too many crafting materials.
2) Two things encouraged me not to kill her: she didn’t actually destroy anything–she’s not a shredder, she just likes to carry my clothes around for a while–and she didn’t pee anywhere. Hooray for that.
3) I am coming to realize that I know Hebrew significantly less well than is acceptable. I am discovering this when it comes to using the Biblical Hebrew to build other languages/dialects (Aramaic, Rabbinic Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew are what I’m working on now) and I FAIL because I don’t actually understand the rules for vowel shifts or have the paradigms for anything other than the very basic verb forms memorized. You’d think if I could recognize forms I could reproduce them, but oh you would be wrong.
4) This means that I am going to have to spend the summer going back over the introductory grammar and learn it for reals this time. I swear I am going to do this.
4a) A troubling thought: I am becoming so used to the warm fuzzy feeling of being surrounded by people who care about the same fiddly things that I do, such as the relative merits of the Lambdin and Seow grammars for embarking on said reconstructive project, that I am in danger of becoming really super boring to the 99.9% of people who are not specializing in this field because they have better things to do with their time. I shall try to avoid this. I cannot promise anything about the contents of the blog, though. Consider yourselves warned.
5) I am making a quilt! With the wonderful sewing machine I got for Christmas! It is going to be fabulous!
6) My most recent project on the sewing machine was a stuffed bird ornament from a book on quilting that I bought because I wanted to make everything in it (Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts, in case you’re wondering). It looks…handmade. In the bad way.
7) Most of the time this semester I have been feeling terrific–cheerful, happy to be here, busy but not TOO busy, challenged but not stupid, feeling like I’m in exactly the right place, basically.
8 ) Today is not one of those days. I feel slow and stupid and man, is there a lot of stuff out there to learn. So much so that four years (8 semesters, 30 classes, not counting summer languages) of graduate school (assuming I get into Notre Dame for the Ph.D) feels like too short of a time to learn anywhere close to enough to actually TEACH this stuff or contribute to this field. And the assumption is not a safe one to make by any means. My goodness are there a lot of people who want fellowships. And knowing that, and knowing that my professors will judge whether they want to let me in here for the Ph.D based on whether they like what I’ve done in the MTS, is kind of freaking me out. Not most days…just the days where I feel slow and stupid and wonder why I want to work with languages when I can’t remember vocabulary words for longer than 30 seconds at a time.
9) I will stop feeling sorry for myself now. I swear.
10) Annnnnd, to end on an entirely unimportant note, Mary Frances, I stole your nail polish color and I am NOT GIVING IT BACK.
Okay, off to read about virtue ethics. Good times!
Being interested in linguistics is a funny thing. The more I learn about it, the more I get the sense that most people’s conceptions of how languages work and what they do is totally different from linguists’ conceptions of these things. Take the split infinitive, for example (or indeed any other finicky grammatical rule that either bugs you when people get uptight about getting it right or bugs you when people get it wrong). The “rule” is that one shouldn’t separate the “to” from the verb itself (“to go boldly”, not “to boldly go”). The reasoning behind it is that, in Latin and Greek (the languages of knowledge, culture and status for centuries), the infinitive is expressed in a single word (dicere, currere, amare). In other words, because it’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, 18th-and 19th-century grammarians (my history is a little fuzzy) decided that it wasn’t “correct” to split it in English, even though separating the “to” from the “go” creates absolutely no conflict in terms of meaning. And yet, most people still assume that keeping the parts of the infinitive together is the right way to use English. Whether they get irritated at people who don’t follow the rule (I have to count myself in this group) or whether they get irritated at people correcting them, there’s still, I feel, a general cultural sense that the rule itself is a valid one.
(If any of my former students read this, they are going to call me a hypocrite; I was pretty hardcore about using standard English grammar in papers. I tried to justify it by arguing that, whether or not the rules have a valid basis, they are still the standard set by the people who hold power in this country; and one of the best ways to get some of that power and make a success of yourself is to write according to the standards by which they’ll judge you. Really, though, it’s just that it BOTHERS me when people make grammatical mistakes. Cognitive dissonance or straightforward hypocrisy? You decide.)
Another linguistic question comes up a lot when Hebrew is discussed. I imagine it’s mostly because Hebrew’s a non-Indo-European language, so its structure is totally different from either English or most of the languages people take in high school; also, it’s a sacred language, so a whole lot of people are pretty invested in texts translated from Hebrew, while relatively few can actually read the original. Well, as close to the original as we can get, which isn’t actually all that close. But that’s another story. The point is that, several times over the past few months, I’ve been in conversations with people who asked me whether and to what extent the structure and vocabulary of Hebrew influences the types and patterns of thought that we find in the Hebrew Bible. That is, does the way that Hebrew grammar works have to do with the way that the “Old Testament mind” works? Let me make one thing very very clear: this is not a dumb question. When I first started learning Hebrew, I was struck with, and enchanted by, its utter alienness of structure and idiom. In the case of poetry especially, it became clear to me that even the best English poetry is a poor substitute for the original; the form of Hebrew Bible poetry (based on parallelism of meaning rather than rhyme or meter) seemed to me ideally suited to the patterns and rhythms of the language. I’m told that this question was a matter of scholarly debate for some time, and like I said, it’s not a dumb hypothesis.
(Also? Before I go any farther, I’d like to point out that I don’t have much of a linguistics background and I can’t really be said to know what I’m talking about by people who actually know about these things. So, grain of salt. Right. Onward.)
Now, though, I get the sense that it’s not really the case, that every “natural” language has the capacity to express whatever thoughts its thinkers damn well please. We can see this in modern Hebrew, which has essentially the same grammatical structure (somewhat simplified) as Biblical Hebrew, and much of the same vocabulary. Admittedly, my exposure to modern Hebrew is limited to six weeks of floundering over “where are the toilets?” and one long-drawn-out struggle with a great article by Mordechai Cogan. But in the latter instance, especially having the English translation of the article to work from as well, it became abundantly clear that Hebrew is just as well suited to expressing ideas drawn from a firmly Western European scholarly tradition as it is to discussing the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Maybe we think that there’s this connection between Hebrew language and “Hebraic” thought because the Bible is essentially our entire corpus of ancient Hebrew. True, we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the past 60 years or so, but that’s a blip in theological terms. And the mindsets of the writers of the Bible–even such vastly different writers as, say, the Deuteronomist and the author of Ecclesiastes–are still much more similar to each other than they are to ours. So I guess it makes sense to posit that the weltanschauung and the linguistic structure are inherently related, even though I’m increasingly thinking that this isn’t actually the case.
A related-but-different phenomenon is the old saying of “Eskimos have 300 different words for snow but no word for __.” The idea behind this, I think, is that, without the lexical category for a thing or concept, recognition or understanding of the thing or concept is impossible. If you’ve read 1984, Orwell uses the same idea for Newspeak–the government systematically erases the language necessary to express rebellious ideas, and so the capacity to have rebellious ideas disappears from the people’s minds. Only I’m pretty sure language doesn’t work that way. This post from the Language Log several years ago is both deliciously snarky and expresses why, exactly, it doesn’t. It’s also the reason I wrote this behemoth of an entry in the first case. Lastly, I wish to have it on record that I thought Orwell was wrong about the way language and thought are related when I read this my senior year of high school–I distinctly remember having a heated discussion with Mr. Wood and the entire rest of the class about it–and now science proves that I’m right. (Okay, Luke, fine, not science. Science-ish. Science-y things. We need a word for fields that aren’t science but are closer to it than, say, art history.)
So, what have I been up to since the last time I posted, long, long ago?
Well, I’ve been reading and writing. My first-ever seminar paper is DONE and turned in. Though it didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped (the more I read on the subject, the less I liked my thesis, and organizing it was surprisingly difficult), it was, I think, good enough. I keep thinking of things I’d like to change, and then I think about the maxim of Dr. Thompson, Luke’s mentor from W+M: “Just concentrate on getting the ball over the goal line.” Not every essay has to be a work of genius. Sometimes, “done” is enough. The good news is that now I feel as though I know a great deal about the subject of purity laws, sacrifice, and homicide law in the Hebrew Bible and in Jubilees (I must have read, conservatively, 1000 pages for this essay), which is the whole point anyway.
I’ve been translating. I don’t think Greek will ever really be my language, but I’m back to about the same skill level I was at my peak in college, under the tutelage of Professor Reilly (badass extraordinaire, a woman who raised show corgis, lived and researched in Greece during the summers, and took the attitude of, “yes, Greek is just that hard. Suck it up. If the 10-year-old British boys can do it, so can you.”). I doubt I’ll earn an A in that class, but then, I’ve never ever gotten an A in Greek, so that’s okay. Hebrew continues to be more my thing–I’m looking forward to doing more in the vein of historical linguistics in the future, starting with Aramaic in the spring. I haven’t done a new language in a while…it should be fun!
I’ve been playing with the dog. Clementine is about 6 months old now, around 15 pounds, and decidedly adorable. She had her spay operation last week and has been wearing a giant conical collar to keep her from licking the stitches ever since–seriously, this thing is enormous. When you face her head-on, it hides the rest of her body. The operation slowed her down for about 12 hours, and then she was back to her usual self.
I’ve been making things. The desire to avoid real work generally kicks the creative/domestic side of me into overdrive. I’ve been baking bread, making cookies and homemade soup, knitting, and actually doing some sewing as well. I’m thinking about starting a quilt. It will probably pass.
I’ve been hanging out with actual people, something I’m not always terribly good at. I’m really enjoying the people in my program these days–they’re fun and into the same stuff I am (well, mostly) and by and large incredibly nice people, which is always a good thing.
I’m realizing that I lucked into a program that I’m very well-suited to. Honestly, I didn’t do as fantastic a job of the grad school search as I might have: wanting to be with Luke, not being in a university setting while I was applying, dissing the Ivies on principle, and deciding to apply only a couple of months before applications were due all limited or skewed my search somewhat. I applied to Notre Dame mostly because it was the only school that both of the undergrad professors I talked to recommended, and I enrolled because it was the only location where both Luke and I were accepted. I had my doubts about doing a Master’s program rather than jumping right into the Ph.D; frankly, I didn’t think I needed it, and I didn’t want to get further into student-loan debt. But this is turning out to be just about the best place I could have gone, I think. It’s not just the faculty reputations (badass though they are) or the money the school is willing to invest in their students (though that’s a nice thing too).
One of the things I really need in a graduate program is to be part of a supportive community. I don’t do well in ruthlessly competitive environments. Not that I’m not competitive, far from it, and if you all knew how much I have riding on being one of the smartest people in the room you would probably not want to be my friend any more, but I don’t like those parts of myself. I’m trying to stamp them out. I like when I’m the kind of person who rejoices in the success of others. And I firmly believe that good scholarship–and good thinking in general–involves being more invested in getting at the truth than in being right. And if I’m feeling insecure about my place in a program, if I’m worried about not getting the scholarship or not being at the top, and if I sense that kind of insecurity in others, not just my personal well-being but also my academic work suffers. So it’s nice to be in a place that feels like a community, and not just a whole bunch of people trying to score points off each other.
This is part of an email I sent to a friend recently, describing one church-shopping experience that Luke and I went through:
“Luke and I are trying out churches, looking for one that works with our very different backgrounds. We went to a Methodist church this Sunday, and liked it, except that it was Consecration Sunday and they had a guest preacher there to exhort the congregation to tithe–Luke and I both have tithing as a personal financial goal, but the way this priest went about it made us both very uncomfortable, and not just because his sermon was easily 40 minutes long! (Though that is a black mark in my book any day.) He repeated the necessity of putting God first over and over, which is something I think both of us can get behind, but didn’t really discuss the WAYS in which the church did God’s work. Obviously the first goal is to keep the electricity on and the salaries paid, and a lot of the time this is a hard enough goal as it is, but I don’t think you can really separate tithing from outreach–if the money you’re giving is only going back into things that directly benefit you, well, that’s not really giving it to God, is it? It’s hard to articulate–but his sermon made me feel pretty icky. Also, did I mention that he talked for far too long?”
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the 10 minute sermon. 20 minutes had better be fairly spectacular.
Another thing I’ve been struggling with since arriving at Notre Dame: What does it mean to be a Christian institution? And what does it mean to be a part of an institution whose denomination/religion you don’t share? People (meaning myself) will joke about Episcopalians being “Catholic Lite”, but both Catholics and Episcopalians know it’s not actually a good analogy. And, while I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Episcopalian, I’m comfortable in an Episcopal institution. I’ve cozied up to our differences, so to speak. Whereas now I am finding my life impacted in very real ways by religious beliefs and decisions that I don’t subscribe to. And it’s making me touchy, which is a bad thing. A friend recently made a comment that could be interpreted to mean that since I wasn’t Catholic, my spiritual journey was incomplete. I’m still pissed off about that–and the thing is, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant to say.
The best analogy I can think of is the summer I spent in Israel, where I discovered that many of the clothes I had brought–namely, tank tops and shorts–were not commonly worn. It wasn’t like they were banned; it wasn’t like Egypt, where I got hissed at for not wearing a head scarf, but it was just…awkward. I could see in other people’s minds, “This girl is dressed inappropriately,” and it made me uncomfortable…so I just didn’t wear the shorts. (I still wore the tank tops. It was ridiculously hot.)
I think it’s probably good for me to be in the minority somewhere. And I like that Notre Dame is unapologetic about being a non-secular institution. But most of my peers came here to deepen their Christian faith and knowledge. I came here to be an academic. And that makes me feel a little like a fraud.
The good news is that I am finally starting to feel confident and optimistic about my Jubilees research paper. I have an idea that I think doesn’t suck, and other than the fact that I have to assimilate an enormous amount of scholarship in order to bring myself up to date on the topic, which I don’t know very much about because I am a noob at this, things are going well. I feel like I belong here again.
The bad news is that I am once again actually doing work, and as a result am not writing blog posts. All of my time-wasting goes to watching 30 Rock online (through Netflix, which is totally worth the $9/month), because I can knit at the same time.
The good news is that I finished the sweater I have been working on today! And it actually kind of looks cute, at least compared to my past sweater-making experiences. Maybe that’s because I used a real pattern this time instead of making it up as I went along. Also, now that I am done, I can cast on for the giant enormous Christmas present that comes next.
The bad news is that it is SO COLD outside that I spend most of my walks to and from class planning new warm things to knit for myself, and then remembering that by the time I finish knitting Christmas presents it will be, in all likelihood, February. Then I curse on the inside and wrap my scarf around my neck more tightly.
The good news is that the new James Bond movie is coming out this weekend!
The bad news is that there is no possible way it will be as good as Casino Royale.
The good news is that I don’t care. Nothing can ruin Daniel Craig for me, him and his fine, fine…acting. (Okay in all seriousness that is about 55% of the appeal.) The other good news is that my boyfriend is not fazed by my crushes on inappropriate people. Also, we may dress up and go out for martinis beforehand or afterwards.
The bad news is that I have been trying to come up with a graceful way to end this post, and failing miserably at it. Enough of this frivolity.
