10 Years After

Southern Man

Intro to Linguistics was okay this morning. Actually, I dozed off to sleep for 2 or 3 minutes at one point. Norah nudged me and inquired if I was okay. I felt good about the homework we did yesterday. I was stressing over it all day yesterday and then last night when I finally sat down to work on it the answers came to me in a flash. I slipped out of the staff meeting at work this morning in time to make it to class early. I was able to confir with fellow students that my answers were correct. Mostly, the other students asked me for my answers and copied them down.

I did some research between Intro to Linguistics and Dialectology. I also looked up sesame in the OED. It listed an uncertain semitic connection to the word and mentioned that it's current usage stems from Arabian Nights. I'm still curious to discover if the arabic word has the same sort of pun as it does in English. Maybe I'll get around to asking my Dialectology professor. He's from Sudan and speaks Sudanese-Arabic natively.

Dialectology itself was boring. The Japanese ESL grad student continued to lead the discussion of Appalachian Speech. Its attrocious. Not just the book, which makes wild claims about all of Appalachian dialect based on a poor survey of 2 counties in West Virginia, but also the grad student leading the discussion. He heaps wild statements ontop of the claims made in the book. One curious statement that he keeps restating is that he is from Knoxville, but that isn't an Appalachian area due to all the non-natives in the area. Then, right after stating this again in fact, he commented that he uses double modals and never realized it as a non-standard feature until he was out of the area.

Since he didn't finish the book it seems he will continue Friday and, if his pace remains the same, will be leading the discussion on Monday as well. The instructor asked if I could look this weekend for more copies of the text (I had purchased two and tried to give him one earlier in the semester).