Mostly this semester has been taken up with my two coursework subjects, ‘Linguistic Theory’ and ‘Language and Identity’. The former is the compulsary fourth year honours subject in linguistics, and mostly deals with the history of linguistic thought and theory. The latter is pretty much what its name suggests, dealing mainly with the ways in which we construct our identities using language, and how language helps define those identities. The latter is also very relevant to my honous thesis (which is why I’m doing it.)

What all that means, thus far, is that I haven’t done much work on my thesis at all. I’ve been doing some general background reading into Yanyuwa, and to a lesser extent into Kriol, and language endangerment in general, but I’ve mostly been trying to get assessment stuff done for my coursework subjects (which are, after all, worth 50% of my mark this year – so sacrificing them for the good of the thesis will only screw me up anyway.)

So, in essence, that’s why I haven’t been posting any insightful posts about lingiuistics or much else for that matter. However, I can say that as I work on my next assignment for Language and Identity I’ll probably have some interesting comment to make on the Nothern Territory Intervention and the language used to sell it to the people. So that’s something you can look forward to if you so wish.

So, now that I’ve explained my lack of blog posts, I should get back to all the other stuff I have to do!

There’s a few shops still standing in the town, the few including the hotel (dating from 1893) which had fire lapping at its back door. Almost no trees have been spared as far as the eye can see in places, and the vegetation is punctuated by the mangled remains of homes. The spared homes often surrounded by blackened vegetation, a reminder of how close they came to the inferno and survived.  All of this is surrounded by lush new grass growth, incongruously giving the sense that the fire spared the grass (of course, it didn’t – the grass has shot up in the five weeks since the fires, with help from the rain.)

We continued on to Buxton before returning to Narbethong for lunch, and the story is much the same for many kilometers. In the distance, the Cathedral Ranges loom eerily looking much like a patchwork quilt – some areas burned worse than others, but all burned.

The Buxton Road House was one building which didn’t survive Black Saturday, and we stopped momentarily to look at what remained. I’ve posted a few photos of it to flickr, although they really show a very small part of the devastated building, let alone the devastation which surrounds it. Not far up the road, on the opposite side, what’s left of a house sits destroyed.

Edit: This kinda reads like a newspaper opinion piece or something (and a couple of people have actually mentioned it to me.) It’s not intentional but probably because I cut it down fairly heavily after I wrote it. I’m not sure how that happened, but it happened organically so it can stay that way.

As the title of this blog oh-so-subtly suggests I’m back at uni for a new year, which is actually pretty good. If I’m not positive now, then nobody will get to see the many stages of my decline from being happy to being a homicidal maniac through my blog, so for that purpose I must say I’m happy. =D. No, really, I’m happy being back at uni, even if it’s taking a bit to get back into the swing of things. I’m actually supposed to be working on an essay at the moment, come to think of it, but blogging for the first time in ages is more interesting than that.

There’s apparently a record number of students doing honours in linguistics this year, which is good. The more people crammed into the lecturer’s office for our little weekly get-together the better! What What I do need to do is get back into reading and such a bit more diligently – which I think I need to take heed of and start working on the aforementioned essay so I’ll cut to the exciting part of the news:

Yesterday, the whole ‘being back at uni’ thing took a very unexpected upturn, because I scored myself a scholarship offer from the university. Now, as much as I was awesomely happy with my marks last semester and all, I didn’t have my hopes up about getting a scholarship, mainly because I just thought my marks weren’t good enough. Apparently they were! Either that or someone in the scholarships department has a thing for me, based solely on my marks and without knowing me. OR they stalk me. I’m going to guess it’s the former with a small grain of suspicion in my mind about the latter. In any case, it’s amazing and has reassured me in some way that I’m doing the right thing – if the uni’s giving me money to keep going then I must be doing something right, yeah?

Hopefully that thought will hold me in good stead as I steadily lose my mind throughout the year. Tune in here to see that happen (along with some random linguistics/photography/computers/random babbling once in a while – probably becoming less and less coherent as the year continues. Cocktail umbrella.)

This isn’t a moan post, though. It’s what the title suggests: a note to myself in the form of a blog post. For some background, last semester I decided to take my camera with me to university to take photos, then I uploaded some of them to Flickr. It was meant to get me taking more photos, but I only ended up posting a handful of photos because something about walking around the uni with a camera in the morning felt weird. But whatever, I’m over feeling awkward walking aruond with a camera, I might even start taking an SLR with me instead of my little IXUS sometimes.

My mission, and I want to hold myself to it to some extent, is to take at least one photo that I upload to Flickr every day I’m on campus. That won’t actually end up being that many, since I’m going to be on campus probably one or two days a week, but it’s still a start.

On top of that, I’m tempted to start another PaD (photo a day), except on Flickr this time instead of my dismally failed on on pBase back in ’03. If I do that, I’ll either update this post and/or post a new post about that.

This post possibly makes it sound like I don’t actually like taking photos, which couldn’t be further from the truth, it’s just that I haven’t been doing it. It’s one of those things that I really like doing that somehow just manages to not happen for a long time, and that’s bad.

So, hold me to my promises blog readers. Damn, I’m pretty sure there are none.

Anyway, that’s partially why I haven’t blogged normally in a while, because I haven’t got a huge amount to blog about. This blog will probably – over time – become more like my last entry where I try and explain things, either to other people or for my own use, while I write my thesis. I actually found that trying to write a fairly succinct (although clearly insufficient) description of linguistics helped me clarify my own thoughts, so writing up some blog entries about different issues as I read and gradually construct my thesis will probably be good for me, and it’ll let people who may or may not be interested in the topics find out some information. I’ll have to do a bit of referencing sometimes, particularly when my comments are regarding a specific text, but I think I can live with that. Other than that, nobody generally reads my blog entries so it’s really sort of a waste of time if I’m not getting something out of them.

I also might post a few more software/hardware reviews or something, depending how pissed off or interested I get in certain things. We all know the world needs more people explaining why they don’t use Linux as their main operating system and about everything else they do on a computer!

In other news, Matt and I have actually (well, almost) finished a website project that we’ve been supposedly working on for almost a year not. That’s not the result of any particular difficulty, it’s just been hard to actually get it to happen. The site itself is up now, and a few finishing touches are being put on, so that’s definitely progress.

Anyway, the main purpose of this entry was to explain why I haven’t been updating my blog particularly often, and to ‘unveil’ what I’m going to probably be blogging about more often starting very shortly. Since I’ve done that, I might leave it there…

but I am intrigued, what do linguistics entail?

(note to self: write WP plugin to automatically link @ tags to Twitter. Or find one. Or get Matt to write it. Done: Got Matt to write it.)

The field of linguistics

To start with, linguistics isn’t one thing. Boiled down to its most simple definition, linguistics can be considered ‘the science of language’.

Like most sciences, there’s lots of different types of linguistics which look at completely different areas. Some examples are:

• Historical linguistics – Looks at language of the past and compares it to languages of today, or tries to reconstruct languages which are no longer spoken based on their descendants still spoken today. In this way, links between languages which previously weren’t known to be linked can be found (eg. linking Sanskrit and English by way of the Indo-European family of languages, which is probably the most famous language family and eventually reconstructing a ‘proto’ language which we call ‘Proto-Indo-European’ which is a model of what the original language which split into the hundreds of other languages looked and sounded like).

  Historical linguistics is also fun for grammar nazi types, because you get to see how unstable grammar, pronunciation and spelling actually are. It puts into context the grammar Nazi in us all, since what we consider to be correct would historically have been considered barbarous to the language. That said, I’m not totally against some kind of order, just not necessarily the stubborn retention of ridiculous archaic weirdness that makes English a nightmare (and other languages for that matter.)

• Syntax – Looking at the so called universals of language grammar, how sentences are constructed in various languages and the relationships between them. Gets pretty heavy mathsy at times. A positive for some, but not for me unfortunately.

  Update: The basis of syntax is the basic building blocks of language – verbs, nouns, sometimes adjectives/adverbs and the various grammatical morphemes (for the sake of simplicity, words). There’s a surprising consistency between languages on the use of them, and most syntax is based on Noam Chomsky’s work on the so called ‘Generative Grammar’ (referring to the fact that languages, in theory, have no limit to what can be constructed. Sentences or phrases can always be packed onto one another to create an endless sentence.) Once you get to the phrase level, the breakdown of phrases into their individual parts is an important part of Syntax.

  It’s also good to remember that syntax doesn’t care what the meaning of words are – it has no material effect on the structure of the language. Many of the sentences you work with in syntax will mean nothing to you, and often in the classroom, nonsense sentences are used specifically to bring this point home. All you need to know is parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc. and a whole lot of data (although the data often comes before the parts of speech, as the assignments we did showed) and you can figure out the syntax. Doesn’t mean you know any better what’s being said though.

• Phonetics and phonology - Looking at the physical and auditory aspects of the way language is spoken, and the processes which make the sounds we hear in language relate to the way we perceive and understand words.  Phonology specifically deals with the variation which occurs in speech, and what these groupings tell us about the way we perceive and speak languages.
• Sociolinguistics – Looking at the social aspects of language use – how social circles affect the language we use, what is considered ‘proper’ language use (grammar nazis beware) and other things relating directly to the social influences on language use.

There’s plenty more of those different fields to look at. Personally, at the moment, I’m focusing on language endangerment. Language endangerment is a relatively new field of linguistics which looks at the declining languages of the world, both to document them and to maintain and in some cases revitalize or reconstruct an almost-extinct language. Australia has one of the greatest number of endangered languages, most of which will probably die out in 50 or so years without major intervention.

Anyway, like I said, that was a very VERY short introduction to linguistics. Probably a completely inadequate introduction to linguistics, but I didn’t want to bore you all with too much detail!

Update: Careers in Linguistics

@ChristopherLane asks:

Last question (for an argument sake) what jobs can you get out of linguistics?

Careers in linguistics is a confusing one. There’s not necessarily a clear cut path for linguists to walk towards a place in a job, and where they can go depends heavily on what they specialize in. For example, someone with a background in something like sociolinguistics and phonology (this is a real example) might work and create those horrible horrible Telstra/Optus/everyone-else things that make you talk to a computer when you call a company. That would involve working with them to define what the computer needs to recognize and the questions asked based on the target audience.

Other fields of linguistics funnel you back into the academia, in the form of a researcher, teacher, lecturer at a university. These roles will quite often involve working with various international bodies to assist with research work and/or pursuing your own interests provided they match up with the university’s interests on some level (ie. you can get paid to do it by the university.) Syntax is probably one of them. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s certainly not for everyone.

In my case, endangered languages can lead in either direction. It’s not so big on the corporate level, but there’s various government funded and some self-funding language centres around Australia working to either document, support or revitalize languages in remote and city indigenous communities. There’s also massive efforts around the world to document the dying languages of other regions (SE-Asia, the pacific and the US come to mind). At the same time, there’s university posts which work on much the same things, but usually offer the opportunity to get stuck into one thing for a greater period of time and really become an expert in a language or language family, and have a very active role in that language’s future.

In summary, there’s no easy answer to that question other than to say that it depends on what you get into. There are careers in linguistics though, but they’re perhaps just not as clear-cut as they are in some other areas.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been almost exclusively using Ubuntu as my primary operating system. Actually, I’ve had every intention of casting Windows off entirely as my main operating system and moving to Linux completely. I won’t be. In this post I’m going to talk about the things I think are going very well in Linux (or, more specifically, Ubuntu) and the things which I think still need work before it’s ready for prime time.

Why?

To start this little review off, I should explain why it is that I decided to install Ubuntu as my main OS in the first place. Basically, MS pissed me off. I had 2 Microsoft OSes installed (Vista and Win 7 beta) as well as Wubi-ed Ubuntu. Both of the Windows installations decided to die for no real reason. In the process of dying, the Win 7 boot manager decided to mangle Wubi as well, and I was effectively left with a computer and no OSes. Since the root of all those problems had Microsoft at their root, I decided that it was time to try something completely different and pursue a Microsoft-free future. So effectively it was done out of spite, or anger, or a bit of a mix of the two.

After I made the decision, I installed XP to the first, small, partition in case of something going catastrophically wrong then proceeded to install Ubuntu. What follows is what I thought of the various aspects of Ubuntu I explored over my two weeks, followed by my reasoning for going back to the dark side. For this year, at least.

Installation

Ubuntu’s installation is pretty much flawless, at least in 8.10. It’s easy to use, clear, and offers the tools which Windows has needed for years – I’m still dreading managing to install Windows on c:\ when it comes to installing Windows again after my experiment. Starting the installation from a live CD with a fully operational version of the operating system is even better, and the Ubuntu cd has come in handy in the past to try and rescue Windows when it has its once-in-a-while notworkathon.

The main thing I would perhaps change in the Ubuntu setup is the default way it wants to partition your hard disk. Who in their right mind would want to resize all their existing partitions to make a new partition with all their free space dedicated to Ubuntu. I can see why they set it up that way, but if I was a new user just checking out Linux for the first time and I installed it only to find out my existing partitions had been completely mangled I wouldn’t be at all happy. The advanced partition manager, however, is as I said above what Windows has needed for years (with the addition of a drive letter reassignment tool which is replicated in a mount point selector in the Ubuntu setup anyway).

Oh, and if you’re running more than 4gb of RAM it should flag that you’re actually installing the x86 version, which I did accidentally the first time because I grabbed the wrong CD. Not a big problem for most people, even for me it was a minor thing, but it’d just be helpful to avoid the situation of installing the whole OS then wondering why it says you’ve got 3.2G of ram, not 8G. In theory, the whole OS could be ‘upgradable’ to x64, but that would take a fairly drastic reworking of the installation and update system so I’d be more than happy with a flag.

First Impressions

Ok, there weren’t really too many ‘first impressions’ so to speak, because I’ve had Ubuntu installed for a while via Wubi, and before that I had version 7.10 installed in vmWare. It’s interesting, though, when you take a decision like making Linux your primary operating system how you suddenly think of all the things you haven’t previously done with it, the drivers you never bothered to install because you didn’t need them and all those sorts of things. The things I would have thought about if I wasn’t more or less forced to install some sort of OS immediately.

I also noticed how much more customizable the Gnome window manager is to customise (especially when paired up with Compiz). It’s quite refreshing to be able to edit every facet of the visual interface with such ease, and I am going to miss that in Windows. Visually, Ubuntu just about has it right, which makes it all the more unfortunate that underneath there are still cracks in the usability of the system.

Hardware Support

This is where things start to go a little sour. From the last time I seriously tried to use Linux for anything (which was a good few years back now) the hardware support has improved a lot. And since then, my needs have also changed. In Windows, once I have my video drivers installed, dual monitors works pretty much flawlessly. In Ubuntu, the drivers let you get both monitors working, and they do indeed work pretty well other than that the nVidia drivers have issues with the Compiz window manager which draws the screen. What ensues is problems with vertical sync in everything – the OS, videos, 3D apps. Everything. It’s not pretty and it’s pretty much impossible to solve without diving into the sourcecode of Compiz itself and running the risk of making it unbearably slow even if you get it to work properly.

Other hardware just doesn’t even begin to work in Ubuntu, which is annoying but I could almost have accepted that if my graphics worked properly. I never even attempted to get my Creative X-Fi working, although that’s more from laziness and not needing to use the card rather than being worried about it not working. Not that I necessarily trust any drivers Creative releases for Linux considering how bad a job they do in Windows. Ultimately the graphics were the killer – I didn’t get a new 9800GT the other month to not be able to even have SD videos play without bad vsync errors.

Software Support

Ubuntu’s software support is pretty damned good. Most of the software I use most commonly either works in Ubuntu, has a perfectly functional open source alternative included in the Ubuntu, and the WINE project is finally getting somewhere. As much as WINE took 15 years to get where it is, which is pretty slow considering how fast everything around it has moved, it’s finally getting to a place where it’s useful not just as a passing curiosity but actually runs a lot of software in a mostly usable state.

Foobar2000 works pretty much perfectly in WINE once you fix the configuration (which is important, because nothing else comes close in either Linux or MacOS.) Photoshop CS2 works surprisingly well, which was also important to me, not that I ended up using it extensively while I had the system installed.

Software support, though, is also one of the reasons that I’ve ultiamately decided to give up on my Linux experiment. I need to use MS Office 2007, which runs well enough for me to use in WINE. I also need to use EndNote, which works pretty much flawlessly under WINE. The only use of both of those though, is if I can use the OneNote ‘Cite-As-You-Write’ addon for Word as well, and it’s completely non-functional in Wine (not without a great deal of trying, I can assure you).

I also discovered a wonderful piece of open source software – VirtualBox. I never knew about it before now, and I’ve been using vmWare for all my virtualization needs up until now. VirtualBox is basically an open source alternative to vmWare and it works pretty well – more than well enough for me. It actually works better in Linux than vmWare does in my opinion (due in no small part to the fact that it doesn’t screw up and crash Ubuntu when you put it in full screen mode…)

My Main Problems

My main problems with Ubuntu were pretty simple: I’m doing honours this year, and have to write a pretty sizable thesis. To do that, I need to use MS Word 2007 and Endnote, because I don’t have time to get used to a whole new way of formatting and referencing documents.  I attempted to use and get used to OpenOffice and Bibus, I really did, but they’re just not as user friendly as they could be or should be. I also anticipated having massive problems when I needed to share my documents with other people or for that matter edit them effectively on my laptop (with the current hardware support, and my requirement to dock, I wouldn’t even put Ubuntu close to my laptop.)

Ultimately that’s the problem – the solutions to the problems I had always involved some level of compromise on my part.  As much as I can compromise to a certain level, two weeks worth of constant compromise made me seriously question whether I could bear working with the OS on any long term arrangement. I’ll probably still have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine (in VirtualBox – so I’m not coming out empty handed!) but for now not as a primary OS. It’s been fun, and I can see that Linux is really moving towards being a viable alternative to Windows and MacOS but for me, this year isn’t the year. Here’s hoping for next year.

I’ve actually been busy since I got back, which is slightly unusual but probably good since if I wasn’t busy I’d be going out of my mind. I did some photography this week, which was a fairly stark departure to all the pretty macro work I’ve been doing (some of which I intend to get printed and framed for potential commercial gain, maybe.) – pretty much some stock standard outdoor product shots. Not the most interesting job in terms of photography obviously, but it was good and I got to do some fun Photoshopping to create a product which exists in concept only at this point for a brochure.

As much as it was all good, I have to say that my 20D chose the wrong time to screw up – the night before the shoot. My shutter button seems to officially be on the way out, which is bad, but hopefully a nice little e-book I’ve found which details the process of replacing it (plus a replacement shutter en route from Canon) will have that all better soon. I ended up using my backup body (300D) to take the actual photos because the 20D shutter only works when I give the whole camera a death grip and force the shutter button down. When I got the 20D everyone seemed so confused as to why I wanted to keep my 300D since I only ever complained about it being slow and such, but I’m now happy I did since I ended up needing it as a backup. The moral of the story is that you can never have too many camera bodies.

I haven’t taken my new macro lens out and explored much yet due to the 20D being screwed, but once the weather moderates a bit (it’s roughly thirty five degrees centigrade outside at the moment and I’m being a sloth) I might stick it on my 300D and learn all over again why I found that body so frustrating – happy times.

To change direction completely for a moment, I’m also finding being back in Melbourne frustrating for another reason which is going to piss me off for a while: the almost total lack of mobile reception around this damned house. Optus is meant to be installing a new mobile tower some time in March which should fix the problem, but March is a long way away so far as I’m concerned and until then I’ve pretty much turned my shiny new iPhone off as not to kill its battery when I can’t even do anything with it. Even though I’m trying to be nice to it, it’s frustrating the crap out of me – Mt Evelyn isn’t the place to be if you want any of the comforts most people in normal cities or regional towns take for granted. Yay for progress.

Now that I’ve dug up some of the things pissing me off at the moment, I might leave the blog there before it turns into one long whinge. Oh, and I really will do a layout for this site soon, since my relative busy-ness will run out soon unless something changes in the near future. Adios!

I’m back in ye olde Melbourne now, which is good and bad. It’s good because I can start getting stuck into some constructive stuff before uni starts again (although much of the constructive stuff mentioned will pertain to uni). It’s bad because every time I come back to Melbourne I realise how much it actually sucks and how much I’d really like to move to a smaller city, especially a northern one. What’s with regional universities and their total lack of a linguistics department? Admittedly I’ve only checked two universities: Charles Darwin University, and James Cook University. Maybe it’s something to do with universities which are named after the full names of individuals (Monash escapes the clause, because it’s not the Sir John Monash University). In any case, the universities which service the cities I wouldn’t mind moving to – Townsville, Darwin and possibly Cairns – have no linguistics department to speak of, besides Townsville having some form of speech pathology course. Certainly no avenues for PhD study. Damned small cities. It’s also frustrating from an academic standpoint because the Northern Territory and Far North QLD are the areas that are most at risk from language endangerment so some facilities to conduct research up north would be much appreciated!

On that note, I might move on and continue my synopsis of what I did in Townsville and what I thought, although from what I’ve written so far you probably gather that I did like Townsville a lot. Personally I’m not sure what it is, me liking Townsville or hating Melbourne…

Townsville Part 2

So, as I said in my last post, I had my week of house-sitting which was probably my most active time in terms of doing what I would love to do a lot more in the tropics, which is take photos. I’d probably choose a less obvious environment than the botanical gardens if I lived up there, but you take what you can get when you’re on holidays!

Over 5 days the house filled up pretty quickly. First, my brother’s partner and my niece arrived back in Townsville from Darwin, which was fine – that just brought us back to normal. A couple of days after that, my brother arrived back from work in Karratha (and attempted to sleep most of the day, thwarted by my niece). The next day, my sister arrived (on Monday the 22nd) and then the Christmas rush began.

Although I don’t drink, much alcohol was imbibed in by all those over 18 on both Christmas and New Years (the intervening time was much less interesting than busy, although we did visit Paluma whicwnsvillerh was good, albeit raining torrentially). The nightmare of my sister’s knee (more details: Twitter) began on the morning of New Year’s day and continues still, although the possibility of it needing surgery is passed.

I know I’ve said very little about what I actually did in Townsville, and that’s because on the whole it wasn’t really that much. Mostly, catching up with family and hanging out enjoying the weather. I’ve never been one for holidays with itineraries which run as long as your arm, so that works for me. The best thing on a holiday is good company. A nice venue like Townsville doesn’t hurt either!

Now that I’ve been in Townsville a little longer than the 2 days I’d been here last time I blogged, I’ve had more time to reflect upon the city and how it works. I’m still not excessively impressed with the CBD itself – compared to Darwin (or Melbourne, but that’s a given) the centre of the city seems very dead. There’s quite a number of buildings around the CBD itself that are empty, and seem to have been so for some time. Once you get out of the city, though, the impression improves a lot. There’s lots of walking tracks and gardens around, and although my opinion of Queensland’s road design department doesn’t have a lot of positive aspects getting around isn’t too bad, if only because the city’s small enough.

My week of housesitting was fairly uneventful, mostly taking some photos (some of which are on my flickr account) and exploring Townsville on my own. I went to my brother’s for dinner on all but one night and even managed to find a shortcut to their place that nobody else had figured out yet! On my photo trips, I visited all three of the botanical gardens in Townsville (in what ended up being the reverse order of preference) – Anderson Park, Queens Gardens and the Palmetum. I haven’t fully explored any of them (least of them Anderson Park, so it would probably grow on me if I visited it more extensively) but from what I’ve seen of them and the area around Townsville more generally the whole thing is a photographer’s dream.

If you look at the gallery you’ll probably notice that I’ve been very preoccupied with leaves since I’ve been up here, and that the vast majority of the photos are just leaves. It wasn’t an intentional thing, it just sort of happened when I visited the Queens Gardens the first time and noticed how amazing the interaction between tropical leaves and the sunlight is up here. So much more than the plants in Melbourne, the light shines through in interesting ways revealing textures and patterns which you can’t properly see without the light. The government decided to give me $1000 (well, lots of people $1000) so I saw that as a sign – an invisible voice said “Go and buy a macro lens” so that’s what I did, so then I took a whole lot of macro shots of the back of leaves. Anyway, not much of an excuse, but I’ve really enjoyed looking at the leaves of Townsville, so I don’t need to make excuses. That said, I’m going to have to look more carefully in Melbourne to find some of this stuff happening because it makes for some pretty amazing photos if I say so myself (even if I haven’t quite mastered the new lens.)

After my week of relative solitude, things got busy and more packed quickly. I’ll talk about Xmas and New Year a bit more in my next blog post, but I just thought I should check in and say that I am still alive. If you want further proof, follow my twitter feed, which I actually update semi-regularly.