I have just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, a very entertaining and surprising book called The Secret History of the English Language. The author begins by arguing that English did not evolve from Anglo-Saxon. He then moves on to claim that Latin in fact evolved from early Italian business shorthand, and then goes into a long ( Read more... )

Today my master's degree and I spent four hours opening mail. Two hundred and forty minutes shelling mail with my Letter Opener of Doom like a squirrel shelling walnuts.

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Tomorrow morning at 8am I have to call a certain phone number and take the Foreign Service Arabic proficiency test. I'm certainly not expecting to pass it on my two whole semesters of Arabic; I just want to make a decent enough showing that they'll consider me worth the trouble. The problem is that I haven't actually done any Arabic since May, and ( Read more... )

Arabic is taunting me with its complexity. There are too many words that mean the same thing. I know, I know, English is the ultimate language for synonyms, but they usually have differing shades of meaning that can justify having eight words when one would do. In Arabic the two words seem to mean EXACTLY the same thing, and these are not very ( Read more... )

O. M. G. Arabic is HARD! I thought the weird squiggly backwards alphabet was a little tricky. I thought the pronunciation of several of the letters was pretty tough. These are nothing compared to the grammar, the mere surface of which we are just beginning to scratch. In all the languages I currently know, the root of a word is a contiguous block ( Read more... )

Hooray! I learned my last Arabic letter today! I learned the whole alphabet in 5 weeks. I wonder how long it took me the first time? So now I know my alif baa taas, but the glee is somewhat muted by the fact that the prof assigned us a mountain of homework for the weekend. I get the feeling that we're going to step up the pace a little from here on ( Read more... )

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Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning
And Hebrews learn it backwards which is absolutely frightening
-- "Why Can't the English," My Fair LadyMeredith is not learning Arabian with the speed of summer lightning, but she is learning it backwards. Today was my first day of Arabic classes, and so far I'm psyched. The first trembling ( Read more... )

Yay! No more finals! I now have a week of freedom shopping, cleaning, packing and otherwise getting ready for my internship. For the last month I've been living with the constant buzz of Things To Do bubbling merrily away in the back of my head, distracting white noise that will hopefully abate somewhat in about two weeks when I'm properly settled ( Read more... )

To expedite my learning of Italian I have begun labelling things all over the house with sticky notes bearing their names in Italian, leaving lots of space for Beth and Laura to fill in the appropriate names in Mandarin and Spanish, respectively. Mom hates it but I think it'll really help. Laura and the cat don't seem to really be into it either as ( Read more... )