I have been really enjoying my classes this semester. I feel like things are going a lot better in the ones I'm teaching -- it really helped to have one semester of that class behind so that I could take in all my mistakes from that term and try to fix them this time around.
And I'm still having a blast with Old English, and even with Historical Linguistics, even though that one is giving me a run for my money. It's still a struggle keeping my head above water all the time, but I don't mind so much having to sit around and memorize Old English verb conjugations, or comparing sets of data from related languages to figure out how they have changed.
You know, speaking of OE verbs ... When I tell people about Semitic languages like Hebrew, ancient Egyptian, and Arabic, and how they don't write their vowels (except for the 'weak' or 'semi-' vowels /w/ and /y/), but that they only write the consonants and then change the vowels to conjugate their verbs or decline their nouns -- when I tell people about this, they seem to think it's utterly incredible. However, English does similar things. This was brought home to me while I was studying my OE verbs the other day. See, in Old English, there were two basic types of verbs, weak and strong. The weak verbs form the past tense by adding a dental (a /d/ or /t/) to the stem, much as we do in Modern English: look, looked; rule, ruled. The strong verbs, on the other hand, form the past tense by changing their vowels: meet, met. This can (and frequently does) also include the past participle: sing, sang, sung; write, wrote, written. (I have used Modern English examples here, since our verbs have inherited these weak/strong attributes from Old English, and most of my readers, I imagine are more familiar with ModE than with OE.) As it turns out, these strong verbs, the vowel-changing verbs, were inherited from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), while the weak verbs were inherited from Proto-Germanic. That is, the strong verbs came from an ancient, unwritten language, while the weak verbs were made up later, after that language had already split into several different languages. That means that PIE verbs, like Semitic words, only alter their vowels to change their grammatical function. It seems entirely plausible to me, then, that PIE and these Semitic languages might be related to each other, at least in phonological processes if not in semantic or syntactic structure. If PIE had been written, might we find that it indicated only the consonants, and not those tricky, shifty vowels?
The last quote, correctly identified by both elliespen and emily, was from The Music Man, one of my all-time favorite movies.
Jump the tracks, can't get back, I don't know anyone 'round here, but I'm safe this time. (32 points)
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