Virtually Home

I've been living in Australia for a few months now, and the main thing that experience has taught me is that my accent is dumb. American vowels are flat and lazy and nasal. I pronounce too many R's on average. It's really quite unseemly. The culture here feels like a weird blend of UK and US culture, partly because goods and media are often imported from both places. I've enjoyed learning some of the features of Australian English and hearing a wide variety of Australian accents. There are tons of immigrants from the UK and elsewhere in my department, so I'm encountering a lot of those accents too. Some Aussie words and phrases I've been interested or bemused by so far: "How are you going?" is used instead of "How is it going?" or "How are you doing?" Tasty cheese = cheddar Barbie = grill, but grills tend to be fireless electric cooktops in this wildfire-prone region Bushfire = wildfire Lollies = candy "Hey" is...

Time passes strangely here. My schedule hardly conforms to the one I kept over the last several semeseters in Oklahoma. It involves a lot of late nights and a lot of sleeping in, eating meals at strange times and bouncing between the attention span of a goldfish and marathons of one activity or another. Lately, I've been throwing all my time at procrastinating studying for my various tests and writing my paper for typology. I'm about to get to the end of a book I'm reading on lingustics, and one of the last chapters is talking about the connections that link language to race and customs in a sort of awkward way. I'm going to blame the fact that it was written in 1921 for the way it talks about race, because it's not strictly politically correct. But then, what does that even mean? Other than that, I've spent a lot of time in my room listening to Tilly and the Wall, really. When I have something to do and feel guilty about not doing it, I spend a lot of time ...

I never thought much about my accent, really in any context, until I left the place where everyone sounds like me. These days I'm meeting a lot of people who have a hard time understanding what I'm saying when I speak French, and a lot of Canadians and Brits who speak different English than I do. Combine those experiences with the fact that my classes are taught in French by professors with various accents (Congo, Naples) and mostly deal with the subject of linguistics? I've been thinking about it a lot more than I ever have. Most of the anglophones I meet in this country immediately say "Oklahoma? Really? But you don't sound like you're from Oklahoma!" The American-inclined ones might add "Actually, you don't have an accent at all." Most of these people have never been anywhere near Oklahoma, though some of them are American (Californians, I'm looking at you). It's true that I scorn the word "y'all" and try not...

So I went to the book store this afternoon and picked up a Robert & Collins English vocabulary study guide, which I'm planning on using backwards. I thought it was pretty clever. Plus, it'll teach me Britishisms! The better to understand my rapidly expanding base of non-American anglophone friends. On the way to the book store I took several photos of the various Christmas trees and light displays near my house. Unfortunately, I discovered that the photos are just a little too blurry even for my hasty posting here. I'll go back and take more time with them. Practice holding my breath and being really still for those long exposures. Maybe I should get a tripod. Point being: you have to wait a while for Christmas photos. In other Christmas news, I've expanded the Great European Christmas Adventure of Ought Nine/Ten (I'm rethinking this title as a result of the awkwardness of the year 2010. On the one hand, I'm already angry about not being able to use the ...

Today I had my first exam in France. It was a really straightforward test over the International Phonetic Alphabet, in a class that is composed of nothing but linguistics majors. So imagine my surprise when I noticed rampant cheating. Not that it would have been difficult, as we had one exam form, and one proctor for a class of over 200, who didn't even walk around the room during the test, didn't discourage people from talking, or even look up when cell phones rang and were answered. Also the girl in front of me kept asking me for answers. I pretended I didn't understand her. And that's today's advantage to being foreign! But seriously. If you're a linguist, shouldn't you know IPA?

This morning I was walking to the tram past a couple of ladies with clipboards. I learned after the first week that once the ladies with the clipboards conducting the survey or trying to get signatures for the petition figure out that you're not French, they absolutely refuse to talk to you further even if you display interest. So I was walking by with my headphones and they made eye contact and I just told them sorry, I'm not French (except I said it in French) - and they're like "wait! Are you English?" (in English) and the confused, resulting conversation that took place in mixed French (on my part) and English (on theirs) was apparently intended to lure me into the church of scientology. I was confused at first -- aside from passing some Jehova's Witnesses at a tram stop once, I have not been proselytized to once since arriving here -- not even in all the churches and cathedrals I've visited. When I looked confused they said "Scientology...you h...