Fairbanks Day 3 - and Linguistics...

Well it was totally worth it. So while I was riding the bus back up to campus today I passed an ice cream shop and out of the corner of my wee little eye did I see a Husky! Unfortunately, I had just passed the bus stop and thought “oh well,” but then at the top of the hill I was thinking “I really want to hug a Husky and at worse I’ll just a cup of ice cream,” so I ran (quickly walked) back down the Hill and got there just in time to see the husky! Totally worth it. His name was Crash, he was a red, 18 month old husky and he was beautiful and full of kisses. We fell in love at first sight and I got many kisses. Also, one of his owners was a Yup’ik native which was awesome, she didn’t speak the language but we talked for a while about it and some friends she knew who were still fur trappers up in the north. Then I got some hazelnut ice cream. The shop was called “Hot Licks” by the way, a fitting name for the moment.

But I’m skipping ahead of myself. I began today by checking out the University of Fairbanks Museum of the North, which was really cool. They had a lot of animal exhibits and exhibits on the Native peoples of Alaska. So a quick lesson for y’all: Alaska is home to two different language families: the Eskimo-Aleut, and the Athabaskan. The Eskimo-Aleut languages are spoken along the coasts of Alaska (and Canada and Greenland) and the Athabaskan are spoken in the interior of Alaska (and Canada), but that’s not to say there are just two peoples, both language families are made up of many different languages and peoples. So at the Museum I got to see a lot of history, and culture, and art and even learned some new things. For instance did you know: the Aurora Borealis is caused by charged particles in the atmosphere, and because of this it actually emits DC electricity which can interfere with power stations and cause black outs, and part of the reason that part of the Alaskan pipeline was built above ground was to insure these currents didn’t cause any problems (the other reason was because they didn’t want to damage the permafrost).

After going to the museum I headed over to the ANLC and met with Lawrence Kaplan, the director of the ANLC. We talked about my project for a little bit and some of the resources that are available that might aid my work. While I missed the professor whose been guiding me in getting here, it was really helpful and nice.

I then proceeded back downtown, and meandered through the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center. There I saw many more exhibits on the history and cultures of Fairbanks and was able to talk to the National Park Service. They do not have a map of the Kotlik area and were quite surprised I was “going so far into the bush” and wished me luck because it sounded awesome. I guess I kinda lied though… they did have a map (but not one to take)… the town of Kotlik was represented on the map by a tiny dot and 9/10ths of the rest of the map was ocean, so not very useful. They recommended I stop by the University Geodata center and that they might be able to print me out that map and the map for the region below Kotlik. I might try that one of these days because maps are cool. I then walked along the Chena River for a ways (the main river running through town) and then I got to see a community band playing in the Golden Heart plaza along the river downtown. I ended my day then by hugging a beautiful husky and eating hazelnut ice cream. Overall, a good day.

I should say that after my first post I actually received several posts that said I really need to “speak Missourian” (not naming any names Dad and Grandpa). So I’ve taken the liberty of writing very informally, and using emoticons for the past few posts. However, that’s not to say I won’t switch back to tech talk when I need to, so don’t be surprised if it suddenly happens…

To begin, linguistics is actually a very interesting field of study because as an academic science, which studies human language, we are required to speak very academic, standard, formal English during our studies and in our writing but our goal is to understand how language works and is very descriptive in nature. That is, your high school English teacher was a prescriptivist, she prescribed to you (or demanded) that you speak a certain way; a way that physically just doesn’t exist outside of each of our own mental squares labeled “Standard English.” Linguistics on the other hand is descriptive; meaning that we want to know how language is actually used everyday by everyone together and each individual independently. So while the word “anyways,” which I apparently say a lot, is not standard English, I do say it and in fact I say it a lot, so it is English and it is normal, and perfectly okay to say. In informal language use. The same goes for fragmented sentences (see the last sentence), conjunctions (I’m, I’ll, I’d, wanna, gonna, kinda, gotcha), and so on. Going off of this, it is actually pretty interesting how conjunctions work from one framework (well from all of them). So a few years back at the LSA Summer Institute I took a class on Information-based Phonology, which wasn’t my favorite class I’m sorry to say but it did point out something interesting. That is: language (as spoken), works by striking the perfect balance between efficiency and robustness. Efficiency being the amount of time and effort it takes to say something while robustness is the amount of meaning in your message that makes it across to your listener. Therefore, in order for a language to be useful it tries to be maximally efficient and maximally robust but one compromises the other. What this means is that the word “I’m” is more efficient that “I am” but it is also less robust. However, as long as we are not talking too fast as to not be understood, the conjunction “I’m” hasn’t lost so much robustness that we arn’t able to use it in our discourse. All of this about using conjunctions also relies on whether or not the two conjoining words actually fall in the proper syntactic nodes as to be conjoined. This phonological theory actually goes further and says that this is actually why phonological processes occur. So assimilation will occur as an efficiency increasing process, while dissimilation will occur as a robustness saving process. As an example the word “thinking” is pronounced [ðiŋkiŋ] and not [ðinkiŋ] in an attempt to maximize the efficiency between the nasal sound /n/ and the stop sound /k/. This is assimilation. While the word “berserk” is pronounced [bəzʊɹk] instead of [bəɹzʊɹk] in an attempt to make the second /ɹ/ more robust and thus the word easier to understand. The word ‘module-al’ becomes ‘modul-ar’ for the same reason, to increase robustness. These are processes of dissimilation.

Anyways, that’s enough technical talk for now, it was just interesting to note this process, as it was something I was thinkin’ about, and the distinction between descriptivism vs. prescriptivism is an important one in linguistics, as descriptivism is better and provides more interesting language use to look at. Ultimately my Third day in Fairbanks and Alaska was awesome, and I’m having a lot of fun exploring and adventuring and learning new things.

Ciao!