Intro

WHOA I clicked on the first blog and freaked out since it was basically awesome and I hadn't even started on mine...but it turns out to be the Upenn language log, thank goodness (not that I didn't expect it out of you guys :) ).

By the way, that's one of the biggest pitfalls (to me) of modern language usage - what the heck do you do when the smiley is followed by an end parentheses? (and the case is more common than it would seem considering that humorous one-liners are often aftherthoughts :) (jk)). actually, the smiley just got me thinking about something - the letters of human alphabet originally (like 4000 years ago) directly corresponded to concrete objects, like a letter (well they were actually words then) visually represented an ox or whatever. Eventually they evolved to break free of the concrete constraints and took on abstract and easy to draw shapes, but now it's like we've come full circle - we're playing with letters to make them look like actual things (smileys)...well :) is composed of punctuation marks, but like :P or :D...you get my point.

Sorry - my name is Varun Sivaram, I'm technically monolingual (but I like Spanish a lot and can understand Tamil, a South Indian language), and I'm prettty excited about this class. Last summer I spent 6 weeks learning about the history of writing (like the actual technology, it wasn't a lit class), and it was sweet. It was kind of tangential to the questions raised by traditional linguistics (and obviously cognitive linguistics), but I read a bit of some dude named Ferdinand Saussure (quick, what do you get when Ferdinand jumps off a trampoline? A flying Saussure!) and it brought up interesting issues...

Of course, I envisioned the class way differently than it's shaping up to be. I was pumped about a lecture type class where we'd examine competing theories of, for example, where the definition of an abstract word is contained (other abstract words? metaphors?), and in rigorous, logical, predetermined fashion take a neuroscientific approach to answering tough questions. I'm still wary of the way this is going to work, but I guess I have faith in the fact that statistically speaking, we're bound to discuss most of the things we'd discuss in lecture, and we'll get to them in cool ways. Plus, I just checked out the google alert and there's actually some cool stuff - I figured a generic search on language would turn up really random things, but I'm finding a lot of relevance...so far.

Aite, see you guys tomorrow.

Varun