group work

Today my group in Applied Linguistics is meeting for the first time. Our presentation is a week from friday. It is not worse than the other groups are doing, but I don't like it. We only really have two projects. One of them is the final and the other is this group project. I hope that we can split up the alloted time into segments and each take a segment. I would rather do my work on my own, it would be easier with my schedule. Oh, well, we shall see how this goes. Our group has an interesting article, and that certainly helps.

family in town

My parents are in town for almost a week. They are staying with me, and hanging out in Portland. Yesterday my folks and fiance and his mother all went to lunch together in Vancouver. Then we went to the farmers market. It was a nice and sunny day. Dad made omelettes for us three this morning, and in a little while we will head downtown to go to meet Jody and go to church together. I just recently started another blog, a wedding blog, but there isn't really anything on it yet, since we don't have the date or place picked out yet. soon.

Taxes

Now is that time of the year when taxes are due, and there is some mumbling and complaining about this. However, it is a good thing to have taxes. Taxes pay for the police department, and the fire department, and many other important services. Without that kind of inferstructure society would not run at all smoothly. That is not to say that everything is perfect, just that it is a far sight better than anarchy ever could be. I used to work at PSU, as a building cleaner. Someone would occasionally paint/ draw symbols for anarchy in the elevator, and it was my job to clean up that sort of mess. It made me chuckle to think what this person would experience if there were a little anarchy in his life (I mean, if suddenly, the cleaning crew no longer cleaned up after him) Oh well, some of the best laughs come from some of the most annoying things. So if you are in the camp that is annoyed by taxes, think of something humorous about tax-day. You could even shock your co-workers with a suprise 'tax-day' party. That would be fun!

Passover

Wednesday was passover, a time to celebrate God's miraculous deliverance from Egypt. Pharoah would not let the people of Israel go, and even after nine plagues, he stubbornly refused to let them go. Only after the tenth plague would pharoah relent. The tenth plague was the death of the firstborn.
Moses instructed the people of Israel what to do: The passover lamb was slaughtered and its blood was brushed onto the doorposts of the house. The people were to roast the lamb and serve it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The angel of the Lord passed over the homes marked with the lamb's blood, and smote the firstborn of every other houshold.
There was mourning over all of Egypt. Pharoah finally let the people go, but he changed his mind, and sent his army after them. This is what Moses said, after God rescued them by parting the Red Sea:
"Who is like to you among the gods, O Lord?
Who is like to you, magnificent in holiness?
O terrible of renown, worker of wonders,
when you stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them!
In your mercy you led the people you redeemed;
in your strength you guided them
to your holy dwelling."
Genesis 15: 11-13

what is the monosyllable rule?

Aha! According to the monosyllable rule, a stressed syllable can occur in a weak position only in two situations 1)if it is a monosyllabic word 2)if it belongs to a polysyllabic word, and the stress of this word occurs at the beginning of the line or after a major syntactic break. On the other hand, an unstressed syllable is always ok in a strong position.
Shakespear wrote in iambic pentameter. The stress pattern is: WSWSWSWSWS. In class we are writing out stressed syllables with capitol letters. So the first couple of lines of Hamlet's famous speech would read:
to BE or NOT to BE THAT is the QUES-tion
WHE ther tis NO-bler in the MIND to SU-ffer...
Those spots where there is a stressed syllable in a weak position are at the beginning of a line, and after a syntactic break.
How about the following sonnet- does Shakespear follow the monolsyllable rule? (that is: do the stresses of the polysyllable words fall on the even (strong) syllables?)
Let not to the marraige of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

morning muse

Todays assignment in Rhyme and Meter is to compare a poem by Byron to one by Pushkin, who was a big fan of Byron. We scanned the poems and put them into a grid to compare them with the 'ideal' meter they were written in: 12 lines of 4 feet of iamb. Then we counted up the number of words with three or more syllables. Byron's poem had three such words- Pushkin's had twelve. The difference between the two languages in word length very much effects the difference in stress patterns. The poem by Pushkin had fewer stresses per line than did Byron's, which gives the poem a different feel.
This class is not really linguistics, yet it is decidedly related to linguistics. It will be fascinating to learn more about the language of poetry, and how it is put together- both in English and in other languages.

links, sort of

I don't know how to add links to my page, but you might like to check out these other sites. The first two are my fiance's blogs:
www.claiming-disability.blogspot.com
www.blog-jody.blogspot.com
and here's a fun one for learning Hebrew:
www.zigzagworld.com

happy news!

On wednesday of spring break, I went on a little road trip to Salem with my beau. We have been dating for several months, and now we are engaged to be married! It's funny sometimes, how a person can think they have everything figured out, and then God surprises them in a big way. When I went back to university in the fall of '04, I thought I pretty much knew what to expect over the next five years. School. Internship. Career-type job. Buy a house. But marraige? Getting married generally involves dating first (since there aren't match makers like in the old days)...I was not expecting any such thing! Anyways, this is my happy news!