Yfele!

[cosmolinguist]

My history teacher sent me a funny e-mail today--not ha-ha funny, so much as weird-funny. It ends

AND i really appreciate your participation-- you often analyze on a level that is VERY high. I mean this. Some of the students don't catch it but I do.

Maybe it's only funny because I think I never say anything in that class, what with all the boys who know more than I do and have opinions about everything.

It's also the amusing kind of funny, now that I think about it, because he writes how he talks; I'm used to hearing him say things in this style ... I'm just not used to them being nice things about me.

And now for something completely different.

I did a few boring, administrative errands today, one of them being registering for classes next semester. I'll be taking

• Modern Russian Intellectualism with the history prof who sent me this e-mail (I wanted Modern German Intellectualism but it's at the same time as something else, and this should still be interesting)
• Advanced Fiction Writing (ha; I haven't written fiction since ... have I ever written fiction?)
• Introduction to Music, which is probably about things I already know but it's the only non-art-history class I could find that fulfills the Fine Arts requirement I still need
• Old English Literature and Language, which excites me terribly, because I am a nerd

That last one's being taught by the grammar and language prof I have now ... as a matter of fact, today in class she told us the details of our Infamous Old English Recitation assignment (later we'll be doing Middle English, and then Early Modern English). I find it cool but daunting.

As we were reading these things in class (we have a choice between the Lord's Prayer, something from Beowulf, and another poem I can't rmemeber right now), I laughed at Sarah for pronouncing things Frenchly, because of course that sounds funny in Old English.

But I've noticed that tendency before; to pronounce strange words in the manner of whatever strange language one happens to be most acquainted with. Jenn did it in German; since she'd taken French in high school, she said "du" a lot differently than I did. When Katie was reading me the subtitles in Traffic (I tend not to be able to read stuff like that), she kept using 'y' sounds for the J's instead of 'h' sounds, because she knows German, not Spanish. And I tend to pronounce things in Old English the way I learned them for Middle English. Or German. Yes, those are the foreign languages I'm somewhat familiar with: Middle English and German. Terribly impressive, aren't I?

Comments

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

Old English is tremendously cool! Second only to Old Norse.

[cosmolinguist]

Well, I'm glad to hear that someone (besides my professor) thinks it's cool that I know an archaic version of a language.