Day: November 21, 2016

1. My doctor said up to 3 weeks. It took me 4. He shrugged that off.
2. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.
3. Be well aware that antidepressants are a roulette. Psychiatrists throw shit at the wall to see what will stick. They don’t work the same for everyone.
4. The usual technique is to switch your meds rather than up your dose, and you certainly don’t up the dose of brand new meds; you’re supposed to increase gently. Because again, psychiatrists are throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick. And the less feces being flung, the less the overall risk.
5. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.

Quite a bit.

I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?

Now. Fieldwork linguists tend to like the cultures of the people they work among. And they tend not to like people they perceive as working to eradicate those cultures. They are academics, so they’re already on preponderance predisposed against religion. (The most visionary linguist we had was a pastor in training, and eventually moved across to theology—and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Our homegrown computational linguistics giant was a fieldworker, and a missionary. Both were regarded by their colleagues with amused detachment.)

I learned more about typology working as a research assistant than doing a PhD. Just as well, because my PhD wasn’t in typology. I was research assistant for a prof doing a phonological survey of Papua New Guinea.

PNG has, what, 1/8 of the world’s languages? 1/6?

How many academic linguists have signed up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, so they can record obscure languages there?

More than there used to be. We’ve run out of new languages among our Indigenous Australians, so PhDs wanting to write a grammar of an underdocumented language are sent to PNG now. But still, of the 800-odd languages there, I’d be surprised if even more more than 50 are documented to an acceptable scholarly level.

You know who’s prepared to sign up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, to record languages in PNG for their own motives?

Of course you do.

Academic Linguists owe a lot to SIL International. Some of them wish they didn’t. While the SIL missionaries are sometimes linguistic incompetents, sometimes they are brilliant linguists; it’s mixed.

I know one thing, though. Vanuatu has the highest density of languages on earth: 110 languages, population of 300k. Vanuatu, for reasons that a lot of linguists would be sympathetic to, has barred SIL from working there.

And Vanuatu, not PNG, is the most linguistically underdocumented country there is.

Ah, Mlle Demoritto, this question causes me amusement, because it betrays your lack of Anglo-Saxon repression.

The Anglo-Saxon proverbial expression is, there are three topics that one should never bring up for social discussion: Sex, Politics, and Religion. All three are regarded as too hot.

This is obviously a culture-specific judgement, and different cultures and individuals will have completely different opinions. Some cultures, and a lot of people, are quite ok to talk about sex. In countries without a sectarian divide, or where there is long-entrenched freedom of religion, religion will be far less toxic—unless individuals are True Believers, trying to convert everyone at the dinner table.

The same actually goes for politics. In Greece, my childhood memory is that discussing politics was more an entertainment, an excuse for people to gesticulate and mock argue, than something serious and deadly (although there was an undercurrent of that too).

So the answer to your question really depends on the culture of the “we”, and on how much of a True Believer (moral, religious or ideological) “we” are.