teaching on halloween

Today was my first time to do some teaching at Middlesex. I took over one of the seminars from Billy and it was a small bunch of first year students, about 16 or 17. I enjoyed it a lot. The topic was very interesting, the kind of thing students would want to talk about and discuss, especially that it had interesting examples of ads and lyrics and stuff. But most of all, I enjoyed getting back to teaching. It has been a year since I last dealt with students, since last December when I finished up the first semester and my MA thesis and left soon afterwards. It felt great actually, I never thought I would miss teaching that much. And maybe because the comeback itself was exciting, you know, teaching something closer to linguistics than I ever did before and of course the excitement of teaching students from different cultural backgrounds and in a different country.

So, who said teaching, I mean, halloween is scary? hohahahaha...

Mai :)

egyptian night on bbc

I couldn't resist peaking at the tv at 9 to watch parts of the new show on BBC1: "Egypt". When this ended an hour later, another program started on BBC2: "Egyptian Journeys" :) Both of course were mainly about ancient Egypt and the amazing pharaonic monuments. I love anything that has to do with my ancient ancestors, plus I enjoyed the occasional Arabic phrases that were said in the first show. This one was actually telling the story of Howard Carter and how he came to discover the grand tomb of Tutankhamun. I couldn't help but wonder how would it feel when you are stepping in a room that is 3000 years old knowing that the last people to be there were actual ancient Egyptians and that you are going to unearth an untouched pharaoh's tomb? Wow, it must have been amazing. The next episode would be more saddening I guess because it will be all about the plots and rivalries of the English and the French in the post-discovery phase while the Egyptians themselves were subdued under the political tension of 1922 Egypt.

Anyway, the most interesting Arabic phrase that was mentioned is this: the cheif of the workers saying to his men at the start of the digging:

"يالا يا رجالة وحدوه" (yala ya reggala wahedooh) = "come on men, praise the one and only God"

it can sound strange to anyone who knows nothing about Egyptian culture, which makes it an interesting case for linguistic analysis, right? :)

p.s.
someone sent this email to the Corpora list:

"I’m very interested in finding a list of 4-letter English words – and, um - by four letter wordlists, I *don’t* mean what one might perhaps normally associates with such a term!"

talk about contextual assumptions! :)

Mai

stephen fry on the english language

I was just watching Stephen Fry on tv saying "English is certainly the richest language in its vocabulary". Now is that an absolutely true linguistic fact? hmmm... I think it depends on how you define vocabulary, right?

But he said something interesting about how language is changing with new generations adding to it all the time. He mentioned this new expression apparently famous among 12-year olds: "this is so book" to mean "this is so cool" which originally comes from when you iTap texts on mobiles and the first option you get for typing "cool" is actually "book" and of course not many 12-year olds have time to click on to the next option :) I tried it on my mobile, it works.. book :)

Mai

57,035 things to say

So I had another glimpse of my dear corpus today. And this time, Billy had a photographic proof that it does actually work on 'some computers' :) And this time too, I couldn't resist checking out at least one thing that I will be living with day and night for quite some time: the number of the(s) in the corpus. And yes, you guessed it, there are 57,035 of them. All I could say at this point is: "yalahwy" :) (do you remember this from 3 posts back?) Of course interpreting this word as expressing surprise or excitement or utter distress is a matter of pragmatic interpretation that would aim at explaining a deliberately ambiguous expression :)

Mai

morning wishes

Walking to campus this morning I stopped to watch three kids standing under a big tree playing who will catch the falling leaves before they hit the ground. I wanted to drop everything and join them. Ah well, maybe in another life, I mean, time.

Mai

for those interested in communication

Check out this link: Forbes.com report on Communicating. It includes very interesting articles which attempt to answer very interesting questions such as 'can chimps talk?', 'how to talk to aliens?' and 'why we have language?' plus an intervew with Chomsky and lots of other things.

On the side, you will also notice 3 'intriguing' vote polls. They are asking:

1. With whom would you most like to have a conversation?
2. What's the most annoying modern communication tool?
3. If you could send a message through time and have it delivered to yourself at the age of 18, what would it be?

I don't think the choices in the first one were good, and I thought the one most voted to would be more secular than "God"?! Do you think those who voted for God are either 'very religious' people or 'very doubtful' people? Maybe. Anyway, it has to be a strange world we are livng in where there are more people who want to talk to G.W. Bush than to Shakespeare.

Reading the choices for the second one, I was annoyed to see blogs among them, then I was more annoyed to see blackberries there because I never used one so can't tell if it's annoying or not, and finally I was amused to see the last option "annoying?"

The last one is really funny. As soon as I read "it's true, you never will need algebra again", I thought that's the one. But it was obvious which will get the most votes. Do you ever have this nightmare where Google is controlling the world and you can only gtalk and gmail and gwalk and gdrive and geat and gdrink and gthink and gdream and.. then suddenly wake up screaming gNOOOOOOOOOO? me neither!

Mai

d'oh, aargh, grrrrrrr, etc.

I am not going to say anything linguistically interesting about these expressions, except that they are sometimes really needed. I was all day like this. You know the feeling when you have been waiting for so long to get your hands on something and just when you have a glimpse of it and think 'halleloya' it's gone again for no logical reason? The 'something' is the 1-million word corpus (collections of texts in a digital form with its own software to browse/search it) that I will be using for my thesis and the 'no logical reason' is stupid computer technicalities. Of course, after a number of failed attempts and no good answers from people in charge, I had already used up all the interjections expressing being annoyed and pist off in both English and Arabic.

Mai

d'oh, in arabic

A lot of discussion is going on these days about the show running on MBC in Ramadan that is an Arabized version of The Simpsons. I haven't seen it myself, but according to this article: Arabized Simpsons not getting many laughs. Of course this is no surprise, and I have always felt that Arabizing anything is not a good idea. It just seems to me to be the lazy way out: we don't have to create a new show, let's just arabize one. And the process of arabizing itself is not an easy task that could turn into a ridiculous tastless imitation if not taken seriously. I mean, yes in the Arabic Simpsons, Homer, now called Omar, can drink soda instead of beer and eat traditional cookies (kahk) instead of doughnuts. But the real problem is the language. As someone wondered, according to the article, how the heck are they going to translate something like "Hi-diddly-ho, neighbors!"?

Actually, I am also thinking of the simple "d'oh", don't you think that even this needs to be arabized? Normally, no Arabic-speaking person would shout "d'oh" when s/he drops a glass of water or says something wrong. And given the fact that there seems to be no consensus on the Arabic equivalents for other interjections like "oops", "ouch" and "wow", I think "d'oh" would join in the list of expressions that are used in the Arab world as if we had no other way of expressing whatever these words mean before. This is really strange since interjections are basically expressions of emotions, like surprise or excitement, and surely it doesn't make sense to borrow an expression of emotion from another language. Of course it's the influence of the media, but I think we should try to get back to the roots of our emotive expressions and revive them.

Personally, I think the typical Egyptian expression "يالهوى" (yalahwy) goes a long way (with the right intonation) in expressing many different emotions like surprise, boredom, excitement and of course utter distress (accompanied by a smack on one's chest) :)

Mai

is it really about cars?

I think the new Renault Clio ad on tv is very interesting. You can watch it here. The whole Britain-French comparison is a convenient idea since it reflects the contribution of the two countries in the making of the car. But does it really stop at that? These are the comparisons:

French: the Eiffel Tower
British: Blackpool Tower

French: cinema
British: television

French: the hot air balloon
British: jet engine

French: haute cuisine
British: the sandwich

Up until this point, I think the French seem to be doing better, except maybe for the fact that they have nothing to match the British "1815 Waterloo" (maybe it could have been "1789 the French Revolution"?). Even though I never tried the hot air balloon, it always strikes me as a very nice idea for flying around and enjoying it. And although I haven't seen Blackpool Tower, my experience of Eiffel is so fantastically live with excitement that I think I share with millions of people who have been there. I didn't even know there is a tower in Blackpool :) And of course the food, don't even get me started on the food :) But I am not sure if British television is a good match for French cinema?!!

But then comes the knock out, my favourite, which definitely turns everything towards the British side:

French: Jules Verne, Jean Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
British: shhh.. Shakespeare

I don't know if some may think this is unfair to the French? But hey, you can actually go through life without reading Sartre's philosophy or Baudelaire's poetry (although it would be good to read about them), but you can't really go through life without reading one or two of Shakespeare's plays or poetry in any form or type. Right? :) Long live Shakespeare.

Mai

iLectures anyone?

According to this Guardian article, Stanford Universiy in California is going to make its course materials available on iTunes. Isn't this a brilliant iDea? Let's give the students the course timetables, lectures, assignments on their iPods and we can all sit back and relax in the empty classes.

Mai

it's a sign

So in my first night as an official mphil/phd student in linguistics, I decided to read something that is not linguistic, i.e. that has nothing to do with linguistics, in other words, that is not even remotely related to linguistics. So I picked up this tiny little book (which I actually bought for my brother) and started reading On Bullshit. And this is just a sample of what I found in the first 3 pages:

• One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

• We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a concientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis.

• My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not or to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of it's concept.

• Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean.

It can't get more linguistic than that :) The red parts alone can even easily go into my thesis :) By page 4 I had stopped reading and started thinking with a smile on my face: "it's a sign, wherever I go, whatever I do, linguistics will be right here waiting for me".

This is no bullshit: linguistics is my destiny :)
Isn't it nice to know? :)

Mai

one fine day

This morning it was all dark and rainy.. Around midday it rained again.. At 2:00 pm it was my registration panel.. After I finished and headed to the tube station I found that the line is suspended so I had to take 2 buses to Victoria line (passing by my old neighbourhood Enfield which I don't miss at all) during which it rained some more.. I went home for 10 minutes then went to Rehab's and Mostafa's place and arrived half an hour late for iftar, walking in the rain.. I just came back home and, guess what, it's still raining..

So, how do I feel now? Well..

I’m only happy when it rains
I’m only happy when it’s complicated
And though I know you can’t appreciate it
I’m only happy when it rains

Garbage, "Only happy when it rains"

Of course I am happy because the registration thing went great today. I only wish my final viva would be like that :) well, maybe it would last a bit longer.. Whew, I am so relieved and I feel like taking a week off and going somewhere. Yeh, like this is going to happen ;-) I did celebrate anyway with my friends, mainly by stuffing myself with sweets :) Right now, I am finishing up a KitKat with a nice warm cup of coffee. And on this fine day, I can't be but happy.

Mai

(ph)d-day

So, tomorrow is a special day. It should be fine really, it's just the registration of the thesis proposal. But of course, you know me, I have to be nervous about anything concerning my work. So what I am doing for the rest of the night is listening to the kind of songs that suit my mood now. I am starting with Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters":

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
and nothing else matters

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don't just say
and nothing else matters

Does this sound defensive or aggressive to you? I think it's a good combination anyway.

Mai

pharaohs rule

A recent archeological discovery in Egypt discovered this thousand-year old drawing engraved on the walls of a forgotten temple. This is believed to be the First Blogger in the world. Egyptologists from all corners of the earth are currently trying to decipher the hieroglyphs written under this drawing (which are not yet accessible to the public because of domain copyright issues) in an attempt to figure out the name of the blog. I think they should just try: www.tutankhamun.blogspot.com

My great ancestors probably invented everything we already have. Pharaohs Rule :)

Mai

author photos

I liked reading this article in the Guardian today: "Facing the facts". It's about puting authors' photos on book covers. I totally agree with the writer that sticking authors' photos in readers' faces like that is pretty presumptuous, especially that those photos have become bigger and bigger over the years. Personally, when I read any literary work, I couldn't care less about what the author looks like. Actually, sometimes I don't want to know, I prefer to keep the mystery, or as the writer puts it: "the faceless book has about it a literary purity". I say leave the author's photos for cook books, how-to-become-a-millionaire books and the-golden-rules-for-losing-weight books. But literature is more sublime. Until now, some of the major literary figures that I studied or read their work remain facially obscure to me.


Of course, sometimes you may get really curious to see the face behind the name and it becomes interesting to see how would that affect you. One of the most interesting experiences of that kind happened to me when I was studying Waiting for Godot as a 4th-year undergrad and was reading loads of stuff about Beckett and the rest of his work. I was fascinated by the theatre of the absurd as well as by the unmatched talent of Beckett. I was so curious to see how he looks like (and it was inevitable really) and, I have to say, he had quite an impression on me. Again, as the article says, "this is what a Great Writer looks like".

p.s.
linguistically speaking, I find this sentence in the article very interesting:
"of course not all authors have faces"
isn't it a nice case for semantic truth-conditions? ;-)

Mai

don't ask

I just suddenly felt that my blog page is very dark. I needed more light.

Mai

the going gets tough, and the tough (try to) get going

I know, this is probably the longest time I went without blogging. It's not that there was nothing to blog about or that I stopped believing in the expressive power of the blogosphere. It's just that this week has been.. well, strange, a series of very up ups followed by very down downs. One day I am having iftar with a nice group of friends, watching the prayers from Mecca on tv, chatting and laughing, another day I am eating alone at home with a cold watching the news. For three days I have a total of 10 hours of sleep, and one night I sleep for 11 hours. Between this and that I was either too busy, too tired or too 'feeling guilty and want to compensate by studying' to blog. Anyway, all things being equal, I am ok now (I am still working on the sleeping issue though, as you can see).

So here I am, savouring the last minutes before dawn to drink as much water as I possibly can and thinking what's worth telling you now that wouldn't be old news (like the fourth Egyptian nobel prize winner (although peace prizes are the least interesting for me)). I guess we could all use a few laughs, so check this out. My bro emailed me this cool Carlton Draught ad that you can watch here. It's a big ad, really big ad, it's so freaking huge.. :) seriously it's one of the coolest ads I've ever seen.

Ok, so enough with the laughs. Here is something a little more academic. On the semantics blog (if you don't know what semantics is please don't go there, it can be scary :) ) there was an interesting linguistic discussion of the note that is written in all papers written by more than one author "the authors appear in alphabetical order". Someone mentioned another very nice version of this: "authors are listed in order of degree of belief in the central thesis" (if you don't really believe in the central thesis, why the hell did you write it in the first place?). Maybe someone will be more honest and write something like "authors are listed in order of who did all the work while the other sat there and did nothing"? How about a personal touch: "authors are listed in order of degree of physical beauty, as it bears on the central thesis"? :) I guess by now you realise I am thinking of other options because I know that if I ever write a paper with someone my name will probably come last :) just kidding.

Oh, and one final piece of news: I recently saw Crash, and it has been a long time since I've seen a movie with a well-written intricate story like this. The story is so real that it makes you think it's scary that we've become to live in such a racist world.

Ok, now that I got the blogging activity going again, I am off to bed with a clear conscience :) good night or good morning.

p.s.1
here is a question for you, the other day I heard someone on tv commenting on Charles' and Diana's marriage saying:

"Britian ooed and ahed at this fairy tale wedding"

is that how would you write it? And can we have more interesting derivations out of these two words like 'ooing' and 'ahing' or 'the ooers' and the 'ahers'?

p.s.2
do you think that "more interesting derivations" in the sentence above is ambiguous?

p.s.3
oops, I kept on writing and forgot to drink more water, now it's too late :(

Mai

the real deal

It's day three, and I still can't manage to do any decent bit of work in the pre-six thirty period. My coffee-depraved mind refuses to deal with anything seriously. For example, yesterday I took the wrong bus to the same place I went to the day before and ended up being half an hour late for iftar as if I needed to get more thirsty. And today, I knew that it's Billy's birthday (happy birthday :) ), but it was hours later when I noticed that today is 6th of October, a national holiday in Egypt, so here is a birthday I'll never forget :) Anyway, I guess I have to depend more often on the post-six thirty period.

Oh, here is the latest piece of academic news for you, according to this, Sir Henry Neville is claimed to be the one who actually wrote the great plays and poems of Shakespeare. All I can say is, well.. even if it's true, it's probably going to be a very long time before a teacher walks in a class and says: "this semester we're going to study Hamlet by Henry Neville".

Mai

going out, coming in and moving on

So my plan for the month, which I started today is simple: going out to work and then to meet people and eat together, coming back in by the end of the day to sleep, and moving on with my life.

Still, I wish my plan could be:

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when 'October' ends

(Green Day, "Wake me up when September ends")

Thanks Miro for the song.

Mai

'ramadan kareem' happy ramadan

I won't even begin to tell you how I spent the past few days. All I can say is tonight is somehow reminiscent of my first night in the UK. Yep, it's that bad. Anyway, I know I'll snap out of it eventually, I'll let you know when.

So, in the early hours of the first day of Ramadan, happy Ramadan everyone.

p.s.
tonight is Arabic music night, although I miss accidentally hearing Abdel Moteleb singing "ahlan ramadan" (welcome ramadan), I am hoping the warm soothing voice of Fairouz singing to her home will help.

Mai

struggling through 'le weekend'

It's not that I was intimidated by your last Yiddish remark and decided to shut up for a while. I was, and still am, struggling through a lot of issues these days.

The main problem is trying to come to grips with the fact that this will be my first Ramadan ever without my family or friends. Some of you might say: "c'mon, you're used now to living on your own in a different country", which is true in some respects, but it's RAMADAN, you know, it's special. It's when you gather with your family round the dining table waiting for the 'iftar canon' to loudly announce eating time over the radio, and then you go on stuffing very nice food down your throat after long fasting hours while listening to the prayers and the rest of the Ramadan-only programs where the same famous people say the same boring things, and complaining of how bad these programs get year after year. It's even better when you are invited over for iftar in the big family gatherings where there is more food or when you eat out with friends where there is more money-spending. Seriously, I don't know how I am going to deal with this. Of course I will be meeting with friends here for iftar, but it's not going to be the same.

Anyway, all this has screwed up my sleeping hours, as you can see. So here I am at 3 am trying to get my mind to work through some examples, there is news on BBC one, and every 10 minutes I click on firefox and check anything on the internet. But at least I had a few laughs when I read this and this. They are particularly amusing for anyone interested in the 'peculiarities' of the French language from English-speaking linguists' point of view, but if you are French or happen to have strong feelings about the French language, you probably shouldn't read them :)

Ok, I still have a few hours of activity in me, so I'll go work through some of my other struggles. 'le weekend est tres intéressant, no?' ;-)

Mai