The StuSie

Alas, I am not the only avid blogger who has been struck gleichzeitig with a case of writer's block and a hopeless lack of free time. Funny how a 30 hour a week teaching job, 15 hour a week bartending job and four graduate classes can put a big damper on the whole do-whatever-you-please front. So it goes.

That said, my former not-so-productive self now feels a sense of completion after each day, having instilled the knowledge of a 'lesser' German (nach Lee...I'll get to that) in the fresh (but soon to be verwelkt) minds of young people.

Alas again, though I seem to be writing, I'm really just faking it, and my writer's block continues. I've simply taken up the soapbox to write a greeting and a brief response to Lee's 'Schwiezer Blog'. Lee indeed is not a Linguist, but he's generally a pretty sharp guy, and though generally you can't trust a country's population to know the whole truth about their language (test this by asking the average English speaker where their language came from), there usually is some truth to the popular myth. Whoever Lee did speak to is right that Swiss German did not undergo any of the second sound shift, which reached completion in the north, partial completion in central Germany, and didn't really even start in Switzerland. That said, it also never happened in Austria. The thing that makes certain varieties of Swiss really special, though, isn't the second sound shift, but nominal morphology. We all know about those few words left in German that take a pesky weak -n or -e ending in the dative case (z.B. Bauer, Herr, etc.). Well, specifically in Valais, which is predominantly French-speaking, but which also has a very small and isolated German-speaking population, they have pretty much maintained the entire nominal morphology of Old High German. In a way we could say they are the Icelandic of continental Europe because their language has remained nearly untouched by major sound shifts and borrowings (save of course some French influx), along with any morphological loss of complexity. Screw the aspirated 'k' and 'li' endings...I think this is the real fascinating stuff. All that said, though, being a Linguist also means looking only descriptively at a language, so I'm am loath to give anyone any respect when they begin attaching value judgements to languages or language varieties. This has been going on since the beginning of time and has really only been used either for purposes of discrimination, propaganda, or to fool oneself into believing one is superior to another. That's another story, altogether, though, so I step down from the box of soap...

But so my students just don't have the same excitement level as Lee's. No backflips, no speed reading, not even a freaking septum piercing in my class. I thought this was the time for young adults to test the boundaries of their personalities and inner selves. The most clever thing I've seen in the last week was that one of my students was clever enough to come up with G6 when I asked them to come up with team names for a little translation competition. Yes, there are six people in their group. So when I told the little bastard that may not be entirely appropriate he comes back at me with Gruppe6. I told him to let me know when his testicles drop.