Backblog (2): Norway

Skipping over a boring half-week with work and unsuccessfully trying to reschedule the generic Language in Context slot to Mondays, or Tuesdays, or anything but Wednesday afternoon... and we arrive at the 2nd PhD Conference in Linguistics and Philology, which was held in Bergen (Norway -- hence the post title) on June 4-6.

Flying out on the Sunday morning, a direct Widerøe flight from Edinburgh to Bergen in a relatively small propellor plane, although it was probably slightly bigger than the one I went to Shetland on last year. I had some difficulties tuning in to the flight attendant's strong Bergen accent, especially with the noise of the motors, but after five years of not actually speaking Norwegian I turned out to still be able to do so anyway. In Bergen I managed to get Norwegian money and find the airport bus to the center of town, and then quickly the hotel.

Hotel. This may be a bit of an overstatement. For £35 a night you would expect more than just a bed and a sink that doesn't actually drain, even in Norway. The light wasn't brilliant either (definitely not more than 30 W) but as it was summer and far North that didn't really matter as it didn't really get dark anyway. I quickly redefined 'hotel' as 'place to kip and nothing else' and stuck to it.

Went out wandering for the rest of the afternoon and evening, mostly oscillating between Bergenhus fort, the park at Lille Lungegårdsvann and Vågen/Bryggen. Found out where I could buy food (the Narvesen kiosk near Galleriet, or the one at Bryggen, or the Baker Brun at Zakariasbryggen) and did so. Danishes, which they call wienerbrød, are great. We have the skillingbolle, which is the local specialty: a cinnamonny Danish with a spiral of white icing. The prinsessebolle, which I can't really remember what it was but I think it's a skillingbolle without the icing. And the skolebolle, which is the skillingbolle with a big blob of set custard in the middle. Behold my breakfast for the next three days. I also need to mention the Imsdal bottled water with lime and fiber taste. Fiber, yes. Oddness.

It was fantastic weather both at Bergenhus fort...



... and at Lille Lungegårdsvann. (And also at Bryggen but I don't want to overdo it on the photo front.)



Then on Monday started the conference, which was the 'real' (right...) reason for going to Bergen. My talk was the first one up after the plenary, and it went alright. This meant that I had the rest of the conference to relax. As usual, you meet people on the first day of the conference that you hang out with for the rest of it. These were JT, a Serbian girl who grew up in Britain and is doing her PhD in Brighton on the syntax/semantics of modals; MF, a Spanish woman who is working on translation in Swansea and speaks with a Welsh lilt; and BUJ, who is from Hedmark but spent five years in Glasgow and sounds like it!

Best talk at the conference was probably the Polish girl who was talking about weak and strong adjective declensions in Old English. Interesting topic, well-presented and a convincing case. The worst talk... well, in reality this was probably the guy from Israel who rush-read through his paper with many an example in Hebrew and didn't quite succeed in telling us what he was actually talking about. But the cash prize goes to... RM from Zaporižža National University in the Ukraine. "Linguophilosophic parameters of English innovations in the sphere of new technologies." God knows what that was about; or probably he doesn't because it was completely incomprehensible and drowned in sixteen-line sentences with five-syllable words. It wouldn't have been so bad if she didn't always ask smart-arsy questions at all (!) the talks.

Also met the Icelandic incarnation of Miss Piggy. JB was chief organizer of the conference, and appears to suffer from a complexity of complexes. She really, really likes herself, is very proud of her achievements, and blames not getting all sorts of important jobs on old boys' networks. We call this a 'victim complex'. Of course these people, even though they haven't published as much as you, may well be as qualified, and just by 'being a single mother and working like a slave for eighteen hours a day' you don't always get what you want. Tough. She did get massive funding (£1m) for a project on case in Indo-European. Which, according to JB, shows that if you think big enough, it's possible to get funding, even for a woman, and even in the humanities. Think big enough. Would that be the reason for grabbing a bowl of peanuts ten minutes after the conference dinner while exclaiming, 'Gee, I'm hungry again already!'...

The flights back were okay. The plane from Bergen to Copenhagen was slightly delayed, which meant that I had to spend an extra half hour in an airport without decent shopping facilities whatsoever (yes, fags and booze, but who cares about that). The plane was a gigantic jumbo and I was sat right at the back next to a woman from Turku who had to run in Copenhagen to get her connecting flight to Stockholm. (Zigzagging your way through Scandinavia, nice...) Then had to spend some time in Copenhagen Airport until the flight to Edinburgh. Had a look at the gate where the Atlantic Airways plane to the Faroes was parked, but didn't recognize anyone. (Hey, I would easily recognize 45 Faroese people, which is 1/1000 of their population. This is a much larger proportion than what I know of the Dutch or Scottish population, and the chances of Faroese people flying to the Faroes from Denmark are also quite substantial, so it was worth a try, especially when bored.)

Danes have a strange music taste, as a quick browse through the music store showed. The new Runrig album was at number 7 in their charts. Now I like Runrig, but even in Scotland it doesn't get to that high a chart position. The Danes also like Michael Learns to Rock, which I thought stopped making music aeons ago. Apparently not.

Oh well, I bought Danish water (Egekilde) and Swedish chocolate, and then a typically Danish hotdog which was very mustardy and little meaty. (Good thing I had the Danish water...) The girl who sold me the hotdog was obviously Danish but when I asked for a hotdog in Norwegian she answered in Swedish. I would probably have understood the Danish, at least I managed to understand the Danish the rest of the airport people spoke. (Mainly the three people I had to ask for directions to the nearest cash machine which was in a very odd location.)

The plane to Edinburgh was way too small for its own good. It was a jet plane, but it was the size of the thing I went to Shetland on. That didn't really add up, and I wasn't really happy during take off, which otherwise was very pretty as you could see the bridge over the Øresund, which starts right next to the airport. (Well I think it comes out of a tunnel underneath the airport there.) Must say I didn't really like the weather report for Edinburgh: overcast and 12 degrees, after having had bright sunshine and 25 degrees in Norway (!). But I survived, and the whole experience was a Good Thing.

Now it's time to go to a dinner party at EM's.

Backblog

And then suddenly three months went by without any updates. Oops. Which means that I now have an enormous backlog of adventures to relate. I don't think I'm going to manage to remember all the way back to March, but the recent past should be alright. So here we go, going in approximate reverse chronological disorder...

Last Saturday, JH and I went to see AF's choir in concert. It was nicely done, although we both had our thoughts about the singing skills of the girl with ringlets. AF also introduced us to his new boy. I say introduced; really AF just vaguely waved in the general direction and we had to wait until the boy introduced himself. He seems nice enough, but because the choir insisted on going to some odd pub miles away, we ended the night with a cup of tea at home and didn't get to meet him properly. As an aside, I was mildly annoyed by the gay militantism in the choir. Is there really a need to re-write all the lyrics? Especially those of negro spirituals from the abolition struggle? Oh, and claiming HIV as a gay disease, I thought the whole idea was to try to convince Bush that it isn't?

Moving on... On Friday I was extremely unmotivated, so I ended up going into town. I didn't buy any clothes because H&M decided not to have a sale on, but I did buy a 10-DVD set of Tintin cartoons for £20. Childhood memories. Although of course in my childhood Tintin didn't speak with an American accent. Still, have been enjoying some of the movies (there's 21 in all) already, but am trying not to watch too many of them too soon.

Friday's non-motivationality was directly related to Thursday, when I decided to try to work on the Evil Reviewer's comments on my taboo-language article. I need to relate it more to recent literature on language death. Great. I did a nice search, found nothing in the past ten years on language death apart from some monographs along the lines of 'Look at all the different ways language behaves. If we let languages die, we'll lose all of it which will greatly hamper the study of linguistics'. Agreed and all, but incredibly irrelevant to my article. As a result, within ten minutes of starting the editing I had crumpled up the piece of paper and physically chucked it against the wall, and sent AM an e-mail saying I was thinking of telling the editor to sod off with his effing journal. Still waiting for the masterplan to bypass the Evil Reviewer and get my article published...

All of last week was celebration week, really. On Monday, CH passed her viva and we had drinks in the Pear Tree. On Wednesday, RRV passed her viva, which was celebrated in style on Thursday with a mini-banquet and a concert by RRV's trio -- two flutes and piano, well impressed as well by TK's piano skills! -- in St Cecilia's Hall. And on Friday we celebrated AR's distinction in her MSc by drinks in the Pear Tree followed by Chinese buffet at Waverley.

The Saturday before that AF asked whether I wanted to go to Treefest with him. We ran into TB at the bus stop, and later also found some Shambles walking about. And later WB said he was coming too, so it was a big group. Treefest is a nice idea: see what things you can do with wood (especially the handicraftsmen were nice, although whether making wooden cubes from a tree with a chainsaw is a craft is another question) and make sure we treat our forests and our environment nicely. Too bad it was infested with tree-hugging hippies. Yuck! I wash my hands off them!

Walked home with WB and decided to try out the wooden spatula he bought at Treefest (for £3, but then again, it did come with the guarantee that this was the most fantastic spatula ever, and once you use it, you will never use another spatula again). So we had a stirfry, the spatula worked okay, and spent the rest of the evening pottering about in WB's room which turns out to double as a music studio. Some nepotist promotion: see some of the tracks at www.barras.ws (esp. 'Jane' and the Buddy Holly cover are nice), which incidentally weren't recorded in his room but in our office!

Devolution

Yay, mail! From some bloke in Cheshire who's trying to sell New Scotland the books of dances that he wrote. Will pass on to new committee. Then my eye caught the envelope:

EDINBURGH EH_ ___
Scotland

Has devolution reached the Royal Mail?

Traffic

This morning when I put the kettle on, I saw a car drive off from our little square, with what looked like a mother bringing her daughter to school. By the time I was pouring the milk into the tea, the car had returned, with mother but without daughter. Surely if you can drive to school and back in the time it takes for a kettle to boil, you may as well walk!

Discussion skills

Why we like e-mail lists:

> Do you see this, or not?

Hmmm... No, not really. Perhaps if you try
capitalised letters or a bigger font, when
you repeat your arguments?

The author of that comment is actually a distinguished professor of mathematics at a Northern European university. Academics can have a sense of humour...

They don't actually listen, do they?

— So do you get paid to mark our essays?
— Yes, I get paid for 15 hours of marking.
— £15 per essay? That's way better than Scotmid!

Lecturers

xx mm

Surely it's not appropriate for a lecturer to end an e-mail with that?!

Philological Society

I regret to inform you that your submission has not won the Prize on this occasion, but the reviewer(s) have recommended publication in Transactions of the Philological Society, but also suggest some revisions to your manuscript. Therefore, I invite you to respond to the reviewer(s)' comments and revise your manuscript.

Some of the reviewers' comments were actually quite reasonable, even. So I'm going to have to revise the taboo language paper, as well as transform the Shetland marriages paper into the style of the journal Local Population Studies (endnotes! grr!) within a reasonable amount of time. I think they mean two to three weeks. In addition, I will shortly receive 25 first-year essays about social and geographic variation in English, ready to mark.

Philosophical musing

Is it possible to think you’re a hypochondriac without being one?

University e-mail

In recent days the performance problems described below (please read that too), have got worse and this sometimes results in login failures and people being logged off. We know this is happening but we are not able to do much about it. The problem relates to the sheer number of students trying to access mail during busy periods and it is overloading the server infrastructure. The only way to solve this will be to upgrade the server and that is already planned but unlikely to take place before the end of the semester (the details are outlined below in the linked document).

The performance problems really only affect the system between 11am and 6pm on weekdays. At other times the server doesn't suffer from load issues. If you can avoid these peak times then you will get better access. You may also get better response by using a different method of accessing your mail e.g. using Thunderbird or pine rather than webmail.

Read this again.

Please do work at this university. We realise you need to use e-mail to actually do some of this work, but please do not check your e-mail during working hours.

Why don't they just fix the system?

Küpsise- ja ploomitükkidega piimašokolaad

Koostis: suhkur, täispiimapulber, kakaovõi, kakaomass, küpsisetükid 10% (nisujahu, suhkur, margariin (taimne rasv, taimne õli, emulgaator E471, happesuse regulaator (sidrunhape), lõhna- ja maitseaine, toiduvärv E160a), invertsiirup, koorevõi, kanamunad, kondenspiim, sool, lõhna- ja maitseaine, kergitusaine (E500, E503), ploomitükid 8% (ploomimahl, ploom, õun, õunapüree, sahharoos, fruktoosisiirup, laktoos, taimne rasv, happesuse regulaator (E330, E331), želeeriv aine (E401, E440), lõhna- ja maitseaine), emulgaator (sojaletsitiin), lõhna- ja maitseaine, sool. Kakaokuivainet min 27%. Piimakuivainet min 21%. Säilitusaineteta. Hoida kuivas ja jahedas (18±3°C). Võib sisaldada vähesal määral pähkliosakesi.

That’s a lot of lõhna- ja maitseaine in the chocolate New Scotland got given last Thursday. From all the other languages on the wrapper it appears to be aroma, but in Estonian it must be two different things.

More points

4. One of my tutees was (supposedly) ill for two tutorials in November. All the more surprising when I picked up the waste of paper that is Student Newspaper, that he should have written two concert reviews. The concerts were both in Glasgow on the Tuesday nights before the Thursday he was supposed to be at the tutorial. He said he does take the tutorials serious... but maybe the illness was partly self-inflicted? (In other words, you are so busted!)

5. My computers need to behave. My desktop needs to stop stopping. It sometimes randomly gives a black screen, sometimes also stopping the music, but sometimes continuing the music. It's very strange and annoying. The only way to get out of it, is by pushing the power button and restarting. It doesn't complain when you do that, but it might go black soon afterwards anyway.

My laptop is also annoying. I've stopped listening to music on it now, as it continues to stutter. I also sometimes get Blue Screens of Death. Error number 77, apparently that has to do with RAM. But when you do disk checks and memory checks and stuff, it says it's all okay. So not only does it refuse service, it's also a pathological liar. It just needs to behave. Please?

Some points

1. Linguistics and English Language need to teach the same subject in the same way. Although it is very amusing, there is no reason why second-years have to learn for their syntax exam that “subjects do not move until Friday”.

2. Work is interesting. Lots of different things going on at the same time, and I enjoy most of them.

3. Just for reference: life happens in the real world, not on the web. Some people need to get a life.

Amusement

I am mildly amused by the music for the SUSCDF dem.

Also a bit amused by the fact I managed to get three links into that sentence.

More plans

There is also a Historical Sociolinguistics conference slash workshop thing in Greece starting on 21 August. Which would make the Faroese teaching completely impossible. Or, alternatively, I could not go to Montreal, do the Faroese course, leave early and move on to Greece.

I have also been sent a job advert about a lecturership in Scandinavian Studies in Aberdeen. Probably a bit early and also not completely tailor-made to what I've done (i.e. it involves literature), but perhaps worth applying for or otherwise making sure that the people in Aberdeen know who I am.

Summer plans

Sigh. Choose.

• 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Montreal (Canada), 6-11 August 2007.
• Faroese Language Summer Course. Torshavn (Faroes), 1-22 August 2007.

Why do they clash with each other, and not conveniently with the Dunedin Festival, which would give me a winning argument in the endless debates with Fiona Gardner about whether or not I should dance in the festival.

More books

It’s been five months since I last posted a list of books that I’d read. I’ve been very bad and haven’t read a massive amount more. I finished the Einstein biography, none of the books that were on the ‘to read’ list, and apart from that:

• Tony Grant (ed.), From our own correspondent: a celebration of fifty years of the BBC radio programme. LINK
  
• Robert Druce (ed.), An Irishman abroad: Cuey-na-Gael’s An Irishman’s difficulties with the Dutch language and Jack O’Neill’s further adventures in Holland. LINK
  
• Alexander McCall Smith, The right attitude to rain. LINK
  

A nice range from non-fiction, via unsure, to fiction.

Now reading:

• Vilborg Davíðsdóttir, Galdur. LINK
  

I bought it from the author at the Scottish Society for Northern Studies annual conference yesterday. She talked to me in Icelandic, I told her I had no idea what she was saying, and she wondered that if I didn’t speak Icelandic, why was I wanting to buy a book in Icelandic. Oh, the wonders of inter-Scandinavian intellegibility (at least in writing). It’s quite slow, I managed to read five pages today. But I might go faster if I stop reading everything out loud to myself with a thick Faroese accent (i.e. as if it were Faroese) so that I can get over the strange word image. Vilborg lives in Viewforth by the way.

Bedtime.

Poor computer

I had a blue screen of death today. I didn't think XP did blue screens of death, that is sooo Windows 98.

I have momentarily blamed Windows Live Messenger, which I think is the only programme I installed recently. It lasted a while before the problems began, but it seems a likely candidate to blame. So I've closed that down and prevented it from starting itself up again. Same with Skype.

For the geeks:

KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR
****STOP: 0X0000007A (oXC02016E4, 0XC000000E, 0x805B709C, ...)

I couldn't write down the last one before the computer shut itself down. Oh, it did a disk check thing and froze after giving me the results.

Please... does anyone have any ideas how to cure my computer?

Ceilidh

It was rather dead. I think tigger_boing nearly fell off her chair at the following bit of IM conversation...

her: "Dunedin was very quiet. We only had three sets."
me: "Oh, you beat us then."
her: *blinks*

Instead of the £530 we had budgeted to fundraise in our endless optimism, we ended up fundraising -£150,44. Yes, that is a minus sign right there. Joy. We did give out some flyers at the end to interested parties, so we may see some people again. Or maybe not.

Bold statement

Now here's someone who's confident of his own theories:

"Of course, as Mufwene concedes (2001: 76), the founder principle works unless it doesn't."

In other news, I have finished two of the books I wanted to finish (Schreier 2003 and Trudgill 2004, from which is the above quote), sent off the PhilSoc essay, and e-mailed EUSA about when the Pleasance booking is, but I haven't heard back from them and I guess they don't know themselves either. I have also made flyers for our dance classes and sent them to ylla to print.