Oops...

And thus went two weeks without an update. Summarizing the past weeks in a couple of lines is a hard task, but I will try anyway: ‘Work, dancing, Freshers’ Weekend, more work, more dancing, sore feet, more dancing, more work, not enough sleep, more work and more dancing.’ See, it wasn’t that difficult.

Language ecology
Have been focusing on language ecology at work the past week. Coincidentally the Linguistics Circle last week was by Mark Garner, who was talking about exactly that. It seems a good idea to study language in its context and to study the interactions between language, speaker and speech community. Whether we need to call language an organism, a species or an ecosystem, I am quite indifferent.

Also found out that ecolinguistics can mean ‘ecology of language’ but also ‘language of ecology’. Which I find extremely boring but MG thinks it’s interesting. Our language classifies oil, water, air, energy etc. as mass nouns, thereby giving the signal that they are unlimited resources. So what does Greenpeace want us to do? Make them quantifiable nouns? Tsk.

Sorbian
I finally got around to sending an e-mail to the Sorbian Institute in Cottbus. It’s been eleven years since I dropped German in high school and I was surprised how well I managed to still write in German. With a bit of help from Google to decide on the gender of nouns and the appropriateness of constructions. Now here’s hoping that Herr Professor Doktor Dietrich Scholze-Šołta and Frau Doktor Sonja Wölkowa write back.

Fire!
MG had made bean soup and haloumi for dinner. Haloumi is some weird kind of squeaky cheese that you fry. Frying occasionally sets of the fire alarm here, which really annoys us but at least we know that it works.

So here we were sitting enjoying our soup and haloumi, when suddenly two fire engines come racing into the estate. Oh shit, would they have been alarmed by our fire alarm and are we going to have to pay for a false alarm? They didn’t come last time the bloody thing went off... But no, apparently there was a real fire in Block 2. Fortunately MG is very curious so I don’t have to give into my curiosity...