Re: Which book sounds most compelling?

Brian M. Scott <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:28:41 +1300, Zeborah
<zeborah@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1iy5mt4.scbbcp9txnp3N%zeborah@xxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

Not intended to be patronising, and I can't see why it
is: I am accusing you, and others, of being very
knowledgeable about language but (possibly) to a lesser
extent than Brian.

You've got your scope wrong. Your original sentence had
"perhaps" outside of the parenthetical delimited by
commas, thus modifying "this is true", ie "of possibly
being very knowledgeable about language but [if so] to a
lesser extent than Brian". If you wanted "of being very
knowledgeable about language but possibly to a lesser
extent than Brian" then you should have said "and,
perhaps to a lesser extent, this is true..."

In any case I am quite certain that at least two people here
know rather more about some areas of linguistics --
especially theories of syntax! -- than I. You have a BA in
it,

Oh, random cultural detail: in New Zealand a BA is a three-year degree,
and the BA(Hons) is a fourth year (seguing into a further year to write
one's master's thesis, if one so chooses, which I didn't, because the
fourth year had already driven me to the edge of sanity). So a BA(Hons)
is more or less equivalent to a US BA, it's not actually claiming any
particular merit/distinction/honours.

(One of my lecturers said that the honours year combined the worst of
lecture-based papers with the worst of thesis-based papers. He was
trying to cheer me up at the time, and possibly to reassure me that if I
stayed for the MA it wouldn't be so bad, but still.)

and Heather has a PhD.; my formal training consists of a
one-semester introductory course and a one-semester course
in linguistic anthropology.

I wouldn't want to compare your and my relative knowledge of linguistics
as a whole, though: I have a tendency to forget a) jargon (and given
that I once decided that 50% of learning a new subject is learning the
jargon...), and b) things I no longer care about (and after I discovered
constructivist theories in my fourth year, I decided I no longer cared
about those idiotic waste-of-time tree diagrams from the previous years.
Semantics I forgot about as soon as the last exam was over).

Morphophonetics now, that was fun; but it's not so useful to sf writers
as etymology.

Plus you're way better at explaining things than I am. :-)

Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
rasfc FAQ: http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
.

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