Google Docs isn't working right which means I can't access a document I need to for class. Now, although there are other things I could be working on, I'm not because I'm frustrated. I ordered pie to help me get defrustrated and it came in two seconds flat exactly as specified with some delicious cheese sprinkled evenly over the top. I have experienced delightification.
So, my question today is, have you even been in a highly technical class that left you feeling generally intimidated and stressed because you only understood about 25-50% of what the teacher initially said?
Did you ever have moments when you were deep into study, your head aching, a new vocabulary word coming at you every other sentence and hope of complete understand looking dimmer and dimmer when all of a sudden you realized the concept they were trying to communicate was something actually quite simple? So simple in fact that you spent another five-ten minutes just trying to check and see if you were understanding wrongly just because it seemed so impossible? Jargon is necessary but, jargon is stupid and annoying.
So, we're talking about government versus agreement in morphological typology right? Hahhahahaha. They tell you that government is the syntactic relationship between two constituents captured by obligatory marking on a dependent constituent like a preposition. Now every dependent constituent is paired with a head and the language either has a tendency to branch to the right or left. Some constituents that contain a large number of grammatical elements are considered heavy and have the tendency to be placed after the head being modified. Thus, in Greek the preposition governs the dative case. What on Earth does this mean?
Look, a preposition isn't that important because it always has to stick to something else. It's not special in a language like Greek partially because they are little and they don't change(meaning they are monomorphemic and fixed in form). In Greek any extra stuff stuck on the beginnings or ends of words are because of that little preposition, he decides you see, not anybody more important like the thing doing the action or the actual event. So, you can say that for our examples the case of nominals depends on the preposition present but case is irrelevant to them.
Baahumbug. I've got another 250 pages to read for tomorrow. That was 1/2 of one.
intellectual snobs. I've never had class, maybe I should stick with that theme.
ReplyDeleteClove time soon my friend. And wine? yes, wine. We'll talk like intellectual snobs.
The answer to your question is yes. I had to take one class out of the department for my master's and it was 20th century literary criticism. For the first two months, I literally didn't understand a single thing that was discussed. I would take notes and I couldn't understand my own notes. I asked the professor if there was a guidebook of terms I could study and he just looked at me funny. That and each subgroup in the class had their own jargon. You had the Marxists in one corner, the semiotic deconstructionists (read as teacher's pets) and you had the I hate white men group, it was good times. Hang in there you will make it. In the words of Homer, "You are so smart, you are so smart, S-M-R-T ---err I mean S-M-A-R-T."
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