#phantaksi

Haha thanks! I'm literally just a zombie going əəəəəəəəəəə :D

Oh man. Just to be upfront about it, I never finished my MA in historical linguistics because xenophobia is a bitch, so when I call myself a linguist it's kind of a lie. I did focus on linguistics in my German BA (as opposed to literature. Bleh.) as well as get a linguistics minor & a TESOL minor, and I was only two modules away from getting my MA (one module was going to be a project and the other was writing my thesis), so thus it only kind of being a lie and not a full lie.

But yeah. Uhhhh so. Idk where you are but where I am in Germany you can't really plan your coursework that well because you don't know what classes will be offered each semester until the start of that semester and you just kinda have to hope that a class that aligns with your interests AND can fill a module requirement will show up. Most of the time I just took whichever class seemed the most palatable and was taught by a professor I didn't hate because some profs and I just did NOT vibe. Looking at you, Wolfgang. Fucker.

Anyway. First and foremost I'd probably describe myself as a language collector? If a language class was available -- ESPECIALLY if it counted as a historical langauge -- I would take it and I especially liked traipsing around the Germanic language family so I ended up taking classes on Old and Middle High German, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle English, and I had the opportunity to take Gothic as an undergrad even though it was a grad course because my advisor was chill and approved me for it BUT it was in the same time slot as a required class so I couldn't take it ToT then the one professor who taught Gothic at the university I went to for my MA retired the year before I enrolled. I also took Old Persian, Latin, and Lithuanian; and I didn't have time for Sanskrit but I did get the coursebook so it's just sitting there waiting for me to stop being intimidated by it (ha!). I just really like seeing how languages change over time, & how languages fit together and how they influenced each other (even if King Darius was a longwinded fucker).

Other than that I am a HUGE slut for syntax. It's so fun. One of the last papers I wrote for my MA before fucking off was about Greek influence on a specific piece of syntax in Late Latin, and the class I took on Old Germanic poetry the professor -- same professor as for the Late Latin course; she was so fucking good -- yapped at us about what that could tell us about syntax. If I had gone on and done my project/research module and thesis, I probably would have either written about the development and syntax of double modals in English (e.g., might could, might should). I did play around in morphology a little bit and look at productivity of certain suffixes in English, but syntax is really my boo. (Semantics, pragmatics, and phon/phon can all go fuck off. Phon/phon less than sem and prag. Fucking... putting calculus in my language get that shit out of my face before I pass out)

I was also super interested in how understanding the history of a language or a set of languages could be helpful pedagogically when teaching a foreign language. Since I'm in Germany and was an English teacher for a hot minute I was particularly interested in how knowledge of historical linguistics and how German and English are related could help German students in English courses, which is kind of weird I know and probably just me being a dork since I got into historical linguistics in the first place to help me when I was learning German.