On Friday, I sent in my grant proposal. Since about February, I've been working on an internship with the Alaska Native Language Center. I've been reading through dictionaries of native languages and researching their cultural terminology. I've been putting all that information into a sheet so my mentors can read through the data to find source words. Now that I've had more time to get used to the data and taken more linguistics classes, they're giving me more freedom to work on my own.
A long time ago, the Alutiiq people invaded the land that is in between the Aleutian islands and mainland Alaska. Being in between the Aleuts and the mainland natives, the Alutiiq people served as a conduit of words from one people to the other. So, I am looking through words that I've already collected from Aleut, Dena'ina, and Eyak, and comparing them to data I've been researching through in Alutiiq. Should the board approve my request and grant me the $2500, my mentor and I will present this data. We would go to Sitka in March to present it before an audience for the Alaska Anthropological Association. It would be a really awesome experience.
I've been really torn about the Cuba trip. I've been told it would be an invaluable experience and that I really need to pursue it. However, it may or may not jeopardize my ability to graduate in or within four years. Before I graduate, I need to take two 400 level Spanish courses for my Spanish degree as well as two writing-intensive and one oral-intensive course for my Linguistics degree. Meeting all those requirements when I return for Spring 2017 would be a miracle. It wouldn't necessarily be impossible, but it would be difficult to make all those requisites align. Even if I were to find a set of classes that met those requirements, that would be a tough semester. If going to Cuba meant knocking one of those out, it wouldn't be so bad, but the semester abroad would be purely for the experience and improvement to my Spanish. I really want to go badly, but doing so might mean shooting myself in the foot.
I have signed up for my classes for next semester. I am taking Intermediate Gwich'in, Spanish Reading & Comprehension, Second Language Acquisition, Semantics, Seminar, and Beginning Aikido, for a total of 16 credits.
To go over all of them: Intermediate Gwich'in will be a continuation of my current semester, just learning more words and grammar. I hope to keep taking it, but I'm not sure about what role Gwich'in will play in my future. There's a lot of linguistic work that needs to be done with native Alaskan languages, so part of me wants to stay up here and do research. However, part of me wants to get out of the cold and dark and explore the world, teaching English or something. Yet another part of me wants to help out refugees, probably also with teaching them English. I feel like we need to do more with helping refugees survive here, and I would like to help. So I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I just plan on going through whatever doors are opened for me.
Spanish Reading & Comprehension will be reading books as a class and going over the material together.
Second Language Acquisition will be learning about how people learn their second languages, which has been a topic of great interest to me lately.
Semantics is the study of word meaning, which also interests me.
Seminar is kind of the big, daunting, final linguistics class. It's like an undergraduate thesis class. I think I'm going to write about my internship work for it so that I already have the data. My next semester is going to be a bit rough so I don't want to add any more work to it than I need to.
Aikido is a martial arts thing. I wanted to continue with swimming, but it conflicts with my classes. I went through pretty much all the PE options, except dancing, and found Aikido works. I wasn't really sure what it was at first, but after briefly googling it, it seemed cool. It should be great, in terms of exercise, self-defense, and discipline.
There's a month-long event that will be held here in I think June called Co-Lang. It's sort of like a linguistics convention. There will be classes held there that I could take for credits. I would very much like to attend this because I would love to take classes there and meet linguists from around the world. I'm not sure what this means for going home as it is kind of awkwardly in the middle of the summer. But we'll see.
I'm not entirely sure if my depression is getting better or not. It feels like it's definitely not worse, but it's not much any better. Unfortunately, all this medication I've been taking is not instantaneous, so I've still got a bit to tell if it is working. Hopefully by the time next semester is in full force it will have had its time to work through me and I'll be better mentally.
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