Scribbles

That was a hard quiz. It took much more work than I was expecting to get through it. However, I did well and got a hundred percent on it. I guess I learned my lesson from the previous quizzes where I didn’t take the extra time to make sure I thought through every question and answer. Over three passes, I ended up changing one or two answers each pass. I wonder how I would have done if the class system hadn’t been down for maintenance Sunday night and I had taken the quiz then. I’m not sure - probably the same, but there’s a chance I might not have done as well. Regardless, I’m now running behind on my work this week. Glad I finished reading the chapter over the past weekend, because the related homework (on writing systems) is also pretty hard.

I received my homework back for week 5, semantics, and my results weren’t as good as the previous two weeks. I had been on a roll of getting 100% on them, but this time I missed quite a few questions. I blame the combination of a busy Valentine’s day weekend and an extra long chapter (over thirty pages instead of the usual twenty). I was a couple of days behind on my typical schedule, so I didn’t get as much time as usual to review my homework. I guess I should have planned ahead for last weekend. It’s crazy how one off day can throw me off track. Anyway, I’m now halfway through this ten week course and I am enjoying the subject very much. The Finegan book is a brief overview of the different fields of study within the overall field of linguistics. I should use this information to decide which direction I want to go, assuming I continue my studies.

At this point, I’m planning on taking at least one more class. UCLA Extensions is offering another online class next quarter, also taught by Professor Operstein. I will ask her for her opinion on how I should proceed from here. I was planning on taking the next quiz (on syntax and semantics) tonight, but the course website is down for a hardware upgrade. They’ve been having performance issues lately. They even lost some data on the discussion boards a couple of weeks ago while doing some maintenance work. This next quiz shouldn’t be too hard, I hope. I did well on the syntax homework and I just need to review my semantics homework before taking the quiz. I’ll shoot for Tuesday night on that one. I’ve already finished this week’s assigned reading, the chapter on writing. That was also very good reading.

My essay on a constructed language:

When I was just entering high school, I happened across a book while at the grocery store that I looked interesting. I bought the book and became totally engrossed in its story. The book was “The Fellowship of the Ring,” written by J.R.R. Tolkien, the first part of a trilogy known as “The Lord of the Rings.” A trilogy of movies was eventually made based on these books (although watching them is not as good as reading them). At the end of the third part of the trilogy, the author included a few appendices concerning the history and backstory to the main story. One of them detailed the alphabets and grammars of several languages he constructed for his story. Looking back, I can see now that reading this gave me my first inclinations that I had a general interest in languages.

Best quiz result so far - eighteen out of eighteen, for a hundred percent. Very nice. Interestingly, this eighteen question quiz was assigned an hour and forty minutes to complete which is longer than the previous quizzes were assigned, but fewer questions. I wonder if this was meant to be a harder quiz then the others? It only took me twenty-five minutes to go through it.