yole's journey in languages

The biggest update for December is that I have finally received a decision on my application to Leiden: I’m accepted into the pre-masters program in linguistics! I’m still not officially enrolled, but given that the decision has already been made, the administrative issues shouldn’t be a problem.

Now, it turns out that the pre-masters program is not as flexible as I thought it would be. There’s a set of general linguistics courses that I’ll be required to take, including phonetics, syntax and morphology, but unfortunately I won’t be able to swap them for something else or even take any additional courses. I definitely don’t mind general linguistics, but I’m a bit worried that you can’t go anywhere in Indo-European studies without knowing Sanskrit, Greek and Hittite, and all of these languages are taught as part of the BA program in Leiden, not in MA. Since I won’t be able to study them as part of the pre-masters, I’ll either need to learn them by myself, or spend some additional time in the master’s program where I’ll be allowed to take those BA-level courses. (Or maybe I’ll end up getting interested in some other area of linguistics, where those courses won’t be relevant. We’ll see…)

I’ve also made some good progress on my Paternosters project. I’m almost done cataloguing all the Paternoster translations in the books that are currently in scope for my research, and I’m continuing my efforts tracking down the original sources of all the translations.

On the learning side, I’ve started looking into Old Norse, using the Viking Language book that I had bought on one of my trips to Scandinavia a few years ago. We’re also going to start Dutch lessons this month, which should be a more practical application of my language skills.

And to conclude, a podcast recommendation. If you’d like to hear from other people who are openly enthusiastic about linguistics, A Language I Love Is… is a great podcast where scholars of specific languages (both modern and historic) go into why they find those languages interesting. No linguistic background required.