Norwegian Saga

Greetings all.

I haven’t much new to report so I’m going to simply give you a run down of some recent news, most of it boring.

I’ve started going swimming again. 700kr buys a gym membership to a fantastic gym from January to August, an awesome deal.

The daylight is returning and that’s given me a tremendous amount of energy somehow, that and the fishoil . The daylight means I’m more in the mood to work on my creative projects (ie. the thesis). The thesis itself is coming along nicely. I still haven’t approached a certain professor about formalizing a student-advisor relationship though I’ve seen him a few times regarding my thesis. I’m told if he wasn’t interested he wouldn’t have even let me into his office so I suppose I should be encouraged he’s taken as much time as he already has to talk with me.

Recently, an essay for another class has been gathering momentum. For awhile I was utterly lost but after a meeting with the prof things are on track. It actually looks like it’ll be a very fun project. I’m doing an analysis of medieval English nautical (eg. seafaring) language in an attempt to discover relationship characteristics between England and the nations from which it borrowed words. So in other words, what types of relationships did England have with whom.

The theory is somewhat simple, certain types of words borrowed into a language tell us things about the relationship between the participating nations. For instance, broad words of a military nature, “Glock, Panzerfaust, Blitzkrieg” etc. can lead to a conclusion that the nations didn’t have close or peaceful relations. While in the same genre but different words could lead one to other conclusions if for instance the words traded were “firing pin, bullet casing, rifled barrel” etc. Chances are such specialist language wouldn’t be known to someone getting shot at so the lingo must have been learned through peaceful means.

That’s the theory, and it probably doesn’t come across as well because I don’t know the first thing about guns. I will be doing this project as I mentioned with medieval languages (Old Dutch, Old Frisian, Low German, Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, Old French) and nautical terminology. There will be some syntactic and functional analysis as well. It’s just a fancy way of saying I’m going be looking at words and their functions to see which ones came from where and trying to draw some sort of conclusions from that. Well see what happens, and there’s lots of work to be done and not so much time in which to do it. My professor even tried to convince me to learn Old Dutch and Old Frisian to which I replied that I was an historian and coming from that sort of background not from a linguistic one. Though he’s a philologist and the course is “England: Language and Settlement” so he’s trying hard to sway me. Jump in the deep end, that’s how you learn, he told me. Then tried to inspire me by telling me that he’d learned Anglo-Saxon in three weeks to read Beowulf when he was in school… I’m still an historian, not a linguist.

It really is odd being around so much cranial talent. I don’t usually feel cowed around people but some of the professors I’ve come into contact with really are inspiring. If I haven’t mentioned already the “pompous British weenie” professor I have (the linguist) has grown on me. His hypercritical nature, though quite useless, is so very like my own.

Enough about that, I’ve also met a number of friends one could call them. I don’t make friends easily and that’s because most people bore me. I’ve stopped trying to analyze why, I just accept that most people are not for me . That was the case more in Canada for me. Over here though it’s different. Ostensibly I’m in the same kind of environment, that is to say university, but the people here are just so much more interesting. I actually enjoy being around them… weird, I know. They’re all from my English class and my Norwegian class. I even got in on an Old Norse reading group where we read sagas in Old Norse and try to translate them, it’s a lot of fun.

I had entertained thoughts of trying to accelerate my thesis and finish by December but I’ve dropped those ideas. I’m going to follow my original plan which has me completing the thesis in May 2010.

So those are the broad outlines. I know it was a lot to read for not a lot of really good bits but hey, no one said it was going to be roses all the time . With the warmer weather coming I’m hoping to get out to take some random photos.

Til next time.