(no subject)

So I can't read Italian so well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as I've never learned it.

It was worth a try.

On the plus side, it seems my prospectus has a maximum length that I have probably already violated, so I can't go into as much detail about things as I have been doing. Which means I can go through the remaining stuff faster (after cutting what I have done).

And apparently having too large a bibliography looks bad, according to my advisor and other sources. So my "scholarship summary" can be correspondingly shorter by cutting out some of the less important pieces.

Too bad about that Italian, though, since by all accounts the article I was trying to read does not remotely fall under the category of "less important."

Oh well.

I'll get around to writing up the rest of the French trip at some point, maybe in time for the anniversary of it.

(no subject)

I have just breezed through a book review in French with minimal recourse to dictionaries, restoring a bit of self-esteem lost trying to read "La figura di Agrippina minore in Tacito," whose easy title falsely promised false things.

[I once told my boss I was daunted by the fact that I had so many things to read in Italian. He picked up the nearest thing in that langauge -- a book review we're publishing -- and held in front of me. "Surely you can read this," he said with some surprise (it's a romance language, innit?). But no, I can't. Little things like "vocabulary" and "verb conjugation" and in fact "entire grammatical structure of the whole fucking language" and so forth get in the way when you've never actually learned them.]

[I may have told this story before; the wife of a friend of mine studied linguistics with Chomsky at MIT, and there was a legendary grad student in that department who was once heard to exclaim, while sitting down with materials related to some obscure tongue, "I'm going to learn this language if it takes me a week!"]

Since I can't read Italian, I've been playing with Babelfish.

( It hasn't been helpful. )

(no subject)

A happy thought for the day.