Alex's Journal

The past couple of days have been rather productive. I’ve managed to write two new songs in relatively short order which means the new album now has nine completed songs. There are still a couple more on the way, but I just haven’t quite gotten around to finishing them yet. I will do that soon though I hope.

Another piece of exciting news in my life is that I’ve started preparations for a grant application and proposal to teach English to German middle school and high school students in Germany beginning next year. If I get it, I should be able to work on a Masters degree at the same time. I’m really rather excited about it, although it is a real pain to get everything together for a grant. I will definitely get through it though because it is absolutely worth it.

I have two semesters left before I graduate from college. That means I will be finished in May 2010. Afterwards I want to teach English or American history somewhere in Germany, but I don’t know how I can go about getting that kind of position. I want to be in Germany for at least two or three years to solidify my German. It doesn’t matter who I teach. A Gymnasium (German high school equivalent) is good or a university or an institute would work as well.

Does anyone happen to know where I could look online? It’s a bit early for it, but I want to start now so I can start directly after I graduate.

I really love the German language. I love it to the point that I use it all the time. I do, however, really just like to use English on occasion without any German. That mood, for lack of a better word, seems to come and go in phases. When I am more inclined to use English, I generally tend to read more books and write more on my blogs than when I am in the mood for German. Although now with my German blog, I have the ability to also write when I am in the mood for German as well.

At the moment, I really just want to speak English. And therefore I have been reading a lot more and writing a lot more blog posts. This phase will probably last a week or two and then I will be back in my German phase. I have no idea why I go back and forth so much, but it seems to happen all the time.

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” which date back tens of thousands of years. They also cite words such as “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as words that will go extinct. Here is a portion of the article:

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

“We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

“We fit a wide range, so there’s a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time.”

For those of you who don’t know what the term “Denglisch” is, it’s a term used by the Germans to describe the English that is constantly working its way into their language. It comes from the German words Deutsch+Englisch (German+English).

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I just got through reading an article about Windows 7 in German. The title of the article is “Microsoft pusht Vista-Nachfolger: Windows 7 soll auch auf Netbooks laufen” (Microsoft pushes Vista replacement: Windows 7 should also run on netbooks). Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with the German title? First of all, “pusht” is not German at all. Nor is “Netbooks.” This is a professionally done online magazine article that is riddled with all sorts of Denglisch. While it makes it tremendously easier for me to read being a native English speaker, it’s really quite sad at the same time that they are loosing their language so quickly to these invading anglicisms.

This is an amusing satirical article that was written in German, but it uses so many English words that someone without really any German experience at all could understand most of it. The point of it is to make fun of Denglisch. It was published in an American newspaper.

I’ve posted my first post to Manifestly Absurd. It’s an argument I got into with an Australian friend of mine about the English language.

I’ve also created 2 versions of the blog. I want to do a direct comparison of Blogger vs WordPress and therefore have created a blog of Manifestly Absurd on both. You can choose one and let me know which one you like better. You can find them here:

WordPress – http://manifestlyabsurd.wordpress.com
Blogger – http://manifestlyabsurd.blogspot.com

[digg=http://www.digg.com/odd_stuff/w00t_is_not_a_word]This flat out sickens me:

“‘w00t,’ an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said ‘w00t’ — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging.”

I really don’t think that “w00t” is a word much less should be crowned the word of the year. The direction the English language is taking due to the use of words like this I find very saddening and for a prestigious institution such as Merriam-Webster to go about promoting it is just out right disgusting.