With an Accent from Holland

Language Lab Exam, Corpus Linguistics, Pilates

Tonight I had my Language Lab exam. It went pretty OK actually. I didn’t really think of my r-deletion, which is a standard feature of RP, but I talked fluently in my discussion topic, and that’s important as well. We had this list of words which we had to pronounce correctly, maybe 200 words or something, and we were asked 20, but I knew them all, so I think that went well as well. It now depends on how they attend to the precise pronunciation of all the features, such as the r-deletion and the voicing of consonants, which I usually don’t do when it should be done. I wasn’t as nervous as I was last semester. Now I’ll just have to wait for my grade.
We also had a workshop of Philology regarding Corpus Linguistics. A corpus is a body of texts, a collection of texts from a certain period or concerning a specific language and in these texts you can research words. You can look at how many times they occur, or in what instances, or spoken by a man or a woman. I thought it was pretty interesting, though some of my classmates thought it was pretty boring. I even checked my own website to see which words occurred most often, and on nr. 1 was the word ‘I’. And no, that’s not a good thing, I know, buy hey, this website is about me and my life, so well.
I also had Pilates this morning. It went pretty OK. We were only there with the 3 of us and that was nice. I was even able to sit up straight with my legs stretched. I was really proud of that and the teacher said that my back is better than it was better. It’s not so round anymore. Tomorrow I’ll have to work. I hope my colleague’s back from his vacation. I heard that there was a lot of trouble with the printing machine today, so I hope things will be all right tomorrow. We’ll see.

posted by Charda @ 10.5.06