Wrapping up again

Okay, I'm packing up my office again, coming back to Melbourne for a few months. I've got all my papers to write up, although I don't have all the data I'd like. It turns out 25 people responded to an email I sent out requesting help from Icelanders to participate in my research, but only 3 of these forwarded to my gmail. I only found this out when I started asking random staff members at uni if they had time to do the test, and someone said 'Oh, yes, I replied to your email last Monday'. What the-? I could have doubled the number of people in the study! So now I have to either get Luce to work out how to do it online, or wait until March when I come back again. Grrr!

Aaaand it's all wet and dark outside, although it's really warm (was lovely at the beach last night). The setting sun is reflecting all gold and lovely off the houses in front of Hallgrímskyrkjuna, and I don't have my camera with me. Sigh.

I finally wrote a song over here, I think I like it. I think it's called 'Home is where you are', but that's a bit soppy, so I'm calling that its working title. We can jam on it when Hannah comes over with Brent and Dan. I think I want to inflict some of my songs on people, maybe I'll post them here slowly or on youtube or something.

See youse next week. It's going to take me all weekend to get home, but I'm on way. Just about. (Yay, only 3 weeks til Beth and I go see New Moon!)

Faroes Fieldwork 2009

omg, this was so funny: I'm in the Faroe Islands with 6 other linguists, on fieldwork. We leave on Monday. Last night we were trying to work out what time our flight is. We spent, I kid you not, about 20 minutes trying to remember, discussing it from every angle imaginable, the time difference between here and Iceland and so on. At the end of 20 mins when we decided we weren't sure and would probably actually need to check, Einar tuned into the conversation when someone decided to ask him if he knew when our flight was. He answered all innocently and completely without hesitation "ten past four". Like, dude, your body's been here the whole time we were discussing it, but where the hell was your brain?! Hahaha!!

It's getting darker...

Wow, so much has happened since my last blog post. In brief: came back to Iceland, now living in Kópavogur instead of Reykjavík :( No, it's actually lovely here, and less than a 1km from where I used to live! Went on a fieldwork trip to Norway, and for the first time ever, found exactly what I was looking for! Omg! (Old people have LDR, young people don't. That's pretty fast language change, which is actually sad.)

Came back to Iceland and got the uni to buy me a nice new Lenovo ThinkPad, which is an absolute monster. I've named him Egill, after Egill Skallagrímsson, an Icelandic hero from the sagas. He was stupendously ugly, killed his first enemy at age 6 (a 10 year old who wouldn't let him play ball with them), but wrote incredibly beautiful poetry. My Egill is like that. Really nothing to look at, but very powerful and a great worker. Except my Egill hasn't killed anyone. Yet. My Egill's full name is Egill Ljótur, Egill the Ugly. Which is actually a fully legitimate Icelandic name. Icelanders are a bit mental when it comes to names I reckon!

I'm off to the Faroes again in a week, and I've finally got this mad experiment to work, although it's going to be a race against time to get the test sentences translated while I'm there as well as running the experiments. Well, we just do the best we can. It's a self-paced reading test, which should give me insight into how the Faroese process sentences, exactly where they have trouble and so on. Cheaper than sticking their heads in an MRI scanner, and should give me similar results :)

And, finally, it's snowing! There's been a dusting on Esja and the hills around us for a while, but it looks like winter has finally come to Reykjavík!

What happened in August?

Wow, that was a busy August! Spent 10 days in the Faroe Islands, where I discovered that there is dialectal variation in their LDR use, from being way more liberal than Icelandic, in the Norwegian/Vestjylland Danish direction, to being more conservative than both Norwegian and Icelandic, although there is always a person restriction, in both complement and non-complement clauses, which I haven't found in any other Scandinavian language. Cool! We also made the news :) (Höski/Höskuldur Þráinsson is my supervisor, and he's the person you see most often in this clip. If you look closely, you'll see quite a few people you might recognise from photos and other places!)


Piotr and I went running all over Tórshavn, and Höski joined us one morning - photos are forthcoming, hopefully by next week on picasa. Luce came down for a couple of days, and I have to say that I really want to have a holiday on the Faroes - take a stack of books, and hit some isolated island (I'd like to go to Nolsoy - not too far from Havn) for a quiet week or two. Just thinking about it makes me yearn to go back! Also did a sea-swim with Ási, Theódóra and her husband Emil. Nearly killed me & T, while Ási and Emil just laughed. *sigh* at least we did it! (Photographic evidence forthcoming :) .) Oh, and the food was awesome, when they were able to find a vegetarian option...

Then Luce & I did the 10km run in the Reykjavik marathon, Luce around 45mins, me just under 54mins. I'm going to see if I can beat 50mins in the next one.

Then I went to Denmark for a conference - the NORMS Grand Meeting. Piotr and I went running each morning with Rakul, our Faroese friend who's a total legend. Höski and another Icelander joined us one morning, and the 3 of us went for a sea-swim on the last run. My talk went well, but I've now seen some of the people who are presenting at the conference I've big-mouthed my way on to in Lund in October, and I'm feeling rather intimidated!

On a lighter note, I got to catch up with a penfriend I've had since I was 15 or 16, who lives in country Jylland (Denmark) and who I last met 13 years ago. Her parents drove an hour and a half to meet me too (good effort by her 79 year old dad, who also lived in Reykjavik 50 years ago!), and I had a very lovely evening/night there. It was strange seeing someone I remember as a teenager looking like a woman, and with a full family, house, etc. She's got 2 kids the same ages as Tali and Ella, and the younger one had the same facial expressions and tummy-sticking-out as Ella, too! But it was also inspiring to meet up again with someone who is living how they want to live, helping run her community activities, and who I have a history with, even if how we met was completely accidental! (She was friends with a pen-friend of one of my friends in high-school!)

Then I went to København and met up with Anne and Steen and their kids, our friends from Iceland who recently moved back home. We went to the Tivoli, and saw a modern ballet of The Little Match Girl, which is one of my all-time favourite stories, and it was very very well done. I managed not to cry at the end, only just. We also went on as many rides as we could, and I went on the giant dropping ride again, scaring the pants off myself. It was great. I suspect I would really enjoy sky-diving :D I shook and giggled for about 5 minutes after the ride finished!

Oh, I think I forgot to mention that we had about a hundred visitors (Tönchen from Melbourne, Thomas and Katrin the Swiss Cheeses, Rosemary Luce's mum, Betty family friend from UK, JC and Jee from Melbourne Uni), with more on their way in a couple of weeks!

And finally, Iceland has night-time again. Not entirely sure I approve, but at least I've got one more summer solstice to look forward to up here...

That's all for now!

June update

Well, June was fairly hectic, as it was always going to be. Luce and I went to Helsinki for a conference, Luce went to Edinburgh for the weekend with Mark, Iceland had its national day and I helped with the Salsa demonstration part of the celebrations, Tönchen came to visit us in Iceland for 2 weeks and we all drove around the entire country together (I've whittled the photos down to around 2,000, still working on it!). Luce and Ási have gone sea-swimming twice so far, l & t climbed Vífilsfell mountain with Heimir, l & t went in the Midnight Run on Jónsmesse night, t & tönch visited the Blue Lagoon, I had my second and third meetings with Faroese speaking people and it turns out that I can mostly understand Faroese! :) Oh yes, and last night we saw Ólöf Arnalds (go on, guess whether Ólöf is a man or a woman!), Björk and Sigur Rós at a free outdoor concert in Laugardal (where we go swimming). Hooray for crazy Björk music that you can dance like a raw prawn to and fend off the threat of frozen toes without looking *too* out of place!

July promises to be a lot calmer, with only 3 papers (Grand meeting postdoc report; Subjects & antecedents; write-up of Humanities conference paper) and some fieldwork (in the Faroes) to prepare for/have done by the start of August - no visitors (until the very end of the month I think). So, it's work on the weekends for me! Oh, and Luce & I have found an organised running group that's training for the Reykjavík marathon in August, I want to do the 10km only, but Luce seems like he's going to be up for at least the 21km! Thank Christ for the perpetual daylight still!!!!

oh wow oh wow oh wow

Faroese is CRAZY! It's totally like Icelandic, but as pronounced by someone from where Elisabeth is from with a speech impodiment. Or should that be speech impodooiment. (Their 'ee' sounds come out like 'ooee' - it's hilarious!)

Well, in more newsy news, We (as in me mostly) had a massive weekend. On Friday and Saturday I had the Humanities conference (Hugvísindaþing). My talk went well, I got to talk for longer than I should have cos the next speaker was sick. And then I got to tag-team answering questions about LDR with Höskuldur Þráinsson. OMG. HIGHlight of my day let me tell you!!

And then I went out with people from the conference, and we had pizza and icecream and I got to ask everyone about how they fly in their dreams. This is totally my favourite question to ask a bunch of people. In my basketball team only one other person flew at all, which surprised the hell out of me cos it had never occurred to me that someone wouldn't fly in their dreams. But at dinner the other night all five of us flew. What's so interesting about this, is how everyone flies differently. We had 3 arm-flappers in our group (like swimming), and 2 no-control at all fliers, with one of these not really flying but doing more sort of massive jumps. He was also the only one who found it easy to get up in the air, for the rest of us the take-off is the hardest part, being easiest with a roller-coaster or something to shoot us up in the air. Only 2 of us fliers with some control over our direction experience gravity as being much stronger the closer we are to the ground, the other finds take-off and low flying relatively straightforward.

I've spoken with people who fly by projecting a force from their heart, chest or belly/belt down against the ground. These people often can't fly over water, as it provides no resistance. In the linguists group the other night I think I was the only one who could definitely fly over water (but I have to be pretty high up to do so), the others weren't sure or definitely couldn't. So: how do you fly? Special pose, force field, manipulating gravity, like treading water, special suit? Where does the energy/ability come from? Is it harder closer to the ground? How do you take off? Do you have control over where you fly? Can you fly over anything - water, buildings, mountains? How fast can you fly (I often find it much quicker in my dreams to fly than to run, with running too often being like Alice in Wonderland!)? Are you aware when you're flying that it's impossible? If so, does this make you unable to fly, or does it make you realise you're dreaming? What does it feel like? Do you always know you can fly, or do you only remember it once you're flying? Aaah, I want to go to bed now!!!

Okay, so then on Sunday was Auður's confirmation - I'll post photos soon. There was a ceremony at the church, then a lovely feast afterwards (oddly no pickled testicles or sheep's heads, but with food that made Luce and I look at it, go "Huh? What the-? Is that-? Oh!!" at the same time, which confused the people around us who were eavesdropping on the English I think!! Basically, you can buy loaves of bread at the supermarket which are sliced horizontally lengthwise instead of vertically in small squares as usual. It turns out they make these massive club sandwiches and rolled sandwiches with the massive slices of bread...), with 120 family members and close friends. (I really don't understand how Iceland has such a small population, when everyone has a million relatives!)

Watched the latest episode of Torchwood - I'm hooked on the AO Dr Who. I love Gwen's facial expressions and I wish Jack and Ianto would be more tender, I loved the episode Jack Harkness with the other Captain JH. *sigh*

Had my lecture on Australian English on Monday morning and got a round of applause - yay! The students reminded me of La Trobe and Monash students, very lovely and definitely willing to ask and answer questions. Interested in linguistics, which makes taking the class like having a sumptuous meal when you've been doing physical work. Replenishes you and makes the air taste sweet...

And at dancing last night a friend from the Háskóli came, his first time, but I think he's going to pick it up quickly. He's coming next time too. And there was a workshop on the weekend, and the guys were all dancing really well, with a couple of very cool new moves that are really energetic. It took me a bit to pick up on the leads, but I go there in the end. And with their better leads, my turns were far more balanced than usual, and I even did a couple of triple and quadruple turns, most importantly without even looking like falling over - woohoo!

And now I've just collected my last bits of data for my NJL paper, which I hope gets accepted. It's due next week, and I'm not finished! But at least now I know a bit about Faroese. I can't wait to get over there, it's going to be so cool!

And then I got to skype with Tönchen this morning, and Beth and Brent this arvo. When people sneeze, Ella apparently doesn't say 'God bless you' or 'Bless you', she says 'I bless you' :D Go Ellachen - you are God!! Hahahah :D

from a little place at the edge of danmark...

I'm now sitting in my hotel room in Danmark, after two days of fieldwork together with other NORMS linguists. It was an exciting trip over, with the other Icelander here (Ási, where the Á is pronounced 'ow' as in 'how', so it sounds like 'mousey' without the 'm') picking me up from home, running 2 red lights on our way to the flybus down to the plane (first time for early-morning Icelandic ever - not a complete debacle, but there's 'room for improvement' :D); listening to a lovely selection of Icelandic music from Ási's ipod (Björk sounds really great singing weirdo Icelandic jazz!, and others just sound a bit mental singing crazy folk songs :) ) and chatting in Icelandic (apparently I have a vague Norwegian accent); having an hour to kill in Copenhagen before our train left and using the time to sprint, in a steady drizzle, with (very full) wheely suitcase in tow, across town to a Chinese restaurant, and back again, where Ási listened to my directions (yes, in Icelandic!) 3 times in a row, even though I continued to suggest dead-ends (this is the person teaching me Icelandic at the moment - he has to be THE most patient person I have ever met!!); getting on board the train and discovering that the [insert eye-rolling type adjective here] ticket guy had given us seats that were not only not next to each other, but in entirely separate carriages!!, which we just ignored and sat in the 'non-reserved' seats for the 3 hour trip, while I knitted and we conversed in Icelandic; arrived an hour later than we were supposed to at the pickup point, and my phone doesn't get any signal here, thank goodness Ási's did; got picked up from Århus train station in a minibus for the 2 hour trip to the other side of Denmark, during which time we ate too much chocolate but continued to speak loads of Icelandic... Yes, I have spoken more Icelandic on this fieldwork trip than I have in the entire time I've been in Iceland!!

Arrived, got assigned a room, had dinner (thank goodness I remembered to order vegetarian - I can face meat sometimes, but not in the quantities it gets served in here!!), skyped luce, discovered I didn't bring toothpaste and had to borrow some, got my gear ready for the next day, then crashed.

Day 1 started with an introduction by a sociolinguist to the Vestjysk dialect, followed by lunch and then our first trip into the field. About 40 people were gathered at a school, plied with cake and coffee, and us linguists were set loose among them: "Hi, you look like a nice person. I'm from Australia. Would you like to answer some questions about your dialect?" So far I've only had one rejection, so that's nice :) I had to talk Danish to the Vestjyske people, so I'm somewhat 'language blanded' with Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian (there are 4 others who speak Norwegian here), English and German. It turns out that, of the 13 of us, we speak regularly (number after / indicates not often): Icelandic (5/6), Norwegian (5, of which 3 Østlandsk, and 3 not-Østlandsk, since 1 seems bidialectal), Danish (3), Swedish (2), English (2/4 - I'm counted post-slash!), German (2/3), Faroese (1/2), Finnish (1/2), 'Nordic' (2). In other words, I'm having an absolute ball!!

Came home, had dinner, had a debriefing session which I found very useful, went for a run in the dark (only ran off the road once!) with the supernatural-sounding zhooming of the windmills for accompaniment, and one of those 'you know you're in the country' smells at one paddock, and went to bed.

Alarm didn't go off on Day 2, but it turns out Ási was looking out for me, so I got a phone call saying 'We're in the bus! Get dressed!' at 8:45. Luckily I'd prepared everything the night before, so I grabbed some bread and cheese and sped outside. Since I was still cozy-warm from bed, I didn't put my jacket on, just a short-sleeved shirt. Øystein was a little worried I'd be cold, which got me worried we were going to be outside all day, because both he and Ási were rugged up with beanies on like they were going for a hike in the mountains! (Don't know where Pål thought they'd get the mountains from actually...) Drove through Paris and Rom to get to the data collection place, apparently we go through London tomorrow. Data collection went really well, I think I've found stuff out, only wish I had more time. Ási and I tried to buy toothpaste and postcards, but the country store 'didn't take foreign cards'. Sorry guys!

Just one more collection tomorrow, then a bit of an outing to the museum. Hopefully I get up in time tomorrow, and can have more exciting linguistic adventures, as opposed to the not-waking-up-in-time kind.

Sorry for the super-long post, but this feels like a massive adventure, and adventures need to be documented in detail!!

everything but the visa...

So, add Denmark to my list of places I might be able to collect data from :D "...West Jutland (Denmark) in February - and we'll try to get you there if you want to ;-)" Aaaaand, my name's down on the grant application for data collection in the Pharoe Islands (that spelling looks strange). "I took the liberty of putting your name in as somebody who would be able to and be interested in using this opportunity to collect (and make use of) some new data on Faroese reflexives. Hope that was OK." Ah, the liberties being taken... actually... I think I could get used to such liberties being taken... ;)

First contact - Iceland returns from France!

Firstly, I *think* they might be offering to pay for me to go to the Grand Meeting in August to meet everyone. I'll let you know. I think I'd miss a class if I went, not to mention a week's trip OS is a nightmare health-wise, so not sure if that's a goer.

Iceland gave us an extra contact for L to find work there, and has said he'll assist where he can.

As to what I'll actually be doing over there: Iceland thinks me studying Faroese (in addition to Norwegian and potentially Icelandic) is a great idea, since the massive Faroese data collection for the whole project will take place August 2008. (Now I'm even more excited - Iceland AND the Pharoes (sorry, no idea how to spell it in English).

And finally, I'm going to be part of the Syntax Variation Group. You all managed to remember 'Long-distance Reflexives' for my thesis, so I'm expecting you to now manage the SVG. :D (that's a super-massive grin to match my own smirk that I think is about to burst off my face...)