Language and History

I meet him almost everyday this quarter, and the more I get to know him, the more interested in him I become. Every week, from Monday to Friday, I would sit in front of him, listening carefully to every word that he say. Every day, I learn something new, things that are precious and worth knowing. Things that would always bring me somewhere else. Away from these small classrooms of Gordy third floor.

Monday and Wednesday, he would lecture us about how words and sounds from different languages are connected with each other. How important it is for us to know the words of our ancestors, the way they communicated in their ancient world. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, he would focus on how literature can be used as a means to study and learn about the people of South East Asian countries. No doubt that these classes are ones I enjoy the most during my study here. How can I not scream; gosh..I love Historical Linguistics!! you may call me a nerd..that's fine..but I really admire Dr. McGinn!

Four important dialects of Melanau that we will focus on are Matu-Daro, Belawi, Dalat, and Kanowit, spoken in Borneo island, around the border of Indonesia and Malaysia. He was collecting around 300 words from the dialects, and put them neatly in the Swadesh words list. The objective of the class is way cool, making us able to reconstruct the Proto Melanau words, spoken 6000 years ago. The whole class received our own project, constructing whether each sound could be derived from other sound, or perhaps, was maintained all along, during the course of time.

The approach that we are using are basically Comparative Methods, looking mostly at the phonological rules in the language. Why not Syntactic, Morphological, or Grammatical rules? Well, looking at the phonological features of the dialects, apparently, is easier. Linguists can easily perceive even the most subtle difference within each sounds, phonemes, and allophones.
And so..there we are...a bunch of Linguistics students, working individually with different given sounds, before finally asked to present within panel discussions, and decide which are the most acceptable rules for the proto-language.

So much fun!!