Secret-secret, I've got a secret

(Do you know that song? I have no idea who sings it. Anyway, it's true, I do have a secret, but I can't tell you what it is yet. If you don't know it already, you will find out very soon.)

More exciting things going on in life! As of this week, I have been named the new coordinator for our department's Phonetics and Phonology Forum ("Phorum"). I am very excited about this, but a little weirded out. I have the habit of saying, "I dunno what' going on, I'm just a first year!" But now I'm in charge of organizing this thing, and I'm also the treasurer for the Berkeley Linguistics Society, and it makes me feel like I should probably know what's going on.

Phorum meets once a week in the Phonology Lab, and all the people who study phonetics and phonology (grad students and professors) get together and we have a speaker on a cool and interesting topic. Well, it is now my responsibility to find cool and interesting speakers and arrange for them to come talk to us. This is very cool because it means I can invite whoever I want, but it also means if I can't get someone scheduled, I have to figure out how to fill in the gaps! Our first meeting is going to be August 31st, and I have a grad student from the Neuroscience Institute scheduled to give a talk on auditory cues for gender identification in humans and animals. She usually studies birdsong, but has been working on a project on human speech. Then I scared one of our undergrads into presenting her senior honors thesis, but she's very bright and her thesis was great, so I'm sure she'll do fine.

And, my classmates and I are currently working on putting together this year's meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. My job there is primarily to secure funding for the conference, which consists mostly of applying for grants and writing letters. We're also in the process of inviting speakers for that, too, and we've had a good time coming up with our themes for this year; our over-arching theme is "Writing Systems and Orthography", and our special session theme is going to be "Language Isolates and Orphans". Language isolates are languages that are not known to be related to any other living language, and I guess orphans are languages whose history is unclear, or which are the only remaining member of a language family. (We made that last term up.)

Anyway, I think it's going to be a very cool conference, and I think we're going to have some very cool Phorum talks, so I'm excited about this semester.

I'm trying not to think about the fact that I only have two semesters until I have to take my master's exam. Eeep. But then I will (probably) have an M.A. in linguistics from UC Berkeley, and that's pretty cool!

Also, I have an idea for my dissertation, but I feel like that might be kind of absurd. I think I want to look at differences between little boys' and girls' speech before they hit puberty and try to figure out how much of them are due to differing anatomy, and how much are learned behaviors. It's language acquisition, it's hardcore articulatory phonetics and anatomy, it's fine-grained acoustic differences and how people perceive them... it's basically everything I'm interested in rolled up in one (potentially huge) project. I haven't run it by my advisor yet, and he might laugh at me for coming up with a dissertation topic after my first year, but it's never too early to start tossing ideas around!

Well. I probably need to get off of here for now. Sorry, this was way more boring than I anticipated. Next time I'm going to try to tell you about our new neighborhood and how much I like it. :)