Being on this campus keeps me humble...

I would not claim to be a highly educated person, but... I have generally thought that I could hold my own in conversation with folks with many differing levels of education...

But... sometimes, here at the International Linguistics Center, even the bulletin board entries make me think that I am very uneducated, or maybe that folks here speak a different language than I do.

A couple of recent examples:

Any of my blog readers ready to sign up for this?

This was the title of a talk held here on campus last week...

Here are some more details about the presentation:

Diagnosing Symmetrical Voice in Little-described Languages
Symmetrical-voice languages are ones that display more than one default transitive
pattern. Each pattern, called a voice, correlates with a different thematic role which acts
as the pivot of each voice. The pivot of each clause is available for wh-movement or
relative clause gapping. The thematic role which correlates with the voice is the pivot.
This talk discusses the nature of symmetrical voice and how a fieldworker might go about diagnosing the voice alternations in an undescribed or little-described language.
Symmetrical-voice is found commonly in Austronesian languages, there are potentially
hundreds of undescribed symmetrical-voices systems in the Pacific.

It was during lunch time, and I was serving in the dining hall, so I didn't sit in on it... I wonder if I could have understood any of it?!?!?