Funology

I’ve settled into being a morning person like it is a sweater that finally fits. My alarm starts to cackle at me at 4:00 AM. There is nothing like the night, with its habit of stars crowning my vision as I look up into that wide slur of sky. But the night owl in me is slowly growing into a woman who looks at the human world just as much as the constellations, who enjoys saying good morning to her regular bus driver, who arises to her black tea and her work annotating Icelandic speech data. I don’t think the night will ever slough away from me, but as a person who exists in the realm of other people now, I have made some slow changes.

I’ve found work that means a great deal to me. As I said, I roll out of bed, the sage sheets tangling around my ankles, and the first thing I do is pet the cats and set the tea to steep (my favorite is called Hearthside Toddy). Once the warmed mug is in my hands, I open up Praat, a software that I never in a million undergraduate years would have thought to be quite interesting. I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that wide-eyed, twenty-year-old Savannah was one who, bent over her Tibetan numerals homework, said to herself, “If I can just get through this phonology course, I never have to look at this again.”

I’m looking at it again.

For the two people out there who read this blog, phonology is the study of the sounds of languages and how those sounds pattern into meaning. I think that it is humankind’s most elegant symbolic system. And for the people in my waking life who know me, they know that I’ve long been a bit obsessed with Iceland and its beautiful, trilling language (sometimes, I compare Icelandic’s inventory of phonemes to a flute’s warbling in the middle of a winter tundra). When I heard about a professor at UNM who does this sort of work with Icelandic phonology, I hesitated — being a shy person — but emailed him. He kindly offered to let me stumble around as best I can on this dream project. Ostensibly, I am looking for Icelandic monophthongs; in reality, I suspect I have a dreamy expression as I listen and try to pick out just the right sounds.

So that is what I have been doing with my early mornings. I finish work, I light a candle, I pick up a journal article, and drink more and more tea (I most certainly drink too much). Then I write my poetry about the teacher who told me that I will never be a writer. Then I do Morphosyntax. Then I catch the bus. Then I get to work as well in the Navajo Language Program’s offices, where I hear Navajo and probably still have that dreamy expression on my face because it is all just so cool.

When I was preparing for school, I invested in a hurricane’s worth of index tabs to annotate my textbooks. It was a delight to sit in the well-lit lobby of my apartment complex, watching cars swish by full of people whose worlds may never again intersect with mine. Now, I’ve read about typology and morphosyntax and usage-based models of language and the place where language and gender bump into each other, whispering, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.” But phonology has been the strange ghost I come back to each night.

I’ve never really been someone who hustled before. Even as an undergraduate with lofty ambitions and no sense of proportion about her research questions, I took things one thought at a time. That was exhausting enough. Now I send out emails to collaborate with the people who inspire me. I imagine they probably get the emails and think, “Good God, she’s up early.”

In terms of that work ethic and that drive to just send out batches of emails to unsuspecting researchers, I’ve made a good friend who is in the same metaphorical boat. I feel a bit relieved that we’re all still working it out. We’re all still seeking connection, hoping to weave those threads so like a web, like a canal bridging parched land to scientific waters. Maybe someday, I’ll get to be a Real Linguist, a Real Phonologist, a Real Cognitive Scientist.

For the time being, I set my alarm. I’ve got work to do.