Re: CHAT: General Question

> On 21 March David Peterson wrote:
>
> >Since the whole issue of American and English speakers and Canadian and
> such came up, why doesn't everybody say where there from, what languages
> they speak, and something else of interest?
I'm Matt Pearson.  Born 31+ years ago in Vancouver, Canada, and raised in
various parts of the States (Seattle, Pittsburgh, Champaign IL, San Diego).
I also spent a year as an exchange student in Sweden, and lived for a few
months in Montreal.  My undergraduate college years were spent in Portland,
Oregon, and for the last eight years I've lived in Los Angeles, where I
recently completed a Ph.D. in linguistics.  I consider the Northwest of
North America to be my spiritual home (my family are mostly clustered in
various cities and towns in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and
Alberta), and will be returning there in the fall, where I will be running
the linguistics program at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for a year.

I speak English, a little Swedish, and random smatterings of French, German,
and Malagasy.  I've studied Russian and Mandarin, but do not claim to speak
more than a few words of either.

My major conlang is Tokana, about which I have reported extensively on this
list.  An old and out-of-date, but relatively complete web-version of the
reference grammar is currently living at http://www.mpearson.narod.ru.
There are some formatting problems, but it's nevertheless worth a look.

Musical tastes:  I actively collect music by Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads,
They Might Be Giants, Joni Mitchell, and a few other popular artists.  I'm
also fond of modern concert music (i.e., contemporary 'classical' music),
especially by John Adams and Steven Reich.  I also like African and Cuban
popular music, Scandinavian and Celtic folk music, ABBA, Brazil '66, J.S.
Bach, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Marley, June Christy, Aretha Franklin,
Cornershop, Ani DiFranco, Peggy Lee, English Beat, Tori Amos, the Kinks,
Kurt Weill, Rosemary Clooney, Pasty Cline, Macy Gray, the soundtrack to
"Hair", the Beatles--you know, the usual.  I also like Malagasy popular
music, which is little known in this country but becoming more popular.  My
favourite artists are Dama Mahaleo and D'Gary.

Matt.