Re: CHAT: Steg's wonderful .sig (and a question)

On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, Daniel Andreasson wrote:

> Kristian Jensen skrev:
>
> > What really surprises me though is that folks studying linguistics
> > at the university have never even heard of the word 'conlang'. Many
> > of the students in my batch seem to be taking linguistics cause they
> > don't know what else they should do.
>
> Yes! That's exactly my experience as well! Last term we were
> about 50 people in my class at uni. (first term of linguistics).
> None of them were really interested.
Incredible, isnt't? People going to a university, being in the vicinity
of a whopping great library and people full of the most interesting
stuff, and being interesting in nothing but the next glass of beer...

But even so, we managed to get a band of people really interested
in sinology together, and asked the professors to put some more weight
into the curriculum, and they were shocked out of their wits. And when
the professor in Classical Chinese, when he had a class of about a
hundred students, started an extra class for those who were really
interested (and prepared to read a chapter of Mencius a week), there
was almost as big a crowd in that class, too.

General linguistics tends to be taken for the wrong reasons, though,
as an aside to specific language studies, by people more interested
in literature. I don't know whether that's true in Scandinavia, too,
but you might try to draw them on the literatures of their choice,
to see whether they "are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will
spue thee out of my mouth.", or are capable of enthousiasm.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt