Hello all!
For lack of a better way to begin this: my name is Dante, I'm a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts in Linguistics and Music Performance (a mouthful that I will continuously regurgitate to future employers and numerous times, I'm sure).
A little bit about myself: as a linguist, I mostly specialize in phonetics/phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics. I've worked on numerous projects ranging from the origins of the Danish stød to irregularities in Hungarian noun paradigms to the morphology of Yakut/Sakha. I'm the most familiar with Germanic and and Romance languages, but have dipped my toes into Turkic, Uralic, and Altaic branches. If you're not exactly a linguist and don't know what any of that meant, I've studied and done a ton of research on how certain sounds have behaved over the history of a language, and how those sounds interact with other sounds in those languages. I'm also an avid conlanger ("conlang" = constructed language... like Dothraki or Elvish or Klingon... yeah I do that stuff).
The question everyone seems to want to know is "Just how many languages do you speak?!" and the answer is a whopping 2 at best: I speak English natively and learned Spanish for quite a number of years and can hold conversations and understand most of what is said to me. I've also formally studied Italian, German, some French, Swedish, and Hungarian (heritage reasons).
On the musical side of things: I've been a musician since the 5th grade and continued to study vocal performance in undergrad. I'm forever a marching band nerd (2 years drum major, alto/tenor sax (I also play the bassoon in concert bands)), I've been in TIA indoor percussion ensembles in high school, and I've been in musicals and plays since 10th grade. I continued to study voice formally in college, and have been involved with numerous operas, musicals, and straight plays. (I'm a lyric baritone if anyone was wondering...)
Perhaps this abundance of information about someone you might not know can get tiring. "Get on with it! What's the blog for?!" I hear from the back row. Ask and you shall receive:
I decided to make this blog on a semi-professional level to document my weird and often unnecessary linguistic knowledge and to share it with the world! Why? I think language, simply put, is the thread that holds human beings together. Language is weird and beautiful, and I want to share that with you. It can be a magical realm of phantoms and angels, but it can also serve as a tool for either good or evil (or memes).
On a personal level, I wanted to create this blog to paint a portrait of the more realistic side of post-grad adventures. As a 22-year-old dweeb, in an inordinate amount of debt, I feel that a large audience can relate to the trials and tribulations of job-searching, apartment hunting, eating too much ice cream because you don't know what to do with all your free time, drinking one too many beers at a friend's house, etc. In short, I'm here to tell a story of sorts. So, expect a mixed bag of informative linguistic posts, musical ramblings, and college-age shenanigans.
I'll leave off at that for now. More on the title of my blog later!
Dante <3
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