10-ICAL papers

Hi folks, as you can guess by my absence, I've been extremely busy with school and work. I am in my last quarter of community college and am taking two demanding psychology courses and another anthropology course. They're very fascinating! I graduate with Associate in Arts and Sciences degree in just 48 days. I'm excited - especially since I don't have to worry about homework and tests for a while. And I can finally concentrate on learning Russian. ;-)

In February, I submitted my transfer application to the University of Washington in Seattle so I can begin getting my degrees in linguistics (and possibly anthropology, though that's up in the air still). If I get accepted and if the financial situation is good, then I will be a UW Husky with junior standing this fall. I won't find out until June or July if I become accepted, which is rather annoying because I can't stand the uncertainty. Argh! So wish me luck.

Back in January, the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and SIL International hosted The Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Languages (10-ICAL)at Puerto Princesa in Palawan.

I, unfortunately, was not able to make it there but many other linguists well-known to me in Philippine & Austronesian linguistics were in attendance like Lawrence Reid, David Zorc, Andrew Pawley, Loren Billings, Michael Forman, Bob Blust, Hsiu-chuan Liao, John Wolff, Paz Buenaventura Naylor, and many others.

As someone who didn't attend, I found the webpage where they collected all the papers presented at the conference to be extremely useful. They are accessible at http://www.sil.org/asia/philippines/ical/papers.html

There is so much to read and they cover a great variety of Philippine languages and other Austronesian languages. So far I have read Pangilinan's paper on Kapampangan orthography, Liao's presentation of dual pronouns in Philippine languages, McFarland's paper on deictic pronouns, and Zabolotnaya's paper about Philippine linguistics in Russia.

So that's it for now. When I have time, I'll do a review of Carl Rubino & Hsiu-chuan Liao's Current Issues in Philippine Anthropology: Parangal kay Lawrence A. Reid that I've been meaning to do.