In other wor(l)ds

Today, the Discourse Analysis class began our work on charting a short
Totonac story. This will be my first discourse chart of a language other
than English. However, I didn't exactly find having English as a first
language to be entirely helpful in the last chart. I felt like I was my
own language resource person, fluent in the language but only able to
use the structures, not necessarily explain why I was using them.
Knowing the intended meaning of a clause sometimes got in the way of
simply stepping back and charting the surface structure. Somehow, the
Totonac story is more manageable to me, walking up to it with my clean
comprehension slate and a morpheme inventory. It will be interesting to
see tomorrow if I charted it correctly.

In Religion & Worldview, we read various articles as a group and tried
to glean information on the local worldview of the participants in the
articles based on their cited perspective on their situation. I related
best to the article on the rounding up of stray dogs in Greece prior to
the Olympic Games this year. This was the first I'd heard of it,
actually. They got them all off the streets, took care of any medical
needs they had, fed and housed them, with the intention of releasing
them back into the streets a happier, healthy bunch of strays than they
were before the games. Oh, and they neutered/spayed them too. Animal
rightists world-wide cried out when they heard of the rounding up of the
stray dogs, for fear that they would be "put to sleep" (sounds lovely,
when you say it like that). But authorities reassured them that this was
not the case, that they were being well cared for. I noticed that there
was no mention of further action on the part of animal rightists due to
the fact that, while the dogs were retaining their right to life, they
were being denied reproductive rights. What constitutes life? Who/what
has rights? Which rights? On what basis?

Wouldn't I love a telling peek at the foundations of some worldviews.