The Fandom Vortex

[float_on_alright]

I love how fandom, particularly writing for the fandom, leads you to other places where you would never be otherwise. I know that statement probably makes it sound dirty or disturbing or concerning and I'm sure it sometimes is, but at the moment I'm just thinking of all the times, I tried to learn enough about something I know nothing about to write and reference it in my writing. Like right now I'm writing a Natasha/Darcy college AU and Natasha has a Ph.D. in Russian Linguistics (you can get a Ph.D. from Harvard for Slavic languages and linguistics). Because of the story, I'm browsing things like Elizabeth Zsiga's "Articulatory Timing in a Second Language: English from Russian and English" and Kenneth Zuercher's "Azerbaijani -Russian code -switching and code -mixing: Form, function, and identity." I'm gonna be real with y'all right now: I have no idea what half of this stuff I'm reading means.

For example:

"In both Russian and English some degree of devoicing is found in clusters where an underlying voiced stop is followed by an underlying voiceless one."

I'm not going to create a works-cited page for my personal journals, but it's essential to put credit where credit is due. Using the ProQuest Linguistics Database through my library, I found the article by Zsiga and the above quote is from page 410 of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Vol. 25, Iss. 3.

Maybe some of y'all know what that means, but I have to admit that I don't. I'm sure that it could be translated enough that I could understand the gist of it, but these are not the kind of articles that are meant for the layman like myself. Still, it's sort of fascinating that there have been such in-depth articles and studies. I guess I'm sort of intrigued by the fact that there are people that focused and interested in such technical linguistic studies. There are not casually interested people. These are obsessed people, and I love it. I think it's wonderful when people are so passionate about stuff.

Still, I wouldn't even know that this was something people studied if I hadn't gone looking for ways to make it sound legitimate that Natasha was teaching this stuff.