User:JeanLackE

I'm a graduate student at [university redacted] studying linguistics; formerly an undergraduate at Grinnell College, and before that at the University of Minnesota. My interests include Amazonian languages, Indo-European linguistics, morphosyntax, and Enlightenment historiography.

I'm a native speaker of English, fluent in German. I have two semesters of Attic Greek and a little Old English, but not much. I have done some work on the Gothic language.

I have a lot of very strong opinions, ranging from the trivial (cursive should still be taught in schools) to the far-reaching (the Industrial Revolution was probably a mistake). One example from the latter end of the spectrum is that these United States are headed towards totalitarianism. Another is that it's our duty to try to stop that. I've been heavily involved in the US-American interpretation of the fight against fascism and in the environmental movement. This has caused an unresolved tension between my personal and intellectual philosophy, which is firmly rooted in the project of modernity, and the need for epistemic justice. Wikipedia fails here too, and while I hope that editing it can help to correct that, I suspect that we need to drop either our positivist-verificationist ideology or our claim to being a place of knowledge for all mankind.

When I'm not resisting capitalism, or advancing it through its characteristic modes of knowledge production, I read books, edit fan fiction, watch silent films, and maintain a tumblr weblog about topics in linguistics. Some of the artists and thinkers I have found particularly influential, in no particular order, are Eduardo Galeano, John Heartfield, bell hooks, Yakov Protazanov, Max Horkheimer, Joan Bresnan, Andrew Hussie, 100 gecs, and Hannah Arendt.

Be careful out there.