The Oxford 2012 Results Day Discussion Thread

Yeah, I was reading a really random book called the Symbolic Species (about language evolution) at xmas and there was an entire chapter dedicated to work a guy called Zoltan Molnar had done concerning how neurons' axons get to the right places in the developing brain, and I was like I recognize this name...


so I googled him, and of course, it was my interviewer (and future tutor) at st johns!!

Influential tutor much....

...hmmm, I'm sure you'll manage, they wouldn't have picked u if they didnt think u could now would they?

btw there is a st johns freshers 2012 group if u wanna join, theres plenty of current students too in case u wanna ask questions etc

http://www.facebook.com/groups/sjc2012/

wow, that's definitely a name you wouldn't forget! How cool

very influential tutor much

mehhhhhhhhhhhhh. We'll see... if you come across a girl with big blonde hair, a near broad-scots accent, swears a bit too much and is crying over the final pages of teach yourself Sanskrit it's probably me.

This is going to sound really dorky but I quit facebook, otherwise I would join D: but thankye anyway!

I'll look out for you!

Ha, I don't blame you, its a dreadful website full of dreadful people...

naw, feel free to come up and say hi.. just hope you get the right person! haha I'm the only girl this year doing oriental studies in first year in St. Johns

Thankyou! someone sensible! I think it's horrid, really can't see the point. It's all just so vain and weird; even TSR freaks me out a wee bit in that way

I think in freshers I'll jus be going up to everyone and saying hi anyway... only way to make friends!


Yeah, thats why I gave up on my Tumblr... I had a nice serious and I hope interesting blog and I had a few cool followers who were into the same kinda stuff (biology, history, languages) but then the hundred other people (including my real life friends) just used to whine and attentionseek and never post any decent original content....

haha same! If we both do that, then we must come across each other at some point

that's a shame :/ But hey, welcome to the general public made somewhat anonymous by the internet.

I can't wait! I'm going to Morocco for the summer but I'm almost wishing it away what with how desperate I am to get to uni. Island life can be pretty dull sometimes (viz. Saturday night spend playing grand strategy games on my computer and trawling the internet whenever I need to take a stress break...) It's gonna be so bloody awesome to actually have people my own age with similar interests near me for the first time in my life :L

I went there a few years ago, you will have an amazing time! I'm the same, I'm going back to Georgia and Turkey, but I'm looking forward to October It will be awesomeeee! I loved St. Johns

haha, there will be people with the same interests ON THE SAME PIECE OF LAND!!!

I think it's going to be ****ing hard work though.....

I'd like to go to Turkey, the mountains look great, plus there are loadsa cool greek ruins on the west coast. (don't think a turk would like to hear that).

All I know about georgia is stalin was born there...

meh, hard work > boring work!

Definitely go if you can! You can get quite cheap flights to Istanbul if you book early enough! haha, pro-Greek/Constantinople all the way

Wellllll, Jason went there to get the Golden fleece (Colchis) and found Medea there apparently. It's still pretty corrupt and backwards post Soviet Union which is a bit of a shame, because they have AMAZING archaeological sites that are underfunded and just off the radar because of the USSR. I mean there are literally hundreds of bronze age graves on a hill, but they have no money/support to excavate them..
It's also one of the oldest Christian countries in the world with beautiful churches and they still do lots of pagan rituals that have morphed into some weird pagan-christian rituals, such as leading a lamb round a church with a candle in front of it, or as Svans (an 'ethnic' group in Georgia, it's hard to define 'Georgian') do, which is dance naked around a wooden statue of a Virgin Mary which has a penis. My boyfriend (who is Svanian), comes from this medieval family and each family in Svaneti has huge medieval towers (His family still has three) and they had weird little democracies made up of different villages in the mountains.. and attacked each other a lot, hence the need for towers. Apparently if someone shamed you, you had to kill that entire family AND their livestock....even in recent times people still do blood grudges (apparently his great granddad shot a guy on his porch because he found out he was a soviet spy etc...)

If you're interested in folklore some of theirs is amazing. They're really into animism and still believe in witches (which are scared of dogs, so you must ALWAYS take a dog with you when you go in the forests) etc etc

sorry that turned into a bit of a rant, but I really do love it If you're interested I can tell you loads more, it's seriously some of the most interesting folklore I've heard.

here's a picture of Svaneti too with the towers, so those towers are in groups everywhere..

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=svaneti&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=0n7&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&biw=1555&bih=988&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsfd&tbnid=LgL_nLrYFU5_CM:&imgrefurl=http://www.tikatours.com/geo/index.php%3Fwiv%3Dred%26dos%3D3%26id%3D27&docid=KEF31O3RpFIXFM&imgurl=http://www.tikatours.com/geo/suratebi/svaneti1.jpg&w=800&h=660&ei=L5OlT_bsMIy68gOqu9zqBA&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=2&sig=106428080203088745798&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=172&start=0&ndsp=35&ved=1t:429,r:8,s:0,i:103&tx=554&ty=463

Cool. I had heard Armenia and Georgia were the oldest Christian countries in the world.

oh I love those kind of bizarre pagan-Christian traditions, they remind me of home. We (or, rather, old people on my island) still do everything deasail (sunwise), even like winding rope, or fixing a fence. At New Years we still do Cullaig which means carrying a sheepskin light to every house to ward off death for the year. Plenty of people also still believe they have the Second Sight. The island I come from is famous for it - last century, psychologists (or psychicalists or sumat) used to visit to test these powers to see if they'd improve weather predictions for the met office ..... and of course these men did get their predictions right, but because of their folk knowledge of the weather, not cos of the Second Sight. And some people still think the Northern Lights are the Fir-Chlisneach, or dancing spirits in the sky...

And they call themselves Catholic!

The scientist within me knows its all ridiculous, but its oh-so-very interesting. (I do despise new age idiots and those stupid druids at stonehenge who make a mockery of a living Gaidhlig culture tho) Georgia sounds really cool. All these mountainous regions at the edge of empires seem to go the same way: lots of blood feuds, lots of religion, lots of paganism... sorry for the wall of text, but yeah I like folklore and traditions and out-of-the-way societies and cultures too!

wow that's so cool! So nice that kind of thing still goes on; it's a thing that really hit me when I went to Georgia, they hold on so tightly to their traditions and family history. Same I could say the same of me!

yeah, new age is a joke; it's the same with some of these new western 'Buddhists' who are heavily into yoga, detox sessions and natural yoghurt... couldn't be further from it's original roots haha

I completely agree. It's just the little things that capture your imagination. Another thing that happened when I was in Georgia, is there this day in February, when everyone's ancestors come down from the soul-world and eat with the family. It has snowed EVERY year on that day (because the souls don't like to get dirty feet, so they walk on the snow ). The souls, like the witches are scared of dogs too, so you feed the dogs lots on that evening to keep them quiet. You make lots of nice smelling food (because they smell food, they don't eat it) and you have to be very quiet because they're scared of noise. It's a very complex ritual and so so strange. They also pour wine on the ground for the souls to drink (with poured milk for babies!) anytime they make a toast. I was in Tbilisi at the time and it hadn't snowed for WEEKS, but it snowed on that day but not the day after etc. WOOOwoOWOowoOW

I'm so glad you like this sort of stuff too!

I think sometimes we have to be careful tho. Like in some of the islands here, there is fierce sabbatarianism (i.e. the local minister padlocks the playpark on a sunday so no one can have fun) and some people are reluctant to give that up, to the extent that we practically lived under a theocracy until five years ago when the gov finally forced em to let us have ferries on a sunday. If traditions are having a negative effect, I think its best just to forget them.

On the other hand, it is great to have a 'proper' culture, a sense of history. e.g. if asked to identify myself in the islands, I don't say D---- Mac----, I rattle of my sloinneadh or patronymic which is my ancestry back 300 years (D son of N son of D son of H etc etc)

I just find New Agers offensive. It's (rightly) considered politicaly incorrect to wear a head-dress and pretend to be a 'red indian' as this demeans living Native American cultures. But its okay to dance around caricaturing the oldest literary culture left in Europe - that of the Irish and Scottish Gaels...

I think the Svan seem to have preserved their culture pretty well! how is their language doing? it says 30000 on wiki but im surprised theyve sustained taht kind of culture if the language is that moribund? Or are these traditions generally Georgian...

It's like all things I suppose. Especially when a lot of traditions put class/genders/races on seriously different levels etc I like to wonder at different cultures; but when it really starts hurting/upsetting people in some way then you have to put your foot down.

See that's wonderful. I actually have an Irish surname (My mum's Scottish through and through), but no one knows much back more than a few generations.

Oh Svanians are serious barbarian types! Even with the USSR and WWII etc, they just carried on like nothing happened. Well, it's a small community now, but pretty much anyone born there speaks Svan. However, go to Tbilisi and everyone usually (of our generation anyway) speaks usually Georgian and Russian. It's really hard to describe, but there's lots of different ethnic groups, with their own traditions (especially dances and songs).. but all kind of come under the umbrella of being 'Georgian', which in itself if a big subgroup. My boyfriend's dad is Svan, and he knows Svan, Russian and Georgian, his mum is Mingrelian, and she speaks Mingrelian, Russian and Georgian. Basically, the whole idea of family and tradition is pretty strong still, but in the cities where everything is becoming pretty westernised, the upcoming generation is losing it's really really old roots. Having said that though, everyone knows inside out Georgian history, folksongs etc.

I think its important we preserve cultural and linguistic diversity in the world, just as much biodiversity. That being said, not at the expense of denying people modern medicine, science and even political systems...

Well, surnames were just foisted on the Celts by the English anyway. Patronymics are more interesting, they tell stories: my two ultimate ancestors (my dad's paternal line and maternal line - my mum is from England) are called the Donald the Great Horseman and Roderick the Gardener. Those nicknames tells us their class, occupation, ability; in the case of Roderick, they even tell us where he lived and worked, there being only one 'Garden' on the island he came from...

Hmmm, that's happening everywhere tho. The internet's the great leveller. The Polynesian outliers have been losing their culture since WW2 and the coming of the cheeseburger. Do the Svan or the Mingrelians have a literary (not oral) tradition yet? Do they have schools?

I think I'll have to find a book on Georgia to read. They say the Caucausus is one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth... I envisage lots of names to remember!

I've seen lenition (the magic 'h'!) called aspiration in the learners school course. Don't really know about proper gaidhlig grammar books tho - I've never read any!

yayyyyyy Yeah, some of them are terrible and just badly written

Well the Kartvelian (Georgian and all Caucasian friends) are agglutinative But maybe if you're doing Classics you should do something badass and ancient like Sumerian.... I've made a little rule for myself- no studying any language unless in links to my present/hopefully future studies. My ankle is metaphorically bound to Greek, Indo-Iranian languages and possibly Germanic ones too (and a bit of Georgian and Russian to keep Mr. Frey happy )

I had my best cake ever in Ireland, true story.

:fuhrer:



YES! I was to learn to read cuneiforms so badly
Oh you're much more disciplined than I am. For classics I should really be focusing my efforts on French, German and Italian (aside from Latin and Greek, evidemment ), but I ought to learn Spanish for family reasons (brother's married to a Salvadorean, bring their kids up speaking Spanish), and Russian is just so badass

Haha, I know my demons! If I focus I can do really well...if not then
Yeah, I'm going to try gear up my French/ German (at least a fairly good reading level) before we start.. apparently French for first year is 'virtually essential' D:

Ohhh, that's so cool and sweet! I suppose when you get your head round a couple of Romance languages then the rest will follow easily

cuneiform is Classics....ish...just very eastern...and lot older...and... *shuts up*

What else is on your language list then? You've already been bombarded with my future plans haha. Do you have any idea what you'd like to do after undergrad. yet?