Open course ware

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NORVIN W. RICHARDS: I was thinking about today's topic earlier. And I thought of a metaphor. I haven't tried this metaphor before. This is the first time I have tried this metaphor on people in class. It's always dangerous thinking of metaphors for all kinds of reasons. One of them is that it's entirely possible that I'm about to beat this metaphor into the ground. I'm going to talk about it for a while. But-- so I apologize in advance if that happens. It's also possible that I will tell you the metaphor, and you will wonder, what the heck is he talking about? It will be too metaphorical. But, hopefully, as the class goes along, it'll become clear what I'm talking about. Or maybe it'll be clear immediately. Who knows? OK. Here's the metaphor. You have to try to imagine for this metaphor that the United States is the kind of country-- bless you-- in which board games are extremely popular. Everyo...

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NORVIN W. RICHARDS: So OK, problem set 0, which some of you have already handed in-- it's not due. Don't panic if you haven't handed it in yet. It's partly a getting to know you problem set. We're asking you why you're here and what you're hoping to get out of the class so we can try to tailor the class to your interests. But one of the other things we ask you to do is to get started on the process of finding somebody to do field work with, so somebody who speaks a language that you don't speak and have never studied, that you're going to spend the semester harassing. So you'll be meeting with this person every so often to ask them questions about how to do things in their language. And so you'll have assignments, problem sets, in which we'll ask you to find out this, or that, or the other thing about your language. So what I wanted to start with today was to talk a little bit about how to d...