User:PN, MA Ling

This is the user-page of PN, MA Ling. I am just going to put a few points about myself for now.

my education and career

I have a master's and bachelor's in Linguistics (the science of human language). I have been teaching English as a Second Language at the adult level since 1994; I have taught at universities, community-colleges, proprietary schools, and immigrant-centers. I have been a full-time instructor at my current university since 2007.

I studied 7 foreign languages (Latin, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, and Polish), but only really acquired fluency in Spanish, which I studied 4 1/2 years and which I was immersed in for a number of years in Central Florida, West Texas, and East Texas. Most of the other languages I did not study long enough, and also I was not exposed to many speakers of those languages. (In the case of Latin, finding speakers is even more challenging.) I also have an interest in Creek Indian (Mvskoke), which is supposed to be one of my ancestral languages (but sadly, it has become difficult to find speakers).

my hopes associated with being an editing user of Wikipedia

I hope to make valuable contributions and improvements to Wikipedia, primarily in areas related to language. (I doubt I will make any contributions to any other areas unless possibly to add a piece of evidence, a photo, etc.)

It appears to me that everyone takes the Internet for granted, as just another in an endless stream of inventions. I, on the other hand, am impressed greatly with the Internet; I consider it the next great leap for knowledge after the printing-press. I grew up before anybody had heard of the Internet in a small city with unremarkable libraries and with very poor public transportation to get a non-driving, curious kid to those libraries. One of my great ambitions was to move to a large city specifically for the libraries. Then the Internet came along and began to equalize access to knowledge. When I finally got the Internet on my home computer when I was 30 years old, I was able to answer in less than a year almost all the questions that had been building up in my head since I had been a child. When I think about the pre-Internet era, it now seems like the Dark Ages.

So this to some degree at least explains my motivation and urge to be an editing user of Wikipedia, to further the cause of propagating knowledge to humans everywhere.