DS Bigham–
Assistant Professor

Current Courses at San Diego State University

Students currently enrolled in one of my courses should go to the course page on Blackboard, linked below.

• LING 101: Introduction to Language

  Sec 1, Sched #21737; TTH 9:30am–10:45am
  Sec 3, Sched #21739; TTH 12:30pm–1:45pm

  
  

  LING 551: Sociolinguistics

  Sec 1, Sched #21761; TTH 2:00pm–3:15pm

Previous Courses I've Taught

• Invented Languages: Klingon & Beyond...

  LIN 312, University of Texas at Austin, Fall 2005, Fall 2006

  [webpage] (includes course objectives, syllabus, schedule, and links to most homeworks and course-packet readings). During UT's "Explore UT" Open House, I was asked to give a brief presentation describing the "Klingon..." course. The slides from that presentation can be found here: [Klingon 101 - Explore UT].

• Introduction to Language and Linguistics

  LIN 306, University of Texas at Austin, Spring 2006, Fall 2007

Distinguished Student Work

Over the two semesters I taught the LIN 312: Klingon & Beyond... course, there were many excellent final projects. Some are listed here. When possible, links are provided to the final projects.

• Evan Wilson, Fall 2005

  For his final project, Evan chose to translate T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" into SolReSol. It proved to be a daunting task and only a section of it could be completed. SolReSol can be represented notationally in many ways, two of which are color and music. Evan combined these two in the final project, producing a video of flashing light. Words that proved untranslateable are spoken against a white background. The final video can be found here: [SolReSol Quicktime mov] while the English transcript for the video is here: [SolReSol pdf].

• Andrew Adey, Fall 2005

  Creation of the Gi'th language

• Darren Doyle, Fall 2006

  [The Kryptonian Langauge] based on in-world sources from Smallville and Superboy.

• Travis Dunn, Fall 2005

  Translation of various comics into Esperanto

  [Sin City cover]   [Sin City sample page]  
  [Doom Patrol cover]   [Doom Patrol sample page]

• Norman Friis, Fall 2005

  Lojban orthography

  [orthography jpg]   [translated line jpg]   [description pdf]

• D Frost, Fall 2005

  Creation of a language without vowels

  [description pdf]

• Ellen Julstrom & Troy Rudolph, Fall 2005

  Klingon Recruitment video for UT (Klingon with English subtitles)

• Cindy Morris, Fall 2006

  Decipherment of the Atlantean language from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Having no formal linguistic training beyond what this intro class had taught her, this was a quite remarkable feat.

• Craig Pemberton & Ryan Johnson, Fall 2006

  SolReSol translation program (based off Evan Wilson's project the previous year)

• Kim Soland, Fall 2006

  Interpretive visual translation of [Ride of the Valkyries jpg]  [explanation jpg], based the langauge-music interface of SolReSol