Visit of Dr Bert Vaux - King's College, Cambridge
Dr Vaux visited Upton Hall on the afternoon of 8 September 2009 to deliver a lecture on Linguistics and also Cambridge Entrance to the Sixth Form at the start of the new academic year.
During his lecture he gave the students a fascinating and entertaining insight into the main areas of a subject which is “situated at the crossroads of academic research”, containing elements from many other subjects from Maths to Psychology and from Modern Languages to Sociology.
Dr Vaux is a specialist in psychophonology (language games, language acquisition, development of writing systems), historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.
An inspirational linguist!
He also enjoys working with native speakers to document endangered languages, especially Armenian and Abkhaz.
By the end of the lecture a whole new world of ideas had been opened up to the Sixth Form who were also fascinated to learn of the careers undertaken by some of Dr Vaux’s students, e.g. secret service agents, journalists, actors, TV personalities and speech therapists.
Dr Vaux also presented the new Cambridge Linguistics Tripos and we hope that some of our students may well decide to apply for this course.