yole's journey in languages

The Leiden University news of the month is that I’ve once more registered for the Summer School. The courses I’m taking these year are Sabellic languages, Introduction to Sogdian, Historical grammar of Sanskrit and Old Irish. The Sabellic languages are the closest relatives of Latin, spoken in parts of Italy before Latin took over, and… Continue reading

As usual, starting with university news. Confirming the validity of my diploma turned out to be easier than I had thought, so now the admission process is officially complete, and I can start my pre-masters program in Leiden in September. Yay! As for my personal projects, all of my time in February was spent on… Continue reading

First, the university news. The process has moved one step forward, and I’m now admitted into the pre-masters program, on the condition that I confirm the validity of my Russian diploma from back in 2001. Dealings with the Russian bureaucracy are quite complicated now that I’ve given up my Russian citizenship and prefer to avoid… Continue reading

The biggest update for December is that I have finally received a decision on my application to Leiden: I’m accepted into the pre-masters program in linguistics! I’m still not officially enrolled, but given that the decision has already been made, the administrative issues shouldn’t be a problem. Now, it turns out that the pre-masters program… Continue reading

November has come and gone, and I still don’t know whether I’ll be starting my Masters program next year. The process is supposed to take time, so I’m not too stressed yet, but having some certainty would be nice. Between a week of travel and catching a cold twice in one month, my research time… Continue reading

Some recent updates: We (me and my wife) have finally submitted our MA applications! I still haven’t received any feedback for the Lycian essay, so I decided to go ahead and submit with what I have. My wife is planning to do an MA in film studies, also in Leiden. I did a bunch of… Continue reading

When I was telling my colleagues that I was leaving JetBrains, some of them responded with something like “it’s great that you’ve now found your true calling”. I couldn’t really agree with this sentiment, because in fact I never lost it, and it’s not really more “true” than software development, to which I happily dedicated… Continue reading

Today I’ve completed my second extra credits essay for the Leiden summer school: the one for the Lycian course. I compared two papers that provide different hypotheses for when preterite endings in Lycian verbs are nasalized. I also looked at the inscriptions that were published after those two papers came out (they’re from 2014 and… Continue reading

Two small updates for today. First, we made probably the first tangible step towards admission: we did the TOEFL test. I don’t have the final scores yet, but in general I didn’t find it too hard, and I got perfect scores for the two sections where we get the results right away (reading and listening).… Continue reading

Yesterday I submitted the first paper that I’ve planned to write as an extra credits essay for the Leiden Summer School. My overall goal with these essays is to demonstrate my research skills and provide an extra argument in favor of accepting me into the masters program (which is not a given, since my previous… Continue reading