yole's journey in languages

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 2015, but a whole bunch of new inscriptions were published in 2019 and 2021), and tried to see how well the hypotheses match them.

I must say that I’ve had way more fun working on this essay than the Old English one. Learning about Old English poetry in general was quite interesting, but the minutiae of counting syllables and computing the distribution of lines in different rhythmic groups felt quite dull. Here, I’ve tried to do a more in-depth linguistic analysis of texts we do not understand completely, to compare different possible interpretations, and in one case I even suggested an original interpretation of my own. This type of analysis brought me a lot of joy, especially given that it’s likely that I’m the first person in the world trying to look into some aspects of those inscriptions.

I hoped that I would be able to use Etymograph for this research, but unfortunately it turns out that there are too many features missing for the type of analysis that I needed (mass comparison of many different sentences and filtering by some specific attributes). So I reached for more traditional tools, created a big Excel table with all the inscriptions (broken into individual sentences where I could do that easily enough), and used Excel’s filtering tools to compare them. I’m pretty sure that this table will come in handy for many more studies if I decide to continue working with Lycian.

In the meantime, the feedback on the first essay came in. It was quite positive, with an overall grade of 8.5. Some of my arguments were not clear enough, and I think that I tried to say too many things overall; I should rather have made fewer arguments and provided better support and examples for the ones I did make. Will try to do better next time. 🙂 At least it doesn’t look like I said anything egregiously wrong or missed anything major.

Now that the essays are done, I can finally return to my work on Etymograph. One of the first things I want to do is actually publish the database, so that others can play with it and not just read my descriptions. Also, I’m considering streaming my development work on Twitch or YouTube – I wonder if anyone would be interested?