yole's journey in languages

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 work on Etymograph. I’ve set up automatic publishing, so you can now check out the Indo-European and Elvish databases (in read-only mode). I’ve also implemented detailed tracking of sources (so that each fact can now have a proper quotation), added the storage of translations for corpus texts and made a whole bunch of smaller changes and additions.

I did all of the Etymograph work using the Lycian inscriptions as the subject matter, which means that I’ve probably invested more time into the study of Lycian than it makes sense at this point. So I’m probably going to switch gears very soon and revisit Old English. That said, I got to see some Lycian inscriptions in the flesh! I had hoped to see the Letoon trilingual in Fethiye in August, but unfortunately the archeological museum there is indefinitely closed. However, it turns out that the English managed to transport an entire Lycian tomb out of the country, which is now exhibited in the British Museum, and it has some nice inscriptions on it. It was fun to walk around it with an iPad and to compare the drawings of the inscription with the actual stone in front of me.

I’ve also found a nice new research project for myself. I saw a link to Pantographia on Hacker News, and I’m now trying to gather as much information as I can about the sources of all the texts in the collection and the languages in which they are written. Stay tuned for the results of my research here on the blog.

By the way, I find it quite awesome that doing this type of research while sitting on a sofa was completely impossible just 10 years ago. I was able to find digitized versions of all the sources that I’ve needed so far, and most of them date back to the 17th or early 18th century. Ten years ago most of these books were not digitized, and locating all of them on paper would have required many trips to libraries all over Europe.

And see you in November! I’ll be traveling for most of the rest of the month, so I don’t expect to be able to share any significant updates before then.