yole's journey in languages

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 in November has been a bit limited. Most of it has been spent in the rabbit hole of Pantographia, which I mentioned in my previous update. It turns out that researching Early Modern collections of Pater Noster translations can keep one occupied for an infinite amount of time, and it’s such a great learning opportunity. Reading old books (in 16-17th century English, Latin, German, French and Spanish), trying to make sense of texts in unfamiliar languages (sometimes with little more than a Swadesh list as a guide), learning about lesser-known parts of European and world history – so much fun! And while some of these Pater Noster translations have been analyzed in detail, quite a few don’t seem to have had any linguist attention at all, and the phenomenon of the collections as a whole is badly under-researched.

I’ve spent some time thinking about ways to publish the results of my research, and I’ve decided that I’ll have the best chances of making something useful to others if I go all in. So now I’m making a database of all the Pater Noster translations from 16-18th century collections, with full textual history. The work-in-progress site is available here:

paternosters.yole.page

I’m still filling it up with content, and it looks like there’s at least a month’s work to go before the current scope is completed. And once that is done, if I don’t stumble into another research topic, I’ll have a selection of individual translations to analyze in depth, as well as plenty of non-Latin scripts to learn to read and transcribe (for now I’m only dealing with translations written or transliterated in Latin script).

I’ve also finally created a Wikipedia account, so now I’m leaving a trail of minor Wikipedia edits as I research various books and authors, as well as collecting the courage to do some more substantial writing.

One other linguistic highlight from November was watching this year’s lecture about birch bark letters from Novgorod. Those videos come out every year after the archeological season ends and provide a detailed analysis of the letters discovered during that season. I’ve been watching these lectures every year for at least the last 8 years, and they were one of the major sources of inspiration for me to study linguistics in general, and writing in dead languages in particular.

So that was November. See you in a month with a new update!