yole's journey in languages

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 traveling to Russia unless absolutely necessary, but it looks like we’ll be able to handle that, thanks to all the help that my parents are providing. However, the process will still likely take several months, and the uncertainty is not helping.

Also, it turns out that my worries from the last post about not being able to study all the languages I need during my master’s year were a bit misguided. All the courses I’ll need are available in the masters; the only problem is that I’ll have an extremely busy year.

My wife has also finally received her admission decision, so now it’s certain that we’ll study in Leiden together for two years: me in the linguistics program and her in the film studies. (By the way, check out her blog too, with movie reviews and personal essays: Wax Cinematic)

On the research front, I’ve made good progress on both Paternosters and Etymograph. With Paternosters, I’ve finally made a step from manually annotating the differences between multiple versions of a given text to having the computer do it. The process is now far less laborious, even though I’ve had to redo a whole bunch of work I did earlier, and I still need to tune the annotation logic to make sure that the annotations are as clean as what I did manually. I’ve also finally started looking in detail at newer collections, especially the “Opus Magnum” of Paternoster collections, “Mithridates” from Adelung and Vater (published between 1806 and 1817), which I previously considered “too modern”. Turns out that it contains many texts from earlier sources, as well as plenty of linguistic and historical background, so I do need to look at all the 500 texts in that collection and catalog all or most of them.

With Etymograph, I’ve started using it as a tool to accompany my Old Norse studies, and adding the features that I miss. Among other things, I’ve started implementing a proper phoneme inventory, made the conditions in grammar and phonetic rules much more flexible (including proper support for ‘and’ and ‘or’ nesting and parentheses in rule conditions), and implemented paradigm editing to make it much easier to enter multiple irregular forms for a word.

I’ve also made the first public talk as a linguist. My friends organized a small “home conference” in Zürich, with about 50 people, and I did a 5 minute presentation (in Russian) about my Paternosters research. The talk sparked far more interest and questions than I had expected, which definitely encourages me to talk more about my “weird interests”.

Another linguistics-related experience of January was playing a game of Dialect with our table-top roleplaying group. I couldn’t pass by a game which centers around making your own language, and even though it’s not quite a conlanging game (you’re builing a sociolect, not a dialect), it was the right kind of fun for me. We made a little story about robots who tried to build a better society on a post-nuclear Earth abandoned by humans, and we pulled words from Russian, English and German to describe the concepts unique to that society. And when eventually all the robots had to shut down because there was no more lithium to make new batteries, the entire group was in tears.

So, as you can see, January was quite full of events. February is mostly going to be more of the same, except for a week that we’ll spend relaxing somewhere warm and nice. Stay tuned!