yole's journey in languages

Starting, as usual, with Leiden news. This time, the big news is that we’ve found a place where we’ll be living, and in less than two weeks we’ll get the keys. We’ve already started preparing and making arrangements for the move, and this has been taking quite a bit of my time.

On the research side, I’ve continued to work on expressing the Proto-Germanic to Old English sound changes in Etymograph based on Don Ringe’s book. After many more examples added and rules expanded and corrected, I’m quite sure that the rule DSL is expressive enough to represent the full real-life sequence of sound changes. There are exceptions remaining where the rules don’t produce the expected outcome, but this seems to be the result of my incomplete understanding of the rules, and not of any fundamental shortcomings of the system. I have a couple other books on Old English history, and those should help me get the final details right. Also, some of the rules ended up quite complex and can probably benefit from better abstractions, but the trade-off here is that I still want to keep the DSL usable by non-developers, so I don’t want to bring in too much programming stuff.

I’ve also started some work on integrating Etymograph with external data sources. I’ve implemented the first integration with an external dictionary – the Bosworth-Toller dictionary for Old English, which is available as an offline download – and I’m experimenting with import of lemmatized texts (texts which provide the base dictionary form and the grammatical information, such as case, number, and person, for every word). For Etymograph to be of any practical use, it needs a large amount of data to be able to make definitive statements about rules and exceptions, and obviously I can’t hope to be able to enter all of this data manually.

On a more general note, I’ve finally read a book of memories about Andrey Zaliznyak which has been sitting on my desk since September, and this made me not just feel inspired, but also rethink my overall approach to the study of linguistics. Up until recently, I’ve been viewing my upcoming studies as a two-year sprint – I’m giving myself this amount of time, I need to use it as efficiently as possible, I need to plan my time really well, and once I’m done I’ll figure out what to do next. And once I’ve read about the early career of Zaliznyak (definitely one of the best Russian linguists of the century), it became crystal clear that, no matter how good you are and how well you plan your time, it just takes much longer to get started as a serious linguist. So it’s still possible that I’ll end up getting completely disappointed in academia at some point (I’m well aware of the overall decline in the funding of the humanities, and I regularly watch “why I quit academia/my PhD” vlogs from different people to avoid getting an overly idealistic perspective). But if I don’t, the only way for this whole endeavor to make sense is to stay there longer, and at least to do a PhD. This also means that I don’t need to worry as much for taking the perfect set of courses during my first and second year – I’ll have enough opportunities to catch up on my learning later. And if I ever want to return to the tech industry, it makes much more sense to do that part time in parallel to the academic career, and not to make a 180 degree turn back.

And finally, a book recommendation. I recently picked up Mark Atherton’s Complete Old English, and it turned out to be the perfect book to recommend to people who are curious about the language but don’t want to invest time in actually learning it. It doesn’t require any linguistic background, it explains how to recognize familiar Modern English words in Old English texts, it provides translations for many of the text examples, and it contains a lot of historical and cultural background if you want to learn something about the people and not just about the language.

See you in the next update!