So I was at the library searching online for some articles on connectionism when I came across an abstract which ended with the following sentence:
Questions yet to be answered are discussed.And I think to myself, "No kidding! Could you be any less specific?" This is almost as bad as those theses or conference proceedings that I sometimes come ( Read more... )

I just found out my paper got accepted to the LSK conference! I'm going to Seoul in July!! ^___^

Today was a really good day. It started out kinda crappy though, I spent all morning in the library estimating the number of loanwords in a bunch of Japanese dictionaries (as part of my thesis research) by turning to random pages in each dictionary and counting the proportion of loanwords on the page. For four hours straight. After that I was ( Read more... )

I just passed my A-exam.
I now have a Masters degree in linguistics.
Now, on to the Ph.D....^__^

So I was idly web-browsing when I came across this page at Languagehat about how there's a word for "hungry" in Russian, but not one for "thirsty". Instead you just say that you want to drink. On the other hand, Russian has the lovely phrase solnechnyi zaichik (literally "sun bunny") for something which we don't have a name for in English (namely ( Read more... )

So today was the last day of classes for the semester. Gave a presentation today in my foundations of linguistics class about connectionism. It went pretty well, considering I had to basically start from scratch and explain what neural networks are and how they work, before I could even talk about how they're relevant to linguistics....The ( Read more... )

Today I finished revising my 40-page phonology paper. Now it's more like *50* pages. Bleah.

Today I finished a 30-page phonology paper* that I've been working on all week...and was supposed to have done last Monday. ^_^;; And, I managed to not even mention Optimality Theory....I'll probably get in trouble for that. -_-

* About phonotactic constraints governing lexical strata in Japanese, if anyone was wondering

Well today got off to an exciting start. I was biking in to campus when I got attacked by a dog. It just ran out into the road and bit me on the foot (luckily I wasn't wearing sandals, or I'd be missing a couple toes right now) and tried to knock me off balance. So I was like, "oh, fuck", and switched to high gear and started pedalling as fast ( Read more... )

Oh, and just in case you've ever wondered how to say "We're completely trapped by Jupiter's gravity!" in Japanese:

完全に木星の引力につかまりましたっ!
kanzen ni mokusei no inryoku ni tsukamarimashită!