Journeyman of Some Issue #6
It’s been over a year since my last newsletter but it’s also been almost a year since I’ve been home. Back in March 2020, I booked what was intended to be a short trip back to Australia. My wife needed to go back for a bit and I decided at the last minute to go with her in case the travel situation due to COVID made it difficult for her to return. As it turns out we were on one of the last flights Qantas flew from the US to Australia. And for almost a year, we’ve been living in Esperance, Western Australia—a lovely part of the world but I left the US in a hurry and a year is a long time to live out of a suitcase away from from all my stuff (books, especially, but also my wine collection, music and audio equipment, etc.)
It’s certainly been difficult and most of my goals for 2020 went out the window although I was able to achieve some things a pick up a few new projects I had not planned on starting.
I had to quit my second certificate at Berklee (in Film Composition). And without my recording gear, I gave up any hopes of doing any kind of instructional videos.
I decided to get back to my wine studies. Even though I was working towards my WSET Level 3 a number of years ago (before my mother got ill), I decided to go back and sit the Level 1 and then Level 2 which I passed with distinction.
At Eldarion, we’ve been working hard on the Scaife Viewer and you can sign up for the dedicated newsletter there.
We’ve also started work on a spaced-repetition vocabulary learning application focused specifically on historical languages. We’re in early alpha although things have been slow the last few months. You can sign up for the waiting list at: https://vocab.study.
Work is continuing on the Greek Learner Texts Project and I’m slowly making progress on my Morphology Tour covering parts of the aorist system in 2020. I’ve also been working on a database of all Greek nominal stems in the major lexica and tagged corpora.
In preparation for studying the Gothic language at Signum (which I’m now in the middle of) I started a project digitzing Joseph Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Grammar. It’s one of the best examples in English of Neogrammarian language description and I’m interested not only for the content itself but modeling the linguistic information in such a grammar in a more machine-actionable way (lots more to say about that another day). Even the typography is interesting!
I’ve also returned to work on preparing Anne of Green Gables for analysis and inclusion in the Scaife reader.
Work is continuing on the Digital Tolkien Project, much of it still unsharable (although stay tuned!). I did start putting together a catalog of verse in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. This led to some other things which I’ll say more about in my next update. Back in June I was also a guest on the Prancing Pony Podcast and gave a talk on the project at Mythmoot.
Assuming I can get back in the habit, lots more to come!