Journeyman of Some Issue #7
Germanic Philology
I’ve just finished up a wonderful Introduction to the Gothic Language course at Signum.
I’m getting very close to finishing the initial markup of Wright’s Gothic Grammar.
I also took the PROIEL treebank which has a tagged Gothic NT with alignment data and generated a static reading site also adding the Byzantine text from Robinson (the choice of PROIEL to align with Tischendorf seemed sub-optimal although I understand why they did it for standalone Greek).
I hope to incorporate this stuff into the new Scaife work soon too. I’m also back to working on Beowulf data which will also make it’s way into Scaife.
Linguistics
I decided to apply to attend the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics. It was always on my wishlist and this year it’s virtual which makes it easier (although I would have happily gone to Leiden for the two weeks). I applied to do courses on Mycenaen Greek, Advanced Indo-European Phonology, Old English, and Old Saxon. Anyway, I got accepted and I’m looking forward to it a lot although I must remember not to take on any other study at the same time! :-)
In other linguistics news, I got a two talks accepted at the International Colloquium of Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL) just before they decided to postpone until next year. One was on Scaife (as part of a workshop on corpora) and the other on my Morphological Lexicon project. I presume (hope!) the accepted talks will carry over.
Tolkien
I was very honoured to be a special guest as part of the Tolkien Society / University of Glasgow live event for this year’s Tolkien Reading Day.
I also did a reading of Appendix F from the Lord of the Rings as part of the streamed read-a-thon organized by The Tolkien Guide.
For these events, I ended up ordering a Presonus Revelator microphone which is quite nice although picks up a lot of background and isn’t nearly as good as my SM7B setup back home in Massachusetts.
Mars Clock
I’ve been meaning for a long time to update my Mars Clock but now with the landing of Perseverance, I’m getting a lot of requests—some of them less than polite (the kind of entitled demands you get used to as an open source developer). I’ll carve out some time at some point although who knows when.
Online Conferences (and one exclusion)
I’ve been attending a few online conferences the last year, many of which, even without the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to attend had they been in person. Most of these have been via Zoom with something like Eventbrite for registration although a couple required registration by sending an email to the organizer.
I had one strange case last week, though, when I wrote to register for a linguistics-related workshop and they asked for my affiliation (which is itself not unusual, although slightly awkward for me). I gave my affiliation as Eldarion but explained that I collaborate with scholars at many institutions (including Harvard, Tufts, and potentially, subject to funding, the very institution hosting the workshop).
I was quite taken aback to be informed that the event was for “specialists” and not open to “the public”!
While I understand the desire to restrict workshops to people with sufficient background knowledge to productively participate, I’m disappointed that I was deemed to be just a member of the public because I don’t currently hold a formal academic position.
Would I have been accepted had I written from my Tufts email address? Or said I was a student at Signum?
Βooks
I’ve been continuing to acquire books here in Esperance, many of which are duplicates of books back home. I might resume a section on recently acquired books in my next newsletter, now that it seems plausible I might be back to some regularity of writing.
I will say, though, that I was able to get the new limited edition de luxe Silmarillion. I actually ordered it from three sources, not being convinced all (or even any) of them would be able to fulfill the order. So far, I’m still waiting on the two Australian booksellers (although they haven’t yet said they can’t get it). Fortunately, Blackwell’s in Oxford came through, and my order shipped the day the book was released, arrived in Perth two days later and here in Esperance ten days after that. They didn’t even charge me shipping!