Profile

I am a graduate student in linguistics at a large university, specializing in psycholinguistics and sentence production, but with a fondness for phonetics. I'm always pleased when the aerodynamic voicing constraint can explain certain processes, but really, anything having to do with pressure differentials in subglottal, superglottal, or nasal cavities will make me happy. I also like historical linguistics and theoretical syntax on the side, but my interest in historical linguistics is confined to parlor tricks ("Wanna know why we pronounce "route" two different ways? Wanna know why Old Persion has a split ergative system that English could develop in exactly the same way?" (Yes, that last would not hold anyone's attention for long in a parlor, but I do love the answer!)), and my interest in syntax is more along the lines of other peoples' interest in sudoku: I think analyses of phenomena according to theoretical syntax frameworks are fun puzzles, but I don't believe that they reveal anything profound about human language.

I like studying languages, and to date have looked in some detail at English, French, Russian, Polish, Old Church Slavonic, and Imbabura Quichua. That looks like a bit like an impressive list, and I have no doubt that it will grow, but I still feel that my sister has a significant advantage. Her list is perhaps slightly shorter, confined to French, Mongolian, and Korean, but she speaks Mongolian and Korean far better than I will ever speak Russian or Polish, and that makes her pretty cool.

Other interests are not less a part of my personality, but a simple list will do the job, so take a peek down below and imagine that they're contained in some sort of narrative.

For your reading pleasure, I will finish with a bit of bad logic in bad Russian.


Привет! Если вы можете это прочитать, скажите мне, какие ошибки я делаю. А если вы не можете это прочитать, то, наверное, мы с вами уже знакомы, потому что я знаю мало людей, говорящих по-русски.

Yeah, that doesn't really make much logical sense, does it? Thanks are due to _mohel_ for grammatical sense, though.

And this is something I never thought I would have to say, being boring as I am, but evidence has shown me otherwise: if you want to friend me, please let me know about it--specifically, that you've friended me, and a few words about why wouldn't go amiss. Otherwise, these strange creatures show up in my info and I'm left scratching my head and wondering where I've picked them up. And you don't really want to be equated with fleas in my head, do you? No, I thought not.