Lol link

Whle I am not normally to be found lurking in the world of facebook, I've been finding the work of lolPhonology sufficiently amusing. If only my undergraduate phonology class was so amusingly instructive!

Proud to be 'Strine

While I would normally refrain from using this blog as a political forum - I would just like to say that I am happy to have woken up this morning to a country where we now have a leader with one of the most impressive broad Australian accent we've seen in the corridors of power for a long time.

Dictionary fun!

Today was threatening to be a slow news day - however the day has taken a surprisingly pleasant turn - because I've just made my first dictionary and I'm rather chuffed!

I have mentioned before that I have been using a program called Toolbox to keep track of all the words in Tam and also help analyse some sentence structure. One feature that I haven't been able to get functioning is the dictionary formatting process. The thing about toolbox is that it's nice and simple to use if everything is running well, but it's a bit of a tangle under the hood so if things aren't working well I either end up making a bigger mess, or being left completely flummoxed - occasionally both.

Having called upon the services of a number of people in the department a number of times this week, N. finally has got it working, although I don't know how and I'm not entirely sure he does either.

But the result is that with a few clicks of a mouse I've got myself the bare bones of a Tam-English-Nepali dictionary in the making!

Nominally Amused

This week I've started writing my nominal morphology chapter. That is, I've been writing about nouns, what they looks like, what they do, who the hang out with (shady characters like determiners, numerals and adjectives.

I always enjoy this bit, where everything comes together. I've noticed it's going much quicker than the verb section I wrote up a few months ago, mainly because I've been keeping notes since then and I'm finding the formatting a lot easier after practice.

I'm mainly writing this chapter now because it is the easiest way to figure out what I still need to check next time (I've been keeping a separate document for that, which is currently over 2 pages of dot-points long). I'm also writing it because I was looking at a calendar the other day and notices that I have my two year report due a month after I get back from my next field trip. I will have to have 20,000 words for that milestone so anything I can do before then is a big help!

More Douche News

Flicking through a copy of Zen magazine at a friend's house over the weekend, I came across a delightful example from Paul Verhoever for my mini-corpus of douche modifiers. This time we have a reference to a pack of "...colossal douche-clerics."

Apparently being a douche is some kind of religious calling.