Goodbye, MM Facebook
Well, it’s happened. I was surprised when my friend sent me this link claiming that Facebook and Messenger have been banned in Burma — from Facebook while I was at home. However, I knew from two days ago that the connection would be gradually disrupted, rather than taken out...
My ICSTLL Presentation
My ICSTLL presentation on Ngawn Chin‘s linguistic classification went very well. It was attended by some popular names in Kuki-Chin and Tibeto-Burman linguistics, such as Jim Matisoff, David Bradley, Lalnunthangi Chhangte, Zakaria Rehman, David Peterson, Pauthang Haokip, and Ken Van Bik (whose dissertation provided the proto-forms with which I...
Day 2 in Hpa-An (ဘားအံ)
Yesterday, I arrived in the city of Hpa-An (ဘားအံ), the capital city of Karen State, Burma. According to Wikipedia, the 2014 Census of Myanmar listed over 200,000 residents in its population. It’s a nice change from the hustle and bustle of Yangon and still more populous than Naypyidaw. It...
How I got my Google Scholar profile verified
Unfortunately, the neo-liberal age of ranking and statistics is affecting us all, including myself. We all want to be noticed and recognized and we thus give up a chunk of our freedom and privacy to do it. I see this dilemma for what it is and, while I don’t...
Finding inspiration to write about Linguistics again
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to write a book and I often find myself “hiding from it”, as my former advisor used to say. I really want to write this book and I have no doubt that I will be able to write all 200+ pages required of...
ICSTLL53 Acceptance
Guess what? I just got the word that my abstract was accepted for presentation at the 53rd meeting of the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. This year marks the first time that the conference is being held virtually from the University of North Texas in Denton, TX....
Using git as a version controller for books (Part 1)
What’s git? Version control? Huh? Okay. So, let’s say that you’re a software programmer. It’s your job to write the code for this huge program and you need: A way to keep backups A way to manage files A way to restore previous edits Let’s say you’re collaborating with...
Announcement: [IN THE WORKS] A descriptive grammar of Sizang Chin
I would like to announce publicly that I have been given the wonderful opportunity to write a monograph with Brill Publishing. The monograph will be edited by Dr. Paul Sidwell, with whom I’ve become acquainted from Linguistics conferences. Basically, I am to take my master’s thesis (available for download...
I wrote this post minimally
You know, I’ve liked the idea of minimalism and minimalist blogs. I’d even contemplated using Luke Smith’s lb blogs package before to write a blog. But, really, the “bloatiness” of WordPress works for me. I’m using another blog package bashblog to write this and it seems pretty painless. However,...
Mea culpa, Hana Bui
Apologizing via the internet is not an easy thing to do. In fact, some would argue it’s a near impossible feat. However, I hope all reading this would know that my apology is sincere. I mis-read and misrepresented Hana Bui’s book, and I’m sorry. In my previous post, I...