Thai Mnemonic for Memorizing Consonant Classes
A Thai teacher I recently spoke to taught me these mnemonic phrases for memorizing Thai consonant classes, commonly referred to as "high" "middle" and "low" classes in English....
Burmese Pronunciation of Pāḷi (မြန်မာအသံထွက်နဲ့ ပါဠိဘာသာ)
I was recently looking at Eisel Mazard’s description of the Burmese pronunciation of Pāḷi (I’m just gonna write “Pali” from here on out) and while it’s very detailed, there are a few mistakes in it that I’d like to correct. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, my...
Burmese IPA Transcription
Despite my best efforts to transfer this from LibreOffice Writer into WordPress (thank goodness I drafted it there and not here), there were issues with the rendering of certain fonts and tables. So, I’m just going to cheat and embed a PDF here. Please contact me if you’d like...
Have I given up on academia?
I was browsing YouTube, as I’m known to do, and I notice a trend of people talking about either leaving their PhD programs, finishing but then not doing anything related to their studies, or even encouraging others not to pursue a PhD altogether. While people may have very good...
Working with diaspora populations should be acceptable in Linguistics
I began working with the Sizang language in 2014-15 and I began working on it while I was still in the United States, before I had ever actually stepped foot in Burma. I got quite a few materials from Kosei OTSUKA during a SEALS Conference in Yangon. Luckily, he...
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...
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....