I'll be there!

It's been a while since I shared an update about my studies, but late is better than never. Here's a new one: yole.blog/2026/02/04/f...

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

I'm on the organizing committee of the 19th T.W.I.S.T. Student Conference in Linguistics, taking place in Leiden on April 12-13th, and the team has put together a really interesting program. Check the schedule at conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl/2025/schedule and stop by if you're in the area!

The ALILI podcast is back!! The third series of the language-loving podcast gets underway with a Canadian linguistic survey/survival guide from none other than Lingthusiasm's own @gretchenmcc.bsky.social! Listen here: Acast: shows.acast.com/a-language-i... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/64oh...

I'm now seriously learning about (natural language) syntax trees for the first time, and it feels so striking and weird that these trees have mother and daughter nodes, rather than parent and child, as the (programming language) syntax trees. Do we actually need this gendering in 2025?

Call for Abstracts is closing soon! The 19th T.W.I.S.T. Student Conference in #Linguistics is looking for student speakers. The deadline is in about a week (21 Feb). Have any interesting research to share? Submit an abstract! You can find more information at conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl

I don't like it that so many of our linguistics courses show examples that are quotes either from Trump or about Trump. I'd rather we didn't cede to him this little bit of influence over our lives.

@sellmair.dev it's probably a bit out of the blue, but I think it's important to say: in my opinion, your work on Compose Hot Reload was the most impressive and impactful thing all of JetBrains accomplished in all of 2024.

So much good progress on the literature review for my pre-master thesis today. Turns out, what Etymograph is doing is called 'Computational Forward Reconstruction' (Sims-Williams 2018 'Mechanizing Historical Phonology'), and there's a very similar project at github.com/clmarr/DiaSim

The 10th anniversary of Android Studio is a good opportunity to tell the story of the small role I played in its creation. Read the story on my blog: yole.blog/2025/01/27/m...

Recap of my first semester as the pre-master student of linguistics at Leiden University: yole.blog/2025/01/11/f...

I've got some very positive feedback from the teacher on my paper for the Academic Skills course, "Father noster na nebesi: Errors in Andreas Müller's collection of Lord's Prayer translations", so I've decided to upload it to academia.edu. Here's the link: www.academia.edu/126910603/Fa...

Worlds collide: I was looking into the research of a professor my thesis advisor mentioned to me, and I noticed that his website is made with Obraz, a fairly niche static web site generator created by Andrey Vlasovskikh, my former colleague from the PyCharm team.

Yay, it looks like I now have a topic and an advisor for my pre-master thesis! Great start of an academic year :) And what's even better is that I have a great head start on the thesis - it will be about my work modeling Proto-Germanic to Old English sound changes in Etymograph.

We played Rise of the Golden Idol over the holiday break, and as much as we loved the first game, the second one wasn't as good. The story is not as coherent, the stakes are weird, the difficulty ramp is not really there, and the big reveal at the end is not foreshadowed or motivated.

With all my skepticism for LLMs and the complete lack of desire to use them for my own work, I'm still trying to remain aware of the developments in the space. And for that, I found Simon Willison's post a great read, with a reasonably balanced view of the space: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

The point of learning Latin is that it makes it easier to learn Greek, which makes it easier to learn Hittite, which really helps with your Akkadian, in turn does wonders for your Middle Egyptian.

This is literally why I couldn't play Highland Song, even though I love Heaven's Vault, hiking and Scotland, and I was really looking forward to the game. I could imagine too well what Moira was going through, with the cold and the physical pain, and for me there wasn't enough hope to offset it.

Later today I'll join @sebi.io's stream, and together we'll solve some Advent of Code in Kotlin :) Join the stream at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECTs...

Picked up this 1846 Old English grammar at the study association book sale for just 1 EUR. Love old linguistics books!

See? Opening a book with a picture of your grammar is actually a thing!

I'm currently in the process of migrating my note taking system from Tana to Obsidian. I wrote a blog post on why I'm doing the migration: yole.blog/2024/11/28/m...

Me, linguist, taking a while to figure out that the academic skills teacher is talking about opening a presentation with "a picture of your grandma" and not "a picture of your grammar"

I was in The Hague today, protesting against the cuts to the funding of higher education. The pessimist in me says that student protests are just cost of doing business for the right, and the consequences that we're trying to yell about are exactly the expected outcome. We'll see how it develops...

I got nerd-sniped into researching Lord's Prayer translations when a link to "Pantographia", an 1799 book, was posted to Hacker News. I've put far more time into it than I should have, but I'm just too intrigued by this bit of history. And I'm always excited to see new publications in the area.

Talking with linguists about graphics design is fun: "This logo is far too kiki, it needs more bouba"

The formal publication of the new Kalašma tablet by Elisabeth Rieken, Ilya Yakubovich and Daniel Schwemer has apparently now appeared in the most recent issue of Archäologischer Anzieger (h/t Simon Poulsen via the Roots of Europe internal mailing list)

One thing I find very refreshing in linguistics, compared to my previous profession, is how little tribalism I see around me. Everyone has very different interests, but no one says that some language is only for dumb people to learn, or that using a language is a detriment to humanity.

Thunder and lightning in late November right before the first class in Hieroglyphic Luwian. Clearly a blessing from the Storm-god!

It's November, and it means that it's Novgorod birch-bark letter season. This year they found so many of them (~60, vs. the usual 5-10 per year) that the regular lecture announcing the discoveries was split in two parts. I'm now watching the first one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCJ...

#introduction I study linguistics (focusing on historical linguistics) at Leiden University. In my previous life, I worked in tech; I spent most of my career at JetBrains, where I was directly involved in the creation of PyCharm and Kotlin, among other things. I blog at yole.blog