Some initial analysis of a corpus of 3000+ previously unpublished Hittite tablets from Šapinuwa: yole.blog/2026/05/05/s...

Šapinuwa Tablets

Yesterday Alwin Kloekhorst, our professor of Anatolian linguistics, told me about a Web site where a large corpus of previously unpublished Hittite tablets is now available. The tablets come from t…

yole.blog

Sharing here an article that I wrote for the onion-themed issue of the magazine of our study association. "Indo-European Words for Alliums": yole.blog/2026/04/30/i...

Indo-European Words for Alliums

The topic of the latest issue of TWISTER, the magazine of our study association, was “Onion”, and this article was my contribution to the issue. I’m also writing a course paper on…

yole.blog

I'll be there!

Alwin Kloekhorst@alwinkloekhorst.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The registration for the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2026 is now open! Interested in classes in Anatolian, Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, etc., etc.? Join us in Leiden from 6-17 July! Program, fees, and application form: www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/education...

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...

February 2026 Study Update

It’s been a while. :) My life in the past year was quite eventful, and updating the blog wasn’t on the top of my mind, but now I’m back to my usual routine and it’s worth sh…

yole.blog

it's ridiculous how some people seem to think the only possible reason to do a humanities phd is to become a tenured professor. i use the considerable fruits of my philological training all day every single day to overanalyse every word anyone says to or around me within an inch of its life

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!

T.W.I.S.T. Conference - Schedule

Saturday

conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl

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

GitHub - clmarr/DiaSim: Work in progress: A Java-written architecture, built in phonology theory in the Neogrammarian tradition, which can simulate diachronic sound change, given the starting phonolog...

Work in progress: A Java-written architecture, built in phonology theory in the Neogrammarian tradition, which can simulate diachronic sound change, given the starting phonological forms for the le...

github.com

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...

My 2 cents for the Android Studio anniversary

For this blog post, I’d like to change gears for a bit and tell a story from my previous life, the one when I was a software developer at JetBrains. Android Studio is celebrating its 10th ann…

yole.blog

Tor Norbye@tornorbye.bsky.social · 2y ago

We've also posted a blog post to mark the occasion, with some very nice quotes from our partners (including @hadihariri.com). Again, thank you to everyone along the way -- our users, our partners, and our whole team! android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/01/andr...

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

First Pre-master Semester Recap

Now that the exams are over and the grades are coming in, I think it’s a good time to recap my first semester as a pre-master student of linguistics at Leiden University. While my previous po…

yole.blog

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...

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers

Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

academia.edu

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/...

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …

simonwillison.net

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.

Jon Ingold@jon.inkle.co · 2y ago

This mini review of A Highland Song nails it for me. When writing I was always aware this was a game about a child in extreme, crazy mortal danger. There’s nothing cozy about the Highlands, or about any journeys taken under duress. For me it was always a game about hope under the darkest skies

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!

Ennius@enniusredloeb.bsky.social · 2y ago

Initial 'Q'(uoniam) at the beginning of the last two books of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae (De constructione) with a depiction of Grammar & a teacher of grammar BL Burney 275; Scholastic miscellany; between 1309 CE & 1316 CE; France, Central (Paris); f.94r

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...

Migrating my notes from Tana to Obsidian

I’m currently in the middle of (reluctantly) migrating my note-taking system from Tana to Obsidian. Given that Tana is still in early access and not many people are familiar with it, I’…

yole.blog

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.

Dr Francis Young@drfrancisyoung.bsky.social · 2y ago

This is amazing. A Lithuanian researcher, Ernesta Kazakėnaitė, has identified the earliest surviving manuscript in a Sámi language: ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/je...

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