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Happy new year to everyone who celebrates it at this time of the year! 🎉 While “New year, new me” may not be exactly true, Benung. The Ayeri Language Resource is looking a little different today. This is because, after over 13 years, it was more than due for a thorough overhaul. I’ve run this site on Wordpress since 2011, however, due to its long running time, more and more clutter accumulated. Also, things I had programmed earlier, for instance, to add glossing, inevitably stopped working from changes I didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to stay up to date with. On top of that, there’s the recent mudslinging about the popular blogging and content-management platform that bodes ill, as well as bots almost constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities especially in plugins that I might’ve installed. Time to move on. ...

With my dissertation off the table, I guess I needed something new to delve into. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, during the summer, Toki Pona has struck my fancy. After about three months of casual practice, it looks like I can produce mostly grammatical sentences. I’m also growing in my ability to understand others’ written sentences, which can be challenging, because, within the domain of content words, there are no hard part-of-speech boundaries. Think “the old man the boat” or “the horse raced past the barn fell,” except as a general feature of the language, though with arguably better ways to tell subject and object apart than in English. ...

A conlang relay was held in May and June 2024 by conlang enthusiasts at the Department of German Studies and Linguistics of Humboldt University of Berlin in association with a few non-Humboldtian friends, together comprising the informal Berlin Conlangers Regulars’ Table. Thinking about it, the last relay I must’ve participated in was the one on the occasion of the 4th Language Creation Conference in 2011 … Pesky little time-flies and their beloved arrows! ...

tenpo pini lili la, mi kute sin e lon pi toki pona kepeken sitelen pona ni tan jan Waputo. time finish small TOP 1 hear again OBJ existence ATTR Toki Pona by.means.of picture good DEM from person RobWords ‘I’ve heard again about Toki Pona recently via this nice video by RobWords.’ kama la, mi kama jo e olin lili lili tawa toki ni lon lawa mi. coming.up TOP 1 come.to have OBJ love small small toward language DEM in head 1 ‘I’ve come to have a little bit of an intellectual crush on the language since.’ ...

I had been working on a Ph. D. in German Language for what feels like forever—more accurately, for seven years since February of 2017. As the proverb goes, “Good things come to those who wait,” so last month, the revised version of my thesis has finally been published by Language Science Press’ Advances in Historical Linguistics series. Carsten Becker. 2024. Genusresolution bei mittelhochdeutsch beide: Eine Analyse im Rahmen der Lexical-Functional Grammar (Advances in Historical Linguistics 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10451456 (🔓). [Worldcat] ...