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] ...

The text on the Ayeri website’s landing page (itself an anacronism these days?) with its evocation of strange, fictitious lands where the language is supposed to be spoken has long slightly bothered me, seeing that I haven’t come up with substantial world-building for this long-running conlanging project of mine so far. Thus, I have recently—and rather ad hoc—come up with a new text that is more plain about Ayeri. Just as with the old text, I’ve tried translating it into Ayeri to give a taste right off the bat. ...

In December 2022 I posted on my Mastodon account a photo from the Berlin State Library’s Unter den Linden branch featuring a pinboard on which were posted festive tags with Christmas greetings in a slew of languages spoken by library patrons. Christmas-themed cardboard cutouts with Merry Christmas written in a variety of languages ...

I’m a doodler. More specifically, I’m in the habit of doodling random words and sentences when watching TV. Moreover, ever since I started toying with adapting Ayeri’s Tahano Hikamu writing system to a style that resembles blackletter, that idea hasn’t let go of me, and it’s become part of my idle doodling. I briefly mentioned the idea of a blackletter-style Tahano Hikamu in the grammar (p. 61–62) along with a small example, but I’ve never really documented it seriously. ...

A Grammar of Ayeri is available from Amazon now, too, so I am assuming you can now indeed order print copies through the regular book trade as well as straight from Lulu.com. 🤓❤️📘 (2018-11-14) If you’ve visited the Grammar page or the Grammar project’s GitHub page recently, you will have noticed that I finally decided to publish a version 1.0 of A Grammar of Ayeri on October 1st. While this is a big step forward that took me some courage, I didn’t announce it in a big way, because I have reason to make a somewhat bigger announcement still today. ...