My ISCTLL 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 made the Ngawn comparisons.)
While University of North Texas said that videos of each presentation would be posted after the event was over, as of this posting, there is nothing online yet. So, I took it upon myself, before I even presented, to record myself giving the paper and to upload it to YouTube. The video can be viewed here:
My SLIDES and my ABSTRACT are also downloadable in PDF format from my site. It was a wonderful experience, overall, and I hope that I will get the opportunity to build upon my work soon.
Tags: linguistics, writing, academics
Day 2 in Hpa-An (ဘားအံ)
Yesterday, I arrived in the city of Hpa-An (ဘားအံ), the capital city of Karen State, Burma. According to Wikipedia, the 2014 Census of Myanmar listed over 200,000 residents in its population. It's a nice change from the hustle and bustle of Yangon and still more populous than Naypyidaw. It also has a nice hint of Thai influence to it, as many of the residents have worked in Thailand at one point of their lives or another. A woman prepared a wonderful rendition of the simple yet filling ไข่เจียวไก่สับ (kʰaj ʝiɛːow kàːj sáp -- omelette with stir-fried chicken). The Thai restaurants in Yangon can't seem to get that right.
The hotel I'm staying in is modest and it probably wouldn't impress me at all in the West. For here, though, it's okay. I've slept in much worse conditions. I also took a walk around the lake at the foot of Zwekabin mountain, and the view was quite nice. Did I mention that I'm not really harassed here for not wearing a mask? It's quite nice. There were, so I was told, only three cases of COVID-19 here since February. Not bad, at all.
My purpose here is actually research-related. Although this is the capital of Karen State, the majority of Karen residents of the city do not actually speak Karen. In Linguistics, we call this phenomenon language shift and its theory is fleshed out in the late Joshua A. Fishman's Reversing Language Shift. My question is simple: why have parents stopped speaking Karen to their children? That, in essence, is the crux of the issue. A language ceases to be spoken when children stop speaking it. It may be an unconscious decision, but it's a decision nonetheless.
I've interviewed four families so far and I'm about to interview a fifth one. I want to hold my readers in suspense to what I've found, so far. But I'll be sure to fill everyone in.
Tags: Travel
How I got my Google Scholar profile verified
Unfortunately, the neo-liberal age of ranking and statistics is affecting us all, including myself. We all want to be noticed and recognized and we thus give up a chunk of our freedom and privacy to do it. I see this dilemma for what it is and, while I don't like it, I accept it, to a certain degree.
Google Scholar is a wonderful portion of Google which searches only for scholarly articles. It can often provide the DOIs and can even sometimes link the off-site PDFs of certain articles. Besides being a good resource for students and independent scholars who cannot afford a JSTOR subscription, it can also host profiles of scholars. I even have a profile:
If you'll notice, I have a critical piece of information on my profile: a verified email! "But, how," you may wonder. "Don't you need a .edu address?" Apparently not. Any address which is not from gmail.com appears to be valid for Google Scholar's purposes. I just finished setting up my E-mail server, after a bit of trial and error (GMail still thinks I'm spam), so I decided to see if I could verify my Scholar profile as well. Eureka! It worked and I'm now a verified scholar!
So, if any of you budding scholars want to get better-recognized by Google's search algorithms, I suggest you get your own website, your own email address that ISN'T a GMail one, and upload your work to multiple academic platforms, such as:
- Academia.edu
- ResearchGate
- Google Scholar
- Zenodo (you've probably never heard of it, but do it)
If you do have your own website and server, keep a backup of everything you've written there. It's your work and there's nothing wrong with storing a digital copy, as long as you don't distribute it ;)
So, what are you waiting for? Compromise your privacy and get verified, darnit!