33.3270, All: Staff Letter: Daniel (and Percival)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3270. Wed Oct 26 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3270, All: Staff Letter: Daniel (and Percival)

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Billy Dickson <billyd at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:02:00
From: Billy Dickson [billyd at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Staff Letter: Daniel (and Percival)

 
Hello Linguists!

My name is Percival the Mammoth. I write to you from atop of the shoulder of
Daniel, one of the web developers for LINGUIST List. I frequently sit on his
shoulder or next to him and supervise to make sure that the changes he makes
to the website are actually for your benefit and that he’s not just
reformatting code for the fun of it (he takes a lot of watching).

This is our first year at LINGUIST List and our second here at Indiana
University, where Daniel is in the PhD program for Computational Linguistics
and I’m tagging along because learning is fun. When we’re not in class, we can
often be found working machine translation for minority languages in the
Apertium project or building tools to help other people do it for languages
that we don’t speak, until Daniel inevitably gets distracted by making yet
another resource for Ancient Hebrew that I’m not sure anyone actually needs
(so far we’ve got a morphological analyzer, a spell checker, a parser, a
treebank, plans to help a friend write a beginner’s dictionary, some
coreference annotations, and he’s still coming up with ideas).

When not working, we enjoy coming up with fanciful constructed languages with
phonemic hats and other such absurdities, having extended philosophical
discussions with our roommates, and reading books over zoom with friends from
undergrad (we recently finished The Lord of the Rings and are now alternating
between Pride and Prejudice and Winnie The Pooh).

Anyway, this grad school thing you humans have is great fun and Daniel and I
are both very grateful to those of you who fund our academic adventures by
donating to LINGUIST List and we hope that you will continue to do so (or
begin today) and that we can continue to provide you with quality linguistic
browsing experiences.

Percival (with help from Daniel because typing with tusks is hard)
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3270	
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