Melissa Boiko @melissaboiko@scholar.social

organizing accounts:

this alt = linguistics, conlangs, academic life.

selfies, comments on books+comic books, transgender issues, politics, miscellanea = @elilla .

trying to keep this account’s public timeline more on-topic as per instance rules \o/

#introduction hallöchen! I’m a Brazilian trans woman living in Germany working on Japanese dialectal fieldwork (long story). Interests include fantasy fiction, imaginary languages, free software, comic books, intersectional veganism, cute cuddly things, and supporting anticapitalist revolutions to bring down the whole rotten edifice

#introductions #germany #bochum #nrw #linguistics #transgender #vegan

certainly not the same as going in person but I appreciate the effort they put into it 😌

my university (#RuhrUniBochum) does a periodic ‘writing week’ event (#Schreibwoche). this time it has to be online, but it’s starting today.

this week I’m gonna get some of my thesis done, it’s past time 😖

some Japanese mastodon slang (2/2):

JOJ: LOL but looks like elephant trunk
tori 'bird': Twitter user
tori-kusai 'reeking of bird': behaves like a bird
tori-kizoku 'Lord Bird': behaves like a bird, i.e. like they own the place
zōgo 'elephant language': what I’m listing here (rather than zokugo, 'slang')

#Japanese #mastodon

(source: 『マストドンつまみ食い日記』)

some Japanese mastodon slang (1/2):

paoru パオる (from pao, 'toot'): to use masto (wider in usage than 'to toot')

paopao-sio: let's masto

paorā 'paorer': mastodonter, masto user

-pau: present progressive aspect; elephant version of Twitter -nau (<'now')

zōge 'tusk': lol (laugh = warai = w = looks like a bit of grass = kusa 'grass' (normal Internet slang) → looks like elephant tusks (Masto parody))

kiba-haeru 'to sprout tusks': similar play on kusa-haeru 'to sprout grass' (= wwww = laughs)

in the absence of words like "doch", the contour can be used to disambiguate tag-negative questions:

— so you don't like maple syrup?
— no˦˨ (, I don’t).
— no˦˨˦ (, I do like it.)

this kind of thing is why I reject the exoticisation of lexical tone as inhumanly hard and fussy. languages like English already have all sorts of sophisticated mappings between pitch and meaning; lexical tone is just doing that at the lexical level (which cases like 'quite' come quite˦˨ close to.)

#linguistics

the word "quite" in English has two meanings that can be distinguished by intonation. try to imagine how the conversation could go in:

a) it is qu↓ite˦˨ good, …
b) it is q↑u↓i↑te˦˨˦ good,…

(a) could be "…so we picked it”. b) could be "…but there are some issues to fix first".)

the fall-rise ˦˨˦ melody in b) is called a "contradictory contour", and it is widespread in languages to signal negation or ambivalence about the direction of the discourse.

> I was extruded on the age limit at the end of last term. In many ways a melancholy proceeding, especially financially. Though I have belonged to F.S.S.U. [university pension scheme] since it began in 1920, it does not provide enough for one to live on one's laurels (old and dusty as Christmas decorations in January). Without the assistance of 'Hobbits and all that' things would be meagre.

J.R.R. #Tolkien, some academic who would be unable to retire without getting lucky on a side gig

torn between being hyped for the upcoming #Schreibwoche/Writing Week (social support for writing my thesis, always helps me a lot) vs. it being on Zoom (anxiety generator engine)

#ruhrunibochum

realisation that I was actually talking about myself and my growing desire to learn more about areas outside my specialty for conlanging purposes

downloading a book from libgen cause it’s faster & easier than going into the living room to find it in the shelf

TIL: ‘Germany’ in Hungarian = Németország, land of the Német = mutes. Apparently this was the Proto-Slavic term for "foreigners, in particular Germanic" (cp. "barbarian", "Welsh"), and the Hungarians got it from them.

Germany is unusual in how many different names it has in other languages 😌

do you ever struggle to remember a word and be like, ‘it was something with /m/-...’

for me it's never anything in the middle, and it's never initial syllable. it's onset consonant, and a vague sense of length.

indexing words by consonant is curious to me when phonemic division is so unintuitive and artificial (in all of human history, a phonemic alphabet was only invented once, and the conditions had to be just right too; in contrast to syllables which are cognitively salient).

many of my academia colleagues seem to dislike teaching. personally I much prefer teaching than the pressure to publish just because, the fetishization of ‘original research’. I'd be a happy girl teaching daily and publishing at will.

I think it does better for the world, too. if we put more energy into good teaching and less into article quantity we'd have more article quality.

putting on makeup to write

wearing perfume to video conferences

dressing up to work at home

kinds of peer review I don’t like

- why didn’t you cite this personal relation of mine? [their article is about something else]

- my guy’s article explains away the results [article is about something else]

- it’s not clear why you didn’t use the theory I like [text says ‘for problems with this theory cf. X, Y and Z’]

- you should spend less space explaining what’s the point the theory I dislike. [same review later] it’s not clear what’s the point of using the theory I dislike

kinds of peer review I like dealing with

- there’s a typo/mistake in bibliography/nonstandard transliteration here
- is this data cell really correct?
- this paragraph is confusing
- this could be mentioned in the abstract
- about this question, for future research, have you considered this direction?
- here’s an article that may help with this issue