Back from International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics

Last week I attended the ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics at the University of Helsinki.

It was an excellent conference with a lot of good linguistic and philological content featuring some nice quantatitive analyses.

Some of the paper highlights for me:

Paul Kiparsky on a regular sound change explanation (via Optimality Theory) for various alternations usually explained via analogy
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Robert Crellin on the ambiguity of Greek without vowels as part of an exploration of why Greek introduced written vowels in the first place
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Lucien van Beek on atelic perfects in Homeric Greek
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David Goldstein on differential agent marking (dative vs prepositional phrase) in Herodotus
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Sandra Rodríguez Piedrabuena on (im)politeness strategies in Ancient Greek
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I may do individual follow-up posts to some of these as they inspired potential investigations of my own in the future.

It was also great just catching up with people I’ve met the last couple of years at Greek and Indo-European conferences at UCLA, Oxford, and Cambridge.

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.