Andrew’s World

Jetzt bin ich nun schon im 10. Semester und immer noch kein Ende in Sicht... naja, nee, nicht so ganz, ein paar Semesterchen werden's wohl noch, aber in diesem sollte ich endlich all meine Scheine machen können. Danach mal sehen, entweder ich geh ein Semester nach China, oder es muss halt nur ein Monat oder ein paar Wochen sein in den Ferien. Dann kommen nacheinander Sinologie-Abschlussprüfung, Magisterarbeit in Linguistik und dann Magisterabschlussprüfung in Linguistik. Also mit diesem Semester mitgezählt noch mindestens 4 Semester.
Der Plan hier wird sich sicher noch etwas ändern, v.A. kommt bald ein Grammatikanalyse-Tutorium hinzu, dass ich geben werde — habe heute meinen Arbeitsvertrag unterschrieben. Ich werd den Plan dann updaten...

( Universitäts-Stundenplan )

Hooray! It's my LiveJournal's 7^th birthday! Yes, I'm keeping this blog for 7 years now, already... I hardly know of any consecutive blogs that old (except for saria's maybe). Today is Wednesday and I am spending the day writing my term paper on Tsez. I just took a shower and I am hungry, I gotta eat something soon. Later the day, I will meet Melanie, Jürgen, Johanna, and maybe others as well in the city, we're planning to go eat and drink something somwhere. Afterwards, I'll visit Tina to take her home so we can watch Torchwood together. :-B

But now on to the annual statistics, date: April 1, 2009
• Date Created: 2002-03-31 15:22:37 (note that that's a different time zone, so it was already April 1 for me)
• Account Type: Basic Account
• Journal Entries: 2,044
• Post Ratio: 0.80 entries per day
• Comments: 9,023 posted / 10,906 received
• Memories: 223 (I stopped memorizing stuff when the tag feature was invented)
• Tags: 79
• Interests: 146 (highest possible amount)
• Friends: 131 (10 of them deleted)
• Friend of: 125
• Member of: 21 communities and 9 syndicated journals (2 of them deleted)

Hm, my posting ratio is declining. :S

P.S.: LOL, I just accidently posted this entry to linguaphiles! :D

Nicht, dass mir langweilig wäre oder so, aber um mich wieder ans LJ-Schreiben zu gewöhnen kann ich auch mal bei diesem Meme hier mitmachen:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

leximon wählte folgende Assoziationen:

Kaukasus
Die Region fasziniert mich, auch wenn (oder gerade weil!) ich dort noch nie war. Nicht nur optisch-landschaftlich, sondern auch akustisch-sprachlich. Also eigentlich vor allem aus linguistischer Sicht: Die Sprachen dort sind dermaßen interessant! Es gibt dort 3 indigene Sprachfamilien, von der jede auf ihre eigene Art spannend und interessant und ziemlich exotisch ist. Mir haben's vor allem die nordostkaukasischen Sprachen (insbesondere Tsesisch!) angetan. Drauf gekommen bin ich eigentlich erst damals zur StuTS in Bremen, als eine Kaukasin einen Vortrag über eine kaukasische Sprache hielt.

McDonald's
Ja, ich gestehe: Ich liebe McDonald's, seine Burger, seine Filialen und überhaupt. Mir doch egal, ob da Katzenfleisch drin ist oder ob die das Essen einfach wieder drauftun, wenn's mal runterfällt, oder das alles pure Chemie oder sonstwas ist. Es ist lecker! (find ich) Und ja, ich habe "Supersize Me!" gesehen, hat mich aber nicht abgeschreckt. Ich gehe aber auch nicht täglich dort essen, vielleicht durchschnittlich einmal die Woche, wenn überhaupt. Manchmal aber etwas öfter. Besonders mag ich Chickenburger, früher mochte ich Cheeseburger mehr. Manchmal esse ich bis zu 4 Stück davon. Anscheinend muss ich wohl einen ziemlich guten Stoffwechsel haben: mir macht's nichts aus, den ganzen Tag nix zu essen und mir macht's auch nix aus, Unmengen an Junkfood in mich hineinzustopfen oder zwischendurch auch mal was gesundes(?) zu essen. Sehr gut. Übrigens: BurgerKing hasse ich. Bäh! ;-P

Unaussprechliche linguistische Termini
Bin ich dafür berühmt? Oh... naja. Man lernt in der Linguistik eben so tolle Sachen wie Interintelligibilität, Indexikabilitätshierarchie oder Konjunktionsreduktionskonstruktion, erfährt wissenswertes über "equilaterale Triangeln" oder lernt, wie man Farben diskriminiert, versucht Wörter wie šq'vnedni ("ich falle" auf Svanisch) auszusprechen und nicht über Sprachnamen wie Murle oder zu lachen oder N|uu bzw. !Xóõ auszusprechen. Und komisch: Debukalisierung hat immer noch nur einen einz'gen Google-Hit. Warum nur?

Gelber Vogel
Gelber Vogel... tsez, tsez, tsez. Ein Wummel-Knuffel ist das! Den habe ich einmal in der 6. Klasse erfunden und er ist seit jeher mein Maskottchen, das ich praktisch überall als Benutzerbild verwende. Diese spezielle Version hier hat auch eine kleine Geschichte: vor ettlichen Jahren hab ich mal mit Svenja P. aus meiner alten Klasse telefoniert und hatte da grad mein Stift-Mauspad neu. Sie frug mich u.A., ob ich denn noch immer diesen kleinen Vogel (Wummel-Knuffel!) zeichne, von früher... ich bejahte dies und hab ein paar davon mit dem Zeichenbrett gemalt und ihr geschickt. Eins davon war mir besonders gelungen und so schickte ich's an timwi, weil er's kolorieren wollte (oder wollte Svenja das?), das hat er auf meine Anweisung getan und so entstand dies Bildchen hier. In Natura ist ein Wummel-Knuffel übrigens in etwa 7 bis 10 cm groß. Das an der Seite sind übrigens kleine Flügelchen (mit denen es aber nicht fliegen kann), keine Ohren! Bei mir ist das Wort Wummel-Knuffel eigentlich immer neutrum gewesen, einige Leute haben es aber als Maskulinum benutzt (der W.K.), was ich eigentlich auch gelten lasse. Klingt irgendwie auch niedlich.

Wörterbücher
...sammle ich schon mein ganzes Leben lang, fast. Inzwischen sind es 274 Stück in 155 Sprachen (komplette Liste hier), von Abasisch bis Zulu. Sie stehen bei mir im Wohnzimmer in einem Regal direkt neben und über meinem Schreibtisch, so dass ich nur kurz mit dem Stuhl zur Seite rollern muss. Ich weiß nicht mehr, was mein erstes war, leider, vielleicht das alte Russisch-Wörterbuch von meinem Vater? Oder das kleine Chinesisch-Langenscheidt? Vielleicht waren's auch die beiden kleinen Latein-Wörterbüchlein... Ich sammle aber nicht nur um des Sammelns willen (mehrmehrmehrmehrmehr...), also ich kauf z.B. keine besonders alten nur weil sie alt sind, sondern ich gehe schon nach Sprachen und was ich noch nicht habe. Mein teurstes Stück dürfte aber das antike Volapük-Wörterbuch sein, das ich seinerzeit für über 70 € bei eBay erstanden habe.

~~~~

Apropos, neulich hab ich mir auch ein paar neue Wörterbücher online gekauft, die ziemlich cool sind. Nämlich ein etymologisches Wörterbuch für Esperanto, ein Esperanto-Mazedonisch-Wörterbuch und ein Esperanto-Usbekisch-Wörterbuch (die beiden letzteren in beide Richtungen). Cool, ne? ^^

My Review on the Year 2008

January
After returning from the 51ª Internacia Seminario in Würzburg (the annual Esperanto meeting I attend), I registered on Facebook and Goodreads, two typical Web 2.0 sites. I found out about "Anglish", a conlang, or rather modified natural language, and had to write an entry in Anglish.

February
In February I found out (through timwi) that "Rollygeddon" got finished – and animated short movie of someone, who once asked me on ICQ if I could pronounce him a sentence in Chinese — so I have a small role in a short movie now! Furthermore I learned that they would produce a new Star Trek movie, so I had a look at the new characters. I had my 23^rd birthday on February 10^th, as every year and got addicted to Doctor Who (same entry).

March
I had my second birthday party (maybe this was still in February?), and I also went to a little party at Lisa's place — that was the day where her chocolate fountain went berserk. I also wrote an entry in French IPA, and I went to a small reading of André Meinunger's new book "Sick of Sick?", which turned out to be really great. This entry here speaks about my visit to the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair with Helen. Then we refounded the EJUS – the Saxon Esperanto Youth – where I am the "vice president", whoo! In our ASJP project the newest ASJP world tree came out and I just had to analyze it a little... I also had some guests over for a few days around Easter: Johanna and her friend Kristina.

April
As every year, I "celebrated" my LiveJournals birthday (the 6^th already) with a statistical entry, you can be sure I'll write something similar on April 1, 2009! And I attended another Esperanto meeting: the sub_18 in Göttingen, which was really cool and fun. Because of that, I missed the first part of the LSSLD (Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity), then university started again. See also my schedule for the 8^th semester. Thanks to Tina, I started to visit the Leipziger Sprachenabend again. We also had a little barbecue in the park with Kathi and some others.

May
In preparation for the next StuTS, I borrowed a Dutch grammar from the MPI library and read it, in that entry you can also read that I joined the Wikipedia-Stammtisch but found it to be quite boring. Later on, I wrote about the 43^th StuTS in Amsterdam which was really really cool, partly because I spent so much time with Tina and partly because Amsterdam is really a wonderful city. Christine D. visited me as well for some days, just to see Leipzig, but I'm not sure if she really liked the city as much as I do.

June
The highlight of June was probably Marc Okrand's visit and lecture on Klingon — he's the inventor of the Klingon language and gave a lecture and later on went to have dinner with us, it was so great! More funny languages: I found an old Melpa dictionary and wrote down some sentences for you to laugh about. I also went to Sarah's garden party and went to the MPI by bike(!), you can also read about my talk on Limbu, a little meet-up with Leipzig's Esperantists, listened to Helen's talk on drum languages at her school.

July
Many things happened in July, but due to laziness I crammed them all into one entry about tuberculosis, sinusitis, Alex' great party, my new glasses, the last university day and my visit to a wellness check.

August
Same as in July, I crammed much into one entry, which is now about Tina, Danaé & نورهان and most importantly: my finally passed Chinese intermediate exam! In August I also went to a reunion of our former elementary school's class and at the end of the month I went to my second sub_18 in Naumburg, which was great yet again (see the entry's German translation here).

September
September wasn't very eventful... to be honest, I didn't find any interesting entry there, but feel free to read about the ASJP project, the Dené-Yeniseian theory and an Arabists' party I attented or about a movie evening, the Wenker-Atlas or the Sprachenabend...

October
In October I watched "K-PAX", was at the farewell party for Danaé, at Conny's birthday, Alex and I gave a presentation on Esperanto in the city, where I also met Erich-Dieter Krause, showed the city to an Esperantist from Israel together with Alex and Tina, attended the Egyptian-Coptic conference at our MPI (read this, this and this entry, plus the previous one in this sentence). Then we introduced the BA Linguistics to the new students (the annual "Erstsemestereinführung" with the legendary "Kneipentour"). Later the month we got to see "The Linguists" at the MPI, Tina and I had my first Esperanto lesson at the university — that is, I taught. That means, my 9^th semester started, so you can check my schedule here. With the first-semester students we visited Wernigerode for the "Ersti-Fahrt" and Tina and I went to see "WALL·E" (another 10 point movie).

November
Not long ago Tina and I also went to a lecture on Tibetan calligraphy and we all went to the 44^th StuTS in Münster... really, StuTSen, Ersti-Fahrten and Esperanto meetings are the highlights of my year, it seems. ;)
There are some other news about November/December, but I won't go into that now... most of you can guess it anyway.

December
Quite a little catastrophe happened to me at the beginning of December: I dislocated my jaw (on both sides!). Luckily, Tina went to the dentist with me, who was able to fix my face again. And I had my first "real" fieldwork trip to Braunau am Inn, Austria, where Sven, Diana, Арсен and I recorded a Hinukh speaker. Then comes already the entry about my uncle Horst's 71^th birthday and my entry about this year's Christmas. That's about all for this year.
I'm not sure if I will write anything more in 2008 (probably not), so let me just add that the day after tomorrow Tina and I will go to Biedenkopf for the Internacia Seminario. I'm really really looking forward to that now, I gotta say!

~ The End ~

Read past years' reviews from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, if you like.

Oh, I almost forgot! I took a meke/quiz/test today, called "The Language Geek Test" — it's really cool, I got quite a high score, and I didn't even cheat! Why don't you take the test yourself and tell me what you got? =)

You scored 63.75% on the Language Geek Test!
You've earned the title of Master Language Geek.

Here's the test:
www.learnlangs.com/lang_geek/

Darauf habt ihr alle gewartet, ne? Mein Stundeplan fürs 9. Semester! Hab ich den wirklich jedes Semester hier in meinem LJ gepostet? Muss ich nachher gleich mal gucken gehen... natürlich studiere ich immer noch Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaften und Sinologie an der Universität Leipzig, bin jetzt im 9. Semester und hoffe, irgendwann (bald?), Magister zu sein. Bei Änderungen im Plan (und dazu wird es kommen) wird der Plan hier noch upgedatet:

( Universitäts-Stundenplan )

P.S.: Wen übrigens meine anderen bisherigen Stundenpläne interessieren, kann hier Semesterweise gucken:
1. • 2. • 3. • 4. • 5. • 6. • 7. • 8. • 9.

And as if it weren't late already, here's today's FridayFive:

( Click to read this week's FridayFive! )

Welcome to this week's FridayFive:

1. What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I remember wanting to become a librarian in the past, when I was small. I loved libraries and the vast amount of knowledge stored in there. Then I wanted to be a scientist... the subject changed during time, I think it first was chemistry, then astronomy, then something like physics (quantum physics or something). In grade 10 or so I abolished that thought and wanted to be an IT person, programming or designing whatever. When I found out one can actually study linguistics and become a linguist, everything became clear and I knew this was the right thing to do.

What is your proudest accomplishment so far?

Accomplishment? Hmm... having gathered so much interesting knowledge about languages, and dictionaries, having learned 20-something writing systems by heart? Not sure, maybe not. I'm usually not very "proud" of anything.

What is your dream job?

Working as a linguist, researching foreign languages' grammar (preferably Caucasian ones), sometimes travelling to those places or just to conferences around the globe. And writing books about grammar, phonetics, glottochronology, writing systems, artificial languages... things like that. That's really my dream job!

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

See previous question. ;)

What does it take to make you happy?

Not much actually. I'm happy when life treads me nicely (or is that "nice"?). I'm happy when I can feel useful and when there's not so much stress, when I can learn new interesting things and still have some freetime. I'm happy when I am respected. Though I'd be even more happy if there were a special someone who also feels special about me... hm.

Yeah, that's it. Now on to my life. There's nothing really new going on, besides that I will teach Esperanto at the university, next semester. But I'll write about that later someday. Probably in German. On Friday I was up early in the city, to meet 陈怡安, who had her final exam an hour later. She wanted me to speak some German with her and practice a bit before her exam. And yes, she passed. Congrats!
I went to the MPI later on, to work, but most of the time I joked around with Juliane, so I only got to work for about 1½ hours. Around noon I met up with Ulrike and Sabine at the 熙桂园 to have lunch. I haven't eaten anything there since the end of last semester, and Ulrike and Sabine haven't been there. They liked it, I think, though I have to say it tasted differently this time... I think they changed the rice. It used to be a bit more gluey and something was missing in the taste. I hope, they will use the normal rice again. The Jiaozi however were better than usual. Afterwards, Ulrike showed me her new appartment (she lives together with Sabine and Judith now), which looks really really nice. I spent some time playing Monkey Island 2 on her computer and got quite addicted. I can't wait for her to send me my saved game so I can continue playing. Amusing... I've played Monkey Island 3 first, then tried Monkey Island 1, lost the interest and now I'm playing number 2. After that, we went to play pool with Melanie, Felix. That was quite nice. Ulrike and I were in one team and in the end we won.
And yesteday evening we played Cranium at my place, with Melanie, Johanna, Lisa, René, Jürgen and partly also Patrick.

And since I didn't get tired of posting trivia of my humble life, I thought about posting the answers for the latest FridayFive (from thefridayfive) here.

( Click here to read or don't to skip )

Two more news:
First, I'd like to change my LiveJournal design again. I liked this one for quite a while but am now growing annoyed of it. Isn't it difficult to read such a small font on a black-and-grey background? I actually want my old LJ design back but I'm not sure if that's possible. I'll mess around with the options someday soon.

Second thing is, I watched a few movies lately, for instance Nell about that grown-up feral child that developped a strange way of speaking (6 points), Britz, which I found really thrilling (9 points), Iron Man, which was quite your typical super hero movie but nonetheless better than the average ones (8 points), then No Country for Old Men, a truly thrilling and exciting picture, nicely done with very good acting and an ending I still struggle to understand (7 points), and lastly, Network, the one about the news host who gets fired and announces his suicide in his last show, which promptly raises the viewer shares immensely. The movie itself wasn't that good, though (5 points).

Let's have a look at the best 25 movies of all times on IMDb and see which I have seen and how I liked them! The movies that I haven't seen yet are marked and are probably movies that I should see very soon. ;)

#	Title	Rating		My vote
1.	The Godfather (1972)	9.1		6
2.	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	9.1		9
3.	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	9.0		5
4.	Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966)	8.9		—
5.	Pulp Fiction (1994)	8.9		7
6.	Schindler's List (1993)	8.8		7
7.	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	8.8		5
8.	Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	8.8		7
9.	Casablanca (1942)	8.8		—
10.	Star Wars (1977)	8.8		7
11.	12 Angry Men (1957)	8.8		—
12.	七人の侍 (1954)	8.8		7
13.	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)	8.7		—
14.	Goodfellas	8.7		—
15.	Rear Window (1954)	8.7		—
16.	Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)	8.7		—
17.	Cidade de Deus (2002)	8.7		—
18.	C'era una volta il West (1968)	8.7		—
19.	WALL·E (2008)	8.7		—
20.	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)	8.7		6
21.	The Usual Suspects (1995)	8.7		—
22.	Psycho (1960)	8.7		7
23.	Fight Club (1999)	8.6		8
24.	Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)	8.6		—
25.	The Silence of the Lambs (1991)	8.6		4

Oh, I think I want to see WALL·E!

P.S.: Why do I see a large gap between my introduction and the table?! How can I get rid of it?

Whoot! I watched "La cité des enfants perdus" yesterday (6 points), which appears to be my 900^th movie! You know that I vote for all of my movies on IMDb? At least you can imagine... so now I have rated 900 movies, from 1 to 10 points. Movies with 10 points are my unbeatable all-time favorites, which I consider "perfect", those are in alphabetical order: "La fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain", "The Matrix", "Memento", "Star Trek: First Contact" and last but not least "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", all of which I have seen multiple times, up to about 20 times for the latter two — and I'm still not tired of them.
The worst movies I've seen, those with 1 point only, include some short movies, which I won't mention now, the rest are: "The Basketball Diaries", "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York", "Ice", "Otto – Der neue Film", "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (the 1974 version). All of them really crappy movies.

If you want to see my entire vote history, follow this link here.

Etwas spät, aber dafür überhaupt: Mein Stundenplan für dieses Semester. Es ist inzwischen das 8. und ich studiere nach wie vor Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaften und Sinologie auf Magister. Sollte sich was ändern, wird der Stundenplan upgedatet. So wie immer.

( Universitäts-Stundenplan )

Oh my, oh my, almost to late for my LiveJournal's 6^th birthday! Happy Birthday to you, dear blog! Hope to be able to keep you around for many more years! And before I bore you with some statistics, I'll just sum up today and the last few days.
Well, today I was at the LSSLD (Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity), attended Søren Wichmann's and Balthasar Bickel's talks, spent some time at the office (aka Fachschaftsratsraum) and later went to Ariane with Luise, to have some waffles, pet Ariane's, Tsonka's and Cordula's cat (Mimi) and go see "Die Welle" at the cinestar with Ariane and Luise — really a movie worth seeing, in my opinion! I also bought a new semester ticket today. Note to self: I owe Ariane € 8.25.
Thursday to Sunday I was at the sub_18 (an Esperanto meeting) in Göttingen, and it was really really great! I will dedicate this an entry later... this week there's the LSSLD at the University of Leipzig, which I will write about at a later day. I should go to bed soon if I want to hear Michael Cysouw's talk tomorrow...

Now to the annual statistics, date: April 1, 2008
• Date Created: 2002-03-31 15:22:37 (note that that's a different time zone, so it was already April 1 for me)
• Account Type: Basic Account
• Journal Entries: 1,941
• Post Ratio: 0.89 entries per day
• Comments: 8,800 posted / 10,516 received
• Memories: 223 (I stopped memorizing stuff when the tag feature was invented)
• Tags: 70
• Interests: 150 (highest possible amount)
• Friends: 128 (8 of them deleted)
• Friend of: 123
• Member of: 21 communities and 8 syndicated journals (2 of them deleted)

That's all for today. See you!

First Sentence Meme
Look at the beginning of each month from 2007. Then post the first sentence from every month...

January: "Again I have counted my mp3 files according to their language families..."
February: — (no entry)
March: "Boah... ich muss unbedingt mal wieder was hier reinschreiben..."
April: "Whoo, happy birthday, my LiveJournal!"
May: "Mi longtempe ne skribis ion ajn en Esperanto, ĉu?"
June: "Schnelles Update, bevor meine Pizza fertig ist..."
July: "Just found the following word in my currently glossed Tsez text."
August: "According to modern quantumphysics, the so called Planck length is the smallest possible length in the universe."
September: "LOL!"
October: "Jetzt ist's schon etwas über eine Woche her:"
November: "Ich sitz gerade im MPI und hab nur etwa eine halbe Stunde gearbeitet, aber das macht nichts, denn heute gab es nicht mehr zu tun."
December: "Ja, die StuTS in Kiel ist natürlich längst vorbei und ich bin wieder zurück."

As you might see... I am bored. Blah, let's do another survey and then head for bed...




**Part 1 - At any point in 2007, did you:
1. Go to a party? Sure, the recent IS in Würzburg, for instance.
2. Try something new? Eggs for breakfast I remember, with salt'n'pepper they're not bad!
3. Have something change your life? Rather someone... *ahem*
4. Kiss someone? Yes.
5. Tell your family and friends you love them? Depends on the definition.
6. Buy something extravagant? "Hamlet" in Klingon? And "Internacia Seminario" shirt?
7. Do something nice for you? I gave two speeches on Tsez, voluntarilly!
8. Do something terribly wrong? My relationshio to Julia, probably... not sure. Seems I forgot all good about it. :-|
9. Move? Nope.
10. Go to a concert? Only Esperanto ones, I think.

**Part 2 - Best of the Year
1. Party: The IS and the Pelmeni evening with my former Russian course.
2. Show: "Kiu volas iĝi Milionulo?" and Heroes!
3. CD: Макка Сагаипова – Безам (was that in 2007?)
4. Movie: It's quite a while that I saw a movie, can't remember... sorry.
5. Song: Loituma – Ievan Polkka.
6. Experience: Julia. But see next section's #6.
7. Concert: Not sure.
8. Book: "The Time Traveller's Wife", a must-read!
9. Month: Juli.
10. Day: June 22.

**Part 3 - Worst of the Year
1. Party: I don't know.
2. Show: No idea...
3. CD: Dunno...
4. Movie: Same here.
5. Song: Dito.
6. Experience: Julia! I guess we will never become friends anymore.
7. Concert: Pafklik.
8. Book: Tau Zero.
9. Month: October. Worst month ever.
10. Day: November 8.

**Part 4 - Hopes for 2007
1. Predict something that you think will happen in 2003? I might attend the sub_18 in Göttingen.
2. What do you hope changes about your country? That it will get rid of tuition fees again...
3. What do you hope for yourself? That I finally manage to get all those papers done I need to write...
4. What do you hope for your family? That my granny and I will finally go visit my aunt Irma.
5. What do you hope for your best friend? Laura? That she gets the problems with Jens fixed.
6. What do you hope for the rest of your friends? Everything they want!
7. Do you think any amazing medical advances will be made? Not really, no.
8. What is your biggest wish for 2007? To find someone who is not as egocentric, unsympathetic, immature as you-know-who.

Fine. Bad memories brings up bad mood. I had to see her again today, at university. I'll eat something now. And then I will go read. Night!

I filled out a questionnaire on neurodiversity, the so-called "Aspie-Quiz".
Your Aspie score: 85 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 126 of 200
You are very likely neurotypical.



Looks like I'm an Entie. I do, however, perceive certain Asperger-typical character traits in myself. So I start to wonder: Is it possible to be an Asperger who has a strong interested in not only languages, but also in the social behaviour of other people, subtle variations in speech and mimics and the way people talk, which then might compensate the typical inability to understand social structures?
I think I share many of the typically [+Asperger] characteristics concerning "private" behavior or habits, but not at all interpersonal things... I think I do quite well with understanding other people and I (usually) do see what others feel or think. This might either be because I'm really much more neurotypical than Asperger, but this might also be because I might just have a weird kind of Asperger's syndrome, which in some way jinxes the result of such impersonal online tests.

What results did you get?

My Review on the Year 2007

January
Unfortunately my blog coverage is very sparse in this part of my life... I remember being at the Internacia Seminario at the Wewelsburg near Paderborn. Fortunately I've updated the most important things anyway, two months later...

February
This month I wrote no entry, but fortunately I did in March: I took my written Linguistics intermediate exam (in Phonology, Morphology and Semantics), the results came later: I passed. Not as well as I expected or hoped, but still well. And there were the oral Chinese intermediate exams again, for me... and I didn't pass them that semester either. Darn! I also planned to go to China with Laura and Co., but unfortunately I couldn't, 'cause I caught a heavy angina. Here you can read about all this...

March
It seems that it was then, than I discovered two great new (English) TV series: "Heroes" (thanks to Melanie) and "Mind Your Language" (thanks to Timwi. I continued working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (where I still work), I have started to work on the Klingon Wiki'a again, and went to Zaira's birthday party, which was very nice. But the bad things was, that Ariane and I broke off. All of that is summarized here.

April
In April was my LiveJournal's 5^th birthday and you can see the statistics there. It was also the start of my 6^th semester at the university, among the new courses was one about field research and we elicited a speaker of Svan! There was also that nice "Semesterauftaktsparty" in the FrühAuf and later on I also tested a burger at BurgerKing.

May
Here we have an entry about the Students Information Day at the Campus Jahnallee and later I also wasted some time faking a screenshot of a Mongolian Windows, which was much fun to do! I also wrote a "live" review on the Eurovision Song Contest 2007, later we watched Кукушка at the university (I've never heard Saami before!), and I was at the Leipziger Zoo with Luise, Julia W. and Ariane (same entry). In this entry you can read how I bought a new mp3 player, some more thoughts about Svan, how Bernard Comrie celebrated his 60^th birthday.

June
I "proved" the linguistic relationship of Hungarian and Klingon and bought a new digital camera. Later, there was this übercool barbecue at the Johanna-Park, where we later on spent the night in the GWZ. I also went to the then 12-graders' last school day and to the Pelmeni event of our Russian course (same entry), so cool! Es scheint, als habe ich zu der Zeit auch Julia M. kennengelernt, oder war zumindest mal mit ihr essen... Read this entry if you're interested in the conjugations paradigms of the Svan language! And read this one to know more about how I rescued a tiny bird (photo included!), how I studied hard for my Chinese exam, how we built a pool in our garden, how I planned (again) to go to China and how Julia and I got together... I'm not sure if I should see this as a mistake now or not. It was the best time of my life, followed by the worst time...

July
In July, I practiced and studied more for my Chinese exam, also with Julia's help.

August
I wrote an interesting entry about the Planck Length here and had finally passed all my intermediate exams in Sinology, finally!!! According to this survey, my IQ is about 132... apparently the same as Luise's. I have yet to talk Helen into doing this as well. ;)

September
Look here for a hilarious comic that fits me sooooo well! I got a new task at work: preparing a Tsez audio dictionary, I started to become interested in German Sign Language (and hence learned SuttonSignWriting), I also guided two Taiwanese girls around Leipzig, had my China trip plans cancelled, found out more interesting facts about my family's genealogy (read about all of this here!) and in September I also started to work for/with Søren Wichmann on the ASJP project. And I posted a nice statistic about my posting-laziness on LiveJournal...

October
Well... then Julia dumped me. In contrast to Ariane, months ago, she was not nice at all and instead tried to make me feel inferior and said bad things to me, which I do not agree with... instead, her e-mails rather showed her own immaturity, her unability to cope with relationships, her totally utopic world view and her intolerance. During the next 2½ months I road on an emotional rollercoaster, first felling desperate and clue- as well as helpless, then confused, later upset and disappointed, let alone utterly frustrated, and now I'm feeling quite apathetic about Julia... I try not to care about her any longer and to forget her, as she's not worth all the fuss. I'd say it depends on her if I can ever be friends with her "highness" again.
Alright... that's that. I also wrote about the outcome of the first ASJP language tree, then university started again with the 7^th semester (see my schedule here), I also signed up for Badminton, which I enjoyed very much. When I got my 242^nd dictionary, I created a WALS map on the languages they cover and we went to Rathewalde for the Erstifahrt with the new BA Linguistics students. Nice people, they are!

November
If you are literate in Esperanto, you can read a rant about Julia here. On November 14 there was a studium universale talk about Sign Languages, and Helen was there as well. Later that month I visited Kathi and elicited her little daughter Elisabeth. It's quite interesting to analyze a child's L1 learning process... and then there was the 42^nd StuTS (Students' Conference of Linguistics) in Kiel, where I won the first price for a presentation on Tsez. Whee! :D

December
In December I went to Luise's birthday party, just like last year. And the highlight of the year: The Leipzig Conference on the Languages of the Caucasus! Unfortunately I had to work and missed many interesting talks... hmpf. Anyways, read all about it in the entries of Day #1, Day #2 and Day #3; also have a look at the photos. Thanks to our Sakha course this semester, I managed to write a little entry in Sakha which is probably full of stupid mistakes, but was fun to write. We also had Christmas parties at the GWZ and the MPI... for the former we wrote a really funny sketch called "Wejnachten bei der Sprachfamilie", a must-read if you speak any German! That's all up to now...
This year's Christmas was relatively uneventful, the food was not as good as usual, and as presents I got a new mp3 player, a little book, some cash and lots of candy and chocolate. Oh, and I've signed up on facebook and I'd say I quite like it!
Starting tomorrow, I will go to the annual Esperanto meeting – the Internacia Seminario – this time in Würzburg.
See you next year! =)

~ The End ~

Past Year's Reviews
• Review on 2002
• Review on 2003
• Review on 2004
• Review on 2005
• Review on 2006

My band is Iain Moss and our new album is List of places in Herefordshire.

1. Adventist World
2. Small nucleolar RNA SNORD82
3. Marfa Airport
4. Viruddh... Family Comes First
5. Cascada: The Remix Album
6. Postalveolar click
7. Rohrdorf
8. United Services Union
9. Geography of French Guiana
10. Strategic complexity
11. When Grover Moved to Sesame Street
12. Mena
13. Marquez crater
14. List of Scottish parliamentary by-elections
15. Kaido Battle: Touge No Densetsu

This was autogenerated from random Wikipedia article names. Get your own Wikipedia Album.

Whoot! I love the 6^th song on my CD! ;)

According to this online Chinese character test, I know about 2103 Chinese characters:
http://www.clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html

I recommend to enter "advanced" and check 72 characters right from the beginning, it doesn't take that long, really. Out of these 72 characters, I recognized 51. Not bad, actually. In practice I'm much worse, I think. According to the site's statistics, an average 7^th semester student recognizes 2079 characters, so I'm a bit below average, it seems. As expected.

I made the test on simplified characters, but I wonder if I had been better or worse with the traditional ones... after all, I'm quite good at Classical Chinese and considerably bad at Modern Chinese. How do you score? Especially Ulrike and Stephi!

Tell me your scores or post them to your journal, please. By the way, I'm reading my friendspage again, every once in a while... but who knows for how long. :S

好的，我现在去睡觉，很累啊。明天十一点钟再上比克尔教师的课。然后我们也得预备我语言学习的圣诞节，这已经星期一举行……万安、好梦！

The Linguist's Geek Code, version 0.9b1:

----------------------------------
BEGIN LINGUIST GEEK CODE BLOCK
version 0.9b1
LGC(5) F++ Pc+ Pn+ M Sx- H+ O+++
Lg+< L(6)D(1)>
Data: M-NorthEastCaucasian

C+ Im+ I()U(1) S++
END LINGUIST GEEK CODE BLOCK
----------------------------------


In other news, my English-Amharic dictionary arrived. Nice. Well, actually it looks kinda funny. It's so old and used that it has gotten fluffy on the outside. Besides, I cannot read the Ge'ez script... geez, what a shame! I don't attempt to learn it either. But as I haven't learned any new alphabets for ages, I'm thinking about giving Tamil or Cherokee a try.

Søren Wichmann et al. are going to submit their paper about the ASJP project and their conclusions, soon. And my name is listed as well, hehe... The question of my Erdős number rises once again, now that I'm going to be a coautor with 5 more people. The problem is, however, that only very few linguists actually have an Erdős number and/or know about it. It'd be a tedious task to track back from the ASJP people and the few notable ones from that Sprach(en)tod book I had written an article for. Soon I can claim two items on my publications list.
I came across the Linguist's Geek Code mentioned above while googling for "chomsky number". So yes, it'd be an idea to introduce this measure of glory to the linguisthood (or -dom?).

That's all for today. I'm out.

I have 241 dictionaries now and will soon get my 242^th (Amharic). That makes 145 languages, altogether. I decided to show their distribution on a WALS map. You will certain notice some "areal" features, such as larger clusters in the Caucasus and in Europe. There are currently none in Australia and only one or two in Southern America. Hmm... who of you wants to buy me a Pirahã dictionary? ;)
Here's a list of the dictionaries I have, which you can compare with the map.


Click the picture to enlarge!

© by the World Atlas of Language Structures.

P.S.: Does anyone know what "Yukagir" (esp. "Kolyma Yukagir") is called in Yukagir?