In the past three weeks:
– I did finish scanning the book, and as you can see from the previous post, I finished translating the first section of it. There are many more sections to go though.
– I didn’t read any 二十分可乐, but I did read a fair amount of 南部吴语, to the extent I can read it without a dictionary.
– I had lots of fun traveling, and listened to several distinct dialects, particularly Northeast Mandarin.

In the coming week:
– I will write the short paper.
– I will write the email about counting in harmonic grammar.
– I will translate the next section of 南部吴语.

In the past two weeks I have gotten fairly little done:
– This morning I finally had a first meeting with the dialect tutor, and I forgot to bring some key materials. It was a good session though. She seems to have pretty good language sense, and knows the dialect pretty well for someone of her generation and education level. It sounds like the citation tone neutralization reported for the older generation is still true of the current generation. It also sounds to me like the voicing contrast in sibilants may be lost. It might be my bad ears, but she said she thought the sounds were the same too.
– I did meet with the friend about the Bidirectional OT paper. He tried to help me get a couple books that I have been unable to find, but the book that the library does have is checked out for the summer. I may need to order a photocopied version.
– I did some cut-and-paste work on the discourse paper, but that’s it. I’ve only spent about an hour on it in these last two weeks.
– I have scanned the dictionary preface and most of the book 南部吴语语音研究 (Southern Wu Phonology Research) to make it easier to read words I don’t recognize.

In the coming two weeks, I will be traveling, first to Hong Kong to get keep my visa valid, and then to the northeast. I will have some time on trains to read, but I won’t be able to do much computer work.
– I will finish the scanning before I leave.
– I will take 南部吴语 and the scripts from 二十分可乐, to read while traveling.

In the past week:
- I got the segmentation evaluation running, though I haven’t looked
at the graphs yet.
- I sent a text message to the dialect professor, but didn’t get a
reply. He’s probably on vacation. I have an appointment with a dialect
tutor for next Sunday.
- I didn’t do anything about the harmonic grammar research.

In the coming week:
- I will give a friend comments on a Bidirectional OT paper he wrote.
(This will have to be tomorrow morning.)
- I will prepare word lists for checking the segment and tone
inventory in the dialect.
- I will start an 8 page draft paper about my segmentation research,
using the wikipedia segmentation as the main validation. This is so
that my advisors can give me suggestions about what to do with it.

This blog is looking kinda abandoned. I had grand plans to post early and often last year, but my writing energies were generally spent on mundane homework squibs. Annoyingly, in addition to my blogspot blog, the great firewall is now blocking this blog too, and the two proxifiers that I had set up to bypass the wall. But the opposition has only strengthened my resolve to continue spreading my subversive thoughts.

One particularly long translation was also somehow hacked I think, magically turning into some Russian link spam. I do my translations in the blog post editor so that I can benefit from an easy pop-up dictionary (the Chinese Perakun extension), and I had not expected this spam attack, nor the Spanish Inquisition, and so I do not have another copy of the translation. The source book is also not available to me at the moment, but hopefully I will soon obtain another copy, at which time I will post a new translation. I also have an unfinished translation from another book I do not have now, which will be soon forthcoming. The translations are a high priority now, and the longer translation will come easier the second time.

I am also hereby adding a category: Butt-kicking. I do not have a proper butt-kicking group at the moment, and I will likely not have such for the next six months, but hopefully I can suitably kick myself by declaring into the either my plans, successes and failures. Briefly:

• I had planned to format the Wikipedia 1.0 corpus for evaluating the discourse segmentation, and had even hoped to be running the evaluations by now.
• I think the files are now in a compatible format, but I have not run any evaluation tests nor partitioned out the subcorpus of interest.
• I had planned to dive into language study, though I hadn’t set any targets.
• I watched lots of the dialect TV show, and hung out with friends, listening to them speak in the dialect and talking a bit about the dialect.
• In the coming week, I should have evaluation scripts set up. If things go smoothly, I may have results.
• In the coming week, I need to contact the dialect professor, and plan and arrange my first meeting with my tutor/informant.
• I also need to write emails to two people to clarify a couple issues with the harmonic grammar research.