If you've come here, I assume it's because you want to know more about me than you can find on the main page of my site. (Or you want contact information, in which case you can avoid the rambling digressions by jumping down to the "Contact" section of this page. Go ahead. Jump on down.)
I'm a web application developer by profession and a writer by vocation. I'm a classic INTP, which means I love systems and details; I didn't go into Lingusitics because of the job prospects*, I went because playing in grammar and word formation were hella exciting fields.
...no, I really thought that. That wasn't a joke, there.
*Though that was a joke, if you were wondering.
I'm a lifelong learner. There's an Oppenheimer quote which goes:
One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale and scope of change itself so that the world alters as we walk in it, so that the years of man’s life measure not some small growth or rearrangement or moderations of what he learnt in childhood, but a great upheaval.
That's the great thing about the age we're in. The sphere of what we know is expanding at an astounding pace, and the sphere of what we know we don't know is expanding even faster. We're constantly on a new frontier. How cool is that?
Fields I love to learn in include languages (human and computer), psychology (especially the psychology of motivation), changing standards of communication and narrative, social construction of race, ability, and gender, and the entire realm of speculative fiction.
I use nonstandard pronouns, which I'm constantly fiddling with. Currently, I'm most comfortable with se/se's/sem(or sen).
Contact
- EMail: an@owomoyela.net
- Twitter: @an_owomoyela
A Random Anecdote
I took Sanskrit for two semesters to fulfill a historical linguistics requirement for my degree. The book we used was Devavanipravesika: a lovely text with a disconcerting (but kinda excellent) habit of giving you names for parts of grammar in Sanskrit, and then refusing to refer to them using English terms, and ultimately refusing to write them in the Latin alphabet.
There's one particular piece of advice that the Devavanipravesika gave us that I'll never forget:
When two dissimilar vowels are juxtaposed and the first is not an "a" vowel (long or short), the syllabic coalescence is effected by changing the first vowel into its corresponding homorganic nonsyllabic semivowel.
I'll never forget it because I had to read over it half a dozen times before I understood what it even meant.