I'm still on the road. Or, still at home, depending on how you look at it. My wife and I were supposed to be back in Bangkok by now, but Uncle Sam is taking his sweet time processing some paperwork for her, so we're sitting on our hands at my folks' house in Washington state in the meantime. In theory that means I should have more time to post on this blog (and for a while I was doing really well), but 'tis not always so. Thank you to those who are still reading.
In other news, though, my friend Torben invited me to contribute on a new blog he's just started, Language Scraps. It's a collaborative blog, a scrapbook (or scrapblog, if you will) of all things linguistic, for general consumption. I plan to write about things that interest me in the non-Thai sphere of language. So feel free to read along there. There's a whole slew of contributors. It should be a grand old time.
And finally, I discovered today that I'm quoted (not by name) on perhaps the most widely-read linguistics blog out there: Language Log. In the post LibraryThing for Linguists from back in April, Arnold Zwicky mentions the group I started on LibraryThing, back in 2006 in those first days after Tim introduced the groups feature. Specifically, he quoted the description of the group I Survived the Great Vowel Shift (a little in-joke for anyone who's ever taken linguistics 101):A group for linguists, armchair linguists, would-be linguists, budding linguists, linguists-in-training, linguistic anthropologists, and/or anybody interested in the scientific study of languages. If Noam Chomsky is your hero... you can join, too. :)
Yes, that's a dig at Noam Chomsky. But an intentionally ambiguous and vague one. Chomsky's linguistic work isn't my cup of tea, but I don't want to start a debate with Steven Pinker or anything.
There's something that bugs me about my blog--my LibraryThing widget links to Amazon.com, when almost none of the books in the widget have pages on that site.
So when you see an interesting cover and you try to click it, you get.... nothing.
The reason is simple--the widget code is provided by LibraryThing, and the vast majority of their covers come from Amazon. In turn, Amazon's terms of use are simple: use our cover images, link to our site. So LT assumes (and the statistics are on their side here) that your covers mostly come from Amazon.
But I've limited my widget to books in Thai or otherwise related to Thailand. And I got almost none of those cover images from Amazon. I've scanned and uploaded 800+ covers to LibraryThing. In fact, I started scanning and uploaded all of my book covers, Thai and otherwise, after I joined LibraryThing. I liked the idea of seeing the cover of my exact copy on my virtual bookshelf. I enjoyed progressing toward the goal of cataloging my entire library. I finished the cataloging last year some time, and now I just add books as I buy them.
The point of all this is that I want to apologize to everyone who has been tricked into clicking on dead Amazon links by the widget. Allow me to point you to a "shelf view" of my Thai books directly in LibraryThing. The covers are somewhat bigger, which is nice, and you can click through to the "info" link to find out more. Title, author, ISBN, publication data that sort of thing. (If you want still larger versions of my book covers, head here.)
In other book news, I plan to start a new feature where I profile Thai books on the blog. These will be kind of like reviews, but focused (at least at first) on books about the Thai language. High (perhaps even first) on my list is คลังคำ, a rather unconventional dictionary. My aim is to introduce you to good books you may not be familiar with, or even aware of.
There is an amazing little library hidden in Bangkok that I had the pleasure of visiting fro the first time yesterday. It's the David Thomas Library, and it belongs to the local SIL office.
If you're not familiar with SIL, they're a faith-based (i.e. Christian) organization which has a number of arms. They're probably most well known for their Bible translating and their work with linguistics, particularly minority languages. Their Ethnologue is quite a feat--a catalogue of the world's 6,900 living languages (by their count). It is not without its shortcomings, and its language classifications and divisions are frequently challenged by linguists, but it's well worth a look.
SIL stands for Summer Institute of Linguistics, which is what they were back when it was started in 1934. Now, though, they're everywhere, and it's not just from June to September.
The David Thomas Library is attached to the SIL's Mainland Southeast Asia Office on Phahonyothin (พหลโยธิน) Soi 8, about 200 meters in on the left. According to its website, It houses some 10,000 books, articles and journals, all in one little room. It's a veritable treasure trove of hard-to-find books, and even more impressive is the amount of unpublished material they've collected, from full manuscripts to handouts from conference talks. You literally can't find some of this stuff anywhere.
The library is named after David Thomas, a giant in Mon-Khmer linguistics who passed away in 2006. During the several hours I spent at the library yesterday, I saw his name inside the front cover of more than a few volumes, so I imagine his personal library is the heart of the collection.
Anyone can use and read the David Thomas Library for free. And they let professors, researchers and students of local universities borrow books. Pretty cool.
It would be very cool to have a library named after me some day. In the meantime, you can check out my personal library on Librarything. These are all books I own, although right now they're spread out between two continents (and there are several dozen Thai books that I haven't added yet).
Or look at a particular subset of my library using tags. Allow me to suggest Thai (all books in Thai), Thai language (books about the language itself), translated English > Thai, translated Thai > English, Southeast Asia, or dictionaries.
The Rikker Dockum Library also accepts book donations. :P
