As many of you have noticed, I’ve not posted for the better part of three months, and I feel that my readers deserve some sort of explanation.

The past few months have been a very exciting time in my life. In addition to classwork, I’ve been working on my Master’s Thesis, taking MA Comprehensive exams, and continuing the sorts of unrelated research that bring me joy. In addition, I’ve been going through the doctoral program application process, and, much to my delight, the process of formally accepting the offer that I received. Unfortunately, this has left little time for linguistics writing outside of class, and as such, this blog has been neglected in the process.

I’d like to apologize to my readers, to those interested in the Cryptorthography Contest (which I would still very much like to see happen), and to anybody who has left a comment without response. Much to my amazement, even in my relative absence, the site has consistently gotten upwards of two thousand hits per week, mostly from search engine recommendations, and the fact that my past writings are still useful to people brings me no small joy.

So, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic will stay up and functional for as long as I can maintain it, and I do hope to start posting more regularly again someday.

However, I can’t promise a return immediately. What I can promise, though, is a very bad Linguistics pun to hold you over:

So, the English definite article ‘the’ walks into a bar with his old friend, the English indefinite article ‘a’. They sit down, order some drinks, and then ‘a’ asks “so, what’re you up to now these days? Still marking noun phrases?”

‘the’ nods its head, taking a drink. “Definitely”

Thanks again for reading, and I hope to return to posting as soon as I can!

A bit more than a month ago, I posted about Cryptorthography and mentioned the possibility of a Cryptorthography contest. Well, the response in comments has been really impressive, and as such, I can confirm that such a contest will be happening.

Although I’m still up in the air about the form of the contest, I’ve got a few ideas, but I’m open to suggestions for rules. Consider the comments thread to be a sounding board for format ideas.

So, start working on your systems, it’ll be only a matter of time before they’re put to the test!

Greetings everybody. I’d like to apologize for any minor breakage on the site this evening, I’ve been migrating the site over to my new hosting, a Joyent Shared Accelerator. Hopefully, the site will now be far faster and more reliable, in addition to being a much more permanent home for lingmystic.

If any pages, links, or other functionalities are broken, please contact me and I’ll try and get things fixed up. Otherwise, it should be the same LingMystic that you know and (hopefully) enjoy.

Thanks, as always, for your readership, and I hope that this new server will allow me to expand the site and make it something even better both for me and for those who stumble across it!