Posts by Year

2022

ACT2022 conference notes: Linguistics

17 minute read

In the previous post, I introduced my submission to the 2022 Applied Category Theory conference (ACT2022). Now that the conference is over, I’d like to share...

Goodbye 2021, Hello 2022!

2 minute read

The last two months of 2021 have been all kinds of tough, but luckily we are now finally in 2022. Happy New Year, everyone! I hope whatever unhappiness of yo...

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2021

Classical Chinese and programming

12 minute read

I like writing about Classical Chinese, and I’m keen on formal languages too. So, every time I see the two concepts show up together, I know I have to write ...

Unusual pronunciations in pop songs

8 minute read

It’s been a long while since I last updated my blog, but here I am! I remember last time it was still in winter, but now it’s already halfway through summer....

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2020

CamCoS 9 conference notes: Day 1

11 minute read

So I’m attending this year’s Cambridge Comparative Syntax conference (CamCoS 9), not as a speaker or student helper this time but only as an audience member....

Dobby’s pronominal system

5 minute read

Recently I rewatched the Harry Potter movies on a whim. Then, I also began relistening to the audiobooks to fill in the missing plots from the cinematographi...

My blog is one year old!

2 minute read

I started blogging last August. Now it’s August again and I can proudly announce that my blog is one year old 🥳! In the past year I wrote fifty-four blog pos...

ACT2020 conference notes: Main sessions

14 minute read

In the previous four posts I organized my notes from the ACT2020 Tutorial Day. In this post I’ll continue to note down things I’ve learned from the main sess...

Where is language from? (Part 2)

6 minute read

I began my previous post “Where is language from? (Part 1)” by commenting on a recent online article about the origin of language. Then I went on to compare ...

Where is language from? (Part 1)

6 minute read

A while ago I came across a website for a Genetic Literacy Project. The slogan of the Project is “science not ideology,” and its goal is to promote science l...

First post of 2020

2 minute read

It’s been quite a while since I last updated my blog, and we’re now already two months into 2020 and one month into the Year of the Rat (kung hei fat choy!)....

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2019

Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020!

4 minute read

Today is Dec 31, the last day of 2019 as well as the last day of the past decade. Tomorrow we’ll be entering a new era, at least physically, and I hope many ...

My science communication experiences

11 minute read

“So what is linguistics?” This is a question I have been asked many times, both by academics from other disciplines and by friends and relatives outside acad...

Why are apples so beloved (linguistically)?

5 minute read

Many years ago, probably when I was in grade six or seven, I accidentally overheard the following snippet from a family conversation. The speaker was the wif...

Category theory notes 8: Functoriality

6 minute read

Fong & Spivak refer to category, functor, and natural transformation as the “big three” of category theory in their newly published textbook An Invitatio...

Category theory notes 7: Categorical idioms

8 minute read

Idioms and slangs are an important part of human language. They are short, expressive, and vividly reflect regional/historical mind-sets. And they are usuall...

Category theory notes 6: Think big

5 minute read

Category theory is spectacularly big. But exactly how big is it? Consider a set $A$. It can hold a huge number of elements, say, all grains of sand on Earth....

Category theory notes 5: Arrows and diagrams

7 minute read

Arrows are so vital to category theory that Awodey jokingly refers to the theory as “archery” (Category Theory, p. 2). Given two objects in a category, an ar...

Category theory notes 4: Monoid

8 minute read

Monoid is one of those concepts that are extremely simple, extremely useful, and can at the same time be extremely confusing. It was one of the first concept...

My first post: Why blogging?

2 minute read

I had mulled over the idea of opening a blog for a long time before finally taking action. The problem was that every time I had got very close to actually d...

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