iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Did you use LLMs to extract the sound change rules as well, or is this manually coded? I've been doing this manually, and it's quite time-consuming if done well. (I converted all the PGmc to OE sound changes from Don Ringe's book; took several iterations and many hours.)

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

BTW how long have you been working on this, and how much is this vibe-coded? I've been working on Etymograph since 2023, lately with light use of LLMs, and seeing Asterisk, I'm considering going all in on agents :)

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Really nice project! You might be interested in my own project along similar lines: etymograph.yole.page/ie . Caveat: It's much more of perma-work-in-progress, and the docs are badly out of date.

etymograph.yole.page

Bibliography

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Hopefully the Urartean paleogenetics guy would be aware that getting a couple dozen co-authors banned from arxiv is a career-ending move, and would think twice before asking chatgpt for some more citations

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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

I'm on the organizing committee of the 19th T.W.I.S.T. Student Conference in Linguistics, taking place in Leiden on April 12-13th, and the team has put together a really interesting program. Check the schedule at conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl/2025/schedule and stop by if you're in the area!

conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl

T.W.I.S.T. Conference - Schedule

Saturday

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Reposted by Dmitry Zhemerov

Dr Danny Bate @dannybate.com · 10/03/2025

The ALILI podcast is back!! The third series of the language-loving podcast gets underway with a Canadian linguistic survey/survival guide from none other than Lingthusiasm's own @gretchenmcc.bsky.social! Listen here: Acast: shows.acast.com/a-language-i... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/64oh...

Artwork for the podcast A Language I Love Is...

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I'm now seriously learning about (natural language) syntax trees for the first time, and it feels so striking and weird that these trees have mother and daughter nodes, rather than parent and child, as the (programming language) syntax trees. Do we actually need this gendering in 2025?

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Study Association TWIST @studieverenigingtwist.nl · 14/02/2025

Call for Abstracts is closing soon! The 19th T.W.I.S.T. Student Conference in #Linguistics is looking for student speakers. The deadline is in about a week (21 Feb). Have any interesting research to share? Submit an abstract! You can find more information at conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

I don't like it that so many of our linguistics courses show examples that are quotes either from Trump or about Trump. I'd rather we didn't cede to him this little bit of influence over our lives.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

@sellmair.dev it's probably a bit out of the blue, but I think it's important to say: in my opinion, your work on Compose Hot Reload was the most impressive and impactful thing all of JetBrains accomplished in all of 2024.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Following your recent example: We spent many hours rewriting the explanations of co- and contravariance in "Kotlin in Action". Would ChatGPT be able to generate a passable (to some degree) explanation of those concepts? I'm pretty sure it would. Was this time wasted? Absolutely not.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Because, while some people value hand-crafted things over machine-produced ones, despite the benefits that machines bring to production, I value brain-crafted thought over machine-produced one. And as long as I can have the choice to not have any machine-produced thought in my life, I will.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

I've got some very positive feedback from the teacher on my paper for the Academic Skills course, "Father noster na nebesi: Errors in Andreas Müller's collection of Lord's Prayer translations", so I've decided to upload it to academia.edu. Here's the link: www.academia.edu/126910603/Fa...

academia.edu

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Worlds collide: I was looking into the research of a professor my thesis advisor mentioned to me, and I noticed that his website is made with Obraz, a fairly niche static web site generator created by Andrey Vlasovskikh, my former colleague from the PyCharm team.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Yay, it looks like I now have a topic and an advisor for my pre-master thesis! Great start of an academic year :) And what's even better is that I have a great head start on the thesis - it will be about my work modeling Proto-Germanic to Old English sound changes in Etymograph.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

But the mechanics are (mostly) still solid, and the improved graphics quality works really well with the same old quirky style. We'll definitely play the DLC when it comes out :)

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

We played Rise of the Golden Idol over the holiday break, and as much as we loved the first game, the second one wasn't as good. The story is not as coherent, the stakes are weird, the difficulty ramp is not really there, and the big reveal at the end is not foreshadowed or motivated.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

With all my skepticism for LLMs and the complete lack of desire to use them for my own work, I'm still trying to remain aware of the developments in the space. And for that, I found Simon Willison's post a great read, with a reasonably balanced view of the space: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

simonwillison.net

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …

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Reposted by Dmitry Zhemerov

John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 21/12/2024

The point of learning Latin is that it makes it easier to learn Greek, which makes it easier to learn Hittite, which really helps with your Akkadian, in turn does wonders for your Middle Egyptian.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

This is literally why I couldn't play Highland Song, even though I love Heaven's Vault, hiking and Scotland, and I was really looking forward to the game. I could imagine too well what Moira was going through, with the cold and the physical pain, and for me there wasn't enough hope to offset it.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Later today I'll join @sebi.io's stream, and together we'll solve some Advent of Code in Kotlin :) Join the stream at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECTs...

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Picked up this 1846 Old English grammar at the study association book sale for just 1 EUR. Love old linguistics books!

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

See? Opening a book with a picture of your grammar is actually a thing!

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Me, linguist, taking a while to figure out that the academic skills teacher is talking about opening a presentation with "a picture of your grandma" and not "a picture of your grammar"

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Радуга на носу лучшая

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

I was in The Hague today, protesting against the cuts to the funding of higher education. The pessimist in me says that student protests are just cost of doing business for the right, and the consequences that we're trying to yell about are exactly the expected outcome. We'll see how it develops...

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

I got nerd-sniped into researching Lord's Prayer translations when a link to "Pantographia", an 1799 book, was posted to Hacker News. I've put far more time into it than I should have, but I'm just too intrigued by this bit of history. And I'm always excited to see new publications in the area.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Talking with linguists about graphics design is fun: "This logo is far too kiki, it needs more bouba"

Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Reposted by Dmitry Zhemerov

The formal publication of the new Kalašma tablet by Elisabeth Rieken, Ilya Yakubovich and Daniel Schwemer has apparently now appeared in the most recent issue of Archäologischer Anzieger (h/t Simon Poulsen via the Roots of Europe internal mailing list)

publications.dainst.org

Eine neue Sprache im Hethiterreich: Der Fund der Kalašma-Tafel (Bo 2023/12 = KBo 71.145) | Archäologischer Anzeiger

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

And this is also counter to my previous field: in tech, tribalism pretty much disappears with experience, as you learn that every tool is good for a specific purpose and ideological reasons are very rarely a good choice for preferring one technology to another.

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I assume some amount of tribalism comes into play later, as you go deep into a theory and don't talk as much to people who prefer other theories in the same field. (I'm aware, for example, that I'm going to learn the Leiden flavor of Indo-European reconstruction, and not everyone agrees with it.)

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

One thing I find very refreshing in linguistics, compared to my previous profession, is how little tribalism I see around me. Everyone has very different interests, but no one says that some language is only for dumb people to learn, or that using a language is a detriment to humanity.

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Thunder and lightning in late November right before the first class in Hieroglyphic Luwian. Clearly a blessing from the Storm-god!

Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

It's November, and it means that it's Novgorod birch-bark letter season. This year they found so many of them (~60, vs. the usual 5-10 per year) that the regular lecture announcing the discoveries was split in two parts. I'm now watching the first one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCJ...

youtube.com

Лекция академика РАН А. А. Гиппиуса «Берестяные грамоты из раскопок 2024 г.» (18 ноября)

YouTube video by ИнСлав

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Dmitry Zhemerov @yo-le.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

#introduction I study linguistics (focusing on historical linguistics) at Leiden University. In my previous life, I worked in tech; I spent most of my career at JetBrains, where I was directly involved in the creation of PyCharm and Kotlin, among other things. I blog at yole.blog

yole.blog

yole's journey in languages