Stamp-collecting

This is a partial (in more senses than one), and hopefully frequently changing, list of some of my recreational projects. Do contact me if there is anything you would like to hear more about -- especially if you think we might team up on something!

I do not actually collect stamps (though I did a little as a tiny child, an eternity ago). But Rutherford said that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, and the stuff here is all physics-adjacent (some of it scientific in nature).

1. Hindi purports to be a nearly fully phonetic language, yet the schwa sound -- which, to take an example, is the vowel sound between व् ("v") and न् ("n") in देवनागरी ("devanagari") -- in Hindi words is often, but not always, deleted in speech, such that देवनागरी becomes a three-syllable word in practice (देव, नाग, री), not a five-syllable one (दे, व, ना, ग, री). (Schwa deletion also occurs in many other Indo-Aryan languages like Kashmiri, Bengali and Assamese.) Though most native speakers instinctively delete their schwas correctly, the precise rules for doing so are only loosely known formally. Increasing the accuracy of the codified rules would significantly help speech synthesis software, not to mention learners of the language, and in my free time I am hoping to develop a model to do this.

2. Mutual Aid NYC (MANYC) is a network that has been set up during the COVID-19 pandemic to aid vulnerable people in New York and elsewhere in dealing with the pandemic, by fortifying community-wide movements, resources and groups that provide help and by simplifying people's access to them. Since some of the most vulnerable communities are those for whom English is not a language of comfort, MANYC has committed itself to providing its resources in many languages used in the NY region. I have been involved in translating the website to a Hindi version.

3. Sometimes for fun I translate children's stories to Kumaoni, my native tongue. You could buy one of these here.