Adam Baker

Welcome to my professional web site. I am a linguist living abroad. This site is about my professional interests, which are fairly broad, but all tied (one way or another) to language and linguistics. I am posting material here, partly to help me keep track of stuff, but mostly to make it available to other people. If you are interested in any of this, please feel free to send me an email.

After about ten years, now in 2023 I have updated the site (mostly behind-the-scenes). This has occasioned many reflections about how programming has changed in the last ten years.

And if this site seems a bit sad, please be assured that I have other interests as well, some of which I discuss on my personal blog.

Present

• Mortal Engine
  A morphological engine, which allows you to create morphological models of languages, so that you can test the model, use it for spellchecking, transduce between different writing systems, etc.
• Computational Study of the Bible
  Various projects about studying the Bible with computational methods.
• Studying Classical Languages
  I didn't get into this at all on purpose, but it's becoming something of a specialty of mine, apparently.

Free Software (Serious)

• Minimal (GitHub)
  A web-based tool for finding minimal pairs and analogous pairs. Not that this is the most difficult problem, but when you end up with a 1000-word list before you turn seriously to the phonology, a little computer help can be... helpful.
• Formant Chart (GitHub)
  Easily create vowel plots in scalable vector format (SVG)—suitable for data exploration and publishing alike. (9/19/2015: Added more features to help in data exploration.) This is a web app, which means you'll need a reasonably modern browser. The code is on GitHub as well.
• Typing Tutor
  This is a program that lets you create typing lessons for any language you can type in. Open-source (GPL), cross platform.
• Unicode Input Utility
  Probably anyone who has used non-Latin scripts probably as a few choice words about Character Map. Here is a free alternative for entering Unicode codepoints (by keyboard, hex value, or glyph name) and seeing what you entered. Open-source (GPL), cross platform.
• Task Manager
  Keep track of your to-do list with four Covey-style lists of items.
• XSLExpress
  XSLExpress is a tool for performing XSL transformations quickly, with a reasonably intuitive GUI. It is very helpful for performing transformations in batches.
• QuickMD5
  Drop files into this application to calculate the MD5 checksum—useful for comparing files.
• Replacement Workspace
  This is a tool for making series of replacements in a text file. Replacement “schemas” can be saved in XML format and loaded back for later use. Support for case sensitive, recursive, and regular expression replacements. Open-source (GPL), cross platform.
• Regular Expression Workspace
  A very simple utility to help you write regular expressions, either to match (portions) of strings or capture segments from them.
• ot-tableau LaTeX Package
  (Link is to the package zip file.) LaTeX macros for typesetting beautiful Optimality Theory tableaux, using easy-to-read source code. Read the docs for further information. Sorry it's 17 years late.
• Historical Phonology Workplace
  Although sound correspondences between languages are (in my opinion) the most compelling linguistic facts around, the way historical linguistics is actually written about makes it difficult to appreciate the empirical basis of a particular analysis. This is a workspace for doing historical linguistic analysis, which additionally documents every decision made by the analyst.
• Game-related software (serious in the sense of “develops mental ability” not “is tedious and stuffy”)
  • Sudoko
    Solve Sudoku puzzles, all at once or step-by-step. Save puzzles as SVG files. Support for international numerals.
  • Chess
    For creating SVG chess problems. There is support for different colors, and non-Christian piece icons.
• ElanCheck
  Edit annotation values from Elan files from an easy interface (great for language helpers).
• FreeTranslator
  Simple interface for putting free translations into FlexText (.flextext) files from Language Explorer.
• PalatoglossatronQt
  Boutique interest: analysis of ultrasound images of the tongue.

Free Software (Silly)

• ePub Workspace
  Create ePub-format books (readable on all ebook readers) pretty easily, including by copying and pasting from web pages.
• Hot Potato
  Play hot potato with as few as two people.
• Sudoko
  Solve Sudoku puzzles, all at once or step-by-step. Save puzzles as SVG files. Support for international numerals.
• Chess
  For creating SVG chess problems. There is support for different colors, and non-Christian piece icons.
• Secret Decoder
  Create a simple secret code for kids (a symmetric, monoalphabetic substitution cipher). This is just a JavaScript tool on the web page, not a download.

Past

• Wakhi Language Documentation. A twelve month fellowship for documenting and basic analysis of the Wakhi language (spread over 2012 and 2013, the gap allowing for the continuation of the work below). Funding provided by an NEH-NSF fellowship for documenting endangered languages.
  • Gloss
    A tool for interlinear annotation of texts.
  • ElanCheck
    Edit annotation values from Elan files from an easy interface (great for language helpers).
  • FreeTranslator
    Simple interface for putting free translations into FlexText (.flextext) files from Language Explorer.
  • XSLExpress
    XSLExpress is a tool for performing XSL transformations quickly, with a reasonably intuitive GUI. It is very helpful for performing transformations in batches.
• Ishkashimi Language Documentation & Development (March 2011–May 2013). Language documentation and basic language development for the Ishkashimi language. Funding provided by the Endangered Language Fund.
• A biomechanical tongue model for speech production based on MRI live speaker data (Summer 2011)
  A project to update my dissertation research by warping the tongue model to the anatomy of a living subject. I've released the 3D scans we made of my vocal tract into the public domain. This was a Summer 2011 project with Jim Scobbie at Queen Margaret University. Funding was provided by the British Academy.
• Kerning Arabic Script Fonts
  Learning to read languages written in the Arabic script is often difficult because of the amount of space between non-connectiong glyphs. Some people believe that this is a difficulty of the script itself, but in fact it's simply a result of font design that is not as careful as it could be. This is a project to kern Scheherezade, a font released under the Open Font License.
• A biomechanical model of the human tongue for understanding speech production and other lingual behaviors
  The abstract-length title says it all. APIL kindly hosts my dissertation web site, which includes everything: the dissertation itself, but also all of the data files you need to replicate my work, along with a lot of simulation files. (2023-09-08: Nothing makes you feel older than having to link to the Wayback Machine to share your dissertation website!)
  • Updated data files and software from my dissertation work.
• APIL Laboratory
  I worked in this lab for a number of years, doing research on ultrasound methodology and articulatory sound patterns.
• SSANOVA Analysis of Tongues and Formants
  You can do stats on curves?! This is a guide.

Contact Info

If you are interested in any of the work described above, I would be pleased to discuss it with you. I can be reached through the email address below, where following standard form “at” and “dot” must be replaced with the usual symbols.

adamb924 at gmail dot com