How can I contact you privately?
Try email, I am not afraid of spam: amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il.
Can you write a Wikipedia article about me?
No. I’ll happily teach you everything I know about writing in Wikipedia and in other wikis that I know, but even then, I’ll recommend not writing about yourself. Wikipedia is not a website on which it’s good to write about yourself; that’s what blogs, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other sites of this kind are for. If you want more people to know about you, do things that will cause someone to write multiple newspaper articles, academic papers, or books about you, and sooner or later Wikipedia editors will notice.
Do you use LLMs to write? Those em dashes look suspicious.
I tried using it to do major copy editing for one post, and I hated it, and I rewrote it all myself afterward. I didn’t use it for any other posts. LLMs are not good for writing full text; at most, they are occasionally good for minor copy editing, and for reverse dictionary lookup, and even their output has to be checked thoroughly by a human. I type em dashes myself, and I try to use them correctly. They are not as hard to type as many people think they are.
I made a spelling mistake in a comment that I wrote. Can I fix it?
Of course! It’s no problem at all—write me a comment or an email and I shall fix it as soon as I can. Either state specifically what would you like to fix or tell me that you count me on me to be the editor.
You make a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes! And you call yourself a linguist?? Stop pretending like you know English well!
Some mistakes are intentional, some are not. You are welcome to contact me about it and I shall gladly fix the latter. But see the next question…
Why do you write ‘i’ with a small letter?
I used to do it because I thought that I deserve a capital letter no more than you do. Then I stopped.
What is “Ya Mama”?
Many, many years ago when I started a blog I had to give it a title. I called it “Aharoni, Ya Mama”, which didn’t mean much. The name “Ya Mama” randomly came from a Fatboy Slim song, which I had heard it a short time before I created the blog. Back then, Unicode encoding was not so common for websites, and I could select the encoding manually. Some people complained that they cannot read it—browsers were not as good at identifying the encoding. So I added “in Unicode” into the title. And then in 2017 I decided to grow up and removed the “Ya Mama” part from the title. Sorry if it makes me boring.
What are those things that you sometimes write in parentheses after links?
Both of these are outdated, but they appear in some old posts.
nonstandard : This means that the target site may not work well in some browsers due to its faulty support of Web standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It often happens because the site was programmed in a way that would make it work correctly in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is very popular, but employs non-standard technologies. These sites are partly or completely unusable to people who don’t use Microsoft Windows. I do my best to avoid using non-standard websites and linking to them, but sometimes there’s a reason to put a link to them here. (Technical note: If I do link to them, I mark those links as rel="nofollow", so they won’t get any credit when search engines rank websites in search results.)
Flash : It meant that it is essential to have a working installation of Flash to view the target site. I marked them because Flash player from Adobe is not Free Software. By the 2020s, Flash is no longer used, and those links are probably irrelevant anyway.
Aharoni in Unicode 