as the populistic epidemiology continues to worsen the situation here under brilliant leadership of our local PM (similar kind of idiot as bojo or trump), effectively, the whole new semester is going to be taught on all unis online and we expect another lock-down (they expect to lose the grip over the situation in two weeks; prague is already without any ICU for covid patients). moreover, my parents-in-law are in not an easy situation, both recover after surgery, nothing fatal, but still serious, so i am very much consumed by all this stuff. being deputy for study on our institute and myself a reader of 6 lectures and two seminars, i have to fully move to online teaching, which i only improvised in the half of the period during spring (we had 6 weeks of total lock-down). to prepare such stuff that it makes sense and can be attained by students who are cut off involuntarily due to health and technical issues is a big challenge.

so, my attention to talossan matters is weakened, i hardly read witt in the last week and hardly pick up any strength to participate. "fortunately", talossa is not a boiling pot right now, which fact sets me a bit at ease just to let you know.

hopefully, i have tons of books to read, films to see, perfect wife to survive the cabin fever, large garden and two funny cats (funny, but serious, yesterday, zaerti has brought us a weasel, and ate half of the poor sodder, which explained the mystery of strange shit found all over our lantifundiae and strange sounds too. she also brings snakes, time to time. aneru is more specialised in birds. lovable killers).

mouse over

as i did not know where else to put this, so it ended here. it is academic, i fact.

you may know, that czech language adopted a specific affix -(ov)á to mark feminine surnames: novák & nováková. it is not a possessive affix (that one would be -ova, which linguistic fact was used in translation of names of those unfortunate women in atwood's the handmaid's tale: offred - fredova), but modern feminists do see it as possessive. plus, when travelling abroad, especially into countries where they do not distinguish feminine and masculine surnames, people may have problems to validate they are a married couple. well, what should we do with my wife when we still carry our original surnames, cos in science too your surname is your trademark

anyway, there is a strong push to allow women not to affix their surnames. there is already a bill in parliament. czech being a flective language with rather complex inflection pattern (feminina have 4 inflection paradigms, masculina even 7), that would pose interesting situations in communication - we have semirigid word order, accusative and nominative are distinguished by affixes, we have feminine and masculine declination which lacks a reasonable paradigm for feminina ending in consonant. imagine a model sentence: hrála medřický. medřický is originaly masculine surname, which was motioned to medřická, but according to the law it would not. as it thus resist any inflection, the sentence has at least three different meanings, which may be difficult to comprehend even in a context.

funny, thing. the same happens to our diacritics. i lived for two years in germany and they ignored my Š any time all the time. interestingly, my surname is originally german (hawlisch < gaulisch). but should we drop the diacritics in our names, because it is ignored anyway? where authoring a scientific paper, they often recommend us to send the diacritics into oblivion, as it statistically decreases the chance of being cited by someone who would get spooked "how do i write it?" - there is a real research on that, strange letters are responsible for one third of the variability in citations.

under strong influence of english, quite some changes similar to those above pop up in flective languages, i.e. intro of analytical grammar. i am no language purist, but i expect these changes to come through the use, not through the law. i understand that names are exclusive language stuff, but even so, if you allow such change, solution how to handle it should be included too, imho.