My name is Gordon Tisher; I live in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.
I am a software developer by trade and I enjoy studying languages and linguistics on the side.
I am married to an excellent woman by the name of Andrea, and we have two children.
I grew up in Liberia, and have lived in and traveled to a wide variety of places.
Computing
I have worked in the fields of computational linguistics / natural language processing, video games and general web development. My resume is here, and my GitHub profile is @chalcolith.
Some projects to highlight:
- I am a core member of the Pony programming language team; Pony is an open-source, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language.
- Kiuatan: a parser generator for Pony.
- IronMeta: a programming language and application for generating pattern matchers/transducers on arbitrary streams of objects. It is an implementation of Alessandro Warth’s OMeta system for C# on .NET.
- Neurocognitive Linguistics Lab: a program to experiment with Sydney Lamb’s neurocognitive linguistics model.
Also my Erdős number is 3 (Gordon Tisher -> Fred Popowich -> Maria Klawe -> Paul Erdős).
Linguistics
I have a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and Exegesis. I’m a fan of Sydney Lamb‘s relational network theory of neurocognitive linguistics.
I have implemented a network activation modeling program.
Languages
I like to study languages as a hobby. A list of those I’ve studied in the past is here (adjust the fluency levels downward for twenty years of marriage and parenthood :-)
I have studied Koine and Attic Greek, and try to keep up a minimum of practice in those. I have translated the Gospel of Mark into English.
I have a number of Esperanto blogs in my RSS reader, and try to at least keep up my passive fluency in that language.
Choral Singing
I sang in Trinity Western University’s Chamber Choir in school, and have sung in various community choirs since then.
I was for fifteen years a member of the Abendmusik Vesper Choir.
I now sing in the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra Chorus.