About Me

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.