I am Paul's cousin, the son of Paul's father's next youngest brother. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I spent most of my life before college in Northern Virginia, where I distinguished myself as a student of Latin and I developed a taste for languages. I have traveled to France, Germany, Spain, and Thailand to study French, German, Spanish, Thai, Mon, and Sô (I only ever spoke so-so Sô). I have visited Wales twice to study Welsh, though I only did any serious studying on the second visit. Most of my language study has been independent: I had only had one semester each of French and German before I traveled to France and Germany. I like to study with a reference grammar, literature, a dictionary, and my thumb -- I hitchhike to practice speaking and listening. The first source of my interest in this project has been my preferred mode of language study.
The second source of my interest in developing Linguru was my experience getting a graduate degree in linguistics. I learned in Germany that I had been accepted with a fellowship to the linguistics department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. That's where I headed soon after arriving back in North America. After a couple years of classes, I needed a topic for a master's thesis, so I picked up some stories by Kate Roberts and counted her pronouns. I managed to turn my pronoun counting into a three-hundred-page thesis, Asseveration in Welsh. I studied how pronoun choice and the use of the formerly pronominal affirmative particles fe and mi are used in Welsh to indicate degrees of emphasis. Several papers, several years, and one doctoral dissertation after that I have emerged, newly Dr. Houghton, a semanticist and pragmaticist and sometime teacher of Welsh.
At the end of my long sojourn in Buffalo I no longer wanted to be in academia. Meanwhile, Paul was in Finland with his own studies and work. We had an extended conference over e-mail and, out of Paul's imagination, frustration, and knowledge of the open-source movement and my linguistic experiences and a prototype electronic Sanskrit dictionary, Linguru was born. Paul moved to Nashville. I moved to Nashville. (My wife, Paula, moved to Nashville.) At Linguru, I am the primary author of the web pages, write the linguistic portions of the software, draw pictures, and strategize with Paul. I write the bits that convert mynd into aeth and back again. I write the bits that try to figure out where you want to go when you click on a word. I maintain the search engine. I drew the flattering picture of myself and the less flattering picture of Paul.1 We have been laboring in penury. I hope you enjoy the product of our labors.
I have given papers on contradictory double-negation, the phonetics of tone in Thai, and a game-theoretical account of (in)definiteness.
If you are interested in my linguistic work, e-mail me and I'll send you a copy of whichever of the papers below interests you. The first is my masters thesis, the second, my dissertation, and the third, a paper I had published in Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes.
e-mail: David.Houghton@linguru.com
1 See the icon at the top of the users page.