MPhil student in Linguistics & Graduate Research Assistant (Language and Brain Lab)

Background

Jonathan Walls studied Russian (BA), French (BA), and Italian (BA) during his undergraduate studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. During his studies, he was senior staff at the University of Oklahoma's Language Learning Center specialising in digital media conversion. As a part of his studies, he spent an academic year in St. Petersburg, Russia, studying Russian language and culture at the St. Petersburg Politechnic University. Additionally, he spent an intensive summer course at the Université Grenoble Alpes studying French language.

Previous Research/Teaching

Before arriving at Oxford, his research focused on the Pamir languages found in Central Asia, a small subgroup of the Indo-Iranian language family. His undergraduate thesis for his Russian studies was a translation of Tatyana Pakhalina's foundational descriptive work on these languages from the original Russian into English. He was the lead language tutor for the University of Oklahoma and taught Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish in small group sessions for undergraduates. Independently, he has also taught Biblical Hebrew for adults on a volunteer basis for various organisations, and has recently produced an interlinear translation of the book of Exodus designed for liturgical reading in a synagogue, available for download at glottophilos.com.

Current Research Interests

Jonathan's current research interests are focused on the Anatolian and Celtic languages, with an emphasis on historical linguistics. His current coursework has focused on the development and features of the Hittite and Luwian languages in the Anatolian language family, and the development of Old Irish. His thesis work is directed at examining Hittite from the perspective of metrical phonology, with a view towards creating a unified account of stress placement in the language using a rule-based framework.

He was a recipient of the Anna Morpurgo Davies Master's Bursary from the UK Philological Society, and is the creator and maintainer of the LuwianType and HitType LaTeX packages for typing in Hieroglyphic Luwian and Hittite cuneiform, respectively. The LuwianType package is available at glottophilos.com/luwiantype.html or via the CTAN LaTeX repository at ctan.org/pkg/luwiantype, and the HitType package is available at glottophilos.com/hittype.html or on CTAN at ctan.org/pkg/hittype.

Current Work

Jonathan is currently employed as a graduate research assistant in the Language and Brain Lab in the Faculty of Linguistics (brainlab.web.ox.ac.uk). His work entails labeling Praat data for an examination of Bengali English and aspiration patterns, as well as helping to run EEG experimentation, among other duties.