Gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilo nil posse reverti

From this famous quote by the Roman poet and satirist Persius was derived my username.

yu. high school student from the tropical island of Singapore.

would like to be intellectual some day.

Personal leanings

• Civil libertarian
  • Affirmative action opponent
  • Pro-choice on abortion
  • Gay rights advocate
• Minarchist, i.e. small-government advocate
• Social liberal
• Fiscal conservative
• Socialist (more British rather than French)
  • but against welfare states

Recommendations

• Black Adder

Fields of interest

Historical linguistics and languages

• Development of the Germanic languages from Proto-Indo-European
  • Grimm's law, Verner's law, High German consonant shift
  • English as a glorified creole
• Genealogy of Japanese
  • Relation of Japanese to Korean and the Altaic language family
  • Relation of Japanese to the Austronesian languages
• Old and Middle Chinese

Politics and political science

• Liberalism
• Democratic Party
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially Du Contrat Social

History

• European history
  • French Revolution
  • Russian history from the tsarist period to the 1917 Revolution
• Oriental history
  • Chinese history from the Han dynasty to the Three Kingdoms period and from the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty
  • Japanese history up till the Heian period and from the Edo period to the modern era
  • The Korean Three Kingdoms period and Unified Silla
• Modern world history, especially from the Enlightenment period to the end of World War II

To Do

1. Translations of high-quality Wikipedia articles in other languages to English where the English version is not up-to-mark
2. Spelling, punctuation and grammar: copyediting