Hello, my name is Chris Sundita. I graduated in 2015 with an M.A. in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Since leaving Cornell, I have been pursuing a career in search relevance in Silicon Valley. Currently, I am an Associate Product Manager and a Senior Search Evaluation Analyst at @WalmartLabs, a division of Walmart Global eCommerce.
Previously, I have held positions at Yahoo! as a Search Quality Analyst, a Linguistic Consultant at Appen, and a Data Analyst at Google. To view my LinkedIn Profile, please click here.
I was affiliated with the Cornell Phonetics Lab, the Cornell Language Documentation Lab, the Cornell Filipino Association, and the Southeast Asia Program.
EDUCATION
Prior to Cornell, I earned a B.A. with departmental honors in Linguistics from the University of Washington in Seattle in December 2011. My undergraduate honors thesis, under the supervision of Professor Edith Aldridge, was The Development of Tagalog -um-. I presented my thesis at UW's Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium on June 1, 2012.RESEARCH INTERESTS
My work at Cornell centered on reconstructing the verb morphology on Central Philippine Linguistics and the interaction of Kapampangan intonation and vowel height. In January 2015, I presented Problems in Reconstructing the Proto-Central Philippine Verb Paradigm at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Portland, Oregon.My main interests are in historical linguistics, phonology, and phonetics. I am also interested in morphology (especially verbal morphology) and sociolinguistics. I have a soft spot for minority and endangered languages and the political rights of their speakers so I am interested in field research, language documentation and preservation. I also have an interest in natural language processing.
As for the languages I focus on, I am mainly interested in the languages of the Philippines as well as neighboring Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, and Guam.
Other languages and language families of interest are Western Romance languages, Germanic languages, English (especially via a sociolinguistic & historical approach), Japanese, Okinawan, Korean, and Semitic.
I started learning Mandarin Chinese due to my interest in the Formosan languages of Taiwan. This has led me to becomings interested in the Sinitic languages and its proposed relationships to Austronesian languages and Tai-Kadai languages.
LANGUAGES SPOKEN AND STUDIED
- English: co-native
- Tagalog: co-native
- Spanish (Latin American): high proficiency
- French (European & Quebec): high proficiency
- Indonesian: three years of university study
- Mandarin Chinese: two years of university study
- Hebrew (Modern): two years of university study
- Icelandic: one year of university study
- Japanese: two years of study in high school
- Intermediate proficiency in Catalan (Central) and Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Basic proficiency in various Philippine languages (Bikol, Kapampangan, Cebuano, Ilokano, etc.)
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
I studied Java as an undergrad and am currently teaching myself Python.HOBBIES
In my spare time I like:- Learning languages. If this was not obvious from the previous section. :-) I am currently focusing on Mandarin Chinese though I am considering learning some Modern Persian at the moment.
- Photography. I have a Nikon DSLR camera and have been teaching myself ways of taking beautiful pictures. My banner at the top of this page was taken by me in 2013 at Mineral Lake in Mineral, Washington.
- Genealogy. I have been doing genealogy since I was a kid. I've gone as far back as finding ancestors who lived in the 16th century.
- Traveling. I don't do this as often as I would like. I love going to Quebec. In late June and early July I drove from Upstate New York to Northern California. I had the time of my life.
- Video Games. I don't play as much as I'd like, but I like a variety of video games.
