Thiago V. S. Coelho

My name is Thiago V. S. Coelho, and I live in Brazil. I was born on 1999-04-19, so I’m currently 27.

This blog post is my personal page, which is kept up-to-date as information about me develops.

Facts about me:

• I have an X (formerly Twitter) profile, and a Facebook profile. You can send me anonymous mail here.
• I have gotten some opinion pieces published by the Mises Wire; I keep a list of them here.
• I am the creator and author of this blog. For a while, I had no personal page about myself besides the page I wrote about this blog.
• My blog includes a fan page for academic philosopher Agnes Callard, which she herself appreciated. My blog also includes a summary of her book Aspiration. Agnes at one point confirmed that I’m her biggest fan.
• Besides this blog, I have two other blogs, namely a blog of translations called Thiago’s Translations Blog, and a blog for sharing other interesting LLM-generated content, called Thiago’s ChatGPT Blog. Also, recently, a newsletter called Children and Rights.
• I have made translations of key works by Olavo de Carvalho and Severinus Boethius.
• I have been deeply involved with Internet memes. At this post, my various Facebook meme pages and groups, and blog posts on meme research, are listed. My main meme page, then called Aesthetic Intellectual Meme Stash (now called Scholarly Scholastic Memes), was correctly cited by KnowYourMeme as the origin of the English version of the “Divorce Leads Children to the Worst Places” meme template.
• I have made various contributions to Wikipedia, outlined in my user page at the site. I consider myself the main author of the articles Absence of good, Best of all possible worlds, Egregore, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and Propositional logic.
• I have a GitHub profile, with very few open-source contributions to my name. One of my projects was a browser game, Color Golf; another was The Dots–Brackets Converter, a webapp for converting logical formulas into and out of the Principia Mathematica dotted notation.
• I generally take thiagovscoelho as a username, which corresponds to my full name. It is my username in all the previously mentioned platforms, but also various other platforms, such as Discord.

Facts for English speakers about my name

First name origin. My first name, “Thiago”, is a variant of “Tiago” (see below about the spelling), which is the Portuguese version of the name of St James, from the Bible – specifically, St James the Great. This is not the James that authored the Book of James, nor the one who was the brother of Jesus – in the Bible, he is really not all that important, aside from how he was one of the two disciples who got the nickname “Boanerges” from Jesus. He is most likely called “the Great” because he was taller than the other James, called James the Less. But there is a tradition that he evangelized the Iberian peninsula, hence the popularity of his name among descendants of people from that area.

Both of the saints known as James were late antique Jews who, in their original languages, were named exactly the same as the great Jewish patriarch, Jacob. But the name distinction developed historically as the name spread from Hebrew to Greek and Latin and thence to many other languages, and it turns out to be helpful to easily distinguish between these biblical characters. In some contexts, I’d be fine with people calling me James if they find “Thiago” unwieldy, it would just be confusing on a public site where Thiago is my display name. Aside from how every Bible in Portuguese calls St James “Tiago”, there is also the interesting fact that James Potter, from the Harry Potter series, was accurately localized in Portuguese as Tiago Potter.

First name pronunciation and spelling. In the original Portuguese, I pronounce my first name [t͡ʃiˈa.ɡu], or [ˈt͡ʃja.ɡu] if I say it fast. (That is, tchee-AH-goo, or TCHAH-goo when said fast.)

The “tch” sound, oddly enough, is standard practice among (almost all) Portuguese speakers whenever a T comes before an I sound (which includes the letter E when it is not stressed). It has nothing to do with the H in the spelling: in fact, “Thiago” is pronounced exactly the same as “Tiago”, which is the original spelling. (Although “Tiago” is more common, and more sensibly spelled, that’s not the version my mom put on my birth certificate.) The H is really only “decorative”: it does not affect sound at all, and in particular, it does not produce a theta sound in Portuguese (since this sound is absent from the language, anyway), although historically, this spelling probably does come from someone incorrectly thinking that there was a theta in the Greek of St James’s name.

In different accents, it might sound more like [tʃiˈa.ɡo], [tiˈa.ɡu], [ˈtja.ɡu], [ti'a.ɡo], [ti'a.ɣu], [ti'a.ɣo], [ˈtja.ɣu], or [ˈtja.ɣo].

I really don’t mind it when English speakers pronounce it [θaɪˈæ.ɡo], as they tend to do when they’ve only seen it written down. It does puzzle me when they abbreviate it to “Thia” as a nickname – in Brazil, it is instead shortened to “Thi”, pronounced [t͡ʃi] (“tchee”).

Middle and last names. My middle names are abbreviated V. S., it does not mean “versus”.

My last name, Coelho, means “rabbit”. (If you were localizing my name to English, the closest rendering might actually be “Coney”.) I am not related to the famous author Paulo Coelho, as far as I know.