hello substack
why i'm bad at blogging, preparations for a remote IOL and watching doctor who in isolation
hello! this is the first actual post i’m making on substack, which is a platform that i never really understood but looks and feels a lot nicer than most blogging platforms at least, and has the in-built feature of intruding on someone’s email inbox, which is quite exciting. there’s even the opportunity for monetisation, but that might be too much of a stretch for what is likely to be a rather disorganised and unfocused newsletter about aspects of my life.
this is not my first attempt at writing on the internet regularly. i had a tumblr account about language many years ago and would occasionally make my own posts, but that ended as i grew out of tumblr in around 2017. i have since had a couple of ambitious attempts at making a linguistics blog that would give me an “online presence” so i could do my part in making linguistics a thing that people know more about. but after only a few posts, i quickly realised that academic blogging was not for me — I spent a long time trying to synthesise things i had been reading about, but in the end it felt too much like the essays and papers i was supposed to be writing for university anyway.
i think a newsletter is more up my alley, at least in terms of my chances of sticking with it. for one thing, it feels more informal and more targeted, like i’m writing to the reader rather than just about a topic. also it has an in-built sort of structure: it’s an update on the things that have happened since the last newsletter — perfect! i love meaningless stats about my life and in my degree i’m constantly doing new things. i already spend so much of my time finding new ways to summarise the activities i’ve done in a certain timeframe that switching to a format where i publish those summaries is less of a leap than, say, writing a blog post that feels more like an extra piece of homework.
what kind of things can you expect from this newsletter then? i want to mostly focus on whatever linguistic projects i’m working on at the moment, so that will be assignments i’m doing for university, any papers i’m working on for publication, plus any interesting linguistic thing i’ve found. i’ll also probably share some more general things about what music i’ve listened to or what doctor who episodes i’ve seen, or just anything particularly interesting i’ve seen.
what i did: LOT summer school 2021
i’m currently in the middle of my 10-day isolation period after getting back from uni, where i just finished an intense 5-day summer school as part of my studies. the summer school was actually very interesting for the most part, even if it involved being on microsoft teams for 6 hours every day starting at 9am. the classes i took were called: Microvariation, The History of Linguistics in Four Myths and What can be learned from usage?.
Microvariation (Edoardo Cavirani, Cora Pots) looked at how intraspeaker variation is modeled by syntactic and phonological theories, and how correspondence analysis and hierarchical clustering can be used to see how variation is distributed across speakers of a language. for someone who didn’t know that much about modern syntax or Minimalism, this was a fantastic introduction to some of the major principles involved.
The History of Linguistics in Four Myths (Raf Van Rooy) was an introduction to linguistic historiography through four examples where modern linguistics can learn something from looking at how the concept developed over time: dialects, universal descriptive frameworks, William Jones as the ‘father of linguistics’ and the original/perfect language. i had a vague interest in linguistic historiography before, from my interest in phonological metatheory, so it was great to hear more about it.
What can be learned from usage? (Dagmar Divjak, Petar Milin) introduced usage-based linguistics and how to incorporate insights from our understanding of learning, both in a psychological and computational sense. i found this one very interesting in terms of how it related to the other two — the presentation of generative grammar seemed very disconnected from the position of modern generative grammarians (as i learnt in the microvariation course) and seemed to be almost a ‘mythical’ opponent for usage-based linguists to fight against. i also generally like the idea of usage-based linguistics, though i have to admit that psychology isn’t my favourite subject. the latter days of the course also required a decent amount of homework to be relevant, which i couldn’t do given the number of other courses i was working on (and the admin of trying to travel home).
to get the full 5 credits from the summer school, i have to write an assignment on one of these courses and pass. i’ll probably write mine on microvariation, since the other two would require a lot more work and are considerably further out of my wheelhouse. at the very least, i only need to pass in order to get the credits for the paper.
what i’m up to: IOL
beyond relaxing after an intense semester, my main priority right now is the upcoming International Linguistics Olympiad (or IOL), for which i am a member of the problem committee. given the current circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising to hear that the competition is being held remotely in each individual country, with independent invigilators ensuring its integrity.
i cannot say much more at this stage other than that preparations are underway, but in a future newsletter look out for more information about this year’s problems and the process of grading which i’m sure will still be exciting, even if the circumstances are unideal.
what i’m up to: doctor who
an ongoing activity that has been kicked into high gear in isolation is my continued mission to watch every doctor who episode, old and new.
so far in my 5 days of isolation, i’ve watched 7 serials / 12 episodes of the show:
Let’s Kill Hitler (river and rory are great, but it’s trying to be too many things, dad fell asleep)
The Rescue (dad stayed awake for this one, maybe the tipping point where hartnell stops being irritating and starts being funny)
Night Terrors (there’s an allegory for ocd/anxiety in here somewhere, but i can’t make it work)
The Romans (i now understand the ian/barbara shippers on instagram, actually a really funny script in places)
The God Complex (rita’s great, concept’s cool, like the cinematography a lot)
The Wedding of River Song (good quips and character beats but the story jumps the shark in terms of moffat-y timeywimeyness)
The Sontaran Experiment (very cool that they used South African English to show how accents might develop over time, but the plot is really threadbare)
with the end of The Wedding of River Song, i finished the 6th series of the modern revival of doctor who (or 32nd series in total), which was just as hit-and-miss as i remember. my favourite serial was either The Impossible Astronaut or The Doctor’s Wife.
in terms of progress, i started watching at three different points and have as such watched all of series 1, half of series 2, all of series 7-9 and rewatched all of series 27-32, as well as assorted episodes elsewhere. so that’s 74% of post-2005 who and 22% of pre-1989 who.
what i’m listening to
troye sivan finally dropped the full version of could cry just thinkin about you from his live version of IN A DREAM, so of course i’m obsessed.
and that’s about it for this newsletter — hopefully i’ll see you again another time (!)