Day 1, CoEDL Summer School. "That's like a crazy amount of exuberance."

Yesterday was the last day of Nanowrimo 2016.

For those uninitiated few, ‘Nanowrimo’ stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’, an (international) event where aspiring writers challenge themselves to complete the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Nanowrimo isn't a “competition” - you don’t “win anything”, no one “cares”. You just pursue quantity over quality like crazy in the hope of achieving some mythical fame and glory.

Nanowrimo has been the best preparation I could have ever had for thinking about writing a thesis. (Because you can’t write a good thesis without writing a bad one first.)

This November is only the second time I’ve missed Nanowrimo in 12 years, but already I can feel myself starting to favour quality over quantity again, the temptation to not write anything unless it’s “perfect”.

But they say if you fall off the horse on one side, get back on and fall off the other side. So I’m in Melbourne for the next nine days attending the CoEDL (Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language - I pronounce it like 'curdle') Summer School and the ALAA (Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) and ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) conferences; and for the next nine days I’m going to write one shitty blog post a day.

It’ll be a like a Dear Diary blog but so, so much worse.

Now, because I’ve just spent all this space writing about writing, the rest of my Day One Shitty Blog Post is going to be a highlight reel of dot points. (And because I’m lazy, all my other Shitty Blog Posts will probably be in dot points as well, fair warning)

So without further ado:

Day One: CoEDL Summer School, The Highlights:

• In a time when I was better and kinder to myself, I only enrolled in summer school units with minimal or no required reading. I was a genius. 
• “Humans like solving problems. If we do not have problems in our everyday life, we create problems.”
• I met a postgrad who is learning Welsh through the online course Say Something In Welsh. This is also how I learnt Welsh, and is how I met the friend with whom I’m staying in Melbourne. Welsh language learners are absolutely the loveliest bunch of people, and Welsh is a global language. Fight me.
• “In German, if you’re a dative object you know something’s going to happen to you, but not as bad as if you’re an accusative-object.”
• Neurotypology: is it possible to categorise languages according to the brain’s physical, actual, neural response to them?
• Some Australian languages have 4 contrasting coronals. That's a lot of contrasting coronals - "a crazy amount of exuberance." What's particularly unusual is that they tend to neutralise those contrasts in word-initial position, where most languages tend not to neutralise contrasts because of the prominence given to consonants in word-initial position. But coronals are weird, and the perceptual cues for their contrast are usually heard in the preceding vowel rather than the consonant itself - so in word-initial position where there is no preceding vowel, the hearer can't reliably hear the contrast. Hence the neutralisation.
• What's even weirder is that I understood that whole part of the lecture and I haven't studied phonetics or phonology in eight years. Full credit to my supervisor for providing me with a solid foundation in both.
• “You can buggerise around with affixes in a way you can’t buggerise around with roots.”
• They say the best part of schools and conferences is the networking opportunities. And I did take the opportunity to network with some wonderfully interesting people today. I also took the opportunity to network with my friend's dog. (I'm in Melbourne now, I can use hipster filters.)