Blog posts

2026

Phonotactics in historical linguistics (Part II)

20 minute read

Published: March 23, 2026

A few years ago, I did the thing where you write the thing, and now I’m legally entitled to sow confusion by shouting “I’m a doctor!” during medical emergencies on planes¹. In a previous post (Part I), I wrote about the background and motivation behind the PhD project that kept me busy for so long. But I left it on a cliffhanger. The big question driving my PhD was whether I could build better family trees of languages (phylogenies) by combining traditional cognate data (sets of related words across languages) with a new kind of data extracted from phonotactics, the rules governing which sounds are allowed to appear together. At the end of the post, I promised a Part II discussing what I actually found. Four short years later, here it is. I appreciate your patience.

Of course I would never do this. But I have watched my share of YouTube videos on how to land a plane, just in case the need should ever arise. ↩

Rookies into rolled gold

26 minute read

Published: March 12, 2026

I actually love the footy. It’s weird to say, as a white Aussie dude, but that hasn’t always been the easiest thing to admit. I’ve spent a lot of time floating around the kinds of academic circles where you’re more likely to hear derisive references to “sportsball”. And look, I get it, there’s aspects of footy culture that aren’t always the most attractive. But sport generally has a lot going for it - it’s shaped my whole life. And Australian Rules football, I firmly believe, is one of the most majestic sports of all. It has this kind of beautifully holistic brutality about it. Other sports have individual aspects where they excel - bigger hits, more pure strength, or endurance. But I can think of few if any other sports that demand so much all-round, mentally and physically, of its combatants. The physicality, gut-busting running on a uniquely enormous field, all while executing extraordinarily difficult fine skills, it’s got it all. It’s even uniquely difficult to officiate, requiring an entire third team of elite athletes just to administer the game. I briefly flirted with AFL selection as a boundary umpire, running around in the (now defunct) NEAFL in the early 2010s. I’d regularly run over 20km in a game, and then spend the rest of the day lying in my dark bedroom with a migraine, and then I’d do it all over again the next weekend, because running around the SCG or Manuka Oval and just being a part of the whole thing was really fucking fun. A boundary umpire’s job is largely to run up and down and throw the ball back in play when it goes out of bounds. Even then, just doing a boundary throw-in at NEAFL (RIP) or AFL standard is a specialist skill, requiring specialist training, from a specialist boundary umpire coach, just to be able to do it. The whole thing is bizarre really, and I love it.