Lingthusiasm - A Podcast That's Enthusiastic About Linguistics

The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in public places. Choosing between languages is both very personal but it’s not only personal -- it’s also a reflection of the way that the societies we live in constrain our choices. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language policy and how organizations and nation-states make language decisions that affect people’s everyday lives. We also talk about the excellent recent lingcomm book Memory Speaks by Julie Sedivy, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (currently ongoing!), and many ways of unpacking the classic quote about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy. Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/682191718408388608/transcript-episode-67-what-it-means-for-a Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode we’re gett

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” -- but that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is that for any given language, we all agree on which order means what. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages put words in a particular order. There are many possibilities, but a few of them show up a lot more than others: “I

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be” known as a copula. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about copulas! This is a special name for a way of grammatically linking two concepts together that’s linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes it’s a verb that’s super irregular (like be/is/was in English, Latin, and many other languages), sometimes it’s several verbs (like ser and estar in Iberian and Celtic languages), sometimes it’s a form of marking other words (like in Nahuatl, Auslan, and ASL), and sometimes it’s not even visible or audible at all (like zero copula in Arabic, African American English, and Russian). We also talk about some of the fun things you can do with copulas in English, such as the lexical g

If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it -- if you’re trying to figure out exactly what makes two s-like sounds different, it would be helpful if you could kinda sorta turn the language processing part of your brain off for a sec and just process them as sounds. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistic visualizations that let us examine sounds in more detail. One kind of visual is a wave form (which is found in many podcast apps!) and consists of longer lines for louder parts and shorter lines for quieter parts. Another kind of visual is a spectrogram, which shows a massive range of possible pitches and shades in which pitches have stuff going on during them at each time, sort of like a giant musical staff with thousands of potential notes. Spectrograms are especially popular in linguistics (th

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these hunches and painstakingly track them down through the historical record to find out which ones are true and which ones aren’t -- in this case, that paste and pasta have a common ancestor, but pesto comes from somewhere else. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about English etymology! We talk about where the etymological parts of dictionaries come from, the gaps in our knowledge based on the biases of historical sources, how you can become the Etymology Friend (with help from Etymonline), and which kinds of etymologies should immediately make you put your debunking hat on (spoiler: anything containing an acronym or formatted like an image meme. Just saying.). Now you too can have etymology x-ray vision! (Aka, where to quickly look up etymologies on your pho

We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can also do the same with other sets of words that don’t necessarily have an equivalent scientific scale, such as the relationship between “some", "a few" and “many“ or even words like "suppose”, “believe” and “know”. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the things that get implied when we use words that involve scales, aka scalar implicature. Why can we revise our description of a warm coffee by saying “actually, it’s hot” but not “actually, it’s cold”? What happens when your language breaks up the scale differently to another language (spoiler: everyone can still agree that a warm spring day is different to a scorching hot one in the height of summer). And how can implied scales be used for humorous purposes, as in the

If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything published in English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the use of a particular word (say, “the”) has been changing? In that case, you might want to turn to some of the text analysis tools of corpus linguistics -- the area of linguistics that makes and analyzes corpora, aka collections of texts. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about corpus linguistics with Dr Kat Gupta, a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton in London, UK. We talk about how Kat’s interests changed along their path in linguistics, what to think about when pulling together a bunch of texts to analyze, and two of Kat’s cool research projects -- one using a corpus of newspaper articles

Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue. “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.” Some of these are pretty straightforward. “Some”? Word. The -s on “prizes”? Affix. But some of them, “I’ll”, “hafta”, “Helen of Troy’s”, “isn’t”....hmmm. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a small bit of language that’s sort of a halfway point between a standalone word and a fully glommed-on affix: the clitic! We talk about why sentences like “That’s the kind of linguist I’m” feel so strange and how on the one hand clitics are a sign of increased efficiency in terms of saying more common words more quickly, but on the other hand they kind of add complication because there are some contexts where the full forms of the words would be fine an

Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind -- our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it's different from what we know ourselves. We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven't heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers. Announcements: This month’s bonus episode is about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we've been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant's perspective) in Semiosis

What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your teeth, your tongue, the roof of your mouth, or in your throat. This whole class of sounds that are produced using friction are known as fricatives! In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about fricatives! We take you on a tour from the front of your mouth to the back (sadly, you’ll have to imagine the tiny cartoon schoolbus for yourself), and tell some of our favourite fricative-related stories along the way, including how the printing press is responsible for Ye Olde Teashoppe signs, the Extremely Welsh clothing chain LL Bean, and Gretchen’s erstwhile student days playing IPA Scrabble. If you have fricative stories of your own to add, feel free to talk about them in the Lingthusiasm Discord, or tag us in them on social media @lingthusiasm and we might sh

When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, machine translation and other language tech tools don’t yet exist for most of them. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Jade Abbott and Bonaventure Dossou of Masakhane, a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur Natural Language Processing research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. We talk about how they started working on language tech, Bona’s machine translator in Fon, and alternative models of participatory research and collective co-authorship. Announcements: This month’s bonus episode is about the linguistics of Pokémon names! Which sounds cuter, a Pikachu or a Charmander? Which sounds like it would be more likely to win in a fight, a Squirtle or a Blastoise? Even if you're not familiar with these pocket monsters, or if you're

“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like “I don’t have a cat”, the type of negated sentence that’s true for some people and not others. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about negation! We talk about how languages make sentences negative, how negation fits into the social side of conversation, and two ways you can make things super extra negative: negative concord (aka “French toast negation”) and negative polarity items (aka “Mean Girls negation”). Plus, a few sneak peeks from the upcoming book Highly Irregular by Arika Okrent, which is coming out on July 1, 2021 and which we are delighted to recommend. Announcements: This month’s bonus episode is a recording of our live show! When someone else is telling a story, you might encourage them to keep talking or to elaborate on a particula

The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, technically known as rhotics, including English r, French r, Spanish r and rr, and more. We also talk about how the presence or absence of R is a feature that distinguishes certain accents: think Canadian vs Australian English, northern vs southern varieties of English in the UK and US, and northern vs southern varieties of Mandarin. Announcements: We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programm

If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re made by people, and those people bring their own interests and priorities to the process. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the process of figuring out the structure of a language and writing it down -- making a kind of book called a descriptive grammar. We also talk about differences in grammar-writing traditions in the history of India, Europe, and China, and how the structures of Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Chinese influenced the kinds of things that their early grammarians noticed about language. Announcements: We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently orga

When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although “stay lingthusiastic!” has the form of the imperative, it really has more the effect of a wish or a hope. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the range of things that imperatives do in various languages. We also get excited about why imperatives are often one of the first verb forms that children learn, how imperatives make up the general “vibe” (aka mood) of a verb, and imperatives in the fairy-tale retelling Ella Enchanted. Announcements: We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-

There’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that has only been invented from scratch a handful of times: in ancient Sumeria (where it may have spread to ancient Egypt or been invented separately there), in ancient China, and in ancient Mesoamerica. Far more often, the idea of writing spreads through contact between one culture and its neighbours, even though the shape of the written characters and what they stand for can vary a lot as it spreads. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about writing systems, and how the structure and history of a language contribute to the massively multigenerational project of devising a writing system (a project which is still ongoing). We also talk about some of our favourite origin-of-writing system stories, including the invention of the Cherokee syllabary and Korean hangul. Announcements We’re just about to hit 100 Lingthusiasm

“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t know very well or a bridge into getting to know someone better by figuring out which deeper conversational topics might be of mutual interest. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science behind small talk: how we pick topics for small talk conversation, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies for dodging awkward small talk questions while keeping the conversation flowing, such as when you’re having a not-great time but don’t want to talk about it, and that ubiquitous linguist question “so, how many languages do you know?” This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster! Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the process of making dictionaries, posing your patron quest

“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick” seem even less likely. What’s going on? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the underlying pattern behind how sounds fit together in various languages, what linguists call sonority. We can place sounds in a line -- or along the steps up a mountain -- according to how sonorous they are, and this lets us compare and contrast how languages put together their syllables. We also talk about the incredibly weird case of S. --- This month’s bonus episode is a behind the scenes look at the creation of Crash Course Linguistics! We’re joined by Jessi Grieser, the third member of our linguistics content team behind the scripts of Crash Course Linguistics. We talk about how we structured the syllabus of Crash Course Linguistics, how Gavagai came to be a

Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does things that are unfamiliar to readers in the destination language but would be familiar to readers in the original language. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. We talk about the new, updated translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (affectionately known as the "bro" translation), reading the Tale of Genji in multiple translations, translating conlangs in fiction, and mistranslation on the Scots Wikipedia. Announcements We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people

High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re growing up. For a particular group of students in the UK, they’re on the forefront of linguistic innovation using a variety known as Multicultural London English. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Shivonne Gates, a linguist who wrote her dissertation on Multicultural London English and is currently a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research, Britain’s largest independent social research agency. We talk about her research on accents in the UK, doing collaborative research with young people, and linguistics research jobs outside of academia. This month’s bonus episode is about pangrams! Pangrams are sentences that contain all of the letters of the alphabet, like the famous "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and the more obscure "Sphinx of black quartz, jud