Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Latest Episodes:

30: Why do we gesture when we talk? Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

This episode is also available as a special video episode so you can see the gestures! Go to youtube.com/lingthusiasm or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8dHtr7uLHs to watch it! When you describe to someone a ball bouncing down a hill, one of the easiest ways to make it really clear just how much the ball bounced would be to gesture the way that it made its way downwards. You might even do the gesture even if you’re talking to the other person on the telephone and they can’t see you. No matter what language you speak, you’re likely to gesture, but that doesn’t mean we all gesture the same. In Lingthusiasm’s very first video episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about gesture in a format where you can actually see what gestures we’re talking about! In particular, we talk about the kinds of gestures that we make at the same time as our words, even when no one can see us (Ever gesture on the phone? You’re not alone!) These gestures, called co-speech gestures, let us reinforce the rhythm of what we’re saying and indicate where or how something is moving. We also talk about how kids learn to gesture as they’re learning to speak, and how gestures differ in different languages. Massive thank you to our patrons for making this special video episode possible! Producing video is not a trivial task for a production team that’s used to audio-only, and your support on Patreon directly enabled us to film, edit, and caption this video, so everyone gets to learn about gesture linguistics without the frustration of not actually seeing what gestures we’re talking about! You’re stellar human beings and we appreciate you greatly. If you’d like to help Lingthusiasm keep producing regular ad-free episodes and cool additional features like this gesture video, become one of our patrons on Patreon. Plus, if you pledge $5 or more per month, you also get access to a monthly bonus episode and our entire archive of 25 bonus episodes right now. That’s so much Lingthusiasm you don’t wanna miss out on! The latest Patreon bonus episode asks, do you adjust the way you talk depending on who you’re talking to? There’s a word for that: linguistic accommodation. In Bonus 25, Gretchen talks with our producer Claire Gawne (yes, she’s Lauren’s sister) about how they’ve shifted their accents between Melbourne, Montreal, and Edinburgh. Plus, some behind-the-scenes on how Lingthusiasm gets made. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to listen to it! patreon.com/lingthusiasm For more information and all the links mentioned in this episode, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/183615937296/lingthusiasm-episode-30-why-do-we-gesture-when-we

29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on Feb 22, 2019

Show notes

Some sentences have a lot of words all relating to each other, while other sentences only have a few. The verb is the thing that makes the biggest difference: it’s what makes “I gave you the book” sound fine but “I rained you the book” sound weird. Or on the flip side, “it’s raining” is a perfectly reasonable description of a general raining event, but “it’s giving” doesn’t work so well as some sort of general giving event. How can we look for patterns in the ways that verbs influence the rest of the sentence? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a new metaphor for how verbs relate to the other words in a sentence -- a verb is like a coat rack and the nouns that it supports are like the coats that hang on it. Admittedly, it creates some slightly odd-looking coat racks that you might not actually want in your home, but as a metaphor it works quite well. (We’ll stick to linguistics rather than becoming furniture designers.) We also take you through a brief tour of other metaphors for verbs and sentences, including going across (aka transitivity) and molecular bonds (aka valency). This month’s bonus episode is a recording from our liveshow in Melbourne, Australia, where we talk about how the internet is making English better with real audience laughter occasionally in the background! Feel like you’re in a cosy room of friendly linguistics enthusiasts by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 23 previous bonus episodes. lingthusiasm.com/patreon Internet language is also the topic of Gretchen’s book, Because Internet, which is now officially available for preorder! You can show the publisher that people are interested in fun linguistics books and have a delightful treat waiting for you on July 23, 2019 by preordering it here! gretchenmcculloch.com/book For links to more topics mentioned in this episode, check out the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/182969748701/lingthusiasm-episode-29-the-verb-is-the-coat-rack

28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages Jan 18, 2019

Show notes

The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a long time, especially in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers, so it’s a really interesting place to learn more about why and how languages influence each other. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Hannah Gibson, a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, about her work on how word order differences between Rangi and Swahili, both Bantu languages, are related to the different languages that they’ve been in contact with. They also get enthusiastic about Bantu languages in general and especially how the famous Bantu noun class system works. (Swahili, for example, has 16 different noun classes. including humans, natural things that aren’t human, abstract nouns, places, and words that begin with ki-.) This month’s bonus episode was about naming people, a topic which has been on Lauren’s mind a lot recently! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and over 20 previous bonus episodes. patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/182098995651/lingthusiasm-episode-28-how-languages-influence

27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms Dec 20, 2018

Show notes

There are certain things that human societies, and therefore languages, have in common. We have the same basic inventory of body parts, which affect both the kinds of movements we can make to produce words and the names we have for our meat-selves. We’re all living on a watery ball of rock and fire, orbiting a large ball of gas. And we all arrived on this planet by means of other humans, and form societies to help each other stick around. Sometimes, we even bring into existence further tiny humans. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the special vocabulary that exists across languages for people you’re related to. Kinship terms are a fascinating area of commonality and variation: on the one hand, all languages seem to have ways of distinguishing family (both chosen and biological) from non-family. But on the other hand, there’s a wide degree of variation in the exact relationships that languages have words for, and this provides an interesting window into which relationships a culture thinks of as important. Languages can split up or lump together kinship relationships by age, generation, gender, clan, marriage, linguistic history, honorific extension, personal choice, and more. We also get into why words like “mama” and “papa” are so similar across languages, the surprisingly recent history of the word “sibling,” and the current rise in offshoots like “nibling” and “pibling.” This month’s bonus episode was a Q&A session from when Gretchen was in Melbourne with Lauren, and it’s available in both the normal audio form and a surprise video version! (We were testing out the camera situation ahead of the upcoming gesture video episode.) Find out about how ears work, fun linguistic games, whether some languages change faster than others, the Australianisms that Gretchen has recently learned, and a behind-the-scenes look into how the liveshows went and future Lingthusiasm plans. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 21 previous bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/181276164046/lingthusiasm-episode-27-words-for-family

26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization Nov 16, 2018

Show notes

A letter stands for a sound. Or at least, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s C or G, which each stand for two different sounds in a whole bunch of languages. C can be soft, as in circus or acacia, or hard, as in the other C in circus or acacia. G can be hard, as in gif, or soft, as in gif. Why can C and G be hard or soft? And why don’t other letters come in hard and soft versions? In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the group of sounds that are pronounced with the back part of the roof of your mouth, aka the palate. When one sound in a word is produced at the palate, it tends to pull neighbouring sounds towards the palate as well, and this palatal attraction explains so many weird mismatches of sound and spelling. Why can C and G be hard and soft? Why do T and D sometimes get different pronunciations as well, as in nation and didja? Why are Irish and Scottish Gaelic names spelled that way? Why is it so hard to spell the clipped forms of “usual” and “casual”? How are cheese and cacio e pepe and queso and Käse all related? This month’s bonus episode was about how to have fun at (or just survive) academic conferences. Whether you’re new to academic conferences, or have never been to one and want to know how they’re different from other large gatherings like conventions, this episode has all the info! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 20 previous bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm This is also our anniversary episode! Whether you’ve been with us for the whole two years or you’ve joined us more recently, we’re glad you’re here. Thank you to everyone who has helped bring the show to more language fans in honour of our anniversary. There’s still a bit of time to get your name on the special thank you post and help more people get a fun language thing in their ears by recommending Lingthusiasm on social media before the end of the month. For links to everything mentioned in this episode visit https://lingthusiasm.com/post/180153994181/lingthusiasm-episode-26-why-do-c-and-g-come-in

25: Every word is a real word Oct 18, 2018

Show notes

squishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast. All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s not! That would be absurd. So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words? In this episode of the funnest* podcast about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take you on a tour through what’s really going on when people say that a word isn’t a word. (*Funnest is definitely a real word, and so are all the others.) We’re heading into our second anniversary! That’s two whole years of linguistics enthusiasm delivered right to your ears every month (twice a month for patrons). To celebrate, we want to share the show with more people! Most people find podcasts through word of mouth, and there are people out there who would be totally into a lively deep-dive into how language works, they just don’t know it exists yet. They need you to save them from their dreary, un-lingthusiastic lives! At our anniversary last year, we thanked over 100 people for their recs, and this year we want to thank even more! Here’s what to do: post about why you like Lingthusiasm on social media (or link to your rec elsewhere, such as a blog or podcast), make sure to tag us in your rec so we can find it, and your name will live on in perpetuity on our special second anniversary thank you post! This month’s bonus episode was about bringing up bilingual babies! We get enthusiastic about various ways to raise children who speak more than one language when you’re stuck in a mostly-monolingual society: the one-parent, one language method, immersion schools, and speaking different languages at home and in the public sphere. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 19 previous bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm In November, we’re doing two liveshows! We’ll be in Sydney at GiantDwarf on Monday the 12th of November, and State Library of Victoria in Melbourne on Friday the 16th of November. Both events will be Auslan interpreted. For more details and how to book tickets check out our liveshow page: http://www.lingthusiasm.com/show We also have new merch! Alongside the Space Babies, new children’s clothing and new colours for the IPA scarves, we also have IPA ties! Check out our Merch page for more details: http://lingthusiasm.com/merch For links to things mentioned in the episode and more details about all of the above, head to the shownotes page: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/179193327461/lingthusiasm-episode-25-every-word-is-a-real-word

24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz Sep 20, 2018

Show notes

As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world’s languages, this is not the case. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Hilaria Cruz, a linguist and native speaker of Chatino, an Indigenous language of Mexico which is spoken by over 40,000 people. Hilaria combines her work as an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Kentucky with creating resources for her fellow speakers of Chatino, everything from paperback or cloth children’s books to high-tech speech recognition tools which will make it easier to create more resources like this in the future. And she’s also making these resources available for other underrepresented languages! -- There were two big announcements at the top of the episode: The first is that we have a date for our liveshow in Melbourne! We will be at the State Library of Victoria on Friday the 16th of November. We are also thrilled to announce we’ll be doing a liveshow in Sydney! We’ll be at GiantDwarf on Monday the 12th of November. For tickets to both, check out lingthusiasm.com/show We also have new merch! Thanks to Lucy Maddox for bringing Space Babies to life! Check out the art in this post. A portion of the proceeds from the Space Baby merch will be donated to the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity. We also have new scarf colours, and t-shirts that say “I want to be the English schwa. It’s never stressed.” Check out our Merch page for more details. lingthusiasm.com/merch The bonus episode this month was about hyperforeignisms! We take an international tour through how our minds deal with the interesting edge cases of words that are kinda-English and kinda-other-languages. Listen to it and 18 previous bonus episodes, and support the show at patreon.com/lingthusiasm To see the links mentioned in this episode, including the photos of the Chatino children's books, check out the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/178291633331/lingthusiasm-episode-24-making-books-and-tools

23: When nothing means something Aug 16, 2018

Show notes

When we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’t often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisingly often throughout our linguistic system, from the micro level of an individual sound or bit of meaning to the macro level of sentences and conversations. In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about four different kinds of linguistic nothings: silence in between turns, silence in between sounds, invisible units of meaning, and invisible words. (Officially known as turntaking, glottal stops, zero morphemes, and traces.) We also announced some details about our upcoming liveshow! Our last liveshow was in Montreal where Gretchen lives, so it’s only fair that our next official show is in Lauren’s hometown of Melbourne! It’ll be sometime in November. Stay tuned for the exact date and venue - you can sign up for Lingthusiasm email updates if you want to be sent it directly: bit.ly/LingthusiasmEmailList Gretchen will also be around for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Summer School in Canberra and the annual Australian Linguistics Society conference in Adelaide. If anyone else in Australia wants to invite her to anything in November or early December 2018, now’s your chance! This month’s bonus episode was an inside view into the linguistics conference circuit which Lauren and Gretchen are recently returned from, featuring emoji, gesture, and the International Congress of Linguists! Support the show on Patreon to get access to this and all 18 bonus episodes. patreon.com/lingthusiasm For the full shownotes with links to everything mentioned in this episode, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/177070997956/lingthusiasm-episode-23-when-nothing-means

22: This, that and the other thing - Determiners Jul 19, 2018

Show notes

When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”? If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings us to a circular question, which is, what exactly is an article, other than “that thing that ‘the’ is”? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a bigger-picture answer to the question of how “the” works, one that joins together a bunch of words that might not seem related at first glance, including the, that, each, my, and five. Welcome to one of our favourite word classes: the determiner! Determiners are probably the most underrated word class. We use them all the time, and linguists have been talking about them by this name as a unified category for nearly a full century, and yet they’re still rarely discussed outside linguistics. That’s a shame, because determiners are also a really interesting way that languages differ from each other. To see this episode's shownotes, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/176067102571/lingthusiasm-episode-22-this-that-and-the-other

21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles Jun 22, 2018

Show notes

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and these two names: “bouba” and “kiki”. If you had to assign one name to each shape, which would you pick? (Here’s a pause to let you think about it.) If you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round shape was bouba, you’re like 90% of English speakers who answer this question. But does this work the same way for speakers of other languages? What about languages that don’t have a /b/ or a /k/ sound, or that have other features, like tone? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your host Lauren Gawne talks with guest linguist Dr Suzy Styles about how language interacts with your other senses like vision and touch, and doing research across different cultures and languages. Suzy is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and runs the BLIP (Brain Language Intersensory Processing) lab. This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about forensic linguistics. Gretchen and Lauren discuss the reasons why you might see a linguist in a courtroom, and whether Gretchen could write a note and convince people it was from Lauren. The least crime-filled crime podcast episode you’ll ever listen to! Listen and support the show at patreon.com/lingthusiasm We also announced two new Patreon funding goals, the first ($2,000) is to film our first video episode, taking a look at gesture. The second ($2,500) is to film at least one video interview discussing signed languages with a deaf linguist. We’re excited by the possibility of making these video episodes about linguistic topics that are a bit hard to convey in audio-only form! To see images of the bouba/kiki test and more links related to this episode, go to the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/175127239183/21-what-words-sound-spiky-across-languages

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