Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics
von Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne
- monatlichErscheinungsrhythmus
- 49 mintypische Länge
- 16. Okt.letzte Folge
Folgenzu den neuesten
91: Scoping out the scope of scope
When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of
90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, w
89: Connecting with oral culture
For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest th
88: No such thing as the oldest language
It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even t
87: If I were an irrealis episode
Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains,
86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language
85: Ergativity delights us
When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since t
84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing!
Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you're pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few an
83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro
Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies
82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences
Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be simila
81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helpin
80: Word Magic
The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and
79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!
Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonatio
78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge
Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the peop
77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting
Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to cr
76: Where language names come from and why they change
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsid
75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions
Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic
74: Who questions the questions?
We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rheto
73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and un-overlapping locations. And
72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd
What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English speaker? In this episode, your hos
71: Various vocal fold vibes
Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if you stretch the flaps across the opening of your throat while pushing air up through, you
70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain scanning machines and then create ve
69: What we can, must, and should say about modals
Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be the case. What will happen (or would, i
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can rememb
67: What it means for a language to be official
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 languag
66: Word order, we love
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
65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
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 p
64: Making speech visible with spectrograms
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 exact
63: Where to get your English etymologies
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 trac
62: Cool things about scales and implicature
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
