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
31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
When a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, it’s crucial to get the kids engaged with the language again. But kids don’t always appreciate the interests of their elders, especiall
30: Why do we gesture when we talk?
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
29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
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” soun
28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages
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 fo
27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms
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
26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization
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
25: Every word is a real word
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 do
24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
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
23: When nothing means something
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 fo
22: This, that and the other thing - Determiners
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
