lingthusiasm

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 things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel a...

Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires! 

First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would you be? We've made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like "You're about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain you" into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality.  Gretchen and Lauren take the ...

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 though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don’t even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a...

Bonus 83: Themself, Basque ergativity cartoons, and bad swearing ideas - Deleted scenes from Kirby Conrod, Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, and Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director's commentary and deleted scenes.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space ...

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, we’ll cancel the picnic” - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they...

Bonus 82: Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction - Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and body functions, while historically in English we've also had more religious swears, like "God's blood" and "God's teeth". In fiction, authors can use invented swear words to get around censorship, like "frak" in Battlestar Gallactica and "frell" in Farscape, as well as to create a sense of a partic...

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 revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.

In...

Bonus 81: Linguistic Advice - Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more

Are there linguistics things in your life that you would like advice about? In honour of our 7th anniversary making Lingthusiasm, this is an episode answering your advice questions, from the serious to the silly.  We're not professional advice columnists but we are professional linguists, and many people have asked us variants of similar questions over the years.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about your linguistics questions! We give advice about how t...

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 there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the obj...

Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp

What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they're called linguistics institutes.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen's visit to the 2023 LSA institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst this summer. We talk about cool projects 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 animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can’t. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand,...

Bonus 79: Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork - Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins

Linguists often do research by interviewing people from a particular linguistic community. Sometimes these communities are nearby, sometimes very far away. Sometimes it's a community that the researcher is themselves a member of, sometimes this involves first building relationships with a community where the researcher is an outsider.

In this bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork with Dr. Martha Tsutsui Billins, an Adjunct Teaching Fello...

Episode 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 about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiast...

New Lingthusiasm Merch! "Etymology isn't destiny" and aesthetic IPA chart on lots of items

A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!

"Etymology isn't destiny" on shirts, magnets, notebooks, and more!

Words change their meanings over time, and when we remind ourselves that etymology isn't destiny, we can also remember we're free to grow and change over the course of our lives too.  We've talked about how the meanings of words are something that we're constantly creat...

Bonus 78: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala

All of the Lingthusiasm main episodes and bonus episodes have transcripts, which involves some interesting technical challenges, including writing words in lots of languages, choosing between writing examples in their conventional spelling versus according to their phonetic value, and translating pauses and intonation into punctuation and paragraph breaks.

In this behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes wi...

Episode 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 similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling ...

Bonus 77: LingthusiASMR - The Harvard Sentences

Sometimes linguistics example sentences are so charmingly bland that they could lull you to sleep, listed one after each other without any larger story for context. We thought, what if we took this effect literally?

We present: LingthusiASMR, a very special bonus episode, in which your hosts Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistics in a very relaxed manner by reading a classic set of linguistics example sentences. Known informally as the Harvard Sentences, the 1965 Revised...

Episode 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 helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne...

Bonus 76: Linguistic jobs beyond academia

Linguistics professors are some of the most visible career role models that you see if you're taking courses in linguistics (since they're teaching the courses), but most people who study linguistics go on to jobs outside academia. Eight years ago, Lauren was trying to figure out what some of those job options were and how people kept using their linguistics training in doing them.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a...

Episode 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 in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawn...

Bonus 75: 2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji

In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We wanted to get to know you better and try out some linguistic experiments with you, so we got formal ethics approval from La Trobe University in case we want to use any of these findings in a research paper later. Thank you to the over 1000 people who filled it out! We have ethics approval for 3 years, so if you missed it this time around, keep an eye out in the future!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get excited ...

Episode 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 intonation. When the pitch affects the  meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother  (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it  tone.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCu...

Bonus 74: Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists - Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod

In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. Since we last saw them in our episode on the grammar of singular they, Kirby is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, USA, where they are doing fun new research about neopronouns (like xe/xer) and reflexive pronouns (like themself) and have two new cats (pi...

Bonus 73: When books speculate on the future of English

Languages change over time. So when you write a book set a few hundred years in the future, some aspects of how people talk are going to be different, and authors can invent potential future versions of a language as a way of speculating about what might be different about future societies.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about four science fiction books/series we're read recently that project interesting future versions of English. In the Terra Igno...