lingthusiasm

Bonus 67: Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is an iconic reference image which many linguists have pinned up somewhere to refer to. But its most familiar form is a not-especially-aesthetic technical diagram and we wondered, what if we made a more artistic version?  

In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic with Lucy Maddox, Lingthusiasm's resident artist, about redesigning the IPA! We talk about how Lucy got interested in linguistics, how she got into art, how we started...

Episode 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 can make them vibrate in the breeze  and produce all sorts of sounds -- sort of like the mucousy reed of a  giant meat clarinet. (You’re welcome.)

In this episode, your  hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get ...

What if the IPA looked like weird nerd art and you could put it in your pocket?

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is sometimes called the periodic table of linguistics -- an important technical diagram that's also visually interesting and which many linguists hang up on a wall, carry around inside a notebook, or simply know the exact keystrokes that'll get them to a page to type or listen to it. 

Like with the periodic table of the...

Bonus 66: Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

If you're looking to try to figure out how kids talk, you might start by asking them some questions, or showing them a picture and trying to get them to talk about it. The problem is, sometimes kids are shy or not accustomed to answering direct questions from strangers, so these methods can underestimate them. A linguist named Bill Labov had a different idea: what if he brought a live rabbit into a school, told the kids that the rabbit was nervous but would calm down if they talked to it, tur...

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 very controlled setups where exactly one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak.

In ...

Bonus 65: Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. But unlike parts of your mouth, hands, and face, which are easy to observe directly, observing the brain takes special equipment. One of these tools is an MRI machine, which is a giant magnet big enough for a person to fit inside. The trick is, your blood has iron in it, and iron is magnetic, and so a huge enough magnet can pick up on which areas of your body have a tiny bit more blood flowing to them at a given time. Th...

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, if only we should have known!) What we must and shall end up with. In other words, we use a part of language known as modals and modality!

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about modals! We talk about the ...

Bonus 64: There's like, so much to like about "like"

"Like" is a word that's super flexible and versatile (it can be a verb, a noun, a particle, and more), and each of these functions has its own patterns of use and history that we can trace back, sometimes surprisingly long ago. For example, the version that's equivalent to "I mean" (as in, "like, you'd need to see it to believe it") is found among speakers who were born in the UK and New Zealand as early as the mid-1800s, while the only version of "like" that seems to be new in recent de...

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 remember, it’s more likely to get called  etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.

In  this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get  enthusiastic about borrowing and loan...

Bonus 63: What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow

Swear words often have an emotionally charged meaning, but that can't be the only factor - after all, there are polite versions of some swear words, such as "excrement" instead of "shit", and words that are treated as swears in some languages but not others, such as "cholera" in Polish and Dutch but not English. It kind of seems like a swear word is a word you have a memory of getting in trouble for...which both explains why swear words might not feel "real" in a language you learned later in...

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 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 po...

Sweary liveshow in one hour!

This is your reminder that the Lingthusiasm liveshow about swearing will be starting in exactly one (1) hour from the timestamp of this post/email, thanks to the magic of scheduling posts at very specific times!

The show will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord, which is available for all patrons at the Ling-thusiast tier and above. If you haven't joined the Discord yet, 2022-04-09 19:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Bonus 62: Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

Word games are a fun way of thinking about the structure of language, from which letters tend to appear in combination with each other to how many different clues you can give towards the same word. Many people have been refining a new set of word game solving strategies recently thanks to a new game called Wordle. 

In this bonus episode, we're joined by Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer to get enthusiastic about word games and puzzles! Dr. Nicole Holliday was our very first interview...

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 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 o...

A Sweary Q&A Liveshow - April 9/10 on the Lingthusiasm Discord

We're doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2022! The liveshow is will be on the Lingthusiasm Patron Discord this April 9th/10th (depending on your timezone). 

We'll be returning to one of our fan-favourite topics and answering your questions about swearing, which you can ask in the AMA-questions channel on discord in advance, or bring along to the liveshow.  You can also share your...

Bonus 61: Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

When you hear about a research study, the questions can seem very authoritative and the results very tidy. But research is ultimately done by humans, and humans need to figure out ways of coming up with questions and methods for answering them.  

In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own research came from, figuring out spaces for new questions in the existing literature, and bridging gaps b...

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 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 c...

Bonus 60: Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

If you can copy-paste a string of letters and symbols from one text field to another, or if the message you wrote on your device displays correctly when you send it to a friend, you've benefited from the background work of the Unicode Consortium. If you've ever gone into the "insert symbol" menu in a document and poked around some of those strange and beautiful symbols, from hieroglyphs to arrows to emoji? Yup, that's Unicode too. 

In this episode, we get enthusiastic about how ele...

Sticker packs, final check in!

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Patreon during our late 2021 Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack special offer! We're now pleased to report that all the sticker packs should have arrived at their final destinations, even allowing for the vicissitudes of international mail (they were sent out in late November). 

If you're attached your stickers to a water bottle, laptop, notebook, or other object and would like to tell us about it or share photos of your increasingly lingthusiastic life...

Bonus 59: We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more

We interview other linguists here periodically, but sometimes you also want to know what your cohost has been up to lately! Or maybe just their answer to a few Highly Important (and Not At All Silly) Questions. 

In this bonus episode, we get enthusiastic about interviewing each other! We talk about our recent activities, such as Gretchen's tentative return to the world of physical conferences at the Unicode Conference, and upcoming projects, such as the academic book about gesture ...

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 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 episod...