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Linguistics After Dark
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Linguistics After Dark is a podcast where three linguists (and sometimes other people) answer your burning questions about language, linguistics, and whatever else you need advice about. We have three rules: any question is fair game, there's no research allowed, and if we can't answer, we have to drink.
It's a little like CarTalk for language: call us if your language is making a funny noise, and we'll get to the bottom of it, with a lot of rowdy discussion and nerdy jokes along the way. At the beginning of the show, we introduce a new linguistics term, and there's even a puzzler at the end!
10episodes
Episodes
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Episode 20: The Ghost of Language Past
Jan 1801:31:52Tap to summarizeWherein we play language games.Jump right to:12:47 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Language games37:07 Question 1: Could y’all talk about how your understanding of how to pronounce the word can affect what you think the spelling, etymology, or meaning is? Examples that comes to mind is “su-burban” vs “sub-urban,” “a napron” vs “an apron,” “a stigmatism” vs “an astigmatism,” “acomma” vs “a comma,” etc. though I think some of those examples are actually different phenomena from each other. I think one is juncture loss? Or rebracketing?58:28 Question 2: If you had a chance to influence the evolution of language, what feature/words would you add a) because you like them and b) to troll people?1:21:43 The puzzler: How can a cube be cut so that the cross-section is a hexagon?Covered in this episode:Latin: the Ghost of Spanish PastThe Ides of MarchNot philosophers discussing cavemen building wallsPig Latin and Ubbi dubbi vs cant, argot, Polari, Cockney rhyming slang…Argobus, argopodesLanguage cannot be containedVerlanJuncture loss, rebracketing, and reanalysis in generalRocketcoptersEli shares a hot take about French he heard years ago (from an actual linguist)LOLcat, dogespeak, and uwuspeakȝEvidentialityClusivityIdentity attestation in first- and second-person pronounsTitles aren’t pronouns but they’re sort of next doorDoctorates should not be relevant to playing frisbeeLinks and other post-show thoughts:WaniKaniYes, being in Italy during Easter during the Jubilee was wild; being in the Vatican while the Pope laid in state was even wilder. (No, Sarah and her students did not get to see him, because they did not have 3+ hours to stand in line.)“Ghosts speak Latin” was supposedly a common belief in Elizabethan England, although Jenny couldn’t actually find a source more direct/reliable than footnotes in various copies of Hamlet (I.i.49) so better citation possibly needed?Ubbi dubbi, Polari, Tutnese, and Verlan. We couldn’t find an actual concrete origin of the name “Pig Latin,” though it does seem to have been called “Hog Latin” and to have begun as a version of “Dog Latin” (which seems to have referred to parody Latin in general).The Pig Latin puzzler was episode 8!Sarah and Eli say that the N in ‘a whole nother’ is always there. This is false: around twenty minutes earlier, Sarah herself said “a whole other,” which in retrospect she can confirm is absolutely influenced by Al’s point that knowing how the spelling works can change your pronunciation.Several examples of Verlan from one of the channels Sarah likes.“Helicopter” came up in episode 14.“Electric” does derive from Greek “ēlektron,” but not directly! It was borrowed into Latin as “electrum,” and then “electricus” in the 1600s by physicist William Gilbert. “Electric” and “electricity” were both first used in English in the 1640s by Sir Thomas Browne, who seems to have coined the latter. “Electrick” is a known early alternate spelling, so that definitely always would have been pronounced with a [k], but we couldn’t find evidence in either direction for whether “electricity” has always had an [s]. Also, Jenny has had the Schoolhouse Rock song stuck in her head for three days.The conlang Eli was thinking of is the Aramteskan language from P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent series, and was developed by Lauren Gawne, of Lingthusiasm fame!Dual, trial, paucal (not “trual,” whoops!)The NativLang video that discusses Chinese timekeeping words.Ask us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, question wrangling and show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 19: Voiced Glottal Stop 2k25
Dec 601:11:01Tap to summarizeWherein we are pro-winter until approximately February 15.Jump right to:4:38 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Allophones26:50 Question 1: Why do we say “And you will be… (this person)?” when confirming identity? Why is it future tense? This cannot possibly be English. This cannot exist. Am I just wrong or is this one of those weird linguistic things?34:59 Question 2: If you had to remove one sound from the human phonemic inventory, which one would it be and why?42:05 Question 3: So, English’s pronoun “they” can vary in meaning quite a lot, for example in phrases like: “well [you know] what they say….” In this case, the meaning of ‘they’ is kind of like ‘the general public.’ An extra pronoun in the language for this could be slightly useful, as confusion could occur between ‘they’ meaning ‘that one specific group of people’ [versus] ‘the general public.’ My question is; whether languages exist where something like this extra pronoun actually exists.1:02:36 The puzzler: A couple claimed it was the anniversary of their wedding in order to receive a discount at a restaurant. The woman said, “Our wedding was on a beautiful Sunday morning, with birds chirping and flowers all in bloom, twenty-eight years ago today.” The waiter responded that the wedding sounded lovely, but they did not qualify for the discount. How did he know they were lying?Covered in this episode:[d] vs. [t] vs. [ɾ], bases, paces, pesos, and besosEnglish “R” is really weird and none of us know why we do itAllophones in complementary distribution are like Batman and Bruce WayneEli is not the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme CourtSarah plans a very strange dinner partyThe future (tense) of English is vast and unknowable (and collapsing with the subjunctive even where it didn’t used to)One of those weird linguistic things turns out to actually be three of those weird linguistic thingsSarah and Eli briefly forget [ɦ] is a sound that existsBabies deserve to keep labiodental tap [ⱱ] but bilabial trill [ʙ] could goWe have not turned a shitpost into something useful“Chat” is not a fourth-person pronounOfficial LxAD stance: The correct thing to do upon seeing a pile of snow is “jump in it”Specific versus generic third-person plural pronounsClusivitySingular, dual, paucal, and pluralEli’s keyboard could have prevented him from guessing last time’s puzzlerLinks and other post-show thoughts:Congrats to Don Bravo in Marshfield who now have a year-round liquor license actually!We promised to include an allophones worksheet in the show notes, so here’s two from a Ling 101 class at UNC Chapel Hill!Voiced ⟨h⟩ is [ɦ], the voiced glottal fricativeThe IPA chart: note that here, as is sometimes the case, the “light gray” and “dark gray” boxes Sarah and Eli refer to are instead blank/empty & gray, respectively.The sounds Eli suggested collapsing into one are [x] (voiceless velar fricative), [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative), and [ħ] (voiceless pharyngeal fricative). Alternately, we could remove the pharyngeals entirely.Periodic Lingthusiasm shout-out!See more at linguisticsafterdark.comAsk us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 18: Can't Say "Teeth" Without Teeth
Aug 401:24:03Tap to summarizeWherein we are not professionals.Jump right to:4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale21:38 Question 1: Why do we use 'on' to refer to spiders being 'on' ceilings? To me the spiders aren't on top of the ceiling, they're under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to 'on' in English, so I'd like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition.38:20 Question 2: Morphologically and grammatically Japanese and te reo Māori behave very similarly: tons of particles all over the place, compounding as a major word source, not many affixes, little to no inflection, reduplication to convey emphasis, and very restrictive phonotactics. I see a pattern: Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai disallow large consonant clusters and are highly analytic. On the other end of the spectrum there are Georgian (agglutinative hell), and (fusional) Czech, which both have unpronounceable consonant clusters. Is this correlation real or am I imagining things? [If it's real,] what is the reason for this convergent evolution?56:05 Question 3: Would someone wanting to be a linguist need a degree? Or is a degree just a sort of certification? I’ve always wondered this because I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics but I didn’t pursue it in university, instead opting for Translation (which I guess could use linguistics but you know what I mean). Would you guys, actual linguists, consider someone who studies the subject by themselves and engages in conversations of linguistics to be a linguist?1:13:09 Last episode’s puzzler’s answer1:19:09 The puzzler: Complete the sequence. C, F, T, ?, Y, H, N, J, I, ?Covered in this episode:TeethMyriads, millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, and trilliardsDon’t be CanadaIndefinite hyperbolic numerals, like “ten thousand,” “seventy,” “seventy times seven,” “a billion,” “a bajillion,” or “hrair”Hanging on to the roof of a busHorses do not have wallsAre French speakers dans or en a mechsuit? We want to knowThings Sarah gets wrong on DuolingoFrom a spider’s perspective, the enemy’s gate is upDoes anyone do things by purpose?The time on a clock is a place, a month or a year is a container, and a day is a surfaceWhy do English speakers do “strength” to ourselvesThe “s” on a present-tense English verb is spicy and weirdJapanese says you can have little a consonant, as a treatThere are more than seven languages in the worldSyllabic consonantsBeing a linguist is not a real-world careerL’Academie Francais are disqualified from linguistics foreverEli proposes a screenplayIt’s teeth that are the problemLinks and other post-show thoughts:We accidentally skipped drinks chat, but Eli had water and Sarah had a weird but tasty raspberry-lemonade wine cooler thingThe secret dozenal system in English and the long hundredShort scale vs long scale, h/t Bex“Thousand” isn’t actually that weird; it’s just a Germanic word, instead of being derived from Latin. Here’s a map of words for “thousand” in European languages color-coded by etymologyPer Etymonline: “billiards” the game played on as rectangular table with ivory balls and wooden sticks, 1590s, from French billiard, originally the word for the wooden cue stick, a diminutive of Old French bille "stick of wood," from Medieval Latin billia "tree, trunk," which is possibly from Gaulish (compare Irish bile "tree trunk"); totally unrelated to French billiardSee more on our websiteAsk us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie and Abby, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →
LxAD @ CrossingsCon Announcement
Jul 2200:00:49Tap to summarizeLinguistics After Dark will be live next month! Come see us at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th–17th. More details at crossingscon.orgtranscript:ELI: Hey, hey, Sarah, what do you call it when a corvid recites a poem by Coleridge?SARAH: …what?ELI: A crow sings Khan.SARAH: But why? that doesn't make any sens—ohhh, a CrossingsCon, because we're doing a live show there!ELI: Yeah! And, and, hey, Sarah, when are the Ides of August?SARAH: Well, CrossingsCon is the 15th through the 17th. The Ides of August are actually on the 13th.ELI: Wait, no no no, ides are on the 15th, you know, the ides of march, stabby stabby, the whole—SARAH: No, only sometimes, because the Romans did this weird thing where they counted the days in a month—ELI: No no no, this isn't Romans After Dark, this is Linguistics After Dark, come see us live at CrossingsCon, August 15th through 17th, more details at crossingscon.org!
Transcribe →Episode 17: The Vibes Are Iffy
Jul 1601:46:32Tap to summarizeWherein we learn how to learn how to read.Jump right to:4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t)1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)”Covered in this episode:The best holiday dinner foodsExistential verbsCopulasThe science of reading“Vibes-based reading” is probably not a fair term but also maybe not an inaccurate one The phonological processorFLOSZ ruleScribal O“Ghoti” is not pronounced “fish”40% and 90% are different numbersThe difference between being able to read and being able to readStatistically speaking, most people are not SarahThe four-part processing system modelThe orthographic processorDevelopmentally inappropriate fonts for kidsDevelopmentally inappropriate fonts for Sarah on DuolingoEli learns he’s a white girl from OhioSight-reading is not the same as whole-word readingThe semantic processorAssociating dogs and blueberries, dogs and bogs, or dogs and dishesThe context processorMost people will not learn to read on their ownIf you’re good at something, don’t necessarily teach itFor once on this podcast, an actual definitive answer! (Which some people might disagree with.)There is no “too late” in life to learn to readWhere to learn to read, as an adultThe nerdiest part of the episodeThe portion of our audience which comprises sailors from the 1800sLinks and other post-show thoughts:Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by George LakoffTrue Biz, by Sara NovićWe may not actually have talked about scalar implicature by name on the pod? Sarah talked about it in a linguistics presentation at CrossingsCon, which we think may be what Eli and Sarah were (mis)remembering when they said we’d covered it early on. Potential future Language Thing of the Day…?Sixty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Basic level in 2022, while thirty-seven percent of fourth-grade students performed below the NAEP Basic level. Only thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022.Not for the first time and not for the last: chriego and sgrAlso not the for the first time, Canadian syllabicsWhat The Font?The three-cueing system was developed by Ken Goodman, who almost certainly had undiagnosed dyslexia, and has been described as functionally teaching children to be dyslexic, rather than teaching anyone (with or without dyslexia) to actually read.Mapping where words are housed in the brainJumbled words don’t actually work quite like thatThe style of writing Latin that Sarah refers to is called scripto continuaThe four-part processor diagram Kristen describesLETRS course with Louisa Moats and Carol TolmanUFLI is the University of Florida Literacy InstituteThe six syllable types in English orthographyAsk us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 16: SOUTHWYIGHTCKPQRFML
Apr 20, 202501:35:24Tap to summarizeWherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now.Jump right to:6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts44:23 Question 1: Why do British people say “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there,” are they afraid of gerunds or something?57:11 Question 2: I’ve noticed distinctions between how numbers are pluralised and ordinalized not only between languages, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd’; number mod 10 = 3, use ‘rd’; else, use ‘th’”, but the pluralization rules are just “1” and “not 1”. How do these distinctions evolve?1:10:52 Question 3: What are the features of real languages that made you go “I can’t believe it’s not a conlang!”?1:28:00 The puzzler: When we quizzed a group of musical artists about their favourite Pokemon, the answers were unsurprising: Daniel Merriweather said Charizard, Eiffel 65 chose Blastoise, Coldplay said Pikachu, Spandau Ballet chose Ho-Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen said Lugia, and New Order said Suicune. But what answer did the Kaiser Chiefs give?Covered in this episode:A weird bit of the Massachusetts-Connecticut borderThe guy who founded ChicagoSarah’s Unnamed Cocktail CornerThe unfortunate timing with which printing became widespread in EnglandLong and short vowels, which should be called tense and lax vowels because that’s what people notice anywayEli does not attempt an Australian accentMerch idea: “I Guess That’s Part of My Grammar Now”The Northern Cities Vowel ShiftThe Mississippi River is not a Great LakeSarah is not doing a corpus study of everything she’s ever saidThe Norman Conquest is not when the Great Vowel Shift happenedGerunds and nominalizing or adjectival suffixesSarah out-grammars EliSit vs set and lie vs layHumans are not computersEli over-simplifies Japanese verb conjugationNoun classes sink Eli’s battleshipAnything too systematic in other languages tends to make English speakers go “sounds fake but okay”Prepositions and cases are useful because they free you from each otherThe world’s laziest conlanger invented EnglishLinks and other post-show thoughts:We touched on accents, including what Sarah referred to as “the Chicago /ɑ/,” in episode 2!Other people talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, including Wikipedia“Mississippi” does in fact mean “big river”! Specifically, it’s the French rendering of an Ojibwe name.The “near-front whatever whatever unrounded vowel” is more formally a “Near-open front unrounded vowel”. The IPA symbol is ⟨æ⟩, or “ash,” which is conveniently pronounced with the same vowel sound it means.The paper Eli mentioned about violence in linguistic example sentences was either Macaulay, Monica, and Brice, Colleen. 1994. Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. In Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., Sutton, Laurel A., and Hines, Caitlin, 449–461. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, or this one by the same authors. Also here’s a related and interesting paper he found while digging those citations up!English does still have a dual/plural distinction with some words! Examples include both/all, either/any, neither/none, between/among, former/first, and latter/lastHistory of English podcast episode about numbers!First, second, third, -th, vs one-left & two-leftAsk us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 15: Mr. White Is On Blast
Mar 7, 202501:29:45Tap to summarizeWherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people.Jump right to:6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing26:10 After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife's friends that my accent sounds "British" to them. I think that's ridiculous, but I'm wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are "British-sounding." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don't drop 'r's for example).37:06 In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary and that Linear A might be. How do we know this? What is cool about this? What fun things should we know?1:01:20 On the topic of syntactic ambiguity I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English? How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?1:27:26 The puzzler: What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in commonCovered in this episode:CherriesSwearingNot swearingObjurgation is just a really excellent wordEither everyone has an accent or no one has an accentEngland has too many accentsLake Champlain is not invitedThe only accents are Boston, Chicago, or British?40 actual linguists with swordsConfusing future archaeologistsꙮYou could write English entirely in katakana or romaji, but you shouldn’tSpaces between words are a mirageThe Law of Conservation of Linguistic AmbiguityFrugivorous time flies are much less confusing in speech than textThere is no Platonic realm of languageNatural Language ProcessingFinishing other people’s sentencesPuzzles designed for high class sailors from the 1800sLinks and other post-show thoughts:Lingthusiasm’s Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project onesiesSwearing is becoming less tabooSwearing reduces painHow many categories of swear words there are depends on how any given study chooses to group them; three, four mostly, five, or more; in general, the list seems to be religion, sex/sexual acts, bodily functions, animals, family/mothers, death/disease, and slursThe list of functions of swear words that Sarah foundBoston BrahminsThe New England historical accent grid Sarah’s husband has mentioned is real! Eli’s guesses were backwards, however—the north–south distinctions are different vowel mergers, while the east–west distinctions are rhoticity: Northern New England accents have typically had the cot–caught merger, while southern New England accents have tended to have the father–bother merger; eastern New England is historically non-rhotic, while western New England is historically r-fulEli was also wrong about the pin–pen merger; it’s one of the most well-known features of Southern American English, not at all associated with New England. (He may have been thinking of the cot–caught merger, which is most common in the northeastern US?)The Great Lakes vs Europe map overlayThe Eskimo-snow mythMargalit Fox’s book on Linear B, and also her books on sign language, Arthur Conan Doyle, and two British soldiers escaping a POW camp with the help of a Ouija boardMinoan civilization and Mycenaean GreeceMichael and Alice are indeed the correct first names! Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris, based on the research of American classicist Alice KoberThe fiber arts tumblr post Eli quotedMinute CrypticAsk us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)
Dec 29, 202401:44:07Tap to summarizeWherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast! Jump right to: 2:42 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ways to Make Words! 42:18 Is it possible to have a different accent in your speaking voice versus your inner monologue voice on a regular basis? when I’m tired mine just throws from one accent to another, even ones I can’t make my mouth do but my brain knows the sounds of. 49:58 I would love to hear y’all talk about Unicode and Unicode normalization and the Basic Multiligual Plane from a linguistics perspective. 1:14:35 I’m learning French and I’m really confused about the word “chez”. it’s supposedly a preposition, but it’s used in a billion different contexts and also indicated possession? Also when used with the word “lui” (“chez lui”) it seems like it’s not a preposition anymore? 1:39:09 The puzzler: What comes next in the sequence 7, 8, 5, 5, 3, 4, 4, ? Covered in this episode: The stress patterns of American English’s only infix Sarah and Eli would definitely stop in the middle of swearing to do linguistics at themselves Goodbye to all our French listeners, if we had any Acronyms that turn into words are okay, but they’re relatively new A Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus Taking two words and telling them “now kiss!” A hypothetical dog food bowl washing machine repair team sign-up list Linguistic compounds neither absorb nor generate heat People who turn into houses The Unicode Consortium, which has a very evil-sounding name, sorts things into astral planes “We’re an hour-long podcast,” Eli says, roughly halfway through a one hour forty-four minute episode ʃ versus ∫ is not a minority language community problem Officially we have no geopolitical stances, but we might be building a map of shady geopolitical linguistics-adjacent organizations Sarah has a hot take about English prepositions Unfortunately for second-language learners, English prepositions just don’t really work like French prepositions “I feel bad all my examples are always Latin,” a Latin teacher says English works like Legos, other languages sometimes work like whole Lego cars? Links and other post-show thoughts: Merriam-Webster does include “-gate” in their online dictionary! This got cut in the edit, but we did originally acknowledge that British English has two distinct expletive infixes, the other one being “bloody.” “Parallel” and “paraplegic” do share the root “para,” meaning “beside.” “Paraplegia” is a Latinized form meaning “paralysis of the lower half of the body,” from the Greek “paraplēgia,” meaning “paralysis of one side of the body,” while “parallel” literally means “beside one another,” and comes from the Greek “parallēlos,” from “para allēlois,” meaning “beside one another.” “OK” really does derive from “Oll Korrect” and dates back all the way to the late 1830s! After that, you don’t really get acronyms being used as words until around the twentieth century. “Werewolf” = “wer” (man, male person) + “wolf” For horses to “champ” (v.) means "to bite repeatedly and impatiently," and dates back to the 1570s; apparently that evolved from the earlier meaning “to chew noisily, crunch,” which dates back to the 1520s. For not the first time and definitely not the last time either, verbing weirds language. The Danish alphabet ends with æ, ø, and å (not ä); we couldn’t find any languages that use both æ and ä (or æ and ȅ), though we did get curious enough to look. Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and on Slack at The Crossings. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing was done by Luca, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 13: A-blade-ive
Oct 6, 202400:52:02Tap to summarizeWherein we shove things away (with knives). Jump right to: 0:37 Is there a word in some language for “responding to the literal words and not the subtext of a request? 4:22 Response question from Spotify: With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren’t actively trying to comprehend it? 7:30 Language Thing of the Day: Noun Cases 22:39 Question #1: Do other languages have adjective ordering like English? 27:08 Question #2: What would the phonetic description of a raspberry be? "Labio-lingual trill"? Also, it occurs to me that it would be cool if there were some kind of database of paralinguistic sounds, containing things like "ingressive labiodental fricative" (inhaling sharply through your teeth), and explanations of what they mean in various languages 35:55 Question #3: What part of speech is "End" in the phrase “End Construction” as seen on a highway road sign? I'd've thought it was a noun, shorthand for “the end of,” but I’ve noticed that in Virginia the road signs will read things like “Enter Fairfax County” and “Leave Arlington County,” which suggest that the first word is a verb, not a noun, and that raises more questions: why is it "leave" and "enter" (imperatives?) rather than "entering" or "leaving"? 44:14 The puzzler: If a 40-pound stone broke into four pieces which could be used to weigh any whole-number increment from 1 to 40, what must the weights of the individual pieces be? Covered in this episode: The hypothetical existence of a possibly-German word or sociological term meaning something in the vicinity of “oblivious literalism,” “de-phaticization,” “desubtextualization,” “supertextualization,” or “involuntary textual meaning-raising” Don’t only listen to nursery rhymes We do the genitive case weird in English The thing that the thing was done to Patients and agents again Eli is shock-nə “Tsk tsk, it looks like rain”? “Standard” English is bad at present tense (and “Standard English” is a bad term) As usual, translation is hard Eli takes the most round-about route possible to figure out where he’s from Links and other post-show thoughts: The ablative in physics Proto-Indo-European noun cases Finnish cases & pronouns Basque cases Adjective ordering in English is (article, number, then) opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose Apparently numbers, if not adjectives, are linguistically categorized as “numerals,” a subcategory of quantifiers, which are a subcategory of determiners A raspberry without tongue is a voiced bilabial trill, written [ʙ] in IPA; a raspberry with tongue (when it’s not on the menu at a cocktail bar) is either (yes!) a voiceless linguolabial trill and written [r̼̊], or a a buccal interdental trill, written [ↀ͡ r̼] in the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech James Hoffman & Hames Joffman The “tsk tsk” / “tut tut” sound is a dental click, written [ǀ] in IPA Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing for this episode was done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
Transcribe →Episode 12: Dead Language Power
Sep 3, 202401:06:41Tap to summarizeWherein we are not warful. Jump right to: 3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic” 5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis 23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the difference into words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”. 35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent? 51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is bullshit." Discuss. 1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat? Covered in this episode: If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem “Collectivity” is not a word people know Etymology is not destiny English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults Sooner or later, M shows up Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit) Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing bullshit Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units Links and other post-show thoughts: Lexical gaps in English Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit! IPA pulmonic consonant charts This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds Optimality Theory Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
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