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4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale
21:38 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 answer
1:19:09 The puzzler: Complete the sequence. C, F, T, ?, Y, H, N, J, I, ?

Covered in this episode:

Teeth
Myriads, millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, and trilliards
Don’t be Canada

Indefinite hyperbolic numerals, like “ten thousand,” “seventy,” “seventy times seven,” “a billion,” “a bajillion,” or “hrair”
Hanging on to the roof of a bus
Horses do not have walls
Are French speakers dans or en a mechsuit? We want to know
Things Sarah gets wrong on Duolingo
From a spider’s perspective, the enemy’s gate is up
Does 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 surface

Why do English speakers do “strength” to ourselves
The “s” on a present-tense English verb is spicy and weird
Japanese says you can have little a consonant, as a treat
There are more than seven languages in the world
Syllabic consonants

Being a linguist is not a real-world career
L’Academie Francais are disqualified from linguistics forever
Eli proposes a screenplay

It’s teeth that are the problem

Links 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 thing
The secret dozenal system in English and the long hundred
Short 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 etymology
Per 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 billiard

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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 :)