Shows
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitionsWe asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things...started to get a little murky. This isn't just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!
So wait...does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It's okay, linguistics has a solution!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...2025-07-1833 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerdTikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and are served to you from an algorithm rather than who you follow. This changes how people talk in them compared to earlier forms of video, and linguists are on it!
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the linguistics of tiktok with Adam Aleksic, better known on social media as etymologynerd. We talk about how Adam got his start into linguistics via etymology, the process that he goes through to make his current videos get...2025-06-2043 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics103: A hand-y guide to gestureGestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide...2025-04-1848 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics102: The science and fiction of Sapir-WhorfIt's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time...2025-03-2151 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics101: Micro to macro - The levels of languageWhen we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the...2025-02-2148 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguisticsThis is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before but might star in one of the next 100 episodes in greater detail.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about brains, gesture, etymology, famous example sentences, languages by the numbers, a few special facts about the word "hundred" and way more! This episode is both a...2025-01-1741 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics99: A politeness episode, if you pleaseIf it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you'd prefer a less polite version, "Listen! Now!"
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of "saving face" and "losing face", aka the push and pull between our desire for help vs our desire for independence, and how they've been formalized in a classic linguistics paper...2024-12-2056 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. BenderWhen a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is...2024-11-2256 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh đ»Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog...
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between nouns, including part-whole (eye of newt), material (a cauldron of silver), interpersonal (the wizard's apprentice), and general association (the school of magic). We also talk about the three big ways...2024-10-1844 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!We're taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don't forget to hold on!
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they're visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or...2024-09-2035 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!Imagine you're in a field with someone whose language you don't speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says "Gavagai!" You probably assumed they meant "rabbit" but they could have meant something else, like "scurrying" or even "lo! an undetached rabbit-part!"
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we're learning new words, inspired by the famous "Gavagai" thought experiment from the philosopher of language VWO Quine. We talk about how children have a whole object assumption when learning language, and how linguists go about learning...2024-08-1643 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episodeWhen we're talking about an activity -- say, throwing teacups in a lake -- we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but also what shape that action looks like. Is this a one-time teacup throwing event (I threw the teacup in the lake) or a repeated or ongoing situation (I was throwing the teacup in the lake)? Both of these actions might have happened at the same time (they're both in the past tense), but this different in shape between them is known as aspect.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...2024-07-1939 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq JonesThere are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who's a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki PĆ«rehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their v...2024-06-2145 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episodeSometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more like "hambag".
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the history of portmanteau words like motel and chortle, the poem Jabberwocky, and why some portmanteaus, like Kenergy from Ken + energy, sound really satisfying...2024-05-1749 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics91: Scoping out the scope of scopeWhen you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope...2024-04-1930 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we areOn Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we're so sorry)... the meat bagpipe!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and...2024-03-2247 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics89: Connecting with oral cultureFor 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 about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral...2024-02-1655 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics88: No such thing as the oldest languageIt'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 singular common ancestor language or several.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren...2024-01-1941 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics87: If I were an irrealis episodeLanguage 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're called the irrealis.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples...2023-12-2234 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso RodrĂguez-OrdóñezBasque 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 this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country...2023-11-1747 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics85: Ergativity delights usWhen 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 object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb...2023-10-2046 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics84: 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, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your...2023-09-2238 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics83: How kids learn Qâanjobâal and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo PedroYoung kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Qâanjobâal, Kaqâchikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they donât 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 enthusiastic about how kids learn Qâanjobâal and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, whoâs an assistant p...2023-08-1841 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentencesLinguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, itâs useful to have data thatâs relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what weâre 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 a story, we might have them all watch the same silent film and re-tell it back.
In this episode, your h...2023-07-2143 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliariesIn the sentence âthe horse has eaten an appleâ, what is the word âhasâ doing? Itâs not expressing ownership of something, like in âthe horse has an appleâ. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, itâs 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 and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic...2023-06-1637 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics80: Word MagicThe 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 Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in...2023-05-1937 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics79: 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 mÄ) and horse (low rising mÇ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about tone, intonation, and the combination of the two. We talk about various meanings of intonation, such as question, li...2023-04-2140 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle HodgeCommunicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- itâs also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people youâre talking about.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication, and has worked with Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL) in Australia and the UK. We talk about Gabâs work a...2023-03-1728 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei TingSingapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your language skills to use in which situation.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn language in Singapore with Woon Fei Ting, whoâs a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological Un...2023-02-1744 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics76: Where language names come from and why they changeLanguage names come from many sources. Sometimes theyâre related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes theyâre related to the word for âtalkâ or âlanguageâ in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name that got mis-applied or even a pejorative description from a neighbouring group.Â
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages are named! We talk about how naming a language makes it more legible to broader organiza...2023-01-2037 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotionsEmotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word âloveâ for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the less intense querer and the stronger amar. Conversely, many Austronesian languages use the same word for the concepts that English would split as âfearâ and âsurpriseâ, while many Nakh-Daghestani (Northeast Caucasian) languages use the same word for the cluster that English splits into âfearâ, âanxietyâ, and âgriefâ.Â
In this episode, your hosts Gretche...2022-12-1527 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics74: Who questions the questions?We use questions to ask people for information (whoâs there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).Â
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance move...yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or int...2022-11-1837 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territoryMaps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but theyâre also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and un-overlapping locations. And yet, if youâve ever eavesdropped on people on public transit, you know that any given location often plays host to many linguistic varieties at once.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the complications that come with trying to map languages and dialects. We talk about the history of how people have tried to map out...2022-10-2139 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcdWhatâs the âitâsâ in âitâs three pm and hotâ? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English speaker?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about absurd hypothetical linguistic questions with special guest Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. We only wish that there was a little more linguistics in the book. So Randall came on to fill the gap with all his m...2022-09-1649 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics71: Various vocal fold vibesPartway 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. (Youâre welcome.)
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the vocal folds! Theyâre often called vocal cords, but as theyâre attached along the lo...2022-08-1940 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev FedorenkoYour 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 donât speak.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina Fe...2022-07-2238 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics69: What we can, must, and should say about modalsSometimes, 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 nine common modals in English, the gloriously-named quasimodals (no relation to the...2022-06-1642 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languagesWhen societies of humans come into contact, theyâll 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, itâs 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 loanwords. There are lots of different trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to language, including words that are associated with particular doma...2022-05-2040 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics67: What it means for a language to be officialThe 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 itâs not only personal -- itâs 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 policy and how organizations and nation-states make language decisions that affect peopleâs everyday lives. We also talk about...2022-04-2237 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics66: Word order, we loveLetâs say we have the set of words âLaurenâ, âGretchenâ, and âvisitsâ and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on whoâs packing their bags and whoâs sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like âGretchen visits Laurenâ and âLauren visits Gretchenâ -- but thatâs not the only word order thatâs possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like âLauren Gretchen visitsâ or âVisits Gretchen Laurenâ, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is...2022-03-1833 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics65: Knowledge is power, copulas are funIt 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: theyâre all formed around a particular use of the verb âbeâ 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 concepts together thatâs linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes itâs a verb thatâs super irregular (like be/is/was in...2022-02-1837 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics64: Making speech visible with spectrogramsIf you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, itâs hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but itâs less convenient for analyzing it -- if youâre trying to figure out exactly what makes two s-like sounds different, it would be helpful if you could kinda sorta turn the language processing part of your brain off for a sec and just process them as sounds.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistic visualizations that let us examine sounds in more d...2022-01-2040 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics63: Where to get your English etymologiesWhen you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, itâs 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 arenât -- in this case, that paste and pasta have a common ancestor, but pesto comes from somewhere else.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about English etymology! We talk about where the etymological part...2021-12-1634 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics62: Cool things about scales and implicatureWe can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. Itâs not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can also do the same with other sets of words that donât necessarily have an equivalent scientific scale, such as the relationship between âsome", "a few" and âmanyâ or even words like "supposeâ, âbelieveâ and âknowâ.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the things that get implied when we use...2021-11-1937 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat GuptaIf you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are very specific, but what if youâve got, say, âeverything published in English between 1800 and 2000âł and youâre trying to figure out how the use of a particular word (say, âtheâ) has been changing? In that case, you might want to turn to some of the text analysis tools of corpus linguistics -- the area of linguistics that makes and analyzes...2021-10-2244 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics60: Thatâs the kind of episode itâs - cliticsHereâs a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Letâs imagine we have two different coloured pens, and weâre going to circle the words in red and the affixes, thatâs prefixes and suffixes, in blue.
âLater today, Iâll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troyâs competition, or if it isnât necessary.â
Some of these are pretty straightforward. âSomeâ? Word. The -s on âprizesâ? Affix. But some of them, âIâllâ, âhaftaâ, âHelen of Troyâsâ, âisnâtâ....hmmm.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a small bit of language thatâs sort of a halfway...2021-09-1741 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of MindLet's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind -- our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it's different from what we know ourselves. We talk about the...2021-08-2038 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field TripWhat do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your teeth, your tongue, the roof of your mouth, or in your throat. This whole class of sounds that are produced using friction are known as fricatives!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about fricatives! We take you on a tour from the front of your mouth to the back (sadly, youâll have to imagine the ti...2021-07-1639 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with MasakhaneWhen you see something on social media in a language you donât read, itâs really handy to have a quick and good-enough âclick to translateâ option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the worldâs languages are African, machine translation and other language tech tools donât yet exist for most of them.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Jade Abbott and Bonaventure Dossou of Masakhane, a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur Natural Language Processing research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. We talk about how they started working on language tech, Bonaâs...2021-06-1837 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics56: Not NOT a negation episodeâI donât have a pet dinosaur.â This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isnât, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like âI donât have a catâ, the type of negated sentence thatâs true for some people and not others.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about negation! We talk about how languages make sentences negative, how negation fits into the social side of conversation, and two ways you can make things super ext...2021-05-2131 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics55: R and R-like sounds - RhoticityThe letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth thatâs practically a vowel.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, technically known as rhotics, including English r, French r, Spanish r and rr, and more. We also ta...2021-04-1640 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a languageIf you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, donât just appear out of nowhere -- theyâre made by people, and those people bring their own interests and priorities to the process.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the process of figuring out the structure of a language and writing it down -- making a kind of book called a descriptive grammar. We also talk about differences in grammar-writing traditions in the history of I...2021-03-1841 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics53: Listen to the imperatives episode!When we tell you, âstay lingthusiastic!â at the end of every episode, weâre using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we donât actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although âstay lingthusiastic!â has the form of the imperative, it really has more the effect of a wish or a hope.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the range of things that imperatives do in various languages. We also get excited about why imperati...2021-02-1942 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics52: Writing is a technologyThereâs no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that has only been invented from scratch a handful of times: in ancient Sumeria (where it may have spread to ancient Egypt or been invented separately there), in ancient China, and in ancient Mesoamerica. Far more often, the idea of writing spreads through contact between one culture and its neighbours, even though the shape of the written characters and what they stand for can vary a lot as it spreads.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Ga...2021-01-2137 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics51: Small talk, big dealâCold enough for ya?â âNice weather for ducks.â
Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you donât know very well or a bridge into getting to know someone better by figuring out which deeper conversational topics might be of mutual interest.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science behind small talk: how we pick topics for small talk conversation, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies...2020-12-1741 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to PâBlickâ is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. âBnickâ contains English sounds, but somehow it doesnât feel very likely as an English word. âLbickâ and âNbickâ seem even less likely. Whatâs going on?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the underlying pattern behind how sounds fit together in various languages, what linguists call sonority. We can place sounds in a line -- or along the steps up a mountain -- according to how sonorous they are, and this lets us compare...2020-11-2041 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics49: How translators approach a textBefore even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does things that are unfamiliar to readers in the destination language but would be familiar to readers in the original language.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. We talk about the new, updated translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (affectionately known as the "...2020-10-1633 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne GatesHigh school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels youâre using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as weâre growing up. For a particular group of students in the UK, theyâre on the forefront of linguistic innovation using a variety known as Multicultural London English.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Shivonne Gates, a linguist who wrote her dissertation on Multicultural London English and is currently a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research, Britai...2020-09-1844 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics47: The happy fun big adjective episodeAdjectives: theyâre big, theyâre fun, theyâre...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: theyâre words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as âbiggerâ or âmost funâ. But when we start looking across lots of languages, we find that some languages lump adjectives in with verbs, some with nouns, and some do different things altogether.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about adjectives! We talk about how linguists come up with diagnostic tests to determine whether something is an adjective, other quirks about adj...2020-08-2138 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phaticsHow are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have a name in linguistics -- theyâre called phatics!
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the social dance of phatic expressions. We talk about common genres of phatics, including greetings, farewells, and thanking; how ordinary phrases come to take on a social meaning versus how existing phatic expressions can become literal again; and how phatics differ across languages and mediums, in...2020-07-1737 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics45: Tracing languages back before recorded historyLanguage is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs donât leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before history started being recorded, we need to engage in some careful detective work, by comparing two or more similar, known languages to (potentially!) reconstruct a hypothetical common ancestor.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about these prehistoric languages that historical linguists have reconstructed, known as proto-languages. We dive into some of our favourite proto-languages (Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Algonquian, Proto-Pama-Nyungan, and Proto-Bantu), lo...2020-06-1938 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowelThe words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common -- they all contain the same sound, even though they each spell it with a different letter. This sound is known as schwa, it's written as an upside-down lowercase e, and it has the unique distinction of being the only vowel with a cool name like that! (The other vowels are called, unglamorously, things like "high front unrounded vowel").
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why the schwa is cool enough to get its own name! We also talk...2020-05-2232 min
Troublesome Terps48: Getting Lingthusiastic With Lauren GawneAre interpreters enthusiastic about linguistics? If not, they should be! With Alex G away on assignment, Sarah, Jonathan & Alex D are joined by linguist and podcaster extraordinaire Lauren Gawne. Lauren teaches linguistics in Australia and co-hosts the Lingthusiasm podcast with Gretchen McCulloch. Special Guest: Lauren Gawne.2020-05-201h 08Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby ConrodUsing âtheyâ to refer to a single person is about as old as using âyouâ to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line âThere's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friendâ, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for both going back to the 14th century. More recently, people have also been using singular they to refer to a specific person, as in âAlex left their umbrellaâ.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Kirby Conrod, a linguist who wrote their dissertation about the syntax and sociolinguis...2020-04-1742 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics42: What makes a language âeasyâ? Itâs a hard questionAsking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is â it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently learnable â because otherwise they wouldnât exist at all!
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about a common question: what are people really asking when they ask about âeasyâ or âhardâ languages? It turns out that there are several things going on, including which languages you already know, whether youâre approaching a language as an a...2020-03-1939 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of timeHow do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like âyesterdayâ, âon Tuesdayâ, âonce upon a timeâ, ânowâ, or âin a few minutesâ. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about when some languages obligatorily encode time into their grammar. We look at how linguists go about determining whether a language has tense at all, and if so, how many tenses it has, from two tenses (lik...2020-02-2135 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle ShaneIf you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the computer may eventually learn how to do these things for itself: to generate new potential ice cream flavours or identify the giraffehood status of new photographs. But itâs not necessarily that easy, and the mistakes that machines make when doing relatively silly tasks like ice cream naming or giraffe identification can illuminate how artificial intelligence works when doing more serious tasks as well.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne interview Dr Janelle Shane, au...2020-01-1744 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversationWhy do some conversations seems to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you canât get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isnât holding up their end of the conversation?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne have a conversation about the structure of conversations! Conversation analysts talk about a spectrum of how we take turns in conversation: some people are more high-involvement, while other people are more high-considerateness, depending on how much time you prefer to elapse between someone elseâs turn and your own. These differences explai...2019-12-1933 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics37: Smell words, both real and inventedWhatâs your favourite smell? You might say something like the smell of fresh ripe strawberries, or the smell of freshly-cut grass. But if we asked what your favourite colour is, you might say red or green, but you wouldnât say the colour of strawberries or grass. Why is it that we have so much more vocabulary for colours than for scents?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language and smell! We discuss research into how languages describe scents, colour-odour synesthesia, and how researchers go about doing experiments on smell voca...2019-10-1836 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn HouLarger, national signed languages, like American Sign Language and British Sign Language, often have relatively well-established laboratory-based research traditions, whereas smaller signed languages, such as those found in villages with a high proportion of deaf residents, arenât studied as much. When we look at signed languages in the context of these smaller communities, we can also think more about how to make research on larger sign languages more natural as well.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Lynn Hou, an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara, in our first bilingual episode (AS...2019-09-2039 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics35: Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burgerSometimes a syllable is jam-packed with sounds, like the single-syllable word âstrengthsâ. Other times, a syllable is as simple as a single vowel or consonant+vowel, like the two syllables in âa-ha!â Itâs kind of like a burger: you might pack your burger with tons of toppings, or go as simple as a patty by itself on a plate, but certain combinations are more likely than others. For example, an open-face burger, with only the bottom half of the bun, is less weird than a burger with only the top half.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and...2019-08-1629 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics34: Emoji are Gesture Because InternetEmoji make a lot of headlines, but what happens when you actually drill down into the data for how people integrate emoji into our everyday messages? It turns out that how we use emoji has a surprising number of similarities with how we use gesture.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about emoji, and how gesture studies can bring us to a better understanding of these new digital pictures. We also talk about how we first came to notice the similarities between emoji and gesture, including a behind-the-scenes look into chapter five...2019-07-1930 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics33: Why spelling is hard â but also hard to changeWhy does âghâ make different sounds in âthoughâ âthroughâ âlaughâ âlightâ and âghostâ? Why is there a silent âkâ at the beginning of words like âknowâ and âknightâ? And which other languages also have interesting historical artefacts in their spelling systems? Spelling systems are kind of like homes â the longer youâve lived in them, the more random boxes with leftover stuff you start accumulating.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about spelling, and celebrate the reasons that itâs sometimes so tricky. We then dive into quirks from some of our favourite spelling systems, including Engl...2019-06-2132 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics32: You heard about it but I was there - EvidentialitySometimes, you know something for sure. You were there. You witnessed it. And you want to make sure that anyone who hears about it from you knows that youâre a direct source. Other times, you werenât there, but you still have news. Maybe you found it out from someone else, or you pieced together a couple pieces of indirect evidence. In that case, you donât want to overcommit yourself. When you pass the information on, you want to qualify it with how you found out, in case it turns out not to be accurate.
In this episode of Lin...2019-05-1733 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics31: Pop culture in Cook Islands MÄori - Interview with Ake NicholasWhen a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, itâs crucial to get the kids engaged with the language again. But kids donât always appreciate the interests of their elders, especially when global popular culture seems more immediately exciting. One idea? Make stories from pop culture, featuring characters like Dumbledore and Batman, but in the local language.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Ake Nicholas, a linguist and native speaker of Cook Islands MÄori, the lesser known relative of New Zealand MÄori. Ake combin...2019-04-1939 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics30: 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 of the easiest ways to make it really clear just how much the ball bounced would be to gesture the way that it made its way downwards. You might even do the gesture even if youâre talking to the other person on the telephone and they canât see you. No matter what lang...2019-03-2133 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs onSome 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: itâs what makes âI gave you the bookâ sound fine but âI rained you the bookâ sound weird. Or on the flip side, âitâs rainingâ is a perfectly reasonable description of a general raining event, but âitâs givingâ doesnât work so well as some sort of general giving event. How can we look for patterns in the ways that verbs influence the rest of the sentence?
In this episode, your hosts...2019-02-2238 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languagesThe 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 for a long time, especially in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers, so itâs a really interesting place to learn more about why and how languages influence each other.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Hannah Gibson, a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, about her work on how wo...2019-01-1835 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics27: Words for family relationships: Kinship termsThere 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-selves. Weâre all living on a watery ball of rock and fire, orbiting a large ball of gas. And we all arrived on this planet by means of other humans, and form societies to help each other stick around. Sometimes, we even bring into existence further tiny humans.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen Mc...2018-12-2034 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? PalatalizationA letter stands for a sound. Or at least, itâs supposed to. Most of the time. Unless itâs 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 circus or acacia. G can be hard, as in gif, or soft, as in gif.
Why can C and G be hard or soft? And why donât other letters come in hard and soft versions?
In this episode of the podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics, your hos...2018-11-1634 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics25: Every word is a real wordsquishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ainât, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast.
All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted arenât real words â or maybe arenât even words at all. But we donât point at a chair or a tree and assert that itâs not a word. Of course itâs not! That would be absurd. So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words?
In this episode of the funnest* podcast about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take you on a tour through whatâs...2018-10-1937 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria CruzAs English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from childrenâs books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the worldâs languages, this is not the case.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Hilaria Cruz, a linguist and native speaker of Chatino, an Indigenous language of Mexico which is spoken by over 40,000 people. Hilaria combines her work as an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Kentucky with creating resources for her fellow speakers of Chatino, everything from...2018-09-2038 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics23: When nothing means somethingWhen we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We donât often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisingly often throughout our linguistic system, from the micro level of an individual sound or bit of meaning to the macro level of sentences and conversations.
In this episode of the podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about four different kinds of linguistic nothings: silence in between turns, silence in between soun...2018-08-1735 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics22: This, that and the other thing - DeterminersWhen linguists think about complicated words, we donât think about rare, two-dollar words like âdefenestrationâ. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like âtheâ. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, itâs easy to explain. But what does âtheâ mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is âtheâ?
If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that âtheâ was an article. But this brings...2018-07-1936 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy StylesMost of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: thereâs no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word âcatâ, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky đŻ and a soft, rounded đ and these two names: âboubaâ and âkikiâ. If you had to assign one name to each shape, which would you pick?
(Hereâs a pause to let you think about it.)
If you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round...2018-06-2237 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binaryAustralian and Canadian English donât sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: theyâre both national varieties that tend to get overshadowed by their more famous siblings.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch use Lynne Murphyâs new book The Prodigal Tongue as a guide to the sometimes prickly relationship between the globally dominant British and American varieties of English, give a mini history of English in our own countries, and discuss our national quests to find space between and around US and UK nationlects.
On the way, we ask the big, c...2018-05-1738 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics19: Sentences with baggage - PresuppositionsWhatâs so weird if I say, âthe present King of France is baldâ or âI need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vetâ? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly canât be true. But if you reply, âNo, he isnâtâ or âNo, you donâtâ it still feels unsatisfying: arenât we still both assuming that France has a king and that I have a pet unicorn?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore different kinds of meanings: sometimes sentences wear their meaning on their sleeves, but sometim...2018-04-1936 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics18: Translating the untranslatableLists of âuntranslatableâ words always come with... translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for âtricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?â
This monthâs Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing...2018-03-1638 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics17: Vowel GymnasticsSay, âaaaaaahhhhâŠ..â Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: âaaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiiiâ. Feel how your tongue moves in relation to the back of the roof of your mouth as you move from one vowel to the next. When you say âahhhhâ like at the dentist, your tongue is low and far back and your mouth is all the way open. If you say âcheeeeeseâ like in a photo, your tongue is higher up and further forward, and your mouth is more closed: itâs a lot harder for the dentist to see your molars.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne a...2018-02-1539 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug testHereâs a strange little blue animal youâve never seen before. Itâs called a wug. Now hereâs another one. There are two of them. There are two ___?
You probably thought âwugsâ â and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if youâve never heard the word âwugâ before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s?
Now try saying two cat__ đđ, two dog__ đđ and two horse__ đđ. Why did you end up with catssss but dogzzzz, and have to add a whole extra syllable to horse?
In thi...2018-01-1933 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics14: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositionsAre you up for some prepositions? You might think youâre over prepositions, but have you ever really looked into them, or have you just gone by them? Other parts of speech notwithstanding, prepositions are something weâre really down with.
In Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne introduce you to our favourite English grammar book, the mammoth, 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (affectionately known as CGEL), and take a deep dive into its 60+ pages all about prepositions. We also explore how it is that a grammar can even have sixty pages of things to s...2017-11-1736 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole HollidayIf you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what âsounds angryâ or âsounds articulateâ? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds?
In Episode 13 of Lingthusiasm, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Associate Professor of linguistics at Pomona Collegem about her work on the speech of American black/biracial young men, prosody and intonation, and what it means to sound black. We also talk about how Obama inadvertently provided...2017-10-2043 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics12: Sounds you canât hear - Babies, accents, and phonemesWhy does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though youâve been learning it longer than theyâve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you canât hear?
In Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore the fundamental linguistic insight at the heart of all these questions: the phoneme. We also talk about how to bore babies (for science!), how sounds appear and disappear in a language, and how to retain our se...2017-09-2129 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maximsâ Would you like some coffee?
â Coffee would keep me awake.
Does that mean yes coffee, or no coffee? It depends! Is it the morning or the evening? Is the person trying to pull an all-nighter or take an afternoon nap? A computer looking strictly at the meanings of the words would be confused, but we humans do this kind of thing all the time without even noticing it.
In episode 11 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about the hidden assumptions of cooperation that we bring to every conversation. They were formulated by the linguist Paul Grice, and...2017-08-1733 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics10: Learning languages linguisticallySome linguists work with multiple languages, while others focus on just one. But for many people, learning a language after early childhood is the thing that first gets them curious about how language works in general and all the things in their native language(s) that they take for granted.
In episode 10 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how learning languages can feed into linguistics and vice versa. We also explore the power dynamics that affect learning languages, and the importance of learning about the rules of interaction as well as the rules of grammar.
...2017-07-2038 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics09: The bridge between words and sentences - ConstituencyHow do we get from knowing words to making brand-new sentences out of them? In episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how words form groups with other words: constituency.
Once you start looking for it, constituency is everywhere: in ambiguous sentences like âtime flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a bananaâ, in remixed films like âOf Oz The Wizardâ, and even internet dog memes.
This monthâs Patreon bonus was the backstory about the linguistics of the doggo meme and its connection to Australian slang, which grew out of this NPR article about doggo. You...2017-06-1539 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics08: People who make dictionariesDictionaries: theyâre made by real people!
In episode 8 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch talk about Word by Word, a recent book by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, about how dictionaries get made. (Spoiler: we liked it.) We also talk about how dictionaries get made for languages that donât have any yet, the changing role of dictionaries on the internet and with social media, and how words often have a longer history than we expect (âg-stringâ, for example has been in use since at least 1878).
Our latest Patreon bonus is about selling your linguistics skills t...2017-05-1831 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics07: Kids these days arenât ruining languageThere are some pretty funny quotes of historical people complaining about kids back then doing linguistic things that now seem totally unremarkable. So letâs cut to the chase and celebrate linguistic innovation while itâs happening.
In episode 7 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how far back we can trace complaints about the language of Kids These Days, why linguistic discrimination is harmful, and why âbe likeâ, hyperbolic âliterallyâ, and other modern innovations are actually signs of something awesome.
We also announce a Patreon to keep the podcast sustainable! You can support us there to listen to a...2017-04-2036 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics02: Pronouns. Little words, big jobsIf there are pronouns, why arenât there connouns? Whatâs the point of these little words?
In this episode of the podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne take a look at the many functions of pronouns. We discuss the vastly different pronoun systems in different languages, how youâd need to change English pronouns to make it easier to write gay polyamorous fanfiction, and why everyone is getting excited about singular âtheyâ these days (despite the fact that itâs really old).
We also talk about the Lingthusiasm logo, the three things that the squig...2016-12-1333 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics01: Speaking a single language wonât bring about world peaceWouldnât it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast!
Lingthusiasm is a brand-new podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics, hosted by Lauren Gawne of Superlinguoâ and Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic.
In this first episode of Lingthusiasm, âGretchen and Lauren discuss the âone language equals peaceâ fallacy, and whether speaking the same words means that people will necessarily agree with each other (spoiler: no). But the history of how people have tried is still really interesting, from constructed and symbolic communication like Blissymbols and emoji to the way astronauts c...2016-12-1331 min