Shows
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 min
Lingthusiasm - 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 min
A Language I Love Is...Montreal French and Gretchen McCullochWe're back! The first episode of an all-new series of the language-loving podcast is here at last.Since one of the co-stars of the hit podcast Lingthusiasm concluded the second series, it seemed only right that the other co-star should kick off the third. Gretchen McCulloch – linguist, podcaster and author of Because Internet – joins me to navigate the linguistic complexities of Canada, specifically in the city of Montreal.This episode is part sociolinguistic survey, part survival guide for how to speak in Quebec, and Gretchen expertly and warmly takes us through Canadian bilingualism and...
2025-03-0946 min
Let's Learn Everything!73: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, Latin in Science, and Internet LinguisticsInternet linguist Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm joins us to casually answer all of our pressing linguistics questions with the most mind blowing facts. Why does science use so much dang latin, and what is so unique about internet linguistics?Images we Talk About:Gretchen's Favorite FrogsTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:10:58) Latin in Science(00:54:49) Misc & Internet Linguistics(01:22:46) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!We also learn about: Words that change the state of the universe, a promise is a kind of magic, “peo...
2024-11-071h 25
Lingthusiasm - 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 min
New Books in Science, Technology, and SocietyGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
New Books in LanguageGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
NBN Book of the DayGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
New Books in CommunicationsGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
New Books in TechnologyGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
Language on the MoveGretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our...
2024-06-0151 min
Go Fact YourselfEp. 143: David Wilcox & Gretchen McCullochTrivia and podcasting are a love story for the ages on a brand new episode of Go Fact Yourself!In this episode…Guests:David Wilcox is an award-winning singer and songwriter, who happens to be one of J. Keith’s very favorites. His lyrics showcase his passion for intense and often very personal storytelling, so personal that some people have commissioned him to write songs about their lives – with surprising results. David’s album My Good Friends is available now.Gretchen McCulloch is a bestselling author and award-winning linguist. How did she disc...
2024-02-021h 11Lingthusiasm - 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 Rodríguez-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 min
Eleanor Martin(yii) [pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Free Ebook Audiobook[pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch **Download PDF/EPUB Here ==> https://slilitendaging.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet [pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Read Online Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language for free in any format with visit the link button below.**Read Boo...
2023-10-1000 min
Penelope Scott(yii) [pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Free Ebook Audiobook[pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Download PDF/EPUB Here ==> https://slilitendaging.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet [pdf] free Download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Read Online Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language for free in any format with visit the link button below.Rea...
2023-10-1000 min
doyanutangdownload [EPUB] Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch download [EPUB] Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Read Online Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language for free in any format with visit the link button below. **Read Book Here ==> https://nembesanga.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet **Download Book Here ==> https://nembesanga.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet Book Synopsis : A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language...
2023-09-0100 min
doyankuwukdownload [EPUB] Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullochdownload [EPUB] Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch Read Online Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language for free in any format with visit the link button below. **Read Book Here ==> https://nembesanga.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet **Download Book Here ==> https://nembesanga.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet Book Synopsis : A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and...
2023-09-0110 min
kacunge[ePub] FREE download Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch READ [epub] Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language By Gretchen McCulloch Read Online Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language for free in any format with visit the link button below. **Read Book Here ==> https://jaelangkungijo.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet **Download Book Here ==> https://jaelangkungijo.blogspot.com/36739320-because-internet Book Synopsis : A linguistically informed...
2023-08-2900 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo PedroYoung kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s 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, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling 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 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 mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) 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 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, who’s 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 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 “love” 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 “fear” and “surprise”, while many Nakh-Daghestani (Northeast Caucasian) languages use the same word for the cluster that English splits into “fear”, “anxiety”, and “grief”.
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 (who’s 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!).
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 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 don’t speak.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina Fe...
2022-07-2238 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics66: Word order, we loveLet’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” -- but that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is...
2022-03-1833 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 you’ve got, say, “everything published in English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the use of a particular word (say, “the”) 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: That’s the kind of episode it’s - cliticsHere’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue.
“Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”
Some of these are pretty straightforward. “Some”? Word. The -s on “prizes”? Affix. But some of them, “I’ll”, “hafta”, “Helen of Troy’s”, “isn’t”....hmmm.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a small bit of language that’s sort of a halfway...
2021-09-1741 min
INFLUENCE[Encore Episode] 160 How the Internet Is Changing Language (w/ Gretchen McCulloch)We're working out some scheduling snafus this week, but we'll be back again with fresh tales from the depths of the Internet. For now, we have an encore episode about a really fascinating topic we covered back in January. We hope you enjoy, and we'll see you again next week!Original notes:If you're concerned that LOLspeak and text messages are ruining language, fear not, grammar nerds! This week, Alli and Jen speak with linguist, author, and fellow podcaster Gretchen McCulloch, who says we are living in a special time for informal written language.
2021-08-161h 07Lingthusiasm - 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, you’ll have to imagine the ti...
2021-07-1639 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 that’s 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, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re 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, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re 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 don’t actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although “stay lingthusiastic!” 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 technologyThere’s 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 minINFLUENCEHow the Internet Is Changing Language (with Linguist Gretchen McCulloch)If you're concerned that LOLspeak and text messages are ruining language, fear not, grammar nerds! This week, Alli and Jen speak with linguist, author, and fellow podcaster Gretchen McCulloch, who says we are living in a special time for informal written language.McCulloch explains why the Internet is changing language and culture in unprecedented ways, how regular people solved the 500-year-long quest for written sarcasm, and why post cards from George Harrison look like your dad's text messages.Follow Gretchen: https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcCRead her book, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules...
2021-01-181h 04Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics51: Small talk, big deal“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.”
Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t 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 min
You Are Not So Smart194 - Because Internet - Gretchen McCullochOur guest in this episode is Gretchen McCulloch, who is a linguist, but also, I’d say a MEME-ologist, evidenced by that the fact that in her New York Times Bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, she spends a good portion of the book tracing the history of memes and how we have used them all the way up to right now, which is part of her her overall exploration of how language itself has changed since the advent of text messaging, SnapChat, TikTok, emojis, gifs, memes, and the internet as a whole.
If...
2020-11-291h 42Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick” seem even less likely. What’s 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 linguistics47: The happy fun big adjective episodeAdjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. 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 min
Audiobook Reviews in Five MinutesBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullochAre you feeling flummoxed, bamboozled, and stupefied by communication and language online? And how exactly did LOLcats irreversibly change the course of the English language? Gretchen McCulloch is a Canadian linguist who studies the language of the internet, for the people of the internet. She is currently the Resident Linguist at WIRED.Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51828723-because-internetAudio production by Graham StephensonEpisode music: "Sneaky Snitch" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
2020-07-2005 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 -- they’re 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 min
The Upgrade by LifehackerHow to Get Your Point Across Online, With Linguist Gretchen McCullochHave you ever spun out over why your friend ended that text with a period? Or missed the subtle sarcasm in an unpunctuated email? We’re clearing up all of these online miscommunications and more this week with help from internet linguist, Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen is the resident linguist at WIRED and author of the New York Times bestseller Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Have an idea for a future episode? Call us at 347-687-8109 and leave a voicemail, or write to us at upgrade@lifehacker.com. We want to hear from you!
2020-07-1338 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 don’t 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 minLingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby ConrodUsing “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, 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 “Alex left their umbrella”.
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 “easy”? It’s a hard questionAsking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently learnable – because otherwise they wouldn’t 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 “easy” or “hard” languages? It turns out that there are several things going on, including which languages you already know, whether you’re 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 “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. 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 it’s 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 can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t 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 else’s turn and your own. These differences explai...
2019-12-1933 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics37: Smell words, both real and inventedWhat’s 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 wouldn’t 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
Instant GeniusGretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate?Scroll through Facebook or Twitter and you’ll notice that many people type in a particular style: full of lols and emoji, and rarely using punctuation or capital letters.Does this mean that we’re losing the ability to use our language correctly? Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet (£12.99, Penguin Books), says absolutely not: in fact, internet users have collaboratively developed a style of language that makes communication much richer.Here’s Gretchen talking to BBC Science Focus online assistant Sara Rigby about how sarcasm and humour drive our use of language, the value of emoji...
2019-10-1630 min
Enjoy This Vivid Full Audiobook And Feel The Difference.Because Internet by Gretchen McCullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/16550to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet
Author: Gretchen McCulloch
Narrator: Gretchen McCulloch
Format: mp3
Length: 8 hrs
Release date: 10-03-19
Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars, 8 ratings
Genres: Content Creation & Social Media
Publisher's Summary:
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is...
2019-10-0330 min
Power-Up With This Game-Changing Full Audiobook And Feel The Difference.Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/396169to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: October 3, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1
Genres: Computers & Technology
Publisher's Summary:
Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions...
2019-10-038h 01Savor The Full Audiobook Everyone Is Talking About — So Breakthrough!Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/396169to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: October 3, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1
Genres: Comedy, Satire & Parody
Publisher's Summary:
Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online...
2019-10-038h 01Download Best Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Computers & TechnologyBecause Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/396169to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: October 3, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1
Genres: Computers & Technology
Publisher's Summary:
Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions...
2019-10-038h 01
Download Best Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Computers & TechnologyBecause Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen MccullochPlease visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/396169 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing Author: Gretchen Mcculloch Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 1 minute Release date: October 3, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Computers & Technology Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online...
2019-10-0305 minPower-Up With This Thought-Provoking Full Audiobook And Feel The Difference.Because Internet by Gretchen McCullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/16550to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet
Author: Gretchen McCulloch
Narrator: Gretchen McCulloch
Format: mp3
Length: 8 hrs
Release date: 10-03-19
Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars, 8 ratings
Genres: Content Creation & Social Media
Publisher's Summary:
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is...
2019-10-0330 minExplore New Full Audiobooks in Literature, Comedy, Satire & ParodyBecause Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/396169to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: October 3, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1
Genres: Comedy, Satire & Parody
Publisher's Summary:
Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online...
2019-10-038h 01
Thinking With Mitch JoelSPOS #689 - Because Internet With Gretchen McCullochWelcome to episode #689 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #688 - Host: Mitch Joel. I purchased the book, Because Internet - Understanding the New Rules of Language, because... well... it didn't take much to get me excited beyond the title. It had me at "hello," as they say. Then Karen Wickre (who was on the show to promote her book, Taking The Work Out of Networking, a ways back) made the intro to Gretchen McCulloch (the author of Because Internet). It turns out that Gretchen and I both live in...
2019-09-221h 01
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, aren’t 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 “strengths”. Other times, a syllable is as simple as a single vowel or consonant+vowel, like the two syllables in “a-ha!” It’s 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
This Is the AuthorS4 E44: Gretchen McCulloch, Jia Tolentino, and Carrie GoldbergS4 E44: In this episode meet Gretchen McCulloch, author of BECAUSE INTERNET; Jia Tolentino, author of TRICK MIRROR; and Carrie Goldberg, author of NOBODY’S VICTIM.
These women explore different facets of today’s culture and society—everything from the internet’s effect on language to reality TV and wedding culture to society’s treatment of victims of assault.
Then find out which author finally took a stand in the gif (jiff) versus gif debate!
Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/540664/because-internet/
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/567511/trick-mirror/
Nobody's Victim by Carrie Gol...
2019-08-0612 min
The Language Mastery ShowLinguist & "Because Internet" Author Gretchen McCulloch on What Makes Modern Internet Language SpecialGretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist, the "Resident Linguist" at WIRED Magazine (Best. Title. Ever!), the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and the author of the new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, a smart, loving, pun-filled look at the evolution of language in the internet age.
📧 Get expert language immersion tips in your inbox each week!
Join my FREE weekly newsletter to get the tips and tools you need to get fluent anywhere in the world.
👉🏼 LanguageMastery.com/newsletter
2019-07-2752 min
Dive Into A Full Audiobook That Is Simply Next-Level.Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/343819to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: July 23, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1
Genres: Social Science
Publisher's Summary:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn...
2019-07-238h 01
Talk the Talk classic feed372: Because Internet (with Gretchen McCulloch)The rules are changing. Here's the manual. Gretchen McCulloch's book Because Internet is a look at how people use language on the net to communicate and to show identity. How do people laugh online? How is emoji like gesture? It's a deep dive into internet language on this episode of Talk the Talk.
2019-07-231h 02Download High-Quality Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Social ScienceBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen MccullochPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/343819to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Author: Gretchen Mcculloch
Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Release date: July 23, 2019
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1
Genres: Social Science
Publisher's Summary:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn...
2019-07-238h 01
Download High-Quality Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Social ScienceBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen MccullochPlease visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/343819 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language Author: Gretchen Mcculloch Narrator: Gretchen Mcculloch Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 1 minute Release date: July 23, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1 Genres: Social Science Publisher's Summary: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone...
2019-07-2310 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
Emoji Wrap — The Emoji Podcast from Emojipedia18: World Emoji Day spectacular with Gretchen McCulloch and Casey Liss🥳 A special #WorldEmojiDay episode with not one but two guests. Discussing Apple's emoji preview, and emojis replacing IRL gestures.
📘 Because Internet (book)
🤷 Emoji aren’t ruining language: they’re a natural substitute for gesture
👩⚖️ Emojis and the law
Follow Gretchen
👉 Gretchen McCulloch on Twitter @GretchenAMcC
🌐 Gretchen's Website
🎙 Lingthusiast podcast @lingthusiasm
Sponsor
This episode of Emoji Wrap is proudly sponsored by website.ws. Own your emoji domain today, and on July 17 only, register your emoji domain for just 99c.
More topics
🥳 Apple Reveals New 2019 Emojis for World Emoji Day
🥯 Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji
🧇 Waffle Emoji
🙅♀️ Eggpl...
2019-07-1700 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to changeWhy does “gh” make different sounds in “though” “through” “laugh” “light” and “ghost”? Why is there a silent “k” at the beginning of words like “know” and “knight”? And which other languages also have interesting historical artefacts in their spelling systems? Spelling systems are kind of like homes – the longer you’ve 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 it’s 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 you’re a direct source. Other times, you weren’t 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 don’t 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 Māori - Interview with Ake NicholasWhen a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, it’s crucial to get the kids engaged with the language again. But kids don’t 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 Māori, the lesser known relative of New Zealand Māori. 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 you’re talking to the other person on the telephone and they can’t see you. No matter what lang...
2019-03-2133 min
Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & FolkloreNames w/ Gretchen McCullochWe’re getting meta in this episode featuring Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch. Learn why names are important not only in mythology and folklore, but in our own lives (including online lives!) as well. Also featuring the Amanda Sins Podcast, a podcast within a podcast, so many throwbacks to the 90s, and what kind of kids did the Bloody Mary thing at sleepovers.This week, Julia recommended CARAVAN and Windfall. Guest- Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist: She analyzes the language of the internet, for the people of the internet. You...
2019-03-131h 08
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: it’s what makes “I gave you the book” sound fine but “I rained you the book” sound weird. Or on the flip side, “it’s raining” is a perfectly reasonable description of a general raining event, but “it’s giving” doesn’t 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 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. We’re 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, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s 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 don’t other letters come in hard and soft versions?
In this episode of the podcast that’s 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, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast.
All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s 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 what’s...
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 children’s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world’s 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 don’t 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 that’s 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 don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”?
If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings...
2018-07-1936 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binaryAustralian and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re 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 Murphy’s 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 - PresuppositionsWhat’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly can’t be true. But if you reply, “No, he isn’t” or “No, you don’t” it still feels unsatisfying: aren’t 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 ‘untranslatable’ 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 “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?”
This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing...
2018-03-1638 min
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics17: Vowel GymnasticsSay, “aaaaaahhhh…..” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. 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 “ahhhh” like at the dentist, your tongue is low and far back and your mouth is all the way open. If you say “cheeeeese” like in a photo, your tongue is higher up and further forward, and your mouth is more closed: it’s 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 testHere’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___?
You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if you’ve never heard the word “wug” before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s?
Now try saying two cat__ 🐈🐈, two dog__ 🐕🐕 and two horse__ 🐎🐎. 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 you’re 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 we’re 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 “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? 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 can’t 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 you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you can’t 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 Maxims– Would you like some coffee?
– 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 “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”, in remixed films like “Of Oz The Wizard”, and even internet dog memes.
This month’s 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: they’re 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 don’t 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 (’g-string’, 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 aren’t ruining languageThere are some pretty funny quotes of historical people complaining about kids back then doing linguistic things that now seem totally unremarkable. So let’s cut to the chase and celebrate linguistic innovation while it’s 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 “be like”, hyperbolic “literally”, 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 aren’t there connouns? What’s the point of these little words?
In this episode of the podcast that’s 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 you’d need to change English pronouns to make it easier to write gay polyamorous fanfiction, and why everyone is getting excited about singular ‘they’ these days (despite the fact that it’s 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 won’t bring about world peaceWouldn’t it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast!
Lingthusiasm is a brand-new podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, hosted by Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic.
In this first episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren discuss the “one language equals peace” 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