For 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 Gret...
2024-02-16 02:45:10 +0000 UTC View PostIn this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires!
First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would you be? We've made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like "You're about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to s...
2024-02-01 22:58:46 +0000 UTC View Post
It’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...
2024-01-18 23:35:08 +0000 UTC View Post
We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director's commentary and deleted scenes.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusias...
2024-01-04 22:44:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Language 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 h...
2023-12-22 00:24:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and body functions, while historically in English we've also had more religious swears, like "God's blood" and "God's teeth". In fiction, authors can use invented swear words to get around censorship, li...
2023-12-07 23:40:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Basque 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 ...
2023-11-17 00:20:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Are there linguistics things in your life that you would like advice about? In honour of our 7th anniversary making Lingthusiasm, this is an episode answering your advice questions, from the serious to the silly. We're not professional advice columnists but we are professional linguists, and many people have asked us variants of similar questions over the years.
In this bonus episod...
2023-11-03 00:55:38 +0000 UTC View Post
When 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 tha...
2023-10-20 00:11:14 +0000 UTC View Post
What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they're called linguistics institutes.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen's visit to the ...
2023-10-06 00:16:57 +0000 UTC View Post
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 promi...
2023-09-22 03:39:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguists often do research by interviewing people from a particular linguistic community. Sometimes these communities are nearby, sometimes very far away. Sometimes it's a community that the researcher is themselves a member of, sometimes this involves first building relationships with a community where the researcher is an outsider.
In this bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about ...
2023-09-08 01:59:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Young 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 va...
2023-08-18 02:49:37 +0000 UTC View Post
A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!
"Etymology isn't destiny" on shirts, magnets, notebooks, and more!
Words change their meanings over time, and when we remind ourselves that etymology isn't destiny, we can also remember we're free to grow and change over the course of our liv...
2023-08-10 01:04:15 +0000 UTC View Post
All of the Lingthusiasm main episodes and bonus episodes have transcripts, which involves some interesting technical challenges, including writing words in lots of languages, choosing between writing examples in their conventional spelling versus according to their phonetic value, and translating pauses and intonation into punctuation and paragraph breaks.
In this behind the scenes bonus ...
2023-08-03 23:48:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguists 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...
2023-07-21 03:45:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes linguistics example sentences are so charmingly bland that they could lull you to sleep, listed one after each other without any larger story for context. We thought, what if we took this effect literally?
We present: LingthusiASMR, a very special bonus episode, in which your hosts Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistics in a very relaxed manner by reading a class...
2023-07-07 00:29:49 +0000 UTC View Post
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the techn...
2023-06-16 01:46:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguistics professors are some of the most visible career role models that you see if you're taking courses in linguistics (since they're teaching the courses), but most people who study linguistics go on to jobs outside academia. Eight years ago, Lauren was trying to figure out what some of those job options were and how people kept using their linguistics training in doing them.
In thi...
2023-06-02 00:23:08 +0000 UTC View Post
The 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 t...
2023-05-19 01:03:19 +0000 UTC View Post
In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We wanted to get to know you better and try out some linguistic experiments with you, so we got formal ethics approval from La Trobe University in case we want to use any of these findings in a research paper later. Thank you to the over 1000 people who filled it out! We have ethics approval for 3 years, so if you missed it this time ...
2023-05-05 00:41:03 +0000 UTC View Post
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 ri...
2023-04-20 23:07:44 +0000 UTC View Post
In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. Since we last saw them in our episode on the grammar of singular they, Kirby is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, USA, where they are doing fun new resea...
2023-04-07 00:24:07 +0000 UTC View PostLanguages change over time. So when you write a book set a few hundred years in the future, some aspects of how people talk are going to be different, and authors can invent potential future versions of a language as a way of speculating about what might be different about future societies.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about four science fiction books/s...
2023-03-03 00:40:50 +0000 UTC View PostThis is your reminder that the Lingthusiasm liveshow about language and gender with Kirby Conrod will be starting in exactly three (3) hours from the timestamp of this post/email, thanks to the magic of scheduling posts at very specific times!
The show will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord, which is available for all patrons at the Ling-thusiast tier and above. If y...
2023-02-18 18:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Singapore 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.
...
2023-02-17 01:44:24 +0000 UTC View Post
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about what we've been up to in 2022 (much travel for Gretchen, with linguistic impressions of Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand!) and what's coming up for 2023 (a second tiny human, er, longitudinal language acquisition project for Lauren, which means you'll get a few more interview episodes from Gretchen's travels).
We...
2023-02-02 23:40:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” 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...
2023-01-20 01:21:31 +0000 UTC View Post
We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past two years of Lingthusiasm with director's commentary and deleted scenes.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen ge...
2023-01-05 21:55:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Emotions 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 a...
2022-12-15 21:40:53 +0000 UTC View Post