lingthusiasm

Bonus 70: Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

Would your eminence care to join me at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe? When we want to evoke a vaguely historical context, people often reach for a pseudo-archaic, Oldey Timey version of English, one that involves thees and thous, fancy titles, and the inevitable Olde Tea Shoppe or Olde Englishe Pub. Oldey Timey English is strictly about vibe -- it's by no means the same as Actual Old English (learning to ...

IPA lens cloths are in the mail 📮

The IPA lens cloths are in the mail and heading your way! Here are some photos of them being packed for delivery by our industrious team of student helpers! 



If you have joined since the special offer closed, you can now purchase 2022-12-01 00:27:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Episode 74: 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 qu...

Bonus 69: 103 ways for kids to learn languages

Each of the languages of the world is a lens on how adults and older children in various cultures create the conditions for babies to learn languages. Of the 7000-some languages that have been counted by linguists, over half of them have either a grammar or a grammar sketch, but only 103 of them have had at least one paper about them published in one of the four major journals about child langu...

Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re 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 you’ve ever eavesdropped on people  on public transit, you know that any given location often plays host to  many lin...

Lingthusiasm listener survey 2022

We're doing a listener survey for the first time! 

This is your chance to tell us what you're into on Lingthusiasm, what we could do more of, suggest topics and guests for future episodes, and also answer some fun linguistics experiment questions, which we might write up into an Official Academic Paper someday! (And either way, we'll report back on the results.) 

The surve...

IPA lens cloth mailing: put your address in this form if it's not already on Patreon

If you have access to this post on the day it’s being posted, congratulations! You’re on board for our lens cloth special offer!

This email is about what happens next, including timelines where we have any control over them.

We are sending the IPA art to the printers this week to be printed onto lens cloths. This is the first time we’ll also see the finished product and we’r...

Bonus 68: Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough

If you want to learn more about science outside a classroom, there are lots of options, such as museums, documentaries, news articles, podcasts, youtube channels and more. When it comes to learning about linguistics, there are some options (you're listening to one of them!) but this is still definitely an area with a lot of potential for growth.  

In this rather meta bonus episode, G...

Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? 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,...

Bonus 67: Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is an iconic reference image which many linguists have pinned up somewhere to refer to. But its most familiar form is a not-especially-aesthetic technical diagram and we wondered, what if we made a more artistic version?  

In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic with Lucy Maddox, Lingthusiasm's resident artist, about redesigning...

Episode 71: Various vocal fold vibes

Partway 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. ...

What if the IPA looked like weird nerd art and you could put it in your pocket?

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is sometimes called the periodic table of linguistics -- an important technical diagram that's also visually interesting and which many linguists hang up on a wall, carry around inside a notebook, or simply know the exact keystrokes that'll get them to a page to type or 2022-08-16 21:52:13 +0000 UTC View Post

Bonus 66: Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

If you're looking to try to figure out how kids talk, you might start by asking them some questions, or showing them a picture and trying to get them to talk about it. The problem is, sometimes kids are shy or not accustomed to answering direct questions from strangers, so these methods can underestimate them. A linguist named Bill Labov had a different idea: what if he brought a live rabbit in...

70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Your 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 backgroun...

Bonus 65: Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. But unlike parts of your mouth, hands, and face, which are easy to observe directly, observing the brain takes special equipment. One of these tools is an MRI machine, which is a giant magnet big enough for a person to fit inside. The trick is, your blood has iron in it, and iron is magnetic, and so a huge enough magnet ca...

69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

Sometimes, 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 episo...

Bonus 64: There's like, so much to like about "like"

"Like" is a word that's super flexible and versatile (it can be a verb, a noun, a particle, and more), and each of these functions has its own patterns of use and history that we can trace back, sometimes surprisingly long ago. For example, the version that's equivalent to "I mean" (as in, "like, you'd need to see it to believe it") is found among speakers who were born in the UK and New Z...

68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll 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, it’s more likely to get called  etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.

In  this epi...

Bonus 63: What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow

Swear words often have an emotionally charged meaning, but that can't be the only factor - after all, there are polite versions of some swear words, such as "excrement" instead of "shit", and words that are treated as swears in some languages but not others, such as "cholera" in Polish and Dutch but not English. It kind of seems like a swear word is a word you have a memory of getting in troubl...

67: What it means for a language to be official

The 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 it’s not only personal -- it’s also a reflection of the way that the societies we live in constrain our choices.  

Sweary liveshow in one hour!

This is your reminder that the Lingthusiasm liveshow about swearing will be starting in exactly one (1) hour 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 you haven't joined the Discord ye...

Bonus 62: Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

Word games are a fun way of thinking about the structure of language, from which letters tend to appear in combination with each other to how many different clues you can give towards the same word. Many people have been refining a new set of word game solving strategies recently thanks to a new game called Wordle. 

In this bonus episode, we're joined by Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimme...

66: Word order, we love

Let’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” -...

A Sweary Q&A Liveshow - April 9/10 on the Lingthusiasm Discord

We're doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2022! The liveshow is will be on the Lingthusiasm Patron Discord this April 9th/10th (depending on your timezone). 

We'll be returning to one of our fan-favourite topics and answering your questions about swearing, which you can ask in the AMA-qu...

Bonus 61: Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

When you hear about a research study, the questions can seem very authoritative and the results very tidy. But research is ultimately done by humans, and humans need to figure out ways of coming up with questions and methods for answering them.  

In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own resea...

65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

It 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: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be”  known as a copula.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and  Gretchen McCulloch g...

Bonus 60: Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

If you can copy-paste a string of letters and symbols from one text field to another, or if the message you wrote on your device displays correctly when you send it to a friend, you've benefited from the background work of the Unicode Consortium. If you've ever gone into the "insert symbol" menu in a document and poked around some of those strange and beautiful symbols, from hieroglyphs to arro...

Sticker packs, final check in!

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Patreon during our late 2021 Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack special offer! We're now pleased to report that all the sticker packs should have arrived at their final destinations, even allowing for the vicissitudes of international mail (they were sent out in late November). 

If you're attached your stickers to a water bottle, laptop, notebook, or othe...

Bonus 59: We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more

We interview other linguists here periodically, but sometimes you also want to know what your cohost has been up to lately! Or maybe just their answer to a few Highly Important (and Not At All Silly) Questions. 

In this bonus episode, we get enthusiastic about interviewing each other! We talk about our recent activities, such as Gretchen's tentative return to the world of physical co...

63: Where to get your English etymologies

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other,  such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s 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 aren’t -- in this case,  that paste...