We've interviewed lots of great linguists 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 outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD of the past few years of Lingthusiasm with director's commentary and deleted scenes.
Featuring: Suzy Styles on Space Babies and where th...
2021-01-07 21:59:19 +0000 UTC
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“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 Lin...
2020-12-17 22:41:51 +0000 UTC
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How do lexicographers make the decision to add new words or meanings to their dictionaries? What makes a word easy or difficult to define? What's the research process like for finding out the origins of words? What up and coming words are lexicographers currently keeping an eye on?
In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the process of makin...
2020-12-03 23:19:08 +0000 UTC
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It's our fourth anniversary!
We just wanted to take this moment to tell you about some additional features that Patreon has been adding lately which you might find useful, and also remind you of the perks of being a patron and make sure you know how to access them.
Nothing is actually changing though, any settings updates are entirely optional.
Patreo...
2020-12-02 02:18:49 +0000 UTC
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“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 abo...
2020-11-19 23:46:26 +0000 UTC
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A big project for Lingthusiasm in 2020 has been collaborating on a series of 10 minute intro linguistics videos with Crash Course, a big educational youtube channel. Now that the 16 videos are midway through going live online, we wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes about how we've been putting the series together.
In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren ar...
2020-11-06 00:25:42 +0000 UTC
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Before 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 languag...
2020-10-15 23:42:35 +0000 UTC
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Most Esteemed and Venerable Audience! Lend us your ears! Attend to your most humble podcast hosts! We crave your indulgence for our discussion of honorifics!
In this episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about honorifics. We talk about how various languages encode social hierarchies in grammar, vocabulary, and the ways we address people. We also talk about some co...
2020-10-01 23:27:37 +0000 UTC
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High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re growing up. For a particular group of students in the UK, they’re on the forefront of linguistic innovation using a variety known as Multicu...
2020-09-18 01:23:26 +0000 UTC
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Pangrams are sentences that contain all of the letters of the alphabet, like the famous "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and the more obscure "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!".
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about pangrams and the further questions that they raise about the structure of various languages. How short can you get an English pan...
2020-09-03 22:52:10 +0000 UTC
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Adjectives: 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 d...
2020-08-20 23:56:47 +0000 UTC
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We had many great applicants for the LingComm Grants and alas, were not able to fund them all. But we would love to see more linguistics communication projects exist! So we decided make this episode about how to start a lingcomm project on a budget. It may also be useful for other kinds of public engagement projects or if you just want to hear the Lingthusiasm origin story!
In this ...
2020-08-07 02:41:19 +0000 UTC
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How 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...
2020-07-17 02:07:04 +0000 UTC
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Both speech and music can involve making sounds using the human body, but they also have differences -- for example, music is generally more aesthetically stylized and can involve way more additional instruments than language. Different cultures highlight the similarities and differences between music and language in various ways, which we've received lots of questions about!
In thi...
2020-07-02 23:49:39 +0000 UTC
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Language 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 hypo...
2020-06-19 02:16:10 +0000 UTC
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We'll be announcing the 2020 LingComm Grant winners when we launch our main episode (about proto-languages!) on Thursday, but we wanted to give you, our patrons, the good news about these fantastic projects a couple of days early.
We had over 75 applications from around the world and we'd like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult!
He...
2020-06-15 04:06:29 +0000 UTC
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It's a truth universally acknowledged that if you put a linguist within 5 metres of a child, that linguist suddenly becomes an acquisitionist. Child language acquisition is a perennial source of entertainment for the linguistically-inclined -- and so is helping any young people in your life develop an interest in linguistics. In this episode, we talk about some of our favourite things to observ...
2020-06-05 03:26:00 +0000 UTC
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The 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 fro...
2020-05-22 01:46:56 +0000 UTC
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Numbers are one of those topics that reminds us that humans go about the world in meat suits -- in particular, meat suits with 10 fingers. But not all languages count on the fingers. Some also include other body parts, like the toes or even protrusions like the elbow, shoulder, and nose. Other systems count based on salient objects beyond the body, such as yams, sheep, and mathematical properti...
2020-05-08 01:16:19 +0000 UTC
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Using “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 us...
2020-04-17 00:27:26 +0000 UTC
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What colour is the letter A? Are the days of the week or months of the year located in particular positions for you? Do certain musical notes have colours or textures? Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon where certain senses or concepts cross over into other ones, and it's probably more common than people realize.
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about synesth...
2020-04-03 00:52:09 +0000 UTC
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Asking 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 &n...
2020-03-19 22:52:13 +0000 UTC
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Every year in linguistics departments across the world, linguists crack out their favourite linguistic examples and welcome a new cohort of introductory linguistics students. Lauren is so excited to be getting back into the Ling101 classroom (it's the beginning of the new academic year in Australia) that this whole episode is about our best tips for teaching (and learning!) linguistics. It...
2020-03-06 01:38:00 +0000 UTC
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We've announced so many things these past few weeks that we thought we'd have a nice chat to catch up about them! Think of it as a bonus bonus episode! (The real February bonus was released early, in January, and it's the robo-generated Lingthusiasm episode.)
In this bonus bonus episode of...
2020-02-27 22:33:25 +0000 UTC
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How 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 ...
2020-02-20 23:39:23 +0000 UTC
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We couldn't make you wait until now to listen to our February bonus (part two of our interview with Janelle Shane), so we released that back in January.
As an extra bonus we wanted to share the updated thank you video that new patrons get when they join Lingthusiasm. We say 'new' but we s...
2020-02-06 22:51:38 +0000 UTC
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Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: And I’m Lauren Gawne.
Lauren: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch. So I mentioned some of my favourite Harry Potter books, and I found Harry Potter and the Cursed Child –
Gre...
2020-01-17 00:45:08 +0000 UTC
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If 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 ...
2020-01-17 00:42:17 +0000 UTC
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Since starting Lingthusiasm three years ago, we've enjoyed hearing from so many of you how Lingthusiasm got you into linguistics or helped you reconnect with your long-lost enjoyment of linguistics. But for many of you, this also posed a problem: where can you find other people to chat with who are just as enthusiastic about linguistics as you are?
You could, of course, follow some ...
2020-01-16 23:06:29 +0000 UTC
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We often look back at the origins of English words, but it's also weird to pause and realize that we're somewhere in the middle of the history of English, not at its ultimate destination. Which leads us to ask, well, what might this future English look like?
Gretchen travelled to the 23rd century to write an op-ed piece for the New York Times about how English might have changed in...
2020-01-02 21:13:05 +0000 UTC
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