lingthusiasm

Gesture goal and custom merch until December 3

We've just hit our latest Patreon goal! Now we can do a special episode about the linguistics of gesture where you can actually see the gestures! This also means that we can film the special gesture video episode while Gretchen is visiting Lauren in Australia, which will definitely make for a much nicer-looking video for you. 

Creating and editing video is a new level of complexity for a pr...

26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

A 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...

Send us your questions for the Q&A!

Just a quick reminder that we're taking advantage of both being in the same place at the same time to record a special bonus Q&A episode for patrons! 

Normally, we ask $10+ patrons for bonus topic ideas, but here we're opening up the floor to all patrons for your shorter linguistics questions! 

Let us know in the comments below, using Patreon's direct message feature in the s...

Sydney and Melbourne patron liveshow meetups!

Gretchen is now arrived in Australia, and here's a photo of us prepping for the liveshow, complete with Real Australian Flat Whites! We're excited to see a whole bunch of Australian lingthusiasts and for you to get to meet each other! 

We'll have mini Coffee Crisps all the way from Canada for you to try (a Canadian chocolate bar kind of like a Tim Tam but with more wafer, and a mild coffee ...

Bonus 21: What's it really like at academic conferences?

If you go to a big music festival, there's a good chance you won't actually get to hang out with any of the musicians who are playing, but if you go to a bit academic conference, it's likely that almost everyone you meet there will be presenting their work. In fact, it's uncommon to meet someone who *isn't* giving a talk at an academic conference. 

Academic conferences are quite diff...

25: Every word is a real word

squishable, 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...

Bonus 20: Bringing up bilingual babies

For many people in the world, raising kids who are bilingual or multilingual is the norm - it's the only way to navigate life. For others, especially in predominantly English-speaking areas, it's a conscious decision made for one of many different reasons. 

In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren take you through several ways to raise children who speak more than o...

24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz

As 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 speak...

Lingthusiasm liveshow tickets, plus a second liveshow in Sydney!

We're very excited to let you know that our Melbourne liveshow will be happening Friday 16th November at the State Library of Victoria. 

In even more exciting news, we've also added a second liveshow while Gretchen is in Australia. We'll now also be doing a liveshow in Sydney at GiantDwarf on Monday, 12th November. 

If you're in either of those c...

Bonus 19: Hyperforeignisms

English loves to borrow words from other languages. When a word is borrowed, English speakers have a few options: pronounce the new word like an English word, or keep the features from the language it came from. Sometimes though, we get carried away, and start applying a pattern that we learned from some borrowed words to others where it doesn't apply. 

In this bonus episode, Gretche...

Space babies and more new merch!

New merch alert! 

Space Babies

What language would we speak in space? Thanks to the Space Race, languages of space are English and Russian, and aboard the International Space Station, the astronauts and cosmonauts speak to each other in an English-Russian hybrid language, a sort of Space Pidgin.

But of course, we wondered, if babies start being born in space, presumably they'd...

23: When Nothing Means Something

When 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 sentence...

Bonus episodes poll!

We've had a couple recent bonus topics suggested by our $10+ patrons! 

Vote for which one you're more excited about to determine which one we do first! 

1. hyperforeignism, using a sound or form perceived as "more foreign" even though that's not actually how it's said/written in the other language 

2. Child language acquisition and other fun linguistics activities you ...

Bonus 18: Emoji, Gesture and The International Congress of Linguists - Summer Conference Adventures 2018

Gretchen and Lauren are both recently back from some exciting linguistics conferences, and now we take you behind the scenes to hear about some of our favourite parts! Lauren went to the International Congress of Linguists and the International Society for Gesture Studies conference, both in Cape Town, South Africa. Gretchen went to two whole conferences on emoji (yes, those emoji 😃) in the ...

22: This, that and the other thing - determiners

When 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” ...

Bonus 17: Homonyms, homophones, and homographs

English is full of words that look the same, but are pronounced differently ('bow' 🎀 and 'bow' 🙇‍), or are pronounced the same but look different ('bow' 🎀 and 'bough' 🎋), and some that look the same and are pronounced the same but have different meanings ('bow' 🎀 and 'bow' 🏹). Why does English do this? Does it really do it more than other languages? And how can we use homony...

Lingthusiasm custom art preview!

One of your and our favourite recurring topics in Lingthusiasm episodes is the question of how children learn languages... and what would happen if kids acquired the Russian/English hybrid language spoken on the International Space Station. You'd have a Space Pidgin becoming a Space Creole because of the linguistic genius of Space Babies! 

(If you want to refresh your memory, see 2018-07-04 06:16:39 +0000 UTC View Post

21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular  reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of  sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different  words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary.  Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and  these two na...

Bonus 16: Forensic linguistics

Linguistics can help solve crimes! 

Sometimes a court needs to figure out who might have written a particular note, or whose voice is on a particular recording, and they call in a forensic linguist to help. But what do linguists in the courtroom actually do? 

In this bonus episode, we discuss how linguists can be expert witnesses in the courtroom, the pitfalls of using lin...

New patreon goals: videos on gesture and signed languages!

You patrons are so amazing that we're running out of goals AGAIN. We're now just over $100 away from our liveshow goal (wow!) so we thought we'd give you some new and exciting goals to look forward to. 

The first new goal is a special filmed episode about gesture in relation to language! 

Lauren has done a lot of gesture research in various languages, but you mig...

20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary

Australians  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 pric...

Bonus 15: Linguistics grad school advice

Linguistics grad school: what should you know if you're thinking about going? Dylan asked us over on the community page about applying for grad school and it turned out that we have plenty to say on the topic. Gretchen and Lauren discuss why you might want to do a Masters or PhD, how to scope out a good program for your interests, and the differences between grad programs in different countries...

19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions

What’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 h...

Bonus 14: The Poetry of Memes - whomst shooketh the bred in the icebox

Roses are red
Violets are dreams
In this episode
We talk poems and memes

There are several recent memes related to poems and mock-old English, and we're excited to talk through the linguistics of memes like Roses Are Red, This is Just to Say, i lik the bred, whomst, and shooketh in this bonus episode. We're becoming more and more convinced that literary criticism is just advanced...

New merch (sneak peek!)

We're excited to announce that we have a new set of merch available, and as patrons, you get to find out about it first! It'll be released to the internet at large in time for the main episode later this month (but please keep it under wraps until then).  

Three things! 

Tree diagram scarves 💚🎧🧣🌳

For anyone into structural relationships between ...

18: Translating the untranslatable

Lists  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  l...

Bonus 13: The grammar of swearing

To celebrate a year of bonus episodes, we make good on our promise from the very first bonus episode that we'll come back and do MORE SWEARING! To everyone who's helped make the show sustainable, we're glad you're here. 

Last time: sweary sounds and swears in other languages. This time: the peculiar grammar of swear words, featuring quite possibly the most bizarre and glorious exampl...

17: Vowel Gymnastics

Say, “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 ...

Bonus 12: Creating languages for fun and learning

Imagine a language where you only had 2 vowels. Or a language where you used different verb tenses depending on your mood. Or a language with 28 different ways to say thank you. We're on our way to constructing a pretty unusual language. But that's part of the fun of constructing  a language; megalomaniacal control, and the ability to test the established limits of what human languages can...

16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test

Here’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 ...