Linguistics After Dark

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  • Resumen

  • Linguistics After Dark is a podcast where three linguists (and sometimes other people) answer your burning questions about language, linguistics, and whatever else you need advice about. We have three rules: any question is fair game, there's no research allowed, and if we can't answer, we have to drink. It's a little like CarTalk for language: call us if your language is making a funny noise, and we'll get to the bottom of it, with a lot of rowdy discussion and nerdy jokes along the way. At the beginning of the show, we introduce a new linguistics term, and there's even a puzzler at the end!
    Linguistics After Dark
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Episodios
  • Episode 11: The Axiom of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Episode 11: The Axiom of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    Jul 30 2024

    Wherein we are not already in textbooks.

    Jump right to:

    • 2:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ergativity
    • 25:50 Some people would say “historic moment” or “electric field”; others seem to say “historical moment” or “electrical field”. Is there any study of this difference[, and] how would you describe [it]? I usually call it whether people use nouns adjectivally, but that may not be accurate or precise. / "Magic" is a noun, its adjective form is "magical," and its adverb form is "magically." "Tragic," on the other hand, is an adjective, its noun form is "tragedy," and its adverb form is "tragically." Why aren't "tragic" and "magic" the same part of speech? should we make them the same part of speech? if so, do we drop "tragedy" and make "tragic" the noun and re-introduce "tragical" as an adjective? or do we invent the word "magedy" and get rid of "magical"?
    • 39:47 How to learn a relatively obscure language without going to the country it is spoken in? How does it compare to learning a dead language?
    • 52:56 If I'm trapped in the distant past with anatomically modern humans armed only with Ryan North's book "How To Invent Nearly Everything", then I plan to follow his recommendation to 'invent' writing (after spoken language, of course). What features should I keep in mind when devising an alphabet for my ancient new friends, and what might the result look like?
    • 1:08:22 The puzzler: The name of what widely spoken language consists of four consecutive US state postal abbreviations?

    Covered in this episode:

    • Agents, patients, doers, subjects, objects, and other words that don’t necessarily refer to the topic of a sentence
    • Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything
    • Sports commentators’ ongoing collective attempt to make nonce ergativity happen
    • Walkers and standees?
    • Agent-patient fluidity and hierarchies in languages like Chickasaw and Dyirbal
    • [Regina George voice] Stop trying to make “magedy” happen
    • If something ends in -al, it’s already in textbooks
    • Linguists don’t believe in adverbs, because they’re the same thing as adjectives (except when they’re not, but really they are)
    • Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything (again)
    • How to study a language depends on why you want to know it in the first place
    • Latin students can’t ask for help if their car breaks down
    • The Latin alphabet is really great for Latin! Because it’s the Latin alphabet, which was invented for Latin!
    • Sarah strongly encourages writing vowels and strong discourages writing boustrophedon

    Links and other post-show thoughts:

    • Eli highly recommends “Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists” by Thomas E. Payne
    • The Chickasaw people (and thus their language) are traditionally from northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, western Tennessee, and southwestern Kentucky. Dyirbal is spoken in northern Queensland in Australia.
    • Eli also mentioned “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by George Lakoff
    • The etymology of “magic”
    • “Verbing weirds language”: Calvin & Hobbes, January 25, 1993
    • XKCD #356: Nerdsniping
    • Lang-8 no longer takes new users but they have an app called HiNative
    • Say Something In has courses in Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Dutch, and Spanish, for native English speakers
    • The Scots Wikipedia issue
    • Ryan North's book “How To Invent Nearly Everything”
    • Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
    • The origin of Hangul

    Ask us questions:

    Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

    Credits:

    Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny wrangles questions, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

    And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
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    1 h y 11 m
  • Episode 10: Voiceless Alvie

    Episode 10: Voiceless Alvie
    Jun 27 2024
    Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat. Jump right to: 15:09 Sneaky Question 0: As my high school-aged daughter starts to look towards college, she wants to learn more about the study of linguistics, both in terms of the fundamentals and in terms of cutting edge research. Are there resources beyond your podcast that you can recommend to us? 32:18 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Phoneme databases and inventories 46:59 Question 1: Where did the phrase “close but no cigar” come from? Where does the phrase "nursing a drink" come from? 57:30 Question 2: During the [2021] live show, you talked about how vowels are fake; with that in mind, would you say that phonemes (as opposed to phones or segments) are or are not fake? Along those lines, what would you say makes one linguistic theory as to how a particular part (say, syntax) of language works better than another, if anything? 01:17:40 The puzzler: The American rapper Watsky put out albums in 2019, 2020, and 2023, named Complaint, Placement, and Intention. The album cover art features the album name in all caps, as large as possible. Why did he choose those album names? Covered in this episode: Linguistics at the University of Campinas and the Brazilian Linguistics education system Generative Linguistics and syntax Should theories of language be good or just look pretty in LaTeX? Resources for linguistics students Phonetic databases and inventories and why they’re useful #LingComm and linguistics memes for online teens (like @lingshits Vowels are, as we have said before and will say again, fake, and also all the same Consonants are real though, like ɬ (aka Voiceless Alvie) The sounds coming out of your mouth are probably not the ones you think Whether you should give cigars to students Links and other post-show thoughts: Severo mentions he is from Campinas. Coincidentally, the University of Campinas is where Daniel Everett did his Master's and PhD in linguistics. Phoneme databases and other IPA resources Severo mentioned: PHOIBLE, UCLA, U of Glasgow’s Seeing Speech and Dynamic Dialects, and George Mason University’s Accent Archive in re European Portuguese sounding Slavic Q’s Greenland That one XKCD, not for the first time and probably also not the last Some papers about aspiration of stops in Korean, and one about Hindi Tom Scott Severo’s adorable felt wug Our guest host: Find Severo on Instagram at @severolinguista and @latinisteria, and check out his merch there as well at @glotalica! Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod, and the drumroll sound is by ddohler. And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
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    1 h y 24 m
  • Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana

    Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana
    Apr 27 2024
    Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours! Jump right to: 5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity34:55 Question 1: Are accents predictable? That is, there are specific accents people have based on the languages they have learned, and often these have specific-enough features to have stereotypes. But would a native speaker of Parisian French have the stereotypical “French accent” when speaking English even if they had grown up in a cultural vacuum or learned English from a book? Further, if this is predictable like this, is it sufficient to predict the accent a native speaker of Quenya or Lojban might have when they were learning English the first time?51:37 Question 2: Have you noticed people using [ts] instead of [t] at the beginning of words, and why might that happen?1:04:34 Question 3: How do songs in tonal languages work? How do the speakers distinguish between the melody and the tone?1:13:01 The puzzler: Change one letter each in the names of two rival NFL teams to get synonyms for the name of a third NFL team Covered in this episode: Transitivity vs. intransitivity and ergative vs. accusative verbsWhy you can give a mouse a cookie but you cannot sleep a sandwichStandard phonological mistakesA rat whose name is not Cheese-teethPolitical allegiances of the NoldorToo vs. tsoo and Tuesday vs. Tyuesday vs. ChewsdayEnglish is a tonal language“Trash” and “ashtray” are (we hope) not the names of beverages Links and other post-show thoughts: Pseudo-reflexive verbs in Romance languages (i.e. “i bathe myself” etc)? In re hypothetical tri-transitive verbs: Wikipedia suggests “bet” and “trade”, citing a paper we couldn’t actually access, but you can try to dig it up if you want to read more. Not everyone agrees, though“Complex transitive verb” can mean different things and not everyone agrees on that, eitherUnaccusative vs. unergative intransitive verbs in English (depending on which argument is missing)Valency), aka the real word for the marble slots we talked aboutMary Spender’s youtube channelChris Punsalan and his grandma of Chooseday fame (Grandma has passed away since we recorded this episode, but there is an extensive backlog of her being very sweet if that's your thing)⟨Triangle⟩ spelled as ⟨chriego⟩ because kids are very good at phonetics actuallyOkay, in retrospect, it should have been more obvious that Chinese media using hardcoded subtitles more often than English media relates as much or more to the HUGE number of topolects in their media market than difficulty hearing tones (even in music) Old/Classical/Archaic Chinese is now suspected to be atonal, but Middle/Ancient Chinese aka Qieyun did have tones and overlaps the written record of Chinese music, including the establishment of Yayue and Chinese opera which does appear to make use of tones. (This is extremely complex and if you’re interested, you should do a lot more digging yourself! Our post-production research is still limited ^^;) Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edited by Luca, captioned by our new intern Harrison, and show notes by Sarah and Jenny. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
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    1 h y 16 m
Ciencia
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