Linguistics After Dark

Linguistics After Dark
Linguistics After Dark

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!

  1. OCT 6

    Episode 13: A-blade-ive

    Wherein we shove things away (with knives). Jump right to: 0:37 Is there a word in some language for “responding to the literal words and not the subtext of a request? 4:22 Response question from Spotify: With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren’t actively trying to comprehend it? 7:30 Language Thing of the Day: Noun Cases 22:39 Question #1: Do other languages have adjective ordering like English? 27:08 Question #2: What would the phonetic description of a raspberry be? "Labio-lingual trill"? Also, it occurs to me that it would be cool if there were some kind of database of paralinguistic sounds, containing things like "ingressive labiodental fricative" (inhaling sharply through your teeth), and explanations of what they mean in various languages 35:55 Question #3: What part of speech is "End" in the phrase “End Construction” as seen on a highway road sign? I'd've thought it was a noun, shorthand for “the end of,” but I’ve noticed that in Virginia the road signs will read things like “Enter Fairfax County” and “Leave Arlington County,” which suggest that the first word is a verb, not a noun, and that raises more questions: why is it "leave" and "enter" (imperatives?) rather than "entering" or "leaving"? 44:14 The puzzler: If a 40-pound stone broke into four pieces which could be used to weigh any whole-number increment from 1 to 40, what must the weights of the individual pieces be? Covered in this episode: The hypothetical existence of a possibly-German word or sociological term meaning something in the vicinity of “oblivious literalism,” “de-phaticization,” “desubtextualization,” “supertextualization,” or “involuntary textual meaning-raising” Don’t only listen to nursery rhymes We do the genitive case weird in English The thing that the thing was done to Patients and agents again Eli is shock-nə “Tsk tsk, it looks like rain”? “Standard” English is bad at present tense (and “Standard English” is a bad term) As usual, translation is hard Eli takes the most round-about route possible to figure out where he’s from Links and other post-show thoughts: The ablative in physics Proto-Indo-European noun cases Finnish cases & pronouns Basque cases Adjective ordering in English is (article, number, then) opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose Apparently numbers, if not adjectives, are linguistically categorized as “numerals,” a subcategory of quantifiers, which are a subcategory of determiners A raspberry without tongue is a voiced bilabial trill, written [ʙ] in IPA; a raspberry with tongue (when it’s not on the menu at a cocktail bar) is either (yes!) a voiceless linguolabial trill and written [r̼̊], or a a buccal interdental trill, written [ↀ͡ r̼] in the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech James Hoffman & Hames Joffman The “tsk tsk” / “tut tut” sound is a dental click, written [ǀ] in IPA 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. Audio editing for this episode was done by Luca, 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 :)

    52 min
  2. SEP 3

    Episode 12: Dead Language Power

    Wherein we are not warful. Jump right to: 3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic” 5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis 23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the difference into words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”. 35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent? 51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is b******t." Discuss. 1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat? Covered in this episode: If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem “Collectivity” is not a word people know Etymology is not destiny English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults Sooner or later, M shows up Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit) Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing b******t Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units Links and other post-show thoughts: Lexical gaps in English Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit! IPA pulmonic consonant charts This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds Optimality Theory 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. Audio editing is done by Luca, 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 :)

    1h 7m
  3. JUL 30

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

    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 :)

    1h 11m
  4. JUN 27

    Episode 10: Voiceless Alvie

    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 :)

    1h 24m
  5. APR 27

    Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana

    Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours! Jump right to: 5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity 34:55 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 verbs Why you can give a mouse a cookie but you cannot sleep a sandwich Standard phonological mistakes A rat whose name is not Cheese-teeth Political allegiances of the Noldor Too vs. tsoo and Tuesday vs. Tyuesday vs. Chewsday English 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, either Unaccusative vs. unergative intransitive verbs in English (depending on which argument is missing) Valency), aka the real word for the marble slots we talked about Mary Spender’s youtube channel Chris 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 actually Okay, 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 :)

    1h 16m
  6. MAR 22

    Episode 8: No Linguist Can Afford That House

    Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics. Jump right to: 3:15 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Garden path sentences 25:05 How do [in/formal] registers change over time; do they stairstep as we invent new informal registers and then everything bumps up a notch and the old formal registers fall off as “staid”, or is it nonuniform? 37:21 Audio question! Is linguistics a science? Is it a prestigious science? Why or why not? 58:03 What are your favorite words that don’t have an English equivalent or cannot be translated into English? 1:16:20 Listeners, what are your favorite words that haven't been fully un-italicized into English yet? 1:18:18 The puzzler: Think of an informal term for a beverage. Now say it in pig Latin, and you'll have an informal term for another beverage. What two beverages are these? Covered this episode: The beverage fandom The euphemism treadmill Real-time language processing How Sarah likes syntactic ambiguity more than most people Linguists are not (necessarily) translators Linguistics is not physics Yoinking words from language to language Are toilets pieces of furniture? Links and other post-show thoughts: The headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” was actually spotted by American editor Mike O’Connell and shared to a linguistics forum, where another member, Dan Bloom, suggested “crash blossoms” as a term, as summarized on the Language Log and expanded on by the New York Times XKCD #435: Purity about applied sciences XKCD #2381: The True Name Of The Bear about the euphemism treadmill That diagram Sarah mentioned about all the branches of linguistics McGill professors Lisa deMena Travis and Jessica Coon’s offices were used as references for Arrival as described on the Language Log here, here, here, and here SciComm people we named who you should look up: Vihart, Matt Parker, Numberphile for math. Brian Green, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox for physics. Language Log, John McWhorter, Gretchen McCulloch, Lauren Gawne for linguistics. English usage, Brian Garner and Grammar Girl. 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. Edits by Luca, transcript by Jenny, show notes by Sarah. 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 :)

    1h 21m
  7. 12/10/2023

    Episode 7: The Fax Machine of Gondor

    Wherein we spin a shitpost question into linguistics gold. Jump right to: 0:58 Mailbag; revisiting our treatment of linguistic typology 12:14 Language Thing of the Day: The Comparative Method 32:32 Question 1: Is English a creole? 40:34 Question 2: Are Old English and Modern English the same language? 51:07 Question 3: Is there any part of language that isn’t just slang and jargon that’s made it into the mainstream? 1:07:47 Last week’s puzzler answer 1:08:33 The puzzler: Take the name of an old communication technology, add a letter, and mix the letters around. You should get the name of a new communication technology — what is it? Covered in this episode: How a language's words and syntax can fall into different places on the typology spectrum We're not Fractions After Dark, but we do like PIE Why Grimm's Law should be called Rask's Rule Star Wars spoilers via linguistic sound changes A linguistics hot take with merit The deterioration of the institution of marriage via etymology Time is the cement mixer of language A defense of business jargon Links and other post-show thoughts: Morphological Typology Sir William Jones's speech, with a quote presaging the comparative method Example of a Swadesh list Examples of Grimm’s Law Examples of English and German post-Grimm shifts English Is Not Normal: A Case for English as a Semi-Creole Germanic, by John McWhorter (The article doesn’t appear to be accessible online, unfortunately.) We tried to answer the question “how many Romance languages are there?” and the answer is both “a lot, more than you might think” and “the number varies depending on what counts as a language” which, honestly, we should have seen coming. The History of English Podcast and the Saga Thing podcast Lenition chart Bill Labov's study about women being the agents of language change comes from Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors, in particular chapters 8-11. We couldn’t find a PDF available anywhere. The beacons are lit! Marketing calls for aid! Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edits: Luca; transcript: Luca/Jenny; notes: Jenny/Eli. 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 :)

    1h 12m
  8. 11/11/2023

    Episode 6: Hamburger. Hamburger? Hamburger!

    Wherein we find an excuse to recommend a bunch of music to you. Jump right to: 2:26 Language Thing of the Day: Filler words14:17 Question 1: How did we get nicknames that don't seem to make sense? Like how did "Peggy" come out of "Margaret"?25:26 Question 2: Why do singers' accents almost always become less intense in their singing voices as opposed to their speaking voices?37:30 Question 3: How do we change the meaning of a sentence just by changing vocal pitch? Typed-out transcripts can lose the information conveyed by vocal pitch.1:04:32 Answer to last week's puzzler 1:07:39 The puzzler: (Too long for Spotify! Check the post on our site!)Covered in this episode: Filler words in different languages (English, Japanese, ASL), and their discourse functionNames and their nickname equivalents: Margaret/Peggy, Theodore/Ted, Richard/Dick, John/Jack Backformed names (e.g. if Nate is short for Nathan, then Kate is short for Kathan)How nicknames are formed in different languages (Russian, Polish, Chinese)What are children if not longitudinal linguistic studies?The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Blink-182, the RamonesOur future as an advice podcastGilbert & SullivanEffect of language exposure before birth on babies' linguistic behaviorNetspeak and netiquette in the 2000sgr8, gr9, T9Because Internet and its audiobook versionCourt transcript style guides of the future How to destroy a stuffed sheep with a lightbulb Links and other post-show thoughts: Number One brand Thai iced tea (available loose or bagged) History of English podcast episode about first namesvlogbrothers video about the names John and HankPop punk accent article blink 182: "I'm an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent," Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1994.History of Punk docuseriesGilbert & Sullivan Modern Major General has excellent patter and limited lyrical. It was tough to find a G&S clip that had both by the same singer in back to back moments.Sondheim (Not) Getting Married Today has good patter vs lyrical.We couldn't find the My Cousin Vinny clip or Chinese nickname thread. If you find some, send them our way! The first five minutes: A sample of microscopic interview analysis by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy, which is a book from 1960 analyzing in minute detail the intonational meaning and paralinguistics of the first five minutes of a psychiatric interview.Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Jenny Sarah transcribed this one, and Sarah Eli did the show notes. 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 :)

    1h 13m

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About

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!

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