Wherein we are not professionals.

Jump right to:

• 4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale
• 21:38 Question 1: Why do we use 'on' to refer to spiders being 'on' ceilings? To me the spiders aren't on top of the ceiling, they're under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to 'on' in English, so I'd like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition.
• 38:20 Question 2: Morphologically and grammatically Japanese and te reo Māori behave very similarly: tons of particles all over the place, compounding as a major word source, not many affixes, little to no inflection, reduplication to convey emphasis, and very restrictive phonotactics. I see a pattern: Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai disallow large consonant clusters and are highly analytic. On the other end of the spectrum there are Georgian (agglutinative hell), and (fusional) Czech, which both have unpronounceable consonant clusters. Is this correlation real or am I imagining things? [If it's real,] what is the reason for this convergent evolution?
• 56:05 Question 3: Would someone wanting to be a linguist need a degree? Or is a degree just a sort of certification? I’ve always wondered this because I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics but I didn’t pursue it in university, instead opting for Translation (which I guess could use linguistics but you know what I mean). Would you guys, actual linguists, consider someone who studies the subject by themselves and engages in conversations of linguistics to be a linguist?
• 1:13:09 Last episode’s puzzler’s answer
• 1:19:09 The puzzler: Complete the sequence. C, F, T, ?, Y, H, N, J, I, ?

Covered in this episode:

• Teeth
• Myriads, millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, and trilliards
• Don’t be Canada

• Indefinite hyperbolic numerals, like “ten thousand,” “seventy,” “seventy times seven,” “a billion,” “a bajillion,” or “hrair”
• Hanging on to the roof of a bus
• Horses do not have walls
• Are French speakers dans or en a mechsuit? We want to know
• Things Sarah gets wrong on Duolingo
• From a spider’s perspective, the enemy’s gate is up
• Does anyone do things by purpose?
• The time on a clock is a place, a month or a year is a container, and a day is a surface

• Why do English speakers do “strength” to ourselves
• The “s” on a present-tense English verb is spicy and weird
• Japanese says you can have little a consonant, as a treat
• There are more than seven languages in the world
• Syllabic consonants

• Being a linguist is not a real-world career
• L’Academie Francais are disqualified from linguistics forever
• Eli proposes a screenplay

• It’s teeth that are the problem

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• We accidentally skipped drinks chat, but Eli had water and Sarah had a weird but tasty raspberry-lemonade wine cooler thing
• The secret dozenal system in English and the long hundred
• Short scale vs long scale, h/t Bex
• “Thousand” isn’t actually that weird; it’s just a Germanic word, instead of being derived from Latin. Here’s a map of words for “thousand” in European languages color-coded by etymology
• Per Etymonline: “billiards” the game played on as rectangular table with ivory balls and wooden sticks, 1590s, from French billiard, originally the word for the wooden cue stick, a diminutive of Old French bille "stick of wood," from Medieval Latin billia "tree, trunk," which is possibly from Gaulish (compare Irish bile "tree trunk"); totally unrelated to French billiard

• See more on our website

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 Charlie and Abby, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. 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 :)

Linguistics After Dark will be live next month! Come see us at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th–17th. More details at crossingscon.org

transcript:

ELI: Hey, hey, Sarah, what do you call it when a corvid recites a poem by Coleridge?

SARAH: …what?

ELI: A crow sings Khan.

SARAH: But why? that doesn't make any sens—ohhh, a CrossingsCon, because we're doing a live show there!

ELI: Yeah! And, and, hey, Sarah, when are the Ides of August?

SARAH: Well, CrossingsCon is the 15th through the 17th. The Ides of August are actually on the 13th.

ELI: Wait, no no no, ides are on the 15th, you know, the ides of march, stabby stabby, the whole—

SARAH: No, only sometimes, because the Romans did this weird thing where they counted the days in a month—

ELI: No no no, this isn't Romans After Dark, this is Linguistics After Dark, come see us live at CrossingsCon, August 15th through 17th, more details at crossingscon.org!

Wherein we learn how to learn how to read.

• 4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula
• 16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t)
• 1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)”

• The best holiday dinner foods
• Existential verbs
• Copulas
• The science of reading
• “Vibes-based reading” is probably not a fair term but also maybe not an inaccurate one
• The phonological processor
• FLOSZ rule
• Scribal O
• “Ghoti” is not pronounced “fish”
• 40% and 90% are different numbers
• The difference between being able to read and being able to read
• Statistically speaking, most people are not Sarah
• The four-part processing system model
• The orthographic processor
• Developmentally inappropriate fonts for kids
• Developmentally inappropriate fonts for Sarah on Duolingo
• Eli learns he’s a white girl from Ohio
• Sight-reading is not the same as whole-word reading
• The semantic processor
• Associating dogs and blueberries, dogs and bogs, or dogs and dishes
• The context processor
• Most people will not learn to read on their own
• If you’re good at something, don’t necessarily teach it
• For once on this podcast, an actual definitive answer! (Which some people might disagree with.)
• There is no “too late” in life to learn to read
• Where to learn to read, as an adult
• The nerdiest part of the episode
• The portion of our audience which comprises sailors from the 1800s

• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by George Lakoff
• True Biz, by Sara Nović
• We may not actually have talked about scalar implicature by name on the pod? Sarah talked about it in a linguistics presentation at CrossingsCon, which we think may be what Eli and Sarah were (mis)remembering when they said we’d covered it early on. Potential future Language Thing of the Day…?
• Sixty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Basic level in 2022, while thirty-seven percent of fourth-grade students performed below the NAEP Basic level. Only thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022.
• Not for the first time and not for the last: chriego and sgr
• Also not the for the first time, Canadian syllabics
• What The Font?
• The three-cueing system was developed by Ken Goodman, who almost certainly had undiagnosed dyslexia, and has been described as functionally teaching children to be dyslexic, rather than teaching anyone (with or without dyslexia) to actually read.
• Mapping where words are housed in the brain
• Jumbled words don’t actually work quite like that
• The style of writing Latin that Sarah refers to is called scripto continua
• The four-part processor diagram Kristen describes
• LETRS course with Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman
• UFLI is the University of Florida Literacy Institute
• The six syllable types in English orthography

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

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. 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 :)

Wherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now.

Jump right to:

• 6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts
• 44:23 Question 1: Why do British people say “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there,” are they afraid of gerunds or something?
• 57:11 Question 2: I’ve noticed distinctions between how numbers are pluralised and ordinalized not only between languages, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd’; number mod 10 = 3, use ‘rd’; else, use ‘th’”, but the pluralization rules are just “1” and “not 1”. How do these distinctions evolve?
• 1:10:52 Question 3: What are the features of real languages that made you go “I can’t believe it’s not a conlang!”?
• 1:28:00 The puzzler: When we quizzed a group of musical artists about their favourite Pokemon, the answers were unsurprising: Daniel Merriweather said Charizard, Eiffel 65 chose Blastoise, Coldplay said Pikachu, Spandau Ballet chose Ho-Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen said Lugia, and New Order said Suicune. But what answer did the Kaiser Chiefs give?

Covered in this episode:

• A weird bit of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border
• The guy who founded Chicago
• Sarah’s Unnamed Cocktail Corner
• The unfortunate timing with which printing became widespread in England
• Long and short vowels, which should be called tense and lax vowels because that’s what people notice anyway
• Eli does not attempt an Australian accent
• Merch idea: “I Guess That’s Part of My Grammar Now”
• The Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• The Mississippi River is not a Great Lake
• Sarah is not doing a corpus study of everything she’s ever said
• The Norman Conquest is not when the Great Vowel Shift happened
• Gerunds and nominalizing or adjectival suffixes
• Sarah out-grammars Eli
• Sit vs set and lie vs lay
• Humans are not computers
• Eli over-simplifies Japanese verb conjugation
• Noun classes sink Eli’s battleship
• Anything too systematic in other languages tends to make English speakers go “sounds fake but okay”
• Prepositions and cases are useful because they free you from each other
• The world’s laziest conlanger invented English

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• We touched on accents, including what Sarah referred to as “the Chicago /ɑ/,” in episode 2!
• Other people talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, including Wikipedia
• “Mississippi” does in fact mean “big river”! Specifically, it’s the French rendering of an Ojibwe name.
• The “near-front whatever whatever unrounded vowel” is more formally a “Near-open front unrounded vowel”. The IPA symbol is ⟨æ⟩, or “ash,” which is conveniently pronounced with the same vowel sound it means.
• The paper Eli mentioned about violence in linguistic example sentences was either Macaulay, Monica, and Brice, Colleen. 1994. Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. In Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., Sutton, Laurel A., and Hines, Caitlin, 449–461. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, or this one by the same authors. Also here’s a related and interesting paper he found while digging those citations up!
• English does still have a dual/plural distinction with some words! Examples include both/all, either/any, neither/none, between/among, former/first, and latter/last
• History of English podcast episode about numbers!
• First, second, third, -th, vs one-left & two-left

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 Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)

Wherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people.

Jump right to:

• 6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing
• 26:10 After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife's friends that my accent sounds "British" to them. I think that's ridiculous, but I'm wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are "British-sounding." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don't drop 'r's for example).
• 37:06 In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary and that Linear A might be. How do we know this? What is cool about this? What fun things should we know?
• 1:01:20 On the topic of syntactic ambiguity I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English? How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?
• 1:27:26 The puzzler: What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in common

Covered in this episode:

• Cherries
• Swearing
• Not swearing
• Objurgation is just a really excellent word
• Either everyone has an accent or no one has an accent
• England has too many accents
• Lake Champlain is not invited
• The only accents are Boston, Chicago, or British?
• 40 actual linguists with swords
• Confusing future archaeologists
• ꙮ
• You could write English entirely in katakana or romaji, but you shouldn’t
• Spaces between words are a mirage
• The Law of Conservation of Linguistic Ambiguity
• Frugivorous time flies are much less confusing in speech than text
• There is no Platonic realm of language
• Natural Language Processing
• Finishing other people’s sentences
• Puzzles designed for high class sailors from the 1800s

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Lingthusiasm’s Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project onesies
• Swearing is becoming less taboo
• Swearing reduces pain
• How many categories of swear words there are depends on how any given study chooses to group them; three, four mostly, five, or more; in general, the list seems to be religion, sex/sexual acts, bodily functions, animals, family/mothers, death/disease, and slurs
• The list of functions of swear words that Sarah found
• Boston Brahmins
• The New England historical accent grid Sarah’s husband has mentioned is real! Eli’s guesses were backwards, however—the north–south distinctions are different vowel mergers, while the east–west distinctions are rhoticity: Northern New England accents have typically had the cot–caught merger, while southern New England accents have tended to have the father–bother merger; eastern New England is historically non-rhotic, while western New England is historically r-ful
• Eli was also wrong about the pin–pen merger; it’s one of the most well-known features of Southern American English, not at all associated with New England. (He may have been thinking of the cot–caught merger, which is most common in the northeastern US?)
• The Great Lakes vs Europe map overlay
• The Eskimo-snow myth
• Margalit Fox’s book on Linear B, and also her books on sign language, Arthur Conan Doyle, and two British soldiers escaping a POW camp with the help of a Ouija board
• Minoan civilization and Mycenaean Greece
• Michael and Alice are indeed the correct first names! Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris, based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober
• The fiber arts tumblr post Eli quoted
• Minute Cryptic

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 Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)

Wherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast!

Jump right to:

• 2:42 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ways to Make Words!
• 42:18 Is it possible to have a different accent in your speaking voice versus your inner monologue voice on a regular basis? when I’m tired mine just throws from one accent to another, even ones I can’t make my mouth do but my brain knows the sounds of.
• 49:58 I would love to hear y’all talk about Unicode and Unicode normalization and the Basic Multiligual Plane from a linguistics perspective.
• 1:14:35 I’m learning French and I’m really confused about the word “chez”. it’s supposedly a preposition, but it’s used in a billion different contexts and also indicated possession? Also when used with the word “lui” (“chez lui”) it seems like it’s not a preposition anymore?
• 1:39:09 The puzzler: What comes next in the sequence 7, 8, 5, 5, 3, 4, 4, ?

Covered in this episode:

• The stress patterns of American English’s only infix
• Sarah and Eli would definitely stop in the middle of swearing to do linguistics at themselves
• Goodbye to all our French listeners, if we had any
• Acronyms that turn into words are okay, but they’re relatively new
• A Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus
• Taking two words and telling them “now kiss!”
• A hypothetical dog food bowl washing machine repair team sign-up list
• Linguistic compounds neither absorb nor generate heat
• People who turn into houses
• The Unicode Consortium, which has a very evil-sounding name, sorts things into astral planes
• “We’re an hour-long podcast,” Eli says, roughly halfway through a one hour forty-four minute episode
• ʃ versus ∫ is not a minority language community problem
• Officially we have no geopolitical stances, but we might be building a map of shady geopolitical linguistics-adjacent organizations
• Sarah has a hot take about English prepositions
• Unfortunately for second-language learners, English prepositions just don’t really work like French prepositions
• “I feel bad all my examples are always Latin,” a Latin teacher says
• English works like Legos, other languages sometimes work like whole Lego cars?

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Merriam-Webster does include “-gate” in their online dictionary!
• This got cut in the edit, but we did originally acknowledge that British English has two distinct expletive infixes, the other one being “bloody.”
• “Parallel” and “paraplegic” do share the root “para,” meaning “beside.” “Paraplegia” is a Latinized form meaning “paralysis of the lower half of the body,” from the Greek “paraplēgia,” meaning “paralysis of one side of the body,” while “parallel” literally means “beside one another,” and comes from the Greek “parallēlos,” from “para allēlois,” meaning “beside one another.”
• “OK” really does derive from “Oll Korrect” and dates back all the way to the late 1830s! After that, you don’t really get acronyms being used as words until around the twentieth century.
• “Werewolf” = “wer” (man, male person) + “wolf”
• For horses to “champ” (v.) means "to bite repeatedly and impatiently," and dates back to the 1570s; apparently that evolved from the earlier meaning “to chew noisily, crunch,” which dates back to the 1520s.
• For not the first time and definitely not the last time either, verbing weirds language.
• The Danish alphabet ends with æ, ø, and å (not ä); we couldn’t find any languages that use both æ and ä (or æ and ȅ), though we did get curious enough to look.

Ask us questions:

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

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing was done by Luca, show notes are done by Jenny, 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 :)

Wherein we shove things away (with knives).

• 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?

• 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

• 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

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

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 :)

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 bullshit." 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 bullshit
• 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 :)

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 :)

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 :)

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 :)

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 :)

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 :)

Wherein we find an excuse to recommend a bunch of music to you.

Jump right to:

• 2:26 Language Thing of the Day: Filler words
• 14:17 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 function
• Names 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 Ramones
• Our future as an advice podcast
• Gilbert & Sullivan
• Effect of language exposure before birth on babies' linguistic behavior
• Netspeak and netiquette in the 2000s
• gr8, gr9, T9
• Because Internet and its audiobook version
• Court 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 names
• vlogbrothers video about the names John and Hank
• Pop 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 docuseries
• Gilbert & 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 :)

Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:

• 00:04:42 Is syntax fake?

• 00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words

• 00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?

• 00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?

• 00:41:13 What is lenition?

• 00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?

• 01:02:15 What are fricatives?

• 01:02:33 The LxAD backstory

• 01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie

• 01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet

• 01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups

• 01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?

• 01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”

• 01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?

• 01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones

• 01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?

• 01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?

• 01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds

• 02:07:30 The Thing At The End

Covered in this episode:

• ⁠Kewpie mayo⁠

• That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you

• How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated

• Translator love

• SWORDS

• On a scale of dead to Amish…

• How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL

• Cappuccinos

• Moose

• ⁠Dessus vs. dessous⁠

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the ⁠full list of additional links⁠.

Ask us questions:

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

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is ⁠“Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod⁠. Join us at ⁠linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer⁠!

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:

• 00:04:42 Is syntax fake?

• 00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words

• 00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?

• 00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?

• 00:41:13 What is lenition?

• 00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?

• 01:02:15 What are fricatives?

• 01:02:33 The LxAD backstory

• 01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie

• 01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet

• 01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups

• 01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?

• 01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”

• 01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?

• 01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones

• 01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?

• 01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?

• 01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds

• 02:07:30 The Thing At The End

Covered in this episode:

• Kewpie mayo

• That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you

• How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated

• Translator love

• SWORDS

• On a scale of dead to Amish…

• How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL

• Cappuccinos

• Moose

• Dessus vs. dessous

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the full list of additional links.

Ask us questions:

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

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod. Join us at linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer!

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

We've gone live for #CrossingsCon! ...two years ago. And before we fell further into our unintended hiatus, we forgot to post this episode anywhere besides YouTube. Oops!! So here is this, and a promise that we are back! Full show notes will be added here and uploaded to https://linguisticsafterdark.com when we get them written, and we have a bonus episode from 2022 ready to post later this month, plus more regular episodes finally being edited!

So without further ado, call into our live show with your burning language questions and our two linguist hosts will answer them for you. Just one catch: we can’t do any research before answering. So if your language is making a funny noise, we’ll get to the bottom of it, with some rowdy discussion, bad nerdy jokes, and a lot of linguistics along the way.

If you enjoyed the show, send us a tip at https://ko-fi.com/emfozzing. And if you *really* liked the show, you can support us on Patreon at https://patreon.com/emfozzing.

For more information about CrossingsCon, visit https://crossingscon.org!

Hello, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark! I'm Sarah, and this not really an episode—it's another teaser for next week's live show at CrossingsCon: Slipping Sideways. At 7pm New York time, Tuesday August 3rd, we'll be doing a live episode with real questions from real audience members! That's you!

The convention is free to attend, and throughout the rest of the week, your beloved podcast team (that's us!) will be participating in several other cool events as well!

On Wednesday August 4th, at 8pm New York time, Eli will be running a pub-quiz-style general knowledge trivia game for anyone who wants to attend.

On Friday August 6th, at 6pm New York time, Eli will also be joining writers CB Lee, Ursula Vernon, and Cat Valente to play Baron Munchausen, a wild and ridiculous semi-cooperative story-telling game.

Then I'll be hosting and Jenny will be appearing on a panel about the creation and use of conlangs, currently scheduled for 8pm New York time on Friday August 6th. That one might change, so keep an eye on the website.

And finally, as promised in our last live show, Eli and I will join our friend Dash to talk about the linguistics and archaelogy of the game Heaven's Vault. We'll be doing that on Saturday August 7th, at 7pm New York time.

We hope to see you at as many of these events as possible, and we welcome you to check out crossingscon.org/events to get a full run-down of the whole convention. Thanks!

And if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth… now y'are :)

Check out the events from #LingFest 2021 at https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/, and get hype for CrossingsCon 21: Slipping Sideways, running from August 1-8 on Gather, with more information at https://crossingscon.org/. Our show has not been assigned a time slot yet, but we'll make sure to announce it as soon as we have one!

⁌⁍ ⁌⁍ ⁌⁍

Wherein we are LIVE.

Jump right to:

• coming soon!

Covered in this episode:

• coming soon!

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• coming soon!

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, Sarah and Jenny transcribe and do show notes. Live captioning for  this episode was done by Kelli Murphy from eCaptions. 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 :)

Hi everyone! We have two big Linguistics After Dark announcements for you.

The first announcement is: we're still here! We have two episodes that are in fact recorded and waiting to be edited, so look for those in the next little bit.

The second announcement is that we'll be doing a live show! We'll be taking questions from all of you while streaming on April 24th at 3pm Eastern. All of this is a part of LingFest, an online festival with some really cool linguistics events happening. Go to https://linguisticsafterdark.com/lingfest for more info and to get the link to the stream.

Thanks for sticking with us and we hope to see you in the stream on April 24!