There are lots of extracurricular activities people do in high school, from sports to debating to math competitions. In the 1960s, a Russian linguistics undergraduate student named Alfred Zhurinsky had an idea: what if one of those things could be linguistics? Zhurinsky established the first ling...
2021-12-02 22:25:27 +0000 UTC View Post
We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can also do the same with other sets of words that don...
2021-11-18 23:53:13 +0000 UTC View Post
This 45 second track is for you to try out the speech to song illusion on yourself!
What's the speech to song illusion? We discuss it in our 57th bonus episode about linguistic illusions.
Optical illusions are pretty well-known, like a rabbit that looks like a duck (or vice versa?) or figures that appear to move or change colour when you look at black and white patterns. But there are also many fun kinds of linguistics illusions!
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enth...
2021-11-05 01:23:26 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a final reminder for any procrastinators that there's only approximately one day left to sign up for a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack by becoming a patron at the Ling-phabet tier or higher by Nov 3 ...
2021-11-02 06:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
In case time has been rapidly slipping away from you and you can't believe there's only a week left of October (I know, I'm sorry), this is your reminder that you can get a sticker pack of all of the above Lingthusiasm stickers (including a signed Because Internet one!) by 2021-10-25 18:48:17 +0000 UTC View Post
If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything publish...
2021-10-21 22:37:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Wikipedia is a treasure trove of late-night rabbit holes on all sorts of topics, including many related to linguistics! But there's more than just the articles themselves -- Wikipedia is also the process of how random people from around the internet work together to figure out what to put in them...
2021-10-08 00:25:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue.
“Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of...
2021-09-17 01:51:46 +0000 UTC View PostPeople have been telling us, I'm extremely bored of this pandemic still (still!) existing and is there a way that I could get more linguistics joy and whimsy in the mail?
People have also been asking, is there a way to get Gretchen to sign my copy of her book Because Internet, especially si...
2021-09-10 07:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a new museum entirely about language which opened up in Washington DC last year! It's called Planet Word, and we've been eagerly following its updates on social media ever since it was announced. Alas, we haven't managed to visit it yet (y'know, pandemic) but we're bringing you the next b...
2021-09-02 22:48:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've closed the box again, what are they going to think is in t...
2021-08-20 00:16:30 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the really nifty things about stories is how they can explore striking and unexpected ways that communication could be different from what we're used to, whether that's communicating with alien life forms or across space and cultures.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen...
2021-08-06 01:06:50 +0000 UTC View Post
What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your...
2021-07-16 01:33:49 +0000 UTC View Post
A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!
Kiki and bouba on scarves, mugs, notebooks, and more!
If I give you a rounded, lumpy shape and a sharp, spiky one, and tell you that one...
2021-07-09 02:26:06 +0000 UTC View Post
In fiction, we can often tell when a character is drunk or high by their way of speaking: when someone's slurring sounds together or jumping erratically from topic to topic, the audience is meant to assume that they're under the influence. But how accurate are these fictional portrayals? 2021-07-01 23:27:13 +0000 UTC View Post
When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, machine translation and other language tech tools don’t yet exist fo...
2021-06-18 02:24:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Which sounds cuter, a Pikachu or a Charmander? Which sounds like it would be more likely to win in a fight, a Squirtle or a Blastoise? If you're familiar with the world of Pokémon, you might have opinions based on your experiences with the games or the anime series, but even if you're not famili...
2021-06-04 01:19:28 +0000 UTC View Post
“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like “I don’t have a cat”, the type of negated sentence that’s true fo...
2021-05-20 22:41:19 +0000 UTC View Post
When someone else is telling a story, you might encourage them to keep talking or to elaborate on a particular point by making various words, sounds, phrases, or gestures, such as "oh really?" and "mhm-hm" and nodding. In a digital context, you might also show that you're following along by likin...
2021-05-06 22:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
You can backchannel your way through the show on the Lingthusiasm Discord, or on social media using the #lingthusiasm hashtag.
You can also find the show and use the chat function at the following youtube link (with embedded captions):
The Lingthusiasm liveshow starts in one hour! The show will last an hour, the first part a relatively normal Lingthusiasm show and the second part for your questions.
Just before the show we'll create a second livestream post so you can watch it embedded into Patreon if you prefe...
2021-04-24 20:57:01 +0000 UTC View PostWe’re doing a virtual liveshow in exactly one week! We'll be getting enthusiastic about the linguistics of the words and sounds and gestures (and emoji!) that people make to show that they’re listening, such as “uh huh” and 👍 and nodding, all the while giving you the chance to backchan...
2021-04-17 22:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of yo...
2021-04-15 22:38:54 +0000 UTC View Post
When you talk to a baby, you might find yourself speaking a bit differently from the way you'd talk to someone your own age. You might notice that you're pronouncing words more distinctly, that you're producing them with exaggerated intonation and facial expression, or even that you're using cute...
2021-04-01 21:06:40 +0000 UTC View Post
If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re made by people, and those people bring their own interests and priorities to the...
2021-03-18 22:14:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Have you eaten salad-salad, drunk milk-milk, or read a book-book lately? Or are you thinking something more along the lines of "salad, schmalad! milk, schmilk! books, schmooks!"? In either case, you're producing reduplication!
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic abo...
2021-03-04 22:28:26 +0000 UTC View Post
When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t actually have the ability...
2021-02-23 09:51:54 +0000 UTC View Post
What do you think is the best food to name a dog after? If you had to remove a phoneme from English, which do you think would have the most interesting results? How do you keep up with linguistics research outside academia?
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about a...
2021-02-04 22:48:41 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that has only been invented from scratch a handful of times: in ancient Sumeria (where it may have spread to ancient Egypt or been...
2021-01-21 19:48:34 +0000 UTC View Post