We've interviewed lots of great linguists on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD of the past few years of Lingthusiasm with direc...
2021-01-07 21:59:19 +0000 UTC View Post
“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.”
Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions – it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t know very well or a bridge into getting to know someone better by figuring out whic...
2020-12-17 22:41:51 +0000 UTC View Post
How do lexicographers make the decision to add new words or meanings to their dictionaries? What makes a word easy or difficult to define? What's the research process like for finding out the origins of words? What up and coming words are lexicographers currently keeping an eye on?
In...
2020-12-03 23:19:08 +0000 UTC View PostIt's our fourth anniversary!
We just wanted to take this moment to tell you about some additional features that Patreon has been adding lately which you might find useful, and also remind you of the perks of being a patron and make sure you know how to access them.
Nothing...
2020-12-02 02:18:49 +0000 UTC View Post
“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick” seem even less likely. What’s going ...
2020-11-19 23:46:26 +0000 UTC View Post
A big project for Lingthusiasm in 2020 has been collaborating on a series of 10 minute intro linguistics videos with Crash Course, a big educational youtube channel. Now that the 16 videos are midway through going live online, we wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes about how we've been pu...
2020-11-06 00:25:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does things that are unfamiliar to &nbs...
2020-10-15 23:42:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Most Esteemed and Venerable Audience! Lend us your ears! Attend to your most humble podcast hosts! We crave your indulgence for our discussion of honorifics!
In this episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about honorifics. We talk about how various languages encode s...
2020-10-01 23:27:37 +0000 UTC View Post
High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re growing up. For a particular group of students i...
2020-09-18 01:23:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Pangrams are sentences that contain all of the letters of the alphabet, like the famous "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and the more obscure "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!".
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about pangrams and the further ques...
2020-09-03 22:52:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking across lots ...
2020-08-20 23:56:47 +0000 UTC View Post
We had many great applicants for the LingComm Grants and alas, were not able to fund them all. But we would love to see more linguistics communication projects exist! So we decided make this episode about how to start a lingcomm project on a budget. It may also be useful for other kinds of public...
2020-08-07 02:41:19 +0000 UTC View Post
How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have a name in linguistics – they’re called phatics!
In this episode...
2020-07-17 02:07:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Both speech and music can involve making sounds using the human body, but they also have differences -- for example, music is generally more aesthetically stylized and can involve way more additional instruments than language. Different cultures highlight the similarities and differences between ...
2020-07-02 23:49:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before history started being recorded, we need to engage in some careful detective &nbs...
2020-06-19 02:16:10 +0000 UTC View PostWe'll be announcing the 2020 LingComm Grant winners when we launch our main episode (about proto-languages!) on Thursday, but we wanted to give you, our patrons, the good news about these fantastic projects a couple of days early.
We had over 75 applications from around the world and ...
2020-06-15 04:06:29 +0000 UTC View Post
It's a truth universally acknowledged that if you put a linguist within 5 metres of a child, that linguist suddenly becomes an acquisitionist. Child language acquisition is a perennial source of entertainment for the linguistically-inclined -- and so is helping any young people in your life devel...
2020-06-05 03:26:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common -- they all contain the same sound, even though they each spell it with a different letter. This sound is known as schwa, it's written as an upside-down lowercase e, and it has the unique distinction of being the only ...
2020-05-22 01:46:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Numbers are one of those topics that reminds us that humans go about the world in meat suits -- in particular, meat suits with 10 fingers. But not all languages count on the fingers. Some also include other body parts, like the toes or even protrusions like the elbow, shoulder, and nose. Other sy...
2020-05-08 01:16:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, and the Oxford English Dictionary has &n...
2020-04-17 00:27:26 +0000 UTC View Post
What colour is the letter A? Are the days of the week or months of the year located in particular positions for you? Do certain musical notes have colours or textures? Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon where certain senses or concepts cross over into other ones, and it's probably more common ...
2020-04-03 00:52:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is -- it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently learnable -- because otherwise they wouldn’t exist at...
2020-03-19 22:52:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Every year in linguistics departments across the world, linguists crack out their favourite linguistic examples and welcome a new cohort of introductory linguistics students. Lauren is so excited to be getting back into the Ling101 classroom (it's the beginning of the new academic year in Austral...
2020-03-06 01:38:00 +0000 UTC View Post
We've announced so many things these past few weeks that we thought we'd have a nice chat to catch up about them! Think of it as a bonus bonus episode! (The real February bonus was released early, in January, and it's 2020-02-27 22:33:25 +0000 UTC View Post
How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of langu...
2020-02-20 23:39:23 +0000 UTC View Post
We couldn't make you wait until now to listen to our February bonus (part two of our interview with Janelle Shane), so we released that back in January.
As an extra bonus we wanted to share...
2020-02-06 22:51:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: And I’m Lauren Gawne.
Lauren: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch. So I mentioned some of my favourite Harry ... 2020-01-17 00:45:08 +0000 UTC View Post
If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the computer may eventually learn how to do these things for itself: to generate new potential ice cream flavours or identify the giraffehood status ...
2020-01-17 00:42:17 +0000 UTC View PostSince starting Lingthusiasm three years ago, we've enjoyed hearing from so many of you how Lingthusiasm got you into linguistics or helped you reconnect with your long-lost enjoyment of linguistics. But for many of you, this also posed a problem: where can you find other people to chat with who a...
2020-01-16 23:06:29 +0000 UTC View Post
We often look back at the origins of English words, but it's also weird to pause and realize that we're somewhere in the middle of the history of English, not at its ultimate destination. Which leads us to ask, well, what might this future English look like?
Gretchen travelled to the...
2020-01-02 21:13:05 +0000 UTC View Post