Lingthusiasm
- Website
- http://soundcloud.com/lingthusiasm
- Description
- Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, hosted by Lauren Gawne (www.superlinguo.com) and Gretchen McCulloch (www.allthingslinguistic.com)
- Language
- 🇬🇧 English
- last modified
- 2019-11-23 14:48
- last episode published
- 2019-11-21 23:55
- publication frequency
- 29.04 days
- Contributors
- Lingthusiasm owner author
- Explicit
- false
- Number of Episodes
- 38
- Rss-Feeds
- Detail page
- Categories
- Society & Culture
Recommendations
Episodes
| Date | Thumb | Title & Description | Contributors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21.11.2019 |
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38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more In English you have one book, and three books. In Arabic you have one kitaab, and three kutub. In Nepali it’s one kitab, and three kitabharu, but sometimes it’s three kitab. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren look at the many ways th... |
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| 17.10.2019 |
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What’s your favourite smell? You might say something like the smell of fresh ripe strawberries, or the smell of freshly-cut grass. But if we asked what your favourite colour is, you might say red or green, but you wouldn’t say the colour of strawberrie... |
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| 20.09.2019 |
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36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou Larger, national signed languages, like American Sign Language and British Sign Language, often have relatively well-established laboratory-based research traditions, whereas smaller signed languages, such as those found in villages with a high proport... |
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| 16.08.2019 |
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35: Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger Sometimes a syllable is jam-packed with sounds, like the single-syllable word “strengths”. Other times, a syllable is as simple as a single vowel or consonant+vowel, like the two syllables in “a-ha!” It’s kind of like a burger: you might pack your burg... |
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| 18.07.2019 |
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Emoji make a lot of headlines, but what happens when you actually drill down into the data for how people integrate emoji into our everyday messages? It turns out that how we use emoji has a surprising number of similarities with how we use gesture. ... |
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| 20.06.2019 |
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Why does “gh” make different sounds in “though” “through” “laugh” “light” and “ghost”? Why is there a silent “k” at the beginning of words like “know” and “knight”? And which other languages also have interesting historical artefacts in their spelling ... |
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| 16.05.2019 |
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Sometimes, you know something for sure. You were there. You witnessed it. And you want to make sure that anyone who hears about it from you knows that you’re a direct source. Other times, you weren’t there, but you still have news. Maybe you found it o... |
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| 19.04.2019 |
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31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas When a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, it’s crucial to get the kids engaged with the language again. But kids don’t always appreciate the interests of their elders, especially when globa... |
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| 21.03.2019 |
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This episode is also available as a special video episode so you can see the gestures! Go to youtube.com/lingthusiasm or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8dHtr7uLHs to watch it! When you describe to someone a ball bouncing down a hill, one of the eas... |
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| 22.02.2019 |
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29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on Some sentences have a lot of words all relating to each other, while other sentences only have a few. The verb is the thing that makes the biggest difference: it’s what makes “I gave you the book” sound fine but “I rained you the book” sound weird. Or ... |
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| 18.01.2019 |
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28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a long tim... |
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| 20.12.2018 |
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There are certain things that human societies, and therefore languages, have in common. We have the same basic inventory of body parts, which affect both the kinds of movements we can make to produce words and the names we have for our meat-selves. We’... |
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| 16.11.2018 |
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26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization A letter stands for a sound. Or at least, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s C or G, which each stand for two different sounds in a whole bunch of languages. C can be soft, as in circus or acacia, or hard, as in the other C in circus or ac... |
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| 18.10.2018 |
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squishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast. All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point a... |
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| 20.09.2018 |
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24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world’s languages, this is not the c... |
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| 16.08.2018 |
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When we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’t often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisi... |
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| 19.07.2018 |
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When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know... |
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| 22.06.2018 |
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21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it ma... |
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| 17.05.2018 |
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20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary Australian and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re both national varieties that tend to get overshadowed by their more famous siblings. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretch... |
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| 19.04.2018 |
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What’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly can’t be true. But if you reply, “No, he isn’t” or “No, you don’t... |
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| 15.03.2018 |
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Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with... translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how how we translate different kinds of mea... |
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| 15.02.2018 |
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Say, “aaaaaahhhh…..” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. Feel how your tongue moves in relation to the back of the roof of your mouth as you move from one vowel to the next. When you say “ahhhh” l... |
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| 18.01.2018 |
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Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___? You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did y... |
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| 21.12.2017 |
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When we talk about things that languages have in common, we often talk about the physical side, the fact that languages are produced by human bodies, using the same brain and hands and vocal tract. But they’re also all produced (so far) by people from ... |
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| 17.11.2017 | Are you up for some prepositions? You might think you’re over prepositions, but have you ever really looked into them, or have you just gone by them? Other parts of speech notwithstanding, prepositions are something we’re really down with. In Episode... |
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| 19.10.2017 |
13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies ... |
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| 21.09.2017 | Why does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for... |
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| 17.08.2017 |
11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims – Would you like some coffee? – Coffee would keep me awake. Does that mean yes coffee, or no coffee? It depends! Is it the morning or the evening? Is the person trying to pull an all-nighter or take an afternoon nap? A computer looking strictly at t... |
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| 20.07.2017 | Some linguists work with multiple languages, while others focus on just one. But for many people, learning a language after early childhood is the thing that first gets them curious about how language works in general and all the things in their native... |
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| 15.06.2017 | How do we get from knowing words to making brand-new sentences out of them? In episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how words form groups with other words: constituency. Once you start looking for it, c... |
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| 18.05.2017 |
08: People who make dictionaries - Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper Dictionaries: they’re made by real people! In episode 8 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch talk about Word by Word, a recent book by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, about how dictionaries get made. (Spoi... |
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| 17.04.2017 | There are some pretty funny quotes of historical people complaining about kids back then doing linguistic things that now seem totally unremarkable. So let’s cut to the chase and celebrate linguistic innovation while it’s happening. In episode 7 of L... |
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| 16.03.2017 |
06: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet English writing is hugely inconsistent: is “ough” pronounced as in cough, though, through, thought, rough, plough, or thorough? And once you start adding in other languages with different conventions and writing systems, things get even more complicate... |
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| 16.02.2017 | Red, orange, yellow, grue, and purple? Not so fast – while many languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, it’s unlikely that a language would lump these two together while also having distinct words for “orange” and “purple”. But how do we ... |
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| 16.01.2017 | Every January, hundreds of linguists gather in a conference room somewhere in the US to discuss and vote for the Word of the Year. It’s the longest-running and most public WotY proceedings, and it’s part of the annual meeting of the American Dialect So... |
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| 12.12.2016 | Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists Linguists are very excited about the movie Arrival, because it stars a linguist saving the day by figuring out how to talk with aliens. Which, if you compare it to previous linguists in film (being obno... |
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| 12.12.2016 | If there are pronouns, why aren’t there connouns? What’s the point of these little words? In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne take a look at the many functions of pronou... |
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| 12.12.2016 |
01: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace Wouldn’t it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast! Lingthusiasm is a brand-new podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, hosted by Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Gretchen McCulloch of All Thi... |
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