Linguistics After Dark

By: Linguistics After Dark
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  • Summary

  • 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!
    Linguistics After Dark
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Science
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Episodes
  • Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)

    Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)
    Dec 29 2024
    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 infixSarah and Eli would definitely stop in the middle of swearing to do linguistics at themselvesGoodbye to all our French listeners, if we had anyAcronyms that turn into words are okay, but they’re relatively newA Terrible Underwater Breathing ApparatusTaking two words and telling them “now kiss!”A hypothetical dog food bowl washing machine repair team sign-up listLinguistic compounds neither absorb nor generate heatPeople who turn into housesThe 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 episodeʃ versus ∫ is not a minority language community problemOfficially we have no geopolitical stances, but we might be building a map of shady geopolitical linguistics-adjacent organizationsSarah has a hot take about English prepositionsUnfortunately 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 saysEnglish 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 :)
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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • Episode 13: A-blade-ive

    Episode 13: A-blade-ive
    Oct 6 2024
    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 Cases22:39 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 languages35:55 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 rhymesWe do the genitive case weird in EnglishThe thing that the thing was done toPatients and agents againEli 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 hardEli takes the most round-about route possible to figure out where he’s from Links and other post-show thoughts: The ablative in physicsProto-Indo-European noun casesFinnish cases & pronounsBasque casesAdjective 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 determinersA 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 SpeechJames Hoffman & Hames JoffmanThe “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 :)
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    52 mins
  • Episode 12: Dead Language Power

    Episode 12: Dead Language Power
    Sep 3 2024

    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 :)
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    1 hr and 7 mins

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