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Posts tagged "Arrival"

Transcript Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode her e or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes pag e.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the complexity of the relationship between the language you speak, and the way that you perceive reality. But first, our most recent bonus episode was the results of our 2024 listener survey.

Gretchen: We learned which one of us was more “kiki” and which one of us was more “bouba.”

Lauren: Mm-hm. And we discussed the highly competitive hand gesture game of “Paper, Scissors, Rock.”

Gretchen: “You mean ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’?” – and more things that people call it cross-linguistically.

Lauren: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and almost 100 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Ooo, 97! We’re almost at 100.

Lauren: Should we do something special for our hundredth?

Gretchen: Stay tuned to see if we do.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, I recently read the classic science fiction book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, which people have been asking me to read for a long time.

Lauren: It’s from, like, the mid-’60s, so, for basically much longer than you’ve been a linguist (or alive) it’s been a staple of linguistic sci-fi reading.

Gretchen: Yes, this book is older than I am. You have to come to classics when you come to them. There’s no wrong time to do something like that. It sure does have a lot of linguistic elements. There’s this very cute bit where – so the characters have a lot of these interesting body modifications. This character has fangs and so can’t make a P sound.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because I guess if you have teeth sticking out over your lips, you can’t close your lips to make a P.

Gretchen: The thing that gets me is it is explicitly said that he can’t make the P but he can make a B – and those are done with the same movement of the lips. It’s just the vocals cords which are different, which has nothing to do with where your fangs are.

Lauren: I absolutely love the linguist brain with which you read these books.

Gretchen: This was my experience of reading a lot of Babel-17 is that there’s a lot of linguistic elements that are almost doing it for me. The biggest of those is “Babel-17” itself, which in the book refers to this mysterious alien language that our poet linguist character (like, more poet linguists, that’s great) is assigned to interpret/decipher/translate/figure out from recordings. Classic linguist sci-fi story line, but Samuel Delany is one of the first people doing it.

Lauren: I was very invested in this character when I read this book ages ago.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

It’s a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you’d been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what’s the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time travel or mind control, a reflection that we add new words all the time as convenient handles to talk about new concepts, a note that grammatical categories can encourage us to pay attention to specific areas in the world (but aren’t the only way of doing so), a social reflection that we feel like different people in different environments (which can sometimes align with different languages, though not always). We also talk about several genuine areas of human difference that linguistic relativity misses: different perceptive experiences like synesthesia and aphantasia, as well as how we lump sounds into categories based on what’s relevant to a given language.

Finally, we talk about the history of where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from, why Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been great on TikTok, and why versions of this idea keep bouncing back in different guises as a form of curiosity about the human condition no matter how many specific instances get disproven.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about two sets of updates! We talk about the results from the 2024 listener survey (we learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba!), and our years in review (book related news for both Lauren and Gretchen), plus exciting news for the coming year.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

“

Gretchen: There’s this one part of Arrival, which I think is the biggest quibble that linguists have with the story, where the physicist character says to the linguist, “You think of language like a mathematician.” And she’s just like “Yeah.”

Lauren: Whereas if she was a real linguist she’d be like, “Um, yeah, obviously.”

Gretchen: I mean, I’m glad they made the point somehow, but this is literally what linguistics is.

”

—

Excerpt from Episode 3 of Lingthusiasm: Arrival of the linguists - Review of the alien linguistics film. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for more linguistics thoughts about the movie.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Arrival of the linguists’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the linguist film Arrival. But first, Lauren, what have you been up to these days?

Lauren: I am enjoying getting a fair amount of work done and published, which is a rare and exciting feat in academia sometimes. I have a descriptive grammar of Yolmo, which is a language that I worked with for my PhD. That’s now available. I’m really excited because it’s an open access book, which means that anyone can download it and read it for free.

Gretchen: Yay!

Lauren: I’ll put the link to that in the shownotes for those who are in any way interested in the grammar of Tibetan dialects of languages spoken in Nepal. I know many of you are. But it’s really, really exciting.

Gretchen: It’s a bit niche.

Lauren: [Laughs] Yeah. You’ve seen Arrival. Now read detailed descriptions of the distribution of ergativity. That’s been happening. I’m going to a conference called LDLT – Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory – in December at SOAS University, which is also the University I’m at. No-travel-required conference – always a bonus. If there’s anything interesting to report there, I will report back.

Gretchen: I look forward to hearing about it.

Lauren: What have you been up to?

Gretchen: I have been working away in the background on my book about internet language and the future of English, which is something that occupies a lot of my time but currently has nothing that I can share with people. So, I’m trying to get the second draft done and into my editor. It’s making progress. It’s taking shape to be a real book, which is exciting, but there’s still a lot of editing ahead of me. I also just got back from Emojicon, which was a conference about emoji where I met some members of the Unicode Consortium, the shadow-y committee that decides which emoji we have. I had a lot of conversations about what types of things should be represented and what the role of a technological standard is implementing that. I think that’s really interesting because it’s the opposite of how dictionaries work. Dictionaries are just playing catch up. People decide to use words and then dictionaries just add them, whereas for emoji, because they’re a technological thing, the committee has to decide first based on sometimes shadow-y evidence for whether or not an emoji’s gonna be desired by a lot of people. That was very interesting.

Lauren: It’s funny. Occasionally, at the moment, I message someone, and I’m just like, “Ah, I wish there was an emoji for this thing. It would be really handy right now.” All I have to do is lobby the Unicode Consortium, apparently.

Gretchen: You can write a proposal. You can make a PDF document that has the reasons and some Google Trends data to try to provide some sort of justification for whether people are searching for it or whether people are tagging stuff with that on Instagram or something like whether it’s a concept that’s being used. Because, I mean, obviously, if it’s just something very obscure, they’re gonna say no. If you ever wanna write an emoji proposal, I can point you to where to do that.

Lauren: There you go. I learnt a thing today.

[Music]

Gretchen: Shall we talk about Arrival?

Lauren: Yes. I mean, I feel like I’ve been talking about nothing else, but maybe people who are linguists haven’t been quite as excited as linguist internet has been about the film Arrival.

Gretchen: The linguist internet has been very excited about it. But I also have the linguist who consulted for Arrival on my Facebook, so I’ve been seeing all her posts about it.

Lauren: Not only do you have her on your Facebook, but she was your teacher, right?

Gretchen: Yeah, she was my advisor in grad school. I worked with her on my thesis.

Lauren: That is amazing. For people who don’t know what the film Arrival is about, you saw it slightly more recently than me, Gretchen, so it’s a week fresher in your brain.

Gretchen: Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor. The linguistics professor gets called upon to – aliens arrive, sorry. Aliens arrive, and nobody can talk with them.

Lauren: I love that you start with the linguistics professor. “There’s a linguistics professor!”

Keep reading

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 obnoxious to poor flower girls, for example) is a vast improvement.

In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, Gretchen and Lauren come to you having just watched Arrival, to tell you what it got right and wrong about life as a linguist, how linguists have been reacting, and the linguists who consulted on the film. We also talk about some other books and films that feature linguistics, if Arrival caught your interest.

We also discuss what we’ve been up to lately. Gretchen is busily writing the latest draft of her book about internet English, and Lauren has just published a grammar of a language spoken in Nepal.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Reviews:

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Original Source | Taken Source

Posts tagged "Arrival"

Transcript Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists

Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists

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