This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!’. 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 getting enthusiastic about the melodies of words. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a recording of our liveshow with Dr. Kirby Conrod about language and gender that we held as part of LingFest.

Lauren: Thanks to all the patrons who attended, asked excellent questions, and also helped support us by keeping the show ad-free.

Gretchen: To get access to this bonus episode and many, many other bonus episodes to listen to go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Hey.

Gretchen: Hey.

Lauren: Hey?

Gretchen: Hey!

Lauren: Hey!

Gretchen: So, here’s one word, “hey,” and it’s got a bunch of different vibes depending on what pitch contour we’re using with it.

Lauren: We can use those pitch contours with a whole bunch of different words to give them a different spin. If we have a word like, “ice cream.”

Gretchen: “Ice cream.”

Lauren: Oh, very serious. Uh, “Ice cream?”

Gretchen: That’s a bit of a question. Ice cream…?

Lauren: Ice cream and what?

Gretchen: Ice cream and ice cream!

Lauren: Perfect choice. “Ice cream!”

Gretchen: Very excited ice cream.

Lauren: We’ve said the word “ice cream” with a whole bunch of different intonation that’s given it different meaning. That’s because we’re making use of the way that we can change the melody of words that we’re saying.

Keep reading

We all know cows go ‘moo’, sheep go 'baa’ and ducks go 'queck’… well medieval English ducks did. Dutch cows go 'boe’ /bu/ and Korean sheep go 음매 (eum-mae).  What is it about sounds that make a sheep sound like a sheep, and how can the name of an ice cream flavour make it sound more delicious?

In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Lauren tests Gretchen on Syuba onomatopoeia, Gretchen quizzes Lauren about good names for different products as we explore ideophones, sound symbolism and their role in understanding the world.

Listen here! 

Get access to this episode and over 30 other additional Lingthusiasm episodes by becoming a member on Patreon! 

Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality

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 out from someone else, or you pieced together a couple pieces of indirect evidence. In that case, you don’t want to overcommit yourself. When you pass the information on, you want to qualify it with how you found out, in case it turns out not to be accurate. 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we come to know things, and how different languages let us talk about this. Some languages, like English, give us the option of adding extra adverbs and clauses, like “I’m sure that” or “I was told that” or “maybe” or “apparently”. In other languages, like Syuba, indicating how you’ve come to know something is baked right into the grammar. We also talk about what this means for how kids learn languages and how English might evolve more evidentials. 

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

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode is about talking to animals! Making animals learn human language has not generally worked out as well as people have hoped, but the attempts are still very interesting! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the animals episode and 26 previous bonus episodes. 

Merch update!

Have you ever browsed the “Insert Symbol” menu just for fun? Do you stay up late reading Wikipedia articles about obscure characters? Or do you just…somehow…know a little bit too much about Unicode?

Introducing the new ESOTERIC SYMBOLS scarves! 

We’ve hand-picked and arranged in a pleasing array our favourite symbols from the editing, logic, music, game piece, punctuation, mathematics, currency, shapes, planets, arrows, and Just Plain Looks Cool sections of Unicode!

Including fan favourites like: the interrobang ‽ multiocular o ꙮ the old school b&w snowman, the pilcrow ¶ the one-em, two-em AND three-em dashes And yes, the classic Unicode error diamond with question mark itself �

We’re also very excited to announce that all our scarf designs (IPA, trees, and esoteric symbols) are now available on mugs and notebooks, for those who prefer to show off their nerdery in household object rather than apparel form. 

By popular demand, we’ve made LITTLE LONGITUDINAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION PROJECT onesies and kiddy tshirts available for everyone! Available in Mum’s, Dad’s, Mom’s, and without possessor marking (because it turns out that there are a LOT of kinship terms). 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Evidentiality (Wikipedia)
• Lamjung Yolmo copulas in use (Lauren’s PhD thesis)
• Batman should learn how to speak an evidential language (Lauren on School of Batman podcast)
  
• World Atlas of Linguistic Structures chapters on evidentiality (77, 78)
• Internet abbreviations as discourse particles
• Evidential acquisition in Turkish and Tibetan
• Fantastic Features We Don’t Have in the English Language (Tom Scott video)
  
• Gretchen’s live-tweet of Ann Leckie’s The Raven

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 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. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, 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).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms. 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 27 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today, we’re getting enthusiastic about words for family members – kinship terms! But first, we’re looking forward to 2019. It’s almost here. We’re very excited to continue with the regular show. We have some exciting plans – like video episodes.

Lauren: We’ve had a really exciting 2018. We’ve done lots of really cool stuff. You’ve been along for the ride, and we’re really looking forward to continuing with regular episodes and other exciting things in 2019.

Gretchen: And we just hit our goal to make a special video episode about the linguistics of gesture, which is super exciting.

Lauren: It was also really great to have Gretchen in Australia when we hit the goal for the gesture videos. That happened while she was out on her trip to do the live shows. We had celebratory ice cream. It was very exciting.

Gretchen: Yes, so that was fantastic. We’re looking forward to the next goal, which is going to be a special video episode interviewing a deaf linguist about the linguistics of sign language. Stay tuned for which sign language and which linguist we’re going to be interviewing for that once we hit that goal.

Lauren: Our latest bonus Patreon episode is a Q&A that we did while we were in the same geographic location, which you can find on patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Yes, as well as 20 previous bonus episodes, which is almost an entire double Lingthusiasm. You should definitely check that out if you haven’t already.

Lauren: We also both have other exciting 2019 adventures. I am having a baby, which we mentioned a couple of episodes ago. That will take up a fair amount of my 2019, I feel.

Gretchen: I feel like babies are pretty busy. But the episodes will continue as scheduled. I have a book coming out in July 2019, so you’ll also hear –

Lauren: A book baby!

Gretchen: A book baby! I wonder which one is gonna be cuter. We probably shouldn’t have that competition.

Lauren: They’re cute in their own ways.

Gretchen: One of them will eventually learn to talk back, and it won’t be the book. If you wanna see what the cover looks like, and for pre-order information, you can check out the link in the show notes or on my website as well.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, here is an important linguistic question – what are you gonna have your baby call you? Are you gonna be a “Mama,” a “Mum,” a “Mummy?”

Lauren: I haven’t thought about this, which means I guess that I’m just gonna go with my socio-cultural norms, so I’m probably gonna be “mum.”

Gretchen: Okay, that’s very standard, yeah. It seems legit.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, I have some friends who called their parents – or had their kids call them by their first names.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, that always seems really weird to me. If I call my parents by their first name, it’s because we’re having some kind of very silly conversation.

Gretchen: I think I only do it if I’m at a grocery store, or a park, or something, and I need to catch their attention, and saying “Mom” or “Dad” isn’t working, and so I’m like, “I guess I should say their name to get them to turn around.” Maybe that’s a thing you could do.

Lauren: I love how it’s such a conscious decision for you.

Gretchen: Definitely not part of my norm, but it is part of some people’s norms.

Lauren: Yeah, I know people whose kids call them by their first name just because they find the idea of being “Mum” or “Dad” really weird.

Gretchen: I also know people who find the idea of “Mum” or “Dad” being weird. They go by something like “Mama,” or “Papa” or, you know, things like –

Lauren: Or they have some kind of cultural – I have people whose families have Italian heritage, so they’re “Mama” or “Papa.” I knew someone at school who had a “Grandmother,” but her friend at school had a “Nonna.” And she was like, “Well, that word sounds cool.” And so she just started calling her very Anglo-Australian grandmother “Nonna” even though there’s no family history of Italian naming in their family.

Gretchen: That’s very cute.

Lauren: It was really cute. So sometimes people will deviate – every family has its own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, they pop up in the kinship terminology that people use.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms 

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’re all living on a watery ball of rock and fire, orbiting a large ball of gas. And we all arrived on this planet by means of other humans, and form societies to help each other stick around. Sometimes, we even bring into existence further tiny humans. 

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the special vocabulary that exists across languages for people you’re related to. Kinship terms are a fascinating area of commonality and variation: on the one hand, all languages seem to have ways of distinguishing family (both chosen and biological) from non-family. But on the other hand, there’s a wide degree of variation in the exact relationships that languages have words for, and this provides an interesting window into which relationships a culture thinks of as important. 

Languages can split up or lump together kinship relationships by age, generation, gender, clan, marriage, linguistic history, honorific extension, personal choice, and more. We also get into why words like “mama” and “papa” are so similar across languages, the surprisingly recent history of the word “sibling,” and the current rise in offshoots like “nibling” and “pibling.” 

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

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode was a Q&A session from when Gretchen was in Melbourne with Lauren, and it’s available in both the normal audio form and a surprise video version! (We were testing out the camera situation ahead of the upcoming gesture video episode.) Find out about how ears work, fun linguistic games, whether some languages change faster than others, the Australianisms that Gretchen has recently learned, and a behind-the-scenes look into how the liveshows went and future Lingthusiasm plans. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 21 previous bonus episodes.

We’re also very excited that we’ve met our Patreon goal to have a video episode about the linguistics of gesture! Follow the Lingthusiasm YouTube channel to keep an eye out for that in the new few months. Our next upcoming goal after this is to do a video episode on the linguistics of a signed language.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Syuba dictionary online
• History of English podcast episode #117 “What’s in a name?”
• Allusionist podcast episode #87 “Name Vs Law”
  
• Harmonic generations (article from Mary Laughren)
  
• Trirelationship kin terms (article from Joe Blythe)
• Nick Evans, Context, culture, and structuration in the languages of Australia (2003) [PDF] 
• Niblings (Superlinguo)
• Siblings (Etymonline)
  
• Gender neutral kin terms
• A Way With Words podcast episode #1472 “Gender Neutral Term for Aunt and Uncle?“
• Mama and Papa across languages
  

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 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. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, 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).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles. 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 21 shownotes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne, and I’m here today with Suzy Styles to talk about how the sounds of language might be connected to other sensations that you have. Welcome, Suzy!

Suzy: Hi, it’s great to be here!

Lauren: It’s so exciting to have you on the podcast. I should just say, straight up, we are doing some research together, which we’re gonna talk about during the show, and I always have such a great time chatting to you every time that we’re working that I wanted to share that, as we often like to do in Lingthusiasm, share the chats that we enjoy having so much with everyone else.

Suzy: It’s super exciting to be here, I’m delighted. I enjoy your podcast very much and also our chats together, so it’s great to combine the two!

Lauren: Excellent, that’s what I like to hear. One thing we always like to ask people straight up is: How did you get into linguistics?

Suzy: It’s a bit of an interesting one! I think when I was a small child I was very much interested in language and words, and thought about being a writer but didn’t really see how that was working with my interest in science. So I was sort of pursuing physics and chemistry and literature at the same time, and I couldn’t sort of square the two away together, and when I was getting towards the end of high school I went and took on a research project where I went and worked with a particle accelerator for a month.

Lauren: That is cool.

Suzy: So I was doing sort of nuclear physics of electron spin and all sorts of things like this, and I realised that I was deeply uninterested in the practical aspects of doing physics experiments and ran screaming to the humanities! Where on arriving at the ANU – the Australian National University – I discovered this class that was this, like, scientific approach to the language stuff that I’d always found delightful? So, Introduction to Linguistics? And I just fell in love. I haven’t left since. So that was my grand introduction, it was the language stuff and the people stuff that I’d always found fascinating, but also a more scientific approach to the logic of the stuff that I loved.

Lauren: So was there a week in that class, or was it literally week one where you were like, “This is where I need to be”?

Suzy: I read the prospectus and I was hooked.

Lauren: That’s doubly impressive! In your day job you work at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the psychology department.

Suzy: Yes.

Lauren: So how did you get from studying undergraduate linguistics to ending up in a psych department?

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 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 may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and these two names: “bouba” and “kiki”. If you had to assign one name to each shape, which would you pick?

(Here’s a pause to let you think about it.)

If you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round shape was bouba, you’re like 90% of English speakers who answer this question. But does this work the same way for speakers of other languages? What about languages that don’t have a /b/ or a /k/ sound, or that have other features, like tone?

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your host Lauren Gawne talks with guest linguist Dr Suzy Styles about how language interacts with your other senses like vision and touch, and doing research across different cultures and languages. Suzy is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and runs the BLIP (Brain Language Intersensory Processing) lab.

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

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about forensic linguistics. Gretchen and Lauren discuss the reasons why you might see a linguist in a courtroom, and whether Gretchen could write a note and convince people it was from Lauren. The least crime-filled crime podcast episode you’ll ever listen to!

We also announced two new Patreon funding goals, the first ($2,000) is to film our first video episode, taking a look at gesture. The second ($2,500) is to film at least one video interview discussing signed languages with a deaf linguist. We’re excited by the possibility of making these video episodes about linguistic topics that are a bit hard to convey in audio-only form!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• The bouba/kiki effect on Wikipedia
• The problems with doing research only on WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people
• BLIP lab
• Ković V, Sučević J & Styles SJ (2017). To call a cloud ‘cirrus’: Sound symbolism in names for categories or items. PeerJ, 5(e3466), 1-18. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3466
  
• Shang N & Styles SJ (2017). Is a high tone pointy? Degree of pitch-change in lexical tone predicts of sound-to-shape correspondences in Chinese bilinguals. Frontiers. 8(2139), 1-13. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02139
  
• When does maluma/takete fail? Journal article
• When does maluma/takete fail? Superlinguo summary
• An article about the Syuba language
• The most common speech sounds across languages
  
• 3D-printed “cloud” and “spike” models that Lauren and Suzy used to do the bouba/kiki test
  
• Lingthusiasm episode 6: Sounds you can’t hear for more about how babies learn sounds and episode 17: Vowel gymnastics for more about how vowels work in different languages

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 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. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, 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).