Lingthusiasm Episode 68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about borrowing and loanwords. There are lots of different trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to language, including words that are associated with particular domains, like tea and books, words that shift meaning when they language hop, like “gymnasium” and “babyfoot”, words that get translated piece by piece, like “gratte-ciel” (skyscraper) and “fernseher” (television), and words that end up duplicating the same meaning (or is it…?) in multiple languages, like “naan bread” and “Pendle hill”. We also talk about the tricky question of how closely to adapt or preserve a borrowed word, depending on your goals and the circumstances.

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

Announcements:

The LingComm grants have been announced! Thank you so much to everyone who made this possible, and congratulations to all our grantees. Go check out their projects as they keep rolling out over the rest of this year for a little more fun linguistics content in your life.

In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded live through the Lingthusiasm Discord, we get enthusiastic about your sweary questions! We talk about why it’s so hard to translate swears in a way that feels satisfying, how swears and other taboo words participate in the Euphemism Cycle, a very ambitious idea for cataloging swear words in various languages, and more.

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 60+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can play and discuss word games and puzzles with other language nerds!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Snopes entry ‘Did Coca-Cola translate its name into a Chinese phrase meaning ‘bite the wax tadpole’?’
• Auslan.org dictionary entry for ‘ham’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘false friend’
• @OlaWikander‘s tweet about tungsten
• Wikipedia entry for ‘tungsten’
• Wikipedia entry for Polish ‘herbata’
  
• The Language of Food blog entry about the etymology of cha/tea
• Map of tea vs cha spread via Quartz
• WALS entry for words derived from Sinitic ‘cha’ vs words derived from Min Nan Chinese ‘te’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘calque’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘Uncleftish Beholding’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’
• ‘Morphological Complexity and Language Contact in Languages Indigenous to North America’ - by Marianne Mithun
  
• Wikipedia entry for ‘Pendle Hill’
• En Clair - The Pendle Witch Trials
• All Things Linguistic post on loadwords creating duplicates (including the TikTok video about pav-roti)
• Wikipedia list of tautological place names

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 advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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 production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. 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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 66: Word order, we love

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” – but that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is that for any given language, we all agree on which order means what.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages put words in a particular order. There are many possibilities, but a few of them show up a lot more than others: “I <3 linguistics” (as in English and Indonesian) and “I linguistics <3″ (as in Turkish and Japanese) are the most common word orders for conveying who did what to who. Another common strategy is using some other way of marking the actor and the acted-upon, which frees up word order for other functions, like indicating the topic of the sentence first (and what you want to comment about it afterwards) – in English, this might be akin to “Linguistics, I <3 it”. We also look at how Yoda maintains his unique approach to word order across a variety of languages, including Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, and Czech.

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

Announcements:
We’re doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We’ll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event to live-react in the text chat, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!

LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.

If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other linguistics nerds. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own research came from, figuring out spaces for new questions in the existing literature, and bridging gaps between multiple subject areas and communities. Listen here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• WALS map of Order of Subject, Object and Verb (SOV, SVO, etc)
• All Things Linguistic post on the I <3 NY meme
• Inuit Sign Language: a contribution to sign language typology
  
• All Things Linguistic post on Yoda’s syntax in languages other than English
• All Things Linguistic post on what baby Yoda’s first words might be
• Why we need a gradient approach to word order
  
• @abenitezburraco tweet about gradient approach to word order
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns. Little words, big jobs’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on’

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 advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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 production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and production manager is Liz McCullough. 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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text

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 readers in the destination language but would be familiar to readers in the original language. 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. We talk about the new, updated translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (affectionately known as the “bro” translation), reading the Tale of Genji in multiple translations, translating conlangs in fiction, and mistranslation on the Scots Wikipedia. 

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

Announcements

We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and we’ve seen a significant bump in listens each November when we ask you to help share the show, so we know this works. If you tag us @lingthusiasm on social media in your recommendation post, we will like/retweet/reshare/thank you as appropriate, or if you send a recommendation to a specific person, we won’t know about it but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction at helping out (and feel free to still tell us about it on social media if you’d like to be thanked!). Trying to think of what to say? One option is to pick a particular episode that you liked and share a link to that. 

This month’s bonus episode was about honorifics, words like titles and forms of “you” that express when you’re trying to be extra polite to someone (and which can also be subverted to be rude or intimate). Get access to this and 43 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

This is also a good time to start thinking about linguistics merch and other potential gift ideas (paperback copies of Because Internet, anyone?), in time for them to arrive via the internet, if you’re ordering for the holiday season. Check out the Lingthusiasm merch store at lingthusiasm.com/merch.  

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable
• Beowulf, translation by Maria Dahvana Headley
• A “Beowulf” for Our Moment (New Yorker)
• Gretchen reads Beowulf (twitter thread)
• The Sensualist: What makes “The Tale of Genji” so seductive (New Yorker)
• Shadowscent, by P.M Freestone
• How I made the Aramteskan language (Superlinguo)
• Scots Wikipedia (Wikipedia article)
• Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem (The Verge)
• Gretchen’s twitter thread about Scots Wikipedia
  

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 production manager is Liz McCullough, 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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation  

Why do some conversations seem to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation? 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne have a conversation about the structure of conversations! Conversation analysts talk about a spectrum of how we take turns in conversation: some people are more high-involvement, while other people are more high-considerateness, depending on how much time you prefer to elapse between someone else’s turn and your own. These differences explain a lot about when conversations feel like they’re going off the rails and how to bring them back on track. 

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 onomatopoeia! We talk about words that take their inspiration from the sounds and experiences of the world around us, and how these words vary across languages. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the onomatopoeia episode and 33 previous bonus episodes.

Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Twin Babies Conversation (YouTube)
  
• Kingston’s conversation with Me (YouTube)
• Conversation Analysis (Wikipedia)
  
• Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation (LSA)
  
• Deborah Tannen (Wikipedia) has several pop linguistics books about conversation, which are very accessible and fun to read! 
• Who’s got the floor? (Carole Edelsky, Language in Society)
• High-involvement and high-considerateness (Wikipedia)
  
• Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
  
• Lingthusiasm Episode 23: When Nothing Means Something

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 production manager is Liz McCullough, 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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 34: Emoji are Gesture Because Internet

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. 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about emoji, and how gesture studies can bring us to a better understanding of these new digital pictures. We also talk about how we first came to notice the similarities between emoji and gesture, including a behind-the-scenes look into chapter five of Gretchen’s book about internet linguistics,   Because Internet (the chapter in which Lauren makes a cameo appearance!)

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

Announcements:

Speaking of which, that’s right, Because Internet, Gretchen’s long-anticipated book about internet linguistics, is coming out this Tuesday! (That’s July 23, 2019, if you’re reading this from the future.) If you like the fun linguistics we do on Lingthusiasm, you’ll definitely like this book! Preorders and the first week or two of sales are super important to the lifespan of a book, because they’re its best chance of hitting any sort of bestseller list, so we’d really appreciate it if you got it now! 

We’re planning a special bonus Patreon Q&A episode with behind the scenes info on Because Internet and the book writing process once it’s out, so send us your questions at contact@lingthusiasm.com or on social media by August 15th to be part of this bonus episode! 

We also have a new tier on Patreon! For $15 or more, join the Ling-phabet tier and get your name and favourite IPA symbol or other special character on our Lingthusiasm Supporters Wall of Fame! Plus, join the new $15 tier by August 15th, and get a free Because Internet bookplate signed by Gretchen with your name on it and sent to you in the mail, so you can stick it inside of your copy of Because Internet (or anywhere else you like to put stickers). 

As usual, we also have a bonus episode for the $5 Patreon tier, and this month’s bonus episode is about family words! Aka familects, these are the unique words that you create and use within your family. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the familects episode and 28 previous bonus episodes.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Many links for ordering Because Internet
• Emoji as Digital Gestures (Lauren and Gretchen’s new academic article in Language@Internet)
  
• Emoji aren’t ruining language: they’re a natural substitute for gesture 🔥🔥🔥  (Lauren’s summary in The Conversation)
  
• Emoji Grammar as Beat Gestures (Gretchen and Lauren’s earlier paper about emoji and gesture) 
• What gesture can teach us about emoji (Superlinguo)
• Why do we gesture when we talk? (Lingthusiasm Episode 30)
  

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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change

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 systems? Spelling systems are kind of like homes – the longer you’ve lived in them, the more random boxes with leftover stuff you start accumulating.

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about spelling, and celebrate the reasons that it’s sometimes so tricky. We then dive into quirks from some of our favourite spelling systems, including English, French, Spanish, Tibetan, and Arabic.

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 direction words! When you’re giving directions, do you tell someone to go north, left, or towards the sea? In this bonus episode, e talk with Alice Gaby about how different languages use different direction words. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the directions episode and 27 previous bonus episodes.

Because Internet, Gretchen’s book about internet linguistics, is coming out next month, and if you like the fun linguistics we do for Lingthusiasm, you’ll definitely like this book! You can preorder it here in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook (read by Gretchen herself) – preorders are really important because they signal to the publisher that people are excited about linguistics, so they should print lots of copies! We really appreciate your preorders (and you can look forward to a special Q&A episode with behind the scenes info on Because Internet once it’s out!)

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Dialect variation in Old English (Wikipedia)
• The Great Vowel Shift (OED)
• Vowel Gymnastics (Lingthusiasm Episode 17)
• William Caxton (Wikipedia)
• Baltimore/Voldemort (All Things Linguistic)
• Arabic Alef (Wikipedia)
• Tibetan Script (Wikipedia)
• Ænglisc Ἐτυμολογικal Speling Réforme - Etymology based spelling proposal for English (All Things Linguistic)
• Make English spelling less logical (BAHfest)

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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable

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 we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?”

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

Announcements:

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing. When we launched our Patreon this time last year (wow!) with a bonus episode about the sounds of swearing, we promised that we’d come back with even more about swearing that we didn’t have space to talk about. Now you can listen to a sweary double feature: put on bonus #1 and bonus #13 back to back! As always, episodes that aren’t specifically about swearing are swear-free. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• No word for dead umbrellas?
• Dr. Jen Gunter’s “no word for…”
• Concept first, jargon second
• A meta-analysis of all ‘untranslatable emotions’ lists
• ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ in Mandarin
• Translating poetry
• The art of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey
  
• Rickrolling (Know Your Meme)
• A better definition of Rickrolling
• Mate(ship)
  
• Early mark
• Denotation
• Connotation
• Life is HARD (Dinosaur Comics)
  

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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 16:  Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test

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 you know this, if you’ve never heard the word “wug” before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s?  

Now try saying two cat__ 🐈🐈, two dog__ 🐕🐕 and two horse__ 🐎🐎. Why did you end up with catssss but dogzzzz, and have to add a whole extra syllable to horse? 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into the realm of language between words and sounds, the realm of morphemes like “wug” and “cat” and “-s” and “pre-” and “episode”.  What do you know subconsciously about how morphemes fit together? How do kids learn them from such an early age? How do linguists test what kids know about words? 

Wugs, in fact, are no longer often used for the wug test, because their cute, birdlike shape has become so famous as an unofficial mascot of linguistics that we can’t assume people haven’t seen the word anymore! People have made wug cookies, crochet wugs, wug memes, and more fun wug items, and you can check out some of our favourite wuggish links below. 

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

Announcements:

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is an interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk about communicating linguistics, and how we are all linguistic geniuses. We also have a new Patreon goal: at $1,200 we’re going to commission a linguist-artist to illustrate a memorable bit from the show! Everyone will get to see the art, which we’ll also make available on merch, and patrons will also get a high-resolution download and behind-the-scenes concept sketches. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Take the full wug test (or try it with a child in your life!) 
  
• The original wug test paper (Berko Gleason 1958)
• wugs, blicks, and kazhes
  
• IOLing 2003 Adyghe morphology problem
  
• “I cooked the wrong meat for them again“ in Mayali
• -spiration
• Teaching yourself morphology
• Morphology meme
• Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax
  
• Longest word in Turkish

Here is a list of cool wug stuff mentioned in this episode:

• Wug cookies (1) (2) (3)
  
• Jumping wug
• The wugs are breeding
• More wugs
• Noots
• Arrival wugs
  
• Renaming ponytails hairwugs
  
• Wugs on mugs
• A knitted wug
• One wug, two wug, red wug, blue wug
  
• Wuge
• wugalicious mock battle
  
• A wug poem
  
• Jean Berko Gleason, creator of the wug test, with a very large wug

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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 15:  Talking and thinking about time

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 the same planet and going through the same fourth dimension: time. 

As the earth revolves around the sun again, each of your Lingthusiasm cohosts is going through another longest (Lauren) or shortest (Gretchen) day, and we’re reflecting on how languages measure the passing of time. This episode of Lingthusiasm is a chance to reflect on the cyclical nature of years and days, the metaphors we use to talk about time in space, from time-space synesthesia to whether the past is behind us or in front of us, and why we measure time in seconds, but not thirds. (We definitely know that tense is also a time-related concept, but it’s such a cool topic that we’re going to give it its very own episode – something to look forward to!) 

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

Announcements:

Thanks to everyone who has made this year of Lingthusiasm so great! It’s been a year since we made our first episodes live, and we have been so delighted by how many people share our enthusiasm for linguistics. Thanks especially to our patrons, who keep the show running (and ad-free). 

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is our first full-length bonus and it’s a question and answer session from our Montreal liveshow! Now you can have the full lingthusiastic liveshow experience with Bonus 8 (the main show) and Bonus 10 (the Q&A). We’ve still got IPA scarves and more in the merch section, but if you’re looking for a gift that doesn’t require postage, why not give someone a gift subscription to bonus episodes on Patreon? 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• A ghost driving a meat coated skeleton
  
• ‘Minute’ etymology (Etymonline)
• Children using time words (All Things Linguistic)
  
• When’s a new year? (Superlinguo)
• Metaphors We Live By
  
• The French Revolutionary Calendar (Wikipedia)
• Chinese/English time metaphors
• Aymara time metaphors
  
• Clinton campaign logo
• Time-space synesthesia
• Time-space synesthesia timelords?

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.

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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, 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).