New Lingthusiasm Merch! “Etymology isn’t destiny” and aesthetic IPA chart on lots of items

A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!

“Etymology isn’t destiny” on shirts, magnets, notebooks, and more!

Words change their meanings over time, and when we remind ourselves that etymology isn’t destiny, we can also remember we’re free to grow and change over the course of our lives too.  We’ve talked about how the meanings of words are something that we’re constantly creating with each other in many Lingthusiasm episodes, so the idea that etymology isn’t destiny is a fun and liberating thing that you can now contemplate regularly by looking at these words in sparkly, witchy script by our linguist-artist Lucy Maddox in black, white, midnight blue, Lingthusiasm green, or (our personal favourite) rainbow gradient. Etymology isn’t Destiny is available on lots of items, including many different shapes and colours of shirts (for adults, kids, and babies!), stickers, laptop cases, mugs, tote bags, water bottles, zip pouches, notebooks, and excitingly, magnets!

Aesthetic IPA chart now on posters, shirts, and more!

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is sometimes called the periodic table of linguistics – an important technical diagram that’s also visually interesting and which many linguists hang up on a wall, carry around inside a notebook, or simply know the exact keystrokes that’ll get them to a page to type or listen to it.

Like with the periodic table of the elements, the layout of the IPA chart is a key to what the symbols mean: from top to bottom, the chart goes roughly from sounds where the mouth is the most closed to the most open, and from left to right, it goes from sounds where the constriction is the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth. This means that many linguists only know well the parts of the IPA that they encounter regularly in languages they work with, and rely on their knowledge of the overall structure to retrieve other parts on occasion. Hence the need to have it handy to refer to.

But there’s also an important way in which the IPA chart and the periodic table differ: art. If you want a handy reference chart of the elements for your wall or your pocket, there are hundreds of possible designs, ranging from subtle, minimalist designs that look like cool nerdy art to intricate, maximalist designs with all the technical detail you might possibly want to refer to.

With the International Phonetic Alphabet, most people are still printing out (or occasionally stickering, or laminating) the same greyscale diagram from the International Phonetic Association. We, your Lingthusiasm cohosts, have a lot of affection for this classic design, which we’ve spent many hours poring over (especially the forbidden grey areas, ahem), but we also wondered, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a more subtle, minimal version that would look more like weird-yet-stylish nerd art and less like a diagram from an academic paper?

For these reasons, last year we commissioned an aesthetically redesigned version of the International Phonetic Alphabet from our linguist-artist Lucy Maddox and put it on a one-time order of microfibre lens cloths. We’ve since heard from several people who missed out on that order or wish they could have the design in another format, so we’ve now made that available in several versions: the original square design as a poster, a version with rectangular proportions as a poster (depending on the shape of that blank space on your wall which needs a cool IPA poster), and a transparent background version that plays well on a shirt! The notebooks and tote bags also look really good with the aesthetic IPA chart on them if you want a version to bring to classes or conferences. Also someone requested a mouse pad so we did that and then we put it on an apron because why not.

Lingthusiasm merch generally

If you’re looking for subtle-to-obvious ways to signal that you’re a linguist or linguistics fan in public, gift ideas for the linguistics enthusiast in your life (or handy links to forward to people who might be interested in getting you a gift sometime), we also have many previous items of Lingthusiasm merch! There are many subtly linguistics-patterened scarves, water bottles with linguistics-related jokes on them, NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT shirts, or just have a browse. All of the Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for the linguist or linguistics fan in your life, and as a patron you get to find out about new merch before anyone else! Check out the merch page at lingthusiasm.com/merch for the previous rounds of Lingthusiasm merch.

As ever, we love seeing photos of any Lingthusiasm merch or linguistics-themed crafts in your lives! Tag us in them @lingthusiasm on all of the social medias (or private message us photos of your babies in Lingthusiasm onesies if you’re not keen on posting baby photos publically, we still love to see them!)

Gretchen: A lot of people ask me if language is changing faster in the internet era. You get the sense that they really, really want that answer to be yes. They’ll sometimes try to make my answer for that yes even if it’s not what I’m saying. The thing is we just don’t have complete enough records to know that for sure because a lot of the words that become trendy these days may become trendy for a week or so, but that doesn’t mean that they stick around and stay in peoples’ vocabularies. It’s less clear how fast that is happening. Somebody would actually have to do that study. It’s not a study that I’m aware of existing in terms of how fast does the average person’s vocabulary change and how many of the words that are being added in a given year were coined within the last ten years or something like that. It’d be a very complicated study to actually do in practice. It’s hard to say definitively English is changing faster or slower because what do you mean by that change and how long does that change have to persist for you to say it’s a “durable” change versus “This is the trend of the week.”

Lauren: It will hopefully keep future generations of people who make dictionaries very busy.

Gretchen: The good thing is we may be able to answer this question in another 100 years or something because we’ll actually have so much more data of this period.

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Where to get your English etymologies’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about the history of language

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).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 63: Where to get your English etymologies. 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 63 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 etymology and why people find it so compelling. But first, thank you to everybody who recommended the show as part of our 5th anniversary celebrations. It really does make a difference. We appreciate all of you so much.

Lauren: This month’s bonus episode is all about linguistics Olympiads for high schoolers and the fun of solving linguistics puzzles for people of all ages. You can listen to this bonus episode and 57 more by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: If you’re a high school student or you know someone who is, you can check out the website of the International Linguistics Olympiad to find an Olympiad happening every year in your country, so you can join one near you.

[Music]

Gretchen: I have some words, and I wanna know if you think these words are related.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: The first set of words is “pasta,” “paste,” “pesto.” Are any of these words related? If so, which ones?

Lauren: I’m very observant, so I notice they all start with a P, and they have a similar shape to them. I like pasta and pesto in combination. I don’t think that has anything to do with where these words come from.

Gretchen: It’s very valuable of you not to let your personal aesthetic judgements interfere with your search for etymological truth, yes.

Lauren: “Paste” and “pesto” feel like they should be related because they’re both goopy things that you mash stuff up in. I’m gonna say “paste” and “pesto” are related. Then “pasta” has me completely stumped in this one because I feel like I could make up some reason there’s a relationship to do with how pasta is like a goopy dough that you cook, but I feel like I’m definitely just inventing connections between these words at this point. I’ll say “paste” and “pesto” – yes. “Pasta” – I’m not sure.

Gretchen: Interestingly, you’re wrong.

Lauren: Oh, no! That’s okay.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 63: Where to get your English etymologies

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these hunches and painstakingly track them down through the historical record to find out which ones are true and which ones aren’t – in this case, that paste and pasta have a common ancestor, but pesto comes from somewhere else.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about English etymology! We talk about where the etymological parts of dictionaries come from, the gaps in our knowledge based on the biases of historical sources, how you can become the Etymology Friend (with help from Etymonline), and which kinds of etymologies should immediately make you put your debunking hat on (spoiler: anything containing an acronym or formatted like an image meme. Just saying.). Now you too can have etymology x-ray vision! (Aka, where to quickly look up etymologies on your phone!).  

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

Announcements:

Thanks for celebrating our 5 year anniversary with us! We loved seeing you share all your favourite Lingthusiasm episodes and moments. We’re looking forward to another year of sharing linguistic joy with you.

This month’s bonus episode is about linguistics olympiads! These involve a series of fun linguistic puzzles, sort of like sudoku for linguistics. Since linguistics isn’t commonly taught in high schools, the puzzles can’t assume any prior linguistics knowledge, so they’re either logic puzzles as applied to language or they teach you basic linguistics concepts in the preamble to the question, making them great for ling fans as well. Alas, we were not in high school recently enough to participate in any olympiads ourselves, so we also talk about how people can get involved if you’re not a high school student, from helping to host a session at a local high school or university to just doing puzzles for fun and interest (they’re available for free with answer keys on the olympiad websites, plus there was a recent book that came out compiling some of them). Plus: how Lauren has made a few olympiad puzzles herself!

Get access to this and over 50 more bonus Lingthusiasm episodes (and help keep the show ad-free) by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Etymonline
• Superlinguo post on macarons, macaroons, and macaroni
• Etymonline entry for *dekm-
• Etymonline entry for fish
• History of the Oxford English Dictionary
• Superlinguo tweet on fact checking acronyms
• Jesse Sheidlower’s tweet on fact checking acronyms
• Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
• Superlinguo’s By Lingo etymology posts

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, and stay tuned for a transcript of this episode on the Lingthusiasm website.

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).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 22: This, that and the other thing - determiners. 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 22 shownotes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne, and today we’re talking about this, that, and the other thing! The other thing of course being determiners. But first: We met our recent Patreon goal to do a live show!

Gretchen: Yay, live show! I’m excited! We will have more news for you about where and when that live show is gonna be, but stay tuned!

Lauren: Thanks to everyone who helped us meet this goal, all of our fabulous patrons who make these main episodes happen ad-free and available for everyone, and who, of course, as a thank you from us, get a bonus episode every month as well!

Gretchen: And if you’re a patron, you’ll also have seen the advance announcement that since we also met our art goal a while back –

Lauren: Yay, art goal!

Gretchen: – we now have preview art up on Patreon which you can see, a sample sketch, and we’re announcing here that the theme for this art is space babies!

Lauren: Space babies! We are so excited. Space babies have been with us since Episode 1, where we talked about what would happen on the International Space Station, given that they speak both Russian and English as their daily languages, if we sent a whole bunch of babies to space to grow up.

Gretchen: Yes, if all the astronauts and cosmonauts started having babies together, what would the babies speak? So we have an international array of cute babies floating in space, very unethically, we are not sending any actual babies to space, but they’re very cute when they’re cartoon versions!

Lauren: We just couldn’t get the ethics.

Gretchen: To be honest, we didn’t try to get the ethics, we knew we couldn’t.

Lauren: We’ve talked about space babies in a couple of other episodes, and of course we always love to chat about just what great language learners babies are, so we’re very happy to have some cute little mascots for the show. And we’ll be launching merch for those very soon!

Gretchen: And this has been one of our most popular quotes with you, the listeners, all the way through, so you will get to wear, or have stickers of, small, cute babies very soon! And you can see this preview and listen to two new bonus episodes – one about forensic linguistics, and another about homonyms – by becoming a patron.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, it’s time to determine who knows the most determiners. Are you ready? This is not a competition, but, you know, I love framing things as a competition.

Gretchen: It’s a competition! It’s on! Okay. I’m gonna start with “the.”

Lauren: Oh, damn, you chose the easy one! I’m gonna go with “a.”

Keep reading

What’s the etymology of this word? When did people start using that thing? How is this new slang term used?

Answering common linguistic questions is often a matter of where to look. In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren talk about our favourite freely accessible linguistics research tools, from Etymonline to corpora, and how to get access to other kinds of linguistics resources when you’re not at a university and don’t have a research budget.

We also talk about the kind of research we’d like to see more of if we weren’t constrained by money.

To listen to Bonus #7 support Lingthusiasm on Patreon!