| CARVIEW |
Posts tagged "lingfic"
Bonus 82: Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction - Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer
The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and body functions, while historically in English we’ve also had more religious swears, like “God’s blood” and “God’s teeth”. In fiction, authors can use invented swear words to get around censorship, like “frack” in Battlestar Gallactica and “frell” in Farscape, as well as to create a sense of a particular culture, such as “smeg” in Red Dwarf, which then sometimes take on new lives of their own among fans.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we’ve ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about fictional substitutes for the F word, expletive infixations like abso-bloody-lutely, sweary lexical gaps (why don’t we swear with “toe jam!”) and old fashioned swears in English. We also talk about learning real-life swear words without full awareness of their emotional valence by reading fiction (such as how Gretchen and Ada don’t find “bloody” as taboo as Jo does), cultural differences in taboo gestures such as pointing with the middle finger in real life and teeth-baring smiles in Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and an extra bonusy bit about recording emotional punctuation in the audiobook of Because Internet.
Content note: Lingthusiasm episodes about swearing contain real swears! If you typically play this podcast around kids, for example, it’s up to you whether you want to have that conversation with them.
Also note that this conversation was first recorded as an interview with Gretchen for Ada and Jo’s podcast, Ex Urbe Ad Astra, where it will one day appear in longer form, but they’ve kindly let us share some of Lauren’s favourite snippets from it in advance (plus a few comments from her at the end!).
Listen to this episode about swearing in fiction, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
Lauren: I think fiction is a really great philosophical experiment. It’s one of the reasons I really find sci-fi to be interesting is because it can push the limits of what another mind is or what another mental state is to be thinking in. One thing we didn’t get to in the bonus episode about Arkady Martine’s Memory Called Empire is that there are people who have the capacity to take on the entire previous knowledge state of someone else. I just am like what would an evidential marking system be like for a person who has multiple consciousnesses worth of evidence for a statement.
Gretchen: Like, “I know this because my original consciousness knew this” or “I know this because the consciousness that I got added to mine later in life knows this.” Oh, man.
Lauren: There’re just so many layers of potential knowledge state there. That’s the kind of sci-fi that lets me bring my linguist brain to problems of consciousness.
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind’
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about linguistics and society, and pragmatics.
“Gretchen: Ella Enchanted is one of those fairy tale retellings. In this particular context, the main character has a blessing/curse put on her by a fairy at her birth where she has to be obedient… if people give her a command even inadvertently, she has to obey it. What’s interesting from a grammatical perspective – and I feel like why I always felt like I had a very solid grasp of what an imperative is – is because she only has to obey things when they’re imperative commands and not when they’re more indirect commands. If somebody says, “Stand up,” “Sit down,” she has to do it. But if someone says, “I wish you would stand up,” or “Why don’t you sit down,” she doesn’t have to do it at that point.
Lauren: Oh my gosh, she’s a walking grammaticality test. She’ll tell you if something’s grammatically an imperative. This is fabulous.
Gretchen: Right?
Lauren: It would be amazing to have someone like this while you’re trying to figure out the grammar of an imperative.
Gretchen: Well, because then you could try it in different languages. Every time I see a stop sign, I’m like, “Ella would just be stuck here. She’d just be stuck here until someone told her to go again.”
Lauren: I assume it’s a pre-technology world because –
Gretchen: It’s like a fairy tale world with horses and stuff. She didn’t have any stop signs.
Lauren: Thank goodness she doesn’t live on the internet because the amount of, like, “Subscribe,” “Click here” – you would be ruined.”
—
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Listen to the imperatives episode!’
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about words, parts of speech, and child language acquisition.
Lingthusiasm Bonus 54: Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
One of the really nifty things about stories is how they can explore striking and unexpected ways that communication could be different from what we’re used to, whether that’s communicating with alien life forms or across space and cultures.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we’ve been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant’s perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin’s classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.
Warning: this episode may make you want to read some books! We don’t spoil major plot points, but we do discuss setup premises and tiny worldbuilding details; if you’re someone who likes to go into a book wholly ignorant, check out the books before listening!
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode! 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 53 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 imperatives. But first, we’re going to do a Lingthusiasm liveshow – a virtual liveshow in late April brought to you on an internet near you for everybody who’s a patron of Lingthusiasm, which there is still time to become. Keep an eye out in late April 2021. We’ll be announcing the dates on social media and the website a little bit closer to the time.
Lauren: This liveshow is our current Patreon goal. All tickets will be for patrons. That is available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon. If you’re listening to this in the future from beyond April 2021, patrons will also be able to listen to the recording of that liveshow event as a bonus episode – along with over 50 other bonus episodes.
Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is also part of LingFest, which is a bunch of other fun linguistics events that are happening in late April. Stay tuned to our website for more information about that. Also, in late April, we’re doing a virtual conference for linguistics communicators called “LingComm.” That’s people who make linguistics communication materials online – modelled after SciComm for science communicators. This is gonna be happening online. You can find more details about LingComm on the website lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms.
Lauren: Our most recent Patreon bonus episode was an Ask Us Anything episode in celebration of our 100th overall episode. It is our 48th bonus and, along with our over 50 main episodes, it means there is twice as much Lingthusiasm. If you’ve worked your way through all the main episodes, they are all available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon.
Gretchen: Thanks for asking us such great questions on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. Go hang out in the Discord if you haven’t yet. It’s fun!
[Music]
Gretchen: Start the episode!
Lauren: Go on!
Gretchen: Be interesting!
Lauren: Do linguistics!
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
Lauren: All of these sentences are giving some kind of command.
Gretchen: These are all what’s known grammatically as “imperatives.” They have the function of giving commands, but they also have the imperative, which is this particular grammatical thing where, in English, an imperative may begin with the bare form of the verb – like “start” and “go” and “be” and “do” and “stay.” That’s a particular grammatical concept that we wanna talk about today.
Lauren: The function of giving a command means that now, Gretchen, I expect you for the next half hour to be very interesting and very linguistic – if you’re going to obey the command that’s been given.
Gretchen: No, I was telling you to be interesting, Lauren.
Lauren: Oh, okay. Well, now we’re in trouble. It is possible to do things that have the function of giving some kind of command that’s not an imperative – that doesn’t have the grammar of an imperative structure. So, “I order you to be interesting,” is not actually an imperative.
Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!
When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although “stay lingthusiastic!” has the form of the imperative, it really has more the effect of a wish or a hope.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the range of things that imperatives do in various languages. We also get excited about why imperatives are often one of the first verb forms that children learn, how imperatives make up the general “vibe” (aka mood) of a verb, and imperatives in the fairy-tale retelling Ella Enchanted.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events for the week of April 24 to May 2. See the LingFest website for details as more events trickle in.
The week before LingFest is LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication. LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive, virtual conference that brings together lingcommers from a variety of levels and backgrounds, including linguists communicating with public audiences and communicators with a “beat” related to language. Find out more about LingComm21.
This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with us, your hosts! We get enthusiastic about answering your questions!, like: What do you think is the best food to name a dog after? If you had to remove a phoneme from English, which do you think would have the most interesting results? How do you keep up with linguistics research outside academia? We also talk about our recent news and upcoming plans for 2021, “tell me you’re a linguist without telling me you’re a linguist”, and lots more great questions from the patron Discord. Become a Patreon now to get access to this and 47 other bonus episodes, as well us our upcoming live show!
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
- Sara Ciesielski ‘Learning to be Sherpa: Children, language and culture on the roof of the world’
- Sara Ciesielski ‘Language development and socialisation in Sherpa’
- The Morphological Imperative
- The Morphological Prohibitive
- Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode
- Embassytown by China Mieville
- Etymonline entry for ‘mode’
- Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality
- Biological class
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).
Bonus #33 - Reading fiction like a linguist | Lingthusiasm on Patreon
Like many linguists, we have a difficult time turning the linguist part of our brains off – which makes reading fiction particularly fun! Sometimes we’re lucky enough that there’s fiction that features linguists or a dedicated constructed language, but even when that’s not the case, language is an interesting part of worldbuilding or narrative voice in a lot of books.
In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren share some of their favourite linguistically interesting fiction, including both classics like Ella Minnow Pea, Frindle, Clockwork Orange, and Cat’s Cradle, as well as newer books like The Fifth Season, The Raven Tower, Murderbot Diaries, and This Is How You Lose The Time War.
Warning: this episode may make you want to add some lingfic to your reading list!
Get access to this episode and over 30 other additional Lingthusiasm episodes by becoming a member on Patreon!
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!”
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
