Bonus 107: Swifties, amorch, Melbin, and bloopers! - Deleted Scenes from Adam Aleksic, Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, and the advice episode

We’ve interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there’s a story or two that we just don’t have space for in the main episode, so here’s a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you. First, an excerpt from our interview with Adam Aleksic about tiktok and how different online platforms give rise to different kinds of communication styles. Second, a return to our interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez for a bit about Spanish internet slang, -och, and why “McCulloch” looks like a perfect name for an author of a book about internet linguistics. Finally, deleted scenes from our advice episode, in which we reveal some Lingthusiasm lore about pronouncing “Melbourne” and imitating each other’s accents and answer questions about linguistics degrees and switching languages with people.

Plus, by popular request: bloopers!

Listen to this episode about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent episodes, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This year, we put out 12 episodes of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics!

Lingthusiasm episodes assume no prior knowledge, only enthusiasm! They can be listened to in any order, so if you see a title that entices you, jump on in:

1. Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!! (transcript)
2. The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate (transcript)
3. On the nose - How the nose shapes language (transcript)
4. Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu (transcript)
5. Urban Multilingualism (transcript)
6. Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions (transcript)
7. Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd (transcript)
8. Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski (transcript)
9. A hand-y guide to gesture (transcript)
10. The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf (transcript)
11. Micro to macro - The levels of language (transcript)
12. A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics (transcript)

We also put out 12 bonus episodes for patrons (transcripts are linked to from each episode’s page):

1. The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern
2. World Linguistics Day
3. What’s in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more
4. ¡Pos ya está! Translating Because Internet into Spanish with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez
5. Reading linguistic landscapes on street signs
6. Why sci-fi gestures live long and prosper - Crossover with Imaginary Worlds
7. Advice #2 - Fun linguistic experiments, linguistic etiquette, and language learning scenarios
8. The linguistics of kissing 😘
9. Linguist Celebrities
10. Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project - Survey results and general updates
11. What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking
12. Crochet vocal tract, grammar is a team sport, gifs, and soy sauce - Deleted scenes from Jacq Jones, Emily M. Bender, and Tom Scott team interviews

Plus, we put out a very special bonus bonus, in honour of our 100th bonus episode: an updated version of our very first bonus episode about swearing, now with extra sweary commentary and unlocked to anyone who follows us for free on Patreon.

Thanks for joining us this year!

Stay Lingthusiastic!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!. 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 SURPRISE! From how languages express the concept of surprise, to what surprised looks like in the brain. But first, if you’ve been intrigued by the idea of our many bonus episodes, but aren’t sure about committing to another monthly subscription, we’ve now made a few of the most popular bonus episodes into collections that you can buy as a single one-time thing.

Lauren: These collections are so fun. We have Lingthusiasm Book Club for all of our book-related episodes; Linguistics Gossip for all the behind-the-scenes episodes; fun word-nerd topics like onomatopoeia and pangrams; Linguistics Advice; and my personal favourite, Lingthusiasm After Dark for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence, and the linguistics of kissing, and the weirdly soothing Lingthusiasmr episode that we’ve recorded of us reading example sentences in a very calm voice.

Gretchen: If there are any other bonus episodes that you’d like us to put in a collection, let us know. This feature is still pretty new and experimental. We’re interested in hearing how it goes for people. Also, this is a reminder that we have gift memberships. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea for yourself or someone else, you can get a year’s subscription to our bonus episodes for a person in your life and help keep the show running. Combining the previous two features, you can also gift one of the collections to some else if you wanna give someone a one-time gift.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview about the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. Is it a centuries-old hoax? Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for collections, gifting, and all of the bonus episodes.

[Music]

Lauren: “Surprise! Gretchen, it’s a party for you! There’re balloons coming from the ceiling, and I’ve made you cake.”

Gretchen: Wow! Amazing! I’m so surprised! Not least because it’s not my birthday.

Lauren: And I’m in Australia, and you’re in Canada.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, there’s that, too.

Lauren: And because we scripted this whole thing to introduce our episode on surprise?

Gretchen: Look, let’s not quibble too much. Let’s talk about a few other things you could say if you were surprised.

Lauren: Okay, sure.

Gretchen: Like, “My, how sparkly these balloons are!”

Lauren: Bit of a throwback. It has “My, how sharp your teeth are, Grandma,” vibes from Little Red Riding Hood.

Gretchen: “Dang, these balloons are so sparkly!” Bit more modern.

Lauren: That works. What about if I didn’t realise it was your birthday, I could be like, “Oh, happy birthday!”

Gretchen: “I can’t believe it’s your birthday!”

Lauren: “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me!”

Gretchen: “Wow, you ate the whole thing!”

Lauren: “Wait, you have a birthday?”

Gretchen: Like we all do.

Lauren: There are so many different ways that we can indicate that we’re surprised, that something is contrary to our expectations, that we’re dealing with new information.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that’s its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this).

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

Announcements:

New on Patreon: you can now buy a set of bonus episodes as a collection if you’re not keen on signing up for a monthly membership. Collections so far include Lingthusiasm book club, Lingthusiasm After Dark, Linguistics Gossip, Linguistic Advice, Word Nerdery, and Interviews.

Patreon bonus episodes also make a great last-minute gift for a linguistics enthusiast in your life.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Intonation and Expectation: English Mirative Contours and Particles’ by Kelsey Kraus
• Kelsey Kraus’ intonationally contoured princess cake
• Etymonline entry for 'surprise’
• 'Tomorrow’s Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 Has Arrived’ by Jennifer Daniel
• 'Brainwaves of people with coarse, curly hair are now less hard to read’ by Laura Sanders for Science News Explores
• 'Novel Electrodes for Reliable EEG Recordings on Coarse and Curly Hair’ by A. Etienne, T. Laroia, H. Weigle, A. Afelin, S. K. Kelly, A. Krishnan, and P. Grover
• 'Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity’ by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard
• 'Event-Related Potentials (ERP) explained! | Neuroscience Methods 101’ by Psyched! on YouTube
• Wikipedia entry for 'N400 (neuroscience)’
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda’
• Lingthusiasm episode 'Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Mirativity’
• 'New Research Article: Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)’ post on Superlinguo
• Wikipedia entry for 'Topic and comment’
• ASL: Topic / Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry marry Mary } Holidays Greeting Card and Mug

Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!

Do you need your friends and loved ones to know just how much of a linguistics nerd you are when sending out holiday greeting cards? Send ‘em Lingthusiasm’s {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays card to let them make jokes about the merry-marry-Mary merger AND the n400 brain wave produced in response to unexpected words. Two linguistics references for the price of one, brought to you by Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

New Lingthusiasm logo - now wearable!

Want other Lingthusiasm fans to be able to spot you in the wild? Want a pretext to try to get your friends into a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics? Get some merch with the Lingthusiasm logo featuring fun little linguistics-y drawings: a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see what items you can spot! Art by Lucy Maddox for Lingthusiasm.

Range comes in both Lingthusiasm green and white.

Bonus 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern

In the 1600s, an antique book is recorded in an alchemist’s library in Prague, containing intriguing but puzzling drawings, like plants with unnatural cuboid roots, as well as a strange writing system, with some familiar letters and some utterly unfamiliar. This book became known as the Voynich Manuscript, after a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, and the meaning (or lack thereof) that lies on its 240 parchment pages is a puzzle that’s intrigued cryptographers, historians, linguists, and more for centuries.

In this episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, who’s a professor at Yale University, researcher of language documentation and historical linguistics, and creator of a class about the enduring enigma that is the Voynich Manuscript. We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Listen to this episode about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate. 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]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbours. I’m here with Dr. Danny Bate, who’s a public linguist, the host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of Why Q Needs U. But first, a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is November 26th – coming up very soon – and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays, decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get created. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Danny.

Danny: Hi, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank you for coming on Lingthusiasm.

Danny: Thank you so, so much for having me. This is surreal, safe to say, as a long-time listener to Lingthusiasm. To be on it myself is – I don’t really know how I’m feeling right now, but I’ll just be pinching myself while we’re recording if that’s okay.

Gretchen: Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you’re supposed to just be listening and not actively participating in the conversation, I’ll give you a little poke or something.

Danny: Thank you, thank you. I’ll be there listening like, “This guy is talking about – I like these topics.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Before we get into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let’s start with a question that we start with all of our guests, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Danny: Right, okay, great question. It involves a little bit of personal history. The short answer is I don’t know. There must’ve been a time when I wasn’t into linguistics. There must’ve been. I have clear memories of thinking that foreign languages are silly and what’s the point of this and why do I have to go to school and other such childish impulses, but it is hard to pin down when I realised that linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, like so many people of my generation, it wasn’t talked about at school. There wasn’t a great awareness of linguistics as a subject. I’m sure that’s still the case for a lot of people today, but it’s improving through things like Lingthusiasm. But that wasn’t there. Not to make myself sound extremely old, but it was definitely something that I came to by accident, organically, while searching for something to study at university that would combine my interests. I knew I liked modern languages, like French and German. I knew I liked philosophy. But it was really a haphazard, chance encounter until I turned up on the first day of my undergraduate degree at the University of York in the UK. Day 1, Lecture 1, yep, this is for me.

Gretchen: You took an intro linguistics class because the concept seemed like it could be kind of fascinating, and you’re like, “This is it.”

Danny: “This is it,” yeah. It was love at first lecture.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate

Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we’ve both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny’s own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!

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

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Danny Bate on Bluesky and Twitter
• ‘Why Q Needs U’ by Danny Bate, on Amazon and Bookshop (affiliate links)
• Danny Bate’s 'A Language I Love Is…’ podcast (Gretchen’s episode about Montreal French and Lauren’s episode about Yolmo)
• ‘Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global’ by Laura Spinney on Amazon and Bookshop (affiliate links)
• 'Proto-Indo-European and Laura Spinney’ on Danny Bate’s 'A Language I Love Is…’ Podcast
• Simon Roper on YouTube
• Jackson Crawford on YouTube
• Wikipedia entry for 'Czech language’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Old Church Slavonic’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Bonus 105: World Linguistics Day

There are many occasions for thinking about linguistics-related topics, from official UN designations like International Mother Language Day, International Day of Sign Languages, and International Decade of Indigenous Languages, to sillier days that have been memed into existence, like World Emoji Day and Talk Like A Pirate Day.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics. We’ve also recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!

Listen to this episode about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.