Carview!

Bonus 74: Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists - Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod | Patreon

In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. Since we last saw them in our episode on the grammar of singular they, Kirby is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pensylvania, USA, where they’re doing fun new research about neopronouns (like xe/xer) and reflexive pronouns (like themself) and have two new cats (pic below!).

We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, like final -e in Spanish and Portuguese and using the -ende (-ing) form in German and Swedish, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language’s canonical pronouns, such as ey/em/eir and xe/xem/xer in English, iel in French (from il+elle), elle in Spanish (related to él/ella), Swedish borrowing a gender-neutral pronoun from Finnish, and fruit-related pronoun riffs in Vietnamese. Plus: experimenting with pronouns for fun and cats and if you know of more examples in more languages, you should send them to Kirby!

Listen to this episode about neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere – they’re made by people, and those people bring their own interests and priorities to the process.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the process of figuring out the structure of a language and writing it down – making a kind of book called a descriptive grammar. We also talk about differences in grammar-writing traditions in the history of India, Europe, and China, and how the structures of Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Chinese influenced the kinds of things that their early grammarians noticed about language.

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 about reduplication! Have you eaten salad-salad, drunk milk-milk, or read a book-book lately? Or are you thinking something more along the lines of “salad, schmalad! milk, schmilk! books, schmooks!”? In either case, you’re producing reduplication! We look at different forms and meanings of reduplication across various languages through the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, why it’s not called just “duplication”, and delve into English reduplication via a classic among entertaining linguistics papers, the Salad-Salad Paper. Join us on Patreon to get access to this and 48 other bonus episodes - as well as the upcoming liveshow!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

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 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:

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 #24: How the internet is making English better - liveshow in Melbourne, Australia

Have you ever wondered where emoji come from? Why does ending a text with a period make people think you’re mad at them? Why doesn’t “lol” mean “laughing out loud” anymore?
This Lingthusiasm bonus episode is a live recording from the Melbourne liveshow! Your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the ways in which the internet is breathing new life into the English language. It’s also related to the topic of Gretchen’s upcoming book, BECAUSE INTERNET, which is coming out July 23 and you can preorder now as a delightful present for your future self and to show the publisher that people are interested in books about linguistics.

It was so much fun to get to meet everyone who came to the liveshows! Become a patron of Lingthusiasm to listen to this recording and support the show.

Bonus #10 - Liveshow Q and eh | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

This episode is the Q&A session recorded after the Discourse markers liveshow. We fielded questions from the audience, as well as some sent in by patrons and fans who couldn’t attend, and now you get to hang out with this excellent roomful of lingthusiasts in virtual space!

We discuss ‘eh’, that most Canadian of discourse markers, what Lauren noticed (linguistically!) while visiting Montreal, and more. To listen to this bonus episode (our first full-length bonus!), gain access to all nine previous bonuses, and generally support the show, become a patron on Patreon.

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday. 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 13 shownotes page.

[Music]

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

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today we’ve got an interview with Nicole Holliday, who’s an awesome linguistics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. We had a really fun chat about the linguistics of Obama and more. Really excited to bring that to you guys.

Lauren: I’m so excited to hear your chat with Nicole. I was very excited to hear that she was gonna be our first interviewee on the show, and it’s a great chat.

Gretchen: Yeah! We had a lot of fun doing it and bringing a new voice into the podcast. But first, Lauren, we’re in the same spot right now! That’s weird!

Lauren: And it’s awesome! It’s been so great. So, I came to Montreal for a conference for the Research Data Alliance, a plenary conference that was here, and then because Montreal happens to be your hometown, I couldn’t resist –

Gretchen: It’s a great town.

Lauren: – hanging out here with you for a little bit. We did a live show which was amazing! Sold out, it was so much fun, it was so great to meet other lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: Yeah! People came! People asked questions! They clapped for us, Lauren!

Lauren: We had some great questions! We had some really, really great questions from people.

Gretchen: And you can hear the live show recording by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us talk about words like “like”, “so”, “um”, “you know”, “behold”, “hark”, and lots of other discourse markers, and feel like you’re right there in Montreal with all the other lingthusiasts at the live show. Also, it’s almost our anniversary!

Lauren: There’s just so much exciting stuff happening in this episode, it’s so great. Next month is our anniversary. It’ll be episode number 14, because we can count, it’s just that we launched with several episodes all at once, so that means next month is a year of doing the show.

Gretchen: Which is really exciting. And to celebrate, because this show has been doing better than our wildest dreams, we want to continue wildly dreaming and see if we can get up to 100K: 100,000 listens across all of our episodes. We’re fairly close, we think we can probably do it, but we need your help to get there. So if you know anyone who could use a little more language nerdery in their lives, this is the month to share the show on social media, email, texting, group chats, with a well-placed sticky note on your forehead – anywhere that you think you want to share the show, we would really appreciate if you can help us get there.

Lauren: Leaving reviews and ratings on whichever platform you use for your podcast listening also really helps other people who you don’t know and we don’t know to find the show and make them want to click “play,” so leaving reviews helps people know what kind of show this is, leaving ratings helps with the way –

Gretchen: Mysterious algorithms.

Lauren: – the mysterious algorithms work in ranking shows.

Gretchen: And especially people who aren’t us saying, “This show is actually good!” is always more credible than us being like, “Hey, we have this thing that we think you might like.” I figure if you’ve gotten to episode 13, we can safely assume you already like the show.

Lauren: If you send us your reviews or tag us into your posts on social media, we would love to see them, and we’ll be thanking everyone that we know about in our anniversary blog post on the lingthusiasm.com website. We’ll pick a couple of reviews to feature there, but we want to thank everyone that we can.

Gretchen: Yes. Or, if you want to rec us somewhere privately and you don’t like being thanked for things, we understand that, too, and you can feel the warm fuzzy glow of satisfaction of helping out an independent production, that is awesome, too.

Lauren: We’re an indie show, and we started off this independently, we do all of the work ourselves with a team that we coordinate, and you are part of that team in a very real and immediate way. You are really our marketing department when it comes to promoting the show. We have the luxury of not having to market ourselves anywhere in particular, we have the luxury of not having to do advertising.

Gretchen: We do not have to buy ads.

Lauren: We have not had to buy ads, we’ve not had to offer advertising to pay for any of the show – you do all of that, and we’re really, really grateful. And we’re asking you to, in this month, in the lead-up to our anniversary show, really be our marketing department and help share the show with new people.

Gretchen: If everybody introduced the show to just one new listener, our audience would double.

Lauren: That is indeed how basic maths works, Gretchen!

Gretchen: But it’s great math! I like it! Like, it’s true and it works!

Lauren: It’s true and it works, and I mean, our audience is great, so I trust them to introduce us to other great people as well.

Gretchen: And our audience has been growing and so you’ve already been doing this, and we figured, let’s take advantage of the anniversary to have an excuse to do a little bit more and see how far we can grow.

Lauren: So this month, recommend us, review us, or re-listen to us in a couple of old episodes?

Gretchen: If you missed any!

Lauren: And now, I’m so, so excited to listen to your interview with Nicole.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch and I’m here with Nicole Holliday in our very first Lingthusiasm interview! Yaaaay! (Say hi, Nicole.)

Nicole: Oh, hi! Yeah, I’m also lingthusiastic.

Gretchen: Awesome! Good! So, we’re recording this interview at the Linguistic Summer Institute in Kentucky, where I have been for this month, in July, so! Nicole, welcome to the podcast!

Nicole: Ah, thank you for having me! I’m a big fan, like, longtime listener, first-time caller…

Gretchen: First-time interviewer! Nobody else got to call earlier!

Nicole: Right! I’m glad to be your inaugural interview.

Gretchen: Yeah! So, as we’re going to now ask all of our guests, how did you get into linguistics?

Nicole: Well, I thought that I was gonna be, like, a UN interpreter when I was a kid, and it turns out that I didn’t speak enough languages because I was American, and you gotta start young. So I went to college and was majoring in Spanish, ‘cause that’s what you do, and I liked it, I was good at it. I was a kid who was good at school but I didn’t find the thing that I was super good at, like, other kids are really good at, like, math or something, and I just, I wasn’t. Until we got to high school Spanish and it was like, no, this is my jam. Why haven’t I been doing this my whole life? So, in college I was double majoring in Spanish and Arabic –

Gretchen: Oh, fun!

Nicole: – and I just happened to take an Intro to Linguistics class. And it was like… I fell in love, right. This was what I wanted to do all this time and I didn’t know!

Gretchen: You had this, like, conversion moment, which I think is very common for linguists coming into this.

Nicole: Yeah, I came to Linguist Jesus and I never looked back. So…

Keep reading

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes. 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 12 shownotes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne, and today we’ll be talking about sounds that you can’t hear.

Gretchen: Phonemes!

Lauren: But first, so much exciting news: interview and live show!

Gretchen: So we reached our Patreon goal to start airing interviews on Lingthusiasm, and we are really excited to bring you an interview next month.

Lauren: Yay! I’m so excited that we met this goal, thank you as always to all of our patrons who support the show directly and allow us to keep building and growing and bringing in new things, including interviews!

Gretchen: So I got to talk to Nicole Holliday, who is an awesome linguist, at the Institute this summer, it was a really fun conversation.

Lauren: I am sooo jealous, I cannot wait to listen.

Gretchen: And we’re going to bring that to you next month! It was really fun.

Lauren: The other exciting news is that I’m gonna be in Montreal in a couple of weeks. In fact, about the time that this show goes out, for a conference and I just – I think I know someone who lives in Montreal?

Gretchen: I don’t know, who’s that, Lauren?

Lauren: Oh, it’s you! You live in Montreal!

Gretchen: Oh hey, it’s me!

Lauren: So this is completely unexpected and a delightful coincidence, and we thought we can’t pass up the opportunity while we’re in the same place to not do some kind of live show.

Gretchen: Surprise last-minute live show in Montreal, late September, it’s going to be at the Argo Bookshop on St. Catherine Street, it’s gonna be at 8 p.m. on Saturday the 23rd of September.

Lauren: So stay tuned to our social media for all the details, the opportunity to register for the event, and if you’re in Montreal, we look forward to seeing you there!

Gretchen: And there’ll be some sort of snacks! We haven’t figured out what kind of snacks there’s gonna be or what kind of drinks there’s gonna be, but there will be some sort of refreshments. So, come for the refreshments, stay for the linguistics!

Lauren: And I’m gonna need heaps of space in my suitcase to bring back all the maple products, so I will bring Australian-themed confectionery. If you see me there and you’ve listened to this episode, tell me and I will give you Australian-themed chocolate.

Gretchen: Hey Lauren, I’ve listened to this episode! You should give me some Tim Tams!

Lauren: Maybe.

Gretchen: And also, this month’s Patreon bonus episode – I almost forgot in the excitement about all the other new stuff that’s coming up – is about linguistics research: what kinds we’d like to see more of, how to do some of your own, and all the ways to find out stuff when your friends ask you about linguistics.

Lauren: You can find a link to our Patreon in the show notes and links to all of our bonus episodes as well.

Gretchen: And go to Lingthusiasm.com or @Lingthusiasm on Twitter or Facebook for details about the live show.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, what do we mean by sounds you can’t hear? This idea that language influences our perception is a really popular one in pop linguistics, and the idea of there’s these words that you can’t totally understand, there’s untranslatable words – Danish has this word for a sense of cosiness that we just can’t understand in English – this type of concept is really popular in pop linguistics, but it generally shows up at the word level. So you get these lists of words that are like, oh, this is this feeling, or this is this social relationship that exists in this language that you just can’t understand in English, and yet the list of untranslatable words often include English translations right beside them, which I’ve always found kind of ironic because, “Oh, you can’t translate this except for this translation that you can see here.”

Lauren: There are some lovely examples of this, though. I think it’s worth acknowledging that they show really interesting cultural foci, so we’ll put some links to the World in Words podcast, they have a couple of great episodes on untranslatable words across cultures that are really lovely, and their whole show is generally lovely stories about language anyway, so we’ll pop that in the show notes. But you’re right, it’s often this, “We can’t translate it in exactly one word,” not that they’re completely untranslatable.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds?

In Episode 13 of Lingthusiasm, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor of linguistics at Pomona College about her work on the speech of American black/biracial young men, prosody and intonation, and what it means to sound black. We also talk about how Obama inadvertently provided her research topic, the linguistics of the Wu Tang Clan, and how linguistics can make the world a better place. Links to topics mentioned in this episode below.

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 a recording of our liveshow about discourse markers in Montreal in September. What do “um” and “like” have in common with “behold” and “nevertheless”? They’re all discourse markers! These little words and phrases get a bad rap for being “meaningless”, but they’re actually really important. Find out how, and picture yourself sitting among real, live lingthusiasts in the excellent linguistics section at Argo Bookshop, by listening to the recording! You can get access to it and previous bonuses about language games, hypercorrection, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and more by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

We’re excited to bring you our first interview episode right before our very special 1-year anniversary episode in November! To celebrate a whole year of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting, we’re aiming to hit another milestone at the same time: 100,000 listens across all episodes. We’re currently at 83k as of right before posting this episode, so it’s totally doable, but we need your help to get there! Here are some ways you can help:

Share a link to your favourite Lingthusiasm episode so far and say something about what you found interesting in it. If you link directly to the episode page on lingthusiasm.com, people can follow your link and listen even if they’re not normally podcast people. Can’t remember what was in each episode? Check out the quotes for memorable excerpts or transcripts for full episode text.
We appreciate all kinds of recs, including social media, blogs, newsletters, fellow podcasts, and recommending directly to a specific person who you think would enjoy fun conversations about language!
If you didn’t get around to listening to a couple episodes when they came out, now is a great time to get caught up!
Write a review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts. The more reviews we have, the more that the Mighty Algorithms make us show up to other people browsing. Star ratings are great; star ratings with words beside them are even better.

All of our listeners so far have come from word of mouth, and we’ve enjoyed hearing from so many of you how we’ve kept you company while folding laundry, walking the dog, driving to work, jogging, doing dishes, procrastinating on your linguistics papers, and so much more. But there are definitely still people out there who would be totally into making their mundane activities feel like a fascinating linguistics party, they just don’t know it’s an option yet. They need your help to find us!

If you leave us a rec or review in public, we’ll thank you by name or pseudonym on our special anniversary post next month, which will live in perpetuity on our website. If you recommend us in private, we won’t know about it, but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction (and feel free to tell us about it on social media if you still want to be thanked!).

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Professor Nicole Holliday’s academic webpage
Nicole Holliday on Twitter (@mixedlinguist)
Interview with Nicole Holliday and Paul Reed about their LSA Institute class on intonation and social identity
Key and Peele Obama fistbump sketch and phone call sketch (videos only work in US)
5 Key & Peele sketches that do work outside the US
People freaking out at Barack Obama’s fistbump in 2008
Sandra Bland: Talking While Black (Language Log)
Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Vernacular Speakers in Courtrooms and Beyond - John Rickford plenary address at the LSA about his paper with Sharese King (video)
Rickford and King 2016 (press release from LSA)
John R. Rickford and Sharese King win 2016 LSA Best Paper prize
The Oxford Handbook of African American Language
African American English blog
More about intonation and prosody
Watch Your Language trailer (YouTube)
Gricean Maxims as demonstrated by the Wu Tang Clan, on Nerdist Alpha (behind paywall, but currently offering 30 day free trial)
Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
The LSA Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL) which provides travel grants every year to help students get to the annual meeting - applications open until Oct 31st!

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 producer is Claire Gawne, 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 #8 - So, like, what’s up with, um, discourse markers? Hark, a liveshow! | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

There are all these little words and phrases that we use all the time - y'know, anyway, okay, right, so, however, I mean, uh, and then… They aren’t strictly necessary, and yet our speech would feel so weird without them. Welcome to the world of discourse markers!

In this special Lingthusiasm live show, recorded in Montreal at Argo Bookshop, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne ensure you can say YES the next some someone says ‘y'know?’

We look at how regular words get transformed into discourse markers, why they’re so important for making speech flow, the fancy kinds of discourse markers in writing and historical texts, and just why they get some people wound up. We also discuss why discourse markers make life tricky for subtitlers and computers, but are so necessary in everyday conversation.

Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to listen to the liveshow and see a picture from the recording!

Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

Why does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you can’t hear?

In Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore the fundamental linguistic insight at the heart of all these questions: the phoneme. We also talk about how to bore babies (for science!), how sounds appear and disappear in a language, and how to retain our sense of wonder when the /t/ you hear doesn’t match up with the /t/ I hear.

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

Announcements:

LIVESHOW: Exciting news! We held our first liveshow on Saturday, September 23rd in Montreal, at Argo Bookshop. It was great to meet so many lingthusiasts at this sold out show. We’re looking forward to bringing the liveshow experience to more people, once we hit our Patreon goal.

This month’s Patreon bonus was about linguistic research, and how to do it when you don’t have a university or a research budget, as nominated and voted on by our patrons. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about language games, hypercorrection, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode and more about phonemes:

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 producer is Claire Gawne, 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).

Posts tagged "liveshow"

Bonus 74: Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists - Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod | Patreon

Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!

Bonus #24: How the internet is making English better - liveshow in Melbourne, Australia

Bonus #10 - Liveshow Q and eh | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

Bonus #8 - So, like, what’s up with, um, discourse markers? Hark, a liveshow! | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

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