This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Where language names come from and why they change’. 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.

Gretchen: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language names. But first, we’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2023. The liveshow will once again be on the Lingthusiasm Patreon Discord, and it will be on the 18th or 19th of February, depending on your time zone.

Gretchen: We’re really excited to be returning to one of fan favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with a returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod, who you may remember from the very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they.” We’re bringing them back for more informal discussion, which you can participate in. If you’re a Lingthusiasm patron, you can ask questions or share your examples and anecdotes about gender in various languages via Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord. We might mention some of them in the episode. Or bring your questions and comments along to the liveshow itself.

Lauren: The Lingthusiasm Discord is available for all patrons at the Lingthusiast tier and above. You can join the Lingthusiasm Patreon by visiting lingthusiasm.com/patreon. That tier also allows you access to our monthly bonus episodes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, which is a fringe festival-like program of independently organised online linguistics events running in February 2023.

Lauren: If you’re listening in the future and want to find out about these events as they’re happening, you can follow us on various social media @lingthusiasm. Our most recent bonus episode for patrons was outtakes and deleted scenes from some of the interviews we’ve done recently. If you wanna hear more from our guests – Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe – you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to that, a whole bunch of other bonus episodes, and our upcoming liveshow.

[Music]

Gretchen: There’s this really fun group activity that you sometimes see in linguistics classes or when linguists are hanging out which is collaboratively brainstorming all of the languages that people in the group can think of.

Lauren: Ooo, yeah.

Gretchen: Especially if you don’t allow Google or Wikipedia, it’s just which languages have you heard of or do you know at least a word or phrase in and can you put them on a whiteboard or in a notebook.

Lauren: Hmm, I’m already finding this a little bit complicated because I never know what name to give some of the languages that I know or know of or work with.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 76: Where language names come from and why they change

Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name that got mis-applied or even a pejorative description from a neighbouring group.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages are named! We talk about how naming a language makes it more legible to broader organizations like governments and academics, similar to how birth certificates and passports make humans legible to institutions. And like how individual people can change their names, sometimes groups of people decide to change the name that their language is known by, a process that in both cases can take a lot of paperwork.

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

Announcements:

We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow! February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) We’ll be returning to one of our fan-favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with returning special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod! (See Kirby’s previous interview with us about the grammar of singular they.)

This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the text chat. This episode will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include them in the show!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from previous interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you. Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past two years of Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes from interviews with Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, and get access to our upcoming liveshow!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman)’ by Dr Lauren Gawne
• ‘Language naming in Indigenous Australia: a view from western Arnhem Land’ by Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer, and Murray Garde
  
• Wikipedia List of Creole Languages
• Wikipedia entry for Métis/Michif
• ‘A note on the term “Bantu” as first used by W. H. I. Bleek’ by Raymond O. Silverstein
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages’
• Wikipedia entry for Endonym and Exonym
• All Things Linguistic post on exonym naming practices in colonised North America
• Tribal Nations Map of North America
• Wikipedia entry for Maliseet
• OED entry for ‘endoscope’
• Wikipedia entry for Light Warlpiri
• Language Hat entry for Light Warlpiri
• Los Angeles Times article about the use of Diné instead of Navajo
• OED entry for ‘slave’
• Wikipedia entry for names of Germany

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, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. 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 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the computer may eventually learn how to do these things for itself: to generate new potential ice cream flavours or identify the giraffehood status of new photographs. But it’s not necessarily that easy, and the mistakes that machines make when doing relatively silly tasks like ice cream naming or giraffe identification can illuminate how artificial intelligence works when doing more serious tasks as well.  

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne interview Dr Janelle Shane, author of You Look Like A Thing And I Love You and person who makes AI do delightfully weird experiments on her blog and twitter feed. We talk about how AI “sees” language, what the process of creating AI humour is like (hint: it needs a lot of human help to curate the best examples), and ethical issues around trusting algorithms.  

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

Announcements:

Janelle helped us turn one of the big neural nets on our own 70+ transcripts of Lingthusiasm episodes, to find out what Lingthusiasm would sound like if Lauren and Gretchen were replaced by robots! This part got so long and funny that we made it into a whole episode on its own, which is technically the February bonus episode, but we didn’t want to make you wait to hear it, so we’ve made it available right now! This bonus episode includes a more detailed walkthrough with Janelle of how she generated the Robo-Lingthusiasm transcripts, and live-action reading of some of our favourite Robo-Lauren and Robo-Gretchen moments. 

Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the Robo-Lingthusiasm episode and 35 previous bonus episodes. 

Also for our patrons, we’ve made a Lingthusiasm Discord server – a private chatroom for Lingthusiasm patrons! Chat about the latest Lingthusiasm episode, share other interesting linguistics links, and geek out with other linguistics fans. (We even made a channel where you can practice typing in the International Phonetic Alphabet, if that appeals to you!) 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Bonus robo-generated Lingthusiasm episode 
  
• Lingthusiasm now has a Discord for patrons!
  
• Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness blog
  
• Janelle Shane on Twitter (@JanelleCShane)
• Janelle Shane’s website
  
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (Janelle’s book)
• Janelle Shane’s TED talk about the weirdness of artificial intelligence
• AI Weirdness ice cream
• AI Weirdness recipes
• How many giraffes on the cover of Because Internet?
• AI Weirdness craft beer
  
• The Fine Stranger beer
• GPT-2
  

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).

Not everyone has a surname, but for many people surnames are a personal or cultural story wrapped up in a convenient little package.

In this bonus episode we get enthusiastic about surnames! We talked about where our own surnames come from, surname-formation strategies from different cultures, people changing and not changing their surnames, and surnames that are common and uncommon in different contexts.

Where does your surname come from? Have you ever considered what it would be like to have a different one?

Listen to this bonus episode (and get access to 31 more bonus episodes in the archives) by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms. 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 27 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today, we’re getting enthusiastic about words for family members – kinship terms! But first, we’re looking forward to 2019. It’s almost here. We’re very excited to continue with the regular show. We have some exciting plans – like video episodes.

Lauren: We’ve had a really exciting 2018. We’ve done lots of really cool stuff. You’ve been along for the ride, and we’re really looking forward to continuing with regular episodes and other exciting things in 2019.

Gretchen: And we just hit our goal to make a special video episode about the linguistics of gesture, which is super exciting.

Lauren: It was also really great to have Gretchen in Australia when we hit the goal for the gesture videos. That happened while she was out on her trip to do the live shows. We had celebratory ice cream. It was very exciting.

Gretchen: Yes, so that was fantastic. We’re looking forward to the next goal, which is going to be a special video episode interviewing a deaf linguist about the linguistics of sign language. Stay tuned for which sign language and which linguist we’re going to be interviewing for that once we hit that goal.

Lauren: Our latest bonus Patreon episode is a Q&A that we did while we were in the same geographic location, which you can find on patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Yes, as well as 20 previous bonus episodes, which is almost an entire double Lingthusiasm. You should definitely check that out if you haven’t already.

Lauren: We also both have other exciting 2019 adventures. I am having a baby, which we mentioned a couple of episodes ago. That will take up a fair amount of my 2019, I feel.

Gretchen: I feel like babies are pretty busy. But the episodes will continue as scheduled. I have a book coming out in July 2019, so you’ll also hear –

Lauren: A book baby!

Gretchen: A book baby! I wonder which one is gonna be cuter. We probably shouldn’t have that competition.

Lauren: They’re cute in their own ways.

Gretchen: One of them will eventually learn to talk back, and it won’t be the book. If you wanna see what the cover looks like, and for pre-order information, you can check out the link in the show notes or on my website as well.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, here is an important linguistic question – what are you gonna have your baby call you? Are you gonna be a “Mama,” a “Mum,” a “Mummy?”

Lauren: I haven’t thought about this, which means I guess that I’m just gonna go with my socio-cultural norms, so I’m probably gonna be “mum.”

Gretchen: Okay, that’s very standard, yeah. It seems legit.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, I have some friends who called their parents – or had their kids call them by their first names.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, that always seems really weird to me. If I call my parents by their first name, it’s because we’re having some kind of very silly conversation.

Gretchen: I think I only do it if I’m at a grocery store, or a park, or something, and I need to catch their attention, and saying “Mom” or “Dad” isn’t working, and so I’m like, “I guess I should say their name to get them to turn around.” Maybe that’s a thing you could do.

Lauren: I love how it’s such a conscious decision for you.

Gretchen: Definitely not part of my norm, but it is part of some people’s norms.

Lauren: Yeah, I know people whose kids call them by their first name just because they find the idea of being “Mum” or “Dad” really weird.

Gretchen: I also know people who find the idea of “Mum” or “Dad” being weird. They go by something like “Mama,” or “Papa” or, you know, things like –

Lauren: Or they have some kind of cultural – I have people whose families have Italian heritage, so they’re “Mama” or “Papa.” I knew someone at school who had a “Grandmother,” but her friend at school had a “Nonna.” And she was like, “Well, that word sounds cool.” And so she just started calling her very Anglo-Australian grandmother “Nonna” even though there’s no family history of Italian naming in their family.

Gretchen: That’s very cute.

Lauren: It was really cute. So sometimes people will deviate – every family has its own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, they pop up in the kinship terminology that people use.

Keep reading

Here’s a riddle:

Everyone has one, but I use yours more than I use my own.
What is it?

A name!

Naming a brand-new tiny human is a big linguistic task. They might carry that name for the rest of their life – or at least for a number of formative years, if they decide to change it when they’re older. But a baby can’t tell you anything about what kind of name they’d like. So how do you pick a name for someone?

In this 23rd bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about the linguistics of naming people. There are lots of factors to consider: does a name sound old-fashioned or super-trendy? How does the name fit in with the rest of the family and with the cultural context? How might a name get misspoken, misspelled, misheard, or mis-nicknamed? Plus, we share how our parents decided on our names, and other name decision strategies to consider as Lauren prepares to name her upcoming tiny human.

To listen to this bonus episode, plus 22 other previous bonuses, support Lingthusiasm on Patreon! 

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 5 shownotes page.

[Theme music]

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

Gretchen: and I’m Gretchen McCulloch. And today we’re going to be talking about colour. But first! I want to point out that all the transcripts for previous episodes are now online so you can check those out. 

Also: Lauren, what have you been up to lately?

Lauren: I have been in the world of gesture and the world of language data archiving. I’ve been at iGesto conference in Porto in Portugal, which was a delightful place for a delightful conference. And I’ve been archiving language data with a couple of projects, one of which is super exciting and I don’t want to be one of those people that holds exciting projects over people’s heads, but I’ve been doing some work with 1970s data recordings that’s pretty cool and coming along nicely. And of course getting my own data into an archive that will be accessible for other people to look at whether they’re speakers of the language or interested in the language or want to do linguistics on it. So that’s been my month, how are you?

Gretchen: I had a pretty quiet month but at the end of February I’m heading to ICLDC which is the international conference on language documentation and conservation in Hawaii.

Lauren: I’m so jealous! I say, having just come back from Porto.

Gretchen: I am really excited because I’ve been hearing about the conference for years and I have not made it yet. So this is an international conference about language revitalization and I’m going to be running some workshops on getting your language information on Wikipedia and I’m also really excited to learn more about what other people’s projects are that they’re working on.

Lauren: Awesome. I’m so excited that LingWiki, the linguistics Wikipedia editing thing is having a season in Hawaii The ICLDC conference is so great it has such a good community and I’m sure ICLDC7 will be a hashtag with lots of action on it in late January early March. [Update: the hashtag is actually ICLDC5.]

Gretchen: Yeah, so check out the hashtag, we’ll try to tweet something about that, I’m sure I’ll be tweeting from my own twitter account on that hashtag. I don’t know how much people use hashtags at gesture conferences so maybe check out Lauren’s.

Lauren: Lots.

Gretchen: Oh good! OK good, you just have to take photos of the gestures.

Lauren: Yeah, I’ll add a link in the show notes as well to the iGesto hashtags. That’s what Twitter photos are for.

Gretchen: Ahhh photos, I forgot about photos.

[Theme music]

Lauren: I am so excited that today’s topic is colour and language! You may be wondering why we would be interested in talking about colour and language at the same time and that is for a number of reasons.

If you take a cross-linguistic perspective you find that there are a variety of ways in which different languages cut up the colour space in order to talk about them, that has some really interesting implications.

Gretchen: Yeah, so I guess the simple reason is colours are things that we have words for! But not all languages have the same words for the same colours, so you have a potential visual spectrum of possible colours that exists and languages that carve up that visual spectrum in some ways that are similar in some ways that are different. Lauren, you have a story for us.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain 

Red, orange, yellow, grue, and purple? Not so fast – while many languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, it’s unlikely that a language would lump these two together while also having distinct words for “orange” and “purple”. 

But how do we know this? What kinds of ways do different languages carve up the colour spectrum? Why does English say “redhead” instead of “orangehead”? How do colour words interact with smells, reading, and the human brain? In episode 5 of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen talk about what linguistic typology and psycholinguistics can tell us about colour words. 

We also chat about Lauren’s archiving work, and the iGesto gesture conference, and Gretchen’s upcoming ICLDC conference adventures.

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

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Basic colour terms (Wikipedia)
  
• XKCD colour survey results
• WALS map of colour terms
  
• Claire Bowen on colour terms, particularly in Australian languages
• Smells can have colours (Lauren’s post)
• We use words to colour our odours (Research team page)
• Blue in Italian (PDF)
• Ancient colour categories (PDF)
• Why red means red in almost every language (Nautilus)
  
• 1972 paper on colour terminology
• Rich’s 1977 colour perception survey
  
• Critique of colour swatches methodology (PDF)
• Kory Stamper on defining colour terms
• Children’s colour term acquisition (PDF)
• An interactive Stroop Effect test
  
• The iGesto conference hashtag (includes many tweets from Lauren)
• Lauren *said* ICLDC7, but she meant ICLDC5 - the 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation
  

 Some things we didn’t even get to mention in the episode:

• Is colour perception a universal human experience? (Sapiens)
• ‘Purple Rain’ — As Retold In A Language Without A Word For Purple (via Steph Campisi)
• Language Log on the ongoing debate about the Namibian tribe that reportedly can’t distinguish green and blue
  
• Roses are red / Violets are grue… (tweet poem from Gretchen)

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).