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Posts tagged "plural"
“Gretchen: I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.
Lauren: The octopus.
Gretchen: The octopus.
Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.
Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet. So, Greek does not make these plural by adding I to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.
Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”?
Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /aktaˈpodiz/.
Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.”
—
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more’
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and words.
Excerpt from Episode 38 of Lingthusiasm: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and words.
Transcript Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more. 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 38 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. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plurals. But first, it’s our anniversary!
Lauren: Every year in November we celebrate another year of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting. This year, we are celebrating by asking you to share your favourite fact about linguistics that you’ve learnt from Lingthusiasm.
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Lauren: Most people still find podcasts from recommendations from trusted friends and acquaintances, so sharing your enthusiasm for linguistics with people is the best way for the show to find new ears. This month’s bonus episode is all about reading fiction like a linguist. A bit like podcasts, I get a lot of my fiction reading suggestions from you, Gretchen. We talk about what it’s like to read fiction through the eyes of a linguist.
Gretchen: All of the linguistically interesting angles and facts and aspects of the fiction we’ve been reading recently in this episode. We also have over 30 bonus episodes. That’s almost half the show! If you’ve been looking for more quality linguistics content in your life, and you’ve listened to all the back episodes of Lingthusiasm, there is more. We have a solution! You don’t have to stop listening. You can get access to these instead.
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Gretchen: And thanks for people who are already supporting us for helping keep the show going and ad-free!
Lauren: Not only can you read linguistics-y fiction, but you can also wear your lingthusiasm with our new merch.
Gretchen: You can wear Lingthusiasm patterns including the International Phonetic Alphabet, the esoteric symbols, and the tree diagrams on your feet with the new Lingthusiasm socks.
Lauren: I mean, you could’ve worn them on your feet with the scarf but that would’ve been strange. The socks fit much better.
Gretchen: Wear the socks on your feet. Don’t wear scarves and ties and mugs on your feet.
Lauren: We also have greeting cards with IPA “Thanks” and “Congratulations” on them but definitely don’t wear them at all.
Gretchen: Yes. Plus, we have t-shirts, baby outfits, and various other kinds of Lingthusiasm merch. If you go to lingthusiasm.com/merch, you can check out photos of all of those and get them for yourself or for a linguist or linguistics enthusiast in your life.
[Music]
Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, it’s grammar time.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: What is the difference between these two words? You ready?
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: The first one is “book.” And the second one is “books.”
Gretchen: Oh, I know this one! I know this one. We’re good. Okay. The first one is when you just have one book and the second one, “books,” is when you have more than one book. How did I do?
Lauren: You did great! Congratulations.
Gretchen: Okay, good. Thank you. I am a speaker of English.
Lauren: Your English-speaker intuitions are working as expected.
Gretchen: That’s good to know, seeing as we’re speaking English right now. This is plurals. Sometimes, you have just one of something. You have a singular. Sometimes, you have a plural of something. In English, the kind of classic way that you form a plural is by adding an S or this /s/ sound to the end of a word.
Lauren: We’ve talked about morphology in a previous episode, which is where you add bits to a word to create more meaning. Plurals are just a really nice bit of morphology in English. I’m very fond of them. I like being able to distinguish between whether I have one book or many books.
Gretchen: Hopefully all the books.
Lauren: Yes, ideally more than one book. I think that’s the appeal of plurals.
Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more
In English you have one book, and three books. In Arabic you have one kitaab, and three kutub. In Nepali it’s one kitab, and three kitabharu, but sometimes it’s three kitab.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren look at the many ways that languages talk about how many of something there are, ranging from common distinctions like singular, plural, and dual, to more typologically rare forms like the trial, the paucal, and the associative plural. (And the mysterious absence of the quadral, cross-linguistically!)
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
It’s also our anniversary episode! We’re celebrating three years of Lingthusiasm by asking you to share your favourite fact you’ve learnt from the podcast. Share it on social media and tag @lingthusiasm if you’d like us to reshare it for other people, or just send it directly to someone who you think needs a little more linguistics in their life.
This month’s bonus episode was about reading fiction as a linguist! Check out our favourite recs for linguistically interesting fiction and get access to 30+ additional episodes if you’ve run out of lingthusiasm to listen to, by becoming a member on Patreon.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- World Atlas of Language Structures
- WALS feature 33A: Coding of Nominal Plurality
- WALS feature 34A: Occurrence of Nominal Plurality
- Nepali plural (Wikipedia)
- Arabic plural (Wikipedia)
- Kinyarwanda plural (Wikipedia)
- Indonesian plural (Wikipedia)
- Tetum plural (Wikipedia)
- Suppletion (Wikipedia)
- Lingthusiasm Episode 2: Pronouns. Little words, big jobs
- Lingthusiasm Episode 16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test
- Dual (Wikipedia)
- Second personal dual pronoun (Superlinguo)
- Trial & Quadral (Wikipedia)
- Paucal (Wikipedia)
- Monolingual field methods demonstration
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.
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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).
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.
