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.

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

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:

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 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern | Lingthusiasm

Get more from Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Patreon

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.

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

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).

Transcript Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘On the nose - How the nose shapes language’. 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 what the nose knows – how the nose is used in language. But first, next month is our 9th anniversary! We love making this show, and we love our anniversary as a moment to say thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for linguistics.

Lauren: To help celebrate, this year we’re asking you to take a moment to rate the show in your podcasting app of choice and to leave a review if you like.

Gretchen: Sometimes I wonder what rating actually does for a podcast.

Lauren: Look, I’m sure there’re some murky, algorithmic ways that it’s used, but it’s also a really useful way to help other people find the show and let them know it’s worth their time.

Gretchen: Podcasts don’t have public listener stats, so when I’m looking at a new show that I’m thinking about listening to or that I might do an interview on, I’ll have a look at the general number of ratings and reviews to get a vibe for the show. That’s where this can help us out.

Lauren: I use a small podcast player. And even there, it’s a big difference in whether a show has zero reviews or a few. Feel free to rate or review on any platform big or small.

Gretchen: We’ll be sharing some of our favourite reviews on social media and in the credits to episodes for the next year, so stay tuned, and you might see your review there.

Lauren: Speaking of things we’ve enjoyed seeing, we’ve enjoyed seeing your photos of the jazzed up Lingthusiasm logo sticker in your lives. If you missed out on one of the stickers or if you want to see the design on other objects, we’ve now also made it available on other merch including t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more.

Gretchen: We’ve also made a new merch item, which are greeting cards that say, “/mɛɹi mɛɹi mɛɹi / holidays.”

Lauren: Do you mean “merry / marry / Mary holidays”?

Gretchen: That’s why the subtitle says, “Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful, festive season.”

Lauren: Also, Gretchen, shouldn’t it be “Merry Christmas” not “Merry Holidays”?

Gretchen: No, because this bonus extra linguistics – hearing or reading “Merry Holidays” produces a surprise effect on the brain, known officially as an “N400.” Other examples from linguistic experiments include, “I take coffee with cream and dog.”

Lauren: Okay, I’m glad you did not put that on a gift card.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I just don’t think it would sell as well. With this card, you are doing language variation, sound change, and psycholinguistics.

Lauren: And with nine years of the show, we also have a great back catalogue of linguistics merch from classy gifts for your favourite prof or linguistics graduate to deep cut references to some of our favourite episodes to designs that look great even if your friends don’t get the linguistics reference. You can get scarves and t-shirts and notebooks and mugs and all sorts of linguistics merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was about synonyms, homonyms, and many, many other less familiar types of -nyms. You can get access to this and nine-years-worth of bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: “Please do not turn your nose up at today’s topic.”

Gretchen: “Let’s just follow our nose and see where we end up.”

Lauren: “Okay, this is already getting on the nose.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

We often invoke the idea of language by showing the mouth or the hands. But the nose is important to both signed and spoken languages: it can be a resonating chamber that air can get shaped by, as well as a salient location for the hand to be in contact with.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the nose! We talk about why noses are so popular cross-linguistically (seriously, nasals are in 98% of the world’s languages), what the nose looks like inside (it’s bigger than you think!), and increasingly cursed methods that linguists have tried to use to see inside the nose (from giving yourself the worst headache to, yes, sticking earbuds up your nostrils). We also share our favourite obscure nose-related idioms, map the surprisingly large distribution of the “cock-a-snook” gesture, and try to pin down why the nose feels like an intrinsically funny part of the body.

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

Announcements:

We’re 9 years old! For our anniversary, we’re hope you could leave us a rating our review on your favourite podcast app to help people who encounter the show want to click “play” for the first time: we’ll read out a few of our favourite reviews at the end of the show over the next year so this could be your words!

People have responded super enthusiastically to the jazzed up version of our logo that we sent to patrons earlier this year! So we’ve now made this design available on some very cute merch. Wear your Lingthusiasm fandom on a shirt or a mug or a notebook to help spot fellow linguistics nerds!

We’ve also made a new greeting card design that says {Merry/marry/Mary} Holidays! Whether you say these words the same or differently, we hope this card leads to joyful discussions of linguistic variation.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about our favourite words ending in nym! We talk about We talk about how there are so many kinds of nym words that are weirder and wackier than classic synonyms and antonyms, how even synonyms and antonyms aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, and why retronyms make people mad but are Gretchen’s absolute favourite. Plus: a tiny quiz segment on our favourite obscure and cool-sounding nyms!.

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:

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 104: What's in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more | Lingthusiasm

Get more from Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Patreon

Bonus 104: What’s in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more

You might have learned about synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and acronyms in school. But do you know about… autoantonyms, contronyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, metonyms, eponyms, anonyms, backronyms, matronyms, patronyms, retronyms, endonyms, exonyms, toponyms, telonyms, demonyms, razzonyms, oikonyms, AND phantonyms?

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about our favourite words ending in nym! Okay, technically it’s -onym (Greek for name, it’s the same root as the beginning of onomatopoeia), but nym feels catchier. We talk about how there are so many kinds of nym words that are weirder and wackier than classic synonyms and antonyms, how even synonyms and antonyms aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, and why retronyms make people mad but are Gretchen’s absolute favourite. Plus: a tiny quiz segment on our favourite obscure and cool-sounding nyms!

Listen to this episode about our favourite words ending in nym, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Transcript Episode 108: Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu’. 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. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about documenting Grassfields languages in Cameroon. But first, Lingthusiasm has more than 20 interview episodes. You can find them all together on our topics page where we have a category for interviews specifically. Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics to find those. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons with a few interviews in there as well.

Our latest bonus episode is one of those interviews. We talk with one of the translators of Because Internet about the particular challenges of translating a book about internet linguistics, like how to translate the Lolcat bible into Spanish when this meme never existed in Spanish in the first place – a problem which Miguel solves brilliantly. You can listen to Gretchen’s chat with Dr. Miguel Sanchez Ibañez, who is a linguist and lecturer at Valladolid University, on Patreon, and you can read Because Internet in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Links in the show notes. Patrons get access to bonus episodes and help keep the show running ad-free. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Professor Pius Akumbu is a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and Cultures of Africa Lab) in Paris, France. Professor Akumbu has done documentation work on a wide variety of topics from lexical tone to traditional stories and also founded a school in his home village to ensure that children have access to primary education in their own language – Babanki, also known as Kejom. Welcome to Lingthusiasm, Professor Akumbu.

Pius: Thank you for having me, Lauren. It’s my pleasure to be invited to your programme.

Lauren: How did you get into linguistics?

Pius: I think the best answer is that I got into linguistics by chance. Like many people in many parts of the world, I had no idea what linguistics was when I completed high school. I went to the university. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Yeah, of course, the orientation before that wasn’t there, so I had to find my way through. Then, as I was wondering what to do, I had some friends who had already decided on one of them, whose name I can mention, Enow Cecilia, had already joined the linguistics department. We met on campus, and she was like, “Oh, come try and see!” I went to that class.

Lauren: What an excellent chance.

Pius: To date, I still really appreciate that I had this opportunity. Of course, when I went there, I had some very nice professors.

Keep reading

Posts tagged "podcasts"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

Lingthusiasm Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

Bonus 104: What’s in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more

Transcript Episode 108: Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu

About Lingthusiasm