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Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Climbing sonority mountain from A to P’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about phonetics and phonology

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P. 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 50 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about sonority. But first, Happy Anniversary Lingthusiasm Month.

Gretchen: Happy Anniversary, Lauren!

Lauren: Happy Anniversary, Gretchen! It’s been four years of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Which is kind of amazing. We launched with three episodes in December 2016, but we celebrate the anniversary in November because we were recording them in advance.

Lauren: It’s also our 50th main episode. Those couple of extra episodes that we launched with explain why it’s not something divisible by 12. We’re so excited to hit our 50th episode of main Lingthusiasm episodes in our anniversary month.

Gretchen: It’s a nice round number for another nice round number. Thank you to everybody who has already shared a link to your favourite episode or just your excitement about Lingthusiasm in honour of our anniversary. There’s still another week to do that within our anniversary month. Of course, we welcome this all year round as well. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and a lot of people don’t yet realise they could be having a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month – or in their eyes because all our episodes also have transcripts.

Lauren: As with every year at our anniversary in particular, we’re asking you to help us connect with people who would be totally interested in a linguistics podcast if only they knew lingthusiasm existed.

Gretchen: We’ve done this call for extra sharing of the Lingthusiasm every year on our anniversary, and we always see in the stats that your recommendations really do help more people find the show. If you share it on social media, tag us. We’ll reply. We’ll like your tweet. We’ll try to reshare it on our Instagram story and whatever else is applicable. Or if you just send it to one person in private, we won’t know about it, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction. Feel free to tell us about it on social media if you wanna be thanked.

Lauren: As well as our 50 main episodes, we have over 45 bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. Our latest episode is a behind-the-scenes chat about writing the scripts for the Crash Course Linguistics series where we had Jessi Grieser along who was also part of that team.

Gretchen: If you’re looking for even more linguistics, we have also been co-writing the scripts for this big educational YouTube channel, which is Crash Course. If you want to watch some videos about linguistics as well and know that we were behind the words that the host is saying on those scripts, we’re really excited to share those as well and to get to share a bit of behind-the-scenes.

Lauren: You now have the option on Patreon to support at an annual level rather than at a monthly level of support. You can also choose from a range of currencies now, so there are some more options there. Annual subscriptions make a great last-minute gift if you’re still thinking about something for the holiday season for yourself or for someone else.

Gretchen: Of course, lingthusiasm merch and copies of Because Internet , now in paperback, also make great gifts, although you’ll have to keep an eye on timing for whether they can be shipped in time. Digital gifts are also great.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, I’ve been getting really into crossword puzzles lately.

Lauren: That is a wholesome hobby to have.

Gretchen: I feel like it’s just one of those things you do on your phone a bit mindlessly. Crossword puzzles always make me think about the way that individual letters – English letters – can combine with each other in particular patterns. Because you’re trying to fill in a particular range of words, and you’re like, “That has to be a vowel there,” or like, “That could be a vowel or an R or an L.” There’s only so many things that could in this slot when you’re trying to guess the words you don’t know.

Lauren: My grandpa taught me to do crossword puzzles, and I feel like I had a really good appreciation for what made an English consonant cluster well before I studied linguistics and learnt about things like syllables and phonotactics, which is the fancy way of saying “syllable structure.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And it’s not just, you know, okay, I wanna cheat at Scrabble, or I wanna like, okay, what if I came up with some –

Lauren: If you wanna cheat, you want to optimise your ability to play Scrabble based on your linguistic analysis abilities.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick” seem even less likely. What’s going on? 

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the underlying pattern behind how sounds fit together in various languages, what linguists call sonority. We can place sounds in a line – or along the steps up a mountain – according to how sonorous they are, and this lets us compare and contrast how languages put together their syllables. We also talk about the incredibly weird case of S.

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

Announcements

We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and we’ve seen a significant bump in listens each November when we ask you to help share the show, so we know this works. If you tag us @lingthusiasm on social media in your recommendation post, we will like/retweet/reshare/thank you as appropriate, or if you send a recommendation to a specific person, we won’t know about it but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction at helping out (and feel free to still tell us about it on social media if you’d like to be thanked!). Trying to think of what to say? One option is to pick a particular episode that you liked and share a link to that.

Also, Crash Course Linguistics videos are coming out every Friday! Subscribe on YouTube, or sign up for Mutual Intelligibility email newsletters to get an email when each video comes out, along with exercises to practice the concepts and links for further reading. 

This month’s bonus episode is a behind the scenes look at the creation of Crash Course Linguistics! We’re joined by Jessi Grieser, the third member of our linguistics content team behind the scripts of Crash Course Linguistics. We talk about how we structured the syllabus of Crash Course Linguistics, how Gavagai came to be a recurring character in the series, finding our delightful host Taylor Behnke, and what it’s like working with the awesome teams at Complexly and Thought Cafe. Get all the details and access to 44 other bonus episodes by becoming a Patron!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Lingthusiasm Episode 17: Vowel Gymnastics
  
• Lingthusiasm Episode 35: Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger 
• Oxford Bibliographies Sonority
• Sonority sequencing principle Wikipedia entry
• Blick vs. bnick
• Sonorants and obstruents
• Why we sing fa la la la la
• Nuxalk language Wikipedia entry

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).