| CARVIEW |
Posts tagged "space"
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 15: Talking and thinking about time
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 15: Talking and thinking about time. 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 15 shownotes 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 talking about how we talk about time.
Lauren: But first, we have very exciting news for 2018, which is: twice the number of full episodes of Lingthusiasm every month!
Gretchen: So, up to this stage, we’ve been doing Patreon bonus episodes, which are sometimes a little bit shorter, one of them is a text chat episode, and sometimes they’re cut bits from the show – now we actually have enough support on Patreon to do full-length bonus episodes. So that means two Lingthusiasm episodes a month for people who support us on Patreon. We are really excited to have grown this far in this short amount of time.
Lauren: We’ll still have free episodes every month through the main channel, but we’ll also have another full-length episode, which means you get more bang for your Patreon buck.
Gretchen: Yeah! So, thanks to everyone who has brought us there so far and it is not too late to start listening to these and all the previous Patreon episodes as well! We also released Lingthusiasm merch last month – IPA scarves, T-shirts and mugs and bags that say “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it”, and Lingthusiasm stickers. And they have been very popular, we have been very much enjoying seeing people’s photos of them and stories about who they got them for, so feel free to keep sending us those. We’re excited to see what you end up doing with them!
Lauren: We were so excited when we put this – especially with the scarves and the “Not judging your grammar” – yeah, we were so excited when we were putting this together and it’s been so nice to actually be able to share it with everyone and everyone else also getting really excited about it.
Gretchen: And we’re really excited to see some of that gear and some of our listeners at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in a few weeks in January. So, we’ll hopefully see some of you there!
Lauren: Our current Patreon episode to round out the year is a question and answer session that we did at our Montreal live show. So if you want to know what it’s like to have the opportunity to ask us some questions, if you want to relive the live show experience, that is available on the Patreon now!
Gretchen: It had a really good energy, people asked really good questions. And it was really fun to have that kind of more back-and-forth than we normally get to do in the episodes. So you can check that out and all the previous bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Lauren: There’s a quote that circulates around on the internet, one of those ones where the original author is lost to time, that for me sums up I think a lot of what we’re going to cover in the episode today, which is, “You are a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust.”
Gretchen: Hmm. That is both weird and cool.
Lauren: And I really like this quote because for me, it takes something that we take for granted, our lived experience of how we move through the world, and it kind of just unhinges that for a second and makes you reflect on how really weird human bodies and human social interaction is. And I feel like a lot when I teach linguistics classes, a lot of my class is just me going, “Look at this really obvious thing you’ve done your whole life, think about how weird it is for a moment, think about how weird it is that we actually communicate with each other functionally.”
Gretchen: I think a lot of the times when we’re talking about linguistics, we end up talking about the “meat suit” part of, like, this is what your tongue is doing. Just think for a second about the fact that you have a tongue! It’s pretty weird! Or this is what your vocal cords are doing, or the weird flaps of skin and the rest of your throat are doing, or the, you know, neurons that you can’t see. And there’s there’s a lot of physical aspects to language that says, okay, well, spoken languages tend to have certain kinds of similarities because that’s just how the human vocal tract is designed. Or sign languages have certain kinds of similarities because that’s what your hands can do. Like, there aren’t any sign languages that require you to stand on your hands. Or spoken languages that require you to, like, bite your tongue to make the word, because humans don’t want to do that! And I think the part that we often miss is that in addition to being in meat-coated skeletons, we’re also on a planet. We’re on the same planet. And some of our experiences as speakers of any of the languages on this planet have certain kinds of similarities with each other because of that planet, and a lot of those are related to time.
Lauren: And so that is our topic for today. We’re gonna talk about talking about and thinking about how time works.
Gretchen: So Happy New Year’s, Earthlings! We’re gonna talk about time.
“
Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space.
Lauren: Yep. Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it?
Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode…
Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen.
Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where both people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a-
Lauren: Space Creole!
Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.
”—
Excerpt from Episode 1 of Lingthusiasm: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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.
