Transcript Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Micro to macro - The levels of 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 all the different layers of language structure. But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary!

Lauren: To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we’ve compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm.

Gretchen: If you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website.

Lauren: Even with 101 options, I’m sure there’re still a few we’ve missed. Feel free to tag us @Lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites.

Gretchen: Or if there’re any that you’re particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedivy about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives and the linguistics of what makes writing feel beautiful.

Gretchen: You can also read Julie’s new book called Linguaphile, which is, indeed, very beautifully written. It is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives.

Lauren: For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s LING 101!

Lauren: Oh my gosh, that is a classic first year subject course code.

Gretchen: I feel like there’s this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics programme has in some form. It’s a classic textbook format. It’s a classic course style. It goes from this very micro-level of language to this macro-level of language where you’re starting with very small list units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse.

Lauren: Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn’t have course codes like “LING 101,” but I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this.

Gretchen: Ours also was not called “LING 101.” It was called “LING 100.”

Lauren: Oh, no. That was the last episode. We missed it.

Gretchen: We missed it. Now we can’t do it ever. Then I was at another university where it was called “201.” I don’t really wanna wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. I think “101” is still classically in the culture – the idea of an intro linguistics course – even if there’re many course codes that are different from that.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is intentionally not in this structure.

Gretchen: It seems like it would be a bit of a shame if we had to start like, okay, our first year is like, only phonetics, and then we’re gonna do only phonology, and then when we get all the way to pragmatics, we’ve got to stop doing the podcast or something. We made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit.

Lauren: I mean, especially with the level of detail wherein – imagine if we’re like, “We’re 100 episodes in. We’re now moving from individual phones up to phonology.” We could’ve been here for quite a while.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s more fun to mix it up. It also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper – a new paper comes out – that we wanna talk about about a particular topic, there’s always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It’s not like, “Oh, well, we did sounds for the first three years, and then we never get to do sounds again.”

Lauren: Episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through – 101 course-style – all these different layers of linguistic structure so you can see how a finite number of building blocks had this capacity to combine in so many novel ways.

Gretchen: I think of it as those – have you ever seen those videos where they start really, really zoomed in on a quark or an electron or a nucleus, and then they zoom out to the atom, and then to the cell, and then to the plant, and then to the backyard, and then to the map-view, and the Earth-view, and the Solar System, and the galaxy, and then you feel like, “Wow! We’re so far out!” and then you can zoom back in and back out. It’s very trippy and fun. We can do that with language.

Lauren: One of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create sentences that have never been uttered before. Collecting these is something of a linguist’s hobby.

Gretchen: We have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them and all these different layers. But let’s debut our candidate sentences here.

Lauren: One: “Today, I learnt that there were smaller walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did, indeed, refer to them as ‘smallrus’.”

Gretchen: Number Two: “Moons can have moons, and they are called ‘moonmoons’.”

Lauren: Three: “As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chien is legally fourth in line to be President of Taiwan.”

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Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.

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

Announcements:

To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we have compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm! This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @ lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, psycholinguist and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile! We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ 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:

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

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 90: Don't you love to do a "do" episode? | Lingthusiasm

Get more from Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Patreon

Bonus 90: Don’t you love to do a “do” episode?

We do love the word “do”,
and we hope you do too.
Don’t you want to know
what the word “do” can do?

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the word “do”! We talk about the various functions of “do” as illustrated by lyrics from ABBA and other pop songs, what makes the word “do” so unique in English compared to other languages, and the drama of how “do” caught on and then almost got driven out again.

Listen to this episode about do, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Transcript Episode 94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The perfectly imperfect aspect episode’. 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.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about aspect. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about comparatives and superlatives.

Gretchen: Would you say that it’s a GOOD episode? It’s definitely one of our BETTER episodes on this topic. In fact, it’s the first time we’ve done an episode on superlatives, so it’s the BEST.

Lauren: It’s the only time, so we’ve made sure that it’s superlative in the linguistic and non-linguistic sense.

Gretchen: To listen to the comparative and superlatives episode, and over seven years of monthly bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: One of my favourite linguistic craft projects was when I embroidered the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Gretchen: I remember that project! You put photos of it on your blog. I love it when people make linguistics crafts and share photos of them or bring them to conferences. It’s so much fun.

Lauren: Yeah, I had already embroidered the IPA when we started this podcast. While I was embroidering the IPA, I really enjoyed thinking about each of the sounds while I was embroidering it. And then since I embroidered the IPA all in a single weekend – it was an impulse project – when I got back to campus that week, I showed it to all my linguistics friends, and they thought it was cool.

Gretchen: Aww. In addition to this charming linguistics crafts anecdote, you’ve also just talked about embroidering the International Phonetic Alphabet in a couple of different grammatical ways. You’ve said, “while I was embroidering the IPA,” and then also, “since I embroidered the IPA all in a single weekend.” Both of those actions take place in the past. You’ve definitely finished embroidering the IPA by now. It’s been years. But they’re different ways of considering what the shape of this same embroider action looks like.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

When we’re talking about an activity – say, throwing teacups in a lake – we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but also what shape that action looks like. Is this a one-time teacup throwing event (I threw the teacup in the lake) or a repeated or ongoing situation (I was throwing the teacup in the lake)? Both of these actions might have happened at the same time (they’re both in the past tense), but this different in shape between them is known as aspect.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about aspect. We talk about the important aspects of aspect: the most common aspectual meaning across languages (whether an action is completed or not) and the most common ways of forming aspects (repeating some or all of the word, or else grabbing something from somewhere else in the grammar), as well as why English aspect in the present tense went weird a couple centuries ago (Shakespeare could say “I go, my lord” but these days we’re far more likely to say “I’m going”). We also talk about our favourite fun aspects of aspect: why there isn’t a Thursdititive aspect even though it would be super useful for a certain linguistics podcast (ahem!), the secret etymological frequentative aspect that’s hiding in plain sight in English, and the real historical teacup-lake-throwing controversy that could have been solved with more precise use of aspect.

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 ways of comparing things to each other! We talk about why comparisons get weird when the groups are too large or too small, the hidden etymological connection between more and most, how we choose between er/est and more/most (and why “funner” is really more logical), and how English has more ways of making comparatives than many other languages. We also talk about strategies that other languages use for making comparatives, and why some words are harder to make comparative.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ 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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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 87: If I were an irrealis episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘If I were an irrealis episode’. 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 how languages express unreality. But first, thank you to everyone who celebrated our anniversary month with us.

Lauren: We always enjoy seeing what you recommend to people and thanking you for doing that. If you did that not on social media, in your own private media channels, thank you very much. You can share Lingthusiasm with anyone who needs more linguistics in their life throughout the year.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is a conversation about swearing in science fiction and fantasy with Ada Palmer and Jo Walton.

Lauren: I was so excited to hear you talk to two of our favourite authors. We’ve talked about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series before. We’ve talked about Jo Walton’s Thessaly books. Getting to hear you talk to them about swearing in fantasy and in science fiction was a whole lot of fun.

Gretchen: This was so much fun. We also have several other bonus episodes about swearing more generally as well as a massive archive of bonus episodes if you’re looking for something to do, and you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes, or you just wanna help us keep making the show. Those are there. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to our full archive of bonus episodes for yourself, or they make a great last-minute gift idea.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is real?

Gretchen: That’s a big philosophical question, Lauren, “What does it mean for something to be real?”

Lauren: Mm-hmm. But we could also answer it linguistically.

Gretchen: We could, indeed. Languages have lots of ways of talking about things that aren’t real. Sometimes, this itself can get tricky. If you want to start a fun discussion among your friends at the dinner table, try asking them things like, “Is a toy sword a real sword?”

Lauren: Hmm, I can totally see a context where you’re playing with toy swords – or maybe those big foam swords that people use in live-action role playing. In that context, it’s a real sword. You’re like, “Please don’t hit me with your sword,” or “I’m gonna practice my sword work.”

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Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Language lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it’s a hypothetical situation (such as “if it rains, we’ll cancel the picnic” - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they’re called the irrealis.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples under the irrealis umbrella. We talk about various things that we can mean by “reality”, such as how existing fictional concepts, like goblins playing Macbeth, differ from newly-constructed fictions, like our new creature the Frenumblinger. We also talk about hypothetical statements using “if” (including the delightfully-named “biscuit conditionals), and using the "if I were a rich man” (Fiddler on the Roof) to “if I was a rich girl” (Gwen Stefani) continuum to track the evolution of the English subjunctive. Finally, a few of our favourite additional types of irrealis categories: the hortative, used to urge or exhort (let’s go!), the optative, to express wishes and hopes (if only…), the dubitative, for when you doubt something, and the desiderative (I wish…).

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

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who shared Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. We hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzies!

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we’ve ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about invented swear words like “frak” and “frell”, sweary lexical gaps (why don’t we swear with “toe jam!”), and interpreting the nuances of regional swear words like “bloody” in fiction.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ 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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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 85: Ergativity delights us

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Ergativity delights us’. 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 ergativity. But first, next month, November, is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month. It’s been seven years!

Lauren: For our anniversary month, we ask you to share your favourite episode or just share some lingthusiasm in general. Most people still find podcasts through word-of-mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.

Gretchen: Or in their eyes since all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.

Lauren: The other day, I shared our colour episode with a stylist because we were talking about the strange history of the colour orange. It’s so fun to find that perfect episode to recommend to someone, and we’ve touched on so many different topics over the last seven years.

Gretchen: I’m always sending people to our episode on turn-taking and conversational styles because there’s this comment that keeps coming up on social media about having to hold up the entire conversation by yourselves or not being able to get a word in edgewise. That’s a linguistics thing that’s been described. You can listen to an episode about it.

Lauren: We’ve asked you to do this every year on our anniversary, and we always see it in the stats. Your recommendations really do help more people find the show.

Gretchen: If you share us on social media, you can tag @lingthusiasm on basically all of the social media sites, so we can see it and reply, or like it, or reshare as appropriate. If you share it in private, we won’t necessarily know, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction – or you can tell us about it on social media if you still wanna be thanked.

Lauren: In what is becoming another anniversary tradition, we are doing our second listener survey this year. This is our chance to learn all about your linguistic interests, and we have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to contribute to.

Gretchen: If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again. You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode, and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year.

Lauren: This year, we also wrote an academic article about the process of making Lingthusiasm, which featured some of your answers from the previous survey. You are officially contributing to academic research. Because of this, we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey.

Gretchen: To do the survey, or read more details, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23. That’s all lowercase and with the numbers in their numeric values – not written out as words.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media. Our most recent bonus episode was a recap of Gretchen’s time at the 2023 Linguistics Institute, which is a month-long linguistics summer course. Was I jealous? Yes. Was I delighted to hear about it? Yes. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Our patrons really do let us keep making this podcast, so we really appreciate any level of support.

[Music]

Lauren: You know, Gretchen, in some ways, ergativity is the basis of our LingComm friendship.

Gretchen: You know, you’re right about that that. I think it started in 2014, right?

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

When you have a sentence like “I visit them”, the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from “they visit me”. However, in a sentence like “I laugh”, you don’t actually need those signals – since there’s only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read “Me laugh” or “Laugh me”. And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like “laugh” patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like “visit”. This pattern is known as ergativity.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!

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

Announcements:

November is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month and it’s been 7 years! To help us celebrate we’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, so we’re asking you to share a link to your favourite episode, or just share Lingthusiasm in general. Tag us on on social media so we can thank you, or if you share in private enjoy the warm fuzzies of our gratitude.

We’re doing our second listener survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here.

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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 78: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala | Patreon

Official Post from Lingthusiasm

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Bonus 78: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala

All of the Lingthusiasm main episodes and bonus episodes have transcripts, which involves some interesting technical challenges, including writing words in lots of languages, choosing between writing examples in their conventional spelling versus according to their phonetic value, and translating pauses and intonation into punctuation and paragraph breaks.

In this behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes with Sarah Dopierala, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show! We talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs as a linguistics graduate student at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!). We also talk about how Sarah has found it more fun and efficient to use less automated/AI tools in her transcribing workflow over time (hint: it’s related to “link Suzy as in”), and the process she goes through to edit the spoken version so that it reads well on the page.

All of which to say: Sarah’s job is not going away anytime soon, and it’s thanks to your support as patrons that we can keep paying her to make these beautifully edited transcripts. As a reminder, all the main episode transcripts can be found at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts (and on each episode’s shownotes page), the bonus episode transcripts are each linked to from each bonus episode’s shownotes.

Listen to this interview with our transcriptionist Sarah Dopierala, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Posts tagged "syntax"

Transcript Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

Bonus 90: Don’t you love to do a “do” episode?

Transcript Episode 94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

Lingthusiasm Episode 94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

Transcript Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Bonus 78: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala

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