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Posts tagged "time"
Excerpt from Episode 41 of Lingthusiasm: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology and syntax.
Transcript Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of 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 41 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time. But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm LingComm Grant.
Gretchen: Yes. When we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons started coming in.
Lauren: Now we’re in a position where we want to pay it forward, and we want to help the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We’re giving out a $500 US grant to a project that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience.
Gretchen: With your help, if we reach 800 patrons by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. We’re really looking forward to seeing the applications come in. Applications are due June 1st. You can see more details about the LingComm grant and how to apply on our website. We’ll link to it from the show notes. It’s lingcomm.org – two Ms in “comm.”
Lauren: We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more linguistics communication projects out in the world but don’t have the time or the expertise. If you really want to help support us in the LingComm grants, we’ve created a new tier at the Patreon called “Phil-ling-thropist.” For every person who supports us at $50.00 or more at that level, we’ll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three-grant goal down by 10. You will be as effective at 10 other patrons.
Gretchen: Don’t feel like you need to do this, but if you’re somebody who has a real job and this isn’t a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it. We’ll also send you a Lingthusiast mug after three months at this tier, so you can share your lingthusiasm that way.
Lauren: Of course, patrons at any level will help us meet the 800-patron goal to give out three grants.
Gretchen: If you’re also excited about showing off that you’re a lingthusiast, we also have a new sticker that says, “Lingthusiast, a person that’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” which we’ve added to the $15.00 level on Patreon. Go check out the Patreon. We have new stuff there!
Lauren: Speaking of the stuff at the Patreon, we now have a Discord server for all our Ling-thusiast and above tiers, which is the first Discord server I’ve ever been on. I’m learning a lot.
Gretchen: It’s been really fun to see people join so quickly because there’re actually a lot of people who are already joined and are chatting about things like interesting linguistics links that you come across, conlanging, learning languages, linguistics memes – we even have a channel where you can talk to each other in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a fun challenge – and other interesting linguistics things that you come across around the internet.
Lauren: Lots of different channels. All very lingthusiastic – typing, chat. I feel like it definitely has an old-days-of-the-internet-user-group vibe that makes me really happy.
Gretchen: It’s been really fun to start hanging out there. I think people are really enjoying that. Join us in the Discord!
Lauren: Our current bonus for patrons is bonus content from our interview with Janelle Shane in which we walk through creating a Lingthusiasm bot that generates Lingthusiasm transcripts. We walked through that in detail, and then we read some of our favourites.
Gretchen: If you would like to hear what Lingthusiasm would sound like if it were written by a neural net who is very enthusiastic but doesn’t really know that much about actual linguistics but finds some keywords sometimes, you can check that out. Definitely stay tuned for the part towards the end where we prompt the neural net with both Lingthusiasm and Harry Potter fan fiction. You get the most magical Lingthusiasm episode ever.
Lauren: This and 35 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, I’m gonna do some real-life sentence elicitation so we can look at some examples of how tense works with time. Are you ready if I give you a bit of a prompt?
Gretchen: Sure. Let’s go.
Lauren: Tell me about something that happened yesterday in the past.
Gretchen: I’m walking down the street yesterday, and I see this bird, right? This bird starts coming towards me.
Lauren: Okay. I am definitely gonna ask you about the rest of that story later, but for now, can I have an example of something that’s happening or could be happening right now in the present?
Gretchen: Well, let’s pretend that I’m not just literally recording this podcast with you because that’s a little bit too meta. Let’s say I’m just sitting at home right now, and I’m eating a delicious cake, and you’re drinking a cup of tea.
Lauren: Mmm. Right. I might need to go get a cup of tea. Before I do that, let’s have an example of something that is going to happen later in the future.
Gretchen: I’m going to the airport tomorrow, fly out to Rome at 10:00. We arrive the next morning, and then –
Lauren: Are you going to Rome tomorrow?
Gretchen: No. No, I’m not. It’s just the first place that I thought of. I’m not going anywhere.
Lauren: But, man, now I want a cup of tea and pizza.
Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time
How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about when some languages obligatorily encode time into their grammar. We look at how linguists go about determining whether a language has tense at all, and if so, how many tenses it has, from two tenses (like English past and non-past), to three tenses (past, present, and future), to further tenses, like remote past and on-the-same-day.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
This month’s bonus episode is about what happens when the robots take over Lingthusiasm! In this extension of our interview with Janelle Shane from Episode 40, we train a neural net to generate new Lingthusiasm episodes and perform some of the most absurd ones for you. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the Robot-Lingthusiasm episode and 35 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.
Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- We’re giving away grants for linguistics communications projects!
- Jakobson quote
- Scots Gaelic ‘Faic’ irregular verb
- Scots Gaelic ‘Seeing’ noun/adjective
- Nominal and adverb tense
- Hodiernal tense Wikipedia entry
- Tifal language tense
- Mandarin grammar Wikipedia entry
- Thai verbs Wikipedia entry
- Burmese verbs Wikipedia entry
- Verb tenses with timelines diagram
- Will vs. Going To
- Will or Be Going To?
- xkcd ‘Writing Skills’
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).
“
Lauren: I didn’t really think about how important twelve was for time until we started listing places where it crops up! So it crops up, obviously – we talk about twelve-hour cycles in the day, and we have 24 hours, so that’s two sets of twelve there.
Gretchen: We have things like twelve signs of the zodiac, or twelve months in a given year. And we also have other types of time-related things that are divided up into twelves, like the minutes and the hours on a clock get divided. So an hour gets divided into sixty parts, which is, you know, divisible by twelve. And then a minute gets divided into sixty parts, and so I looked up – because I was thinking, why is it that a second is called the same as, you know, the “first, second, third, fourth”?
Lauren: Is it a coincidence? I had always assumed it was.
Gretchen: No! No! It’s not a coincidence! I also vaguely assumed it was a coincidence. But actually, in medieval Latin – and this is according to Etymonline, which is great – they divided the hours into various kinds of small parts. And the first part of the hour was called the “pars minuta prima”, or the first small part. And “minuta” there is related to, like, “minute” or “miniature.”
Lauren: Right, yeah.
Gretchen: But it just means small. And so that’s where a minute comes from – that’s the first small part. And then the pars minuta secunda –
Lauren: Ahh, I see where this is going!
Gretchen: – is the second small part! And that’s the second.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Which is another sixtieth. And there actually used to be a term for a sixtieth of a second, what we would now use milliseconds for, which was called a tierce, or a third, which is the third small part, which is yet another sixtieth of a second.
Lauren: Ahh. Like, seconds are so simple and salient to me, having grown up with them, that a tierce, like a third, just sounds so weird? But a millisecond is completely fine. You can see the modern decimal system of influence –
Gretchen: Modern decimal system kind of encroaching on the second! Yeah!
Lauren: Wow, imagine if we still measured things in thir… thirds?
Gretchen: Thirds!
Lauren: Thirds.
Gretchen: Or tierces, if you want to be Latin-y about it.
Lauren: Tierces! Yeah.
Gretchen: But, I mean, we could have ended up – you know, we have milliseconds now. The French Revolution, which was one of the things that introduced the metric system, also tried to introduce a ten-day week instead of a seven-day week.
Lauren: Ah, yeah, I heard about this. There’s a great Twitter account that just tweets out whatever day it is in the old French revolutionary calendar.
Gretchen: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, they named them all after, like, agrarian things, right?
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So, there have been attempts to do that, but for some reason the seven-day week and – I guess the nice thing is is that if you divide a 28-day month, which is kind of a lunar month, into four parts, you get this seven-day week, even though there’s no other reason to use seven because it’s this weird prime number.
Lauren: And a ten-day week, it’s a long time to the weekend.
Gretchen: But if you have a three-day weekend, maybe?
Lauren: Like, you’re never gonna win people over. I would rather get a two-day weekend after five days than a three-day weekend after seven.
Gretchen: I don’t remember exactly how they gave the days off, you could have another one halfway through? So it would be like three and then one and then three and then… how do you math? What’s left? Two more?
Lauren: I’m not a French revolutionary, I’m sorry.
”—
Excerpt from Episode 15 of Lingthusiasm: Talking and thinking about time
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more about the linguistics of time.
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.
Lingthusiasm Episode 15: Talking and thinking about time
When we talk about things that languages have in common, we often talk about the physical side, the fact that languages are produced by human bodies, using the same brain and hands and vocal tract. But they’re also all produced (so far) by people from the same planet and going through the same fourth dimension: time.
As the earth revolves around the sun again, each of your Lingthusiasm cohosts is going through another longest (Lauren) or shortest (Gretchen) day, and we’re reflecting on how languages measure the passing of time. This episode of Lingthusiasm is a chance to reflect on the cyclical nature of years and days, the metaphors we use to talk about time in space, from time-space synesthesia to whether the past is behind us or in front of us, and why we measure time in seconds, but not thirds. (We definitely know that tense is also a time-related concept, but it’s such a cool topic that we’re going to give it its very own episode – something to look forward to!)
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
Thanks to everyone who has made this year of Lingthusiasm so great! It’s been a year since we made our first episodes live, and we have been so delighted by how many people share our enthusiasm for linguistics. Thanks especially to our patrons, who keep the show running (and ad-free).
This month’s Patreon bonus episode is our first full-length bonus and it’s a question and answer session from our Montreal liveshow! Now you can have the full lingthusiastic liveshow experience with Bonus 8 (the main show) and Bonus 10 (the Q&A). We’ve still got IPA scarves and more in the merch section, but if you’re looking for a gift that doesn’t require postage, why not give someone a gift subscription to bonus episodes on Patreon?
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- A ghost driving a meat coated skeleton
- ‘Minute’ etymology (Etymonline)
- Children using time words (All Things Linguistic)
- When’s a new year? (Superlinguo)
- Metaphors We Live By
- The French Revolutionary Calendar (Wikipedia)
- Chinese/English time metaphors
- Aymara time metaphors
- Clinton campaign logo
- Time-space synesthesia
- Time-space synesthesia timelords?
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 editorial producer is Emily Gref, 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.
