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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode

Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re…maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking across lots of languages, we find that some languages lump adjectives in with verbs, some with nouns, and some do different things altogether.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about adjectives! We talk about how linguists come up with diagnostic tests to determine whether something is an adjective, other quirks about adjectives (such as why we say “big red ball” but not “red big ball”), and the galaxy-brain question of whether grammatical categories like adjectives are even valid across all languages.

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

Announcements:

By popular demand, our IPA, Tree and Esoteric Symbol designs are now available on these new non-medical reusable fabric masks from Redbubble. On our store you’ll find the white IPA characters on black, red or navy, and the esoteric symbols in white on black or green on black. If you fancy another colour, or the tree design, we’ve made masks available on all of the scarf pages.

Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble.

This month’s bonus episode is about doing LingComm on a budget - plus the Lingthusiasm origin story! We got started doing linguistics communication when we were both broke grad students. We talk about the various stages we went through with launching our blogs, Superlinguo and All Things Linguistic, and of course this podcast a few years later! We give tips on how to come up with a topic, set a schedule, and promote your project, as well as the nitty-gritty details on free or low-cost ways to do things like registering a website and starting a blog, podcast, or youtube channel. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 40 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.

Here are the links mentioned in this 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 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).

Transcript Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented. 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 37 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 language and smell. But first, we’re heading into our November anniversary!

Gretchen: Yay! Three whole years of Lingthusiasm. In celebration of that we are – as we have done for all our anniversaries – we are trying to help more people than ever find the linguistics enthusiasm that we know and love. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. This year, we’ve thought of something to help talk about it.

Lauren: We want to help people find Lingthusiasm by sharing with them what makes linguistics so great. We’re asking you to share a thing that you’ve learnt from Lingthusiasm over the first three years of episodes.

Gretchen: If there’s a fun fact, or a story, or an anecdote that you find yourself retelling or mentioning to people, that would be a great thing to post on social media or to tell someone about, “Hey, there’s this podcast that’s cool! Here’s something I learned from it.” It’s also really helpful to us because, Lauren, you and I have been doing linguistics for quite a while and we sometimes forget which things aren’t new to us but are actually new and exciting to other people. Help us remember which things are new and exciting for you to learn about!

Lauren: If you can’t think of one in particular, because there’re so many great things that you’ve learnt on the show, stay tuned to our social media. We’ll be retweeting and sharing other people’s facts so you can get some ling-spiration.

Gretchen: You can also reshare anybody else’s facts that you would like to co-sign. We’ve noticed that some of our biggest growths in listenerships have been from other people pointing out interesting things that they’ve learned recently. We thought we’d try to do that more formally for the anniversary. Share something interesting you’ve learned, something you find yourself retelling to other people, and other people will realise this is where they can get more stuff like that.

Lauren: I love every anniversary we come back and encourage people to share their lingthusiasm, because every year we have been growing. We have been reaching new ears. Maybe you are new ears since our last anniversary. Maybe you have been with us since Episode 1. We’re always excited to encourage new people to discover that linguistics is fun and interesting and relevant to their everyday life.

Gretchen: We also have another new Patreon bonus episode. This one is about surnames. Listen to this and support the show on Patreon. You can also share your stories about where your surname comes from and any linguistically interesting things that happened to you because of your surname.

Lauren: We talk about the origins of “McCulloch” and “Gawne” in that episode. We also have over 30 bonus episodes for you to listen to. That’s almost half the number of shows. If you’ve listened to the whole main episode back catalogue, there’s almost as many episodes again waiting for you over at the Patreon.

Gretchen: There’s your solution for “Oh, no! I’ve listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes. What do I do now?” The answer is – go listen on Patreon. There’re lots of things for you still to listen to. Thank you if you’ve been supporting us on Patreon already.

Lauren: You help us keep the show ad-free and ticking along. We also have exciting new Lingthusiasm merch for you.

Gretchen: By popular demand, you can now get lingthusiastic socks!

Lauren: I’m very excited about the socks.

Gretchen: All three of our prints – the International Phonetic Alphabet, the tree structure diagrams, and the esoteric Unicode symbols – are now also available on socks, in addition to the scarves, and ties, and mugs that they were previously available on.

Lauren: We have multiple patterns. We have multiple colours. You can buy them along with all of our existing merchandise. We also have greeting cards that say “thanks” and “congrats” in IPA as well as some other greetings.

Gretchen: If there’re any linguists that you need to thank or congratulate as the year winds to a close, that is something you can now do. Plus, and get this – I’m really excited about this – we have water bottles that have the glottal symbols from the IPA on them. They are glottal bottles. I’m so pleased.

Lauren: You can get your nice glottal bottles for your water. Or it’s even more satisfying if you’re the kind of the person who says “water” with a glottal stop in the middle of “water.”

Gretchen: Or “bottle” with a glottal stop there too. They have the glottal stop, the glottal fricative, and the voiced glottal fricative. People won’t know that’s what they are until you tell them. I’m so pleased!

Lauren: Finally, we have new T-shirts and mugs that say, “Linguistic correctness is just a lie by big grammar to sell you more grammars.”

Gretchen: To check out the full set of Lingthusiasm merch, which there’s quite a lot of at this point, go to lingthusiasm.com/merch. It makes a great gift for the linguist or linguistics enthusiast in your life.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is your favourite smell?

Gretchen: Ooh, there are so many good smells. I really like the smell of rose. I also really like the smell of almond. It depends on whether you’re talking about to wear or to eat. I also really like spicy scents.

Lauren: Almonds as in fresh almonds or almond blossoms?

Gretchen: No, almond extract that you bake with.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Like marzipan.

Gretchen: Well, yeah. Or like amaretto, or vanilla extract but almond. It’s so good. I could eat/smell that forever. What’s your favourite smell?

Lauren: This one always slightly startles people in the northern hemisphere, but I love the smell of freshly cut grass because it reminds me of Christmas, which I think says a lot about how frequently my family ever got around to mowing the lawn.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented

What’s your favourite smell? You might say something like the smell of fresh ripe strawberries, or the smell of freshly-cut grass. But if we asked what your favourite colour is, you might say red or green, but you wouldn’t say the colour of strawberries or grass. Why is it that we have so much more vocabulary for colours than for scents?

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language and smell! We discuss research into how languages describe scents, colour-odour synesthesia, and how researchers go about doing experiments on smell vocabulary (featuring the gloriously-named Sniffin’ Sticks).

Plus, we talk about how Lauren invented a scent-focused language for a YA fantasy novel! The book is called Shadowscent in the US or The Darkest Bloom in the UK, and it’s by PM Freestone. Lauren created the Aramteskan language that appears in the book. We discuss what it is like to work on a constructed language for a novel, and how Lauren brought her knowledge of linguistics into the creation of this language. For more details on Shadowscent, including how to order, visit PM Freestone’s website.

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

Announcements:

November is our official anniversary month! To celebrate three years of Lingthusiasm, we’re asking you, our listeners, to share your favourite fact from the show! This helps people who need more linguistics in their lives realize that this is a place where they can get it, and helps show us what people find interesting. If you share on social media, tag us (@lingthusiasm) so we can thank you and reshare it.

We also have new merch! All of the Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for the linguist or language fan in your life, and we love seeing your photos of it!

Socks with the International Phonetic Alphabet, tree diagrams, or esoteric symbols prints on them. (You can also still get our three prints various colours on scarves, notebooks, mugs and ties.)
New word art design: LINGUISTIC “CORRECTNESS” IS JUST A LIE FROM BIG GRAMMAR TO SELL MORE GRAMMARS, available on shirts, totes, mugs, and zippered pouches.
New items with IPA-themed puns, so you can have glottals on your bottles or liquids around your liquids!
Greeting cards with “thanks” or “congrats” on them in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in a cheerful confetti-like design, to help you thank or congratulate a linguist in your life.

This month’s bonus episode is about surnames! We share the history of our own surnames, how different cultures approach naming, and when people change names. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the directions episode and 31 previous bonus episodes.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Asifa Majid (Twitter)
Asifa Majid academic website
Odor-color synaesthesia (Abstract)
What Makes a Better Smeller? (Open Access publication)
Smells have colours (Superlinguo summary)
Huehuetla Tepehua Olfactory Language (PDF publication)
Cha'palaa Olfactory Language (Open Access publication)
Sniffin’ Sticks
Shadowscent original announcement (Superlinguo)
Shadowscent UK release (Superlinguo)
David J. Peterson on Khaleesi
You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality (Lingthusiasm episode 32)
Colour words around the world and inside your brain (Lingthusiasm episode 5)
More info/how to order Shadowscent (PM Freestone’s website)

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 editorial manager 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).

“

Gretchen: It’s unlikely that you’d get a language that only has three colour terms and those terms are turquoise, orange, and pink.

Lauren: Yeah, because that’s not covering a lot. I mean, it might be covering a lot of the colour space in your wardrobe but not for all speakers.

Gretchen: Admittedly there is a lot of turquoise in my wardrobe.

Lauren: So it’s not surprising that late stage colours like pink and orange have really clear and recent etymologies in English compared to something like red or green or white. I remember when I learned this stuff in undergrad a friend of mine in the class just would not believe that you could cover brown, purple, and grey in one colour. She was just like “how could you have one word that covers all of those three??” And then one day she came to class and she was so excited and was like, “look, look at the scarf that I bought!” And it was true, you couldn’t tell, in certain contexts it looked brown and some contexts it looked purple and in some contexts it looked grey and that was her, like, theoretical proof those colours were close enough that it made sense to put them in one word.

Gretchen: Well the scarf actually brings us into an interesting point about why languages developed colour terms, which is that there’s often some relationship between produced goods whether that’s dyed fabrics or gemstones or other types of processed goods that people make into specific colours. Because if you’re thinking about the sky for example, you know, we say all the time the sky is blue, but it’s really not necessary to specify that the sky is blue. You can say the sky is dark or light, the sky is cloudy or clear, and if it’s clear and it’s light of course it’s blue! What other colour is it going to be? Or you can say something like the tree is living or the tree is dying, you don’t necessarily need to specify the tree is green or that it’s red. In nature a lot of things only really come in one specific colour. Whereas once you start making cars you don’t say this car is ripe or it’s not ripe, or this car is cloudy or it’s clear, or this dress that you’re going to make is ripe or unripe or that this basket that you’re weaving is dyed a particular colour. Once you start dying stuff in colours it becomes more useful to talk about a finer variations or if you send someone to buy for you a particular thing in particular colour may want to specify exactly what that colours going be once you start colouring stuff artificially.

Lauren: So certain technological innovations can give rise to the necessity for finer distinctions and colour terms.

Gretchen: And some colour terms are etymologically linked to specific things that created those colours. Purple, for example, is linked to the name of the particular mollusc that was used to make purple dye back around ancient Greece.

Gretchen: I came across a study of women in Eastern Europe where specifically the older women had more colour terms related to traditional dyeing methodology for textiles, whereas the younger women had become disconnected from traditional dyeing terminology for textiles and could no longer identify words like madder and russet and stuff like this that are used in traditional terms – they tended to use more industrialised colour terms. This seems to be one of those “if you use it you get more words for it” areas, like with any specialised domain.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s a professional vocabulary distinction to be made there as well. I do remember reading something, and again we’re into uncited anec-data here, but I do remember reading something that said professionals can discriminate with more technical words, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they see more colours than people who don’t have these professional words. So you might give people two similar colour chips. And someone who does fabric work will say “that’s magenta and that’s russet,” whereas someone who doesn’t have to discriminate will be like, “Well, this one’s rustier and this one’s richer red.” They can still see the difference. It’s not like not having the word prevents you. Or, people who I’m friends with in Nepal who predominantly speak a language that doesn’t have a blue-green distinction, they still see the distinction, they still prefer fabric in one colour over another one.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you’re painting your bedroom yellow, you’re not going to be like, “I dunno, all yellows look the same to me” – you probably care whether it’s like a lemon yellow or a butter yellow or a golden yellow. But if you’re sorting laundry, you might go back to the most fundamental colour distinctions and just separate out the lights and the darks.

”

—

Excerpt from Episode 5 of Lingthusiasm: Colour words around the world and inside your brain. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for links to further reading.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Posts tagged "typology"

Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode

Transcript Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented

Lingthusiasm Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented

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