Episode 76: Where language names come from and why they change
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a
geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re
related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself;
other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely
different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a
name that got mis-applied or even a pejorative description from a
neighbouring group.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen
McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages are
named! We talk about how naming a language makes it more legible
to broader organizations like governments and academics, similar to how
birth certificates and passports make humans legible to institutions.
And like how individual people can change their names, sometimes groups
of people decide to change the name that their language is known by, a
process that in both cases can take a lot of paperwork.
This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron
before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the
text chat. This episode will also be available as an
edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you
prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your
favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include
them in the show!
In this month’s bonus episode
we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from
previous interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you.
Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past two years of
Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes from
interviews with Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.
At the start of 2022 it was my aim to move gently through this year, after the general global upheaval the pandemic brought, and settling back into work after parental leave. I mostly think managed that for myself, and things worth sharing still happened this year.
This year we ran another round of LingComm Grants, and we’ve been enjoying seeing new linguistic communication projects come to life. We also published summaries of top tips from plenary panels of the 2021 LingComm conference, and I teamed up with Gabrielle Hodge to write about how to plan communication access for online conferences. The LingComm conference will be back in 2023!
Superlinguo remains a place where I can test out ideas or share things that aren’t necessarily the shape of an academic publication. I also continued my slow series of posts about linguistics books for kids, with a gem from 1966!
In 2022 the Linguistics Job Interviews series was edited by Martha Tsutsui-Bilins. After 8 years and 80+ interviews, the regular monthly series is coming to an end. There were 12 new interviews this year:
Regular interviews may have ended, but I’ll have more on linguistics, jobs and careers in 2023. I also wrote this post about doing your own Linguistics Job Interviews, to encourage other people to share their stories or interview others about their experiences.
Academic articles in 2022
This year I had two academic articles published. I also published one academic review of a monograph:
Gawne, L. & S. Styles. 2022. Situating linguistics in the social
science data movement. In A.L. Berez-Kroeker, B. McDonnell, E. Koller
& L.B. Collister (Eds), The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data
Management, 9-25. MIT Press. [Open Access PDF][Superlinguo summary]
Gawne, L. & T. Owen-Smith. 2022. The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang. Studies in Language. Issue number forthcoming doi: 10.1075/sl.21049.gaw [published version][Green OA version][blog summary]
Gawne, L. 2022. Review of Repetitions in Gesture by Jana Bressem. The Linguist List. [HTML]
The year ahead
I will be on parental leave in 2023 🎉
Last time I went on leave with a newborn I had no idea if I would have a job to return to. I’m very grateful to not have that stress hanging over me this time around. Lingthusiasm will continue as regularly scheduled. It will be interesting to see how things here go without the monthly job interview posts. I’ll still have new publications, and various linguistics resources and observations to share, if maybe on a less than weekly basis. You can always follow Superlinguo on Tumblr @superlinguo), join the mailing list (in the sidebar), go retro and use the RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter (@superlinguo)
Mutual Intelligibility has been a year-long
project to curate online linguistics resources. As teaching and learning
shifted rapidly to internet-based mediums in early 2020, we wanted to
help guide instructors and learners through some of the amazing
linguistics content that’s already freely available online.
Below
is a full collection of all of the posts that featured on Mutual
Intelligibility. Our thanks to everyone who created the resources that
we featured, to Liz McCullough for her editorial work, and to the Lingthusiasm patrons who helped us fund this project.
We
currently do not have plans to continue with regular Mutual
Intelligibility newsletters, but we will keep these existing posts
publically available and you can keep an eye out for the occasional
future email as we have relevant plans to share. For a more regular
correspondence, you can get a monthly email when there’s a new
Lingthusiasm episode (including supplementary links on that topic), by
signing up at lingthusiasm.substack.com.
Crash Course
To accompany the 16 weeks of 10-12 minute introductory videos on Crash Course Linguistics,
we created a newsletter with supporting resources and related
activity/activities, curated by Liz McCullough. The activities are
mostly from the International Linguistics Olympiad and various national olympiads, which are a huge treasure trove of linguistics puzzle sets.
These
six Resource Guides provide a comprehensive lesson plan (like a
textbook’s supplementary material but entirely online), and were
compiled with the assistance of Kate Whitcomb. They are also available
in PDF and Doc format.
3
Links posts are quick highlights lists of three relevant links about a
specific topic, with a short description for each of the three
resources. We produced twenty-three 3 Links posts in 2020, most of which
were edited by Liz McCullough, with other contributors noted on the
posts themselves.
Thanks
to everyone who has been following us and sending in questions and
links over the past year. It’s been our privilege to help make a rough
year somewhat easier for you.
Lauren, Gretchen, Liz, and the rest of the Mutual Intelligibility team
About Mutual Intelligibility
Mutual
Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics instructors with
online resources, especially as so much teaching is shifting quickly
online due to current events. It’s produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm. Our editor is Liz McCullough.
Mutual
Intelligibility posts will always remain available free, but if you
have a stable income and find that they’re reducing your stress and
saving you time, we’re able to fund these because of the Lingthusiasm Patreon and your contributions there.
If you have other comments, suggestions, or ideas of ways to help, please email mutual.intellig@gmail.com.
Lingthusiasm Episode 10: Learning languages linguistically
Some linguists work with multiple languages, while others focus on just one. But for many people, learning a language after early childhood is the thing that first gets them curious about how language works in general and all the things in their native language(s) that they take for granted.
In episode 10 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how learning languages can feed into linguistics and vice versa. We also explore the power dynamics that affect learning languages, and the importance of learning about the rules of interaction as well as the rules of grammar.
This month’s Patreon bonus was about hypercorrection, where you try so hard to follow a linguistic rule that you end up overshooting. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about the doggo meme, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. Gretchen’s new recorder in this episode is thanks to the support of our patrons!
The International Phonetic Association has a long-running series of articles where the sound system of a language is presented. These “Illustrations of the IPA” have now been produced for many languages across the world. Marija Tabain (my colleague at La Trobe) has produced a clickable map, an illustration of the Illustrations of the IPA if you will. From the website:
The map below shows (approximate) locations of languages for which
there is an Illustration in the Journal of the International Phonetic
Association. Green markers denote Illustrations that also appear in the
Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.
Click on the pin on the map to identify the language and follow the
link to the publication and recordings, where available. Languages
marked with * have multiple pins.
Suzy Styles of NTU’s BLIP Lab has put together this chart showing the most common speech sounds across languages. It’s set out like the IPA chart, but incorporates features such as unvoiced nasals that are represented with diacritics and not typically included in the main chart. You can see that only a few sounds occur in 80% or more of the world’s languages, and there are many sounds that only occur in a small handful (some of you may think of Zipf’s law when you see this distribution, as only a few sounds are in many languages, and many sounds are only in a few languages).
It’s useful if you’re building a conlang and you want to know how naturalistic it sounds. It’s also handy if you’re learning a language and want to know just how ‘weird’ those ‘weird’ sounds you’re learning are. For example, the trilled ‘r’ of Italian and Spanish [r] is actually much more common than the English ‘r’ sound [ɹ], and the sound at the start of thing in English [θ] is also pretty unusual.
Prevalence rates of
speech-sounds across 1672 languages. Data from PHOIBLE Online. Colour scale
indicates range from the listed percentage to the next higher percent.
This
figure first appeared in Styles SJ (2016) ‘Sensory worlds: Multisensory
outcomes of sensory tuning to phoneme structure’ Presentation at the
5th Southern African Microlinguistics Workshop, Bloemfontein, South
Africa, November 2016.
Nepal is home to 123 languages, some of which are spoken across entire
regions, while others only have a small number of speakers. The more you
travel around Nepal, the more you will get the chance to meet speakers
of these languages. All native languages are recognised as national
languages in the Constitution of Nepal, although Nepali is the official
language of government administration.
In the article briefly introduce Newar, Sherpa, Tamang, Tharu and Nepali. You can read the rest on the Inside Himalayas website.
Gerald Roche and others are celebrating #DiverseTibet throughout May on Twitter. Tibet is large place, and people who identify as Tibetan are more linguistically, culturally and geographically diverse than I ever realised before I started working in the field of Tibeto-Burman studies for my PhD.
I thought I’d contribute to the celebration of the diversity within Tibetan with this recording of a song in Kagate - a Tibetan variety that is spoken in Nepal. Many people don’t realise than the mountains of Nepal are predominantly inhabited by people of Tibetan origin.
If you know any Tibetan of the Classical or Lhasa variety then some words in this song will be familiar. I don’t have a complete translation yet, but I’m working on one. The singer is Pasang Maya, and she also wrote the words. We recorded this during my visit in January, and we’re sitting in a field that’s recently been cleared for farming. She called this song Lama-wa, and it is about community, family and being Tibetan. I think it fits nicely with the theme of Diverse Tibet for this month.
The opening talk of this year’s Australian Linguistics Society conference will be a public lecture by Prof. Andy Butcher from Flinders University. Andy’s work is utterly fascinating; he looks at the sounds of Indigenous Australian languages and how this is possibly influenced by a hearing condition otitus media with effusion (OME), or ‘glue ear’. This is the summary from the website:
Chronic OME develops in the majority of Aboriginal infants in remote communities within a few weeks of birth, typically affecting hearing and the perception of speech sounds. Among the specific consequences of this are difficulties in hearing differences between sounds “t” and “s” in words like “tap” versus “sap”, or the “p” and “b” in words like “pack” and “back”. Given the importance of these sounds in distinguishing words, OME-induced hearing loss has been shown to disrupt speech and language development in English. It also may have an adverse role in the development of English literacy. Interestingly, the specific sound frequencies where hearing is not lost happen to be typically those that are used in the acoustic makeup of speech sounds in traditional Aboriginal languages.
In other words, these languages favour consonant and vowel sounds which exploit precisely that area of hearing ability which is most likely to remain intact in OME. Thus Aboriginal languages may be acoustically more robust than English as a medium of communication for those with OME-associated hearing loss.
The talk is on Tuesday the 1st of October at 5pm at The University of Melbourne. You can get more information and register here.
Later this week I’ll be at the 19th Himalayan Languages Symposium at ANU in Canberra. I always enjoy going to conferences full of people who work with languages that are closely related to those I am familiar with, as we often face similar issues and complexities. I’ll be sharing some of my PhD work, and I’m looking forward to meeting many people and putting faces to names!
I thought I’d use it as an opportunity for some gratuitous fieldwork photographs! From top: Prayer flags at Boudhanath, Everest from a plane window, children rowing to school on Phewa lake in Pokhara, baby goats and looking towards Manage from Lamjung.
This year’s International Linguistics Olympiad was held in Manchester, England, from the 22nd to the 27th of July.
USA and Russia again took out the top two spots, with Poland coming third. It was pleasing to see that individual medalists came from a wide range of countries. Australian Martyna Judd from Queensland took home a bronze medal, congratulations Martyna!
It was also the first year that Australia sent two teams, with Queensland Academy for Science Mathematics and Technology and Murdoch College Western Australia representing. Check out some photos of the event here.
Congratulations to everyone who participated at IOL 2013, and we’re already looking forward to IOL 2014 in Beijing!
Things have been quietly ticking away here at Superlinguo. It may seem like we spend all of our time baking and doing craft, but there’s been lots of other things happening too!
We’d like to take this chance to welcome all of our new Tumblr pals. It would appear that we’ve been picked up by one of the Tumblr spotlights, which has resulted in a 5-fold increase in followers in the last month or so. We hope you enjoy our language geekery!
For those in Australia who need some extra word-nerd in your life, I have a new regular spot in the Big Issue called By Lingo! Every edition I’ll give you the fascinating low-down on the stories behind everyday words. Edition 436 starts us off with ‘wisdom teeth’. Melbournians, don’t forget you can also catch Georgia on 3RRR radio's Breakfasters every few weeks on a Friday morning.
Finally, in academia news, I’ll be graduating on the 10th of August (there will be photos). There are also plans for the sketch grammar of Lamjung Yolmo to be a book, stay tuned for more information on that. I’ll also be presenting at Australex in Adelaide later in the month, as well as the Himalayan Linguistics Symposium in September and I’ll be at the Australian Linguistics Society conference in October as it’s being run by my department.
Don’t forget, you can always check out our archives, ask us a question or hit us up on facebook or twitter!
You know that feeling of anticipation/dread you sometimes get when you wait for an assignment to be marked? Imagine that your assignment was 100,000 words long and took you four years to write and you can imagine some of the dread that I felt waiting for my thesis to be read by two independent examiners.
In Australia we don’t have a defense/viva system of examination based on a presentation for PhDs. Instead the entire examination is of the thesis as a written piece of work. The average time it takes for a PhD to be examined is around 4 months according to the Graduate School at Melbourne Uni - although I know one person who once waited 9 months.
So when I found out that my thesis has been examined in less than two months you can imagine that I was rather surprised. And any dread was unfounded - both examiners have passed it with only minor changes! That means that in the next month or so I’ll make those and then I’ll get to make some pretty hard-bound copies to show you!
February 21st (today!!) is International Mother Language Day! Set up by the UN, it’s a chance to stop and think about the amazing linguistic and cultural diversity found on Earth, and the importance of encouraging people to maintain this diversity.
Make sure you take some time to think about your own mother language today! Call a family member! Sing a song (preferably trashy pop, if that genre exists in your language).
If you live in a country where you get to speak your own mother language as your main daily language, think about how lucky you are.
Today, like every day, go out and hug some linguistic diversity!
This piece of photoshopping magic came from the official UN site for International Mother Language Day and was just too good to not share.
