We've just hit our latest Patreon goal! Now we can do a special episode about the linguistics of gesture where you can actually see the gestures! This also means that we can film the special gesture video episode while Gretchen is visiting Lauren in Australia, which will definitely make for a much nicer-looking video for you.&nb...
2018-11-23 04:45:23 +0000 UTC View Post
A letter stands for a sound. Or at least, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s C or G, which each stand for two different sounds in a whole bunch of languages. C can be soft, as in circus or acacia, or hard, as in the other C in circus or acacia. G can be hard, as in...
2018-11-16 00:14:17 +0000 UTC View PostJust a quick reminder that we're taking advantage of both being in the same place at the same time to record a special bonus Q&A episode for patrons!
Normally, we ask $10+ patrons for bonus topic ideas, but here we're opening up the floor to all patrons for your shorter linguistics questions!
Let us know ...
2018-11-14 23:40:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Gretchen is now arrived in Australia, and here's a photo of us prepping for the liveshow, complete with Real Australian Flat Whites! We're excited to see a whole bunch of Australian lingthusiasts and for you to get to meet each other!
We'll have mini Coffee Crisps all the way from Canada for you to try (a Canadian chocol...
2018-11-10 04:43:55 +0000 UTC View Post
If you go to a big music festival, there's a good chance you won't actually get to hang out with any of the musicians who are playing, but if you go to a bit academic conference, it's likely that almost everyone you meet there will be presenting their work. In fact, it's uncommon to meet someone who *isn't* giving a talk at a...
2018-11-01 23:37:23 +0000 UTC View Postsquishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast.
All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it...
2018-10-18 23:49:07 +0000 UTC View Post
For many people in the world, raising kids who are bilingual or multilingual is the norm - it's the only way to navigate life. For others, especially in predominantly English-speaking areas, it's a conscious decision made for one of many different reasons.
In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren...
2018-10-05 00:52:29 +0000 UTC View Post
As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world’s languages, this is not the case.
In this episode, your host Gretchen M...
2018-09-20 21:32:27 +0000 UTC View PostWe're very excited to let you know that our Melbourne liveshow will be happening Friday 16th November at the State Library of Victoria.
In even more exciting news, we've also added a second liveshow while Gretchen is in Australia. We'll now also be doing a liveshow in Sydney at GiantDwarf on Mond...
2018-09-20 06:08:13 +0000 UTC View Post
English loves to borrow words from other languages. When a word is borrowed, English speakers have a few options: pronounce the new word like an English word, or keep the features from the language it came from. Sometimes though, we get carried away, and start applying a pattern that we learned from some borrowed words to oth...
2018-09-08 07:30:50 +0000 UTC View Post
New merch alert!
What language would we speak in space? Thanks to the Space Race, languages of space are English and Russian, and aboard the International Space Station, the astronauts and cosmonauts speak to each other in an English-Russian hybrid language, a sort of Space Pidgin.
But of cours...
2018-09-02 22:08:04 +0000 UTC View PostWhen we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’t often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisingly often throughout our linguistic system, from the micro level o...
2018-08-17 00:11:49 +0000 UTC View PostWe've had a couple recent bonus topics suggested by our $10+ patrons!
Vote for which one you're more excited about to determine which one we do first!
1. hyperforeignism, using a sound or form perceived as "more foreign" even though that's not actually how it's said/written in the other language
2...
2018-08-08 20:13:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Gretchen and Lauren are both recently back from some exciting linguistics conferences, and now we take you behind the scenes to hear about some of our favourite parts! Lauren went to the International Congress of Linguists and the International Society for Gesture Studies conference, both in Cape Town, South Africa. Gretchen ...
2018-08-02 22:58:40 +0000 UTC View Post
When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, b...
2018-07-19 21:33:15 +0000 UTC View Post
English is full of words that look the same, but are pronounced differently ('bow' 🎀 and 'bow' 🙇), or are pronounced the same but look different ('bow' 🎀 and 'bough' 🎋), and some that look the same and are pronounced the same but have different meanings ('bow' 🎀 and 'bow' 🏹). Why does English do this? Doe...
2018-07-05 22:15:57 +0000 UTC View PostOne of your and our favourite recurring topics in Lingthusiasm episodes is the question of how children learn languages... and what would happen if kids acquired the Russian/English hybrid language spoken on the International Space Station. You'd have a Space Pidgin becoming a Space Creole because of the linguistic genius of Spa...
2018-07-04 06:16:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shape...
2018-06-22 03:04:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguistics can help solve crimes!
Sometimes a court needs to figure out who might have written a particular note, or whose voice is on a particular recording, and they call in a forensic linguist to help. But what do linguists in the courtroom actually do?
In this bonus episode, we discuss how linguis...
2018-06-07 22:59:29 +0000 UTC View Post
You patrons are so amazing that we're running out of goals AGAIN. We're now just over $100 away from our liveshow goal (wow!) so we thought we'd give you some new and exciting goals to look forward to.
The first new goal is a special filmed episode about gesture in relation to language!
Laure...
2018-05-24 20:22:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Australians and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re both national varieties that tend to get overshadowed by their more famous siblings.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch use Lynne Murphy’s new book Th...
2018-05-17 21:43:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguistics grad school: what should you know if you're thinking about going? Dylan asked us over on the community page about applying for grad school and it turned out that we have plenty to say on the topic. Gretchen and Lauren discuss why you might want to do a Masters or PhD, how to scope out a good program for your inter...
2018-05-04 00:56:30 +0000 UTC View Post
What’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly can’t be true. But if you reply, “No, he isn’t” or “No, you don’t” it still f...
2018-04-19 21:29:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Roses are red
Violets are dreams
In this episode
We talk poems and memes
There are several recent memes related to poems and mock-old English, and we're excited to talk through the linguistics of memes like Roses Are Red, This is Just to Say, i lik the bred, whomst, and shooketh in this bonus episode. We're bec...
2018-04-06 01:27:41 +0000 UTC View Post
We're excited to announce that we have a new set of merch available, and as patrons, you get to find out about it first! It'll be released to the internet at large in time for the main episode later this month (but please keep it under wraps until then).
Three things!
Tree diagram scarves 💚🎧...
2018-04-03 19:30:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with… translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like sc...
2018-03-15 23:43:48 +0000 UTC View Post
To celebrate a year of bonus episodes, we make good on our promise from the very first bonus episode that we'll come back and do MORE SWEARING! To everyone who's helped make the show sustainable, we're glad you're here.
Last time: sweary sounds and swears in other languages. This time: the peculiar grammar of swea...
2018-03-02 23:10:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Say, “aaaaaahhhh…..” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. Feel how your tongue moves in relation to the back of the roof of your mouth as you move from one vowel to the next. When you say “ahhhh” like at the dentist, your tongue...
2018-02-15 22:56:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Imagine a language where you only had 2 vowels. Or a language where you used different verb tenses depending on your mood. Or a language with 28 different ways to say thank you. We're on our way to constructing a pretty unusual language. But that's part of the fun of constructing a language; megalomaniacal control, and ...
2018-02-01 23:31:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___?
You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if you’ve never heard the word ...
2018-01-19 00:45:55 +0000 UTC View Post
