lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest languageIt’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately,...

lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episodeLanguage lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy...

lingthusiasm:Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-OrdóñezBasque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages...

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”....

lingthusiasm:Episode 84: Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you’re pointing at. Humans are really good at...

lingthusiasm:Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major...

lingthusiasm:Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentencesLinguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to...

lingthusiasm:Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliariesIn the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like...

lingthusiasm:Episode 80: Word MagicThe magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of...

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Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey

several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects...