October 06, 2024

Episode 13: A-blade-ive

52 minutes

Wherein we shove things away (with knives).

Jump right to:

0:37 Is there a word in some language for “responding to the literal words and not the subtext of a request?

4:22 Response question from Spotify: With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren’t actively trying to comprehend it?

7:30 Language Thing of the Day: Noun Cases

22:39 Question #1: Do other languages have adjective ordering like English?

27:08 Question #2: What would the phonetic description of a raspberry be? "Labio-lingual trill"? Also, it occurs to me that it would be cool if there were some kind of database of paralinguistic sounds, containing things like "ingressive labiodental fricative" (inhaling sharply through your teeth), and explanations of what they mean in various languages

35:55 Question #3: What part of speech is "End" in the phrase “End Construction” as seen on a highway road sign? I'd've thought it was a noun, shorthand for “the end of,” but I’ve noticed that in Virginia the road signs will read things like “Enter Fairfax County” and “Leave Arlington County,” which suggest that the first word is a verb, not a noun, and that raises more questions: why is it "leave" and "enter" (imperatives?) rather than "entering" or "leaving"?

44:14 The puzzler: If a 40-pound stone broke into four pieces which could be used to weigh any whole-number increment from 1 to 40, what must the weights of the individual pieces be?

Covered in this episode:

The hypothetical existence of a possibly-German word or sociological term meaning something in the vicinity of “oblivious literalism,” “de-phaticization,” “desubtextualization,” “supertextualization,” or “involuntary textual meaning-raising”

Don’t only listen to nursery rhymes

We do the genitive case weird in English

The thing that the thing was done to

Patients and agents again

Eli is shock-nə

“Tsk tsk, it looks like rain”?

“Standard” English is bad at present tense (and “Standard English” is a bad term)

As usual, translation is hard

Eli takes the most round-about route possible to figure out where he’s from

Links and other post-show thoughts:

The ablative in physics

Proto-Indo-European noun cases

Finnish cases & pronouns

Basque cases

Adjective ordering in English is (article, number, then) opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose

Apparently numbers, if not adjectives, are linguistically categorized as “numerals,” a subcategory of quantifiers, which are a subcategory of determiners

A raspberry without tongue is a voiced bilabial trill, written [ʙ] in IPA; a raspberry with tongue (when it’s not on the menu at a cocktail bar) is either (yes!) a voiceless linguolabial trill and written [r̼̊], or a a buccal interdental trill, written [ↀ͡ r̼] in the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech

James Hoffman & Hames Joffman

The “tsk tsk” / “tut tut” sound is a dental click, written [ǀ] in IPA

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing for this episode was done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

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