For the Love of Language

We discuss one of the most famous studies in Linguistics.

Why are animal sounds different in different languages? We dive into some phonetics and discuss onomatopoeias.

In which we create a theoretical constructed language (conlang) and dive into some of the fundamentals of Linguistics.

What are language families? From English to Proto-Indo-European and Nicaraguan Sign Language, our ramblings hopefully bring you something you didn't know before.

La Malinche, also known as Malintzin or Marina, was gifted as a slave to Hernán Cortés by the Tabascans, and became the intermediary between him and the Aztec king Moctezuma.

To learn more about La Malinche, check out:

Malinche's Conquest by Anna Lanyon (1999).

Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Tomo A) by Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (1984) describes La Malinche's origins and mentions her interpretation with Geronimo de Aguilar.

"Malintzin/La Malinche/Doña Marina: re-Reading the myth of the treacherous translator" by Pilar Godayol (2012).

Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy (2008).

"Aproximación al discurso iconográfico y textual del encuentro entre Cortés y Moctezuma." by Alain Lawo Sukam (2005).

"Reflections on interpreting settings and ethics in view of visual representations of la Malinche." by Krisztina Zimányi (2015).

The story about Francisco Pizarro and Atahualpa comes from La Primera Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (1615).

We discuss everything from the Latin alphabet to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and somehow manage to digress into how we only scream in vowels.

Is language an innate, human thing, or is it the same as every other cognitive process? We discuss the timeless debate between innatists and interactionists that originated with Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner.

We cover one of our most requested topics: swearing. Why do people swear? How do we rate the severity of swear words? What does taboo language tell us about a culture?

EJ mentioned feeling the emotion from swear words more in a first language than in second languages. There have been several studies that mention this, including Emotion and lying in a non-native language (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçeği-Dinn, 2009) and A study on the effects of first- and second-language swear words in advertisements (Hoeve, 2020).

In which Stacie describes what it really means to rain cats and dogs and other ramblings on the topic of semantics and pragmatics.

A conlang is a constructed language. What goes into creating a language? Why do it? Have any conlangs been successful?

We mention Michael Adams' book From Elvish to Klingon.