Linguistics After Dark

By Linguistics After Dark

Linguistics After Dark is a podcast where three linguists (and sometimes other people) answer your burning questions about language, linguistics, and whatever else you need advice about. We have three... more

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FAQs about Linguistics After Dark:

How many episodes does Linguistics After Dark have?

The podcast currently has 19 episodes available.

Linguistics After Dark episodes:

October 06, 2024Episode 13: A-blade-ive
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 :)
...more
53min
September 03, 2024Episode 12: Dead Language Power
Wherein we are not warful.
Jump right to:
3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic”
5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis
23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the difference into words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”.
35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent?
51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is bullshit." Discuss.
1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat?
Covered in this episode:
If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem
“Collectivity” is not a word people know
Etymology is not destiny
English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes
Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults
Sooner or later, M shows up
Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit)
Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing bullshit
Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Lexical gaps in English
Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too
Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness
Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit!
IPA pulmonic consonant charts
This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds
Optimality Theory
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 is 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 :)
...more
1h 7min
July 30, 2024Episode 11: The Axiom of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wherein we are not already in textbooks.
Jump right to:
2:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ergativity

25:50 Some people would say “historic moment” or “electric field”; others seem to say “historical moment” or “electrical field”. Is there any study of this difference[, and] how would you describe [it]? I usually call it whether people use nouns adjectivally, but that may not be accurate or precise. / "Magic" is a noun, its adjective form is "magical," and its adverb form is "magically." "Tragic," on the other hand, is an adjective, its noun form is "tragedy," and its adverb form is "tragically." Why aren't "tragic" and "magic" the same part of speech? should we make them the same part of speech? if so, do we drop "tragedy" and make "tragic" the noun and re-introduce "tragical" as an adjective? or do we invent the word "magedy" and get rid of "magical"?

39:47 How to learn a relatively obscure language without going to the country it is spoken in? How does it compare to learning a dead language?

52:56 If I'm trapped in the distant past with anatomically modern humans armed only with Ryan North's book "How To Invent Nearly Everything", then I plan to follow his recommendation to 'invent' writing (after spoken language, of course). What features should I keep in mind when devising an alphabet for my ancient new friends, and what might the result look like?

1:08:22 The puzzler: The name of what widely spoken language consists of four consecutive US state postal abbreviations?
Covered in this episode:
Agents, patients, doers, subjects, objects, and other words that don’t necessarily refer to the topic of a sentence

Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything

Sports commentators’ ongoing collective attempt to make nonce ergativity happen

Walkers and standees?

Agent-patient fluidity and hierarchies in languages like Chickasaw and Dyirbal

[Regina George voice] Stop trying to make “magedy” happen

If something ends in -al, it’s already in textbooks

Linguists don’t believe in adverbs, because they’re the same thing as adjectives (except when they’re not, but really they are)

Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything (again)

How to study a language depends on why you want to know it in the first place

Latin students can’t ask for help if their car breaks down

The Latin alphabet is really great for Latin! Because it’s the Latin alphabet, which was invented for Latin!

Sarah strongly encourages writing vowels and strong discourages writing boustrophedon
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Eli highly recommends “Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists” by Thomas E. Payne

The Chickasaw people (and thus their language) are traditionally from northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, western Tennessee, and southwestern Kentucky. Dyirbal is spoken in northern Queensland in Australia.

Eli also mentioned “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by George Lakoff

The etymology of “magic”

“Verbing weirds language”: Calvin & Hobbes, January 25, 1993

XKCD #356: Nerdsniping

Lang-8 no longer takes new users but they have an app called HiNative

Say Something In has courses in Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Dutch, and Spanish, for native English speakers

The Scots Wikipedia issue

Ryan North's book “How To Invent Nearly Everything”

Canadian Aboriginal syllabics

The origin of Hangul
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. Eli edits, Jenny wrangles questions, 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 :)
...more
1h 12min
June 27, 2024Episode 10: Voiceless Alvie
Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat.

Jump right to:
15:09 Sneaky Question 0: As my high school-aged daughter starts to look towards college, she wants to learn more about the study of linguistics, both in terms of the fundamentals and in terms of cutting edge research. Are there resources beyond your podcast that you can recommend to us?

32:18 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Phoneme databases and inventories

46:59 Question 1: Where did the phrase “close but no cigar” come from? Where does the phrase "nursing a drink" come from?

57:30 Question 2: During the [2021] live show, you talked about how vowels are fake; with that in mind, would you say that phonemes (as opposed to phones or segments) are or are not fake? Along those lines, what would you say makes one linguistic theory as to how a particular part (say, syntax) of language works better than another, if anything?

01:17:40 The puzzler: The American rapper Watsky put out albums in 2019, 2020, and 2023, named Complaint, Placement, and Intention. The album cover art features the album name in all caps, as large as possible. Why did he choose those album names?
Covered in this episode:
Linguistics at the University of Campinas and the Brazilian Linguistics education system

Generative Linguistics and syntax

Should theories of language be good or just look pretty in LaTeX?

Resources for linguistics students

Phonetic databases and inventories and why they’re useful

#LingComm and linguistics memes for online teens (like @lingshits

Vowels are, as we have said before and will say again, fake, and also all the same

Consonants are real though, like ɬ (aka Voiceless Alvie)

The sounds coming out of your mouth are probably not the ones you think

Whether you should give cigars to students
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Severo mentions he is from Campinas. Coincidentally, the University of Campinas is where Daniel Everett did his Master's and PhD in linguistics.

Phoneme databases and other IPA resources Severo mentioned: PHOIBLE, UCLA, U of Glasgow’s Seeing Speech and Dynamic Dialects, and George Mason University’s Accent Archive

in re European Portuguese sounding Slavic

Q’s Greenland

That one XKCD, not for the first time and probably also not the last

Some papers about aspiration of stops in Korean, and one about Hindi

Tom Scott

Severo’s adorable felt wug
Our guest host:
Find Severo on Instagram at @severolinguista and @latinisteria, and check out his merch there as well at @glotalica!
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. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod, and the drumroll sound is by ddohler.
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
...more
1h 24min
April 27, 2024Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana
Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours!
Jump right to:
5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity
34:55 Question 1: Are accents predictable? That is, there are specific accents people have based on the languages they have learned, and often these have specific-enough features to have stereotypes. But would a native speaker of Parisian French have the stereotypical “French accent” when speaking English even if they had grown up in a cultural vacuum or learned English from a book? Further, if this is predictable like this, is it sufficient to predict the accent a native speaker of Quenya or Lojban might have when they were learning English the first time?
51:37 Question 2: Have you noticed people using [ts] instead of [t] at the beginning of words, and why might that happen?
1:04:34 Question 3: How do songs in tonal languages work? How do the speakers distinguish between the melody and the tone?
1:13:01 The puzzler: Change one letter each in the names of two rival NFL teams to get synonyms for the name of a third NFL team
Covered in this episode:
Transitivity vs. intransitivity and ergative vs. accusative verbs
Why you can give a mouse a cookie but you cannot sleep a sandwich
Standard phonological mistakes
A rat whose name is not Cheese-teeth
Political allegiances of the Noldor
Too vs. tsoo and Tuesday vs. Tyuesday vs. Chewsday
English is a tonal language
“Trash” and “ashtray” are (we hope) not the names of beverages
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Pseudo-reflexive verbs in Romance languages (i.e. “i bathe myself” etc)?
In re hypothetical tri-transitive verbs: Wikipedia suggests “bet” and “trade”, citing a paper we couldn’t actually access, but you can try to dig it up if you want to read more. Not everyone agrees, though
“Complex transitive verb” can mean different things and not everyone agrees on that, either
Unaccusative vs. unergative intransitive verbs in English (depending on which argument is missing)
Valency), aka the real word for the marble slots we talked about
Mary Spender’s youtube channel
Chris Punsalan and his grandma of Chooseday fame (Grandma has passed away since we recorded this episode, but there is an extensive backlog of her being very sweet if that's your thing)
⟨Triangle⟩ spelled as ⟨chriego⟩ because kids are very good at phonetics actually
Okay, in retrospect, it should have been more obvious that Chinese media using hardcoded subtitles more often than English media relates as much or more to the HUGE number of topolects in their media market than difficulty hearing tones (even in music)
Old/Classical/Archaic Chinese is now suspected to be atonal, but Middle/Ancient Chinese aka Qieyun did have tones and overlaps the written record of Chinese music, including the establishment of Yayue and Chinese opera which does appear to make use of tones. (This is extremely complex and if you’re interested, you should do a lot more digging yourself! Our post-production research is still limited ^^;)
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edited by Luca, captioned by our new intern Harrison, and show notes by Sarah and Jenny. 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 :)
...more
1h 17min
March 22, 2024Episode 8: No Linguist Can Afford That House
Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics.
Jump right to:
3:15 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Garden path sentences

25:05 How do [in/formal] registers change over time; do they stairstep as we invent new informal registers and then everything bumps up a notch and the old formal registers fall off as “staid”, or is it nonuniform?

37:21 Audio question! Is linguistics a science? Is it a prestigious science? Why or why not?

58:03 What are your favorite words that don’t have an English equivalent or cannot be translated into English?

1:16:20 Listeners, what are your favorite words that haven't been fully un-italicized into English yet?

1:18:18 The puzzler: Think of an informal term for a beverage. Now say it in pig Latin, and you'll have an informal term for another beverage. What two beverages are these?
Covered this episode:
The beverage fandom

The euphemism treadmill

Real-time language processing

How Sarah likes syntactic ambiguity more than most people

Linguists are not (necessarily) translators

Linguistics is not physics

Yoinking words from language to language

Are toilets pieces of furniture?
Links and other post-show thoughts:
The headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” was actually spotted by American editor Mike O’Connell and shared to a linguistics forum, where another member, Dan Bloom, suggested “crash blossoms” as a term, as summarized on the Language Log and expanded on by the New York Times

XKCD #435: Purity about applied sciences

XKCD #2381: The True Name Of The Bear about the euphemism treadmill

That diagram Sarah mentioned about all the branches of linguistics

McGill professors Lisa deMena Travis and Jessica Coon’s offices were used as references for Arrival as described on the Language Log here, here, here, and here

SciComm people we named who you should look up: Vihart, Matt Parker, Numberphile for math. Brian Green, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox for physics. Language Log, John McWhorter, Gretchen McCulloch, Lauren Gawne for linguistics. English usage, Brian Garner and Grammar Girl.
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edits by Luca, transcript by Jenny, show notes by Sarah. 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 :)
...more
1h 21min
December 10, 2023Episode 7: The Fax Machine of Gondor
Wherein we spin a shitpost question into linguistics gold.
Jump right to:
0:58 Mailbag; revisiting our treatment of linguistic typology

12:14 Language Thing of the Day: The Comparative Method

32:32 Question 1: Is English a creole?

40:34 Question 2: Are Old English and Modern English the same language?

51:07 Question 3: Is there any part of language that isn’t just slang and jargon that’s made it into the mainstream?

1:07:47 Last week’s puzzler answer

1:08:33 The puzzler: Take the name of an old communication technology, add a letter, and mix the letters around. You should get the name of a new communication technology — what is it?
Covered in this episode:
How a language's words and syntax can fall into different places on the typology spectrum

We're not Fractions After Dark, but we do like PIE

Why Grimm's Law should be called Rask's Rule

Star Wars spoilers via linguistic sound changes

A linguistics hot take with merit

The deterioration of the institution of marriage via etymology

Time is the cement mixer of language

A defense of business jargon
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Morphological Typology

Sir William Jones's speech, with a quote presaging the comparative method

Example of a Swadesh list

Examples of Grimm’s Law

Examples of English and German post-Grimm shifts

English Is Not Normal: A Case for English as a Semi-Creole Germanic, by John McWhorter (The article doesn’t appear to be accessible online, unfortunately.)

We tried to answer the question “how many Romance languages are there?” and the answer is both “a lot, more than you might think” and “the number varies depending on what counts as a language” which, honestly, we should have seen coming.

The History of English Podcast and the Saga Thing podcast

Lenition chart

Bill Labov's study about women being the agents of language change comes from Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors, in particular chapters 8-11. We couldn’t find a PDF available anywhere.

The beacons are lit! Marketing calls for aid!
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edits: Luca; transcript: Luca/Jenny; notes: Jenny/Eli. 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 :)
...more
1h 12min
November 11, 2023Episode 6: Hamburger. Hamburger? Hamburger!
Wherein we find an excuse to recommend a bunch of music to you.
Jump right to:
- 2:26 Language Thing of the Day: Filler words
- 14:17 Question 1: How did we get nicknames that don't seem to make sense? Like how did "Peggy" come out of "Margaret"?
- 25:26 Question 2: Why do singers' accents almost always become less intense in their singing voices as opposed to their speaking voices?
- 37:30 Question 3: How do we change the meaning of a sentence just by changing vocal pitch? Typed-out transcripts can lose the information conveyed by vocal pitch.
- 1:04:32 Answer to last week's puzzler
1:07:39 The puzzler: (Too long for Spotify! Check the post on our site!)
Covered in this episode:
- Filler words in different languages (English, Japanese, ASL), and their discourse function
- Names and their nickname equivalents: Margaret/Peggy, Theodore/Ted, Richard/Dick, John/Jack
Backformed names (e.g. if Nate is short for Nathan, then Kate is short for Kathan)
How nicknames are formed in different languages (Russian, Polish, Chinese)
What are children if not longitudinal linguistic studies?
The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Blink-182, the Ramones
Our future as an advice podcast
Gilbert & Sullivan
Effect of language exposure before birth on babies' linguistic behavior
Netspeak and netiquette in the 2000s
gr8, gr9, T9
Because Internet and its audiobook version
Court transcript style guides of the future
How to destroy a stuffed sheep with a lightbulb
Links and other post-show thoughts:
- Number One brand Thai iced tea (available loose or bagged)
History of English podcast episode about first names
vlogbrothers video about the names John and Hank
Pop punk accent article blink 182: "I'm an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent," Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1994.
History of Punk docuseries
Gilbert & Sullivan Modern Major General has excellent patter and limited lyrical. It was tough to find a G&S clip that had both by the same singer in back to back moments.
Sondheim (Not) Getting Married Today has good patter vs lyrical.
We couldn't find the My Cousin Vinny clip or Chinese nickname thread. If you find some, send them our way!
The first five minutes: A sample of microscopic interview analysis by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy, which is a book from 1960 analyzing in minute detail the intonational meaning and paralinguistics of the first five minutes of a psychiatric interview.
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Jenny Sarah transcribed this one, and Sarah Eli did the show notes. 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 :)
...more
1h 13min
September 23, 2023Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ CrossingsCon 2022 (full video with audio description at the end)
Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:
00:04:42 Is syntax fake?

00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words

00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?

00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?

00:41:13 What is lenition?

00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?

01:02:15 What are fricatives?

01:02:33 The LxAD backstory

01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie

01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet

01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups

01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?

01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”

01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?

01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones

01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?

01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?

01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds

02:07:30 The Thing At The End
Covered in this episode:
⁠Kewpie mayo⁠

That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you

How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated

Translator love

SWORDS

On a scale of dead to Amish…

How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL

Cappuccinos

Moose

⁠Dessus vs. dessous⁠

Links and other post-show thoughts:
Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the ⁠full list of additional links⁠.
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is ⁠“Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod⁠. Join us at ⁠linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer⁠!
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
...more
2h 14min
September 03, 2023Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ CrossingsCon 2022
Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:
00:04:42 Is syntax fake?

00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words

00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?

00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?

00:41:13 What is lenition?

00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?

01:02:15 What are fricatives?

01:02:33 The LxAD backstory

01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie

01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet

01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups

01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?

01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”

01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?

01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones

01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?

01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?

01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds

02:07:30 The Thing At The End
Covered in this episode:
Kewpie mayo

That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you

How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated

Translator love

SWORDS

On a scale of dead to Amish…

How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL

Cappuccinos

Moose

Dessus vs. dessous

Links and other post-show thoughts:
Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the full list of additional links.
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod. Join us at linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer!
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)
...more
2h 15min

FAQs about Linguistics After Dark:

How many episodes does Linguistics After Dark have?

The podcast currently has 19 episodes available.

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