Wherein we learn how to learn how to read.

• 4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula
• 16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t)
• 1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)”

• The best holiday dinner foods
• Existential verbs
• Copulas
• The science of reading
• “Vibes-based reading” is probably not a fair term but also maybe not an inaccurate one
• The phonological processor
• FLOSZ rule
• Scribal O
• “Ghoti” is not pronounced “fish”
• 40% and 90% are different numbers
• The difference between being able to read and being able to read
• Statistically speaking, most people are not Sarah
• The four-part processing system model
• The orthographic processor
• Developmentally inappropriate fonts for kids
• Developmentally inappropriate fonts for Sarah on Duolingo
• Eli learns he’s a white girl from Ohio
• Sight-reading is not the same as whole-word reading
• The semantic processor
• Associating dogs and blueberries, dogs and bogs, or dogs and dishes
• The context processor
• Most people will not learn to read on their own
• If you’re good at something, don’t necessarily teach it
• For once on this podcast, an actual definitive answer! (Which some people might disagree with.)
• There is no “too late” in life to learn to read
• Where to learn to read, as an adult
• The nerdiest part of the episode
• The portion of our audience which comprises sailors from the 1800s

• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by George Lakoff
• True Biz, by Sara Nović
• We may not actually have talked about scalar implicature by name on the pod? Sarah talked about it in a linguistics presentation at CrossingsCon, which we think may be what Eli and Sarah were (mis)remembering when they said we’d covered it early on. Potential future Language Thing of the Day…?
• Sixty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Basic level in 2022, while thirty-seven percent of fourth-grade students performed below the NAEP Basic level. Only thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022.
• Not for the first time and not for the last: chriego and sgr
• Also not the for the first time, Canadian syllabics
• What The Font?
• The three-cueing system was developed by Ken Goodman, who almost certainly had undiagnosed dyslexia, and has been described as functionally teaching children to be dyslexic, rather than teaching anyone (with or without dyslexia) to actually read.
• Mapping where words are housed in the brain
• Jumbled words don’t actually work quite like that
• The style of writing Latin that Sarah refers to is called scripto continua
• The four-part processor diagram Kristen describes
• LETRS course with Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman
• UFLI is the University of Florida Literacy Institute
• The six syllable types in English orthography

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

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. 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 :)

Wherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now.

• 6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts
• 44:23 Question 1: Why do British people say “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there,” are they afraid of gerunds or something?
• 57:11 Question 2: I’ve noticed distinctions between how numbers are pluralised and ordinalized not only between languages, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd’; number mod 10 = 3, use ‘rd’; else, use ‘th’”, but the pluralization rules are just “1” and “not 1”. How do these distinctions evolve?
• 1:10:52 Question 3: What are the features of real languages that made you go “I can’t believe it’s not a conlang!”?
• 1:28:00 The puzzler: When we quizzed a group of musical artists about their favourite Pokemon, the answers were unsurprising: Daniel Merriweather said Charizard, Eiffel 65 chose Blastoise, Coldplay said Pikachu, Spandau Ballet chose Ho-Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen said Lugia, and New Order said Suicune. But what answer did the Kaiser Chiefs give?

• A weird bit of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border
• The guy who founded Chicago
• Sarah’s Unnamed Cocktail Corner
• The unfortunate timing with which printing became widespread in England
• Long and short vowels, which should be called tense and lax vowels because that’s what people notice anyway
• Eli does not attempt an Australian accent
• Merch idea: “I Guess That’s Part of My Grammar Now”
• The Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• The Mississippi River is not a Great Lake
• Sarah is not doing a corpus study of everything she’s ever said
• The Norman Conquest is not when the Great Vowel Shift happened
• Gerunds and nominalizing or adjectival suffixes
• Sarah out-grammars Eli
• Sit vs set and lie vs lay
• Humans are not computers
• Eli over-simplifies Japanese verb conjugation
• Noun classes sink Eli’s battleship
• Anything too systematic in other languages tends to make English speakers go “sounds fake but okay”
• Prepositions and cases are useful because they free you from each other
• The world’s laziest conlanger invented English

• We touched on accents, including what Sarah referred to as “the Chicago /ɑ/,” in episode 2!
• Other people talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, including Wikipedia
• “Mississippi” does in fact mean “big river”! Specifically, it’s the French rendering of an Ojibwe name.
• The “near-front whatever whatever unrounded vowel” is more formally a “Near-open front unrounded vowel”. The IPA symbol is ⟨æ⟩, or “ash,” which is conveniently pronounced with the same vowel sound it means.
• The paper Eli mentioned about violence in linguistic example sentences was either Macaulay, Monica, and Brice, Colleen. 1994. Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. In Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., Sutton, Laurel A., and Hines, Caitlin, 449–461. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, or this one by the same authors. Also here’s a related and interesting paper he found while digging those citations up!
• English does still have a dual/plural distinction with some words! Examples include both/all, either/any, neither/none, between/among, former/first, and latter/last
• History of English podcast episode about numbers!
• First, second, third, -th, vs one-left & two-left

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

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)

Wherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people.

Jump right to:

• 6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing
• 26:10 After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife's friends that my accent sounds "British" to them. I think that's ridiculous, but I'm wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are "British-sounding." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don't drop 'r's for example).
• 37:06 In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary and that Linear A might be. How do we know this? What is cool about this? What fun things should we know?
• 1:01:20 On the topic of syntactic ambiguity I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English? How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?
• 1:27:26 The puzzler: What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in common

Covered in this episode:

• Cherries
• Swearing
• Not swearing
• Objurgation is just a really excellent word
• Either everyone has an accent or no one has an accent
• England has too many accents
• Lake Champlain is not invited
• The only accents are Boston, Chicago, or British?
• 40 actual linguists with swords
• Confusing future archaeologists
• ꙮ
• You could write English entirely in katakana or romaji, but you shouldn’t
• Spaces between words are a mirage
• The Law of Conservation of Linguistic Ambiguity
• Frugivorous time flies are much less confusing in speech than text
• There is no Platonic realm of language
• Natural Language Processing
• Finishing other people’s sentences
• Puzzles designed for high class sailors from the 1800s

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Lingthusiasm’s Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project onesies
• Swearing is becoming less taboo
• Swearing reduces pain
• How many categories of swear words there are depends on how any given study chooses to group them; three, four mostly, five, or more; in general, the list seems to be religion, sex/sexual acts, bodily functions, animals, family/mothers, death/disease, and slurs
• The list of functions of swear words that Sarah found
• Boston Brahmins
• The New England historical accent grid Sarah’s husband has mentioned is real! Eli’s guesses were backwards, however—the north–south distinctions are different vowel mergers, while the east–west distinctions are rhoticity: Northern New England accents have typically had the cot–caught merger, while southern New England accents have tended to have the father–bother merger; eastern New England is historically non-rhotic, while western New England is historically r-ful
• Eli was also wrong about the pin–pen merger; it’s one of the most well-known features of Southern American English, not at all associated with New England. (He may have been thinking of the cot–caught merger, which is most common in the northeastern US?)
• The Great Lakes vs Europe map overlay
• The Eskimo-snow myth
• Margalit Fox’s book on Linear B, and also her books on sign language, Arthur Conan Doyle, and two British soldiers escaping a POW camp with the help of a Ouija board
• Minoan civilization and Mycenaean Greece
• Michael and Alice are indeed the correct first names! Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris, based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober
• The fiber arts tumblr post Eli quoted
• Minute Cryptic

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 Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)

Wherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast!

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

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

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing was done by Luca, show notes are done by Jenny, 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 :)

Wherein we shove things away (with knives).

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

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 :)

Wherein we are not warful.

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

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 :)

Wherein we are not already in textbooks.

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

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 :)

Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat.

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

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 :)

Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours!

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to [email protected], or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.

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 :)

Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics.

Jump right to:

Covered this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

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 :)