Best Lingthusiasm Podcasts (2024)

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92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode 49:32

9d ago49:32

49:32

Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more …

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91: Scoping out the scope of scope 30:09

21d ago30:09

30:09

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typ…

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90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are 47:48

2M ago47:48

47:48

On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibilit…

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lingthusiasm:

3M ago

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lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral cultureFor tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from...

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89: Connecting with oral culture 55:19

3M ago55:19

55:19

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and …

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88: No such thing as the oldest language 41:36

4M ago41:36

41:36

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are sha…

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87: If I were an irrealis episode 34:59

5M ago34:59

34:59

Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen.…

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86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez 47:25

6M ago47:25

47:25

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who gr…

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85: Ergativity delights us 46:00

7M ago46:00

46:00

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". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or …

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84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing! 38:55

8M ago38:55

38:55

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you're pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can't. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of…

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83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro 41:06

9M ago41:06

41:06

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 research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more …

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82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences 43:56

10M ago43:56

43:56

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we …

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81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries 37:39

12M ago37:39

37:39

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical infor…

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80: Word Magic 37:19

1y ago37:19

37:19

The 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 fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, pla…

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79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation! 40:43

1y ago40:43

40:43

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) a…

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78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge 28:53

1y ago28:53

28:53

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people you’re talking about. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf …

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77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting 44:28

1y ago44:28

44:28

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your la…

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76: Where language names come from and why they change 37:17

1+ y ago37:17

37:17

Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name…

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75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions 27:02

1+ y ago27:02

27:02

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the less int…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Lingthusiasm Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

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Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

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All Things Linguistic

1
92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode 49:32

1
91: Scoping out the scope of scope 30:09

1
90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are 47:48

1
lingthusiasm:

1
89: Connecting with oral culture 55:19

1
88: No such thing as the oldest language 41:36

1
87: If I were an irrealis episode 34:59

1
86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez 47:25

1
85: Ergativity delights us 46:00

1
84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing! 38:55

1
83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro 41:06

1
82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences 43:56

1
81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries 37:39

1
80: Word Magic 37:19

1
79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation! 40:43

1
78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge 28:53

1
77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting 44:28

1
76: Where language names come from and why they change 37:17

1
75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions 27:02

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