Wherein we frequently get off topic and get angry at Les Immortels.

Jump right to:

  • 1:08 Things Sarah Is Mad About Once She Did the Show Notes
  • 3:39 Linguistic Thing of the Day: Borrowing!
  • 8:00 L’Académie Française is annoying
  • 22:27 Are there languages other than Irish that have the concept of helping vowels?
  • 33:51 How do linguistic rules emerge?
  • 51:36 Canadian raising! What actually is it?
  • 1:09:00 The puzzler: Why are these birds flying in from different directions?

Covered in this episode:

  • A very hardcore church named All Souls Parish
  • Calques vs loanwords
  • Sarah mispronouncing the Spanish word for “avocado”
  • Epenthetic schwa and syllabic consonants
  • Should linguists get swords?
  • L’Académie Française does not know how language works
  • Anglish
  • Languages are not mathematical constructs
  • How phonetic inventories and stress patterns differ between languages
  • Lenition isn’t lazy, it’s economical!
  • Pidgins are not pigeons (though neither has syntax)
  • Linguistic redundancy
  • Adopting children and/or giving them piggyback rides
  • Vowels are like a shopping cart, or maybe a trombone
  • Whitney Houston
  • Emordnilaps

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, 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 until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)