Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana
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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 questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, 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 :)
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?
- 1:18:18 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 in 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 questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, 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 :)
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, and follow us at @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And if you'd like to support us, you can pledge on our Patreon. Thanks for listening!