Episode 16: SOUTHWYIGHTCKPQRFML

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

Jump right to:

• 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?

Covered in this episode:

• 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

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• 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

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. 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 :)