Episode 18: Can't Say “Teeth” Without Teeth

Wherein we are not professionals.

Jump right to:

• 4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale
• 21:38 Question 1: Why do we use ‘on’ to refer to spiders being ‘on’ ceilings? To me the spiders aren’t on top of the ceiling, they’re under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to ‘on’ in English, so I’d like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition.
• 38:20 Question 2: Morphologically and grammatically Japanese and te reo Māori behave very similarly: tons of particles all over the place, compounding as a major word source, not many affixes, little to no inflection, reduplication to convey emphasis, and very restrictive phonotactics. I see a pattern: Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai disallow large consonant clusters and are highly analytic. On the other end of the spectrum there are Georgian (agglutinative hell), and (fusional) Czech, which both have unpronounceable consonant clusters. Is this correlation real or am I imagining things? [If it’s real,] what is the reason for this convergent evolution?
• 56:05 Question 3: Would someone wanting to be a linguist need a degree? Or is a degree just a sort of certification? I’ve always wondered this because I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics but I didn’t pursue it in university, instead opting for Translation (which I guess could use linguistics but you know what I mean). Would you guys, actual linguists, consider someone who studies the subject by themselves and engages in conversations of linguistics to be a linguist?
• 1:13:09 Last episode’s puzzler’s answer
• 1:19:09 The puzzler: Complete the sequence. C, F, T, ?, Y, H, N, J, I, ?

Covered in this episode:

• Teeth
• Myriads, millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, and trilliards
• Don’t be Canada
• Indefinite hyperbolic numerals, like “ten thousand,” “seventy,” “seventy times seven,” “a billion,” “a bajillion,” or “hrair”
• Hanging on to the roof of a bus
• Horses do not have walls
• Are French speakers dans or en a mechsuit? We want to know
• Things Sarah gets wrong on Duolingo
• From a spider’s perspective, the enemy’s gate is up
• Does anyone do things by purpose?
• The time on a clock is a place, a month or a year is a container, and a day is a surface
• A spider’s eight tiny shoes
• Why do English speakers do “strength” to ourselves
• The “s” on a present-tense English verb is spicy and weird
• Japanese says you can have little a consonant, as a treat
• There are more than seven languages in the world
• Syllabic consonants
• If you send us your thesis, we will talk about it
• Being a linguist is not a real-world career
• L’Academie Francais are disqualified from linguistics forever
• Eli proposes a screenplay
• Cryptic crosswords (again)
• Cercury, Fenus, Tearth…?
• Sarah forgets how many Young Wizards books there are
• It’s teeth that are the problem

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• We accidentally skipped drinks chat, but Eli had water and Sarah had a weird but tasty raspberry-lemonade wine cooler thing
• The secret dozenal system in English and the long hundred
• Short scale vs long scale, h/t Bex
• “Thousand” isn’t actually that weird; it’s just a Germanic word, instead of being derived from Latin. Here’s a map of words for “thousand” in European languages color-coded by etymology
• Per Etymonline: “billiards” the game played on as rectangular table with ivory balls and wooden sticks, 1590s, from French billiard, originally the word for the wooden cue stick, a diminutive of Old French bille “stick of wood,” from Medieval Latin billia “tree, trunk,” which is possibly from Gaulish (compare Irish bile “tree trunk”); totally unrelated to French billiard
• List of words for very large numbers; the number of particles in the known universe seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10^80 to 10^97, so less than one duotrigintillion on the short scale / one sexdecilliard on the long scale
• “Google” was indeed an accidental misspelling of “googol”!
• We couldn’t actually find an equivalent of “Anglosphere” for the Arabic-speaking world; if one exists, we’d love to know!!
• Icelandic apparently uses the long scale!
• The Greek words Sarah reads aloud are εκατομμύριο (“hundred-myriad”, i.e. 100 × 10,000), δισεκατομμύριο (“bi+hundred-myriad” = 10^9; short scale billion), and τρισεκατομμύριο (“tri+hundred-myriad” = 10^12; short scale trillion)
• The Indian numbers Eli mentions are lakh (/læk, lɑːk/), which is one hundred thousand, and crore (/krɔːr/), which is ten million. Eli apparently got the commas slightly wrong, though; the conventional digit grouping in India isn’t every five zeroes, it’s 2-2-3, so 10^5 (one lakh) is written 1,00,000, and 10^7 (one crore) is written 1,00,00,000.
• Japan goes up by 4 zeros at a time: 万 ([man]; ten thousand, 10^4), 億 ([oku]; hundred million, 10^8), 兆 ([chō]; short scale one trillion / long scale one billion, 10^12), 京 ([kei]; short scale ten quadrillion / long scale ten billiard, 10^16)
• NativLang: “Clocks around the world: how other languages tell time”
• Yes, the “10,000 steps a day” thing started as marketing, specifically for (naturally) a pedometer
• There’s apparently something of a debate over the correct translation of the verse Sarah cited, Matthew 18:21–22: at least five versions, starting with the New American Standard Bible in 1971, say “seventy-seven times,” while several others, including the New King James Version from 1982, still say “seventy times seven.” #TeachTheControversy
• The Transit app Sarah mentioned
• French prepositions of place
• English prepositions
• BWIOFAT: the ablative prepositions, By, With, In, On, From, At, Than
• Japanese location particles: に [ni], で [de], and へ [e] (when it’s a particle). に and で are used to indicate location, but に is for states of being and で is for locations of an action, while に and へ are used to indicate direction or goal of movement
• English has either two or twelve tenses, depending on how you count them
• Old Chinese probably had no tones; their development seems to have corresponded to “a reduction in the number of consonants and vowels.”
• Bopomofo
• We couldn’t find the word Sarah was talking about, but she thinks the language in question was Berber
• There are actually a lot of consonants that can be syllabic in languages other than English, including ones that create consonant clusters English speakers tend to consider unpronounceable, but also English does have syllabic consonants other than the four well-known ones, we just use the others exclusively in onomatopoeia! [ ʃ̩ː] (shh, a shushing noise), [s̩ː] (sss, a hissing noise), and [z̩ː] (zzz, a buzzing noise) are all technically syllabic consonants
• The Linguistic Society of America
• Sarah nerd-sniped Eli about syntax trees sometime before episode 11
• Canadian engineering licenses
• Minute Cryptic

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 and Abby, 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 :)