[Music] ELI: Hello, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark. I'm Eli, SARAH: and I'm Sarah. SARAH: If you've got a question about language and you want experts to answer it without having done any research whatsoever, we're your podcast. ELI: Settle in, grab a snack or a drink, and enjoy! ELI: So, longtime listeners— [SARAH laughs] ELI: —those of you who have listened to all three episodes— ELI: may note that it's just me and Sarah today, and that is because Jenny has decided to take on more behind-the-scenes work, and so it's just gonna be the two of us in front of the mics from now on. SARAH: Yep! but don't worry, she's still around, and SARAH: I'm sure we will still get contributions from her in post, and as she listens to us record and tells us when we say silly things. ELI: I was gonna do a "sometimes I can still hear her voice" joke, but actually that's literally not going to be true for any of our listeners. SARAH: [laughs] That's true! ELI: So, we're gonna try a new thing this episode, which is based on the fact that we don't do any research to answer the questions on the podcast, ELI: but we do do research when we go to put the show notes together. And by that I mostly mean that Sarah and Jenny do research putting the show notes together, because I edit and they do the show notes. ELI: So we're gonna talk about some of the things that we learned while doing the show notes from last episode. SARAH: Yeah. So, first of all, I'm only giving you the highlights, you should go read the whole show notes, because they're awesome, but a couple of things: number 1, the thing I'm most upset about is that the study about German irregular verbs that I talked about last week? SARAH: I can't find it. I have no idea where it went, but I can't find it. If you have any information about this, please tell me, because I'm really upset. SARAH: I did learn a whole lot about what constitutes irregularity in German, and that's a whole other thing. SARAH: Also the other consonants, the ones we couldn't figure out what they're called? SARAH: They're called pulmonic consonants, which just means that they come from your lungs. ELI: Well, that makes sense. SARAH: [laughs] Right, like, in retrospect? should've figured that one out. ELI: I mean, I do—I do figure, like, it would be weird for linguists to just have an unmarked category of consonants, like obviously they had a name, ELI: but I do like the fact that they're just, like, "the other ones." SARAH: Yeah. SARAH: I'm good with that. SARAH: Oh, the other thing that I'm mad about was not something that I learned in the show notes, but was something that I realized after the fact, which is that because I have that Aaron/Erin / marry/Mary/merry—I said too many words—merger, SARAH: there's a church near somewhere that I used to live that's called "All Souls Parish," and— ELI: Wow, that's a hardcore church. SARAH: [laughs] It really upset me the first time I said it out loud! SARAH: 'cause like, when I read it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's a different word, that's fine, and then I said it out loud and I was like, oh, man, OW! ELI: Do we know if Louisiana has this merger? SARAH: Oh, that's a good point, because they use "parish" instead of "county." ELI: Yeah, exactly SARAH: Er, like p[æ]rish instead of county. SARAH: I have no idea! Maybe that's something we can look up this week. ELI: I—we should totally call this segment "things Sarah is mad about once she did the show notes." SARAH: [laughs] Sounds good. ELI: Should we learn a language thing? SARAH: We should learn a language thing! ELI: Today's language thing of the day is borrowing, and we're going to look at two specific kinds of borrowing, but borrowing in general is when one language takes a word or a phrase from another language. ELI: There are two main ways that languages borrow: one is through loanwords and the other is through calques. ELI: And as Sarah pointed out to me, the fun thing about this is that "loanword" is a calque and "calque" is a loanword. SARAH: I learned that from Twitter, so that's not, like, a novel discovery of my own. That's another thing I'm mad about, frankly, but also I love it. ELI: So, a loanword is when a language takes a word from another language, and basically just uses that word as-is, or sometimes because the phonologies aren't the same, they have to change some of the sounds of the word, but it's basically, "this word is in a different language and we're gonna try to do that as as faithfully as possible." ELI: And a calque is when a language looks at a word that another language has and translates it part by part or, when we're talking about a phrase, word by word, into the language that is doing the borrowing. ELI: And calques are really cool because they, like, they're like, stealth borrowing, almost? Like, they're legitimate borrowing, but it's like it's kind of sub rosa. SARAH: Nice borrowed phrase there. ELI: Yeah! exactly. ELI: So, we've talked about—"loanword" is a calque. ELI: It's a calque from German, from the word "lehnwort" (approximately [in reference to his pronunciation]), which is just German for "loan" and "word." ELI: And "calque" is a loanword, because it is a French word that means a copy of something. SARAH: Nice. ELI: Yeah, so I have like a whole bunch of examples of loanwords and calques, but one of the ones that I really want to point out is "whiskey," because whiskey is—depending on what language you're talking about, ELI: whiskey is either a loanword or a calque— SARAH: okay! ELI: —which is really cool. ELI: Whiskey has some like crazy etymology going on. ELI: So there's—if we start with "aqua vitae" ([ɑkwə vitei])—is that—? SARAH: [as if shrugging] Yeah. ELI: My Latin is not great. There's a lot of Latin and a lot of French in this, so, Sarah, just feel free to like smack me down SARAH: [laughs] SARAH: if you want my one piece of advice that ⟨ae⟩ says [ai], so [ɑkwə vitai] ELI: Ah, got it. ELI: So, "aqua vitae" ([ɑkwə vitai]) is "the water of life" in Latin. SARAH: mmhmm. ELI: And so it's been used through borrowing to refer to lots and lots of different alcoholic beverages. ELI: It was borrowed into various Scandinavian languages, and that is where aquavit [ADD IPA] comes from. SARAH: Okay. ELI: And it was calqued into French as ⟨eau de vie⟩, and also into Irish as (supposed to be [ˈɪʃkʲə ˈbʲahə]; Eli actually said approximately ['ɪʃkə 'bjɑhɑ]) SARAH: Okay! ELI: Which, I'm not sure that that's close to correct, but… SARAH: You tried. ELI: I did. SARAH: We have IPA in the show notes and everything—[correcting herself] in the outline. ELI: but that ⟨uisge⟩ (theoretically [ˈɪʃkʲə]) is where we get ⟨whiskey⟩ from. SARAH: Nice. ELI: So English borrowed "whiskey" out of Irish, which calqued it out of Latin. SARAH: That's absurd. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: I love words. ELI: I know!! Words are great. Even if they're fake. ELI: So there are a whole bunch of like calques and loanwords and stuff, some cool ones that I want to talk about in English. ELI: We have the word "earworm," which is like, a song that you can't get out of your head? and that is originally from German, from "Ohrwurm," which is "ear" and "worm." ELI: And then one that I didn't know was, "moment of truth" is a calque from Spanish and it refers—it comes from "momento de la verdad," which is the last thrust of a bullfight. SARAH: Whoa, that's really interesting. ELI: Yeah, apparently it came into English through a Hemingway novel. SARAH: That sounds right. ELI: So. Bullfighting. ELI: But English calques are cool, but I actually really appreciate the number of French calques that are out there, because French has this thing ELI: called l'Académie Française—probably not saying that right— SARAH: Nah, you're good. ELI: Am I? Oh, cool—which is basically a governing body for the French language and… is bad. SARAH: I love to rag on l'Académie because it's so dumb, SARAH: and then occasionally I think about what it would be like if we had one of those for English and it's just absolutely like incomprehensibly funny?? ELI: Yeah! SARAH: Like how could you—like they just dictate, like, the correct—not just the correct way to spell everything, but the correct way to name different objects and like, can you imagine how much more boring this podcast would be if people all agreed on whether to call it a sofa or a couch? or like whether to say [ADD IPA] or [mæɹi] or [mεɹi]? like, our whole last episode would go out the window. ELI: Well, but that's the thing about—that's the reason that l'Académie is, like, not worth it, is because first of all, there are actually—I think there's one linguist in l'Académie, now— SARAH: Oh, that's new! ELI: —after, like, two hundred years or something. SARAH: Good job. ELI: Like, we're not even gonna get into the fact that they call themselves immortals and they get to carry a sword for some reason. SARAH: Wait, what?? ELI: Oh, do you—yeah, so, the members of l'Académie are called The Immortals, and they get to carry a sword SARAH: What universe are they from? ELI: Napoleon. SARAH: Oh my god. ELI: Back when they thought that, like, "Okay, we're gonna like keep the French language pure, so we'll put a bunch of, like, playwrights, and, like, natural history professors, and stuff, into—" SARAH: Oh my god. ELI: Yeah, and they were like, "Linguistics? What is that? That's not real!" so... SARAH: Yeah... Producer Jenny in the background points out that, uh, playwrights are not really the people you want to keep your language stagnant and doing nothing. SARAH: I don't know, have you ever heard of Shakespeare? ELI: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, is this—like, they claim to issue all of these edicts, and then it's not even just, like, francophones overseas, like even French francophones are just like, "yeah, okay, whatever, l'Académie, we're gonna continue..." ELI: So they have this big thing, where they they will calque words and phrases that the general populace is borrowing, ELI: and like, the big one there is "le weekend," [SARAH laughs in recognition] ELI: which l'Académie hates. ELI: I'm not—Sarah, can you say the official—? SARAH: Yeah yeah yeah, so, the majority of French people say "le weekend," and like that is even what we are teaching our students in their French classes in high school. However, we are also teaching them that technically, SARAH: the official phrase is "le fin de la semaine," "the end of the week," which, like, fine! ELI: Right. SARAH: and I know Spanish uses "fin de semana" equally, the same way. ELI: Yes. SARAH: but the Spanish-speaking people actually USE "fin de semana," whereas the French-speaking people… don't. SARAH: And l'Académie is like "no, on all of your official translations—" like, if you look at—I'm a dork, I have my phone set—my phone OS is set in French to help me practice, and whenever I set, like, an alarm to get me up on Saturday and Sunday, it'll be like, "le fin de la semaine" and I'm like, "why." SARAH: "That doesn't even fit on the screen, just say 'le weekend,' it's fine!" ELI: So this is a great example though, of—"le fin de semaine" or whatever that is pronounced correctly, is a calque: it takes the parts of the word, and it translates them one by one into the target language. ELI: And "le weekend" is a loanword: it just takes the word wholesale from the source language and shoves it into the phonotactics of the target language. SARAH: Yes. I also notice that you have "courriel" on this list, which is a shortening of "courrier électronique," which is "electronic mail," so obviously "courriel" is "email." ELI: Yeah, I love this! when they calqued it they calqued—they took the shortening also. SARAH: Right, and I thought that was super clever! SARAH: I learned the word "courriel" just from my phone, and I didn't take it apart, I didn't know the word "courrier," like, "mail," I was just like "oh, 'courriel'" is what I get when I open up Gmail," like "cool, I've learned this word," SARAH: and I was talking to one of my friends, who is a French teacher and like, speaks fluently, and has lived in France, and I said something about like "send me 'un courriel'," and he was like "[stuttering] no one says that!" [ELI laughs] SARAH: And I was like, "Well, what am I supposed to say?" and he's like "…un email" [imeɫ] [English pronunciation], and I was like, "Oh. Okay." SARAH: But like now because I've learned it from this l'Académie-official source, like, I'm always gonna use that word and sound like a dork, it's gonna be great. ELI: So all languages do borrowing, especially languages that have, like, lots of contact with other languages. ELI: Occasionally you get people who are trying to parse out— ELI: especially in English, you get people who are trying to parse out what the language would sound like if it hadn't—if the Norman Conquest hadn't happened, or, you know, if English hadn't been an imperial language, right, ELI: and there is this cool thing that goes around every once in a while called "Anglish," A-N-G-L-I-S-H SARAH: Yes!! ELI: And the prototypical thing of this is, it's like the beginning of a physics textbook, except all of the words that are derived from languages other than Anglo-Saxon or languages that descended from Proto-Germanic are replaced by equivalents, or like potential equivalents, ELI: and I don't think that the people who put Anglish out are like, "this is how the language should be!" ELI: I think they're very much like, "this is cool! and is a fun thing to do!" which is like the right tack to take because I'm sorry, like, ELI: this is what English is, it's, it's all these things. SARAH: So l'Académie is like, the opposite of the Anglish people. ELI: Yeah… Yes. Okay, yeah, so, l'Académie is like the opposite, where they are saying, "we want to keep the language pure, and we're going to try to do that through whatever small amount of Napoleonic power we have," and then people don't listen to them, but, like, the Anglish people have the right idea, where they're like, "let's explore and have fun". ELI: One of the cool things that comes out of that is they—so, the word "electron," and "electricity" and so on, ELI: comes from a Greek word that refers to the material amber, because that's where static electricity sort of first became known, SARAH: Ohhhh yeah! ELI: and so Anglish uses "amberic" instead of electric. ELI: I can't remember what word they use for the electron, maybe like an "amberic mote" or something. [SARAH laughs] ELI: but this shows up in His Dark Materials, where—in His Dark Materials, they used the Germanic-derived rather than the Greek-derived, ELI: and in the world of His Dark Materials they say "amberic" when they mean "electric," and what they call— SARAH: THAT'S where that comes from! ELI: Yeah! And there's one place, it's very small, but they call amber "electrum." SARAH: Right! That's so fun, that's so fun. ELI: Yeah. Hey, listeners, if you haven't read His Dark Materials, go read it! or watch the HBO series—the HBO series is pretty good. ELI: So we talked about calques a bunch in English, and I just want to talk about a few cool, like, English loanwords. SARAH: Mmhmm. ELI: There's that saying, right, "some languages borrow; English, you know, hunts languages down in dark alleys, knocks them out, and rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary"? SARAH: Absolutely! ELI: Which I've—I've always been, like, not a big fan of, because actually, like, the Norman Conquest was what shoved French into English, and that's like where a lot of the—there's, like, Romance/Anglo-Saxon tension happening, but English does tend to absorb lots of words from different languages. ELI: It is true that English is an imperial language and a lingua franca, which, "lingua franca" is a— ELI: Actually, I don't even know if lingua franca is a loanword, it might just be using Latin... ELI: But English has like a whole bunch of loanwords all over the place. ELI: Some easy places to see them are foods, because just call it the thing that it is in the culture that it came from, right, so like "sushi," or "escargot," or "paneer," ELI: or in America we say "gyros," and in the UK they say "doner kebab." SARAH: Mm. ELI: Same thing; "gyros" comes from Greece, "doner kebab" comes from Turkey. There's also stuff that like, got picked up thanks to World War II or the Korean war. ELI: "Skosh," meaning "just a little bit," is from a Japanese word "sukoshi" [すこし], which means "just a little bit." SARAH: I didn't know that word in either language. ELI: Somebody will be like, "Yeah, just move that a skosh to the left." SARAH: Oh, is that like "scootch"? ELI: It has nothing—actually, I don't know, I don't know if it has to do with "scootch." SARAH: Cool, we'll look that up later. ELI: Yeah. I don't—hm. My intuition says no, but I have been wrong before. SARAH: Okay. ELI: Or like, "honcho," "head honcho"—there is a Japanese word, "hanchō" [はんちょう], which is like the leader of a team or a group or a squad, ELI: like a low-level leader, SARAH: Okay. ELI: and that's where "head honcho" comes from. SARAH: Nice. ELI: But there's, like, all kinds of—you know, there's a lot of Yiddish in English because of vaudeville and copywriters on TV, like, saying something is "kosher," or saying that somebody has "chutzpah," or you had to "schlep" to the store, or you're just gonna have a little "nosh"— SARAH: I was gonna say, I didn't realize "nosh" was Yiddish either, nice. ELI: Oh yeah. ELI: It's interesting who uses "nosh" as a verb and who uses it as a noun, because I have it as both. SARAH: Yeah, I think I do too. Mostly as a verb though. ELI: There are also a lot of religious terms that come from Hebrew, so, "amen," or "hallelujah." ELI: "Jubilee" comes from the Hebrew word "yobhel" [ADD IPA] (יובל), which means a ram's horn, because you blew the shofar when it was the Jubilee year. SARAH: Makes sense. ELI: And then there's stuff that comes in from Spanish, and a lot of the things that come in from Spanish come from other languages, ELI: just like a lot of the stuff that comes in from French is ultimately from Latin SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: So like, "avocado" comes to us from Spanish, where it was "avocado" [aboɡado], which meant "lawyer," but that's because that's the closest word that they had to the Nahuatl word "ahuakatl," which was the name for the fruit and also the word for "testicle"— SARAH: Great. ELI: —use your imagination! and "adobe," which was borrowed from Arabic ⟨aṭ-ṭūb/الطوب‎⟩, which means a brick. SARAH: Nice. ELI: So you got, like, multiple chains of borrowing happening here. SARAH: So, I have a fun story about the Spanish word for avocado. ELI: Oh please. SARAH: So there is the word lawyer, ⟨avocado⟩, but there's also—um, and I don't know actually, like, exactly the order in which these things happened, but there's also the word ⟨aguacate‎⟩? ELI: Oh yeah. SARAH: —which is used for avocado to distinguish it from "the advocate" or "the lawyer." ELI: Mm-hmm. SARAH: And someone told me a story, or I read about it online, I don't remember, about a little kid who had been eating avocado, and knew the word ⟨aguacate‎⟩, and really loved it, SARAH: and then bit into a jalapeño, which was a similar color or texture or something, and the kid obviously, like, spat it out or whatever, and then said, "this is the ⟨fuego-cate‎⟩", taking the ⟨aqua⟩ from—or the ⟨agua‎⟩ from ⟨aguacate‎⟩, which is "water," and replacing it with ⟨fuego⟩, which is "fire." SARAH: Because it's like an avocado, but spicy. ELI: Ah, I love that! That's cute. SARAH: It's so cute! and I love when kids, like—I think we talked last week, about how there's a certain point at which kids can start to analyze and break down the parts of words, and so it's, like, adorable, but it's also like, "Hey, you're really smart, actually! You can put, like, water and fire as opposites, and you can be like, 'this thing has water in the name, and this thing is like it, but it's hot, so it's a fire-thing'!" SARAH: That's so cool! Brains are so cool. ELI: Brains are super cool. ELI: Yeah, we should do a thing on language play at some point. SARAH: Yes, send us your language play questions! SARAH: I know someone sent in a question about like, spoonerisms, when you flip sounds, that we haven't gotten to yet. SARAH: Send us more things like that, maybe we'll do a thematic episode one day. ELI Yeah, we could do, like, spoonerisms, Pig Latin, that kind of thing. SARAH: Yeah! SARAH: On the topic of real language questions sent in by you, our real listeners: send us things! SARAH: If you want to send us a question you can email it to , either in text or as an audio recording. SARAH: Especially if you are asking about phonology and accent questions, we would love to hear your voice and how you pronounce things. SARAH: Or you can hit us up on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or Slack—anywhere you can find us on the internet, we will get your questions. ELI: Everyone should send us recordings of themselves saying Aaron, Erin, Mary, marry, and merry. SARAH: Also parish, perish, and Parrish—like the guy from The Raven Boys—if you want. ELI: Huh, yeah. SARAH: Let's just… get all of those recordings, it'll be great! ELI: And we'll do something with them, probably. SARAH: I don't know. We'll listen to them and be excited! [ELI laughs] ELI: Okay, okforthey asks via Twitter, "I was listening to a podcast about the Irish language and it mentioned 'helping vowels'. Are there any other languages that do this? it seems pretty useful." SARAH: Um, cool, that's a great question, thanks for asking it; Eli, do you know anything about this, cuz I don't! ELI: I can save this from being a rule three question. SARAH: Thank you. Go. Tell me things. I wanna learn. ELI: Well, I will tell you that I'm drinking a Hopewell Goes called "Table Salt," and it's really good. SARAH: It's called "Table Salt"? ELI: Yeah, well, it—Goes is like, it's like, a style of beer that's like, "goes well with salt," SARAH: Okay. ELI: I think there's a little bit of salt in here? SARAH: The concept of putting salt in your beverage seems really counterintuitive. SARAH: However, I am drinking Perfectly Plums Summer seltzer, and seltzer originally was named that because it had salt in it so, awkward. ELI: Yeah! SARAH: This doesn't. It frequently no longer has salt in it. But that's where the word "seltzer" comes from. ELI: You could probably add just a little bit of salt and it would amp up the flavor. SARAH: Yeah, that's fair. ELI: But this is not Cooking After Dark, this is Linguistics After Dark. SARAH: [laughs] Alright. ELI: So, let's talk about helping vowels. ELI: I only know this because I went to Ireland last year, and so I did a lot of looking up stuff about Irish beforehand, because of who I am as a linguist. ELI: Irish has this thing where—I'm going to get the phonotactics a little bit wrong, but basically, they don't do consonant clusters? ELI: or, in a lot of scenarios, they don't do consonant clusters. SARAH: Okay. ELI: And so in places where you would have a consonant cluster, there's an epenthetic schwa. SARAH: (understanding) Ahhh! Um— ELI: —for people who don't know what that means, it just means that there's a schwa that gets inserted when you say the word. SARAH: Cool. ELI: So you get this schwa that gets inserted between two consonants so that they're not a cluster, ELI: and that's—it's just part of the rules of the language? of the way that people say things? SARAH: Oh! ELI: and I think it probably sometimes is sort of just interpreted as, like, accent, but it is an actual part of the rules of the language. SARAH: Sure. SARAH: Oh—that—yeah, alright, so I just didn't know what the word "helping vowels" meant, cuz Japanese does that when they borrow English words, right? ELI: Yeah, although Japanese is a little bit different, because it has sort of a really strict moraic, like, consonant-vowel thing? ELI: and Irish does do consonant-vowel-consonant syllables, where Japanese will also do it at the end of a word. SARAH: Well, right. ELI: Circumstances are different, but yeah, it totally—you're absolutely right. SARAH: I've been playing this game called Zen Koi, that Jenny introduced me to, actually, SARAH: and it's a Japanese game where you feed fish on your phone and then they turn into dragons, it's very fun. ELI: Sounds very Japanese. SARAH: Yeah. It's very relaxing—hence the name "Zen Koi," obviously—but all of the breeds of fish are Japanese names, SARAH: and it's really fun when I find the ones that are obviously, uh—oh, I'm gonna get this backward, is it a calque or a loanword? SARAH: Calque. ELI: Loanword. SARAH: Loanword. SARAH: Whatever, borrowings from English, or just transliterations—well, almost—of English words, like there was one that had polka dots on it, and was called "Supotto." ELI: Oh yeah. SARAH: And you say it and you're like "oh, 'Spot,'" but you put in the [su] because you can't say S and P back to back, and then you have the extra O on the end because you can't end it with a T. SARAH: Supotto. ELI: Yeah, this, this shows up a lot when—cuz English has a bunch of— especially S: S and then a stop and then R, right? SARAH: yeah. ELI: We have a lot of those clusters, and so when that gets borrowed into Japanese— ELI: I think my favorite one, that I learned in first-year Japanese, was ⟨マクドナルド/Makudonarudo⟩, so that's "McDonald's." SARAH: Oh my gosh. ELI: You just, like, it's just everywhere. SARAH: Oh, yeah, that's true, because like, English you can start words like "S-P-R," could be, like, "spring," and if you wanted to say that in Japanese you'd be like, ⟨supuring⟩/[supurɪŋ]. ELI: Yeah, I mean, a lot of Japanese speakers also speak English, SARAH: Yeah ELI: and so, the way that I was taught, anyway, is that those vowels get quote-unquote "swallowed," SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: and so you really, like, you'd, like—they're there, but you just try to go as quickly as you can, pass them on the sidewalk, don't look at them. [SARAH laughs] ELI: I think this is also kind of related to syllabic L and syllabic N and syllabic R— SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: —those kinds of things? do you want to explain what those are? SARAH: Yeah, so, we were actually just talking about how in English, we are allowed to have syllables that start with three consonants in a row, depending on what consonants they are, and that's fine! and Japanese is like, "Nope. You get one consonant, (1). That's all." SARAH: And English is lax enough about its consonants that we don't even—we don't even require a vowel to be in the syllable at all, so we can have a word like ⟨button⟩, and the first syllable, obviously, is [bʌ], which is a B and an [ʌ], so you have a consonant, you have a vowel, if you want to put the T at the end of [bʌt] and make that the end of your syllable, great. SARAH: then you have ⟨-on⟩, which most of us would just say as [n]. Like, there's not an actual vowel in there, just [n]. ELI: Yeah, you just kinda say [bʌt] and then [n]: [bʌt.n] SARAH: Right. And so that's something that phonologists—er, phoneticians—whatever, people who study sounds—call a "syllabic N," because it's an N that is being a syllable all by itself with no vowel, and vowels are typically the core of syllables cross-linguistically. SARAH: And English also does this with L, and with R, so you can have ⟨button⟩/[bʌt.n], you can have ⟨butter⟩/[bʌt.ɹ], and that [ɹ] is basically just an American English R by itself. SARAH: In most British dialects—well, I shouldn't say most; I haven't surveyed them, but—in many British dialects, they just drop that R off entirely and replace it with a vowel, so you could say "buttuh" [bʌt.ə]. ELI: Yeah, 'cause they're non-rhotic, right? SARAH: Right, so if they drop their Rs—or like, New England, a lot of accents in New England drop their Rs—so you'd say [bʌt.ə], and you're replacing the R with a vowel, but if you keep the R, chances are you don't put a vowel in there, you're just saying R. SARAH: And then you also have ⟨bottle⟩ and—or ⟨rebuttal⟩, I guess. I'm trying to find really close pairs here. ELI: It's the the verb for what a butler does: he ⟨buttles⟩ SARAH: Yes! He buttles! SARAH: And, and when you ⟨buttle⟩, you have [bʌt], just like in ⟨butter⟩ and ⟨button⟩, but then you just have ⟨-le⟩/[ɫ]. ⟨le-⟩/[l]. ⟨-le⟩/[ɫ]. ELI: So this is like, this is a thing where, I think a lot of people think that this is [əl], or [əɹ], or [ən], SARAH: Yup. ELI: but it's phonetically different, right? SARAH: Uhhhh… kind of? I feel like that's one of those things that the answer you get is gonna depend on who you ask and what day of the week it is? SARAH: There's different conventions for how to notate those sounds, so some people will do a schwa and then the letter, some people will just do the letter and put a little hash mark underneath it (n̩, ɹ̩, l̩), which is the IPA diacritic symbol for "is syllabic even though it's a consonant". SARAH: and especially with R, there's also a special little symbol that means "schwa, but like an R." ELI: Schwa, but make it R. SARAH: Yes exactly. Uh, the fancy name is the "rhotacized schwa," which just means "schwa, but make it R," and so depending on who you talk to, some people will transcribe ⟨butter⟩ as ending with the R sound, syllabic ([ɹ̩]); some people will transcribe it as [əɹ]; and some people will transcribe it as this schwa with a little curly tail ([ɚ]) that means "R-colored," or "rhotacized." ELI: I actually—so I fall into that last category. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Although I can swear that I have used a syllabic R notation in other places, but I spent a lot of time in undergrad just going back and forth between the schwa and the rhoticized schwa, trying to, like, figure out what the difference was physically? SARAH: Mm-hmm ELI: And also probably scaring other people away. SARAH: [laughs] Yeahhh… ELI: If you have spent time saying the schwa and the rhotacized schwa to yourself quietly, trying to figure out the difference, and you don't know what your major is in college? your major is linguistics. SARAH: If you've spent time just repeating two words in alternating pairs trying to figure out what the difference is, your major is linguistics, go sign up. ELI: Cool. So, I don't know specifically if the Irish helping vowels are a manifestation of syllabic consonants? ELI: So the thing about Irish is that it is a language that has a lot of its own linguistic terminology, ELI: so it talks about "broad" vowels and "thin" vowels, or broad vowels and slim vowels, and broad and slim consonants, and there's, like, there's a lot of linguistics that was done on Irish, by Irish people, before linguistics sort of had, like, a global organization happening to it, ELI: and so there are a lot of names for things that happen in Irish, that are not necessarily sort of what—what an academically-trained linguist would call them? ELI: so it's kind of hard to say in that, like, "does it fit in this category or does it fit in a different category." SARAH: I'm just thinking now about the Irish linguists in the past being like the common French people, and then academic linguists being like L'Académie, except the academic linguists aren't jerks about it, SARAH: and the Irish people are like, "Hmm, you say 'epenthetic schwa'. That's nice." SARAH and ELI together: "We say 'helping vowel'!" [both laugh] SARAH: Right, and just, like, if you want to study Irish, you just gotta learn their own terminology, cuz they're like, "Yes, we understand that you have words for this. We do too! 'kay bye!" [laughs] ELI: Yep. SARAH: It's great. ELI: Yeah. ELI: [laughs] Do we get swords, as academic linguists? SARAH: That sounds really dangerous. I'm not sure I would trust my academic linguist friends with swords. ELI: That's true. All right, shall we move on to the next question? SARAH: Yes! Actually, our next question is going to kind of continue on this theme: Kaitlyn G. asks via email, "How do linguistic rules emerge? For instance, in my intro linguistics class we're currently talking about phonotactics, and how a lot of languages have specific rules as to what sounds can go where in a syllable. How do those rules develop, and why do different languages have stronger or weaker rules?" ELI: The last sentence of that question is a really interesting thing to say, about stronger rules and weaker rules, SARAH: Mm-hmm? ELI: because I personally don't think about rules as being strong or weak? ELI: There are rules—the way that I was taught, you know, there are rules that can counteract or prevent other rules, SARAH: Okay. ELI: but stronger or weaker rules to me seems more like an optimality thing? like an optimality theory thing, ELI: where things can have a certain number of strikes, or they are ordered in a certain way. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: So I'm not quite sure which thing was meant by Kaitlyn here, but I think there is a lot of really interesting stuff to talk about, about how certain kinds of phonotactics evolve, and the historical implications, the historical linguistics implications of them. SARAH: Yeah! How do these rules develop… um, I… SARAH: Over time? I mean, that's cheating, but it's also true. ELI: Like, there are a lot of different ways, and some of the sort of more… ELI: Some of the more famous stories are things like "a king had a lisp, and that's why Castilian Spanish has a TH [θ] instead of an S sound." SARAH: Wait, is that really true? ELI: I don't know if it's really true, but— SARAH: But that's the story? ELI: That's the story. SARAH: Huh! Cool. ELI: But there's also—I mean, the straightforward and also unsatisfying answer to this is, ELI: somebody started talking that way, and other people also started talking that way. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: You know, you get sound changes that happen over a period of time within a group that is basically only talking with itself, or is being influenced by a group that they're newly in contact with, but it's tough to say what the motivation behind those things is? SARAH: The other thing that I was just thinking of is, every language has to make decisions about the things in it that it cares about? ELI: Yeah. SARAH: Which, we talk about languages—like as linguists, we talk about languages as if they are sentient and conscious a lot, which they're not! SARAH: Languages are the way that they are because *humans* are the way that they are, and every time I have a student complain about languages being complicated, SARAH: or something just doesn't make sense, I'm like, "Hi, have you ever met a human? That's how we do things!" ELI: Yeah! ELI: Yeah, not to, like, take you off track, but I think it's kind of important to keep in the back of your mind for this question, for folks who are listening, that like, languages are an organic evolved thing, and just as there are evolved structures on the body that don't make sense anymore, or are byproducts of other kinds of things— ELI: like, keep that in mind, that language is a human thing, it's not a mathematical—or, like, a Platonic concept. SARAH: Right. I also—I'm just gonna keep thinking about L'Académie all day now, but I just had this image of— SARAH: If language is an organic thing that grows and develops over time, it's like a tree or animal or something, SARAH: and I just had this image of L'Académie d'arbres—the Academy of Trees— [ELI laughs] SARAH: —and someone just showing up to the tree in your front yard, and being like, "No, that's not what leaves look like." ELI: Oh man. L'Académie is the HOA of francophones. [SARAH laughs] SARAH: Yes. The Homeowners' Association—the Tongue-Owners'—? [ELI laughs] SARAH: No, no, nope. We're done! Okay, anyway, um. SARAH: But yeah so like, languages evolve and grow like a tree does, and like animals do, and like humans do, and sometimes, like Eli said, the reason that something happens is because someone did it and then kept doing it and other people imitated them, for whatever reason, whether because they're the king and you want to respect the king, or because you're like that seventh grader who sees that their friend has changed their handwriting and is now dotting all their "i"s with circles instead of dots, and that's really cool, so I'm gonna dot my "i"s with circles, or I'm just gonna not dot my "i"s at all and look really hipster, or like whatever! SARAH: People talk and imitate each other's speech in the same way. SARAH: But also when we think about the way that humans learn languages, and develop languages, right, SARAH: cuz like, there's a direction or an understanding by which, you know, English, or French, or whatever language, exists in the world right now, and if you take an infant who was born five seconds ago, they can acquire that language, and they can learn that language. SARAH: So part of this is about how a newborn brain can take a language and understand it, but in a kind of reciprocal way, languages have evolved over time to be understandable by infants and to be learnable by infants, because if infants can't learn a thing eventually as they grow, then it's not gonna survive. Because that's how humans are. SARAH: So anyway, languages have to make all these decisions about how they're going to present information, and we have obviously this huge range of sounds that the human mouth can make, but not every language has every sound in it. SARAH: Every language has had to choose which sounds they care about, and some languages—English? has SO MANY sounds! SARAH: And that's what makes English hard for speakers of some other languages, because if you come from a language that has very few sounds, and suddenly you're having to differentiate all these different English sounds, you're like, "What's even happening?" SARAH: On the other hand, because English has so many sounds, it can cram a bunch of them together, and it has more options for making, like, individual syllables different from each other. ELI: Oh, that's a good point, that the phonotactics help determine what the minimal pairs in a language are. SARAH: Right. ELI: That the more sounds that you have, the more options you have for making minimal pairs, and I bet that there is some research out there, at some point, ELI: about sound-inventory versus word-length or morphological typology. SARAH: Yes. SARAH: I think I was actually reading a book about this, that I haven't finished yet, but, um—book rec actually! it's called NATIVE LISTENING, and it's a very academically inclined book, but I found it really accessible despite, like—I'm a linguist but I'm no PhD, so I still found it really accessible, SARAH: and it's about how the languages that you know or learn as a child influence the way that you hear other languages. SARAH: Not just like, "Oh, I don't recognize those words," but like—not just the sounds, but also the prosody, like the rhythmic patterns and the tonal patterns in your sentences, and what different languages use of those? ELI: Yeah, you see this sometimes when people are learning languages that have similar sound inventories but very different prosody. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Like, Spanish and Japanese is a good comparison, ELI: because they actually have very similar phonetic inventories, SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: but the stress patterns are all different, and especially in America, people are much more used to a Spanish stress pattern, SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: so you get a lot of Americans who speak Japanese, but the words have Spanish stress patterns. SARAH: That's so interesting! SARAH: Um, the other thing, because I'm thinking about it—the one study that I remember, from the part of that book that I've already read, was about… Spanish? I think? SARAH: and Dutch and English, and how Dutch has—and I'm gonna have to go look this all up later, because I don't fully remember, but SARAH: if I recall correctly—Dutch has a very static stress pattern within words, so it's not variable. ELI: Mm-hmm. SARAH: Spanish and English both have somewhat variable stress patterns. SARAH: And that means that English and Spanish speakers, when learning each other's languages, are already clued in to listen for that change in stress, SARAH: and that it might indicate a change in meaning, like— ELI: Oh, interesting. SARAH: like REbel (noun) versus reBEL (verb), whereas Dutch speakers, who don't have that sort of alternating stress pattern, don't pick up on it in English or Spanish nearly as quickly, if at all, when they're first encountering it. And they did—part of the study was, they did a thing where the people would listen to a word, or part of a word, and then—and they'd be looking at like an array of pictures, and they did an eye tracking thing, so they saw where your eyes went to first when you heard the part of the word, and they used—for example, ⟨October⟩ and ⟨octopus⟩, which have the same first two syllables, and importantly the same *first* syllable, with the same vowel: there's no vowel reduction. SARAH: Like, ⟨octopus⟩ sometimes gets reduced to a schwa in the middle, but ⟨October⟩/[ˌɑkˈto.bɹ̩], the emphasis is on the [to], and ⟨octopus⟩/[ˈɑk.tə.pʊs] it's on the [ɑk], SARAH: and if you just say [ˌɑkˈt], or [ˈɑk.t], English speakers were much faster to pick the right picture— ELI: Oh, that's cool! SARAH: —either an octopus or a calendar, and Dutch speakers—who spoke English!—were 50/50, um, or something like that. SARAH: Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that different languages are gonna have different constraints on what their syllables can be, SARAH: based on what other constraints have developed in the language. You can't have *all* of the different things. ELI: Yeah, you have to pick and choose a little bit, about where you're going to have a lot more of something, ELI: and where you're going to kind of have some—have some ambiguity. SARAH: Yeah. SARAH: Cuz humans can handle ambiguity very well! They can't handle it indefinitely. SARAH: They also can't handle absolute non-ambiguity, because that's just too much information to keep track of. SARAH: And as my [American] Sign Language teacher was fond of saying, "Humans are lazy." SARAH: That was her reasoning every time someone was like, "Well, how come this sign used to be X, and has now, like, evolved into this, like, more streamlined version that's much less clear?" SARAH: And she was like, "Cuz we're lazy, and no one wants to, like, make five gestures, when you can make one that clearly says the same thing." ELI: So, that reminds me actually—I was going to talk about this, but that's a really good segue into ELI: one of the most common historical sound changes which is lenition, or softening. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: There's a chart—we'll find it, we'll put it in the show notes—of a bunch of different phonemes, and sort of what direction they tend to go, and you can see that sounds tend to soften over time, in terms of historical change. ELI: And it doesn't always happen, there are all kinds of other changes, but my guess is that that sign language process is similar to lenition. SARAH: Oh, absolutely. ELI: And this is one of the sort of pet peeve things, which is like, it's not— ELI: It *is* speakers being lazy, but it's not *people* being lazy: it's the *vocal apparatus* being lazy. SARAH: Right, and that's actually what I was gonna say, is, she would joke and it would be like, "Because we're lazy," but it wasn't in, like, a "Ugh, humans are so lazy, why don't we say it the Right Way anymore," kind of way. SARAH: It was a—humans aren't lazy, humans are economical! Like, don't— ELI: Yes. Economical is a much better way to put that. SARAH: Right? like your brain has so much information to process, all the time. SARAH: And so when it comes to the possibilities of language, this is why infants have the capability to distinguish between every single possible sound, and every single possible, like, syntax thing, and every single possible everything. SARAH: And they learn pretty quickly, like within a year, which sounds, which sound patterns, matter, and they get rid of the rest of them! ELI: And they will learn this even if you did not intend them to learn this, and that's where Creole languages come from. SARAH: mmmhm! ELI: If you have two cultures that meet, and they trade, and they interact, and, eventually, you know, they're going to shack up together— ELI: In the immortal words of my morphology professor, Rand Valentine, "You sell enough fish together, eventually you're gonna have a kid." SARAH: [laughs] Amazing. ELI: And if your two parents don't, you know—their native languages are not the same or, you know, they are using some kind of pidgin to communicate, the next generation of the community that's using that pidgin will interpret that pidgin into what's called a creole language, which is the infant linguistic apparatus taking in the input that it has, and making a language out of it. SARAH: Mm-hmm! Also just to clarify, we mean pidgin P-I-D-G-I-N, which is like, "contact language," not like a bird. ELI: Yeah. ELI: That's a—it's a—it's a technical term for a not-quite-language that occurs when two groups of people who don't speak the same language need to develop a communication strategy. SARAH: Yep. And then, as Eli said, if that pidgin sticks around long enough for kids to start learning it, it will become a creole. Which is just a pidgin but codified and growing into a real language of its own. ELI: Yeah. I mean pidgins don't have syntax, they don't really have, like, phonotactics, they don't really have structure, but a creole is what happens when you filter that through a newly-minted linguistic apparatus, such as comes standard with just about every infant. SARAH: Yep! So infants learn this stuff and they figure out what matters and what doesn't, and then they're like, "You know, I gotta learn other stuff? I gotta learn how to walk, I gotta learn how to eat, I gotta learn how to, like, deal with these new appendages that I have, because I keep growing and that's really weird, and right! I can hear all these sounds, but like now I have to say them back, if I want people to pay attention to me? and forget that I have sounds, but like how do I combine them into things that mean things? There's so much stuff I have to learn!" SARAH: And so they dump overboard all the extra possibilities for a language, in order to take in and make space for all the rest of the things they have to do with their life. SARAH: And different languages keep different things and dump different things. ELI: So I guess kind of what we're saying is, phonotactics are a way to build in some redundancy to make up for that lost variation. ELI: Right, that if you have those rules, then if you miss some information coming in, you can unconsciously reconstruct it, because you know the rules that the language has to adhere to, which you've developed by learning that language. SARAH: Yes. SARAH: And that redundancy is really important too. I was again, as I frequently do, listening to a recent Lingthusiasm episode; SARAH: they were talking about how children and adults learn languages really differently. SARAH: And it's not just because of, like, that magical window when you can hear all the sounds and all that stuff, but because adults, adults have already filtered out a lot of this stuff, and so when you have extra rules, like gender agreement, or number agreement between nouns and adjectives, or like, "Why do my verbs have to have an S on the end if it's a singular person doing something instead of multiple people doing something?" SARAH: And adults learning new languages find those types of constraints really confusing, because it's very easy to mess them up, but children *love* those kind of constraints, because that means if I didn't hear the subject of the sentence, but I hear you say "walks," SARAH: I know it's only one person, so I can like look at the context around me, and be like, "Oh, you must mean Dad, because he is the one over there" or things like that. ELI: Yep. SARAH: So that's another part of it. ELI: So the actual question, which is like, "How do these rules develop?" ELI: The answer is "arbitrarily." ELI: And like, at the base level, there's a lot about language that is just arbitrary, SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: or evolved because that is the path that it took, but there is a lot of depth, and it's a really great question to ask, "Why do these rules exist in the first place? What is the role that they're playing?" SARAH: Yes. Excellent question, Kaitlyn! ELI: Shall we move on to another question? SARAH: We shall. ELI: All right! [eəɹɪn], or possibly [eəɹɪn], asks via Instagram, "Canadian raising! What actually is it?" SARAH: It's when you take your Canadian, and then you put them on your shoulders, and you carry them around, and, like, talk to them… ELI: Oh, is it not when you adopt a Canadian child and then… you bring them up? SARAH: Oh, that's also true. Maybe it's taking a Canadian child and putting them on your shoulders, ELI: (excitedly) Oh! SARAH: and keeping them there for the whole time they grow up. ELI: (warily) Oh. SARAH: That sounds really stressful. ELI: (dramatically) I carried you on my shoulders for 18 years… [SARAH laughs] ELI: Canadian raising is—it's the difference between "eh" and "eh??" SARAH: [laughs] Okay, uh, but no, more seriously: Canadian raising is a really interesting phonological process which has to do with vowels, and it's called Canadian raising because compared to whatever definition of Standard US English accent you want to use, Canadians do this. SARAH: However, also people in Minnesota do this, and also people all over the north of America do this, and also people in other parts of America do this. SARAH: They just don't know it. ELI: So what you're saying is the Canadians have invaded the US and they're living among us, changing our vowels. SARAH: Uhhh, sure… I don't want to promise that it went that direction, and that we didn't just steal them? but— ELI: That is a thing that we would do. SARAH: Honestly, I could see it both ways. SARAH: Anyway, so… ELI: (like a Canadian) So. SARAH: (like a Canadian) So. SARAH: Uh, I'm gonna do my best to explain how this works visually. ELI: Perfect for a podcast. SARAH: I know, I—bear with me, and if you get lost, check the show notes, or check our fancy Instagram highlight story for episode 4, and I will definitely put this chart there. ELI: Grizzly bear with you? SARAH: What? ELI: Canadian? Canadian raising? SARAH: I'm so confused. ELI: You said bear with me, so, you know, SARAH: Oh! Oh boy… SARAH: Okay, uhhh, I'm gonna do my best to explain visually this vowel space, this vowel chart, and if you get lost, check the show notes, check our Instagram story highlight for episode 4, and I will put the chart in there as well. SARAH: Um, so this is a shape that someone—maybe Eli?—told me they've heard called the shopping cart of vowels. ELI: That sounds like a thing I would say. SARAH: So picture, like, your typical—at least, North American—shopping cart, grocery cart, and there's, like, the pretty vertical part next to the handle, and then there's, like, the slanted part out toward the front. SARAH: And that is the shape, if you also include, like, parallel top and bottom lines connecting those two things. SARAH: That's the shape that we have kind of decided is the vowel space, and it kind of also represents the shape of your mouth, where, like, your throat is the vertical back part, and your bottom teeth are farther in than your top teeth, and that's how you get that slanty bit at the front. SARAH: And this is one of the reasons why we like to say that all vowels are the same vowel, because with consonants we can be like, "Yes, there's a really definitive place of articulation." SARAH: If you make a [t] sound or a [θ] sound, you're absolutely using your teeth, and if you make a [q] sound you're definitely not using your teeth. SARAH: So those are really distinct. Whereas vowels are all made in your open mouth without touching your tongue to anything, it just kind of matters how open your mouth is, and how you put your tongue in your mouth while you make the AHHHHHH sound. ELI: It's kind of like—I've heard it described as like a colormap? SARAH: Mm-hmm! ELI: Right? When you're, like, selecting a color on the computer, like, you see the entire spectrum and it's, like, very bright at the top and very desaturated at the bottom, and like, red is on one end and purple is on the other, and you, like— ELI: There are very different greens, like, there's a whole spectrum of greens to pick from, and like, by the time that you are at orange, you are very obviously not in green anymore, but if you had to pick a point where it stopped being green, you couldn't do that. SARAH: Yes. That's an awesome example. SARAH: The other thing I was thinking of is like, a trombone? ELI: Yeah. SARAH: Like, if you just have ever seen someone, like, hold the trombone closed and play a sound and then just let the slide go out, and it's like, [drawn-out high-to-low pitched sound, like a divebomb sound effect] SARAH: and you're like, "At what point did any of those notes change? I don't know." ELI: So that's like—that's good, consonants are, like, like a trumpet or another, like, valved brass instrument, and vowels are like a trombone. SARAH: Yes! So as I said previously, English has a ton of sounds. So many sounds. SARAH: I don't know why English is so selfish with the sounds. I'm sure there's something else we're being really stingy on, but we have so many sounds. SARAH: And we have some number that I don't remember of individual vowel sounds, and we think it's five, casually, because we're like, "Oh yeah, A, E, I, O, U." And then you're like, "And sometimes Y." And there's the long and short versions, and sometimes there's an R on them, and "Oh, what do I do about "ow"? that's not a letter!" and you're like "Ah, crap, we have a lot of vowels." SARAH: Um, and we do have a lot of vowels, and we have things like "ow," that are what we call "diphthongs," which means two sounds that are pronounced as one sound, or like you hear them as one sound, so "ow" is a combination, if you say it really slowly—and this is where you're gonna start to freak out the people sitting around you, so welcome to the club. SARAH: Bonus points if you're doing this on public transit. Although given the timing of everything, cut that part. Anyway. ELI: I don't know, I hope some, like, healthcare workers and other essential service providers are having their day brightened by listening to us ELI: ramble on about weird linguistics things. SARAH: That's true. And if you are, we love you. Thank you so much! SARAH: Um, so if you say "ow" really slow, you're gonna get ah… ooh [a … u] [SARAH says this several times, getting faster] SARAH: And that sound, [au], is your mouth moving from the [a] sound, which is like, kind of toward the bottom in front of the vowel shopping cart, to the [u] sound, that is much closer to the top and back of the vowel cart. SARAH: And if you say them really quickly in succession, you get "ow" [au], and that's the sound that we recognize in English as being its own independent phoneme. ELI: Go ahead. Say it. Say it to yourself now. Wherever you are, just feel your mouth go from the front and the bottom to the top and the back. ELI: Okay, keep going. SARAH: Good job! SARAH: So then we have another one, we have "eye," like the things that you see with, or the first person singular pronoun. SARAH: And that sound starts in the same place as "ow" starts, actually, but instead of going to [u], it goes to "ee"/[i], which is also toward the top but toward the front. SARAH: Again, say it to yourself for a second, [a...i] [SARAH repeats this getting faster] ELI: I mean, pretend that you're Whitney Houston at the beginning of "I Will Always Love You." SARAH: ♫ I will always love— ♫ SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I mean, she, she actually does this "ah-ee-I" thing. SARAH: That's true. SARAH: And actually, that's also why if you are a trained singer, you have probably been told not to say [au], or not to say [ai], because when you hold that sound out for any length of time, you have to pick, you have to either hold on [a], or you have to hold on [i]. SARAH: You can't hold in that transition space, because the whole point of a transition is that it's not stationary. SARAH: So like, my choir teacher always said, if you're gonna string out the beginning of that song, you gotta go ♫ahhhhhhhhhh♫ and then at the end, transition to the [i]. SARAH: (Or then make your transition really long, if you want to be dramatic, like Whitney Houston.) ELI: And you might be like, "Can I sit in the middle," and you can't, because the middle is eh/[e], and nobody wants to be like ♫And ehhhhhh-ee-ehhhhh—♫ SARAH: That's true. ELI: I mean, I guess we are talking about Canadian raising. SARAH: [laughs] But also like, yeah, try that. It's not gonna work, but you should prove it to yourself. Give that a try. SARAH: Extra bonus points if you're singing the song now. SARAH: Anyway, so you have these diphthongs, and they are traveling between two vowels in the vowel cart, and the whole point of Canadian raising is that their vowels, overall, don't start out— SARAH: Either their diphthongs don't start out as low, or some of their single vowels, which are fancily called monophthongs, aren't as low as typical American vowels are either. SARAH: So, one of the ways that Americans like to make fun of Canadians, (usually in a loving way), is to imitate them, and people don't realize that what they're trying to imitate is this Canadian raising, but Americans hear Canadians say the word ⟨about⟩, as in, like, "I'm reading a book about dogs," as "a boot"/[əˈbut], and then you'll be like, "Oh yeah, I was oot and aboot," [for "out and about"] and then Canadians will be like, "You're gross, stop talking, don't say that," and they'll be like, "no Americans are all, [əˈbæut], what do you mean [əˈbæut], that's, like, not a sound," and the real issue is that when Canadians say this word, they don't start all the way down at [a], they start very close to the middle of the vowel space, probably still a bit toward the front, but much higher, so like, in the kind of second out of three tiers, if you will, in the vowel space. SARAH: So we call it Canadian raising because Americans start down in [a], Canadians start up in [ʌ], and so they'll say [əˈbʌut]. [ʌ...ut] [ʌut] ELI: And to be clear, we're talking about—the word ⟨about⟩ has that "ow" diphthong in the middle of it, so that's—we're talking about— ELI: the first of those sounds doesn't start as low. SARAH: Exactly. And that one in particular is very noticeable to Americans, because many Americans don't make the [ʌut] sound or the [ʌu], they say [au]. SARAH: And so what pisses people off, when you start to have this teasing, is that because Americans are unused to hearing that sound start higher, they hear it only as the [u], only as the ending sound. SARAH: And so they go, "Oh, Canadians say [əˈbut]," and then Canadians are like, "No, obviously we don't say [əˈbut], it's a diphthong, there's a second sound in there. *You* say it wrong! you say [æut], [æut], like, you start so low, like what's wrong with you?" SARAH: And of course, most people don't have the linguistic terminology to actually describe this, so they just yell at each other. SARAH: Which is also a thing linguists do, so don't worry! But that's the basics of it. SARAH: The interesting part is that it's not just that diphthong, and it's not just that word. SARAH: Like I was saying before, people from Minnesota [said with a "Minnesota O"] also raise a lot of their vowels. SARAH: That "O" when we make fun of people from Minnesota, it's just the same "O" that we would say but higher, [o:] instead of [ou]. SARAH: Actually, technically "o" is a diphthong also: it starts at [o] and goes to [u]. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: And so they start—[to herself] Minnesota—yeah, they start with a higher version of [o], and then that's what we make fun of. ELI: [o], by the way, is about halfway up and in the back. SARAH: Yes. ELI: So if you're trying to figure out—you're, you're saying "oh," and you're trying to figure out how to make that a little higher, ELI: take the beginning of your "oh," and make it just a little more [u]-like. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: but not all the way, because that's how you get to Minnesuuuta. SARAH: Minnesuuta, yes. SARAH: So the other one that is really interesting, and that when I learned about Canadian raising in college I was like, "Oh, this explains something that I had observed previously, as a high schooler, but had no way of explaining," and that was that my friend—usually when she was being really casual— SARAH: but when we separated from each other and headed home after school, she would say "bye" [bʌi], and I was like, "Huh, I say bye" [bai], SARAH: and I couldn't figure out why we were saying it differently. Also, what's the auditory equivalent of eagle-eyed? ELI: Sharp-eared. SARAH: Sharp-eared? Shark-eared? ELI: Sharp-eared, I think. SARAH: Sure. We'll go with that. Shark-eared listeners— ELI: No, sharp! Sharp, with a P. SARAH: Sharp with a P, great! Sharp-eared— ELI: I like—I like, though, that you took the mold of "eagle-eyed," ELI: and you were like, "Well, it has to be another animal!" SARAH: Well, right? ELI: "Sharks are known for having good ears!" SARAH: I was like, "Are they, actually?" SARAH: Anyway, uh, sharp-eared, keen listeners may notice that I have a lot of raised vowels in my speech. SARAH: And I don't know why? I think it happened when I moved to New England? SARAH: But like—it might be in the outtakes later, I don't know, but I actually messed up saying "aboot" the first time, SARAH: cuz I just actually say [əˈbʌut] most of the time, despite never having lived in Canada or Minnesota. ELI: And I don't live quite up enough in the Midwest to have raising, myself. SARAH: Yeah. But I got it somewhere and it's really strange. SARAH: My whole vowel inventory is a mess. Anyway! ELI: It's okay, they're all the same vowel. SARAH: It's true, they are. SARAH: Um, so my friend was saying "bye" [bʌi], and I was saying "bye" [bai], and I was like, "I understand that that's the same *word,* but it's definitely not the same *sound.* Like, what is she doing?" SARAH: And then I found out in college, in one of my phonology...? classes? Phonetics? I don't know, in one of those sound classes, that the sound [ai], like I said, is a diphthong, and you can either start it down at [a], like [au], [a..i], or you can start at [ʌ] like [ʌut], and you can say [ʌi], and we parse it as the same sound, because based on one of the phonotactic rules of English, it *is* the same sound. SARAH: What bothers Americans about the way that Canadians use both of these raised sounds is that they don't use the lowered sounds in specific instances where Americans do. SARAH: Americans raise those sounds in a lot of words, but they don't raise them in ⟨about⟩ and ⟨ride⟩, and Canadians do raise them in those, and that's what bugs people. SARAH: The [ʌi] sound typically, in American English, only shows up when the sound after it is voiceless, so like a K or a T or a P. SARAH: So—we've talked a little bit about minimal pairs, which are two words that are almost exactly the same, except for, ideally, one single sound. SARAH: And the fact that that sound separates two words tells you that that's—both of those sounds mean something and matter. SARAH: So in English, you can ⟨bite⟩ [bʌit] something, you can have a ⟨bite⟩ [bʌit] of food. And you can ⟨bide⟩ [baid] your time. SARAH: And we spell those almost exactly the same, except for the T and the D, and we hear them as basically rhyming, but they don't. SARAH: ⟨Bite⟩ has that raised [ʌi], and ⟨bide⟩ has [ai], and that follows a really reliable pattern. You can ⟨write⟩ [ɹʌit] a paper but ⟨ride⟩ [ɹaid] a bike ⟨bike⟩. SARAH: [bʌik] is also raised. SARAH: When there's *no* consonant after it, we keep it low, so we say bye [bai], and fly [flai], and try [tɹai]. SARAH: And what was bothering me about my friend's speech was that she was raising it even though there was nothing afterward to tell her to do that, and I couldn't figure out why. SARAH: Why [wʌi] (mimicking the friend's [bʌi]) [ELI and SARAH laugh] SARAH: And then I learned, and I was like, "Whoa, that explains everything, that's so cool," and now it's something that I say! SARAH: I will say [bʌi], especially when I'm trying to be, like, silly or casual, because people will understand it, but it's, like, funny, cuz it's not what you expect. SARAH: And so, my like pet peeve about Canadian raising is that everyone's like, "Oh, it's a Canadian thing, and it's weird," and I'm like, "No, it isn't. It's the exact same thing that you do with the word 'bike', you just don't know!" SARAH: But now you know! ELI: But it's, it's one phonotactic rule that is different in another dialect, SARAH: Yes, and actually, as I have said all of that—⟨about⟩ ends with a T. ELI: Yes, I was going to point this out. Out [testing his own pronunciation] SARAH: Americans—yeah, Americans you would think would raise that, but apparently we don't apply the raising rule to the [au] sound, but Canadians do. SARAH: So I would guess that—if you're a Canadian listening to this, please tweet at us or something and tell me if I'm right— I would guess that many Canadians would say ⟨crowd⟩, like a crowd of people, still with [au], and I would guess that they say ⟨ow⟩ [au] when they get hurt, and they don't say [ʌu]—maybe they say that, I don't know. SARAH: They probably don't ask "how [hʌu] are you"—that sounds like "who are you"! ELI: Almost, yeah. SARAH: Well, I guess it would be right between [au] and [u], because that's what Americans think that sound is. SARAH: Anyway! I'm pretty sure they don't say "how [hʌu] are you," I'm pretty sure they say "how [hau] are you," but when they close it with a [t], they apply the raising rule, and most Americans do not, and that's what pisses Americans off. SARAH: So there you go! ELI: I don't think there's anything I can add to that. ELI: That's a great answer to the question of what Canadian raising is. SARAH: I love Canadian raising. SARAH: Also, if anyone has a small Canadian that wants a ride on my shoulders, I could do that too. ELI: [laughs] One day, we'll have a live show, and that can happen. SARAH: It's true. SARAH: All right! ELI: Shall we talk about last time's puzzler? SARAH: I was gonna say, Eli, will you please remind us what our puzzler was? ELI: Absolutely. So we have a puzzler every episode, and last episode our puzzler was "What do these words have in common?" and the words are: assess, banana, dresser, grammar, potato, revive, uneven, and voodoo. ELI: And the answer, which it took me a little bit to get, and then like a light bulb went off in my head, is that if you take off the first letter, what's left is a palindrome. ELI: It's the same backwards and forwards. SARAH: That's awesome, because the answer that was given when I found this puzzler was "If you add the first letter to the end, it becomes a palindrome!" [laughs] SARAH: Which is by definition the same thing. ELI: Oooh, so you get, like, "bananab." SARAH: Yep. ELI: Or "dresserd," "grammarg [gɹæmɑɹg]" SARAH: [stumbling] "Potatop [pou 'tei toup]?" [SARAH and ELI laugh] ELI: "Potatop [pou 'tei tɑp]", it's a high quality potato. SARAH: "Reviver"—that's a real word! ELI: One day, we'll open a linguistics themed bar, and we will serve "grammargs [gɹæmɑɹgz]" [a pun on "margs" for margaritas] ELI: I nominate that we call these "spalindromes." SARAH: "Spalindromes," I love it! ELI: Do you know about emordnilaps? SARAH: About what? ELI: Emordnilaps! ELI: So, an emordnilap, spelled the way that "palindrome" is spelled but backwards, SARAH: Ah, okay. ELI: is a word that when you reverse it, becomes a different word. SARAH: Oh, nifty! ELI: So it's not just like a word that isn't a palindrome, it's a word that becomes a different actual word when you reverse it. SARAH: So like "dog" and "god." ELI: Exactly, yeah. SARAH: Nice. ELI: Those are emordnilaps. SARAH: Nice. ELI: Okay, so do we have a new puzzler for this week? SARAH: We do! SARAH: So just in case anyone wasn't clear, as a group we are really big fans of Car Talk, and we are sad that it is off the air, and that at least one of the Tappet brothers has passed away, but we have really a lot of love for them, and so, in addition to kind of stealing their show format, we are also stealing some of their puzzlers, because their puzzlers are baller. SARAH: So this puzzler came from Car Talk, who got it from Bill Denlinger, whoever that is. Thanks, Bill! SARAH: And it goes like this: "My cousin Bruno put up a bird feeder in his yard. It was nothing fancy; just a flat board, with raised edges, kind of like a shallow cigar box, with the lid removed, so the food wouldn't fall off." SARAH: Sarah's insert here: I've never seen a cigar box. I'm imagining this is kind of like a baking sheet? with raised edges? ELI: It's got, it's got a little bit more height to it, but I mean, think like a shallow shoebox, basically. SARAH: Okay, so like, maybe like the lid of a shoebox. SARAH: Okay, so he has this bird feeder that's kind of like the lid of a shoebox. "As Bruno sat in his recliner in the living room, watching the birds come and go, he noticed a peculiar thing. On some days, the birds would all fly into the feeder from the north. On other days, they would fly in from the south, and on some, they seemed to fly in from all directions. The birds weren't tagged and Bruno didn't know anything about them, but they appeared to be the same birds. He wondered why the birds didn't fly into the feeder from the same direction every day, but had this really peculiar behavior instead. He couldn't explain it, until one day he noticed something while he was outside, filling up the feeder. And he said, 'Ah ha!'" What did Bruno discover?" ELI: Ooh, I think I know this. If I think I know this, what should I do, Sarah? SARAH: You should… not say it right now, SARAH: because we don't want to spoil it. ELI: Okay, that's fair. SARAH: But you should keep it in your head, and then when we announce the answer on the next episode, you can pat yourself on the back, if you got it right. ELI: Also, hey! This isn't a linguistics puzzler! SARAH: That's true! Because it turns out that there's not all that many linguistics puzzlers available, and I couldn't think of one. ELI: Also our last ones are not really linguistics puzzles. They're more like letter puzzles. SARAH: That's true. SARAH: However, if you have a cool linguistics puzzler that you want to share, send it to us! SARAH: We would love to share it, and we can read off your name instead of Bill Denlinger's name, although I'm sure Bill Denlinger is a great person. SARAH: But also we just think puzzlers are fun. SARAH: Not everything has to be linguistics. it's fine! SARAH: Um, figure this out! Check back with us next episode to see if you got it right! SARAH: And obviously you can, like, google this, it's out there. It's cheating. ELI: Totally cheating! SARAH: But also we won't find out if you do, so if you get really impatient and want to find out sooner if you got it right, the internet exists. SARAH: But see if you can figure it out, cuz I listen to podcasts while I'm driving, I don't want you guys to like, look stuff up on a website while you're driving. SARAH: Don't do that, it's dangerous! ELI: No. Imagine these birds and why they're flying from different directions. SARAH: Feel free to name them! Yeah, so that's what I got. That's it for this episode. SARAH: Thanks so much for listening! ELI: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. ELI: Audio editing is done by me, question wrangling is done by Jenny, and show notes are done by Sarah. ELI: Transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. SARAH: Our show is entirely listener-supported. You can help us by visiting patreon.com/emfozzing, which is E-M-F-O-Z-Z-I-N-G, and by telling your friends about us. SARAH: Big shout out today to our patrons, because I have a new microphone, and Eli's gonna have a new microphone as soon as it gets mailed to him! Which is happening… at a time… in the future… but this is so cool! SARAH: I hope that my sound quality is better than it has been, and I get to make fun sounds like [tap tap tap] by accidentally hitting my mic with my fingers. SARAH: I gotta learn to gesture differently while I talk now. it's a problem. SARAH: Anyway! You guys are great, and the people who rate us on iTunes and whatever other podcast services have ratings are also really great, and that helps us out so much and gets other people to hear us, so thank you so much! ELI: Today we want to say thanks to these awesome patrons: Bex, Inga, Mitch, Dre, Bryton, Geoff, Rachel, and Dash. ELI: We also want to thank electrike, kalob1, and Jeanietoo—though kalob1 has a numeral one and Jeannietoo is T-O-O, tricky there—for leaving us reviews on iTunes. Thank you all so much! ELI: Find our episodes and show notes online at LinguisticsAfterDark.com, and on all your favorite podcast directories. SARAH: And send us your questions, text or audio, to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or you can tweet them to us @LxADpodcast or you can find us on Facebook or Instagram, also @LxADpodcast ELI: And, until next time, if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are. [beep] SARAH: And I was staring at the word "loanword" and thinking, "This is not what happened to that word!" SARAH: "You're wrong!" ELI: [laughs] Well, that's the whole point! SARAH: God dammit. Okay. [beep] SARAH: Whatever I said before was a great lead-in. SARAH: I think you're just gonna have to pull it and put it where it… now… oh my god. [beep] ELI: Actually I don't even know if lingua franca is a loanword, it might just be using French— SARAH: —Latin. [beep] SARAH: One of the typical ones you always hear is someone saying oh, "about" [əˈbʌut] SARAH: No, shoot, I did it wrong. ELI: [laughs] Did you—did you do it right? SARAH: [laughs] Yes. [beep] ELI: Oh great, my cat has discovered my recording booth. Which is just my bedroom. CAT: meowww ELI: hold on [SARAH laughs] ELI: Get—! [beep] SARAH: I don't—I'm so full of shit today, I don't know what my problem is! [laughing] ELI: [laughing] No, that was great, I'm totally keeping that in, that was wonderful! [beep] SARAH: MinnesOHHHta [beep]