[Music] SARAH: Hi, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark. I'm Sarah. ELI: And I'm Eli. 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. SARAH: Settle in, grab a snack or a drink, and enjoy. ELI: Hey, Sarah. How's it going? SARAH: Going okay. How are you? ELI: Doing okay. This is weird because we saw each other this morning. SARAH: [laughs] ELI: Sarah came over yesterday to help me move into my new house, which is very nice. SARAH: Yes. It is a very nice house. I actually have a question. ELI: Yeah? SARAH: So I told a story at CrossingsCon ‘22 about the word that my friends and I made up, “lucreschadenfreude,” to— ELI: Yes, I remember. SARAH: —describe this particular sensation. And one of my colleagues asked me the other day, or was just saying that like he's been on a quest for like 10 years to find a language that has a word for this particular feeling that he hasn't found a word for yet. And so I thought that y'all might enjoy the puzzle of it, and perhaps one of our listeners knows a word that would fit the bill here. He was talking about this thing where people misunderstand the underlying intention of an action. He's like, the example he always thinks about is when your friend says, “Hey, you want to come watch like some movie,” and you're like, “I hate that movie. No, I don't want to come watch that movie,” but the point is less that they want to watch that movie and more that they just want to hang out with you. ELI: Ah, so they've like skipped over the like “let's hang out” and tried to suggest something specific because that's like a better way to make a plan than like, “Let's hang out sometime. I miss you.” SARAH: Yeah, or like when people just go and, you know, hang out and play pickup basketball or whatever and there's the one person who shows up and just goes all out like they're at the Olympics, and everyone else is like, “It's not actually fun to play with you, because you're trying way harder than everyone else is because you've missed that the point of this is to just, like, hang out.” ELI: Yeah. Although, I I kind of feel like that's a little different where the first thing is like, it’s just kind of sad. You know, like you could have had like a really cool time, and instead it's just two people trying their best to like have a good time, and instead, there was like some, a missing element. I feel like the second one is like, “Yo, Frank, chill. Like, this is a pickup basketball game in a park somewhere.” I don't know, I don't… I… There's something on the tip of my tongue about the sort of missed communication, you know, passing in the night kind of a thing, but I don't know. I… There’s probably a very long German word for it. SARAH: Well, I figured that our audience enjoys that sort of conundrum and might know the very long German word or other such term, so… ELI: There's probably, I feel like, you know, somewhere in the sociological or psychological literature, there's probably something like oblivious literalism. It doesn't quite cover the basketball game scenario, but I… Again, I feel like that's a little bit different. I think that is a different scenario than like, somebody suggests something that is overly specific with a subtextual meaning, and you dismiss the subtext and you respond to the literal… Dephaticization? I guess they're not really phatic, are they? SARAH: Oh. ELI: Oh, I— JENNY: No, but it— ELI: Dephaticization. Yeah. JENNY: Again, that feels like the right genre of… Like it might not be the right specific term, but it's close. ELI: Desubtextualization. SARAH: Supertextualization. ELI: Involuntary textual meaning raising. SARAH: [laughs] All right, we should come back to this next month, let it simmer. JENNY: Whatever it is, I'd really like to have a word for that. ELI: Seriously listeners, if you have a word for this, send it on in, and uh we will credit the best ones on the podcast. Hey, by the way, Sarah, whatcha drinking today? SARAH: I'm drinking a raspberry lemonade soda. What are you drinking? ELI: I have a Festbier by Notch. You know, it is winter, and so it is time for the darker beers, although Festbier is kind of on the other side of winter, but get a nice little… see how the new microphone does with the can open here. [can opening noises] All right. Well, before we get into language thing of the day, we do have some notes from last episode. SARAH: Sort of. ELI: Well, it's less notes from last episode and more a response question on Spotify that we want to address, because Spotify doesn't have comment replies yet. I didn't even know that Spotify had comments, so this one is new for me. SARAH: They introduced a thing where it's like a Q&A. You can ask a specific question at the end of each episode, and some people have been responding to them, and other people have been just using it as a place to say a thing unrelated to the question that we ask, both of which are fantastic. So Sydney asked, “With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language as an adult or as a non-infant, would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren't actively trying to comprehend it?” ELI: I feel like the answer to this is an unalloyed “yes.” SARAH: Agreed. ELI: Like, immersion is the best way to learn a language, and a lot of times people think about that as like, “Go to a place where everyone speaks that language,” or like, “Only talk in that language for a while,” but there is something to be said for surrounding yourself with what that language sounds like. SARAH: Yeah, and obviously understanding it is eventually the goal, but don't only listen to nursery rhymes because that's the only thing you understand. ELI: Yeah. I mean, you want to internalize the rhythms of the language, the sounds of the language, like especially if you can get stuff that is closer to unprepared speech. So, you know, like TV shows are good for this. Podcasts are even better because, you know… or YouTube videos, that kind of thing, because if people are speaking off the cuff, you get all of the filler sounds, and repairs, and tones, and stuff that may not be affected by an actor putting on a character. But just in general, like even if you're putting a movie on in the background or something like that, yes? SARAH: Yeah. Do it. ELI: Listening to music in your new language is also a really good idea. I think you're probably not going to get the thing where like babies' phonemic inventories expand to what they hear before they start doing active language learning, or language production I guess, but it will give you a sense of what the language is supposed to sound like, and that… Even that could be like… That can be good for just, I don't know, getting used to what things should be like. You know, languages have different rhythms. They've got different feelings, like you can fake your way through the language when you start getting a little bit better at it if you just kind of like fake it till you make it. This is a cool question. Thanks for posting it, Sydney. SARAH: Indeed. ELI: If you're listening on Spotify, go on and, I don't know, post some more interesting questions to us. We'll put them on the list to answer during the podcast. SARAH: Indeed, and YouTube comments, also. ELI: Yeah, YouTube comments are great, or, you know, send us an email or an audio thing, but we'll get to that in a second. First, we have to learn a language thing of the day. Sarah, do you have a language thing of the day that you want to teach us about? SARAH: I do. Today's thing is noun cases. So— ELI: Is that noun classes? SARAH: [laughs] Noun cases. We'll do noun classes another time. So we've been talking about verbs and voice and thematic roles and the ways that all of these different bits of information collaborate together in the syntax of a sentence, and noun cases are forms of a noun that indicate the grammatical role that that noun or pronoun has in the sentence, and they often overlap with the thematic roles we've talked about previously, things like agent and patient. But they're different, because as we talked about when we were talking about agent and patient, you can have the agent of the sentence be the subject or some other part of the sentence, and you can have the patient be the subject or some other part of the sentence. So, noun cases basically mark how the nouns are meant to interact with the verbs and with the rest of the sentence. So, for example, Proto-Indo-European historically had eight noun cases. Most modern languages in that family have fewer than eight cases left, but a lot of them have some. English has three, which we basically only see in pronouns. ELI: Does English have three or does English have two? SARAH: English has three. ELI: I assume you're talking about nominal, accusative, and dative. Right? SARAH: No. ELI: Or nominative… SARAH: Nominative, genitive, and dative—uh, nominative, genitive, and objective. ELI: Oh, yeah, okay. Cool. That tracks. SARAH: Yeah. So— ELI: Forgot genitive was a case because we do it weird in English. SARAH: We do. Well, I have an argument to make about genitive, but I'll get there in a second. So nominative or subjective, depending on the naming system you use, names the subject of the sentence, shockingly. And so with an active verb, that's usually the agent, like, “Sydney asked a question,” but with a passive verb you could say, “A question was asked by Sydney,” and now the question is the nominative thing. It's the patient because we've changed what type of verb it's interacting with. The objective or accusative… So accusative and dative in languages that have more cases indicate the direct object and the indirect object. In English, we do those the same way, so we sometimes just call it the objective case. And with proper… Not proper nouns like with capital letters, but with actual nouns, we don't really indicate case very much, but we see this with pronouns, and I like to use the “they” pronouns as my example because they have the best… They don't have overlap between their forms. So you have “they,” which is the subject form, and you have “them” which is the accusative or objective form, so “They asked a question” or “The question was asked by them,” and it doesn't really work if you're like, “Them asked a question,” or “The question was asked by they,” or, “I saw they over there,” or whatever. And then the third case that we have is the genitive or the ownership case, and so you have “their,” T-H-E-I-R, “my” or “your.” And particularly with the third-person pronouns, then that gets a little weird because, like, you have he/him/his and then “his” as the like substantive form of that, and then like she/her/hers, but then you have the accusative and the genitive form being the same, which is annoying for example purposes, but then you got like they/them/there and “theirs,” and I'm like, “Wow, look at all of those separate-looking words.” So great. ELI: But Sarah, I was taught in third-grade language arts class that the subject is the doer and the object is the thing that the thing was done to. SARAH: Yes, and that's true for active sentences, which is the majority of what third graders are writing, and in fact, even in like Latin 1, I do use that definition with my students because they want the word “subject” to mean “topic,” which is a whole other thing. ELI: Oh yeah, topic is not even in this same realm. SARAH: Right. They’re like— ELI: Topic is like a discourse thing. SARAH: Right. They're like, “‘Oh, I bought a car yesterday.’ The car is the subject of the sentence,” and I'm like, “No, the car did not do anything. That's not what's happening.” So yes, the kind of basic sentences that most of us think about are active sentences where the subject, the nominative thing, is also the agent, is the doer, and the object is the accusative thing, is the experiencer, but as soon as you start messing with verb voice, then those roles, those thematic roles that we've talked about, stop lining up as neatly on the cases. ELI: Yeah. I think if you will go back in our previous episodes, we've kind of been building up to this a little bit talking about different voice and talking about transitivity of verbs and active versus passive and all of that kind of thing, but it's also, cases interact with that, but they're also not one to one. There are other kinds of cases that use… that tell you different things about the noun’s relationship to the sentence, which… SARAH: Yes. ELI: We will get to. SARAH: Yes. So I said that English basically has three. We have the nominative, the objective, and the genitive. Proto-Indo-European historically had eight of them, so it was those three… or the objective case split into the accusative and the dative, so that gives you four. The vocative case, which is used for calling somebody's name, so when you're like, “Hey, Eli. How are you?” “Eli” would be vocative. The locative case for when you are in a place like, “I live in Boston.” You don't have to say “in,” you can just be like, “Boston-n” or whatever the ending is, and that means “in Boston.” ELI: I am shock-n. SARAH: [laughs] So that's a great example, actually, not to completely stomp on your joke, but… ELI: No, that's all this podcast is. Go for it. SARAH: Well, so that's the thing is that in a lot of modern languages where some of these cases have fallen away, they've been replaced with prepositions, and a lot of prepositions, especially in English, can serve dozens of functions. And one of the things that I was talking with my students about just the other day is like, you can be in a place. You can be in Boston, and that's sometimes the same word in Latin as being like in shock, but also there are ways that if you phrased it wrong, you would be like, “Yes, I am inside of shock,” and you're like, “What?” Or like, “to write something with a marker” is different than “to write something with a partner,” and if you phrase it wrong, then the implication is that you have picked your partner up and are using them to write on the board, or you and the marker are standing next to each other taking turns writing the words. ELI: Yeah, you're holding up the Sharpie, you're like, “Does this scan right to you? Are you…” SARAH: [laughs] ELI: I mean, that's a good point about prepositions, which is that it's a closed class, and so they have to be somewhat promiscuous meaning-wise, right? And also that a lot of the places where we don't have case that shows up directly on nouns, we now have these prepositions which kind of sort of goes to show that like, case shows up in all kinds of ways. Right? SARAH: Exactly. ELI: You could argue that there is a dative case in English that is shown by a number of prepositions. The question is, “Is there something useful to be done with that supposition?” which there kind of isn't in English. Like, the interesting thing is with nominative, objective, and genitive. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: So we got loc and voc. SARAH: Yep, and then the other two are the ablative, which initially showed motion away from a place, and the instrumental, which is what you would use for like writing with a pen or with a marker. ELI: Is that what “ablative” means? SARAH: Yes. ELI: There's a thing in… Hopefully this is not super spoilery. There's a thing in Voyager where they get ablative hull armor, and I was always like, “I got to look that word up at some point,” and apparently it's hull armor that shoves things away from it, which makes a lot of sense. You want your armor to be ablative if it all can be. SARAH: Yeah. Right. Apparently, in physics you can also describe things as ablative /ə'bleɪtɪv/. Spelled the same, means the same-ish, pronounced differently. Haven't looked into that other than— ELI: Like with knives. SARAH: Yeah. Wait, what? ELI: Yeah, “ablative.” [ə'bleɪɾɪv] SARAH: Oh. ELI: Like with a knife. SARAH: Oh. Sorry I missed that one. [laughs] ELI: I'm having a kid soon. The dad mode is turned way up. SARAH: I appreciate that. I'm just not smart enough right now. [laughs] ELI: The brain cell, it'll come back. SARAH: It will. ELI: Wait, so is it… is “ablative” /ə'bleɪtɪv/ in physics the same as “ablative” /'æblətɪv/? Is it just pronounced differently? SARAH: I think so. It's been a while since I looked up the specific uses uses of it, but yes, it's completely the same etymologically. And so, like in Latin, the locative technically exists only for, get this, the names of cities, the names of towns, the names of small Islands, which we define by “only big enough to have one town on it,” but not the word for “city,” “town,” or “island,” but specifically the words “house,” “countryside,” and “ground.” Because language. ELI: Wait, hold on, though, I have to ask. Like, is this a thing where that's all that we have evidence for, or is this like people are contemporaneously writing like, “Ah, you have said ‘I am in the city’ using locative. What a heathen.” Like, “What a barbarian that you don't know how to speak Latin correctly”? SARAH: Based on the corpus of Latin language that we have, every time someone says, “So and so is in place name,” if it's a common noun they use the preposition in. If it is a proper noun or one of those three special words, they never use the preposition… ELI: Oh. okay. SARAH: …and they use this other set of endings. It's real weird. ELI: No wonder so many classicists are weird. SARAH: [laughs] But like, again, the locative probably used to be a more widely spread case, and then its usage shrank and shrank and shrank and got replaced with prepositions, and the instrumental case doesn't exist in Latin at all. It just got absorbed into the ablative. There's a running joke among classicists that there's probably an ablative usage of the kitchen sink because there's an ablative usage of literally everything else so far. Greek was like, “No, we don't even have an ablative. We're going to take all of those uses and distribute them across dative, genitive, and accusative and add even more prepositions,” and English was like, “Yeah, also forget the dative. We're just going to… every preposition. All of them.” ELI: If I remember correctly, if you go back to Anglo-Saxon, AKA Olde English, you get more cases right, and they're on every noun as well. SARAH: Yes. ELI: But you get more cases than just the nominative, and I think back then you might have had accusative and dative, and genitive which they definitely had, but Anglo-Saxon had more cases. It's been consolidated over the past thousand-plus years, right? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Okay, so we've got nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative and locative (which, the twins), ablative, and instrumental, instrumentative. So that's it, that's eight cases? Like, that's what we got? SARAH: Those are the Proto-Indo-European cases. Basque, which is famous for being, as far as we can tell, unrelated to most other things, has like eighteen cases. I think Finnish has like seventeen. ELI: Nineteen, I think is— SARAH: Nineteen. ELI: —what I heard a lot. SARAH: A lot. I do remember at one point going to— ELI: It’s so many. SARAH: —look into that, and it turns out that a lot of the Finnish cases, if I recall correctly, like always occur with prepositions too. It's just that every preposition, like, has its own special case ending that goes with it. So like you have the ablative, but you also have the, like, the absentive or something. So it's like if you're going away or just being away. And there's like a case for being in a place that's different from like… I don't know. I don't speak Finnish. I'm not going to try to say that I do, but there are so many cases. ELI: That's like trying in English to figure out the difference between whether you should say that you're in a form of transportation or on a form of transportation. SARAH: Yeah, exactly. It's… ELI: Which one you use is left as an exercise for the listeners, by the way. SARAH: [laughs] Yes. So yeah, across all the languages, there's actually tons of cases, and some languages, like Latin and German and Russian and Greek, mark cases on the nouns and the articles or determiners and on the adjective. So if you're like, “I gave a cookie to the whiny cat,” “the whiny cat” would be entirely dative, but there are also languages where you would be like, “I gave a cookie to the whiny cat,” and “cat” is the only word that would be dative and “the” and “whiny” would just be like single form that cannot change. ELI: So this is like how in a lot of languages noun class, AKA noun gender if it's a Romance language, and number, you'll see the determiner and you'll see the adjective agree with the noun on those levels. You've got languages where noun class is also something that those other words will participate in the agreement with. SARAH: Yes. And so there's some languages where all three of those things can change along with the noun, and there are some languages where like the articles and the adjectives just do their own thing, and the noun does whatever it wants. ELI: Very cool. Well, thank you for taking us through noun cases. This is one of these things that's like, it's definitely there and it's very cool to study, and it is a gateway or a connection to a lot of different points in linguistics. SARAH: Yeah. Definitely. All right, well, that brings us to real language questions submitted by real listeners. If you want to send us a question you can email it in text to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com or send an audio recording of you speaking your question out loud, which is super handy for phonology and accent questions. Please also feel free to send us how to pronounce your name, either in a recording or IPA or something, or leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube or wherever you find us. Eli, do you have a question for us? ELI: I do. Tom W asks via email, “Do other languages have adjective ordering like English does?” SARAH: Yes. ELI: Cool. Done. Next question. SARAH: [laughs] Yeah, I know that they do. I don't have a lot of deep insights into that other than it's just a really fun way to play with language to deliberately break those rules that you don't even think about. ELI: Can you say real quick what adjective ordering is? SARAH: Some people can recite the quote-unquote “correct” order of adjectives for English just cold, which I cannot do, but- ELI: Yeah, neither can I. SARAH: But consider the fact that if I said that I owned seven large shiny green fuzzy sheep, that would be a very weird thing to own, but it sounds grammatical. But if I own green fuzzy large seven shiny sheep… I had to really struggle to even say that, because it breaks every instinct in my brain. ELI: Yeah, definitely. And I think this is something where it's super far down. SARAH: It’s so far down. ELI: There's a lot of grammatical things that you can break in like language play, and you can do language play to break this, but I think people… It's so ingrained that people really don't even know it, and also it's so deeply ingrained that a lot of people wouldn't be able to examine it. Like, there are things out there that will say what the classes of adjectives in the order are, although there are a bunch of cases that break that as well. So it's not 100%. It's not every single case, but it is kind of a very strong guideline… SARAH: Yep. ELI: …that things sound very ungrammatical if you have a red big balloon and not a big red balloon. SARAH: Yeah. I will say the one I'm pretty confident on is that if you're going to name a specific number of something, that has to be first. ELI: First or very early. SARAH: Or maybe second, yeah, but like you can have seven green big stupid balloons, and I might be “Big stupid, or green big, big green…” I could go think about that, but as soon as you put seven later into the list I'm like, “Nope.” ELI: Yeah, although there is some evidence that numbers might sort of count as a different part of speech. SARAH: Ooh, I've never heard that. ELI: I have seen numbers as a Q for “quantitative” or “quantifier.” There's other definitions of “quantifier” out there as well, so… SARAH: Sure. ELI: If you're thinking, “That's not a quantifier,” like, don't get that confused, but I have seen some suggestions that number isn't an adjective, or acts as something that is slightly different than an adjective or something like that. SARAH: Sure. I could… I can definitely see… I mean, think about languages like Spanish and French where the word for “one” is also the word for “a.” Like- ELI: Yeah, exactly. SARAH: It overlaps with the determiners. Yeah. ELI: Yeah, and this would be a case where it is often used sort of in substitution for a determiner. SARAH: Right, and I mean frankly, they’re also, you're like, “Oh, yes, the seven green pigs,” and if you're like, “green seven the pigs,” no. [laughs] ELI: Right, exactly. SARAH: No, absolutely not. ELI: I mean, that's like… You don't even, you… Drawing that tree doesn't make any sense. SARAH: Right. Right. The other, the one that I do know that comes to mind is less about adjective order in like long compounding strings of adjectives, and more just a very funny mnemonic that's taught in like French class in the U.S., because a lot of French adjectives are placed after the noun that they describe, which is the opposite to how English does it, but not all of them. Adjectives having to do with beauty, age, size and goodness or quality, come before the noun, and beauty, age, size, and goodness spell BAGS. And so you'll hear French teachers talking about the BAGS adjectives, which just cracks me up. ELI: Man, they're so close. If only adjectives about beauty came after. You could say “age before beauty” [Sarah laughs] to remember it. SARAH: It's true. ELI: Instead, it's BAGS first. which I feel is like a lot ruder, you know? SARAH: [laughs] Incredible. ELI: So there you go, Tom. It definitely exists, but because it's so innate and so deep down, even though we've got, I don't know, a handful of languages hanging around in this podcast, we can't even tell you what the ordering is for English. We just know that it sounds weird if you do it in a different way. SARAH: Yep. All right. I think that brings us to our next question, which comes from Luca also via email, and the question is, “What would the phonetic description of a raspberry be?” By which I think he means [ʙ̥::]. “Labiolingual trill, perhaps? Also, it occurs to me that it would be cool if there were some kind of database of paralinguistic sounds containing things like ingressive labiodental fricative [Sarah inhales sharply through teeth] (inhaling sharply through your teeth) and explanations of what they mean in various languages.” ELI: Oh, so okay, so I know this one, actually, and I had to really resist doing some research on this because I'm going to get the names of things not quite right, but I do actually know this one. So the first thing that strikes me here is is interesting, because I don't use my tongue when I blow a raspberry. SARAH: Same. I would have gone bilabial trill, for sure. ELI: Yeah. It's… SARAH: [ʙ::] ELI: …straight up bilabial trill, which I think is straight up in… SARAH: Yes. ELI: …the IPA. SARAH: That's a thing. I forget what letter it is. ELI: I think it might be attested, so it's not a um it's not a blank white square. I think it has a symbol, yeah. SARAH: It has a letter. I think it's… It's not beta, but it's something else out there. ELI: Yeah, beta is V beta is [β]. Beta is a voiced… SARAH: Bilabial V? ELI: Voiced… Yeah, basically, exactly. It's bilabial V. SARAH: That's my next uh cover band of something. ELI: Bilabial V? That's your like, I don't know, it's your like rockstar alias. SARAH: Actually, yeah, Bilabial V is going to be the front man for my band, Dark L. All right, so, but Eli, you said that you had something here. ELI: So I'm not sure what it would be if you have your tongue involved. So there is a letter for if you are just using your lips. That's the word for that body part. There is a letter for if you're just using your lips, but if you get your tongue involved I don't think that there is an IPA symbol, but there is a set… It's a superset of IPA, the name of which, I don't remember, but it's used for disordered speech. It's used to transcribe disordered speech, so it has a whole lot more of these sort of not attested in language and not sort of one place of articulation, one manner of articulation, that kind of thing. It has things like inhaling through your teeth, and it probably has a raspberry with tongue, which is a drink I ordered at a cocktail bar last week. [Sarah laughs] It probably has all of these kinds of things, and a lot of diacritics that you can add in order to do some of this stuff. Which IPA actually also has a bunch of these kind of modifier diacritics that talk about things being fronted, or being palatalized, or being, you know… There's a bunch of them that kind of came after the like “one symbol, one place in the chart…” Actually, they probably came before, and then they were like, “Oh, yeah, actually, we should do… You know, we have this grid to fill out.” I feel like if they had come a little bit earlier, we might have a lot more like, “Here's a base symbol with a bunch of stuff put on it, one for each feature,” so there is this International disordered speech transcription alphabet (which is not the name of it, but we'll figure out what the name is and we'll put a link to it in the notes) that has a whole bunch of these sounds and symbols for them and diacritics for them, um and they are fun to pull up and make… just go down the line and make. SARAH: That's awesome. I, actually, I think Luca’s pretty good with these descriptions, like “labiolingual trill,” yeah, if you use your tongue for that, sure. ELI: Makes sense to me, yeah. SARAH: Ingressive labiodental fricative? Not sure about the lips in that one, but maybe. [Eli makes air inhaling noises] I guess it depends if you… ELI: Yeah. SARAH: …bite your lip while you do it or not. And yes, for those of you who cannot see my face, I am both biting and not biting my lip and deciding how I would make that sound. [inhaling through teeth noises] ELI: Suddenly I am totally back in phonology class sitting there, just [makes inhaling noises]. SARAH: Yep. ELI: Sorry to anyone who's listening on headphones. SARAH: [laughs] So, but I really also like this idea of the database having then a, like, what is the discourse function of the sounds in different cultures in different languages. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: Because, like… ELI: They feel so universal, and yet… SARAH: And I bet that they're not. ELI: …they probably are not. Yeah. SARAH: And also, actually when I was at your house you introduced me to the YouTube channel called Hames Joffmann. ELI: Oh, yeah. SARAH: Which is a, like, parody channel of the coffee connoisseur James Hoffman, who is a great YouTube channel by the way if you enjoy coffee or just enjoy listening to people talk, which you're listening to this podcast so you may well do. ELI: Yeah. James Hoffman has a great voice and a great way of speaking to camera. SARAH: Yeah, he's fantastic. And I had not before yesterday encountered the spin-off channel where they just clip bits and reconstruct them into completely chaotic new quote-unquote “informative” videos about six carrots or being fruity or [laughs] whatever. ELI: Yeah, go give James Hoffman a listen, especially if you care about coffee at all and then go give Hames Joffman a listen. And you got to put on captions, because the captions are great, and whoever captions it knows IPA, so you get a little bit of bonus there. SARAH: It's true, and the captions are why I thought about this, because the first video on the parody channel that I watched in the captions had in parenthesis the phrase “(is it possible to inhale disappointedly?)” And I was just like… [laughs] ELI: Which, the answer is yes. That's this. SARAH: Right, and it was like, thank you for describing that appropriately. I mean, this goes back to the the episode we had a few months ago about like how to appropriately transcribe tone of voice and all of that stuff, and I just, I want to say thank you to whoever was doing the captions on that channel, because it's beautiful, and y'all should go check it out. ELI: Yeah, this is also… I've been thinking about this a lot because I do the New York Times crossword a lot, and very often a word, a nice three-letter word that shows up a bunch, is “tsk” T-S-K, and there's a lot of ways that this gets clued depending on where it is in the week and so on, but a lot of it is like “sound of disappointment” or “chiding letters” or something like that. And not only does it have the sort of multivalence set of meanings, but it's also interesting because when is the last time that you've heard somebody actually go, “Tsk, tsk, tsk”? Like, this goes a little bit back to our “um” and “er” kind of a thing… SARAH: Yeah. [k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ] ELI: …where it's come all the way around, but like when it talks, when it gives a clue like “clicks of disappointment,” right? Like they're not talking about somebody saying, “Tisk, tisk.” They're talking about somebody going [k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ], which I have to say, there's a lot more N than T in that for me. SARAH: [k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡ǀ]. I get TSK out of that, but I also, as soon as I found out that that's what's spelled in British English as T-U-T, I was like, “Oh, Pooh Bear ain't saying ‘Tut tut, it looks like rain.’” “[k͡ǀ k͡ǀ k͡] looks like it's raining.” ELI: That's weird. SARAH: Right? But it makes so much sense. ELI: English people, what are you doing? SARAH: That makes so much more sense. ELI: Oh, my gosh. I… My mind is blown, because I, there's no… There's no T at the end of that. [Sarah laughs] British people, what are you doing? This is why we had to take your language away from you. SARAH: [laughs] But I mean, I guess there is if you're saying it over and over, like the T at the start of one syllable hits the next one… Anyway. ELI: I guess. SARAH: But yeah, but I mean, again, that's… And like, I wonder if that's a sound that's actually used in any of the African languages with clicks. It probably is. ELI: Oh, it definitely is. SARAH: But that's not a linguistic sound. That's not a phoneme of words in English. ELI: Correct. Yeah. SARAH: But it is a meaningful sound, and so I want, yeah, I want that in this hypothetical database that Luca’s described. If any of you listeners know of such a database, please hit us up. ELI: Very cool. Yeah, I actually wouldn't be surprised if there is a database or maybe a paper or something out there that has some of these transcriptions and has, probably for pretty limited set of languages, but has these meanings. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Cool. All right, let's move on to question number three. This comes from Mark Schaefer, who asks via email, “What part of speech is ‘end’ in the phrase ‘end construction’ as seen on a high highway road sign? I'd have thought that it was a noun, shorthand for ‘the end of,’ but I've noticed that in Virginia the road signs will read things like ‘enter Fairfax County’ and ‘leave Arlington County,’ which suggests that the first word is a verb, not a noun, and that raises more questions. Why is it ‘leave’ and ‘enter’ (imperatives?) rather than ‘entering’ or ‘leaving’?” SARAH: Yes. Correct question. [laughs] ELI: This is a great question. SARAH: I have silently been wondering this same thing my whole life. ELI: Do you go past ‘end construction signs’ and you, like, raise your hand like, “Yeah, solidarity. End construction”? SARAH: [laughs] No, but I should, with the amount of construction that happens in Massachusetts, but I feel like a lot of the places I've lived actually have had like entering and leaving such and such county or such and such township, but I have also definitely seen “enter Fairfax County,” “leave Arlington County” type things. ELI: Yeah, I've seen them both, for sure. SARAH: And definitely end construction and… Oh, the one that has always gotten me is “police take notice.” ELI: I have never seen that sign. SARAH: It's less a road sign. I think it's more like on shop doors, but I'm like, “Is this a statement that generally they do, or is this a request that they should? Like, is that an imperative or not?” ELI: Oh, interesting. SARAH: And there's no… It's just three words. There's absolutely no context of… It's usually like, you know, “no trespassers” or “no solicitors” or whatever. “police take notice,” and I'm like, “Are you telling them to, or descriptive?” ELI: That sounds pretty straightforwardly imperative to me, I have to say. I think it's just missing a comma. SARAH: Yeah, but similar with- ELI: You got that vocative case on that first word, and then- SARAH: See, if English had visible case endings and visible verb endings [laughs] we would have far fewer jokes to make. ELI: That's a really good point to make for this, right? Which is that this is happening because we have so much zero derivation, or so much zero inflection in this case, in English that you have things like “end construction.” This is also, by the way, this is a problem for people who translate software where there's a lot of buttons and instructions in English. I guess they're not really… Instructions are straightforwardly imperative. But like buttons that are not clearly imperative, and so they get they get translated in all kinds of ways that take a lot more circumlocution in other languages. SARAH: Yes, or and you also get buttons that are just like nouns, where it's like… ELI: “Report.” SARAH: Yeah, and it's like, is that a button to make a report, like you should translate that into the word, like, “a document,” or should you translate that into like “file a complaint” or… ELI: Right. Like the view menu, what is the view in… Is it the verb “view”? And if that's the case, like, what… SARAH: Right. I'm actually looking right now on Google Docs. Right? “File,” “Edit,” “View,” “Insert,” “Format,” are all zero inflection, zero derivation nouns and verbs, and then you get “Tools” and “Extensions,” which are definitely nouns, and then “Help,” which is back to being ambiguous. ELI: You know, and you could look at this and you could say “Tools” and “Extensions” are clearly nouns, so maybe the rest of them ought to be, but like “Insert,” the stuff that you do under “Insert” is pretty clearly- SARAH: Oh, sorry, that is definitely a verb. ELI: Yeah, it's definitely a verb. SARAH: That's definitely a verb. What am I talking about? ELI: And so you don't have consistency across these things. SARAH: Right, and then this poor translator is like, “Should I be consistent? Should I be accurate? Should I be coherent? Like, ideally all of those things, but…” ELI: And this can show up a lot in like product names and that kind of thing. So this is like a thing that is actually… I mean, look, it's not a bug of English. It's a feature of English that you get these kinds of neutral… neutral constructions of verbs. I feel pretty strongly that in “end construction” and “enter Fairfax County” that those are verbs… SARAH: Okay, but- ELI: …but- SARAH: …what are “end construction”? ELI: Yeah, so I think that it is basically a flipped version of “construction ends,” like “construction ends here,” but it is in a weird way that makes sense in like the reduced kind of English that you get on signs and in newspaper headlines and that kind of thing that you can sort of make these things that make sense, but don't… Like they're not full sentences. Right? They're not full clauses. But that's… I mean, look, that's, it's a hypothesis and to be honest, I'm not even sure how you would test what is going on here because if it was a noun you would expect “end of construction” but “enter of Fairfax County”? SARAH: No, but then also why… Yeah, like, the fact… Like it's definitely a verb in “enter” and “exit” or “leave,” but- ELI: It doesn't feel imperative, which is the only thing that it feels… Like, otherwise it has to be… It has to be like a second person. SARAH: Yeah, it's definitely you are entering or you are leaving, but also without the “you,” it's just very… It feels imperative, and it's like, “What, are you trying to kick me out?” Like… ELI: Okay, so actually, here, I'm having a brain wave. Right? I think… So English does not do well with the present tense. When we use the present tense in normal conversation, we're usually using it to indicate something that is regular or habitual. SARAH: Yep. ELI: Right? If I say, “I walk to the store,” it means like, “Every day I walk to the store to get groceries.” This is quote unquote “Standard English.” Other dialects do other things. Man, we need another thing for “Standard English.” That's a tangent. Whatever. And when we want to say that something is happening like presently we use the progressive voice, so… or progressive aspect, rather. So you say, “I am walking. I am walking to the store.” SARAH: Which is why “entering Fairfax County” or “leaving Fairfax County” sounds reasonable. ELI: Right, so I think that this may be some kind of actual present tense second person. It's not imperative, but it's like a, “You enter Fairfax County now.” “You leave Arlington County now.” And it is weird because nobody- SARAH: Pro-drop in second person is not a thing. ELI: Exactly. SARAH: Okay. ELI: Okay. Pro-drop in second person is not a thing, but neither is, you know, neither is actually using the present tense for things that are happening currently. So… But that feels closer to me to what's happening… SARAH: That makes sense. ELI: …than imperative here. SARAH: I certainly… I don't like it, but it makes more sense as a motivation than the imperative like “enter Fairfax County or else.” ELI: Yeah. I don't know why they have phrased it this way. It may just be that it was quicker to paint the sign. SARAH: Yeah, and it probably also depends on like the size of the sign and how big you want the text to be, because if you add “-ing” that's three more letter… You know, all those things. ELI: And who knows, you know, if it's Virginia like maybe that sign was originally put up in the 1600s, and like they have just copied whatever it said for the last 400 years. SARAH: That's entirely possible, yeah. All right. ELI: This is a cool question. Thank you for asking it, Mark. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I'm going to think about this question every time that I drive into a new town now. SARAH: Yeah, we'll maybe report back next episode about weird road signs we've seen. ELI: Oh, there is a… So usually, you have these road signs that are like left lane… It's “left turn in left lane only” or something like that. There's one that's around here, I think it's in Billerica, that is “left lane for left turn,” which is the opposite of how it's been, and I haven't seen it anywhere else. It strikes me as a very weird way to say that. Anyway, I will keep my eyes out for other ones, but… SARAH: Cool. I'm going to bring us back to last episode's puzzler, which was: What is three-sevenths chicken, two-thirds cat, and two-quarters goat? ELI: Okay, so I went nuts with this puzzle because here's my thought process. There's seven letters in “chicken,” so clearly it's about the letters in the word. SARAH: Okay. ELI: And it's “two-quarters goat,” not “one half goat,” so it's clearly also like letters in the word. SARAH: Okay. ELI: Right? So then I was like, “Okay, ‘cat’ and ‘goat,’ they both… Two-thirds and two-fourths, and they both have an ‘at’ but that's different than the three that I need from ‘chicken.’ ‘Chicken’ has an overlap of C with ‘cat,’ so maybe there's a C,” and I was looking for putting this together, and then I just… I, like, started, “Maybe I should list out all the possibilities,” and thankfully if you start listing out all the possibilities, the very first one is an actual word. SARAH: [laughs] That is true. And the word is? ELI: “Chicago.” SARAH: Well done. ELI: Is that the answer? SARAH: That is the answer. ELI: Yes! SARAH: By the way, for anyone who hasn't picked up on this yet, Eli, where are you from? ELI: Oh, I'm from Chicago. SARAH: Cool. ELI: And if you are from around Chicago, I'm from Evanston, although I lived in Chicago also. SARAH: I was just going to laugh real hard if you were the one person on this that didn't figure that out. ELI: I'm so glad I got it, then. Yeah. SARAH: Well done. JENNY: I just really enjoy how long it took you. Like, I got that in like one glance and I was like, “Oh, Eli's going to love this.” Like, I fully thought like, “Oh, that took me nearly like a whole 3 seconds. I bet Eli's going to get it in one.” ELI: I tried to be to escape room about it. SARAH: [laughs] All right. Well, if you also figured out “Chicago,” good job. Eli, do you have a new puzzler for this episode? ELI: I do. So this puzzler was linked to us by David Petty, so thank you very much, David. This is a puzzler from Car Talk, and that's very cool because Car Talk really is an inspiration for this podcast, and this puzzler was sent to Car Talk by Dave Etnoyer. So we're giving attribution chain all the way back. Okay. This one is a mathy one. Get out a pencil and paper. You're probably going to need it. A farmer had a 40-pound stone which he would use to weigh 40 pounds of feed. He had a balance scale, so he'd put the stone on one side and pile the other side with feed, and then when it balanced, he knew he had 40 pounds of feed. A neighbor borrowed the stone, but he had to apologize when he returned it because it had broken into four pieces. The farmer who owned the stone later told the neighbor that he had actually done him a favor. The pieces of the broken stone could now be used to weigh any item, assuming those items were in one-pound increments from 1 pound to 40. So what were the weights of the four individual stones? So if you wanted to weigh 1 pound, 6 pounds, 11 pounds, 22 pounds, 39 pounds, how would you use the stones, the thing you're weighing, and the balance beam? So basically you need four individual weights whose sum adds to 40 that you can use on a balance scale to weigh any item that weighs any number of pounds from 1 to 40. And if you want a push in the right direction, figure out how you would weigh two pounds, and that might help give you a little bit of a hint. SARAH: Okay. That one I'm not going to get in three seconds. ELI: No, I don't think so. SARAH: [laughs] ELI: But this is a… This is a cool puzzle. SARAH: Yeah. I'm going to enjoy this. ELI: This is a little bit like those puzzles where it's like, “What is the fewest number of coins that you need to pay for any number of cents from 1 to 99?” Which is another cool puzzle… It's a bonus puzzle. SARAH: We used to have to answer questions like that in like elementary school. It was like, “What's the smallest number of coins and bills to give change for X, Y, and Z?” And I was a little shit, and I said to my teacher one time that the most number of coins and bills was if you gave it in all pennies, so you'd get like 462 pennies, and she was like, “If anyone tried to give me 462 pennies in change, I would just let them keep it.” JENNY: The thing I'm actually being reminded of isn't like the making change kind of puzzle. It's the ones where it's like, “If you have weights of this, this, and this size, how do you measure an amount that isn't in any of those?” And I feel like… ELI: Or the, like, you've got a five-liter jar and a three-liter jar and like a… It's another classic puzzle. JENNY: Yeah. So that's what I'm actually getting here, and I feel like that's either going to be really helpful in working this out… SARAH: Exactly, same. JENNY: …or leading me in completely the wrong direction, and I don't know which. ELI: So I will say that I think that it will be helpful not necessarily because the solving process is the same, but because having experience with that kind of puzzle is probably just a good thing to… Your brain will work in a similar way for this. JENNY: Because I mean like the thing is that that's what the farmer is having to do now is use… Like, he knows the size of the weights. We don't, but he does, and so that's the puzzle he's solving. ELI: Right. You're solving the meta puzzle of what weights does he have to have in order to be able to do this? This is… It's also kind of like the game 24, wherein you get four different numbers between 0 and 9, and you have to use plus, minus, divide, and times to make the number 24. Starting to get a little bit further afield here. SARAH: Yeah. Elli: All right. Well, on that puzzle and the bonus puzzle right after it, I think that that's it for this episode. Thanks everybody for listening. SARAH: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Luca. Question wrangling is done by Jenny, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is Covert Affair by Kevin MacLeod. ELI: Our show is entirely listener-supported, and you can help us by visiting patreon.com/emfozzing and by telling your friends about us. Ratings on iTunes and other podcast services help as well. SARAH: Every episode we thank patrons and reviewers. Today, we want to say thanks to these awesome patrons. Timothy Persons, Andy Rusterholtz, Rachel Goodwin, Bex Fortin, and Jason Chance. We also want to thank Mia Moray and Sydney Fisher for commenting on Spotify and littleskywatcher for commenting on YouTube. And to answer their question: no, I still haven't seen Spiderverse. I'm sorry. ELI: Oh, I also haven't seen it, but it definitely is on my list. SARAH: All right. We'll report back when we get there. ELI: Find all our episodes and show notes online at linguisticsafterdark.com and on all your favorite podcast directories, and send those questions, text or audio, to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com. You can reach us on all the usual socials @lxadpodcast. SARAH: And until next time, if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are. [music] [beep] ELI: Are you good? if I do it? [makes weird noises] SARAH: Nope. [beep] JENNY: That being your alias that does bad English covers of French pop songs? [beep] ELI: Yeah, so what I have is a cat scratching at my chair. [beep] SARAH: The legal equivalent of being a pain in the ass? ELI: There's a Vine out there that is, “Road work ahead? I sure hope it does.” [beep] ELI: What… What's… What is… What is going on out there? SARAH: The… The question of all time, honestly. ELI: [laughs] [beep]