Linguistics After Dark

Wherein we frequently get off topic and get angry at Les Immortels.

Jump right to:

• 1:08 Things Sarah Is Mad About Once She Did the Show Notes
• 3:39 Linguistic Thing of the Day: Borrowing!
• 8:00 L’Académie Française is annoying
• 22:27 Are there languages other than Irish that have the concept of helping vowels?
• 33:51 How do linguistic rules emerge?
• 51:36 Canadian raising! What actually is it?
• 1:09:00 The puzzler: Why are these birds flying in from different directions?

Covered in this episode:

• A very hardcore church named All Souls Parish
• Calques vs loanwords
• Sarah mispronouncing the Spanish word for “avocado”
• Epenthetic schwa and syllabic consonants
• Should linguists get swords?
• L’Académie Française does not know how language works
• Anglish
• Languages are not mathematical constructs
• How phonetic inventories and stress patterns differ between languages
• Lenition isn’t lazy, it’s economical!
• Pidgins are not pigeons (though neither has syntax)
• Linguistic redundancy
• Adopting children and/or giving them piggyback rides
• Vowels are like a shopping cart, or maybe a trombone
• Whitney Houston
• Emordnilaps

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Louisiana sort of has the Mary/marry/merry merger
• ⟨scooch⟩ predates ⟨skosh⟩ and is not related! Nor is either related to ⟨skoosh⟩.
• All about Anglish! And all about physics in Anglish: Uncleftish Beholding
• Epenthesis, and more about its presence in Ireland and the UK.
• The “Castilian lisp” is indeed not out of deference to a king, nor is it actually a lisp, but that folk-explanation apparently dates back to the late 1300s.
• ⟨hƿæt⟩/⟨hwæt⟩ gives us ⟨what⟩ and also some Discourse
• Native Listening (the book where Sarah read about that Spanish/English/Dutch word-stress study)
• Some online things related to that
• Lenition of consonants follows reliable patterns.
• Eli said a quote wrong! It should have been "Eventually, you sell enough fish together, you decide to have a kid." -Tom Purnell, Eli’s sociolinguistics professor
• Gretchen McC on the basic English vowel cart
• Canadian raising diagrams and audio examples
• We’re grateful that you could bear with us

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @LxADpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)