98: Origin Uncertain (with Anatoly Liberman)

Commas, em dashes, apostrophes, and interrobangs. We use them for timing, for grammar, and even for social purposes. But these little marks didn't just arise overnight. Dr Florence Hazrat fills us in on the history and meaning of these symbols. Florence is the author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World. Timestamps 00:00 Start 01:48 Intros and hot punctuation takes (5:21) On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World 06:13 Patreon plug: It's OnlyFans for your brain 11:37 News: Irish citizenship test 17:35 News: Bonobo compositionality maybe not a thing 22:36 Side note: How does disconfirmation feel? 26:26 News: Analogies increase fidelity in language transmission 36:34 News: The Internet Archive is saving news footage 39:30 Related or Not: Theme from Camden 40:14 Related or Not 1: stick 44:32 Related or Not 2: vacation, vaccine, vacuum 46:10 Related or Not 3: Spot the pair 52:57 Interview with Florence Hazrat, author of On the Mark 55:09 Getting into punctuation 56:44 Punctuation is about prosody and…? 01:02:26 Misconceptions and playfulness in punctuation 01:04:45 Who were the heavy hitters in punctuation? 01:08:36 Punctuation as a democratising force 01:11:38 Hyphens and identity 01:14:59 English puts hyphens and spaces everywhere 01:20:14 How is digital communication changing punctuation? 01:23:57 Of dashes both em and en 01:30:33 Which punctuation marks have disappeared? 01:35:48 What punctuation should we be using, but don't? 01:38:15 Does punctuation help reading comprehension? 01:46:11 Conscious punctuation 01:49:19 Word of the Week: parachute 01:54:34 Word of the Week: Lake America 01:56:09 Word of the Week: doom trolling 02:05:44 Word of the Week: Naoero 02:06:46 Comment from Scott: Soo-ey! and Shakespeare 02:08:42 The Reads Show notes Why does French have circumflex letters? https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/05/21/french-circumflex-circonflexe/ Citizenship rules to be tightened with longer residency and language test https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-citizenship-residency-changes-7154915-Sep2026/ White Australia policy | National Museum Australia https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-australia-policy Dictation test passages used in 1925 | National Archives of Australia https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/society-and-culture/migration-and-multiculturalism/dictation-test-passages-used-1925 [PDF] Aspects of Racism in the Australian Context: Issues of Definition and Action Minister for External Affairs Atlee Hunt, in a 1903 memo to his staff: "It is not desirable that [coloured] persons should be allowed to pass the test . . . and before putting it to anyone the Officer should be satisfied that he will fail. If he is considered likely to pass the test if put in English, it should be applied in some other language of which he is ignorant." https://www7.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AUJlHRights/1994/9.pdf Structure without semantics: no evidence for bonobo compositionality in Berthet et al. (2025) https://peerj.com/articles/21651/ Holding, Thomas, Paul E. Smaldino, and Charlotte O. Brand. "Analogies Evolve by Increasing Transmission Fidelity in the Communication of Complex Information." Evolutionary Human Sciences 8 (2026): e32. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2026.10063. TV News Search & Borrow | Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/tv Jethro Tull - Aqualung (Instrumental) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVcsLJ3mixQ Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox in a risky experiment. It changed Russia's history https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-22/catherine-the-great-russian-empress-inoculation-thomas-dinsdale/101405692 On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, by Florence Hazrat https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/florence-hazrat/on-the-mark/9781541606494/?lens=basic-books (

Michael Erard has been covering language in major publications for a good long while. What has he learned, and what can linguistic communication take from his work? Michael sits down for a chat with Daniel and Hedvig to talk about his new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life. Timestamps 00:00 Start 01:21 Getting the book together: Save your contracts! 04:22 Getting into lingcomm 06:38 Popular things v things you're interested in 10:48 Getting the Spidey sense 19:30 Public reactions and book tour insights 23:22 Lingcomm involves a little bit of pastoral care 26:55 How has the lingcomm landscape changed? 34:05 Persistent misunderstandings 39:48 Are we seeing a lingcomm explosion? 47:37 Are we doing any good? 57:07 Thanks and closing

How do children learn language, and why can't other animals? Why are false friends between languages always naughty? And how is public perception of language changing? Dr Karen Stollznow is taking us through a tour of psycholinguistics, taboo language, and linguistic skepticism with her new book Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language. We're also taking a look at Bitch: The Journey of a Word. Timestamps 00:00 Start 00:32 Intros: Do you use Y'ALL? 06:46 New patron shoutout 08:07 News: Strathfield Council trying to control shop signage 17:37 News: Claude introduces watermarking 25:43 News: Welsh joins the Star Wars club 29:30 Related or Not: Theme from Hugh 30:25 Related or Not 1: cute and acute 34:48 Related or Not 2: skip 42:22 Related or Not 3: tribe, tribute, & tributary 46:51 Karen Stollznow on psycholinguistics 50:36 Language and animal communication 53:37 Skepticism in linguistics 59:48 Getting a book done 01:02:09 The attraction of taboo words 01:08:18 Daddy diaries and child language acquisition 01:15:00 False friends 01:19:09 Best way to learn a language? 01:22:05 Public awareness of linguistics 01:26:58 Word of the Week: forever war 01:29:56 Word of the Week: aegyo 01:31:20 Word of the Week: meat proxy 01:33:46 Word of the Week: Cyberno de Bergerac 01:37:31 Comment: vague v ambiguous 01:39:24 Comment: Okay if languages die? 01:41:59 Comment: Sudoku pronunciation in Japanese 01:43:20 The Reads 01:56:02 Outtake: Hedvig watches an eclipse 02:00:18 Outtake: Glottle

Emoji, once regarded as some kind of frivolous nonsense, have become an important way we communicate online. But how did these little pictures come to our devices? What is the Unicode Consortium, and how did they get involved? And who is the Levitating Suit Guy? Fear not; author Keith Houston is here to give us the whole story in front of a live audience. Keith is the author of Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. Timestamps 00:00 Start 02:21 Introducing Keith Houston, author of Face With Tears of Joy 03:28 Put your top five emoji in chat 08:03 What's the state of emoji now? 10:11 How did the Unicode Consortium get involved? 22:30 The strange history of Levitating Suit Guy 27:37 The latest emoji in v17.0 30:12 Changes to some emoji 38:22 What gives an emoji staying power? 47:12 Related or Not: Theme by David 48:10 Related or Not 1: orchard and hoard 52:46 Related or Not 2: belle, bell, ball, & ball 59:01 Related or Not 3: Italian aceto (vinegar) & Spanish aceite (oil) 01:03:45 Why don't they use emoji on Reddit? 01:05:26 Are emoji now more acceptable in serious contexts? 01:08:34 Do speakers of some languages use emoji more? 01:13:00 Any languages where they just don't use emoji? 01:13:59 Does everyone call them "emoji"? 01:16:13 Sociolinguistic trends in emoji? 01:22:12 The reads: Which emoji is closest to your name? 01:33:06 Afterparty

Why don't we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random? We use sound and sign to encode information about our age, place, gender, sexuality, and so much more. Sometimes we're not even aware of how we do it. But we're fixing that on this episode with Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, editors of Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory. Timestamps 00:00 Start: Introducing Jennifer Nycz and Lauren-Hall Lew 01:57 What is sociophonetics? 03:01 What's in our own sociophonetic background? 10:10 Why is it always vowels, vowels, vowels? 13:03 Why don't we all just sound the same? 15:09 You can hallucinate accents by seeing a photo 16:00 Sound encodes gender and sexuality 20:57 Chronolects, Boomerlects, and GenX-lects 22:04 Tweens to teens: What to expect sociophonetically? 27:33 Are there reasons for sound variation and change? 34:16 Why does a community change faster than an individual? 38:37 Does media have an influence on accent? 42:17 How much are we consciously aware of? 44:52 Are some accents easier? 48:39 What are the sociophonetic hot spots? 50:54 Are American women more nasal? 52:09 Persistent misconceptions 54:49 Fight linguistic discrimination, or teach marginalised people to "pass"? 01:03:03 The sociophonetics of signed languages