121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monsters
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguisticsShow Notes
Vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they're all possessed by the spirit of linguistics!
In this silly spooky episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about various kinds of linguistic monsters. We talk about how vampires would make the best historical linguists, the ghosts of borrowed words and old grammar haunting our modern vocabulary, why Your Honour can enjoy dressing up as a grammatical imposter, the common origins of witch and wizard, and more hauntings from the thrilling world of monster linguistics.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjQyMDAxMTg4Nw Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/830584421665128448/transcript-episode-121-vampires-ghosts
Announcements: In honour of the 10th anniversary of Lingthusiasm, we're launching the Linguistics Zine Challenge: make or share a linguistics zine and tell us about it by the end of November, and you could win prizes! Full details, including the submission form and details of all the fun prizes up for grabs, can be found here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/829947863269294080/announcing-the-linguistics-zine-challenge
November is also World Linguistics Day! Join your fellow language nerds around the globe on November 26th as we celebrate linguistics. Last year people from 70 cities in 34 countries participated. Tag us in your celebration posts on social media, or get extra lingthusiastic and share your favourite linguistics zine in honor of the day. More details here: https://lingcomm.org/category/world-linguistics-day/
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the most deeply irrelevant pitch emails we have somehow ended receiving after almost 10 years of podcasting....and find creative ways to make them all somehow about linguistics anyway! (Don't worry, we've redacted all the names of the actual brands so we can poke fun without feeling like we're actually getting salesy on you. And so no one sues us.)
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes, plus access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm/posts/bonus-116-is-our-170970754
For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/830584229365743616/lingthusiasm-episode-121-vampires-ghosts
More from Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics
Narratives about smaller languages often focus on the death and endangerment sides of the story. There's generally less on the social and political reasons why some languages are favoured at the expense of others, and how community members are working on reconnecting with their languages.
Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? What about the studies trying to teach bonobos and other primates to communicate through buttons or signs? What have we learned about whale communication from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth?
Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you're reading something and it just won't stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try.
Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other?