Linguistics After Dark

By: Linguistics After Dark
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  • Summary

  • Linguistics After Dark is a podcast where three linguists (and sometimes other people) answer your burning questions about language, linguistics, and whatever else you need advice about. We have three rules: any question is fair game, there's no research allowed, and if we can't answer, we have to drink. It's a little like CarTalk for language: call us if your language is making a funny noise, and we'll get to the bottom of it, with a lot of rowdy discussion and nerdy jokes along the way. At the beginning of the show, we introduce a new linguistics term, and there's even a puzzler at the end!
    Linguistics After Dark
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Episodes
  • Episode 16: SOUTHWYIGHTCKPQRFML

    Episode 16: SOUTHWYIGHTCKPQRFML
    Apr 20 2025
    Wherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now.Jump right to:6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts44:23 Question 1: Why do British people say “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there,” are they afraid of gerunds or something?57:11 Question 2: I’ve noticed distinctions between how numbers are pluralised and ordinalized not only between languages, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd’; number mod 10 = 3, use ‘rd’; else, use ‘th’”, but the pluralization rules are just “1” and “not 1”. How do these distinctions evolve?1:10:52 Question 3: What are the features of real languages that made you go “I can’t believe it’s not a conlang!”?1:28:00 The puzzler: When we quizzed a group of musical artists about their favourite Pokemon, the answers were unsurprising: Daniel Merriweather said Charizard, Eiffel 65 chose Blastoise, Coldplay said Pikachu, Spandau Ballet chose Ho-Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen said Lugia, and New Order said Suicune. But what answer did the Kaiser Chiefs give?Covered in this episode:A weird bit of the Massachusetts-Connecticut borderThe guy who founded ChicagoSarah’s Unnamed Cocktail CornerThe unfortunate timing with which printing became widespread in EnglandLong and short vowels, which should be called tense and lax vowels because that’s what people notice anywayEli does not attempt an Australian accentMerch idea: “I Guess That’s Part of My Grammar Now”The Northern Cities Vowel ShiftThe Mississippi River is not a Great LakeSarah is not doing a corpus study of everything she’s ever saidThe Norman Conquest is not when the Great Vowel Shift happenedGerunds and nominalizing or adjectival suffixesSarah out-grammars EliSit vs set and lie vs layHumans are not computersEli over-simplifies Japanese verb conjugationNoun classes sink Eli’s battleshipAnything too systematic in other languages tends to make English speakers go “sounds fake but okay”Prepositions and cases are useful because they free you from each otherThe world’s laziest conlanger invented EnglishLinks and other post-show thoughts:We touched on accents, including what Sarah referred to as “the Chicago /ɑ/,” in episode 2!Other people talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, including Wikipedia“Mississippi” does in fact mean “big river”! Specifically, it’s the French rendering of an Ojibwe name.The “near-front whatever whatever unrounded vowel” is more formally a “Near-open front unrounded vowel”. The IPA symbol is ⟨æ⟩, or “ash,” which is conveniently pronounced with the same vowel sound it means.The paper Eli mentioned about violence in linguistic example sentences was either Macaulay, Monica, and Brice, Colleen. 1994. Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. In Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., Sutton, Laurel A., and Hines, Caitlin, 449–461. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, or this one by the same authors. Also here’s a related and interesting paper he found while digging those citations up!English does still have a dual/plural distinction with some words! Examples include both/all, either/any, neither/none, between/among, former/first, and latter/lastHistory of English podcast episode about numbers!First, second, third, -th, vs one-left & two-leftAsk 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. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)
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    1 hr and 35 mins
  • Episode 15: Mr. White Is On Blast

    Episode 15: Mr. White Is On Blast
    Mar 7 2025
    Wherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people.Jump right to:6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing26:10 After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife's friends that my accent sounds "British" to them. I think that's ridiculous, but I'm wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are "British-sounding." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don't drop 'r's for example).37:06 In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary and that Linear A might be. How do we know this? What is cool about this? What fun things should we know?1:01:20 On the topic of syntactic ambiguity I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English? How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?1:27:26 The puzzler: What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in commonCovered in this episode:CherriesSwearingNot swearingObjurgation is just a really excellent wordEither everyone has an accent or no one has an accentEngland has too many accentsLake Champlain is not invitedThe only accents are Boston, Chicago, or British?40 actual linguists with swordsConfusing future archaeologistsꙮYou could write English entirely in katakana or romaji, but you shouldn’tSpaces between words are a mirageThe Law of Conservation of Linguistic AmbiguityFrugivorous time flies are much less confusing in speech than textThere is no Platonic realm of languageNatural Language ProcessingFinishing other people’s sentencesPuzzles designed for high class sailors from the 1800sLinks and other post-show thoughts:Lingthusiasm’s Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project onesiesSwearing is becoming less tabooSwearing reduces painHow many categories of swear words there are depends on how any given study chooses to group them; three, four mostly, five, or more; in general, the list seems to be religion, sex/sexual acts, bodily functions, animals, family/mothers, death/disease, and slursThe list of functions of swear words that Sarah foundBoston BrahminsThe New England historical accent grid Sarah’s husband has mentioned is real! Eli’s guesses were backwards, however—the north–south distinctions are different vowel mergers, while the east–west distinctions are rhoticity: Northern New England accents have typically had the cot–caught merger, while southern New England accents have tended to have the father–bother merger; eastern New England is historically non-rhotic, while western New England is historically r-fulEli was also wrong about the pin–pen merger; it’s one of the most well-known features of Southern American English, not at all associated with New England. (He may have been thinking of the cot–caught merger, which is most common in the northeastern US?)The Great Lakes vs Europe map overlayThe Eskimo-snow mythMargalit Fox’s book on Linear B, and also her books on sign language, Arthur Conan Doyle, and two British soldiers escaping a POW camp with the help of a Ouija boardMinoan civilization and Mycenaean GreeceMichael and Alice are indeed the correct first names! Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris, based on the research of American classicist Alice KoberThe fiber arts tumblr post Eli quotedMinute CrypticAsk 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. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca. 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 :)
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    1 hr and 30 mins
  • Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)

    Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)
    Dec 29 2024
    Wherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast! Jump right to: 2:42 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ways to Make Words!42:18 Is it possible to have a different accent in your speaking voice versus your inner monologue voice on a regular basis? when I’m tired mine just throws from one accent to another, even ones I can’t make my mouth do but my brain knows the sounds of.49:58 I would love to hear y’all talk about Unicode and Unicode normalization and the Basic Multiligual Plane from a linguistics perspective.1:14:35 I’m learning French and I’m really confused about the word “chez”. it’s supposedly a preposition, but it’s used in a billion different contexts and also indicated possession? Also when used with the word “lui” (“chez lui”) it seems like it’s not a preposition anymore?1:39:09 The puzzler: What comes next in the sequence 7, 8, 5, 5, 3, 4, 4, ? Covered in this episode: The stress patterns of American English’s only infixSarah and Eli would definitely stop in the middle of swearing to do linguistics at themselvesGoodbye to all our French listeners, if we had anyAcronyms that turn into words are okay, but they’re relatively newA Terrible Underwater Breathing ApparatusTaking two words and telling them “now kiss!”A hypothetical dog food bowl washing machine repair team sign-up listLinguistic compounds neither absorb nor generate heatPeople who turn into housesThe Unicode Consortium, which has a very evil-sounding name, sorts things into astral planes“We’re an hour-long podcast,” Eli says, roughly halfway through a one hour forty-four minute episodeʃ versus ∫ is not a minority language community problemOfficially we have no geopolitical stances, but we might be building a map of shady geopolitical linguistics-adjacent organizationsSarah has a hot take about English prepositionsUnfortunately for second-language learners, English prepositions just don’t really work like French prepositions“I feel bad all my examples are always Latin,” a Latin teacher saysEnglish works like Legos, other languages sometimes work like whole Lego cars? Links and other post-show thoughts: Merriam-Webster does include “-gate” in their online dictionary!This got cut in the edit, but we did originally acknowledge that British English has two distinct expletive infixes, the other one being “bloody.”“Parallel” and “paraplegic” do share the root “para,” meaning “beside.” “Paraplegia” is a Latinized form meaning “paralysis of the lower half of the body,” from the Greek “paraplēgia,” meaning “paralysis of one side of the body,” while “parallel” literally means “beside one another,” and comes from the Greek “parallēlos,” from “para allēlois,” meaning “beside one another.” “OK” really does derive from “Oll Korrect” and dates back all the way to the late 1830s! After that, you don’t really get acronyms being used as words until around the twentieth century.“Werewolf” = “wer” (man, male person) + “wolf”For horses to “champ” (v.) means "to bite repeatedly and impatiently," and dates back to the 1570s; apparently that evolved from the earlier meaning “to chew noisily, crunch,” which dates back to the 1520s.For not the first time and definitely not the last time either, verbing weirds language.The Danish alphabet ends with æ, ø, and å (not ä); we couldn’t find any languages that use both æ and ä (or æ and ȅ), though we did get curious enough to look. Ask us questions: Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and on Slack at The Crossings. Credits: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing was done by Luca, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are a team effort. 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 :)
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    1 hr and 44 mins
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