Linguistics After Dark
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!
Episodes
Wherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now.
Jump right to:
- 6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts
- 44:23 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 “numb...
Wherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people.
Jump right to:
- 6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing
- 26:10 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." I...
Wherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast!
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- 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 Unic...
Wherein we shove things away (with knives).
Jump right to:- 0:37 Is there a word in some language for “responding to the literal words and not the subtext of a request?
- 4:22 Response question from Spotify: With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren’t actively trying to comprehend it?
- 7:30 Language Thing of the Day: Noun ...
Wherein we are not warful.
Jump right to:
- 3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic”
- 5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis
- 23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the ...
Wherein we are not already in textbooks.
Jump right to:
- 2:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ergativity
- 25:50 Some people would say “historic moment” or “electric field”; others seem to say “historical moment” or “electrical field”. Is there any study of this difference[, and] how would you describe [it]? I usually call it whether people use nouns adjectivally, but that may not be accurate or precise. / "Magic" is a...
Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat.
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15:09 Sneaky Question 0: As my high school-aged daughter starts to look towards college, she wants to learn more about the study of linguistics, both in terms of the fundamentals and in terms of cutting edge research. Are there resources beyond your podcast that you can recommend to us?
32:18 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Phoneme databa...
Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours!
Jump right to:
- 5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity
- 34:55 Question 1: Are accents predictable? That is, there are specific accents people have based on the languages they have learned, and often these have specific-enough features to have stereotypes. But would a native speaker of Parisian French have the stereotypical “French accent” when ...
Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics.
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- 3:15 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Garden path sentences
- 25:05 How do [in/formal] registers change over time; do they stairstep as we invent new informal registers and then everything bumps up a notch and the old formal registers fall off as “staid”, or is it nonuniform?
- 37:21 Audio question! Is linguistics a science? Is it a prestigious science? Why or why not?
- 58:03 What...
Wherein we spin a shitpost question into linguistics gold.
Jump right to:
- 0:58 Mailbag; revisiting our treatment of linguistic typology
- 12:14 Language Thing of the Day: The Comparative Method
- 32:32 Question 1: Is English a creole?
- 40:34 Question 2: Are Old English and Modern English the same language?
- 51:07 Question 3: Is there any part of language that isn’t just slang and jargon that’s made it into the mainstream?
- 1:...
Wherein we find an excuse to recommend a bunch of music to you.
Jump right to:
- 2:26 Language Thing of the Day: Filler words
- 14:17 Question 1: How did we get nicknames that don't seem to make sense? Like how did "Peggy" come out of "Margaret"?
- 25:26 Question 2: Why do singers' accents almost always become less intense in their singing voices as opposed to their speaking voices?
- 37:30 Question 3: How do we ...
Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)
Jump right to:
00:04:42 Is syntax fake?
00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words
00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?
00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?
00:41:13 ...
Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)
Jump right to:
00:04:42 Is syntax fake?
00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words
00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?
00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?
00:41:13 Wha...
We've gone live for #CrossingsCon! ...two years ago. And before we fell further into our unintended hiatus, we forgot to post this episode anywhere besides YouTube. Oops!! So here is this, and a promise that we are back! Full show notes will be added here and uploaded to https://linguisticsafterdark.com when we get them written, and we have a bonus episode from 2022 ready to post later this month, plus more regular episodes finally...
Hello, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark! I'm Sarah, and this not really an episode—it's another teaser for next week's live show at CrossingsCon: Slipping Sideways. At 7pm New York time, Tuesday August 3rd, we'll be doing a live episode with real questions from real audience members! That's you!
The convention is free to attend, and throughout the rest of the week, your beloved podcast team (that's us!) will be participa...
Check out the events from #LingFest 2021 at https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/, and get hype for CrossingsCon 21: Slipping Sideways, running from August 1-8 on Gather, with more information at https://crossingscon.org/. Our show has not been assigned a time slot yet, but we'll make sure to announce it as soon as we have one!
⁌⁍ ⁌⁍ ⁌⁍
Wherein we are LIVE.
Jump right to:
- coming soon!
Covered in this episode:
...Hi everyone! We have two big Linguistics After Dark announcements for you.
The first announcement is: we're still here! We have two episodes that are in fact recorded and waiting to be edited, so look for those in the next little bit.
The second announcement is that we'll be doing a live show! We'll be taking questions from all of you while streaming on April 24th at 3pm Eastern. All of this is a part of LingFest, an online festiva...
Wherein we talk a LOT.
Jump right to:
- 1:50 The International Phonetic Alphabet
- 30:59 Corrections
- 36:08 Question 1: Computer languages: Are they languages (in a linguistic sense)? They have rules, syntax, even dialects. They can express certain complex ideas better than English, but they cannot (easily) express arbitrary ideas.
- 44:50 Question 2: What causes a compound word like ‘bluebird’ (a bird that is blue) to becom...
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 puzzl...
Wherein we make wugability happen and invoke rule three.
Jump right to:
- 3:40 The Part Where We Say The Title
- 20:22 Are clicks consonants?
- 30:22 Why do people like some words and hate others?
- 43:53 An uncharacteristically serious discussion about conversational styles and their relation or lack thereof to gender
- 65:18 The puzzler: What do the words ASSESS/BANANA/DRESSER/GRAMMAR/POTATO/REVIVE/UNEVEN...
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