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
In which LxAD show hosts Eli and Sarah get drunk and answer questions about language, live and unedited. That’s it. That’s the panel.
Jump right to:
0:00 Introduction
2:25 Baby Language Acquisition Update
5:01 Questions
5:40 Question 1
6:17 Question 2
7:24 Question 3: What the heck is Linear B?
20:36 Question 4: What do you do with a drunken linguist?
22:00 Question 5: How did you get into linguis...
Wherein we play language games.
Jump right to:
- 12:47 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Language games
- 37:07 Question 1: Could y’all talk about how your understanding of how to pronounce the word can affect what you think the spelling, etymology, or meaning is? Examples that comes to mind is “su-burban” vs “sub-urban,” “a napron” vs “an apron,” “a stigmatism” vs “a...
Wherein we are pro-winter until approximately February 15.
Jump right to:
- 4:38 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Allophones
- 26:50 Question 1: Why do we say “And you will be… (this person)?” when confirming identity? Why is it future tense? This cannot possibly be English. This cannot exist. Am I just wrong or is this one of those weird linguistic things?
- 34:59 Question 2: If you had to remove one sound from the human...
Wherein we are not professionals.
Jump right to:
- 4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale
- 21:38 Question 1: Why do we use 'on' to refer to spiders being 'on' ceilings? To me the spiders aren't on top of the ceiling, they're under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to 'on' in English, so I'd like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition.
- 38:20 Question ...
Linguistics After Dark will be live next month! Come see us at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th–17th. More details at crossingscon.org
transcript:
ELI: Hey, hey, Sarah, what do you call it when a corvid recites a poem by Coleridge?
SARAH: &...
Wherein we learn how to learn how to read.
Jump right to:- 4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula
- 16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t)
- 1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)”
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...
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!
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’a...
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 th...
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 difference into ...
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 ...
Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat.
Jump right to:
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 databases ...
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&...
Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics.
Jump right to:
- 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? ...
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 main...
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 change the meaning of a sent...
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 What...
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 What is...
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...
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