Episode 11: The Axiom of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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 noun, its adjective form is "magical," and its adverb form is "magically." "Tragic," on the other hand, is an adjective, its noun form is "tragedy," and its adverb form is "tragically." Why aren't "tragic" and "magic" the same part of speech? should we make them the same part of speech? if so, do we drop "tragedy" and make "tragic" the noun and re-introduce "tragical" as an adjective? or do we invent the word "magedy" and get rid of "magical"?
• 39:47 How to learn a relatively obscure language without going to the country it is spoken in? How does it compare to learning a dead language?
• 52:56 If I'm trapped in the distant past with anatomically modern humans armed only with Ryan North's book "How To Invent Nearly Everything", then I plan to follow his recommendation to 'invent' writing (after spoken language, of course). What features should I keep in mind when devising an alphabet for my ancient new friends, and what might the result look like?
• 1:08:22 The puzzler: The name of what widely spoken language consists of four consecutive US state postal abbreviations?

Covered in this episode:

• Agents, patients, doers, subjects, objects, and other words that don’t necessarily refer to the topic of a sentence
• Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything
• Sports commentators’ ongoing collective attempt to make nonce ergativity happen
• Walkers and standees?
• Agent-patient fluidity and hierarchies in languages like Chickasaw and Dyirbal
• [Regina George voice] Stop trying to make “magedy” happen
• If something ends in -al, it’s already in textbooks
• Linguists don’t believe in adverbs, because they’re the same thing as adjectives (except when they’re not, but really they are)
• Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything (again)
• How to study a language depends on why you want to know it in the first place
• Latin students can’t ask for help if their car breaks down
• The Latin alphabet is really great for Latin! Because it’s the Latin alphabet, which was invented for Latin!
• Sarah strongly encourages writing vowels and strong discourages writing boustrophedon

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Eli highly recommends “Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists” by Thomas E. Payne
• The Chickasaw people (and thus their language) are traditionally from northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, western Tennessee, and southwestern Kentucky. Dyirbal is spoken in northern Queensland in Australia.
• Eli also mentioned “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by George Lakoff
• The etymology of “magic”
• “Verbing weirds language”: Calvin & Hobbes, January 25, 1993
• XKCD #356: Nerdsniping
• Lang-8 no longer takes new users but they have an app called HiNative
• Say Something In has courses in Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Dutch, and Spanish, for native Englis