Episode 12: Dead Language Power

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 words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”.
• 35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent?
• 51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is bullshit." Discuss.
• 1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat?

Covered in this episode:

• If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem
• “Collectivity” is not a word people know
• Etymology is not destiny
• English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes
• Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults
• Sooner or later, M shows up
• Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit)
• Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing bullshit
• Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Lexical gaps in English
• Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too
• Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness
• Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit!
• IPA pulmonic consonant charts
• This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds
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