Episode 14: SNUBA (Snail Tuba)

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 infix
• Sarah and Eli would definitely stop in the middle of swearing to do linguistics at themselves
• Goodbye to all our French listeners, if we had any
• Acronyms that turn into words are okay, but they’re relatively new
• A Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus
• Taking two words and telling them “now kiss!”
• A hypothetical dog food bowl washing machine repair team sign-up list
• Linguistic compounds neither absorb nor generate heat
• People who turn into houses
• The 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 episode
• ʃ versus ∫ is not a minority language community problem
• Officially we have no geopolitical stances, but we might be building a map of shady geopolitical linguistics-adjacent organizations
• Sarah has a hot take about English prepositions
• Unfortunately 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 says
• English 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.

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