Episode 15: Mr. White Is On Blast

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." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don't drop 'r's for example).
• 37:06 In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary and that Linear A might be. How do we know this? What is cool about this? What fun things should we know?
• 1:01:20 On the topic of syntactic ambiguity I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English? How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?
• 1:27:26 The puzzler: What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in common

Covered in this episode:

• Cherries
• Swearing
• Not swearing
• Objurgation is just a really excellent word
• Either everyone has an accent or no one has an accent
• England has too many accents
• Lake Champlain is not invited
• The only accents are Boston, Chicago, or British?
• 40 actual linguists with swords
• Confusing future archaeologists
• ꙮ
• You could write English entirely in katakana or romaji, but you shouldn’t
• Spaces between words are a mirage
• The Law of Conservation of Linguistic Ambiguity
• Frugivorous time flies are much less confusing in speech than text
• There is no Platonic realm of language
• Natural Language Processing
• Finishing other people’s sentences
• Puzzles designed for high class sailors from the 1800s

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Lingthusiasm’s Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project onesies
• Swearing is becoming less taboo
• Swearing reduces pain
• How many categories of swear words there are depends on how any given study chooses to group them; three, four mostly, five, or more; in general, the list seems to be religion, sex/sexual acts, bodily functions, animals, family/mothers, death/disease, and slurs
• The list of functions of swear words that Sarah found
• Boston Brahmins
• The New England historical accent grid Sarah’s husband has mentioned is real! Eli’s guesses were backwards, however—the north–south distinctions are different vowel mergers, while the east–west distinctions are rhoticity: Northern New England accents have typically had the cot–caught merger, while southern New England accents have tended to have the father–bother merger; eastern New England is historically non-rhotic, while western New England is historically r-ful
• Eli was also wrong about the pin–pen merger; it’s one of the most well