Episode 16: SOUTHWYIGHTCKPQRFML

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, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd’; number mod 10 = 3, use ‘rd’; else, use ‘th’”, but the pluralization rules are just “1” and “not 1”. How do these distinctions evolve?
• 1:10:52 Question 3: What are the features of real languages that made you go “I can’t believe it’s not a conlang!”?
• 1:28:00 The puzzler: When we quizzed a group of musical artists about their favourite Pokemon, the answers were unsurprising: Daniel Merriweather said Charizard, Eiffel 65 chose Blastoise, Coldplay said Pikachu, Spandau Ballet chose Ho-Oh, Echo and the Bunnymen said Lugia, and New Order said Suicune. But what answer did the Kaiser Chiefs give?

Covered in this episode:

• A weird bit of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border
• The guy who founded Chicago
• Sarah’s Unnamed Cocktail Corner
• The unfortunate timing with which printing became widespread in England
• Long and short vowels, which should be called tense and lax vowels because that’s what people notice anyway
• Eli does not attempt an Australian accent
• Merch idea: “I Guess That’s Part of My Grammar Now”
• The Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• The Mississippi River is not a Great Lake
• Sarah is not doing a corpus study of everything she’s ever said
• The Norman Conquest is not when the Great Vowel Shift happened
• Gerunds and nominalizing or adjectival suffixes
• Sarah out-grammars Eli
• Sit vs set and lie vs lay
• Humans are not computers
• Eli over-simplifies Japanese verb conjugation
• Noun classes sink Eli’s battleship
• Anything too systematic in other languages tends to make English speakers go “sounds fake but okay”
• Prepositions and cases are useful because they free you from each other
• The world’s laziest conlanger invented English

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• We touched on accents, including what Sarah referred to as “the Chicago /ɑ/,” in episode 2!
• Other people talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, including Wikipedia
• “Mississippi” does in fact mean “big river”! Specifically, it’s the French rendering of an Ojibwe name.
• The “near-front whatever whatever unrounded vowel” is more formally a “Near-open front unrounded vowel”. The IPA symbol is ⟨æ⟩, or “ash,” which is conveniently pronounced with the same vowel sound it means.
• The paper Eli mentioned about violence in linguistic example sentences was either Macaulay, Monica, and Brice, Colleen. 1994. Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. In Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., Sutton, Laurel A., and Hines, Caitlin, 449–461. Berkeley: Berkeley