Linguistics After Dark

Wherein we play language games.
Jump right to:
12:47 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Language games
37:07 Question 1: Could y’all talk about how your understanding of how to pronounce the word can affect what you think the spelling, etymology, or meaning is? Examples that comes to mind is “su-burban” vs “sub-urban,” “a napron” vs “an apron,” “a stigmatism” vs “an astigmatism,” “acomma” vs “a comma,” etc. though I think some of those examples are actually different phenomena from each other. I think one is juncture loss? Or rebracketing?
58:28 Question 2: If you had a chance to influence the evolution of language, what feature/words would you add a) because you like them and b) to troll people?
1:21:43 The puzzler: How can a cube be cut so that the cross-section is a hexagon?
Covered in this episode:
Latin: the Ghost of Spanish Past
The Ides of March
Not philosophers discussing cavemen building walls
Pig Latin and Ubbi dubbi vs cant, argot, Polari, Cockney rhyming slang…
Argobus, argopodes
Language cannot be contained
Verlan
Juncture loss, rebracketing, and reanalysis in general
Rocketcopters
Eli shares a hot take about French he heard years ago (from an actual linguist)
LOLcat, dogespeak, and uwuspeak
ȝ
Evidentiality
Clusivity
Identity attestation in first- and second-person pronouns
Titles aren’t pronouns but they’re sort of next door
Doctorates should not be relevant to playing frisbee
Links and other post-show thoughts:
WaniKani
Yes, being in Italy during Easter during the Jubilee was wild; being in the Vatican while the Pope laid in state was even wilder. (No, Sarah and her students did not get to see him, because they did not have 3+ hours to stand in line.)
“Ghosts speak Latin” was supposedly a common belief in Elizabethan England, although Jenny couldn’t actually find a source more direct/reliable than footnotes in various copies of Hamlet (I.i.49) so better citation possibly needed?
Ubbi dubbi, Polari, Tutnese, and Verlan. We couldn’t find an actual concrete origin of the name “Pig Latin,” though it does seem to have been called “Hog Latin” and to have begun as a version of “Dog Latin” (which seems to have referred to parody Latin in general).
The Pig Latin puzzler was episode 8!
Sarah and Eli say that the N in ‘a whole nother’ is always there. This is false: around twenty minutes earlier, Sarah herself said “a whole other,” which in retrospect she can confirm is absolutely influenced by Al’s point that knowing how the spelling works can change your pronunciation.
Several examples of Verlan from one of the channels Sarah likes.
“Helicopter” came up in episode 14.
“Electric” does derive from Greek “ēlektron,” but not directly! It was borrowed into Latin as “electrum,” and then “electricus” in the 1600s by physicist William Gilbert. “Electric” and “electricity” were both first used in English in the 1640s by Sir Thomas Browne, who seems to have coined the latter. “Electrick” is a known early alternate spelling, so that definitely always would have been pronounced with a [k], but we couldn’t find evidence in either direction for whether “electricity” has always had an [s]. Also, Jenny has had the Schoolhouse Rock song stuck in her head for three days.
The conlang Eli was thinking of is the Aramteskan language from P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent series, and was developed by Lauren Gawne, of Lingthusiasm fame!
Dual, trial, paucal (not “trual,” whoops!)
The NativLang video that discusses Chinese timekeeping words.
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, question wrangling and show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Wherein we are pro-winter until approximately February 15.
Jump right to:
4:38 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Allophones
26:50 Question 1: Why do we say “And you will be… (this person)?” when confirming identity? Why is it future tense? This cannot possibly be English. This cannot exist. Am I just wrong or is this one of those weird linguistic things?
34:59 Question 2: If you had to remove one sound from the human phonemic inventory, which one would it be and why?
42:05 Question 3: So, English’s pronoun “they” can vary in meaning quite a lot, for example in phrases like: “well [you know] what they say….” In this case, the meaning of ‘they’ is kind of like ‘the general public.’ An extra pronoun in the language for this could be slightly useful, as confusion could occur between ‘they’ meaning ‘that one specific group of people’ [versus] ‘the general public.’ My question is; whether languages exist where something like this extra pronoun actually exists.
1:02:36 The puzzler: A couple claimed it was the anniversary of their wedding in order to receive a discount at a restaurant. The woman said, “Our wedding was on a beautiful Sunday morning, with birds chirping and flowers all in bloom, twenty-eight years ago today.” The waiter responded that the wedding sounded lovely, but they did not qualify for the discount. How did he know they were lying?
Covered in this episode:
[d] vs. [t] vs. [ɾ], bases, paces, pesos, and besos
English “R” is really weird and none of us know why we do it
Allophones in complementary distribution are like Batman and Bruce Wayne
Eli is not the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Sarah plans a very strange dinner party
The future (tense) of English is vast and unknowable (and collapsing with the subjunctive even where it didn’t used to)
One of those weird linguistic things turns out to actually be three of those weird linguistic things
Sarah and Eli briefly forget [ɦ] is a sound that exists
Babies deserve to keep labiodental tap [ⱱ] but bilabial trill [ʙ] could go
We have not turned a shitpost into something useful
“Chat” is not a fourth-person pronoun
Official LxAD stance: The correct thing to do upon seeing a pile of snow is “jump in it”
Specific versus generic third-person plural pronouns
Clusivity
Singular, dual, paucal, and plural
Eli’s keyboard could have prevented him from guessing last time’s puzzler
Links and other post-show thoughts:
Congrats to Don Bravo in Marshfield who now have a year-round liquor license actually!
We promised to include an allophones worksheet in the show notes, so here’s two from a Ling 101 class at UNC Chapel Hill!
Voiced ⟨h⟩ is [ɦ], the voiced glottal fricative
The IPA chart: note that here, as is sometimes the case, the “light gray” and “dark gray” boxes Sarah and Eli refer to are instead blank/empty & gray, respectively.
The sounds Eli suggested collapsing into one are [x] (voiceless velar fricative), [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative), and [ħ] (voiceless pharyngeal fricative). Alternately, we could remove the pharyngeals entirely.
Periodic Lingthusiasm shout-out!
See more at linguisticsafterdark.com
Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Wherein we are not professionals.
Jump right to:
4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale
21:38 Question 1: Why do we use 'on' to refer to spiders being 'on' ceilings? To me the spiders aren't on top of the ceiling, they're under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to 'on' in English, so I'd like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition.
38:20 Question 2: Morphologically and grammatically Japanese and te reo Māori behave very similarly: tons of particles all over the place, compounding as a major word source, not many affixes, little to no inflection, reduplication to convey emphasis, and very restrictive phonotactics. I see a pattern: Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai disallow large consonant clusters and are highly analytic. On the other end of the spectrum there are Georgian (agglutinative hell), and (fusional) Czech, which both have unpronounceable consonant clusters. Is this correlation real or am I imagining things? [If it's real,] what is the reason for this convergent evolution?
56:05 Question 3: Would someone wanting to be a linguist need a degree? Or is a degree just a sort of certification? I’ve always wondered this because I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics but I didn’t pursue it in university, instead opting for Translation (which I guess could use linguistics but you know what I mean). Would you guys, actual linguists, consider someone who studies the subject by themselves and engages in conversations of linguistics to be a linguist?
1:13:09 Last episode’s puzzler’s answer
1:19:09 The puzzler: Complete the sequence. C, F, T, ?, Y, H, N, J, I, ?
Covered in this episode:
Teeth
Myriads, millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, and trilliards
Don’t be Canada
Indefinite hyperbolic numerals, like “ten thousand,” “seventy,” “seventy times seven,” “a billion,” “a bajillion,” or “hrair”
Hanging on to the roof of a bus
Horses do not have walls
Are French speakers dans or en a mechsuit? We want to know
Things Sarah gets wrong on Duolingo
From a spider’s perspective, the enemy’s gate is up
Does anyone do things by purpose?
The time on a clock is a place, a month or a year is a container, and a day is a surface
Why do English speakers do “strength” to ourselves
The “s” on a present-tense English verb is spicy and weird
Japanese says you can have little a consonant, as a treat
There are more than seven languages in the world
Syllabic consonants
Being a linguist is not a real-world career
L’Academie Francais are disqualified from linguistics forever
Eli proposes a screenplay
It’s teeth that are the problem
Links and other post-show thoughts:
We accidentally skipped drinks chat, but Eli had water and Sarah had a weird but tasty raspberry-lemonade wine cooler thing
The secret dozenal system in English and the long hundred
Short scale vs long scale, h/t Bex
“Thousand” isn’t actually that weird; it’s just a Germanic word, instead of being derived from Latin. Here’s a map of words for “thousand” in European languages color-coded by etymology
Per Etymonline: “billiards” the game played on as rectangular table with ivory balls and wooden sticks, 1590s, from French billiard, originally the word for the wooden cue stick, a diminutive of Old French bille "stick of wood," from Medieval Latin billia "tree, trunk," which is possibly from Gaulish (compare Irish bile "tree trunk"); totally unrelated to French billiard
See more on our website

Ask us questions:
Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Credits:
Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie and Abby, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Linguistics After Dark will be live next month! Come see us at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th–17th. More details at crossingscon.org
transcript:
ELI: Hey, hey, Sarah, what do you call it when a corvid recites a poem by Coleridge?
SARAH: …what?
ELI: A crow sings Khan.
SARAH: But why? that doesn't make any sens—ohhh, a CrossingsCon, because we're doing a live show there!
ELI: Yeah! And, and, hey, Sarah, when are the Ides of August?
SARAH: Well, CrossingsCon is the 15th through the 17th. The Ides of August are actually on the 13th.
ELI: Wait, no no no, ides are on the 15th, you know, the ides of march, stabby stabby, the whole—
SARAH: No, only sometimes, because the Romans did this weird thing where they counted the days in a month—
ELI: No no no, this isn't Romans After Dark, this is Linguistics After Dark, come see us live at CrossingsCon, August 15th through 17th, more details at crossingscon.org!

Wherein we learn how to learn how to read.
Jump right to:4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula
16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t)
1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)”
Covered in this episode:The best holiday dinner foods
Existential verbs
Copulas
The science of reading
“Vibes-based reading” is probably not a fair term but also maybe not an inaccurate one
The phonological processor
FLOSZ rule
Scribal O
“Ghoti” is not pronounced “fish”
40% and 90% are different numbers
The difference between being able to read and being able to read
Statistically speaking, most people are not Sarah
The four-part processing system model
The orthographic processor
Developmentally inappropriate fonts for kids
Developmentally inappropriate fonts for Sarah on Duolingo
Eli learns he’s a white girl from Ohio
Sight-reading is not the same as whole-word reading
The semantic processor
Associating dogs and blueberries, dogs and bogs, or dogs and dishes
The context processor
Most people will not learn to read on their own
If you’re good at something, don’t necessarily teach it
For once on this podcast, an actual definitive answer! (Which some people might disagree with.)
There is no “too late” in life to learn to read
Where to learn to read, as an adult
The nerdiest part of the episode
The portion of our audience which comprises sailors from the 1800s
Links and other post-show thoughts:Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by George Lakoff
True Biz, by Sara Nović
We may not actually have talked about scalar implicature by name on the pod? Sarah talked about it in a linguistics presentation at CrossingsCon, which we think may be what Eli and Sarah were (mis)remembering when they said we’d covered it early on. Potential future Language Thing of the Day…?
Sixty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Basic level in 2022, while thirty-seven percent of fourth-grade students performed below the NAEP Basic level. Only thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022.
Not for the first time and not for the last: chriego and sgr
Also not the for the first time, Canadian syllabics
What The Font?
The three-cueing system was developed by Ken Goodman, who almost certainly had undiagnosed dyslexia, and has been described as functionally teaching children to be dyslexic, rather than teaching anyone (with or without dyslexia) to actually read.
Mapping where words are housed in the brain
Jumbled words don’t actually work quite like that
The style of writing Latin that Sarah refers to is called scripto continua
The four-part processor diagram Kristen describes
LETRS course with Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman
UFLI is the University of Florida Literacy Institute
The six syllable types in English orthography
Ask us questions:Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Credits:Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.
And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)