This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Connecting with oral culture’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about oral storytelling. But first, we have a fun new thing that you can do which is that we’ve created a highly scientific – [clears throat] – personality quiz where you can answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with those responses.

Lauren: If you’re new to the podcast, and you’re trying to figure out what episode to start with, or if you’ve been with us for ages, and you wanna dive into the back catalogue, or if you’re trying to figure out which episode to recommend to a friend, our incredibly un-scientific, often-amusing questioned quiz is there for you to find the perfect episode.

Gretchen: You mean, you don’t think that which beverage someone likes corresponds to which Lingthusiasm episode they’re gonna like? I think this is very scientific.

Lauren: Absolutely unvalidated, absolutely untested, they are entirely for your amusement at bit.ly/lingthusiasmquiz.

Gretchen: Unscientific – but very fun.

Lauren: You can also find the link in the episode show notes.

Gretchen: In our most recent bonus episode, we take this quiz ourselves to find out which episode we are – although, of course, we love all of them as our children – and we also talk about the results of our 2023 listener survey.

Lauren: This one is rigorously scientifically constructed and tested. We have all the results, including whether Lingthusiasm is more kiki or bouba, and we discuss the results of important questions like, “Is the thumb a finger?” and “Is your sister’s husband’s sister still your sister-in-law?”

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to this bonus episode and way more behind-the-scenes and other fun topic bonus episodes that help us keep the show running for all of you.

[Music]

Lauren: A conversation I enjoy having is to ask two people how they met because, sometimes, you’ll get this wonderfully honed and polished version of the story that they’ve both told that may not actually be entirely the original story but is “The Story” of how they met. And sometimes, you get two completely different takes on the event, and that has its own value as well.

Gretchen: When it comes to the story of how we started this podcast, my version of the story is Lauren and I had been friends on the internet for a long time. We were finally hanging out in person for the first time at a conference, and Lauren was like, “I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast,” and I was like, “I’VE been thinking about starting a podcast,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lauren: Whereas I swear by the story that Gretchen was like, “I would love to do a podcast,” and I was like, “I have skills that I could bring to your great idea for a podcast. We should do this together.”

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Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how “oral” vs “ written” culture should perhaps be referred to as “embodied” vs “recorded” culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• The ‘Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz
• 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ by Ted Chiang
• 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press’ blog post by Devon Zeugel
• 'Orality and Literacy’ by Walter J. Ong
• Wikipedia entry for Grimms’ Fairytales
• Wikipedia entry for Milman Parry
• Wikipedia entry for Homeric Question
• Wikipedia entry for Mwindo Epic
• Encyclopedia.com entry for Mwindo
• Crash Course episode 'The Mwindo Epic’
• 'The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years’ by Ray Norris on The Conversation
• 'The Pleiades – or 7 Sisters – known around the world’ by Bruce McClure on EarthSky
• Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Semiotics
• 99% Invisible episode 'Ten Thousand Years’
• Wikipedia entry for Aesops Fables
• 'How Inuit Parents Teach Their Kinds to Control Their Anger’ by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh for NPR
• Deafness and Orality: An Electronic Conversation
• Wikipedia entry for The Tale of Genji
• Bea Wolf, a middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, by Zach Weinersmith

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

• 'Writing is a technology’
• 'Arrival of the linguists’
• How translators approach a text’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Not sure which episode to listen to first? Want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm? Or do you just want to know yourself on a deeper level? Let our perfectly calibrated, Very Serious ‘Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz guide you!

Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires! 

First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would be? We’ve made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like “You’re about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain you” into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality.  Gretchen and Lauren take the quiz on air and share our own results – please let us know what you get and if this quiz helps you remember an older episode or figure out how to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm!

Second: we have results from the Lingthusiasm survey that many of you took last year! Find out whether Lingthusiasm listeners consider the show more kiki or more bouba, and highlights from your very extensive comments on whether your sister’s husband’s sister is still your sister-in-law, whether the thumb is a finger, and more gestures that are rude in some places. A few survey results also appear in an academic paper that we wrote: “Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study” which was published in Language and Linguistics Compass (open access).

Finally, a few updates: For 2024, Gretchen is heading to the Societas Linguistica Europea conference in Helsinki in August and Lauren is heading back to full-time prof work, teaching syntax and turning gestures and Lingthusiasm research into papers. Plus: the LingComm Grants are running again for 2024.

Listen to this episode about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

—

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Climbing sonority mountain from A to P’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about phonetics and phonology

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘No such thing as the oldest language. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about old languages. But first, our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes with three of our interviews from this year.

Gretchen: We had deleted scenes from our liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod about language and gender. We talked about reflexive pronouns, multiple pronouns in fiction, and talking about people who use multiple pronoun sets.

Lauren: We also have an excerpt from our interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez about Basque because it’s famous among linguists for having ergativity.

Gretchen: We wanted to know “What do Basque people themselves think about ergativity?” It turns out, there are jokes and cartoons about it, which Itxaso was able to share with us.

Lauren: Amazing and charming.

Gretchen: Finally, we have an excerpt from my conversation with authors Ada Palmer and Jo Walton about swearing in science fiction and fantasy. This excerpt talks about acronyms both of the swear-y and non-swear-y kind.

Lauren: You can get this bonus episode as well as a whole bunch more at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Also, yeah, maybe this is a good time to remember that we have over 80 bonus episodes.

Lauren: We have bonus episodes about the time a researcher smuggled a bunny into a classroom to do linguistics on children.

Gretchen: We also have a bonus episode about “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and more phrases that contain all the letters of the alphabet – plus, what people do with phrases like this in languages that don’t have alphabets.

Lauren: We also have an entire bonus episode that’s just about the linguistics of numbers.

Gretchen: If you wish you had more lingthusiasm episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help us keep making this podcast long into the future, we really appreciate everyone who becomes a patron.

Lauren: You can find all of that at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hey, Lauren, I’ve got big news.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: Did you know I’m from the oldest family lineage in the world?

Lauren: Wow! You sound like you are part of some prestigious, ancient, royal – I can only assume royal with that level of knowledge about your family lineage.

Gretchen: Well, you know, I have some family members who are really into genealogy. I’ve been looking at some family trees. And I have come to the conclusion that my family is the oldest family in the world.

Lauren: You know, I have grandparents, and they have grandparents, and I assume they had grandparents, and I guess my family goes all the way back as well. We didn’t come out of nowhere. I might not know all their names. I don’t think we were ever rulers of any nation state as far as I’m aware. But I dunno if you are from the oldest family lineage because I think everyone is.

Gretchen: Well, this is not a mutually exclusive statement. I can be from the oldest family lineage, and you can be from the oldest family lineage, and everyone listening to this podcast can be all from the oldest family lineage in the world because we’re all descended from the earliest humans.

Lauren: This is a good point.

Gretchen: Psych!

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Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

It’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there’s an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don’t even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn’t need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it’s interesting or worthy of respect.

Read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Tracing languages back before recorded history’
• 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root’ on YouTube
• Glottolog entry for 'classical’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign’
• Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok’ (also known as Benkala Sign Language)
• True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads
• Gretchen’s thread about reading True Biz

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Bonus 83: Themself, Basque ergativity cartoons, and bad swearing ideas - Deleted scenes from Kirby Conrod, Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, and Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

We’ve interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there’s a story or two that we just don’t have space for in the main episode, so here’s a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you. First, we go back to our online liveshow with fan-favourite guest Kirby Conrod, previously seen talking about singular they and other language and gender topics, about reflexive pronouns (themself vs themselves) and people who use multiple pronouns in fiction and real life. Then we go back to Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, previously talking about Basque language revival, about how Basque people feel about the famed ergativity (hint: there are cartoons!). Finally, we go back to authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, previously talking about swearing in science fiction, fantasy, and history, about bad swearing ideas in fiction and why acronymic etymologies should be viewed with deep suspicion.

Listen to this episode of deleted scenes from recent interviews, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Kat: Yeah. Computers are super, super good at counting. They’re super, super good at finding and identifying these strings. But they’re not very good at the analysis bit. We don’t want our computer to do the analysis for us. We want to be very aware of the kind of software and the kind of programming that goes into it that give us the results. Because we as humans are fantastically sensitive to language. That’s where the human element comes in. It’s why we don’t just leave it all to the computers to just do as they will with it.

Gretchen: It’s really a lot more of a partnership between the computer showing you some things and the human making meaning out of that.

Kat: Exactly. It’s meant to be a partnership where you play to each other’s strengths. You let the computer do the bit it’s good at, and then you do the bit you’re good at.

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about language and technology, and the history of language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘If I were an irrealis episode’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about how languages express unreality. But first, thank you to everyone who celebrated our anniversary month with us.

Lauren: We always enjoy seeing what you recommend to people and thanking you for doing that. If you did that not on social media, in your own private media channels, thank you very much. You can share Lingthusiasm with anyone who needs more linguistics in their life throughout the year.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is a conversation about swearing in science fiction and fantasy with Ada Palmer and Jo Walton.

Lauren: I was so excited to hear you talk to two of our favourite authors. We’ve talked about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series before. We’ve talked about Jo Walton’s Thessaly books. Getting to hear you talk to them about swearing in fantasy and in science fiction was a whole lot of fun.

Gretchen: This was so much fun. We also have several other bonus episodes about swearing more generally as well as a massive archive of bonus episodes if you’re looking for something to do, and you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes, or you just wanna help us keep making the show. Those are there. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to our full archive of bonus episodes for yourself, or they make a great last-minute gift idea.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is real?

Gretchen: That’s a big philosophical question, Lauren, “What does it mean for something to be real?”

Lauren: Mm-hmm. But we could also answer it linguistically.

Gretchen: We could, indeed. Languages have lots of ways of talking about things that aren’t real. Sometimes, this itself can get tricky. If you want to start a fun discussion among your friends at the dinner table, try asking them things like, “Is a toy sword a real sword?”

Lauren: Hmm, I can totally see a context where you’re playing with toy swords – or maybe those big foam swords that people use in live-action role playing. In that context, it’s a real sword. You’re like, “Please don’t hit me with your sword,” or “I’m gonna practice my sword work.”

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