Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?
How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)
(She’s right, we fudged a little! The -ie in “doggie” only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?)
Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your language skills to use in which situation.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn language in Singapore with Woon Fei Ting, who’s a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We talk about how the rich multilingual environment in Singapore led Fei Ting and the lab to do language documentation while trying to figure out how kids learn to talk in Singapore, creating a dictionary of Red Dot Baby Talk (named after how Singapore looks like a red dot on the world map). We also talk about Singlish more generally, some words that Gretchen has learned on her trip, doing research with kids and parents via Zoom, and the role of a lab manager and other lab members in doing linguistic research.
Announcements: Our liveshow is in just a few days!! Gretchen will be chatting to Dr Kirby Conrod (from our episode about the grammar of singular they) about language and gender on February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! You can find out what time that is for you here.
This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the text chat. This episode will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: ask us questions about gender or tell us about your favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include them in the show!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what we’ve been up to in 2022 and what’s coming up for 2023. We also talk about our favourite linguistics paper that we read in 2022 slash possibly ever: okay, yes, academic papers don’t typically do this, but this paper has spoilers, so we STRONGLY recommend reading it yourself here before listening to this episode, or check out the sample paragraph on the Patreon post.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, and get access to this weekends liveshow!
Lingthusiasm Episode 55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity
The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, technically known as rhotics, including English r, French r, Spanish r and rr, and more. We also talk about how the presence or absence of R is a feature that distinguishes certain accents: think Canadian vs Australian English, northern vs southern varieties of English in the UK and US, and northern vs southern varieties of Mandarin.
Announcements:
We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events for the week of April 24 to May 2. See the LingFest website for details on other events.
The week before LingFest is LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication. LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive, virtual conference that brings together lingcommers from a variety of levels and backgrounds, including linguists communicating with public audiences and communicators with a “beat” related to language. Find out more about LingComm21.
This month’s bonus episode is about talking to babies and small children! We talk about how the way babies are addressed differs across cultures, how people sometimes alter their speech subtly for babies even when they think they don’t, and how infant-directed speech differs from similar genres like pet-directed speech. Join us on Patreon to get access to this, as well as 49 other bonus episodes - as well as a ticket for you and a friend to our upcoming liveshow!
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
In short, Putonghua reigned supreme until the virus outbreak. However, the status of other dialects and languages changed almost immediately with the disease.
After the lockdown of Wuhan in Hubei Province, the center of the virus outbreak, the institutions which used to promote Putonghua to eradicate poverty have come to shift their strategy by developing language resources for the learning of non-standard Mandarin varieties. For instance, a bilingual audio-brochure in Putonghua and Hubei Mandarin was produced for medical staff and volunteers recruited to answer emergency calls and inquiries. The brochure provides model conversation between doctors and patients in both varieties. The necessity of speaking and understanding Hubei Mandarin has become more prominent as an increasing number of medical workers and volunteers from other parts of China have headed for Hubei: by February 20, over 60,000 medical workers from 29 provinces of China have been sent to Hubei to fight together with the local medical staff and infected patients.
The shifting linguistic focus from Putonghua to other Chinese varieties not only helps to improve medical care and save lives but also helps to build solidarity with the over 59 million Hubei residents hardest hit by the epidemic. The attempt to improve communication by speaking non-standard Chinese has raised the awareness of Chinese language policy makers regarding the importance of conducting more applied research on language and health communication in real-world contexts.
Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time
How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about when some languages obligatorily encode time into their grammar. We look at how linguists go about determining whether a language has tense at all, and if so, how many tenses it has, from two tenses (like English past and non-past), to three tenses (past, present, and future), to further tenses, like remote past and on-the-same-day.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
A great introduction to L, R, and related sounds in English, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Cantonese from Vox:
One of the most persistent and well-studied foreign-accent features is a lack of L/R contrast among native Japanese speakers learning English. It’s so well-known that American soldiers in World War II were reportedly told to use code words like “lallapalooza” to distinguish Japanese spies from Chinese allies.
But American movies and TV shows have applied this linguistic stereotype to Korean and Chinese characters too, like Kim Jong Il in Team America: World Police, or Chinese restaurant employees singing “fa ra ra ra ra” in A Christmas Story. The accent feature has been a tool for racist portrayals of Asians in media, where white or Asian-American actors were directed to play Asian characters with a heavy, often inaccurate accent.
But a foreign accent is just a phonological hybrid of two languages, and by listening carefully, you can learn some interesting things about linguistics. In this episode of Vox Observatory, we take a look at Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages and how each affects the pronunciation of Ls and Rs for English-language learners.
A NYT obituary for Zhou Youguang, the inventor of the Pinyin system for Romanizing Chinese, provides a nice summary of the history of the writing system. Excerpt:
Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.
Adopted by China in 1958, Pinyin was designed not to replace the tens of thousands of traditional characters with which Chinese is written, but as an orthographic pry bar to afford passage into the labyrinthine world of those characters.
Since then, Pinyin (the name can be translated as “spelled sounds”) has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.
It is to Pinyin that we owe now-ubiquitous spellings like Beijing, which supplanted the earlier Peking; Chongqing, which replaced Chungking; Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse-tung; and thousands of others. The system was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization in 1982 and by the United Nations in 1986. […]
In attempting to devise an alphabetic system with which to transliterate Chinese, Mr. Zhou was continuing an orthographic tradition that went back at least to the 16th century.
Traditional Chinese writing, conceived more than two thousand years ago, is a logographic system, in which each word of the language is represented by a separate character. To the reader, each character conveys mainly semantic, rather than phonetic, information.
This fact gives Chinese writing an inherent advantage: It can be used as a common system with which to write the country’s many mutually unintelligible dialects. Thus, speakers of dialects as divergent as Mandarin and Cantonese can communicate with one another in writing, with each character encoding the same meaning — “house,” “blue,” “think,” and so on — regardless of its pronunciation in any one dialect.
But by the same token, such a system carries a great disadvantage: Because the characters disclose little phonetic information, it is not possible, without prior knowledge, to look at a Chinese word and know how to pronounce it.
For readers, there is also the immense onus of needing to master thousands upon thousands of discrete characters to attain even basic literacy: Compare the mere two dozen or so characters that users of alphabets have to learn.
“Pinyin is not to replace Chinese characters; it is a help to Chinese characters,” Mr. Zhou explained in the interview with The Guardian. “Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear.”
As a result, illiteracy remained rampant throughout China well into the 20th century — affecting, by some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the population. It was also inordinately hard for foreigners to learn to read the language.
Other Romanization systems had been tried before, beginning with one developed in the late 1500s by Jesuit missionaries from Europe. Until the advent of Pinyin, the most prevalent system was Wade-Giles, the work of two British diplomats in the late 19th century.
But the Wade-Giles system, linguists have long agreed, is unwieldy and inaccurate. It employs a cumbersome set of numbered superscripts to indicate Chinese tones — the meaningful variations in pitch that distinguish many words in the language. Nor does it reflect Mandarin pronunciation especially faithfully.
At the start, Mr. Zhou and his committee confronted a set of foundational questions: Should Pinyin employ the Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic or a purpose-built one? How should it indicate the tones of the language?
Though China’s close alliance with the Soviet Union made Cyrillic seductive, the committee ultimately settled on Roman because of its worldwide prevalence. Simple diacritical marks, including acute and grave accents, were used to represent tones.
So I work with a language company coordinating interpreters for hospitals and schools and jazz right? And one of the best parts is when a requestor butchers the language beyond recognition.
Me: Hello! How can I help you?
Requestor: Hi, yeah I need a Mandanese interpreter?
Me:…would that be Mandarin or Cantonese? (you can’t have it both ways, homeskillet. PICK A DIALECT.)
Requestor: Hi, yeah I need a Loation (Lo-AY-shun) interpreter?
Me:…Laotian? (Lay-OCEAN) (Every time, I swear. EVERY TIME.)
Requestor: Hi, yeah I need a a Mandarian interpreter?
Me:…a Mandarin interpreter?
Requestor: Hi, yeah I need a Textile interpreter?
Me:…a Tactile interpreter? (bro I’m about to interpret this weave over here)
Requestor: Hi, yeah I need an Asian interpreter?
Me:…What? (why)
I once had a journalist ask me for commentary about “the American language.”
Look, we can talk about the English language, American varieties of English, languages indigenous to the American continent, or languages currently spoken in America. All of these are interesting topics. But I’m afraid I cannot let someone write an article about “the American language.”
English-speaking parents tend to use vague, one-size-fits-all verbs as they emphasize nouns: cars, trucks, buses, bicycles and scooters all simply “go.” Mandarin speakers do the opposite: they use catchall nouns such as “vehicle” but describe action—driving, riding, sitting on, pushing—with very specific verbs. “As a native English speaker, my first instinct when a baby points is to label,” Tardif says. Her babysitter, on the other hand, was a native Mandarin speaker, whose instinct was to name the action she thought the child was trying to achieve.
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