This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics’. 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 linguistics in 100 different ways for our 100th episode. But first, thanks for joining us for this very special round number episode.

Gretchen: Whether this is your first or hundredth episode of Lingthusiasm, or anywhere in between, we’re delighted by your enthusiasm for linguistics.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes from interviews including talking to Jacq Jones about linguistics crafting, chatting Gavagai with Tom Scott, and a discussion about computational linguistics and language documentation with Emily Bender.

Gretchen: The support of our patrons and your enthusiasm for our bonus episodes on Patreon has been the way that we’ve funded the show for the first hundred episodes. Your continued support will help us make many more.

Lauren: For this bonus episode and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: This is our 100th episode of Lingthusiasm! We should do something special to celebrate.

Lauren: Oh, yeah! We could do an episode on the linguistics of time words like “month” or “year.”

Gretchen: I think we’ve done that. What if we do tense and how time works in grammar?

Lauren: We’ve done that, too. We could do numbers.

Gretchen: No, we’ve done numbers in a bonus episode. Besides, how are we supposed to pick just one favourite topic?

Lauren: When it comes to linguistics, maybe our favourite topic is all of them.

Gretchen: I remember when I was first learning linguistics and feeling like I was constantly having my mind expanded by so many things that I didn’t know about languages and how they fit in the world.

Lauren: Oh, yes, I love those moments where you’re just like, “Ah ha! This is cool.” We’ve pulled together 100 linguistics facts for our 100th episode!

Gretchen: Featuring some Lingthusiasm classics, things from previous episodes that either stood out to us or people on social media told us were especially memorable, and maybe some things that might show up in expanded form in future episodes.

Lauren: One thing we’ve also loved across the last 100 episodes have been the amazing guest interviews we’ve done. We’ve also excited to share some facts from previous guests on the show, which they’ve sent along to help us celebrate.

Gretchen: We’d love to hear from you, too! What’s a quick fact, example, story, other thing related to linguistics that made you go, “Whoa,” or that you like sharing with people? Whether it’s already in this episode or something we haven’t gotten to yet.

Lauren: Maybe that will help more people find the show for Episode 200!

Gretchen: Dreaming big. Okay, Fact Number 1, everyone has an accent.

Lauren: Fact 2: there’s no single, agree-upon definition of what a “word” is.

Gretchen: Or, for that matter, what a “language” is.

Lauren: These words are hard to define because they’re much more nuanced and multi-featured in context.

Gretchen: This is actually also how most words work. There’s a gap between how we come to understand the meaning of a word, which is generally through lots of different examples of a dog or a bird or a tree or a chair, and then how we try to pin that down by trying to unite some of the features of those examples for what they have in common.

Lauren: I think we’ll just make it a single fact rather than having 100 facts that say, “A hotdog is or isn’t a sandwich” or “There’s not such thing as a fish / tree / grass.”

Gretchen: Well, you can move on to some other domains, keeping things varied.

Lauren: Fact 7: writing was only invented three or four times, which always seems to me like fewer times or maybe more times than I would’ve expected.

Gretchen: Yeah, because if it was invented one time 6,000 years ago and then just expanded, you’d have this single happenstance origin story. Or if it had been invented dozens and dozens of time throughout the course of history, then, yeah, sure, writing just pops up all over the place. But this tantalising three or four times depending on whether you think that the last two were related to each other or different origins – that’s tantalising.

Lauren: Instead, they were all invented around 6,000 years ago in Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, and Ancient China.

Gretchen: We don’t know how old language is because words coming out of your mouth, signs on your hands, don’t leave fossils the way writing does, but it’s at least ten times older than writing.

Lauren: The earliest writing systems, though, didn’t use punctuation like many modern systems do. In the Western tradition it started for Greek actors to better read the scripts that they were reading.

Gretchen: One interesting character at the intersection of writing, sounds, and punctuation is the Hawaiʻian ʻokina, which was mentioned to us by former guest Tom Scott, who points out that it’s often rendered identical to an open-curved single quotation mark, or even sometimes and apostrophe, which is what people often type because that’s easier, but it’s actually a completely different character that’s sometimes like a small C. The equivalent in the Tahitian language, the ʼeta, doesn’t even get a Unicode character. This shape is linked to the Arabic character hamza, which also has this high-up-in-the-air C-ish shaped thing, and can be traced back to Phoenician, where the character aleph was used to express both a glottal stop (which is this sound that’s in “Hawaiʻi” or the sound that’s also in Arabic) and was used in Arabic to express this consonant sound (the glottal stop) and also the long vowel /a/, which is what a modern aleph, alpha, letter A all represent the sound of the vowel version rather than this hidden consonant one.

Lauren: The Lingthusiasm logo is also in the shape of a glottal stop from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Gretchen: That’s true. On the topic of Unicode characters – emoji are also in Unicode.

Lauren: Yep, and we proposed the peaking eye emoji along with our internet friend Jennifer Daniel. The next time you use that on your internet keyboard –

Gretchen: Think of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: The word “sneeze” in Middle English was actually written “fneese.” It’s just that “fn” looks a bit like that long S that’s used in old, printed English, and so people read “fn” but thought they were reading “sn,” and that’s how we get “sneeze.”

Gretchen: You told me this back, Lauren, years ago, and I am still not over “fneese.”

Lauren: “Fneese.”

Gretchen: The one that got me when I was taking intro linguistics was that the word “knee” in English used to pronounced /knɛɪ/. That’s why it’s still spelled that way.

Lauren: The word “spell” as in “to spell out the sounds of a word” and the word “spell,” “to cast a spell,” are etymologically related because writing was seen as quite mystical, and that’s how spells were created.

Gretchen: Speaking of silent spelling, one of the facts that has stood out to several people who’ve listened to this podcast is that the French circumflex accent, that’s the one that looks like a little hat, often denotes an S that became silent and then invisible, which explains a lot of doublets that were borrowed from French into English before this S became silent. You have pairs like “hôtel” and “hostel,” “forêt” and “forest,” “côte” and “coast,” “pâté” and “paste.” All of these have this silent S that has become a circumflex in French, and the S is still produced in English. “La Belle et la Bête,” “Beauty and the Beast.” “Fest” and “fiesta” and “fete” are all from that origin.

Lauren: Double borrowing also gives us “shirt” and “skirt,” which both come from the same root, but “shirt” was in Old English and underwent a sound change, and then we borrowed back in “skirt” from Old Norse which had not been through that same sound change process to refer to a different item of clothing.

Gretchen: This is also not entirely an etymology podcast, but I do want to point out that the word “calque” is a loanword from French which means “to translate each of the items of a loan literally.” So, a “skyscraper” is a “gratte-ciel,” which literally means it scrapes the sky. But “loanword” itself is a calque – this literal translation – of the German word “Lehnwort,” which means that “calque” is a loanword because it was borrowed directly from French and wasn’t translated piece-by-piece, but “loanword,” which was, is a calque.

Lauren: I don’t know if that’s confusing or satisfying. I think both. When we misanalyse a word in English and think that it actually has the shape of another word, this is known as an “eggcorn” because of an example where someone had the word “acorn” and misheard or misunderstood it as “eggcorn,” because it looks like a little egg. But the word “eggcorn” itself is a double eggcorn because it used to be, before “acorn,” “oak corn,” which makes sense; it comes from an oak tree. I’ve never understood why oak trees have seeds that aren’t called “oak seeds.” They used to be “oak corn.”

Gretchen: Because “corn” is just any kind of seed.

Lauren: Mm-hm. So, it’s a double eggcorn.

Gretchen: This is such a satisfying fact because it’s like an eggcorn is an eggcorn is an eggcorn.

Lauren: Our producer, Claire, wanted to share the fact that “orange,” the word in English, didn’t exist until the fruit turned up. The colour that we now think of as orange was just lumped in with red or yellow depending on the tone.

Gretchen: Which is why in English we say “redhead” for a person with hair that is really closer to the colour orange. We don’t say “orange-head” because people with that hair colour have existed speaking English or an ancestor of English longer than the word or colour “orange” has existed in English.

Lauren: If you ask people where on their face a frown is, Americans are much more likely to say the mouth, while Brits will say the forehead. This explains why some people find the phrase “Turn that frown upside-down” confusing because they don’t have the American mouth interpretation. Similarly, “It takes more muscles to frown” is the British “You’re moving your forehead a lot” interpretation.

Gretchen: Former guest Tiger Webb sent us, “From 1935-37, the BBC formed a ‘subcommittee for the invention of new words,’ in part to work out what to call people who watched television.”

Lauren: Wait, what do we call them?

Gretchen: Their main suggestion was “televiewer,” which did not catch on.

Lauren: Oh, that did not catch on. I guess we do call them “viewers” or “audience.”

Gretchen: Definitely not “watchers” though, which we could’ve had. “Watchers.”

Lauren: Will Marler is an animator who joined us for our discussion about the Tom Scott Language Files videos. Will has shared, “An animation-themed turn of phrase,” which is the phrase, “to bump the lamp,” which comes from the 1980s film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is live-action but with all of these animated characters. Because in one scene, one of the human characters bumps his head on a lamp, it sways, and the lighting makes it so much harder to animate, but it was such a dedicated animation team, they went to that extra effort, and that’s what “bump the lamp” means – to go that extra mile in making a creative work satisfying.

Gretchen: On the topic of furniture, one of my favourite linguistic connections is the word “canapé.”

Lauren: Okay, the small nibble hors d’oeuvre thing that you get at a fancy party. I don’t understand how that’s a lounge room etymology.

Gretchen: This is because the French word for “couch” or “sofa” is also “canapé.”

Lauren: And they’re related.

Gretchen: I had learned the word for, like, oh, you put your little cheese and meats and herbs and stuff, pâté, on a piece of bread or toast or cracker, and then you eat it, but this refers to their toppings are on a little couch of bread.

Lauren: That is cute and tasty.

Gretchen: Would you like a sofa from this tray?

Lauren: Since we’re talking about delicious things. The English word “cheese,” the Spanish word “queso,” the German word “Käse” and the Italian word “cacio” – as in cacio e pepe, one of my favourite pasta dishes – those are all cheese, and they are all related.

Gretchen: But they’ve undergone sound change. This would be less visible if they were written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Which the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA) represents all of the sounds in spoken languages that have come to the attention of linguists.

Lauren: Those linguists who decide what’s in the IPA is the International Phonetic Association. The IPA runs the IPA.

Gretchen: The IPA journal used to accept submissions entirely written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. You would read them out in the accent of the author, but the whole thing would be written in phonetic notation.

Lauren: When we look at phonetic features, the word for “nose” across the world’s languages is much more likely to have a nasal sound like a /n/ or a /m/ or a /ŋ/ or a nasal vowel like /ɑ̃/ far more frequently than you would expect by chance. It just seems like when people think of noses across human languages, they put these sounds in.

Gretchen: Also, if you have a rounded, smooth shape and a sharp, spikey shape, over 95% of people will call the rounded one “bouba” and the spikey one “kiki.”

Lauren: That’s because we have these associations between particular sounds and particular features in other areas. This is sound symbolism. It gives us this nose phenomenon. It gives us this kiki-bouba phenomenon. This sound symbolism pops up in all kinds of places. Our very first guest, Nicole Holliday, shared the fact that this kind of sound symbolism is why, in the US, there are comparatively more girls names that end in the small /i/ sound and boys sounds that end in /n/ because we have this sense of small, cute, diminutive being feminine, and that has shown up in the way that we choose baby names.

Gretchen: That takes us to 37 facts if you’re keeping track at home.

Lauren: In English, when we think about the past and the future, we think about the past being “behind” us. I have listened to the previous 99 episodes of Lingthusiasm. I think of them as behind me. When I look “forward” to the next 99 episodes, I look frontwards into the future. But that’s not the mapping that is shared by everyone. Aymara speakers in the Andean highlands and Arabic speakers in Morocco have a mapping where the past is in front and the future is behind, which makes sense because we know we have visual understanding of what those previous 99 topics were, but the next 99 topics on Lingthusiasm are a mystery. They’re outside of our field of vision.

Gretchen: We can’t see them. English actually has two major spatial representations of time. There’s the past as “behind” us, so human body orientation, and also that the past and the future are on a timeline from left to right, which is a writing system-based orientation.

Lauren: I love this because it doesn’t show up in idioms. You’re not like, “I’m putting this to the left of the timeline,” but it does show up super strongly in our gestures.

Gretchen: There are persistent gestural taboos across many different cultures around the world that say you shouldn’t point at rainbows.

Lauren: Gestures that have a conventionalised name and form, such as “thumbs up” or “finger hearts” or “head nod” are known as “emblem gestures.” These are very different to the kind of on-the-spot, spontaneous gestures that we use alongside speech. One really nifty thing about emblems is they operate over areas that are often quite a lot wider than any one language. A thumbs up had a really wide circulation across western Europe and has now become a bit of a global gesture thanks to liking buttons on the internet.

Gretchen: Italians are often famed for gesturing a lot, but they don’t actually gesture more frequently than speakers of other languages. What they do is they tend to move from the shoulder more, so the gestures appear more prominent.

Lauren: That takes us up to fact 42.

Gretchen: In the next section, we’re gonna pull out some classic linguistics example sentences and what they’re used for. If you’ve taken Ling 100 or you’ve read a lot of pop linguistics, get out your bingo cards and see how many you recognise!

Lauren: “The horse raced past the barn fell.”

Gretchen: This is an example of a sentence that leads you down a garden path of one interpretation before the word “fell” makes you reanalyse the syntax of the whole thing. “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

Lauren: “Flies” and “like” are doing completely different things in these two very similar surface-looking sentences. “I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. What he was doing in there I’ll never know.”

Gretchen: Another classic example of ambiguity from one of the Marx brothers. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Lauren: Sometimes a sentence can be grammatical even if it’s nonsensical. “Twas bryllyg, and þe slythy toves // Did gyre and gymble in þe wabe: […].”

Gretchen: This is a classic example from Lewis Carroll illustrating that nonsense words can take on a certain grammatical status, a certain meaning, because of the context of the shorter function words like “the” and “of” that are found in between.

Lauren: When we were doing research for this episode, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated that the first time a part of this poem was published in 1955 Lewis Carroll called it a “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” and the THs are actually thorns, which is an older English writing convention.

Gretchen: Oh my god, that’s such a deep cut.

Lauren: There is a single Binij Gunwok word, which is a language from the north end of Australia, and it translates into English as “I cooked the wrong meat for them again.”

Gretchen: That’s such a great example of languages that stick a whole bunch of parts together to combine and make one long word. The example I learned was from Turkish, and it literally translates as “Are you one of those who we could not Europeanise?”

Lauren: I love that we both have different examples for the same phenomenon. “Who would know aught of art, must learn, act, and then take his ease.”

Gretchen: This is a sentence that contains all of the vowels in at least some varieties of English. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Lauren: This is a sentence that contains all of the written characters that we use in written English.

Gretchen: The quick brown fox one is very classic. There’re also some more obscure examples of pangrams in English like “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” from Lingthusiasm favourite book Ella Minnow Pea.

Lauren: And “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow,” which can only ever be read with that intonation.

Gretchen: But slightly shorter and far more intimidating.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: The “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese by the Chinese Linguist Yuen Ren Chao in the 1930s as a linguistic demonstration because every word is pronounced “shi” when written in modern standard Chinese with only the tones differing.

Lauren: I think that, like, if you don’t understand why that’s cool without an explanation, I can’t help you.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah.

Lauren: “Tear a thin sheet from the yellow pad.”

Gretchen: Ah, one of the charmingly anodyne sentences of the Harvard Sentences, a list of 720 sentences that (combined) contain all of the different sound patterns of English. You can use them in speech synthesis.

Lauren: We read all 720 of them in a bonus ASMR episode.

Gretchen: We sure did, so you can fall asleep to that if you like. “It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad.”

Lauren: This “salad-salad” is an example of contrastive focus reduplication in English – sometimes known as “salad-salad reduplication” because this example is from a famous paper called the “salad-salad paper.” “She spread the bread with socks.”

Gretchen: If you play people this sentence while they’re wearing a brain scanner, you can see a little predictable spike in the brain processing activity 400 milliseconds after “socks,” which is very unexpected in this context.

Lauren: People who do these kind of unexpected sentences always use “socks,” and I have no idea why.

Gretchen: “More people have been to Russia than I have.”

Lauren: This is an example of the comparative illusion that sounds like a perfectly fine sentence until you actually sit there and try and figure out what it means for more people to have been to Russia than you who is one person. “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” How many “buffalos” are there in this sentence? I don’t know.

Gretchen: Eight, I believe. This is an archetypal sentence that is often quoted as an example of a perfectly cromulent sentence that can contain eight of the same word.

Lauren: It’s always been a tongue twister for me.

Gretchen: But only if you have the verb “buffalo,” which means “to bully,” then it means something like “Bison (or the plural of “buffalos”) from Buffalo, New York, whom Bison from Buffalo bully, in turn bully bison from Buffalo.” As I have never heard of this verb “to buffalo” until I encountered this sentence, I have to say, it’s always rung a bit short for me. But here’s a satisfying one from German. “Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.”

Lauren: And the translation of this is…?

Gretchen: “When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies.” Because the word for “to fly” and the insect “fly” happen to be identical in German.

Lauren: Very satisfying. Some of our favourite literary terms.

Gretchen: Ooo, I have to go for “zeugma.”

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Some examples: “Miss Bolo […] went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.”

Lauren: So, “in a flood of tears” and “in a sedan-chair.”

Gretchen: Yes.

Lauren: But we can put both of those together. Even though they’re not semantically parallel, they’re syntactically parallel.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or as Alanis Morissette said, “You held your breath and the door for me.”

Lauren: Two very different kinds of holding, and yet, it kind of works.

Gretchen: It has this sort of charmingly whimsical thing that makes you stop and think for a second, which I enjoy.

Lauren: Also, a shoutout to “chiasmus,” so called because it makes a little X as you shuffle things around two parallel sentences. So, “Champagne for my real friends; real pain for my sham friends.”

Gretchen: Named after the Greek letter “chi.” I has always confused me how to pronounce this word. We looked it up, and it’s /kɑɪæzməs/.

Lauren: Also, absolutely sounds like a European metal band.

Gretchen: You can go listen to Chiasmus’s latest tour. Now we’re at 62!

Lauren: It’s time for some language families.

Gretchen: William Jones, who was the guy who introduced the use of the Greek letter “pi” to stand for the thing about the circle. He was the father of the guy who discovered Proto-Indo-European, a.k.a., PIE, also named William Jones. You can celebrate both William Joneses on Pi Day every year, March 14th.

Lauren: We’ll celebrate the PI(E) Guys on Pi Day.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Proto-Indo-European is what we have reconstructed back, but in the current Indo-European family, according to Glottolog, there are currently 586 languages. In contrast, the Austronesian family, which spreads across the Pacific and Indian Ocean region, has 1,274 languages.

Gretchen: In Papua New Guinea, which is the world’s most densely linguistically populated place, there are 840 languages.

Lauren: Glottolog has 8,604 languages in its current inventory. We know it’s hard to pin down what is and isn’t a language, but I love that that number has grown from about 6,000 when I started reading about linguistics.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it might’ve been 6,500 when I started. Our notion of what we consider to be a language or whether two related varieties are different languages or dialects of each other continues to grow and evolve. These numbers are artificially precise. They do give us a sense of the spread of where a lot of languages are, but they should always be taken with a grain of salt. I like to think of languages and language families as being like the stars in a very dark night sky. There are about 5,000 stars visible, in total, from the Earth to the naked eye without telescopes and extra tools like that. You can see about half of them from any one hemisphere. If you look up at an incredibly dark night sky, and you’re seeing the Milky Way, it feels like so many. And there’s way more languages than that.

Lauren: Glottolog lists 227 signed languages, a number that has been rapidly growing as we document the world’s diversity of signed languages.

Gretchen: I’m sure that’s definitely still an undercount. There’re a lot of places where the signed language and the spoken language don’t necessarily track onto each other. One of my favourite examples of which is that American Sign Language is more closely related to French Sign Language than it is to British Sign Language because the first American School for the Deaf was founded by a deaf Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, who brought his language over from France and taught it to a lot of deaf students.

Lauren: Former guest Nicole Holliday shares a really cool fact about how there are parallels between a spoken and signed language for a particular group. African American English and Black ASL share prosodic features. The ASL used by Black Americans uses a larger signing space which corresponds to the greater pitch variation in African American English.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm team member Martha Tsutsui-Billins reminds us that Protactile sign languages are a thing. This is sign language in the touch modality used by DeafBlind people to communicate directly with each other without having an interpreter or something as an intermediary. You can sign directly on someone else’s body.

Lauren: I know there’s an ASL community version in North America, and there’s an Auslan tactile sign as well.

Gretchen: Neat.

Lauren: That brings us up to Fact 74.

Gretchen: We’ve discussed a whole bunch of ways that language happens in your brain and the variation that exists between people. If you take the prompt – think of your house. What colour is it? What materials is it made out of? This can be variation in how much mental imagery you have. Some people have very detailed, almost photographic mental images. Some people have sketchier mental image, and some people have zero mental images at all. They thought people were speaking metaphorically about mental images when some people are speaking literally. This last group is known as “aphantasia,” but there’s a whole phantasia continuum.

Lauren: There’s also a lot of variation in how you think to yourself. Some people have an inner voice. Sometimes, that talks to them a bit. Sometimes, it talks to them a lot. Other people have detailed imagery – they’re high phantasia. Other people have writing or schematic ways of thinking to themselves. This all falls under a larger variation in inner voice.

Gretchen: There’s also variation in terms of thinking about one sense in terms of another, so numbers having colour, or music making shapes – which is known as “synaesthesia.” This is a bit different from the sound symbolism, where a lot of people associate bouba with the round, blobby object, because synaesthesia tends to be a bit more arbitrary but consistent within the individual. If a particular letter is red, then it’s always red. It doesn’t necessarily mean something that’s inherent to the redness of the letter. I am also a synaesthete.

Lauren: Bonus extra fact. The thing I love about all these different ways of understanding how people process thought and language is that it’s a really great reminder that language is just one way of expressing our thoughts, that these systems operate with a lot of variation across people, and they operate somewhat independently. We can have thoughts without language, whether that’s because you’re non-verbal or because you’re expressing your thoughts through other media like art or dance.

Gretchen: Right. You may be able to express thoughts via art or something else. Similarly, you can have language that doesn’t actually express internal thoughts behind it. This is why GenAI (or “generated artificial intelligence”) is often called a “stochastic parrot” because the parrot also doesn’t have thoughts that it’s conveying when it says, “Polly want a cracker.” It’s just repeating this phrase that it’s heard other people use.

Lauren: On the topic of linguistic birds, can I use this segue into Fact 80?

Gretchen: [Laughs] All right, I’ll allow it.

Lauren: Okay. In the International Space Station, to minimise miscommunication, if an English speaker is speaking to a Russian cosmonaut, they will speak in Russian, and if a cosmonaut is speaking to one of the English-speaking team members, they will speak in English. People use their non-default, non-native language to make sure everyone is best placed to communicate. In our first episode of Lingthusiasm, we hypothesised that if the International Space Station was to become an isolated and self-managing system, there’s a very good chance you’d get a really great English-Russian contact language situation that would be, in fact, a “space pigeon” [wordplay on “space pidgin”].

Gretchen: And that, if there were babies born in space – we haven’t quite achieved that technology yet, but just for the sake of the hypothesis – that they would transform this contact language variety, this space pidgin, into a space creole, and make it fully-fledged and grammaticalised.

Lauren: I still have my Lingthusiasm drink bottle with a little space pigeon floating around with its helmet in space. Delights me still.

Gretchen: Let’s keep going with babies.

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: This might be handy in space. Babies can drink and breathe at the same time, which we were reminded of by previous guest, Jacq Jones.

Lauren: Thanks, Jacq.

Gretchen: Adults cannot do this. If you want to try, please watch out for choking.

Lauren: This doesn’t work because we have a flap in our throats, known as the epiglottis, which allows us to switch from the breathing tube to the eating tube.

Gretchen: Both adults and babies have this flap, but because the voice box is higher up in babies, they can close the flap to make two totally different tubes, whereas adults have a point where these two tubes have to merge. The baby thing – the higher voice box – is also what chimps still have. This makes it harder for chimps to produce the complex vocal sounds that humans have an easier time with. The Australopithecus proto-hominoid, Lucy, had the same thing as the chimps, this very high voice box. Neanderthals had a voice box that’s midway between Lucy and modern humans for larynx position. This is one of the things that enabled human spoken language to become as complex as it is because we can produce so many different sounds.

Lauren: Also, we still have no idea if the earliest human language was spoken or signed.

Gretchen: We certainly had anatomically modern hands before we had anatomically modern voice boxes. This could very well have been the case. The human voice box lowers around age 3-to-6 months, which is also when chocking risks increase. So, great.

Lauren: I feel like a lot of very stressed parents are very sensitive to that developmental milestone. I do love, though, that adults treat infant vocalisations as though they are turns in the conversation. In cultures where there’s a practice of high interaction with babies, they’ll introduce them to cultural practices around turn taking really, really early.

Gretchen: Babies also babble with the accent of languages they’re exposed to. French babies babble in a more French way. English babies babble in a more English way. Children of Deaf adults who are signed to will babble on the hands as well.

Lauren: Within language development, there is the one-word stage and the two-word stage, but in between them, there is a one-word and one-gesture stage, and this stage heavily predicts how and when the two-word stage will unfold.

Gretchen: Language is multimodal. Even when babies are in utero – and if they’re hearing anything, it sounds like things are under water – they can tell different people and languages apart before they’re born.

Lauren: When I was pregnant, I went around telling people that I was “temporarily plural.”

Gretchen: Yeah, I made you a onesie that said, “Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project,” which both your kids have now worn.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: It’s also in the Lingthusiasm store for if your linguist friend has a kid.

Lauren: I mean, I love that linguists will absolutely put their kids in these onesies, but I also love that if you ask linguists what their favourite word is, you’re very likely to have at least one in a group say their favourite word is “um.” In fact, we got two related “um” facts from previous guests.

Gretchen: Bethany Gardner said, “If someone uses ‘um’ or ‘like’ before a word, it’s probably a sign that they are talking about something that’s harder to describe.”

Lauren: And Daniel from Because Language shared a completely different paper that says when you say “um” before a word, people will remember it better.

Gretchen: “Um” helps with both production and comprehension. Also from the Because Language podcast, Hedvig said when we take turns in conversation, the gap between two people is less than the time we know it takes to plan what you’re going to say. So, people have already started thinking about they wanna say before the other person has finished.

Lauren: This happens at such quick time intervals, even in these quick intervals, sometimes the reason a conversation can feel unbalanced is because different people have different conversational styles that differ by fractions and fractions of seconds. Some people prefer really high overlap, and some people prefer to have more distinct space between speakers while they’re taking turns.

Gretchen: The was a favourite fact of the reviewer who put Lingthusiasm in the New York Times a little while ago – not that we’re bragging.

Lauren: As a related fact, we’re both high overlap speakers, and we’re very grateful to our editorial team for smoothing that over.

Gretchen: We’re now at 96.

Lauren: There’re two common strategies for innovative gender neutral language in common use. The first is expanding the domain of applicability for one feature that’s already gender neutral, so Spanish and Portuguese with the E, as in “todes” from “estudiantes.” Or you can put all the endings on the same word, like German “-innen” or French “celleux.”

Gretchen: As a third option, sometimes people will invent a completely different pronoun to use. These are referred to as “neopronouns.” “Neo” means “new,” but there are attested neopronouns from over 150 years ago. “Xe” – X-E – as a gender neutral English pronoun dates back to at least 1864.

Lauren: We are at 98. We have two facts that are 100-themed to finish out our show.

Gretchen: The first one from former guest Randall Munroe is, “My favourite fact is that the German word ‘hundred’ and the Roman word ‘cent’ both come from the same older word that began with a K sound, which underwent different sound shifts in different language branches. The Russian and Farsi words for ‘hundred’ – ‘sto’ and ‘sad’ – are related to ‘cent’ and ‘hundred’ as well. They’re all the same word from different sides of an even older pronunciation shift in Indo-European. This was my first exposure to the idea that such different-sounding words could be connected in deep time – in a way that we could actually figure out.”

Lauren: Fact 100, there is a word, “long hundred,” which means “one hundred and twenty.”

Gretchen: This number is also known as the “great hundred” or “twelfty” because it used to be the default 100 in Germanic languages. Then when the Latinate “hundred,” which is five twenties – five score – instead six twenties or six score, was introduced and became more popular they were referred to for a while as the “long hundred” and the “short hundred.” The “long thousand” was ten long hundreds, so 1,200. You might wonder, “Well, how did they refer to the short hundred if 100 was five twenties?” The answer to this is they had “tenty” and “eleventy.”

Lauren: Oh, how novel.

Gretchen: A lot of people these days associate “eleventy” with Lord of the Rings, but this is because J. R. R. Tolkien was the kind of scholar who was like, “Yeah, I’m totally gonna use the long hundred system within Lord of the Rings.”

Lauren: “I’m bringing the long hundred back.” If we try really hard to make the long hundred happen, we can do this all again in 20 episodes time.

Gretchen: All right, everybody, let’s see if we can do it in the next 20 months! Often on Lingthusiasm we like to do a really deep dive. One or two of these fun facts could be expanded into a whole episode, but there is something fun about occasionally doing this whistlestop tour.

Lauren: It’s been so fun to share just some of the many reasons that we’re enthusiastic about linguistics in this episode. Because it is our 100th episode, we’d really love it if you help us share the enthusiasm about linguistics.

Gretchen: We hope that even more people can reach the linguistics enthusiasm. We’d love it if you give this episode a share with a linguistics fact or story or other interesting thing that you like, whether it’s from this episode (you can pick a favourite), or just an extra bonus thing that we didn’t get to since there are so many reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics. We’re looking forward to the next 100 with you.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, and a little Gavagai rabbit, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts, buttons that say, “Ask Me About Linguistics,” and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help the show keep running way past 100 episodes, ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include deleted scenes from recent interviews, a linguistics travelogue, and a crossover interview where the team from Let’s Learn Everything ask Gretchen all of their linguistics questions. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – especially this month in honour of our 100th episode.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer 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.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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