This week Tom Scott joins us to chat about linguistics, the scientific study of language. If you learn anything from this episode, let it be that a conversation with someone that likes linguistics is always going to go off the rails with as many tangents as possible…
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References & Further Reading
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/science-linguistics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLXNzDUH58
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/undergraduate/what-is-linguistics/#:~:text=Linguistics%20is%20the%20scientific%20study,from%20other%20animal%20communication%20systems%3F
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-27346-1
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/science-linguistics
https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-20th-century
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=is+linguistics+a+science&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=linguistics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLXNzDUH58
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
https://www.ipachart.com/
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/undergraduate/what-is-linguistics/#:~:text=Linguistics%20is%20the%20scientific%20study,from%20other%20animal%20communication%20systems%3F
https://linguistics.uchicago.edu/undergraduate/why-study-linguistics
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2022/02/13/language-is-the-next-great-frontier-in-ai/
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/why-major-linguistics#:~:text=Linguistics%20is%20a%20major%20that,%2C%20and%20meaning%20(semantics).
https://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk/branches-of-linguistics/phonetics/#:~:text=Phonetics%20is%20a%20branch%20of,teeth%2C%20to%20produce%20particular%20sounds.
https://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk/branches-of-linguistics/phonology/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/language/Historical-attitudes-toward-language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4544681/#:~:text=Hockett%20presented%20a%20list%20of,seven%20properties%20he%20identified%20previously.&text=To%20these%20he%20added%20vocal,feedback%2C%20semanticity%2C%20and%20discreteness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6232916/
https://www.thoughtco.com/syntax-grammar-1692182#:~:text=In%20linguistics%2C%20%22syntax%22%20refers,syntactic%20properties%20of%20a%20language.
https://www.thoughtco.com/semantics-linguistics-1692080
https://www.britannica.com/science/pragmatics
https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/features/schwa/
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Which & how many languages do you speak?
my least favourite song is the english translation of 99 luftballons because the entire meaning of the song is completely lost. the english version even looses half of the storyline
This was really interesting. I love languages. In school I learned English, Spanish and Latin, but forget so much of it^^ I also learned a little bit Japanese, which is so different and interesting in comparison to the roman languages.
curiosity about "yeah, no" and "no, yeah". We have the same stuff on Portuguese hehehe
I love linguistics!
I think this is my favourite episode to date – may or may not have sparked a desire to study linguistics.
I speak three languages, having grown up in Latvia with a Swedish-raised father & American-raised mother. ADHD runs in the family, so communication has always been a doozy (in both the positive and negative sense), but living in England for a few years has put an entirely new spin on things. The lengths to which some, particularly the older generation, go to avoid putting almost anything in direct terms is the most difficult 'language' I've attempted to learn, and there are social settings that leave me biting my nails about what messages I might have unknowingly sent if my naturally straightforward approach wasn't sufficiently reined in.
Do any of you have experience presenting – to use a phrase I picked up while binging The Crown – an 'excess of personality' in the company of individuals you don't wish to offend? How do you bridge such stark differences when it comes to the understanding of a successful interaction?
English and learning French mostly
I speak 3! English, Danish, and Faroese!
I have taken German classes but remember none of it 😅
You have successfully click baited me by using Tom Scott.
Also English sucks, it's a bunch of languages in a trenchcoat basically
28:25 thats brilliant
Does anyone w/ an american accent struggle w/ the word "multidisciplinary"? I'm American & have no issues pronouncing it, but when I attempt to pronounce the word in a British accent it's a lot more difficult to stress the right part of the word.
This episode has perfect timing! Just started a language degree and I had to learn the IPA consonants this week. Been watching Tom's video series on linguistics and it's really motivating
Linguistics has been one of the most fascinating things to me every since I read Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life.” I’d love for you to do a part two episode one day!
I speak Mandarin and English fluently, Hokkien and Malay conversationally.
As a speaker of two Chinese languages, I would maintain that the Chinese "dialects" are separate language. The only thing uniting these languages is the shared writing system and some similar vocab, which I would argue is no different from the similarities between English and French, for example.
the fact that every show is only subbed in nordic countries absolutely blew my mind! like wtf?!
one!
Loved this! I'm an ESOL teacher because I find myself contemplating applied linguistics almost daily. So much fun 🙂 and shout out to the Lingthusiasm Podcast!
Oh! And! For any English nerds out there, you should check out the History of English podcast by Kevin Stroud.
"let it go" in hungarian is translated to "let there be snow"
when we were learning english in school we did actually learn the specific order of adjectives
I was bilingual as a child as my mum is half German
And I’m just picking it back up now via Duolingo. I’ve forgotten almost everything and it’s v hard but I’m making progress.
I would say "It's not untrue that …" aloud, but I put a huge amount of stress on the 'un'
I came here for Tom Scott, was super taken aback as soon as I recognised Luke bc I used to watch his stuff and haven't seen him in ages. Had to tab back in when I heard his voice bc I recognised it so strongly and it threw me for an absolute loop
Auslan and BSL are related, but ASL is drastically different as it is in the French Sign Language family.
Here in West Virginia, Cell, Sail, and Sell are all pronounced the same
I'm bilingual, I can speak English and Spanish.
One field of linguistics that I think is also fascinating is historical linguistics, or the study of the history of languages. You end up finding up things you thought were unrelated are actually related, and that things you thought were related are actually unrelated and just sound or look similar by sheer coincidence. You also learn to debunk folk etymologies.
For example, I heard Lindybeige (well, I think it was him, I might be misremembering) say once that it makes more sense to write "defence" with a C, because it comes from "fence". It is actually the other way around : "fence" comes from "defence", and "defence" comes from Old French "defense", itself from Latin "defensa". So, in reality, it would actually make more sense, from an etymological point of view, to write both "defense" and "fense" with an S.
I speak English and just a little Japanese! 少し日本語に話します！
I lived in Glasgow for a year and compared to Wales, Scotland basically just speaks English (obviously with varying dialects).
But in North Wales Welsh is many people’s first language and welsh is on all signage.
I only saw Scots on the inside of the subway trains or in small text at each train station on platforms
Basically nowhere else. I also never heard anyone speaking it.
Interestingly with the test of identifying the colour ignoring the written name, bilingual people tend to be significantly better at this, believed to be due to the fact that both languages actively compete with one another in the brain all the time which supplies ample practice for ignoring irrelevant information due to juggling two seperate language systems simultaneously