Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana

Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours!

Jump right to:

• 5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity
• 34:55 Question 1: Are accents predictable? That is, there are specific accents people have based on the languages they have learned, and often these have specific-enough features to have stereotypes. But would a native speaker of Parisian French have the stereotypical “French accent” when speaking English even if they had grown up in a cultural vacuum or learned English from a book? Further, if this is predictable like this, is it sufficient to predict the accent a native speaker of Quenya or Lojban might have when they were learning English the first time?
• 51:37 Question 2: Have you noticed people using [ts] instead of [t] at the beginning of words, and why might that happen?
• 1:04:34 Question 3: How do songs in tonal languages work? How do the speakers distinguish between the melody and the tone?
• 1:13:01 The puzzler: Change one letter each in the names of two rival NFL teams to get synonyms for the name of a third NFL team

Covered in this episode:

• Transitivity vs. intransitivity and ergative vs. accusative verbs
• Why you can give a mouse a cookie but you cannot sleep a sandwich
• Standard phonological mistakes
• A rat whose name is not Cheese-teeth
• Political allegiances of the Noldor
• Too vs. tsoo and Tuesday vs. Tyuesday vs. Chewsday
• English is a tonal language
• “Trash” and “ashtray” are (we hope) not the names of beverages

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Pseudo-reflexive verbs in Romance languages (i.e. “i bathe myself” etc)?
• In re hypothetical tri-transitive verbs: Wikipedia suggests “bet” and “trade”, citing a paper we couldn’t actually access, but you can try to dig it up if you want to read more. Not everyone agrees, though
• “Complex transitive verb” can mean different things and not everyone agrees on that, either
• Unaccusative vs. unergative intransitive verbs in English (depending on which argument is missing)
• Valency), aka the real word for the marble slots we talked about
• Mary Spender’s youtube channel
• Chris Punsalan and his grandma of Chooseday fame (Grandma has passed away since we recorded this episode, but there is an extensive backlog of her being very sweet if that's your thing)
• ⟨Triangle⟩ spelled as ⟨chriego⟩ because kids are very good at phonetics actually
• Okay, in retrospect, it should have been more obvious that Chinese media using hardcoded subtitles more often than English media relates as much or more to the HUGE number of topolects in their media market than difficulty hearing tones (even in music)
• Old/Classical/Archaic Chinese is now suspected to be atonal, but Middle/Ancient Chinese aka Qieyun did have tones and overlaps the written record of Chinese music, including the establishment of Yayue and Chinese opera which does appear to make use of tones. (This is extremely complex and if you’re interested, you should do a lot more digging yourself! Our post-production research is still limited ^^;)

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. Edited by Luca, captioned by our new intern Harrison, and show notes by Sarah and Jenny. 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 :)