Episode 19: Voiced Glottal Stop 2k25

Wherein we are pro-winter until approximately February 15.

Jump right to:

• 4:38 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Allophones
• 26:50 Question 1: Why do we say “And you will be… (this person)?” when confirming identity? Why is it future tense? This cannot possibly be English. This cannot exist. Am I just wrong or is this one of those weird linguistic things?
• 34:59 Question 2: If you had to remove one sound from the human phonemic inventory, which one would it be and why?
• 42:05 Question 3: So, English’s pronoun “they” can vary in meaning quite a lot, for example in phrases like: “well [you know] what they say….” In this case, the meaning of ‘they’ is kind of like ‘the general public.’ An extra pronoun in the language for this could be slightly useful, as confusion could occur between ‘they’ meaning ‘that one specific group of people’ [versus] ‘the general public.’ My question is; whether languages exist where something like this extra pronoun actually exists.
• 1:02:36 The puzzler: A couple claimed it was the anniversary of their wedding in order to receive a discount at a restaurant. The woman said, “Our wedding was on a beautiful Sunday morning, with birds chirping and flowers all in bloom, twenty-eight years ago today.” The waiter responded that the wedding sounded lovely, but they did not qualify for the discount. How did he know they were lying?

Covered in this episode:

• [d] vs. [t] vs. [ɾ], bases, paces, pesos, and besos
• English “R” is really weird and none of us know why we do it
• Allophones in complementary distribution are like Batman and Bruce Wayne
• Eli is not the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
• Sarah plans a very strange dinner party
• The future (tense) of English is vast and unknowable (and collapsing with the subjunctive even where it didn’t used to)
• One of those weird linguistic things turns out to actually be three of those weird linguistic things
• Sarah and Eli briefly forget [ɦ] is a sound that exists
• Babies deserve to keep labiodental tap [ⱱ] but bilabial trill [ʙ] could go
• We have not turned a shitpost into something useful
• “Chat” is not a fourth-person pronoun
• Official LxAD stance: The correct thing to do upon seeing a pile of snow is “jump in it”
• Specific versus generic third-person plural pronouns
• Clusivity
• Singular, dual, paucal, and plural
• Eli’s keyboard could have prevented him from guessing last time’s puzzler

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Congrats to Don Bravo in Marshfield who now have a year-round liquor license actually!
• We promised to include an allophones worksheet in the show notes, so here’s two from a Ling 101 class at UNC Chapel Hill!
• Voiced ⟨h⟩ is [ɦ], the voiced glottal fricative
• The IPA chart: note that here, as is sometimes the case, the “light gray” and “dark gray” boxes Sarah and Eli refer to are instead blank/empty & gray, respectively.
• The sounds Eli suggested collapsing into one are [x] (voiceless velar fricative), [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative), and [ħ] (voiceless pharyngeal fricative). Alternately, we could remove the pharyngeals entirely.
• Periodic Lingthusiasm shout-out!
• See more at linguisticsafterdark.com

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Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. 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 :)