69: What we can, must, and should say about modals
Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be...
16 Jun 202242min
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happ...
20 Mai 202240min
67: What it means for a language to be official
The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in...
22 Apr 202237min
66: Word order, we love
Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their...
18 Mar 202233min
65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting ...
17 Feb 202237min
64: Making speech visible with spectrograms
If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it...
20 Jan 202240min
63: Where to get your English etymologies
When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists t...
16 Des 202134min
62: Cool things about scales and implicature
We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these...
18 Nov 202137min
