46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have ...
17 Juli 202037min
45: Tracing languages back before recorded history
Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before his...
19 Juni 202038min
44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
The words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common -- they all contain the same sound, even though they each spell it with a different letter. This sound is known as schwa,...
22 Maj 202032min
43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were thei...
17 Apr 202042min
42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question
Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languag...
19 Mars 202039min
41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time
How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also requi...
20 Feb 202035min
40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane
If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the computer may eventually learn how to do these things for itself: to gene...
17 Jan 202044min
39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
Why do some conversations seems to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation? In ...
19 Dec 201933min
