Lingthusiasm Episode 112: When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)

Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis of what they’ve said, there are certain steps that make it easier for that analysis to happen, or to be understood or reproduced by others later.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how language becomes linguistic data. We talk about making recordings of language, transcribing real-life or recorded language, annotating recordings or transcriptions, archiving all those materials for future generations, restoring archival materials from decaying formats, and presenting this information in useful ways when writing up an analysis. Along the way, we touch on playing 100+ year old songs from cracked wax cylinders, the multi-line glossing format used so readers can understand examples in a language they’re not already fluent in, analyzing spontaneous conversation using tapes from the Watergate Scandal, recognizing everyone who’s contributed (including your own intuitions!), and Lauren’s role on a big committee of linguists and archivists formalizing principles for data citation in linguistics.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

If you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to or you just want to help us keep making this show, we have over a hundred bonus episodes available for you to listen to on Patreon.

Not sure about committing to a monthly subscription? You can now sign up for a free trial and start listening to bonus episodes for free right away.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Adam Aleksic about tiktok and how different online platforms give rise to different kinds of communication styles. Second, a return to our interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez for a bit about Spanish internet slang, -och, and why “McCulloch” looks like a perfect name for an author of a book about internet linguistics. Finally, deleted scenes from our advice episode, in which we reveal some Lingthusiasm lore about pronouncing “Melbourne” and imitating each other’s accents and answer questions about linguistics degrees and switching languages with people..

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Leipzig Glossing Rules from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics
• Kittens & Linguistic Diversity Facebook page
• Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT)
• Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)
• CABank English Jefferson Watergate Corpus
• Jefferson Transcription System – A guide to the symbols
• Wikipedia entry for ‘List of -gate scandals and controversies’
• The Austin Principles
• T-Recs - ‘Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics’ by H. Andreassen, A. Berez-Kroeker, L. Collister, P. Conzett, C. Cox, K. De Smedt, and B. McDonnell
• ’Berkeley Cylinders’ post on Old Phono
• 'Media Stability Ratings’ post on Museum of Obsolete Media blog
• 'The Tape Restorator’ post on Endangered Languages and Cultures
• DELAMAN Award
• Pāṇini Award from the Association for Linguistic Typology
• 'New publication: Situating Linguistics in the Social Science Data Movement. Chapter in the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management’ post on Superlinguo
• 'Linguistic Data Interest Group: Five years of improving data citation practices in linguistics’ post on Superlinguo
• 'New Commentary Paper: Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo [open access]’ post on Superlinguo
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
• 'Tiny Turtle Follows Cat On a Skateboard | Cuddle Buddies’ on Cuddle Buddies YouTube page

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL). It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the data people use to do linguistics. But first, if you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to, or you just wanna help us keep making the show, we have over 100 bonus episodes available for you to listen to on Patreon. If you’re not sure about committing to a monthly subscription, you can now sign up for a free trial and start listening to bonus episodes for free right away.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was a whole collection of extra, great material from interviews we’ve done over the past year that was too good not to share. You can hear more from Adam Aleksic about how the differences between platforms shape how slang evolves on them, and from Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez about Spanish internet memes.

Lauren: We have some bonus linguistics advice questions that we answer in this episode as well. For this and over 100 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, what is linguistic data? I’m speaking a language right now. Does that mean I’m linguistic data right now?

Lauren: Absolutely. In fact, we have used recordings of this show with Bethany Gardner to make vowel plots of the two of us. Extremely yes.

Gretchen: That is true. Maybe this episode someday will be part of another analysis. This is one of the things that I find so exciting about linguistics. There’s always language to analyse. There’s language going on right inside my head that I could analyse at any time.

Lauren: Indeed. Even with a recording of a conversation, there’re so many different things that you could do with the same single recording. You could look at (as we’ve done) the way both of us pronounce different words. You could also look at the choices of words that we make, or the way our sentences are structured, or the way we do back and forth. Language is so many different things, and linguistic data can be so many different things as well.

Gretchen: One of the reasons I love linguistics is because of this wide-ranging approach to data. Linguistics really is a science. You can do linguistic experiments and get that kind of experimental scientific data. Linguistics is also a humanity in that you can do this kind of detailed textural analysis or very detailed analysis on one particular piece of a story or a conversation and analyse that one thing in its own terms. All of these fall within linguistics. They’re all different ways of relating to language and to linguistic data.

Lauren: It could be signed language or spoken language. You could look at written language. You could look at those things across time for a single person or a single group. You could look across different people right now. You can do experiments or you can observe naturalistic data.

Gretchen: One of the things that we want out of linguistics as an academic discipline, as a scientific discipline, is the idea that its data is replicable. Sometimes, that can be replicable in the scientific sense. If you’ve got a hundred Australian English speakers, and you have them read a list of words, and then you extract their vowels, and you analyse the vowels, the idea is that you could get a different group of another hundred Australian English speakers to read the same word list, and you should get the same results. Or if you get a different set of results, there should be some sort of reason why this group is different from that group. Maybe 50 years later the vowels have shifted because you’re doing these at different times.

Lauren: Maybe you’re looking at Melbourne and Sydney English speakers. Nothing like a bit of intercity variation to get people excited about comparing data. Sometimes, you can learn a lot about language by just studying a story or a conversation in a lot of detail. The real challenge with this data is that, even if you ask the same person to tell the same story again – or even if you have those two people have another conversation on the same topic – it’s always going to be different because you’re really trying to capture something about that particular moment.

Gretchen: In some ways, it makes them feel weirder if you say, “Now, can you just have the same conversation that you were having before I turned the tape recorder on? Make sure you laugh in all the same places that you were laughing before because you’re gonna find it just as funny the second time around, right?”

Lauren: This is maybe a good point to confess that once or twice we have lost a recording of this show. Doing it again – like, I fully sympathise why you can’t just replicate that exact moment.

Keep reading

Bonus 107: Swifties, amorch, Melbin, and bloopers! - Deleted Scenes from Adam Aleksic, Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, and the advice episode

We’ve interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there’s a story or two that we just don’t have space for in the main episode, so here’s a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you. First, an excerpt from our interview with Adam Aleksic about tiktok and how different online platforms give rise to different kinds of communication styles. Second, a return to our interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez for a bit about Spanish internet slang, -och, and why “McCulloch” looks like a perfect name for an author of a book about internet linguistics. Finally, deleted scenes from our advice episode, in which we reveal some Lingthusiasm lore about pronouncing “Melbourne” and imitating each other’s accents and answer questions about linguistics degrees and switching languages with people.

Plus, by popular request: bloopers!

Listen to this episode about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent episodes, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This year, we put out 12 episodes of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics!

Lingthusiasm episodes assume no prior knowledge, only enthusiasm! They can be listened to in any order, so if you see a title that entices you, jump on in:

1. Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!! (transcript)
2. The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate (transcript)
3. On the nose - How the nose shapes language (transcript)
4. Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu (transcript)
5. Urban Multilingualism (transcript)
6. Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions (transcript)
7. Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd (transcript)
8. Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski (transcript)
9. A hand-y guide to gesture (transcript)
10. The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf (transcript)
11. Micro to macro - The levels of language (transcript)
12. A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics (transcript)

We also put out 12 bonus episodes for patrons (transcripts are linked to from each episode’s page):

1. The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern
2. World Linguistics Day
3. What’s in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more
4. ¡Pos ya está! Translating Because Internet into Spanish with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez
5. Reading linguistic landscapes on street signs
6. Why sci-fi gestures live long and prosper - Crossover with Imaginary Worlds
7. Advice #2 - Fun linguistic experiments, linguistic etiquette, and language learning scenarios
8. The linguistics of kissing 😘
9. Linguist Celebrities
10. Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project - Survey results and general updates
11. What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking
12. Crochet vocal tract, grammar is a team sport, gifs, and soy sauce - Deleted scenes from Jacq Jones, Emily M. Bender, and Tom Scott team interviews

Plus, we put out a very special bonus bonus, in honour of our 100th bonus episode: an updated version of our very first bonus episode about swearing, now with extra sweary commentary and unlocked to anyone who follows us for free on Patreon.

Thanks for joining us this year!

Stay Lingthusiastic!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about SURPRISE! From how languages express the concept of surprise, to what surprised looks like in the brain. But first, if you’ve been intrigued by the idea of our many bonus episodes, but aren’t sure about committing to another monthly subscription, we’ve now made a few of the most popular bonus episodes into collections that you can buy as a single one-time thing.

Lauren: These collections are so fun. We have Lingthusiasm Book Club for all of our book-related episodes; Linguistics Gossip for all the behind-the-scenes episodes; fun word-nerd topics like onomatopoeia and pangrams; Linguistics Advice; and my personal favourite, Lingthusiasm After Dark for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence, and the linguistics of kissing, and the weirdly soothing Lingthusiasmr episode that we’ve recorded of us reading example sentences in a very calm voice.

Gretchen: If there are any other bonus episodes that you’d like us to put in a collection, let us know. This feature is still pretty new and experimental. We’re interested in hearing how it goes for people. Also, this is a reminder that we have gift memberships. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea for yourself or someone else, you can get a year’s subscription to our bonus episodes for a person in your life and help keep the show running. Combining the previous two features, you can also gift one of the collections to some else if you wanna give someone a one-time gift.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview about the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. Is it a centuries-old hoax? Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for collections, gifting, and all of the bonus episodes.

[Music]

Lauren: “Surprise! Gretchen, it’s a party for you! There’re balloons coming from the ceiling, and I’ve made you cake.”

Gretchen: Wow! Amazing! I’m so surprised! Not least because it’s not my birthday.

Lauren: And I’m in Australia, and you’re in Canada.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, there’s that, too.

Lauren: And because we scripted this whole thing to introduce our episode on surprise?

Gretchen: Look, let’s not quibble too much. Let’s talk about a few other things you could say if you were surprised.

Lauren: Okay, sure.

Gretchen: Like, “My, how sparkly these balloons are!”

Lauren: Bit of a throwback. It has “My, how sharp your teeth are, Grandma,” vibes from Little Red Riding Hood.

Gretchen: “Dang, these balloons are so sparkly!” Bit more modern.

Lauren: That works. What about if I didn’t realise it was your birthday, I could be like, “Oh, happy birthday!”

Gretchen: “I can’t believe it’s your birthday!”

Lauren: “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me!”

Gretchen: “Wow, you ate the whole thing!”

Lauren: “Wait, you have a birthday?”

Gretchen: Like we all do.

Lauren: There are so many different ways that we can indicate that we’re surprised, that something is contrary to our expectations, that we’re dealing with new information.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that’s its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

New on Patreon: you can now buy a set of bonus episodes as a collection if you’re not keen on signing up for a monthly membership. Collections so far include Lingthusiasm book club, Lingthusiasm After Dark, Linguistics Gossip, Linguistic Advice, Word Nerdery, and Interviews.

Patreon bonus episodes also make a great last-minute gift for a linguistics enthusiast in your life.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Intonation and Expectation: English Mirative Contours and Particles’ by Kelsey Kraus
• Kelsey Kraus’ intonationally contoured princess cake
• Etymonline entry for 'surprise’
• 'Tomorrow’s Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 Has Arrived’ by Jennifer Daniel
• 'Brainwaves of people with coarse, curly hair are now less hard to read’ by Laura Sanders for Science News Explores
• 'Novel Electrodes for Reliable EEG Recordings on Coarse and Curly Hair’ by A. Etienne, T. Laroia, H. Weigle, A. Afelin, S. K. Kelly, A. Krishnan, and P. Grover
• 'Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity’ by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard
• 'Event-Related Potentials (ERP) explained! | Neuroscience Methods 101’ by Psyched! on YouTube
• Wikipedia entry for 'N400 (neuroscience)’
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda’
• Lingthusiasm episode 'Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Mirativity’
• 'New Research Article: Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)’ post on Superlinguo
• Wikipedia entry for 'Topic and comment’
• ASL: Topic / Comment

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Merry marry Mary } Holidays Greeting Card and Mug

Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!

Do you need your friends and loved ones to know just how much of a linguistics nerd you are when sending out holiday greeting cards? Send ‘em Lingthusiasm’s {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays card to let them make jokes about the merry-marry-Mary merger AND the n400 brain wave produced in response to unexpected words. Two linguistics references for the price of one, brought to you by Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

New Lingthusiasm logo - now wearable!

Want other Lingthusiasm fans to be able to spot you in the wild? Want a pretext to try to get your friends into a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics? Get some merch with the Lingthusiasm logo featuring fun little linguistics-y drawings: a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see what items you can spot! Art by Lucy Maddox for Lingthusiasm.

Range comes in both Lingthusiasm green and white.

Bonus 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern

In the 1600s, an antique book is recorded in an alchemist’s library in Prague, containing intriguing but puzzling drawings, like plants with unnatural cuboid roots, as well as a strange writing system, with some familiar letters and some utterly unfamiliar. This book became known as the Voynich Manuscript, after a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, and the meaning (or lack thereof) that lies on its 240 parchment pages is a puzzle that’s intrigued cryptographers, historians, linguists, and more for centuries.

In this episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, who’s a professor at Yale University, researcher of language documentation and historical linguistics, and creator of a class about the enduring enigma that is the Voynich Manuscript. We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Listen to this episode about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbours. I’m here with Dr. Danny Bate, who’s a public linguist, the host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of Why Q Needs U. But first, a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is November 26th – coming up very soon – and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays, decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get created. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Danny.

Danny: Hi, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank you for coming on Lingthusiasm.

Danny: Thank you so, so much for having me. This is surreal, safe to say, as a long-time listener to Lingthusiasm. To be on it myself is – I don’t really know how I’m feeling right now, but I’ll just be pinching myself while we’re recording if that’s okay.

Gretchen: Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you’re supposed to just be listening and not actively participating in the conversation, I’ll give you a little poke or something.

Danny: Thank you, thank you. I’ll be there listening like, “This guy is talking about – I like these topics.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Before we get into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let’s start with a question that we start with all of our guests, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Danny: Right, okay, great question. It involves a little bit of personal history. The short answer is I don’t know. There must’ve been a time when I wasn’t into linguistics. There must’ve been. I have clear memories of thinking that foreign languages are silly and what’s the point of this and why do I have to go to school and other such childish impulses, but it is hard to pin down when I realised that linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, like so many people of my generation, it wasn’t talked about at school. There wasn’t a great awareness of linguistics as a subject. I’m sure that’s still the case for a lot of people today, but it’s improving through things like Lingthusiasm. But that wasn’t there. Not to make myself sound extremely old, but it was definitely something that I came to by accident, organically, while searching for something to study at university that would combine my interests. I knew I liked modern languages, like French and German. I knew I liked philosophy. But it was really a haphazard, chance encounter until I turned up on the first day of my undergraduate degree at the University of York in the UK. Day 1, Lecture 1, yep, this is for me.

Gretchen: You took an intro linguistics class because the concept seemed like it could be kind of fascinating, and you’re like, “This is it.”

Danny: “This is it,” yeah. It was love at first lecture.

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