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Ever find yourself distracted from what someone is saying by wondering about how they say it?
Lingthusiasm is a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us. From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn't realize you were already making. One of Spotify's top 50 Science podcasts 2022.
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118: Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales
Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? What about the studies trying to teach bonobos and other primates to communicate through buttons or signs? What have we learned about whale communication from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how people use technology to try and enhance our communications with bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales. (Sorry, other animals, you’ll need to wait for a future episode.) We talk about the crucial distinction in animal communication studies between “any communication at all” (yes) and “language the way humans do it” (no), how we can actually learn more by appreciating animal communication systems on their own terms, and how some kinds of tech are helping us do that. We also talk about the logistics of studying animal communication, including avoiding the Clever Hans effect, how ubiquitous recording technology has changed the game on whalesong in recent decades (but there’s still lots of catching up to do), and an at-home study of over 10,000 dogs using buttons (they’re still recruiting if you want to join!).
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 Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is… about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels. Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic, and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.
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).
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Lingthusiasm gets into zines!
We hear from people a lot who are enthusiastic about linguistics, and many of you have been trying to get other people in your life also into linguistics, which is amazing!
Whether it’s linguistics fans trying to articulate their (our) excitement to family and friends, linguistics academics trying to spread the word to future students who might want to take a linguistics course, or when we go to in-person conferences and events and we’re trying to explain why people might want to listen to a whole half hour of linguistics enthusiasm every month, we’ve been feeling a need for more ways to bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world.
Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen’s and Lauren’s and producer Claire’s and editor Leah’s friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately [although a few of our friends would like it pointed out that they’ve been into zines since earlier zine waves. you’re very cool and we appreciate you.]
Basically, we make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines for free, and then people can have them floating around on your coffeetable, bulletinboard, break room table, outreach events, wherever you’re looking for eye-catching pick-up-able objects to help get people interested in linguistics. And then we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!
All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We’re making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!
Zines are DIY and participatory, so we’re also hoping to encourage other people to make linguistics-related zines and help people find other linguistics zines that exist!
We’ve done one lingcomm through zines workshop at a linguistics conference so far (LabPhon), and have another lined up (NWAV), and we’ve heard from some linguistics profs who are excited by the idea of using zines in teaching as well! You can see (and repurpose) Linguistics Communication through Zines slides here.
Let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media if you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose!
Okay, we’ve made you wait long enough. Wanna see some zines?
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes. Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling? Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Stay tuned for more Lingthusiasm zines in the future! And thank you to all our members on Patreon who got to see the zines early and gave us many helpful comments! It’s thanks to the support of our community that we’re able to make fun free linguistics resources like this.
Stay Lingthusiastic!
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Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?
How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)
(She’s right, we fudged a little! The -ie in “doggie” only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?)
Support these zines and more linguistics enthusiasm on Patreon — patrons get new zines early!
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What’s this gesture called? A Lingthusiasm zine
The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these “emblem gestures."
Support these zines and more linguistics enthusiasm on Patreon — patrons get new zines early!
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Which shape is bouba and which is kiki? A Lingthusiasm zine
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes.
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 using technology to communicate with animals – and how we could know if animals are using language? But first, we have a special treat for you on Patreon.
Gretchen: A while back, I got asked to read the audio book for Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith, which was a very fun day in a recording studio reading these classic sonnets distilled down into very silly rhyming couplets.
Lauren: It’s impressive how Zach managed to write something that was both so elegant but also funny. Gretchen’s delivery is excellent.
Gretchen: Zach has very kindly given us some free copies of this audio book for patrons to download.
Lauren: This is available for all patrons both free and paid. Even if you haven’t checked us out on Patreon, we’ve been posting more and more fun stuff there for all levels of patronage.
Gretchen: Including our very first bonus episode about swearing, which we refreshed with some new, swear-y information. It’s also free for all patrons.
Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode over at Patreon includes some extra content from two excellent, recent interviews. One is a discussion with Danny Bate about learning Czech and living in Czechia. We also returned to the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern, who has a very cool undergraduate university class about it.
Gretchen: To listen to this bonus feature as well as over 100 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, do you feel like people ask you a lot to adjudicate on specific examples of animal communication and whether or not they are truly language? Because this happens to me all the time.
Lauren: Oh, yes, and I’m always so happy to have this conversation with people because it’s always so interesting what animals and what theories about communication come up in these stories. I love hearing about all the different ways different animals communicate.
Gretchen: I think that it’s useful to be descriptive about what we mean and try to be very precise about what we mean here because I wanna distinguish between two things. One is any type of communication. And the second is specifically what linguists mean when we talk about language. Because sometimes the word “language” gets used informally to refer to any type of communication at large.
Lauren: Weirdly enough, linguists have a really specific idea of a specific bundle of features used in a specific way that is only found among humans across modalities.
Gretchen: So, the question of “Can animals communicate? Can they communicate with each other? Can they sometimes communicate with us as humans or with other species of animals?” – the answer to that is absolutely. They can communicate some ways and some things. Have we yet found an animal that uses a communication system in the same ways that human communication systems do that all human languages have in common whether they’re spoken, whether they’re signed, whether they’re tactile? That we haven’t. All of the human things, regardless of how related to each other they are, regardless of whether they have a writing system or not, they seem to have something in common that, so far, we haven’t found any animals or aliens that do all of those things.
Lauren: Figuring out the specific thing that that communication is is interesting in itself. But also, what if we reboot Dr. Dolittle in a really tech savvy way, like, can we bridge some of that gap? Is it just because they don’t have the same face shape as us to make the same sounds or the same focus on making signs with hands and bodies – can we use technology to see if this really is a level playing field or not?
Gretchen: I saw the Dr. Dolittle movie back when it came out. I confess to having that dream. Like, what if we really could someday communicate with animals? I think that the quest for it has led in some interesting directions, even if (spoiler) we’re gonna find out at the end that they’re not quite the same (so far) as what humans are doing.
Lauren: Now, we are not going to – even though we are called to adjudicate on a wide range of animal communication stories today – Gretchen, we are not going to arbitrate every single animal communication story. We’ve already done an episode where we look at horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, dogs, other animals. Today, we’re just gonna look at a few case studies in particular.
Bonus 113: Czeching out…the Voynich Manuscript? Deleted scenes from Danny Bate & Claire Bowern
Learning languages and solving linguistic puzzles: two great topics that we’re always interested in a new angle on!
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 Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is… about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels, and Danny attempts to teach Gretchen the most uniquely Czech sound (ř, the voiced alveo-palatal fricative trill). Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic (which draws on related fields from medieval studies to information theory) and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy’. 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 the science of beautiful writing with Dr. Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile.
Lauren: But first, this episode originally aired on Patreon a year and a half ago. We heard from so many listeners who wanted to share it with their writing groups or with academics trying to make the transition from scientific writing to literary writing. We thought we’d make it available to everyone as part of our annual unlocking of a bonus episode in the main feed.
Gretchen: Which also gives us and everyone on the production team a mini break that keeps making the show sustainable for us.
Lauren: If you’d like to listen to over 100 other more Lingthusiasm episodes that are bonuses like this one, and maybe you’d like to suggest which one we should unlock next year, join us on Patreon.
Gretchen: We’ve also been posting more and more titbits for everyone who follows us on Patreon – both free and paid – including unlocking our very first bonus episode about swearing with added swear-y commentary.
Lauren: We’ve recently unlocked a bonus chat with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about linguistics podcasting.
Gretchen: Or if you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcasts on the back burner and doesn’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, there’s a new option on Patreon where you can purchase a community gift membership for us to give out to one of your fellow lingthusiasts who’d like to listen to the bonus episodes and can’t afford it right now.
Lauren: We’ve already given out seven of these community-gifted memberships thanks to the generosity of few people who found this feature before we had even figured out what we were doing with it.
Gretchen: If anyone else is inclined to join them, I think that was really a post that resonated in this economy. It helps us keep going at the same time.
Lauren: Stay subscribed to emails from Lingthusiasm on Patreon to hear about any future community gift memberships that become available.
Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for memberships for yourself, for a specific person you know, or for these new community gift memberships.
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Gretchen: Hello, Julie.
Julie: Hi, Gretchen. I am fulfilling a longtime fantasy of appearing on Lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: It’s so fun to have you since you’re already a listener.
Julie: Indeed.
Gretchen: Before we get into stuff about your book, Linguaphile, and your other book, Memory Speaks, let’s start with a question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get into linguistics?”
Julie: I stumbled into it. I had started university as an English major. I had always thought that I would be a writer from the time I was very small. I was reading through course descriptions, came across this thing called “linguistics,” and it made reference to “grammar” and other stuff that didn’t sound overly interesting to me, but I thought, “If I’m gonna be a writer, I probably need to know some of this stuff.” I took the class, and from the get-go, I was utterly mesmerised. I think my experience was a little bit like – imagine you’re a kid, and you love bugs. You’ve spent your life watching bugs and being fascinated by them, but you don’t realise you can be a scientist of bugs and that there is a science of bugs. Then suddenly you encounter this, you know, at the age of 18. That’s a little bit what it was like for me just to realise that you can study this scientifically, systematically. Of course, one of the things that comes out when you start looking at linguistics is the realisation that there’s so much about language that’s going on below the surface of conscious awareness that is not really easy to just introspect about unless you have the right tools.
Gretchen: You’d had a lot of language experiences before discovering linguistics as a named phenomenon.
Julie: I did. And I think that’s what gave me an orientation and an attunement to language and a desire to use it as a medium as a writer. I was lucky enough to have been dragged from one linguistic environment to another. I think my parents would probably not frame it that way. It was quite a difficult time for them to be bouncing around from one country to another. I was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, and then we lived in Austria for a while, and Italy, and back and forth a bit, and then finally landed in Montreal where I learned French as my fourth language. Finally, English as a fifth language in kindergarten for the first time.
Gretchen: Wow. I really enjoyed the Montreal aspects of your writing because I also live in Montreal. Hearing some of the things that were, like, before I lived here, before I was around in here, and the way that English and French interplay in that – and in your childhood brain.
Julie: Yeah, no, it was a real lesson to me in observing some of the sociolinguistic aspects of language because it was very clear at the time – so this would’ve been the early-to-mid ’70s when we first arrived – that French – I mean, it was the language spoken by the majority, but it was not the language of official business, and it was not the respected language.
Lingthusiasm Episode 117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy
Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you’re reading something and it just won’t stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down. We also do a small linguistic experiment on air using the following words, which you can play along with: luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.
Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking, and we’ve added an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast! We talk about being nearly teenaged in the world of language podcasting (Lingthusiasm turns 10 later this year, and The Allusionist turned 10 last year!) and alternative careers that we had on the way to becoming podcasters (did you know Helen once worked for a reality TV show?). We also talk about breaking the kiki/bouba test, the importance of publishing “failed” experiments, the Bender Rule and the Holliday Rule (both previous Lingthusiasm guests!).
Note that this particular bonus episode is available to everyone who follows us at any level (including free!) on Patreon, so welcome if you’re joining us as an Allusionist fan (or a broke lingthusiasm fan tbh, we’re trying to give you some treats while also trying to keep the show running!!).
Speaking of which…a few people found Patreon’s new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we’ve been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we’d be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!
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).
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
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