Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings. 

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q'anjob'al and a learner of Kaq'chikel. We talk about Pedro’s background teaching school in Q’anjob’al and Spanish, which sounds kids acquire later in Q’anjob’al (hint: it’s the ejectives like q’ and b’), and gender differences in how kids speak Q’anjob’al. We also talk more broadly about why this work is important, both in terms of understanding how language acquisition works as a whole and in terms of using the knowledge of how children acquire Indigenous languages to create teaching materials specific to those languages. Finally, we talk about Pedro’s newer revitalization work with a community of Itzaj speakers and the process of building a relationship with a community that you’re not already part of.  

Transcript available soon.

Announcements:

We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now - and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn't destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!

We also have tons of other Lingthusiastic merch available, it makes a great gift to give to a linguistics enthusiast in your life or to request as a gift from someone. Special shoutout to our aesthetic IPA chart redesign, which now comes in rectangle (looks great as a poster if you have an office or corridor that needs to be jazzed up), and with a transparent background for t-shirt purposes! Or get it on a tote bag or notebook so you can bring it to conferences! 

In this month’s behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes with Sarah Dopierala, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show! We talk about how Sarah's background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she's noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!)

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! 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:

• Pedro Mateo Pedro’s website
• Guatemala Field Station website
• Wikipedia article for Q’anjob’al
• Wikipedia article for Mayan languages
• The Acquisition of K'iche' Status Suffixes - Clifton Pye
• Lingthusiasm episode: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas 
• Lingthusiasm episode: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
• How diverse is child language acquisition research? Paper by Evan Kidd & Rowena Garcia (open access)
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘103 ways for kids to learn languages’

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

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter 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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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).

Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling a story, we might have them all watch the same silent film and re-tell it back.  

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistics examples that have been re-used in lots of studies to get large groups of people to produce comparable language data. These sentences are supposed to be pretty unremarkable so we can focus on doing linguistics on them, but they end up having a sort of charmingly banal vibe that makes them much beloved by people who have spent tons of time poring over recorded files. We talk about The North Wind and the Sun, the Stella passage, the Rainbow passage, the Harvard Sentences, the Frog story, the Pear story, and the Tweety Bird video. We also talk about what goes into creating different genres of reusable example sentences, from phonetic balancing to what makes a concept culturally specific, as well as our experience learning about and coming up with various examples. 

Have a favourite recurring example that we didn’t have space for here? Let us know! 

Transcript available soon.

Announcements: 

In this month’s bonus episode we present: LingthusiASMR, a very special bonus episode, in which your hosts Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistics in a very relaxed manner by reading one very large classic set of charmingly banal linguistics example sentences. Several people have told us that this has helped put them to sleep, which isn’t usually our goal but it sure is for this episode! 

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! 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:

• Wikipedia entry for ‘The North Wind and the Sun’
• Illustrations of the International Phonetic Association (IPA)
• International Phonetics Association - Journal of the IPA
• The Speech Accent Archive - Please Call Stella
• The Speech Accent Archive - Submissions
• The Rainbow Passage
• Gender Reveal Podcast episode discussing gender and voice
• The Harvard Sentences
• Superlinguo post on The Harvard Sentences
• Wikipedia entry on ‘The Frog Story’
• Frog Story corpora
• ‘Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?’ by Neil Cohn
• The Pear Story video 
• Pear Film World Corpus
• ‘The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production’ By Wallace L. Chafe
• ‘A Pear Story Study of information status, thematic role and animacy in Meithei (Manipuri, Meiteiron)’ by Shobhana L. Chelliah
• ‘The Chinese Pear Stories - Narrative Across Seven Chinese Dialects’ by Mary S. Erbaugh
• Looney Tunes ‘Canary Row’ video
• ‘Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power’ by David Adger (with David’s cat and husband as the example sentence names)
• ‘Don't Touch My Projectile: Gender Bias and Stereotyping in Syntactic Examples’ by Monica Macaulay and Colleen Brice
• ‘Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997?’ by Cépeda, Kotek, Pabst, & Syrett
• ‘The Diverse Names Generator: An app for decreasing bias and promoting inclusion’ by Maura O’Leary, Rainey Williams, Mario Peng Lee
• Diverse Names Generator

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

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter 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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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).

funny ways to say “middle of nowhere”

in most languages there’s an expression with ass-something/in the ass(hole) of the world, where God or satan lost their shoes, but here are other funny ones I saw under this post

• 🇩🇪German: where Fox and Hare bid each other good night - Wo sich Fuchs und Hase Gute Nacht sagen
• 🇨🇿Czech: Where foxes bid good night to one another - Kde si lišky dávají dobrou noc
• 🇩🇰Danish: where the crows turn around - Hvor kragerne vender on Lars diarrheas field/on the field of Lars Shitpants - På lars tyndskids mark
• 🇳🇴Norwegian: far damn from violence - langt pokker i vold, “huttaheiti” (gibberish)
• 🇸🇪Swedish: out (there) in the spinach - ute i spenaten,“tjotaheiti” (see above, maybe originally from Tahiti)
• 🇪🇸in Spain: in the fifth hell/pine tree - En el quinto infierno/pino,  where Christ lost the sandal/hat/lighter - Donde Cristo perdió la alpargata/gorra/mechero
• 🇹🇼in Taiwan: where birds don’t lay eggs and dogs don’t shit - 鳥不生蛋狗不拉屎的地方 
• 🇵🇱Polish - where dogs barks from their ass - gdzie psy dupami szczekają, where crows turn around -  Gdzie wrony zawracają
• 🇮🇹(north?) Italian: in the ass of the world/ in assland - in culo al mondo/ in culonia/culandia 
• 🇦🇺An Australian colloquialism is “gone to whoop whoop” or “in the middle of whoop whoop’

In Polish we have another cool one which is „Where the devil says goodnight” - „Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc”

The Polish version of Witcher 3 actually has a pop up telling you just that if you get too close to the edge of the map.

very curious to hear what yall think
*for the purpose of this poll, linguist simply means someone who actively studies and has a deep interest in the scientific study of language. whether it be formal education, professional work, or just personal interest, it all counts.

I will always advocate for every queer person's right to be a fully autonomous sexual being-and that always must and always will include asexuals. Recognizing the significance of queer sex should not mean that every queer person should be mandated to meet an arbitrary sexual prerequisite in order for their queerness to be affirmed. Centering queerness around sex leaves very little room for queer folks for whom sex is insignificant, or for whom sex is never or rarely possible, or for queer folks who have never had sex before, or for queer folks whose only sexual experiences have been violent. It also leaves a lot of queer people, especially young ones, feeling pressured to have a certain amount or certain type of sex in order to legitimate or prove their queerness to themselves or to someone else.

-Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing compulsory sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

The book (which looks amazing)

(me, my parents, my sister, and the baby are sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch)

baby, pointing at the light fixture over the table and signing "on": o.*

my sister: we actually can't turn that light on right now, because the lightbulb inside is burnt out! it needs a new one.

baby: ighbu.

sister: yes, lightbulb! granddaddy said after we eat he's going to climb up there on a ladder and change it, and then the light will come on!

baby: gadada! adda, uuu! ighbu o!

sister: exactly!

baby, signing "on" and pointing at the light and then my dad, with increasing urgency: GADADA ADDA UUUU. O.

my sister: we're going to finish eating first though, ok?

baby: nonono. O. gadada adda uuu.

[a split second goes by]

baby, pointing to himself: ba. adda uuu. ighbu.

me: you're going to climb the ladder and change the lightbulb yourself?

baby: dzyeah. *pointing to the buckle where he is buckled into the high chair* ububu.

me: unbuckle you? so you can change the lightbulb?

baby, highly businesslike: dzyeah.

*pronounced like "on" without the n

this comment passes peer review

This is what makes learning Spanish so uncertain -- I get told some word by Duolingo, that contradicts what I learned growing up along the US-Mexico border, and neither agrees with the words my co-worker from Columbia uses 

:D

When I was a kid, we lived in Chile, and my mum had a friend who was from another LatAm country (I don't remember which) and one time she told a taxi driver to "keep the change" but she said "y quedate el pico", which to the Chilean taxi driver meant "and put away your prick"

Ah me. :)

(Still remembering the time when Dave Gemmell told us how he went to Germany on a book tour and chanced his arm with the language one time, telling the bus driver on a sultry summer's day, "Ich bin so warme.")

(...Whoops.) :)

Every time I ask a question on here about Welsh, tumblrfolk from North Wales and South Wales learn exciting new things about each other.

Then there's me who speaks a hybrid of Castillian and Canarian Spanish, confusing people in both places.

(Ditto my Welsh- I learned Welsh in Aberystwyth so it's generally Hwntw with a side serving of unexpected Gog. I know you shouldn't mix dialects but it's hard not to and it's what comes naturally to me).

Feel free to elaborate further in the tags, especially if you picked Option 3 because as a professor myself it MYSTIFIES me that there are students who do that! (Also, unless it is just the Culture at your school or something, you should not do that. For future reference)

I feel like everyone who complains too much about translation work should be assigned about ~100 lines to translate, perfectly, from the language of their choice into English, while keeping the sense of poetry intact and ALSO keeping the original sense as well. It’s only 100 lines, right? Not, say, thousands of lines, like you’d get with a longer narrative story. It should be a piece of cake. 

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

We had a running joke about how many times our grad PI’s emails scared us because they were uncharacteristically terse. (You’d get like “We need to talk about your paper.” and then the actual talk would be “It’s great!”)

And he heard us talking one day and started adding smiley emojis to his emails, and honestly it really helped

Can we also have a support group for all of the people who’ve had to do the “Please do not send me a text that says ‘call me.’ unless someone is dead. If no one is dead, you need to delete the period and add a lighthearted emoji” workshop with their boomer parents? Because I know about 10 people who’ve had that exact conversation.

Texts from my mom look like this now:

Call me! 👻

call me 🥑 🥭

Call me. (No one’s dead I just want to talk.)

CALL ME! 🎏🐹🌴💅🏼🎷🌺👒

Book rec if you are interested in this kind of language stuff: Gretchen McCullough’s book BECAUSE INTERNET. It goes into these topics in detail along with a bunch of others and is really fascinating.

Thank fuck for Tumblr and my 21yo friend who keep me from sounding like the old lady I am.

Ngl this post managed to prepare me for my current boss’s emails. If I hadn’t known about the ellipse thing I’d have a much worse idea of how she sees me.