Episode 20: The Ghost of Language Past

Wherein we play language games.

Jump right to:

• 12:47 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Language games
• 37:07 Question 1: Could y’all talk about how your understanding of how to pronounce the word can affect what you think the spelling, etymology, or meaning is? Examples that comes to mind is “su-burban” vs “sub-urban,” “a napron” vs “an apron,” “a stigmatism” vs “an astigmatism,” “acomma” vs “a comma,” etc. though I think some of those examples are actually different phenomena from each other. I think one is juncture loss? Or rebracketing?
• 58:28 Question 2: If you had a chance to influence the evolution of language, what feature/words would you add a) because you like them and b) to troll people?
• 1:21:43 The puzzler: How can a cube be cut so that the cross-section is a hexagon?

Covered in this episode:

• Latin: the Ghost of Spanish Past
• The Ides of March
• Not philosophers discussing cavemen building walls
• Pig Latin and Ubbi dubbi vs cant, argot, Polari, Cockney rhyming slang…
• Argobus, argopodes
• Language cannot be contained
• Verlan
• Juncture loss, rebracketing, and reanalysis in general
• Rocketcopters
• Eli shares a hot take about French he heard years ago (from an actual linguist)
• LOLcat, dogespeak, and uwuspeak
• ȝ
• Evidentiality
• Clusivity
• Identity attestation in first- and second-person pronouns
• Titles aren’t pronouns but they’re sort of next door
• Doctorates should not be relevant to playing frisbee

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• WaniKani
• Yes, being in Italy during Easter during the Jubilee was wild; being in the Vatican while the Pope laid in state was even wilder. (No, Sarah and her students did not get to see him, because they did not have 3+ hours to stand in line.)
• “Ghosts speak Latin” was supposedly a common belief in Elizabethan England, although Jenny couldn’t actually find a source more direct/reliable than footnotes in various copies of Hamlet (I.i.49) so better citation possibly needed?
• Ubbi dubbi, Polari, Tutnese, and Verlan. We couldn’t find an actual concrete origin of the name “Pig Latin,” though it does seem to have been called “Hog Latin” and to have begun as a version of “Dog Latin” (which seems to have referred to parody Latin in general).
• The Pig Latin puzzler was episode 8!
• Sarah says that the N in ‘a whole nother’ is always there. This is false: around twenty minutes earlier, Sarah herself said “a whole other,” which in retrospect she can confirm is absolutely influenced by Al’s point that knowing how the spelling works can change your pronunciation.
• Several examples of Verlan from one of the channels Sarah likes.
• “Helicopter” came up in episode 14.
• “Electric” does derive from Greek “ēlektron,” but not directly! It was borrowed into Latin as “electrum,” and then “electricus” in the 1600s by physicist William Gilbert. “Electric” and “electricity” were both first used in English in the 1640s by Sir Thomas Browne, who seems to have coined the latter. “Electrick” is a known early alternate spelling, so that definitely always would have been pronounced with a [k], but we couldn’t find evidence in either direction for whether “electricity” has always had an [s]. Also, Jenny has had the Schoolhouse Rock song stuck in her head for the last three days.
• The conlang Eli was thinking of is the Aramteskan language from P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent series, and was developed by Lauren Gawne, of Lingthusiasm fame!
• Dual, trial, paucal
• The NativLang video Sarah referenced that discusses Chinese timekeeping words.

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Abby and Charlie, question wrangling and show notes are done by Jenny, and transcriptions are done by Luca and Deren. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)