For the Love of Language

Why do you speak differently than your grandma?

Special guest Liam Connerly, an expert in Latin and Greek, talks with us about education and etymology!  Listen to Liam's podcast, Latin in Layman's - A Rhetoric Revolution here!

How names become words with their own meanings. How brands die and Karen becomes the person you don't want to be.

How do we imply things that others can infer? How do we create implicatures? We discuss the Gricean Maxims of quality, quantity, relation, and manner.

Straw men, slippery slopes, ad hominem and more. How do people use twisted logic? We reference the logical fallacies from: Purdue Owl: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/logic_in_argumentative_writing/fallacies.html Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rhetorical-devices/logical-fallacies/ 

We talk about emotional vs logical arguments, how syllogisms work, and how to convince your friends that the sky is orange.

We dive into the pros and cons of audiobooks and narration, with a significant tangent into the importance of human connection.

We discuss some of the different types of gaslighting. If you need help, reach out to your emergency services or the Domestic Violence Hotline at https://www.thehotline.org/ or by calling (800) 799-7233.

We discuss compound questions, leading questions, and some of the differences in how questions are formed between different languages and cultures.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra! We discuss Star Trek's Tamarian encounter and how Captain Picard learns how to communicate using the Tamarians' historical metaphors.

Breaking everything into little boxes. And EJ's dog definitely wanted to be a part of the show.

We discuss the fantastic episode of Bluey where the mom asks the family to say "toilet" instead of "dunny." You can find Dunny if you watch Bluey on Disney+.

Can we define poetry? What makes good poetry? How do you find your voice? Do you have a poem inside you? Is AI ruining poetry? And, Stacie shares her "Ode to Pizza." Joshua recommends A Poet's Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie and "Picnic, Lightning" by Billy Collins.

We talk about different aspects of body language and give some examples of body languages across cultures. EJ recommends reading What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro, and The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.

We discuss ideas from the study Does bilingualism protect against dementia? A meta-analysis by John A. E. Anderson, Kornelia Hawrylewicz, and John G. Grundy. Find the study at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32462636/ .

A syntax discussion! What is merge? Is language actually special at all, or just one of a billion instances of merge in the human experience? Stacie references the book Merge in the Mind-Brain: Essays on Theoretical Linguistics and the Neuroscience of Language by Naoki Fukui.

We talk about working with teams, note-taking, the value of networking, and building connections by asking questions.

How do langauges become international? How do widely spoken languages impact minority ones? What would it take for Icelandic to become a lingua franca?

We discuss markedness, with a brief foray into phonetics. Stacie references the 1986 book Markedness, edited by Fred R. Eckman, Edith A. Moravcsik, and Jessica R. Wirth.

How do different languages handle numbers? Note: Here is a reference for different languages' plural rules for software localization: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/43/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html 

What are the different ways people perceive grammaticality in language?  In this discussion, we rely heavily on Dr. Gert-Jan Schoenmakers' recent research in Linguistic judgments in 3D: the aesthetic quality, linguistic acceptability, and surface probability of stigmatized and non-stigmatized variation, which can be downloaded here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2021-0179/html

We discuss how the Navajo language was used as an unbreakable code during World War II. We recommend reading Chester Nez's book Code Talker to learn more.

From simple platitudes to flipping people off, we discuss how politeness manifests in different scenarios.

We answer this fantastic question that came up on our Instagram.

Why and how do people speak multiple languages in the same conversation?

We discuss how we speak differently when speaking to children.

Ashely de Tello and Connie Davis join us from De Tello Publishing to talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing. We touch on using keywords, how AI can be used to help generate content, and catering your content to your audience.

What is Artificial Intelligence? Is it actually intelligent? We share our thoughts on the newest AI that's all the rage: ChatGPT.

Do you think of fluffy beasts falling from the sky whenever someone says, "it's raining cats and dogs," or do you think of getting out your slingshot when your boss says, "let's kill two birds with one stone?" This episode is all about idioms.

We talk with Amanda about how she became a Speech Language Pathologist and what that means.

What are the different myths around language creation and how languages became distinct from each other? We talk about several different cultures' language origin stories.

We dive into domain-specific language, as well as cultural appropriation and whether jargon should always be public.

References referring to referents can get interesting.

We team up with Only the Strongest, some of our amazing podcasting capoeira friends, and talk about how language is used in the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. List to more of Only the Strongest here: https://open.spotify.com/show/3jw3OGIPDqc2jL8isOFHVD?si=6a1547224f18447e

What does your language look like when you're speaking to yourself in your head? We discuss thought in interpretation, how people address themselves in their heads, and changing your inner dialog.

Ashley de Tello, the CEO of De Tello Publishing, joins us to talk about how she helps people profitably publish their ideas. We dive into different parts of the writing and publishing process, as well as ghost writing. Check out De Tello Publishing at detellopublishing.com.

We discuss one of the most famous studies in Linguistics.

Why are animal sounds different in different languages? We dive into some phonetics and discuss onomatopoeias.

In which we create a theoretical constructed language (conlang) and dive into some of the fundamentals of Linguistics.

What are language families? From English to Proto-Indo-European and Nicaraguan Sign Language, our ramblings hopefully bring you something you didn't know before.

La Malinche, also known as Malintzin or Marina, was gifted as a slave to Hernán Cortés by the Tabascans, and became the intermediary between him and the Aztec king Moctezuma. To learn more about La Malinche, check out: Malinche's Conquest by Anna Lanyon (1999). Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Tomo A) by Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (1984) describes La Malinche's origins and mentions her interpretation with Geronimo de Aguilar. “Malintzin/La Malinche/Doña Marina: re-Reading the myth of the treacherous translator” by Pilar Godayol (2012). Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy (2008). “Aproximación al discurso iconográfico y textual del encuentro entre Cortés y Moctezuma.” by Alain Lawo Sukam (2005). “Reflections on interpreting settings and ethics in view of visual representations of la Malinche.” by Krisztina Zimányi (2015). The story about Francisco Pizarro and Atahualpa comes from La Primera Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (1615).

We discuss everything from the Latin alphabet to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and somehow manage to digress into how we only scream in vowels.

Is language an innate, human thing, or is it the same as every other cognitive process? We discuss the timeless debate between innatists and interactionists that originated with Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner.

We cover one of our most requested topics: swearing. Why do people swear? How do we rate the severity of swear words? What does taboo language tell us about a culture? EJ mentioned feeling the emotion from swear words more in a first language than in second languages. There have been several studies that mention this, including Emotion and lying in a non-native language (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçeği-Dinn, 2009) and A study on the effects of first- and second-language swear words in advertisements (Hoeve, 2020).

In which Stacie describes what it really means to rain cats and dogs and other ramblings on the topic of semantics and pragmatics.

A conlang is a constructed language. What goes into creating a language? Why do it? Have any conlangs been successful? We mention Michael Adams' book From Elvish to Klingon.

Alexis shares some of her knowledge and experience from working as an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter.

Do sounds have meaning on their own? We reference the following if you want to look up more details: The Bouba/Kiki Effect Pokémonikers: A study of sound symbolism and Pokémon names On sound symbolism in baseball players' names