#chichewa

Lingthusiasm Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be” known as a copula.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about copulas! This is a special name for a way of grammatically linking two concepts together that’s linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes it’s a verb that’s super irregular (like be/is/was in English, Latin, and many other languages), sometimes it’s several verbs (like ser and estar in Iberian and Celtic languages), sometimes it’s a form of marking other words (like in Nahuatl, Auslan, and ASL), and sometimes it’s not even visible or audible at all (like zero copula in Arabic, African American English, and Russian). We also talk about some of the fun things you can do with copulas in English, such as the lexical gap that’s filled by “ain’t”, the news headline null copula, and the oddball philosophical experiment known as E-Prime.

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

Announcements: We're doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We'll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!

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If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other language nerds. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about character encoding! We talk about the massive list of symbols that your phone carries around, how that list (aka Unicode) came into existence, and why it's still growing a bit every year. Listen here! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

France is Bacon dot com

Etymonline entry for copula

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Schwa, the most versatile English vowel’

Wikipedia entry for copulas in Germanic languages

Etymonline entry for ‘be’ and ‘is’

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics’

Etymonline entry for ‘ain’t’

The Copula Systems of Western European Languages from a Typological and Diachronic Perspective - Britta Irslinger

Wikipedia entry for copulas in Chichewa

Wikipedia entry for verbs in Nepali

The Japanese Professor entry ‘The Copula ‘Desu’’

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’

Wikipedia entry for verbs in Yolmo

David Bowles tweet on copulas in Nahuatl

Wikipedia entry for Nahuatl, including more detail on the geographic distribution of speakers 

Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics - Johnston and Schembri

Reddit post on how to express ‘be’ in American Sign Language

Wikipedia entry for zero copula

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘When nothing means something’

WALS entry for zero copula

All Things Linguistics entry on zero copula in African American English

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for null copula

Wikipedia entry for E-Prime

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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.

like I learned Spanish as a very little kid, and started learning it probs 3 years after I did English, and it has permanently replaced the phrase “What is that called?” with “How do you call this?” in my vocabulary. because that’s how the phrase literally translates from Spanish to English. 

And sometimes there’s just a phrase or word in a language that just beats all the words in your own language, so you can never get it out of your head. I lived in Malawi, where they largely speak Chichewa, and they have this word -- “chimodzimodzi” -- which translates literally to “same same”, but it’s applied in so many super useful situations that we don’t use that phrase in, and we just DO NOT HAVE AN EQUALLY USEFUL WORD and now I slip that word into conversations accidentally which just don’t fly.