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Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics

This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before but might star in one of the next 100 episodes in greater detail.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about brains, gesture, etymology, famous example sentences, languages by the numbers, a few special facts about the word "hundred" and way more! This episode is both a fun overview of the vibe of Lingthusiam if you've never listened before, and a bonus bingo card game for diehard fans to see how many facts you can recognize.

We also invite you to share this episode alongside one of your favourite fun facts about linguistics and help more people find Lingthusiasm in honour of our 100th episodiversary! Whether you pick something new that resonates from this episode, or share the fact you were sitting on the edge of your seat hoping we'd mention, we look forward to staying Lingthusiastic with you for the next 100 episodes.

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

Announcements:

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, we go back to our interview with phonetician Jacq Jones, previously seen talking about how binary and non-binary people talk. Then, we return to computational linguist Emily M. Bender to talk about how Emily's students made a computational model of Lauren's grammar of Lamjung Yolmo and how linguistics is a team sport. Finally, we return to our group interview with the team behind Tom Scott's Language Files to talk about sneaky Icelandic jokes and the unedited behind-the-scenes version of the gif/gif joke.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links and citations mentioned in the episode:

Wikipedia entry for 'Writing system'

Wikipedia entry for 'Punctuation'

Wikipedia entry for ''Okina'

Wikipedia entry for 'Hamza'

Wikipedia entry for 'Glottal'

'Fneeze' blog post from EtymologyNerd

Etymonline entry for 'kn-' prefix

Calque is a loanword; loanword is a calque on Tom Scott's Language Files

'When You Think About It, Your Past Is in Front of You: How Culture Shapes Spatial Conceptions of Time' by Juanma De la Fuent et al

Wikipedia entry for 'Jabberwocky'

'Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages' by Damián E. Blasi et al

Wikipedia entry for 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den'

'Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity' by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard

Wikipedia entry for 'Zeugma and syllepsis'

Pi(e) facts post on Bluesky from Gretchen

Glottolog entry for 'Family: Indo-European'

Glottolog entry for 'Family: Austronesian'

Wikipedia entry for 'Languages of Papua New Guinea'

List of the worlds languages on Glottolog

'How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?' by Megan Garber on The Atlantic

Glottolog entry for 'Pseudo Family: Sign Language'

'Biography of Laurent Clerc' post on Gallaudet University website

'Q&A: How Pro-Tactile American Sign Language — PTASL — is changing the conversation' by Jaimi Lard and Christine Dwyer on Perkins.org

'Feeling the signs: tactile Auslan' post from Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators Inc

'How do we know if they could speak?' by Fran Dorey for Australian Museum

'If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension' by J. E. Arnold, C. L. H. Kam. & M. K. Tanenhaus

'The effect of disfluency on memory for what was said' by E. Diachek, & S. Brown-Schmidt

Wikipedia entry for 'Gender Neutrality' and 'Neopronoun'

Wikipedia entry for 'Centum and satem languages'

Wikipedia entry for 'Long hundred'

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

What it means for a language to be official

Writing is a technology

Word Magic

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

Colour words around the world and inside your brain

Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

Bonus episode 'The episode-episode (Reduplication)'

Bonus episode 'When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia'

Speaking a single language won't bring about world peace

How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Talking and thinking about time

This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

Bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all'

Bonus episode 'LingthusiASMR - The Harvard Sentences'

Merch mentioned in this episode:

Space Pigeon and Space Babies merch

Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project

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.

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

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.