podcasts

Lingthusiasm Episodes

+CK1 Ber '17

linguistics

Linguistics

In this episode Michael Ellsberg interviews Michaela Boehm.

From Michael Ellsberg:
"I've interviewed famous billionaires. I've interviewed rock stars. I've interviewed NYT-bestselling authors. And yet, of all the interviews I've done, the one I'm most excited about is the one I'm sharing with you now.

Michaela Boehm is in my opinion the most advanced, master teacher on sacred sexuality currently teaching. For 13 years, she traveled and co-taught with David Deida, author of "The Way of the Superior Man." Now she has branched out to share her own unique blend of wisdom, synthesized from her 22 years of counseling practice, along with her training and experience as a lineage holder in a tantric tradition of Kashmiri Shivaism. Her private clients include Oscar-winning actors, producers, writers, and multiple Grammy-winning musicians--and now she's sharing her wisdom with us.

As I love to do, in this interview we dove right in to the nitty-gritty: The Dark Side of "Conscious Sexuality." I'm a student of conscious sexuality---but every scene and every philosophy has its own shadow side. What is the shadow side of the "sacred sexuality" scene? In this wide-ranging, no-holds-barred interview, we dive into the conversations no one else is having, and the things no one else is saying, around this controversial topic."

Some of the topics we cover include:
• The true meaning of the "shadow side"- as opposed to how it is usually used in personal development circles
• Why "sacred sexuality" should not be used as a tool for healing
• The most important factor for healing old sexual wounding
• How so much spiritual practice ends up being a futile quest to gain love or approval from "daddy" or "mommy" in our minds - and what to focus on instead
• How so many teachers or "gurus" of spirituality and sexuality use scarcity and subtle shaming to keep students hooked on constant up-sells.
• Why the focus on "commitments" and "accountability" in Men's Groups is misguided and ineffective, and what Men's Groups should be focusing on instead
• How Women's Groups often end up perpetuating the same shaming of women that the women are going into the groups to avoid, and what--in Michaela's opinion--Women's Groups should be focusing on instead
• The rise of the "Stepford Dakinis"
• Many women ask "Where are all the good men?" - and why asking this question is barking up the wrong tree .(The discussion we get into for the next 15 minutes is hands-down the most controversial segment of any interview I've ever done, watch out!)
• How can independent, strong-minded women (who are into men) find the man they want?
• How can a woman who wants the experience of surrender with a man, decide which man she can trust?
• How polyamory often bogs down and leads to "a lot more discussing than fucking"
• Why the tantra worlds and BDSM/kink worlds often judge each other, and how they can be integrated
• The single best first step for opening to the divine in sexuality

...

For instant access courses, events, and teacher training: www.michaelaboehm.com

To order Michaela's book "The Wild Woman's Way": https://amzn.to/3FJEBEa

Music by Steve James: https://www.guruviking.com/

Find out more about Michael Ellsberg here:
www.ellsberg.com

Podcast #04: The Dark Side of "Conscious Sexuality" with Michael Ellsberg

Wouldn’t it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast! 

Lingthusiasm is a brand-new podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, hosted by Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo​ and Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic.

In this first episode of Lingthusiasm, ​Gretchen and Lauren discuss the “one language equals peace” fallacy, and whether speaking the same words means that people will necessarily agree with each other (spoiler: no). But the history of how people have tried is still really interesting, from constructed and symbolic communication like Blissymbols and emoji to the way astronauts communicate in the high stakes environment of the International Space Station.

For links to things mentioned during this episode visit http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episode-1-speaking-a-single-language

Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

01: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace

If there are pronouns, why aren’t there connouns? What’s the point of these little words? 

In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne take a look at the many functions of pronouns. We discuss the vastly different pronoun systems in different languages, how you’d need to change English pronouns to make it easier to write gay polyamorous fanfiction, and why everyone is getting excited about singular ‘they’ these days (despite the fact that it’s really old).

We also talk about the Lingthusiasm logo, the three things that the squiggle stands for, and why it had to be green.

For links to things mentioned in this episode, check out the shownotes page at http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520062361/lingthusiasm-episode-2-pronouns-little-words

Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

02: Pronouns. Little words, big jobs

Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists - Review of the alien linguistics movie

Linguists are very excited about the movie Arrival, because it stars a linguist saving the day by figuring out how to talk with aliens. Which, if you compare it to previous linguists in film (being obnoxious to poor flower girls, for example) is a vast improvement. 

In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, Gretchen and Lauren come to you having just watched Arrival, to tell you what it got right and wrong about life as a linguist, how linguists have been reacting, and the linguists who consulted on the film. We also talk about some other books and films that feature linguistics, if Arrival caught your interest. 

We also discuss what we’ve been up to lately. Gretchen is busily writing the latest draft of her book about internet English, and Lauren has just published a grammar of a language spoken in Nepal. 

For more information visit the show page http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520817516/lingthusiasm-episode-3-arrival-of-the-linguists

Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

03: Arrival of the Linguists - Review of the Alien Linguistics Movie

In this episode, Michaela Boehm and Steve James share a Q&A excerpt from the first installment of their Sexual Yoga Special Instruction Series. Topics include:

•Steve on the relationship between tension, stretching, and mobility
•Healing major surgery trauma through movement
•The mechanics of acquiring effortless skill 
•How somatic learning can inform your everyday life 
•The role of confusion in learning
•Michaela on the shock-therapy approach to personal growth
•Why sometimes you have to live out your strong attractions
•How to make your own distinctions 
•Leveraging the body for psychological payoffs
•Pushing your edge and the self image
•The spiritual hamster wheel 
•Energetic conductivity and resistance
•Sensitivity and discrimination 
•The human energy system and full body orgasms 
•Identifying resistance in the system
•The glass ceiling of tension in sexual yoga
•Upping the pleasure threshold
•The effect of initial sexual experiences on future pleasure 
•How to unblock orgasm problems in a woman
•Clitoral vs G-spot orgasms
•Using the G-spot to unlock whole body pleasure
•Relaxed or limp?
•The role of tension in pleasure
•Working with unconscious relationship dynamics
•God sex and co-dependency 
•Can I be intimate with abandonment issues?
•Intimacy and fundamental loss 
•How can I practice sexual conductivity in the body without a partner?

...

For instant access courses, events, and teacher training: www.michaelaboehm.com

To order Michaela's book "The Wild Woman's Way": https://amzn.to/3FJEBEa

Music by Steve James: https://www.guruviking.com/

Podcast #10: Human Energy System, Unblocking Pleasure, & Whole Body Ecstasy

Every January, hundreds of linguists gather in a conference room somewhere in the US to discuss and vote for the Word of the Year. It’s the longest-running and most public WotY proceedings, and it’s part of the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America. Gretchen was there this year and the past few years, while Lauren has never been (but actively reads the #woty16 hashtag on twitter!). 

We discuss what the ADS Word of the Year vote feels like from inside the room where it happens, the categories and politics around selecting a WotY, look at the different offerings from other organizations that also name a WotY (Lauren is pretty pleased that Australian Word of the Year was “democracy sausage”, while Gretchen would like a Canadian Word of the Year for 2017, thank you), and end up wondering what even is a word. 

We also respond to finally going live! Thanks for all your comments so far, and if you have a sec to rate us on iTunes or wherever else you’re listening, we’d super appreciate it.

Update: In the show we said that 'Trump’ was selected as sign for the year for Netherlands Sign Language. It was actually the Swiss Deaf Association, in Switzerland. 

For more information visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/155962380426/lingthusiasm-episode-4-inside-the-word-of-the

Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

04: Inside the Word of the Year vote

Red, orange, yellow, grue, and purple? Not so fast – while many languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, it’s unlikely that a language would lump these two together while also having distinct words for “orange” and “purple”. 

But how do we know this? What kinds of ways do different languages carve up the colour spectrum? Why does English say “redhead” instead of “orangehead”? How do colour words interact with smells, reading, and the human brain? In episode 5 of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen talk about what linguistic typology and psycholinguistics can tell us about colour words. 

We also chat about Lauren’s archiving work, and the iGesto gesture conference, and Gretchen’s upcoming ICLDC conference adventures.

For more information, transcript, and links mentioned in this episode, visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/157327666801/lingthusiasm-episode-5-colour-words-around-the

Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

05: Colour words around the world and inside your brain

English writing is hugely inconsistent: is “ough” pronounced as in cough, though, through, thought, rough, plough, or thorough? And once you start adding in other languages with different conventions and writing systems, things get even more complicated. How’s a person supposed to know whether to pronounce “j” as in Jane, Juan, Johan, Jeanne, or Jing? 

In the 1800s, linguists decided to create a single alphabet that could represent any sound spoken in any human language. After several revisions and competing standards, we now have the modern International Phonetic Alphabet with 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and a surprisingly passionate fanbase including linguists, musicians, and people who like cool symbols. 

In episode 6 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen talk about the history of the IPA, how it works, and some of the fun linguistics games and stories that have arisen around the IPA. 

For more information visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/159237203511/lingthusiasm-episode-6-all-the-sounds-in-all-the

06: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet

In this episode, Michaela Boehm and Steve James offer a Q&A from their Lineage and Liberation Workshop. Topics include:

• Body-based trauma approaches
• Summary of the emergent field of somatic trauma research
• The subtleties and pitfalls of releasing trauma in the body 
• The Grinberg Method 
• The pitfalls of cathartic release approaches
• The Non-Linear Movement Method® as a trauma release approach
• How to unlock sensitivity 
• The paradigm of pain 
• Working with the stress response
• Sensitivity and overwhelm 
• The importance of learning distinctions 
• How to improve psycho-sexual reaction time 
• How to radically increase bodily pleasure 
• Psychedelics and trauma release
• Catharsis and retraumatization 
• The psychology of addiction 
• How Michaela teaches people to work with anxiety 
• The mechanics of a panic attack 
• Detecting unconscious energy leaks
• Escaping energy vampires 
• Childhood patterns that create vulnerability to exploitation 
• The different lines of Kashmiri Shaivism and establishing authenticity 
• Steve on The Tantric Wedding Singer 
• The root text of Michaela’s lineage
• The role of discipline in tantric training 
• Michaela’s advice to younger women

...

For instant access courses, events, and teacher training: www.michaelaboehm.com

To order Michaela's book "The Wild Woman's Way": https://amzn.to/3FJEBEa

Music by Steve James: https://www.guruviking.com/

Podcast #17: Freeing Patterns, Energetic Mastery, and the Tantric Wedding Singer

– Would you like some coffee? 
– Coffee would keep me awake. 

Does that mean yes coffee, or no coffee? It depends! Is it the morning or the evening? Is the person trying to pull an all-nighter or take an afternoon nap? A computer looking strictly at the meanings of the words would be confused, but we humans do this kind of thing all the time without even noticing it. 

In episode 11 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about the hidden assumptions of cooperation that we bring to every conversation. They were formulated by the linguist Paul Grice, and are known as the Cooperative Principle or Grice’s Maxims. Not only does stating these assumptions explicitly help us understand conversations where we exchange messages beyond the literal meaning of our words, but it also explains a lot of humour – many jokes rely on creative flouting of Gricean Maxims! 

This month’s Patreon bonus was about language play: games like Pig Latin, rhyming slang, and Verlan, as nominated and voted on by our patrons. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about hypercorrection, the doggo meme, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

We hit our next funding goal shortly after recording this episode, which will allow us to start bringing on guest linguists, so stay tuned for more info on upcoming interviews!  

For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/164303700686/lingthusiasm-episode-11-layers-of-meaning

11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims

If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds? 

In Episode 13 of Lingthusiasm, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Associate Professor of linguistics at Pomona Collegem about her work on the speech of American black/biracial young men, prosody and intonation, and what it means to sound black. We also talk about how Obama inadvertently provided her research topic, the linguistics of the Wu Tang Clan, and how linguistics can make the world a better place.

This month’s bonus episode is a recording of our liveshow about discourse markers in Montreal in September. What do “um” and “like” have in common with “behold” and “nevertheless”? They’re all discourse markers! These little words and phrases get a bad rap for being “meaningless”, but they’re actually really important. Find out how, and picture yourself sitting among real, live lingthusiasts in the excellent linguistics section at Argo Bookshop, on the recording. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about language games, hypercorrection, swearing, and teaching yourself linguistics by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. patreon.com/lingthusiasm

For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/166585412086/lingthusiasm-episode-13-what-does-it-mean-to

LINGTHUSIASM ANNIVERSARY UPDATE!
We’re excited to bring you our first interview episode right before our very special 1-year anniversary episode in November! To celebrate a whole year of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting, we’re aiming to hit another milestone at the same time: 100,000 listens across all episodes. We’re currently at 83k as of right before posting this episode, so it’s totally doable, but we need your help to get there! Here are some ways you can help: 

- Share a link to your favourite Lingthusiasm episode so far and say something about what you found interesting in it. If you link directly to the episode page on lingthusiasm.com, people can follow your link and listen even if they’re not normally podcast people. Can’t remember what was in each episode? Check out the quotes for memorable excerpts or transcripts for full episode text.  
- We appreciate all kinds of recs, including social media, blogs, newsletters, fellow podcasts, and recommending directly to a specific person who you think would enjoy fun conversations about language!  
- If you didn’t get around to listening to a couple episodes when they came out, now is a great time to get caught up! 
- Write a review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts. The more reviews we have, the more that the Mighty Algorithms make us show up to other people browsing. Star ratings are great; star ratings with words beside them are even better. 

All of our listeners so far have come from word of mouth, and we’ve enjoyed hearing from so many of you how we’ve kept you company while folding laundry, walking the dog, driving to work, jogging, doing dishes, procrastinating on your linguistics papers, and so much more. But there are definitely still people out there who would be totally into making their mundane activities feel like a fascinating linguistics party, they just don’t know it’s an option yet. They need your help to find us!  

If you leave us a rec or review in public, we’ll thank you by name or pseudonym on our special anniversary post next month, which will live in perpetuity on our website. If you recommend us in private, we won’t know about it, but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction (and feel free to tell us about it on social media if you still want to be thanked!).

13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

Are you up for some prepositions? You might think you’re over prepositions, but have you ever really looked into them, or have you just gone by them? Other parts of speech notwithstanding, prepositions are something we’re really down with. 

In Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne introduce you to our favourite English grammar book, the mammoth, 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (affectionately known as CGEL), and take a deep dive into its 60+ pages all about prepositions. We also explore how it is that a grammar can even have sixty pages of things to say about prepositions in a single language and how the tricky edge cases are what makes grammar so interesting. Plus, we look at cousins of the preposition in other languages, like case markers, postpositions, and even circumpositions, why prepositions are complicated to translate, and pied-piping, the prepositional structure named after a fairy tale.  

This month’s bonus episode is about how linguists solve the divisive question  of what makes a sandwich a sandwich. We introduce prototype theory to solve sandwiches, explain how bats and penguins relate to the idea of ‘birds’, and explore other meaning questions. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about discourse markers, language games, hypercorrection, teaching yourself linguistics, and more by supporting Lingthusiasm at patreon.com/lingthusiasm  

We also now have Lingthusiasm merch! Check out our soft, patterned IPA scarves in red, olive, and navy; shiny Lingthusiasm logo stickers; and mugs, t-shirts, and tote bags that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT at lingthusiasm.com/merch. 

Thanks so much to everyone who spent the month recommending and reviewing Lingthusiasm to celebrate our first anniversary this episode! We had the ambitious plan to get the show past 100,000 listens, but we knew we could only do it if you helped to introduce Lingthusiasm to new ears. You stepped up and helped us get there right on schedule! If you left a recommendation or review in public, we’ll thank you by name or pseudonym on our special anniversary post next week. If you recommended us in private, we obviously don’t know about it, but we hope you still feel a warm glow of satisfaction.

For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/167572233831/lingthusiasm-episode-14-getting-into-up-for-and

14: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions

When we talk about things that languages have in common, we often talk about the physical side, the fact that languages are produced by human bodies, using the same brain and hands and vocal tract. But they’re also all produced (so far) by people from the same planet and going through the same fourth dimension: time. 

As the earth revolves around the sun again, each of your Lingthusiasm cohosts is going through another longest (Lauren) or shortest (Gretchen) day, and we’re reflecting on how languages measure the passing of time. This episode of Lingthusiasm is a chance to reflect on the cyclical nature of years and days, the metaphors we use to talk about time in space, from time-space synesthesia to whether the past is behind us or in front of us, and why we measure time in seconds, but not thirds. (We definitely know that tense is also a time-related concept, but it's such a cool topic that we're going to give it its very own episode -- something to look forward to!) 

Thanks to everyone who has made this year of Lingthusiasm so great! It’s been a year since we made our first episodes live, and we have been so delighted by how many people share our enthusiasm for linguistics. Thanks especially to our patrons, who keep the show running (and ad-free).

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is our first full-length bonus and it’s a question and answer session from our Montreal liveshow! Now you can have the full lingthusiastic liveshow experience with Bonus 8 (the main show) and Bonus 10 (the Q&A). We’ve still got IPA scarves and more in the merch section (www.lingthusiasm.com/merch), but if you’re looking for a gift that doesn’t require postage, why not give someone a gift subscription to bonus episodes on Patreon? (www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm)

For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/168801498861/lingthusiasm-episode-15-talking-and-thinking

15: Talking and thinking about time

Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___? 

You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if you’ve never heard the word “wug” before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s?  

Now try saying two cat__ 🐈🐈, two dog__ 🐕🐕 and two horse__ 🐎🐎. Why did you end up with catssss but dogzzzz, and have to add a whole extra syllable to horse? 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into the realm of language between words and sounds, the realm of morphemes like “wug” and “cat” and “-s” and “pre-” and “episode”.  What do you know subconsciously about how morphemes fit together? How do kids learn them from such an early age? How do linguists test what kids know about words? 

Wugs, in fact, are no longer often used for the wug test, because their cute, birdlike shape has become so famous as an unofficial mascot of linguistics that we can’t assume people haven’t seen the word anymore! People have made wug cookies, crochet wugs, wug memes, and more fun wug items, and you can check out some of our favourite wuggish links below. 

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is an interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk about communicating linguistics, and how we are all linguistic geniuses. We also have a new Patreon goal: at $1,200 we’re going to commission a linguist-artist to illustrate a memorable bit from the show! Everyone will get to see the art, which we'll also make available on merch, and patrons will also get a high-resolution download and behind-the-scenes concept sketches. To listen to bonus episodes and support the show, visit patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

To see this episode's shownotes, including how to run your own wug test and lots of fun wug creations, visit http://lingthusiasm.com/post/169866479416/lingthusiasm-episode-16-learning-parts-of-words

16: Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test

Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with... translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?”

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing. When we launched our Patreon this time last year (wow!) with a bonus episode about the sounds of swearing, we promised that we’d come back with even more about swearing that we didn’t have space to talk about. Now you can listen to a sweary double feature: put on bonus #1 and bonus #13 back to back! As always, episodes that aren’t specifically about swearing are swear-free. To listen to bonus episodes and support the show, visit patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

To see this episode's shownotes and definitely NOT get rickrolled, visit http://lingthusiasm.com/post/171912276831/lingthusiasm-episode-18-translating-the

18: Translating the untranslatable

What’s your favourite smell? You might say something like the smell of fresh ripe strawberries, or the smell of freshly-cut grass. But if we asked what your favourite colour is, you might say red or green, but you wouldn’t say the colour of strawberries or grass. Why is it that we have so much more vocabulary for colours than for scents? 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language and smell! We discuss research into how languages describe scents, colour-odour synesthesia, and how researchers go about doing experiments on smell vocabulary (featuring the gloriously-named Sniffin’ Sticks). 

Plus, we talk about how Lauren invented a scent-focused language for a YA fantasy novel! The book is called Shadowscent in the US or The Darkest Bloom in the UK, and it’s by PM Freestone. Lauren created the Aramteskan language that appears in the book. We discuss what it is like to work on a constructed language for a novel, and how Lauren brought her knowledge of linguistics into the creation of this language. 

-- 

November is our official anniversary month! To celebrate three years of Lingthusiasm, we’re asking you, our listeners, to share your favourite fact from the show! This helps people who need more linguistics in their lives realize that this is a place where they can get it, and helps show us what people find interesting. If you share on social media, tag us (@lingthusiasm) so we can thank you and reshare it.  

We also have new merch! All of the Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for the linguist or language fan in your life, and we love seeing your photos of it!  See photos of our new socks, greeting cards, glottal bottles, and t-shirts that say LINGUISTIC "CORRECTNESS" IS JUST A LIE FROM BIG GRAMMAR TO SELL MORE GRAMMARS at redbubble.com/lingthusiasm 

This month’s bonus episode is about surnames! We share the history of our own surnames, how different cultures approach naming, and when people change names. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the directions episode and 31 previous bonus episodes. patreon.com/lingthusiasm 

For the links mentioned in this episode, go to the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/188414891881/lingthusiasm-episode-37-smell-words-both-real

37: Smell words, both real and invented

In English you have one book, and three books. In Arabic you have one kitaab, and three kutub. In Nepali it’s one kitab, and three kitabharu, but sometimes it’s three kitab.

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren look at the many ways that languages talk about how many of something there are, ranging from common distinctions like singular, plural, and dual, to more typologically rare forms like the trial, the paucal, and the associative plural. (And the mysterious absence of the quadral, cross-linguistically!) 

It’s also our anniversary episode! We’re celebrating three years of Lingthusiasm by asking you to share your favourite fact you’ve learnt from the podcast. Share it on social media and tag @lingthusiasm if you’d like us to reshare it for other people, or just send it directly to someone who you think needs a little more linguistics in their life.

This month’s bonus episode was about reading fiction as a linguist! Check out our favourite recs for linguistically interesting fiction and get access to 30+ additional episodes if you’ve run out of lingthusiasm to listen to, by becoming a member on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm

For links and more go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/189218282891/lingthusiasm-episode-38-many-ways-to-talk-about

38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more

A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. "A fascinating listen that will change the way you see everyday communications." –New York Times. "Joyously nerdy" –Buzzfeed.  

Weird and deep half-hour conversations about language on the third Thursday of the month.

Listened to all the episodes here and wish there were more? Want to talk with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics? Get bonus episodes and access to our Discord community at www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm 
Shownotes and transcripts: www.lingthusiasm.com