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Category: language (page 4 of 22)

Talk the Talk: Gorilla Baby-Talk

19 June 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Gorilla Baby-Talk

I’m fascinated by the origins of our language. I feel like I’m always building up more of the picture of how it came about, and today’s podcast features two new pieces.

Piece one: Some linguists hold to social interactionism, or the idea that young humans acquire language in a social context. And what do you know: apes appear to use simplified gestures to their young.

The other piece is lip smacking. Macaques smack their lips, and that’s the kind of coordinated fine mouth movement that could have provided the bridge from grunts to discrete sounds.

Language appears to have left its traces in other species, leading all the way up to us.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Talk the Talk: Search Insights

12 June 2012 / / 1 Comment

Search histories are pretty honest. Under the cover of (supposed) anonymity, we search for things we wouldn’t admit. But it all goes into the data pile, and then I talk about it on the radio! You see, today’s podcast is about Google Insights for Search, which is a very cool way of browsing through Google’s query data for all the things people are looking for, by location.

That’s where the fun begins. Near the end of the podcast, I mention a few sexual paraphilias, and in which Australian state they’re most searched for. The strange thing is that Western Australia doesn’t seem to come in at number one in any of them.

Which is where you come in. If you can find out what sexual practises WA leads the nation in, I’d be most grateful if you’d post it in comments. Please — I’ve got to know what people around me are getting up to. It’s driving me crazy.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Talk the Talk: Lost in Translation

5 June 2012 / / 4 Comments

Ordinarily I’m not into unusual words from other languages. Yes, they exist, but why make them into some weird curiosity? Even so, I thought this article was interesting

25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist in English

and I thought there were some things to say about language categories and lexical gaps.

Plus the fact that English would be so much better with a word like ‘tartle’. Let’s all borrow it.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Talk the Talk: Rape

31 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Rape

I have to say, I approached this show with a bit of trepidation, since ‘rape’ is such a potent word and I thought people would be angry about whatever I said. But you have to tackle the tough ones sometimes. And some people do throw the word around, so I wanted to address it. One politician referred to ‘raping companies‘, which does seem trivial. And then Fox’s Catholic priest referred to the government ‘raping their rights’. Don’t you think that of all people, a Catholic priest would want to divert attention away from that word? I’ve never noticed him being so concerned about actual rape.

Yes, we do discuss the word ‘rape’ and its history, but we’re really talking about how to navigate language change. Is it okay to use the word ‘rape’ metaphorically, like “raping the wilderness”? Or does that trivialise real rape? On the other hand, the word ‘rape’ has been stricken from actual trials where sexual assault is the real issue! I was a juror in a sexual assault trial years ago, and I don’t recall the word ‘rape’ being used.

Hang out ’til the end — there’s a little bit of post-show chatter.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Talk the Talk: Really Old Art

22 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

A good Talk today — it’s always fun with Stacy G. This time we’re talking about cave art, and what it has to do with language.

So they’ve found a limestone slab dated to 37,000 years ago, it’s got a carving on it, and it’s a vulva. Here’s a pic (from this article): (SFW)

No, not the circular thing with the tail. The thing inside the circle. Or am I just seeing things? I’m not used to looking at vulval imagery.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Gayvoice: Is it real?

20 May 2012 / / 7 Comments

There’s a new study that claims that people can detect gayface with 80% accuracy. But I’m not satisfied with it — when you dig down, the study really says that some people can get up to 80%, but everyone as a whole scores 57%, which starts to look a lot like random chance.

What about gayvoice? Lots of people are certain they’re gayvoyant, and they give a lot of plausible explanations for the voice — gay people use extra sibilance that serves as a socio-linguistic signal, and so forth — but I think that’s getting ahead of the game. Before we try to explain gayvoice, we have to make sure it’s real. As a starter, I’ve set up a quasi-scientific experiment.

The concept is simple. I’ve pulled twelve samples of male voices from episodes (chosen at random) of Dan Savage’s wonderful Savage Lovecast, where people call up and ask Dan for sex advice. The podcast is publicly available, so one presumes the guys in question consented to having their voices out there. Each of the guys identified as either gay or straight (but not bi or trans), and I’ve chosen a bit of their call that I think gives enough to get a feel for their voices, but not enough to give their orientation away.

Guess which guys are gay, and which are straight. You’ll see how well you did at the end of the test, and I’ll post the overall results in a couple of weeks.

<a href=”http://goodreason.polldaddy.com/s/gay-or-straight”>Click here to take the quiz.</a>

polldaddy.add( {
type: ‘button’,
title: ‘Click here to take the quiz.’,
style: ’rounded’,
text_color: ‘FFFFFF’,
back_color: ‘000000’,
domain: ‘goodreason.polldaddy.com/s/’,
id: ’16CC078F34156E61′
} );

Just one catch: At the moment, the poll does not work on Safari — it doesn’t let you see the audio clips. Apparently the new version of Safari has broken a few different poll sites. Use a different browser.

If you’re curious about gayvoice, people have studied this a bit.

  • Benjamin Munson is on the forefront of the research [ 1 | 2 (pdf) ]
  • Uncle Cecil of the Straight Dope has treated it.
  • So has the Economist.
– – – – – – –
UPDATE
It’s been about a week, so I’ve put some results after the jump.
The way to read this chart: A green bar is the right answer, so when the green bar is on top, most people got it right. 
The upshot: People picked gay voice correctly only half the time. Looks like random chance to me. You’d actually have done better if you’d assumed everyone was straight.
This doesn’t mean gayvoice isn’t real though. It just means these test-takers couldn’t tell from these samples. And there might have been a lot of confounding variables.
  • The samples weren’t long enough, or of high enough quality.
  • The speakers were listeners to the Savage Lovecast, and might have had more-gay friendly attitudes, which might have affected their speech patterns.
  • This means they might have been more willing to accommodate to the person they were speaking to (viz, Dan, a gay guy).
  • Talking about your own sexual problems might make you speak differently.
  • Just because the general public can’t pick it doesn’t mean it’s not real. What about other gay guys? I didn’t do a breakdown that way, but it would be interesting.

Obviously, there are ways of speaking which are considered stereotypically gay, but from this test, they don’t seem to be reliably detected by most people. “More research is needed.™” Thanks to all to took the test. 
Also, a shoutout to Polldaddy — there are lots of polling services, and I tried them all, but theirs was the easiest and most helpful, especially when embedding audio clips. Try them for all your polling needs.

Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes

16 May 2012 / / 1 Comment

This is a surprisingly simple guide to Hangul, the Korean writing system.

Another fun fact: Hangul was once called “Achimgeul” (아침글) or “writing you can learn within a morning”. It was intended as an insult, but I think ease of learning is a good thing, don’t you?

Talk the Talk: The Persabian Gulf

15 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: The Persabian Gulf

Did Google plan to be in the middle of international conflict when they started Google Maps? Perhaps not — and yet, here we are. Labelling it the ‘Persian Gulf’ gets the Arabs mad, and calling it the ‘Arabian Gulf’ irks the Iranians. And that’s just one of many trouble spots around the globe.

It’s kind of our fault, though. Google wouldn’t be such an authority if we didn’t all rely on it so much.

It was a pleasure to talk to the effervescent Stacy Gougoulis this week. Check us out!

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Grammar police: A case study

14 May 2012 / / 5 Comments

I don’t usually share Facebook conversations, but you gotta see this. It’s like a lot of rants from grammar police, but this one hits all the highlights.

Here’s the original grab: “George Lucas disses neighbours by doing something awesome”. One reader looked askance at the appearance of the word ‘diss’.

At this stage, I’ve decided that only a gentle corrective is required. But this reader escalates.

Whoa. Who knew that the word ‘diss’ would cause such an ‘appauling’ ‘degredation’ of language? One would have thought that someone so devoted to the preservation of correct English would… use it. I’m forgiving of bad spelling and punctuation, but not when someone holds themselves up as a protector of language. Grammar police should take note: when you have a rant, it’s a virtual certainty that you’ll start spelling words wrong.
What bugs me most, though, is the presumption that a word that comes from Black American usage is automatically ‘lazy’, ‘degraded’, ‘uneducated’, and ‘eroded’. This is what privileged speakers of the standard variety tend to throw at people who speak non-standard varieties. Racism isn’t cool, but criticising their variety of language is an acceptable substitute.
There’s no linguistic reason to think that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with African-American Vernacular English. Like all language varieties, it’s regular and rule-governed. His rant says nothing about language, and everything about his own attitude towards people of colour. After all, why is he complaining about the slang term ‘diss’, and not the equally slang term ‘awesome’? It’s simple; white people say ‘awesome’, so that’s okay.
So here’s what I usually say to grammar police (plus a poke at the ‘lazy thug’ jibe).

But this reader is not one to hearken to liberal elitist linguistics professors. He responds with a blistering salvo.

Oh, I’m Australian! That explains everything! Who knows what kind of made-up mumbo jumbo they speak?
And then he blocked me, so the fun had to stop.
So let’s finish by noting the common features of the linguistic fascist, all of which are present in this exchange:
  • A belief that language change is indicative of some kind of moral decline
  • A belief that — not just using non-standard varieties of language, but simply borrowing words from them! — will cause ignorance, indolence, and crime
  • A volatile and touchy sense of privilege that easily erupts into attacks of bile
  • Terrible spelling and punctuation

Pareidolia of the Daylia: Mishka the Talking Dog

11 May 2012 / / 1 Comment

Mishka’s a talking dog, or so they say. She can do a passing impersonation of a person saying “I love you”, as long as the person isn’t speaking too distinctly, is chewing a lot of gum, and happens to be a dog.

It’s a funny thing about talking animals, though — it’s a lot like listening to records backwards for hidden messages. It’s just random sounds until someone tells you what you ought to be listening for, and after that, it’s as clear as can be. You have to be primed.

Here, try this: Click on these links, but keep your eyes closed to avoid the priming (usually in the title). Is there any difference between the howls?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_6X0aRDGlg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki13JIVwMdk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKFS3YUP1lo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnYt_g9GjvI

Oh, well. Nice dog. She’s happy to vocalise. I just hope people aren’t taking this too seriously. But people took Alex and Victor seriously, and they were both just similar cases of pareidolia. So you can never be too sure.

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