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65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
🕑 Added 2022-02-17 23:56:05 +0000 UTCIt 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.
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!
LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.
For links to everything in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/676480179186597888/episode-65-knowledge-is-power-copulas-are-fun-it
Comments
Lauren Fotiades
My current D&D campaign has the catchphrase "the more friends, the more happy!" for an npc, which popped into my head about halfway through the episode I think, so when you got to null copulas and "the more, the merrier" at the end of the episode I was all like 😲😲😲!! Also, on "Lingthusiasm exists a podcast"... I feel like I can actually see that as a valid construction. Not in regular speech, sure - but if I saw it in like a translation of Beowulf, I don't think I'd bat an eye.
Yonatan Zunger
Oh good, I've been looking forward to some copulation!
Squeeee for the mention of #CelticCopulas ! (The Irish equiv of tha is tá, & Wiktionary says it’s part of the *st(h)eh root family. So tá & is map pretty precisely to estar & ser.) I’m wonder if we can trace back a connection? I’m imagining some key monks being obsessed with Neoplatonist categories of permanent & temporary characteristics…. Aaaanyway, a v fun esipode!
