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Lingthusiasm Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
🕑 Added 2020-11-19 23:46:26 +0000 UTC“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick” seem even less likely. What’s going on?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the underlying pattern behind how sounds fit together in various languages, what linguists call sonority. We can place sounds in a line – or along the steps up a mountain – according to how sonorous they are, and this lets us compare and contrast how languages put together their syllables. We also talk about the incredibly weird case of S.
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This month’s bonus episode is a behind the scenes look at the creation of Crash Course Linguistics! We’re joined by Jessi Grieser, the third member of our linguistics content team behind the scripts of Crash Course Linguistics. We talk about how we structured the syllabus of Crash Course Linguistics, how Gavagai came to be a recurring character in the series, finding our delightful host Taylor Behnke, and what it’s like working with the awesome teams at Complexly and Thought Cafe.
Announcements
We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and we’ve seen a significant bump in listens each November when we ask you to help share the show, so we know this works. If you tag us @lingthusiasm on social media in your recommendation post, we will like/retweet/reshare/thank you as appropriate, or if you send a recommendation to a specific person, we won’t know about it but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction at helping out (and feel free to still tell us about it on social media if you’d like to be thanked!). Trying to think of what to say? One option is to pick a particular episode that you liked and share a link to that.
Also, Crash Course Linguistics videos are coming out every Friday! Subscribe on YouTube, or sign up for Mutual Intelligibility email newsletters to get an email when each video comes out, along with exercises to practice the concepts and links for further reading.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/635258033226776576/lingthusiasm-episode-50-climbing-the
Comments
Incidentally, the video includes diagrams of the oral cavity and other interesting linguistic content.
In the episode, you mention two languages which have syllables without vowels. But I think you are missing the classic example of Czech and the well-known phrase Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "Stick your finger through your throat". There is a lovely YouTube video of a song with this text you might enjoy: https://youtu.be/olL-uToqtLk . Or look it up in Wikipedia.
