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Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd
🕑 Added 2022-09-16 00:32:11 +0000 UTCWhat’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English speaker?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about absurd hypothetical linguistic questions with special guest Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. We only wish that there was a little more linguistics in the book. So Randall came on to fill the gap with all his most ridiculous linguistics questions! One of our unresolved questions that we can merely speculate about is our predictions for what the future of English might be like. Are you listening to this episode from more than two decades in the future? Please write in from 2042 or later and let us know how accurate we’ve been!
Announcements:
We’ve teamed up with linguist/artist Lucy Maddox to create a fun, minimalist version of the classic International Phonetic Alphabet chart, which you can see here (plus more info about how we put together the design). It looks really cool, and it’s also a practical reference tool that you can carry around with you in a convenient multi-purpose format: lens cloths!
We’re going to place ONE (1) massive order for aesthetic IPA chart lens cloths on October 6, 2022. If you want one, be a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher on October 5th, 2022, timezone: anywhere in the world. If you’re already a patron at that tier, then you’re set! (That’s the tier where you also get bonus episodes and the Discord access, we’ve never run a special offer at this tier before but we think this time it’ll be worth it!).
In this month’s bonus episode we chat with Lucy about redesigning the IPA! We talk about how Lucy got interested in linguistics, how she got into art, how we started working with her, and the many design considerations that went into making a redesigned IPA chart.
Click here for the full show notes, which includes links to things mentioned in this episode
Comments
We had a D&D player way back when who insisted that "tome" (the Tome of Magic) was pronounced like "tomb" /toom/.
Matt Zweig
I really enjoyed this episode! While I always love your content, I think it’s fun to bring in a “layman” to ask random linguistic questions.
ADHDProgrammer
With respect to words pronounced like the are written, I have found D&D to be a rich source of these. Our DM still says Meal-ee for melee, and Chim-er-a rather then KY-MEER-A for chimera. He knows the 'right' way to say these, but he first learned them as a teen in the 70s from the PHB and DMG, and ever heard them said aloud until much later. Generally, those old D&D books had a lot of uncommon words with greek, latin or french roots, and weird spellings.
