73: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, Latin in Science, and Internet Linguistics

Episode notes

Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm joins us to casually answer all of our pressing linguistics questions with the most mind blowing facts.  Why does science use so much dang latin, and what is so unique about internet linguistics?

Images we Talk About:
Gretchen’s Favorite Frogs

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:10:58) Latin in Science
(00:54:49) Misc & Internet Linguistics
(01:22:46) Outro

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We also learn about: Words that change the state of the universe, a promise is a kind of magic, “people ask me how i make a living doing linguistics and it’s very simple actually” just make podcast wagers, the language of space, space pidgin language, “that’s a great hypothesis and it’s actually hte opposite of that” sometimes the answer is imperialism! English is being used in science now how Latin was back then, the vulgate bible was latin to reach more people even the “vulgar”, you’re cousins a scribe learning latin – what are you doing a podcast? “Writing is a Technology”, writings only been invented like 4 times, writing originated as reciepts and lists, the A is an upside down ox, why invent a new letter when that means having to change the printing press – just double letter! you access computing through programming and programming is linked to language, we don’t know whether the first language was spoken or signed, french linguists once banned the discussion of the origin of language bcause it was deemed “fruitless”, it’s wild we could retrofit our brains to read and write at all, changing, linguistically accurate sesame street, “Who would know aught of art must learn, act, and then take his ease”,  Ella you have goregous tripthongs, nice try Gretchen but our 69th episode was a few back, the Mini frogs, isn’t a linguistic podcast niche? you’re saying that to me in a language, Gretchen loses her words and makes perfect sense, Gretchen went back in time to give herself this mystery book, you don’t have to be the version of yourself you imagined when you were twelve, Linguistics loves undergrad researchers to explain the youths, there’s always new linguistics to study, the kids are changing language- and that’s so fascinating, linguists and polyglots are related but not the same, what makes internet language Uniquely internety, is it really internet lingo or just AAE, the internet made people write a lot more than they used to, informal and unmediated writing is uniquely internet linguistics, people have wanted a sarcasm punctuation since at least 1575, emoji are a form of gesture, postcards were sometimes numbered like twitter threads, Gretchen did Sooo much research into the literature of sarcasm, the potential for misunderstanding is the point of sarcasm, “sarcasm is this linguistic trustfall”, pushing the boundaries of what a language can be, Solresol the musical conlang, language is everything – rainbows are language, whitespace programming language,