Gretchen: I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.
Lauren: The octopus.
Gretchen: The octopus.
Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.
Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet. So, Greek does not make these plural by adding I to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.
Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”?
Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /aktaˈpodiz/.
Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more’
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and words.
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Hi! Why is the prepollex always called a “false” digit or a pseudothumb? Some species I can see it just has a single bone in there, but in other diagrams of different species (eg Hyalinobatrachium) it looks like it has several separate bones like a normal finger. Is it missing musculature or a joint that would categorize it as a proper thumb? Or is it to do with its origin, so even if it were a perfect copy of a thumb it still would be called a false digit?
The latter; the prepollex does not seem to have the same origin as the rest of the digits. This also means that it lacks the musculature and other structures associated with a normal digit. Frogs are ancestrally tetradactyl on their hands (as are salamanders, by the way, pointing to ancestral tetradactyly in basically all lissamphibians, meaning that the pentadactyl forelimb might actually have crystallised on the amniote branch, rather than already being fixed in the tetrapod common ancestor). So, any fifth 'digit' showing up in modern frog hands today must be secondarily derived.
The inimtable Darren Naish has written a bit about this.
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I saw this on Twitter and then asked some Chinese friends about it because I thought it was super cool. Because yeah, apparently two-syllable (or two-part? Like below with “share”) loanwords can be reanalyzed as separable morphemes.
One friend also said it sounded outdated lol like from when she was little, maybe 15 years ago or so. But still!
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Harpy genders
Harpies have an odd gender ratio, since males develop their plumage at different rates. Drake males are a slim portion of their population, so to outsiders, harpies look like a species with female majority. Most males, rooks, will develop female coloration until they are sexually mature, they are considered shrikes until there is a development in male color.
Their gender is their color, gender is not related to size or body parts. Leucisticism is shockingly common, and is the result of genetic conditions of the parents. Apollo and his father both carry this gene, and is a reason why Apollo only has sisters. Leucistic males are still counted as shrikes.
Harpies can also alter their color status with dyed feathers, make up, and diets that change the pigment and oil production of their feathers. Though, it is difficult to achieve a drakes full body coloration this way.
next installment will be about secks so rember to liek and suscibez and commet on your favorite harpy gender <3
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Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode
Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they're called the irrealis.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples under the irrealis umbrella. We talk about various things that we can mean by "reality", such as how existing fictional concepts, like goblins playing Macbeth, differ from newly-constructed fictions, like our new creature the Frenumblinger. We also talk about hypothetical statements using "if" (including the delightfully-named "biscuit conditionals), and using the "if I were a rich man" (Fiddler on the Roof) to "if I was a rich girl" (Gwen Stefani) continuum to track the evolution of the English subjunctive. Finally, a few of our favourite additional types of irrealis categories: the hortative, used to urge or exhort (let's go!), the optative, to express wishes and hopes (if only...), the dubitative, for when you doubt something, and the desiderative (I wish...).
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
Thank you to everyone who shared Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. We hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzies!
In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we've ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about invented swear words like "frak" and "frell", sweary lexical gaps (why don't we swear with "toe jam!"), and interpreting the nuances of regional swear words like "bloody" in fiction.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
'Irrealis' entry on Wikipedia
'How do you get someone to care about Shakespeare? Two words: Goblin Macbeth' on CBC
xkcd comic 'Conditionals'
'Pedantic about biscuit conditionals' post on Language Log
'The pragmatics of biscuit conditionals' by Michael Franke
Lingthusiasm episode 'This time it gets tense - The grammar of time'
'Realis and Irrealis: Forms and concepts of the
grammaticalisation of reality' by Jennifer R. Elliott
'If all the raindrops' on YouTube
'If I Were a Rich Man (song)' entry on Wikipedia
'Rich Girl (Gwen Stefani song)' entry on Wikipedia
'Louchie Lou & Michie One' entry on Wikipedia
'Louchie Lou & Michie One - Rich Girl' on YouTube
'Semi-Toned - Rich Girl (acapella)' on YouTube
'Subjunctive mood' entry on Wikipedia
'Céline Dion - Pour que tu m'aimes encore' on YouTube
WALS entry for 'Feature 73A: The Optative'
Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala'
Lingthusiasm episode 'Listen to the imperatives episode'
'Dubitative' entry on Wikipedia
'A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman)' entry on WikiJournal of Humanities
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
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