Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.

Show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/3-lets-talk/ Subscribe: http://becauselanguage.com/listen/

How does conversation work? Why are videoconference calls so awkward and terrible? Why can we say goodbye multiple times in a conversation, but good morning only once? And how do we get good at being a conversationalist?

David Crystal tells us about his book Let’s Talk on this episode of Because Language.

Language is a lot like love. You can enjoyably lose yourself in both. They can both be dangerous. And they both entail a responsibility to keep each other safe. A new book Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is both a language book and a memoir, connecting the strands of language learning, language love, and language loss. Daniel speaks with author Dr Julie Sedivy.

Also: Large language models have proven adept at duplicating patterns of language that humans find possible. But what about impossible language patterns? Can LLMs learn those? And what even is an impossible language? Dr Matt Spike explains.

Timestamps

• Cold open: 0:00
• Intros: 0:34
• News: 5:49
• Interview with Matt Spike: 32:01
• Related or Not: 50:57
• Interview with Julie Sedivy: 1:05:34
• Words of the Week: 1:33:33
• The Reads: 1:55:04
• Outtakes: 2:01:21

Here’s an entire show, curated by one of our most prolific contributors — newly minted speechie PharaohKatt!

She’s got news. She’s got words. She tries to stump us on Related or Not.

She even teaches us how to roll our R’s. Wow.

But best of all, she answers all our questions about speech and language pathology.

ChatGPT has just landed. It can generate text that seems fluid, plausible, and (surprisingly) not total nonsense. It's got a lot of people wondering what's left for humans — and for the field of Natural Language Processing. Here to help us is computational linguist Daan van Esch.

For our first episode, we asked some of our linguist and lingo-pod friends what their favourite thing is about language.

We are joined by:

• Ben Zimmer
• Carrie Gillon (The Vocal Fries)
• Ellen Jovin (Grammar Table)
• Grant Barrett (A Way with Words)
• Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne (Lingthusiasm)
• Jane Solomon (The Dictionary of Difficult Words)
• John McWhorter (Lexicon Valley)
• Nicole Holliday (University of Pennsylvania)
• Ryan Paulsen (Lexitecture)

Much gratitude to all our friends for their kind support.