Episode 75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions (Patreon)

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the  specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For  example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings:  familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love  this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the  less intense querer and the stronger amar. Conversely, many Austronesian  languages use the same word for the concepts that English would split  as “fear” and “surprise”, while many Nakh-Daghestani (Northeast  Caucasian) languages use the same word for the cluster that English  splits into “fear”, “anxiety”, and “grief”.

In this episode, your  hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the  layers of language that are involved in emotions, from how emotion words  form different clusters of related meaning in different language  families to how the way your face shape changes when you smile affects  the pitch of your voice. We also talk about how our understanding of how  to talk about emotion changes throughout history and our lifespan, and  how bilingual people feel differently about emotional words in their  different languages.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank  you so much for celebrating our 6th anniversary with us! We appreciated  all the love and support on social media, and it was great to see you  recommending us to other language fans. Thank you to anyone who made an  irl recommendation of the podcast, we appreciate you too!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about stylized Oldey Timey English! We talk about  contexts in which pseudo-archaic forms get used, from Gretchen's recent  experience with names and titles in a 1492 papal election roleplaying  game, to how the language handbook of the Society of Creative  Anachronism balances modern-day desires for gender-neutral language with  creating historic-feeling titles, and a 1949 academic article  cataloguing business names in the New York City phonebook that began  with "ye".

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/703740969788522496/episode-75-love-and-fury-at-the-linguistics-of