This summer I spent time with Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Italian, Latin (unexpectedly!), and… well, okay, kind of all of them, at least in museum exhibit form.
So I did what any linguist would do and made myself into a guinea pig, comparing four different language learning strategies on four languages to see what happened. I’ve written up an Introduction/overview and some highlights and…
Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).
There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!
We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!
This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.
We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
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, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).
The latest viral internet trend is creating AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli. You've very likely seen them by now—or maybe even created some yourself.
They look something like this:
But did you know there's a connection between Ghibli and a very common Hebrew root?
As noted, the images are inspired by the style of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation (anime) studio. The Wikipedia entry gives this explanation for the origin of the studio’s name:
The name "Ghibli" was chosen by Miyazaki from the Italian noun ghibli (also used in English), the nickname of Italy's Saharan scouting plane Caproni Ca.309, in turn derived from the Italianization of the Libyan Arabic name for a hot desert wind (قبلي qibliyy). The name was chosen by Miyazaki due to his passion for aircraft and also for the idea that the studio would "blow a new wind through the anime industry.".Although the Italian word would be more accurately transliterated as "Giburi" (ギブリ), with a hard g sound, the studio's name is written in Japanese as Jiburi.
And where does the name of the wind come from? The Wiktionary entry for ghibli defines it as: "sirocco (a hot, dust-carrying desert wind in North Africa, somewhat similar to the foehn)." The sirocco is a similar type of wind to the hamsinfamiliar in Israel.
The same entry also provides this etymology:
From Italian ghibli, from the Libyan Arabic form of Standard Arabic قِبْلِيّ (qibliyy, “coming from the qibla”)
And what is the qibla? It is the direction Muslims face when praying toward Mecca, literally meaning "direction." For those in Libya, the qibla would be east, toward Saudi Arabia. The Wiktionary entry notes that the etymology comes from Arabic قِبْلَة (qibla, “that which is opposite”).
And this meaning, "opposite", brings us to the Hebrew root קבל kibel, which as I've written about here previously, also originally meant "opposite":
The root קבל in earlier biblical texts did not mean "receive", but
rather "to be opposite", or "before, in front of". From the sense of
"opposite" comes the meaning of makbil מקביל - "parallel" or
"corresponding", as found in the description of the loops of the
tabernacle (Shemot 26:5). As with the previous verb, קבל was also
influenced by Aramaic, and so in the later books of the Tanach, came to
mean "receive", since a person receiving stands opposite the person
giving.
So while it's quite a journey from Japan to the Middle East, we've once again found a connection between a popular modern word and an ancient biblical cognate.
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