Sterling Martin was in grad school, studying C. elegans worms, when COVID19 hit and suddenly he found himself in lexicography, as part of a team creating a Navajo-English dictionary of science terms.
Read moreAllusionist 168. Debuts
There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies. Today Kalle Rocklinger, sex educator with RFSU, the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden, talks about how and why over the years, the RFSU has come up with and publicised new terms for body parts and sexual acts, and what they would still like to change. This is the first part of the Telling Other Stories series, about renaming things.
Read moreAllusionist 147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2
"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added an option for people to register their official gender as X; with it, the country's strictly binary-gendered naming laws were suddenly transformed. Other changes, like a new genderfree pronoun, are catching on; but overhauling a whole grammatically gendered language is no easy undertaking.
Read moreAllusionist 146. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 1
The Icelandic language has remained so stable over the centuries, speakers can read manuscripts from 900 years ago without too much trouble. And when they need a new word for more recent concepts, there are committees to coin one, so that the modern Icelandic lexicon includes such things as the internet, helicopters and mansplaining. Defending the language from the encroachment of English, however, is rather more challenging.
Read moreAllusionist 136. Misogynoir
“It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is,” says Moya Bailey, who coined a term that enables people to discuss a specific combination of racism and sexism: misogynoir.
Read moreAllusionist special: Podcast Podcast
Here’s a special episode about the word that brought us all together… aaand a lot of you hate it.
Read moreAllusionist 95. Verisimilitude
When you’re watching a fantasy or science fiction show, and the characters are speaking a language that does not exist in this world but sounds like it could - that doesn’t happen by accident, or improvisation. A lot - a LOT! - of work goes into inventing new languages that sound real. Conlanger David Peterson talks about how he created languages for HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Read moreAllusionist 64: Technobabble
You've encountered technobabble when Doc Brown is shouting about flux capacitors in Back To The Future, or when Isaac Asimov writes about positronic brains. Astrophysicist Katie Mack and NASA JPL technologist Manan Arya discuss how science fact relates to science fiction.
Read moreAllusionist 5: Latin Lives!
For years, I've been wondering why a radio station in Finland broadcasts a weekly news bulletin in Latin.
And now, I have found out.
Antti Ijäs from Nuntii Latini - now the Finnish Broadcasting Company's longest-running programme - explains how he invents new Latin words for modern concepts, and why the show is important even though, outside of the Vatican, not many people speak Latin any more. Listen now via iTunes, your favoured podcast directory, or RSS.
FOR EXTRA CREDIT:
Examine the vocabularies for Nuntii Latini.
Explore Vicipaedia, the Latin Wikipedia.
Sign up for your free monthly Latin puzzle book, Hebdomada Aenigmatum.
Learn a whole load of interesting stuff from the Reading, Writing, Romans blog
Try to understand the Papal tweets.
Have you seen Plebs? It's worth it for the theme tune alone, but I’m particularly amazed that a sitcom has been commissioned that is not only full of jokes aimed at the ever-rarer breed that is Latin students, but targeted specifically at those who had The Cambridge Latin Course textbooks.
Let's not forget the Latin grammar jokes in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
skelf
Say hi at facebook.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/allusionistshow, and come back in a fortnight for the next episode.
Valete!
- HZ
CREDITS
Presented and produced by Helen Zaltzman.
Antti Ijäs has a blog about etymology, which makes me wish I understood Finnish.
Here is Nuntii Latini's website (OK fine, here's an English translation) and the weekly bulletin is available as a podcast from iTunes.
MUSIC:
'Allusionist Theme' - Martin Austwick
'Latin Lingo' - Cypress Hill
Theme from Carry On Cleo
Theme from I, Claudius
'You Will Be Back Someday' - Kevin Tihista's Red Terror
