05: Colour words around the world and inside your brain

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Red, orange, yellow, grue, and purple? Not so fast – while many languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, it’s unlikely that a language would lump these two together while also having distinct words for “orange” and “purple”. But how do we know this? What kinds of ways do different languages carve up the colour spectrum? Why does English say “redhead” instead of “orangehead”? How do colour words interact with smells, reading, and the human brain? In episode 5 of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen talk about what linguistic typology and psycholinguistics can tell us about colour words. We also chat about Lauren’s archiving work, and the iGesto gesture conference, and Gretchen’s upcoming ICLDC conference adventures. For more information, transcript, and links mentioned in this episode, visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/157327666801/lingthusiasm-episode-5-colour-words-around-the Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:15.0	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:17.0	I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're going to be talking about color.
0:20.0	But first, we want to point out that all the transcripts for previous episodes are now online, so you can check those out.
0:27.2	And Lauren, what have you been up to lately?
0:29.9	I have been in the world of gesture and the world of language data archiving.
0:34.8	So I've been at EGesto conference in Porto in Portugal which
0:39.3	was a delightful place for a delightful conference and I've been archiving language
0:44.8	data with a couple of projects one of which is super exciting and I don't want to be
0:49.7	one of those people that like holds exciting projects over people's heads but I've
0:53.7	been doing some work with
0:55.2	1970s data recordings that's pretty cool and coming along nicely and of course getting my own
1:01.2	data into an archive that will be accessible for other people to look at whether they're
1:05.4	speakers of the language or interested in the language or want to do linguistics on it so that's been
1:10.4	my month how How are you?
1:11.8	I have had a pretty quiet month, but at the end of February, I'm heading to ICLDC, which is the
1:18.4	International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in Hawaii.
1:22.1	I am so jealous. I say having just come back from Porto.
1:26.5	I am really excited because I've been hearing
1:28.7	about this conference for years and I have not made it yet. So this is a big international
1:33.1	conference about language revitalization and I'm going to be running some workshops on getting
1:39.1	your language information on Wikipedia and I'm also really excited to learn more about what other
	...

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