About this podcast
I say tomayto, but you say tomahto. Why? What cognitive, economic, racial, or social factors led you to say tomahto and I tomayto? How did you acquire the ability to produce and perceive coherent sentences? These are some questions that linguists attempt to answer scientifically. Led by Talia Sherman, a Brown University undergrad, this podcast explores language: what it is, how it works (both cognitively and in practice), and its relationship to politics, history, law, pedagogy, AI, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, critical theory, and more!
Episodes
The newest 20 of 37 episodes
- Evaluating AI World Models w/ Keyon Vafa · 56 minKeyon Vafa (postdoc at Harvard) studies the implicit world models that generative models learn (or at least are constrained into representing). How do we make sense of these…
- Literary Studies and Liberalism with Amanda Anderson · 1 h 0 minAcross Amanda Anderson’s scholarship, she notes a mutually beneficial and complex relationship between the aesthetic and the political. There’s a “political potency” to art that…
- Sean Carroll on Theoretical Physics and Interdisciplinarity · 1 h 11 minUltimately, this episode is about science and scholarship. As Sean says, “understanding something as well as you can in science means that you need to confront the data and be…
- Data Science and Machine Translation w/ John DeNero · 48 minWe've been told time and time again that we need to understand data in context: it's an ethical imperative. Not every language gets an LLM; not every population fully understands…
- Listening, Semiotics, and So Much More w/ Michael Berman · 1 h 14 minIn language-centric fields we privilege the speaker. Linguistics looks at spoken or signed utterances; linguistic anthropology does as well. But Michael Berman looks at…
- The Modern Dictionary w/ Stefan Fatsis · 60 minWe’re in a paradoxical time for dictionaries, claims Stefan Fatsis. On the one hand, we’re bombarded by words and ways to understand them in this lexically intense…
- Language Ideologies w/ Savithry Namboodiripad · 59 min“And that’s what ideologies are: the air that you’re breathing, something that feels like it’s common sense.” From start to finish, this episode is about ideologies: their…
- The AI Con w/ Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna · 1 h 6 minThe AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna…
- Philosophy of Language w/ Justin Khoo · 1 h 21 minJustin Khoo, an associate professor of Philosophy at MIT, begins this episode with the assertion that philosophy asks the most fundamental questions we can possibly…
- Neurolinguistics, Phonetics, and Language Change w/ Chiara Repetti-Ludlow · 38 minThroughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech…
- Education, Anthropology, and Schoolishness with Susan Blum · 45 minIn early 2023, Susan Blum came on Tomayto Tomahto to discuss linguistic anthropology. 2 years later, she's back to discuss her work on schoolishness, ungrading, and linguistic…
- Communicating Climate Science w/ Josh Willis (NASA) · 41 minA defining quirk of fields like English, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, etc is that the the objects of study mirror the medium through which the objects of study are…
- A Raciolinguistic Perspective with Jonathan Rosa · 1 h 15 min"What frame allows you to take seriously the consequence of ideological overdetermination without conceding that it has a reality or a natural position?” This is one of many…
- Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 2: Optimality Theory and the Tapestry of Law · 45 minWhile legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics, it has been estranged (until now) from the practice of adopting linguistic theory and methods. In Part 2 of our…
- Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 1: Dialectal Due Process · 41 minLegal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics. After all, law is, in some sense, a linguistic construction. But our entire legal system interfaces with language far…
- Words, Words, Words w/ Ben Zimmer · 59 minBen Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is a self-described "linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut," but I think this episode proves him to be a…
- Sociolinguistic Labor and Linguistic Oppression w/ Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright · 54 minPeople often talk about language as "a window" into many things. Language can teach us about the mind, the brain, history, etc. But language is also a medium for discrimination…
- Stochastic Parrots and the Information Ecosystem with Emily M. Bender · 52 minThere’s a lot that I can say about Emily M. Bender, but I think that a philosophy professor of mine said it best when he described her as the “cutting edge of technology and AI…
- Historical Linguistics with Brian Joseph · 39 minTo study language is to study something uniquely human. To study language throughout time and history is to study the evolution of something uniquely human, to determine the…
- Live from NYC: Favorite Linguistics Facts · 42 minPicture this: it's early January, 2024, and hundreds upon hundreds of linguists have gathered for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)'s annual meeting in New York City. With…
