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Transcript Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘On the nose - How the nose shapes language’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about what the nose knows – how the nose is used in language. But first, next month is our 9th anniversary! We love making this show, and we love our anniversary as a moment to say thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for linguistics.

Lauren: To help celebrate, this year we’re asking you to take a moment to rate the show in your podcasting app of choice and to leave a review if you like.

Gretchen: Sometimes I wonder what rating actually does for a podcast.

Lauren: Look, I’m sure there’re some murky, algorithmic ways that it’s used, but it’s also a really useful way to help other people find the show and let them know it’s worth their time.

Gretchen: Podcasts don’t have public listener stats, so when I’m looking at a new show that I’m thinking about listening to or that I might do an interview on, I’ll have a look at the general number of ratings and reviews to get a vibe for the show. That’s where this can help us out.

Lauren: I use a small podcast player. And even there, it’s a big difference in whether a show has zero reviews or a few. Feel free to rate or review on any platform big or small.

Gretchen: We’ll be sharing some of our favourite reviews on social media and in the credits to episodes for the next year, so stay tuned, and you might see your review there.

Lauren: Speaking of things we’ve enjoyed seeing, we’ve enjoyed seeing your photos of the jazzed up Lingthusiasm logo sticker in your lives. If you missed out on one of the stickers or if you want to see the design on other objects, we’ve now also made it available on other merch including t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more.

Gretchen: We’ve also made a new merch item, which are greeting cards that say, “/mɛɹi mɛɹi mɛɹi / holidays.”

Lauren: Do you mean “merry / marry / Mary holidays”?

Gretchen: That’s why the subtitle says, “Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful, festive season.”

Lauren: Also, Gretchen, shouldn’t it be “Merry Christmas” not “Merry Holidays”?

Gretchen: No, because this bonus extra linguistics – hearing or reading “Merry Holidays” produces a surprise effect on the brain, known officially as an “N400.” Other examples from linguistic experiments include, “I take coffee with cream and dog.”

Lauren: Okay, I’m glad you did not put that on a gift card.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I just don’t think it would sell as well. With this card, you are doing language variation, sound change, and psycholinguistics.

Lauren: And with nine years of the show, we also have a great back catalogue of linguistics merch from classy gifts for your favourite prof or linguistics graduate to deep cut references to some of our favourite episodes to designs that look great even if your friends don’t get the linguistics reference. You can get scarves and t-shirts and notebooks and mugs and all sorts of linguistics merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was about synonyms, homonyms, and many, many other less familiar types of -nyms. You can get access to this and nine-years-worth of bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: “Please do not turn your nose up at today’s topic.”

Gretchen: “Let’s just follow our nose and see where we end up.”

Lauren: “Okay, this is already getting on the nose.”

Gretchen: There are a lot of nose-based idioms. We tried to find an authoritative source that would give us a long list, and it was a bit of a challenge. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs reminds us of “cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face,” which is when you –

Lauren: Poor choice.

Gretchen: Poor choice. And a longer list from The Free Dictionary reminds me of “get your nose out of joint,” “put your nose to the grindstone,” “have your nose in a book.” In a lot of these, the nose stands for what you’re looking at, what you’re focusing on. When you see the direction someone’s nose is pointing, you have a sense of where they’re going. There were also some more obscure examples like “strap on the old nose bag.”

Lauren: As in “to eat something” like a horse uses a nose bag to eat?

Gretchen: Exactly. Depending on how many horses you’ve encountered in your life, you may or may not be familiar with the term “nose bag.” I had seen nose bags but not this idiom. The example sentence they give is “Whenever we get to grandma’s house, I love to strap on the old nose bag. She’s such a good cook.”

Lauren: [Laughs] Okay, that’s not an idiom I would access in my everyday life.

Gretchen: I don’t think my grandma would be flattered by the idea that eating at her place is like strapping on a nose bag. I think she’d think that was poor table manners.

Lauren: That’s one that’s out of use but still somewhat accessible to us. I had a poke through the Oxford English Dictionary for some historical nose-based idioms we no longer use. This one, which was used in the 1500s, is “to have a nose of wax.”

Gretchen: Is that a person with a really prettily moulded nose?

Lauren: No. The waxiness is relevant. It’s a person or a thing that is easily turned or moulded, so a person who’s easily influenced or has a weak character.

Gretchen: Ah, that makes sense. I have the obsolete idiom “to bite by the nose.”

Lauren: It sounds very violent. To be really rude to someone?

Gretchen: Sort of – to treat with contempt. The Oxford English Dictionary has a quote from Shakespeare that says, “Has he affections in him that can thus make him bite the law by the nose?”

Lauren: Oh, taking on the law – by the nose. I have “to make a bridge of a person’s nose.”

Gretchen: I have no idea. Make them put on a little hat?

Lauren: Very cute. It’s when you – again, treating the nose as standing in for the whole person – when you pass over a person. You treat their nose like a bridge, and you just go straight across them.

Gretchen: All right. I have not encountered that idiom before. I really wanted to come up with some sort of large typological survey of all of the different nose idioms in all of the different languages, and you can find a lot of people making lists of idioms that are supposedly in various languages and, unfortunately, for the most part, do not meet the evidentiary standards that we like to set ourselves as a podcast because they will have no citations. Have you found anything in other languages about nose idioms?

Lauren: I did have a poke around the published literature and, again, it was a bit spotty. Definitely no elegant, one-stop database of idioms. I found a paper on Romanian and English where the author noted a lot of parallels between English and Romanian in terms of the way the nose stands in for the person or their intuition or is connected to either ideas of pride or disdain/bad behaviour.

Gretchen: Turning one’s nose up at someone.

Lauren: Yeah, so a similar kind of idiom space for noses in Romanian and English. Then I found a paper on Arabic body part idioms in general that had an Arabic idiom that literally translates as “His nose is in the sky” where “sky” is the equivalent of “air” – someone who has their nose in the air is disdainful and arrogant. Again, similar uses of the nose being paid attention to. I couldn’t find any nose-based idioms that were drastically different to our own cultural sense of what the nose does.

Gretchen: You could imagine maybe there’s a language somewhere or maybe this would be a science fictional concept of some other use of the nose in the metaphorical space, but people see to have a relatively similar idea of the nose in conceptual space, it’s just that we don’t have a lot of data on this.

Lauren: For a lot of language documentation work, idioms are not necessarily documented very consistently. It’s very hard. They’re very productive. They’re quite idiosyncratic. They’re hard to elicit out of people spontaneously sometimes. It’s understandable why it’s difficult. It’s a pity we can’t report back on the cognitive landscape of what the nose means in idioms across languages.

Gretchen: But what we can report on is the use of the nose to make specific sounds. There is a lot of database work on this, which is really exciting. We can use the nose to make certain sounds like the /m/ sound and the /n/ sound – M and N. Please feel free to make all of these sounds along with us. I’m sorry if you’re in public right now. This is one of those episodes –

Lauren: I’m not sorry that you’re in public right now.

Gretchen: – where we make you make some sounds.

Lauren: I’m delighted. We also have the sound /ŋ/ which we have at the end of words in English like “hung,” but in other languages, it can be at the start or in the middle of a word as well. Tibetan languages have it at the start, so a word like /ŋə/ for “five” would be an example.

Gretchen: There’s also the /ɲ/ sound, like in the word “onion,” which is found in some words in English and very common in other languages – famously written with a tilde on it in Spanish, for example. For all of these sounds, your mouth is closed off at some point. You’re blocking the air from coming out of your mouth, and you’re opening up the nasal passage in the top of your throat, the back of your mouth, to let air out of your nose instead, which you can verify empirically.

Lauren: It is very easy to see the mouth closed off for an /m/ sound, but even for those /n/ and /ŋ/ sounds, you’re closing off the mouth, just further back.

Gretchen: And you can hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel how there isn’t air coming out of your mouth and there is air coming faintly outside your nose when you try to make these sounds. My hand is drifting up to my mouth so I can try this, but of course, I can’t do it while I’m actually talking.

Lauren: What would happen if you, say, blocked your nose while you were also blocking your mouth, Gretchen?

Gretchen: If I pinch my nose so that air can’t come out of it, and I still try to make an /m/ sound or an /n/ sound, nothing happens. It’s very anticlimactic on a podcast because nothing comes out anymore.

Lauren: You can physically block and release the nose to really feel that there is the air and, therefore, the sound coming out through your nose.

Gretchen: We can vary the kind of nasal sound that gets produced by closing off the mouth in a different spot to make the chamber of the instrument of your vocal apparatus into a different shape and, thereby, make a different shape of a sound come out. /m/ and /n/ are particularly common ones in languages around the world. /nm/, /ŋ/, /ɲ/ – /ɲə/ and /ŋə/ – also quite common, but there’s a bunch of them.

Lauren: Having at least one of these nasal consonants is very common in languages. In fact, Gretchen, we have a typological survey we can refer to.

Gretchen: Yes! I love a typological survey.

Lauren: Because the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has a bunch of maps about phonetics, including a map that is a bit of a fun one because it’s the absence of common consonants. Nasals are so common that it’s actually weird when a language doesn’t have them. On this map, there’re 12 languages out of over 500 – so 2% of the sampled languages – do not have nasals. They are randomly spread across the map. This is not like there’s just one language family that’s weird. It’s like, language families for spoken languages on the whole have nasals. There’re just some fun family members who, for some reason or another, do not have them.

Gretchen: Sort of eccentric cousins that are like, “Yeah, yeah, we don’t have nasals, but all of our relatives do.” 98% of languages have some kind of nasal sound. To be fair, it is easier to make a database of how many sounds a given language has because languages tend to have somewhere between a dozen and several dozen sounds compared to the number of idioms in a language, which can be practically infinite.

Lauren: Permanently changed. We do change sounds in a language. It’s a lot slower and a much more generalised-across-the-population process. If we worked hard, Gretchen, we could coin a couple of idioms and make them happen within our own little group.

Gretchen: Maybe by the end of the episode. Maybe we can bring back the “strap on the old nose bag” idiom.

Lauren: [Laughs] It is, as you say, much easier to do databases of the kinds of sounds you have in a language than the kinds of idioms you have.

Gretchen: The vast majority of languages have at least one nasal. English has like, three. How far up on the nasal list do we go?

Lauren: We can go all the way up to, I think the most extreme inventory I’ve seen documented is 13 distinct nasals in Yélî Dnye, which is an unclassified language of Papua New Guinea, spoken on Russell Island. Thanks to the fact that it has some really fun things like co-articulated nasals and some extra modifications for each of the places of articulation, it gets up to 13 distinct nasals.

Gretchen: I have a list here of its 13 distinct nasal sounds. I’m gonna try to produce them. I am not a Yélî Dine speaker, but I know the International Phonetic Alphabet, and I can give it a try. I’m gonna produce it with a little vowel after them so they’re a little easier to hear. We have /m, mʷ, mʲ, mʷʲ, n̪, n̪͡m/ – that’s a /n/ and a /m/ produced at the same time. I’m not terribly good at coarticulation. Then we have our further back n̠, n̠͡m – again, that different type of N-ish sound with an M – /n̠ʲ, ŋ, ŋʷ, ŋʲ, ŋ͡m/ – again, coarticulated with the M. I don’t imagine I did it as well as a Yélî Dine speaker would, but that was neat. That’s a lot of nasals.

Lauren: Excellent performance. That is a lot of nasals, especially compared to a language like English. So far, we have only been talking about nasal consonants. We fully closed off our mouth. We’re letting all the air come through the nose. But we also have nasal vowels.

Gretchen: In a regular vowel, what we also call an “oral vowel,” the air just comes out of your mouth, as you can verify by /a/. A nasal vowel, the air is coming out of both your mouth and your nose. This fills in the tableau of like, air just comes out your nose, that’s a nasal consonant; air just comes out your mouth, that’s an oral sound – could be a vowel, could be a not vowel; air comes out of your nose and your mouth, that’s a nasal vowel; air comes out of neither, silence.

Lauren: Also a useful part of language, silence, but we’re not gonna cover it here.

Gretchen: Not very linguistically interesting.

Lauren: Great.

Gretchen: Well, we did a whole episode about silence. We can link to that one. So, nasal vowel – I learned how to do nasal vowels before I learned about them in linguistics because they’re found in French. In French, you have an oral vowel like /o/, and you have a nasal vowel like /ɔ̃/. In a word like /bo/, which is “beautiful,” versus /bɔ̃/, which is “good,” the difference between these two vowel sounds is whether you also have some air coming out of your nose.

Lauren: You sound a little bit like the Wikipedia page for nasal vowels, which has a warning that “The examples and perspectives in this section deal primarily with French and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject.”

Gretchen: Oh, no! I’m not representing a worldwide view of the subject. I feel like this is more of a problem for Wikipedia than it is for me personally.

Lauren: Also, because we have access to the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, and WALS has a map on vowel nasalisation where there are around a quarter of the languages sampled that have some kind of nasal vowel contrast in their inventory.

Gretchen: One of the things I noticed about the French nasal vowel inventory is that there’s quite a lot of oral vowels and fewer of them that can be made nasal, but as this might not represent a global view of the subject, do you know if that’s something that’s true in other languages as well?

Lauren: It is true for a lot. The slight majority (I think it’s like 60% of the inventories in this survey) had fewer nasal distinctions than they had for oral vowels.

Gretchen: That’s kind of neat. I remember when I was first learning how to transcribe stuff in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I was really frustrated by the idea that the /æ/ sound in “at” and the /æ/ sound in “an” or “ant” didn’t feel entirely the same to me. Yet they were telling me, “Oh, just use the /æ/ symbol for all of them,” but I was like, “Yeah, but the one before the N feels a little bit different to me.” This is because English also has a bit of vowel nasalisation, but what we do is we just make a vowel a little bit more nasal when it’s next to a consonant that’s also nasal.

Lauren: We’re being efficient. We’re getting ready for that nasal consonant by just starting that process of opening up to the nasal cavity.

Gretchen: Exactly. This is a process by which a nasal vowel can evolve in other languages. In French, there didn’t used to be a nasal/oral vowel contrast. It just used to be that some vowels were before an N, and then you would start producing those with a nasal vowel, and then eventually the nasal itself gets dropped, and you just have the nasal vowel, and suddenly there’s a contrast. In English, we don’t have any words where there’s a distinction between /æ/ and /æ̃/. That’s not a distinction we have. We don’t consider English to have nasalisation at a level that’s important to distinguish between different words, but it is subtly there, especially in rapid speech, as we’re preparing to say a nasal consonant.

Lauren: These kind of influences of sounds on each other are very well known. In fact, there is a particular kind of association. If you have a language that has glottal consonants – so they’re those ones all the way back at the glottis at the very back of the vocal tract.

Gretchen: So, like a /hɑ/.

Lauren: /hɑh/ is a great example –

Gretchen: An H sound.

Lauren: – where they are more likely to have a nasalised vowel following them.

Gretchen: Hunh. Oh, wait, I just made one. I guess that, at first, I feel like those are so different because I feel like the nose is really at the front of my face and the glottis (the larynx, the voice box – all words for the same thing) is really at the back of my throat. But if I think about making a nasal sound, I am actually moving that little flap of tissue that’s at the back of my nose/top of my throat, which when you think about it is actually quite close to the voice box, so maybe there’s an overlap between these. That’s great.

Lauren: It’s such a common tendency across languages. It has an absolutely unnecessary fancy technological name, which is “rhinoglottophilia.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] So, the nose and the voice box – they’re friends.

Lauren: They love each other.

Gretchen: They love each other. Are we sure there’s not fan fic about the nose and the voice box having little shenanigans?

Lauren: I can only hope. But it is, as you said, a great reminder. That bit that’s moving up and down to open up the nasal cavity, that’s at the very back of the soft part of your palate. If you wash your hands, you can put a finger in your mouth and feel how the top of the roof of your mouth is quite hard, and then as you move back, if you’re not prone to weak gag reflex, you can feel where it starts getting soft, and then way back, past where you want to safely stick your finger, or where you can possibly stick your tongue, is this little flap that opens up the nasal cavity or closes it off.

Gretchen: I have not empirically tried to access my own little flap. I have just made the sounds and been like, “Ah, I guess it must be moving because I’ve made /n/ and /a/ and felt things moving.” But you don’t have a lot of nerve endings there. You can’t really tell what’s going on. When we were researching this episode, I reached out to a linguist who I know named Kevin McGowan, who’s a linguist at the University of Kentucky, who has a lot of thoughts about noses.

Lauren: That’s the kind of expert comment we love to get.

Gretchen: I was like, “Yeah, I just wanted to verify – you know, you have a little flap in your throat, that this thing that I learned in intro linguistics is still correct.” And he was like, “Well, it turns out that it’s more complicated than that.”

Lauren: Ooo, it’s more complicated. That is absolutely the story – just like flaps open and closed – or goes halfway for a nasal vowel.

Gretchen: Indeed. Remember how there’s different kinds of Rs? We did a whole episode about Rs, and it turns out there’re different kinds of Rs. They sound the same, but you can produce them differently in your mouth. It turns out the nasals are the same. There are different ways you can create this sort of the closure depending on what you experimented with as a baby and what you were trying to do was duplicate the sounds that you were hearing from people around you. You didn’t have access to the back of your throat. You couldn’t see what other people were doing. You couldn’t see what yourself was doing. You were just experimenting and trying to make sounds that sounded like what other people around you were making.

Lauren: If we’re not just flapping open and closed, what else are people doing back there, Gretchen?

Gretchen: Most people do do the trap door thing that we learned about in intro linguistics, but there’s also a thing where you can kind of do the trap door thing and also pull the sides in at the same time. It kind of folds up like an envelope. Then there’s the wildest one is the circular method where you just sort of close it from all sides. It looks like a string purse from above.

Lauren: Okay, wow. They are very different methods of achieving the same end.

Gretchen: Or I guess if you were rounding your mouth but closing it at the same time, you’d be closing it from all sides. Do I know which one I do? Absolutely not. None of us knows which kind of nasal closure we make.

Lauren: We’re all walking around like little nasal mysteries.

Gretchen: Except possibly for Kevin because he tried to find out what this area looked like on him. I have to report that there is a public service announcement where Kevin says that Susan Lin – his colleague and he – “once spent two days giving me the worst headaches of my entire life” trying to use an ultrasound to poke at the back of my neck to create an image of this.

Lauren: Those probes are not soft. You really are going in hard at the base of the skull there to try and get to the nasal cavity, which goes really far back into the head – more than you want to think about.

Gretchen: It’s actually quite close to the ear. It’s really far back. Kevin says, “To this day, I feel a little guilty for not figuring out how to publish, ‘Please don’t try this. You’ll get a massive headache’,” so we’ve promised Kevin that we will give the PSA of “If you wanna try to look at what the back of your throat is doing, don’t do it by trying to stick an ultrasound wand into the back of your head and give yourself a massive headache.” We don’t advise it.

Lauren: But there’s a good point that we can use methods for studying what’s happening with nasals other than just listening or using acoustic sound waves.

Gretchen: One method people have used to study nasals (which is a little bit gross but is not gonna give you a headache for two days) is to use earbuds.

Lauren: As in the cheap, small headphones that I have on a cable for when my wireless earbuds die. Those kind of –

Gretchen: Well, I think either the wired or the wireless kinds, but the tiny ones you put in your ear, you can also put them in your nose.

Lauren: Okay. Get a different pair. Get a second pair. They’re not expensive.

Gretchen: [Laughs] You can also put them in your nose – carefully, don’t stick them all the way up – and then you can play things either with the earbud into your nasal cavity, and then have a recorder at your mouth to see how much the sound has changed by its going through the nose bit and going through the mouth bit.

Lauren: My own voice goes through my nose from my voice box out. You send out sounds but through the “in” hole back, and then you listen to what’s coming out the mouth to get a sense of what’s happening in those cavities.

Gretchen: Yeah. Or the inverse – you send sounds out through the mouth and then you use the earbud to record what they sound like when they come through the nose.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because headphones and microphones are just the same technology but backwards.

Gretchen: Exactly. If you play an /a/ – like a pure tone /n/ – and you make it go through your mouth or your nose or one or the other, and you know what the sound was originally because you have the original recording of it, you can see how much it changes by artificially playing it out of your nose or your mouth or the opposite direction, whereas if you just put it from your voice box (where it normally comes from), it’s harder to record it at the source of your voice box before it reaches the rest of your nose and your mouth. That’s why you might do a study like that.

Lauren: I feel like when we learnt about this kind of articulatory phonetics, we spent so much time thinking about the oral cavity (because there’s so many things you can manipulate in there), but there’s a lot going on in that nasal cavity as well. It’s not small. It’s about the size of the oral cavity, give or take, and there’s a lot of variation between people.

Gretchen: I feel like it was when I started doing nasal swab tests for COVID and flu and stuff that I really realised that the inside of my nose was bigger than I thought it was even though I’d seen the diagrams in linguistics class.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, and I still had (while drawing my little undergraduate heads and where the nasal cavity was and the oral cavity) I think I still had this very naïve sense that because your nose has that little angled sticky-out-y bit on your face that my nostrils went up in that direction, but your nostrils basically go straight back in all the way to your ear, as you said.

Gretchen: If you think of a skeleton, it’s got nose that goes all the way back because there isn’t the little cartilage bit there that’s protecting it presumably from stuff getting in for the most part.

Lauren: If you’ve had a particularly disgusting cold, you know that your nasal cavity can hold a lot of content.

Gretchen: Thank you for that.

Lauren: To be as discrete about it as possible.

Gretchen: It can hold an entire French fry. But did you know that you really have two noses?

Lauren: No! I’ve got two nostrils. Are you telling me those nostrils are completely separate not just at the start but all the way through?

Gretchen: They are separate down quite a bit. One of your nostrils is more open at any given time. They take turns in the nasal cycle every few hours depending on the person.

Lauren: Oh, they share. That’s very cute. That’s nice.

Gretchen: This has an influence on how you breathe, but it doesn’t have a huge influence on speech sounds because both of them work fine as acoustic resonators, so we didn’t learn about it in linguistics class. I just think it’s neat.

Lauren: Also, a shameless etymological digression, but “nostril” literally means “nose hole,” and that “thrill” is the same as “thrilling” as in something was so intense that it moved you so deeply –

Gretchen: That it pierced your soul.

Lauren: It pierced your emotional soul, and it was absolutely “thrilling” – same “thrill” hole as “nostril.”

Gretchen: I’m gonna start calling them “nose thrills” now.

Lauren: [Laughs] That’s my thrilling etymology for you. Now, humans have the same size oral and nasal cavity. Elephants are an animal that has a much larger nasal cavity.

Gretchen: Do you mean the trunk?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Okay. I guess that makes sense because when we make nasal sounds, like if you hum, you can hum at about the same pitch as you can sing because your nasal cavity and your oral cavity are a pretty similar size, but elephants can make different sounds with their mouths versus their noses.

Lauren: Yeah, and they can get really low rumbly sounds through the trunk because it’s a much, much bigger cavity, and that seems to be important for the way they do long-distance communication. That’s one way that humans and elephants are different.

Gretchen: There’re no other ways. Humans all over have noses, presumably also have words for noses. They’re pretty salient features.

Lauren: It does turn up on the Swadesh List, which we have problematised before, but it is seen as a basic set of vocabulary you are likely to be able to encounter across the world’s languages.

Gretchen: You know, they’re culturally important as well. You use them for smelling. They look significant. Something that I was intrigued to learn from a study that came out a little while ago was that, statistically speaking, more languages have words for nose that reference the nose – that have a nasal sound in it like /n/ as in “nose” – than you might expect by chance. It’s not all of them, but kind of a lot.

Lauren: This is a 2016 paper from Blasi et al. What is important about this paper is they were like, “Look, people have been saying this for ages,” but what this paper did for this and a whole bunch of other words was look at a balanced and weighted set of vocabulary lists. It’s not just that you were like, “Oh, heaps of languages I know have a /n/ or a /m/ in the word for ‘nose,’” and you’re like, “Yes, because you only know Indo-European languages. You’re biased.”

Gretchen: Which literally have a common etymology in – yeah, okay.

Lauren: Yeah. This took that into account. It weighted everything properly. When you take away coincidence for language family and other coincidences, it’s still a greater-than-chance likelihood that people are like, “Ah, I’ve got this thing on my face, and it’s involved in these sounds.” There is some kind of link that’s happening there.

Gretchen: I do find that very pleasing. I’m very pleased both by the statistical weighting – that they did a responsible study, and they did not, you know, over-sample French like the Wikipedia article (someone could fix that), but also that it actually turns out to be true that this hypothesis, this gut feeling that people had had, turns out to be weighted when you do the proper stats.

Lauren: That was what was exciting about that paper is that people had had this hunch, and it really showed that there is some relationship between words for “nose” and some nasal element to what that word might be, which is a very low baseline permeation of iconicity across spoken languages.

Gretchen: When things resemble, in form, the meaning that they have, as in “nose” and nasal resemble each other, that shows up.

Lauren: Perhaps equally unsurprising if you look at the word for “nose” across sign languages – I haven’t seen this done systematically, but in our little survey of online sign databases, all of them also make use of the fact that the nose is right there, available, as a place of articulation, and they mostly just point towards the nose to indicate “nose” in sign language.

Gretchen: There were a few differences, like the video we found of Langue des Signes Française, French Sign Language, had them tapping the nose twice, whereas all the other languages that we noticed had the person tap on the nose once. There may be a few other differences that are not in readily available sign language dictionaries on the internet because we only looked at about five of them, but it seems not super surprising to me that they would also invoke the nose literally being right there.

Lauren: I feel like the nose and nasality comes up a lot in the way people perceive speech. We’ve talked about how nasal sounds are used as part of a sound system. But some people will have more or less of that nasal resonance happening in their everyday speech as well. As listeners, we’re very perceptive of it.

Gretchen: I find it really fascinating that there’s two things that people can mean when they say that someone’s speech sounds “nasal.” Since we’re an audio podcast, I can demonstrate. [Having-a-cold-type nasal voice] One of them is, you know when you have a cold, and everything just sounds a little bit stuffed up, and nasal, because there’s no sound actually coming out of the nose at all. I am reproducing this – not by giving myself a cold but by pinching my nose while saying these sentences.

Lauren: You sound quite stuffy, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Indeed. That’s because I was pinching my nose. People will say this sounds “nasal,” which in this context means doesn’t use the nose at all. [All-the-air-through-the-nose-type nasal voice] And then there’s the kind of the speech where you’re really talking into the nose, making the nose vibrate more.

Lauren: I can see how hard you’re concentrating trying to sustain that throughout your entire speech stream. That is not where your nose normally ends up.

Gretchen: [All-the-air-through-the-nose-type nasal voice] No, it’s much harder. I’m not trying to do any particular accent. I’m just trying to speak [normal voice] into the nose more, which I will confess is not my typical register.

Lauren: It’s funny because I feel like when you speak like that, my brain also wants to register that as being a nasal-y voice, but you’re literally doing the opposite this time.

Gretchen: Right. I’ve definitely seen a lot of linguists express frustration – it’s like, “What do you mean ‘nasal’ means both with the nose and without the nose?” Dennis Preston, who’s a linguist that does a lot with perceptual dialectology (what people think of how other people speak), he makes this nice point that’s like, when folks say “nasal,” they just mean “involving the nose in some unexpected way.” That could be both more nose or less nose. It’s just that it’s doing nose stuff, and I’m noticing.

Lauren: It’s a nifty way of thinking of these two completely opposite phenomena, and we lump them in the same way.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Lauren: We’ve talked about spoken language phonology. The nose is also very important in a lot of sign language phonology as a place of articulation for where signs get made.

Gretchen: One of the important aspects when you’re making a sign is you have your hand or hands doing something, and that can be in various places. That could be out in neutral space in front of you; it can be in contact with various parts of the body (the other hand, the arm, the mouth, the nose, the chin) and one of those places is the nose.

Lauren: The nose is a passive articulator because it’s not the thing that’s moving. It’s usually one of the hands or both the hands are coming up to the face and performing a sign in a location. The nose is one. I find the face very interesting in signed languages because you can have a lot of different places, like the nose, the chin, the cheek, the forehead, may all be different places that the same hand shape can then have a different meaning because they’re different places of articulation.

Gretchen: Even though these places may be just a couple inches, a couple centimetres away from each other in the way that if the place was your forearm, which is also a place that you can locate a sign, moving a couple inches on your arm doesn’t necessarily make a huge difference in terms of meaning, but on the face, those couple inches between the nose and the cheek or between the nose and the chin can make a really big difference in terms of meaning because we’re so attuned to the subtle spots on the face.

Lauren: And I think because the nose is right there in the centre of this more sensitive articulatory space, it’s a very prominent place of articulation.

Gretchen: I felt like I wanted there to be – much as with all of this other idiom research – a list of signs that involve the nose as passive articulator in someone’s PhD dissertation. We did not find this. We looked at quite a bit of research. There isn’t a lot of categorising signs by their place of articulation. It has been more common that people categorise signs by the hand shape, and so trying to find a list of signs that were made with the nose was not something that was available.

Lauren: We can tell you whether languages have nasal sounds for spoken languages. There’s no equivalent database of whether languages use the nose as a place of articulation across signed languages, which would’ve been nifty to have.

Gretchen: If somebody ever creates this sign language typological resource, maybe in many years when the research arrives there, we will be delighted to know about it and share it with you. Lauren, is there gesture research on nose-related gestures?

Lauren: The nose is used in quite a few emblems, which are those gestures that are meaningful for particular cultural groups. A couple of them show up in this big survey from the very late ’70s across Europe where people are looking at where gestures of this particular kind get used across Europe and what meanings they have. The first one is the “nose thumb.” Well, they call it the “nose thumb” in their book, but it’s where you put your thumb on your nose, and you wiggle all your other fingers upwards.

Gretchen: Oh, I definitely know this gesture from childhood. I think I would probably call it “cocking a snook,”

Lauren: Ah, yes.

Gretchen: Or the “naa naa nana na” gesture (with intonation).

Lauren: I don’t think I had a name for it. I think I would literally have just called it the “naa naa nana na” gesture.

Gretchen: You’ve got to singsong that.

Lauren: But it has a really specific meaning for me of like, I’m making fun at you.

Gretchen: But often in a silly way. You don’t necessarily make it to someone that you’re mad at in traffic. It’s a real sort of “I’m the king of the castle” type gesture, not a like, “Hey, you cut me off!” type of gesture.

Lauren: Yeah, I have a few others for that. But this gesture is a great example of how you don’t have to have a name for something for it to have a very specific meaning for you. What I love most about this from the survey is they were like, “This is the only gesture that appears all across Europe and with the same meaning consistently for everybody.”

Gretchen: Wow. Yeah, I thought it was just in my childhood, but it’s really all over the place. It doesn’t have one consistent name. Does it have a whole bunch of names?

Lauren: There’s 500 years of documentation of this as a mockery gesture. It has, thanks to those hundreds of years of documentation, a bonkers list of names in English alone, including, as you said, “cocking a snoot.”

Gretchen: I would say, “cock a snook,” I think, rhymes with “book.”

Lauren: “Snook” and “snoot” kind of appear to be the same. They both mean a nose, like a dog nose, or like “cock an eyebrow” or “cock a gun,” which means to “raise,” so like “raising a snout” – “raise a nose,” “raise a snout.” Other names include “Queen Anne’s fan.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] Queen Anne’s fan – oh. Someone’s being saucy with her fan.

Lauren: A “Shanghai gesture,” which apparently “Shanghai” is an Australian word for a slingshot. It’s like your – got a little slingshot at your face. “Coffee milling” – because it’s the same action as grinding coffee.

Gretchen: Grinding coffee with your nose, coffee milling, okay.

Lauren: The “five-fingered salute” – pretty self-evident there.

Gretchen: I can picture it as a five-finger salute.

Lauren: Yes. And “pulling bacon” because to be “bacon-faced” was to be pulling a face, like a silly face.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I love it.

Lauren: I love that the authors – they just kind of threw their hands up when it came to the etymology or the meaning behind this gesture. They’re like, “Maybe it’s a deformed salute. Maybe you’re mocking thumb sucking. Maybe it’s making a grotesque nose. Maybe you’re suggesting the person stinks. Maybe you’re threatening to flick snot at someone.” They’re like, “We don’t know. The nose is just – it’s doing something.”

Gretchen: It’s doing something. This gesture has been around for 500-plus years. It’s all over Europe. We don’t know where it came from. And we don’t know why it means that.

Lauren: To give you a sense of just how wildly consistent that is, the other nose-based gesture that they have in their survey is to tap the side of your nose with your index finger.

Gretchen: I think I would have that as meaning keeping something a secret, like “Let’s just keep that between ourselves.”

Lauren: That’s a common meaning for that in the UK and parts of Italy.

Gretchen: Does it mean other things in other places?

Lauren: Yes, and it’s a pretty wild mix. It can mean “Be alert” or “I am alert,” but that’s only in Italy. It can mean “I know what’s up,” but that was only recorded in Belgium and Scotland. You can indicate someone is clever. Again, that was only in Southern Italy and Scotland.

Gretchen: Maybe I have the clever meaning, too. That’s sort of like a secret – like someone that’s clever can maybe keep a secret or knows secrets.

Lauren: I mean, yeah, there’s definitely overlapping threads here. You can accuse someone of being “nosey” in the UK by doing this gesture, or you can threaten someone who’s being nosey if you’re in southern Italy, Malta, and some bits of the UK.

Gretchen: There seems to be this UK/Italy split here. But they did their survey across many places in Europe. It was just those two places that particularly had this tapping the side of the nose gesture.

Lauren: This particular kind of gesture. Some of them were about secrets. Some of them were about alertness. Some of them were about threats. A much more mixed bag compared to the cocking a snook gesture that was really, really prevalent.

Gretchen: And really consistent. I learned a French gesture that means someone’s drunk, which involves putting a fist up at your nose and then twisting it to the side. You can also tilt your head at the same time. To indicate maybe it’s like the bottle that’s being poured down your throat, or your nose has gone red because you’re drunk or something like this. I don’t know the exact connotation of it, but these are one of the official French gestures that you need to learn about in French class. This was one that involved the nose.

Lauren: There’s a lot of different emblems that involve the nose. You can pinch your nose or scrunch your nose to indicate an unpleasant smell. You can raise your nose to show that aloofness of the idiom that we discussed earlier. There’s all kinds of ways that the nose can be used in emblems that has a lot in parallel with the kinds of uses it gets in idioms.

Gretchen: It’s got this sort of meaning to it in a way that I just feel like other parts of the face – I mean, the eyes probably also have a lot of meaning to it, the mouth – but something like the chin or the cheek or the forehead has one or two meanings. You can “take it on the chin,” you can “keep your chin up,” but there’s not dozens of meanings that the chin has. I really feel like the nose is punching above its weight when it comes to having lots of connotations attached to it.

Lauren: And it was right under our nose this whole time.

Gretchen: And being very versatile when it comes to producing sounds and being a location for signs as well.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like the jazzy version of our logo on mugs and notebooks – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog are Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistic landscapes; synonyms, homonyms, and many other -nyms; and an interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez about how he translated Because Internet into Spanish. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or leave us a nice rating or review, like this one from sarberg915, who said, “A joy to listen to: I’ve been listening to Lingthusiasm for quite a while now. One thing that keeps me coming back is the hosts’ genuine love for the subjects of linguistics, language, and communication. You can hear the joy shine through in their voices as they speak. You feel the visceral delight of a particularly delicious example. You wouldn’t expect a discourse on grammar to cheer you up, but somehow it does. The best way to learn is from someone passionate about the subject, and you won’t find anyone more passionate than Gretchen and Lauren.” Thanks, sarberg.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer 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.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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