109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

Introduction

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we're getting enthusiastic about what the nose knows,

Anniversary Celebration

0:31how the nose is used in language. First, next month is our ninth anniversary. We love making this show and we love our anniversary as I want to say thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for linguistics. 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. Sometimes I wonder what rating actually does for a podcast. Look, I'm sure there are some murky algorithmic ways that it's used, but it's also a really

1:01useful way to help other people find the show and let them know it's worth their time. Yeah. 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. I use a small podcast player and even there, it's a big difference in whether a show has like zero reviews or a few. Feel free to rate or review on any platform, big or small. We'll be sharing some of our favourite reviews on social media and in the credits to episodes

1:33for the next year, so stay tuned and you might see your review there.

Nose Idioms

1:37Speaking of things we've enjoyed seeing, we've enjoyed seeing your photos of the Jazz Upplingthusiasm 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. We've also made a new merch item, which are greeting cards that say, Merry, Merry, Merry Holidays. Do you mean Merry, Merry, Merry Holidays? That's why the subtitle says, whether you say them the same or differently,

2:08hope you have a joyful, festive season. Also, Gretchen, shouldn't it be Merry Christmas, not Merry Holidays? No, because this is 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. Okay, I'm glad you did not put that on a gift card. I just don't think it would sell as well. With this card, you are doing language variation,

2:40sounds, change, and psycholinguistics. 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. Our most recent bonus episode was about synonyms, homonyms, and many,

3:11many other less familiar types of nims. You can get access to this and nine years' worth of bonus

Nasal Sounds

3:20episodes by going to patreon.com. Please do not turn your nose up at today's topic. Let's just follow our nose and see where we end up. Okay, this is already getting on the nose. There are a lot of nose-based idioms. We tried to find an authoritative source that would give

3:53us a long list, and it was a bit of a challenge. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs reminds us of cut off one's nose despite one's face, which is when you – Poor choice. Poor choice. 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. It's when you see the direction someone's nose is pointing, you have a sense of where they're going. There were also

4:24some more obscure examples like strap on the old nose bag. As in to eat something? Like a horse uses a nose bag to eat? 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. Okay, that's not an idiom I would access in my everyday life.

4:58I don't think my grandmother 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. That's one that's out of use, but still somewhat accessible to us. I had to 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. Is that a person with a really prettily molded nose? No. The waxiness is relevant. It's a person or a thing that is easily turned or molded. A person

5:34who's easily influenced or has a weak character. Ah, that makes sense. I have the obsolete idiom, to bite by the nose. Cool. It sounds very violent, just to be really rude to someone. Sort of, to treat with contempt. Okay. 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? Oh, taken on the law by the nose. To make a bridge of a person's nose.

6:04I have no idea. Make them put on a little hat? Make them – 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. 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

6:35languages. You can find a lot of people making lists of idioms that are supposedly in various languages. 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? I did have a poke around the published literature. 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

7:11a 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 or bad behaviour. – Sort of turning one's nose up at someone. – Yeah. 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

7:46arrogant. 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. – Yeah, because 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. People seem 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.

8:16– Yeah. 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.

Nasal Vowels

8:41– 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 sound and the 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. – I'm not sorry that you're in public right now. – Where we make you make some sounds. – I'm delighted. We also have the sound

9:14which we have at the end of words in English like hung. 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. A word like N for five would be an example. – There's also the N sound which is 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

9:47from coming out of your mouth. 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. – Yes. It is very easy to see the mouth closed off for an M sound. Even for those N and N sounds, you're closing off the mouth just further back. – 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 out faintly outside of your nose when you try to make these sounds. My hand is drifting up to my mouth so I can try this,

10:21but of course, I can't do it while I'm actually talking. – What would happen if you, say, blocked your nose while you were also blocking your mouth, Gretchen? – Well, 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 M sound – it's very anticlimactic on a podcast because nothing comes out anymore. – You can physically block and release the nose to really feel that it is the air and therefore the sound coming out through your nose. – We can vary the nasal sound that gets produced by closing off the mouth in a different spot to

11:01make 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. N and N are N and N also quite common, but there's a bunch of them. – Having at least one of these nasal consonants is very common in languages. In fact, Gretchen, we have a typological

11:31survey you can refer to. – I love a typological survey. – 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 are 12 languages out of over 500. Two percent of the sampled languages do not have nasals and they are randomly spread across the map. This is not like there's

12:05just one language family that's weird. It's like language families for spoken languages on the whole have nasals and there are just some fun family members who for some reason or another do not have them. – Sort of eccentric cousins that are like, yeah, we don't have nasals but all of our relatives do. – Yeah. – So, 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

12:35a dozen and several dozen sounds compared to the number of idioms in a language which can be practically infinite. – And 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. – Maybe by the end of the episode. Maybe you can bring back the strap on the old nose bag idiom. – And so, it is, as you say,

13:09much easier to do databases of the kinds of sounds you have in a language than the kinds of idioms you have. – The vast majority of languages have at least one nasal. English has three. How far up in the nasal list do we go? – We can go all the way up to – I think the most extreme inventory I've seen documented is 13 distinct nasals in Yeledine, which is an unclassified language of Papua New Guinea spoken on Russell Island. Thanks to the fact it has some really fun things like co-articulated nasals and

13:46some extra modifications for each of the places of articulation, it gets up to 13 distinct nasals. – I have a list here of its 13 distinct nasal sounds. I'm going to try to produce them. I'm not a Yeledine speaker, but I know the international phonetic alphabet and I can give it a try. I'm going to produce with a little vowel after them so it's a little easier to hear. We have M, M, M, M, N, N. That's a N and a M produced at the same time. I'm not terribly good at co-articulation. Then we have a further back N, M – again,

14:22that different type of N-ish sound with an M. I don't imagine I did it as well as a Yeledine speaker would, but that was neat. That's a lot of nasals. – 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. We also

14:59have nasal vowels. – In a regular vowel, what we also call an oral vowel, the air just comes out of your mouth, as you can verify. In nasal vowel, the air is coming out of both your mouth and your nose. This fills in the tableau of air just comes out your nose, that's a nasal. Air just comes out your mouth, that's an oral sound, could be a vowel, could be not vowel. Air comes out of your nose and your mouth, that's a nasal. Air comes out of neither – silence. – Also, a useful part of

15:31language – silence, but we're not going to cover it here. – Not very linguistically interesting. – Great. – Yes. We did a whole episode about it. We can link to that one. – 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 «on». In a word like «beau», which is beautiful, versus «bon», which is good. The difference between these two vowel sounds is whether you also have some air coming out of your nose. – You sound a little bit like the Wikipedia page for nasal vowels, which has a warning that the examples

16:06and perspectives in this section deal primarily with French and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. – 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. – Also, because we have access to the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures and Walls has a map on vowel nasalization where there are around a quarter of the languages sampled that have some kind of nasal vowel contrast in their inventory. – One of the things I've noticed about the

16:38French nasal vowel inventory is that there's quite a lot of oral vowels and fewer of them that can be made nasal. 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? – 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. – Oh, 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

17:14ah sound in at and the ah sound in an or ant didn't feel entirely the same to me. Yet, they were telling me, oh, just use the ah symbol for all of them. I was like, yeah, but the one before the end feels a little bit different to me. This is because English also has a bit of vowel nasalization. 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. – We're being efficient. We're getting ready for that nasal consonant by just starting that process of opening up to the nasal cavity.

17:47– 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. Then, eventually, the nasal itself gets dropped, and you just have the nasal vowel, and suddenly, the contrast. In English, we don't have any words where there's a distinction between

Influence of Sounds

18:11ah and an. That's not a distinction that we have. We don't consider English to have nasalization at a level that's important to distinguish between different words, but it is still subtly there, especially in rapid speech, as we're preparing to say a nasal consonant. – 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.

18:45– Like a ha. – Ha is a great example. – An H sound. – Where they are more likely to have a nasalized vowel following them. – Huh. 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. 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,

19:20which when you think about it is actually quite close to the voice box. Maybe there's an overlap between these? That's great. – It's such a common tendency across languages. It has an absolutely unnecessary fancy technological name. – Oh my god, please tell me. – Which is rhinoglottophilia. – So the nose and the voice box, they're friends. – They love each other. – They love each other. Are we sure there's not fanfic about the nose and the voice box having little

19:51shenanigans? – I can only hope. 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. Then as you move back, if you're not prone to weak gag reflex, you can feel where it starts getting soft. Then way back past where you want to safely stick your finger or where you can possibly

20:23stick your tongue is this little flap that opens up the nasal cavity or closes it off. – Yeah, 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 ah and felt like it was moving. 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. – That's the kind of expert comment

20:54we love to get. – I was like, yeah, I just wanted to verify you have a little flap in your throat that this thing that I learned in interlinguistics is still correct. He was like, well, it turns out that it's more complicated than that. – Oh, it's more complicated. That is absolutely the story. Flaps open and closed or goes halfway for a nasal vowel. – Indeed. Remember how there's different kinds of R's? We did a whole episode about R's and it turns out there are different kinds of R's. They sound the same, but you can produce them differently in your mouth.

21:25– Mm-hmm. – It turns out the nasals are the same. – Yeah. – There are different ways you can create this sort of closure depending on just what you experimented with as a baby. What you were trying to do was duplicate the sounds that you were hearing of 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. – If we're not just flapping open and closed, what else are

21:58people doing back there, Grace? – Most people do do the sort of trap door thing that we learned about interlinguistics. 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 so it kind of folds up like an envelope. – Right. – And then there's – the wildest one is the circular method where you just sort of close it from all sides and it looks like a sort of string purse from above. – Okay. Wow. They are very different

22:31methods of achieving the same end. – Yeah. Or I guess if you were sort of rounding your mouth but closing it at the same time, you'd be sort of 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. – We're all walking around like little nasal mysteries. – Except possibly for Kevin because he tried to find out like what this area looked like on him. – Right. – And I have to report that there is a public service announcement where Kevin says that Susan Lynn, his colleague, and he once spent two days giving me

23:06the worst headaches of my entire life trying to use an ultrasound to like poke at the back of my neck to create an image of this. – Oh, those probes are not soft and you really are going in hard at the kind of base of the skull there to try and get to the nasal cavity, which goes like really far back into the head, more than you want to think about. – It's actually quite close to the ear. It's really far back. – Yeah. – So, Kevin says, to this day, I feel a little guilty for not figuring out how to

23:37publish. Please don't try this. You'll get a massive headache. We've promised Kevin that we will give the

Nose Research

23:41PSA of if you want to 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. – 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. – Well, one method people have used to study nasals, which is a little bit gross but is not going to give you a headache for two days, is to use earbuds. – As in the cheap, small headphones that I have on a cable for when my

24:20wireless earbuds die – those kind of – – 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. – Okay. Get a different pair. Get a second pair. They're not expensive. – You can also put them in your nose – carefully. Don't stick them all the way up. Then you can play things either with the earbud into your nasal cavity and then have a recorder in your mouth at the mouth to see how much the sound has changed by its going through the nose bit and going through

24:55the mouth bit. – Right. 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 of the mouth to get a sense of what's happening in those cavities, okay? – 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. – Oh, yeah, because headphones and microphones are just the same technology but backwards. – Yeah, exactly. If you play an ah, like a pure tone, and you make it go through your mouth or your

25:31nose or one to 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 mouth. That's why you might do a study like that. – I feel like when we learn about this kind of articulatory phonetics, we spent so much time thinking about the oral cavity because there's so

26:04many things you can manipulate in there. 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. – Yeah. 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. – Oh, yeah. I still had – while drawing my little

26:38undergraduate heads and where the nasal cavity was and the oral cavity, I think I still had this very naive sense that because your nose has that little angled sticky-outy bit on your face that my nostrils went up in that direction. Your nostrils basically go straight back in all the way to your ear, as you said. – Yeah. 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. – If you've had a particularly disgusting cold,

27:10you know that your nasal cavity can hold a lot of content. – Thank you for that. – – to be as discreet about it as possible. – You can hold an entire french fry.

27:24Did you know that you really have two noses? – 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? – They are separate down quite a bit. One of your nostrils is more open at any given times and they take turns in the nasal cycle every few hours depending on the person. – Oh, they share. That's very cute. – Yeah. – That's nice. – This has an influence on how you breathe but it doesn't have a huge influence

27:56on speech sounds because both of them work fine as acoustic resonators. We didn't learn about it in linguistics class. – But I just think it's neat. – Also, a shameless etymological digression. – Uh-huh. – But nostril literally means nose hole. – Great. – And that thrill is the same as thrilling as in something – – Oh. – – was so intense that it moved you so deeply. – It pierced your soul? – It pierced your emotional soul and it was absolutely thrilling.

28:28– Same thrill hole as nostril. – I'm going to start calling them nose thrills now. – It'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. – Do you mean the trunk? – Yes. – Okay. I guess that makes sense because when we make nasal sounds – like if you hum, you can hum it about the same pitch as you can sing because your nasal cavity and your oral cavity are

29:00pretty similar size. Elephants can make different sounds with their mouths versus their noses. – Yeah. They can get really low rumbly sounds through the trunk because it's a much,

Animal Nasal Cavities

29:10much bigger cavity. That seems to be important for the way they do long-distance communication. That's one way that humans and elephants are different. – There are no other ways. Humans all over have noses. – Yes, you are correct. – Presumably also have words for noses. They're pretty salient features. – It does turn up on the swaddish list, which we have problematised before, but it is this seen as a basic set of vocabulary you are likely to be able to encounter across the world's languages. – They're culturally important as well. Use them for smelling. They look significant. Something that I was

29:46intrigued to learn from a study that came out a little while ago was that statistically speaking, more languages have words for noses that reference the noses, 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. – This is a 2016 paper from Blassie 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

30:21other 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 noses, and you're like, yes, because you only know Indo-European languages, you're biased. – Which literally have a common etymology in – yeah. – Yeah. Okay. – This took that into account. It weighted everything properly. When you take away coincidence for language family and other coincidences, it's still

30:53a greater-than-chance likelihood that people are like, oh, I've got this thing on my face and it's involved in these sounds and there is some kind of link that's happening there. – 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 oversample 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 people had had, turns out to be weighted when you do the proper stats. – Yeah. That was what was exciting

31:25about 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. – So, when things resemble the – in form, the meaning that they have – – Yeah. – as in nose and nasal that resemble each other, that shows up.

31:57– And 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. – There were a few differences, like the video we found of langue des signes français, French sign languages, had them tapping the nose

32:27twice, whereas all the other languages that we noticed had the person tapping the nose once. So, 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. – 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

33:03their everyday speech as well. As listeners, we're very perceptive of it. – 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. – Okay, excellent. – One of them is 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'm reproducing this not by giving myself a cold but by pinching my nose

33:34while saying these sentences. – You sound quite stuffy, 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. – Right, yeah. – Then there's the kind of speech where you're really talking into the nose, making the nose vibrate more. – 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. – No, it's much harder. I'm not trying to do

34:04any particular accent. I'm just trying to speak into the nose more, which I will confess is not my typical register. – It's funny because I feel like when you speak like that, my brain also wants to register that as being a nasally voice, but you're literally doing the opposite this time. – 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? – Yeah. – But Dennis Preston, who's a linguist, 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

34:38the 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. – Yeah. – It's a nifty way of thinking of these two completely opposite phenomena and we lump them in the same way. – Absolutely. – We've talked about spoken language phonology. The nose is also very important in a lot of sign

Sign Language Phonology

35:03language phonology as a place of articulation for where signs get made. – 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. – Yeah. – That could be just 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. – 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

35:38a 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. – Even though these places may be just a couple inches, a couple of 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 of inches on your arm doesn't

36:10necessarily make a huge difference in terms of meaning. On the face, those couple of 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. – I think because the nose is right there in the centre of this most sensitive articulatory space, it's a very prominent place of articulation. – 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

36:42not find this. We looked at quite a bit of research and there isn't a lot of categorising signs by their place of articulation. It tends to be more common that people categorise signs by the hand shape. Trying to find a list of signs that were made with the nose was not something that was available. – Yeah. 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 have been nifty to have. – Maybe if somebody ever creates this

37:16sign language typological resource, maybe in many years when the research arrives there, we will be delighted to know but to share it with you. Lauren, is there gesture research on nose-related gestures? – 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

37:51is the nose-thumb. 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. – Oh, I definitely know this gesture from childhood. I think I would probably call it cocking a snook. – Ah, yes. – Or like the na-na-na-na-na gesture with intonation. – Yeah, I don't think I had a name for it. I think I would literally have just called it the na-na-na-na-na gesture. – You've got to sing-song that. – But it has a really specific meaning for me of like, I'm making fun at you. – But often in kind of a silly way. You don't necessarily make it to

38:27someone that you're mad at in traffic. It's a real sort of like, I'm the king of the castle type gesture, not a like, hey, you cut me off type of gesture. – Yeah, I have a few others for that. – Okay, okay. We'll get there. – 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. But 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. – Wow. Yeah, I thought it was just

38:58in my childhood, but it's really all over the place. It doesn't have one consistent name, doesn't have a whole bunch of names. – Yeah, so there's like 500 years of documentation of this as a mockery gesture and it has, thanks to those hundreds of years of documentation, a bonkers list of names in English alone. – Okay. – Including, as you said, cocking a snoot. – I would say cock a snook, I think. Rhymes with book. – Okay. Snook and snoot kind of appear to be the same. They both mean like a nose,

39:28like a dog nose and like cock an eyebrow or cock a gun, which means to like raise. – Okay. – So it's like – – Raise your nose. – Raising a snout. – Okay. – Yeah, raise a nose, raise a snout. – Okay. – Other names include Queen Anne's Fan. – Queen Anne's Fan, oh. Someone's being saucy with her fan. – A Shanghai gesture, which apparently – Shanghai is an Australian word for a slingshot, so it's like you're like – got a little slingshot at your face. – Oh. – Coffee milling, because it's the same action as grinding coffee. – Grinding coffee with your nose, coffee milling, okay.

39:59– The five-fingered salute, pretty self-evident there. – Okay, I could picture it as a five-finger salute, – Yes, and pulling bacon, because – – Pulling bacon. – To be bacon-faced was to be pulling a face like a silly face. – Ah! I love it. – And I love that the authors were just kind of – they just kind of threw their hands up when it came to the etymology or the like meaning behind this gesture. They're like, maybe it's a deformed salute, maybe you're mocking thumb sucking, maybe

40:33it'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. – 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. – Yeah. – And we don't know why it means that. – To give you a sense of just how wildly consistent that is, the other nosed-based gesture that they have in their survey is to tap the side of your nose with your index finger. – I think I would have that as like meaning keeping something a secret,

41:08like let's just keep that between ourselves. – Mm-hmm. – Yep. That's a common meaning for that in the UK and parts of Italy. – Okay. Does it mean other things in other places? – Yes, and it's a pretty wild mix. It can mean, be alert or I am alert but that's only in Italy. – Oh. – 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. – 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 no secrets.

41:41– 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 is being nosey if you're in southern Italy, Malta, and some bits of the UK. – There seems to be this sort of like 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. – This particular kind of gesture and 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.

42:18– And really consistent. – Yeah. – I learned a French gesture that means someone's drunk. – Okay. – Which involves sort of putting a fist up at your nose and then twisting it to the side. You can also sort of tilt your head at the same time. – Right. – And to indicate maybe it's sort of like the bottle that's being poured down your throat or like your nose has gone red because you're drunk or something like this. – Yeah. – 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 and this was one that involved

42:49the nose. – Right. 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. – Yeah. 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

43:21have a lot of meaning to it, the mouth – but something like the chin or the cheek or the forehead has like one or two meanings. You know, you can take it on the chin, you can keep your chin up, but there's not like dozens of meanings that the chin has. I really feel like the nose is sort of punching above its weight when it comes to having lots of connotations attached to it. – And it was right under our nose this whole time. – And being very versatile when it comes to producing sounds and being a location for signs as well. – For more Lingthusiasm and links to all

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44:33– Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to 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 want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com slash Lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistic fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include

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