Baby Talk: Howard Chang and Dave Shepherd use their best adult vocabulary as they discuss baby talk.
Dave thanks Andy, Beverley and Jianxia for their support through the PayPal donation button. (2:00)
This is show #100. The recording date, March 21, is the third anniversary not only of The Word Nerds, but also of Schlaflos in München. (2:14)
Thanks to Blue and Cihat for emails. (3:08)
Baby talk, reflecting the circle of human life; different applications for baby talk (4:18)
Music bumper from “Little Child” by Jamie Varley. (14:35)
How babies learn to speak: Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar (15:27)
Song: “Boogie Woogie Baby” by Deanna Bogart (24:28)
Rude words of the week: “baby” (28:04)
Music bumper from “Court of Greedy Kings” by Val Davis. (30:25)
Stories of our own first words, and our children’s first words (30:43)
Music courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network and Ioda Promonet
Theme music by Kick the Cat
Closing music from “Grapes” by Evan Stone
time: 37:28
size: 34.3 Mb
rating: PG (Howard very briefly mentions sexual contexts for baby talk.)
Deanna Bogart
“Boogie Woogie Baby” (mp3)
from “New Address”
(Deanna Bogart)
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More On This Album
Jamie Varley
“Little Child” (mp3)
from “You Ride”
(Sota Music)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Buy at Napster
Buy at Rhapsody
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Amazon
Buy at GroupieTunes
Buy at mTraks Download
More On This Album
Congratulations on 100 high quality, fascinating shows, and three years. We look forwrad to many more!
Happy 100th Show! Still going strong, and I’m lovin’ it!
Congrats!
While listening to your discussion of the etymology of “baby,” I was reminded of a similar etymological epiphany I had in graduate school at St. John’s College. We were reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and we came across a passage referring to the “barbarians” (in Greek, “hoi barbaroi”).
My tutor, a student of classical Greek, told us that the “barbarians” were foreigners (Persians, I believe), who were only capable of inchoate babblings that sounded like “bar-bar-bar.” (I think he told us that the term originated in Herotodus’s discussion of the Persian invasions of Greece, but I may be wrong about that.)
Thus, the word “barbarian” is an echoic reduplicative that has the same sense as the word “baby.” In other words, those Persians who invaded Greece thought they were scary, but they were really just big babies.
Congratulations and celebrations on your 100th fantastic podcast!
Hay, congratulations on 100, a respectable run on all accounts! Im 15, from england and i was readding an article recently about the development of speech etc. It was really interesting, one of the things that came up was the coceptual understanding of grammer. They say that past the age of 5 a section of the brain totally shuts down (or at least for its original purpose) and from then on it is impossible to fully understand the slightities of a language’s grammer. The report covers research into all sorts of cases, such as child abuse and neglect. But unless we learn a language before 5, and by that i mean basic language structure, it is impossible to develope a natural, subconscious language. Intersting eh! Anyway, well done, i love the podcast!
Hi there,
I’m VERY happy that i finally found what i need and more in a podcast, since i knew “The word nerds”, i Never look for any podcast to help me with my English.
But i wish that you could post something like Main subjects, because sometimes i can’t get the spelling for some words, which is very important for me as an ESL learner; like the word ” Masagenistics”, ” spoonarism”, and i want to tell you guys
I LOVE YOU, keep getting up.
I’ve invited all my friends to check “The word nerds”.
Thank you,
Khlood Elsayed (allergic-2-luv)
Somehow, my copy of “Baby Talk” only recorded 16 minutes. Was that an error on my end?
John, I’d try downloading it again. It should be about 37 and a half minutes long. Nothing has changed with the file since we originally posted it.