lingthusiasm

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 91: Scoping out the scope of scope

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Scoping out the scope of scope. 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 scope. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about inner voice, and the different ways that people organise their interior narrative – such as inner speech, inner visualisation, inner non-symbolic thought – and other ways that our minds are surprisingly different from each other.

Lauren: We look at a classic paper on inner voice, and we also include some results about inner voice from our 2023 listener survey.

Gretchen: It was fun to see how our results compared to the results of that classic survey and compare differences in methodologies and how the insides of our minds are both similar and different to each other.

Lauren: Also, on Patreon, our patrons at the Ling-phabet tier not only get all of our bonus episodes, but they get a Lingthusiast sticker, which is not available anywhere else.

Gretchen: This is a sticker that says, “Lingthusiast – a person who’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” if you want to stick it on your laptop or your water bottle and try to encourage people to talk about linguistics with you. We also give people in the Ling-phabet tier your very own, hand-selected character of the International Phonetic Alphabet – or if you have another symbol from somewhere in Unicode, you can request that instead – and we put that in your name or your username on our sponsorship Wall of Fame on our website to thank you for supporting the show.

Lauren: You can see our Supporter Wall of Fame at lingthusiasm.com/supporters, and maybe you can join it as well.

Gretchen: We also make delightful high-quality, human-edited transcripts for all of our episodes – bonus episodes and main episodes – where all of the proper names and words in other languages have had their spellings checked. Transcripts are available as text-based pages at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts or if you’d like to follow along with the audio and the transcript at the same time, you can go to our YouTube channel. Transcripts for bonus episodes are linked to from each of those bonus episode pages as well on Patreon.

Lauren: It’s thanks to the support of our patrons that we are able to continue to provide the show ad-free and high-quality transcripted.

[Music]

Gretchen: One of the best kebabs that I ever had was a philosophical kebab.

Lauren: Hm, okay.

Gretchen: I was at a kebab shop, as one does, and I ordered my kebab off the menu, and then the person behind the counter says to me, “You okay with everything?” And I sort of had this moment of, you know, I do like to think that I’m a relatively accepting person, but there are some things in life that maybe I’m not okay with.

Lauren: Um, is it just that they wanted to know if you wanted tomatoes and hummus and onions?

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, that’s what they were asking me.

Lauren: Reminds me of the everything bagels in Everything Everywhere All at Once where the everything bagel eventually takes into it everything across the multiverse.

Gretchen: So, not just sesame seeds and poppy seeds and dried onion bits.

Lauren: No, a little bit more “everything” than a traditional, physical everything bagel.

Gretchen: You know, it’s funny that “everything” in the context of a kebab and “everything” in the context of a bagel are different from each other. This also reminds me of a very nice poem by Shel Silverstein which is about a hot dog.

Lauren: Can I hear it?

Gretchen: Yeah. “I asked for a hot dog / With ‘everything’ on it / And that was my big mistake, / ’Cause it came with a parrot, / A bee in a bonnet, / A wristwatch, a wrench, and a rake. / It came with a goldfish, / A flag, and a fiddle, / A frog, and a front porch swing, / And a mouse in a mask– / That’s the last time I ask / For a hot dog with ‘everything’.”

Lauren: So good – and not dissimilar to one of the main plot points in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Gretchen: Which is great. We’ve had hot dogs and bagels and kebabs, and the set of prototypical toppings for them, I mean, could include onions in any case but definitely includes lots of other things as well. And yet, a goldfish, a rake, a parrot, a frog – not typical toppings for any of these food items.

Lauren: I think we should open a café with all of these ambiguous “everything” foods. What should we call it?

Gretchen: We could have everything bagels, hot dogs and kebabs with everything, like an everything pizza. I think we could call it the “Everything Café.”

Lauren: Ah, yeah. We actually have a different phrase in Australia. We can order things with “the lot.” You can get a pizza with the lot; you can get a burger with the lot. It means it comes with the full set of expected items – no goldfish, typically.

Gretchen: There is a certain irony to the fact that in Canada we also have a phrase that’s different from “with everything,” and that’s “all dressed.”

Lauren: Ah, but is it all dressed with –

Gretchen: No goldfish.

Lauren: But is it all dressed with a flag and a fiddle?

Gretchen: No goldfish, no fiddles. But you can have all dressed chips, which is the flavour that has a bit of barbeque and a bit of sour cream and onion and a bit of ketchup, and it’s just got all of the stuff.

Lauren: All dressed chips are delicious – just, like, generically salty delicious.

Gretchen: You can have an all dressed pizza, which is a pizza with the typical expectation of pizza toppings. Again, no fiddles. In French, “tout garnis” which is also perhaps a literal translation – I don’t know which direction – of “garnished with everything.”

Lauren: Hm, yes. Of course, what counts as “everything” varies across items and across cultures because Australia famously loves some beet root in a burger with the lot.

Gretchen: Ah, yes, whereas my all dressed burger does not contain beet root, although I understand it’s delicious.

Lauren: It is delicious, indeed.

Gretchen: Both “everything” and “all dressed” and I assume, also, “the lot,” have something important in common, which is this idea that they include “all,” but “all” within a culturally-defined set not everything possibly conceivable and that we have a set of expectations for what we mean around that “all” or that “every.”

Lauren: Knowing where that “all” stops creates issues with what the scope of “all” includes.

Gretchen: Right. We have expectations around the scope of what goes on a pizza or the scope of what goes on a hot dog, but those are implicit.

Lauren: Maybe we should call it the “Scope Shop” for our café.

Gretchen: Ooo, “The Scope Shop,” “Ye Olde Scope Shop.”

Lauren: /skoʊp ʃoʊp/.

Gretchen: “Shoppe”? Oh, and then can we have a Medieval bard at our Scope Shop?

Lauren: Uh, I’m not sure why, but given this is all hypothetical, pitch me.

Gretchen: Well, it’s because the Old English word for an oral poet or a bard was /ʃɑp/, which was pronounced like “Scope Shop,” but it’s spelled S-C-O-P. It’s like halfway between the two, so then you can have a “Scope Shop Scop.”

Lauren: Right. This is ambiguous in terms of which word you’re using, which is very different from the kind of ambiguity we’re gonna be looking at with “everything.”

Gretchen: This is the ambiguity that has to do with which word you mean or what a specific word means rather than ambiguity that’s inherent to the concept of “everything” that it includes an expected set.

Lauren: When it comes to grammar, it’s not just words like “everything” and “the lot.” This kind of ambiguity pops up in a bunch of places in grammar, and that’s what’s on the menu for today.

Gretchen: Mm-hm. Can we also have at the Scope Shop customised birthday cakes?

Lauren: Sure, why not.

Gretchen: I’m gonna get you to write a message for me on the cake, okay?

Lauren: Okay, sure, what would you like on your cake?

Gretchen: I want it to say, “Happy Birthday.” Underneath that, “We love you.”

Lauren: Okay. I’m gonna decorate a cake, and it’s gonna say, “Happy birthday underneath that we love you.”

Gretchen: Yeah, well, what I want is for it to say, “Happy birthday.” UNDERNEATH that, “We love you.”

Lauren: Great. “Happy Birthday. Underneath that: We love you.” Eight words. We should be able to fit that on a cake.

Gretchen: No, I don’t want the WORDS “underneath that” to be on the cake. I want the words “We love you” to be literally underneath the words “Happy birthday.”

Lauren: Oh, like, “Happy birthday. We love you.”

Gretchen: Yes.

Lauren: I mean, it’s fine, but it’s not as funny.

Gretchen: See, you do see this on various pictures that go around the internet of very literal cake decorations. You know, “Happy birthday, Kevin, in red text,” where the “in red text” is also literally written on the cake or something like that.

Lauren: There’s a running series of jokes in this vein from BoJack Horseman, which is an animates series, and the birthday banners start with “Happy birthday, Diane, and use a pretty font.”

Gretchen: So, it’s not in a pretty font. It’s “and use a pretty font” is on the banner.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And the next one is “Congrats Diane and Mr. Peanut Butter. Peanut Butter is one word.” Again, all of it on the banner and, for some reason, they went back to the same supplier despite two years of failed banners because –

Gretchen: Rookie mistake.

Lauren: – the next year is “Congrats Diane and Mr. Peanut Butter. Mr. Peanut Butter is one word and don’t write one word.”

Gretchen: Oh, no, I love it.

Lauren: And then at some point, I think it’s probably Mr. Peanutbutter is wearing a t-shirt that says, “I had a ball at Diane’s 35th birthday, and underline ball. I don’t know why this is so hard.”

Gretchen: Again, the shirt says, “I don’t know why this is so hard.”

Lauren: Yes. Someone is taking down a quotation and is deciding to misinterpret a re-reading of “Oh, yeah, they said on the t-shirt put ‘I had a ball at Diane’s 35th birthday, and underline ball, and I don’t know why this is so hard’.”

Gretchen: Sounds very normal to me. I mean, this is how you can tell that they were ordering these banners and these t-shirts and so on and these cakes over the phone or potentially in conversation and not in written English, for example, because then you would just have a text field, and you could use punctuation to convey what you want on the cake.

Lauren: I mean, in spoken language we use our intonation, and in signed languages we can use the sign space, so where we sign something to indicate the start or the end of something that is being quoted. But misinterpretations can arise, and that’s where we get these hilarious cakes and banners.

Gretchen: I always think of this in context of the CBC, which is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I remember as a child hearing CBC radio announcers saying things like, “The prime minister said, quote, ‘Blah blah blah,’ end quote” – or actually I wasn’t sure if it was “end quote” or “un-quote.” I looked I up on the CBC website, and I actually found both in the same transcript. Oh, wait, can I do these examples for you in my CBC radio voice?

Lauren: Yeah, sure, absolutely.

Gretchen: “A senior official said, the actual number may be, quote, ‘higher than is being cited,’ un-quote.”

Lauren: I love how generic that line of media is taken out of context, but also, how snarky it is to highlight that something is “higher than is being cited.”

Gretchen: Second example. “The provincial health minister has called the overcrowding, quote, ‘not acceptable,’ end quote.”

Lauren: Amazing. There’re just two words. “Not acceptable” is in the “quote-end quote.” Because you don’t want, as a newsreader, for people to think that the next line of the news is potentially something attributed to the provincial health minister.

Gretchen: Exactly. Because they’re saying it in this very flat, modulated, not-expressive – they’re not doing a whole bunch of stuff with intonation, and they obviously don’t have gestures because they’re on the radio – so they need the formal statement of – sometimes saying, “un-quote,” sometimes saying “end quote” – to demarcate exactly where the quotes begin and end.

Lauren: That’s because once we say someone said something, that opens up the beginning of this reported scope, and without intonational punctuation, like quote marks, very helpful, but without them, it can be hard to know where it stops. That’s because in English the verb “to say” comes before what is being said.

Gretchen: I could say something like, “Lauren told me a story,” and maybe I said this ten years ago, and everything I’ve been saying since then has just been in the story you told me.

Lauren: Hmm, yes. Highly implausible, but I guess technically possible.

Gretchen: This podcast has secretly just been one of us this whole time.

Lauren: The fact that our verb “to say” comes before what is being said is not the way that every language structures its grammar. For languages that tend to put the verb at the end of a sentence, that “say” will come after the thing that is being said, and this is true for the Tibeto-Burman languages that I work with as well as many other languages in the world, but it means that you know when a quote finishes because someone will say – you know, it would be something like, “The provincial health minister, the overcrowding, ‘not acceptable,’ he said,” or something to that paraphrased effect. You know the end of a quotation. It might be ambiguous at the front end, but you know when something is finished.

Gretchen: Despite how English verbs normally work, with “said,” you can put it at the end of a sentence. There’s a whole style of joke in English that depends on putting the verb towards the end. They’re known as a Tom Swifty. By convention, they’re always attributed to a speaker called “Tom.” You have a statement something like, “‘If you want me, I shall be in the attic,’ said Tom, loftily.”

Lauren: And the way that Tom says something is always a hilarious pun on the content of what is being said. Yeah, that is a great example of –

Gretchen: Like “attic” and “loft.” It wouldn’t be funny if you said, “Tom said loftily, ‘I shall be in the attic’.” Actually, maybe that’s still funny because it’s just the connection between the two.

Lauren: But not as funny to have the punchline delivered at the end.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly.

Lauren: Of course, even though languages that have the verb, say, at the end of the sentence, they also do the thing English does where we just report something without saying, “They said.” There is still the chance for ambiguous cake decoration to occur.

Gretchen: It’s very important to be able to have funny cakes. Those cake examples of scope in quoted speech are this humorous misinterpretation of something that someone says that someone else writes down. There’s also another way that you can use scope to get multiple readings. This is with negation.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, that’s another fun place for scope ambiguity.

Gretchen: In this case, you can get one sentence that itself has several meanings depending on how you interpret the negation.

Lauren: For example, a bench in honour of Nicole Campbell, it’s engraved with a little plaque, and it says, “In honour of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile.”

Gretchen: This photo of this plaque on this bench went around the internet a while back. People found it really funny because you have this very obvious humorous reading, which is she refused to look at dogs and also wouldn’t crack a grin.

Lauren: Which is a very cantankerous anti-dog stance that is clearly the opposite of what was actually so wonderful about her.

Gretchen: And clearly the intended reading is “It was never the case that when she saw a dog she didn’t smile at the dog.”

Lauren: And, I assume, in this park, at this bench or somewhere proximal, this would often occur.

Gretchen: Right. Maybe it was a dog park.

Lauren: Instead, what you get is like, “She refused to look at dogs and she never ever smiled at all in her entire life.”

Gretchen: Or she lived on an island where there were no dogs at all.

Lauren: I mean, that’s why you wouldn’t smile.

Gretchen: Because there’s no dogs there.

Lauren: Sad times.

Gretchen: What a tragic bench plaque of this horror life that this person lived. It’s so tempting to get that reading.

Lauren: We’re commemorating a tragedy there.

Gretchen: It’s really important to have memorial plaques like this. If we think of “never” as popping up a little umbrella over some part of the remainder of the sentence, then the parts that get shaded by that umbrella are within the scope of never, and the parts that are still out in the open to get rained on or sunned on are the ones that are outside the scope of “never.”

Lauren: We have one reading where there’s a really narrow scope of how big the umbrella for “never” is, which is just “never saw a dog,” and then “didn’t smile” is out with its own narrow little umbrella. So, “never saw a dog” and “didn’t smile” – poor, grumpy Nicole. Then we have a really broad umbrella where “never” fits over the whole “saw a dog and didn’t smile.” “Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” – a really big umbrella. It can all stand under it, and we get this very different reading.

Gretchen: I like how you’re doing very helpful gestures right now that nobody can see.

Lauren: It’s for my own cognitive processing.

Gretchen: Make sure you do the gestures when you’re listening as well. This is my suggestion. The thing that I like about scope as a phenomenon is that it’s one of those things that pops up as you’re going about your life if you’ve got your little linguistic lenses on and you’re analysing sentences as you see them. This means that linguists will often have a little pocket full of examples of scope and scope ambiguity. When we were preparing for this episode, I was having dinner with some linguists, and I said, “Hey, anybody have some favourite examples of scope to share?”

Lauren: I’m glad that you’re making it clear this is genuine thing that we enjoy doing is asking people for their favourite examples of scope.

Gretchen: Please send us examples of fun linguistic phenomena. One of them said, in the women’s bathroom in the Georgetown linguistics department – this is an important part of linguistic cultural history – there was a sign that said, “Please make sure to flush. Automatic sensor doesn’t work 100% of the time.” The two readings there – which took me a second because they’re a little bit less funny than the “never saw a dog and didn’t smile” example, I will admit, but the fact that it was found in the wild, you know, has some benefit to it – one is it’s not the case that it always works, so maybe it only works 90% of the time not 100% of the time, which is what the person writing the sign presumably intended.

Lauren: But there’s also a reading that’s like, “It doesn’t work 100% of the time – 100% of the time, this thing does not work.” It is a very bad automatic toilet flush.

Gretchen: Exactly. Might as well not even be there. Somebody had written, apparently, “scope ambiguity hee hee” on this sign in the bathroom of the linguistics department.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Because this is what we’re like.

Lauren: With negation and reported speech we have either “someone said” or we have a bit of negation that creates this umbrella that goes forward into the sentence to scope over what comes next and how much of what comes next is what can lead to some ambiguity. But I also think about that brief historical fad in 1980s English for putting “not” at the end of a sentence.

Gretchen: Is that something where you’re like, “Here’s some pizza for you – not!”

Lauren: Exactly. I think we’re gonna have to work on your customer service if we’re gonna open this restaurant, Gretchen. But that one is reaching back into the sentence and that is what makes it funny in English because we’re so used to things going forward into the sentence and scoping over what comes after it.

Gretchen: But in principle some other languages must do negation scoping back into the sentence instead of scoping forward into the sentence, just like with recorded speech, right?

Lauren: There’s lot of variation in where negation can pop up in the grammar of a language. I went to visit WALS just to confirm with some survey of a range of different languages, and even though having negation just before your verb is the most common, there are lots of languages that will have the negation right at the very end of a sentence. In fact, something close to 20% of the languages in this survey had that form of negation right at the very end. So, in those languages, it is totally normal for it to go back into the sentence that’s just been said and scope back over what has already been said instead of scoping over what is to come.

Gretchen: You could probably still get some kinds of ambiguity, but maybe a bit of a different set. Thinking about this scoping either forwards or backwards into the rest of the sentence or into the bit of the sentence that came before, it feels like less of a classic round umbrella that scopes equally over your entire body and more like one of those retractable ones at the front of the café that really scopes over in one direction rather than circularly.

Lauren: We should definitely have one at the front of our hypothetical café.

Gretchen: If you’re within the scope of the Scope Shop slope, you can still have soap? I think we’ve got to work on this menu.

Lauren: We definitely got to work on this menu. The cool thing is, if you bring in both reporting and negation, you can get some really brain-hurting ambiguity going on.

Gretchen: There’re some examples of this that you see going around on social media a fair bit because they’re really fun to do lots of different interpretations with, but also, a lot of these sentences are a bit violent or menacing.

Lauren: I think even the ones that aren’t menacing once you start reading them with different stress, which gives rise to different readings, you can’t help but find them a little bit menacing. One that goes around frequently is “I didn’t say he stole the money.”

Gretchen: Okay, let’s try reading this putting emphasis on each word one at a time.

Lauren: “I didn’t say he stole the money.”

Gretchen: Maybe this other person said it.

Lauren: “I DIDN’T say he stole the money.”

Gretchen: You’re trying to put words in my mouth.

Lauren: “I didn’t SAY he stole the money.”

Gretchen: I just showed you all the security camera footage.

Lauren: “I didn’t say HE stole the money.”

Gretchen: Maybe she did.

Lauren: “I didn’t say he STOLE the money.”

Gretchen: Maybe he borrowed it.

Lauren: “I didn’t say he stole THE money.”

Gretchen: Not that big stash of profits, just some petty cash.

Lauren: “I didn’t say he stole the MONEY.”

Gretchen: He stole the car.

Lauren: Each of these gives rise to different readings. Obviously, we can use emphasis in any sentence to change what word we’re focusing on.

Gretchen: But in this case because we have both the “say” and the “didn’t,” it puts emphasis on which parts are we negating and which parts are we reporting the speech of. In combination, that creates this very strong change in meaning when you emphasise one word versus another.

Lauren: They’re really fun. I can definitely see why when you have an example that’s so juicy in terms of the flexibility of the meanings that arise, you often see these doing little circuits on social media.

Gretchen: One of the other examples that goes around on social media pretty often is even more violent. It’s “I didn’t ask you to kill him.” You can try this exercise for yourself on this other sentence if you like.

Lauren: Of course, along with the intonation in spoken language that helps us figure out where the negation is being scoped over, we also have the gestures that we use alongside speech. There is work that shows pretty consistently that, say, maybe a headshake in English for negation or something like a pushing away or a shaking a hand in refusal tends to scope very nicely over the same bit as the grammatical negative form like “not” or “don’t.”

Gretchen: Very nice.

Lauren: We also have gestures when you are in an audio and visual context – unlike this audio-only podcast.

Gretchen: Signed languages also use non-manual markers like eyebrows and shaking head and things like that to do this kind of negation scope and make sure it’s clear when it starts and ends.

Lauren: Alongside reported speech and negation, we also have our classic everything bagel-slash-pizza menu item.

Gretchen: We can also make “everything” ambiguous.

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: We’ve already made “everything” ambiguous one way by talking about how much it refers to in a cultural context. We can also make it ambiguous in a more structural way by combining it with words like “some.”

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: The classic example that a lot of people encounter in a semantics class is “Everyone loves someone.”

Lauren: That could be that everyone has at least one person that they love. There might be some overlap, but there’s lots of different people getting that love.

Gretchen: Or it could mean there’s this one person who everybody loves who’s super popular.

Lauren: Oh no, that is gonna get really difficult. I feel very sorry for that someone.

Gretchen: Certain complications in fandom, and maybe they’re too popular. But “Everyone loves someone” can just as validly mean both of those things.

Lauren: Alongside “some,” there are words like “all” and “every” that create this “Exactly how much is being scoped?” ambiguity as well.

Gretchen: Right. There’s another example from the linguist I was having dinner with, which is my friend’s kid got one of those kindergarten worksheets where they have them do exercises to teach them about quantities. The instructions said, “Colour half of all the pigs.”

Lauren: There’s six pigs, and I have to colour three of them.

Gretchen: If you were the kindergarten teacher, you might have assumed that’s what the exercise meant. This kid colours all of the first pig, clearly does a lot of thinking, erases half of the first pig, and then colours half of the remaining five pigs. “Colour half of all the pigs.”

Lauren: I really got to commend that kid for their lateral thinking skills. I mean, they completed the task.

Gretchen: I think this kid has a great future as a linguist. They’d fit right in at the Georgetown linguistics department.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: They fit right in in the bathroom of the Georgetown linguistics department. [Laughter] Then you can get really fun examples of these kinds of ambiguity with words like “some” and “every” and “all” sometimes in headlines. I remember seeing, a few years ago, “Someone’s getting a vaccine every 10 seconds.”

Lauren: We’re confused about whether we’re talking about lots of different someones or just one, single someone, aren’t we?

Gretchen: Like, “Wow! This person is gonna be so well protected against COVID, but what about the rest of us?”

Lauren: Ah, yes, that is where we really wanna be careful about whether we have a scope ambiguity or not.

Gretchen: Similarly, there was a headline that went around that was “A woman gives birth in the UK every 48 seconds. She must be exhausted.”

Lauren: Yeah, I am horrified by that one. Sometimes this pops up even with words that we don’t think of as having this kind of scope ambiguity. On social media a while ago, a baby care brand with the slogan “Caring for your baby since 1890,” and someone had just commented, “My 100-plus-year-old baby says thank you, but please let her die now.”

Gretchen: Oh no. So, not caring for your one, individual baby.

Lauren: For your one, individual baby or your generic, ever-changing baby. Gretchen, after all this scope ambiguity in reported speech and negation and words like “some” and “all,” I just wanted to ask, “Are you okay with everything?”

Gretchen: You know, some days, that might be toppings on a kebab. Some days, that might be the entire universe. I’m okay with everything that’s in the scope of this episode, and that’s enough for today. But no onions.

[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 our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is 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 or get a cool sticker in the mail, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include inner voice, how to make a vowel chart – with Bethany Gardner – and an episode where we took the “What Episode of Lingthusiasm are You?” quiz. Perfect for picking a starter episode for a friend or deciding what to re-listen to. 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.

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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #episodes #transcripts #podcasts #episode 91 #scope #ambiguity

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 91: Scoping out the scope of scope

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope. We talk about how humour often relies on scope ambiguity, such as a cake with "Happy Birthday in red text" written on it (quotation scope ambiguity) and the viral bench plaque "In Memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn't smile" (negation scope ambiguity). We also talk about how linguists collect fun examples of ambiguity going about their everyday lives, how gesture and intonation allow us to disambiguate most of the time, and using several scopes in one sentence for double plus ambiguity fun.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads! We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called "The phenomena of inner experience", and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!).

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Also: Join at the Ling-phabet tier and you'll get an exclusive “Lingthusiast – a person who’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” sticker! You can stick it on your laptop or your water bottle to encourage people to talk about linguistics with you. Members at the Ling-phabet tier also get their very own, hand-selected character of the International Phonetic Alphabet – or if you love another symbol from somewhere in Unicode, you can request that instead – and we put that with your name or username on our supporter Wall of Fame! Check out our Supporter Wall of Fame here, and become a Ling-phabet patron here!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Wikipedia entry for Everything Bagel

'Shel Silverstein's hot dog and the domain of "everything"' post on Language Log

Wikipedia entry for 'Scop' (an oral poet)

'New publication: Reported evidentiality in Tibeto-Burman languages' post on Superlinguo

Wikipedia entry for Tom Swifty

'Bench in honour of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn't smile' post on All Things Linguistic

WALS entry for Feature 144B: Position of negative words relative to beginning and end of clause and with respect to adjacency to verb

'A few notes on negative clauses, polarity items, and scope'

'I didn't ask you to kill him' Learning English post on sentence stress and meaning

'I didn't ask you to kill him' sentence stress example in action by @dheanasaur on TikTok (⚠︎warning, loud sound)

Non-manual Markers in ASL / NMM's

'The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect' by Simon Harrison

'Quantifier Scope Jokes' post on All Things Linguistic

'Caring for your baby since 1890' ambiguity post on All Things Linguistic

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episodes #podcast #podcasts #episode 91 #scope #ambiguity #scope ambiguity #linguist humour #SoundCloud

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 86: Inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for thoughts

When you think about your daily life -- say, going grocery shopping -- are your thoughts shaped like an inner voice or music, mental images or video, inner feelings or other sensory awareness, or unsymbolized mental impressions? Most people have some combination of these things, but the degree to which you literally visualize a bright red apple or mentally hear yourself saying "and don't forget the apples" is something that varies widely from person to person. But until we start asking about it, it's easy to assume that other people's thought-shapes are formed just like our own, and that any impressions to the contrary are just people speaking metaphorically.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads. We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called "The phenomena of inner experience", which asked 30 university students to write down the shape of their thoughts at random intervals throughout the day, and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!). Listen to this episode about the shapes of thought, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #bonus #bonus episodes #bonuses #podcasts #inner voice #inner thoughts #inner monologue #survey results

[lingthusiasm]

In honour of Vowel Month please take this highly serious poll about your favourite vowels!!!

tumblr polls only have 10 options so we're going with the weird bois, sorry schwa, it's not my fault danny j didn't love you

(don't know what these symbols mean? vote on vibes or listen to our friend danny jones saying all the vowels on an old school record here)

#linguistics #polls #vowels #vowel month

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'. 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]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plotting vowels. But first, we have a fun, new activity that lets you discover what episode of Lingthusiasm you are. Our new quiz will recommend an episode for you based on a series of questions.

Gretchen: This is like a personality quiz. If you’ve always wondered which episode of Lingthusiasm matches your personality the most, or if you are wondering where to start with the back catalogue and aren’t sure which episode to start with, if you’re trying to share Lingthusiasm with a friend or decide which episode to re-listen to, the quiz can help you with this.

Lauren: This quiz is definitely more whimsical than scientific and, unlike our listener survey, is absolutely not intended to be used for research purposes.

Gretchen: Not intended to be used for research purposes. Definitely intended to be used for amusement purposes. Available as a link in the show notes. Please tell us what results you get! We’re very curious to see if there’re some episodes that turn out to be super popular because of this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots that we discuss in this episode.

Gretchen: This is a behind-the-scenes episode where we talked with Bethany about how they made the vowel charts that we’ve discussed, how you could make them yourself if you’re interested in it, or if you just wanna follow along in a making-of-process style, you can listen to us talk with them.

Lauren: For that, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: As well as so many more bonus episodes that let us help keep making the show for you.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, we’ve talked about vowels before on Lingthusiasm. At the time, we said that your vocal tract is basically like a giant meat clarinet.

Lauren: Yeah, because the reeds are like the vibration of your vocal cords – and then you can manipulate that sound in that clarinets can play different notes and voices can make many different speech sounds. They’re both long and tubular.

Gretchen: We had some people write in that said, “We appreciate the meat clarinet – the cursed meat clarinet – but we think the vocal tract is a little bit more like a meat oboe or a meat bassoon because both of these instruments have two reeds, and we have two vocal cords. So, you want to use something that has a double vocal cord.”

Lauren: I admit I maybe got the oboe and the bassoon confused. I thought that the oboe was a giant instrument. Turns out, the oboe is about the size of a clarinet. Turns out, I don’t know a lot about woodwind instruments.

Gretchen: I think that one of the reasons we did pick a clarinet at the time is because we thought, even if it’s not exactly the same, probably more people have encountered a clarinet and have a vague sense of what it looks like than an oboe, which you didn’t really know what it was. I had to look up how a bassoon works. We thought this metaphor might be a little bit clearer.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: However.

Lauren: Okay, there’s an update.

Gretchen: I have now been doing some further research on both the vocal tract and musical instruments, and I’m very pleased to report that we, in fact, have an update. Your vocal tract is not just a meat clarinet, not just a meat bassoon, it is, in fact, most similar to a meat bagpipe.

Lauren: Oh, Gretchen, you found something more disgusting. Thank you?

Gretchen: I’m sorry. It’s even worse.

Lauren: Right. I guess the big bag – a bagpipe is made of a bag and pipes – the bag acts like your lungs. The lungs send air up through your vocal folds as they vibrate to make the sound. You do have a bag of air, just like in the human speech apparatus.

Gretchen: That’s a good start. What I didn’t know until I was doing some research about bagpipes – because the lengths that I will go to for this podcast have no bound – is that a bagpipe actually has reeds inside several of the pipes that extrude from the bag.

Lauren: Because there’s multiple sticking out in different spots.

Gretchen: There’s the one that you blow into, which doesn’t have a reed, but then the other ones, there’s the one with the little holes on it that you twiddle your fingers on and make the different notes, and then there’s also some other pipes up at the top. They also have reeds in them. Those reeds are just tuned from the length to a specific level. You know when you hear someone start playing the bagpipes and there’s this drone? [Imitates bagpipe sound] The sort of single note? That’s because of the note those reeds are tuned to in the other pipes that don’t have the holes in them.

Lauren: Ah, they’re not just decorative.

Gretchen: Right. They have this function of giving this harmony to the melody that’s being played on the little pipe with the holes in it, which is technically known as the “chanter,” but this is not a bagpipe podcast despite appearances to the contrary. We will link to some people on YouTube telling you more than you ever wanted to know about how bagpipes work if you want to go down that rabbit hole. But if you had an extra pair of hands or two, or a couple people helping you sort of reaching around your shoulders – this metaphor’s getting weirder by the minute – and you cut a bunch of little holes in the other sticking-up-the-top pipes –

Lauren: You would have less droning, and you could play multiple melodies or multiple notes at the same time. Hm.

Gretchen: At the same time. With this, you could make a bagpipe play something very close to vowels.

Lauren: Ah, cool!

Gretchen: This is so cursed.

Lauren: I mean, yes. Before we even talk about making it out of meat – it’s deeply, deeply cursed – it kind of reminds me of this instrument from the early 20th Century called the “voder.”

Gretchen: Would I pronounce that “vo-DUH” or “vo-DER”?

Lauren: With the R at the end.

Gretchen: Okay, “voder.”

Lauren: Thank you, convenient rhotic speaker here.

Gretchen: I’m glad to be of service.

Lauren: It kind of looked like something between a little stenographer’s keyboard and a piano, and with a whole bunch of finger keys and foot pedals you could manipulate it to make something that sounds like human speech.

Gretchen: Ah, wow. And this is pretty old?

Lauren: It’s from like the 1930s. There’s a little, short video snippet in one of the links in the show notes.

Gretchen: You could play these chords, and also have some consonants somehow, and end up with something that sounds like a synthetic human voice.

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the early computer speech synthesis, as well, was actually quite good at making things that sounded like vowels. It turns out a lot of the consonant things are a little bit harder to do, but the very basic sound of vowels, as you say, you could play it with just a few bagpipes very carefully re-engineered.

Gretchen: I guess if you’re looking at instruments that can play multiple notes at the same time, we could also say that the human is like a meat piano.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Or at least you could make vowels on a piano by doing a sufficiently complicated sequence of weird chords, like notes at the same time.

Lauren: I mean, we also have an instrument that’s known as the human voice. Humans are very good at singing. We possibly don’t have to engineer all these cursed things to get to that.

Gretchen: Okay. Let’s talk about the human voice as itself. We start with the vocal cords or folds. The tenseness or looseness of the vocal folds is what produces pitch. Then they go through the throat, which we can think of as one tube. Then they go through the mouth cavity, which we can think of as a second tube. Each of these tubes bounces around the sound in different ways to add two additional notes – one from the throat, one from the mouth – onto the sound that’s coming out, which is what makes it sound like a vowel to us.

Lauren: You can map the physics of air moving through the throat space and the mouth space as it comes out to pay attention to the differences between different sounds.

Gretchen: If you’re taking a physics diagram or a diagram of the acoustic signal and saying, “Which pitches are coming out of the mouth, which frequencies are coming out of the mouth that are being produced by these two chambers?” then you can see what those are, and you can do stuff with those diagrams once you’ve made them.

Lauren: The seeing bit is spectrograms, which we looked at in an earlier episode and played around with making different sounds and how they look in this way of visualising it where you have all these bands of strength and information that you can see vary depending on the different sounds that you made. That’s because of those different ways that we manipulate and play around with the air as its coming out of our mouth.

Gretchen: The first band that comes out is just the pitch of the voice itself. The lowest one is what we hear as the pitch of the sound, but I can make /aaaa/ and I can make /iiii/. Those are the same set of pitches but on different vowels.

Lauren: There’s something more than pitch happening there.

Gretchen: There’s something more than pitch happening. There’s two more notes – sounds – that come out at the same time. If the throat chamber is large because the tongue is fairly high and far forward, then this sound that’s the next one after the pitch, which was call “F1,” is low. Then if the mouth is quite open, and the lips are spread, the mouth chamber is quite small, so that sound is quite high, so the next sound, “F2,” is high pitched. If you put your tongue far forward, and your lips spread, you get /i/. The first of these dark bands is low; the second of them is high. That produces the sound that we hear as /i/. Whereas, by comparison, if we make the sound /u/, the throat chamber is still large because the tongue is quite high, but now, the mouth chamber is big because we have the lips rounding that make it big – /u/. Now, F1 is low, and F2 is also low, and we’re hearing the sound /u/.

Lauren: We have a very clear way of telling from those signals in the spectrogram, if we look at it, the difference between an /i/ and an /u/, even if we can’t hear it, we can see it on the spectrogram. This is where you begin to read spectrograms.

Gretchen: Or if we want to start measuring spectrograms very precisely, we can start doing this. We can also start seeing, okay, is /i/ when I make it the same as the /i/ when you make it?

Lauren: They’re similar enough that we recognise it as the same sound. If we both say, “fleece.”

Gretchen: “Fleece.”

Lauren: You say, /flis/. I say, /flis/.

Gretchen: /pətɛɪtoʊ pətatoʊ/. I think they sound pretty similar.

Lauren: Mine is maybe a little bit higher. I really pushed my tongue forward and up. It’s a very Australian thing to do.

Gretchen: We can actually record some people making all of the vowels and compare their measurements for these two different bands of frequency and see how similar two people’s vowels are to each other.

Lauren: Depending on the quality of your recording, you can see a lot more happening there as well. There’re all the properties that mean that we can tell your voice from my voice, or my voice from someone who has exactly the same accent because we have all these other features. It’s very different to if you record, say, a whistle or one of those tuning forks that people use to tune instruments because they are giving a clean single note.

Gretchen: A pure tone that’s just one frequency, one pitch, not several pitches all at the same time that we then have to smoosh together and interpret as a vowel sound.

Lauren: That’s what gives the human voice its richness. If a human voice sings the same note as a clarinet and an oboe, which are definitely two completely different woodwind instruments, there’s all these extra bits and things in the spectrogram that you can pick up the difference in the quality or just use your ears – also another possibility.

Gretchen: Yeah. If you wanna do detailed acoustic analysis on it – which is kind of fun and can tell us more precise things about the differences between how different people speak, which is neat – then you have this very precise way of measuring it by converting it into a visual graph/chart thing or a vowel plot rather than just listening to someone and being like, “Uh, these sound pretty similar. I dunno. I guess they’re a bit different. How are they different? Hmm.” Sometimes, being able to do it with numbers is easier.

Lauren: In the era before we had computers to create spectrograms and take these measurements, people did use their ear. The best phoneticians had this amazing ability to tell the difference between really, really subtly-similar-but-slightly-different sounds.

Gretchen: And they’re so well trained in being able to hear the difference between “Oh, you’re saying this, and your tongue is a little bit further forward than this other person who’s saying this with their tongue a little bit further back,” but if you’re not very good at hearing tongue position out of sounds, you can also produce some stuff and make the machines tell you some numbers about it, which can be easier with a different type of training.

Lauren: When we talk about the position of the tongue and how open the mouth is, we can use a plot to map where in the mouth these things are happening. That’s called the “vowel space.” We made a lot of silly sounds when we talked about that many episodes ago.

Gretchen: The vowel space goes from /i-ɛ-a/ on one side.

Lauren: That’s all up the front of your mouth, and it’s just going from being more close to more open.

Gretchen: /i/ to /ɛ/ to /a/, but you can through all these subtle gradations between them, and through /u-ɔ-ɑ/ at the back.

Lauren: That’s from all the way up the top at the back to open at the back.

Gretchen: You can draw a diagram of this which is shaped like square that’s been a bit skewed. It’s wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s known as the “vowel trapezoid” because the mouth is not perfectly shaped like a square. The jaw can hinge open.

Lauren: Only so far.

Gretchen: Only so far.

Lauren: Because this represents how you say or articulate these sounds, this is known as “articulatory phonetics.”

Gretchen: But then because you’re articulating a thing that goes into a sound that we can also analyse as the sound itself, these ways that you can articulate things map onto things that show up in the sound itself. Analysing that is called “acoustic phonetics.”

Lauren: Because you’re paying attention to the acoustic properties – the sound properties.

Gretchen: The really nifty thing is that this vowel chart that we’ve made from over 100 years ago, linguists, before they had computers, were like, “Here’s what I think the articulatory properties of the vowels are based on my mouth and my ear and some other people’s mouths and ears.” You can actually map very precisely this acoustic thing. Once we had computers, you can make them correspond to each other in this way that – you hope it works because, obviously, people do understand the vowels, but it actually does work when you start measuring things as well.

Lauren: I had always wondered whether it was just a coincidence that the articulation – where you put your mouth – and the acoustic information about the F1 and F2 with the spectrogram, but explaining it in terms of F1 and F2 are the way you change the shape of your throat and your mouth that leads to these changes in the acoustic signal, you can see how the articulation and the acoustics come together, and you get a similar type of information across both of them.

Gretchen: Absolutely. I think it’s really neat that there’s this relatively straightforward correspondence. There’s also, you know, an F3 that also does other stuff because there’s other more squishy bits of your mouth, and we’re not getting into them.

Lauren: There’s also a bunch of flip-flopping of X- and Y-axes that you need to do that Bethany kindly walked us through in the bonus episode.

Gretchen: Because these diagrams were created in an era before they were doing the computer acoustics. Sometimes, I think about the alternate version of what phonetics would look like if we’d started doing it with computers right away, and how there’s all this analogue stuff that’s residual based on human impressions, and how our vowel charts might be completely rotated if we had just started doing it with computers the whole time.

Lauren: But then we’d have to imagine ourselves standing on our heads to say anything, so I’m glad they are the way they are.

Gretchen: That’s true. When you’re talking about vowels, it’s an interesting challenge with English because there’s lots of different dialects of English, varieties of English, ways of speaking English, and, generally speaking, we’re pretty good at understanding other accents. One of the big factors that accents vary on, though, is the vowels.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: If you’re getting people to record a word list to do some vowel analysis on, what you might wanna do is have them record a bunch of words that all begin and end with the same consonant insofar as possible.

Lauren: Because vowels are very sweet and easily influenced. They’re very easily influenced by the consonants that are next to them. You have to make sure that they’re all kept in line and not influenced by what’s happening around them by giving them all the same context.

Gretchen: They’re very susceptible to peer pressure. You can have people say something like, “beat,” “bet,” “bit,” “bought,” “boot,” all of this stuff between B and T.

Lauren: I learnt to record between H and D: “hid,” “had,” “hoo’d,” “hawed.” Some of those words are less, uh, common – frequent – than others, but again, a really consistent environment.

Gretchen: But this also, obviously, causes problems for when you want to talk about the particular vowels in a given accent or in a given variety because if you go around saying, “Oh, well, the /hoɪd/ vowel” or something like this, how do you know if that’s a Cockney person saying, “hide,” or it’s me saying “hoyed,” or something else because all your consonants are the exact same, and there’s nothing to let you figure out what the original word is.

Lauren: Someone did come up with a solution for this. That person’s name is John Wells.

Gretchen: John Wells is this British phonetician who I’ve never actually met in person, but I feel like I know him because I used to read his blog back when he posted more actively.

Lauren: He used to write his blog in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which means that if you read the IPA, you would be reading it in John Wells’s voice.

Gretchen: You absolutely would be. This was a challenge that I used to set to myself. Sometimes, he also wrote in Standard English orthography, to be fair, but sometimes he would just write a whole blog post in IPA, and you’d be like, “Cool, I guess I’m reading this out loud to myself and hearing John Wells’s accent and speaking it like him,” which was really neat. In the 1980s, John Wells was like, “Hey, it’d be really useful if we had a way to refer to sound changes that happen in different English varieties,” which often happen to – like, all of the times you say the /ɪ/ vowel are a little bit more like this or like that, depending on the accent.

Lauren: I think it was very personally motivated because he was writing a book called “Accents in English.” It gets very difficult in a book, especially, but even in an audio recording, to be like, “the /ɪ/ vowel,” “the /u/ vowel.”

Gretchen: Right. You could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to refer to the specific vowel that people are making. But if you want to say, “People in this area realise this vowel as that, and people in this other area realise the same vowel as something else,” how do you refer to that thing that’s the macro-category of vowel that people would consider themselves to be saying the same word, but the specific way they’re realising it is different? He came up with what he called “the standard lexical sets,” which are now also called, “Wells Lexical Sets,” possibly John Wells’s greatest legacy, which is a bunch of words that are, crucially, easy to distinguish from each other based on the surrounding consonants that you can say when you’re giving a talk – like you can say, “the ‘kit’ vowel,” or “the ‘goose’ vowel,” or “the ‘fleece’ vowel,” and people know that the “kit” vowel refers to the specific sound because there’s no other “keet” word in English that it could be confused with.

Lauren: John Wells was somewhat self-deprecating when he was talking about this, and he was like, “I just kind of came up with it in a week where I had to write this bit of the book, and it’s weird to think that they’re still in use now,” but it was based on years of insight into the different ways different varieties of English realise different vowels and the balance he was trying to strike.

Gretchen: He has this charming blog post from 2010 where he’s like, “Anybody’s welcome to use them. I don’t claim any copyright. Maybe this is my legacy now, I guess.” He does actually put quite a bit of thought into the sets because they’re words that can’t be easily confused for each other. Sometimes, that means the words are a little bit rare. You have “fleece.” You might think, “Well, why not use ‘sheep’ because surely that’s more common. People say that.”

Lauren: But “ship” and “sheep” are very hard to distinguish in some varieties of English.

Gretchen: Right. If you had “sheep,” it could be confused with “ship,” whereas if you have “fleece” and “kit,” there’s no “flice” or “keet” for them to be confused with.

Lauren: Good nonce words to add to your collection.

Gretchen: Thank you. Similarly, for people like me where I make the vowels in “caught,” as in the past tense of “catch,” and “cot,” as in a small bed, the same. If I talk about /cɑt/ and /cɑt/, people are like, “I dunno which one you’re talking about because you say them both the same.” And I’m like, “Great, neither do I.”

Lauren: You mean when you’re talking about /cɑt/ and /cɔt/.

Gretchen: Hmm. Yes, see, you don’t have that “caught/cot merger.”

Lauren: Very easy for me, but it’s much easier to be able to say /θɔt/ and /lɑt/ – much more distinct for me to perceive with you because they don’t have merged equivalents.

Gretchen: “Thought” and “lot” are much more distinct because the consonants are different. You don’t need to be relying only on the vowels. Some of these words are just super fun. Can we read the whole Wells Lexical Sets? There’re not very many of them.

Lauren: Sure. Let’s take turns in going through each of the words.

Gretchen: All right.

Lauren: So, you can hear the differences in the way we pronounce each of these vowels.

Gretchen: /kit/.

Lauren: /kit/.

Gretchen: / dɹɛs/.

Lauren: / dɹɛs/.

Gretchen: / tɹæp/.

Lauren: /tɹæp/.

Gretchen: /lɑt/.

Lauren: /lɑt/.

Gretchen: /stɹʌt/.

Lauren: /stɹʌt/.

Gretchen: /fʊt/.

Lauren: /fʊt/.

Gretchen: /bæθ/.

Lauren: /bɑθ/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different.

Lauren: We’ll come back to that one.

Gretchen: /klɑθ/.

Lauren: /klɑθ/.

Gretchen: /nɛɹs/.

Lauren: My Australian English speaker in me is already immediately prepared for /nɛːs/.

Gretchen: So, non-rhotic. Very good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: /flis/.

Lauren: /flis/.

Gretchen: /fɛɪs/.

Lauren: /fɛɪs/.

Gretchen: /pɑm/.

Lauren: /pæm/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different. /θɑt/.

Lauren: /θɔt/.

Gretchen: Also, very different. We’ll come back to this. /goʊt/.

Lauren: /gəut/.

Gretchen: Bit different. /gus/.

Lauren: /gus/.

Gretchen: /pɹəɪs/.

Lauren: /pɹæɪs/.

Gretchen: Bit different. I have Canadian raising there. We’ll get back to that. /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Lauren: /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Gretchen: /moʊθ/.

Lauren: /mæʊθ/.

Gretchen: Also, we’ll get back to that. /niɹ/.

Lauren: /nɪɑ/.

Gretchen: /skwɛɹ/.

Lauren: /skwɛɑ/.

Gretchen: /stɑɹt/.

Lauren: /stɑːt/.

Gretchen: /nɔɹθ/.

Lauren: /nɔːθ/.

Gretchen: /fɔɹs/.

Lauren: /fɔːs/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/. I’m only slightly hamming up my Australian English diphthongs there.

Gretchen: That whole set with the Rs where I’m like, “These are just the same sounds, but now there’s an R,” you’re like, “No, these are really different diphthongs.”

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɑ/. /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: Taking you on a journey of my whole mouth.

Gretchen: One thing you could do if you’re trying to compare mine and Lauren’s vowels is you could listen to us saying them and being like, “Yeah, those sound kind of different in some places.” But another thing we could do, is we could draw some diagrams.

Lauren: That’s what we did.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: We were very grateful that Dr. Bethany Gardner – who is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the USA – took the time to work with us to take recordings of us saying words and plotting the vowels onto a vowel plot.

Gretchen: Now, we can look at our vowel plots and compare our vowels to each other. We have a whole bonus episode with Bethany about how we made these graphs with them. For the moment, let’s just look at them and compare them with each other and say some things about the results.

Lauren: We sent Bethany recordings of us reading the Wells Lexical Sets, much the way we did just then.

Gretchen: Less giggling though.

Lauren: We did record them a little bit more professionally, but they also used some processes to scrape data of equivalent word recordings from episodes of Lingthusiasm using our transcripts – turns out, another use of our transcripts!

Gretchen: Get people to analyse your vowels for you. It’s so cool!

Lauren: You can see the difference between clearly spoken vowels where we’re really focusing on them and then that really compelling influence that other sounds have on vowels that drag them all over the space.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m looking at the first set of graphs for each of us, which are the Wells Lexical Sets, and my vowels are a lot more consistent in them. When I make /i/ and /ɪ/ and /u/, all the points are quite clustered in one spot – because we said everything several times – but I seem to be hitting quite a consistent target there. Whereas when I look at Bethany’s vowel plot of me from the Lingthusiasm episodes, there’s way more stuff there, and I’m way more spread out. My vowels are less consistent with each other because I’m producing them in several words. They tested several different words. I’m just producing them in running speech where things merge into each other a lot more rather than this very clear word list style.

Lauren: And human ears and brains are so good at disambiguating things that might be very close to each other in the plot, but in a running sentence, we can hear them quite clearly for the words that they are.

Gretchen: Right. My “goose” vowel and my “foot” vowel – /gus/ and /fʊt/ – are almost totally distinct from each other when I’m reading a word list. There’s very little overlap in terms of how I’m saying them. But when I’m saying them in running speech, apparently there’s a lot of overlap because I’m probably saying something like, “Oh, go get the goose,” /gʊs/, rather than /gus/ with that really clear /u/.

Lauren: There’s no other word I’m gonna confuse “goose” with, or even if I did, in context, I’d know what thing you’re expecting me to go get.

Gretchen: Right. Even if I’m saying something like, “dude,” you’re not gonna confuse that for “dud.” I’d be saying them in different contexts.

Lauren: The nice thing is you can see, especially from our clearly spoken word lists, that we are speaking a language where the vowels are in a similar place, but there are some slight differences. You can actually start to get the hang of the differences in the way different varieties of English tend to use the vowel space from this information.

Gretchen: One of the things I noticed about your vowel plot, Lauren – and this is a feature of Australian English – is that your “kit” vowel and your “fleece” vowel are very close to each other, especially in episode speech rather than word list speech.

Lauren: Yeah, “kit” and “fleece,” for me, are both really far forward. You’re using other features like length or tenseness to really disambiguate them. People struggle to do it.

Gretchen: Or just in context. I noticed when I was visiting Australia that people would say things like /bɪːg/, and I’d be like, “Oh, okay, I would say that as /bɪg/.”

Lauren: It’s a pretty classic feature of Australian English. It does remind me of one of the most embarrassing times someone misheard me when I was living in the UK. I was talking about how I used to be on a team with my friends for social netball. This person was not listening that well, and it was a noisy environment, and they thought that I had said, “nipple.”

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: /nɪpl̩/ and /nɛtbɑl/.

Gretchen: /nɛtbɑl/, /nɛtbɑl/, whereas I think my /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels, my “kit” and “dress” vowels, are pretty distinct from each other. They don’t really overlap.

Lauren: Whereas all of Australian English is really far forward. It tends to be quite high. The British English speaker – I don’t know what sport they thought we play in Australia, but there was a moment of deep confusion.

Gretchen: These are the types of things that you can find out when you get your vowels done the way sometimes people – I think there’s a trend on Instagram right now to get your colours done, you know, find out whether you’re a “winter” or a “soft spring” or something like this.

Lauren: I’m an Australian English “kit”-fronting.

Gretchen: Yeah. What are your vowels? What does this say about where you’re from? Is there anything you noticed about mine?

Lauren: I think, for you, definitely what becomes clear is that “caught/cot merger,” or, as I like to think about it, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Gretchen: Ah, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Lauren: I can tell if people have it if my name and the word “gone” sound the same.

Gretchen: The past participle of “go.”

Lauren: It’s very salient for me. The cot/caught merger is so famous, people don’t use the Wells Set terms for it. They just refer to it as “caught/cot.”

Gretchen: But you could also call it the “thought/lot merger” or the “lot/thought merger.” I never know which one goes first because I literally just think of these as being said the same.

Lauren: You can see evidence. We’re not imagining that you’re merging them. You are physically merging them in the vowel space.

Gretchen: I’m literally saying them as the same thing. I was always confused about the “thought” vowel when I was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet because I was like, “I can’t figure out how to make a sound that is somewhere in between this sound in ‘lot’ and ‘thought’ but doesn’t go all the way up to the /oʊ/ in ‘goat’.” It doesn’t feel like there’s anything between them for me. That’s true. The vast majority of Canadians have “thought” and “lot” merged. But unlike at least some Americans, we don’t have them merged low; we have them merged high. I have “thought” and “caught,” and in order to produce the other vowel, I had to actually produce something lower in my throat – like /θɑt/ /cat/ which sounds very American to me – I had to produce this lower sound because there was no space between “thought” and “goat.” They’re very close to each other. In fact, the thing that I wasn’t producing was /ɑ/, the really low one, that sort of dentist sound.

Lauren: Yeah. Movements and mergers can happen in all kinds of different directions. The merging of “cot” and “caught” also explains why it took me a very long time to understand that “podcast” is a pun because it’s meant to be a pun with “broadcast,” and /pɑd/ and /bɹɔːd/.

Gretchen: /pɑdkæst/ and /bɹɑdkæst/. It’s the same vowel for me.

Lauren: Whereas it works as a pun for you. That was very satisfying to learn that’s why that’s meant to be a pun.

Gretchen: The pun that I didn’t get based on my accent – and this is to do with the “price” and “mouth” vowels – I didn’t realise that “I scream for ice cream” was supposed to be a pun.

Lauren: Oh, because the raising that you have in Canada means that it doesn’t work that way, whereas /ɑɪ skɹim fə ɑɪ skɹim/.

Gretchen: Right, you have the same vowel in those – or the same diphthong – but for me, “I scream for ice cream,” those are very different. In “choice” and “price,” I have different vowels than I would have in “choys” and “prize” – if “choys” was a word.

Lauren: “Bok choys” – multiple.

Gretchen: “Bok choys” – yeah, several of them. And “prize.”

Lauren: Returning to “podcast” but moving to the other end of the word, /kɑst // kæst/ as a distinction is so famous in mapping varieties of British English that people talk about /bɑθ // tɹæp/ distinctions all the time.

Gretchen: I hear of it as called the “bath/trap split,” but as you can hear, the “/bæθ // tɹæp/ split,” I just say them both the same.

Lauren: Whereas in Australia, Victorians traditionally would say /kæsl̩/ like “trap,” and people further north and in the rest of the country could say, /kɑsl̩/ –

Gretchen: Like “bath.”

Lauren: So, whether you’re a /kɑsl̩/ or a /kæsl̩/ shows this “bath/trap split” as well, to the point where, in New South Wales, you get the city of “New /kɑsl̩/,” but in Victoria, you have the town of “/kæsl̩/ Main.”

Gretchen: Ooo, this “castle” distinction from the “trap/bath split” – I think sometimes when I’m trying to do a fake British accent, I will just make all of my “traps” and “baths” into /tɹɑps/ and /bɑθs/.

Lauren: Right, okay. You know there’s something happening there, and you haven’t quite landed – because it does vary.

Gretchen: Well, then they’re not different categories for me because it’s all one category, and I push them all forward rather than moving half of them because I don’t know which half to move.

Lauren: I find it very satisfying listening to “No Such Thing as a Fish,” because they talk about the /pɑdkɑst/ or the /pɑdkæst/, and their guests do, depending on whether they’re from Southern England or more in the midlands and north where they tend to say /kæst/ instead of /kɑst/.

Gretchen: I have literally never noticed this distinction. I’ve also listened to many episodes of “No Such Thing as a Fish” because you made me start listening to them back in the day, and I’ve never noticed that they say anything different because it’s just not something I pay attention to.

Lauren: It’s so salient for me as a Victorian English speaker, but I notice it all the time. There would be a really fun mapping variation activity to do listening through to Fish – turns out I just listen to it and don’t get distracted by that too much.

Gretchen: Well, if you want to commission Bethany to make graphs of their vowels, I’m sure that’s an option.

Lauren: I love how Wells’ lexical set has just entered – in many ways, the “bath/trap split,” it means you get all these other terms like “goose fronting,” which is just great as a term.

Gretchen: I love how vivid these words are. Things like “fleece” and “goose” and “goat,” they’re very common animal nouns that are quite vivid.

Lauren: And there’re definitely linguists who have dressed up as Wells Lexical Set items for Halloween. It makes a great group Halloween costume.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, my favourite one of these was from North Carolina State University. They got the whole department, and they each dressed up as one member of the Wells Lexical Set. Someone was a “kit.” They dressed like a cat. Someone dressed like a goose, and someone dressed like a cloth or a fleece. Then they stood in the positions to create the vowel diagram. They posted a photo on the internet. You can see it. We will link to it. It’s really great.

Lauren: Magic. You and I also once had a project where we plotted the Wells Lexical Set using emoji.

Gretchen: That was your project.

Lauren: I did the making the joke. You did the graphic design. It was a good team project.

Gretchen: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair. I feel like I remember you being the instigator of this.

Lauren: Shenanigans were shenaniganed.

Gretchen: You can get a goose emoji and a goat emoji, and you can map the vowels in there as well.

Lauren: And “Goose fronting” – because we’re talking about moving the tongue further forward or back or up and down in the vowel space – I have quite fronted vowels as an Australian English speaker for my front vowels. So, “goose” – I’ve already got it quite far forward compared to you. You can see that in the diagrams.

Gretchen: I think my “goose” – my goose is also cooked – my “goose” is also fronted. Because I think Canadian English is also undergoing goose fronting. There’s a lot of different regions that are all simultaneously fronting their geese – no, not their “geese,” fronting their “gooses.”

Lauren: Fronting their “gooses.” I feel like the really stereotypical example is from California, particularly in the lexical item “dude.”

Gretchen: “Dude” – sort of like a surfer pronunciation of “duuude.”

Lauren: “/du̟d/ you’re a fronted /gu̟s/.”

Gretchen: If you compare that with like /dud/, which would be less fronted, /dud/ sounds like you’re more of a fuddy duddy, and /du̟d/ sounds like you’re “so /ku̟l/.”

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, there’re other things happening there as well because I found a paper while researching this where someone looked at 70 years of Received Pronunciation, which is that incredibly stuffy, British, old-fashioned newsreader voice. Apparently, goose fronting is happening in that variety as well.

Gretchen: Oh, so if the Queen was still alive, she’d be fronting her “goose” as well?

Lauren: Quite possibly. Gooses are being fronted all over the place.

Gretchen: All over the English-speaking world. One of the things that can happen if you’re getting your vowel tea leaves read is you can say things about region. Another thing that looking at a vowel plot can do – because vowels just contribute so much to our sense of accent – is it can say things about gender. One of the cool studies that I came across about this is there’re studies of kids. People often assess someone’s gender based on their voice. If someone’s on the phone, you may have an idea about their gender. You may also have an idea of their age. Part of this is based on vocal tract size. Kids’ voices are high pitched because kids’ heads and throats and larynxes are smaller than adults.

Lauren: The cool thing is there’s no gender difference in that until puberty. People who go through a testosterone-heavy puberty tend to grow larger vocal tracts and tend to have deeper pitches. I mean, not in the scheme of things where they’re so completely different. There’s so much overlap. But we’re really tuned into these subtle differences. But before that age, anything that kids are doing different, it’s nothing to do with what’s happening with the meat pipe and everything to do with what’s happening with the social performance of gender, which is to do with your culture.

Gretchen: Even at age 4, when there’s really no physiological difference, age 8 when there’s really no physiological difference, you can see that kids are producing their vowels somewhat differently in a difference that increases with age based on their gender because they’re culturally acquiring “This is what it means to feel like a boy,” “This is what it means to feel like a girl,” and they’re doing gender with their voices even when they don’t have the vocal tract changes reinforcing that yet.

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: Yeah. You can see that there are differences at age 4 that increase with age and increase up to age 8 and 12 and 16 and get more distinct from each other. The other thing is, once people get a bit older in teenage-hood and in adulthood, there are gender differences in vocal tract. The general finding with gender differences in vowel plot size – so we’ve been talking about having some vowels be more front or some vowels be more similar to each other, but the overall finding when it comes to gender is roughly that, at least in English-speaking environments, men tend to have all of their vowels more similar to each other, more towards the centre of the space/ Specifically, cis straight men tend to have vowels that are all more towards the centre of the vowel space. Everybody else – so cis, straight women, gay men, lesbians, trans people of all genders, nonbinary people – use way more of the vowel space.

Lauren: Straight men, you’re missing out.

Gretchen: Like, cis straight men are doing this one very specific thing with buying into hegemonic masculinity of vowels where they’re not wearing interesting colours, and they’re not doing interesting vowels.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: There was one quote from one of the studies that I read where they had one cis straight man who was an anomaly in the list of not doing this very centralised vowel thing, and he was like, “Yeah, sometimes people hear me, and they think I’m gay, which I’m not. I’m just a nerd. I don’t really do that macho stuff.”

Lauren: Aww, it’s nice they asked him.

Gretchen: Yeah. “People just perceive my vowels as whatever. I don’t really care. I’m not trying to do that thing with my vowels.”

Lauren: Fascinating that the social discourse was enough that he had been made aware of it.

Gretchen: Yeah, and that doing anything out of that little man box of the very small set of vowels was enough to get him thinking, “Oh, yeah, well, it’s because I don’t buy into this particularly narrow view of masculinity.”

Lauren: Fascinating. I should say, you flagged English there, but that’s because we have more of this work in English. We need more of this work across the world’s languages. There’s so much to be done about the social dimensions of vowels.

Gretchen: Right. A lot of the early work in, especially, gender and vowels has this very essentialist framework of like, “We found the male vocal tract; we found the female vocal tract.” There’s a recent study by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart which I got to see at the Linguistic Society of America last year where they were looking at “What are the vowel differences between genders, and can we actually characterise these more precisely?” They found that the biggest thing that affected vowel spaces was actually related to height. Taller people have more space in their vowels – deeper voices.

Lauren: Makes sense. They’ve got more space for their bigger meat pipe. That’s more of a bassoon than an oboe, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Taller people have a bigger meat pipe. In fact, the relationship between height of your whole body and size of your meat pipe is very linear and doesn’t have a categorical distinction for gender. Of course, if you collapse this into two different buckets labelled “men” and “women,” you’ll find, on average, that men are taller than women on average, but of course, there’re lots of individual people who are exceptions to that, and it’s much more of a variant thing. Similarly, with some of the research on sexuality, some of the early stuff is like, “Oh, do gay men or do lesbians have different-shaped vowel tracts from a physiological perspective?” The answer is “No, this is cultural.”

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: But the finding keeps being reported in terms of like, “Oh, well, gay men have more extreme vowels in various places,” especially with “trap” being produced further away from the centre of the mouth. Lesbian women tend to have further-back sounds for “palm” and for “goose,” or sometimes they’re intermediate between male and female targets. But again, this seems to very much be cultural. The bi women – some studies found they patterned with the lesbian women. Some studies found they pattern with the straight women. No one knows what to do with us. The one study I found on bi men found they patterned with the gay men, but again, maybe other studies would find something different. There’s a paper by Lal Zimman about trans men’s voices being perceived as quote-unquote “gay” after they go on testosterone. He finds that it’s not quite the exact same as the cis gay men, but it’s also because it seems to not be in that narrow man box. People are just parsing it as gay.

Lauren: So many cultural attitudes coming to bear on vowel spaces.

Gretchen: Studies on trans women’s vowel spaces is often fairly dominated by the speech pathology literature, which is about, specifically, vocal training and trans women really trying to make their voices sound different, but it still finds that they’re not doing exactly the same thing as either cis women or cis men.

Lauren: Right. Again, lots of cultural practice at play there. Anything about our nonbinary pals?

Gretchen: There is a recent dissertation by Jacq Jones, and they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Which is, again, not exactly the same as anybody else and not necessarily the same as each other either. They could just keep doing whatever they want. But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on gender and sexuality, especially in terms of dispersion of the vowel space and regional stuff in terms of specific things being closer or further from each other.

Lauren: There’s so much happening in vowels in terms of plotting them all in this space in the mouth, but also so much happening in terms of plotting them in the social space. This is what makes vowels so rich and so interesting.

Gretchen: I feel like when we’re talking about vowel plotting, there’s this aspect of “Mwahaha, I am putting my fingers together and plotting,” which is maybe the fact that vowels do convey so much social information about who you are or where you’re from that you can make plots about people when you know what their vowels are. If we were going to make a meat clarinet or a meat bassoon or even a meat bagpipe –

Lauren: Oh, dear.

Gretchen: I’m so sorry. We would not only want it to be able to convey the basic vowel chart. One of the reasons why I think these synthetic versions of the human voice often sound so weird is that they don’t have all of this additional demographic information, regional information, gender and sexuality information that’s also so important to our experience of vowels.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – including visualisations of our very own vowel plots – 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 the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. 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.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. 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 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. Our most recent bonus topic was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots we discussed in this episode. We talked to Bethany about how to do vowel charts and how you can plot your own vowels, or you can just learn about how they did it for us. Think of it like a little behind-the-scenes episode on the making of this episode. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: 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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #transcripts #podcasts #episodes #episode 90 #vowels #vowel sounds #vowel plots #vowel charts #IPA #international phonetic alphabet #phonetics #accents

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we're so sorry)... the meat bagpipe!

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are. We commissioned Dr. Bethany Gardner to make custom vowel plots for us (which you can see below!) based on how we say certain words during Lingthusiasm episodes, and we talk about how our personal vowel plots let us easily see differences between our Canadian and Australian accents and between when we're carefully reading a wordlist versus more casually talking on the show. We also talk about where the two numbers per vowel that we graph come from (hint: that's where the bagpipe comes in), the delightfully wacky keywords used to compare vowels across English varieties (leading us to silly names for real phenomena, like "goose fronting"), and how vowel spaces are linked to other aspects of our identities including regional variation as well as gender and sexuality.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the process of making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. We talk about Bethany's PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular "they", how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to make nifty vowel plots for us! If you think you might want to map your own vowels or you just like deep dives into the making-of process, this is the bonus episode for you.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

The Lingthusiasm Vowel Plots:

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

See larger versions of our vowel plots on Bethany's Github, which also contains a tutorial on making your own if you're excited about an intermediate-level coding project

Previously on vowels: Lingthusiasm episode 'Vowel Gymnastics'

Previously on visualizing sounds: Lingthusiasm episode 'Making speech visible with spectrograms'

Previously on "meat clarinet": Lingthusiasm episode 'Various vocal fold vibes'

'How do bagpipes work?!' from Ally The Piper on YouTube

Make your own bagpipe! - 'The World's Greatest Latex Glove Bagpipes || DIY' from World By Charlie on YouTube

Wikipedia entry for 'Voder'

A Voder in action - 'VODER (1939) - Early Speech Synthesizer' from VintageCG on YouTube

99% Invisible episode 'Vox Ex Machina'

Identifying sounds in spectrograms

Formants

Wikipedia entry for Wells Lexical Set

'lexical set' entry on John Wells's phonetic blog

'The Standard Lexical Sets for English as emoji' on Superlinguo

'The Advance of ‘Goose’' on Dialect Blog

'GOOSE-fronting in Received Pronunciation across time: A trend study' by Sandra Jansen and Jose A. Mompean

Australian kit/fleece vowel (Wikipedia entry on Australian English phonology)

'Australian English Monophthongs' by Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox

'Vowel Acoustic Space Development in Children: A Synthesis of Acoustic and Anatomic Data' by Houri K. Vorperian and Ray D. Kent

'There is no female vocal tract: Abandoning essentialist ideology in phonetics' by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart

'The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production (L)' by Janet B. Pierrehumbert et al.

'Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men' by Lal Zimman

'Revisiting the acoustics of speaker gender perception: A gender expansive perspective' by Brandon Merritt and Tessa Bent

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episodes #podcast #podcasts #episode 90 #vowels #vowel sounds #vowel plots #phonetics #ipa #international phonetic alphabet #accents #SoundCloud

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 85: How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner

One major thing that makes accents and languages sound different from each other is in how people pronounce their vowels.  We could examine vowels by training our ears to pay very close attention to these differences, and many linguists have, but another way of getting a new perspective on these vowel distinctions lies in creating visual representations of the precise and subtle variations on how individual people make their vowels. 

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. Bethany is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and importantly for our purposes here, they’re really great at making graphs in R. We talk about Bethany's PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular "they", how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to become good at making all sorts of graphs. We also talk about how Bethany went from the full Lingthusiasm audio and transcripts to 400 teeny-tiny labelled audio files of Gretchen and Lauren saying particular key words to calculating two important numbers for each vowel that we said and mapping them out on a graph.  

Get a sneak peek of the final vowel plots for Lauren and Gretchen in the shownotes for this episode!

Listen to this episode about creating vowel plots, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #podcast #bonus #bonus episodes #bonuses #bonus 85 #vowel charts #vowel plots #vowels #vowel sounds #Well's lexical set #Bethany Gardner

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Connecting with oral culture'. 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 oral storytelling. But first, we have a fun new thing that you can do which is that we’ve created a highly scientific – [clears throat] – personality quiz where you can answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with those responses.

Lauren: If you’re new to the podcast, and you’re trying to figure out what episode to start with, or if you’ve been with us for ages, and you wanna dive into the back catalogue, or if you’re trying to figure out which episode to recommend to a friend, our incredibly un-scientific, often-amusing questioned quiz is there for you to find the perfect episode.

Gretchen: You mean, you don’t think that which beverage someone likes corresponds to which Lingthusiasm episode they’re gonna like? I think this is very scientific.

Lauren: Absolutely unvalidated, absolutely untested, they are entirely for your amusement at bit.ly/lingthusiasmquiz.

Gretchen: Unscientific – but very fun.

Lauren: You can also find the link in the episode show notes.

Gretchen: In our most recent bonus episode, we take this quiz ourselves to find out which episode we are – although, of course, we love all of them as our children – and we also talk about the results of our 2023 listener survey.

Lauren: This one is rigorously scientifically constructed and tested. We have all the results, including whether Lingthusiasm is more kiki or bouba, and we discuss the results of important questions like, “Is the thumb a finger?” and “Is your sister’s husband’s sister still your sister-in-law?”

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to this bonus episode and way more behind-the-scenes and other fun topic bonus episodes that help us keep the show running for all of you.

[Music]

Lauren: A conversation I enjoy having is to ask two people how they met because, sometimes, you’ll get this wonderfully honed and polished version of the story that they’ve both told that may not actually be entirely the original story but is “The Story” of how they met. And sometimes, you get two completely different takes on the event, and that has its own value as well.

Gretchen: When it comes to the story of how we started this podcast, my version of the story is Lauren and I had been friends on the internet for a long time. We were finally hanging out in person for the first time at a conference, and Lauren was like, “I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast,” and I was like, “I’VE been thinking about starting a podcast,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lauren: Whereas I swear by the story that Gretchen was like, “I would love to do a podcast,” and I was like, “I have skills that I could bring to your great idea for a podcast. We should do this together.”

Gretchen: We had this conversation face-to-face not over email or over DMs or somewhere where it might’ve been recorded, so we have no record to know whose version of this memory is factually what happened, but emotionally, both of us think that it was the other person’s idea first, which I think is really funny.

Lauren: I’ve even gone back to look at early written interactions that we’ve had to see who started the conversation from social media through to DMs and emails, and I’ll tell you what, direct messages on social media platforms are not an archivist’s friend.

Gretchen: It’s really hard to actually find out what’s going on. Even our first emails to each other which we can find are continuing the conversation from DMs. But this tendency to want to have our life histories documented is a very written-culture technology sort of thing. It’s what made me recommend to you to read this short story by Ted Chiang, who I knew that you’d heard of as the author of Story of Your Life, which is the short story that was adapted into the movie Arrival. He has this other short story called The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, which I thought you would enjoy. Do you wanna give us a little summary of it?

Lauren: Sure. I mean, we’ve already talked about the fact that writing is a technology. We have a whole episode on the idea of putting symbols onto clay or paper or tortoise shells is a very particular cultural invention, but what I like about this short story is it gets to the point that this technology brings with it all of these social changes and social dynamics that create literacy. It’s a short story, but you get two for the price of one. There’re two completely different narratives that are happening in this story. The one that’s specifically about writing is about Jijingi, who is a Tiv speaker from Tivland. A missionary named Moseby arrives in his village. Jijingi is the only person in the village who takes Moseby up on the offer to learn how to write. Moseby comes along with a whole colonial project – very much like British colonial vibes – where writing comes along as a technology that is used to govern people administratively, so along with writing comes record-keeping and trying to write down and codify histories and rules. That brings with it all these changes to the social fabric of Tivland.

Gretchen: I liked this story because it talks about the effect of the transition from oral culture to written culture on memory and cultural shift. One of the ways that Chiang illustrates this is by having the second strand of this braided story, which features an unnamed journalist as the narrator who is talking about this futuristic technology – which the story is set some unknown number of years in the future – when everyone has started using “Remem,” which are these optical cameras – you carry around this iris cam which is giving you access to video footage of a whole bunch of things that have happened in your life, all of these moments that would’ve gone undocumented, like the moment when Lauren and I decided to start a podcast.

Lauren: We could go back and get the definitive version, which for us would be an amusing resolution, but our unnamed protagonist goes back to look at all the arguments he had with his teenage daughter, which is never gonna end well.

Gretchen: It causes the unnamed narrator of that story to reassess his relationship with his daughter and the accuracy – or the emotional truth – of these memories that he’s been feeling in one particular way and how it feels to go back and look at them from the perspective of this disinterested camera which was also present at the scene.

Lauren: We are so familiar with writing as a technology and as a memory tool. It was nice to be put in the position of being slightly bamboozled by this future technology and how that would once again make us reassess our relationship with – as the title of the story says – the truth of fact and the truth of feeling.

Gretchen: We’ll link to the short story because it’s available online. I definitely endorse reading it. What did you think about it when you read it?

Lauren: I assume that the story of the Jijingi is – it seems to be drawing on the thing that we see happen when Western cultures brought literacy in with them because there’s all these dynamics around the written record changing the oral tradition where different tribes would talk about how they were related to each other, and then they were like, “No, because you’ve written it down here, and the written version is the definitive version, so we’re not gonna honour the current status of knowledge about which groups your group is aligned with.” I assume the specifics of that were fiction, but it seems to really capture the vibe of that.

Gretchen: Interestingly, this specific case is a real case that happened. Of course, the specific names of the people involved and what they were thinking, I think, are, indeed, fictionalised. But the Tiv people of Nigeria had a set of genealogies that were being used in settling court disputes, and they were recorded by the British in the colonial context. Then they diverged in the oral tradition from the written thing, and then the later oral people were saying, “No, you guys have written down the wrong thing. We have what’s true here.”

Lauren: Because that’s what’s true at this point in time for – like, “We’re friends with this community over here right now and not this other village, so we’re gonna update the story to reflect the current state of things.”

Gretchen: Right. And there isn’t perceived to be a rupture in that the way writing can create a rupture between your perceived-self versus the version of yourself that you’ve projected into the past. What I was told was that Chiang had read an academic manuscript about the effects of orality and literacy on cultures and on humans by an academic named Walter J. Ong and had been inspired to take a few sentences from that and expand that into a whole short story that elaborates on the emotional truths addressed in that relatively dry academic fashion.

Lauren: It’s very satisfying because I was like, “This feels like a story,” but it did feel grounded in an understanding of how literacy can change social dynamics.

Gretchen: I was inspired to read the academic book as well by this, but the short story conveys these truths in a more vivid storytelling way, which gets to the whole storytelling themes that come up from making things memorable by telling them as stories.

Lauren: I appreciate you sent me the short story and not the 200-page academic manuscript.

Gretchen: I read the 200-page academic manuscript! I think it’s very interesting. We’ll return to more things from the Ong book so that not everybody has to read it. But one of the things that reading this Ong book about orality and literacy made me reflect on was what he calls “residual orality,” little pockets of our lives and our experiences that may still be in an oral culture even when we’re living in predominantly written cultures, which you and I are both predominantly in a written culture. One example of this coming up in my life was I’m just young enough to remember when social media changed the way that gossip worked to be more written from being more oral.

Lauren: Ah, yes.

Gretchen: I remember in a pre-Facebook era of gossip where let’s say there was a party, and I wasn’t there. If some big drama happened at the party, you know, “I can’t believe so-and-so said this to so-and-so,” there’s a big fight or something, and I wanted to reconstruct what happened, I had to go talk to a bunch of people – I remember doing this – talk to a bunch of people, get their stories, which would all be a little bit different from each other, and decide what I believed from that based on my knowledge of these people and their personalities and what they were likely to tell as a story. I remember it being a really weird experience when Facebook started, and people would be posting things that were in view of just their friends. You could see similar types of dramas playing out – you know, “I can’t believe what this person said to that person” – but you could actually read the whole thing, and you could be present for the whole thing, and you could have that factive truth of witnessing the whole thing, even if you weren’t there at the time, because a few hours later it would still be there.

Lauren: And the pulling out your phone to tell someone some gossip that’s happened because you want to hold up the Instagram photo or you want to show them the Facebook thread where all the drama went down.

Gretchen: Right. Screencap culture of “I can’t believe this person said this thing. I’m gonna take a screencap and just show it to you” rather than “I’m going to report the story of what happened from my perspective” has made gossip more of a written culture than an oral culture where we have less acceptance for the fact that things may change a bit in the retelling, or you may retell the version as you experienced it from your own perspective and massage it to be more of a story with emotional beats at particular places. Now, you pull out a screencap, or you pull out the actual version, “Let me just read you what this person sent me.” Gossip has gotten more written in the last 20 years, which you can phrase that as a loss, and it’s also harder for people to deny obviously jerk-ish behaviour, so there are pluses to it, but it is something that’s changed.

Lauren: Another area that I think of as residual oral culture is when it comes to fairy tales. As a kid, it took me a long time – and I think a lot of people struggle with this tension – where the animated film version of a fairy tale is different to the picture book that you have which is different to a different picture book that someone else might have or the version that your grandmother told you not from a book just the version that she had. This is how fairy tales traditionally go. This idea that there’s a written, canonical version kind of came about when the Grimm Brothers decided to record fairy tales that they had encountered as part of their general documenting of German language and German history. I love that the Grimm Brothers are known most broadly for their fairy tale writing down. In linguistics, they’re known for doing all of this amazing historical research on the sounds of German and Proto-German. Fairy tales are their secondary claim to fame for linguists.

Gretchen: But giving the claim to fame of the people who did the documentation when what they were actually doing was documenting a thing that was in the collective memory of a group of people is a theme that keeps coming back when it comes to oral culture. Again, I am grateful to the Grimm Brothers for writing all of these stories down because otherwise I probably wouldn’t know them, as with many of the documenters. On the other hand, they ended up getting credit or claiming credit for all of these people whose names we don’t know who iterated on various versions of these fairy tales because they were part of a collective oral tradition.

Lauren: Also, writing something down doesn’t mean that it will stay a part of the transmission tradition. The Grimm Brothers over multiple volumes and multiple reversions of it ended up with around 200 fairy tales.

Gretchen: I don’t know 200 fairy tales.

Lauren: You mean you don’t know “The Three Snake-Leaves”?

Gretchen: I know “Cinderella.”

Lauren: Are you looking forward to the animated remake of “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage”?

Gretchen: I know “The Princess and the Pea”?

Lauren: Some Grimm fairy tales have stood the test of time, and others have not remained in transmission for different groups of people. You might be from a different part of the world where you still know “The Magic Table, the Gold-Donkey, and the Club in the Sack,” but that’s not one that I’ve kept in my family repository of stories.

Gretchen: But writing lets things remain in an archive for someone to rediscover rather than the cultural pruning of the oral tradition where the bits that gets remembered are the bits that get continually repeated.

Lauren: There’s a lot of oral culture that we only have thanks to the written form. Homer and the Homeric epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – only exist because someone at some point wrote down a version of those stories.

Gretchen: Somebody who may or may not have been a guy named Homer.

Lauren: But I have a statue of the bust of Homer! He was a person!

Gretchen: I mean, there certainly was some person and some people somewhere, but Homer is, in many ways, a cultural folkloric figure himself. By tradition, these poems are attributed to Homer, but they may not have even been written by the same dude. They certainly seem to have some temporal distinctions between the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were definitely part of the Ancient Greek oral tradition because they have a lot of structural features that are characteristic of the oral tradition, the sort of episodic structure, the formulaic things like “wily Odysseus” and “owl-eyed Athena” and the various epithets that get attached to the characters who are these clear archetypes. Homer himself – we don’t really know. This idea that he was this blind guy is because one of the bards in one of the Homeric poems is blind, and people have said, “Well, maybe this is a self-insert because he himself was blind.” We don’t know.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: The paintings and the busts and so on of Homer are all produced several hundred years later. They’re sort of fanfic adaptations of him.

Lauren: I actually feel more impressed when I discovered that Homer wasn’t a single person and, in fact, this whole debate about the status of him is known as the “Homeric question.” I feel more impressed knowing that there wasn’t just one person who told these stories but there were, and still are, people across this region who would remember thousands and thousands of lines of oral stories and be able to perform them – not word-for-word every time – but they would hit the same beats, they would be transmitting the same stories, they would all put their own spin on it, and that this continued on for centuries and millennia, and somehow I find that more powerful than the idea that there was this one dude in particular who was really good at this.

Gretchen: It wasn’t this lone genius. It was a culture that supported bardic storytelling.

Lauren: It wasn’t necessarily a culture that just disappeared with Ancient Greece. In fact, even well into the 20th Century, if you went to the region in Europe around there, there would be people in mountain villages who still sang epic songs of incredible length. Milman Parry was an American classicist who decided to see if there were any “modern Homers,” as it was put, and he recorded one song that was performed over five days and ended up being 13,000 lines, which is just an amazing skill to have and one that, as a literate person, I’ve not grown up to be trained to have the kind of memory to perform that kind of feat.

Gretchen: That’s really neat. I think a thing that interests me about the question of the Homeric recordings and Milman Parry’s recordings is that the Homeric Greeks, whoever Homer was or all of the Homers were, were using this new technology – to them – of writing to record these oral poems that were very important to them culturally. Then you have Milman Parry using also the latest and greatest recording technology which was, what, wax cylinders?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, I think it was these aluminium disks that they had to swap out every five minutes or something. I can’t even imagine the amount of equipment that they had to move around to make this happen.

Gretchen: Yet, it’s still such a feat to record a five-day poem. There’s also a big recording feat that happened in the 1960s to record the Mwindo epic from the Nyanga people in the Congo. The poet there, Candi Rureke, who was asked to narrate all of the stories of Mwindo, who’s the hero of these folk stories, and said, “Never had anybody performed all of the episodes in sequence.” He narrated, as a result of the negotiations between the researchers who wanted to do this, all of the Mwindo stories – sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse – over 12 days. There were three scribes – two Nyanga scribes and one Belgian scribe – who were writing down his words at the same time because it’s obviously faster than one person can write. This is not like writing a novel or a poem. It’s much more of a performance. After the end of those 12 days, he was exhausted, obviously.

Lauren: I’m not surprised.

Gretchen: It’s already framed in terms of the demands of writing, which says, “Okay, we’re gonna try to do this in a big, tight sequence and have this efficient thing.” Oral poems are created to be told to people for maybe an hour or two in the evenings, and then the next day, you tell another story for an hour or two, and together, they form an episodic mythology of “Here are all the stories of the gods” or “Here are all the stories of the heroes” or “Here are all the stories of these archetypal, legendary figures” – the princesses and the dragons and these types of things.

Lauren: As a member of the Nyanga community, you hear all the Mwindo stories across your lifetime. The idea that you would sit down and tell them in some kind of sequence is not the normal way these are performed.

Gretchen: Right, exactly. There’s a story about Mwindo, who’s the hero – the omnicompetent hero – his epithet is “Little-One-Just-Born-He-Walked.” He walked as soon as he was born. There are stories about how he climbed from the womb and, in one case, emerged from his mother’s bellybutton. This is the version from the recording with Rureke that I was able to find. But I also saw in a different encyclopaedia that Mwindo emerged from his mother’s middle finger. They’re both clearly doing a similar preternatural birth-style story – emerging from your bellybutton or from your middle finger – but the details can vary. In both cases, the important stuff is still there where he’s helping his mother with chores even while he’s still in the womb. He’s walking and talking from the moment he’s born. His father’s trying to only have daughters because there’s a prophecy that his son will be his downfall. He tries to kill Mwindo even as a baby and, of course, he doesn’t succeed because this is a hero.

Lauren: What a precocious child.

Gretchen: Exactly. But the birth story is one of the many stories that gets told and isn’t necessarily told in sequence where it’s like, “Well, first he was born, and then this thing happened and then this thing happened.” You could pick any one of them to tell on a given night.

Lauren: It’s interesting how we see stuff vary in oral narratives, but there’s also something really compelling about what is emerging as the same across different stories and, often, across large areas. I mentioned briefly that the Grimm Brothers kicked off this whole recording of folk stories and fairy stories across Europe and beyond. People have looked at the similarities there. But there’s this even bigger story that I find really compelling, which is the story of the Seven Sisters, which I know from Indigenous Australian narrative tradition.

Gretchen: I’ve heard of the Seven Sisters as referring to a Greek story about the constellation that I also know as the Pleiades. It’s got this very closely clustered set of stars in the night sky that's sort of shaped like a teeny-tiny Big Dipper, I think of it. In my recollection, when I’ve looked at the Pleiades myself, I’ve seen six stars, and yet, the Greek stories about the Seven Sisters, the Indigenous Australian stories about the Seven Sisters.

Lauren: Yeah, the story in Australia is about the same set of Pleiades of which there are six if you look in the sky now, but some astronomers did some research that looked at how one of those stars is actually two stars, one in front of the other, and if you rewound the sky 10,000 years, they would be two different stars. The story of the Seven Sisters is that one of them is shy. You don’t see her, and she hides herself. It seems like this story that gets told across cultures is to account for what has been a changing of the sky across millennia.

Gretchen: That’s fascinating. This lost seventh star, or seventh person represented by the star, has been found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American, Indigenous Australian cultures that have – I mean, they’re a very cluster-y cluster. I have to say, if you’re looking at the night sky and looking for like, “I think these ones all go together,” they’re very close according to our visual perception on Earth. I can see why you’d come up with a story about them.

Lauren: Being in the night sky is a really good hook for remembering the story and continuing to pass it on as you all look up into the sky.

Gretchen: Yeah. But the fact that this seventh star has been transmitted for maybe 10,000 years is phenomenal.

Lauren: And a really great example of how oral culture can be a really great way of preserving knowledge or recording history not in the way that we think about it with writing. Not to say that that’s the only value that it has because it absolutely doesn’t, but it is one really interesting thing about the way we preserve and transmit these stories.

Gretchen: We don’t have written records that are 10,000 years old. Writing is not that old. Scientists have sometimes wondered, “How could we try to transmit a message to people 10,000 years in the future?” If we look towards the past of what kinds of things did get transmitted, maybe we need to take inspiration from oral cultures. One group of scientists and folklorists who’ve been trying to figure out the way to transmit messages for a long period of time are people who are trying to come up with long-term nuclear waste warning messages.

Lauren: Hmm, because that nuclear waste is still gonna be nasty well beyond any period we know we have successful transmitted messages in human history to date.

Gretchen: There’s this fascinatingly named field of research called “nuclear semiotics.”

Lauren: Oh, that sounds amazing. What is that?

Gretchen: Which is the study of how to create nuclear warning messages that will still be intelligible 10,000 years in the future.

Lauren: Oh, because we have that yellow triangle with the black spikey symbol, but I’ve absolutely heard of people who were like, “My 5-year-old looked at that symbol and thought it was a flower.”

Gretchen: Right. Or if you use a skull, well, sometimes skulls are, you know, maybe it’s pirates.

Lauren: Yellow might be meaning that it’s something really cool in here rather than a bit of a warning.

Gretchen: There’s a lot of proposals. Some of them are more practical and some of them are a little bit more wacky. Certainly, writing it out in a whole bunch of different languages so that even if some of them aren’t in common use in thousands of years, maybe at least some of them will still be sort of around.

Lauren: Or maybe we’ll have reverted entirely to being oral cultures again. Literacy has arrived. It may not stay.

Gretchen: But if literacy doesn’t stick around, then one of my favourite proposals is the breeding of so-called “radiation cats” or “ray cats” – because we have had cats for more than 10,000 years. We know that.

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: If you bred a special type of cat where they would change colour when they came near radioactive emissions, and then you’d have to transmit the message that if the cat changes colour, it’s bad.

Lauren: Oh, you make a folk story out of colour-changing kitties which will be out there in the world and, hopefully, that story gets passed on along with the other folktales.

Gretchen: You have to make a fairy tale and myths and poetry and music and painting about the dangers of colour-changing cats. You have to get all of the cats or many of the cats to be colour-changing, but people like cats. There was an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible where they commissioned a musician to write a song about ray cats for a 2014 episode about this which was called “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty),” which was supposed to be so catchy and annoying that it might actually get handed down and stay working. But I have to say, I have never heard people sing this song in a cultural-folkloric sense, so I don’t know if they succeeded in having it be transmitted even 10 years.

Lauren: But you know, I listened to that episode many years ago, and as soon as you said “colour-changing kitties,” I knew exactly what was happening even though I did not know nuclear semiotics. So, there you go. There might be hope.

Gretchen: Maybe if it’s a wacky enough idea, people will keep talking about it because it sounds so cool.

Lauren: It’s really good applied folklore studies there.

Gretchen: In addition to transmitting information about how many stars are in this particular constellation, this speaks to the role of folklore and oral cultures in shaping behaviour. Maybe that’s telling people to not go near the colour-changing cats, but also, there’s a whole bunch of Aesop’s Fables around things like jealousy or things like ingenuity, various clever things that foxes do or things like that. Those are ways of telling people about appropriate or inappropriate behaviour.

Lauren: I bet you’re gonna tell me Aesop isn’t real either.

Gretchen: Well, look, it seems like the fables originally were part of oral tradition and were written down about three centuries after Aesop’s death.

Lauren: Ok, so the fact of feeling rather than the fact of truth. I get it.

Gretchen: I think at that point there were various things that, once you had Aesop’s Fables as a template for a certain type of morality story, you can ascribe various other kinds of stories and jokes and proverbs to him, even though some of that is from earlier than his period or is not just strictly from the Greek cultural area.

Lauren: Aesop’s Fables, where usually animals perform different actions, and they have moral consequences, it’s actually a really good teaching tool, teaching children about cultural expectations around behaviour and what counts as good behaviour and what counts as rude behaviour. That’s really hard. Having stories to do that with rather than waiting for them to make every possible social mistake is a really great cultural tool.

Gretchen: A lot of parents these days will buy their kid a picture book about, like, “Here’s the potty, and why you might want to use it” or “Saying ‘thank you’ – it’s important. Here’s all the ways we can say ‘thank you’” to also try to mould their kids’ behaviour into some of the things that’re culturally important to us.

Lauren: It’s why it’s really fun to see different morality stories across different cultures as really interesting ways to see what a particular culture values.

Gretchen: There’s an interesting story about Inuit storytelling as used to discipline or to train children into things that are important. Obviously, it’s important for kids to stay away and be careful around the ocean where they could easily drown. Instead of yelling at them, you know, “Don’t go near the water!”, you can tell them a story about a sea monster who is in the water who could eat little children, which is a little bit more vivid in terms of the potential –

Lauren: It certainly gets the point across.

Gretchen: It’s a bit more vivid than just saying, “Don’t go near the water. It’s not safe,” to tell you here’s this fanciful story that the kid may or may not completely believe in a literal sense but conveys this message of “This is dangerous. Don’t do that.”

Lauren: You know, we don’t just have to tell children stories to teach them lessons. Society has a long tradition of telling children stories at bedtime.

Gretchen: There’s a really fun version of this. Another epic poem that was written down so early that we don’t know the original poet’s name is Beowulf in the Old English Tradition. In this case, we don’t even have a “Homer” name. Even though we don’t know anything about Homer, Homer’s name is ascribed to this poem by tradition. In the case of Beowulf, we just call this person the “Beowulf Poet” because we don’t even know who wrote it down or which exact people it passed through, but it has many of these similar characteristics in terms of having these formulaic elements and these rhythmic elements that make it easy to remember as a poem and eventually get written down.

Lauren: It was written so early in the history of English that we’ve even talked in a previous episode about how there is a modern translation of it into an English that is more accessible to us today.

Gretchen: There’re many translations of it into various different kinds and registers of Modern English. At the time, I was very excited about the Maria Dahvana Headley translation, which begins with “Bro” to translate the “Hwaet” word at the beginning which gets your attention. Other people have also translated this word with things like “So” and “Look” or “Listen.” There’s another new translation of this poem which reimagines it as a children’s story where all the characters are children, and the monster that comes and eats the warriors and drags them back to his lair and so on is, instead, a sort of grumpy old neighbour who goes into the children’s treehouse and makes them grow up instantly into boring adults.

Lauren: Oh, how terrifying!

Gretchen: The connection here is that this adaptation was written by Zach Weinersmith, who’s a webcomics guy, mostly, who started telling it as a story to his kids as a bedtime story and found that oral culture stories, even though we think of them as high-culture and complicated and things, actually tell really well to children because children are still operating under an oral culture in many cases because they haven’t learned how to read yet.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, you’re so right. I feel like my early primary-schooling days were such a rich world of all those rhymes and stories and games that you learn as a little kid. So good!

Gretchen: Right, like the skipping games and the clapping games which get transmitted by other children, and sometimes you meet someone from somewhere else, and they’ve got a slightly different version of “Ring Around the Rosie.”

Lauren: Mine was “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down.”

Gretchen: Mine was “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

Lauren: Ah, there you go. I mean, yours is obviously incorrect, but good for you. [Laughter]

Gretchen: We were transmitted different versions of those rhymes, but they have this characteristic game of holding hands and running around in a circle and falling down that they go with even if parts of it, especially the little bit more nonsensical parts, got transmitted into something else that felt a bit more sensical.

Lauren: How does the Beowulf retelling read? It must be fun to read out loud.

Gretchen: It’s really fun to read out loud. Here’s the first couple lines, which go “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters/ The parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof/ The unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers/ Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.”

Lauren: Oh, so good.

Gretchen: I love that it’s doing the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre, and it’s doing all these very Old English compounds of “world-fighters” and “bedtime breakers” and “fun killers.”

Lauren: That’s still accessible.

Gretchen: That’s still accessible and playing with the language but in a way that’s still available to kids. I recommended it to some of my friends with kids, and they said their 5-year-old loved it.

Lauren: Perfect. A lot of highly literate people are untrained in oral storytelling that, personally, having something I can read to replicate that experience is really reassuring for me as a limited-capacity literate person here.

Gretchen: I also think it’s neat because children’s stories are trying to do two different things. One of those is create pre-literate and early-literate and proto-literate children by giving them these books with relatively simple language and words that are relatively phonetically spelled, especially for English, which is not very phonetically spelled all the time, and trying to give them something that they might be able to read by themselves relatively early on. And then simultaneously, these kids are quite sophisticated language users in the oral domain, and so giving them texts that are very dense and rich and have a lot going on and aren’t simple texts that they could read by themselves but let them engage with that level of oral language that they already have is this other thing that children’s storytelling can also do. A lot of these stories were either told, you know, fairy tales are traditionally told to children but also are traditionally told to mixed audiences including both adults and children. It’s interesting to see that more explicitly brought back.

Lauren: It’s interesting when you look across things like Beowulf and the stories of Mwindo and the stories that we have from the Homeric epics. You see, as there is in this Ong book, all of these features of particularly oral storytelling. It doesn’t have to be beginning to end. It doesn’t have to always be exactly the same every time. It’s these features that make you realise what a weird genre the idea of narrative fiction in book form is and, again, how literacy has created this weird layer over the top of human storytelling.

Gretchen: It took hundreds of years of literacy for someone to invent the novel. Poetry is much older than the novel, and diary or memoir or “Here’s my life story” is much older than the novel, but the idea that an author can see into characters’ brains and tell you what they’re thinking and tell you what a bunch of people are thinking but in this very psychoanalytic way and in a way that is linked together – one of the points that I thought was interesting that Ong makes in the book is that many of the early novelists were women perhaps even because they were educated enough to be literate but not educated in the what he calls “residually oral classical tradition” that the men were being educated in at the time. They were more willing to look at writing as its own medium and to see what writing could be capable of that wasn’t trying to learn Latin and study Greek rhetoric or, in the case of Murasaki writing the first novel in Japanese, learning as much of the classical tradition that was still bound up in this rhetorical history of trying to learn these very formal and stylised and performative types of stories.

Lauren: We talked about Murasaki’s Tale of Genji in our translation episode as well. That was written, and then no one paid attention to it for literally hundreds of years. It’s like a millennium old.

Gretchen: It was very popular at the time.

Lauren: Yeah, just kind of written for her friends we think. It’s all very opaque what the context of that being created was. Fiction, for a long time, was not taken seriously as a written art form. It was all about the oral storytelling in cultures that are now very book story focused.

Gretchen: You have Jane Austen sort of inventing what we can think of as the modern novel, at least in English-speaking cultures, and yeah, some of these early novel writers not being educated as much in this classical rhetorical tradition.

Lauren: Fascinating. I’ve never really thought about it before, but it’s an interesting observation.

Gretchen: One thing that I will say that I disagree with – so Ong is writing this book which is very interesting in 1982, and our thoughts on some things have changed since 1982.

Lauren: Right, okay.

Gretchen: One of the points that oral culture people who are newly encountering writing make and, like, Plato has Socrates make this point when he’s writing down Socrates' speeches because this was also an early transition from oral to written culture is that when you have a person telling you something, that person can be asked questions and can be interrogated, can answer and be held to account for the story that they’re telling you. You could ask them how they know things. When you have a written book, you are just forced to take the writer’s thoughts and opinions on their say-so at this one snapshot of the time that they’ve written them down, and you don’t have the living person there to ask questions of. We think, as very literate culture people, that the book is the better version, but not actually having access to the person is both a plus because it can live on beyond them and also a downside because their thoughts might’ve changed, and you don’t have a way of knowing that when all you have is a record from one period of time. Which is to say that the Ong book is not great about sign languages, by which I mean, it just really doesn’t include or look at them.

Lauren: Oh, dear.

Gretchen: Yeah. Charitably, I’m gonna say that the research has come a long way since 1982, when it was published. Ong’s dead now, so we don’t know what he thought in more recent times. But what the sign language research does show is that even though “orality” and “oral culture” is this term that’s based on the mouth and the voice, the cultural phenomena that we now attach to that word are very much features of signed language cultures and d/Deaf cultures as well.

Lauren: We have that great interview with Gab Hodge where she told us all about the amazing resources that d/Deaf people have for storytelling in signed languages, particularly Auslan and BSL that she works in.

Gretchen: I also came across a very interesting discussion from a Listserv from 1993.

Lauren: Oh my gosh! How did you manage that? We couldn’t even go back to DMs from five years ago.

Gretchen: This got archived as a PDF from the ORTRAD Listserv – the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: There’s an electric conversation on d/Deafness and orality that got preserved in this very, very written culture way. Because I was able to go back and read what people were writing in 1993. It’s slightly edited to add little footnotes about like, “This is an emoticon. Here’s what an emoticon is,” because maybe in 1993 you don’t know that.

Lauren: So cool. Okay. What is in this Listserv conversation?

Gretchen: There’s a lot of really good commentary from Lois Bragg, who was a d/Deaf professor at Gallaudet University who was talking about the d/Deaf community doing oral culture. She was very clear that this is something that she thinks applies to the d/Deaf community and that there is a lot of narrative that is epic and legendary and somewhat historical or autobiographical, and it tends to be quite stylised. This is what she thought of as characteristic of d/Deaf culture. There’s a lot of storytelling and plays and poems and wordplay and things like that. There was some discussion with both Lois Bragg and Stephanie Hall – and this is in 1993 – that d/Deafness is in this unique situation regarding literacy because there isn’t one widely used way of writing sign language that lots of d/Deaf people use, although there’s a variety of systems that researchers and various people use experimentally. This is still an oral culture that has maybe a relationship to English as a literate culture that’s like the Anglo-Saxons who were going home and speaking Old English to each other and learning to read and write in Latin, which was a completely different language, just to access the technology of writing. Even though d/Deaf people can learn to read in English or another oral language that has a written tradition, there isn’t an endogenous way of writing signed languages that’s widely accepted.

Lauren: One bit of oral tradition that I love that’s at the opposite end of the scale from remembering a full epic – maybe this is just because of my terrible literate-person memory – but I love the oral tradition of memorable units of small sayings that everyone remembers and get embedded into your reflexive response to things. So, things like, “A stitch in time saves nine.” You have to learn what that means, but you get told it a whole bunch, and then you learn what it means, and then you say it to people when they wanna put off doing something that needs doing.

Gretchen: Or something like, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” and how you can learn, “Oh, okay, so if the sunset is really red, the weather’s more likely to be nice the next day.”

Lauren: Ah, I have it as, “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.”

Gretchen: Well, you see, I grew up on the coast.

Lauren: That’s your maritime culture coming through and my pastoralist culture coming through there.

Gretchen: Or “Measure twice, cut once,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Lauren: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I was about to say they rhyme, often, or are alliterative. That one doesn’t, but it still sticks in my mind.

Gretchen: They’ve got a metrical quality to them like the longer poems, and we’ve retained the shorter proverb-y bits of memorable units. I was thinking about when I was reading the Ong book, and he talks a lot about “residual orality” even in cultures that are primarily literate. I have an example in my own life about a thing that I did that was part of oral culture. I worked as a tour guide as a summer job. We had a half-hour guided tour of the museum that the various tour guides would give the same way. Once I had been working there for a few months, I had certain jokes and anecdotes and beats that I knew, things that would work as laugh lines, and things that were more serious, and ways to get from the serious bits to the funnier bits, and not just have sudden transitions there. I had the memory of which bits that I said at which parts of the tour keyed to different locations along the route within the museum, which is a very long-standing memory technique. I learned to do that tour in an oral culture way by watching some other people’s guided tours, and then they said, “Okay, you can probably do one now.”

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: One time I saw a script of the guided tour written out, and it just felt weird. It felt flat, and it didn’t have the jokes in it the same way. It didn’t have the delivery. Some of our tour guides would try to learn it from the written script, and it just didn’t feel like it was the tour the way it existed in this more fully-featured and three-dimensional and located-in-time-and-space version as it was in my mind.

Lauren: You might not always give the tour exactly the same way twice, but you were probably paying attention to like, “Oh, this is an audience that really likes the emotional bits. I’m gonna tone down the jokes,” or “I’m gonna move through this bit quickly.” You can react to the moment.

Gretchen: Right. Or “These people are giving me lots of laughs, so I’m gonna be even jokey-er.” I would have versions that I would do with seniors or with kids that would be a little bit different, but yeah, it felt like it was this very oral object that I hadn’t realised that I had that part of oral culture in my memory. The other thing that I thought about when I was reading this Walter J. Ong book – which made me wish that I read it before I wrote Because Internet, but you know, a book is a snapshot of a moment in time.

Lauren: Oh, it’s not an oral saga that you can update depending on the season.

Gretchen: I can’t just update it. I’m doing the updating in our oral saga of the podcast. Which is thinking about the relationship of internet memes to oral culture. Because in oral culture, the only things that get transmitted are things that have been put into a form that is memorable. Proverbs like, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” you can substitute “sailor” for “shepherd” because they have the same number of syllables, and it still works, but if you try to say, “Red sky at night, sailor’s enjoyment,” that one doesn’t get remembered the same way.

Lauren: At some point, someone sat down and explained to me, you know, “The reason we say this is because where the sun is reflecting off the sky at the sunset or the sunrise reflects what’s happening with the clouds, and that gives you some indication of what might happen with precipitation later on that day.” Like, sure, that’s an explanation, but it’s not as catchy.

Gretchen: And weather tends to move from west to east because of the rotation of the Earth, and all various things like that. But it’s the mnemonic “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight” that sticks with you in your brain, and you have to preserve that mnemonic in a form that is memorable and that is pass-around-able. If you say something like, “Red sky at night, saves nine,” “You can lead a horse to water, but it’s worth two in the bush,” these are silly, playful things that we can do because we have that memory of them. But memes are not oral culture in that sticky pneumatic way. The thing that enables memes is being able to Google them. And the thing that enables the tremendous proliferation of memes – and there are so many of them. The early stages of memes were more oral. Like, “I Can Has Cheeseburger” was just the same image that kept getting repeated in a whole bunch of contexts. Whereas now, you have a template of a meme that’s like “The Distracted Boyfriend” meme where you have the guy, and he’s looking at the one girl, and the other girl’s looking at him, and you can put a whole bunch of different labels on that. Because you can search for the template, and you can search for the name, and you can see a whole bunch of people making their riffs, and then you make your own riff, and it prizes originality and riffing off of it – like, when I see a new meme that’s been going around, sometimes I look it up, or I read the meme explainer of like, “Here’s what it is,” from Vox or somebody.

Lauren: You have to work backwards. That’s been five minutes not five hundred years.

Gretchen: Right. And the fact that there are all these templates and variants that we make of the memes, rather than repeating the same really sticky one, that’s actually a very written culture phenomenon that there’s lots of different versions and edits and metacommentaries. Whereas having something that’s more sticky that just gets repeated is a more oral culture thing. Sometimes, people try to say that memes are oral culture because they’re pointing at something, but what they’re actually pointing at is that memes are an extreme of written culture rather than an extreme of oral culture. They are a cultural shift, but they’re a cultural shift in the opposite direction that people typically say, which I wish I’d been able to put that in Because Internet, but here’s the updated version.

Lauren: This episode has really, once again, hammered home how unusual in the course of human history written literacy is and how amazing and creative and powerful – and how much of a skill – oral literacy is.

Gretchen: It’s hard for you and I to even talk about oral literacy or oral literature without using metaphors brought in from literate culture. Even when we try to project our memory of what it could’ve been like to not be literate, we end up bringing in a bunch of our literate assumptions. People doing the detailed ethnography and record-keeping of oral cultures help us disturb some of those and understand more deeply a very old and also still present way to be human.

[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 of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on 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 our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: 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 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 to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include an episode about swearing in fiction, some of our favourite deleted scenes from interviews that we’ve done over the past year or two, and the hosts of Lingthusiasm do the super scientific “Which Lingthusiasm Episode are You” quiz, as well as reporting on the results of the Lingthusiasm survey and talking about what’s coming up for the next year. 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.

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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #transcripts #orality #literacy #oral culture #myths #epics #fairy tales #Ted Chiang #Homer #Mwindo #nuclear semiotics #ray cats

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how "oral" vs " written" culture should perhaps be referred to as "embodied" vs "recorded" culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We've created a new and Highly Scientific™ 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you're not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

The 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' by Ted Chiang

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press' blog post by Devon Zeugel

'Orality and Literacy' by Walter J. Ong

Wikipedia entry for Grimms' Fairytales

Wikipedia entry for Milman Parry

Wikipedia entry for Homeric Question

Wikipedia entry for Mwindo Epic

Encyclopedia.com entry for Mwindo

Crash Course episode 'The Mwindo Epic'

'The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years' by Ray Norris on The Conversation

'The Pleiades – or 7 Sisters – known around the world' by Bruce McClure on EarthSky

Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Semiotics

99% Invisible episode 'Ten Thousand Years'

Wikipedia entry for Aesops Fables

'How Inuit Parents Teach Their Kinds to Control Their Anger' by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh for NPR

Deafness and Orality: An Electronic Conversation

Wikipedia entry for The Tale of Genji

Bea Wolf, a middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, by Zach Weinersmith

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

'Writing is a technology'

'Arrival of the linguists'

How translators approach a text'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episodes #podcast #podcasts #episode 89 #orality #literacy #fairy tales #myths #epics #oral culture #Ted Chiang #Homer #Mwindo #nuclear semiotics #ray cats #quiz #personality quiz #SoundCloud

[lingthusiasm]

Not sure which episode to listen to first? Want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm? Or do you just want to know yourself on a deeper level? Let our perfectly calibrated, Very Serious 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz guide you!

#linguistics #personality quiz #uquiz #quizzes #languages #langblr #language stuff #language learning #lingthusiasm #podcast

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires! 

First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would be? We've made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like "You're about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain you" into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality.  Gretchen and Lauren take the quiz on air and share our own results -- please let us know what you get and if this quiz helps you remember an older episode or figure out how to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm!

Second: we have results from the Lingthusiasm survey that many of you took last year! Find out whether Lingthusiasm listeners consider the show more kiki or more bouba, and highlights from your very extensive comments on whether your sister's husband's sister is still your sister-in-law, whether the thumb is a finger, and more gestures that are rude in some places. A few survey results also appear in an academic paper that we wrote: "Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study" which was published in Language and Linguistics Compass (open access).

Finally, a few updates: For 2024, Gretchen is heading to the Societas Linguistica Europea conference in Helsinki in August and Lauren is heading back to full-time prof work, teaching syntax and turning gestures and Lingthusiasm research into papers. Plus: the LingComm Grants are running again for 2024. Listen to this episode about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #bonus #bonus episodes #bonuses #questionaire #quiz #survey #survey results #personality quiz #uquiz

[lingthusiasm]

Gretchen: I mean, I will say that we have a pretty phonotactically weird cluster in the name of our podcast. Lauren: This is true. Gretchen: We’re finally admitting it four years in – like, /lɪŋ/ /θʊziæzm̩/. They belong to different syllables, but they’re just done with such distinct places in the mouth that people have a really hard time saying our name. We didn’t think that through. Lauren: Different places and different manners. There’s a little bit of stuff that I’ve read about the influence of sonority preferences across syllables. We meet the requirement. Normally you have something that’s more sonorous at the end of the first syllable than at the beginning of the second syllable. We got that bit good. Gretchen: Okay. So, we’ve got /ŋ/ at the first syllable and then /θ/ at the next one, but they’re just one away from each other kind of. They’re not that far.

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Climbing sonority mountain from A to P’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about phonetics and phonology

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episode 50 #sonority #IPA #sounds #phonology #phonetics #quotes

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘No such thing as the oldest 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]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about old languages. But first, our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes with three of our interviews from this year.

Gretchen: We had deleted scenes from our liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod about language and gender. We talked about reflexive pronouns, multiple pronouns in fiction, and talking about people who use multiple pronoun sets.

Lauren: We also have an excerpt from our interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez about Basque because it’s famous among linguists for having ergativity.

Gretchen: We wanted to know “What do Basque people themselves think about ergativity?” It turns out, there are jokes and cartoons about it, which Itxaso was able to share with us.

Lauren: Amazing and charming.

Gretchen: Finally, we have an excerpt from my conversation with authors Ada Palmer and Jo Walton about swearing in science fiction and fantasy. This excerpt talks about acronyms both of the swear-y and non-swear-y kind.

Lauren: You can get this bonus episode as well as a whole bunch more at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Also, yeah, maybe this is a good time to remember that we have over 80 bonus episodes.

Lauren: We have bonus episodes about the time a researcher smuggled a bunny into a classroom to do linguistics on children.

Gretchen: We also have a bonus episode about “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and more phrases that contain all the letters of the alphabet – plus, what people do with phrases like this in languages that don’t have alphabets.

Lauren: We also have an entire bonus episode that’s just about the linguistics of numbers.

Gretchen: If you wish you had more lingthusiasm episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help us keep making this podcast long into the future, we really appreciate everyone who becomes a patron.

Lauren: You can find all of that at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hey, Lauren, I’ve got big news.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: Did you know I’m from the oldest family lineage in the world?

Lauren: Wow! You sound like you are part of some prestigious, ancient, royal – I can only assume royal with that level of knowledge about your family lineage.

Gretchen: Well, you know, I have some family members who are really into genealogy. I’ve been looking at some family trees. And I have come to the conclusion that my family is the oldest family in the world.

Lauren: You know, I have grandparents, and they have grandparents, and I assume they had grandparents, and I guess my family goes all the way back as well. We didn’t come out of nowhere. I might not know all their names. I don’t think we were ever rulers of any nation state as far as I’m aware. But I dunno if you are from the oldest family lineage because I think everyone is.

Gretchen: Well, this is not a mutually exclusive statement. I can be from the oldest family lineage, and you can be from the oldest family lineage, and everyone listening to this podcast can be all from the oldest family lineage in the world because we’re all descended from the earliest humans.

Lauren: This is a good point.

Gretchen: Psych!

Lauren: I think it’s definitely worth remembering the difference between the very fact that we are all from the same humans – and the difference between that and knowing names of specific individuals back to a certain point.

Gretchen: I should clarify – I am not royalty. I do not actually know the names all the way back because at a certain point writing stops existing and, at some point before that, people stopped recording my ancestors. I don’t know when it stops.

Lauren: But there’s definitely a tradition in certain royal families and stuff of being able to claim that you can trace your family back to, you know, maybe –

Gretchen: Like Apollo or something.

Lauren: Oh, gosh, like, mythical characters, okay. I was thinking of just tracing them back a thousand years, but I guess –

Gretchen: Tracing them back to Adam and Eve or tracing them back to Helen of Troy or Apollo or these sorts of things. I feel like – at least I’ve heard of this. I think that talking about human ancestral lineages helps us make sense of the types of claims that people also make about languages being the oldest language.

Lauren: I feel like I’ve heard this before – different languages making claim to being the oldest language.

Gretchen: I’ve heard it quite a lot. I did a bit of research, and I looked up a list of some languages that people have claimed to be the oldest.

Lauren: Okay, what did you find?

Gretchen: A lot of things that can’t all be true at the same time.

Lauren: Or can all be true because all languages are descended from some early human capacity for human language.

Gretchen: Right. There’s different geographical hot spots, you know, people making claims about Egyptian, about Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese, Aramaic, Farsi, Tamil, Korean, Basque – speaking of Basque episodes. Sometimes, people look at reconstructed languages like Proto-Indo-European, which is, you know, the old thing that the modern-day Indo-European Languages are descended from. But part of the issue here is that, at least for spoken languages – and we’re gonna get to sign languages – but at least for spoken languages, babies can’t raise themselves.

Lauren: Unfortunately, I, personally, have to say after the last few years.

Gretchen: Deeply inconveniently –

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: – for adult sleep schedules. If you have a baby with typical hearing, and they’re being raised in a community or even by one person, they’re gonna acquire language from the people that are raising it.

Lauren: Absolutely – in much the same way we all have people giving us genetic input, we also have people giving us linguistic input and continuing on that transmission of human language.

Gretchen: Exactly. When the languages claim to be “old,” that’s often more of a political claim or a religious claim or a heritage claim than it is a linguistic claim because we think that languages probably have a common ancestor. Certainly, all languages are learnable by all humans. If you raise a baby in a given environment, they’ll grow up with the language that’s around them. The human capacity for language seems to be common across all of us. We just don’t know what that tens-of-thousands-year-old early language looked like.

Lauren: In much the same way we lose track of earlier ancestors when we get earlier than written records. We talked about this in the reconstructing old languages episode that there’s just a point where you can’t go back further because there’s just not enough information to say exactly how Proto-Indo-European might have, at some earlier point, been related to, say, the Sino-Tibetan languages or the Niger-Congo family.

Gretchen: Right. We also talked about this in the writing systems episode where writing systems had been invented about 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 years ago, but human language probably emerged sometime between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago, which is so much older. That’s 10-times-to-30-times older than that. We don’t know because sounds and signs leave impressions on the air waves that vanish very quickly and don’t leave fossils until writing starts being developed much later.

Lauren: Very inconvenient.

Gretchen: Absolutely the first thing I would do with a time machine.

Lauren: All of those languages that you mentioned as people laying claim to them being the oldest, they come from all kinds of different language families. Although, I have to say, a very Indo-European, Western skew there, which probably reflects the corners of the internet that you have access to.

Gretchen: This reflects the people that are making claims like this on the English-speaking internet that I’m looking at and the modern-day nation states and religious traditions and cultural traditions that are making claims to certain types of legitimacy via having access to old texts or having access to uninterrupted transmission of stories and legends and mythologies that give them those sorts of claims. There’s no reason to think that a whole bunch of languages on the North and South American continents are not also equally old as all the other languages, but people aren’t doing nation state building with them, and so they don’t tend to show up on those lists.

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of nation state building, a lot of religion happening there as well. I think about how yoga is – I love a bit of yoga, and I think it’s really lovely that all the yoga terms are still given to you in this older Sanskritic language, but it definitely is done sometimes with this claim to legitimacy and prestige in the same way that having something in Latin for the Catholic Church gives that same kind of vibe.

Gretchen: I think about this scene from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding where you have the daughter, who’s the one that’s getting married. She’s in the car as a teen with her parents. It’s this scene where the parents are being a bit cringe-y in the way that teens often experience their parents to be. The dad is saying, “Name a word. I will tell you how it comes from Greek,” because he’s got this big Greek pride thing going.

Lauren: This a classic Greek-American migrant pride happening.

Gretchen: Right. He says, “arachnophobia,” and he’s explaining how the roots come from Greek, and that one’s true. Then the daughter’s friend, who’s in the back seat, is rolling her eyes and saying, “Well, what about ‘kimono’?”

Lauren: Ah, “kimono” the Japanese robe?

Gretchen: Yes. The Dad’s like, “Oh, no, it’s from Greek. Here’s this connection that I have found.”

Lauren: I like his linguistic ad-libbing skills.

Gretchen: It’s certainly a great improvisational performance skill. The movie is clearly designed to put the viewer in sympathy with the young girls in the back seat who are teasing him, and the daughter’s face-palming at this claim, which is one of the reasons why it’s one of my favourite examples of people making up fake etymologies in media because you don’t leave the movie thinking, “Oh, I never realised ‘kimono’ was from Greek.” You leave that movie being like, “Ah, here’s this dad who has over-exaggerated pride in his heritage that doesn’t allow for other people’s heritage to also have words that come from them.” It’s a claim that he's making for personal reasons and for heritage reasons that doesn’t have linguistic founding, but none of these claims have linguistic founding.

Lauren: The dad has come kind of close to a linguistic truth though, which is that linguists talk about languages having features that can be either conservative or innovative. Modern Greek has a lot of the same sound features as Ancient Greek, which is probably helped by that consistent writing system. A writing system definitely helps transmission stay stable because you can point back to older texts. English has probably slowed down a lot in its change because of the writing system as well.

Gretchen: Genuinely, English has borrowed a lot of words from Greek – as well as a lot of other languages that are not Greek. This gets to both Greek and Sanskrit and Chinese having these eras that are talked about as “classical” or as “old,” which is an era that the present-day people, or some slightly earlier group of people, looked back on and thought, “Yeah, those people were doing some cool stuff. We’re gonna call it ‘classical’ because we liked it in history.”

Lauren: I do love the idea that Chaucer had no idea that he was moving on from Old English to Middle English because there wasn’t a Modern English yet.

Gretchen: How could you describe yourself as “Middle English” – that’s sort of like the “late-stage capitalism” that implies that we’re towards the end of something. Like, we don’t know, folks.

Lauren: I don’t think English always does self-deprecating well. English has a lot of belief in its superiority as a language. I think we can say that about the ideology behind English. But I do love that English didn’t go for “Classical English.” Imagine if we said Beowulf was written in “Classical English.”

Gretchen: We could have, yeah. We could have.

Lauren: We just went with, “Ah, that’s old. I don’t understand it. It’s got cases. It’s got all these extra affixes. It’s old. It’s a bit stuffy.”

Gretchen: That may have been because they were comparing it already to Classical Latin and Classical Greek, which was even more antique. The English speakers were looking elsewhere for their golden age. I don’t think people often claim that English is the oldest language because English speakers are seeing the history of their society located in this Greco-Latin tradition.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that’s a good explanation for it. I do wonder if maybe the attitude that we now have towards Shakespearean English, if maybe that will become “Classical English” when we’re a bit further on, and Shakespeare becomes even less accessible.

Gretchen: Right. And if Shakespeare becomes the text that everyone is referring to because it’s this quote-unquote “classic” text but calling something a “classical era” reflects on the subsequent era and what they thought about the older one more so than the era itself.

Lauren: Having this ability to distinguish between an “old” or a “classical” and a “modern” version of a language requires that writing tradition, whereas the majority of human languages, for the majority of human history, have happily existed and transmitted knowledge without a writing system. These writing systems make us very focused on pinning down. I super appreciate the website Glottolog, which catalogues languages and all the names they’re known by. We have a lot of languages that are “classical,” like “Classical Chinese” or “Classical Quechua.” We have some “early” – so “Early Irish.”

Gretchen: I think I’ve also heard of “Old Irish.”

Lauren: We have “Old Chinese” and “Old Japanese” in Glottolog, but I’ve definitely also heard them referred to as “classical,” so slightly different vibes there. Of course, you have things like “Ancient Hebrew,” which, older than old, very prestigious. I particularly like the precision with which some names get given to different languages over time. Glottolog has an “Old Modern Welsh,” which is nice and specific. I particularly appreciate the “Imperial-Middle-Modern Aramaic.”

Gretchen: “Imperial-Middle-Modern Aramaic.” That also gets to languages being named and being spread through empire and conquest and wars, which is also part of that historical tradition that people look back to.

Lauren: For sure. That’s part of the narrative building around languages. A lot of what is maintained about a language is religious documents or documents of imperial rule. That means that that imperial form might have been a particular register. Imagine if all that we had about English was the tax forms that we have.

Gretchen: Oh, god, that would be really boring.

Lauren: You would have a very different idea of what English is compared to how it’s spoken day-to-day. That’s what makes this understanding of old languages just from a written record really challenging.

Gretchen: When I think about trying to understand the history of languages just from the written record, I’m reminded of this classic joke – I dunno if you’ve heard this one – where you’re walking down the street one night, and you see someone standing under a streetlight looking at their feet and trying to search for something. You go, “Oh, what are you looking for?” And the person says, “Oh, my contact lens. It fell out. I’m trying to find it.” And you say, “Oh, did you lose it under the streetlight?” And the person goes, “No, I lost it a block over that way, but there’s no streetlight there, so it’s much easier to search here.”

Lauren: [Laughs] Hmm.

Gretchen: I guess this is a joke that doesn’t work so well now that everyone has phones with flashlights on them, and contact lenses have improved their technology and don’t pop out spontaneously like that. But when we’re looking for the history of language, it’s like looking under the streetlight because that’s where it’s easy to look. It’s not actually doing a random sample of all of the bits of history – many of which are just lost to us.

Lauren: Indeed. I like thinking about the imperial languages and the classical languages because sometimes we do get written records that help give us a glimpse into just how ordinary people were going about living their lives.

Gretchen: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, can we talk about the clay tablet?

Lauren: We can absolutely talk about the clay tablet that I know what you mean because you’re talking about the complaint to Ea-nāṣir, which is a clay tablet that’s written in Akkadian cuneiform. It’s considered to be the world’s oldest known written complaint.

Gretchen: This is from a customer named Nanni who’s complaining about the quality of the copper ingots that was received.

Lauren: The thing that I love about this is that there is this complaint, but also, they’re pretty sure they found Ea-nāṣir’s house because there are other complaints about the quality of the copper in this residence.

Gretchen: We really think we know who’s at fault here.

Lauren: Yeah. It seems like he was just a provider of adequate quality copper, and people really needed to go to a better place to get a better quality of copper.

Gretchen: Cuneiform is also this interesting example of searching under the streetlight for the contact lens because the language Sumerian was written in cuneiform, and then later, Akkadian, which is a Semitic language related to modern-day Arabic and Hebrew, and Hittite, which is an Indo-European language related to English and Sanskrit and a bunch of other languages. They were all using this system of stamping the ends of reeds in these pointy triangle shapes onto clay blocks. Do you know what happens to clay blocks when they’re in a house, and the house burns down?

Lauren: They just get fired and made more resilient.

Gretchen: They get made incredibly durable. If people were writing on parchment or in textiles – like in fabrics or cords or strings or on leather or wood – most of those don’t get preserved the same way because you expose them to water, and they start rotting.

Lauren: And they don’t do great with fire.

Gretchen: They really don’t do great with fire. Animals will eat them. Clay has none of these problems. We don’t even know if we know what all of the ancient writing systems are because the ones that have survived are the ones on clay or stone.

Lauren: I was so charmed when I learnt about Latin curse tablets, which are very similar to the complaints to Ea-nāṣir. These are small bits of lead that people could scratch a curse or a wish onto, and then they would throw them into some kind of sacred water. They found, like, 130 of these at Bath in Britian, but they appear to have popped up all over the Roman Empire. It’s just like these tiny insights into the pettiness of humanity as opposed to the great works of literature, or we’ve talked about how the Rosetta Stone was in these three official languages and was all about a declaration about taxation.

Gretchen: But instead, you can have “This curse is on Gaius because he stole my dog” sort of thing.

Lauren: “I have given to the goddess Sulis the six silver coins which I have lost. It is for the goddess to extract them from the names written below” – and then just lists people who owe this person cash.

Gretchen: That’s petty. I like it.

Lauren: Yeah, so annoyed.

Gretchen: I actually read a romance novel called Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall, which was set in Bath and used the ancient Bath curse tablets as a plot point.

Lauren: So charming.

Gretchen: If anyone wants to read curse tablets and also “romantasy” I think is what we’re calling the genre now.

Lauren: I feel like Jane Austen would’ve included curse tablets if she knew about them.

Gretchen: I think she was no stranger to pettiness. It’s very convenient that they wrote their curses on lead tablets, which is such an incredibly durable format. Imagine if they’d written them on cloth, and then we’d never have them for posterity.

Lauren: I feel sad for all the human pettiness that we’ve lost access to.

Gretchen: Two other old writing systems that we have access to because of the durability of the materials they were written on are oracle bone script, which is the ancestor to Chinese – another writing system that we think developed from scratch because we can see it developing thousands of years ago.

Lauren: Oracle bones written on I believe turtle bones and turtle shells.

Gretchen: Yes, hence the “bone” part – also very durable material and also used for religious purposes.

Lauren: My sympathy and thanks to the turtles.

Gretchen: Indeed. Then the early Mesoamerican writing systems, of which the oldest one is the Olmec writing system, which were written on ceramics. They show representations of drawings of things that look like a codex-shaped book made out of bark which, obviously, we don’t have. We just have ceramic drawings of the bark. Come on!

Lauren: Oh, no!

Gretchen: Ah, it’s so close!

Lauren: How cruel to point out that we’re missing information.

Gretchen: You thought you were mad about the Library of Alexandria burning down. Wait until you hear about the Olmec bark.

Lauren: Yeah, ah, that really gets you and just is a reminder of how much we can’t say about the history of human language because of what we don’t have a record of.

Gretchen: Well, you know, before we do a whole episode about things that we don’t know – because much as we can make fun of searching for the contact lens under the streetlight, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: What’s something else that people sometimes mean when they say a language is “old”?

Lauren: Well, this goes back to that conservative idea that some languages just have conservative features that haven’t changed as much. A language that has a lot of sound changes we might call very “innovative,” or they’ve “innovated” a new way of doing the tense on the verbs. You can trace it back to an older form of the language, but it looks very different at this point in time.

Gretchen: I think the example that I’m most familiar with this is Icelandic versus English. In the last thousand years or so, English has had a lot of contact from things like the Norman Conquest, which introduced a lot of French words to English, compared to Icelandic, which has had less of that. Icelanders have an easier time reading something like their sagas, which are 800 and more years old, than English speakers have reading texts like Chaucer, which are about the same age but have had a lot more linguistic changes happening because of more contact in English over the years.

Lauren: That’s one of the things that linguists who look at when a language tends to be more innovative and change, it tends to be during these periods of contact. It tends to be during periods of invasion. English had the French come up from the south, repeated Viking incursions from all around the coast. They all had an impact on the language. I find it really interesting. Icelanders are really proud of how conservative the language is and that they still can read these older stories. I think in some ways English has created this story for itself where it’s really proud of the fact that it is this language that continues to take influences from places and is really innovative. These are just part of the story that a language can tell about itself and the speakers can tell about it.

Gretchen: I think that there are reasons to be proud of any language that don’t have to rely on age as the sole arbiter of legitimacy. In some cases, it’s that rupture with the past that people use as a point of pride. I’m thinking of Haitian Creole, for example, which is descended from French. You can hear that French influence. When I’ve heard people speaking Haitian Creole, it almost sounds like they’re speaking a French dialect that I don’t quite know. But the writing system is very different. It’s much more phonetic than French is. The word for “me” in Haitian Creole is “mwa,” and it’s written M-W-A. The word for “me” in Modern French is “moi,” pronounced the same way but written M-O-I.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: It used to be pronounced /moɪ/. This is why you get “roy” and /ʁwa/ for “king” and stuff like this, hence the spelling. But the sound changes happened in French. When the Haitian speakers were deciding how to write their language down, they were like, “No, we’re gonna have a phonetic system. We don’t need to be beholden to the French system. We’re gonna have something that establishes our identity as something that’s distinct from French.”

Lauren: For anyone who’s tried to learn the French spelling, especially those endings that are still in the writing system but not in the pronunciation system, I think it’s fair to say French has gone through a number of sound innovations, even if it might be more conservative in other features of the grammar.

Gretchen: It’s very conservative in the writing system, but the sounds have changed a lot.

Lauren: It’s interesting you bring up Haitian Creole because creoles are the result of this intense contact between two or more languages. They often get labelled as being “new,” which is kind of the flip side of this discourse around “old” languages.

Gretchen: That’s controversial in linguistics whether to consider creoles “new” or to consider them older. What they definitely have is children being raised by people who also already had some amount of language. Babies can’t raise themselves. But they do have this situation where their speakers were prevented from learning how to read and write, learning how to access the formal varieties of language, often very violently and through horrible circumstances. A lot of creoles came about because of the slave trade, because of historical systems of oppression. The language transmission was not the same as if you were learning it from parents who’d been educated in the language, but they were still learning from people who had access to the language. There’s been a bit of a swing in creole studies more recently to say, “What if we don’t consider these completely new? What if we think about the ancestral features that they have in common with the languages they’re descended from?” which you can readily trace as well.

Lauren: Thinking in terms of which features are innovative rather than the whole language as being new. Maybe it has a very innovative way of doing the noun structure, but it still has a lot of the features of the two different – or multiple different – languages in terms of sounds, and so taking apart the different linguistic elements and not just focusing on the whole thing as being “new” or “old” and trying to apply these labels that don’t actually account for what’s happening.

Gretchen: It can be kind of exoticising to creoles to say, “Oh, these are completely different from all of the other ways that languages have gotten transmitted,” when what’s also going on is kids in a community who were exposed to a bunch of languages or a bunch of different linguistic inputs at a time making sense of that and coming up with, collaboratively, something with the other kids in the community that is different from what people were speaking before but still has that ancestral link.

Lauren: There are contexts in which children are raised without that access to language transmission. That is when a d/Deaf child is born into a hearing and spoken language family context, which means that they’re not getting that language.

Gretchen: Generally, the child and the parents and the family and community members do end up with some amount of ways of communicating based on the existing gestures that people do alongside a spoken language and elaborating on them, making them more complex, because you are trying to communicate somehow. There are linguistic studies about this, right?

Lauren: Ideally, in an ideal world, if you’re a d/Deaf child, you would want to have access to signed language input through, ideally, your family but also your wider educational context. Some d/Deaf children do get hearing aids. They are useful but not a perfect replication of the hearing child experience. That’s a possibility. There are some contexts where children have just developed this communication system with their hearing family in their own home context. These are known as “home sign.” There have been examples of this, and they have been studied. One of the most famous examples that has been described in a lot of detail is the example of David and his family. Susan Goldin-Meadow and her collaborators over the years have done a lot of work looking at the way David and, especially, his mother communicate with each other.

Gretchen: This is a really tough situation. I think these studies started in the early ’90s. Hopefully, people know better now and can give their d/Deaf kids access to a sign language, but given that this happened, what can we learn from the situation?

Lauren: Goldin-Meadow definitely started publishing about this in the early ’80s. So, David – who I will forever think of as a 7-to-10-year-old child – is actually a GenX-er who, if he had kids himself, they’re undergraduates now.

Gretchen: Okay. It’s good to put famous children from studies in perspective.

Lauren: Because they are – it’s like the Shirley Temple phenomenon, right. David, in my mind, is always just this kid who’s learning to communicate with his mom, but he’s a fully-grown, tax-paying adult now.

Gretchen: What was he doing when he was communicating with his mom in this immortalised-in-amber childhood years?

Lauren: What was really interesting from a thinking-about-this-human-capacity-for-language-and-communication perspective is that his mother and the family developed this way of communicating with him that grew out of their typical gestures and context and a lot of showing each other stuff.

Gretchen: Pointing to things and so on.

Lauren: Pointing – so useful in all languages and all contexts. What they found was that David was creating systematic order out of the gestures that he was getting. So, he had more systematic structure in terms of the hand shape that he was using – he created these hand shape structures and these individual signs that his mom would also use but not as consistently as him. It’s actually the child taking this really idiosyncratic, raw gesture material from his mom. Gestures in spoken language context tend to be a bit more freeform and unstructured than, say, something like a signed language, which uses the same hands but in a very different way. He wasn’t doing something that was a fully structured language, but it had more structure than what he was being given.

Gretchen: His brain was really starved for linguistic input, and he was trying to extract as many linguistic vitamins and minerals as he could from this incomplete gestural system that he was being given as the closest approximation of language. Obviously, we do wish that David, who was raised in the US I think –

Lauren: I think.

Gretchen: – had just been given access to ASL, which lots of people already were using in the US and could’ve happened where he would’ve gotten the fully-fledged, healthy balanced diet of lots of linguistic input from lots of people, but the child brain seems to want to reconstruct language out of whatever is available to it.

Lauren: This type of system, which is often called “home sign,” is not the same as a fully-fledged sign language. Children often don’t have the same level of linguistic structure. They obviously can’t communicate with people outside of the home context who don’t know the signs that they’ve created with the family. I think it’s also worth pointing out that it is more structured than you would expect it to be from the input. We’ve seen when you take children from these emerging structures, and you bring enough d/Deaf people together, you actually get a real blossoming of a full linguistic system.

Gretchen: The most famous example of this is in Nicaragua in the 1980s, where a bunch of d/Deaf children were brought together at a school for the first time. The school wasn’t trying to teach them a signed language; they were trying to do an oralist method of education, which is [grumbles] – about which the less said, the better – but the kids themselves were coming in with their home sign systems and developing them further in contact with each other. When the next generation of kids showed up, and they had access to this combined home sign system, they really turned it into a full-fledged sign language, which is now – Nicaraguan Sign Language is the national sign language in Nicaragua. These types of languages are some good candidates for “youngest” language, even if we don’t know what the “oldest” language looked like.

Lauren: The amazing thing about Nicaraguan Sign Language is there were linguists on the ground pretty much from the beginning of the school in 1980s. There is a documentation of how this language has evolved. It was the older signers coming in, communicating with the younger children coming to the school, who then created more of the structure – so being a bit like David but in this really rich communicative and linguistic environment and building this structure into the language.

Gretchen: It seems to take those two generations of linguistic input. That feels very reassuring to me which is that language is so robust that even if we lose all of our writing systems, and we lose all of our memory of writing systems, and we lose access to the memory of what language looks – like, suddenly we all wake up with amnesia or something – we would rediscover this. Even though they wouldn’t be the same languages, we’d put something back together and still be able to talk to each other.

Lauren: We know this because Nicaraguan Sign Language is not the only example we have of a recently developed language that has emerged. The Nicaraguan Sign Language is a school-based sign, but we also have what are known as “village-based” sign systems, which is where there might be a d/Deaf family, or a number of d/Deaf families in the village – or a very high percentage of d/Deaf population – and a sign language emerges that the whole village, d/Deaf and hearing, use to communicate. It’s usually “village” because it is these smaller communities where people gather and live together and have to communicate with each other all the time.

Gretchen: And if you have an island or somewhere in the mountains or somewhere were there’s a high degree of genetic d/Deafness because there’s a relatively high degree of isolation, you can have a third of the village be d/Deaf, in which case, everybody in that village is learning signs from each other at a young age. I think the famous example of that that I’ve heard of relatively nearby is Martha’s Vineyard in the US, which is an island, I think. It has a village sign language.

Lauren: Lynn Hou talked about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in the interview she did with us, which is in a tribal group in a desert in southern Israel.

Gretchen: There’s also Kata Kolok, which is also know as Benkala Sign Language or Balinese Sign Language, which is a village sign language indigenous to two neighbouring villages in northern Bali, Indonesia. Similar situations there.

Lauren: We see this robustness of language and these “young” languages but building on this underlying human tendency to want to create linguistic structure when you bring enough people who can communicate together.

Gretchen: A really interesting example that I’ve encountered recently of what it’s like to suddenly have at least access in terms of format or modality to language, even if you don’t know what everything means yet, is in the book True Biz by Sara Novic, which is set at a school for the d/Deaf. One of the main characters is a d/Deaf girl whose cochlear implants have been malfunctioning, and so she hasn’t been raised with access to a sign language, but suddenly, she’s in this school now and is learning ASL and trying to get her cochlear implants to still work but, in the meantime, is suddenly immersed in this environment where she has full access to language instead of this piecemeal access via attempting to lip read or attempting to use these implants that haven’t been working very well for her. The author is d/Deaf and talks about a variety of different types of experiences that people can have in that context.

Lauren: I really appreciated how this book made the most of the written format to occasionally just not give you what another character was saying, and so you get this experience of being the young protagonist in the book suddenly like, “I’m only getting half of this sentence. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s very stressful.”

Gretchen: Because there’s just a bunch of blank spaces. There were also some places where there were drawings of words that were being talked about or worksheets that she was seeing with line diagrams of different signs. Despite the fact that it’s a book that’s in written English trying to convey ASL, which is not English and doesn’t have a standard way of being written, I think it’s doing a really interesting job of trying to convey that experience.

Lauren: That lack of writing system for signed languages means that a lot of the history of signing in human language history has been lost to us. There have been different signing communities at different times in history. It’s probably been a very common way of humans doing language, but we just don’t know because it’s not in the streetlight of the written record.

Gretchen: Right. We don’t even know if the first language – the “oldest” language – was a spoken language or a signed language. People have come up with arguments for both things. We just don’t know.

Lauren: Which in some ways I find very relaxing instead of constantly trying to make cases for which language is the “oldest” or which is the “newest,” you can just let go of those debates because they are all, at the end of the day, unproveable. You can just enjoy the variety of human language without it being a competition.

Gretchen: A language doesn’t have to be the oldest language or even the newest language in order to be cool. Languages are great. All languages are interesting and valid, and people should have the right to have access to them when they want them. By listening to this episode, you’re participating in part of that chain of human language transmission that stretches beyond anyone’s written record or recorded record or video record. You’re still part of it.

[Music]

Gretchen: 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 at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all of the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA symbols, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I blog as AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. 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 to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include fun interview excerpts, an interview about swearing with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, and our very special linguistics advice episode where you asked questions, and we answered them. If you 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.

Gretchen: 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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episodes #podcast #transcripts #podcasts #language history #Olmec Bark #cuneiform #writing systems #sign language #home sign

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect.

Read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm episode 'Tracing languages back before recorded history'

'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root' on YouTube

Glottolog entry for 'classical'

Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir'

Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets'

Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform'

Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems'

Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'

Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language'

Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok' (also known as Benkala Sign Language)

True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads

Gretchen's thread about reading True Biz

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episodes #podcast #podcasts #episode 88 #language history #oldest language #classical languages #ancient languages #sign language #home sign #cuneiform #writing technology #writing systems #SoundCloud

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 83: Themself, Basque ergativity cartoons, and bad swearing ideas - Deleted scenes from Kirby Conrod, Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, and Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with director's commentary and deleted scenes.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space to share with you. First, we go back to our online liveshow with fan-favourite guest Kirby Conrod, previously seen talking about singular they and other language and gender topics, about reflexive pronouns (themself vs themselves) and people who use multiple pronouns in fiction and real life. Then we go back to Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, previously talking about Basque language revival, about how Basque people feel about the famed ergativity (hint: there are cartoons!). Finally, we go back to authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, previously talking about swearing in science fiction, fantasy, and history, about bad swearing ideas in fiction and why acronymic etymologies should be viewed with deep suspicion. Listen to this episode of deleted scenes from recent interviews, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #podcast #podcasts #bonus episodes #bonuses #bonus #interviews #deleted scenes #pronouns #neopronouns #Basque #ergativity #scifi #fantasy #swearing #acronyms

[lingthusiasm]

Kat: Yeah. Computers are super, super good at counting. They’re super, super good at finding and identifying these strings. But they’re not very good at the analysis bit. We don’t want our computer to do the analysis for us. We want to be very aware of the kind of software and the kind of programming that goes into it that give us the results. Because we as humans are fantastically sensitive to language. That’s where the human element comes in. It’s why we don’t just leave it all to the computers to just do as they will with it.

Gretchen: It’s really a lot more of a partnership between the computer showing you some things and the human making meaning out of that.

Kat: Exactly. It’s meant to be a partnership where you play to each other’s strengths. You let the computer do the bit it’s good at, and then you do the bit you’re good at. Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about language and technology, and the history of language

#langauge #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 61 #quotes #podcasts #corpus linguistics #kat gupta #language and technology

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘If I were an irrealis episode’. 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 how languages express unreality. But first, thank you to everyone who celebrated our anniversary month with us.

Lauren: We always enjoy seeing what you recommend to people and thanking you for doing that. If you did that not on social media, in your own private media channels, thank you very much. You can share Lingthusiasm with anyone who needs more linguistics in their life throughout the year.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is a conversation about swearing in science fiction and fantasy with Ada Palmer and Jo Walton.

Lauren: I was so excited to hear you talk to two of our favourite authors. We’ve talked about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series before. We’ve talked about Jo Walton’s Thessaly books. Getting to hear you talk to them about swearing in fantasy and in science fiction was a whole lot of fun.

Gretchen: This was so much fun. We also have several other bonus episodes about swearing more generally as well as a massive archive of bonus episodes if you’re looking for something to do, and you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes, or you just wanna help us keep making the show. Those are there. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to our full archive of bonus episodes for yourself, or they make a great last-minute gift idea.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is real?

Gretchen: That’s a big philosophical question, Lauren, “What does it mean for something to be real?”

Lauren: Mm-hmm. But we could also answer it linguistically.

Gretchen: We could, indeed. Languages have lots of ways of talking about things that aren’t real. Sometimes, this itself can get tricky. If you want to start a fun discussion among your friends at the dinner table, try asking them things like, “Is a toy sword a real sword?”

Lauren: Hmm, I can totally see a context where you’re playing with toy swords – or maybe those big foam swords that people use in live-action role playing. In that context, it’s a real sword. You’re like, “Please don’t hit me with your sword,” or “I’m gonna practice my sword work.”

Gretchen: It is more of a real sword than a mimed sword or an entirely imaginary sword. It is real as in you can touch it, but it is not real as in it could cut people. One of my friends has a cheese plate that comes with these delightful small swords and daggers and axes that you can use to cut cheese with.

Lauren: Cute.

Gretchen: Which is great. This is, by some definitions, a “real” sword because you can cut things with it even if those things are cheese.

Lauren: Probably taken away from you as a weapon if you try to take it on an aeroplane.

Gretchen: Are we letting the airplane security people decide what a real sword is? The solution to all of our philosophical questions is just answered by airline security people.

Lauren: I’m taking a really weird range of stuff to the airport next time I travel just to check what is real. But then there are things that exist but not in this reality. So, Excalibur is a famous sword. But is it a real sword?

Gretchen: Right. Probably there’s a museum somewhere that has something that claims that it’s Excalibur. It certainly is a sword that has a bunch of cultural connotations with it – that has a level of reality that’s different than a magical sword that someone just makes up as a fantasy novel writer for their own novel but doesn’t have a broader cultural existence.

Lauren: I feel in some ways it’s more real than a foam sword or a cheese plate sword because it is more prototypically sword-like in my head. Could you imagine if Arthur went around with a cheese plate-sized sword or a foam sword? That’s the version of King Arthur I’m gonna rewrite.

Gretchen: I recently saw a production of Macbeth in which – so Macbeth has this famous speech which starts, “Is this a dagger that I see before me?”, and he’s not sure if he’s hallucinating or not. He’s about to kill the king, and he’s feeling guilty about it.

Lauren: He’s not sure if it’s just a cheese board.

Gretchen: Is it just a cheese dagger? In this production – which was also interesting because all of the characters were dressed up as goblins, but that’s a whole other thing.

Lauren: Uh, okay.

Gretchen: We’ll get to that in a sec.

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: The staging represented the dagger, at first, as a beam of light – like a tightly focused spotlight – in front of Macbeth, and everything else on the stage was all in red. There was this beam of white light. You’re saying, “Is this a dagger that I see before me?”, and you’re seeing this beam of light. In that context, the audience is supposed to be believing that Macbeth is hallucinating. Then the actor pulls out a prop dagger that I’m sure was probably not very sharp to subsequently be the murder weapon that he’s gonna go kill the king with. So, “Is this a real dagger? Is this an unreal dagger?” Different productions approach this question of “Is Macbeth seeing something real or not?” in different ways.

Lauren: The prop dagger is more of a real dagger than the beam of light dagger. And in the play, it stands in as a real dagger, but it’s less of a real dagger than a sharp one that might stab someone.

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: I’m keeping track.

Gretchen: Exactly.

Lauren: Just to be clear – were they real goblins?

Gretchen: Well, [laughs] I certainly felt like I had just seen some goblins perform Macbeth. I had to keep reminding myself, like, no, they’ve just got costumes on because, man, those costumes were really great. The actors came out into the lobby and interacted with the audience before and after the show, so they felt –

Lauren: As goblins? In character?

Gretchen: As goblins in character.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Sort of improvising. They felt like they were real goblins. Then I’ve had to explain this show to other people, and they’ve been like, “So, wait, were they humans in the play?” And I was like, “No, it’s complicated. It all made sense at the time, though, I promise.”

Lauren: Amazing. I do have a moment of caution because goblins aren’t real in our world, but also, goblins have been used by a bunch of 20th Century fantasy writers to stand in for, for example, Jewish people in not always the most sensitive or appropriate way. Is that something that was happening here? I say with caution.

Gretchen: No, thank goodness.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: One of the things you can do with something that has a cultural reality is the characters are very careful to say, “These other writers – you may have heard other things about goblins – they were all wrong. We’re the real goblins, and we’re gonna tell you the real story of goblins, which is not at all antisemitic” in the context of the actors wanting to do this play.

Lauren: Okay, so they were more real fake goblins than the fake fake goblins of fantasy.

Gretchen: Exactly. They were laying claim to being the real goblins and being like, “No, these other authors have said nasty things about this, but that’s not who we are.”

Lauren: Hilarious.

Gretchen: Which is something that you can do with something that has a cultural level of reality. “If I had a dog” is a hypothetical statement, but dogs are real.

Lauren: You could have a pet dog if you wanted to.

Gretchen: “If I had a dragon” is also a hypothetical statement, but it has a different level of hypothetical reality.

Lauren: You could put a little costume on a lizard, but yeah, you’re not getting a pet dragon of fire-breathing, winged fantasy fame.

Gretchen: Well, but maybe I have a dragon plush toy, which is a real dragon that I could have.

Lauren: True. Much easier to feed than a real dog or lizard.

Gretchen: My house insurance is a much bigger fan of me having a stuffed dragon. Those have a different level of reality compared to if I say, “If I have a frenumblinger” –

Lauren: If you have a what what?

Gretchen: Well, a “frenumblinger,” clearly, which is the creature that makes it not rain when you bring an umbrella.

Lauren: Ah. I absolutely always take an umbrella everywhere with me, but I didn’t realise I was appeasing this particular deity.

Gretchen: Well, if only you’d realised you were appeasing the frenumblinger – which is a creature that we made up that doesn’t have a cultural reality beyond this podcast.

Lauren: Dragons are more real than frenumblingers, even though both of them are not real.

Gretchen: Yeah. Reality itself is a continuum and depends on the context that you’re talking about.

Lauren: It’s so great that language lets us talk about things that aren’t here and aren’t real.

Gretchen: And that may or may not be real in the future.

Lauren: A lot of the time, we do this with words – like something being “not real” or “There might be dragons.”

Gretchen: Or “fake” or “toy” or things like that – “imaginary.”

Lauren: But languages can also use grammatical marking as part of a way of showing whether something’s real or not in the way that we do our grammar.

Gretchen: This is referred to with a delightful name, which is the “irrealis.” There are various kinds of irrealis markers that happen at a grammatical level in addition to all of the ways you can use words to talk about things that are imaginary or pretend or fake or constructed.

Lauren: There’s lots of different ways that we talk about the “slipperiness” of reality in language. We’re gonna talk about the grammatical structures of irrealis for the rest of this episode.

Gretchen: We’ve talked about stories and deliberately imaginary or fantastical contexts, but there’s also lots of places in everyday language where we wanna talk about things that haven’t happened and may never happen but might happen. We wanna talk about them.

Lauren: For example, “If it rains, I bring an umbrella,” regardless of whether I believe in frenumblinger.

Gretchen: That’s a relatively here and now if-then statement. We can also say, “If it rains, I will cancel the picnic,” which is something that’s even more hypothetical.

Lauren: Disappointing, but fair enough if we have to do that.

Gretchen: You can have more hypothetical conditional statements like “If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops, oh, what a rain that would be!”

Lauren: That sounds horrifying.

Gretchen: Wait, do you not know this children’s song?

Lauren: I do not know this children’s song. It sounds like the start of an apocalypse.

Gretchen: “If it had rained lemon drops and gum drops, the plants would’ve been crushed under the weight.”

Lauren: Not to mention us. I don’t think my umbrella’s gonna be much help here.

Gretchen: Not to mention the effects on the water table.

Lauren: Oh, gosh. This is an absolute ecological apocalypse here. How terrifying.

Gretchen: Conditionals can be used to talk about both relatively realistic hypothetical events – and also very fantastical ones.

Lauren: I’m gonna go listen to this song after this, but I am already scared of it.

Gretchen: You’ll be even more excited to learn that the second verse goes, “If all the snowflakes were candy bars and milkshakes.”

Lauren: How are we even gonna produce that many candy bars and that much milkshake?

Gretchen: “Oh, what a snow that would be!”

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: My favourite type of conditionals are not candy bars and milkshakes, they are, in fact, biscuit conditionals.

Lauren: Delightful.

Gretchen: Going from one food to the next. So, this is a famous example from J. L. Austin, who has the statement, “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them.”

Lauren: Oh, thanks, but where are biscuits if I don’t want them?

Gretchen: [Laughs] This is the thing because in these examples of “If it rains, I bring an umbrella,” if it doesn’t rain, maybe I don’t bring an umbrella, or maybe I bring one just in case to appease frenumblinger – compared to “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them, and if you don’t want them, well, where are they?”

Lauren: There are lots of different relationships between the first half and the second half of a conditional. I do like that biscuit conditionals set you up for a really great mom joke there.

Gretchen: There’s a related xkcd comic which goes, “I’ll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out.”

Lauren: “But where will you be if I don’t want to hang out?” I do actually wanna hang out.

Gretchen: I wanna hang out, too. But yeah, this sort of “What happens with the other half of the ‘if’?” This is one of the tricky things about talking about hypothetical events that there are lots of different ways of getting into that hypothetical.

Lauren: Which is why the caption on the xkcd comic is “Why I try not to be pedantic about conditionals.”

Gretchen: Very important.

Lauren: A good motto to live by. A lot of conditionals are slippery when the hypothetical part is in the future, and that’s because the future is quite difficult. It is unknowable by its very nature because we have a linear progression of time. That means that the future and irrealis bump up against each other in really interesting ways.

Gretchen: Right. If you make a statement – a relatively unremarkable future-y statement – like, “I’m probably gonna go to the store tomorrow,” or “I want to bake a cake tonight,” these are fine. These express a future or a desired future, but if you make the past equivalent – so instead of “I’m probably going to the store tomorrow,” “I probably went to the store yesterday.”

Lauren: Are you okay?

Gretchen: Like, was I sleepwalking? Was I consuming a substance that made me forget things?

Lauren: Do you have amnesia?

Gretchen: That’s suddenly a much weirder statement. “I want to bake a cake tonight,” fine. “I wanted to bake a cake last night” is fine, but it implies that it didn’t actually happen. Like, “I wanted to bake the cake last night. In fact, I did bake one.” Okay. Well, why didn’t you just say, “I baked a cake last night?”

Lauren: For sure. In fact, this is where English “will” for future came from. Something like, “I will bake a cake” originally meant something much more like, “I want to bake a cake.”

Gretchen: You still get, I think, sometimes these older, tiny things like, “I know it’s gonna happen. I will it.” That’s the same “will” in origin. The wanting intensely is that future “will” – it became that future “will.”

Lauren: The way that “will” is turning into something much more grammatical in the English future is a nice example of how different languages will sometimes use words and sometimes use grammar for these less-real irrealis contexts.

Gretchen: English still has grammatical past – “I baked a cake last night” – which is different from “I bake a cake right now.” But in some languages, instead of having a past/non-past like we have in English, what you actually have is a realis/irrealis where you have one form of a verb to talk about things that have happened or that are currently happening – any version of it that’s real – and then you have another form that’s talking about any version of it that’s unreal, whether that’s future or hypothetical or that whole class of things. It also makes sense as a way of splitting the conceptual timeframe into things that I have evidence for actually happening and things that I don’t yet have evidence for.

Lauren: For example, Manam, which is an Austronesian language in Papua New Guinea, doesn’t have a tense distinction like past and present and future; it has a realis and an irrealis form. They’re all prefixes on the verb.

Gretchen: There’s one set of prefixes for realis, whether it’s like, “I’m doing this,” “You’re doing that,” “We’re doing this,” “They’re doing this,” and so on. And there’s one for irrealis, which is like, “I might,” or “I will,” or “We might,” or “They might,” or all of these groups of forms. Another example of a language that uses realis versus irrealis as a really important distinction is Terêna, which is a southern Arawak language spoken in southwestern Mato Grosso, Brazil. They have two different forms for every verb, which is “actual” and “potential” – basically realis and irrealis – that have different suffixes. You have things that are realis, which can be translated as stuff like, “He went,” or “when he went,” or “He will go,” which in this case is grouped with the realis.

Lauren: So, it’s definitely gonna happen.

Gretchen: The idea is it’s definitely gonna happen. Then, in the irrealis category you have things more like, “Let him go,” or “when he goes,” which is more hypothetical.

Lauren: What people segment up as realis and irrealis differs depending on the grammar of a language.

Gretchen: Exactly. In many cases, English uses just extra words like “will” or “want” or “let” or “if” to indicate that something is irrealis, but we do have a few verb forms that are also used for hypothetical events.

Lauren: One of my favourites involves both mid-20th-Century musicals and Gwen Stefani.

Gretchen: Great.

Lauren: In English, we have two different structures. We have “if I were a rich man.” That is a slightly different structure to “if I was a rich girl.”

Gretchen: Ah, so these are two relatively famous songs. “If I Were a Rich Man” comes from Fiddler on the Roof, which is a 1964 musical.

Lauren: And “If I Were a Rich Girl” is a Gwen Stefani song from 2004.

Gretchen: This immediately gives us these great dates for when these two forms were more popular – “if I were,” “if I was” – and then these two songs that are influenced by each other.

Lauren: This form that has “were,” instead of just the normal past tense “was,” is something known as the “subjunctive.”

Gretchen: Ah, the elusive subjunctive in English.

Lauren: It is elusive because it is changing into this regular past tense form as we see with Gwen Stefani’s “If I Was a Rich Girl.”

Gretchen: Right. Not everybody says the subjunctive in that context. It’s still optionally there. You have to do it in “if I were” or “if he were” because in all the other forms, “if you were,” “if they were,” “if we were,” it’s just the same as the past tense form. You have to use it with “I” or “he” or “she” – one of the forms that would use “was” in another context – to be able to see it show up, which is probably why it’s kind of fragile and disappearing.

Lauren: Yeah, I think so.

Gretchen: Can we try to do a little bit of antedating? Fiddler on the Roof comes out in 1964, but the title of the song “If I Were a Rich Man,” having now looked into it, was inspired by a monologue from 1902 by Sholem Aleichem, which was in Yiddish, and the title of that was, “Ven Ikh Bin Rothschild,” or literally, “If I Were a Rothschild.”

Lauren: So, I don’t have to speak Yiddish to know that they’re talking about the very rich American Rothschild family.

Gretchen: Yes. Something that I think is interesting grammatically about the title of this monologue, which is a great monologue because it all goes on about how he’s gonna build schools for all the poor children and stuff – it’s a great monologue – but is “ikh bin,” which is the same as the German form “Ich bin,” like “I am,” whereas the German subjunctive form in this context is “Ich wäre,” which is more like “I were.”

Lauren: Yiddish and German are related, but they’re already doing different things.

Gretchen: They’re already doing different things specifically with subjunctive. Yiddish is already following this trajectory that English is following where it’s getting closer to the more usual form for “I am.”

Lauren: And you’re just meant to know that it’s hypothetical because he’s not a Rothschild, and he’s not building schools.

Gretchen: Well, and you have this word “if,” yeah.

Lauren: I also did some antedating on Gwen Stefani’s version of “If I Was a Rich Girl,” which was on her debut solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. It turns out that it’s actually a cover of a 1993 song by Louchie Lou & Michie One, where they also sing “if I was a rich girl.” Already by the early ’90s in younger people’s speech you see the subjunctive slipping.

Gretchen: Who are Louchie Lou & Michie One?

Lauren: They’re a British female ragga/soul duo from London in the early ’90s and were linked to the film clip for this track because they’re clearly having a lot of fun with it.

Gretchen: They may have had their finger on the pulse of language change a bit sooner than Gwen Stefani in 2004.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: When I think about the connection between “If I Were a Rich Man” and “If I Was a Rich Girl,” I think of an a cappella mashup from the mid-2010s, which combines these two songs in a very fun music video from some very posh-looking British a cappella singers, which we can also link to because it reinforces – and I hadn’t really realised that “If I Was a Rich Girl” was actually playing on “If I Were a Rich Man,” and they’re using some of the same beats in the background of the song. I hadn’t realised there was a connection between those. I should say, when Gwen Stefani came out with that song, she’d already released some music, and she was already pretty wealthy. At the time, you got some newspaper commenters and so on who were saying like, “Isn’t it a bit disingenuous for you to be saying, ‘if I was a rich girl’? Because you are, in fact, a rich girl.”

Lauren: Yeah, but the lyric “if I were not the rich girl that I am so I can be an avatar for my unwealthy audience” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

Gretchen: Gwen Stefani at the time explained that as she was talking about the time before she had found commercial success when she used to be broke – which, maybe, you know, okay.

Lauren: A different level of hypothetical there.

Gretchen: Two levels of hypotheticality.

Lauren: We’re seeing this really interesting development over the last century or so in English where the subjunctive is changing in English.

Gretchen: Sometimes people say that this is “losing the subjunctive,” but interestingly, in both cases, it’s a past form. “If I was” and “if I were” are both using the form that is associated with the past – “was” or “were” – to refer to an event that is very much not the past. In fact, it hasn’t happened.

Lauren: Ugh, this is why it’s so hard to learn it as a second language speaker.

Gretchen: The subjunctive is something that often comes up when people are learning languages like French, Spanish, Italian – in German, it’s called the “conjunctive,” but it’s the same thing, the conjunctive and the conditional – because these languages have more fully-fledged forms for the subjunctive that they use to express a range of meanings that English speakers know how to express but aren’t used to thinking as all of the same kind of thing. Sometimes, I think it must actually be really hard if someone speaks one of those languages first and is coming in and trying to learn English, and they’re like, “What do you mean I just have this one easy form that I use for all this stuff, and I have to learn, like, seven different ways of expressing it now?”

Lauren: [Laughs] For sure.

Gretchen: I think this must actually also be hard because English doesn’t have one unified subjunctive. We have a whole range of extra stuff. You can just use the subjunctive for all of them? That’s so easy!

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, you could be like me and whenever anyone talks about the subjunctive, in my head I just hear, “if I was-slash-were a rich man-slash-girl.”

Gretchen: I’m glad that you’re covering the full range of possible forms there with “was” and “were.” I remember feeling confused about this form in the classroom and trying to use the subjunctive where, a lot of the times, the context that you’re talking about things are very remote and seem kind of artificial. The thing that really made me feel more comfortable using the subjunctive and recognising it was just encountering it in the wild in a bunch of contexts where it was like, “Oh, yeah, this is what this has to mean.” There’s a particularly useful song for the French subjunctive, if you like, which is on a classic Celine Dion album from the 1990s.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: The song is called, “Pour Que Tu M’aimes Encore,” which is the title which translates sort of like, “So That You Love Me Again.” The “you love” is subjunctive. It’s hypothetical. It’s not the case, otherwise you wouldn’t have a song to write, but it’s saying all the things that the speaker would do so that the other person loves them again.

Lauren: Really looking forward to the Celine Dion/Gwen Stefani mashup that really helps people learn the French and English subjunctive forms.

Gretchen: Sounds great.

Lauren: The subjunctive is one of a set of different ways that we can talk about whether things are real or not. They’re also a subset of irrealis categories that are about trying to make the reality that you want to happen. There’s a great list on Wikipedia to check out. I feel like this was written by a linguist who is like me and remembers that there are different types of irrealis categories but never remembers their formal names.

Gretchen: This is definitely one of those cases when it’s like, if you know Latin, you just name everything with Latin roots, and then it sounds fancier than “the wish subjunctive” and the “want-to-make-people-do-things subjunctive.”

Lauren: Yes. We are gonna use the fancy names here, but like me, you’re absolutely not obliged to remember them. You can just click on the Wikipedia link whenever you wanna think about –

Gretchen: Every single time.

Lauren: Yeah. Let’s both pick our favourite two of these categories.

Gretchen: But, Lauren, we’re both gonna pick the “hortative” because it’s so cool!

Lauren: It is, and I just used it with “let’s.”

Gretchen: You just used it. “Let’s” both pick our favourite two subjunctive forms. The hortative is something that exhorts – it urges. It’s often found with “let” in English. Something like “Let us love each other,” “Let it snow,” “Let there be light” – imploring, insisting, or encouraging by the speaker. Sometimes, a language will have a specific form potentially used for the hortative, or this will be one of the categories that something like a subjunctive or another irrealis form can be used for. What’s one of your favourites if you can’t have the hortative?

Lauren: Well, if I can’t have the hortative, I will go for the category where an event is hoped for, expected, or awaited, which is the “optative.”

Gretchen: The “optative.” I want to opt into this coming event. Do you have an example of the optative?

Lauren: Something like, “May I be loved” or “May they get what they deserve,” which sounds threatening or hopeful depending on the context.

Gretchen: Can you use something like a “if only”?

Lauren: In Russian, to do something like the optative it would be literally translated as something like, “if only” – “If only she came back” – to do that expected or hoped for thing.

Gretchen: We have a “may something happen,” “if only something happened,” maybe “I wish something had happened.”

Lauren: I love Abkhaz – which is the language that Sarah Dopierala works on; we interviewed her for a bonus – I love that it has two different optative forms, and they both do slightly different things. In Abkhaz, you have Optative 1, which is to curse and to bless, and then Optative 2 is to express a wish, a dream, or a desire. The first one would be something like – the form of greetings is literally “May you see something good,” which is a blessing.

Gretchen: That’s a lovely greeting, yes.

Lauren: It’s a lovely greeting. I quite like. Optative 2 would be something like, “I wish she’d drink the water.” You get these two different forms that give you an idea of different ways you can do an optative.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess technically – we did a whole episode about the imperative, so that’s things like, “Drink the water,” and “See something good,” “Come back” – that is technically a type of irrealis because if you’re commanding someone to do something, it hasn’t happened yet.

Lauren: Ooo, yeah, so now you can go back and look into the whole imperative episode as an irrealis episode.

Gretchen: In principle, we could’ve done an entire hortative episode and an entire optative episode, but we decided to think about the macro category for a while first.

Lauren: My final category is one for when you’re not necessarily sure about the thing that you’re talking about, so you can’t be entirely certain if it’s real or not. This feature shows up in Yolmo. I wrote about it for my thesis. I wrote about it for a whole year before saying it. It turns out that I hate to say the word “dubitative” – /d͡ʒubɪtɛɪtɪv/?

Gretchen: /dubɪdəˈtɪv/.

Lauren: /dubətɪv/. /dubɪdətɪv/.

Gretchen: “Indubitatatative.”

Lauren: I’m very happy to write it for a year, and then I gave a presentation, and I was just like, “Oh, this is a problem.” But it is a grammatical category in Yolmo, and I do have to talk about it because it’s one that crops up in a whole bunch of languages. In English, we use a word like, “might,” you know, “I might make a cake,” “He maybe made a cake.” We use lots of different words for showing a lack of certainty. In other languages, it’s part of the grammar. In Ojibwe, which is an Algonquian language in North America, there is a specific suffix. The difference between saying something like, “aakozi,” meaning, “He’s sick,” or “aakozidog,” which is something like, “He must be sick; I guess he’s sick; Maybe he’s sick.” Like, “I can’t see inside this person’s head. I’m not a doctor. I can’t say for certain whether they’re sick, but they look pretty miserable.” I find having a grammatical form for whether you’re certain about something is so handy.

Gretchen: Technically, if you’d like, I did look up how to say this word. Oxford says /dubɪtɛɪtɪv/, but you know, language is pluricentric. You can say it however you’d like.

Lauren: I’ve definitely heard all of those different pronunciations from different people over time. I guess I will just continue to be uncertain about the way it’s pronounced.

Gretchen: Would you say you have “doubt”? Would you say you’re /dubɪtɛɪtɪv/ or /dubɪdətɪv/ about how to say “dubitative”?

Lauren: I would definitely use a dubitative grammatical form about my certainty about pronouncing it if we had one in English.

Gretchen: Excellent. I think my final form that I’m excited about – because I’m not counting imperative because we did a whole episode about that – I want to talk about a form that you can use to express a desire or a wish of the participant. If you wanna say something like, “I wish she loved me” – you have desire – you can use a /dəzɪdɹ̩ətɪv/ – I think that’s the only way it’s said. There are languages from Japanese and Mongolian to Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European that all have desiderative forms of some sort.

Lauren: Aww. I like when a nice form crops up across a bunch of languages.

Gretchen: I think that that desire to try to impose order or predict what people are gonna say or what’s gonna be reality is part of what makes irrealis forms, like the subjunctive, complicated and confusing for people to learn is that they’re trying to talk about this whole class of events that haven’t happened yet and may or may not ever happen, which itself is confusing and chaotic to try to predict the future. It’s not the grammar’s fault that we’re using it to speculate about the unknowable.

Lauren: For sure.

Gretchen: One thing that we do know is that there is a fun etymology related to trying to impose order and predict the future of what people are gonna be like.

Lauren: I love a fun etymology story.

Gretchen: Have you ever wondered why the Greek Zodiac and the Chinese Zodiac are both called “zodiacs” even though one is months and the other one is years?

Lauren: I have never thought about this before. Is it something to do with the fact that – I mean, they both have cycles of 12 animals, so they definitely have a lot in common even though they don’t work on the same 12 rotation cycle.

Gretchen: Well, interestingly, it has nothing to do with 12, but etymologically, they come from the Greek “zodiakos kyklos,” or “zodiac circle,” which is literally a circle of little animals.

Lauren: Oh, “zo” as in “zoo.”

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: But “diak” just is the diminutive “little”? Oh, that that is very cute.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s “little animals.”

Lauren: How adorable.

Gretchen: There’re lots of tools that people use to make sense of the uncertainty or unknowability of reality in the future. Some of those tools are grammatical tools. Some of those tools are –

Lauren: Cute little animals.

Gretchen: Circles of little animals. Sometimes, that tool is etymology because people also use the origins of words to try to make sense of uncertainty even though etymology is also not destiny.

Lauren: We believe that so strongly that we made it into a sticker.

Gretchen: When you’re thinking about what’s real and what’s not real, when you’re wondering what’s knowable or unknowable, what’s certain or uncertain, the irrealis is a form that connects you through time and space to generations of other people who have also wondered what’s real.

[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 of the podcast platforms or go to 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 our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and stickers at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @gretchenmcc on Bluesky, 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 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 to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include my excursion to linguistics summer camp, a.k.a. the LSA Linguistics Institute, a linguistics advice Q&A episode, and swearing in science fiction and fantasy. 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.

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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episodes #transcripts #podcast #episode 87 #irrealis #morphology #syntax #semantics