Lingthusiasm

Transcript Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 21:33:47 -0500

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.

Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 21:21:20 -0500

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:

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

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.

Not sure which episode to listen to first? Want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm? Or do you…

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 19:11:19 -0500

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!

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

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 18:21:41 -0500

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

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.

"Gretchen: I mean, I will say that we have a pretty phonotactically weird cluster in the name of our..."

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 20:11:49 -0500

“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

Transcript Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 18:29:53 -0500

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.

Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 18:27:49 -0500

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:

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.

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

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

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 17:53:36 -0500

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

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.

Kat: Yeah. Computers are super, super good at counting. They’re super, super good at finding and…

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 06:48:23 -0500

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

Transcript Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:09:08 -0500

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.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:05:07 -0500

Language lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it’s a hypothetical situation (such as “if it rains, we’ll cancel the picnic” - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they’re called the irrealis.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples under the irrealis umbrella. We talk about various things that we can mean by “reality”, such as how existing fictional concepts, like goblins playing Macbeth, differ from newly-constructed fictions, like our new creature the Frenumblinger. We also talk about hypothetical statements using “if” (including the delightfully-named “biscuit conditionals), and using the "if I were a rich man” (Fiddler on the Roof) to “if I was a rich girl” (Gwen Stefani) continuum to track the evolution of the English subjunctive. Finally, a few of our favourite additional types of irrealis categories: the hortative, used to urge or exhort (let’s go!), the optative, to express wishes and hopes (if only…), the dubitative, for when you doubt something, and the desiderative (I wish…).

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who shared Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. We hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzies!

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we’ve ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about invented swear words like “frak” and “frell”, sweary lexical gaps (why don’t we swear with “toe jam!”), and interpreting the nuances of regional swear words like “bloody” in fiction.

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.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

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.

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

Bonus 82: Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction - Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 18:55:15 -0500

Bonus 82: Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction - Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer | Lingthusiasm

The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and body functions, while historically in English we’ve also had more religious swears, like “God’s blood” and “God’s teeth”. In fiction, authors can use invented swear words to get around censorship, like “frack” in Battlestar Gallactica and “frell” in Farscape, as well as to create a sense of a particular culture, such as “smeg” in Red Dwarf, which then sometimes take on new lives of their own among fans.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we’ve ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about fictional substitutes for the F word, expletive infixations like abso-bloody-lutely, sweary lexical gaps (why don’t we swear with “toe jam!”) and old fashioned swears in English. We also talk about learning real-life swear words without full awareness of their emotional valence by reading fiction (such as how Gretchen and Ada don’t find “bloody” as taboo as Jo does), cultural differences in taboo gestures such as pointing with the middle finger in real life and teeth-baring smiles in Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and an extra bonusy bit about recording emotional punctuation in the audiobook of Because Internet.

Content note: Lingthusiasm episodes about swearing contain real swears! If you typically play this podcast around kids, for example, it’s up to you whether you want to have that conversation with them.

Also note that this conversation was first recorded as an interview with Gretchen for Ada and Jo’s podcast, Ex Urbe Ad Astra, where it will one day appear in longer form, but they’ve kindly let us share some of Lauren’s favourite snippets from it in advance (plus a few comments from her at the end!).

Listen to this episode about swearing in fiction, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Transcript Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:08:19 -0500

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez’. 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. I’m here with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez who’s an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about new speakers and language revitalisation. But first, some announcements. Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary. We still have a few days left to fill out our Lingthusiasm listener’s survey for the year, so follow the link in the description to tell us more about what you’d like to see on the show and do some fun linguistics experiments. This month’s bonus episode was a special anniversary advice episode in which we answered some of your pressing linguistics questions including helping friends become less uptight about language, keeping up with interesting linguistics work from outside the structure of academia, and interacting with youth slang when you’re no longer as much of a youth. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to this bonus advice episode, many more bonus episodes, and to help keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Itxaso, welcome to the show!

Itxaso: Hi! It’s so good to be here. I feel so honoured because we use so many of your episodes in our linguistic courses. For me, being here is exciting.

Gretchen: Hello to Itxaso and also to Itxaso’s students who may be listening to this episode.

Itxaso: I dunno if I want them to find this episode, though. [Laughter]

Gretchen: They’re gonna find it. Let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Itxaso: I feel like, for me, it was a little bit accidental – or at least, that’s how you felt at that time. I grew up in a household that we spoke Basque, but my grandparents didn’t speak Basque. My parents spoke it as non-native speakers. They were new speakers. They learnt it in adulthood, and they made me native. But I was told all my life, “You speak weird. You are different. You’re using this and that.” Later on, I was told that, “Oh, you’re so good at English. You should become an English teacher because you can make a lot of money.” And I thought, “Oh, yeah, well, that doesn’t sound bad.” When I went to undergrad, I started taking linguistic courses, and then I went on undergraduate study abroad thanks to a professor that we had at the university, Jon Franco. That’s where I realised, “Wait a minute. All of these things that I’ve been feeling about inadequate, they have an explanation.”

Gretchen: So, people were telling you that your Basque wasn’t good.

Itxaso: Yeah.

Gretchen: Even though you’re the hope and the fruition of all of this Basque language revitalisation. Your parents went to all this effort to learn Basque and teach you Basque, and yet someone’s telling you your Basque is bad.

Itxaso: Absolutely. You know, people wouldn’t tell you straight to your face, “Your Basque is really bad,” but there was all these very subtle ways of feeling about it, or they would correct you, and you were like, “Hmm, why do they correct it when the person next to me is using the same structure, but they don’t get corrected.” As a kid, I was sensitive to that, and then I realised, “Wow, there’re theories about this.”

Gretchen: That’s so exciting. It’s so nice to have “Other people have experienced this thing, and they’ve come up with a name and a label for what’s going on.”

Itxaso: It’s also interesting that as a kid I did also feel a little bit ashamed of my parents, who’re actually doing what language revitalisation wants to be done. You want to become active participants. But I remember when my parents would speak Basque to me, they had a different accent. They had a Spanish accent. I was like, “Ugh, whatever.” Sometimes it would cringe my ears; I have to admit that. As a kid, I was in these two worlds of, okay, I am proud and ashamed at the same time of what is happening.

Gretchen: And the other kids, when you were growing up, they were speaking Basque, too?

Itxaso: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I grew up in Gernika, right, and we have our own regional variety. I remember on the playground sometimes they would tell me, “Oh, you sound like the kids in the cartoons.”

Gretchen: So, you’re speaking this formal, standard Basque that your parents had learned as second language learners, and the other kids are still speaking the regional variety of Basque but hadn’t gone through the standardisation process and become the one that’s in the media.

Itxaso: Correct. My first variety was actually this standardised variety that nobody spoke when it was created in the ’60s. My parents learnt this in their 20s, and then that’s the variety that I was exposed to at home. But then you go in the street, and they’re like, “Oh, you sound like Doraemon,” because that’s what we watched.

Gretchen: The character in the cartoon, yeah.

Itxaso: Yeah, in the cartoon. It was like, “Oh, okay, do I? All right.” Then I started picking up the regional variety.

Gretchen: Right. You pick up the regional variety as well from the kids. Then what did your parents think of that if they think they’re speaking the fancy one?

Itxaso: Oh, my goodness. It was absolutely hilarious because my mom, she always thought that the Standard Basque is the correct way because that’s the one that you learnt in the school, so she did have this idea that literacy makes this language important. You know, for Basque revitalisation, that’s important. But I remember we were at home, and she would correct me because, for instance, as any spoken language, you would also shorten certain words. She would always say, “Oh, that’s not how you say it. You’re supposed to say this full word. You have to pronounce the entire word.” Then I said, “But Mom, everybody else uses this other variation,” especially with verbs, which are a little bit complicated, right. Then she would say, “Oh, Itxaso, you know what? I gave you this beautiful Basque, and then you went out to the school, and they ruined it all for you.” Then in order to come back, I would tell her, “Mom, but I am the native speaker here.” So, these tensions of who is right.

Gretchen: Who is the real Basque speaker, who is the best Basque speaker, and in this context where, in theory, your goals should be aligned because you’re all trying to revitalise Basque, and in theory, you all have the same goal, and yet, you’re getting criticism from different sides, and people are criticising different groups in this – but in theory, you have the same goals.

Itxaso: I think growing up in this paradox of I’m also criticising my mother, who actually, thanks to her, I get this language. In the revitalisation process, I think this negotiation is fascinating that you’re constantly being exposed to.

Gretchen: Constantly being exposed to all these different language ideologies around what is good, what is not good. You went to university, and you started encountering linguistic words for these experiences that you had. What were some of those words?

Itxaso: Some of these words I remember was this “standard language ideology,” that the idea or, in a way, that the standards are constructs that don’t exist. And I was thinking, “Wait a minute, in my language, we have a very clear standard.” We actually have a name for it. We call it “Unified Basque,” or “Euskara Batua.”

Gretchen: “Batua.”

Itxaso: “Batua” means “unified.” It’s associated with a kind of speaker. These are speakers that, like my parents, learned Basque through the schooling system, which today is actually the majority of the Basque-speaking population, at least on the Spanish side. “Standard language ideology” – I was thinking, “What is that? Oh, okay, it’s the thought that we have that these standards exist. How do I make sense of that?” I remember when I was in college, the term “heritage speaker” was thrown a lot.

Gretchen: “Heritage speaker” of Basque. Are you a “heritage speaker” of Basque?

Itxaso: I don’t consider myself a heritage speaker of Basque because – so I have Basque heritage, yes, and no. My dad’s side of the family is from Spain as well, but they also grew up in the Basque Country. This comes also with the last name. Do I have Basque heritage? Yes. But I think our connections with language are a little bit more complicated than the ethnicity per se. It’s like, we have this saying that says that it is Basque who speaks Basque. That was this poet, Joxean Artze, that we used to hear a lot during the revitalisation process. The question is, “What kind of Basque?”

Gretchen: Yeah, like, “Who is Basque enough to speak Basque?” And your parents speak Basque, but your grandparents didn’t speak Basque anymore, but if you go far enough back in your ancestry, somebody spoke Basque. But who counts –

Itxaso: But – yeah. My grandparents didn’t speak Basque. Their parents – maybe they had some knowledge. I dunno how far along. What we do know is that the region where my grandparents grew up in, Basque was already in the very advanced stages of language shift. Also, my grandparents were born in the civil war, so speaking Basque was probably not – it could get you killed.

Gretchen: Yeah. Which is a great reason to say, “Hey, you know what.”

Itxaso: Right. Then later on, this paradox is coming into play. As a 5-year-old kid, you’re not aware that your grandpa, you know, could have been killed if they spoke our language, but at the same time, my dad’s side of the family also was going through some kind of shame because he learnt the language as an adult, and he became in love with the language. This idea of heritage – do you need to be a heritage to be part of the language? It was a little more complicated than that. When I asked my mom, “Why do you learn the language?”, for her, she was always, “Because my identity now is complete.” But for my dad, it wasn’t the same reason.

Gretchen: Why did you dad learn Basque?

Itxaso: My dad learned Basque because after the dictator died, the revitalisation was very important, and there were a lot of jobs.

Gretchen: Ah, so just economic reasons.

Itxaso: For him, it was pure economics. Then, you know what, if I learn Basque, I’m gonna have more opportunities to have a government job, and a government job is a good job. Then after that, throughout the time, he actually became even more in love with the language, more invested in the revitalisation. He also did a lot of these – bertsolaritza is this oral poetry that we have. It has a very, very long oral tradition in the Basque Country. He read a lot of literature. He taught Basque in the school system. He was also invested in teaching Basque to immigrants as well because he felt like an immigrant himself as well.

Gretchen: And this question of who has Basque heritage, if you’re an immigrant to Basque Country, you are becoming part of that heritage as well.

Itxaso: Yes.

Gretchen: It’s an interesting example of how economic and social and cultural things can really work together for something, like, being able to get a job doing something can allow you to fall in love with it.

Itxaso: Yes, yes.

Gretchen: Or it can be hard to stay in love with something if there’s no way to support yourself while doing it.

Itxaso: Absolutely. I remember that he was always invested in these processes. I have to admit that – now I’m gonna be a little picky again because these ideologies sometimes don’t always fully go – you know, we still have these biases – my dad’s fluency and also competency became stronger and stronger, and then he started to also speak like locals, little by little.

Gretchen: Okay, you know, this standard, unified Basque – he’s like, “Well, maybe I’ll talk like the other local people.”

Itxaso: I remember that my mom was very clear, especially in the beginning – I dunno if she feels that way anymore – that the standard is the correct one. I don’t think my dad did have so many overt ideas about it. For him, in the beginning, it was instrumental, “It’s gonna give me a good job,” and then he fell in love. And then it’s like, “Now, I have to go to the richness” – sometimes he would say that – “of the dialects of the traditions.” But he didn’t have this heritage Basque. He was born in rural Spain, and his parents moved to the Basque Country for economic reasons.

Gretchen: And he sort of fell in love with it anyway. What’s it like for you – because you live in the US now – doing research with Basque and trying to stay in touch with your Basque identity despite not living in the Basque Country?

Itxaso: For me, I have to admit that, again, I came to the United States thinking that I’m going to be an English teacher when I come back. I said, “I’m gonna do my master’s, and then I’m gonna go back to the Basque Country, and I’m gonna teach English.” Uh-uh, no.

Gretchen: Okay.

Itxaso: I realised that the farther I am from home, the more I wanted to understand the processes or how I felt as a kid because I realised, “Wait a minute, I can find answers to the shame and pride that I had growing up.” I was also ashamed of my grandparents that they didn’t know Basque because when he would take me to the park, right, I knew that people would talk with him. I would just go, instead of him looking at me whether I am falling off from the swing, I was checking on him to see who was gonna talk with him because I was ready to do the translation work for him.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, if he can’t talk to the other parents or grandparents or whatever, then you’re like, “Oh, here, Grandad, let me translate for you.”

Itxaso: Yep. Then I remember that I’d think, “Hey, I’m teaching him Basque. He’s practicing, right?” Every Sunday he would come, you know, to our hometown and, before going to the park, I made him study Basque. He was so bad at it. Like, terrible at it. It was very hard for him, and he would tell me, “But Itxaso, why are you doing this to me? I didn’t even go to school.” I mean, he didn’t have much schooling even in Spanish. I said, “Don’t worry. If you’re Basque, you have to speak Basque.” Those were some of the – and I was 5 or 6. I was so happy, right. At the same time, I had this very strong attachment to him but also internalised shame that in my family intergenerational transmission was stopped. As a 5-year-old kid, you don’t understand civil war – yet. [Laughter]

Gretchen: I hope not.

Itxaso: When I went to graduate school, I realised, “Wait a minute, my teachers were correcting me all the time.” I had this internalised shame that exercised, right. I was told that sometimes I wasn’t Basque enough; sometimes I was being seen as a real Basque. So, what’s happening? This is when I realised that sociolinguistics, which is the field of study that I do, became very therapeutical to me.

Gretchen: You can work through your issues or your family issues and your language issues by giving them names and connecting them with other people who’ve had similar experiences like, “Oh, I’m not alone in having this shame and these feelings.”

Itxaso: Absolutely. And that there were many of us. There were a lot of Spanish speakers in my classroom who, maybe they didn’t have literacy in Spanish, or they had similar encounters of feelings, and I said, “Wait a minute, so we’re not that weird,” and understanding that, in fact, this is quite common. Or there were also speakers of other language revitalisation contexts that I thought, “Oh, wait a minute, I thought we were this isolate case,” and you’re thinking, “No, we have similar feelings of inadequacy, but at the same time, pride.” I used the world of linguistics in general to understand these patterns and also to heal in some way.

Gretchen: No, it’s important.

Itxaso: I almost had a little bit of a rebel attitude in some ways. For me, it was like, “Ha ha! I got you now!”

Gretchen: Like, “You don’t need to make me feel shame anymore because I have linguistics to fight you with!”

Itxaso: There we go! “And now, I’m gonna go back with my dissertation. I’m gonna make sure that you understand that YOU are the one wrong and not me, and that when you correct me, I am also judging you.”

Gretchen: Does it work very well to show people your dissertation and tell them that they’re wrong?

Itxaso: No. [Laughter] Absolutely not.

Gretchen: I was gonna say, if you said this was working, it’s like, “Wow! You’re the first person that I know who wrote a dissertation and everyone admitted that they were wrong.”

Itxaso: Yeah, but then you have this hope.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Itxaso: Then I realised, okay, well, this is my therapeutic portfolio, basically.

Gretchen: At least you know in your heart that you are valid. So, you don’t like the word “heritage speaker,” which I think “heritage speaker” does work for – we don’t wanna say, “No one is a heritage speaker” – but for you in your context, that doesn’t feel like it resonates with you. What is a term that resonates with you for your context?

Itxaso: For me, it resonates more – I consider myself a native speaker of Basque, or my first language is definitely Basque. We have a term for that in the Basque Country, “euskaldun zahar,” and it literally means – “euskal” means “Basque,” “dun” means that you have it, and “zahar” means “old.”

Gretchen: You have the “Old Basque.”

Itxaso: Yeah, you have the Old Basque, which is associated with the dialects or the regional varieties. It has nothing to do with age.

Gretchen: Okay. You’re not an old Basque speaker as in you’re a senior citizen with grey hair, you’re a speaker of Old Basque.”

Itxaso: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Compared to a “New Basque” speaker?

Itxaso: There we go. Mm-hmm. A New Basque speaker, right, which we also have a Basque term for that, right, it actually means that you started it in more new times, which for us is associated with the revitalisation.

Gretchen: That’s like your parents.

Itxaso: Exactly. My parents consider themselves “new” speakers of Basque, and the Basque word for that is “euskaldun berri.”

Gretchen: “euskaldun berri.” So, this is “speaker of New Basque” or – and the idea of someone being a new speaker of a revitalised language in general where you learned it in adulthood and maybe you’re trying to pass it onto your kids and give them the opportunities they didn’t have, but you have these challenges that are unique to new speakers.

Itxaso: Absolutely. And oftentimes has to do with the idea of how authentic you are. This is something that is being negotiated, right – these negotiations we’re having in our household. When my mom said, “I know the correct Basque,” and I would basically implicitly tell her, when I was telling her, “But I know the authentic one.” Because of that, those similarly wider ideologies, right, this is how my parents also, little by little, they were able to sprinkle their Standard Basque with some regional “flavour,” as we call it, right. They would change their verbs, and they would start sounding more like the regional dialects.

Gretchen: Are there different contexts in which people tend to use the Standard Basque versus the older Basque varieties, like either formal or informal contexts, writing, speaking, like, official contexts or intimate contexts? Are there some differences, sociolinguistically, in terms of how they get used?

Itxaso: Yeah. For somebody that, for instance, I consider myself also bi-dialectal in Basque in the sense that I speak the regional variety now even if my first variety was actually the standard. I use the Standard Basque to write. But that is only part of the mess or the beauty or the complexification because those people that started learning Standard Basque in the school, sometimes, they might feel that their standard is too rigid to be able to have these informal conversations. One of the things that a lot of new speakers of Basque are doing is, in fact, creating language.

Gretchen: To create an informal version of the standard. Because it’s one thing to speak it in a classroom or something, but if you’re going to go marry someone and raise children in this and you wanna be able to have arguments or tell someone you love them or this sort of stuff maybe this thing that’s very classroom associated is too fancy-feeling for that context.

Itxaso: The same way that they don’t wanna sound like the kids in the cartoons, like Doraemon, for instance. [Laughter]

Gretchen: That’s not how real people sound.

Itxaso: Knowing that a standard was necessary for our survival, for the language to survive, at least during those times, but at the same time, we need to get out of this rigidity that this standard might give us. The new speakers in many ways are the engineers of the language.

Gretchen: The original creation of Standard Basque in the 1980s was taking from all of these different regional varieties and coming up with a version that could be written, and you could have one Basque curriculum that all of the schools could use rather than each region trying to come up with its own curriculum, which is logistically challenging.

Itxaso: Absolutely. The Standard Basque was created, finally, in 1968, and little by little being introduced in the educational purposes. And the education in the ’80s, too, is when [exploding noise] bilingual schools skyrocketed, and the immersion programme became the most common one.

Gretchen: And this is immersion for kids, for adults, for everybody?

Itxaso: For kids. You start with kindergarten or, I dunno the terms here in the US, but 2- or 3-years-old, all throughout university. Of course, that went through different stages. Of course, there’s some degrees in university that might not be fully taught in Basque, but overall, little by little, I mean, in the past four years, a lot of that has been done.

Gretchen: What’s it like for you now going back to the Basque Country being like, “Wow, revitalisation is done. It’s complete. Everything is accomplished. We have nothing to worry about anymore.” Is this the case?

Itxaso: Absolutely not. There’s still debates going on. One of the big debates that have been talked – so we have sociolinguistic surveys that we wanna measure how successful is this standard, and what does that even mean. All the people who learned Basque in the schools, like my parents, are they actually using the language all the time? Or even if you grew up speaking Basque. The reality is that Basque revitalisation has been very successful in creating bilinguals. Most of the population, if you are 40 or younger – especially here I’m talking about the Basque Country in the Spanish side because the French side does not have the same governmental support that we do. The answer is that some surveys show that Basque is not as spoken as it is acquired.

Gretchen: People learn it in the schools in the immersion programmes, but then, the kids are playing on the playground, maybe they’re not using it as much, or you’re going into a store, and you’re buying some milk or something, and you’re not necessarily using Basque for these day-to-day interactions.

Itxaso: Correct. I remember when I was doing my own fieldwork and collecting data for my dissertation, I remember that I would ask people from the city because this is where the revitalisation was most impactful because this is where Basque was least spoken before the standard was implemented. That was a – oh, my goodness. There is this saying that we have that Basque is being used with children and dogs.

Gretchen: Okay. [Laughter]

Itxaso: And then I started to notice – and, you know, my sister, she uses Basque with her friends, but at home, she would use a lot of Basque with the dog that she got a few years ago. I was so surprised because then our interactions back home become more Spanish-dominant with time. I was like, “Oh, my goodness. Is this true?” I started to notice. In fact, some adults that would talk Basque to their children but also to the dogs, but later on, a lot of the adult interactions.

Gretchen: But then when you grow up, you use Spanish. You have this ideology of “Okay, well, it’s important for children to have Basque, but then you grow up and you put it away,” which doesn’t sound that great.

Itxaso: Meaning that the normalisation of Basque, it hasn’t started.

Gretchen: It has succeeded at some level, yeah.

Itxaso: Absolutely. But the work is not completely done yet. I don’t think it’s ever gonna be – I mean, when I say it’s never gonna done meaning that you always have new processes or new challenges. One thing that I did notice – so the last sociolinguistics survey showed two very interesting trends in the opposite direction. The first one was that new speakers, and especially young new speakers from the city, they’re starting to embrace Basque in their daily life interactions. They’re adopting the language and using it and engineering it and making it more informal. In fact, we have different standard Basques that are starting to emerge in one city, in Bilbao. Another one might be emerging in Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is the capital. And the other one – San Sebastián. There’s still a standard but with some flavours. People are documenting that. The other one is that in certain Basque-speaking regions or traditional speaking regions like my hometown, for instance, that the use of Basque among teenagers has actually dropped a little bit – slightly. I have noticed that, too, when I go back. I was thinking, “Why would that be? Why is it that teenagers might see” –

Gretchen: You have to think that Basque is cool as a teenager.

Itxaso: Exactly. I also noticed different kinds of trends. When I grew up in the ’90s, during my rebel times, we loved punk. We loved rock.

Gretchen: Was there Basque music in rock and punk and this sort of stuff?

Itxaso: Oh, my goodness, Berri Txarrak, which translates to “bad news.”

Gretchen: We should link to some Basque music in the shownotes so people can listen to it if they want.

Itxaso: We loved it. Little by little, more soft rock became more popular. This is still popular. But I noticed in the past five years or so that reggaetón is –

Gretchen: The young people are listening to reggaetón. Is there reggaetón in Basque?

Itxaso: That’s what we need, I think.

Gretchen: Okay. If there’re any reggaetón artists who are listening to this, and you speak Basque, this is your project.

Itxaso: I’m like – maybe there is. I’m not a big fan of reggaetón.

Gretchen: But it’s what the young people want. It’s not about you anymore.

Itxaso: Exactly. I do wanna hear some Basque – I know there is feminist reggaetón, but I haven’t heard Basque reggaetón as much.

Gretchen: Maybe someone will tell us about it.

Itxaso: Maybe it’s time to adjust to –

Gretchen: And to keep adapting because it’s not just like, “Oh, we have this one vision of what Basque culture looked like in the past, and you have to be connected to that thing specifically,” it’s that it evolves because it’s a living culture with what else is going on in the world.

Itxaso: Absolutely. This is where the making of what it means to be a speaker of a minority language also comes into play. I know that in many Indigenous language revitalisation processes hip hop music has been extremely important in the process of language revitalisation. Maybe we do need some Basque reggaetón.

Gretchen: All right. Sounds good. I’m sold. Basque is famous among linguists as being a language that’s spoken in Europe but that’s not ancestrally related to any of the other Indo-European languages. This makes it famous, but also, I dunno, how does this make you feel?

Itxaso: Aye yae yae yae yae. It makes me feel good and bad at the same time because it’s like, “Oh, you know about Basque? That’s awesome!”, but then, “Oh, we’re being told that this is what you know about Basque,” which is this “exotic” language, and I’m like, “No, no.” That’s the part that I’m like, “No, we’re normal, too.”

Gretchen: “We’re also just people who’re speaking a language trying to go about our lives.” It also has things that are in common with other language revitalisation contexts – I’m thinking of Gaelic and Irish in Scotland and Ireland and lots of Indigenous language contexts in the Americas, in Australia. There’s so many different places where there’s a language that’s been oppressed, and it’s hard to say what is Indigenous in the Spain-France context, but definitely big governments have said, “Oh, you should all be speaking Spanish,” “You should all be speaking French,” and you have to struggle to make this something that is recognised and funded and important and prestigious and all of this stuff.

Itxaso: Absolutely. And for the first time in the history of the Basque language, now we are considered a “modern” language – another stereotype that oftentimes – “Oh, you are such an old language!” And I’m thinking, “But we speak it today.”

Gretchen: It’s not only ancient speakers. There’s still modern people speaking Basque.

Itxaso: Yes, and we have a future. We can do Twitter. We can do Facebook. We can do social media.

Gretchen: You can do Reggaetón.

Itxaso: Reggaetón in Basque. We can do a lot of things in Basque. People associate us oftentimes with these ancient times from the lands of the Pyrenees and caves. I’m like, “Great.”

Gretchen: But you’re not living in caves now.

Itxaso: Exactly. And when they tell us, “Oh, you are this unique language and so weird,” and I’m like, “We’re not weird. We’re unique like any other language, but we also have similar processes.”

Gretchen: Ultimately, every language is descended from – like, languages are always created in contact with other people, so there’s this ancestral descendant from whatever people were speaking 100,000 years ago that we have no records of. Everything is ultimately connected to all of the other humans, even if we aren’t capable of currently tracing those relationships with what we have access to right now.

Itxaso: Even within among linguists, right, it has been debated – Basque has been compared to possibly every language family out there. Even Basque people, “Oh, we found a connection! Maybe we are connected to the languages of the Caucasus.” All Basque linguists just roll their eyes thinking, “Here we go again.”

Gretchen: “Here’s another one.”

Itxaso: This idea of also looking at the past has been very important to understand our existence, but also it’s important to understand that we have a future, and that one is going to form the other in many ways. When they say, “Oh, where is Basque coming from?”, I’m like, “I dunno if we’re ever gonna find that out.”

Gretchen: I dunno if that’s the most interesting question that we could be asking because it’s hard to have fossils of a language. Writing systems only go back so far, and the languages being spoken and signed much, much earlier than that, we just don’t know because they don’t leave physical traces in the air.

Itxaso: What is fascinating is that, so recently, there has been some evidence – they found some remains that, in fact, Basque was written before the standard or before when we thought. Initially, we know that the first Basque writings were names in tombs, in graveyards. Now, we actually have some evidence – or at least they found some evidence – that Basque might have been used for written purposes also and that the Iberian writing system was used for that. They’re still trying to decode.

Gretchen: Maybe we could link to a little bit of what that looks like if there’s some of that online, too.

Itxaso: It looks like a hand. The text looks like a hand, and there’re five words there. They have only been able to decode one word.

Gretchen: But they think that word is Basque?

Itxaso: Yes.

Gretchen: Cool.

Itxaso: We will see. I mean, stay tuned.

Gretchen: Further adventures in Basque archaeology, yeah.

Itxaso: Even for Basque people that is actually really exciting. That’s where the part of like, “Oh, maybe we know where we come from!” We’re like, “We actually come from maybe there,” or I dunno, does that make my dad less Basque for that?

Gretchen: And does that make the new speakers less valid? But it’s still kind of cool to find out about your history.

Itxaso: Yes, and that this history’s so complex. It’s also entrenched in our real life today. It’s still important to us in some ways.

Gretchen: You also co-wrote a paper that I think has a really great title, and I’d love you to tell me about the contents of the paper as well. It has a very interesting topic. It’s called, “Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward.” What do you mean by a “unicorn language user”?

Itxaso: Well, first of all, I have to admit that this title was by the first author, Evelina. I mean, amazing. What we mean by “unicorn language users” is that when we study languages, or when we think of people who speak languages, there is that stereotypical image that comes to our mind, and it oftentimes has to be, “Oh, maybe a fluent speaker or a native speaker.” But what does that even mean in a minority language context where language transmission has been stopped and then back regained in a completely different way? Then you also have these ways of thinking from the past intermingled with the modern reality. Who is a Basque speaker?

Gretchen: Right. Is it true that basically every Basque speaker at this point is bilingual?

Itxaso: Absolutely. When you do research with Basque, and with many minority languages, you have to do it in a multilingual way of thinking because if there is a minority, it’s for a reason.

Gretchen: You can’t find this unicorn Basque speaker who’s a monolingual you can compare to your unicorn Spanish monolingual – well, there are Spanish monolingual speakers – but trying to have this direct comparison is not something that’s gonna be realistic. Your co-authors of this paper are speakers of Galician and Catalan –

Itxaso: Also, Greek.

Gretchen: And also, Greek!

Itxaso: Cypriot Greek.

Gretchen: Cypriot Greek – who have had similar experiences with being – we’re not saying “heritage speakers” – but being speakers that have connected to multiple bilingual experiences.

Itxaso: Minorities, right. It all unites us because all of us had some experience that was within Spain. Either we grew up or we live in the nation state of Spain. What was interesting is that, as we were discussing this paper, all of us had slightly different experiences as users of minority languages. In Catalan or in Galician or Basque and also Cypriot Greek. I said, “How can we understand all of these complex or slightly different ways of experiencing” – and our experiences have also changed throughout our lives. How is it that we use the language – what associations we have, what the language means to us, or the languages mean to us, what kind of multi-lingual practices we actually engage in. At the same time, I remember that in the paper we also reflected a little bit on how we also engaged in our research in these unicorn searches in the beginning and how to unlearn that.

Gretchen: Because when you’re first trying to write a paper about Basque, and you’re saying, “Okay, I’m gonna interview these Basque speakers, and I’ve got to find people who are the closest to monolingual that I can,” or who embody these sort of, “They learned this language before a certain age,” because your professors or the reviewers for the paper or the journals – what you think people want or these studies that you’ve been exposed to already have this very specific idea of what a speaker is or a language user – because we wanna include signers and stuff as well – what exactly someone is to know a language compared to the reality of what’s going on on the ground which is much more complex than that.

Itxaso: Absolutely. I feel like we have to self-reflect onto how is it that we’re representing and doing research – or the issue of representation becomes really, really, really important. What is it that we’re describing, what is it that we’re explaining, how are we doing it. Sometimes, there’re power dynamics within this knowledge in the field. When you wanna publish a paper in a top journal, there’s certain practices.

Gretchen: And they wanna have a monolingual control group. “Oh, you’ve got to compare everything to English speakers or to Spanish speakers because they’re big languages we’ve heard of.” Like, “Can’t I just write about Basque because there’re lots of papers that are only about English or only about Spanish? Why can’t there be papers only about Basque?”

Itxaso: Exactly. And you are thinking, “Wait a minute, I can’t find a Basque monolingual.” Maybe they exist, but they’re not readily, either, available, or it’s not common –

Gretchen: In a cave somewhere.

Itxaso: Right. We’re like, “Okay, well” – exactly. Or maybe they do live monolingually.

Gretchen: Yeah, but they still have some exposure to Spanish even though most of their life they’re in Basque. And going and finding this 1% of speakers who managed to live this monolingual life – how well is that really representing a typical Basque experience or a breadth of experiences with the language, which, most of which have some level of multilingualism?

Itxaso: Correct. We as researchers sometimes have to pick. When we make those decisions, we sometimes do not make those decisions consciously because a lot of those questions might come from the field. But then this paper also allowed us to reflect on also thinking, “Why is it that I have to put up with this? This is not working properly and describing things that matter to us” – and matter to us as a community, not only as researchers. Why is it that my parents’ varieties do not get represented that well? Why is it that other participants do not make it to the experiment because they get excluded on the basis of just, oh, literacy, and things like that, which becomes a sticking point as well. Who is a unicorn? Well, clearly there are no unicorns. There are many unicorns.

Gretchen: Sometimes, I think that there’s an idea that being, say, a bilingual speaker is like being two monolingual speakers in a trench coat. The thing that you’re looking for, this unicorn-balanced bilingual of someone who uses their languages in all contexts and is completely “fluent” – whatever we mean by that – in all contexts when, in reality, many people who live bilingual or multilingual lives have some language they use with their family or some language they use at the workplace or in public or that they’re reading more or that they’re consuming media in more. They have different contexts in which they use different languages.

Itxaso: Compartmentalisation is very important but not full compartmentalisation either. There’s gonna be a lot of different overlaps – and so many different experiences. Another thing is that I think doing research with new speakers is important is because those experiences may change from year to year.

Gretchen: Your parents’ cohort of new speakers compared to new speakers who are teenagers now – they’re gonna have very different experiences.

Itxaso: Or maybe a new speaker when they are teenagers versus when they’re in the labour market versus when –

Gretchen: They’re having kids or they’re grandparents or something are gonna have very different experiences even throughout the course of their lives.

Itxaso: Even myself, me as a Basque speaker, my way of speaking has also changed or the way I adapt. One of the challenges in the Basque Country has been “What are the processes – or how is it that they decide, ‘I’m gonna speak the language’?” It’s a continuation. This adoption of the language, you don’t fully, suddenly adopt it.

Gretchen: You don’t adopt it and then that’s all, you’re only speaking Basque from now on. It’s a decision that you’re making every day, “Am I gonna speak Basque in this context? Am I gonna keep using it?”

Itxaso: You negotiate that because, obviously, when you speak a minority language, you’re gonna be reminded that certain challenges might come on the way. Some new speakers might like to be corrected, but some might not.

Gretchen: So, how do you negotiate “Are you gonna correct this person?” “Are you not gonna correct this person?” “Can you ask for correction?” What do you want out of that situation?

Itxaso: Some new speakers, they might want to also sound like regional dialects or older dialects, but some others might not. They create other ways to authenticate themselves and to invest in the language and to invest in the practices that come with it. Each person is unique at the individual level, but then at the collective level, things happen, too. Understanding those is very, very, very, very important.

Gretchen: The balance between the language in an individual and also a language in the community or in a collective group of people who know a language – both of those things existing. We’ve talked a lot about new speakers of Basque. Are there also heritage speakers in the Basque context?

Itxaso: There are. In fact, they do exist. The question is, “Who would these people be?” These people could actually be people that grew up speaking Basque at home but maybe, during the dictatorship, they didn’t have access to the schooling in Basque, so they might not have literacy skills in Basque – so older generations.

Gretchen: They might have things that are in common with heritage speakers. The way that I’ve heard “heritage speakers” get talked about in the Canadian or North American context is often through immigrants. Your parents immigrate from somewhere, and then the kids grow up speaking the parents’ language but also the broader community language and that parents’ language as a heritage language. That still happens in Basque; it’s just that wasn’t your experience in Basque, so you wanna have a distinction between heritage and new speakers.

Itxaso: It’s also true that sometimes if we focus too much on the new speakers, we actually also forget describing the experiences of these individuals that we might consider from the literature as heritage speakers because they don’t use this term for themselves.

Gretchen: The heritage speakers don’t use it for themselves?

Itxaso: Yeah. Or the Basque people that say, “I am just a Basque speaker” or a “traditional Basque speaker” but in a different way. They usually say, “But I don’t do the standard.”

Gretchen: “I’m not very good.”

Itxaso: Sometimes, they think that their Basque is not good enough because they don’t have that literacy.

Gretchen: Or they might be able to understand more than they can talk, sometimes happens to people.

Itxaso: Yeah, sometimes it can happen. Or they talk very fluently, but then they say, “I don’t understand the news,” because they’re in the Standard.

Gretchen: Finally, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, whether Basque-specific or not, what would that be?

Itxaso: I think that – oof, that’s a loaded question, I love it. For me, I would say linguistics is rebellion. Linguistics is therapy. Linguistics is healing. A linguist is the future. [Laughs] And minority languages have a lot to show about that. In this case, it’s Basque – or for me it’s Basque because I’m intimately related to Basque – but those are the key aspects that I would say that you can do therapy through linguistics.

Gretchen: Linguistics is therapy. Linguistics is rebellion. I love it. That’s so great.

[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 Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get bouba and kiki scarves, posters with our aesthetic redesign of the International Phonetic Alphabet on them, t-shirts that say, “Etymology isn’t Destiny,” and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. Our guest, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, can be found at BasqueUIUC.wordpress.com. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include a behind-the-scenes interview with Lingthusiasm team member, Martha Tsutsui-Billins, a recap about linguistics institutes, a.k.a., linguist summer camps, and a linguistics advice episode. Also, if you like Lingthusiasm but wish it would help put you to sleep better, we also have a very special Lingthusiasmr bonus episode [ASMR voice] where we read some linguistics stimulus sentences to you in a calm, soothing voice. [Regular voice] 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. 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.

Itxaso: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

Lingthusiasm Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:04:02 -0500

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who’s an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who’d learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn’t alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for “unicorn language users”, aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.)

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share.

If you’d like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023.

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Basque music recommendations from Itxaso:

Berri Txarrak 'Libre’ on YouTube. This band, mentioned by Itxaso in the episode, was huge in the 90s and 2000s. This song was a big hit, and it is very philosophical about topics also related to Basque politics. This one discusses 'Freedom’.
Su Ta Gar 'Mari’ on YouTube. This band was huge during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and key to the revitalization processes - at least for the younger generation that wanted to see themselves as young 'rebels’.
Gatibu 'Aske Maitte’ on YouTube. This band is from Gernika, they became active in 2000s and are one of the leading bands in Basque Country today. Their topics continued with the general theme of freedom, but also tackle lots of issues of feminism in a softer rock way.
Zetak 'Hitzeman’ on YouTube. The band has become a biiiig hit in the Basque Country in the past few years. Super romantic and fun.

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.

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

2023 Listener Survey: Including new experiment questions!

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 16:05:09 -0500

We’re running our second official listener/reader survey!

This is your chance to tell us what you’re into on Lingthusiasm, what we could do more of, suggest topics and guests for future episodes, and also answer some fun linguistics experiment questions. This year’s experiment questions are new, so feel free to take it again if you did it last year and you’re curious!

The survey is online, and will take 5-30 minutes (depending on how much you want to tell us in the open text boxes).

The survey runs across our anniversary month, and closes December 15th 2023.

bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23

Results from our 2022 survey!

Here is a blog post of some of the most interesting results, or you can see a selection of audience reflections in our open access academic paper ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’.

If you’d like to hear us talk through the survey results, you can listen to our bonus episode ‘2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji’. Patrons already have access to this episode, so if you’d like to listen to it, plus our back catalogue of 80+ bonus episodes, you can join us on Patreon here. (And a massive thank you to everyone who’s already a patron, you really do help us keep running both the show itself as well as fun things like the survey.)

Here are two of the results from last year’s survey:

This survey is being conducted by Lingthusiasm in conjunction with La Trobe University (Ethics approval HEC22181). Thanks to La Trobe for the support to collect data that we can share with Lingthusiasm listeners and academic audiences. More information can be found in the Participant Informed Consent Form before the survey starts.

Lingthusiasm seventh anniversary: help share the show!

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 17:23:12 -0500

Lingthusiasm turns seven in 2023!

In celebration of our seventh year making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, we’re asking you to help introduce the show to people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed! Lingthusiasm is a great fit for anyone in your life who is curious about language or who likes hearing ad-free conversational deep-dives into hidden patterns in the world around us from people who are extremely invested in articulating why it’s so cool.

Your recommendations really do work (we see it in the stats each year!), whether it’s sharing this very post, tagging us on social media, sending an episode you enjoy directly to a friend who’d like it, or rating us on podcast players. Or if you’ve been following us on social media for a while but have gotten behind or haven’t gotten around to actually listening at all, this is a great cue to dive into an episode or two!

We also love being recommended as guests on your (other) favourite podcasts! We love chatting about links between linguistics and your other favourite topics (we’ve done linguistics and science fiction/roleplaying games, linguistics and conlanging, linguistics in romance novels, linguistics and mythology, and more!).

Trying to figure out what to say about Lingthusiasm? Here are some ideas:

What’s Lingthusiasm like?

Ever find yourself distracted from what someone is saying by wondering about how they say it? Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us.

From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn’t realize you were already making.

“Lauren and Gretchen know their stuff, have an easy rapport, and are skilled at pitching linguistic concepts to a general audience.” —Sentence First

“Joyously nerdy.” —BuzzFeed

“I checked out Lingthusiasm by playing a random episode and it was funny and fascinating and educational AND it had a shout out to Dinosaur Comics!” —Ryan North

Which episode should I start with?

You can start listening to Lingthusiasm anywhere! Here are some episodes that people often enjoy:

How to rebalance a lopsided conversation (Episode 39)
When nothing means something (Episode 23)
Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization (Episode 26)

Or if you like, you can start with an interview episode:

What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd (Episode 72)
Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou (Episode 36)
The grammar of singular they with Kirby Conrod (Episode 43)

All episodes have human-made, edited transcripts.

Journey back through time to previous anniversary posts:

Bonus 81: Linguistic Advice - Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 21:03:34 -0400

Bonus 81: Linguistic Advice - Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more | Lingthusiasm

Are there linguistics things in your life that you would like advice about? In honour of our 7th anniversary making Lingthusiasm, this is an episode answering your advice questions, from the serious to the silly. We’re not professional advice columnists but we are professional linguists, and many people have asked us variants of similar questions over the years.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about your linguistics questions! We give advice about how to change people’s perspectives on “correct” language, intergenerational slang, amateur research and finding linguistics community and jobs outside academia, learning signed languages from Deaf instructors, singing in different accents, our desire for more research on how podcasts spread linguistic structures, and a lightning round of many more questions!

Listen to this episode of linguistic advice, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 20:04:01 -0400

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Ergativity delights us’. 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 ergativity. But first, next month, November, is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month. It’s been seven years!

Lauren: For our anniversary month, we ask you to share your favourite episode or just share some lingthusiasm in general. Most people still find podcasts through word-of-mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.

Gretchen: Or in their eyes since all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.

Lauren: The other day, I shared our colour episode with a stylist because we were talking about the strange history of the colour orange. It’s so fun to find that perfect episode to recommend to someone, and we’ve touched on so many different topics over the last seven years.

Gretchen: I’m always sending people to our episode on turn-taking and conversational styles because there’s this comment that keeps coming up on social media about having to hold up the entire conversation by yourselves or not being able to get a word in edgewise. That’s a linguistics thing that’s been described. You can listen to an episode about it.

Lauren: We’ve asked you to do this every year on our anniversary, and we always see it in the stats. Your recommendations really do help more people find the show.

Gretchen: If you share us on social media, you can tag @lingthusiasm on basically all of the social media sites, so we can see it and reply, or like it, or reshare as appropriate. If you share it in private, we won’t necessarily know, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction – or you can tell us about it on social media if you still wanna be thanked.

Lauren: In what is becoming another anniversary tradition, we are doing our second listener survey this year. This is our chance to learn all about your linguistic interests, and we have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to contribute to.

Gretchen: If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again. You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode, and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year.

Lauren: This year, we also wrote an academic article about the process of making Lingthusiasm, which featured some of your answers from the previous survey. You are officially contributing to academic research. Because of this, we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey.

Gretchen: To do the survey, or read more details, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23. That’s all lowercase and with the numbers in their numeric values – not written out as words.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media. Our most recent bonus episode was a recap of Gretchen’s time at the 2023 Linguistics Institute, which is a month-long linguistics summer course. Was I jealous? Yes. Was I delighted to hear about it? Yes. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Our patrons really do let us keep making this podcast, so we really appreciate any level of support.

[Music]

Lauren: You know, Gretchen, in some ways, ergativity is the basis of our LingComm friendship.

Gretchen: You know, you’re right about that that. I think it started in 2014, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I had been getting a higher than usual number of questions about linguistics topics on my blog, AllThingsLinguistic, and I decided, “Look, I don’t have time to answer all of these, but I know that there are other linguists on Tumblr who do sometimes have areas of expertise that I don’t or maybe just have more time,” and so I put this post out saying, “I want to try to be a bit of a connecting point for people who have questions about linguistics topics that aren’t currently very well explained online and then to encourage people who had answers to those to either write a blog post or especially contribute to Wikipedia for those particular topics so that there’d be better information about various linguistics topics on the internet.”

Lauren: I was in grad school at the time, so while my supervisors probably thought I didn’t have the time, I certainly had the enthusiasm.

Gretchen: And someone had specifically asked a question about ergativity and said, “Look, I’ve read the Wikipedia articles about this, but I still feel confused. Can anybody help me understand this phenomenon?”

Lauren: Look, we can definitely say that this was to answer the question that someone had asked, but also, I found it really helpful to write this incredibly long-form, back-to-first-principles blog post about what ergativity is to really help keep it in my mind while I was working on some of my coursework for grad school. It benefitted everyone, and it also allowed me to see where there were some parts of the Wikipedia page that I could contribute to. Those edits are still up there as well.

Gretchen: Amazing. Subsequently, I did some more Wikipedia workshops, and I reached out to you to get involved with those because I saw that you had edited Wikipedia before, and I was like, “Ooo, this person seems responsible and reliable and maybe I can nerd snipe her into doing more things.”

Lauren: “She blogs. She wikipedias.”

Gretchen: Eventually, that led to the podcast.

Lauren: It’s all because I’m a bit of an ergative devotee.

Gretchen: An “ergativity devotee.”

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: I recognise that we are saying the word “ergativity” a lot, and we’re not explaining what it is yet, and I promise we will get to that. I also want to point out that ergativity has a certain level of linguistic cultural cachet.

Lauren: This is true.

Gretchen: It’s a term that’s only used in linguistics. It’s one of those things that you can throw into conversation, and you’ll sound like you know some linguistics if you say it in an appropriate context. We are here to give you the ability to casually toss “ergativity” into conversation. My favourite example of that currently – although, who knows, there could be more examples in the future, I hope there are – is an xkcd comic called “The Tower of Babel.” I think we should narrate it.

Lauren: Okay, a dramatic reading of an xkcd comic. Let’s do this.

Gretchen: First of all, there’s more than two characters in this comic, so we’re just gonna – it’ll be fine.

Lauren: We’ll make it work. One of those characters, though, I should point out, is a curly-haired linguist.

Gretchen: Hmm.

Lauren: Who bears a striking resemblance to you.

Gretchen: I will be playing that character.

Lauren: Yes, Gretchen will be playing Gretchen.

Gretchen: Lauren will be playing all of the other characters.

Lauren: Correct. Okay. We ready?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: “The Tower of Babel is complete!”

Gretchen: “Let’s go meet God!”

Lauren: “Hi, God.” (god voice) “Wow, nice tower! You did a great job! I’m so proud!”

Gretchen: “Thanks!”

Lauren: (god voice) “I’m going to give you a reward. What do you like about the world?”

Gretchen: “Hmm, words are really cool.”

Lauren: “No, wait –” (god voice) “Great! I’m going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment…”

Gretchen: “YESSSSSSS!”

Lauren: “We should not have brought a linguist.”

Gretchen: Technically, the curly-haired linguist character is not named, but I think of her as a kindred spirit. Morphosyntactic alignment is the broader concept that ergativity is an example of. This is gonna be an episode where you can listen to half an hour of explanations so you can understand two words in a comic strip. Are we ready?

Lauren: We are so ready. If you don’t retain every bit of detail about this, don’t worry. I was multiple years into a PhD before ergativity really clicked for me.

Gretchen: The thing to really retain is that sentences have this organising principle that’s different in different languages. If the exact details are something that takes a while to sink in, that’s totally okay.

Lauren: We are going to explore some cool languages doing cool stuff this episode.

Gretchen: All right. Let’s start with English, just to give ourselves a bit of grounding. When you have a sentence – let’s take a very basic sentence, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is a thing that has happened – and, obviously, we need to distinguish that from “Lauren visits Gretchen.”

Lauren: Which, in English, we do by the order that the words come in.

Gretchen: Right. This lets us know who’s going to Australia, who’s going to Canada, otherwise you could end up buying some very confusing airline tickets. We could also do a version of this sentence that doesn’t use names. You could say, “I visit them,” “They visit me.” Here we have both the word order and the form of the words themselves – “I” versus “me,” and “they” versus “them” – that’s telling us who’s doing what to who.

Lauren: Very convenient. Thank you, English pronouns, for helping here. If I visit them, I can say, “I arrive.” We have “I” at the start of each of those sentences. In English, we wouldn’t say, “Me arrive” or “Them arrive.”

Gretchen: But in principle, we could. It would be confusing if we started going around saying, “Me visit they” because then you wouldn’t know which of the clues to follow, but it actually is not confusing to say, “Me arrive,” or “Them arrive,” instead of “I arrive,” and “They arrive,” because there’s only one person or entity doing a thing in each of those sentences. When we have two different people or groups acting on each other, when we have two different roles in the sentence, we need to distinguish between them grammatically either with word order or by changing the shape of the word. When we only have one person or group – one role doing an action – then that solo entity can kind of cluster with either of the forms in the sentence where we have two of them.

Lauren: We should use some kind of visual metaphor here to help show the relationship between these three different roles that you can have in a sentence.

Gretchen: I first learned this relationship between roles by having somebody draw a little triangle on a piece of paper with these three different possible roles and doing a circle around which ones are clustered together in which language.

Lauren: I did that on my blog post. I love using some very nifty colour-coding when I teach this with slides, but we don’t have access to that.

Gretchen: This is an audio podcast. Instead, we thought we would send everybody something in the mail so you can have a visual.

Lauren: Oh, we could launch a massive advertising campaign. Imagine the day where we have morphosyntactic billboards in Times Square!

Gretchen: All of the bus shelters – we could just pay for advertising, so you can see this diagram if you’re listing to this podcast while you’re walking the dog.

Lauren: I think this may be getting out of hand here.

Gretchen: You know, because we have such a massive budget, Lauren.

Lauren: I’m gonna have to break the sad news to you that we’re gonna have to use something that is a little bit closer to home and a little bit more on budget.

Gretchen: Okay, let’s try – if you look at your hand.

Lauren: Or borrow someone else’s.

Gretchen: Borrow someone else’s consensually if you like. We can put these two people with their two roles in the one sentence on two different fingers. If we have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” we can put the doer, the visitor – that’s me – on the index finger, and the visitee – that’s you, Lauren – on the pinky finger.

Lauren: Great. I’ve got a little metal hand gesture here.

Gretchen: You’re sort of doing the horns thing. Then for the one person in the sentence all by itself, like, “I arrive,” the only thing acting, that’s gonna be on the thumb sticking out on its own.

Lauren: I like that because with “I arrive,” there’s only one role happening there. The thumb sticks out on its own.

Gretchen: Right. The thumb is its own solo player. We’re just ignoring the middle and the ring fingers. That’s a more complicated sentence for a future episode.

Lauren: There’re certainly other things you can put in a sentence, and we’re not gonna look at those things-slash-fingers right now.

Gretchen: But the nifty thing about this metaphor – so again, we’ve got the index finger, which is the visitor, the pinky finger, which is the visitee, and the arriving person over here on the thumb.

Lauren: “Arrivee.”

Gretchen: “Arrivee.” The thumb can touch the index finger, like when you’re making an “okay” sign. That represents when you group together “I arrive” and “I visit,” the way English does. Those are patterning together. You have the pinky finger that’s all by itself doing its own thing.

Lauren: That’s me.

Gretchen: You can also have the thumb touch flat against the pinky finger. The represents when the arrivee and the visitee are doing the same thing. That would be “visit me” and “me arrive” in a language that does something like that. Then the index finger is all by itself, and it’s doing its own thing. So, it’s doing, for example, “I.”

Lauren: You know what? It’s a lot more awkward for me to touch my index finger and my pinky finger together.

Gretchen: Right. Those don’t really touch together very well. You can brush the sides a bit, but they don’t touch flat as easily as the thumb does. That represents how you really don’t want to mark the two roles in the same sentence with the exact same marking because then you don’t know who’s visiting who.

Lauren: Defeats the purpose of distinguishing who’s doing what in a sentence.

Gretchen: Right. This is our visual metaphor using something that hopefully everybody has access to. Unfortunately, the Lingthusiasm budget does not stretch to billboards.

Lauren: No, but it does stretch to hoping that people have hands. The other thing that’s nifty about your metaphor, Gretchen, is that “okay” is a meaningful gesture in English in a way that touching the thumb and pinky together is not. You know the way that they line up in English is for the thumb and the index finger to go together – “I arrive” and “I visit Gretchen.”

Gretchen: Ah, because that’s a gesture that we have. I can’t guarantee that all of the cultures that do have the “okay” handshape do have this exact morphosyntactic alignment.

Lauren: It only works if you’re trying to remember things for an exam in English.

Gretchen: The other thing that’s the case, at least for me, is I find it’s a bit easier and more comfortable to tap my thumb to my index finger than to tap my thumb to my pinky. I feel like this represents, as a mnemonic, how this grouping of the visitor and the arrivee together is a bit more common cross-linguistically. The other one is still in a bunch of languages, and we’re gonna talk about that, but it’s a bit more common to have the index and the thumb grouped together.

Lauren: The other thing I really like about this is that putting the pinky and the thumb together is now, like, a cool, new linguist greeting.

Gretchen: Yeah. “Okay” already has a meaning, but the pinky-thumb together, this could be a cool, new linguistic handshape gesture. You could do a little tappity-tap of your thumb against your index and your pinky finger in succession. You could use this as a cool hand gesture to flag down linguists in public.

Lauren: Are you a fan of morphosyntactic alignment?

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s like the “Live long and prosper” gesture for linguistics.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Or if you’re at a bar, and you’re trying to find a discrete way of finding out if someone’s a linguist, and you don’t want to just ask them – I dunno why you wouldn’t just ask them – but you could do this little gesture.

Lauren: No, no, no, if you’re in a bar, and you wanna find all the linguists in a noisy environment is what you’re trying to say there.

Gretchen: Right, exactly, yeah. I hope this catches on. I did just make this up. I can’t guarantee other linguists will recognise it – but maybe! It seems pretty useful.

Lauren: In English, we tend to keep the thumb and the index finger together – “I visit Gretchen,” “I arrive.” In other languages, you can have it as the thumb and the pinky together, and it’s “Gretchen visits me” or “me arrive.” Even though that’s not the way it works in English, that is the way it works in other languages. That is known as “ergative.”

Gretchen: This whole thing is morphosyntactic alignment, and a part of this is ergativity. Specifically, we’re used to doing this default “okay” sign – the index and thumb together. This has a name. It’s called “nominative-accusative alignment” because those are the two different groups. Then the pinky and thumb together is called “ergative-absolutive alignment,” but it often just gets shortened to “ergativity” because that’s the most salient piece of this entire edifice. People tend to name the most exciting bit.

Lauren: Of course. You’ve got to stick with the exciting bits, Gretchen.

Gretchen: When you have the thumb and pinky touching, the person who’s visiting is left doing all of the work of packing their bags and getting on the flight, and the other people are just like, “I’m just here. I’m getting visited. I arrive. Who knows how that happens?” But the visitor has to do all of this stuff. So, the entity that’s doing all the work is called the “ergative.”

Lauren: The etymology of “ergative” – that “erg-” there – is from a Greek root that comes from the form “ergon,” which is “work.”

Gretchen: An “ergonomic” chair is, I guess, a chair that sort of works well for you.

Lauren: Huh, yeah, makes sense.

Gretchen: Or the “erg-” – which is pronounced slightly differently in “SYN-ergy,” “synergy,” /sɪnəɹgi/.

Lauren: /sɪnəɹgi/. I guess it is /sɪnəɹgi/.

Gretchen: Working together.

Lauren: Working together. That’s nice. There’s some real synergy to that etymology.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I think ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root, *werg, meaning “to do,” which is the origin of “erg-” as in “ergative” and “synergy” and also “energy” – “energy” does the work – is also the origin of the English word “work.”

Lauren: Cool. That was a fun little etymological rabbit hole to go down.

Gretchen: The ergative – or to use an Anglish root – the “work-ative.”

Lauren: The “work-ative.” That would be so good.

Gretchen: Why don’t we just call it the “work-ative” now?

Lauren: We already have enough going on here terminologically to not to re-Anglicise it. But it is one of those pieces of terminology that was created in the 20th Century as part of this formalisation of linguistic terminology. That’s why it has this Greek root, and also why it doesn’t show up in other branches of sciences because we didn’t borrow it from physics or biology. It was created within linguistics.

Gretchen: Right. Whereas compared to something like “morphology,” which refers to the shape of words but can also be used in metals and geography – the shapes of other things – “ergative” is specifically used for the grammatical concept and only the grammatical concept, so you really look like you know what you’re talking about if you can use this word.

Lauren: Let’s stop making up fake English ergatives and start looking at ergativity in some languages that actually have it as part of the grammar. I think we’ll just start with one of the poster children languages for ergativity, which is Basque.

Gretchen: Basque is a language that’s spoken in Europe but is not ancestrally related to any of the Indo-European languages. It’s not related to Spanish or Catalan or French or any of the languages that are spoken in that region of Spain and France. It’s also not related to Greek, which has this common ancestor with English, this “work” ergative “erg-” connection. It gets a lot of people very excited because it’s a language that’s convenient for people based in Europe to work on but is not related to the other languages in its neighbourhood, although, of course, it’s done a certain amount of borrowing because of contact later.

Lauren: First cool Basque fact – it’s an isolate. Second cool Basque fact – it has ergative when most other European languages don’t show anything like this.

Gretchen: Third cool Basque fact is, like you might expect for a language that is very different from all of the languages in its neighbourhood, it’s been undergoing language revitalisation movements since the 1970s and 1980s. We’re gonna talk a lot more about that in a very soon upcoming episode, so stay tuned for way more about Basque. But as the poster child for ergativity, let’s talk about what it specifically looks like.

Lauren: For our verb “arrived,” it looks very much like English. If we’re talking about Martin, “Martin etorri da” – “Martin has arrived.” But if we have a verb that has two roles in it – in this example, we have “Martin has seen Diego” – we have, “Martin-ek Diego ikusi du.” Here, we have this “-ek” on “Martin.”

Gretchen: Right. Because you have the “-ek,” which is the ergative marker, on the one solitary, “There’s ‘Martin’ being his index finger all alone,” compared to “Martin” with no marking on the end, and “Diego” with no marking on the end, which are the other form that’s called the “absolutive” – the one that isn’t doing as much of the work – and that’s the one that’s not ergative. Those are the two forms that are linked together – your pinky and your thumb touching each other.

Lauren: We see exactly the same pattern in the language Arrente, which is from Central Australia in the Northern Territory where if a child is sitting, the child is marked as “ampe,” but if a child is chasing a dog, it’s “ampe-le.” Again, there’s a suffix on the role that is doing something to something else. That index finger is marked different from the pinky finger and the thumb.

Gretchen: Again, we see something that’s very common with ergativity – and this makes sense when you think of an efficiency perspective. When you have just one role or one person – “the child,” “the dog,” “Martin” – doing something all by itself, you don’t need to add anything to the end of it to indicate who’s doing what to who. You can just say it, and it’s fine. It’s the case when you have two different entities, you need to mark at least one of them so that you can tell who’s doing what. You pick one to mark. For languages that are ergative, you pick the one that’s doing the action, and you mark that one. The other one is unmarked. Then implicitly for languages that are the other category, that aren’t ergative, you pick the one that’s being acted upon to add the marking to, although in English that’s less clear because we’re using word order and we’re using these relics of markings on the pronouns, so that’s not as clear in this case. But in the poster child ergative languages, it’s very clear that you have this one entity that’s got a suffix on it or, potentially, a prefix or something like that, and then the other one just doesn’t have any marking on it at all.

Lauren: You mentioned earlier that ergativity is not as common as the English style of marking. I thought this was a really good reason to visit our new friend Grambank and see in a big database of languages just how common each of these patterns were.

Gretchen: Before we visit Grambank, let’s just test our cross-linguistic intuitions. Do you think of ergativity as pretty common, not that common – what’s your sense of it just based on the languages you’re familiar with?

Lauren: I think of it as pretty common, but I know I have a bit of an area bias because I work in Nepal where there’re a lot of languages that have ergative marking, then being in Australia, a lot of my colleagues work on Australian languages and languages of Papua New Guinea, and it’s relatively common in those language groups as well. So, I think it’s common, but I think that’s my bias showing.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because my gut feeling about ergativity is it’s not super common. I know it’s in the Mayan languages. We just talked with Pedro Mateo Pedro. The Mayan languages that he works on all have ergativity. And in Basque – which I talked with someone else who we’re gonna have an interview about shortly.

Lauren: Based on Lingthusiasm episodes this year, incredibly strong preference for ergativity.

Gretchen: That might be the reason we decided we needed an ergativity episode. I’m just gonna say. But other than that, I don’t feel like I have a lot of languages I could name off the top of my head that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that one’s super ergative.”

Lauren: Well, let’s have a look at the numbers. There are around 1900 languages in this part of the Grambank database. 150 of those they couldn’t tell from the resources they had. Of the ones that are left, ergative is found in 390, and it’s not found in around 13-, 1400.

Gretchen: So, that’s about 400 with ergativity and 1400 without ergativity. That’s, I would say, quite a lot – not super common, but quite a lot, which is about what we thought between us.

Lauren: The great thing about Grambank is that there is a little interactive map you can zoom in on. When you zoom in, you can see that three real hotbeds of ergativity are the Nepal part of Southeast Asia, Australia, and then various little clusters in Papua New Guinea. I was pretty spot on about my areal bias.

Gretchen: There’s some in Central America, but not a ton, so there’s your Mayan languages.

Lauren: You can certainly see where Basque is in a map of Europe because it is an ergative language in a sea of not ergative languages.

Gretchen: There it is – right on the border of France and Spain. Ergativity – as if we weren’t having enough fun –

Lauren: More fun. More let’s have more fun.

Gretchen: Ergativity is also really neat because we’ve done basic ergativity, but it also shows up in different ways across different languages.

Lauren: It shows up in so many cool and different ways. It’s really one of those things like, if you’ve met one ergative language, you’ve met one ergative language.

Gretchen: The thing with ergativity is, again, it’s that clustering of the pinky finger and the thumb roles in the sentence, but some languages have that clustering in some contexts, and the more cross-linguistically common clustering of the index finger and thumb together in other contexts.

Lauren: These are languages that flip between those two different hand gestures in different contexts.

Gretchen: One of the reasons why the exciting version of the phenomenon that gets talked about is ergativity rather than nominativity, which is the English-y pattern, is that there’re lots of languages like English where you basically just have only these two entities patterning together. But languages that are ergative are often partially ergative, or what they call “split ergative,” so, again, that’s the exciting one. They often have a little bit of the other system in there as well.

Lauren: They can split in different ways, which is why it’s fun to look at ergativity in each individual language because they’re often doing slightly different things.

Gretchen: Do you have some examples of split ergative systems for us?

Lauren: I have so many examples of split ergative systems. I’m very excited to share with you. One that is actually common enough that the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has different maps is that some languages will do ergativity in pronouns but not in common nouns – or the other way around. WALS actually has different maps for whether a language is ergative in nouns or ergative in pronouns.

Gretchen: I guess that sort of makes sense to me because English has – you know, pronouns change their shape depending on whether they’re the subject or the object or something, but our nouns really do not change their shape. You could imagine that but for ergatives.

Lauren: Yeah. Pronouns have their own history and way of being made, and they tend to keep features for a long time, whereas you can add new suffixes to things all the time and change it up. Common nouns and pronouns can go off on their own journeys, with one being ergative and the other one being not. That’s one way that the split can happen.

Gretchen: There’s also splits that are based on meaning, which I really find fascinating.

Lauren: I have one here in a language called “Dani” from Papua New Guinea, which is where you are more likely to get something marked as ergative if it’s an action that is uncommon.

Gretchen: So, if it’s describing something that’s unexpected, then it’s ergative. What would be an example of that?

Lauren: The example that I have from the class that I teach on syntax is that it would be uncommon if you had a sentence like, “The python ate the man,” but would be more common if you had a sentence like, “The man ate the python.” You wouldn’t mark that second one as ergative.

Gretchen: Okay. In this culture, it is common for humans to eat pythons but, mercifully, uncommon for pythons to eat humans.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I feel like I’ve learned some interesting things about Dani culture as well.

Lauren: I really like this one because what counts as uncommon surely varies quite a lot from culture to culture to linguistic context.

Gretchen: I feel like I’m remembering this saying about headlines where if a dog bites a man, that’s not a newspaper headline, but if a man bites a dog, that is a newspaper headline.

Lauren: And you should mark it ergative.

Gretchen: That’s interesting because, in this case, it’s the human biting the animal that’s less common. It’s not just a human/non-human animacy thing, it’s really a “In this culture, humans don’t bite dogs, but they do eat pythons.”

Lauren: Again, it’s the interesting case that gets this ergative marking added to it.

Gretchen: Because the ergative is like the “work-ative,” so it’s when you wanna call attention to something that’s doing a particular job.

Lauren: Another time you see a split across languages is depending on the tense of the verb. You’re more likely to get something that’s split in a way where the ergative is in the past and you have a non-ergative in present or future or however else the language segments up time. Nepali is a language that has ergative in the past.

Gretchen: What does that look like?

Lauren: Because it’s Nepali, I use it as a chance to use “momo” in my examples, which are a delicious dumpling.

Gretchen: Very delicious.

Lauren: If I say “Tomorrow, my sister will eat momos” –

Gretchen: Okay, that’s future.

Lauren: – I would say, “Bhōli didi mōmō khāncha.” “Didi” is “sister” – nothing marked there. But if I were to say, “Yesterday, my sister ate momos,” I would say, “Hijo didi-le momo khāyo.”

Gretchen: Ah, so instead of “didi,” which is just “sister” without a marking, you have “didi-le,” which is “sister” plus ergative. In both cases, “momo” is not marked. I assume maybe it’s that they’re in a certain word order that’s telling you that your sister ate momos, and also that momos are this delicious dumpling that are not animate and can’t go around eating your sister – one hopes.

Lauren: Yes, I guess if my sister was tragically eaten yesterday by a momo, I would still mark it as ergative, but only because it’s in the past and nothing to do with how unusual that situation is.

Gretchen: Okay. You would need to mark “momo” with an ergative because that sure is doing something but not actually because of the surprise factor.

Lauren: No. Because in the past with Nepali – and Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language, so it is part of this larger Indo-European family but on a completely different end of the geographic spectrum to English because it’s in Nepal.

Gretchen: Do we know why Nepali has an ergative even though most of the other Indo-European languages don’t?

Lauren: I don’t know what the exact mechanism is, but there are a whole bunch of features of Nepali that are very similar to languages from other families in the area, including the Tibeto-Burman languages that I work with. It’s possibly some kind of contact influence happening there.

Gretchen: That makes sense. So, we have ergative for nouns and pronouns. We have ergative for unusual events. We have ergative for past. Any more kinds of split ergative systems?

Lauren: Everything we’ve talked about so far is very much “If it’s this form, do this; if it’s this form, do that.” If it’s a pronoun, do this; or if it’s a past tense, do this. There’re ergative systems where it’s not a hard and fast rule of the grammar. It all depends on the context. These are called “optional systems.”

Gretchen: Ooo, this is so exciting.

Lauren: The languages that I work with have these optional systems. You can’t make a grammatical rule that’s like, “In the past, you must use ergative,” or “You must use ergative with pronouns.” Instead, what happens is if you look across a corpus, sometimes you’ll get ergative, sometimes you won’t, and it really depends on a range of different factors.

Gretchen: Do they have to do with trying to emphasise who’s doing the work?

Lauren: Yeah. They touch on some of the things we’ve talked about so far. You are more likely to get an ergative in the past because something has very clearly been done – the work, the active role, has been done. You’re much more likely to get it with something that was intentional or that is unusual. You also get things like you’re more likely to have ergative if it’s not a habitual action – if it’s a slightly unusual or uncommon action that someone’s performing – of if they’re more animate. You’re more likely to get ergative with a human than an animal and more likely with an animal than something like a tree.

Gretchen: Makes sense.

Lauren: But this is not 100% of the time. You need to collect a really large corpus of people talking about all kinds of different contexts to see where you’re more likely to get an ergative or not.

Gretchen: This also sounds like it has potential to be somewhat cultural because what people think of as a habitual action or what people usually do versus less commonly do seems like it would have some relationships with culture.

Lauren: This is also why it’s really important to not just give people a bunch of sentences to read and translate because if I give people a list of sentences to read and translate, they’ll just give the ergative in all the situations where you have someone acting on something else – so where you would expect there to be that index finger role acting on something else. But then you hear a story, and you’re like, “Where did that ergative go?” It’s because it’s being used optionally and strategically, which makes it very cool and fun to try and figure out the patterns.

Gretchen: When I nerd sniped you nine years ago into writing a blog post and updating the Wikipedia article about the ergative, I was really touching into something that was very near and dear to your heart.

Lauren: Indeed. Since then, I’ve also written the entire Yolmo language page in much more detail that also touches on a little bit of this ergative structuring.

Gretchen: Excellent. While we’re talking about ways that you could organise how you know who does what to who, you can group the person who’s by themself in a sentence with only one role with the one side of the verb with two or with the other side of the verb with two, but in principle, you don’t actually need to make it pattern with anything. You could have a system that has all three different roles marked in three different ways. Does that ever happen?

Lauren: It does, indeed. It’s known as a “tripartite” system because there are three parts, each doing their own thing.

Gretchen: Do you have an example of a language that does that?

Lauren: Conveniently, I have one from Wangkumara, which is a language of Queensland in Australia. They have three different pronouns depending on what role is in the sentence.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, very neat.

Lauren: For something like “I arrived,” our thumb form would be “nganyi.” For the “I” in “I visited you,” it would be “ngkatu.” In English, they’re just both “I,” but they’re both different. But then, if it was you visiting me, instead of “me,” it’s “nganha.” It’s three different pronouns for the three different roles.

Gretchen: “Nganyi,” “ngkatu,” “nganha” – three different forms. None of the fingers are touching each other. I think we could do this in pseudo-English if we wanted to. We would just have to invent an extra pronoun form.

Lauren: That makes sense.

Gretchen: We could have, like, “I visit them,” “They visit me,” but then “Mo arrives,” and “Tho arrives.”

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: Those, you’d have like “I,” “me,” and “mo,” “they, “them,” and “tho,” or something like this. That would be your extra form all by itself doing its own thing in the sentence where it’s the only one.

Lauren: I love that if you hold up your thumb, index, and pinky and make sure none of them touch each other, you can make the “I love you” gesture that’s based on the ASL form of the verb “I love you.” It’s like, “I love you, tripartite systems.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] That is really great. I love the tripartite system so much I’m making the “I love you” handshape. While we’re on linguistic phenomena that are a little bit complicated but have really cool names –

Lauren: Okay, are we into the deepest ergative deep cut that we can make?

Gretchen: The deepest ergative deep cut has one of my favourite names of a grammatical phenomenon ever, and we have to talk about it because it just sounds so cool. In English, you can have a sentence like, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is the active sentence, and you can also have a version of that where you put more emphasis on the visitee by having “Lauren is visited by Gretchen.” That’s the passive version of the sentence.

Lauren: We’re moving fingers around on hands here.

Gretchen: We’re moving fingers around on hands here. You can promote that visitee person to a more prominent position for reasons of emphasis.

Lauren: Thankfully, the Lingthusiasm budget does not extend to hand surgery, so you’re just gonna have to imagine the fingers moving around.

Gretchen: This is gonna get a kinda gross, Halloween-y metaphor here. But in ergative languages, because the ways that the subject and object relate are different, instead of having a passive, we have an antipassive. I think there should be more specialised terminology that begins with “anti-” because I feel like it’s like having “antimatter” but for linguistics.

Lauren: See, I always think of antipasto share plates when I hear “antipassive.” They’re delicious, so I have positive feelings towards the antipassive.

Gretchen: The delicious platter with olives and artichokes and cured meats on it.

Lauren: I don’t wanna go straight from cured meats to fingers, but I can explain how the antipassive works if we like.

Gretchen: Okay, just give us the brief antipassive rundown while we’re here because I think it’s such a cool piece of terminology.

Lauren: I’ll do a translated example from Dyirbal, which is a language spoken in Queensland in Australia – because this is the first language the antipassive was described for, so it shows up in a lot of examples. If a man was cutting the tree, we have “man” and “tree,” and it’s an ergative sentence, so the index finger “man” is marked “ergative.” It’s distinct and different.

Gretchen: Gotcha.

Lauren: In the same way with the passive you get rid of focusing on one of the fingers in the sentence, we can get rid of the tree and just have “The man was cutting,” but in Dyirbal, you can’t have “the man” still be ergative because now there’s only one thing that’s in the sentence, and so you have to make “the man” – even though he’s still cutting, and we think of “cutting” as having two things – we now make it look like the non-ergative, so that absolutive, so it looks like a thumb and is, therefore, more focused.

Gretchen: In the same way that in a non-ergative language, like English, you can have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” or “I visit them,” you can change that into the passive by going, “Lauren is visited” – there you are all by yourself in the sentence – or “They are visited” – there you are all by yourself in a sentence. In this case, “The man was cutting the tree,” instead of promoting the tree and going, “The tree was being cut,” which you’d maybe do if it was a passive, you have “The man was cutting,” but now, you have to take the ergative off “the man” because otherwise he has previously being marked with ergative.

Lauren: Yes. In a language like Dyirbal, it’s completely normal-sounding in a way that a passive sounds normal in English even though you’ve gotten rid of one of the roles because you’ve changed the marking. It makes complete sense. It sounds very grammatical. And it just makes “the man” even more of a focus, and what is being cut is less of a focus. In the way that a passive gets rid of the original subject, the antipassive makes the original subject, like, subject++. That’s why it’s “anti-passive.”

Gretchen: If you put a passive and an antipassive in the same sentence, would it cause an explosion? We’ve talked about all of these interesting – ergativity can pop up in various little bits of the grammar in different languages. But what if I were to tell you that there’s actually a little teeny tiny bit of English that is actually ergative?

Lauren: It was here all along.

Gretchen: The ergativity was inside the house all along!

Lauren: Please share.

Gretchen: You know how in English we have a double E ending that goes on certain nouns. You can have things like “retiree” or “escapee” or “employee.”

Lauren: We’ve had “devotee” and “arrivee” in this episode so far.

Gretchen: That’s true. This is a thing that goes on nouns, but they’re all nouns that come from a verb. If you have a verb like “employ,” and you say, “Gretchen employs Lauren,” then “Lauren” is the employee.

Lauren: Employee of the Month I would hope.

Gretchen: I don’t actually employ you, but you are the Employee of the Month in my heart.

Lauren: Aww, thanks.

Gretchen: The same thing is if I visit you, you’re the visitee; if I pay you, you’re the payee; if I nominate you; you’re the nominee, and so on.

Lauren: So, there’re two roles in this sentence.

Gretchen: Right. The one that is acted upon is the one that when you make it into a noun with “-ee,” that’s what it means. But there’s another set of verbs that you can also use “-ee” with. If we decide that we want to retire from making Lingthusiasm, which we have no intention to do, but we would then be “retirees.” We’re the only entity in this action, you know, “Gretchen is a retiree,” “Lauren is a retiree,” “I have retired,” “You have retired.” I’m not retiring you.

Lauren: So, there’s only one role. I’ve got my thumb, and that’s marked with this “-ee.”

Gretchen: Yeah. If you were trying to escape, you could be an “escapee.” It’s not like I escape you. It’s just, “You escape.” Now, you’re an “escapee.” Again, here’s this thumb and here’s this pinky that can both get the “-ee” marking on them.

Lauren: Wait a second, that’s my ergative handshape, Gretchen.

Gretchen: That’s my ergative handshape – that “employee” and “retiree” and “escapee” and “visitee,” “arrivee” all get the “-ee” marking on them, and the one that’s left over that’s the exception is things like “employer” and “visitor” and “nominator” – these ones that do the action, that are the ergative one that’re doing the work – all the work of nominating you – that’s the one that has the “-or” ending, which is the ergative one.

Lauren: There we go! There was a tiny bit of ergativity in English all along.

Gretchen: We should note that not all words that end in “-ee” are examples of this particular phenomenon in English. You have “mentor” and “mentee,” but you don’t have, for example, “chimpanzor” and “chimpanzee.”

Lauren: [Laughs]

Gretchen: “Chickador” and “chickadee.”

Lauren: Okay, that is definitely looking for morphology that is not there.

Gretchen: “Frisbor” and “frisbee” – c’mon!

Lauren: The “frisbor” is the person that throws the frisbee.

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then the “frisbee” is the one that receives it.

Lauren: Right, okay, that is definitely some interesting morphological reanalysis there.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I think it works great. But it doesn’t happen for every instance of the “-ee” ending, but it does happen in a bunch of them. So, here’s this example of a tiny, tiny way in which English has a split ergative system.

[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, and 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, 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 with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include what I learned at linguist summer camp, how we make the Lingthusiasm transcripts, and doing linguist fieldwork. 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 – especially this month in honour of our seventh anniversary. The Lingthusiasm survey is open until December 15th, 2023, anywhere on Earth, and it’s available at bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 19:59:13 -0400

When you have a sentence like “I visit them”, the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from “they visit me”. However, in a sentence like “I laugh”, you don’t actually need those signals – since there’s only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read “Me laugh” or “Laugh me”. And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like “laugh” patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like “visit”. This pattern is known as ergativity.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

November is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month and it’s been 7 years! To help us celebrate we’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, so we’re asking you to share a link to your favourite episode, or just share Lingthusiasm in general. Tag us on on social media so we can thank you, or if you share in private enjoy the warm fuzzies of our gratitude.

We’re doing our second listener survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here.

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

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.

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

Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 20:25:02 -0400

Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp | Lingthusiasm

What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they’re called linguistics institutes.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen’s visit to the 2023 LSA institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst this summer. We talk about cool projects that Gretchen learned about at this year’s Lingstitute, including the Linguistic Atlas Project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (talks about all of these projects are now available online). We also talk about the history of LSA summer institutes (the first one was in 1928, almost a hundred years ago!), why they’re not to be confused with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which is a missionary project for Bible translation (awkward), and both Gretchen’s history attending various institutes and Lauren’s history not attending them (sorry about the FOMO though).

Listen to this episode about linguistics summer camp and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.