What do signed languages have in common? How do oral languages influence signed languages? How do they influence each other? Here to answer these questions and many more, it’s Dr Adam Schembri of the University of Birmingham.
You can watch our chat with Adam Schembri on video, with Christy Filipich doing Auslan interpretation.
Also joining us as a special guest: Dr Mark Ellison.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:38
News: 3:33
Related or Not: 54:15
Interview with Adam Schembri: 1:05:31
Words of the Week: 2:08:27
Comments: 2:27:56
The Reads: 2:31:21
Listener comment: 2:39:33
Listen to this episode
Video
Signed language chat with Adam Schembri
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
- Chris W
- Diego
- Larry
- Raina
- Felicity
- Cheyenne
- J0HNTR0Y
- Tony
- Manú
- Andy
- Alyssa
- Matt
- Rene
- Amir
- Jack
- Rach
- Whitney
- Rhian
- Elías
- Termy
- Helen
- Lyssa
- Tadhg
- PharaohKatt
- Chris L
- sæ̃m
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Joanna
- Steele
- Ariaflame
- Margareth
- Colleen
- Meredith
- Andy from Logophilius
- Kathy
- LordMortis
- Kevin
- James
- Nigel
- Keith
- Rodger
- WolfDog
- Ignacio
- Molly Dee
- gramaryen
- Kristofer
- Canny Archer
- aengryballs
- Sonic Snejhog
- Nasrin
- Stan
- Luis
- Kate
- O Tim
And our newest patrons:
- at the Listener level: Murray-Luke, and Bill
- at the Friend level: brottlet
- and new free members: M Zhang, B, and Twicks!
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Latvian linguists nay de-capitalizing ‘russia’
https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/culture/03.07.2024-latvian-linguists-nay-de-capitalizing-russia.a560158/
‘The Avengers’ cast reunited to dub movie in the Lakota language
https://ew.com/the-avengers-cast-reunited-for-a-new-dub-in-lakota-language-8674749
To sound like a hockey player, speak like a Canadian
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240516122636.htm
How do you pronounce “hockey”? US players say it with “fake Canadian” accent.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/why-us-hockey-players-often-speak-with-fake-canadian-accents/
Scientists Witnessed the Birth of a New Accent in Antarctica
https://www.iflscience.com/scientists-witnessed-the-birth-of-a-new-accent-in-antarctica-70287
British people increasingly copying each other’s speaking style, study say
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/british-people-increasingly-copying-other-113640913.html?guccounter=1
British Conversation is Changing: Resonance and Engagement in the BNC1994 and the BNC2014
https://academic.oup.com/applij/advance-article/doi/10.1093/applin/amae040/7690629
Bourhis and Giles, 1979. The Language of Intergroup Distinctiveness. (Welsh story)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269710388_The_Language_of_Intergroup_Distinctiveness
Chomsky argues language is for thought, not communication. Quote from 13m46s
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w
Pan and Yan, 2024. The perceptual span in traditional Chinese
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-and-cognition/article/perceptual-span-in-traditional-chinese/F7C73C38C92D25D935CD22FDD64AE86F
John Bulwer, 1648. Chirologia, or, The naturall language of the hand
https://archive.org/details/gu_chirologianat00gent/page/n3/mode/2up
Annelies Kusters on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/256352718
Marta Morgado
https://ulices.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/research-groups/reception-and-translation-studies-rg-6/marta-morgado/
Palfreyman, N., & Schembri, A. (2022). Lumping and splitting: sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 26(1), 105-112.
https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12524
They’re serving what?! How the c-word went from camp to internet mainstream
https://theconversation.com/theyre-serving-what-how-the-c-word-went-from-camp-to-internet-mainstream-210214
What does ‘serving c*nt’ mean?
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/serving-cnt-memes-explained/
Serving Cunt
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/serving-cunt
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: The presence of ice hockey implies — by the way, not many people know this — the existence of water hockey and…?
HEDVIG: Air…?
DANIEL: …steam hockey.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: ‘Cause air hockey already exists.
DANIEL: Yes, air hockey does exist.
HEDVIG: Oh, no, you mean for water.
MARK ELLISON: Okay. Yeah.
HEDVIG: I thought you meant fire! Water.
DANIEL: Fire hockeyyyyy.
HEDVIG: Earth hockey.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE INTRO]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s linguist and rare phoneme collector, Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I didn’t know about that second one. What do you mean? I don’t…
DANIEL: You know how I make up something that’s not true about you…
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: …for the bit? It’s a gag. It’s a bit.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. Okay, I see. Very funny. Thank you.
DANIEL: I do notice that you do have a rare phoneme in your name though.
HEDVIG: I think… Mmm. I think it has a special place on the IPA chart, but I don’t think it’s that… Mm, I mean…
DANIEL: Multiple places of articulation. That’s pretty great.
HEDVIG: I… That is one way of construing it. I’m not sure that’s entirely true, you know?
DANIEL: I utterly defer to your knowledge as the owner of this phoneme.
MARK: You hear it every day, don’t you, Hedvig?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well.
MARK: It’s very common.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, it’s like a soft… what’s… an X on the IPA chart? Like, what you think of as like Bach, /x/. It’s a slightly softer one, Skirgård. I think people like to think of it as rarer than it might be, but I might be wrong. Anyway…
DANIEL: That’s cool.
HEDVIG: …thank you very much for that introduction, Daniel. I appreciate it.
DANIEL: Thank you for explaining that to me. I really appreciate that, thank you, you’re so great. Okay, awesome. That voice that you heard is not Ben, because Ben is away. He’s trundling away in the northern hemisphere.
MARK: Poor Ben.
DANIEL: Instead, we have a special guest. Usually, he lives near Hedvig in Germany, but for this episode — heh — he’s in the next room at my place!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
MARK: Mhm.
DANIEL: He actually is. It’s Dr Mark Ellison of the University of Cologne. Hey, Mark.
MARK: Hi, there. It’s good to be here.
DANIEL: It’s nice to have you over.
HEDVIG: Is he in the same room that I slept in when I was at your house?
DANIEL: The same.
MARK: Yes.
HEDVIG: Ah, nice! I know that room.
MARK: You know this room? Excellent.
DANIEL: There are a good many linguists who are aware of that room.
MARK: [LAUGHS] As they should be. I can see a globe which, no doubt, should have marks for each of the linguists who have stayed here.
HEDVIG: That’s a nice idea.
DANIEL: That’s the globe in my kids’ toy room. Mark, this is at least your third time, maybe more. So, congratulations.
MARK: Thank you.
DANIEL: Third time on the show.
MARK: It’s always a privilege.
DANIEL: And you know what this means? This means your status as cohost is assured. That means you can crash episodes at will whenever you want.
MARK: Wow, that sounds like fun. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We’re about to see how much fun it is.
MARK: Yes, we are. I hope it’s as much fun for you as it will be for me.
HEDVIG: Maybe while Ben is on his Big Silly Bike Ride, we can try and get more of the cohosts to crash because we need people to fill in.
DANIEL: That’s a very good idea, and we are going to try to do that very thing.
MARK: Good thinking.
DANIEL: But for this episode, I had a lovely chat with Dr Adam Schembri of the University of Birmingham.
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Just out on the deck, out the back. He didn’t stay in that room, but he did come and have coffee. We’ve done lots of episodes on the deck. His research is in signed languages and so our Discordians pummeled him with all of their sign language questions and he answered both on audio and on video. So, if you would like to listen…
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s nice.
DANIEL: …to this episode, you might be doing that now. But if you’d like to watch the interview instead of, or in addition to hearing it, you can follow the link in the doobleydoo to YouTube, you’ll see me and Adam chatting on the deck. And you know who else you’re going to see?
HEDVIG: No, I don’t. Who?
MARK: Nope.
DANIEL: I bet you can guess. You’re going to see…
HEDVIG: Wait, one of your children.
MARK: One or two of your children. [LAUGHS] We had the same idea, Hedvig.
DANIEL: Hint, it’s about signed languages. It’s Christy Filipich, our favorite Auslan interpreter.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Oh.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: Yep. She’s going to be appearing on video in a box.
HEDVIG: Nice.
MARK: In a box.
DANIEL: Or something like that.
MARK: [LAUGHS] You should get more chairs, Daniel.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]. It’s patrons that make it possible for everybody to enjoy regular episodes for free and to have transcripts so that all of our shows are readable and searchable. In return, you get some perks. There’s access to our Discord with lots of lovable language nerds.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: If you’re a patron at the Listener Level, you get special bonus episodes like the one that Mark and I are going to have later on. We’re going to be out on the deck. We’re going to be talking. What are we talking about? Mark, what are we talking about?
MARK: More deck talk. Well, so many things…
DANIEL: Deck talk!
MARK: …I was keen to talk about.
HEDVIG: Can you… can you call it Deck Talk, please?
DANIEL: Deck talk!
HEDVIG: And then, we would get some New Zealanders to talk.
[LAUGHTER]
MARK: Deck talk! Oh, Hedvig, you’re so naughty.
DANIEL: Talking about our decks. We’re a couple of deck-hids.
MARK: Yes.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. That would be great.
DANIEL: We don’t know what we’re talking about. So, send us ideas and questions.
MARK: Yes, that would be great.
DANIEL: I’m kind of thinking that this is going to be sort of a continuation of our episode, Lazy in a Good Way.
MARK: Yeah, I can see that happening. Follow up with a bit more news about what we’ve discovered about prominence, for example, in my day job. But also, what else I’ve been looking at in terms of, for example, understanding how doing causal inference might be a particular interest in linguistics. That’s something that’s in my head a lot these days.
DANIEL: Okay. Inference is one of the coolest things about language, I’ve got to say.
HEDVIG: Mark, do you follow Richard McElreath on Twitter?
MARK: I don’t, actually. I tend not to be on Twitter very much, I’m afraid.
HEDVIG: Okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: A very good idea.
MARK: Good to follow people, but I like to find another way of doing it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I do, too. I am getting… It is a bit hard because there are some interesting things, but then I am getting a lot of… It seems AI bots really want to pose listicles a lot.
MARK: Okay.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: They’ll be like, “Ten pop culture moments you don’t want to miss.” And it’s almost only Rihanna, Beyonce, and Britney Spears which, I don’t really mind, but I’m also like, “You guys can only do one kind of content.”
MARK: Do you have the unmissable, for the fifth time you’ve seen that same list item, is it?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, there’s bonus episodes, but there’s also live episodes, and we have one coming up. If you are a patron at any level, watch your Patreon inbox or our Discord, because we’re going to be dropping the time and date of our next live episode. It’s episode 105 or 500, depending on if you count Talk the Talk or not. So, it’s going to be really special whatever happens. So, if you’re on the edge about being a patron, why don’t you give it a shot? Come and join up.
HEDVIG: Ooh, that’s a good point.
DANIEL: patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right, should we get some news in?
HEDVIG: Yes.
MARK: Let’s get some news in.
DANIEL: I think these first few ones are going to be super short. I just love your quick takes. All right, this is hot takes.
HEDVIG: Okay. Hot takes.
DANIEL: Hot takes.
HEDVIG: I am in a very hot place. By the way, my new hot tip. Sorry, yes, I’m going to derail it immediately.
MARK: Sure.
HEDVIG: Ben’s not here.
DANIEL: Awesome.
HEDVIG: If you are also living in a hot place like Europe, all over Europe, take gel freezer bags, put them in tea towels, and put them in your armpits.
MARK: Mmmm.
DANIEL: Oh, that’ll cool your core.
HEDVIG: Yes. It circulates everywhere very quickly, and you cool down everywhere. Also, I have tried putting them over your heart, but I just feel like the armpits are safer.
DANIEL: Not medical advice.
HEDVIG: Also, you can squeeze them.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay. That’s it.
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you.
HEDVIG: I’m ready for hot takes.
DANIEL: We’re talking about Latvia, because the national armed forces of Latvia, earlier this year in its communications, started doing a thing. And the thing they started doing is this. They started putting the name of Russia, the Russian Federation, and the names of its leaders in all lowercase.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Great.
DANIEL: A very subtle kind of shade that they are throwing.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: When you don’t want to give somebody that initial cap, you stick it all in lowercase.
MARK: Wow.
HEDVIG: Is that what that is doing? Is that it’s just like… I just don’t think that’s…
DANIEL: Effective?
HEDVIG: I mean, it’s just a publicity stunt, really.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: I know that Latvia and Lithuania have had discussions before about tossing out Russian loan words and stuff like that for decades. And I fully understand that they are very worried and anxious about having a border with Russia, etc., especially because the Russian government seemed to consider Russian speakers as things that are also—Like, people…
DANIEL: Russia?
HEDVIG: …that they should. Exactly, like extensions of the Russian territory.
DANIEL: Evidence of Russianness. Yes.
HEDVIG: Which is terrifying. And that’s not really how modern nation states work, etc., etc. But I do think this is just a silly thing. And also, I’m not sure that lower keys letters signal disrespect as much as informality.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it means what people think it means, because symbolism is hard.
HEDVIG: Yes. And it’s definitely a thing that they did, and they want people to pick up on it and they want to anger Putin. And hey, if you’re having a war about letters instead of killing people…
DANIEL: Maybe that’s…
HEDVIG: Maybe that’s preferable. [CHUCKLES] I don’t know.
DANIEL: Okay — Mark, your hot take.
MARK: Maybe it’s directly an attack on Moscow rather than an attack on Russia because they are taking the capital out of Russia.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] I thought that they weren’t supposed to conduct maneuvers like that inside the country. That was… Mm, yeah, no, I’m joking, but that’s not very funny. Taking the capital.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Thank you, Daniel, for…
DANIEL: So, who else?
HEDVIG: …reviewing your own joke.
DANIEL: Who else could have made that connection? Only Mark Ellison, folks.
MARK: It’s my job.
DANIEL: So, the Latvian Language Expert Commission of the state language center took a look at this, and they said, “Yeah, we’re not on board.” So, they’re not considering that as a thing that they will recommend everyone do.
HEDVIG: Also, I understand that Russia and Russian are things connected with the current Russian government, but there are lots of Russian speakers and Russians who aren’t in support of the Russian government. So, you’re also sort of…
MARK: Exactly.
HEDVIG: And there may be times for collective punishment, but I don’t know. I think this is just not really it.
MARK: This distinction that Hedvig is making is something that I experienced fairly directly in that the day after the war started, I was with a mutual friend, Eri Kashima, in Helsinki, and we were looking for a restaurant. And the one we had aimed for was closed for some reason. And the only one that was nearby was a Russian restaurant that was full of Tsarist memorabilia. So, they had no particular interest in Putinesque Russia. And in fact, I did hear later that they had put a Ukrainian flag in their window because presumably they were being boycotted by locals who did not like the sound of it appearing in a Russian restaurant. But I think we should… Maybe it’s a good idea if we grew up and followed the advice of using our words when we want to criticise people rather than using a typeface or what would you call it? Decapitalising is a little bit childish.
HEDVIG: Yeah, a bit childish.
DANIEL: Technically still words.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: Well, there are a lot of ethnic Russians in Latvia. And yeah, the Russian war against Ukraine sucks, and I hope they lose and lose big. But Russian Latvians are kind of having a hard time because there have been moves in parliament to ban Russian entirely or to ban services in the Russian language…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: …which affects people in the real world, so.
HEDVIG: It’s mainly a signaling act, which doesn’t mean it’s not important or meaningful. We should also say that, yes, I’m sure that Russian speakers in Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia are having a hard time. There are also Putin supporters among Russian speakers in those countries, as well as there are Putin supporters who don’t speak Russian as well. Like here in Germany, there are people who are definitely Russian who support Putin. So, it’s a complex thing, but maybe that’s the thing you should find out about when you want to discriminate against someone rather than whether they speak Russian or not.
MARK: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
MARK: I agree with you.
DANIEL: That was good.
MARK: That was good. Because given that half of Ukrainians speak Russian as their native language.
HEDVIG: Including the president. Yeah.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Let’s move on to… this story suggested by Diego. It’s about the movie, the Avengers. A long time ago, we did a story about how Star Wars had been dubbed in Navajo.
HEDVIG and MARK: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: We also noticed when Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury was dubbed into the Nyungar language of Western Australia.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
MARK: Amazing.
Daniel Well, now Lakota, the Sioux Native American language is getting in on the action. The Avengers is being dubbed into Lakota with the original actors doing the voice work.
MARK: [GASPS]
HEDVIG: That’s cool. That’s nice.
DANIEL: How cool is that?
DANIEL: That’s amazing.
HEDVIG: That is pretty cool.
DANIEL: There’s an article in Entertainment Weekly by Christian Holub, but it seems that Mark Ruffalo, Bruce Banner seems to have been the main driver. He says, “This project came out of my relationship with the Lakota people. I’ve been hearing about the work they’ve been doing to revitalise the language. There’s not a lot of people left who speak it.”
And let’s see, this is also from the article. “In one of the videos behind the scenes moments from the recording sessions, you can hear Robert Downey Jr remark, ‘Dude, that is so slick. What a beautiful language.'”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I think it’s really meaningful that they’re doing this because… I mean, I don’t want to shit on my peers and linguists in general, but if you want to get kids to think it’s cool and fun and accessible to learn the language, they do love Marvel. [LAUGHS] Marvel’s a big hit among kids. It’s just like having a dubbing of popular kids shows and stuff like that is a really good idea. And it’s something that’s hard for linguists to do on their own. I think linguists have an easier time creating maybe original content or creating content that’s related to traditional myths or stories from communities, which are also really important and should also be done, but might not be as easy to compete for kids’ attention as a Marvel movie. So, I think it’s really cool that they’re doing this.
I wonder what else, because I know that they did Moana of course in lots of Pacific languages, which seems exceptionally appropriate because it’s a movie that takes place in the Pacific world. But Avengers isn’t. So, this is pretty cool that they’re showing that kind of interest for things that are just not… I don’t think there’s any connection between Avengers and Lakota otherwise, right?
DANIEL: No, not really.
HEDVIG: It’s just that they thought it was a cool thing to do. That’s really nice. My hot take is, that’s really nice.
DANIEL: Mark. Your hot take?
MARK: Yeah. I’m really curious about what standard their accent in Lakota got to. And is there any commentary in the text about reactions from the remaining speakers to what they hear?
DANIEL: There isn’t, but it does sound like they worked really hard on getting it right, doing multiple takes, just making sure they got every line nailed, so.
MARK: Great. In that case, I think it’s amazing, and I think it’d be wonderful to see more of this type of things. If they pick some minority language for each new film and somebody champion that, that’d be amazing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. it’s really good.
MARK: Such a good thing and very good publicity I’d imagine.
DANIEL: My hot take is this is very cool news. And it’s cool that Lakota is joining the dubbing, the dub club. I also look forward to a day when the way you know that a language is valued is for reasons unrelated to that language’s proximity to white mainstream culture. But that is just making a rather sour point. And I will quickly pivot to say, if you want to get young people speaking a language, that’s a good way to do it, is to make it in a medium that they enjoy.
MARK: I would also say, yeah, maybe people who are in the interest group that they’re trying to encourage to actually be more interested in Lakota, maybe those people are fans of that movie. And so, I think as a friend of mine who comes from minority language community in India was saying that, “You can’t expect us to live in a museum.”
So, I agree with you about it would be great to have other expressions of culture coming in and enriching the kind of this communal or ecumenical culture we have, which is, albeit a little bit postcolonial in its nature. But I think that we can’t… One of the goals is to not exclude people from content of whatever ilk of content. I think it’s great.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. All right, next one. This one was suggested by Ben Not the Host one. This is about hockey. I don’t know if you two are hockey fans.
HEDVIG: Oh, I was just in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You were in the Hockey Hall of Fame?
HEDVIG: Yes.
MARK: Tell us about this.
HEDVIG: I was…
MARK: My guess is that’s ice hockey, though, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yes. Is what you’re talking about, not ice hockey?
DANIEL: I think what we’re talking about is ice hockey because I know sports very well, and ice is a surface that people popularly play hockey on.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Nailed it.
HEDVIG: Don’t know what that’s a reference to, but there is ice hockey and there is field hockey.
MARK: Yes. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And in Canada, both are quite popular, in particular ice hockey. And I was recently in Canada, in Toronto, and they are home to the Hockey Hall of Fame, where you can see the Stanley Cup, and you can beat your husband at tabletop hockey…
DANIEL: Nice.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: …which was amazing, 3-2.
DANIEL: Oh. I’m good at that.
HEDVIG: I turned out to also be decent at it, and I was very thrilled because he usually meets me at everything like that.
MARK: More decent than Steve. Is that what you learned? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Fairly.
DANIEL: You know what this means? The next time we get together, it’s on. It’s foosball time.
HEDVIG: Oh, really? Oh, do you have a table?
DANIEL: Yeah. No, but we’ll go to a place. I know a place.
HEDVIG: Yes, yes, yes.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: Yes. Hockey is getting pretty popular, ice hockey in some parts of the USA with US players joining the ranks of the greats. And as such, some of the players are starting to say hockey stuff in a way that some people are identifying as Canadian. So, this is work from Andrew Bray of the University of Rochester, who notes, “That they’re not trying to sound Canadian. People identify it as Canadian, but it’s probably just kind of a halfway version.” Bray says, “It is important to note that American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian. Rather, they’re trying to sound more like a hockey player.”
HEDVIG: Uh-huh. And that just happens to be very much Canadian.
DANIEL: Just happens to sound. Well, Bray says that American athletes… I’m reading from the article, link on our show notes for this episode. “Athletes borrow features of the Canadian English accents, especially for hockey specific teams and jargon, but do not follow the underlying rules behind the pronunciation, which could explain why the accent might sound fake to a Canadian.”
HEDVIG: Oh, because they know some specific words that they’re pronouncing similar to their Canadian teammates, but then they don’t use the same vowel combinations in other words that you’d think. So, they’ll say… what’s the Canadian term? Okay, what are hockey terms? Hockey, puck.
DANIEL: Apparently, ice.
MARK: Come on, what did you do at that museum, girl? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I mean, most of the words just seem like they are the same. Like, brawl is just a term also. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Hang on, I’ll get the article up.
HEDVIG: Yes. A hockey puck. Hockey stick. I guess they don’t have goalies in American football, so maybe they know the term ‘goalie’ from there.
DANIEL: Oh. Apparently, a hockey arena is a barn while the puck is a biscuit. It’s a biscuit.
HEDVIG: Oh, I think I have heard of that. I do know that when they launched Punjabi commentary of hockey on the popular Saturday Night Hockey in Canada, I saw an interview with the two Punjabi speakers who were commentators, and they had to think of new words for things. And I think the word they picked for a hockey puck is the same that you use for a little potato patty in Punjabi cooking, which I thought was like A plus.
DANIEL: A scallop.
MARK: Yep.
DANIEL: Would it be a scallop or a cake? Don’t tell the Australians. They’ll start fighting about it.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: This reminds me of that time when the… By the way, Andy from Logophilius and many other people sent us this story about the Antarctica research team that started talking like each other and developing Antarctican English accent.
MARK: Wow.
DANIEL: Yeah. Happens so fast.
MARK: Yep.
DANIEL: So once again, we want to sound like the people we’re around because language is one way we show membership in a group.
MARK: That’s so true. But also, it’s because I think we just make communication easier. Now, that sounds a bit too directed. I think it’s more we just adapt to what’s around us, very fast.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MARK: And I think many people think… You hear people saying, “I am so unique because I adapt. When I hear someone, I can’t help myself but imitate them. Isn’t that weird? Ha-ha,” But actually I think, pretty much…
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s very common.
MARK: …everybody does that. It’s very, very commonly…
DANIEL: Commonly normal.
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I think that the three of us are a little bit unusual in that we’re all immigrants.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Mark and I are immigrants to Germany, and Daniel’s an immigrant to Australia. And we spend a lot of time in multilingual settings and being out of our little pond. And sometimes, I get reminded that a lot of people live in the country that they’re born in and the town they’re born in for most of their life. So, they are adapting to the people around them. It’s just that there are people around some pretty much like they do.
MARK: True.
HEDVIG: So, they don’t notice the adaptation until they go on a holiday somewhere or they go somewhere, and they notice they’re adapting and they’re like, “Oh, my god, I’m adapting. I don’t usually do that.” And it’s like, “Well, you’re usually not in a multilingual setting.”
MARK: That’s a very good point. I like that. That’s certainly true. I think that you’ve caught it.
DANIEL: And doing that makes language more efficient.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: I’ve been thinking a lot about language efficiency, and that’s one thing that does it. You just bridge the distance so that there’s less distance, and then things work better.
HEDVIG: My North American accent went to even higher degrees when I was in Canada.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Ah, tell us a story. Did you have to ask for water?
HEDVIG: No. Yeah, I did ask for water. I did do that once, and someone didn’t understand me. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s always water. Water.
HEDVIG: But no, I just noticed also not just the pronunciation of things, but also the talking style, and how to do things. It was really fun, but it felt a little bit like putting on a little bit of an act. And now, I’m back in weird multilingual German, lots of other immigrants talking land. So, we’ll see where that goes.
DANIEL: This whole thing reminds me of a story that Diego suggested in our Discord. There’s an article in The Independent by Vishwam Sankaran. It’s quoting a paper by Dr Vittorio Tantucci of the University of Lancaster, published in Applied Linguistics. They took a look at a corpus from 1994 and another from 2014, and what they were looking for was evidence that people in dialogue were reusing and acknowledging parts of each other’s utterances.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: They call this phenomenon resonance. And the reason we do it is, once again, to bridge the social distance and make communication work better. They found, just quoting here, “We discovered that upper class people from the corporate world and neighboring sectors mutually resonated much more in 2014 than they used to in 1994.”
MARK: Wow.
HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: They’re not sure why, but they think it might be due to, “Dramatic change in corporate and institutional communication in the 2000s, involving a new turn toward corporate social responsibility, participatory frameworks in higher education, and the enactment of ideologies such as inclusivity, engagement, inequality in higher social grades of British society if your awareness goes that far.”
HEDVIG: Well. It could be unconscious. We say that people adapt a lot, but there is also people who consciously don’t because they want to underline their different identity, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: The one British guy in my small town.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That made him special.
MARK: I had a friend in Edinburgh who had gone through Oxford, and usually British people, when they go to Oxford or Cambridge, they adapt to an Oxbridge accent. And my friend was cockney, and he worked very hard, he said, to maintain his cockneyhood, and his way of speaking, and he seemed to have done it fairly successfully. So, I think, yes, there are definitely people who even as like late teenagers, early 20s, are faced with a strong pressure to adapt. And some resist it for their own personal identity reasons, while others succumb to the borg.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m wondering if it’s more common with people who come from a more minority background that is socially slighted, that you feel resentment towards, like, “Why should I adapt to you, fucker?”
HEDVIG: Or if it also happens with… Because sometimes we talk about upper class people that when they notice that the underclasses are adapting to them, that they… We almost talk of them as like consciously moving in a different direction to try and make it more special. But that would entail something that isn’t either of those two things. It’s not adaptation, and it’s not maintaining your own identity. It’s…
MARK: It’s kind of acceptation, I guess, is the word, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MARK: To you, like change away from what you have.
DANIEL: Divergence.
HEDVIG: I wonder how that works.
DANIEL: Well, we already know the Welsh experiment, don’t we? About…
HEDVIG: The Welsh experiment?
DANIEL: A classic Welsh experiment, where you find people who are learning Welsh in Wales, and they had a recording of a person, I think with a posh British accent, who was asking questions, and they would respond into the tape player. And then, the voice of the British person would ask, “Why are you learning Welsh, a dying language that has no future?” And then, they watched to see what the respondents would do. Three of the speakers started using Welsh words and phrases in their answers at that point.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: One woman just put her head down and just started conjugating Welsh verbs into the microphone without even answering the question. That’s a very good study that shows us where divergence can happen. I’ll have a link to that up on the show notes for this episode.
All right, thanks to Diego and to Ben Not the Host one for those, that’s the end of our hot takes.
Now, it’s time to go a bit deep. This one was suggested by Diego on our Discord. It’s a new paper in Nature by linguists from MIT doctor, Ev Fedorenko and Steven Piantadosi. This one’s about what language is for. There have been a lot of ideas about what language is for. Noam Chomsky famously said, “The language was not for communication.” Are you aware of this quote?
HEDVIG: I’ve heard it attributed to him. It seems like such a hot take. So, extremely hot that that can’t be…
MARK: It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: It is hard to believe.
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I can believe that he believed that it was first developed for something, but it then got… What do you call those things in the church? Spandrel, spandralised.
DANIEL: Oh yeah.
HEDVIG: Like, it got overtaken. I don’t know our ears aren’t developed for holding glasses, but that’s mainly what I… That’s not mainly what I do with them, [LAUGHTER] but this is a lot of what I do with them.
MARK: I think we had both encountered this comment attributed to Chomsky from possibly in the same reading sessions about Chomsky’s view on the evolution of language in the philosophy department at the Australian National University. We both were very surprised by this position that it was about thought rather than about communication. But I must say, I have been having discussions this last week with Luisa Miceli of University of Western Australia about, this came up over lunch, and she said she kind of had listened to some talks by Chomsky and was less in opposition to that viewpoint because she said what he’s interested in is in capturing the creativity of language and understanding that. We would argue, I think that many of us would agree, that his tools perhaps were not the right ones for engaging in that task. But if his goal is to talk about creativity, then maybe he meant the kind of putting together different concepts that happens in a stage just prior often to communication.
HEDVIG: But why then isn’t the cognition for thought rather than language is for thought? Like, I don’t…
MARK: I see what you’re saying, but I think to some extent, this kind of mental reality of language picture is one to capture the compositionality of ideas. But I think if you believe that language is there for the purposes of thinking, then these two are not separate. The compositionality of concepts and the compositionality that’s available in language are not separate things. So, I think the idea that Luisa was picking up on was this unity that I think he had in mind for these things.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: She’s smart.
MARK: If language is a device for thought, then it’s the mechanism by which you combine concepts.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Merge, once again.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: He’s been saying this for a number of decades, and in fact, I found this video from a 2014 talk at Google. I’ll just read the quote. Once again, link in our show notes. “Common understanding,” says Chomsky, “is that language is primarily a means of communication and that it evolved as a means of communication. Probably that’s totally false. It seems that language is evolved and is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. It’s a system of thought, basically. It can be used to communicate. Everything people do can be used to communicate. You can communicate by your hairstyle, style of walk, everything. And yes, language can be used to communicate, but it doesn’t seem to be part of its design. Its design seems to be radically different and in fact even seems to undermine communication. If you look carefully at the structure of language, you find case after case right at the core of language design where there are conflicts between what would be efficient for communication and what is efficient for the specific biological design of language. And in every case that’s known, communicative efficiency is sacrificed.”
HEDVIG: Hmm.
MARK: Hmm.
DANIEL: Hard disagree.
MARK: Yes.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. Well, I want to see a case. I don’t know a case. I can’t think of one.
DANIEL: Well, one of the cases is ambiguity. We say, well, because ambiguity exists that’s not an efficient use of language. It would be more efficient if every concept had a different word.
HEDVIG: That doesn’t make any sense.
DANIEL: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t.
HEDVIG: It doesn’t make sense. And let’s spell out why it doesn’t make sense, because sometimes I listen to podcasts when they say that, and I don’t understand.
MARK: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: It doesn’t make sense because we don’t have infinite memory capacity in our brains, and therefore we can’t store a unique item for everything we want to express. And ambiguity often can even arguably sometimes be useful. I’ve made the case that pronouns in English being ambiguous, whether it’s inclusive, exclusive, whether or not the speaker is included or not, can actually be useful in socially awkward situations where you don’t want to spell out if someone’s invited or not. And sometimes, ambiguity like a term is ambiguous for two meanings that are really different from each other and you can easily figure it out by context.
So, I don’t know. That one doesn’t strike me as… This is again what it sounds like they think that humans are computers. If you’re a computer, ambiguity is probably really bad.
MARK: Mm, I think that’s only because we tend to talk about really simple things with computers. If we talked about worldly things, like the stuff we encounter when we go about our daily lives, the computers would need ambiguity just as much as we do. And I think what ambiguity lets you do is minimise your communicative effort while at the same time adapting to the context you’re in. So, if you do those two things together, you can have a much more efficient code.
And in fact, if we actually look at the way, for example, MPEG encodes videos, it does that by making each video dependent on the past context for a little while, and then it will send a whole picture and then build on that again. And so, each of those encodings of the supplementary pictures is ambiguous because it only tells you a little bit about how to change the previous frame to the current frame. It’s an ambiguous representation, but it’s super efficient. It’s just so much more efficient. So, this idea that…
HEDVIG: That is so interesting.
MARK: …lack of ambiguity is efficient is not true in the least.
DANIEL: No, ambiguity is incredibly efficient.
HEDVIG: Is that why when videos sometimes fail, the background stays fixed, but the person moving is glitching?
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Yep, that’s exactly why. It made a mistake. It thought that it shouldn’t update a thing when it should have.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Steven Piantadosi, who was a coauthor on this paper, has written about ambiguity extensively. He says, “Ambiguity allows efficient units to be reused. Ambiguity is efficient.” Okay. So, in one view, language started out for cognition, but then, incidentally, worked out fine, mostly for communication. But in another view, language started as communication, but is also good for thinking in.
MARK: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: How could we tell the difference between these two views?
MARK: Wow, that’s a great question.
DANIEL: How does universe A look different from universe B?
HEDVIG: I wonder if the people who are able to make this distinction are people who can hear their thoughts. You know that thing that some people hear a voice?
DANIEL: Why did you just say that? Why did you just say that? [LAUGHTER] That comes up.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MARK: Well, it’s an internal thing.
HEDVIG: Because I think if you have an internal monologue… I didn’t read ahead by the way.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I came back from Canada yesterday. I have jetlag. I barely know what Daniel’s going to talk about.
DANIEL: No worries.
HEDVIG: If you have an internal monologue, then I think you’re predisposed to thinking that thoughts are language. And if you don’t have, you’re not, probably less so.
DANIEL: Then, it’s mysterious. The link is less clear.
MARK: I would agree with that. And I think that probably you’ll find fewer mathematicians saying that language is there for thought because they don’t think usually in verbal means, in verbal categories.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: Interesting.
MARK: Well, think about, would you try and process integral calculus in natural language?
HEDVIG: Maybe not.
MARK: It would be very problematic. You have that geometrical conceptions and some symbols that you hang them on, but it’s not natural language.
DANIEL: Your first degree was math. So, you tell me. I don’t know.
MARK: I will agree with myself then.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Very good. Smart.
DANIEL: So, I’m going to pull it together and move forward here. This study is by Dr Evelina Fedorenko of MIT and team published in Nature. And the cool thing about this is that you can read the paper if you have access to Nature. But if you don’t, you can read her tweets. And I’m pulling a lot of them here because they’re public and they’re also really well written.
So, Dr Fedorenko says, “If language mediates thinking,” that is to say, if the Chomskyan view is correct, “then linguistic mechanisms should be engaged when we think, and thought should not be possible absent language or if you feel like that’s too strong, that it should be difficult absent language.”
But Dr Fedorenko points out that, “Using data from fMRI and patients with aphasia, we argue that the language system is not necessary for thought, that they can still do cognitive stuff even though they’ve had brain problems that knock out language.” Also, Dr Fedorenko reveals in these tweets that her own husband has no inner monologue. He’s aphantasic. So, this whole idea that we need language to think in is kind of beside the point for him.
Then, she says, “If language is a tool for communication,” that is to say, if it’s for communicating, “It should show hallmarks of efficient information transfer.” And of course it does. Of course, it does. She points out ways in which this is so, she says, “An efficient code should be easy to produce and understand, robust to noise, and learnable by humans. Human languages exhibit these properties at all levels of structure, including sounds, word forms and meanings, and syntax.” That’s the pocket view.
HEDVIG: That’s so interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I want to know more about… I want to know more about everything, and I’m very glad that they tweeted those things. I also want to know more about what we discussed earlier when we said ambiguity is one example and what other examples there are…
MARK: Mm-hmm. That would be interesting.
HEDVIG: …and whether or not they address all of them. I also find that maybe listeners to this podcast would be a bit surprised that two of the authors came from MIT. I did look them up. They are both from the Brain and Cognitive Science Department, not from the Linguistics Department, which must make for a somewhat awkward atmosphere, but not as awkward as I thought.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, what probably happened was we developed language, and then language developed us. It’s not like we got language to think in, and then we developed communication. It’s probably the opposite, according to this study.
MARK: I think there’s something that we can add as potential evidence that language is for communication. And that is, I would say that my language at the moment is the same as yours, Daniel, more or less, and the same as Hedvig’s that she’s using at the moment. And if it was for internal monologue, why would we be so conforming to each other?
DANIEL: It would always be different. It would be different.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a good point. I promise this connects, Daniel. [LAUGHTER] I heard that in Warhammer 40K… I’ve mentioned this before, I think. Yeah, Daniel’s making that face. In Warhammer 40K, there is like a thing that is like an instant translator, and people go to that thing to do political stuff because they want to talk to someone from a different place. But then everyone forgets how it works and then a town grows up around it and everyone who grows up around it, just do their baby babbling.
MARK: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: And they could, theoretically, all speak entirely individual different languages because the translator would just translate. So, this actually goes into the universal translators or actually just telepathy and not translating.
DANIEL: We have chewed on this one quite a bit.
HEDVIG: We have.
DANIEL: I love this question.
HEDVIG: But what I’m getting to is Mark’s point that if it’s for thinking, then yeah, we should be more like those people who are just doing their individual things. Like, our individual differences should be probably greater unless someone tells me that thinking is also very confirmative, which maybe it is.
DANIEL: That is such a good point though. Yeah, why would there be a unifying force if we’re just thinking in it, and that’s really all it’s supposed to do? Why would we accommodate at all?
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: Is that important?
HEDVIG: It’s like when people do those Facebook posts where they ask how do you…? If I say 5 plus 8 is 13, how do you do that in your head? Because I go 5, 5 plus 3.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Always, always, always.
DANIEL: I do 8 plus 2 plus 3.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: I start with 8. I start with 8, I add 2. There you go, got your 10, and then I add 3.
MARK: I’m just there. Sorry. It’s atomic for me.
HEDVIG: Really? You don’t divide it up at all?
DANIEL: It is 13.
MARK: No way.
HEDVIG: See? All the three of us do it differently.
MARK: I had a little book when I was about five years old, and I was writing down all the sums, tables and the multiplication tables for quite a lot of numbers till I just knew them all.
DANIEL: Wow. Baby Mark.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s far out.
HEDVIG: I struggle with 5 plus 7 or 5 plus 8. My thinking is I know that 7 plus 3 is 10, and I know that 8 plus 2 is 10, therefore, and then I can work it out.
MARK: Okay.
HEDVIG: But I can’t work it out atomically at all.
DANIEL: I just want to finish up this story by saying people are talking about languages for blah. It’s for thinking. It’s for communicating. Hey, yeah, it is for those things. You know what else it’s for? It’s for having fun with. It’s for thinking about. It’s for showing emotion. It’s for showing group alignment. It’s for showing our individual specialness. How about languages for all those things?
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Because we’ve been doing those things for a long time.
MARK: I absolutely think that’s true very much that… everything else, it’s like saying, what are our hands for? It’s like, whatever you can use your hand for. If it helps you survive and reproduce, that’s brilliant as far as evolution is concerned.
DANIEL: What is a mountain for? You know, whatever you want to do with the mountain, right. Maybe mining, maybe climbing around, maybe just ignoring it. I don’t know. For means there’s some kind of intended purpose. I don’t think there is an intended purpose.
HEDVIG: No. But you could argue that something that it is used more often for might have an impact on how it works. And if you want to know how it works, it’s good. If you have a hay fork, you might want to know how hay works. Even if you can also bring it to a Halloween masquerade to be the devil and torture people.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Cool.
MARK: True.
HEDVIG: Language is for a lot of things, and hands are for a lot of things. But some, they do more often than others, and that might have an impact on how they work.
DANIEL: Okay.
MARK: Yes.
DANIEL: But then in that case, we’re doing thinking a lot more than anything else.
MARK: But it’s distributional.
HEDVIG: We’re doing thinking more than communication?
DANIEL: Yeah. I spend a lot more time thinking than I do talking.
HEDVIG: Oh, do I?
MARK: Yeah, but this is if you’re a verbal thinker, Daniel, in terms of language, if you’re using language in your head, like soft talk.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And I might not be using language. I might be using mentalese or nothing. I don’t know.
MARK: Exactly. In that case, then if you’re not using language, then it doesn’t bear on this particular question about how language is evolving.
DANIEL: Yep. Yep. You got me.
HEDVIG: Whenever people say that they think in language, I try to assess if I do it or not. And I have a really hard time with it because I do think about words in my head, and I do think about sounds, but I also think about images and how things fit together. And I have a sort of almost tactile experience sometimes in my head. And also, I know multiple languages, so sometimes there are different words that come up. So, I don’t know what people mean when they say they have an internal monologue. How do they then think about a picture?
MARK: I agree with you. That’ why I find exactly the same thing, that languages… Like, if I am writing poetry, then I often think in language. But if I am trying to follow a TV program, I might be partly thinking language, partly visual, but blended. The conceptual content is blended in some fashion.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
MARK: It’s not as simple as one or the other.
DANIEL: Isn’t this stuff fascinating? This stuff is so… Aargh.
HEDVIG: It is.
MARK: Processing is the best.
DANIEL: So cool.
HEDVIG: And, Daniel, I’m so glad you invited Mark, because I used to share a corridor with Mark and talk to Mark all the time and now…
MARK: We did.
DANIEL: Same.
HEDVIG: …I almost never talk to Mark. And now, I get to… Ooh.
MARK: Yay. It was good.
DANIEL: Thanks, Diego, for sharing that story with us. Mark, you got one more news story? Let’s see what we got.
MARK: Me. I’ve got a news story. Do we know about perceptual spans in reading?
HEDVIG: Ohh.
DANIEL: This is new.
HEDVIG: Tell me. Tell me.
MARK: Yep. So, perceptual spans in reading are basically when your eyes are focused on one point on the page, how many letters to the right and how many to the left are included in what your brain is processing. And there’s an incredibly wonderful, sneaky way that people do experiments to work out the answer to this.
And that is that we can now have these little cameras that can point at your eyes and check where your eyes are pointing on a page when you’re reading. And you make people read in an experiment and you track where their eyes are pointing, and you replace what’s outside the window you’re testing with that random letters or fixed letters. And then, you see if the window’s really small, how small can I make the window without disturbing their reading speed when you ask them to read aloud?
DANIEL: So, I’m looking at the word HAPPY, but the next word might be changing depending on whether…
MARK: Might be changed all into Ks. Like, no letter other than K to the left and to the right, except this little bracket that you’re looking around where your eyes are focused.
DANIEL: Okay.
MARK: And so, it’s just in your core vision.
HEDVIG: The tricky thing about this experimental setup, and I like it, is that what you might notice is the change. So, if I’m looking at the word HAPPY and I’m on the second P and the H changes to an S, I might not have been paying so much attention to the fact that it was a H, but I might notice the movement.
MARK: I understand that. But apparently, I think they don’t find this as a problem because usually the disruption happens when it’s inside already the window.
HEDVIG: Okay.
MARK: The conscious distraction will happen when it’s inside the window of what we’re paying attention to in the reading process. And it seems to be, as far as we can tell, that there is your focal point and around it, there’s a little window to the left, and I think that’s stuff we’re still processing. We want to get a bit more clarity on that contextual information while we’re making predictions about what’s to the right, in the case of a left to right written language.
And the reason why we think that’s the case, because in English, for example, we pay attention… Let me just check here, I’ve got the numbers.
HEDVIG: Oh, English has so many things where the -le endings are all pronounced el.
MARK: Actually, our window is 15 to the right of where eye is. Fifteen letters to the right of where eyes are.
HEDVIG: Fifteen to those right, so ahead?
DANIEL: That’s huge.
MARK: And four to the left.
DANIEL: 4 to the left, 15 to the right. Okay.
MARK: So, we have a little bit of that past context, which may be just because we jumped a bit further beyond where our previous window was or maybe that we’re actually reinforcing some of that final context that we were like part of our predictive interpretation of the text, and we’re just firming that up. And then, we are making predictions related to what’s on the right and verifying them against the data we’re actually getting from the system, what our eyes are taking in. So, we’ve got this kind of 4 and 15. But what we see when we look at Hebrew and Arabic is it’s reversed because they’re reading right to left.
DANIEL: Right to left.
MARK: And so, that big window size, the big part of the span is in the forward direction to the left, whereas they have a small window of characters they’re looking at in terms of before the point where their eyes are focused. And your eyes jump from moment to moment in reading. They jump from one point to then they leap to another point and then another point in what we call saccades, these jumping movements of the eyes. And it’s really fun.
But the question is that people have thought that there’s a connection between the complexity of the characters in the language and the size of that window. The idea being that the more complex the characters, the more information they’re carrying, the smaller the window is because people can’t process too much information at once.
And what we know for example is that… we’ve done this lots of Roman alphabet languages, and we have similar sizes. But then, they looked at Tibetan, because Tibetan’s one of these nice languages where you have actually a stacked structure of letters. You have some letters are combined vertically as well as some in the linear order. So, you can get these complex hypercharacters, we could call them hypersegments. And this actually ends up resulting in a combination where we see Tibetan, they look onto the left, about three characters. But to the right, because it’s a left to right language, they only look seven to eight. So, about half the size to the right, as English speakers do in terms of number of characters, and that’s because their characters are richer. That was the explanation.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s really cool.
MARK: But can we actually have a kind of a controlled study? And this was something that’s been done in a really interesting paper that’s come out recently in Language and Cognition, just a few months ago, maybe last month, where people had looked at an already existing study that was done on simplified Chinese, and they said they got a result of saying one character to the left and three or four characters to the right.
HEDVIG: Because similarly to… I mean, not the same as but similar to Tibetan that each sign is more complex…
MARK: Exactly. That’s it.
HEDVIG: …and it’s constructed both vertically and horizontally.
MARK: Exactly. It’s basically a box of complexity, much more than we have in our English characters, the Roman Alphabet characters that we use in English and many other languages in Europe and the world. But the great thing about Chinese is you can do a controlled experiment, because same language, same pronunciation, but there’s people who use a more complicated forms of the characters. And what they show in this paper is that these people have a smaller window.
DANIEL: Ahh. It worked.
MARK: Everything else, as far as we can tell, okay, the actual dialectal pronunciation is not exactly the same in Taiwan and in Mainland China, which varies all over Mainland China, the pronunciation of Mandarin. But the actual phonemic structure of the language is the same, and the characters are a little bit more complicated, but the syntax is the same. The actual grammar is the same in these two cases, except the characters are more visually complex in the traditional characters, and they show that you end up with a smaller perceptual window in that case.
DANIEL: So, complicated characters mean…
HEDVIG: Smaller window.
DANIEL: …it shrinks your span.
MARK: which basically means that there’s a limit to how much information you can process. And if you have too much in your characters, you only get to see less of that at a time, which is really cool. If you’re designing an alphabet for a language community, think about it. Or if you’re designing a font, having an overly complicated font is not a good idea. A visually complex font is not such a great idea. And we’re fortunate to have with us someone who’s actually being paid money for designing fonts.
DANIEL: Well, me.
HEDVIG: Yes.
MARK: Haven’t we, Daniel?
DANIEL: We have. We have. I think about this all the time. Readability is also kind of what you’re used to as well. So, there’s that aspect. You get good at things. Could you tell us who did the paper and where it was published?
MARK: Sure. Authors are Pan… The surnames I’ve got here, Pan and Yan, published this year in Language and Cognition.
DANIEL: We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: Thanks for bringing us that story. That blows my mind. All right, you guys ready to rock out?
MARK: Yep.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME PLAYS]
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: That’s amazing.
MARK: Is this about pharaohs and their wives, or what’s this section about?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: This is Related or Not, our favorite game, where we try to figure out is the connection between two words etymological or merely coincidental. That theme song was given to us by Hugh. Thanks, Hugh, you’re the greatest. By the way, can I just say that playing this game with Mark around the house is hilarious because my two daughters, ages seven and five, they do this thing where they walk up to me and they say, “Dad, dad, is flour and flower related?” Like, baking flour and a bunch of flowers. And I’ve been like, “Oh, actually, I do know this one. And yes, they are, and here’s the reason why.” And Mark’s been like, “Are you sure about that?”
[LAUGHTER]
MARK: I was suspicious of that one.
DANIEL: He’s been giving me the Mark look. Yup, I know the Mark look. So, you can expect that look a few times during this game.
MARK: I think it’s going to happen.
DANIEL: I think it’s going to happen. So, here are three pairs that sound the same, but only one pair is related. Hedvig, time to get pen and paper, if you’ve got it.
HEDVIG: Okay, pen and paper. Hold on.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I’ve got paper. I’m getting pen. Okay.
DANIEL: So once again, I’m going to give you three pairs of words. Only one pair are two words that are related to each other. And these all sound the same. So, this is in alphabetical order.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Okay, ready?
HEDVIG: Yep.
DANIEL: Number one, CANON with one N… Well, two if you count the last one. CANON, a law or when something is official. And CANNON, a gigantic gun. That’s the first pair, CANON and CANNON. Next one, LIGHT and LIGHT. LIGHT that you use to see with, bright light, and LIGHT as a feather. And the third pair, PRUNE and PRUNE. PRUNE, the tasty, sweet sort of date like thing. And PRUNE, when you clip bits of a plant to help it grow better. CANON and CANNON, LIGHT and LIGHT, PRUNE and PRUNE. They sound the same. They’re spelt the same except for the CANON one. Only one of these pairs is related. And I will say that I guessed before I knew the answer. So, I’ll tell you my guess first.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I guessed that LIGHT and LIGHT were related because photons are not very heavy and you can imagine that there’s a relationship between not heavy and something that is as not heavy as a sunbeam. So, that was my guess.
HEDVIG: I struggle with that one, LIGHT and LIGHT, because I don’t know if it’s very natural to think of the light that gets emitted from the sun as something you can weigh at all.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. You don’t know about photons. So, it’s not going to happen, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. It seems like a very difficult thing.
DANIEL: It’s a stretch. Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, I know that when you have plum trees, they can get a lot, a lot, a lot of fruit. Like, suddenly you get a year where the tree is almost falling over because there’s so much fruit, and then you might need to prune it. And that might also be true of prunes, but I don’t know.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: No. This one makes me feel all kinds of light.
DANIEL: Mark, do you have any things you’re leaning toward?
MARK: I am leaning towards the same answer as yourself, Daniel. That would be LIGHT and LIGHT. I wouldn’t say you have to go with the photon story. I’m thinking is that the connector being maybe light work, it’s easier to work when you have light.
DANIEL: Ah, that’s true.
MARK: And light is the opposite of burdensome.
DANIEL: Mmm.
MARK: If you have a light. So, I’m stretching and making metaphors and connections, but…
DANIEL: That’s what brains do.
MARK: …I would have to do the same for the others as well, so I kind of less of a stretch with that one.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig what do you think?
HEDVIG: The first one, we’re all just throwing out, or no one’s considering CANON and CANNON?
DANIEL: Right.
MARK: Do you know, I am very tempted to say, “This must be the one, because they’re spelled differently.”
DANIEL: Perversity.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
MARK: Like the FLOUR and FLOWER one.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: I’m going to guess because the other two guess, LIGHT and LIGHT, I need to be different. I have the opposite of conformity. I’m going to pick PRUNE and PRUNE.
DANIEL: All right. Well, I will tell you, Mark, that we are both wrong. It was Diego that gave us LIGHT and LIGHT. Here’s the story. Bright light seems to come from Proto-Germanic *leuhtą. It goes to a Proto-Indo-European root, *lewk, meaning light or brightness. The not heavy light comes from a different Proto-Indo-European root, h₁lengʷʰ-, meaning not heavy or having little weight. But there is something very interesting. LIGHT, as in light blue. Okay, this is where you redeem yourself. Do you think that LIGHT, as in light blue, is that related to the kind of light that illuminates things, or is it related to the kind of light that isn’t heavy?
MARK: It’s the heavy one.
DANIEL: It’s the heavy one?
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s the one that isn’t heavy. And that reminded me of light and heavy varieties of languages. So, thanks Diego for that one. Okay, it’s time to pick a different one, Mark.
HEDVIG: That’s weird.
MARK: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Do you want CANON and CANNON or PRUNE and PRUNE?
MARK: I want to go with CANON and CANNON. I don’t have good reasons. I just think the spelling is there to throw us off, and I think there is this sound connection.
DANIEL: Okay. And, Hedvig, a la Monty Hall problem, I’m going to offer you a chance to switch. Do you want to stick with PRUNE and PRUNE or switch to CANON and a CANNON?
HEDVIG: I’m going to stick with PRUNE and PRUNE.
DANIEL: PRUNE and PRUNE is not related. James on our Discord gave us that one. The fruit, James says, goes back to proûmnon in Greek, which just means plum. That’s just what they called it. Whereas the gardening sense goes back to French provigner, which is of unknown origin, probably relates to PREEN. But OED says prooignier — I’m saying that very wrong — roignier means to gnaw or to chew. So, it could be preening, could be chewing. But either way, PRUNE and PRUNE, not related.
The related one’s given to us by coconut on our Discord. CANON and CANNON, they both go back to canna, Latin canna, a reed or a tube, like cane. Except that a cannon — that’s augmentative, the -on — means it’s just a really huge friggin’ tube that gigantic cannonballs come from. And that which is CANON is a proclamation, which is like a rule or a standard or a way of measuring. You know how we say that’s a pretty high bar to clear? That bar…
MARK: What’s the CANON?
DANIEL: The meaning jumped from the ruler to the rule. So, CANON and CANNON, related. Thanks, coconut. And thanks to Diego and once again to James.
HEDVIG: So, it’s related to the word in CANNELLONI and…
DANIEL: Yes, very much. Okay, Hedvig, you had one for us.
HEDVIG: I do. So, I got this one from Pontus Welin.
DANIEL: Good old Pontus.
HEDVIG: And he posited this one, and I think I made a guess, but I’ve forgotten which one I guessed. I know which ones Steve guessed. So, you can get that one, if you want. So, the word, mall, like where you go shopping and get smoothies.
DANIEL: A mall.
HEDVIG: A mall. Is that related to one of these three words? MAIL, like the thing you get letters with. MALLET, the thing you bonk someone on the head with.
DANIEL: I do.
HEDVIG: Or MINGLE, the thing you do at a reception where you stand around with a drink in your hand and talk to people.
MARK: What a great question.
DANIEL: I thought you were going to say MAUL, to turn somebody into meat.
MARK: MAUL.
HEDVIG: I can look that one up while you guys guess.
DANIEL: Okay, dang it. Semantically, I want to say that MINGLE is the closest one for those.
MARK: Yeah. Me too.
DANIEL: Why would it be related to MALLET? Why? Why? Why would it be related to MALLET? No, I’m throwing that one out.
MARK: Well, I don’t know. I’m going to say MALLET.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
MARK: Because, I mean, I can see a connection, but obviously you just make up stories. I can make up a story of, like, malls are kind of boxy-shaped things, and the head of mallet is a boxy-shaped thing, as opposed to a hammer, which is much more slender and solid.
DANIEL: But a mall is a big place where there’s lots of activity, and that is the kind of place where you’d see a lot of mail. So, I’m going MAIL.
MARK: [LAUGHS] Are you?
DANIEL: Yeah, we’re both leaving MINGLE out in the cold.
MARK: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s not MINGLE. Can’t be MINGLE.
MARK: Philologically, I think you can be, but.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: All right, I. Let’s hear it.
HEDVIG: So, when I heard Mark speak, I realised that I had guessed mingle and Steve had guessed mallet purely out of I think contrarian. Like, this can’t be that one, so it’s got to be that one. And he was right. It was mallet.
DANIEL: Mark was right.
MARK: Yay.
HEDVIG: So here it gets a little bit complicated. So, I verified this via Etymonline. So, mallet is a small wooden hammer, and it ultimately comes from a proto-Indo-European root, which gets to mele, which is to crush and grind.
DANIEL: Oh, I’ve been to the mall at Christmas. I can see the crushing and grinding. Yeah, no, that’s fine.
HEDVIG: Well, do you know what Pall-Mall is? This is the key thing.
MARK: Aah.
DANIEL: I’ve heard of pell-mell, but I think I have done this one, but go ahead.
HEDVIG: What is that, then?
MARK: Do you mean the place in London? Or do you mean, like Daniel’s saying, to run in a furious fashion.
DANIEL: To run pell-mell with your arms and legs flailing, is that what we’re talking about?
HEDVIG: No. Maybe it’s related to what I’m talking about, but I’ve never heard of that.
MARK: You’re talking about the place in London?
HEDVIG: Pall-mall or palle-malle is a game that is a little bit like croquet. Once popular game, played with a wooden ball in a kind of smooth alley boarded in each side. So, like a bowling alley…
MARK: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: …in which the ball was struck with a mallet.
MARK: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: And there you go. And then, we get long, flat space, and then we get the mall, as in tree-lined promenade space. Like the mall in front of the… Is it the White House or somewhere in Washington? They love talking about the mall.
DANIEL: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: And then, it goes from that like a walking promenade. And then later, we get mall, shopping mall.
MARK: Oh, that’s amazing.
DANIEL: Nice going, Mark. You got that one. Thank you. That’s cool.
HEDVIG: Thank you to Pontus. I thought that was really fun. I really enjoyed that.
DANIEL: Thanks, Pontus. Affectionately known around the show as moon-moon.
MARK: Okay.
DANIEL: Thank you both for playing. This has been a lot of fun and thanks to everybody who has suggested things. If you want to give those to us, do it on our discord or hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here with Dr Adam Schembri, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Two-time guest, returning champion.
ADAM SCHEMBRI: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thanks for come and hang…
ADAM: When was the last time actually?
DANIEL: It was on Talk the Talk back in like 2018. It was about sign language gloves.
ADAM: Right. Oh, okay, that issue.
DANIEL: Yeah, that was a while ago, wasn’t it?
ADAM: Yeah. I don’t need to talk about that anymore because there are several great articles… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, good.
ADAM: …that really summarised that issue really well and about how nobody consulted any Deaf people when they came up with this idea.
DANIEL: How about that?
ADAM: Yeah. And nobody thought about, okay, so you’ve got one-way communication happening, something that is potentially translating what someone’s signing into spoken English. But then, what happens in the other direction?
DANIEL: Nothing!
ADAM: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Absolutely nothing happens. Is this tech getting better? Is it getting to the point where they’re starting to…? Okay, so the problem with sign language gloves: handshape is only one aspect of signed language. And I think we’re getting into some of our questions here. But there are now some AI projects that are looking at facial expression, head tilt, movement, all the other parameters of signed language.
ADAM: Right.
DANIEL: Is this getting better?
ADAM: Yeah. From what I’ve seen, some of the signing avatars are looking really amazingly realistic.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: So, a lot of that work is progressing really well. It’s not work that I must admit that I keep an eye on myself. But a colleague that works with me at the University of Birmingham, Neil Fox, a Deaf colleague, he’s written a paper with Bencie Woll and Kearsy Cormier, two hearing colleagues of mine, also from the UK, about issues to do with technology for sign languages and how best to go about it, how to involve the Deaf community, how to consult with Deaf people, bring on Deaf people as coresearchers.
Another Deaf researcher that’s done a lot of work in this area is Maartje De Meulder, a Deaf academic originally from Belgium. She’s done some great work in this as well. Joseph Hill, a Deaf American academic, wrote a paper about signing gloves specifically, and why they’re really not a great idea. So, yeah, I can certainly recommend work that people should look at in this domain, but it’s not something that I work on very much myself.
DANIEL: Okay, we will have links on our…
ADAM: I can give you the references for all of those. Yeah.
DANIEL: It’ll be on our website, becauselanguage.com. So, you’re here for a conference?
ADAM: That’s right. Sociolinguistic Symposium 25.
DANIEL: Nice. Where is your research taking you these days?
ADAM: Right, so I’m actually working on a big project funded by the European Research Council called SignMorph. It’s basically a project that’s investigating whether the concept of sociolinguistic typology, which is a theory put forward by Peter Trudgill, a British sociolinguist, whether that in any way can help us understand the situation, the structure and use of sign languages.
Now, sociolinguistic typology, as the name suggests, is about bringing two areas that I’ve always been interested in, linguistic typology and sociolinguistics together. And it’s looking at, okay, so is there a relationship between the social structure of different language communities and the structure of the languages they use? So, this has been an area that’s become quite a hot topic of research, particularly in language evolution, but also in typology. And we’re trying to look at whether this applies to sign languages, where we’re in particular focusing on three aspects of sign languages that I think make them different from spoken languages. Obviously, the first one is sign languages are visual-gesture languages, they’re primarily visual-gestural. So, spoken languages are also visual-gestural. You get co-speech gesture.
DANIEL: I do gesture.
ADAM: Right. Yep. [LAUGHS] But the difference is that sign languages are primarily visual-gestural languages. Also, some linguists considered sign languages to be relatively young languages. So, this is the idea that specific named sign languages can be tied to the emergence, particularly, of the first Deaf schools for Deaf children.
So, this is the classic kind of… I hope some of your listeners are familiar with the Nicaraguan Sign Language case, okay, which is quite well known in linguistics. So, in Nicaragua, there wasn’t really a Deaf community or a shared sign language before the establishment of the first school for Deaf children in the 1970s. And that brought together Deaf kids who’d previously been isolated and probably home sign users using sign languages within their own families, brought them together to create a new community. And while the teachers were busy trying to teach them to lipread and write and read in Spanish, the Deaf kids had other ideas…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. [LAUGHS]
ADAM: …and were creating a new language, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
ADAM: So, this Nicaraguan Sign Language case is quite well known, and linguists have been working with that community since the 1980s to document how this sign language has emerged and changed over time.
But it’s probably the case that this Nicaraguan story is the same story for a lot of sign languages. So Auslan, as the majority sign language of the Australian Deaf community, is historically related to BSL, British Sign Language. And we think a similar story occurred for BSL once the first schools were established in the late 18th century, from about 1760 in the UK, bringing together Deaf people for the first time.
But we do know that there is a tradition of sign language use in the UK that predates the establishment of the first schools. We do have documentation of some signs that were used by Deaf people before that time. And some of them, amazingly, are still used in Auslan and BSL today.
We have a book from 1648 by a hearing writer called John Bulwer. He dedicated the book to two Deaf brothers that he was acquainted with, and he talked about sign languages in this book. And some of the signs that he identified in this book, such as thumbs-up for GOOD, pinky finger extended for BAD, and then other signs like this [SIGNS] for CONGRATULATE, where you create alternating circling motion with the GOOD handshape for CONGRATULATE. And CRITICISE, [SIGNS] you do the same thing with the extended pinky. So those signs are documented from 1648, and they’re still used in Auslan and BSL today.
DANIEL: Wow! Okay.
ADAM: So, obviously when we say that sign languages like BSL are young compared to spoken languages like English…
DANIEL: That we know of.
ADAM: That we know of. It’s hard to really… So, it’s a debatable kind of question, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
ADAM: But certainly, you could say that modern BSL probably dates from the establishment of the first schools in the late 18th century. So, that would make, obviously, modern BSL as a variety younger than Modern English.
DANIEL: Okay. And then, we have the sociolinguistics side where we think that languages sort of just trundle along, but actually what happens is we are social beings and we’re always shifting styles. I say DOIN’ sometimes and GOIN’, and sometimes I say DOING and GOING, depending on who I’m talking to. And you’re saying that this is a thing for sign languages as well.
ADAM: Yes. So, the third part of the picture that we’re looking at in sign, we’re looking at sign languages as visual-gestural languages. Sign languages as relatively young languages. And the third part is the ecology of signing communities, which is unique to signing communities. It’s partly a bad-news story in the sense that years of oppression of sign languages and the denial of access to sign languages in countries like Australia and the UK mean that there is a proportion of the adult Deaf population, signing Deaf population, that have experienced language deprivation. So, these are Deaf kids who grew up into Deaf adults. Their parents and their schooling focused only on speech.
DANIEL: Oralism.
ADAM: Yeah, oralism…
DANIEL: Yeah.
ADAM: …initially. And in many cases, because… I mean, lots of people are really shocked to find out this, that through most of the 20th century in Australia and the UK, sign languages were not used in Deaf education, and the focus was exclusively on the development of spoken language skills.
DANIEL: They thought it would harm the Deaf kids.
ADAM: Yes. There was a complete misconception that sign languages weren’t real languages, that they would interfere with the development of spoken language skills in Deaf children. We now know that it’s actually completely the opposite. Okay? That, in fact, Deaf kids who have exposure to sign languages from as early as possible actually will develop better skills in English. It makes total sense from what we know about bilingualism and…
DANIEL: Our brains handle signed language the same as spoken languages.
ADAM: Right. So, you give kids language and then they can learn other languages, but they have to have a language to start with, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
ADAM: So, entirely unsurprising. But unfortunately, because in Australia and the UK, you’ve got this perception that sign languages weren’t languages. You’ve also got the monolingual mindset, which many sociolinguists have talked about in these countries. The idea that any kind of second or third or additional language will interfere with the development of English.
This happened to me in my own case. My grandparents started to speak a little bit in Maltese and also French because they were two languages that my Maltese grandparents knew. So, when I was being looked after by my grandmother when I was a toddler, she was doing lots of code switching between English, French, and Maltese, and my mother stopped her from doing that because unfortunately, my monolingual Australian mother was labouring under the misapprehension that this would interfere with my English language skills. So, that’s very common as well.
So, what that means is that in the signing Deaf community in Australia and the UK, you’ve got a huge range of language experience amongst Deaf people. So, you’ve got, in some cases, a minority of Deaf people who come from Deaf families. So, families in which the gene for deafness has been passed down over multiple generations. And those Deaf children, they get sign language from birth. And so, they are first language signers.
But most Deaf people are born to hearing parents, and most hearing parents don’t learn to sign. So, Deaf people from hearing families encounter sign languages at all different stages of their life. A proportion of Deaf people encounter it when they first go to school, and they meet other Deaf kids. Some of them will encounter it later on in their school experience. Some of them will only come into contact with the signing Deaf community after they’ve left school as young adults. So, there’s a huge range of language acquisition patterns in the Deaf community from Deaf people who have acquired Auslan or BSL or another sign language as a late first language and have experienced some degree of language deprivation, right through to Deaf people from multigenerational signing families.
DANIEL: And then, these people get together.
ADAM: Then, these people get together. And the question is that the majority of signing Deaf adults aren’t from Deaf families. So, we think it might be as many as 95% of the Deaf community in Australia and the UK that aren’t from signing Deaf families. So, have a more varied language experience.
DANIEL: Yeah, because they’ve gotten their input from their parents who are learners.
ADAM: Right. Or they’ve got them from their peers. So, you’ve got something called horizontal transmission rather than vertical. So, they’ve learned sign language from other Deaf kids at their school or from all different kinds of ways. Huge variation in language acquisition patterns.
DANIEL: Wow.
ADAM: So, then the idea is, okay, so only in signing Deaf communities like in Australia and the UK, do you get this incredible diversity of language experiences. So, how does that impact on the structure of the language as well? Because one of the claims of sociolinguistic typology is, for example, that English grammar has changed over time because of repeated experiences through its history in which adult second language learners of English have had a huge impact on the grammar.
DANIEL: Okay. Like French and Latin and things like that.
ADAM: So, if you look at a lot of the big languages, the killer colonial languages in the world, you see similar patterns in terms of grammatical change. A movement away from very rich morphologies to kind of more syntactic kinds of means of, for example, representing argument structure.
DANIEL: Instead of using suffixes, we’ll just plop words next to each other.
ADAM: Yes, yes. So, there seems to be something going on there, although there’s a lot of evidence and counterevidence for this claim. For example, there have been studies that have looked at the relationship between nominal case marking and numbers of second language speakers and found a kind of relationship that big languages with lots of second language speakers tend to not have nominal case marking. But there’s also evidence… Recently, there’s also other papers that have come out and claimed that there’s no clear relationship between morphological change and social structures. So, this is still an ongoing area of debate and quite a really interesting and exciting issue in linguistics at the moment…
DANIEL: Gosh.
ADAM: …looking at this. Because, as I said, there’s evidence and counterevidence, and it’s not sure where we’re going to end up.
DANIEL: And this is where you come in.
ADAM: And this is where we come in because I was like, “Okay, so here we have an example of sign languages that are…” We would think, because of the nature of the social structure of signing communities that they would be primed to be languages that would be more readily learnable.
DANIEL: You’d think. That would be sensible.
ADAM: Yeah. And so, we’ve started to investigate this but investigating it kind of indirectly. So, we have just got some results. We’ve done an online study of BSL morphology in which we’ve shown examples of morphological marking in BSL to hearing non-signers and ask them to try and guess what the meanings of those morphological markings are. So, this is a new study. No one’s ever tried this before. There’s been lots of iconicity studies of individual lexical items in sign languages.
DANIEL: Iconicity.
ADAM: Right. Yes. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s put a pin in that.
ADAM: Okay.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about this before. Sometimes, people think that signed languages are just pantomime. As I remember you telling me, there was a kind of a thing where sign language researchers would be like, “It’s not iconic.” And now, we’ve kind of come back and said, “Actually, you know what? There’s a lot of iconicity.” There’s a lot of iconicity in spoken language. And that’s where the sign looks like the thing.
ADAM: Right. The sign looks like your idea of the thing.
DANIEL: Yes.
ADAM: How you construe, what you think is a salient feature of the referent really influences what kind of iconicity you get.
DANIEL: For example, NURSE in Auslan.
ADAM: Well, NURSE in Auslan represents the old…
DANIEL: Well, that’s a hat.
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s pretty iconic.
ADAM: It’s very iconic, but you don’t see nurses wearing this much anymore. So, it’s like NUN, okay. Nun also represents the habit. But nuns don’t wear habits so much anymore. One of the best examples of this is POLICE. Okay, the sign for POLICE OFFICER in Auslan is like this [SIGNS]. And we think based on 19th century photos…
DANIEL: Let me just describe what you’re doing. You got two fingers out. And it looks like you’re stroking your watch.
ADAM: Yeah. So, there’s two signs actually in Auslan. There’s one sign in which the whole hand wraps around the wrist several times, and there’s another one where the index and middle finger kind of represent two lines on your wrist. Now, what’s really interesting is if you look at 19th century photos of police uniforms, they often have stripes or a white band on the sleeve of the uniform.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
ADAM: So, we think that one possible explanation for the signs for POLICE OFFICER in Auslan today reflects 19th century aspects of police uniforms. But of course, police officers don’t wear this kind of uniform anymore, but the signs still do. And what’s really interesting is that now when people learn Auslan, they think those signs have something to do with handcuffs.
DANIEL: I was going to say handcuffs!
ADAM: Right? So, there’s this wonderful thing that you get in sign languages where sometimes the historical origins of the iconicity of signs is not remembered by the community and new interpretations arise, like kind of post hoc explanations based on iconicity. People always…
DANIEL: It’s folk etymology.
ADAM: Yep, it’s folk etymology. You get this wonderful case where people think that the signs are associated with handcuffs, but I suspect that they come from the 19th century police officer uniforms that you can see photos of. You just google “Australian or British 19th century police officer uniforms.” That’s what I did [LAUGHS] and whole photos will come up and some of them will show these stripes or these bands on the sleeves of the police officers.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. Well, last night, I put out the call to my Discord patrons on the old Discord. I said, “I’m talking to Dr Adam Schembri pretty soon, does anybody have any questions?”
[LAUGHTER]
ADAM: And you got quite a few, I heard?
DANIEL: They unloaded on me. They’ve got tons. So, we’re just going to… Let’s try to take these kind of in as little detail as we can, unless you really want to.
ADAM: Okay.
DANIEL: Unless you feel it. We’re going to go… Because it’s a lot.
ADAM: Well, you’ve already heard me talking at great length this morning. So, you know that I don’t do little detail very well.
DANIEL: Okay, cool.
ADAM: So, I’ll try my best.
DANIEL: Okay. PharaohKatt asks…
ADAM: Otherwise, you’ll be here all day.
DANIEL: I know, we don’t want to… Well, I would love to. I got time if you’ve got time. PharaohKatt asks, “I’m always fascinated by signs that are the same in two different sign languages that mean different things.”
ADAM: Right. Okay. Yes.
DANIEL: “Like, WHAT and WHERE signs are swapped in Auslan and American Sign Language. Is this the equivalent of a false cognate or is something different happening here?”
ADAM: That’s a really good question. I don’t know the answer to that. It’s interesting that, as you said… Well, the WHERE and the WHAT gesture seems very similar to a general palms-up gesture. Sorry, the WHERE and WHAT. So, WHERE in BSL and WHAT in ASL consist of like the whole hand, palm facing upwards, moving side to side.
DANIEL: Got my hands out, moving side to side.
ADAM: So, the hands alternate moving side to side.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: BSL also does a circular motion. But anyway, there is a form of BSL WHERE and ASL WHAT that are pretty much identical. Now, probably these two signs have developed from in lots of sign languages, you get the palms-up sign or gesture being used as some kind of interrogative.
DANIEL: Yeah. This is just how you ask a question.
ADAM: Yeah. So, it’s how you ask a question. So, we can explain how those two signs ended up as ‘wh’ words in sign languages, but they just happen to go on different paths. But it is really interesting that WHAT and WHERE in… WHAT in BSL and Auslan is the raised index finger with your palm facing outwards being shaken side to side. That’s WHAT in BSL and Auslan, but it’s WHERE in American sign language.
DANIEL: Oh.
ADAM: And again, it’s probably something this could come from some kind of pointing gesture again that you might use.
DANIEL: Wow.
ADAM: It kind of makes what pointing to which thing or…
DANIEL: Yes. Which direction.
ADAM: Where pointing where, which direction.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ADAM: And eventually conventionalising over time into that, kind of. So, you can explain that through the relationship to the co-speech gestures or the emblematic gestures that are used in English-speaking communities, how these signs have ended up as ‘wh’ words in sign languages. But it’s really fascinating that they’ve kind of done exactly the opposite meaning.
DANIEL: That’s amazing.
ADAM: So, yeah. I think you can explain how these two particular forms ended up in sign languages, but it is really interesting that they ended up with opposite meanings, but you can do a story to explain how that happened.
DANIEL: And that makes sense. I mean, we have contronyms. This isn’t exactly a good example of a contronym, but it’s just how… When you have a word that means a certain thing, it can fork. And that’s just how we do it.
ADAM: Right.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: And also, that same sign, the…
DANIEL: Wiggle finger.
ADAM: …index finger being waved in many European sign languages is a negator.
DANIEL: Well, that makes sense. [SIGNS] No, no, no.
ADAM: Yeah. Again, related to the emblem for NO that is used in many European countries. So, in some sign languages, that’s a negator.
DANIEL: Okay. Sean asks, “Ooh, I have a question. So, to my knowledge, sign languages are grammatically different to the spoken languages where they come from.” This is at least true for BSL and spoken English. They are different. I know this much.
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, If I say in English, “Monkeys like bananas.” In Auslan, I could do that many different ways. I can say, “bananas, monkeys like.”
ADAM: You could. You could. But the most default word order would be SVO.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: But you can move that around. You can move the order of those signs around. The order is more flexible. But generally, you would mark orders using, for example, brow raise. So, if you wanted to say, “It’s bananas that monkeys like,” then you would sign, “Bananas,” with raised eyebrows, and then, “Monkey like,” okay.
DANIEL: It’s bananas that monkey… Well, I can do that in spoken English too.
ADAM: Exactly.
DANIEL: All right.
ADAM: Right. So, it’s very similar to the strategies used in spoken English.
DANIEL: Thank you. I didn’t know that.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But obviously, the precise details of the grammar are different. So, you don’t have to say, “It’s bananas that monkeys like.” You would say, “Bananas monkeys like.”
DANIEL: “Bananas monkeys like.” Sean continues, “But I’m wondering, do sign languages usually try to stay grammatically similar to the spoken languages for that region, or can they diverge quite a lot?” And Diego follows up with, “To what degree do oral languages influence sign language?” And I guess my question is: which has a stronger pull? The spoken language that is near it or other sign languages that are around?
ADAM: The spoken language definitely has an influence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that SVO is kind of like the default sign order that you find in BSL, Auslan, ASL although you can get other orders, obviously. But there have been studies of the Auslan corpus by Trevor Johnston that, when you do have two arguments in a clause, SVO is the more common construction. But where they are different is the fact that unlike English, they are huge argument drop or pro-drop languages. So actually, the most common clause construction in the Auslan corpus study was verb only. It was verb only. So, the arguments like the subject and the object drop. Now, you can do this because some verbs have ways of incorporating information about the argument in their specific structure.
For example, there’s a subclass of verbs called depicting verbs in which the handshape represents the class of referent. You would use one handshape for a person moving, another one for a vehicle moving, another one for a small animal moving. So, you get a handshape in that, called a classifier handshape by many researchers, within those constructions that represent some aspects of the referent. So, you don’t need to repeat the noun to refer to the referent because there’s some information in the verb.
Another way is indicating verbs which use space. That’s where you allocate particular parts of the signing space to particular reference. And then, you direct the verb from, for example, the location on your right that you’ve associated with the subject to the location on the left that you’ve associated with the object.
DANIEL: For example, in spoken English, if I want to say, “The man crossed the room,” I have to use five words to do that. But you’re saying some of those elements are kind of optional because I’m doing handshapes that indicate the man and I’m moving to a direction that’s across the…
ADAM: Yeah. So, within a discourse, if you’ve established that you’re talking about a man in a room, within previous clauses, then you could describe the man crossing that room with a single verb sign.
DANIEL: Crossed.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this is something that seems to be quite common to BSL, Auslan, and ASL. So, all sign language used in English speaking communities. So, you get both an influence from English. So, there tends to be SVO word order when you put in a subject and an object, but you also get a huge amount of argument drop. So, dropping of subjects, dropping of objects, because there are devices within the sign language for maintaining referents so that you still understand who is being talked about by other strategies.
And another strategy is called constructed action, in which the body enacts certain features of one of the referents. So, there are a whole range of strategies that signers use to keep track of referents that allow verb only clauses, for example, to be extremely common.
DANIEL: Okay, so it sounds like…
ADAM: So, it’s… both are true.
DANIEL: It’s both.
ADAM: It’s both.
[LAUGHTER]
ADAM: But in terms of other sign languages influence, well, that’s a really interesting question I think we need to do more work on that. But certainly, my colleague, Marta Morgado, who’s a Deaf colleague from Portugal working on the SignMorph project with me, is currently looking at the influence of international sign on Portuguese Sign Language, her first sign language. There’s been work on this topic. So, how sign languages influence each other, and it’s often most obvious lexically. So, you get borrowing from other sign languages. In Australia, we have quite a bit of borrowing from American Sign Language.
DANIEL: Yeah, as always.
ADAM: Yep. But it’s really interesting because Auslan and BSL are historically related. But you can see interesting examples of pairs of signs in BSL and Auslan, where the Auslan option is a borrowed sign from American Sign Language and the BSL one isn’t, and that’s primarily because we know that, for example, many leaders of the Australian Deaf community before university education became available to them in Australia. Once the Disability Discrimination Act was passed in the 1990s, universities were basically required to provide sign language interpreting for Deaf students and there was a huge growth of Deaf students because there’d been a backlog in the 1990s. Lots of universities experienced this huge growth of Deaf students once the legislation had been passed.
Prior to that, a lot of Deaf activists, some of my friends, for example, went… Some Deaf people that I know in Sydney went and worked or studied at Gallaudet University in the US, which is the Deaf university in the US. So, this is still quite common that Deaf people from all over the world go to Gallaudet for an education. And what that means is they have to acquire American Sign Language. So, they acquired American Sign Language, and then they came back to Australia with some things that they learned about in American Sign Language and those things stuck.
For example, SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETER in Auslan is the same as the sign or similar to the sign used in American Sign Language, because the whole idea of the professionalisation of sign language interpreting was something that only developed in the 1970s and 1980s here in Australia, when the first certified… It became possible to become a certified Auslan interpreter.
And so, there was a lot of influence from the American system they’d already set up, certification of American Sign Language interpreters. I think they did that in the 1960s. So, they already had an established system in the US. So, I guess the idea of this certification of sign language interpreters and the sign for SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETER came from…
DANIEL: Ah, no wonder that stuck.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. So, that kind of stuck.
DANIEL: All right.
ADAM: Whereas in BSL, there’s a different sign for INTERPRETER that’s not related to the ASL sign. So, they developed their own sign. So, yes, there’s a lot of lexical influences from other sign languages, and some sign languages in particular, American Sign Language are very powerful on the world stage in terms of their influence. But also, within many parts of the world, there’s also a contact variety called International Sign.
DANIEL: What is International Sign?
ADAM: International Sign is a highly variable contact variety that results from Deaf mobility. Again, if you want to understand International Sign, there are a whole host of videos and films about International Sign made by Annelies Kusters, who is actually one of the keynote presenters at Sociolinguistics Symposium. A Deaf professor of sociolinguistics. She did a big project called MobileDeaf, which is about international Deaf mobility, and she looked in particular at international signs. So, there’s a lot of material you can find online. Again, I can give you references to Annelies’ work. I think she’s done a series of about six films on international Deaf contact.
But yeah, one of the most interesting things about this is this has resulted in this International Sign contact language that’s quite variable from place to place, from context to context, but which is very successful, a means that Deaf people use to communicate across language barriers.
And the thing about it, of course, is that from a lifetime experience of communicating with us hearing people, Deaf people are actually extremely good at overcoming language barriers. So, it’s kind of weird that people often say, when they find out that there are lots of sign languages around the world, some hearing people go, “Oh, but that’s such a shame.”
DANIEL: “Why don’t they standardise?”
ADAM: And you go, “Well, no, actually…!”
[LAUGHTER]
ADAM: “Actually, Deaf people are amazingly good at communicating across language barriers.” And there is a system of International Sign that has developed as a result of language contacts. But International Sign itself is influencing individual sign languages. So, this is what my colleague, Marta Morgado, is looking at. She’s looking at the influence of International Sign on younger Deaf people in Portugal. Because younger Deaf people use Instagram Live and lots of other types of social media that allow you to share videos, and there’s a lot of international communication across different signing communities that uses International Sign, and some of this International Sign, she’s finding younger Deaf signers in Portugal thinks really cool, and they incorporate it into their Portuguese Sign Language.
DANIEL: Oh, my god. This is so great.
ADAM: Yeah. So, she’s done some great research that talks about Portuguese Sign Language version 2.0, which is what the young people are calling this new variety of Portuguese Sign Language, which is influenced by more international context. So, we’re seeing this happening. I’m talking specifically about research on Portuguese Sign Language because this is what Marta is working on. But we know that this is the case for many, many signing communities that are increasingly using social media to communicate internationally.
DANIEL: Ready for the next one?
ADAM: Yep.
DANIEL: Diego asks, “Are there many signed language isolates?”
ADAM: Quite a lot, yes. Yes, there are.
DANIEL: A higher percentage than spoken?
ADAM: Really hard to say because the whole area of sign language families is a huge area of… well, underresearched areas.
DANIEL: Do you know what? I didn’t do a good job of explaining that question because somebody might not know what an isolate is.
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, an isolate is, for example, Japanese and Korean are typically considered a couple of isolates where they don’t seem to relate to any other living languages they were once part of…
ADAM: Basque in Europe, for example.
DANIEL: Basque is a great example. Once part of a huge language family, all the other branches have died out, leaving only that one. It doesn’t seem to be related to any other language that we know. You’re saying there are lots of sign language isolates?
ADAM: We really don’t have a good answer to this question but it’s quite clear that there are some families of sign languages that fit into similar patterns that we understand from spoken language families. For example, the sign languages related historically to BSL, so Auslan, New Zealand Sign Language, I can talk confidently about those three varieties being historically related because we know the history. How white settlers took British Sign Language, brought it to Australia and took it to New Zealand. So, we’ve got the historical documents. We can see the lexical and grammatical similarities between these languages.
There’s a similar story for Taiwan Sign Language, Korean Sign Language, and Japanese Sign Language. Again, we know that the schools in Korea and Taiwan were established by Japanese educators, and Japanese Sign Language was taken to those countries. And these two families are completely unrelated to each other. But it seems quite clear that these sign languages fall into a family-like pattern that we know from spoken languages.
But when it comes to other sign languages, the picture is really unclear. There are lots of sign languages that have been influenced by LSF, Langue Des Signes Française, French Sign Language, but we don’t have a clear picture of how that has worked. So, there are LSF-influenced sign languages in Africa, for example, in West Africa. But there are also sign languages influenced by American Sign Language in West Africa. And American Sign Language itself has some historical connections to French Sign Language, LSF.
DANIEL: I read that, yeah.
ADAM: So, it’s a very complex picture, and we don’t really have enough data to make these kinds of generalisations about all of these sign language families. But it’s also clear that there are lots of sign languages that have developed independently.
DANIEL: Yeah. I mean, home signs.
ADAM: Yes. For example, in Bali, we have Kata Kolok, which is a sign language used in one community in Northern Bali. This community is a village of about 3000 people, where there’s been a high proportion of deafness in this community for some time. So, I think we believe the language has been around for maybe eight generations that we know of. There are about 30 to 40 Deaf people I believe in that community, which might not sound a lot, but when you think about it, that’s like over 1 in 100 people.
DANIEL: No, I’ve heard that when you get to about 20%, there comes a tipping point where, oh, everybody just goes ahead and learns both languages.
ADAM: Yeah, I don’t think it needs to be 20% in the case of sign languages. So, in Kata Kolok, we’re talking about 1% or 2% of the population that’s Deaf. But many, many hearing people, of course, have Deaf people in their family or have Deaf neighbors or no other Deaf people in the village. So, the number of hearing people who sign to varying degrees of fluency in that community is quite high.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
ADAM: So, Kata Kolok has emerged spontaneously with very little contact with other sign languages. It’s not historically related to Indonesian Sign Language, which is used in other parts of Indonesia, which has a different history. But there are many Kata Koloks around the world. We’re discovering new languages like this all the time. So, there are other sign languages like this, like Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana. Traditionally, there was a sign language called Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language in the US, which was a similar kind of situation.
So, we know that there are these so-called micro community sign languages or village sign languages, there’s various names for these kinds of sign languages which are different from Auslan, the kind of macro-community, national sign languages that Auslan is. There are these micro-community sign languages all over the world, and a lot of them seem to have developed quite independently from any other sign language.
But they haven’t developed independently from the gestural culture used in the surrounding community. So, they’re often influenced by the gestures that are used by hearing people within that community. For example, in Indonesia if you hold your five hand up and you twist it at the wrist.
DANIEL: Holding my hand up and I’m like… Yeah, okay.
ADAM: You’re twisting like you’re waving your five hand in the breeze. This is a common gesture throughout Southeast Asia for NO or a negator. And this is incorporated into many sign languages in that region that are unrelated to each other, but nevertheless, it’s incorporated into the sign languages as a negator in the same way that we talked about the waving index finger being incorporated as a negator into. So, this is why sign language families then get really complex, because there’s also gesture families.
DANIEL: There’s contact and gesture. Yeah, okay.
ADAM: There are these gesture families that we don’t really understand very well either. So, there’s all different co-speech and emblematic gestures that are used across the world, and they don’t necessarily fall into patterns that match spoken languages. For example, in both Greece and Turkey, you get the head flick backwards to mean NO. And obviously, Turkish and Greek are not related spoken languages, but there’s a gesture kind of sprachbund.
DANIEL: Yes, yes, yes.
ADAM: And so, this also can influence sign languages. So, you’ve got the gesture sprachbunds influencing sign language families. You’ve got also iconicity making signs in unrelated sign languages looking very similar because similar strategies of iconic representation are being used independently. One of the clearest examples I know is, as I said, Taiwan Sign Language is part of the Japanese Sign Language family, not historically related to BSL or Auslan.
DANIEL: Nope.
ADAM: And yet, the sign for ICE CREAM appears to be the same.
DANIEL: What is it? [LAUGHS] You’re holding a cone.
ADAM: Just motioning backwards and forwards in front of your mouth, which looks like licking an ice cream, holding and licking an ice cream. This seems to be the same in both sign languages because a similar strategy of iconic representation has been chosen. So, this is why the area of sign language families is hugely complicated.
DANIEL: This just makes my head spin.
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: There’s so much going on.
ADAM: There’s so much going on. This is why no one’s really got a clear idea about this. I said, apart from some clear examples like the British, Auslan, New Zealand Sign Language family.
DANIEL: We love those.
ADAM: Yeah, Trevor Johnston and I created an initialism, BANZSL, British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language.
DANIEL: Yeah, what’s BANZSL? I just found out about this yesterday.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. To refer to this group of sign languages but we’ve stopped using it primarily because it was widely misunderstood. This is a problem that linguists have. Sometimes, we just make up a term or a word to refer to a good… I can give you another reference. So, a paper by Nick Palfreyman and myself in the Journal of Sociolinguistics looks at this issue of naming languages, naming sign languages, and how many hearing linguists have just forged ahead and given names to sign languages without properly reflecting on the impact that this can have creating these named categories.
So, we just kind of came up with BANZSL as kind of a useful way to refer to all three sign languages at the same time. But unfortunately, the name just took off and someone wrote a Wikipedia entry saying that BANZSL was the language from which modern BSL and Auslan and New Zealand sign language have descended.
DANIEL: Oh, no. And it’s the same thing and… Oh.
ADAM: It’s all the same thing and then we got pushback. We talk about this in the article by Nick Palfreyman and myself.
DANIEL: Yup. “Who are these hearing chaps coming in and…”
ADAM: I didn’t realise that I created this monster where suddenly Deaf people from all three communities are going, “Hey, what’s this BANZSL thing? Why are you calling our sign languages by this one term?” All of the three sign languages are their own sign languages with distinct histories. And yes, so I’ve stopped using it because of obviously understandable pushback from Deaf communities saying, “Why have you just renamed these sign languages? We’ve already got names for our three varieties, thank you very much, and we’re quite happy with those.”
DANIEL: But it was a useful label when you’re talking… Mm.
ADAM: Yeah. It was a useful language to talk about shared properties between all three varieties. But unfortunately, it took on a life of its own, something that we didn’t intend.
DANIEL: Oh! “Stay in your lane here, hearing guy.”
ADAM: This is about staying in my lane, yes. And this is a problem. I mean, no, it’s a real problem that you have as a linguist, like when you’re studying previously undocumented linguistic varieties, and you might be one of the first people to do that, it can have a huge impact. So, as I was talking about the linguistics textbook that Trevor Johnston and I wrote, as I was talking to you in the car about that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yes. We know.
ADAM: We wrote it as a textbook for our course on Auslan linguistics that we were teaching at Macquarie University back then. And we had no idea, of course, that being the only book on the linguistics of Auslan that it would go on to have such a big impact on Auslan teaching.
DANIEL: It’s the Blue Book.
ADAM: Yeah. And people here call it the Blue Book, and everyone knows the book that they’re talking about. This is something that we didn’t anticipate happening, or certainly I didn’t anticipate happening. I thought, I’m busy writing a textbook for linguistic students. But of course, because there aren’t any other resources about the linguistics of Auslan available, it’s quite widely used by Auslan teachers and Auslan students. So, this is an issue for people working on language documentation about the relationship you have with the communities and making sure you stay close to the needs and the wishes of that community.
DANIEL: That’s a good lesson. And just to get back to isolates. So, it sounds like there are sign language isolates, just like there were language isolates. Spoken language isolates. See, I still do the thing. But in the case of spoken languages, it’s often because all the other branches of the tree have died out. But in signed language isolates, it sounds like the opposite. They’ve actually just sprung up.
ADAM: Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, basically, wherever a community of Deaf people begins to form, a sign language will emerge spontaneously.
DANIEL: It’s just a human propensity for language.
ADAM: It’s just… Yeah, humans want to communicate, and this is what happens. And so, this has happened in many, many parts of the world. And so, you’ve got these, what look like sign language isolates.
DANIEL: Okay. Diego has also asked, “How many, if any, linguistic features tend to be universal across signed languages?” And I’m going to guess that where we do find them, it’s because they’re iconic. That’s just a really good way to do the thing, like with ICE CREAM, or because of contact or just what do you think?
ADAM: Yeah. We can’t answer this question, so we don’t have all the data in. Okay, so…
DANIEL: What are the broad patterns? What seems to happen?
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at, for example, the sign languages that I know best, that I’m most familiar with, the sign languages that have been most documented, these, of course, are many European sign languages, American Sign Language, Auslan, etc., New Zealand Sign Language, you do get a lot of shared features, shared grammatical properties across those sign languages. So, some of the things I talked about before, the use of a particular handshape, a classifier handshape inverts to refer to a class of entities, that’s quite a widely used strategy in many documented sign languages. The use of space to show argument structure, to show who is doing what to whom.
DANIEL: This over here and that over there.
ADAM: Mary over here and John over there. Mary on my right, John on my left. And then, directing the sign ASK from the location associated with Mary to the location associated with John.
DANIEL: That makes sense. Cognitively, that’s… Yeah.
ADAM: Mary asked John. So, that strategy again is widely… But I’m not going to say these things are universal, because we don’t really know. We don’t have the data for all sign languages. There do seem to be some documented sign languages that don’t make a lot of use of the classifier handshape system. There do seem to be some sign languages where it’s been claimed that they don’t make use of space in the same way. So, we’re still very much early days in terms of what… We can certainly talk about some widely shared grammatical features.
Iconicity seems to be very powerful across all sign languages. Visual iconicity seems to be very powerful. But in terms of grammatical strategies, we can certainly talk about some grammatical principles that are widely shared across many documented sign languages and that are also present in international sign.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. Well, these things are strategies then. It reminds me of spoken languages where we say, “Oh, well, are there universals?” From a Chomsky perspective, you would say, “Oh, well, there must because it’s all part of the human language faculty.” But it seems more like there’s just a bunch of strategies and nobody uses the same pile of strategies.
ADAM: You get lumpers and splitters in linguistics. So, you get the lumpers who are kind of like the universal grammarians, who are interested in how much spoken and sign languages resemble each other. And then, you get the splitters, the language diversity guys who are interested in the differences. And very rarely, do you get people… I’m kind of interested in both, but I’m not certainly someone who thinks… I do think that if there are shared properties across the world’s spoken and signed languages, they probably relate to shared features of cognition.
DANIEL: I think so too.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. But also, in the case of sign languages, there seem to be shared quite common strategies that involve the use of visual representation like iconicity, that involve the use of space, that involve the use of the body. So, embodied kinds of representations. These are quite common across sign languages. But I think it’s really important to remember that some of these strategies are also used in co-speech gesture. That’s what’s really interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
ADAM: So, we get pointing used by speakers.
DANIEL: Yeah, we do.
ADAM: We get enactment. When we use quotative like, how often do we use a facial expression or a body enactment instead of actually directly quoting them? We say, “Oh, you know, she was like, ‘Mm.’”
DANIEL: Oh, that’s… Yeah. [LAUGHS]
ADAM: You know, frowning. Not too keen to go to the party. So, “She was like ‘Mm.’” frowning. So, a lot of these strategies are shared between signed and spoken languages.
DANIEL: As you’d expect.
ADAM: But again, we need to understand more about the multimodality of spoken languages, as well as know more about the grammatical features of different sign languages before we can really answer this question.
DANIEL: Okay, thank you. This one’s from Wolf, about sign language syntax.
MARK: Right.
DANIEL: Okay. “Over the past year, I’ve been learning some Israeli Sign Language, as well as some American Sign Language, which are actually distantly related, but very much mutually unintelligible. And I’ve noticed something interesting, a lot of reliance on forming sentences by asking a rhetorical question and then immediately answering it.” So, here’s some examples. A series of comedy videos called Animal Corner, where the host introduces each video by signing, “Hello, everyone. Here Corner animals, subject which? Lion” or some animal.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: “What’s the subject?” It’s a thing. Hebrew subtitles on the video. “Time, place where? New York.”
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, Wolf says, “I don’t have any examples from ASL off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this kind of sentence structure used there too.” Is this way more common in sign languages than it is in spoken?
ADAM: Yeah, I can’t really comment because we’d need corpus studies to really determine this. I know that in conversational BSL and Auslan, you see this strategy far less than you see it in kind of presentation genres. I think it’s very genre specific in sign languages. So, for example, in lectures or in explanations, you might get this used a lot and it’s a focusing strategy. It’s a way of focusing on the new information, for example, in a clause. So, it’s sometimes called a pseudo-cleft construction rather than a rhetorical question structure. And I’m not surprised that he’s seeing it in videos of sign language.
DANIEL: It’s a they. Wolf is a they.
ADAM: So, okay, they are seeing it in videos because that is where… So, these kinds of presentational-style genres in which information is being given, it’s very common to see this structure. But how common it is in conversational, face-to-face BSL or Auslan, it’s unclear. Certainly, one thing that’s really interesting is that lots of Auslan and BSL teachers comment on the fact that hearing students pick up on this strategy and tend to overgeneralise and use it in way more context than it would be normally used in conversational sign language. So, yeah, definitely that’s a strategy. How much it’s used within across all genres, all discourse types in sign languages, is an open question.
DANIEL: Okay, you’ve got time for a couple more quick points? PharaohKatt asks, “Are there hilarious misunderstandings between older and younger signers because of sign variation?”
ADAM: [LAUGHS] There are hilarious misunderstandings between not just older and younger signers, but signers from different regions. The thing is you’ve got regional variation in Auslan, you’ve got lots of regional variation in BSL, but fluent signers are very comfortable with this variation. So, this more often happens probably to hearing second language learners like myself. So, I might learn a particular sign for something in one particular region because, for example, in Australia or in the UK, when you go to a sign language class, you tend to be taught your local regional signs. And there are lots of regional differences in BSL and Auslan, you might learn your local signs. And then, you might go to part of the country where the same sign means something quite different. And this, of course, creates a lot of yeah misunderstanding… Not so much misunderstandings, but hilarity because…
DANIEL: Comedy. Let’s hear one. What’s a good example?
ADAM: Well, for example… The funniest examples that people often talk about in Auslan and BSL involve signs that can mean sex.
DANIEL: I knew we were going there.
ADAM: Right, or something else. So, for example, in some parts of the country in Auslan, the sign meaning SEX can also mean HUNGRY. So, okay…
DANIEL: Which makes sense, right?
ADAM: So, basic two biological drives, I guess. So, in Melbourne, the sign. This is a traditional difference between Melbourne and Sydney. But the thing is signers in both places know about this difference. So, the confusion never occurs except for people learning the language.
DANIEL: It’s like saying ROOTING for a team or something.
ADAM: Yes. Exactly. The same sign can mean I’M HUNGRY or it can mean SEX. Similarly, between BSL and Auslan, a sign in Auslan that means COCA-COLA, or in Scottish varieties of BSL means ORGANISE or ARRANGE, can In English varieties of BSL means SEX.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s hilarious.
ADAM: Unfortunately, these are… I know it’s terrible that these examples come to mind quickly, but these are the ones that of course cause the most hilarity.
DANIEL: ORGANISE and SEX being the same word, I’ll be talking about… because orgies are hard. You’ve got to do a lot of work to get them going.
ADAM: I think the case is that…
DANIEL: There’s snacks…
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. I mean, these signs, the forms… I don’t know why this sign… So, this is the sign, Coca-Cola. [SIGNS]
DANIEL: Okay. I got two hands together in L shape and I’m scissoring them.
ADAM: You’re scissoring them, yes. Why this sign means Coca-Cola in Auslan, I really don’t know.
DANIEL: Fascinating.
ADAM: But it is a sign meaning SEX in English varieties of BSL, but it also can mean other things within varieties of BSL itself. So, yeah, these are some of the examples.
DANIEL: Love it.
ADAM: The thing is in both the BSL and the Auslan communities, these examples are well known and so they only really trip up beginners, learners.
DANIEL: Of which there are a lot.
ADAM: Of which there are a lot, yes.
DANIEL: Aengryballs asks, what is the aspect of sign languages that surprised you most when you got really deep into their study? Did they have any surprises for you?
ADAM: Wow, that’s a really good question. I don’t really know how to answer that question. As a second language learner of sign languages, I think one of the things that I find most surprising is my ability to move to signing International Sign Language or American Sign Language. It seems to be easier to move between BSL and Auslan, which are historically related and which I’m most fluent in. For a long time, I trained as an Auslan English interpreter, so I was using Auslan very regularly when I was based here in Australia, working with Deaf people and using Auslan quite a lot. So, I was quite comfortable. I achieved not a reasonable level of fluency in Auslan.
And then, I moved to the UK and then I worked a lot with Deaf people there and I’ve been working with the Deaf communities there. And so, I’ve achieved… I’m doing my level 6 BSL. I’m doing a class level 6, that’s the highest level that you can do in BSL. So, I’m hoping to get my level 6 qualification in BSL, which is the highest level around. So, I’m doing a class at the moment in Birmingham. It’s great, I’m learning lots.
But what I find really difficult is shifting between BSL and Auslan. So, I’ve given a couple of presentations to the Deaf community here in Australia and it’s really super hard. Even though Auslan was my first sign language, it’s really hard to switch back into Auslan without interference from BSL. And I feel like I think I could do this better if I did it more often. I don’t move between the signing communities often enough, but it’s really tricky. I find it really tricky.
Whereas when I’m in international context and I might be using American Sign Language and I kind of have beginner to intermediate American Sign Language and beginner to intermediate kind of levels of international sign, I find it…
DANIEL: Don’t get mixed up.
ADAM: I don’t know whether it’s related to the fact that I’m a bit more fluent in BSL than Auslan than I am in these other varieties, so it takes more concentration. But I’m just constantly surprised at how bad I am at Auslan these days. Whenever I stand up and give a presentation to the Australian Deaf community, they’re like, “What’s up with your Auslan?”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Didn’t you write a book or something?
ADAM: Didn’t you write a book about it? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised because I am… These are my additional languages. My first language is English. And if I think about it… I also struggle with lexical differences in British English. You know, I forget that it’s not capsicum and it’s not eggplant. And that these things that I’m wearing over my legs are my pants. I forget that pants means underpants in the UK and these things that I’m wearing are my trousers. And the thing that I’m wearing on a hot day is called a vest, not a singlet. So, I slip up but it’s particularly with vegetables, like, I just can’t recall. I’m sorry, but what kind of word is pepper?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
ADAM: [LAUGHS] A pepper. CAPSICUM is such a useful word.
DANIEL: It is. It’s an amazing word. What about the monitor? We’ve talked about work by Mark Ellison about and Luisa Miceli about doppels. And when you want to say a word but it’s really close or it’s the same as the other word, and your brain goes, “No, dont! Don’t say that one because that’s the same. Oh! No, actually, that is the right one. Say that.”
ADAM: And I think another surprising thing about an underresearched area is proprioception. The physical feedback… is that the right word? Am I saying that right?
DANIEL: I think so.
ADAM: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I do believe so.
ADAM: As a signer, I feel myself making mistakes. I’m not necessarily looking at my hands. I’m looking at another signer. I’m looking at a Deaf person or another signer when I’m signing, but I can feel that I’ve done the wrong sign. Because I can feel my hand hitting the wrong location. I can feel my hand making the wrong handshape. I can feel that I’m messing this up.
DANIEL: Like when you’re typing.
ADAM: Yeah, when I’m signing.
DANIEL: It’s like when you’re typing and you’re like, “I know I just did that word wrong.”
ADAM: Yes, exactly. So, it’s the same thing you’re getting this sensory feedback within your own musculature and nervous system. I think it’s called proprioception.
DANIEL: Let’s go with that. For the purpose of this conversation, that is the word.
ADAM: Yes. So, there is a word.
[LAUGHTER]
There is a word for this that’s escaping me right now, but that’s a really underresearched area. And I think some researchers have begun to look at this, this kind of feedback that we get as signers. This is a surprising thing. I don’t have to see myself messing up. I know I can feel that I’ve messed up. And it makes a lot of sense because obviously signing, it involves moving specific parts of your body to specific locations and moving them in specific ways. So, you can feel your body doing that and you’re getting feedback on that, your own body’s movement and articulation. So, it makes sense.
But I think I shouldn’t be surprised as someone who has sign languages as additional languages, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am surprised that given I had a rock-solid foundation in Auslan before I left Australia, what happened to it? Where’s it gone?
DANIEL: Attrition’s a bitch.
ADAM: Yes. Attrition, yes. So, this is a kind of L2 attrition. I’ve talked about this on Facebook and on Twitter, on X, and people say, “There’s a literature on thisj You should go and read it about additional language attrition that people have.” So, I need to look into that a bit more.
DANIEL: There are so many questions that we aren’t getting time to do, and I’m so grateful to all of our patrons who have been sending these questions to us on Discord. I do have one more though from me, that is people who work in the ling comm space, people who do linguistics podcasts. What could we be doing better than we are so that Deaf people can enjoy our shows? What would you like people to do?
ADAM: I would love to see more linguistics and language podcasts, providing transcripts, but also providing video. I know that, for example, other podcasts when they’ve invited Deaf researchers onto the podcast, that they’ve used video, they’ve done a video presentation. They’ve recorded a video interview with the Deaf signer. Yeah, I mean, I’m here today, but I would love you to bring in one of my Deaf colleagues. So, Gabrielle Hodge is one of the leading Auslan Deaf researcher herself. Robert Adam is also another Deaf Australian based in the UK who’s done really interesting work on Irish Sign Language, which is another sign language which was used in Australia but is no longer being passed on within the Catholic Deaf community. And he has personal experience of that because his mother was an Irish Sign Language user. So, he’s looked at language contact between two sign languages writing his research.
Gab Hodge has done lots of research on Auslan grammar. So, it’d be great for her to come on the show as well. Annelies Kusters, who I mentioned. Okay, she’s here in the country at the moment, but she’s a professor of sociolinguistics. She’s the first Deaf professor in the UK, in our field, and she’s done wonderful work on international signs. So, she’s really someone you should invite back to talk about international science. So, I would love to see more of my Deaf colleagues being invited to talk about sign languages and about their research in podcasts.
I love podcasts myself, especially a lot of the linguistics podcasts, but I don’t share links to podcasts on X or on Twitter or on Facebook, unless I know that they are making themselves accessible to my Deaf colleagues, unless they are providing transcripts, unless they are providing video interviews with a sign language interpreter or with a Deaf person signing and being interpreted into a spoken language.
And unfortunately, a lot of my linguistics colleagues do podcasts without any accessibility built in. That’s really disappointing. And so, I really would love to see accessibility for Deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues and also more interviews with Deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues.
DANIEL: We will do those things, and when we do, we will get to the rest of these questions with them. But for now, we are talking to Dr Adam Schembri, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Adam, I am so grateful to you for coming and making your time available.
ADAM: Thank you for inviting me. It’s been great.
DANIEL: So fascinating. Thank you so much.
ADAM: It’s been great. Thank you so much.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: All right, it’s time for Words of the Week, and we’re going to start by talking about an explicit word. It’s the C word, which is being used in a novel way, but if you don’t want to hear that word, just close the door behind you, thank you very much. So, the word of the week this week is SERVING CUNT.
HEDVIG: I am surprised we haven’t had this one before. This is an old usage. This is like at least a decade.
DANIEL: This is not new at all. We’re talking from about 2011 at the latest, probably far older. But it’s new to me and so I’m going to put that out there by saying this is not new, it’s from drag culture. Me not being a part of that community, I’m just finding it. I’m like, “Wow, that to me, sounds like a really novel use of CUNT.” Of course, I’m aware of other uses of CUNT. For example, in Australia, we talk about a guy being a cunt. You can be…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. A good cunt.
DANIEL: …a shit cunt.
HEDVIG: Reliable cunt.
DANIEL: A good cunt. A lovely cunt.
MARK: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Lovely cunt. Yeah.
DANIEL: Lovely cunt.
MARK: Yep. Absolutely.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about what it means. What does it mean to SERVE CUNT?
HEDVIG: It means to be very, very confident.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: I think is definitely involved. It means to be a little bit similar maybe to what you might call a diva.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Like being quite extravagant, and it’s primarily being very feminine.
DANIEL: Do you have to be a woman to serve cunt?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: But it gives a feminine energy. And diva, what’s another way? It is a bit related, maybe, to… It doesn’t need to be being a good person.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: You can be a bit bitchy.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: What else is involved in serving cunt? I mean, it is something people say when someone’s doing some sort of performative thing, someone’s on stage or they’re performing in some sort of way.
MARK: But it seems like they’re excelling as well from what I see in the definitions…
DANIEL: They are killing it.
MARK: …online.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MARK: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Yes. They’re doing very well at this thing. They’re doing very well at exuding this kind of sort of very confident, diva-ish, very feminine persona, they’re doing it very well, something like that.
DANIEL: There’s an article on this from Christian Ilbury from the University of Edinburgh in the conversation, points out that this term comes from drag culture. And here are some definitions: “being confident, sassy, or fierce”.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: The Daily Dot says “having an aggressively cool, bold outfit and/or attitude” and Know Your Meme, which probably does the best job of tracking this, says “to be powerful in an unapologetic and feminine manner”.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I notice also @notgwendalupe on X has a photo of, and I quote, “Nicole Kidman looking effortlessly cunty in 2003.” And in the photo, she just looks like she does not give one single fuck.
HEDVIG: Yes. It is very much like you not caring about other people’s opinions and just doing your own thing in a very outwardly way.
DANIEL: Do you know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of BIG DICK ENERGY.
HEDVIG: FISHY.
DANIEL: Oh, FISHY? Really?
HEDVIG: No, I was going to say that it’s sort of complementary to FISHY because FISHY involves also feminine energy, but in a different way. It doesn’t have to be as aggressive.
DANIEL: Really? Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Yes, I would say. And I am also not a drag queen, so.
DANIEL: No, in my lexicon, if something’s fishy, it means it’s a story that you probably shouldn’t believe, right?
MARK: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Oh, there’s that meaning as well. But there is in the drag community, as far as I can tell from drag shows, fish… Okay, so guess how fish is connected to feminine.
DANIEL: Oh, god, no, I understand exactly how it’s connected, and I don’t want to say it.
HEDVIG: All right, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
MARK: That’s why we have you on the show, Hedvig. You can say it.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: That’s all right. The listener may draw the appropriate inference. But people used to say: Oh, big dick energy. Yeah, it’s about being quietly confident, having a big dick.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: But you can have big dick energy even if you don’t have a dick. Rihanna has big dick energy. And remember how we…
HEDVIG: She does.
DANIEL: …would say… we would have that discussion? But now people are saying, “Oh, no, you can absolutely serve cunt, even if you don’t own a vulva.” That works, it’s degendered. So, I think that’s a neat symmetry that we have these two…
HEDVIG: That’s true.
DANIEL: …body part references that involve quiet confidence and that can cross over to any gender, that’s cool.
HEDVIG: You’re right, because you can serve cunt, I think, without necessarily being loud about it. Trying to think of how they’re different. Mm, I don’t know.
DANIEL: Why is quiet confidence so damn attractive? Why is that?
HEDVIG: Well, mystery in general is attractive because you know that saying? Rather have people assume you’re an idiot than speak and…
DANIEL: Remove all doubt.
HEDVIG: …reduce all doubt?
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I’ve thought about this because I have a friend who’s very mysteriously cool, and I always want to be like her…
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And I try for like 20 minutes, and then I’m like, [ONOMATOPOEIA] Blulbablubablbub! It’s impossible. But I think it’s that if you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s mind and you think they’re a little bit cool, you assume what’s going on in their mind is super cool.
DANIEL: Yeah. And backed up by strength as well. I feel like that’s part of it. I always think of that one samurai in the Seven Samurai who goes and infiltrates the brigand camp, kills them all, and then comes right back home and sits down after that flurry of activity and is quiet and calm and alert.
MARK: There’s a nice case of this in the TV series made from the book, Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. In the book, Musashi, these ruffians come in to object to Musashi. They say he’s making too much noise, disturbing them where they really just want to hassle somebody and have a fight. Musashi’s not really replying. He’s just nodding while they’re talking. And at some point, one of the ruffians’ notices that he is plucking flies out of the air with his chopsticks. And they then suddenly become very polite, and they excuse themselves and back away.
DANIEL: Wow, that’s very Miyagi.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s cool.
MARK: Yeah. It’s very quietly confident.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go to our next one, INFORMATION SENSIBILITY, which is a terrible term. I’m going to try to find a better one. This one was suggested by my dear son Zak, who said: Check this out. It’s about, how do you decide if some information is correct? How do you know if some information is true? And I think that in the classical science way, we would know how to do that. You look at the claims and then you evaluate the evidence for the claims. And that would be how you’re… That’s one way to do it.
But this is an article in Business Insider from Adam Rogers looking at how Generation Z people are evaluating their information. Talks about work from Jigsaw. Now, if you haven’t heard of Jigsaw, a Jigsaw is a Google subsidiary that looks at online politics and polarisation. And the CEO, Yasmin Green, talks about some research they did where she mentions that Gen Z folks aren’t looking for information literacy, which was the kind of thing that I was describing, where you try to scope out the veracity of information. Instead, they use what Green calls information sensibility.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Here’s how it works. They don’t read long articles. They spend most of their time in time pass mode where they’re sort of scrolling. But then when they hit some information that they want to evaluate, they don’t necessarily go in depth. Instead, “They just read the headlines and then speed scroll to the comments to see what everybody else says.” Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw’s Head of Research, says “Gen Zers will have a favorite influencer or set of influencers who they essentially outsource their trust to and then they’re incredibly loyal to everything that influencer is saying.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, I can believe that.
DANIEL: How does this strike you?
HEDVIG: I mean, I think that evaluating information is a very effortful task. And I think that requiring every citizen in a democracy to be fully informed on all concepts of policy is very privileged position because most people have lives and hobbies and families and other things to do. So, I always think that people look for some sort of shortcut in this. Unless it’s a topic that they’re very interested in, they’re going to…
Like I, for example, listen to Swedish radio, national news, and BBC, and I outsource a lot of my source evaluation to the editing boards of those institutions because I don’t know about Zimbabwe internal politics. I assume they ask a specialist, and they might sometimes get it wrong, but probably not as often as I’m going to get it wrong. So, I fully understand the want of outsourcing and I think that’s very sensible. I have to say that I hope they pick good influencers for that. And I hope they don’t pick the same influencers for everything, like someone who knows a lot about fashion and how to reduce your carbon footprint might not be a reliable commentator on the war in Ukraine.
DANIEL: Intelligence is specific.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, it makes sense to me, and looking at the comments also makes sense. I do that as well for some things because more often than not good information does rise to the top in some comment sections. For all the bad things that are happening on Twitter, the Community Notes is a pretty good function.
DANIEL: [GASPS] So good.
HEDVIG: It’s actually not that bad.
DANIEL: So good. I am a Community Note evaluator. Did you know that the way that they decide if a Community Note is worth putting on is if they can find two people who disagree on lots of stuff, but they agree on that, that’s part of what gets it shown, which I thought was cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I kind of get it. So, I think Community Notes is like an updated version of the comment section because the comment section can be flooded by bots very, very easily. So, that doesn’t seem like a great idea. Yeah, I get it.
MARK: I think the comments are a little bit like the reviews on Airbnb. Like, when if you’re choosing a place, then to some, it’s worthwhile reading the reviews and getting a feeling like what’s this, how did people respond to what was there and did they hit… throw up any things that are red flags. And this is what you want to do in the comments, is read them critically and just see if any of your red flag issues get raised, like, “Oh, I could see that something was factually wrong.” Maybe somebody can say that and then you can evaluate, does they claim that it was factually wrong, make sense or not? And I think that’s quite a valuable way of doing things.
One thing like Hedvig was saying about choosing your sources and particularly having different sources for different things, this is something I quite like in this Conversation magazine, where they use academic experts to write articles. They can only allow to write articles about their actual official topics as academics, which is great, so you don’t get physicists telling you about why vitamin C is the cure-all for everything or things like that. Or, why astrology is just the solution to social problems around the world.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
MARK: Not saying physicists are prone to doing that, but it could happen. So, I think that this is choosing our sources that the people we want to trust with filtering information is a super important thing to do, but I think it’s something we necessarily do and it’s sensible to cheat. As has been said earlier, laziness is the way we can navigate our way through life. It’s like being efficient with our effort. And part of that is looking over the shoulder of other people we think might be able to understand things better and see what they’re looking at.
This is something that was a shock to me when I lived in Poland, because we have distance things, distance requirements when you’re out in public. Say Australia, they were a little bit infringed upon in Poland, because you look in a shop window and then people just gather around and stare in the shop window over your shoulder to see what was catching your eye. I don’t know if that’s still true so much, but it was certainly in the 1990s, so it was a big thing
DANIEL: That’s very Soviet.
MARK: [LAUGHS] It was very fun to manipulate as a… you know, just for fun.
HEDVIG: You know how people who sometimes struggle with mental energy will talk about spoons. Both of you made that face and I know that was a campaign at ANU campus. So, I don’t know how Mark doesn’t know it. But it was this metaphor that was developed about that, say, every day you have five spoons, and you can use one spoon to have a shower and do things to your body and look really nice, and you have one spoon for cooking dinner, and then you have a certain amount of spoons. The metaphor is spoon for some reason, I don’t remember why it’s spoon. That maybe sometimes you have a five-spoon day and sometimes maybe you have a ten-spoon day and you can have a two-spoon day, but the point is just to illustrate that you have a finite amount of energy.
MARK: Yes. That’s makes all the sense, yeah.
HEDVIG: And maybe your mental or your physical energy can be different. Maybe you have physical spoons and mental spoons either way. But sometimes it’s different for different people in different, different days. And there might be activities that can give you more spoons during the day, maybe, but generally, most activities reduce your number of spoons.
And I think that sometimes when people who are very smart talk about information and politics and stuff like that, they sort of assume that people have many more spoons than they do.
MARK and DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Right. We already have decision fatigue on so many different things.
MARK: That’s so true.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, I fully understand. But yeah, I would highly recommend… Podcasts are lovely. And if you listen to this, you’re probably a podcast person. And there are so many great big news desks that put out like a small little… So, there’s ABC News Daily for Australian stuff. There is Aktuellt of course for Swedish stuff, if you’re a Swede. BBC put up a lot of great ones. If you live in Germany, the local podcast called Germany in Focus, which is sort of Germany news for immigrants, I think they’re weekly, that’s pretty decent. And just professional journalists are good at filtering information, and I would recommend doing that rather than, as I’m supposing a lot of people are doing right now, sort of scrolling through CNN or BBC News, their actual websites. Pick one of their little broadcasts instead, because then you get a good little smorgasbord.
DANIEL: One thing I’d add to that, which I think is a funny, useful experiment to do, is to think about something where you do know a lot about that topic and look at that in the feed that you’re looking at and just see how does that feed score in terms of its usefulness or validity, in terms of something you do know about? And this unfortunately ended me reading a particular magazine, I don’t know if I should mention its name, but I used to read it with some joy at their interesting articles, and then they would get articles on something I knew about. And I thought, “Oh, this is horrible. I don’t actually like this.” And it took such the joy out of the consumption because I realised that I was getting such a far from solid picture through the articles that I didn’t want to actually engage with it anymore.
HEDVIG: That’s fair.
DANIEL: Well, this method of checking is being called INFORMATION SENSIBILITY, but I can’t remember that name. I don’t think that’s a very good name. Is there a better name? Maybe something about curation? Like, you’re assembling a team to help you figure out stuff. Source curation or peer curation? What do you think?
MARK: You could talk about it as your curation team.
HEDVIG: Wait, are you talking about what the Gen Z are doing with going to the comments section and looking at influencers specifically?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay. Because I think that’s a bit different from what Mark and I were describing where you go to BBC.
MARK: Yeah.
DANIEL: No, yeah. Okay, so let’s go back to that then.
HEDVIG: So, we need a term that’s… So, I think something like…
DANIEL: Because I don’t think it’s a terrible strategy.
HEDVIG: No, but the loyalty is a little bit of a concern.
MARK: I would say why not INFLUENCER CURATION, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: INFLUENCER CURATION.
HEDVIG: Something like that or influencer news, like something that has the influence, because I think that’s important. And what you said, Daniel, was that these people in the survey attributed a lot of loyalty to that influencer, which is different from what Mark was saying that they would trust them on a multitude of issues that they’re not an expert on.
DANIEL: Yeah, that doesn’t sound positive.
MARK: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Which sounds bad [bjed].
DANIEL: Okay, well, let’s finish this up with one from Wolf via email. Last week, we took a look at the work of Noam Chomsky. In the light of a report that he had died when he hadn’t actually.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wolf says, “Is NOBIT a word?” That is to say, an obit, somebody writing when somebody has died. But when they haven’t died, it could be a NOBIT, as in, an obit for a “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” person. We’ve seen novid when you don’t have covid, you’ve just got a cold that isn’t covid. Now, we can have a nobit.
HEDVIG: I don’t know because there was another word that occurred in the same week. So, the Londonist newspaper that I linked to who had written a piece about Noam Chomsky and then pulled it away.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I put it up on our Discord as like, “Ooh, I think maybe Chomsky has died. Oh.” And then within 10 or 20 minutes, I was like, “Nope, he hasn’t. Everyone, get back.” So, I’m glad we didn’t put that on actual air. But they wrote something… I think they called it a memor… It had MEMORY in it. Do you remember the term?
MARK: A memorial?
HEDVIG: Like a memma… Mm.
DANIEL: I don’t know. We can combine errata with memoriam.
MARK: [LAUGHS] Memoratta?
DANIEL: Mem-errata.
HEDVIG: Because I don’t think NOBIT is good.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sorry, Wolf.
HEDVIG: I’m very cruel. Yeah, I know. We had the bit when someone posted that he seems like he’s in hospital. Oh, my god, I have to go… Here we go, the Jacobin, they put “obituary” into the URL, but I remember that when I clicked it, they had already changed it to mem… [ONOMATOPOEIA]. When you go there, you get page not found. So, I will never know.
MARK: Okay. We’ll never know.
DANIEL: Well, so that means SERVING CUNT, INFORMATION SENSIBILITY, or something else, and NOBIT: our Words of the Week. Let’s just get some comments from our last few episodes. This one’s from Heddwen. Heddwen says, “Better late than never. I’m listening to the German episode. And the German language does have a kind of Académie Française, though perhaps it doesn’t put itself in the spotlight as much. It regulates spelling. Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung.” Am I saying that correctly, you two German speakers?
MARK: Rechtschreibung.
HEDVIG: Rechtschreibung. So, right writing is what it means.
DANIEL: Right writing. Right writers. Hedwin continues, “I have now spoken to my German husband, who studied linguistics in Germany. He’s adamant that this organisation is totally different to the Académie Française, and also makes the point that it hasn’t existed for that long and its rules are not official.” Well, so that’s an interesting thing going on there.
Florian has some comments. They say, “The asterisk…” Remember how in German you have an asterisk and that is gender inclusive?
HEDVIG: Well, so you have an asterisk at the end of some nouns where the noun has a masculine and female form, so student and student*innen.
MARK: You put the asterisk before the -innen.
DANIEL: Before the suffix. The generic suffix.
HEDVIG: But as we talk about in that episode, sometimes you get an underscore instead or a colon, so people are varying. So, asterisk is one thing.
DANIEL: Well, Florian says, “The asterisk is just about shifting from being the most progressive option toward being the standard,” in Florian’s view.
HEDVIG: It’s true.
DANIEL: Then, they say, “Probably the most popular feature of gender-inclusive German is the participle instead of studentinnen,” male students, the previous default, “pretty much all university documents nowadays say studierende,” people who are studying.
MARK: Mmm.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Not as in currently hitting the books, that would be lernende, but as people enrolled at a university. So, it’d be like saying instead of the student which it’s not gendered in English, but let’s just say, what’s an example of?
HEDVIG: You could say… It’s sort of similar to studiers.
DANIEL: Studiers. Studying.
HEDVIG: I know it’s not the same.
DANIEL: How about instead of WAITER or WAITRESS, you say WAITING. This person is a waiting.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Also, Florian continues, “A hilarious tidbit in my opinion is the use of gendering as a verb in German. German has a proud history of taking English words and using them for completely different things. Beamer for projector, handy for mobile phone, but only a dumb one. The funniest one to date is gendern for using gender-inclusive language, that is, for not gendering. This is, as far as I know, the first 180 complete inversion of meaning in an English loan in German.”
HEDVIG: So, like “sie hat die Wort genderen gemacht” something like that. Like, she has gendered the word…
DANIEL: And that means?
HEDVIG: Meaning: making it inclusive. So, putting the -innen or making the gerund.
DANIEL: I love hearing these comments that people are giving. We’ve got more at the end, but for now, big thanks to Adam Schembri and Christy Filipich, everyone who gave ideas for the show, especially Diego, MVP for this episode. SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. All you marvelous patrons. Dr Mark Ellison, thanks for coming on the show today.
MARK: It’s great to be here.
DANIEL: And, Hedvig, it’s great to see you again, matey.
MARK: Mmm. Definitely.
HEDVIG: It’s nice to see you too.
DANIEL: Oh, thank you.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: Take it away, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Oh, yes, yes, because you already did. Okay.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: If you like our show, there are multiple things you can do to support us. You can follow us on multiple social media platforms. We are @becauselangpod on all of those. You can send us ideas to our email, hello@becauselanguage.com where you can leave a message via SpeakPipe, which you don’t need to download any app or anything like that. You can just go to our website, becauselanguage.com, and click, I think I believe it’s on the right side of the homepage. And then, you can leave us an audio message, which is really nice because it’s nice to hear your voice. You can also tell a friend about us and leave us a review in all the places you can leave a review, I would recommend iTunes and Podchaser. It’s two of the top places to leave reviews. Even just one review makes a lot of difference. So, it’s always nice. And if you do leave a review, you can also be mentioned on the show, like rndzvs.
DANIEL: Rendezvous, perhaps?
HEDVIG: Exactly, rndzvs on Apple Podcasts has left a comment from Chile saying, “Super interesting, five stars. I love this podcast. It’s so insightful and just entertaining to listen to.” And that is really nice to hear because we do strive to make some information entertaining. So, love that from Rndzvs. Thank you so much.
DANIEL: Thanks, rndzvs. Another thing you can do is become a patron. Patrons help us by giving us a little bit of money, and then we can do good things, like transcripts so our shows are readable and searchable. But depending on your level, you also get lots of perks, Discord access, mailouts, shoutouts. And oh, by the way, here’s a shoutout now, this is our patrons at the Supporter Level, and I’ve been doing some pretty wacky ordering, and this time is no exception.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Oh, god. Mark, do you know about this?
MARK: I have just learned this past week, I have learned about the ordering crisis, that apparently there’s a shortage of ways to order, and Daniel’s solving this by himself.
DANIEL: I’m creating more.
HEDVIG: Crisis, you call it? One person said that they thought that the alphabetic was getting a bit boring, or sorry, the order we had.
DANIEL: I said, “Boring?” I said, “That’s not going to happen for long.” So, this time, we’re ordering the names by how close they are to the alphabetical order. So, what I did was I took the letters in their name and I alphabetised them and compared that to their actual name. And then I used a measure called the Levenshtein distance to see how many additions, deletions or transpositions it takes to get from one string to the other.
So, for example, in “Daniel”, you have to first swap the A and the D. That’s one change, how many others? Now, I had to normalise it because I didn’t want to punish very long names, which would require a lot of transpositions. So, after figuring out the Levenshtein distance, I divided it by the number of letters in the name.
HEDVIG: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. So, if you have the username Abba, you first alphabetise it to make it A-A-B-B, and then you count the difference between Abba and Aabb, and that’s a number.
DANIEL: So, you would have two changes, you have to change one B to an A and one A to a B, that’s two, that’s the Levenschtein distance. But then, I divide that by four, the number of letters in the name.
HEDVIG: Oh, the number of letters in the name. Okay, not always four.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s right, not always four. So, for example, “Matt” is almost there with a Levenshtein distance of one. But, I mean, he would be, wouldn’t he? He’s got a short name. There’s less chances to screw up.
So here are our supporters. Chris W. Chris, you were almost there, just twiddle the R and the I. Diego, again, just twiddle the I and the E. Larry, nice going, just about alphabetical there, buddy. Reina, Felicity, Cheyenne. Two long names, it’s harder for a long name because long names tend to get punished, but those letters are well in order. J0HNTR0Y, Tony, Manú, Andy. Alyssa. Oh, shame about the Y, better if your name had been Alassy. But anyway, Matt, Rene, Amir, Jack and Rach.
Now, we’re getting to the names that are not so much in alphabetical order. Whitney, ooh, that W at the front. Rhianne, Elías, Termy, Helen, Lyssa, Tadhg, PharaohKatt, long name, but mostly in order. Chris L, who comes down much later on the list than Chris W because that L was stuck in the middle. sæ̃m, Nikoli.
MARK: So bad.
DANIEL: Ayesha. You’d think Ayesha was pretty alphabetical, but that Y up front, mm, and the A at the end, ooh. Joanna, Steele, Ariaflame. Margaret, Colleen. Meredith. Andy from Logophilia. Long name, held up surprisingly well. Kathy. LordMortis.
Now, here are the names that needed almost as many modifications as they had letters. Kevin, James, Nigel, Keith, Rodger. Wolfdog. Can I get an awoooo?
HEDVIG: No, you’re not getting anything, Daniel. You’re not only reordering the names, you’re basically reviewing people’s names.
MARK: [LAUGHS] Yeah. That’s right.
DANIEL: Only alphabetically, not for euphonious nature or anything like that. Ignacio, Molly Dee, gramaryen, Kristofer, Canny Archer, aengryballs, Sonic Snejhog, Nasrin, Stan, Luis, Kate, O Tim. And our newest patrons at the listener level, Murray-Luke and Bill. At the friend level, brottlet. And our new free members, M Zhang B and Twicks! That’s not Twix as in the chocolate bar. It’s got a C-K-S at the end. Yeah, those are free members. We have free members. Maybe come on over to Patreon and sign up for that. What will happen? We don’t know. Maybe something good. Thank you.
MARK: Your name will be introduced in an order you did not anticipate. Yes.
DANIEL: And then, critiqued alphabetically. Okay, Mark, last bit is yours.
MARK: Last bit mine. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Wow, Mark, that was really good.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew. Well done.
DANIEL: Pew.
MARK: Pew.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: I was in a hotel in Canada, and they had Gideon’s Bible. And I was looking into it and I didn’t know that they have a section which is like, if you have problems with X, go to section Y in the Bible.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
MARK: Wow.
HEDVIG: And I thought that was very strange.
MARK: What kind of problems?
DANIEL: If you have masturbation problems, go to story of Onan.
HEDVIG: You could have problems with alcohol, with…
MARK: Oh, okay. I get you. Not problems with… You don’t believe that Jonah 3, verse 15, go and see Matthew 3:22.
HEDVIG: There was something about, “You struggle with your faith,” I think was one.
MARK: Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: But they did have, “You struggle with thinking about divorce,” which I thought was interesting, I was wondering. It basically just says, “Don’t get divorced.”
DANIEL: Well, that’s the Bible.
HEDVIG: But it does also say, which I thought was really funny, it points to a section that says, “If you are a widow or a widower, you can get married again.”
DANIEL: That’s very generous.
MARK: Okay.
HEDVIG: Which sounds almost like they said, “If you’re thinking of divorce, just kill your husband.” [LAUGHTER] I know that’s not what they meant. but it only points to that section. It doesn’t also reference do not kill. So, I don’t know. I don’t know about that.
DANIEL: If you struggle with thinking maybe the Bible isn’t scientific, sorry, got nothing for you. Just don’t blend those fabrics.
MARK: Yeah, just go to the verse about the four corners of the earth and so on.
DANIEL: The earth rests on pillars, doesn’t it? That’s what I read.
MARK: I don’t think that’s actually in the Bible, is it? Is it pillars of the earth?
DANIEL: It’s Job. Yep.
MARK: Really?
DANIEL: Yeah. Job 38.
MARK: Damn.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Hey, everybody. Now, in episode 96, Hedvig and I talked about legal versus common definitions of words in Estonian legal precedents. Turns out we have a listener who is, though not a legal professional, somebody who works in the Canadian legislative publishing process. So, it’s a long comment. I’m just going to play it, and I hope you enjoy.
RECORDING: I hope you enjoy in Canada, we do not have a language academy like some countries or languages do, to tell you which words are right and which words are wrong, or which words are good and which words are bad. However, words in legal texts do need to have very specific meanings. This is important because if a law says something happens once a month, does that mean once every 30 days? 31 days? 29 days? Once from the first day of a particular month to the last day? What about a year? Is a year 365 days? A calendar year? A fiscal year? Who’s fiscal year? These are some really simple examples, but you can probably tell how this can get even more complicated.
To avoid this ambiguity, we use defined terms in our statutes. I’ll share some interesting ones later, but in essence, defined terms are meant to explain that when reading this act or these regulations, this is exactly how you are meant to interpret this word. It cannot mean anything else for the purposes of this particular statute.
Another reason to include defined terms is to shorten something that you’re going to see repeated a lot in the text. Here’s an example from our Income Tax Act.
“Agreement means the Convention on Mutual Administrative assistance in tax matters concluded at Strasbourg on January 25th, 1988, as amended from time to time via protocol or other international instrument as ratified by Canada.” Clearly, henceforth, I would rather just say the agreement and not have to repeat even the title of that convention.
We don’t have to formally define every single word. Definitions are only needed if the meaning is meant to depart from the commonly understood definition. If the term is expected to be well understood by the intended audience and unambiguous, we don’t write a legal definition. Similarly, if the intended meaning comes up with the first dictionary search, we don’t have to define it. A lot of jargon does come up in specific areas of law. Do not get me started on tax law, but as long as the intended audience gets it, you’re probably good.
Don’t be fooled though, some common words are actually defined in legislative texts that give more specific definitions than their common understanding. A big one that comes up a lot is the word ‘person.’ Section 35 of the Interpretation act tells us that person includes a corporation. This is more important in some statutes such as tax law where legal entities are specific things. Otherwise, if we want to refer to a human being, we need to say something like individual or natural person. Because if you don’t do that, whenever you talk about a person, I don’t know, needing medicine or something, that could be interpreted as a corporation needing medicine.
Another defined term that could actually have a pretty big impact on our entire legal system is the reference to the monarch. We have a lot of legal texts that refer to Her Majesty and the queen. Queen Elizabeth reigned for a long time. So, we have had many years to refer to her and our legislation. And then on September 8th, 2022, the Commonwealth countries ceased to have a queen, rest in peace, and we immediately became the responsibility of a king.
Did all of our laws that refer to the queen suddenly become obsolete? No, because of a handy definition in the interpretation act. It says, Her Majesty, His Majesty, the Queen, the king, or the crown means the sovereign of the United Kingdom, Canada, and her or his other realms and territories, and head of the Commonwealth. This means that anywhere you might read the Queen or Her Majesty, you can legally read that to refer to whoever the current monarch is instead, and we do not have to take on the herculean task of amending piles of legislation immediately.
One brief final example I have is maybe funny, maybe frustrating, maybe distressing is the word ‘Indian.’ This word has a lot of context and baggage and discussion around it that I won’t get into. But suffice to say, it is not the current most accepted way in Canada to refer to an Indigenous person. We ideally would use the name of a person’s specific band, or one of the words, First Nation, Inuit or Metis, or the word ‘Indigenous.’
Unfortunately, Canada still has an act called the Indian Act, and it is a very large and powerful act that affects a lot of daily life for a lot of Canadians. Furthermore, many legislative texts refer to this act. And not only would it be another herculean task to edit out all of the uses of the word ‘Indian’ in the act or other federal legislation that refer to this act, it would be an impossible task to edit every piece of paper around the country that is not under federal jurisdiction that refers to this federal Indian Act. So, we continue to use the word Indian in federal legislation.
But remember how I said we are expected to use dictionary definitions when a word isn’t defined in an enactment? Well, one of the dictionary entries, and in fact, the first listed entry in the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary, the one we use for legislation, for the word ‘Indian’ is a native or national of India. So, unless we want a statute to apply to persons from the country of India, we must use a defined term for the word ‘Indian’, to specify that we are talking about a person to whom the Canadian Indian Act applies and nothing else.
Does this solve the problem of using an outdated and sometimes offensive word in our legal texts? Of course not, and I’m not indigenous myself. So, I cannot speak to how people actually feel about this, but to me, adding that definition is a tiny step to show that this is only a legal term and not accepted in plain language.
So, those are all my examples. I hope it wasn’t too dry and legalese. We’re always aiming to adjust and modernise language in our Canadian legal text, but hopefully I provided a bit of context as to why it can be a really difficult process. So, we have these crutches of defined terms to help bridge those gaps. Now, don’t get me started on gendered pronouns in legislation, but that is maybe a topic for another day.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]