Our Mailbag is once again full of questions, and podcasting luminary Helen Zaltzman is here to help us answer them!
- Why is the raspberry sound (PHBTPBBBBT) not a speech sound in any language? Or is it?
- How can sounds in a language change so much over time?
- Am I burned out? Or burnt out?
- Why are they called metaphysicians and not metaphysicists?
- What can we call something besides lame?
- Why is amphi– so infrequently used in English?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Revisions to the extIPA chart | Journal of the International Phonetic Association | Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/article/abs/revisions-to-the-extipa-chart/06C01EA81DA2AECA2AC52AAF21556B33
ↀ – Roman Numeral One Thousand C D: U+2180 – Unicode Character Table
https://unicode-table.com/en/2180/
extIPA SYMBOLS FOR DISORDERED SPEECH (Revised to 2015) [PDF]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/ExtIPA_chart_%282015%29.pdf
Blowing a raspberry – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_a_raspberry
A Tribe Called Quest: Ham ‘N’ Eggs — [ʙ] at 1m45s
Axamb: Small Island, ᵐʙoroᵑgonsu-n | Vanuatu Voices – Concept nose [43]
https://vanuatuvoices.clld.org/parameters/43_nose#8/-15.761/167.723
Patrick Honeybone: ‘Lenition in English’ [PDF]
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/homes/patrick/englen.pdf
YouGlish stats
Worldwide
burned out 1082
burnt out 820
USEng
burned out 957
burnt out 647
AusEng
burned out 15
burnt out 35
UKEng
burned out 49
burnt out 89
metaphysician (n.) | Online Etymological Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/metaphysician#etymonline_v_44665
8 Words To Use Instead Of “Lame” | Thesaurus.com
https://www.thesaurus.com/e/ways-to-say/s/words-to-use-instead-of-lame/#8-words-to-use-instead-of-lame
Non-Ableist Alternatives to the Phrase {“Lame Duck”} – The Prompt Magazine
http://www.thepromptmag.com/non-ableist-alternatives-phrase-lame-duck/
Finding Alternatives to Ableist Language | by Grace Lapointe | Medium
https://gracelapointe.medium.com/finding-alternatives-to-ableist-language-627f86808103
Natural Semantic Metalanguage
https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/schools-departments/natural-semantic-metalanguage
nsm-approach.net – A resource base of publications using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. 1,100+ detailed notices, and counting!
https://nsm-approach.net/
Transcript
Daniel: Let’s do a show. Why not?
Hedvig: …finish doing sorry I got excited because I got cinnamon bun. And it’s so crispy but I’m going to
Daniel: [GASP]
Ben: [GASP] Cinnamon buns are the best!
Hedvig: Yeah. Get yourself a husband who gives you cinnamon buns before recording. Well, maybe not right before recording.
Ben: I’ll take yours, thank you. And I meant your husband, not your cinnamon bun.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He didn’t get his linguistics knowledge from any Fancy Pants University. He learned about it in the gutter with all of us. It’s Ben Ainslie,
Ben: [SOUTH LONDON ACCENT] The University of Life, mate. That’s where I’ve been educated.
Daniel: There’s an accent that has some attitudes with it….
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Mm hmm.
Hedvig: Very much so.
Ben: I’ve just heard that phrase. I can’t even remember what film or television show that’s from, but I distinctly remember that exact phrase being delivered, probably in a much better version of that accent.
Daniel: Was it Michael Caine? It sounds like you were doing Michael Caine.
Hedvig: Yeah. Or
Ben: If it was I apologise on behalf of Michael Caine and everyone else.
Hedvig: Mitchell and Webb.
Ben: Yeah, maybe Mitchell and Webb. That sounds like a Mitchell and Webb thing. Huh? Anyway, you should do Hedvig’s now. I’m sure it’s much better.
Daniel: She did learn linguistics at a Fancy Pants University.
Hedvig: I did.
Daniel: But she hasn’t let that keep her from wearing other forms of clothing besides pants. It’s Hedvig Skirgård
Ben: I thought it was going somewhere different. I thought you were gonna go: but that doesn’t keep her from rolling around in the gutter with the rest of us.
Daniel: She wears different clothing in the gutter and elsewhere.
Hedvig: Yeah, no, I do. I am actually wearing Fancy Pants today. Wearing some lovely pants that I bought in Canberra that have a sort of kangaroo pocket.
Daniel: Are you?!
Ben: Do you know what? I’m wearing some fancy pants right now too, some pajama pants. So I feel like Hedvig and I should send pictures of our pants to add to the show notes page.
Daniel: Okay, I will too. I will also do my pants.
Hedvig: Sure, sure, I’ll do that.
Daniel: Hang on, getting the pants selfie.
Ben: Daniel Daniel, stop. I feel like you’re pantsless and we really need to stop here.
Daniel: It’s all right. All right. There we go. You’ll see what kind of pants I’m wearing.
Ben: Oh, that’s… it makes it worse. Definitely didn’t improve my suspicions
Daniel: I’m not specifying
Ben: You should definitely introduce the third and most important member.
Daniel: We have a very special guest joining us for this bonus Patreon episode. It’s the host of the surpassingly popular Allusionist podcast. It’s Helen Zaltzman. Helen, hello.
Helen: Hello. I’m sorry that I did not wear special pants for this. I’m wearing a dress. That is zero pants.
Hedvig: Dresses are lovely to wear, though.
Helen: Yes.
Daniel: Dresses are great. Does it have pockets?
Helen: No, because I made it and I didn’t want to make pockets.
Ben: My broad understanding of pants could be sort of extended to anything that covers the lower half of the body.
Helen: Oh, okay. Well, I’m wearing a… dress pants.
Ben: I’m a very permissive definitionist
Hedvig: Yeah, very. I think they need to have one entrance and two exits.
Helen: Hmm.
Ben: Oh, interesting. Well, some of us are clearly prescriptivists
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, I think pants need to have a separator between the legs. I’m, I’m basically a dictator. Yeah.
Ben: I’m glad we’re on the same page. Moving on.
Helen: I’m wearing the British form of pants which is the under kind.
Ben: Yes, of course the British.
Daniel: Yeah okay, I didn’t really expect to go here this quickly in the show. But I will say this. Something strange happened Helen, on this very day. An old high school chum emailed me out of the blue, because this is what you have to do to reach me since I canned my Facebook account. She emailed me, we hadn’t heard from each other in years, and the very first thing she wrote was “Hey, there’s this podcast maybe you’ve heard it before. It’s The Allusionist, Helen Zaltzman. She’s really smart and funny. Also,”
Helen: Oh no!
Daniel: Yeah, she’s like going on about this and she says also, she says “this Veronica Mars podcast that I really like even though you might not” and then
Hedvig: [WHISPERS] I love Veronica Mars
Daniel: I was trying to find a way to say that you were on the show with us tonight without it sounding like a total flex you know? Oh, yeah, I totally know Helen. nails emoji.
Helen: You should have said “Oh that asshole, no thanks. That amateur podcast?”
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: That’s some real Truman show vibes there that someone brought it up?
Daniel: I’ve done Truman Show.
Ben: Wait, what? Hang on Alright, I you were doing a bit I was just like, Wait, is that a code for something that I don’t understand? What’s doing a Truman Show I want to know about this
Hedvig: To me, Truman’s show is like when you when you think about something and then like the radio plays that song you’re thinking about
Daniel: Yeah. Or you start seeing ads for stuff
Hedvig: Like when things seem to be like, you’ll life seems to be choreographed and like produced.
Ben: I’m trying to think of a witty portmanteau of deja vu and Truman Show to encapsulate that moment.
Hedvig: Truman-du?
Daniel: Deja vuman show
Helen: Dejatru
Ben: And that’s why, ladies and gentlemen, she is on the far more successful linguistics Podcast.
[LAUGHTER]
Helen: Well, it’s just earlier in the day where I am. I have an advantage, cuz you know, I’m not as tired.
Ben: I’m gonna lean on that give me that you’ve just offered me and say yes, that’s definitely.
Daniel: So basically everybody in the world Helen knows you’re awesome. But in case there’s someone who doesn’t. Could you please just give us a quick rundown of all the stuff you’re doing?
Helen: Well, yeah, I make three podcasts predominantly: The Allusionist, which is an entertainment show about language, and Answer Me This, where we answer questions from the audience on a great range of topics. And then Veronica Mars Investigations, where we’re recapping the television show Veronica Mars. And we’ve nearly finished. So there it is. There it all is.
Hedvig: I just finished my first look through a Veronica Mars songs the movie just a few weeks ago. So it’s still all very raw.
Helen: Fresh. Yes, it sort of starts stronger than it ends.
Ben: I’ve never tried it myself. But I’m a huge fan of The Good Place. And so now I have been on sort of cautiously interested in going back and seeing some of her earlier work.
Helen: She’s amazing in it, but it’s a very different show.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s not that similar. I like The Good Place. I like Veronica Mars, but it’s not that similar. But it does seem to be a trend I’ve noticed among boys that I’m interested in. So my ex and my husband are both like Veronica Mars stans.
Helen: Interesting!
Hedvig: Yeah, I think I think if you meet a boy, and he says he likes Veronica Mars, apparently, maybe that’s a good sign.
Helen: I don’t know. Because it’s it’s a show with fairly terrible gender politics and a lot of sexual violence. So maybe not.
Hedvig: Yes. Yes.
Ben: To be fair, the thing you’ve just described is unfortunately applies to, like 85% of all media being so sad that that isn’t a very exclusionary metric for like a lot of things that are on television.
Hedvig: It’s maybe a little bit different for Veronica Mars, because the male writers, I’m… you, Helen obviously know a lot more about this, but I just watched it. And this is my understanding. The male writers want to make Veronica, the kind of feminist that they think women should be.
Helen: One who hates other women,
Hedvig: And who often… exactly hates other women, but then they need to make it so she still likes her super valley girlfriend who passes away and she has some other very feminine type friends. But her best friend is Mack who’s also very tomboy and “not like other girls.” In general Veronica Mars is “not like other girls.”
Helen: “Not like other girls”
Hedvig: Yeah, that is I agree. And it comes off very often as very, like a male writer has done this.
Daniel: I’m thinking of watching The Good Place again. And they say that the first time you watch as Eleanor the second time you watch it as Janet.
Ben: Oh, that’s interesting. I like that. That’s a good take.
Daniel: Not mine. This is a special bonus episode for our wonderful patrons. If you’re listening to this reasonably soon after its release, thank you for being a patron you are helping us to do stuff like transcripts and you’re making it possible for us to do mail outs and keep the show going and do the work we’d love to do. If you’re listening to this quite a bit later, because we released it into the wild a few months afterwards, then thank you as well for listening. And if you want to join the movement…. If you want to hear bonus episodes, the moment they come out and hang with us on our discord channel, head over to Patreon and support the show and while you’re there, Helen are you on?
Helen: I am! The Allusionists has a Patreon.
Hedvig: Great
Daniel: Go to The Allusionist, Patreon and support Helen as well.
Hedvig: And if you are a patron right now help me because I need help with my quiz questions. I need quiz questions, please. Thank you. That’s it.
Daniel: Thank you. Shall we get to some questions?
Ben: Yes, please. Wait, do we want to do the news first? Don’t we have a little news thing?
Daniel: We’re just jumping straight in.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Jumping in. No Words of the Week either.
Ben: Oh, wow. Yeah, this is, this is exciting.
Daniel: Oh, shoot. This one comes from TioFrio on twitter, @BeechMeister. We’ve seen them a few times. “Are there any languages that use the raspberry sound as a phoneme? If not, why do you think that is?” Well, how do we start?
Helen: Because you’d be spitting everywhere?
Daniel: Straight to the right answer.
Hedvig: Well, what is the raspberry sound? Let’s start there.
Ben: PBBBFFTT
Hedvig: Is it? Is it that?
Ben: It is that
Hedvig: Okay, do you need to push your lips against something, or not?
Ben: Your tongue
Daniel: your tongue?
Hedvig: No, no. Do you need to do [FART SOUND] like towards your something? Okay, you go [PBBFFT PBBFFT]
Helen: No, that’s optional. That’s just for flair.
Hedvig: That’s optional. In that case, I would argue, which I argued with Daniel before the show, that this is essentially what is known as a bilabial trill
Daniel: No, no, no, no, no, no, no Hang on. We need to define what this is. This is… using a bilabial trill like B or P’. The first one was pulmonary [B]. And the second one was ejective [P’]. That’s not a raspberry.
Hedvig: Okay, then make a raspberry
Daniel: To do a raspberry, you must put your tongue out. You have to put your tongue out [FART/RASBERRY SOUND] like that.
Hedvig: Okay, but when you do it towards like, like I just did towards my arm [FART/RASBERRY SOUND]. I don’t put my tongue out. When I do it on like little babies stomachs. I don’t put my tongue out.
Ben: Okay, so no, no, no, Hedvig brings up a good point here, because you can do a raspberry on someone, in which case it does not involve the tongue between the lips, because that would just be super fucking creepy.
Daniel: I know why that’s not a speech sound.
Ben: Yeah, yeah, but, but I am also prepared here to back Daniel in that when doing it unassisted, or what we like to call a blonde raspberry.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Interesting.
Ben: You’ve got to have your tongue between the two lips to make that sort of that trilling sound. And I would go one step even further, which is to say a true afficionado of the raspberry will do it whilst vibrating both the top and the bottom lip simultaneously against
Hedvig: This I agree with. Yes. Okay. Helen, would you… so even if they’re like the prototypical non… when you do a raspberry not on a person,
Daniel: The blonde raspberry
Helen: An air raspberry.
Hedvig: Do you agree that the prototypical one like Daniel and Ben has to have a tongue element outside of the teeth?
Helen: Right, I’m gonna have to try it now. Please, excuse me. Okay, so
Daniel: This is good radio
Helen: [MINOR FART SOUND] that’s with tongue, this is without tongue [VERY LOUD FART SOUND]. So I would count both versions rasberries.
Ben: No, I disagree. They’re clearly different.
Hedvig: See, very similar! Thank you, thank you.
Ben: As similar as M and N
Hedvig: No, no, no. You introduced a guest as a very important part of this show and she’s made a judgment call in my favor.
Helen: Well I just think if you’re, if you’re asking this question, you might as well cover the betongued raspberry and the tongueless raspberry right?
Daniel: All right, well, let’s start with calling it what it is. So this could be defined that the blonde raspberry [BEN SNICKERS] could be defined as a voiceless labiolingual trill.
Ben: [MUMBLES] a voiceless labiolingual trill. Okay.
Daniel: Now, this doesn’t appear on the IPA chart, which is why I think, no, there are no languages that use it as a speech sound. If we did find it in a language, we would add it. However, I do notice that it appears on the…. well that’s what they did with the, with the [THINKING SOUNDS] V with the tilda and an R?
Hedvig: Yeah, but you can probably add a bunch of diacritics and get to one maybe,
Daniel: Absolutely, um, I did find it somewhere though. Not on the IPA chart. But the extIPA, symbols for disordered speech. This is a, this is a thing.
Hedvig: Ah. Yes, yes
Daniel: It uses a weird character that I’ve never seen before. It’s the Roman numeral 1000, CD, that’s the Unicode name. And what it looks like is imagine a C and then a D butted right up against each other. It looks like a butt, which is… fitting because it makes a butt-like sound.
Hedvig: Right? It’s a bit like when you have an O and an E stuck together.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah, but it’s two O’s or a C or a D. Yeah. Okay, so let’s focus on that one for a second. Why not use… I think Helen’s answer is probably a really good one, because you’re just blowing saliva everywhere. And it’s gross.
Helen: not ideal.
Ben: Is there not other speech sounds that do that, though?
Hedvig: Exactly. So I, before the show, I sent Daniel two examples of the tongueless voiced bilabial trill. So that no tongue and it’s voiced and you use both lips. One of them, the first one is from a song by A Tribe Called Quest, it’s called Ham and Eggs. Where he goes, “BBBBRRridge!”
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: Which I think really is a good example of bilabial trills, it’s my favorite example. The other one is a recording of a language in Vanuatu called Axamb. And it has, yeah, it just has the more it’s, the more natural bilabial trill in the middle of a word [DIFFERENT RECORDING, MALE VOICE] [ᵐʙoroᵑgonsu-n] That is what a bilabial natural sound would sound like.
Daniel: Yes. And that was the word “nose” in Axamb using the bilabial trill, which is definitely a speech sound in lots and lots of languages. So How come nobody goes? Hi, my name is Dan[RASBERRY SOUND]iel.
Ben: Is it because it’s really hard to chain together with other phonemes? Like much harder than other phonemes? Because you have to kind of stop, do it, and then resume?
Hedvig: Yeah, you could only really do it if your sounds right before and after are also in a similar position, which most of the sounds aren’t.
Daniel: That’s a good point. I do find that difficulty is kind of in the mouth of the beholder, though.
Ben: Maybe, are there certain phonemes that only ever sort of start a word in certain languages? Because I could see the raspberry being like, PPFleasantly or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Hedvig: This bilabial trill, from Axamb example is in the middle of a word.
Ben: Yeah, right. Okay. Well,
Daniel: My guess here, we’re always having some tension between putting effort in to make ourselves understood. And then, you know, easing back, if not so much effort is required. And I just feel like the [RASBERRY] sound takes a lot of effort of…you’re putting your articulators pretty far forward
Ben: I… look… I’ve got to be honest, I, as a not linguist with no experience in the field in any way,
Daniel: Why start now?
Ben: I find that hard to sort of buy into, and the only reason is, all fucking speeches hard. Like it takes human beings a really long time to figure out how to do it and like heaps of trial and error. And to my like, super Western, Anglo-centric, sort of brain, a bunch of the sort of non-English phonemes, from places like Africa, seem really, really hard and difficult to me. But I’m sure they’re not, I’m sure they’re not any harder or more difficult than any of the phonemes that I speak. And I know classically that like in Japanese, putting a P and an L next to each other. For a Japanese person is like, what? That’s impossible. Whereas to me, it’s just like: no, that’s just the sound in purple. So I don’t know, I don’t find that it’s a bit tougher to do is necessarily that good a reason?
Helen: Why don’t know, people are super lazy, I think probably in English anyway, you’re just going to lazy it out and say, put instead of [RASBERRY SOUND] because it is much less mouth effort, do not underestimate how lazy people are
Ben: Well we dropped to the silent B off the end of things. So I suppose you’re right,
Hedvig: Because there’s a lot of things we can do with our mouth, but that we don’t do and not because they’re so difficult, we can’t even produce them with our mouths, we often can do that. We can do a lot of weird things with our mouth that we don’t use in language all the time. But if you want to say a sentence, you want to say a sound, then another sound and another sound, there are things that don’t really meet that threshold of like Ben was saying from the start, that maybe don’t go well together. And like Helen was saying, you know, you can’t underestimate how lazy you need to be in order for that to be a quick processing thing that you can do in milliseconds.
Ben: So what you’re kind of talking about here is the like blank tiles in the IPA chart, right? Some of them because we can’t literally pronounce those sounds, but other ones because we kind of could but they’re just stupid and dumb and really hard. And so they’ve just never made their way into language. Would the raspberry sound just be that? Like would it be potentially like a bit of a blank tile in the IPA chart?
Hedvig: There’s not even a place in the usually the IPA chart for the lingual stuff, is there?
Daniel: Not labia lingual, no. There’s no labiolingual column.
Hedvig: There’s labiodental which is your lip to your teeth. But what about?
Daniel: [f] and [v]. I got one more. We’ve heard a number of hypotheses, the living saliva loca theory, the too much effort theory. Could it be that it just sounds taboo? Like it sounds like a fart?
Ben: Yeah!
Hedvig: No…
Daniel: Farts are pretty universal. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to sound like that. Nobody wants to hear that.
Ben: I actually think this this one I buy the most.
Hedvig: Really? Why?
Ben: Yep. Taboo hypothesis.
Daniel: Taboo avoidance, it’s normal. We know it exists.
Hedvig: So my… when I fart it makes other sounds as well as some of them sound like other language sounds
Ben: Sure. Yeah, yeah. And like the, the this the words people say for a dog barking all over the world are different, right? But like, I don’t know, I reckon you could go to just about any culture in the world. And
Helen: People love the fart sound.
Ben: Exactly. You could go to any culture in the world and say in that person’s language, “Hey, hey hey, what does this sound like? [FART SOUND]” and I’m pretty sure every culture in the world in their language would be like, that sounds like you farting.
Helen: I think if it was that taboo, people wouldn’t be blowing raspberries on babies for fun.
Hedvig: Yes! Yeah
Helen: And people do find fart sounds really funny. So I think that’s partly because it’s like, oooh, but like, they’re not a particularly outre forbidden sound are they?
Ben: Just, just to throw it out there, because I just want to throw good money after bad now… Do we perhaps think that we sanction the blowing of raspberries on babies because babies are one of the only areas where those kind of body functions are not seen as particularly taboo, because we have to deal with them all the time?
Helen: No, I think it’s just because the baby’s not verbal yet, so…
Ben: Fair enough, yeah,
Helen: You can use the phonemes you’re not otherwise using.
Ben: And and at the end of the day, it’s really hard not to blow a raspberry on an infant’s tumtum, because it’s just so satisfying.
Hedvig: Yeah, I try and blow them on my cats. It’s… with limited success
Daniel: Oh my gosh
Ben: That sounds unsuccessful and dangerous simultaneously
Daniel: Inadvisable!
Helen: Unless you’ve got one of those furless cats
Daniel: Oh my god!
Ben: [DISGUSTED SOUNDS] blowing a raspberry on a Sphinx that that you just wow, you can’t gouge out your mind’s eye, Helen.
Daniel: If you have one of those cats and you can blow raspberry, please send us what it sounds like.
Ben: Why would you do that? Don’t! No!
Daniel: Why would you NOT do that?
Ben: That’s like a person who has an aversion to feet and you just going “hey can you just send me like pictures of your stinky feet?” Like no.
Hedvig: I can probably do a raspberry on ???. I’ll try. Oh, what’s the next theory?
Daniel: Hang on? I did. Oh, that’s the only three.
Hedvig: Oh, okay
Daniel: I’ve got saliva everywhere.
Ben: I like how Hedvig sounds disappointed. Like, “Daniel, I expected you to come up with more theories.”
Hedvig: No, no. I like it. These are fair. Yeah.
Daniel: Saliva everywhere. Too hard to make and sounds taboo. I didn’t want to do this, but I’m making a Twitter poll right now. And we’re gonna come back to it at the end. Okay. Okay, there we go. Next one. This one comes from James on Patreon. “I just looked up the origins of confab on Etymonline because you’re always going on about it. And then through to confabulation, and from there to *BHA, as a root.” Okay, now that means to speak. That’s what it was in proto Indo-European. James continues, “however, it seems most of the words connected to *BHA I am familiar with have become more like for from Greek finance, which also means to speak. The broader question is, how can phonetics change so much from a bilabial voiced plosive [b] to a bilabial, unvoiced fricative [f]. Are there examples like this in more recent memory, where we can observe perhaps in the last 100 years in other languages, or maybe English as a nod to the language of the show? Totally Love you guys. Keep up the awesome work, et cetera, Kiss Kiss Kiss.”
Ben: Thank you for sending us those kisses at the end, James. Helen, Daniel, and Henrik, can you please explain every aspect of this question to me because I don’t understand.
Helen: Well I’m not a trained linguist. I’m out.
Ben: Okay, Daniel and Hedvig, can you please explain to Helen and I?
Hedvig: One of the things to keep in mind about what we’re talking about here, is that we have three kinds of sort of evidence. We have modern languages and the sounds they have. We have records of ancient languages, like ancient Greek, where we think we know what ancient Greek sounded like. And then we have reconstructed languages. Now reconstructed languages rely on the first two. And when you do reconstruction and historical linguistics, you try and find the solution to the two you have, and what things you have in the language that you find, try and find the solution that is the most parsimonious. The Occam’s razor that is a simplest, but also historical linguists employs specific, they have certain ideas that certain sounds are more likely to change into other sounds. So they’ll say, Oh, it’s more likely that an S goes through a H, than a H goes to an S, or something like that.
Ben: Like so we’ve we see this with like, Is it like D and TH as well? Like? I for some reason, in my brain like, pader and father, like cognates, and that sort of thing, right?
Hedvig: Yeah, those kinds of things
Daniel: Or dental going to teeth? You know,
Hedvig: Right. Yeah. So there are a lot of these. But it means that there are certain sounds, for example, that are just very rare to occur in ancient languages. Do you see my point? Because they are supposed to be in these chains. Right? So if you go backwards, you just sort of go one way. I don’t know if… So I was hoping that if I gave you that overview and context that Daniel maybe had looked up the things about the specific root? Is that true.
Daniel: I want to approach it from a slightly different direction. So James is asking, if you have B [b] like a stop. That’s called a plosive. Because it explodes. B, and then later on, you’ve got F [f] for those words. How did that happen? And it’s actually, it’s actually has kind of an easy answer. It happens all the time. It’s got a name, it’s called lenition. And the word lenition just means weakening. And that’s where Ben was talking about. Sorry, which What was your example Ben? Was that?
Ben: Father and Pader.
Daniel: Yeah, you got Pader going to father so there’s a P [p], a nice plosive going to F [f]. It also happens with cornus, which in English appears as horn, the K [k] goes to a H [h].
Hedvig: It also happens in Polynesian with S to H, Savai’i becomes Hawaii.
Daniel: Ah, very good. I noticed that Mater, mother in Latin goes mother, so the T in the middle goes to a TH. And, in fact, in French, it goes to mere. It’s disappeared entirely. And that’s lenition too.
Hedvig: Yeah, and it’s, so because we’ve seen this pattern over and over again, with ancient languages and modern languages, we’ve built up this idea that there are these specific rules that like S goes more often to H than H goes to S, or P goes to F more often than F goes to P. But the truth is also that we actually haven’t done historical linguistics on that many languages, if we’re just honest with ourselves. So some of these rules might also be a bit wrong. So when you see a reconstructed root, there’s a reason why they mark them out with an asterisk at the front. It’s because you should take the precise phonetics probably with a grain of salt. It’s probably more likely to say there’s some sort of word that is the ancestor of these words. And it maybe was somewhere along these lines, but maybe the precise phonetics, you should sort of be a bit careful with.
Daniel: We’re kind of to the end of my expertise on this. But could it possibly be a cycle where things start out with stops, and then they, they,
Ben: Ooh, that’s a fun concept
Daniel: Weaken all the way down? And then they sort of, we start putting stops in again, I know we’re talking about very long timescales.
Hedvig: I’ve heard people suggest that, that if… because if you just go on this lenition path, for example, sooner or later, you’ll just end up with a morpheme that’s just like a vowel. Like [NON DESCRIPT VOWEL SOUND]
Daniel: Everything disappears.
Hedvig: So there’s this theory that you add on, maybe not content in the same place, maybe not even in the same morpheme slot of phoneme slot, but that you might be adding on content somewhere else in the word or morpheme to bulk up the phonetic distinctiveness. Because as you go down this lenition path, you end up at, you guessed it, Danish, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: As we’ve done a show on
Ben: Never fail to rely on a Swede to just have a good old swing at the Danes
Hedvig: Well, we had a whole show on it, so I feel entitled to do it. But there’s this idea that maybe maybe you don’t make the S that went to a H become an S again, but maybe you add an S somewhere else in the word.
Daniel: You do something.
Hedvig: Yeah, you, you probably need to do something because otherwise all of the languages that exist today will sort of be like uhhhhh, and they’re not
Ben: To be fair, I think you could also criticize that like a broad Australian accent for just being ridiculously valley with not a lot of consonants. So like: [AUSTRALIAN ACCENT AS IF HE DOESN’T HAVE ONE ALREADY AH yeaaa ate,.
Daniel: And then that’s that tension between, you know, like, efficiency or what some people call laziness. And yeah, I call it efficiency. And you know, the drive to be understood that, which is, after all, what we’re kind of doing around here. We should probably point out also that fortition, the opposite of lenition, fortition is strengthening. That happens to. That’s how for example, burthen and murther became burden and murder. Sometimes sounds do strengthen,
Hedvig: But the important part is that doesn’t necessitate that it’s the same phoneme that gets strengthened. It’s probably somewhere else in the word.
Ben: You can just do some crazy other shit in another place.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay, so that’s lenition. Thanks, James for that question.
Ben: Kiss Kiss Kiss. Sorry, I just had to send it back. It seems rude not to.
Daniel: You don’t have to reciprocate. It’s okay.
Hedvig: For the record. James wrote xX xX. I feel like I need to say that.
Ben: That’s what the kiss kisses.
Daniel: Those are kisses.
Hedvig: I know. I’m just saying that if you wrote Kiss, kiss, kiss. K-I-S-S That would be a different vibe.
Daniel: That’s true.
Ben: That? Okay, fair enough
Daniel: Okay fair enough. I didn’t want to make it weird
Ben: The fidelity of James’s message has been heightened.
Daniel: Yeah. Maybe it’s like the three x’s on a cartoon bottle of ale.
Ben: Yes, perhaps poison.
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe
Daniel: Cass on Patreon says, “am I burned out or burnt out? Or do I just have burnout?”
Hedvig: Oooh!
Daniel: I’m sorry Cass
Ben: I would like you guys to explain the difference between burned and burnt very much. Because I didn’t realize that I had that question until right the second.
Daniel: That’s smart Patrons.
Hedvig: No, I think we should ask you, Ben. What do you feel when you see the word burned?
Ben: Oh nooo
Hedvig: No, honestly, because this isn’t a technical linguistics puzzle. This is a native speaker puzzle. You need to close your eyes. Pull inside of yourself. Take a deep breath.
Ben: Oh, no, this is just like therapy. And I do really badly in that context. Okay.
Hedvig: And then when I say, when I say burnt, what do you see?
Ben: What I heard ED just then, is that what you mean? Like voiced?
Daniel: With a T
Hedvig: When I say burnt, what do you see?
Ben: Some… Okay. I see a, maybe this is just like my Australian-ness but like I see a landscape that is black
Hedvig: Oh, interesting. And then, we’ll try it again. We’ll take a deep breath. Yep. [DEEP BREATH IN]
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Burned
Ben: I see a person who has sustained an injury that we call a burn.
Hedvig: Ah,
Daniel: Interesting. Okay.
Ben: I don’t know, did I pass the test? This is just making me so nervous! Am I a good dancer?
Hedvig: Yes, you did. You said, you said what you saw. That’s all you had to do.
Ben: Oh, this is like therapy.
Hedvig: Do you think one is more intentional?
Ben: I think burned, ED, is more intentional, like there has been more intent behind it.
Daniel: If I say the word toast, do you think burned or burnt?
Hedvig: Burnt
Ben: Burnt
Hedvig: But I burned the toast, and the toast is burnt.
Helen: So it’s more of a state of being and burned is more of a verb. Even though they are the same, aren’t they? Like just burnt is older than burned?
Ben: Okay so burnt with a T is older Helen Is that what you’re saying?
Helen: Yes.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: And also we tend to use it as an adjective. So you have burnt toast, burnt brick, burnt offering. Those all have Ts
Ben: The landscape is burnt.
Daniel: But if you say I burned, you could you could say either I burned the toaster or I burnt I’ve, I’ve burnt the toast. They’re both okay. So for burnout, you might have burnout, one word, but probably not burn out. Nouns get compounded. I would say that these days, you’re probably burned out. So I took a look in the Google Ngram corpus and I found that burned and burned out are more popular than burnt or burnt out in American and British English.
Ben: I wonder though, if that is purely a reflection of our writing habits not really mirroring our speech habits. Because I feel like I’ve heard people say burnt out more often than I have heard people say burned out.
Daniel: Well, I did do a little check on Youglish.com which allows you to look through the annotations in YouTube videos and it looks like burned out and burnt out are about 50% 50% in spoken English, at least on YouTube videos.
Hedvig: And as we discovered in our little breathing exercise earlier when I said burnt the first time, Ben thought I said the other word. So they’re excessively similar.
Ben: Yes, very, very very very
Helen: Well that’s probably why burnt with a T existed and then the ED was to make it more regular with other past tenses when people were trying to even up spelling.
Hedvig: Yeah I think that’s a good shout
Daniel: Anyway, Cass, we hope that you’re okay that you’re not too burnt out. And thanks a lot for that question. Let’s go to Britta on Twitter (twitta!). “Okay, philosophy Twitter, why are they called metaphysicians and not metaphysis????” Four question marks
Helen: Oh, err, because physician, well metaphysician is an older word than physicist. Metaphysician’s from about 15th century, physicist from 19th century.
Daniel: Nice.
Ben: Ah, I was gonna have a totally different guess. I want to say what my guess is because really like human beings
Helen: Oh, I ruined the game!
Ben: No, no, no
Daniel: No, this is good.
Ben: You didn’t ruin the game. I just fully expected that meta-physsulll whatever’s whichever one we want to use, chose physicians because far more authority and status is conferred with the position of a physician rather than a physicist, even though a physicist is still a very high status profession. I feel like basically no one beats doctors in terms of them saying stuff and us going: yeah, okay. I’ll do that.
Helen: Well that’s sort of right, because the person who coined physicist as in a student of physics was a man called the Reverend William, we will? Possibly we-will? It’s spelled W-H-E-W-E-L-L, which I know it’s, I don’t know how to do it. Do you?
Ben: Nope
Daniel: Nope
Helen: He published a book in 1840 called The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. And he said, “as we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general, I should incline to call him a scientist. Thus, we might say that as an artist, as a musician, painter or poet, a scientist as a mathematician, physicist or naturalist.” So
Daniel: This guy’s on fire.
Ben: Yeah, he’s just dropping the heat.
Daniel: Keep going!
Helen: Yeah, I don’t, I can’t [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Keep going, Whewell (wee-well)
Helen: So many W’s.
Hedvig: Yeah, I was gonna say that naturalist must have been the earlier thing.
Daniel: Yes, it was.
Hedvig: That’s what like Aristotle thought he was.
Daniel: I couldn’t believe this but metaphysician has been in use since the mid 15th century?
Helen: It was a growth industry.
Daniel: Amazing
Helen: The Silicon Valley of its time
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe we should tell our listeners, because I totally know, what is the metaphysicist?
Ben: Well, a metaphysician.
Daniel: Metaphysics is just like making up bullshit about supernatural bullshit. That’s what it is.
Hedvig: Okay, let’s go to Helen for a definition next
Ben: Is it not a real thing?
Daniel: Well, an early definition of metaphysics from 1569 is things of supernatural and the science of them. So I think it’s just pin balanced Angel counting.
Hedvig: I believe there. Isn’t there a non Christian kind of metaphysics as well?
Daniel: That’s bullshit too.
Hedvig: Okay, wow coming out strong.
Daniel: No but anything supernatural, I don’t care if it’s Christian or not,
Hedvig: Do you not have a spiritual bone in your body anymore?
Ben: Have you not met excommunicated religious people before?
Daniel: I was not excommunicated, I resigned.
Ben: Sorry, like, people who have turned away from their community like, like they go harder than any other group of atheists. Like, I’m like a casual atheists. I’m like: Yeah, man, God isn’t real, but like, whatever you do you, whereas people from those religions are just like no
Helen: Evangelical atheists.
Ben: Yes, exactly.
Daniel: I’ll change my mind with any evidence of supernatural anything.
Ben: But Daniel, this one time, I put a crystal on my friend, and then they got better. So
Daniel: Well, that’s it. Okay.
Ben: So metaphysics is hippy wawa nonsense, like, just if we put just like a big line under it, is that fundamentally what we’re talking about?
Daniel: Study of the supernatural
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s it’s no, but it’s also the study of the world as it is. It’s actually, the way I learned about it for the first time, which I thought was how you’re using, it is from Aristotle of like, is answering question like: What is there? And what is it like? And what are objects? And what is knowing? And what is time is?
Ben: Well, that sounds like philosophy.
Hedvig: Yeah
Daniel: Epistemology
Helen: All questions. No answers.
Ben: So is metaphysics just philosophy? Or is it different?
Hedvig: I think it’s a kind of philosophy. I just pulled up Wikipedia. And it’s this is the kind of philosophy
Helen: Yeah, the science of the inward in the central nature of things. But also science itself didn’t mean what we now use the term to mean until fairly recently, I think. I thought it just meant knowledge more generally for hundreds of years.
Ben: This is why we need Helen on the show more often because she has such wonderful things like the Reading Rainbow of like cool etymologies. Now you know,
Helen: I just, you know, as an evangelical atheist for pedantry. Now, I just delight in telling people you know, these things aren’t concrete meant something else for ages don’t get too possessive about.
Hedvig: Yeah, no science for sure.
Ben: It’s really hard to be like linguistics adjacent. Before you just almost like, against your will have to adopt that idea. Like, at a certain point, the amount of evidence about how fucking up in the air all of this shit is just on a long timeline. You’re just like: aw, I can’t really have a strong view on much now.
Ben: [LAUGHTER]
Helen: Will release in a way
Hedvig: Sobering
Daniel: seems to me that metaphysics had a lot of stuff, but bit by bit people took it away and said: Okay, we’re carving this off and it’s epistemology. Okay, we’re carving that off, and it’s ontology. And pretty much all that was left was the supernatural. Because everything else became science.
Hedvig: I think maybe this is a discussion about classification. Because as I’m reading about here, I think people use metaphysics as the umbrella category for ontology and epistemology. So, but but I don’t know.
Daniel: So not entirely supernatural.
Hedvig: No
Daniel” Okay, that’s cool.
Ben: I think that the real test here would be call up like a sort of academic specializing in ontology and be like: do you describe yourself as a metaphysician? And if the answer is no, then I think we have a fairly clear answer about who this would probably pertains to a
Daniel: Twitter poll! Bye for now, the answer to this question and it kind of was in the tweet replies already, but metaphysician came first because they had access to the word physician whereas physicist wouldn’t be around for a long time. Couldn’t be used.
Hedvig: That’s a really cool piece of evidence. Helen, thank you for bringing it to show.
Helen: Oh, my pleasure. Couldn’t come empty handed!
Ben: Shooting from the hit with the etymology, pew pew
Daniel: Bill on Patreon says “Hey, y’all love the pod. Keep up the good work. Can you help me find a non-ablest replacement for lame in my lexicon?”
Ben: I’ve been struggling with this myself, Bill.
Daniel: “Your replace a slur from your lexicon series is one of my favorite segments and I haven’t been able to figure this one out. You’d do a great service to me and my friends. I’ve heard people try to use pathetic as a replacement but pathetic lacks the useful connotations that lame has. At least it has them here in North Carolina, USA. I think those useful connotations, there’s something like pathetic because your social privilege separates you from reality. I’ve also described lame as evoking an idiot white suburban dad who thinks he’s figured the world out because he had an easy life. I don’t know y’all. Maybe something like Karen-ish could work? But since I’m a white man, Karen-ish has sexist overtones.” Boy, Bill, you are really exploring every angle on this one.
Helen: Listen, Bill real talk. Okay? Lame doesn’t really mean any of the connotations that you have listed. What it really means is physical disability. Every other meaning it has is just the connotations of ableism, which means, I don’t think you’ll find an exact synonym for what you think it means. And you won’t find one term for all circumstances in which you would use this word. So think about what it is you’re trying to say in each of these specific circumstances. Like sometimes people are being pathetic. Sometimes you just want to dismiss whatever they’re saying, without really specifying why. Sometimes they’re being boring, sometimes just rubbish, we would say, in Britain. Insipid, inadequate
Hedvig: I think that’s an excellent point. I was also thinking that it’s going to be really hard to find a perfect match. One that came to mind for me that might cover some of the use cases is basic. I think that it’s not going to be… listen, we can’t… we can sit here and list like some ideas for Bill but we’re never gonna be able to find one perfect replacement. But I like the ones you were listening to Helen, I think there we good.
Helen: Parochial maybe? For what he’s describing, as well.
Hedvig: Parochial. That’s quite fancy
Ben: I’ve always favored…. Because I’ve struggled with this a lot. I really like, in terms of, I’m going to try and answer in terms of the spirit of the question for Bill. Like a good, versatile, non-ablest non-homophobic, you know, all the all the various umbrella kind of thing. I really like wanker
[LAUGHTER]
Helen: I wish Americans would get on board with wanker, I think they’d enjoy it so much. They don’t really have those, like mid tier swears.
Ben: It’s just such a Yeah, they don’t have a masturbatory thing I know.
Helen: Bollocks as well
Hedvig: But what’s wrong with masturbating? I don’t get
Ben: Nothing. And I guess I guess at worst, it’s not particularly sex positive. But I’ve got to be honest, in the like, in the spectrum of people who probably need people looking out for them. People who masturbate are probably not on that list right now. Like maybe we’ll get there one day, but unless we get to some, I don’t know. Bizarre Handmaid’s Tale type future. I think for now, people who masturbate probably don’t need their stuff protected as much as say, people with a disability or Black people or whatever.
Hedvig: Oh yeah, definitely that
Helen: I don’t use this word. And I’m never stuck for a criticism of something.
Hedvig: I don’t know if this is helpful or not. But I, recent lockdown and also end of my PhD, I find it sometimes a hard time to express myself when I’m a little bit stressed or anxious. And I’ve come into this pattern of using very basic, very small sentences. Like, I don’t feel well. Period. I don’t like this. Period. I want to go lie down now. Period. I don’t want go to that thing.
Ben: You’ve basically become a simplistic automaton basically.
Hedvig: No, but but I, but I like it. Like just it’s again, to go back to like therapy [LAUGHS]. Like restating things in the simplest of terms, when it’s like, I don’t like this thing. I don’t like this person. I would like to not have to do anything with this person anymore.
Ben: You’ve basically become Hal from 2001 as Dave is shutting him down. [AS HAL] No, Dave do that.
Hedvig: Yeah, no, a little bit. I’m an advocate for this type of thing. And if you’re really into this kind of thing, I recommend checking out natural semantic meta-language.
Daniel: Yeah!
Hedvig: Which is when people try and come up with definitions for words, maybe such as lame, using only about 60 to 70 basic words. And there’ll be like: “there is the thing, that the person talking doesn’t like the thing,” that will be like a description of something like lame, I’m into it.
Daniel: I like this too. And my guide is, when there’s something you’re trying to avoid saying, try to get to the bottom of what you’re really trying to say, because the word you want is probably lurking in there waiting for you to find it.
Helen: Always
Daniel: For example, let’s just try this together. You put lame next to other words, and it’s different. So if there’s a lame attempt, what are we really saying we don’t like about it? That it’s?
Ben: Ineffectual, basically
Hedvig: Half bad?
Helen: Misguided
Daniel: Pedestrian, right. Okay, good. How about a lame excuse… it’s an excuse that is?
Hedvig: Insincere?
Ben: Inadequate
Helen: Not even trying?
Daniel: Yeah, transparent? See something like that. We can say that. Lame Duck period, which is when a leader has been voted out but the new person hasn’t come in yet.
Ben: Oh, that that would be like a gap
Hedvig: That sounds American
Helen: Yeah. That doesn’t seem like something that really needs its own term. Fair enough.
Hedvig: Limbo.
Daniel: Oh, limbo’s good.
Helen: Hiatus.
Daniel: Kalani Harris from the prompts suggests the zero fucks period.
Hedvig: I don’t know what that is either.
Daniel: When you give no fucks
Hedvig: Oh okay, fair enough.
Daniel: Presidential Twilight or pre inauguration. You know, if you need it, it’s there and we don’t have to use lame duck. But let’s remember that the reason we go to all this effort of using language thoughtfully is that, that way we don’t make people feel bad or we don’t further discrimination. And we get our meaning across into way that doesn’t distract our audience with things that we don’t mean.
Ben: Can I give Bill one final honorable mention? So this one comes by way of my partner, Ayesha. She came across a bit of a like a I think it was like a Twitter feed with exactly this type of thing. Like I’m trying to remove like ablest slurs from my lexicon, but I really want to insult people still, how do I do that? [LAUGHTER] And Bill, in opposition to the answer I gave you before, wanker, which I think is like really versatile. I’m going to give you a an incredibly specific and bespoke one that was on this twitter feed that Ayesha shared with me, which was “you are as bad as an inescapable shower fart”
Daniel: Goodness.
Ben: And I just think that is possibly going to only ever be useful to you once in your life. But in that one instance, it’s just going to be mwah, chef’s kiss. Perfect.
Daniel: You know how a lot of sentences are one offs and never to be spoken again?
Hedvig: What’s bad about a fart in the shower?
Ben: Have you never farted in the shower and it smells really bad
Hedvig: I frequently fart in the shower, it’s my favorite place to fart
Ben: Yeah but you fart and you are trapped in that small cubicle with your fart?
Hedvig: No, because when I sense a fart coming, I direct the water towards the area where the fart is about to come out.
Ben: [LAUGHTER] This is so not what I need to know
Hedvig: Sorry! You’re the one who…
Ben: All I say is that I and other people in the world are able to identify that being in a shower with your own stinky fart is sub optimal life.
Daniel: What do YOU think, Helen? Just kidding.
Helen: Well I was just thinking if you if you want words that are a similar tier of swear to wanker, there’s pillock that means penis or belland, which means the end of the penis. Bringing the connotation that the penis is bad there. But I suppose there’s a time and a place for penises. And out of those places they aren’t welcome, as the people that Bill is trying to describe may not be.
Daniel: Ah, very good.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s a fair point.
Daniel: I had a good one. I’m trying to stop saying tone-deaf and I thought of a good substitute: off-key.
Ben: As a person who has been off-key for his entire life, I find that personally offensive.
Daniel: Okay, okay fine
Ben: No no, I’m kidding, I’m kidding
Daniel: I’m sorry to the off-key community. By the way, all of us, we need to work on crazy and insane. I’ve been doing the transcripts and it comes up a lot. Let’s try bonkers, bananas, wild, and weird. Next, from Paul via email. Paul says “I love listening to Daniel with Russell on the 720 weekly segment.” This is something else that I do on ABC Radio of Australia. “It’s such an island of refuge in the bombastic ocean of morning radio show assaults on the ear hole.” [CLEARS THROAT POINTEDLY] “My question is, why does the prefix amphi seem like a linguistic orphan? It makes an appearance in the words like amphitheatre and amphibian, and seems related in meaning to ambidextrous. But after a couple of honorable mentions, amphi seems to run out of friends to headline with.”
Ben: What a great way to phrase that. I love it. It’s so evocative.
Daniel: It gets better. “With the generic meaning of both sides or all sides, I would have thought it could collaborate with greater frequency with other words to enrich their lives. For example, amphivision, to see both sides. I’m amphivisual. Amphiemotional, shortened to Hey, you’re a bit amphi lately. Amphi intelligent, well rounded knowledge. So what’s happened? Is it the case that amphi didn’t play well with others at the beginning of language construction to be show up like a bad mannered Greek uncle uninvited to the Christmas lunch? Or did those uppity prefix also rans like omni beat him out of everyday usage? Why is it sort of the same as ambidextrous? Do they share a common ancestor? Great show love, your work”
Helen: Yes
Ben: Helen with the early answer,
Helen: Yes, let’s all go home. Common ancestor, done. Yeah, they are similar. So it is actually in loads of words that have amb- in, ambulance, and loads that I didn’t expect as well.
Ben: Ambulatory is that also one?
Helen: Yeah. perambulate all of those. Umlaut as well, apparently.
Daniel: What?!
Helen: You know, you’re saying it doesn’t appear in many places, but it’s like put on a fake beard and popped up in loads of words.
Ben: [LAUGHTER] You just carried on with the great evocativeness I love it.
Daniel: We got to break down ambi, alright? So the am is from, away from, and the bi is both or both sides or from just all around. So an ambulance used to be a field hospital where you would walk around and check on everybody. In the same way that embassy was, an ambassador was somebody who goes around to all the different places.
Ben: So then how do we get to amphi?
Daniel: Oh, amphi is just Greek and ambi is Latin.
Ben: Oh, okay. So those are just the two Greek ones that showed up and Latin kind of did most of the heavy lifting and also as Helen said, on like Groucho Marx glasses and just kind of hit in plain sight.
Daniel: Helen’s absolutely right, it hides in plain sight. There are ambis everywhere except it might just be the latter half. Because when we have by as in both, like bicycle, like two that’s, that’s the bi in ambi.
Hedvig: Oh, right
Helen: Amputate as well.
Hedvig: Amputate.
Daniel: Yes, you’re cutting around.
Hedvig: Wow, so cool, so many places so the answer to the question is it’s actually in lots of places?
Daniel: It’s actually everywhere. Everywhere you’re seeing a bi that’s actually ambi as well.
Helen: Do you think Paul will be relieved or he’ll be like, Oh, it’s ubiquitous, not cool anymore?
Ben: Yeah, yeah. He’s, he’s got the hipster prefix like affection. And now that everyone’s got it, he’s like: I’ll move on to the next thing.
Daniel: Let’s move on to the next thing. I asked our Discord friends. Did they have any questions for Helen and there’s one of course from PharoahKatt Here we go. “So we all know that etymologies that sound interesting are probably false, like the one for fuck, F-U-C-K What’s the most interesting etymology you’ve come across that was actually true.
Ben: Oh, yes! What’s the surprisingly true folk etymology?
Helen: Well, if they’re folk etymology is, then they’re not true, are they?
Ben: Then folk-sounding etymology, how’s that?
Daniel: Yeah, what’s one that you couldn’t believe
Ben: You’re like that’s folk as fuck, and it turns out to be not folk at all.
Helen: Okay. Login, I would say is one of these. It’s our, it’s a genuine log that was thrown overboard from a ship on a knotted rope in order to measure speed. So they would count out the rate of knots, another expression, and then log that in a book. Well, I mean, at the time, they didn’t log it, they wrote it in a book and later we call that logging it.
Ben: The book itself. The book. Yeah, it was the log book, right. So you would record things in the logbook, and then you would log in?
Daniel: Oh my gosh!
Hedvig: Ohh! And now it’s just log. Like, [ROBOT VOICE] Captain’s log, Stargate 234.5 We encountered
Ben: That is actually based on a real log, and I can’t believe this, but I actually also knew that
Helen: You know how people are like: oh, podcasts is a ridiculous word because no one uses iPods anymore. There’s so many bits of detritus, in the English language when it comes to things. People don’t use a real log to log into a computer now. So I just wish they could concentrate on other matters. Really.
Ben: I feel like there’s a really good TikTok skit in that somewhere, like a person just holding an actual logbook, very delicately trying to type into a keyboard with it.
Daniel: I’m going to! I found a good one. This one came up on the speakeasy on ABC Radio last week. Why do we call it taking a gander?
Ben: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I want to guess. Because male geese are just fucking pricks, and are in everyone’s business all the time.
Daniel: Yup, that’s it.
Ben: Fuck off! Really?!
Daniel: Take a gander at me. You know, geese, they have that neck and they’re just always moving that neck around, looking around having a good old sticky beak, looking for whatever. So having a gander is one of them.
Hedvig: Geese are such bullies when I lived in the Netherlands, where there were streets when I walked down, and there were geese on the road and I would like cross the road. Because like the geese…
Daniel: Roaming gangs of geese
Hedvig: That’s why it’s so funny
Ben: They are awful creatures.
Hedvig: Earlier today, a friend of mine said that they knew a dog that would like frequently attack geese and kill them by biting their necks. And I was like, what kind of a dog? What kind of brave dog?
Ben: Yeah, like what, have you got a Tibetan Mastiff or something like that? What is that?
Hedvig: What is that? It’s… smurf! We said the same word at the same time.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Wait, smurf?! Do you guys say smurf instead of jinx?
Daniel: You say smurf?
Hedvig: Yeah, we say smurf. What do you say? Jinx? Oh, jinx! You can’t say anything until I say your name.
Ben: Okay, well shit.
Daniel: While Ben’s recovering. Why is it called the tank top?
Hedvig: Oh, I am actually wearing a tank top. No, I’m wearing a crop top. Sorry.
Daniel: Everything’s a crop top. I did a search for crop top and every conceivable shirt was in there.
Hedvig: Yeah, I love crop tops. Why is it called a tank top? Because men who were in the… Ben maybe has an answer?
Daniel: Ben [LAUGHTER]
Ben: There we go. Yeah, I think it’s because tanks are hot as fuck. And soldiers had to wear like yeah, light shirts, otherwise it would just be horrendously umcomfortable
Hedvig: I second this
Daniel: Nope.
Ben: Ah fuck! Fuck!
Helen: What happened to their tank pants then? Maybe they didn’t wear any, just the tops.
Ben: Yeah well, look I would be, if you had told me that most personnel on board tanks in both World War I and World War II were mostly naked, I would immediately believe you
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: It’s because you… Helen, your guess?
Helen: Well, I’ve looked it up so it wouldn’t be fair.
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] It’s because you were in a tank of water — swimming pool.
Ben: Oh, like early Victorian swimming cossies kind of thing?
Hedvig: OHH! I should say for non Australia’s, cossie is short for swimming costume.
Ben: Sorry, apologies.
Hedvig: No, that’s fine. It’s just words that I’ve learned that I know that other people don’t know
Helen: That’s bathing suit for Americans, or swimsuit
Daniel: It’s now coming back to our Twitter poll. Why is the raspberry sound not a speech sound in languages? The least common answer for our 31 votes so far: “sounds taboo.”
Ben: Oh, boo, screw you guys.
Daniel: 12.9% The next least popular answer, number two: “saliva everywhere,” 29%. And the most common answer from our Twitter fans
Ben: Laziness
Daniel: “Too hard to make” 58.1%
Helen: See?! Lazy, lazy people!
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] Let’s hear it
Hedvig: Yeah, I identify as a lazy person. And I’m sort of vaguely proud of it. It means I just I use a lot of effort to try and get work done in less time.
[LAUGHTER]
Helen: Smart way to live.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah. Love it
Daniel: We did have some other questions, but they were a little bit more involved, Bianca and PharaohKatt. So we wanted to do a good job on them. We’ll be getting to those in a bit. Okay, thanks to everyone for their great questions. We got some comments to get through from Raya on Twitter. About our last episode, we did the word apartheid as it applies to the Palestinian situation. She says, “great episode as usual. I feel like I should chime in on the whole apartheid debate. We Palestinians call it apartheid.”
Ben: There we go.
Hedvig: And during the show, I also looked up the Jewish Voice for Peace, which is an American Jewish organization, which is mostly pro-Palestine, and they also use apartheid.
Daniel: There we go. Raya continues, “South Africans also referred to it as apartheid. Human Rights Watch calls that apartheid and it is an apartheid system under international law. The term crime of apartheid originated in the South African context but can definitely be applied elsewhere. Debating It only hurts the case in my opinion.” Peter also on Patreon says, “the points on apartheid were interesting but in this case, it is a legal term in international law so it has been defined already in a way abstract from the South African context.” There we go.
Ben: I was, look, as soon as Raya chimed in and was like: I’m a Palestinian, I’m like: Yep, I believe you
Daniel: I’m on board
Ben: And that’s what I said at the time as well, like if a Palestinian wants say that there is no way whitey McWhiteyson over here is going to be like: well you shouldn’t do that.
Daniel: Awesome. From Joanna via email, Hello@becauselanguage.com: “Hello everyone. I’m a relatively new listener and appreciater, also a speech therapist among other things. Loved the episode about VIP. Kamala Harris’ speech and terrific for hosting David Crystal whose work I’ve met via Theatre Arts. Re the question in your latest episode about doubling of x in anti-vaxxer, etc. Daniel came close with the comment about how consonant spelling changes the preceding vowel, I just go a step further. Consider the alternative: If I were to read the word vaxer single x with no meaningful context, I’d probably pronounce it vay-xer or rhyming with brakser, or so to my eye, the double x confirms that the correct vowel is the shorter A, as in vaccine, thank you for the podcast.” Tone of friendliness with just the right amount of brain tickling. What do you think, folks?
Hedvig: Yeah, I like it
Daniel: Would you mistake it for vay-xer?
Ben: I mean, we have a D in fridge for a similar reason. So I don’t see why not?
Hedvig: What do you call a person who waxes people’s legs?
Helen: Oh!!
Ben: I call her Carol, personally
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: No, I think that’s fair enough. I mean, it’s a Germanic thing to have a short vowel when you have two consonants after, so it makes sense. You might need some guidance on that. Now that said, English is famously you know, not one to play well with the other Germanic children. So, you know, whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
Helen: Do you think people want the double x because vaccine has a double C and so
Hedvig: [WHISPERING LOUDLY] That’s what I said!
Daniel: That was Hedvig’s, Yeah, that was a good one.
Hedvig: I like this guest, we should have her on more often. I’ve agreed with her at least twice so far
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: At first, I thought, I would not see laxer and think lay-xer, but then you know what? Maybe there is just something about double consonants that straightens it out for us and makes our brains go: change that vowel! I mean, it’s not an incompatible explanation.
Helen: Do you think it’s also we don’t often get to write a word with a double x in it. And so people are like, well, this seems fancy.
Ben: Yeah, this is fun!
Helen: It’s a snazzy word
Ben: It feels like it’s a little dead person in the middle.
Daniel: It’s sexxy.
Ben: Oh god.
Daniel: Okay, I’m gonna take that one back. Scroggie on Twitter says BecauseLangPod have talked about the no languages of Australia. Remember them?
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: The Aboriginal Australian languages that are quite similar to each other and they distinguish them by saying: Oh, those are the folks who say bun for no and there was people that say wan for No. Yeah, I immediately thought about the yes languages of France.
Hedvig: Yes. Yes.
Daniel: What a fun and interesting way to name your language rather than naming it after a country or a group of people. I did not know about this. Did you Helen or Hedvig?
Hedvig: Yeah, Langue d’Oc. Langue d’Oc.
Daniel: Tell me more. Tell me more.
Hedvig: There used to be a lot more diversity in French than there is now, and they used to refer to different varieties by the different words for yes. Most famous one is Langue d’Oc where, I think Oc or something like that is the, so Langue de Oc. Lang du Oc I think it is.
Daniel: It was originally hoc in Latin, which is this. You want a bagel? This?
Hedvig: Yeah. We I think in that episode we talked about some more cases as well because there’s a language isn’t the guinea where, if I’m correct in my memory, it’s the language name. Sorry the words for what? Yeah, it’s a great if you have like a Shibboleth that people are aware of it’s pretty neat way of distinguishing nearby varieties
Ben: Especially if they really really really common aspects of the language, right? Like yes, no, or what
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, yeah, it’s never like you know, microphone or pizza. Thank you for that. And then last of all from Bill on Twitter he says, “next EP you should vote to make bi-monthly aligned to the opposite configuration of bi-weekly” and then he included the fire Elmo GIF.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Fire elmo GIF is pretty great.
Daniel: From now on bi-monthly means twice a month and bi-weekly means every two weeks. Hmm, okay.
Helen: BOOO
Ben: Some people, some people just want to watch the world burn, clearly.
Daniel: Helen Zaltzman, thank you so much for hanging out with us and being on this special episode.
Helen: Pleasure! thanks for having me.
Ben: We should get you on way more often,
Hedvig: Yeah, this was fun!
Ben: Because you are super successful, by virtue of the fact that you’re really really really smart and interesting and talented.
Helen: No, I’m just good at sounding like I am. That is my one true gift in life.
Ben: To be fair, that is exactly the premise by which I have conducted nearly all of the successes in my life as well. So in this regard, I really resonate with that. You should invite me onto your show where you just answer ransom questions. Ransom questions?
Daniel: Ransom questions
Ben: Ransom questions.
Daniel: How do I pay?
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Make sure you make them jump in a pool first, so they can get rid of any wire there
Helen: What kind of suitcase do I put the cash into?
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: steady, hardshell, definitely
Daniel: How can people find out where you are or get in touch with you online, if you want them to?
Helen: Oh, well, I’m sure you can find my podcasts: Answer Me This, The Allusionist with an A and Veronica Mars Investigations in the pod places. And I mean, you can probably figure out how to find me on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook as well if you so wish.
Daniel: Thank you
[MUSIC]
Hedvig: Thank you so much, Helen, for being on the show, that was tons of fun. If you listen to the show, and you like this and you have something to say to us. If you listen to this show in the near future, it means you’re a Patreon so you can DM or ask us things on the discord channel. But if you listen to this at a later date, you can always contact us through all of the other ways as well. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastadon, Patreon, TikTok and clubhouse and on all of the places we are BecauseLangPod, one word
Daniel: Oh and substack. We’re on substack now too
Hedvig: Oh, and we have a new one as well that isn’t on my list. Daniel, please tell us
Daniel: This sub stack at this point is just claiming the name for everywhere.
Hedvig: Okay. Apparently we’ve claimed, staked out a claim on substack as well. You can ask us a question comment or if you just want to say hi. And we would also love it if you help the show by telling a friend about us, or leaving us a review and other places we do reviews. And of course I should mention, you can also send a good old fashioned email at Hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you’re as brave as Sadman Stories, feel free to tweet about us and recommend people on the Twee-ters to listen to us that also be tons of fun.
Ben: As Hedvig just alluded to, if you’re listening to this shortly after it’s aired, you’re probably already a Patron. But we also drop our Patron only episodes much later on. So you might be listening to this ages away. This is the magic of podcasts from when we actually recorded this. Basically, I’m traveling through time right now and speaking to a future version of you. How cool is that? And I’m basically saying to you, hey, if you wanted to be a Patron of the show, one really, really cool thing that that does. Like the vast majority of the money that we get from our Patrons we devote to transcribing our shows through the wonderful work of Maya Klein of Voicing Words, who we’ve have actually had on the show. You can go and listen to the show with Maya Klein. That is a really good episode, you should definitely check it out. But yeah, the vast majority of the money we get at the moment goes towards transcribing the shows which has the advantage of allowing people who are unable to listen to things to be able to enjoy our shows, but also, it makes the show’s searchable. So if you are having that argument at the pub, and the person’s like: Mmm, this thing is definitely this way and you think to yourself, fuckin I remember Daniel said a thing about this, you can quickly jump on search it and you will actually be able to find Find that little that nugget. It’s like a Shazam for interesting podcast shit. That’s what we have basically created by transcribing our shows. And that is only possible because of our Patrons, some of whom I’m going to name right now. Thank you to Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin thank you to all of our patrons.
Daniel: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno, and of the very great band Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Don’t let your dreams become memes, because language
Ben: That was so fucking cheesy. Oh my god. Don’t let your dreams become memes?!
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Also, you should let your dreams become memes!
Ben: Like what the fuck?
Hedvig: That sounds great.
Daniel: It resonated with me. I’m leaving it
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Okay boomer, whatever you say
Hedvig: Speaking of dad humor….
[BEEP]
Daniel: I had forgotten for the moment which one is older.
[LAUGHTER]
Helen: Burnt is older
Ben: Did you just drop like a like a gavel on us linguists?
Hedvig: It was a teaspoon. I had a cup of tea and I moved a teaspoon. I don’t know why I’m so noisy today. I just touched a teaspoon.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: It really sounded like Daniel was Judge Judy-ing burned and burnt.
Hedvig: This one is gained down like mad. Okay, here we get, that’s super low gain.
[BEEP]
Daniel: Let’s go to Britta on Twitta.
Ben: Oh, Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hedvig just Community call-back right now. Go.
Hedvig: Ah, she she’s a Swedish dog?
Ben: No, damnit! I was expecting you to be like, oh, Britta, you’re the worst!
Hedvig: Oh, I was just I thought I’d go a bit niche or niche.
Ben: Sorry, I went I
Hedvig: Which canonically of Swedish descent on the show Britta, the comedy show Community. And yeah, I don’t know. when time [???] calls her a Swedish dog.
Ben: I rolled too deep with a homie who was packing too much heat. I’m sorry. Sorry.
Hedvig: Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Britta on Twitta, you’re the worst.
Ben: There we go.
Daniel: Thank you.