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Become a Patron!Show notes
Speech and sun: New research on climate and how we speak
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-speech-sun-climate.html
Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1200463/full
An ancient language with nearly a million undeciphered texts just got a translator that does the job in seconds: A.I.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230705234025/https://fortune.com/2023/07/05/google-translate-ai-akkadian-ancient-worlds-oldest-language-iraq-assyrian/
Researchers Are Breaking Ancient Language Barriers With AI
https://decrypt.co/147176/ai-ancient-language-translation-cuneiform-akkadian
Translating Akkadian to English with neural machine translation
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/5/pgad096/7147349?login=false
Cuneiform writing on a clay tablet
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/s4kpy9/cuneiform_writing_on_a_clay_tablet/
A unified theory of the lexicon and the mind: Researchers find common cognitive foundation for child language development and language evolution
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996971
From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade7981
Frilly dresses and white supremacy: welcome to the weird, frightening world of ‘trad wives’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/31/white-supremacy-trad-wives-far-right-feminist-politics
Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous Woman Disappeared
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/alt-right-star-racist-propagandist-has-no-regrets/616725/
What’s in a name? India’s Modi sits behind ‘Bharat’ placard at G20 summit
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/09/india/g20-summit-india-bharat-placard-modi-intl-hnk/index.html
Quoicoubeh | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/quoicoubeh
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: It’s just about time to get started. I don’t expect Hedvig today because it’s, what 2 or 3am.
BEN: That’s actually more social a time for her than when we normally record for her, which is like 9am.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] For her, yeah.
BEN: I would put more money on her being here now than at the other time.
DANIEL: Okay, well, [CHUCKLES] we’ll see what happens.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special patron bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. With me now: he’s forgotten more linguistics than the average master’s student ever knew. It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: It’s just… every week, everyone who’s listening in the show is like… a lot of this stuff doesn’t… I’m sure a lot of my replies don’t make it in, but I often am just like, “Stop! Stop saying nice things. I don’t like it.”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It just floats on by. No, what I mean is it doesn’t… like, in one ear and out of the other.
BEN: Yes, that is definitely the key takeaway from that message is that I am like a very ineffective sponge. Like, the water just sloshes off me.
DANIEL: You’re permeable.
BEN: Yeah, highly.
DANIEL: But along the way, you provide interesting excretions, like a sponge. So…
BEN: Look, I got to say, I like this summation of my character better than the first one. So, I’ll take that. Ben Ainslie, occasional interesting secretions.
DANIEL: Linguistic sponge. There we go. [CHUCKLES] Usually, people talk about babies as linguistic sponges, but you’re in the opposite sense. Fascinating.
BEN: We all know that the baby thing is bunk anyway.
DANIEL: Hmm. Hedvig is probably not going to be with us unless she wakes up. So, we have decided to make this show accessible in the Americas this time. So, let’s see. I’m just curious. Who’s joining us from the Americas? Go ahead and pop yourself in chat there.
BEN: We’ve got a bunch of waves!
DANIEL: We’ve got the waves,, yeah.
BEN: Yeah. Good call on that one.
DANIEL: Okay. We got some people I didn’t expect as well. Some of our Perthians. Like Lord Mortis and PharaohKatt. Awesome to see you. Got a few items from you, so you can jump on in to that one. We’ve got Cameron representing from Detroit, Michigan. We’ve got Rach, great to see you. Rach has an item coming up. Annika from Boston.
BEN: We got someone from Boston. A fellow non-rhotive American. I got a lot of time for the Boston accent.
DANIEL: Oh, man, so many people. This is so great. Okay, and now the other thing that I want to know. Who has decided to brave the clock and join us from Europe? [LAUGHS] Who we got?
BEN: Do we have any…? Oh, we’ve got…
DANIEL: We’ve got Aengry Balls. Awesome.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Love it.
DANIEL: I saw… who else? Who else? I saw somebody. Ariaflame? You’re in Australia, aren’t you? Okay. Yep. Cool. All right, well, we do have a few, so this is great. And Ben and I are coming at you from Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, Perth, Australia. The land of the Noongar people, also known as Boorloo. And we would like to just take the opportunity to pay our respects to elders, past, present, and emerging. So, hello to everyone joining us on Zoom. These are our wonderful patrons. They give us ideas. They give us financial support. They make it possible to keep the show going, paying the bills. You folks are the reason that the regular episodes are free for everyone. So, thanks for your support. Thanks for being here. We hope you’re enjoying it. We hope you like it.
So this episode is all about your stories. People have brought us things, and some people are actually here to present in their own words. So, if you would like to, or if you have at certain intervals, if you have comments or questions or even a story that we didn’t get on the run sheet, you can just unmute and say what you got, and we’ll make way for you.
All right, well, who’s ready? Ready for some news?
BEN: I am ready.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I’m pumped.
DANIEL: We got a few here. Diego, who wasn’t able to be with us on this one, but he sent a recording for something a little later. This one’s about climate and language, again. So, this is work from Professor Ian Madison and a team. He’s from the University of New Mexico Department of Linguistics. This one’s about how climate affects language on a language-wide scale. If, for example, a place is a little higher in altitude or a little moister or a little bit colder, does that have an influence on the speech sounds in that language? Now…
BEN: Hold up a second, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] This is ticklin’ a few different parts of the old memory cortex!
DANIEL: Well…
BEN: I seem to recall we had like a whole thing. We had a palaver over this, did we not?
DANIEL: We sure did, on multiple occasions. That’s because this is based on work by Dr Caleb Everett at University of Miami. We did at least three episodes with him on climate and phonology. Then, when it all flared up again and people got really angry about it, as though they were discovering it for the first time, we did another episode. I think it was Episode 33, You’re Wrong About Blasi, Everett, and so on. So, yeah, this is that work kind of…again. So, let’s go back to Everett for a second.
BEN: So, scientifically, is this a person who’s just like, “I just really, really, really, really want to make sure that the data said what the data said?” Is that what’s going on here?
DANIEL: What’s happening is this is somebody who was working on this contemporaneously with Everett, but just in different ways, and now they’re releasing some work as a way of pushing it forward, keeping it going.
BEN: Cool. So, let’s Rocky Horror Picture Show it. Let’s do the time warp again, bare bones it out for us.
DANIEL: Here were Everett’s three things. He proposed in 2013 that there were altitudes and ejectives. Ejectives are a kind of sound that we don’t use in English, but they do in some languages, and it sounds like this. When you say a /k/ sound in English, it sounds like /k/. What I’m doing is I’m saying /k/ with a puff of air. That’s a normal pulmonic plosive /k/. But if I’m doing it as an ejective, it sounds a bit like a beatbox. I’m not actually puffing that air out except I am gathering a little bit of air and then shooting it out that way. So instead of /k/, /t/, and /p/, ejectives sound like… and these are speech sounds in some languages.
BEN: Your microphone is not picking up any of those sounds.
DANIEL: Oh, sorry.
BEN: I think you’ve got some equaliser that is just like zhoonking that exact frequency that all of those sounds make.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I could tell that it was blocking it. You know what’s happening? Zoom is treating it like noise.
Ben Ah. Okay.
DANIEL: Because they’re not speech sounds in English. Okay.
BEN: Thanks again, Anglocentrism.
DANIEL: Precisely. Colonialism destroys us all. There was this idea that if you’re high up on a mountain, you’re more likely to have these ejective sounds. The second one, 2015, humidity and tone. Languages that are sitting around in less humid places are less likely to use tone.
BEN: Like, Swamp equals tone, basically swampy, humidity, wet.
DANIEL: If I could put that the other way, no swampy leads to no tone.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah. And then, the other one was temperature and consonant clusters. When it’s hot, you’re more likely to do single consonants and when you’re in a cold place, the consonant clusters build up and they get crunchy. That was around 2017. Okay. Now, along the way, Seán Roberts helped us to break this down a little bit and show why this work was not very strong. There were a couple of reasons. Number one, the results from Everett were significant, but the effect size was very tiny. So, why would we think that the climate was responsible when it could be something else, with that tiny of an effect size?
The other problem was that the results were not robust. Seán Roberts switched to a different database of, for example, tone, and the results fell apart. Also, Everett used not running stretches of text, but simply wordlists to figure out how many consonants and how many vowels were in the language, and he built his index that way. But that’s from wordlists. If you do it based on stretches of text, then you would get different results.
BEN: So, basically, several times, we were like, “Eh, it’s not great, it is not great. Sorry.”
DANIEL: We were like, “This is really interesting, but I can’t figure out what the problem was.” And then, Shawn showed us what the problems were, [LAUGHS] which was really nice. So now, to this new work, what we see is — here’s the claims they’re making. They’re doing three. Mountains and ejectives, humidity and tone, and temperature and consonants.
BEN: Okay. So, we’re back to square one, two, and three, essentially.
DANIEL: Yeah. I feel like we are. The other thing is, I tried to read through the bits and see if they’ve addressed the problems with wordlists and robustness, and I haven’t been able to find that they are addressing these concerns adequately or approaching them. They are approaching some things in a slightly different way, but it seems like they’re trying to establish the same sort of patterns. This work makes me feel like I’ve been doing this for a very long time!
BEN: You old.
DANIEL: I feel like I’m becoming the institutional memory for linguistics, but I think maybe everybody feels like that. Maybe all linguists are like that.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Perhaps… that’s a very nice way to say it, Daniel. I would have put you closer to the man on the rocking chair on the porch, throwing things at the kids as they run by the house.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Being like, “I’ve told you 15 times. Altitude does not affect ejectives!”
DANIEL: “You kids, get off of my map.” So, there are still people trying to establish this idea. A lot of linguists are convinced that it’s bad linguistics. I don’t think it’s bad linguistics. I just think it’s not likely to lead to very strong results… so far. But we’ll be keeping an eye on it as long as there are people to push it around.
BEN: Okay, so that’s four. We’re up to four. We should just have a little tally. Maybe we can make up a little graphic. Same thing with, like, animals doing language and stuff. We’ll just put a little tally mark next to it as it goes and be like, “Hey, we did the sideways one. We’re up to five, yay.”
DANIEL: Oh, or like Sapir Whorf again. Wow, okay, here we go. Okay, let’s see. This one was related to us by Diego and Aengry Balls, work from Guy Gunthers of Tel Aviv University and team published in PNAS Nexus, which is more fun to say than PNAS. It’s about cuneiform and Akkadian. Aengry Balls, you are here. Do you want to jump on and tell us what’s going on here, or you want me to drive?
AENGRY BALLS: I actually don’t remember at all sharing this. I’m sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay. It was back there in the Discord. This is the thing. You put stuff in show-ideas. You say, “This is kind of cool. I’ll read it later, but I’ll post it here now.” Then, Daniel finds it and suddenly there it is. You’ve contributed. Well, I appreciate that. So, I did the work for this one. Everybody knows about cuneiform, right? These cool…
BEN: Can I take a stab?
DANIEL: Yeah, go for it.
BEN: I think cuneiform means any written language that is made in a similar way, which is like the pointy… if you take a square end of a stick and you lean a corner of that stick in, you can make different triangles. You can make fat triangles, skinny triangles, and a few other bits and pieces. You can make a fairly robust written language that way. I think the thing about it is, cuneiform handwriting is probably way better than mine because you’ve got a really consistent way of making the marks on the clay.
DANIEL: Yeah, but take a look at this thing that I’ve shared. You can see… I hope everybody can see that.
BEN: It is slow. It’s very slow. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s somebody practicing. It’s contemplative, just watching someone do it, though. The results are remarkably beautiful.
BEN: This is like all those TikToks you watch where someone’s telling a story and then underneath someone is like making goo or something.
DANIEL: Yeah, that thing. Why are they always doing something while… they’re always combing their hair or doing makeup while they’re talking about really important stuff.
BEN: Weirdly gendered ones you brought in there, Daniel.
DANIEL: Or they’re changing oil or something.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Good save, man. Really pulled out of the nosedive on that one.
DANIEL: Thanks. Well, most of cuneiform we have are written in Sumerian and Akkadian. These are languages from long ago, round about 5,000 years ago, some of the first writing that we have. And there are so many of these texts that it’s really really hard to translate them all. So, this team from Tel Aviv University…
BEN: Meaning just like a labour perspective, we just don’t have the time?
DANIEL: It’s just super, just take a long time and it’s a massive effort. So, this team is working on using machine translation to translate them automatically from Akkadian into English.
BEN: That’s fun. As soon as you said like, “Oh, there’s way much too much to do.” I’m like, “That sounds like a job for computers.”
DANIEL: It is. But it’s hard because cuneiform characters can be either an entire word or a sound.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, already there’s trouble.
BEN: Oh, so you’ve got an inconsistent internal system, essentially.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Remember that writing in the early days was come as you are.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It was brand new. We were just trying stuff out and seeing what worked.
DANIEL: Whatever we could do. In fact, sometimes there were even characters that were semantic determinatives. Let me tell you what that means. You would write the word for WOOD, but the word for WOOD could be used for something else or if it’s a sound, then it could be something really, really different. So, you include a little cue, like a tree branch or something that means WOOD and that’s their way of saying, “Hey, this thing that I just wrote…,
BEN: This is the WOOD one.
DANIEL: …this is the wood one. It’s not the bird one,” yeah.
BEN: Yeah, gotcha, gotcha.
DANIEL: It’s also hard because there’s no spaces or punctuation.
BEN: Again, when you’re just trying it out, you don’t realise when you invent the car, you probably make it go first and then you’re like, “Braking would be handy.”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Exactly. Well, this team used neural nets. So neural net machine translation, just like Google Translate does now. It does a pretty good job. It actually gets pretty good scores on BLEU, which is a way of evaluating machine translations. Then… here are some failures though. The right translation of one of them was, “Why should we conduct the lawsuit before a man from Libi Ali?” That was the correct translation as done by a human. The machine did, “They are in the inner city, in the inner city.”
BEN: [ENCOURAGINGLY] Okay, so room for improvement.
DANIEL: As with all machine translation. What I love though, did you know, Ben, that you can do cuneiform in Unicode?
BEN: Okay, hold on. You mean that big list of funny characters that you can access from keyboards that you can use to make fun emoticons and that sort of thing, some of those are actual cuneiform characters?
DANIEL: There’s Latin script, there’s Cyrillic script, there’s Greek. There’s all the different languages of the world and there’s cuneiform.
BEN: That is so cool. I’m googling that immediately. You’re going to hear loud clacking.
DANIEL: Go ahead, fill our chat with cuneiform translations. So, that means that there’s a good way to represent it on a computer, and that means that it becomes tractable. So, this work is pretty cool. It looks like they’re using it now not for anything really serious, but they’re using it to maybe give humans a rough idea of what’s going on so that then they can come in and make a better translation. How about that?
BEN: I’m just… sorry, I got completely distracted. I’m putting cuneiform in the chat!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, let’s see it.
BEN: I will be honest.
DANIEL: Anybody? Anybody? Look at you.
BEN: I feel like various video game designers over the last 20 or 30 years have just control C, control V when they want to do, like, demonic script. That’s the biggest visual association with stuff like that. I’m like, “Oh, okay, so he’s obviously a necromancer.” That’s just clear.
DANIEL: It’s the new Zalgo text. Right.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s cool though. I can’t believe there’s heaps as well. There’s not a little bit there’s stacks. I’m putting more in there. Boom, look at that.
DANIEL: When you said demonic text, I thought you said demotic text, and I was wondering what you meant.
BEN: Nerd. Wow, some cuneiform — I have to say, I’m just putting more and more in — is a lot more complex than I probably appreciated. There is some really, really highly detailed stuff here.
DANIEL: Yeah, the video that I just showed, that was pretty rudimentary. Some of the strings…
BEN: Yeah, compared to what I’m seeing, for sure.
DANIEL: …angles and no wonder people decided on alphabets. Oh! the alphabet! What an invention!
BEN: For sure.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
BEN: Well, that’s really cool. I have discovered cuneiform Unicode, and that alone makes that story worthwhile, not to mention all of the legitimately interesting things that came along with that story.
DANIEL: Here’s another legitimately interesting thing. I titled this one ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, maybe. This is about language. One of the things that I love about language is, the patterns, and especially with child language. So, children can make lexical extensions if a word that they want is unavailable. So, I don’t have the video, but when my oldest daughter was two, learning language, I showed her an apple and said, “What’s this?” She said it was an apple. I showed her a banana and she said, “Nana.” Then, I showed her a pear. She didn’t have that word in her lexicon, but she extended apple. She called it an “aapple”. Then I showed her a lemon. I said, “What’s this?” She said aaapple. Then, I held up the banana again, said, “What’s this?” “Nana.” It was very cute. So, children do this, but languages do exactly the same thing over time. So, if you have the word “ball” and then you have a floaty sort of helium thing, you can take that ball and extend it or even build on it, like balloon.
BEN: Oh, that’s cool.
DANIEL: You see where this is going though?
BEN: I, until this very moment, did not realise that BALLOON was like a form of BALL. That’s interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah. Somebody find out, is that an augmentative? I think it must be. Mm. So, the question is, is there any connection between the way that children extend meanings and the way that languages extend meanings? Because if there is a connection, then what you found is something that makes sense to humans.
BEN: Right, it’s a bit inherenty. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, this is work from Dr Thomas Brochhagen from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and a team published in Science. First thing they did was, they built a model to predict how likely a word is to relate to another word, how likely a language is to extend this word into that word. They thought… okay.
BEN: Wait, are we thinking like… just sorry for being stupid, like Semantle style?
DANIEL: Kind of. Yeah, I mean, that was one aspect. English does BALL and BALLOON; how likely is that? Is that a freak appearance or is it something?
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: So, they said, “Okay, well, how are things in the world like each other?” They said, “Well, some things look like other things,” that’s one. Some things are associated with other things, like fork and plate.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: Some things are taxonomic like an apple is a fruit. So, APPLE and FRUIT are related.
BEN: Yup, so the branching concepts.
DANIEL: Kind of and then affective, which is described as how pleasant and intense a term is, like SUNNY.
BEN: So, by that logic would like stormy and… Ah, no, because they’re related by topics. So, SUNNY and HAPPY?
DANIEL: Exactly.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “She had a sunny disposition,” or what’s another example? “We’re expecting some stormy problems coming up,” that kind of thing.
BEN: Gotcha. Okay.
DANIEL: So, a lot of these words are related to each other. BALL and BALLOON would score high, PLATE and FORK would score high, very likely to blend into each other. Whereas other words — CHOCOLATE and PEN; not related to each other very well. They don’t have very much in common, so we wouldn’t expect a language to do that.
BEN: Yeah, my chocolate pen business was very short lived, unfortunately.
DANIEL: Sorry to hear that, by the way. You can unload some of those chocolate pens onto me though. They were very tasty.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, go straight in your shame-nom pile.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, they built a model to see what words were likely to extend to each other, but not just in English, ha-ha, in 1400 languages. Ha-ha.
BEN: Damn.
DANIEL: Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, German, Portuguese but also Swahili, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean. So, they did a lot there.
BEN: So, this is a fundamental to human beings kind of thing.
DANIEL: Well, they found that those words were very likely to be related to each other based on those four things. That’s a human experience thing. But then, they threw out that model and got a database.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I love it. “Okay, we’ve done all this work. Now get rid of all of it.”
DANIEL: “It’s done. No one must ever see this.” Then, they got databases of child extension errors, like when my daughter said that a pear was an apple.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: And they tried to find out if the child errors were based on those same four factors, and if they could use them to predict what languages would do. And in fact, the child data was a fairly good predictor of not just what kids do, but what languages do according to those four ideas. Wow.
BEN: So, essential to human languaging.
DANIEL: I think we found that children and populations do the same things because those things make sense to humans. How about that? I just thought that was really cool. When you see something like that, it just makes me feel excited.
BEN: Maybe it’s related to that whole total number of human beings in a group is inversely proportional to its intelligence kind of thing? So, when you study language by mass, you’re dealing with large groups of people and as we all know from Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black… that’s a movie. [WHISPERING] Daniel, by the way that’s a famous movie.
DANIEL: Thanks, thanks.
BEN: A person is smart, but people are dumb panicky animals.
DANIEL: Haven’t seen it, by the way. Yeah, brain gets bigger, social group gets bigger. That’s right. Something else to talk about. Now. I think it might be time for our favorite game.
BEN: [SINGS] Related or Not.
DANIEL: [SINGS] Related or Not.
BEN: [SINGS] George isn’t at home. Please leave a message after the beep. Sorry.
DANIEL: This one comes to us from PharaohKatt. PharaohKatt, you want in on this? You ready to present this one to us?
BEN: Muscle in there, Lord Mortis.
LORD MORTIS: Oh, there we go, she’s just back. Okay, cool.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah, no, I’ll save switching to my laptop until after we’ve done this. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, so you left us one on the Discord, and I was entranced. So, what were you musing about back then?
PHARAOHKATT: Okay, so I’m learning Spanish at the moment, and while I was learning Spanish, I was thinking about the word CASA, which is HOUSE, and how language change has turned a /k/ into a /h/. That’s an H sound, because you probably can’t hear it on my microphone.
DANIEL: Uh huh.
PHARAOHKATT: I was wondering, is the English word HOUSE related to the Spanish word CASA, but gone about with that sound change from /k/ to /h/.
DANIEL: Mhm, mhm. I love that one, by the way. There was. There was a /k/ to /h/ thing, which is why CENTUM — hundred — became a HUNDRED in English. My favorite one is that English HAVE looks like Latin HABERE, which means HAVE, to HAVE something. And so, you would think that was the same, but in fact, they’re not cognates. The cognate is Latin CAPERE, like capture, and then the /k/ in CAPERE turned into /h/. So, I like that one a lot.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: So, we’ve got one puzzle. What’s the other half of this?
PHARAOHKATT: The other half is I was thinking of the word CASTLE and wondering…
BEN: Yes! I always wondered this.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. Is that related to CASA?
BEN: This is [LAUGHS]
PHARAOHKATT: Which, I mean, it would make sense because they’re both places that you live, and they both have that CAS- sort of beginning, and I have no idea where the silent T comes into this, but those were my musings.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I have made a poll. So, are you ready to play, everybody? Get your clicking fingers ready.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Here we go. I’m launching this one. Okay, so CASTLE and CASA, are they related or are they not?
BEN: I don’t get to vote. This is totally bunk.
DANIEL: Sorry, Ben. That’s the cost of being a cohost, in case this whole thing goes down.
BEN: I hate power. Democracy is a lie. What?
DANIEL: While we’re waiting, Annika says CHÂTEAU, CASTLE in French seems related to CASA too. So, we got three: CASA, CHÂTEAU, and CASTLE. Could it be that one of those is a doublet? All right. What do you think, Ben?
BEN: Well, I’m a little bit torn on this one. I’m wondering if it’s one of those things, if both CASTLE and CASA have a older relative. That’s what I’m wondering. Which is why the -TLE… and potentially also CHÂTEAU. Like, there was one thing that sounded a certain way, way before the days of regularly writing things down, and that word spread through some Romance and Germanic languages, and then it just ended up in a lot of different ways. The HOUSE one, I’m really… oh, that’s a tricky one.
DANIEL: Let’s leave HOUSE for a second because we’re getting to that one. That’s the next question. My answer was I didn’t think they were related. I just thought that there was more going on with CASTLE.
BEN: Okay, someone… Aengry Balls mentions that CASTILLO in Spanish is CASTLE, I think. But then that follows… again, really, really… I’m right outside my knowledge here. But isn’t Spanish one of those languages where littler less significant things usually just have a diminutive form of the bigger word? So, CASA and CASTILLO would actually make a bit of sense.
DANIEL: Which is funny because we don’t think of a castle as a little house, do we?
BEN: No, that’s what I mean. CASTILLO, which is their word for CASTLE, and then CASA, which is like little castle.
DANIEL: Mm, mm. All right, I’m going to shut off the poll, we’ve got 14 people have answered, and let’s display those results.
BEN: It’s close. It’s a tight one.
DANIEL: Yep. 47%, it’s right split right down the middle. Seven of us say related, eight of us say not related. This one is a little bit fuzzy. The answer is probably not related, but possibly.
BEN: All right, lay it on us.
DANIEL: CASTLE happened twice in English. Before the year 1000 CE, we had Late Old English CASTEL, which was a village. After the year 1000, we had Old Northern French CASTEL, which meant a fort, and Latin CASTELLUM was a diminutive of CASTRUM, which was a fort. That’s why when you see CASTRA in English names, it means a castle or a fort. So, it works its way into Chester, like Chichester or Winchester. When you see that -CHESTER ending, that’s castle.
BEN: Doncaster and places like that.
DANIEL: Yes. Precisely. So that comes from something Latiny, whereas CASA in Spanish seems to come from Latin CASA, a different word, hut or cottage or cabin, which is of uncertain origin, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kat-, K-A-T. Now, this is interesting. *Kat- meant to link or to weave together in a kind of chain.
BEN: Which I guess was the kind of dwellings you would make, right? You would put some poplars together and you would weave some sticks, and you’d daub it with mud and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s why the sense extended. But there’s our extension again, right? Because of metonymy, to a hut or a shed. So, probably from Proto-Indo-European *kat-. But now, here’s the tricky bit. There are some sources that say that CASTLE might also go back to *kat- in Proto-Indo-European, but maybe not. I looked it up in the Chambers dictionary. By the way, if you’ve already bought the Chambers dictionary, don’t buy the Barnhart dictionary because they’re exactly the same book right down to the individual pages, and I didn’t know that. So, it’s got CASTLE as… Where are we? Can’t read right now. It says that it was related to possibly Latin CASTRARE, to cut off, and therefore it would be cognate of CASTLE.
BEN: So, right. So, CASTLE is closer to CASTRATION than it is to CASA.
DANIEL: Maybe, or it might go back to the fort. So, what we’re getting is that CASA possibly comes from Proto-Indo-European *kat-, and then CASTLE also possibly comes from the same place. But that’s two possiblys in order to get that right.
BEN: Now, is this the sort of thing that, this sort of stuff is going to happen whenever we’re talking about super fundamental to human existence things?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Right, like a dwelling is just so universal that it muddies the waters a little bit?
DANIEL: Yeah, we often see the phrase “of uncertain origin” when we get to stuff in this domain.
BEN: Right, okay. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There’s another interesting thing. Spanish ALCAZAR, “castle”, does come from Latin CASTRUM, but it’s been funneled through Arabic al-qasr and there’s that Arabic influence in Spain.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. And now, it’s time for the next one.
BEN: CASA and HOUSE.
DANIEL: Okay, CASA and HOUSE. Ben, what’s your idea?
BEN: Well, put the votes out. I’ll do like a little bit of [SINGS] doo doo doo doo.
DANIEL: You’re my think music. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah, worst think music ever.
DANIEL: Launch. There we go. I found a place where you can launch. All right. CASA and HOUSE. Sorry — CASA /kœsa/. Listen to me. CASA /kasa/.
BEN: CASA and HOUSE.
DANIEL: ¿Donde esta la casa?
BEN: I reckon… I’m going to go not related on this one. My thinking goes that HOUSE is one of those funny words that is way newer than we think than you would expect it to be.
DANIEL: HOUSE is new?
BEN: Yeah. I’m wondering if HOUSE is one of those words. Like, for 1500 years, in old English, we called it HUT. Then in the last 300 years, we’re like, “Well, we can’t call them huts anymore. We got to call them houses or something.” So, it’s actually got a fairly distinct little path of its own. That’s my logic.
DANIEL: There are all kinds of weird little things like that, like cut. The word CUT, you’d think it was super old, but it’s actually new. Nobody cut things until later.
BEN: There’s these funny little… like, the opposite of a fossil. [LAUGHS] You would imagine this to be ancient and storied word. And it’s like no, some guy in 1954 was like, “Well, this is a cool way to say it.”
DANIEL: PharaohKatt, I forgot to ask you, what was your guess?
PHARAOHKATT: My first thought was that they were related just because I really like the idea that there was a sound change that happened, and that’s why…
BEN: Because I want it to be true.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. That is exactly what I’m thinking. Because I want it to be true.
DANIEL: Okay, [LAUGHS] good.
BEN: It’s a good reason. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That has always served me well in my life. Does anybody else want to throw in? We’ve got everyone throwing in their guess. Again, if you’ve got something important to say, go ahead and unmute. PharaohKatt, you’ve also asked, could HOUSE and HUSBAND be related? I know that one.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
AENGRY BALLS: I was actually going to chip in on the HUSBAND thing. Go ahead, sorry.
DANIEL: No, no, you go ahead. I’ve been talking enough.
AENGRY BALLS: So, I don’t know this for a fact. But from my… I studied Scandinavian languages in university, and so I think it might be just like HUS in Scandinavian languages is like a house. BONDE in Norwegian specifically, is a farmer or like of peasant of some kind.
DANIEL: Worker. Yeah.
AENGRY BALLS: So, I’m reasonably sure it’s something like husband like, HUSBONDA something like that.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Exactly right. HUSBONDA meaning the owner of the house, the worker of the house. Yep.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: Thank you. All right.
BEN: That’s really cool.
DANIEL: We are going to end this. What do most people say…? Oh, my answer was I don’t think they’re related because I think HOUSE is actually super old. So, I went opposite.
BEN: Oh, you did the opposite.
DANIEL: I think it was too old for a thing. Okay, let’s see the results. We have more people saying related on this one. Nine out of 16 of us say related, but again, that’s close. That’s 56%, whereas 44% not.
BEN: If this was an American election, we would probably give it to the not-related side.
DANIEL: Aaargh. Okay, let’s see the actual answer. This one’s more certain. This one is not related.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: HOUSE — we’ve already talked about what CASA goes back to, but HOUSE goes back to Proto-Germanic HUSAN, and then the trail ends. We don’t know why HUSAN was there. Possibly because it’s related to HIDE. The house is the place where you hide, but that’s just a guess.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: It turns out that CHÂTEAU and CASTLE are related. Those are doublets, which is very nice. Also, I never made the link between a CASA and a CASINO, a little house.
BEN: Oh, wow. Yeah, of course!
DANIEL: How about that? All these funny little things that we just never think of. PharaohKatt, thank you so much for bringing that one to us. That was a lot of fun.
PHARAOHKATT: I will keep throwing my musings into the Discord and see what happens.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yes, please.
BEN: Be like Aengry Balls and just completely forget about it and be like, “What thing? Okay, cool!”
AENGRY BALLS: Yeah. Well, I still don’t remember. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know how often we can just participate like this verbally, but I have a question if you know.
DANIEL: Yeah, go nuts.
AENGRY BALLS: Do we know of any cognates of CASA specifically in English or Germanic languages as a whole? Do we know?
DANIEL: Well, okay, so we just mentioned CASINO, which popped in, and that got borrowed into English.
BEN: Do they call them that in Germanic language places though, or do they have another word for it?
DANIEL: Ah, yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Any of our Scandinavian speakers. Is it called a casino? Is it pretty much just… Jump in.
AENGRY BALLS: In Norwegian, it’s CASINO or something like that. But surely in Old Norse, it wasn’t that because it sounds more like a Romance or at least Italic word to me. Not at all a Germanic one.
DANIEL: But of course, borrowing is definitely a thing. Oh, yeah. We’ve got lots of things coming up in the chat, which you can see. Ann asks what about CASE or (Dustin) CASING? Casing like for a sausage, which is a little… it’s a sausage’s little house. Also, CASSETTES.
BEN: We will make a house out of the pig’s intestines for its meat. Ha-ha-ha.
DANIEL: A tasty, tasty house. All right. Now, here’s another one. This one’s from Liz. Liz, are you around? I didn’t see you in the list, but Liz sent me an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. “I loved the episode recently with Emily Bender. I did a unit of computational linguistics at UWA back in the early 90s when we were using Lisp to write code that could identify noun phrases and verb phrases in a sentence. Language processing has come a long way since then. It sounds like you might need a break from Related or Not.” Do we need a break from it? Okay. “So, maybe from time to time, it would be interesting to guess the order in which a set of semantically related words entered English with their current meaning.” Ho, ho. Ho, ho, ho. So, based on Liz’s suggestion, I worked up this list and I made my guess. So I’m going to give you four words in the same domain in English. You have to guess the order in which they popped in. You ready?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: The words are CHAIR, COUCH, SOFA, and STOOL. That was in alphabetical order. All four things that you sit on. CHAIR, COUCH, SOFA and STOOL. It’s time to… now, I can’t do a kind of poll where you drag them around into an order.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: So, you’re just going to have to pop this one in chat. CHAIR, COUCH, SOFA, and STOOL. Okay, would anyone like to give their guess? What’s the earliest?
BEN: I think STOOL is going to be earliest.
DANIEL: A vote for STOOL. Okay.
BEN: There we go. I hit enter too soon, like a boomer. Sorry, everyone.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We’ve talked about the boomer thing. STOOL, CHAIR, COUCH, SOFA. Okay, I see some votes moving around. There does seem to be… there’s a bit of alternation between SOFA and COUCH. Which one came first? A bit of alternation between STOOL and CHAIR. I’m enjoying this. Okay, um…
BEN: I love that there’s very clear… I don’t think there’s been one exception to CHAIR and STOOL definitely being one end of the spectrum, and COUCH and SOFA definitely being on the other.
DANIEL: Yup. Yeah, there seems to be a really strong bifurcation, which is surprising for reasons that I’ll give a little later.
BEN: Oh, look at you dropping the tasty hints!
DANIEL: Okay.
AENGRY BALLS: I’d like to participate.
DANIEL: Yes, please. Please do.
AENGRY BALLS: I’m reasonably sure STOOL came first because there are related words in other Indo-European languages. For example, STOL in many Slavic languages means table, and you have STOOL in Scandinavian languages, which means a chair or something like a chair.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
AENGRY BALLS: Especially, the Slavic STOL, which is a table, which is chair, or stool-like…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yes, it is.
AENGRY BALLS: …makes me have a reasonable inkling that it’s much older than the other ones.
DANIEL: Okay, thank you, Aengry Balls. Let’s see, I’m seeing a lot of people saying that CHAIR and COUCH sound French, which I think is fair. That motivated my choice. I said that STOOL was definitely first because it just sounded old, probably Old English. Then, CHAIR and COUCH. I had to guess. I said CHAIR first and then COUCH later for social reasons because it also sounded French, you know, coucher. Then, I put SOFA last. So, I said STOOL, CHAIR, COUCH, SOFA. Does that sound right?
BEN: I think SOFA is going to sink us all, and it’s going to be this weirdly, bizarrely old thing now.
DANIEL: Okay, so let’s get to the answers. The first one was STOOL. It was a thing that you sat on, and it was any kind of chair. But then, the next one, CHAIR, came in in the 1200s. OED says 1297, came in from French. And because CHAIR rose in prominence, it pushed out STOOL. So now, STOOL…
BEN: Oh, god, Daniel. Daniel. I saw your face. You were entirely too happy with yourself on that one.
DANIEL: There’s a link here. The stool, it could still be a chair, but it had to be the kind that had no back. Or it could be the kind of chair that you sit on while poopin’.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: And then, it meant poop because things…
BEN: Oh, is that how we actually got STOOL?
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: Yeah. Right. Okay.
DANIEL: It is. It is. It is.
BEN: I will allow it. But I still did not enjoy your little smirk, buddy.
DANIEL: You’re not happy about it. No. No. Audio listeners don’t have to put up with that. Okay, so we’ve got STOOL and then CHAIR. And then, just a little bit later, in the mid-1300s, we’ve got COUCH. And that’s interesting because I think a lot of us put a really strong line between CHAIR and COUCH. We would alternate CHAIR and STOOL or SOFA and COUCH, but not too many people alternated CHAIR and COUCH. But yeah, those were pretty close. Then finally, SOFA.
BEN: Hang on though. Did COUCH mean what we now think it to mean, or did it just mean another chair?
DANIEL: It actually meant just a CHAIR for a while, but it meant a lie-down place… ah, mm, mm. And then, it meant a certain thing, that one came a bit later.
BEN: Yeah, because I’m sure I was thinking the same thing. Most people were, which is the idea of a couch and a sofa as a thing in a house, is a very modern, like industrial-revolution kind of thing, like it’s a very new idea.
DANIEL: Yeah, that is. SOFA came even later. That’s from Turkish sofa. It wasn’t even a piece of furniture for a while. It was just a raised part of the floor that you would sit on and cover with pillows and blankets and things, and then you would sit on it. We don’t see an actual sofa until 1700s. The OED and Etymonline says 1717. How about that?
BEN: There we go. I got it right. Yay!
DANIEL: Liz. Thank you, Liz. That was great. All right, let’s keep things moving along. By the way, if you have suggestions for Related or Not, you can send them to us. You can slap them in the Discord. You could even put them in chat right now and fight over them during the boring bits of what we’re doing. But now, it’s time for Words of the Week.
BEN: [BEATBOXES] Doo doo doo, it’s Words of the Week.
DANIEL: You’re coming dangerously close for having to improv a thing for Words of the Week like you used to.
BEN: Yeah, I know. I better be…
DANIEL: And you stopped having to do that.
BEN: I better be careful.
DANIEL: I’m going to put you back on that.
BEN: I got off the junk, man. I don’t want to go back.
DANIEL: I’m going to ask everybody including you, Ben, to start off with what’s your candidate for Word of the Year? Because it’s going to be Word of the Year season. Have you noticed? Do you have any sense of what’s the big ones?
BEN: I actually think… I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like the pace of natural disasters this year is… A very noticeable uptick has occurred between fires and hurricanes and flooding and droughts and all this kind of stuff. It’s getting really serious and obviously #becauseclimatechange. So, I think NATURAL DISASTER or just DISASTER might be a real… because it doesn’t have to be a new word, right? It’s just the one that is most relevant and used and that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah. Something disastery.
BEN: Yeah, something in that space.
DANIEL: Okay. All right, I’m going to appeal to our listeners. What’s your pick? Unmute and unload.
BEN: INDICT! [LAUGHS]. I agree, Ariaflame.
DANIEL: INDICT. Ariaflame has INDICT. I like the word INDICT because it’s got a C in there, a silent C, very rare in English. And the reason is it didn’t used to have a C. It came to us from French with no C, INDITE. And then, the Latinising busybodies said, “Oh, this comes from Latin DICERE,” to say or to tell. “So, let’s stick the C in there so that everybody will remember.”
ARIAFLAME: Which is why, until I think this year, where it kept coming up, I had no idea how it was actually pronounced. Like so many words, I learned from reading and I thought it was ind-ict, because that’s what it looked like.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No shame. No shame, Ariaflame. We’ve all been there. It’s happened to all of us.
DANIEL: It’s a persephone for you. It’s one of your persephones. That’s what I like to call onlyredditisms. Okay, cool. I’m seeing a -CORE from Ann. -CORE seems like a candidate.
BEN: UNGOOGLEABLE, Linda. Yeah, I’ll back that. That’s a fun one.
DANIEL: It’s okay to unmute and tell know since you’re here, but if you just want to chat, that’s cool too. Let’s just be reading these. Yes, PharaohKatt.
PHARAOHKATT: I’m really loving, I am really loving the HOT X SUMMER thing because it started, of course, with HOT GIRL SUMMER and then it was like SOMETHING GIRL AUTUMN. But the one I keep seeing now is HOT LABOUR SUMMER because of all of the union action and strikes that are happening a lot.
DANIEL: Nice. Can you give us a sense? I was aware of HOT GIRL SUMMER but missed it. Why is there a summer with a girl in it and why is she hot? What was behind that? Do you have any sense?
PHARAOHKATT: The way I figure it is — and I could be completely wrong about this, this is just from vibes — is it comes from the spring break culture in the US where you get the girls going out in their cute little bikinis in the summer and just having a real good time and not really caring about anything else. It’s like this is the time to be hot girl and have a fun.
DANIEL: And have a fun. And that’s the kind of summer that this is.
BEN: Yeah, like almost an acknowledgment of we’re actively throwing off the shackles of expectations and what it is to be like a good girl and all that kind of stuff. It’s just like, “Hot Girl Summer!”
DANIEL: Okay.
DUSTIN: I saw HOT GIRL SUMMER come up, I think it was part of the City Girls, part of the hip hop rap group stuff. They were coming out with Hot Girl Summer, was like one of their songs is where I seem to remember it coming from, like Megan Thee Stallion and those folks. It’s going to be Hot Girl Summer. ???That was a vibe.
BEN: If it’s a cool word that young white people enjoy, we can reliably guess that it was stolen from AAVE.
DANIEL: Yeah, but there was a song involved. I knew there was some music involved. Now, it’s worked its way into a template, what some linguists call a snowclone. But I like just calling it a template. So HOT X SUMMER. Okay, cool. I think that the word of the year has just got to be AI.
BEN: True, yeah.
DANIEL: You hear it absolutely freaking everywhere. Every time, there’s a presentation by a tech company, there’s always a supercut of every time that they said the word AI. AI. AI. AI. It’s being used as a selling point. I noticed that when we were talking earlier about the Akkadian machine translation, all the articles, “Oh, AI. It’s translating things.” And I’m like, “This is machine translation.” I mean, it is AI. But they’re not calling it MT, are they? They’re calling AI.
BEN: Right. It’s now become the phrase that we use for any time computer does hard thing.
DANIEL: Except as Lord Mortis points out, Apple appears to be assiduously avoiding the term AI.
LORD MORTIS: Yeah, there’s actually a lot of podcasters in the Applesphere that I listen to are taking bets onto whether Apple will actually mention that phrase or what they’re going to say that’s not that phrase. Because they have to say something on Tuesday.
BEN: What the Appleism… like Apple… Like, it’ll be Apple Smarts or something. [LAUGHS]
LORD MORTIS: Well, it’s more like… they talk about the phone learning from your preferences or things like that and presenting you. But they never use the word… like the phrase artificial intelligence. [ED: THEY DIDN’T USE THE TERM IN THAT PRESENTATION.]
BEN: Well, because it runs counter to what they’ve pivoted to in terms of their brand identity. Certainly from what I’ve observed over the last, I don’t know, year or so, Apple is like, “We’ll be the one who really focuses on privacy.” All of their phone ads now are all about like, “Screw you Google. Screw you Facebook. Our phone will protect you.” So, you can’t do that and then be like, “But also, [EVIL SCIENTIST VOICE] we will record everything and learn from you.”
DANIEL: Once we do AI and add that, then we’ll be cooking with gas.
LORD MORTIS: Yeah, yeah, it’s [CROSSTALK]
SPEAKER: Apple is the guy who tells everyone they don’t listen to the mainstream bands and that they don’t know the mainstream celebrities.
DANIEL: “I don’t have a TV.” That’s what I should do. I should say I don’t know pop culture because I’m too cool for that. That’s it. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Unfortunately, Daniel, in Apple’s instance, you need to be able to be cool to sell that lie.
DANIEL: Dang, okay. I’m interested in Apple nomenclature. In the late ‘80s, it was power. Everything had power in the name.
BEN: Yes, PowerBook and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Then in ‘90s it was E, there was an E in front of everything. And then in the 2000s, it was always I. Everything was always I.
BEN: I, yep.
LORD MORTIS: On that, just to expand, just to give everyone some context, we’re about to have this year’s Apple phone, the September announcement that happens. So, they’re going to tell us what the new phone is and some of us will be spending way too much money on very shortly. But one of the other questions everyone has is, they released a new watch, and it’s like the sports watch, and they called it the Ultra. It’s the second time Apple has used Ultra as one of their product modifiers. They usually have a set of product modifiers that they use, like Pro or Ultra. So, the phones have traditionally been like Phone Pro and Phone Max and then there’s the Phone Pro Max, which is both bigger and better. So, there’s a question this year is, is the Phone Pro Max going to be called the Phone Ultra? The iPhone 15 Ultra or something like that? So are they going to discard these — and they’re marketing metrics, marketing names that Apple uses today.
BEN: Does anyone else just hear, like, Grande and Venti and stuff?
LORD MORRIS: That’s what it is! It is that! [LAUGHS] It’s Apple’s version of that thing. Absolutely 100%.
BEN: That’s exactly what I hear. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right. Well, let’s go on. I’m going to share something here. This is from Diego. This is another one. This is going to be our Name of the Week. Let’s see.
BEN: Name of the Week. Okay.
DANIEL: Yep. Here we go.
BEN: Is this going to work. Those are a lot of pixels. Or actually not very many pixels, but in a very big space.
DANIEL: There we go.
DIEGO [RECORDING]: So, I came across a CNN article about the name that India is using for itself at this year’s G20 Summit, which is actually taking place this weekend. India is hosting for the first time in New Delhi, and when the invites went out to the various world leaders, they were issued by the “President of Bharat”, as opposed to the usual “President of India”. So, there’s a renewed social and political conversation about what India should be called by the rest of the world.
Now, India and Bharat are essentially interchangeable. The Indian constitution uses both names. Both names appear on passports and other official documents. But which one you use seems to be a matter of preference and identity and even political ideology. The CNN article talks about how this is a big deal because it could potentially change how India is referred to on a global scale. Similar, I think, to how Türkiye recently changed the spelling of its name.
So, under Prime Minister Modi, the Indian government has been trying to break away from its imperial British past, including by changing the names of streets, buildings, and even islands to remove any trace of colonialism. And because the term “India” is what was adopted by the British who ruled the country for some 200 years, many argue that it should no longer be used. But Prime Minister Modi is a member of the nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party or BJP. So, some people think the name change is just another tactic that his party is using to push their Hindu nationalist agenda.
Now, the word “India” comes from Greek and Persian relating to the Indus River, which is ultimately a borrowing from the Sanskrit word, Sindhu. Bharat comes directly from a Sanskrit word used in the Rigveda to describe one of the original tribes of the region. I think it’s worth pointing out that India’s Supreme Court previously rejected requests in 2016 and 2020 to rename India to Bharat. Also, that the term “Hindustan” also exists and that it was considered at one point, but the country ended up settling on just India and Bharat. But Hindustan is still the word for India in Urdu.
DANIEL: Y’all got excited about that one. What was going on?
BEN: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of countries doing this basically. I would love for Japan to do it in relation to Nippon and stuff like that. It’s great, it’s really fun. We’ve had heaps of people in the chat talk about a surprisingly large number of times this has happened quite recently. We’ve got… where are we? Sorry, scroll, scroll, scroll. We had the Czech Republic, which of course for a while was Czechoslovakia, but then they got rid of Slovakia. Then, they went to Czechia. Then, we’ve got obviously, famously recently, Turkey has been like, “Hey everyone, I would prefer Türkiye.” Everyone mostly as far as I can tell, was like, “Cool, I’m down with that.” Is there any others?
DANIEL: It’s interesting because last time we had a show with Diego, our Diego’s Digest, he mentioned about covid guidelines in Sanskrit being broadcast at Varanasi airport. And some people were like, “Why are we doing this?” Other people were like, “This is awesome. This is India.” Other people were like, “Is this the Sanskrit folks trying to Sanskritise everything? What’s going on?”
BEN: So essentially, here we need to acknowledge that obviously language does things other than communicate effectively. [LAUGHS] So, Sanskrit…
DANIEL: The choice of language matters.
BEN: I am speaking as a white guy here, but to my really dummy, dummy white guy knowledge, Sanskrit occupies roughly the same space that Latin does, like the actual Latin language, which is to say: very few people speak it. It is mostly a dead language. Now people are using it, not unlike in the West, as like: well, if you really want to be like, a properly smart person, you will know Latin. You know how there’s those people in Western circles where it’s just like, “I lament the days when we would sit around and learn Latin and be actually smart people, unlike the stupid people now.” And I think Sanskrit exists in that space but also has a bunch of really noxious, kind of like, “To be Indian is this thing and not this thing,” which in a country with as many different languages and ethnicities and religions is a pretty difficult pill to swallow, I think, for a lot of people.
DANIEL: It’s a power move, for sure. Like a CEO that tries to brand stuff their way so that they can make an impact or something. I don’t know if that’s what Modi’s doing, but it’s a move. I had not realised that Bharat was an alternate name.
BEN: Neither had I. This came up on a TikTok and it’s like line one of the constitution! It’s like, “India, which has always been Bharat.” It’s like: Oh, okay, nice. It’s like the fourth word in their constitution. Good to know.
DANIEL: Wow, how much I knew about this. Hey, gosh. I need to get out more. This is why I don’t have time for television.
BEN: Stop making excuses.
DANIEL: Okay, so that was an interesting… something to watch for. This one was a tweet suggested to us by @jello4marcello, one by Helen. I’ll drop the text in chat. It is, “The heat this summer has me sleepcoded, bedpilled, and restmaxxing.” Wow.
BEN: I have not heard any of these words!
DANIEL: Well, okay, hang on. You’ve seen things being coded for something else?
BEN: Oh, like gay-coded or villain-coded and that thing, cool, cool, cool. Okay, now run me past -PILLED.
DANIEL: We’ve had lots of discussions about how Disney villains are queer-coded, right?
BEN: Right. Yeah.
DANIEL: And that’s been going on. -PILLED, red pill is one of those, yeah.
BEN: Oh. [LAUGHS] Sorry.
LORD MORTIS: Yep.
DANIEL: Take it, Lord Mortis!
LORD MORTIS: Yeah, -PILLED is like, it’s just become a thing. I was looking at something earlier today. I can’t remember what specific prefix was, but there’s a special word you have for this active suffix stuff where people just stick new things in front of it. But yeah, pilled is definitely out there and in use.
DANIEL: Combining forms.
LORD MORTIS: So yeah, coming from RED- and BLUE-PILLED obviously being the original ones, but there’s all sorts of things out there now.
DANIEL: Now, we’re getting into some sad areas. There’s black-pilled.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: You can get black pilled, you can get… Yeah. And then, -MAXXING, we had a bit… one of our words of the week a few episodes ago was SLOWMAXXING where you’re taking the time to make that chili or to make some art or something like that.
BEN: Shameless nerd admission here. The only productive version of that I know is MIN-MAXING. So, in video games, where you can control your character’s various qualities, you approach it in a real spreadsheet, finance bro way, where you’re just like, “Intelligence? I have no use for you! All the strength, all the charisma!” But if you encounter a door with a lock, well, you’re going to die of hunger because you won’t be able to figure it out.
DANIEL: Can I just say that I felt recently I can’t stand The Matrix. Then I watched The Matrix again, and I realised I love The Matrix. I just don’t feel very good about Matrix fans.
BEN: How did you ever arrive at the conclusion that The Matrix — singular, because obviously there was no further movies made after the first one was.
DANIEL: There were no sequels.
LORD MORTIS: I don’t know. The new one is… It’s very meta, but the new one has some interesting things to twist.
BEN: That I will agree with. That I will agree with. But how did you arrive at The Matrix is not good?
DANIEL: Haven’t seen it.
BEN: You had the worst takes, the worst takes.
DANIEL: No, no, no. The fans were bugging me. The fans were bugging me.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: Which is weird, because I think many of us who have changed the way we live can relate to suddenly understanding that the constructed reality for you has been a lie. A la Truman Show.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, yeah, I got Truman-pilled when I left…
BEN: That’s good, you know what? I’m going to give you points, young man. That was a good reference. You did good there. That was a good point of reference.
DANIEL: I could go on and on. Okay, let’s keep it going. TRADWIFE. I’ve seen this one. It’s been in my periphery for a long time. Now we’re getting to some really, really sad areas. A traditional wife, a woman who takes on a traditional wifely role, an uxorial role. But that’s not the whole picture, because…
BEN: …cause you’ve got quite a bland meal right now, Daniel. I think you want to add some white supremacy to the dish.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s not what that movement needs!
BEN: But that’s what that movement has.
DANIEL: Yeah, it sure does. Feminism gives us choices. Ordinarily I would have no objection to somebody taking on a more traditional role if it’s their choice and they’ve decided with full informed consent to do that and it’s not coerced. But I often argue that if there’s a god involved who can punish you, then it is coercive. Well, check this out. This is an article in The Guardian by Sian Norris who describes the tradwife phenomenon as “a toxic combination of antifeminism, white supremacy, normalized abuse, and a desire to return to an imagined past”. Oh, man.
BEN: “Imagined” being the very key.
DANIEL: The way we never used to be.
BEN: Modify that… yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, we talk about how narratives inform our lives, and this is one that’s coming up and creating a… it’s something I would hope that nobody ever would subject themselves to. But here we are. I’m noticing that TRAD- is becoming productive. There’s an article in the Atlantic. Can I gift this to everybody? I’ll just drop it in chat. About the odious white nationalist Lauren Southern.
BEN: The person’s name is actually Southern?
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: She was being described as a TRADTHOT.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh no…
DANIEL: Ugly stuff, again, tradthot.
BEN: There’s a lot going on here.
DANIEL: It’s an alt-right term for a single woman who supports traditional values but doesn’t live them. So, you’ve got TRAD- and you’ve got THOT, which… we were having a discussion on Discord about THOT being a sexually promiscuous woman and that it was an acronym for “That ho over there.” And I said to myself, that’s never an acronym. That’s got to be a backronym. Turns out that the farther you go back to the origins of THOT, the stronger the acronym signal gets, not weaker.
BEN: Okay, so not a folk etymology. Etymology etymology.
DANIEL: Yeah, it could actually not be a backronym. It could be an acronym.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: And of course, thank you, Dustin — It’ll have its roots in a song. Okay, finally. So, there was a sad bit, but watch out for TRAD- coming up in lots of different ways. We’ll keep an eye on that one. And Rach, one from you. Are you there? Patch in, my friend.
RACH: Yeah, I’m here. Hi, I’m Rach.
DANIEL: Hi, Rach.
RACH: I think I’m going to present to you one of my new favorite words, which I think is probably a good one to come after TRADWIVES and my word is GIRL DINNER.
BEN: Oh, should we do the song? Should we do the song?
RACH: I don’t know if I know the song very well, but I can try.
BEN: [SINGS] Girl dinner, girl dinner.
RACH: [SINGS] Girl dinner!
BEN: [SINGS] Girl dinner! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m missing a lot.
RACH: So, GIRL DINNER is a meal, and essentially, it’s just a bunch of snacks that require zero effort that you just bring together. And I like to refer to it as a charcuterie board of snacks. So, cheese, bread, grapes, and berries, and all the things that are just really easy to do. It started earlier this year, and then since then, TikTok has kind of like gone overboard with it. So, there’s the song, the jingle about it, and then there’s also a filter where like, three plates come over your head, and then it’ll turn, and it’ll give you a girl dinner. Like, this is what your meal is going to be. [LAUGHS] So, it’s pretty fun.
DANIEL: It is fun.
BEN: Now, Rach, do you want to speak to the stuff that exists behind it? Like, the discourse around it in relation to feminism and household labour and that stuff?
RACH: Yeah, that’s why I think it’s an interesting word to talk about after TRADWIFE, because it’s the opposite of that mentality. It’s not really… Yeah. So, we’re talking a lot about women doing all of this work around the house, and they don’t want to also just make food and cook. So, it’s kind of like a liberating thing where they can just do whatever they want and eat whatever they want. And it also pushes back against this shame or feeling that you need to be eating certain foods in order to maintain your body and your shape. And it’s just about embracing what you want, eating what you want, not really caring what other people are thinking about your food. It doesn’t matter that you’re literally eating grapes and cheese and having a glass of wine. Like, that’s your dinner, and it’s what you want to do.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It’s great.
RACH: Did you want to add anything else to that, Ben?
BEN: Just the discourse I’ve seen as well just is an acknowledgment of, like… were you to study how much time an individual man or woman — cishet man or woman — would spend on preparing food when they are in a single state, the numbers are pretty similar. Which is to say GIRL DINNER and BOY DINNER, although they might end up looking quite different at the point of consumption, have a pretty analogous amount of work required, which is that blokes will get like a can of Stagg Chili and schlop it out into a bowl and microwave it and that’s dinner or whatever. But then, when heterosexual people get together in a relationship, the amount of labour required for dinner goes through the roof, but only for one of the two of those human beings. Right? So, basically, when a heterosexual couple is formed or a unit is formed, the amount of time a man spends making his food effectively doesn’t change. Right? He might genuflect towards peeling some potatoes or something like that, but women do, unfortunately, all the work.
And so GIRL DINNER is actually a bit of a feminist reclamation of going, “You know what? We actually do the same stuff here. Right? like, we both of us just don’t want to do this because cooking is boring and hard.” I don’t believe that, but a lot of people do and fair enough. Because it’s time consuming, it’s expensive, blah, blah. And so, the girl dinner is a celebration, I think, almost of going, “Okay. You know what? We’ve had to wear this yoke for quite a long time, and I’m really happy to take it off. Really happy.”
DANIEL: Okay. That answers my question about why it’s a GIRL DINNER and not a GOBLIN DINNER — the other word that we use for low effort stuff. I’m glad that’s a girl dinner because that makes a lot more sense.
RACH: I was also reading a little bit about the backlash of men about it too, which is also awful, where men are talking about their dinners. So, if you want to see men also trying to take the word because they’re terrible, there’s [LAUGHS] discourse on that too.
BEN: Just love it. Just like: Nobody. Men: Someone’s talking about a thing that I have an opinion on.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] A man has entered the room to give his manly view.
BEN: Someone help me out here. I’ve also seen this shift into either GIRL MONEY or GIRL SPENDING or GIRL FINANCES. Is anyone…
ANNIKA: GIRL MATH.
BEN: Girl math. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, GIRL MATH. So, girl math is a similar thing, although from what I’ve been observing, a little bit more irreverent. Was that you, Annika? Did you want to speak about girl math?
ANNIKA: Yes, that was me. I’ve been seeing a lot about girl math lately. I don’t know exactly how to describe. It’s a way of conceptualising spending money in a way that I think reduces the guilt of spending money on expensive things. Yeah, if anyone else wants to jump in, that’s kind of the best I can do, I think.
BEN: I can share some examples. I’ve heard of girl math being employed, and I want to be really, really clear. Everything that I’ve seen here is a very almost lovingly, self-effacing acknowledgement of the silliness of what this thing is and how it works. So, it’s like, “Girl math is buying all of your festival tickets eight months before the festivals happen, because when the festivals happen, then they’re basically for free!” and stuff like that. Or like girl math is, “Well, I have to buy the really, really expensive napkins for the wedding because if I get the cheap ones and every time I look down at the napkins, I’m going to be really sad. And then later, I’m going to have to spend a lot of money on therapy getting over my sadness about not having the wedding that I really wanted, which in fact will end up costing me rather a lot more. So, should just get the expensive napkins for my wedding.”
DANIEL: PharaohKatt asks, is this kind of buying into the idea girls are bad at math? Is this kind of a humorous, playful poke at that idea?
BEN: I would just as soon as — and it’s not going to happen. As Rach was saying just before, it’s going to take negative 4 seconds for a bunch of douchey men to start being like [MAKES DOUCHEY MEN SOUNDS] and as soon as that starts happening, it’s like, well, the fun is dead. The fun is over. I think it’s only fun if people are quite lovingly making fun of themselves. I defy any freaking man out there. Even the most like, “Girls are bad at math guys.” Really, really? how much did you spend on the exhaust for your truck, my friend? Be honest, because I see the welds. That shit is titanium. It is nothing less than $5,000.
DANIEL: Thank you both for that. Thanks for that input. Let me just… Tu, tu, tu. I guess we have a chance. We got a couple of minutes for any other words. What are you noticing out there?
AENGRY BALLS: One that I noticed that I like is BEIGE FLAG. Has this one been mentioned? Actually, now that I say it, has this one been mentioned before? In previous episodes?
DANIEL: We did do it. If you’re caught up, you will have heard it very recently. We had RED FLAG and BEIGE FLAG. Yeah. Which started out as a normal thing that makes you go, “Oh, you’re a bit basic,” but now has been changed to an enjoyable quirk that your partner has.
AENGRY BALLS: Oh, okay, I wasn’t up to date on this one. I thought it was still like, “How boring are you?”
BEN: It started that way and then it’s just quickly morphed into like, “This is the thing that actually low key I kind of like about my partner.” It’s weird. It very quickly shifted.
DANIEL: Having a favorite font is the old meaning, but that could be a kind of nice… kind of sweet thing.
BEN: You would say that, man who has his own font.
DANIEL: I do. You can download it now. All right.
BEN: For the low, low price of…
DANIEL: …of nothing. Who’s got another one that may not have been featured? [SINGS] Doo doo doo doo doo.
BEN: I’m just looking through the chat to see if anything got mentioned there [CROSSTALK] Hear my loud scrolling. Sorry, everybody.
DANIEL: PharaohKatt wants STRIKE to be a Word of the week.
BEN: Because there’s just been a lot of that going on with movements and stuffs?
DANIEL: Labour stuff. Yep, yep, yep.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah, exactly that. There’s just so many strikes right now. Now, video game animators have authorised a strike if there’s no things and now the auto union as well has authorised a strike.
BEN: Bring it on.
PHARAOHKATT: Strike, strike, strike, strike!
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I love is whenever you… I don’t know about you, PharaohKatt, and depending on where you work and all that stuff, but certainly where I work is not what I would call like a bastion of left-leaning ideology necessarily. It’s not particularly conservative either, but I think just baseline, people aren’t that supportive of it. I’ll very loudly espouse, like, “Heaps of things. Striking, striking, striking.” People are like, “But that means everything will get more expensive.” I’m like. “Yes. Good. That is a good thing.” It’s obviously not a good thing if you’re on the bones of your ass but that’s a separate conversation about how we need to support people who are way down the lower end of whatever’s going on in society. But yeah, we shouldn’t be able to buy a little whatsit for like a dollar that was made in China, and that we throw out after a day! Like, that is not a good thing. We should have people paid well. If I buy a shirt, I should look after it and I should try and keep it for like five or six years and wash it well and all that sort of thing, instead of buying new clothes every year.
ARIAFLAME: One of the things I came across recently is apparently… I can’t remember the name of the board in the USA that deals with labour laws and so forth, has apparently changed the rules very recently, which affect how unions can be created and has made it easier too for that to be created because now if the company tries to union bust an attempt to get a union voted for, that union automatically becomes valid.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Nice. Take that.
BEN: But look, it’s an interesting instance of the law just actually making an inherent sense, isn’t it? Because if an organisation is being like, “We really actively don’t want this thing to be a thing,” then the law is like, “Well then, but clearly it is a thing because you’re working against it. You can’t work against nothing.”
DANIEL: That’s a thing now. [LAUGHS] Aengry, what have you got? You had a word in a different language.
AENGRY BALLS: So, I’ll make it short because I realised I’ve been talking a lot. So, in French, a few months old, it’s very, very recent, at least on the internet, which is QUOICOUBEH, which isn’t a real word, but it’s something that young children and teenagers will respond to adults, like figures of authority when they say “Quoi?”, which means, “What?” So, they’ll purposefully say something, mumble something, and the figure of authority will say, “Quoi,” and they say, “Quoicoubeh.” And it sounds…
BEN: Please tell me, “It’s a loser says what?” Please?
AENGRY BALLS: Exactly.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
AENGRY BALLS: So, they’ll go, “Quoicoubeh,” which sounds super simple. But the French speaking internet, at least in France, has gone completely feral around this, and it’s become the new… what’s the word again? Scapegoat for like, French…
BEN: Everything that’s wrong with French society basically.
AENGRY BALLS: Exactly, French philosophobia and the French language going to shit.
BEN: I love it.
AENGRY BALLS: Because as you may know, France, it is very strong, like this feeling of wanting linguistic conservatism, if you may.
BEN: They have a whole academy just for it!
AENGRY BALLS: Oh, yeah. So, this is a very, very big thing on the internet at the moment. QUOICOUBEH.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That has tickled me… not even pink. That’s tickled me red. I love it. That’s wicked.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Got time for one more, if anybody’s got one, and then we got to wrap it up.
LORD MORTIS: PRIVACY NIGHTMARE.
DANIEL: Lord Mortis, over to you.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You would come in with PRIVACY NIGHTMARE, Lord Mortis.
LORD MORTIS: Yeah, I mean, it’s been going on slowly for a while in Australia, we’ve had data leakages and things like that, which is the same thing. This concept of capitalism just basically taking more information from people than they require and then either not safeguarding it or selling it for more profit. TVs do it. Now, it’s been discovered your car is doing it too! Including in certain license agreements, if they figure out your sexual preferences, they will sell that data onwards. It’s in their license agreement. So, you agree to it. So yeah, I’m wondering if that’s going to come out as like a thing. I mean, there’s a thing, I just don’t know if PRIVACY NIGHTMARE is going to end up being like a phrase that’s used.
DANIEL: Some version of it.
LORD MORTIS: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s going to come up somewhere, somehow. We just haven’t settled on it yet.
LORD MORTIS: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Well, hey, this has been so much fun, and it’s been fun to have you on the show and be able to see ya. So, I would just like to say a huge thank you to everybody who gave us ideas for this episode. Thanks to the team from SpeechDocs who transcribe all of our words. And most of — ah! — all you lovely people who not only donate to keep the show going, but also actually show up and have fun with us. It’s a wonderful thing. Thank you all.
BEN: Yay. These are always so much fun.
DANIEL: Ben, over to you.
BEN: Oh, yes, I have to do some reading.
DANIEL: I hear that music. You have to imagine music for this one.
BEN: Look, I feel like if I’m being honest, the thing that I’m about to read is totally wasted words on the entire group of people who are currently listening to these words. But eventually, we will release this episode for people who are not patrons. So, I read for them, not for you lovely people.
If you would like to help the show, you can give us ideas and feedback like all of the human beings who are currently sitting in the lobby with us right now who built this entire show over the ideas and feedback that I left for us on Discord. You can leave us a voice message on SpeakPipe, which I am still desperately wanting more people to do because I love hearing all of your voices. You can send us an old-fashioned email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Or you can kick it really old school and you can do like normal human things, like interacting with your friends and being like, “Hey, did you know this is really cool podcast that I listen to? You should listen to it too.” And of course, you can consider becoming a patron like all of the people who sat in this lobby with us and hung out. And then, all of our other patrons who are probably going to listen to this episode just a little bit later when it gets released. You are all helping us do wonderful, amazing things. And from the bottom of my heart… as tragic as this might sound to some of you, highlight of my week doing Because Language. When there’s a Because Language weekend, it’s a good weekend.
DANIEL: I didn’t know you felt that way.
BEN: You are all helping me be able to feel joy temporarily. So, I would very much like you to know that I’m appreciative of that. So, thank you to all of our wonderful, wonderful, wonderful patrons.
DANIEL: It’s funny you feel that way because I feel that way too. Like, when I edit the show, I’m like, “Oh, I get to hang out with my…” I develop a parasocial relationship with you.
BEN: You made it even sadder.
DANIEL: Yeah, I know, because you’re not even there. Big shoutout to our top patrons. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, Aengry Balls, Tadhg, Luis, and a couple of new patrons. They’ve joined up and they’ve taken out a yearly membership, not just monthly, which is a thing that you can do now. And they are Connie at the listener level and Keith at the friend level which, by the way, betrays a wonderful confidence that we’ll still be around in a year.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Love your optimism, guys…
DANIEL: A confidence that I endeavor to.
BEN: What are we at? Twelve years. I think it’s a pretty safe bet now.
DANIEL: Yeah. Our first shows, Ben, were in 2011.
BEN: Good lord.
DANIEL: So, we’ve been going for a while.
BEN: Good lord. Hey, can I do the last bit?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Thank you again to all of our wonderful patrons. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible, who! have a new album out last week. So, if you have not had a chance to, go and listen to Didion’s Bible’s new album, it’s a wonderfully sort of fun, low key but happy… It’s the kind of music you need a bit more of in your life as the world slowly crumbles into the ocean, basically. It’s nice. It’s nice music. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next time, Because Language.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you all. Bye.
BEN: Okay.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]