What’s happening with signed language in Argentina? How are terms for gender changing in the Spanish language? And are Zoomers making work language more casual?
Listener and friend of the pod Diego Diaz has put together a terrific bunch of language news and words for our edification and enjoyment.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
When is Hispanic Heritage Month?
https://latino.si.edu/hispanic-heritage-month
Spain Allows the Use of Basque, Catalan, and Galician in Congressional Sessions
https://slator.com/spain-allows-the-use-of-basque-catalan-and-galician-in-congressional-sessions/
Portuguese sounds like Slavic
https://www.dutchtrans.co.uk/why-portuguese-sounds-like-slavic/
Piden a la RAE suprimir la acepción de judío como “persona avariciosa o usurera”
https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/mundo/piden-a-la-rae-suprimir-la-acepcion-de-judio-como-persona-avariciosa-o-usurera/
They ask the RAE to eliminate the meaning of a Jew as a “greedy or usurer person” [Google Translate]
https://www-eluniversal-com-mx.translate.goog/mundo/piden-a-la-rae-suprimir-la-acepcion-de-judio-como-persona-avariciosa-o-usurera/?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Dos claves para comprender la importancia de la Ley de Lengua de Señas Argentina
https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202305/627330-opinion-lenguaje-senas.html
Two keys to understand the importance of the Argentine Sign Language Law [Google Translate]
https://www-telam-com-ar.translate.goog/notas/202305/627330-opinion-lenguaje-senas.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth When Exposed to ASL by Six-Months – ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347621000366
Spanish Genders Fluctuate in Argentina
https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/09/19/spanish-genders-fluctuate-in-argentina/
Pashto Pronouns
https://mylanguages.org/pashto_pronouns.php
Asylum applications denied due to AI translation | The World
https://theworld.org/media/2023-09-21/asylum-applications-denied-due-ai-translation
AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims
https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-translation-errors-afghan-refugees-asylum/
New policies for changing names, pronouns around the world
https://theworld.org/media/2023-09-20/new-policies-changing-names-pronouns-around-world
Language at work is becoming more casual — thanks to Gen Z
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/14/language-at-work-is-becoming-more-casual-thanks-to-gen-z.html
‘Lazy girl jobs’ are trending in rally against burnout culture
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/lazy-girl-jobs-burnout-culture-rcna97367
‘Hypertourism’ The New Buzzword in Travel
https://euroweeklynews.com/2023/09/16/hypertourism-the-new-buzzword-in-travel/
Santorini Instagram v reality
https://www.tiktok.com/@justi_travel/video/7256120314969558278
Cherry blossoms in Japan
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/87azbj/cherry_blossoms_in_japan/
Grass slides in Hulunbuir Prairie, Inner Mongolia
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/16fquky/grass_slides_in_hulunbuir_prairie_inner_mongolia/
Jamais Vu: When the Familiar Turns Eerily New – Neuroscience News
https://neurosciencenews.com/jamais-vu-neuroscience-23969/
Deja Vu: What It Is and Why It Happens
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/deja-vu-what-it-is-and-when-it-may-be-cause-for-concern/
What Causes Déjà Vu?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-causes-the-feeling-of-deja-vu/
Ig Nobel Prizes honor zombie spiders, rock-licking scientists, and a clever commode
https://www.science.org/content/article/ig-nobel-prizes-honor-zombie-spiders-rock-licking-scientists-and-clever-commode
Semantic Satiation: Why Words Sometimes Sound Weird or Lose All Meaning
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/71855/why-does-word-sometimes-lose-all-meaning
centipede effect | Oxford Reference
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095558435
Have you heard about the ‘whom of which’ trend?
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-heard-trend.html
Evile, K. & Pesetsky, D., (2023) “Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied-piping”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1).
https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/9943/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Can I hear how Diego’s doing?
DIEGO DIAZ: I’m doing well. Staying awake. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DIEGO: My day’s just ending as yours is beginning. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: I’m the only one for which this time zone is good. [HUMMING] It’s about time the Perth people get a chance.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Starting off, it’s someone whom of which has been with us for nearly 100 episodes, I think. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Hello, hello. Yes, I’m here.
DANIEL: Nice to see you.
HEDVIG: Nice to see you, Daniel. [CHUCKLES] I don’t know why… that was nice. I like that. I appreciate that.
DANIEL: It’s kind of a normal thing that people say. It’s one of those phatic utterances.
HEDVIG: I think I was taken… what’s it called taken…? I was surprised by the fact that it was such a normal introduction. [LAUGHS] I wasn’t really sure what’s it taken… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Kind of asking you how you are is kind of weird for me. Yeah. I may or may not care how you are, [WHISPERS] but I secretly do. And taking the Ben spot this time, it’s friend of the pod and prolific contributor, Diego Diaz. Hey, Diego. How’s it going?
DIEGO: Hey, guys. How’s it going? Happy to be here.
DANIEL: Oh, man. You’ve brought show. You brought a show for us.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] Yes. I had some time on my hands this month. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You do. Ben is taking a break because the school kids that he teaches are on break, and so he’s taking a breather before school starts again this week. Ben and I are kind of mirror images. I have school-age children. He teaches school age children. So, my holiday is his workweek, which is really nice.
HEDVIG: Ah. I’ve never thought about that, but that’s true.
DANIEL: Society’s problem now. Ben’s problem now.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, Diego, as I said, you have written an entire show for us, which is great. We love it when you do the hard yards.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
DANIEL: Changes the dynamic of the show, because for this show, I get to drive, you get to inform, and Hedvig gets to comment.
DIEGO: Sounds good.
DANIEL: Whereas usually I drive and inform, and Ben and Hedvig comment, a lot. So, I don’t know. I think I’m going to enjoy this. But what keeps you finding language stories? Because you’re continually pouring into our Discord, great language stories that you find. Tell me again, what keeps you going.
DIEGO: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many languages in the world, and there’s always something linguisticy happening in one place or another. And yeah, they just always pop up on my feed, on the podcast, just going through the news. Even when I’m not looking for them, they find me. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s true.
HEDVIG: I was not looking for them last night. And we went out and we met a friend of a friend who unprompted brought up a new site that we had on the show about the new ancient Indo-European language that was found.
DIEGO: Nice.
DANIEL: See?
HEDVIG: They just brought it up casually in conversation, and I was like, that rings. “I remember talking about that.” And then they asked me follow up questions, and I was like, “I don’t know… all the details… anymore!”
DANIEL: “I didn’t listen back to that one!” Remember how I was so concerned that all the details were just coming from one place and that nobody knew about it yet? And then suddenly, people are bringing it up all over the place. So, wow. I feel like we’re really cutting it. I think, Diego, you found that one as well. Was that you?
DIEGO: I think it’s one of the ones that I did not find. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. I’ll go back and find out.
HEDVIG: Well, Diego regularly finds a lot of stuff for us, and we’re very very grateful, and we’re really happy to have this Diego’s Digest episode.
DIEGO: My pleasure.
DANIEL: Yeah, I mean, at this point, it’s just easier to give you your own show and just let you do it. For all you patrons listening to this, thanks very much because you keep the show going, you make sure that everyone in the world gets to hear all of our regular episodes for free. So, thank you. You’re making it work. But if you’re listening to this slightly later, when this episode becomes public, hey, why not join us? Become a patron. Depending on your level, you get bonus episodes, shoutouts, and every patron gets… what? What does every patron get?
HEDVIG: What does every patron get?
DANIEL: What does every patron get? You tell me.
HEDVIG: Well, wait. There’s a lot of different things. So, there’s the discourse, there’s a mailout for people of a certain tier. There’s the premium episodes.
DANIEL: Everybody gets the mailout.
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry. Everybody gets the mail out.
DANIEL: Everybody gets to hang out on Discord.
HEDVIG: What are you asking me for?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And mention on the show at the end.
DANIEL: There are shoutouts. There’s one thing we’re forgetting, and that is that every patron gets to join us for live episodes.
HEDVIG: Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, I was looking around.
DANIEL: There’s so much.
HEDVIG: You know, there’s one more thing that everyone gets.
DANIEL: I… I fail to think of what it could be, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: It is the satisfaction of knowing that you supported a great show that you like.
DANIEL: Which is ours! Satisfaction.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] That’s so cheesy.
DANIEL: And couldn’t we all use a little bit of satisfaction in this world of ours? We’re all just hanging on here, as we’re going to see for some of these news items. Okay, so that is patreon.com/becauselangpod, if you don’t like Patreon, that’s okay, there’s other ways to do it. You could try Ko-fi or PayPal. We’ve got links to those too, on our website becauselanguage.com. So, there’s lots of ways to support the show. But another supporter of our show is Diego to bring us some news. He supports us with news and info and words which we have now. So, Diego, we need some context for these stories. You’ve brought us a lot of news stories about specifically the Spanish-speaking world for this first bracket. What’s been going on?
DIEGO: Yes. We’ll start off in Spain, where they have a few minority languages, regional languages that are finally getting some attention in the Spanish Congress. So, the languages, Basque, Catalan, and Galician are now allowed to be used in congressional sessions.
DANIEL: Were they forbidden before? Were they just only Spanish, can’t do Basque, Catalan, Galician?
DIEGO: Right. From what I read, it was mostly Spanish being the language used, and the other languages were still being used in some documents. But now, it’s official on the same level as Spanish for the other three languages.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: I always wonder if the use of Catalan is a little touchy for Spain.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] Well, we could do a whole other section about that battle for trying to get Catalan as official as some of the other languages, even in the EU.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And the reason why Daniel is saying that is perhaps because the region where Catalan is spoken in Spain regularly every now and then wants more independence or to be independent from Spain.
DIEGO: Exactly.
DANIEL: So, if you grant legitimacy in the Congress, then that could fuel some kind of linguistic separatism movement, which we know is going on.
HEDVIG: Or it could make people feel, “Oh, Spain is a nation state that we’re a part of and we continue to be a part of, and we’re represented in, and we don’t want to be independent because we get something.”
DANIEL: We get what we need out of our relationship. Yeah, maybe it could hose that down. Oh, which one’s more likely, I wonder? Oh, I don’t have a sense of this.
HEDVIG: Yeah. To me, it’s not obvious that it would go either way. We know that we live in a world where a lot of nation state boundaries are drawn for not great reasons but redrawing them to fully represent linguistic boundaries or ethnic boundaries is probably just going to mean a series of world wars.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Huh, but let’s head back to Spain. I know that recognition of these languages, even at this level, is kind of a big deal for Spain, but also for the EU. How so?
DIEGO: The article that I had found actually talks a little bit more about the more far-reaching ramifications of this happening in Spain because it’s an EU nation. So, other EU members are worried about the precedent that this could set for other minority languages that are trying to get official status in the EU. More than anything, they seem to be worried about just how practical it is and the financial burdens that might come up with translating things and having everything available in a multitude of languages. So, that seems to be the… not necessarily backlash, but just the concern about if it happens in Spain, if it happens in the EU, what could be next?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: I understand that is a pragmatic situation, but if it’s worth it’s not an impossible one to solve, especially now that we have all these large language models and AI things. I’m not saying that they’re always doing translation perfectly, but I think between two languages that are a bit similar to each other and both have large amounts of text, [SQUIRMS] could probably do a decent job, right?
DIEGO: Yeah. Well, then there are other regional languages in Spain that aren’t as big. So, people are saying, “Well, what about those ones? What are we going to do for them?” But, yeah.
HEDVIG: But maybe the answer is in the census, you said, which is if they’re not that big, then the government doesn’t care much about them.
DANIEL: Let’s do more, more for everything. And yeah, the EU is an interesting case because Spain might feel like recognising Galician, Catalan, and Basque is a safe move, but there are other countries that have minority languages where it’s not such a safe move. And so, that has impact, that has echoes for them. I’m looking at… Catalan, I know a little bit about Catalan because I traveled to Barcelona once, which is not the same as knowing Catalan, but I’m familiar with it a little bit. And everyone knows about Basque. It’s the language isolate. We’ve done a number of stories on Basque. I feel like Galician is the one that I’m least familiar with. Who knows more about Galician than I do? Probably everyone.
HEDVIG: I only know something about Galician because I play the computer game, Crusader Kings III, and I’m…
DANIEL: That is as good as going to Barcelona.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And I have the title of Kingdom of Galicia.
DANIEL: How did you get the title of Kingdom of Galicia? Did you choose that?
HEDVIG: I fought a bunch of wars. What do you mean? I married smartly.
DANIEL: And you ended up there? Okay, well done, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Well, I’m playing a campaign in Spain. I’m trying to conquer all of Spain. So, I’m learning about Spanish geography that I never knew anything about. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, you’re the kind of person that Spanish parliament worries about. This is what I’m talking about.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] Exactly.
HEDVIG: I vaguely know where the region is, which is, if I’m not mistaken, it’s up north half of Spain, a little bit to the west. It’s like a bit south and west of Basque country. Is that roughly right? Now, we google and see…
DIEGO: It’s on top of Portugal.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, even more west, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Cool. So, your claim to knowing Galician is Crusader Kings. Diego, what you got?
HEDVIG: I’m just being facetious.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
DIEGO: Well, also you can maybe guess, based on the geographical position, that Galician is actually more closely related to Portuguese. I mean, Spanish and Portuguese are both Iberian Romance languages, but Galician and Portuguese kind of have a common Romance ancestor. People call it proto-Portuguese or Galego-Portuguese, Galician-Portuguese. But the main split is that the Kingdom of Galicia got absorbed or became part of the Kingdom of Spain. And so, essentially… I’m not an expert, but Galician is essentially a very heavily influenced by Spanish version of Portuguese.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DIEGO: So, it’s kind of like a halfway point between Spanish and Portuguese.
DANIEL: That’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Now the question becomes because the tricky thing with Portuguese, when you hear it on the bus or something, is the first reaction you have, unethically, is it’s a Slavic language, what’s going on? And then you hear some…
DIEGO: Well, that’s European-Portuguese. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, yes. Especially European-Portuguese, of course. And then you hear some lexical items, and you hear that they sound Romancy, and you go, “Aha.” And then you have a choice of Romanian or Portuguese, where Portuguese actually sounds more Slavic than I think Romanian does. I said what I think.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ah, interesting. I never felt that way but…
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I mean you’ve invited me on this show as a commentator. I had a Romanian roommate and I’ve listened to some European Portuguese, and I think Romanian sounds less Slavicy.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DIEGO: I can’t remember what the term is. The time stressed language, I think, both Russian and European-Portuguese are that.
DANIEL: Stress-timed language.
DIEGO: But Brazilian Portuguese is syllable.
HEDVIG: And the fricatives.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Lots of frication.
HEDVIG: There are certain specific phonemes that just like, woo-woo.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DIEGO: Yeah, that vowels tend to disappear.
HEDVIG: So, Galician, you said it is closer related to Portuguese historically, but it has been under more influence from Spanish. So, it sounds more Spanish now.
DIEGO: Right. Like, a lot of the distinct sounds that Portuguese has compared to Spanish have kind of been washed away and sound more like their Spanish equivalent. So, it’s not as nasal. They don’t have as much the zha or the sha.
HEDVIG: Okay, interesting. Thank you. That’s very fun.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: I like that.
DANIEL: Let’s move on. There’s a bit of a content warning for this bit, because this involves a bit of anti-Semitism. We’re going to be talking about it. Go on, Diego, take us in.
DIEGO: Yes. So, once again in Spain, the Royal Spanish Academy has a few requests coming its way to have its definition for Jewish updated in the dictionary. Several Spanish-speaking Jewish communities around the world are asking the Royal Spanish Academy to take out things like greedy person and usurious from the definitions for Jewish. And if you don’t know what usurious means, it has to do with a high interest loan, essentially like that.
DANIEL: Charging interest for people. Okay. International banking, all that garbage. Yeah. Okay.
DIEGO: Right. So, to be fair, I looked it up on the RAE’s dictionary, and it is the fourth entry, and it says that it’s a derogatory use of it, but it’s still there and people don’t think it should be.
DANIEL: So, they got a usage note. That’s interesting. Okay. I notice also that there’s been some blowback over the definition of autista, which I guess is autistic. Using that as an insult. Also, a word I didn’t know, trapacero. What is trapacero?
DIEGO: Right. So, I’m not very familiar with it. I think it’s a Spain Spanish specific term, I believe, but it essentially means a con man or a swindler.
HEDVIG: Oh, someone who entraps you.
DIEGO: Right. So, it’s in the dictionary under a definition for gypsy.
DANIEL: Oh, okay, right, cool.
DIEGO: So not great.
DANIEL: I see also judiada, which is a group or gathering of Jewish people. That was the second definition, but the first definition is playing a trick on someone, a deception which causes harm to someone. These groups are trying to get the RAE, the Royal Spanish Academy, to change the definition. What exactly are they asking for? To remove it or…?
DIEGO: Right. They want these parts suppressed, essentially, from the current definitions, because even though the dictionary reflects language use, they don’t believe it’s in alignment with the social and cultural realities of our world today.
HEDVIG: Right. So, there’s two possible ways to view this critique. One is that this is how Spanish people use these words, and these people wish that they didn’t, and they think that changing it in the dictionary will change the way people do it in the world. And the second one is they think that Spanish people don’t use these words like this anymore and that this is merely like an update of like, yeah, people used to do that, but they don’t really anymore. So it’s unnecessary to have in the dictionary. And it sounds, Diego, like it’s more the second one, because the first one seems futile because that’s unfortunately not really how it works.
DIEGO: Yeah. To be fair, I don’t live in Spain, so I’m not sure how commonly they’re used over there. For the Spanish that I use, the people that I talk to in Spanish, I’ve never encountered these used that way. I’ve never heard of the word ‘judiada’ before, but I can’t really speak to country to country. But given Spain’s history with the Jewish population, I wouldn’t be too surprised, unfortunately.
DANIEL: Yeah. Once again, it just speaks to the way that there are multiple roles for dictionaries. I mean, as linguists, we sometimes don’t like the way that people see a word’s inclusion in a dictionary as like conferring legitimacy. We often say, “Hey, dictionaries are just looking at usage.” And then when we encounter an example of usage that’s super gross in a dictionary, we go, “Oh, I didn’t mean that.” So, I guess for these groups of Jewish people, their way of threading this needle is to take the second course. They’re saying, “Stop including it because it doesn’t align with 21st century social and cultural reality.” That ain’t usage. I guess that’s the only way that you could really defend it, because trying to say, “Take that out of the dictionary because we don’t like it,” that’s not the side you want to be.
HEDVIG: Well, yeah…
DIEGO: And the fact that it’s Jewish Spanish-speaking communities, not just Jewish communities who don’t really care about what the Spanish language, but specifically people who are Jewish and use the Spanish language, it kind of maybe hits a little closer to home.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, you bet. I get it. Okay, let’s go on to our next story. This one’s about Argentinian sign language. What’s going on there?
DIEGO: So, I just wanted to get this one in here because I thoroughly enjoy learning about sign languages and also my family’s from Argentina, so it’s a little old, it’s from a few months ago, but yeah. Argentinian sign language, or Lengua de señas Argentina, LSA, has officially been recognized by the Argentinian government as a natural and original language of Argentina. Part of the heritage, part of the culture. So, it’s a big deal for Argentinian sign language, but also a major accomplishment for sign languages all over the world anytime this recognition takes place.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: And what does the recognition come with?
DIEGO: Well, I don’t know about protection under the law, but in Argentina today, it’s still not viewed that great. People still vi… or medical professionals still view it as a disability no matter what. And they are often prohibiting deaf people from… or telling their patients not to use sign language. So, the fact that now it’s official…
HEDVIG: Oh, they’re still doing like oral education.
DIEGO: Yes.
HEDVIG: Ah. Okay. Good to know.
DIEGO: It’s a lot of words…
DANIEL: Can we just drill down into what that means? So, there are multiplicity of approaches for deaf people and deaf children. And in the bad old days, what they would do is say, “No sign language. You’ve got to get on the oral track, and we are going to punish you for using sign languages. We are going to get you into the mainstream. You’re going to learn lip reading. You’re going to learn all that stuff.”
HEDVIG: And you’re going to learn to vocalise words yourself, even if it is by someone putting their hands on your throat and pushing it to get your articulatories in place.
DANIEL: And can I just read this bit? I’m going to read this in translation. But this is from the Secretary of the CAS, the body of deaf speakers, Julia Valmarrosa, who said, “In the medical field, there continue to be unfounded beliefs such as maintaining that sign language harms the acquisition of an oral language. Myself I went through that situation. When I was only four months old, health professionals told my family this same thing. The problem is that there is no evidence, there’s no research that this is so. The problem is not the deafness, but linguistic deprivation.”
DIEGO: Exactly.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s an easy thing to forget as well that most deaf children are born to hearing parents. And you’re two hearing people, and you have a deaf child, and you of course, go to the medical professionals and you’re like, “Okay, what do we do? What’s the situation? This is new to us.” And you trust their advice. They say, “It is harmful.” It’s the same when people say, “Oh, you should only speak one language at home if you’re multilingual,” or something, you assume that they know what they’re talking about. Of course, you do. I feel so bad for these parents who get this shit advice from a place that they think is authoritative and has the best intention.
DIEGO: Right.
DANIEL: And then, some parents feel like, “Ooh, I am just coming up to assigned language myself. I’m not proficient. How in the world can I help my deaf child to do it?” And this has been handled in the research community. We’ve covered research like this on the show. Parents can really… you know that scene in The Simpsons where Marge says, “How can you get money? I know, I’ll give piano lessons.” And Lisa says, “Mom, you don’t play piano.” And Marge says, “I just have to stay one step ahead of the kid.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, it seems that parents can stay one step ahead of the kid. It does work, and doesn’t cause any harm to children to learn it together.
HEDVIG: And also, I’m going to say something that I don’t know if it’s true, but I also imagine that you could develop a family home sign system with your child that is not exactly like the official version, but that works within your family household. And then, the kid could go to a school with deaf signers and learn a more different variety.
DIEGO: Yeah, absolutely.
DANIEL: And then bring it home.
HEDVIG: And then bring it home.
DIEGO: Yeah. Home sign, pigeon sign.
HEDVIG: That seems like it ought to be… yeah.
DANIEL: So, it looks like… this says that it recognises LSA, in translation, natural and native language of Argentina. This doesn’t look like the same as recognising as an official language, where there’s a responsibility to provide representation and assistance in official capacities, but it still gives it some clout, maybe a protected status in education, maybe just a normative commitment to LSA. Symbolic recognition is still a very, very good thing, especially when people have been punished for using it.
DIEGO: Right. And that’s unfortunately still happening today in Argentina, where you have the medical professional saying, “Okay, get the cochlear implant. We’re going to do oralism, lip reading.” But essentially, that’s language deprivation because their first language should be a sign language, and then once they master that, they can move on to the oral language around them. That often doesn’t happen.
DANIEL: Okay. Good job, Argentina. Let’s start turning this thing around. If you are a speaker of a signed language, if you’re a member of the deaf community or you’re familiar with it and we’ve gotten something wrong, please let us know. We will offer an update. We’ll do the best we can to get it right. So, that’s hello@becauselanguage.com. And finally, in our Spanish speaking rundown, we’ve got something on gender in Argentina.
DIEGO: Yes. This has to do with inclusive language or nonbinary language. Not too long ago in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, which functions a little differently, it’s kind of like… for those who don’t know, it’s kind of like Washington DC. The last 20, 30 years or so, it’s become the autonomous city of Buenos Aires. It kind of has its own little government going on. The Education Ministry has forbidden the use of inclusive language in schools. So, no X, no E, no @ sign in place of the masculine O or feminine A, saying that Spanish is essentially hard enough to learn, and we don’t need to complicate the process for students and we need to preserve traditional grammar.
DANIEL: Let’s back that up just a second. As we know, this isn’t the case in English. If you have all students in English, we just say all students, whether it’s masculine, feminine or a mix of them. But in Spanish, you’ve got todos los estudiantes if they’re male or a mixture. Todos las estudiantes if it’s only women.
DIEGO: Correct.
DANIEL: So, you kind of have to choose. But Spanish speakers are coming up with ways not to have to choose. So, you mentioned three, Diego. There’s the letter X, which I’ve never seen… I’ve seen most commonly in LATINX, and some people don’t like LATINX and some people use LATINX to describe themselves. So, that’s cool. Have you ever seen TOD-X-S… /ese/?
DIEGO: Yes.
DANIEL: Really?
DIEGO: Yes.
DANIEL: Fascinating.
DIEGO: But whether it’s an X or an E or the @ sign, they all tend to get pronounced as A. So it’ll all come out as todas for the most part.
DANIEL: Is that right?
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: I love the @ sign because it’s like it’s got an A, but it’s got an O around it. So it’s both. But you’d say them all as todes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I like the @ sound too, but it’s a funny thing to type on your keyboard. It’s easier if you take one of the A to Z letters, if we’re honest.
DANIEL: Shift key. It’s a Shift key.
HEDVIG: It is not on my keyboard.
DANIEL: It’s not? What does your keyboard say?
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry, it is Shift, but it’s not the same place as… anyway. But this is interesting.
DANIEL: I like TODES. I’m into TODES. What are you noticing, Diego? Is TODES sort of winning out or is one version getting dominance?
DIEGO: Yes, so that’s definitely the one that I’m seeing and hearing the most. So, when you hear it’s hard to know what the person would write it as, since we kind of have a few options, but definitely the E. And per this article, that tends to be what more progressive people are choosing to use. So in Argentina, for example, you still have people who are completely against this and don’t think it makes any sense to have inclusive language.
DANIEL: Yeah, old story.
DIEGO: You have others who are kind of going halfway and they will say todos, it means everyone or all for those who don’t know. So, instead of referring todos to mean everyone, men and women. They are specifically saying todo e todas. So, we have the masculine form and the feminine form.
DANIEL: Oh, man, English went through that. I remember that.
DIEGO: Right. And so, a lot of people are saying that’s not good enough because there are plenty of people who identify as neither man nor woman. And that’s where todes would come into place, because it’s gender neutral, it’s not male, it’s not female, it’s nothing specific. It’s everyone and anyone. So, that’s the trend for the more progressive people who are recognizing the value in having the inclusive language. But as I mentioned on my last, there are still people who are applying this rule to nonhuman nouns in Spanish to be kind of funny or cute. They think they’re being funny or cute, so they’ll apply this “e” ending for objects. So, like a table or a chair and then just to say, “Oh, we’re being inclusive of everybody.” So, they’re kind of…
DANIEL: Todes las mesas, all the tables.
DIEGO: Right. Exactly.
DANIEL: [RATHER SOURLY] You guys are a hoot.
DIEGO: So, it’s in flux, as the article says.
HEDVIG: I have a question.
DIEGO: Yes?
HEDVIG: The TODES variant, do people say “todos y todas y todes” or do they just say “todes”?
DIEGO: That is an option. I have heard that before too. And that’s kind of, I guess, the way to we have the men, we have the women, and then people who identify as neither. But the whole point of the TODES would be that should include everybody. But we’re still figuring it out.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: In terms of simplicity, it seems to me that the TODES is by far the easiest. And it seems like if…
DIEGO: But it’s “unnatural” for Spanish to do that.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, it…
DANIEL: Oh, no. And it hurts children! Oh, the children, it hurts them.
DIEGO: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s an /e/ sound. It’s easy. So currently in Spanish, as far as I know, there are masculine and feminine grammatical genders for humans and also for objects, like you say. So, you get these arbitrary things where like a table and a window and whatever. When you learn it, you have to get past the idea that a table is feminine or masculine or whatever. In French that I know better, the masculine gender is also sort of understood as the neutral gender. So, if you have a bunch of people, you can use the masculine ending to mean masculine… Essentially, it’s masculine and neutral.
DIEGO: Right. The generic masculine.
DANIEL: The mix.
HEDVIG: So, you would only use the feminine ending if it was really a group of exactly only women.
DIEGO: Exactly, yeah.
HEDVIG: As soon as there’s one man in there, you…
DIEGO: Exactly. There can be 10 million women and one man, you have to switch to the masculine or the generic masculine. And so, a lot of people people argue that the male part takes over, Spanish and the Romance languages, because all the Romance languages do this, they’re sexist. They’re inherently sexist languages. But I’m pretty sure Latin wasn’t thinking about that [LAUGHS] as it became a language.
HEDVIG: I think that’s maybe reading in a lot to it that isn’t necessarily there. But what could happen is if Spanish going through this flux… European Spanish and Argentinian Spanish and Colombian Spanish, we might see this change play out differently in different places. There are already grammatical and lexical differences between these Spanishes, and this could be another fertile ground for that dialectal variation. But if it goes down the route of todes, then you’d have a system where you have an animate class of humans that are todes.
DIEGO: I like that.
HEDVIG: And then maybe you keep the masculine feminine for the objects. And you’re like, “We know this is crazy. It’s called masculine-feminine because back in the day, at some point, it was, but it’s no longer.” And that’s more similar actually to African gender systems. They often have one class for animate and then for plants and other stuff, you have a bunch of other ones. But humans are special, but they’re one thing, which I kind of like.
DANIEL: It’s so funny how languages are following in each other’s footsteps. The whole, “Oh, okay, well, we’re going to recognise women, but we’re going to use he or she.” “Oh, you know what? We’re going to use a gender neutral.” “No, you can’t do that because it’s going to harm people and it’s hard to learn,” blah, blah, blah. It’s like the Académie Française, who harrumphed the use of… we covered this. So, I’m reading this from our old notes. The use of gender-neutral language in schools will be, “Harmful to the practice and intelligibility of the French language. With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language already quasi hegemonic across the world, would certainly, and perhaps forever, defeat the French language,” said this representative.
DIEGO: You have to save the French language.
HEDVIG: I have learned English and I’ve learned French. And let me tell you, [DANIEL LAUGHS] the gender inclusive language is not the major hurdle. Get your fucking vowels in order.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Get your writing system under control, French. But thank you for going on record against hegemony. That’s awesome.
HEDVIG: I fully understand that. And that is a political thing. And Germans are similar, and I understand it. English is fucking everywhere, and it’s fucking…
DANIEL: Well, fair enough.
HEDVIG: I understand it. But Académie Française, this is not the major problem for learning French.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re reaching for something.
HEDVIG: Not at all. Get your other shit in order.
DANIEL: Check out the response from the governor of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof. I am really interested in that name. Anyway, here’s the quote, and this is in translation. “Denying language to trans and nonbinary children and adolescents constitutes an attack on the right to identify of each and everyone, and to be in an environment in which diversity is respected.” He called on young people to… I’m sorry, I think it’s a he with the name Axel, I’m assuming that, “They call on young people to ‘rebel in respect of others,’” awesome. “And defended the right of young people to speak as they wish.” Based, no notes.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: All right. Well, hey, I really enjoyed getting a sense of how healthy and vibrant and changing, how alive Spanish is. And that’s really good to remember, because, as you pointed out, Diego, this is a very special month.
DIEGO: Yes. In the US from September 15th to October 15th, it’s Hispanic Heritage Month. So, I thought it was a good moment to talk about all these stories.
DANIEL: I’m so glad to have all that news. Thank you for that. And Happy National Hispanic Heritage Month for those who celebrate, and we’ll try to put that on… You know what I’m going to do? I’m putting together a calendar of all the linguistic stuff, and that’s going to be, like something that subscribers can subscribe to. I’m sticking that one in. Isn’t that a good idea?
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s fun. Can we do just a shared public Google Calendar that you and I can edit and people can subscribe to?
DANIEL: And they can suggest stuff?
HEDVIG: They can suggest stuff.
DANIEL: Let’s do it.
HEDVIG: Like, I know Australia and New Zealand stuff, they have like Samoan and Tongan Week and stuff like that.
DIEGO: There are sign languages day also.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Been meaning to do this for a long time. Let’s get on it. Next project. Here we go.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s really fun. That’s such a great idea.
DIEGO: Just really quick, Axel is a man, and I believe his name, it’s Ashkenazi Jewish. That’s his background.
DANIEL: Very cool. Okay. Very cool. I wonder if people adapted. This might be a job for Youglish to see if there’s anybody who has said this person’s name on a YouTube video or something.
DIEGO: Yeah, it would be Kisi-llof, I guess, in Spanish, but yeah, who knows?
DANIEL: Okay. Sounds good.
HEDVIG: It sounds Slavic.
DIEGO: Yes, probably.
DANIEL: Oh, not this again. All right, it’s time to play our favorite game, Related or Not. And this time, Diego has brought the game.
DIEGO: But who’s going to fill in for Ben? Who’s going to guess for Ben? Because I know the answers to the… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You know the answer? I think it’s just me versus Hedvig here, and I have not looked up anything.
DIEGO: Ooh. Stakes are high.
DANIEL: …but I’ve made my guesses. All right, well, you got three.
HEDVIG: I am not as smart as I look, and I don’t look very smart.
DANIEL: Give us number one.
DIEGO: All right, so the first one, Related or not? LOYAL and LEGAL.
DANIEL: Okay. Do they tie back to some sort of common, possibly Latin, root?
DIEGO: Maybe.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: You think they do?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. Do you have a reason for thinking that? Is there anything that you… like any knowledge you have that helps?
HEDVIG: I just know that words that are cognate with LEGAL sound, like, have an “oi” in other languages, so…
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, LEGAL, definitely Latin.
HEDVIG: So, I think it’s French.
DANIEL: Yeah, [LAUGHS] I thought that as well.
HEDVIG: French. It’s always French!
DANIEL: I said related. LEGAL is Latin. LOYAL is going to be French. And I also know that in Spanish, the G often gets elided, so that LEGAL would become LEAL, which is not too far from LOYAL. So, yes, it sounds like we both say related. What do you got, Diego?
DIEGO: Yes, they are in fact related. And your train of thought was what led me here in the first place. I just one day randomly realized that the words in Spanish, LEGAL and LEAL, are just one letter off. And I looked it up, and sure enough. And just like Hedvig was saying, I thought of another one. REGAL and ROYAL have that same connection with the -EGAL and -OYAL.
HEDVIG: I did not think of that one, but that is perfect.
DANIEL:L There it is.
DIEGO: Yeah.
HEDVIG: What it is, egal, like egalite. And egoy…
DANIEL: But that one didn’t elide to EGAL in Spanish, no.
DIEGO: EGAL and EQUAL. Igual, igual. So, it’s kind of there.
HEDVIG: There we go.
DANIEL: Oh, it did weaken a little bit.
DIEGO: And so, per Etymonline… Or do we care?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah, sure.
DIEGO: Yeah. So Etymonline says comes from truth or faithful in allegiance. So from French loyal, from old French loial, leal, good quality, faithful. And then “al” ultimately from Latin legalem from LEX law. So you look up LOYAL, it gives you LEGAL.
DANIEL: Oh, if we’re talking about multiple things, there’s the relationship between LEX and LEGAL and REX and REGAL. In Latin, the X turned into a G for the other ones. Okay, cool. Just travels all the way down. Okay, what’s number two? We’re one in one. Here we go.
DIEGO: Yes. All right. The next pair, WHISTLE and WHISPER.
DANIEL: [EXHALES]
HEDVIG: I think no. I think it’s a gl- situation where we have a strange set of words like GLIMMER and GLISTEN that sort of mean similar things and they look similar, but it’s not because they’re related, it’s because of other things. And I think WHISTLE and WHISPER is in that category.
DANIEL: It’s a sound symbolism. Oh, crap, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. Okay, I said related because…
HEDVIG: I’m like 75% confident.
DANIEL: Okay. I noticed that WHISTLE has an -LE on the end, and so I thought, “Oh, is that one of those instrumentals, or perhaps frequentatives?” We have SPARK and SPARKLE, CRACK and CRACKLE for the frequentative things that happen a lot or with great intensity. We also have instrumental. You use a thing and then you add -LE to it. So you use a spindle to spin. You use a handle to pick up things with your hand. So, I thought maybe WHISTLE would be like making a sound over and over again, and that could tie into WHISPER, but I didn’t follow it all the way through. So, I’m going to say related, and I’m probably wrong.
DIEGO: All right. They are in fact related.
HEDVIG: Fuck.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] So per Etymonline as well, WHISTLE comes from old English, hwistlian, which meant to whistle — surprise. And that’s from a Proto-Germanic…
DANIEL: And there’s definitely sound symbolism there, right? Totally sound symbolism.
DIEGO: Yeah. And it says from Proto-Germanic, hwis, which is of imitative origin.
DANIEL: There you go.
DIEGO: And then we look up WHISPER, old English, hwisprian, which meant to speak very softly. And that’s from the same Proto-Germanic root of hwis.
DANIEL: So, I wasn’t right on the le, was I? It wasn’t instrumental.
HEDVIG: Sorry, let’s back up a second.
DANIEL: Are we disputing?
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Just going to point something out.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
HEDVIG: WHISTLE and WHISPER are both to this “hwis” thing, which is imitative origin.
DANIEL: They are, yes.
HEDVIG: So, they’re both from, like, an idiophone on an onomatopoetic thing.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That imitates what it sounds like when you make the thing.
DANIEL: Yes, but as we know, even imitative things can come out very differently in different languages, and the Proto-Germans pick the same arbitrary thing for that sound. So, related? Yes.
HEDVIG: Okay. I’m just saying it’s not the same related kind as LEX that we had earlier, because LEX is an arbitrary combination of sounds for law. There’s nothing about LEX that’s like you got to have an L in there when it’s the law book. Right?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. The imitative thing muddies the water a little bit, but by the time it gets to Proto-Germanic, the water runs clear. And very quietly. Like a whisper. Or a whistle.
HEDVIG: Just saying this because you won. Okay, right. Next one.
[LAUGHTER]
DIEGO: All right. And the last one we have is SECRET and SECRETE.
DANIEL: Yes. Maybe I’ll go first on this one. While it is true that if you are secreting things, it isn’t the kind of thing you want to talk about, and so it might be a bit of a secret. There’s a related sense there, uh, but I’m feeling like these are not related, so I’m saying nah.
HEDVIG: So, just to show I’m sure about what SECRETE means. It’s going to get gross. SECRETE.
DANIEL: You’re right! That means two different things.
HEDVIG: It does? Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, it does.
HEDVIG: Learn something.
DANIEL: We better be careful about this one.
HEDVIG: SECRETE can mean like what an organic being does, producing liquid.
DANIEL: I’m doing it now.
DIEGO: Or glands.
HEDVIG: That’s gross.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Right now, I am…
HEDVIG: You mean you’re sweating.
DANIEL: …lightly and profusely sweating and I’m salivating. So, there are a couple of things I’m doing… I’m making secretions in a couple different ways.
HEDVIG: I did not enjoy you drawing attention to that, Daniel. Please, let’s move on. It’s like hearing your dad say that he… it’s just not something I want to hear about.
DANIEL: And the other sense of secreting?
HEDVIG: Is what? I don’t know. What is the other sense of secreting?
DANIEL: To hide yourself.
HEDVIG: Oh, secrete yourself away!
DANIEL: Yeah. Are they the same?
HEDVIG: Well.
DANIEL: Okay. It’s going to be a tiebreaker.
HEDVIG: It’s going to be related in that case, because to secrete yourself away is definitely to hide yourself and put yourself in a secret place.
DANIEL: That… Okay, so I agree. I agree that to secrete yourself away is rel… uh, but… argh.
HEDVIG: But also, how is SECRETE yourself away and SECRETE fluid…?
DANIEL: Clearly, all three are related, and I’m totally wrong on this one. That’s what’s happening here.
HEDVIG: No. Can we just drill down on how are they the same word? Because, like, to produce liquid and to hide…
DANIEL: Aw, they’re just doublets, like DISCRETE and DISCREET — separate.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And quiet about something.
HEDVIG: In Swedish we have SECRETE, as in the noun, like /səˈkriat/, like the insect-produced residue that’s on the leaf or whatever.
DANIEL: That’s better. Let’s go with that one.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: We don’t have the word for… the secret doesn’t sound like secret. It’s hemlighet.
DANIEL: To hide something away doesn’t have any sort of reflex, like sec-something? Not really?
HEDVIG: No…o…o…?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s okay! You’re not supposed to know everything.
HEDVIG: But it’s [IN SWEDISH] sacral, like sacred, but that’s different.
DIEGO: Sacred and secret. That’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, no, no. Okay. I think that they are related, but I need someone to tell me how SECRETE and SECRETE AWAY works.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s deal with that one on the side quest. So, Diego, what you got? I blew it, didn’t I?
DIEGO: They are related.
DANIEL: Argh. How are they related? What was going on?
DIEGO: So, SECRET comes from Latin, secernere, to set apart or part, divide, exclude. And then SECRETE comes from Latin, secretionem or secretio, which meant a dividing or separation.
DANIEL: Something set off.
DIEGO: So, to answer Hedvig’s question, I think maybe when you secrete something, you produce something that separates from the body, something like that. So, when you secrete yourself away, you remove yourself. So, maybe that’s the connection.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay, so the secreting sweat is you’re separating the fluid from your body.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
DIEGO: I believe so.
HEDVIG: It’s going through the barrier of your skin and can go somewhere else outside of your body.
DANIEL: It’s very natural.
HEDVIG: And when you secrete yourself away…
DANIEL: Nothing wrong with it.
HEDVIG: …you hide yourself and you go behind a barrier. You separate yourself out from… Ugh. Weird.
DANIEL: So, all three related. Okay, so that means score is two and two. I want a tiebreaker.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] All right. So, shall we go to that question?
DANIEL: Let’s go with the multiple choice.
DIEGO: All right. So, we have a multiple choice question.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DIEGO: Just in case there was a need for a tiebreaker.
DANIEL: There is.
DIEGO: So, the words of KUMQUAT and LOQUAT, as in the fruits, where do they come from? So do the words come from an Indo-European language, a Sino-Tibetan language, an African language, or an American Indigenous language? KUMQUAT and LOQUAT.
HEDVIG: They are both spelled with Q.
DANIEL: They are.
HEDVIG: We need to point this out.
DANIEL: I’m feeling tremors from an American Indigenous language, but I am not sure I’m going with that.
HEDVIG: Me too. But I don’t like choosing the same because then the tiebreaker doesn’t… can we also just talk about the fruit for a moment? So, kumquat is a citrusy thing, right?
DIEGO: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah, they’re kind of terrible. There are some fruits we don’t need.
HEDVIG: They’re not terrible. Loquat is…
DIEGO: Another citrus.
HEDVIG: Another citrus. Okay, then I’m going to bet Sino-Tibetan.
DANIEL: Oh, that was mine because I was almost certain that this was going to be Malay. That was going to be… Okay, since we’re guessing the same thing…
HEDVIG: Malay is not Sino-Tibetan.
DIEGO: Right, okay. So, if you pick the same language family, now you have to pick a language for the tiebreaker.
DANIEL: Goddamn it. Well, then I’m going to be wrong because I said Malay already and I got it wrong.
DIEGO: I don’t know if Malay is Sino-Tibetan.
HEDVIG: No, it’s Austronesian.
DANIEL: Why don’t we just ask the language person who knows all of the… what is your thing again? Typology. Let’s ask the language typologist.
HEDVIG: So, the reason I drill down on Sino-Tibetan is because I have been interested in the history of domestication of citrus fruits and read Wikipedia pages, and I learned that an orange is a hybrid between a mandarin and a pomelo which is…
DANIEL: Mandarins came first, really?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: And it was hybridised and domesticised in Sino-Tibetan-speaking regions thousands of years ago.
DANIEL: They’re big on citrus.
HEDVIG: I think that group of people have been interested in citrus for a long time and would have a lot of words for it. Now, KUMQUAT with a Q and LOQUAT with a Q, -quat probably means like fruit or citrus fruit or something like that, and then “kum” as that citrus fruit and “lo” as that citrus fruit. So, it’s not Mandarin because we don’t transcribe Mandarin generally with Q-U-A-T, I haven’t seen. I know Q exists, I know U exists but it’s usually not like that. So, I think it’s a Southern and a Western for some reason. So maybe it’s like Cantonese or Hokkien. No, that’s too far East. I don’t know precisely where. I just think it’s not Mandarin.
DANIEL: Guess anything and you’re closer than me. All right, what do we got?
DIEGO: All right. Hedvig, you’re pretty much on the money. It’s from Cantonese.
HEDVIG: It is?
DANIEL: Nice.
DIEGO: So, KUMQUAT is golden orange and loquat — low quat — apparently is rush orange, as in, like when you feel a rush. That’s what I found.
HEDVIG: Because they’re a bit more reddish or something?
DANIEL: Grows in the rushes? Nah.
DIEGO: It went to your head. I don’t know. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Really?
DIEGO: I couldn’t figure out what that rush really meant, but that’s what I found.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Rush orange.
HEDVIG: That’s so fun. I love citrus fruit.
DIEGO: Yeah. And so, QUAT means orange.
DANIEL: I’m pretty sure that RUSH means it grows in the rushes. It grows in the reeds.
DIEGO: Oh, okay. I don’t know that word.
HEDVIG: No, he said it was rush as in the rush of blood to the face.
DIEGO: That was my guess.
HEDVIG: Oh, that was your guess.
DANIEL: What rush meant in that context.
HEDVIG: Oh, guessing. Are we guessing? All right, well, loquat, black orange, Wikipedia says.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Oh, fascinating.
DIEGO: [CROSSTALK] more than one source.
DANIEL: But doesn’t matter because, Hedvig, I’m giving this one to you. You did a great job. You beat me out by just that much on the tiebreaker. Congratulations. Woo, Hedvig. [CLAPS]
HEDVIG: For anyone aspiring to the success that I have garnered, I can recommend having Wikipedia evenings with your roommates or spouse, where we used to do this with my friend Axel years and years ago when I was a student. You just pick… you’re like, “The history of mandarins,” or fans or whatever else, and you sit both a Wikipedia and you have a big bowl of tea, a pot of tea. And then, you sort of just throw facts at each other, like, “Did you know, blah, blah, blah?”
DANIEL: Oh, yeah? Well.
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really fun. Instead of maybe playing games or looking at TV, it’s a nice thing. It’s an interactive thing.
DANIEL: We’ve been having lots of fun with people suggesting words and phrases, even phrases for our Related or Not game. But, Diego, thanks to you for bringing these to us.
DIEGO: No problem.
DANIEL: Now, it’s time for more news, and this one is about machine translation causing some trouble. We have briefly touched on this in passing, but it’s time to take a deeper dive because it’s going to be happening more and more, and we need to raise awareness. So, Diego, what’s the story?
DIEGO: Yes, this one comes from The World. So it’s not really an article, it’s more of a sound bite.
DANIEL: Ten minutes, it’s good to listen to.
DIEGO: Right. There was a case in 2020 here in the US. A Pashto speaker, I’m not sure what country they were from, possibly Afghanistan or Pakistan, but this person was trying to seek asylum here in the US. Didn’t speak English, had the documents for the hearing translated by an aid organization, and that aid organization used a machine translation tool to translate the documents from Pashto to English. And it looks like all of the “I” pronouns in the document were replaced with “we” pronouns for some reason, because machine translation isn’t perfect. And when this person was before a judge looking at the translated document, and then, I’m assuming through an interpreter hearing the story firsthand, the judge noticed discrepancies between the two versions of the story and essentially saying, “You were saying that you were with people before, and now you’re saying you were alone.”
DANIEL: The other way around.
DIEGO: Oh, sorry. Thank you.
HEDVIG: Yes, there’s a discrepancy.
DANIEL: Yeah. “You said you were alone for this bit, but your document says that there was more than one person. What’s going on?”
HEDVIG: Fuck. This is so… Mm. Yeah.
DIEGO: And so, asylum was denied.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And this is a recurring pattern that we’ve seen before, not just with machine translation, but in general, when refugees and asylum seekers are assessed, if they find one hole in the story, if they find anything that is inconsistent, and this is true in Sweden and in Germany and in the US, and everywhere else, if you find anything that is consistent. We had one a couple of years ago where they said they spoke a certain language, and then the judge or reviewer or whatever went to Ethnologue and said, “Oh, that language is not spoken in that country. You must be lying. Everything you said is a lie. We’re going to dismiss it entirely.” And it’s just like it’s a combination of machine translation, like you said, not being perfect. It’s trying its little best. It’s a little computer. And “I” and “we” sometimes are used a bit interchangeably when you write a text. Actually, I do that.
I say something like, “I did this and this study.” And then later I say, “As we saw in the plot,” because I’m like addressing myself and the reader, something like that. This happens all the time. It’s not weird that the machine translation would do this, but it is weird to use such an imperfect tool and then have such high standards of perfection of the story because they fuck themselves up. This is not the person seeking asylum’s problem.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. That’s right.
HEDVIG: Argh. It gets me so angry.
DANIEL: And as we saw with Jack Hessel in our interview on AI Hype Hosedown episode, automation always poses risks, and we need to be well aware of the risks. And people who use automatic translation or any sort of automation tool should not be using them for mission critical things, or they should be reviewing them very carefully with the skill that a human would use if they’d done it themselves in the first place. Sheesh.
HEDVIG: I’ve been thinking about this because they’ll say, “Oh, it’s so expensive to have interpreter and everything.” But maybe what you could do is you could have a machine translation of a bunch of the documents and then bring a Pashtu expert on a telephone call. You don’t need to bring them over to Washington DC or whatever and just say, “Do you have anything to say about this person’s story or anything about the proceedings, about the accuracy of the interpretation?” I don’t think it needs to be that hard.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay, but there’s one thing that we’re not taking into account. Yeah, we covered the Pashto example a few episodes ago, but caseloads are huge and the backlog is immense. Diego, do you got any numbers on how big the backlog is?
DIEGO: Yes. So, according to The World, in December 2022 in the US, there was a backlog of 1.6 million asylum applicants still pending in immigration courts.
DANIEL: Holy crap. So, this isn’t just this one case. This is the tip of a huge freight train, so to speak.
[DIEGO LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Why are they all want to go to the US? Well, Pashtu, that might be like a person who’s worked for the US military in Afghanistan in some day.
DANIEL: Oh, they might have been an interpreter for Afghanistan.
HEDVIG: They might ironically have been an interpreter.
DANIEL: Oh, that would be cruel. So, caseloads are huge, backlogs are huge. Software is so available that it is so tempting to just reach for it, and then you get a problem and you just don’t… I mean Pashto isn’t even a language where “I” and “we” are handled by the same word. I looked it up. So, yeah, this kind of stuff can just pop out of nowhere. And humans… there just kind of isn’t a shortcut, humans have to review.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I hear what you say, Daniel, that there’s a huge backlog and a lot of people want to seek asylum in the US for reasons I don’t… I mean, maybe if you have family there…
DANIEL: I know.
HEDVIG: …but I’m sorry, I don’t… yeah, whatever.
DANIEL: Comparatively.
HEDVIG: But governments have priorities. They have a lot of money. And they give tax breaks. If you had like a pie chart of the US budget [DIEGO CHUCKLES] and it was like how much money they’re spending on asylum seeker administration versus how much money they’re spending on the military industrial complex, in the big perspective, of course it costs a lot of money, of course, there are a lot of asylum seekers, but governments are big. There’s 300 million people in the US. This is a big economy. It’s a lack of care, it’s a lack of consideration. They don’t prioritise these people. That is why. It’s not that they don’t have the money. It’s that they’d rather spend it on other things.
DIEGO: There’s also a bit of negligence on the part of these companies that are pushing these machine translation tools because they have multimillion dollar contracts with the government. And I don’t know if it’s a lie necessarily, but they flat out advertise their services, as, “We’re here to help asylum seekers, we can do all these languages. Come to us, give us the contract.” And then, this happens.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s like that service that we covered before where they were doing weather warnings in Alaska, and they wanted to do it in some indigenous languages, and the machine translation was just… because input to the machine translation was like, I think, like Bibles or other narratives, and it was just spouting like nonsense and not telling people…
DANIEL: I remember that.
DIEGO: They talk about how specifically that Pashto is not a small language. So, how did this happen?
HEDVIG: But also, the mistake is actually quite small. The mistake like the “I” and “we,” it’s much smaller mistake than what happened in the weather service case, where they were just like, “The bear is coming down the hill,” or whatever, and it was like something completely else, this is a small thing. What needs to happen is if they’ve decided to use this tool, then the judge needs to be not so fucking stickler for things that are within the error bars of the tool they used.
DIEGO: Right. But I’m sure the judge is very far removed from even knowing that that’s how this document got translated or whatever, yeah.
HEDVIG: And that’s their problem.
DIEGO: Right.
DANIEL: Hey, we’re talking about pronouns. Why don’t we move on to the next story about… this is what’s happening in Canada? Diego, what’s going on in Saskatchewan?
DIEGO: Yes. This one is also from The World. The main context of this story is kids going back to school around the world. And a lot of them, or in some cases, they’re choosing to adopt new names or even new pronouns. Specifically in Canada, in the province of Regina, they’ve adopted some new policies where essentially parents have to be involved in this process. If a student decides that they want to use a different name or different set of pronouns at school, the staff, the teachers have to let the parents know that this is happening. And then, it’s only with their permission of the parents that this can take effect at school.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: [SIGHS] Yeah.
DIEGO: And a lot of people are not happy about that because there are plenty of cases of LGBTQ youth who don’t come from an affirming home life, and it could be a risk to their very safety having the school tell the parents, “Hey, your kid is doing this.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: At the same time, if you are using and going by a different name or a different pronoun in school, even if you didn’t inform the parent right away, probably the parent is going to find out somehow. They get report cards. They see things that the school writes.
DANIEL: Some schools have a thing where they say, “What name would you like?” I think this was in The World article because I did listen to it. They’re asking, “What name and gender should we refer to you at school? What name, if anything different, should we use to refer to you in communications with your parents?” So, they are trying to split that.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DIEGO: Right. Do you use something different at home compared to at school?
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s say it like that. “Do you go by a different name when you’re at home?”
DIEGO: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, some of that can be not causes of a great conflict. There could be people who are like, “Oh, I have,” for example, “a traditional Chinese name that my mom calls me by my family, but I am, for stupid reasons, embarrassed about it in school. And I want to be known as Angela.” And the parents are fully aware of that, and they’re like, “Oh, we’d really like you, we gave you the beautiful name Mei Chin but okay.” I can see a non-super dramatic version of that.
DANIEL: Yep. I know that parents want to be informed and involved, and I know that loads and loads of parents just want what’s best for their child. And so, at one time in my life, I would have said, “Of course they should be informed. What right would a schoolteacher have to keep parents in the dark on matters related to their child? That’s really odd.” But…
HEDVIG: Then, you met some other parents.
DANIEL: Then, I had parents. Well, all right. You ready? Story time. Okay. I had deconverted from the Mormon faith, and I was talking to my mother, elderly. We were driving the car, and it was when gay marriage was a hot topic. And she said, “So you think that gay marriage is okay?” My dear, sweet mother. And I said, “Yeah, I think it’s all right.” And so, we actually started having a bit of an argument about it. She motioned to my two boys who were sleeping in the back, this is on a long drive. She said, “Do you think they should be able to get married?” I’m like, “Mom, that’s not what this is about. Some people are gay, and they…”
HEDVIG: Oh. Like, if we allow the gays to marry, then you’ll be able to do incest and marry a dog! That argument.
DANIEL: For my mom, the link between pedophilia and homosexuality was unbreakable. Like for many people of her generation. And I said, “Mom, you know, the thing is, I’m not gay, but if I were, you would still… love me.”
HEDVIG: Ohhhh?
DIEGO: Right?
DANIEL: There was a silence.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: The silence persisted. And then she just looked at me and said, “Well… I don’t know.” And I realised, “Holy shit.” There are parents who value their ideology over their child. So, that radicalised me, and I am now a firm believer that when a student has parents with horrible religious views or regressive views or cultural views that would do harm to their child, those kids are the ones who need to be supported expressly over the objections of their parents.
DIEGO: Exactly.
DANIEL: And I expressed that view on Discord. And our listener, Fiona, pointed this out. I’m just going to quote it. “And other kids need to be protected from abusive teachers and coaches and other authority figures. Identifying which case applies is not trivial.” And that was such a good point. Arg, this is stuff is so hard.
HEDVIG: It is really hard, yeah.
DIEGO: Now, imagine being a teacher in this situation. [CHUCKLES] What do you do?
DANIEL: I wish Ben were here.
DIEGO: Right. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It is so hard. But there is a way of embracing the child you have in front of you and who they are even in that moment. It’s entirely possible for kids to go… I hate it when people say like, “Oh, it’s just a phase.” I’m like, “Well, if it is a phase, let them have that phase.” I don’t know. I have a friend who has gone through like a bisexual phase, and she doesn’t really identify like that anymore and it’s like that was a phase, but it doesn’t make it any more real at the time. There’s no read to…
DANIEL: It’s still valid.
HEDVIG: It’s still valid. It’s fine. Let’s just look at the bright side, which is that most teachers, most scout leaders, most coaches, most parents are kind, loving, and caring to their children. Let’s hope that these people who will not embrace and love their children, no matter who they are, are a minority. And let’s not get blindsided and too bogged down in the darkness because there are a lot of… I just hope that for every bad parent, that child has a high probability of having a good teacher and the other way around.
DANIEL: Yeah, somebody’s got to be good here. Yeah, that was my takeaway as well. School teachers are professionals, and they need to be empowered to use the best knowledge we have about how to support students. And there are going to be times when supporting students, their health, their psychological wellbeing, even their physical safety, means keeping parents out of the loop, unfortunately. Sometimes vice versa. So, be the support for that kid. And if you are that kid, lifeline in Australia 13-11-14 other places, find someone who can help you and plan your escape. All right, let’s pivot to language of work.
DIEGO: Yeah. So, this one is from CNBC, but I believe the article mainly talks about what’s happening in the UK. So, I can’t really speak to what’s happening here in the US. But Gen Z is leading some language changes in the workplace, especially in the written communication. So, things like “yours truly” or “to whom it may concern,” those are disappearing from emails. Or instead of putting “with regards” or “with respect” at the end of an email, just putting “thanks” because of social media and whatnot, work emails and messages are kind of turning more into just conversations as opposed to a formal letter that you’re writing. So, openings and closings for those emails are kind of just falling by the wayside.
But on the other hand, there are things that are seen as being too informal. So, putting things like hiya or…
HEDVIG: I do that.
DIEGO: …ta. Or just ta, which I’m assuming is short for ta-ta.
HEDVIG: It’s ta means thank you in British English.
DIEGO: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Where did we get that? Oops.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I can ask my Brit of a husband. But it does mean thank you.
DANIEL: You’re right.
HEDVIG: So, if someone hands you something, you can say ta.
DIEGO: Okay, I didn’t know that.
HEDVIG: But I do start emails with hiya and for a while…
DIEGO: That’s very UK English.
HEDVIG: …I didn’t understand that oi, O-I, is like an aggressive greeting. I thought it was…
DANIEL: Tell me you were beginning emails with OI.
DIEGO: Yeah, I hear it in my head in like a Manchester accent. [LAUGHS] Oi!
HEDVIG: Yes. I thought it was similar to hi.
DIEGO: In Brazilian Portuguese, it is. That’s how you say hello in Brazilian Portuguese. Oi.
HEDVIG: Right. So, I thought it meant hi. So, I started emails with oi and no one really pointed out to me. Everyone was like, “Okay, Hedvig’s being weird, whatever.” And then a British person was like, “You know that that’s pretty aggressive?”
DIEGO: Right.
DANIEL: That’s what you say when somebody is stealing your sandwich and you catch them.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, apparently. That’s tough with that. But I still do hi, hiya. And this is some… We got onto it varies by countries. So, in Sweden, we’ve used hi as a starting for very long time now. You can say that to your professor. You can say that with anyone. But in English, I try to start the emails chain if it’s someone I haven’t with dear title, first name, last name, to just be like cover all my bases and be like, and then I get a reply back that’s like, “Hi, Hedvig. Thanks, James.” And I’m like, “Okay. Hi, James.”
DANIEL: Okay. You’re James now. Yeah. Guests often say, please don’t call me Professor So-and-So.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Now, I remember a time when I noticed that people at work were moving from only email to communicate to using a combination of email and texts. And I feel like work texts are more accepted now. That’s just the feeling that I got. Am I wrong?
HEDVIG: What? Texts?
DIEGO: Yeah. And then, you have the internal messaging…
HEDVIG: Like Slack.
DIEGO: …systems that people use also, which is awesome.
HEDVIG: I am of the opinion that it’s very important to help yourself and your colleagues respect a good work-life balance. And that means that you should view any kind of written communication like email or DMs or anything as essentially defaulting to not time urgent. So, if someone is working on the weekend and is emailing you on a Saturday, they cannot expect an answer until normal business hours. If you do get answer, lucky, good, nice, but it should not be expected. This happens to me a lot because I am a night owl, and I like to work odd hours. So, I email someone and then someone’s like, “Oh, I’m so sorry I didn’t respond right away.” And I’m like, “Well, I emailed you at like 02:00 AM. So, like, chill.”
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: There’s another expectation. I have some colleagues who say, “Well, you shouldn’t email me on a Saturday. You should email me 09:00 AM on Monday.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not in charge of when you check your emails. You should check your email 09:00 AM on Monday.” And I should send it…
DIEGO: Right. And have the self-control not to answer me at 02:00 AM.
HEDVIG: Exactly. Right. I don’t expect you to. I think probably you’ve gotten this one, Daniel, because when I use my work email, I have a little postscript. Can I…? Daniel’s like…
DANIEL: Oh, yes, I have seen that. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Which is, “You are not under any obligation to respond immediately with the possible exception of something that is actually urgent,” which doesn’t happen often. “Our working hours may differ due to time zone, holidays, care responsibilities, daily rhythm, etc. If you see my message at a time when you are not able to respond, please consider marking the message as unread until you have the time.”
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: “I strive towards patience. Thank you.” Because I got so many people thinking that I expected them things, so I’ve added this now to be like, “Chill.”
DIEGO: Were they all American?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: A fair amount of them are American. Yes.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I even got invited to join an editor volume and then I was on sick leave, and I had a sick leave response. During my sick leave, I did check my email, and I responded to the editor, and then he immediately responded back and said, “We actually decided to drop you from the volume because you didn’t respond early enough earlier this week.”
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I was like…
DANIEL: Rude.
HEDVIG: “Well. I had an automatic sick leave reply that maybe…” This was an American. Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. It’s Americans. The problem is Americans.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: Hey, let me just pull this quote. Gen Z. I say Gen Zed, which is defined as, “People aged 18 to 24 for the purpose of Barclays research appears to be leading the shift nearly three quarters. 71% of those surveyed credited younger workers with the change.” Are they though? Are they really? Or, are people just blaming the kids for a more general sort of language or norm change? I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: I don’t understand why they’re blaming Gen Z.
DANIEL: I know.
HEDVIG: I think this is already in millennials.
DANIEL: Millennials killed everything, including communication.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think it’s even in Gen X.
DANIEL: Well, we’d be at the tail.
HEDVIG: Like, less formal than boomers.
DANIEL: I’m an older Gen X, so I’m probably at the tail of this. I’m just watching everyone trying to figure out what’s going on.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I still sign off with “best” even though everyone hates it.
HEDVIG: Mm, I do this sometimes.
DIEGO: Best what? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Best.
HEDVIG: Best regards.
DANIEL: It means I’m the best.
DIEGO: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s why I say that.
DIEGO: Right. Best Daniel. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: When I write “Best”, I think: I’m the best.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I don’t know, you’ve been a university lecturer, Daniel, so you’ve gotten emails from students. What I hear people complain about when they teach a course with young people is not necessarily the formal aspects of the messages, like, “Hi, Daniel,” blah, blah, but it’s rather that the content itself where it’s like, “Please read the syllabus.” “Don’t contact me two minutes before to get an extension,” like, the actual things. And then, exactly how they’re expressed like, it’d be nice if someone likes to call professor.
I had a professor in Canada who was a woman, and she opened her class with saying, “I want you to address me as Professor Last Name.” And that was because she had noticed that all of her male colleagues were, and she wasn’t. And she was like, “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m more approachable.” [GIGGLES]
DIEGO: Fair.
DANIEL: Fair.
HEDVIG: Fair.
DIEGO: I think that was the main takeaway of this article is that keep it in moderation, keep in mind who you’re communicating with, what the content of the message is, and follow language use accordingly.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Good advice.
HEDVIG: They don’t get taught in university or primary school how to write messages to people, right?
DIEGO: That’s very true.
DANIEL: Personal experience.
HEDVIG: I would focus less on the formal language and more on the, “Is it appropriate for you to message your course lecturer about this?”
DIEGO: Sure.
DANIEL: That would be a really good skill to have. Just a good little workshop, just a mini workshop, how to write professors. It would say something like, “Aim for a medium level of formality. But if you know more about your professor or teacher, then you should do what they want, just like you would with somebody else about stuff that they prefer.” That would be a really good bit.
HEDVIG: And don’t waffle on. Write your question clearly.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Some great news there. Thank you, Diego, for bringing us all these great news stories. I feel better informed already.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: But now, it’s time for Words of the Week, and the first one: LAZY GIRL JOB. We’re starting off with an article from Angela Yang of NBC News. This is another girl one.
DIEGO: Yes, we have another…
DANIEL: Lots of girls going on.
DIEGO: Yeah, another girl word. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Another girl word. All right, Hedvig, are you aware of this one? I should ask Hedvig first.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: LAZY GIRL JOB. I can guess.
DANIEL: You’ve probably read the run sheet already.
HEDVIG: Well, I’m not sure that the description helps me that much.
DANIEL: Okay.
DIEGO: It’s a bit of a misnomer.
HEDVIG: Well, I see a lot of people online reclaiming LAZY in general, because there’s two kinds of lazy, which is some people who have a lot of anxiety and procrastinate a lot will think that they are lazy. But then, you should ask yourself, “Are you having fun?” Because the word LAZY implies that you’re doing something else fun. If you’re only having anxiety, then I don’t know if you’re lazy, you’re just having anxiety, which is not the same as being lazy. And then, the other thing is like work smarter, not better. Being lazy is not only… I am a lazy girl and it makes me strive for solutions instead of just hard grinds.
DANIEL: Yes. Cultivate the three virtues of the programmer. Laziness, impatience, and hubris. That’s a phrase that I [HEDVIG LAUGHS] learned in my programming days.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And those are virtues. Laziness is good if it’s a good kind of laziness.
HEDVIG: Yeah. If it means that you don’t hard code and do bullshit work. You should never do the work that a computer can do.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s stupid.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: You’re not a good computer.
DANIEL: Find lazy solutions that are good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Find efficient solutions.
DANIEL: Well, here’s what I’m noticing. We’re noticing lots of anti-work phrases. I think anti-work is a big theme lately with QUIET QUITTING and so on.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re noticing lots of phrases about taking things just a little easier. Thankfully, more of them are involving girls and not goblins.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Girl math.
DANIEL: Hedvig, an area that you had strong feelings on, because why should I be a goblin if I like to slob around the house and wear sweatpants all day long?
HEDVIG: Did I say that? Maybe I want to be a goblin. Goblin sounds nice.
DANIEL: Oh, you’re such a contrarian.
HEDVIG: Huh, maybe I’ve changed my mind! No, but goblin is nice.
DANIEL: Why don’t you be a girl goblin?
HEDVIG: A goblin is nice and gender neutral as well.
DANIEL: That’s true.
DIEGO: Halloween costume idea. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DIEGO: Girl goblin.
HEDVIG: Or just goblin.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Why don’t you do a crossover thing like goblin ninja?
DIEGO: There you go.
HEDVIG: I don’t want to be a ninja. That sounds like a lot of work.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, never mind.
HEDVIG: To run around and be athletic? No.
DANIEL: That’s so not goblin.
DIEGO: Be an anti-ninja.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I want to be a lazy little programming goblin who tries to find solutions that make her work less.
DANIEL: See, that’s the thing. That’s what lazy is going for here. It’s like not working as lazy. No, it’s a good work-life balance. Girl math means girls are stupid? No, girl math has its own internal wisdom that is amusing in a good way. So, it’s almost like these terms involving girl acknowledges the criticism that someone might use against it, but then subverts that criticism. I like that.
HEDVIG: Maybe. Yeah. I’m a little bit confused about girl dinner. It’s a shame I wasn’t on the episode, because I have found out that it’s supposed to be funny that it’s messy.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. That’s part of the chart.
DIEGO: Oh, the article here says, “Girl dinners constitute snack plates in lieu of fully prepped meals, encouraged mainly online, particularly women, to take reprieve from burnout.
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Avoiding burnout. That’s it.
DIEGO: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I like GIRL DINNER. I have that a lot when Ste’s not around.
DANIEL: A couple of episodes, I thought that AI was going to be the Word of the Year. I am thinking that GIRL is going to be giving AI some strong competition. Strong competition.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DIEGO: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, a LAZY GIRL JOB is, when you try and do your job in a way that is efficient and keeping your work-life integrity intact.
DIEGO: Yeah. Still having time for…
HEDVIG: And not burn yourself out.
DIEGO: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Not hustling. Not trying to outcompete your colleagues. Not trying to overachieve compared to what your salary represents. Yeah, I’m happy with that.
DANIEL: All right, good. Let’s go to HYPERTOURISM, the new buzzword in travel. This one is an item from Euro Weekly News. What is hypertourism?
DIEGO: Yes. So, apparently, this word is replacing the 2015 term, OVERTOURISM, which passed by me. I wasn’t aware of that one.
DANIEL: We missed it.
DIEGO: But there’s a very well-known Italian language dictionary that has added HYPERTOURISM as one of its terms, defining it as the overwhelming concentration of tourists in renowned cities and sites during specific times, potentially harming monuments the environment, and disrupting local life. Some people are going so far as to even refer to extreme cases of hypertourism as TOXIC TOURISM.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DIEGO: So, just…
DANIEL: Lost in toxic.
DIEGO: …keeps going up and people are just traveling and making a mess all over the world. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I was wondering why OVERTOURISM is being shoved aside in favor of HYPERTOURISM. I think that maybe it’s because… This is what I came up with. HYPER is Greek. OVER is English. Maybe it seemed a bit hypocritical to use English loan words, heh, while complaining about tourists, many of which are English speaking.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, no, no, no, no.
DANIEL: Do you think? Am I onto something here? C’mon.
HEDVIG: No, no, no it’s just that OVER…
DIEGO: If anything, they would have stayed with OVERTOURISM.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: OVER is a little bit ambiguous. I think HYPER is more clear.
DIEGO: Yeah, yeah. I’m thinking the same thing.
HEDVIG: I can see OVER meaning a couple of different things, whereas HYPER, I understand. But TOXIC seems better for what it sounds like it is.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: I feel like OVER means too much, but HYPER could mean too much or really fast. Some kind of velocity.
DIEGO: Like, somebody who’s like going up a bunch of different places in a short period of time?
HEDVIG: Oh, like those people who are like, “I’m going to take a two-year sabbatical and visit every country.”
DIEGO: Sure.
DANIEL: Oh, you’re such a hypertourist. That’s awesome.
DIEGO: I would call that supertourism. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, dang.
HEDVIG: Or globetrotter.
DANIEL: Okay, got it.
DIEGO: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You know what? I wonder if anybody saw the same video I did, Instagram versus Reality on the Greek island of Santorini, where it’s that beautiful white place near the cliffs and just like the…
HEDVIG: I’ve been there.
DANIEL: Have you?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What was it like?
HEDVIG: I went there on a vacation to Greece when I was like 14 years. It was nice. It’s known for its beautiful sunsets. The main city is like up on a cliff. It’s nice. There were some donkeys.
DANIEL: Crowded?
HEDVIG: Ah, a lot of Greek islands are crowded.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, this video had the Instagram version, which was one person looking out over the whole sort of what…
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. I think I know what’s coming.
DANIEL: Then the reality was the entire place was crammed with hypertourists.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. I think there’s definitely a place for this term.
HEDVIG: I think you’ve got to ask yourself when you plan your vacation what it is the activity that you want to be doing. Because I want to lie in a sofa, and read a book, and drink a light beer. And the thing is, I don’t need to spend a lot of money to be doing that. I can go to a rundown house in the middle of Sweden and do that, kind of.
DANIEL: There’s this thing I do. I teach my girls stuff from Reddit. They say, “Let’s do the Feed, dad!” So, I pull up this bunch of subreddits [HEDVIG LAUGHS] called The Feed. I know, I know, but it’s good ones. It’s aww, and it’s nextfuckinglevel, and toptalent, and earthporn, and spaceporn. And we just… I’ve found that there’s…
HEDVIG: For people not familiar, can you please assure people that when you say Earthporn, you mean very nice pictures of places on the earth. It’s nothing sexual.
DANIEL: That is correct. It is the non-porny version of porn. And sometimes, we’ll just find these great places like cherry blossoms in Japan or sliding down a grass mountain in Mongolia, or Banff Canada. Beautiful national parks. And we often say, “Man, let’s go to those places.” So, we’re just assembling a list. So, that could be one. So, yeah, one day, maybe we’ll go to some of those places and be hypertourists, but I hope that it doesn’t hurt anyone.
DIEGO: Don’t go to Hawaii. Don’t go to Hawaii.
HEDVIG: Don’t go to Hawaii.
DANIEL: I won’t.
DIEGO: They don’t need any more tourists, unless you’re going to go and help and do good things. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go on a vacation necessarily to see things. Does that make sense?
DIEGO: Mm.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I want my holiday to be restful, not a sightseeing tour.
DIEGO: Yeah, I’ve definitely had my fair share of castles and chateaus and palaces in Europe…
HEDVIG: After a while, you’re like…
DIEGO: … I can do without…
HEDVIG: I can’t take a better… yeah…
DIEGO: Didn’t I already see this one?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Unless it’s a place that have an attachment to and I’m like, “Yes, I want to go and see the thing.” I just don’t want to see stuff. I just want to, yeah, be in my couch and have my beer.
DIEGO: Yeah, totally.
HEDVIG: Lazy girl.
DIEGO: Lazy girl vacation. There we go.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Have a lazy girl vacation.
DIEGO: Oh, my god. Yeah.
DANIEL: Sometimes, you see things and you think, “Have I already seen this before or have I not?” which is the perfect segue for our next term, which is JAMAIS VU.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. So, it’s the counterpart to déjà vu. Let’s talk about déjà vu for a second, which means “already seen”. Has anybody got any theories on why we have déjà vu? Why do we have that feeling that, “Oh, I’ve done this before”? What’s going on? Is it the Matrix?
HEDVIG: Your memory and your brain and your perceptions are not perfect. And we don’t remember things. We don’t have photographic video memory, generally. Maybe some people do. And when we’re in a relaxed state or we’re not focusing or not paying attention — let’s say we sit in a park and there are trees and the leaves are falling and it’s autumn — you might register like, “I’m in a park, I’m on a bench,” blah, blah, blah, but you don’t register all the details.
Fast forward to a year from now, you’re in another park and your brain goes, “Oh, I didn’t register all the details last time, and I’m not registering all the details this time, and they look very similar.” And then, your brain goes, “We’ve been here before. Isn’t that cool?” And your rational mind goes, “No, but I’m in Toronto, and what you’re thinking of is somewhere else.” I think that’s it.
DANIEL: “I’ve never been here.” For me, it’s always like somebody will say something or I’ll be talking. I often have the sensation when I’m talking and saying stuff.
HEDVIG: Me too.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, I looked it up. We have this skill called “familiarity discrimination”. And it’s a really useful skill. It helps us know if we’ve seen something before. But sometimes, we’ll have something that will happen in our temporal lobe and a thing that we’re experiencing will get flagged as familiar, but then there’s nothing specific in memory to attach it to. And so, this mismatch is called déjà vu. Cool.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: It can happen for people who are having seizures, it can be a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, and it seems that you’re more susceptible to déjà vu if you have a high level of education, travel a lot, remember your dreams, and interestingly, hold liberal beliefs.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s… That is… That is… that…
DANIEL: Isn’t that odd?
HEDVIG: No no no, that’s some bad statistical controls.
DANIEL: Okay.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I am willing to accept that is the case. We’ll throw a link up on our website, becauselanguage.com. Okay. But now we’re over to JAMAIS VU. Diego, help me out.
DIEGO: Right. So, this describes a sensation when something that should be familiar to you seems eerily new and unsettling.
DANIEL: Oh. [LAUGHS]
DIEGO: They’ve done research that recently won an Ig Nobel Award for literature.
DANIEL: Love the Igs.
DIEGO: Yeah. So, they found in their experiments that 70% of the participants were experiencing jamais vu after writing the same word for about 33 times. That was one of the tests that they were doing.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Ah, yes, yes. Yes, I know this. If you pick a word, for some reason, I’ve stuck on the word GROUP, and you say it a lot, after a while, you’re like…
DIEGO: Exactly.
HEDVIG: …“Groooup?”
DANIEL: Group.
DIEGO: It’s not a word anymore.
HEDVIG: What? Group. Group.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Why you would call anything a group?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is known as semantic satiation.
HEDVIG: No, it’s known as jamais vu.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, it’s a kind of jamais vu, but it’s specific to language. So, you are used to doing something on automatic but then for some reason, automaticity fails you. So, you can’t rely on it. And then you can’t rely on conventional process memory either, because that’s not how you know how to do that thing and suddenly, you’re just like, “This is weirdly new, and I’ve got to pull over and remember how to drive.”
When I was a kid, I learned this poem, and I’d like to tell it to you now. It was first published by apparently Katherine Craster, the poet, in a book called Pinafore Poems in 1871. And then in 1881, it was just everywhere. Everyone was publishing this poem. Here it is.
The centipede was happy – quite!
Until the toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”
This worked her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.
I just like that because it shows when automaticity fails, and that’s jamais vu, which is also known as The Centipede Effect as a result of that poem.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Don’t think about how you walk.
DIEGO: Right. Or breathe.
DANIEL: Or swallow.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. Here I go.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. A little bit weird, but I still managed. Okay, cool. Let’s finish up with our last one, WHOM OF WHICH. Is this something that you say? Have you ever said WHOM OF WHICH?
DIEGO: Yeah. So, before finding this article, I had no idea that this existed as similar to the professor in the article, who had never heard this before. But essentially it seems like it’s just an elaboration of WHOM. It’s just a reinforcing of WHOM. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, the example in the sentence that I see on our run sheet, it says that someone said, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.”
DANIEL: Whom of which is our best player. We can also see WHOM WHICH, “Oh, that’s me whom which you’re looking for. Let’s have a chat in DM.” Actual tweet. We can even find WHICH OF WHICH in this example. “He’s an excellent governor with none of the Trump baggage, which of which Trump did on his own.” So, this is Dr David Pesetsky of MIT. He’s published an article in the journal Glossa called “Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied-piping””. Pied piping? Anyone remember this one with this term? I haven’t heard this term since the Principles and Parameters days of Chomskyism. How about you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I know.
DANIEL: You do? Okay.
HEDVIG: No, I don’t know this, but I know the rat catcher.
DANIEL: Tell me the rat catcher story. Come on. Summarise.
HEDVIG: Dutchman in Harlem who could enchant rats and draw them out of the city?
DANIEL: Yeah, the rats would just follow him when he played his tune. And then, what happened was he did it for the town and then he said, “Now, pay me.” And the mayor said, “We’re not going to pay you. We have no rat problem now. Your stupid piping didn’t do anything.” And so, the pied piper started playing another song, and all the children followed him out of town, and they never saw their children again. Yikes. All right.
So, in linguistics, generativists thought that this was a parameter that some languages do and some languages don’t. So, pied piping is: when you move a W-H phrase, it can drag along other stuff. So, for example, I can say, “It was an old kind of suitcase.” That sounds good. “It was an old kind of suitcase.” Now, if I want to make that a question, I have to replace OLD with WHAT, because I don’t know if it’s old or what kind it is.
HEDVIG: “What kind of a suitcase was it?””
DANIEL: Yeah: “What kind of a suitcase was it?” I have to bring the whole “kind of suitcase””… I have to not only bring the WHAT, but I have to drag the KIND OF SUITCASE with it. I can’t say “What was it kind of suitcase?” Right?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, that W-H movement forces the KIND OF SUITCASE to be dragged along and that’s pied piping. There’s another example, maybe more common. “I was thinking of them.” That’s what I can say. And then if I want to turn that into a relative clause with WHO, I can do two things. I can strand the OF at the end of the sentence, “The people who I was thinking of.” So, now I’ve stranded OF, left it at the end. Or, I can pied pipe it, “The people OF WHOM I was thinking.” Okay.
HEDVIG: Of whom. Fucking. Sorry. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. So Pesetsky thinks that the OF in WHOM OF WHICH is getting dragged along because of the pied piping phenomenon, and he points to other languages like Tlingit and Chʼol and Finnish that also do pied piping, as a way of not only explaining WHOM OF WHICH, but also showing that pied piping is a thing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: What do you think?
HEDVIG: Um, I feel embarrassed for not knowing more about this because it feels like a central tenet of generative theory. I know other things of generative theory, but this one, I’ve heard people talk about, but I wasn’t really sure what it was. Now, I’m trying to think of like…
DANIEL: I don’t even think it’s that important.
HEDVIG: Well, no, it’s kind of interesting, but it says something about what kind of a suitcase, “what kind of” is like a noun phrase or something, and it’s coming along, but not in some cases. That’s weird. But “vad är det för sorts”. Yeah, so, we don’t do that in Swedish.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah?
HEDVIG: No, I don’t think so. “Det är en röd väska”. No, “Vad…” eh…. It’s an old type of bag. “Det är en gammal sorts väska”. It’s a little bit weird.
DANIEL: So, if you made it a question, would you say, “What is it kind of suitcase?” Or, would you say, “What kind of suitcase is it?”
HEDVIG: “Vad är det för sorts väska.” Yeah. What are kind of bag?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But that’s because we’re a V2 language.
DANIEL: So, you can strand it.
HEDVIG: That’s because we’re really, really V2. Like, we really, really, really want the verb there.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. Okay. Cool. Look, I don’t know that much about this parameter. I think it’s interesting, but I’m not a good enough of a syntactician. I just thought maybe construction grammar is a way of explaining this. Like, it’s just a chop and change. Look, WHOM and WHICH are related words. “The person WHOM you were speaking to”, “the person WHICH you were speaking to”. We use them interchangeably. And then, we can also substitute those two in phrases like, “Our friends, many of WHICH are left-handed,” “many of WHOM are left-handed.” So, because you’ve got the MANY OF WHICH / MANY OF WHOM thing, it would be natural to mix it up: WHOM OF WHICH, right?
And if I explain it that way, that explains why OF is kind of optional, like WHOM WHICH. Pesetsky in his article didn’t really have a good way of explaining why you can say WHOM OF WHICH, but you can also say WHOM WHICH. I’m just thinking, Well, but we do say MANY WHICH. “He is one of MANY WHOM I support.” “He is one of MANY WHICH I support.” So, you can omit the OF. So, we’re just chopping and changing. Maybe that’s not a very good way of explaining it, but the construction grammar answer just seems good to me. If you’re a syntactician and you’re just getting super angry, I want to hear a really good explanation of why you think the pied piping is a better explanation. But I’m just thinking, it’s just repertoire? Maybe that’s a dumb answer.
HEDVIG: No, no. It’s not a dumb answer. I’m at the stage now where I write things and I use WHICH and then Grammarly tells me to use THAT almost every time.
DANIEL: Really?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm. Getting scolded by Grammarly. I mean, maybe. Hmm.
HEDVIG: I don’t know.
DANIEL: Hmm. I don’t know.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s a rare construction. So, we’ll be looking out for it. It’s certainly pretty interesting. But if you want to check out Dr Pesetsky’s paper, there’s a link on our website, becauselanguage.com. So, LAZY GIRL JOB, HYPERTOURISM, JAMAIS VU, and WHOM OF WHICH: our Words of the Week. Diego, thank you so much for giving us all of these stories. It’s been great to have you.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DIEGO: Yes, thank you for having me.
HEDVIG: Very good. You gave Daniel a bit of a break this week.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ll say.
DIEGO: A little bit. A little bit. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: If you would like to hang out with Diego, and in fact all of us, you can do that on Discord. Thanks to the team from SpeechDocs who transcribe every word that we say and most of all, our patrons who keep the show going.
HEDVIG: It’s you.
DANIEL: It’s me. If you want to support Because Language, you can give us ideas and feedback. Just follow us on all the socials. We are @becauselangpod on just about every conceivable platform except Threads. You can leave us a voice message so that we can… I hate Facebook. Why would I do Threads? Why? Anyway. Leave us a voice message. You can do that on SpeakPipe. You can just email us a sound of your voice. We would love to hear you. We’ll play you as long as you’re reasonably concise. Send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Another thing you can do, tell somebody about us. We rely on word of mouth for our listeners and for our patrons. You can also leave us a review. And… and, uh…
HEDVIG: You can also…
DANIEL: And now, I hand it over to Hedvig to tell you about the most important way that you could support us.
HEDVIG: If you have a few dollars, pounds, euros, whatever currency you have, each month, it could be very little, it helps us do things like compensate people who are guests. It helps us pay SpeechDocs for transcribing things and other costs we have, and also compensates a little bit of our time as well. It’s a way for us to keep the show going without it becoming… We like doing this show, and it’s just a way of making it easier for us to do the show considering the rest of our life and considering all the things that are needed for the show to be good.
If you listen to the show a lot, I would suggest maybe check in the last, say, five months, what are the podcasts you have listened a lot to and then consider supporting not just us, but also them as well on Patreon. A lot of podcasts have Patreon feeds. It’s a great way of supporting your content creators.
DANIEL: If there’s anybody that you look forward to, like when a new episode drops of theirs and it makes you just feel a little bit happy, that’s my clue that, “Oh, okay, time to throw them a few simoleons.”
HEDVIG: Or you go back in the archives and listen to everything that they’ve done from the start. That’s what I’m doing with some podcasts and I’m like, “Yeah, I do support them now,” because I’m like, “Yeah.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: This is funny of us to say, because this is a Patreon episode, which means that the person listening to this the first time around is someone who has supported us, and we are very grateful for that. And if it’s released to the public feed later, you could also get this message firsthand and feel that warm feeling in your stomach from supporting the show. We’re going to give a shoutout to our top patrons who are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis…
DANIEL: [ECHOING OMINOUSLY] LordMortis.
HEDVIG: Yeah. 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…
DANIEL AND HEDVIG: aengry balls.
HEDVIG: Tadhg, Luis. And we also have a special shoutouts for two new patrons at the Listener level, Coco and Magdalena. Thank you to all of our wonderful patrons. We are very grateful that you’re there for us.
DIEGO: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beano and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
ALL: Pew, pew, pew. Yay!
DANIEL: Yeah. Diego got to say the thing!
DIEGO: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Well done!
DIEGO: I got Drew’s name right this time. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That was good.
HEDVIG: That was really nice.
DANIEL: You are welcome to say it, you know, using any words that you want to.
HEDVIG: Are you?
DIEGO: Oh, it’s just easier to follow that. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s someone else’s name.
DANIEL: No, I don’t mean his name. I just mean…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We always treat that part like it’s set in stone, and it doesn’t have to be.
HEDVIG: No, no, no, no. It is.
DANIEL: It is?
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It is.
DANIEL: I didn’t intend that. Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: No no no, this is a recipe for a good podcast.
DANIEL: It is?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DIEGO: A good little outro.
DANIEL: Yay, we have a good podcast!
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] You’re just realizing that now?
DANIEL: No, but it’s nice to be told.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: My favorite podcast always says, “Let the deep dish bless you… and guide you,” I think. Protect you, let the deep dish pr…
DANIEL: Wow, that’s really serious.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Wow.
DIEGO: I think it’s perfect that you end every episode with the name of the podcast.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think so too.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DIEGO: I love it.
HEDVIG: I think it’s really good. Thank you, Diego.
DANIEL: Except for the one time when I said, “We’ll catch you next time. Don’t let your dreams become memes.”
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Diego, you’re feeling the full front of the dad energy?
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]