Minority languages are under threat everywhere, but Tibet represents a particularly difficult challenge. The Tibetan language family is under pressure from (no surprise) Mandarin, even as community support for Tibetan remains high. But where does that leave the many other minority languages of the area, like Manegacha? Language policy, community pressure, and individual language choice are coming together in a turbulent mix. Is there any place for hope in this setting? Dr Gerald Roche tells us about this unique situation, drawing from his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet.
Daniel chats with Dr Sasha Wilmoth about a very surprising sentence, and how our brains process language in some surprising ways.
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 0:55
News: 5:30
Chat with Sasha Wilmoth: 21:30
Related or Not: 39:40
Interview with Gerald Roche: 54:40
Words of the Week: 2:02:56
The Reads: 2:29:16
Outtakes: 2:32:56
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Mary Walworth: Trickledown endangerment: The role of Tahitian in French Polynesia
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767237_Trickledown_endangerment_The_role_of_Tahitian_in_French_Polynesia
Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust, and joy across languages
https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/156/5/3118/3319867/Vowel-signatures-in-emotional-interjections-and
I'm excited to share our new study on cross-modal iconicity from our special issue in JASA! We show [r] is rough and [l] is smooth even in languages that conflate them within one phoneme. The effect is even stronger than the bouba/kiki effect!
— Aleksandra Ćwiek (@acwiek.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 10:52 PM
The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages
https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/156/5/3468/3321514/The-alveolar-trill-is-perceived-as-jagged-rough-by
Plato’s Cratylus | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-cratylus/
Cratylus by Plato
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html
Potatoes are better than human blood at making space concrete bricks, scientists say
Our brains often fail to notice key words that can change the whole meaning of a sentence
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120716091921.htm
True Or False? How Our Brain Processes Negative Statements
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090211122147.htm
Sasha’s homepage
https://sashawilmoth.com
Descendants of the Latin word “coquina” (kitchen) in Europe and beyond [OC] | Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gjvew7/descendants_of_the_latin_word_coquina_kitchen_in/
The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet by Gerald Roche
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777783/the-politics-of-language-oppression-in-tibet/
The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/35478
Donald Laycock | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Laycock
The “Blue Water Rule” and the self-determination of nations
https://www.cwis.org/2017/10/the-blue-water-rule-and-the-selft-determination-of-nations/
Tibetans protest against language curbs in Chinese schools
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/20/tibetans-protest-language-chinese-schools
Another Day in the Colony by Chelsea Watego
https://www.uqp.com.au/books/another-day-in-the-colony
Mariame Kaba: Hope is a discipline
https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/activism/hope-is-a-discipline/
American Kakistocracy | The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/american-kakistocracy-donald-trump-berlusconi/680675/
anticipatory compliance
#WordOfTheWeek
unless anyone has a better name for this— Because Language (@becauselangpod.bsky.social) November 18, 2024 at 10:01 AM
What are the South Korean origins of the feminist 4B movement rising in the United States?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-13/south-korean-origins-4b-movement-us-trump-election/104586252
Why is it called the “4B” movement? | Mashed Radish
https://mashedradish.com/2024/11/14/4b-movement-korean-origin/
S. Korea to cut number of teachers amid diminishing student numbers | Straits Times
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/south-korea-to-cut-number-of-teachers-amid-diminishing-student-numbers
Appendix:Ancient Greek third declension | Wikipedia
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Ancient_Greek_third_declension
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Could we put all of our transcripts into TSD [Time Series Data] files? Like, downloadable TSD files that are formatted so you can see who’s saying what, and then I can run a little R script and find things out?
DANIEL: Cool.
BEN: Oh, that sounds really fun and embarrassing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Who swears more? Daniel, Ben or Hedvig?
BEN: Ben. Definitely Ben.
HEDVIG: Who talks the most?
BEN: Ooh, Daniel.
HEDVIG: You can do all kinds of things.
BEN: Yeah. Who interrupts the most? That could be really fun.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, that’s one of us two, hey.
DANIEL: Yeah, that wouldn’t work because I separate you guys out in the edit.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Let’s start with Ben Ainslie. Ben, I forgot to do an intro. So, this is your chance to say whatever you want to, to our audience.
BEN: Oh, okay. Why don’t I do my own intro? Ooh, and let’s make Hedvig do one as well and we have to junt. Okay, here’s the challenge, Hedvig. And I’m making it hard for both of us, so don’t feel like I’m singling you out. We have to say something that is actually useful as a podcast introduction and is not either of us just giving into our deep-seated need to be like self-deprecating. So, I’ll go first. He joined the show… Oh, see, I was about to do it straight out. [LAUGHS]. I was going to be like, “He joined the show over 12 years ago and we haven’t been able to get rid of him, he’s Ben Ainslie.” That doesn’t meet our requirements though.
DANIEL: I still like it.
BEN: He has steadfastly… Oh, here’s how I split the baby. “He has steadfastly remained relatively ignorant of linguistic topics, which is a great use to us so he can act as the audience in the trio. It’s Ben Ainslie.”
DANIEL: Mm. That’s pretty good. I’ve often thought that if I could remember everything that I’ve ever said, I’d be brilliant.
BEN: I feel like I would mostly just be guilt ridden or embarrassed, one of the two.
DANIEL: Mm, mm. And, Hedvig Skirgård, it’s time for your intro. Go ahead. What do you want to say?
HEDVIG: Oh, god. She has a PhD in linguistics, and that’s practical when you talk about language and linguistics. Even if she doesn’t know everything, she still has the membership card.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s Hedvig.
DANIEL: It’s Hedvig Skirgård
HEDVIG: It’s Hedvig Skirgård. Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about what’s coming up on the show.
BEN: Yeah, why don’t we.
DANIEL: We’re going to be talking to Dr Gerald Roche of La Trobe University. He’s written a new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet.
BEN: Just a little bit of controversy in that region, in that topic.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. Speakers of minority languages in Tibet are switching to Tibetan and its endangering smaller languages, not to mention the threat that Tibetan itself is under. And so, global advocacy groups are having a really hard time facing this challenge. We’re going to be talking to Dr Roche about that.
BEN: That is very cool.
HEDVIG: This is similar to what Dr Mary Walworth calls “trickle down endangerment”. She describes it in French Polynesia where smaller languages in French Polynesia are switching to Tahitian and people in Tahiti are switching to French.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Dang. Yeah. Okay. So, lots of churn. Lots of churn going on. We’re going to find out about that. Plus, we’re doing news words and Related or Not. But first, we’ve got some information for patrons. So, there’s a lot going on from now until the rest of the year. Our next episode is a Diego show. Our friend, Diego Diaz, is curating a show for us, bringing us news, bringing us words, bringing us Related or Not. It’s going to be fun.
BEN: He’s a pretty top guy.
HEDVIG: He makes good selections. Yeah.
DANIEL: If you’re in the Listener level, you’ll be able to hear that. Our episode after that is a live episode. It’s our Words of the Week of the Year episode. It’s live. We’re going to have some special guests. We’re inviting everybody into a big old Zoom room. We’re going to have a great time talking about all the words of the year and they’re going to be featured from you because you, dear listener, are going to vote for your favorites. Even now, you can head to our socials, that’s BlueSky, that’s the other places. And you’ll be able to find all of our Words of the Week from this year, and you can just like them, and that’s how you can vote for them, and we’ll compile all the votes and we’ll count them down. Do you remember last year’s?
BEN: Do I remember last year’s? Yes. Yes, I do.
DANIEL: We had Cory Doctorow talking to us. We had…
BEN: That’s right.
DANIEL: The word was ENSHITTIFICATION. It was fantastic. It was really fun.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Top-tier word. And has only sadly become more relevant as the year…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I’m afraid so. Maybe we can make it the word again. No, not twice in a row. But all patrons, including free patrons, are invited to that. Also, our mailout. If you are a paid patron, you’ll be getting…
BEN: If you’re in arrears, take a hike!
DANIEL: I can’t do it for the free ones because the postage is a killer. But if you are paid up, you’ll be getting a mailout with lots of stickers. So, make sure that your address is up to date with Patreon. If you’re not a patron, why not become one? There’s a lot going on at patreon.com/becauselangpod. Phew.
HEDVIG: Phew indeed.
BEN: Why don’t you tell me something interesting that’s going on in the world of linguistics, Daniel?
DANIEL: I will. Let me ask a question here. Have you ever thought about the way that we say ow? But OW is kind of a word, and in other languages, when they give a cry of pain, they don’t say OW, they say something else.
BEN: Oh, I think I kind of knew this, but also until you said it right then, I never really properly knew it.
HEDVIG: It’s sort of a bit like the animal sounds, except then we’re trying to sort of pick up a sound that they’re making. Whereas…
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: …when we’re doing interjections like OW, we’re trying to form what comes out of us into a word, if that makes sense.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Now, tell me, what do people say instead of OW in a language that you know pretty well?
BEN: For some reason, AYA is coming to my mind from some sort of a language.
DANIEL: Well, Spanish is AY.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. Well, there we go. Maybe that’s what it is.
HEDVIG: Swedish is AY as well.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think a lot of them have AH.
DANIEL: Some sort of AH sound? Mm-hmm, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s interesting, because you’d think that such a spontaneous exclamation would be like really spontaneous. Instead, we say OUCH, and other languages conventionalise it differently. So, it’s a little bit…
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: …like a cry of the heart, a cri de coeur.
BEN: What if… Can I put a theory forward? And maybe this is where the story is going, and if I’m stealing the lead, I apologise.
DANIEL: Not at all.
BEN: Hedvig said this is a bit like the animal sounds, like cock-a-doodle-doo vs. coco-rico-rico and all that kind of thing, right?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: But then, Hedvig, you said, but we’re not really trying to mimic a sound, but maybe we are.
DANIEL: Ooh, like what?
BEN: And by that, I mean, I don’t say OW when I hurt myself.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Ouch.
BEN: And I would put it to you that not many people do unless, I don’t know, maybe they see a kid hurt themselves and they go, “ooh, ow…”
HEDVIG: Ooh, right.
DANIEL: Ouch.
BEN: …or something like that right? When I properly hurt myself enough to actually make me make a sound, it’ll be like a relatively involuntary sound of some kind. If I stub my toe, it’s like [MAKES A PAINFUL SOUND] or something like that. Or if I cut myself, I’ll go or something [MAKES A GASPING SOUND] oo, something right? And so maybe these words are all an attempt to give a name to this constellation of pain sounds that humans make.
HEDVIG: Do you never say… You’ve never hurt yourself at a level lower than stubbing the toe and said OUCH when it happened?
BEN: Maybe I’m just a weirdo?
DANIEL: Let’s hurt him and find out. I’ll be right over.
BEN: Or maybe I do it, and I don’t realise… [LAUGHS] [PUNCHING ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: Take that, Ben! What do you say now, Ben? What do you say now?
BEN: Yeah, I just don’t think… I don’t think I do. No.
DANIEL: Okay…
HEDVIG: Because I do, but I also make funny sounds when I sneeze, but I do consciously have a few milliseconds of… And then, I decide to say the thing. And then afterwards, sometimes I think to myself, “Well, was that a cry of pain because you thought about saying the thing you said?” So, that can’t be very spontaneous, can it?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah. So, this is sort of what I’m…
HEDVIG: And then, I get myself into, like, pain imposter syndrome, and I’m like, “Did I hurt myself?” And it’s like very stupid.
BEN: The inner monologues of linguists are frightening places.
DANIEL: Let’s get away from pain and talk about disgust. If you see a disgusting thing, what’s the vocalisation you might make in English or another language?
BEN: I know what you want me to say, which is EWW.
HEDVIG: ECCH.
DANIEL: Okay. You can say whatever you want to say.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a more closed vowel and back vowel. It’s aa, eww.
BEN: Eww.
DANIEL: Sorry. Open and closed? Can we go back a bit? So open would be…
HEDVIG: So, it’s like higher and further… Well, it could be back or front because EGH, UGH, I would do both.
BEN: I would go with UGH, like EWW.
DANIEL: AA, AA.]
HEDVIG: Yeah AA.
DANIEL: So, an open sound would be AA, and a slightly more closed sound would be egh or urr, or agh, maybe even ee, that’s really tight.
BEN: Like, you’ve got tight lips as you form the vowel, like eww.
DANIEL: How about a spontaneous cry of joy?
BEN: Daniel.
HEDVIG: He’s taking us on a tour through the vowel system because now he wants us to go high and back…
BEN: What I loved… What I particularly enjoyed is he just asked two Millennials, “What spontaneous noises of joy do you make?” And it’s like, dude…
DANIEL: Must be something, folks.
HEDVIG: Yay, woohoo.
BEN: …we’re in our mid to late 30s. That shit doesn’t happen very often.
DANIEL: Do you just say [SARCASTIC VOICE] WHOOPTY-DOOPTY?
HEDVIG: Well, I mean, if something good happens for someone else, I clap my hands.
BEN: I think I do like a “Heya” or something like that.
DANIEL: You know, we tend to think that we say WOOHOO, and that’s…
BEN: No one. Yeah, no, I’m not claiming that.
DANIEL: Woo hoo! I mean, when we perform a spontaneous joy thing, then we tend to say something like WOOHOO, but I feel like…
BEN: If we perform, is it spontaneous, Daniel? We’ve been through this.
DANIEL: I feel like that’s only a Simpsons thing. I feel like WOOHOO has only been since either Homer Simpson…
BEN: Yeah, yeah, I’d agree with that.
DANIEL: …or Blur, Song 2, which also, I think, ties back to Simpson, woohoo. I think YAHOO would have been earlier.
BEN: I agree. Yeah. In Australia now, it’s YEEEW.
DANIEL: Yeeew. We’re looking at nonverbal vocalisations. And at stake in this discussion is how far does iconicity go? That’s the onomatopoeia thing. How far does sound symbolism go? Is there any universality in this? Now, this research comes from Dr Maia Ponsonnet of the University of Western Australia — my colleague — and a team. Maia has been on the show before, episode 387 of Talk the Talk. This is Dr Ponsonnet and a team published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. I didn’t know it was Maia when I picked it out, but I like her work anyway.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Wait, she emailed me about this. I filled in her questionnaire. I know this.
DANIEL: Oh, so you’re data?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I submitted the data for Swedish. I had to, like, ask a bunch of Swedes also to make sure I wasn’t… a weirdo.
DANIEL: We’ve got a window into this research. This is great. Now, we have to cut you out for this part. For impartiality.
BEN: Yeah, you’re a data point.
DANIEL: Conflict of interest. Sorry, you’re gone. No. Tell us about what you did for this one. What was your data like? What did they have you do?
HEDVIG: I know Maia and she emailed me and said we’re collecting data from lots of languages and we want like anger, joy, disgust. Or sorry, pain, joy, disgust,
DANIEL: Pain, joy and disgust. Those three.
HEDVIG: And like, the words. And there were all these qualifiers about how the words should… Similar to basic colour terms, there are criteria and then write them down and then write an IPA transcription of it, so I did that. But yeah, it was hard for… I think especially for disgust, I didn’t have that many different ones, I think.
DANIEL: It’s hard to find words like actual words. Like, we’ve got one, we’ve got eww.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or ugh, U-G-H, I guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The team did look at vocalisations, the actual words, and this is conventional for joy, pain, and disgust across up to 131 languages, across five different regions of the world, that’s Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Latin America. But looking at words was just one part. In another part, they looked at nonverbal vocalisations in the situation. They got people to act out these things. Not necessarily looking at words you might find in a dictionary, but words that people might say.
BEN: But you said nonverbal.
DANIEL: Yes. So, for example, OUCH is a word, so that’s verbal. But if I say [PAIN ONOMATOPOEIA]…
BEN: Oh, okay, okay.
DANIEL: That’s vocal but not verbal. It’s not conventionalised. Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s get to the results. They found that for pain, the results were pretty uniform. A lot of people do some kind of open vowel, like ah, ahh, ow. Even ow is on ah sound. Disgust was more, as we found, kind of central. Like, wugh, wegh, that’s kind of a middle vowel, not an ah, it was an ah. It was usually something like eh. Joy was really different. If you look at the plots for joy, you’ll find that it’s all over the place. It’s spread across the /a/ area. But also, there’s a lot of /i/ going on, like WHEE, I guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m looking at my responses that I sent in to her, and that was pretty good. So, the joy ones I wrote, like, HOORAH, HEYA, TOPPEN, YIPPEE, and YES.
BEN: YIPPEE. Yeah, I love YIPPEE.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm. And that’s conventional. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And it was hard. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, so that’s an interesting datapoint, and I just want to give one of my favorite facts. Do you know where OOPS comes from? Why do we say OOPS when we make a tiny little mistake?
BEN: This I do not know.
HEDVIG: Why do we say oops? I don’t know. But I do know that Germans say Uppsala, and I am from a city called Uppsala.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you are.
HEDVIG: It’s very confusing. Uppsala.
BEN: Is that because they… Is that like a Timbuktu thing where they’ve just been like, “Everyone from this city is really clumsy, so we’re going to use that word when…”?
HEDVIG: I don’t think so. I think it’s going to connect to the etymology that Daniel’s going to say.
DANIEL: Where are you from? Stumbleton.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, let’s just say that you see a child and they stack it, kaboof. And what you do is, in English, at least you pick them up, you say UPS A DAISY.
BEN: Upsy daisy. Yeah.
DANIEL: Or UP A DAISY or something like that. And UP A DAISY became UPS A DAISY, and then that became OOPS A DAISY, and it just got shortened to OOPS. So, it’s from picking a child up.
BEN: That’s really cute.
DANIEL: It’s related to UP.
BEN: Upsy daisy. Yeah. That’s so funny.
DANIEL: Although I got to say that OED says it’s possibly a natural cry, which is the last resort of a scoundrel.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s take a look at another one about sound, and this one is from a team. It’s Aleksandra Ćwiek of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin and a team. Dan Dediu is on this one. We know Dan. He’s been on the show before. Published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America as well. Now, let’s see. We all know about the kiki and bouba effect.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: The one where you give somebody a spiky shape and you give somebody a blobby shape. And everyone knows across languages that kiki is the spiky one and bouba is the blobby one. And that does not have anything to do with the way that the letters look in the language, it’s independent of that. I’m going to name some sounds, and you can tell me how you would draw these sounds on a piece of paper.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: How about the /t/ sound, as in T?
BEN: How I would draw it on a piece of paper…? Oh, like what shapey kind of thing?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. I give you a little card, and you are going to draw…
BEN: Probably like right angles. Something with like edges.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Okay. It’s got a bit of a corner to it. Would you agree?
HEDVIG: Ben, would you change your mind if I put the T in a word like tutu?
BEN: No, I would say that still is quite like a… Not as spiky as Kiki, but still, like, there’s edges, there’s cornices to this particular sound. It’s definitely not all curves.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, how about an /l/ sound? The letter L is usually…
HEDVIG: La-la, lu-lu, li-li.
DANIEL: Lemon.
BECCA: Thinking like a wavy line, maybe not necessarily a blob, but just like a sinuous kind of curve.
DANIEL: Okay, no wrong answers. No wrong answers. Now, I’m going to give another sound, the /r/, the rolled R. How would you draw that, Ben?
BEN: That’s got to be a really short zigzag, like a [MAKES SPIKY SOUNDS]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay. Interesting. Now, it’s been noticed that words for roughness, like rough and abrasive, they use the R sound not just in English, but in lots of other languages. They’ll use some kind of /ɹ/ [NOTE: COMMON R IN ENGLISH] or /r/ [NOTE: TRILLED R] or something like that.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: It’s not just the trill, the /r/. It’s other R’s as well. Well, this team got about a thousand people to participate from a wide range of languages, some from places that were kind of modern, some from places that didn’t even have electricity. They were trying to account for cultural bias. And they gave them two cards. One was a straight line, horizontal, and the other was a jaggy rickrack, the kind that you have described, Ben.
BEN: Ahhh!
DANIEL: And they would ask, they would give people the /r/ sound and ask them which one do you associate with that? And they found that people really do associate the /r/ sound with a jaggy line almost 90% of the time that’s stronger than the Kiki, bouba effect.
BEN: I want listeners to know this was not a setup. I was not given any of this information beforehand. That was just 100% me sort of exemplifying the data clearly.
DANIEL: It’s a strong effect, even Ben was able to come up with that.
BEN: Even knuckle-dragging simian, Ben Ainslie, was able to arrive at the right answer.
DANIEL: And the effect held for languages that don’t even have an R and L contrast.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Which was interesting.
BEN: That’s super cool.
DANIEL: One weird result was that if your language has /r/ as the main… Like, there are languages that have a bunch of R sounds. There’s /ɾ/ in English and /ɹ/ in English, we don’t have a /r/ usually. But if your language just had the /r/ as the main R sound, then the effect was actually a little weaker.
BEN: I guess that kind of tracks though because if you’re using it so ubiquitously across all of your words with an R sound, then it would probably lose some of its intensity, maybe.
DANIEL: Possibly, possibly. I mean, things are noticeable because they contrast. And if you don’t have that contrast, then maybe the effect is weaker.
HEDVIG: How big of effect is there? And also, R is notoriously a sound that’s produced very differently in different contexts and in different languages. But this was like a proper alveolar trill that they got to hear every time, right?
DANIEL: Rruh, yep, that’s right.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay, cool. That sounds really cool. It reminded me of when I decided I was going to start studying linguistics, my dad gave me Plato’s dialogue, Cratylus. Do you know?
DANIEL: I remember the Cratylus dialogue. Yeah.
BEN: I am not familiar.
HEDVIG: Okay. Plato’s dialogues in general is that he takes Socrates and makes Socrates say what Plato believes is true to someone who’s a dumdum roughly.
BEN: Succinctly.
DANIEL: And I’m just asking questions, says Socrates.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Anyway, I think they talk about… I was just looking up like a translation because I couldn’t find it, but because they talk about R being associated with motion, I think.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: And that like names… because they talk about the origins of names and how all names are like, tied to meaning and are depicting like all sounds are as well. So, if a name has an R sound, then it’s supposed to depict a noun, but I can’t find the exact quote.
DANIEL: They take it a bit far in the Cratylus dialogue.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That does sound a little bit like two uncles at a party being like, “You ever thought about how sounds all came from somewhere?”
HEDVIG: I mean…
DANIEL: “Have you ever really looked at your hands?”
HEDVIG: I think it’s a good place to start.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s really. I did an extended bit for my master’s thesis. Please don’t read my master’s thesis. There’s a lot of Cratylus in there though. But I think these two studies are a really interesting look at sound symbolism and how it ties into word creation. So, we’ll have links to those on the show notes for this episode.
HEDVIG: That is really cool.
DANIEL: Lastly, for our news, I noticed this really weird headline and I’d like to read it to you, you ready? This is from space.com. “Potatoes are better than human blood at making space concrete bricks, scientists say.”
HEDVIG: I love this headline. I like it so much. Yeah, I like it.
DANIEL: Why do you like it so much?
HEDVIG: Because it’s just really fun.
DANIEL: Do you like the thought of turning human blood into concrete space bricks and imagining what horrors exist?
BEN: Can I guess, Hedvig? Can I try and put words to what you about to try and say? This feels like white-hat clickbait.
DANIEL: Please explain that.
BEN: Like, it feels like playful, good-natured clickbait. Because obviously that title gives you no actual helpful information, but it definitely makes you want to find out what’s going on.
HEDVIG: They’re trying to make materials because say you want to build something on moon or mars and you have to transfer all the materials. So, they’re doing these things with like making bacteria excrete cement and stuff like that. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s pretty cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
BEN: I’m in the same boat. I like this headline because it’s like good-natured tomfoolery clickbait instead of like, “You won’t believe what this medical disaster looks like,” or whatever.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: “You won’t believe what they’re building space bricks out of now.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, the funny thing about that sentence though was that it took me a weirdly long time to process.
BEN: Really?
DANIEL: It did. I was looking at that and thinking, “human blood, concrete, space?” There was enough gaps in my knowledge that I had a really hard time figuring out. If you did a quiz for me afterward and said, “What’s better at making concrete space bricks? Potatoes or human blood?”, I would have to think about it. And then, I would say, “Uh, th-the potatoes?” but I wouldn’t be sure why.
BEN: Oh, man. Yeah, I did not…
HEDVIG: I’m worried for you.
BEN: I did not encounter any semantic ambiguity there at all.
DANIEL: I’m not saying there’s ambiguity, but for some reason I really had to think through that sentence because there was…
HEDVIG: I think that makes sense. If you don’t… maybe Ben and I just have a wilder imagination.
BEN: We’ve read more speculative fiction in our lives.
DANIEL: Yeah. You probably have to for sure. For sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
BEN: What I will say is this, actually, for me, fires off something that I’ve been kind of noticing for a long time now. And this doesn’t do it, but it reminds me of lots of things that do do it, which is a lot of newspaper subheadings employ grammar that I find deeply baffling. So, like what Daniel just described, but like way worse, where it’ll be like something, something, something, comma, something, something, something. And I’m just like, “Wait, how did the… What the fuck? How does this…?” And I’m like, I’m not dumb. I know, I’m not dumb. And I’m a reader, I read things. I’m not supposed to be bad.
HEDVIG: No, no, that’s true.
BEN: But I’m bad at this.
DANIEL: That was what I went through.
HEDVIG: No, it’s a thing. Oh, but usually something like, “Ministers said to have…” and it’s like these, like, weird this… Because this isn’t a weird grammar.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Potatoes are better than human blood of making space bricks.
DANIEL: X is better than Y at doing Z. Yeah.
BEN: Scientists say. The only thing that could be a little bit confusing there is like scientists say at the end, so you kind of go, “Oh, okay. It was a scientist who said it.” Anyway, sorry, Daniel, we’ve got really bogged down in the title. Was there story here we needed to talk about?
DANIEL: You must admit that it does make you pause and think about the situation that gave rise to this research.
BEN: Definitely, which is why it’s a good headline. Because I immediately was like, “They’re making space bricks out of both potatoes and human blood? Tell me more.”
DANIEL: And comparing the results?
HEDVIG: It sets up a very fun premise. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes, sure. Well, I mentioned this on Twitter. I said, “This took me a long time.” And you know who got in touch? Dr Sasha Wilmoth, who I think is a friend of yours, Hedvig. Didn’t you know Sasha at ANU?
HEDVIG: Yes, yes, I messaged her. I actually messaged her about something else the other week, and then I saw that you had talked to her, and I was like, “Oh, my god, I can’t believe I missed Daniel… meh meh meh meh.”
DANIEL: Well, she was very helpful because she came in and said, “This is a really weird sentence and here’s exactly why.” And she gave me charts and graphs and a full explanation. I said, “Hey, come on the show and talk about this.”
BEN: Hey, anytime you want to validate my perspective on how things work, you’re welcome. So, tell us… Well, lay it on us then, Daniel, why is this a bit wackadoodle? Why did it take you a while?
DANIEL: Let’s find out from linguist Sasha Wilmoth, of the University of Melbourne.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I wanted to ask you about a headline that took me a weirdly long time to process, but your background isn’t in processing. So, what do you do normally?
SASHA WILMOTH: I work in language documentation, particularly on Australian Aboriginal languages, and I’ve mostly worked on Pitjantjatjara, which is a language in Central Australia. And I have done some processing research with some psycholinguist colleagues, but it’s not my main area of research.
DANIEL: Ah, so that’s why you got in touch on this Twitter thread that I saw.
SASHA: Yeah, because I had that same experience of reading that sentence and it was so jarring. My brain was like: doot, doot, doot, doot. Like, every word just took a while. So, I was like, “What is going on here?”
DANIEL: That’s what I liked about this. And we’re going to get to the sentence. But I’m really interested in this because I love thinking about how language in some ways takes the form it does because of demands on processing. We try to make things easier on our listeners. And also, we’ve been talking with Dr Mark Ellison about attention. We don’t like to pay constant close attention to someone. So, we pay close-enough attention and meanwhile, we’re making tons of predictions about what’s going to happen so that if there’s a mismatch, we can go back and ask. We do a lot of shallow processing. Have I got that about right?
SASHA: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, there’s the pressure on… We want to make it easier on our listener, but we also have this sometimes competing pressure to make it easy for ourselves. So, we want to expend as little effort as possible, but if we just say “buh” for everything, then that’s not going to be easy for our audience. But at the same time, if we make things super, super clear and explicit for our audience, that requires a lot of effort from us. So, there’s these two competing pressures.
DANIEL: It requires a lot of effort from us. But also getting things into words very precisely takes a lot of time. Like, Stephen Levinson says, encoding is slow, but decoding is fast, so our listener’s going to get bored. So, there’s that kind of pressure too.
SASHA: Yeah, exactly. And the thing about close attention that Mark was saying, although I haven’t listened to that conversation yet, [DANIEL CHUCKLES] there’s sort of this principle which people have called the Uniform Information Density principle. So, we want to keep the amount of information fairly constant and easy on our listener so we’re not packing too much into one sentence, which is what was so weird about that headline.
DANIEL: Okay, well, let’s get to the headline then. Would you read it out for me? It’s from space.com.
SASHA: Sure. So, it is, “Potatoes are better than human blood for making space concrete bricks, scientists say.” It’s hard to even read out.
DANIEL: I know, I’m tripping over it. And I also love how it’s a completely bonkers headline, but then it ends, comma, “scientists say”, in a completely normal fashion. So, why did this tie us up so badly, do you think?
SASHA: So, the reason is most of the words in this sentence, even though it’s like grammatically very normal sentence, the words are very unpredictable. So, it’s very uncommon to start with POTATOES.
DANIEL: It is? Okay. All right. It’s not very common. I haven’t done it for a while.
SASHA: Yeah, exactly but not unheard of. But if you start a word with POTATOES, then the chances of the second word being ARE is pretty high.
DANIEL: Pretty good.
SASHA: There could be some other things there, but pretty likely to be ARE. And then, BETTER THAN, that’s not too crazy. But then, it’s when we get to almost every single other word, they just are so unpredictable. We can’t anticipate what’s coming next.
DANIEL: Human blood.
SASHA: Yeah. I actually don’t even know what the story is about.
DANIEL: I don’t either, and I’m not able to guess.
SASHA: Yeah. I prefer not knowing, I think.
DANIEL: Yeah. I had so many questions, I got lost. I mean, what is a space brick? How do you make one out of a potato? And why would you? And then BLOOD? What?
SASHA: And then, why are you comparing potatoes and human blood? Like, that’s your two options?
DANIEL: So, we’ve talked about garden path sentences before where the syntax kind of messes you up. For example, “The prime number few.” What? The prime number… Oh, this wasn’t PRIME NUMBER. This was the prime. Those in their prime…
SASHA: Oh, okay. Yep.
DANIEL: …number few, right?
SASHA: Yep.
DANIEL: So, PRIME sounded like it was going to be an adjective, but it wasn’t. It was a noun, and everything went wrong there. But this isn’t a garden path sentence at all. It’s a straightforward sentence.
SASHA: It’s grammatically, syntactically, completely straightforward, yeah. So, it’s just the semantics and the unpredictable words that are tripping us up.
DANIEL: Okay, well, let’s talk about the surprisingness then, because in the… Do you have a favorite name for Twitter now?
SASHA: I call it Twitter.
DANIEL: Okay.
SASHA: I’m sticking with that.
DANIEL: I like… They can’t make us shift.
SASHA: Exactly.
DANIEL: I’ve had jerks say, “You’re deadnaming Twitter.” I was like, “Fuck off.” Anyway…
SASHA: Yeah. Twitter’s not a person. We can deadname it.
DANIEL: Exactly.
SASHA: That’s fine.
DANIEL: So, you showed a graph that has… I’m just looking at it now, and I’m going to slap this up on the show notes for this episode. But what I’m seeing here is a very bumpy graph. I guess if it’s up more, then it’s the surprisingness. And every stop on this bus trip that this graph is, is a word. Have I got that right?
SASHA: Yeah, exactly. Pretty much. So, this is a graph of surprisal, which is basically surprisingness. And you can quantify that using information theoretic techniques. So, this is like a whole field of mathematics and linguists can apply that to language as well. So, we can actually tell what are the chances of each word occurring. And then, if it’s a very uncommon one, that’s very surprising, we say that has more information content in that word.
DANIEL: Okay. So, we’re not measuring any kind of physiological response in me for this bumpy chart.
SASHA: No.
DANIEL: We’re looking at how likely a word is to occur at all, and then maybe also in context?
SASHA: Yeah. So, this is about how likely a word is to occur based on the word that came before it.
DANIEL: Okay.
SASHA: And so, this is based on corpus data. So, huge amounts of text in English. And then, language models can sort of quantify what are the chances of each word following another word.
DANIEL: Okay, so on the chart, it starts out really high. You said that it splits up POTATOES. It made POTATO the first token and the second token?
SASHA: Yeah, I’m not sure why that was. I think that’s just some weird quirk of the algorithm or the data that they’re using.
HEDVIG: Okay, so POTATO, as you say, was the most surprising word. It’s way up there on the chart, and that’s a weird way to start a sentence. Okay, that’s the surprisingness. Then, it goes way down for ARE BETTER THAN.
SASHA: Yep. So, you can see BETTER is the first little spike up. And then, THAN it goes way down, because THAN is almost redundant.
DANIEL: BETTER THAN.
SASHA: Well, not quite. Yeah, it’s…
DANIEL: I hear BETTER THAN all the time.
SASHA: Exactly. Yeah.
DANIEL: Then I get a slightly more surprising… Now, it goes up for HUMAN BLOOD.
SASHA: Yeah.
DANIEL: I guess HUMAN BLOOD is just very vivid. It’s something that you… you weren’t expecting that, especially in the context of potatoes.
SASHA: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Okay. And then, FOR goes down again.
SASHA: Goes down and then up for MAKING, just not that surprising.
DANIEL: A little bit. A little bit.
SASHA: A little bit.
DANIEL: And then, SPACE CONCRETE BRICKS. There it goes.
SASHA: Yeah. So, that’s like three highly surprising words in a row. You cannot predict what’s coming next after each of those.
DANIEL: SCIENTISTS SAY. And then you see that SCIENTISTS SAY is way down again, because that’s a totally normal thing. And then the last one is the end.
SASHA: So actually, there’s the… I think the comma counts as its own token in the way that it’s…
DANIEL: Ah, comma is a token, naturally. Okay. Well, I think we’ve explained the surprisingness. It takes a lot of weird twists and turns, and that’s all in the semantics. You mentioned that this was an “entropic sentence”. What does that mean?
SASHA: Yes. Maybe it should have been a bit more precise and said that the sentence overall has a high information content or high surprisal overall, but I could say at each point, there’s a high conditional entropy. So, entropy sort of meaning uncertainty.
DANIEL: Okay.
SASHA: So, at each point, we sort of don’t know what’s coming next. And overall, it’s very surprising.
DANIEL: So, the more surprising it is, the higher the entropy, is that right?
SASHA: Yeah. So surprisal is a measure of the information in a single event, and entropy is a measure of the uncertainty across a distribution of events.
DANIEL: Is that like how easy it would be for me to replace a word if it went missing? Does that have anything to do with entropy? This is something I understand very poorly.
SASHA: What do you mean, if a word went missing?
DANIEL: If there was some noise, or a car horn went off and I couldn’t hear a word that you said, how likely would I be…? If somebody honked the horn at THAN in BETTER THAN. I could get that back. I could get that back. But if it was CONCRETE, I’d miss it. I wouldn’t… So, does that have anything to do with the entropy?
SASHA: Yeah, it absolutely does. That’s a great thing to maybe explain. So, this comes from a sort of model of communication that Claude Shannon came up with in the 1940s when he was working on cryptography during the war effort. And so, he was interested in how do you compress information as much as possible. And the model of communication is that you have some sender. I have a message. I have something I want to say to you. And I encode it into some signal. That could be speech. It could be morse code or smoke signals or anything, but some sort of signal where we’ve agreed on what the code is. And then, you, as the receiver, have to decode it and it crosses some… That signal might be through a noisy channel. So, there might be a car driving past or honking or something like that. And then, you have to be able to decode it and narrow down the message to my one intended message.
The reason that we have lots of redundancy in human language is sort of because we’re always in a noisy channel. There might be something else interfering with the message as well as the processing cost. We can’t be constantly as efficient as possible.
DANIEL: Okay, I want to talk about some other work that we’ve talked about. We did an episode years ago on semantic illusions. This was work from Professor Hartmut Leuthold at the University of Glasgow and a team. This is back in 2012. They were looking at processing of sentences like this: “Should it be legal for a man to marry his widow’s sister?” What do you think, Sasha? Should it be legal for a man to marry his widow’s sister?
SASHA: He’s dead.
DANIEL: You were quick on that one. That’s right. If a woman is a widow, her husband is dead, and therefore he’s not going to be marrying anybody.
SASHA: Exactly, yeah.
DANIEL: Nice. There was also a study by Mante Nieuwland and Gina Kuperberg from Tufts University. This is way back in 2008. They studied two kinds of sentences, there were pragmatically licensed sentences which are nice and they don’t throw you any curves. And then there are pragmatically unlicensed sentences. So, a licensed sentence would be, “In moderation, drinking red wine isn’t bad for your health.” That’s pretty straightforward.
SASHA: Yep.
DANIEL: Now, here’s an unlicensed one. “Vitamins and proteins aren’t very bad for your health,” which makes you stop and think for a second more than the previous sentence. I just feel like the “space concrete bricks” sentence is just super pragmatically unlicensed.
SASHA: Yeah, that’s true. And I guess it comes from the genre of a headline compared to normal discourse.
DANIEL: Ah, where things are left out, different words are used.
SASHA: Actually, because… Yeah, if you’re thinking of compressing information, a headline is actually just a compressed form of a story.
DANIEL: So, the format is also playing a role.
SASHA: Yeah, I think that’s also what’s going on. So, it’s trying to cut out all the unnecessary and redundant information and just get down to what’s the core, most informative things that we can pack into a short sentence for a headline. Whereas if you were discussing that in a conversation, you’d pad it out across multiple sentences and introduce each idea to give your audience some time to process what’s going on.
DANIEL: Okay, so this took us a long time because the words in the sentence are surprising. It’s pragmatically unlicensed, which makes it difficult to parse. And then, it’s also in the format of a headline where things are left out and that causes a bit of hangup as well.
SASHA: Yeah, I would say that’s a good summary.
DANIEL: Fantastic. Well, Sasha, I’m really grateful that you came up on Twitter and responded that way because now I feel like I understand a bit more about language processing and time.
SASHA: Great, I’m happy to help. Thanks.
DANIEL: Sasha Wilmoth of the University of Melbourne. How can people find out what you’re doing? Do you want people to find you?
SASHA: Yeah. So, I am on Twitter and then I also have a website where I post publications and stuff. So, on Twitter I’m just my name, Sasha Wilmoth, and my website is just sashawilmoth.com. And I’m on Google Scholar and all the usual sites as well.
DANIEL: We will have links up on the show notes for this episode. Sasha, thanks so much for hanging out with me and explaining stuff.
SASHA: Thanks so much, Daniel. Great to chat.
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Related or Not. This time, our Related or Not theme is from Camden.
BEN: Camden, the place?
DANIEL: No, it’s a guy. Camden sent us this via SpeakPipe, which everyone should do.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Let’s listen.
CAMDEN: Hello, hello. This is Camden Parks contacting you from rural Illinois in the United States. I’ve been thinking about your Related or Not jingle, and it’s hard to get that, believe it or not, tune out ahead. So, I thought, let’s just think of something that’s radically different. And for some reason, I thought Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. [BEN LAUGHS] Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do musical accompaniments. So, you’ve just got to deal with my voice.
DANIEL: [BREAKING IN WITH THE POWER OF THE EDIT] Don’t worry, Camden. I got your back. I found a guitar track and I laid it over your singing. So, let’s hear that.
CAMDEN: [SINGING] Do these words share a root? Or are they merely false friends. This is etymology, done on the fly to no serious ends. Related or not. [SPEAKING] Yeah, and do with that as you will. Thank you and bye.
DANIEL: Thanks, Camden.
BEN: I’m going to have to replay that, because I’m going to remember [SINGING] this is etymology.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that was good.
BEN: [SINGING] No serious end.
HEDVIG: That’s very well done, Camden.
DANIEL: It was good. And you know what? The guitar track that I found, I’ve got to… I’m crediting that on the show notes, but I didn’t have to pitch it up. Camden, your pitch was impeccable. I didn’t have to do anything.
BEN: Oh, nailed it. Without backing. Good on him. A sincere Jethro Tull fan. And who wouldn’t be of a band, a rock band with a flute?
DANIEL: Very much. All right, our first one comes from Vehemently via email. KITCHEN and CUISINE.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: You know cuisine comes out of the kitchen. Don’t you know.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: In fact, in some places, the cuisine is the room.
BEN: CUCINA is kitchen in Spanish, is it not?
DANIEL: COCINA in…
BEN: COCINA.
DANIEL: Is it CUCINA in Italian?
BEN: So clearly in the Romance languages, there’s a link between CUISINE and KITCHEN.
DANIEL: Mhm. Mhm.
BEN: Does that transport over into English? Hedvig, you look like you already know the answer to this.
HEDVIG: I just know that there’s been a map of these two-word etymologies that’s been doing the round on social media networks lately. I can remember the image of the map, it features sort of orange and red colours over Europe, and all the lines are coming out of Italy, but I think they might be… They’re at least from like two different Italic dialects or something like that.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And I’m not sure if they end up converging at some point.
BEN: I’m going to go not related because I feel like kitchen, with its K, just has a really different vibe. I’m sensing some Norse. I’m sensing some Germanic. Something quite different from the COCINA/CUISINE. That sort of like soft, lilty mouth sound.
HEDVIG: Ben, can you pronounce the two words that we’re doing for you, please?
BEN: Oh, but I’m probably pronouncing the Spanish one wrong. KITCHEN and CUISINE.
HEDVIG: Okay, so do you hear how both of them have a /k/ in them?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay, fine, but, but, but… [HEDVIG SNORTS] [UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER] Wow, my stupidity got a snort out of Hedvig. That’s… I feel really spesh. That’s really nice.
DANIEL: That doesn’t happen.
BEN: Okay, you know what? Fine. But I’m sticking to my guns.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s fair. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying it feels…
BEN: Feels like you’re saying it a bit.
DANIEL: Sounds, not letters.
HEDVIG: I’ve been like brainwashed. Like, I think so much about sounds all the time that I’m bad at spelling. So, when you said that one of them has a sound that the other one doesn’t have and it’s a ka, I was like…
BEN: That’s wrong.
DANIEL: That’s the same sound. Are you saying then, Hedvig, that you think they might be related?
BEN: Go on. You got to say it after all that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, what if it could just be that the -CHEN is like a Germanic diminutive thing.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Okay.
HEDVIG: Or something. Yeah. Okay. I’ll guess that they are related, but I’m not so sure.
DANIEL: Okay. I thought yeah, they’re related. I’ll believe anything. And also, remember, we borrowed a lot of those kitchen words and food words from French.
BEN: Yeah, that’s true.
DANIEL: So, answer, Vehemently says they are related. They both go back to vulgar Latin. COCINA or CUCINA, so related.
BEN: Can we for a second talk about why it’s called that? Why is it vulgar Latin? And is there a prudish Latin? Like, how does that work?
DANIEL: Vulgar just means, like, of the people.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: And usually Vulgar Latin refers to, yeah, not as formal, not what you speak in the senate and maybe what was spoken later.
BEN: Like the laypeople.
DANIEL: The language of the people. Only later did VULGAR mean something bad. Because they people thought that other people were bad. And they are. Okay. Thanks, Vehemently, for that one.
Next one’s from Gordon. MINIMUM and MINIATURE. They both have MINI- in them. My answer was, of course they’re related. At least, I think the two MINIs are related. And I think they’re both related to MINUS. Mm-hmm.
BEN: Interesting. Now, I’m really inclined to say no here because it feels so obviously a strong link that why would it even be up for question?
DANIEL: You know what? I love how we started off playing Related or Not. But it really quickly turned to Are Our Listeners Fucking with Us or Not?
BEN: Yeah, yeah. It is just absolutely Prisoner-Dilemma shit all the way. And I think we are being fucked with. So, I am going not related.
DANIEL: Okay, Hedvig, your answer.
HEDVIG: I mean, we get to into the problem we’ve had before where, like, if part of the word is related, then sometimes Daniel has been like, [IMITATING DANIEL] “No, it has to be the whole word.”
DANIEL: Okay, okay, hang on. Can’t believe you gave me that voice.
HEDVIG: So, it’s MINIATURE and MINIMUM, right?
DANIEL: Let’s just say the two MINIs. Are the two MINIs related?
BEN: What we’ll say here is, yeah, exactly right. If MINI is shared between these two words, even if the second half of it is, like, wildly different, I’m calling it related. So, I’m claiming though, I’m putting my flag in the sand and being like, the MINIs are not related.
HEDVIG: It’s the A that is screwing with me, mini-a-ture. I’m going to say that they are related. Oh, my god. They’re both small.
DANIEL: So, I said related. Hedvig said related. Ben says not related because he suspects a trap. It was a trap. They are not related.
BEN: [EXCITEDLY] Yes, all that Dungeons & Dragons finally comes in handy.
DANIEL: MINIMUM just comes from Latin, minimum. That’s really straightforward, but then the MINIATURE…
BEN: That’s not coming from… That is.
DANIEL: That’s what it is.
BEN: It is just the Latin word.
DANIEL: What it is. But MINIATURE comes from something different. A different Latin word, MINIUM, which was a word for their red lead. There was a kind of lead, and it was red. And they used it in paintings. They would paint things red, like little tiny, teeny, tiny pictures in manuscripts with red paint, and those were called miniatures. I mean, yeah, they were small, but the meaning transferred from the red lead that they were painted with, the minium, to the size of them. And miniatures were then a thing that were really tiny.
BEN: That’s really cool.
HEDVIG: That’s amazing.
DANIEL: It’s possible that MINIMUM played an effect, that it had a little bit of a cross-influence, but they are not necessarily related that way. It could be a case where the two words group together. Thanks, Gordon, for mucking with us.
BEN: I caught you, Gordon.
DANIEL: Ben’s onto you, man. He’s done this.
BEN: It’s not paranoia if they really are all out to get you.
DANIEL: This one is from James on our Discord. If you do glass, you are a GLAZIER. Yes. So, James is wondering about GLASS, GLACIER. And I’m adding GLAZE… Actually, I’m adding GLASS. GLASS, GLAZE, and GLACIER. Do you think any of these are related?
BEN: GLAZE and GLASS definitely are. I can say that with a rock-solid certainty.
DANIEL: How do you think?
BEN: I mean, I can give you the… Because to glaze something is to put a microscopic layer of glass on something. So, glazed pottery has a very fine film of glass all around it. And then, other things that became glazed, which had that look, like a glazed ham or whatever, a layer of usually some gelatinous or kind of clear-looking thing on top of something.
HEDVIG: Sugar.
BEN: Yeah, exactly right, sugar. So, that for me is like a pretty, like an indelible link between the two. So, GLASS, GLAZIER, and GLAZE would all be related.
DANIEL: Do you feel that way, Hedvig, before we go on to GLACIER?
HEDVIG: No, I think that’s maybe true. I think everything has to do with ice.
BEN: Ooh. Interesting, interesting.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, interesting. There’s your glacier tie-in.
BEN: Because I was going to say GLACIER, no.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Well, have you ever seen ice and seen glass?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: I have.
BEN: They bear a passing resemblance. [DANIEL CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: They do. Have you ever seen sugar sculptures, by the way?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, true. And look like having been to actual glaciers, they do have like an incredible sort of glass, like deep blue sort of… It’s pretty incredible when you see them. So, you’re probably right. I think. Yeah, most likely.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think they’re all related. I think it’s got to do with ice.
BEN: But, but, but, but. But. But. But.
HEDVIG: But.
BEN: Glass…
DANIEL: But.
HEDVIG: Yes?
BEN: …is a pretty recent thing.
DANIEL: It’s a bit different.
HEDVIG: Yes, I was thinking about that too. That’s why… And ice isn’t.
BEN: Yeah. So a glass…
DANIEL: Yeah, but metaphor.
BEN: Okay, so you’re thinking all of the various glass words we have have all come from GLACIER. That… I mean, I can imagine that.
HEDVIG: Not from GLACIER, from some word for ice.
BEN: Yeah, okay, sure. Which we then also applied to GLACIER.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I think that GLASS and GLAZE were related, but I felt that GLACIER wasn’t connected. I felt like that was…
BEN: That’s what I said originally, but then Hedvig convinced me otherwise, and I’m going to stick with it because she seems real smart and stuff. She’s a doctor.
DANIEL: She is pretty smart.
BEN: Of language.
DANIEL: I’m… I’m pretty smart.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
[PAUSE]
BEN: No, no. I’m sticking with that one.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I might be dragging you down.
BEN: That’s okay. We’ll go down together.
DANIEL: Well, the joke’s on you, because GLASS and GLAZE are related. They both come from Proto-Germanic, *glasam, glass. But GLACIER’s on its own. That’s right!
HEDVIG: Is it really. Is it really.
BEN: Hang on, hang on, hang on. Proto-Germanic…
HEDVIG: That’s not very far back.
BEN: …had a word for GLASS.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. They did. I guess they must have been making that stuff.
BEN: Surely, but hang on…
HEDVIG: You can make sand. You can make…
BEN: Oh, like obsidian and that sort of thing. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Take some sand and potash and stuff, okay. So, it seems that GLACIER comes from old French glace, which meant ice, from a different Latin word, glacies, which means ice. And if we’re really going Proto-Indo-European, although Douglas Harper of Etymonline told us not to…
BEN: Yeah, he was just like, boo.
DANIEL: If we go back there, GLASS and GLAZE are both from a proto-Indo-European root, *ghel-, something like to shine. Whereas GLACIER and French GLACE, meaning ice, is from a totally different proto-Indo-European root, *gel-, meaning something cold or to freeze. So, GLACIER seems to be on its own.
BEN: Ooh, Hedvig…
HEDVIG: I’m sorry.
BEN: We went down together on that one. But are you sort of feeling clearly in this ancient linguistic tree, this shit is clearly all related?
HEDVIG: Well, I mean, I do agree with Doug that the further back you go, the muddier it gets.
BEN: The more ridiculous it becomes. Yeah, yeah. Or in this case, the glassier it becomes.
DANIEL: Through a glass darkly.
HEDVIG: But the way historical linguistics comparative method works, certain things, you get almost like a reduction in number of sounds the further back you go…
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: …in some ways. You do pick them up in some ways as well. So, you don’t only reduce, but… So, things get more and more similar the further back you go. And then I think, I believe Daniel when he says, at least to our current knowledge, we cannot say that GLACIER is related to GLASS and GLAZE.
BEN: Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: That’s all. That’s all.
BEN: I’m just looking at your map of all of the kitchen words. It’s pretty amazing because normally there’s a bit more variance than that across all of those linguistic traditions, and they’re all very clearly related.
HEDVIG: So, for our listeners, I don’t know if Daniel’s going to keep this in, but I remembered the map about the kitchen words that I had seen and I posted in our little private group chat. Yeah, so it’s supposedly all from vulgar Latin, cocina or cucina, or coccina.
BEN: Any Italian looking at this map would absolutely spooge themselves to know that, like, all words for kitchen came from there.
HEDVIG: Oh, you’re right. Oh, and I don’t like feeding the Italians’ confidence when it comes to food.
BEN: They would just be like, [IN AN ITALIAN ACCENT] “Yes, of course. This makes much sense.”
DANIEL: Speaking of spooge, we are seeing people talking about glazing someone as a way of praising someone?
BEN: Daniel.
DANIEL: That’s where I see the etymology for that one. Nice, huh?
BEN: Daniel.
DANIEL: Anyway, the relevant sense is that of polishing.
BEN: Talking… speaking of vulgar Latin, Daniel, honestly.
DANIEL: Thanks to James and thanks to everybody who’s giving us Related or Not words. We’re having a lot of fun with it. Don’t forget, we’re doing them for our live show. You’ll get to vote for real. So, it’ll be fun.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here with Dr Gerald Roche from La Trobe University. He’s the author of a new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald, thanks for coming on and having a chat.
GERALD: Yeah, thanks very much. Really lovely to be here.
DANIEL: Wow, what an issue. What a topic. You’ve really tackled a pretty big thing here with some pretty big implications for the world.
GERALD: Yeah, I wanted to tackle a topic that I think is extremely important, the global crisis of linguistic diversity. And it’s a big topic to take on. So, we’ll see. I don’t know how it’s gone. Let’s find out, I suppose.
HEDVIG: I guess so. Maybe just as a quick beginner, if there’s anybody who’s not convinced that language diversity is a good thing or that language endangerment is kind of terrible, what’s the case for keeping minority languages around?
GERALD: Mm. So, the case that I make for keeping minority languages around is that you have to go through an awful process which is both politically oppressive and harmful to get rid of those languages. I come to these issues as anthropologist. I call myself a political anthropologist. And so, I’m less interested in the languages and what happens to them and what information they contain and things like this than I am in the people who speak them. And so, when I think about that question about like why diversity, why retain languages, my answer is that diversity is maybe in itself not the most important thing. What’s more important is the harm that is caused in the process of getting rid of that diversity and the sort of oppressive relations of domination that get enforced in that process. That would be my pitch to you and your listeners.
DANIEL: Okay. Whereas, I, as a linguist, would say, “Oh, language eradication is super bad news because we’re losing languages.” You’re actually saying language eradication is really, really bad for people and their social connections and their cultural knowledge and what happens to them.
GERALD: Yeah, exactly. I understand the kind of answers that other people give, but my concern is that they can also create justifications for destroying diversity if they can prove that they can solve that problem. For example, if you say that the problem with reducing linguistic diversity is that we lose valuable knowledge about the environment or humanity or something like that, which is an argument people make, well, then the counterargument is that if we can record that knowledge, then you can just get rid of the languages and it doesn’t really matter.
Another example is that people will say, “Well, diversity is good because it leads to high team functioning in a productivity sense.” If you have different people with different languages, they bring different perspectives. Again, if you can get that high functioning without the languages, then it doesn’t matter.
The last argument that people make along those lines is like the cognitive function one, that being multilingual is good for your brain. It slows down aging. It prevents Alzheimer’s, etc., etc. Again, if you can show that people can get those benefits without multilingualism, then you’re providing people with an excuse to just get rid of languages. That’s my concern with those kind of answers.
DANIEL: And what we’re saying instead… Well, the answer that I might give instead, if I’m thinking more along your lines, is if we’re seeing the loss of languages, it means that there’s something bad that’s happening way up the chain, and language is just one of the ways that this is coming out. Would that be right?
GERALD: Yeah, exactly. I think that there are specific things about language. Language is targeted in particular ways, but it’s often targeted alongside other things. And so, that’s why I think it’s important to think about what I call language oppression, which is what is driving the destruction of linguistic diversity. It’s important to think about it in tandem with and in relationship to other forms of oppression in relation to race, ethnicity, and so on.
DANIEL: Well, what kinds of oppression are we talking about? Since it’s the title of the book.
GERALD: [LAUGHS] Yes. So, language oppression. I’ll talk a little bit about that term and where it comes from, because it’s not my term. I didn’t invent it. It comes from a book chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages. The chapter has many authors, but the lead author is Alice Taff. So, she’s writing with a group of scholars who are talking about the relationship between Indigenous languages and health. We have this literature going back a couple of decades now showing us that retention and reclamation of Indigenous languages has a number of surprising positive outcomes for people’s health and wellbeing, and they kind of are talking about those relationships. And the argument that they make is that, well, the process by which people are deprived of their language is oppressive and harmful in and of itself. And so, when you reverse that process and you undo those relationships, that has a positive impact on health and wellbeing, which I think is correct.
So, to sort of focus attention on that, they use this term “language oppression” rather than “language endangerment”. And so, language oppression, they define as the coerced enforcement of language loss through these various means. And when I read that, it just kind of clicked for me. It made sense in terms of what I’d seen in the field over a number of years, but also in terms of the literature that I was working with coming out of anthropology, so anthropology of violence, the critical anthropology of the state and so on. So, it brings all of that together really nicely.
I like the way that it operates kind of as a replacement for “language endangerment”. So, I think language endangerment, the way that it’s described in the literature, is a real and important problem, but I don’t think that’s the best term to describe it if we want to have a proactive, solutions-oriented approach to stuff. Because when we say language endangerment, the image that I always have in my head is like a scary monster hiding around a corner, or it’s like there’s a weird glow on the horizon, we don’t know what it is. I don’t feel that the language endangerment literature, as much as it’s been useful and provided lots of insights, I don’t think it has managed to describe the problem in a way that charts forward a path towards what we actually need to do to intervene in the situation effectively on a global scale.
That’s what I think this idea of language oppression really does for us. It does that in two ways. One is the way that I mentioned previously is that putting oppression in the title helps us think about it as a political relationship along the lines of other political relationships that we’re already familiar with. We know that other forms of oppression exist. We know that they are not good. We know that they have been and can be successfully resisted. So, it puts our thinking in that frame immediately through that term.
And then, the other thing that I think it does is it sets up that binary relationship of oppressor and oppressed, which is really important for making analysis of what’s going on and what needs to be done. I certainly wouldn’t say that this is something which is done universally in the endangerment literature, but there is a tendency towards victim blaming in the way that the problem is framed. One of the ways that we see this is through this concept of language vitality. You turn on your linguistic thermometer and you measure the vitality of the language, and if the language doesn’t have enough vitality, then it’s on its way out, it’s endangered, it’s moribund, whatever. But it locates the problem in the language just through the way that we talk about it and the way that the criteria it uses are in terms of domain analysis, like the language is spoken at school, in the media, in business, in government offices, and so on.
It puts the focus on the language, but what actually needs to change is the broader context beyond the community and beyond the language. So, knowing that the language is not in school is important because that’s a massive driver of why people choose not to use and transmit a language. But the question is, why isn’t that language in school? Who said it can’t go in there? Do people want it in there? Do they really have that option on a legitimate level? So, language oppression, I think, draws our attention to those kind of issues, like who outside the community is pressing down on the community? Who is oppressing them? What are they doing? How are they doing it? And then, we can get into the complicated analysis of what oppression looks like in practice, because it’s often not the kind of direct, explicit violence that we are led to expect. So, that’s kind of what the book does, is like unearth what oppression looks like in this context.
DANIEL: I like how oppression is kind of how you’re advocating for language oppression as a substitute term for language endangerment. Because yeah, if you use the term language endangerment, it sounds so abstract. It’s like, “Oh, condors are endangered, pandas are endangered. Well, I didn’t really do anything, but nobody did anything to make that happen. It just happened.” And it doesn’t just happen.
GERALD: Yeah. And the kind of the irony is that the conservation movement and the climate movement have gone in a much more political direction now. So, you have climate justice movement and things like this. One of these memes that goes around that, which is like, “The X number of people who are producing X percent of the global carbon output have names and addresses.” So, climate activism has gone in this much more heavily politicised direction because we’ve realised that there’s a power dynamic that is enforcing this, that there are institutions and people with vested interests in maintaining this situation. And what is fundamentally needed is a change in those political relationships.
The endangered language movement started off aligning itself with environmental movements sort of as a way to gain traction, be more visible, to sort of jumpstart the thinking in terms of borrowing some of the tools.
DANIEL: It’s understandable, the work had already been done in that area.
GERALD: Yes, exactly right. And they wanted it to make sense to people. So, that approach made sense, although arguably there were other options available that weren’t taken. But leaving that to the side, I do think it made sense. But the movement that language endangerment was modeled on has shifted so drastically in that time, and I think it’s… Maybe we need to catch up with climate movement as it now exists in this much more politicised form.
DANIEL: Okay, well, now that we’ve drawn an express link between languages disappearing and political oppression, let me ask this question, and I’ve asked this question before to other people, but I want your take. Is all language death language murder, or do sometimes people just naturally shift away from their traditional language? Are they choosing, or is it all oppression all the way to down?
GERALD: Pretty much. Like, short answer is pretty much today, it’s all oppression all the way down. So, there are counterstories that you can tell. One of my favorite examples comes from Papua New Guinea. I think it’s the research of Donald Laycock. But anyway, there are these historical examples of, like… You know Papua New Guinea is this fantastically diverse part of the world. And there are these case studies where it looks like people have just stopped speaking one language and started speaking another for kind of laughs. That’s an oversimplification, but because they wanted to. They had these cultural values where diversity, differentiation, and distinction were all important, and they enacted that through these acts of extreme linguistic creativity. And they would collectively make these decisions where they would invert particular linguistic practices to start differentiating themselves from their neighbors. So, that has happened historically.
But if you look around the world today, it would be hard to find, really, an example of that kind of thing, and it would certainly be the exception rather than the rule. So, we have to understand the historical specificity of what we are witnessing today. If I go on what used to be Twitter or if I give a public talk about this stuff, there is always some contrarian in the audience who wants to say, “No one speaks Latin anymore,” or something like this. “And aren’t you just interfering in natural processes?” “Isn’t this just part of the way that the world is.” And it’s like, yes, languages change, and they change over time to become unrecognisable to their ancestor languages. And we know that this is a historical thing that has happened. Yes, yes, you contrarian, you are correct, you win the conversation.
However, that’s not what’s happening now. We have this kind of like new global situation which has emerged over the last 500 years or so, where Europeans started getting in their boats, going around the world, invading countries, doing genocide, dispossessing people of their lands, destroying cultures, enslaving people, etc., etc. Everything shifts in the world after that. And we get to this point, like very concertina-ed version of history where there’s this decolonial moment in the mid-20th century where post-World War II, setting up the United Nations, lots of colonised countries are calling for their independence from their European overlords, and the United Nations shepherds through that process. It creates a procedure for making new states so that colonialism is no longer a thing. So, they do that, but they do it in a way that essentially just devolves responsibility for colonialism to the new governments.
China is a classic example of that. China was set up as a colonial empire around the same time that Europeans were going around and doing it. So, China expanded into Tibet, into Xinjiang, into Inner Mongolia, off the back of silver that was being mined out of South America with a demographic explosion that was based on the potato, which had been taken through colonial trade network works into Asia and in response to expanding Russian influence in Siberia and Central Asia. So, China was part of that global colonial movement.
When it came time for UN-sponsored decolonisation, they just said like “China, you’re good. You have your country. That’s fine, you just keep that.” Like, they actually defined colonialism in a way that meant that you had to get in a boat and cross an ocean to do it. It’s called the Blue Water thesis. So, the Blue Water thesis was because if they hadn’t kept that, if they hadn’t used that principle, they would have had to break up all the post-colonial nations into smaller states. So, look at the Congo, look at India, look at Ethiopia, look at Nigeria, etc. If they’d followed through on the principle of actual self-determinations for self-identified peoples, 90% of the countries that exist in the world today would no longer exist. And that would have like… For the United Nations, that was not good. So, they just tweaked the definition of colonialism in such a way that most people in the world could continue doing it because they didn’t have a boat. So, China becomes a country. China is not a country. China is an empire with a flag and a seat at the UN. And that’s why we have this situation where Tibet is there, Xinjiang is there, Inner Mongolia, the Yi people are there, etc., etc.
And today, now, all the people who participate in the United Nations have a vested interest in maintaining that system. And that system is fundamentally an assimilatory system. It’s a system that fundamentally destroys linguistic diversity.
DANIEL: Okay. Now, we need to get to Tibet, the topic of the book. My understanding before reading the book was, I was aware that Tibet and the Tibetan language was under pressure by the Chinese government. The surprise in reading your book is finding out that speakers of the Manegacha language are flowing to Tibetan and lots of other people who speak different languages are flowing to Tibetan, and Tibetan has kind of become the choice.
And it made me think of the 2010 protests when the Chinese Communist Party tried to crack down on Tibetan as a language of education. And there were massive protests, and Tibetans came out and said, “No, we value the language.” And at the time, I thought, “Oh, well, that’s very positive.” But I don’t think I was aware of how this would affect other languages. And you’re smiling because this seems like I’m making a common mistake. Is that a common perception? And what’s the reality?
GERALD: Yeah, it’s not so much that it’s a common mistake. It’s the result of a mixture of misinformation and disinformation that have been propagated for decades for particular purposes. That’s not what I’m laughing at. I’m laughing at the sort of the realisation that something that looked good might actually be bad, because that was kind of a key problem that I had to grapple with in writing the book and thinking through the problems that I analysed. And for me particularly, it also involved rethinking my own involvement in particular projects that I’d worked on. Because I lived in China and worked with Tibetan communities for eight years, broadly, a lot of those were sort of like supporting Tibetan culture in the face of a great sense of loss.
DANIEL: Sounds good.
GERALD: So, there was kind of a realisation moment where it’s like, “Well, some of these projects that I’m working on are working against the interests of some Tibetans than for others.” So, that was a complicated realisation, I suppose. So, the background that you need to know on this is that Tibet is a multilingual region. There’s like three different components… I’m going to give you the complex version of it because it’s a linguistics podcast, you want to know about languages, so…
DANIEL: Here we go.
GERALD: …I’m going to give you the complex version of it. So, in Tibet you have Tibetan people as an ethnic group and then you have other ethnic groups. So, that’s the first level of diversity. It’s just ethnic. The other ethnic groups in Tibet speak a range of different languages. Each ethnic group would speak one or more language, mostly multiple languages. So, you have Monpa, Lhoba, Mongolian, Nashi, Mongour peoples across Tibet. So, you can’t just think of Tibet as only home to Tibetan people. That’s step one of the level of diversity.
The second level is the Tibetan language itself. So, in media and a lot of non-linguistic scholarly publications, you will just see people talk about THE Tibetan language. It is a language family, Tibetic languages. It’s a cluster of closely related languages. The number is up for debate. All of those languages have some historical relationship with the written Tibetan language, which is apparent to and acknowledged by the speakers of those languages, but they are essentially, for the most part, mutually unintelligible languages.
So, for example, if you take the difference between Lhasa Tibetan, Lhasa Tibetan spoken in like the Tibet Autonomous Region, and Amdo Tibetan, which is the Tibetan that I studied and is spoken up on the Northern Tibetan plateau in what is today, Qinghai province, Gansu province, bits of Sichuan province. Between those two languages, they are not mutually intelligible. There are vast differences between them. Lhasa has a tonal system, Amdo doesn’t. Lhasa has a system of honorifics that is extremely extensive. Amdo has a system of imperatives. Like, they do have some honorifics, but you don’t use it. You’re much more likely to use these imperative formulations.
I had a friend who went from Amdo to live in Lhasa, and I asked them how they were going with their Lhasa Tibetan. They were like, “It’s just so hard here. They use honorifics for everything. They even call their dogs by honorifics, and I just can’t bring myself to do it.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. Now, I have a question here then. In that case, when we say that speakers of minority languages are shifting to Tibetan, which Tibetan are we talking about, in general?
GERALD: Depends.
DANIEL: Oh, shoot.
GERALD: Depends on where they are. So, they are typically shifting to the local spoken variety of Tibetan.
DANIEL: Would they be mutually intelligible with other versions of the spoken Tibetan that other people are shifting to?
GERALD: Yes, a bit, but depends.
DANIEL: Okay.
GERALD: So, I’ll get to the third level and then I’ll…
DANIEL: Oh, yes. Yes, please.
GERALD: …help to explain my answer to that. So, the third… So, you’ve got like non-Tibetan languages by non-Tibetan people, you’ve got Tibetic languages spoken by Tibetan people. And then, you have a bunch of other languages which are non-Tibetic languages spoken by Tibetan people. What that means is that these languages are kind of in other language clusters, other language families. So, they have no historical relationship with the written Tibetan language, but their speakers identify as Tibetan. So, there’s a couple of different groups. So Manegacha, for example. Manegacha is usually defined as a Mongolic language. So, the speakers… So, that language migrated around the time of Genghis Khan’s empire down to that area and it’s become like… it’s one of these garrison contact languages where it’s Mongolic, but it’s heavily influenced by the local Tibetan language. So even the name, Manegacha, Mane is Mongolic, gacha is Tibetan and it means our language.
So, you have Mongolic languages, you have Sinitic languages there as well. You have these interesting languages that people call mixed languages. And then people argue about whether mixed languages are a thing or not, etc. And then there’s another group of languages, the Gyalrongic languages, which are a Tibeto-Burman group of languages, but they are not Tibetic, if that helps your listeners at all. And so, they’re just like they’re very different languages. They don’t sound like Tibetan in any way.
Between Tibetic languages, people can, with effort over time, make themselves understood. And that’s specifically because of the way that the spelling works. So, if people speak two different languages, two Tibetic languages, but they both know written Tibetan, they can spell out stuff in a way that they will each understand because the writing… like, when we spell a word in English, it’s like C-A-T, cat, right? In Tibetan, it’s a syllabary. And you would spell the word out something to the effect of like C plus A is CA, CA plus T is CAT. And so, you build up the word in this much more structured, systematic, piece-by-piece way, rather than just stringing it out and then saying the word so people can follow through and be like, “Oh, I would say that like that. No, no, no.” And so, you have these ethnographic literature of people describing these interactions between people where they can’t speak to each other, but they can spell to each other.
DANIEL: Wow.
GERALD: But for non-Tibetic languages, they can’t do that. Like, someone speaking one of these Gyalrongic languages, they can’t spell out what they want to say to someone who knows written Tibetan because there’s no connection between the languages whatsoever. So, that’s the layers of linguistic diversity. I’m not going to do this, but then you need to overlay the local cultural understandings of language on top of that as an anthropologist. And that’s what I do in the book, what do people mean when they say language? What are the local words for that? How do they think about that? How do they consider this issue of linguistic difference and language families and things like that?
So, if anyone is still awake after hearing that, [DANIEL LAUGHS] the point to take away from it is that Tibet is linguistically diverse. The group that I work with is those minority languages spoken by Tibetans. A broader look at those languages, they’re spoken by at least a quarter of a million people, which is about 4% of the total Tibetan population. There’s probably somewhere around 30 of those languages, probably somewhere around 30. All of those languages are fairly like small, localised languages. They’re very like landed languages, if you know what I mean. Like, Manegacha, Manegacha is spoken in four villages in one valley on the northeast Tibetan plateau when it’s spoken by Tibetans and most of the languages are spoken like that. It’s a couple of villages, one valley, a little network of communities around the mountain or something like that.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, so our discussion here is going to focus on Tibetan, but it’s also going to focus on Manegacha, because these are the two that you have expertise in and you describe them in the book a lot. There’s a quote here and somebody really liked this quote on Bluesky. So, I liked that myself. You describe a rupture between children and their parents in Manegacha-speaking families. And I’m going to read this here. “What we see here is a rupture between parents who can speak and understand a language and children who can understand but do not speak that language. It is not simply a rupture between generations regarding the languages that they can and do use. It is also a rupture in the identities these generations feel and express, the communities they belong to, the economic and social opportunities they have access to, and their perceptions of the world.” Could you tell me a little bit more about the nature of this rupture? What’s going on?
GERALD: Yeah, sure. So, this rupture that I talk about in the book is kind of… It’s a classical pattern described in the linguistics and sociolinguistics literature on language shift, where you have this three-generation pattern of language shift where grandparents are speaking one language, you have a second generation where the parents are bilingual in the heritage language and the new language, which is often the dominant language of the state in the context of migration. And then, the third generation of children that grow up, they no longer have access to that heritage language, except perhaps passively. And they are dominant in the new language that their parents spoke. So, you have this switch of language across generations.
And so, there’s all sorts of things that happen in that pattern, and there’s all sorts of things that happen when that intergenerational pattern results from oppression specifically as well. So, just to give a kind of somewhat extreme version of that, that I learned about from a colleague in Singapore. This is a common pattern seen in Singapore, where you have a multilingual population, whose languages are recognised through an infrastructure that is formally designated in terms of race. And you have Chinese, Indian, and Malay. And each of those racial identities is associated with a specific language. So, Chinese, Mandarin; Indian, Hindi; and Malay, Malaysian.
Now if you’ve ever been to India or you know anything about China, you’ll know that those aren’t the only languages in those places. India is home to hundreds of languages. China is home to hundreds of languages. Even if you identify as Han Chinese, like ethnically Chinese, there are multiple languages like Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, etc. So, the Singaporean state forced all those people into those language categories on the basis of what they defined as race.
So, if you take sort of like an example of a Chinese person from Singapore, you have grandparents generation of people speaking Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, Mandarin, etc. Their children can only have a formal support for Mandarin in the school, etc. So, the children grow up bilingual in their parents’ language, let’s say, Cantonese and the Mandarin that they need to use to get ahead in life. Now, their children, the grandchildren only get Mandarin from their parents. They don’t get Cantonese at all.
Then, you have this massive rupture between the grandparents and the children and the grandchildren. Because the grandparents only speak Cantonese, the grandchildren only speak Mandarin, the middle generation is like too busy doing capitalism. So, they can’t hang out with anyone because life in Singapore is very intense. Grandparents and grandchildren can’t interact. And this has driven a spike in elder suicides in Singapore, which has only become apparent after this pattern of intergenerational language shift has emerged. And it’s essentially happened because that elder generation is isolated and living in despair, without social or familial connections to sustain them.
DANIEL: That is tragic.
GERALD: Yeah, it’s tragic and it’s a kind of extreme example, but it’s indicative of the kind of changes that can happen during those processes.
DANIEL: Well, that’s a really good case for language diversity right there, that we haven’t even mentioned yet.
GERALD: Yes, yes. Unless you can figure out a suicide prevention mechanism that doesn’t rely on maintaining languages.
DANIEL: Okay, fair enough.
GERALD: But anyway, so these are the kind of things that I try to look beyond and behind in terms of just the loss of the language, is how has people’s ability and tendency to relate to one another transformed through these long-term oppressive relationships. So, one of the things that you see is that people start reconsidering their relationship, like their identity essentially, and what it means to be Tibetan. So, traditionally, if you go back to kind of the literally proverbial wisdom in Tibet, there’s all of these sayings that talk about linguistic diversity not in a positive way, but just in a matter-of-fact way.
So, you have these proverbs where it’s like, every valley has a river, every community has its own way of speaking. It’s a classical one. Every lama has their teaching, every village has a way of talking, things like this. So, people recognise that this diversity existed and there’s no indication that it was ever perceived as any kind of threat.
But then, within the context of the new Chinese state and the way that it manages diversity and manages identity, it just pushes this framework where it’s like one people, one language, and that’s it. So, to be Tibetan, you have to speak Tibetan. And so that forces these people who speak minority languages into sort of having to choose between their language or their identity. And with Tibetan as a threatened identity within China, under pressure from the Chinese state to assimilate towards Mandarin, that just ratchets up the pressure where Tibetan becomes this extremely, not just precious, but imperiled identity, but the only way to get access to it is through the state’s framework of one people, one language. So, it forces this really tragic decision onto parents where they like, “Do I want my kid to grow up Tibetan or do I want them to grow up Chinese?” essentially.
DANIEL: And Manegacha is just going to get stuck in the cracks.
GERALD: Yeah, either of those decisions forces them to sort of deprive the child of the heritage language either way. So, it becomes this difficult relationship that penetrates right to the level of the family and the household. There’s one moment that I think made it into the book, which talks about a family where one parent speaks Tibetan, one parent speaks Manegacha, and the parent is kind of beating the child for speaking Manegacha at home. You find all these kind of examples. Like a mother… a woman who marries into a village where they speak Tibetan, but she speaks Manegacha, and the village basically comes around and has an intervention and says, “You can’t use this language with your kids. You’re harming them. This is bad for them. We don’t want you in the village doing this anymore.” It’s either like, “You stay here and speak Tibetan or you leave and leave the children.”
So, I think it’s really important to think long-term history, big structures, look for the state and then trace that right down into the way that people connect with each other and relate to one another. Because essentially, that’s what language oppression does, is that it distorts and transforms and manipulates the kind of intimate relationships that give language life.
DANIEL: This reminds me of the discussion we had with Abduweli Ayup, who you helped me get in contact with. And we talked to Abduweli in a different episode. He described the situation of the Uyghur people in China. And that was a very direct form of language oppression where state actors come into your home and look for signs of use of the Uyghur language. There’s taking people away to camps, there’s re-education, there’s imprisonment, there’s torture. But this situation seems quite a bit different. I was going to say it seems milder, but it’s not really milder. It’s still just as oppressive. It’s just that now, it’s not necessarily the state, the Chinese Communist Party, directly intervening. It’s kind of the neighborhoods doing their work for them. That’s really sad.
GERALD: Yeah. And that’s what gives a lot of the political dynamic that I describe in the book its ugliness. Because in essence, it’s Tibetans doing nasty things to each other, which is the tragedy of it. But just to go back where you started. The Xinjiang situation and Tibetan situation, there are multiple connections and parallels between them, not simply because they are both in the same country, but in some sense a lot of the things that were done in Xinjiang were trialed in Tibet first. And some of the personnel were even transferred across.
For example, that thing of sending people into the homes to check up and see how everything is going, that was used in parts of Tibet after the 2008 uprisings, which was like this big mass wave of protests across Tibet, like the biggest protests in modern Tibetan history. And the way that some of the local governments responded was basically sending people into families to talk to them once a week or just randomly pop in and, “How’s everything going? Have you heard anything weird? Do you know anyone who might have a picture of the Dalai Lama in their home? You don’t have one, do you?” and things like this. So, that kind of invasive home level surveillance was implemented in Tibetan regions prior to it being implemented in Xinjiang.
The re-education that we saw in Xinjiang. In the conclusion of the book, I talk about this as carceral language oppression, because in Xinjiang you could be put into a prison just for being detected as a non-Mandarin speaker. That was enough to trigger these surveillance mechanisms that could see you locked up. And then inside the prisons, people were not allowed to speak Uyghur, Kazakh, Tajik, etc. And they were basically only considered for parole on the basis of an informal proficiency test, where essentially the guards had to be like, “Oh, your Mandarin’s fine now. You can go.”
These kind of systems were used in Tibet after 2008 as well, where they were… like, even in Reb Kong where I was doing this research, we’d drive down the highway connecting the city of Xining where I lived to Rebgong, and you pass a school and be like, “Oh, that’s where they locked up the monks after 2008 to reeducate them.” Like, everyone knows, everyone sees that it’s just a part of their daily life.
And then, the other thing is the surveillance systems that they implemented in Xinjiang were what they called grid policing, was this specific style of checkpoints and little miniature police stations all around the city so that wherever you went, it was tightly controlled. There were checkpoints where your ID was checked, cameras surveilling you as you moved between points. This was all over Xinjiang. And that was trialed and tested in Lhasa after 2008. And the person who was responsible for that went to Xinjiang to set it up there. So, there are all these direct connections between the two sides and between the multiple sites of general oppression and language oppression, specifically throughout China.
But yes, there are really important differences. And one of the important differences that I talk about in Tibet is the way that the state makes use of these preexisting kind of prejudices between Tibetans towards one another to mete out the state’s assimilatory goals. So, I don’t want to overemphasise this too much, but Tibetan people are people and people everywhere, there’s always the potential for relationships that are hierarchical, riddled with domination and prejudice and discrimination. And that existed in Tibet prior to the modern Chinese state being set up there. So, you have these dynamics of kind of like a Tibetan civilisation chauvinism centered on the idea of like Lhasa as like a pure holy center of civilisation. These distant peripheries where barbarians lived, speaking ugly backwards languages that no one who was rational could understand. Like, Tibetan texts talk like this… Tibetans led military campaigns against people that they considered barbarians, etc., etc.
DANIEL: It’s an old story.
GERALD: Yeah, it’s an old story. Tibetans are human and so they carried out these very human activities. The cunning of the Chinese program to eliminate those minority languages is that it has harnessed them towards its end. And so, how that primarily works is that in Rebgong, for example, you have this relationship between Manegacha speakers and other Tibetans which are just discriminatory. Tibetan-speaking Tibetans will describe Manegacha language as being like… They will compare it to animal sounds or other noises. So, they deprive it of its human quality. It’s just sounds, it’s not communication. They will peddle offensive stereotypes about Manegacha speakers that treat them as like subhuman, semi-animals, uncivilised, etc. Manegacha speakers are subjected to sort of on a day-to-day basis in their interactions with Tibetan people to sort of like just jokes about them, like not speaking correctly, not being really Tibetans, etc. Not being really human. Levels up to sort of physical violence, people beating each other and so on.
There was one instance where I record an example of like real hate speech that circulated on Chinese social media app like just before I got there one year, and everyone was talking about it. And so, the reason I think we need to consider this as part of the state’s agenda to assimilate those minority languages is that the Chinese state is incredibly punitive and reactive and just clamps down extremely aggressively on anything that it doesn’t want to see happening. The response to the 2008 protests was essentially martial law. Then when people protested in the streets, like lock them up, go to the village, interrogate the family, lock some of them up, close the school for weeks, open the school. Students are under complete surveillance all the time so that no one has even enough personal freedom to think about doing this ever again. They criminalised local Tibetan language associations, where all they were doing was essentially memorising Tibetan vocabulary. That’s a crime now.
So, the Chinese state just can be very punitive when it wants to clamp down on a specific form of behaviour, but it just enables this kind of constant abuse against Manegacha speakers to continue. And I think that suggests to me that the Chinese state is fine with it happening.
I talk about this in the book as being banal violence. BANAL has this nice etymological history where it means banal in the sense of everyday and ordinary. But it also traces back to Roman law, where it links up to words like BANDIT and BANISHMENT and so on. And it was a legal treatment where a specific population was just like, “Right. The law doesn’t apply to you anymore, and we’re going to let the world do what it wants to you.” And that’s exactly what happens to the Manegacha speakers. So, there’s this violence, which is every day, but it’s also taking place in the state where the law has abandoned Manegacha speakers essentially.
DANIEL: I imagine that the Tibetan folks think that the leopards will never eat their face, the ones who are carrying out this. Do you know what I mean?
GERALD: Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you foresee a time when people who are speaking Tibetan, like they’re getting rid of their minority languages in favor of Tibetan? Do you foresee a time when those Tibetans are then going to have to shift again to Mandarin?
GERALD: Yeah. This has already happened, and Tibetan people are already worried about it happening and are kind of aware of it. That’s what those 2010 street protests were really about. And the point where it gets particularly tragic is the kind of the local language ideologies, which sort of basically say that destroying Manegacha is part of projecting Tibetan language, is sort of the boldest way I could put it. So, the reasoning goes like this, which is that a language is destroyed not through the decay of intergenerational transmission… This is the local Tibetan language ideologies, Language is not destroyed by decaying intergenerational transmission. It’s destroyed by lexical erosion. So, words from Chinese gradually replace Tibetan words one by one. And then suddenly, you wake up one day and you’re speaking Chinese, and you didn’t even know it. This is actually a very widespread kind of language ideology in relation to lexical purism.
It’s historically false. Like, languages don’t disappear by lexical replacement. There’s like, you can maybe pick out one or two historical examples where that happens, but it doesn’t really happen. So, people in Tibet are pushing all their energy towards this lexical issue without paying attention to the intergenerational transmissions of the language, which is the driver of language loss. And when they pay attention to that issue of lexical erosion, they look at a language like Manegacha and remember, like Manegacha, it’s Mongolic and Tibetic. And they think of that language as being the future of Tibetan. That language has become mixed with Chinese and it’s in the process, like stuck halfway between being Tibetan and being Chinese.
There’s an anecdote in the book where a bunch of Manegacha speakers go to do road work somewhere else in a Tibetan-speaking town and someone walks by them and says, “If you’re not careful…” He hears them speaking Manegacha as a Tibetan speaker and he says, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into Chinese, Han Chinese. And if we’re not careful, we Tibetans are going to turn into you.” So, Manegacha has this status in Tibetan eyes as being a corrupt form of Tibetan which is already half-assimilated.
And so, for Tibetans to protect Tibetan existence, it’s not just identity, it’s the existence of a thing. For them, to protect Tibetan, they have to get Manegacha speakers to speak pure Tibetan again. To unify the nation, to bring everyone together, to build the strength of the Tibetan community. And all across Tibet, those minority languages are seen as mixed languages. They are seen as evidence of prior assimilation, and they are taken as a threat to the unity and strength of the Tibetan people. So, they have to be destroyed for Tibetans to survive, and this is the tragedy. Those language ideologies kind of compel other Tibetans to assimilate the minority language speakers on behalf of the state.
DANIEL: It’s a heartbreaking situation. You write in the book, “Under the circumstances, it is hard to have hope, but it is necessary.” How do you do it? What keeps you going? I mean, I know that you’re not even in contact, you’re not able to have contact with the people that you work with anymore.
GERALD: No.
DANIEL: Do you know what’s going on over there and what’s next for them and how do you keep going?
GERALD: Yeah, so I can’t go back to China anymore. And beyond that, I know that my work is not very well received by Chinese… Like, I know that people in the security apparatus read my work, and they dislike it. This would be the mildest way that I could state the understanding of the situation that I have. So, anyway, yes, I can’t go back. And I deleted all my Chinese social media accounts, and I don’t reach out to people there because I’m a security risk for them. I will hear occasionally stuff that is happening, but I don’t have that kind of… As an anthropologist, that on the ground, information is essential to the understanding that I put forward.
Particularly in this case, the understanding of Tibet and Tibetan language politics that I put forward is so at odds with the hegemonic representations of Tibet in the literature, in the media, in advocacy circles and so on. And the only reason that I was able to put forward that understanding is that I was there for a long time. I hung around with people a lot and did what anthropologists do, which is nothing but hang around.
Now I don’t have access to that, I don’t know. I do hear bits and pieces of it, but I don’t really know, and so, I’m trying to avoid voicing in any authoritative way what is going on there today. So, there’s lots of… For example, there’s these campaigns about the colonial boarding schools in Tibet, which is being promoted by the Tibet Action Institute. And I’m sympathetic to that campaign and think that what they’re describing is a problem and very real. But I’m not able to contribute to those discussions because I don’t really have access to information that I consider to be meaningful. So, I could go and read Tibetan newspapers, but I would really want to know what people on the ground think and feel and so on.
Yeah, so that’s one part of your question, but the other one was about hope. Hope is, like, a tricky thing in this kind of situation. The book, what I hope the book mostly does is describe how deeply entrenched the language oppression is and how it comes at Manegacha speakers from multiple directions and just how limited their options are. The book is essentially… it traces out how people’s decisions about language are restricted over and over and over again, wherever they turn, across generations. So, it’s about these ubiquitous power forces. And that should be depressing for people, which is why I tried to talk about hope a little bit at the end, because history is full of depressing things that were defeated by people who did something.
Like, my 10-year-old son, I don’t have to worry about him earning a wage in a chimney today, which is a good thing because child labour is illegal, slavery, etc., etc. So, we have historical precedents for knowing that bad and seemingly insurmountable things can be changed through collective action. If we don’t think that’s going to happen, we’re not going to do anything. And so, holding onto that idea that change is possible, that’s what hope means to me. And it’s possible to be hopeful in this situation, and it’s necessary to be hopeful if we want to change things.
There’s kind of two extreme perspectives on this that I’m both drawn towards. So, one is Chelsea Bond in her great book, Another Day in the Colony, where she has a chapter… And I didn’t ask, but I’m assuming I can swear in your podcast. And the chapter is called “Fuck Hope,” is the name of the chapter where she’s just like, “I’m tired of hearing activists talk about hope because what we see is just like the repetition of the same old racist behaviour, the perpetuation of racist structures over and over again. To hope in this kind of situation is to invest your energy in something pointless. And what we need to do is just like we need to survive and resist and concentrate on those things. And hope is a luxury for other people.” So, that is one perspective that I’m drawn towards.
But I think that she’s describing the predicament of Indigenous people in Australia, and I’m talking about Manegacha speakers in China. And I do have the luxury of hope. I can stand out here and have hope about that situation. And me having hope is kind of like a precursor to any meaningful action and transformation that would support those people and able the community to fulfill its expressed wishes. Like, when I talked to Manegacha speakers, I did surveys, like, “Do you want your language to be maintained?” “Yes.” “Strongly want.” Do those people have the conditions where they can do that? No. Do they have the political conditions where they can create those circumstances themselves? No, because they will be thrown in prison. So, it’s kind of like we can all either stand by and just let this happen, or we can choose to do something. And that has to be driven by a hope that change is possible.
So, the kind of countervailing the perspective to Fuck Hope, is this idea from Mariame Kaba, who is an abolitionist organiser from the US where she talks about hope is a discipline. Hope is not an emotion. It’s not a feeling of like, “Oh, I think something nice is going to happen today.” It’s not the shimmery, glimmery Disney bluebird on my shoulder feeling. Hope is a practice. It’s something that you do. It’s the insistence that you’re going to continue doing something in the face of what seemed like insurmountable odds.
Like, bravery is also a practice. It’s something that you get better at by repeating. And so, I think it’s important to not only have hope but to practice hope, like to get good at it, to really convince yourself that change is possible. And the way that I do that is reading in the social movements literature, reading in the radical literature, looking at examples of successful political and social struggles, and knowing that these things have happened time and time again in situations where it didn’t seem like the good guys were going to win. It does happen, but you have to remind yourself of that possibility every day. That’s what hope is. Hope is doing that work to know that it’s possible.
DANIEL: One of our Words of the Week this week is HOPECORE.
GERALD: [LAUGHS] Hopecore.
DANIEL: Cultivating an aesthetic where hope is possible. Spoiler alert for the rest of the book. And you mention in the book that this looks like techniques of resistance and reclamation, like building those and forging new circuits of collaboration and exchange. I just think there’s a lot to chew on over there. So, can you give us a tip? What should we be doing? Should we be reading? Cultivating that hopeful mindset? Anything else concrete?
GERALD: I think hope in some ways has to be a way of seeing, of finding something surprising in a situation that you hadn’t expected. So, for me, that moment was I was kind of, like, mired in hopelessness at the end of the book and the thing at the end of writing it and the thing that made me most hopeless was the way that the Manegacha-speaking community had kind of internalised a lot of the oppression that is aimed at them where Manegacha speakers would just be like, “Yeah, well, it’s true. Our language sucks. There’s no reason to pass it on to our children. There’s nothing that we can do about it,” and so on. And I kind of just didn’t feel like anything positive could come out of the situation if that was the expressed attitudes that the community had.
But then, once I had a bit of time and stepped away from it and done some thinking and reading in other literatures, what occurred to me was even when Manegacha speakers feel like that, the vast majority of them still wake up and make a decision every day to speak Manegacha to each other when they have the opportunity to do that.
So, if you go to the Manegacha-speaking communities, the adults and grandparents will be speaking to each other in Manegacha. And the kids, they might be speaking to each other in Tibetan or Manegacha, depending on what language they’ve been given access to by their community and family. But for Manegacha-speaking adults, for example, they’re all completely bilingual in Tibetan and Manegacha. And so, they could just not speak Manegacha anymore. And in someways, it would make their life easier because they wouldn’t have to deal with the discrimination that they receive from Tibetan speakers every time someone overhears them speaking Manegacha and things like this.
But they don’t do that. They have this sense that it’s important to speak Manegacha, it’s appropriate to speak Manegacha to one another, that the language should live in the villages. And we have to take that choice for the political decision that it is. It’s not like a natural thing that people would just speak their language in their community. Because when the whole world is geared towards telling you to not speak your language, just to decide to do it is a political choice. And so, I much later found out that there’s like a whole literature on these kind of like political movements that don’t look like political movements. That you have to develop sort of a way of looking to find politics in unusual places, manifesting in sort of less obvious ways.
And so, in that sense, hope is a way of seeing. We have to look at the world and strive to see resistance and political commitment where we might not necessarily see it. Because there is this tendency to victim blame in endangerment linguistics that I mentioned before, and we really need to look at what people are doing in their communities, given the choices that they have, and sort of celebrate the difficult decisions that they make when they do. So, that’s one part of it. I think that those conditions are very common throughout the world where people are making those difficult decisions, and we need to recognise that.
DANIEL: Yeah, I sometimes call this the quiet courage of the everyday.
GERALD: Yes, perfect. That’s a beautiful term to describe it, yeah. So, that needs to be linked up, I think, to broaden networks of people working together to resist language oppression. And there are ways that we can do that, forms of collective action and organisation that make that stuff possible. I’m a keen poster. I’m a less keen poster over time, I suppose, but I still think it’s meaningful to get online and to describe, simply say, what is happening that people don’t want to hear. To say language oppression exists, the state wants to assimilate these languages, start fights, etc. I think that’s fine.
But the real work that needs to be done is in terms of bringing people together and organising for collective action because that’s the only thing that’s going to make a difference. Mass mobilisation, mass collective action, putting pressure on key players to do things differently. Like, the way that I imagine this happening in relation to the Tibetan context is, we’re not… You can’t call up the Chinese state and tell it to stop assimilating languages. They’re not interested in hearing from us. But we can petition our local representatives to send that up the chain to be put towards representatives in UN forums where this question about minoritised languages, about linguistic erasure, about language oppression can be put to the Chinese government year after year after year until it has to make some kind of response that it is at least acknowledging the problem.
We can go to Tibetan organisations that engage in resistance and raise awareness, and we can work with them to improve understanding of linguistic diversity, improve understanding of the predicament that minority language speakers face in Tibet. And more broadly, we can like work together to sort of build an anti-language oppression culture in the same way that we build feminist culture or anti-racist culture where we all work together to embed our opposition to language oppression in our everyday life. Just simply in the way that we interact with one another, the way that we think about these problems. You can be anti-racist, you can be feminist, you can be anti-language oppression, and you can do that 24/7. And the more people who do that, the better it’s going to be.
DANIEL: The book is The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. It’s out now from Cornell University Press. We’re talking to the author. Gerald, what is the social landscape for you like these days? Where are people finding you and where do you want people to go?
GERALD: Yep.
DANIEL: It’s an exciting time.
GERALD: It is. It’s bifurcation time. So, I’m on Bluesky. I’m inundated with Americans on Bluesky like everyone else, so come and find me on Bluesky. I’m still using Twitter for the time being. It’s a difficult and sometimes dangerous place to be, but I’m going to be there for the time being at least, so you can find me there. You can even find me on LinkedIn. I’m everywhere on the internet. But yeah, come and find me on Bluesky for sure.
HEDVIG: Dr Gerald Roche, thank you so much for coming on today and having a chat. I really… I feel kind of hopeful after talking about this.
GERALD: Yay. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed this. Cheers.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: And now it’s Words of the Week. And we got a ton, let’s get through them. This one was suggested by Jack via email, hello@becauselanguage.com the word is KAKISTOCRACY. KAKISTOCRACY.
BEN: Kakistocrasky. Sorry, I can’t even pronounce it. KAKISTOCRACY.
HEDVIG: Is it khakis, the pants?
DANIEL: Pants?
HEDVIG: Is it the pants?
DANIEL: It is not the pants.
BEN: Khakis?
DANIEL: No, it’s not the same as the colour of khaki. Too bad. Wait, is it?
BEN: Is it a word for poop? Like kaka?
HEDVIG: Kaka?
DANIEL: Indeed it is. It does come from probably all the way back to proto-Indo-European, kaka-. Why is KAKA for POOP? I guess it’s because you want to say something like get away from that thing ka-ka-ka, something sharp.
BEN: Oh fuck, I couldn’t even tell you. All I know is that KAKA in my head is incredibly American.
HEDVIG: I thought it was from Spanish.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: Yeah, it is.
HEDVIG: And that’s why it’s American, because they have more contact with Spanish speakers than British people do. Because I only know of that as like a Romance and American thing. I don’t… So, I’m not sure if we need to read in too much into the sounds.
BEN: Okay, so I’m assuming when your democracy is a giant stinking pile of shit?
DANIEL: It’s government by the least suitable or the least competent citizens of a state. It comes from Greek, kakistos, the worst. So, Jack has suggested KAKISTOCRACY as a way of describing the current moment. We’re watching cabinet picks come down and really, he does seem to have a knack for picking the most compromised people so that they’ll be grateful to him, and he can control them. It’s gross. It’s the worst.
HEDVIG: Something like that, yeah. I think we’ve all been obsessed with American elections for quite a while now. It’s good to also remember that a similar type of thing has happened in many other countries the last two years where whatever sitting government has been blamed for inflation. And so, you vote in the other government, no matter who they are. And I think kind of Americans like to think they’re very special and that Trump is very special, and you have something very unique going on. And I’m not sure it is. I think maybe it’s the same thing as everywhere else.
DANIEL: It’s the same damn thing.
BEN: So, who in Europe…? Off the top of my head, I know both Hungary and Italy currently have like proper far-right whack job nut bags in power.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: There’re a few others though, isn’t there?
HEDVIG: Well, Denmark’s been having a thing going on like that for quite a while. Netherlands has Geert Wilders, which I think he’s doing relatively well.
BEN: But here’s the thing though, have they…
HEDVIG: Türkiye has Erdogan.
BEN: …come into power? That’s what I’m looking for specifically because I know that they are the ruling parties in Italy and Hungary and Türkiye. Do we know…
HEDVIG: Well, we’ve just had a bunch of elections here in Germany and AfD got a lot of votes in a lot of places. Alternative für Deutschland.
BEN: And Le Pen nearly won the French election as well.
DANIEL: True.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I want to talk about how we cover Trump going forward. We’re a linguistics show, so we’re going to talk about it where it affects language. I have noticed myself in the last 10 years steering around American politics, not like purposely avoiding it, because…
BEN: [BEN LAUGHS] I don’t know if people who listen to this show would agree with you, Daniel. [LAUGHS] It feels like we run headlong into the barricade on that one quite a bit.
DANIEL: I know what you mean. And we do cover it every once in a while. That just shows the extent to which it confronts me, and then I try to avoid it because I’m mindful that some listeners consider us to be a bit of a refuge in some ways. I think we’re going to avoid covering the daily outrage, not cover American stuff so much.
BEN: Well, because it’s exhausting.
DANIEL: Yeah. And that’s the point.
HEDVIG: Also, I’m not sure we have the best expertise and takes on it. There are a lot of shows you can listen to. I really like the QAA podcast. Well There’s Your Problem, the engineering podcast does pretty good coverage. Yeah.
DANIEL: If we do cover it, it’ll be something about language, and maybe it’ll be something that we can do something about so we don’t succumb to helplessness. That’s kind of a guideline that I’m going to try to use going forward. Make it productive. Okay, thanks, Jack, for that word. Next one, Dr Caitlin Green pointed us to a bleat. I’m not calling them skeets on Bluesky, I’m calling them bleets, for Bluesky. A bleet by regular meghan on Bluesky. The story is about Trump deporting Chinese undocumented people first. And so, Asian American groups rush to prep as though to obey or to… I mean, there’s getting ready, but then there’s also assuming that it’s a done deal and not throwing a shoe into the gear.
Caitlin says, “a reminder that it’s our duty as regular citizens to refuse to comply or assist these actions as much as possible. Anytime you encounter the opportunity to stick a wrench in the works, do so.” And the phrase that I came up with for this kind of obedience in advance is ANTICIPATORY COMPLIANCE. We need to avoid anticipatory compliance. Watch out for obeying in advance just because we’re trying to game stuff out, we’re trying to figure out what to do.
BEN: We should probably acknowledge though that there’s a pretty substantial cultural component to ideas of compliance and just ideas of societal organisation and the degree to which individuals versus groups versus whatever have agency and autonomy. And all of that is a fancy way of saying different cultures are far less individualistic than, say, just like boilerplate Western culture. What I’m not saying is that all Chinese people are like automatons who will do what they’re told, that is obviously not true.
DANIEL: It’s not about that, but…
BEN: But it needs to be acknowledged that our perspective, or like coming from a Western perspective and saying, “We need to be mindful of anticipatory compliance,” is coming from a culture of where individualism is not only problematically elevated to positions of reverence, it is also not shared by lots of other cultures. And so, we just keep that in mind, is all I’m saying.
DANIEL: And I am coming from a place of ultimate privilege. The way this affects me over here in Australia is I feel sad sometimes, and I don’t… My normal enthusiasms aren’t as much fun anymore. That’s the extent to which this shit affects me.
BEN: But if you fall pregnant, Daniel, and you do not want to carry that baby to term, you can still avail yourself of services here in Australia.
DANIEL: I could do it. Maybe it’s now time to talk about this one, 4B MOVEMENT. The 4B movement.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: What do you know about this?
BEN: Oh, Hedvig, I’m assuming this has been across your various feeds as well as mine. Do you want to take the reins?
HEDVIG: It’s a radical feminist movement from South Korea, where people are very tired of the patriarchal system there and are refusing to date, marry, have sex with, or have children with men and are just like cutting men out of their lives and saying, “Look, it’s too much bother, not worth it.”
DANIEL: Agreed.
HEDVIG: I mean, I know people who have done that without being part of an explicit movement, and I am very grateful that I live in a place that is not as patriarchal and conservative as South Korea. Yeah, that’s the 4B movement. I have seen a lot of people, especially American women, about a week after the election result in America was announced, I saw a lot of women being, younger women in particular, feeling like they’re very estranged from their male peers and were also no longer really interested interacting with them and being like, “Look, they voted this guy in. This guy is going to do bad things for me. I am not necessarily going to start dating women, but I’m going to reduce how much men I have in my life and what I do for them.”
BEN: And the only thing linguistically that we should probably acknowledge is BI- is a prefix in Korean which means NO. So, the 4B movement was four different types of Nos, like no to sex, no to marriage, no to a couple other things, no to childrearing, and something else. I can’t remember what the fourth one is.
HEDVIG: And dating.
DANIEL: John Kelly on his blog, Mashed Radish, explains that in Korean there are 4 Bs in the movement, and it sounds more like P, not B, but bisekseu, no sex. Bichulsan, no childbirth. Biyeonae, I’m not getting the pronunciation right, no dating. And bihon, no marriage. And yes, Ben, you are correct, the B is a not. Lest we think that this is an isolated movement in Korea, there’s an article in The Straits Times that shows that the number… I’m just quoting here, “The number of newly hired teachers in 2024 declined by over 50% compared with that in 2014. This appointment crisis comes as more than 150 elementary schools across the nation had no new first graders enrolling in 2024.”
HEDVIG: Right. So, I heard about this too, and I’m wondering… there is a general trend in a lot of developed countries where people are having fewer kids.
DANIEL: Because kids suck.
HEDVIG: Like, also people who… [LAUGHTER] No, not because kids suck at all. And I really don’t like when people who are child free are described as like, egotistical or not liking kids, as someone who has doesn’t have a child. It’s not like that.
DANIEL: Let me just say they’re a lot of input.
HEDVIG: So, there’s not a clear association that it’s the 4B movement in South Korea that has led to the declined birth rate. I actually think that’s probably quite implausible, both because the movement in its current size is relatively new and also because I just don’t think there’s enough women in it probably to have that big of an effect. But it is the case that in a lot of places like Germany, Sweden, Italy, UK, birth rates are going down for all kinds of reasons. There’s a lot of researchers trying to figure it out. There’s some research that show that the more education a woman has, the less likely she is to have a lot of kids, at least. There’s also research on if you have easier daycare options, maybe you’re more likely to have kids. If you know that you have to take four years out of your life and take care of a kid, maybe you’re less likely to have a kid, at least young.
BEN: I’d be fascinated to see what housing prices have to say about this as well, because… This is purely anecdotal to my own experience. I have a good job, I have a good income, I can’t afford to buy a house in Australia, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Now, admittedly I have a child, but I have to imagine there’d be some sort of causal association there of like, if a huge chunk of the population now can’t afford homes, which used to be able to afford homes, at least some of them would be like,: Well, I don’t know about this kids business.
DANIEL: Mm, mm.
HEDVIG: Or it could be like a nudging effect and a cumulative effect that all these things have a small and conscious effect and that builds up. And it could also be that it just means that people have children later in life where some people might also have a harder time getting pregnant or having a lot of kids. So, it doesn’t need to be… I Think a lot of when we think about these big societal and political things, people have this weird idea that people sit and consciously, like, “I can’t buy a house. Therefore, I’m never going to have children.”
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: That’s probably not what anyone is doing.
DANIEL: It’s probabilistic.
BEN: No, I think nudging is a great way to phrase it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. But you know what? I really enjoy the Lysistrata energy of the 4B movement. Anyone know about Lysistrata?
BEN: No, the what, the what what?
DANIEL: It was a play by Aristophanes, about 400 BCE, where the women of Greece got sick of the men fighting the Peloponnesian War.
HEDVIG: Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes.
DANIEL: So, they go on a sex strike and end the war. It’s a really funny, really ribald play. And yeah, I dig that energy.
HEDVIG: Which is funny because Greek men, out of all ancient men, famously…
DANIEL: You’d think they had options.
HEDVIG: …didn’t only go for women! Right?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: They had alternatives.
HEDVIG: They had alternatives. And yet!
DANIEL: And yet. Well, last of all, this is one that I tweeted — I bleeted — on Bluesky, HOPECORE.
BEN: Hahaha.
HEDVIG: We’ve had a lot of aesthetics floating by, but I think that this is a needed and helpful use of the -CORE combining form. An optimistic outlook that even when hope seems hopeless, maybe hope can survive. We have often said on the show that having hope is the most punk rock thing that you can do.
BEN: Or being kind, just being a kind, hopeful person is actually the most countercultural version of humanity these days.
DANIEL: And it’s difficult. Cynicism is really easy and cheap. And hope is hard.
BEN: And I say that as a grumpy, cynical motherfucker. Like, yeah, absolutely, being… Holding on to hope, it’s like an active process, ugh.
HEDVIG: And also remembering that social media is not a great conduit for staying aware and conscious and up to date with news. I have, by the way, started on my presentation for my niblings and godchildren on how internet works, and I gave a draft presentation for my niece and nephew the other week. And one of the things was just like, look, social media is not a great place. You can use it for kittens and cats and funny dances and recipes and stuff like that, but it’s not for serious stuff. Even when it’s stuff that you agree with, I would actually argue you just add like, I don’t know, BBC World News or something like that to your diet.
BEN: Hedvig, you’re just describing my day job. This is what I do. [LAUGHS] This is literally what I do. I stand up in front of kids and be like, “Hey, guys, this is fucking terrible! You should use it less.”
HEDVIG: I’ll share my little slides with you…
BEN: That’d be great.
HEDVIG: …because we have just watched Inside Out 8.
DANIEL: Love it.
HEDVIG: So, I use the little emotions to be like, “Facebook can trigger your anger emotion. And then, you’ll sit there for longer, and then they get more money.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s really…
DANIEL: This is what I told the young ones when deleting YouTube from their iPads. Because I think YouTube is especially egregious.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: But You…
DANIEL: But?
BEN: No, he’s right. He’s right, Hedvig. I don’t know if you’ve seen…
HEDVIG: Is it?
BEN: Yes. Have you seen some of the heinous fucking shit the algo-generated fucking crazy shit that is out there for kids? It’s wild and not in a cool way.
HEDVIG: I haven’t because my YouTube algorithm… This is another thing that your YouTube algorithm, that’s what I tried to say to the kids was like, “Your YouTube algorithm is in a certain extent a reflection of what you feed it.”
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: If it’s terrible, you’re terrible.
BEN: Little kids don’t have any consciousness around that.
HEDVIG: No. That’s when we found out that my nephew has been running YouTube in the background for hours and hours to keep his computer active, to get money on something, on Roblox. And he thinks that if YouTube is off…
DANIEL: Roblox is a curse.
BEN: And how old is that?
HEDVIG: How old is he?
BEN: He. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t want to make him feel bad. Let’s just…
BEN: No, no. Tell me, tell me, tell me.
HEDVIG: He’s under 10.
BEN: Okay. I don’t feel bad, like that just further confirms my deep suspicion.
HEDVIG: But he doesn’t watch it, right?
BEN: No, no, no. I know.
HEDVIG: He just keeps the YouTube going. And I explained to h…
BEN: But let’s think about the passage there. He is part of a game system or a network of game systems that has convinced him to be running this stuff in the background to get like pretend currency or some version, like some resource in the game, that is like… 🤯‼️
HEDVIG: And I was working from home in their house, and I heard this little pling from his room all the time, I was like, “This is driving me fucking nuts.” And I went in there and I discovered all this, and I just like shut a lot of things off and turned off sounds and was like… And then, what happens is because he just puts on YouTube Reels or Shorts or whatever they’re called, and he doesn’t do any selection, the algorithm just feeds him what is generally popular.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: So, when we talked about how algorithms work, he was like, “Oh, is that why my algorithm is like not very fit to me because I do this thing?”
BEN: Because it’s just been churning constantly.
HEDVIG: And I said, “Yes, that’s why.” And then also, I said, “But, you know, that takes electricity and things.” He’s like, “Yeah, but it’s just the socket in the wall.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s the one mom and dad pay for.” And he was like, “Oh.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I’m at the stage now where poor Ellis, the more I go through things, the more I realise the worst thing that happened to that poor kid is having a nerd for a dad. Because I’m amongst the harshest and most restrictive device parents I know. Ellis had a Gameboy for a little while, that’s gone. Things like iPads and god forbid, a phone, absolutely not. Now, he has… I’m not with his mum anymore, so the other side of the equation is not under my control. But I’m going to advocate so strongly for him not having a smartphone until he’s at least like 15 or 16. Like, it’s just… they are psychic damage engines, man. Like, it’s wild.
DANIEL: We’re never doing Roblox.
BEN: Yeah, Roblox is a hard pass.
DANIEL: So many parents. Since we’re talking about social media, I said that was the last one, but I want to do one more because I want to recommend Bluesky. We’ve gotten thousands of new fans on Bluesky. We’re attracting…
HEDVIG: There’s an exodus happening.
DANIEL: This week has been, especially the Xodus. The Xodus, maybe that’s a Word of the Week. And Bluesky is on the rise. So, here’s what’s happening, though. As Bluesky gets more popular, right-wing trolls are piling in, hoping to get attention and spread their signature brand of awfulness. And the algorithm is just not rewarding them.
BEN: Not having it.
HEDVIG: Why not?
DANIEL: Because Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm. Not in the same way.
BEN: So, what’s the mechanism?
DANIEL: Bluesky shows you bleets from people you follow…
BEN: Oh, old school.
DANIEL: …in chronological order. Do you remember that? Do you remember that?
BEN: That seems so quaint now.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s so good. There’s a Discover tab and there’s a Popular with Friends tab and you can check those out. But also really strong moderation things, you can block entire lists of people.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: And they just don’t get the attention.
HEDVIG: If you have one friend that you like and you follow and they just post a lot and you’re just like, “I can’t have 80% of my feed be this person…” So, on Facebook, you can click on a person, say, “Can we just tone this one down?” Like, I don’t want to mute them, I don’t want to unfollow them, I don’t want to unfriend them, but just like this… because some people just post a lot more than other people.
BEN: Prolific. Let’s say prolific. Let’s give them a nice word.
HEDVIG: Right. Is there a way of doing that?
DANIEL: There’s no way to “see less from this person”. You can block keywords for things that you’re not interested in.
BEN: I’m just so jazzed. Not that I would use Bluesky, not because I’m philosophically opposed, but Twitter never had a use case that held any interest or value for me, so Bluesky doesn’t either. But I just can’t believe I forgot that there was a pre-algorithm system to this. I genuinely, for a second, I was like, “What do you mean there’s no algorithm. It has to be something.” And then, I was like, “Oh, that’s right.” It could be like an RSS feed. You could literally just subscribe to the shit you want and then it arrives in the order that it was generated.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. It’s really, really good. It’s a really good experience just like the old days.
BEN: It feels like bespoke artisanal internet. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think Instagram for a while when they switched, I think they offered some people an option to have a chronological again or that… Like, if you paid money. I know that Instagram, if you pay money, you don’t get ads, you can do that. But I’m not sure if you pay money, you can get chronological because I would love chronological Instagram.
DANIEL: Well, it’s on Bluesky. And so, because trolls are not getting much traction, there are lots of think pieces this week about echo chambers. We’re starting to see echo chambers being talked about a lot. It’s like, “Oh, you should invite trolls into your feed because you need to hear all opinions.”
BEN: Because garbage is so valuable.
DANIEL: Well, that’s the thing. I have mentioned that there are three groups that I think of. I think of there’s people I agree with, and they are fun. There are people I can have interesting disagreements with, and I try to learn from them. And then, there are bad people with bad opinions who bring nothing. And if you ignore them or block them or mute them, that’s not a problem. You’re getting more signal and less noise. The problem is not that we’re including too little. The problem is that we’re excluding too little. Not everyone is worth your time. And my experience is so much better without people who have really bad assumptions or ill will. I do not gain anything from them.
BEN: Also, famously, this idea that like the before times of algorithmic curation not creating echo chambers is absolutely farcical.
HEDVIG: Absolutely, that’s really weird.
BEN: The echo chambers already existed. Like, that’s not changing.
HEDVIG: I mean, the only way that could be different is that people who like to argue, maybe the algorithm was feeding them people to argue with and they were getting a satisfaction out of like keyboard warriorship where they’re not necessarily in an echo chamber, but I would kind of say that they almost are because they’re just in a like a slash…
BEN: They’re in a combat echo chamber.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like a conversational battle royale.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they’re in like hyperrational atheist argumentation debate school.
DANIEL: Well, you don’t need to invite that third group, trolls. You don’t need to invite them to avoid echo chambers. What you need to do is be very clear about who are the interesting disagreers and who are the people who bring no value. Listen to the former, block the latter, and then listen to your friends sometimes.
HEDVIG: And also, at the risk of trying to take Ben’s job again, it is very hard to be a journalist like a chief editor and balance news. That is something people go to like school to for a really long time. That is something that news…
BEN: And on-the-job learning for even longer. Like, it is a thing that requires a long time to figure out.
HEDVIG: And that is something that news desks do as groups and that they have like responsibility protocols for. Like, if someone fucks up, they have a way of dealing with it and etc. And they have like ombudsman and everything. And it is very weird to me that we expect every individual person to do that job, it’s an odd thing to expect me to do. So, let me have my social media for like fun and like basic awareness. Like, “Oh, someone published a new paper. There’s a cute cat.” And then, like…
BEN: I like that those are on the same level.
HEDVIG: Honestly, that’s the other thing I also find a little bit embarrassing and that I wanted to tell my nephew like, if someone tells you that Twitter is just a bunch of people arguing or TikTok is a bunch of people dancing, that says like a lot about them.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: And sometimes less about the platform.
DANIEL: Well, speaking of finding papers, we are going to… on Because Language, we’re going to be looking at Bluesky a lot more for our show material than we are on Twitter or other platforms. We’re going to maintain the other platforms, but I’m mainly going to be hunting through Bluesky for things. So, if you’re on there will probably find your work. That’s how we found the work that we talked about this time. So, KAKISTOCRACY, ANTICIPATORY COMPLIANCE, 4B MOVEMENT, HOPECORE and ECHO CHAMBER, our Words of the Week.
Let’s hear a comment from Cass on Patreon. “So, great to clean my room with some familiar voices.” That’s us, by the way. “I have done a lot of tongue twisters. Almost spelled tongue wrong twice there. And when hearing this question, we had a question about does your brain mess up when you try to think of tongue twisters,” Cas says, “I was thinking: No way! But when Daniel said ‘unique New York,’ my brain said ‘Newyeek Unork’ before I said it. I think that when I lead kids in a silly song about having coffee in copper coffee pots, or when I’m reciting tongue twisters for mouth warmups, that I’m so focused that I’m only speaking, not thinking first. But in this case I was listening and looking at my phone. So, the brain twisting happened because I wasn’t fully focused.”
BEN: She wasn’t in flow state.
DANIEL: Exact. “I was so fascinated by Hedvig’s idea that I looked it up and tongue twisters in signed languages are: finger fumblers! OMG.”
BEN: Oh, that’s so good.
DANIEL: Isn’t that great?
BEN: That’s wicked.
DANIEL: Thanks, Cass. Quick one from Bren on our Discord. “Not sure if anyone’s interested, but after episode 108 when the team discussed the River Styx and Stygian…“
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. I remember this.
DANIEL: “I thought of other examples of X to G change. There are quite a few used in medical length language, probably because lots of words from Ancient Greek there. For example, LARYNX, LARYNGITIS.”
HEDVIG: Yes, laryngeal.
DANIEL: “PHALANX, PHALANGES. PHARYNX, PHARYNGEAL. COCCYX, COCCYGEAL.” For the super nerdy or still interested, there’s a Wiktionary article that illustrates the grammar. We’ll throw that up on the show notes for this episode, becauselanguage.com. Thanks to our special guests, Dr Gerald Roche and Dr Sasha Wilmoth, everybody who gave suggestions for this episode. SpeechDocs for transcribing every word we say, our patrons who keep the show going. And Ben and Hedvig, thanks for making the time to chat. I really enjoy our talks.
BEN: Ngaww….
HEDVIG: If you like our show, there are a number of things you can do to support our show. You can follow us on various social media platforms. On all of them we are becauselangpod, one word, including on Bluesky where, as Daniel said, we’ll be doing more things. You can also send us ideas, like Camden did earlier in this episode via something called SpeakPipe. So, that’s a simple interaction where you can send a little audio file to us, or you could do that on our website, becauselanguage.com, or you can also just record like a voice note on your smartphone or whatever or on your laptop and attach that as a file and send that to hello@becauselanguage.com. If you, for example, have a fun Related or Not or if you have fun Word of the Week or something, you can record yourself saying it and that’d be really nice. We like hearing your voices.
A really great way to support our show and to spread the knowledge about it is to tell a friend or write a review. And if you write a fun review, we might also read it aloud on the show.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Another way to help us is to become a patron. Patrons help us by making sure that we have the money to keep the show running, pay the bills, compensate our guests a little bit. And depending on your level, you get live episodes, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, access to our great Discord community of lovely people. Now, I want to give a shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. This time, we’re ordering our Supporters alphabetically. Oh, wait, that’s a bit boring. So instead, we’ll order them and then give them a number in the order that they’re alphabetised.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: And then, we’re spelling that number out. And then, we’re alphabetising that.
BEN: Oh, I see.
HEDVIG: So, there are no numbers that start with A.
BEN: Or B.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Or C. Or D.
HEDVIG: So, EIGHT would be first.
DANIEL: Yes. And number eight is Ariaflame. She was number eight, but eight alphabetises at the top of the list. Elías, Canny Archer, Colleen, Rhian, Tony, Steele, Stan, Rodger, Termy, Tadhg, Sonic Snejhog, sæ̃m, Amy, Meredith, Raina, O Tim, Nikoli, Rene, Whitney, Molly Dee, Rach, PharaohKatt, Nigel, Nasrin, Amir, Chris W, Ayesha, Felicity, aengryballs, Andy from Logophilius, Diego, Andy, Daniel, WolfDog, who was last at 60, but in this order comes right in the middle, number 36. Ben, Chris L, Keith, Margareth, Luis, [DANIEL AND BEN IN UNISON VERY EVILLY] LordMortis, Matt, Kevin, Manú, Lyssa, Larry, Kristofer, Alyssa, Cheyenne, gramaryen, Kate, Jack, J0HNTR0Y, Kathy, Joanna, Ignacio, Helen, and Aldo. Aldo was number two on the alphabetised list, but because the number two alphabetises last on the list of the numbers, Aldo, you bring up the rear.
BEN: That’s really cute.
DANIEL: Yeah. And our newest patrons at the Listener level, Jennifer A, Jennifer B, Vitor, MarkGammie, Rayley, Jason, and Matt S. These are all new listeners. My goodness.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: And our newest free patrons, Kate, Rachel, Convenientmarkettodreams, and one other… who is it?
HEDVIG: Garnelenbox, which means shrimp box in German.
DANIEL: Thank you, Hedvig. And of course, thanks to all our patrons.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thank you so very much for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Pew, pew, pew.
HEDVIG: I need to go cough a lot.
DANIEL: Go cough a lot.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Hang on. Go back, go back. What’s this about water?
BEN: No, she just has to figure it out as we go.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [It’s] wildly, drastically overemphasised how important water is in our lives. And I say that…
DANIEL: You mean…
HEDVIG: Because you live in Perth?
BEN: No, nothing to do with that. I say that in the full knowledge that water is a thing that we require to not be dead. And yes…
DANIEL: Oh, you’re a water skeptic. Yes.
BEN: And yet, I still think as a society, we have swung way too far in favour of water. It just annoys me.
DANIEL: Why are we carrying bottles around? Does everybody need a water bottle? Seriously? We never had those things back in the 1980s.
BEN: I’m in high schools where every single kid has a water bottle and they’re just like, [MAKES SUCKING SOUNDS] just suckling at the teat of Big Water all the time. And do you know what it means? Do you know what it actually means? They have to piss all the time. So annoying. So annoying. And then when you challenge anyone on it, it’s like, “You’ve got to be hydrated. You’ve got to be hydrated.” Yeah, we know. And your body has an amazing mechanism for that. It’s called thirst, and it is allowed to exist for a while. You can be thirsty for like [SCOFFS], I don’t know, 55 minutes. And then, between your classes, [MAKES DRINKING SOUNDS] you take a big old drink.
DANIEL: Drink. And it only gets worse as you get to be an older man because you drink two or three coffees and a cup of tea and maybe a big glass of water, you’re weeing from 10am to 1pm.
BEN: You’re just locked in that bathroom for hours. It becomes an office.
HEDVIG: Can I?
BEN: Yes, yes, go on. Sorry. Yes, you can.
HEDVIG: The degree to which you can drink medically too much water is still quite high, and I think most people don’t do that.
BEN: No, I agree.
HEDVIG: And peeing is… And as a person with like migraine and headache problems, hydration’s pretty… [BEN SIGHS] Like, when a doctor says like drink more water, usually like…
DANIEL: Consult your medical professional.
BEN: I am not arguing with doctors suggesting, but I don’t think that… Anyway, anyway I’m not saying…
HEDVIG: They would fidget with something else, Ben. They would fidget with something else.
BEN: It’s not the fidgeting. That’s not what annoys me. Do you know what it is? Do you know what it is? The thing that annoys me is that it is the cloak of healthiness.
HEDVIG: Oh, the hypocrisy.
BEN: No, no, no, no. The idea that, if I say, “Hey, man, maybe you don’t need to bring a water bottle to class.” They’re like, “You want me to be unhealthy?” It’s like, “Well, that’s not at all what I said, but okay.”
DANIEL: “Must my thirst be unslaked?”
BEN: Yeah. There is this pervasive thought amongst all of society now, which is like, if thirst exists for a microsecond, your body is being damaged, and it’s like, not true.
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