What’s in the linguistic news? Diego knows. He’s been tracking down stories and words for us all year long, and now he’s curated an entire show for us. It’s the latest in the Diego series.
- How do you write laughter in Spanish? Or other languages?
- Why do islands have so many languages?
- Why are speakers of an Indonesian language using Korean Hangul as their writing system?
Plus Words of the Week and Related or Not!
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- News: 5:07
- Related or Not: 34:14
- Words of the Week: 46:40
- The Reads: 59:30
- Outtakes: 1:03:18
Listen to this episode
Video promo
@becauselangpod One: Ben is my super-weiner. Two: The Historical Dictionary of English is cool. https://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk This is from our bonus episode 110: Diego's Dossier. Hear the whole thing here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110-diegos-with-118198899?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
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Become a Patron!Show notes
sundorwine | Historical Thesaurus of English
https://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?type=search&qsearch=sundorwine&word=sundorwine&label=&category=&oef=&oel=&startf=&startl=&endf=&endl=¤tf=¤tl=&year=&twoEdNew=&twoEdUpdated=&page=1#id=131269
How to laugh correctly, according to the RAE it’s not “jajaja”
https://inspain.news/how-to-laugh-correctly-according-to-the-rae-its-not-jajaja/
¿Es válido escribir la risa «jajaja»? | RAE
https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/es-valido-escribir-la-risa-jajaja
How To Laugh Online In 20 Languages
https://beelinguapp.com/blog/how-to-laugh-online-in-20-languages
Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/seals-and-signs-tracing-the-origins-of-writing-in-ancient-southwest-asia/B3C2D400F3F80A7A0162D9035C9C2804
Mesopotamia Artifacts Help Explain How Language Evolved from Pictures to Words
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/mesopotamia-artifacts-help-explain-how-language-evolved-from-pictures-to
Language Evolves Over Time and Islands Can Drive Linguistic Diversity
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/language-evolves-over-time-and-islands-can-drive-linguistic-diversity
Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199295
Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2016.0185
Phonemic diversity decays “out of Africa”? | Language Log
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090
Indigenous Indonesians use Korean letters to save a dialect
https://www.abc.net.au/asia/indigenous-indonesians-use-korean-letters-to-save-dialect/103306022
King Sejong Invents an Alphabet, by Carol Kim, illustrated by Cindy Kang
https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/king-sejong-invents-an-alphabet/
Spanish language Royal Academy incorporates the word “Che” to its latest dictionary edition
https://en.mercopress.com/2024/11/09/spanish-language-royal-academy-incorporates-the-word-che-to-its-latest-dictionary-edition#google_vignette
La RAE agregó una nueva palabra argentina al diccionario
https://www.pilaradiario.com/la-pancha/la-rae-agrego-una-nueva-palabra-argentina-al-diccionario-n5457753
‘Droidspeak’: AI Agents Now Have Their Own Language Thanks to Microsoft
https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/21/droidspeak-ai-agents-now-have-their-own-language-thanks-to-microsoft/
[PDF] DroidSpeak: Enhancing cross-LLM communication
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02820
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First, it’s Ben Ainslie. Ben, I was looking for synonyms for friend because I didn’t want to say, “My friend, Ben Ainslie,” time after time.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And I think I found a pretty good word for you, because I looked in the Historical Thesaurus of English.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, here’s the word for you…
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right? SUNDORWINE. You’re my sundorwine.
BEN: Sundorwine. Are we talking old English here? Like a different language?
DANIEL: It is an old English word.
BEN: So, we’re basically just pulling from a different German language at this point, but fine. That’s fine.
DANIEL: Well, I was going to go for BELAMY, which was popular in 1225 to about 1689. By the way, can anyone guess the etymology for BELAMY? If you’re my BELAMY?
DIEGO: Sounds Latin.
BEN: I have no idea. Like, someone who rings your bell?
DANIEL: No, you’re my bel ami. It’s French.
DIEGO: Oh.
BEN: Oh, like my girl or whatever.
DANIEL: My belamy, my good friend. All right. But no, you’re my sundorwine. The sundor means special, and the wine means friend. Special friend.
BEN: I was really hoping you were going to say wiener. My special wiener.
DANIEL: My special weiner. And it’s my special wiener, Ben Ainslie. Well, on that note, I didn’t go for COCKMATE, which turns up around 1579. The relevant sense of COCK is somebody who’s really great, like your boss. So, you’re my boss friend. You’re my old cockmate, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Wow. Yeah. No, I’ll take super wiener for sure.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s do that. And now, somebody who’s been finding lots of material for the show, he’s curated this entire episode, it’s Diego Diaz. Hey, Diego.
DIEGO: Hey, guys. How’s it going?
DANIEL: Nice to have you again.
DIEGO: Great to be back.
BEN: He’s our hombre, our amigo, our… [SQUIRMS]
DIEGO: Yes, yes.
BEN: …help.
DANIEL: Well, for you, Diego, I decided on HAILFELLOW. You’re my hailfellow.
BEN: That’s… How does he get HAILFELLOW, which is great, and I get SUPER WIENER or COCKMATE? There is some injustice in this naming. If anyone who says linguistics is, like, logical and impartial, I defy you to get Daniel to give you a friend name.
DANIEL: How about CHUM? Can we go for chum?
BEN: Oh, like the stuff you throw to the sharks? Sure, Daniel, why not?
DANIEL: I would throw you to sharks.
BEN: Great.
DANIEL: No.
DIEGO: That’s a good one for Related or Not.
BEN: Yeah [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Exactly. Exactly.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Now, Hedvig is not with us for this episode, but Diego has unearthed a trove of news stories, words, and Related or Not pairs. And because we love when someone does the work for us in a very well done way, we like to let them. So, Diego, thanks for coming on and bringing us such good, amazing finds.
DIEGO: Yeah, pleasure to be here.
DANIEL: Now, tell me what drives you. What makes you hunt down such things? Because you found a lot of stuff and you always do.
DIEGO: Yeah, I mean, it’s just pretty easy to do a quick search and find them on the internet. Sometimes, I come across them spontaneously. But a lot of times, I just do a quick search for language stories. And almost every day there’s something new. So, yeah, there’s always something new to find. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: There is always something new to find.
BEN: Our linguistic gopher.
DANIEL: This is a bonus episode for our patrons at the Listener level. Thank you for being a patron if you’re listening to this soon after its release. Now, we’ve got some news for you. Our next episode is the Words of the Week of the Year episode. We’re going to be looking at all the dictionary words of the year and we’re going to be counting down our words of the week, of the year. Which one of our words of the week will be the winner? We’re going to count them down on the live show. So, watch Discord, watch Patreon for the time, date and link to the Zoom room. It’s going to be a lot of fun. If you’re not a patron and you’re listening much later, then please jump on it. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: I’ve been listening to a lot of RTR, which long, long time listeners of the show will remember, was the radio station that we began on.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. It’s where we met.
BEN: The Full Frequency show, which is the dance music show that happens in the afternoons on RTRFM, they have the Listen Later Massive and the Restream Ravers and I love that. I think we should crib it and adopt it and the Listen Later Linguists.
DANIEL: Good idea, me old cockmate.
BEN: So, shoutout to the Listen Later Linguists, who are probably copping this months after we made it, because why not? That’s the great awesome time travel ability of podcasts. And if you are listening to this through the mists of time, think about becoming a patron because you get a bunch of cool stuff, and it allows us to do a bunch of cool stuff.
DANIEL: Yep, it sure does. So, that URL once again, patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right, Diego, start us off, what you got?
BEN: Coming in hot.
DIEGO: Yes. So, everybody’s second favorite language academy after the French, of course, the Royal Spanish Academy.
DANIEL: Yep.
DIEGO: For some unwarranted reason, they decided to give us the definitive answer on how to laugh in a text message. So, in English, we have lol, or you can do ha-ha-ha. So, in Spanish, we usually do ja-ja-ja.
BEN: Because the J is pronounced as an H, right? So, to a Spanish speaker that still sounds in their head like ha-ha-ha-ha.
DIEGO: Right. Yeah. It can be a soft H or a hard H, like ha-ha-ha or [USING A HARD H] ha-ha-ha depending on the dialect.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I like that you can be like a camp Disney villain with [USING A HARD H] ha-ha-ha. It doesn’t sound like that.
DIEGO: Exactly, exactly. So, they’ve come out to say that the correct way to spell it is with commas between each J-A. So ja, ja, ja.
BEN: Ugh, ugh. That’s a big ick from Ben. Oh, yucky. That’s just… who… What?
DIEGO: Yeah, unnecessary. Uncalled for.
BEN: It’s like they looked at the Académie Française and they were like, “Hold my beer. I can be as big a jerk as those guys. Let me just get my pedant all the way on. I’m going to throw commas into laughter.”
DANIEL: There is a reason, you know? I mean, they did give a reason.
BEN: No, don’t be a bloody apologist, Daniel. Go on, tell us what the reason is.
DANIEL: All right. Diego, did you read this part?
DIEGO: Yeah. Do you mean the part about if it’s less than three?
DANIEL: Yes, that is…
DIEGO: Right.
DANIEL: Maybe I’ll just read what their explanation is and I’m going to try it in Spanish and then I’ll…
BEN: Be a mouthpiece for the machine, Daniel. Go right ahead.
DANIEL: We’ve got to give voice to anyone who’s not sure here. Okay. Lo indicado escribier ja comma… How do you say comma in Spanish? Comma?
DIEGO: Comma.
DANIEL: Ja-ja-ja. Aunque es frecuente el uso de ja, ja, ja, esta forma representa la pronunciación [JAJAJA], con la reproducion de la risa en la que todos los elementos on tónicos. All right, I’m going to translate that. It’s indicated to use ja, ja, ja even though it’s very common to use it jajaja in six letters, this form would actually represent the pronunciation jajaja, and the reason is because when you’ve got a three-syllable word, the second syllable gets the stress. And it continues. This doesn’t correspond to the reproduction of laughter in which all of the elements are tonics, they all get the stress, ja, ja, ja.
So, if you say it, six-letter ja-ja-ja with no commas, it’s like you’re doing a word and the word would be jajaja, which is meaningless.
BEN: It’s not like that though. Look, I don’t speak Spanish, so I am the least qualified to talk about this. But I am a white man, so my opinion is super relevant in any space that I occupy. That’s not how words work though. It’s not the case. Look, Diego, as a first language Spanish speaker, I presume?
DIEGO: Simultaneous bilingual.
BEN: Okay, good enough for me. Let me ask you, rather than just tell you my opinion.
DANIEL: That’s better.
BEN: Do you… When you read ja, ja, ja, spelt J-A-J-A-J-A, do you unavoidably, like through brain programming, immediately hear that as ha-ha-ha?
DIEGO: No, of course not.
DANIEL: Oh, clearly that’s not right because that’s a word.
BEN: [LAUGHTER] Okay, good. I was just checking because I don’t speak Spanish, so maybe that is like a thing. That middle syllable stress is like this ironclad thing that is like brain neurology that you can’t get away from, but Diego has just verified that’s not a thing.
DIEGO: No, I understand the logic. Yes, if you look at it as one word, yeah, following our rules of spelling, jajaja, it would be jajaja, and you’d have to have an accent on the last “a” for it to be jajaja. But it’s onomatopoeia. It’s not really a word per se. So, that would be my argument, is that it’s not speech, it’s not dialogue. So, you don’t need the commas because it’s onomatopoeia.
BEN: Also, I sort of query the RAE’s… Text messages is not where you need to be spending your time, bros and sisters, and everyone in between. Like, this is…
DIEGO: You are trying to stay relevant.
BEN: Well, this is not…
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s it.
BEN: Failed. You have failed at your task, sirs, madams.
DANIEL: Somebody at the RAE had a thought while they were on the toilet. I got to put out a press release.
BEN: Honestly.
DIEGO: This is gold.
BEN: Text message language is a fetid morass of linguistic dysfunction, because you put several different things that are working against good language in the same space. Element number one…
DANIEL: Standard language.
BEN: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?
DANIEL: Yeah. I know what you mean.
BEN: Element number one, phone keyboards. Just the worst. Just the absolute worst. People, even people who are very good at them, do not enjoy using them and generally don’t spend a lot of time correcting the many, many, the myriad mistakes that come from using that input system.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Two.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Most text messages are under like time pressure, usually. Like, I don’t know about anyone else in the world, but most of the text messages I send are while I’m like, half listening to some other conversation while I’m quickly trying to like bust out—Like. the brain is in several spots, this is not…
DANIEL: What happens is you see the typing awareness indicator that they’re typing something, and you’ve got to get this out before they hit send. So, it’s like, “Shoot, I’ve got to get my thought out.”
BEN: We’re playing three-dot chicken.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I agree. We know what things are in context. This is completely unnecessary advice, but this is a good opportunity for us to do a review of how we laugh online. We haven’t done this since the Talk the Talk days.
BEN: This is a fun retrospective.
DANIEL: So, we’re due for a refresher. How do we laugh in other languages? In many languages, there’s lots of H, there’s lots of J. What else do you know?
BEN: I only know the bespoke English ones because they tend to be the ones I use. I very rarely say ha-ha-ha-ha, but I will say tee-hee or he-he-he or stuff like that.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay. Yep. I did some research and found that in lots of other languages, it’s got an X, like Greek, Russian, or Ukrainian. Also, Russian has something like B and then a string of G’s. Baggagagug.
BEN: But is that like a Cyrillic thing? So is the B a B, but like, not a B kind of thing?
DANIEL: I am describing Cyrillic letters, but they’re equivalents. So, they’re equivalent of a B plus a gamma, gamma, gamma, gamma, gamma.
BEN: That’s fun. That’s like an Elmo…
DANIEL: Ugg ugg ugg ugg!
BEN: Yeah, yeah. Like a Bugs Bunny [CARTOON LAUGHTER] “ugg ugg ugg”. No, Popeye! Popeye. That’s who laughs like that.
DANIEL: It is Popeye. And then, there’s Brazilian Portuguese. Remember how everyone 10 years ago was writing hue-hue-hue?
BEN: Yep. Sure, we do.
DANIEL: Does anybody know about this?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
DIEGO: That’s not the one I know for Brazilian Portuguese.
DANIEL: Okay, well, what do you… What’s the one that you know in Brazilian Portuguese?
DIEGO: I know they do RS because I think it’s short for risos, which is like laughter or laugh.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
BEN: Ah, so that’s their lol.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
DIEGO: Pretty much the other one that’s more like onomatopoeia, kind of gets them in trouble because it’s multiple Ks in a row because it’s like ka-ka-ka.
BEN: Ke-ke-ke-ke.
DIEGO: So, sometimes it comes out as 3Ks. And some people don’t like that. [LAUGHS]
BEN: There’s some branding issues there.
DIEGO: Yeah. So, if I ever use it, I make sure to do four, at least.
BEN: That extra K, the whole shebang, the most important K ever.
DANIEL: Klan intensifies.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, ten years ago or so, Brazilian players were playing Ragnarok online and League of Legends with English speakers. And they would find each other by typing BR, like, “Are you Brazilian?” And they would sometimes laugh hue-hue-hue. And so, English speakers would taunt them by typing hue-hue-hue. It became a whole thing.
BEN: That’s fun.
DANIEL: Japanese type laughter with all W’s, WWW, because of the not ha-ha-ha but wa-wa-wa.
BEN: Okay, yeah.
DANIEL: Thai, in Thai, it’s a string of fives because the number sounds like ha with a falling tone.
BEN: Oh, cool.
DANIEL: Arabic has the Arabic letter ha, so you just type a string of those. And then, there’s Indonesian, which surprised me.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: it’s like this. Wk-Wk-Wk.
BEN: That’s like wak-wak-wak.
DANIEL: Wak-wak-wak. I did a little bit of digging and I thought, wait, are they… Is it sort of like a gua-gua-gua-gua or something like that? And there have been a lot of TikTok videos on this. And in the comments, you can find people trying to explain this. The W is the pronoun, I or me, which is actually G-W, but is shortened to W. That’s the W. The K is for Kitava, which means laugh. So together, you get KW-KW. I laugh. I laugh. I laugh.
BEN: Okay, so this is closer to a lol.
DANIEL: This one is. So, you got two ways you can go. You can try to represent the sound of laughter using the phonotactics of your own language, or you can do something else indicating the word laughter. And so, these are two strategies that people use. Isn’t that fun?
BEN: That is curious.
DANIEL: [MAKES SOUND] What’s next, Diego?
DIEGO: Yes, people trying to prove the link between writing as just symbols and writing as an actual writing system.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s stop there for a second. Ben?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: What do you know about the way writing started? Because we’ve talked about it a couple of times. This is a test.
BEN: Well, yeah, so I’m actually having to revise what my understanding was of this, because what Diego just said made me be like, “Oh, no, the thing in my head was wrong.”
DANIEL: Me too.
BEN: Because I had thought… Okay, here’s my assumption that existed until about 30 seconds ago, before Diego just ripped the pillars of my intellect away from me.
DANIEL: Ben’s headcanon.
BEN: Writing started as cuneiform… Or well…
DANIEL: That was an early one.
BEN: Depending on where you want to look and depending on who you ask, one of the early forms of writing was cuneiform, where you would use the corner of a squared off stick to do a series of lines in different configurations, which would mean certain things. Then, other early forms of language were symbolic, the most famous of which would be Egyptian hieroglyphs. When I say famous, like the most pop culturally sort of known version of this would be Egyptian hieroglyphs.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Now, my understanding was that language did just… Sorry, written language did just like slowly move along the line of, “We’re starting with pictures that mean the things that they mean.” And eventually the sort of like semantic not usefulness of that, just overcame the literal meanings and they started to be like abstract representations for things. And I’ve seen a lot of this in Chinese and Japanese characters as well, so like the thing… This is just an example. I don’t know if this is true. The thing for house looks a little bit like a house, and then over time it like changes and then language happens.
But based on what Diego said just before, I think that’s wrong. And these people are trying to prove the thing that I just said, which would suggest that it wasn’t previously proved.
DANIEL: Okay. Now, everything that you’ve said is pretty good. Cuneiform is one of the earliest kinds of writing. But we can go back even farther than that. And this is even before. This is the version that I taught in class before hearing this story that Diego suggested. The version that I always taught was that you start with Mesopotamian clay tokens.
BEN: Oh, okay. Yep.
DANIEL: When you bought stuff, they would keep a little token saying, “Oh, this was one sheep,” or, “This was one thing of beer,” or something like that. These little clay doots. And the doots had little things on them, like an X or a line or a picture or something. And they would keep these doots in a clay envelope so that they could haul them around if they wanted to. But the problem is, if you want to know how many tokens are in the envelope, you’ve got to break it open. So, then they got smart, and they pressed a little stick on the envelope to show how many tokens were inside.
BEN: And that’s cuneiform or like early cuneiform.
DANIEL: Yeah. By that time, they realized they didn’t even need the doots anymore. They could just get rid of them.
BEN: Why are we messing around with these doots nonsense? We’ll just use the lines.
DANIEL: That’s it. So, clay tokens was the story I always heard. But now, this is something from Dr. Silvia Ferrara published in Antiquities. Diego, take it away. What are we learning here?
DIEGO: Yeah, they have been studying the trade records from what used to be a Mesopotamian city in modern day Iraq. And I guess they pretty much used to keep track by engraving certain designs on cylinders, kind of putting like a seal on them. And this group of researchers is matching successfully the cuneiform to the pictures on the seals.
DANIEL: These artworks are really cool. They’re like these cylinders with stuff on them. And you just take one of those and you roll it across the clay so that you can make a big, long, decorative strip.
BEN: Oh, yeah, I get you kind of like a rollable stamp or whatever that can just keep printing out its impression.
DANIEL: Yeah. And you roll it across some clay to make a record of the transaction, and this is called a seal. So, Diego, you’re saying they’ve managed to match up some of the drawings on these seals to early cuneiform.
DIEGO: Right. Like the images of certain types of pottery or linen to show the trade transaction.
DANIEL: Even some of the decorative curlicues that look like they’re just decorative, they may actually be fruit that might have stood for something too.
BEN: Can I ask. So, we’ve got the seal, which is the picture, and then we’ve got cuneiform, which are kind of like tally marks, but also a little bit more semantically complex than that, I believe. Like, they’re not just like 1, 2, 3, 4. They’re a bit more like… They can do more than that.
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: Are we saying the seals are sort of like ciphers that give you more understanding of the cuneiform, or are we just saying, “Oh, look, this cuneiform is like tallies and stuff about lamb and about barley.”
DANIEL: Your second thing is the right thing. It looks like they started out with these seals, and then the seals evolved into cuneiform that you could do without even using those cylinders, as cool as they are.
BEN: Okay, okay, okay.
DANIEL: So, in addition to the clay token story, these seals might be something that helped move early writing along. Very cool. Okay, Diego, what’s the next one you got for us?
DIEGO: Another study showing… we pretty much already knew that islands are kind of a… How would I say? I don’t want to say hotbed.
DANIEL: A diversity hotspot.
DIEGO: Yeah, there we go. That islands are a diversity hotspot when it comes to flora and fauna as well as languages. But what they found now is that the different geographical factors that can affect how plants and animals evolve on an island also play a role in how languages evolve on different islands.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Now, is this more of the higher altitudes mean less plosive stuff, or is this a different thing?
DIEGO: It’s a little different. They do talk about how the phonemic inventory tends to be smaller in these island languages, but what they talk about is how something, for example, like a river, where it can separate certain species of plants and animals from each other and then ensure that they thrive and evolve separately. When it comes to languages, a river is a resource that actually brings people together and would then bring different languages together.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DIEGO: So, different examples like that.
DANIEL: So, this is research from Dr. Lindell Bromham out of ANU and a team published in Nature. The reason that islands are biodiversity hotspots for animals is a function of their size. So, bigger island means more resources and you can have more critters flourishing. And then, remoteness. If it’s remote, then that means we see more diversity as well. I guess no one’s going to bug you, there’s less pressure so things can flourish. But this team found that island size was a good predictor of language diversity. Bigger islands do have more languages, but remoteness wasn’t a good predictor of language diversity.
BEN: I guess that kind of makes sense. Like, if you are the people of Rapa Nui and you are a long, long way from any other people, you would imagine that your language would large…- if not entirely homogenized, because obviously there would be linguistic diversity across an island. It would be a lot more homogenized than, say, Fiji or Tonga or Samoa or something that’s got a lot more neighbors.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, remote islands are not biodiversity hotspots because it’s less likely that you’ll stumble upon them. If you’re animal or a plant, you got there because you blew there or you washed up there. So, there’s not going to be a ton of animals there. But if you’re a human, you probably intended to go there and maybe lots of humans intended to go there. So, you could actually find lots of people there with their languages.
BEN: I think a good test case here is something like Papua New Guinea, which famously has crazy high linguistic diversity, like so, so many different little languages. Very big, so that tracks. But also, very close to heaps of other things. Papua New Guinea is like sandwiched right in the middle of just heaps of stuff, so makes sense?
DANIEL: And there you go, voilà, language diversity because you’re going to bump up against people who don’t speak the same language you do. Yeah, that’s right. Did we want to talk a bit more about the lack of phonemes? Island languages tend to have way fewer phonemes, fewer sounds than mainland ones.
BEN: Well, you used to give me an explanation for this, but then you took it away and it was my favorite linguistics fact, and you took it from me.
DANIEL: Well, maybe we can give it back. What was it?
BEN: The idea that as you follow the leading edge of the out-of-Africa migration patterns, you essentially have the people who have had the least time stationary amongst other human beings to build up this phonemic inventory. So, if we sort of… The out-of-Africa arrows, which I’m sure most of us have seen on like textbooks and images and stuff is like we all began life in Africa and then some arrows go up into Europe and some arrows go out into Asia and some arrows go down into the sort of like Pacific islands, Australia, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The people who got to Polynesia, who got to Hawaii, who got to Rapa Nui were kind of consistently… goddamn, they are the OG explorers. Because as humans kept expanding to where humans had not previously been, they were the people who were just like always at the leading edge. And I don’t obviously mean contemporary Polynesians were, but if you are, say, Polynesians in the… I’m going to pull a number out of my head, like the 1200s is like one of the Polynesian expansion waves where islands were still being discovered and settled by Polynesians.
DANIEL: Yeah, the migration started around 3,000 years ago, but some of them were closer to about 1000 years ago.
BEN: Anyway, point being, those people at the leading edge of that wave of human settlement and migration have had the least opportunity for linguistic diversity. And conversely, if you go all the way back home to parts of Africa where humans sort of like came from, their phonemic inventory is bananas, right? That’s where you get click languages. And they’ve got phoneme counts in like the 60s and 70s, I think. And English clocking in at like 40s something.
DANIEL: 40ish. Yeah, that’s right.
BEN: Yeah. So, that was my favorite ever linguistic fact. And then once upon a time, Daniel was like, “Oh, it turns out that’s not a thing.” And I was like, “Well, fuck you, Daniel.”
DANIEL: This has gone back and forth. What we’re describing is something called the founder effect. For example, biologically, when a community goes off to an island, they can take some of the members, but not all. So, there’s a loss of diversity, there’s a little bit of a bottleneck. And that can happen for sounds as well. So, this work comes from Dr. Quentin Atkinson and a team back in 2011, where they pointed out that the farther you get away Africa, the fewer phonemes you tend to have.
Now, I tried to find some work debunking this, but instead I just found it confirmed by Joaquim Fort and Joaquim Perez-Losada in 2016. So, the work seems pretty solid for now. The only thing that I might add, or that Hedvig might add, was that farther away, languages might have lost phonemes, or the African languages might have gained them through contact or not. And also, the kinds of sounds that you look at might matter as well. But at this stage, I’m willing to say that founder effect in phonemes is back on the table.
BEN: Woohoo. Well, now, whenever people be like, “Oh, you do a linguistics podcast? What’s your favorite linguistics fact?” I’d be like ha-ha-ha
DANIEL: Founder effect on islands.
BEN: Not just islands though, but like everywhere.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true. Well, let’s go on to our last story, which is, coincidentally, about Indonesia.
BEN: Ooh, fun.
DANIEL: Hedvig, take it. You’re not Hedvig. Diego, take it, please.
DIEGO: [LAUGHS] If only. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Yes, so on the island of Bhutan in eastern Indonesia, the speakers of a smaller indigenous language called Bahasa Cia-Cia… I hope I’m saying that right.
DANIEL: I wasn’t sure. I tried to find that out too.
DIEGO: Yeah, they have been using the Korean Hangul alphabet… It’s not really an alphabet, but that writing system to write their completely unrelated language.
BEN: What? That’s so cool, why?
DANIEL: It is cool.
BEN: Of all of the things to settle on, how did they arrive there?
DIEGO: There was a cultural exchange between the people of this community in Indonesia and some Korean scholars back in 2009.
BEN: Okay, for a second, Diego, I thought you were about to say a whole bunch of the young folk just went crazy hard on K-dramas and K-pop. I was going to be like, “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.”
DIEGO: I mean, that could have been the inspiration, but it seems to mainly have to do with the fact that their language is just better represented using the Korean writing system, and it’s just proven better for them.
DANIEL: So, just a bit of fact, the Cia-Cia language spoken… I don’t want to say Cia-Cia. I hope I’m getting it right. Cia-Cia.
DIEGO: Bahasa Cia-Cia.
DANIEL: Okay. Bahasa Cia-Cia, it’s spoken by about 80,000 people in Southeast Sulawesi, and it looks like it’s been privately taught to schoolchildren in Hangul since 2008. But now, it looks like schools are using it and it’s spreading a bit, partly because of that one cultural exchange that happened between scholars in 2009 and now here we are.
BEN: Can we do a quick check-in? And if I’m asking things that you guys don’t know, then you can cut this, Daniel. But should we do just like a whistle stop tour of the contemporary idea of Indonesian as a language?
DANIEL: Oh, sure. Go ahead.
BEN: Because I feel like some humans out there might being like, “Oh, okay, cool. Indonesian is a thing that exists and it’s a language and everyone Indonesia speaks it,” which is like sort of true, but also doesn’t acknowledge where Indonesian came from, which is a pretty sordid tale in its own way.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yep.
BEN: My understanding is that in the 1970s, the Indonesian government basically just cracked the shits and was like, “Right, fuck it.” Like, we’ve got…
DANIEL: “We’re going to have one language and we’re going to call it Indonesian.”
BEN: “We’ve got like a thousand different languages across our tremendously huge archipelago nation, most of which are like mutually unintelligible. So, we’re just going to kind of make a conlang, like a little bit largely borrowed from Malaysian”?
DANIEL: There are quite a few languages that are real natural languages, but which governments have had a hand in constructing or standardizing. I feel like Italian is like that. German, we had Doug Harper telling us German is a lot like that.
BEN: Okay, I guess that’s true.
DANIEL: I think this kind of thing is a lot more common than you would think.
BEN: Perhaps, just maybe more recent than we in the west are accustomed to. Like, in the living memory of many Indonesians, there was a time where there was thousand languages and then there was a time where there was one language.
DANIEL: I mean, those languages are still there.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: It’s just that one variety of the language will be made out to be THE standard, even though not many people use it as their normal everyday language. Modern standard Arabic is like that. Lots of people understand it, but most people use something else day to day. I feel like in the nation state ideology that we have, we just have this thing where, “Oh, country, one language,” or, “It’s preferable to have one language.” And that doesn’t mean that it’s true, but…
BEN: And you do… Look, as we often say, devils do not need any further advocates. And the Indonesian government is far from like above reproach when it comes to things like human rights issues and corruption and a bunch of other stuff. But just for a second, I have to acknowledge that trying to govern a place with a thousand languages without a lingua franca would be really challenging. Like, that would come with a huge suite of issues, which does not mean we should necessarily force everyone to speak one language, but to acknowledge that there’s a reason people aren’t just doing it willy nilly.
DANIEL: That is a really good point. I noticed this quote from an ABC article. This is from a scholar. I’m trying to find the scholar’s name, Abadin. There’s someone quoted here named Abadin who says “In Latin words, there’s no agreed way to pronounce the sounds, fah or tah. But after I learned Korean, it turns out there are Korean characters for the sounds.” And I thought, “Okay, I know that I like the Latin script. It’s the one that I know best. So, that’s cool.” It seems to work well enough for most purposes. And so, sort of picking Korean, yeah, it’s syllabic, and that’s cool. But it seems like a bit of a funny little quirk of history that they decided to take on this script. But if it helps that language to survive, then I’m all for it. I hope they like it. I hope it makes them happy. So happy that they laugh. And when they write that laugh, it will look like this. Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka.
BEN: Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka. I’m always a fan of stuff that is just a bit punk. And this just seems like a bit punk. Like, they’ve gone, “I’m going to do Korean characters. Take that, the world.”
DANIEL: Latin. It’s a cool script.
BEN: Yeah, totally. And it’s very unique, like, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Korean peninsula being so close and having been conquered many, many times by both China and Japan, would have a writing style based on those two, because those two writing styles are related anyway, but it’s totally not. It’s like a completely different thing, visually distinct in every way. And that’s really baller, that’s really cool.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I’m going to drop on our show notes page at becauselanguage.com, a link to a children’s book that I bought for my girls called King Sejong Invents an Alphabet, and it’s about the creation of the Hangul script. It’s told in a way that a child can understand. And then at the end of the book, it says, “Now that we’ve told you the story, here are the things that maybe are a bit different than we just told you in the story.” Which I thought…
BEN: This is the fun bit. And now, here’s the truth.
DANIEL: Now, here’s the true bit. That’s very good. [DIEGO LAUGHS] Thank you, Diego, for all these stories. Are you ready for some Related or Not?
BEN: Yes.
DIEGO: Let’s do it.
DANIEL: All right.
[NEW RELATED OR NOT THEME SONG]
GORDON [SINGS]: Hey, get ready. It’s time to start the game.
Which of these words come from words which were the same?
Do they share a common ancestor like the ornage and kumquat?
Though it might be their similarities amount to diddly squat.
Are they related or not?
Can you see how they’re connected? Can you trace the dots?
You don’t need to be a linguist or even a polyglot.
Are they related or not?
It doesn’t matter if they sound the same or if they’re close semantically.
The question is whether they exist on the same branch of the etymological tree.
Are they related or not?
The aim of the game is in the name.
Are they related or not?
Play it at home or on a train.
Are they related or not?
Say it out loud, or in your brain.
Are they related or not?
DANIEL: There’s our Related or Not theme song from Gordon. Thanks, Gordon. And now, Diego’s brought some words. Diego, fuck us up.
DIEGO: Yes. All right. I mean, the stakes are pretty high. There’s no Hedvig to help you.
DANIEL: I know. I know. She can’t help us out.
DIEGO: Even up the distribution. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. You and me, Ben, head-to-head.
BEN: I’ve got this.
DIEGO: So, the first pair of words are CLEAN and CLEAR.
DANIEL: CLEAN and CLEAR. When you clean a room, you clear it away. And then, it’s clear and clean.
BEN: CLEAN and CLEAR. Claro. I’m going to go… I’m jumping in hot. I’m coming in fast, as is my wont. I am going, not related. I feel like clear. I’m having something in my head that in the romance languages, there’s like, claro, claris, that sort of thing. Whereas clean, feeling different to me, feeling distinct, feeling unrelated.
DANIEL: I am going to say the same thing. I happen to know that CLEAN is from Old English, clæne. That’s how they used to say it. And I thought, CLEAR, that’s more Latin. That’s got to be something different. So, I think Ben and I are both saying not related. Were we correct?
BEN: By the way, Daniel, you’re just like a total copycat. You look like a total little bitch. That’s fine.
DANIEL: I know. I’m totally ganking your answer.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Hey, man, quit bogarting my answers.
DIEGO: All right. Well, you are both correct.
BEN: Yes.
DIEGO: They are not related.
BEN: Did we get both of the roots right? Like, I got Latin and he got Germanic or whatever it was. I wasn’t listening because he’s dumb.
DIEGO: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, CLEAN is Old English clæne. Free from dirt or filth. But I found it really interesting when you trace it back, it’s cognate with klein as in small in German.
DANIEL: Oh, cute.
DIEGO: Something having to do with morally pure and chaste and innocent and delicate and fine and so, yeah.
BEN: Fascinating.
DIEGO: And like you guys said, clear is from French cler, which is from Latin clarus, which meant clear and loud for sounds, but also bright for sights. So, like clear as in being able to hear something clearly or see something clearly, both of those meanings are really…
DANIEL: Easy to perceive.
BEN: That’s so fascinating that the linkage between those ideas goes that far back.
DIEGO: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s cool. All right, one-on-one. Let’s go for the second one.
DIEGO: All right, so the next two sets are sets of three, so it’s going to be a little trickier. So, are any of these related? ALCOVE, COVE, and CAVE.
BEN: Oooh.
DANIEL: I should go first this time. So, I’m looking at COVE and I’m looking at ALCOVE, and I’m thinking Arabic influence. Somebody took a COVE, ran it through Arabic and said, “That’s my word.” Okay, I think those two are related and I think CAVE is different.
BEN: Okay. My red herring meter is going off ferociously. This is like playing Connections. Like, there’s just some stuff here that should not…
DANIEL: Do not trust. Do not trust!
BEN: Yeah, because it seems on a surface level like all three of these things should be very related because they are very semantically related. A cove is like a carved-out space within a coastline. A cave is exactly the same thing in a cliff. And an alcove is exactly the same thing in a fricking wall.
DANIEL: Don’t trust it! It’s a trap!
BEN: No, I’m doing it! I’m doing it because I’m not a little follower like you, Daniel. I’m saying all three are related. And by the way, if I get that right, I get a bonus point. ‘Cause there’s three here.
DANIEL: Oho! No, I’ll give you. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give it to you. All right, Diego, how did we do?
DIEGO: So, I guess neither one of you… Well, so Ben is wrong and Daniel is kind of wrong.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yes.
DIEGO: So, none of them are related.
BEN: I’ll take it. I’ll take it.
DANIEL: None of them are related.
BEN: I don’t have to win. I just have to have Daniel not beat me.
DANIEL: Yeah, but I’m one ahead of you, so you know.
BEN: Nuh-uh. We got the same point on the last one.
DANIEL: No, no, no. Because I thought ALCOVE and COVE are related, but CAVE was the different one.
BEN: No, no, no. I only get a bonus point if I get it right. I don’t get extra… I don’t minus more for getting it wrong.
DANIEL: No, no, no. But you said they were all related and guess how many were related? Bomp-bomp.
BEN: Yeah, I know. So, you’re not ahead of me. You don’t get any bonus for that. There was none related for you either. They’re all unrelated.
DANIEL: We can dispute the scoring as we go.
BEN: You don’t get bonus for… [MAKES ANGRY NOISES]
DANIEL: Diego, tell us what’s going wrong.
DIEGO: That’s what we need Hedvig for.
DANIEL: No, she would just add more confusion.
BEN: Okay, okay, lay it on us, Diego. I’ll beat Daniel up later. It’s fine.
DANIEL: You can’t find me.
DIEGO: So, Daniel was right about ALCOVE ultimately coming from Arabic, al-qobbah, which meant the vaulted chamber. And then, it passed from Arabic to Spanish alcoba, and then to French, alcove. So that’s Arabic. Then, COVE apparently comes from the Old English word cofa, which was a small chamber or cell. And that’s from a Proto-Germanic word, *kubon. And then, CAVE is from Old French via Latin, and it’s originally used to refer to a hollow place, sorry, cavea, in Latin.
BEN: Wow.
DIEGO: So, yeah, none of them are related.
DANIEL: It’s enough to make you think that the way things attract certain sounds to them. I have seen every once in a while, somebody try to make this argument, “Oh, no, no. There’s a natural thing that this kind of thing attracts these sounds.” Boy, sometimes, you can get that idea.
BEN: You would think though that like all of those things would attract a sound that echoes really well, and CAVE kind of doesn’t. If I was to subscribe to that thinking, I would be like, “Ah, they should all be called, like, peppo or something.”
DANIEL: Ba-ba-ba-ba… But no, it’s just a cave.
BEN: All right. Just to be clear.
DANIEL: Okay, it’s time to close this off. I’m a little bit ahead of you.
BEN: We are tied on point each, because Daniel does not get points for identifying that things are not related. Dumb, dumb, really dumb. So, at one point each, what is the final round, Diego?
DANIEL: It’s all come down to this.
DIEGO: We need to come up with an official point scale.
DANIEL: That’s it.
DIEGO: So, the last set of words are three senses of the word, SCALE. So, the SCALES that you find on an animal. SCALE as in the weighing device. And then SCALE, like the verb to climb, like to scale a mountain. So, are any of these three related?
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
BEN: Ooh, I’ve got a really hot take for this.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I think the SCALE for weight and the SCALE for climb are related. And I think that might… This is whack a doodle, and I’m so ready to be wrong on this. But I think it might come from the pathway of scale as a size adjustment. To scale something means to make it bigger or smaller. And so, to scale something means to climb the big thing or to climb up a thing or something like that. So, I’m saying weight and climb senses are related. And then, fishy, fishy body ornamentation.
DANIEL: Yeah, the fishy kind, not related. Whenever I try to solve these, I say, “What’s a unifying sense?” And then, I start looking at the words. It’s like, okay, climbing scale, what’s some other words? Like escalator, something like that? Scale, that’s as far as I can go. Then, to weigh. To weigh something is to tell something from something else, that was no help. And then, the skin kind like snakes have, I thought, “I’ll bet skeletal. Skeletal has something to do with this.” And then, I remembered that there’s a Proto-Indo-European root *skel-, to cut off or to separate, because we talked about that one before. We had that with *skel- and *sker-, and because we were talking about scrape or something once. Okay, so my answer was, they’re all related, but you got to go to Proto-Indo-European skell to get there.
BEN: But hang on. I feel like we have said. We have said. I was giving you space, Daniel. I was being polite. I was removing myself, distancing, giving you the pulpit, but now I feel compelled, Daniel, to say…
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: …are we not saying that Proto-Indo-European is out?
DANIEL: I think we might be saying that Proto-Indo-European is a bit speculative. It was Anatoly Lieberman who told us, “in the starry sky of etymology” — because it’s got little stars. You put stars by those proto-Indo-European words — He says, “In the starry sky of etymology, it’s very easy to break one’s leg.”
BEN: It’s like a messy swamp by that point.
DANIEL: Okay, so in that case, I said all related. I’m just going to stick with it.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: All related.
BEN: Okay.
DIEGO: All right. So once again, kind of a mixed bag. Two of them are related and one of them is not.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DIEGO: So, I don’t know how you want to count that.
DANIEL: Which ones?
DIEGO: Okay, so the animal SCALE and the SCALE that you use to weigh are the two that are related.
BEN: Damn it.
DANIEL: Dang it.
DIEGO: And the one meaning to climb is not related.
BEN: Argh. So, okay, how are… Did we weigh stuff with scales? Was that a thing?
DIEGO: It’s a little farfetched, I guess, as we, in retrospect, for us, easy to say. So, the scale for animal comes from Old French, escale, which meant scale or cup or husk or shell pod. And that apparently is a Frankish borrowing, *skala, which meant to split or divide. And, Daniel, you’re correct. That ultimately comes from the proto-Indo-European root, *skel-, meaning to cut. So, I guess at some point in history, there was a half of a shell, a split of the shell that was used as a drinking cup or as a pan for weighing. So, by the early 1400s, the meaning had been extended to the thing that you put something else on to get the weight for the balance. And then, it got extended to the entire instrument, and that’s why it’s called a scale.
BEN: That’s so fascinating.
DANIEL: And then to climb? The one that’s unrelated?
DIEGO: Right. And so that is from Latin, scala, which is a ladder or a flight of stairs.
BEN: Ah, there you go.
DANIEL: Very cool. All right, so how did we do? Was it a tie? It’s a tie.
BEN: No, Daniel.
DANIEL: We crossed the finish line together.
DIEGO: I… let’s just call it a tie.
BEN: No, Daniel, you got one point on me.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: Yeah, at the end there, because you got one of the relateds. That was correct.
DANIEL: I guess so. But you know what, Ben? I will look back at your inert body, lifeless on the track, and I will pick you up and I will cross the finish line with you.
BEN: With my corpse. You will drag my corpse under the line. Thank you, Daniel.
DANIEL: And I’ll say, “Why? Why must this happen to my chum? my cockmate?”
BEN: Oh, Jesus. Good callback. Good callback.
DANIEL: Thank you. And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. Diego, you brought three words for us. What do we got?
DIEGO: Yes. So, the first one is near and dear to my heart. It’s the Argentinian and Uruguayan quintessential word, CHE.
DANIEL: I’ve heard this a lot…
DIEGO: Which you may know from Che Guevara, who was Argentinian, so he popularized it outside of the Spanish-speaking world. But within the Spanish-speaking world, it’s one of the quintessential words that kind of sets apart the way that we talk in a good chunk of Argentina and Uruguay.
BEN: So, for non-Spaniards, for those of us who do not speak Spanish, is there a good? So, are you saying it’s a shibboleth? Like, it is a word that will distinguish one group of people from another group of people? But are you also saying… I got what you were saying that, but are you also saying that it’s like one of those words that’s just like, crazy, semantically ambiguous, and useful in like a billion different…?
DIEGO: You can pretty much use it any way you would use HEY in English. So, to get somebody’s attention or to express shock or surprise, like, “Hey, are you sure you want to do that? Or, “Hey, why don’t you come over?” Or also just like, “Hey, let me get your attention.” So, I don’t know so much as a shibboleth as much as one of the things that people will say to me when they find out that I’m Argentinian or that my family’s from Argentina, they’ll throw out the same three or four words in a very stereotypical… Very exaggerated Argentinian accent.
BEN: Gotcha.
DIEGO: It’s always one of the three or four words that comes up.
BEN: So, it would be the same as like us hearing that a person is Irish and then be like, “Oh, you’re from Ireland, are ya. Tiddly tea potatoes.”
DANIEL: Ben!
DIEGO: Right, right. Or somebody telling you, “Throw another shrimp on the barbie.”
BEN: So good to know that there’s jerks everywhere, so refreshing.
DANIEL: So, why did this reach your attention this week?
DIEGO: Yes, because unbeknownst to me, it wasn’t in the dictionary, or at least not in the Spanish Royal Academy’s dictionary. And it’s one of…
DANIEL: Them again.
DIEGO: …the words that has been incorporated into their latest edition. So, it’s finally being recognized…
BEN: They acquiesced.
DIEGO: …by the governing body.
DANIEL: Why did it take so long for them to recognize it?
DIEGO: I mean, it’s hard to say. And like I said, I mean, it’s kind of that situation of you don’t need a dictionary to tell you that a word that you use every day is a word, but probably for the same reason as the ja, ja, ja thing. I’m sure they’re just trying to stay relevant. I mean, this is something easy. It doesn’t hurt anybody. Everybody already knows that it’s a word that we use. So, I think it helps them look good and yeah, free publicity.
BEN: Can I be cheeky and put you on the spot and make you an impromptu translator? Can you read out the definition and translate it into English so that we know what it is they’ve put in?
DIEGO: Yeah. It says here, “En su sitio web oficial, la RAE define CHE como una expresión usada para llamar la atención, detener o pedir atención a alguien, o para denotar asombro o sorpresa.” So, it’s used to call attention, to stop or ask for somebody’s attention, or to denote awe or surprise.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: Okay, awesome. Okay, cool. All right, so CHE, that’s one of our words. What’s next?
DIEGO: Che.
DANIEL: Che.
DIEGO: So, the second one is DROIDSPEAK. And we’re not talking about Star Wars.
DANIEL: Darn.
DIEGO: But I guess as AI is different, AI entities or agents collaborate and talk to each other, a lot of times for the large language models, they’ll do it in natural language and human language, and oftentimes it’ll be English. And they’re realizing that it’s not as efficient, having the two AI agents communicate using human language. So, Microsoft has essentially developed a new communication system so that they can actually streamline and be more efficient in sharing the information. Yeah, I guess it says it makes it almost three times faster and it’s more accurate. So pretty much, AIs, in addition to doing everything that they already do, now they’re getting their own languages.
BEN: So, there’s obviously the initial… like, this feels pretty Skynetty sort of thing to this. Maybe we shouldn’t give the machines a language that they can speak to each other that we don’t understand because that seems like really, a very short hop to plotting. And we want them to be plot-not-adjacent. But that’s just me being a bit silly. If this does meaningfully reduce the computational load of what a lot of these models are doing, this potentially is actually a very good thing.
The power draw on AI at the moment is wild. Like, Amazon, Microsoft, all of these people are exploring nuclear facilities to be able to simultaneously power their AI systems and meet their like carbon-neutral things that they all set down in writing before AI came along and before they had to just like get dump trucks of GPUs from Nvidia, like dumped on their doorstep and then hooking them all up to power. So, if it is a genuine significant increase in efficiency, that could actually be really cool. And you would have to imagine it would be. Like, if you’re not mounting the natural language processing on both ends of two models interacting with each other, that would be a pretty significant saving, I would think.
DANIEL: Well, here’s what’s happening and it’s not as scary as all that. This is the words of the authors. I looked at the article. There’s going to be a link on becauselanguage.com in the show notes for this episode. Yuhan Liu of the University of Chicago and a team from Microsoft, this is on arXiv, they say, “The communication often includes the full context of the query so far.” That is to say, when two large language models or two AIs are communicating with each other, they have to include all of the context going back to the quote, which can introduce significant pre-fill phase latency, especially with long contexts.
So, this team had the idea of including all the context from the conversation in a more compact form. Now, how do you do that? Well, normally bot 1 sends the query, but also sends a lot of context to make it make sense, because that’s how they understand things. And then bot 2 takes all of that context and generates a high-level mathematical representation of it so that bot 2 knows what bot 1 was talking about and then bot 2 can respond. So, what this does is instead of bot 1 sending over all the context so that bot 2 can make a mathematical representation of it, bot 1 simply sends a mathematical representation of the context to bot 2, boom, done.
BEN: So, it does improve speed, but it’s probably not improving power usage very much because the same fundamental computation is taking place.
DANIEL: They say that it achieves up to a 2.78 times speed up in pre-fill latency with negligible loss in accuracy. So, it’s going to happen easier, quicker, and with less computation. I think those are good things.
BEN: Can I ask a bit of a dummy Ben question? What role is being served with AIs talking to each other? Why would Microsoft be doing that? What does that get them?
DANIEL: Well, then my AI can use language to communicate with… I don’t know, what’s their… Expedia? Is that their travel service? I can send queries to them, and they can send answers back to me and we can be communicating.
BEN: Okay, sorry, I see. I thought it was like you get ChatGPT and Gemini to talk to each other or something like that, but that’s not what’s going on. It’s almost like an API for AIs, I guess.
DANIEL: Precisely. Any system that uses a large language model to send text around the web will be able to do this better. That’s a good thing.
BEN: Yeah. Fair enough.
DANIEL: All right, what’s our last one?
DIEGO: All right, and the last word is more so a hashtag. It’s #XODUS and it’s XODUS spelled without the “e.” And it’s pretty much in reference to large numbers of users leaving the Twitter X platform and going to Bluesky. And a lot of notable celebrities are following the trend as well and promoting this hashtag to kind of announce when they’re leaving Twitter and joining Bluesky. So, it looks like 20 million users have switched so far and there’s almost 1 million users per day that are joining Bluesky. So, it’s a good time for Bluesky right now.
BEN: Wow. I’d be really curious to watch what those numbers do. Like, 1 million a day when you have 20 million is like, what’s that, like 5% a day. That’s huge. I really hope this is a thing and it isn’t. What was Google’s social media called? G Plus.
DANIEL: It was Google Plus.
BEN: Google Plus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really just hope it doesn’t go in that direction. Like this sad anemic death over years. I want it to work. Anything that sticks it to old boy Musk, I’m a huge fan of.
DANIEL: Well, I do notice that we’re getting more engagement on Bluesky with less followers. I still go to Twitter sometimes for news about stuff, but it is getting worse. Feels a bit emptier. Maybe that’s just because the content creators I used to follow have more or less outed themselves as terrible people and I have muted them, but Bluesky’s fun.
BEN: I’ve never spent a lot of time on Twitter basically ever.
DANIEL: No, yeah. Even after stealing Ben Ainslie the sailing guy’s account.
BEN: So, he’s the real Ben Ainslie. Except he’s not, he’s Benedict. Imposter. Anyway, Sorry.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: And it’s his middle name as well. Anyway, anyway, anyway…
DANIEL: You’ve earned it. You’ve got nothing to prove.
BEN: My sense, my feeling is that what is sort of currently happening to Twitter is what happened to Facebook a while ago. Like, as I scroll through Facebook now, which is uncommon, but when I do, it’s just sewage. Like, it’s just AI slop and like thrice-reduced memes that have like gone through first Reddit and then Instagram and then something else and then like your grandma’s WhatsApp chain and then made its way to some like bot-driven chumbox. Like, it’s just so… I don’t even want to say evil. It’s not evil. It’s just so gross. It’s like there’s nothing there. There’s no… And it feels like, correct me if I’m wrong, but the sense that I get is that is slowly happening to Twitter and what you’re getting is more like of that sort of AI-bot driven, like I just want some eyeballs on this content kind of stuff.
DANIEL: Mm. Here’s the thing that I’ve noticed when people have invested a lot of time into a site, there’s a lot of resistance to leaving. I mean, we already know about the dynamic of enshittification. We say, “Ugh, this has become terrible, but it’s too much work to leave. All my friends are here.” It takes a lot of horribleness to make people leave for a different platform. But once they do, those people never come back. They never come back. So, if we want people to leave Twitter for Bluesky, the goal is to make Bluesky fun and awesome. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy. Just post awesome stuff and share awesome stuff from fun people. And if somebody’s making the experience bad, just mute them or block them and then it will be fun for everybody.
I said this in our last episode. If you do linguistic research, if you are a linguistic researcher and you’re putting out articles or books, I find a lot of things online and Bluesky is now going to be the place that I will probably find you. Oh, and Diego will probably find you as well. So, CHE, DROIDSPEAK, and #XODUS: our Words of the Week.
Big thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. Thanks to patrons for keeping the show going. And, Diego, our special guest curator. I’d just like to say, Diego Diaz, thank you so much. MVP for this episode.
BEN: Definitely.
DIEGO: Yes. Yes. Always a good time. Always a good time.
BEN: Hey, if you enjoyed today’s show, there’s all sorts of things you could do to help make the show even more awesome. You can follow us. We are @becauselangpod just about everywhere. As we’ve just mentioned though, you’ll find us on Bluesky more than other places. You can send us ideas. We really like it when you use your voice and you can do that at SpeakPipe and if you just—you’ll find the button at our website, becauselanguage.com and you can also just send us a good old-fashioned email, hello@becauselanguage.com and it will go into Daniel’s inbox, and he will read it.
You can also tell a mate because word of mouth is great and it’s fun and that’s how all the cool stuff in my life got to me, is because someone who I like was like, “Hey, you should check this thing out.” And then, I don’t watch it for like six months and then I finally get around to watching it and then I’m like, “Oh my God, that show is amazing.” And they rage at me because they’re like, “Yeah, I know, it was amazing six months ago when I told you about it.” Anyway, yeah, that’s some stuff you can do.
DANIEL: Takes about four times, doesn’t it, to hear a thing before it really sinks in? Another thing you can do is become a patron. Patrons help us by giving us some dough so that we can keep the lights on, keep the bills running, and make mixed metaphors. Depending on your level, you get live episodes, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, access to our awesome Discord community of lovely people.
I would just like to give a shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. As you know, sometimes I like to mix things up. I like to do things in a different order. This time we’re ordering our supporters by the number of syllables longest, first. And if people have the same number of syllables, then I’m going to order it by the syllable that the stress falls on and alphabetical from there.
So, the very longest name. Andy from Logophilius. The next longest Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ. Now, we’re down to the four syllables, Ariaflame. She’s up top because stress is on the first syllable. Chris W.
BEN: Oh. I see what you did there. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. Felicity, Ignacio, Canny Archer, that’s on three. Sonic Snejhog, gramaryen. Now, all you three-syllable people, aengryballs, Kristofer, Margareth, Meredith, Nikoli, PharaohKatt, Alyssa, Ayesha, Diego, Elías, Joanna, [WITH BEN] LordMortis. Now for the two’s, Aldo, Amy, Andy, Helen, J0HNTR0Y, gets stress on both, but okay. Kathy, Kevin, Larry, Lyssa, Molly, Nasrin, Nigel, [WITH BEN] O Tim, Rachel, Rodger, Termy, Tony, Whitney, Wolfdog, [howls Amir, Chris L, Colleen, Luis, Manú, Rene, Rhian. And now all you one-syllable folks, Jack, Kate, Keith, Matt, sæ̃m, Stan, Steele, and Tadhg. And our latest free members, Rong and utarzan. Thanks to all our patrons.
BEN: I think it’s definitive proof that English is just busted as a language, when you have organized this list by how many syllables there are in the word, and there is absolutely no consistency with word length all the way down this list. Like, Colleen, one of the longer names in the list is like nearly at the end. It’s… Arghh—Just…
DANIEL: Yeah, but that’s…
BEN: English go home. You’re drunk.
DANIEL: Take it, Diego.
DIEGO: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Kraplianov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Yay, Diego.
BEN: Well done.
DANIEL: Thank you, thank you. While you’re looking that up, can I just talk about how weird Argentine Spanish is? Like, I dated somebody who went on a Mormon mission to Argentina, and I kept noticing weird little things. Like, we were playing a game once and she said, “Tócame.” She said, “Touch me,” and I’m like, “What?” And she looked up at me confused and said, “Tócame, a mi me toca. When you say in Spanish, “It touches me,” that’s the way of saying, “It’s my turn.” But she didn’t say, “A mi me toca.” She said, “Tócame,” which sounded like, “Touch me.” I was like, “What?” There were just lots of weird little things like that.
DIEGO: Yeah, yeah. We’re pretty famous for how we talk.
[LAUGHTER]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]