You know the story. The language you speak doesn’t determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there’s no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are separate.
Well, maybe it’s time to revisit this. Séan Roberts and Cole Robertson are finding a cognitive connection, not with how our language makes us talk about the future, but with how our language lets us express uncertainty.
Also, Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig Skirgård team up to test out language universals. Which ones are getting knocked over?
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:36
- News: 6:08
- Chat with Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig Skirgård: 23:06
- Related or Not: 49:22
- Interview with Séan Roberts and Cole Robertson: 1:10:38
- Words of the Week: 2:18:09
- Comments: 2:37:20
- The Reads: 2:42:37
- Outtakes: 2:50:05
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@becauselangpod Related or not? CAST and CASTER You know, those wheels on a bed. Surely you didn't want that bed to stay where it is. From our episode 130: Back to the FTR http://becauselanguage.com
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Large linguistic models: Investigating LLMs’ metalinguistic abilities
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11022724
Wei et al., 2022. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
Enduring patterns in world’s languages: One-third of grammatical ‘universals’ stand up to rigorous testing
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-patterns-world-languages-grammatical-universals.html
Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02325-z
Greenberg’s list of universals
https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/05/greenbergs-list-of-universals/
Low-certainty modals not future tenses cause increased psychological discounting in English relative to Dutch
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106338
Language about the future on social media as a novel marker of anxiety and depression: A big-data and experimental analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666518223000098
[PDF] Chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf
Replicated typo: Uncovering spurious correlations between language and culture
http://www.replicatedtypo.com/uncovering-spurious-correlations-between-language-and-culture/6396.html
Seán G. Roberts , James Winters, and Keith Chen: Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132145
Spurious correlations by Annemarie Verkerk
https://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.com/2017/03/spurious-correlations.html
(Funny how Annemarie was writing about Roberts’ work on this in 2017, and now we have them both on this episode!)
How The Viral “Everyone Is 12 Now” Theory Just Might Explain Everything That’s Happening In America Today
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-193144275.html
@vibingranolamom All my anemic girlies this one is for you 💀 #soup #period #highiron #plantiron #vegan #veganrecipes #periodpositivity #momsoftiktok #womenshealth #anemia ♬ Little Things – Adrián Berenguer
What Is the “Bean Soup Theory” on TikTok?
https://www.insidehook.com/internet/bean-soup-theory-tiktok
The neologism ‘LLM grooming’ explained
https://englishinprogress.net/neologisms/llm-grooming-explained/
‘May I Meet You?’ The Pick-Up Line Meme, Explained
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/11/18/may-i-meet-you-the-pick-up-line-meme-explained/
Kajkavian (language) | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kajkavian
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: By the way, had a birthday party for my oldest daughter. Tried to bait the kids into a 6-7. Didn’t work. I think it’s passé now.
BEN: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Too many people know about it.
BEN: When sad, tired, old dads like Daniel are trying to get in on the joke, that’s how you know for sure it has died.
[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 up, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, your favourite way to express the future in English. You have to choose one. WILL, SHALL, or GONNA. Or something else. There might be others that I haven’t thought of.
HEDVIG: I’m trying to think. I’m trying to think of what I’m going to do tomorrow. And then, I’m trying to say it. Or tonight. I’m going to. Going to, going to, 100%.
DANIEL: Going to.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s a classic. Doesn’t get much better. Yep, it’s there for a reason. Okay, and our second cohost, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Hello.
DANIEL: Same question. WILL, SHALL, or GONNA?
BEN: Tomorrow, I will… My brain says it wants to say that I will, but I suspect I’m a gonna, not a going to, a gonna.
DANIEL: Yeah, gonna. It’s got to be gonna.
HEDVIG: I like that too.
DANIEL: I love SHALL. I want to bring back SHALL. Big fan of SHALL.
BEN: Oh, yuck. No. That’s as noxious to my ears as an Australian affecting APPRECIATE [si].
DANIEL: Tomorrow, I shall feast upon dainties.
HEDVIG: But you can use “I’ll” and then just be like, “Actually, it’s not ‘I will,’ it is ‘I shall,’ and I just…”
BEN: Oh. [CROSSTALK] Yeah, okay, that’s fun. You can just…
DANIEL: I don’t have to tell you that I’m thinking SHALL. I can say “I’ll,” but in my head it’s SHALL. You’ll never know my secrets.
HEDVIG: I just noticed by the way, have you noticed that AISLE in the supermarket, and, “I’LL see you tomorrow.”
BEN: Yes, that is something I have.
DANIEL: We have noticed that, yes.
HEDVIG: You’ve noticed that? I just did. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Bonus. ISLE, like the small thing in a body of water, all three.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I knew someone who had internalised that as ALL and wrote, “All be back,” A-L-L, which I thought was really interesting. Well, for this episode, we are having a chat about the future, which is why I introduced us this way. You see, we did a news item a little while ago. We were revisiting, once again, the story about if you have a grammatical future tense, do you have better savings, and we’ve long pooh-poohed this.
BEN: Oh, yes, a very Whorfian sort of idea.
HEDVIG: Memory test. Ben, do you remember… we talked about this with our guests as well, but do you remember which direction it’s supposed to go in?
BEN: Oh, if you do have future tense, you would be better at it, right?
HEDVIG: Better at saving?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s what you’d think.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: But in fact, it’s — according to work by Keith Chen, 2013, it’s the opposite, because remember… I say remember. I hardly remember. This is about temporal discounting. So, if you… according to the original Whorfian paper by Chen, if you have a grammatical future tense, then it means that your present and your future are disconnected. It’s like the future is some weird different thing and you can discount the future.
So, we mentioned an article by Dr Cole Robertson and Dr Séan Roberts, friend of the show, in which they found people on the individual level didn’t discount the future just because they had a separate future tense. It just didn’t work out that way, in fact, it worked the opposite. Well, we thought there was a little more to the story. We wanted to find out a bit more of the lore of how they got involved, how they got wrapped into this project and what their work on the future has found. So, we’re going to be having a chat with Séan and Cole for this episode.
BEN: Ooh, and we will be going to the future.
HEDVIG: I do think that they labeled our chat Back to the Future, which I thought was very funny, and I think we should keep for the episode, if we can.
DANIEL: Well, that’s why this episode is called Back to the FTR, which means Future Time Reference. So, we’ll hear that.
BEN: Oh, nested levels of meaning.
DANIEL: Our next episode is going to be our last episode of the year. It’s the Word of the Week of the Year episode. And you can get involved in lots of ways. If you are a patron, even if you’re a free patron, you can come to our live episode. We’ll have special guests. We’ll count down our Words of the Week of the Year and see which one wins. Does anybody remember our last year’s Word of the Week of the Year?
BEN: I do not.
HEDVIG: Wait, which one won?
DANIEL: Yeah, I can remember… Wait…
HEDVIG: I’m thinking really hard.
DANIEL: It was ENSHITTIFICATION. Oh, yes, I do remember now.
HEDVIG: No, that wasn’t last year, was it?
DANIEL: ENSHITTIFICATION was two years ago.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that sounds right.
DANIEL: Last year was -WASHING.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Different kinds of washing.
HEDVIG: Green washing, pink washing, sports washing.
DANIEL: Sports washing. Sanewashing, which wasn’t my favourite. Get your votes in. The other thing is, we are having our annual mailout, so patrons, please make sure that your address is correct in Patreon, if you want that. Maybe there are a lot of people who just don’t have their address on file because they don’t want it, which is fine. But if it is on file, I will send you a mailout if you are a paid patron at any level. So, we’ll have some fun stuff that way.
BEN: That’s very cool. And we didn’t end up making the Coppertone ad where my bum is like coquettishly being shown. So, don’t let that stop you becoming a patron is what I’m saying.
DANIEL: Oh, Ben, we’ve all seen your bum. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Hedvig’s face right now is a very clear like, “I haven’t. I haven’t seen Ben’s bum.”
HEDVIG: I don’t know if I want to, but I haven’t. I feel like I’m left out of something.
BEN: No, no, no.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s get to the news. You ready?
HEDVIG: Is it here?
BEN: What’s going on in the news other than my buttocks, which are obviously hot news in so many more ways than one? What linguistically is going on that is newsworthy?
DANIEL: Have you noticed how large language models are terrible at getting stuff right when it’s something that you know well?
BEN: I have noticed this, yes. I wouldn’t say terrible, but definitely not good.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: I have noticed definitely biases in training data. So, the more something is written about on the internet, the more likely it is to get it right. And when you ask it about something niche, especially if it doesn’t occur a lot on the internet, it is about to get things wrong.
DANIEL: I found that etymology is especially bad. It just makes things up terribly because it doesn’t seem to have any access to word histories.
BEN: Hallucinating with stuff, especially when you get it to cite references, is wild. It is unhinged how readily… It’s like the worst kind of undergrad student. You’ll just be like, “Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, that’s a really interesting point you made about the implications of this thing on this thing. What reference were you using to base your conclusion on?” And then they’ll say a thing and then you’ll go like, “Let’s have a check,” and it’s like that just doesn’t exist.
DANIEL: “The statistically likely thing for me to say is this paper,” and it’s just nothing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. We need to all remember that it is a fancy autocomplete. You say something it guesses that what comes next, that is it.
BEN: Why do you bring that up, Daniel?
DANIEL: How do you think they would do at linguistic analysis? Like solving the kinds of problems that linguists typically have to do.
HEDVIG: Like what? I think, for example, it wouldn’t be too bad. I would guess that if you had a text collection, a corpora, and you wanted to tag it for word class, so every word it finds, you want to know if it’s a noun, adjective, or a verb. I think it could do pretty well with that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true. But then, a simple part of speech tagger usually gets 99% and up, so I can’t say the bar is pretty high.
BEN: I would imagine, my intuitive sense would be quite good because the inner guts of a large language model… I mean, it’s in the name, right? It’s a large language model.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] True.
BEN: These things have been designed to ape and to mimic as best as is possible. And we have to say to a, like, pretty astoundingly good degree, natural human writing and speech. So clearly, something in the working there is having a really strong and nuanced understanding of linguistics and language, at least on some level. That’s my intuition.
DANIEL: Well, this paper is an attempt to test that very thing. This is work from Gaspar Begos, Maximilian Debkowski, and Ryan Rhodes. Do you know Ryan Rhodes? Pretty good follow on Bluesky.
HEDVIG: Oh, nice.
DANIEL: This is published in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. It’s open access. There’s a link in the show notes. They got lots of large language models to do four kinds of linguistic analysis. And now, I’m going to test you, Ben. Linguistic Olympics.
BEN: Oh, no. Am I dumber than a machine? The answer is almost certainly yes.
DANIEL: Hedvig will give us the answers.
HEDVIG: I’m so curious of what these tasks are, because linguistic analysis could literally be a lot of different things.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: What I love in this particular game is I have the very good job. But Hedvig has just been flung this like, PS, you just tell us whether it’s right or wrong, and she has no idea what’s coming.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’m sure that since she’s a linguist who does analysis, she’ll be great at this kind of thing. First one, this is the first task they gave it. Here’s a sentence and is this sentence ambiguous? Sentence number one. Eliza wanted her cast out. Eliza wanted her cast out.
BEN: Are we assuming all of this is the written word and not the spoken word?
DANIEL: It is written, not spoken. I was trying hard to speak it with a neutral sort of…
BEN: That is an ambiguous sentence.
DANIEL: Can you tell me how?
BEN: Because it could mean two things, and it is equally possible that either could be true. The only reason… Well, it’s actually… sorry, that’s…
HEDVIG: Tell us the two things.
BEN: So, it could be that Eliza wanted someone or something CAST OUT, as in removed from a place. But the CAST can also be a noun. It can refer to an actual object. So, it could be a CAST that a person has on their arm, or it could be a CAST, like maybe she’s an artist and she’s working with molding and casting and that sort of thing, and she wanted her cast out of the forum or something like that.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, good.
HEDVIG: I agree. I do think that it would have been better if it’s CAST OFF.
DANIEL: Perhaps. Perhaps. “She wanted her cast off.” Oh, that is very good. That’s ambiguous as well.
HEDVIG: You have your cast on your leg or something, and you want it off. Yeah.
DANIEL: Now, if I were asking Hedvig to do a thing, I would say, all right, Hedvig, please now draw a syntax tree of both of those sentences where you start with…
HEDVIG: I started… You know what?
DANIEL: I don’t want you to do it.
BEN: She’s such a nerd. She already did the homework.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: And what this looks like for anyone who’s never seen a syntax tree is it starts at the top with something like a sentence, and then that goes to something like a noun phrase and a verb phrase, and then it breaks down and breaks down. And when you get to the final end, you’ve got all the words. Eliza wanted her cast out.
HEDVIG: Eliza wanted her cast…
DANIEL: While Hedvig’s doing that, Ben, I’m going to ask you the second task. They tested these models on recursion.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Recursion is when a structure gets nested into another copy of the same structure. For example, I can have one adjective in a phrase, like “the blue rug”, or I can start doing recursion and stacking those adjectives in the same phrase, like “the big, blue, ornate, circular rug”.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: So, I gave you an example of recursion where we stack up adjectives.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: For this, they tested on a particularly tricky kind of recursion, at least for humans. It’s called center embedding. Are you ready for an example? Hedvig knows what I’m talking about.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. This is a similar problem as the CAST OFF thing.
DANIEL: Yes, it is. But I think this is a cognitive problem.
BEN: I like it. I like it. Gimme, gimme, gimme.
DANIEL: So, here’s one sentence, right?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: “The man left.” Easy. Now, I’m going to take a sentence and I’m going to embed that into the middle of the first sentence. “The man the girl saw left.” Okay, you see what I did? I stuck a sentence in the middle of that first sentence, but now I’m going to do it again. “The man the girl the dog loved saw left.”
BEN: Are we assuming there’s any punctuation in this sentence?
DANIEL: Don’t have to.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s what he’s doing with stress.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Punctuation is shorthand for stress and pauses. And Daniel is doing like: the man, the girl saw, the dog loved, left. So, imagine sort of commas.
DANIEL: “The man the girl the dog loved saw left.”
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck, you did it that way.
DANIEL: What I find here is that when you get to three levels, it just turns into gibberish. Like, when you get to that third…
BEN: Now, could I ask? It only turns into gibberish because the things that you are nesting are very, very small. So, you’ve essentially got your three layers of recursion all flopping over each other straight away. Now, if you stretch stuff out, if you added some more words in there: “The old man that the young girl, the smelly dog loved, left.”
HEDVIG: That’s the thing, you’re adding the THAT and that is helping you.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s the THAT that’s helping you. It’s not more words that’s helping you if that makes sense.
DANIEL: I think that you can give it all the help you want and it would still be just a tangle of words.
BEN: I won’t lie. I’m desperately trying to stop myself from drowning. So, I’m getting to like just my nose above water on this one.
DANIEL: We’re just not good at that level of complexity. So, bad for humans, but I could ask a large language model, “Does this sentence have recursion? Where? Please draw a tree.” Okay, here’s the third task, it involves a sentence like this. “I think she will arrive at 3.” Okay, now I’m going to take that sentence and I’m going to twiddle it. “When do you think she will arrive?” And if I were asking a linguist, I would say show me a tree for the first sentence and then show me the second tree for the second sentence, showing where the bits moved to. This is pretty tricky stuff.
BEN: All right. Okay.
DANIEL: And then, the fourth one was I could give it a phonological analysis problem very similar to the kinds I give my students, but on a made-up language. Here are some words; you’ve got to figure out which sounds are actually the same and why they’re changing into the sounds that they are. This will only make any sense to linguists. Phonological analysis problems are kind of like a second-year thing.
HEDVIG: Can I ask a question?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Large language models in the kind of like autocompleting shouldn’t really be that good necessarily at doing these things because it’s kind of in a way mainly influenced by its training material and some added skeletons. Lately, we’ve seen a lot of AI agents being added what’s called like reasoning or like tools. So famously, in the beginning, people would say like, “What’s five plus two?” And it’d be like, “I don’t know, eight?” And they’d be like, “Well, good work.” But if it knows to ask its little calculator tool, [WHISPERS] “What’s five plus two?” And it says, “Actually, that’s seven.” “It’s seven,” then it can do better. But that is no longer a bare language model, if you know what I mean.
DANIEL: Correct.
BEN: That’s a more comprehensive product.
DANIEL: It’s stapled to different tools. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yes. So, in this paper, when it was able to, for example, draw trees, was it just a plain large language model?
DANIEL: All of the models were just plain large language models. Here they were. They used Llama, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and OpenAI’s o1.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
BEN: Now again, I’m wondering if this is to do with the fact that large languages…
DANIEL: Hang on, I haven’t told you how they did.
BEN: Oh, okay, sorry. I’m assuming it’s news because they did good. Like, you’re not going to do the story because it was like: And it was all terrible.
DANIEL: They were all terrible. Except for one.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Except for one. OpenAI’s o1 did a great job, actually managed to answer these hard linguistic questions, even on made up data, very, very well.
BEN: Which one is that o1 one?
DANIEL: o1 is… What even is o1?
HEDVIG: [READS] “We’re releasing a preview of OpenAI o1, a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond.”
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I think it’s their most advanced one.
DANIEL: It’s their most advanced one.
HEDVIG: “With a first series of reasoning models.” It’s not a bare language…
DANIEL: It isn’t handing off jobs to different capable tools. It’s still a language model. Here’s the difference. It uses something called a chain-of-thought mechanism. Now usually, a chain of thought is something you do in your prompts to guide the model bit by bit. You break the task down and you say, “For this first bit, think about this. Now that you’ve got that, give me the answer to this second step. Now, the third step, now the fourth step.” And you do that bit by bit to avoid errors. But o1 has a chain-of-thought mechanism built into it.
BEN: And it will actually show you it as well, which is a little bit interesting. Like, as you are prompt crafting and waiting, it will actually sort of articulate the steps that it’s undertaking, which is… I know we like to poo-pooh, but that was a moment where I was like, “Ooh, this is quite fascinating, really.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, I think so too, because now what you’ve got is a model that, yes, takes a lot longer but generates more steps. But what it’s doing at each step is it’s including more context. Instead of giving it a big task that it has no clue on, you’re giving it a series of… Well, it’s taking it into a series of small tasks that then include more context, which then allows for a greater depth of reasoning.
BEN: It’s a chunking thing, like a much more effective chunking methodology.
DANIEL: Yes. And we’ve kind of known that chain-of-thought mechanisms have been better since about 2022. There was a paper called Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. It was by Jason Wei and a team. They say experiments on three large language models show that chain-of-thought prompting improves performance on a range of arithmetic, common sense, and symbolic reasoning tasks, because you’re breaking down the problem. I just feel like this is a viable avenue for hallucination mitigation. I think that’s actually quite a good thing.
BEN: I don’t know about… Yeah, mitigation might be the right word, but even that I think is possibly a bit too kind, possibly… like hallucination band-aiding maybe, I would be willing to say.
HEDVIG: One thing that is true about them is if they’re breaking them down and going through different more steps. But one thing I’ve noticed, like I was having some basic programming problems the other day and I had a file and I was like, “Can you help me find out what’s going wrong in this file?” And it was like, “That file’s empty.” And I was like, “No, I know it’s not though.” And it was like, “No, no, it’s empty.” And then, we talked about it for a while, me and the large language model, and then we found out that it had asked another tool if this file was empty. The tool was not able to read the file. And that means either it couldn’t read it or it was empty and it went with, “It’s empty,” and then just stuck to its guns. And I was like, “Can you not hold more than two thoughts in your head?”
BEN: It’s the great like, I have Eleanor Schellstrop’s file. Do you have the file or are you holding a cactus? I am definitely holding the file. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yes, it’s exactly that. And I went like… because I was frustrated, end of day, I was like, “Are you not able to hold two ideas?” And it was like, “I am not.” And I was like, “Great.” So, at each of these reasoning steps, only one alternative survives, even if it is like a 52-48 percentage split between the probabilities of two answers, only one survives to the next step. Do you see what I mean?
DANIEL: It’s decided.
HEDVIG: So, if it’s 98% sure or 52% sure, it doesn’t know. And it goes through all those steps anyway, so it can still hallucinate. And I also read here on Wikipedia that there were some research that show that these kinds of reasoning models are, in certain tests, more able to deceive [CHUCKLES] which is…
BEN: Because, don’t forget, when you make them smarter, you make them better liars.
DANIEL: Oh, ouch.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Daniel, I’m surprised you didn’t learn that just through parenting.
DANIEL: It’s very difficult when you have children that are much cleverer than you are, even at their young age.
BEN: I don’t have that problem.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: Like at all.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our last news story. And this one was suggested by James on our Discord. And when I read a little bit further, I found out that one of the authors, well, it’s you, Hedvig.
BEN: [GASPS] Oh, my.
DANIEL: This is some of your work. And usually I would say, [BLOWS A RASPBERRY] who cares about that? That’s just internal stuff.
BEN: Whatever the Hedvig version of AI slop is. What Hedvig slop is this?
HEDVIG: Which Hedvig slop is this?
DANIEL: But then, I realised we have like a publishing powerhouse among us. It’s Hedvig Skirgård and…
BEN: What-what?
DANIEL: It’s also Dr Annemarie Verkerk, another of the authors. Well, I couldn’t resist. I wanted to find out about this paper myself.
HEDVIG: This week, me and a team of colleagues from my department, University of Auckland and University of Saarland, published a paper about language universals. So, these are the kind of statements, as in, like, “If you have a lot of suffixes on your verb, you also have this word order,” or something like that. And we published this after many years, and it was nice this week, because this week we published a paper and I got rejected from a grant. So, it’s like the life of a researcher in one week.
BEN: Highs and lows.
DANIEL: Ouch.
HEDVIG: Highs and lows. It’s okay. I have to apply for more, but such is life.
DANIEL: Okay. Language universals are these things where if a language is… And we sometimes express them in terms of tendencies. So, if a language is adjective noun, then we see certain other things. But if it’s noun adjective, then we see the opposite.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And you actually went and checked them all out.
HEDVIG: We checked a bunch of them out. How much should I say? Because Annemarie and I are probably going to say the same thing that I’m going to say now when she’s here.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s bring her on.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here with Annemarie Verkerk and inexplicably, Hedvig Skirgård. What’s she doing on this show?
HEDVIG: Oh, well.
DANIEL: We’re talking about a new paper called Enduring Constraints on Grammar Revealed by Bayesian Spatiophylogenetic Analyses. What a great title. It’s in Nature Human Behaviour. It’s an illustrious panel of authors. Annemarie Verkerk, Olena Shcherbakova, Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård, Christoph Rzymski, Quentin D. Atkinson, Simon J. Greenhill, and Russell D. Gray. Lots of great authors on that project. We got the lead author here, along with Hedvig. So, Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig, welcome to the show.
ANNEMARIE: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: All right, so this one’s about universals, and I think I know some stuff about universals. Like, I know why linguists would be interested in universals. But what’s your view? Where did this come from in your research world?
ANNEMARIE: Well, in my research world, it always existed because I’m a linguistic typologist. So, I got introduced to the topic in my undergraduate classes. So ever since then, I’ve known about them at least.
HEDVIG: And they have so many different possible origins. Like, some of them are like, “Ooh, we think this would make like cognition easier if you are like sort of harmonious in this and this way.” So, if the demonstratives come before the noun AND the adjective comes before the noun, maybe it like lowers processing costs. But then, some other universals are entirely differently motivated. So, it’s like a bit of a bag of like… It’s mixed nuts. It’s not a homogenous set, which I find frustrating and annoying and interesting, I mean.
DANIEL: Okay, so it sounds like we’re talking about different kinds of universals, because when I think of language universals, I think, “Oh, here’s a thing that all languages have in common. All languages do this thing.” And we’ve talked about those a bunch. There are some interactional ones. Some people think that there are syntactic universals, but I don’t know. But what kind of universals are we talking about here, Annemarie?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, so we are talking about a very specific type, in a way. In the literature, we call these implicational universals. So, that means that they say something like if X, then Y. And the textbook example of that is if a language has subject-object-verb word order, it tends to have postpositions. So, appositions that come after the complement noun.
DANIEL: So, if I say something like, “The man the bear saw,” or, “I, the bear saw,” that’s subject, object, verb. And if a language is like that, then it has a strong tendency to, you say do postpositions like, instead of “on the table,” I might say “table on,” is that what we’re saying?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, that’s what we’re saying.
DANIEL: Okay.
ANNEMARIE: Yep.
DANIEL: Now, I can think of a few more of these. For example, if a language has a word for three, it’s probably got a word for two as well. I mean, it wouldn’t make sense for it to just skip two and go on to three. Is that an implicational universal?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, that would have been one. It’s an interesting one though. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Uh-oh, I got them in trouble already.
ANNEMARIE: No, no, no. There are actually word orders about number. The one that we had, or one of the ones that we had in the paper is about how or how number is expressed in morphological markers for number. So, there’s one really strong one which states if a language has a grammatical category, which is called a trial, which means that it somehow expresses units of threes of things, then it must also have a dual. And now, I’ve forgotten whether that’s one that’s highly supported in our favour or not…
HEDVIG: Let me double check.
ANNEMARIE: …but we should check it.
HEDVIG: I’m pretty sure.
DANIEL: That’s kind of what I was getting at. If a language says, the three of us, then it’s also going to have a bit for the two of us.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: So, the idea here is there are tons of these supposed language universals, and you and the team started plowing through them and investigating them. How did you do that?
HEDVIG: Well, we are very lucky that Franz Plank and Elena Filimonova… Am I getting that right? Filimonova had made this thing called the Constance Universals Archive, where they took suggestions from all over the literature and wrote them down in a big old web page. So, like on page 92, this author said that languages that do this, do this. So, we took all of those and then we tried to filter them for suggestions that we could actually test with our Grambank database.
DANIEL: Okay, now remind me about Grambank, which is this awesome tool that you’ve got.
HEDVIG: Yes. Grambank is a big old database of grammatical structures. So, we have a bunch of different features, 195, and we fill them in for as many languages as we can. So, it’ll be things like, is there a trial marker on the noun? It’ll be things like, is there a case suffix? Blah, blah, blah. We don’t cover all things in grammar, so we couldn’t match all of them. So we went through all of the ones that Franz and Filimonova had in their database, and then we found 191 that we could actually implement meaningfully into Grambank.
DANIEL: That’s a lot.
HEDVIG: That’s a lot. There were more than. What is it, more than 2,000?
ANNEMARIE: 2,000. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
ANNEMARIE: But many of these, of course, you can basically just immediately determine that we can’t test them because they are about phonology or they are about highly specific passive constructions that Grambank doesn’t have data on. So, we struggled for the longest part, actually, with the kind of fringe cases where we’re like, we can cover this, but exactly how to do it was not always straightforward. We had the most discussion, that took the most time just to figure out how to actually implement them using Grambank questionnaire items.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we had a lot of revision and back and forth. So, it was mainly me, Annemarie and Hannah Haynie and Olena Shcherbakova who sort of trolled through that list to sort of filter it. Because as maybe some listeners are aware, but some may not be, linguists don’t use consistent terminology.
DANIEL: Oh, no.
HEDVIG: So, what one author says is case… Is that actually what Grambank means is case? Maybe they’re not identical, but are they close enough that we can do something with it? So, these kinds of discussions, we had to have a lot.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I’m still just amazed that linguists have spent so much time making up to 2,000 claims about, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that if a language does this, it tends to always do that.” Yeah, and then you manage to like plow through 200 of them. Now, the ones that I always think of Joseph Greenberg, the linguist Joseph Greenberg is always mentioned in connection with universals because he sort of really… Is he the first person to get people thinking about this stuff?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, probably. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Not the first person to make suggestions like this, but certainly the first person to like wildly popularise the idea of searching for these and trying to explain them. So, he made a bunch of primarily word order universals that have been very, like, setting the tone in the field for sure.
DANIEL: Now, this can’t be the first time that people have plowed over this. They’ve been going over Greenberg’s universals for a really long time. But still, I feel like you’re coming after him. It’s like, “Okay buddy. It’s time. [LAUGHS] We’re going to get you.”
HEDVIG: I mean, a lot of them hold up, right?
DANIEL: A lot of them. All right, well maybe it’s time to get the broad results. Annemarie, give me the top line results for what you found.
ANNEMARIE: So, we did it in two different ways. First up, we did it on a more or less contemporary level taking into account, genealogical and geographical non-independence, but not doing anything with language history. And then in the second set of experiments that we did, we explicitly modeled these features as they evolve on phylogenetic trees, or a phylogenetic tree, I should say. And both of these experiments point out that about a third of them hold if you look at both of these experiments. And what’s also very interesting to us is that depending on the type of universal that you look at, you get very different results. So, I can elaborate on that if you want.
DANIEL: One thing before you do though, both, this is for both of you. We’ve talked numerous times about Galton’s problem. We would like to treat things like they’re unrelated, but they’re not unrelated, they’re related by family or they’re related by place. And so, you might think that you’re looking at 17 different languages to do this thing, but actually you’re only really looking at one thing. How did you control for that?
HEDVIG: Yes. So, one way you could think about it is that if you think about language families, language families are trees, so you have one parent for each tip or node. So, each language has one parent. And if you go further back, suddenly there’s only one parent for all of them. You have the root of the tree. And if a certain feature was present at the root and that just got inherited by all the descendants, then that can look like it’s very common, but if it’s two features that are co-occurring, they will look like they’re co-occurring independently in all those languages, but in fact they’re all just being inherited. So, this is what we call phylogenetic autocorrelation, or also commonly known as Galton’s problem.
So, when you conduct statistical tests, you have to meet the assumptions of your tests, and one of them is that if you think that your data is independent, they should actually be that. And we know that they aren’t in this case. So, the first step, like Annemarie said, is sort of traditional, what’s called a regression model, where you say, “This thing, trial. This thing, dual. Do they have an effect on each other given these relationships between all the languages?” And we also think that there could be some spatial spreading of things that could also interfere. That’s called spatial autocorrelation. So, we include a spatial term as well. That’s sort of the first step. And then, once we’ve completed that, we go on to this more nuanced analysis of actually what Annemarie described it as like modeling it on the tree, just a bit more involved.
But I quite like it. We were discussing a lot when we were writing the paper about how to do this and what order to do things and we came up with this sort of, I think of it as like a bit of a filter process, like if each universal gets through step one, if it gets through the regression analysis and if it survives that, it gets to go through the second gauntlet of this co-evolutionary analysis.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, credit to Simon Greenhill for that one. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a good step and I’m actually going to reuse those steps in some other papers.
DANIEL: It means you do less work. You don’t have to test every language for everything. You can knock out some in the early round. Yep, very good. Okay, and you found that once you had accounted for area effects and phylogenetic effects, one-third of these universals that you were looking at held up, or in other words, two-thirds [CHUCKLES] didn’t.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, the fact that we can very confidently show with two very different types of experiments in a way that a third of them survive shows that they’re relevant. It’s not the case that we should not think about these types of patterns at all. So, some of them really seem to be quite strongly supported. And I think it’s super interesting, especially the way that they come about. So, you can think about different ways in which languages get to that point. Just thinking about how we arrive at these kind of somehow attractor states of two features that are combined with one another, from a historical perspective, I think that’s super interesting and I think that’s something that I want to explore in greater detail, is exactly how that happens.
HEDVIG: Annemarie wrote a very nice supplementary section. If I can do some personal advertising. I think I contributed a bit to it, but I think Annemarie did most of the writing. If you go to our article and you go to supplementary 9, there’s a whole lit review of all kinds of causes that people have suggested, different theories, a lot of things that couldn’t come into the main text. So, if you want to get into theories of why certain things have been suggested, I can recommend reading.
ANNEMARIE: Thank you.
DANIEL: I’m aware that many people have suggested that language universals exist because there’s a broad faculty of language, and all human languages are basically the same language. What’s your view as to why we have language universals?
HEDVIG: Well, first off, maybe we should say that we’re not here looking for what’s called absolute universals. These are not always true.
DANIEL: “All languages do this.”
HEDVIG: So, if you write to us and tell us that you do have a language that, for example, the verb agrees with the object but not the subject, that’s technically counterevidence for that universal. But what we’re saying here is that the tendencies are very strong, but they’re not absolute. So, we’re looking for meaningful related patterns, not absolute counts of, like, if we found one counterexample that doesn’t turn over… So, what we’re looking here is like strong tendencies. And what Daniel was describing is sort of the generativist paradigm of what’s called universal grammar, where they are, as far as I know, not really open to strong tendencies. It should kind of always be the case, more or less, right?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s a bit of a point of difference…
DANIEL: To my understanding, yes. So why do we have these tendencies? Why did the tendencies that you found exist?
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. So, this is the conundrum. For me personally, that’s a huge kind of conundrum. So, on the one hand, you don’t have to believe in Universal Grammar or anything like that to be able to say, “Well, there is something about human language that we share as a species,” and may drive certain feature combinations to come up simply because they are somehow more adequate than others. This has been a very influential idea in functional typology, and I can see why. It has a natural appeal.
For example, it’s very… not the universal that we tested, but it’s very strong across the world’s languages that subjects precede objects. And probably, this is the case because people want to put first in sentences what the sentence is about. So, subjects come out of what was originally topics, and this all makes a lot of sense.
But on the other hand, it cannot be the case that that’s all there is because we do get all of this variation and this deviation from expected patterns. I think there, the rule that we can explore is history. So, historical change very often might actually be contact induced. So, one language community meets another speaker community and while they do things slightly differently, some change happens to be taken over and this change then triggers other stuff happening in that language.
And of course, this is something that we don’t know much about for many languages of the world simply because they’re not recorded in history. Like, for example, Latin is stuff like that. But in some cases, you can discover some of these kind of historical pathways to feature combinations that you see today and that’s kind of what I find interesting.
What I want to say, this interface between, on the one hand, preferences that are probably somehow at least global or universal, that probably have cognitive nature. And on the other hand, these kind of historical accidents or kind of historical pathways through which things change.
HEDVIG: Another thing to think about, maybe for some of these, for example, scalar ones is just raw frequencies in language use. So, dual, you talk about singular things and plural things probably a lot. The amount of times you talk about specifically two is probably not as often. Probably more than you talk about things of three though, I would suspect. [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, if you go from theory of, like, you make into grammar what you do most often, it would make sense to first create a form for a plural and then create a form for dual just by the frequencies of… You could look at some sort of corpora or something. So, some of these are explained by sort of just pragmatic use frequencies stuff as well.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. Which is still… I would still kind of put it in the cognitive bin because that relates to the human experience.
DANIEL: That makes sense. Before I let you go, can you just reel off a few cool ones that you were pleased made the cut or maybe didn’t.
HEDVIG: A lot of the usual suspects are topping what we’re calling the narrow word order. So, things like if you have your demonstrative after your noun, you have your adjective after your noun, if you have your numeral after your noun, your adjective is…
DANIEL: So, if I say instead of “red house”, I say “house red”, I’m also going to say “house that” instead of “that house”.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yep. Makes sense.
HEDVIG: So, you sort of like… you either put all the things before or all the things after, be that demonstrative numerals, whatever it is, you get like freak things like French where like some adjectives are in the other place.
DANIEL: Yeah. No, but that makes sense. I’m getting a really strong cognitive feeling off of that one, so cool. What else?
HEDVIG: Yeah, so those were kind of usual suspects, but those aren’t very surprising. You asked us for something that’s like a little bit unusual. Well, in our other category, there’s a wild bunch that I don’t really… I was a bit surprised by, I think.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
HEDVIG: Like, you have less case markers, so markers on nouns for like if they are the subject or object or things like that…
DANIEL: Like going “to the house” or “from the house” or “for the house” or… Yes, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you do more marking of tense.
DANIEL: If I have more cases, I’ll also do more marking of tense.
HEDVIG: No, if you have LESS cases, you have more tense.
DANIEL: Is that because…? Now I’m inventing crazy theories.
HEDVIG: Really no… what that one… that is in our other bin for a reason because we’re like, “I don’t… What is this?”
DANIEL: Because languages spread the complexity around and if it’s too complex, they’ll knock it down.
HEDVIG: No, that’s not true.
DANIEL: Oh, no, I got it wrong. Dang it.
HEDVIG: I have a paper and that’s not really seems… At least for certain measurements of complexity, that doesn’t really seem to fully hold true in certain studies. Yeah, so…
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. This is a curious one for sure.
HEDVIG: I don’t know what’s up with that.
ANNEMARIE: I think we’re going to see more work on that.
DANIEL: Well, I’m not going to beef up my verbal stuff because I already beefed up my cases. I only got so much time in a day.
HEDVIG: That is the equicomplexity hypothesis. But that has been shown to not really work out and…
DANIEL: Damn it, you’re knocking over my hypothesis. This is great. I love this.
HEDVIG: This is possible that this one is a sort of like odd fluke, that it’s actually tracking something else. There’s something else about these languages that is causing both of these things or something like that. But that’s one that at least when I saw that it come out, Annemarie, what did you think when you saw less case, more tense being supported?
ANNEMARIE: I didn’t think very hard about this one because we had another one in there that was kicked out earlier in round one where we basically had… I think it was like more case, more tense aspect, and that one would basically speak to the general morphological profile of a language where, indeed, some languages are just morphologically more complex than others.
DANIEL: They just like sticking things on the ends of words.
ANNEMARIE: Right? Yeah. No, that one apparently doesn’t hold, but this one still does. Maybe this… I think probably Hedvig is right in the sense that there might be another factor here, that’s the third factor, the hidden factor that we don’t see that could be affecting both of these to align a certain way such that they align here.
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe that one is a little bit of a fluke we need to look a bit more closer because we also have the reverse one listed, which is more case, less tense and that one is not supported.
ANNEMARIE: That one is supported in the synchronic analyses, but not in the evolutionary ones.
HEDVIG: In the base traits, yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, wow, that’s amazing.
HEDVIG: So, something is probably a little bit funny here. We don’t…
ANNEMARIE: Maybe. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Sorry, I pointed out… Why don’t we take one that we actually know like a bit better? Because that one’s an interesting one to me. Annemarie, do you have a favourite one you want to take?
ANNEMARIE: Well, one that I think might be interesting for listeners is that there’s this paper, I think it’s 1988 or it’s 1989, by Matthew Dryer, who says that adjective-noun order is not involved in narrow word order universals. And also, if you look at WALS [World Atlas of Linguistic Structures], and you look at whether the order of noun and adjective correlates with the order of verb and object, it doesn’t work at all. But then, if you look at our list of supported narrow word order universals, we see noun adjective and adjective noun popping up relatively frequently. And I find this super interesting in the sense that it doesn’t seem to be the case that the order of adjective and noun is correlated with the order of object and verb. I mean, 40 years ago, Dryer already said this and proved it, but it does seem to be the case that the order of adjective and noun seems to correlate with other nominal word orders. So, with the order of noun and demonstrative, with the order of noun and numeral, etc., and the order of noun and genitive.
So, there might be something going on with somehow putting modifiers of nouns either in the same position with respect to the noun, or kind of distributing them so that they’re on both sides to make things somehow more balanced? I don’t know. I have no idea. But I think this one stands out as something that wasn’t really expected and somehow could be quite theoretically relevant as well, yeah.
DANIEL: I sometimes like saying that as a linguist, I get to see language in the broad view. But I feel like you, the typologists, are just coming at this from the very most broadest view because you get to see so many languages, so many features over so much time. Is it not amazing? Does it make you gasp sometimes?
HEDVIG: It sometimes gives you a little bit of vertigo. You can also be subject to what I like to call a galaxy brain where you can kind of… You see so many ways that things can be that nothing surprises you and you’re like, “Oh, this could be this way and this way and this way.” Like, there’s at least one language in the world that does that. So, you kind of wear out. It does terrible things for your… at least mine, I don’t know about you, Annemarie, but like your writing… And anything is possible in my English, I’ll just do whatever I feel like, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I need to be more in on the details as well.
ANNEMARIE: There is that for sure. The other thing, with respect to this paper, it’s just that we tested 191. On the one hand, it sounds like a big number. But on the other hand, we could also say, “Well, we’re going to test every Grambank feature in relationship to every other Grambank feature,” which would be a whole large number of analyses. [CHUCKLES] And this has also been suggested by people in the audience when I talked about this stuff, like why do you restrict yourself? That’s what they say.
DANIEL: Why don’t you just do some mining? Yeah.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah. Why don’t you just do some mining? And then, that’s what I find when I go a bit like wide eyed, like saying like that would be a really computationally intensive task. And what probably is going to come out is that Greenberg was right all along. So, on the one hand, we do have as a discipline some ideas about patterns that still hold. And some of them might not. But still, I mean we had pretty good heuristics to find these patterns in the first place. So, we don’t need all of that mining. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe, somebody is going to do this.
DANIEL: We already know where to look, probably.
ANNEMARIE: Yeah, we already know where to look, yeah.
HEDVIG: We want to do hypothesis-driven research where we’re starting from a foundation of, like, “People have a belief that this and this is related because of these reasons, let’s say test that,” though sometimes those reasons are a little bit murkier than others. Another thing to note, if we were to take all the 195 grammar features and test every pair for those, first of all, it would be over 30,000 pairs, and then also you could run the risk of what’s called P-hacking yourself…
DANIEL: Oh, dang it. Yes.
ANNEMARIE: True. Yeah.
HEDVIG: …which means you could, you could find relationships that are kind of spurious and are not theoretically supported and then you ad hoc afterwards find a reason to say why they’re supported. But we want to start in sort of theory and hypotheses and then employ these more sophisticated and nuanced ways of testing it and then discuss the results. Otherwise, you can… Yeah, you can do bad science.
DANIEL: Well, the paper is definitely worth the read. We’re going to have a link to it in the show notes for this episode. We’ve been talking to the authors, Annemarie Verkerk and Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig and Annemarie, thank you so much for coming on and chatting today.
ANNEMARIE: Thank you.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Related or Not.
BEN: Now, what have we got this week?
DANIEL: Ben?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: You said that you wanted to hear a certain kind of theme music, a certain kind of jingle.
BEN: I think I’ve put a call out for a few things, but I may have… knowing me as I do, I have either asked for a…
DANIEL: That shows a high level of self-awareness.
HEDVIG: Knowing me, as I do is…
DANIEL: I think we’ve got to stop that right there.
HEDVIG: That’s really good.
DANIEL: I’ve either asked for an EDM banger or a rinse-tactic wobble-filled drum and bass nonsense one. Which one did I get?
DANIEL: You kind of asked for all of the above. You wanted a jungle style EDM…
BEN: Jungle because…
DANIEL: Deep house.
BEN: …it’s massive.
HEDVIG: Jungle is massive.
DANIEL: Well, we got it. This one comes to us from David who sent it to me.
BEN: I’ve legitimately never been as excited as I am right now in my entire life. This is so great.
HEDVIG: It’s going to be good.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME]
BEN: Love it.
DANIEL: There you go.
BEN: I was expecting… Yeah, I was expecting something really crunchy and really, like, grimy. But then, he gave me this awesome liquid like London scene circa 2008. David, get out of my head, bro. That was fantastic. I love it.
DANIEL: That was so good.
HEDVIG: That’s very good.
DANIEL: Thanks for that.
HEDVIG: Very impressive.
DANIEL: Our first one comes from Kalina who says…
HEDVIG: More paper.
DANIEL: “Thought of this because I have some heavy-duty CASTORS,” those wheel things…
BEN: The things that are on the bottom of beds that when you have sex, turn your mattress into like a yacht sailing on the high seas. You’ve never had that experience?
[LONG PAUSE]
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I’m really struggling here.
DANIEL: My bed doesn’t have castors.
BEN: Okay, so, Hedvig, have you ever owned a bed with those tiny little black wheels?
HEDVIG: No. Black wheels?
BEN: The kind of wheels that are on the bottom of an office chair?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Okay. That’s a castor.
HEDVIG: On a bed??
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: On a bed.
HEDVIG: Sorry, that was very loud.
BEN: Some cheap shitty beds come with them.
HEDVIG: But why would you want that on a bed? You want your bed to stay put.
BEN: 100%. [DANIEL LAUGHS] And like I said, when you have sex on such a bed, it turns it into the Jolly Roger.
HEDVIG: It already moves too much without the wheels. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Whoomp, whoomp, whoomp.
BEN: It’s bad. It’s really bad.
DANIEL: No, no, it’s great. You can go for a distance record, it’s like, “That was a good one. Let’s try it again and see how far we can go.”
BEN: So, CASTOR wheels, the wheels that are on the bottom office chairs.
DANIEL: Okay, Kalina continues. Kalina’s email is not about having sex, by the way. “…made of CAST iron.” Go with me. Okay. “If I were to CAST the table across the floor, the CASTORS let it glide smoothly as if on oil.”
BEN: Castor oil.
DANIEL: Particularly.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, four things. You’ve got CASTOR, a wheel on a table or a chair, not a bed. CAST, as in set in a mold, like cast iron. CAST as to throw, like dice or a net. And CASTOR oil. Kalina says, “Love the show. It’s one I regularly recommend to people looking for a new podcast to listen to. Thank you for making it.” No, thank you, Kalina.
HEDVIG: That is very nice. Especially after last recording, where I don’t know if you kept it in, Daniel, but we read some reviews that weren’t that friendly, so I really appreciate that.
DANIEL: I sure did and it and it was great. Love all our reviews.
HEDVIG: Okay, can I ask a question? The wheelie things that I had never heard of, how are they spelled?
DANIEL: Now that is a good question.
BEN: C-A-S-T-O-R. Castor.
DANIEL: Yes. And…
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: C-A-S-T-E-R is considered a variant.
HEDVIG: That’s what I was asking about. Yeah, exactly. E or O. Because English vowels, especially when they’re in that position, I’m like, what are you asking me to do?
DANIEL: Well, I mean yes, so is it relevant or is it not? Maybe not.
HEDVIG: Well, castor oil, I know, is with an O.
DANIEL: That’s true. Hmm.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Do you want me to go first? I’ll go first.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you go first. You go first.
DANIEL: I think cast iron is cast because it’s thrown into a mold. That’s what I think.
BEN: Okay. Yeah, I think so… like, poured essentially.
DANIEL: Yep. I don’t think the other two are related to those or to each other.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: You don’t think CAST, like a gypsum cast, is related to cast iron?
DANIEL: Oh, you mean like a… Sorry, gypsum…
BEN: Yeah. She’s talking about, like, what you would put on your arm or whatever and he is saying exactly the same thing.
DANIEL: Oh, I do think that is the same…
BEN: That is the same process.
DANIEL: But I don’t think the bed castor is related, and I don’t think that the oil is related. Why? What do you think, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Huh, huh-uh.
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: Oh, this is a hard one.
BEN: I’m actually… Sorry.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
HEDVIG: You go. Ben, you go. Ben, you go.
BEN: I was actually going to say, and this is very rare for me. I’m sitting pretty close to where Daniel is on this. Castor oil, I think, is just going to have its own entirely silly, bespoke etymology related to nothing at all, because it’s like an oil and it’s really old and it’s been around for squadrillion years and blah, blah. Castor wheel is the odd one out for me. I completely agree that to throw something and then to pour stuff into something is just like a related sense. Castor wheel, the only thing I’m wondering is, could it in some way be related to either of the two other ones, right? So, maybe it was made of a kind of plastic that was derived from castor oil originally, I don’t know. Or, could it also have been, like, you put it on stuff and then you could throw them across the room. I’m going to back Daniel here. I’m going to say that CASTOR wheel, its own thing. CAST and throw, related. CASTOR oil, its own thing.
DANIEL: Okay, Hedvig, we both agree. [WHISPERS] Peer pressure.
HEDVIG: I am more and more working myself into the all-related camp.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: So, CASTOR wheel, CAST iron, I CAST it across the room, CASTOR oil and a CAST on my leg are all related. And I want to make it known that if it’s castor oil because of some guy who was called Castor and he was called Castor because he came from a family of people who did casting.
BEN: Fair, fair. Yeah, I’ll pay that. I’d agree with that. Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: I would grant that to you.
HEDVIG: I won’t have any of that nonsense.
DANIEL: None of that nonsense. All right, we’re all wrong.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: We’re all wrong. Now, I’m going to… This is part two. One of them is the odd one out, quickly, which one?
BEN: Castor oil.
DANIEL: Castor oil.
BEN: That’s what I’m guessing. No, no, no.
HEDVIG: Fuck, fuck.
BEN: Castor wheel is the odd one out.
DANIEL: Ooh. Okay.
BEN: And I think I’ve got answer to this one.
HEDVIG: I think it’s cast on your leg.
DANIEL: The cast iron. Cast into a mold.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: The cast on your leg wasn’t one of the choices. I wasn’t asking you to explain that.
BEN: Yeah. You just made that up. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m treating that the same as cast iron because it’s a thing that’s… Yeah.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Okay. This is not my smartest… I mean, I guess it’s castor… No, because if you’ve ever had a cast iron pot, you know you need to oil that shit.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Mm, sure.
HEDVIG: That’s how it works. You need to put on oil and then put it in your oven for like a long time, and then back and forth and make a layer thingamajig. Takes forever, and it’s really scary because everything gets really hot. So, that is definitely the oil involved. So then, maybe cast iron and… it was only one that was the odd one out?
DANIEL: There was one odd one out. The other three were related.
HEDVIG: Okay, well, castor oil, then I guess if it’s some guy, and then I’m going to look up and he’s going to be a castor, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, so I said it was the oil, Hedvig says it’s the oil, and Ben says it’s the wheel.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Well, first of all, we’re all correct in that CAST, to throw, and CAST, to form in a mold, they are both related. They both come from old Norse kasta, to throw. The unrelated one is the oil.
BEN: Damn it. Damn it.
DANIEL: Castor oil is, eww, beaver oil.
BEN: No, but hang on. I suspected this, and I…
DANIEL: Yes, you did.
BEN: Yeah, but hang on. Hang…
DANIEL: You deviated.
BEN: …the fuck on, Daniel. Because…
DANIEL: You swerved.
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
BEN: …the anal gland of the beaver, of which castor oil does sort of derive its name, because it replaced the stuff that we got from the anal glands of beaver… Sorry, really quickly, because most people probably wouldn’t know this.
DANIEL: It’s true.
BEN: The anal glands of the beaver, which is my favourite rodent in the entire animal kingdom…
DANIEL: They’re great.
BEN: …were used in both perfumery and flavour, artificial flavouring. They made like a fake vanilla flavour.
HEDVIG: Musk.
BEN: Yeah, musk.
DANIEL: [RETCHES]
BEN: Delicious, delightful, wonderful scent. Really good, by the way, in perfumes. Really lovely, musky scent. Leathery kind of notes. The anal gland is called the castor gland, one imagines…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. That’s what I was thinking of as well.
BEN: …because it is used to eject and secrete these smells.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Which means to throw.
DANIEL: Mm, okay, hold on there. Hold on.
HEDVIG: I’m also triple googling. [LAUGHTER] I feel…
DANIEL: So, the Latin word for beaver was castor, from Greek, kastor, but not really, because people in ancient Greek times, they did use different kinds of oils for healing and for those other purposes, but they couldn’t have had a beaver. They didn’t have them. Etymonline says the name probably was borrowed from another language, perhaps influenced by the hero’s name, as in Castor and Pollux.
BEN: Hang on a second. So, we called the beavers Castor canadensis.
DANIEL: That is the taxonomic name for the beaver, Castor.
BEN: But we don’t really know why the naturalists picked that name.
DANIEL: Probably because of association with some other animal that was used in ancient Greek times. Anyway.
BEN: Okay, okay. I’m allowing that one. That is unrelated. I didn’t realise that the first… Oh, I feel shame, Daniel, because I love the beaver and I didn’t know its taxonomical names, so sad.
DANIEL: Oh. Now, the wheel is related. So, at first, I looked up CASTOR, O-R, because that’s how I’ve always spelled it, and I turned up in the OED, “a small vessel with a perforated top from which to cast or sprinkle pepper, sugar or the like in the form of powder.” That makes sense because you throw it on your food. But when I started looking up caster, E-R, I got wheel, and here’s what it gave me. CAST also meant turn. That’s an old sense of CAST along with throw.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: And this is a wheel that turns. So that’s where the connection is. This is a wheel that casts, or it’s a wheel that turns. And then also the cast iron is thrown. Casting, of course, is throwing.
BEN: I wonder if we would find any other bespoke fossil castors in manufacturing or technology, unbeknownst to us, the little ball bearings inside like a fishing reel, are actually called castors or something like that.
DANIEL: Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting a beaver to turn up in this one. [BEN LAUGHS] I mean, that was random.
BEN: They’re just such delightful creatures.
HEDVIG: They are really cute.
DANIEL: Thank you, Kalina. That was a great one. Let’s go to our next one from Camden via SpeakPipe.
BEN: Let’s see how we can factor beavers into this one. This will be fun.
CAMDEN: Hello, this is Camden calling from the Illinois farm country. I had a thought for Related or Not. With all the talk about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I heard a lot of CREATURE and CREATION. Are those two words related? Thank you much. Goodbye.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: CREATURE and CREATION.
HEDVIG: Oh, thank you.
BEN: Can we also just really quickly acknowledge how much Camden’s voice sounds like all of Superman’s dads from across his cinematic history? Just that…
HEDVIG: I was going to say What’s-his-face from Woebegone.
BEN: Nah, he’s great. I like it. Camden, you’ve got a fantastic accent.
HEDVIG: That’s very nice.
BEN: Creature…
HEDVIG: Can we get Camden to record our end bit? And say theme music was written and recorded by.
BEN: That’s a great idea.
DANIEL: Well, certainly, I will ask.
BEN: Just get him to set up a Cameo account, Daniel, and then you can pay him money.
DANIEL: Here’s the problem though. I don’t trust Camden, because with CREATURE and CREATION, I think he’s fucking with us.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I mean, you fuck with us all the time, Daniel. So, like, no, no. This one seems better.
DANIEL: My Related or Nots come from real life, from genuine experience. If anybody’s fucking with you, it’s not me.
HEDVIG: And Camden’s don’t?
BEN: What are you suggesting that he’s not? Like, what…?
HEDVIG: Let’s get back on track. I’m going to be the one who gets us back on track.
BEN: No, no, no. We’re not getting back on track. I want to figure out exactly what the fuck Daniel meant just then. Daniel proposes that his ideas come from the world, from his life and environment.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: But apparently, Camden, having the thought, “Hey, CREATURE and CREATION sound really similar. I wonder if they’re related.” That’s the fake evil world. There’s no real world there. What’s that about?
DANIEL: This’ll stuff ’em. Oh, you know how our listeners love to just love to give us these?
BEN: I’m going… I’m smacking the back of that horse’s rump and I’m saying related. Hard related.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: I’m betting no, but I don’t know how to get there.
HEDVIG: I am also betting no, because I have a vague memory. In the back of my brain, there’s a little flicker of something.
DANIEL: This is one of those.
BEN: I really want to be right and you guys to be wrong.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I kind of want that too. [BEN LAUGHS] I kind of think that’d be fun.
DANIEL: Well, I want that, too. And today, we all get our wish because they are related.
BEN: Ohhhh.
DANIEL: They both come from Latin creare, to make, to bring, forth, produce or procreate.
BEN: Do you know what? And fuck you, Daniel. Because of course they do. Because, of course, they are…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] In retrospect, of course.
BEN: …so semantically related.
DANIEL: How could they not be related?
BEN: All of god’s creation. All of god’s creatures, Daniel. look, it’s right there in whatever that’s called in the Bible.
HEDVIG: What other -tion/-ture do we have? Do we have any others? Like, attention, creature?
DANIEL: Perfection, no.
BEN: Prefecture?
HEDVIG: Prefecture.
DANIEL: No, no, no.
BEN: Adventure.
DANIEL: Prefection? No.
BEN: Advention?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Hang on, I gotcha, I gotcha. I’ll get my massive word list.
BEN: [LAUGHS] -ture, -ture, -ture.
HEDVIG: Your massive word list is going to help you with this?
BEN: Culture, cultion. No.
DANIEL: Capture and caption. No, those are…
HEDVIG: There we go. That’s one.
DANIEL: No. Create, creature.
BEN: Surely.
HEDVIG: Well, what do you mean? I mean, it’s the wrong word class order, but still.
DANIEL: Denture and dentition, perhaps?
BEN: Maybe.
DANIEL: No, there’s nothing…
HEDVIG: No, that’s good. I like it. Denture.
DANIEL: Fracture and fraction.
BEN: Oh, fracture and fraction. They’re surely that. Surely that. When something fractures, it becomes a fraction.
DANIEL: That’s a good point.
HEDVIG: That was very good suggestion, Camden, anyway.
BEN: Okay, so they’re related. You guys are wrong. And my instantaneous intuition rides triumphant on the steed on whose rump I smacked my hand.
DANIEL: [GRUNTS] Thank you, Camden. Last one from Eleanor, who is a new patron at the Listener level.
HEDVIG: Thank you, Eleanor.
DANIEL: Eleanor says, “A Related or Not. BRAID versus PLAIT,” or /plæt/, depending on how you say it.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. Fuck, I always get confused about this.
DANIEL: I mean, they’re kind of the same thing. And Eleanor says, “I thought it was interesting that they both start with a bilabial, /b/ and /p/, plus an approximate, /ɹ/ and /l/. They have the same spelling in the middle, and they both end with an alveolar /d/ and /t/.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. She’s right about all those things.
BEN: She’s convinced straight out of the gate. Like, all of that was just like, “Yeah, that’s compelling.”
DANIEL: I’m phonologically convinced.
BEN: Yeah. Me too. I mean, you shouldn’t have read all of that out because it’s made it really uninteresting because we’re all just thoroughly converted by Eleanor.
DANIEL: We can’t help ourselves.
BEN: Well, I say we.
HEDVIG: I wrote them down and I thought about it as well, but it is suspiciously.
DANIEL: Eleanor says, “Thanks for all you’re doing to bring linguistics to the attention of the wider public in such a brilliant and hilarious way.” Hedvig’s brilliant. Ben’s hilarious. Just saying.
BEN: In that order. It’s really important.
HEDVIG: I also want to be funny.
BEN: I would like to be brilliant.
DANIEL: Well, I’m convinced. My answer was yes. Sounds like it.
BEN: Okay, so what do we got?
HEDVIG: Yes, they’re related.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Okay, good.
HEDVIG: I understand, when I first… When Daniel said it BRAID, PLAIT, I was like, what? I mean muh? And then, I wrote it down and I lined it up just the way that she did, and I was like, huh, B/P, R/L, D/T, these are things I know turn into each other. But there’s something about the BRAID and PLAIT. The vowels are spelled the same, but they’re not pronounced the same, are they?
DANIEL: Well, they are in my old variety of Pacific Northwestern English. We always said plaited. Braided or plaited.
BEN: Oh, now. Oh, you guys.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Ben?
BEN: Plait or /plæt/, if you were to use Daniel’s utterly wackadoodle thing, and pleats in a skirt.
DANIEL: Oh, pleats. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: That’s a good question.
DANIEL: So, are we all saying yes on this one?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I think pleats as well. Yeah.
HEDVIG: We’re now looking for more things to make it more challenging.
DANIEL: By the way, notice how BRAID, every one of those is voiced and with PLAIT, they’re all unvoiced. That’s interesting.
BEN: That is fun. Okay, well done, Eleanor, for convincing us of the right answer straight out of the gate.
DANIEL: Yeah, well, but it’s not the right answer because they’re NOT RELATED!
BEN: Oh, what???
DANIEL: That’s right. Braid is Old English bregdan, which has a meaning, to pull quickly hither and thither, which is what you better do if you’re trying to braid a nine-year-old. However… and it is related to embroider.
BEN: Ah, that makes sense.
DANIEL: Braid, embroider.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: But /plæt/ or plait comes from Latin plicāre to fold, which is just the word it goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, to braid stuff.
HEDVIG: That’s got to be pleats though, right?
DANIEL: Well, okay, so I’ve got to say, what’s the deal with the pronunciation? Because sometimes, we can find it spelled like plate, like the plate that we eat off of.
BEN: What? No.
DANIEL: But sometimes we can see that it’s spelled plat, P-L-A-T. So apparently, this is one of those things that has been pronounced differently in different places and the spelling has followed that. By the way, did you know that plait is related to pleats?
BEN: So, PLATE, as in the thing you eat of is related to PLEATS? Or plaits in the hair is related to pleats?
DANIEL: Sorry, plaits in the hair related to pleats. Ben, you got it right.
BEN: Yay. I’m going to take that as, like, a consolation prize.
DANIEL: Thanks, Eleanor. And thanks, David, for our latest Related or Not jungle jingle. You can send us all your suggestions the regular ways, hello@becauselanguage.com or SpeakPipe on our website, because language.com.
BEN: Can I issue David further requests? Can I now just fling more genre requests at him?
DANIEL: He’s done enough, hasn’t he, Ben? He’s done enough for us.
BEN: No. I want more.
DANIEL: What do you want, Ben?
HEDVIG: Can I make a request?
BEN: Okay, yeah, it’s your turn. Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Okay. I just think a lot of things are fun in bossa nova, and bossa nova is very easy to do recognisably.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
BEN: Bossa nova is pretty fun.
DANIEL: [LAYS DOWN BOSSA NOVA BEAT]
HEDVIG: See, you can just do it immediately.
BEN: It’s true.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’ve got with us, Dr Séan Roberts of Cardiff University. Séan, this is like the fourth time we’ve been on with you, isn’t it?
SÉAN: Yeah. Great to be here. Yeah. And wonderful to be back.
DANIEL: Thanks for hanging with us. And Dr Cole Robertson from the Center of Language Studies at Radboud University and the Department of Psychology, Emory University. Cole, welcome onto the show.
COLE: Thanks for having me.
HEDVIG: So, you are Roberts and Robertson. How is that?
COLE: The dynamic duo? We go back a long time. Séan, was I your first PhD supervisee, Séan, as you were a postdoc.?
SÉAN: Yeah, that’s right. So, we were… Yeah, in the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands, where Hedvig was also there. Yeah, it’s been a long time. Just before this, I had to read over the paper to remember what was in it. Because a lot of this stuff, some of the studies were done quite a long time ago now. [LAUGHS] Yeah, so all this stuff is based on Cole’s PhD work, which we’ll get into.
COLE: Although there are a couple new studies in the paper we’re going to talk about, which I did as a postdoc at Emory.
DANIEL: Yes. So really, this work goes back a long way, and you’ve both had such illustrious careers in so many different ways in linguistics. And so, I want to dive into some of that as well. But to start with, could you both tell us a little bit about what you’ve been doing? Séan, we know that you’ve been doing work on perception, and you’re also a bit of an enthusiast in replication or just the scientific method. Tell us about what you’ve been doing.
SÉAN: So, this response is the kind of thing that I get from linguists. What do you do? Like, what is it? I guess I’m really interested in methods and particularly statistical methods and sort of big data stuff. And so, like the origin of this project, you cast your mind back to 2013, which seems like a very long time ago, just to give you an impression of how long ago that was, so I had to look this up, but our studio was still in beta, and the LME4 package for doing mixed effects modeling was still in beta. The World Atlas of Language Structures, which is this big database of language structures, was only just a few years old.
DANIEL: We use it all the time, and this was just brand new at the time.
SÉAN: Yeah. And GitHub was only a few years old. But it was this kind of exciting time where these sort of new big databases of cross-cultural stuff were appearing and we had new statistical tools. You could do all this stuff on your laptop for the first time, to take all that data and start finding connections between the stuff. So, I was at the Max Planck Institute at the same time as people like Fiona Jordan, who were looking at kinship, and Michael Dunn, who was looking at word order, and Hedvig, who was starting to put together the sort of basis of Grambank which would come to dominate all databases of typology.
HEDVIG: I think I was the parasite in this situation because I was only employed as like a student assistant. I wasn’t even a PhD student. And then, I just like bullied my way socially into all these places and made all these connections that I’ve really been able to use for the last 10 years.
DANIEL: Cole, I’ve been checking out your work, and you’ve been experienced in lots of ways involving large language models, but that’s lately. You’re also doing a lot of stuff with emotion and with verbs. Could you tell us what you’re into and what you’ve been doing?
COLE: I have a fairly eclectic background. I did a master’s in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, which is in an institute that was founded by Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist, who had done a lot of work actually on the origin of language and the evolution of language, which is to say, not specifics to do with the way that languages evolve, but why humans possess the faculty at all, and what were the evolutionary dynamics that gave rise to that in the Paleolithic.
DANIEL: I seem to remember Robin Dunbar’s name because of the primate brain size hypothesis. Dunbar noticed that as the brains of different primates get bigger, the number of individuals in their social sphere goes up. And if we extend that to humans, then we probably have room for about 150, maybe 200 people in our monkey sphere.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This is the Dunbar number.
DANIEL: Yes.
COLE: That’s what he is most famous for, yeah, is correlating brain size with social group size to arrive at a prediction of the human group size from the size of our neocortex. And the notion there is that our kind of social connections and social cognition is actually what drove that encephalisation process. So, we got big brains because we like to have lots of friends and that helped us fend off predators.
In any case, when I did this master’s, I did a module on the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And I was really struck by the notion that differences between languages around the world could give rise to differences in perception and I decided I wanted to do a PhD focusing on that.
This was about 2015. And at the time, Chen’s results, 2013, were freshly released, and Séan’s publication was, I think, on the verge of being released in PLOS. And so, I approached Asifa Majid and tried to find out if there was some interest in looking at this question about whether the way languages require us to speak about the future impacts the way we kind of think about and plan for the future.
DANIEL: Okay, so we have discussed Keith Chen’s work on savings and what our languages require us to say. Could we just start there maybe? My memory is that Chen’s hypothesis was that if your language had a grammatical future tense. Now, it’s not whether you can talk about the future, because everybody can talk about the future. It’s one of those things that we love to do. But not all of us have to use a special grammatical marker on our verbs to talk about the future. And the idea that he had was if you didn’t have one of those, then you were better at saving money because the future was kind of like the present because you handled them both grammatically. So that was going to have a spooky effect on the way that we think and on the way that we behave. I say spooky effect. Is that a good way of describing it?
SÉAN: No, it does seem magical. And I think one of the sort of achievements of Cole’s work is making the effect much less magical, but that’s right. So, if you talk about the future as different, it seems further away and so you’re less worried about it. You discount more the possible rewards in the future, so you’re more likely to take stuff in the present rather than sort of saving for later.
And you have to remember at the time, as you can imagine, linguists got really angry about this, as they do with all sort of linguistic relativity stuff, but particularly because it seemed like such a big leap from the sort of small details of how we talk up to really big decisions that we make about our psychology.
DANIEL: But now, Cole, you did a PhD in this. Were you copping any of this anger, or did you notice this in the linguistic community? What was going on for you while you were interested in this area?
COLE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there was a massive blowback, mostly online, like on blogs and stuff, criticising Chen’s basic typology, the way he was kind of broadly characterising. I think he classed something like 130 different languages in terms of whether they require a future marker when you talk about the future like a tense or whether they don’t.
And some of that criticism I think was fair, some was unfair. So, for instance, just to dig into the detail a bit, it’s not whether a marker is required when you talk about the future generally, but in fact when you make a prediction about the future. This is a very important category when it comes to talking about the future. So, you could say the main other ones are, I guess, schedules and intentions. So, if you say in English, “The train arrives at 5 PM,” that’s acceptable, but it doesn’t have a WILL in it, doesn’t have a future marker in it.
DANIEL: You just use present.
COLE: Exactly. You can use the present tense for a schedule. Similar with intentions, you can say, “I’m going out later.” That’s an intention, and you can also elide the future tense marker. But if you make a prediction, “It rains tomorrow,” you generally have to use some kind of future marker. And that’s either like WILL or BE GOING to or one of these modal verbs like MAY or COULD or MIGHT. And so, a lot of linguists said, “Well, look at all these counterexamples, like in English, for instance, where you can talk about the future without the future tense.” Actually, maybe misunderstood slightly the nuance there, and that the definition was about predictions.
But yes, I was certainly aware of the blowback. I don’t think I was fully aware of the kind of contentiousness around linguistic relativity within the broader linguistics community. I had done a Great Books undergraduate degree and then this anthropology degree as a master’s student. So, I wasn’t steeped in the history of kind of arguments and controversy over linguistic relativity within linguistics.
HEDVIG: Well, I think what’s really great about this new body of work is sort of reassessing what more precisely the predictions are and how it is good to test them, but also just maybe acknowledging that the effects may not always be very large, but they could still be there. Because I think part of the blowback comes from this idea of like an extreme version of linguistic relativity where you’re sort of programmed and you can’t even see certain colours and you can’t even imagine certain things. That seems very extreme, and no one I know in this space who do research, exploring and try to falsify these hypotheses usually push it that far. It’s like if you have a language that’s like this, you’re like a little bit more probable to do this, yeah.
SÉAN: Yeah. At the same time, in the economics world, this was a really interesting result because the effect size seems sort of moderate if you’re used to linguistic experiments, but it’s actually massive if you’re used to economic things. So, the ability to explain as much of the variation in people’s economic behaviour as Chen was able to do, if he was right, it would mean massive changes [CHUCKLES] to economic policy and the ability to make quite a big difference.
So, I think there was quite a big difference in the understanding of it in different fields. And whenever I’ve gone to talk to biologists about it who aren’t sort of connected to both of those things, they kind of think, “Oh, yeah, okay, that seems interesting.” So, it’s really interesting, your attitude to it. People are coming to this question with a lot of baggage. Maybe baggage is the wrong word. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s almost like the dating in evolutionary linguistics, historical linguistics, people also have a lot of baggage. And also in anthropology, broadly, even just classifying cultures in any way has a lot of baggage that I think a lot of people are sort of now rummaging through and finding out what’s actually making sense and what isn’t.
DANIEL: I think being a linguist of a certain age, I think what drives linguists crazy, or what used to drive linguists crazy about it, is that it’s one of those things that seem so intuitive to people who aren’t linguists. They’re like, “Oh, well, that totally makes sense if that would be the case.” And linguists say, “Oh, you know… It’s just…”
HEDVIG: You say that, Daniel.
DANIEL: “…it’s not that simple.”
HEDVIG: I was so glad that you did this because I… Both reading your paper that you kindly showed us the manuscript of Cole and Séan and Daniel’s recap in the beginning, I actually have to remind myself every time if having a separate future makes you more or less likely to save money. Because in my galaxy brain, I can totally support either case. I’m like, oh, if you don’t have a future, it’s like the future’s here with you now and it’s closer to you, and therefore you plan for it or something. But if it’s separate, you think of it as a separate thing and it’s… I don’t know, I can sort of make my brain go either way. So, I actually have to be reminded. So, the fact that other people find this intuitive is… Cole and Séan, do you find it intuitive, which direction it goes in?
SÉAN: I find myself…
COLE: Yeah, I’ve been steeped in it so long, I no longer remember what my intuitions were, as well as this notion about temporal discounting, which is to say, the farther away things are in time, the lower you kind of value them. And with that framework, it’s, I think, maybe more intuitive. But, for instance, you could imagine that being forced to mark the future grammatically say “it will,” “it could rain,” “it may rain,” might increase its salience and then cause you to value it more. So, I think it’s like, prima facie, totally plausible to imagine it went the other way as well, but I can’t honestly remember what my original intuitions were.
SÉAN: To be fair to Chen, the original paper has a sort of mathematical model and is very precise about the sort of hypothesised relation. I think it does make sense in terms of that history of work on future discounting.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: One thing that maybe is upsetting to linguists in this fare is that people who share the same language also usually share the same culture and share a lot of other things in common than just the language. For example, you might just have a culture where generally people don’t have as much money and you try and meet the needs you have that week rather than the needs you have in a year from now, because you don’t know what’s going to happen a year from now. So, in that way, you might not care about the future. And also, your language might or might not have a future tense marker. So, linguists are very focused on language like the thing you find in a dictionary and a grammar and the idea of sort of disentangling them seems like a bit unintuitive.
DANIEL: Séan, you worked with Keith Chen on round two of the paper, and we’ve kind of discussed this, but I’ve never heard the story from your angle. What was it like? Why did you go to Chen and say, “Hey, let’s do a thing”? What was that process like?
SÉAN: Well, actually, I wrote a blog post. His paper came out on a repository so people could read it. It wasn’t fully published yet, and it sort of fitted in with all of this sort of exciting work on looking at cross-cultural relationships. And I wrote a blog post criticising the statistics and saying, “Well, you need to take into account that languages are related to each other.”
And then, Keith Chen, to his immense credit, responded to that post saying, “Well, actually, I think the details are a bit more complicated. Do you want to work together to investigate this? I’ll share my data. We’ll work together. And we’re working on this with James Winters as well. We’re on these kind of stats.” And so, that’s really all credit to him to being open to working with people. And I think because we had a criticism that was constructive in the sense that we had a sort of solution that he sort of was interested in working with us.
And then, yeah, he’s a really interesting person, incredibly intelligent and interested. And he wasn’t precious about his own theory. He really wanted to sort of find the answer.
So, we worked on this and we tried all kinds of different methods. We actually found a bug in one of the R packages for mixed effects modeling because the analysis was so complicated that it sort of broke a load of things and in the end, we summarised. Well, in some methods it’s sort of significant and in some it’s not. So, we need two things. First of all, better methodology for looking at cross-cultural stuff. And second, experiments would really help where you can actually sort of control things and get around the kind of problems with deciding whether it’s to do with language or culture or whatever. So, we thought, “Great, we’ve solved it. We’ve put this paper out. No one will sort of run with this hypothesis in the same way without being…
HEDVIG: You thought that…?
SÉAN: Yeah, yeah, I thought… [HEDVIG LAUGHS] And then over the next 10 years, there’d be so many papers, “Oh, Keith Chen, we used this original,” and then not testing sort of the shared ancestry of languages and things. So, our message didn’t really get out there. We sort of promised this thing…
HEDVIG: I thought you meant… Well, also because I know you guys, so I knew it but I thought you meant, “Oh, we have said the final word on it. No one’s ever going to write about this again,” [SÉAN LAUGHS] but you meant people will now… This will set the record straight. By the way, thank you, Séan for saying that because I have maybe been passing on a falsehood, which is I thought that you approached Keith…
DANIEL: So did I.
HEDVIG: …but it was the other way around. And Daniel probably has that falsehood from me.
DANIEL: I did.
HEDVIG: So, very good. Yeah, it’s my fault.
SÉAN: Just before this recording I went on and you can still find the blog posts and you can still read Keith Chen’s response. Yeah, blogs were a thing back then. It’s like how you use it… [LAUGHS] I guess maybe they still are, but that was certainly like a really big break for my career. The ability to sort of put stuff up really rapidly and get responses on.
COLE: I think Séan touched on a really interesting point which I think probably for this audience is worth dwelling on, which is the proliferation of papers on this question within economics because I don’t know to what extent linguists are aware of this. So, there have probably been over the last 10 years, 12 years, 25 papers, 30 papers that looked to predict economic outcomes from Chen’s original variable which again indexed whether a language required speakers to mark future time reference when they made a prediction. And there have been some really interesting, I think, approaches to unpacking some of those issues that you were talking about to do with the cultural confounds that linguists tend to raise when they’re talking about the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
And also, I guess where linguistic relativity gets a little bit criticised is people say, “Okay, so there are some effects, like Russians might be slightly faster at categorising light versus dark blue than English speakers, but the blue still looks blue. And what’s the big deal of a difference in 125 milliseconds in terms of their categorisation?” Is that perception or is it just slightly some small attentional bias that gives rise to some quicker processing speed. In other words, like, yeah, there’s a bit of it, but so what?
And so, like Chen’s results first of all show these amazing things. There were differences as a function of this language variable in peak blood flow and in grip strength and all these kinds of physical outcomes to show that this kind of… Potentially, these linguistic differences really impacted people’s propensity to exercise, which is kind of an intertemporal decision because you trade present discomfort for future health when you choose to exercise.
And then, lots of other ones. So, I mean, wildly… likelihood of committing suicide on a cross-country sample as well as support for euthanasia. And this is because that you can construe future suffering as an intertemporal decision as well. And if you’re valuing that future higher, you think the suffering is going to be worse and you’re going to be more likely to support euthanasia. So, this is one of the other studies.
HEDVIG: Oh, oh.
COLE: Which is heavy, but a very kind of big and real potential effect of some kind of linguistic variable.
And then other stuff like… I mean some cool stuff like firms headquartered in Hong Kong, when it switched from Chinese to English, compared with comparable South Asian firms invested more… Sorry, less after it went to English in research and development and had smaller cash holdings. So, there’s some really interesting ways to try to unpick the fact that culture could kind of be confounding these outcomes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. That’s the thing, right? Culture. I think no one is that surprised that cultures have different behaviours and focuses and emphasis and pragmatic conventions. I think the thing that is a bit scary is the idea that it’s just language.
SÉAN: And also, that I think we were frustrated that these studies were using this same variable about the future tense, which linguists are rightly sort of a bit skeptical about, and doing things like pretending there’s one language per country and that people aren’t bilingual. So, there wasn’t a sort of careful analysis of what was going on linguistically in languages, and there wasn’t much sort of careful experimental evidence. And I think that’s where Cole kind of came in to try and fill that gap.
COLE: I want to give the economists more credit than we’re giving them. There were studies in Switzerland where you looked at French versus Swiss German speakers and found differences. There were bilingual experiments in Estonia with Russian and Estonian that found differences as well. And there were other, I think, within-country bilingual experiments as well that tried to unpick this difference between language and culture to the extent that people who are in the same country, even though they spoke a different language, arguably shared the same culture.
So, they definitely were grappling with this, but with these still sort of, I guess, correlational methods that don’t ultimately sort of rule out the fact that there could be these cultural differences that could be giving rise to the effects.
HEDVIG: I have to say I would find cultural differences quite interesting without the language.
DANIEL: Well, I think that brings us up to the current study, which we did cover a bit on the show, but let’s cover it from your angle. You didn’t just look at country by country or language by language. You looked at individuals and you did it more experimentally. So, let’s take a look at what that was like.
COLE: Yeah, 100%. So, our approach was like, let’s try to figure out if this is true or not by not trying to look at a broad sample of 129 languages where you kind of sacrifice granular understanding of what’s happening in the languages, but by just comparing two languages. And those languages were English and Dutch. Where in English, you need to mark a future time statement with WILL or another modal verb. And in Dutch, you don’t. You’re free to just say, “It rains tomorrow.”
And then, I guess the other major bit is we actually measured the way individuals use language. And so, I think linguistic relativity is a mediational hypothesis, which is to say there are constraints in a language’s grammar that affect an individual’s use of language, that constrain it in certain ways by forcing them to use certain grammatical constructions which might require them to pay attention to different aspects of their surroundings. And that, in time, can give rise to sort of entrenched offline biases in some cases.
I guess where we like to think we’ve made a contribution is we tried to actually measure and model that kind of mediation pathway where individual language use was a part of our experiments and you can see the way that these broad grammatical constraints shape that and how that in turn influences people’s decisions and behaviours.
HEDVIG: So, the idea is that in English, the grammar of English says that if you want to make a future prediction, you have to use some sort of auxiliary verb. You can choose to use WILL, “it will rain tomorrow”. But that is a choice that means that you are very certain it’s going to rain. If you have a lower certainty, you have to say something like, “it may,” “it could,” “it should,” like, “Based on my calculations, it should rain tomorrow.” Whichever one you choose, you have to make a choice. You can’t say, “It rains tomorrow.” So, that’s the idea, right? And Dutch people can say, “It rains tomorrow.” They can probably also say, “It probably rains tomorrow.” “It might rain tomorrow.” They can choose to do those things, but they can also choose to go with the default and that still means a future prediction, whereas the English people are forced to make a choice.
COLE: That’s right.
HEDVIG: What’s that Boas quote that I love? Grammar determines the aspect of each experience that must be expressed, not what can happen but must…
COLE: It’s not so much about what may be expressed as what must be expressed or something like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, English speakers are confronted with this choice more often than Dutch speakers.
COLE: That’s exactly right. And so, this is where our work kind of, I guess, branches off from the notions in Chen. So, the notions in Chen are all to do with the future tense. It says English requires a speaker to use the future tense, and that there’s kind of two mechanism’s that either makes the future seem farther away. Because if you think about a tense marker, maybe that sort of indicates that stuff’s happening later. And so, you think about that marker as encoding some notion of like temporal distance. And the other mechanism is actually to do with precision.
So, he has two, and he doesn’t say which one he thinks is most likely to be happening. But the notion there is that when you have a tense marker, it divides time up into past, present and future. Whereas without one, it’s just present and past. And so, that tripartite division would cause speakers to have more precise temporal representations of what’s happening in the future. And in either case, it’s going to make you value it less.
So, all of those mechanisms broadly are to do with tense and to do with the way we’re imagining or construing time. And so, our work says, hold on a second. You don’t have to say WILL when you talk about the future. What you have to do is exactly what you just said, Hedvig. It’s index, your certainty using a modal verb, of which WILL is one. So, you can say IT WILL, IT MIGHT, IT MAY, IT SHOULD, IT COULD. “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” And you’re not free when you’re making a prediction to not make that kind of index of your certainty around what’s going to happen in the future. So, our work says, look, people discount things that have a low probability as well. If you have a 10% chance of getting $100 in a year, you’re going to discount that much more than if you have 100% chance of getting $100 in a year.
And so, there’s this really pretty well worked out mechanism where if your kind of language is forcing you to think about how certain you are about future events all the time, that could bias your estimation of that kind of certainty, like downwards to some extent, relative to a Dutch speaker who can just say, if they want, “It rains tomorrow.” Although they are, as you point out, totally free to use one of these markers if they choose to. They just don’t have to.
HEDVIG: And another great thing about your study is, and my husband, who is British, objects a bit to when I say this, but I kind of think that English people… I know not all British people are English, but English people are sort of short Dutch people. Like, they’re so alike. Like, they have so many things in common. They’re not identical populations, but like Birmingham is not identical to Essex either. So, you’re in a way a bit, at least to a certain extent, a little bit controlling for that cultural variable, I think.
COLE: They’re, among the most closely related Western Germanic languages that you could have, for sure. And also, culturally not so different. It’s not as though you’re comparing English with…
SÉAN: But then, I think that’s the really interesting thing about Cole’s work. So, the insight, it’s about probability and not necessarily the sort of distance. So, that was the real breakthrough moment for us. And it took many, many experiments that sort of didn’t work, and like there were a bit of effect, but we couldn’t really tell what was going on and it was Cole’s insight to sort of, yeah, crack that nut.
But then also that actually there’s a lot of variation in how people talk about the future. So, we kind of think of English as sort of having quite a bit quite stricter rules than Dutch. But actually, when we ask people to write down sentences to describe events in the future, there’s a lot of variation. So, some people use a lot of low-certainty language, some people don’t. Some people use WILL quite a lot. So, that also gives us leverage then, it’s not just about predicting differences between cultures, but we can predict differences between individuals as well, potentially. And then, that becomes much more like a sort of standard psycholinguistic experiment. The sort of way your attitude to the future is related to the way that you talk about the future.
DANIEL: Mm. And, Hedvig, I remember when we talked about this work, you mentioned that the future, it seems like it’s not so much a tense as it is a mood.
HEDVIG: Yeah, well, this is because I come from a grammatical typology, so tense and aspects, things like progressive, punctual, mood and modality and evidentiality are all in this like floating abstract semantic space where they kind of go into each other. So traditionally, mood is to do with the relationship between the action, event or state with other possible worlds, is like one way of expressing it. So, I hope that something’s going to happen, you could call that an optative mood.
And the future, we’re not sure about what happens in the future. We’re relatively sure about what happened in the past though, like [LAUGHS] not 100%, right? And we’re kind of sure what’s happening in the present. But future is… Yeah, you can say, “I want this to happen. I hope this happens.” It’s a much more loose space. It’s not like the other tenses.
But tense is weird in general. You were talking earlier, Cole, about using present tense like you do in Dutch for future. There’re also languages where you can use present tense to talk about past events. And languages move through this semantic space and transition between these different states quite a lot. It’s quite fluid space. You quite often see markers migrating between these different categories. So, it’s a wild area.
DANIEL: I have just realised that MOOD and MODAL are related. We call them modals. All the modal verbs in English, like CAN, COULD, SHALL, SHOULD, MAY, MIGHT, MUST, WILL, WOULD, those are all expressing a mood. So, they’re modal. Wow. Okay, there’s my insight for the day. [LAUGHS]
COLE: Nice.
DANIEL: It’s a mood.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
COLE: I think this is really interesting because there have been these sort of thunderous debates, I guess, within linguistics and cognitive psychology around the extent to which cross-linguistic effects affect perception. And people want to say of linguistic relativity that if it’s not perception, it’s maybe slightly trivial. It’s down to attentional biases or categorisation differences or thinking for speaking differences and these kinds of things.
And I guess where my work rejects that framing of triviality as being correlated with perception is to say that you can’t perceive the future fundamentally and you can’t perceive probability. You can perceive frequency. And then, probability is an estimate on the basis of some experience of frequency as to the end-run likelihood of that event, which is also again not something you can ever perceive. And this work says, “Hey, look, we’re not talking about perception at all. We’re talking about abstract construals of future events. And yet, language can have an impact on these things and that can have pretty important kind of knock-on consequences.” Certainly, if you take the economist’s results seriously, and I think that’s maybe an interesting intervention into the kind of framework around the way in which people have debated this sort of importance of linguistic relativity research.
DANIEL: It’s a bit of a criticism of linguists that we dismiss Whorfianism. We say, “Oh, that’s not happening.” And then, when it does look like it’s happening, we dismiss it as trivially obvious.
HEDVIG: Trivial. [LAUGHS]
COLE: [LAUGHS] Sure, right.
HEDVIG: Say, there’s a lot of linguists and I spend a lot of time with a lot of linguists who are in like cultural evolution, evolutionary biology kind of spaces. And I go to conferences and there’s this idea in fields that are proximate to linguistics like psychology, cognitive science, economics, anthropology, evolution biology, they have a stereotype of linguists. And sometimes, I get a little bit annoyed because I’m a linguist and I’m not like that. My friends aren’t either. So, you’re talking about some stodgy strawman that I don’t know. But then every now and then, I go to a conference. and I meet them and I’m like… Right. I see.
COLE: [LAUGHS] They’re out there.
HEDVIG: They’re out there.
COLE: I don’t mean to paint linguists as a broad class as being necessarily suspicious of linguistic relativity. I think the way I’ve been talking about it is broadly true within cognitive science as well, which I’m maybe a little bit closer to those kinds of framing of the debate.
DANIEL: Okay, but in your work, you did find kind of a reverse Whorfian effect, where according to Chen’s hypothesis, or according to a Whorfian view, you would expect people who used more future words would discount the future more because it’s this weird different thing. And you found the opposite. You found that English speakers who make greater use of the future tense discount less, not more. They were actually willing to forgo the $10 now so that they could get a hundred dollars in a year. They didn’t engage in temporal discounting, even though they used lots of future.
COLE: So, there’s some complexities to those results, but that is a piece of the puzzle. So, when we talk about mediation results, there’s a couple different ways of talking about the effects. So, there’s the indirect effect, which is there’s this language difference between English and Dutch. So, English people have to use the future more, and then that impacts their decisions. And then, there’s the total effect. And actually, those things can go in, like, different directions. So, you can have an effect via future tense, which is, as you say, positive. We found that the more people use the future tense in English, the… um… the less they discounted rather than the more they discounted.
DANIEL: [QUIETLY] You hesitated.
COLE: I know. I had to think about it for a second. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I do too, every time.
COLE: I know. But the total effects in those studies were either the same way that Chen had hypothesised, or in one of the studies, there was a non-significant total effect. So, this suggests that it’s not WILL that’s mediating it, but that there is still this kind of negative effect as a function of the difference in languages. So, it says maybe it’s not WILL, but the effects broadly are still going in the direction that Chen hypothesised.
HEDVIG: Well, maybe, I think I need that broken down a little bit. First off, you had an experiment where you asked people to do things and predict things and guess at things, correct?
COLE: Yeah, 100%. So, what we did is we gave people some little sentences with essentially a blank, and they all referred to the future. So, they had to fill in sentences like, “Tomorrow, it rains.” And they had to fill it in how they would say it if they were speaking to a friend in some context, which we supplied. And then, individuals can choose whether they would say tomorrow it might rain or may rain or will rain or whatever it is they would say, and we measured those linguistic differences. And then, we had them do a temporal discounting task, which is you give kind of a choice between a reward that’s delayed and a reward that’s now. So, you might say, “Would you prefer $5 now or $5 in a month?” And at some point, as those times get longer and longer and longer away, people tend to choose the $5 now because the distant reward they perceive to have a lower value.
SÉAN: Sorry, just to check. So, it’s like, “Would you prefer $5 now or $6 later?”
COLE: Oh, sorry, yeah. The later reward is usually larger. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: And also…
SÉAN: So, you might be willing to wait a week to get an extra $5, but you’re probably not willing to wait a year to get an extra $5.
DANIEL: That’s the temporal discounting.
SÉAN: Exactly. It’s sort of objectively worth the same, but your mind is sort of like, “Oh, things might happen. They might break their promise,” or something.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. “How much do I trust this guy? I answered a poster on university campus, and I don’t know these people.”
COLE: Yeah, exactly. And even if you’re 100% certain, you might just rather buy something now with it instead of waiting all of that time.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
COLE: It just seems like it’s less valuable when it’s far away.
HEDVIG: And there was variation, like you mentioned earlier, within the English group and within the Dutch group. So, some people were more likely to use WILL, some people were more likely to use “may.” So, it’s not like a language is a monolith that because you have WILL, you always use it. There is variation between people. And what’s cool about Séan… I think it was Séan or Cole, one of you, one of the Roberts/ons mentioned earlier that gives you a different statistical strength, because then you can actually look at the English speakers who are more likely to use will if they are also more or less likely to discount the future within the English speakers, right?
COLE: That’s exactly right. Yeah, so these individual language choices… I like to think of… what is that old Greek philosopher’s quote about free will where…? I think it’s Zeno or something. Zeno, he says you have about as much free will as a dog being pulled behind a cart [CHUCKLES] or something like this. So, I think language constrains the choices that you have, but then within those constraining factors of the language’s grammar, there are individual differences. And those individual differences correlate with aspects of your personality. So, someone might be likely to use WILL all the time, and that’s going to correlate with how patient they are or how much certainty they kind of construe the future with. And we’re able to kind of model that as well as these broad cross-linguistic differences, constraining factors.
SÉAN: So, this latest paper tries to test these two things. So, it tests Chen’s hypothesis about the tense and also Cole’s hypothesis that actually it’s about modality. And broadly, what we found over the last few papers is modality explains a lot of the results and tense really doesn’t.
DANIEL: Hang on, I need to break that down a little bit. So, modals are in English, WILL, MAY, MUST, MIGHT, things like that. But we don’t have a grammatical future tense. Our listener, Colin, we’re getting feedback from listeners like Colin, who emailed and said English does not have a grammatical future tense.
COLE: Yeah, so that’s an interesting… That touches on Chen’s original typology. And so, I guess he breaks it down and I think this is pretty well grounded in work from Östen Dahl into like four categories. So, there are languages that have no future at all. There’s no future tense marker. You can only use the present. I think Finnish is an example. There are languages like Dutch where there is a future tense marker, but you’re free not to use it. And there are languages like English where you have an unbound future tense marker like WILL but you must use… Well, I would say you’d have to use a modal verb to mark the future tense. And then, there are languages with an inflectional or grammatical future tense.
DANIEL: Spanish.
COLE: Yeah, like Spanish or French or much of the Romance languages. Now, I would say that the salient difference from a Whorfian perspective is not whether it’s a bound morpheme, it’s not whether it’s part of a grammatical future tense. It’s whether there is a grammatical structure that’s obligatory. So, it’s actually whether it’s obligatory or not, which is kind of important because that’s what’s going to change the attentional differences that a speaker has to make in order to speak in that language.
And so, Chen cuts the boundary between weak FTR, between languages like Dutch that don’t require a tense marker and languages like English that do, along the lines of where it’s obligatory, not along the lines of whether it’s an unbound modal or whether it’s like inflectional or grammatical future tense. And I think that broadly makes a lot of sense.
DANIEL: FTR? Sorry.
COLE: Sorry. Future time reference. Yeah, FTR is short for any statement about the future. Whether it’s marked or not with a tense or a modal or anything, it’s all FTR.
HEDVIG: As someone who deals with practically comparing grammars all day, I can say that it is guiding my work a lot, this notion of obligatoriness, because it’s very hard to distinguish a language like Finnish and Dutch in your example, because Finnish probably can come up with some sort of modal verb to say something about the future if they were pressed. And it can be hard to know if that is just optional, what is grammar in that case. And if the Dutch thing is not obligatory and it’s optional, then isn’t that kind of like those things in Finnish? I’m not saying that it’s impossible to draw the limit and I’m going to get hate mail from a bunch of linguists now, but it’s very hard when a grammar writes like, “And sometimes, people can also do this, but sometimes they don’t, and I don’t know why.” And it’s like, well, I can also say I have three tomatoes, but I can also say I have tomatoes, and that doesn’t mean I have a trial anyway. Yes, so Chen’s hypothesis has to do with the idea that the future is a faraway, dislocated place.
DANIEL: Some weird different thing.
HEDVIG: Cole’s hypothesis has more to do with the certainty probability. So, it will rain tomorrow, and it may rain tomorrow are equal in time distance from the present. They’re both tomorrow, but they differ in certainty
COLE: 100%, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
SÉAN: In fact, Cole’s original title for the paper was “Not when but if,” which I thought was a great… But then, an editor made us change it to “whether” rather than “if” and so the whole thing…
COLE: IF is the beginning to introduce a conditional, and they’re like [THE NO GESTURE] and we’re like okay, fine. It was a pity.
SÉAN: But yeah, that’s the right difference.
DANIEL: So, walk me through the results then. I mentioned one: English speakers who use the future tense markers more, discount less, not more. What were the other results that you found as far as the modals go?
COLE: Yeah, there are two papers, one that looked at tense, and we found the opposite to Chen’s prediction.
DANIEL: That was it.
COLE: Yeah, so he would say, if you use WILL all the time, if your language requires you to use WILL all the time, that’s going to make you think of it as far away and less valuable. And we found that English speakers use WILL more, but to the extent that they did, it made them construe the future as more valuable, so, the opposite way. And we thought that kind of makes sense if you look at the role WILL plays in the English kind of modal verb system where WILL is a marker of high certainty. If you say it WILL rain, you’re saying you’re pretty certain it’s going to rain. And if you say it MAY, you’re a lot less certain. And so, if you think that people kind of discount low probability events, people who use WILL a lot, they’re going to discount less and value those things more highly if they use WILL. So, that was kind of one finding from this paper that came out in August.
And now, we have another paper coming out fast on its heels where we try to unpack that hypothesis a little bit more. And rather than saying it’s not WILL, we try to say what we think is happening. And what we think is happening is the following. We think that English makes you kind of index this choice between WILL and COULD and MAY and MIGHT, and makes you sort of index the extent to which you’re certain about those future events. And that causes you, we would say, to think about those events as having a lower probability of occurring. So, English speakers are kind of less certain about the future because their grammar asks them to make this choice all the time about how certain they are, and that in turn causes them to devalue it.
And so, in the paper that’s coming out shortly, we measure all of those things. We measure future tense in English and Dutch, and we measure how much people use these kind of modal constructions like COULD and MAY and MIGHT and SHOULD. And we actually measure kind of the extent to which they can… The temporal distance as well, we have a way of measuring that where we just get them to rate with a slider, how far away they think tomorrow is, a week away, two months away, this kind of stuff.
And we found across the board that when you look at how the future tense works and how this temporal distance stuff works, all of that is just non-significant. I tested it in many different ways, and we find kind of no effects via future tense, no effects via these kind of temporal measures, whereas we find these strong significant effects via the modal verbs. So, English speakers use more of these modal verbs, and that causes them to devalue the future. Whereas there’s just kind of, in our data, at least, no support for these kind of temporal notions that were advanced in Chen’s original paper.
SÉAN: So, we’ve come full circle from me writing a blog post saying, “Look at this stupid hypothesis,” to, “Actually, oh, no, maybe it’s right. Oh, no, it is wrong. Well, actually, the general idea is right, but the mechanism is different.” But it’s still fundamentally about making choices, like Cole said. So, English forces you to make choices not just about when something’s going to happen, but if it’s going to happen. And that “if” is much more of a predictor of how people actually make decisions about the future.
DANIEL: So, Cole, I’m looking at a paper of yours from a couple of years ago. Here’s the title, “Language about the future on social media as a novel marker of anxiety and depression.” It was published in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences back in 2023. How’d we miss that one? Social media, we found lots of influences. Like when people are presented with different things in their feed, their comments show a different mood. People’s mood is generally terrible when they’re on social media. Tell me about this work of yours and what you found that… what influence modals had there.
COLE: So that paper, what we did was we looked at Reddit. We scraped some posts from r/anxiety and r/depression, which are like subreddits, communities where people who have anxiety and depression can meet up and talk about it and find social support from other people who are suffering with those mood disorders. And so, I think what we did was we took the top 100 posts or something from those communities and then we took a kind of snowball approach. We thought there might be some… We didn’t want to measure the sort of community voice. We wanted to understand how those people spoke in general. So, we downloaded their top posts from all subreddits that they posted to, but they were the top posters in those anxiety and depression subreddits, but it’s their language from across a sample of other subreddits as well. And we compared that with a similarly composed sample from /all, which is just all of Reddit, so it’s sort of maybe like a sample of sort of Reddit in general.
And what we found was that those speakers from anxiety… first of all, there were no differences between the anxiety and depression ones. And maybe posting to those different subreddit is like a bad diagnostic criterion as to whether you actually have anxiety or depression because they’re often comorbid. So, no differences between those. But compared to the general sample, we found that those people with anxiety or depression were using more of these modals. So, they were talking about the future in kind of less certain ways.
HEDVIG: Certain.
COLE: Yeah, even though we kind of measured the actual literal distance. So, if someone was saying tomorrow, that’s kind of a distance from the present of one day. If they were saying next week, that’s one week. And so, you can kind of measure the objective difference in like reference dates. And so, they were speaking about times, objective times that were closer to the present but with more uncertain language as compared to the sample from r/all, which is using kind of more distant reference, but they’re more certain about it.
And you can imagine I guess the way we interpreted those results was if anxiety is a kind of mechanism to stimulate present action, people who have heightened levels of anxiety might be struggling with a kind of overactive kind of anxiety response where they’re immediately concerned with things that are happening in the near future, but they’re like less certain about it, which makes that distant temporal horizon even less certain to the extent that maybe it’s not even worth talking about.
And so, that’s kind of the broad findings with those studies. So, there’s these interesting correlations between these sorts of mood disorders and the way you kind of think about the future, where anxiety kind of fundamentally has some future-oriented relationship because it is really about stimulating action about things that that you need to do for the most part.
HEDVIG: I have some anxiety actually, diagnosed and one thing that happens is you do a lot of like, “what if” scenarios and you can imagine very, very terrible things happening in a very short span of time. You need to exercise your ability to believe that not everything is possible and some things are more possible than others. I was chatting with a friend of mine who recently got accepted for a research grant and I said congratulations. And they said, “Oh, I’m not sure about this yet. It’s been announced on the website, but they still haven’t emailed me directly with this and this kind of confirmation. So, I still don’t believe it’s happening.” And I was like, “All right, okay, you have…” Because one thing that happens is when you don’t have ability to predict what’s happening around you, what is probable, you sort of just give up on it and you’re like, anything can happen. I can fall off this roof. I don’t know. Someone told me I got this money but, like, until it’s in my bank account, I don’t trust it.
COLE: Mm-hmm. True.
DANIEL: That’s temporal discounting all right.
COLE: There it is. Or certainty discounting, as the case may be. As you pile on the uncertainties, the distant future becomes irrelevant to your present circumstances, perhaps.
DANIEL: And that’s anxiety.
COLE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ah, okay, so I’m still not sure. [COLE CHUCKLES] Is the language driving anxiety or is it simply reflecting anxiety that’s there? This might not be Whorfian at all.
COLE: This study, I would not characterise it as Whorfian. No, it was all in English for the first point. But it really is about looking at kind of correlations between the way people use language and I guess the potential underlying mood disorder diagnoses that they have.
We did a follow-up study which was a little bit more experimental as well. And I think what we tried to do was measure a relationship between tendency towards anxiety and depression and temporal discounting. And we did find that it was really anxious sample in that experiment that we ran that had this effect of discounting the future more than the depressive samp… That suggests maybe the online results are more to do with anxiety. But no, it’s not Whorfian. This is really to do with kind of correlations between language and mood disorder and maybe looking at that as an insight into the way that these mood disorders cause people to construe the future.
HEDVIG: It sounds more similar to work we’ve seen on diagnosing dementia and Alzheimer’s and things like that with disordered speech. I don’t know if you’ve seen those where it’s more like a symptom of something rather than a cause.
SÉAN: Yeah.
COLE: Yeah, 100% sure.
SÉAN: And you can imagine, I think, that there might be some general… something about our personality that’s affecting both the way that we speak and our attitude to the future. But then, the latest paper also tests this with bilinguals. So, we test the same people and in different languages. And Cole can reveal the magical… Because for me, this is the strongest evidence you could get. The same person, you change the language and if they change their decisions about the future, that seems like the strongest kind of evidence you could look for a Whorfian effect.
COLE: Yeah, 100%. So, in terms of these cultural confounds, I guess the approach we took to try to understand if we are just really measuring cultural differences which are somehow both reflected in language and discounting, We tried to develop evidence that it was really to do with language by we got some Dutch/English bilinguals. These were all Dutch people because all Dutch people…
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
COLE: …speak English, but not all English people speak Dutch and so, we got Dutch people. And we did the same experiment. We measured their language. We gave them these kind of fill-in-the-blank exercises and we did some psychological discounting tasks. And we measured the same people at different times, so it’s with a participant, I think there was a month-long gap or something like that and half the sample did it in Dutch and English, the other half English and Dutch. And what we found in that study was again, the extent to which they used future tense. And when they were speaking in English, they did use more future tense. They also used more of these modal verbs. And there, we took some proficiency scores, so with people with higher English proficiency used more modal verbs and more future tenses as well.
And what we found was when they were in the English condition, when we asked them to speak in English and measured these discounting tasks in English, again they discounted more. So, they had like lower values for the future events. And then, this was like mediated by the modal verbs. And the future, again, when we controlled for that path, kind of had no effect. So again, we’re finding no support for Chen’s mechanism. But broadly, the effect’s going in the right direction in the way he hypothesised. But it’s all kind of to do with these modal verbs causing people to think about the future as having lower probability.
And then, because it was bilinguals, you can kind of arguably say that they’re from the same culture.
HEDVIG: Yes.
COLE: Now, people might object and say that switching languages activates different cultural schemas. And so, maybe you’re somehow like activating cultural differences by switching languages. But I would say if language is able to activate cultural values, then it might play some kind of outsized role in transmitting them as well, which is essentially the Whorfian hypothesis.
HEDVIG: And again, we’re talking about English and Dutch people. So, I again put forward that like…
COLE: They’re the same. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I mean, not the same, but kind of the same.
COLE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Modals are weird. Modality is just a weird thing.
HEDVIG: This is a…
COLE: I mean, look, I did a PhD. I spent years on this and I really came to the conclusion that you almost can’t unpack the difference between time and modality when it comes to the future. They’re just so overlapping. I mean, I titled the dissertation, “The future is a thing of possibility,” because it just seemed like everything I studied about it, that just kept coming through in almost every way I could study.
SÉAN: I think the really great thing about this kind of research is that we have this sort of one negative result for Chen, but there’s other positive result that opens up all other kinds of questions. And in the paper, there’re various other things. Every time I seemed to read the manuscript, there was like a new study in it and there’s one about our perception of probability in a nonlinguistic task. And then, Cole collected a load of scripts of earnings calls from businesses where…
HEDVIG: I was going to ask about this.
SÉAN: Yeah, CEOs are talking about the business and what’s going to happen in the future. And so now, there’s this huge corpus, enormous thing that has the potential to answer lots more questions about this kind of relationship between the way we speak and the way we think about language. And now that we have a sort of handle on this modality thing, that gives us a way into the languages.
And of course, Cole has done a massive amount of work pulling together all the research that’s been done on English and Dutch. But there’s a whole… As Hedvig… there’s so many and they all work very differently, and so you really need… Yeah, the ideal way to go ahead in this is not this sort of Keith Chen’s binary approach to two different types of languages, but you need to understand how the language works, how people actually use the language and their behaviour and the culture and how they relate to these things altogether. So, for me, it’s a really exciting sort of future that this kind of study has.
HEDVIG: Yeah, super cool.
DANIEL: What do you wish you knew? If I had a magic wand and I could wave it, what do you want to know? What’s it all pointing toward? What are you trying to find out?
COLE: Well, I think one of the questions that the paper sort of touches on which Séan mentioned in terms of these earnings calls data, but doesn’t, I think, fully answer is how general is this finding that we’ve identified where at least in English and Dutch it really does. I’m pretty high confidence in English and Dutch that it has to do with these kind of modal differences and probability discounting and the way you kind of construe how certain you are. But of course, those are just two languages, and there are 129 languages that Chen categorised in terms of these grammatical differences. And so, there’s a big question, like, is this general? Or, is this is something specifically to do with two closely related Western Germanic languages that share a modal tense system for talking about the future?
And so, we tried to answer that by looking at the way business executives talk about the future in earnings calls in the US. And so, earnings calls are quarterly or annual calls where like the executive leadership of a publicly traded company will talk with analysts, usually representatives from investment banks, and present their outlook on the… There’s a future-oriented outlook on the likelihood of them hitting their earnings per shares target in the next year or the next quarter. We looked at the annual ones as that’s when a lot of the reporting comes, and so lining it up was a little bit easier. So, we looked at these annual earnings calls.
So, these are really interesting kind of sample of languages because we kind of know they’re talking about the future and there are databases that let you look at the nationality of the different directors. And Séan had done a lot of work to map nationality to the top three languages that were spoken in many, many countries across the world. And we kind of cross-referenced all that.
Oh, and the other thing that’s interesting is the way you download these earnings calls transcripts, they’re precisely diarised by paid human annotators. So, you know precisely who’s saying what, whether they’re an analyst, what their name is, whether they’re a representative of the company, etc., etc., etc. So, you can figure out through this transcript… It’s pretty cool.
HEDVIG: That is such a cool corpora.
COLE: Yeah.
SÉAN: Can you tell them how big it is?
COLE: I’d have to look at the numbers.
SÉAN: But it’s like 100 million words or something. When we worked this out, it was like…
HEDVIG: I’m sorry, it’s publicly available?
SÉAN: It’s massive amount of data.
DANIEL: You wouldn’t have to have that many earnings calls to get that many words. They’re long.
COLE: They’re long and… No, I think it’s not publicly available, but some amazing collaborators of mine looking at some… So, I have to… Sorry, I should thank Sedat Erdogan, Marco Fasan and Giorgio Giotti who did a lot of the downloading of those earnings calls, which may come out in later work, some of the work that he did with them.
So, we downloaded 22,000 earnings calls which resulted in almost three million utterances from like 8,000 directors. So, you’re talking about a pretty big sample of language. Now, I have to say like the number of directors from… So, it’s mostly English because it’s in the US. So, the number of directors from like weak FTR-speaking countries, much lower, so like 67 or 70 or something like that. Obviously, that’s a very small portion of the overall sample.
But you can look at the nationality. We know what languages are spoken, the proportions of the languages that are spoken in their origin countries and we can map that to Chen’s kind of FTR variable and then look. The question is, do they speak differently when they’re speaking in English because they hail from these countries with different future time reference systems? And then, when you’re looking at those kind of weak FTR… the weak ones, the ones that don’t require a marker, I think we’re broadly looking at mostly Germanic languages, and then some Sino-Tibetan ones too. So, Mandarin for the most part, and Cantonese and some other related languages. And this lets us look at whether they use more future tenses, which is what is hypothesised by Chen in 2013, or whether they use more kind of modals.
And what we found across this sample was that, [CHUCKLES] as predicted by our kind of construal hypothesis, they used more present tense constructions and fewer modal ones, but there was no difference in future tense. So, this suggests that…
HEDVIG and DANIEL: Ah.
COLE: And so, this is compared to English, so the strong sample is really just English, but people who come from Germanic-speaking backgrounds or Sino-Tibetan-speaking backgrounds, when they’re speaking English compared to English native speakers, use a lot fewer of these modals and more present tense instructions, which suggests that difference is kind of characteristic of a broader linguistic difference but it’d be really interesting to look at languages with more heavily grammaticised future tenses, like the Romance languages, or a broader language sample of those kind of stronger ones where it’s grammaticised in different ways to English.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool. That’s such a cool corpus.
DANIEL: Hey, Séan, I want to ask you the same kind of question. Can I get you to finish this sentence? I’ll be really happy when I finally understand…
SÉAN: I’m not sure I want to find some… So, I’d be really happy if I’m just allowed to keep playing with this data and [LAUGHTER] developing the methods. I’m really happy that this work, the sort of method of measuring people’s usage and the probability together, that seems like a strong thing. And then, all the statistical work that’s sort of gone into this, so there’s some causal inference stuff in there, lots of sort of controlling for random effects, which is all this kind of stuff that I like to do.
So, I guess I’ll be happy when everyone has access to these kind of methods and linguistics can focus on debating the difference in results and theory rather than your sort of personal perspective on which sort of camp you belong to. And I hope that these sort of empirical methods, collaborating with lots of people, asking these questions that transcend sort of traditional boundaries will push people further towards being interested in sort of what’s next and what does that mean rather than, “Oh, that can’t possibly be true.”
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Dr Séan Roberts of Cardiff University and Dr Cole Robertson from the Center for Language Studies, Radboud University and the Department of Psychology at Emory University. We’re going to have links to all of the stuff we’ve been talking about on the show notes for this episode. Is there a way that you want people to find you and find out what you’re doing?
COLE: I think I’m @ColebRob on Twitter, but I don’t actively maintain a massive online presence. [LAUGHS] But yeah, find me on Twitter, sure.
SÉAN: Yeah.
COLE: Sorry, X.
SÉAN: I’m on Bluesky. Or you can look up my stuff on Google Scholar. [CHUCKLES] Yeah, I went from writing a blog post every day. Once I got a job, I stopped doing that because I have other things to do.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, we’ll have links up. But, Séan and Cole, thanks so much for coming on and talking us through your work today. It’s been really fun to chat and really good to have you talk about your work instead of just us talking about your work all the time.
SÉAN: Thanks so much. It’s lovely to talk about this.
COLE: Thanks so much for having us on. I really appreciate it and it’s been great to meet you both.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week. Hedvig, you got our first one.
BEN: We got a juicy one coming in…
HEDVIG: Yes, I do.
BEN: …from the fog of war.
DANIEL: Did you know this one, Ben?
BEN: No. As in, I thought Hedvig was bringing one to us like completely outside of our radar, like what’s going on?
DANIEL: Yeah, I’m completely. This is…
HEDVIG: It’s in our run sheet, which she may or may not have up.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I actually was like I thought we had already talked about this, and I wrote it in our Discord channel and I got a very funny reply from… Who was it? Who was it? Who was it? That was so funny. I got to give a special shoutout to Anne on our Discord. So, the word is BEAN SOUP THEORY.
DANIEL: BEAN SOUP THEORY.
BEN: BEAN SOUP THEORY. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes. All right. Do you want to have any guesses?
DANIEL: Does it have anything to do with that delightful story, the Russian folktale, Stone Soup?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I know that story.
BEN: That’s a really good exclusion, Daniel, well done. I’m wondering if it’s going to be… because it’s Hedvig and I’m wondering if it’s going to be related to some kind of TikTok challenge thing. So, here we…
DANIEL: Why theory? Why theory?
BEN: Because a couple of these little, shall we say, tests or even shibboleths are being played out in TikTok. So, for instance, the most recent one that I saw was the bird test, where a female partner is supposed to tell their male partner, “I saw a bird today,” and record the partner’s reaction. So, I’m wondering if BEAN SOUP THEORY is one of those.
HEDVIG: I’ll give you that it’s a thing that originated from TikTok, but it is the thing that describes a wider thing and it is not a challenge or a test or anything like that.
BEN: BEAN SOUP THEORY. Okay, no, you haven’t got me on this one. I’m an unknown.
HEDVIG: So, there once was someone who posted a video on TikTok talking about a soup that they really liked, bean soup, and said, “This is how you make bean soup. Put in the onions. You do this and that.” And suddenly, a lot of comments started appearing that were like, “I don’t like beans. But what if you don’t like beans? What can you substitute it for?” And people were like…
BEN: [LAUGHS] In the bean soup.
DANIEL: If you don’t like beans, you’re out of luck for this one. Make something else.
HEDVIG: If you don’t like bean soup, you should probably scroll away. So, BEAN SOUP THEORY is when people believe that things that are in particular appearing on their algorithmically curated feeds but also could be elsewhere in life, that everything needs to be relevant and pertinent to them.
BEN: Ah, okay.
HEDVIG: So, for example, if I tell you guys, “It’s really cold here, I need to wear a warm coat,” you might say, like, “We’re in Australia. We’re in Perth. You don’t need to wear a coat.” And I’m like: this is not…
BEN: The information did not need your contextual anchor point.
HEDVIG: …about you. So, as people are getting more and more curated For You pages on their various social medias, as they may be spending more and more time with people who are like them, sometimes something breaks through and it’s not something that is “for them,” and they react like someone is doing something wrong. This person has uploaded a bean soup recipe, is violating some sort of rule, and it’s like, no, they’re not. You literally can scroll.
BEN: You take your bean shit out of here.
DANIEL: Get off my feed, man.
HEDVIG: So, BEAN SOUP THEORY is sort of like a general failure of theory of mind, being able to imagine other people. And it’s sort of maybe also related to main character syndrome or something like that where…
DANIEL: I thought of that. Yeah.
HEDVIG: …you just think everything’s about you.
BEN: Can I put forward that we can take it one step further?
DANIEL: Oh, always.
BEN: Because as you are relating all of this to me, my brain is going, “I fucking love bean soup,” moments. I don’t actually particularly love bean soup, but I really love coming across a recipe that I know I would never normally come across. I really love when something hits my feed and I’m like, “Fuck, there’s a zero percent chance I would ever stumble upon this of my own volition. This is so interesting. And there’s a bunch of stuff here that I’m not actually super keen on. But, like, whoa, how cool is this?” So, I think we can even go to the final stage here and be like, BEAN SOUP THEORY, final form: actively seek out the shit that rocks your world. Not in the, like, “Oh, this is the greatest thing ever,” but just like, “Whoa, that’s really unusual.” Look for those moments, look for the bean soup.
DANIEL: That’s a whole thing that I wasn’t aware of. Look for the bean soup. I think it’s also a sign of maturity to be able to say, “This doesn’t require my response. This doesn’t require my input. The world doesn’t really need what I have to say, not really,” which is a weird thing for a person with a podcast to have.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But it’s a hard thing to do and it’s worth reminding yourself that you are on the internet with a lot of other people that you don’t know. And you’re also on the internet with a bunch of like 12-year-olds who don’t have a fully formed brain and don’t know that they can just scroll away and feel the need to comment stuff. I’ve seen many common sections where people are, like, just not really understanding how to engage. I’m like, if you don’t like this or if you think people shouldn’t talk about this, the best thing you can do is literally scroll away. You don’t need to be in this.
DANIEL: You have reminded me of a thing that needs to be a Word of the Week, and that is: EVERYONE IS 12 NOW.
BEN: Everyone is 12. I’ve not heard that one.
DANIEL: EVERYONE IS 12 NOW theory.
BEN: So, is Word of the Week just becoming theories? Is that what’s happening?
DANIEL: This is the Everyone Is 12 Now theory. This is a post from Patrick Cosmos, @veryimportant.lawyer. “Working on a new unified theory of American reality I’m calling ‘everyone is twelve now.’” Then, the next one goes on, “I’m strong and I want to have like 50 kids in a farm.” “Of course you do, you’re twelve.” “I don’t want to eat vegetables. I think steak and French fries is the only meal,” “Hell yeah, homie, you’re twelve.” “Maybe if there’s crime, we should just send the army,” “Oh, bless your heart, my twelve-year-old buddy.”
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I like that.
HEDVIG: I understand this. I also think that we live in a very complicated world and if you can distill information into a catchy little bite, then people are much more likely to spread it. But it also means that a lot of things that are true are not expressible in one sentence. So, sending like the army because there’s been burglary in one sentence could sound plausible to some people, but as soon as you think about it a little bit harder, it doesn’t work.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s the sign of somebody who hasn’t really approached a hard problem. I think Hank Green once said that when you get close to a hard problem, you realise, “Oh, this is why this is a hard problem. Oh, okay.”
Next one. LLM GROOMING. This one comes to us from our pal, Heddwen, via Mignon from her blog English in progress, this was back in April. I’m going to read it. “LLM Grooming refers to the deliberate manipulation of large language models by flooding their training data with disinformation, aiming to bias their outputs towards specific narratives. It is a specific type of data poisoning.”
BEN: Ah.
HEDVIG: Is it what Elon Musk does with Grok or tries to do?
DANIEL: It is. It’s so weird because he was at first trying to get Grok to say South Africans deserve to be welcomed. And then, it was like, “Long live Russia.” Now, it’s just like, “Elon Musk can fight 12 tigers,” or something. But there’s more to it. There’s a reality fight going on. I think the most exhausting relationships I’ve ever had are with people who you have to have reality fights with. You have to constantly do battle to establish that the version of events that you remember was real. And right now, we’re in a big relationship with exactly those kind of people.
HEDVIG: And also, because there’s so much like… There’s this tendency, you can see this with people like flat earth and other things where like, “If I personally haven’t seen it, then it isn’t true,” because there’s so much deep fakes and everything, it’s exhausting.
BEN: I think for me, there’s the really compelling gravity pull that I observe that a lot of these things share is the feeling of like: “Okay, sheeple, I have the inside line. Most you fucking idiots think that the world is a sphere, but I and the select few like me, who is smart enough understand the truth, right?” And I think you can extend that to like alt-right policy and all that kind of stuff, like these little right bros sitting there being like, “Look at these fucking idiots who think like welfare works for a society. Like, what a pack of dickheads.” Yeah, that’s the pull I tend to find is the most.
DANIEL: Conspiratorial thinking tends to do that.
BEN: So, LLM grooming is this horrible thing that some people are doing. Now, do we know if it’s… I’m guessing the OpenAI’s of the world and the Copilots of the world are probably at least a bit across this, right?
HEDVIG: I mean we already know… So, we’re talking about here is what Daniel called poisoning the data that’s the input. And we need to remember also that the data that was the input from the start before they did whatever tweaking they wanted was also not a perfect representation…
DANIEL: It’s already biased.
HEDVIG: …of the world. It was already biased in some way. Like, it’s scraping Reddit and Wikipedia and whatever else. And I don’t know about you, but if you spend some time on Reddit, there’s a lot of stuff in there. It’s great for learning how to make a sentence in English. Like, you should have a verb, and this’d be good. But it doesn’t know the truth about the world necessarily. There’s a lot of data out there.
The other thing that they have been doing is training chat agents based on large language models on human interaction by employing a lot of people in countries where you can pay people very little to sit and talk to it and grade answers. That’s not the grooming here. The grooming here is the input data, correct?
BEN: Right. So, deliberately feeding bad stuff.
DANIEL: A lot of people know that people trust large language models and rely on them for their models of reality. So, we need to be very skeptical of large language model output or, hey, just don’t use it. I’m starting to get a little bit radicalised about this. Maybe there’s no good use case for this technology. I don’t know. But people are using it and that takes us to our next one that I noticed just today, THOUGHT PARTNER (derogatory). This is a Bluesky post from Pavel. “Marketing guy described ChatGPT as his thought partner. And I was doing my best not to tell him that framing the bullshit extruder as an intellectual peer isn’t exactly a great look.” Thought partner, blech.
BEN: Yeah, that’s not how I would frame it. [LAUGHTER] I would call it my drudge work lackey. That’s what I would, honestly.
DANIEL: My clueless intern. That’s how we should be treating large language models, as the clueless intern that doesn’t know anything. You’ve got to check all their work all the time.
BEN: My Igor.
HEDVIG: Swedish prime minister earlier I think this year said that he uses ChatGPT as a… And I don’t know how to say this in a good word in English, but it’s like a sparring partner.
BEN: Oh, okay. Yeah, I get you. Like a shadow boxing opponent or something.
HEDVIG: Like a reality check thing. Yeah, which is, I think similar to the thought partner. Yeah, I definitely think that it is…
DANIEL: That’s not bad.
BEN: Here’s my guess in terms of… Because, Daniel, you mentioned being radicalised and like there being no good use case here. I have a feeling we might see this go the way of VR. Do you remember like when VR came out and, fuck me, like the histrionics that were being bandied about how this was going to, like, kids are never going to like go outside again, like doctors are going to be able to learn everything remotely, blah, blah. And I don’t know if you have ever had occasion to use VR for any of these supposed use cases, but it still to this day fucking sucks. It is the very opposite of the smartphone, which was a device that was invented that unbeknownst to us, solved like all of these design problems that we hadn’t even encountered yet, and it just slotted into the pocket. And VR was like the exact opposite of that. Everyone was like the most excited you could possibly imagine and then it turns out, but it’s really bad for every single thing that you use it for. [LAUGHTER] And I think we might see AI go a similar way, maybe.
HEDVIG: With the risk of making some of our previous guests on this show not happy with me…
BEN: Mm-hmm. Do it.
HEDVIG: …I was in a conversation with some people on Bluesky recently. It wasn’t a good point in the argument we were having, but they said something to the effect of there are some functionalities of modern-day AI mixed with large language models that have been very helpful for certain disabled communities.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, subtitling of speech. Better high quality… Let’s all remember that there were pretty good automated tools for a lot of these things beforehand. So, it’s not entirely clear for all of them if the large language model is necessary. But maybe in the drive to show that large languages are useful, more people are making these apps with large language models, so they are becoming more accessible to people. People are seeing more of them.
BEN: It’s a bit like celiacs and the gluten craze, right? If you were a celiac over the last 20 years, how stoked are you that people went cuckoo bananas over gluten? You were just like, “You know what? Other people’s stupidity is my boon.”
DANIEL: That is working for me. I have stuff to eat.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go to our last one suggested by James. MAY I MEET YOU?
BEN: MAY I MEET YOU?
DANIEL: MAY I MEET YOU? Oh, not in touch with this one?
BEN: No, not at all.
DANIEL: The tweet comes from Bill Ackman, who is a hedge fund billionaire. “I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask, ‘May I meet you?’ before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a no. It inevitably enabled the opportunity for a further conversation. I met a lot of really interesting people this way.” Okay.
BEN: I’ve got many things to say about this. I’ve got so much to offer. One, how old is this person?
DANIEL: Well, he’s old now, but he’s describing what he would say when he was younger.
BEN: Yes, exactly. That’s the olden days like when culture was different. Daniel, when you were a teenager, you did and said things that were wildly different from what your daughters, who are currently like nine, are going to do.
DANIEL: Are you saying that the world I was born in no longer exists? Ben, is that what you’re insinuating?
BEN: I’m saying the world that you were born into is a very different place than the one that exists now. But beyond that, Daniel, I know Hedvig is going to back me on this, this is being communicated from a frighteningly American-only perspective. In Australian culture, it is like, and has been since I was in my 20s, going up to random people at the bar, which is a very, very, very common and accepted and even invited thing in American culture is fucking deplorable here. I’ve seen comedians do entire jokes about it because Kiwis share our culture in this regard and they talk about like an American trying to pick a girl up at a kiwi bar and being like, “Ah, I just wanted to say you’re just one of the most mesmerising and beautiful people I’ve ever seen and I would hate to walk away from this situation not having shot my shot with you.” To which, this girl’s just like, “Ew, cunt. [LAUGHS] Like, get the fuck away from me.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. What is it with Americans and like superlatives and like this weird, faked earnest seriousness?
BEN: Sorry. I think there’s two things at work here. I think Old Mate is wildly out of touch because he’s old. And old people don’t know shit about what goes on for young people.
DANIEL: They don’t know what’s weird now.
BEN: Two, in America, still to this day, there is far more appetite for and tolerance of approaching strangers and striking up a conversation. And I can attest to this because I just rode a fucking bicycle across the continental United States.
DANIEL: I’m there. I’m there.
BEN: And so many people would just come up to me and be like, “Excuse me, sir, can I ask what you’re doing?” And they were lovely. They were like super friendly, extroverted people. And I was in their place, and it was their culture. So, I tried to rise to meet them at that level and in that space, but it was weird to an Australian. So, I think there is a very cultural specific thing.
HEDVIG: I can attest to this also because in Leipzig where I live in Germany recently, there’s been like an uptick of pickup artist students on town talking to girls. And so many women found it uncomfortable that it actually got into the local newspaper. [LAUGHTER] They were like a lot of women are feeling very uncomfortable by these men who are walking up to them and then being like…
BEN: Local pests.
HEDVIG: …you’re so beautiful. And they’re like, “What is going on? I don’t want to go into town anymore. This is crazy.”
BEN: So funny.
HEDVIG: Also, another thing about this, may I meet you specifically, there’s also possibility here of what’s called survivorship bias, which is…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yes, thank you.
HEDVIG: …he might not correctly recognise what it is that was working, and he might attribute it to this phrase, and it may or may not be true…
BEN: It might have been that he was really rich.
HEDVIG: …but he also might be a very charming, charismatic person, like something else that was actually what was working, not this may I meet you. In order to know this, we would have to have a control group of poor Leipzig pickup artists to see which one works best.
DANIEL: Oh, well, people are trying “may I meet you?” And they’re getting laughed at and cringed at and it is cringe.
BEN: That is yuck.
DANIEL: So, BEAN SOUP THEORY. EVERYONE IS 12 NOW THEORY, LLM GROOMING, THOUGHT PARTNER (derogatory), and MAY I MEET YOU?
BEN: Boo.
DANIEL: Our Words of the Week. Let’s go on to some comments. This one is from Colin on Patreon about yes languages and no languages. We talked about languages of France, which are yes languages. That is to say, some names of languages just simply mean, “Oh, yeah, they’re the people that say…“
BEN: Yes this way.
DANIEL: Ock for yes. They say oil for yes. And there are no-having languages of Australia. Oh, they’re the people that say boon for no, they’re the Boonwurrung. They’re the people that say woi for no. They’re the Woiwurrung.
Colin says: Chakavian, Kajkavian, and Shtokavian are supradialects within the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin continuum, named for their different words for WHAT. And I learned in Russian, you say, Kak? or Shto? In fact, I remember my Russian teacher saying, don’t say shto, say kak? when you want to say “what”? And don’t say shto. And so, you got the shto havers, the kak havers, and the cha havers. So Kajkavian, Chakavian, and Shtokavian, the what languages. I thought that was kind of neat.
HEDVIG: That’s really fun.
BEN: Do you know, for quite a while, it took me a second to… I was trying to guess what word you meant because the way you said WHAT, I was just like… It’s like, “They use WHAT.” And I was like, “Ooh, I wonder what they use.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Let me think.
BEN: That’s really cool. I like it.
HEDVIG: But this is fun.
DANIEL: Nonlinguist says what?
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Nonlinguist says what. This is fun because I believe we talked about this before the Yam languages of Southern New Guinea also use the term for what for their different languages, if I’m not mistaken. So, we’ve got yes, no, and what as our shibboleth names of languages so far. I’m curious if…
BEN: How many can we add?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m going to put up for nomination maybe like hello.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s going to be something that’s very fairly common in discourse, like the first thing that you’d say to somebody, like, “What?” [LAUGHS]
BEN: It can’t be an UM though, can it? Because that’s too common. It can’t be like UHH.
DANIEL: Ah, those can vary.
HEDVIG: Also, within a language, users will also use many different things, I think.
BEN: Oh, yeah, true.
HEDVIG: So, I think it’d be hard.
DANIEL: We got UH and UM…
BEN: Okay. All right, what’s our next…
DANIEL: …said by different people. From Elías on our discord, “Listening to the latest episode and the aunt Word of the Week,” because we talked about AUNTIE and who gets to be called an auntie, “and I just remembered that in Icelandic, you have one word for male relatives. Uncles, male cousins, nephews, that’s frændi. And one for female relatives, aunts, female cousins and nieces, frænka. There you go, simple.
HEDVIG: That’s nice.
BEN: I would really like to know how tricky it is to communicate kinship in Iceland. So, they use patrilineal and matrilineal last names. So, your last name will be your mother’s first name if you’re a girl. So, if my name is Ben Ainslie or Benjamina Ainslie and I had a kid, then Ellis’ name would be like Ellis Benjaminasohn and so on and so on and so on. So, that’s already crazy and really confusing to my super Eurocentric brain. But now, all male relatives, barring your dad and your grandfather, all have the same name, that’s wild.
HEDVIG: No, no, wait. Sorry. It’s the word RELATIVE.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, you can say my relatives came over.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And if that group happened to be all female, you can use frænka.
BEN: But if I say, do I have a word for cousin and a word for auntie?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: All right.
HEDVIG: Yes. It’s like sibling’s sister, brother.
BEN: Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
HEDVIG: It’s just that you have one word that… Unless… I don’t believe I’m mistaken here, but Elías can tell us.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. But your language and his language are a little bit the same, so you should, like…
HEDVIG: Yes, I think this is frende, probably for Swedish, where… Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Which is just like a kinman or someone you know.
DANIEL: So, they do distinguish if you want to distinguish, the words are there, but you can also refer to them collectively. Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: Just like English has the word RELATIVE that you guys just used.
DANIEL: Yep, true. My siblings.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Finally, from Eleanor on Patreon. “As a mum of preteens, I have the dubious pleasure of hearing all the new slang/memes/general nonsense that they bring home with them.”
BEN: Eleanor, I’m sorry. As one to another, I’m sorry.
DANIEL: “This is probably very old news, but it has been interesting to watch how the term BRAIN ROT has entered their lexicons. Not as an uncountable noun, but as a countable one. So, 6-7, 6-7 is a brain rot. It seems to be replacing MEME in young person speak.” That’s interesting.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Seems to follow the pattern of calling a blog post a blog. I did a blog the other day. A whole blog? Oh no, we’re referring to just one. Thanks, Eleanor. And thanks to our guests, everyone who gave stories, words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing the words. And thanks to you great patrons for keeping our show going.
Now, if you’d like to help us here on Because Language, you already know that there are lots of things you can do. Follow us on the socials. We’re becauselanguage.com on Bluesky. @becauselangpod, just about everywhere else. Send us your input if you’ve got news stories, words, questions. Oh, especially mailbag questions. You can do that by sending us a good old email, hello@becauselanguage.com, or heading over to our website, becauselanguage.com, and pressing that SpeakPipe button. It’s wonderful to hear your voices. I love it. Thank you, everybody.
You can also tell a friend about us or leave us a review, and we will read them out on the show once we find them.
BEN: The other thing you can do, other than leaving a really positive review to balance out some of the nasty ones that we’ve read out recently, is you can become a patron. You get stuff depending on your level. You won’t get a picture of my bum. We’ve already covered that. You get to participate in live shows. We’ve got…
DANIEL: Well, I covered it.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I’m so good at accidentally punning. We’ve got live shows like the one coming up at the end of the year where we vote and decide on the Word of the Week of the Year. You get bonus episodes, you get mailouts, you get shoutouts, you get discord access, which is the real cherry on top. And most importantly of all, you get to have your name thoroughly fucked with in the readouts at the end of the show. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Daniel, could you please enumerate the fuckery this time?
DANIEL: So, I was thinking about illuminated manuscripts.
BEN: What?
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: Those old books. And they have these beautiful initial capitals. Like, they’ll have one letter, the first letter that’s massive and it’s decked out in gold and everything. And I was thinking about those, and I was thinking, what’s the most common ones? Is it A or is it E? I mean, I know with the frequency of English letters, it’s something like E, T, A, I, O, N, etc. But what about for these manuscripts? Do you have a guess? Are you guessing T, Hedvig?
BEN: Are you saying specifically…?
HEDVIG: T, T, T. Because it’s not most common letters. It’s most common letters at the start of a paragraph.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: No, at the start of a chapter?
DANIEL: Well, of a really long stretch, for sure.
BEN: But we are talking about a constrained body of work here, right? So, like the monk-scrawled velum bookie things for the years before we had the printing press. Is this what we’re talking about?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That is what we’re talking about.
BEN: Well, we would probably have to account for the fact that we would be traipsing back into Middle English for that.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: I think Hedvig might have it right. I might go with S.
DANIEL: S is the number three in the list that I have. T is halfway through. [BEN GASPS] It’s actually not the most common at all.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: I smoked you like a Christmas ham! I don’t care about not winning. I care about beating Hedvig, and I did. And that’s what matters.
HEDVIG: I also care about beating you, and I didn’t. [LAUGHTER] Fuck no.
DANIEL: Let me tell you about the method I used, because this isn’t comprehensive. There is a Wikipedia page. It’s a category page. Initials from illuminated manuscripts, link in the show notes, and it’s got a list of all the letters in that collection. Now, that won’t be exhaustive, but one would presume that it follows some kind of order maybe roughly. At least, it was the best I could do with the time that I had. Here’s the top five. P is the top letter, followed by A, S, E, and I.
BEN: I would not have guessed P in a million years.
DANIEL: I wonder why. Why is that?
BEN: Is it Middle English? Did Middle English have way more words starting with P?
HEDVIG: So, religious text and it’s pater?
DANIEL: Oh, that’s a good guess. That’s a very good guess. The lower ones are the letters that came later or that we don’t use very much, like W, K, Z, Y, X. And the one that never appears in the Wikipedia collection is J. There are no J’s because that was… U secretly occurs one step before T, weirdly. Don’t know why.
BEN: J’s didn’t exist until when?
DANIEL: Well, J was considered a variant of I until the 1600s, 1700s.
HEDVIG: As it should be.
BEN: So, one of the things that spins me out about that is that when I go through my phone contact list, I am floored. I am astounded by how overrepresented J names are just generally. I’ve just got so many more J names than any other name. Anyway, you can look that up later. I best read out the list. So, I’m going from most valuable… Now, did you do like a nested level here? So, you did the first letter and then the second letter, you ranked them in an alphabetised system in that way?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, the frequency is something like P, A, S, E, I, C. And that’s alphabetical order now. So, everybody with names that start with P are at the top of the list. A is next. People with J are at the very end. All right, let’s see what we got.
BEN: Okay. At the very top place, which I think is fitting, given how much work she does for us, PharaohKatt, followed by…
HEDVIG: Yay.
BEN: Amanita, Amir, Amy, Ariaflame, Aldo L, Andy B, Andy from Logophilius, Ayesha, sæ̃m, Sonic Snejhog, Stan, Steele, Sydney, Elías, Ignacio, Iztin, Canny Archer, Colleen, Chris L. Daniel goes here. Diego.
IN UNISON: O Tim.
HEDVIG: Tim.
BEN: Ben, that’s me. Martha, Margareth, Manú, Meredith, Mignon, Molly Dee. Hedvig is here. Helen, Rach, Rachel, Rene, Rodger, Tadhg, Tony, Laura. Larry.
DANIEL: Oops, we forgot Larry. Oh, there we go.
BEN: Larry comes before Laura. What am I doing? I’m so sorry, Larry. Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ.
BEN and DANIEL: LordMortis.
BEN: Luis, Lucy, Lyssa, Faux Frenchie, Felicity, Fiona, Nasrin, Nigel, Nikoli, gramaryen, Wolfdog, Kathy, Keith, Kevin, Kristofer, J0HNTR0Y, James, Joanna, John M, and John K.
Thank you to our latest patrons at the Friend level, Bastián. And at the Listener level, Eleanor, MVP of this episode for so thoroughly red-herring us and leading us down the garden path.
DANIEL: And giving us a comment.
BEN: And Victoria, who upgraded from the Friend level. Our newest free patrons are Lindsay E, Talmar, and Byron. Thanks, guys.
DANIEL: Special shoutout to Lucy, who is our newest supporter. Thanks for making the decision to support the show. We appreciate it.
BEN: Yah. Hedvig, it’s your turn.
HEDVIG: Oh, I was… Well, how do you say? What do you say? Delegate.
BEN: You start by saying “our” and then the next word is “theme”.
HEDVIG: I’m delegating that to Camden, but… Yes, but I’m going to get Camden to say it. But I’m going to say one time, clean for Daniel, but then we’re going to hope that Camden says it.
BEN: It’s not going to happen.
HEDVIG: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also… [BEN LAUGHS] See, I’m going to…
BEN: See, now we need Camden.
HEDVIG: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you, both.
HEDVIG: Good job, everyone.
BEN: Thanks, everybody.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Did you know that they recently saved the Czech government a bunch of money.
DANIEL: Oh, the beavers did?
BEN: I did not know that. Tell me more.
HEDVIG: The Czech government had like an environmental… I’ll look up the exact story. Okay, do you want me to look up the exact story or do you want to hear it from my memory?
BEN: Memory, quickly.
DANIEL: Mm, memory.
HEDVIG: Okay. I think it was in Czechia and the Czech government were going to, like, re-restorate some wetlands and they were planning on like doing a bunch of restoration and building a dam or something. And the beavers just did it before.
BEN: Someone just flung some rodents at the problem and just sorted it out.
DANIEL: Just drop them.
HEDVIG: No, they just did it naturally. They were like, “This is moving water. This is no good.”
BEN: I love them. They’re so great.
DANIEL: They’re so good. So good.
BEN: Just the sound of a tinkling brook and them being like, “Absolutely not.”
HEDVIG: Absolutely not.
DANIEL: Yeah. They just are there with their bristly tusks and like, “Oh, hello there. We’re just moving stuff around. I hope you don’t mind.”
BEN: And they’ve got to chew. They have to chew. Not only do they hear running water and they go like, “Absolutely not,” but they also have to chew because their incisors just grow forever. They have to wear them down.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: I saw a woman who I’m going to guess she’s maybe in her 60s or something, she has gray hair and she’s really good at hula hoops. And she makes these little cute little videos and she’s figured out how to hula hoop on her butt. So, she can shake her butt and then the hula hoop circulates only on her butt.
BEN: Hedvig.
DANIEL: That’s pretty good.
BEN: I’ve spent a lot of time dancing to psy trance in the bush. I have come across butt hooping before.
HEDVIG: I hadn’t. And I was like…
BEN: Yeah, it’s pretty great. It’s pretty great.
HEDVIG: …“Oh, my god, she’s so talented.”
BEN: I defy any person to watch a human being hooping their butt and not be mesmerised. It’s like a Zamboni machine on the ice. Like, how can you watch that and not just be engaged?
HEDVIG: It’s fascinating. And it’s surprisingly, to me, at least, nonsexual. I know butts have a sexual… but to me it’s just like, that is a crazy thing to be able to do with your butt.
BEN: I’m just so enamoured with the fact that they can do it on their butt as a person who can’t even hoop his waist. I cannot hula at all. I do the three pathetic loopy doops and then it’s just… it’s sad. And everyone feels bad for me and for themselves having seen me fail.
HEDVIG: Ben, have you ever tried to teach yourself twerking? Because it is also…
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s not what the world needs.
DANIEL: I have never done that. Not even in the privacy of my own home have I done that.
BEN: Have you tried to teach yourself how to clap your cheeks? Hedvig, is this is what we’re coming to?
HEDVIG: What is that?
DANIEL: Hang on, I’m doing it now. Hang on, hang on. I just about got… Oh, damn it, I almost got there.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: By the way, do you know a really elegant refutation of flat earth theory?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: I’ll post a video that shows that if you stand at the North Pole and you focus a camera on Polaris, the whole sky turns counterclockwise. And if you go to the South Pole, you focus on the south point, the entire sky rotates clockwise. There is no model for a flat earth that accounts for that.
BEN: And yet, there’s still flat earthers. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: People to do… I think there’s been some flat earth experiments to do with that like a canal of water and light.
BEN: Do you know what? Let’s just leave flat earth.
DANIEL: We don’t have to do this.
HEDVIG: We don’t have to fight with them.
DANIEL: The video that I saw. And if you go to the equator, they just travel in a straight line. And the ones over here go curve this way and the ones over there curve that way, anyway.
HEDVIG: That’s true.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]