What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth has been working with the small island community of Nusi in Papua New Guinea, which was recently featured in an episode of Pole to Pole with Will Smith. What’s it like doing media for a large audience, and more importantly, how do we help speakers hold onto their language? Dr Walworth joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:45 Intros
04:00 What’s coming up on this episode
06:58 New patron shoutout and spruik
09:05 News: Air Canada CEO resigns over English communication
14:34 News: Banning foreign language election information in the UK
23:54 News: Can LLMs pass the Wug Test?
34:03 News: Does closing your eyes help you hear better?
39:48 Related or Not: Theme
40:23 Related or Not: GORGE, ENGORGE, and GORGEOUS
48:09 Related or Not: ANY and MANY
51:54 Related or Not: GUAVA, GUACAMOLE, GUARANÍ, GUARANÁ
01:00:20 Interview with Mary Walworth
01:45:52 Word of the Week: bimbofication
01:54:00 Word of the Week: glottophobia
01:55:50 Word of the Week: liveness check
01:57:54 Comment from Colin: CLAN and PLANTA
01:59:03 Comment from Lauren: crash blossoms
02:02:49 The Reads
02:08:09 Outtake
Listen to this episode
Watch this episode
Video promos
@becauselangpod People on the island of Enusi weren't just glad to get a visit from Will Smith — they were also keen on meeting linguist Dr Mary Walworth. We're glad to see her too, as a guest on this episode. https://becauselanguage.com/136-these-languages-are-anchors/ Find it on your pod listener. @natgeo @natgeotv ♬ original sound – Because Language
@becauselangpod What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth explains that language is a cultural anchor. Catch her on our latest episode. https://becauselanguage.com/136-these-languages-are-anchors/ @natgeo @natgeotv ♬ original sound – Because Language
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau to retire later this year following language controversy
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/air-canada-ceo-michael-rousseau-retires-9.7146886
Le grand patron d’Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, annonce son départ
(note the word démission, or resignation)
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2242632/pdg-air-canada-michael-rousseau-demission
Everything you need to know about Quebec’s Law 14 (Bill 96)
https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/site/qc-law-14-bill-96
Less bigotry and more scrutiny, please
https://nation.cymru/news/less-bigotry-and-more-scrutiny-please/
Amendment number: NC37
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4080/stages/20536/amendments/10034286
Election battle on Chinese apps intensifies as Liberals target crucial voters
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-27/chinese-social-media-apps-political-campaigns-federal-election/105201336
Josh Frydenberg, Gladys Liu reportedly admit Chinese corflutes instructed ‘correct’ way to vote
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/josh-frydenberg-gladys-liu-reportedly-admit-chinese-corflutes-instructed-correct-way-to-vote/c53rfaouo
Chinese Australian Liberal supporters falsely accuse Labor faithful and government critics of being under investigation
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-23/liberal-party-wechat-troll-spreading-lies-about-critics/101003472
Community size rather than grammatical complexity better predicts Large Language Model accuracy in a novel Wug Test
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0343164
Aggregate metrics derived from Grambank data (fusion)
https://github.com/grambank/grambank/wiki/Aggregate-metrics-derived-from-Grambank-data
The Bitter Lesson
http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Closing your eyes to hear better might be a big mistake
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260320073819.htm
White Noise, Pink Noise, and Brown Noise: What’s the Difference?
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/pink-noise-sleep
Pole to Pole with Will Smith, episode 5
https://www.natgeotv.com/za/shows/natgeo/pole-to-pole-with-will-smith#episodes-t1
[PDF] Grammar as a bridge: Empowering Indigenous learners in a Solomon Islands language school
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/c01e8723-8d7c-4e2b-a489-5123f8330bd9/content
Kristi Noem “devastated” over reports of “crossdresser” husband’s “bimbofication” fetish
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/03/kristi-noem-devastated-over-reports-of-crossdresser-husbands-bimbofication/
Immigrants say Spain is overcome with ‘linguistic racism’
https://theworld.org/segments/2026/03/23/immigrants-say-spain-is-overcome-with-linguistic-racism
crash blossom
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crash_blossom
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hedvig has said that she’s “on way”. I wonder what that means.
BEN: That she is bulking up. She is in a bulking regime for which she is on whey protein.
DANIEL: Oh, right. I think that she meant to spell “no way”, meaning, “There’s no way I’m getting on a podcast with you guys.”
BEN: Understandable. The older I get, the more Groucho Marx I am becoming. Like, why would I want to be part of something that would have me? Terrible.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s all-around man about town, Ben Ainslie. Ben, hello.
BEN: From around town, I send you my salutations.
DANIEL: Ben, could you please prove that you’re a human and not an AI?
BEN: Okay. So, the way I notice that I am the most human is I, to Hedvig’s eternal chagrin, use dictation on my phone a lot because I really hate typing texts.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
BEN: And one of the most frustrating things about it is clearly my mode of speech just is not very like the corpus of data that natural language processors have been programmed on, because I’ll use words like SHALL and it doesn’t fuck with stuff like that. It’s like, “That’s one percent of instances when people say a word that sounds like SHALL or SHE’LL or SHE’D that they’ll actually be saying SHALL. So, I’m just going to correct it to one of these other ones.” And then, I have to go through all of my text that saves me no time at all and go, “No, that’s this word. And no, that’s this word. And no, that’s this word.”
HEDVIG: That’s terrible.
BEN: So, yeah, I think just the way that I speak kind of definitively classes me as not AI.
DANIEL: Well, you had me when you tripped over the word PROCESSOR, so I was convinced then.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Also, I’m grumpy sometimes and like not American sounding. And I don’t mean in terms of accent, but I don’t have that, “Sure thing, buddy. I can help you out with that” demeanour, which all AI seems to have.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Thank you. I’m convinced. Next, it’s good human, Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, same request. Prove to me that you’re a human.
HEDVIG: Prove to you that I’m a human.
DANIEL: You could tell me something that only you would know about me.
HEDVIG: Oh, only I would know about you?
DANIEL: I know. It’s hard, isn’t it.
HEDVIG: You have weird coffee cups that are like double walled, like transparent.
BEN: They’re not weird.
HEDVIG: They’re vacuum sealed.
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry. ’90s. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s very unlikely that you would know that. Mm-hmm. Yep, okay. [CROSSTALK]
BEN: I smashed one of those earlier today in fact.
HEDVIG: I like them, but they’re unusual.
DANIEL: Did you?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: They are.
HEDVIG: I like them, and they’re unusual.
BEN: Not in a fit of rage to be clear. I just dropped one.
DANIEL: I don’t know how I would prove that I’m a human. I can’t even refer to my very human sense of anxiety because I don’t have one. [LAUGHS] I do have unwarranted confidence, but bots have that too, so I could actually be an AI. Sorry about that.
BEN: Sure. And you do have that kind of boundless, Americano, like, good-vibe optimism as well. So, you’re like squarely in the slot for that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, he does.
DANIEL: That’s a persona, that’s a sona.
HEDVIG: We need to bring him down with more like Aussie, European, whatever it is that we have they don’t.
DANIEL: If we haven’t done it by now?
BEN: Yeah. I’ve got to be honest, Hedvig, I’ve been… As we established in our last show, I’ve been slogging away at that task for 15 years. It’s just I’m seeing precious little movement on the frontier.
DANIEL: Can’t beat my boundless sense of optimism! 😄
BEN: Mm-mm. Was put in there by American exceptionalism too young and too fervently.
DANEIL: At least publicly. Well, today on the episode, we’re talking to Dr Mary Walworth of the French National Center for Scientific Research. She studies language loss. She’s been working with people on… Now, I hope I get this right, Enusi Island in Papua New Guinea. Sometimes it’s called Tench Island and they speak a language called Nusi or sometimes Tench, Tenis, which is Tench.
HEDVIG: Well, as Ben might have guessed, Ben, would you want to guess why there’s the name Enusi and Tench for this island and people and language? Which one do you think is local [DANIEL LAUGHS] and which one do you think is something else? Let’s play a game.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’m guessing that Tench is what the French did and Enusi is like all the other way around.
DANIEL: Is it French? Is it British?
HEDVIG: I don’t think it’s French but it is the name of a colonial general who… or lieutenant or something who saw the island, yeah. That’s…
DANIEL: But Hedvig, surely, they have the -ENCH ending in their words because it’s in the word FRENCH. I mean… [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I was picturing an E at the end of Tench, like Tenché or something.
HEDVIG: No, it’s just like if you want to google the island, you can google both. Enusi is becoming more and more common, I’ve seen. But sometimes in older sources, people will refer to it as Tench. So, it’s good to be aware of both, but people prefer to be called Enusi or Nusi. Yeah.
DANIEL: And the language is Nusi, but it’s Enusi Island. What’s the difference between Enusi and Nusi? You would know this, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I don’t know this. And I think it’s possible… I can ask Mary. Mary and I also happen to be friends, which was really funny because when Daniel said, like, “We’re going to interview Dr Mary Walworth,” I was like, “Great. She used to be in an office next to me, I know her very well.” [LAUGHS] And apparently Daniel didn’t know and the people at… Who was it? It was National Geographic who set us up also didn’t know. So that was fun.
DANIEL: Yeah, I had no idea. And I’ve been trying to stay away from Max Planck Institute people. And yet, they’re just… Whenever there’s something interesting, they’re there.
BEN: Lousy. Lousy with Planckers.
HEDVIG: There’s a lot of us. But you asked about the difference between Enusi and Nusi. I don’t know the difference. I think it’s possible that you can maybe sometimes call the language Enusi as well. I don’t know the difference.
DANIEL: Okay. I might flip back and forth indiscriminately during the interview with Mary. And we’re interviewing Mary because she was recently on an episode of Pole to Pole with Will Smith, who is an actor and a rapper.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: We were interested in a couple of things. We were interested in what climate change is doing to minority languages. But we were also interested in what goes into communicating linguistics to the public on a big scale, like a television program. So, that’s all coming up in this episode.
BEN: Or a statewide radio show, Daniel. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, I’m still coming to grips with that one. Our first live episode of the year is coming up, and that means we’re inviting all of our patrons, both free and paid, to attend. We’ll be announcing the date and time shortly, but to get in, you need to be a patron. So, sign up, patreon.com/becauselangpod. Does anybody want to read our new latest patrons?
BEN: I can do this thing. Patrons are great. And we’ve got some new patrons. Our newest supporter is Becky. At the Listener level, we’ve got Renee OnTheBeach, bumping it up from free. Also, Simon A with a yearly membership. Hello, Simon. All at once, eh? Big spender. And Sousa K, bumping it up from the Friend level. And at the Friend level, speaking of which, Caycee H. I’m going to go with Caycee /keɪsiː/ on that one.
DANIEL: I think it’s Cayce /keɪs/. I feel like it’s Cayce.
BEN: Cayce? C-A-Y-C-E. Listeners, you decide. Caycee or Cayce H. And Benedict, one of the very best kinds of eggs. Both with a yearly membership and our newest free patrons, Autumn. Tom C, samm, Matt D, Barbara B. Is that iara or lara?
DANIEL: That’s a lara. That’s a lowercase L.
BEN: Okay. Lara. Interestingly, Daniel pronounced it as Ilara which, very confusing.
DANIEL: Llllllara.
BEN: Sarah and Oliver B. To all of those humans, welcome to the fam.
HEDVIG: I should also issue like a general like if we say your name on this show and we say it wrong, we probably can’t go back and like edit it. But if we read you at the end every time and we say wrong every time, I don’t know about you too, but like I would like to know. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I would like people to wait just the right number of times to maximise how guilty I feel about having got it wrong. That’s what I would do in your shoes.
DANIEL: I think it’s somewhere between three and five. Somewhere between three and five is that awkward limit. Well, let’s get to some news. This one was suggested by Jill via email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Hi, Jill.
DANIEL: Hey, Jill. This has been in the French language news this week in Quebec, and I thought I’d send it along in case no one has already mentioned it. So, Jill is going to give us the rundown here. “After a plane crash in New York that killed the pilot and co-pilot, the CEO of Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, was criticised for a video where he gave his condolences to the family in English only, although the pilot was a Francophone Quebecer.” How about that? That’s not going to sit well with the folks in Quebec.
“Lots of Quebecers and politicians viewed this as a sign of disrespect. Not the first time Rousseau has been in hot water about his lack of French skills. Air Canada is subject to the federal government’s language laws. So, the CEO is supposed to be able to communicate in French.” What do you think? Fair?
BEN: Interesting. I wasn’t aware that… So, I’m interpreting that last piece of the story to mean any organisation or company that is… Do they say federally in Canada? Are they a federation across the provinces?
DANIEL: It is the federal government’s language laws.
BEN: Yeah. So, any organisation or company that is operating at a federal level, meaning they have instances across Canada, the expectation is what, That all members of their organisation are bilingual? That all members of senior management are bilingual? Like, where, I’d be really interested to know what that law is.
DANIEL: Well, I’m looking at the context of the charter of the French Language, which governs language use for businesses in Quebec in particular, Bill 96, that’s the most recent revision. And if you’re doing business in Quebec, you have to offer services in French. You have to make the signage with French being prominent. For big companies, you have to have a French council that meets every six months. I’m not seeing any provisions here that every single employee has to speak French or that in fact every CEO has to speak French.
BEN: I mean, if we take a step back for a second, the optics are shockingly bad. Shockingly bad.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Regardless of what the law is.
BEN: Like, if you are giving condolences to a family in not their language, that’s really bad look, not good.
DANIEL: I think there’s a strong expectation that a CEO in a communicatory role who’s doing a job like this, there is kind of an expectation that that’s going to be available in all languages, if only just for symbolic reasons.
BEN: I mean, there’s also the idea of a law and a norm, right? So, there might not be a legal basis for the CEO being expected to speak French. But if you’ve got an entire province, or at least a good proportion of a province, who will hate you if you don’t or are not able to, just even from a business perspective of, like, you can’t be fucking off that bigger chunk of your potential customer base with that kind of regularity. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But if we think about it… This is, I think, a particular thing to Canada because there are also some people, there are multicultural nations where this wouldn’t… This has more in it than just the language of the pilot and this company. This is like a part of like a general trend where French is losing ground in Canada overall and this is like one facet of it.
I mean there’s news like this… I know there’s a guy, I think, in Winnipeg who gets traffic tickets in English and refuses to pay them unless he also gets them in French and stuff like that. So, like, this is… I’m not saying that these are necessarily the same, but there’s like a general feeling of that the Canadian government isn’t respecting French and this is one instance of it.
DANIEL: Jill continues, “If the reaction seems somewhat extreme, this sort of thing happens frequently here where American/English Canadian companies are supposed to operate in French to do business in Quebec, but often they don’t or the service is not as good. So, Quebecers end up having to speak English to access services while people here in Montreal, for example, do tend to know at least a bit of English. Generally speaking, the rest of Quebec is much less bilingual.”
Jill has another interesting angle here. “I haven’t been following the story in the English language news, but another interesting thing about this was the different angle in the two languages.” And if you look at the URLs of two articles that Jill sent, and we’ll slap them both up in the show notes for this episode, one of them says, this is the English version, “Michael Rousseau retires.” That’s the verb that gets used. And then in the French, it translates to… What is the word? It’s démission. The word is démission.
BEN: Is that dismissed?
DANIEL: Resign. That’s resign. Not just retire but actually resign. So, there’s a little bit of a different way of looking at things in the English-speaking articles about this and then in the French-speaking articles about this. Kind of fun. Good datapoint. Jill finishes up. “Love the show. Thanks, Jill in Montreal.”
BEN: Thanks, Jill.
HEDVIG: Oh, thank you so much, Jill.
DANIEL: Now, Hedvig, you showed this one on our Discord and feel free…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: …to jump in if you know about it. I’ve written a bit on it, but this is a…
HEDVIG: No, you read your bit that you’ve written. I know some things but you’ve got it prepped.
DANIEL: Okay, I’ll start off. This is in the UK, getting this from an Instagram post by Sophia S. Gaylor. There’s also an article by Martin Shipton in the Nation.Cymru. Link in the show notes. Here’s what’s going on. There is a piece of legislation called NC37. It’s an amendment to the Representation of the People bill and it is “a new clause that would make it a criminal offense to publish or promote election campaign materials in any language other than English or the native languages of the British Islands during the short campaign period before an election.” Criminal offense to give out election information in other languages.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
BEN: So, you wouldn’t be able to put something out in Arabic for like majority Arabic-speaking constituents or anything.
DANIEL: Correct.
BEN: [CONCERNED EXPRESSION] Ooh. Ooooh. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But you would be able to in the various Celtic languages.
BEN: Yeah. Like Scots Gaelic or whatever.
HEDVIG: Welsh. Yeah, Scots Gaelic. You could be spicy and try Irish and see [LAUGHTER] what happens. But yeah, this was proposed by the Conservative Party and it’s obvious that they feel like the other parties are catering to populations that they shouldn’t be. And that brings them, I don’t know, an unfair advantage. But maybe also more broadly, they’re feeling like they’re promoting a sense of a multicultural Britain that they don’t….
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: And this is at an age where you know, we all know that AI transcription and Google Translate aren’t perfect, but they’re not that bad. And now, I’m protecting myself mentally from like the influx of linguists who will contact me later, but it’s not that bad. I went to Japan recently and I was in the shop and I was like, “What is this product?” And I did… And I was like, “It’s not a perfect translation, but I can figure out what this is.”
BEN: My smartphone was an invaluable tool in non-English speaking countries. It’s wild how useful it is.
DANIEL: Now, here’s the argument from the Tories. Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, said… This is from the Nation article. “Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: “Campaigning with different messages in a foreign language is a deliberate ploy to exclude those who do not speak that language.” That’s English speakers, I guess. “It is not in the service of integration. It is about cynically driving a wedge between groups.” Comment?
BEN: Ah, god.
HEDVIG: Isn’t this similar to a discussion that was had in Australia, in Sydney a couple of years ago where there were campaign material in Mandarin? Is this ringing a bell for anyone?
DANIEL: No, I didn’t know about that story.
HEDVIG: I think there was a scandal because my memory of this event was that there was different campaign messages for, I think, it was the New South Wales level politics, not nationwide. So maybe, you guys in Perth didn’t pay attention to it, but if you lived in Canberra, you noticed it.
But in that instance, I believe there was different campaign messages in the different languages and that was a problem. But people found that out because there are bilingual people and also you can fairly…
BEN: Translation services.
HEDVIG: …easily figure out how to translate material. So, like, the problem wasn’t necessarily that they were a different language, it was that they were making different promises or doing different things.
DANIEL: Secret messages. Yessss.
HEDVIG: But they’re not that secret, right?
BEN: Yeah. Yeah. The dog whistle is secret messages.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right.
HEDVIG: The reason why the journalists wrote the story, it’s because it was like relatively easy to find out.
BEN: But that’s… You’re making a rational argument though, Hedvig, and that is never going to work with people who are not making arguments in good faith. And the Conservative Party in the UK is not putting forward the argument in good faith. The things that they are saying, they do not believe. I know we tend to… I know you subscribe to this, Hedvig. Daniel, I think you’re a little bit more cynical in this regard than I tend to be, but I usually don’t prescribe malice when stupidity is a more obvious solution or answer to a question. But in this particular instance, when we get to conservative politicking and campaigning, I see malice far more than I see stupidity. These people…
DANIEL: There’s so much stupidity and malice around. How can we keep track of which one it is? I mean, why is it that accommodating minority groups is labeled as divisive?
BEN: Because they don’t vote for conservative people.
DANIEL: Oh, I see. So, let me make sure I got it right. Racism, sexism, language, discrimination, not divisive. Trying to fix those things, divisive. Have I got it?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Trying to fix them by not making everyone homogenous. Yeah.
BEN: And I would also… I would go a step further and say, and this is where my real cynicism kicks in, this is from the same playbook as various voter exclusion laws in the United States. This is a group of people who want to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote because those groups of people will not fucking vote for them. So, we don’t want people writing materials for, I don’t know, the Pakistani community, the Jamaican people. I mean, those are terrible examples, the Cantonese community, the Polish community, etc., etc., because those communities are not going to vote for the Torys.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: But also… I mean, it also betrays just a basic thing, which is that they want a homogenous sort of, not fully ethnostate, but a little bit cult state, [LAUGHS] cultural state, and they don’t want multicultural state, and that’s sort of the basic assumption. And they’re also, of course, probably trying to win voters from the parties who are even more xenophobic than they are. And I have to say that if they were sitting in that campaign room and choosing between different options, then this one directs the ire at the other politicians, which is like, “You are bad because you are writing campaign material in Urdu…”
DANIEL: I get it.
HEDVIG: …which I’m being very cynical. It’s a little bit better than we should throw out the people who speak Urdu. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I agree with you.
DANIEL: It’s a bank shot.
HEDVIG: Like one step up.
BEN: I agree with you in principle. But I can’t help but notice that the undertone of the message is like, “These guys who want to write shit for the dirty brown folk who are like fucking up our country, fuck those guys.”
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, it’s kind of about who we want voting, and who we want it to be harder to vote. It’s also a discussion about whose language deserves to be represented in the public square and whose language should be excluded. So, they’re mounting multiple attacks on the people themselves and the people who represent them.
BEN: One of the things that I imagine is quite challenging in this specific regard in England is unlike in the United States, Canada, Australia, as much as we have a huge, very vocal block of human beings in all of those places who are like, “This is a white majority country. This is what we should be always, blah, blah, blah,” we are settled places. So, there’s a really easy comeback to that, which is: we fucking stole this land. This by definition, is a place where people come to from other places. Whereas England isn’t that. That’s not its historical lineage. As in, it obviously is because there’s been just like waves and waves and waves of people for the last several thousand years who have come to the UK. But culturally and historically, it is like England where English people come from and this was like not a “multicultural” place. This was a… And fighting back against that, I imagine, adds an extra layer of difficulty because there’s this, like, I don’t know, this standard you can bear to be like, “This is England.”
HEDVIG: But when you are the British Empire or the French Empire which are, I think, the two best examples of this, and you’re colonising a lot of other places and you need labour at home, and you’re saying to people like, “Oh, you guys from the Caribbean, why don’t you come and settle over here and work in our factories?” And then, be like, “Oh, no, we brought the culture from our empire to our empire heart.” And like, “Oh, no.” So, like, there is some of that as well, which I think happens both in UK and France, where they have colonised a lot of other places. And then, those people have moved around freely… or not freely, but have sometimes moved to the Imperial court. And then, they’re like, “Oh, no. The brown people from the perimeter came to the center? Argh.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s move on to our next story. It’s time for a Wug Test. Remember the Wug Test?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: I do not remember the Wug Test.
HEDVIG: [Jean] Berko Gleason’s little squiggle. It looks like a little sort of bird. It looks like a peep if you know a peep.
BEN: I do know a peep.
DANIEL: The marshmallow things.
HEDVIG: Yeah, American candy. And the test is to show it to a child, show one and say, “This is a wug.” And then, you show two of them and say, “Now, there are two.” Fill it in, Ben.
BEN: Wugs. Wog.
DANIEL: Congratulations. You passed the Wug Test.
HEDVIG: Right. It’s a test if kids know how to form regular plurals.
BEN: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: So, let’s do one. Hey, Ben, I like to spelf. I love spelfing. Guess what I did all day yesterday. Yesterday, I…?
BEN: Spelfed.
DANIEL: Okay. Not spelved, surely?
BEN: Well, okay, okay. Interesting.
DANIEL: I don’t know. So, we give these tests to children to see if they’ve internalised the rules for English. Can they do plurals? Can they do past tense? And if children can, then can a large language model also? This is work from Dr Nikoleta Pantelidou of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona published in PLoS One. They gave large language models Wug tests on different languages, and the models were ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, Grok 3, Bert, DeepSeek, and Mistral. Now remember, large language models don’t always have access to the internals of words. Remember the Strawberry Problem from last year?
BEN: Yes, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, you ask large language model how many Rs there are in STRAWBERRY and it will say the wrong number because it’s not actually tokenising within words and counting things. It’s sort of like relying on like probabilities. And like, often when people ask how many there are, the answer is three, so I’ll say three.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yep. Now, some of the languages they used are high resource languages with a lot of data, like English and Spanish. Some are rather smaller languages with low resources, like Greek and Catalan. But another thing that they wanted to check for was complexity. Some languages are more complex in certain ways, and some are less. Like, does it have tensed forms? In English, you’ve got BUY and BOUGHT. That’s something different. And you’ve got lots of verb inflections.
So, the list that they had from least complex to most was English, Spanish, Catalan, and Greek. The reason they chose it in that order… Well, they used Grambank, actually, and they were looking at grammatical features and English came up less complex because it doesn’t have as many… [READING TO SELF] “Languages with affixes encoding”… higher fusion scores. Why did they say least to most?
HEDVIG: Fusion is the score I made up!
DANIEL: Tell me about fusion.
HEDVIG: Well, fusion technically is a thing in theoretical linguistics that means that particular… It means like how much material you have fused to each other. So, you can think of it in a way as like how much like affixes and stuff you have stuck on each other versus if you have a language where things are more freestanding.
There are more aspects to fusion. Specifically, for Grambank, we have a bunch of features in there that say, like, “Do you have a past tense marker on your verb? Do you have plural marker on your noun?” etc. And then, we count up for each language how often the answer was yes. And then, we say that if you answered yes more often to such questions, if you have something bound on something else, you have a higher fusion score.
And me and Hannah Haynie created this score because we were trying to understand our principal components analysis that we were getting out. I’ve written a little post about it on our wiki, if you want to learn more. But basically, it’s a very simplified way of saying how much sort of things do you have stuck onto other things?
DANIEL: Okay, well, the least to most list is English was the least fusional. Spanish, Catalan, and Greek was most.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that seems right.
DANIEL: I also looked at something else, the informativity dimension, which is how much stuff you have to do.
HEDVIG: I also made that one with Hannah.
BEN: [LAUGHTER] Go on then.
HEDVIG: So basically, we have a bunch of questions that says, like, “Do you make a distinction between male and female in your pronouns? Do you make a distinction between inclusive and exclusive WE? ” You can think of these as information points. You can say, “No, we don’t make a distinction, we leave it ambiguous.” Or you can say, “Yes, we make a distinction grammatically.” So, every time you say WE, you have to decide whether it’s inclusive, exclusive, you can’t leave it ambiguous. Or at least, there’s an option for you to switch grammatically.
So, we count up for all of those questions that ask about a sort of distinction. We count up for all of those if you said yes or no. And if you say yes, it means that for these particular concepts that we checked for, you made a grammatical distinction more often, you as a language. And if you answered no, then for these concepts, there’s more ambiguity. So, we call that informativity. I found out later, after we published this article, that the term informativity also means something else, but that is what it means here.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay, well, Greek was the highest in informativity, followed by Spanish. English, again, was the lowest. All right, so now here’s the question. Which kinds of languages would do better? Would they do better if they were big languages with lots of online resources and lots of data to pull from? Or would they do better if they were simpler languages, less complex in terms of fusion and informativity? Which would do the Wug Test best?
BEN: Simple.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I’m going with simple.
DANIEL: Going with simple.
HEDVIG: High fusion. No, it should be… It should do better if they’re high.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: The problem is also that these scores are primarily targeting what’s called bound morphology. So, like the wug/wugs, when it’s stuck to the word, there are languages where you might mark plural with a separate word that’s separated by a space and that should be easier maybe for the large language model to tokenise, because that’s a separate token. It doesn’t need to look within.
DANIEL: Separate word.
HEDVIG: But these scores don’t grab onto that, so they don’t know… Well, for some of them, it knows, but not for some.
DANIEL: Okay, well, here’s the result. The winner was: the languages with more data had better results on the Wug test…
BEN: Argh, boo.
DANIEL: …even if they were more complex. Yep. So, this is the Bitter Lesson. If I use the term Bitter Lesson, have we heard that one?
BEN: I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: Bittersweet?
DANIEL: It’s from an essay from 2019. The bitter lesson means we’ve tried knowledge-based approaches. We’ve tried using human knowledge on computer problems, and it turns out that what we should have been doing was just giving it tons of data, tons of statistics and tons of compute. Works better every time, to the chagrin of linguists.
I also just want to say large language models are just about there on the Strawberry Problem and other ones. People who develop these things have been hammering away at problems like the Strawberry Problem, on the internals of words problems. They don’t seem to be tokenising on characters, which is what you’d expect them to do. Instead, the models seem to be doing a kind of reasoning approach where they’re able to take the words, break them down into an array, and then do stuff to the arrays.
So, for example, I tested this on Claude and ChatGPT. What word do I get if I take every third letter in the word, REBELLIOUSNESS? Letter three, letter… And so, what it’s able to do, it says, “Let’s take every third letter counting from the start.” It puts the word REBELLIOUSNESS and then it says, “1 R, 2 E, 3 B.” And once it’s got that in a row, then it’s able to take letters 3, 6, 9 and 12 and you get the word BLUE. See what it’s doing? It doesn’t have access to the internals of words, but it’s able to do an operation where it takes the word apart and then it’s able to manipulate that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s what’s happening.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
BEN: As soon as we talk about the inner workings of large language models, I get lost. It is very high order thinking stuff. And I’m like a pretty smart guy, I think. Like, I know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, but as soon as people start talking about how the actual large language model learns and how the tokens are constructed and broken down and all that kind of stuff, I’m just kind of like “Guh?” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: How about you…? Hedvig, you and I try to explain it like someone’s five?
HEDVIG: No, no. But I think one thing that is confusing is that when large language models first came out, they were mainly just large language models. Now, we’re seeing agents that have other tools incorporated as well. So, for example, it used to be that when you ask ChatGPT, like, “What’s 3 + 4?” It would just look at like, what do people usually answer when you say 3 + 4, and it would answer that. Now, there’s a bit more of an approach of like, let’s detect that the user is asking a math question and then add on a calculator that it can use.
So, this is a little bit more similar to what Daniel described here. So, it’s like, “Oh, I’ve detected that you want to look inside of this word. I’m going to pull on an extra tool I have that helps me look inside this word.” So, it’s like you’re giving more tools to the large language robot. So, it’s no longer just doing the vectorising deep learning thing. It’s doing… Yeah, a calculator and a magnifying glass.
DANIEL: Tell you what, let’s just do one last one. Oh, by the way, who, who sent me this one? It was me. Thank you, me. [LAUGHTER] Last one, if you’re trying to hear sound in a noisy environment, should you close your eyes or should you keep them open?
BEN: I am a shockingly bad person to ask this question to. Or maybe, I’m the exact right person to ask this question to. My hearing, my capacity to differentiate sounds from background noise is atrociously bad. It has been the scourge of every significant partner I have had in my life. If they walk out of the room and a little bit of echo is introduced to their voice as they potentially yell from the other room, I’m done. I’m gone. I got nothing. Like, it goes from like, “Hey, Ben, What did you want to have [INDISTINCT TROMBONE SOUND]?” [LAUGHTER] That is what I hear. And yeah, like parties or the, the one that kills me is like restaurants with big tables, so I’m like, far away from someone, I’m cooked I’m cooked.
DANIEL: Oh, no. Yep, same.
HEDVIG: I also struggle a little bit with it. It’s also good to just remind us that like the human brain and ear is very advanced because if you look at like the incoming acoustic signals that you’re receiving, especially in an environment like that… for example, it’s pretty hard for computer… It used to be pretty hard for computers to do and I think it still is in many circumstances. It’s really hard to distinguish noise from signal. And your ear is like evolutionary engineered, if you can call it that, to do this for human voices. Which brings me to my question, Daniel. You asked if it’s better to close your eyes or not. Is it human speech and is there a human I can see?
DANIEL: There is no human you can see. It is a recording. And it’s not human speech, the sounds were canoe paddling, drumming, lark chirping, train, and keyboard noise masked by 70 decibels of pink noise.
BEN: What is pink noise?
HEDVIG: Ben, do you know about white noise?
BEN: I do.
HEDVIG: That’s when all frequencies are randomly evenly able to occur. So high- and low-pitched sounds. So, acoustic phonetics like to do other kinds, where like there’s brown, pink and other ones, which is just like different biases on which frequencies are able to occur. So, I think pink is more high pitched. Is that true? And brown is more low pitched.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Well, it’s been shown that closing your eyes enhances auditory sensitivity under fairly clear conditions. But they wanted to find out what happened when the target sound was masked by noise. This is work from Dr Ke Ni of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a team published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
All right, so we know what they were looking for. Some people looked at a video, they looked at a photo or they closed their eyes. What the team found was, “Taking blank visual stimulation as the baseline, closing your eyes elevated detection thresholds.”
BEN: That doesn’t surprise me.
DANIEL: Meaning you needed more sound to hear the sound when you closed your eyes.
BEN: Oh, wait, okay. The opposite of what I would have assumed.
DANIEL: Elevated the threshold.
BEN: That’s interesting.
DANIEL: By contrast, they say watching a video or a photo lowered thresholds by a few decibels contrary to conventional belief.
BEN: Hang on a second. Are you watching a video or a photo of the sound you’re looking for?
DANIEL: Not necessarily.
BEN: So, if you’re looking for keyboard sound in pink noise, the video you’re watching is not going to be of a person typing on a keyboard.
DANIEL: Correct.
BEN: Okay, that’s fucking wild. Why would that possibly happen that way?
HEDVIG: Also why is… What is the?… Because normally when it’s human speech, we look at a human’s face to see their mouth movements and stuff to try and infer what’s happening so that if we don’t hear everything, we can be like, “Oh, well, it looked like Daniel was making an M, so I’m going to assume he made an M.” But canoes don’t work like that.
DANIEL: They don’t make M sounds.
HEDVIG: And especially if I’m looking at a video that isn’t a canoe and I’m hearing canoe sounds…
DANIEL: It’s a mismatch.
HEDVIG: …maybe seeing. Yeah, that’s crazy.
BEN: I would have thought for sure eyes closed would have done better. It’s the opposite of the turn the radio down when you look for the house number phenomenon.
DANIEL: Mm. So, they say that closing the eyes puts you in a state known as neural criticality, which increases how strongly it filters incoming information. In other words, disengagement is disengagement.
HEDVIG: Oh. Closing your eyes turns down your ears?
DANIEL: Closing your eyes turns down your ears.
BEN: Wow. I would not have thought that.
DANIEL: Turns up the filters.
HEDVIG: For this kind of thing.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: It’s an unusual result. And that’s why this really caught my attention.
BEN: Do you know what I want? I would love to test now. My “yes, and” to this study is, is there a difference between having your visual stimuli removed via being in an entirely dark space versus having your eyes closed?
DANIEL: Ooh.
BEN: Is there something to do with actually the act of closing the eyes that is turning the ears down? And if you’re in like a dark cave or whatever, but your eyes are open, do you still have your ears turned up? That’d be cool. I want to know that.
DANIEL: Further work by Ben Ainslie. Nice.
BEN: That one’s free, you canny linguists, you can just take that one. That’s a gift from Ben Ainslie straight to you.
DANIEL: And that’s the news. And now, it’s Related or Not. This time, our theme comes from Gordon.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME BY GORDON]
DANIEL: Thank you, Gordon.
HEDVIG: Very good. Very cute.
BEN: Charming. Charming intro.
HEDVIG: Charming.
DANIEL: Okay, this one comes from Tigertronia and PharaohKatt on the Discord, but it’s been raised in times past by Ariaflame and Dermohurl earlier, so we’re finally doing it. This one’s about GORGE. GORGE.
HEDVIG: On food.
DANIEL: That’s one meaning. What else?
HEDVIG: It’s a low frequency word, but I know it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Awesome.
BEN: To gorge oneself, and also a cleft in the earth.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: It’s also your neck, like “gorge de pigeon”.
BEN: GORGE. I’ve never heard in English GORGE used as neck or throat.
HEDVIG: Do you know when you want to kill someone, you might use a garrote.
BEN: Garrote, yes.
DANIEL: Not related, surely.
HEDVIG: I was just… In my head, I was going… That was obviously related in my head and I went, what? You saw me in real time figure out that I didn’t know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: How about this? I felt something rise in my gorge.
HEDVIG: That sounds like it could be your groin.
BEN: Yeah, nah, that one. I’ve never heard that before. That is the lowest frequency of the three, for sure.
DANIEL: Well, we’re going to step through this pairwise like we have before. Let’s see at what point we get off the bus.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, the first one, GORGE, as in to engorge yourself. And ENGORGE. GORGE and ENGORGE, related or Not?
BEN: Yes, related.
HEDVIG: I’m still on the bus. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, I’m definitely related on that one because it’s the same word with a prefix attached to it.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. And pretty obviously means inside of one’s gorge, right?
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: We all said yes, and the answer is yes, obviously. This one is pretty straightforward. GORGE comes from Old French gorge, which probably… Which is the same word but with a French accent.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I picked that up.
DANIEL: Oh, good. I’m glad that my French is so awesome. It’s probably related to Latin gurgulio, which goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root *gwora-. And then, you just say it twice and it sounds like somebody swallowing a whole bunch.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: So, there we go.
BEN: It’s an onomatopoeia.
DANIEL: It’s an onomatopoeia, as so much of language is. Next, let’s add to that, not just gorging yourself and to engorge, but GORGE, your neck. This is your GORGE right here.
BEN: I’m going to have to go related on that even though I do not believe that GORGE actually means neck and that you’ve just made it up in this very moment for this game. [DANIEL LAUGHS] But yeah, to ingest, to put in the throat. That strikes me as very related.
DANIEL: Me too.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. I’m on the bus.
DANIEL: We’re still traveling because these are related. You put it in your neck. Actually, this sense of GORGE, meaning the outside of your neck, is the older sense. And it was only the outside of your neck, not the inside. That’s why you ENGORGE, meaning you put it in. I guess THROAT handles that. Throat’s kind of a funny word because it means the front of your neck and like, I had a sore throat, but it doesn’t mean the back. What a weird word.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: And neck in English mainly means the back?
DANIEL: I think so but it could be the whole thing.
BEN: Yeah. I want to go no on that. I think NECK refers to the entire… Like, NECK is the equivalent of TORSO, but for this portion of the body.
HEDVIG: I would also say the torso is mainly the front.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Oh, I feel that.
HEDVIG: The other thing is the back.
DANIEL: I feel that. Dang.
HEDVIG: And if I say I have pain in my neck, I don’t have pain here, do I?
BEN: Yeah, but here’s the thing. If we say we have pain in our neck or you wouldn’t… I don’t know. I don’t know.
DANIEL: The front is your throat.
BEN: I agree. I agree that THROAT is the front. I think that NECK and TORSO are collective groupings of things and then back or throat are more specific areas upon those collective groupings.
DANIEL: Interesting. It’s kind of like the word DAY could mean, like, all of a day, 24 hours, or it could just mean the bright part. We press words into service.
BEN: Yeah, true, true. Or if you got shot in the neck with a crossbow. It wouldn’t really matter what part of the neck that crossbow was now sticking out of. We’d be like, “That guy’s been shot in the neck.”
DANIEL: Dang. That’s true.
HEDVIG: No, I agree. I just think that it’s the whole thing, but with a flavour of mainly the back.
BEN: Okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: Okay. We sorted out NECK and THROAT, but let’s get on to the next meaning of GORGE, which is a narrow valley.
BEN: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I would say yes.
DANIEL: Also related to all of those?
BEN: I’m going to go yes as well. It’s the throat of like the river or the canyon or whatever.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I also said yes, I can see the similarity. Simple metaphor.
HEDVIG: We went to a really nice gorge on Crete when we went on our honeymoon. Not the one that everyone goes to, a smaller one. And gorges are beautiful.
BEN: We’re not like the other honeymooners.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I didn’t know about either one.
HEDVIG: It was just like a four-hour drive or something and then like a six-hour walk. And then, like, it was… I’m not doing that much hiking. It’s too much. Anyway, it was really cool. And there was like a very old cave in there with like a really old temple that was like 2,000 years plus. That’s very cool.
DANIEL: Was it a grotto?
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: It might have been a grotto.
DANIEL: Because if it was a GROTTO, then you might have seen something that was GROTESQUE.
BEN: Ah, that’s fun. I did not know that connection.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. But now, it’s time to get back to GORGE. The answer was yeah, a narrow valley is related to the other senses of GORGE. Now, it might be time to get off the bus.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: GORGEOUS.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: If something’s GORGEOUS, is that related to GORGE?
BEN: I’m going to go, no.
DANIEL: Maybe somebody saw it on his neck and thought it looked great.
HEDVIG: No, I think we are still on the bus. And I think this has to do with the sense that like a woman’s like neck and…
BEN: And décolletage?
HEDVIG: …what’s this called again? Décolletage is like very sexualised and very like hot.
DANIEL: Gorgeous.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, I think that a woman who has like a very pretty neck and maybe front area here is gorgeous.
DANIEL: I thought so too, but I … I went weak positive on this one. So, Ben is a no. Hedvig and I…
HEDVIG: Daniel, you know this game. You’re on the bus or you’re off the bus?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’m on the…
BEN: You can’t be doing like a school camp like hanging out the window kind of nonsense.
DANIEL: I’m eyeballing the exit. So, I think is this bus… Have I missed my stop? What? Okay, answer: related. So, the OED says it comes from Old French gorgias, elegant or finely dressed, of uncertain origin. But then, Etymonline steps in and says perhaps a special use of gorgias, necklace. And in fact, Oxford admits that it might be like there was a special kind of necklace.
BEN: Necklace. Sorry, I thought you meant without a neck? I was like, that doesn’t sound very gorgeous at all.
DANIEL: They say neck-lace here in Australia, don’t they? Well, hey there, neckless.
HEDVIG: When you said necklace, I assumed you meant the same way as backless. That like the dress exposes the skin.
DANIEL: A neckless dress. Sorry about that. Well, how do I disambiguate that? I’ll say it not Americanly, neck-lace, there we go. A necklace that was really nice looking and very gorgeous. So, all related.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: Thanks to tygertronia, PharaohKatt, Ariaflame and Dermohurl. Hope you didn’t actually hurl because that would be a disgorgement. All right, next one. This one’s from James, but PharaohKatt wondered this one as well many years ago I found on our Discord. ANY as in, do you have ANY money? And MANY. She has MANY money.
BEN: Oh, that’s fun. I like this.
DANIEL: She has many things. ANY and MANY. These go back aways, don’t they?
BEN: Oh, these must be old words, right?
DANIEL: Super friggin’ old words.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I like this.
BEN: I’m going to let Hedvig…
DANIEL: Shall I go first?
BEN: …take the lead or you, Daniel.
DANIEL: I said sure. Why not? Again, I’m lukewarm on this one.
HEDVIG: I say sure as well. It reminds me of like, WILLY-NILLY which is… There used to be an old negative prefix, so will and nil is to not want. So, willy-nilly is someone like…
DANIEL: Which means does he want or does he not want? Will-he-nil-he.
HEDVIG: Yeah, someone who’s like fickle. And I mean, it shares nothing with ANY and MANY, except that it’s a prefix. But let’s think of when we use it like, I want any cat, and, I want many cats. That sounds like they belong in a sort of paradigm, doesn’t it?
DANIEL: Yeah, they’re both determiners, aren’t they?
HEDVIG: Yeeessss.
BEN: That was the lukewarmest yes so far.
HEDVIG: It’s just I know that there’s a lot of linguists who listen to this as well. Determiners is like a bit of a funny class of words, and sometimes I get lost in my own definitions and I start worrying.
DANIEL: This, that, these, those, any, many. ANY is a funny word because it’s only used for negatives and questions like, “Do you have any money?”, or, “I don’t have any money,” but you can’t say, “I have any money.” Can’t do it. Sounds weird.
HEDVIG: I use… Any is a function in the programming language I like to use, R. So, you can say, like, “If any of these is true, then do blah, blah.”
BEN: That’s a fun one. That’s a good way to do Booleans.
DANIEL: Ah, yes. That’s cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right, so Hedvig says yes.
BEN: So, I haven’t answered. I’m going to go…
DANIEL: I say yes.
BEN: I’m going to go no, to be a contrarian, primarily to put a little dramatic tension to the game, but also because they’re really old words, and they’re short words, I could see that maybe things have gotten rounded off and ended up close together, but started off not close together, so let’s see.
DANIEL: Ben wins. [BEN SCREAMS] ANY and MANY, not related, coming from totally different Proto-Indo European roots, ANY is from *oi-no-, one or unique. MANY, perhaps from *menegh-, meaning copious, but Etymonline points out the pronunciation of MANY was altered by influence… of ANY!
HEDVIG: Yeah. This happens sometimes.
BEN: Okay, so would we call that like a cheat related, maybe?
DANIEL: Yeah. Resemblance based on squishing.
HEDVIG: Eh, it’s just phonology. It’s allowed. It’s not…
BEN: Well, look, let this be a lesson to all of our listeners. Play the devil’s advocate, be a contrarian, it works out well.
DANIEL: Then, I wondered, what did MANY look like before ANY came around? And it was probably something…
HEDVIG: Can I guess?
DANIEL: Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
HEDVIG: Is there a velar nasal in it?
DANIEL: There is a velar. It’s /g/.
HEDVIG: I’m being cheating. I’m using Swedish. So, it’s “många”.
DANIEL: Well, it was something like manig with a G. Sometimes it had an O, like MONEY. Like the money that you spend. That’s how it looked. But by Middle English, 1500s, 1600s, we start seeing many. So, there you have it. It grows together. Thanks, James and PharaohKatt.
Finally, from Diego, with support from Hedvig. Diego says, this is on our Discord. “I’m wondering if GUAVA…”
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: “…GUARANI and GUARANÁ might be related with the GUARANI languages being the possible common factor. I know Guaraní and Guaraná are definitely from South America, but I’m not sure about guava.” And then, Hedvig, you added GUACAMOLE.
HEDVIG: Ben, I don’t know if you know about this, but I’m trying to get more items for Related or Not, and I don’t want to look them up. So, what I do is I prod my friends when we go for Friday beers, and then I drunkenly write a bunch of things in our Discord and then I forget about it.
BEN: [LAUGHS] And you wake up the next day and go, “Oh.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What did I post? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, we had Guaraní, guava…
BEN: Could you guys explain what the things other than guava are?
HEDVIG: Oh, there’s an ethnic group who have a language that’s part of it.
DANIEL: That’s Guaraní.
BEN: Guaraní.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Is that where Guyana gets its name?
DANIEL: Mm-mm. Different again.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s Guinea, the same as in Guinea.
BEN: Oh, yes, of course. Like the many Guineas. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: The many guineas.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s that one.
DANIEL: Guaraná.
HEDVIG: And then there’s a sort of berry thing that you can make that’s related to coffee.
DANIEL: It’s a fruit with beans on it. Some people are using it as a coffee substitute. And there’s also a famous soft drink made from not the beans, but the rest of it.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And of course, we know GUACAMOLE because it’s tasty and wonderful and slippery.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. I think I added GUACAMOLE to just be like…
DANIEL: Yep, you did. Now, we’re not wondering if they come from the same language. Simply tying back to the same language won’t be enough, because they probably do, but the same word.
BEN: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So, we need to ask ourselves where the GUAVA comes from, which is actually surprisingly hard, I have discovered in my… Well, as in, to intuit where food comes from is actually quite hard. Obviously, I could just fucking google it and it’s really easy. [DANIEL LAUGHS] But the industrialisation of food has made inferring or guessing where stuff has come from extraordinarily difficult, I think, because… okay, sure, for really big famous things like potatoes and tomatoes and the nightshade family coming from the New World in the Colombian exchange, fine. But guavas: A. are not super readily available as a foodstuff. You generally need to go to pretty niche supermarkets to get yourself some fresh guava when they’re in season and that sort of thing. Or you can only get guava paste from Indian supermarkets and that sort of stuff.
I’m going to go unrelated based on the fact that guava does not come from the place where the ethnic groups come from. I’m going to guess that GUAVA is not from South America and it is in fact from the South Asia region.
DANIEL: Okay, so you’re putting GUAVA on its own.
BEN: I am.
DANIEL: The rest of them related, do you think?
HEDVIG: I think we’re going to need a list here.
BEN: Maybe the berry and the ethnic group are related.
DANIEL: Okay. Ben says that the Guaraní and the Guaraná.
BEN: Oh, and by the way, I think GUACAMOLE is unrelated to all of them.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Not connected.
DANIEL: You’ve picked out that pair.
HEDVIG: I have a theory about the guacamole, the guava and the berry, which is… Now I’m getting stuck in my head.
DANIEL: Guaraná.
HEDVIG: Guaraná. What if GUA- is like fruit or round thing?
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: Or to pound maybe.
HEDVIG: Do you pound all of them? Yeah, yeah, you can. So, if it’s like round thing or fruit or to pound and that’s common and then like, the ending is like, “Oh, it’s this one.”
BEN: I know that guacamole is so named because mole is the thing you make guacamole in. I’m pretty sure.
DANIEL: No, mole is the sauce, isn’t it? Mole is like a kind of… You can get mole at restaurants.
BEN: Oh, actually, no, you’re right. It’s like a thin consist… Molcajete is what you make the guacamole in. And the mole is… you’re right, it’s like things with a thin, runny consistency, generally speaking or like…
DANIEL: Yeah, so I got guacamole.
HEDVIG: So, if GUA is like round thing or fruit or pound and then CA we don’t know and MOLE is like sauce, then guacamole is… do-do-do, I don’t know, but I’m having fun, and I think I’m going to go with my theory of GUA in those fruit things being round thing, fruit, egg, pound, and then we have… the leftovers are Guaraní, the people and language, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Which I’m going to guess is unrelated. I don’t see…
DANIEL: The odd one out.
HEDVIG: Unless it’s the people who eat those things.
DANIEL: They wouldn’t be called that.
BEN: You’re going to have to make a guess on the bus or off the bus.
HEDVIG: No, people can be called that. You can be like… We’re the people who really like this food.
DANIEL: Maybe. Maybe.
HEDVIG: Yeah. All right, I’m going to go all related. Fuck it. Bet it all!
DANIEL: You should see them. They just go nuts with that stuff. I said none. I said nothing related because I think…
HEDVIG: None?
BEN: We’ve got a good spread going here. This is good.
DANIEL: I said, I think a GUA sound can come from anywhere. So, I didn’t think any. You know, you got /wa/, and that turns to /gwa/, or /gwa/ turns to /wa/ or /wua/ or something. Just grows. Just grows like weeds, those /gaz/. Okay, here’s the answer. Ain’t none of them related. So, let’s start with GUAVA.
BEN: Argh, that’s rough.
HEDVIG: Fuckin’ hell.
DANIEL: This one comes… Ben you did a great job. The GUAVA comes from Arawakan, which is a West Indies language. The fruit was guayaba, or maybe from Tupi, guajava. Tupi likes its GUA sounds. There’s a lot of them coming up.
Okay, now let’s move on to GUACAMOLE. Different word, different language. This one comes from Nahuatl, an Aztecan language, āhuacamōlli. And the āhuacatl is the avocado, and the mōlli is the sauce. Apparently, āhuaca and guaca, they can move around a little bit.
GUARANÁ comes from another Tupian language, Sateré-Mawé, which the word was Warana. Instead of Guaraná, it was Warana. Not sure why it’s called that. It might be from Portuguese Guaraná and they borrowed it from Tupi, where they like their guas. Again, wa to gua.
Finally, the Guaraní people. Now, prior to European contact, they called themselves the Abá. Jesuit missionaries found them and noticed or wrote down that they also called themselves Guaraní, which is an old Tupi word, war or warrior, people who fight. Maybe they called themselves that. Maybe the name was given to them by the Spanish. But even so, it looks like none of these four words are related to each other. Different languages, different roots, different times.
BEN: How thoroughly unsatisfying when Daniel is the only person who wins, everyone loses.
DANIEL: Oh, but you did pretty well, both of you. Thanks to both of you and thanks to Diego.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I did the worst. I did the opposite.
DANIEL: Did you get any right? Oh, okay, never mind.
HEDVIG: I don’t know about the other. I only care about this GUA question now. And I guessed all related and the answer was none, so. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’s all right. I love your thought process. I’d still give you part credit.
HEDVIG: I think this is also proof that when I suggest things in the Related or Not Discord channel, I do not look up the answers and I have no…
DANIEL: You’re being impartial. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I am being very impartial. I don’t know what’s going on.
DANIEL: Thanks, Diego. Thanks to everybody who suggested. Thanks to Gordon for the theme. If you’d like to send us a Related or Not or a jingle, send those to hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re here with a very special guest. She’s a permanent researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She recently appeared on the National Geographic series Pole to Pole with Will Smith. It’s Dr Mary Walworth. Mary, thanks for coming on the show.
MARY WALWORTH: Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.
DANIEL: I was surprised to find out that you already knew Hedvig.
MARY: For a long time. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yesh. I think Mary and I have known each other since, I want to say, like 2016. Does that sound right?
MARY: Yeah, about 10… probably about 10 years. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. We’re both linguists interested in Pacific and have worked in the same workplace, so. [LAUGHS]
MARY: That’s right.
DANIEL: That’s right. Well, I want to talk about what you’re doing in a couple of different ways. First of all, I’m really interested in… I never know the right way to say this, language endangerment. Maybe once I finish with this bit, you can tell me the right way to say this, but language endangerment, language loss, especially as it pertains to climate change. But I am also interested in this media thing that you’re doing because I am also a media linguist and I would like to be on television. [LAUGHTER] So, I want to find out all I can here. But maybe we should start with the island that is of concern in this series and it’s the island on the map. It’s Tench Island. It’s very small. It’s in Papua New Guinea. And I wanted to know a little bit about the language seen on Tench Island.
MARY: Yeah, sure. So, we’re going to call it Nusi, right? Because…
DANIEL: Nusi, got it.
MARY: …that’s the local name. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you. I would so much rather call it that. Thank you.
MARY: Yeah. So, we’ll call it Nusi. Nusi language, Nusi Island, but people there also do refer to it as Tench and it is that on most maps if it is on a map. Tiny place. Probably the small… I mean, I go to small islands often, but it’s probably the smallest island I’ve ever been to, and very remote.
HEDVIG: How long time does it take to walk around the island you’d say?
MARY: We walked around the island. To be fair, we were kind of stopping every few steps to take a GPS point and learn the name of that particular zone. But it took us a couple of hours, and that was with stopping, so you could go around very quickly.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
MARY: Yeah. I think typically there are about 30 to 50 people living there regularly. That can increase when you have people coming to visit, important people coming to visit or for holidays or for anything like that. But generally speaking, there are about 30 to 50 people, I would say, that are living there, which creates a really interesting language scene.
So, you’ve got a lot of different dynamics. You have the language of Enusi, the Nusi language, which is really not spoken anymore between people. So, this is the endangered language, the severely endangered language that’s still known and kind of we’re still trying to pull it out from this group of elders that you see me working with in the episode.
Then, there is sort of the local PNG Tok Pisin contact language, Pidgin Creole language, that’s used throughout the country, and people are speaking that there as well. And then, you have a nearby language that has kind of replaced the Nusi language, another Oceanic language, another language that’s related, very closely related to Enusi language called Emirau, and that is the heritage language of the closest island to Enusi. And that’s what people are generally using. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Which brings us to a term… I don’t know if Mary coined this term or popularised it, which is the term “trickle-down endangerment”…
MARY: Sure.
HEDVIG: …which I’ve heard you use also in French Polynesia, and which also applies in this case. Can you tell us maybe a little bit more what that’s about?
MARY: Sure. Trickle-down endangerment, as far as I know I did make that term up. In the French Polynesian context texts, it refers to a language that is endangered, that is sort of endangering other languages. So, for whatever reason, it is a language that is part of a more centralized zone of a place that has been previously colonized. So, the language in the centralized zone, in this case, it was Tahitian in Tahiti, becomes endangered by the French language, but in the outer islands of French Polynesia, Tahitian was sort of used through religion and through other means and ended up replacing the local languages of outer islands. So, you have Tahitian replacing other local languages.
So, in this case, yeah, it is. It could be similar to a trickle-down endangerment where you have Emirau, which is definitely an endangered language itself, or at least a small language. People are speaking it regularly on the island of Emirau, but it is a smaller language. So therefore, a little bit more endangered and not well documented, that has replaced Enusi language on the island of Enusi.
HEDVIG: And Emirau and Enusi are both Oceanic languages, correct?
MARY: They are, yep, they are.
HEDVIG: So, one could imagine that it is a different situation when you’re facing another language coming in where there are some similarities versus if there was a language that was very different. Do you think that it’s more likely to happen in these cases, it’s easier to learn a more related language or it doesn’t matter, trickle-down endangerment is as prevalent whether languages are related or not?
MARY: I think typically something like trickle-down endangerment is going to happen with languages that are more closely related. And I think that kind of endangerment can happen more rapidly because it’s a local language also in a sense. So, it’s not totally coming from the outside. It’s not coming in the context of a foreigner bringing a language that’s totally different with completely different sounds and structure. It’s local people coming with a language that maybe people already have some knowledge of or some contact with. So, it’s going to be much more rapid. And the sound systems and the structure are going to be really similar most of the time in these cases. So, yeah, it’s going to happen probably much more rapidly.
DANIEL: And so, this is one of those cases where maybe oppression is not a primary cause of language loss, but the language loss can be quite severe and quite quick for all that.
MARY: Yeah, sure. I mean, it kind of depends on how you look at oppression [LAUGHS] because it’s deep in there still. You’ve got a situation where on Enusi, small population but was larger in the past and people stayed marrying different clans on the island for a very, very long time. They resisted the outside for quite some time.
Eventually, missionaries did come and it’s still quite a religious Seventh-Day Adventist island. It’s a very important part of their local culture. But that didn’t start until, I believe, the 1940s, I want to say, don’t hold me to that, but I’m pretty sure that’s when the first missionaries arrived there.
And then, over time, the population decreased, maybe partially because of this outside contact, I don’t know. And then, that reduces the marriage pool, the reproduction pool on island. And so eventually, people had to marry out. And that was encouraged also by the church to marry out. And they married out to clans that had the same names on this island of Emirau. And that was, I mean, you can… We did genealogies with pretty much everybody who’s living on the island most of the time. And you could see that kind of started to happen in the 1960s, I would say. So, this language, that’s why you’ve got the older people who still have this linguistic memory of Enusi language and can still have that be drawn out. But then, as the generations continue, once people started marrying out, the language was almost fully replaced and you see this really clear cut.
DANIEL: And I suppose this is where we mentioned that actually there’s some English going on as well. In the episode, we see people who are speaking English pretty well, so that’s going on too.
MARY: Yeah, you’ve got… Realistically, you have… So, Norman and Robert, the father and son do speak English. Not everybody speaks English. I would say English was kind of rare. On island, people do speak Tok Pisin, which is…
DANIEL: An English-based creole.
MARY: Yeah, exactly. It includes a lot of English. So, English isn’t such a big jump. But Norman, he’s a fluent English speaker. He’s also sort of a linguist. I mean, in one of our first conversations, he started talking to me about William Labov and sociolinguistics and I was like, “Hold on a minute. This is amazing.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There you go.
MARY: We had some really serious linguistic conversations. And then, of course, Robert is his son. So, some of that has been passed down to him as well. So, I think they were not the norm on island in terms of English being with such ease.
HEDVIG: It was really beautiful to see in the episode, I think, the ambition, enthusiasm, passion that Norman has for his community and what he sees for their future and what he wants to do. And it was very interesting as well to hear his father, you were doing this, he poetically called sort of like archeology of the mind or something like that. I was very impressed by that. And I was wondering if it’s not too uncomfortable to talk about what you think of the current state of the language and what the future is like.
MARY: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Well, as you know, whether you can see that or not in the episode, definitely I felt it in my preliminary work with them leading up to and during the filming of the episode, it’s a situation that’s not unlike other situations I’ve experienced where pretty much people say the language is gone. It’s kind of spoken by these people, but there’s not a lot left, and they don’t use it between them. So, that was sort of the situation that was presented to me.
But there’s a sort of magic that can happen when you start talking to people about not even necessarily their language, but a little bit about language, about their past, about their family members that have passed on, about how they do things in a village or on island, walking around and doing these place names, as I mentioned before, and stuff starts to come out. And then, as stuff starts to come out, it sort of somersaults out and pours and pours out.
And when you thought you were only going to maybe get a hundred words out of somebody, suddenly you’ve got full sentences. So, you see, even just in this small interaction that we had on camera with Norman, we have, “I’m from Enusi,” coming out, and with all sorts of other pronouns that didn’t necessarily make the cut and all of this too, but we had some sentences and that’s this amazing magic of the linguistic memory when you do this kind of language archaeology, so to speak, and digging around. So, I think the situation is more hopeful than a language that’s just dying and that’s it. We’re going to get what we can, and it’s not going to be much.
We’re planning to go back in October of this year to do a little bit more serious documentation. And Robert, Norman’s son, I did leave a recorder with him, and he had shadowed me in some of the field work that happened around the episode, and he saw how I did things. And we had a chat about, it doesn’t have to be as rigorous as maybe I would do it. You can just go and record and record stories and see what’s interesting and see what comes out. I know he’s been doing a little bit of that. So, I think that’s a really good sign. Interest creates more of these magic moments where language can come out. So, we’ll see what happens when I go back, but I’m optimistic that there’s more.
HEDVIG: Well, some of these demographic changes that you talked about are not that old. I mean, you talked about 1940s and 1960s. I mean, that’s not that long ago in people’s history.
DANIEL: That’s 80 years.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but that’s not that long ago.
MARY: Well, it’s long enough that the kids aren’t learning the language. And as I’m sure you guys know, and a lot of your audience knows, when you have that intergenerational transmission cut, that’s where it’s downhill, so that is not happening. But I’m optimistic that islanders want kids to learn some of the language. We’ve talked about doing little booklets or some way to learn in church or in school or even just sort of more casually. So, that’s positive.
But yes. So, on one hand, it’s dire because you don’t have the kids learning it, but it is not so super long ago that… some of these older people that I work with, they do remember their grandparents speaking the language, so that’s a really good thing.
DANIEL: We put out the call to our listeners on our Discord, and Yevaud has come up with a question. And I think this is a question that we should be asking everybody who’s doing work in this area. Yevaud asks, “When it comes to documentation, how do you go about making the data accessible to the speech communities and how much subject participation or collaboration is there in general?” Such a good question because I feel like in the old days, we used to Rambo in and take the language, but now there’s much more focus on getting the community to participate and making resources available to the community. What’s going on there?
MARY: Yeah, for sure. Great question and a super important one. So, the first thing that happens whenever I’ve been in a speech community is have it… especially in a place like Papua New Guinea and similarly in Vanuatu, where you have a chief or a council of elders on the island or in the village, the very first thing is a meeting, sort of like a townhall kind of meeting, for me to introduce myself, say what I’m interested in, why I think it’s important, and why I want to document a language and to see if they have any interest, if that’s cool [LAUGHS] with them. If not, then I’m not going to stick around because that would be totally inappropriate. Usually, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced people saying “No, we have no interest.” Usually, it’s, “Yes, this is really important. We’re so excited you’re here and here’s what we want to do. Here’s what we’d like to see happen.”
So then, of course, the community interests are not always the same as language science interests, but you find a way to make those work together. And that’s pretty easy to do when you are working with a severely endangered language and you’re starting with things like basic vocabulary or basic sentence structure because you’re just getting all of the words for body parts, so to take that and to say, “Okay, let’s have a local person do some drawings of the body or have the kids do a contest of how to draw the human body and let’s add in the local words and print it out,” And there, you’ve already got something that’s community based and on the language science part, you’ve got a really cool little list of human body parts, something like that. Same with numbers.
In terms of making the recordings and the data accessible. What I always do is take multiple ways of copying over all of the recordings that I’m doing. So, of course, I have my backup for future archiving and language archives after the fact, but a USB key for the community if there’s a computer that’s available. Also, something that I like to do is, everybody’s got cell phones now and smartphones and often on non-Apple ones, there’s a place for like a micro-SD card. So, I’ll copy over, I’ll bring a bunch of micro-SD cards, copy the recordings and MP3 and somebody who’s got a more powerful smartphone with that capability, then they can be the guardian of those recordings until they make their way to a language archive.
DANIEL: Sounds like a lot of moving parts there.
MARY: Yeah, but it is important that you explain what you’re doing. Be completely honest about your own interests as a linguist, as a scientist and hear what they want to do and make sure that they are involved every step of the way and that you’re involved in what they want to do.
HEDVIG: And if I can do a small plug. Daniel, we have episode number 35 with Lesley Woods and [Alice] Gaby about collaborative research practices in linguistics which I can also recommend. And also, Lesley’s book, Something’s Gotta Change, is available for free, which is a pretty good resource as well. And I know that it’s very similar to what Mary’s saying, so.
DANIEL: Okay, well, we’ve talked a little bit about Nusi and language loss or language endangerment, which is a huge problem. We already know that because of… Do we still tell the stat about how in a hundred years maybe half of the world’s languages will disappear? Is that still valid? That’s what we always used to say.
MARY: Yeah. I mean, there’s the stat of the every two weeks, a language dies. And it is a stat, whether or not that’s actually going to happen, that does seem to be the tendency if we’re not documenting these languages. If they’re not being safeguarded in some way, then yeah, they’re going to disappear.
HEDVIG: Maybe, Mary, you could talk a little bit about how endangerment is defined because some people think of it mainly as an issue with small populations.
MARY: Sure.
HEDVIG: But some people have lived in relatively small, comparatively small corporations, say, under a thousand or under ten thousand for a very long time. And I imagine this is the case for Enusi, for example, which is not a huge island. So, what is it that defines it as endangered now in a way that it wasn’t before?
MARY: Yeah, that’s a really good question. We touched on it slightly before talking about the intergenerational transmission. So, a small language doesn’t necessarily mean that a language is going to die. What is concerning about language health is when you have a rapid reduction in the number of speakers, sort of a dramatic reduction in the number of speakers, and that those speakers get older and older as the number of speakers reduces dramatically.
So, all of that to say when kids stop speaking the language, when the language stops being spoken at home and is another language or languages are used in place of the local language, that’s where language starts to become endangered and it happens really quickly. And then, that’s when numbers might matter.
But numbers, general numbers don’t matter if they’re stable. If it’s a small island or a small village and the number of speakers has always been small and continues to be small, that’s no big deal as long as people continue to speak the language and that it has some domain of use within the society.
HEDVIG: So, maybe we should be looking at like average age instead of population size, something like that if we find ages of everyone, which we don’t. [LAUGHS]
MARY: Yeah. And the rapid decrease of speakers is an issue. If you’re seeing a rapid decrease of speakers, that’s where numbers really matter.
DANIEL: Okay. But now, in addition to the mix, we’re seeing that climate change is having its own impact as people are having to leave the traditional home of the language. Tell me more about that as it relates to people of Nusi.
MARY: Yeah, so in Nusi, because it’s a low island and kind of just floating around as this inverse coral mound, basically, they’re not unique, also in their situation of being a low-laying island with rising sea levels. People will be displaced. When, we don’t know, but they will, they will not be able to stay there forever. And that is the case for not a lot, but a growing number of Pacific islands as well as other places in the world, but my familiar zone is Pacific islands. And what displacement does is unless everybody goes to the same place outside of their island home, it’s going to have an impact on transmission of cultural practices and of what encodes those, which is language. So inevitably, there’s a risk for increased language engagement as people are being displaced.
HEDVIG: And it was really cool, I thought, in the episode that you’ve had both Robert and Norman Jana and also John Ayni who works on marine conservation, who’s not from Enusi if I’m not mistaken. But I mean, maybe this shouldn’t just be a plug for watching this episode, but I thought that was a nice touch to sort of bring them together to discuss those issues side by side because, as you say, when people move and people have to move because of climate change, culture doesn’t move in the same way with you.
MARY: Yeah, yeah. John is a really special person, as you do see in the episode. And I will shamelessly plug the episode because it is great. [LAUGHTER] Not just the language parts, but John’s work is incredible. And he’s doing not just conservation for the resources around his communities, but also for conservation of traditional practices which help this conservation of the marine life around that area.
So, it is. it’s a natural collaboration with somebody like John. And John will be coming back with me in October to Enusi, not necessarily to document the language, but to help see what comes out. As the language starts coming out, maybe some practices of how to handle a king tide, if they were happening in the past, or how to manage crops that are growing on the island, maybe these things will also emerge and that’s really his wheelhouse. So, we’re hoping something will happen from that teamwork.
HEDVIG: Are you going to sail again? In the episode, you sail to Enusi on a more or less traditional craft. I don’t know exactly. Are you doing that again in October or are you taking a motorboat? What are you doing?
MARY: We’re going to take… Hopefully. We’re working out what we’re going to take. We’re going to take a local sort of cargo boat over. Yeah, yeah. Less adventurous, but [LAUGHS] also fun.
DANIEL: So, it sounds like what we’re getting is these… We’ve got these diaspora communities who are having to move to different places and find their own way. They might not move to the same place. They might still be in touch if they’re able to use the internet, if they’re able to use social media. What do you see is the role for maybe AI or corpus tools in this work? What are some of your predictions?
MARY: Yeah, I mean, I think for people who are being displaced for diaspora communities, in the first place, even if people are not in the same exact place, that you have to just to kind of back up, like looking at language as not just a tool for communication or even a tool for transmission of culture, but as an anchor. So, these languages are anchors even without the place, even without the homeland, they can anchor people together. So, if that sense is there, I think that there’s real positivity in people maintaining the language even in their smaller groups and across a diaspora.
Now, how do people do that within a diaspora situation? I mean, social media already is such a great tool for that. People using local language or code switching with whatever language is the main language of where they’ve ended up. There’s some really, really cool language that emerges there while also safeguarding and protecting and transmitting their heritage language. So, absolutely. I mean, you see that on Instagram, Facebook. The only reason I’m even on Facebook anymore is just to just watch that happen. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I was going to say exactly the same thing. I posted earlier to our listeners in the Discord, some stuff from Facebook about the episode and Enusi and stuff. And I was like, “I know everyone doesn’t think it’s cool to hang on Facebook, but if you want to talk to people who live in the Pacific, this is the only place really.” I chatted with John Aini on Facebook Messenger because I had a question for him and he was like: Ah, okay. Oh, yeah. And it was super nice. And for all the Mark Zuckerberg of it all, [MARY LAUGHS] it has that use.
MARY: Absolutely. Yes.
DANIEL: That’s a really good use case for that. I mean, I scarcely remember that Facebook exists, but that’s a really good thing that it does.
MARY: It is. It’s a great thing. And it’s also for keeping people connected to their language, to their culture, to each other, it’s great. It’s also really cool as like a medium for study of how language changes and how languages mix.
DANIEL: What have you noticed? Is this in people’s comments?
MARY: Yeah, I mean, I haven’t noticed it much with Nusi Islanders yet, but with other communities that I work with, the mixing of using sort of token words or token phrases that are in the heritage language, mixed in with Tahitian or mixed in with French and maybe an English word here and there. And it’s just really… In one post, in one utterance, you’ve got a whole 150 years of contact history that’s just emerging. So, it’s really cool.
HEDVIG: And because there isn’t usually a spellcheck for these languages, you get people writing how they think things sound and what they sound. So sometimes, you can see changes, like things coming together. Like, as linguists, when you have your little linguist hat on, you can see changes in people’s comments. And if Facebook ever had Enusi language and Samoan and Tahitian and Rapa Iti, then they’ll normalise all that beautiful little variation.
MARY: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, now let’s move on to how the episode of Pole to Pole with Will Smith got made. I want to know, first of all, how did this start? How did they get in contact with you at National Geographic?
MARY: It’s really funny. So, I had an email and I actually… I think this is… a very similar thing happened to Ali, who is featured in the North Pole episode. But I had a message, a couple years back and it was something about Nat Geo Disney+. And I put it into my trash because I was like, “I don’t have Disney. I don’t know what this is.” I thought it was just their advertising for some new thing I could stream. And then, something made me go back to it and I read it and it was the casting team for this, and they were just at that point just kind of looking to chat about what I did. And yeah, and then the conversations just started happening and happening more frequently and then it just came together.
HEDVIG: And before this at that point, you had, for example, done work in the Pacific already with Rapa Iti in French Polynesia. So, they must have seen that you worked on endangered languages of the Pacific and then been like: Mm, makes sense.
MARY: Yeah, yeah. At this point, I was maybe already known a bit for that work, for documentation in various parts of the Pacific. And at that point, I’m not sure that they knew exactly where would be the focus for the whole episode, so that kind of emerged in some of our conversations as well.
DANIEL: Were there any surprises that you had when the actual production got started? What didn’t you expect?
MARY: I have to say I was involved at every level that there weren’t too many surprises, and that was a really, really good, cool thing. This was the first time I’ve ever done anything like this. So, I actually don’t know if that’s a regular thing that happens, but people were saying, “Oh, be careful. You can’t imagine a big production coming to a small island,” and all of that. And so, I was just really honest. This is my experience in the Pacific. This is how my experience is with people interacting there. And production really took my advice and my experience to heart, and I think that worked really, really well.
Everything was done so respectfully, so carefully with the communities. Obviously, you see with John, that’s definitely the case. And on island too, I mean, there were no big dramatic surprises, which was great. I’d say the biggest surprise was how easy it was to work with a major Hollywood superstar. That was the most surprising thing. [LAUGHTER] Like, “Oh, okay, yeah, it’s the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. That’s cool. Whatever, let’s talk about language.”
DANIEL: And he was into it as well.
MARY: Super into it.
HEDVIG: Maybe you have John Aini need to thank, because it sounds like he sort of put Will in his place earlier on and was like, “I’m in charge here. You’re doing what I’m telling you.” And he must have been like, “Oh, okay.”
MARY: [LAUGHS] That’s right. Yeah. That might have had something to do with it. I mean, I also think, I get the sense that, you know, Will is somebody who is genuinely curious. I don’t think you’d do a show like this if you’re not super curious about the world around you and what you don’t usually see. So, that really came off a lot with him.
And when it came to language and language science, he had a lot of questions. We had a lot of conversations about what does it all mean. And I could see it click for him, the connection of language and history and this idea of language as an anchor or a tether to your past and how meaningful that is not just for one individual person, but sort of for us as a collective, as a species and that was a really cool thing to witness. And yeah, very, very genuine.
I will also say during our recording session, his linguistic ability was really keen. Like, it didn’t all make the cut, this whole interaction we had, but his repetition of sounds was so impressive. I was like, “How did you…? Okay, that’s good.” But then, also the questions he was asking were exactly the kind of follow-up questions I would have asked as a professional linguist. I was like, “Oh, wow, you could be a research assistant like for real. Can’t pay you as much as you might earn for…!”
DANIEL: Be accustomed to, no. [LAUGHTER]
MARY: “…but you’re really good at this.” So that was cool. I mean, that was really… Yeah, that was genuinely surprising and made everything just flow a lot easier.
HEDVIG: Mm. I think actors and comedians often have a very good sense of language and culture and social settings. I see a lot of like really interesting linguistics takes in like random comedy podcasts sometimes. And I’m like, “You’re right, that assumption, like that thing, that’s a good idea.”
MARY: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: But doing a big production can be really risky. What if the story gets away from you? What if it’s too much big budget and you miss what’s going on on the small interactions? But it sounds like that wasn’t really a problem here.
MARY: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of work went in ahead of time to again making sure people were okay with the big production, that we were going to the right places. For me, on the linguistic side of things, even never having been to Nusi, I knew Nusi was an important language because, up until this point, was pretty much completely undocumented and it sits in a zone that’s really important historically for the migration of people through there and contact and all of this. Even a small island like that, it was sort of like, “Ooh, I want to go there. And there’s a lot of really good reasons.”
So, I think in all cases something would have happened that would have catered to this story of language endangerment and definitely their history with the king tide and rising sea levels and all of that. The climate issue was already there and already linked to language. So, it wasn’t a huge risk, I don’t think, for us but that also is due in great part to the production, who did a lot of work ahead of time.
HEDVIG: And didn’t you also… If I remember correctly, Mary, didn’t you travel to Enusi before the shooting of the episode and met with people?
MARY: Yeah, so I did do a bit of meeting people, doing some genealogies with people, getting to know their recent history and individual histories in quite some detail before we did shoot the episode.
DANIEL: Well, then, it sounds like if you had any advice for other public linguists doing something big like this, I guess that might be, plan ahead?
MARY: Always. I mean, for any linguist, [LAUGHS] plan ahead. Plan ahead and then be ready to let it, to not work out. I mean, we did have some weather going to Nusi. It did put us off schedule, a nicely planned schedule, because the island, it’s not super duper far away, but it is difficult to get to land from being out in the open ocean. So, you need the swell to be right, you need the weather to be right. So, I mean, in that way, we were at the mercy of Mother Nature. And that did delay things a little bit. But yeah, having a plan. Having a backup plan. Having a backup backup plan, and then just being ready to adapt.
DANIEL: So, what happens now? The people of Enusi are doing their thing. They’re watching the water, they’re getting help from you, and they’re doing the work of documenting the language. What happens to these languages now or other languages like them?
MARY: Yeah, I mean, what happens… So, this is an interesting story that’s not about Enusi, but about the Sing Sing. This first scene where you meet me at this event with all of the different groups speaking unrelated languages and doing their chants and dances. After we filmed that, people were obviously excited that Will was there, of course, but I was surprised again that people were really excited that I was there. Not because they knew who I was, but because they knew I was a linguist. And I think almost every group, the leader of their group came up to me and said, “Okay, can you help us? Can you help document our language?” And I was like, “Well, I mean, I would love to. I wish I was a hundred different people with all the time in the world.” But I’ll see with students and other people I work with. That’s great news if you want to work with linguists.”
So, I think the future of these languages is continued interest and continued work, again with that growing interest that allows even the most endangered language to a positive chance at least of being able to be described and to have some data from it and to potentially be revitalized if the community wants that.
HEDVIG: I think besides the change that we talked about earlier in linguistics, where linguists are trying to do more collaborative research together with communities, another change that I think Australia is a little bit maybe of a leader in is the language centers, where communities work together and where there is a sort of stable core that goes on as people transition in and out.
So, in Australia, I know that there are many Indigenously run language centers that will say, “We would like a graduate student to come around and do something and also run local events.” I know that there are some similarities to things happening in Western Province in PNG that Dick Evans runs. And I also have a friend who runs something similar in Nigeria. And so, this kind of practice seems to be popping up more, trying to create a sort of structure that is there. It doesn’t need to be that… Mary can’t be everywhere. [LAUGHTER]
MARY: Exactly.
HEDVIG: And Mary is not immortal. Building something that sort of sustains for a longer time. So, you were mentioning leaving recording equipment to have people record things, also saying, “What do you want to record? What’s important to you to record?” And then, building something maybe even sometimes there’s like a house or a place or something where materials live and where it’s continuously happening. That’s something that, I don’t know, brings me some sort of hope.
MARY: Yeah. And I think local training, whether it’s a training center expressly for language documentation or if it’s, again mentioning at the very beginning before we started recording, I do teach some university courses in Tahiti and in New Caledonia, where the student body is 99% local people who have a connection with a heritage language and have access maybe to a grandparent or a parent or somebody who’s still speaking or still remembers the language.
So, these universities having programs that include courses and language documentation is a really great way for somebody that like me and hopefully my students in future years to teach these courses to people in a way that’s really manageable to say, like, “You don’t have to be some great linguist to document this language of yours. You can have some skills and there are methods and you need to know these methods. But then, just you can take the recorder and you can go and you can record, and then you can safeguard these in archives or local archives,” which are also increasing. So, that’s a big positive even if it’s not just government-run language centers or training centers, even universities and local people just getting their hands on some training.
HEDVIG: This is where I can plug an Open Access article by Debra McDougall and Alpheaus Zobule called “Grammar as a Bridge,” about the Kulu Language Institute in Solomon Islands, which I think is a really interesting example of this kind of stuff.
MARY: Yeah, for sure.
HEDVIG: We’re not… Yeah, I think, I think the field has moved from like very extractive research to collaborative research to now almost like a separate stage where we’re talking about, yeah, structures and involving people in a more structured way.
MARY: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, what do you think was one of the good outcomes that came out of doing the show?
MARY: I think the biggest positive is that people know what language science is in a real palatable, bite-sized way and the importance of looking at languages and not just the major languages and what that means to all of us and what a uniting thing that is for all of us. That was what I wanted from it and I think came out of that. And just the feedback that I’ve had since the episode came out, and people that worked on production who didn’t really know or necessarily care about linguistics beforehand were like, “Whoa, that is impactful. That touches my life. That touches the people around me in some way.” I’m hoping that that’s what came through.
DANIEL: Hey, everybody. Linguistics exists.
MARY: Exactly. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, and it’s cool. I mean it’s a really cool thing. But more than being cool, it’s like our… I say it’s our human superpower in the episode and I really believe that. It’s this complex language, our complex communication tool that allows us to like express everything around us, our entire history, our entire line, our cultural practices, just through this thing we’re doing with our mouths or with our hands. It’s super cool and it’s really uniquely human and that’s all of us.
HEDVIG: We’re talking to Dr Mary Walworth, who featured recently on Pole to Pole with Will Smith in episode 5, Pacific Islands, about language endangerment and climate change.
DANIEL: Mary, thanks so much for coming and hanging out with us today.
MARY: Thank you, guys. It was really fun.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s Words of the Week.
BEN: Woo.
DANIEL: First one comes from Andy from Logophilius who emailed, hello@becauselanguage.com. Here’s what he says, “Although it pains me to think about it, [CLEARS THROAT] the word, BIMBOFICATION, has been getting enough play in the news that it probably deserves at least some discussion on Because Language.” Does anyone know the context in which BIMBOFICATION has come up in the last week or two?
BEN: I don’t know why it’s in the news, but it’s just a kink. Like, I don’t mean “just” as in like to dismiss it, but it is part of the large pantheon of the wild and wonderful ways that human beings can express themselves sexually via kinks. I’m guessing someone in the news has like been outed or kink-shamed in some way for, like, liking bimbofication as like a kink or something.
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: Is it only a kink or is it also like making yourself seem stupider than you are in general?
DANIEL: Ben, what’s your understanding of bimbofication or the term, bimbo?
BEN: First of all, I don’t love that I have become the kink [LAUGHTER] professor of the show.
DANIEL: We don’t know. We’re totally vanilla.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I would like to put it out there that whilst I would be honoured to be as experienced in kink as it is made to seem like I am by mostly Daniel, I would very… I’m sure anyone with any… And I have no doubt there are many of our listeners because we’ve got some pretty kooky listeners in a really positive way. There’s almost certainly a bunch of members of our listenership who are like big on kink and they will listen to my explanations and be like, “This fucking dilettante doesn’t know shit.” And you would be correct, kinky listener. I don’t know much about this stuff, but apparently, I know more than my ex-Mormon co-host. So, I have become the conveyor of the information. To answer your question, Daniel.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: Bimbofication from a kink perspective, my understanding is a playful and unserious sort of descent into the aesthetic and cultural trappings of the archetype that we would call the bimbo. Like super, super blonde, really ditzy, fake lips, fake boobs, all that sort of stuff that we would put in the sort of collective grouping of like what a “bimbo” is. And let’s acknowledge that that’s a pretty gross and sexist term and largely, I think, kind of outdated as well. Nevertheless, within the kink community, like doing… It’s essentially a form of role play with like really elaborate dressups and that’s how I would describe that as a kink.
DANIEL: But also, there are people who enjoy women who have a very elaborate persona. I’m just reading this from lgbtqnation.com. Many of the women in the scene are adult film and entertainment performers augmenting their appearance to achieve a Barbie Doll like appearance. And then, you got it with the fake boobs and the eyelashes and the outrageous persona.
Now, this is going to take us to a political place here. So, gird up your loins. Kirsti Noem was an American politician. She was picked by Trump to be the Secretary of Homeland Security where she was the one in charge of ICE raids. Now, it seems her husband, Brian Noem, has made the news because he enjoys bimbofication. He enjoyed women who were in the scene. He enjoyed dressing like just such a woman. And the pain that I think Andy’s talking about. My read on that is we hear at Because Language headquarters don’t care if people like that sort of thing. We wish that people felt more free to express themselves sexually. We earnestly want that. But MAGA conservatives don’t want that. They continually throw up an idealised and sanitised version of the family and society. It doesn’t have people of colour in it, it doesn’t have LGTBQ people in it. It scarcely has women in it. Not that are people who have the right to self-determination.
HEDVIG: And this is the straight husband of this politician, correct?
DANEIL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Well, maybe straight in a public-facing way but I think the suggestion here is probably rather more queer in their private sexual lives.
DANIEL: But he is married to a MAGA figure and so we do get a grim sort of satisfaction when a cruel person in politics like Kristi Noem finds that they can’t attain their phony ideal of family and society, especially when she was having it off with someone else in Trump World equally cruel and stupid.
BEN: I think what this sort of reminds me of is like there’s this property to really constrained cultures, cultures that are driven by incredibly firm adherence to like norms and that sort of thing because you always get freakiest people popping up from such cultures. So, like classically high-class English world, like lurking beneath the surface was just absolute freakazoids just willing to do all sorts of wild and depraved things.
The same can be said for like German culture. The same can be said for like Japanese culture. It strikes me that the more you try and like constrain human self-expression, the more… I hate to sound like Jeff Goldblum but like, kink finds a way. [LAUGHTER] Just like if you try and bolt that stuff down really hard, it’s a fundamental human drive to express oneself sexually. And what I’m definitely not saying is that like all kink is the product of constraint.
DANIEL: Repression. Yeah.
BEN: That’s not what I mean at all. But this is what this reads like to me, is this guy married to like a super public, super conservative figure was finding an outlet to express his needs, his desires, all that kind of thing, that, yeah… I can’t help but feel in situations like this, you want to just kind of like sit down with Kristi Noem at a diner or whatever and be like…
HEDVIG: It’s okay.
BEN: “Lady, this is what… Like, this evil that you think the world is, it’s mostly just blokes who want to like dress in ladies’ clothes and like get their fuck on. Like, is it really that bad? Is it really so… Like, just let your husband be the version of himself that he wants to be and be aware of it and then life is good. You could just…”
DANIEL: Coming from inside the house.
BEN: “Yeah, you could just not be a bitch about it and then like everything would get a lot better for you.”
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. And everyone.
BEN: And you could also like probably join in. Like, maybe you would really enjoy your bimbo husband, who knows?
DANIEL: Well, I did a little bit of digging into BIMBO just to find out its history. Obviously, it’s Italian, a male infant or a child. We see that from the 1500s. And then, in 1919, we see that people are using bimbo to refer to a guy.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s one of those where it’s jumped genders, and there are lots of terms like that.
BEN: What kind of guy was it?
DANIEL: It was a stupid guy. A guy who didn’t know anything.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: Like a child.
BEN: Like a baby. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. And then, it didn’t take long for it to start referring to women although, don’t forget, by the 1980s, we see himbo.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: Little him form. Yay. Okay, let’s move on. Thanks, James. This one suggested by Diego, GLOTTOPHOBIA.
HEDVIG: So, GLOTTO- is word or…?
DANIEL: Tongue.
HEDVIG: And -PHOBIA is fear. So, GLOTTOPHOBIA is someone who’s afraid of languages or words or tongues.
DANIEL: That’s it. It’s xenophobia, but specifically about language. Diego links us to an article in The World from Gerry Hadden. Link in the show notes. People from Spanish speaking countries, especially Latin America, are facing a lot of discrimination when they go to Spain and try to find work because people, employers, people on the street are insisting that they get rid of their South American accent. The Argentine accent, Peruvian accent, whatever. And speaking Spain Spanish. That’s worth a listen. It’s a good one. And it’s a useful term. We needed this term to describe linguistic discrimination. Somebody can be glottophobic.
BEN: As Hedvig said earlier in the show, like, “I’m sorry, guys. If you trample all over the world colonising things and spread your language like a virus, you don’t then get to later on be like, [IN A HAUGHTY TONE] ‘I don’t like how these people who have been speaking our language for hundreds of years, separate to our own language, speak it slightly differently.’” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [IN A HAUGHTY TONE] This cannot be.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I mean, it’s similar to sort of dialectal fear as well. So, you get people within England being like, “Ooh, they’re Northerners.” Or you probably get… I mean, in Spain, you get Castilian versus everything else and included… and you also have Catalan within Spain. So, people love to find reasons to simplify their lives by generalising other people using irrelevant attributes. Let’s just put it like that.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: What’s next?
DANIEL: Last one. This one was suggested by Tigertronia on our Discord. It’s a LIVENESS CHECK. What could a liveness check be?
BEN: LIVENESS CHECK.
HEDVIG: Is it the app that you tap every day to say that you’re alive and if you don’t tap it, it sends out an alert to your relatives?
BEN: Ooh, like a dead man switch or a dead man pedal?
HEDVIG: That is an app. It’s called Are You Alive or something. It’s called something like that.
DANIEL: I love apps with really understandable titles. No, it’s not that this time.
BEN: A LIVENESS CHECK. I mean, is it something to do… Did it come to us from electrical engineering or electrical like workman or anything like that?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: No? I’m making sure things alive or not live, as the case may be.
DANIEL: Good guess.
HEDVIG: Is it a welfare check? Like, you call the police to go to your house to check that you’re alive?
DANIEL: No. This one…
BEN: Okay. Lay it on us.
DANIEL: This is what I did at the beginning of this episode. It’s asking someone to do something to prove that they’re not an AI.
BEN: Ah.
HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: The one that AIs do really badly is putting three fingers in front of your face. AIs will not want to do that because it’ll be very clear exactly what’s going on.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: So, that’s a liveness check. It’s like a reverse Turing test.
HEDVIG: I feel like we keep finding these things, like, ooh, it can’t count. Strawberry. And it doesn’t understand the seahorse emoji and holding three… Let’s stop telling Sam Altman the things. [LAUGHTER] Because he’s implementing fixes specifically for that. Because I was talking to my mom about ChatGPT recently and we were saying like “Oh, have you ever like… Let’s check if it has learned the thing about strawberry,” and it had. And we were like, “Oh, let’s check the seahorse emoji,” and it knows that one.
BEN: Yeah. Damn. Yeah. We’ve got to stop telling Skynet how to fool us.
HEDVIG: [SHUSHES] [WHISPERS] Yeah.
DANIEL: So, BIMBOFICATION, GLOTTOPHOBIA and LIVENESS CHECK: our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments. On a previous episode, we talked about how the Irish word CLAN came from Latin planta, meaning a plant or a root. This one’s from Colin on our Discord, “Daniel expressed a bit of puzzlement at the derivation of Irish clan from Latin planta but didn’t go into it. The phonetic oddity is also seen in Irish corcra, purple.” Notice the /k/ to /p/? Same thing. “And I suspect it’s all mixed up with the separation of P Celtic and Q Celtic,” which I had never heard before. Colin says…
HEDVIG: Mm.
DANIEL: Wait, Hedvig, did you… Was that a gasp of recognition?
HEDVIG: No, I did know about this, and I only know insular versus mainland Celtic is the only split I know of.
DANIEL: Well, here’s Colin’s explanation. “/p/” — the P phoneme — “had already disappeared in Celtic, but in some dialects, the ones that became Brythonic, /kw/ was morphing into /p/. So, my guess is that P was heard as a variant of kwah.”
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: That’s worth some extra study. Thanks a lot, Colin. Finally, on our latest episode with Dan Parker, we talked about headlines that lead you down the garden path, like, “Eye drops off shelves,” Eyedrops off shelves? Eye drops off shelves. You could read it either way and it’s crazy one way and it’s fine the other. Lauren says, “Hi there. I listened to your most recent episode. There’s a term for when headlines in newspapers, due to their minimal grammar and punctuation, are ambiguous or confusing in meaning.” Here’s the term: “a crash blossom.” You’ve heard of crash blossoms?
BEN: I have not.
DANIEL: “This term,” says Lauren, “apparently comes from a now famous headline, Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms.”
BEN: I have no way of interpreting that meaning.
HEDVIG: Linked with the crash, and the violinist blossoms.
DANIEL: You got it. Violinist, linked to JAL crash, blossoms.
BEN: I still don’t actually understand what they’re saying. Are they saying this particular violinist is now doing very well? Have blossomed into the society?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Beautiful.
BEN: Is that actually what they’re saying?
DANIEL: That’s what they’re saying. There must be a better way to do that.
BEN: That’s fucking crazy. That is so bad. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That is really bad.
DANIEL: “It appeared to link a violin player, Diana Yukawa, to a plane crash site because her father was on the plane when in fact she was developing as an artist. I loved the additional examples you provided and your discussion of linguistic ambiguity in general. Thanks for all you do. Love the show, Lauren.”
BEN: Aww.
HEDVIG: Thank you, Lauren.
DANIEL: That’s nice.
HEDVIG: Might I also add that you created a small little video based on our conversation with Dan Parker and his book, Linguistic Illusions, where he tricked me about the number of animals on the Ark.
BEN: Oh, yes, I saw that on TikTok.
HEDVIG: I was annoyed and I said that he had hijacked my kindness. And there was at least two people on TikTok who commented, “She’s right.” And I was like, “Yes!”
BEN: Validation.
HEDVIG: Validation.
DANIEL: For anyone who hasn’t listened, the question was, how many animals of each type did Moses take onto the Ark? And the answer was, Ben?
BEN: The answer is not two, because obviously it’s a completely made-up story and Moses didn’t take any animals on to the Ark. But Moses didn’t take any animals on to the Ark at all because it was in fact Noah who didn’t build an Ark and didn’t take any animals anywhere.
HEDVIG: Also, I learned recently, I think, from my husband, Noah also didn’t bring two. He brought different amounts of different animals. Like, there’s clean and unclean animals. Daniel knows it better, but it’s not two, yeah.
DANIEL: [CLEARS THROAT] Very often, there will be two competing versions of the story. And so, what biblical compilers did was they just included them both. That’s why we see God creating the universe and Adam and Eve. And then, we see God creating them again, two different stories. So, in one version, Noah brings two of each animal. And in the other version, he brings seven of the clean ones, two of the unclean ones, and the Bible just has both of those stories there.
BEN: Funsies.
DANIEL: Funsies. So, I had heard the term crash blossom, but I’d never delved into it. But now I have, so thanks a lot, Lauren. [CAT APPEARS IN FRAME] Meow, toe beans, toe beans.
BEN: That was so sweet. This little face… I mean, let’s just temporarily ignore that foot is covered in cat feces, but that’s fine.
HEDVIG: Shut up.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] She always washes her hands when she leaves the terlet.
HEDVIG: She does not.
DANIEL: Big thanks to our guest, Dr Mary Walworth. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas, words and news. Thanks to SpeechDocs who transcribes every last word that comes out of Ben’s face…
BEN: Ugh.
DANIEL: …and us, and you great patrons.
HEDVIG: Because Language lovers, we would love for you to do some things. You can do the following things for us, and it would make us a little bit more happy than we otherwise are. I think that’s relatively fair.
DANIEL: Couldn’t be happier. Wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t work.
BEN: Chuffed.
HEDVIG: Oh, you’re at max happiness.
BEN: You would chuff me. Consider me thoroughly chuffed if you do any of the following things.
DANIEL: Oh, but my happiness does not depend on your actions. Don’t feel like you have any responsibility.
HEDVIG: You can follow us. We are becauselanguage.com on BlueSky and we are @becauselangpod, a lot of other places, including Facebook, Instagram. Do we still have an active Twitter account?
DANIEL: Yes, we do.
HEDVIG: If we do, yeah. And you can send us ideas like items for Related or Not, or jingles for Related or Not, or comments on Related or Not. Also, we have other segments, such as the news…
DANIEL: It’s the Related or Not show. [BEN CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: If you’re a Patron, you can write to us on Discord. We have a channel for news and channel for Related or Not. If you are not a patron, you can also use the SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com, or email us at hello@becauselanguage.com and it will get to us.
If you like the show, feel free to tell a friend about it. And if you don’t like the show, I’ll quote Chris Endery, who’s a Canberra comedian. I listened to his podcast recently and he said, “If you don’t like the show, don’t tell anyone about it and try and forget that you heard it so that you can listen to the next episode afresh and maybe we’ll get a second chance.”
BEN: That’s nice.
DANIEL: Oh, nice.
BEN: And if none of those things suit you, you could also become a patron. You get stuff depending on what kind of level you patronise us at. Your support helps keep the show running. It helps keeps us in supplies and software, like the cool thing we use to record ourselves at three disparate parts of the earth simultaneously. You keep regular shows free for all of the humans out there who just listen to us for free. And if you join at a particular level, you will get the very special scrambled egg shoutout that we smoosh up. And by we, I mean Daniel, smooshes up every single week. Daniel, how have we smooshed the patrons this week?
DANIEL: Well, this one’s about counters, typographically. Do we know what a counter is?
BEN: I don’t.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: A counter is a little enclosed space on a letter like the two bubbles in a capital B or the one in an O.
BEN: Oh, no. Oh, folks, this is going to go bad really quickly.
HEDVIG: Yes. I asked about this. I know, because Daniel’s a font nerd. And recently in the Discord, I was like, “What are fonts where the space inside the O where inside the B are filled in?” And apparently, that’s a counter.
DANIEL: Yes, it’s called a counter, and I was looking for one. I have seen fonts where it’s got letters and then it’s got counters, and you can put one on top of the other and it looks really cute, like a kid drew it or something. Really good.
BEN: Oh, I see what you mean.
DANIEL: Yeah. And I thought, “Well, who has the most counters?” [BEN LAUGHS] So, I counted the counters, and here they are.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
BEN: Okay, so we’re starting off strong. We’re starting with the most, and we’re moving to the least. So, seven enclosed bubble spaces, also known as counters, go to Andy from Logophilius and Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ.
DANIEL: Now, the interesting thing about their names is they’re very long. So, if you normalise for… If you divide the number of counters by the number of actual letters, they both drop to the middle of the list.
BEN: Okay. At five counters apiece, we’ve got Rodger, J0HNTR0Y, and PharaohKatt. Four counters in their names is Andy B, which is good because it’s not a very long name. I think if you normalised for him, he’d be like way up the top. Diego, Wolfdog, Molly Dee, Rosemary, Ariaflame, gramaryen, and Sonic Snejhog.
Three counters in the names and we have Aldo, Rene, Becky, Ayesha, Joanna, Laura D, Rachel, Steele, Amanita, Colleen, Ignacio, Meredith, LordMortis…
DANIEL: LordMortis.
BEN: Canny Archer, Faux Frenchie. And fun — Ben, Daniel, and Hedvig, all tied on three at the bottom of the threes. At two, we have sæm, Rach, Fiona, Helen, Lance, Nigel, James C, Martha, Mignon, Sydney, John Mac, and Kristofer. And at one, we have my Amir, Manú, [WITH DANIEL] O Tim, Stan, Tony, Elias, John K, Kathy, Keith, Kevin, Larry, Lyssa, Xekri, Nasrin, Nikoli and Whitney. Whitney, that’s impressive to have only one counter and having that many letters. Very cool.
And finally, with zero counters, you blobless, unenclosed freaks. Chris L, Iztin, Lucy and Luis. Thank you to all of our patrons, even the counterless vagabonds at the end of the list.
DANIEL: Our theme is was written and performed by Drew Kreplianoff, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you both.
BEN: You’re welcome.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Anyway, I’ve made myself coffee, which is why I’m a bit late.
BEN: Oh, there you go.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s great.
BEN: So, we’ve got to give it approximately 40 minutes and then you’ll be like, pew.
HEDVIG: Something like that. I make it with half decaf nowadays because otherwise I get anxious.
BEN: How fascinating. I have not encountered this property, this propensity in caffeine. I put it down to being monstrously out of touch with my own inner landscape. So, maybe I am feeling incredibly anxious and my brain is just like, “This is fine, everything’s fine. I don’t know why you’re jittery. Don’t pay attention to that.”
DANIEL: Yeah, lack of self-awareness is the way to caffeine insensitivity. It’s like, “Oh, I’m not susceptible to… No, I just don’t know my feelings and I’m not very self-aware.”
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Then, there’s the times when I’m like, “Oh, maybe I’ll skip coffee today.” And then, I’m like, “Why am I dragging my ass around? Oh, my god. Oh, wait, I’m not caffeine insensitive after all.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] We’ve got a lovely coffee caravan down by the river near where I live, and on a Saturday morning or something, I’ll wander down there. And I went there with a mate recently and I said, “Oh, hey, can I grab a flat white with two extra shots?” And the very nice Italian barista was just like, “Signor, no, four too many, too many, too many shots. I give you three.” [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Look, mate.
BEN: My local drug dealer told me to take it easy, basically.
HEDVIG: That’s fucked up.
DANIEL: Slow your roll.
BEN: “My friend, no, no. I know something terrible has happened, I can see this, no.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And then you say, I can see the concern in your face, however…
BEN: No, no, no. I yielded… Look, I take the philosophical standpoint that when random strangers are giving you unsolicited advice, it’s normally a really good idea to listen to that person. Friends and family, people who know me well, totally disregardable. But like randos who are just like, “Dude, are you sure?” I’m like, “Hmm.”
HEDVIG: There is a candidness that can come out sometimes for strangers where like they don’t care enough about you to lie.
BEN: 100%. Yeah, this is exactly my philosophy. This person’s not taking my feelings into account. He’s just like, “That’s a concerning amount of caffeine. Don’t do that to yourself.”
DANIEL: Well, at the point at which you become my doctor, then you can say comments like that. Otherwise, I got this.
BEN: Ah, said like a man married to a doctor. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Or my wife. [LAUGHTER]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]