Australian magpies are even cleverer birds than we thought. New research from Dr Stephanie Mason shows that they do two language-like things we used to think only humans could do: learn their calls socially, and combine their calls in a way that looks a lot like syntax. So are we calling this language? If so, how are the linguists taking it? Stephanie joins us to talk about magpies, media, and the territoriality of linguists.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:54 Intros: Your favourite bird
07:10 What’s coming up: Magpies
09:34 Join us! Patreon spruikery
11:32 News: Jamaican MP shut down for speaking Jamaican in Parliament
19:35 News: Whale phonology
31:46 News: Unicode to include new genderless pronoun for Mandarin
36:37 News: China and the Rubio Workaround
38:16 Related or Not: New theme from Hugh!
40:05 Related or Not 1: SLAP, SMACK, and SWAT
45:45 Related or Not 2: SOUND
56:13 Related or Not 3: SPECK, SPECKLE, SPECTRE, and SPECTRUM
01:00:36 Talking about magpies with Stephanie Mason
01:03:38 About Australian magpies
01:06:17 The problem of anthropomorphism
01:15:21 What’s the semantic content?
01:22:52 Linguists can be territorial about language
01:34:48 Social complexity drives new behaviours
01:45:19 Magpies learn their calls socially
01:49:42 Magpies combine their calls
01:58:44 Magpies learn calls across the lifespan
02:05:36 Finding those birds
02:08:10 Doing public engagement: Are metaphors actually helping?
02:17:26 Words of the Week: mog
02:24:54 Word of the Week: pied-à-terre
02:27:48 Word of the Week: dummymander
02:33:03 Word of the Week: Sooooo-ee!
02:39:22 Etymology of Guacamole
02:39:35 Comment: guacamole = testicle sauce?
02:41:28 The reads
02:46:28 Outtake
Listen to this episode
Video
@becauselangpod Dr Stephanie Mason has studied Australian magpies, and has found that these clever birds combine their calls. What do they sound like? And what does this mean for language? Find out in our new episode! https://becauselanguage.com/139-magpie-syntax/
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| Chris L | chr157 | 50.00% |
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| Rach | r4ch | 25.00% |
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Become a Patron!Show notes
XC382917 · Laughing Kookaburra · Dacelo novaeguineae
https://xeno-canto.org/382917
XC200287 · Australian Magpie · Gymnorhina tibicen
https://xeno-canto.org/200287
XC1088464 · Grey Currawong · Strepera versicolor
https://xeno-canto.org/1088464
XC1101754 · Common Nightingale · Luscinia megarhynchos
https://xeno-canto.org/1101754
XC1031963 · Superb Lyrebird · Menura novaehollandiae
https://xeno-canto.org/1031963
XC900281 · Western Meadowlark · Sturnella neglecta
https://xeno-canto.org/900281
XC488030 · Common Loon · Gavia immer
https://xeno-canto.org/488030
‘It’s broken English’: MP’s attempt to speak Jamaican in parliament sparks language row
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/may/21/jamaica-parliament-language-english-patois
Jamaican Lawmaker Blocked From Delivering Parliamentary Speech in Patois
https://www.blackenterprise.com/jamaican-lawmaker-blocked-parliamentary-patois/
When I stood to deliver my maiden sectoral speech on Culture and the Creative Industries, I chose to speak first in the language understood by…
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1935658013981968
The phonology of sperm whale coda vowels
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2069/20252994/481340/The-phonology-of-sperm-whale-coda-vowels
The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
A New Chinese Pronoun Opens Space for Nonbinary Identity
https://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2025/12/chinese-nonbinary-pronoun-unicode/
New Chinese gender-neutral pronoun ‘X也’ joins Unicode: A win for non-binary visibility
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/us/news/new-chinese-gender-neutral-pronoun-x-joins-unicode-a-win-for-non-binary-visibility/articleshow/126214142.cms?from=mdr
Ming Dong, Rong Chen, Lin He. (2023.) Gender bias in the Chinese epicene pronoun ta. Language Sciences, Volume 97, 2023, 101543, ISSN 0388-0001,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2023.101543.
[PDF] Huang Xingtao: A Cultural History of the Chinese Character “Ta (她, She)”
https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781000825831_A44159008/preview-9781000825831_A44159008.pdf
Another sinograph for Unicode — the third-person gender-neutral pronoun
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72620
Rubio is banned from China, but Beijing may have found a way around it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/05/14/officially-marco-rubio-is-still-banned-china-so-how-is-he-beijing/
Beijing changes Rubio’s Chinese name, perhaps to get around travel ban
https://www.rfa.org/english/china/2025/01/21/china-usa-trump-rubio-chinese-name/
Young magpies learn complex ‘sentences’ just like humans
https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2026/march/young-magpies-learn-complex-sentences-just-like-humans
Stephanie Mason: Ontogenetic evidence of socially learned call sequences in Western Australian magpies
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2066/20251620/480728/Ontogenetic-evidence-of-socially-learned-call
Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World by Tim Low
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/where-song-began-australias-birds-and-how-they-changed-the-world-9780143572817
mog | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/mog
The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet by Helen Lewis | The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?gift=Cf_JdpplmxXIwUybUZaTV7S8V1mnExM8osjqdxcqQfQ&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Looksmaxxing influencer’s brittle interview shows the absurdity of a life lived on social media
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/looksmaxxing-and-the-absurdity-of-a-life-lived-on-social-media/106597224
Mayor Mamdani, Governor Hochul Announce State’s First Pied-à-Terre Tax, Requiring Ultrawealthy and Global Elites to Pay Their Fair Share
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani–governor-hochul-announce-state-s-first-pied-a-ter
Where Did the Term “Gerrymander” Come From?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-term-gerrymander-come-180964118/
Trump’s Enormous Gerrymandering Blunder
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/virginia-gerrymandering-redistricting-election-trump/686888/
The Revenge of the Dummymander
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/02/dummymander-midterm-strategy-gerrymandering/686115/
Gerrymandering, Western Australia | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Western_Australia
No Snopes.com, the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”.
https://nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2016/02/no-snopescom-word-guacamole-does-not.html
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Dr Stephanie Mason of the University of what? Western what? Australia?
STEPHANIE MASON: Yep. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, sounds good.
HEDVIG: It’s like coming home.
STEPHANIE MASON: Yeah. School of Biological Science. Well, I guess I’m Centre of Evolutionary Biology really, but yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, hang on. We’ve had an evolutionary biologist before.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, well, I always think when I’m talking to zoologists and evolutionary biologists, I’m a comparative linguist. But when I’m talking to linguists, I’m an evolutionary biologist, because… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s really fine, yeah.
STEPHANIE: …I don’t necessarily sound like a linguist to actual linguists, but… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, we’ve got a couple here tonight.
HEDVIG: Sorry, sorry. We’re going to get more focused in a second, I promise.
STEPHANIE: No, that’s good. I like it. [LAUGHS]
[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 linguist and podcaster, Hedvig Skirgård.
DANIEL: Hello, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hi. How are you doing?
DANIEL: Doing good. Do you have a favourite bird?
HEDVIG: Ooh. Well, I didn’t think much about birds until I moved to Australia. I do like the kookaburra. I do think they’re very funny. Look very funny. And when they show up, it’s like a unicorn showed up. You’re just like, “[GASPS] Oh, there’s the kookaburra over there.”
DANIEL: [MAKES KOOKABURRA SOUNDS]
BEN: Yeah. They are a pretty tremendous sounding bird.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. They don’t mind taking up space in this world of ours.
BEN: They’re third on my list. But, Daniel, you better introduce me before I start giving you my listology. My listicle.
DANIEL: And next, it’s teacher and podcaster, Ben Ainslie. Hello, Ben, again, favourite…
BEN: You Won’t Believe What Birds Ben Ainslie Likes. [LAUGHS] That’s the name of the listicle. So, all three of my favourite birds are favourite because of the sounds that they make, and there is a hierarchy. In third place is the Australian bird, the kookaburra, which makes, [KOOKABURRA SOUNDS] for anyone who hasn’t heard, just do yourself a favor and bust that out sometime, because it’s brilliant.
My second favourite is, I believe, one of the topics of our show today. It is the magpie, koolbardi in the Noongar tongue from whence Daniel and I currently live. And I’ve always loved them because [MAGPIE WARBLES] of the warble that the magpie makes. Again, if you have… [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: [MAKES MAGPIE SOUNDS]
HEDVIG: That was very bad.
BEN: If you… Oh, Daniel’s going with props. No.
HEDVIG: No, no, no.
BEN: What I love what I adore about the magpie warble… And by the way, if you are listening and you would like to google, make sure you put “Australian magpie” in there, because there is another bird, the magpie, which probably sounds like super trash and basic. What I love so much about the magpie call is its staunch refusal to ever be accurately mimicked by the human vocal tract. Like, never have I heard…
DANIEL: I tried.
BEN: …anyone do a good, authentic magpie warble.
HEDVIG: I believe the guest of our show today did a pretty glorious attempt but I don’t know if it made the cut or not.
DANIEL: It did. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Okay, Daniel, I need you right now to tell me, did it truly and honestly… put kindness aside, be clinical, did it sound truly like a magpie?
DANIEL: Look, I think it’s as close as an expert can come.
BEN: Argh, that’s a no. That’s a no.
DANIEL: This is somebody who… [LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s a no. But you know what? I would have been disappointed if the answer was yes, because I adore how much they exist beyond human physical ability to mimic. And then, I know this is a very long answer, but you asked, you fell into the special interest area, Daniel. So now, you get the horns.
DANIEL: I’m used to this.
HEDVIG: Wait, Daniel, do you think you and I can guess what’s Ben’s number one based on the criteria, great sounds?
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, what’s the coolest sounding bird? [COCKATOO SOUNDS] Cockatoo comes to mind.
HEDVIG: Currawong [CURRAWONG SOUNDS].
BEN: I will help you both out. Despite my first two birds being Australian, my favourite is not.
HEDVIG: So, there’s a couple of trees next to where I live where there’s a nightingale [NIGHTINGALE SOUNDS]. And they are loud and weird.
BEN: Ooh. Solid choice.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if you know this. They make so many different noises. We pass it regularly when Ste and I bike home from the pub. And he always goes, “What is that?” And I’m like, “It’s the nightingale again, I promise you.” And he’s like, “But it’s not the same as last time.” And also, people say that nightingales sound pretty. That doesn’t sound pretty. And I’m like, “It is. I assure you. It’s always the same tree. It’s that fucking nightingale.”
BEN: Look, there’s so many birds that would be honourable mentions here. Like, the lyrebird would be one… [LYREBIRD SOUNDS]
DANIEL: The superb lyrebird would be one.
BEN: …like the ability to mimic, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. No.
BEN: But, Daniel…
DANIEL: You love the meadowlark.
BEN: I don’t. Sorry, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay. That’s one of my faves.
BEN: I’ll give you one final clue to… This is the one-point version. It is without question the most spooky and ethereal of all birds in the world.
DANIEL: The loon.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: [LAUGHS] The loon.
DANIEL: Woo-hoo.
BEN: I believe it might be called the common loon or the Eurasian loon. I’m not sure which one. I was lucky enough to finally hear my first one in the wild just a couple of years ago when I was doing my big ride across the Americas and there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I have heard in this world that sounds as truly evocative of, like, ghosts and spirits and wraiths and stuff as a loon.
DANIEL: Often used in films as a way of evoking a strange sort of mood, even in like alien films, which there wouldn’t be any loons at all.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Unless true answer, they are in fact actually aliens living amongst us, which I would buy.
DANIEL: Who knows. I’m going to have to say I’m really fond of the New Holland honeyeater.
BEN: I’m unfamiliar.
DANIEL: They are little black and white birds with yellow tipped wings and they just have this [IMITATES A NEW HOLLAND HONEYEATER] really, really high, really loud call. And when you get a bunch of them, like they were swirling around the outside of my house today, [ONOMATOPOEIA] they were going berserk. And they have occasionally intruded on an episode that we would have out on the deck, [NEW HOLLAND HONEYEATER SOUNDS] especially the one with me and Ellison. And I just had to run a low pass filter over them to bring them down because they were so persistent.
BEN: I think Daniel… What I’m picking up is Daniel, actually, he’s applied his love of punk rock to the bird world. He just loves these disruptive you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do punks.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s them. Little jerks. Well, the reason I’m thinking about birds is that we’ve often talked on the show about the language-like things that our animal friends can do. In particular, we’ve been interested in syntacticity. Now, that’s a thing that humans do where if we change the order of the symbols, you get a different meaning. For example, milk chocolate is not the same as chocolate milk. And a piano player is not the same as a player piano.
Now, syntacticity has been thought to be a thing that animal communication systems lack. But then, it appears that the birds known as the Japanese great tits can do it. When they hear recordings of calls, they do things if the calls are in a certain order and if they’re not in that order, they just ignore them. Well, it seems that another animal has joined the syntax club and that’s the West Australian magpie.
BEN: I have several questions. First of all, is there a different one for Western Australia?
HEDVIG: They studied Western Australian magpies. I don’t know if they’re distinct species.
DANIEL: Hedvig and I are going to be talking to Dr Stephanie Mason from the University of Western Australia, where I’m a lecturer. She’s been traipsing all over Boorloo or Perth tracking these birds, and she thinks she’s found not one, but two interesting human things that we used to think only humans do. Their calls seem to be syntactic, and their calls are socially learned across the lifespan. So, that’s coming up.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Cool. I feel like a magpie should be like an honourary corvid. You know what I mean? Like, they aren’t corvids, but boy, oh boy, are they, like clever buggers.
DANIEL: They’re smart little guys and gals.
HEDVIG: I have to say there’s a class of like… I mean, you know how like crabs have evolved several times. There’s a type of dark, medium-sized bird that’s like very curious…
BEN: Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.
HEDVIG: …and I call them corvids. And I know that they’re not all corvids. Is a jackdaw a corvid? I don’t know. I know Australian magpies aren’t.
BEN: They are. Yes, they are. Jackdaws and jays are.
HEDVIG: Jackdaws are?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: But I do know exactly what you mean, which is there’s this like medium-sized sort of bird of prey, but also deeply opportunistic creature that’s really clever, flies, and just like sorts shit out.
HEDVIG: Yeah, like dark… Yeah. And I don’t know what to call them, but I tend to say, “Oh, it was probably a corvid,” to seem smart, but… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I was looking over the Because Language inbox today as I was preparing the show, and I was struck by how many people are out there just giving us suggestions, ideas and support. So, why don’t I take a moment and say thank you to all of you who share your ideas. I could never find all this stuff myself.
But a special thanks to everyone who has signed up as a patron. Patrons provide financial support so we can keep the show going. We get new patrons every month, but we also lose some patrons because people’s situation changes. People get different interests and they move on and that’s okay. But if you like what we’re doing and you think this work should continue, then consider becoming a patron. Even just a buck a month help. Even free, we’ll make it worth your while. Would anyone like to read our latest patrons?
BEN: I can do it. Actually, why don’t I do the Friend level and Hedvig, you do the newest free patrons.
HEDVIG: Sure.
BEN: At the Friend level, we have Greg, Aniko, Philip W and Rohan or Rowan — not sure how they’d like that pronounced — D.
HEDVIG: And at the free Patreon tier… So, you can just sort of follow accounts, any accounts on Patreon and you get sort of updates and little information and then if you upgrade to a subscription tier, you get more content. But at the free Patreon level we have Karl H, Daniel Q, Zach W, sh, Billy F, JSR Shayne P, Paul M, which is nice. Very curious about… There’s so many people who are just name letter.
DANIEL: Well, that’s because I want to preserve their privacy, but I also wanted to provide a measure of specificity.
HEDVIG: Oh, so you’ve done that. Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
BEN: I love how Australian primary school it sounds. I don’t know if this is true for other primary schools in the world. Like, Hedvig, I don’t… This happened in Sweden as well when you would be like…?
HEDVIG: I was Hedvig S. There was three Hedvigs. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, dear. So, we hope that you’ll join us at patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Okay, so what has been going on in linguistic news before we get to the whoops and the warbles of the magpies?
DANIEL: Well, this first story was suggested by Pickwick on BlueSky. Love it when I see some BlueSky folks. Hedvig, you noticed this one too?
HEDVIG: I had noticed this one in my feeds. So, English is spoken in many places in the world, including in Jamaica. And there’s a particular variety spoken in Jamaica sometimes called Patois.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. It’s an English-based Creole language. Linguists might call it Jamaican Creole. So recently, in the Jamaican Parliament, new MP, Nekeisha Burchell, gave her maiden speech. She’s the opposition spokesman, spokesperson for Culture, Creative Industries and Information. So, you’re going to hear three things here. First of all, MP Burchell starting her speech in Jamaican and then the speaker, Juliet Holness, cutting her off. And then lastly, we’ll hear some interesting reactions from other MPs. Let’s have a listen.
[RECORDING]
NEKEISHA BURCHELL: Madam Speaker, mi git up dis afta noon fi mek mi fuss sectoral speech pan mi portfolio…
JULIET HOLNESS: Hold on, hold on. Standing orders. And I think are fully aware. If I have to stop you again during your presentation, you will not get any additional time. [MP CHATTER] No, and she knows.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Broken English!
JULIET: Standing orders, see page 3.
[END OF RECORDING]
DANIEL: No speaking Jamaican Creole here! The language is English. But then you hear the other MPs saying, “She’s speaking broken English.”
BEN: Yeah, I heard that in the background, “Broken English,” that kind of thing.
DANIEL: So, she kind of ripped the lid off of a lot of nasty attitudes that Jamaicans have about Jamaican Creole, which is interesting because it’s often the case. I’m thinking Singapore, but I could be thinking of a lot of places where English-based countries can have a lot of people speaking a variety, like the Creole variety, but they’re not proud of it. It doesn’t have a place of prominence, and it’s not allowed in official settings. So, I can understand why she got stopped. There are rules about this. You don’t get to deliver your address in any language you want. So, they stopped her and she likely knew that they would because she was engaging in a form of linguistic activism, no question. And I can approve, but I can see why somebody else wouldn’t.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s funny with these things because these are political tools. People are using them… like, they’re not just saying words, they’re making choices by the variety and words they’re choosing to use. And you can see it going one of two ways if you’re like a former culinary nation state. One is that you could embrace it as a part of national uniqueness, identity and be like, “Yeah, we’re not like the British. We speak like this,” and lean into it to different degrees.” Or you could do what they are doing, which is like, “No, we have a national rule that we only speak…” whatever they’re choosing to call it standard English or, yeah.
DANIEL: Well, Jamaican Creole is certainly used enough in Jamaica. I mean, it’s spoken by most Jamaicans as their first language. It’s used on the campaign trail a lot. So, yeah, why not in Parliament?
BEN: We talk often, or at least we did all the way back in the old show days about how language does a lot more things than communicate. It communicates which groups we are a part of and aren’t a part of. It tells people what things we care about and don’t care about and that sort of stuff.
It would be my guess that it would be the case that more refined forms of English tend to be concentrated in wealthier and more powerful and influential Jamaicans. And Patois less so, as in, I think every Jamaican probably is able to communicate in Patois. I don’t think every Jamaican is necessarily able to converse in the level of English that the speaker of the house was engaging in just before.
And it is unfortunately an aspect of the Western cultural tradition that we have given many places a belief that there are some smart, clever and sort of people deserving of being in power and those people are usually “smarter” and “better educated,” and I say all of those things with big air quotes. And that system, that cultural legacy also says, “Well, you don’t want to share power. [LAUGHS] You don’t want to broaden the scope of who is part of the decision-making process because it is our learnings that people who don’t look like us, talk like us, think like us, are educated like us, are silly idiots that we need to kind of do better for. It’s very paternal. It’s very…” So, that’s the sense that I get from what’s going on there, is there is the normative sanctioning and pressure of like, “No, no. We don’t use the dirty, yucky talk. We use the good talk.”
DANIEL: “We’re better than that.”
HEDVIG: It’s interesting what Daniel said that people have been using Patois on the campaign trail because, after all, if you want to be elected by people and if you want to… A lot of politicians want to appear one of the people. Like, in Sweden, people always… For some reason, we’re obsessed with eating hot dogs during campaign trail. It is the way to show that you’re a man of the people because hot dogs. [LAUGHTER] And in Britain, every people running for a prime minister, which is bound to happen soon again likes to be shown having a pint in the pub, right?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And you want to be normal. You want to be like, “Oh, I’m an everyday person,” even though you’ve been educated at Eton or whatever else, so that they’re using Patois on the campaign trail, it sort of would then be like, well, then naturally people are going to be like, “Well, why don’t we just use it in Parliament as well?”
DANIEL: Once you get to Parliament, just stop, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s almost as if for all of these people, there is actually no scaffolding that actually supports any of their beliefs around language or anything else. It’s just, “What can I do that will work and get me more influence, power and prestige?” And if it means drinking a pint like a fucking ponce [LAUGHTER] and being like, “Look how of the people I am,” and pretending like you don’t just… I don’t know, sip… jebeaudelais over your pheasant or whatever.
HEDVIG: Well, maybe I wonder how it will develop over time because I think it’s been shown that some American presidents or politicians, they lean more into regional accents on certain parts of their campaign trail. And I’m wondering if there… I wonder if there are some really highly educated, wealthy Jamaican politicians who are not that good at Patois.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Oh, that’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah. What did they do?
BEN: And they try and order like I don’t know…
HEDVIG: That’s going to be a problem.
BEN: Insert regional Jamaican street food here. And people are just like, “That’s not how you do it.” [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’ve seen Cool Runnings once. I’ll see what I can do. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I like this quote from the article in The Guardian by Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg, who are in Kingston. “Danea Dunkley, an event project manager, pointed to the parliamentary bodies in Wales and New Zealand, which allow Indigenous languages. She said the issue ‘raises the question that every postcolonial society must sit with at some point: Whose language is legitimate and what spaces can they be used in?’” Whose language deserves to be represented in public? This wasn’t the biggest linguistic outrage I’ve ever seen, getting shut down in Parliament when she knew that was going to happen, but I was glad to see this happen. It tells me that there’s some tension there, there’s some agitation. I’m glad for that discussion. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. Thanks, Pickwick, for that story.
Well, on this day when we’re talking about bird calls, it seems appropriate to tackle this story. This is work from linguist, Gašper Beguš, of Project CETI in the University of California, Berkeley and a team, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. And it’s about the communication of sperm whales, the sounds they make. I think we’ve all seen this one. Tygertronia showed it to us on the Discord.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s been going around Discord and Bluesky and linguistics in social media circles. So, basically, we’ve seen, I think an uptick in variants of: this is a feature that seems to be true about human language. Is it unique to human language? Let’s see if it occurs somewhere else. So, we’ve seen this with lots of things, like Daniel said at the top of the show, with syntacticity and social learning as opposed to just like innate hardcoding of calls. And now in this case, this team has decided to try and understand whale song. So, you might have heard whale song. It’s just like woooo, crazy stuff. I think whales are easier to imit…
DANIEL: Pretty good. Much easier than magpies.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Much easier than all birds.
DANIEL: Way easier.
HEDVIG: I think they are mammals. I am a mammal. Birds are not mammals. Their vocal tracts have…
BEN: We’ve got lineage.
DANIEL: They’ve got syrinxes.
HEDVIG: Flaps and stuff. They’ve got stuff in their throat that I don’t have. So, in this case, they segmented the sound into smaller segments and studied whether there were sort of clusters of sounds, and they found a couple of things. One of them, if I remember correctly, that there are long and short vowels. Did I remember that correctly, Daniel?
DANIEL: Yeah. Here are the basics. They were looking at the patterns they used. Sperm whales use clicks, these patterns of clicks, and they’re called codas. And in the paper, they sort of conflate codas and vowels. I guess that’s metaphorical. So, these are the vowels that they use. So, here are the basics that they found. They found two kinds of vowels, they’ll call them codas, Based on the patterns of clicks, they call them a-codas and i-coda. That’s the letter A and the letter I. Just like we have different vowels /a/ and /i/. It’s kind of like we have.
They found that the a-codas are longer than the i-codas, just like our /a/ vowels are typically longer than /i/ vowels. They also claim there are long and short vowels, like that the whales distinguish between long and short I and short I, just like we do. And when they make a sound, it changes the way they make nearby sounds just like we might say… what’s a really good example? This is consonants.
HEDVIG: Pancake.
DANIEL: Oh, yes, Pancake.
HEDVIG: Well, I think it’s a good example. So, this is a thing not everyone does, but when you’re making the sound PANCAKE, you could think of it as combining PAN and CAKE. But what happens is while you’re doing the nasal in the middle there, the N, your throat is already anticipating that like, “After this, I’m going to do a K sound.” So, you get this nasal that becomes a K a little bit in the middle that actually is a slightly… It’s sort of like velar nasal almost. So, you can think of it as you’re almost saying pang-cake, if you… Not everyone does this, but a lot of people do.
DANIEL: Pangcake. I do.
HEDVIG: And the interesting thing is you probably don’t know if you do or not. So, if you’re a listener of the show, try just saying the breakfast food that you have with maple syrup on top [CHUCKLES] and see if you’re making a sound like a pan or a pang, like, you could imagine a loud sound, a pang sound. Truth is, you might do one or the other. And when you hear people say it, you might not even know which one they’re doing. You immediately sort it into, “I heard pancake. I don’t care exactly what happened.”
Linguists call this coarticulation. So, it’s when sounds that are nearby each other, in this case, the N and the K, influence each other. In this case, what’s happening is they’re influencing the place of articulation. So, you’re moving your sound further back in the throat. And this is sort of something you’d expect any sort of organism to kind of… I don’t know… I kind of would be surprised if whales didn’t…
DANIEL: If they didn’t anticipate. Yeah. Mm, mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it seems like an unavoidable feature.
DANIEL: Well, this is one thing they found. They found the coarticulation, that the realisation of individual sounds is influenced by adjacent segments. Now, there’s one thing they didn’t try to do and that’s figure out the meaning of the sounds. And I mean, how could we ever know what they mean? But I do think that this is a weakness in a lot of animal studies. I have no problem with the idea that other animals can use strategies that humans have landed on because we find these strategies useful. We use them to get more out of the symbols we use to make meaning. But do they need to make meaning? Do they need to engage in these things because they’re making so many meanings they need to do the same hacks we do? I mean, what meanings are they making? And the answer from a lot of this work is, we don’t know. We just found a pattern and we think that’s interesting.
HEDVIG: For whales, it’s also tricky because the recordings you have, you might not even have video of what the whales are doing. I don’t know fully but, like, I imagine that it’s easier to track behaviour of like a bunch of birds in a cage, for example, which I know isn’t what…
BEN: Sperm whales, notoriously difficult to actually, like, follow. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: But they do.
HEDVIG: You might like, “Oh, this is breeding season and they’re making this sound more often than when they’re in their feeding area, they’re in their breeding…” You could be like, “Okay, maybe that’s like…”
BEN: Yeah. I’m sure the researchers were…
HEDVIG: …come over here…
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: “…let’s have a good time.”
BEN: I’m sure they work really hard to do the best they can, but this is the deepest diving mammal on earth. [LAUGHTER] It goes down to some fucking bullshit places that we would struggle to follow. We can listen, absolutely, but yeah, that’s a tough get.
HEDVIG: But what that means for this paper is when they talk about phonology, and some of my phonology friends are going to tell me it’s not as simple as this and there’s other things to it, but usually when we talk about phonology, we at least consider… One of the aspects we consider is minimal pairs. So, is there two sets of words where when you change this sound, you get a different meaning? So, I’ve been trying ever since we started talking about this item to come up with a good simple minimal pair /i/ for /a/ in English. Ping, pang.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Ping pong and pang, like a loud sound. Is that a thing?
DANIEL: See, so you change one and you get a different meaning. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Yeah, I think this work is going to be quite controversial judging by this quote from the paper, “We argue that coda vowels” — these codas — “not only are mere acoustic resemblances of human vowels, but also have similar features to human vowels, hinting at independent evolution across humans and sperm whales, which share a common ancestor.”
BEN: I was going to say, I think that just the claim that they share sonic features with human vowels is a stretch [LAUGHS] because we’re talking about clicks. So, it might share structural features, like it can be lengthened and shortened and all the stuff that you said before, but even from the very beginning of this story, the idea that they ascribed them voweliness, I thought, was like, “Uh? What?” It feels like you’ve found some stuff that vowels do and you’re like, “Because vowels do this one thing and it’s doing this one thing, let’s call them vowels,” which…
DANIEL: Yeah, for them, for this team, this is not a metaphor. They think they found something that connects us, like, literally and that it’s not just strategies that we land on, it’s inheritance.
HEDVIG: But if it is what’s being shared is sounds from a vocal tract that are sustained, if that’s what vowels are, you can sing on, you can go eeeee.
DANIEL: You can say aaaaa. Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Now, we’re going to get into that you can actually do the same with nasals, etc. [LAUGHTER] But let’s put that out of our mind for a moment. I’m going to get so many “real linguists” contacting me over DMs after this episode is released, like: Hedvig is not a phonologist!
DANIEL: I’m not a phonologist either.
HEDVIG: But let’s just… I’m going to take a deep breath and step into the water. Why would it be an independent evolution? This sounds quite basic things of how auditory communication would work. So, why couldn’t our most recent shared ancestor do this?
DANIEL: It would just be something that you’ve kind of got to do. There’s no other good way to do it.
HEDVIG: If you’re a social species that’s like running around trying to coordinate action and you want to, “Get over here. Get out of my face. Let’s have intimate time. I want to be fed. Get away. Go away. I hate you,” as roughly I think…
DANIEL: Those are the things you need to do.
HEDVIG: …that sounds like something maybe our most common recent ancestry could be doing, I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s a very long time ago, whales and humans but, like, I don’t know.
BEN: Well, yeah. And by that logic, surely everything else that could conceivably have a linking point somewhere back there. So, there should be a fuckload of other animals that you would see this in. Like, you should see it in like dogs and bears and pigs and fucking all sorts of other things.
DANIEL: Orcas and… Yeah. So, what do you think? Any final words? It’s cool work.
HEDVIG: I think it’s cool work. I think the framing is a little bit maybe hyperbolistic… what’s it called?
BEN: Look, I will say anything including whales is fucking dope. Let’s just establish that as a baseline. Whale shit is wicked shit. So, I’m never going to hate on a thing that’s dealing with whales. But as with most like animal language stuff, it’s kind of like, eh, like if I squint real hard, I guess I can kind of see what you’re going for here, but it’s a lot of squinting.
DANIEL: As communicators, we often use terms like sentences and vowels because people understand them, but I think sometimes they might not help convey what’s really going on. It might convey a misleading impression that, “Oh, whales are speaking a language like ours and if only we knew it, then we could understand them and we could talk to the whales.” In some of the discussion that I’ve seen on the web surrounding this article, that’s been what it is, “Wow. Talking to whales would be really cool.” And that’s not where they wanted to go, but I think that’s where their framing takes people.
HEDVIG: If you’re a listener of this show and you’re interested in animal communication, I can really recommend looking into some of the deeper literature on this, especially around a guy called John C. Lilly who made some famous dolphin experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, including I believe feeding dolphins acid and trying to teach them English. There’s one of my favourite podcasts just now are running a special two-parter episode about the history of this guy and what he’s been doing.
And we like to see ourselves in other animals and sometimes I think that we both anthropomorphise the animals too much and also don’t really recognise them on their own terms. Like, whales are really cool. Like, a lot of the things they describe in this paper is really cool on its own. Coarticulation though, I think that’s what they’re describing sounds so similar to what humans do, but it also sounds similar to what I suspect that kookaburras do. Like I think you don’t have discrete sounds. Like, people don’t go like pee, aaa, nnn, kah, aa. I forgot how PANCAKE works. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: You’re just three goblins in a Hawaiian shirt, aren’t you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Hand me some more of those peekahanazars.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, whatever. Whatever, however!
BEN: I love the mapale syrup that goes all over them.
HEDVIG: I’m terrible with letters, but I’m just saying no one produces discrete sounds, I’m not… Whales also don’t produce discrete sounds. Of course, they like…
DANIEL: So of course, they’re going to blend in a little bit.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, thanks, Tygertronia. Let’s move on to a story given to us by James on our Discord. In English, we’ve been talking a lot about the question of a nongendered third person singular pronoun for a few hundred years now. We have HE, we have SHE, we have IT, we’ve got THEY. We’ve got a bunch of stuff. We’re especially talking about it now that the concerns of nonbinary people are now being taken more seriously. Well, the same thing has been happening in China and now a new nonbinary Chinese character is joining the Unicode set. It’s pronounced tā and it has what looks like an X in it.
HEDVIG: What’s interesting about this is that Mandarin Chinese actually doesn’t have a distinction for third person gender in spoken. They’re both tā. I think it’s the first tone, if I’m not mistaken. And so, the place where you have a distinction is in the writing system. So, when you write it down, you write it differently, but when you speak, you say the same thing. I was reminded of this because I’ve been watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Hero to like… I think it’s Wuxia, Hong Kong movies with kung fu. And there was a sentence that I understood. Someone said, “Tā shì wǒ de,” Like, “She’s mine. I’m going to fight her.”
DANIEL: Oh, right.
HEDVIG: When everyone’s fighting, you’re like, “Argh, I’m going to take her out.”
DANIEL: So, it is tā.
HEDVIG: It was tā. And in the translations and stuff, they write she, but as he says it, technically, unless you know the context, you don’t know, which one it is. But when you write, you do make a distinction. So, the character… There’s a beautiful little illustration that we’re going to link to in our show notes, which shows on the left side the male one and on the right side the female one, and then the one in the middle is like a mix of both.
DANIEL: If you’re watching the video, this is on the screen now. So, what you’re looking at there for our listeners is you’ll see that it’s in two chunks. So, for the he version of tā, the leftmost radical is the male, and the other one is called… It’s pronounced ye, which can be translated as also, but that might not be relevant here. But if you’re looking at she, the female version of tā, then the radical on the left is the woman radical. What this will have is neither one of those male or female radicals. It’ll just have what looks like a letter X, and that will also be pronounced tā, same again.
HEDVIG: It looks really similar to the HE one, I must say. It’s only one stroke away from the male one, but…
DANIEL: That’s true. I found out something interesting. It turns out that before 1918, the tā characters, there wasn’t a separate male and female tā character written. It was all the same.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: So, is this a regression?
BEN: I’m so glad that other languages do the silly shit that English does [LAUGHS] where we get like a storm in a teacup about stuff, and then people are like, “Actually, this is a relatively new invention that everyone now really cares about.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, at that point, many people decided to change that epicene pronoun, tā, in writing. And that was because at this time, ideas were coming in, people in China noticed other languages, other pronouns, there was also a women’s equality push. So, many Chinese people decided to adopt the SHE pronoun, the version of tā, in order to highlight women’s accomplishments. But now that pronoun has been gendered in writing, now there’s a desire to add that third variant with an X on the left. And now, the Unicode Consortium has given it the nod. So, you’re going to see it on a computer near you.
HEDVIG: I know we’ve talked about gendered pronouns in many different countries before, and also other expressions of male, female, gender binary in languages. And it’s worth noting what you just said, Daniel, which is there’s also the other side of the coin where people say, “No, we want to have a distinction because we want to highlight that it is a woman doing this job or a woman doing this thing, where we want to highlight that it’s actually a group of all female doctors.” In European languages, you’ll get different ones, and we want to highlight that most of the time… because in some languages, like French, if there’s at least one man in the group, then you get the male gender for the entire group. Say 99 women and 1 man, it’s like male or neutral, you might call it. And some people see that as a worthy feminist women’s right point in the other sort of highlighting it, so it’s not as simple as making it neutral. It is something that attains all these goals. There’s many strategies.
DANIEL: But if you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other end of the stick. And so now, you’ve made gender part of your writing system. Well, let’s just go all the way and add another symbol.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, it’s all part of the discussion process as we negotiate life using this tool we call language. Thanks, James, for that story. And finally, this one was suggested by Magistra Annie. Did you know that Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, was banned from China in 2020 and yet he just took a visit with Trump? How did he manage the ban?
HEDVIG: Different name?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yep.
HEDVIG: I’m Mark Ruben.
BEN: Was that the truth?
DANIEL: That was the truth. Because we’re talking about China, this is Chinese writing. Here’s what happened. He’s been a critic of Beijing and how it’s been treating minorities. So, when things went bad between the US and China in 2020, he was banned along with some other US officials. But then came his trip with Trump. They didn’t want to walk it back, so they just changed the character they used to write his name. There’s a lot of ways to write Ru.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: So, Marco Rubio is still banned, but Marco Rubio is fine. Just use a different symbol. I think this is hilarious just because, A, it’s political kabuki and this face-saving stuff, which is very Chinese, but there’s an extra angle. The Washington Post reports that the old Ru character. If you’re watching the video, you’ll see it on your screen now. It was a neutral character typically used for surnames. The new one carries a different meaning, rash, rude and clumsy. [LAUGHS] burn.
HEDVIG: At least, they got him on that. But that’s… yeah, that’s such theater, like you said, kabuki. It’s just, like, yeah, jumping through funny hoops.
DANIEL: It sure is. But fun to watch from a linguistic perspective. Thanks, Magistra Annie, for that. And now it’s time for Related or Not. And we have a new theme. This one’s from Hugh Stickley. Hugh Sticky, he had already sent us a theme that I think of as… like, we’ve been having it in heavy rotation. It’s the rock version with Ben’s voice. But he sent us a new one. I think it’s a bit Jim Reeves-ish. Let’s have a listen.
BEN: I don’t know what that means.
HEDVIG: I’m ready.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME BY HUGH STICKLEY]
BEN: Wow. That’s some lovely crooning.
HEDVIG: That is very impressive. That is very, very good. I would like that to be our new standard one, please.
DANIEL: Hugh, you’ve done it again.
HEDVIG: That’s amazing. I’m going to play that for Ste the minute he gets out of his… or we all get of our calls.
BEN: It feels… do you know what it’s reminiscent of for me is the kind of slow-timey country and western stuff that always gets played in movies when you’re trying to evoke that something really fucked up is about to happen and the juxtaposition of how nice and safe and old timey the music is usually belies some horrifically graphic violence that’s about to go down.
DANIEL: About to go down.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Thanks, Hugh. This one comes from James on our Discord. This is a fun one. James says SLAP, SMACK and SWAT, all in the sense of hitting something with your hand.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: All related, none related or some combo. SLAP, SMACK and SWAT.
BEN: Oh, there’s a strong argument for onomatopoeias things here. Would we say if they all end up being onomatopoeias, that we would call that related?
DANIEL: We would probably call them not related etymologically. They just happen to be that way because onomatopoeia.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I get where Ben’s going with this though, because what if one of them was first and then the other one is like variants of it?
DANIEL: Well, if there was one that came in early and then influenced the others, that would also not, according to the rules of our game, be by descent. It would be by side influence.
HEDVIG: No, no. Like it’s daughters, but it’s just very recent.
DANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay. That would be possible.
HEDVIG: Okay, can we also address that I believe Australia has extended its slip, slap, slop system?
BEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I think there’s six now.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, it’s slip on… This is for sun protection for people who have never been to Australia. Australian sun is very strong and there’s a little rhyming thing that people say SLIP, SLAP, SLOP, which is slip on, like clothes. Slap on a hat. Slop on sunscreen.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Is that correct?
DANIEL: Good so far.
BEN: Good so far.
HEDVIG: And then where does it go?
BEN: We’ve got two additions.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: We’ve got SEEK and SLIDE. Seek some shade and slide on UV-protected sunglasses.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: And don’t forget the airway and breathing and circulation.
BEN: Yeah. No, no, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay, never mind. Rescue position. Well, what do you think, Hedvig, I want to ask you this. This is an issue in language typology, is it not? I mean, some features in a language may be handed down from a parent language and others may be borrowed from a language that happens to be nearby. So, when you’re using words to determine whether two languages are related, you’ve got to watch out for those onomatopoeia words because they can make languages look more related than they are.
HEDVIG: Which is a separate problem from borrowing. So, this is things that I think has come up with… And also separate problem from child language stuff. So, you could imagine animal sounds is a great one. So, if you’re around a donkey, you’ll hear a bunch of sounds. So, you hear like yee-yaw and you’ll hear other sounds as well. And donkeys actually make more different sounds than you think they do, they are also the sound…
BEN: Oh, a tremendously wide variety of sounds.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and as I said earlier, so does nightingales, apparently. But different languages could say yee-yaw, yee-yaw with different variants, but for unrelated reasons. They’re not related to each other. But they’ve done something similar because there are other sounds from the donkeys that they could have picked up. So, it says something about their phonology and stuff that they’ve picked something vaguely similar. So, if we’re tracing language history might not be relevant, but for language comparison, it might be interesting for other reasons.
BEN: I love the flat dead-eyed stare that Daniel is giving because he’s just hearing us try and wheedle connections in and he’s sitting there being like, “Listen, fuckers, this is Related or Not. [LAUGHTER] It is about etymology. If there is not an etymological link. Get out of here. Just get out of here. Jog on,” as an Aussie might say.
HEDVIG: We have SLAP, SMACK and SWAT, which are all things you do like with your arm and preferably also your hand palm. All of them, arguably. You can also swat with a fly swatter.
BEN: Well, I think you can do everything with a thing that imitates a hand. So, a fly swatter, you can slap with it and that sort of thing. Like, anything that’s got like a flat paddle. I could slap someone with a spanking paddle or something like that. Like, hello. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Like a coaster.
BEN: Yes…
DANIEL: Oh, my.
BEN: …or a Spice World coaster.
DANIEL: Or Spice. Yes.
HEDVIG: I don’t think that these are etymologically related.
BEN: I’m going to say the same thing.
DANIEL: Same.
BEN: I think there is obviously deep linkages, but that by the rules of the game this is going to be a not related.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hedvig, do you know any words in Scandi languages that seem similar to these?
HEDVIG: I mean, my problem is that I think they’re borrowed from English.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: [LAUGHS] So, they’ve brought their disease with them.
HEDVIG: There is klappa in Swedish, which is like SLAP. Like klappatil somebody is to smack them in the face. So… But then, I have to change the S to a K, which is a bit much.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, well, let’s make it easy. We all said they were unrelated. They were all imitative. And James gives the answer, none of them share the same path through language etymology, but all of them, per Etymonline and by the way, OED as well, are probably of imitative origin. All right.
BEN: Which any reasonable person would claim is a clear relation link.
DANIEL: I didn’t hear that. [BEN LAUGHS] All right, one for us. Thanks, James. Now it’s one from Jameson. Jameson emailed us hello@becauselanguage.com. “Hi, Daniel, Ben and Hedvig. I am a huge fan of Because Language and have been listening since the Talk the Talk days.”
HEDVIG: Whoo-hoo. I love that.
BEN: I love how many people say that because it means they have been tragic nerds for a really long time and I’ve got a lot of love.
HEDVIG: Don’t… Ben!
BEN: I said I’ve got a lot of love!
DANIEL: Nerd is positive.
HEDVIG: Our consensus is that our audience…
BEN: I softened the insulting thing by saying how much I loved that thing!
HEDVIG: The negative thing about our audience is that they ask too smart questions. Not that they’re nerds, remember. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s true.
BEN: You didn’t soften yours. I softened mine. I’m just saying.
DANIEL: Anyway, “My son was asking me about Latin phrases the other day and I reeled off a few from the top of my head. One of the ones I thought of was…” [LAUGHTER] Just a few!
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry, hang on. Just to be clear, I got flak from both of you for being like, “Our listeners are tragic nerds.” Jump cut 30 seconds further into the show when it was like, “And then, I rattled off Latin phrases off the top of my head.”
HEDVIG: Love it! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: No, that wasn’t the good bit. The good bit was that the son’s like, “Father, what are some Latin phrases that you can think of?” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Anyway. Sorry. I’ll just wallow in my rightness while you continue, please.
HEDVIG: No, I’m going to do it. Veni, vidi, vici.
DANIEL: Nice. Any others? Persona non grata.
BEN: I know…
HEDVIG: What is QED? is quod something…
DANIEL: Quod erat demonstrandum.
BEN: Hang on, I’ve got a good one. Ad hoc ergo propter hoc.
DANIEL: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
BEN: Oh, there were go.
HEDVIG: Ad hominem.
DANIEL: My kids know that one because I blow on the lights… I blow on the traffic lights to change them and then they say, “That’s post hoc, dad.”
BEN: Nerd. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, Jameson continues. “One of the ones I thought of was ‘mens sana in corpore sano’.”
HEDVIG: Mm. Healthy mind in a healthy body.
DANIEL: You got it. I know that one because it was inscribed in the gym that I used to run around the track on back in the dear Brigham Young University. “It got me thinking about the word SOUND and its various meanings, so.”
HEDVIG: All right, okay. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: You know where this is going. I love a good polysemous one. “Are the words SOUND as in healthy, free from defect, solid or stable…”
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: “SOUND as in a particular auditory impression, and SOUND as in Long Island Sound” — or Puget Sound, by the way — “a body of water.” So, SOUND as in healthy. SOUND, noisy. Or SOUND, the body of water, Related or not?
HEDVIG: Shit. This is…
BEN: I’ve got some thoughts.
DANIEL: While you’re panicking, Jameson also points out, “There are a couple other meanings, such as the verb, to plumb the depths of, to sound, the adverb meaning thoroughly, as in sound asleep, and an instrument used to examine bodily cavities.” Jameson finishes up, “Thank you for your consideration and for all that you do. Best, Jameson.” Thanks, Jameson.
HEDVIG: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: I actually like how Scottish people say SOUND when they mean that something’s good. Should we go to the pub? Sound.
BEN: So, that’s the first meaning, or like a… What do you call it? A spinning off of the first meaning that you gave us? Yeah, sense of the first meaning. So, my first question is around the bodies of water at the edges of like islands and land masses, like Long Island Sound or New England Sound or whatever. I imagine that is related to the idea of plumbing the depths of something. It would have come to us via like the nauticalness of ships and figuring things out and that sort of stuff. But the question then becomes that property of ships sounding things out, is there a reason that I’m not aware of that is in fact related to sound or to sound like good, healthy, blah, blah, blah?
DANIEL: Solid. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That is the question.
BEN: Argh. [MAKES EFFORTFUL SOUNDS] I reckon there is going to be a link to one of the two. I don’t know which one. So, I think SOUND, body of water, is related to either thing detected by ears or solid, steady, dependable, but I… [GRUNTS]
DANIEL: But not both.
BEN: Not both.
HEDVIG: I have a question. Can you say the Latin phrase that was in the gym again, please?
DANIEL: It was mens sana in corpore sano.
HEDVIG: I think that the SOUND, as in that’s a sound idea is unrelated to SOUND, as in a noise. And I think that the noise is related to the nautical stuff because I think you could use sonar or something. So, we also have sonar and sonograph, and those also have to do with sound. And then, we have sano, like da, da, that’s all to do with health and I think they’re going to go back to separate roots. I think there’s been some analogy, but my problem here is that in Swedish, the nautical sound outside of some islands and a sound idea are also spelled exactly the same.
BEN: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHS] Fuck.
HEDVIG: But the sound auditory thing is not. That doesn’t, as far as I know, exist at all. And I don’t think it’s like that in Germany either.
BEN: I’m going to… Do you know what? Based on that, that’s going to tip me in that direction. So, I think the body of water is related to steady, sturdy, etc. And the SOUND that we hear comes to us from a different root. And I’m going to guess then that sounding something out… Because, Hedvig, your point about the fact that we can detect things with sonar, I think that’s an accidental… Like, later on in technological development, we were like, “Hey, how cool is this? We can use sound to figure out where the bottoms of things are instead of just a rock on a rope.” [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So, so wait, so wait, so wait. It was like, “Gee, I wish there was a better way to do sounding.” And somebody said, “Say that part again!”
BEN: I think that’s… [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if that happened, but I think someone at some point was just like, “You guys are not going to fucking believe this. I just found a way to figure out how far down something is. Tell me how I figured out how to sound out how far down the bottom is. Get me to tell you how.”
DANIEL: I don’t know how…
HEDVIG: I used sound!
DANIEL: What? No, no, no. That’s totally separate words. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Whatever. I think SON, SOUND, SANO are different and that somehow, two out of these words go back to one of them and one goes back to the other. I think there’s a set of one and two here.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Okay. I think they’re all related.
HEDVIG: We’re in a disagreement about what the set is.
BEN: Ooh, Daniel, big swing.
DANIEL: I did. I said all related. I think the throughline is something like healthy. Something is solid or healthy. And that moved, by the way, to soundly asleep. So, you’re solidly asleep. And when something seems solid, it often sounds solid or good, like a watermelon or something, which is kind of like sounding when you’re thumping that thing.
BEN: Oh, gosh.
DANIEL: I think the body of water doesn’t have a certain sound. I think it’s solid and that’s what I think the connection is, but I’m saying all three.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, because it’s shallow.
DANIEL: Okay. The answer is they’re either all of them related or ain’t none of them related. What do you pick?
BEN: Hang on, hang on. What do you mean? It could be both. Or you’re just saying… Now, you’re giving us… Okay.
HEDVIG: He’s saying that’s the answer. It’s not what I said.
DANIEL: I’m knocking… Do you want to swap?
HEDVIG: Right. So, it’s either they’re all unrelated or they’re all related.
BEN: I’m going to be contrarian. I’m going unrelated because I want Daniel to be wrong and I want me to be right.
DANIEL: That’s always good.
HEDVIG: I still think that’s sono, sanu are unrelated. But the Swedish and the German is throwing me off because it’s spelled the same and that’s just suspicious, but then you get analog change sometimes. [ONOMATOPOEIA] Okay, I’ll go… So, Ben is going all unrelated, was it?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And I go all related.
HEDVIG: All right. I’ll go all related. Someone needs to get points.
DANIEL: All related. Ain’t none of them related. Ben’s got it.
BEN: Fuck yeah. Let’s go, bitches.
DANIEL: Okay, now. There are some big asterisks here though, I’ve got to say. So, let’s start with…
BEN: No, no. The asterisks don’t matter when I’m right and you’re wrong, okay? They only matter when you’re right and I’m wrong.
DANIEL: Let’s start with the noisy SOUND. So, it comes from Latin, sonus, a sound or a noise. Interesting, the D was not originally there. People complained about it as well. They said, “Why are people writing a D in there?” as late as 1582. Comes from Proto-Indo-European root *swen-, to sound. Now, let’s go to healthy or solid. Comes from Old English gesund as in GESUNDHEIT, be sound. Be healthy.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: So, that’s how SOUND and GESUNDHEIT are related.
BEN: That’s fascinating.
DANIEL: And then, they go back to Germanic root, *swen-. Now, didn’t I just say that the Proto-Indo-European root for the noisy sound was *swen-? And now, we have healthy or solid goes to *swen-?
HEDVIG: This is why I don’t fucking trust Indo-Europeanists.
DANIEL: That sounds like the same as Proto-Indo-European. Is it the same? Not as far as we can tell. The OED says the ulterior etymology is uncertain. I really want to connect those.
HEDVIG: I don’t enjoy this.
DANIEL: I don’t like that at all. Now, a narrow channel, the SOUND of water comes from Germanic not *swen-, but *swem-, to move, to stir, and to swim and that’s why it’s related to SWIM. So, as far as I could tell, none of them related. But do you buy that? As Anatoly Liberman told us, when you’re in the starry sky of etymology, it’s easy to break your neck.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Unless you mean in this instance.
DANIEL: So, for now, we’re going to say not related, but darn, they look close and analogy is always an option.
BEN: I will say I’m really surprised to learn that the body of water has no relation to any other thing. And it’s just another example of how fucking wackadoodle nautical terms were and remained for a really long time.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Big thanks to Jameson. Last one, one from Paul. Paul emailed us, hello@becauselanguage.com, saying, “Is the following a tethered tetralogy, a questionable quartet or a foursome of fiendish faux amis? Here they are. SPECKLE, the small dot. SPECK.” Now, watch out. This is the cured meat variety. You ever had speck?
BEN: I buy it all the time for my pasta.
DANIEL: “SPECTRE, a ghost, and SPECTRUM, a range of things. Thanks as always for all you do. Cheers, Paul.” Thanks, Paul.
BEN: Oh, there’s a lot of permutations possible here.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: You know what? Let’s save some time on the old waffly Ben Ainslie. I’m going all related.
DANIEL: Is that right?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Jumping in.
HEDVIG: So, second one, SPECK, is to do with the fat of an animal. I know that in other Germanic places. And I don’t think fat is spotty.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Is it spotty?
BEN: Typically not. No, it’s usually like very white and consistent.
HEDVIG: I do think SPECTRE and SPECTRUM are related. There’s a lot of overlap there in sounds. And also, the things that aren’t overlapping are just Latin nominal declensions, whatever.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s so great when you’re not part of a knowledge base to see people being, like, really quite rudely dismissive of things in a way that you could never do because you don’t know which things are safely, like, that you can just denigrate in that way. It’s great. I like it.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s just. I mean, it’s like…
BEN: No, don’t defend. It’s all good. It was fun. I like it. I am made stronger. I am nourished by when people are like, “Gah, that’s just this stupid thing.”
HEDVIG: It’s just endings. Who cares? Okay. I think SPECTRE and SPECTRUM are related. I don’t think any of the other things are related. Let’s say that.
DANIEL: Okay, very good. I think that we’re dealing with two things here. I think some of these are Greek SPEK, to look. And this is where we get SPECTATOR and SPECTACLES.
BEN: Yes. Yep, yep.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: I think SPECTRE and SPECTRUM are here. A SPECTRE is a thing you think you see, and a SPECTRUM is a range of light that you can see, which is why the looking thing. The other two are probably something different, like spot. I notice that SPECKLE is a pattern of specks because frequentative L-E, like CRACK and CRACKLE, SPECK and SPECKLE. Shows that something is happening with frequency or intensity. I’m less confident with the meat. So, I think we’re dealing with a pair of pairs. I think that SPECTRUM and SPECTRE are related, and I think that SPECKLE and SPECK, the meat, are related. Two pairs.
BEN: There we go.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Oh, the winner is Hedvig, who nailed it all the way along. Nice going.
BEN: Argh, damn.
DANIEL: A SPECKLE is a small spot or stain, Middle English spekke, so SPECKLE is that speck. SPECK, the meat is not related. It’s from Middle English spik, animal fat or from Old English spic, bacon, which is of uncertain origin. But SPECTRE and SPECTRUM are related. They come from… I was wrong about Greek. It’s Latin SPEK. By the time, the Proto-Indo-European root *SPEK got to Greek, it was scopos, which is why we SCOPE things out.
BEN: Aah.
DANIEL: Isn’t that nice? So, a spectre is a thing that appears. And they both come from Latin SPECTRUM, because a spectrum meant a ghost long before it meant a range of light only in the 1670s.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Oh, that’s so interesting. I had no idea.
DANIEL: It was a ghost. And so, by 1670, we can see that it was a range of light. And now, we can say lots of things are on a spectrum, like gender or whatever.
BEN: Yeah, spectrum now means a range basically. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s right. Yep. Good old semantic shift. Actually, now I remember KUMMERSPECK, which was grief bacon, the weight you gained from emotional overeating. I remember that now.
BEN: Yeah. Because SPECK is just the German word for bacon, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: It’s animal fat. Yeah, I think.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Thanks, Paul. And thanks once again to Hugh Stickley for the new Related or Not jingle. If you’d like to gift us a jingle or a group of words, just send them via Discord, social media or just a good old email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We are here with Dr Stephanie Mason of the University of Western Australia Center for Evolutionary Biology. Hey, Stepanie, how’s it going?
STEPHANIE: It’s going very well. Thank you for having me on the show.
DANIEL: Well, thanks for coming on. Hedvig, are you excited for this one? Because this has a lot of interesting things for me.
HEDVIG: I feel like this is the year of, like, a lot of animal communication research, isn’t it? Because there was that recent paper, whale phonology. And today, we’re going to talk about birds, and I’m really excited. And I feel like there’s so many of these kinds of papers and it’s really nice to be able to talk to someone who’s like inside of this bubble a bit more.
STEPHANIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Very cool. Well, Stephanie, this has been a wild year for you. You finished your thesis. Congratulations.
STEPHANIE: Thank you. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All the media that you’ve been doing, all the attention. What’s this year been like for you?
STEPHANIE: It’s been an interesting one. I had this sort of naïve view in my head that I would finish my PhD, and I would have this lovely, relaxing break, and that’s really not been the case. [CHUCKLES] So, yes, I’m sort of in between positions at the minute, which is meant to be my break, but I’m doing probably more work now than I was I was doing when I was doing my PhD. So, I haven’t quite figured that out yet. But yes, it’s been pretty hectic.
It was very nice to finish this kind of body of work and get the first chapter of it published. Yes, I’m sure we’ll get onto the topic of this being often controversial work. But yeah, it’s hard to kind of get it out there and frame it in the right way that works for everyone. So, yeah, it’s been a big, big task. But yeah, it’s really nice to have it kind of start getting out into the world anyway.
DANIEL: The framing has been an interesting aspect of this. As a media person and as a science communicator, I am really interested in this. So, I think we’ll dig into that pretty heavily. But first, tell us all about you, your research and how you got here. Why magpies?
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] So, yeah, I guess. I mean, I did my undergrad degrees in zoology and psychology. I actually started doing zoology and neuroscience and then couldn’t hack the… Or maybe that’s a bad word to use in this context, but couldn’t hack the cadavers. That was maybe a poor choice of words. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’re not meant to hack the cadavers.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] But yes, I decided I was more interested in sort of the external manifestation of behaviour as opposed to what brains actually look like in real life. So yeah, I was always really interested in kind of behaviour, and I was actually more on the side of wanting to look at kind of abnormal animal behaviour and zoochosis and all that kind of stuff. But I did my honours project with Mandy Ridley at UWA. She had a really cool project going on the magpies and it kind of just snowballed from there and I ended up doing my PhD. and yeah, I would love to continue kind of working on them if I get the opportunity.
HEDVIG: Maybe it’s worth saying for our non-Australia-familiar listeners that Australian magpies are like one of the best things about Australia and also not related to European magpies that closely, correct?
STEPHANIE: Yeah. So they are not a corvid. They are a different group entirely and they were a result of colonial naming of things that sort of look like things from back home, but not really. So, they’re a much larger bird. They still have kind of… Interestingly, they still have lots of the same kind of features. They’re also very intelligent and have these cool kind of vocal systems. But yeah, they’re in an entirely different group of birds and they really shouldn’t be called magpies because it creates lots of confusion. But yes, the Australian magpie is what I study and specifically the West Australian subspecies, which is actually quite different from the eastern states’ subspecies.
HEDVIG: You know, when I moved to Australia, I thought that what I was going to find fascinating were like kangaroos and, I don’t know, spiders and snakes, but I just personally fell in love with the birds. In Canberra, where I lived, the birds everywhere, they’re making noise, they’re doing things, they’re trying to get some food somewhere, they’re looking at you. They’re always up to something.
STEPHANIE: Yes, that’s an excellent way to describe, I think, Australian wildlife generally actually. [LAUGHS] But yeah, we have really unique bird life here. And I should start by saying I’m not an ornithologist, so I happen to study a bird, but I’m certainly not a bird expert. They were just a really good study system for the questions I had. But I’ve been reading this book called Where Song Began. And besides being an interesting kind of narrative about kind of vocal communication, it’s also just crazy hearing about why we have the diversity we have in birds here and how different they are from birds everywhere else. There’s so much more aggression here. Nectar birds, apparently sort of not that common elsewhere, and we have hundreds and thousands of them here.
So, yeah, birds here are crazy. And I’m sad that I’ve only gotten the opportunity so far to study one of them, but I’m becoming more of a bird person. I used to be really afraid of them, so my trajectory as a researcher has been [LAUGHS] an interesting one. But no, I love magpies now. And I’m growing to love other birds, too. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Those big black birds that we see, are they actually crows or are they ravens?
STEPHANIE: Ooh, see, the ones I think we get in Perth are mostly Australian ravens, but we do get little crows and Torresian crows up north. And I was actually doing a job up in the Pilbara where I was having to remind myself to write down Torresian crow on my surveys instead of Australian raven. But yeah, we have a few different species.
DANIEL: A friend told me once that they had magpies around and they used to feed the magpies little bits of hamburger. They liked it.
STEPHANIE: Yes. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Bit of mince. And one day… you tell me if this story sounds plausible, because I’m willing to believe that they are smart birds. But are they this smart? One time, the magpies were making a big noise around my friend’s house. They made a big noise. And so, they came out to see what it was, and there was a fallen magpie, a downed magpie, a sick bird. And they were all almost as though, my friend thought, they were saying, “Humans, come and help.” So, they took the bird to a bird hospital. Does that… That’s probably not a thing.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] I think that animals seeking help and falls into the same realm as sort of animals mourning, which may well be a genuine thing, and I think it probably is, but it falls into a very contentious area of animal behaviour that I avoid with a [LAUGHTER] long pole as much as I can because, yes, I think there’s sort of… Yeah, I doubt it, [LAUGHS] but maybe.
DANIEL: It sounds like the kind of thing a human would look at and think, “Oh, yeah, that’s what they’re doing.”
STEPHANIE: Yeah, this field is actually a really interesting kind of minefield for anthropomorphising and really avoiding anthropomorphising. And I think, yes, you have to be very careful about what you conclude from the things that you see. But no, I mean, curiosity in animal behaviour is a really important thing to have. And if that means seeing humanistic sort of elements there in things like calling for help and mourning and stuff, I think that’s useful in its own way until it can be proven or disproven or… yeah.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s really hard to tease these things apart. And yet, we as humans really want to read in intent and complex things that maybe aren’t there. One of my friends here in Leipzig says that… So, we claim that our cats make slightly different sounds for different situations. And he says, “It’s just making a ‘pay attention to me’ sound and then you’re in the kitchen and then you think that you should feed them. And that the sound in all instances means, “Pay attention to me,” and there’s no differentiation or intent or anything more than that.” And I’m bound to think that that’s true.
And it’s really hard to study meaning in animal communication and intent because we don’t really know what’s going on and what’s intentional and what’s just like, “Ooh, I saw a snake and I’m scared and I made a sound,” which is why it seems to me from the outside, like a lot of animal communication papers focus on other things than meaning. So, things like in this case, like learning or the sound sort of system or things like that, because meaning seems to be beyond. But a lot of the comments I see from public on these kinds of things are like, “Oh, so soon we will be able to talk to birds.” And it’s like, [LAUGHTER] “Oh, I’m not sure. We’re sort of figuring out maybe how their sounds maybe cluster into groups.” Is that a correct reading?
STEPHANIE: Well, I think there’s kind of two separate things there. So, the first one is I don’t think we’re anywhere near being able to communicate with other species, nor do I think that would necessarily be a good thing. I think that they would do well to stay away from humans. But semantic meaning in animal vocalisation, I can’t say anything about cats. I certainly have never read any research on cats, so I don’t know if that’s something that’s out there that I’ve missed or that it just hasn’t been done. But there is lots of evidence for semantic meaning in animal vocalisations and that’s actually kind of the major turning point, I think, between…
I guess for a long time, the kind of approach… And I think still a lot of linguists kind of see it as, “Well, we tried to teach chimpanzees sign language. They weren’t able to do it. And therefore, there’s no such thing as language in any other animal system,” which is an interesting approach and a slightly problematic one. And that’s maybe a separate [CHUCKLES] point, but I guess the idea there is that the methodology they were using was not answering the question of whether or not there was language in other systems. It was whether or not you could teach a chimpanzee sign language with any kind of accuracy.
But I guess the major turning point that led to this whole field of, I guess, more kind of modern comparative linguistics was the discovery of semantic kind of referentiality within animal vocalisations. And a really kind of classic example is in monkeys, kind of producing calls that when they call the snake call, everybody looks at the ground. When they do the eagle call, everybody looks at the eagle. And when they do the leopard call, everybody runs up into the trees, regardless of whether or not one of those animals is present. So, I guess that was then used as evidence that… I mean, if they’re doing those things reliably in response to the call and not just seeing the actual animal, then there must be meaning contained within that. And that was that shift from animal vocalisations being seen as this just of kind expressive “argh” thing to being these actual kind of referential vocalisations and from there it’s kind of… rolled on. That’s not what I mean to say. I’m struggling with my words. I’m so stressed because I’m talking to two linguists. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Snowballed.
STEPHANIE: But yeah, snowballed. That was the word I was looking for, thank you. [LAUGHS] But yeah, that kind of discovery of examples of referentiality within calls kind of led to a door being open to more meaningful comparative research, I guess. Because, I mean… yeah, I don’t think there was ever particularly reliable evidence of chimpanzees or gorillas or whatever it was learning to use human language in the form of sign language or lexigrams or whatever it was. But this shift kind of refocused us to looking at, well, sign language isn’t really relevant to how they live their lives and it’s an odd approach to test capacity in that particular species or that group or whatever.
HEDVIG: Yes, agree. Teaching monkeys human sign language or even adapted sign language for chimpanzees is not as interesting maybe as looking at what they are already doing in their own groups. Because even if you can teach an animal certain complex things, if that is not something they’re doing in their own social situations, then that just means that there’s some sort of abstract capacity, but it’s not really being used.
There’s an example in some literature on another pod on human language about like for thousands of years humans could run and jump, but it was only when we invented the Olympics that we started jumping and running in very particular ways. [STEPHANIE LAUGHS] We always could, but we didn’t really need to. Like, pole vaulting has no function outside of…
STEPHANIE: Oh, now, I really want to think of a function for pole vaulting in everyday life.
HEDVIG: I mean. I mean, maybe there’s like getting across…
DANIEL: Getting over a wall. Come on, you two.
HEDVIG: You could get across a gap, I don’t know. There’s maybe a use. But the point is humans could do it for a long time, but they didn’t. Maybe there are some primates who can use some signs, but they don’t really. And I kind of would expect that evolution would be driven by what we do, not what we can do?
STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of framing it. I mean, I think we may get in trouble if we don’t mention that there is actually a lot of kind of gestural communication in primates. That’s not an area I know nearly enough about, so we won’t go into it. But there is certainly elements that are kind of, I guess, similar to sign language, although they’re used in kind of conjunction with vocalisations as well, but that’s kind of a whole other kettle of fish, that’s a really interesting area that I would love to get into more as a researcher.
But yeah, no, I think that’s a really good way of framing is that… Yeah, unless it’s actually useful for what they’re doing, then whether or not they have the capacity for it is sort of a separate question, although I guess still a really interesting one. I mean, it’s always cool to find out whether or not an animal can do a human thing, but it wasn’t necessarily answering the question that it was then used to kind of defend, which was…
I mean, I did a linguistics unit when I was doing my degree and was told very firmly that because they never successfully taught sign language, therefore there is no language in other systems. And I’m certainly not saying that anyone has to date shown language in another animal, but I think that was a very kind of reductive approach to all of the really cool things and all of the really cool similarities that there actually are, even if it doesn’t perfectly map onto what language looks like in humans, I guess.
DANIEL: You mentioned semantics and how that’s been an area that’s kind of been glossed over. And it reminds me of a quote from Wittgenstein, who said, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able understand it.” I keep thinking about that, [LAUGHTER] because what would… Have you ever thought about that? Like, a lion has the ability to speak, but what would the lion be speaking about? Lion stuff. I don’t know anything about lion stuff. I wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.
STEPHANIE: Well, this is the major hurdle in comparative research. And often, I get really interesting questions from linguists about really kind of complex linguistic concepts, and whether it’s possible that they’re present in animal systems and I’m just like, “Slow down.” [LAUGHTER] I mean, it’s really difficult to study human languages that you’ve never come across before, I’m sure. But I guess… well, maybe you can correct me on this, but I guess in most instances, at least, you can kind of point to something, and then they say what they would call that, and then there’s a way of communicating there, but particularly with birds, it’s very hard to do that.
And so, yeah, I mean, there could be all sorts of things that we still don’t know, and we may never know, purely because it’s just so difficult to cross that kind of boundary of what’s relevant to them and what’s relevant to us. And yeah, everything that it is to be a human makes it really difficult to put yourself in the shoes, the claws [HEDVIG CHUCKLES] of another animal, and kind of try and work that out. And there are lots of ways of doing that to some extent, and lots of work has been done on that. And we know the meanings of various sequences both in the system where I study, but probably more expansively in quite a few primate species now. But yeah, it is like a huge hurdle that I think makes this work. Yeah, it’s not possible to kind of keep up with human linguistics, because it’s just such a different mode of research, I guess.
HEDVIG: We have such different settings that we’re working in. And correct me if I’m wrong, but when it comes to birds, the main semantic content we can imagine is like, “Get out of my territory. Get over here. I would like to engage in reproduction. I’m a child. Feed me.”
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] Yes.
DANIEL: The way you said that was just the best, Hedvig.
STEPHANIE: I know, was that an insight into how you flirt? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Also, that one you could imagine is different for male and female members of the species maybe potentially.
DANIEL: Come over here. I would like to engage in reproduction.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] My new favourite pickup line.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ll flirt my husband later. And then maybe, “I’m a child, feed me,” something like that. What else?
STEPHANIE: Well, that’s actually something that was really interesting. I don’t know that I really sort of… This sounds really bad, I don’t know that I really thought about until I had my viva and I was defending my thesis to a primate researcher who was asking… To give some context, this work really started with a PhD that came before mine. The wonderful Dr Sarah Walsh started this work on the magpies, looking at their call sequences and she did a really good job of describing the system for the first time and categorising the repertoire. Like I’ve already kind of alluded to, it’s a huge undertaking to work out the meanings… They produce over a hundred different call sequences, and it’s a really big undertaking to figure out what all of those mean.
So, we do have an idea of what some of them mean. We know that they’re all kind of alarm or alert vocalisations relating to that kind of, “Get out of my territory,” or, “There’s a fox,” or, “There’s an aerial predator,” but we don’t know the specific meanings of lots of them. But I’d never really thought about, well, actually that’s quite unusual to have such a varied repertoire, but all of it relates to threats. So, they do have other vocalisations. Their call sequences are one aspect, and then they have kind of song which is they do warbling and chorusing where they all synchronise and all sorts of cool stuff, which serves kind of a separate function in kind of group cohesion and also territory defense, but then also kind of mating. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a magpie singing in the middle of the night, waking you up, but our kind of going theory is that might be to alert members from outside of their group that they’re welcome to come in and come over here and reproduce, as you put it. [LAUGHS] And then they have begging vocalisations. The fledglings babble as well. So, there’s all sorts of different things going on and there’s kind of different contexts they’re referring to with those kind of vocalisations. But as far as we can tell, all of their call sequences relate to kind of threat contexts. And I’d sort of just been like, “Yeah, that’s fine, whatever.”
And then, talking to Catherine Crockford who was one of my examiners and yeah, it was such a good conversation. I think vivas are always posed as this really scary thing and mine was just this really awesome conversation with two comparative linguists who I really respect and love, it was awesome.
But obviously in chimpanzees they have kind of, I think one of the papers puts it as like 390 different call sequences. And they can refer to threats, but they can also refer to kind of food and social interaction and cohesion and things like that. And it was only when she kind of raised that, that I was like, “Oh, that’s actually really weird,” because… I mean, immediately you go, “Oh, well, then it’s less complex because they’re referring to fewer contexts,” but actually it’s sort of… Sure, that might be true, but then why do they have over 100 different sequences to refer to what’s probably not that many different threat contexts? I mean, there’s sort of aerial predators, and as far as we can tell, they have kind of one sequence to refer to aerial predators, regardless of the species. That may not be the full extent of it. They may have specific ones for certain species. I don’t know necessarily why they would need to, because they pose the same threat regardless.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I was going to say.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, like mobbing if there’s an intruder from another group, because the western subspecies are very territorial and they maintain these really kind of stable family groups. But really, beyond kind of aerial predators, foxes, cats, snakes, some of the groups though not the ones we study on the UWA campus, I don’t think, although maybe someone can tell me they’ve seen a snake on campus. Yeah, that would be cool. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Not in 25 years.
STEPHANIE: But yeah, it’s actually really kind of… It’s sort of a whole other kind of unexpected question that came out of literally by viva. And that was the first time I’d ever really thought about that because I was so focused on what does the development look like, what does the kind of… What are the ordering rules that they’re using, that kind of stuff. And meaning was too big an undertaking to kind of approach in my thesis. And we already had a kind of basic understanding that these were semantic sequences. We just didn’t have the kind of the time and manpower to work out what every single one referred to. I can’t really remember what started me on this spiral of talking about sequences now. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, it was just the…
DANIEL: The semantics.
HEDVIG: No.
STEPHANIE: The semantics, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we were maybe perhaps starting at a little bit the wrong end for getting to your paper, actually, because semantics is not part of it.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. Maybe, perhaps. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We’re getting there.
HEDVIG: But when you talk about animal communication and sooner or later, semantics comes up.
STEPHANIE: 100%. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, well, that’s what happens in the media versions. People jump to it. They go right there or they go like, “Oh, wow. So, they have language? They have syntax?” And I just want to say, since we’re talking about territoriality, it’s okay with me if they have language. I don’t really care. I don’t know if they do or not. You know why? Because I don’t know what language is. On the show, we’ve had lots of talks about what language is, and I think that we’ve kind of arrived at this thing where you can’t really tell at what point a communication system becomes language. It’s kind of like Wittgenstein, again, with his family resemblances. Like, there are some communication systems that have these attributes. Human language has these attributes. And other communication systems are going to impinge a little bit. They’re going to use some of the same strategies that we use and I think that’s something that we’ve come back to over and over again in animal communication, is that there are strategies for doing what we do, for making meaning, and we’re going to… All of us with brains, birds, apes, humans, dogs and cats, we’re all going to use some strategies and that’s fine with me. Hedvig, do you agree?
HEDVIG: I am going to… The best way to learn something is to make a statement. Like, make a hypothesis or a claim and then get feedback on why you’re wrong. That’s how we all progress, right?
STEPHANIE: I love this as an approach, yeah.
DANIEL: Go.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I think that in a broad sense, communication is broader than language. And I think we can say that there are animal communication systems where individuals are transmitting information to each other and they’re coordinating action, for example. Like you were describing, there’s also different threats. So, the point of telling other members of a threat is so that they go and do the right action. Like, they run away or they hide, or they do whatever they need to do for the species in a group to survive. There’s a sort of evolutionary advantage to the group surviving instead of just every member for themselves. That’s why we expect social species to have communication systems and nonsocial species don’t. They’re just lone wolves.
DANIEL: Cooperation.
HEDVIG: Then, I think that there’s maybe… It’s not like a territorial thing, but I think that usually when people mean language, I do like this classical linguistics notion of arbitrary beats making up larger parts that then have meanings that are conventionalised. And I know that that’s not like a hard cut border. I know that there is iconicity in human language, spoken and signed. And I know that there can be arbitrariness in animal communication systems, but that sort of is what I’d expect the distinction to be kind of.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. A lot of people would say syntacticity. If you combine your calls in different ways, then that’s language and otherwise it’s not. And those are two great things, and I think those are two things in our bag of tricks. Arbitrariness, which helps us to make more complex meanings than we could otherwise or syntacticity helps us to get more mileage out of the signs we use. Those are both great. I’m not sure if those are like, oh, those are necessary and sufficient conditions and otherwise it’s not language, it’s something else. I don’t know. I don’t know.
STEPHANIE: It’s interesting to hear you kind of talking about this and hear that there is kind of… Particularly when you said, Daniel, that you’re not territorial about language. Because I think that my impression from interactions I’ve had both with comparative linguists or people more on the animal side of things talking about their experiences talking with linguists and my own experiences talking with linguists, is that there’s… And this may be me being a wounded evolutionary biologist and me reading into things more than I need to. But there’s certainly this feeling of kind of yeah, this, not necessarily territorialness, but this kind of moving of the goal posts for a lot of features.
So, I mean, features started out various features like referentiality and, and syntax and kind of vocal production learning and all these things kind of have these quite basic definitions to begin with. And then as research starts to emerge, things get added to them by linguists and there’s a commentary that comes out on an animal research paper by linguists saying, “Well, no, because they haven’t shown this thing.” And then, that research arises to the challenge and shows that thing as well, and then the goalposts get moved again.
And I understand that there’s kind of… Realistically, I don’t think any other animal vocal system will ever be revealed to parallel the complexity in human language. And I don’t think that there’s any kind of research on my side of things that genuinely thinks that. I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, but my impression is certainly that nobody’s trying to say that, but I guess that there’s this feeling of kind of, “Well, no, you can’t…” There’s this kind of defensiveness as if something’s going to go bad if we find similar features in other systems and that’s not necessarily true of every linguist, and I know that that’s not true of every linguist. But this kind of overall feeling of we’re going to keep moving the goalpost so that you can’t kind of come near our special skill, which I think is fair enough in one sense and that there’s a lot of things that go into human language that just probably aren’t there in animal systems, or certainly haven’t been shown yet.
But I guess the downside of that then is, I mean, firstly, a lack of curiosity, I think, is really kind of… yeah, sort of anti-science almost. And I think that anything that we can learn about other systems, however closely or distantly related they are, and both of those kind of groups serve different functions, so obviously we can look at the kind of genetic origins of things if we’re looking at primates, but we can see kind of… By looking at the magpie, for example, we can start to look at drivers outside of phylogeny and relatedness, we can look at, well, what common drivers are there to create a syntactic system in this bird that really has no place being anything like humans? Why is this feature present in any form in this animal? And you can start to pick apart the kind of drivers more.
It’s a really interesting battle because it’s kind of like… It doesn’t really negatively impact linguistics in any way, shape or form to understand all the variation that’s out there and use that to kind of inform the understanding of the evolutionary origins of how human language came to look the way it is, because it certainly didn’t just appear within humans and come from nowhere. There’s lots of mechanisms that were already in place in primates, and there’s some that aren’t as well. Like, vocal production learning is a really contentious thing that there’s still some people who think that maybe we’ll show it one day in primates/ I’m pretty happy with the body of evidence that says that they do other kinds of vocal learning, but not production learning specifically.
But then, we have this feature and syntax in a completely different species that has nothing to do with us. And so, I kind of see it as the more information you can get, why wouldn’t you want it? And kind of moving definitions and being like, “Well, it’s not the same as language,” is kind of redundant almost, because it’s just information and it’s useful and… yeah.
HEDVIG: I agree with you. I think lack of curiosity is a very unattractive feature in a scientist. I think there’s a couple of things that are happening. One is that a lot of linguists haven’t really thought maybe that hard of what language is and it’s one of those, “I’ll know when I see it,” things. And then, someone from evolution biology shows them something, they’re like, “Mm-hmm. Not that, but I can’t really tell.” The secret is that you could, as a linguist, just say Hockett’s design features, and then you don’t have to waddle around, but people don’t do that for various reasons.
STEPHANIE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Another one is that I think language tends to be compounded as like an emblematic cognitive ability for a lot of other cognit… There are a lot of things humans can do that animals don’t do. I don’t know, algebra. Like, that’s not language. Like riding a bicycle…
STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think counting. We’ve showed counting, but not algebra. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: We have researchers in my group working on New Caledonian crows and counting and stuff like that.
STEPHANIE: Yes.
HEDVIG: But there’s a lot of things humans do that aren’t language, that are very cool and that enable us to have very complex societies and like, I don’t know, oil tankers and newspapers and digital bullying and whatever else.
DANIEL: Parliaments, yeah.
HEDVIG: We do a lot of things that animals don’t. And sometimes, people just bake all of that into language as if it’s one thing. And I think you said something just there about that. Like, there’s a lot of other cognitive skills that humans have that set them apart and that some animals may have to different degrees.
And then on a very, very boring sociological point, and I don’t know if this is true, but I’m just going to make a statement that a lot of linguists are not getting as much funding for their research as they would like and a lot of linguistics departments are facing funding issues. And sometimes, when other disciplines do something that gets labeled as something related to language, people consciously or unconsciously feel personally a little bit threatened. And that’s not your problem. That’s not evolution biologists’ problem at all.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] I would like to say there’s very little funding in what I do as well. So, we’re all in the same boat in that sense. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, but sometimes I get a sense that might be lurking behind as well.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I feel like we’ve marked out, we’ve noticed a boundary here. And I think some linguists, especially those who are fans of other linguists whose names rhyme with Floam Gromsky, they…
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] Sorry, I don’t know who you mean.
DANIEL: They really do have an interest in saying, “Nope, it’s not language and I won’t ever allow anybody to cross that.” Whereas I really do feel like it took me a long time to get to where I am. And where I am right now is the body of features that we do to communicate, these are what we are calling language, just like we called the bundle of features that are giraffe, we call them giraffes. We call it language and we have the language we do because of our bodies, and these are strategies that we use, but these strategies are available to others. And once you have that, then you don’t feel threatened if another species does something that you happen to also do, because these strategies are available to everybody with a brain and a need and a body that can do that thing.
STEPHANIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: And so, that’s kind of… Is that where we are? I feel like that’s where we are, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think what you’re both saying, like, it’s interesting to see what kind of drivers and what kind of need shape behaviour and evolution broadly. So, there’s various kinds of biological convergent evolution. Isn’t it the case of like dogs and hyenas have a similar jaw, but their most common recent ancestor don’t, so it seems like they both maybe have evolved it because they face a similar like niche problem of needing to, I don’t know, chew on bones? And maybe Australian magpies and humans and bees and… who else do people usually attribute communication to that’s fun? Slime molds are doing something, we don’t know what, but maybe…
STEPHANIE: Now, you’ve gone too far. [LAUGHS] Yup, cetaceans are a big one, yeah.
DANIEL: Dolphins and whales.
STEPHANIE: Dolphins.
HEDVIG: Dolphins, I mean that’s boring. They’re mammals.
DANIEL: Dolphins and whales are not boring.
HEDVIG: They’re mammals. I want something a little more fun.
DANIEL: Yes. Okay. You were going… Yeah. Okay, farther afield.
HEDVIG: Anyway, it’s interesting what it is that drives them. So, what is it do you think drives Australian magpies to have the features that you have found?
STEPHANIE: Social complexity. So, I think that that’s kind of… That’s not a new idea by any means. And social complexity driving kind of communicative complexity, I think, is most people’s kind of accepted view of… I mean, that’s very clear in humans in the sense of you can work backwards and think, well, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to where we are as a species without the capacity to communicate in a really complex way. If we could only use kind of one word at a time, we’d have a very hard time getting anything done.
So, I guess, yeah, social complexity is a really obvious one, but it hasn’t necessarily always been tested in other species well, and that’s kind of more of a methodological issue, I guess. But yeah, I think with magpies, they’re actually kind of… And this certainly isn’t unique to magpies, there are a bunch of other… I mean, even just within birds, there are loads of other birds that are doing really cool things with cool sequences, maybe not so cool as the magpie, but cool enough. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Bias. [LAUGHTER]
STEPHANIE: Well, I mean, there are some very real reasons why I say that as well, but certainly bias plays a large part as well. [LAUGHS] But yeah, I think social complexity is the really kind of obvious one. And obviously, there has to be certain physical features in place in order to do certain kind of communicative things.
But in terms of once you have that capacity to make sound and you have that capacity to learn new sounds, whether that’s really learning new sounds through kind of production learning or learning how to use your innate repertoire in new ways for a new context or whatever it is, what’s kind of driving that is this… I mean, the social complexity hypothesis is an… increasingly complex assemblages of social animals led to this kind of increase in need for better ways to communicate because, like I said, in humans, we wouldn’t get anything done if we could only use kind of one word at a time or in the sense of kind of social vocal learning that if you couldn’t add to your repertoire over time as your group got more complex, then you’d kind of be at a dead end.
So, I guess, yeah, social complexity is really the only answer to… Well, the only one that I know of that explains why this has happened. And while I said it’s not unique to magpies, I mean, there’s lots of really interesting social dynamics in all sorts of species that show whether it’s syntax or syntactic-like communication or other interesting communicative features.
Our Western magpies are particularly interesting because they live in these really kind of stable family groups where there’s lots of different relationships going on. So, I guess when I was talking about this methodological issue, that’s kind of not necessarily prevented us from finding clear evidence of this relationship between social and vocal complexity, but slowed that process down and led to lots of critique, is using kind of the wrong measures. And so, labeling vocal and social complexity at the kind of group level and looking at whole groups as a single entity and saying, “Well, this group is larger, so it’s more socially complex. And this group is smaller, so it’s less socially complex,” and then we look at their vocals as a group, and that can work, but obviously there’s some obvious flaws with that. And I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ever done this with a species where it would be really stupid, like a herd of cattle, for example, where if you have 1000 cattle versus 500 cattle, you probably have much the same kind of variation in relationships between all those individuals.
But actually, it’s idea of sort of the group size thing works better if you have an animal that isn’t socially complex, because the group level is probably a good way to describe it, but when you get increasingly complex in your social interactions, there’s a lot more variation between individuals that you’re missing when you label things at the kind of the group level. And that’s something that’s already been addressed by several studies, but something that we were really interested in doing is kind of…
Sorry, I should clarify what I mean there. It’s been addressed in the sense of people have been more careful about choosing species that they really believe are definitely socially complex, and they’ve backed that up by saying they do cooperative care or they have varied relationships within their group. So, we can use group size, and it’s safe to use group size in this context. But I still think that everything you want to know about sociality is so reliant on the individual. Like, everything it is to be socially complex is the variation between individuals and how different individuals experience a group and how they interact with others.
And so, something we were really focused on in the work that we did was measuring at the individual level how social is this individual and how vocal is this individual. And that was kind of… And we haven’t necessarily done it in the best way that it could be done, but it was a good starting point and really the first example of this being done to test the social complexity hypothesis using actual individual members of these magpie groups that we looked at over a long period of time as well. So, not only was it in the individual level, but it was also longitudinal and kind of… It’s easy for me to say this retrospectively, but to me that seems really obvious. Like, if you’re looking at picking apart how social complexity drives vocal complexity, you actually need to look at the individuals and you need to follow them through time. And yet again, I’ve gone off on a tangent and I can’t really remember how we got here, but that’s how my brain works. So, enjoy, everyone! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No. It was right. We were asking you what drives this kind of behaviour, and you say social complexity. And then, you’ve explained a bit more what it’s like.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I just went off on one about social complexity. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s okay. That’s very interesting. It actually mirrors some work on human language. Can I do that quick, Daniel?
DANIEL: Yeah, go for it.
HEDVIG: Well, so there’s some work in like… So, cultural evolution studies of human societies have found various interesting effects of what people like to call social complexity or political complexity in human groups. So, this is, like you said, it’s not necessarily only about group size, but also how people are organised within a group. These measurements usually have to do with like social class or hierarchies or if you have several levels of administration and stuff like that.
So, I wrote a paper about political complexity and number of languages in the Pacific. Basically, the more complex state you have, the fewer languages you tend to have because you enforce homogeneity or potentially, stuff like that. There’s also work on language complexity in human languages and social complexity and social size. Some people say that the larger your society is, the more likely you are to interact with people that are not like you, and the more simpler your language becomes because you can’t…
STEPHANIE: Interesting.
HEDVIG: There’s too much common ground. So, several sort of connection points, but they’re all different kinds. But there is a recurring issue in these studies, which is sometimes people use population size as a shorthand for some of these factors. But actually, ideally, what we would like to do, of course, is put a little GPS tracker on every human in a society and then track who they are close to at all times and who they talk to. But that’s generally considered unfeasible and unethical on humans.
DANIEL: Just a teensy bit.
STEPHANIE: What?! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But on animals, animals don’t mind being recorded for hours on end. They don’t have privacy!
STEPHANIE: Well, you did actually raise an important thing there that I should clarify, is I’m not necessarily saying that people who have used group size in animal research have done so because they haven’t been able to acknowledge what I’m saying now. It may well be a methodological constraint a lot of the time, particularly for kind of broad phylogenetic studies where you’re trying to look at several species at a time, it makes perfect sense to use group size because there’s simply no way you can follow individuals to a sufficient kind of sample size from the ten different species you want to look at.
And so, when you were talking about kind of the ethics and feasibility of tracking humans, I felt like I needed to clarify, I’m not just criticising studies that have had to use group size for kind of methodological reasons.
DANIEL: Okay.
STEPHANIE: But yeah, no, that’s really interesting. So, are you saying that you’ve kind of got the opposite effect where there’s more complexity and there’s therefore vocal complexity is reduced? Because that’s kind of the complete opposite from the way we think about it in other systems.
HEDVIG: There is a theory that if you often interact with the same people all the time, you can afford to learn their quirks because you hear them all the time, you have more exposure to them. So, you can sustain a more irregular language because you have more opportunities to train for it. Whereas… I’m paraphrasing like lots of different papers. People are going to write in and tell me how I’m wrong.
But another theory is that if you have a large society and you’re often interacting with people who you don’t know, like we speak English. I’ve never met Stephanie before. I know something about her because I’ve read about her. So, I have some expectations of what she knows, but I don’t know everything she knows. So, I have to express myself in ways that I think will be more successful. Whereas if I talk to my partner who I see every day, I can use short hands and stuff. So, there’s one theory that the more often you interact with strangers, it sort of has certain effects on how you structure your language. You can maybe become more… Especially if you have second language speakers, people who didn’t grow up speaking it, you might have certain effects. You might become more regular as a language, more compositional and more predictable and stuff like that. And those are some of the theories out there.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. So, that then makes me… Oh, there’s so many questions that come out of that. Maybe there’s sort of a maximum point and then you start reducing your complexity in order to maintain… Yeah, you’ve just opened a whole can of worms for me now. Yeah, it’s very interesting because when we look at social complexity in animal communication, it’s usually… I mean, depending on how you’ve approached how you’re measuring social complexity, generally, the idea is that increase in social complexity equals increase in vocal complexity. So, that’s a really interesting kind of insight that actually there may be a kind of an endpoint to that where you start going…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. A point at which… to a point and then it goes down.
STEPHANIE: …the opposite way.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
STEPHANIE: It’s a really interesting thought.
DANIEL: Lots of interesting questions here. And magpies just aren’t at that point. But we need to drive toward the research here because it’s time to talk about these birds. How many were in the group that you looked at?
STEPHANIE: So, I looked at several different groups. I think it was eight social groups in the end, although we have a lot more than that. Those were just the ones that had fledglings that survived. They’re not always the best at surviving. So, I looked at basically a fledgling from each social group so that I had kind of a variety of different social experiences. There were a few groups where we had multiple fledglings, but within those groups we saw really vast kind of variation. Sorry, I’ll backtrack, 11 fledglings in total. And we followed them for kind of 200 days of their development. And I don’t mean that we were literally standing with them every day for 200 days. We followed them kind of once a week during that time for an hour.
But what we were doing is recording everything that the fledglings were doing vocally and socially. So how much time were they spending with each of their group members and what were they kind of saying during that time? But then also, what were their group members… What vocalisations were their group members using, and what were they kind of doing when they were with the fledgling? That kind of thing.
DANIEL: And were the fledglings picking it up, basically?
STEPHANIE: Well, that’s basically what we showed. I mean, we already had some idea, we knew that magpie repertoires vary between groups to some extent. So, we knew that they have kind of some shared call sequences, but there’s also huge variation in group repertoire. And that is sort of already an inkling that there’s some kind of social learning probably going on there. There’re other reasons why you might get variation like that, but it could be social learning. But we hadn’t…
Before I kind of did my PhD, there wasn’t any kind of ontogenetic research that had been done… Well, actually, when I started my PhD, there wasn’t any ontogenetic research on animal syntax, full stop, which was why it was such an exciting…
DANIEL: Ontogenetic? Sorry?
STEPHANIE: Sorry. Developmental. So, studying the kind of the developmental period from… In my case, when they left the nest to when they became kind of sort of sub adults. But yeah, it’s a really interesting… The way I kind of think about it is if you want to understand a feature, you should look at how it develops from a young age. And linguists have been really, really good at doing that because child language development is a huge aspect of how we understand human languages.
Animal researchers have not necessarily been as effective at doing that and that’s for lots of different reasons and it’s not necessarily a choice, but sometimes just a practicality. And with syntax, I think that it was so recent that we’d… Well, I mean, relatively recent, that we’d found evidence of kind of semantic syntactic vocalisations in animals that there just hadn’t really been the time to then, once we found it in a species, go back and look at how it developed. So, that was kind of what led to my research, was this gap in looking at how this feature develops. Because once you understand what drives its development, you can basically use that as a parallel for what likely drove it at the more kind of evolutionary scale. If it’s really socially driven during development, then it’s likely that was also a factor in how it emerged evolutionarily.
So, yeah, that was the kind of the motivation for my work. So, we already knew from Sarah Walsh’s work that they had these sequences. We knew that they had some level of kind of ordering rules as well. So, we knew that they were ordering… I realised we’ve sort of talked about all the bigger ideas and haven’t actually talked about the basics of magpie communication. So, maybe I’ll do that now before I go on.
To date, as far as I know, unless something very recent has come out that I’ve missed, they’re still the only species outside of humans that’s been shown to combine at the phonological level and also at the call level. So, there’s lots of examples of species either combining kind of meaningless sounds into meaningful calls or combining meaningful calls into meaningful sequences whether or not… I mean, there’s some species where that seems to be kind of an additive effect and it’s sort of trivial compositionality, I guess, but there’s also examples of that being nontrivial and the kind of individual calls actually affecting one another and changing what the resulting sequence means, all sorts of work on that. But no animal had been shown to do both of those things at the same time, which is obviously a big aspect of kind of linguistic syntax. Maybe I’m oversimplifying there, but I guess the level of phonological syntax and then compositional syntax.
DANIEL: Now, we need to delve into this because we’re talking about…
STEPHANIE: Okay. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, so you’ve got two contributions here. We’ve been talking about social learning. They learn their calls socially. And also combinatoriality, they combine their calls in different ways to make new calls. So, we don’t know what these calls mean, but we know that they’re doing something different. They’re combining the different calls. Can you tell me what the calls are? What do they sound like? Can you do some bird imitation limitations here?
HEDVIG: Can I try? And then, Stephanie can tell me, is it like [MAKES BIRD WARBLING SOUNDS]. I’m not doing it very well. [MAKES BIRD WARBLING SOUNDS]
DANIEL: What are the elements?
STEPHANIE: That is a beautiful impression of a different type of vocalisation that magpies do. So, that was an excellent example of a warble in a magpie, which is a type of song. So, I guess, yeah, I feel like we’ve approached this from sort of the pointy end and missed all of the basics.
DANIEL: That’s what we do.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] I love it. It’s a great way to approach an idea. Magpies are a songbird. So, they do produce song, and that song is learned and that’s there and that exists and that’s cool. And then, they have this separate set of vocalisations which are their kind of semantic non-song vocalisations. We do know the meaning of some of them. They have kind of four main syllables that they use. Syllables, I’ll say everything in inverted comments so that I don’t offend anyone [LAUGHS] using terms willy-nilly, as it were.
They have kind of these four sounds that they use and some of them are never produced in isolation, some of them are. So, there’s one particular one which we call the noisy line, which is sort of like [MAKES BIRD SOUND] So, it sounds like a typical bird scream, basically. And that one can be used as a call by itself. So, it’s an alarm call, a general disturbance, kind of low-level alarm call. But they also produce that call with what we call the down sweep as a single call. So, they combine… We call these kind of syllables or segments. They combine these two segments into a call that they produce that’s kind of like, [MAKES BIRD SOUND], it goes down at the end. I’m so embarrassed that I’m doing these impressions for you. I hope you appreciate them.
DANIEL: Why don’t you always do this as a part of your… in your media stuff? [LAUGHTER]
STEPHANIE: So, the DS can be produced in isolation as well. So, both the NL, sorry, the noisy line we call the NL and the down sweep, DS, they can be produced in isolation or they can be combined into what is also a kind of a general disturbance alarm call.
Now, the difference between those two alarm calls, we’re not 100% sure. One thing we do know is that the noisy line is produced very, very early in development. And we think it actually develops from a kind of grunt vocalisation that they produce while they’re still in the nest even. And the noisy line down sweeps are the sort of phonologically combined and I’ll kind of circle back to why that’s maybe not a perfect analogy in this case.
The phonologically combined call, they don’t produce until slightly, still very early, kind of in their kind of second week out of the nest kind of to sort of third or fourth. But yeah, we’re not super clear on what the difference in the meaning there. And it may just be a sort of inconsequential difference and really either one can be used. They’re both general disturbance, both kind of low-level alarm calls.
The reason I said that phonological combining is maybe not the best descriptor there is because some of these sounds are meaningless and are combined into meaningful calls and that kind of fits into that description well. But then, we do have the weird case of some of them not being meaningless because they’re produced in isolation, which suggests that they hold some kind of meaning. And we know that they are because they’re producing kind of alarm context. I don’t know if you can add… I mean, I guess there are human phonemes we produce in isolation as well, are there?
HEDVIG: I was going to say there are like sounds in human languages, there are words that are just one phoneme.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I guess maybe I’ve been traumatised by a very sort of traditional description of phonological syntax, which is that it combines meaningless sounds into meaningful words. But yeah, thank you. Because I was always like, what about the word, A, because that’s a single sound and it’s also a word. Okay, so cool, we’ll move on. [LAUGHS]
So, yeah, they produce kind of a variety of calls and lots of them are… So, they have the noisy line, the down sweep, the short high and the long high. Those are kind of the four main…
HEDVIG: Please produce those, please.
STEPHANIE: Oh, those are a bit high. They’re sort of above my register. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Do your best.
STEPHANIE: [MAKES BIRD SOUND] would be a long high and then a half of that would be a short high. And they actually cluster separately. So, these categories have all been confirmed using what’s called uniform manifold approximation and projection, which is basically just a fancy cluster analysis that…
HEDVIG: UMAP.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, UMAP, cool, okay. I didn’t know how widespread UMAP was at this stage, but that’s great, cool. So, yeah, they’ve all been confirmed with UMAP, and they cluster really distinctly regardless of which magpie is producing them, they’re really reliably clustering. There are a few other kind of elements in there that may be sort of a variation on one of them. They sound a little bit different, but they don’t cluster distinctly, but we’ll stick to those four because we know that those exist.
So, yeah. They can either produce some of them in isolation or they can combine them into these calls and those calls hold meaning. And then, those calls and whether or not the calls are single, we call them single-segment calls or multi-segment calls to kind of distinguish between the ones that have combined segments in and the ones that don’t. And then, they combine those into sequences. So, a mixture of single and multi-segment calls into sequences. And we use kind of 0.05… does that sound right? I’m very tired at this stage, so I don’t know if that is right. But yeah, a really short period of silence in between calls. Anything longer than that and it’s a separate vocal event.
DANIEL: And we know that they are… That’s how we know that they’re being combined. But how do we know that they mean different things? Because that’s the essence of combinatoriality, is they’re combining them to do different stuff. How do we know that they’re doing different stuff?
STEPHANIE: So, this was something that Sarah started to approach in her work, and she took observations of the context in which these sequences tend to occur and basically had kind of correlations between all the sequences definitely related to aerial predator threats. So, one of the really common ones I talk about and give examples of is this noisy line, down sweep, short high down sweep, long high down sweep sequence, which as far as we can tell, it produces…
Well, we know it produces this kind of aerial mobbing response. And it seems to be produced reliably in the context of aerial predators. So, that’s one that we were pretty sure of the meaning. They produce the others in other contexts. And the idea is… I mean, it’s difficult to kind of talk about in concrete terms because there’s enough kind of observational evidence to know that they’re producing them in different contexts, but it can be really hard to delineate what exact things about that context that’s driving them to use that particular vocalisation and that’s work that we want to do more work on if we get the opportunity because yeah, it’s a really important thing. And really there’s only so far we can go talking about combinatoriality and ordering rules and stuff before we have to actually confirm what all of these things mean.
DANIEL: And you do that by playing recordings to them and seeing if they do anything like mob together or flee?
STEPHANIE: Yeah, so we’ve done lots of playback experiments, whether that’s playing back the vocalisation and seeing how they react or showing them predator presentations. So, we have this… Well, we had… he’s somewhat deceased now, but we had this crazy, animatronic, taxidermied goshawk that we’d put out and record their responses to and we’ve used that for kind of cognitive testing as well as the more kind of vocal stuff. But yeah, that’s kind of work that was part of Sarah’s thesis and work that she got lots of really cool results from, but certainly needs kind of further exploration.
DANIEL: Well, that certainly sounds like syntacticity to me. What about you, Hedvig? [STEPHANIE LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, I’m just thinking about the ethics of scaring birds, but I think that’s considered fine, right?
DANIEL: I think it’s okay.
STEPHANIE: I know. Sometimes, I do worry, but we go through rigorous ethics processes.
DANIEL: You’re going to get a bird with a briefcase saying, “I represent the magpies and we’re hauling you into court.”
STEPHANIE: I’d like to clarify, we have very stringent processes for how often we do this to them, how many times at a single group. So, we try and minimise our impact, and we only scare them in ways that they’re being scared already by nature, [LAUGHS] that’s how to frame that.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. Sounds good. Well, I feel like we’ve dealt with the combinatoriality. That sounds good to me. I’m pretty satisfied on that score.
STEPHANIE: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, the social learning. What I understand is that you looked at the fledglings, 11 different fledglings from 8 different groups, and you were able to see who they interacted with and then correlate that with how complex their calls were? Am I getting that right?
STEPHANIE: Yes, sort of. So, we did sort of two different analyses. So, one of them was just looking at the contents of the repertoire overall. And by the end of development, fledglings were significantly more likely to produce the sequences that their group members were producing than any other group.
So, we basically took all of the sequences in the whole population and did what’s really a simple analysis, but really effective, and we basically code it as zeros and ones. Do you have this sequence, or do you not have this sequence? And then, you can compare the fledgling set of zeros and ones with their group and then the rest of the population. So, we group everyone else in the population together. So, any individual that’s not in their group, and then any individual that is in their group. And we compared those and found that basically their group very strongly predicts what they sound like at the end and the other groups don’t.
Now, obviously that in and of itself isn’t necessarily evidence of social learning. So, that could be that they produce those sequences because those sequences are relevant to what they experience as a group. But what’s really interesting, and what’s still a really big question that we have is so all of these groups border each other immediately. We have kind of two subpopulations, one is at UWA on campus. So, any of the magpies that you see wandering around when you’re on campus are magpies that we use in our research. But we also have a subpopulation in Guildford which is sort of towards the Perth Hills, if you’re not familiar. And those are kind of distinct and geographically separated.
But within each of those populations, all of the family groups that we use, their territories, border each other immediately. And they all experience much the same kind of environmental stimuli. So, all of the same… I mean, aerial predators, when they’re over one group, they’re visible from other groups as well. They have the same kind of interaction with humans and cars and planes and foxes and cats and things like that. So really, there’s not a clear reason why there would be any variation. Well, there may be some variation, but there’s no reason why there would be such extensive variation in the repertoires between groups unless it was social learning and that’s kind of one piece of evidence that kind of supports this analysis that we did.
And then also, we have this idea that they increase over time. And obviously that by itself is also not evidence of social learning. I mean, even in primates, where we’re pretty sure that they have kind of genetically determined repertoires, they may still kind of develop acoustically over time as their vocal cords and stuff develop. But all of that evidence together is kind of… There’s no other explanation that makes sense besides them kind of socially learning.
Now, we know that they are capable of open-ended vocal production learning because they can produce novel mimicry throughout life. So, we already know that kind of neural capacity is in place for vocal production learning. And I maybe naively went into my PhD assuming that that’s what was driving these call sequences as well, but that’s actually not really what we found.
So, what was really interesting and maybe what was actually evident already but wasn’t really kind of pulled apart until we wrote this paper and did this research, was that they actually all use the same building blocks. So, all of them use those same segments, and all of them use the same calls, but they all produce different sequences, and they produce them using reliable ordering rules. We already know this to kind of some extent from Sarah’s work. We’ve also got a paper that is in review at the minute, that looks at that to kind of a greater extent and how they’re using those ordering rules at different levels. I kind of went in thinking, “Oh, they’re vocal production learners.” They’re open-ended vocal production learners as well, which is obviously much rarer. But that actually doesn’t seem to be what’s driving these call sequences even though that’s kind of, I assumed, “Oh, you have this capacity, why wouldn’t you be using it?”
But what was really interesting is that we showed that they have all of the same building blocks and all of the same calls, but they produce them reliably using these kind of ordering rules, but specific to their group. And that kind of raises lots of questions about, “Well, why? What is the function of that?” But it was also really interesting because it revealed that actually they may be doing the same thing that we think we’re seeing in primates who lack the capacity for vocal production learning.
So, the overall theory for why this emerged… kind of evolutionarily why syntax emerged, the theory has been very kind of driven by primate research, primate research alone. And that theory is that because primates don’t have the capacity for vocal production learning, that they developed this capacity to combine existing calls to kind of overcome that and increase their communicative capacity without that ability to add new signals. And then later on, humans develop the capacity for vocal production learning so that we could do both and become even more complex. So, that’s the kind of idea that’s come out of syntactic work in chimpanzees and other primates and looking at what the kind of evolutionary pathway to that was.
DANIEL: Okay, so let me just make sure I got that then. So, they have a limited number of units that they can use, but combinatoriality allows them to combine them in multiple ways so that they can do more things? Mean more things?
HEDVIG: Well, think about it like this. Like, if you’re building a bunch of different… If you’re in a factory and you have ten Lego pieces of different sizes and colours, and you get told, “You have to produce as many variations as you can,” if you only have ten pieces, then you have to do that by making different combinations. But if you’re an Australian magpie and you can create new Lego pieces of new colours, then you technically don’t need to combine them. You can just spit out a different colour every time.
So, the theory is that primates use combinatorics to overcome the limited vocal range that they have. But the magpies have a great vocal range, they’re just not using all of it. And these two groups, we could think of them maybe as like dialect communities, seem to have converged on slightly different ordering in the two communities, maybe for a function, maybe randomness, it doesn’t need to be like goal driven…
DANIEL: That’s what I was wondering.
HEDVIG: It could just be random as well.
STEPHANIE: I’ll just clarify. So, it’s more than just two groups. So, there’s two subpopulations, but the repertoire varies between all of the family groups. So, there’s like 16 maybe we’ve got more now, but those 16 that we’ve studied kind of call combinations in extensively, and all of their repertoires vary, but they reliably use the same ordering rules within those groups. So, it’s not… They’re reproducing the same sequences over and over again, they just vary between groups. So, I think we’re relatively sure it’s not random in the sense of… Well, I mean, we know it’s not random in the sense that they’re using ordering rules to arrange their calls into sequences. So, there’s structure there. It may be random in the sense that it’s emerged through kind of random innovation over time, but…
HEDVIG: That’s what I meant, that the reason this family uses this order, this family uses the other, isn’t because, like, some particular reason.
DANIEL: Basic dumb question. How did you know you were dealing with the same groups of birds? Or how did you know you’re dealing with the same individuals?
STEPHANIE: Yes. So, I mean, we know that their territory borders are very stable over time. They shift kind of over years, but kind of within a breeding season, they’re very fixed. A lot of our adult birds are ringed, so they have little cool bracelets on that tell us who they are in kind of unique combinations. And then, the fledglings, we ring them when they’re old enough, but before that point, they’re usually distinctive based on kind of plumage. I mean, obviously, they’re all variably black and white, but they have kind of distinct patterns in their wings or they have scars a lot of the time because they get dealt a lot of aggressive blows from older individuals in their groups. So, as sad as it is, often if they’ve been beaten up a little bit, it’s easier to tell them apart. So, yeah, so we know we’re reliably kind of following the same individuals and we have kind of life history data for a lot of these… I mean, they live to kind of… They can live to up to sort of 35 years. So, we have life history data for a lot of the adults from a very long, long time ago.
DANIEL: Were they ever hard to find? Was there ever an individual who was like, “I’ve got to get some data on this individual, but I can’t find them”?
STEPHANIE: Yes, yes. So, part of the reason why we only follow them sort of once a week is because often that one hour once a week can actually be sort of four hours of ripping your hair out trying to find this bird that you can hear. You just can’t find it. And my least favourite… Well, I say this, I love the individuals at this group. And sadly, I think most of them have dispersed or been hit by cars now and they had a bit of a crisis. But over in the Somerville Theater at the end of the UWA campus, there are these huge pine trees. And this group love to sit at the top of them, which is completely useless for me when I need to be relatively sort of close range to record their vocalisations. So, yeah, there is a lot of kind of hours of recordings of me just being like, “For god’s sake, come down from the tree.” I don’t necessarily need them to be walking around on the ground in front of me, but, yeah, when they’re hiding, when they’re in people’s houses, when they’re being fed by people, we can’t work with them. So, yeah, they were all sorts of kind of field constraints that made this work difficult.
But I am still very grateful to work with magpies as opposed to a species that lives, I don’t know, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. They’re a relatively accessible study system compared to a lot of the species that people study. So, yes, they have their difficulties, but I shouldn’t be too ungrateful for the ease of access.
DANIEL: We need to wrap it up, but I just wanted to talk for a second about what it’s like being a media person. We’re media communicators. And you’ve kind of been sort of pushed, activated into this service. But at the same time, people do have these linguistic notions. I remember you being on the Australian ABC talking to Nadia Mitsopoulos, a pal of mine, and she said, “Does that mean they have sentences?” It’s what people go to. And you said, if I remember correctly, “I think if I say that they have sentences, the linguists will get mad at me,” which is that territoriality again.
HEDVIG: Such a bad rep. We need to do something about this, Daniel. [STEPHANIE LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I know, I know we’re trying, we’re doing it on a show like this one. But remember, I’m trying to balance this idea of, “Hey man, these things are strategies, they’re available to everybody.” But I’m also trying to say to people, I know that saying that birds have syllables or monkeys have sentences. I know that does a good job of framing this in a way that the public will understand. So, maybe I’m happy to let that run because it’s not doing any harm really. And if you don’t know what a word is for humans, then you can’t really run along behind and say, “No, no. Those aren’t words for birds.” At the same time, we do run the risk of…
HEDVIG: False equivalence.
DANIEL: …simplifying…
HEDVIG: Like, we’ll find the word for, like, danger and then we’ll like do like a little one-to-one mapping between words and then we’re like: no bird.
DANIEL: It does give people the wrong idea. But if you say, “Well, they’re great at vocal learning and combinatoriality,” and then you have to explain in a one-hour interview what these things are, that’s not helpful either. And just relying on things like words, sentences, syllables, well, it could be a useful shorthand that can nonetheless mislead people. How are you walking this tightrope?
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] I don’t know if you’ve realised from me talking for the last hour that I am a very longwinded person and I go off on tangents [DANIEL LAUGHS] and I forget why I started talking. I’m just talking because I have lots of thoughts and they need to get out of my brain because they’re very loud. So, I’ve really struggled. It’s really difficult because I’m actually someone who really likes there to be kind of scientific rigour and I’m very pedantic about, “Well, the methodology you’ve used doesn’t actually answer the question you think it’s answering.” And I’m certainly not kind of immune to that. There’s lots of times where I have to revisit something that I’ve said and go, “Actually, I don’t know that I really could have said that,” and things like that. But I really care about things matching up. And it’s very important to me that the questions you ask match the methodology you’re using and the conclusions you draw. And that’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. And we always, scientists fail at that all the time because it’s just a hard thing to do.
But there’s also something to be said for. Like you said, most people don’t really know what a sentence is even. Like, to the vast majority of people, if you said, “What’s a sentence?”, they say, “Oh, it’s a collection of words that we put in a specific order and it means something, and we can make them longer or we can make them shorter and we can change the meaning of them,” and that’s kind of the extent of most people’s concept of a sentence.
DANIEL: Pretty good. That’s phrases as well.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] I don’t think that magpies are producing sentences because that’s a very human term. And there’s things like subject and…
HEDVIG: You said they were combining calls.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, they’re combining calls into sequences. And I tend to use call sequences when I’m talking in more kind of…
DANIEL: Let’s do that.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, maybe it’s the same thing. I feel like there’s more that goes into it. Maybe I’m a bit traumatised from speaking to linguists in the past, [DANIEL LAUGHS] but I feel like there’s more that goes into a sentence than just syntax. And I don’t know that we really have time to necessarily get into that, but I think there’s more kind of ideas.
HEDVIG: Not really.
STEPHANIE: Not really? Okay, cool. Then screw it all, they have sentences. Whoo! [LAUGHS] But yeah, I guess, really, regardless of whether or not they’re sentences or we should call them sentences or whatever it is, I guess the idea is that, yeah, when you’re talking to the media, there’s no point trying to be…I mean, sorry, I shouldn’t say that. There is 100% reason to try and be as accurate as possible because it’s important to not miscommunicate your findings.
But you also have to be conscious, like you said, of the fact that you don’t have time to go into the level of detail required to be as accurate as you can be in a kind of a journal article. And so, sometimes it makes more sense to just use the words that people know. And I try my best to say language-like or say things in inverted commas because that hopefully most of the time covers you, but it is just really hard.
And I think this is maybe an interesting linguistic thing of when you’re talking, it’s very hard to be precise, or I find it very hard to be precise when I’m talking. When I’m writing, it’s very easy because you can go back and you can delete things and you can look at something for a long time and address what it really means and break that down and make sure you’re being as accurate as possible. I just talk. [LAUGHS] It’s really hard to… Yeah, I struggle to sit and not feel awkward that I’m taking the time to be like, “How can I say this as accurately as possible?”
HEDVIG: I think it’s sort of… The flip side of that is that when you write, you can’t use all the extra channels that you have when you’re talking. So, you have to be more precise. Whereas now that we’re talking, we’ve talked earlier, I can guess things about what you mean and things and if you said a word slightly wrong or something, I can be like, “Yeah, it’s probably that.” So, we have many more channels available to us to correct for various things. And if you have a collaborative, empathetic conversation partner, you can actually get by with not being very precise, [STEPHANIE LAUGHS] which is a great feature in some ways. When you misalign that when you think that you have more in common than you do, then you get problems. But I think, I think that’s one of the strengths and weaknesses of speech. You can’t speak in scientific articles…
STEPHANIE: Yeah. As much as I’d like to. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, it certainly is a challenge being able to communicate this stuff for a lay audience and it’s something that we are thinking a lot about. So, thanks for going there with us. Not traumatised? A little bit traumatised?
STEPHANIE: No. This has been a very healing process for me. There’s been lots of openness and curiosity and I’ve learned lots as well. It’s been a wonderful example of how animal people and human people need to interact about science. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, just to finish up, what do you hope people will know or do because of your work?
STEPHANIE: Ooh, I mean, I guess… Yeah, that depends on whether you mean science people or people people. [LAUGHS] I guess really the scientific… I’m saying, hang on, maybe that sounded demeaning to people people. I meant people people are real people, and science people are weird people if anyone misconstrued that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We’re weird people.
STEPHANIE: [LAUGHS] In the science sense, I guess that ontogenetic and longitudinal kind of… Sorry, developmental and long-term data is really, really crucial to understanding complexity. That’s what complexity is, is it’s variation in how things change and form over time. I guess for more kind of… Oh, I’ll get told off by my friend, Heather Bray, if I say general audiences, but I still haven’t found a better word to describe the general public. [LAUGHS] But I guess just, yeah, curiosity in the animals that are around you, beyond the kind of despair of species extinctions and climate change. And there is still lots of really cool stuff going on around you in all of the animals that we often take for granted. I mean, this is a backyard bird, essentially. Obviously, they’re very cool, but they’re literally… I mean, they’re sort of as common as a pigeon. So, they’re a very usual bird in Australia and nothing special to most people. But, yeah, I guess… yeah, I’d want to encourage people to see positive things happening in nature and cool things happening in nature when it’s really hard to do that because there’s so much horrible stuff happening to nature, I guess.
And so, yeah, hopefully, whether or not I’m saying the right words and upsetting linguists with my interviews, [LAUGHS] I hope that at least for the vast majority of people… And it has I’ve had so many emails from people being like, “I’ve got really cool magpies in my garden. Do you want me to send you recordings?” If I haven’t replied to you, if you are one of those people, I’m really sorry. I’ve just been absolutely swamped. But no, it’s really cool to see people engaging with science for an animal that they get to experience every day.
DANIEL: It brings the science home.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a nice way to put it.
DANIEL: We’re talking to Dr Stephanie Mason, Evolutionary Biologist from the University of Western Australia. Nice to talk to somebody in the hometown, I’ve got to say, for once.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, it’s been lovely. Thank you for having me.
DANIEL: Thanks for coming.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for Words of the Week.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
HEDVIG: I’m really excited about the first one. This is another case of Daniel gets brought into the crazy TikTok world that Ben and I spend some time in. Ben, do you know what the first word is?
BEN: I do know what the first word is, not only… because you’ve got to remember I’m double dipping here, like I get my own…
DANIEL: You’ve got to say the word. What’s the word? What’s the word?
BEN: Sorry. MOG.
HEDVIG: The word is MOG.
BEN: Or MOGGING or getting mogged.
DANIEL: Getting mogged.
HEDVIG: Such a funny dumb one.
BEN: So, I double dip. I get not only the stuff that I consume via social media, but I also get the like gross permutations of that bubbling through the youth in my work as well.
DANIEL: So, what are you noticing?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: My understanding, because this is not a thing that is on my feeds so much because I’m obviously like way too cool and better than that [LAUGHS] is to mog or mogging or whatever is something you do to a camera to essentially pull a really cool face and pose to look good.
HEDVIG: Aaah, no.
DANIEL: That’s not what I’m getting. I’ve got a different… That sense does appear, and I’ve seen that one in Green’s Dictionary of Slang. And it’s related to MUGGING. Mugging for the camera or mugging for the audience. But getting mogged?
HEDVIG: Yes, that’s a different thing.
BEN: Okay, lay it on me then.
HEDVIG: Ben, do you know what MOG stands for, like the letters? Does it help you if I say that the original abbreviation is AMOG?
DANIEL: AMOG. Are you sure about this? Because this could be an acronym and it’s never an acronym.
HEDVIG: Pretty sure about this.
DANIEL: Yeah, I found this too.
HEDVIG: I’m pretty sure it’s this because the sphere it comes from makes sense with this. So, I have heard at least that it comes from alpha male of the group. So originally, stands for like “Oh, he’s the AMOG of this group,” or something like that, and then it becomes…
BEN: Like GOAT or whatever.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But then, it becomes to dominate others. So, he is mogging the group. Like, he is… want to or is and is dominating everyone else by being the alpha. Then, it becomes, like, you can add a modifier to it so you can say, “Oh, he is heightmogging me.” Means we’re taking a picture together and he’s taller than me and he is taunting my shortness and he’s heightmogging me. Now, you can do this with anything where someone else is dominating you in some sphere.
DANIEL: Looksmogging. I’m looksmogging Ben right now.
HEDVIG: Looksmogging. Exactly. Exactly.
BEN: Now and always. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And it’s not clear sometimes if the person who’s doing it is intending to do it. Some people just are taller than others and are appearing in a picture next to someone else. They’re not necessarily going out of their way to heightmog. And it comes from this sort of toxic online male sphere where everyone is obsessed with…
BEN: So, it shares semantic similarities to something like THROWING SHADE, which also underwent its own semantic shift because it originally meant someone who just cast a shadow by virtue of being very big and impressive. And then, it turned into a person who was wielding that as like a weapon. And I get that casting a shadow was just a general term, whereas you can attach MOGGING as productive thing to lots of other things. So, you can looksmog or heightmog or whatever, which is very in keeping with the really super gross masculine space of like everything is a competition. You must always be like trying to achieve status and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: I think also throwing shade, I think you can do it to your friends in a teasing, playful way, I think, a little bit.
BEN: Sure, you could probably do… You could apply this in a teasing way, right?
HEDVIG: I don’t think so. I think it’s always kind… I don’t know, I’m not enough in these spheres, but I think it’s always kind of…
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hang out more with 13-year-old boys, Hedvig, find out.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think you can… like, you guys tease me for like not liking to get up early in the morning, which is like 9am on a weekend.
DANIEL: Clockmogging.
BEN: I have never engaged in that sort of rhetoric.
HEDVIG: You could describe that as throwing shade, I think. But if you were early-bird-mogging me, I feel like that would be meaner.
BEN: If we were chronomogging.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, that’s it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I feel like that would be meaner, but maybe I don’t know the nuances of these words enough.
DANIEL: Well, the word I saw continually in this discourse was who was mogging whom? When you mog somebody, you outclass them or outdo them. I’ve tried to hunt down the etymology of this. Wiktionary says it’s an acronym and I bet it’s not. But they’ve got “alpha male of group”, first used around 2018 by bodybuilding groups, which is the right community.
I’ve also seen in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, there are lots of meanings for MOG including mugging, like to MUG someone to steal their stuff. To MUG for the… to MOG for the audience, that’s in there. Also, if you got MOGGED in the early 20th century, it meant that you got moved along by the police. “We were sitting there for a while, but we got mogged.” So, still not sure. I’m still holding onto: it’s never an acronym. Those are always ex post facto explanations, just to bring in a bit of Latin.
BEN: I’ll just quickly add a rider to this one of like kids these days, like fresh from the front line of youth. I do not know if this is just a little bit of rose-tinted glasses on my part, but I don’t recall when I was an adolescent, I recall being a very toxic human being, as all of us were. I don’t recall this level of fervor around status because mogging is not the only aspect of this that I see in youth culture, and I see it all the time. There is this like ongoing battle for… Obviously, status in teenagehood has always been a thing. But what I mean is there’s this incredibly sophisticated suite of linguistic tools now that just keep coming, and new ones keep coming in where there’s all of this stuff you can say about who has high or low status on what level and why. And I just remember that being like understood but not said when I was in high chool.
DANIEL: It was implicit, wasn’t it? Yes.
BEN: [LAUGHS] And it’s become very explicit. Anyway, that’s my reading from the youth at the moment.
HEDVIG: I also remember that being a thing of American high school movies. And I assumed it wasn’t like… “Oh, she’s the coolest girl in the school.” Like, if you had asked me when I was 15 who was the coolest girl, I actually do think I know who that was now that I think about it.
BEN: I’ve just seen in real time as Hedvig be like, “Solveig Gettagard was a fucking bitch.”
DANIEL: Oh, wait, hang on. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think I know who was the prettiest girl in school, but I don’t think she was the most popular girl in school, if that makes sense.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. They don’t always go together. Let’s go to our next one. That’s mogging. PIED-À-TERRE.
BEN: I do not know this one.
DANIEL: That one’s come up recently. Hedvig, any help?
HEDVIG: It’s a type of apartment. It’s an apartment that faces the street. It’s a borrowing from French. I thought it’s a word in several European languages, borrowed for… I don’t know.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think that it’s not a kind of apartment, but it’s a matter of who owns it. So, it means a foot on the ground. Like, “I was thinking of getting a pied-à-terre in New York City”, and that’s just an apartment so that you’ve established a presence in that place. You’ve got a foot on the ground, but you don’t live there. It’s just a place that… You don’t live in that city.
HEDVIG: I think I know what I was thinking of. I was thinking of SOUTERRAIN, like a basement apartment. Anyway…
DANIEL: Oh. Right, right.
BEN: So, what a regular human might call a holiday home, but for wealthy, more like [CHUCKLES] international humans, is just one of the several homes that I have that I may live in for some of the year. Okay.
HEDVIG: Where you have a foothold.
DANIEL: A foothold, precisely. Earlier this year, New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, proposed a pied-à-terre tax, a tax on homes over 5 million dollars whose owners live out of state, which I thought was brilliant. It raised money for the city, discouraged buying up houses, which contributes to housing scarcity, although 5-million dollars homes, maybe not so much.
BEN: Yeah, we don’t… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: At least we can get money for it.
DANIEL: And get money they have because he has just announced a balanced budget by taxing the rich and saving money from elsewhere. So, nice going, let’s see how that works out.
BEN: Well, I mean, obviously this is fake news because socialism never works and it will immediately end in the cataclysmic downfall and… I think they even made a movie about this Escape from New York, did they not? I think yeah, that’s what we’ll likely see.
HEDVIG: This Mamdani guy sure is charming the pants off everyone, Trump included.
DANIEL: That was funny, wasn’t it? What was the deal with Trump’s enormous smile when they were meeting together? Was it that Trump always craved…
HEDVIG: He’s a charming man.
DANIEL: …approval from New York? And so…
HEDVIG: He seems to be nice and cool.
BEN: If you ever needed a compelling reason as to why you should just dump everything you have into the charisma stat in a D&D campaign, Mamdani is THE exemplar of like how you can win everything just by being the most charismatic fucking human alive and he is. Just to watch him, you’re just like, “Dude.”
HEDVIG: Also, says things very simply. Like, I saw an interview with him, I think, this week where he was asked like, “Oh, like, have you ever purchased marijuana?” And he was like, “Yes, I have purchased marijuana at a legal store.” And he didn’t say, like, what he did with it. The other people were like, “Oh, because I had a back injury and whatever.” And he’s like, “No, I’m just going to say that I have purchased weed.”
DANIEL: Never apologise.
HEDVIG: “End of story. You can figure out the rest.”
DANIEL: Let’s continue our American theme. This one was suggested by James a little while ago, but it’s of coming up again, DUMMYMANDER. Tell me what you know.
HEDVIG: So, I know GERRYMANDER, which comes from SALAMANDER, which has to do with when you redraw political voting regions to benefit your party and it’s a thing that happens in America and also in other places, I’m sure. So, DUMMYMANDER. So, is it dumb, or is it dummy as in like a stand-in?
DANIEL: I think this one is dumb.
BEN: Yeah, that would be my take.
HEDVIG: Dumb. Is it when you do gerrymander badly so you shoot yourself in the foot?
DANIEL: Yes, it is. That’s exactly right. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Well done. Good job.
DANIEL: Nice going.
HEDVIG: Yes. God, my guesses today.
DANIEL: So, let’s talk about GERRYMANDER /ʤ/ or gerrymander /g/, because this was named after one-time Vice President of the USA, Elbridge Gerry. So, people called it a gerrymander /g/ for a really long time. He hit on the idea of redrawing the Massachusetts State Senate districts to favour the Democratic Republican Party. It was the Republican Party, but at the time it was called the Democratic Republican Party.
Now, one of the districts resembled a huge lizard, so a cartoonist drew it to look like a salamander but called it a gerrymander. And last year, Donald Trump pushed Governor Greg Abbott of the state of Texas to redraw the boundaries, even though it’s only supposed to happen in years ending in zero. Well, California responded to Texas’ gerrymandering with a vote, a plebiscite, to whether they should do the same thing and it passed and this caused a cascade of gerrymandering across the country.
Often, you do gerrymandering by taking a district where you have a lot of your voters. You feel like you’re going to win that place easy. So, let’s just hive off some of them to other districts where we’re not as strong, where we won’t win, because we’re confident that we’ll still have enough people in that original district to win. But the problem with gerrymandering is that you might have overestimated your popularity in that district. You moved too many people out and then you lose all the districts because you’re massively unpopular.
BEN: You’ve spread yourself too thin.
DANIEL: It’s a dummymander.
BEN: Does any other entity in the world do this?
DANIEL: It’s a tactic that has been used… The Wikipedia page for gerrymandering says that there are other countries besides the USA where this happens. There’s always a temptation to pick your voters instead of letting your voters pick you. My question is, why does the AEC in Australia, why does the Australian Electoral Commission work so well? Why hasn’t that been weaponised?
BEN: That’s what I was going to ask, like, is Australia unusual to have an independent body be the thing that dictates what the electoral boundaries are?
HEDVIG: But hey, wait, so gerrymander only makes sense if when you win a certain district, you get everyone from that district. If you have proportional representation, then gerrymander doesn’t matter.
BEN: Yeah, but a lot of places only have proportional representation in some of their assemblies. We only have proportional representation in the Senate in Australia. And we don’t house the executive in the Senate, so one would argue that that’s like the less important of the two.
HEDVIG: Maybe it’s just not spread to Australia. Like, some ideas take a while. Like, those awful ideas from Tony Abbott in Australia are now making their way to Europe, and that took like 15 years.
BEN: America is weird. We have said this many times. The fact that you vote for other things, like sheriffs and judges, and there is level of “democracy” at work that is baffling to many outside observers, where we’d be like, “Why would you make an elected representative in charge of that?” The fact that elected representatives can be in charge of drawing electoral boundaries is insane. That is the craziest fucking shit I’ve ever heard.
DANIEL: But could you imagine if America had a federal election boundary drawing committee? That would get weaponised so fast. I’m glad that America doesn’t have that.
BEN: I guess the question then becomes like how are some institutions relatively… is it just institutional culture? Like, is it just the AEC has been people coming in, being like, “We do the right thing. That’s what we do. It’s important”?
HEDVIG: Stop. I have to say, Ben and Daniel, big fans of Australian democracy and whatever, Wikipedia page for gerrymandering has a section on Australia with a subsection on Western Australia on gerrymandering.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s not unknown in Australia. It is still happening. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Hold on. I’m looking. I’m looking.
HEDVIG: The Western Australian Legislative Council was long gerrymandered, which clearly favored Rural Conservative National party, blah, blah. So, it’s not an unknown thing in Australia. It’s not as common as it seems like in the US but it’s not like it’s not heard of.
BEN: Ah, okay, okay. Hedvig is talking about state parliament, which everyone understands is dumb and doesn’t matter. Anyway. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Why do we even have that level of government?
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We can just get by with city and federal. That’s all we need.
BEN: I mean, there is a strong argument.
HEDVIG: This is a long list.
DANIEL: Last one. This one is suggested by Allison, who says, “Dear Ben, Hedvig and Daniel, I have a submission for Word of the Week. I’m a grade 4 and 5 teacher in Nova Scotia, Canada, and I’ve heard my students saying Sooooo-ee! as an exclamation for something good. An example, “Madame brought us Timbits this morning, Sooooo-ee!” I asked my son, also Gen Alpha, but little older, in a different school, and he said that his classmates say it too sometimes. So, it’s broader than just the friend groups in my class. I don’t know if it’s more widely used, but I’d be curious to hear from other listeners or Ben and if his students say it too. Thanks for all you do. Sincerely, Allison.”
HEDVIG: Now, I think Ben and I are thinking the same thing, which is that it sounds a bit like sheeup! which is like a Pacific thing.
BEN: No. Oh, there’s three things this could be. I’m coming in with, like… I’m putting my… I think I’ve got a handle on this hat on.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: It could be the Pacific Islander thing that Hedvig is referring to, which almost certainly has hit pop culture popularity through Moana, where Maui, when he’s celebrating goes tee-hoo, that kind of thing, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: It could be that. Especially if there is any kind of rugby tradition in the young, in the sporting things because Islander lexicography and tradition has spread through those communities. And I will note that rugby does get played in Canada. But I don’t think it’s that. It could also be another very similar-sounding thing that young people do often as a celebration is an imitation of a soccer player’s celebration sound from South America. I think it was Ronaldo, but it could be one of the other really famous ones. When they would score, they would emit a very soooo kind of sound and there’s heaps of kids in and around the place who make that sound. And it can often have an upwards inflection. So, it can be like a sooooo kind of thing. The third thing that it could be is… I can’t believe this. These are so wildly diverse. The third thing it could be is a pig call.
DANIEL: That’s it.
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS] There we go.
HEDVIG: Fucking hell. Really? Pigs.
BEN: The third one, this is not one I’ve encountered through my kids, by the way.
HEDVIG: Oh, wait, I think I’ve heard it for cows.
BEN: Yeah. So, it might be.
HEDVIG: General, like come to me, domesticated animals.
BEN: Sooui. Soooui. That kind of thing. Like, you might have heard it in England. I’ve heard it in England. It’s like “looo, pig, pig” — that kind of thing.
DANIEL: Right, right. It’s something that you use to call the hogs to come out and eat. This has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1893. The reference is sooey. “The sound used to drive hogs out of one’s way”, interesting. And that comes from a book titled Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi. How about that?
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: And has anyone seen that video featuring the Ross Sisters from 1944? It’s the song, Solid Potato Salad. Do you know the one? You must have seen it.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Holy crap.
HEDVIG: I realised as you were talking, I meant the… I was thinking of the Hammond Sisters, but…
DANIEL: You are in for a treat, I’m going to select… Okay, hang on.
BEN: I’m doing it right now. Solid Potato Salad, here we go. Oh, I have seen this, yeah.
DANIEL: They are contortionists. [SOLID POTATO SALAD PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND] That’s the one.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. I don’t like what they’re doing with their bodies.
DANIEL: So, he calls them like they’re pigs.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Not problematic at all.
DANIEL: But why are kids picking this up? But that fits with the definition because it’s like, “Oh, the teacher brought cookies. Sooooo-ee!” Bring out the hogs.
HEDVIG: Sorry, I’m still traumatised by the video I just exposed myself to where…
DANIEL: You’re welcome.
HEDVIG: …they’re like lying on their bellies and then walking with their feet around their heads.
BEN: Have you never seen contortionists before?
HEDVIG: I have, but not in a while and I was not ready for that.
BEN: A surprise contortionism.
DANIEL: They were very flexible in their family.
BEN: But, Daniel, can I ask, how certain are you that you have transliterated, or indeed that Allison has transliterated what she’s heard effectively into her writing to you? I believe, due to my experience with young people, that it’s more likely going to be one of the first two things that I said.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: I think the football thing is the pig thing.
BEN: Oh, I don’t think…
DANIEL: Related or not? Oh.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Oh, think about it.
DANIEL: Sometimes, things help each other along.
BEN: Because sooey as a call for pigs is, I think, quite an amazing American thing. I suspect…
HEDVIG: And Nova Scotia is nowhere near America.
DANIEL: No, but it’s…
BEN: Sure, sure. I suspect of the list of things that young people could potentially have been exposed to, two of the things are in works that they would be seeing all the fucking time, and one of them is a profoundly fucking archaic thing that has not been in anything they would have seen for ages. I reckon that Allison has sort of typed out her best approximation for the sound and Daniel has accidentally jumped onto this third thing. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I suspect that they are probably saying the Ronaldo celebration or the Tee-hoo, but the Che-ho is a little bit further away, sound wise and I don’t think you would get to Sooooo-ee! from Tee-hoo. Allison, if you’re listening to this, please, please get in and let us know what you think is happening there.
DANIEL: And other listeners, we need you as well. Have you heard this? Would you transcribe it that way? Let’s get to the bottom of this.
DANIEL: So, MOG or getting mogged. PIED-À-TERRE, DUMMYMANDER and SOOOOO-EE! ore Words of the Week. Let’s get to a comment by Franco via email. You will remember that we recently discussed the etymology of the word, GUACAMOLE, where MOLE means a kind of sauce. Franco says, “Thought you would find this interesting regarding the origins of the word GUACAMOLE.” And Franco links us to a meme. It’s one of these things that makes the rounds occasionally, and it’s back lately. So, here we go. The claim is that the word AVOCADO comes from the Nahuatl word for TESTICLE, and because mole means sauce, guacamole means testicle sauce?
BEN: I mean, look, one can see why this erroneous meme could spread so easily because, boy, oh, boy, do avocados look like testicles. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: In, I will say, more ways than one, it’s the little… It’s the ball inside the thing. Number one.
DANIEL: They’re hangin’.
HEDVIG: And then, there is the skin texture sometimes.
BEN: Yeah, the scrote.
HEDVIG: I’m not wrong.
DANIEL: Crenelated sort of… Yes, no, we’re there.
HEDVIG: And then, depending on the avocados you’re getting, the size is not that far off either.
BEN: Whoa. The last one I’m going to… I’m pumping the brakes on the last one, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I’m just saying I’ve seen small avocados that are comparable in size. You have too.
DANIEL: Here’s the facts. The Nahuatl word for AVOCADO is āhuacatl. At some point, people started referring to testicles using the same word, possibly because of shape or resemblance. But this is just the kind of taboo avoidance that we see with calling them NUTS or whatever.
BEN: Eggs or whatever, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right, huevos. So, yeah, another myth busted. Thanks, Franco. Thanks also to our guest, Stephanie Mason. Thanks to everyone who gave us ideas, words, and news. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words so more people can enjoy the show. And thanks to you great patrons.
BEN: Hey, Because Language lovers, we’d love you to do a couple of things for us. You could follow us @becauselanguage.com on BlueSky or @becauselangpod just about everywhere else. You can send us ideas, news and words. The very best of ways to do this is through Speak Pipe so we can hear your voices. For a hot second there, we had a real run of Speak Pipe submissions, and I lament its passing. I get it. It’s a little bit trickier. It’s a little bit more awkward. You don’t want to be that person in your cubicle at work where you hate everyone being like, “Hello, Because Language, I’d like…” Yeah, do it anyway. Do it anyway. Get your voice out there, be brave, be uncomfortable.
HEDVIG: We live off your shame.
BEN: It is through discomfort that we grow. You could also just do us a solid and tell a mate about us and be like, [IN A WEIRD VOICE] “You should check out this real cool podcast to listen to,” except do it in a cooler voice than that.
DANIEL: Use that voice.
BEN: Use that exact voice and they’ll be like, “Wow, I’m mesmerised by your clear witchery.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You can also become a patron. You get stuff depending on your level. There’s mailouts, shoutouts, bonus episodes, live shows, and Discord access. We get your support, which helps to keep us going, helps our partners to realise that this endeavor has merit and is therefore worth spending time on and keeps us buying the staples that we need to keep things flying out of the office. So, we’d like to give a big shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. And as always, I have ordered the names in some strange and arcane fashion. Are you ready?
BEN: Always.
DANIEL: I was thinking about old school leet and how we used to turn letters into numbers.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: We still do with passwords and stuff.
BEN: Leet haxxor!
DANIEL: Like a letter I can be a number one, but you can’t turn every letter into a number, at least not for the most basic formations, I suppose you can get creative. There are some pretty aggressive leet sets out there. I just went with a basic kind of set and I wondered, out of all our supporters, who has the most leetable name, the one where you can turn the most letters into numbers.
BEN: Oh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: All right, so let’s start. We’ve got our hundred percenters, Elías and Steele. All of the letters in their name can be turned into numbers pretty easily.
BEN: That is cool. I think they both just got gamer handles, by the way.
DANIEL: Basically. Yeah, they just leetmogged everyone right down [BEN LAUGHS] the list. And if you want to see the list, by the way, with the equivalents, you can head over to becauselanguage.com. It’s in the show notes for this episode. The about 75%, we’ve got Lyssa, Nigel, Diego, Stan…
IN UNISON: O Tim.
DANIEL: Luis, Aldo, Amanita, Colleen and Ignacio, down to 71%. The two-thirdsers, now we’re people with two-thirds of their letters in their name. Nikoli, Ayesha, Ariaflame, Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ. Ben and Daniel, we are here, Ben.
BEN: Buds.
DANIEL: Then, we go down the list. Meredith, Molly Dee, Helen…
IN UNISON: LordMortis.
DANIEL: Keith, Fiona, James and Lance. Now, we’re to about a half. We’ve got Sonic Snejhog, Wolfdog [HOWLS] Kristofer, PharaohKatt, Andy from Logophilius. And now, exactly 50%, it’s Chris L, Rene, Nasrin, Joanna, Rodger, Amir, Tony, Mignon, Rosemary, Martha, and Hedvig, you are here.
BEN: I said it before, but I’ll say it even more, this one. Hedvig, if you need a new gamertag, your leet one is dope. It looks so good.
DANIEL: h3dv16. Look at that.
HEDVIG: It kind of looks cool. Yeah.
DANIEL: I like it. I like it. We’re down to about a third of the letters. Gramaryen, Whitney, Larry, Andy B, Kevin, Kathy. These are all on 40%. Laura, Xekri, Becky, J0HNTR0Y. Helped that some of his letters were actually numbers. [HEDVIG LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Now, we’re down to one-third. sæ̃m, Amy, Yevaud, Faux Frenchie and Sydney. And now for the only a quarter, our quarter masters, Canny Archer, Manú, Rach, Lucy and at the bottom at the list at 20% John K. Nobody had a unleetable name. Everybody was leetable. So, congratulations to everyone who celebrates. Thanks to all our patrons.
HEDVIG: Lovely… Yeah, all names have vowels, I think, is the answer to that. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thanks, everybody. This was so much fun.
HEDVIG: Ben, you don’t know this, but like sometimes when we do interviews, me and Daniel, with people, when we stop recording, both Daniel and I go, “Pew, pew, pew.” And then, the poor guest is just like, “What’s going on?”
BEN: Why are you shooting me?
DANIEL: Did you notice that Morten Christiansen, when he was a guest, he got in a pew at the very end.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: It made me so happy.
HEDVIG: Yeah. He should know by now.
BEN: What a great litmus test for, like, who yes-ands in that particular situation.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]