It joins, it divides. It’s disappearing in some places, but it’s stronger than ever in others. For this episode, we’re talking to Professor Pardis Mahdavi, author of Hyphen, an exploration of identity and self as it concerns this confounding little mark.
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Archaeologists Find 3,450-Year-Old Alphabetic Inscription in Israel | Archaeology | Sci-News.com
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/tel-lachish-inscription-09571.html
Oldest piece of writing ever found in Israel identified on ancient shard of pottery
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-oldest-piece-israel-ancient-shard.html
A Missing Link in The History of The Alphabet Might Finally Be Discovered
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-they-ve-found-a-missing-link-in-the-history-of-the-alphabet-itself
(Full paper) Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish | Antiquity | Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/early-alphabetic-writing-in-the-ancient-near-east-the-missing-link-from-tel-lachish/C73F769B7CF3A7E4E2607958A096B7D8
Meet The Worst Businessman Of The 18th Century BC
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/05/11/meet-the-worst-businessman-of-the-18th-century/
New curricula to boost local language diversity: MOE – Taipei Times
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/01/18/2003750793
Google doodle celebrates ñ: Why one letter is so significant
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/google-doodle-celebrates-why-one-221406586.html
Our news story about Baby Fañch | Talk the Talk
https://talkthetalkpodcast.com/301-mailbag-of-wonder/
Home / Pardis Mahdavi
https://www.pardismahdavi.com/
Hyphen (Object Lessons) Pardis Mahdavi: Bloomsbury Academic
https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/hyphen-9781501373909/
Dark history of ‘Hyphenated American,’ as well as good uses for both dashes | At The Library Column | newsminer.com
http://www.newsminer.com/features/our_town/at_the_library_column/dark-history-of-hyphenated-american-as-well-as-good-uses-for-both-dashes/article_bbad92ee-7858-11e8-a91a-972aac8a1e8f.html
Quote by John Wayne: “The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that…”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1367576-the-hyphenated-american-is-ridiculous-but-that-s-what-we-have
“THE HYPHEN” LYRICS by JOHN WAYNE: The Hyphen, Webster’s Dictionary…
https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/john-wayne/the-hyphen-11
Everything You Need To Know About The Anglo-Saxons – HistoryExtra
https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/facts-anglo-saxons-dates/
Civil Twilight – Definition and Explanation
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/civil-twilight.html
America First’s Anglo-Saxon ‘Racist Dog-Whistle’ Slammed by Historians
https://www.newsweek.com/america-firsts-anglo-saxon-racist-dog-whistle-slammed-historians-1584398
Column: The GOP’s Anglo-Saxon problem – Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-04-21/the-gops-anglo-saxon-problem
Full article: The dangerous discourse of the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ myth: masking the race–religion constellation in Europe
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1696049
John Kasich proposes creating a propaganda department to spread ‘Judeo-Christian values’ | Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/17/john-kasich-proposes-creating-a-propaganda-department-to-spread-judeo-christian-values/
A Look into the White Centered Euphemistic World of White Supremacy and Racism: White Privilege | by Dr. Cynthia Alease Smith
https://medium.com/the-baldwin/a-look-into-the-white-centered-euphemistic-world-of-white-supremacy-and-racism-white-privilege-7bcf735681c1
Optus removes online job ad calling for ‘Anglo Saxon’ staff at Neutral Bay store
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-13/optus-removes-online-job-ad-calling-for-anglo-saxon-staff/9653270
paradise | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/paradise
Transcript
Hedvig: I heard, like, a dietest expert, whatever say that you know how people say that coffee is dehydrating, or that tea is dehydrating. I heard someone say that sure it’s a bit more dehydrating than water but it’s still mostly water. So it’s still good idea, if that’s all you have a hand, you should still drink it
Pardis Mahdavi: Agreed.
Ben: Yeah, I’m not sure that people who are saying like coffee dehydrates you, are like advocating that in a survivalist situation where there is no consumable liquid of any kind
Hedvig: Yeah maybe that’s true
Ben: That you should like, well, you definitely shouldn’t have coffee because that’s even worse.
Hedvig: Oh no, Ben Ainslie, the logic police!
Daniel: You’re out in the wild and there’s a really good latte sitting on a rock over there.
Ben: Be like no
[MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, ne’er-do-well. It’s Ben Ainslie
Ben: I would have also enjoyed rake, just thrown in there somewhere. I just always really liked the name rake but that’s okay, that’s okay. For next time for next time.
Daniel: Yeah, okay. Okay. She’s a good-hearted, smooth-talking, Johnny-come-lately, it’s Hedvig Skirgård
Hedvig: [LAUGH] I like it when there’s something that’s a little bit like a little bit of an insult because I don’t like the ones that are just like, oh, everyone’s amazing. I like that.
Ben: Yeah, laudatory is awful. We don’t care for that at all
Hedvig: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s that I became Australian. But yeah, the laudatory ones just make me like euughh
Ben: Based on Daniel’s introduction, I… I’m not going to, but I kind of want to speak in like 40s gangster Dick Tracy like voice for the rest of the show. Cuz he described us both that way [DICK TRACY VOICE] Johnny-come-lately, no-good, ne’er-do-well, fly-by-night type, see!
Daniel: Fly by night I forgot that, dang. But you’ll notice that all the terms I used to describe you contain…?
Ben: Hyphens!
Daniel: Yes, indeed!
Pardis: Exactly.
Hedvig: So because I’m not the English speaker, I actually didn’t catch that.
Daniel: It was subtle. We have a very special guest co-host. She’s the Dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and author of the new book, “Hyphen”. It’s Professor Pardis Mahdavi. Hello, Pardis.
Pardis: Hello. Thanks so much for having me. And if only I had a hyphen in my name, I can continue to dream. Yes.
Daniel: I know. That would make it complete, wouldn’t it?
Ben: When you, should you have ever in your life been married, I mean, there’s a golden opportunity there.
Pardis: You know, I am married. And my kids, all three of them have hyphenated last names.
Ben: So you’re just looking at them going, damn you!
[LAUGHTER]
Pardis: Envious of their hyphen.
Daniel: Well, we all try to give the next generation, you know, something that we didn’t get to have, so
Pardis: Exactly, my gift to them.
Daniel: But I would like you to tell us a bit about yourself and [EARNEST VOICE] what hyphens mean to you?
Pardis: Absolutely. So I guess I see myself as somebody with a lot of different identities. And so growing up, I’ve you know, understood my identity to be Iranian-American. But even now, you know, as Dean, I’m also a professor, I’m also you know, an author. And I’ve always struggled with having so many different identities. And so that struggle began with, you know, being an Iranian-American and constantly feeling like I had to choose one or the other. And I even find today in my daily life that I get most exhausted when I’m trying to just be the dean or just be the professor, as opposed to, you know, living in the hyphen. I don’t have to be just Iranian or American. That hyphen living inside it is a beautiful, comfortable, powerful place of belonging for me. And my life has changed since I’ve found belonging inside the hyphen.
Hedvig: That’s beautiful.
Daniel: Wow. That’s such a great way to say it. And it’s such a simple character, you know, just a simple stroke of a pen.
Pardis: Yes, but there’s so much with tiny but mighty, there’s so much more to this little orthographic concept.
Daniel: Oh, well, we are going to explore this as we discuss your book. But first, we have some news, but even before that, a bit of a plug. We recently had a
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: That was… wow. That was smooth
Daniel: You know, I’m laying out the outline in reverse order
Ben: You just greased that pig right up, didn’t you
Daniel: Like momento, backwards. We recently had a bonus episode for our Patrons. Our latest bonus episode was with Maya Klein, who does the transcripts for our show, and she is very well acquainted with all the weird things we do.
Hedvig: Yeah, that was fun. That was really good.
Ben: I really liked where she told us which of us was the most annoying. That was great.
Daniel: And we never did figure out who says fuck more, but I guess it’s I guess it’s all there in the transcript. Anyway, if you want to hear all of our bonus episodes the minute they come out, then sign up to become a Patron at the appropriate level. Oo! and also our live show is happening very shortly. 8 May 2021. Get ready. All Patrons are invited. It’s our It’s All Semantics show. You can find us at patreon.com/becauselangpod. Jump on it.
Ben: Okay, what’s happening in the world of linguistics, I have to know.
Daniel: Well, this one is suggested to us by Mr. Bobby Hunt. Something of a missing link in alphabetic writing. Ben, what do you know about the origins of writing? Where do you Where are you coming?
Ben: Well, again, for people who haven’t heard me say it 500 times in every show, I am the non-linguist in the show. So Daniel often throws to me to be like: hey, dummy, what do you know? I understood cuneiform from Sumeria to be the earliest alphabet? He says, with the highest of rising inflections denoting his utmost confidence in his answer.
Hedvig: Maybe we should ask Ben, what do you think an alphabet is?
Daniel: That’s a good question.
Ben: Okay. an alphabet is a system of symbols, which are abstract. And, and tie to sounds specifically?
Hedvig: Yeah, nice. Good. And what is other types of writing that isn’t an alphabet?
Ben: So like pictographs? I think the most famous example would probably be the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt.
Daniel: That’s a common misconception.
Ben: Oh, really? Did they tie to sounds as well.
Daniel: For years people were convinced that the symbols used by Egyptian hieroglyphics represented words, and that blocked our understanding of it for a good long time. And when Thomas Young and John Francois Champollion realized, ah, these are sounds, it opened the whole thing up.
Ben: Really? Oh, wow. I just I, so early in the show and I learn.
Hedvig: But they might have been pictographs at one point.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: They look awfully like things.
Ben: I think, that’s what’s so baffling about Egypt and so fascinating about it. And I tell my kids at school this as well, it’s like, Egypt went for longer than we are now from Jesus. That’s a tremendously huge amount of time. So yeah, I would believe that an entire system of writing could change many times over in that time
Daniel: A lot can happen, and that’s where this word comes in. This is some work by Dr. Felix Höflmayer and a team from the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Their work has been published in the journal Antiquity. They found a shard of pottery with writing that enhances our understanding of when alphabetic writing began. And they’re calling it something of a missing link in when writing transformed from the symbols representing whole words to when they just started representing sounds.
Ben: So do they mean that it’s a missing link because it has features of both?
Daniel: No, not really, we’ve just had this gap between the 19th century BCE and the 13th century BCE. A big long time where we weren’t sure whether alphabetic writing came about near the beginning of that period, or somewhere near the end.
Daniel: So what was our previous sort of earliest alphabet? What was the answer to the question you asked me?
Hedvig: And also, who are we? Because this shard was found in Israel. So what alphabet?
Daniel: Well, it’s characters that look an awful lot like Hebrew characters, actually. You can kind of see, or at least at a very early form. The Hebrew characters come from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were just like the huge innovators here. Although that goes back to something called proto-sinaitic. And if you want to do a Google search on that, that’s completely fine. But
Ben: I love that you’re giving our listeners permission to Google things. If you’d like to, you may
Hedvig: No, but I understand. It’s a very, it’s a very big topic. It’s hard to summarize, I appreciate Daniel
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: But because we had this gap between the 19th century BCE and the 13th century BCE, well, this one comes right in the 15th century BCE, that’s when it’s been dated to and it has alphabetic characters. So this pushes back our understanding. It gives us a little bit of a firmer idea of when this came about.
Ben: So just to ask a really stupid question. Because it’s like a shard of pottery, right? So which is to say relatively limited in what it’s got on it? Do the researchers even know what language it’s in?
Daniel: Yeah, it’s it’s a big chunk, the the authors of this paper in Antiquity, they go through and they say, all right, well, here’s this round circle and it looks an awful lot like the word for eye. But it didn’t mean an eye at this point, it meant the sound that was the first sound in the word eye. And they just go through and say, Okay, this looks like this character, which came from Egyptian, but was eventually turned into Hebrew, that and so on. We’re gonna drop a link onto our blog, becauselanguage.com.
Ben: So it’s kind of a proto-Hebrew,
Daniel: Hmm. Well, it certainly does resemble characters that would eventually come to be the Hebrew alphabet.
Ben: Do we think it’s the same as like, Middle English is to English?
Daniel: That’s a tough one, because those are different sort of languages or different time periods, whereas we’re talking writing systems here, which could have represented a number of different languages.
Ben: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Because
Hedvig: But you’re right, Ben, that we could assume that something that looks like Hebrew writing looks now is at least probably, maybe in a Semitic language, at least. Hopefully
Ben: I’m actually surprised to learn that alphabets are that young. I know 3,450 years isn’t super young. But like, I would have thought they went a little bit further back than that.
Hedvig: But we’ve only been doing sort of agriculture, like staying in a place and keeping track of grains and borrowing and loans and stuff. A lot of these old scripts that I’ve heard about, at least are often about counting how many of a certain
Ben: Like sheep and stuff
Hedvig: Yeah, cattle or grains and how much
Ben: Well that’s what I understood cuneiform to have always been by the Sumerians. Just like a tally system.
Hedvig: Exactly. There’s a, have you heard about the oldest complaint letter ever? By Ea-nasir?
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Please, please.
Hedvig: No, no, it’s just it’s just a very, very old letter when someone writes to someone else and said: I was supposed to get copper from you, but the copper that came late and the servant who delivered it was rude. And it wasn’t the agreed amount. And it’s sort of like, it’s often completely said to be the first one star review of anyone
Ben: Or, I like my interpretation from what you just said, was like, wow, people were asking to speak to the manager a long time ago.
Hedvig: He’s very upset! He didn’t get the copper he asked for. It makes perfect sense! But anyway, I understand a lot of these old writings are often about financial things. So keeping track of things, so like to get like more sentences and stuff takes a while and to read to keep track of things in that way. I mean, so what is it we think we’ve been agricultural for max as a species? 8000 years?
Ben: Yeah, eight to 10,000 years maybe?
Hedvig: Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I hang out a lot with like archaeologists and like ancient DNA people, but like, that’s not… that’s, that’s fairly recent.
Ben: It’s just a slow start. Alright, took us the first six thousand years to figure out how wheat worked. And then we got around to writing.
Hedvig: Yeah, but but it’s true also, that there could be many more examples of writing that were maybe written on things that don’t really stand the test of time. Or that we haven’t found yet. There are many places in the world where we haven’t done that much archaeology. Yeah,
Daniel: it’s exciting that we’re still finding stuff
Pardis: I just loved the Phoenicians but because I’m a Phoenician right now.
Daniel: Tell me about that!
Pardis: Given that I live in Phoenix
Pardis: [LAUGHTER]
Pardis: I consider myself a Phonecian and I was like, see, it’s all connected. It all comes… you know, I’ve been wondering for the last two years what brought me here to Phoenix, like what made me live in the desert. And you just talking about this made me realize, well, this is clearly why I’m meant to find some trace of the Phoenicians here
Daniel: Please tell me Phoenix people don’t call themselves Phoenicians
Pardis: We actually do!
Ben: Daniel, how dare you!
Daniel: I had no idea I had no idea.
Pardis: We’re very proud of it. And we have this like little Phoenician symbol that dots the highways and the like little you know, cityscape and when you fly, a little Phonecian symbol and it’s like “Welcome to Phoenix, home of the Phoenicians”
Daniel: That’s amazing
Ben: That is my very favorite local demonym I’ve ever heard.
Pardis: Isn’t it? See, now you need to come. Now you need to come visit
Ben: 100%. Look, I’ve been to Phoenix before when I was very young, but I need to go back so I can be an honorary Phoenician
Pardis: So you too can be a Phoenician. Exactly.
Hedvig: What’s a Perth, people from Perth call themselves?
Daniel: That’s a good question.
Ben: I don’t think we have a good demonym. The best one I’ve heard that would actually like probably classify might be Perthling?
Hedvig: Perthians
Pardis: That’s a good one.
Hedvig: That’s cute. Sounds like you’re small.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: It’s accurate.
Pardis: Perthling
Daniel: I’ve heard Pearthling, I’ve heard Perthian.
Pardis: I like Pearthian. Pearthiasis
Pardis: Pearthians.
Daniel: And if you’re a significant Pearthian, then you are a Pearthonality.
[ALL GROAN]
Hedvig: No one uses that
Daniel: Yes, they do.
Ben: We use it derisively to talk about like D-list people.
Daniel: Exactly
Hedvig: Oh, Okay. It’s like I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the same thing, but like ANU in Canberra, Australia National University likes to say that they’re educating thought leaders. So any new students will sometimes jokingly refer to each other as thought leaders, just because it’s such a bad idea.
Ben: So wanky
Hedvig: Such a wanky name. I think Pearthonalities also, like some PR person thought they had a really good idea.
Ben: No, no, no, it’s the opposite. It’s like, you know how like, every city like, Pardis will know this as well. Like you have the person who like presents the main news in that city. And so literally, everyone in that city knows that person. So they’re huge in that city. And literally, no one outside of that city has any idea who they are. This is what we mean by Pearthonality. Ah, okay.
Pardis: Oh, I like it. The Perthling is cute too, because it’s got the otherworldly like futuristic. So, you know, like, the Phoenicians were like, you know, were living in the way, way past Pearthlings you are living in the way, way future. So really interesting sense of temporality to it to me,
Ben: What else have we got in the news? Or are we still,
Daniel: Just to wrap up the… just wrap up this topic. The other interesting thing about this work is that we shouldn’t really think of the alphabetic system is entirely the result of Egyptian writing coming in and taking over, but rather, there was collaboration between the Egyptians and the people who were in the Levant.
Pardis: I love that. Very cool. Okay.
Hedvig: And next thing I knew, I was scouring the internet for some news for a segment and I saw, I came across this article in The Taipei Times. From a couple of months ago, where they announced that they’ve made a new policy that students in first and second year in high school will be taking weekly classes in one of Taiwan’s local or native languages. And also possibly, Taiwanese have any sign language. Oh, this was really interesting. And I dug a bit more into it. And it got me into a very familiar position that I wonder if maybe my dear co-hosts will also have found themselves in some times.
Ben: You fell down a hole, didn’t you?
Hedvig: I fell down a little bit of a hole.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: You fell down a big information hole
Daniel: It never happens…
Pardis: The language hole.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: So you know about Mandarin Chinese, right?
Daniel: Yeah. Yup
Pardis: Of course.
Ben: I have heard about this language. Yes.
Hedvig: Have you heard about Taiwanese-Mandarin Chinese?
Pardis: I actually have, yes. I mean, my husband is Chinese-American. And of course, one of the people in my book is Chinese-American. And really teases out kind of the connections between actually the language and the words that are used, and the concepts like these cultural concept. And so, you know, Taiwanese-Chinese as my understanding is that it’s almost like… and I could be wrong, so you have to correct me. But my understanding is that it’s almost like a Creole in a sense, right? If we’re trying to sort of make the comparison. One of the things that I find so fascinating, though, is the way in which the characters themselves also change in the different sort of dialects of Chinese. Like how the characters look, and if you could see me on a camera, and I’d be like drawing some characters. This is the problem with being a professor, right?
Hedvig: Exactly. Because in mainland China, they tend to favor this simplified Chinese characters, as they’re often known, wherein Taiwan, they tend to favor what’s called traditional which, in a simple way traditional tend to have more strokes and more components and the simplified tend to have fewer. Also sometimes merges different signs. But as I was reading about this, I learned that about 70% of Taiwanese people descend from what is sometimes called Hoklo immigrants, who arrived on the island prior to the sort of Japanese rule in the 1800s. And they speak something that is sometimes called Hoklo, Holo, Taiwanese, Hokkien or Southern Min, and at this point, I was seeing these words that I’ve seen so many times before. And so for example, this language or dialect of Southern Min, or or whichever label we choose to label, it is one of these languages that is being offered in schools. So Taiwanese school is generally in Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese, but what will be offered is also Hoklo and also Hakka, which is another Sino-Tibetan language, and Taiwanese Sign Language. There will also be some classes offered in some places, if my understanding is, that this will be optional classes in indigenous languages of Taiwan that aren’t Sino-Tibetan at all.
Pardis: Wow,
Ben: That is really exciting.
Pardis: That’s so important. That is, I mean, we’re here at ASU, we’re offering a lot of indigenous languages. You know, because of course, we sit on land in Arizona, that’s, you know, we have over 33 tribes in Arizona. And so we’re doing the same thing here. We’re offering languages that if we don’t teach them here at university, those languages are going to get lost. So that’s I’m glad to hear that they’re doing that in the school.
Ben: And my limited understanding of a lot of indigenous sort of sovereignty in Asian nations is that it really isn’t much of a thing, a lot of the time. I know the Japanese are very much not interested in sort of elevating the Ainu people, the Ainu language or anything like that. So it’s really, really exciting, I think to see that, that the Taiwanese are actually making a real concerted effort to like, put the spotlight on indigenous languages.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m wondering how much of a spotlight it is. So the main mandatory thing that will be offered is Hoklo, Hakka and Taiwanese sign language. So Hoklo and Hakka are both Sino-Tibetan, and then there will be an optional element of other non-Sino Tibetan indigenous languages. And I looked up some stats, so it’s about 2.3% of the population of Taiwan are registered at some sort of, and here the terms are also different, so like indigenous or Aboriginal people, and the Amis people is the largest group of those. And there’s about 10,000 people there who speak Amis as a first language. So I, in my research endeavor, I work on Austronesian languages, and these are Austronesian languages. So I feel a bit familiar with these languages. But when it comes to all these Chinese languages and for lack of a better word, where a lot of these get grouped into a lot of them melt into each other a bit, I think maybe Paradis what you’re talking about what a Creole or maybe a Koine. And I was thinking as I was falling down this rabbit hole of trying to tease out like, okay, so some people calling this a dialect. So people call this a language, some people are grouping this with this and saying this is similar. I was thinking maybe we should actually just do a show on it. And invite someone who knows better. I have behind the scenes, I have some suggestions for Ben or Daniel for for people we could invite, because it’s, it’s a lot. But the end bit of the news segment is that besides Mandarin Chinese in Taiwanese schools, they will also be offering other languages of Taiwan,
Pardis: Which is also really political. Right? I mean that’s the really interesting component of it is that this is a serious political move. You know, I lived in Singapore when my kids were young. And you know, talk about Hokkien, right? There was a real push for Hokkien, right? But they were, the school that my kids went to half the day was in Mandarin, and half the day was in English. And so you know, and then my kids would come home, and I would speak Persian or Farsi to them. And so they were all sorts of confused. But it was very political, right? What what languages are being taught was very political. That’s really Taiwan stepping out in front.
Ben: And I think going back to Hedvig’s point about what is a dialect and what is the language? I mean, that’s, it’s the same answer, right? It’s just a very political.
Pardis: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. But what I was, what I was sort of lacking is when I was looking at these things this, so I know that Cantonese and Mandarin for example differ with the amount of tones they have. So besides the writing system, I’d be interested to talk more maybe on the show about Okay, what are actually like the differences when we talk about these different things? Are there different word orders? Are there different phonemes are there different sort of like into the nitty gritty because I’m tired of falling into this rabbit hole of all these terms that some people say are the same, and some people don’t.
Ben: Hedvig, what I’m hearing you say is you want to make a nice big Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of different variations, and a bunch of different ways that languages can be different, and basically just do like checkboxes.
Hedvig: Yeah, but I also just want to get a sense of when people say that something, there’s a difference. Like, I want to hear the difference. I want to, I want to know, I’m tired of this rabbit hole.
Ben: It’s almost like you’re a linguist.
Pardis: There you go. Hedvig, I don’t know if this helps you or not, but so I’m a Persian speaker, you know, that’s my, that’s my first language. But when I was learning Arabic, my Arabic tutor was so frustrated with my pronunciation. So the word for book in Farsi or Persian is kitob ([kitɒb]]. It’s also the same in Arabic, but it’s pronounced kitab ([kitab]. So I would kept saying kitob, and she would say, kitab. Kitob Kitab. So it’s like, also the pronunciation. So here’s another example for you.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Daniel: I think we all know, this is gonna be an uphill climb for Taiwanese community languages, but it’s so encouraging to the communities themselves, that these are recognized and taught. That’s a super important step. So good for them.
Hedvig: Especially Sign Language, it’s very cool. That one surprised me. If it was only Hakka and Hokkien, and I would have been a bit cynical and like, Oh, this is a political thing. But when I saw sign language in there, I was like, Oh, this looks a little bit cool. I’m into this.
Ben: It’s like if you can, if you can, like shoot for your political goals but also do some good along the way. Let’s call that kind of a neutral win. Like a yeah, like a neutral-lawful, lawful-neutral or something.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel: Finally in the news, let’s celebrate enye (ñ). I noticed that a recent Google Doodle was all about this great letter. It’s the one that has a tilde on it.
Ben: The n with the funny little hat
Hedvig: A little wave.
Daniel: Yes. It’s jaunty, isn’t it?
Pardis: It’s beautiful.
Daniel: We love these little characters, don’t we?
Pardis: Yeah, so elegant
Daniel: Yeah, it’s, it’s cool like a hyphen. But it’s also got a little bit of a swash to it.
Pardis: Yeah.
Daniel: So we know that this letter has a history, it came from Spanish. It used to be a double end. So for example, the word year in Latin was annos with two Ns. But scribes were eager to save space. And they drew a little line above the n so that annos became años. And this happened at about the same time that Spanish was going through a little bit of a change. They move that n sound farther back in the mouth nye. So that ano became anyo. And we also saw in 2017, dear Ben, the story of a kid from Brittany, a part of France, his family spoke Breton, he was a newborn and they wanted to name him Fañch with an N with a tilde, a little ñ. And they got knocked back by the French government. But I think he, I think he got his ñ after all,
Ben: This is like, it was one of those stories where I was just like, oh, France, you be so French
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, accents and stuff on characters are a struggle when you travel around.
Ben: Do we, do we speak from experience?
Hedvig: I just have a dot over an A in my last name. It’s not very tricky. But um, but I like to sort of, I don’t like having to just submit to not having it. I’m getting tired of that. So I’m trying to just tell people, okay, if you write just an A, just know that, you know, it’s not legally my name, like you can write it like that if you feel comfortable, and you can’t find the things on your keyboard, and you don’t know how to Google. But like, just FYI, that’s not my name. And I told HR where I now work. And they frowned, they said: Oh, we don’t know. Yeah, we don’t have that character on our keys. And I was like, it’s okay. Just Just FYI, if it comes just, it’s not my legal name. I’ll go by this if you want.
Ben: I find it very baffling good person in HR in Germany, when they must, they must come across so many Scandi people with funky letters are just like: how do you make the letters have the hats or dots?
Pardis: Well, and it’s so depressing, because if you think about like, you know, I have a chapter in my book, people at Google spend, you know, months and months and months coding for, you know, at Google or at different sort of, you know, people who are in the kind of coding space spend so much time coding for these different symbols. And then I think when they hear that people can’t find them on the keyboard, they’re like, come on, we just put all that time into the code.
Hedvig: And literally when I can’t find things, if I don’t know how to make the ñ, this character talking about now, I literally Google stupid stuff like “n with a wave on it” and then I get it and copy paste.
Pardis: Yeah that’s what I do!
Ben: Yeah just copy paste it. Yeah, It’s so easy.
Hedvig: But I did get a piece of paper that I got to sign where I said that, I would concede that for the purposes of HR here Skirgard was my name. Of course, I got a thing to sign. I always get things to sign.
Daniel: How do you feel about instead of ring a? How do you feel about two A’s?
Hedvig: I feel better. Thanks for asking. So for people who have funny characters in this name, this might be a familiar experience. Because if you look in your passport, most passport has a little line at the bottom where it has these like, characters. It looks like it’s supposed to be very easily machine readable. And that’s because it is. And in that system they use this ASCII convention of using a double A for that character. And I don’t mind that as much. No I don’t. At least this systematic,
Ben: Because it is still acknowledging that Yeah, exactly.
Daniel: Well, if you would like to use a ring a on your Mac keyboard anyway, it’s option A and if you would like to use the ñ character, it’s option n and then press n again. And that will give you the ñ. Celebrate the ñ. Yeah.
Ben: That was very lovely.
[MUSIC]
Daniel: We are here with Professor Pardis Mahdavi, author of the book Hyphen, which we have had a read of and I quite enjoyed it.
Pardis: Thank you. I’m glad to hear that.
Daniel: It interweaves the stories of people and their exploration of identity and self and it brings in some good solid linguistics research to show how the Hyphen, this little mark, combines words, but it also combines identities. And Pardis, you as an Iranian-American yourself, you are…Oh, now I hesitate to use the term hyphenated-American, because that hasn’t always been complimentary has it?
Pardis: Right. I mean, as we’ve been talking about on the show, it’s very political, but actually, it’s coming back. And so many of us are now embracing that hyphenated-Americans. So yes, I would consider myself a hyphenated-American. Because we’ve worked hard to bring that a positive feeling back to that moniker, if you will.
Daniel: Yeah. Now, how did you decide to go about it this way? It’s such a, like, interspersing, the personal with the more distant research?
Pardis: Well, Daniel, for me, the hyphen is personal, right? I mean, for me, the hyphen helped me, like I said, to find belonging. And so, you know, I think so often, we might just, you know, have these little characters that we go across in our daily lives, and we don’t connect with them on a personal level. So I wanted readers to connect on a personal level with this tiny bit of orthography. And, you know, to see just how, you know, historically, how significant this, you know, piece of punctuation has been for so many people. From Dionysus Thrax to Gutenberg, to all of us today who consider ourselves hyphenated individuals, so not just hyphenated-Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are hyphenated-Australians and, you know, we could go on and on, right? But for me, it’s, it is so personal, right? Because I’ve found my own identity. So, you know, there’s so much of people talk a lot about feeling liminal. liminality, you know, in Spanish people talk about, you know, neither here nor there. And people often struggle with this. Well, I don’t fit anywhere. I’m too Iranian in America, and I’m too American in Iran. Right? I mean, you know, in the United States growing up, I was very aware that I had this very complicated name, right? And then I would show up at school with my lunchbox, you know, packed full of aromatic, you know, Persian food, which really set me apart from the other kids in Minneapolis.
Ben: Oof, wow yeah
Pardis: You can imagine, right?
Ben: There is some bland food up that way.
Pardis: Exactly. It got better when we moved to California. But you know, initially, here I am this, you know, young girl, you know, way too Iranian in America, my English, you know, had an accent to it. Because, of course, I didn’t learn English until I was five. And so I very much was aware of being you know, not fitting in, you know, the United States. So then all my life, I thought, Well, once I go to Iran, I’ll fit in there. Right? I will that’s going to be you know, the homeland. That’s going to be where I belong. And then I arrive in Iran, I began to do fieldwork. And of course, I’ve written a number of books on Iran. But the minute I arrived in Iran, I realize wait a second, I’m way too American for Iran. My headscarf was constantly slipping. I didn’t quite have the like, right look down for Tehran, like the you know, perfectly positioned sunglasses with lip gloss, you know, but without the headscarf falling. The very fashionable look that my cousin seemed to comport all the time, right. And so I had this shocking realization that I didn’t belong there either.
Pardis: Now, of course, so many of us can relate to that, this sort of I don’t belong here, I don’t belong there. And at first, it was really troubling for me. But when I started to actually read more about, you know, other hyphenated-Americans, and actually the journey of the phrase hyphenated-American, and even going back in time to learning about the hyphen itself, as being a piece of orthography meant to connect, meant to create belonging, I actually suddenly realized, I don’t have to live on one side or the other of the hyphen, I can live in it. And ever since I sort of had that realization, it’s sort of opened up a different way of actually seeing the world for me. And I found that so many of the people who are hyphenated-Americans that I’ve come across in stories, I tell in the book, they also have found a bit of liberation by embracing the in-between and living inside that hyphen.
Hedvig: It’s very impressive to me to have such a personal connection to a orthographic character. And I like it and I think it’s, it’s a tone is an angle that makes makes a lot of sense. I was wondering where to start. So should we start with the very old oldest sort of Greek and others usage of hyphens?
Pardis: Sure, we can start with where the hyphen actually comes from, right?
Daniel: Sounds good
Pardis: So yeah, so we can we can start with your favorite and mine. Dionysus Thrax. Right. So the the ancient Greek grammarian, who probably most people don’t give a second thought to, but I love, you know, thinking about his contemplations as he roamed the library halls of Alexandria, right? And he was struggling because he was quite fixated on language as spoken versus language as written. And so in the art of grammar, or Tékhnē grammatikē, he comes up with what we would later call a sub-linear hyphen, and he comes up with this beautiful little kind of bow-shaped, you know, marker underneath two words that sutures the words together for the reader or the singer in that case, right. Because, of course, at that time, a lot of these things that words that appeared on page were songs. And so he wanted to help make a distinction for the singer, between two words that were indeed separate. But that should have a piece or a ring of the song that brings them together. It was his way of demarcating that two words belong together. So even Thrax was thinking about this question of belonging, which I think plagues so many of us in the world today, here in 2021.
Daniel: So when did it do a little hop, and sort of get in the middle of the line?
Pardis: So I mean, this, there’s some debate about this, actually. But you know, the sublinear hyphen did continue to be used in Greek texts for centuries. Now, while the Romans had initially adopted the Greek writing practice of writing without spaces, it was actually by the eighth century, when Celtic monks, who were struggling with the unfaced Latin texts, they found a new use for the hyphen that the Romans would quickly adopt. So the Celtic scribes, they were having a hard time sort of prying apart the the sutured together words and concepts that their non-Latin speaking linguistic skills couldn’t grasp. So they broke up and inserted words, you know, dividing them in an attempt to make sense of them. But of course, remember, they were writing on stone, right? And so rather than start their writing over or procure a new piece of stone, or very expensive parchment, they decided to make a new purpose for the hyphen, which was dividing, right, so they use the hyphen to divide words or concepts that they didn’t understand. So that’s when the sort of the more elegant sublinear bow shaped u hyphen that was used to fuse words and highlight words that belong together, was erased and replaced with a straight line dividing marker of punctuation.
Hedvig: That’s really interesting.
Ben: My god, I’m just, I just feel so sorry for these poor Celtic monks. Imagine a language that’s not your own. And they’re like, also, it’s all just one big text. So have fun with that
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I took Latin in secondary school, and usually our Latin books had lovely spaces between words so that we could, you know, learn it, but we went on a field trip to Rome and saw some columns and stuff, and they Yeah, didn’t have any. Some of them don’t have any spaces. And it’s really hard.
Pardis: It’s incredibly difficult. And, you know, you probably see, you know, when you go to Rome that some of them have like, the dots between them, right?
Hedvig: Yes.
Pardis: Right. So it’s like, well, what, why? Why are the dots there? And what why is there a dot and why is there a hyphen, and it is, you know, I do feel sorry for the Celtic monks. But I’m also a little mad at them for taking the hyphen and making it a divider as opposed to something that sutures and make things belong,
Daniel: That seems significant.
Hedvig: And when you think about the other possible path, which is two things that belong together to write them without a space at all?
Pardis: Well, so actually, if you if you look at the journey of the hyphen, that’s actually what the hyphen has done. So, you know, when we take a look at the Oxford English Dictionary, right, so you know, some years ago, it came out, and people said: Oh, my gosh, you know, 1000s of words that had hyphens in them. There’s a hyphen, thief on the loose, there’s no more hyphens. And they were mad, and they were writing letters like to talk about, you know, complaints and mad letters to management. They were writing letters to, you know, the editor of the, you know SOED, saying you’ve stolen the hyphen. And the reality is, is that actually, what had happened was the hyphen had eventually brought words together, right? And so over time, you know, you had two words that began so let’s talk like way-station, because the hyphen itself is a way-station, right? So way station, two separate words, then you hyphenate them to show that they can belong together in a sentence, but then there it actually dropped the hyphen and you drop the space, Hedvig, as you’re suggesting, and then just becomes waystation But it’s actually the hyphen that brought them there that actually created that journey and created that new word without the space. But you still need the hyphen to take us from two seemingly separate words, to then a concept that then can enter sort of, you know, narrative language or discourse as one word. So in the shorter Oxford English Dictionary, when they actually removed the hyphen from some 16,000 words, that was actually, you know, a credit to the hyphen because they removed the hyphen from words that no longer needed to be hyphenated but that could actually be linked together.
Daniel: My job here is done.
Pardis: Exactly. And that’s probably what the hyphen said.
Daniel: And this is a pattern that you can see over and over again, if you poke around in the Google Books Ngram corpus, you look at a word like Goodbye, I’ve done this a bunch of times, you see, good space bye, good hyphen bye, and then Goodbye, or even good night. You know, the two word version is initially more popular, then the hyphen version really takes over. And then, in the last maybe 30, 40 years, we see one word versions, and it happens over and over again, with hairbrush and icebox, and lots of other things.
Pardis: Exactly. Though the hyphen does an important job.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m not, English is not my first language. And in Swedish, we don’t use the hyphen this way, we just go directly from space to no space. And it is a source of a lot of new words. We also do compounds more than English does in general. So every year when there the Swedish… sort of similar to like, language council puts out a list of their neologisms of the year, there’s often a lot of just compounds in there, because it’s very easy to make new words when you can just compound anything. And we do, we use the hyphen in some other ways. But it is actually fascinating. It’s a bit hard for me actually as a second language, because sometimes to know where the transition of word is, with English, because I can hear something and think, Oh that sounds like the way that the stress goes in those in those sounds, sounds like it should be one word. But then my beloved husband, for example, proofreads my text and says no, no, they’re ?? is two, and I just, sometimes I just throw up my hands. And one of those is data point.
Pardis: Yeah, that’s Yes. So Hedvig I can actually relate
Hedvig: [HEAVY SIGH]
[LAUGHTER]
Pardis: I can relate to you, because I’m also, English is not my first language. And so I would be reading things and I would have the same struggle. Where do I put the emphasis? But actually find that when the hyphen was there as that kind of way-station to use another one of my favorite hyphenated words, It actually helped my brain sort of understand how to then stress what words, but it also helped my brain to process. Okay, these two words that don’t seem like they have anything to do with each other, actually, can have something to do with each other. So it allowed my brain to like, keep that word and understand that compound word, right, because I’ve seen the hyphen bring the two words together.
Hedvig: That’s a good point. Yeah, I definitely prefer the hyphen to the space version anyway. And it is, I guess, if you have very long compounds, and you don’t have spaces, you can get into the same problem that the Celtic scribes have with Latin that you can get lost in where the segmentation is supposed to happen. And where you can get lost in parsing the word. Doesn’t happen that often, but I can, I can see it happening. And I definitely prefer the hyphen yeah, to this…
Ben: But we must protect ourselves from the eventual apocalyptic linguistic frontier that is old Latin.
Hedvig: So funny that you say that because in in Sweden, the rhetoric is exactly the opposite. We must protect ourselves from English’s as bad influence on us to put spaces where we shouldn’t have them
[LAUGHTER]
Pardis: Well see, thing, well, then the just the hyphen will solve all your problems, too. It’s a trans-national diplomat.
Hedvig: That’s not a bad point.
Daniel: The one rule that I know about hyphens is that you don’t use them if you have an expression like: this happens once in a lifetime, right? But if you take that and then you pick it up, and you use it as a modifier, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, then you do use hyphens, to keep it together and show that that’s, that’s a modifier. But we’re even dropping those. I was amazed to find in the book Hyphen, that New York when used as an adjective or used as a modifier, like New-York Public Library, got a hyphen,
Pardis: And it had it forever, yes!
Daniel: That’s weird to me.
Pardis: Yes. And, you know, still to this day, you actually have places where it’s, because it’s been etched in stone, Daniel, New York still has a hyphen!
Daniel: Yep. Amazing. Even things like high school student, you know, we don’t, we would never hyphenate that anymore. So hyphens are disappearing from a lot of words, but in issues of identity, like being an Iranian-American, seems like these are going to stick around. Is This The Last Stand of the Hyphen?
Pardis: Well, so let me say this. hyphens may be disappearing from a lot of words, but they’re also I think, appearing or reappearing. Just they’re sort of, we were talking earlier about the afterlife, right? They’re just reincarnated. Right. And so you know, a little bit later, we’ll talk about my word of the day or my phrase of the day, which I am going to predict for you all right, now. They’re are two separate words, but I predict for you all that they’re going to have a hyphen, pretty soon, and then it’ll be one word, probably 30 years from now. You’ll have to come back to me on that in 30 years.
Ben: How do you like that foreshadowing? Oooh
Pardis: You like that? Little bit of a thriller, a little bit edge to your see. But I do think the hyphen is gonna, is gonna appear more because it’s going to… you know, as, as words change, as you know, the zeitgeist, you know, rings in things like intersectionality. And I think the hyphen will also come in, to help us understand things like trans-formation, transformation, or proper pro-per and you can hyphenate things, to ask ourselves to reconsider a word like inter-sectionality, you put a hyphen in different parts of it to ask us to think about that word as a word, right? But in terms of this question of identity, I think, I think we’ve done a lot of work to say, you know, what? Being hyphenated as an identity is a powerful thing, and it’s not something you know, if we were to take, you know, Woodrow Wilson, or Roosevelt and their sort of disdain for or even, you know, John Wayne, “a hyphenated American is not an American.” We’ve moved past that. I mean, that was an awfully painful song, right? And I think we’ve moved past that to say that actually, in a sense, all Americans are hyphenated-Americans. And that has been really powerful. And I think that has given the mighty hyphen, its due spotlight.
Ben: One thing that I was thinking about, and I’d like to hear your experience as a Phoenician and an Arizonan. Arizonian? Arizonwa?
Pardis: I’ll stick with Phoneician
Daniel: Arizonling, obviously
Hedvig: Can we just make it Arizonoir?
Pardis: Arizonoir, Yes. Because that is the antithesis of because it is always bright and sunny here. So we should call it Arizonoir. That seems befitting,
Ben: I, when you, much, much earlier in this episode, when you said I’m sure there must be hyphenated-Australians, my brain sort of rattled through a few. And then I realized, we don’t really say Aboriginal-Australian, basically at all, we just say Aboriginal. And I was wondering if in the US, and I realized that there is substantial sort of discourse around this phrase, but is Native American hyphenated?
Pardis: It is not hyphenated. That’s a great questions, Ben.
Ben: That’s what I was interested in. Is, are the indigenous peoples of a particular place perhaps the only peoples who don’t need a hyphen? Because
Pardis: So that is what they would say, exactly right, Ben. That’s what they would say they would say: look, you know, actually, it’s it’s folks who are indigenous or Native Americans that don’t need the hyphen, but the rest of you all you’re Irish-American, or Italian-American, you all the rest of you all need a hyphen, but we actually don’t. So it’s a sort of like a look, this is where the where the original, you know, tillers of this soil.
Ben: And it’s just interesting to me that, I don’t suppose for any sort of, not through any agency necessarily has that linguistically manifest here in Australia, and presumably, in other places, as well, where, you know, individuals don’t refer to themselves as, you know, indigenous dash wherever, they’re just indigenous, because it’s their land.
Pardis: Although, you know what? That has actually created some political moments here as well. So I will tell you that here and I don’t know about Australia, but here in the United States, there’s definitely a tension between American-Indian. So people say, Well, we have a school that’s, which is one of the schools that’s under me is American-Indian Studies. And so there’s some tension between Indigenous and American-Indian. And there are tensions between okay, like, so we are, we are building a presence here as you were building a presence in Hawaii. Right. And so you have an indigenous community in Hawaii, who are who are saying, look, you know, we’re not Native Americans, right? We’re Islanders, right? We’re Indigenous Islanders. And now the question has arisen, well, are they considered American-Indian? Like, would these be courses that would be in American-Indian Studies? So even like the the epistemology right now is struggling with that question.
Hedvig: And I guess I don’t know if this makes any sense also, but I mean, Australia and United States of America are recent concepts as nations-states. Even if you’re from a place I could understand, I don’t know if anyone, you know, feels that way. But I could understand feeling like: Oh, no, I am from this place. I’m indigenous to this place. But like Australia might be something else. Am I making sense? Like the word Australia is, you know, an English word based on the idea of a southern continent as a whole continent. It’s not an America, you know?
Pardis: Yeah so actually to your point, a lot of, you know, folks here in Arizona, for instance, they identify as Hopi or Navajo, or Havasupai right? They’re not gonna they’re, they would say the same thing. They would say, why would I call myself Native American, right? Because America is a relatively newer construct or concept, right? And so that’s why they identify as with their tribal status, right? As Hopi or Navajo or Cherokee or Chumash,
Hedvig: I can understand both ways of feeling about that. I could understand feeling like No, but I want to, I want, you know, I want to underline that I am native and First Peoples or indigenous or Aboriginal, and then have the nation-state name, just sort of underlying that as a position to the other people of that state. I can understand that as well. I don’t know.
Pardis: You know, I do think that, my book isn’t out, but I’ve I’ve had some of my folks who are Indigenous read the book, and they’ve, they’ve actually come to me and say, You know what? Like, I do wonder if, if, if the hyphens can help us here. Because you also have people who say that they are, because you’ll have people who say that they’re, you know, Hopi and Havasupai, so they might say Hopi hyphen Havasupai, right? So they’re also, you know, you’ve also got that. Those two different identities, which a hyphen can actually help suture,
Hedvig: That’s really cool.
Daniel: What do you hope people will do as a result of reading hyphen?
Pardis: First, I guess I hope that I can help create a sense of belonging for people who had some of the same struggles that I’ve had, right? That this feeling of needing to pick one side or the other. I hope people can understand the power of living inside of the hyphen. And they can they can feel a sense of belonging by living inside the hyphen. I think for others, I hope that it makes them think about the power of a small orthographic concept, in really, you know, history, all the way back to the ancient Greeks, right, historically, and politically, bringing about social transformation. So I don’t think people think, I mean, obviously not here, we’re in a in a Cast room of the converted. But I think oftentimes, people don’t think about how social transformation comes about through things like orthography, and grammar and language. And so I hope that this book, because it will connect to people who right now, you know, we’re also in a moment, right, we’re right now, in a moment, of social transformation. We’re in a moment where people are really thinking about their identities in so many different ways. And I hope that as this kind of helps people think about their identities they’ll also take a moment to pay attention to, to the orthography and to the construction of concepts and ideas through language.
Daniel: The book is Hyphen. It’s out from Bloomsbury books, and the author, Dr. Pardis Mahdavi Thanks for talking to us about your work.
Pardis: Thank you so much for having me.
[MUSIC]
Ben: [CLEARS THROAT GRATUITOUSLY] Sorry, I just have to clear my throat because I hate Word of the Week so much. No, I’m not going to go back to the pretend. That was my old me and I have done a lot of therapy. I’ve made a lot of ground. And I have come to realize that Word of the Week is a necessary growth opportunity that I must take with both hands. So um I welcome Pardis, your offering to the altar of my pain.
Daniel: It’s very brave. I so admire you.
[LAUGHTER]
Pardis: It is very brave. And I’m hoping that, I’m hoping Ben, that this will help to soothe your pain because it’s a phrase of hope ultimately. So my phrase of the of the week or what I’ve really been thinking a lot about, actually, really since the the inauguration of our new President and Vice President Kamala Harris, is civil dawn. If any of you thought about that phrase, civil dawn? Do you know what it means?
Ben: Civil dawn?
Hedvig: I’m not sure I do.
Daniel: I had to look it up.
Ben: I’m gonna, I can, I’m gonna guess
Pardis: Okay guess, let’s see.
Ben: As with all things in life, when I don’t immediately know the right answer, I look towards the most appropriate pop-culture reference I can come up with. And so I’m thinking that this is in some way relevant to the truly abysmal 1980 film Red Dawn.
[LAUGHTER]
Pardis: Oh no!
Ben: In the sense that Red Red Dawn basically is a story about like how the Russians invade and some like plucky teenagers need to like fight the good fight against the invaders. and wonder
Daniel: Wolverines!
Pardis: That’s not a story of hope, Ben!
Ben: No, no no. If we change that for just a second, right and we recast the plucky teenagers as having won, and the plucky teenagers in this context being people who aren’t like insane, right-wing nut bags, then the Civil Dawn would be like the decent people coming back and taking over again.
Pardis: Yeah, okay. So now you’re actually on the Yes, yes. You’re on the right directory. Yes.
Daniel: Gets there eventually
Hedvig: Can I guess as well?
Pardis: Yes, go for it.
Hedvig: Can I ask first how the last word of that is spelled?
Pardis: Yes. So Dawn is spelled D-A-W-N
Hedvig: Okay. I thought it was D-O-N and I had a totally different, I thought it was gonna be gard
Pardis:Godfather?
Hedvig: Oh, no, no. Like,
Daniel: Did you have the cot caught merger, Hedvig?
Ben: That’s really fun. I like I like…
Pardis: Okay, but wait, Hedvig, You’re not totally off. Okay, are you are you ready? There is, the guard part that does come in. But go ahead finish and then I’ll tell you actually how that comes in.
Pardis: No, I thought it was gonna be you know that you don something, is to wear something.
Pardis: Ah, okay to wear. Okay. Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah, I thought it was. I’ve been watching a lot of fashion videos on YouTube lately. And I watched the whole one of the inauguration and everyone was very impressed with everyone’s clothes options.
Pardis: You’re right, actually and the color scheme, so, that’s true. I’m okay. I wish it was that but but not exactly. Daniel, do you want to venture a guess? Or, well you already looked it up
Daniel: I did. I had I had to check it out. And it was a term that I was not familiar with.
Pardis: Okay. So for our our listeners, Civil Dawn is, officially it’s actually a nautical term. Right. So it’s actually the moment when the geometric center of the Sun is six degrees below the horizon in the morning. Okay? It’s it’s preceded by Nautical Twilight. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of a new dawn, right? This, this new we were in a period of darkness here. And, and I was thinking about that, and I was also thinking a lot about so as you know, I do research on Iran. And the The guardian police, the morality police in Iran are called the Dark Patrol. Okay.
Ben: Oooh, that’s is…
Pardis: Yeah. So it’s like, so if you translate it
Daniel: Are we the baddies?
Ben: That seems like a real are-we-the-baddies moment.
Pardis: The morality police, right. Yeah. So the, the underground resistance that I’ve been studying, right, the feminist, the underground revolutions, the sexual revolution that I’ve been writing about, and I’m writing about the underground again, now. They, we call ourselves the Dawn Patrol, D-A-W-N, but it’s also like, so they’re the they’re the Guardian patrol, the morality police, the Revolutionary Guard, they there’s a guardian patrols slash the dark patrol. So that gets to your guard point Hedvig. But we called ourselves the dawn patrol, because we were the we were driving the light into the darkness. And so civil dawn, I’ve been thinking a lot about because we are I feel that that’s the moment we’re in, especially here in the United States, of we’re in that that moment, just before as the sun is coming up right now, right where the sun is six degrees below the horizon, but we are coming up and it’s the underground driving that light to shine that light in the darkness. And and so I’ve been talking a lot about civil darkness and and and with a lot of these underground movements, and people are saying, yes, we’re the dawn patrol, but in a sense, we are civiled on, because also taking that part of the civil like civility, right? We are a cause for civility
Ben: A civic society.
Pardis: Yeah, exactly
Daniel: Yeah, pertaining to regular society. That’s right,
Pardis: Exactly. And so these underground transnational resistance movements have been taking up this, this sort of identity as civil dawn. But so here are two words that you might not have ever heard together civil-dawn, but I think we’re gonna put a hyphen in them. Because actually, that signals the rise, the rising up of a movement.
Ben: I gotta say, Pardis if you ever want to become some sort of like quasi-totalitarian left-wing leader, that rhetoric was rock solid
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Stirring, stirring.
Hedvig: Unfortunately, isn’t… What’s the Greek party called? [FURIOUS TYPING]
Daniel: That was the rising golden?
Pardis: Golden Dawn, yeah
Hedvig: Golden Dawn. Mmhmm
Pardis: But Civil-Dawn, Civil-Dawn’s so much better
Ben: I would 100% vote for you and then be fine when you just took all democratic power away from whatever parliament was in charge.
Pardis: Well, thank you, Ben. But I’ll keep that in mind.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: That’s great, though. Because civil-dawn is that time when things are just starting to become visible, you can just start seeing things. Yeah.
Pardis: Yep, yeah. You googled it right, Daniel, how did you feel when you kind of read that or you saw those images when you? I’m also giving permission to people go ahead and Google civil-dawn, it’s actually beautiful.
Hedvig: Okay, I think I’m actually going to do that right now [TYPING]
Pardis: When you look at the image of that moment of civil-dawn, it’s actually my favorite time of the day.
Hedvig: Is it? I’ve heard this or I saw on QI, the show with, the British show. And you know, as you know, sometimes they’re right about things, and sometimes not. But there’s this thing, right? It’s sunsets, and I think it must be same at dawns, where the sun is technically below the horizon. There is a…
Ben: Below the horizon. There’s a light, there’s a glow
Hedvig: Yeah, there’s an effect that makes it look like it’s still a bit above
Pardis: Exactly. And you can actually see it when you Google it, you actually see the imagery, you’ll see where the sun is at civil dawn. And I sort of like that’s where we are.
Hedvig: And I’m looking at it now. And then. So it’s civil dawn, as opposed to nautical dawn and astronomical dawn.
Pardis: Correct
Hedvig: Wow, I wonder why it’s civil
Daniel: That’s right. So it’s civil, I did look this part up, it’s considered civil dawn because it pertains to regular folks, this is what regular folks would call dawn. For example, there’s a quote from 1931. in Oxford, “there are 24 hours in the astronomical day, two sets of 12 hours in the civil day.” So as normal people perceive it, there’s also civil twilight,
Pardis: Right civil twilight, right. And so because it’s also that that bit about kind of normal people, it’s like, yes, we are, the resistance is not a minority, the resistance that is like, we are the majority here.
Hedvig: Yeah I’m looking at the pictures, it is really pretty.
Ben: I really like that. That’s definitely, that’s a big vote yes, for me.
Daniel: Our next term of the week, vaccine hesitancy. This has been a big one lately. And so I wanted to put it out there. Many countries are putting the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccine on pause. But now it’s starting to lift a bit. I thought pause was another interesting term. People are reflecting on their options. I want to put an idea out there. Vaccine denialism is a horrible and irresponsible movement that kills people. Vaccine hesitancy is an attitude that I think, I don’t agree with, but I find understandable, because the responsible thing to do is to roll up our sleeves and get a vaccine when you can, whatever you can, of course, allowing that some people can’t because they’re immunocompromised or what have you. But it’s still normal to look around and think this is new, there have been some unforeseen problems. You know, well, what’s my move here? Now, I personally can’t get any vaccine yet, but I was sort of mentally calculating the odds. I’m just over 50. So AstraZeneca is probably fine for me. Should I, should I see a Pfizer becomes available? No, I should just get whatever because the odds of any clotting problems are so small anyway, COVID is way more serious, but then I am in Perth. So the risk of doing nothing is very low.
Hedvig: That’s the thing I think is really important is weighing the risk. There’s already a cognitive bias against doing something when the alternative is doing nothing.
Daniel: That’s right
Ben: Man, nothing is just so easy.
Pardis: So much easier!
Hedvig: It’s so much easier
Ben: So crazy to just do nothing.
Pardis: Well, and it allows you to continue if you don’t, if you don’t get the vaccine, then you can tell yourself, well, I’ll just continue to stay in my house and not you know. I’m double vaxxed, so I will say I’ve had both my shots of Pfizer.
Hedvig: Congratulations
Pardis: Thank you. Well, I’m an educator. So I figure you know, I’m dealing with thousands and thousands of students, and we’re going to graduate them soon. But, but do you think vaccine hesitancy might be a way-station? Like I’ve been on the way to getting the vaccine, that’s my hope.
Daniel: I hope that people will feel the concern, but also look at the evidence and sort it out for themselves and do what I think is the statistically wise thing, which is to get the vaccine.
Pardis: Yeah,
Ben: I think so as well. My take, certainly in Australia, around AstraZeneca is that policymakers are being incredibly cautious, like far far far far more cautious than they would be normally, like, like outside of pandemic status like conditions. Because they are aware that a significant mistake, right, like if they’re not… like the chances of AstraZeneca being a huge problem of super, super low. But if it becomes a huge problem then because of the space that we’re in and because anti-vaccine is the thing and all that kind of stuff, it could seriously compromise the public’s trust in a vaccine push. And so I think they’re just being… If I can be really uncharitable, they’re basically like: people are pretty dumb, if we make a mistake here, we’ll lose them forever, basically. And so we just, we need to really, really, really make sure that we don’t make a silly mistake. And to be really charitable, they’re probably also saying, like, losing anyone’s life over vaccine is really, really bad. And we need to make sure it doesn’t happen. Or at least it happens as as infrequently as is humanly possible. So I understand from a policy standpoint, why the pause is there, I’m with you, Daniel, I’d really, really hope that we, as human beings, sort of take up the gauntlet that they just kind of left there for a second when they say, Yep, yep, we’re all good. It’s safe. And we go, Okay, cool. Thank you for taking a closer look. We appreciate that. And boom, now I’m getting stuck with the needle.
Daniel: Me too. It’s a sign that the system works.
Hedvig: I’m yet again, going to surprise Ben. Ben has this idea that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia doesn’t make much good radio. Is that not true, Ben?
Ben: [CHUCKLES NERVOUSLEY] No, no, you’ve educated me since then… yes I do believe that.
Hedvig: Okay. Well, once again, I want to point to the wonderful ABC show The Signal, where they’ve done multiple episodes about this, and specifically about vaccine hesitancy where they talked about what is it like as a government to say, we’re going to have a pause, does that create more problems or less problems? Because you can argue, like you were saying that if you take a pause, you could make a seem to the public, like you’re taking it very seriously investigating it very seriously. And then when they unpause it, that should make people think, Oh, yeah, this is a good thing. But it tends to just make people more cautious. Overall, right, which is, here in Germany, we have an election in September, and just last Wednesday, they decided that non prioritized groups are allowed to have the AstraZeneca vaccine. So I’m on a waiting list. I don’t know. I’m hoping I’ll get something. Excited.
Pardis: Yep, it definitely gives a sense of freedom of movement. Once you get it definitely feels much better. I’ll say that. I definitely feel that
Ben: I’m a superhero against this one very specific, very thing!
Pardis: Very tiny, small but mighty virus. Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s go to the next one. One of the fun things about white supremacy, heh, is watching out for nativist dog whistles. People who are white supremacists just try to find a way to promote white people stuff without saying the word white. So there are lots of ways to do it. If you’re a dumb racist, you say, Judeo-Christian values. If you’re a smart racist, you refer to the Western Intellectual Tradition
Hedvig: Western Culture
Daniel: Or, oh, how about this one, enlightenment era values. that’s those are, those are good things, but people are picking them up and using them in the service of something bad.
Ben: Just to be clear in during the Enlightenment, we had slavery and colonialism, right? Just trying to
Hedvig: And also, people weirdly, worshiped the state of naturalness of humans, that is a little bit creepy as well. Like we’re all supposed to live in the forest without our shoes on or something, I dunno
Pardis: that’s sort of founding fathers discourse. We get that a lot in the US, right? It’s like our founding fathers like Yes, well, our founding fathers exactly like did not… had slaves, etc. Right?
Daniel: But if you’re a super dumb racist, who is convinced that, say the votes of black people shouldn’t count, because there’s somehow low quality votes. Have we got a term for you! And it’s a hyphen, one of our Words of the Week: Anglo-Saxon as a synonym for white, it’s back.
Ben: Can we do just a super quick tour on what this… because I remember growing up and people would say this as a as a synonym for white? What, what does it actually mean?
Hedvig: Doesn’t refer to two Germanic groups that invaded the British Isles about 2000 years ago?
Daniel: Yes
Hedvig: Well, the Angles, the Angles were already there, right? And the Saxons came to where the Angles were, correct? Is that how it works?
Hedvig: Yes but I think the Angles also came there at one point that wasn’t too much deeper in time? Because
Daniel: They were invited by the… oh, sorry,
Hedvig: No, I was I was gonna guess stuff, I prefer you knowing stuff.
Pardis: I was just gonna say that you know, the the sort of WASP, right? Was used quite a lot here in the states right White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant. To sort of be you know, demarcation of okay, yes, I’m an American, but it’s I’m a particular, you know, WASP but it had a bit of a pejorative connotation, right? This sense of like, well, that’s a very waspy thing to do or something but, and it had white in it. Yeah,
Hedvig: yeah. And you exclude the Irish then and Catholics
Pardis: Right, Catholics. Yeah,
Hedvig: Interesting choices all around
Daniel: It’s pretty specific, good thing it’s a four letter acronym. So the indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles were under siege from Celtic tribes. And so they invited the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes to come over and help fight. They all take a look at the place and said: we love it. It’s ours.
Ben: I’ll have this, thank you very much for this.
Daniel: They pushed the the original inhabitants all the way over to what is now Wales, they call them Wealas, which means ironically, foreigner.
Pardis: That’s so interesting,
Hedvig: Interesting choice, yeah.
Daniel: So the Angles lent their name to Angleland. And fast forward to Ben, if you remember 2018, we talked about how an Optus store in Sydney once made a job wanted to add saying that people who are Angl-Saxon would be preferred.
Ben: Oof
Pardis: Wow
Daniel: So yeah, that got taken down pretty fast. But lately, a group of US House Republicans were discussing the formation of an America-first caucus. All the worst Republicans said they were joining up. The money quotes where they were recruiting people to join based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” What is that? Like, feudalism? What? What kind of pre-Norman crap is going on there
Ben: Slavery?
Hedvig: Is it the actual law system? Because I know that like, British people do law in a different way and the Americas partially do it like that because of the British? Is that a thing?
Pardis: But also, what about, what is the story with the strategic dropping of the W and the P? Just an AS? Just take the A-S. Okay.
Daniel: They also say they are for an architectural style that quote “befits the progeny of European architecture.” Wow, European architecture. Never heard that one before.
Ben: I mean, it’s it’s weird how, like, the architecture in particular is such a weird one. Because when you cruise around DC, it’s so weird. Like, like, in the sense that like, if you have a passing interest in architecture, Washington, DC, and I mean, this would love in my heart is like, ye oldie Europe Disneyland.
Hedvig: Yeah all the columns
Daniel: All the Grecian stuff
Ben: All the state buildings were very clearly what they were, which is like, a nascent American state trying really hard to be like: we count! We matter!
Daniel: We’re a thing
Hedvig: We’re a continuation of Rome. Yeah
Pardis: We’re legit.
Ben: It’s just so funny that that now is like, Oh, we must continue this grand tradition. It’s like, you guys were just trying so hard to flex. And everyone thought you were such doofuses, when you did it.
Daniel: I just love how these republicans you know, are for European architecture. They must just look at the Taj Mahal and just get so angry.
Hedvig: And they also when they say they’re for European architecture, they’re for Western continental European architecture, usually, and from a particular era. They probably don’t want to make British Victorian townhouses. They don’t want to make Soviet cool brutalist architecture. They don’t want to make Scandinavian functional 1960s design. There’s very particular thing they want
Daniel: Not that Europe!
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Just the Europe like the one that’s already here,
Hedvig: And I’m not sure they want to have apartment buildings either. So I grew up in a turn of the century European four story apartment building, and I actually live in one right now as well. And they have a particular style and I almost have almost never seen it in America.
Daniel: Well, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy quickly put the kibosh on this movement because they accidentally said the quiet part out loud. The Republican Party wants to be racist without looking racist and they committed the sin of looking racist so the organizers said we’re just gonna quietly drop it
Ben: we’re gonna have to find a more effective dog whistle because this dog whistle just was a whistle.
Daniel: Now I know this is US based but pointing out racist dog whistles is kind of what we do. So sorry Hedvig, but Anglo-Saxon is one of them. Finally, hard pants. Hard pants. Is anybody wearing hard pants right now? You know what I mean when I say hard pants right?
Ben: I do not.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Hedvig: Is it not soft pants?
Daniel: Yes, that is exactly right
Pardis: Is it uncomfortable pants?
Hedvig: I’m wearing hard pants.
Daniel: Well they can be. For this one we need to go back. So we we mentioned this on episode 18 that the lede got buried and now people are starting to talk about hard pants. So let’s take a quick listen to what happened with lexicographer Kory Stamper back in Episode 18.
Kory: I have had a long conversation with friends of mine about finding the best soft pants, which is one of those, those sort of amazing terms that that only the pandemic could give. You know, soft pants being like, comfortable pants you wear at home and of course hard pants then being business trousers that you wear in the office.
Hedvig: So we call sweatpants soft pants in Swedish. So, we’re one step ahead of you
Kory: Yeah, I was gonna say the Swedes are so much better at so many things in America.
Hedvig: But we don’t have hard pants. We don’t have hard pants. I like hard pants. That’s very good.
Kory: You like hard pants? Hard pants is a great term. But yeah, it’s cuz you you… It’s one of those that you say it and you know exactly what you mean by it. Like, Oh, yes, hard pants. They’re not hard.
Daniel: It’s not a retronym.
Kory: Oh, it might be.
Daniel: I think it is.
Kory: Yeah. A retronym with a little bit of lexical distinguishing. Yeah.
Kory: Nice.
Pardis: I think it needs a hyphen.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Hard-pants. I agree.
Hedvig: I’d be up for that.
Pardis: I think I would be way more excited about if it had a hyphen because, I wouldn’t have put hard with pants. But now that I think of it, now that I heard that it makes sense. But I still need the hyphen for my brain to digest it.
Ben: It’s true what they say, when all you have is a hammer everything’s a nail.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Ben!
Ben: Who can resist.
Hedvig: Hey, Pardis would you put a hyphen on sweatpants?
Pardis: Oh, yeah. Well, actually, sweatpants I would put, I would put a hyphen, yeah, I would. Because sweat and pants or so…. Yeah, I would. And I like your, I like the point about how in Swedish it’s soft-pants. So I think we should actually stop calling sweatpants sweatpants, and we should just do soft hyphen pants.
Hedvig: Because sweatpants, it’s is a lie, right? That we’re only using them for sport
Pardis: It’s a lie! In fact, I like to save my sweatpants and not work out in them. I work out in like my shorts or my like my Lululemon leggings.
Ben: I was just about to say we’ve actually had a whole nother generation of garments take up the mantle of the lie. So we’ve we’ve had sweatpants, which people for 40 years have not been sweating in, and now we have active wear which people are just not active in.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: And then hard pants that aren’t even hard!.
Hedvig: Have you heard athleisure?
Pardis: Oh athleisure of course
Daniel: Oh that’s a good one.
Pardis: I like the Phoenicians are all about athlesiure. And something about it being warm all the time here that they just, everyone even comes to work in their athlesiure now
Hedvig: Fair enough.
Daniel: Alright, so I wanted to give that one it’s due. It’s on the record now. Hard pants. So here we go. Civil-dawn, vaccine hesitancy, Anglo-Saxon, hard pants, and maybe even athleisure you can spell those with hyphens, or without, we’re not gonna complain, but they are all our Words of the Week. A few comments. Glyph says, “I’m currently listening to the transcription episode. And I wanted to comment on Daniel’s statement that it is unfair that non-English speaking scientists have to learn English to get their papers indexed well, by Google Scholar. We have to learn English anyway, if we want to intersect with the broader research community, to collaborate to read other people’s papers and to get ours read. English is the lingua franca in the end, and it is really helpful that I only have to learn a single language to interact with everyone in my area of research, instead of like five or six.” Quick comments?
Hedvig: That is true. But as we were looking at some examples during that, if you’re researching about Hebrew, and articles about Hebrew in Hebrew aren’t coming up, then there’s a bit of a problem, right? Because you’re right. You want to interact with everyone in your research area. That’s a very good point. I think this is a very good point. In general, we don’t want to go back to this like Renaissance ideal that like, everyone needs to learn ancient Greek and Latin everything because that means only spoiled kids will do research and that’s no fun. But there are research topics where the lingua franca isn’t necessarily English.
Pardis: Right, like French.
Daniel: Let’s talk for a moment about the Amanda Gorman translation controversy. Amanda Gorman, of course, being the Black poet who presented her poetry at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in the USA. And the work has been translated into many languages. But of course, there has been some controversy as a translator in Catalan was taken off the job. It was felt that because he was not a Black woman that perhaps he wasn’t the right person to do that work. And there has been controversy in other countries as well. So @lulalearn on Twitter says “Episode 24 really problematic that reduces the ability to translate an experience solely on shared characteristics. There is more to me than just my race. And so my race alone should not determine who can or cannot study what I have to say. Continuing any translation will still need to be peer reviewed, not automatically okay, just because the writer and translator share characteristics.” Thoughts?
Ben: So just so I’m following here, Lulalearn’s sort of critique is that we shouldn’t necessarily seek out translators who share characteristics with the author of the original work?
Daniel: I think Lulalearn is arguing against a kind of racial reductionism, which I completely agree with and am not arguing for.
Ben: But but to, their point is that if you were to try and seek out translators who have a large sort of overlap in Venn diagram of sort of, like identity characteristics, that that is engaging in a kind of reductionism.
Hedvig: Or that it is accepting like a candidate for the job, who is less competent than the alternative, which is the thing I take a bit of an issue with
Pardis: But that’s a that’s a false binary, right?
Pardis: Yeah, yeah yeah
Ben: Yeah I reject that completely
Pardis: It’s like the binary of like, excellence. And, you know, people when they say excellence and diversity are a binary, it’s a false binary. So I would reject that frame framing completely.
Ben: Yeah, I would agree. I was just before I pushed back on Lulalearn’s point, I just wanted to make sure that I understood what was being said here. My… Yeah, I would, without wanting to be too combative. I would, I would mostly disagree. I don’t think that looking to find someone who has, like a, like a deep kinship and understanding with the author is engaging in in reductionism, necessarily. I don’t think anyone was advocating, like find any black person you can. That’ll do. I think that when you, especially something as ephemeral as poetry, you definitely want a person who who is able to tap into as, as much as is possible, a significant amount of that individual’s lived experience. I wouldn’t think that that’s reductionist on any level.
Daniel: comment from Rhian on our discord channel, who had thoughts. “There is a huge lack of representation in translation, full stop. Sweeping anecdotal statement, but the translators I know are all from white upper middle class and above backgrounds. The more ‘unusual’ the language” in quotes, “the whiter and more middle class the translator. I say this as a painfully white painfully middle class Swedish English translator, and our translator gene pool is tiny. I blame both the school system applying my UK born and raised perspective, and general attitudes about language learning. Most people don’t continue with languages to GCSE level, the exams you do when you’re 15, or 16, meaning they actively opt out of MFl, when they’re 12, or 13. Language learning is pointless, basically, [STRICT EDUCATOR VOICE] ‘you can’t get a job, if you don’t do a proper subject.’ Then you get to Uni and the pot gets even more homogenous at BA level. Student loans, compulsory year abroad, four year degree rather than three, the highest number of contact hours of the humanities subjects plus the reading and learning you’re expected to do meaning no chance of a part time job if you want to pass your degree. So you’ve excluded people from disadvantaged backgrounds, or automatically created self optimal conditions and a level and you’re looking at having to fund your studies with bank loans Bank of mom and dad again, part time jobs being almost out of the question. So yeah,”
Pardis: Oh no, Rhian, I feel like you need to come to Arizona State University, we have a whole new model of higher education going on here. Almost all of our students work. And in fact, I know you’re talking about the humanities. I’m the Dean of Social Sciences, but I have a lot of humanities schools under me, you know, people are getting BAs and BS’s in things like Justice Studies, or Trans-border Studies, or American-Indian Studies. And most of them are working, because we also reject the binary of access, that there’s a barrier between access and excellence. So we have tried to make our school inclusive, accessible, and excellent, but also flexible, right, so that we understand I mean, this is where even the online learning comes in, so that you can do multiple things. But I actually think the comment is the best best argument for a liberal arts education that I could hear, right? A liberal arts education prepares you to do any number of different things. I mean, that the statistic that stays with me is our students who graduate this May well have anywhere between 30 and 50 jobs in their lifetime. That is crazy. That means they’re needing to be skilling and reskilling. So actually, these humanities liberal arts degrees are positioning you very well, for any number of degrees, including translation. The other thing I push back on is Farsi is, Farsi or Persian is considered a quote unquote, unusual language, but most of the translators are not white. So there’s a little factoid.
Hedvig: I think what I take this comment by Rhian to be is sort of that translators are already less representative of the communities that are translating before in terms of diversity. And that in those cases, not giving a translation job of a person of color author to person of color translator is, is… Am I meant to take that this is supposed to be an argument that that is sort of further disadvantaging people, persons of color translators?
Pardis: I mean, that’s fair. I mean that that’s that’s that’s definitely fair. But I think I think the idea that that there aren’t that many persons of color translators because the system excludes that, I think we have to think about how the system has changed.
Ben: I certainly read Rhian’s statement to be basically a critique of a systemic, disquality of the training process, which means that a lot of the translators through the UK system, it sounds like end up being white. And that’s a massive problem that we need to address. Agreed.
Daniel: Which sounds like it’s happening at ASU
Pardis: It is definitely happening at ASU.
Daniel: Awesome. Professor Pardis Mahdavi, how can people find out what you’re doing?
Pardis: You can follow me on twitter on social media or I have my own website www.pardismahdavi.com, or stopped by Phoenix so you can call yourself a Phoenician for a day.
Ben: I want it so bad
Daniel: We should go. We’ll do a live show.
Pardis: We should. We have a beautiful studio here at ASU, we’ll host you and we’ll all the Phoenicians
Daniel: Oh come the day. Come the day. The book is Hyphen, and available from Bloomsbury books. Thanks so much for joining us.
Pardis: Thanks so much for having me. This was a real pleasure.
Ben: We have had such a delight on today’s show. But if you have a question, comment, or you just want to say hi and get in touch with us, we are BecauseLangPod on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram messenger on Patreon, TikTok and Clubhouse. And if there is some other, impossible to imagine, social network that you would like to engage with Daniel on, just tell him and he will make an account on that, on that platform.
Daniel: [DEEP SIGH] I will work it in.
Hedvig: I still think Vebo. I don’t know what we’re going to do with Vebo, but
Daniel: I don’t know about Vebo
Ben: I also would encourage anyone who is listening, I really like reading out people’s feedback at the end of the shows. But what I would like even more is hearing your voices. So if we can figure out some way to for people to send like, recorded snippets to us that we can just play so we don’t have to add like weird inflections to your voice and you don’t have to listen to us say your words and then be like, no, that’s not at all what I was saying. Then give us your voice. I think you could probably even email us if it’s not too long. Just emails an mp3 of what you’ve recorded. Hello@becauselanguage.com
Hedvig: Yeah, use your basic voice recorder app that almost everyone will have on their smartphones
Ben: And then just just a fling it to us via that ancient telegraphy pathway of email. And of course, please go out and tell heaps of people about how great our show is. If you’ve liked the show, just infect some other person with your linguistic love. And one great way to do that, if you don’t have too many friends in your life, like I don’t, you can just infect a random stranger through a review in all the places that you can leave reviews.
Daniel: Speaking of reviews, there’s a new one doo doo doo doo doo. Here it is. It’s from it’s from SmulTronV via Apple podcasts. They say “funniest podcast ever. Five stars. I came for linguistics and stayed for the lulz. Colon capital D.” Yeah, see, simple as that
Hedvig: And Smultron is wild strawberries in Swedish, so it’s probably a Swede.
Daniel: Oh, Smultron, huh?
Ben: I love that your name for wild strawberries also sounds like a Decepticon
Daniel: It does! Smultron
Pardis: Or a Perthling
Hedvig: A lot of berries end with on, it’s an old plural. So hallon, smultron, ???, etc etc
Daniel: As always, thanks for Dustin of the podcast Sandman Stories who frequently recommends us and many other pods.
Hedvig: Thank you so much for that. One of the great things about this show is that we have some money that kind people give us and we spend it on good things we think. And one of the things we spend it on is transcripts. As you would have known if you listen to the latest episode on our Patreon, we have the lovely Maya Klein, who makes transcripts for all of our shows, which means that you can search. If you’re thinking: Oh, where did I hear that thing. You can search our transcripts and find it and it also means that we can look for people who struggle to listen or can’t really catch everything we say you can also go and look at the transcripts. And the thing that makes this possible is our lovely supporters on Patreon. We would like to give a shout out to our top Patrons. They are: Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Lyssa, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, [PANTS HEAVILY] Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin. Thank you so much. To all of you for your support.
Daniel: Isn’t that just a great list of people. What a long list. Oh, it does the heart good!
Hedvig: At what point are we going to stop reading out?
Daniel: Always! Forever! Every single time. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening, we will catch you next time, Because Language
[MUSIC ENDS]
[AIR HORN SOUNDS]
Daniel: Hedvig, your beverage?
Hedvig: I am drinking, for lack of a better word Chai. Yogi tea original with milk and sugar.
Ben: Nice
Hedvig: It’s essentially Chai
Daniel: Not gonna judge.
Hedvig: I’m trying to cut down on caffeine. So I’m exploring a lot of non-caffeinated hot beverages.
Daniel: That’s cool.
Ben: I found the easiest way for me to give up coffee, which I did several months ago was just to have to wear a mask and smell my coffee breath. And then I was like, Oh, no, no, no, I don’t care for this at all.
Daniel: Gross! I’m trying to cut up on coffee by consuming more of it.
Hedvig: Why?
Pardis: Yeah, okay
Ben: Are you trying to teach coffee a lesson? Take that coffee.
Daniel: I think I’m just pushing my limits. I think that’s what that’s all it is.
Ben: I love that. That is your version of pushing. I’m going to drink slightly more caffeine.
Hedvig: Is it child related?
Daniel: No, I don’t think so. So that they don’t get it all, no.
Pardis: Or so that you can stay ahead of them. So you can keep going.
Ben: Yeah, as it’s classic, you know, use, a wakefulness promoting agent
Hedvig: Every parent.
Pardis: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel: I just need to stay one step ahead of the kid!
[BEEP]
Hedvig: Can I ask, am I making it up? Or is the word paradise mean enclosed garden?
Pardis: Yes that’s exactly right.
Hedvig: Yes!!
Daniel: Nice
Pardis: You’re totally right. It means… So it’s Pardes in Hebrew. And Pardis also means paradise or enclosed garden in Persian. And so a lot of linguistic experts speculate that the word paradise actually came from both Persian and Hebrew, the word pardes, pardis.
Hedvig: Makes perfect sense. Because there’s a point in the Bible right where they get like outcast and I always in my mind thought there was like a wall. Like there’s the wall and like outside of the wall is like desert and like no man’s land inside the wall is like the garden.
Pardis: It’s like a paradise. The Garden of paradise. Yeah, the Garden of Eden. Exactly right.
Daniel: Well it kind of reminds me about how the Old Testament — people hate it when I say Old Testament — when the Torah. It didn’t really concern itself with the afterlife until the Hebrews ran into Zoroastrians, and they were like: afterlife. Cool. Good idea.
Pardis: Yeah, put that in.
Ben: I could see a long con incentive to be very useful in this in this framework.