The Because Language team are talking through some of the most interesting research around, and you get to listen!
- Valuable medical information gets lost when Indigenous languages are wiped out
- When it comes to learning languages, multilinguals have the edge over bilinguals
- A generativist argues that languages don’t adapt to their environment. What’s behind this?
- And it’s iconicity turned up to 11: some experiments that explore how language began.
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Language extinction triggers loss of unique medicinal knowledge
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210609115508.htm
Linguistic and biological diversity linked
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210517194739.htm
Enhanced activations in syntax-related regions for multilinguals while acquiring a new language
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86710-4
Why Don’t Languages Adapt to Their Environment?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00024/full
Cultural evolution leads to vocal iconicity in an experimental iterated learning task
https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/6/1/1/6270843
Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon
https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5459/
Transcript
DANIEL: Get in close. I want to hear.
STEPHEN MANN: Yeah, no, if I do go quiet, just tell me and I’ll speak up. Sometimes I go low. I don’t know why.
DANIEL: And no drumming on tables! I’ll…
HEDVIG: Sorry — I won’t do it.
DANIEL: ~Oh, I can look up something!~ Tappy tappy tappy tap.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, sorry.
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus Patreon patron edition of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Her interests are linguistics, knitting, and specialty coffee. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Thank you very much.
DANIEL: You are into the coffee these days, aren’t you?
HEDVIG: I am quite into coffee. I must say my knitting interest has gone down. I did it for a while, and then I thought to myself, “Machines do this.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And then, once I had that realisation, I couldn’t really comfortably continue without feeling like a machine. But I’m trying to finish a scarf, which is just a big rectangle, but I’m trying to finish it.
DANIEL: Yeah, but knitting machines are so soulless, you know. If you have analog knitting, it sounds warmer.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they don’t go from 45 to 65 stitches on a couple of rows.
DANIEL: Even so…
HEDVIG: Somehow, I multiplied… yeah.
DANIEL: I’m going to throw my sabot into one.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Did you know that French Luddites threw their sabots, their shoes, into the gears, and that’s why they call it SABOTAGE?
HEDVIG: SABOTAGE, yes.
DANIEL: You knew that, didn’t you?
HEDVIG: Yes, I did.
DANIEL: Welcome to this episode. It’s Etymologies Everyone Knows. And also, joining us, his interests are bees, D&D, and Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s Stephen Mann.
STE: Thank you. Yes, accurate. Those are the top three, I think. In reverse order, obviously.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you for joining us. Ben can’t be with us this time, but we’re very glad to have your take on things to sort of be the non-linguist of the group. And that means I can’t pretend not to know anything. Actually, for this one, I might not be pretending, I really might be lost on some of these articles.
HEDVIG: All right!
DANIEL: So, thank you for being here.
STE: No, thanks for having me. I was just saying before how I was so impressed the first time I listened way back in the Talk the Talk days to how good Ben was at taking apart arguments and critiquing and pointing out holes that needed to be filled. It’s going to be a difficult time for me to try and step into those shoes.
HEDVIG: No. You’re just going to be you, and it’ll be fine.
DANIEL: Exactly.
STE: I also didn’t know the etymology of SABOTAGE. So, we’re starting off on the right foot.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Oh, I see what you did there.
STE: No pun intended.
HEDVIG: No, I did know that the shoes were called that. Never mind, I was going to say I wasn’t sure but I actually was sure. And they’re Luddites as well. Yep.
DANIEL: Yep. Now, this episode is a very special bonus Patreon edition. Thank you so much for your support. You help the show, and that means that for a few months, at least, you’re the only ones who get to listen to this. So, I’m glad that you’re here. We are taking all the news, all the research knowledge, and we are bringing it to you in our own special way, which means that we’re trying to figure it out and we’re probably not going to get it quite right, but we’re going to try.
HEDVIG: Oh, we’re going to do our best.
DANIEL: As you do with Journal Club. This is one of our famous Journal Club episodes. I like Journal Club. I learn more.
HEDVIG: I also like Journal Club. I think it’s fun. It is one of the shows where it’s the hardest to not try and sit and google and tap away at my machine at the same time, because suddenly we have something like, “Oh, well, how big was their sample size, actually?” And I’m like, “Oh, I want to know that.” And then, it’s like clickety, clickety, clickety, and then Daniel hates me. So, maybe for Journal Clubs, we just allow clickety clack?
STE: Do you have a sound effect that you can drop in to signify that you’re doing the research?
DANIEL: You can click while I’m talking because I can mute you during those times. We’re on separate tracks.
HEDVIG: Okay, click while you’re talking.
DANIEL: Okay, well, should we just jump in?
HEDVIG: Yes, let’s do it.
DANIEL: Okay, the first one is about loss of medical knowledge. This is work from Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte, Professor of Ecology from the University of Zurich. We all know that there are loads and loads of Indigenous languages and non-Indigenous languages that are disappearing. What’s the stat? In 100 years, we’re going to be losing, what, like half?
HEDVIG: That’s what David Crystal in his famous book on the topic says, I don’t know what the current rate is, but there’s about 7,000 languages in the world and a lot of them are actually, frankly, like, no longer spoken. We used to call that extinct, now we call that sleeping, because they can be revived again. But a lot of them are under threat. And by under threat, we mean they are no longer being passed on to the next generation.
DANIEL: Now, there are some bad reasons to be against this, and there’s some good reasons. One of the bad reasons is: when you lose a language, you lose a way of thinking. It’s no longer possible to think a certain way.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: It’s a bit sketchy.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s very Sapir-Whorfian. I think what gets confusing is that so often language gets mixed with culture and thinking, and it’s hard to tease out what is what, which is partially what this paper right now is about. Why don’t you tell us about it, Daniel?
DANIEL: Here’s a very good reason to lament the loss of languages worldwide, and that is that some of the stuff that is encoded in these languages is stuff that only those people know, and the example that I always go to is biomedicine. People in remote places, they were experimenting with herbs (or [erbz]) for a long time, and they remembered what worked. When we lose their language, we lose knowledge. But that’s what this paper is about.
HEDVIG: Yes, that’s what this paper today is about. So they estimate that about 75% of the world’s medicinal plant applications are only known in one language. Not surprising, is it? A lot of very localised plants and stuff are probably only known to a small amount of people, right?
DANIEL: Right.
STE: Yeah, I initially read that is that there this one language that is containing all… 75% of the world’s knowledge of medicine.
HEDVIG: That’s pretty cool.
DANIEL: Sorry, I didn’t mean that.
STE: But no, it’s… for each of these, if you pick one, there is one language, but they’re not all in the same language, I guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It isn’t always the same language. Actually, could that be true that English contains 75%? What are the stats here? 75% of all medicinal plant services are linguistically unique and therefore only known to one language.
STE: That’s really incredible.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What a disaster.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I wonder what kinds of applications there are in there. I know that ibuprofen is a plant. It’s extract, isn’t it?
DANIEL: I didn’t know that. I know that aspirin came from plants, but I didn’t know that ibuprofen was.
HEDVIG: Nope. I am looking at history of ibuprofen. No, I think you’re right. I think it’s aspirin that is from a plant base. I’m wrong. It’s interesting to be wrong.
DANIEL: Of course, the plants for aspirin came from the jungle, except you can’t find it now. You know why?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Because parrots eat them all. That’s going at the end.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The researchers say the big message is basically that “there is increasing evidence that cultural diversity and biodiversity are interrelated, and we find this at a fairly fine geographic scale. If this is the case, then it makes a strong argument for Indigenous people to be part of ecosystem management in sites where they live.” What this tells me is that the work we do needs to be connected with the community. The days of us being able to swoop in, study a language, and swoop out, they need to go, and the knowledge of the community needs to benefit the community. And when that happens, it can benefit all of us.
HEDVIG: And funnily enough, the next item we have on our Journal Club is very related about linguistic diversity and biodiversity, isn’t it? So this is a paper by Gorenflo and Romaine from Pennsylvania State and University of Oxford. And they were studying linguistic diversity and biodiversity to find out how to get better at biodiversity conservation in specific places in Africa. And they found, which has been found before, actually, by Susanne Romaine, one of the authors together with David Nettle, that the number of languages in a given space and the number of unique species in a given space are correlated across the world.
DANIEL: Okay. Now, why would that be? Because when conditions are good for living, lots of things can live there?
HEDVIG: I think so, right? That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
STE: Yeah, just from the abstract and trying to think about what kind of causal basis there could be for that seemed to be the key or the sort of initial hypothesis. These tests were done in natural world heritage sites, right? So, I guess the sites with really important resource bases, I guess, for humans, as well as other biological taxa.
HEDVIG: And unlike a lot of other papers that have been written before about biodiversity and linguistic diversity, in this one, they actually suggest some active policy changes. So they suggest that involving Indigenous communities in these places is a good way of making the conservation of the biodiversity have greater success chance. I’m not entirely sure what kind of involvement we’re talking, but it makes sense.
STE: It’s interesting. This is a biology journal as well, right? Not a linguistics journal.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think so. Conservation Biology. Yeah.
STE: I take it, it’s one where policy suggestions would be taken more seriously by people reading this?
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I’m not used to… Actually, before this show, there’s a famous book by David Nettle called Linguistic Diversity where he also talks about this. I was looking up a review of that book, and one of the review’s, like, main critique of that book was that it wasn’t suggesting policy changes, that it wasn’t saying, but it wasn’t discussing recent colonial history in terms of linguistic diversity. And it seems like this paper is taking that on more, like, active. Linguists in general tend to not… how do you say?
STE: Get involved?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Like, people who work in specific languages, people who do documentation work maybe get involved. But people who do, like, cultural evolution — are these two variables connected? — a lot of the papers we studied, they don’t tend to get involved.
STE: I can sort of see why from the perspective of somebody who just wants to do work and doesn’t want to get entangled in wider debates, certainly not political debates. It’s hard enough to do good science. It’s hard enough to entangle yourself within scientific debates without even going to wider moral and political debates as well. But there comes a point when the thing that you’re studying, you have an obligation to look into those things as well. And that’s, I take it, a part of the reason why this ends with policy suggestions as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’ve been so encouraged, as we’ve done episodes of the show, to see that there are so many people who are invested in promoting linguists from the community, promoting work from the community, making sure that — Living Languages does a great job of this — making sure that old work becomes accessible to people now, to whom that language pertains, so that we’re not just starting over again every generation. I think it’s such an encouraging trend.
HEDVIG: Yeah, totally agree.
DANIEL: Speaking of multilingualism, let’s talk about…
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Were we talking about…? Weren’t we talking about multilingualism? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’ll see if I can make that a little smoother. Let’s talk for a second about something completely different. [LAUGHTER] This is some work from Keita Umejima and a team in Scientific Reports. This is about multilingualism and what it takes to learn another language. This one was about Kazakh. I know not very much about Kazakh.
HEDVIG: Kazakh is a… now it’s going to be tricky, because it’s either Slavic or Turkic.
STE: Turkic.
HEDVIG: It should be Turkic, right? It’s not that we use Kazakh for Russia spoken in Kazakhstan. No, we’ve had this on the show before, we talked about Kazakh. I’m sorry…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We have talked about Kazakh.
HEDVIG: I tripped myself up because I was like, “I feel sure about this, but then no.” And, Ste, you’ve been to Kazakhstan, haven’t you?
STE: Yeah. I think I learned one word.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
DANIEL: What was it?
STE: I used to remember it. I think it was букет, bwket, it meant flowers. Actually because there’s a lot of flower stalls and it was one of the places where the word is in Cyrillic Kazakh rather than Russian.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because you can kind of read Cyrillic, aren’t you?
STE: One by one. Yeah.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
STE: Transliterate all the letters and then sound it out.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s more that I can do! That’s great. And you know a word in Kazakh. I don’t know any words in Kazakh.
STE: Well, anyone can know. Anyone can now look that up and tell me whether that was the right word or not. I didn’t check beforehand.
HEDVIG: I think you’re very brave to say it in front of…
DANIEL: That was a loan word, right? I mean, BOUQUET.
STE: Oh, BOUQUET! That never clicked before, literally.
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
STE: [laughs]
DANIEL: Daniel Midgley, loan-word spotter. Thank you. Thank you. I didn’t find anything too surprising in this one. What they looked at was how easy it was for speakers to pick up the phonology of Kazakh because, of course, it has its own phonology, it has different sounds from any other language. And they found that when people were exposed to Kazakh, it took less time for someone who was multilingual than for someone who is simply bilingual. For me, this says if you know a lot of languages, you’re a little bit better at picking up an additional one. This is my experience as well. When I learned Spanish, that was one unit of difficulty, let’s say. But then, when I started learning Russian, which isn’t that related, it didn’t seem as hard as learning Spanish. I had my footing, I knew what kind of things to look out for, kind of.
HEDVIG: But is that a learning advantage or a linguistic advantage, am I making sense? Like, is learning how to swim, if you know how to swim, like, do the proper crawl thing, are you then more better at learning how to run well? I don’t know, was that a good metaphor?
DANIEL: Well, one of the things that they mentioned is that not only were they better at picking up phonology, but also picking up syntax, but also, they found in this fMRI study, when they looked at the brains of these multilinguals, they found that their domain general brain networks were more enhanced, which suggests to me that there’s a lot going on behind the surface besides just language.
HEDVIG: Cool. That’s really cool. And this was a paper in one of the Nature journals, Scientific Reports, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: Now, it’s maybe time for clickety clack, because I was wondering what languages people knew.
DANIEL: Well, there was Japanese. There was some English. There was…
HEDVIG: Ah, it says here, 62 native Japanese speakers, all the participants were acquiring Kazakh for the first time. And then, one participant — ah! — had both Japanese and Turkish. Turkish is also Turkic…
DANIEL: This is a Turkic language. That will give you a leg up, wouldn’t it?
HEDVIG: And then… I want to know what other things the multigroups knew, because if they knew Turkish… and she was not exceptionally… the person who knew Turkish was not much faster than the other multilinguals at acquiring Kazakh.
STE: It looks like the reasoning they excluded it was just it was dual L1 rather than the one of the L1s was specifically Turkish.
HEDVIG: Oh.
STE: Anyway.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you’re right. That’s really interesting. It’s always interesting to read the materials and methods section of these papers. I find it’s one of the most interesting parts very often. But if they mentioned the person had Turkish, I’m assuming the other ones didn’t have other Turkic languages. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have highlighted it.
DANIEL: So we have talked a bit about what kind of advantages someone has if they’re bilingual, and it looks like earlier work about executive function hasn’t really panned out. But it is kind of nice to see that if you are multilingual, that does have an advantage. And that is learning more languages makes you good at learning more languages.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked before on this show about what are other cognitive possible advantages of being bi- or multilingual but it does seem, I agree, that learning more languages seems like a non-surprising advantage of knowing more languages.
STE: My response to this is, like, you know the meme where Chrome and Firefox are fighting and in the corner, Internet Explorer is like eating paste?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
STE: We got the multi and the bilingual people fighting it out over who’s better at learning a new language, and then you’ve got the monolingual people in the corner, enjoying the taste of their own language.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Sitting this one out.
STE: Sitting it out, yeah. I say that as someone who is trying to learn a second language right now as well!
HEDVIG: And you’re doing so well at it.
DANIEL: Yeah, how’s that going?
HEDVIG: It’s going really well. We have German class every week, and — I’ll be honest — I just glide by by guessing from Swedish a lot of the time.
DANIEL: You Germanic speakers!
HEDVIG: We were learning a new pragmatic particle, DOCH. And I was like, “Ah, that’s like DÅ.”
DANIEL: I love DOCH!
HEDVIG: Yeah, and I see Ste there, like, asking questions, being like, “Okay, so in this case, it goes in this position.” But then he makes these really nice sentences and you get the gender and the case right more often than I do.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
STE: I can make a really beautiful sentence given five minutes to construct it, but it doesn’t really bode well for conversation or participation.
HEDVIG: No, I think you’re doing great.
DANIEL: Whereas Hedvig just dropped some proto-Germanic on their asses and it’s just fine. You get the idea.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I want to talk about DOCH. I’m not finished with DOCH. My understanding of DOCH is that if somebody says: it isn’t, then you can say, it is too, and they can say DOCH and there’s nothing you can say back. Is that right?
HEDVIG: Yes. Our German teacher told us that it can be contrastive in that function. Yes. It can also be… what was it we had, MACH DOCH?
STE: Just do it. We were trying to think of translations for that Nike…
HEDVIG: Yeah, if you use the imperative form, the one that’s asking… command people to do things and you add DOCH, then it becomes more direct and almost a little bit rude.
DANIEL: Oh, well, that’s easy to translate.
HEDVIG: To what?
DANIEL: SUDO.
STE: [LAUGHS] This is one of those situations where only an XKCD comic can explain…
HEDVIG: Oh, I know what SUDO is on command line stuff.
STE: Yeah, that’s it.
DANIEL: Yes.
STE: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Sudo, do it.
HEDVIG: Okay.
STE: Yeah, when I was sort of struggling to get it, the best examples were ones that are just ridiculous commands like, “verdienen sie doch mehr geld”. Just earn more money.
HEDVIG: I think JUST. You keep saying JUST all the time. Just do it.
DANIEL: JUST is good.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think JUST is doing it. Yeah. But it could also be like, “Get out of the way then.” If you’re in the shop and you’re annoyed someone’s in your way, apparently you can use DOCH as well.
DANIEL: This is a dangerous word! It’s almost got too much power.
STE: I remember someone telling us, I think, very similar to what Daniel said originally about…
HEDVIG: Contrastive.
STE: Yeah. For example, if you say something like, “Oh, no, we weren’t in the office drinking gin.” “No, doch, doch.” Something like that.
HEDVIG: Hmm. Hmm.
DANIEL: Indeed, you were.
STE: Wasn’t that an unnamed person’s example to us a few months ago?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] We weren’t in the office drinking gin?
STE: No, not about us, about themselves. Which is why they’re going to remain unnamed.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
STE: I cannot, you know, drinking gin in the office.
HEDVIG: Let’s hope my boss never becomes a Patreon!
DANIEL: Thank you. I enjoyed hearing about your German studies. Let’s go on to some work from José-Luis Mendívil-Giró from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Would this person possibly be described as a generativist?
HEDVIG: I think they are. We should also say that this paper is a few years old, but I’m trying to… It’s from two-thousand and… I’m clicking it. 2018.
DANIEL: Why did this get your attention at this distance?
HEDVIG: Ah, good question. It’s called, “Why don’t languages adapt to their environment?”
DANIEL: Wait a minute, we just did a whole show about languages adapting their environment…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: …and it turns out they kind of don’t.
HEDVIG: Well, it turns out for those three things, it seems like they kind of don’t, which is fine, I think.
DANIEL: Which is the climate thing, so heat and air pressure.
HEDVIG: This paper caught my attention because I am myself pursuing research projects that have to do with the social niche hypothesis and if social environment of languages makes a change for what they’re like, or how fast they diversify and stuff like that. And I wanted to… you’re looking, you’re writing a paper and you’re trying to find a contrasting view of, like, what would the opposition be? Me and my coauthors came across this paper and we were all trying to read it, and it all enraged us.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: We had trouble finalising reading the paper because we were all like, “Argh [GRUNTS].”
DANIEL: [GROANS]
HEDVIG: Like that.
DANIEL: Steaming.
HEDVIG: And then I noticed that Séan Roberts is actually one of the reviewers, so I’m not sure what to make of that because Séan is a friend of the show and is a very sensible person. I thought this paper was… I don’t want to be too mean, but I found it difficult to read, and I don’t agree with the conclusions.
DANIEL: I have this friend who is a doctor who’s very knowledgeable, very temperate in his reasoning, and avoids the kind of polemicism that I love to go in for. He avoids it like anything. So I always think, “You are TOO SENSIBLE, and it’s DRIVING ME CRAZY.” Is that like this?
HEDVIG: No. As in: this paper’s not sensible.
DANIEL: No, is that like Sean though, reading over this?
HEDVIG: Oh, like, he’s being too fair in his review?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: I mean, well… let’s get into this paper.
DANIEL: Why don’t you tell me about it?
HEDVIG: Right. This paper is called, “Why don’t languages adapt to their environment?” It’s written by a man who I would confidently describe as a generativist thinker, so he’s part of the linguistic school.
DANIEL: I just have to bust in though. Sorry, languages do adapt to their environment, don’t they? I mean, really. Social environment, like, we’ve talked about how when you have a number of people, the language looks that way. But if you have a huge number of people, then the language looks a different way.
HEDVIG: Well, we’re trying to figure that out now. This is the cutting edge right now of linguistic research, is whether this is true or not. But we are trying to figure it out by… like, we, I say, as in other researchers are trying to figure out, trying to figure out by coming up with empirical test cases, and then seeing if the effect is significant. This paper is dismissing that point from theory, which is a different beast.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s… that’s rough.
HEDVIG: Well, you can… theory can be great! One of the reasons I also want to talk about this paper is because we don’t talk that much on this show about generative thinking broadly that much. So, this paper… and I’m going to get Ste to help me along a bit as well. First of all, there’s a couple of premises, basic assumptions. So the first one is that languages don’t really exist. They’re like fuzzy defined categories. The thing that exists is the internal thinking language of an individual.
DANIEL: Okay. So this is very common for people in the Chomskyan mould. I tend to look at like wouldn’t say, “Look at this group of people doing a certain thing. They’re performing language and they’re changing it according to…” But if you’re more in the Chomskyan mould, that you’re going to think of language not as it’s performed — that’s the external manifestation of language — but the real language is inside your brain, the internal language.
HEDVIG: It was inside you all along.
DANIEL: It was inside you. It was the friends we made along the way. No, it’s NOT the friends you made along the way, it’s inside you!
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: That’s not language as a social action. It’s language as internal cognitive activity.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. And languages — as in Spanish as a language and English as a language or whatever — aren’t really meaningful units really, from this perspective.
DANIEL: That is interesting. I’m not going to poopoo that. I think that’s… because English, what is that? It’s not a thing, neither is Spanish.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but we can talk about… that there’s a lot of idiolect. So, the external individual language of an individual and how they differ, but we can say that there are clusters, right? Like, people who say that they speak English tend to understand each other better than one person who speaks Swedish and one person who speaks English.
DANIEL: We define English as, “Well, it’s not anything else.” It’s not Spanish. It’s not Japanese. It’s not anything else. These people understand each other mostly, kind of. It comes in different flavours, but it’s English, but it’s an abstraction.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if I would go that far.
DANIEL: That’s so interesting.
STE: Even those categories are less extreme, you could say, than the I-language, the internal language, that is what this author, and I guess other generativists, are using the word LANGUAGE to refer to. They’re not just taking the idiolect of an individual person who speaks English in a kind of janky, unusual way. They’re taking it to be something that is very different, very much deeper than the kinds of surface structures that distinguish languages as we would talk about languages. They’re talking about the internal system.
DANIEL: And would this be the kind of thing where Chomskyans often say, “Well, all of human languages are basically one language, the universal grammar.”
HEDVIG: Yes. From this perspective, exactly. I-languages are very alike, and external languages may have differences between each other, but that’s just like makeup, that’s just external. That’s not important. Those differences aren’t really important. I should also say that this particular generative stance, there are generativists who aren’t subscribed to these quite strong beliefs.
DANIEL: Okay, but I am listening. I’m listening. Okay. Once we accept that the languages are basically kind of the same language with minor tweaks and they don’t adapt to the environment, why don’t they adapt to their environment?
STE: Once you’ve got this internal system, you’ve got a shield between that internal cognitive system and the rest of the world, that interface. And hings can change in the way that the interface works, the way that you converse with other people. These are the superficial changes in words that we see that may account for the superficial differences between external languages. But the only kinds of changes that can occur are changes to that superficial level. Once you’ve got this model of the external part, the interface, and the internal part, it’s a short step to saying then that internal part just can’t change at all as a consequence of something that’s happening in the external environment.
So in fact, I think a better title for this paper would be, “Why can’t languages adapt to their environment?” Because it’s not an empirical claim, it’s not like you’ve looked and seen whether languages, in this person’s definition of the word LANGUAGE, have changed or not. Languages, as they define them CAN’T change to adapt to their environment, by definition, because the model they’ve set up just doesn’t enable any kind of pathway from external circumstances to a change in the internal structure of brains.
HEDVIG: Exactly. And in one place, I think the author also says that the only environment that’s relevant to language is the brain.
DANIEL: That is the environment, and we all have human brains.
HEDVIG: We all have human brains, and they are so similar, and the variations across populations aren’t meaningful in any way, and that’s the only environment of language. So no, it doesn’t adapt. In fact, I think he even says language doesn’t really change!
DANIEL: Not deeply, not the I-language. That’s the same as it was when we acquired language a long time ago, because it’s the I-language.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What if I challenged that by saying, “I don’t think these superficial differences are, in fact, unimportant at all?” What if I said, “I think they’re kind of important”?
HEDVIG: Then, from this perspective…
DANIEL: Would he just say, “Well, I don’t”?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m sorry, I think that’s a little bit the response from this perspective is, “Oh, but you’re wrong,” because you’re not agreeing to the basic premise that the only interesting language is the internal language and the only environment of that is the brain.
STE: Yeah, it’s really difficult to see how this can constitute a conversation between people like you who study ecological relationships with languages and people like this who has that definition of language. They’re two different definitions of the word LANGUAGE. It would be…
DANIEL: And I’m okay with that, because different definitions of language show us something interesting. Like, formal language is one way of looking at language and social language is another way of looking at language. That’s totally fine. The other way that I might approach this is by asking the author: If you say that the I-language, the internal language, is the really important thing, what can you tell me about it? What does it look like? What are its structures? Because we’ve actually seen how sometimes cultural beliefs like taboo avoidance — don’t say the names of dead people — can actually change the grammar of some languages. And the grammar is something that Chomskyans at least think is kind of important. So, I would ask this person, “Are you able to outline the structure of the I-language? Or, are you just going to not tell me what it is and then say it’s the only really important thing?”
HEDVIG: No, I think other generativists are working on what the I-language is like. I mean, that’s what UG is all about. We’re going to have opportunities later in our show to talk to some generativists who maybe… Maybe we’ve misunderstood them, but I would say that part of the great generativist enterprise is answering that question. This project of defending that basic premise from people who say that there’s a social or ecological adaptation of language is like a side project. Most generativists are involved in trying to answer the question you just asked, yeah.
DANIEL: Now, ages ago, they had the Principles and Parameters model where they were trying to figure out, what are the principles of language, and then what are the parameters along which they shift between language. I know that they don’t do that anymore. I’m not as well versed on what form their search takes now. Are you better informed than I am on this?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. But I know that we’re going to have a special. This will be a sneak preview for our Patreons in our show planning. We’re going to do two episodes, one with senior people talking about generativism, and one with more junior people talking about generativism, and we’ll be asking them these questions, I think, because, as far as I understand, they’ve changed names of the theories and the theories have changed, but the central enterprise is still the same.
DANIEL: And I will be very interested to find out what they think language is like and what’s important about it.
STE: I’m extremely looking forward to these shows, genuinely.
DANIEL: This might be hard. This is going to be rough terrain.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it is!
DANIEL: But I’m up for it!
HEDVIG: Okay!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, that sounds interesting. Let’s go to something maybe a little easier, something that I grasp much more intuitively, and that is the iconicity of language, by which I mean, language kinda looks like the thing that it refers to, or sounds like the thing that it refers to. So we can all think of examples of iconicity, like for example, onomatopoeia words.
HEDVIG: Our cat is teeny-tiny!
DANIEL: Yeah. [laughs] Okay.
HEDVIG: She’s quite small.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, let me start with that first. Yeah, we have things like SPLASH or WOOF, words like that. But then we also have words for size. For example?
HEDVIG: Large, huuuge.
DANIEL: [BIG VOICE] Large and huge.
HEDVIG: Gargantuan.
DANIEL: [TINY VOICE] Teeny-weeny. The small words. We have a counterexample of BIG and SMALL, but in general, the tiny word sound like teeny-weeny and the big words sound big and huge, and gargantuan. Good so far.
HEDVIG: What you’re saying is that front vowels are… front high vowels, like /i/ are more… I’m also doing a high tone for some reason. /i/…
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Why not?
HEDVIG: …are tend to be associated with smaller objects and back vowels like /u/, /a/ are tend to be associated with LARGE.
DANIEL: So, let’s just take a second and focus on that, even though we’ve kind of done it before. If you say to yourself, /i/ and /u/, back and forth: /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/…
HEDVIG: [LIKE A SIREN] /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/
DANIEL: And you notice what your tongue is doing, on the /u/, your tongue goes back a bit. At least mine does. And if you say /i/, your tongue goes forward, Ee, Oo Ee, Oo. My tongue is just sliding back and forth. But is yours?
STE: /i/ /u/ /i/ /u/ /i/. I can’t feel my tongue.
HEDVIG: The tricky part is with /i/ and /u/, you’re also doing different lip movements. /i/ /u/, so that makes it harder. So, if you can do an /i/ /ɯ/ /u/ /ɯ/ /u/ /ɯ/ /u/ [SWITCHES BETWEEN ROUNDED AND UNROUNDED /u/]
DANIEL: Yeah, I can feel that. I think so.
HEDVIG: You can.
STE: I’m trying to see your tongue.
HEDVIG: Ste’s trying to see my tongue. /i/ /ʌ/ /i/ /ʌ/
STE: /i/ /ʌ/. I don’t think I put my tongue in my teeth when I say Ee.
HEDVIG: Not near your teeth, but more front than when you say /u/.
STE: /i/, /u/. Oh, yeah. I felt it go down.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And the easy one is /i/ and /a/ because with /i/, your tongue is really up high, but with /a/, it’s much, much lower. So, we say that /a/ is a low sound, /i/ is higher, and it’s more toward the front of your mouth, whereas /u/ is back just a hair.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s why your doctor makes you say, Aaaa, because that’s…
DANIEL: Aah. Oh!
STE: Because it goes down to the bottom of your mouth.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: [AS A DOCTOR] “Okay. Open your mouth and say Ee. Wait, I can’t see anything in there! What are you doing?”
HEDVIG: Exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Now, let’s see here, I’m noticing this paper, “Cultural evolution leads to vocal iconicity in an experimental iterated learning task.” Eh, wait a minute, is Simon Kirby behind this somehow?!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It sounds like it. We know…
DANIEL: ‘Cause, he loves those games where one person does something and hands it down the chain, then hands down the chain.
HEDVIG: It’s like a very complicated game of telephone.
DANIEL: That’s great.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They’re really cool. You can in a controlled environment learn a lot of things from these. And if you look at the author list, yes, there’s two other authors, Niklas Erben Johansson and Jon W Carr, who are both before Simon Kirby, but he is also the coauthor of this paper, indeed.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay, I was looking at the experiment that they did. They gave people a word, a made-up word, and it was a long word. It was “grimpralhus”, something like that. And then, they would get a person to hand it down to the next person, and then to the next person. Here’s how it went. It went something like grimpralhus and then gimrahu and at about five generations later, it’s igarʊ. It can really change a lot. And then, about five more generations, it’s ejarʊ. And then, by the time you get down to generation 15, it’s ejlo. That’s a really long way from gimpralhus, ejlo.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But for a different group, they gave them grimpralhus, and then they told them, “By the way, this is a word that means small.”
HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: And then, they watched what would happen as they went down the chain to see if they would get any special kinds of sounds. And the word that they got, for example, by the end was siathaw, which contains an E.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it does.
DANIEL: They gave more people the same word gimpralhus, and they said, “This word means big.” I noticed that whereas the words for small turned out to be shorter, two syllables, and they had /i/ in them. When it was big, you had things like gringranrʊs and ivivibixabixa. This was in the same chain. And it ended up on inembuɹiha.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: That’s big, and it’s got lots of /a/ vowels in there. I guess siathaw has vowels like that too. But they also tested for pointy and round. The pointy one, it went from gimpralhus to tusalopo and round, it went to hokogo. [laughs]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is so great. [LAUGHS] How did it get all the way there? You can see the chain.
HEDVIG: And we should say… I’ve also found this table now, and this is an example of one of the chains, but they did this many, many times. They didn’t always get tusalopo and hokogo.
DANIEL: No, no. That was one…
STE: That would be impressive!
HEDVIG: That would be very impressive!
DANIEL: It could go anywhere. Yeah, then I’d be interested. They found, it looks like that when it was small. When they said this word means something small, they tended to get lots of /i/. And when they said that it was pointy, then they got lots of acute consonants. What’s an acute consonant? That’s not a term I’m familiar with.
HEDVIG: No, no, no, I’m looking at the definition here. So it says here that acute are things like /n/ /t/ /d/ /s/ /z/ /l/ /ɹ/ /r/ and /dʒ/. Whereas grave ones are /m/ /ŋ/ /h/ /k/ /g/ eff — I’m mixing names, sorry — /f/ /h/ /v/ /w/.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m reading that, that acute consonants, we now call them mostly coronal. What is coronal? I should know this.
HEDVIG: Oh, it has to do with your tongue, what part of your tongue you’re using. So, if you’re using the tip of your tongue or the back of your tongue.
DANIEL: Okay. Oh, I’m seeing also the Wikipedia page for this says that there are labial, acute, and back. And the labials are p-like, the acutes are t-like, and the back ones are k-like. So all the /t/, but also /d/ and all the ones right around there. And those are the pointy ones. I guess it sounds kind of pointy. I guess I’m getting a kiki/bouba thing going on here.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Except it’s titi.
HEDVIG: So grave actually mixes /m/ and /b/ — which are done with the lips — with /k/, which are done for the back in the mouth.
DANIEL: Right, okay.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if I would say that this… like, when I think of the vowels like we talked about before, I get an instant sense of what the iconicity could be about. When I look at these consonants, I’m struggling more.
STE: Yeah, there are three different ways of categorising these consonants. And like you, Daniel, I was thinking of kiki/bouba, or whatever the example is that the one that linguists often tell to nonlinguists.
HEDVIG: Kiki/bouba.
STE: And I was looking out for…
DANIEL: The spiky one!
STE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, kiki is the spiky one, the blobby shape is bouba.
STE: In the example table, the round one has the K in it, I think. Not this one, in the example transmission chains that we just looked at. So, yeah, they’ve categorised them in sort of a different way.
HEDVIG: Maybe the kiki/bouba you mentioned made me think of the vowels, but yeah, you’re right.
DANIEL: That’s what I’m thinking too. I’m thinking, if you said koko, that wouldn’t be spiky.
STE: Ah, really?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s the vowel thing. It’s not the K thing so much. It would have worked just as well if they’d said, “Oh, one of them is tit and one of them’s bouba.”
HEDVIG: But that said, tusalopo and hokogo both contain a lot of /o/, and they’re pointy and round.
DANIEL: Yeah, I guess that’s why they went for the T, huh, for pointy?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Hm.
DANIEL: I love iconicity, I think it’s so cool. The way it seems to have an influence on language and I think there’s a lot of interesting data in this paper.
HEDVIG: I definitely think that there’s also the effect of, like you said, the length. The big words in this example are… there seem to be three or four syllables. Whereas the small words boil down to three or two syllables.
STE: And look how quickly the long words change. The longer words are changing pretty much every generation. Whereas the smaller words, obviously, are much easier to retain because easier to hear and easier to recall.
DANIEL: [SINGING] Limits on working memory.
HEDVIG: It stays in… for the small one, it stays jahu for a while in this example. Just jahu, jahu, jahu, jahu, jahʊ, bjaho, mjaho. But for a while, everyone’s like, “Yeah, no, this is the same. This is the thing.”
STE: I love these transmission chain experiments.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they’re really cool.
STE: Yeah, right, I like the idea of Simon Kirby just sitting in his office thinking, “Okay, what can I get these undergrads to do next?”
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, and by the way, didn’t we find the connection between number of syllables and Pokémon evolvedness? Remember that? Yeah!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: If you had a little tiny Pokémon, it was usually two syllables. But if you had a massive one, highly evolved, it was, like, three or more.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s it. Yeah, that’s pretty fun. What’s next in our iconicity segment?
DANIEL: Well, let’s see. There’s one by Bodo Winter and Marcus Perlman. This is Size, Sound, Symbolism in the English Lexicon. Hey, this is exactly the same thing. As we’ve seen before, people have noticed that size words have a lot to do with vowels. Like, if I have two pairs of scissors and one pair is tiny and the other pair is huge, and I say that one is a lofo and the other one is a lifi, you know exactly which one is the big scissors and which one is the tiny scissors. But it hasn’t always been clear if this is just an artifact of the datasets. So what this team did, Bodo Winter and Marcus Perlman, they looked at examples of words in English that meant either tiny, small, large, big, or huge, and they extracted 223 words, and they got things like GIGANTIC and HEFTY and HUMONGOUS and PRODIGIOUS. STRAPPING. But then, they also got DIMINUTIVE, INFINITESIMAL, MINISCULE.
HEDVIG: When I was little, I couldn’t pronounce my name. And for the… my first pronunciation of my name was Hefty.
DANIEL: Aww.
HEDVIG: And I think I was also a little bit chubby, so that was pretty good.
DANIEL: Aww. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I approve.
DANIEL: So, what did they get out of this one?
HEDVIG: Well, they show that if you only look at size adjectives, you can find an effect for size symbolic pattern. But if you look at general vocabulary words…
STE: It looks for adjectives, but not for other words?
HEDVIG: Yes. I think that’s it. It doesn’t work for… what’s the word?
DANIEL: Okay, so if I say for example, the noun COLOSSUS, which means a huge, huge thing…
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: When they looked at things that weren’t adjectives, but were still sizey, didn’t pan out.
HEDVIG: Like the difference between a BOAT and SHIP or something.
DANIEL: Ah, that is interesting.
HEDVIG: Then, maybe it doesn’t hold. But it holds when it’s adjectives.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Which is interesting, because it looks like we weren’t sure about that. They did a pretty extensive deep dive into the English lexicon and found, “Yep, the pattern holds. You tend to see lots of /i/ when you get tiny things and lots of /u/ or /o/ when you have big things.
HEDVIG: And it’s most strongly for… there’s particular phonemes where this effect seems to be more size, and it’s /i/ /ɪ/ /a/ and /t/. So, again, with the /t/.
DANIEL: There’s the T again.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I noticed that in their list, they had TEENY-WEENY, TEENSY, and TEENSY-WEENSY. And I think they did try to strain out some similar ones, but the effect still remains. LITTLE as well, BITTY.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
STE: I wonder why adjectives, not other words, it makes me think that maybe there are fewer other kinds of constraints or forces dictating the forms of adjectives, so they’re more free to be shaped by iconicity? Or that there’s more reason that iconicity would be a stronger force for adjectives for the kinds of words. Or combination of those two things?
HEDVIG: Maybe. I’m trying to scroll to see some examples of…
STE: When you’re saying an adjective, when you’re using an adjective to describe something, you’re thinking about ways that it differentiates that thing from other things. And size is a dimension that is very salient for differentiating things.
DANIEL: Whereas a colossus is just a colossus.
STE: Yeah, once you’ve got a noun, the way that differentiates from other things is just by what noun category it is. I’m not sure what it is.
DANIEL: Nouns just are.
STE: Did COLOSSUS come first, or COLOSSAL? COLOSSUS, I guess. And then COLOSSAL derived from…
HEDVIG: I am trying to find… Sorry, it’s going to be clickety-clack. These are all adjectives. I want to find the list of the general one.
STE: Yeah, you’re right then. You’re including a lot of things which seem like they would be related, like a lot of things that begin with mini and teensy.
HEDVIG: Minikin, minuscular.
DANIEL: Oh, dear, are we seeing Galton’s problem, where we’re comparing things over and over again that are actually related?
HEDVIG: Maybe.
STE: You can also say if there are a lot of words of the same kind, there’s a force there that generates or encourages more of those words to proliferate. So, it’s not too much of a problem. If you’re just doing a bare statistical analysis, then you might run up into Galton’s problem. But if you’re also trying to find other kinds of reasons why there are so many words of this kind, one reason might be: we just get more words of a similar kind for size, because we have some reason for making more salient words, more iconic words. Sometimes when people invent words, for things like being small or being large, they’ll come up with something that’s completely novel, or at least novel to them, but it will have those properties. So, maybe there’s something very productive in that practice, and you want to really emphasise how big something is, you add syllables.
DANIEL: There’s got to be something that makes a word stick. You can invent a word, but it won’t stick. How do you make a word stick? Well, it’s got to catch. What makes things catch? Well, that’s a cognitive question.
STE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oof. Ste and Hedvig, thank you so much for getting together with me and illuminating my understanding in all the latest linguistic stuff. This is so cool. I love Journal Club.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I like it, too. It’s fun.
STE: Thanks so much for having me. I’ve learned more linguistics this weekend than, I think, ever.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Me too. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: And you talk to Hedvig a lot!
HEDVIG: Yeah, you talk to me every day.
STE: Oh, yeah, no, so it’s not true. Reading Hedvig’s PhD thesis was…
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
DANIEL: Oh, my goodness. What’d she have you doing? “Can you just read this?”
HEDVIG: He read it… I think you read it three times.
STE: I was reading for proofing, but it got more and more interesting as it went on. Which was the chapter that I said was the most interesting? I think it was the last.
HEDVIG: The one I’m working on as a separate paper now, the ancestral state reconstruction.
STE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Stockholm syndrome. I’m telling you, you were captive, couldn’t get away.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And you couldn’t say, “This is garbage.”
STE: I couldn’t be an anonymous reviewer, unfortunately. Yeah, I had to… my name was right on it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I thanked you, but I don’t know how to thank you enough, because that’s purely… I’m so grateful for it, babe.
DANIEL: You two!
[OUTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hey, thanks for listening, thanks for being awesome patrons. We would be lost without patrons handing us great linguistic knowledge, great comments on our Discord channel. If you want to say hi to us, please do. We are @becauselangpod on every conceivable platform. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I don’t love Facebook anymore.
HEDVIG: A lot of people don’t, but it’s still a platform that’s widely accessible to a lot of people, which the other ones aren’t always. So, I feel conflicted.
DANIEL: I feel like it’s bad for the world. Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse, Substack, everywhere else or just send us a lovely email, hello@becauselanguage.com. If you would like to help the show, tell friends about us. This is something that Dustin of the Sandman Stories podcast is very good at doing. He does it relentlessly. You can also leave us reviews everywhere that you can leave reviews. And if you do this, people will be able to find us, and that, my friends, is what we are truly after. All right, one of you, you have to read the next bit.
HEDVIG: Ste, you don’t want to?
STE: Does it make sense for me to do it? I don’t know. Do you usually have guests, other people doing it?
HEDVIG: Okay, you can do this part.
DANIEL: [WHISPERS] Is this appropriate?
HEDVIG: You want later?
STE: No, that’s a Daniel part. [CHUCKLES] I’ll read some of it if you want me to read. I can’t read the end bit though.
DANIEL: Why can’t you read the end bit?
HEDVIG: Why can’t you read the end bit?
STE: What, say the outro thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ste, I’m deputising you to do the outro.
STE: Okay.
HEDVIG: All right. I’ll do the second bit first then.
STE: Yep.
HEDVIG: And this is a special Patreon episode. And we would like to thank our top patrons for making episodes like this possible and all the other wonderful things we do with your money, including making transcripts, making extra episodes, and making regular episodes and having them without ads. And like I said, also having the transcripts, which means you can search them and they become accessible for people who can’t listen, or just don’t want to?? it says here in my reading notes, which is interesting.
DANIEL: I know people who… You know who didn’t want to listen?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Noam Chomsky. I said, “Noam, we talked about your work. Professor Chomsky, we talked about your work. Do you want to respond?” And he said, “Sure, send me a transcript.”
HEDVIG and STE: Really???
Well, I sent him a transcript. Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: You never told me this.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: What??
DANIEL: He write back. He’s very… And then he said, “Well, clearly, you don’t really understand what you’re talking about.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
STE: Actually, wow.
HEDVIG: I didn’t know that.
STE: He is well known and impressively good at responding to…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve heard that.
STE: To read the transcript of a show and respond. Impressive.
DANIEL: How does he do it?
HEDVIG: That’s cool.
STE: Even if it’s just dismissive, out of hand. Still! I guess that’s something notable.
DANIEL: But the cool thing about getting dismissed by Chomsky, is…
HEDVIG: You’re in good company.
DANIEL: Your workmates say, “Hey, what you been doing?” And I’ll be like, “Ah, got nothing done today, back and forth with Noam Chomsky all day long.”
STE: “He just won’t leave me alone.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s like the MPI of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen was once called “a perversion of linguistics” by Noam Chomsky. Or at least that’s the way the rumour goes. And apparently, they’re incredibly proud of it, and they tout it a lot. Anyway.
DANIEL: Why do we stan the guy?
HEDVIG: We can make transcripts and have Maya Klein of Voicing Words make transcripts for us and send them to Chomsky because of our lovely, lovely patrons at Patreon.
DANIEL: Yeah, and let me just give a quick shout out to our top patrons. They are Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Bob, Udo, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger — lots of you, aren’t there? — Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, and most recently, Samantha, Zo, Kathy, Rach, and the legendary Kate B. Thanks to all our patrons. All right, Ste, take it.
STE: Our theme music — their theme music — has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC STOPS]
DANIEL: That was terrible, Ste. You’re going to have to do it all again.
STE: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That was lovely. I thought that was lovely. He’s much better than me at doing one take good. You’re good at talking.
DANIEL: That sounded very natural.