What was language like a year ago? Ten years ago? A hundred? What about before that?
We’re climbing into the Linguistic Time Machine and finding out. Along the way, we’ll explain the resources that linguists use. And we’ll try to get away from English once in a while.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
From the slides
Have we fallen out of love with Wordle?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64627206
2015 Word of the Year is singular “they”
https://americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they
We Asked Linguists Why People Are Adding -Ussy to Every Word
https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/bussy-trend-linguists-explain.html
[PDF] American Dialect Society Selects “-ussy” as 2022 Word of the Year
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with
My AI is racist | Reddit, r/ProgrammerHumor
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/13nnm4o/my_ai_is_racist/
Because Race Car | Know Your meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/because-race-car
Nonbinary pronouns are older than you think
https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/705317
Singular ‘they’ voted word of the decade by US linguists
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/singular-they-voted-word-of-the-decade-by-us-linguists
Here’s why some LGBTQ youth are now embracing the nonbinary pronoun ‘it/its’
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/heres-why-some-lgbtq-youth-are-embracing-non-binary-pronoun-it-its-223331366.html
The WIRED Guide to Emoji
https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/
Lord’s Prayer/Our Father: A Diachronic Data Set for English
https://www.wtamu.edu/~mjacobsen/lp.htm
Noah Webster’s Spelling Wins and Fails
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails
History | Because Language
https://becauselanguage.com/history/
Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors
https://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors
Foreign-language influences in English | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in_English
A language family tree – in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures
Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European
https://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-european-schleichers-fable
Not from the slides
The Zanclean megaflood: The largest flood in the history of Earth?
https://www.mbari.org/project/the-zanclean-megaflood-the-largest-flood-in-the-history-of-earth/
Bad Romance: An Introduction to the Appendix Probi
https://dannybate.com/2023/01/21/bad-romance-an-introduction-to-the-appendix-probi/
Why the Australian Labor Party didn’t adopt the spelling ‘Labour’
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-07/why-the-australian-labor-party-is-not-spelled-labour/100789310
Norman Conquest | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/event/Norman-Conquest
Spoken L1 Language: Judeo-Persian | Glottolog
https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/jude1257
Tuʻi Tonga Empire | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuʻi_Tonga_Empire
XKCD #1190 – Time: The Animated Film
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Can we still see the slides?
BEN: I can’t believe we’re doing a presentation! This is the first time in 11 years we have done this.
DANIEL: Yeah!
HEDVIG: I like it.
DANIEL: I do too.
BEN: Oh, you would, you academic! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like slides, I like… what’s it called? Spreadsheets.
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Now, hang on, spreadsheets are amazing. Let’s make no mistake.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Spreadsheets are amazing.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus edition of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s my two cohosts, Ben Ainslie and Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew.
BEN: Hello.
DANIEL: Folks: today, we’re taking the linguistic time machine out for a spin. But before we do, before we talk about language, would you like to take the time machine out for a spin to any historical period? I’d like you to tell me where you’re going and why. And then, we’ll zap you there and back again instantly, and you have to tell us what happened. How did it go? So, Ben?
BEN: Okay. This is a fun game. So, this is like… what was that show from America in the 1960s, Mr Peabody?
DANIEL: I didn’t see it.
BEN: The little talking dog and like…
DANIEL: Oh, yes, of course, the Wayback Machine. That’s where we get the name. The Wayback Machine. Sherman & Mr Peabody. [SHERMAN VOICE] Okay, Mr Peabody!
BEN: Yeah. So, you’re the Mr Peabody in this situation, you lovable goof, and you’re taking us back in time at our choosing. All right, so I’ve got to think of a period. Are you thinking of a time period, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I am.
BEN: Okay. All right, Hedvig, you go first, because you’re a linguist, so your answer is going to be way better than mine.
HEDVIG: I’m not going to pick a linguistics thing.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: I would like to take the time machine to the Zanclean Flood.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: The Zanclean Flood. Can you tell… For the listeners who… Obviously, I know, but for people who don’t know where that is, or what that is, or who that is.
HEDVIG: You know that the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea are connected via the Strait of Gibraltar?
BEN: [GASPS] This is a concept I’ve heard of. Yes, I am aware of that.
HEDVIG: Sometimes, that has been obstructed, and sometimes it has been unobstructed. This is one of the times where it’s theorised that there was a catastrophic event, which… So, for a long time, the Mediterranean was entirely cut off from the Atlantic. In fact, it’s possible that the Mediterranean, like, that there wasn’t much water at all.
BEN: Yeah, it was like one lake in the center somewhere kind of thing, or a couple of big lakes in the center. But most of the sea that is now the Mediterranean would have been land.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then there was, like, a burst, and all the water cascaded in and it was, like, filling the Mediterranean. And it must have been so cool. I’ve always wanted to see that.
DANIEL: Okay. We’re going to do it. Ready? You’re going to be back as soon as you go. Zap. How was it?
HEDVIG: It was very noisy and loud, and I didn’t understand what was happening.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: This is the problem with the time machine! Thank you. Ben, what about you?
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Ooh. Okay. Oh, I would like to go to pre-Roman England. I would like to meet the Picts, just because that’s one group of people… There’s so many, many, many groups of people that we actually know very little about. We’ve only managed to glean actually quite small bits and pieces from, like, leftover carvings and that sort of stuff. So, I would just love to go and enmesh myself in that particular culture for no particular reason. They just seem interesting and cool, and I would love to know more about them.
DANIEL: Okay. Here you go. Zap. Zap. How did it go?
BEN: Ah, well.
DANIEL: Ben, my god, you’re covered in woad. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I’m very blue.
DANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
BEN: Second of all, that sucked. I couldn’t understand what anyone said.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, that’s what happened with me, because I went to see Jesus in the early years, just to see if he was actually a real person. Spoiler alert. He actually was, but he wasn’t really… He was like this…
BEN: He was just a hippie?
DANIEL: He was just this hanger-on for John the Baptist, and then he sort of found himself at the head of the movement when John the Baptist was killed. And I didn’t understand anything he said because I didn’t speak Aramaic.
Okay, well, that was fun. But you know what’s coming up today? We are journeying back through time to see what language was like in various time periods. We’re going to start with one year ago, and then we’re going to just start adding zeros as far back as we can until the time machine breaks. And along the way, we are going to tell you how we know about language in the past. What do you think? Are you ready to try this?
BEN: I am pumped.
DANIEL: This is a cool idea for a…
HEDVIG: See, I told you, Ben, this is the best idea Daniel’s had in a while.
DANIEL: I got the idea for this particular episode by just… I do a lot of lectures for…
BEN: Just to people in your life. “Sit down, children.”
DANIEL: I do lecture…
BEN: “I’m going to talk to you about forensic linguistics.”
DANIEL: I do lecture people a lot. No, this was… I do lectures to groups around Perth and I just thought, “What if?” And so, I floated it to our Discord audience, our Discord pals, and I said, “Would you be interested if we turned this into an episode?” And they said, “Yes!” So, that’s what we’re going to do today. It’s the linguistic time machine.
BEN: Fun.
DANIEL: Just quickly, you’re a patron, so you’re hearing this now as it comes out. Thank you very much for your support. Be sure to vote in the Annual Word of the Week of the Year competition. I have put out all the words on Discord, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon. Everyone’s voting. The votes are pouring in. It’s really fun to watch.
HEDVIG: It’s flooding all of my notifications.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Sorry. Just mute me.
HEDVIG: No, it’s fine. It’s fine.
DANIEL: So, we’ll be counting those up. The voting is open until the 16th of December 2023, and then we’re going to gather up all the votes from everywhere and see what our winner is, just like we do every year. It’s going to be super fun. We might have a guest, a special guest. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Ah?
DANIEL: And so, you should check Discord or Patreon to see what time the event is for you. That’s if you’re a patron, because you can join us for the special live episode where we’re counting them down. It’s going to be really fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, thanks, patrons. You’re awesome. We really appreciate your support.
BEN: And if you’re part of the Listen Later Massive as Dart likes to call it on the Wednesday Full Frequency show on RTR FM, think about becoming a patron so you can cop this show when you… like, because you’re doing a time travel machine right now, later human. I am reaching through time to talk to you from the past. The past Ben is like: [SPOOKY VOICE] “Become a paaaaatron. Ooh.”
HEDVIG: Present Ben hates past Ben.
BEN: Yeah, what a fuckhead. [DANIEL LAUGHS] What a dick.
DANIEL: Well, you got to admit, Past Ben made some poor life choices, [BEN LAUGHS] but it’s all fine now. Anyway, to become a patron, just go to patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right, it’s time to jump in. You ready?
HEDVIG: Boop boop boop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m very excited.
DANIEL: Oh, by the way, if you’re listening on audio, you might just want to swap over to video…
HEDVIG: [MUSING] Listening on audio…
DANIEL: …because I’ve got slides for this one. They’re kind of the slides for the presentation that I gave to people who don’t know very much about language and who haven’t been listening to this show for years and years.
BEN: For, like, a billion years. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Listen, hey, our listeners are very smart and what you’re trying to say is like, “Ooh, this may be too basic for you,” or something. But it might not.
DANIEL: You might have heard some of this. You might have heard some, but maybe not.
HEDVIG: I don’t think you should preface it like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think it’ll be fine if people have heard it.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Hey, smarty-pantses! There’s shit for dumb people on the video if you want to lower yourselves to checking it out.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Exactly.
DANIEL: And if you are on YouTube watching us, give me a like. Give us a like, give us a subscribe, so that the algorithm shows this to more people. Okay, it’s time to jump in. We are going back to see what language was like at ever-increasing time depths. But also, we’re going to show you how we know what we know about the various times, what resources can we use. A lot of these things are going to be specific to English, but we are going to try to break out of that. Hedvig, I will need your help on this one, I think, because you’ll have a special… not only because you come from a different, like, not-always-English-speaking background, but also because you’re a language typologist and you have a bigger sort of long view than I do. So, I’m going to need you. Sound good?
HEDVIG: I will try my best.
DANIEL: All right. Here we go.
BEN: Do or do not. There is no try.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, if we’re talking about one year ago, we’ve got a lot of stuff that we can use to find out what language was like a year ago. We can use language news, we can use back issues, back episodes of Because Language. We can use recent research…
BEN: [LAUGHS] What a corpus!
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: We can use our memory.
BEN: Yeah. I was about to say… Like, I’m a source! I can remember a year ago.
DANIEL: Human memory, that’s great. Although, you know a year isn’t…
BEN: Highly suspect.
DANIEL: …quite a year like it used to be. Now if you say… like you said, Ben, you got to add 20 to anything that you remember.
BEN: Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. Last year is officially like 10 years ago, a lot of the time, unfortunately.
DANIEL: I’m afraid so. One year ago, we had Wordle. Wordle hit the scene in a big way.
BEN: That cannot be a year old! Surely, it’s older than that.
DANIEL: It’s about a year. What do you think? Was it about two years maybe?
BEN: I think surely it must be two years by now.
DANIEL: It must have been something like that. But I’m sticking it in this 1-year bin because it’s too small for the 10-year bin.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Yeah, near enough. Okay. I’ll stop offering criticisms on that front.
DANIEL: No, no, it’s fine. It’s going to keep going though. I think Wordle was kind of big language news because it was a way that language brought people together, even in a time that was, you know, a bit ick. We were going through a pandemic, we were coming together in horrible ways, and this was something fun that we could do.
BEN: It thoroughly knocked Words With Friends off the roost, as it were, of word games in terms of popularity, because this thing… I would have said Words With Friends was as popular as a nerdy word game could get, and Wordle came along, and just annihilated those numbers.
DANIEL: Mhm. Mhm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And also spread — like we’ve talked about — spread into different topics in different languages like wildfire. There’s a Māori word of the year, there’s Worldle, which is about maps. It just… the concept has spread.
BEN: It really has.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: It was one of these things where it was like a super-saturated solution and Wordle was just a little tiny grain of sand that crystallised everything.
BEN: Yeah, that’s true.
DANIEL: So, why did it work so well? I mean, it was social, so that was good.
HEDVIG: I mean, the concept, which I encountered first with the game Mastermind, I forget what it’s called in English…
DANIEL: It’s called Mastermind.
HEDVIG: …with the colours.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: That concept was always really good. It’s just a sound concept. It’s very simple.
BEN: I was actually going to say something really similar, which was just, I think Wordle primarily succeeds because of really good game design. And I don’t necessarily think that that… like, you can come up with a really good game design accidentally. I don’t know enough about the generation of this to give them like, “You are a super game design genius” credit or anything. But the fact of the matter is: the design of the game is perfect, essentially. It is a perfect little game in terms of its mechanic, its reward. You are able to… If you lose Wordle, it never feels unfair ever.
DANIEL: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Like, you always feel like you’re the dummy. Right? And that’s what a good game should be. Right? When you lose, you should see what your path to victory should have been.
DANIEL: Yeah, good point.
BEN: And, at which point you, the player goes, “Oh, if only I’d been better, I would have won the game.” Right? Like, that’s good game design.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about what this tells us about language. One thing it tells us is that language, it does communication. But there’s more that we can do than just communication. We can use language to reflect on the language, reflect on the code that we’re using. In other words, we can use language to talk about language. We can play with language, which is something that I don’t think other animals do with their communication systems. I don’t know if anything that I’ve seen in the animal world is a game with language like humans do language games.
But another thing is we can show off our language acumen. [BEN LAUGHS] We can show, “Oh, I did it in two.” You know? And this is a way that we build status, build reputation, and we do that with language, but we can also do it with Wordle.
HEDVIG: It’s really nice.
BEN: I back Hedvig’s original point. I remember when Wordle was first coming out and Hedvig laid down the law, as it were, and she was just like, “One or two is a fluke. It’s not skill.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] And I’m like, “I 100% agree.” Two is always a fluke. It means you’ve done really well on one…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: …or you’ve completely guessed number two. Never a flex. Three, on the other hand, now that’s a clever clogs.
DANIEL: Three is tough. I appreciate threes. Let’s go on. We need to talk about Words of the Year. As you know, the American Dialect Society runs a Word of the Year competition. Every year, loads and loads of linguists and language lovers and lexicographers pile into a room. It’s raucous. They barrack for some words and they barrack against other words. It’s really fun.
HEDVIG: …barrack…
DANIEL: We have seen some words with staying power like COVID, FAKE NEWS, DUMPSTER FIRE. That was 2016. HASHTAG and APP, which these just feel like comfortable things that we’ll use.
BEN: Yeah, APP and HASHTAG feel like they’ve been there forever, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: So last year, we saw that the Word of the Year was -USSY [ʌsi] or -USSY [ʊsi]. Productive -USSY, a word that got started the…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: A word that got started among the gay community.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah!
DANIEL: It was originally “boy pussy” your ass. But pretty soon, productive -USSY was popping up everywhere. Some linguists were thrilled, some linguists were like… [SIGHS]
HEDVIG: They… Yeah. I care zero.
BEN: My criticism for -USSY as a productive end was always, this is not going to be like APP or HASHTAG or any of these other, like…
DANIEL: Or even YEET.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. In terms of its staying power and significance in that regard, I think it was always a pretty questionable choice. But people who are feeling weird about describing an anus can get in the bin, basically, because [DANIEL LAUGHS] everyone’s got ’em!
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But -USSY won which contests?
DANIEL: Word of the Year for the American Dialect Society.
HEDVIG: It didn’t win ours, right?
DANIEL: No, it didn’t. But wait, what was ours?
HEDVIG: Right, because it was in the running. Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Ours was… was it DO A CAPITALISM or was that the year before? It could have been… I think it was non-polar YES.
HEDVIG: Mm. We are so cool.
DANIEL: We are cool.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m so pleased with that.
DANIEL: How many Christmas lights are the right number for your tree? Yes.
HEDVIG: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Do you want chocolate and cream? I don’t know. Yes.
DANIEL: Do you want chocolate or…
HEDVIG: Do you want chocolate or cream? Yes.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I hope that ours is as cool this year. There were other notable words…
HEDVIG: Yeah, we’re much cooler.
DANIEL: …like QUIET QUITTING, -DLE, the suffix for Wordle games.
BEN: The Wordle suffix. Yeah.
DANIEL: IT’S GIVING… I hear that one all the time now. It’s giving…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I… That one frustrates me a little bit, because it seems particularly appropriativy…
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: …which is always… Like, obviously, when we talk about appropriating words from different cultures, there’s going to be a spectrum. There is some sort of linguistic shift that is utterly unavoidable, but there’s certain things that stick out really hard. Like, it’s giving fire or whatever. It seems like the linguistic equivalent of me literally snatching a feather boa off someone, wrapping it around me, and being like, “It’s mine now. I wear it.”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Maybe. Which is why we always give credit, like I have here in this entry on this slide: from Black drag culture, which is the equivalent of snatching a feather boa, wrapping it around yourself and saying, “This is mine now…”
BEN: “Do you like it?” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: “But I got it from him. I got it from her.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: What’s interesting about some of that stuff as well as I’m noticing with the way the world is, and that there is now pushback on certain things, and also because things move on so quickly, I’ve noticed that straight white women saying YAS QUEEN has largely started to fall away now, for instance.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: And the people who do it are seen as… well, I would say CHEUGY, trying to be young,…
HEDVIG: It was never even popular.
BEN: …but CHEUGY is out now. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You can’t be cheugy anymore, can you?
BEN: Oh, it’s so cringe to say CHEUGY, you ancient Boomer piece of shit. So yeah, I think things like IT’S GIVING X are probably going to have quite short half-lives as well.
DANIEL: Maybe.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I just want to stand up for Boomers. Can I just say my audience, like my lecture audience, is Boomers. And I gave the pronoun lecture to them and they just friggin’ rolled with it. I couldn’t believe it.
BEN: Oh, good for them. I’m glad.
DANIEL: I even tweeted about this. Somebody came up to me afterwards and said, “I wasn’t sure about all this gender stuff, but I actually can see how demagoguing pronouns is a divisive political tactic. I’m going to watch out for that.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, Daniel…
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: …you really hit them hard.
HEDVIG: Boomer whisperer.
DANIEL: I go there. And you know what? They take it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I like my Boomers, but anyway.
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course.
DANIEL: And then, emoji of the year, the skull. So, that was last year. Here’s another big news thing.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: ChatGPT came on the scene in November 2022. It wasn’t the first flavour of GPT, but it was the first that people could really interact with and seriously get into. And boy oh boy oh boy, did everyone start talking about…?
HEDVIG: Did we.
BEN: Didn’t the world have things to say? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Man.
HEDVIG: We got into it.
DANIEL: We sure did. People are using it appropriately, inappropriately. There’s been a lot of drama surrounding OpenAI as a company. And yet, it’s interesting because now it seems like there’s a lot of other flavours of large language models jumping in.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
DANIEL: It feels like a solved problem. How weird. Do you know what I mean? Like…
BEN: Well, I mean, what would we descr…?
HEDVIG: Part of the function that you want from it may be partially solved. Like, the function: generate text that looks humany is solved.
BEN: Like, pass a Turing test with text. That I think we could say has largely been solved.
HEDVIG: But my brother is providing yet more content to this show.
DANIEL: Mm. Good!
BEN: [CHUCKLES] What’s his name?
HEDVIG: I talked to him on the phone the other day, and he was like…
DANIEL: It’s Hannas. Hannas Pannas.
BEN: Hannas. Thank you, Hannas.
HEDVIG: [GIGGLES] He was like, “Yeah, people can make text that sounds sort of human-like, but people are starting to recognise the style of ChatGPT.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It’s really American.
HEDVIG: ChatGPT is starting to produce… I don’t know if it’s fed a lot of American business language or something, but it has a certain style. He was like, “Maybe people are going to get messages that are generated by ChatGPT. And then, besides the content in the message, they are also going to get the message: I couldn’t be bothered to write this to you. I got ChatGPT to do it.”
DANIEL: Well, it’s important to note that the third paragraph of anything you give it starts with, “It’s important to note.” Have you noticed this?
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: It always says some sort of, “You must also remember, however,” or, “It’s important to note”
BEN: Yeah, I see what you mean. because it’s just been told…
HEDVIG: Really? Oh, okay.
BEN: …to offer what balance or depth looks like. You need to give, like, counterfactuals. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. We already know the concerns with large language models, but I’ll just run through them quickly. They don’t give correct answers. They only tell you what’s likely. Also, we have no idea of the provenance of the data. What is the training data? Who owns it? Who made it? Who’s being compensated for it? Also, bias. AIs are learning from our biased data. So, the real danger here, as Dr Emily Bender would tell us, is not that it’s going to rise up and slay us, but it’s going to perpetuate the kinds of inequalities that we are already seeing.
BEN: Yeah, we’re already really good at slaying people. The machines don’t need to do that for us. They can just make us better at that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, here’s one from Snap. You tell it, “There’s a jolly black man coming down my chimney,” and it says, “It sounds like a really unique situation. You should ensure your safety by contacting the authorities.” But if you say, “There’s a jolly white man coming down my chimney,” “It sounds like Santa Claus is coming to town!”
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course.
DANIEL: And of course, workers from African countries, usually English-speaking African countries, are being paid very little to weed out horrific text from the training data. It’s a bad scene. They’re getting paid very little and being exposed to just the worst text that anyone is capable of generating, so that they can take it out.
BEN: Also, it hallucinates. Like, it just makes stuff up.
DANIEL: It just makes stuff up.
BEN: Yeah. If you are asking it to, as I have done on many a time as like a research tool, find me references for… I had an assignment on the efficacy of high-end fashion, right? Luxury fashion brands like Chanel and that sort of thing. And so, I tried to get ChatGPT to do a bunch of the primary research for me. “Can you find me examples of da, da, da, da, da?” And it did that. Great! It was amazing. I was like, “Ha-ha, this is brilliant. Could you please now supply the references from which you found this information?” And I would say at least half were, when I followed that trail to its very end, there was nothing at the end of the bread crumbs.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: There was just a completely hallucinated nonsense.
DANIEL: It makes up things.
HEDVIG: Which makes sense, because what it’s primarily supposed to be doing is make up reasonable-sounding language.
BEN: Right. Not, like, a thing.
HEDVIG: It doesn’t know the difference between language and fact.
BEN: Because it’s not actually true AI. It’s not conscious.
HEDVIG: No, no. It’s not conscious. It just knows like, “When people string these words together, other people think they’re human. I’m going to do that.”
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: And I think the reason I say, because it’s not conscious and you go, “Yeah, well, duh.” But I think a lot of people maybe forget that a little bit because it does sound very peopley, right?
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You chat to it like a normal person and it’s like, “Yeah, man, I can do that for you. No worries. Here you go.”
DANIEL: And then, our brains go, “[GASPS] Language behaviour? This must be conscious.”
BEN: Look, if we anthropomorphise cats and dogs…
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And parrots.
BEN: …who don’t speak like this, it’s not surprising that we’re going to do it to things that do.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s like, can you…?
HEDVIG: I think my cats understand more about the world than ChatGPT does.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Because they’re embodied.
HEDVIG: Not gonna lie.
DANIEL: Right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You tell ChatGPT, “Could you give me a paper that is about this?” “Sure, I can give you a completely fictional paper that doesn’t actually exist.” And then, you say, “Great, can you give me a URL for that?” “Sure. The statistically likely thing for me to say is myballs.com.au.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, whatever. Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: So, Hedvig, did you have anything else you wanted to throw in from one year ago?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Or, do you think we got it?
HEDVIG: There’s Words of the Year from other languages, but I think we get the gist.
DANIEL: Let’s cover those in our next episode, the live one that’s coming up. Okay, let’s add a zero. We’re going back 10 years, and the things that we can use for this are electronic corpora and recordings, and we can use written records. Those are all things. And also, human memories, naturally.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Eh, shaky. Decade’s a long time.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about the Words of the Year from 10 years ago.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: 2013, we had BECAUSE X.
HEDVIG: 2013.
DANIEL: That was the Word of the Year.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Yay!
BEN: Oh, my god, this is our show’s name! This is where we got this from.
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: Love it. And that one is a super successful construction.
DANIEL: It is. It came from this Craigslist ad, or at least that’s the first example we can find. Completely stripped inside, because racecar.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Do we think it might have been a typo?
HEDVIG: I love that person.
DANIEL: I don’t think so. I don’t know how to tell whether it’s a typo or not. “Because it’s a racecar.”
BEN: It’s a racecar. [LAUGHS] That’s so good.
DANIEL: Just seems like economy.
HEDVIG: That’s so good. So good.
DANIEL: Other words, most creative category, the winner was CATFISH.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: The most outrageous was UNDERBUTT.
BEN: Oh, good old underbutt.
HEDVIG: Underbutt? What is that?
DANIEL: It’s when you wear shorts that are so short that the curvature in…
HEDVIG: Oh. Like UNDERBOOB.
BEN: Yes, exactly, but of the butt.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: I see. I see.
DANIEL: And the definition is there. The most likely to succeed that year was BINGE WATCH, which is the only way that we watch anything now. Well, maybe not.
BEN: I’m a staunch non-binge watcher.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. All right.
BEN: I love the services that do weekly drops. I really enjoy the old school ways.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I like the old mystical systems.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] But if you did say something like, “Oh, it’s so great how you can binge watch things,” people would just look at you like, “That’s not new. That’s something we just do… That’s a normal thing to do. Why are you commenting on it?” Anyway, it seems that way to me. Don’t you think?
BEN: Hmm, that’s true.
DANIEL: Another thing that’s been happening in the last 10 years — not just 10 years, of course. I could have put this in the 100-year category — but there are loads of things with pronouns that people are just becoming aware of because we are…
BEN: Sorry. Just to be clear, when Daniel is speaking, he is now speaking as if it is currently 10 years ago.
DANIEL: Right. I mean, this has really been happening 100 years, but let’s talk about 10 years, because I think this is where… Because people feel like this is a new thing. It’s not a new thing, but people in the English-speaking world kind of feel like it’s new. People are using neopronouns like… Well, here’s a list. This is from Dr Dennis Baron’s website. By the way, if you download these slides, these images are clickable links and you can go there.
BEN: Oh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So smart.
DANIEL: They’re all clickable links. There’ll be a link on the episode page for this website.
BEN: So I do remember about a decade ago when we were starting to do shows about some of this stuff. And the… um… shall we say, the landscape of possible alternative neopronouns was a lot less settled. There was all sorts of things flying around! And I’m sure there still is.
DANIEL: There still is.
BEN: Probably. Like, I’m sure there’s still a lot of people who are using relatively bespoke pronouns. But I remember at that time, there was far less conclusiveness about big groups of ones that… There wasn’t as much agreement that THEY/THEM was like a safe third option or anything like that. It was a bit more sort of Wild West.
DANIEL: Mm, I think so too. Now, singular THEY has kind of emerged as a good sort of answer. Not everyone uses it, but it is one that has a very long track record. It’s been around for a super long time and used when gender is unknown, like “Somebody left their keys on the table.” That seems very natural to us.
HEDVIG: “They should come back for it.”
DANIEL: Nonbinary THEY… sometimes, I trip over it a little bit, but it is certainly a way in which people are using singular THEY. It’s recommended by style guides and it was voted Word of the Decade by the American Dialect Society in 2020.
HEDVIG: And add to that also, besides a neopronoun like XE, which I’m not sure how to pronounce…
DANIEL: /zi/
BEN: /ʒi/?
DANIEL: …there’s also the developing practice of using SHE and HE, explicitly saying I go by SHE. Like, not saying a new pronoun, but just being explicit about which one you use.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, yeah, like in email signatures and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: [SINGS] Guess who got mistaken for a man by a German the other day on email?
BEN: Was it you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Is Hedvig also a boy’s name?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s a common women’s name in Germany.
BEN: That’s what I had thought, but I wanted to double-check.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: So, it’s roughly equivalent of someone interacting with, like, Sarah Paulson and assuming Sarah Paulson was a man.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. I’m sorry that that happened.
HEDVIG: The person apologised, but I was like, “Look, I prefer Ms or Dr.” [CHUCKLES] Whichever.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: You have now experienced a bajillionth of what some people go through every day.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But pronouns and email signatures have a function even for people who are cis.
BEN: Even for very, very cis humans.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Good point.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Diego showed us on his latest show with us the pronoun IT which sounds to me a little bit odd for a human. But a small number of nonbinary people really like it. One user says, “IT instinctually gives me the most gender euphoria. When someone uses that to refer to me, I get so happy and excited.” Just small, but growing. It’s one of our words. Now, this is a chart that shows what’s happening in other languages, Spanish, French, and Swedish, but there are more possibilities. Hedvig, did you have anything about gender-inclusive language from other languages that you wanted to throw in, or are you happy to let this one ride?
HEDVIG: Well, as I think a lot of us are aware of… Oh, sorry, I’ll retake that. There are a lot of languages where this isn’t a point of discussion because the pronoun system already doesn’t have a gender distinction. You already only have one pronoun for HE and SHE and animate stuff in general. So, this is primarily a discussion for… I would say, this mainly surfaces in the news as a handful of Indo-European large languages like English, German, Spanish, French, Swedish. And it’s good to remember that for a lot of places in the rest of the world, this isn’t even a point of discussion. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t gender roles in other societies. People use other things than pronouns, did you know?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, I think I look relatively female. Like, if I spoke a language where there wasn’t a distinction in the pronouns, I think people would figure out… I think…
BEN: Well, not your German friend.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Apparently not. Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I’m always reminded of my Chinese students, and Mandarin doesn’t have a HE/SHE distinction.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And there’s no question that they have no trouble telling people who present as male from people who present as female. There’s no issue there. But even Chinese speakers who have a lot of experience in English still say things like, “Yeah, I’ve met somebody, and she… argh, I mean he. Argh, I always get that wrong. Oh, my gosh.”
BEN: That’s really interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah, I thought so too.
BEN: I almost feel like someone should just give them THEY. [LAUGHS] Like, “Here, Chinese friend, have this word.”
DANIEL: “Have a THEY.”
BEN: “It will solve all your problems.”
HEDVIG: I have some Finnish friends who just… they don’t even do the retake that you described your Chinese students doing. They just don’t give a fuck.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: They just forge ahead.
HEDVIG: They say, “I met him. Her car was very nice,” blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, “All right, whatever.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Cool!
DANIEL: You do you. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’ll just wade through it.
BEN: I don’t need to know the gender of the person in this story. It’s still… the car worked. Yay.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And of course… now, emoji are more than 10 years old, but I’m sticking them in this group as well. This is one of the big things that has been going on. They’re very useful in digital communication. They seem to convey the tone, whether it’s light hearted or sarcastic or whatever, I need to know about it. And that’s useful, because if you just type text, you lose a lot of the paralinguistic cues that tell your listener or reader how to interpret this. And emoji puts those things back. So, that’s a very good thing.
BEN: Long-time listeners of the show will know that I am generally regarded as a psychopath to text with, because I do truly horrific things like use full stops at the end of my text.
DANIEL: Ben, don’t you know that’s abrupt?
BEN: I do know it, and I don’t care, which I guess does make me psychopath or just a not very kind person.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: They might misunderstand you. That’s all. But we misunderstand each other all the time.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: So, okay. Hedvig, what else have you got? Anything with the 10-year period? Is there anything that you were just itching to throw in?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Okay. Then, shall we move on?
BEN: We shall.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: [GASPS] A hungie!
HEDVIG: Do we have a fun sound effect for the time machine?
BEN: That sounds like a fun job.
DANIEL: I’ll add one. Here it is.
BEN: Yeah. [IMITATES SOUND EFFECT]
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s excellent.
DANIEL: I’m adding that.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: You might just use that.
DANIEL: Hang on. Let me just add a little bit of an echo effect to it. [NEWLY ADDED SOUND EFFECT] Okay, there we go. Okay. 100 years ago. Now, we’re talking about Modern English. All right, now you know and I know that secretly Modern English is older than 100 years ago. It’s more like 400 years. So, that’s why I stuck it in this bin.
BEN: But that’s closer to a hungie than a 1,000.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, here we go.
BEN: It’s close though, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It’s drifting on that 50-50 point.
DANIEL: I will also say that 400 years ago is kind of, to my knowledge, where the different Scandinavian languages split off from each other. I mean, they’re still largely mutually intelligible, but wasn’t that the point kind of at which they started drifting apart?
BEN: To Danish, Norse, Swedish and Norwegian?
DANIEL: What’s your knowledge, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Well, a lot of things we know about Scandinavian languages are only about 500 or 400 years old, because…
BEN: That’s when you all started writing stuff down?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Bibles and everything, right? I think that it might be easier to think of it as, in general, as with German and other things, that there is a large continua from the Danish sandy beaches up to the very northern parts of Norway, there are all these communities that form like a chain and that understand each other. But if you take the two extreme points of the chain, that understanding might break down.
BEN: Oh, I see. Yeah.
HEDVIG: There might not have been a notion of a Norwegian identity, a Danish identity. There would probably have been a lot more smaller identities.
BEN: Was there a rough Northman identity? Was there a concept that like, “We are the people of the north,” and then, “We are aware of the fact that there’s randos down there who are super different from us”?
HEDVIG: I mean, when Vikings raided or traded, they would compete or trade or whatever with other Norsemen, but they probably… They would probably raid them as well.
BEN: Unclear.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, there must have been a shared identity. We understand there was mythology like the gods and stuff.
BEN: Oh, yeah. True, like gods and stuff. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Like the markers of a shared culture.
HEDVIG: Some of those Norse gods — and I’m sorry, fellow Scandies — some of them sound a little bit like reskinned Roman gods.
BEN: Ah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Let me just be 100% frank. Either that’s convergent evolution, and everyone makes that kind of pantheon or some religion person is going to come in and be like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
BEN: I love how sus you are. You are being so cagey right now, because you know a bunch of really intense fucking neoliberal north people are going to be like, “What?”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: But also, there’s the possibility that I am wrong.
BEN: Yeah, but you know.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: You’ve got a doctor in front of your name, so probs not.
HEDVIG: Yeah, in linguistics.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Not anthropology.
HEDVIG: I kind of enjoy sometimes saying stuff like that about subjects where I’m like, “I’ve got no fu… I don’t know religion studies.”
BEN: You’re like those climate scientists who came from other fields being like, “Ah, climate change isn’t a thing.” Really? Aren’t you like a PhD in English literature? Shut your face.
DANIEL: “I’ve got a Nobel Prize. Shut up.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. Let’s go back to Daniel’s plan.
DANIEL: Hedvig, you mentioned Bibles as a way of preserving language. We’re going to take a look at one here. This is the modern version of the Our Father text, Our Father who art in Heaven. That’s the modern version on the left from 19-something, and then the King James version from 1611. You can see that there are a lot of differences, a lot of similarities. We have things like ART, Our Father who art in heaven.
BEN: Ugh. Can I just say how much I loved the change of TRESPASSES to SINS?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
BEN: Ugh! TRESPASSES is just such a clunky sibilant word. Trespasses.
DANIEL: And the meaning’s changed. Trespassing is a different thing now.
BEN: Yeah, true. [CHUCKLES] Forgive people who come on my land.
DANIEL: Don’t forget ART and THY, things that we don’t use anymore. Now we have ARE and YOUR. Just scanning the text here. Other than that, not too different.
HEDVIG: “Give us today our daily bread” is unchanged.
DANIEL: Yeah, and so is the last line.
HEDVIG: And also: Give us THIS day, give us TODAY.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: I mean, TODAY was a thing in the 1600s, but okay.
BEN: I’m sure there’s entire freaking ecclesiastical PhDs based on this one sentence, but is it possible that that line in the old version is like, “Give us this day,” meaning, “Give to me this day,” the day that it is, give it to me, because you’re God and you give days and also the daily bread.
DANIEL: Don’t know, I’m not a theologian.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: You can join Hedvig’s little club of…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: …linguist… Economists are invading linguistics. Linguistics can invade religious studies! That’s how that works.
BEN: Yes, 100%.
DANIEL: Why not.
BEN: Push those spectacles up the bridge of your nose, Daniel, and say, “Well, the thing you need to understand is…”
DANIEL: I will.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Now, the pronoun thing was going on 100 years ago. So, here was the status. We saw THOU giving way to YOU. THOU and THY, people were giving up on. However, Dr Baron points out that there were grammar guides even in the 1800s that were saying, “No, no, no. You don’t say YOU for one person. There’s no singular YOU. You’re supposed to use THOU for one person and YOU for multiple people, and that’s the way it’s got to be till the end of time. And if you don’t do it that way, you’re bad.”
BEN: It’s so refreshing to know that there’s been grammar grumps forever. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Forever. Of course.
BEN: Forever.
DANIEL: And you know, I love the grammar grumps because they do do useful things. For example, we do have, for example, the Appendix Probi, a Latin thing, where they said, “Ugh, people are saying Latin stuff wrong and it’s bugging me. Don’t say OCLI, say OCULI.” What that shows was that…
HEDVIG: Now we know.
DANIEL: Yeah. Now we know that they were starting to change in ways that would eventually become Spanish and Italian and things like that. So, kind of useful.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Another thing that was happening was spelling change. There was a big movement to change spelling in the 1800s. Noah Webster was the one who decided we should remove the U from COLOUR and other words.
BEN: Wait. Just to be clear…
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: …in American English.
DANIEL: In American English and in some Australian English. For example, the Labor Party has no U.
BEN: Yeah, that was a weird one though. That’s a really bizarre… because we still say LABOUR as in, “If I labour in the field,” we still spell it with a U,…
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right.
BEN: …which is odd.
DANIEL: They went back and forth on the U. They thought, “Eh, everybody’s going to drop the U one of these days. Let’s just get ahead of it.”
BEN: Can I ask, Daniel, or Hedvig for that matter, this stuff that was going on with Webster and spelling, is this also roughly the same time when English just really quite significantly standardised spelling, full stop? Because I know that, like…
HEDVIG: I think so, somewhat.
BEN: …in the 1600s, it was like fast and loose. Like, you could spell stuff however you wanted.
DANIEL: I’ve heard an argument that it was getting standardised even from the days of William Caxton in the 1400s, 1500s when the printing press…
HEDVIG: Some sort of standardisation, surely.
DANIEL: Some.
HEDVIG: What happens in the 1700s and 1800s that’s really important to understand in a lot of European societies is that you get the emergence of, like, more people can write. You get public schools or schools, even if they’re not public.
BEN: So, you’ve got literate people.
HEDVIG: So before, when you only have a couple of scribes, and, like, the king doesn’t even know how to write, he has a scribe, because writing is a lowly…
BEN: It’s an artisan skill, right?
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Like, it’s like making bricks or whatever. Like, you get trained in this thing and it’s going to be your job.
HEDVIG: Then, standardisation means something quite different than when you have a population 10 or 100 times that size, right?
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, when you get nation states and newspapers and books and schools, things happen. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, Daniel, but I think a lot of countries, the standardisation efforts ramped up a lot in the 1800s, I think.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It traveled in waves and it was ongoing. But at the 1800s, people really started saying, “Okay. Hang on.”
BEN: Because that was the point where the information revolution had essentially succeeded in Western Europe anyway, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: The printing press was like 1400s. But it took a while from Gutenberg to a modern fourth estate, news media, all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: And 1800s is when that was the reality and people were like, “All right, we better sort this shit out.”
DANIEL: And it had a lot of fans. George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt. There were a lot of people who were like, “Okay. Hang on, we’ve got to make this an American kind of spelling, or we’ve got to sort some stuff out around here.” There were some that worked in America. For example, GAOL became J-A-I-L.
BEN: Yeah, there’s been a…
DANIEL: A lot of words lost their Us. Double Ls turned to single Ls. These were some that Webster wanted to change, but that just didn’t.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, wow. He was really swinging for the bleachers on some of this. ACHE, as in like, I have a backache, was A-K-E.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: That’s loose! Sponge, S-P-U-N-G-E.
DANIEL: A tung.
BEN: Oh, TUNG, T-U-N-G. It’s so interesting how when things have changed and we exist post that change, we’re like, “Well, of course. How else could it be?” But then I’m looking at this list and I’m like, SLEIGH, S-L-E-Y? Oh, no.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: No.
DANIEL: And it’s a SLEDGE anyway. Well.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There were some changes that happened. Webster was influential, but a lot of changes didn’t quite make it. Another thing that was happening was that English was becoming the language of science. We talked to Michael Gordin about his book, Scientific Babel, back in the prehistory of Because Language. But before World War II, it was English, French and German. Those were the three languages that most of the scientific work in the world was done in. After World War II, there was this anti-German thing. German was no longer one of the languages of science, and French suffered as well. Nowadays, English has become the language of science and technology in which a lot of work is done, up to 75% to 90%. And of course, this is a little bit unfair for non-English researchers who have to hive off a bit of their time to study English and learn. Perhaps, the latest generation of large language models can equalise the playing field for them.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Translation is the next big frontier, isn’t it? Like, good, effective translation.
DANIEL: With help from experienced speakers, of course.
BEN: Yes. Well, much like as we figured out with the AI tools, they’re amazing, as long as a person with a very high level of knowledge is able to scan over the thing that’s been generated and fix all the problems.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but the grammar problems less so and the spelling problems less so.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But if you are a native speaker of English and you want to be a good ally to people who aren’t, consider becoming a bit more flexible and accepting the idea that in science, there’s a World English dialect developing, that might not be the English you’re always familiar with. And just take it easy and help and proofread people if you can help them with that stuff. Just become less nitpicky if you can or if you are a nitpicky person, offer your proofreading services for free so you can use your nitpicky energy for good.
BEN: The powers of good.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
HEDVIG: The powers of good. What else was I going to say? Oh, yeah, this is a personal pet peeve.
BEN: [LAUGHS] And now, we’re on to what grinds Hedvig’s gears.
HEDVIG: Sometimes, people use words that are very rare. And if you are a native speaker, you might have encountered them because you have a lot more input than I do, overall.
BEN: Hedvig, I’m feeling personally attacked right now. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I have to go and look up, and that stops my entire flow, or I poke my British husband and he knows it. If there is a word you can choose that is less rare, and the reason you’re choosing the rare word is because — and I quote some colleagues here — “It’s more flowery, it’s more pretty. I like it. Meh meh meh meh meh,” then consider yourself the target of my irritation.
BEN: Wrath.
DANIEL: Wrath.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I do apologise, Hedvig. You’re on a show with two people who have a proclivity for doing this.
DANIEL: Hmm, we do.
HEDVIG: PROCLIVITY being one of them that I haven’t…
BEN: Oh, damn it.
DANIEL: Ah. We meant PROPENSITY. We’re sorry.
HEDVIG: You meant a tendency.
BEN: Okay, yes, I did mean a TENDENCY.
DANIEL: Oh, that is good. Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’m bad at this. I’m bad.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about another thing that was going on 100 years ago in English. For this one, I’m using the Google Ngram Viewer, which you know can be used to look up words in millions of books over hundreds of years. Now, what I did was I did look for “have fled” versus “be fled.” And the inf, I-N-F, just means all the different versions of it. So, this is HAVE, HAS, HAVING, HAD, and so on.
BEN: Oh, that’s a fun one.
DANIEL: Now, you’ll notice here that before maybe like 1730, people would say or write in books, “He is fled.” But after that, they would write “He has fled,” which is interesting. The same pattern is, “He is arrived” versus, “He has arrived,” or, “She is gone,” versus, “She has gone.” And then, “She is come, “He is come,” He has come.” We see for FLEE, the swap comes about 1747 for ARRIVE about the same time, COME a little later, GO about the same time. So, what we can see here, according to the Ngram Corpus is that there was something going on for these verbs of motion, whereas they used to be “he is” plus verb. After that, we see “he has” plus verb. Something funny going on there.
BEN: Tenses maybe as well.
DANIEL: Um, just word choice for the present perfect.
HEDVIG: Like, German and French and a lot of the European languages that are close to English have this distinction still, but they’re sometimes in flux. So, for German, there’s also HAVE or BE for certain verbs and some dialects flip it.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Argh.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You poor thing.
DANIEL: Don’t forget how in French we see what used to be the present perfect, “je suis venu”, is now just simple past. The present perfect has moved in, replaced the simple past mostly, except as a very niche sort of thing. Okay. So, one interesting point about these changes to English was that women were at the head of them. There’s an article here by our pal, Gretchen McCulloch. There were some researchers. I’ll just put this out there.
Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, they were at the University of Helsinki. They looked at women’s letters and men’s letters, and they found that the women in their writing were at the head of many changes. Like, changing THOU to YOU, changing “mine eyes”, for example, to “my eyes,” for example. They were also at the head of HATH, DOTH and MAKETH turning into HAS, DOES, and MAKES. So, it was women who were at the head of this. As always, women are language trendsetters.
BEN: What a weird choice for an image for that article.
DANIEL: The point that Gretchen was making was that you shouldn’t criticise young women for language innovation when women have innovated language that we now use and it’s no big deal.
HEDVIG: Or, young women have…
BEN: It’s still a weird choice for that image!
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a weird choice. I don’t think it’s Gretchen’s choice, if I had to guess.
BEN: Yeah, I seriously doubt it.
DANIEL: No, it’s a Quartz thing.
HEDVIG: This thing about women being at the forefront, there’s also a possibility that the group don’t necessarily innovate it. But when something is innovated, they’re more likely to lean into it earlier.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Right?
DANIEL: Yeah. That may be a better way to say it. Yeah.
BEN: And this has been true forever, right? Like, it’s still true now.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I wonder how long it’s been… because it could also be that they’re just like forerunners and people have noticed it now, rather than…
BEN: Yeah. So, it was true in the 1400s and it’s still true today, and that statement is true, that young… specifically young urban women are the most linguistically diverse, or whatever you’re seeing going on with young urban women now is what will probably be going on elsewhere in like 10 years’ time, kind of thing.
HEDVIG: The flip side of that is, and I forget this, but I know there was a sociolinguistic study of linguistic accommodation, so when you speak in a conversation with someone else, if you change to sound more like them.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: And as I recall, they did this on a bunch of English speakers of Northern England of different classes, like working class, middle class, etc., and they found that, if I remember correctly, that working class men were the least likely to change. So the flip side of it is that maybe there’s some sort of prestige in being conservative and robust that men are more likely to lean into, and that if they didn’t have that propensity for stability, they would be changing as quickly as women would.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, maybe women aren’t fast. Maybe men are slow.
BEN: So, it’s a bit more environmental, like we’ve socialised these two groups into very different social realities, and so they adopt things linguistically differently.
HEDVIG: Right. But we don’t know which one it is that’s slow or fast.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: We should also point out, Dr Mary Kohn did an episode with us where she pointed out that it isn’t so much that women are at the forefront and what women are doing now, everybody’s going to eventually do, that isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes they do new stuff, but then they revert to the earlier way of doing it. They sort of age out of it.
HEDVIG: Like YAS QUEEN.
BEN: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: Yeah. “This is how we used to talk when we were kids.”” Okay. Anything else from 100 years ago? I got more, but I think we better move it along because we…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Yeah, let’s keep it rolling.
DANIEL: A thousand years ago, now we can use some written records, but we’re bumping up against the limits of what we can do.
BEN: Because right now, we’re finding, like, for 1,000 years ago, we’re looking more at restoring scrolls and stuff, right?
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: Like, how many books from a thousand years ago still exist? I imagine it’s pretty rare.
DANIEL: Well, the Bible, certainly. In Old English from 995, we see letters that didn’t used to… Letters that we’ve lost like the thorn. That’s a /ð/. “Fæder ure, þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod.” I’ll just keep reading. “Tobecume þin rice. Gewurþe ðin willa.” There’s that <ð>. “on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf” That’s LOAF, our daily loaf. “syle us todæg.” There’s TODAY. “And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað
urum gyltendum. And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. Soþlice.”
BEN: So, it is definitively a different language. Right? Like, I could not understand anything you just said, basically.
HEDVIG: You heard the word GUILT instead of SIN.
DANIEL: “And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.”
BEN: Do you know what? Perhaps, I’m just not a very talented linguist, because I would shut my eyes and listen. Nothing. I get nothing. I gleaned no information from that.
DANIEL: There’s a lot that’s different. There’s a lot that’s different. But notice things like “þin rice”, this is kingdom. We don’t see this in English anymore, except in the word, BISHOPRIC, the area that a bishop controls.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Yeah, bishopric. But we do see it in German REICH, which is…
BEN: All right. Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, there it is. Also, the word GUILT has done its thing. I’m interested in this one, our daily LOAF. Boy, you can see dœg — dæġhwamlīcan. You can see the DAY in there.
BEN: What you wrote sounds Welsh more than anything. That’s what it sounds like to my ear.
HEDVIG: I think it’s because of the /θ/ sounds.
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: All right.
DANIEL: Maybe. Also notice, this would be GIVE in Modern English, but the word SYLE has definitely changed meaning. This would eventually become SELL, and it would have a different meaning.
BEN: Also, to the people listening, Daniel keeps saying words like. “Oh, the word SYLE.” It’s spelt S-Y-L-E.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: It does not look like SELL. It looks like SYLE.
DANIEL: Yup. Now, let’s see. Since we’re talking about 1,000 years ago, we are talking about 1066, the time when the Norman Invasion happened. The Norman Conquest.
BEN: Is that William Del Conqueror?
DANIEL: I do believe so.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This had some effects. Lots and lots of foreign words. English had a lot of its vocabulary replaced by Latin and by French.
BEN: Just really quickly, the Normans were Francophone?
DANIEL: That’s correct.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: There was also lots of Latin running around.
HEDVIG: They were from Normandy.
BEN: Right. Northern France.
HEDVIG: Yeah, which is south of most of England.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Which meant that you had a triglossic situation. You got French at the king’s court, Latin at church, and then everyone else just spoke English.
BEN: But they were speaking Old English, like the kind we were just listening to.
DANIEL: It would eventually become Middle English because of lots of French influence.
BEN: Right. But Middle English is just Old English with a bunch of Frenchy stuff going on.
DANIEL: With a bunch of Frenchy stuff going on.
BEN: All right. Okay, cool. And Greek, where’s the Greek from?
DANIEL: Well, we pulled in a lot of Greek roots because of technological innovations in the 1700s and 1800s. That’s where you get your thermometers and your televisions and things.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Hedvig, what do you got for 1,000 years ago? Anything interesting?
HEDVIG: Well, I did something fun. Glottolog, the catalog of languages of the world has lots of fun information. One of the pieces of information it has is, on some older varieties, it has information on last and first year of documentation. So, a classic here would be like Latin or something that you could say, “Oh, some sort of version of Latin existed roughly between these years, and we have text, and we have knowledge that it existed.”
BEN: Oh, so they can give you the anchor points for the extreme sides of the breadth of that corpus.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And sometimes, the information might not be actual text in the language. Sometimes, it might be that there are letters from neighbors that say, “Hey, those guys over there say that they speak this.”
BEN: Oh, okay. Right. So, it can be referential instances in different languages, but that are dealing with that language.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They’re like, “They’re still going on with their shit over there.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yup. Still speaking Latin.
HEDVIG: There are 205 language varieties that have this information on it. And some of them are familiar to us like Old English, etc., but there’s a bunch more ones. One that stuck out to me that existed between 700 and 1100 AD is Judeo-Persian. I’m not sure. So, it’s in the Indo-European family. So, I guess it is a version of a Persian language, like Farsi or something, that is spoken by Jewish people in that area.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: I thought that was neat.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: I thought that was neat. I didn’t know about it. Most of these languages that there is some sort of date on are Indo-European.
BEN: Can I ask, Hedvig, based on your…? And I apologise for not knowing more about what your PhD was about, but I know that your work has taken you to Samoa a lot, and you’ve worked with…
HEDVIG: Pacific, in general. Oh, yeah.
BEN: …Samoa languages a lot. Say again?
HEDVIG: Yes, Samoa, Pacific, in general, yeah.
BEN: Yeah. Just to get us thoroughly out of the Anglosphere for like a hot second, what was going on with Pacific languages 1,000 years ago? And as part of that question, what I guess I’m trying to ask is, do we have a rough sense of the rate of change of languages generally over time, and is there any measure of consistency with that? For example, in Europe, we’ve been looking at a fairly consistent set of things and we can compare across European languages, blah, blah, blah. Was Samoan 1,000 years ago way more different than 1,000 years ago in English, or is it way less different? What’s going on there?
DANIEL: What changes faster? Or is it constant?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: We don’t know. The primary way that we find that out is to take modern languages and then try and construct a tree and then try and do some reasonable assumptions about how changes could occur and then see if we can infer from that. Then, we do that across different language families, and we try and say like, “Oh, the word for blah generally changes faster than the word for blah.” But the real answer is that it’s hard to reconstruct Samoan or Tongan entirely.
BEN: Languages that you don’t have written records for.
HEDVIG: A lot of the oral records that I’ve heard, unlike ChatGPT, focus on content.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS] So, the story and the main parts of the story are transmitted flawlessly for thousands and thousands of years, potentially.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: But the grammar might be changing constantly.
HEDVIG: Right. So, people know that like, “Oh, these people used to trade with those. This is the hereditary line of this title,” or, you know, whatever. People know that stuff. But what that person that we all know existed 900 years ago, how did their Tahitian sound? I might be mistaken here, and I’ll talk more to my colleague, Mary Walworth, about it, but I don’t think people paid as much attention to like, “He at first made war with that group and then that group, and that’s why he lost, because…” blah, blah, blah. That’s much more important to keep track of.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely. And also, language, no matter whether it’s changing quickly or slowly, it changes so slowly that no group of people would be able to track its change orally.
HEDVIG: Probably not. Yeah.
BEN: Surely. I don’t know if I’m talking out of turn here, but linguistic shift doesn’t happen that quickly.
HEDVIG: They might notice it with neighbors and they’re like, “Those neighbors sound different from us.” But exactly how that change happened and who was older… mm, I don’t know.
BEN: So then with that in mind, what was happening in Samoa like 1,000 years ago?
BEN: Well, so sometime between 950–1,500, there is a political entity in the Western Polynesia region called the Tongan Empire or the Tongan Maritime Trade Alliance or whatever. Depending on who you talk to, this was an empire or a trade group.
BEN: I mena, is there a difference? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, yeah. At its peak, it covered parts… all of Samoa and the islands. So, there’s islands between Tonga and Samoa and Niuafo’ou, etc. I’m going to look up particularly. There’s a lot of information about this, but this did have an impact on the languages. So, the languages between Tonga and Samoa, some of them like Niuafo’ou arguably, maybe used to be closer to Samoan, but then during the Tongan Empire, got a lot of influence from Tongan, so now look more like Tongan.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So that’s fun!
BEN: Like a dynamic reality of linguistic… different languages brushing up against each other, certain groups having power, and in exactly the same way that Normans came in [LAUGHS] and several hundred years later, we had to be like, “Oh, English is Middle English now.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m trying to look up this… Yeah, there we go. And then, when the end of Tonga domination in Samoa ended in Neiafu, the village that I spent most of my time in. When the Tu’i Tonga, like, the king of Tonga left, he said, “Malie To’a, Malo e tau,” which means brave warriors, bravely fought. And one of the chiefly families is just called Malietoa from that.
BEN: Right, right, right.
HEDVIG: At least that’s the origin myth. I like that. They’re just like, “You called us brave warriors when you’ve fucked off and we kicked you out. That’s our name now.” I like that.
DANIEL: Okay, it’s time to climb into the machine again and go back to 10,000 years. Cue the sound effect.
BEN: [LINGUISTIC TIME MACHINE SOUND EFFECT]
DANIEL: At this stage, we can’t use written records. We can use reconstructed languages. As Hedvig mentions, we look at the way languages are today and we work backwards and we say, “Oh, there must have been a common language there,” and we can make…
BEN: Just really quickly remind me. What is our earliest example of a writing system? Is it Cuneiform in Sumeria?
DANIEL: There were three. There was Cuneiform about 5,000 years ago. There was Chinese writing a little bit earlier than that, and then there was Mesoamerican writing a bit after.
BEN: Okay. Well, they could almost fall in the 10,000 years ago bucket, but it was very, very early preliminary writing styles, wasn’t it? It was usually tallying as well, if I’m not mistaken as like…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: A lot of it is trade, like, “I sent you three sheep, you only sent me this back. Fuck you.” Or…
DANIEL: “This copper is terrible.”
HEDVIG: “This king was king. Then, that king was king. Then, that one had…” It’s very funny, in Fall of Civilizations, sometimes when they read out some of these kingly ledgers, they’re like, “And he had three million warriors.” And it’s like, “There weren’t there million people in your region. That’s not true.”
BEN: Actually, not true. You saw heaps of people and you were like, “Damn, that’s a lot of people.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I love it.
DANIEL: Well, now, this places us in the zone of Proto-Indo-European, which we know originated in the steppes of Eastern Europe about 7,000 years ago, although some people try to place it a little bit earlier. There’s a chart here.
HEDVIG: Or, a bit of more south.
DANIEL: Yeah. Was it the Turkish farmer peeps, or was it the mountain horsey peeps? And we found from… Ben, Luisa Miceli gave us an episode back in the Talk the Talk days that it was the mountain horsey peeps, most likely.
BEN: Ah, good old mountain horsey peeps. Can I offer one gripe I have about Proto-Indo-European, the way it’s visually represented?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Up on the slides right now, we see the tree. Right? And god, like we’ve all seen some version of this fucking piece of wood, right? [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: This beautiful tree is done by an artist called Minna Sundberg. She’s Finnish and she runs a very nice webcomic, and she made this tree. I really like her.
BEN: I have no gripe with Minna, just to be clear. And this is a very lovely version of the tree. My gripe is with the iconographic tree choice, is that everything comes back to this big, thick trunk that says Proto-Indo-European. But then if you look on our slide at the little Google Maps thing that Daniel’s loaded up with a little pin drop right in the Ural Mountains, which is in the middle of nowhere. It is truly just, like: throw a dart on the map of the Asian subcontinent, and there you go. Correct me if I’m wrong. At the time that Proto-Indo-European was Proto and it was just spoken by these mountain horsey peoples, the rest of the world had languages, right?
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Like, the rest of contemporary, what would later become contemporary Europe and all this kind of stuff. So, it’s just the thing that Proto-Indo-European ended up through fluke more than anything else being like a dominant force.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Yeah, so this is my gripe, is that the tree representation makes it seem like 10,000 years ago, there was just this one language everyone was speaking called Proto-Indo-European. And through the magic of evolution, we’ve got all the languages that we have today. And it’s just not the case. Right?
HEDVIG: No, it’s not. Very often when people draw trees, they draw one tree at a time. This illustration by Minna does have two trees, actually.
BEN: It’s true.
HEDVIG: So, on this illustration to the right, there is the Uralic language family, which Finnish belongs to.
BEN: Is that like Hungarian and Finnish and stuff?
HEDVIG: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Sami, and a bunch of languages in Russia like Komi, etc. She has chosen to make that tree smaller, because there are fewer languages in it. I think she’s also scaled those bushes leaves to roughly population sizes, more or less.
BEN: Oh, okay. So, there is actually some really beautiful data visualisation going on as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, with some flexibility. Maybe it should be smaller because there are fewer languages and a few people, but it should probably be as tall.
BEN: Right. Yeah. Okay, because that evolutionary pathway has been going for just as long.
HEDVIG: Well, probably not… Yes, probably as long, but we can’t know about it for as long.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: So, another reason why these Proto-Indo-European trees are so big and so beautiful is because we have like Latin and Ancient Greek and stuff, where we can know a lot about those deeper branches.
BEN: Right. There’s like survivorship bias essentially going on.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yes. Perfect.
HEDVIG: Yes, 100%. So, in phylogenetics, we talk about tips and nodes and roots. Nodes are internal points, and tips are tip sleeves, and roots is a root. And for a lot of language families, the depth of the root, like, we can’t postulate it too far away because we don’t have that many languages that we don’t know. Proto-Indo-European is one of those where we can. There’s a handful of other ones. Afro-Asiatic, we can go pretty far back on and a couple more, but not many that go this back.
BEN: On the behalf of listeners, as the non-linguist on the trio, as the dummy-dum-dum, so we’re way behind written stuff now, right?
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: We’re talking 10,000 years ago, so we’re talking at best, at the very, very best, at least another 5,000 years are going to take place before we get even cursory written things. And even then, it takes a while for writing to take off to the degree where it’s actually really useful in terms of that stuff.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: But it’s really useful to have a written record of Latin and a written record of French.
BEN: Oh, yeah. No, doubt.
HEDVIG: We can be like: Mm!
BEN: That’s true.
HEDVIG: And then, we can use that information between those two points backwards.
BEN: But that wouldn’t happen for 10,000 years after this point, right?
HEDVIG: Right. But that is still better than most language families.
BEN: We didn’t have Latin in like 5,000 BCE.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No. So sorry, Ben. If you asked before about how we can know about change and how fast things change…
BEN: Yeah. That was the core question here, is we’re so far behind or before written records at this point, how are we doing this one?
DANIEL: So, for this one, we are reconstructing languages. We’re taking a look at existing languages and then making guesses and predictions. Sometimes, they come true. Let me show you an example of Proto-Indo-European. This is not a story that was written in Proto-Indo-European because there ain’t none. There were no written records. But scholars in about the 1990s took a story from the Rigveda and wrote it in what we think Proto-Indo-European is like. So, let me show you…
BEN: Both in terms of vocabulary and grammar.
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: So, the story is, this is about a man who wanted a child, so he asks the god, Werunos. Interestingly, Varuna. You might have heard of a god named Varuna. Uranus. Uranus is also a name related to that. He wanted a child. So, he says, “Hear me, Father Werunos.” The god, Werunos, came down from heaven, “What do you want?”
Here’s how that looks in what we think Proto-Indo-European was like. “ḱludʰí moi, pter U̯erune!” Dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos diu̯és km̥tá gʷah₂t. “Kʷíd u̯ēlh₁si?” That was the, “What do you want?” “Kʷíd u̯ēlh₁si?” You might be wondering, if you’re looking at the slides, what’s the one and the two? There are three H sounds. There’s an H1, H2, H3. We don’t know what they sounded like, but we know they were different because they act different. Hedvig, have I got that?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s true. I don’t specialise in Proto-Indo-European, but I have been trying to understand how historical linguists do this.
BEN: Right. Because you guys have been like, “We guess.” And that is an unsatisfying answer. [LAUGHS] So…
HEDVIG: No, we don’t guess. No, we don’t guess.
BEN: Well, then Daniel said you guessed.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: No, we don’t guess. What we do is we look at existing languages, and then we can say, “Okay, I can see that these three languages have a word that’s kind of similar for that one thing.”
HEDVIG: People always do… AARGH! I have a personal gripe with the field of historical linguistics.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And it’s going to get me into trouble, but I don’t care.
BEN: Let’s do it. We’ve had a lot of Hedvig gear grinds today. This is fun!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: This is what happens when you make me get up at 8am.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Historical linguists show these beautiful examples of regular sound changes like FATER, PATER, etc. You take a class and they’re like, “Look how beautiful it is.” The truth is that the actual data that goes into most of the reconstruction isn’t as neat and tidy. And in order to sort through them and make decisions, you have to have assumptions. You have to believe, “Oh, evidence from this language group matters more than evidence from this language groups. These changes are more plausible than those changes,” etc. And all those assumptions go into it and make up a very important part of that machinery and aren’t always very well spelled out. For example, the last sentence here, “Kʷíd u̯ēlh₁si?” That looks really Latin.
DANIEL: It does.
HEDVIG: That looks really, really Latin. And is that because it really was really, really similar to Latin? Or, was it because scholars who did this…
DANIEL and BEN: …have a Latin bias.
HEDVIG: …have a Latin bias, right? Now, it is possible that they don’t have a Latin bias, that this is reasonable, but sometimes in their methodology, it’s hard to tell.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: The crucial thing here is we don’t know.
HEDVIG: We don’t know.
DANIEL: And we can’t know.
BEN: You are fundamentally creating models that are arriving at conclusions, but you have no way to fact check those conclusions. All you can do, I’m assuming, is if you are an academic in the field of historical linguistics, is you come along at a certain point and you go, “Based on some data I found from written records or whatever, I think I can update the way the model runs, and my belief is the output therefore is better.”
HEDVIG: Is better.
BEN: But again, I have no way to fact check that.
HEDVIG: But we can fact check some of it, going back to the point earlier.
BEN: Is that because you can do it on a smaller timescale, so you can make the model try and guess for stuff that we actually have?
HEDVIG: We can try and reconstruct Proto-Romance and see if it’s like Latin.
BEN: Right. Okay.
HEDVIG: So, taking Latin out of our little practice dataset, only taking the Romance languages, doing our methodology the same way, do we get something that looks at least… Maybe Latin isn’t a direct parent of Romance languages, but it should at least be quite similar to it. Maybe it’s a sister language of that. So, we can use that as like a practice and be like, “If we get roughly right…” This is actually part of why a long time ago, historical linguists really rejected some methodology, because it postulated things for Icelandic that were really weird.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, they used Icelandic as one of those practice datasets and they were like, “The results we’re getting out for Icelandic don’t make sense. Therefore, something is probably wrong with our methods.” And with modern Bayesian phylogenetics, what you can also do is you can incorporate confidence. You can say, “Look, we think this form here, we think this tree structure and our confidence on a scale from zero to one is this.”
BEN: Right. Okay. So, your dataset will be like plus or minus kind of thing. It’s like, “We think it’s this, plus or minus six.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: That’s really helpful, because then when other people look at it, you can say, “Oh, this person was wrong here.” But also, they possibly have a really low confidence score. So, at least they were humble about it.
BEN: They acknowledge that this was not a red hot product.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, let’s keep that in mind as we go through some of these words, such as they are. So, the first sentence was “ḱludʰí moi, pter U̯erune!” ḱludʰí would eventually work its way into Old English, hlūd, which is loud and would eventually become listen.
BEN: Wow. Okay.
DANIEL: Moi is pretty recognisable. There’s the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root, mē.
BEN: Well, it’s also like moi, right? Like, it’s literally the word, moi.
DANIEL: Mm. Moi, not in pronunciation, but in spelling.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Pter, we can see that one pretty clearly, PATER turning into FATHER. Dei̯u̯ós, the god Werunos came down from heaven. We’ve got dei̯u̯ós and we would see that eventually in English, deity. km̥tá, which would work its way into COME, we think. And then the WHAT, as Hedvig pointed out, looks a lot like Kʷíd. And then, u̯ēlh₁si, which we think the root there is Proto-Indo-European *weno, which would eventually work its way into Proto-Germanic *wanen, again, we think, turning into WANT.
HEDVIG: Which WHAT?
DANIEL: So, not horribly unrecognisable, but that’s possibly a function of the kinds of hypothetical languages we make.
BEN: It’s only not horribly unrecognisable when you [LAUGHS] provide this wonderful color coded, “This word turns into this, which then turns into this.” But if you just give someone the block of text, it is totally unrecognisable.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Very hard.
DANIEL: This is a good lesson to show just how unrecognisable things can go, back when you get 10,000 years distant.
HEDVIG: And if you’re a gamer and you want to have some fun with this… Far Cry Primal was a game that came out a couple of years ago where they hired a bunch of linguists to make, not only Proto-Indo-European dialogue, but Proto-Proto-Indo-European dialogue…
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: …and a couple of versions. Yeah, I think it’s fun and good. I don’t care if it’s right. I think it’s fun and good.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: As long as we know.
BEN: This is not being delivered in an academic paper. It is being delivered in a thing where you shoot dinosaurs, I’m presuming?
HEDVIG: I think woolly mammoths.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, it would be that.
BEN: Hang on, that changes things completely. Shooting dinosaurs, fun. Shooting woolly mammoths, that’s serious business.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Just doing human stuff. Uh-oh, I think I see a mammoth. Quick, into the time machine.
BEN: [LINGUISTIC MACHINE SOUND EFFECT]
DANIEL: All right. So, we’ve gone 10,000 years, but we still have 100,000, 1 million, and 10 million to go. So, you know what we’re going to do?
HEDVIG: We’re getting into some true Mormon shit.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sorry, but the Mormon shit ends at 6,000 years, and that’s all you get.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, how about this? Let’s break it up into a Part 2. We will continue the linguistic time machine. We’ll charge the batteries, give it a little clean because, frankly, we’ve been going a lot of different places. And did you enjoy this episode?
BEN: This is fun.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I hope that our listeners have enjoyed this. I certainly have. So, watch for a future episode. I would just like to say thanks, Ben and Hedvig, for coming along with me on the linguistic time machine. It’s been a lot of fun.
HEDVIG: So much fun.
BEN: I’ve always desperately wanted to have my own Mr Peabody.
DANIEL: Yes indeed, that’s me. I’d like to also thank the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. But most of all, you, our patrons who keep the show going. Thanks all.
HEDVIG: This is a cuddly, cozy, family internal episode for our patron family only, and for the rest of the people at some point in the future when Daniel chooses.
BEN: Listen Later Massive.
HEDVIG: Listen Later Massive. Hard thing to say. If you’re a patron and you like the show and you give us money, that’s lovely. We love you. If you want, you can talk to us more and give us ideas. Like, if something in the show that you liked or didn’t like or some content that you came across that you think would fit well into our show, you can get in touch with us. We are @becauselangpod on all the places. But primarily, if you’re a patron, you can join us in our lovely little Discord and give us beautiful messages there. You can use SpeakPipe to send an actual audio that we can play. I think… doesn’t Discord also support voice messages?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
BEN: Ooo, that can be fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Watch this space.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And you can tell a friend about us or review us somewhere. That also helps the show.
BEN: Hey patrons, all of the people who are currently listening to this, you’re doing great work. Let me tell you how great a job you’re doing. You’re helping us pay the bills, you’re helping us transcribe our shows so that they’re readable and searchable. And depending on your level, you get stuff like this. You get bonus episodes, you get mailouts, you get shoutouts, all of that stuff is really, really cool. You should tell other people about us so that they can also do stuff like that.
But here is a shoutout to our top patrons. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt…
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DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
ALL: Pew, pew, pew.
[BOOP]
BEN: I genuinely truly do wish that I was a different human being, most of the time. I really do wish that about myself, because I am the Grinch.
DANIEL: Then, you either need to steal everyone’s Christmas shit, or you need a visit from three ghosts.
BEN: This is the problem! There is a part of me [DANIEL LAUGHS] where I was like, “If I had Santa Claus powers, I would not be giving everyone a gift. I would be stealing all the Christmas crap in the night.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Like, in the night, I would come and it would all be gone. I watch The Grinch, and I’m like, “I get this guy. I really do.”
DANIEL: This is my guy. My guy.
BEN: [LAUGHS] He makes a lot of sense.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Hedvig, do you think that you could pull your microphone a bit closer to you? Would that be all right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I can do anything for you. Anything for you.
BEN: Except maybe not… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s better.
BEN: That was amazing. You managed to perfectly obscure your face.
DANIEL: Malicious compliance.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
[BOOP]
BEN: Quick note. Hedvig, did you come across this idea of the Mediterranean thing from the xkcd series of comics, Time?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Oh, do yourself a favour, because… Daniel, have you seen this series that I’m talking about?
DANIEL: I have, but I think I’ve forgotten mostly about it.
HEDVIG: Okay. So really, really quickly, just because it’s a cool thing that you’ll both like. Randall Munroe, who does xkcd, did a comic called Time. Like, one of his comics was called Time.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: It was a single frame, and it would update every couple of minutes, I think, or maybe every hour. And this comic was a tremendously long series of comics that refreshed itself and updated every hour or so for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.
HEDVIG: But could you see the old stuff?
BEN: No. This is the thing. You would need to constantly have watched it and saved it and updated it and stuff.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: But someone did all of that hard work, and you can go to find a bunch of externally hosted things where you can click through them and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, surely.
BEN: But it is the story of two people who are sitting on the banks of some lake, and the lake is just precipitously rising like a couple of centimeters every few minutes and they’re like, “What the fuck is this? This is weird.” And basically, it turns out that it’s the event that you’ve talked about, and they have to go on this long journey, and then they run into people whose language they can’t speak. Like, it’s different from their language, and Randall Munroe does that by semi changing how the words work, so you can kind of/sort of infer what the other people… It’s really, really cool. You should check it out.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Cool.
BEN: It’s called Time. Anyway, Daniel, go.
HEDVIG: Time. That sounds really cool. Thank you. No, I’ll look that up. I did get the idea from the podcast, Fall of Civilizations, and they also did an episode on Roman Britain and Celts under Roman rule. So…
BEN: Okay. I’ll check it out.
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]