We’re climbing back into the linguistic time machine and taking a look at language in the long view. We’ll find out what language was like
- 100,000 years ago
- 1 million years ago
- 10 million years ago
and then jump into the future
- 100 years
- 1,000 years, and
- 10,000 years from now.
What will we find?
Watch this episode
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Stone tools, language and the brain in human evolution
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223784/
On the Neurocognitive Co-Evolution of Tool Behavior and Language: Insights from the Massive Redeployment Framework
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12577
Homo sapiens and early human migration | Khan Academy
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/world-history-beginnings/origin-humans-early-societies/a/where-did-humans-come-from
[$$] Birds are just as fashion-conscious as people | The Economist
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/02/01/birds-are-just-as-fashion-conscious-as-people
Dinner Guests: How Wolves And Ravens Coexist At Kills
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/dinner-guests-how-wolves-and-ravens-coexist-at-kills/#
Linguistic Hypotheses on the Origins of Language
https://freelanguage.org/general-language-info/linguistic-hypotheses-on-the-origins-of-language
Heave Ho!
https://www.heavehogame.com
Researchers ‘Translate’ Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—a Lot
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564/
What bats have to say about speech and language
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325843/
Our Brains Treat Signed and Spoken Languages Alike
https://www.futurity.org/brains-sign-language-speech-1721212/
Fire control | CHIELD
https://correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variable.html?key=389791574
Homo erectus may have been a sailor – and able to speak | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/20/homo-erectus-may-have-been-a-sailor-and-able-to-speak
Cooking | CHIELD
https://correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variable.html?key=4234432752
Suzana Herculano-Houzel: What is so special about the human brain?
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain?language=en
Brain size | CHIELD
https://correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variable.html?key=170243050
Discover all about the kangaroo birthing cycle
https://www.blackpoolzoo.org.uk/blog/kangaroo-birthing-cycle
Nicholas Evans: Did language evolve in multilingual settings?
https://researchprofiles.anu.edu.au/en/publications/did-language-evolve-in-multilingual-settings
Primate Speciation: A Case Study of African Apes
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/primate-speciation-a-case-study-of-african-96682434/
Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/abs/michael-a-arbib-how-the-brain-got-language-the-mirror-system-hypothesis-new-york-oxford-university-press-2012-pp-xvii-413/E424E4FB5BA8EBE12670417128A0B5B8
Bipedalism | CHIELD
https://correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variable.html?key=2413943838
Vocal tract | CHIELD
https://correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variable.html?key=1653868553
Little did we know about this grammatical rule | The Language Closet
https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/05/07/v2-word-order/
The Race to Save the World’s Disappearing Languages
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/saving-dying-disappearing-languages-wikitongues-culture
Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age
https://longnow.org/ideas/shining-a-light-on-the-digital-dark-age/
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain. — Lily Tomlin
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lily_tomlin_100110
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
BEN: I’m glad we have slides. Slides are good. They are a necessary thing in the world. And Daniel’s made some. So, let’s all of us gather round the 21st century campfire, which is, of course, the slide deck, and have us a wholesome good time.
DANIEL: How interesting that you would phrase it that way, because fire is going to come up in our story.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team with me now, my two wonderful podcast princesses. Princess number one, Hedvig Skirgård. Hello, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hi. I am…
DANIEL: Having a good morning?
HEDVIG: I’ve got my cup of tea. As listeners and my podcast host will know I’m not the best morning person, but I am flying myself. It will be great.
DANIEL: All right. And princess number two, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.
BEN: I want everyone to imagine that I’m doing that weird regal so-my-hand-doesn’t-get-tired wave, like the curve from side to side. Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Well… Uh-huh?
BEN: That’s true Princess style. I don’t even want to put in the effort to look exuberant.
DANIEL: Well, but if you’re a rodeo princess, then it’s this kind of thing [SHARP HORIZONTAL SLICING WAVE].
BEN: I’ve never seen a rodeo princess.
DANIEL: Uh-huh. I’ve never been one, but I have seen them.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: People don’t have to imagine how your wave looks like, because for this episode, there’s two ways to do this. You can listen to the regular way on audio, and that’s great. But there’s also slides for this episode, which you will be able to see if you flip over to our YouTube channel and watch the video version of this episode, which has slides and us waving.
BEN: In a regal manner.
DANIEL: So, you can find a link to the video in the description for the audio episode that you’re listening to now.
BEN: Hey, Hedvig, why are you in Sweden? I’m in meaning to ask.
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m in Sweden, because I’m here sitting Department of Linguistics and Philology at the Uppsala University, and doing some research and doing some teaching.
BEN: Listen to that, guys. That’s the life of a career academic. Ooh, soak it in. She’s made it.
HEDVIG: It’s fun. I get to teach in Swedish, and the students are really lovely. Yeah, they’re very sweet. They’re all having fun. We’re in that part of the intro to linguistics where you have to talk about, like, “So, the retroflex part of the palette is the place where it tickles the most. So, everyone put your fingers into your mouth,” and they’re like, “No.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: And I’m like, “No, trust me.” [LAUGHS] And then like, “Now, put your fingers on your Adam’s apple and then put your fingers on your nose.” It’s a lot of touching. I’ve encouraged them to clean their hands afterwards.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Teaching first years is the best. I love it. I’m so envious. Have fun with it.
HEDVIG: It is really fun.
BEN: So, before we talk about the ancient and distant past of historical linguistics, do we have some news to check in with?
DANIEL: No, but we do have some patron thanks. I’d like to thank you for being a patron. You are helping us to keep the public episodes public for everyone. Also, a bit of housekeeping. Watch your mail because I just dumped about 200 envelopes into the postbox. I think it was a postbox. Pretty sure it was a postbox.
BEN: Some poor person’s shopping trolley just has a lot of mail.
HEDVIG: You would not believe, as a person having a bike with a bike basket, people put all kinds of stuff into your bike basket.
DANIEL: Recycling.
HEDVIG: Usually trash. Yeah, various kinds of trash.
BEN: Is it ever kittens? Does the cat distribution system ever work that way?
DANIEL: She said trash.
HEDVIG: Mainly takeaway coffee mugs.
BEN: Ah, that’s less exciting than kittens.
DANIEL: Well, it was a postbox, because some patrons are already getting their annual mailout with patches and our postcard and stickers and stuff. Now, Ignacio and I figured out something. Ignacio of course gave us the idea for our etymology sticker. So, thanks, Ignacio. I’ve been telling people, “Make sure Patreon has your address.” But there’s a little problem. Even if you have given Patreon your address, it’s possible that Patreon won’t show it to me, because when you signed up, there’s a tick box that says, “I don’t want any physical mail.”
BEN: Aah.
DANIEL: If you’ve ticked that box, Patreon will not show me your address and you won’t get the mailout. So, here’s what you do. Climb into Patreon, see if you can find a tick box like that, and untick it. And if you have any doubts about your mail, that your mailout is coming or not, give it a little while, give it a week or two, depending on where you are. But if you’re worried, just slip me a quick email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: I was going to say, yeah if you don’t want to untick the junk mailbox, which, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t want to untick…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Just send Daniel your address because, yeah, he’s going to get it anyway.
DANIEL: Yeah. And if you’re not sure, I’ve got the list of everybody that I’ve sent the mailout to. I’ll just say, “Oh, yeah, you’re on the list. You’re fine.” Or, “No.” Go ahead. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. It’ll be a quick one. Anyway, we hope that you like the stuff we sent. We had fun putting it together. Thanks for being patrons and sticking with us. And if you’re listening to this later, we need you become a patron now at patreon.com/becauselangpod. Okay, I think it’s time that I share the slides.
BEN: Slide decks.
DANIEL: [SCATS]
BEN: [CROSSTALK] Class is in session, kids.
DANIEL: I’ll say. Let’s take a look at what happened last time. We looked at what language was like at ever increasing time depths. We looked at language one year ago where we mostly talked about large language models and Wordle. Those were the big things. There was some vocab. That was fun. 10 years ago, we started looking at emoji and gender inclusive language. About 100 years ago, we looked at modern English, the rise of modern English, and also pronouns. About 1,000 years ago, then were talking the transition from old English to Middle English. And then we went to 10,000 years ago where we started talking about Proto-Indo-European, the Austronesian language family, and how we reconstruct languages. Did we get that about right?
BEN: Yup. That was our whistle-stop tour.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm. So, this time, we’re going to take a look at even deeper timescales, and then afterwards, we’re going to take the time machine to the future a bit and do some speculation. It’s going to be real fun.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, we are on 100,000 years ago. And the first thing that we’d like to do is say, “Well, what kind of things can we use to figure out what language was like 100,000 years ago?” I’ve got archaeological records. Hedvig, what else?
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, archaeological records can be interesting. It can tell us maybe about culture. So, if people have a similar kind of art form in different areas, then maybe they’re related and we can hypothesize, but it’s hard to hypothesize about the actual features of languages. So, there is some research where people actually try to scan mummies and stuff and try and reconstruct vocal tracts, but not usually as far away as 100,000 years ago. 100,000 years ago, we’re talking potentially before everyone left Africa, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Well, that’s going to be my question, right…
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: …is where are humans 100,000 years ago? Because I’m pretty sure we’re not in what we now call the Americas, for example.
DANIEL: Hmn-hm.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: I don’t think we’re in Australia yet. Would we be on the Asian continent, possibly?
DANIEL: Let’s talk about that. The first thing that I want to bring up is when did language arise? And we’ve got a number of bins that we can set as hard limits or events that seem to be language-ish. So, let me just bring these up and then we can hash this around a little bit. 5 to 7 million years ago, that’s MYA, we see speciation of chimps and humans. We talk, they don’t. We sign, they don’t. And so, I think that’s an earliest possible limit of when we would say, “Okay, language now.”
HEDVIG: Right. But a lot of the conceptions we have about what defines human language is defined sometimes a little bit ad hoc with trying to cut out specific other species, so we’re like these Hockett design features or something. A lot of them are targeted at excluding bees, excluding parrots, excluding [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:08:45] and stuff. But if we remove that kind of “we need humans to be special” glasses and instead just ask, “What are different communication styles, what are different modes of communication and what are different animals trying to do?”, Then there are a lot of things actually in common. Just because they don’t have arbitrary science and blah, blah, blah, they still have a lot of things in common.
To prepare for this episode, I emailed with some people and I emailed with Dan Dediu, and he said, in just a personal note like, “I would not be shocked if even 1 million years ago people use something similar-ish, eerily similar to what we do now, but we can’t ever know because we can’t really find any evidence of it.”
BEN: Right. So, this person’s point was, if you were to take a time machine a million years ago, you would see a thing that would be functionally indistinguishable from finding some undiscovered tribe today and hearing their language kind of thing.
HEDVIG: No. Maybe it would be indistinguishable, but it would probably still work as a complicated communication system. So, maybe the utterances would be smaller, fewer phonemes. It would be different, but maybe it would still be a complicated communication system, why are we like… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: But we have that spectrum in our languages on earth today anyway, right? Like, there are languages with far fewer phonemes than others, correct?
HEDVIG: Right. But we’re talking maybe even…
BEN: Less than that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, the ones we find today are actually pretty… I mean, they’re a bit different, but they’re…
DANIEL: I’m really glad you’re mentioning this, Hedvig because I really have come to think quite differently about this. Because I was pretty influenced by the Chomskyan syntactic school, though I didn’t want to be, I would say things like: Oh, well, we can say that it’s language when…. And then we go to Hockett’s design features like: Oh, they take their utterances, break them down and build them up to make new ones — syntacticity or something.
I’m just not sure that that’s what we’re looking for here. If you think that language arose because we got a specific brain mutation that allowed us to do abstract symbolic manipulation, then you’re going to come up with one answer. But I just think of language as like, I don’t want to say a spectrum, but I don’t think of it as like syntactic. I think of it as in terms of Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater. We’ve just all been playing language-y games for a super long time.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And if you think of it that way, then language could have arisen many times, or things that are like language have arisen many times along the way. And it could happen again, because we’re all just playing this improvisational game, and language is the buildup of these games.
HEDVIG: The point of language or at least one point of language seems to be to coordinate social action. So, I say something, and I want you to have a certain thought in your head and then learn or say something else. That’s the game that we’re playing. The other potential function of language is that it’s about organizing your thoughts, that it’s an internal thing, and then secondarily an external thing that you talk to other people. But I think it’s probably mainly talking to other people.
And a lot of other social species need to communicate with each other. We’ve probably needed this also. And other primates, okay, maybe they don’t do exactly all the fancy things we do but they do a bunch of cool stuff. So, they probably did something. What are we up to now on our time machine? 100,000?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: No, we’re at 5 million.
DANIEL: We’re just taking a short look back, a quick look back. We’re going to stay in the 100,000 camp. But I just want to say this. Just like giraffes, where at some point there were pre-giraffes and then there were giraffes, and one day, there’s going to be post-giraffes, and we come along, and we say, “Oh, giraffe now.” We do the same thing with language. We say language now, but there’s been elements that have floated in and things that are floating out and language. Whatever we’ve been doing, we come along, and we say, “Oh, at this point, it’s language,” but that might be arbitrary like giraffes.
BEN: So, the idea being, if I can boil both of you down…
HEDVIG: Yes, please.
BEN: …to a layperson.
DANIEL: That’s your job.
BEN: Yeah. There’s a bunch of creatures on the planet who… and we’ve said this before in other shows, who are doing like proto-languagey things. They’re doing language like things, because they have the same suite of needs that humans have that probably gave rise to language in the first place like social coordination.
DANIEL: And a repertoire that allows them to do some of that stuff too.
BEN: Yeah. So, the point here is, if we were to be able to give octopuses and dolphins and chimps and bees and put whatever animal you want in here that’s doing language like things right now, parrots, if we gave all of these animals another couple of million years, maybe they would sophisticate the language-like things they’re doing into something that would be more like a language. But possibly not like our language, because they would follow a different path and then they would probably have a bunch of their own rules being like, [CHUCKLES] “Well, I think you’ll find that what the humans do is not, in fact, language.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Because there’s only us who do real language.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: Those gross hairless monkeys with their weird mouth squawking, they can’t manipulate their tentacles like a real person can.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, for sure. And if you imagine a group that has a very different social organization to most like mammals, if you imagine like ants, they, for some reason… which, honestly, you have to realize that evolution doesn’t have a goal, right?
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It just solves the problem in front of it.
BEN: It’s just not die. Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Not die. It’s good if you’re not in pain, but it’s not as important as not dying. So, you can be in a lot of pain still.
BEN: And only to the point of reproduction as well. That’s really crucially important to remember as well like, “Fuck, and then die. Fine.”
HEDVIG: Maybe. For some social species, it’s good to have some people around to babysit.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But ants have a very different… The members of their species, for example, have very different bodies depending on their functions and they would be like, “Oh, of course, the worker ants could never wave their antenna that way. That would be gross. Of course, only the queen can do that,” or something. And they’d be like, “Humans don’t have to…”
BEN: A bunch of queens talking to each other.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Humans don’t have this special feature that’s like all of their species can talk to each other. It’s super gross. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Let’s be clear. I’m not saying that squid have their own kind of language.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: But I’m thinking of language nowadays as…
HEDVIG: Why not?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I don’t get it.
DANIEL: Well, let me put at this. Let me talk about the way that I visualize it, and maybe you can tell me if you think so. You know how Wittgenstein talked about family resemblances when he was talking about games? Like, some games have a goal, some games don’t. Some games use equipment, some games don’t. We have this category of game, but an individual game doesn’t have to have all of the attributes. Instead, it’s like a grab bag of things that we come along and say, “Oh, that’s a game.” Maybe language has family resemblances to other kinds of things that other animals are doing, and we just put the label “language” on it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure. And also, if bonobos don’t need to talk about what they did yesterday and the imagined universe, then they’re not going to evolve the ability to do… I mean, the fact that we are doing it is like… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: Way too busy masturbating anyway.
HEDVIG: Also, honestly, Ben, how much joy has all this civilization brought you personally?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Tons, tons.
BEN: You are preaching to the choir, right?
DANIEL: I’d live twice as long as I would have normally.
BEN: See, only on average, Daniel. So, that’s an important factor to remember.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: I actually imagine one of the hardest things in the world would be either anthropologist or an archaeologist, when you are just constantly confronted with this information that human beings actually probably had much happier lives and then we fucked it…
DANIEL: And shorter.
BEN: …all up.
DANIEL: Well, anyway, let’s move it along and talk about some other events that people might say, “Oh, language began here,” or maybe a wave of stuff happened that contributed to our language, which I think is more likely. 1.6 to 1.8 million years ago, we know that there was Homo ergaster and they were using tools. Tool making is very important. We know that when you stick somebody in an fMRI machine and you have them imagine toolmaking. Guess what lights up? Broca’s area.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Okay. So also, Homo erectus crossed oceans, managed to make it to other places. Hard to imagine without the kind of brain that would be able to do language.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And not just because toolmaking, but also because you need a group of people…
BEN: Yeah. You need…
HEDVIG: who probably [CROSSTALK] some wrong.
BEN: …social organization.
HEDVIG: You need to be like, “Okay, everyone, we’re going to get on this boat and we’re going to be on this boat for a long time and it’s going to be miserable. But hopefully, there’s something fun over there.”
BEN: Just to be clear to all the listeners as well, obviously, many animals can cross the ocean. What we’re talking about is the fact that Homo erectus and us are not well suited for that task. So, we would need a lot of organizing to pull it off.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: By the time we get to 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, that’s KYA, 1,000 years ago, we start seeing that humanoid fossils look a lot like us. We had the same body. I’m not going to designed lockdown, but I am going to say, “Yeah, we looked a lot like we do now.”
HEDVIG: And this is where we also get into the potential cousin of ours, neanderthals, which everyone in the show has a little bit probably DNA of. So, when we talk about Homo erectus and stuff, we say that we talk about species, but we know that there were other homo things running around at the time that we could interact with and that maybe had something language-y, we don’t know. But anyway, some of us had… What’s it called in the Sims? Woo-Hoo time?
DANIEL: Skoodilypooping.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Goddamn.
HEDVIG: Skoodilypooping. Right. And they were around in parts of Eurasia about 300,000 years before Christ. So, we’re talking about… It is 2,000 years. Who cares? It’s about 300,000 years ago until about maybe 30,000 years ago, something like that, I think. And then, they’re no longer and they only live on in us. And if we are lucky, maybe we can do that.
BEN: I’ve seen various figures. Does anyone know what we’ve settled on? It’s like we are roughly 1.5% to 2% neanderthal? Is that how that works?
HEDVIG: If you have origins from outside of sub-Saharan Africa as well.
BEN: Oh, okay because their gene lines are clean. They never skoodilypooped with the bad ones.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s not like a lot. Well, I share a workplace. I’m in the same institute as Svante Pääbo, who just received a Nobel prize for research that has to do with this stuff. So, maybe I shouldn’t talk out of my hat. We should prepare and talk thoroughly about it.
BEN: Get the clever people on the show.
HEDVIG: If we’re talking about bonobos being able to do some sorts of communication, and other primates, neanderthals were more like us than bonobos. And probably, I believe that we think that they had burials, like they buried people, right?
DANIEL: Burial. Yes. Hey and then we’ve got 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, humans out of Africa, which I think we might be able to say is the latest that we’re going to put… That’s going to be a late limit. The argument is that language arose in Africa and then we all took it with us as we dispersed. But again, if you think that language could happen through innovative language games, then it doesn’t have to be.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Then, it could be even later.
HEDVIG: No, no. I don’t think it could be later, because it takes a while for it to reach that level of sophistication and complexity, and I don’t think there’s enough time from going out of Africa to now to get to it. So, it’s got to be…
BEN: We took language alongside spears and fire out of Africa.
HEDVIG: Yeah, there’s no way.
DANIEL: I’m leaning toward the 150,000 to 200,000. I’m leaning toward the green one, personally. That’s where I go. But again, it doesn’t have to be a thing where before this, there was no language. After this, there was. It could be there were waves, and we added things to our repertoire, and everybody’s using their repertoire to get themselves across.
BEN: And like we said, Homo erectus crossed oceans a million years before that point. So, there was something language like almost certainly happening just by virtue of that feat.
DANIEL: The counterargument is they got washed asea and survived after the tsunami.
BEN: [BLOWS A RASPBERRY]
DANIEL: Okay. Cool.
BEN: I’m Sorry. Let’s just apply Occam’s razor to that one a little bit. One is someone won the lottery, and the other one is, based on the evidence that we see, it’s pretty likely that this thing happened.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Maybe just for our listeners, we should say we’re getting into time that’s here where as you can notice by us being like, “Oh-uh-oh,” we have very little… It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s hard to know.
HEDVIG: And it’s probably gradual, some of these things.
BEN: Would we say, Hedvig, because I feel like you’re the closest to this, that many people spend their entire lives trying to answer small aspects of these questions?
DANIEL: Oh, my God.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Toolmaking, crossing oceans, types of culture like dance, decorations of tools, all these things that we think have to do with a social group and social communication that can leave some sort of evidence in archaeological remains, because brains don’t fossilize. And even if they do, we don’t know how to…
BEN: And language certainly doesn’t. The spoken word doesn’t get trapped in mud.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: No. But little prints into clay does.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And why would people be printing stuff into clay if they didn’t have some sort of social meaning building system, right?
BEN: Why would you create carvings and paintings of things if you didn’t tell each other’s stories?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Right. But then we also have other animals who have fashion.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, various animals. Every now and then, there’s animal news that like, “Oh, all of these birds pick up this leaf and put it on their left side, and they’re all really into this right now.” They also do social signaling with visual means. So, I’m like, [ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: We’ve taken a lot more time on this slide than I was planning to.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: But I’m really glad we do, because this is like a long… Yeah, kind of.
HEDVIG: You thought… What did you think?
BEN: Hedvig, [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: You can’t just dump this kind of chum into the water and not expect us to go wild.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay. Well, having looked at this overview, let’s plant ourselves firmly into the 100,000 years ago camp. We’re pretty sure… like, I’m taking the view that we had language or something very, very language like by 100,000 years ago, because early humans were very similar to us, physically and genetically. We all had bodies that were capable, and it seems weird to have that kind of hardware if you’re not already using it, unless you’re using it for something else, which is possible.
HEDVIG: You mean hardware as in speech organs?
DANIEL: Yes, and brain structures.
HEDVIG: Right. Yeah.
DANIEL: And abilities.
HEDVIG: They are probably not useful. Yeah.
DANIEL: We’ll talk more about those a little later.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Another thing. They were able to coordinate their activity. They were able to hunt cooperatively, which doesn’t always require language, but it helps if you have it. They were able to migrate out of Africa somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago, which seems… And this is where the language has to be very weak. We have to say weak things like, it seems very difficult for them to have been able to do that stuff without language, but they still could.
BEN: Can I also put forward one idea here? Because I always see hunt cooperatively laid down.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I have so much experience in studying early humans. So, obviously, this is a very important thing that carries a lot of weight. But can we acknowledge that all of the other things that humans do would also require language and be really difficult? Like, if you are preserving and storing food supplies for, say, a winter season or something like that, or if you are gathering a certain thing that needs to be treated in a certain way, otherwise it kills you, and after you treat it becomes food, all of that stuff requires language? It’s so not just hunting stuff.
HEDVIG: Also, a lot of other social species hunt cooperatively, like wolves do.
BEN: Yeah. And lions.
DANIEL: Yeah. Wolves and ravens.
HEDVIG: So, it can’t… Right. I’m more in the cultural decoration burial. Those things seem unusual and seem to require not only communication systems but also the idea of social units and meaning and signaling and stuff like that. That is more interesting to me than… But yeah.
BEN: So, the thing that I come to with migrating out of Africa is that you need to be able to have essentially like a calorie bank to pull that off and you definitely, definitely need to be able to do that if you want to go into places that freeze for half of the year. You need to have the faculties to build up, and then use a supply of food and materials and that sort of thing. And humans didn’t have it because in Africa, you didn’t need it. And then to do it, we probably very much needed language. But that goes back to Daniel’s point, right? We don’t know that, for sure. We just have to say, “Man, that would be really tough if we couldn’t talk to each other.”
DANIEL: It suggests that we had brains capable of it at least, even if we didn’t use it. But are we all on board that 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, something very much like language was going on? Are we cool with that?
BEN: I think so.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, you okay with that?
HEDVIG: Yeah. And that it might have existed for even longer than that. But at that point, we would have had to have that. Yeah.
BEN: There’s like a bottleneck, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Control+L to have language to get past this point.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And to be like, we’re talking about the origins that we all come from sub-Saharan Africa, but not from all parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It’s more like Eastern Africa. And it’s not like all those areas are full of calorie foods and super easy to navigate, either.
BEN: True. There’s deserts and difficult… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: It was not like we didn’t have a challenge before we tried to go through Egypt.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: We must have had a challenge all along.
BEN: I’ve seen a few nature documentaries about Africa. And whilst I don’t want to give them too much credit, I feel very confident in saying there are hard, scary things that exist in Africa that being a human being around would have been. Hippos, man. Holy fuck.
DANIEL: Argh.
HEDVIG: Oh, they’re terrifying.
BEN: That just argh.
DANIEL: Even an ostrich would send me scurrying up a tree.
HEDVIG: And hippos don’t even need to eat. They are not going to eat you.
BEN: They are not a predator, but that almost makes it worse.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: They’ll just be walking along being like, “Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables,” and then they clock a human, they’re like abso-fucking-lutely not.
HEDVIG: Fuck off.
DANIEL: No and nothing.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about how language started. There are lots of ideas, and they have fun names like the ding-dong hypothesis. You see something, [BEN LAUGHS] you’re trying to make the sound ding-dong language as onomatopoeia. And then once you get that, then you got words and then you can go from there. Otto Jespersen was a big ding-donger.
BEN: Apparently, like this theory, clearly by a New Yorker. Ping-pong. There it is.
DANIEL: Closely related, the bow-wow hypothesis, where you’re trying to imitate the sounds of animals that gives you words, and then you can… By the way, these weren’t considered to be mutually exclusive. The uh-oh hypothesis, where language started as warnings. Fall, die, kill, and the heave-ho hypothesis, where people tried to use language to coordinate joint action, which is a very language-y thing. And so, you’ve got to roll a gigantic rock off of something, and so you all work together, [MAKES GRUNTING SOUNDS] and so now you’re using vocalizations to coordinate joint action.
BEN: Just as a very quick aside, everyone, if you haven’t give… there is a wonderful little indie video game called Heave Ho. It’s a party game. It’s a cooperative game. It’s great fun. Everyone should give it a try. On that note, I favor the heave-ho hypothesis, intuitively.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Not because of the game, but because doing stuff together is hard. Anyone who’s ever done one of those team building exercises where you have to achieve a task and everyone’s either blindfolded or gagged or whatever is so difficult. It’s really challenging.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I think that these different hypotheses are like mapping on to different things. Some of them like warnings and coordinate action, both have to do with the idea that there is an interest in being a member of a group, and that the group needs to function well. The onomatopoeia and animal noises are just like the origins of the particular things. So, I feel like these could also be combined. Like, the warning thing could be onom… crosstalk]
BEN: Right. So, ding-dong and bow wow happened as part of… Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: They’re a bit different. And then also, when we hear heave-ho, maybe we think about doing big things, but there are a lot of things that go on in social groups that aren’t building houses. I remember we talked a while ago on this podcast about this study of… I think it was bats living in a colony. Does that ring a bell? Or was it naked mole rats? One of them.
DANIEL: I don’t remember.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think it was bats.
BEN: Two delightful-looking creatures.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They were really living close to each other, and the researchers thought that most of their communication was like, “Your butt is in my face.”
DANIEL: That’s right. It was complaints. “This sucks.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: “Why is it so dark? I hate being a bat.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, but honestly,…
DANIEL: Yeah, I remember that.
HEDVIG: …next to each other and being like, “Can you scoot over a bit?” Like, “You smell. “I would like to be closer to the fire.” There are a lot of little things that need to work for a social group to work. Not all of them are these like…
BEN: “Your fire is too smoky. Can you sort it out? Because it’s like smoking out the camp.”
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Not even only complaints, but maybe not… I think of like, “Your butt is in my face,” as coordinate action.
DANIEL: Yeah, I agree. Hey, there are a lot of other hypotheses like this. And if you want to find out more, if you’re on the audio version, flip over to the video version. You’ll see something I’ve got on the screen, an article called Linguistic Hypotheses on the Origins of Language. That’s in the show notes. In fact, all of the graphics that you’re seeing, they’re in the show notes for this episode. So, check that out, becauselanguage.com.
Now, let’s keep on going. In the 1800s, linguists loved debating these origins of language. They didn’t have any good ways of knowing which one or ones were correct or how they interlocked. So, in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any discussion of language origins. It’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, hang on. No, we’re not doing that. Shut up.” That’s what it was like.
BEN: Because it just caused far too much ruckus?
DANIEL: I’m afraid so.
HEDVIG: And also, not only far too much ruckus, but they also thought that it wasn’t going anywhere.
BEN: Like, it’s a fundamentally unanswerable question.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They’re like, “This is just taking up time and we can’t know. We can’t falsify it. We can’t test it.” So, like… mm.
BEN: It’s like at a work meeting when someone starts talking about something that’s already happened or something like that, and everyone in the room is just like, [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: “Carl, shut up.”
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: “In 100 years, go for your life. But for now, just cork it.” Now, it’s a good time to talk about signed languages, because people have sometimes asked, “Wait, was it gesture or was it sound, or was it both? Did we switch over at some point?” And the probable best answer is the gesture was happening at the same time as sound, because we were just using our repertoire, and our repertoire is a lot of things. People used what they had to create and transmit meaning.
We find that signed languages are full languages by their own grammar. They are not debased versions of spoken languages or gestural versions of spoken languages. And our brains treat signed and spoken language alike.
HEDVIG: We can also tell this by the fact that people who aren’t deaf also use gestures accompanying signs. So, I am back in Sweden, in my hometown, and I was talking to some of my old high school friends, and I was like, “Edwin,” and then I pointed to where his mom and dad and him used to live. Because that’s how I distinguish which Edwin I’m talking about. And you do that all the time with spoken languages as well, like using your hands or your eyebrows or other parts besides your speech organs to communicate is not something entirely confined to sign languages. We do that all the time. If you’ve ever tried to tell an Italian person to speak without moving their hands, you’ll learn.
DANIEL: Anyone. It’s hard for us to stop waving our hands around when we’re talking.
BEN: I’m very bad for it. Kids, when they want to make fun of me in class, will mimic my hand gestures as I’m talking. And it is one of the most authentically distracting and derailing things a human being can do.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: I doff my hat for their creativity, but at the same time, it’s so annoying.
DANIEL: Okay. We’re going to leave 100,000 years ago. We’re climbing back into the machine. We’re going back to a million years ago, which we have already talked about. So, let’s go deep. The things we can use, we can use information about human bodies because we know that at this point, we all had similar bodies, at least probably. We can use information about human settlements, and we can use research from this wonderful resource called the CHIELD database. CHIELD started by our pal, Sean Roberts, and some others.
HEDVIG: I have contributed to it, and people can contribute to it. It’s a wonderful thing. Basically, what it is, it is a database of lots of different papers on both language origins, but also language change… We’re not necessarily only about these kinds of timescales. In fact, they’re not super common. But what you can do there is you can visualize different people’s scientific arguments in graphs. So, if people say that, for example, in order to have language, you need to have… your speech apparatus needs to look a certain way. Then you can get a little graph with two nodes that say like, “Speech organs look this way and language a little arrow.”
What you can do on CHIELD is you can look at lots and lots and lots of different papers in this way and see how their arguments hang together. Because reading people’s papers is sometimes tricky and sometimes you want to compare many papers at the same time. So, I really recommend going and exploring CHIELD.
BEN: People who do work like this are doing the Lord’s…
DANIEL: Big time. Big time.
BEN: Big, big time.
DANIEL: I decided to zoom in one and it’s fire control. Now, what you’re seeing on the…
BEN: Hey, we’re back at fire.
DANIEL: Yeah, we made it back. So, what we’re seeing in this chart that I’ve got here is there’s a bubble with fire control in there, but it’s also got lots of links to other things. I’m just going to read some out, other bubbles, like warmth. I’m starting at 9 o’clock. Foraging strategy fuel. Lightning, it’s related to fire control. Extended day. Nightlight. I’m going to go over to 3 o’clock. Wildfire social interaction. Fire transport. Cooking. There’s just all kinds of things that people in various research papers have linked to fire control when it comes to language and language development.
HEDVIG: And like Ben was talking about being able to extend calorie resources by drying or cooking them and make them edible make things that aren’t edible edible. So, just the idea of fire is actually a complicated scientific concept that you can teeth apart in these type of graphs.
BEN: Not only that, but ancient humans… Are we still talking…? Maybe I should have said this at the start of this section. A million years ago, are we still talking about Homo sapiens, or have we moved into one of our progenitor people?
DANIEL: I think we’re not at Homo sapiens yet. I think we’re pre-Homo sapiens.
BEN: So, there as well, I think we need to acknowledge that fire is actually really complex. I think people have this idea that… It’s very much tied to white supremacy and colonialism, all this kind of thing, that making fire is this primitive, savage thing and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: To have figured this thing out, which is to say fire, required an incredible scientific mind, or minds, because it probably got discovered a bunch of times by a bunch of different people. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually gone out and tried to make a fire by scratch. I have.
DANIEL: I have.
BEN: It’s extremely hard.
DANIEL: It’s not that easy.
BEN: Even if you know what you’re doing and even if you have all the right tools and all that kind of stuff, it’s not an easy undertaking. And the people who figured out how to do it and figured out how to do it reliably and could control it really, really well… We spoke a second ago about how migrating out of Africa required a fair bit of coordination. This too, I think, would be a strong piece of evidence as to why humans would need language just to coordinate, because making and controlling fire is a very hard thing to do.
HEDVIG: And once you’ve made a fire, you probably want to coordinate as a group to keep it. Also, even when you have matches… I’m in Sweden right now, and most of the houses, the rooms that I’m in this house have this thing that you don’t have in Australia, which is called a tiled fireplace. They’re lovely. You make a fire in them, they heat up, and they heat you throughout the night. I tried to make a fire in it with matches, paper and wood that is dry.
BEN: Like, tinder, kindling, all of it. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: All of it. I wasn’t good at it, and I had to be like, “[UNINTELLIGIBLE [00:40:17] [BEN LAUGHS] Hi? Can you come make the fire in my room, because I suck?”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: She’s like, “Okay.”
DANIEL: Let me talk my way around fire here for a second. If you’ve got control of fire, that means people gather together in social groups. So, now you’ve got a group of individuals who are in a social setting. And while the fire is going, it’s dark at night, what are they doing? Well, they’re sitting around, they’re telling stories, they’re talking to each other, they’re communicating, they’re nurturing, feeding young, forming bonds. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s language-like going on there.
As you mentioned, Hedvig, it means that humans can cook food, and that means that you can make non-edible things edible. It allows you to predigest food. You can unlock proteins that wouldn’t have been ordinarily available, which means you get more nutrition out of food, and that feeds a human brain. Let’s just take a look at what’s going on around the cooking. Cooking connects to anatomy, cooperation, nutrition, residence system, parental investment, food storage, sociality. There’s so much going on here.
BEN: So, can I ask…
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: …about the human brain? Because we talked about food, calorie surplus, human brain size, blah, blah, blah. We’ve spoken before. We’ve mentioned it already in the show. Broca’s area is the thing that fires up when you think about toolmaking. We didn’t mention it at the time, but Broca’s area is also the thing that fires up when you do languagey things. But Broca’s area, if I’m not mistaken, is not like one tiny little clump in the brain. When we do language, a whole bunch of different areas all around our brain… When I say around our brain, I mean like physically separated within our brain, all coordinate and fire off and do things, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Okay. Again, not an expert, but our brain size is not cheap.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: So much sugar.
BEN: From an evolutionary perspective, having brains the size and complexity of ours is not a small energy expenditure for us. So, we need to get something out of it. Because like Hedvig said, evolution [UNINTELLIGIBLE [00:42:41] about what happens to us other than living long enough to have babies and have those babies live long enough to have more babies and all that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Part of the reason we have such a big brain is because we can do language. But because we can do language, we can get all of these things that allow us to have such a big brain. So, I think the point I’m trying to make here is the control of fire, which allowed us to get a calorie surplus, is a huge reason why… it reinforces that cycle of like, yes, absolutely. We have huge energy-intensive brains, because having the huge energy intensive brains allows us to control fire and allows us to do funky things with food, which gets some small calories. So, we can have bigger brains, and so on and so on.
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: And like, “Of course, we can talk.”
DANIEL: Let’s zoom in on brain size for a second, because the CHIELD graph has lots of things for brain size. I’m starting at 12 o’clock, propositional knowledge, communication, group size, gestures, hand gesturing. Down at 6 o’clock, social intelligence, iconicity, population size. There’s a lot going on.
HEDVIG: But wait, we know that the sheer size of your brain… So, for example, big animals have larger brains.
BEN: I was going to ask this as well. Like, a blue whale has a huge brain.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Because it needs to control a big body. So, it’s not just that we have a big brain in comparison to our body size, it’s also that it has a lot of folds and stuff. But most humans tend to have a similar-ish sized brain, and we tend to be able to cognitively do similar-ish things. So, what is the variation in brain size in humans in these papers saying? So, what was one of them? You said like iconicity. Is it comparing species? I don’t understand.
DANIEL: Well, if I were on the CHIELD database right now, I would actually click on that link and find out. It would take me to the paper, where it would actually tell what they were on about, because to be honest…
BEN: I think you have homework.
DANIEL: Not quite sure.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Iconicity, go find that paper.
DANIEL: But let me just read through some of these points. Having a bigger brain correlates with larger social groups. Robin Dunbar in The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution has pointed out that when you get larger social groups, you also get larger vocal repertoires. Not just in humans, but in primate species and in chickadees, both wild and captive, which was interesting.
HEDVIG: Because you need to communicate more meanings. You need to have more different kinds of signals you can send, so you need to have a bigger vocal tract to send those. This is the thing about that humans, compared to a lot of other primates, have a vocal tract that is bigger and can make more distinctive sounds, but also we have an easier time to choke on food.
DANIEL: We’re getting there. We’re getting there in the 10 million.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, yes, I will. Ben, you’ve mentioned Robin Dunbar’s primate group size hypothesis before. Do you remember what you were saying about that? This was many episodes ago.
BEN: Oh, okay. Robert Dunbar’s primate group size hypothesis. Is this related to the something number? Like, human beings basically can only function up to a certain number of social contacts, and beyond that number, our brain just does a backflip and then explodes. Which is part of the reason why in the modern era, we are all so miserable and anxious all the time, because we’re connected to way too many people.
DANIEL: Yup. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Okay. Cool.
DANIEL: This is something that Robin Dunbar hypothesized. It’s a bit speculative, Dunbar admits this, but Dunbar noticed that as the brain size goes up, so does the number of people in your monkey sphere and the number of people in your social group. And for humans, that would be something like 200 plus/minus 50. 200… [CROSSTALK].
BEN: The argument I’ve heard this played out as, and I think this is someone taking Dunbar’s work beyond that point is basically like, if we live in communities with meaningful connections above the 150 and 200 number, it doesn’t work super well.
DANIEL: Apes use grooming to maintain social connections. But grooming 200 people would take a super long time. Dunbar estimates about 42% of all your time. Way too time consuming. But talking to that many people is manageable. So, Dunbar asserts that language is the functional equivalent of grooming for humans. And this is evidenced by the fact that about two-thirds of our talk is social, and only 10% procedural. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I just think that another difference between other primates and humans is that we can have different types of relationships, and that it is hard to have 200 best friends. But you could have 10 best friends, 50 work colleagues, 10 people you sometimes see on the bus. I feel like my relationships are quite different, and that I try and pay conscious attention to that, and they take up different space in my brain because of that.
BEN: I’m not sure how many frenemies the average chimp has, but I’m very sure that I have more.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Frenemies. Yeah, we have our imagination and our ability to fantasize and stuff. I went out for coffee with a friend of mine that I haven’t seen in 10 plus years, and I don’t think about her every day normally, but I remember her and now, our relationship picks up. So, she doesn’t take up my 200 space all the time, but I can, when I see her reattach. I feel like that’s quite different from… I feel sometimes when we say like, “Oh, your village can only be 200 people,” We sort of forget.
BEN: Do you think, Hedvig, that it’s possible that you… I say this with so much love in my heart, because you are fundamentally a dumb monkey like the rest of us.
HEDVIG: I know.
BEN: But you live in a modern world beyond the capabilities of the dumb monkeys that we all evolved to be that you’re hot desking human connections in your head, because you’re still strained by this 200 number, but you have to make it work. So, you’re just like, “Okay. All right. I haven’t seen you in a while. So, you go down there.” And then, “Oh, look, there’s a person I saw before, but you go back…” And so, it’s just this constant like keep the plate spinning with the 200 number.
HEDVIG: Maybe. But I feel like the 200 numbers… Yeah, because different types of relationship means that it can’t be 200 numbers. And the hot desks aren’t all the same. Like, Christina doesn’t take up the same hot desk as my friend, Angela. Or they can’t… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: [CROSSTALK] you’re saying the number is much smaller. Like, your number is just like 50, and you just need to keep swapping the 50.
HEDVIG: No. I think it’s still like 200-ish.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Maybe it’s like active vocabulary versus passive vocabulary. There are words you can use, and then there are words you could recognize. I think there’s people we know, and then there’s people we recognize.
BEN: True.
HEDVIG: I can advise, in general, it’s good to know your type of relationship that you have with individual people and not expect more or less than that. That makes sense? Like, Ben and Daniel are my podcast host friends. I talk to them about certain things, and I expect certain things of them, but they’re not my all-purpose best friends that I can do everything with. And no one is.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. It is wisdom.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. Hedvig’s therapy talk is. Over.
BEN: What I love is one of Hedvig’s BFFs is listening to this show and just silently weeping as they realize that she doesn’t think of them in that way.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No one is like that.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No one has an all-purpose friendship.
BEN: I’m just teasing. You are absolutely correct. I know.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. All right.
DANIEL: Let’s get away from Dunbar for a second and talk about the effect of bigger brains on reproduction.
HEDVIG: Oh, no. I am 35. I have multiple friends the last 10 years who have or are about to give birth. And I can tell you that the fact that we have the brain size we do and the heads we do and the uprightness of we do causes a lot of pain in childbirth.
DANIEL: Yup, it does.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It comes with advantages, but it certainly comes with some disadvantages. So, having a bigger brain, on average, will give you greater cognitive capacity. You can have greater capacity for abstract symbolic manipulation. Babies got huge heads.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: The way we get them out helps a little bit, because their heads are kind of squashy at first. But yeah, birth is a difficult thing. So, one strategy that humans seem to have gotten is get them out early.
BEN: Listeners, just so we’re clear, Daniel means that relatively speaking. It doesn’t mean that humans now are trying to get them out really early. He means just like human beings have evolved a strategy of when we give birth, our young are still quite not there yet.
DANIEL: I’m saying that when a giraffe is born, it falls from a height of 2 meters, [MAKES A GIRAFFE FALLING SOUND] and then it can run away, okay?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Human babies are very immature. They’re vulnerable. But remember, you’re in a large social group, and that can help you to care for immature young until they’re able to look after themselves.
BEN: Which we see in other animals that exist in social groups as well.
HEDVIG: Kangaroos are so crazy. Like, marsupials, they give birth to very, very—[CROSSTALK]
BEN: Oh, they’ve taken that strategy to the extreme.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: They give birth to very, very immature young. And the first thing that little marsupial babies do when they come out of the uterus is climb up the mother and into the pouch, and then they attach. And the uterus is essentially like a second… The pouch is a…
BEN: The pouch is a second uterus.
HEDVIG: A second uterus, and they stay there for a longer time. So, they actually gestate. They’re double cooked.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: They are.
BEN: They’re blind baked like a pie.
DANIEL: They’re biscuits.
HEDVIG: They are so useless. They are arguably maybe even more useless than humans when they get born the first time. When they get born the second time, they seem to be more like giraffes. [CROSSTALK]
BEN: They get to be born a bunch of times, right? So, they get born out of the uterus, but then when they’re in the pouch, they can just come and go as they please. It’s like an open-door policy.
HEDVIG: But not the first couple of months. They attach.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Did you know they actually skin attach to their mother’s nipples?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they can’t move.
DANIEL: Well, we know that everything was in place body wise by 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, something like that. But boy, the web of language here is so complicated. By this point, the human body had reached the stage where communication was possible.
HEDVIG: Also, another interesting thing about… If we’re talking about this again, there’s a great paper by Nick Evans from a couple of years ago about, when we think about the origins of language, we sometimes think like, “Oh, there was one language and it’s spread, or, “A language got invented multiple times.” But humans and most species are really good at variation. And he makes out the point that like, maybe we have been multilingual, whatever multiple languages mean at that point. Maybe we have been multilingual all along. Maybe we always had variation in the system. So, it’s not like one group, one language, even at this time.
DANIEL: Language game.
BEN: I often think about how diverse accents can be in places that have had one language for a long time. And so, because I’m Anglo person, I think about this in terms of the UK. And you can have two different people from different parts of the UK which, in a contemporary conception, are no more than a couple of hours from each other by car, but have accents so divergent that it is entirely possible not to fully be able to grasp what one or the other is saying.
If we think about that in terms of prehistory, where human beings were shackled to the amount of distance they could easily walk in a couple of days, of course, of course, we had this wild variation, because we’re talking about a time frame of like thousands and thousands of years as well. That’s the other thing. We had the languages of the UK, like the accents in the UK after a couple of hundred years. Imagine the level of variation, and dare I say, speciation of language. When you’re talking about divergent groups who really couldn’t probably… A mountain range is like an insurmountable thing for everyday travel, potentially, and people lived on the other side of mountain ranges.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: But that’s even taking into account the idea of isolation. Now, we’re talking even people who aren’t isolated from each other, like people within the same village speaking differently. Because that happens today, people’s families speak multiple languages in one family at home. People move around. So, there’s no reason this idea of one group, one village having some normative striving towards homogeneity is not necessarily the case. And humans are really good at variation. This is why it’s fun teaching this course, but humans are really good at variation. And the fact that we don’t use them more is like…
BEN: Or really bad depending on what your perspective is. We’re really bad in that we variate all the time.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, we’re very good at dealing with variation.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, we can handle a lot more.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s the thing. We are like… What’s the likeness? We are spinning one plate one stick where we could be spinning like four.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: You’re spinning a lot more than that, Hedvig. I’m spinning one plate, and I’m only doing that one kind of half ass.
HEDVIG: I’m not spinning as many as I could, for sure.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: No, you’re spinning a couple of plates too, Ben, because nobody speaks with the same style all day long. We’re switching between different styles.
BEN: Ugh, stop.
DANIEL: There are different social accents in Perth. They’re just all over the place. But now, it’s time to hop back into the time machine. Quick. Let’s get away from 1 million years and go back to 10 million years ago.
BEN: [MAKES TIME MACHINE NOISES]
DANIEL: Gorilla species at about 10 million years ago, chimps 7 million years ago. We’re not talking about having language at this point, although communication is very likely. We were still getting ready. Our brains were doing their thing. But even now, we can start seeing ways in which our bodies were getting ready for language. And one of the things was mirror neurons. We don’t talk much about mirror neurons anymore. I can’t remember the last time I heard about mirror neurons. But, for example, when I used to do a demonstration, I take a knife… I’ll do it.
HEDVIG: A knife? Ooh, what’s going to happen? I’m not enjoying this.
DANIEL: So, I’ve got this knife, this kitchen knife, and I’m poking it into my hand. And as I poke it into my hand, I’ve got neurons in my brain that are firing, saying, “There’s a knife poking into my hand.” But you watching me, there’s a similar part of your brain that’s firing as well, just watching me. It’s mirroring what I’m doing. And if you talk to Michael Arbib, he was the big one about mirror neurons, he talked about grasping. I’m using part of my brain to grasp with my hand. But when you see me grasp the same part of your brain, the mirror neurons in that part of your brain are operating too. It’s detectable.
HEDVIG: This is why it’s really hard to watch TV shows with social awkwardness?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: You and I were on exactly the same page there. 100%.
HEDVIG: Do you watch Peep Show? A British show that is very hard for me to watch.
BEN: Yeah, Peep Show is hard.
DANIEL: Fawlty Towers.
BEN: I’m watching…
HEDVIG: All of the things… No, Fawlty Towers is fine.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Not for me.
BEN: Yeah. [CROSSTALK] tough.
HEDVIG: Oh, wow. Oh, Daniel.
BEN: I literally just a couple of days ago finally started to give Beef on Netflix a try. The Ali Wong and Steven Yeun one about two people who are in a feud. And again, it’s not as bad as Peep Show, but just the level of human beings doing intensely difficult things, I break out in a flop sweat. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Thanks, mirror neurons.
DANIEL: I watch Borat through my fingers, you know?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yup. So, the idea is that mirror neurons helped us to do things like have empathy, to recognize other people’s actions, and that means recognizing other people’s intentions. And that means thinking, “Oh, this is someone who might be worthwhile to talk to or to understand or coordinate with.” We could see relevance in other people’s actions. So, Michael Arbib talks about the language-ready brain, where brain and body evolved in tandem. So, that’s one thing that was going on 10 million years ago.
Another thing, bipedalism which… I’ll just summarize the chart here. Basically, we were bipedal about 6 million years ago and exclusively so 2 to 4 million years ago. And when you’re walking on two legs, a couple of things happen. Number one…
BEN: You got hands.
DANIEL: …you got hands. So, I can do tools, and I can do gesture, and I can do things that are good for my brain and are good for my communication. Another thing is that when you’re walking on two legs, your vocal tract is not a tube that you bark through. Your head is now facing forward. Your vocal tract is now bent into an L shape. And what that means is… here’s the chart from CHIELD’s. Vocal track links to three balloons here, biological constraints, I don’t know. But also, phoneme inventory size and lexical capacity. Hedvig, take this one because you were going there.
HEDVIG: This is the idea that if you’re able to make more distinctions, you can distinguish between more different kinds of signals in your little game. And that’s great, because your language can talk about more different things unambiguously. You can still have ambiguity, but the idea that I’ve heard that everyone gets taught in first year linguistics that… I should actually look up the paper that says this, is that the way our pharynx and our vocal folds works is such that, because we can do all these things and the way our vocal folds work, we no longer can block the glottis.
Glottis is related to your lungs. It connects your lungs to your vocal apparatus. Yeah, Daniel has some slides, it’s higher when you’re a child and it descends. But it has descended in such a way that food can get down there.
DANIEL: Yeah. The air hose and the food hose cross.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And we can accidentally get food into our glottis and then choke and die. But it’s worth it.
BEN: Right. It’s like the big brain thing, right? It’s a payoff.
DANIEL: It’s a tradeoff. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a payoff. So, being able to make more different sounds… also possibly there are more things than just more different sounds. It’s like Daniel said walking bipedally, there’s more things going on than just making more sounds, maybe.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: That’s like a threefer.
DANIEL: But when your vocal tract is in L shape, more things can touch other things. And so, you can make lots of different sounds. And that means that you’ve got 40 different sounds and you can have different words. Imagine what it’s like when you have a language that has 7… No, wait, 11 phonemes. All the words have to be super-duper long, which costs you…
BEN: True.
DANIEL: …in memory. But if you have lots of phonemes to choose… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: Or, alternatively, you have a smaller repertoire of things that you actually can say. It’s one of those two options?
DANIEL: Which is fine too. Yeah. All right. So, now, what we’ve got is, it’s time to come back home to now. [BEN MAKES WINDING DOWN NOISES] Now, what we’ve got is a way to put ideas into other people’s heads with arbitrary signs. We can communicate with people around the world. We can record and share language in ways that persist over time and space, and we use language to show identity and group membership. We use it to create and maintain social relations. We have language now.
But now, it’s time to go ahead a little bit. 100 years from now. Now, do you have any guesses as to how language is going to be different 100 years from now? Because I put this to our pals on Discord, they’ve got some ideas. What do you reckon?
BEN: I certainly have some ideas here, Daniel.
DANIEL: All right. Let’s go.
BEN: If I know one thing about the youth of today, it’s that they don’t bloody talk to each other anymore. No one says anything. They’re all on their devices all the bloody time.
DANIEL: English is going to the dogs.
BEN: So, I would anticipate that in 100 bloody years, language will be dead.
DANIEL: I’m enjoying how Ben is using his accent to perform that character.
BEN: [LAUGHS] No, but I hear a lot of pearl-clutching talk on the part of people about young people today and their “inability to communicate,” and all that kind of stuff. I find that talk really bad.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You don’t like it?
BEN: I don’t have a better thing for it. Because humans are language engines. It’s just what we do. Just because the way that a person is communicating might be different from the way that you’re familiar with, doesn’t mean it’s not language. Yeah, anything that is like, “Oh, people will be speaking through electronic implants in their head,” or whatever is like, “Okay…” Let’s say they did. Let’s say they were speaking through electronic implants in their head. They still have to be using language, and that language is going to look a certain way. So, how does it look?
HEDVIG: I think that with technology, with the ability to direct message or make very casual register videos and script writing, it has changed the kinds of things that people can communicate over large distances. Like, it used to be that you could just send letters or write books, and you wrote in a formal style, you can make more informally now. So, the writing systems are changing. You can talk more informally to people far away. You can form a subcultural group with people that you’ve never met…
BEN: Outside the world.
HEDVIG: …in real life. So, that’s really powerful, I think. Social groups aren’t restricted by distance anymore. And I think that with technology, with spelling and stuff, it’s hard to change how words are spelled, but I think they’re still going to change in pronunciation. I think that a lot of the times, grammar things like syntax and especially ordering can change without people paying as much attention to it. So, Swedish is a V2 language. Meaning, that in a sentence, your verb has to be in the second position. So, if I say like, “Hedvig has blue eyes,” “Blue eyes has Hedvig.”
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Anyway, I hear more and more young people… Children, for example, Swedish children don’t acquire the V2 rule late. They actually don’t do V2 first, which is fun.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Okay. So, it’s like an arbitrary rule that has to be beaten into you.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And immigrants struggle with it and young people struggle with this. So, in the other day at Uppsala University in the coffee room, we were talking being like, “100 years from now, Swedish might no longer be V2.”
BEN: And everyone was like, “Woo-hoo.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Everyone was like, “Yeah, it could happen.” Because also the spellchecks don’t really catch it in the same way, like if I misspell a word.
BEN: Right. Because it’s a tricky… Well, given the fact that two linguists were really struggling to explain it, I can see how a spellcheck would really struggle to pick it up.
DANIEL: Speaking of spelling, do you think that in 100 years, sound change in English will progress to an extent that it breaks English spelling and we need to fix it?
HEDVIG: I don’t think we’re going to fix it. I think we’re just going to add more arbitrary rules that people are going to have to learn.
BEN: Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s exactly what I anticipate happening.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Just going to be harder and harder to teach English.
HEDVIG: And what could also happen is if I’m like, there’s a place around here called Vadstena and it is spelled with a D in it, it has never been pronounced with a D in it. But for stupid 1,800 reasons, it’s spelled with a D. So, people are now starting to say Vadstena with a D, that has never been the place name. It’s only stupid spelling. But people who aren’t local to here don’t know that. So, they say, “Oh, I went to Vadstena.” And I think that can happen as. So, people will start trying to pronounce the way it’s written, even though it’s never been pronounced that way.
BEN: There must be a name for that, because I have a version of that in English as well. We have a town in the north of Western Australia called Derby, D-E-R-B-Y. And every English person who comes to this place is just like, “Oh, you’ve got a Darby.”
DANIEL: You’ve got the Darby.
BEN: And so, clearly, it must have been named after Derby, a place in England or a name, because the name is pronounced the same way, even if it’s spelt with an E. But here in Australia, we were just like, “Oh, look, D-E-R-B-Y, Derby.” All good.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you reckon people will start talking about tropical is-lands?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh. Do you reckon?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: I don’t reckon.
DANIEL: I don’t reckon. How about this? Let me go through this slide with the easy ones, and then I’m going to make a pretty wild, spicy take here.
BEN: Oh, okay. Big calls. I like it. Bring me… [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: We know the language is going to continue to change, because all languages are doing that. Accents will change, but I think in 100 years, the number of them are going to mostly hold steady. Like, people are saying, “We’re losing this and this accent.” But no, we’re not. It’s just that what we consider that accent is changing. But we will be losing languages. The estimate is that maybe half of human languages will be gone within 100 years. And that estimate, I’ve never seen that retracted. So, unless we get busy.
My spicy take is I think that world learner English is going to be a major force, because there are so many people who are learning English and are semi in contact with the English-speaking world.
BEN: So, is that like the English as the 1,000 easiest and simplest words kind of thing?
DANIEL: People who are learning it. And I think that we’re going to see two things. I think we’re going to see third-person singular S, as in, “John eats.” I think it’s going to drop out. And I think that we’re not going to be so funny about subject-verb agreement, because we’re going to have a billion people who just don’t get it. And so, we’re going to loosen up a lot on that.
HEDVIG: It could also be that we extrapolate the S to all the other ones. So, I eats.
DANIEL: Oh, maybe.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: The subject-verb agreement thing is where you go, “Uh, many people likes chocolate.”
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Many people was happy.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Gotcha.
HEDVIG: I experienced it myself, because it’s a thing of, when we talk about evolutionary stuff again, it only changes if you get enough input. I have listened to our podcast recordings, and I will often randomly pick between was and were. And none of you two ever misunderstand me. So, I’m not going to change.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] No pressure.
BEN: I’ve often said that there doesn’t need to be spelled three ways, because we can differentiate it fine when we speak. So, we probably could when we wrote it as well. My spicy take is, and I think this just speaks to my own psychology rather than any actual informed guessing on my part, 100 years is a long time. I think we don’t think it is. I think a lot of people still exist in the like we are at the end of history kind of phase of human existence. And I think that within 100 years, we could potentially see the end to a couple of different things. We could see the end to late-stage neoliberalism, capitalism as we currently see it in the world today. I think enough horrendous, terrible fucking things could go down that a bunch of people around the world be like, “Let’s try something else.” So, A.
B, I think we may well be in the process of seeing the end of American cultural influence in the anglosphere as well, which I think the death of the American cultural influence in the anglosphere could largely mean the death of the influence of the Anglosphere, full stop. Because if the dominant, say, cultural and economic force pivots to be the EU, English is absolutely not the language of the EU. And what we might see is like a proliferation or a splintering of…
Because at the moment, globally, you very much do exist in a world where to learn English is to learn the language of social and financial upward mobility. I think we might see that not be the case by 100 years. And then, people might pivot to, like if you’re in the Asia Pacific, potentially learning Mandarin or Hindi or something like that might make more sense to you. If you live in Europe, maybe learning French or German or some other large economic powerhouse of the Union might make more sense to you. Because of that, I think the monolinguistic force of English might go away to a greater or a lesser extent, which, yay, death to the English.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Let me just read some of the comments from our listeners and friends. aengryballs says, “In 100 years, Spanish will have replaced English as a global language.”
BEN: Ooh, big cool.
DANIEL: More people will be fighting to protect their minority languages. aengryballs says Spanish. I think French, because Africa.
BEN: Oh, no, French had its time.
DANIEL: No, it’s getting…
BEN: it had its time.
DANIEL: It’s going to come back. I’ve been going through our old Talk the Talk episodes, and we’ve got a future of French episode. And the fact that most of the population is going to be coming out of Africa in the next 100 years means French is going to have a resurgence in some form.
HEDVIG: Wait, sorry, there’s different things here. There’s the death of Anglo cultural hegemony. But in the EU and in Nigeria, a lot of people speak a variety of English.
DANIEL: Are we talking about Nigerian Pidgin.
HEDVIG: Nigerian pidgin English.
DANIEL: Niger.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Nigerian pidgin English. Europeans, we talk English to each other even though none of us have as a native language. We speak European English that’s different from American English. If I want to get a job in the EU, I might not need to learn German or French, but I might need to learn European English.
DANIEL: I will concede that point, although I will point out that Niger is not English. It’s an English-based creole. But yes, that’s not a big deal.
HEDVIG: In the grand scheme of English based language varieties…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: …it doesn’t have to be French. And also, West African French is the better French. So, I would be happy with this.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: It is.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Oh, what I love about that is how much French, like as in the country, French speakers would just hate that.
DANIEL: They would just hate you.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Just hate you so much. And anything that angers the French is okay by me.
DANIEL: PharaohKatt says, “In 100 years, I feel like a lot of ‘err’ and ‘ol’ will swap like or so for also. Australian English will become more rhotic.” This one has a chance.
BEN: Whoa. Australian English becoming more rhotic. That is a big call.
DANIEL: Well, roticity is the kind of thing that can and does flip over 100 years. It did in New York City, where in the 1700s, the R version was more prestigious than in the 1800s, the R less version was more prestigious, and now it’s back to R.
BEN: Ah, I think we’ve discovered like a personal trigger of mine, because [LAUGHS]…
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: …my insides hurt when you said that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh.
BEN: I was like, “Nope. No hard R in Australia.”
DANIEL: Now let’s take it to 1,000 years from now. Now, remember, a 1,000 years ago, we had old English, which is really, really tough for us to decipher…
BEN: Indecipherable, yup.
DANIEL: …unless you know what you’re doing. Will modern English be as unrecognizable as old English is to us, or will writing preserve it?
BEN: Unrecognizable, I vote.
HEDVIG: It’s not just writing either. I think sometimes people forget that TV, films and podcasts are things that people use to spread linguistic innovations and patterns. We don’t have sitcoms from 1,000 years ago, but do you think that people… I watch some films from the 1950s sometimes. Do you think people 1,000 years from now would be interested…? Okay. Do you think people 200 years from now would be interested in watching Friends?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: That’s a really interesting question. I think so. Oh, maybe not, right?
DANIEL: Would the humor even make sense? Humor is socially situated.
HEDVIG: Yeah?
BEN: Not only that, but we have access to books that are 200 years old. But only a very tiny minority of people actually regularly read books that old.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That’s true. If you were to measure how many people have read the full collection of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or whatever, and judge that by the average population, that would be… [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: There are so many stans. Oh, my God. There are so many Austen stans.
BEN: No, there’s vocal stans.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: There’s not so many of them. It’s not the same thing.
HEDVIG: And also, what does many mean? Like, there are more than a handful of them. Yes, Daniel, but are they a lot?
BEN: There’s also 7 billion people in the world. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, Hedvig, do you think that media will form an anchoring effect?
HEDVIG: That’s what I’m trying to say. But also, that media changes. So, we talked about Jane Austen and stuff, in 1800s is where we get the development of the novel as a thing. Like, a novel is not a thing that has always existed. If you try and read Gilgamesh, you will notice it’s not a novel.
BEN: And those guys were doing it differently even then. Like, Dickens famously would serialize his novels first so we could get the payday out of that and then he’d publish it as a book.
HEDVIG: Right. Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go to the next one. The one thing that people say to me is, “Oh, I think that English is going to be the only language in the world.” So, will English be the only world language with minor variations, or will another language dominate, or will it just be lots of languages all over the place?
HEDVIG: Lots of a handful of languages. We’re still talking about 7,000 languages reducing down to a much smaller number that are actively spoken and used. And where we’re talking about like, “Ooh, it’s going to be French or Spanish or English or German or Mandarin or Hindi,” even if it was all of those, that’s like 10. 10 compared to 7,000 is like a lot smaller. Even if you don’t like math, you can tell that 10 is a smaller number to 7,000.
BEN: One thing that I think about a lot is that a lot of the stuff that sits behind people being like, “Oh, we’re just going to have one language?”, is this idea that globalization is a thing that can only ever become more that? Like, there is this unified direction of greater levels of interconnectivity and all that kind of stuff. That’s not at all true or guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. And even today, we can look around the world and we can see a significant… if not a backslide, certainly a significant slowing down on a lot of the mechanisms that people would describe as globalization.
We are seeing a return to big power politics on the part of places like America and Russia and China. There have been like seven coups in West Africa in the last two years. There is significant social unrest in significant parts of the world. It is not a lock that the world is going to always be this happy-clappy kumbaya, like, “Ah, in 150, 200, 300, 400 years, everyone’s going to speak the same language and there’ll be no borders and it’ll be this amazing…” No, probably not.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It probably won’t.
HEDVIG: And we see people not being as shackled or scared of Western state homogeneity. Like, we see, for example, last couple of weeks, member states from the global south speaking out and condemning Israel and not being as scared of America as you’d think they’d be, which is new.
BEN: Definitely.
HEDVIG: That is new. And I was just going to say about subcultures. Being a person who grew up with a lot of various subcultures, memes, and talk communities and 4chan and stuff, people are forming smaller social groups all the time and they develop conventional lifestyles and people are able to participate in both of those at the same time.
DANIEL: Okay. Let’s go to our listeners. PharaohKatt says, “In 1,000 years, our language will be as incomprehensible as old English is to us today.” So, that’s…
BEN: I agree.
DANIEL: …taking that view. aengryballs says, “In 1000 years, their equivalent of the internet will have developed one or several languages of its own separate from spoken language.” Also, “Mass exodus and casualties caused by the climate catastrophe will be visible in the historical record of spoken languages.” I think that’s a really good bet. If there’s a black swan event or if there’s a catastrophe for humans, it’s going to show up in language definitely. Absolutely.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. Digital dark age. I’m going to talk about this as 1,000, but also 10,000 years from now. If somebody gave me a floppy disk, and I still have floppy disks, but I have literally no idea how to read them. And we need to be aware of… This might be an age where all of the language that we have, all of the corpora that we’ve built up will just get lost or missing just due to disuse or unreadable. Well, 10,000 years from now, it’s really tricky. It could be that technological progress will change the way we use language entirely. Will we use something else? I don’t think so. I think we’re still going to be using language. 10,000 years ago, we had Proto-Indo-European and a bunch of protolanguage families. Is it possible that the human language family tree will look like English at the top of a tree with other sub…? Will English be its own language family and French will be its own language family and whatever?
BEN: Oh, that’s interesting. You’ve got this idea that Proto-Indo-European is the progenitor of this huge, chunky trunk of language tree. But not because it’s inherently good, but because all of the other languages died. [LAUGHS] So, maybe we won’t win whatever bottleneck event, whatever cataclysmic, awful thing happens. In 10,000 years, maybe we’ve colonized space and Earth is a vaguely inhabitable but mostly terrifying rock, and everyone in space is speaking some modern version or some…
DANIEL: Space-ish.
BEN: …far, far adapted version. Yeah, of like Chinese or Mandarin or…
DANIEL: Space pidgin.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
HEDVIG: But probably if in the future, as it is now, geographical distances are more easily overcome, then also maybe cultural history and language history isn’t meaningfully construed in a tree model at all.
BEN: Yeah, true. I also like the idea that in 10,000 years, there’s going to be people just finding the bones of our civilization. Coming across great, huge, gargantuan things and just being like, “What the fuck were these people doing? What is this?”
DANIEL: Well, that’s what aengryballs says. “In 10,000 years, the world will be different from how it is now in every way possible. If humans still exist, languages will be unrecognizable as the 21st century will have been the beginning of a long period of digitization that left no archaeological record other than plastic packaging. You will still be able to find some Latin here and there, but most archaeology will be done through rummaging for well-preserved detritus and a few data storage devices.”
And Ignacio echoes that. “I have this horrible recurring thought, after we have digitized the whole of human knowledge, then post the next catastrophe, no one will actually be able to access the knowledge, because they won’t have the right adapter or charger or something.”
BEN: Or it just won’t exist. Like, we don’t currently have the technology to keep data good for 10,000 years. That doesn’t exist.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: At the big seed bank up in Svalbard where they store a bunch of things, they also store digital information and they don’t use USBC drives or anything. They use like a fancy kind of film thing. They are trying to think of things that will last longer than the devices you have in your home.
BEN: I’m sure they are, and I’m sure some really smart people out there are trying really hard. But didn’t the seed bank start flooding a couple of years ago, because they never expected it to get warm and then it started getting warm? I guess what I’m trying to ask is, does the thing that they’ve invented be good if it gets submerged in water for 10,000 years?
DANIEL: One suggestion from the Long Now project is that we take disks of nickel or plates of nickel, and we etch writings onto them that would be readable by a medium power microscope.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s one… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: It’s literally just actual like stone tablets, but on a very small scale.
DANIEL: We know that the seed repository was melted because Grandmaster Glitch got in and the Go Jetters couldn’t stop him in time.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Sorry, Go Jetters reference.
BEN: Jesus. Daniel. Daniel.
DANIEL: With that, we’ve got to take the linguistic time machine back. I got to vacuum it out before I return it. They’re going to kill me. We put so many years on it. Oh, my gosh. But what we’ve seen so far is the brain, body and culture have come together to make human language over a long period of time. We got a lot of ways of finding out about what language is like. And when we see language at the timescales that we’ve been looking at, we can see that it’s actually looking at it is much more fun than complaining or fretting about how language should be. And those prescriptive concerns seem quite small and petty at this time distance. And we’ll just close by…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: …saying the two things I always say. It’s normal for language to change and it’s normal for people to use language differently. Final thoughts?
BEN: Bring on the changes.
HEDVIG: I feel like I need to say something uplifting, because we ended in a bit of a…
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: [UNINTELLIGIBLE [01:27:17] dark space. I think that humans can be dicks, but we are generally really… like, most of us, most of the time are quite, I would describe it as cute. Like, we’re trying to connect with each other. We have little electricity flying in our brains, and we’re like, “I’m going to vibrate my floppy bits in my head to make similar electric things fire in your head.” And there’s something just very sweet about that. I think that very, very fundamental things to our species, and even to a lot of other mammals, in general, and even animals that aren’t mammals and even plants is that we’re trying to connect, we’re trying to form groups, because groups is how we get through this shit. I just think humans are really cute.
DANIEL: Humans are cute, but they’re also really tenacious and good adapters. I think the language abilities we have are stronger than the forces that are against us. I think if there’s humans, there’s going to be human language.
BEN: Yeah, I think that’s an uncontroversial but potentially not very satisfying end to the… [CROSSTALK].
DANIEL: Well, I was trying for uplifting. So, go ahead, Ben.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: You give us your try. You’ll uplift us.
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: We’ve had two very nice, warm, cute, fuzzy… Look, what I’ll say is that what Daniel said was absolutely true. If there’s going to be human beings, then we’re going to be talking, whatever form talking looks like. And just like the bats in the cave, a huge amount of that talking is probably going to be complaining as we get people to get their butts out of our face and all the rest of it. But that’s part of being a human being too, is having a good old whinge. So, I think we will have language to whinge with in 10,000 years’ time. It just won’t look anything like the whinging we do today.
DANIEL: Lily Tomlin said that. She said, “I believe that humans invented language out of a deep-seated need to complain.”
BEN: 100%.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I would just like to say a big thank you to SpeechDocs who transcribe all of our words, to our patrons who keep the show going. Thank you for being here and joining us on this journey. Ben and Hedvig, thank you so much for making time to come and chat with me. This has been a lot of fun, and I just really look forward to our chats. Thanks for all you bring.
BEN: As a podcast passenger princess…
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: …I think you should make a whole bunch more lecture series. Just do that work, Daniel. You can probably use ChatGPT to do a lot of the grind for you and you can just like… This is great. I think you should do more of these that people can watch online and have a fun little time.
DANIEL: I like it.
HEDVIG: Thanks.
DANIEL: Yup. All right. Hey, thank you for being patrons and supporting Because Language. But just for anyone who doesn’t know, here are some ways you can do it. You can tell a friend about us or leave a review in all the places where you can leave reviews. You can follow us. We’d be lost without the feedback and input from our listeners. So, we’re @becauselangpod in all of the places. If you want to leave us a voice message that we can play on the show, you can do that with SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com. You can even email us a file of your voice. We’d love to have it. Or, don’t even use your voice, just send us ideas. Lots of people do that. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: You can also, if you are feeling particularly patronly, become a patron yourself. You get special episodes as they’re recorded instead of whenever Daniel gets around to releasing them to the general public. You put money toward transcribing all of our shows so that everything that we’ve said is searchable. So, if you ever find yourself stuck in one of those pub conversations where you’re like, “No, no, no. I know it,” you can actually Control+F your way to the right answer that you heard in our show and then get back to your friend and be like, “And another thing.” You get bonus mailouts, you get to participate in our live episodes, you get to sit in and watch the magic/not magic happen. And you also get to be part of our Discord, which is just full of really great nerdy in the best possible way humans.
I’m going to shout out some of those nerdy in the best possible way humans right now. Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt…
DANIEL and BEN: LordMortis.
BEN: Lyssa, gramaryen, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer…
DANIEL and BEN: O Tim.
BEN: Alyssa, Chris, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, Raina. And our new patron at the friend level, Itama. Hey, Itama. You are great. Welcome.
HEDVIG: And 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.
DANIEL: Pew, pew, pew. Thanks, everybody.
BEN: I am currently reading what can only be described as a Neanderthal-based romance book series and having a great time. So, I’m really… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: The cave people.
BEN: Yeah, The Clan of the Cave Bear. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course, traditional. Traditional women’s reading, not men’s reading. Interesting.
BEN: Well, as you would find, as you contain your surprise, my partner was like, “You should try this out.” And I was like, “Okay.” And then, I did, I was like, “Ooh, it’s so sexy and exciting. I like it.”
DANIEL: This is The Clan of the Cave Bear?
BEN: Yeah. Earth’s Children series, I believe is its official…
DANIEL: It was assigned to me to read in high school.
HEDVIG: Wait, in America, in a Mormon environment?
DANIEL: Yup. Not a Mormon environment.
BEN: To be fair though, that first book entirely devoid of like… I don’t know what happened to Jean, whatever, but she wrote a book and then they were like, “Oh, write some more.” And she was like, “Okay, but this time, all the vagina.” So much vagina.
HEDVIG: Amazing.
DANIEL: Well, I think I’m going to start on that note with the intro for the show.
HEDVIG: Let’s go.
BEN: All the vagina. Cue intro music.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]