What are your eyes doing when you describe a scene? It may depend on your language.
New research from Dr Rachel Nordlinger and team shows that we do a lot of planning and scanning very quickly, and it follows the requirements of our language. She’s studied Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language, to see what its speakers do.
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The crocodile cartoon I showed Ben
https://images.app.goo.gl/yrK9Mi2qDF474ETB7
Realism of OpenAI’s Sora video generator raises security concerns
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2417639-realism-of-openais-sora-video-generator-raises-security-concerns/
Trump, Immigration and the Lump of Labor Fallacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/trump-immigration-lump-of-labor.html
Temperature shapes language sonority: Revalidation from a large dataset
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/12/pgad384/7457938
Linguistics study claims that languages are louder in the tropics
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-linguistics-languages-louder-tropics.html
People May Speak More Loudly or Quietly Depending on the Climate
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/climate-affects-loud-languages
‘We find no evidence to support the previous claims that humidity affects the emergence of lexical tone.’
Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/investigating-environmental-effects-on-phonology-using-diachronic-models/0F09C301B9997281C7D498B83AB4472C
The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-53063-7
New evidence of independent written language on Easter Island before arrival of Europeans
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-evidence-independent-written-language-easter.html
Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows
https://web.archive.org/web/20231020045154/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/grammar-changes-how-we-see-an-australian-language-shows/
Do you have a ‘third place?’ Here’s why finding one is key for your well-being
https://www.today.com/life/inspiration/third-place-meaning-rcna94279#
Next update wen?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/219990/discussions/0/3111416678609850872/?l=norwegian&ctp=3
This little shop casting when??? (William Jackson Harper and Kristen Bell)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Broadway/comments/1aqv050/this_little_shop_casting_when/
Blue cards to be introduced for football sin-bin trials – sources
https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/39485753/blue-cards-introduced-football-sin-bin-trials-soccer
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
BEN: I didn’t realise this until recently. Apparently, for most of like the age of sail, we know how ships and directions have all bunch of funny, different names.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I wasn’t aware that port, meaning left, is actually quite a new term.
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: [GASPS] It was larboard, wasn’t it?
BEN: It was. It was starboard and larboard.
DANIEL: Larboard.
BEN: Anyone instantly sees the problem with that situation.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. On a ship where it’s noisy.
[LAUGHTER]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. And with me now, it’s my tireless podcast pal, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I? I’m so tirable. [LAUGHS] I don’t know where you’ve pulled tireless from. I’m tired 100% of the time.
DANIEL: My tired podcast pal…
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: …Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Weathered. Boy’s got city miles on him.
DANIEL: Well, hey, it’s great to have you. Hedvig is on a work assignment, and she can’t join up with us for this part of the show. But later on, Hedvig and I are talking to Dr Rachel Nordlinger of the University of Melbourne.
BEN: Delightful. So, we will check in with time traveler Hedvig soon.
DANIEL: We will. And there’s a real story here based on the hottest of new research. You ready?
BEN: I’m ready.
DANIEL: I’m sending you a drawing. Sorry, I should have done that. I should have been ready for this.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Fantastic radio. Good thing it’s live.
DANIEL: Okay. I have sent you a cartoon. And our listeners can’t see it, but that’s okay, because I’m going to get you to describe this picture in a very simple sentence.
BEN: Okay. A colored clip art picture of a crocodile biting a man on the bottom.
DANIEL: Okay. Now, I noticed that you started with the crocodile and not the man.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Any insight as to why you might have started there?
BEN: I think… Do I have genuine insight? No.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Can I speak in an uneducated manner? Absolutely. I think I would probably start with the most unusual thing and work my way towards more common. So, if it had been a three-headed alien riding a crocodile, biting a man on the bum, I’d probably do it in that order, right?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Rather than there is a man who is being bitten on the bum by a crocodile, who in turn is being ridden by a three-headed alien.
DANIEL: The man is normal, and crocodile is kind of weird.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, that’s true. And I think part of this is also that English is kind of the way it is. So, we tend to go with the subject. We tend to put subjects first, although you don’t have to. But the interesting thing is that’s having an impact on what your eyes are doing in the first few milliseconds when you looked at that cartoon that I gave you.
BEN: They’ve done eye trace studies on this, haven’t they? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They’ve done eye trace studies. What if you didn’t speak English? What if you spoke some other language that put the verbs first? Where do your eyes look then?
BEN: Ah-okay. So, you’re like, eyes blue languages instead of your blue eyes languages?
DANIEL: Or, what if you spoke a language that didn’t have any fixed word order at all? What then?
BEN: Oh-oh.
DANIEL: What are your eyes doing there?
BEN: Oh, Daniel. Hold on. Pump the brakes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: That sounds wild to me.
DANIEL: It is. So, Dr Rachel Nordlinger has done that research. She studied the Australian language of Murrinhpatha, and she’s going to be telling us what she’s found.
BEN: Ooh, that was all a juicy, juicy plug.
DANIEL: Yes, it was.
BEN: That was a good plug. You’ve done a good plug.
DANIEL: Thank you. But here’s another plug. Our latest bonus episode was our second trip into the linguistic time machine. We saw what language was like at a time depth of hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. You know what? I’m enjoying the Daniel lecture series. I think we’re going to do more of those.
BEN: Yeah. I think we should keep the good times rolling. I think we should do some fireside chat style thing. Gather round, children, as Grampy Daniel is going to learn you some linguistic know-how.
DANIEL: Going to hang out those slides somewhere. Well, if you’d like to hear all of our bonus episodes the minute they come out, become a patron at the listener level. No matter what level you join at, you get rewards, like bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, live episodes, and our super-duper Discord community.
BEN: Hang out with the crew.
DANIEL: So, hop on and join up. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Well, now that you have finished plumbing your way through all of those plugs, I’m guessing there might have been a little bit of news in the world of linguistics in the week gone past.
DANIEL: I think so. Let’s talk about Sora, which just dropped last week. Have you been checking this out?
BEN: Sora, not the main character from the Kingdom Hearts video game franchise, I’m assuming.
DANIEL: You are correct.
BEN: Is this the video AI thing?
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: You can take a text prompt and it’ll make a movie. Turning text into movies is really something else.
BEN: Is it? [CHUCKLES] I’m going to be that guy.
DANIEL: Okay. But I’m thinking about the effect on artists, and I’m thinking about disinformation, especially during an election year.
BEN: The tech stuff has been around now for what, like 18 months?
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: And the truly breathless declarations of it, wholesale changing white collar work, have just thoroughly failed to materialise.
DANIEL: Well, okay, so I like that we’re hosing down the hype a little bit, because-
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: …you’re right.
BEN: Yeah, cooling it. That’s all I want to do is…
DANIEL: Just cool.
BEN: …I want to cool it off. It’s real cool. It’s a cool thing. It’s a fun toy.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: We certainly still need artists. We’re certainly still going to need videographers and producers and directors. So, hosing it down, it is really cool. It’s really interesting.
DANIEL: I wanted to say the same thing, that the ability to fake video, the ability to concoct video, has been with us for a long time. This will make it easier for anyone to do very cheaply, very quickly, very realistically.
BEN: The people who wanted to use this nefariously, people making deepfakes of Obama saying things he never said or Trump saying…
DANIEL: That was it.
BEN: …he never said or whatever, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: They already had access to these tools. And they weren’t expensive or complicated. So, I’m not entirely sure… I feel like all of the people who were going to use this sort of thing nefariously were already doing that.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, in one sense, nothing has really changed. We still need skepticism. I’m going to argue that we need skepticism more than we’ve ever needed it.
BEN: More than ever. Like, a huge part of media literacy education now, I think needs to be, don’t buy it, basically. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Where did that come from? Where did that come from, how do you know?
BEN: Yeah. Don’t just consume. I’m just as susceptible to this as anyone else, and I’ve definitely found myself doing a whoopsie and sharing a thing and then finding out that there was like shitty provenance on it and feeling like an absolute tool. It can happen to… Well, I was about to say really smart people. I’m not one of those.
BEN: It can happen to…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yes, you are.
BEN: …dummy dums-dums. And it can happen to smarty smarts-smarts and everyone in between. And these tools, yes, okay, it is making it even, even, even cheaper. But people were out there fucking with this shit for a while now anyway. All the same problems that we’ve been wrestling with are still there.
DANIEL: And the real problems are not destruction of society. The problems are continuing to fuck with society in ways that we have been fucking with society for a long time.
BEN: Yeah. This is not the end is nigh. This is like the downward spiral we’ve been on for a really long time is just taken another notch downward. We need to reinforce our civil engagements and our democratic systems. We need to make sure that courts aren’t being fucking stacked with insane idiots and all the rest of it, right?
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: This doesn’t change that very much, I don’t think.
DANIEL: No. Okay.
BEN: But it is a good reminder that this shit is happening, and we need to be a vanguard for shitty, bad misinformation bullshit.
DANIEL: There’s another thing in that people talk about jobs, “Oh, no, jobs are going to be lost,” I’ve been thinking, “Yeah, this is going to affect the job market a lot.” But as with other technological change, I feel like it’s going to move jobs around. It’s going to hit people hard in certain sectors, but it will move jobs around. Paul Krugman did an interesting mailout this week in the New York Times about something called the lump of labor. People say, “Oh no, this is going to remove jobs.” No, this time it’s really going to remove jobs. And his answer is it’s not like there’s a lump of labor that needs to be performed. And if machines take part of the lump, it means there’s less for humans to do. It also opens up the job market in some ways.
BEN: We’re essentially talking about creative destruction as like an economic concept. I’m sure that there will be significant job losses, like, right now in tech. You’re seeing thousands of jobs slashed through the tech sector in America. But that’s not new. Factories were shutting down in the 1970s, 1980s. Manufacturing was offshored out of America a long, long time and out of Australia a long, long time ago. And all of those people… [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: And it sucks for those people.
BEN: Yeah, it was really, really bad and tough and hard. I’m not trying to be flippant about the fact that this stuff doesn’t matter. It definitely matters. We need really good mechanisms in place to help transition people from obsoleted jobs and professions into other stuff. But yeah, I think there’s this idea that, no, this thing is going to be the thing that makes us all need the universal basic income or something, because 50% of the world is going to be unemployed in some dystopian cyberpunk hellscape.
Look, it’s really easy to be a cynic about this stuff and go, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” Because it’s the safe bet. And eventually, we’re probably going to be wrong. There will be something that comes along eventually, probably. But I really don’t think cute videos being made by prompts is the final proper flying horseman of us all losing our jobs.
DANIEL: And Krugman’s big point that convinced me was he showed what happened when women entered the workforce, did men drop out of the workforce at the same rate?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: No. No, they really didn’t. It changed a lot. It changed a lot.
BEN: Oh, definitely.
DANIEL: I will just say though, the one thing that still makes me hesitate. A robot with artificial general intelligence that can learn to do anything a human could do, that might be the thing.
BEN: How far away are we from a learning machine like that though?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: A safe one? One that won’t injure people if it encounters errors or anything like that?
DANIEL: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I feel like we’re off of language now, and I think we should probably move on.
BEN: True.
DANIEL: Okay. This story was suggested to us by Wolf of the Wisp and by Kara on Discord. Ben, you’ll remember the work of Dr Caleb Everett in geophonetics. We covered it just a little while ago.
BEN: People who live in mountainous areas do certain things with the way their language works, so they don’t expel air and stuff like that.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s enjoying a resurgence now.
BEN: Okay. It feels like we’ve cycled in and out of this stuff many times.
DANIEL: Yeah. Wolf says if they hadn’t done it before, they’d only do it again. Well, there’s been some new work and some movement in the area, so I wanted to cover it just because it’s something that we know very well and that we’ve covered a lot. So, this is some work by Tianheng Wang of the School of Liberal Arts, Nankai University in China, and a team published in PNAS Nexus. They’re trying to further the work by Dr Everett on geophonetics, the idea that climate has an effect on language. So, let’s just once again do a very quick run through of the three Everett experiments.
Number one, correlation between high altitude and adjectives, like not kha, but ka. Number two, correlation between low humidity and lack of tone. And three, correlation between cold temperature and less sonority. And the way that usually shakes out is that if you have a language in a hot climate, you get lots of consonant vowel. Consonant vowel, there’s a higher proportion of vowels to consonants in the language. And if you are in a cold place, you tend to get these crunchy consonant clusters like kra and cha and stra and things like that.
BEN: Okay. And it was celebrated and then it was disproven, and then it was re…Like Lazarus, it emerged, and then some other people like, “No.” It’s cycled through this, yes-no, yes-no, yes-no thing for a while.
DANIEL: It kind of has. We’ve had chats with Dr Everett. In the end, we weren’t convinced because of these reasons. The significance was good, but the effect size was tiny. So, how do you know that’s really what’s doing it? The results were not robust like when our friend Sean Roberts reran the second experiment with humidity and tone using a different database of tone. The results failed to replicate, fell apart.
And here was the most important for today. We weren’t convinced, because the third experiment, higher temperature correlated with more vowels, they used word lists to figure out the proportion of vowels to consonants in the language. They didn’t use a long string of spoken text like the one I’m doing now.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: They looked at word lists.
BEN: They analysed a dictionary.
DANIEL: And that could give you different results.
BEN: Right. And that idea, I think, would be locked to the idea of, a dictionary is just a list, whereas a language has grammar. And so, certain words will only ever sort of link up in certain ways. So, you will not get a particularly accurate read of consonant vowel if you just look at the list. You need to see how it plays out grammatically.
DANIEL: Yeah. Some words are more common, some words are less common, especially the long ones. Okay. Now, let’s get to this new work. This one is about the third experiment with heat and vowels. I say vowels. I should say sonority, which vowels are sonorous, but other sounds are too. I wanted to see if they addressed that particular criticism of Everett’s work. Did they use a corpus of spoken language, or did they just use word lists? And it appears that by reading the article, they say, “In this study, we utilised vocabulary lists of basic words.”
BEN: Oh, boo. All right.
DANIEL: And that’s just even basic words, so it really didn’t address this criticism. And then, we see all the coverage in the nonlinguistic media, which I’d linked to in the run sheet, which many people remember. Here are some headlines. This is from phys.org. Linguistics study claims that languages are louder in the tropics.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s not even the thing though.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It makes it sound like everybody’s like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Is it just me or does that have a bit of a whiff of a colonial vibe as well?
DANIEL: Yeah, it does.
BEN: Like, “Oh, those wacky, hot blooded, temperate people.”
DANIEL: Happy-go-lucky people. That’s not what the papers…
BEN: No, but it seems like that’s what the vibe behind that story was this like…
DANIEL: It does.
BEN: …”Ah, this will feed into some mild existing bias that exists in Westerners.”
DANIEL: And this is the same as the headline from Atlas Obscura. People may speak more loudly or quietly depending on the climate, which is not really what it’s saying. If you have vowels like Aa or Ee, those are more sonorous and they will be louder than things like ss or tt, right? I mean, that is a thing, but that’s not what this research is saying.
BEN: When you publish stuff as a researcher, these days, if I’m not mistaken, you also have to play the game. So, you make a press release.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: So, you’ve published your thing, but you don’t just trust that your little journal or whatever it is, is going to land on the desks of science reporters all around the world. So, you make a press release. And are we thinking that this person, in their press release, put louder [CHUCKLES] in there? Because it seems pretty striking that several different places are all plucking that particular string.
DANIEL: The difficulty here is describing the concept of sonority.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: So, sounds in languages have a certain hierarchy of sonority. Up at the top, the most sonorous are vowels like aaa and oooo. They carry the sound. And then a little bit lower down, you’ve got the sounds like ul and err and the nasals like mm and nn. Down at the bottom, you’ve got all the quiet things like sha and sa and th and dh.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Those are relatively less sonorous. So, you’re trying to explain what sonority is. I imagine that the word loud is going to come out somewhere and people understand… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: And then people are like, “Oh, so those languages louder.” And it’s like, “No, that’s not…”
DANIEL: Well, no that’s not… Oh, loud languages. How about that? It depends on climate. [SIGHS] Through all of this, our friend, Sean Roberts, has been on the case. I mentioned that he retried the second experiment, humidity and tone, with a different tone database, and the results fell apart. He’s got a new paper along with the team. This one’s about the second experiment with humidity and tone. It’s called investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models. This is published in Cambridge Core, which could also be an aesthetic.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Cambridgecore? Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: Cambridgecore.
BEN: Like normcore’s posh English brother.
DANIEL: Yeah. Hey, Cambridge pals, Kitty, Romani. What’s Cambridgecore? What would that be? Please let us know. Anyway, they studied the Bantu language family, because it’s got a lot of variation in both humidity and tone. It’s got everything from rainforest to Savannah and everything in between. And they do some complicated analysis, which you can read. We’ve got the article on our show notes page. And they say we find no evidence to support the previous claims that humidity affects the emergence of lexical tone.
So, they have put the second experiment to bed. I’m sure they’re working on the others, but I really respect Sean for doing the work, going back and trying to replicate results that other people have found, sometimes working with them to make their research better. He’s doing a great job.
BEN: So, [CHUCKLES] can I ask a potentially quite impolitic question?
DANIEL: Why not?
BEN: Is Sean Roberts beefing with Caleb Everett? [CHUCKLES] It seems like Sean… And I don’t mean this as a burn at all, but it seems like Sean’s coming along and being like, “Your data. I don’t know.” And then, just constantly being like, “Wrong. Still wrong.”
DANIEL: I don’t think so. We had Sean on the show to talk about this when he tried to replicate the second experiment. I said, “Is that it? Is it done?” He said, “It doesn’t mean it’s done. It just means this stuff is hard and tone is tricky.” We’re talking about tricky things.
BEN: Okay. Sean isn’t beefing with Caleb. Is Caleb like, “Go to work. Stop it. Leave my shit alone.”
DANIEL: Not to my knowledge. Dr Everett has been pretty quiet on this front, and it sounds like he’s working on different things to my knowledge.
BEN: Oh. It seems like academia. Obviously, it’s all hoity-toity and well to do from an outsider’s perspective. But you can imagine that internally, there would actually be significant acrimony between people who are tearing down other people’s research and all that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: There is. However, if you’re doing it right, then…
BEN: Oh, because people always do all the things right, Daniel.
DANIEL: No, they don’t. We’re talking about an idealised model of science that we like to adhere to but don’t. And yet, because we like to adhere to it, we would probably have to admit that ideas are forged in the hot iron of conflict.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That was so poetic. I loved it.
DANIEL: Thank you. I do have my flights of fancy at times.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We don’t like to be told we’re wrong, but we would have to admit that we want it to be true that it matters not who is right, but what is right.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And if you aren’t willing to do that, then you’re on the bad path.
BEN: We’ll move on from the beef, the not beef.
DANIEL: The not beef.
BEN: The not beef.
DANIEL: We’ll go beyond the beef.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about one more. This one was suggested by Diego on our Discord. What do you know about the history of Rapa Nui, the island off the coast of Chile?
BEN: Commonly referred to in pop culture as Easter Island. I actually have a few little possible facts, possible factoids kicking about in my head.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: So, let’s run down the list. It is most famously known globally for having the… I think they’re called the moai.
DANIEL: The moai. Those heads.
BEN: The moai. The huge… Well, they look like heads, but they’re often actually heads and bodies, statues. And for a long, long time to, again, a westerner’s perspective, these moai were seen as a bit of a Stonehenge-y, like, how could they do it? Especially considering Rapa Nui is more or less devoid of trees.
DANIEL: It is now.
BEN: Yes. So, the white people who arrived at Rapa Nui found it very puzzling that the native inhabitants could have made these huge… And they are. They’re huge carvings out of volcanic, igneous rock in a landscape that really didn’t seem like it was producing much in the way of stuff to make tools, and structures and all that kind of thing. I also know that for a long, long time, Rapa Nui was considered, I guess you could say, anthropological cautionary tale of a group of human beings, who I think are called the Rapa Nui, who basically deforested and ecologically painted themselves into a corner.
But I’m also… little, little thingies are ticking away in my head that some of that analysis, that anthropological analysis of the people of… Or, sorry, the archaeological analysis, because there’s this idea that the people now are not Rapa Nui and all the Rapa Nui died out, and that’s just categorically false. The people who still exist on Rapa Nui are like a direct line of descendants from the Rapa Nui. The idea that they just obliterated their own island is actually not particularly accurate. They were living just fine, and doing okay, and then white people came and were like, “Hmm, I assess the following things about you.”
DANIEL: Yeah, there’s a lot of that, especially because a lot of the Rapa Nui were taken and enslaved. And then, Europeans made contact in the like 1720s, that’s going to be important, took away, enslaved some of the Rapa Nui people. And then when those people came back, they accidentally brought diseases, which killed a lot of the leaders and the people who could read Rongorongo.
BEN: Which I’m going to guess is the language of the Rapa Nui.
DANIEL: It’s a kind of script. It’s not the same as the language. We don’t know exactly what language they spoke, although we know that they were Southeast Polynesians who arrived at Rapa Nui anywhere between 300 CE to 1200 CE.
BEN: We’re touching on so many different cool things here. So, they were part of the waves of Polynesian expansion, but we don’t know which wave they were a part of necessarily. Is that right?
DANIEL: That’s correct. It seems, I read this from Wikipedia, when James Cook visited the island… When was that? In the 1770s. One of his crew members, a Polynesian from Bora Bora, Hitihiti was able to communicate with the Rapa Nui.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s interesting.
BEN: So, mutually intelligible Polynesian language.
DANIEL: I think they probably made do. So, let’s talk about the writing. Rongorongo looks a lot like writing. It’s characters in a line. There are images. It’s not letters like we have them, but sort of pictures. There are animals and plants and tools and body.
BEN: Would we call them pictographs, like an Egyptian?
DANIEL: Definitely. Not hieroglyphs, exactly. But yes, pictographs is a good way of describing it. They’re arranged in a line, and they seem to start at the bottom and go this way. Then at the end of the line, they turn around and go the other way, and then they turn around and go the other way.
BEN: Okay. So, like marching ants snaking their way up.
DANIEL: We would call it boustrophedon in writing lore. Okay. So, there are 27 wooden objects that we have. They were wood. And it has this Rongorongo script on it. Nobody’s deciphered it yet.
BEN: Now, the provenance of these items, were they taken by white people and then went all over the world, and we’ve slowly been collecting them back in the way of these sorts of things?
DANIEL: That is correct. None of them are still on Rapa Nui, none of these 27 objects. And no one has deciphered it, because a lot of the people who used to understand the script were killed. So, here’s the question. In our last episode on the linguistic time machine, we mentioned that there were three different times when writing has arisen. China, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, like the Incan Empire and things. So, there’s three. Could it be that the people of Rapa Nui came up with the idea of writing independently as maybe a fourth example of writing emerging?
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Or, was it simply imported after European contact?
BEN: Okay. So, they were like, “Oh, so these European people are doing some funky stuff with taking their language and then making it into things. Maybe we’ll try that.”
DANIEL: Let’s try that. So, this is work by Dr Silvia Ferreira from the University of Bologna in Italy and a team published in Nature’s scientific reports. They say, this is in the Abstract, “Central to this issue is whether the script was invented before European travelers reached the island in the 18th century AD,” because they would have brought writing.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, these examples of Rongorongo are on wood.
BEN: Okay. So, we can date them?
DANIEL: We can carbon date them.
BEN: We can carbon date them, but wood can be really, really old. Can we carbon date them and tell when the markings in the wood were made? Is that possible?
DANIEL: That is the tricky bit. The authors acknowledge that the engraving might have been done long after the wood was gathered. But at this stage, they’re trying to date the wood and that’s so that they can determine a kind of like beginning point. If that’s after 1700s, then forget it. But if it’s older, then maybe. They’ve already dated two tablets and they were in the 19th century AD, 1800s.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: So, this new work involved looking at four wooden objects. They calculated when the trees were felled by looking at the rings. They looked at three of them, that’s A, B and C, and they dated them between 1785 and 1848, so after European contact. But the fourth one looks to be solidly in the mid-1400s, like 200 or 300 years before the Europeans arrived.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: It’s old wood. It’s not from the island. Actually, it’s from South Africa. It could have been driftwood, possibly from a shipwreck, because it’s made of the kind of wood that people made ships out of.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: They reckon this is pre-European contact. But of course, the tricky bit is we don’t know when they carved on it. The wood was old.
BEN: They could have had a really cool old piece of wood that had been hanging out for a couple of hundred years on Rapa Nui, and then they were like, “Imma carve some stuff into this.”
DANIEL: Or, they could have taken whatever was carved on it or whatever it was doing, scratched it out and then repurposed it, because that’s what they did with wood that was so valuable.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: So, at least we know that the wood itself, and possibly the carvings themselves, predate European contact, and therefore, this might be an example of a fourth writing system.
BEN: I wonder if there’s any way to verify that, the carving being early, not just the wood being cute. Oh, that’s so fascinating.
DANIEL: Thanks to Diego and all our Discordians who have been talking about this. You can find all the links that we’re talking about in the show notes for this episode. That’s becauselanguage.com. It’s time for our favorite game, Related or Not.
BEN: Related or Not. Is it connected to the word and the other word?
DANIEL: Do you know what we need? We need a theme tune for this segment, and not that one.
BEN: [LAUGHS] We need to reach out to Drew Krapljanov. Help. Otherwise, Ben’s going to keep singing his shit.
DANIEL: You know what? If you’re a musician and you want to donate a song to us for Related or Not, just send us what you got. We’ll play it.
BEN: I will take sad queer boy ukulele folk. I will even take that. That would better than Ben Ainslie.
DANIEL: Hey, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. That would actually be a preferred genre.
BEN: I just want to be clear. The thing in that sentence that I take issue with is 100% the ukulele. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. Just checking.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: All you bedroom artists, take note. Okay, the first one comes from Lynnika. Hey, Lynnika. She says, “Related or not. WAFFLE, the food. And WAFFLE…
BEN: And WAFFLE, the thing Ben does.
DANIEL: There’s two meanings of WAFFLE, I think, but I’m going to lump them under the same thing. There’s to talk a lot, which is what Ben does. And then, there’s to prevaricate, to be indecisive. He waffled on the matter, which means he flip-flopped.
BEN: I’ve never heard it used that way. That must be an American thing.
DANIEL: I feel like WAFFLE, like to talk and talk and talk, seems more prevalent these days. He’s waffling on, right?
BEN: Yeah, exactly. That’s the only use I’ve heard of. Okay. Is it related to the food?
DANIEL: Is it related or not?
BEN: Ooh. To-to-to-to-to.
DANIEL: Shall I start?
BEN: Yeah, go for it.
DANIEL: I thought, yes, kind of. Because I thought of waffle as being imitative. Waffle, waffle, waffle, waffle. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
BEN: Oh, okay. So, you reckon the food was named after the thing Ben does.
DANIEL: Okay. I thought that the food might have come later. I also thought that maybe because waffles get floppy, so some sort of flip… When you make waffles… Like, I make waffles on some Sundays. And at first, they’re really crisp, but then after about an hour, they absorb all the moisture in the room, and then they’re really gross and floppy and I thought maybe that’s the flip-floppy sense. So, I thought that they were probably related, but I also thought of an imitative origin for waffle. Maybe the food helped it along.
BEN: It’s an interesting one. Waffle is in that really nebulous zone of length and complexity? If it was any longer or more complex, it would be definitively related.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Like, there’s no way that this is an accidental thing. And if it was any shorter, I’d be like, “Nah, it’s so easy to just be like, blah, blah.”
DANIEL: Too easy to converge. It’s in that sweet spot, isn’t it?
BEN: Yeah. So, it’s not easy to differentiate that way. I’m going to go with related as well. I think it was the other way around.
DANIEL: How so?
BEN: I think food name came first, because Belgian waffles have been around for a while, at least, probably like 200 years, I reckon.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I think maybe it’s related to the tradition in France of people, like, all the fucking philosophers and stuff, sitting in cafes and talking.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Maybe there’s some connection to that, and so people would waffle, and talk and talk and talk at places where you got waffles.
DANIEL: Okay. The answer is they’re not related.
BEN: Oh, damn it.
DANIEL: Although I was a little bit closer. It is imitative like I thought, but it comes from a different word “to waff,” which means to yelp like a puppy, waff, waff, waff.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s cute.
DANIEL: But what do you know? The -LE is frequentative, which means you do it a lot.
BEN: Ah. So, waff, waff, waff, waff, waff.
DANIEL: Waff, waff, waff. Yeah. Remember how we said that SPARK and SPARKLE. If you got one thing, it’s a SPARK. A bunch of them, it’s a SPARKLE. And crack and crackle. Old English used to have a productive frequentative -LE, and this is what that is. Now, here’s the surprise. Waffle, the tasty breakfast food instead comes from… It comes later. To waffle is actually earlier. So, it comes from about 1794, to be precise, the phrase WAFFLE IRON comes up. And it comes from an old English word, wefan, to weave.
BEN: Oh, that makes sense because it’s got like that crosshatch pattern.
DANIEL: It’s got a weavy pattern. That’s why it’s also related to the word, wafer.
BEN: Oh, because they’ve got the… Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Zero and zero for us. Thanks, Lenika. Let’s go to our next one. This one’s from aengryballs.
BEN: Ah, classic.
DANIEL: The English word, SHE, and the Irish word, SÍ, which are both a pronoun for her.
BEN: Oh. This seems like a trick, like, everyone would be like, “Yeah, of course, they’re related, because obviously, Ireland’s right next to England,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
DANIEL: Pronouns never change!
BEN: Yeah. And then, it’s going to be like, “Sucked in. Irish is like freaking ancient, idiot. We had SÍ for like a billion years and you took it from us,” or something like that.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, but now I’m second guessing myself.
DANIEL: But then could it be that there’s the old Double Reversey Uno whammy. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Add four.
DANIEL: You do it.
BEN: I’m going to go not. I’m going to go not. I going to trust my gut. I feel like this is a trick. I feel like the obvious answer is yes. So, I’m going to go with no that they are completely accidental like octopus eyes and my eyes.
DANIEL: I happen to know this one.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And you are correct. They are not related.
BEN: Yes. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I don’t know where Irish SÍ comes from, but I do know because I do a lecture on pronouns, that SHE in English is actually quite new.
BEN: I see.
DANIEL: Yeah, it was once hēo or hīe. That was what you would use for a woman. But because of sound change by the 1200s, sounded way too much like the word for he.
BEN: Yeah, totally. Well, that’s what I was just thinking. I was like, “Well, that’s dumb.”
DANIEL: Hēo, hīe. Yeah, that sounds like HE. So, it’s like they had to move. So, sometime around the 1200s, English speakers changed it from HE to SHE because they borrowed the word SEO or SIO, which meant “that one”.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That one.
BEN: Cool.
DANIEL: Which means that SHE is a neopronoun. And funnily enough, about 50 years ago or 80 years ago, you could still find people in the north of England who wouldn’t say, “Is she married?” They would say, “Is she married?”, or “Is hoo married?”, or “Is her married?” And that all meant Is she married?
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Isn’t that wild?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Now, that was the path for English. We had a pronoun that sounded a lot like he, but then we changed it to that one, which sounded like she. The path for Irish SÍ is different. I’m reading from Wiktionary. It’s from old Irish sí from proto-Celtic sí, sounds the same. From Proto-Indo-European, SÍ, that’s spelled S-I, and then the second of the H’s, there are three H’s, and we don’t know what they sounded like in Proto-Indo-European. But check this out. This is the part you’re not going to believe. It’s two things. It’s SA and E. Those are the two parts of SHE in Proto-Indo-European.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: SA means “that one”.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Just like English.
BEN: Okay. So, it is octopus eyes. It’s like they took the same path unrelated to each other.
DANIEL: Yup. It’s convergent evolution. It’s just “that one” with a feminine ending. So, it is. It’s octopus eyes.
BEN: Wow, that is really interesting. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, it means that girl. Hey, Marlo Thomas reference. So, the answer is they’re not related, but they followed the same track. Thanks, aengryballs.
BEN: Just chasing their own little journey side by side. To-do-do-do.
DANIEL: Let’s finish with one from Jen via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Jen writes us saying, “I discovered your podcast recently and have been binging it because it’s unbelievably amazing.” Don’t you feel amazing, Ben?
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, for sure.
DANIEL: “So, I grovelingly apologise if you have covered this already. The other day, my boyfriend tried to say SCALPEL, but stumbled and said something more akin to SCAPULA.”
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: “I said they must be related because I’m pretty sure SCAPULA have historically been used as blades or knives.” In fact, we even talk about shoulder blades, don’t we?
BEN: We do.
DANIEL: “We tried looking it up, but it didn’t feel conclusive. I love language and have a degree in anthropology, and my boyfriend is an English teacher with a degree in bioarcheology.” Wow.
BEN: Oh, god, it sounds like they could answer this question better than us.
DANIEL: Please. “So, if you could solve the mystery, it would make us extremely happy. Thank you so much for making a show that I can and do listen to all day long. All the best, Jen.” Good god.
BEN: Ooh-kay.
DANIEL: So, we’re talking SCALPEL and SCAPULA. Related or not?
BEN: So, first things first, I’m going to go ahead and say that SCAPULAE, whatever plural we want to use, have probably not been used for blades in prehistory. I think they would probably far more readily be used for plates and bowls and other things that work really good when you have a flat, semi curved surface.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Now, that doesn’t mean that the words aren’t related necessarily, because yeah, we do call them shoulder blades for a reason, because we have these other things called blades, which are thin and have a leading edge and all the rest of it.
DANIEL: My doctor partner says scapulas are pretty sharp.
BEN: I’m thinking they are related, and I’m thinking they’re related because of snooty medical lingo reasons.
DANIEL: Taking it back to Latin, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m thinking that in the era when we were like, “Ah, maybe science and medicine instead of woo-woo nonsense,” and then they started just naming everything with Latin shit. I’m going to go with related for that reason.
DANIEL: Okay. What I wrote was, “What the heck? I’m going yes. They sound the same. They have a plausible connection. I bet SCAPULA is straight Latin,” and I wasn’t sure about SCALPEL.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. The answer. I’m not sure. Let me just read what I got.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, you’re about to give such an unsatisfying answer to these two people.
DANIEL: I am, but for a good reason.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: SCAPULA dates from 1578, according to the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. It is straight Latin from Proto-Indo-European *skap, which is like *skep, to cut or to scrape.
BEN: Okay. So, we called it that because, at the very least, it looks like a cutty thing. If not, is used for a cutty thing.
DANIEL: If you needed to scrape some wood or something, you would use a scapula…
BEN: Oh, yeah. True.
DANIEL: …to do that.
BEN: Yes, scrape, scrape. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Scrape, scrape, scrape. So, that’s the thing that we use to scrape, so we’ll call it *skep. And it became scapula. SCALPEL, also Latin scapellum, diminutive of scalperum, related to scalpere, to carve. But this goes to a different Proto-Indo-European root. Not *skep, like we have in scapula, but *skel, to cut.
BEN: But they’re related sounds, right? We’re thinking that in Proto-Indo-European like this family of things probably had similar sounds. Skel, skep, squee, I don’t know.
DANIEL: That’s not even all. There was *skel, there was *skep, there was *sker, there was *ske. And they all meant to cut or to scrape.
BEN: Oh, okay. [CHUCKLES] So, I’m feeling like we’re one step away from the root of all of those things, right?
DANIEL: I’m not a reconstructionist. I don’t know from Proto-Indo-European. Were they allomorphic? Were they the same word just in different forms for different reasons? I don’t know.
BEN: But we should probably acknowledge like, okay, if we go far, far, far, far, far enough back, they are related. But we’re now going into the misty fog of war distant, distant past.
DANIEL: I know. I know.
BEN: So, you could probably say no, I think.
DANIEL: I should say no, right? That would be the textbook answer. Because you look at *skel, you say, “Well, no, one is *skel and one is *skep. They both mean the same thing, but they’re different forms.” And then, I remember that these words are hypotheticals based on the best evidence we have. They’ve been hanging around mixing it up for centuries. I should say no, but I feel like giving this a qualified maybe.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You got a vibe. You got a gut check on this one.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] My vibe check tells me that [BEN LAUGHS] this is still possible. There’s more going on behind the scenes, and categorical answers probably aren’t going to help us out that much. So, etymologies aren’t always definite or certain. So, thanks, Jen, for that one, because I’m glad that it raised this point. If anybody wants to chime in, let us know.
Hey, thanks to everybody who are sending these games to us. We’re having fun with them. If you have one, send it. Or, if you’ve already sent us one and it’s been a while, then send it again. And if you want to do a theme tune for this segment, then send that too. They can all go to hello@becauselanguage.com
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Professor Rachel Nordlinger, Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language and the Linguistics Discipline Chair at the University of Melbourne. Hey, Rachel, thanks for having a chat with me and Hedvig today.
RACHEL NORDLINGER: Hi, nice to talk to you both.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking over the last year or so about how we do language and what’s going on in our minds when we do it. We’ve become aware of how you’re approaching this question when it comes to looking at a scene and deciding how to put things in words, and not just in English. So, we wanted to ask you about it. How does that sound?
RACHEL: Sure, let’s do it. Love to talk about it.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Well, let’s just find out about you. So, you are at the University of Melbourne doing linguistics. How did you get here?
RACHEL: Well, I started an arts degree as an undergrad a long time ago. We don’t need to go into how long ago that was.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
RACHEL: I just came to university loving languages. I just had enjoyed doing languages at school. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with languages, but that’s what I was going to do at uni. So, I did French and Italian. And then discovered this subject called linguistics. And that I realised once I started doing linguistics that actually what I loved about languages was actually linguistics. I was never going to have time to learn every language in the world. But if I did linguistics, I could really get to the nuts and bolts of things really much faster.
So, from then on, I only did linguistics. And one of the subjects I did was a subject on Australian Aboriginal languages with Nick Evans, who’s now at ANU, but he was at Melbourne at the time. And that was just super fascinating, because they’re just really interesting languages and do things so differently from English that my little nerdy language brain loved that. And then, I had an opportunity to do fieldwork with the Bilinarra people in Victoria River Downs region of the Northern Territory, which I took the opportunity that was for my honors thesis. And then really, I just haven’t looked back. I just loved that so much. I loved the combination of the really interesting linguistic data and questions and interesting languages with the fieldwork side where you get to really engage with the people and learn about the culture and build relationships. The combination for me was just fabulous.
So, I’ve been doing that really ever since, for about, well, 30 years now. I was clearly five when I started.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
RACHEL: So, my interest has always been about the languages, the people who speak the languages, and how we can learn more about what it is to be human and the way humans are through looking at their languages interesting ways.
DANIEL: I wanted to ask about Australian languages since you’re well versed in what’s going on there. It seems to me that it used to be that linguists, white people, usually would go in and study a language and take away what we could find out. Now there’s much more of an emphasis on getting Aboriginal linguists to do the work. Working with community, giving back to the community, is this what you’re finding? What’s the scene like now, and has it changed?
RACHEL: I think it’s definitely changed in that way over the last 50 years or so. Unfortunately, I don’t think linguistics has been great at getting a lot of Aboriginal people into the academic side of linguistics. But there are lots and lots of Aboriginal people who are very, very engaged with language work and very passionate about it in their own communities. I think linguists are much more aware these days than perhaps they were in the past of the importance of doing this sort of work in collaboration with people in communities, ensuring that Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal people are really involved in all aspects of the work, in driving some of the research questions, all those sorts of collaborative aspects of the work. So, I think it’s really changed in that way.
There’s a lot of emphasis and a lot of energy going into trying to encourage Aboriginal people to do more and more of this linguistic work and to really think about ways in which we can enable that in ways that people want to do it right. So, it can’t just be our academic way of doing things. We need to really think about, well, what is it that people really want to do, and how can we support and enable people to do it in their way?
HEDVIG: Does that mean that the way that, like, we describe languages themselves has changed because people want different things described or anything like that?
RACHEL: Well, yeah, it’s an interesting question because I think… There is often a bit of debate about the fact that linguistic academic outputs are often full of all sorts of terminology, that if you’re not trained as a linguist, it’s a little hard to really follow what’s going on. So, the question then is, how should you produce things in a way that makes it accessible for non-linguist community members? I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think that what many of us now do is do both.
So, we can see a value in the linguistic outputs, because I guess it’s analogy might be like with medical science, you still want to describe things in the really precise way that gets the sort of description as detailed and accurate as possible for medical scientists. But then you also want to have a version that is accessible to people who aren’t trained in that way. So, a lot of us do things like we might write a grammatical description that’s really more for the linguistic analysis side. But then think about helping the community put together a dictionary, and learners guides and other more community-oriented resources that will suit their needs as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we talked earlier, and Daniel’s going to remember, what Episode 2, Lesley Woods at ANU, who’s doing plain language grammar and talking about, not only making more material that is accessible to community, but also writing the descriptions themselves in a more accessible.
RACHEL: Yeah. It’s really important, but it’s also why we need more and more Aboriginal people like Lesley being engaged in this, because I’ve had the experience myself of doing what I thought was a publicly accessible, sort of plain language learner’s guide of Wambaya, which is a language that I worked on many years ago, one of the first languages I worked on. I wrote the grammar, and then I did the learner’s guide and I made it as plain language. I thought it was really plain language for people who didn’t know linguistics to understand. And yet, I had feedback from community saying, “Actually, we don’t understand what you’re talking about, [DANIEL LAUGHS] and it’s not the plain language you thought it was.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, no.
BEN: So, I think sometimes it can be hard for those of us who end up getting so specialised in linguistics to actually, you almost forget what non-linguists need, I suppose.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a humbling experience.
DANIEL: It almost sounds as though there’s a place for intermediaries, Aboriginal or not, where they could interface with the linguistic work, interface with the community and just bring it to the right level.
BEN: Yeah. There is that sort of work. So, there are language centers around Australia with linguists or people who are trained in linguistics, but who are working with community. And that’s actually a big part of their role is to take the linguistic resources and then, I don’t know, translates the role, interpret them, change them into formats to suit the goals of the specific community. So, they play a really important role in that respect.
DANIEL: Awesome. We like to focus on them as well. Living languages also, super good.
RACHEL: Mm-hmm. Living languages is another good example. Yes, exactly.
DANIEL: All right. I want to talk about this work that you’ve done, but I want to approach it from the viewpoint of me as an English speaker, because I want to talk about what happens when I’m putting a sentence together. So, I speak English. And if you show me a picture like a crocodile is about to bite a person, and you ask me, make an utterance that describes what’s going on in this scene. As an English speaker, I’m more or less obligated to start with the subject, because that’s an English… Actually, it’s a most languages thing. Since the crocodile is doing the biting, that seems like a good choice. What is going on with me and my body and my perception when I’m making that choice to start with the crocodile?
RACHEL: Yeah, well, so what we know is that when you look at a picture and you’re planning your sentence, the first thing you need to do is look at the picture and form… So, psycholinguists talk about sentence production, which is what we’re talking about, so planning to produce a sentence as happening in incremental stages. So, the first stage is the event apprehension stage or the conceptual formulation stage, so where you’re building the concept or preparing the concept or getting an understanding of the event of what you’re going to say. And then you move information into the linguistic formulation stage, which is where in your brain, you start to seek the actual linguistic constructions that you’re going to use to express this concept. And then, once you’ve sort those linguistic elements, you then move them to speech production and you start to produce them.
Now, this happens incrementally, but it can be going on concurrently. So, you could potentially, as an English speaker, what it seems like most people do is they look at the picture, and in the event apprehension stage, they very quickly decide which element is going to be the subject. They look primarily at the subject at that stage, and presumably send that information down to linguistic encoding and say, “All right, get ready to express crocodile.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
RACHEL: “Find the right word and get it all ready.” That heads out to speech production. While that’s happening, you’re then looking at the rest of the picture and going, “Okay, after that, I need to think about biting,” and then you’re sending that down and so on. This is obviously a very simplistic characterisation of how it works, but that’s the basic idea. So, earlier studies along the lines of what we did looked at languages like English, and what they found is that if you show an English speaker, the picture of that crocodile biting someone or about to bite a man, in the very early stages when they first see the picture… So, we’re talking about the first 600 milliseconds after they see the picture. So, it’s like a period of time that is subconscious. We don’t even realise we’re doing it. And in that first 600 milliseconds, what you find is that English speakers look primarily at the part of the picture that they then express as the subject. So, in this case, they look primarily at the crocodile.
DANIEL: How do you know what I’m looking at, by the way?
HEDVIG: Have you hired lots of poor little student assistants who have to look at people’s eyes?
RACHEL: [LAUGHS] No, not that. There is now this sophisticated technology called an eye tracker. And what an eye tracker does is-
DANIEL: That’s a good name.
BEN: …film, basically. It’s like a little video camera, I suppose. It’s super sophisticated and it can zoom right in on your… I guess, it’s your pupils, the key elements of your eye and measure where you’re looking on the screen, basically. So, it’s the eye tracker that tells us where you’re looking.
DANIEL: So, here I am, the English speaker. And in the first 600 milliseconds… is it the kind of thing where my eyes dart around the entire picture and then I go, “Oh, crocodile. That’s going to be significant”? Would that be what we see?
RACHEL: Well, it’s really hard, because these studies are done over, say, 50 speakers. So, what we’re looking at is the sort of average looks across a whole group of speakers, because the statistics don’t really work very well on just one speaker. But essentially, what we see is that you might do a few little looks across the rest of the picture, yes, but you’re primarily in that time as an English speaker really just looking at the subject. You’re just really looking at that going, “Oh, okay, that’s a crocodile. I need to let linguistic encoding know to find the word for that crocodile and get it ready.”
HEDVIG: All right. Well, that sounds pretty plausible that we’d be looking at the one who’s going to be the subject. Why could anyone do it any other way?
RACHEL: Right. So, what the previous research did, as people in this sort of paradigm said, “Well, what if we look at languages that have other word orders?” So, English has a particular order in which it likes to put words in the sentence. Subject goes first. But of course, not all languages do that. So, other research looked at Tseltal, which is a language where the verb likes to go first. And so, what they said is, “Well, let’s do the same study and let’s look at what Tseltal speakers do,” because they don’t have to get their subject out first. They have to primarily get their verb out first. So, what do they do when they’re planning their sentences? What they found was that Tseltal tile speakers look much more evenly across the whole picture.
So, they had a more even distribution of looks to subject and object in that first 600 milliseconds. Not the huge number of looks to subject like English speakers had. What they concluded from that was that, because Tseltal speakers have to get the verb out first, they need to work out what the whole event is. In order to know what the verb is, you need to know what’s happening in the whole picture. So, you need to look more evenly across all the participants or subject-object participants in the picture to get a sense of the event, so that you can get your verb out first. And so, this supports the idea that grammatical properties of the language that we speak might actually influence the way in which we process and do language in the brain.
And so, that’s why this research is interesting, because a lot of psycholinguistic research has been based primarily on European languages and languages that tend to do things in the same way. And so, people had proposed universals about how language processing is done. But in fact, what this research is suggesting is it may not be the same for everybody. It might depend on the grammatical properties of the language you’re speaking, and that might actually play a role in how you go about planning and producing your sentences in interesting ways.
DANIEL: Okay.
RACHEL: So, that was the context in which we got the idea to look at languages that we find in Australia where there is no fixed word order.
DANIEL: How do you mean?
RACHEL: Okay. So, English is a language where subjects have to go first in the sentence, and then you have your verb, then you have your object. So, crocodile bites man means something very different from man bites crocodile, right?
DANIEL: True.
RACHEL: And then, Tseltal is a language where the verb tends to go first. So, you would say bites, and then talk about the rest of the sentence. In many Australian languages, including Murrinhpatha, which is the language we looked at initially, in many Australian languages, there isn’t a fixed order in which you have to put those things in the sentence. You could say, crocodile bites man. You could say, man bites crocodile. You could say, bites crocodile man, bites man crocodile. Any of those options would mean the same thing and would be grammatical.
DANIEL: How do they know the difference between “man bites crocodile” and “crocodile bites man”?
RACHEL: So, sometimes it’s context. But in a lot of languages, it’s things like case marking, where nouns carry information about what role they’re playing in the sentence. So, that’s what you find in Pitjantjatjara, which is another language that we looked at. In a language like Murrinhpatha, it’s information that’s marked on the verb telling you properties about the subject and properties about the object. So, there are just other ways that the language encodes this information instead of word order. So, English just chooses to do it with word order as do many languages. But you don’t have to. You can do it in other ways and keep your word order free.
It’s actually quite a lot. In that respect, it’s a lot like Latin. For example, Latin had very free word order. And in fact, Old English did as well. So, it’s in European history too, even though it feels very different. But Australian languages are well known for having an order of freedom that we don’t find commonly in other languages of the world, where there really is a lot of flexibility in how you can order these things in the sentence.
HEDVIG: But it’s like, if in the language, you need to somehow signal who does what to who, you can distribute that job to different little workers, and you can have your little word order worker who does the job, or you can have your little markers on the verb that does the job, or you can have little markers on the noun, or you can have all of them combined. And in some settings like where you can often assume that it’s very common that crocodiles bite man than the other way around, you might be able to be a bit more ambiguous than otherwise. But if in such a world, all of a sudden, surprise-surprise, the stone is speaking to the girl, you might pay a bit more attention to getting them all in line.
DANIEL: Yeah. Or, if a person bites a crocodile, that would be strange. So, we better just…
HEDVIG: It’d be strange, but Queensland is a big place with a lot of funny people in it.
RACHEL: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Indeed, there are. Is this what we’re talking about? We’re talking about Queensland. This is where they speak Murrinhpatha?
RACHEL: No, Northern Territory, actually.
HEDVIG: I’m just referring to the Florida man trope of Queensland man. No?
DANIEL: You are absolutely correct, and I have no issue with that comparison.
RACHEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: So, Northern Territory for Murrinhpatha.
RACHEL: Yeah, Northern Territory. So, we thought, well, if the order in which you put words in a sentence influences the way you process that and plan that sentence, what happens if there isn’t any fixed order to put words in your language? We thought maybe what we would find is it’s just random, and some people do the English sort of thing and some people do the cell tile thing, or maybe we would find that it all just looks like English anyway. We didn’t know what it would look like, but we thought, well, that seems to be an interesting question. So, we thought we would find out. Sure.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That sounds like the perfect way of coming up with a good research question. Yeah.
RACHEL: MM-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. So, you got a bunch of Murrinhpatha speakers. What was the process like working with them?
RACHEL: Well, it was fabulous. I’ve worked with Murrinhpatha speakers for, well, 15 or so years at that point. So, I knew people pretty well. Another aspect of this research that’s a little bit new was that we took all of the equipment into the field. Usually, this psycholinguistic research is done in a lab situation. People come into a lab, and there’s all this fancy equipment set up and the experiments run there. We took a portable eye tracker and computers with the experiment on it to Wadeye, where Murrinhpatha speaking people live, and conducted it there with 50… Well, I think we ended up with 46 in the end, Murrinhpatha speakers, and we just showed them… They just sat and looked at the computer screen, and pictures would come up, and we would just ask them to tell us what’s happening in the picture.
So, it was a very easy task for them to do. And the eye tracker kept track of where they were looking on the screen, and we recorded their responses. And then later the analysis was to then have a look at what correlations we could find between what they did in the first 600 milliseconds of seeing the picture and which element or which participant they produced first in their response.
DANIEL: I’ve got a guess, even though I’ve looked over this, but Hedvig, what do you think happened? Let’s make a prediction.
HEDVIG: I didn’t look over this. It’s 06:30 AM and I’m responsible for a full university course for the first time in my life. So, I’m not doing anything besides the bare minimum. Daniel told me to show up… [CROSSTALK].
RACHEL: You want me to tell you?
HEDVIG: No, I want to guess.
DANIEL: No, make her guess. Make her guess. Make her guess.
RACHEL: [LAUGHS] What do you think we found?
HEDVIG: Well, I feel like the default ought to be the whole event frame thing, because then you got to select your verb, and that’s important.
DANIEL: Yeah.
RACHEL: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Now, you’ve got free rein. You can pick whatever you want.
RACHEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But then Rachel said that people have free word order. But what if some orders are more common?
DANIEL: I was wondering about that too. Is that right?
HEDVIG: You can do any order, but people tend with the subject first.
RACHEL: Yeah. Well, even before we got to the eye tracking data, this part was interesting because yes, we describe it as free word order. But in principle, I guess we didn’t know what people were going to do in an experiment. So, even if your language was free word order, why wouldn’t you just pick one order and just do that all the way through? You’ve got to describe 95 pictures or whatever it ended up being. So, maybe you just do that. Just pick the best of the order and do that all the way through. Or, maybe everyone would do something different, each person would do a different order, or we didn’t know.
What we found actually was a lot of word order variation. Every word order was used, we found that each speaker used an average… a mean of 5.45 orders across the experiment. So, there was no one who just stuck to one.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: The same speaker. Oh, my gosh.
HEDVIG: That’s so fun.
RACHEL: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s wild.
RACHEL: Yeah. So that part, even before we got to the eye tracking data, that was super exciting, because what we really found was this real flexibility of word order that we always said was there. But this was a really great way of seeing it in real life, in real time, because every picture is different. So, there was no context, there’s no building up of a narrative, there’s nothing. It’s just purely each one… Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you have any insight as to why people just don’t converge? I always think of language as being like a regularising force, and we tend to do things. I know that there’s variation and we have a number of choices, but man, it seems like if we want things to be easy, we standardise. But they haven’t.
RACHEL: No, they haven’t. We found some tendencies. So, we found that humanness. So, our pictures were intentionally varied for human participants and non-human participants, and who was acting on who and so on. We did find that there was a preference to putting humans earlier first in the sentence. Not absolute. Not everyone did that. So, often if a human was an object, like the crocodile biting the man, for example, you would get more responses with the man first. So, there seems to be a preference to putting humans first and sentence. So, we did find some tendencies.
But yeah, a lot of it, at least from what we can tell in the experiment… We can only access so much of what people are thinking. But to the extent that we can determine in the experiment, a lot of it just seemed to be, I don’t know, random free choice. Why not? You got all those word orders, why not?
DANIEL: It’s a party.
RACHEL: We did think, well, maybe people are just mentioning the thing their eyes happen to land on first, because that’s another possibility. If you got free word order, maybe whatever you see first, well, that comes out first.
DANIEL: Boom.
HEDVIG: And you varied them. So sometimes, the mouse biting the cheese… I don’t know if you had that. But sometimes the mouse was on the left side of the screen, and sometimes it was on the right side of the screen.
RACHEL: Yeah. And we also, across participants, had two versions of the experiment. So, different participants saw the same picture but in reverse, so that controlled for that.
DANIEL: So good.
RACHEL: We didn’t find any significant correlation between where people looked first in the picture and which element they produced first. So, that didn’t seem to be part of it.
HEDVIG: That’s surprising.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
RACHEL: Yeah. But to get back to your earlier question, there were certainly some orders that were more common than others. More responses had the subject first. The most common order that we found in the Murrinhpatha experiment was subject-verb-object, which is like what we have in English. But even so, that was still under 50% of responses. So, it wasn’t a majority response. It was just our most common one.
DANIEL: Did they also speak English? I’m thinking interference.
RACHEL: Well, we wondered about that. Yes, people can speak some English, but the Murrinhpatha speakers that we… Well, all the Murrinhpatha speakers in Wadeye grow up with Murrinhpatha as their primary language, and competencies in English vary across the population. That wasn’t something we could really control for.
DANIEL: Okay.
RACHEL: But even if it was an English influence, it still was way under, or under 50% of responses. So, it doesn’t really get us very far in terms of accounting for the variation.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, so, Hedvig, your guess was that they would be looking all around during the first 600 milliseconds.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. I think so too. But then I think when they chose a thing, when they finally landed on a thing, they would hone in on that.
HEDVIG: But we’re only talking about the first 600 milliseconds. So, whatever they hone in on later, we’re not thinking about that.
DANIEL: That’s true. All right. I’m ready.
RACHEL: Wow.
DANIEL: I’m damp with anticipation.
RACHEL: [LAUGHS] What was exciting is you’re both right. So, in 600 milliseconds, which is just the tiniest amount of time, in 600 milliseconds, Murrinhpatha speakers looked across the whole event just like Tseltal speakers do, but they did it much faster and much earlier, and then made a decision about the word order they were going to use, and then started to look at the element, the subject or the object that they were going to produce first. So, in 600 milliseconds, they do the Tseltal thing and the English thing, effectively. They look across the whole event, decide what word order they’re going to use, and then start to primarily look at the thing they’re going to say first, which was extraordinary, because that’s a lot to be doing in 600 milliseconds.
HEDVIG: So, in the experiment in the condition where the crocodile bit the man, they looked all over the scene and then man is the most human-y thing, so they pretended to say that first. So, then they looked at the man and they say, “Man crocodile bit,” and then they do markers and things, so you know who’s biting whom.
RACHEL: Yeah, basically. Not everyone did exactly the same, but the overall tendency is yes. So, they would look across both participants. So, that’s the closest we can get to assuming they’re looking across the whole scene. But they would look relatively evenly across man-crocodile, man-crocodile, man-crocodile, man-crocodile, man-crocodile, man, man, man, man, man, because they decide that’s what they’re going to say first. And all of that happens in 600 milliseconds once they’ve seen the picture. They don’t actually say anything for… I think the average speech onset time was something more like one and a half or even closer to two seconds. So, they’re doing all this work really quickly, but then they’re not speaking straight away. Then there’s more all the linguistic encoding work and stuff still happens, but they’ve worked out a plan very quickly in the first 600 milliseconds.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: It takes a long time to get all of your speech organs and everything in a row.
RACHEL: Yeah. And so, we were very excited by this result because it showed… Well, it suggested that Murrinhpatha speakers were doing something different to what had been found for English speakers and Tseltal speakers and all of the other languages that this experiment had been done with. But then we thought, well, maybe it’s not about the freedom of word order. Maybe it’s because Murrinhpatha has these really big complex verbs, because the verb carries all this morphology telling you who the subject is and the object and all this sort of stuff has to get put together in the verb. We thought, well, maybe that’s why they’re doing this. Maybe it’s not about the free word order. Maybe it’s a bit like the Tseltal effect where, because you’ve got to deal with this big complex verb.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
RACHEL: That’s why you’re looking quickly across the scene and getting it sorted early. So, then we thought, well, we’ll look at a different language. We looked at Pitjantjatjara, which is another Australian language with very flexible word order, but has very simple verbs, more like English verbs, and has nouns with case marking on them. So, we thought, well, let’s have a look at Pitjantjatjara and see what happens there.
So, Pitjantjatjara is a very different language. Verbs are different, nouns are different, it works very differently. The only thing really it shares with Murrinhpatha is having this flexible word order. We ran the same experiment with Pitjantjatjara speakers, had a look at what they were doing, and it was exactly the same as the Murrinhpatha speakers.
DANIEL: Nice.
RACHEL: So, that was super exciting. So, they were again doing this really early rapid, what’s called, relational encoding by the psycholinguists. So, that’s where you look across both participants in the scene fairly evenly in that event apprehension stage. They were doing that really rapidly, then deciding which word order they were going to produce because they started to look primarily at the thing that they mentioned first. So, it was the same. So, that was pretty cool.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
DANIEL: What a cool result.
HEDVIG: We love to talk on this show about experiments and how to control for things, and it sounds like you’ve done such a thorough work with so many of things, like varying humanists or varying order. And it sounds like you were so lucky to have both Murrinhpatha and Pitjantjatjara that you could do this on, that you could compare them like this. It seems so fortunate for figuring out the logic of the research question. It’s so satisfying.
RACHEL: Yeah. So, all of the experimental design, and as you say, it was very carefully worked out and thought through. All of that is due to my colleague and collaborator, Professor Evan Kidd at ANU. So, he was or is the psycholinguist on the project. And all of that is due to him, because I had never designed experiments or done this before. So, he had that all very carefully and thoroughly worked out to control for all those different elements. Well, I guess it was by design that we chose to look at Pitjantjatjara next, because we wanted a language that was so different.
But yeah, we were lucky that we had someone. So, that was Sasha Wilmoth, who was a PhD student of mine at the time who was able to run that experiment for us in Pitjantjatjara. So, it really rounded it off nicely and made us feel quite confident in saying that. I guess what we feel like this data is showing us is that speaking a language with free or flexible word order puts a particular pressure on the processing system that requires you to make these decisions and do this part of your planning very, very quickly, much more so than in a language that has a much more fixed word order, like English or Tseltal.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Well, I was going to ask if it’s possible to flip it and say that English puts a lot of pressure, forcing people to look at subjects. And that if we didn’t have that, we would be looking at the entire scene. I don’t know which one is less pressured now that I think. I don’t know which one is cognitively harder.
RACHEL: Yeah. When I said pressure, that might have been the wrong word. I didn’t mean to suggest that there’s a negative hardness about that, but just more that the consequence of speaking a free word order language is that your processing system needs to work in a certain way, and that therefore leads you to look much more quickly across the event early on, because you’ve got to then make your decisions about what order you’re going to use, and so you need to pack that all in much earlier, I guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It just amazes me about planning and utterance. We get situations thrown at us that we’ve never seen before. We launch into sentences with a scantiest of looks at what it is that we’re talking about. When we launch into a sentence, it feels to me like we just have no idea how the sentence is going to end. It’s something we work out in progress concurrently with all the other cognitive stuff that we’re doing. It’s really amazing.
RACHEL: That’s true. It is really amazing. And obviously, we need to remember that we were getting people to do this in a very constrained context, where they’ve seen a picture and they’re describing a picture. So, actually, in real speech where you’re planning as you go and there isn’t any script about what you’re going to say or describe, I guess that’s going to be even harder in that way. Yeah.
DANIEL: I want to ask about the reporting on this, because the scientific American article… There’s going to be a link in the show notes for this episode. Here’s the title. Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows, which they decided to lean into the Whorfian angle, the idea that language influences our thought. And linguists are typically kind of allergic to this idea. How valid do you think it is that language can reach into our thinking? Because this work certainly sounds like it’s the language we speak having an influence on what we notice. Some of that is language, because we’re using, our language influences our language planning, duh. But also, language is sort of helping us make decisions about what we do. Do you think that this is a good example of maybe something that’s slightly Whorf adjacent?
RACHEL: I’m channeling my collaborator, Evan Kidd here, as I say this, but I think we would be very, very hesitant to draw anything from our results beyond what we tested in the experiment. So, the reality is, we were asking people to do a linguistic exercise, and we looked at how they did that linguistic exercise. So, really, we don’t know anything beyond what they do to plan their sentences. But I guess it depends what you mean by thought. That is still part of thinking. To plan your sentence, you still need to… That’s an aspect of thinking. So, in that sense, we have shown that the language you speak influences the way in which you think when you’re planning your sentence in that way. But I wouldn’t want to say that we’ve suggested anything beyond that.
So, I think in the article, it was drawn upon as one interesting example. But she also talked about other things that other research that perhaps gets a bit closer to Whorfian ideas. We wouldn’t have pushed the Whorfian angle, but journalists take things to attract… They have to, right? That’s what makes people excited.
DANIEL: In the attention economy.
RACHEL: Yeah. That’s what makes people think about it a bit. Yeah.
DANIEL: I should have mentioned the author, Christine Kenneally, in Scientific American.
HEDVIG: And also, Rachel and Evan might want to downplay it. We talk in the 600 milliseconds. We don’t think that this structures like how Murrinhpatha speakers in general think about actors or how they think about people in the world or anything like that. We’re just saying, “Oh, when they look at people, when they look at things, the first six 600 milliseconds, they tend to look a bit more like this,” and that could be influenced by the language planning they’re about to do. So, you could call it a very, very, very tiny linguistic relativity effect, and then just spread that scientific midway, maybe, by saying like, it’s a tiny effect, but sure, you can call it an effect if you want, because people with linguistic relativity also want to say like, “Oh, and that’s why French people are better at diplomacy,” or something.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: They want to pull it really, really, really far. But maybe there’s a place for tiny ones.
DANIEL: Yeah.
RACHEL: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s the aspect of Whorfianism that I object to is that language has a spooky effect on your thinking. Like, if your language has a certain grammatical set up, if you have grammatical gender, then you’re going to be worse at having… You’re going to have less women in the workforce or something like that. I think we all objected that, and I think that’s the work that isn’t very strong. What I want to get away from though is us going, “Pssh, that’s not a thing.” And then when it turns out to be a little thing, sort of, then we go, “Scoff, that’s not a real example, because blah, and I’m still right.” I don’t want to do that. I want to give it a fair hearing. I want to say, yeah, maybe some of these spooky examples are not very good. The evidence for them isn’t very good, but maybe we could say, “Yeah, tiny effect in this one way, which not coincidentally, also pertains to language.”
RACHEL: Yeah. Well, I think there is no doubt for me, anyway, but I don’t think it would be controversial, that the language you speak has an influence on things that you pay attention to when you’re talking about them. So, if you speak a language with gendered pronouns like English, well, we’re hopefully getting better at getting used to non-gendering them. But traditionally in English, English has had very gendered pronouns. And if you speak a language with gendered pronouns, you have to be paying attention to people’s gender, so that you know which pronoun to use. If you speak a language that doesn’t have gendered pronouns, then you don’t have to be paying attention to their gender.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t understand gender or you don’t notice what gender people might be, but it does mean that you don’t have to pay attention to that every single time you speak. So, there’s no doubt that speaking a language… Languages, with their grammatical structures, force their speakers to pay attention to certain things. In Murrinhpatha, every time you talk about a group of people grammatically on the verb, you have to encode whether those people are related to each other as siblings or not. So, you can’t talk about a group of people without paying attention to the kinship relations between the group of people you’re talking about.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
RACHEL: We don’t have to do that in English. It doesn’t mean that I can’t think about people’s relationships or I don’t understand that these people are brother and sister. It just means I’m not forced to think about that every time I say something. So, I think that’s the level where language really does influence the way you have to talk about the world, because it forces you to pay attention to certain things just to get the grammar right.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Professor Rachel Nordlinger from the University of Melbourne. Rachel, thanks so much for hanging out with us and talking today.
RACHEL: Thanks so much. It was really great fun.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week. And the first Word of the Week that I’ve got… I’ve just been noticing these things and here’s one. THIRD PLACES. Have you heard of this one?
BEN: I have. Oh, you’ve found one of my little… Do you know what? We need to come up with a word for the thing I’m about to describe.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Weird… Not habits. Weird things that you find yourself watching a lot of on YouTube, right?
DANIEL: Yes. A groove.
BEN: Yeah. Like, I’ve been on a YouTube groove now for a while on urban planning.
DANIEL: Yes, I know you have.
BEN: Yeah. I think I’ve even mentioned it before. There’s a great…
DANIEL: And you said nothing. You didn’t even tell me about this one. Sorry, go on.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] This is the thing when you’re in a groove, right? You don’t know how much to info dump. You and I both, I think, share a bit of equality where we can get on a real roll, and then far too late in the process, start to clock that the other person does not give a fuck about what we’re talking about. So, it’s hard to know when to whoa yourself in.
But if anyone is interested in urban planning and urban design, there is a wonderful creator on YouTube who has a channel called Not Just Bikes. And that’s where I ran across this term. They talk about third places in urban design. That’s where the concept comes from.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Not just urban design. Sorry, in civil design.
DANIEL: Like, social design.
BEN: Yeah, social design.
DANIEL: What is social design? I’d never heard of it before.
BEN: In our horrendous, post-apocalyptic, capitalist hellscape universe that so many of us exist in, there’s basically two places for us. There is home and there is work. And if you’re a kid, work is school. It’s just the same thing, but it’s different. Like, you go to the thing and then you come home. You go to the thing and then you come home. THIRD PLACES are places other than those two places. And in the best version of society, or at least in societies where metrics of health and wellbeing are really high, and crime and antisocial behavior are really low, third places tend to be extremely well activated zones of human activity. So, they are things like parks and recreation centers and…
DANIEL: Clubs.
BEN: Yeah. Clubs. The thing you find in a lot of places, not just in Europe, but all around the world is like town squares are often really, really, really good third places where you can just be, and you can interact with the world around you in a way that is pro-social. The reason why town squares are so good is you can do a little bit of shopping, as in for essentials, food and that sort of thing. You can run into people. There’ll often be people like dancing and doing all sorts of fun activities like that. And crucially, really, really crucially in the West, in our as aforementioned capitalist, end-of-times hellscape, is that third places also need to be free as well.
In Australia, we have heaps of third places. They just cost money, right? Bars cost a lot of money to be at. Health clubs or like country clubs or sports clubs or whatever, cost money to be part of… You have to be a member often. So, third places have been largely coopted by profit-oriented capitalist living. And in really, really, really spread-out suburban places, like America’s really bad for it, Australia’s really bad for it, Canada’s really bad for it, third places are just not a thing in a lot of places. And it makes us not happy as human beings. We don’t like it. We don’t know we don’t like it, but we don’t like it.
DANIEL: They don’t really exist, but they used to.
BEN: Big time.
DANIEL: I see Freemason clubs or, like, Elks clubs. I guess that’s…
BEN: Also, I’ve got to say, for the people listening, they don’t just have to be weird culty things either. [LAUGHS] They can be just normal…
DANIEL: Yes. But as we saw with Lisa the Iconoclast, how are you to keep a population together [BEN LAUGHS] unless it’s by a tangled mythology of lies and half-truths? How else are you going to do it, Ben? Can’t do it with facts.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: That doesn’t make you feel special. Facts don’t give you any secret knowledge.
BEN: Well, all I can say is the Netherlands exists and they don’t have weird stonemasons everywhere.
DANIEL: It’s always the Netherlands.
BEN: [LAUGHS] They just keep doing it really well. The only uncomfortable thing is everyone’s Dutch.
DANIEL: Ooh. Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Ow. Hey.
BEN: Had to.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. So, third places necessary, because…
BEN: Essential.
DANIEL: …they help to boost public participation, public trust, and those are great things. Okay. Next one. Have you run across this word, WHEN? I mean, W-H-E-N. But it could also be W-E-N.
BEN: Nope.
DANIEL: Well, I’m just going to read some examples here. This is one from Steam. Somebody wrote about a game. “Next update wen?” W-E-N.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay.
DANIEL: Have you run across this?
BEN: I feel like I see what’s coming across here.
DANIEL: Here’s one from Broadway. It’s a photo of William Jackson Harper and Kristen Bell who were in The Good Place together. And this is on r/Broadway on Reddit about Little Shop of Horrors. This little shop casting when??? It pops up in the Tesla community a lot. When next gen? That’s when’s the next generation vehicle? $300 wen? So, we’re seeing when being used in different ways. What’s your analysis here?
BEN: Reminds me of… And I’m going to date myself here a little bit, get out your smoking pipes, fellow older internet denizens.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
BEN: This reminds me of I can haz cheezburger language.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s lolcat.
BEN: It is giving…
DANIEL: It’s giving lolcat…
BEN: …lolcat vibes…
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: …for sure. I can have wen.
DANIEL: So, it’s one of those things where picking out Words of the Week is hard, because the natural ones just sink right down into bedrock and you just use them. You often don’t recognise them as new or breaking words at all. And so, only gradually do I become aware of it. Sort of like Homer Simpson when he hears, “Dental plan.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: “Lisa needs braces.”
DANIEL: Only gradually does it dawn on me. So, this one is interesting grammatically, because usually you have when, like a sentence like, “When does the market open?” You have when and then an auxiliary verb and then whatever. “When does the market open?” But lately when or wen with a W-E-N is getting stuck on before or after just a predicate or just a noun phrase like, “Wen market open?”, or, “Market open wen?” And I think this is interesting, because he’s doing what because was doing when we started just sticking it on to noun phrases, because race car, because language.
BEN: And that was so interesting to us that we named a whole fucking podcast after it.
DANIEL: I thought it was great. In 2017, I was walking down the street and then I had the idea for that name, and I thought, “Holy crap, I’ve got to check and see if anybody’s got it.” And nobody did. So, that is a case of WHEN shifting a little bit, showing some grammatical shift.
BEN: Pretty cool. I like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: What’s next?
DANIEL: Next one’s suggested by Diego. BLUE CARD. Ben?
RACHEL: Is this sports ball?
DANIEL: You and I are such sports ball fanatics. I wonder that we don’t talk about it more on the show. But we are avid enthusiasts of any kind of sports ball.
BEN: Definitely. I know people who like sports are listening to this and being like, “Oh, not these fuckers who just like hate sport.” Look, I get it. I get you like the thing and we hate the thing, that’s fine.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It’s just I cannot muster up any fucks to give about sport. I’m sorry. It’s just really boring.
DANIEL: It’s fine. It doesn’t mean that we’re better or anything.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: It’s just there are tons of things that we are into…
BEN: I don’t think I’m no better.
DANIEL: …that nobody else cares about, right?
BEN: People like punk music. I don’t like punk music. It’s not my jam. I don’t hate people who like punk.
DANIEL: You gave it a shot. It’s fine. So, this one, there’s a headline from ESPN, Blue cards to be introduced for football sin-bin trials.
BEN: So, my limited understanding of football/soccer depending on which part of the world you’re coming from…
DANIEL: It’s the International Football association board. That’s soccer, isn’t it? It’s professional football, but I think they mean soccer. Okay, let’s keep going.
BEN: The story has soccer in the HTML. So, I’m going to call it soccer.
DANIEL: Okay. You do know you’re a sports ball.
BEN: My understanding of that sport is that there is a yellow card, which is a warning. Like, a serious warning though. That’s like a yellow card and then a red card. You can acquire yellow cards, I think. I think maybe two or three. And then, you get a red card. And a red card is very, very bad, because then you get sent off, but you don’t get sent off and replaced. So, your team will have to play one player down if someone gets red carded.
DANIEL: Okay, that sucks.
BEN: Yes. So, it’s a very significant penalty. Like, even people like us who don’t know sports ball are like, “If 11 people are now playing 10 people, 11 people definitely have an advantage.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, this is not as bad as a red card. A blue card is for when you have bad behaviour, because we are living in the Assholocene.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’ve not heard that word before. That should go on the Word of the Week list.
DANIEL: Oh, that was on the American Dialect Society last year, but we didn’t get to do it with Grant. But anyway, this blue card is, if you’re rude to an official or you attack another player but it’s not bad enough for a red card, you get a blue card and there are penalties for that. Like, I think you move the ball 10 yards toward the goal, or you have to run around and touch every seat before you get to come back and play or something like that.
BEN: Let me actually click through on this link, because that sounds to me like exactly what a yellow card exists to do. So, I want to see what the difference is. Because I’m assuming people who actually know soccer will find our analysis so far deeply unsatisfying.
DANIEL: Yeah, the article might not help you, but go ahead and read what they got.
BEN: Control+F, everyone’s favorite. Okay. “Grassroots football in England, which has a particular problem with referee abuse from players, has been using the yellow card to indicate the offence across 31 leagues since the 2019-2020 season.”
DANIEL: Right.
HEDVIG: “The IFAB wanted a different color to be distinct to players, coaches and supporters, and has chosen blue.”
DANIEL: They wanted a different color.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I guess it’s not the same as a yellow card. I guess it’s like…
BEN: No, it is the same.
DANIEL: It is the same.
BEN: They’ve just decided to use blue.
DANIEL: Blue one.
BEN: Fans won’t be seeing the blue card in top-level competitions like the Premier League or UEFA or the Euros. Okay.
DANIEL: So, you’re having the same reaction I had, and that is, is that different? I read it like five times.
BEN: Okay. I can parse a little bit of this.
DANIEL: Okay. This is funny. This is hilarious. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Blue cards have been brought in by IFAB, which is the International Federation… the International Football Association Board. IFAB, it’s really important to note, is not FIFA, it is not UEFA, and it is not the Premier League.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: So, [CHUCKLES] there are really, really, really big soccer entities that govern a whole bunch of soccer.
DANIEL: Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah blah. Magnesium.
BEN: [LAUGHS] So, there’s a bunch of bodies that govern soccer that are not doing this. So, it is a relatively small part of the soccer world. Small, but not insignificant.
DANIEL: And they’re trying it out. They’re trying it out and see how it goes.
BEN: They’ve decided to use a blue card instead of a yellow card. I don’t know why.
DANIEL: If you can help us out, then go ahead and get to us, hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Actually, that is a genuine, actual question. I can’t believe this is happening. I now am curious about a sports thing. So, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I can answer that question.” I know why they’re using blue instead of yellow, because it seems to me like the yellow card exists, and they’re just chosen to do a blue one instead. Come and tell me. I’d be really interested to know.
DANIEL: Ben’s curious about a sports thing. I don’t even know who he is anymore.
BEN: I saw a horseman flying earlier today.
DANIEL: Last one. This one was suggested by Lyssa on Facebook who says, “How do we feel about my friend who maybe coined the term, FLYROGLYPHICS?”
BEN: Are we just allowing random shit our friends say into Word of the Week now? [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Where do you think the rest of them have come from?
BEN: Not that.
DANIEL: A flyroglyphic would be…
BEN: It’s stuff we see in the wild.
DANIEL: A flyroglyphic would be a term like P-E-R for Perth or B-N-E for whatever that airport is.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: They’re actually called IATA airport codes. And Ben, I know how much you love that weird flight matrix tool that you found.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, you know a little bit about this.
BEN: Wow, you’ve really custom built a list of bizarre shit Ben does in his free time on the internet.
DANIEL: Stuff Ben likes. Yup.
BEN: I actually find a lot of this stuff more shameful than like gross kinky sex shit. Like, people will come across me doing something on my laptop and be like, “Ben, what are you doing?” I’ll slam it close and be like…
DANIEL and BEN: “Porn.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Because it’s better than having to say, “I found an interesting search tool for flights that allow you to restrict the flight by aircraft manufacturer code.” That’s more embarrassing to me than sex shit. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I found out a little bit about why these flyroglyphics, these IATA airport codes are so weird, because they don’t always match the city.
BEN: Well, I imagine because you only have a limited—Like, three letters is not very many letters.
DANIEL: Well, that’s true. But there’s more to it than that even.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, in the USA, they started off using a two-letter code used by the National Weather Service.
BEN: Didn’t they learn their lessons from the States?
DANIEL: They did not. And then, they would add letters like an x. So, that’s why LA, Los Angeles is LAX. Portland is PDX and Phoenix is PHX. Okay, Phoenix does have an X in it, but that X is not the X in Phoenix. It’s the x in, “We’re adding an extra letter to PH.”
BEN: That’s dumb. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Also, the US Navy got all of the N codes. So, a city that started with N didn’t get to use n. So, Newark, New Jersey is EWR.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Now in Canada, a lot of the flyeroglyphic start with Y whether the name of the place starts with Y or not.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And the reason for that is that, if the airport had a weather station, they would add a Y as in yes to show that it did have a weather station associated with that airport.
BEN: Oh, Jesus.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, like what is Montreal? I looked this up.
BEN: YMT or YMN or something?
DANIEL: It’s YUL. So, just a funny bit of cultural holdover there. And then of course, there are a lot of codes that are the same. For example, story time, flying to Salt Lake City, where’s my luggage, got diverted.
RACHEL: Seattle.
DANIEL: No, it didn’t go to SLC. It went to SCL.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Santiago, Chile!
BEN: Oh, no. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Santiago International Airport. That’s where it went.
BEN: That’s rough.
DANIEL: Yeah, but at least they paid for me to get new stuff. I still love my airport shoes. I still wear them. Anyway…
BEN: Flyroglyphics, I don’t hate it.
DANIEL: I kind of like it. Thanks, Lyssa, for that one. So, THIRD PLACES, WEN, BLUE CARD, and FLYROGLYPHICS: our Words of the Week. Just to say a big thank you to Dr Rachel Nordlinger. Big thank you to SpeechDocs who transcribes all the words that we make. Thanks to you patrons for being awesome. And Ben, thanks to you for being here and hanging out with me. Really appreciate you.
BEN: Oh, shucks. Thanks to you for doing literally everything on the show. But also, thanks to the other squad of human beings who do so many things, including like a lot of our show ideas and that sort of stuff, our patrons. Who hang out on Discord and do the absolute level, wickedest job at keeping things interesting and telling us about stuff and also just being legends. And if you want to become a patron, you can do so at any amount of money that you like. It starts very, very cheap. And you can be on our Discord and get access to our shows as they come out and a bunch of other stuff that’s really, really cool. And we just did a whole bunch of mailouts as well. So, if you like knick knacks and paddy whacks, you should become a patron, because you will get Daniel sending you things in the mail.
And certain patrons even get a shoutout. Those patrons are 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, who’s a babe, Steele, Margareth, Manú…
DANIEL: She is.
BEN: … 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 new this time, Tony, with a yearly membership. Ah, did the whole calendar year. Good on you, mate. And let’s not forget our new patron, Itamar. Thanks to all our lovely, wonderful patrons.
DANIEL: We mentioned Itamar last time, but then realised he might not have gotten to hear because he wasn’t on the listener level.
BEN: Oh, that’s no good. Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: So, Itamar, thanks very much. And then, we got a couple of late breaking patrons, Heddwyn at the Friend level. It’s great to see you on Discord. And Wolf Dog joining up as a supporter. Thanks everybody. Hey, if you want to support the show besides being a patron, there are other things you can do besides joining up and giving us money. By the way, there are free Patreon memberships as well. Like, you can just sign up as a free member and I don’t even know what that does.
But if you want to support language in other ways, here’s how you can, tell friends about us or leave us a review in all the places where reviews could be left. You can follow us. We’re @becauselangpod in all the places. You can leave us a voice message on our website with SpeakPipe, or just send us an email with your ideas or even your voice. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com.
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.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Tchoo.
[BOOP]
BEN: Something that Hedvig and I have become fond of saying is that one of the most punk things you can be today is hopeful and pro-social. Third places are punk as fuck, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: The way to be punk today is like get involved in your local community, go find… If a third place doesn’t exist, fucking make one, and just do a cool community garden or a wicked little lending library or whatever it happens to be, and make that third place. That’s how we’re going to anarchist our way to a better world.
DANIEL: Our internet communities are awesome and we love them, but they need to be in meatspace…
BEN: Mm-hmm. For sure.
DANIEL: …so that you run across people you don’t run across.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]