Noam Chomsky is one of the world’s foremost thinkers, and his impact on linguistics is incalculable. Yet many people are only familiar with his political activism. What are his linguistic ideas, and why have they been so tenacious?
To answer that question, Daniel had a delightful chat with generative syntactician and Chomsky fan Katie Martin.
We’re honoured to have a chat with linguist and Uyghur language activist Abduweli Ayup, recipient of the 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award from the Global Coalition for Language Rights.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:41
News: 10:10
Interview with Abduweli Ayup: 37:36
Related or Not: 57:50
Interview with Katie Martin: 1:06:56
Words of the Week: 1:59:29
The Reads: 2:15:53
Outtakes: 2:22:21
Listen to this episode
Video
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time we are ordering the names by what percentage of letters are duplicates. Somebody with all singletons will come lower. And then if there’s a tie, the score of the third to last letter of their name, in Scrabble. High scores first.
- Canny Archer (8 out of the 11 letters are duplicates, or 73%)
- Joanna
- Alyssa
- PharaohKatt
- Cheyenne
- Colleen
- Sonic Snejhog (50%, but highest-scoring letter, H)
- Molly Dee
- Matt
- Rene
- Steele
- gra-mary-en
- Larry
- Raina
- Helen
- Lyssa
- LordMortis
- Andy from Logophilius
- aengryballs
- Rodger
- Ariaflame
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Ignacio
- WolfDog
- Felicity
- Meredith
- J0HNTR0Y
- Margareth
- Kristofer (no duplicates from here on, but F is worth 4 points)
- Kevin
- James
- Amir
- Tadhg /taig/
- Nigel
- Jack
- Rach /ɹaʃ/
- Keith
- Chris W
- Whitney
- Andy
- Tony
- Termy
- Kathy
- sæ̃m
- O Tim
- Manú
- Kate
- Diego
- Rhian
- Chris L
- Elías
- Nasrin
- Stan
- Luis
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: Jessica
- And our newest free members: Alexis, Justine, and Susan
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
The Fraudulent Factoid That Refuses to Die (Pauline Kael’s Nixon comment)
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-Refuses-to-Die
Elon Musk’s X Begins Hiding Likes For Users
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-x-begins-hiding-likes-for-users-5871641
Elon Musk’s X Introduces ‘Private Likes’ Feature: All You Need To Know
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-x-introduces-private-likes-feature-all-you-need-to-know-5881369#
The Swedish Teenagers Who Started the ‘Instagram Riots’ Just Got Sentenced
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yv4apw/gothenburg-instagram-riots
SoftBank’s new ‘emotion canceling’ AI turns customer screams into soft speech
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/softbank-emotion-canceling-ai-tones-calmer-tones
How does ‘not’ affect what we understand? Scientists find negation mitigates our interpretation of phrases
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240530182152.htm
Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622
Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award
https://www.coalitionforlanguagerights.org/post/2024-language-rights-defenders-award-winner#viewer-jugkf271
Uyghur Linguist Abduweli Ayup Honored as Winner of 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award
https://uyghurtimes.com/uyghur-linguist-abduweli-ayup-honored-as-winner-of-2024-language-rights-defenders-award/
[PDF] Abduweli Ayup: Full statement
https://uyghurtribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/04-1710-JUN-21-UTFW-013-Abduweli-Ayup-English-1.pdf
[PDF] Resisting Chinese Linguistic Imperialism: Abduweli Ayup and the Movement for Uyghur Mother Tongue-Based Education
https://docs.uhrp.org/pdf/UHRP_Resisting_Chinese_Linguistic_Imperialism_May_2019.pdf?_ga=2.216219286.1693909080.1716616360-282927845.1716616360
The Fight to Preserve the Uighur Language | Fair Observer
https://www.fairobserver.com/podcasts/uighur-language-china-muslims-chinese-xinjiang-38048/
Uyghur Humanitarian Center – Uyghur Help
https://uyghurhelp.org
Eight things you can do to help Uyghurs in a time of genocide
https://uhrp.org/take-action/
Temu shoppers risk buying items made by forced labour, MP warns
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67752413
How Shein and Temu get around US labor laws that ban products made with forced labor
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/how-shein-and-temu-get-around-us-labor-laws-ban-products-made-forced-labor
Abduweli Ayup is writing books for exiled Uyghur children
https://thechinaproject.com/2023/03/09/abduweli-ayup-is-writing-books-for-exiled-uyghur-children/
Linguistics of Noam Chomsky | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_of_Noam_Chomsky
[PDF] Chapter 3: Judgment Data | Carson T. Schütze and Jon Sprouse
https://web.mit.edu/hackl/www/lab/turkshop/readings/schutze-sprouse2011.pdf
Quote by Robert Pirsig about “the analytical knife”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6942840-when-analytic-thought-the-knife-is-applied-to-experience-something
Spherical cow | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
Hailey Welch, aka the ‘Hawk Tuah girl,’ learns firsthand what it means to go viral
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2024/07/05/hawk-tuan-girl-hailey-welch-interview/74311380007/
First Came ‘Spam.’ Now, With A.I., We’ve Got ‘Slop’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/style/ai-search-slop.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes
Cronigiri? Yes, and It’s a Stunt Pastry That Actually Works.
https://ny.eater.com/2024/6/6/24170708/onigiri-croissant-cafe-w-flushing-murray-hill-queens
7 croissant hybrids to try on National Croissant Day
https://www.completefrance.com/living-in-france/7-croissant-hybrids-to-try-on-national-croissant-day-6308372/
“Reinvest in Your Hood”: Breaking Down Episode 6 of ‘Atlanta’
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/4/21/23036546/atlanta-season-3-episode-6-recap-reinvest-hood-paperboi
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: So, I am recording myself. I’m recording us. And I’m recording us. So, it’s going well.
BEN: But are you recording us?
DANIEL: Well, let me just check. Ooh, yeah. I was recording us, and I was recording us. But was I recording us? Yes, I was. I was recording us.
BEN: That’s a huge load off. I’m really quite a lot less anxious than I was.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s highly functioning functionalist, Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: I wouldn’t say I’m a functionalist.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’re not a functionalist? I thought you were the only functionalist I know, who I was sure was a functionalist.
HEDVIG: I just think functionalist is a really broad term, and I’m not that into theory.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: By the way, I’ve been thinking about pivoting to intercultural communications.
DANIEL: Reeeeally?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You mean, entirely out of linguistics? Is that what you…?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Or is that a field of linguistics?
HEDVIG: I think there’s enough… It’s sort of a field of, I don’t know, psychology or anthropology or something, but I think there’s enough overlap.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I like it. I’m thinking of pivoting into this thing. What is it? Eh, it’s…
DANIEL: It’s something.
BEN: …over there, somewhere. I don’t know.
DANIEL: It’s many different things.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s more practically oriented. So, it’s more like oriented. I mean, it tends to be focused on business people or diplomacy.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Get dat monies.
DANIEL: International relations. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
HEDVIG: I think it’s more interesting in terms of immigration.
BEN: Ah, okay. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
DANIEL: Ah.
BEN: Yeah. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
DANIEL: And I guess you’d have to say that for a typologist, it would be a lateral move, kind of.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m not sure I’m doing it.
BEN: So, just to be clear, we have a functionalist cultural communicator typologist. That’s the…
DANIEL: Ish.
BEN: That’s what we’re going for? Yeah, like maybe. Kind of sort of.
HEDVIG: You have a linguist interested in language use. That’s it.
DANIEL: There we go. And it’s high cycling cyclist, Ben Ainslie. How’s it going, Ben?
BEN: I’ll take it. Yeah. No notes. I like that. I’ll… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: High cycling?
DANIEL: I don’t know if you can see this on the video, but Ben has grown an impressive beard so that when he is cycling in the United States and he encounters a bear, the bears will accept him as one of their own.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Friend. Brother. Oh, that just made me think of Brother Bear, which I feel gets a lot of hard shake from Disney fans.
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: And it is actually like a bit of a sleeper Disney film that people should check out if they’ve not seen because it’s soundtrack, in particular, freaking rules.
HEDVIG: It is. It is a good soundtrack. But you know what it is that singing? I think it’s like Bulgarian or Georgian chorals.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fully. It’s what you also hear in Ghost in the Shell and stuff, right? Like that [IMITATES MUSIC]. That sort of thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s beautiful. And I agree. It’s really beautiful. It is a little bit jarring.
BEN: Love it.
DANIEL: Ben, you’re going on an extended Big Silly Bike Ride for months and months in the USA.
BEN: #BSR.
DANIEL: Have you been training?
BEN: Nah.
DANIEL: So that you can cycle with a fridge on your back?
BEN: No, I haven’t. Not at all. I’m woefully underprepared. Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, no.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, is this your last episode with us for a while?
BEN: It will be. I’m hoping, hope against hope. And it’s notoriously hard, as Hedvig will understand whenever you try and get adults together for say like a D&D Campaign, getting people together for a podcast is a similar thing. It’s really tricky. But I’m hoping that somewhere out in the wilds, with my little dinky wired headphones plugged into my phone…
HEDVIG: Oh, yes.
BEN: I might be able to recept into you guys and maybe we can do a little bit of an impromptu show.
HEDVIG: Aww.
DANIEL: That would be wild.
HEDVIG: I love that so much.
BEN: While I’m, like, sitting…
HEDVIG: I love that so much.
BEN: …on the side of a river somewhere or I don’t know.
HEDVIG: I recorded a podcast one year from my friend’s woodshed.
BEN: There we go. I’ve got to one-up the woodshed. That’s my challenge.
DANIEL: Even if reception is spotty, I think it’d be cool if you could just record and send an audio file of where you are right now, with maybe some light harmonica music in the background.
BEN: Well, what I might do is anytime there’s an interesting sound, basically, so if I’m camping and I can hear coyotes yippee-yapping in the background and that thing…
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
BEN: I’ll record a second of that and be like, “Hey, everyone, this is me. Those are some coyotes. Anyway, I’ll see you later.”
DANIEL: I would like that very much. And while you’re away, we’re hoping to have lots of guesties. Lots of great friends joining us. And also, we can record at a sensible time for Hedvig. Not in the morning. [BEN LAUGHS] How about that? How about that?
BEN: Once again, I want to maintain the time for Hedvig is not unsensible. It’s just unsensible for Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: It’s really important that we establish this. We are not making Hedvig be up at 3am. That’s not what’s happening.
HEDVIG: I’ve done that before but yeah. For the listener, I need to say, these guys are so friendly and nice to me. They are making me get up at 9am on Sunday mornings. That’s what they’re making me do. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s terrible. We’re monsters.
BEN: They are brutalising my circadian rhythms.
DANIEL: For this episode in the last little while, you will have noticed that Professor Noam Chomsky has taken ill. Reports of his death were exaggerated, thankfully, but many people, late linguistic people have been asking, “What’s his deal? Why is he so notable?” And so, I thought that it was a good time to discuss the man, the legend, with someone who knows and likes his work.
BEN: Excellent.
DANIEL: I found Katie Martin, who is a generative syntactician in the Chomskyan mold.
BEN: That’s a mouthful.
DANIEL: In the Chomskyan tradition, has ties to MIT, and has scorchingly good takes on the socials. She’s a bit of a Chomsky nerd. So, we got together and had a bit of a chat, and we’re going to play that for ya later.
HEDVIG: Lovely stuff.
BEN: I really look forward to that. My understanding of Noam Chomsky that I’ve garnered both from outside of the show and this show broadly suggests that Noam Chomsky is fundamentally two human beings. Is that there is linguist Noam Chomsky, and then there is social theorist/pundit Noam Chomsky?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Like, when he was taken ill, the Jacobin, a famous socialist newspaper, wrote a remembrance of him, and I don’t think they talk much about the linguistics really.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. Right.
DANIEL: Exactly.
BEN: Until I came to Because Language legitimately did not know that he was even a linguist.
HEDVIG: They removed it.
BEN: And then when I had been at Talk the Talk/Because Language for a while, I was still like, “Oh, linguistics must be that thing he does on the side.”
[LAUGHTER]
And that is not an accurate description of Noam Chomsky’s life or work.
DANIEL: Not realising that he was this pioneering linguistic intellect without which the field would not exist as it is today.
BEN: As significant in linguistics as he is in sort of social discourse.
DANIEL: I think that’s true for a lot of people, many people are seemingly unaware, “Oh, Chom… Oh, he does linguistics? Oh, that’s kind of interesting.” And that’s literally the only area of his endeavor that I’m aware of.
BEN: Does he lowkey also just like bust out Rachmaninoff on the keys and stuff like that? Is he that kind of a polymath? Is he like a…
DANIEL: Not that I know of.
HEDVIG: By the way, I’m not sure these things are as disconnected as you might think.
DANIEL: I agree.
BEN: I don’t think they’re disconnected for Chomsky, which I’ve now come to realise. What I mean is they’re disconnected for the wider world.
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe.
DANIEL: But tell me what you mean, Hedvig. How do you mean? Because I agree with you, but I want to hear where you’re going.
HEDVIG: I just think that researchers who think about people and humans and social things a lot often form ideas about those things outside of their academic discipline.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: For good and ill. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh. Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: For good and ill. We learned the other week when we talked about Germany, the Verein Deutsche Sprache has linguists in it who have political opinions that relate to their thoughts about language. So, it’s not uncommon.
DANIEL: And that’s weird to me because a lot of linguists, I mean, the columnist, Pauline Kael, once joked that she didn’t know anybody who voted for Nixon. [LAUGHS] I don’t know any linguists who are right wing, actually. No, I kind of do. But…
HEDVIG: Are you sure you don’t?
DANIEL: I’m sure I do. But I’ve noticed that my knowledge of linguistics leads me to extend my circle of concern for human beings, which is to me more of a lefty thing than a righty thing.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure about that.
DANIEL: I am absolutely sure about that.
HEDVIG: If you’re interested in history of people and you’re that classical, mid-18th century humanities academic scholar, where you’re like, “Oh, I want to understand where all the native people in America came from because I want to catalog the world just like the botanists did,” then you can easily get into phrenology and stuff like that.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like really, really gross racial nonsense.
DANIEL: Well, I’m kind of talking about modern conservatives, but…
BEN: Yes, jumping the gun. Guns have been jumped. Ben is at fault.
[LAUGHTER]
Let’s do some plugging and some spruiking and then we’ll get to the news.
DANIEL: Our last episode was a bonus mailbag episode where we talked about some sexual vocabulary and lots of other questions. We played some games, had some laughs. It was really fun. So, that was a bonus episode which patrons at the listener level get to hear. But there’s lots of other levels that you can be on, and there are lots of other benefits besides, not the least of which is Discord access. Access to a delightful community of word nerds.
BEN: So many words. So many nerds.
DANIEL: So, if you would like to come join us, we are patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: So, what have you got for us, Daniel? What’s going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past?
DANIEL: Well, we’re catching up on a lot of stories because things are coming pretty thick and pretty fast. But one of the things that happened on Twitter or X, as it is sometimes known, is that the functionality changed.
[LAUGHTER]
By the way, do you call it Twitter, or do you call it X?
HEDVIG: No, I don’t call it Twitter. Did you know, by the way, that on most phones, like androids, you can change the app icons to whatever you want? So, I just have it as a picture of a bird, and I renamed it Twitter.
DANIEL: It’s the bird site.
HEDVIG: It’s the bird site.
BEN: I’m still in a place in my life and in my world where I intersect with Twitter, basically not at all. And I’m not mad about that. So, I don’t find myself having to say things. You best believe I call them tweets though, when I have to reference them. Xeets? No. Nuh-huh.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Sheets?
HEDVIG: Post. He wants posts.
BEN: No, that’s not going to happen.
DANIEL: “He” is, of course, Elon Musk, owner of TwitteX, who announced that likes — when you like something, you click on that little heart to show your support for something — they’re private now, which means if I make a tweet, I can see who liked our tweets, but nobody else can.
HEDVIG: That’s curious.
BEN: Oh, so their… The tweeter can see likes of their posts.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I can see exactly who liked all of my tweets.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But nobody else can.
HEDVIG: But other people can see how many people liked your tweet.
DANIEL: You can see how many. But not who.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, that’s a lot less interesting! Sorry!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Aw, I think it’s pretty interesting, actually.
BEN: I don’t mean to smack your story. I’m sure it’s a very interesting story. I had thought that, to the public eye, the like number had gone away.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: But what is interesting, Ben, for someone who… I actually don’t use this functionality so much on Twitter, but one way that you can find out something about another user is you could go to their likes and be like, “Yeah, they tweet this and they repost this,” and whatever, but what are the things they like? Because that’s the most like… you probably post one tweet for every ten likes or something, right?
BEN: Sure, sure, sure. So, you can build up a profile of the shit a person is about.
HEDVIG: And that’s also why people have been trying to restrain each other. So, politicians are like, “You shouldn’t get horny on me. Like, you shouldn’t… You shouldn’t like stuff that could get you in trouble because it’s public.” And some platforms like TikTok and Facebook have it optional so the user can say whether likes are public or not. But Elan has chosen that everyone just has private likes.
BEN: So, is this so we can be creepers more effectively? Is this what we’re thinking?
DANIEL: It’s probably so that if you like something that is spicy or something that is, heh, white nationalist or something that you worry about blowback, you don’t have to worry about blowback anymore.
BEN: Like, a person who you didn’t realise was in Stormfront, but is clearly posting things probably from a person in Stormfront, [CHUCKLES] and then it turns out they’re from Stormfront.
DANIEL: Well, you don’t have to worry about any consequences for the things that you like anymore.
BEN: I see. So, this is a mild cancel abatement tactic. This is to reduce the cancelability of people.
HEDVIG: If you do feel more free about what you like, your feed will change. So, you’ll probably get more stormtrooper… No, what’s it called? Stormfront. Stormtrooper, whatever.
BEN: Stormfront. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: You’ll get more of their posts generally in your feed, and you’re more likely maybe to reply to them or repost them as well. So, it’s probably going to slip out what you like.
BEN: Yeah. Gotcha.
DANIEL: Maybe, yeah. And so, I got a tweet from Max Papillon and I asked if I could share this. He said, “Sure.” Max says, “Obviously the removal of public likes is being done for nefarious purposes, but wow, what an interesting, natural experiment in semiotics. So many people commenting on the subtle communicative functions of likes. I hope someone is taking notes.”
I just thought that was really quite true. There are functions of likes. You show support, you gesture or signal support for that person’s message.
BEN: For our listeners who might not necessarily be able to rattle off a clear definition of what semiotics are. It’s the study of signs and signifiers. The idea that a thing that we put out in the world can have a literal meaning. The one I always use when I’m talking to my students is laundry detergent comes in containers. And the thing that the laundry detergent is in has a literal… it’s a container and it contains detergent. But the brand identity of those red Tide bottles that are popular in America is off the chain. That packaging to Tide is worth squajillions of dollars, because…
HEDVIG: What does that mean?
BEN: That is the people have an association with the container that is far beyond It contains detergent.
DANIEL: That is interesting. It wouldn’t be the same if we just had a clear container with different colors of sloshy fluids.
BEN: Well, I mean, like…
HEDVIG: What do they mean?
BEN: So, delivery of various consumer products is in terms of what it presents to the world, so much more than literally just a thing that contains the product. And for some reason, I always think about the Tide detergent bottles because they’re just a very visually obvious thing, I think. They really stand out to most people on shelves and that sort of stuff.
DANIEL: Oh, let’s talk about Australian context. The Saxa salt container. I’ve got one.
BEN: Yep. Yeah [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Got one right here. I’m in a pantry.
BEN: This is so true.
DANIEL: This is good design, but it’s also a cultural signifier.
BEN: Yeah. 100%.
HEDVIG: What does it mean? You keep talking.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Tell me. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
BEN: So, Hedvig, what do you think the Saxa salt container means? What does it mean to you?
HEDVIG: It is a very common design, sort of functionally 60s. It means…
BEN: Is it common?
DANIEL: Kind of.
BEN: I don’t see many other containers that look like that.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. But a lot of people have it.
BEN: Oh, I see. It’s a very widespread thing. Yes.
HEDVIG: It just means I buy the default salt. What am I…
BEN: Is that the only association or attachment?
HEDVIG: Yes. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
BEN: Okay, I would put it to you, madam, that that particular salt, that a lot of people would associate more with it than what you’ve just described, right?
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: They would… Like Daniel said, they would ascribe a belongingness to having possessed it. There’s a certain kind of person who purchases Saxa salt, a certain kind of like Austr…
HEDVIG: What is the kind of person?
BEN: A #Australian with a capital A. It is the Australian salt.
DANIEL: I can go into somebody else’s home and see this container like I have and say, “In this one thing, we are common.”
BEN: Not only that, but there’s also Saxa pepper, which is in a similar… powdered pepper. And those two things on a table signify an older school Australiana as well. Right?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN: Like a pre-Jamie Oliver infiltrated when Australian cooking was pretty shit and pretty British. And we boiled most things and we fried other things.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: And the seasons that we had were very simple. It was like that, the pepper and maybe a barbecue sauce, an HP sauce, or something like that. So, it also signifies or means an older Australiana, like an Aeroplane Jelly and a Vegemite and that sort of thing as well.
HEDVIG: You do know that it’s not an Australian brand. I just looked it up. But that doesn’t matter. I understand. That doesn’t matter.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, right, okay.
BEN: I did know that, but it [CHUCKLES] doesn’t change it for me.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s fair. That’s fair.
BEN: So, anyway, once again, fractal digression, in terms of semiotics in relation to what we’re talking about though, I think what… Max Butterfly?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: In terms of Max Butterfly’s tweet about the semiotics of how people are responding to this, I think what they are suggesting is that how many likes or being able to see people’s likes and keeping track of likes has a lot more meaning than just the literal numbers. Like, far, far, far more meaning. And people’s responses to that strata of identification going away is indicative of how much meaning it has.
DANIEL: So, I think that this hiding likes is a move to shield people from consequences of showing support for bad things. This is going to redound once again to the benefit of bad actors, as always. Just to close it off, I would like to suggest, I have a feature request for Twitter.
BEN: Lay it on us.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] They’re not going to care. Let’s go.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Make sure you put it into that pipeline of things that they really like hearing about.
DANIEL: Well, this is a good one.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Once a year, for one day, turn it on. Everybody can see everybody’s likes. Just like The Purge.
BEN: Oh, Purge. You want to do a Twitter Purge!
DANIEL: I want to do a Purge. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: It’d be fun! Aww.
BEN: “It’s a purge planet, Morty.”
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our next one. This one was suggested to us by Aristemo, and it involves AI technology and voice changing we’ve already seen this was a while ago, a story about how some call centers are using software to switch someone’s accent from, for example, sounding like an Indian English speaker or an Asian English speaker to sounding more like a Daniel English speaker or a Ben English speaker or something like that.
BEN: I like that you started with a Daniel English speaker because you’ve just got this freaky Daniel-only mélange accent that belongs nowhere.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. No one wants that. No one wants that.
DANIEL: Nobody needs what I got. But this is a new piece of technology used by Softbank in Japan. It is not accent changing, but emotion changing.
BEN: Oh, okay. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I’m curious. You’ve piqued my curiosity here, Daniel.
HEDVIG: I was going to say that I have a weird case for the accent changing, which is that people are biased, annoying fucks, and they don’t pay attention to information and messages when someone has what they think of as an accent of someone who isn’t educated. So, if you can hack the system by having a different…
BEN: Yeah. I understand.
HEDVIG: But this is going to be used by call centers to try and scam American boomers out of money. But they’re already doing that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] This works pretty well even without the accent thing.
BEN: But this isn’t that.
DANIEL: This isn’t that.
BEN: So, what is the emotion changing thing? I’m really curious about this because. I’m wondering because every call center person, independent of their ethnic cultural background, has just sounded like a horrifically overworked, pleasant, programmed automaton, because that job is awful. It’s awful no matter where you come from, no matter what you do, working in a call center is not a pleasant job. And they’ve always got this real, almost like white-knuckled grip on vocal self-control. So, what are they changing?
HEDVIG: “And is there anything else I can help you with today?”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, you can just hear in their words, just like, “Please say no. Please let me go.”
DANIEL: Let me tell you this headline from interestingengineering.com, “SoftBank’s new ‘emotion canceling’ AI turns customer screams into soft speech.”
BEN: Oh, so this is for the workers? This is awesome.
DANIEL: It is for the workers. That’s right.
BEN: Oh, this is great.
DANIEL: So, first of all, they run an AI over the input that the customer is giving. It’s anger detection, basically. And then, if there is angry speech, it uses, “Acoustic features of nonthreatening voices to create a calmer, more natural tone.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] This is wicked.
DANIEL: How about that?
HEDVIG: This is good. Time for this.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] This is a good use of AI.
HEDVIG: This is a good use of AI. I was positive on the accent changing, because if people are going to be biased fucks, then let’s just fuck with them. And I like this. If we can make people who work in call centers have less of a shitty day, win-win.
BEN: So, here’s my real cynical Ben belief.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Yeah, I’m bringing it in. I think this has been designed not with the protection of call center workers in mind, but the improvement of outcomes for the people who are calling call centers in mind. And the idea I imagine would be, if your call center workers are not being anywhere near as verbally abused, they’ll probably keep doing good jobs with callers, right? So, if you’re hearing a calm, reasonable person and you’re just interacting with that person in a calm, kind, generous, whatever way, that’ll probably, on like a big sort of numbers sense, mean that, that call center is going to do much better. Now, that’s my cynical take.
HEDVIG: That’s not even that cynical.
BEN: My really functionalist take is, like, that is still going to result in those call center workers hopefully getting less verbally abused. Huge win. Love that. Love that.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Because they are going to work longer and better because they are going to feel less shit.
BEN: I hope so. I really do. And I hope it’s as good as it’s sort of making itself out to be as well.
HEDVIG: Yes, I want to hear it.
BEN: Because if it’s just one of those things where when someone starts screaming at you, it’s just like a real obvious, like, “No, I don’t want it,” or something like that, they’re going to be like, “Well, this person’s screaming at me,” and that feels shit.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But at lower the cost of the human interaction for the person who’s on the receiving end of the abuse.
BEN: Yeah, like I said, cynical genesis notwithstanding, if anything that helps a rank-and-file worker deal with abuse better or not feel like they’re being as abused, call that a win.
DANIEL: Well, this currently only works in Japanese, but maybe other languages will be rolling out soon. This next one is a piece of research about negation.
BEN: Negation.
DANIEL: I have noticed that some people get really het up about double negatives, or as we call them in linguistics, negative concord. What do we know about this?
HEDVIG: They’re not the same thing.
DANIEL: Tell me more. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Sorry.
BEN: I love it. I love it.
DANIEL: They can be, but not always.
BEN: I love the doctor just being like, “Wrong.”
DANIEL: No, they can be, but not always.
HEDVIG: Okay. Double negatives can mean two different things, and negative concord could be one of those things.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Double negation could mean either that you mark your default negation that you use for active verbs, like, “I dance,” “I don’t dance.” Whatever that negator have, does that occur discontinuously in more than one place? So, do you have, “I don’t dance, not” and that means the same thing as I don’t dance, that’s what French does, you got two. That’s one thing.
Then, people call double negation when you just actually have the negative operator twice and they cancel each other out like, “I don’t not like him,” or something like that. Where the fact is I do something like-like him.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s not perfect like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And then, negative concord is when you’ve got something else, like an ANYBODY or time or something else like, “I don’t love him anymore,” or, “I never dance,” and you mark negation in more than one place when you do that, that’s negative concord.
DANIEL: Like, “I don’t dance no more.”
HEDVIG: “I don’t dance no more.”
DANIEL: In English, it’s considered nonstandard, but there’s kind of a funny path that this took. A bit of history. It was the loathsome [CHUCKLES] Robert Lowth who lived in the 1700s and handed down so many tiresome prescriptive rules. He was a grammarian and he thought that language should be logical like math. It’s not, but he thought it should be.
BEN: Wrong. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah. And whereas people, like everyone from William Shakespeare to everyone, was using multiple negation as a way of supporting the negation. So, multiple negation means just intensifier, more negative. But he argued in his book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, “Two negatives in English destroy one another or are equivalent to an affirmative.” That was one of his rules.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Or equivalent to an affirmative, which is kind of how we use the… What most laypeople think of a double negative is exactly what you’ve just described, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s right.
HEDVIG: And that was my second one.
BEN: Like Hedvig’s, “I don’t not like him,” that’s exactly what that is.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah. But now, how does that check out cognitively? For example… I’m getting away from double negatives now. I’m just going to get into negation proper and how our brains handle it. So, for example, if I say that there’s a car and the car’s not old…
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: …does that mean that it’s new?
BEN: No, it means it’s medium.
DANIEL: Kind of medium.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, why would somebody say it that way?
HEDVIG: Well, this gets back to the Levinson’s: if you have a complicated way of saying something, you mean something complicated, right?
BEN: I like that. I’ve not heard that before.
HEDVIG: [SCREAMS] We talked about that last time. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Say that again, because that’s so good. We used his implication. “What isn’t said isn’t.” That’s one of his.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What isn’t said, isn’t.
HEDVIG: So, simple forms suggest normal extension. Abnormal forms suggest abnormal extension. So, why aren’t you saying…
BEN: Yeah. No, but you said it way cooler before. Say the cool one.
HEDVIG: Oh, I said a complex thing entails a complexity thing or something like that.
BEN: No, no. no. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I think you said, “If you say something with complexity, then there is complexity in the thing.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It means you mean something complicated.
HEDVIG: That’s his…
BEN: Yeah, you mean something complicated. There we go.
HEDVIG: Abnormal form suggests abnormal extensions. So, why don’t you say that the car is middle aged?
[LAUGHTER]
Now I know why you don’t say it, because that sounds insane.
DANIEL: Why did you say it isn’t old? Why didn’t you say it was new? Because if I meant that it was new, I would have said that it was new, but I didn’t. So now, what did I mean? Well, I don’t know.
BEN: And I also don’t mean that it’s old. I mean that it’s just in that kind of medium, like, my car’s approximately ten years old and it doesn’t look like a shit box, but it also doesn’t look like a brand-new car, like, what do you call that?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Now, that’s complicated! [BEN LAUGHS] So, we have very sensibly decided, like the sensible people that we are, that negation does not necessarily flip something to an opposite.
BEN: Well, I would extend that to Hedvig’s original example. “I don’t not like him,” is not the same as saying, “Oh, yeah, I really like him,” right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. It is.
BEN: It means, “I’m on the fence,” or like I’m…
HEDVIG: I have neutral. I don’t have an opinion.
BEN: What’s that thing where you feel two emotions? I’m ambivalent. I’m experiencing ambivalence about it.
DANIEL: Something middle. Yeah. Well, now, this has been found experimentally. This is work from Dr Arianna Zuanazzi of New York University and a team published in PLOS Biology. So, we’re going to try their experiment. Are you ready?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Oh, sure.
DANIEL: I’m going to give you a phrase about how high or how low something is, and I just want you to give me a number from 1 to 10. So, if I say really, really high, that’s a 10.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: All right. High. Something is high.
BEN: Seven?
DANIEL: Yeah. You reckon, Hedvig? About seven? Why are you looking…
HEDVIG: Yeah 8, 7.
BEN: You look scared. Hedvig looks scared, right now. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m giving you something you didn’t expect.
HEDVIG: Okay, next. 7. I’m 7 as well.
DANIEL: Low.
BEN: 3.
HEDVIG: 2.
DANIEL: Okay, I said 2. Not high. Is that a 2?
BEN: 6?
HEDVIG: That’s between 4 and 6. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How about not really high? It’s not really high.
HEDVIG: Between 5 and 7.
BEN: No, I think that because… Well, hang on. Can I clarify, Daniel? Did you mean… because the emphasis matters here, I think…
DANIEL: I know.! I know.
BEN: Did you mean not really high? Or, did you mean not really high?
DANIEL: Now, intonation is going to matter on this, which is probably why, in this experiment, they read the words. [BEN LAUGHS] So, there is a difference between it’s not really high versus it’s not really high.
BEN: Okay. So, the not really high would be like… a high would be 7, and not really high would be a 5, 6 again.
DANIEL: 5 or 6. How about it’s really not low?
HEDVIG: It’s really not low.
DANIEL: It’s really not low. This is hard.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that one…
BEN: Because I think we’re all in agreement that 5 is your neutral point of neither high nor low, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Really not low.
DANIEL: It’s higher than 2, surely.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay, if I change intonation, but if I say, “Oh, that’s really not low,” then it means it was on the lower end, but it was not really low. So, it means it would have to between 3 and 5.
BEN: But you said really not low.
DANIEL: It is really not low.
BEN: To which I am just like, “Well, it’s basically not low at all.” So, it’s 5.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, in this experiment, they gave people one, two, or three words to read, including REALLY and NOT. And then an adjective like GOOD, LOUD, BRIGHT, and WARM. And they had them click on a scale to show how much or how little that thing was, just like we just did. What they found was…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Humans are monkeys, aren’t we?
DANIEL: Can be. [BEN LAUGHS] They found that when they gave participants high rating words like LOUD, BRIGHT, or GOOD, they reacted faster than the opposites, QUIET, DARK, or BAD. So, that’s interesting. The positive versions were faster. Also, when there was no negation, they were faster, which makes sense, because negation, I think, slowed us down a little bit. They also tracked mouse movements, which is interesting! And they noticed that at first, if you gave somebody “not hot”, people would move the mouse toward “hot” for [BEN LAUGHS] a little bit and then away.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, that’s very… That’s cute.
DANIEL: Isn’t that great?
BEN: Oh, it’s… Yeah, it’s physicalised indecision, right?
HEDVIG: And this is a good example of also something that I was reminded recently at a conference I went to that, like, we think that we process things linearly, like, we process the word NOT, and then we process the word HOT. But that might not be the case.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Our ears might perceive them that way, but in the brain, we might actually sort of jumble things around. So, they’ve picked up on HOT, and then, like, oh, and then even though NOT preceded HOT, they still thought about HOT at first.
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, don’t think of an elephant, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, remember our high and low sentences. I’m going to give you what they found from highest to lowest. So, here were the highest things. Really really high, really high, and high. Okay, so no surprises. But you’ll notice there’s no negators in that chunk. Now, as we get a little bit lower, like the 5s, 6s, and 7s, the negators start to come in. Really not low. Not-not high. I like that one.
BEN: Not-not high.
DANIEL: Not really low. And not low. Those were all on the high side. Now, we’re going on the low side and not coincidentally, in the middle range here of low, we see all the negators, not not low, not really high, not high, and really not high. And then, as we get down to the bottom, all the negators go away, and we see low, really low, and really really low.
HEDVIG: That makes sense.
BEN: Right. So, negators are… granulators? are like zoomer-inner-ers? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: They make us… They force a level of specificity that doesn’t exist in just the bog standard, yeah, really low or really high.
DANIEL: Yep. That’s it.
HEDVIG: But importantly, they don’t negate… Like, NOT HOT is not COLD. It only pushes you to the middle of the scale. It doesn’t push you down the scale.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Precisely! The ones with the negatives get closer to the positives, but they never get all the way there. So, NOT GOOD is never BAD. It’s just somewhere between GOOD and BAD. So, their finding is negation does not invert meaning. It mitigates meaning. And that’s a really interesting result.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
BEN: That’s fun. I like that.
HEDVIG: When I was little, I thought that negation and opposites were, like, perfect inverses.
DANIEL: Ah.
BEN: Give us an example. Give us a little Baby Hedvig thing that you would have done.
HEDVIG: Baby Hedvig was very confused when people said that cats and dogs are opposites.
BEN: Because to your brain, you were like, “They are nearly the same creature in a lot of ways.”
HEDVIG: They got fur, they got four little, they’re domestic, they’re in people’s houses. A lot of them are roughly the same size.
BEN: They can often be approximately the same size if you’ve got a big cat and a small dog and all that kind of thing.
HEDVIG: They’re really similar. They eat similar food.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That is funny.
HEDVIG: So, in my mind, what you did was you took a thing, and then you listed all of its attributes. And then when you said something was opposite or negated, you took all those attributes and you shifted them to its opposite.
BEN: Right. So, the opposite of a dog would have to be like a hairless frog that was not domesticated and didn’t have any cute features, whatsoever.
HEDVIG: No. Ben, you’re not going far enough.
BEN: Okay, okay.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Baby Hedvig was more galaxy brain.
BEN: Please educate me.
HEDVIG: It’s not animal.
BEN: Okay, I gotcha.
DANIEL: It’s a concept.
HEDVIG: Then I started getting further away. I was like, “It can’t be made out of matter.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay, so the opposite of a dog is, like, ennui.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, something like that. Or the opposite of a dog is the negative space, the rest of the universe minus the dog.
DANIEL: Wow. It’s everything but the dog.
BEN: Oh, dude, you would have been… I can’t tell whether you would have been awesome or horrible as a child.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Oh, I happened to meet my old teachers last weekend. [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, you’ve got an answer. Great.
DANIEL: What did they say?
HEDVIG: This was university teachers. They were like, “Hedvig, in some ways, you were a dream student. You were so engaged. You had so many questions. But you also raised your hand a lot and asked a lot of questions and sometimes just didn’t even wait for… You just interrupted us.” [LAUGHS] Like, straight up, just like…
[LAUGHTER]
And I remember this, like, a couple of weeks into my introductory linguistics class, one of the teachers took me aside and was like, “Hedvig, lovely stuff, but you’ve got to tone it down. [LAUGHS] You got to…”
BEN: Aw, bless… Well, clearly, they didn’t hate you. Because otherwise they wouldn’t have attempted to do that. They would have just rolled their eyes and given you very short, unsatisfying answers and moved on.
HEDVIG: They might have done that, and I didn’t pick up on it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Not hating Hedvig is not quite the same as loving Hedvig.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
BEN: That was one of the better callbacks we’ve done in a long time.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ve been working on my callbacks.
BEN: Oh, good job.
DANIEL: Last item, the Global Coalition for Language Rights has announced the winner of the 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award. And it’s Abduweli Ayup. He’s an Uyghur exile activist and a linguist. He was unjustly imprisoned in China from 2013 to 2014 and now lives in exile. And he’s recognised for promoting the Uyghur language through writing, teaching, and advocacy. I had the chance to talk with Abduweli Ayup a little earlier.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
Hey, Abduweli, thanks for coming on and having a chat with us.
ABDUWELI AYUP: Thank you for having me.
DANIEL: For those who don’t know, could you please tell us a little bit about the situation of the Uyghur people and the Uyghur language in China? What’s going on?
ABDUWELI: Let’s start with like this. For example, you have kids, but you are really afraid to speak to your kids at home because you have Chinese officials at home every… once a week.
DANIEL: I find that surprising and horrifying. Do parents have to speak to their children in Mandarin, in Putonghua?
ABDUWELI: Yes, if that Chinese official there with them and they have to, it means that their Chinese, Zhōngguó gōngmín yìshí, it means like Chinese citizenship consciousness is strong enough if they speak Chinese to their kids. But if they insist speaking Uyghur to their kids, it means that they are not educated enough. They should be reeducated. Because for Uyghurs, there is a scoring system. You have to be above 60 of your score. If your score under 60 and you will be the object to send to the eradication camp.
DANIEL: Oof. That’s pretty serious. And that’s going on today.
ABDUWELI: Yes. And not that your kids, especially from that Uyghur dominant region, we have two parts, north and the south part, and the south part especially Uyghur dominant. And in that region, the kids have to go to boarding kindergarten from three years old.
DANIEL: Three years.
ABDUWELI: They have to separate from their family and go to boarding school. Especially this policy, before the policies exist, but some places implemented the policy, but some places not. But especially 2021, the policy implemented forcefully. And Uyghurs, especially those counties and villages and townships, they have to send their kids to boarding kindergarten. Those kids stay at the boarding kindergarten from Sunday evening to Friday evening.
DANIEL: I can only imagine the effect on the Uyghur language would be very disruptive. It must be very difficult to maintain the Uyghur language.
ABDUWELI: Yes, of course. I interviewed four kids saved by Turkish family members. They are a Turkish citizen, but because of their parents arrested in China. And then, they sent to the boarding school and they stayed in boarding school about 20 months. When they sent to the boarding school, they are four and six years old. And after 20 months, I have met them in Turkey, they forgot their language completely. They forgot the language and their parents had difficulty to communicate with their own kids.
DANIEL: Now, I have read a report called Fighting Chinese Linguistic Imperialism, and that’s coming from the Uyghur Human Rights Project. We’ll have a link on our website, becauselanguage.com. You tell your story of your efforts to promote Uyghur and your imprisonment. Why was it important for you to promote the Uyghur language? Why did that become so important to you?
ABDUWELI: Because I learned about my ancestors and about my hometown, about my family history through my language, when I was really young, from my mom and from my dad. And also, they read a lot of books written thousand years ago and hundred years ago and a few ten years ago. Language put me connected with the people who lived thousand years ago, and the language put me connected with the people who lived 500 years ago. And I felt that I’m not alone in this universe, I’m not alone in that my small village, I’m the one connected with different part of the world. I’m the one connected with my ancestor. I’m the one connected with same people neighboring with us, and even some of them far away but emotionally we are connected.
For example, when I was young, my father read Foggy Capital. It means London. That impressed me very strongly and, in my imagination, London is a foggy capital all the time. 2021, I visited London, but it’s not. My first question to a British friend, “No, London is not foggy.” Look, that language input that image of London through the language. And then, I imagine London as a foggy capital because of the novel, because of the language.
DANIEL: I read in the report that people have been fired from teaching jobs and other jobs for not speaking Mandarin and the reasons given for firing them are that they are not modern enough or that they are fighting the government. Can you tell me some insight as to why speaking Uyghur would be considered fighting the government? What’s behind this?
ABDUWELI: Since 2014, the Xi Jinping started his people’s war against terrorism. Xi Jinping government put extremism, terrorism and separatism as a pretext, and his government put Uyghur in that box. If you are Uyghur, it means that you are terrorist, you are a separatist and you are a religious extremist. And this miscategorisation lead that Uyghur suddenly became the enemy of the state, enemy of the second largest economy in the world, with 11 million tiny population.
DANIEL: But the reality is that these are just people who are trying to maintain their history, go about their lives, communicate and share a sense of identity. It seems like that’s really threatening.
ABDUWELI: Yeah. In the reality, for example, my younger sister, she’s a geography teacher, and she was teaching geography in Chinese and she was teaching at the high school and she got arrested because she’s Uyghur. The accusation is double faced. What does double faced mean? It means that you are communist party member, and at the same time you speak your language and you feel that you are Uyghur. In China, how can you become the Chinese one night? Even you started to war against the people of Uyghur ethnicity but how people suddenly in a few years converted or changed it into Chinese majority? It is impossible. And then if you keep this double identity, like Uyghur and the Chinese, or Uyghur and the communist party member, and you become double faced, and it is really like ridiculous accusation in this world, I think.
DANIEL: We often hear that language rights are human rights. This is a phrase that linguists say sometimes. For you, what is the connection between language rights and human rights?
ABDUWELI: It is really a right definition actually. The language rights is the human rights because we are human. Because we are a storyteller, we are creator and we are a thinker. For example, we create the language and then we create the culture. And then, we became the ruler of this world, because… We can commit… We can organise through language millions of people. And then, we become the ruler of the of the earth and we succeeded from other mammals. And it’s because of us. If we call ourselves human being, the first significant feature is the language. If we admit we have rights, our language right should be the significant rights, the first right of as a human being.
And the second, we are human being, we speak different language, we practice different culture, and it is our natural rights. We cannot imagine anyone who are universal, who are not Uyghur, not Chinese, not British, or not American. You have to be someone who lived in the specific culture and practice different culture. It’s our human nature. And our cultural rights as an ethnic group is also to be protected. For example, human, we have human rights and ethnic group, they have ethnic rights, they have their cultural rights.
And the third, as a human, we create our culture in different geography. For example, people in Africa, they have the culture that’s related to their climate. And people in North Europe, like us in Norway, we have a culture, just adjust to our nature.
So, when we talk about human rights, we should talk about language and the culture and our sense of belongness. All of those rights are connected to human and it’s all rights express through language, right by language. That’s why human rights should be linguistic right first.
DANIEL: That’s great. You used to live in China. Now, you’re living in Norway. Are you still in contact with the Uyghur community? Is that still possible in China?
ABDUWELI: I’m not in direct communication with the people, but I am always in connection. Because when I was in China, I fight for this language, and because of this language is really in danger if we compare with the 2013, that’s why people really want to be saved and they hope their language really want to be saved. So, I always receive some messages through third party or fourth party or indirect way. So, I even heard that in May 28th, I think, I received the message from far away, Australia, that one of my friends sent a message to my friend in Australia and my friend in Australia sent message to me. He congratulated me.
DANIEL: That’s great.
ABDUWELI: People are amazing. They learned this.
DANIEL: So, they know. They know that you got this award.
ABDUWELI: Yes, they learned this. So, I’m really excited not because of I got this award. I’m not only proud of this award and because of the people who are suffering and they congratulate me through that way I feel really happy because it is important for those people who are oppressed. For them, it’s a hope. It means that international community is watching. They are doing something. They are willing to save them. The hope is really important because when I was in jail, when I was working at the corridor, the lawyer just hit me and I fell down and he just helped me stand up and said, “Don’t worry. In the world, people are talking about you.” He just said one word and then left. He’s not my lawyer. He just told me at the corridor when I’m just returning from the interrogation room to my dormitory. He just used that chance to remind me that, “Look, people are talking about you.”
It supported me and it helped me a lot. It helped me to eat whatever I eat and the sleep well and be alive. It helped me a lot. So, such a work, yes, it helped me. It helped Uyghur. Especially, it will help those people who are losing their language in China, those people who are oppressed, who are hopeless right now. So, it’s really important for the people who are living there.
DANIEL: Well, we’re very glad to have you tell us about your struggle and your award, because we want to help to spread attention of this issue for our audience. Is there anything that people who are listening now can do about this situation? It seems like a very difficult situation and I don’t know what to do or how to help. What do you suggest?
ABDUWELI: First of all, we are all consumer in this world. And why China put that millions of people in the camp, it’s because they want the free labor. They want that cheap product because they are using those people as forced labor, slave labor. So, we shouldn’t buy those products linked to Uyghur slave labor. For example, we have seen a lot that Temu, it’s an app, Chinese app. If you search Instagram, if you use Facebook, if you use Twitter, you always can see that Temu, Shein advertisement will pop up, their commercial will pop up. It means that they are working really well to spread those advertisements. And then, Shein and the Temu, it is related to Uyghur forced labor. They are using the cotton, they are using the wool, and they are using other products related to Uyghur forced labor.
So, now we get used to download the app and buy something. It is really popular around the world. But if you think about it, what we have done, it is wrong or right? It is beneficial to our earth, or it has put more people in danger or put more people in the camp? We are consuming those slave-labor products. That’s why this slavery exists in the world. If we pay attention when we buy something, if we check is it made in China, is it related forced labor or not, Chinese government don’t have to put those people in the camp because of billions of people buying and let them strong. That’s why they can contain those people in the camp. So, first thing we should do, we shouldn’t buy something related to forced labor made in China. We should do this the first.
Second, especially in democratic world, we have rights to vote, vote our politician. When we use our vote, we should pay attention to their behavior. Are they on the human rights side or not, what they have done to human rights. Yes, we’re all human. And we should protect and support human rights. And if the politicians, they are working with, for example Russia, for example, Iran, or like those terrorist groups, we should not support them, we should not vote for them. We should check their behavior and their history and their resume. And we shouldn’t support those guys, even if they are successful in the country’s economy. But we should pay attention that are they on the human right side or not. We should pay this attention.
And the third, we are storytelling animals. It’s our success. That’s why we use this language. So, tell Uyghur story to your neighbor, to your friend, to your students, to your classmates. And I hope we will change. Because the human being, we succeeded Second World War. At the end, democracy survived. And then, we declared Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That’s our win over in human history. So, I believe we will win this atrocity, we will win this dictatorship, and we will embrace the democracy around the world.
But the democracy, human rights, freedom of speech is not something for free. We should fight for it. We should talk about it. We should educate our students, our friends, our family members, our neighbors about human rights and promote this human rights advocacy around the world.
DANIEL: We will try to do those things. We are talking to Abduweli Ayup, Uyghur language activist, linguist, and the recipient of the 2024 Language Rights Defender Award from the Global Coalition for Language Rights. Abduweli, I would just like to thank you very much for sharing your story with us and I would like to congratulate you on this award.
ABDUWELI: Thank you for having me. Thank you for giving me this chance.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for our favorite game, Related or Not. And for our theme this time… Man, people have been giving us some really great jingles, haven’t they?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I am so stoked.
DANIEL: You’re going to love this one. We’re back to our friend, Adam, who created a lot of jingles for us, a lot of versions of our jingle with Suno AI. And they used your words, Ben, because you improvised a little song once, “Related or not. Is it related to the word or to the other word?” So, he used those lyrics. And here we go. Time to dance. You ready?
[NEW RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: This is so cute.
DANIEL: What’d you think? That was something.
BEN: That was delightful. I want to be on a European beach somewhere with the camera that is filming me dancing with gay abandon, is doing a Michael Bay circle thing, as I’m like [IMITATES FAST-PACED MUSIC]
HEDVIG: Swoop low with the telephoto.
BEN: Yes. Swoop low with the telephoto. [LAUGHS].
HEDVIG: That’s the line from Epic Rap Battles of History when the directors are battling.
BEN: I like that. I like that.
DANIEL: Let’s get to the game. For our first one, I’ve got three pairs of words. Only one pair is related.
HEDVIG: Okay. Three pairs. Oh, god. Oh, I need pen and paper. Okay, hold on.
DANIEL: You might. You might.
HEDVIG: I found paper. Now, I need pen. I found pen. Okay, let’s go. Okay, number one, pair number one, tell me.
DANIEL: Okay, these are in alphabetical order.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: BUSINESS and BUSY. Oh.
BEN: Oh.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Have you noticed the word BUSY in the word BUSINESS?
HEDVIG: I have.
BEN: I have always assumed that’s what it was. It was a busyness. Like a business is where people got busy! Not in a sexual way.
DANIEL: They get busy. Next one, CUCUMBER and ENCUMBER. Have you ever tripped over a cucumber? You might find that they’re encumbering the place. What about those -CUMBERS? Are they the same -CUMBER? And finally, the third pair. SMUGGLE, to smuggle something in. And SMUG. You’d be pretty pleased with yourself if you manage to smuggle things in.
BEN: Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, two of those are just garbage, coincidentally related. Nothing going at all. But one of them is related. Which one?
BEN: I really want it to be BUSY and BUSINESS because I have spent my entire life folk etymology-ing that together in my head.
DANIEL: But could it be that it’s a phony folk etymology?
BEN: Oh! That’s going to really hurt me.
DANIEL: That will be so hard.
BEN: Yeah. I’m going to be very disappointed.
DANIEL: I don’t want to hurt you, Ben. I don’t want to hurt you.
BEN: SMUG and SMUGGLER?
DANIEL: Or SMUGGLE, yeah, yeah.
BEN: Sorry. SMUGGLE. I reckon that could go one of two ways. Either it’s just woefully unrelated, or it’s just the most obviously related thing. Because smugglers are smug.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s a tough game. It’s a tough game. Have you ever met one? Those bastards. I’m going to slap it off their face.
BEN: I’m going to put CUCUMBER out of the race. That’s a hard no for me.
DANIEL: Okay. Do you agree, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I would like to say that I don’t think smugglers are particularly smug. I think smug are people who are pleased with themselves and who are little spoiled brats.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I thought… Yeah, SMUG is when you’re pleased with yourself and when you feel like you’ve got one over on someone else, which is inherent to smuggling.
HEDVIG: That is true.
DANIEL: Very smugly, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: That is true.
BEN: Because you can only smuggle when someone is wanting you not to take goods somewhere.
DANIEL: And really, if you manage to get one over on someone by smuggling, how would you feel after that?
BEN: Pretty smug.
HEDVIG: Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Pretty smug.
HEDVIG: but Ben, have you ever been in a pumpkin patch or where you grow any kind of, like, squash or cucumber or pumpkins?
BEN: Good point. Because they’re ground creepers. Yes, of course.
HEDVIG: And they are fucking in the way.
BEN: Yep. No, 100%. And they would encumber other plants as well.
DANIEL: Dang.
HEDVIG: And also, English is the only one that does CUCUMBER. I think everyone else is like, gurka, agurk, gherkin, ogórek, gurke.
BEN: How is this defined.
HEDVIG: All the other Germanics are like gurke, gurke.
BEN: This is pineapple all over again, isn’t it?
DANIEL: This is chai tea, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: It’s like ananas in various forms in every conceivable language. And then we’re like: ~pineapple~. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right, it’s time to choose.
BEN: Oh, Christ. Oh, you’ve just thrown a total cucumber and it’s encumbered me.
DANIEL: Thank you, thank you.
HEDVIG: So, there’s only one of them that’s true. Is that the case, or one of them is false?
DANIEL: Only one of them is true.
BEN: I’m going with BUSINESS. I just want it to be true. I’m just going with my heart here.
DANIEL: Yes, you are following your heart. Yep, yep. I can tell. I can tell this means a lot to you, and I hope it goes well.
[LAUGHTER and CRYING]
HEDVIG: I’m going to go with the CUCUMBERS.
DANIEL: Is that’s right?
BEN: Solid.
DANIEL: How about that?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I want you… as much as it will hurt me, because it means I’m wrong, I want you to be right because it was such a good chain of thought that you put down there.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I can tell you right now that SMUG and SMUGGLE are not related. Okay? So, SMUGGLE is… you know that -LE like, crackle and sparkle, where -LE is a frequentative? Well, this is a frequentative too. There was a word meaning to sneak, *smuganan in Proto-Germanic.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Smyga! [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh. How about that?
HEDVIG: That means SNEAK.
DANIEL: Well, there you go. Comes up again. And then SMUG, SMUG has had a bit of a semantic journey in the 1500s. It meant trim or neat, and then it meant self-satisfied. Because if you look great, then smug is how you feel, and then you’re smug. So, not related. Okay. The one that is related, it’s BUSINESS and BUSY. [BEN EXHALES] Ben is relieved.
BEN: Oh, what a load off. This is one of the few times where I really didn’t want Hedvig to lose either. I really liked the idea that CUCUMBER and ENCUMBER could be the same because they trip you up. Because they’re viney.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Those vines! It’s the vines.
BEN: I’m so glad. I am so glad. So, it is exactly what we think it is. It is a busy-ness.
DANIEL: It is the state of being busy, occupied with your occupation, and then the occupation itself, because meaning jumps. The CUCUMBER and ENCUMBER are not related. CUCUMBER goes back to a Latin word, cucumerem. The B is not etymological, but just got stuck in. But we can’t take that back any farther. But ENCUMBER goes back to Latin COMBRUS, which is a barricade or an obstacle, probably from Latin CUMULUS, meaning heap. Which means that ENCUMBER doesn’t relate to CUCUMBER, but it does relate to CUMULUS clouds.
HEDVIG: Cumulus.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Because they’re the big heapy clouds.
DANIEL: Got to say that it was Jan that gave us SMUGGLE and SMUG, and it was Holly, Spiderhunter of Taitung, who gave us CUCUMBER and ENCUMBER. Thanks, y’all.
BEN: Sorry.
DANIEL: Hedvig, what about yours? You brought us one.
BEN: Wait. Whoa whoa whoa. Holly, the… sorry?
DANIEL: Spider hunter of Taitung.
BEN: I am in love with that name. Moving on. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That is pretty darn good.
DANIEL: Yep. Although we have spiders on our deck and we like our spiders and we give them names except that one bad day, a wagtail discovered our stash.
BEN: Oh, spiders. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I know. We don’t have them anymore. Hedvig, you brought us a Related or Not.
HEDVIG: I just had one that came up in conversation that I wanted to run by you guys. Okay, do you think that the English words, TWIN and TWAIN, are related?
BEN: Twin and Twain. Oh, so like to cut something in twain, meaning into two pieces, right?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: And TWIN.
DANIEL: That sounds intuitive, but I don’t think that they are related. I think it’s likely that those things could have come from independent places.
BEN: Well, then can I throw a third thing in there?
HEDVIG: First, you make your guess about TWIN and TWAIN.
BEN: Okay. Okay. I think they are related because I think TWIXT is in there as well.
DANIEL: There’s a lot of two things going on there.
BEN: Twixt and twain and twin…
HEDVIG: Let me find twixt.
BEN: …I think they’re all related.
HEDVIG: I think it’s betwixt that I need to look for.
DANIEL: Like BETWEEN. I think the between is related to twi…hahhhh hhhhhhh. [LAUGHS]
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, no. Oh, it’s gone bad.
DANIEL: We broke Daniel.
BEN: Well, I’ve got my money on the table.
DANIEL: Go ahead.
HEDVIG: So, Ben said yes and Daniel said no.
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: And Ben is right, they are related. And BETWIXT is also related. [DANIEL LAUGHS] They all go back to Proto-Indo-European *dwís. They’re all super related. I just thought [LAUGHS].
DANIEL: Ben, you’re on a roll today.
HEDVIG: I just thought it was one of those like, “Oh, it seems so obvious that of course it’s not. No, no, no, no, no.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Hey, don’t give me the dumb voice. I don’t deserve the dumb voice. Ben, you got one?
BEN: Isn’t that just an American accent? Isn’t that what we do when we do dumb voice?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: That’s certainly what I did growing up.
DANIEL: For reasons.
BEN: I’m sorry to say.
DANIEL: For reasons. A big thanks to everybody who’s sending us these Related or Not suggestions and jingles. If you want to send us more, we’re working through them. That’s on our Discord or hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here with linguist, Katie Martin. Katie, thanks so much for hanging out with me on the show today and talking.
KATIE MARTIN: Yeah, my pleasure. I’m very happy to be here.
DANIEL: So, we’re talking about Noam Chomsky today. He’s been in the news lately and he hasn’t been well.
KATIE: Yes.
DANIEL: And there was a rumour that he had passed on, which turned out not to be true, thankfully.
KATIE: Yes. Thankfully.
DANIEL: Tell me about yourself, Katie. What’s your scene? Because what I know about you is that you have ties to MIT. You have been a generative syntactician. And you jokingly say in your bio that your views [KATIE LAUGHS] represent those of Noam Chomsky. So, I thought, “Who better to have on the show talking about Professor Noam Chomsky than you?”
KATIE: Yes. His unofficial Twitter amanuensis, if you will.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Very good.
KATIE: Very unofficial. [LAUGHS] Yeah. So, I’m a generative syntactician. I’ll do a little bit of semantics and pragmatic stuff on the side, as I think most syntacticians have some flex in either direction, either in the semantics direction or the phonology direction these days. Yeah, I was at MIT for four years. I didn’t overlap with Chomsky. I have gone to many of his talks. I’ve emailed with him like everyone on the planet, although I had a good reason to do it. I wasn’t just sending him my crackpot theories or anything.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] I don’t know, he must get a lot of that.
KATIE: I would imagine so, because even I get a lot of that.
DANIEL: Do you?
KATIE: There is a robust community of people who send their crackpot theories to everyone who has an MIT email address.
DANIEL: Right, okay, sounds good.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah, it’s really… I get some great insights. Yeah.
DANIEL: I have also had an email exchange with Noam Chomsky back in 2016 when we talked about him on the show. And I said, “Hi, we talked about you on the show. Do you want to respond?” And he said, “Yes, I need a transcript.” So, I made a transcript of that episode and sent it to him, and we had a bit of a back and forth. He said I was hopelessly confused, which was great. [KATIE LAUGHS] Well, it’s true. I don’t know minimalism as well as he does, and I certainly don’t know it as well as you do.
So, I thought that maybe for today, we could just talk a bit about Chomsky’s ideas, Chomsky’s influence, his impact on you and on linguistics in the field. I’ve got my list of major Chomsky ideas, but I probably don’t understand them as well as you do. Maybe you could help talk me through and correct me.
KATIE: Yeah, for sure. We can go through some ideas. Yeah. I do want to disclaim that I’m not a Chomsky scholar. I am not directly his student. I have no personal or legal connection to him. [LAUGHS] I am just a syntactician who likes his work and got the opportunity to study with a lot of people that he taught, work with a lot of people that he worked with. And it’s been a thrill and a pleasure, but I don’t want to overstate my connection to him, although my Twitter bio does overstate my connection to him.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] But jokingly so.
KATIE: By everyone… I think yes, I think it’s clear to everyone that it is a joke. Although maybe not. Maybe not.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, well, then let’s start there. You have been, I guess, in the Chomsky orbit, at least a bit.
KATIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: How has his work influenced you? What’s the connection that you feel toward this guy?
KATIE: Sure. Yeah. I mean, people call him the father of modern linguistics, and I don’t really think that’s an overstatement. I think his work totally revolutionised the field. And I think it’s really interesting because, I was looking. I was listening to… Okay, I’m going to be honest. I don’t really listen to podcasts. I was reading the transcript of your podcast, which I do.
DANIEL: Cool.
KATIE: I am a dedicated reader of the podcast.
DANIEL: Oh, awesome. Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
KATIE: And, you guys were talking a bit about the Linguistics Wars. He’s had this very strong positive influence, I guess, but also there’s been… I hesitate to call it negative, actually, because it’s been positive in terms of the work it’s produced. But the backlash to his work has also produced its own field of linguistics. So, whether or not you are a follower of his, if you will, or working in the same tradition that he’s working and working in the frameworks that he proposed, I think many, dare I say, most linguists are, if not working along lines he proposed, then responding to the lines he proposed.
DANIEL: God, that is so true. I mean, if you’re working in linguistics, where you sit really can be described in terms of whether you are in opposition to Chomsky or whether you are in alignment with Chomsky. Do you think that’s still true? I mean, I know that…
KATIE: I do think that’s still true. And I’m honestly shocked by how true it is every day of my life, [DANIEL LAUGHS] how heated it remains. I think there is very much a phenomenon where people who are too young to have worked directly with Chomsky or to have been his peer or his student are now inheriting the attitudes of their supervisors. So, there is just as lively a fan cult of Chomsky, which I wouldn’t say I’m a member of, but I’m adjacent to at least, as there is a backlash that is still very vibrant. Yeah.
DANIEL: When I was doing my linguistics degree, I was in a department of anti-Chomskys.
KATIE: Right, yes.
DANIEL: And then, a few Chomskyists, or Chomskyites.
KATIE: Chomskyians. I think
DANIEL: Chomskyians. That’s it. That’s the way to do it.
KATIE: I think that’s what people say. Yeah, that’s my idea. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, well, then maybe we could talk through some of his ideas and just talk about why this has created such a fertile research program and why the reaction to this research program has been so strong. So, I read Syntactic Structures, 1957, as didn’t we all during my linguistics work. And as I understand it, the main idea here, and we’ve had shows about generativism. So, I’ll just repeat something that we talked about there.
One idea was that if you were a linguist before Chomsky, what you might do is go to a place, learn the language that the people speak, describe it, describe the grammar of that one language. But Chomsky’s idea was, “Hmm, instead of describing the grammar of a language, why don’t we get behind the scenes and describe what human language is like?” Because to Chomsky, all human languages are pretty much the same language with minor variations. Would that be… Am I getting it right so far?
KATIE: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a fair representation. I think what he really did for linguistics is he made it a science. His proposals allowed him and a group of other people working at the same or similar time to take it from a sort of descriptive study of data to a science that was putting forward hypotheses and propositions about the reasons for that data. No longer saying just, “Here’s one language. Here’s what we found. Oh, here’s another language. Here’s what we found. Here’s our guesses about the structure of Indo-European.” Philology was very dominant back then, of course, as you know.
But rather, okay, why do we get these patterns in these languages? What is driving this? What’s causing it? What’s the underlying mechanism that allows this? What are the systematic commonalities between languages? What are the possible differences? It was less an attempt to describe a single language and more an attempt to just map out the space of possible language. So, I think he really modernised it in terms of what we think of a science today. He really brought linguistics into the world of the scientific method, I guess, hypotheses and evaluating those hypotheses based on the data rather than data collection and then description and maybe generating some claims about that specific language.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. So, I guess the first thing I’m thinking right here is there are some ways in which he made linguistics more of a science. And yet, there were ways in which the linguistics that he was doing is not very scientific.
KATIE: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, let me see if I can elucidate what I’m thinking here. I guess I’m thinking in science, as we conceive of it, we try to make testable propositions and make predictions that come true in the light of evidence. But when we talk about Chomsky’s idea of finding out about the grammar of all languages, that is to say, the universal grammar, has it really yielded testable ideas that we can check?
KATIE: That is, I think, the perennial question, is how much. And you see this especially with criticism of the minimalist project, which is for those who don’t know, I’m sure the modern Chomsky linguistic framework, the research program that most modern Chomskyans is working in is called the minimalist program that especially has been criticised for being functionally untestable. It is not so much hypotheses about the way language works as it is a beautiful portrait of what language should be in a perfect world or something like that. There is great debate about how testable these predictions are, and I think it’s been a mixed bag.
I think there have been a lot of concrete testable predictions in terms of what is possible for a language to be like. I think, as we’ve moved into collecting multilingual data and started looking farther afield for languages, it’s been very productive to have all our predictions about what languages are possible, been borne out. I guess you could say that, you guys have had Dan Everett on. So, he’s obviously more qualified to talk about his work than I am. But in a way, what Dan Everett was doing was testing Chomsky in prediction. He found from his work that the hypothesis was proven wrong to him. I know people who work on Pirahã today who would disagree. It’s simultaneously a very understudied and overstudied language.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Those people, oh, my gosh, here come the linguists again.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS] What a language. Yeah, they’ve really done a great service to our science. I’m sure they’re very tired of us but yeah. Simultaneously somehow, the language we know the most and the least about. But yeah, what he was doing was he was taking a prediction of Chomsky’s about what languages were possible, and he believed that he found a language that disproved that. And other people have said that than him. There has been work on other languages that has suggested certain specific Chomsky proposals about possible syntactic structures, possible semantics for languages that they don’t work as we expect them to. And there have also been lots of studies of languages that show, “Hey, actually, if you look at this closer, this works exactly as we predicted.” That’s pretty surprising.
Typologists have done a lot of work comparing the possible spectrum of languages we see to the predicted spectrum. And it lines up in some places and doesn’t in others. I don’t think it’s been a complete success for the Chomskyan program. I’m not under the illusion that he’s never had any data challenge him ever or anything.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
KATIE: And I think some people really are true believers like that. Yeah, there’s definitely been data that has disproven him. There’s been data that supported him. A lot of his conclusions and predictions about what languages we might see in the world have been borne out.
So, yeah, I think there have been quite a few testable predictions produced by the Chomskyan program. I think it’s true that he has a tendency, and I don’t necessarily mean this in a critical way, to be very big picture. And often, a lot of his proposals are beyond our capacity to collect data for them, beyond our capacity to understand the brain enough to know whether they are borne out. And he has been criticised, I think fairly, for making some of these hypotheses that are functionally, at our current level of understanding, untestable and possibly forever untestable, because they’re things like, “Mother Nature has organised the human brain thusly,” and, can’t really go and check that. If we could ask her, boy, would that be convenient?
But yeah, he does have a tendency towards making pronouncements, and that can be off putting to a lot of people who hear that and think like, “Come on now.” That’s not scientific to be making these sweeping generalisations, these sweeping statements about the motivations for things that we can never really know. So, he’s been criticised a lot for that. I think that’s a fair criticism. I think it provides a service to be a huge thinker like that, to be a big picture thinker, to say, “Here are the big ideas that are going to drive our study for the next 70 years.” And he said stuff that, people are still working towards, working for.
So, I think being sort of a, I guess, a mildly nutty idealist about what we could know about language is of benefit to the science in a way, as much as it is detriment to the science.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. You’ve mentioned minimalism, which is the one area that I understand the worst. [KATIE LAUGHS] So, I really do need your help on this. Let me take you through what I do understand, and then you can help me out.
KATIE: Sure.
DANIEL: So, it’s so cool, the idea of let’s take a look at how languages systematically differ from each other. And also, let’s take a look at ways in which they’re the same. And the implementation of this idea that I’m most familiar with is something called the principles and parameters model.
KATIE: Okay. I was going to bring that up if you didn’t.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s so freaking cool. So, there are principles that all human languages obey, like all human languages organise themselves structurally. And then, when you start moving things around, like, instead of, “I eat cake,” “Do you eat cake?”, you have to take into account structural elements and then we start drawing a lot of trees. That’s a principle that apparently, as far as I know, all languages seem to obey. Very cool.
But then, there are also these ways in which languages differ, but they differ systematically. And we can talk about those in terms of parameters. So, for example, if I want to say, “It is raining,” in English, there’s no it that’s doing the raining. Nothing’s raining. But I still have to put in an it. I have to put in a subject. Okay. Now, I don’t always have to do this in English, for example, I can do diary drops like, “Went to town. Ate a hamburger. Had fun.” Right? I can drop subjects in some cases, but in general, in English, you just can’t start dropping subjects. Whereas in other languages I have learned like Spanish, you can! If you want to say. “It is raining,” you don’t have to include an it. You can just say, “Llueve,” raining. So, that’s a pretty cool parameter.
Now, as I understand it, the number of parameters that I’m aware of either was very small or the whole thing kind of didn’t work and we needed to move on to something else. Can you tell me about that? Can you take it for me? [LAUGHS] Take it, Katie!
KATIE: Sure, sure, sure. I can try. Yeah. Again, I wasn’t alive for any of this. My understanding is based on reading some of the papers that came out around the time. But yeah, my understanding of principles and parameters was, you’ve described it perfectly. There are these fundamental principles that are true of every language, and then there are parameters, and you can think of them as on/off switches for a feature. So, you can be prodrop, like Spanish, which just means that you can drop subjects in certain cases, or you can be non-prodrop like English. And the idea is that when a baby is learning a language, they are getting the settings for these parameters from their input.
And because there are only this fixed number of parameters, you can require less input to learn a language. You require an accurate, like to the world amount of input. Because without any underlying structure to human language, the idea is that a kid does not get enough stimulus to be able to successfully only produce grammatical sentences, not produce ungrammatical ones, so on and so forth, poverty of the stimulus argument, yeah.
DANIEL: That’s the poverty of the stimulus. Yep, got it. Heard that a lot. Okay.
KATIE: Yeah. So, that’s the idea. And principles and parameters is a way of explaining the poverty of the stimulus problem, if you will, by saying a kid only just has to fix these parameters and a lot of the rest of it is coming gratis with the language system, if you will.
So, yeah, so principles and parameters, was a model of syntax primarily, although it had implications in other systems of language. And I think the philosophical problem with principles and parameters that drove the move to the minimalist program was that it kept ballooning and the number of parameters became larger and less constrained. And some parameters seemed to be relevant for languages and others didn’t. And it was becoming… Okay, I don’t know how much you know about phonology, but I’ll just take a moment here to dunk on the phonologists.
DANIEL: Okay.
KATIE: So, optimality theory is, I guess, the popular modern way of doing phonology and basically it is a system where you are ranking constraints on possible output words.
DANIEL: What’s a constraint?
KATIE: Oh, so a constraint, you can think of it like a filter. So, imagine the phonological system is all of the possible strings of sounds go in.
DANIEL: Uh-huh, okay.
KATIE: And then, there are these constraints that filter out different strings that are impossible in that language. And then, you get outputs that are coherent phonological system. So, you could have constraints like limit on the number of subsequent consonants.
DANIEL: Yeah, I can’t string five different…
KATIE: You can’t string five different consonants together in English because we can’t have consonants as the nuclei of syllables. But a language like Berber, they do have syllables that have consonants as the nuclei. So for example, Berber would have a lower ranked constraint for that than English. And the idea of optimality theory is that all languages have the same constraints. There is a set of constraints, and then those constraints are ranked differently and the importance of the constraints is determining what is coming out.
Berber has that constraint, saying that syllables need to have a vowel nucleus, but there is a different higher ranked constraint that is cancelling that out. Something that says, “Don’t insert vowels where there wasn’t one before.” That constraint is higher ranked, so it doesn’t allow them to insert those vowels. So then, they’re left with syllables that break this lower ranked constraint.
The problem with optimality theory is that we’re on like 17,000 constraints. [CHUCKLES] Someone gave me a spreadsheet once that had all of the constraints that had been proposed in the literature since optimality theory really came out in, I don’t know, 1992. So, we’ve had about 20, 30 years almost, and we have proposed a truly unwieldy and impossible number of constraints. And many of those constraints are just minor variations on each other. They’re just slight rephrasings. But some of them, you kind of need it for this language to work. And then if you try and put it in English you start causing problems and so on and so forth. It’s ballooned into this unmanageable collection of proposals that is completely at odds with the sort of pared down universal goal of the…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Because you’d look at that and you’d say, “Well, an infant is never learning that.”
KATIE: Right, right. It’s totally impossible.
[LAUGHTER]
It simply could not be that there are that many constraints in phonology. It would be unworkable for the human brain. We just don’t have enough processing power to do that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And getting away from phonology, the same thing for syntax, the number of parameters that were suggested, just massive.
KATIE: Right. Yes. It’s the exact same problem. People started proposing parameters, and the number of parameters exploded and there were so many different syntactic operations being proposed, and there were so many different reasons for things being proposed. And it was escaping the original idea of paring down language to something that was maximally simplistic and maximally learnable.
So, the minimalist project, the minimalist program really came out of that impulse to pare down, and it’s very pared down. It really is minimalist in the traditional sense. So, the idea of the minimalist project program… It’s called the minimalist program but I always feel like that sounds really pretentious. So, I sometimes call it something else. But yeah, the minimalist program is very dedicated to absolute simplicity and a paring down of syntactic operations and motivations for those operations to occur.
Fundamentally, under minimalism, there is one syntactic operation, and that’s merge. That is the core of everything. Merge, external merge, as it’s called, is how you get stuff from the lexicon into the sentence. And then, internal merge is movement. So, rather than thinking of a movement as an operation where you’re taking something that’s already in the structure and you’re moving it, and that is a different kind of operation than when something enters the structure, minimalism reframes movement as just a structure, internal form of merge. You are taking something that is already in the structure, and you are merging it into a new place.
DANIEL: Okay, so let me just take it back.
KATIE: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I’m going to do the merge operation. I take noun, dog, and I take determiner, the, and I’m going to merge them. And now, those two things are one thing.
KATIE: Yep.
DANIEL: Which you could call it… I don’t know you could call it a noun phrase. You could call it something else. I don’t know.
KATIE: Yeah, we call them determiner phrases now but that is controversial, yeah.
DANIEL: Determiner phrases? Yeah, that’s cool. All right. And then I can take that one thing, and I can merge it with a verb, and then that can become a sentence. Can you explain movement then in terms of merge? Like, I’ve got, “I see the dog.” How do I go from there to, “The dog is seen by me”?
KATIE: Right, right. Okay, so let’s do something a little simpler than a passive. Let’s do…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I got it on myself. [LAUGHS]
KATIE: No, no… It’s okay, it’s just passives have a lot of internal structure, and I don’t know how to draw a tree [LAUGHS] in this context.
DANIEL: Give me a better example.
KATIE: Yeah, let’s just do a question. I saw the dog. What did you see?
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
KATIE: So then, we don’t have to insert too many dummy things to… Yeah, okay. So, I saw the dog, we have all of those things merged into the structure, right. We have “the dog” merged together with the determiner, that stuff is all coming from the lexicon, is being merged into the structure that’s external merge.
So now, when you want to form a question, what you’re doing is remerging something that was already in the structure into a new position. So, we know that when you have a question, it’s going to sprout some extra structure on top that’s going to accommodate what would have been called movement. You could still call it movement, the movement of that object, what is currently the direct object of the verb, into that position about the subject. And so, we’re going to remerge the dog into that structure, and for a variety of reasons, it becomes who.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. So, the impression that I’m getting is that there are lots and lots of syntactic generativists or generative syntacticians who are looking at languages, making explanations about why they act the way they do, and then talking about it with each other.
KATIE: That’s what we do. Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: In an effort to put together the most compact representation that describes the most about as many languages as we can get.
KATIE: That’s exactly right. Yes.
DANIEL: Wow.
KATIE: The goal is the absolute minimum description that covers all of the languages that exist and that does not predict that there should be any languages that don’t exist. So, we don’t want a system that overgenerates massively. That would be much easier if we said, “Oh, well, all of these things are possible. There’s nothing we don’t expect to find.” Of course, when you say things like that, they have the corollary that is problematic that makes language much harder to learn. If there’s this infinite realm of possibilities, how are kids ever figuring out which thing in that infinite set of possibilities is their language actually doing? But it’s very easy to overgenerate. It’s very easy to say all of these things are possible. So, if you find a language that does one of these things, it’s not a problem for our theory.
What we’re trying to do is make sure that we are predicting all and only the languages that actually exist. And that’s a very difficult task, because there are a lot of languages, and a lot of them do really weird and cool stuff.
DANIEL: I was going to say, do you ever get input from a language and it suddenly torpedoes an idea…
KATIE: Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: …And you have to go, “Oh, crap. Well, that didn’t work.” [LAUGHS]
KATIE: Totally, totally, totally. Yeah, yeah. And I think as with any, I guess, mission driven or hypothesis-driven project, there is often a tendency to do whatever you can to make the data work with the hypothesis. And I think a lot of the valid and grounded criticisms of generativism, in the minimalist program in particular, are that there is a lot of stipulation and contortion and vigorous reimagining that is taking place to make the hypotheses not fall apart in the face of real-world data. And there’s been a lot of criticism of generativism along two lines related to data. One is that it’s too English centric.
DANIEL: I’ve heard that.
KATIE: Which is something that I think used to be true 100%, and that I think is very much not true anymore. I think we’ve made huge strides in terms of incorporating data from other languages. I think we’ve made a lot of progress on that. And I hope the functionalist AI large language model people will also start making progress on that. Because for as much as we’re criticised for being not with the times, I think that is a way in which we are with the times, and sometimes the AI people are not being welcoming to, accommodating of, enthusiastic about multilingualism, about multilingual data, but understudy languages. And, yeah, I think that’s something that we’ve really progressed on. I don’t think it’s true at all anymore to say, “Oh, you know, Noam Chomsky’s theories are just about English and maybe French.” It’s really not true anymore.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, so that was the first criticism, too English centric. What’s the other one?
KATIE: Oh, the other one is that it’s too introspective.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] We sit in the office and make sentences.
KATIE: We sit in the office and imagine sentences. Yeah, that’s a huge criticism that has been levied at the generalists in particular. I think all linguists, though, really, is that there’s a lot of sitting around imagining complex sentences that may or may not ever occur in real life, making pronouncements about what things are grammatical and what are not. And we definitely do have a tendency to do this. I mean, there is very much a veneration of the idea of the native speaker in generativism, in linguistics generally, in Noam Chomsky’s idea of all speakers as perfect knowers of their own language. Whether or not they perform it correctly or not, they do have complete and perfect knowledge of the grammar of their own language, which I believe. I think that’s true.
But we have this veneration of the native speaker, but then sometimes you will have things where some German semanticist is working on English, and an English speaker will be like, “That’s not right.” And they’re like, “Well, my theory says it is.”
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, my theory of English semantics predicts that this sentence makes sense, so it has to. And it’s like, mm.
DANIEL: Oh, right. But that is not the territory.
KATIE: Right. But there was this big paper by Sprouse, Schütze, and Almeida, and they looked at the journal, Linguistic Inquiry, which is a big generative syntax, mostly syntax, although it has other things journal. And they evaluated all of the judgments, or a large selection of the judgments they found in it that had been cooked up by people sitting in their offices in Boston or wherever. They went out and actually did a big study and got a bunch of English speakers to give judgments on them, and they found that overwhelmingly, the judgments were correct.
DANIEL: Oh, really?
KATIE: So, that was very reassuring.
DANIEL: Oh, that is good, okay. That’s cool.
KATIE: Yes, that was so reassuring to us. It was a source of great concern, and I think this paper did a long way to assuage that concern. Possibly, we have taken it a little too enthusiastically and taking that as a rubber stamp for all future “sitting in a room and imagining sentences” behavior, which is maybe not the best tendency to encourage.
And there’s a lot more work on acceptability judgments and studies and things like that. But yeah, I think there is still a tendency to get the single opinion of a 65-year-old German semanticist on the validity of this English sentence and nobody else, and be like, “Okay, well, now we know what’s grammatical.”
DANIEL: There is this assumption in the Chomskyan program of we are addressing an idealised speaker of a language who has perfect competence in the language, but we’re not concerned about performance. If there’s slipups or variation, we’re going to place that outside of our analysis for now.
I used to do a demonstration with my students in first year because I was explaining the generative program and how this was going to be the focus of our first-year class. I got an apple, and I cut the apple down from top to bottom on the table with the stem pointing up, and it showed you a certain pattern. And then, I took a second apple, and I placed it sideways and cut it. And this time, you got to see the seeds arranged in a star pattern, as you do. And I said, “When you choose to wield the analytical knife this way or that way, it has consequences for what you see.”
And I feel like the Chomskyan generative program, with its emphasis on syntax, because that’s super-duper interesting, and it can tell us a lot about why language is the way it is, that is one axis, one way to wield the analytical knife. It’ll show us certain things, but it will obscure other things. And there are other ways of looking at why language is the way it is, using the cognitive knife or using the sociolinguistic knife. How do you feel about using it in the service of syntax? And do you see ways in wielding that analytical knife in other ways?
BEN: Yeah, I think that’s a very… I don’t even know if it was intended as a criticism. I think it was a very fair characterisation of the Chomskyan approach to language, I think. We’ve talked about his tendency to pronouncements, and I think Chomsky himself would be like, “This is the way to look at language. If we do things my way, we will have a complete understanding of language. We’ll have all the understanding of language we ever need.” I’m putting words in his mouth. I’m sure he wouldn’t say exactly this. He’s a reasonable guy, he’s a reasonable guy, but he does have a tendency to pronouncement.
So, one could imagine, and he has said things like, “Do things my way or the highway,” basically, which is a reason for a lot of animosity and it’s fine. But I don’t think that’s true. I think that generative syntax, generative linguistics, the Chomskyan program, minimalist program, is one way of looking at language. I don’t think it’s intended… Okay, maybe it is intended to be the final, total study of language, but I don’t think it should be intended to be the final, total study of language.
DANIEL: Yeah, me neither.
KATIE: Yeah, I don’t think it realistically is going to because it does, as you mentioned, obscure a lot of data. It obscures a lot of sociolinguistic data. It obscures a lot of real speaker data. It obscures a lot of cognitive data.
DANIEL: Corpus data as well. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
KATIE: Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that it obscures by design, because it is looking at language from one very specific perspective that is designed to achieve a perfect understanding of perfect language. And language in life is very messy and not perfect. It always reminds me of how physicists will always joke about how they always do their research on… It’s like, imagine a perfectly spherical cow. And we’re imagining the spherical cow of language.
[LAUGHTER]
We’re imagining this perfect form of the language that does not exist in real life that we can hypothesise about and predict the behavior of. And then when we go out into the real world, there are other factors. Our cow is not spherical, our cow needs to eat, and our cow has cloven hooves, whatever. I’m really pushing this analogy to its very brink.
DANIEL: I like the spherical cow. And, we used that example when we had our talk with David Adger. I’m trying to figure out exactly how long it’s going to take for this ball to fall to the ground if I drop it off of a tower. And I’m going to make measurement after measurement after measurement, and they’re all a little bit different. And you can come up to me and say, “Hey, all of your measurements are going to be just a little bit wrong. And if you want to know how long it’s going to take, I have a really cool equation that you can use that’s idealised.” And so, yeah, Chomsky was trying to find the equation, but it sounds like with our spherical cow example, he was trying to describe something that doesn’t exist. But of course, when we’re doing science, we have to idealise.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah. I think that we are studying the spherical cow as generative syntacticians, but we also need biologists to study how actual cows live in the world. [DANIEL LAUGHS] That is not an entirely separate thing, and it shouldn’t be an entirely separate thing. And I think the more combo biologist-physicist, if you’ll allow me to extend the analogy, people we have, the better it is for the field as a whole. I think the more that the physicists ask the biologist, “Hey, what’s the cow really doing out in the field today?”, the better we’ll be. And I think the more that the biologist asked the physicist, “Hey, what do you predict the cow is going to be doing a tomorrow?”
DANIEL: So, do you find that in your work there are biologists and physicists working together? Are there sociolinguists working with syntacticians?
KATIE: Yeah, I think more and more that is the case. I think there are a lot of people doing really cool syntax mixed with sociological stuff. I’m just thinking off the top of my head, Kirby Conrad and they do a lot of really cool work on the both… They’re very much a generative syntactician, very much trained in that tradition, very knowledgeable about that tradition, truly an expert. And they also do a ton of sociolinguistic work, especially on pronouns, but also on many other things that is drawing both on, if you will, the spherical cow and the actual cow behavior. So, there’s lots of people like that who are really incorporating both sides of this tradition into their work, and learning from the two different fields and synthesising them. I think that could always happen more.
I worry about the state of the field, especially in terms of the big push towards computation and computational approaches to language. That’s going to be the one interface along which everyone works. Everyone is going to be a generative/computational, a sociolinguist/computational, and we’re going to lose some of those other intersections, but we’ll see.
But yeah, no, I think drawing from multiple traditions is always going to give you a better understanding than sticking in one framework. As you were talking about with the knife, I think the more angles that you’re looking at things from, that you’re slicing your apple from, the better. I don’t think there’s enough of it by any means. I think that linguistics is very factional. I think the generativists hang out with the generativists, and we go to our generative conferences, and we work in our generative departments, and we talk to each other, and we read each other’s papers. And then, I think the functionalists talk to each other and go to functionalist conferences and read each other’s papers. And we mostly have Twitter fights and sometimes [DANIEL LAUGHS] have real life fights, not physical fights, [LAUGHS] but go yell at each other’s talks. But I do think that there is a tendency towards ideological sequestering, if you will.
DANIEL: Yeah.
KATIE: I think the more we combat that, the better.
DANIEL: Chomsky has been known as a pugnacious fighter and as intellectually incredibly tenacious. He’s also been known as incredibly helpful and kind.
KATIE: Yes.
DANIEL: Answers people’s emails. He’s really got both of these sides. Have you had an opportunity to experience that?
KATIE: I’ve never experienced the pugnacious… I mean, I’ve never worked with him closely enough, I think, to really get an idea of who he is as a person. I’ve heard a lot of stories. I mean, yes, he is incredibly generous with his time. He is shockingly, inexplicably generous with his time. You can email him your crackpot theory, and he will read it and respond like no one else. I don’t know how he has the time to do it. He is like…
DANIEL: It is amazing.
KATIE: Temporally, it doesn’t make sense. [LAUGHS] But he really will. And he really… My undergrad advisor, when she was a PhD student at MIT, I think in her first year, she just rolled up to his office and was like, “Will you advise my independent study project?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure.” He was basically retired, and he met with her for countless hours to work on this project. He didn’t know her from Adam. Yeah. And she was at MIT, so she had the up but he does that with everyone. He’s so generous with his time. But if he thinks you’re being an idiot, he’s not going to hide that.
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s it.
KATIE: The thing with him is he will read your crackpot theory or your non-crackpot theory, and he will give it a serious consideration, and then he will seriously tell you what he thinks of it.
DANIEL: Yeah. And not only that, but he’ll be right, because he very, very adeptly picked out exactly what I didn’t know and told me in no uncertain terms, “You are confused on this one thing.” But then at the end of that exchange, I said, “Well, hey, thank you for that. Someday, we would love to have you on the show.” He said, “I can’t do it right now. I’m super busy with this thing at Arisona. Blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “Well, maybe later.” And the last email he sent me was, “Hope that we can find a chance to do so.”
KATIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: But at the same time, I thought, but there’s no way I’m taking him up on this, because what would I be able to understand from a discussion with him that I couldn’t also get from somebody who understands Chomsky really well or somebody… it was a conversation that I didn’t feel really needed to happen. I didn’t know what I would say. It’s just…
KATIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel this very much when people email him their theories. I’m like, “Are you sure that this is ready for this? Like, there’s no one else who could look at this first? You’ve got to go right to the top? [DANIEL LAUGHS] You’ve got to ask God. You can’t get anyone else?”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And he’s not God, but he’s not the devil either.
KATIE: He’s just a guy. He’s just a guy. He has foibles. He’s not perfect.
DANIEL: Yeah.
KATIE: And his combativeness in his pugnacious stubbornness, his forthrightness, has caused a lot of problems for the field. And, I mean, I think a lot of the factionalisation of functionalists or cognitive linguists versus generativists is a legacy of that. There are people who have real generational beef with Chomsky’s students, because Chomsky was a jerk to their advisor and their advisor was like, “Yeah. That guy’s bad for the field.” So, when he is being pugnacious, when he’s being stubborn, it’s because he’s taking you seriously, and he’s really giving you the time of day.
That’s really something we could all learn from him, actually. He really will entertain anything seriously and really, really take it seriously. And I think maybe I’m being too generous to him, but I think try and see it for its merits and try to criticise it fairly and harshly. He’ll criticise it harshly. But I think he is very harsh because he’s taking you seriously as an intellectual, not opponent, but interlocutor. Whereas I think a lot of other academics in his position are just like, “I’m not even going to give you that time of day.”
DANIEL: I don’t have time for this. Yeah.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah. Like, this isn’t just nonsense.
DANIEL: We haven’t even addressed his political activism, and we won’t have time on this show. Can I just share with you… this is my most brutally honest view of Chomsky.
KATIE: Okay.
DANIEL: And I’ve said this before. I’ve tweeted this before. He’s not our Einstein. He’s our Freud. Somebody who has had an immense impact on the field. Wouldn’t be what it is without him. Very, very alive in the popular imagination or in the popular understanding. But in many cases, like Freud, had ideas that didn’t pan out. Super cool ideas that didn’t pan out. What do you think?
KATIE: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair. I think if you asked him, he would say that he’s had lots of ideas that didn’t pan out. I don’t think he’s a person… He’s produced so much work. Once I had to email him for… I was volunteering for the Endangered Language Fund. He was on the board because he’s on the board of a million things. [DANIEL CHUCKLES] I was writing up his little bio. I was like, I don’t know, 19 or something. And my boss was like, “You’ve got to email him because he’s on the board. You can’t just put his bio on the website without him approving it.”
So, I write up this little bio on Wikipedia. I’ve taken linguistics for one year, and I email him and I’m like, “He’s never going to respond. There’s no way. This guy’s so busy. He’s written like a hundred books.” And I wrote in my bio, he’s written 127 books or how many however, many books Wikipedia says. And he emails me back right away the next day and he’s like, “I don’t think I’ve written that many books, but honestly, you would know better than I would.” It’s like, what?
[LAUGHTER]
Like, what? Like, he’s so prolific. And not all of those are linguistics books. A lot of them are political. But I don’t think he would stand by 100% of the things he said because he said 10 billion things. And yeah, I don’t think he is an Einstein where he has a fixed number of proposals and they’ve all been proven right and everything he’s ever said was correct. Thank you, unimpeachable genius. I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think it’s like he said 20,000 things, and 400 of them were the best things that anyone has ever said. They’re shattering genius that has changed the field forever.
And then, a thousand of them were complete nonsense. And then the rest of them, somewhere on the extremely vast spectrum between the most unimpeachable genius sentences ever uttered and complete hogwash. [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, I think when you have produced as much work, there are some, real gems in there and he has done stuff for the field that no one else is even approaching. There’s no one touching him in terms of contribution to linguistics, in my opinion.
But also, when you say 10,000 things and when you’re a really big picture thinker, you’re going to say some stuff that is not exactly 100% on the nose or that is like extremely far from the nose occasionally.
DANIEL: And now you and the folks in your field are taking those gems and working with them.
KATIE: Yeah, that’s the idea. I think there are often, joking, I think, called accusations. But I don’t think there is a single generative syntactician who treats Chomsky pronouncements like the pope or like… No one’s reading Syntactic Structures like the Bible. I think, okay, maybe there are some people, but no one who’s seriously working in the field. Yeah, it’s not, probably there are some.
[LAUGHTER]
But I think no one who is seriously working in the field is a Chomsky total acolyte. I think we’re his worst critics in many ways. I think generativists give him a lot of grief for a lot of the things he says. Yeah, if you’ve ever been in a Chomsky talk, the question period is lively and people are skeptical of stuff. Yeah, there’s a lot of pushback. Because he’s been working, and he’s alive still, thankfully, he’s very much in dialogue with the field. Of course, I’m sure that’s going to be less so now that he’s unfortunately taken an ill, but he’s still very much a presence. People are still in dialogue with stuff that he wrote in the 60s, and it’s still being interrogated actively, actively worked on.
Yeah, I think, as you said, we’re looking for the gems. We’re trying to pull out the good ideas, and there are a lot of them and work from them and validate them to the best of our abilities. There has been stuff that’s fallen by the wayside. He’s disagreed with himself a hundred times. There’s been a million pivots between. As we were talking about, just from principles and parameters to the minimalist program, from government and binding to principles and parameters, there have been so many proposals that have been put forward, and then debunked or modified or grown or changed into what we have today. And it’s still a very young field, and there’s a lot of foundational stuff that is still not settled.
But a lot of the reason that’s going to be settled is because Chomsky said something about it, and maybe what he said was totally wrong, or maybe it was 100% right, or maybe it was just a good jumping off point. And I think in most of the cases, it’s that he has provided a lot of excellent jumping off points. He went out into the wilderness, and he put out a bunch of really distant goals for us. He was like, “Go to that mountain all the way over there. I think what’s going to be on that top of that mountain is x, and maybe what’s on top of that mountain is y.” But now, we all have to go hike out to the mountain. So, [LAUGHS] it’s a valuable service.
DANIEL: Give me one of the gems. What’s one of the really good ones? Any of his ideas that you just come back to over and over again and say, “Yeah, that was one of the good ones”?
KATIE: Ugh, there’s so many critics of the universal grammar, and I think it’s misrepresented a lot. But to me, this idea that all languages are the same at their core is just so beautiful, and it feels so right, and it’s so useful. It’s so useful. Even if it’s wrong, it’s so useful. It’s driven so much work. It’s driven so much of my work. I’ve worked on English a little bit, and Korean, Indonesian, and Gitxsan, and all these languages. And just having this lens to look through them, of looking for these commonalities, looking for the differences, and seeing if we can parameterise, if we can quantify these differences, is so useful. It’s such a beautiful idea about… I don’t know, it’s beautiful about all people being the same or what… It’s really corny.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I mean, it’s cosmic, isn’t it, in a little way.
KATIE: It is very cosmic.
DANIEL: I don’t think it’s meant to be cosmic. I think it’s not meant to be misty eyed. But it does get you there, doesn’t it?
KATIE: It does. It does a little bit. As he’s gotten older, I think he’s tended a little more towards the beauty of Mother Nature type pronouncements. I went to one of his talks, and he was talking about Mother Nature for 25 minutes, and we were like, [LAUGHS] “What is happening?”
DANIEL: Wow.
KATIE: Like, “How literal are you being about this right now?” I don’t think anybody was sure. But, yeah, no, I mean, the universal grammar thing, it does get you. It’s a beautiful idea. It’s a useful idea. It’s a great jumping off point. It’s just like a core original idea, it’s wild to me that a single person thought that up and that no one had thought of it before.
When you hear these ideas, all human language has this fundamental shared basis, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s obviously true,” I think. If you get away from the technicalities of it, if you get to just the idea that there is something about human language that is unique and shared, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. Okay,” that seems viscerally true to me, maybe not to other people. Do want to sound crazy.
DANIEL: Everybody sounded like The Beatles after The Beatles.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s like, “Oh, there was a time when they didn’t think that,” And it feels so different from where we are now in terms of our understanding of language and our philosophy about language.
DANIEL: And we can disagree about the reasons for that being the case, but I think it’s still a really good start and a good way to start thinking about language. I agree. I like that.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, there are other explanations for it. I don’t think you have to think of the… Yes, I think maybe it’s not calling it the universal grammar, but the commonality of language or something. Because, yeah, I don’t think you have to agree about the cognitive underpinnings of it, which I think is something that generativists and functionalists disagree on a lot.
DANIEL: Mmm.
KATIE: Yeah, you’re like, no.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, Katie, I am just so grateful for you to come and share your experiences and your knowledge with me. Yes, I know that there’s a lot of angstiness and some bad vibes surrounding Chomsky and the language wars and differences in linguistic program, but I’m just glad that we’ve been able to come together and just vibe out and enjoy talking about a really great thinker.
KATIE: Yeah, yeah. I think whatever your perspective on him, whether you agree with him totally or disagree with him totally, or somewhere in between, and I think most of us are somewhere in between, you cannot deny that he has made a huge contribution to the study of language.
DANIEL: Yep, absolutely. And, Professor Chomsky, if you’re out there listening, we just want to wish you all the best.
KATIE: Yeah. I’m sorry that everybody said that you died. That was terrible. [LAUGHTER] I’m so sorry about that.
DANIEL: Am I keeping that bit? No, but I will keep this bit. We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing without you. None of us. None of us would be doing what we’re doing without you.
KATIE: No.
DANIEL: Katie Martin, linguist and overall cool person. [KATIE LAUGHS] I’m so glad to be able to spend this time with you. Thank you so much for coming on and chatting.
KATIE: Thanks so much.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s go on to Words of the Week. And this one was suggested by Mr Bobby Hunt. HAWK TUAH.
BEN: Oh, yeah, I like that.
DANIEL: I’m going to spell that one Hawk Tuah. And I’m sure that everybody in the world, even me, knows the relevance of this phrase.
HEDVIG: I don’t. And I have TikTok and Twitter, and I clicked on the link, and I’m going to watch it now.
DANIEL: Okay, we got a reaction video here.
BEN: Okay. Watching people watch things is weird.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Uh-huh. Okay.
BEN: Now, I’ve got to watch it.
DANIEL: Charming.
HEDVIG: It is charming.
BEN: Well, look, what I would say is people under the age of 25 don’t have a prefrontal cortex and [DANIEL LAUGHS] therefore sometimes might not exert the best, like, “Should I be doing this thing right now in a public forum?” judgment. I think this is a good piece of evidence about that.
DANIEL: There’s nothing wrong with her cortex.
BEN: No, no, no, no. I’m not for a second saying that spitting on that dick during sex is bad or wrong in any way. If you are confronted with a dick and you wish to spit on it, I say power to you, person, for whatever it is you plan to do with that thing in front of you. Go strong, team! However, going viral for drunkenly talking about how you want to do that might be the sort of thing when you wake up the next day, that you are like, “Oh, dang.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: “Is it possible that I might not have wanted to do that?”
BEN: It’s possible to want to be a really, really sex positive person and have really low inhibitions around sex, not in a humongously broadcast multimedia way, is all I’m saying. And I really feel if that individual found themselves in that situation where they’re like, “I didn’t want to be sex positive in front of 30 million people.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, it was positive for sure. I mean, everyone who saw it was delighted by her simple unpretentiousness. Not simple. By her… outgoing nature, her extroversion, giving out relationship advice, sexual technique, and onomatopoeia with such enjoyment.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: I was about to say, the ultimate enemy of everyone doing a spelling bee, we have found ourselves in onomatopoeia territory.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We have.
HEDVIG: Because this sound is not only for what she describes.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: But also, for example, in English culture, I think as well, if you want to show disdain for someone and you’re like, “I don’t like you,” you spit on the ground in front of them. And you would do the same thing, you do [MAKES A SPITTING SOUND], and then…
BEN: Hocking a loogie, as the Americans call it.
DANIEL: Mm-mm!
HEDVIG: Uh-huh. Okay. So, I think the reason why we’re listening and talking about this clip is not just because of sex positivity and this viral thing, but how do you write down…
BEN: Onomatopoeia-ise that thing.
HEDVIG: …this.
DANIEL: Yep. So, this has been spelled HAWK — like a bird — and then TUAH.
BEN: I’m going no notes again.
HEDVIG: Exactly.
BEN: I feel like this is solid.
HEDVIG: It’s a good one.
DANIEL: Yeah, sounds like. The way that she vocalised it, certainly. I looked around on the web for all I could find on spit onomatopoeia… by the way, spit is onomatopoeia. “Sp”…
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: There it is.
BEN: Of course, yeah.
DANIEL: What I found was four letters: PTUI.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: No, but that doesn’t have the [MAKES GETTING-READY-TO-SPIT NOISES]
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re right. This does not have the buildup.
BEN: It’s the second half only. Who goes to the show after intermission? We want the whole shebang.
DANIEL: Yes. PTUI has also been latinised as PATOOEY. So, just different ways of doing the PTUI. But you’re right.
BEN: And that’s really old now as well, right? Like, you’ll find that in Archie comics from 1955 [LAUGHS] and stuff.
DANIEL: Super old. There are some really old references. Not so far back as the 1800s, but definitely in the 1900s. However, you’re right. I can’t really find any other example of spit onomatopoeia better than Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, who gave it lots of N’s and G’s, [MAKES GETTING-READY-TO-SPIT NOISES]. That’s stage one. Then, stage two, the loogifying.
BEN: Oh, yep, yep. [LAUGHS] Intermezzo.
DANIEL: Yes. And then the third, the final delivery: ptooey. So, that’s how you do it if you’re really going deluxe.
HEDVIG: I like these.
DANIEL: Did you notice how fast this went around? I feel like we have this impression that our internet experience is now hopelessly bifurcated and we’re not having the same things go viral. But this really was one where something…
BEN: I didn’t see it.
HEDVIG: I didn’t see it.
DANIEL: Everybody around the world… No?
BEN: I didn’t see it.
HEDVIG: I didn’t see it.
DANIEL: You didn’t have the same internet I had?
BEN: We’re bifurcated! This did not hit my feeds.
DANIEL: Here’s Daniel generalising his experience to everyone [BEN LAUGHS] else yet again.
BEN: 100%.
HEDVIG: I mean, it looks like it was popular.
DANIEL: It was.
BEN: I’m going to speak on behalf of Hedvig for just a second. This did not infiltrate CatTok. It did not infiltrate just general Good-Vibes-Tok.
HEDVIG: But, Ben, if I say, what do you keep under your pillow…
BEN: No, not on mine either.
HEDVIG: I keep a little…?
BEN: Mm-mm. I don’t know.
DANIEL: What even are you taking about?
HEDVIG: [SINGS] Dirt on my pillow for the dirt man.
BEN: I don’t know this.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: This is not of my stuff. This has not come across.
HEDVIG: We’re in different bubbles.
BEN: We’re all living in our tiny little bubbles.
DANIEL: Every human is a mystery to every other. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: All right, what about this one?
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: [SINGS] She’s so brave. She’s well behaved.
BEN: The puppets one? Like, [SINGS] what a beautiful girl. Like, that show?
HEDVIG: It’s almost…
BEN: It’s the same show, but it’s like a different audio.
HEDVIG: No, it’s someone singing to a dog is going to the vet.
BEN: Oh, but isn’t the audio from that puppet show? [SINGS] She’s so brave.
HEDVIG: Oh, maybe it is. I don’t know. Oh.
BEN: I think it is. I think it’s from the. [SINGS] What a wonderful girl. Could she be any cuter.
HEDVIG: Yes, [SINGS] any cuter. Yeah, by Katy Perry.
BEN: Well, this is great radio. I think we should keep doing this for a really long time. [HEDVIG LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You know what? I’m going to move on to the next one.
BEN: Yeah, fair enough.
DANIEL: This one was suggested by Coconut on our Discord. There’s an article in the New York Times. First came SPAM. Now, with AI assisted search… Remember that thing we did on AI assisted search last time? We’ve got SLOP.
HEDVIG: Yes, we do.
DANIEL: AI SLOP.
BEN: Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s exactly what we needed.
DANIEL: It’s what it is.
BEN: AI slop is not what we needed. That is a word that we needed to describe what it was.
DANIEL: Definitely, we saw that Google was giving us AI slop, which is why Coconut suggested this. Facebook is also full of AI slop.
BEN: Oh, man.
DANIEL: Oh, here’s a photo of a child who created an enormous sandcastle. And the comments are just like all bots.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. So, I have been off Facebook for a really long time, measured in probably years. But in preparation for my #bigsillybikeride, I have joined a couple of the groups to do with this Big Silly Bike Ride so I can get tips on good places to stay and where the water points are and all that kind of stuff. But it means I’m back on Facebook for the first time in a really long time. And I was off Facebook prior to AI just being a thing the way it is now. And now it is just resplendent. It is a swamp. It is a maw of AI slop, just feeds and feeds of just garbage.
DANIEL: It is horrible.
HEDVIG: Mine isn’t.
DANIEL: The thing is though, your feed is now not the good part of Facebook. The good part of Facebook is the groups.
BEN: Okay. All right.
DANIEL: That’s what’s good about it, and those are very good indeed. In fact, I would argue that for language communities, they are actually helping diaspora communities, and communities keep their language together and learn languages. Facebook is doing some very good things in that area, but I do find the user experience for Facebook now just to be ass. It is the worst.
BEN: It feels to me, because I’ve been told this by a number of people and my partner, who is part of a bunch of different advocacy groups and that sort of thing through Facebook, has said similar stuff. And it really feels to me… Remember that story of how in San Francisco a bunch of tech bros reinvented public transport and they were like, “Guys, wait until you hear this idea. I’ve got this super disruptive thing. We’re going to get these things, like cars, but bigger that can hold multiple people. And they’re going to go on and they’re going to stop at certain places. They’re going to pick people up and then take those people to where they need to go.” And everyone was like, “You’ve invented buses.”
DANIEL: This is disruptive.
BEN: And I feel like what Facebook has done, everyone’s like, “Yeah, but the groups, man.” I’m like, so they just spent billions and billions of dollars to make forums. Do you guys remember forums from the ’90s where you would just go online to a community of people who had shared interests and you would just, forum?
HEDVIG: You’re not wrong. Forums are great. But I think, Ayesh said to you as well, but that is like, Facebook groups is the form that most people that you want to reach are at. So, that’s the forum platform I’m going to use. And also, I don’t get much AI slop in my feed at all.
BEN: Okay, well, you’re very lucky, because the rest of us are wading through it…
HEDVIG: Look, I just logged on. I get family picture, German news, urban planning, a family map, shopping, Midsommar, map. I get a lot of maps.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Your cartography love is out of this world.
HEDVIG: Family photo.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Someone. Family photo.
BEN: Okay. Okay. Way to humble brag how clean your feed is, Hedvig. We’re just sitting here in the bayou of AI garbage.
HEDVIG: Listen, you haven’t used Facebook very long. So, it probably doesn’t think it knows anything about you. And it’s like, “Everyone else likes AI slop. I’ll give it to this guy.”
BEN: Oof.
DANIEL: Last one, suggested by James: CRONIGIRI.
BEN: I hate this. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Straight out of the gate. If this is what I think it is, and I’m pretty sure it is.
DANIEL: Tell me what you think it is.
BEN: I hate this so much.
DANIEL: Hedvig’s try. Go ahead, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Is it CROISSANT and NIGIRI, the sushi thing?
BEN: I don’t think it’s NIGIRI. I think it’s CROISSANT and ONIGIRI. The not sushi, but very sushi adjacent thing.
HEDVIG: Oh, the rice thing.
BEN: The triangle. Yeah, the triangle with…
DANIEL: It’s a triangle.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: For our listeners, onigiri are delicious little rice triangles wrapped in nori, seaweed. And sometimes, but not always, have fillings in them. So, when I was traveling in Japan last year, the konbini, the convenience stores, would always have really, really high quality, tasty food, and we would get onigiri for the equivalent of two or three bucks and it would be like wild mustard greens and beef onigiri. And it was [SMACKS LIPS] beautiful.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Yeah. To what I hate about this.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: We do not need a croissant crossed with an onigiri. That’s not a thing the world needs.
DANIEL: Why don’t we?
HEDVIG: I’m also not sure why we don’t.
BEN: Okay, okay, okay, okay. Justify this!
DANIEL: Is it the word you hate?
HEDVIG: Cronuts were great.
BEN: Cronuts were great. Here’s the thing about cronuts. They largely come from the same food tradition. And even if we take it away from food tradition, the same flavour profile. What about fermented sour rice and seaweed do we need a croissant in? What does a croissant have to do with that flavour situation?
DANIEL: Pastry’s versatile. Are you forgetting about the tacro? Come on.
BEN: I hate you so much.
DANIEL: Everyone’s looking at me. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wait. I also want to know what a cronigiri is. What have they made?
BEN: Okay, so sell me on this, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay, we know that an onigiri is a Japanese dish — I’m just reading this from my own Mac dictionary — consisting of small balls or triangles of rice stuffed with a pickled or salted filling, typically wrapped in dried seaweed, a bento box, and some onigiri. Now, I am reading an article from Eater NY by Luke Fortney, where they write about food technicians at Cafe W in New York City making… [SIGHS] They gave it the wrong name, an ONIOISSANT.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that is the wrong name.
DANIEL: That’s the wrong name. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and we have CRONIGIRI. They worked on making onigiri with croissants and including things in them that are onigiri-ish.
BEN: Then, they’re absolutely not, first of all. If the thing that I’m looking at here is…
HEDVIG: Have they just invented pies?
BEN: No, they haven’t. Not based on the image that I’m looking at here.
HEDVIG: Are you sure?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Have you seen those little standing Yorkshire puddings?
BEN: Oh, yeah. Maybe it’s a bit like a Yorkie, I guess.
DANIEL: I’m looking at onioissant with chive, bacon and cream cheese. And I’m thinking, you know what? But I haven’t had a onigiri, but I think I want a cronigiri.
BEN: Okay, so, so, so here is what I would say. Part of what I hate about this a little bit is, there’s just a whiff for me. Have either of you watched Atlanta, Donald Glover show?
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: No, but I know it’s cool. I’ve seen some clips.
BEN: There’s a great episode in season 3 where one of his friends goes to London, and London has a pretty big Nigerian expatriate population or migrant population, whatever you want to call it. And this guy is of… he has Nigerian parents. He’s a second-generation Nigerian. And he takes a white friend to a local spot that does jollof rice and all the Nigerian hits, and he’s like, “Oh, man, this is wicked. It tastes like home. It’s really authentic Nigerian chef. Blah, blah, blah.”
And then by the end of the episode, he hits back up that spot, and his white friend, who had a bit of money, has bought it, and is now doing mushy peas, jollof rice. And it speaks to how gross westerners tend to approach this stuff of, like, “Oh, let’s take…” It’s like the colonisation of food. “I get to do whatever I want to anyone’s thing ever, because that’s how I be.” And I don’t know. I just hate it. Like, onigiri’s great. Croissants are great. Cronuts are great. Stay with cronuts. You know what? You had donuts. You had croissants. You wanted to combine them? Go for it. Taking onigiri and be like, “Oh, you know what this needs? Croissant dough.” Ugh.
DANIEL: How did you feel about the cruffin.
BEN: Again, fine. There were muffins. There were croissants. They all basically come from the same culture. I know, look, maybe I’m just being a grumpy bastard.
HEDVIG: You don’t like fusion generally.
BEN: I don’t like fusion when it is done in a really tacky way like this.
HEDVIG: But I’m not sure this is so tacky. I don’t like it when someone is like, “I’m going to show you…” Like, for example, at home, Steve and I put halloumi into our Indian curries instead of paneer because we like it. But we would never open an Indian restaurant and be like, “We sell Indian food.”
BEN: And so, that’s my gripe here. Much like deviant sexual behavior, whatever you want to do in your own home, fine, [DANIEL LAUGHS] whatever, right?
DANIEL: Just don’t sell it.
BEN: That’s totally fine. You can take tomato sauce and you can combine it with freaking raspberry jelly if you want to, and you can just be a flavour terrorist and you can do it for yourself and that’s fine. But when you go out and you make a business of it, I don’t know, it’s really gross. I don’t like it. It’s really appropriative.
DANIEL: Harsh words for cronigiri. But call me officially curious. So, it looks like we’ve got HAWK TUAH, AI SLOP, CRONIGIRI, and possibly also, FLAVOUR TERRORIST. Thank you, Ben. These are our Words of the Week.
Thanks massively to everyone who gave us ideas for the show, SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words, and all you marvelous patrons. Ben, I’m going to miss you, buddy, for the months while you’re gone.
BEN: I’ll try and slowly dissipate my rage over the cronigiri [LAUGHS] as I ride across America.
DANIEL: Have a crupcake for me while you’re at it. Okay.
BEN: I will. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: And, Hedvig, thank you for being here.
BEN: Again, all the baked things combined… Anyway, sorry. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: If you like the show, here’s some stuff that you can do to help us. First up, you can follow us. We are @becauselangpod in just about every conceivable social platform. You can send us idea like so many of the people who have sentence us ideas here. It really helps us keep going. In a very real way, you form the show into what it is. How do you give us ideas? SpeakPipe on our website, that’s becauselanguage.com, or just email hello@becauselanguage.com. Also, you can tell a friend about us or write us a review. And we have a new review. This one’s from Hannah Bantry on Apple Podcasts. Here it is. Because Quality, five stars. It gets better. Ooh.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Stop it you two.
HEDVIG: Stop it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] “A consistently excellent show that has sent me down many fascinating rabbit holes and fueled endless interesting conversations over years of listening. I’m writing a review after someone to whom I had recommended the show enthused about their love of it and I realised I should invite more people…” Isn’t that great? Wow.
HEDVIG: That’s lovely. That is really lovely.
BEN: Who wrote that?
DANIEL: That was Hannah Bantry on Apple Podcasts.
BEN: I feel like Hannah Bantry needs to enter the podcasting game herself and do a cooking thing where, if she wants to, derails cronigiri amongst other things. But she should call it Hannah Bantry Pantry.
DANIEL: That’s very nice.
HEDVIG: Oh, I was wondering how you were going to connect actually her to it.
BEN: Yeah. Hannah Bantry Pantry. What a great podcast name that would be.
DANIEL: What about she does stuff with bananas? It can be Hannah Bantry’s Banana Pantry.
BEN: Oh, that’s pretty good.
DANIEL: Maybe she hates the Hannah Banana thing. Maybe that bugged her as a kid. Sorry, Hannah.
HEDVIG: Maybe she hates food. Hannah, get in touch. Tell us.
BEN: Maybe she’s only eaten at wanker hipster fucking things that make cronigiri.
HEDVIG: Get in touch. Tell us if you hate food. Thank you so much for the review. That really warms our cold little hearts.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Hedvig’s turn.
HEDVIG: Yes. If you like the show, you can do like Hannah Bantry and write a review somewhere. It’s a great way of spreading the good word. But you can also support us on Patreon. Patreon is a great platform that a lot of podcasters use to support their work. If you go on Patreon, you can also support other podcasts you like, and you can support us. What that means is that you’ll sign up for a subscription and you’ll give us a little bit of money every month. You can also sign up for free to just follow us on there but you can also give very small amounts of money. You can set it yourself and you can cancel it at any time.
And when you go on there, you also get access to a link that you can put into your podcast reader and actually listen to extra episodes that we publish regularly only for our supporters on Patreon.
And we read out all the names of Patreon supporters who are at the supporter level or higher. And every time recently, Daniel makes a new order of them because someone said that the order we had was getting a bit repetitive. So, this time, we’re ordering the names by what percentage of letters are duplicates.
DANIEL: Hedvig is seeing this for the first time. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Somebody with all singletons will come lower. So, my name, Hedvig, has all the letters only occur once. So that would be…
DANIEL: Same with Daniel.
HEDVIG: Daniel?
DANIEL: May be at the bottom.
HEDVIG: If someone is called Benny and have two N’s, they would be higher.
DANIEL: 40%.
HEDVIG: What did you do…? And then if there’s a tie, because a lot of them are just going to have two repeatings, it’s ordered by the score and scrabble of the third to last letter.
DANIEL: High scores first. Go ahead. Let’s hit the names.
HEDVIG: How do you do this, Daniel? Okay.
BEN: What we are getting, Hedvig, is a terrifying insight into the actual inner workings of Daniel’s mind. Like, this is how… you remember in The Simpsons when Bart goes to the office of Mad magazine and you see behind the door and it’s just sheer insanity, hoodlerism? Then, the door closes. This is what’s happening. We’re seeing inside Mad magazine for a split second.
HEDVIG: This is so funny. Okay, so the first one. So, the one that has the most duplicates is Canny Archer. Eight out of eleven letters are duplicates. So, A occurs several times, C occurs, N occurs, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so 73%.
DANIEL: The letters that don’t occur, they spell out the word HEY.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. What are you…? Okay.
DANIEL: All the singletons.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right, we’ve already angered Ben earlier today, so I feel like… Okay. Then, it goes Joanna, Alyssa, PharaohKatt, Cheyenne, Colleen, Sonic Snejhog, Molly Dee, Matt, Rene, Steele, gra-mary-en, Larry, Raina, Helen, Lyssa, LordMortis, Andy from Logophilius, aengryballs, Rodger, Ariaflame, Nikoli, Ayesha. [SINGS] Passing me by. Ignacio, WolfDog, Felicity, Meredith, J0HNTR0Y, Margareth. Kristofer who has no duplicates but the F, so the third letter from the end is worth 4 points. So now, we get into the ordering of the Scrabble. Kevin, James, Amir, Tadhg, Nigel, Jack, Rach, Keith, Chris W, Whitney, Andy, Tony, Termy, Kathy, sæ̃m, O Tim, Manú Kate, Diego, Rhian, Chris L Elías, Nasrin, Stan, and Luis. And, we have two new patrons on our listener level, Jessica and Chris H. And we have two people who just follow us on there for free, Alexis, Justine, Susan, and Eric. Thank you to all of you.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov. Is there anything he can’t do? Probably not. Who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible, who will be playing a support show coming up this week if you happen to be in the Perth area. So, go down to… I think it’s the Rosemont Hotel tonight, maybe. No, maybe it was last night. Oh, fuck, I ruined it. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Well, anyway, thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: Boo, boo, boo.
DANIEL: Thank you all.
HEDVIG: I just had one that came up in conversation that I wanted to run by you guys. Okay.
BEN: I have one too.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: This is what we do, Daniel. Daniel spends days preparing and researching and, [BEN LAUGHS] paying attention to the Discord. And me and Ben are, like, “At the pub yesterday.”
DANIEL: “Friggin’ I heard one down’t the pub.”
BEN: “Take a seat, boys! We’ve got a good one coming in hot off the press!”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’ll try to scrape something together from that last one. So, what…?
[LAUGHTER]
[BOOP]
BEN: Love it. Do you… Final fact. This is how it works. No, no. This is what’s happening. We are digressing straight away. It’s happening.
DANIEL: And then, I get to say.
BEN: Just roll with it. [LAUGHS] I watched Speed the other night, as other tragic millennials will remember, also known as The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.
DANIEL: That couldn’t slow down. Comfort food, right?
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. My mom’s had a car trouble that’s a bit similar to Speed.
BEN: Are you… You’re…! You’re digressing from my digression. I love this. Yes. Tell me about what your mom has to do with Speed.
DANIEL: Fractal digressions. Stop it.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] My mom has a problem with her gearbox, where she can’t really drive under 60. Otherwise, the machine makes a huge sound. And I was like, “That’s like Speed.” And everyone was like, “What are you talking about?” I was like: You know, the movie?
BEN: Otherwise, an aged Dennis Hopper will call her up and be like, “Pop quiz, hot shot.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Anyway, sorry.
DANIEL: He was so good in that movie.
BEN: My original digression before we digress to your mum’s real life Speed situation, not to be confused with the drug, is that I recently was reminded of Brother Bear and how great the music was because I was watching Speed, and I was like, “Gee-willikers, I did not fully appreciate the first eight go-rounds with Speed in my youth, how hard the music in Speed goes as well.”
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I looked up the composer. This composer also did the music… for Brother Bear!
DANIEL: Is that right?
HEDVIG: Amazing! What an ear!
DANIEL: What a weird convergence. Oh, my gosh.
BEN: Like, however many years later. Like, ten years later.
HEDVIG: What an ear.
DANIEL: How interesting.
BEN: What a dude. What a dude. Yeah. If anyone wants to go back and watch Speed, it’s actually… as long as you don’t have brain cells that you want to be exercised, it’s solid. I rate it.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Super good. Structurally, it’s impeccable.
BEN: Yeah, 100%, man. Like, just all the beats.
HEDVIG: I fully understand that there is art out there that helps you question things and think about things, and [BEN LAUGHS] we were going to watch some of that. Maybe Ste likes watching that stuff, but I need some of that no thinking, only excitement sometimes.
BEN: Here’s the thing. Sometimes you want kickback fun times. But those movies don’t have to be badly made, and Speed isn’t. Speed is really well made.
HEDVIG: Yes. Netflix has been churning out these shit stuff templactic action movies. And sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I’m in for some brain-dead stuff. I’ll watch it.” And then, I’m like, “But this is bad, though.”
BEN: This is the bad. I want the good bad. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: This is yuck. And then, I turn it off and… I’m like, “Oh, that was…”
BEN: Okay, Daniel. Fractal digression has ceased.
DANIEL: The thing that bugged me was that he didn’t have to turn into a bear… at the end of Speed… to help the people on the bus. [BEN LAUGHS] He could have done it in human form.
BEN: In that final LA subway epilogue action sequence, there could have been a bear there and there wasn’t. And really, we’re all the poorer for it.
DANIEL: Just felt forced. Just felt forced.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I had an experience with AI slop that wasn’t slop.
BEN: As in you thought it was AI slop and it was just a person making garbage content.
DANIEL: So, there’s a genre of music on YouTube which is AI songs generated by AI. You give it lyrics, it’ll come out with a song in a certain style, and they try to make it like, “Oh, let’s do a ’60s soul number or a ’40s ballad.” And it’s going to be obscenely sexual or gross lyrics. And people think that’s funny. It is not that funny.
BEN: Like, you see this on TikTok as well, right?
HEDVIG: There are really popular.
BEN: But it’s not AI, it is just people doing it. Like, if Trent Reznor did The Beach Boys or something like that.
DANIEL: Yeah, there’s a lot of it.
HEDVIG: But you also see the AI stuff on TikTok. Like, people intentionally make AI music on TikTok as well.
DANIEL: Gross or funny AI music. Okay, well, there was one that I shared with our Discord. I said, “Look, guys, this isn’t that funny, really.” But when you get to the middle break, I looked at my computer screen because the number that it was doing, it was a slow ballad, and the choral parts were exquisite.
BEN: So, it just all of a sudden went super hard.
DANIEL: Ah, it was just gorgeous. It was on my head. I mean besides the gross lyrics, I just thought it was gorgeous. Wow. Wasn’t slop at all.
BEN: A broken clock still gets it right twice a day. It’s possible for good stuff to come out of yucky things.
DANIEL: And the song, if you want to look it up, was Don’t Fart When I Go Down on You. Okay.
BEN: Jesus Christ.
DANIEL: It’s… well, like I said. [BEN LAUGHS]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]