36 - Journal Club: Clickety Clack

451 turns

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