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Language A to Z
Language A to Z
“Passionate, erudite, living legend lecturers. Academia’s
best lecturers are being captured on tape.”
—The Los Angeles Times
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Professor Photo: © Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph.com.
Cover Image: © Orla/Shutterstock.
P
rofessor John McWhorter teaches linguistics,
Western civilization, and American studies
as an Associate Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University
and is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1993, taught
at Cornell University, and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley. His academic specialties are language
change and language contact.
i
the Los Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, Ebony, and Vibe. He has
provided commentaries for All Things Considered and has appeared on Meet
the Press, Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, The Colbert Report, Book
TV’s In Depth (on C-SPAN2), Talk of the Nation, TODAY, Good Morning
America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Fresh Air. ■
ii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography.............................................................................i
Course Scope......................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
Lecture 1
A for Aramaic��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������3
Lecture 2
B for Baby Mama������������������������������������������������������������������������������10
Lecture 3
C for Compounds�����������������������������������������������������������������������������16
Lecture 4
D for Double Negatives��������������������������������������������������������������������22
Lecture 5
E for Etymology��������������������������������������������������������������������������������28
Lecture 6
F for First Words�������������������������������������������������������������������������������34
Lecture 7
G for Greek Alphabet������������������������������������������������������������������������41
Lecture 8
H for Hobbits������������������������������������������������������������������������������������48
Lecture 9
I for Island�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������55
Lecture 10
J for Jamaican����������������������������������������������������������������������������������61
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Table of Contents
Lecture 11
K for Ket�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������67
Lecture 12
L for Like�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������74
Lecture 13
M for Maltese������������������������������������������������������������������������������������80
Lecture 14
N for Native American English����������������������������������������������������������86
Lecture 15
O for Oldsters in Cartoons����������������������������������������������������������������92
Lecture 16
P for Plurals, Q for Quiz��������������������������������������������������������������������99
Lecture 17
R for R-Lessness����������������������������������������������������������������������������105
Lecture 18
S for She����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������112
Lecture 19
T for Tone���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������118
Lecture 20
U for Understand����������������������������������������������������������������������������124
Lecture 21
V for Vocabulary�����������������������������������������������������������������������������130
Lecture 22
W for What’s Up, Doc?�������������������������������������������������������������������136
Lecture 23
X for !Xóõ, Y for Yiddish�����������������������������������������������������������������142
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Table of Contents
Lecture 24
Z for Zed�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������148
Supplemental Material
Bibliography������������������������������������������������������������������������������������153
v
Typographical Conventions
• Italics are used for words cited as words (rather than used
functionally; e.g., The word ginormous is a combination of gigantic
and enormous) and foreign-language words.
• Single quotation marks are used for meanings of words (e.g., Wife
meant ‘woman’ in Old English).
vi
Language A to Z
Scope:
T
his course takes each letter of the alphabet as an occasion to explore
one aspect of language around the world—not languages around
the world. Some of the entries are about individual languages such
as Aramaic and Maltese, but most are about general concepts such as
vocabulary, tones, and double negatives; a single pronoun like she; and even
expressions such as “baby mama” and “What’s Up, Doc?” Throughout the
course, you will gain an introduction to the linguist’s perspective on what
people speak, how they speak it, and why.
The course will also show that language is a highly diverse thing,
independently of any traits of the cultures that speak them. Languages can
either be highly telegraphic or almost obsessively attendant to nuances of
experience. On one hand, in many, one usually doesn’t indicate whether
something is plural or singular; in others, there is no way to mark tense;
and others have no plural pronouns. On the other hand, there are languages
where almost all plural forms are irregular like children and geese in English,
all verbs are irregular, and there are as many as eight or nine “genders”
that a noun can be a member of. The English speaker’s sense of grammar
is actually but one of endless variations on how people communicate—and
1
in that vein, the course will also show that English is a more fascinating
system than we are often told, in terms of how we know to put the accent on
loud in loudspeaker but to put it on speak in mentioning someone who is a
loud speaker.
This course will seek to answer the questions that people often pose to
linguists and lend a sense of why linguists give the answers that they do. ■
Scope
2
A for Aramaic
Lecture 1
W
e will never know how Middle Easterners 2,500 years ago would
have felt about today’s world. However, we can be quite sure that
to them, the idea of Arabic being an official language in over 25
countries would sound as counterintuitive as a sitcom built around Mary Ann
from Gilligan’s Island would be to us. But 2,500 years ago, Arabic was an
also-ran, an obscure tongue spoken by obscure nomads. The star language—
of the world—was Aramaic.
Aramaic Language
• Aramaic had been the star language of the world since the 7th
century B.C., but today, it’s easy to know nothing about Aramaic
beyond that Jesus Christ spoke it, and many only picked that up
in 2004 when Mel Gibson had dialogue in Passion of the Christ
rendered in the language. Yet Aramaic lives on, quietly but fiercely
à la Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard.
3
© WeFt/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Aramaic is spoken in Syria, which is why you will often see the language
referred to as Syriac.
• Ironically, the glory came in the wake of defeat. When the Assyrians
took over Babylon in the endless game of musical chairs of ancient
Middle Eastern geopolitics, they deported Aramaic-speaking
Lecture 1: A for Aramaic
4
that one day ice cream and stockings and iPads were going to be
sold in Hebrew—with all anachronism-related adjustments made,
of course—and this is why portions of the Bible were written in
Aramaic rather than Hebrew.
• What put the final stamp on Aramaic’s international status was when
the next winner of musical chairs, the Persians, had no interest in
imposing their language upon their subjects. Instead, they recruited
Aramaic as their own administrative language for an empire that
stretched from Greece through Central Asia. King Darius would
dictate a letter to a faraway subordinate in Persian, and a scribe
would translate it into Aramaic; then, upon delivery, a scribe would
translate the letter from Aramaic into the local language.
• This is what Daniel was being trained for as a captive under King
Nebuchadnezzar, and the skill was rather awesome, as Aramaic is
not user-friendly. It can put words through magnificent contortions
when putting them together.
5
• One thing we can see in this is that ease has nothing to do with why
a language comes to rule the world. The king of hill before Aramaic
had been its Middle Eastern relative Akkadian—what the Aramaic
speakers were kicked out in in Babylonia. But Akkadian is built just
like Aramaic, even though for a time, people were taking it up by
the millions.
• Arabic was the next language of this brood to become the lingua
franca of the Middle East and beyond, and anyone who has
struggled to learn much Arabic beyond just cracking the challenge
of learning how to sound out its letters knows that Arabic is no
party for the newbie.
Complicated Languages
• Then, meanwhile, from the final centuries before Christ until as
late as the 11th century, Greek was the language that ruled Eurasia.
Ancient Greek stretched from points in Spain across the Middle
East and eastward through what is today Pakistan and into India.
However, few would consider learning Greek anything close to
a breeze, groaning as it is with cases, declensions, conjugations,
gender on its nouns, and so much on everything else.
• In fact, the only thing more counterintuitive than how widely Greek
was once spoken is how common it was even among ordinary
Americans until the 20th century to actually master Ancient Greek
in school.
• Then, the system spread as far as India and Southeast Asia, such
that the scripts you see in Burma, Cambodia, and elsewhere are,
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if you look closely, yet more variations on a way of writing that
emerged somewhere far, far away, where there are camels and
languages spoken that have nothing whatsoever to do with pad thai
or sitars.
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influence, or power should be learning Mandarin—right? Actually,
not really. While the growing economic power of China is clear,
language dominance is about culture and technology as much
as money.
• The world has long known empires that ran things in the language
of the conquered people. King Darius was quite content to run
the Persian Empire in Aramaic; he relegated Persian itself to
announcements chipped onto the sides of mountains. Genghis Khan
and his Mongols ruled China for decades in the 13th century with
no interest in spreading their language, happily leaving Chinese
in place.
and less, while in the Near East, Arabic continues to eat away at the
language just as it did on Nabataean tombstones.
8
language that was once a sign of sophistication across the vastest
empire the world had ever known being today the one out of the
world’s 6,000 most readily associated with Mel Gibson.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
9
B for Baby Mama
Lecture 2
I
n 2008, Tina Fey starred in a movie called Baby Mama, whose title
referred not to an infant giving birth, not a mama who happened to be
but a baby, but a baby’s mother. The term has become established as a
reference to the mother of one’s child who one is no longer married to. It
seems to have become officialized in 2000, when the rap group Outkast had
a megahit called “Ms. Jackson” that was dedicated to “all the baby mamas’
mamas.” It is a vernacular term, mostly associated with Black Americans.
People also use baby daddy, with the corresponding meaning, and oddly,
these words teach us valuable things about language in the United States.
Black English
• Check out the origin of baby mama and baby daddy online and
you’ll find that even the Oxford English Dictionary has fallen for
a tasty notion that the source is Jamaican patois. And indeed, in
casual speech in Jamaica, there is a term baby-mother.
• In fact, baby mama and baby daddy are not just isolated expressions.
Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama
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• Some suppose, understandably, that black speech is simply
“Southern,” and there are similarities, but you’d know the difference
on the phone even if the person were reading from a phone book.
That has, basically, been proven: Most blacks and whites can
immediately identify even Southerners’
race on the phone.
• That means that white and black people tend to speak English with
different accents—that is, you could also put it that whites are the
ones with the “accent.” Everybody speaking any language speaks
with a different accent than other speakers.
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• In her book, Lisa Green, a linguist at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, describes Black English just like
someone might describe Dutch or Klingon, and she gives the basics
on Black English and possessive marking: Sometime Rolanda bed
don’t be made up. That’s the church responsibility.
• In the 1980s, the bawdy black comedian Robin Harris was doing
comedy routines about a naughty brood of children, and the routines
were laced with the catchphrase Dem Bebe kids!—not Bebe’s, but
Bebe—and black audiences spontaneously recognized that way of
putting it as “local” and real.
• Black English has its own different take on have, and it’s quite
systematic. There are black people all over America using had
today just like black people were during the Ford administration,
because it is grammar.
Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama
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• Part of the answer is England, of all places. Remember the
indentured servants from schoolroom history lessons who worked
alongside slaves on Southern plantations? Well, it wasn’t elite Brits
who wound up laboring in the Alabama cotton fields: Slaves worked
alongside folks speaking rural brands of English quite unlike that
of Henry Higgins. According to a rumor that gets around, those
indentured servants are supposed to have been talking like Falstaff
or one of the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
• You may have picked up the idea that there are parts of the South
where Shakespearean English is still spoken, which is such a
pleasure to hear about even though, really, imagine driving off into
some tiny town in Virginia and being greeted at the gas station in
Elizabethan English. How? If nobody talks like that in England
anymore, why would they still be doing it in North Carolina?
• Language is like one of those lava lamps from the 1970s: It just
ooches and squinches away forever, not going in any direction in
particular and certainly not for any reason. Its essence is, quite
simply, that it moves.
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• A lot of what we now hear as “Southern” seems to have only
really gotten started after the Civil War, for example, long after the
England connection was an antique matter. The dialect was still
ooching along like that lava, and where it happened to have ooched
by then is what we happen to be hearing now. As hard as it is to
believe, before the 19th century, travelers in the South from England
often mentioned how elegant Southern English was—not quaint
or “accented.”
• But the larger fact that England was where it started holds up,
and that means that Black English started there to a large extent,
too. Even today, you might hear someone in Yorkshire say among
friends My sister husband rather than My sister’s husband. In court
transcriptions of statements by London prisoners in the 16th and
17th centuries, lower-class folk regularly say things like Goldwell
wiffe instead of Goldwell’s wife and Barlowe owne brother instead
of Barlowe’s own brother. Many of these people were due for
transportation to plantations in Virginia and beyond. Baby mama
wasn’t long in coming.
• Besides that, if you were trying to learn English really fast, and only
from hearing people talk and imitating them, can’t you imagine that
even when they were using the possessive ’s all nice and tidy—that
while you were sorting out things like the past tense of see being
saw and the plural of man being men—you might find yourself
leaving off persnickety things like that ’s?
• Adults learning languages around the world round the corners a bit
Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama
14
’s the same way. It’s not that they never used it—just not always. It
became an option rather than a rule.
• Black English has been going its own way now for a good while.
It has its own cadence. But the basics are largely what they always
were, and when people say baby mama, they’re channeling Bob
Crachit more than Bob Marley.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
2. What aspect of French or Spanish have you found hardest to learn, and
would you think of it as an improvement in the language if that feature
somehow vanished?
15
C for Compounds
Lecture 3
R
ussian has enough noun and verb endings to sink a boat. But it
doesn’t seem like Russian people ever even think about that.
Taiwanese tones are complicated, but people who have grown up in
Taiwanese-speaking households just think of it as something they speak with
their parents and not as being especially difficult. The way we really express
the future in English—by using will—is very subtle and very complicated,
but we walk around doing it as easily as we breathe.
• On the one hand, English uses suffixes like -ment and -ation to
make nouns—for example, govern to government and dispute to
disputation. But on the other hand, those suffixes don’t always
work: How would you make the verb recall into a noun? There’s no
recallment or recallation. That’s where things go below the radar;
you make recall into a noun by shifting the accent backward and
saying “RE-call.” It is interesting that you wouldn’t say “re-CALL.”
Lecture 3: C for Compounds
• But it’s not just that one word; it’s a process. It’s the same with
how we can rebel against something and become a “RE-bel” or
record something to create a “RE-cord.” These aren’t just one-offs.
There is a piece of grammar that we all have deep in our brains—
according to what we know now, it wouldn’t be surprising to find
it in the temporal lobe somewhere and possibly on the left side—
that changes a word’s part of speech with the strange little move of
putting the accent up front.
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• Basically, we apply this accent shift when something becomes
“a thing”; in that way, we’ve been putting it in that idiom. If you
see a bird that happens to be black, then you say you saw a “black
BIRD.” But if you see the particular kind of bird called a blackbird,
then you pronounce it “BLACKbird.” That is, blackbirds are “a
thing,” while black birds are just birds of a dull color that make us
wish they were parakeets.
• We create new compounds all the time without thinking about it:
bank scam, Burger King, cost control, point guard. Compounds
are one of the meat-and-potatoes elements of speaking English.
Imagine trying to explain to a foreigner who is learning English
why we say “a rocky ROAD” and call a street “Maple ROAD”
but say “ACCESS road” instead of “access ROAD.” It’s because
access road is so conventionalized a concept that it is a compound,
a new word despite its spelling as two.
17
the accent shift. It’s a compound, but it most likely will never be
written as one word. Writing can only shed a flickery light on what
a compound is; you know it not from what we scratch on paper, but
what comes out of our mouths.
• In any case, the joy of compounds is that you can watch them
happening all the time within your actual life. We missed seeing
how -ed became the marker of the past by a long shot, and we’ll
never know what it was like to hear God Be With You fuse into
Goodbye as Shakespeare practically did. But compounds? Just cock
your ear to the language and you find new ones everywhere.
• Take one episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1973.
The characters order Chinese food. However, even as late as the
Watergate era, they’re calling it “Chinese FOOD” instead of the
way we say it now, “ChiNESE food.”
• But it’s not that those actors talked funny; Mary Tyler Moore
Lecture 3: C for Compounds
and Valerie Harper talk just like other Americans. It was because
Chinese food wasn’t “a thing” yet, and therefore, it wasn’t a
compound for all American English speakers. It was still a little
exotic. People didn’t usually have woks at home, and we were still
a more steak-and-potatoes country.
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• For us today, then, “ChiNESE food” is like “BLACKbirds.” Just
like a blackbird is something more specific than a bird that is black,
and ice cream is something more specific than cream with ice cubes
mixed in, when we say Chinese food, we mean something more
specific than “food the way they make it in China.” We mean “a
thing,” so to speak—namely, Chinese food as prepared in America
for Americans and often ordered as takeout.
• Knowing how compounds work, you can even know how people
pronounced things in the past without hearing it. Ethnic food is a
useful example again. On one episode of The Honeymooners in
1956, Alice talks about making a “PIZZA pie,” as people still said
then; however, it was already shortening to just pizza, which she
says a few minutes later.
• If you watch television commercials from the 1950s, you can find
people in black and white gleefully indulging in repulsive-sounding
substances represented as bringing pizza home in a can, and they
pronounce it as “pizza PIE,” just like today we would say “nectarine
PIE” because for some reason, nectarine pie isn’t “a thing.”
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really Mary’s land, or are we just saying basically the same thing as
Marilyn Monroe’s first name but spelling it differently? Today, the
“land” part just hangs there dead—it’s a mumbled little “lin.” Think
about breakfast: What fast do you think of yourself as breaking?
• But it was this accent backshift process that created the word
originally that now feels like it’s just one thing instead of two.
Sometimes, spelling has completely caught up with spoken reality,
and we really can’t have any idea how central compounding was to
the words we use every day.
• You might think that if a rosy is a cute li’l rose and a piggy is a cute
li’l pig, then a daisy is a cute li’l—daze? A daisy is not a kind of
daze, especially because really there’s no such thing as a daze. The
word daisy started as “day’s eye.”
they are.
20
“Penny LANE,” and the Beatles lyric wouldn’t scan properly with
the music, and they’d have had to write the song about something
else, like maybe a woman named Penny Lane, in which case they
could have said “Penny LANE.”
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Why do some people say “GREEN beans,” with the accent on green
rather than beans?
21
D for Double Negatives
Lecture 4
T
here was a lot of nifty negativity in English back in the old days—
meaning that there were all kinds of ways to express “not-ness”
that nowadays we don’t get to play around with. There were special
negative versions of some verbs. So, you could have, or if you didn’t have,
you naved. Somebody was, or if they weren’t, then somebody nas. So, in Old
English, to say I have ships, you said Ic hæbbe scipu, and to say I don’t have
ships, you could say Ic næbbe scipu. This carried on into Middle English:
There was no man anywhere so virtuous was There nas no man nowhere
so vertuous.
Creating Negatives
• French makes a sentence negative by putting a pair of headphones
on the verb: ne before and pas afterward. I don’t walk is Je NE
marche PAS. If you’ve ever thought that was kind of swell, then
you would’ve liked early English, where things were the same
way: ne before and nought after. He doesn’t speak was He NE
speketh NAWT.
• After a while, the NE wore away, and we were left with just the
NAWT, which is exactly like what has happened in French the way
it’s actually spoken, where to sound like a person instead of a book,
Lecture 4: D for Double Negatives
for a long time now, people have been dropping the NE and just
leaving the PAS.
• As you can see from the way you could say no nought, early
English reveled in double negatives. Think about the following
sentence: There nas no man nowhere so vertuous. These days,
we’re told that a sentence like that is wrong. It would have to be
There was no man so virtuous anywhere. After all, two negatives
make a positive, don’t they? So if you say I don’t see nothing, then
that means that nothing is not what you see and that, therefore, you
must see something.
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• It’s one thing to be able to work out that two negatives technically
could be taken to indicate a positive, but it’s a mental trick—
one that requires the same kind of mental bending as it does to
comprehend that the world must not be flat or that bikes stay up
when we ride them.
• Even in English,
German, and Dutch,
once you step outside
of the standard
dialect, the colloquial
© EDUCA33E/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
dialects are full of
double negatives—
just like most of
the languages of
the world. In fact,
double negatives are
legal in every dialect
of English except the
standard one, and Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury
Standard English is Tales, is known for using double negatives
extensively in his writing.
one of hundreds of
23
Englishes. Double negatives are fine in English overall; it’s just that
something is up with one of the dialects.
• It was different not so long ago. In Old English and Middle English,
doubling the negative just meant doubling the force of the denial. It
was a way to spice up the chili. Ic ne con singan was I can’t sing. Ic
ne con noht singan was literally I can’t sing nothing, and it meant ‘I
can’t sing a thing!’
• So what happened? The way the story is often told, it was a certain
grammarian of the late 18th century named Robert Lowth. He was
a bishop and scholar, and he wrote A Short Introduction to English
Grammar to fashion a standard form of writing English. It played
a central role in what kinds of things are considered bad grammar
today. Lowth certainly did declare that two negatives make a positive.
Lecture 4: D for Double Negatives
• We don’t know why people started doing this and probably never
will. No one happened to write about it at the time; they just started
doing it. It seems to have been almost a sort of fad or an affectation.
Such things happen; they’re happening now.
24
The Any Fad
• These days, there is a certain naked noun tic percolating into
American English—for example, using epic fail instead of epic
failure. Why this, and why now? All we know is that these things
happened—just like I don’t see anything as a substitute for I don’t
see nothing. For a while, there was even an anywhen: Today, we
say I didn’t go ever, but at some point, you could say I didn’t
go anywhen.
25
• It’s a funny thing. Overall, the things that happen to have been
declared as Standard English tend to be a little odd, a little rare, a
little unnatural. “Standard” always seems to be things that none of
the dozens of other dialects do, and often the “standard” things are
even rare as languages go worldwide.
• Normal languages don’t have the same word for you in the singular
and the plural. Older English didn’t either; there was thou in the
singular and you for the plural. And that’s the way it still is in
plenty of regional dialects in England today. But only in that weird
“standard” did you creep into the singular and make a nest. If you
speak Hindi, then to you this feels normal; there’s one language that
happens to do it the English way.
• It’s almost as if somebody back in the 1600s and 1700s was actively
trying to make Standard English kind of difficult, something you
have to wrap your head around instead of just lying back and
speaking it. There’s even something to be said for the possibility
that this elite class were setting themselves off from the hoi polloi
by adopting these peculiar wrinkles of grammar.
end of the day, none of this means that we can make speeches and
write prose with double negatives and expect to be taken seriously.
• Listen closely to someone from the band of states that runs roughly
from Pennsylvania west to about Utah, and you’ll catch sentences
26
like Pantyhose are so expensive anymore that I just stopped
wearing them or That’s still the custom there anymore. If you didn’t
grow up with it, it sounds weird—but you understand it. And that’s
all language is about: understanding.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. If double negatives aren’t actually unclear, then are there still reasons
for teaching people out of using them, and what are they?
2. Would it improve the quality of the song “I Ain’t Got Nobody” if it were
reworded as “I Don’t Have Anybody”? Or, do “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and
“I Don’t Have Anybody” truly have the same meaning?
27
E for Etymology
Lecture 5
E
eny, meeny, miny, moe. We’ve all said it or at least heard it. Children
use it to pick someone to do something, or be “it,” and sometimes
adults even use it. But where does it come from? What’s an eeny? Or
a meeny? Certainly, this meeny isn’t supposed to be an unpleasant person. In
fact, where eeny, meeny, miny, moe comes from has something to teach us
about etymology—what it is, what it isn’t, and why linguists don’t talk about
it as much as the public seems to wish we did.
Counting Words
• The words five, finger, fist, foist, pentagon, Pentecost, and
quintessence can all be traced back to one word for five—pénkwe—
in one language spoken by nomads who migrated from the south of
what is today the Ukraine, about 8,000 years ago.
• Those people migrated both far to the west and far to the east,
and their language was the source of what became most of the
languages that are spoken today in Europe, Iran, and India. You can
compare all of those languages’ words for the same things and work
backward to tell what the word was in that original language.
didn’t have writing, but they certainly talked, and we can know
all of these millennia later that their word for five was pénkwe and
that that’s why we English speakers call our fingers fingers and our
quintessences quintessences.
28
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe originated in Great Britain, where shepherds used the
sequence of words to count their sheep.
were twilight and biscuit. Trei not only became three, but today it’s
hiding out in words like contest and sitar. Kwetwer became trapeze.
• Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is all about sheep in Great Britain. There,
in rural places especially until recently, there were special numbers
that people used—actually, not just with sheep, but for counting in
games and such.
29
• The counting numbers come from what were regular numbers for
the Celts who lived in the area before the Angles and Saxons and
Jutes took over in the 5th century. And that brings us to eeny, meeny,
miny, moe.
• It’s a lot like that call kids use in games: Olly, olly, oxen free!
Nobody knows what it means, but apparently, it started as
something like Calling all the outs in free, meaning that everybody
in the game who was deemed “out” is now allowed to come out.
But now, people just howl it out as if it were Turkish, which it
might as well be. Imagine the same thing happening to aina, peina,
para, pedera—making it all rhyme and match and come out easily.
Lecture 5: E for Etymology
30
The Origin of Words
• Usually, a word traces back to some other word a long time ago
that meant something pretty similar. So, where does the word tree
come from? Old English had a word treo that meant ‘tree,’ and that
came from a word that was used by people somewhere in the south
of what is today the Ukraine. They didn’t say tree; they said deru,
which meant ‘oak.’
• First it was ‘oak,’ now it’s ‘tree’—one doesn’t run out and shout that
one through the streets. However, if you hang around etymologies
long enough, you do find plenty of cases that, even if they aren’t
as exotic as the hickory, dickory ones, are more involved than oaks
starting to be called trees, and they also teach us larger lessons
about what languages are like.
• As time went by, there was a sense that if quaint meant ‘clever,’
then you could easily use it to refer to things that were cleverly
made, like clothes—in the same way that Americans used to talk
about someone looking smart in their fancy duds. But one thing
leads to another.
• If you’re looking well turned out, you, in general, just may be kind
of pretty. Or at least you’re looking better than you did before you
put that stuff on. If you’re all gussied up, you might even have a
certain air of fanciness about you—fanciness, or even affectation.
So as time goes by, the word quaint might start having a meaning
of, basically, ‘all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask
me.’ That’s what the word meant into the 1700s.
31
praise, but to you, what they are praising is old fashioned. To you,
it’s ‘all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask me, but
it’s from the old days, so really it’s kind of cute in a charmingly
dismissible kind of way.’ That is exactly what quaint means now.
That happened step by step.
• But people have been using literally in these “wrong” ways a long
time. John Dryden in the 17th century was already doing it, and
then Jane Austen, Thackeray, and so on. Doesn’t that suggest that
it’s less that literally is being misused than that its meaning has
changed, just like quaint’s did? This is a clue that literally is just
doing what comes naturally.
Lecture 5: E for Etymology
32
• Literally once did mean ‘word for word,’ but it’s added a new wing
that conveys emphasis. In any language, people are always seeking
new ways of spicing up their statements, and literally has just
followed the noble tradition that actually, surely, and very have,
with no one batting an eye.
• Another word that came from that pénkwe word was punch (not
the fist kind, but the drink). Pénkwe meant ‘five,’ and while some
people were spreading it into Europe, others were taking it to India.
When pénkwe got there, it became panch, and punch originally had
five ingedients—sugar, spice, lemon juice, water, and alcohol—so
people called it five, but for them, that meant calling it punch, and
the English brought that home with them.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. What will you say the next time someone mentions that people misuse
the word literally? Do you now agree or disagree with that sentiment?
33
F for First Words
Lecture 6
T
here have been experiments now and then where misled individuals
have tried to determine what language is born within us by shielding
babies from speech and trying to see what they came up with.
According to Herodotus, an Egyptian king tried it and traced one word in
the babbling he heard to a language spoken in Turkey. Then, James IV of
Scotland had two babies raised by a deaf woman, and some people somehow
had the idea that what the kids were speaking was Hebrew. Most people
intuit that what the kids were speaking in cases like these was nothing.
Baby Sounds
• There are various cases of children not exposed to language until
they were seven—or even in their 20s—and none of them were
discovered prattling away in Turkish, Hebrew, or anything else.
Rather, the language that humanity seems to share is limited to
exactly two words, the ones any parents have heard: mama and papa.
• Why those words? Really, it just comes down to anatomy. The /ah/
sound results from just pushing air out of a semi-open mouth. The
first consonants children make are the ones that come most easily.
• Just thinking about your lips and teeth for a minute, you can imagine
that /mm/ will be one of the first sounds any baby will make by just
buzzing through the lips, while /p/ will come naturally if the baby
Lecture 6: F for First Words
is going /ah/ and then stops the airflow for a second with his or
her lips: /ahhhpahhh/. A /b/ sound is a variation on the same sound.
Then, babies might stop the airflow by putting their tongue on the
ridge behind their teeth, and if they do, then they’re making either
a /t/ or a /d/.
• Often, it’s the /m/-type sound that comes first, and hence, ma. If the
mother hears this and responds to it, then there is a link between a
sound and an entity. Then, babies have a way of doubling syllables,
34
and they find it easier to understand doubled syllables. So between
them and the mother, ma will become mama.
• Once the /p/ or /t/ or /d/ comes, then the other parent will just as
naturally become papa or dada—or tata (tateh means ‘father’ in
Yiddish). In addition, one of the few languages in the world without
double negatives besides Standard English is Nahuatl, and father is
ta’ in Nahuatl.
• The African language Luo is vastly unlike English in all ways. For
one thing, every plural is irregular. Imagine if the plural of cup was
cop and the plural of door was goor and the plural of cucumber was
cucuhhhhmber—that’s what Luo is really like. However, mother
and father are mama
and baba.
appa. Greenlandic
Eskimo people say
anaana and ataataq.
These are different, In Tamil, which is spoken by many people
from India in America, the words meaning
but also not different. ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ are amma and
appa, respectively.
The Start of Language
• Linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg claim to have
reconstructed some of the first words of the world by comparing
all of them. The word for finger would have been tik. The word
35
for water would have been akwa. Most linguists dismiss this work.
Even tracing the words in Indo-European is chancy: We will never
actually hear or read what the actual words were, and professionals
have been fighting for almost 200 years now on details.
• For example, the Japanese word for the sound a dog makes is
wanwan. The word for ‘baggy’ is dabudabu; the word for ‘tinkle’
Lecture 6: F for First Words
• Even in English, there are sounds that any native speaker associates
with certain concepts. In words like gleam, glimmer, glitter,
glance, glint, glow, glamour, and glimpse, notice how /gl/ seems to
symbolize a flashing of light, or the perception of one.
36
• Think about how even the word glory feels to native English
speakers—even though it technically doesn’t have anything to do
with a flash going off. Part of why we cherish the word is because
the /gl/ at the beginning makes it feel like a pretty light is going off
or something is glowing.
• The vowels get into the act, too. All over the world, high, tight
sounds like /ee/ and /ih/ correspond to small things, while /ah/ and
/oh/ correspond to big ones—for example, teeny weeny, little, slim
as opposed to large, broad, vast.
• And there are pesky things like how we use do in English: Do you
know him? I do not know him. When we use do in that way, it
doesn’t even mean anything. Where do you get words that not only
don’t sound like anything but don’t even mean anything?
37
• Some linguists think that language began about 80,000 years
ago; others see 150,000 as much more likely. But we will never
hear those ancient speakers, and they didn’t write. So we have to
guess—intelligently, but still guess.
38
• Motherese has that musical quality, and mothers sing to their babies,
and babies seem to like singing—so it makes sense that maybe
language started from people imitating something like animal calls.
This is archaeologist Steven Mithen’s idea.
• But suppose a smart person noticed that both calls had -ma in
them and abstracted that -ma could be taken to mean just ‘her.’
This would be the birth of a word. And then imagine if humans
abstracted lots of words like this and then started combining them
to express whole thoughts—maybe, for example, something like
ma ruff to mean ‘she hunts.’
• Theories like these are clever and intriguing but ultimately don’t
quite prove anything. However, they genuinely are currently the
state of the art in our attempts to figure out how language started,
because it’s a tough nut to crack. Attempts have been percolating
for over 150 years, and today’s attempts tend to fall into categories
that were established long, long ago.
Suggested Reading
39
Questions to Consider
40
G for Greek Alphabet
Lecture 7
I
t’s easy to miss how deeply peculiar an alphabet is—not the alphabet,
as in the Roman one we are most familiar with, but any alphabet. We
take it so much for granted that on a certain level, we think of language
as actually being words written out according to the way they sound. Try to
hear someone say already and not think of the word spelled out, floating in
the air. But this is actually a highly exceptional way of being human.
• The song is not only a song of the sounds, but also the special
names we have for the sounds, and it is always sung in a certain
41
order. The alphabet is a truly odd thing, and as such, it took a while
for humans to come upon.
• Imagine that you’re a person from the time before writing, and
you decide to invent a way of transcribing language onto bark or
papyrus or bones or whatever is around. What would your first
approach be? If you think about it, the last thing you’d come up
with is working out a separate symbol for each individual sound
in your language. It’s not what people around the world have been
inclined to do, and it isn’t what happened.
• It’s almost as if the Egyptians knew it, too, because amidst all of this
magnificent mess were symbols that were used just for individual
sounds. In hieroglyphics, these were used for clarification,
though. You’d add a consonant or two to remind the reader what
the general shape of the word was that the pictures were meant to
correspond to.
Lecture 7: G for Greek Alphabet
• So, to write carve, you could take the symbol that meant ‘wood’
and the symbol that meant ‘knife,’ add the symbols that meant ‘h’
and ‘t,’ and the reader would know that you meant the word hti
for ‘carve.’
• That’s all cute, but it was a trick, almost a game. This was an elitist
system mastered by carvers in service to the rulers. It trickled
down in a rather simplified form for writing in ink and for business
purposes—this was the hieratic script.
42
• But even so, there were 700 symbols, plus all the folderol. Anybody
watching this being done who didn’t have writing would still barely
be able to help wanting to import it, but also perhaps streamline it
so that people could wrap their heads around it who had more on
their plates than sitting around scribing elegantly.
• Take a little over 20 of these, and you had the first alphabet (sort
of). Actually, our workers only developed symbols for consonants.
It seemed like enough to them. You can put yourself in their heads:
No one has ever heard of an alphabet; all anyone knows is this
hieroglyphic thing that looks more like a Jackson Pollock painting
than a writing system.
• So, now we’re writing things so you can perceive the basic sound of
language from the writing. For example, the writing of the sequence
“y cn prcv th bsc snd f lngg frm th wrtng” is a much better sight
than pictures of branches and knives to mean ‘carve.’ Today, Arabic
and Hebrew are still written pretty much that way.
43
somewhere on Cyprus in the 8th century B.C., the Greeks from
across the pond picked up the Phoenician writing system.
how to write them and the awesomely random ways they are used.
• But even those kinds of systems mean you need about 70 symbols;
an alphabet will be fine with about 30 or 35. An alphabet makes it
easier to foster universal literacy. However, ultimately, the alphabet
44
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
At Delphi, written records from the ancient Greeks have been found etched
into rocks.
• The alphabet was handy because you could write down that string
of sound, as is. They knew, intellectually, that the string was
composed of separate words. All humans have a sense that there
are distinct words. But the Greeks also knew that the words, in real
speech, don’t have spaces between them. So why would the Greeks
write with spaces?
45
• We’re used to the idea that in a reference book, things will be
arranged in alphabetical order. But look at a medieval book
and you’ll usually find that they’re great with putting things
under particular letters and arranging those piles, so to speak, in
alphabetical order. But, within a particular letter, everything is just
thrown in with no order.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
46
2. Penmanship is said to be on the decline. Is there value in being able to
render alphabetic symbols in the modern world, as opposed to typing
and understanding them?
47
H for Hobbits
Lecture 8
T
his lecture is about hobbits—what they can show us about how
linguistics is a kind of science. From the outside, it easily seems
like what linguists do is either to indicate what ways of speaking are
wrong or to catalog the etymologies of words. However, this is not what
linguists do. When people ask linguists what they do, the answer that they
are trained to give is “study language scientifically,” but that doesn’t really
help. What does that mean?
• There are plenty of languages in the world that don’t use prefixes or
suffixes much, including Chinese. But the place to find languages
like that is not down in Indonesia and the South Seas. In this case,
a tiny cluster of languages is sitting there contrasting bizarrely with
Lecture 8: H for Hobbits
48
• There’s no actual documented way that people just junk the way the
grammars of their languages work for no reason. Something drops
here and there, sure; for example, English speakers are slowly
letting go of whom. But languages don’t just strip entirely.
• While the skeletons date back 13,000 years, there are legends
among the people who live there now of little people living with
modern humans, who had some kind of language of their own and
could “repeat back” in modern people’s language.
• The legends suggest that these little people were still around as
recently as just a few centuries ago, and the descriptions of the
49
people are detailed, even to the point that people explicitly set them
apart from just fantastical spirits—they have plenty of them that
they talk about, too—so that we can tell that there really were such
people on Flores.
• It seems that the little people were gradually incorporated into the
modern human society over time; probably, they were subordinated
in some way. It would have meant that modern human kids were
hearing the little people’s version of the language as much as the
real one.
• It’s even why English is kind of easy. Vikings came and dumbed
down Old English when they married English-speaking women
and exposed their kids to bad English. Wouldn’t that be the perfect
explanation for how these languages got to be the way they are?
Lecture 8: H for Hobbits
50
• This would mean that there would be no reason for them to learn
sapiens languages to any significant extent—and that there would
certainly be no reason for sapiens to start talking like the hobbits.
That’s what we would need to explain why the Flores languages
took it all off the way they did: nonnative people speaking
them wrong and then being imitated. But why would anybody
imitate how the hobbits talked if they were never around and
considered repulsive?
• However, the problem is still that languages do not just strip naked.
Basically, it’s clear that at some point, adults must have come to
Flores and learned the local languages only partially and left them
changed forever. But who?
• Written history can’t help much. Flores societies were oral ones
without writing until they encountered the West starting in the
1500s, and even after that, European observers had no real interest
in chronicling population movements between it and other islands.
And as for archaeology, it hasn’t gone far on Flores yet; what we
know about the hobbits even existing is a lot of it.
• There are two very odd things about the vocabularies of these
Flores languages. First of all, the words in these languages are too
alike. Even when languages are related, they’re different. French
and Spanish are closely related, but you have to take classes in each
one separately; nobody would say that Spanish is a kind of French.
The reason is that both languages have been evolving separately
for about 2,000 years now. There are new words in each language,
new sounds in each language, and new kinds of grammar in each
language. Separate languages never stay the same.
51
• But the Flores languages seem almost as if they’ve been resisting
that. For example, another clump of related languages in the area
in the islands once known as the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, are
close relatives, but they’ve been sitting as separate languages for
about 3,500 years, longer than even French and Spanish. So, they’re
similar—but different.
• The words for ‘come’ in five of these languages are tawae, kawae,
maa, ma, ‘ama. The words for ‘fish’ in each of them is yano, iane,
vuut, ian, si’a. This is what even closely related languages are like.
‘Fish’ in French, Spanish, and Italian is poisson, pescado, pesce,
respectively—similar, but different.
their own. Making do with their crummy Old English, the Vikings
plugged so many of their Old Norse words into it that we can barely
get through a sentence without them: get, they, wrong, take, anger,
bag, low, club, knife.
52
It’s a language of Sulawesi. It was called Celebes on old maps,
and it’s shaped like a four-legged starfish. There’s one language
spoken there called Tukang Besi. It’s one of a thousand variations
on Austronesian.
• If the Flores languages are both naked and full of words from
another language, then presumably adult speakers of that language
invaded Flores and learned the local languages badly, spraying
it with words from home and shaving off the pesky prefixes and
endings. Then, just like the Vikings in England and the nursemaids
in South Africa, they passed their rendition on to future generations,
resulting in the Austronesian languages without prefixes
and suffixes.
• This time, the history and the folklore help us out. From the 1600s
to the 1700s, a Sulawesi kingdom ruled one half of Flores. Then,
folklore among Flores groups is full of tales of origin in Sulawesi,
as opposed to the countless other islands in the area.
• It would be more fun if it were the hobbits who did it. And research
is continuing on them. If archaeologists find evidence that the
hobbits actually did live peacefully among Homo sapiens, then
there is still the possibility that the hobbits are the reason for the
changes in the Austronesian languages.
53
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Slavic languages like Russian and Polish have very similar grammars.
However, one of them, Bulgarian, is the only one without case markers
on nouns. What does this tell us about the history of the language?
2. Icelandic has a great many noun and verb endings. English has very few,
comparatively. Both are offshoots of the same original language, Proto-
Germanic. How could we know that one of them has been spoken on a
remotely located island and the other one has not been, just on the basis
of this difference in the number of endings?
Lecture 8: H for Hobbits
54
I for Island
Lecture 9
T
he word island offers part of the answer to a question often asked:
Why is English spelling such a mess? It isn’t as messy as it can seem.
According to some estimates, it’s only about a quarter of English
words that aren’t spelled in a predictable way, and it’s been calculated that
only about three percent of English’s words are so irregular in their spelling
that you just have to learn them by rote. Alas, however, those hundreds of
words tend to be the ones most commonly used—hence, the mess.
© Digital Vision/Thinkstock.
The story of how the word island came to be spelled the way it is represents the
strange path of metamorphosis of some English words.
55
French, that same akwa word became just one vowel, /oh/, although
it’s written eau, because French’s spelling is scary as well.
• English treated that word a lot like French: It got a lot shorter and
uglier than it did in Italian. Namely, in Old English, akwa had
become a word, eeg. That doesn’t sound much like our word water
today, and that’s because that was a separate word that started in
Proto-Indo-European as wed. In Russian, that same root became
vodka, while in Irish, it became the word that English borrowed
as whiskey—both of those alcoholic beverages are named after
just water.
• Old English had this other word eeg, and the word for island was
eegland. By Middle English, the g had dropped out, and we had
a smoother word: iland. Then, some very smart, cultured people
had the idea that iland must be a messed up version of the word
isle; they thought eeland was missing an s—that lazy people had
stopped bothering to pronounce it.
• What is the b in doubt doing there? The original Latin word for
doubt was dubitare, and certain sorts decided that our word had to at
least have that b in there in writing, so here we are. The same thing
Lecture 9: I for Island
56
with light because delight “lights you up.” In addition, foreign
shouldn’t have a g in it. We don’t say “faregan” now, and no one
ever did. It’s just that some persnickety person thought that foreign
was supposed to be spelled like the word reign. Rhyme is so hard
to spell mostly because of the h—“ruh-HIGHm”—and it’s another
bionic letter, so to speak; they only stuck that in out of a sense that
rhyme was supposed to be like rhythm.
• In the 1300s and 1400s, a lot of this sort of thing was happening
in English. For example, the word made should be pronounced
“MAH-deh” from what you see on paper. In fact, in medieval times,
the word sounded like “MAH-deh” when it was first spelled. But
then came the Great Vowel Shift, and gradually, /ah/ became /ay/.
So, “MAH-deh” became “MAY-deh.” Then, that final e dropped off
over time; sounds at the ends of words have a way of doing that.
Henceforth, “MAYD.”
• Humans get stuck in their habits. When words are used a lot, people
keep them the way they are, even if they don’t make sense. It’s why
the plural of common words like man and woman is irregular—men
and women—but not of words like credenza and watercolor. We
use some words so much that we don’t stop to think about how to
fix them up.
• After the Great Vowel Shift, a word like feet was pronounced “feet”
even though it had first been spelled when the word was “fate.”
Mice started out as “mees,” but now we don’t even stop to think as
to why it’s pronounced “mighs.”
57
Spelling and Pronunciation
• Why is English spelling such a catastrophe? First, it is because
people added letters based on Latin. Sometimes, we’ve even started
pronouncing them: Soldier started out as “sojure.” Somebody stuck
in the l because of Latin, and now we actually have to say “soul-
jrrrr.” Then, the Great Vowel Shift happened, leaving legions of
words basically spelled wrong forever.
• For example, why can’t we just spell gazette without the final te? We
never said “gah-ZET-uh” the way the French do. In English, though,
the extra te is just a nuisance (which is pronounced “nwee-SOHNS”).
• Sometimes, weird things happened for reasons that are just plain
silly. For example, the word some is not pronounced “soam,” so
what’s with the o? Shouldn’t it be spelled the same way as sum, as
in addition? It used to be.
• Nobody started out with the word “suhm” and wrote it with an o
just for kicks. It was spelled with a u. However, in Middle English,
the shape of the letters scribes wrote in meant that sometimes that u
Lecture 9: I for Island
could be confused with the m that followed it—it would get a little
lost. So, they decided to just use an o instead for legibility. So, here
we are today with “soam.”
• It was the same with come; it was “koom” in Old English, but it
started being spelled “coam” later to help out those scribes. Monk,
tongue, and worm all have that story: an o that makes no sense,
58
jammed in eons and eons ago to make it easier for a few people to
read in a script that today no one has even heard of.
• The saddest thing about the whole situation is that it has a way of
making us make it even worse. If the words don’t keep up with
the way they’re pronounced, then our natural tendency is to try to
keep pronouncing them the way they’re written, especially because
writing has a way of seeming like what language really is. So, h’s
tend to drop off of words. Americans are more familiar with this
from our sense of British English.
• But you just know that there will be some inconsistency that sets in.
That’s what happened to us across the Atlantic with the word herb.
In England, it’s pronounced “herb” with the /h/, but in the United
States, we drop the /h/ and pronounce it “erb.” Because we keep the
h everywhere else, like on hospital, the spelling of the word herb
alone becomes nonsensical.
59
• But it never happens for English, and it’s partly because of that
inherent conservatism in all of us about certain things. What a
phonetic spelling system would look like is the pronunciation
symbols that you see in dictionaries, with all those epsilons and
upside-down letters and a and e run together. Would you really
want to read anything written in that? No matter how tired we are of
often and living after the Great Vowel Shift, how much do we really
want to give up the spelling that we’ve known our whole lives?
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Do you pronounce the t in often? If so, why not also the t in whistle?
2. The Chicago Tribune started spelling some words more logically in the
1930s, which meant actual headlines such as “Rookie Goalie Scores
6th Hocky Shutout.” The practice was dropped officially in the 1970s.
Should it have continued?
Lecture 9: I for Island
60
J for Jamaican
Lecture 10
T
he language of casual speech in much of Jamaica shows us how vast
the linguistic repertoire of many people around the world is compared
to the typical American’s. This refers not just to the fact that it’s so
common for people to be bilingual or multilingual, although that is true.
Rather, even within one language, the one language people speak in many
places is just so much bigger than American English by itself.
Jamaican Patois
• Jamaican patois developed in the 1600s when African slaves
learned English fast, and the result was a hybrid between English
and African languages. It’s more English than African, but it’s a
lot further from Standard English than Black English is. Still, with
experience one learns.
• Along the lines of the first point, Jamaican patois is not only
something different from Standard English itself, but patois is
several different variations. The way it’s spoken among the poorest
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people with the least education is very different grammatically from
the way it’s spoken by working-class and middle-class people.
• So, Jamaicans who speak patois can slide up and down this scale of
varieties. They are using basically three different grammars, or at
Lecture 10: J for Jamaican
least two, all while speaking English just as we speak English. They
have a larger English, in other words.
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Socially Determined Levels of Language
• Experiencing that in the Caribbean, the untutored observer might
reasonably just think the whole language is an unstructured mess,
but actually, it’s a matter of socially determined levels of language,
and this gets even more elaborate in some places. It’s especially
common in South and Southeast Asia, for example.
• In Javanese, though, it’s words in general that are like this. There
really are three different words for eat, depending on whether
you’re at a wedding, talking to your pal, or speaking to a little
child—or a child talking to an elder and using the elevated forms,
or a rich person talking to a peasant and using the child forms, or
to be more respectful the middle ones. It’s a whole repertoire that
people use in different ways, and the customs also change with
the times.
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• To the Javanese, subconscious awareness of subtleties like that
permeates the whole language, instead of being just a matter of
certain words like return, or kids versus children, or parcel versus
package, or veggies versus vegetables.
• Quite often around the world, among the people who speak a
language so much larger than American English, there is a sense
that the rendition of the language that you don’t use at weddings,
the one that isn’t associated with prestige, is “bad,” or “not the
real language.”
• Yet they are talking about a way of speaking that has been carefully
described in whole books, and many of the books are only about
one corner of the grammatical structure. Patois is as structured and
nuanced as any way of talking, but because it’s associated with lack
of education, it’s very hard for people not to assume that the way
Lecture 10: J for Jamaican
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Lanka, and it’s a close relative of Hindi. Twelve million people
speak Sinhalese, and they’re lucky they’ve been doing it since they
were toddlers because it’s hard.
• There are different endings you use on a verb to express not just
present and past, but doing something for real, on purpose, and by
accident. The nouns have case markers just like they do in Latin.
There are all kinds of things you have to actually express that in
English we just leave to context. For example, if you see something,
in Sinhalese you have to indicate that seeing is something that
happens to you instead of something you impose on something else.
• It was only in the 1700s that Literary Sinhalese was resurrected for
schools and the public, and it was actually for an understandable
reason. The antique dialect was felt as a badge of pride in the face
of colonization by the Portuguese and the Dutch.
• Naturally, the written word started working its magic, and soon
there was the idea that the way Sinhalese is actually spoken
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is “not the real language.” That’s as if we told newspaper
editorialists to write in the language of Beowulf if they wanted to be
taken seriously.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. What is the difference between curse and cuss? Is cuss, in your mind,
a “real word”? Do you associate it with a particular group of people or
kind of people? Think similarly about burst and bust.
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K for Ket
Lecture 11
T
his lecture introduces one of the world’s 6,000 languages that people
are highly unlikely to hear about beyond where it’s spoken. What we
expect is different from the reality—the reason for that is different
from what we’d think it was—and its implications for the future of the
languages of the world is one part unpleasant and one part encouraging. All
told, this language has much to tell us. This language is called Ket.
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people we might have a guilty sense of as simpler than Westerners,
is extremely elaborate.
• In Ket, ‘I come’ is diksivɛs, and ‘I go’ is bɔɣatn. What part means ‘I’?
It is very difficult to tell, and Ket is like this more often than it isn’t.
In diksivɛs, the ‘I’ part is di-, and in bɔɣatn, it’s bɔ-. This is a language
with two completely different ways of indicating ‘I.’ Some verbs use
one while some use another, and you just have to know.
• In English, we handle that run is now and ran is the past. The a
alone means past. But imagine if ran alone meant ‘I ran’ and ram
meant ‘he ran’ and rap meant ‘you ran’—and then if ram meant ‘he
ran’ and dram meant ‘he might have run.’ Then, imagine if verbs
not only worked like that, where each little sound had a meaning,
but most verbs weren’t short like that but long like defibrillate, with
each sound meaning some tiny part of what you’re trying to say.
That’s Ket.
• Plus, Ket has tones like Chinese. And it has eleven cases and crazy
genders like European languages: Trees are male, thumbs are
female, and body parts are neuter.
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ways of separating things into meaningless genders, step by step.
Or, somebody will start pronouncing something in some slightly
different little way, and randomly it will catch on, and a few
hundred years later, there’s a whole new sound in the language.
• Languages are like Ket because they can’t help it anymore than
kudzu can help growing. This is because speaking is largely
subconscious and fast. Anything that’s subconscious and quick
is ripe for habit forming, for mission creep. Once something gets
started, it has a way of hanging around and settling in—even when
the language was doing just fine without it.
• The only reason languages can get away with being as complicated
as Ket is because they are picked up by children. Children’s brains
are plastic to an extent we adults can barely even conceive of. But
what this means is that especially with a language like Ket, once
even a single generation grows up without living in it, it’s almost
inevitable that no generation ever will again.
• After the teen years, the ability to learn a language well ossifies,
and even to the extent that we might learn to wangle a certain
ability in a language as adults, what are the chances that we’d use
it within the spontaneous intimacy of talking with our offspring?
Pretty much none.
• The sad fact is that fewer and fewer people are speaking Ket
anymore. Russia actively sought to dilute the Ket’s culture, and
between that and the effect today of globalization and the media,
the typical Ket’s main language is now Russian. It’s getting harder
and harder to find really fluent speakers under a certain age.
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© Struthious Bandersnatch/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
In the 1600s, the Ket people were incorporated by Russia, changing Ket culture
and language.
• There are programs that try to revive these languages, because they
are badges of cultural identity. Some groups have classes. In others,
Lecture 11: K for Ket
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• But something that has to be considered is that Native American
languages were usually spoken by small groups and not learned
very much by grown-ups. So, they were kudzu languages—that
is, normal. To take a random example, in the Salinan language in
California, there’s no regular way to make a plural, just like in the
African language Luo. Every noun is like men and geese. House is
tam; houses is temhal. Dog is khuch; dogs is khosten. And this is
how it is for all nouns.
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languages won’t be meaningfully alive. Anecdotally, this is already
effectively what’s going on with some of the languages that have
been revived more successfully, such as Irish Gaelic and Maori.
• But in light of this, it’s important that languages like this at least
be recorded as they are. Why should we care if those languages
die? One reason is that often, the people whose grandparents speak
them want to hold on to them in some way. If they can’t speak
them conversationally anymore, at least we can use the Western
advantage of writing, and now electronic resources, to record what
the languages were.
• Plus, you never know what a language can teach us. For example,
just like Russian and English don’t seem much alike but they both
trace back to that Proto-Indo-European language, Ket turns out to
be related to the Navajo language spoken across the Pacific in the
American Southwest. Ket helps prove that Native Americans came
to North America across the Bering Strait from Siberia. Ket, then,
teaches us not only what languages are like, but also what they can
show us about where people came from.
Suggested Reading
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Questions to Consider
2. If you speak a language other than English natively, what is the “hard” part
of that language, that you’re glad you don’t have to master consciously?
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L for Like
Lecture 12
T
his lecture is dedicated to something linguists get asked about quite
a bit. It’s actually a very interesting issue, but the general trend is to
think of it as simply a nuisance. The subject of this lecture is like—
not like as in That cat looks just like my cat, not in the dictionary entry sense,
but like the way it’s used by younger people, peppering seemingly every
utterance with an air of the tentative.
• The step is so short from acting like a person to just quoting him
or her that people take it in other languages; it’s very natural for
quoting to involve a kind of acting that becomes so much a habit
Lecture 12: L for Like
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We associate it with young people and, therefore, with acne, back
seats, and gossip.
• We certainly feel the same way about the other like: the (like)
hesitation (like) you don’t really want to own (like) what you say
like. But, all that means is that the new likes are new, so the people
who use them aren’t old yet.
• Many people think of like as something people shed when they get
older, and there’s something to that, but next time you’re at a loose
end, listen to some people around 40 and notice how many likes
they still use. As hard as this is to imagine, in about 40 more years,
there are going to be white-haired people on walkers sprinkling
their conversations with like.
• It’s true that there once was an America where people didn’t use
like in these two ways, no matter how young they were. The new
likes didn’t pop up out of nowhere in 1980, despite the idea that it
started with Valley girl–speak.
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out about how young people talk, then somebody would have used
it for color—but no one does.
• The beatnik like was used by a certain sort, to a certain extent. But
there’s a difference between “Like, wow, man” and like used by
young people of all sorts all over the country—and often several
times per utterance. Like took off at a certain point in the 1970s and
far beyond that one usage as a quotative particle.
• The other like is something else. You say, “This is like the best
party I’ve ever been at,” and what you do with the like is cast your
assertion in an air of “as if.” You imply that you are offering the
statement as a possibility rather than a reality. You do that as a way
of not coming on too strong. It’s a softener.
• For example, you say, “You have to, like, push harder” to someone
you don’t want to command too explicitly. You imply that you want
them to do this pushing harder at a kind of remove—like pushing
harder. You don’t mean it literally, though; you’re conveying an
attitude. In that, like is part of what is very much an ordinary part of
human speech.
Pragmatic Particles
• Language starts with the words. Linguists call that the lexicon.
Then, there are the sounds; you have to know how to make them
Lecture 12: L for Like
and put them together. That’s called phonology. Then, there are the
prefixes and the suffixes that turn a word into another one, or even
the accent shifting that makes compounds. That, the business of
making words, is called morphology. Then, you have to know how
to put the words together: “I walk,” but “I do not walk” and “Do
you walk?”—where you shift you to behind the do. All of that kind
of thing is what linguists call syntax.
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• But there’s another level, and without it, you’re not really talking.
It’s little words that convey how you feel about what you’re saying.
Even is one of them—not in its literal meaning, but in one you’d
never think to teach anybody, because it just happens.
• Just like words like just: “They decided not to cater; they just had
a picnic.” In the sentence “Actually, we had a picnic,” what does
actually mean? It does not mean ‘in actuality’ because you wouldn’t
say, “They had a picnic in reality”—how else would they have it?
When words are used like this, linguists have a name for what
realm of language we’re in. Unfortunately, it’s a clumsy, vague, and
opaque term (in other words, jargon). We call it pragmatics.
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to alternate opinions, and even a disinclination to firm assertion.
Teachers have noticed an increase in those attitudes in students over
the past decades, and there’s no reason that it wouldn’t be reflected
in language to some extent.
• In French, they use genre in the same way as like: “Je suis genre
rarement énervé” means ‘I’m, like, not nervous much.’ In Spanish,
Italian, and Portuguese, people are using tipo, or ‘type,’ in the same
way, and there are other examples.
there are three things they should teach themselves to suppress for
the duration: saying um, using “upTALK,” and repeating like-like-
like-like-like. It may be a piece of grammar, but there are times
when you might want to sound like you mean what you’re saying.
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Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. People seem more irritated by the hedging usage of like than of you
know. Why might that be?
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M for Maltese
Lecture 13
M
alta is a nation that consists essentially of three main islands. It’s
in the Mediterranean Sea, with Sicily to the north and the North
African coast down below. Malta is in the European Union. What
do they speak in Malta? A natural guess is that they speak Maltese, and that
guess is correct. But what’s Maltese? What languages is it related to? You
never hear about a Romance language called Maltese, but you also can’t
quite imagine that what they speak in Malta is an African language either,
because it is a European country.
What Is Maltese?
• Maltese is a kind of Arabic. It’s the only Arabic variety that is
an official language within the European Union. But it’s a very
interesting kind of Arabic, because geography matters. On the one
hand, Arabic speakers of course once had geopolitical sway in
Europe, as far westward as Spain, and therefore it isn’t completely
surprising that at least one remnant survives of how far Arabic once
spread. But then, there is Sicily up to the north.
cream is ġelat.
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© Hemera/Thinkstock.
People from Malta, an island located in the Mediterranean Sea, speak Maltese, a
kind of Arabic.
• However, it’s easy to declare that Maltese “is Arabic” because of the
way its grammar works. That’s linguistics tradition: The essence of
the language is the grammar, while the words are just clothes. But
ordinary people don’t always think that way. Languages are spoken
by real people with real histories and real feelings.
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• Many Jamaicans can speak in a way that English speakers cannot
make heads or tails of, yet they see themselves as speaking English.
For a long time, Italy had an investment in classifying Maltese
as a kind of Italian. After all, half of its vocabulary is Italian—so
much so that if you know a Romance language, you can make your
way through a lot of things written in Maltese, especially since it’s
written, like a European language, in the Roman alphabet.
• Any map of languages that shows one language spoken in one area
and another language spoken in another area is almost always an
idealization. In real life, what we think of as a language is a spread
of variations on a theme, some of those variations so influenced by
some other language that classifying it as one thing or another is
basically impossible.
with one another. As long as you keep things pretty simple and don’t
talk too fast, a Dane can get along just fine in Sweden or Norway.
The closest an American English speaker would come to this might
be getting along in parts of Jamaica or rural Scotland.
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histories. So even though a Dane doesn’t take Swedish lessons but
instead goes to Sweden and adjusts, these are officially different
languages, just as English and Portuguese are.
• There are clear historical reasons why many Serbs and Croats think
of themselves as speaking different languages, but one suspects
that the notion is much easier to uphold for the simple reason that
Serbian is written in Cyrillic while Croatian is written in the same
Roman alphabet that we use for English. The writing systems look
so different, and they have such resonant historical connotations,
that it’s easy to suppose that the speech varieties in question are
“different languages.”
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• That’s neat, but it also has everything to do with why anyone would
think of Mandarin and Cantonese as variations on the same thing.
They look the same on paper, and that’s the only way we really
“see” language. Writing can make languages look like languages,
and it can make languages look like dialects, independently of
the reality in terms of what the “languages” are like in relation to
one another.
• But what doesn’t get around is that this kind of speech spreads
beyond France. It hops through the Alps and alights in parts of Italy
and Switzerland. Those kinds, which shade into one another as you
move along, aren’t called Occitan anymore—they’re something
else. It has different names used by its speakers in various places.
Some people call their stripe of it Romand; others call their stripe of
Lecture 13: M for Maltese
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• In reality, there are no such things as “languages” and “dialects.”
The words are too caught up in history, psychology, and notions
about writing to make any coherent sense, even though in real life
we cannot help using them according to categories. Really, there
are just different ways of talking, shading into one another across
vast areas, crisscrossing cultures as often as not.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
2. Do you, or does someone you know, speak something you have been
inclined to think of as a “dialect”? What were the grounds for that
classification?
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N for Native American English
Lecture 14
I
f you like old movies, then one thing that takes getting used to is the way
Native Americans are portrayed as speaking English. People who grew
up watching The Lone Ranger on television, or even Looney Tunes, will
be familiar with the old shtick. Native Americans—or Indians, as they were
called and still often are—spoke a pidgin English. Tonto, from The Lone
Ranger, said things like “Me no like-um that man, kemosabe; he heap big
villain.” And for some reason, there was an idea that all Native American
men spoke in deep voices. That was on one level a stereotypical convention
of an earlier era. However, so often, stereotypes have some basis in fact.
• It’s hardly a surprise in itself that when Native Americans first met
Lecture 14: N for Native American English
white men, they did not learn actual English. Around the world,
probably since the beginning of humanity, when groups meet for
occasional purposes of trade, there’s no reason to actually learn
to speak each other’s languages—especially because it’s really
hard for adults to learn new languages anyway. So, business is
conducted in a stripped-down version of one of the languages, or
even a mishmash of both.
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• In terms of speech, from the Native American side, it is actually
recorded by people with no interest in making fun of anybody that
Native Americans said things, in talking about navigating water,
like “That make hard paddlum through, hold’em canoe,” or praising
someone, saying, “Heap good Indian, hunt buffalo and deer.”
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• Henry David Thoreau, who was well known as a studious and
sympathetic chronicler of the unfamiliar, was one of many who got
down on paper that -um
that we understandably
suppose today to be
a joke. In The Maine
Woods, he describes how
• But in the broad view, American Indian Pidgin English was just
one example of something that happens to languages worldwide.
Sometimes, they leave footprints in regular English. For example,
the Chinese were highly resistant to trade with whites for a very long
time, and therefore, you can imagine that to the extent that they let
it happen in pieces with England in the 1600s, they wouldn’t have
started learning actual English. Instead, they learned just enough to
get their business taken care of.
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expressions from Chinese Pidgin English were “long time no see”
and having a “look-see.”
• Pretty soon, places like New Guinea had a new lingua franca that
even kids started learning. And when a pidgin starts being used this
much—used like a real language—it becomes one. Real people
need real language.
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• In Tok Pisin, you can say Mitupela bai boilim wata. Slowly, that’s
“Me two fellow by-and-by boil-him water.” “Me two fellow” is we,
and not just we, but if you mean ‘we two’ and not ‘you.’ If you
meant ‘me and you,’ you’d say “you me fellow,” or yumipela. If
you meant ‘we three and not you,’ it would be “me three fellow.”
You can imagine how complicated pronouns get in Tok Pisin.
• Then, when you say bai boilim wata, bai started as ‘by and by’ and
now is the way you say ‘will.’ Then there’s boilim wata, just like
the paddlum canoe in American Indian Pidgin English. That -im is
the way you would put it in a lot of the languages that the people
who created Tok Pisin spoke, so here it is today.
• There are flavors of this language spoken in other parts of the area.
It’s a double-edged sword, though. On the one hand, the people
there have a lingua franca they didn’t have before. But on the other
hand, that lingua franca feels “cool.” It’s used in the media and
in education and allows you to get beyond your village. And that
means that it threatens the existence of the original languages.
• Let’s say that two people from different villages speaking different
languages get married and have kids. The couple talk to each other
in Tok Pisin. Many couples in the village do that, and that’s what
Lecture 14: N for Native American English
the kids grow up hearing. To the kids, the local language starts to
feel like the “other” thing, very in-group and maybe even backward.
Tok Pisin becomes the “real” language—especially because that’s
what they see on paper.
• It’s a problem. Luckily, it doesn’t always come out this way. Take
the way of speaking English known in Hawaii as “pidgin.” It isn’t
one, actually; it is a full language just like Black English or Tok
Pisin is. But it started as a pidgin, and the name stuck.
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time started. The overseers were Portuguese, while the workers
were mostly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Have you ever known someone who lived in a language for decades but
never spoke it very well? It can happen. What was the reason the person
you know never got very far in learning the new language?
2. Have you ever had to speak a language you didn’t know much of, for a
long time or very often? How far did you get, and what determined how
far you got?
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O for Oldsters in Cartoons
Lecture 15
Y
ou can learn a lot about how language works from extremely
unexpected places. Looney Tunes is one of them. You can get a lot
from them about how language can differ in the city as opposed
to the country, for example—and not just that it does, but why. There’s an
old Bugs Bunny cartoon of 1944, The Old Grey Hare, that has Bugs and
Elmer Fudd as old men going through their usual antics but with canes,
gray beards, spectacles, and the shakes. But these aren’t the only indications
that they have reached their twilight years. Bugs, as an oldster, talks in a
hillbilly accent.
• There’s a part where the Wolf kicks Granny out of her house.
Bugs talks like Bugs, and the Wolf talks like Bluto in the Popeye
cartoons, but for some reason, Granny, living in the same place they
do, talks like she grew up in the fastnesses of West Virginia. As the
wolf shoves Granny out of the house, she yells, “Land sakes, Wolfy,
aintcha gonna eat me?” and then “Can’t a body get her shawl tied?”
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© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
Older people might speak differently than younger people, but their way of
speaking was grossly exaggerated in old television and movies.
• Why are old people rustic? One sees this kind of thing again and
again in pop culture of that era. Old people sound like the Beverly
Hillbillies even when the people around them use mainstream,
standard American.
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• Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street in 1920 about Carol Kennicott
finding little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, boring and was celebrated
for writing about “America” itself. Things are different now. The
notion of the city as unhealthy for one’s morals is antique. We pity
urban residents dealt a bad hand, but we hardly think they’d be
better off in a Minnesota farming town.
Martha’s Vineyard
• The city/country distinction can manifest itself in different ways,
Lecture 15: O for Oldsters in Cartoons
94
there, people would say “luh-eet” instead of light and “buh-eet”
instead of bite. This happened not only on the /igh/ sound, but
also the /ow/ sound in house. It might be more like “huh-oos.” Out
would be “uh-oot.”
• But there was something going on with just a certain group. Labov
classified this group as people 30 to 45—that specific. The people
in that age group were “luh-eeting” and “huh-oosing” all over the
place. For them, it was “uh-ee” and “uh-oo” for almost every word
those sounds were in, instead of popping more in some words than
others. For them, it was almost all the time instead of just some of
the time—just them, the people grown up but not yet middle aged.
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• And it meant that if you stayed, you were making a statement. You
were being loyal to where you grew up. If you were in your 30s or
early 40s, then that was just the time of life when you were pretty
much settled down. You had staked your claim; you weren’t going
to be making any grand transformations after that. So, you stayed—
even if you weren’t going to get rich.
• Sentiments like that have a way of percolating into the way you
talk. People in their 30s and 40s created a new, stronger version of
the local accent as part of their stronger devotion to the island. Old
people were set in their ways. Young people weren’t sure what they
were going to do yet, so they didn’t adopt strong local accents.
• In other places, the way you can know that a person is an urban sort
is when he or she knows how to wiggle his or her uvula. The uvula
is that weird thing hanging down from the back of your mouth,
and it can be used to make speech sounds, just as the lips and the
teeth can.
the uvula.
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do the Spanish-style trill (like the one found in “perr-r-o”). That
shows that until not long ago, that kind of trill—what we think of as
a “real” r, because it is—was universal in southern France.
• But cities aren’t laid out next to each other; somehow, pronouncing
r in a brand new way hops the countryside and takes root only in
urban areas. It would appear that somewhere along the line, a certain
stratum of Europeans decided that uvular r sounds sophisticated
and took it up into their casual speech.
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the country did not pick it up and that, therefore, the linguistic map
for uvular r looks like somebody sprinkled it over much of Europe
from on high like little candy bars.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
2. Would you say that you sound differently now than at an earlier stage of
your life? Your slang has likely changed—but would someone imitate
you differently now than they would have 30 years ago? What would
the difference be?
Lecture 15: O for Oldsters in Cartoons
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P for Plurals, Q for Quiz
Lecture 16
W
e think of language as being for something, and it is—
communicating—but from that, it’s natural to think that the way
our language is built is for something, too. But it’s staggering to
find out how very much of what we say every day and think of as central
to how any rational human being would express themselves is in fact just a
jolly accident. So very much of what we do when we talk is decoration.
Plural Marking
• One of the main languages in Sudan in Africa—actually, in what is
now the nation of South Sudan—is called Dinka. As languages of the
area goes, it’s a big one: It has about 2.5 million speakers. However,
that’s fewer people than live in Chicago, and the language is rarely
committed to paper. It’s an indigenous language, and one might
suppose that it would not need to be as complex grammatically as, for
example, Russian or Greek. But it is, in fact, as complex as them—
more, really, as is usually the case with small languages.
• If you have two feet, then why don’t you read two beek instead of
books? In Old English, you did. And just like more than one child is
children, more than one lamb was lambru. You fried up your eggru,
and people talked not about breads but breadru.
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• In Dinka, one singular-plural pair is “bing” (cup) to “biiing”
(cups)—three /ee/s instead of one. So, how do you make a plural in
Dinka? It looks like you triplicate the vowel, which is weird, to us,
but not really difficult. In an alternate universe, you can conceive of
an English where the way to say cups was “cuhhhps.”
• But then, how do you make the word for plant, “waal,” into a plural?
It already has two /ah/s, and you can kind of tell it’s not going to be
“waaaaaal.” Nobody would have time to talk about plants. Rather,
“waal” becomes “wal”—you shorten the vowel. It’s hard to know
why “biiing” has three /ee/s but then while chief is “bang,” chiefs is
“baang” with just two /ah/s. How do you know whether to duplicate
or triplicate?
• Maybe there’s some light at the end of the tunnel with words like
the one for hippo. One hippo is a “roow,” but several hippos are
“root.” That looks more “normal.” Maybe the regular rule is that
you make a plural with -t just like you use -s in English, and those
first few are just weird exceptions like mice for mouse.
is “tuuk,” said on a low tone. Say it in a flutier way, and that’s the
plural version.
• So, what’s the rule for making a plural in Dinka? There isn’t one!
You just have to know. It’s as if all nouns in English were like goose
and geese or man and men. In fact, in Dinka, man is “mooc” while
men is “rooor,” and woman is “tiik” while women is “djaaar.”
• Just how children manage to pick this up is not the easiest thing
to figure out. In any case, millions of people speak this language
with ease every day. And to them, the idea that a language doesn’t
have regular plurals is normal, especially because that’s the way
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languages of this whole group work, including the Fur language of
the people in Darfur.
• There are quite a few languages in the world that just don’t care
how many of things there are. They are especially common in East
and Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. Chinese is typical
of this kind of language. When you speak Chinese, you mark things
as plural only when you’re being highly explicit and usually when
it’s a person. Otherwise, plurality is just left to context; there’s no
plural marking.
• Japanese is like that, too. There is a plural marker, a word tachi, but
it’s a mark of the goofy English speaker to tack tachi on to everything
that there is more than one of. Tachi is for people, basically.
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plural marking for a reason. But pretty quickly, you can see that that
doesn’t quite add up. Clearly, it’s not about what people are like.
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
Languages are like tartans, which are randomly elaborate patterns that become
symbolic of certain groups—not because certain colors and stripes correspond
to those groups in some logical and elemental way, but because tartans will
come out in all kinds of patterns.
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• There are other languages where the pronouns are first person,
second person, and third person—but there’s no difference between
singular and plural. It’s a little easier for an English speaker to wrap
their head around that than for many people, actually. For example,
you can refer to one person or seven million. But now imagine if
the word he could refer to one person or seven million, and then
imagine if I could also mean ‘we.’
• There are plenty of languages that exist that are like that. Having
just one pronoun for everything would make communication a little
tricky. But a difference between first person singular and first person
plural is not necessary for living life. Context usually makes it quite
clear whether you mean ‘me’ or ‘us,’ and if you mean ‘us,’ you can
just say something like “my family” or “my crowd” and move on.
• That’s a cute little story, but it’s almost too good to be true. Really,
there are two words quiz. When we use it in quizzical, it means
‘odd,’ and people were calling an odd person a quiz some years
before the Dublin story is supposed to have happened. So that
pretty much renders that tale a myth.
• Then, there is the use of quiz to mean to ‘test’ somebody. Now, that
could have morphed from the ‘weirdo’ meaning—somebody odd is
something that has to be figured out—but there are hints that this
usage came from elsewhere. Some have said that it’s from the Latin
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Qui es? meaning ‘Who are you?’ and was the way you opened an
oral exam in Latin way back when. And the first time it’s used to
mean ‘to give a test’ in writing, it’s actually spelled quies, so maybe
it started this way.
• The best bet is that quiz is from quiset, borrowed from French. But
almost certainly, the cute story about the theatre owner is better
theatre than etymology.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, What Language Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Could Be.
Lecture 16: P for Plurals, Q for Quiz
Questions to Consider
1. In English, we can say both people (an irregular plural) and persons. If
a foreigner asked which to use when, what would your advice be? Then,
try the difference between fish and fishes (as in He sleeps with the fishes
or The Seven Fishes).
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R for R-Lessness
Lecture 17
“W
hy are people doing that?” people often ask linguists. Why
do people say “birfday” instead of “birthday”? Why are
people saying “Yeah, right?” What people are often waiting
for is a concrete reason, along the lines of people seeking some kind of a
goal. After all, much of the time, when we do something, it’s for a reason,
so it’s plausible to think that language changes because people are doing
something on purpose. However, the weird thing about language is that to
such a large extent, we do it subconsciously. This lecture will give you a
panoramic sense of that by zeroing in on just one letter—r—in our lives.
In the Northeast
• There is always so very much that we do when we speak that we
aren’t aware of, even when it connects to something as elemental as
our sense of place in the world and what kind of image we would
like to present.
• So, why did the British start leaving off their r’s? We know that it
wasn’t deliberate. We also know that r’s are fragile in all languages.
They have a way of taking many forms—a “tr-r-ill” here, morphing
into a uvular buzz there. So when r’s are hanging around on the
ends of syllables, a linguist is ready for them to start acting up, just
like if vowels are hanging around on the ends of words and not
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pronounced with an accent, then you just know they are going to
wither and die someday.
• But before long, the accent we now associate with Downton Abbey
was considered normal, and it was other British accents with their
r’s that were considered provincial. That shows how arbitrary our
judgments of what sounds good in language are.
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in black English, one does not talk about someone having “flavor”
as opposed to “flava.” All of these are r-less.
• There are many reasons for this r-lessness, and they don’t have a
whole lot to do with what people were doing internationally. First,
from early on, in America, upper-crust English was r-less in New
York and Boston, specifically—not in the other big Northeastern
metropolis, Philadelphia.
• It’s very hard to tell just why and how people spoke in specific
places hundreds of years ago; no one was paying much attention,
there was no such thing as linguistics, and you couldn’t record
anything. But from what we can tell, there were two possible
reasons for r-lessness in those two cities. One does involve a
certain amount of deliberateness: It is thought that upper-crust
New Yorkers and Bostonians were imitating British people out of
a sense of social inferiority. It’s possible; only into the 20th century
did cultured Americans let go of a sense that true civilization was
across the Atlantic.
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poor people imitate rich people’s talk. If anything, it’s the other
way around.
In the South
• In the South, historically, r-lessness is most associated with
Charleston in South Carolina, and there is even a strain of
thought that traces that r-lessness to England. However, there was
something else about Charleston that distinguished it from other
Eastern cities—including ones like Philadelphia, where r-lessness
didn’t happen—and that was that it was a principal place of entry
for slaves from the Caribbean and Africa and was surrounded for
a radius of hundreds of miles by plantations. And beyond this, of
course, was the plantation South in general.
as “corrrr-nrrrr.”
• The African languages that slaves brought to the New World are
this kind, for the most part, so slaves often rendered English in
an accent that was more Japanese than European. One of the first
things to go was r’s after vowels.
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Hence, “flava” instead of “flavor.” So, why do black people say
“brotha” instead of “brother”? It’s ultimately because that’s a lot
like someone would say it who grew up speaking Kikongo or
Mende or other languages few Americans have heard of.
• So, black people are r-less not because they have something against
pronouncing what’s on the page, but because their ancestors spoke
r-less languages.
• To get back to the South in general, surely it’s not an accident that
whites are r-less exactly where African slaves were most common.
With white children on plantations often being raised by black
slave women or servants and poor whites and blacks often working
side by side, the relationship between black and white speech
in the plantation South was more intimate than it can be easy to
imagine today.
• In the South, it went both ways: Black speech got some things from
white speech, too. But r-lessness in the South started in West African
villages and wound up in Tennessee Williams. So Southerners are
r-less not because it’s hot where they live, but because they took it
in from black people.
• Time had been that the fancy New Yorker was as r-less as a
Londonian. The handiest way to get a peek at it today is in not just
old movies but ancient ones, early talkies where people are standing
around in drawing rooms sounding, frankly, almost ridiculous to
our ears.
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associated with “tawkin’ like dis,” and people started to avoid it as
much as they could, at least when they felt “on” so to speak, such
as professionally.
• Labov found that in the 1960s, people were less r-less the more
upper-crust the store—more “New Yawkese” at Klein’s than at
Macy’s and more there than at Saks. But there was nuance in it, too.
Generally, older people were more likely to be r-less, the old way.
But at Macy’s, older people were more r-full.
going to happen. No one said this, mind you, or even knew it, but
the pattern was unmistakable.
• So why did the older Macy’s clerk in New York in 1964 use more
r’s after vowels than the younger ones? Obviously, there’s no
answer if we’re waiting to hear that old Mrs. Bainbridge carefully
pastes those r’s in because she wants to sound classy—because she
didn’t even know she was doing it. But she was.
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• The lesson for today, then, is that the reason people sound the way
they do almost never traces to them doing something or meaning
something in a deliberate way. Language, to a large extent, just
happens, for all kinds of reasons. However, there are exceptions.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
2. It has been said that whatever British people are saying sounds like
Shakespeare because of the accent—at least, the more formal-sounding
British people. Earlier Americans such as Bette Davis and Franklin D.
Roosevelt sounded more like British people than any American now
does. Did they, in your opinion, sound “smart” or just stiff and strange?
(Or neither?)
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S for She
Lecture 18
O
ld English had a problem, and in this lecture, you’re going to learn
how it solved it—but then didn’t. It was all about pronouns, and it
gives us a precious look at what a language is over time, as opposed
to right now. We are often told that language changes, and the first thing that
comes to mind is slang, or how your grandparents might talk differently than
you do. But language changes also to the very depths of its being, in what
we think of as a normal sentence. It changes too slowly to process within a
single life, but there are wrenching transformations over many lives.
• First, there was creating she. We will probably never know exactly
Lecture 18: S for She
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along, a j-ness slipped in, and people were saying “hjeu.” Then,
in some places, “hjeu” could be pronounced “hjoh”—a lot like
we would prefer to say it now if it were up to us. Meanwhile, the
j-ness creates a whispery sound, and over generations, people start
making that sound as an s—“hjoh,” “hsjoh,” “sjoh,” “shoh”—and
after a while, the word was “sho.”
• Then there was the they The epic poem Beowulf, written
in Old English, is often taught
problem; “hyay” and “hay-uh” today in American schools to
just wouldn’t do. However, the show how English has evolved.
Scandinavians invaded starting
in the 8th century, and as much of a nuisance as they were in many
ways, their third person plural pronouns were just fine. They
certainly didn’t sound just like their he and she.
• The Vikings had a way of marrying women and raising bairns and
such, and their weird English became what English was after a
while. Their third person plural pronoun was they—no more “hyay”
and “hay-uh.” They probably had a way of sprinkling they into their
English because English’s crunch of “hay-ish” little words felt so
vague and inadequate.
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• At this point, we see English cleaning things up, making a she
where there was none before, letting strangers insert their own
pronoun when ours is no longer doing its job. One thing we see in
a case like this is that when clarity is really under threat, languages
have a way of cleaning themselves up.
• For some reason, English took you and ran with it in a way that
other European languages usually didn’t. Even you itself had been
pushing it. Originally, it was ye as a subject—think “Hear ye!”—
and you was the object. But around the Tudor period, people started
just yanking you into serving all purposes.
• But at the same time, thou and you start falling together. Sometimes
you see people using you to be formal and thou to be mean, and
Lecture 18: S for She
• Thou hangs around in some parts of England, but rural ones that are
located way out. For the most part, English is as ambiguous in the
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you realm as it was starting to be in the he, she, and they realm—
and nobody bats an eye.
• After the 1300s, people just stopped using man that way, instead
just jamming you in there. So today, we say, “You have to be
careful with these big corporations.” You is both underdifferentiated
and overworked.
• Just like they comes from Old Norse, in Old Norse, as it happens,
they barely used their version of “monn.” They had it, but for some
reason, they didn’t much like it; they’d just dump it and not even
bother to plug anything else in. For “Old Norse is spoken here,”
they would have had something like “Speaks Old Norse here”—no
pronoun. But if people used to that learned English, what was going
to happen to “monn”? Out it went, with nobody thinking about
issues of repair or emergency. And we’re okay.
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world; all languages go along with much, much more than human
beings actually need to communicate. Within our own languages,
everything feels so natural and ordinary that we figure it’s necessary.
• However, we can’t say that it did this because English would have
fallen apart otherwise, because not long afterward, it allowed us
to get to the point where you stands for one, two, three, or eight
billion people.
• For a while, there were even places where he and she were the
same word “hay,” and it was like that for generations. Yet we don’t
imagine those poor people in the East Midlands running around
saying, “I do wish we could make a difference between a lad and
a lady.” They made do—just as people do all over the world today
who have a pronoun that means both he and she.
• In the grand scheme of things, what English did about the third
person problem was the exception, not the rule. The rule was
English just letting things flake off that were cute enough, but
not necessary to being a language. No language just dumps all its
verbs. Some languages drift down to having almost strangely few
sounds, sometimes as few as eight or nine, but when that happens,
on average, words tend to get longer so that you have more material
to make things sound different with.
Lecture 18: S for She
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Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Does the fact that English has no difference between “you one” and
“you all” ever create confusion as you try to communicate, and if so,
if you could wave a magic wand, would you make “you all” standard
rather than colloquial?
2. One often hears sentences like “Who all is coming?” Why do people
append that all—is it redundant or handy?
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T for Tone
Lecture 19
T
he purpose of this lecture on tones is less about revealing what tones
tell us about something else or something larger than it is about giving
you a sense of what tones are like in languages and what they do. It’s
a very dense subject, but it’s something that the general public rarely gets
much of when linguists share information. Importantly, tone languages teach
us that there is amazing variety in the ways that exist of being a language.
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or ‘rough’ or ‘coarse.’ Then, if you say it with a kind of gentle
bounce—ma-a-a—it means ‘horse.’
• That’s just ma. It’s like that with every syllable in the language. Any
Mandarin Chinese name or word you hear in English is incomplete,
in that the syllable can mean countless different things depending
on the pitch: Deng Xiaoping, feng shui, and so on. Speak Mandarin
on a monotone and you basically are saying nothing. Use the wrong
tones and obviously you risk saying all kinds of funny things, such
as mixing up someone’s mother and a horse.
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• There are tonal languages all over the world, but they tend to cluster.
There’s Chinese, and that means all eight or so of the languages
that are called Chinese “dialects,” and that covers a lot of land.
Cantonese has six tones while Taiwanese has about seven or eight.
• Note that /b/ and /p/ are really variations on the same sound. Don’t
think about where they fall in that random thing called the alphabet;
think about how they feel in your mouth. /B/ is just doing /p/ with
a kind of tympani punch. Now, imagine saying “boke” and “poke.”
(Pretend that a boke is another word for ginger snap.) If you
measure somebody just talking, there’s a tendency to say a word on
Lecture 19: T for Tone
• Suppose that because /b/ and /p/ are really the same sound, they
actually become the same. That sort of thing happens all the time.
Suppose that this happened with boke and poke and that the /b/ and
/p/ both became /p/. Then, you just have poke and poke, so now
poke means both ‘ginger snap’ and ‘giving somebody a little jab.’
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• But it doesn’t—because we’ve always pronounced boke and poke
with different tones, where boke is pronounced lower and poke is
pronounced higher. We didn’t care before; we didn’t even notice.
But once it’s poke and poke, then if you listen closely, the tone
difference is still there. That’s how tone happens. In that language
now, the lower-tone poke means ‘ginger snap’ and the higher-tone
poke means ‘little jab.’
• What’s even more fun is that in many languages, the tones play
against the accent. You have to both put the accent on the right
syllable, and then you also have to get the tones right. Swedish,
for example, has tone. That’s the reason for the grand old Swedish
accent with Swedes in old movies saying things like “I’ve got To do
THE diSHES.”
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© Monkey Business/Thinkstock.
Children who grow up learning Chinese are at an advantage for having perfect
pitch because of the nature of the language, which is tonal.
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then, and it seems to be a matter of genetics more than anything.
Good musicians can learn to approximate it, but the eight-year-old
kids who can just do it are simply dear little freaks.
• This isn’t taught; it just is. This is what a brain can do if bathed in
a tone-language environment from birth. As such, a person finds
it easier to identify a B-flat pitch out of nothing, because they are
pitching their speech out of nothing day in and day out.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
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U for Understand
Lecture 20
O
ften, it’s impossible to say that something new people are doing
with language is for a concrete reason, other than that it is the nature
of human language to morph along, with new habits emerging and
old ones falling away. However, there are certainly cases where something
is happening in a language, such as English, for an identifiable reason—not
one that people are consciously thinking of, but a reason that makes sense,
that shows that there is a basic coherence in communication despite what a
magnificent mess a language is in so many ways.
• For example, take the popular term epic fail. What’s a fail? We
think of fail as a verb, and there is no such thing as “a” fail. Rather,
what happened to the noun failure? It would be one thing if this
were just an isolated expression, but it’s actually part of a trend.
Lecture 20: U for Understand
• There are people now saying, “Let’s focus on the build,” instead
of using the word construction. Others use “What’s the ask?” in
reference to someone quoting a price—ask, instead of request, for
example. People sometimes note that a person offered an interesting
solve, or people do a reveal instead of a revelation. Have we
no suffixes?
• The truth is that people are doing this out of a quest for order.
In terms of feel, it is indeed slangy and a tad dramatic; there is a
fundamental tendency among humans to seek a certain extravagance
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in speech. Something was once nifty, then keen, then groovy, then
cool, then wicked, awesome, rad, and so on. “Cool beans,” people
even say—the expressions don’t even have to make sense—but the
point is the novelty, the weirdness.
• Obviously, under and stand came together and created not a term
about standing under things, but a whole new word that refers to
comprehension. And that process is one way that languages are
always building new things while other ones wear away. Some
sounds fall away, such as the silent /e/ at the end of words. Some
words disappear, as whom clearly wants to if we would only let it.
• The story of fail and solve and such begins with things like that, the
building of new words. Now, we get closer to what fail and solve
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are about in that these fusions have a way of drifting from what
they started out as meaning.
• So, words come together to make new ones, but then the words
go idiomatic on you. This is the same kind of process that occurs
with compounds, such as blackbird. With compounds, words come
together and neither of them becomes a prefix or a suffix, but the
meaning of the two together becomes more specific than the literal
meaning. A blackbird is a certain species of black bird.
Idiom Creation
• Idiom creation is useful in itself, because it creates new words just
like the initial snapping together of words does. What else would we
call a transmission in a car? Whatever it was, it would come from
Lecture 20: U for Understand
• However, then we get to epic fail and “What’s the ask?” We think
to ourselves, “What about failure?” It means more in English as we
speak it than the act of failing. It has connotations. One thinks not
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just of something as simple and bland as something intended but
not achieved, but of the failing happening in a context of urgent
expectation that there would be success, with the failing implying a
judgment over an entire enterprise or a life.
• Failure has idiomatized some, as words will always do. So, if you
want a noun to indicate something not working out in a less loaded,
more literal, cleaner way than failure, then one way is to wipe the
moss off of failure and just say fail. You can get away with it in
English because in this language, it’s normal for nouns and verbs
to both be bare: You can copy a copy; you can view a view. So, you
can fail, and thereby have experienced a fail. It’s creative, and it’s
based on a quest for clean, direct expression.
• The reveal makes perfect sense. Revelation doesn’t refer only to the
revealing of something; it’s undergone a certain idiomatization. We
associate revelation with long-standing secrets. We also associate it
with concepts rather than things, such as Watergate. If you want to
refer to an act of revealing without all of the static, then how about
reveal? It’s an impulse to go back to the basics.
• Fail and solve and ask and the rest exist because people are seeking
to clear away the idiomized connotations that words accrete over
time, in order to express direct, undecorated concepts. It’s the same
impulse that traditional grammarians consider healthy in other
contexts: directness and clarity over implication and ambiguity.
• Oddly, the dudes and dudettes using these words this way today are
in a way feeling the same way about English as some of the stuffy
old grammarians of the 1800s did. If you’re at a loose end, it can be
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fun surveying the notions some of these men and women with three
names had about what was right and what was wrong.
• We like to think that things mean what they say they mean. The
word understand has never made sense—you aren’t standing under
anything—so technically, it should be deemed “not an English
word.” But if we banned it, we’d deprive ourselves of a glimmer of
insight it gives into ancient Germanic people.
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Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. “Failed Flee Across Ice” a sign reads. What motivates someone to write
flee rather than flight?
2. We know that idioms like kick the bucket are “just expressions.” But can
we say that verb-particles like turn up (as in ‘to appear after being thought
lost’) and make up (as in ‘to reconcile’) are “just expressions,” too?
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V for Vocabulary
Lecture 21
P
eople often wonder whether some languages have bigger vocabularies
than others. We are often taught that English has the biggest vocabulary
and that we should be proud of that. It’s fun to be proud, and whether
or not some languages are “bigger” than others is an interesting question.
The problem is that when you try to give it a real answer, that answer turns
out to be highly elusive. In fact, the question as to whether English has a
bigger vocabulary than other languages ends up being as ethereal as the
question of what the difference between a language and a dialect is.
Vocabulary Words
• One of the main problems with the question of whether some
languages have a bigger vocabulary than others is deciding what a
word exactly is. We think we know: apple, already, parsimonious,
bubble, rhinoceros. But it’s harder than that. Is spoons a different
word from spoon? Probably not. What about when verbs are
irregular? Is has a different word from have? We’d have to decide.
An is a form of a; is it a separate word?
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apply makeup? If makeup is a word, then why isn’t making up, of
your face, a word, too? Make up also means to fabricate something;
isn’t that another word?
• But things get hairier in other cases like this. For example, the pair
of words pick up has over a dozen meanings. You never think about
that; people learning English do, though. And with all of those
meanings, can we really just say that all English has is two words
pick and up? But, how do we decide which of these combinations
are words and which are just variations on one another? It gets into
the fuzzy language-dialect kind of distinction again. English has
hundreds of these constructions with verbs and little particles like
up and out.
• Then there’s the problem of what a language even is. Take Arabic,
a language that its speakers and fans often celebrate as being big
like English in terms of vocabulary. In fact, Arabic as a term really
refers to several distinct languages. The Modern Standard Arabic
of the printed page and formal contexts is as different from what an
Arab speaks casually as Latin is from Italian, and then the casual
Arabic of a Moroccan is as different from the casual Arabic of a
Syrian as Italian is from French.
• Just as with Chinese, the general feeling is that all of these are
“dialects” of the language Arabic because of the shared cultural
heritage and the fact that almost all Arabics are written with the
same system, with a major exception being Maltese Arabic.
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is, different languages, as we think of most naturally. But to most
of us, that wouldn’t feel meaningfully comparable to counting the
number of words in Polish, or even English.
• Slang is words. Just because they smell like socks doesn’t mean
they don’t qualify for the count, after all. But most slang comes and
goes. Does it count? Do we count the slang of all parts of society?
How far back do we want to go? Back in the day, one way of
making fun of classical music was to call it “longhair” music. The
expression is now antique. Does it belong in a dictionary? And, did
it belong in a dictionary 50 years ago?
• What about slang like diss? This one looks like it’s here to stay;
some slang is sticky for some reason. So maybe that one can squeak
into the dictionary and be considered a real word—but what about
people who would object that we already have disrespect and that
the word is improper?
• Figuring out just what words are and which ones we want to count
is so slippery when you think about what the entirety of a language
is that the whole question as to whose is bigger more or less falls
apart. Some people will tell you that English’s magic bullet is that
it has borrowed so many words, from Old Norse, Scandinavian,
French, Latin, and Greek especially.
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Persian, Vietnamese, Turkish, and the hundreds of indigenous
languages in Australia all have deeply bastard vocabularies.
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• A related idea you might encounter is that thesauruses are almost
unknown for languages other than English, meaning that they
just don’t have as many synonyms to tease apart. But this is more
a matter of cultural preference. Truthfully, thesauruses tend to be
among the books more visually than practically significant in the
home. One could certainly compile thesauruses based on other
languages.
whose earlier stages are lost to history; we can only surmise about
them using intelligent guesswork, of the kind that lets us know what
the Proto-Indo-European language was like, for example.
• And that means that for most languages, there is no such thing
as a book that gathers centuries of words, used and obsolete, and
presents them as part of the language in an abstractified sense. In
any language, words come and words go. If the language is English,
somebody probably gets it down on paper, and as such, it continues
to have a kind of existence, because we can experience it forever.
134
• But if it’s most languages, then when the word goes out of fashion
and stops being used, then, ultimately, it’s gone. In most languages,
the vocabulary is what its speakers can actually retain in their heads
for living use. Naturally, that is not 600,000 words.
• Sometimes you read that small languages have only a few thousand
words. However, that isn’t written on high anywhere either, and
it’s a little low. We get closer to the truth from dictionaries written
by people who have devoted a whole career to the language or
much of it and have consulted a good number of native speakers.
Dictionaries like that tend to have about 20,000 or 25,000 words.
• Given that it’s all but impossible for even these sources to be
absolutely complete, we can say that unwritten, indigenous
languages generally have a few tens of thousands of what we
would intuitively think of as words. That is, they have the number
of words that humans need to express themselves with both clarity
and nuance, plus artistically when necessary. In terms of whether
some small languages have bigger vocabularies than other small
languages, we have to figure out what a word is first.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
2. Explain what epistemological means. Just try. Some people say that they
know how to use it but can’t explain what it means.
135
W for What’s Up, Doc?
Lecture 22
I
n this lecture, taking a page from the issue of whether slang counts as
vocabulary, you will take a closer look at slang and its place in what
a language is. People wonder about slang. Often, they wonder whether
there is more of it now than there once was. They wonder why we seem to
use so much more profanity than we used to. These are real issues, and one
way to get a grasp of it is—of all things—Bugs Bunny.
• The director of the first One of the most famous cartoon characters
Bugs Bunny cartoon, from the Looney Tunes series is Bugs
Bunny, who has many catchphrases,
Tex Avery, explained including “What’s up, Doc?”
that “What’s Up,
Doc?” was Texas slang in the 1920s; specifically, among young
people, there was a “Doc” expression that was used as slang. Today,
that is utterly forgotten.
136
• We now know that teenagers in Texas back then had slang, and we
can be quite sure that “Doc” wasn’t somehow the only bit of slang
they ever came up with. They were young people spending lots of
time together, as derisive and jolly as modern teens are. So, they
had slang—lots of it. It’s just that no one had any reason to write it
down. Plus, we can’t hear them; there was no reason for ordinary
people to be recorded speaking casually in the 1920s.
• But we can know that for some years in the 1920s, some of them
were saying, “What’s up, Doc?” as a greeting, and meaning it
straight, because the expression was new and Bugs Bunny didn’t
exist. So, we don’t know what the slang among Texas teens was in
the 1920s, except for the word “Doc,” but we know they had it, and
by extension, we know that teens all over the country had their own
varieties, differing from place to place but always there.
137
• However, in all times among all humans as far as we know, there
have always been young people. Also, groups hardly have to be
young, and even among older people, it’s hard to find a person
whose vocabulary consists only of words that have existed since
time immemorial. Everybody was young once, and you don’t stop
wanting to play with language just because you’ve reproduced.
138
• In other books, you can get a peek at the kind of slang that American
undergrads were using. In the late 1800s, at Williams College,
the jocular word for ‘toilet’ was lem. At the same time, they were
calling it a minor at Harvard.
• The old days were full of slang. Much of what’s different today
is that slang is aired publicly in a way that would be considered
unthinkable before. Much of the slang from the past never met the
page, or it did only once in someone’s attempt at a lexicon of what
they called vulgar terms or colloquialisms, and then disappeared
forever. However, we are a much less formal culture than we once
were in terms of dress, dance style, mannerisms, mores, cultural
tastes, and therefore, of course, language.
139
him were using some terms that the era of I Love Lucy and I Like
Ike just wasn’t ready for.
• And they do. Today, although nobody would put it in just such a
way—and, in fact, journalists are already doing pieces where
they claim that LOL means just about anything—it actually has a
function: It signals basic empathy between texters. What began as
signifying laughter morphed into a little piece of stuff that eases
Lecture 22: W for What’s Up, Doc?
• LOL is informal (it won’t be making its way into any new
constitutions or legal documents), stands in for something else (in
this case, all of the nervous laughing and standing on one foot and
looking into the distance that we do in live conversation to keep
things light), and is associated with young people. That is, we’re in
slang world.
140
and dude for ‘my good fellow’ among modern male persons.
Overall, though, the slang that feels so much more “us now” than
“them then” is not as new as it feels.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. What is an expression that was part of the warp and woof of speech
when you were growing up that ended up going by the wayside? Would
you put it in a dictionary?
2. Are terms we use with children, such as doggie and tummy, slang? If
not, what are they? Should they be in a dictionary, or are they “not really
words”—and if not, why?
141
X for !Xóõ, Y for Yiddish
Lecture 23
!X
óõ is a language with clicks in it, and the exclamation point
stands for a click. When you say the name of the language,
!Xóõ, the first sound is a click combined with the /kh/ sound in
Bach. Then, you say “oh-ong.” There are two o’s in sequence: One of them
has a high tone, and the other one is nasal, like the word bon for ‘good’ in
French. This is all very interesting, and that’s just the name of the language!
!Xóõ
• !Xóõ is one of a whole group of click languages, called the Khoisan
family. Depending on where you draw the line between language
and dialect, which is a pretty arbitrary business, there are about
a dozen of these languages or three dozen. They’re spoken in the
southern part of Africa, by people who were once called Bushmen
and Hottentots, although those terms are now inappropriate.
• !Xóõ has more sounds than any other language. There are about
164 consonants in one dialect of !Xóõ, and of them, 111 of them are
clicks. Some of them make you suck in; other ones make you push
out. Sometimes, there are ones that make you do a kiss.
• The clicks aren’t just decorations. They aren’t only used in names,
or words for noises or animals, or to ask people to come toward
you. They are actual sounds, just like the regular consonants.
In fact, words are more likely to start with a click than a regular
consonant. In addition to clicks, !Xóõ has tones, like Chinese, and
creaky sounds, like the ones found in Southeast Asia.
142
• Clearly, this is a very hard language for foreigners to learn. It
even does some damage to its native speakers; click-language
speakers have a bump on their larynx that comes from spending
their lives doing these clicks.
The grammar is tough in many
ways, too: !Xóõ has a lot of the
crazy plurals that are in Dinka,
• Where did the clicks come from? That question is what starts us
down the road of identifying these languages as the first ones. The
clicks aren’t something that just happens in languages in other
places. Some languages spoken near the click languages have
inherited some clicks over time, and that’s why languages like
Xhosa and Zulu have some clicks.
• Otherwise, the only other language on the planet that has been
known to have clicks was a language spoken during initiation
ceremonies by one single group of Australian aboriginal people.
What happened in southern Africa? The question is so difficult that
some people have found it easier to turn the whole issue upside
down—suppose the click languages were the first human language,
and then what happened after that is that the clicks got lost as
humans moved elsewhere.
143
• Of course, that still technically leaves the question as to how the
clicks started, but if we’re talking about the first language, then
just maybe the clicks came before speech. Even today, some click-
language speakers use only clicks when they’re hunting. Perhaps
speech grew out of that, giving us a way to imagine how you get a
language with clicks in it.
• But this account only works if at first there isn’t a language. Why
would you have a language, then start clicking at animals, and then
start using those clicks while you’re saying something to another
person? And if by chance you were that sort of person, why would
people start imitating you? So, if the clicks were first, then it would
have been among people who didn’t have language yet. Today,
there are no languageless people, so this would have had to be the
first language—right?
• One would surmise that they are related to the more southerly click-
language speakers, and indeed, archaeological evidence shows
that click-language speakers were once more widespread and that
Lecture 23: X for !Xóõ, Y for Yiddish
only later did another group, called the Bantu, migrate downward
and cover the territory and leave the click-language speakers as
speckles on the map. That means the two click languages stranded
up in Tanzania are remnants of a time when the click language area
was continuous.
• If you compare the DNA of those Tanzanians and the other click-
language speakers, you do find a relationship. However, these
days, researchers can go from groups’ DNA to measure how much
time has passed since the groups started splitting off and becoming
different people with different languages. One study of that kind has
shown that the click-language speakers started becoming different
144
groups about 70,000 years ago, which is exactly when humans
started migrating out of Africa.
• There are three kinds of languages that belong to the family called
Khoisan, and technically, other than the clicks, these languages are
very, very different. The ones in the south, like !Xóõ, have the crazy
plurals. The ones in the middle are like Chinese, with no prefixes
and suffixes and lots of tone. Then, the ones in the north have
nine genders.
• But in the end, a sadder story the click languages are telling is
about extinction. There is a very real possibility that none of these
languages will be spoken a hundred years from now—or, at most,
just one. Several of them have gone extinct over the past century,
and many of them are disappearing so fast that there’s a question
as to whether researchers will even get to them in time to describe
how they work.
145
• As with Ket, there are people who ask why we should care about a
language dying, and languages like !Xóõ give a useful answer, in that
it’s so difficult and peculiar that essentially only natives can do it in
any real way. These days, only a few thousand people speak !Xóõ. It
would be especially unfortunate if we couldn’t even get languages
like this down on paper and on recordings so that we can at least
know what they were like—and figure out more about where they
came from and what they can tell us about the human story.
Yiddish
• Yiddish is that odd story about the death of a language that isn’t
dying at all. Yiddish is a Germanic language. In the classificational
sense, it is a dialect of German with a heavy overlay of words
from Hebrew and Slavic languages, because of the history of the
Jewish people who have spoken it. That history is also much of
why it is considered a separate language from German; as always,
what decides these things is based on humanity, not formulas.
Generally, Yiddish to German is Maltese to Arabic, where Maltese
has a massive load of Italian vocabulary, but when you scrape the
surface, you see Arabic underneath.
preserve it, there are those who say that the very existence of efforts
like those means that the language will never truly live again.
Once there’s a revival movement, it’s already dead, some say.
Frankly, there’s a lot of truth in that statement—but not when it’s
about Yiddish.
146
• There are about 150,000 Americans alone speaking Yiddish in the
home—not in some class, not in a summer program, not for fun.
There are about 20,000 more people doing that in Canada and many
more in other places.
• Whence the idea, then, that Yiddish is dying? It’s that old sense that
language is in print instead of in the mouth. From there, it’s natural
to feel like a language doesn’t really exist unless it is thriving on
the page. But that’s an illusion due to the invention of print just
several centuries ago. There are about 5,900 languages that are only
spoken, yet surely we can’t tell their speakers that the languages
they learn on their mommies’ knees aren’t “real.”
• So, Yiddish isn’t dying in the least. There would seem to be a notion
that if it is only being spoken casually in homes then it is not alive,
but this is nonsensical. A dying language is a Native American
language that is now spoken only by people in late middle age or
older, that youngsters of the culture only know some words of—that
is, most Native American languages or the Aboriginal languages
in Australia. A dying language is Ket, now spoken by only a few
hundred people.
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Can you say “!Xóõ”? Just do it a few times (perhaps wipe your nose and
mouth), and through this alone, savor the marvel of linguistic diversity.
147
Z for Zed
Lecture 24
W
e sense the letter z as an odd letter. It’s at the end of the alphabet.
It’s associated with the sound of bees flying, which we sense as
vaguely threatening. But in fact, z is more a part of us than we
think. It is quite different from what it seems, and the reason is that eternally
tricky difference between language on the page versus language in the
mouth. A grammarian got it right in 1582 when he said that “z is a consonant
much heard amongst us, and seldom seen.”
148
• However, for the Phoenicians, zayin wasn’t something vaguely
sinister to tack on to the end of the line. They made it the seventh
letter; to them, the /zz/ sound was perfectly natural, perfectly
common, and therefore quite plausibly situated where today we
put g.
• The Greeks liked it, too. But for a reason we’ll never know, they got
the name wrong. The Phoenicians had another letter called tsade,
for the sound /ts/. Maybe the Greeks tripped up on how similar /ts/
and /z/ are, but all we know is that they picked up that “I” and called
it zeta, from tsade, instead of zayin. In Phoenician’s close relative
Hebrew, Americans to this day learn about the z letter zayin, but
fraternities use the Greek “Z” letter, zeta, in their names.
• Still, to the Greeks, misnamed or not, the /z/ sound wasn’t odd or
“other” at all. Rather, that’s how the Romans felt about it when they
picked up the Greek alphabet, and there was a reason: Latin didn’t
have a /z/ sound itself.
• For the Romans, /z/ was just a sound that popped up in the words
they borrowed from Greek. So at first, they didn’t even bother to
bring it at all. But time passed, and they liked borrowing those
words. They never gave them back, so they needed a z around. But
not in spot seven getting in the way; z was special, so the Romans
stuck it onto the end.
• In Old English, there were really both s and z, but only s was
written; z was something that happened, sometimes, to what
was written as s. What was written as s turned to a z when it was
between two vowels.
149
• For example, the word rise, even now, is spelled with an s, but what
we say is a z. If we said it with an s, we’d be saying rice, which
we aren’t and shouldn’t. That’s how it was in Old English, too: the
word for ‘rise’ was “ree-san,” but the way it was pronounced was
“ree-zan.” To speak the language was to know that subconsciously.
But under that way of thinking, /z/ wasn’t a “real” sound; it was just
something that happened to the letter s sometimes. You didn’t need
to write z; it was just something you did. But you did it all the time.
• But how would the Anglo-Saxons write words that began with z,
like zone and zealous? Would they really write them with an s and
just expect people to know to pronounce them as a z? The answer
is that there were no such words in Old English. Words that started
with z were borrowed later from French and Greek.
• The addition of these new words meant that English needed an actual
written z now, and in the Middle Ages, English started using the letter
z—but only so much. By the Middle Ages, certain spelling conventions
had settled in, and nobody was interested in going back and sticking z’s
in everywhere where what was written as s was actually pronounced as
z. So we kept spelling rise the way it has always been spelled, with an
incoherent s to confuse children until the end of time.
• Even now, the English hold on to the old tradition a little more than
we do; they spell words like analyze with an s (analyse), so you just
have to know that it’s really pronounced as a z. In America, Noah
Webster undertook spelling reforms in the early 19th century, and
while there’s much to be said about what did and didn’t work and
why, when it comes to Webster, we have to give it to him for giving
poor z a little more air to breathe.
Lecture 24: Z for Zed
• It even seems not to quite know what its name is. The Brits still
call it “zed.” That makes sense—it’s how zeta would come out in
150
English after being chewed up forever. But what, then, is this “zee”
business that seems to so normal to us? That started as an alternate
in Britain, actually. The French had a tradition of naming letters by
their sound plus an /ee/ or an /ay/: “beee, “deee,” and so on. So,
according to the pattern, the proper name for “zed” was “zee.”
• But what about the shape? First it was like an “I,” but it was the kind
of “I” you could use as a weapon, so imagine the top and bottom
strokes a touch on the long side. Now, imagine writing that over
and over again. Wouldn’t you start doing it all in one continuous
stroke—top, zip down and to the left, bottom—so that you made
the whole thing without even having to lift your pen? The Greeks
started doing that after a while, and that’s the Z we know today.
• But there’s one more place z sits hiding in plain sight. The plural
marker in English is s—as in “wallz,” “doorz,” “kidz,” “blobz,” “pigz,”
“dayz,” “hedgez,” “judgez,” and “kissez”? Note that we don’t say
“walls” and “bridges.” All of those are more cases where the printed
page makes us think about an s when really we’re saying a “z.”
• And those words aren’t exceptions; they’re the norm. It’s only after
some sounds that we actually say “s” for the plural: “cats,” “caps,”
“ducks.” But most of the time, you’ll notice that the plural marker
is pronounced as a “z.”
151
• People like Noah Webster missed things like that, but they’re just
as real as the /z/ sound in analyze. A lot more of what we hear and
see around us as language is “real,” as opposed to something else,
something more an approximation of language than language itself.
• According to what the powers that be teach us, only a certain few
languages are “real,” and they’re mostly from Europe. If pressed,
we might throw in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew,
Persian, and probably Hindi. But that’s because we think of them
as languages written down a lot. According to that metric, and
we breathe this in without even being able to think about it, other
languages are just “dialects.”
Suggested Reading
Questions to Consider
1. Just as we utter the /z/ sound much more than we are always aware,
Lecture 24: Z for Zed
152
Bibliography
Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. New
York: William Morrow and Co., 1990. Unsurpassed as a jolly, often laugh-
out-loud trip through the history of English, still probably America’s favorite
source on the subject after almost 25 years at this writing.
153
coverage and arrangement that make it still invaluable despite the Internet
that has come into existence since its first edition. Captures between two
covers a magnificent volume of information, much of it otherwise hard
to access.
———. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Linguists’ anti-prescriptivist
stance summarized in a pointed yet temperate tone in a single book, well
keyed to the world we live in today.
Falk, Dean. Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of
Language. New York: Basic Books, 2009. This is one of many attempts
to solve the language origin question, and like all of them, leaves as many
questions as answers. However, Falk’s presentation is extremely insightful,
as well as readable, and has always struck me as the most intriguing of the
more accessible speculations (as opposed to ones such as that language
emerged when early humans gossiped while grooming one another).
and Language. New York: Walker & Company, 2011. Few people get around
to writing about what it was like to learn a foreign language, and almost none
address at any length the special task an Indo-European language speaker
faces in learning a tonal language. Fallows actually devotes a compact
154
memoir to that issue, with useful observations on the difficulties of learning,
in general, a language with fundamental structures so unlike ours, as well as
where the problems intersect with cultural differences. This is the handiest
source I know on getting a sense of what a tonal language is like beyond
elementary observations such as mine.
155
———. The Social Stratification of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006. This second edition of a book originally published
in 1966 preserves a detailed account of Labrov’s research project and
adds a summary statement of the progress of this kind of inquiry in the
decades since.
Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins and How We Know Them: Etymology for
Everyone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Liberman’s exploration
of etymologies benefits from a wry, erudite sense of humor and an awesome
command of European languages. He gives a sense of how challenging it is
to recover the origins of many of even the most ordinary words of English,
while also showing what is really needed to arrive at answers where they
exist. This book can serve as a calling card for something even handier in
these times, Liberman’s weekly blog at Oxford University Press’ website.
McWhorter, John H. Doing Our Own Thing. New York: Gotham Books,
2003. An anthropological description of a shift in American language culture
over the 20th century from a sense that public language should be highly
formalized to one seeking to bring public language closer to the norms of
casual speech. Beware the mistake many made when it was published of
expecting a rant against the public’s “bad grammar,” which it is not.
———. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English. New
York: Gotham Books, 2008. This book describes the Celtic grammatical
infusion that English underwent, followed by the simplification of its
grammar by Scandinavian invaders. The thrust is that the history of English
is more interesting than the fact that it has a mixed vocabulary. Prescriptivism
and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that grammar shapes the way we think)
are engaged along the way.
156
———. What Language Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Could Be. New York:
Gotham Books, 2011. “Normal” languages are the ones learned by few
adults and spoken by small numbers of people, which have complexified to
a massive degree over the millennia. In this light, English and other “big”
languages are the abnormal ones, sanded down by adult learners over time.
This book shows what “normal” languages are like, with the goal of creating
a view of English as something more than a collection of rules too often
broken.
———. Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014. The claim that a language’s grammar makes
its speakers see the world in a particular way is very popular with the media
and general public, despite that academic studies confirm only imperceptibly
slight differences in cognition caused by such language differences. This
book explores the gap between academic and public perceptions on this
issue and offers that it is more empirical, as well as fruitful and respectful
of indigenous groups, to focus on what languages show people to have
in common.
Nagle, Stephen, and Sara L. Sanders, eds. English in the Southern United
States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. While this is an
anthology of academic articles, most of them are accessible to the layperson,
and this is an excellent source for those interested in current views (as
opposed to the rather antique ones outlined in many classic sources) on the
origins of Southern English and its relationship to black American speech.
157
much data that one almost wishes he had written a reference book. However,
one can also essentially use this as such, in which case it is an invaluable
collection of information on language history, of a kind often alluded to
in other sources without elucidation (i.e., What exactly were Akkadian,
Babylonian, Aramaic, Luvian, Sumerian, Elamite, etc., and what happened
to them?).
Partridge, Eric, ed. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1963. This book, commonly referred to by writers on slang,
profanity, and their history, is available in the typical university library and
brings together information from various renditions of a source dating back
to the 18th century. Here one can see how copious and vibrant slang was for
people centuries removed from us.
Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
This is the prettiest of the available primers on how writing emerged and
evolved; a treatment of the subject needs illustrations, and this book has
Bibliography
those in color—a child would enjoy just paging through it. Plus, Robinson
covers the subject just enough for those disinclined to academic obsession, a
danger in books on this subject, in which it is easy to lay on a tad too many
descriptions of yet another variation on, for example, the letter a.
158
Rosten, Leo, and Lawrence Bush. The New Joys of Yiddish. New York:
Harmony, 2003. Rosten’s original edition of this book has been a jolly classic
for decades, focused mostly on Yiddish words and expressions and their
expression of the culture. Some have been less than happy with Lawrence
Bush’s modernization, which incorporates aspects of modernity, including
political views, and thus becomes somewhat less “cozy” than the original.
However, outsiders would be deprived of a crucial aspect of the Yiddish
story without coverage of the new revival movements of recent times, and
this book lends a fine introduction to these.
Sacks, David. Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from
A to Z. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. This is an engagingly written and
scientifically scrupulous coverage of, actually, the birth of writing, in which
articles on each of the letters are the main course but only one part of the
book’s message. To learn about the history of a letter, start here—or use the
whole book as a way to inhale the invention of the alphabet without feeling
like you’re in school.
Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1997. Of the various textbooks on pidgins and creoles, this
is the clearest, most up to date, and most worldwide in its orientation. Run,
don’t walk—this one made me decide not to write one of my own.
159
more complex when adults have rarely learned them, carefully distinguishing
this insight from the broader fact that cultural factors overall can also influence
languages to an extent. Trudgill has a gift for being concise yet complete, such
that his book is the most readable of the increasing number of explorations of
this thesis.
160