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Literature
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Language A to Z
Language A to Z
Course Guidebook
Professor John McWhorter
Columbia University
PB2291A
Guidebook
Subtopic
Linguistics
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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
TVs 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 Aramaic3
Lecture 2
B for Baby Mama10
Lecture 3
C for Compounds16
Lecture 4
D for Double Negatives22
Lecture 5
E for Etymology28
Lecture 6
F for First Words34
Lecture 7
G for Greek Alphabet41
Lecture 8
H for Hobbits48
Lecture 9
I for Island55
Lecture 10
J for Jamaican61
iii
Table of Contents
Lecture 11
K for Ket67
Lecture 12
L for Like74
Lecture 13
M for Maltese80
Lecture 14
N for Native American English86
Lecture 15
O for Oldsters in Cartoons92
Lecture 16
P for Plurals, Q for Quiz99
Lecture 17
R for R-Lessness105
Lecture 18
S for She112
Lecture 19
T for Tone118
Lecture 20
U for Understand124
Lecture 21
V for Vocabulary130
Lecture 22
W for Whats Up, Doc?136
Lecture 23
X for !X, Y for Yiddish142
iv
Table of Contents
Lecture 24
Z for Zed148
Supplemental Material
Bibliography153
Typographical Conventions
This guidebook uses the following typographical conventions:
vi
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).
Language A to Z
Scope:
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.
Then, while those variations in themselves are largely random, differences
between the ways that segments of society talk can be indexed to
sociohistorical factors in ways that reveal subconscious aspects of
psychology and even teach us about ancient human migrations otherwise
lost to history. Seemingly minor things, such as the way people of a certain
age sometimes shape a certain vowel or pronounce r, can be tied to societal
shifts that the people themselves may not even be consciously attending to.
Aspects of a languages vocabulary or its sounds can be tied to migrations
and takeovers otherwise only vaguely alluded to in folktales, if at all, as we
see regarding the click languages of Africa and some deeply obscure ones
of Indonesia.
Scope
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.
A for Aramaic
Lecture 1
e will never know how Middle Easterners 2,500 years ago would
have felt about todays 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 Gilligans 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 worldwas Aramaic.
Aramaic Language
Aramaic had been the star language of the world since the 7th
century B.C., but today, its 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
la Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard.
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
conquerees to distant corners of the empire, such as Egypt. This
spread Aramaic far and wide, and soon people were learning it from
the cradle throughout the Fertile Crescent.
that one day ice cream and stockings and iPads were going to be
sold in Hebrewwith all anachronism-related adjustments made,
of courseand this is why portions of the Bible were written in
Aramaic rather than Hebrew.
What put the final stamp on Aramaics 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.
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 Akkadianwhat 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,
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.
Suggested Reading
Jastrow, The Neo-Aramaic Languages.
Ostler, Empires of the World.
Questions to Consider
1. Do you think Americans are currently well advised to learn Chinese?
Why or why not?
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 babys mother. The term has become established as a
reference to the mother of ones 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
youll 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.
10
In fact, baby mama and baby daddy are not just isolated expressions.
They are examples of grammar of what linguists refer to as African
American Vernacular English, Black English, or (since the 1990s)
Ebonicsand it existed long before rap music.
That means that white and black people tend to speak English with
different accentsthat 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.
11
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 Bebes, but
Bebeand black audiences spontaneously recognized that way of
putting it as local and real.
Black English has its own different take on have, and its 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.
12
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.
13
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 sisters 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 Goldwells wife and Barlowe owne brother instead
of Barlowes own brother. Many of these people were due for
transportation to plantations in Virginia and beyond. Baby mama
wasnt long in coming.
Besides that, if you were trying to learn English really fast, and only
from hearing people talk and imitating them, cant you imagine that
even when they were using the possessive s all nice and tidythat
while you were sorting out things like the past tense of see being
saw and the plural of man being menyou might find yourself
leaving off persnickety things like that s?
Adults learning languages around the world round the corners a bit
in situations like this, just as we do when we are getting pretty good
at French or Spanish but still dont command the little stuff.
s the same way. Its not that they never used itjust not always. It
became an option rather than a rule.
Baby mama, then, is a symptom of the birth of Ebonics as a mashup of assorted British regional dialects, seasoned by a sprinkle of
streamlining that any language could benefit from. In English, the
plural of lamb used to be lambru. Arent you glad it isnt now?
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, theyre channeling Bob
Crachit more than Bob Marley.
Suggested Reading
Green, African American English.
Nagle and Sanders, eds., English in the Southern United States.
Questions to Consider
1. Black English is simpler Standard English, but Standard English is
simpler Old English. Is there an argument that Standard English is,
therefore, bad grammar? Why or why not?
2. What aspect of French or Spanish have you found hardest to learn, and
15
C for Compounds
Lecture 3
ussian has enough noun and verb endings to sink a boat. But it
doesnt 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 Englishby using willis very subtle and very complicated,
but we walk around doing it as easily as we breathe.
16
On the one hand, English uses suffixes like -ment and -ation to
make nounsfor example, govern to government and dispute to
disputation. But on the other hand, those suffixes dont always
work: How would you make the verb recall into a noun? Theres no
recallment or recallation. Thats 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 wouldnt say re-CALL.
But its not just that one word; its a process. Its the same with
how we can rebel against something and become a RE-bel or
record something to create a RE-cord. These arent just one-offs.
There is a piece of grammar that we all have deep in our brains
according to what we know now, it wouldnt be surprising to find
it in the temporal lobe somewhere and possibly on the left side
that changes a words part of speech with the strange little move of
putting the accent up front.
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. Its because
access road is so conventionalized a concept that it is a compound,
a new word despite its spelling as two.
the accent shift. Its 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 well
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.
18
Take one episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1973.
The characters order Chinese food. However, even as late as the
Watergate era, theyre calling it Chinese FOOD instead of the
way we say it now, ChiNESE food.
But its not that those actors talked funny; Mary Tyler Moore
and Valerie Harper talk just like other Americans. It was because
Chinese food wasnt a thing yet, and therefore, it wasnt a
compound for all American English speakers. It was still a little
exotic. People didnt usually have woks at home, and we were still
a more steak-and-potatoes country.
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 isnt a thing.
20
But it was this accent backshift process that created the word
originally that now feels like its just one thing instead of two.
Sometimes, spelling has completely caught up with spoken reality,
and we really cant have any idea how central compounding was to
the words we use every day.
You might think that if a rosy is a cute lil rose and a piggy is a cute
lil pig, then a daisy is a cute lildaze? A daisy is not a kind of
daze, especially because really theres no such thing as a daze. The
word daisy started as days eye.
really Marys land, or are we just saying basically the same thing as
Marilyn Monroes first name but spelling it differently? Today, the
land part just hangs there deadits a mumbled little lin. Think
about breakfast: What fast do you think of yourself as breaking?
Penny LANE, and the Beatles lyric wouldnt scan properly with
the music, and theyd 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
Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language.
Questions to Consider
1. Why do some people say GREEN beans, with the accent on green
rather than beans?
21
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 dont get to play around with. There were special
negative versions of some verbs. So, you could have, or if you didnt have,
you naved. Somebody was, or if they werent, then somebody nas. So, in Old
English, to say I have ships, you said Ic hbbe scipu, and to say I dont have
ships, you could say Ic nbbe 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 dont walk is Je NE
marche PAS. If youve ever thought that was kind of swell, then
you wouldve liked early English, where things were the same
way: ne before and nought after. He doesnt speak was He NE
speketh NAWT.
22
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
its actually spoken, where to sound like a person instead of a book,
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,
were 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, dont they? So if you say I dont see nothing, then
that means that nothing is not what you see and that, therefore, you
must see something.
Its one thing to be able to work out that two negatives technically
could be taken to indicate a positive, but its 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
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
Standard English is
one of hundreds of
23
Englishes. Double negatives are fine in English overall; its just that
something is up with one of the dialects.
24
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 cant sing. Ic
ne con noht singan was literally I cant sing nothing, and it meant I
cant 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.
We dont 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; theyre happening now.
Its 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 dont have the same word for you in the singular
and the plural. Older English didnt either; there was thou in the
singular and you for the plural. And thats 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; theres one language that
happens to do it the English way.
Its 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. Theres 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.
Listen closely to someone from the band of states that runs roughly
from Pennsylvania west to about Utah, and youll catch sentences
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
, The Fight for English.
Questions to Consider
1. If double negatives arent 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 Aint Got Nobody if it were
27
E for Etymology
Lecture 5
eny, meeny, miny, moe. Weve 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? Whats an eeny? Or
a meeny? Certainly, this meeny isnt supposed to be an unpleasant person. In
fact, where eeny, meeny, miny, moe comes from has something to teach us
about etymologywhat it is, what it isnt, and why linguists dont 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 fivepnkwe
in one language spoken by nomads who migrated from the south of
what is today the Ukraine, about 8,000 years ago.
28
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.
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 its
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 usedactually, not just with sheep, but for counting in
games and such.
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.
Its 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, pederamaking it all rhyme and match and come out easily.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is pretty normal.
First it was oak, now its treeone doesnt 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 arent
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 clothesin the same way that Americans used to talk
about someone looking smart in their fancy duds. But one thing
leads to another.
If youre looking well turned out, you, in general, just may be kind
of pretty. Or at least youre looking better than you did before you
put that stuff on. If youre all gussied up, you might even have a
certain air of fanciness about youfanciness, 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. Thats what the word meant into the 1700s.
praise, but to you, what they are praising is old fashioned. To you,
its all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask me, but
its from the old days, so really its kind of cute in a charmingly
dismissible kind of way. That is exactly what quaint means now.
That happened step by step.
32
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. Doesnt that suggest that
its less that literally is being misused than that its meaning has
changed, just like quaints did? This is a clue that literally is just
doing what comes naturally.
Literally once did mean word for word, but its 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 pnkwe word was punch (not
the fist kind, but the drink). Pnkwe meant five, and while some
people were spreading it into Europe, others were taking it to India.
When pnkwe got there, it became panch, and punch originally had
five ingedientssugar, spice, lemon juice, water, and alcoholso
people called it five, but for them, that meant calling it punch, and
the English brought that home with them.
Suggested Reading
Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology.
Liberman, Word Origins and How We Know Them.
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
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 sevenor even in their 20sand 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.
34
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
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 theyre making either
a /t/ or a /d/.
Often, its 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,
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
cucuhhhhmberthats what Luo is really like. However, mother
and father are mama
and baba.
Fuse/Thinkstock.
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.
36
To trace even further back, you have to compare Proto-IndoEuropeanwhich is already full of question marks itselfwith
other reconstructed protolanguages like the one that would have
given birth to languages like Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic,
the one that would have given birth to Chinese and Tibetan and
hundreds of other languages, and so on. By then, the signal is so
weak that its impossible to be really confident.
For example, the Japanese word for the sound a dog makes is
wanwan. The word for baggy is dabudabu; the word for tinkle
is chirinchirin. To express that something kept on going, like a
cucumber plant that takes over the yard, the word gungun is used.
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.
Think about how even the word glory feels to native English
speakerseven though it technically doesnt 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 onesfor 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
doesnt even mean anything. Where do you get words that not only
dont sound like anything but dont even mean anything?
37
Motherese has that musical quality, and mothers sing to their babies,
and babies seem to like singingso it makes sense that maybe
language started from people imitating something like animal calls.
This is archaeologist Steven Mithens 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 thoughtsmaybe, for example, something like
ma ruff to mean she hunts.
Theories like these are clever and intriguing but ultimately dont
quite prove anything. However, they genuinely are currently the
state of the art in our attempts to figure out how language started,
because its a tough nut to crack. Attempts have been percolating
for over 150 years, and todays attempts tend to fall into categories
that were established long, long ago.
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.
Falk, Finding Our Tongues.
39
Questions to Consider
1. If you made up a language, what would the first 25 words you
constructed be?
child uttered, and did it contain any of the words you just listed?
40
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.
42
Imagine that youre 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 youd come up
with is working out a separate symbol for each individual sound
in your language. Its not what people around the world have been
inclined to do, and it isnt what happened.
Its 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. Youd 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.
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.
Thats 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
purposesthis was the hieratic script.
But even so, there were 700 symbols, plus all the folderol. Anybody
watching this being done who didnt 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 were 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
44
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
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, dont have spaces between them. So why would the Greeks
write with spaces?
45
Suggested Reading
Baron, Alphabet to Email.
Sacks, Letter Perfect.
Questions to Consider
1. If an alphabet is more efficient and easier to learn than a picture-
based writing system, then are there arguments in favor of the Chinese
maintaining their system nevertheless, or would it be advisable for them
to switch to an alphabetic writing system?
46
47
H for Hobbits
Lecture 8
48
There are plenty of languages in the world that dont 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
hundreds and hundreds of their relatives right around them.
Theres 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 dont 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 peoples language.
The legends suggest that these little people were still around as
recently as just a few centuries ago, and the descriptions of the
people are detailed, even to the point that people explicitly set them
apart from just fantastical spiritsthey have plenty of them that
they talk about, tooso that we can tell that there really were such
people on Flores.
50
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 peoples version of the language as much as the
real one.
Its 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. Wouldnt that be the perfect
explanation for how these languages got to be the way they are?
This would mean that there would be no reason for them to learn
sapiens languages to any significant extentand that there would
certainly be no reason for sapiens to start talking like the hobbits.
Thats 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, its 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 cant 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 hasnt 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, theyre 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.
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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, sia. This is what even closely related languages are like.
Fish in French, Spanish, and Italian is poisson, pescado, pesce,
respectivelysimilar, but different.
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.
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Suggested Reading
Forth, Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia.
McWhorter, What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be.
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, ProtoGermanic. 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?
54
I for Island
Lecture 9
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
its written eau, because Frenchs spelling is scary as well.
56
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 doesnt sound much like our word water
today, and thats 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 whiskeyboth 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 sthat 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
happened with debt. If it isnt pronounced deh-butts, then why is
the b there? It is because of the Latin word debitus, of course. Latin
is so cool that our spellings must reflect itor at least thats how
the educated sort tended to feel back then.
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 dont make sense. Its why
the plural of common words like man and woman is irregularmen
and womenbut not of words like credenza and watercolor. We
use some words so much that we dont 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 dont even stop to think as
to why its pronounced mighs.
57
58
For example, why cant 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
whats with the o? Shouldnt 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
could be confused with the m that followed itit 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,
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 dont keep up with
the way theyre pronounced, then our natural tendency is to try to
keep pronouncing them the way theyre written, especially because
writing has a way of seeming like what language really is. So, hs
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.
Thats what happened to us across the Atlantic with the word herb.
In England, its 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.
But it never happens for English, and its 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 weve known our whole lives?
Suggested Reading
Crystal, Spell It Out.
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
60
J for Jamaican
Lecture 10
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 its spoken among the poorest
61
So, Jamaicans who speak patois can slide up and down this scale of
varieties. They are using basically three different grammars, or at
least two, all while speaking English just as we speak English. They
have a larger English, in other words.
In Javanese, though, its words in general that are like this. There
really are three different words for eat, depending on whether
youre at a wedding, talking to your pal, or speaking to a little
childor 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. Its a whole repertoire that
people use in different ways, and the customs also change with
the times.
63
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 dont use at weddings,
the one that isnt 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 its associated with lack
of education, its very hard for people not to assume that the way
of speaking itself is broken, or inadequatewhereas a Martian
encountering patois instead of the English of Connecticut would
have as hard a time mastering the local lingo as he would have in
New Haven.
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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Suggested Reading
Roberts, West Indians and Their Language.
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.
66
K for Ket
Lecture 11
his lecture introduces one of the worlds 6,000 languages that people
are highly unlikely to hear about beyond where its spoken. What we
expect is different from the realitythe reason for that is different
from what wed think it wasand 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.
An Elaborately Complex Language
Today, Ket is spoken by just a couple of hundred people in Siberia.
Even in its heyday, it probably was usually only spoken by a few
thousand at a time at most. Thats a communitybut thats tiny
compared to the 125 million who speak Japanese or even the 5.5
million who speak Hebrew.
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 ranand 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 werent short like that but long like defibrillate, with
each sound meaning some tiny part of what youre trying to say.
Thats 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.
Languages are like Ket because they cant help it anymore than
kudzu can help growing. This is because speaking is largely
subconscious and fast. Anything thats subconscious and quick
is ripe for habit forming, for mission creep. Once something gets
started, it has a way of hanging around and settling ineven 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. Childrens 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, its 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 wed 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 Kets culture, and
between that and the effect today of globalization and the media,
the typical Kets main language is now Russian. Its getting harder
and harder to find really fluent speakers under a certain age.
69
In the 1600s, the Ket people were incorporated by Russia, changing Ket culture
and language.
70
There are programs that try to revive these languages, because they
are badges of cultural identity. Some groups have classes. In others,
there are master-apprentice programs, where elders teach younger
people the ancestral language in a home setting. One reads about
such efforts in the media frequently, and there are now quite a few
books calling attention to how many of the worlds languages are
on the brink of disappearing. By one estimate, only 600 of the
current 6,000 will exist in 100 years.
But in light of this, its 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 cant 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 dont 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
Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices.
Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Typology.
72
Questions to Consider
1. Do you know someone who learned a new language as an adult and
learned it very well? Are you yourself such a person? What led to
the success?
2. If you speak a language other than English natively, what is the hard part
of that language, that youre glad you dont have to master consciously?
73
L for Like
Lecture 12
74
The step is so short from acting like a person to just quoting him
or her that people take it in other languages; its very natural for
quoting to involve a kind of acting that becomes so much a habit
that a word like like becomes a piece of grammar.
Many people think of like as something people shed when they get
older, and theres something to that, but next time youre 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.
Its true that there once was an America where people didnt use
like in these two ways, no matter how young they were. The new
likes didnt pop up out of nowhere in 1980, despite the idea that it
started with Valley girlspeak.
75
out about how young people talk, then somebody would have used
it for colorbut no one does.
The beatnik like was used by a certain sort, to a certain extent. But
theres a difference between Like, wow, man and like used by
young people of all sorts all over the countryand 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 Ive 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. Its a softener.
For example, you say, You have to, like, push harder to someone
you dont want to command too explicitly. You imply that you want
them to do this pushing harder at a kind of removelike pushing
harder. You dont mean it literally, though; youre 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
and put them together. Thats 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 theres another level, and without it, youre not really talking.
Its little words that convey how you feel about what youre saying.
Even is one of themnot in its literal meaning, but in one youd
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 wouldnt
say, They had a picnic in realityhow else would they have it?
When words are used like this, linguists have a name for what
realm of language were in. Unfortunately, its a clumsy, vague, and
opaque term (in other words, jargon). We call it pragmatics.
78
In French, they use genre in the same way as like: Je suis genre
rarement nerv means Im, like, not nervous much. In Spanish,
Italian, and Portuguese, people are using tipo, or type, in the same
way, and there are other examples.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing.
Questions to Consider
1. People seem more irritated by the hedging usage of like than of you
know. Why might that be?
79
M for Maltese
Lecture 13
What Is Maltese?
Maltese is a kind of Arabic. Its the only Arabic variety that is
an official language within the European Union. But its 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 isnt completely
surprising that at least one remnant survives of how far Arabic once
spread. But then, there is Sicily up to the north.
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Hemera/Thinkstock.
People from Malta, an island located in the Mediterranean Sea, speak Maltese, a
kind of Arabic.
81
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.
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 its easy to suppose that the speech varieties in question are
different languages.
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Thats 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 thats 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 doesnt 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, arent called Occitan anymoretheyre 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
it Savoyard. Linguists call it Franco-Provenal.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, The Power of Babel.
Questions to Consider
1. If you learned Bulgarian, you could use it to get around in Macedonia
with almost no problems. Yet Macedonia is a country of its own, and its
inhabitants are not enthusiastic to be told that they speak a dialect of
Bulgarian. If you had to decide what Macedonian is, where would
it fall?
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?
85
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 Americansor Indians, as they were
called and still often arespoke 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.
86
Its hardly a surprise in itself that when Native Americans first met
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, theres no reason to actually learn
to speak each others languagesespecially because its 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.
87
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 wouldnt have
started learning actual English. Instead, they learned just enough to
get their business taken care of.
Pretty soon, places like New Guinea had a new lingua franca that
even kids started learning. And when a pidgin starts being used this
muchused like a real languageit becomes one. Real people
need real language.
In Tok Pisin, you can say Mitupela bai boilim wata. Slowly, thats
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, youd 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 theres 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.
Its a double-edged sword, though. On the one hand, the people
there have a lingua franca they didnt have before. But on the other
hand, that lingua franca feels cool. Its 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.
Lets 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 thats what
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 languageespecially because thats
what they see on paper.
Its a problem. Luckily, it doesnt always come out this way. Take
the way of speaking English known in Hawaii as pidgin. It isnt
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.
Suggested Reading
Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles.
Simonson, Pidgin to da Max.
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 didnt 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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Theres 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 Cant a body get her shawl tied?
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.
Marthas Vineyard
The city/country distinction can manifest itself in different ways,
depending on local conditions. Sometimes its about who you
want to be, even though youre not even trying to be itat least
not linguistically.
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But there was something going on with just a certain group. Labov
classified this group as people 30 to 45that 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 timejust them, the people grown up but not yet middle aged.
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 werent going
to be making any grand transformations after that. So, you stayed
even if you werent 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 werent sure what they
were going to do yet, so they didnt 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.
But cities arent 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.
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
Labov, Language in the Inner City.
, The Social Stratification of English.
Questions to Consider
1. Where you grew up, do older people (roughly, 60 or older) speak
differently from younger people, and if so, why?
2. Would you say that you sound differently now than at an earlier stage of
your life? Your slang has likely changedbut would someone imitate
you differently now than they would have 30 years ago? What would
the difference be?
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If you have two feet, then why dont 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.
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 its not going to be
waaaaaal. Nobody would have time to talk about plants. Rather,
waal becomes walyou shorten the vowel. Its 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 theres 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.
So, whats the rule for making a plural in Dinka? There isnt one!
You just have to know. Its 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 doesnt
have regular plurals is normal, especially because thats the way
There are quite a few languages in the world that just dont 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 youre being highly explicit and usually when
its a person. Otherwise, plurality is just left to context; theres no
plural marking.
Japanese is like that, too. There is a plural marker, a word tachi, but
its 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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iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
plural marking for a reason. But pretty quickly, you can see that that
doesnt quite add up. Clearly, its not about what people are like.
Languages are like tartans, which are randomly elaborate patterns that become
symbolic of certain groupsnot 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 personbut theres no difference between
singular and plural. Its 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.
Thats a cute little story, but its 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 meaningsomebody odd is
something that has to be figured outbut there are hints that this
usage came from elsewhere. Some have said that its 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 its used to
mean to give a test in writing, its 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 Isnt, and What It Could Be.
, Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language.
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).
R for R-Lessness
Lecture 17
In the Northeast
There is always so very much that we do when we speak that we
arent 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 rs? We know that it
wasnt deliberate. We also know that rs are fragile in all languages.
They have a way of taking many formsa tr-r-ill here, morphing
into a uvular buzz there. So when rs 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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106
But before long, the accent we now associate with Downton Abbey
was considered normal, and it was other British accents with their
rs that were considered provincial. That shows how arbitrary our
judgments of what sounds good in language are.
pronounced with an accent, then you just know they are going to
wither and die someday.
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 dont 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, specificallynot in the other big Northeastern
metropolis, Philadelphia.
Its 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 couldnt 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. Its possible; only into the 20th century
did cultured Americans let go of a sense that true civilization was
across the Atlantic.
So, what happened to rs in New England? Supposedly, workingclass people in these areas imitated upper-class ones. However,
usually, the way people talk reflects in-group solidarity, and in
fact, linguists have in general discovered almost no cases where
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poor people imitate rich peoples talk. If anything, its 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 citiesincluding ones like Philadelphia, where r-lessness
didnt happenand 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.
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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 rs after vowels.
So, black people are r-less not because they have something against
pronouncing whats on the page, but because their ancestors spoke
r-less languages.
To get back to the South in general, surely its 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 its 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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Labov found that in the 1960s, people were less r-less the more
upper-crust the storemore New Yawkese at Kleins than at
Macys 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 Macys, older people were more r-full.
So why did the older Macys clerk in New York in 1964 use more
rs after vowels than the younger ones? Obviously, theres no
answer if were waiting to hear that old Mrs. Bainbridge carefully
pastes those rs in because she wants to sound classybecause she
didnt even know she was doing it. But she was.
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
Labov, Language in the Inner City.
Questions to Consider
1. A hundred years ago, to imitate a rich person, one would speak in a
certain highfalutin way. Note that today, that wouldnt make sense.
How would you imitate the way a modern rich person speaks? Why, in
your opinion, has this changed?
2. It has been said that whatever British people are saying sounds like
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S for She
Lecture 18
112
First, there was creating she. We will probably never know exactly
what happened to create she. There was no ancient English word
shay or the like; it really was that weird little word hay-uh. So
where did she come from?
along, a j-ness slipped in, and people were saying hjeu. Then,
in some places, hjeu could be pronounced hjoha 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 shjoh, hsjoh, sjoh, shohand
after a while, the word was sho.
At the same time, in some other
areas, the disaster outright
happened; he and she were
the same word he. You see it
in manuscripts, where a lady
is referred to as hay. Before
long, people started saying
shay instead of hay. Almost
certainly, they picked this up
from people from the areas where
the word had become sho; they
mixed show and hay and
got shay. Soon, shay was
pronounced shee, and disaster
was averted.
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 wouldnt 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 didnt 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 theyno more hyay
and hay-uh. They probably had a way of sprinkling they into their
English because Englishs crunch of hay-ish little words felt so
vague and inadequate.
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For some reason, English took you and ran with it in a way that
other European languages usually didnt. Even you itself had been
pushing it. Originally, it was ye as a subjectthink 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
sometimes the alternation seems pretty random. But after a while,
all there is is you, for both singular and plural, subject and object.
To an Old English speaker, that would sound like baby talk, but its
all we have in even the most elegant of English.
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
you realm as it was starting to be in the he, she, and they realm
and nobody bats an eye.
Pronouns in Various Languages
Quite a few European languages have a word that refers to people
in a generic sense. Spanishs Se habla espaol is the most familiar
example: se means you in the sense of one. In French, this is
on. In German, its man: Hier spricht man Deutsch means One
speaks German here. In Old English, it was man, too: To say,
Its said in books in Old English, you said Man cw in bocum.
The man didnt mean man; it meant one, just like the se in Se
habla espaol.
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 didnt much like it; theyd 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 hereno
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 were okay.
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 its necessary.
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However, we cant 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 dont
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 dojust 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.
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
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 allis it redundant or handy?
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T for Tone
Lecture 19
118
Thats just ma. Its 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 someones mother and a horse.
There are tonal languages all over the world, but they tend to cluster.
Theres 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.
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Note that /b/ and /p/ are really variations on the same sound. Dont
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, theres a tendency to say a word on
a lower pitch if it starts with b than if it starts with p.
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.
Whats 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. Thats the reason for the grand old Swedish
accent with Swedes in old movies saying things like Ive 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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This isnt 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
Fallows, Dreaming in Chinese.
Questions to Consider
1. To give yourself a sense of what it would feel like to speak a tone
language, see how many ways you can say someones name to convey
different attitudes, expectations, etc.
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U for Understand
Lecture 20
ften, its 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 reasonnot
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.
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For example, take the popular term epic fail. Whats 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 its actually part of a trend.
There are people now saying, Lets focus on the build, instead
of using the word construction. Others use Whats the ask? in
reference to someone quoting a priceask, 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
in speech. Something was once nifty, then keen, then groovy, then
cool, then wicked, awesome, rad, and so on. Cool beans, people
even saythe expressions dont even have to make sensebut 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
some words that originally meant something else, like budgetbuster.
You certainly wouldnt call it a buzmetzka or a glingbork. In
addition, however the word understand started, and linguists
actually dont know, it did give us a word for comprehending.
Comprehension itself came from Latin; before that, English had its
own local understand. It had to come from somewhere.
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However, then we get to epic fail and Whats 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
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, its 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. Its creative, and its
based on a quest for clean, direct expression.
The reveal makes perfect sense. Revelation doesnt refer only to the
revealing of something; its 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? Its 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. Its 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 youre at a loose end, it can be
127
fun surveying the notions some of these men and women with three
names had about what was right and what was wrong.
128
We like to think that things mean what they say they mean. The
word understand has never made senseyou arent standing under
anythingso technically, it should be deemed not an English
word. But if we banned it, wed deprive ourselves of a glimmer of
insight it gives into ancient Germanic people.
Suggested Reading
Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English.
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
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 its 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? Wed have to decide.
An is a form of a; is it a separate word?
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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 theres 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.
132
Slang is words. Just because they smell like socks doesnt mean
they dont 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 its here to stay;
some slang is sticky for some reason. So maybe that one can squeak
into the dictionary and be considered a real wordbut 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 Englishs magic bullet is that
it has borrowed so many words, from Old Norse, Scandinavian,
French, Latin, and Greek especially.
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.
But if its most languages, then when the word goes out of fashion
and stops being used, then, ultimately, its 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 isnt written on high anywhere either, and
its 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 its 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
Bryson, The Mother Tongue.
Winchester, The Professor and the Madman.
Questions to Consider
1. One is often offered opportunities to increase ones vocabulary. That
activity is unheard of in a typical small, indigenous community where
it is assumed that normal adults know the words they need to know.
Have you ever found it advantageous to acquire words you didnt know
before? What was the advantage?
2. Explain what epistemological means. Just try. Some people say that they
know how to use it but cant explain what it means.
135
136
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 Whats up, Doc?
that
Whats
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.
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 isof all thingsBugs Bunny.
We now know that teenagers in Texas back then had slang, and we
can be quite sure that Doc wasnt 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 slanglots of it. Its just that no one had any reason to write it
down. Plus, we cant 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, Whats up, Doc? as a greeting, and meaning it
straight, because the expression was new and Bugs Bunny didnt
exist. So, we dont 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.
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138
Another kind of slang is used as a crafty and vaguely sinister ingroup affair, such as among thieves. The classic example is the
rhyming slang that Cockney criminals used, where apples and
pears stands for stairs, and it means that you can just say apples
and people know you mean stairs.
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 whats 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 someones 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 wasnt ready for.
140
And they do. Today, although nobody would put it in just such a
wayand, in fact, journalists are already doing pieces where
they claim that LOL means just about anythingit actually has a
function: It signals basic empathy between texters. What began as
signifying laughter morphed into a little piece of stuff that eases
tension and creates a sense of equality.
LOL is informal (it wont 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, were in
slang world.
Suggested Reading
Partridge, ed., A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
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
wordsand if not, why?
141
!X
!X
142
!X has more sounds than any other language. There are about
164 consonants in one dialect of !X, 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 arent just decorations. They arent 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, !X has tones, like Chinese, and
creaky sounds, like the ones found in Southeast Asia.
Khoisan
Afro-Asiatic
Nilo-Saharan
Niger-Congo A
Niger-Congo B (Bantu)
Austronesian
!X is one of a group of
languages known as Khoisan
languages, which are spoken
mainly in southern Africa.
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 arent something that just happens in languages in other
places. Some languages spoken near the click languages have
inherited some clicks over time, and thats 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
downsuppose 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
But this account only works if at first there isnt a language. Why
would you have a language, then start clicking at animals, and then
start using those clicks while youre 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 didnt have language yet. Today,
there are no languageless people, so this would have had to be the
first languageright?
One would surmise that they are related to the more southerly clicklanguage speakers, and indeed, archaeological evidence shows
that click-language speakers were once more widespread and that
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 clicklanguage 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
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 !X, 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 nowor, at most,
just one. Several of them have gone extinct over the past century,
and many of them are disappearing so fast that theres 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 !X give a useful answer, in that
its so difficult and peculiar that essentially only natives can do it in
any real way. These days, only a few thousand people speak !X. It
would be especially unfortunate if we couldnt even get languages
like this down on paper and on recordings so that we can at least
know what they were likeand 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 isnt
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.
146
Whence the idea, then, that Yiddish is dying? Its that old sense that
language is in print instead of in the mouth. From there, its natural
to feel like a language doesnt really exist unless it is thriving on
the page. But thats 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 cant tell their speakers that the languages
they learn on their mommies knees arent real.
So, Yiddish isnt 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 ofthat
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
Rosten and Bush, The New Joys of Yiddish.
Thomas, The Harmless People.
Questions to Consider
1. Can you say !X? Just do it a few times (perhaps wipe your nose and
mouth), and through this alone, savor the marvel of linguistic diversity.
Z for Zed
Lecture 24
e sense the letter z as an odd letter. Its at the end of the alphabet.
Its 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.
The Greeks liked it, too. But for a reason well 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 Phoenicians 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 wasnt odd or
other at all. Rather, thats how the Romans felt about it when they
picked up the Greek alphabet, and there was a reason: Latin didnt
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 didnt 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, wed be saying rice, which
we arent and shouldnt. Thats 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/ wasnt a real sound; it was just
something that happened to the letter s sometimes. You didnt 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
zbut only so much. By the Middle Ages, certain spelling conventions
had settled in, and nobody was interested in going back and sticking zs
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 its really pronounced as a z. In America, Noah
Webster undertook spelling reforms in the early 19th century, and
while theres much to be said about what did and didnt 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.
It even seems not to quite know what its name is. The Brits still
call it zed. That makes senseits how zeta would come out in
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. Wouldnt you start doing it all in one continuous
stroketop, zip down and to the left, bottomso that you made
the whole thing without even having to lift your pen? The Greeks
started doing that after a while, and thats the Z we know today.
But theres one more place z sits hiding in plain sight. The plural
marker in English is sas in wallz, doorz, kidz, blobz, pigz,
dayz, hedgez, judgez, and kissez? Note that we dont say
walls and bridges. All of those are more cases where the printed
page makes us think about an s when really were saying a z.
And those words arent exceptions; theyre the norm. Its only after
some sounds that we actually say s for the plural: cats, caps,
ducks. But most of the time, youll notice that the plural marker
is pronounced as a z.
People like Noah Webster missed things like that, but theyre 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 theyre mostly from Europe. If pressed,
we might throw in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew,
Persian, and probably Hindi. But thats 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
Robinson, The Story of Writing.
Sacks, Letter Perfect.
Questions to Consider
1. Just as we utter the /z/ sound much more than we are always aware,
spoken reality reveals some letters as rather useless. X could just as
easily be written as ks or z. If we could stop time and wake everyone
up afterward in a mental state open to serious novelty, would you pull x
from our alphabet, or retain it because it would make it easier to engage
older texts?
152
Bibliography
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.
. Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling. London:
Profile Books, 2012. Leave it to the preternaturally prolific Crystal to pen
a book addressing the question as to why English spelling is such a mess.
There are a number of reasons, all neatly addressed in this readable and
authoritative book.
Durkin, Philip. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009. A readable guide to the science of etymology,
perhaps most enjoyable just for all of the often counterintuitive word
histories it contains. Most etymology books are, despite the best of intentions,
monotonous reading after a whileone word after another. This book, with
chapters arranged according to separate subjects, problems, and approaches,
avoids that pitfall.
Bibliography
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, Falks 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).
Fallows, Deborah. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love
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
155
Bibliography
156
. What Language Is, What It Isnt, 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 languages 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.
Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices: the Extinction of
the Worlds Languages. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A sober
political argument for the preservation of indigenous languages, focused on
practicalities as well as ideology. There are now quite a few books sounding
the alarm about language extinction, but this one will be most compelling to
the skeptic, even the skeptic who remains one regardless.
Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the World: A Language History of the World.
New York: Harper Collins, 2005. I have never been sure how many people
would be up for actually reading this cornucopia of information on leading
languages of antiquity and their fates into modern times; Ostler lays on so
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.
Pyles, Thomas. The Origins and Development of the English Language.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964. This is my favorite breadand-butter guide to the history of English over time, in that it focuses as
much on grammar as on words, in language accessible to all. Its no longer
in print but is so common in libraries (and among used books, etc.) that I feel
confident including it here.
Bibliography
Rosten, Leo, and Lawrence Bush. The New Joys of Yiddish. New York:
Harmony, 2003. Rostens 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
Bushs 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
books message. To learn about the history of a letter, start hereor use the
whole book as a way to inhale the invention of the alphabet without feeling
like youre in school.
Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. New York: St.
Martins 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,
dont walkthis one made me decide not to write one of my own.
Simonson, Douglas (Peppo). Pidgin to da Max. Honolulu: The Bess
Press, 1981. A jocular illustrated glossary of the creole English of Hawaii,
focusing on colorful vocabulary but giving a good sense of a creole as a
living variety.
Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. The Harmless People. New York: Vintage,
1989. This is an esteemed description of life among the people who speak
click languages, lending a larger perspective than mere grammatical
description of the world that has harbored such languages and the threats to
its continued existence.
Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic
Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. This book neatly puts
forth the thesis now increasingly influential among linguists that languages are
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.
Bibliography
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