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tanadrin · 4 years

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A Sketch for a Modern Gothic Alphabet

Inspired by all the AOE2 I’ve been playing today, and the unfortunate lack of Gothic-language unit responses in said game, I sat down and started sketching out a Modern Gothic conlang: basically, what would happen if you gave the language of the Goths the Hebrew treatment, and tried to cobble together a functional language out of the attested bits we have.

Now, I don’t think this would be nearly as big a project as it might seem; even though the Gothic-language literature isn’t nearly as extensive as other ancient Germanic literatures, our goal is not some intangible lexicographic “purity.” Anything we do not have words for, and can’t plausibly calque, we’re going to borrow--but the existing vocabulary may prove surprisingly effective, e.g., a word like thius, thiwos, “servant” > “employee.” Bandi, bandjos means “band” as in “group of people,” but why can’t it also mean “band” as in “rock band”? If it works for English, it will work for Gothic, I say.

But I think the alphabet is an opportunity to get really creative. The Goths wrote in an alphabet adapted for their own language, which I’ve heard described as “basically Uncial Greek;” but it also seems to borrow liberally from the Latin alphabet and from Germanic runes in a couple of places, and it’s interesting and different enough on its own that I think simply squeezing the language into a Latin or Greek transcription wouldn’t do it justice aesthetically. Now, the attested Gothic alphabet did not make case distinctions; “majuscule” and “miniscule” script in the Early Middle Ages weren’t used to convey information as we use capitalization, they were simply stylistic variants. Some of the Gothic letters resemble capitals, and some resemble miniscules; and when a letter is the same in both Greek and Latin majuscule, whether we choose the Greek or Latin miniscule is going to be important. We have to make sure each letter is visually distinct in both forms, after all.

So this is how I would design a modern version of the Gothic alphabet.

Αα - ans. [a] or [a:], transliterated <a>. Pronounced as in father. Most of the letter names are the reconstructed reflex of the Proto-Germanic name for the corresponding rune; ans is no exception. Old--that is to say, real--Gothic has both long and short [a], and does not in writing distinguish the two. For our purposes, we will write long [a] doubled: <aa>

Ββ - bairkna. [b] or [v], but always transliterated [b]. [v] is the allophone of [b] immediately after a vowel, or between two vowels; as the sound doesn’t otherwise occur in Gothic, there’s no ambiguity here, and we don’t need to mark it. Loanwords with [v] in them will probably get borrowed as [b] or [v] depending on the environment the sound occurs in.

Γγ - giba. [g] or [ɣ], transliterated <g>. [ɣ] is a fricative, pronounced in the exact same spot as [g]; like [v], it’s just an allophone of <g>.

Δδ - dagz. [d] or [ð], as in English then. Transliterated <d>.

Εε - aihws. Represents [e:], which is similar to the first part of the diphthong in English “day,” or the Spanish e. Although the names of the Germanic rune-letters were originally acrostic (starting, or at least containing, the sound they represented), sound change in Gothic means that the <ai> in aihws is actually pronounced like the e in English let.

Uυ - qairna. [kʷ], transliterated <q>. This sound is a labialized [k], very close to the qu in English quern or quiz. Up until now, we have been rather slavishly following the Greek alphabet, in both order and names of our letters; however, in qairna, we have no Greek equivalent. At least, not in the age of the Bishop Wulfilas, who was responsible for first writing down the Gothic language--there is the archaic Greek letter qoppa, source of the Latin q; why Wulfilas did not use the Latin letter, I don’t know, and I don’t know why he chose a letter which was bound to cause confusion among Greek-speakers, resembling as it does a miniscule upsilon (had Greek miniscules even been developed by the 4th century?). But, much like the Turks turning dotted and dotless i into two different letters with distinct capitals, we’re going to split the difference and divide upsilon in two. The lowercase quairna is a u-shaped crescent, without the right-hand stem. The uppercase is a larger version of the same. Using U and its small capital variant would be an excellent typographical approximation.

Ζζ - aizo. [z], transliterated <z>. Identical to modern English. Gothic did not rhotacize [z] in the same way that the other Germanic languages did, retaining a clear distinction with [s]. There is no satisfactory rune-name for this letter; the name chosen is arbitrary, on the pattern of English phonetic names, with some consideration given to the fact that [z] did not occur at the beginning of words in Gothic.

Ηh - hagal. [h] or [χ], transliterated [h]. Attic Greek had no letter H, but the Latin letter H was based on a version of that alphabet where eta retained its original value, [h]. As the old Gothic <h> strongly resembles a miniscule Latin [h], we will simply borrow that letter. Alone or at the beginning of a word, <h> sounds as in English; in a consonant cluster, or in the final position, it is a fricative with the value of German or Scottish <ch>.

Ψψ - thaurnus. [θ], transliterated <th>. The question of why a literate churchman, whose best reference for the written word was Greek, would not simply use theta for the dental fricative continues to vex me; perhaps he thought psi was more like the runic thorn, whose name this letter shares.

Ιι - eis. [ɪ], transliterated <i>. Identical to iota, a dotless i. By the time the Goths encountered the Greek-speaking world, the spelling conventions of the tongue were centuries out of date. The diphthong originally represented by <ei> was now pronounced as a long [i] (the sound in “deep” or “scream”), and so that digraph was chosen for the long [i] sound. Its short equivalent--pronounced as in English “hit” or “bill”--got iota.

Κκ - konja. [k], transliterated <k>. Identical to Greek kappa.

Λλ - lagus. [l], transliterated <l>, in both cases as in “lake” (which is what lagus means). Identical to lambda.

Μμ - manna. [m], transliterated <m>. Although the small form of the Greek mu, with the compressed peaks and the left-hand stem is often confused by people familiar with only the Latin alphabet for “u” or a letter like it, and lowercase manna would seem already to be similar to two other letters (one of which we have not yet encountered), I have chosen to retain this form because it is the miniscule corresponding to the Greek letter. And I like descenders.

Nν - nauths. [n], transliterated <n>. Since there is no [v] in this alphabet, there’s no worry we’ll confuse the small form of nu with that letter.

Gg - jer. [j], transliterated <j>. Here we have our first real problem. You see, this isn’t a G. If you look at the letter as written in Gothic manuscripts, it looks a lot like a Latin G, but the hook is a right-hand descender only. It doesn’t go inside the body of the letter, as far as I can tell. What this really is is a C with a descending right stem or hook, like the IPA letter for the velar nasal... but that letter doesn’t exist in any font I’m aware of, and would look almost identical to a capital G. So here I’m approximating it with G, and approximating its miniscule form with a lowercase (but note, single-storey) g, because I expect the desired lowercase form (a small c with a slightly elongated descending right hook) would look very much like a g where the body of the letter was open.

Ƞn - uurus. [u] or [u:], transliterated <u>. As with <a>, a doubled <u> signifies a long vowel, not originally distinguished in written Gothic. The original letter looks like a small and large version of Latin miniscule n (where the capital does not descend below the line).

Ππ - pairtha. [p], transliterated <p>. Equivalent to pi. Not a very common sound in Gothic, due to Grimm’s Law, but found in lots of Greek loanwords like pascha, “Easter.”

ɥ - hjo. [dʒ], transliterated <hj>. Now we are really far off the beaten track. You see, the Gothic alphabet had two letters with no sound-values at all. The Greek alphabet gave numeric values to each letter; when set off with dots or an overline, it was intended that you should read them as a number, and not a word. Gothic retained that convention, and used similar values for each letter in the Gothic alphabet; but it had two more numerals than it had need of for letters, including one that looks like <h>, rotated 180 degrees. Rather than strike these letters from the alphabet, I’ve elected to keep them, and to arbitrarily reassign them to values I think will be useful for modern Gothic loanwords. To distinguish the affricate value of <j> from the (more common outside English) liquid version, I have prepended an arbitrary <h> in the transcription. This is also a handy ex-post-facto justification for why the name of my pseudo-Gothic kingdom on my minecraft server is spelled the same way, since originally it was spelled as “Hjairsil” only becaused that looked amusingly like Gothic. Unfortunately, I have no font on my computer that can render the rare capital form of this letter! As one of those IPA symbols that occasionally gets dragooned into service as a real honest-to-god letter, it does have a capital, at codepoint U+A79D--but my computer cannot render it, and I don’t know if yours can either. The name of this letter is arbitrary, chosen phonetically.

Ρρ - raida. [r], transliterated <r>. The old Gothic alphabet actually uses a symbol that looks like a Latin capital R, with a right-hand descender. If one desired to use a version of this letter more like that one, I would use Rʀ, as the open lowercase r feels rather out of place.

Ss or Σς - sojil. [s], transliterated <s>. The letter S is, after all, only a variant of sigma; I would not use the closed, medial form σ, due to its similarity to other letters, and the fact that the old Gothic letter resembles Latin S and final Greek ς, but not σ.

Ττ - tius. [t], transliterated <t>. Equivalent to Greek tau.

Yʏ - winja. [w] or [ɪ]; transliterated [w]. Wulfilas uses upsilon, whose majuscule is identical to English Y; the letter evidently retains its identity as upsilon specifically, because it transcribes that letter (originally pronounced [y], like German ü) in certain names when they appear in Gothic, though by that time it would have had the value of a short [i].

Ϝϝ - faihu. [f], transliterated <f>. Possibly a capital and small capital F would be better; but digamma is an authentic, though rare Greek letter, which is virtually identical.

Χχ - iggws. [k], transliterated <k>. Greek chi.

ʘ - hwair. [ʍ], transliterated [hw]. Another letter with a case problem: hwair resembles theta slightly, but also monocular o, or the IPA symbol for the bilabial click. I would prefer the distinct sizes of the monocular o, rather than theta (which looks very similar in both upper and lowercase forms) but my computer doesn’t support that character.

Ωω - othal. [o:], transliterated <o>. The Gothic letter strongly resembles both the Greek omega and the odal-rune, whose name it inherits; but it definitely denotes the long [o] sound only, the short [o] being a digraph.

Cc - tsho. [tʃ], transliterated <tsh>. Tsho replaces the final letter of the Gothic alphabet, which is either the tyr-rune, or or the Greek sampi. <c> with the affricate value pairs neatly with <g>, and will be of more use in loanwords.

The transcription scheme should ensure that Gothic spelling is unambiguously recoverable from a Latin transliteration.

Old Gothic had several digraphs, which modern Gothic will carry over intact. <gg> represented the nasal [ŋ] (ng in sing) in Greek, and does so in Gothic as well. The digraph <gw> represents [gʷ], parallel to <q>. Note that this introduces an ambiguity: the trigraph <ggw> can represent either [ŋw] or [ggʷ], an ambiguity present in the original orthography; but this is not an especially common sequence of letters. The trigraph <ddj> has an uncertain value according to historical linguistics; I have opted to abolish this uncertainty by assigning it the value of a geminate palatal stop [ɟː], in accordance with some reconstructions.

The two vowel digraphs <ai> and <au> present an irritating problem. Rather against the principle of parsimony, and the principle that ancient peoples tended to construct or adapt writing systems neither more nor less complicated than necessary for their tongues, I tend to be of the opinion that spelling should usually be considered to strongly reflect pronunciation. Yet these two digraphs appear in positions that have distinctive vowels in Proto-Germanic; and on that basis, it has usually been the custom in Gothic grammars and textbooks to distinguish three values for each. There is good reason for doing so on etymological grounds, if you wish to keep distinct the Proto-Germanic reflexes of each appearance of each digraph; but this seems improbable. Improbable, but not impossible--since there are cases where these digraphs must reflect true diphthongs, rather than the flattened values they otherwise would likely represent, especially in Greek proper nouns. By arbitrary fiat, modern Gothic will use <ai> to represent only long and short [ε]; and will use <au> to represent both long and short [ɔ], except in the aforementioned Greek names and modern loanwords.

<iu> is a falling diphthong, not two distinct vowels; double consonants are always pronounced as such (e.g., <nn> as in “unnamed”, not “unaimed”). Gothic has a stress-accent system like English, and like English does not mark stress. Punctuation follows the Greek norm, as used in modern times: guillemets or dashes set off quotations, a raised point substitutes for the semicolon (which is instead the question mark), the decimal point is the comma, and the digit separator is the full stop. Proper names, and the start of a sentence are capitalized, as is each word in a title.

#modern gothic #conlanging

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lingthusiasm · 6 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 25 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're getting enthusiastic about how every word is a real word. But first, it's almost our second anniversary! Whoa!

Lauren: Yay! Next month is our anniversary month. We like celebrating in November. It will be episode number 26. We can do maths, don't worry. It's not episode 24 because we launched with several episodes at once, but we are very excited about our anniversary month.

Gretchen: Yes! And on our first anniversary, we celebrated by asking you to help more people find the show, and you definitely came through. We ended up thanking almost 100 people in our anniversary post for all your recommendations on social media. And we saw a big bump in listeners, which kept going afterwards and even until now. And so, this year we want to see if we can thank 200 of you for recommending Lingthusiasm to people in your lives.

Lauren: That means we need your help. So if you know anyone who could use a little bit more language nerdery in their lives, this is the month to share the show on social media. Email people, text them, send it to your group chat, or just leave a well-placed sticky note for the person in the office. Writing a review or even just leaving a rating on whatever podcast app you use really helps us so much. It helps other people find the show, and it helps encourage other people to click Play if they happen to come across us.

Gretchen: And it helps your friends who need more interesting things to listen to, who want more fun linguistics in their lives. It helps them find something that they're going to enjoy. If you send us your reviews or tag us in your post on social media, we would love to see them, and we'll be thanking everybody that we know about in our anniversary blog post on lingthusiasm.com. We'll pick a couple reviews to feature there.

Lauren: If you would prefer to recommend us privately, please send us an email with the story of how you recommended us so that we can add you to the thank you post.

Gretchen: Or feel free to just recommend us and not tell us about it. You can still get the warm, fuzzy feeling. Plus you'll get to feel a warm, fuzzy glow of satisfaction both when you recommend us and when we thank you all together at the end. Even if you don't tell us about it, you can still feel that warm fuzzy feeling.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is an independent show, but we are lucky to have a massive marketing department, which is all of you.

Gretchen: Aww!

Lauren: And we really appreciate when you take the opportunity to share Lingthusiasm with other people.

Gretchen: If everybody introduced the show to just one new listener, our audience would double.

Lauren: So this month, take the chance to recommend us or review us.

Gretchen: We really appreciate it, and so do the people who are about to discover the show because of you.

We also have another way to discover the show, which is two live shows! In addition to the Melbourne live show, which is going to be on the 16th of November, we also added a show in Sydney on the 12th of November, so you can go to either of those shows. Just go to Lingthusiasm.com, look for the link that says Live Show to get tickets.

Lauren: We're really excited to be joined by Tiger Webb in Sydney, who is the ABC’s language researcher. Super excited to also be joined by Alice Gaby for our Melbourne show, who's a researcher at Monash. And we're also thrilled that we will have both shows fully Auslan-interpreted as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, so the topic of those shows is how the internet is making English better. We’re going to be talking about a few bits that are coming out from my book and from other things on the internet, and through texting, and emoji, and everything. There's no knowledge of linguistics or of previous Lingthusiasm episodes assumed, so feel free to bring your friends even if they have never listened to an episode, because then they'll have this whole back catalogue to discover. We're really looking forward to seeing you there and meeting people in real life after the show!

Lauren: Other quick exciting news, we have new merchandise, including adorable space babies, t-shirts that say, “I want to be the English schwa. It's never stressed.” We also have baby clothes that say, “Not judging your grammar, just acquiring it,” as well as new IPA scarf colours and now, IPA ties.

Gretchen: So you can get the International Phonetic Alphabet on various items as well as the clever baby riff on “not judging a grammar, just analysing it.” The baby is just acquiring it; I love this one so much. The space babies are so cute. Everything's coming up babies in the merch these days –

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: – including this month's bonus topic, which is about multilingual babies and raising kids speaking multiple languages. For this and 19 other bonus episodes – there are so many bonus episodes now! It's like twice as much Lingthusiasm. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm and support the show and listen to all the bonus episodes.

Lauren: And while everything's coming up babies, probably about time I let everyone know I'm going to be having a baby in January.

Gretchen: What? What a coincidence! It actually really is a coincidence.

Lauren: That’s actually quite the coincidence that – it’s just baby month here at Lingthusiasm. We are definitely going to keep running all the way through December, January, February, and beyond, so no worries about that. We'll still have our main episode every month as well as your Patreon bonus episode.

Gretchen: Yeah, so we'll be recording episodes, and events, and interviews, and so on in advance to make sure that we give Lauren some mat leave from the show and make sure that everyone here still gets to listen to it. And I'm very excited to hear the results of your new, long-term longitudinal language acquisition project!

[Music]

Gretchen: Have you ever heard, Lauren, someone say, "That's not a real word"?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, like, so often.

Gretchen: All the time.

Lauren: It's just a go-to phrase that people throw around a lot. But when we started talking about this idea of what is a real word and what is not, it seems like such a simple throwaway line. But there's so many things that are happening when people say this.

Gretchen: Yeah, there's a whole bunch of different things that someone can mean when they say, "Oh, well, such-and-such, that's not a real word," and it seems like breaking those down individually can help us understand what's really going on here and why – Spoiler Alert – all words are real words. We're going to come back to that. We’ll keep coming back to that.

Lauren: We'll keep coming back to this very important point.

Gretchen: I don't like to do the fake Myth Bust-y thing where it's like, "It's an open question: Are there some words that aren't real?" Like, no.

Lauren: Absolutely not, spoiler alert.

Gretchen: I'm going to start with the answer and then we get to break it down and not leave you hanging.

Lauren: Yeah, so there's not going to be any "Surprise, everything is a real word" at the end of this. We're very happy to state that as a starting point.

Gretchen: "Are some words unreal?" I think it's one of those questions that's like – that’s like saying, "Are some animals not animals?" Well, you're already calling them animals, like, what are you doing with yourself?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Are some words not words? No!

Lauren: The thing I find really interesting about the different subcategories of "It's not a word" is it shows how we conceptualise words and how our brain processes different things in different ways. And how language is both this thing that happens in our brains but also in our particular social contexts and interactions. That's why in this episode, we're going to look at all the different things that people really mean when they say, "That's not a real word". Shall we take a tour, Gretchen?

Gretchen: Okay, let's take a tour.

Lauren: We've given them very serious scientific category names because everything sounds so much better when you give them a very official name.

Gretchen: Yeah, the first kind of thing people mean sometimes is the "blobfish."

Lauren: The Blobfish Reaction.

Gretchen: The Blobfish Reaction. So if I'm like, "Oh, yes, here's a blobfish..."

Lauren: What the heck is a blob – "blobfish" isn't a real word, Gretchen. You just made that up. You're not even sounding science-y by saying this is a blobfish. You're just looking at something that looks hideous and calling it a blobfish. That's not a real word.

Gretchen: It’s a cartoon thing. Blobfish are apparently real animals. I googled "strange animals" to try to come up with the best example of a strange animal, and the blobfish one – hands down, it is really weird and blob-y looking. You should definitely look it up. But more to the point, apparently blobfish exist. Apparently the scientific community probably also has a Latin name for them but definitely also calls them blobfish. This is something that, if you hadn't heard of it, like me half an hour ago, or like Lauren until two minutes ago, you're like, "That sounds fake."

Lauren: I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and they are apparently a fish from Australia. So now I'm feeling very – like I've failed as an Australian.

Gretchen: Oh no. But they don't have a name like "blubbo" or something?

Lauren: No, we haven't called them "blobbies" yet.

Gretchen: Ah, I think that's just a failure of imagination. But yeah, so sometimes your reaction is that's not a real word because: I don't think that's a real thing; I don't even know if that's a thing; or I haven't heard this word before.

Lauren: I felt really embarrassed because I was probably about 26 or 27 the first time I heard the word "isthmus."

Gretchen: Oh, okay.

Lauren: And I just did not have it – it turns out, we just don't have isthmuses in Australia. It's like a peninsula- type thing.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's kind of – I don't know what the difference is between isthmus and a peninsula now that I'm thinking about it. I'm sure someone does but off the top of my head –

Lauren: The difference is that I had heard of the word "peninsula" before I was 27.

Gretchen: I mean, I grew up on a peninsula, but I don't know – and there are, definitely, also some places called isthmuses – isthmae? Isthmapodes? What is the plural of an isthmus? I can't even say this word anymore. It's too difficult.

Lauren: Yeah, trying to have the first reaction of it – instead of being "That's not a word," trying to have the first reaction of, "That is not a word I have encountered yet."

Gretchen: Yes, I haven't heard of that. And how sad the world would be if I knew all the words already. Can you imagine not learning any new words? You'd never have that like, "Whoa, what is that" or "I learned a new thing now." Imagine a world where you've learned all the words. That's a terrible world!

Lauren: Imagine a world where the vocabulary was so finite that you'd run out of new words and experiences to have.

Gretchen: Oh, what a horrible word – world. You know, I'm trying to think of examples of this, because I have definitely heard of words far too late and been like, "Whoa, that's a real thing? Okay!"

Lauren: But also think of how quickly your brain managed to absorb them and accept them. I now very happily accept that "isthmus" is a real word and the isthmus of Oaxaca is a real place because my brain is capable of accepting new words.

Gretchen: And that blobfish are real animals apparently. I saw a graph once that said the average adult between the age of like, I don't know, 18 and 55 or something, learns one new word on average every day. We're still learning new words all the way through adulthood even though we think of learning new words as something you do when you're a kid, or when you're in school, or when you're acquiring a specific technical area, and yet we're picking up new words all the time.

Lauren: We're perfectly capable of it. So the important lesson here is that we don't know all the words.

Gretchen: Erin McKean has a really nice quote about this from her TED talk about redefining the dictionary. She says when people think about a place and they don't find that place on a map, they think there's a problem with the map. But when they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think this must be a bad word. But it's more likely to be a bad dictionary. And I think that really sums it up. Okay, maybe a word is or isn't in a dictionary, but you've still found it in the dictionary, that is something that's just made by people, and they still have to acquire all the words themselves.

Lauren: That's funny how we go, "I don't believe you that ‘blobfish’ is a real word," but it's not like I'm going to sit here and go, "I don't believe you that Carlton is a real place."

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly!

Lauren: And I'm going to take you to Carlton when you're here because there's great ice cream.

Gretchen: Okay, good. Yeah, like, "Oh, Lauren, I haven't been to Carlton. I didn't know there was –" actually, there's a Carlton in Canada as well, because the Brits and colonies and stuff. It's the name of a University in Ottawa. So I've been to that Carlton. I'm like, "That's a real place." But my Carlton is not the same as your Carlton.

Lauren: Well, that is probably true in this case.

Gretchen: I think there's kind of a subset of this category which is using an existing word in a different sort of way. One of the things that I did for my very scientific research of this episode was I looked for the quote "isn't a real word" and "not a real word" to see what kinds of words people were saying were to be a word. So this is how we came up with these different categories as we took what people were saying about something not being real words and we kind of broke them down into the different types of things people do. And a couple that we came across people saying weren't real words were things like "learnings," which is, I guess, used in teacher jargon to mean: the learnings; the learning outcomes; or the learnings that the students will derive from this lesson are blah blah blah. I haven't heard "learnings" being used in that particular context, but I definitely believe that people could do it. And the annoyance that I was seeing with someone calling that "not a real word" was more about being annoyed with jargon, or being annoyed at using an existing word in a different sort of way that the other person wanted to be like, "No, that's not legitimate. I don't want to acknowledge that one."

Lauren: And again, it's this "I have never come across this before so it must be wrong" not "I just haven't had my brain expanded for this new category."

Gretchen: Maybe there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than have been dreamt of in your philosophy, or your learnings as it will.

Lauren: It's also very likely – you could almost reliably put money on this, but especially the ones that people keep coming back to, like "impact" as a noun is one that people complain about a lot. And, like, there’s over years of records of people using that word in that way. Generally, these ones become recurrent cycles of outrage when there's no good evidence that other people haven't been happily using it this way for a very long time.

Gretchen: Yeah, either it's been used that way for a long time or it hasn't been, but we could start doing it now. It's fine. People seem to pass along their annoyance with corporations, or with their boss, or with stuff of being kind of new to you and therefore opaque or difficult to understand, with the annoyance of the words themselves, when they're just – you know, the words are innocent here. They're just channelling your feelings towards the boss or the – you know, there's a lot of corporate jargon going on, or something like that. Saying "learnings" – if people are using it as a word; It's a word now. And "impact" has been a useful verb and noun for many hundreds of years.

Lauren: The next type of "that's not a word" reaction you find is an extension of that form that we just talked about, which is what we're calling the Funner Reaction.

Gretchen: When I came across this one, I specifically saw a lot of people using words like "funner" and "funnest" and self-consciously saying of themselves like, "This game is funner than the other one. I know that's not a word." So rather than using it as a criticism of someone else, like I noticed with the other kind of examples, people were using it as kind of a pre-emptive self-criticism, like, "Yeah, I know this isn't a word. Don't make fun of me for this, but it's something that I want to use right now." And I think that's slightly different.

Lauren: It's something you want to use, and it makes complete sense. So it's something like "impact" as a noun is completely codified in English. There's lots of examples. Things like "funner" or "necessariness" or "squishable" are all words that might not be in a dictionary, but we know what each of the individual parts of that are. We have English morphology that's sufficiently consistent and transparent that we understand what all of those bits are doing when we combine them, even if they're not codified normally to go that way.

Gretchen: Yeah, you can add "-able" to a whole bunch of words. You can say "squishable," or "huggable..."

Lauren: "Doughnutable."

Gretchen: "Laughable," "doughnutable." I think a lot more things should be "doughnutable" or "ice-cream-able."

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Are the same types of things doughnutable that are ice-cream-able? Like, this is great! It's really cool that language can do this, and it's a shame to see people limiting themselves from this. Well, kind of not limiting themselves, but then adding this pre-emptive fig leaf because we're so used to limiting ourselves by not doing this type of linguistic play. It's there to be played with. Let's play with it.

Lauren: Especially if you are – it's interesting that people feel they have to police themselves on social media, which is a more playful and informal – maybe don't start using non-standard combinations of bits of words in, like, a job application or your Nobel Prize speech. Maybe stick with some more standard forms there. But if you can't play around with language on social media, it's a bit sad.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, and I think the question is not so much where is making up words or where is playing around with words appropriate, but where is play appropriate. You know, certain types of environments like a formal dinner or something aren't necessarily appropriate for playing with your food or playing with your words, but that doesn't mean that other environments aren’t appropriate for this. You know, there is a space for play.

Lauren: Look! I’ve made my soup doughnutable!

Gretchen: Maybe don't do this if you're having dinner with the Queen. Maybe don't. But that's a feature of a particular social situation, a broader social context, and I think we have the sense that language should be more rigid than even other areas where – you know, an experimental chef is admirable. Or if you're good at experimenting in the kitchen, that's a good thing you can do. And yet, people feel the need to apologise for experimenting with their vocabulary. Don't apologise! This is great. This is a feature, it's not a bug.

Lauren: I feel like there are some really expensive restaurants where you pay a lot of money to have ice-cream-ised to soup.

Gretchen: Oh no. It's worth experimenting with this. Some of them are almost so well used that they've taken on status of their own. A lot of people will observe, you know, you can be "overwhelmed," you can be "underwhelmed," but can you be just "whelmed"? Or why can't you be just "whelmed"? Some of these have been around for a while.

Lauren: Poor whelmed. It got abandoned by its cool, more morphologically complex children.

Gretchen: Yeah, its children abandoned it. But yeah, let's play with these things.

Lauren: So "whelmed" was a word. It was a completely normal word, and we added "under-" and "over-" and then we forgot about "whelmed." And now people say "whelmed" isn't a real word. Poor whelmed.

Gretchen: It was real for a while. Why can't it come back? But I think it's a matter of perception. If people start using "whelmed" again, people will figure out what it means.

Lauren: Like a horse getting into a unicorn costume and it no longer exists.

Gretchen: I think another reaction that I see from "Okay, is this a word?" or "Can this be a word?" is what I'd like to call the Schadenfreude Reaction, which is like, "Well, the Germans have a word for this."

Gretchen: We English speakers, we can't possibly, but the Germans must have a word for it. This one always – it’s a very particular kind of reaction because it's a sense of, "It'd be great if we could create a word. It would be nice if this type of thing existed, but I can't possibly do that as an English speaker. We need to go to another language and let them do it," which is a lot of what the history of English-speaking science and philosophy have done, is just go to Greek or Latin and make them create a word, and then borrow it into English, because somehow that seems more legitimate. These days, it's German. But it's the same sort of thing. And I think it's that we create words in English all the time and yet we have this sense of like, "Oh, maybe someone shouldn't do that," or those kinds of things. In particular, German is very good at creating words by compounding them.

Lauren: English is also good at creating words by compounding them.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: It’s just that we still leave a space there.

Gretchen: Yeah, I found someone saying that for some reason they thought "apple lovers" wasn't a real word. And I was very confused about this because surely all English speakers recognise "apple" and surely all English speakers recognise "lovers." So I guess they're asserting that "apple lovers" together isn't a real word. But you just made it. Congratulations! Now it's real.

Lauren: But it's got a space there, Gretchen, and I'm very anxious about the fact that a word is a thing that has a space on either side of it.

Gretchen: Well, maybe this is the point of the podcast where we have to say: For all that we're saying all words are real, there's another linguistic sense in which a word isn't even a linguistically meaningful unit because where you put your spaces is a certain kind of arbitrary.

Lauren: It's as much a product of the history of our writing system as it is anything else.

Gretchen: Yeah, and the same thing that gives German a word like "schadenfreude," which is literally just "schaden," which means harm or damage, and "freude," which means like happiness or joy, and they're like, "Oh, harm-joy." English could do this too. English does the same sort of thing by smushing together multiple words. There's just – we're more likely to leave a space there and less likely to shove them together. If you wanted to say "apple lover" in German, you could definitely do that. It’d probably be something like "Apfellieber." But you just wouldn't put a space there.

Lauren: Oh, that's right! We should use that in English.

Gretchen: But we could just say "apple lover"!

Lauren: So we could accept that having a space in the middle of something doesn't prevent it from being a word.

Gretchen: Yeah, and there's lots of – you know, dictionaries are really good at adding compound words even if they have a space in between them. It's just they seem like two words for the purposes of – if you're doing word count on your Word document, to be like, "How many words is in here," it will count them separately because they have spaces. But a lot of things like "greenhouse," or "chalkboard..."

Lauren: Smartphone...

Gretchen: Smartphone... You know, those started out with a space in between them and then we gradually got rid of the space. German just goes a little bit faster than us in getting rid of the space.

Lauren: There's also one that I'm sure you have an example from when you were, perhaps, growing up or when you move to a different dialect area, where someone essentially tries to shame you for using a form that isn't part of standard English or is less-used in standard English. We've called this the Ain't Reaction.

Gretchen: I think "ain’t" is the quintessential example of this, because it's so present in so many varieties of English, and it's so shamed in all of them where it’s present, and yet it's still there, and it's still alive and kicking in English. People write letters to the editor about finding it in dictionaries like, "Aaaargh, this shouldn't be there and it's because it's not real," and there's so much animus towards "ain't."

Lauren: How many decades and centuries of people telling other people "This isn't a real word" has it been and "ain't" is still going strong? It just makes me so happy.

Gretchen: Yeah, good job "ain’t," you're a fighter. Well, it starts out as a contraction of "amn’t," like "am not." "Is" goes to "isn't," but what does "am" go to?

Lauren: Amn't!

Gretchen: "It isn't," but "I amn’t." That eventually turns into "ain't." That's why there's no "amn’t" now. Except I think there is in a couple dialects, but not in most dialects. So "ain’t" takes on that function, but then once it stops sounding directly like "amn’t," it's like, "Well, I could just expand and work for all of the different pronouns!" It's very versatile. It's super useful. And yet it's highly, highly stigmatised. The way that that stigmatisation is expressed is, specifically, in this "not a real word."

Lauren: I think it speaks to the fact that "not a real word" gets used as this really broad, un-reflexive, unconsidered response to this thing that clearly is a word people use all the time and that the only reaction you have is "That's not a real word" instead of "That is a word that is considered informal and is probably best not used on this tombstone."

Gretchen: I’m sure someone’s used it on a tombstone. Yeah, I think there's a lot of nuance in that. And this is one of the examples where "That's not a real word" gets used to shut down discussion and shut down argumentation, especially like, "Oh, that's not a real word." "Well, I looked it up. It's in the dictionary." And then you're like, "Well, that's a bad dictionary now because it had this not-real-word in it." It's one of those things, like, you can't have an argument with somebody who won't at least acknowledge what would have to exist in order for them to be proven wrong.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: You know, if you say, "Well, would you accept that dictionary as a source"? And then you show them the word in Merriam-Webster or Oxford – all the dictionaries have "ain't" – and then you show them there, and they're like, "Well, I don't accept this as a source either." You're like, "Well, you just changed the goalposts now." Who do you accept as the ultimate arbiter for what is or isn't a word? Or is anyone who makes the assertion something isn't a word automatically the correct one?

Lauren: I just feel like if someone says to you, "That's not a word," it's really unfair that the burden of proof falls on you.

Gretchen: But I'm like, "Here's a store that's there." And you're like, "Nope. Not a real store because it's not in the yellow pages yet." I'm like, "But you can walk into it. It's a store that will sell you things." They're like, "Nope." No one's ever asked, "Oh, not a real word? Well, define a real word. What is a real word?"

Lauren: I guess the challenge here is – the easy response is to say, "Well, here's evidence that it is." But often when people are saying this, there is something here that's about language policing, and it's often cover for some kind of classism, or racism, or it's particularly picking on the language of a particular subgroup, or it’s covert sexism. So there is something here that's unpleasant, and I wish people would stop doing.

Gretchen: But even when I agree with them, it's also still an argument made in bad faith.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: You know, it's not – if someone says, "Well, you know, this isn't a word," even if I agree that this was probably a typo that someone made, or this is something that maybe wasn't appropriate to a particular context, legitimising the argument that "not a real word" is a reasonable response to anything is still a problem, even if the core thing that they're getting at might have some utility in the context because it's so undefined, and it's such an easy way of covering for classism and racism and all sorts of these kinds of discriminations that people smuggle into language.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: The problem is the incorrect ideas about how language works, not the particular words being used. Another type of word that people have the reaction "It's not a word" to is a word like "smush" or "smoosh" or "aaaargh."

Lauren: So things that are more representative of sounds, or reactions, or feelings that are often informal, or onomatopoeia.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I think this begins to get into like, "Oh, it's not a word because my computer gave me a red underline when I tried to type it." There are lots of different ways to try to spell "aaaargh," and I definitely don't think computers, generally, have all of them. That doesn't mean that a particular one isn't going to be the exact one you want right now but, thinking about those areas, we're trying to represent certain moods, or certain feelings, or certain onomatopoeias, or certain other kinds of sounds that exist in nature or in the depths of our soul, like "aaaah." These are hard to write adequately.

Lauren: And a lot of onomatopoeia in English is a bit not-standardised, and people kind of play with it a lot. In other languages, it can be more codified into the language. If you think about onomatopoeia in terms of the sounds that animals make, we have lots of codified ways of doing that. You know, pigs "oink" and ducks "quack," and that's very codified. You'll find "quack" in the dictionary. And you'll probably find "oink" in the dictionary. But, essentially, language is very messy at the boundaries in the way that what is a word and isn't a word – and you can't just be like, "Well, it's got a space." That gets a bit fuzzy at the boundaries. The same with this. So like "smush" might be more of a word than "aaaah," which is perhaps all that easy to say. And, you know, "haha" is more of a word than [laughing noise] in terms of laughter.

Gretchen: Yeah, but there's a certain kind of intentionality to them too, which I think distinguishes even something like "aaaargh," which can be spelled in a whole bunch of different ways, from something just kind of randomly mashing on your keyboard, or having your cat walk across your keyboard –

Lauren: Or actually screaming, which we won't do for the sake of your ears.

Gretchen: Yeah, no screaming on this podcast. If you'd like to scream, please provide your own scream here. But there's a certain conventionalised way of representing those, and they have a certain recognisability to them and language-specific way of doing them, even if there's also this flexibility around them as well.

Lauren: At the opposite end, moving back to things that do fit within our expectation that they only have spaces on either side, they usually have relatively regularised spelling conventions, but people get very upset about them, is when brands make forays into word creation.

Gretchen: Oh dear.

Lauren: And because – I think one thing that upsets people about this a lot is – when it doesn't feel forced, we don't think about it. And we accept a squillion brand names into our lives, and they just get absorbed, and we’re completely fine with it. And then there are times where it just feels very forced, and so...

Gretchen: It crashes.

Lauren: I have named this the Tronc Reaction when people say "That's not a word." So "Tronc" was the Tribune Publishing Company. Quite a few years ago they rebranded themselves to Tronc: T-R-O-N-C.

Gretchen: Yeah, which was just – they got kind of widely made fun of for it on social media as just like, "Why have you picked this name? It's so ugly. It's plunky. It's tronc-y. It's not a good name."

Lauren: And there is something about – you know, it doesn't have a particularly standardised English spelling – it's T-R-O-N-C – but it definitely fits. It's not like it's against the kind of sounds that you can put together in English.

Gretchen: Yeah, and it definitely sounds a bit, I don't know, like, plunky. It's a bit clumsy-sounding. But we've incorporated so many weird words into English, things like Xerox or Kleenex, which have a lot more X’s than a normal English word does, or something like Google or Twitter, which sounded very frivolous when they were first introduced, and now we're just like, "Oh, yeah, of course, I'm going to google it." And it doesn't seem weird to us because we're so used to them.

Lauren: And I think it's partly that we're very happy to accommodate new words when we need them. So Google sounded pretty silly when it started, and now we talk about googling things to the point where, if I'm trying to find something in a document, I'll sometimes be like, "Oh, I just have to google for that word." It's like, I'm not even in the proprietary search engine. It's just become the handy word. So if the language needs that word – whereas I don't talk about "Bing-ing" anything.

Gretchen: But, yeah, like, "I’m going to go Yahoo it."

Lauren: I don't have any particularly strong feelings about either of these search engines.

Gretchen: But one of them is definitely a lot more verb-y.

Lauren: One of them has definitely verbed into English a lot more happily.

Gretchen: I even use "Skype" to indicate for general video calls even if I'm not actually using Skype’s platform.

Lauren: Oh yeah, it doesn't matter what platform I'm using, it’s still – that's become generic.

Gretchen: It's like, "Hey, Lauren, do you want to Skype?" And then of course it's gonna be on Google Hangouts or something. It's not gonna be on Skype.

Lauren: Which is problematic for companies. You know, when their brand gets used generically, it means that they lose some of the brand copyright power. But I think it shows that language can be quite accommodating. I mean, English does love adding new words all the time. Whether they come from a top-down company or not seems to be a bit arbitrary. But it's the thing about when we need them.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: You know, Skype came around as the first video platform that I use.

Gretchen: It's when we need them or when – it's something that people decide for themselves kind of bottom-up and not, I think, something forced down. Another one that I had a lot of fun with seeing people do on this was – so somebody replied to the Pope's Twitter account, where the Pope was talking about the Beatitudes, which is – it's a thing in the Bible, I don’t know. Being like, "'Beatitudes' isn't a real word." It's like, "Look, guys. This is the Pope."

Lauren: I probably can't tell you what a beatitude is off the top of my head but, frankly, if the Pope is talking about them, he probably thinks they're real a word.

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah. Like, "Is this really the hill you want to die on right now?" Like tweeting at the Pope being like, "This obscure bit of theological terminology, which you have spent your entire life studying, is not a real word." I also found somebody saying that "gubernatorial" is not a real word? And I agree this word looks weird.

Lauren: I kind of almost feel compelled to agree. There is some story here where "governor" and "gubernatorial" came into English through slightly different – There's always the French-from-Latin paths.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And like, one of them came in via Latin via French, and one of them snuck in straight via French or something. And that's why "gubernatorial" is – it should just be "governatorial" if we're going to have a regularised system. But English, like any language, can handle quite a bit of irregularity in the vocabulary.

Gretchen: Yeah, and you get the impression people who are using arguments like this – you know, they're not really saying to the Pope like, "I don't trust your command of the English language," especially the Pope’s social media officer, who probably isn't even the actual Pope. What they're saying is, "This is an argument that I can make that" – like, we're talking about the beginning. You can use this as an argument even if you don't believe it, because it immediately shifts the burden of proof to the other person to say, "No, this is a word and here's why," and not to you for being like, "Well, why don't you think so?"

Lauren: It kind of reminds me of a subset of this, which I like to think of as the Mansplain Reaction, which is where you say something's not a real word because it conflicts with your worldview, essentially.

Gretchen: I really like an example of this that I found, which was somebody saying that "conspiracy theory" is not a real word.

Lauren: Oh, okay.

Gretchen: I know!

Lauren: Why is "conspiracy theory" not a real word? Is it because it has a space in it? Gretchen, we've been through this one.

Gretchen: No, somebody said it's a made-up mind-control word that causes one to dismiss the facts of any investigation. I was like, "Oh, okay."

Lauren: This is a pretty prototypical example of a Mansplain Reaction.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it's like, "I don't like the concept expressed by this word, so I'm going to attack the word not the concept," or say like, "It was unnecessary to name this concept because I don't think the concept is important or I don't think the concept exists."

Lauren: There's no such thing as "mansplaining." We’re just having a conversation in which I am aggressively disagreeing at you.

Gretchen: Right. I think the big problem that I have with the "not a real word" argument is it implies that there are some sorts of words that aren't real. But by the time something exists for you to say, "It's a kind of word," that's all it takes to be a real word.

Lauren: And words are words by consensus. No word is a real word. Every word has to start off by a group of people agreeing that this string of sounds has this particular meaning. And some people in some contexts have more authority in naming these things. You know, I will probably trust a doctor in telling me whether a word means a particular thing in terms of medical usage. I will definitely trust someone to tell me what their name is rather than trusting myself.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think there are certain kinds of authorities. A person is the ultimate authority on what their own name is, and, by that logic, linguists should be the ultimate authorities on whether words are real or not. And what we're telling you is all the words are real.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts or Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: hyperforeignisms, multilingual babies, homonyms, and an inside view of the gesture and emoji conferences. And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can't afford to pledge, that's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Especially this month when we're doing our special anniversary round of recommending to help the show grow! Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and AE Prévost, our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #transcripts #episode 25 #meaning #words #word #not a real word

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svartikotturinn · 5 years

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My strangest tutoring story

When I was in high school I was briefly a Na’vi tutor. Yes really.

Background

About the Golden Mouse competition

There is (or was?) this sort of contest called ‘The Golden Mouse’ (a.k.a. ‘The Virtual Olympics’), an annual competition for geeks held by the Tel-Aviv University and Mif‘àl haPáyis.

The way the competition works is that 50-odd schools that have a building paid for by MhP gather middle school students (20-odd in total, rough assessment) who are given subjects they have to study, like math and history and some more niche subjects, under the direction of one of the teachers at the school. The students normally divide into sub-groups, each dedicated for one topic or more. After some time spent studying, they are gathered to answer those questions online within a set timeframe.

After this, the 50-odd teams get whittled down to 30-odd for the second stage, and the process is repeated. Those 30-odd teams are in turn whittled down to 5 for the finals, for which they are taken (on a school day!) to TAU to hear three lectures. Then they are sent to separate rooms, where they answer questions related to those lectures. Finally, there’s a big ceremony and the top three places are announced.

Now, the second stage (or sometimes the first) usually requires basic knowledge of a given languge: one time it was Old High German, another time it was Esperanto, another year it was Italian, and that’s as far as my knowledge goes.

My personal connection

When I was 18, a loose friend of mine randomly asked me if I was familiar with the competition, and if I was willing to help her because she had to study a language for it and she knew I was a language geek. What she didn’t know was that I had competed in the competition myself twice: when I was in the eighth grade, and again the following year. The first time I was there, the language was Mandarin; six kids wanted to learn it, but they all gave up pretty quickly, and I was the only one who stuck with it. Nowadays I speak a bit of Mandarin, but I’m not remotely fluent or anything. That year we also won the competition. (The next year there was no language, and we didn’t win, but we did get to the finals.)

Naturally, I was overcome with sweet nostalgia and said yes. When she told me she needed my help with learning Na’vi, I was even happier, even though I didn’t know the first thing about the language.

The process

The first thing I did was tell my friend to learn to read IPA while I read about the language on Wikipedia. Then we started making little sessions on MSN Messenger, in which I taught her linguistic terms and how they’re applied in Na’vi, based on the Wikipedia article on the language and later the Wikibooks articles on it, essentially translating what it said and improvising little drills on the way, like:

‘In this sentence, which word is in the accusative?’ (She’s a Russophone Ukrainian, which was somewhat helpful.)

‘How would you change the sentence to convey that you’re going hunting, but you’re not happy about it?’

‘Name the noun cases and the suffixes that indicate them.’

I also taught her what ejective consonants are; while I was familiar with the concept, I originally misread the name as ‘ejaculative’ and told her not to laugh at—she didn’t even know the English word ‘ejaculate’, though. It took her a while to master, but she was so proud when she got it.

Meanwhile, the other girls who comprised the Na’vi group tried learning Na’vi on their own, but they focused more on vocabulary, using a website they were given by the organizers. As a result, they didn’t know the first thing about grammar or pronunciation—my friend told me she’d heard one girl pronouncing px as [f] instad of [p’], and she explained the mistake to her (‘once I was done laughing’). So they pretty much divided the work so that my friend was in charge of grammar and pronunciation and her group mates were in charge of vocabulary, and then taught each other the material they’d studied.

At one point my friend told me about a funny incident that had happened that day: the teacher in charge of their team once came up to them while they were studying with the transcripts of our sessions. He wanted to say something, then noticed the transcripts, picked them up, turned pale, gave them a thumbs up, and went to talk to another group.

Conclusion

Eventually they didn’t really need my lessons. They just had to translate a very short text in Na’vi, then call TAU and pronounce Oe-l nga-ti kam-ei-e properly. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a Na’vi greeting featured prominently in the film, glossed as ‘I-ERG you-ACC see-LAUD’, i.e. ‘I see you and I’m happy about it’, but more like ‘I see the inner you’.) Furthermore, Na’vi grammar is pretty much made of a collection of the most esoteric grammatical features of human languages, and the language with the most similar grammar to Na’vi I know is Georgian (which also shares ejective consonants with it). Not only that, but they didn’t even pass the first stage.

But at least I sparked her interest in linguistics, and now she can write in her CV, ‘Languages: Hebrew, English, Russian, Japanese [which she was taking at Berlitz], Na’vi...’, and I can write, ‘Also, I was once a Na’vi teacher…’ (I actually did have that in my CV for a while, until I realized it was pretty cringe.)

And, of course, we both have an nice anecdote to share.

#me #personal #Na’vi language #Virtual Olympics #Golden Mouse #Tel-Aviv University #TAU #language learning #tutoring #linguistics

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lingthusiasm · 6 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 19 shownotes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're talking about when sentences come with baggage. But first, we have new merchandise for you!

Lauren: Whoo! New merch!

Gretchen: By very popular demand, we have scarves that have tree-structure diagrams on them – they're very subtle, there are no words, there are no labels, so they can belong to whatever theoretical framework you're interested in, whether that's syntax trees, language family trees, syllable structure trees... They look really cool, we're really excited to see them around your necks.

Lauren: We have them in grey, cream, light pink, teal, and red, and we've also taken the opportunity to add a few more colours that were requested to the IPA scarf lineup as well, so if you were thinking of getting an IPA scarf or one of our new tree scarves, we have some new colours. We also have new colours for some of the "Not judging your grammar, just analysing it" zip bags and notebooks.

Gretchen: And we also have a bunch of new items that say "Heck yeah descriptivism" or "Heck yeah language change," because we couldn't pick, so if you want to be extra excited about linguistic descriptivism or language change, you can now do that. And if you want a black, grey, teal, or light pink IPA scarf with all your favourite characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet on them, you can get those too.

Lauren: And, as always, if some of those colours don't take your fancy, all of our patrons can order custom colour merch in whatever colours they like!

Gretchen: Just go to lingthusiasm.com/merch!

[Music]

Gretchen: I am really excited about this topic, because this gets to take me back five years to when I was obsessed with watching a YouTube series called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Lauren: And I watched it entirely on your recommendation.

Gretchen: And it was good! Right?

Lauren: And just for the sake of it, not because I wanted to be ready for our presupposition topic.

Gretchen: No, I think I actually got our producer Claire into it before, and then she got you into it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is not about linguistics, it's a YouTube adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice set in the modern day, and it has very little to do with linguistics, in fact, except for the fact that one of its episodes, episode 63, has this really good example of exactly what we're talking about in this episode. And I feel like watching this episode five years ago, when I was still in grad school, I had this moment when I was like, this is exactly what I have been learning about presuppositions for. So I want to act this out for you.

Lauren: Okay. Should we act it out together?

Gretchen: Yeah, but I need to give a little bit of context first.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: So, if you know anything about the story of Pride and Prejudice, you know, spoiler alert! There's – sorry, the book's really old!

Lauren: You've only had 200 years to read it, folks.

Gretchen: So, where we are up until this point is Darcy has done the first really awkward proposal to Lizzie, and she has said, "No, who are you kidding?" And then he has given her a letter where he explains himself, and because this is a YouTube vlog series, all of this has happened in the vlogs. And at this moment, Lizzie has read the letter, but she hasn't talked about it on the vlogs, because if you'll recall from the book, it has very, you know, kind of private and personal information about other people in the letter, so she doesn't feel like she can talk about it. And so at this moment, Caroline, who is Bingley's sister, who also probably has a thing for Darcy, has come over to Lizzie's videos and been like, "Hey Lizzie, so, like, what's up?" And this is where our scene starts. Do you want to be Lizzie or Caroline?

Lauren: I'm happy to be Caroline.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: It's all good. Like, I'm not going to deny you the opportunity to be Lizzie in a run-through of The Lizzie Bennett Diaries.

Gretchen: I appreciate you, you're a good friend!

Lauren: I'm not a monster!

Gretchen: Caroline is also a great character, she causes all these, like, really interesting semantic moments in the story.

Lauren: I'm really happy to play the semantically integral character. Okay! Okay.

Gretchen: All right! So, Lizzie says, "You have been watching my videos!"

Lauren (as Caroline): No, I haven't! That's why I need you to catch me up!

Gretchen (as Lizzie): You've been watching my videos, and now you want to know what's in Darcy's letter.

Lauren (as Caroline): No, I don't!

Gretchen (as Lizzie): I believe an appropriate response would have been "What letter?"

Lauren (as herself again): Ooooh, busted! That's Lauren being scandalised, not Caroline being... busted...

Gretchen: Yeah, okay. Cut scene! We're back as ourselves. So what happens here, after the end of this scene – Lauren, what do you think about Caroline's, like, video-having-watched state?

Lauren: Well, she's clearly busted, as I have declared, because the response should have been "What letter?" There's this assumption that she knows about the letter, because she's not like, "Aah! Take a step back, what are you talking about?"

Gretchen: But she denied it! She's said no!

Lauren: But she said, "No, I don't know what's happening," not "no" to the earlier bit of information that is in the sentence.

Gretchen: Yeah, like, "No, I don't want to know what's in the letter. Oh wait, I still am presupposing that there's a letter."

Lauren: Yeah, so the letter is just in there as baggage.

Gretchen: Yeah, the letter gets brought along for the ride.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: And so this was really interesting to me because it's a very clear example from the situational context – and of course Lizzie is not a linguist, but she's saying, "I recognise that there was this extra meaning that I was bringing along that you shouldn't have been aware of."

Lauren: Lizzie is a natural linguist!

Gretchen: She's a natural linguist! There's a similar type of thing that can happen – the classic example of this nature is if I were to say to you, "Hey Lauren, is the present king of France bald?"

Lauren: Ooh! Okay, let me think. Umm... let me think about who the present king of... hey, wait a minute!

Gretchen: What just happened!

Lauren: This is a trick question! Like, whether they're bald or not is not the relevant fact? The relevant fact is that there hasn't been a king of France since the revolution in 178... oh jeez, my history teacher is going to be very upset with me. 1789?

Gretchen: That's probably right. I don't know.

Lauren: I'll check that.

Gretchen: This is a very good Masterpiece Theatre! Yeah, so, the problem with that is again, it presupposes that there is a present king of France. In the way that if I said, "Is the present Queen of England bald?" you know, you'd have a real answer to that question.

Lauren: Oh! No, I think. It looks like her hair, but how do we know? But I feel like I'm definitely on firmer ground with that than asking about kings of France. This is a famous example because Bertrand Russell, who was a philosopher, it was one of his favourite sentences, he loved bringing this one out as a dinner party conversation piece to get people talking about how sentences come with all this additional information, and we kind of presume a whole bunch of knowledge and put it at the front.

Gretchen: That sounds like a great dinner party topic of conversation, I'm going to do that now!

Lauren: Yeah, I teach undergraduate semantics on the theory that what you're doing is teaching people how to have really great anecdotes for parties.

Gretchen: I'm into it.

Lauren: So, this is a famous one, it comes up when we're teaching this kind of thing, but it kind of comes from the philosophical tradition of understanding how meaning works? And it amuses me, because a lot of philosophers don't realise that a bunch of the time what they're doing is actually linguistics when they're doing kind of this language theory stuff. And it really just makes me happy that there are all these philosophers that think they're doing philosophy and it's like, "You're all actually linguists! You just don't know it!"

Gretchen: Everything is linguistics! I think my favourite thing about presuppositions – well, one of my many favourite things, in addition to the many jokes that rely on it – which we're definitely going to get into! One of my favourite things is that one of the ways to spot a presupposition is the response that you need to have to a sentence that has a buried presupposition. So if you reply to, you know, "Do you want to know what's in Darcy's letter?" and you say, "Yes, I do," that presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter. And if you say, "No, I don't," that still presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter. So if you want to not be Caroline and not get stuck, you have to say, "What letter?" or "Actually, I didn't know there was a letter," or "Hey, wait a minute! There was a letter?" And the "hey, wait a minute!" one gets abbreviated HWAM. H-W-A-M. It's an acronym, okay. So it's the HWAM (pronounced aitch-wham) test. You're like, "HWAM, there isn't any king of France!" "HWAM, Darcy wrote a letter?!"

Lauren: Yeah, you need a little HWAM stamp to stamp on examples.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: Declare them as presuppositionably cancellable.

Gretchen: A little stamp you can stamp on someone's forehead when they make an unwarranted presupposition. HWAM!

Lauren: HWAM!

Gretchen: You could tattoo it on your knuckles, it's got the right number of letters.

Lauren: ...yeah. I'm gonna stick with the rubber stamp, personally.

Gretchen: I mean, it also just sounds like a superhero move: HWAM! Or, HWAM! There isn't a king of France! There you go.

Lauren: Yeah. So this is a way of cancelling the presupposition. So the idea that Darcy wrote a letter is a presupposition, the idea there is a king of France is a presupposition. Instead of putting on some HWAM knuckledusters, maybe we can put on some lab coats, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Okay, we can put our linguist lab coats on.

Lauren: And try some more presupposition testing, because this is one of those great areas of linguistics where you can kind of prod at examples and see how they react and see whether you can cancel them. So if you have a "hey wait a minute" reaction, that's a good indication that there is some kind of presupposition.

Gretchen: Okay. Do you have an example for us?

Lauren: Well, we had the HWAM.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: Another thing to do is to find a way that cancels it by bringing in additional information.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: So, "the present king of France is bald" could be cancelled by saying, "the present king of France is bald and also not recognised as a monarch because of the revolution."

Gretchen: Oh, so there's some pretender, or some descendant that has set up a puppet court and claims to be the king of France.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Mm!

Lauren: One of my favourite presupposition cancellings is a really cheeky one because it's something that is so – we don't even think of it as a presupposition, because it's so semantically wiped for us, but when we say "good morning" –

Gretchen: Ohh!

Lauren: We say, "Good morning!" And someone goes, "No, it's not." It’s my favourite presupposition cancelling because that's the way you greet people, you just say "good morning." And it's more of a, like, "I wish you a good morning" rather than "you are having a good morning." But, you know, someone says "good morning" and you reply with, "Actually, my boss was late and the coffee shop had run out of muffins" you're cancelling their presupposition of goodness in the morning.

Gretchen: I like it.

Lauren: A slightly fancier test, but one that I think shows how complicated our presupposed knowledge is, is something that's called "projecting" in the literature, which is where really complicated sentences, or more complicated sentences, can lead to really interesting presupposition carrying or cancelling. And I'll give you two examples sentences to think about, and then we'll talk through them, Lizzie Bennet-themed. So: "Lizzie thinks that Darcy's brother is delightful" versus "Lizzie said that Darcy's brother is delightful."

Gretchen: So I think to the first one I have to go, "Hey, wait a minute! I didn't know that Darcy had a brother!"

Lauren: Yeah. But if Lizzie thinks that Darcy's brother is delightful –

Gretchen: Maybe she just thinks Bingley's actually his brother, or something.

Lauren: Maybe. Like, you can construct a reality in which you presuppose that Darcy has a brother. But if I said, "Lizzie said that Darcy's brother is delightful..."

Gretchen: Yeah, then it doesn't matter if it's true or if I think it's not true, I'm not bothered by it, because I'm just like, well, now she's asserting that.

Lauren: Yep. So because Lizzie said it, you go, "Hey, wait a minute! Why would she say he has a brother? I didn't think he did." She's saying it as some kind of, like, joke, or to throw me off-track, because it's what she says. But if if you report what she thinks, you're more likely to agree that the presupposition holds and that Darcy has a brother, or that you're misunderstanding something.

Gretchen: Hmm. But if you have, like, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's brother is delightful..."

Lauren: I think what happens is that people just run this with all permutations of possible thinking/knowing/believing.

Gretchen: Yeah, 'cause I think if I say, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's brother is delightful," that implies that I, the speaker who's saying the sentence –

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: – now I also think that Darcy has a brother and that this brother is delightful.

Lauren: Hey, wait a minute, Darcy doesn't have a brother!

Gretchen: When you first wrote these examples, I went in and changed them, because I was like, "It has to be Darcy's sister, 'cause he doesn't have a brother."

Lauren: I can't believe you didn't trust me.

Gretchen: And then I was like, "Wait, wait, this is what you're trying to do."

Lauren: This is the point of the examples.

Gretchen: This is the point of these examples.

Lauren: I feel sorry for people who don't know anything about Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or Pride and Prejudice, or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Pride and Prejudice BBC, or Pride and Prejudice the film, because they're like, "Yeah, Darcy might have a brother, whatever."

Gretchen: Whatever, who cares. Yeah, if you don't know, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is free, you can watch it on YouTube, it'll take... many hours.

Lauren: Yeah. Okay, so that's some ways that we can kind of pick apart presuppositions, and we can see that they're quite complicated and slippery, and it's not always as easy immediately as, like, "Whoa, what king of France?"

Gretchen: Yeah, they require certain amount of world knowledge as well.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because oftentimes we accommodate a presupposition without even really thinking about it. Like, the king of France one gets us because that's part of world knowledge that there isn't a king of France.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But I'm sure if I said to some people, "The president of Canada is bald," people might be like, "Oh, okay!" Wait a second, Canada has a prime minister!

Lauren: Oh, yeah, I didn't even pay attention to that.

Gretchen: Yeah! We know a certain amount of whether France is a monarchy, because the French Revolution was a pretty big deal but –

Lauren: It was a pretty big deal.

Gretchen: – in more subtle cases of world knowledge, you don't necessarily pick that kind of thing up.

Lauren: Yeah. Do you know what's really upsetting to me?

Gretchen: What's that?

Lauren: Is that the "is the present king of France bald" wouldn't have worked in the time that Pride and Prejudice was written, because it was written, like, a decade after the monarchy collapsed.

Gretchen: Oh no! Then you have to say, like, "Is the present king of France headless?" It's true, like, the day after.

Lauren: "Is the present king of France Napoleon?" No, only recently. Because I was, like, it would have been so great if we could have had: "Is the present King of France bald?" completely collapses now; at the time of Elizabeth and Darcy, totally would have held, but alas, no.

Gretchen: Ahh. So it still had this weird presupposition for them.

Lauren: We haven't had a present king of France for quite a while!

Gretchen: But it's not just – so, a lot of the examples we've been using so far have been with names of people and names of roles that people have, which is something that you can presuppose.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But you can also do it with other kinds of words, not just names. One example that I really like is somebody on Tumblr, quite a while back, because I was looking through my presuppositions tag, asked me if I could recommend my favourite etymological dictionary. Lauren, what's your favourite etymological dictionary?

Lauren: My favourite etymological – this is, like, such a linguist question, isn't it? My favourite etymological dictionary. A dictionary that is just etymologies? I mean, obviously Etymonline.

Gretchen: But is it your favourite?

Lauren: I mean, I said "obviously" because it's like the only one.

Gretchen: I know!

Lauren: I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary does some etymology, and some of the other ones...

Gretchen: They do some etymologies, but it's often behind a paywall.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah, so when I replied to this at the time, I was like, "Well, I don't have a favourite, I just have one. It's Etymonline, you should go read it."

Lauren: It's really nice to not have to make choices in life.

Gretchen: You know, "There's one that's online that's good that you should check." Or I think maybe they asked "some of your favourite etymological dictionaries"? And I was like, "There's... there's just this one." This was a joke that I used to play with my siblings, 'cause I'd be like, "You're my favourite brother! You're my favourite sister!" when I was growing up. I only have one of each.

Lauren: Yeah, it is a good – it's like a top Mother's Day card: "To my favourite mother."

Gretchen: Yeah. If you actually have two mothers for some reason, that's really mean, but...

Lauren: Yeah, true.

Gretchen: When you only have the one, it's just clever.

Lauren: Your birth mother is sitting there crying while your stepmum is, like, really smug.

Gretchen: Yeah, don't actually do this if you have multiple mothers.

Lauren: Don't do this if you have more than one mother, but if you're conveniently single-mothered, as I am – convenient for the sake of this joke – that's pretty good.

Gretchen: Yeah! So you can pull the "favourite X."

Lauren: What's your favourite theory about how language determines thought?

Gretchen: It's my least favourite theory!

Lauren: Kind of backs you into a corner there.

Gretchen: You know, if you're the only person in a race it's like, you came first in the marathon that I had in my backyard ten minutes ago! That no one else ran in!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But you came first! Good job!

Lauren: It's a good way to talk yourself up.

Gretchen: Yeah. I'm my favourite person in my apartment right now, yeah! Motivational self-help talk for presuppositions!

Lauren: Aww! There are other ways in which presuppositions are really just an excuse to talk about great strategies for irritating siblings. And one set of those is including the use of "stop."

Gretchen: Mmm.

Lauren: So, the classic "stop hitting yourself" presupposes that you chose to start hitting yourself.

Gretchen: So this is the classic thing where you go to your sibling and you make their own hand hit them?

Lauren: You pick up someone else's hand and use it to hit them, which, like, makes – I'm really glad that you also agree that this is the thing that you do.

Gretchen: Oh yeah, very much!

Lauren: 'Cause, like, I don't want to sound like the person that's the aggressive sibling.

Gretchen: I mean, I obviously, personally never did this.

Lauren: Mm-hmm, yes, it was your favourite younger brother who would do it all the time.

Gretchen: I have witnessed this happening among hypothetical siblings that may or may not be mine. "Stop hitting yourself" or you can be like, "Stop hitting me!" and then you can try to bring the wrath of your parents down on the sibling, even if they weren't actually hitting you.

Lauren: Or one that I get asked all the time, which is like, "When did you stop eating meat?" As a vegetarian, it's a topic that I don't give much thought to, but other people are really interested in.

Gretchen: Right, so if you've been vegetarian your entire life, then it's like, "Well, I didn't stop because I didn't start."

Lauren: Yeah, it presupposes –

Gretchen: Have you?

Lauren: See? There you go, you're really interested now, aren't you, in how long I've been a vegetarian.

Gretchen: Ah, no. The other classic example of ones that assume an emotional valence towards a situation – so if you have something like "how are you coping with your thesis?"

Lauren: Augh.

Gretchen: You're like, "Actually, I'm enjoying it!" or "Actually, it's been going pretty well these days!"

Lauren: Ahh, I finished mine, like, five years ago and I still get an automatic twinge just hearing you ask that question. But yeah, there were times when –

Gretchen: I thought you were gonna say you finished yours five years ago and people still ask you that question.

Lauren: No. But people would ask you. And some months you'd be having a really good month, things were under control, and you'd be like, "Well, I'm coping fine! It's all good." But you can't ever ask this question, like, neutrally or positively, you have to presuppose that things aren't optimal because it's a stressful experience.

Gretchen: I get asked this question about my hair, because I have very curly hair, and people say, "How do you deal with your hair? How do you manage your hair?" And I'm like, excuse me! I like my hair, I resent that it has to be a thing to be dealt with!

Lauren: "How do you deal with the burden of your hair?"

Gretchen: "How do you keep yourself from murdering your hair?" Like... no!

Lauren: So, I think we've declared those as the Annoying Youngest Sibling paradigm of questions.

Gretchen: I think this fits very well with our overall Pride and Prejudice theme that has appeared for this episode.

Lauren: Yup, yes. Definitely.

Gretchen: There are definitely some younger siblings in Pride and Prejudice!

Lauren: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say some annoying younger siblings in Pride and Prejudice.

Gretchen: I think that could be said!

Lauren: Yeah. So that's that set of that class of words.

Gretchen: And there's also a set around the number of times you've been doing something. So if you say, you know, if someone else is getting up and going to the kitchen and you're like, "I'll have some water, too!" It's like excuse me, I wasn't planning on bringing you water!

Lauren: "Oh, I'd love some of those biscuits if you're opening the packet!"

Gretchen: It's like, I wasn't... I wasn't opening that. Or, "Since you're better at mowing the lawn, I'll just let you do it!"

Lauren: Yeah. Presupposes that you're better at mowing the lawn.

Gretchen: Or just because I'm smarter than you doesn't mean that you couldn't do...

Lauren: That one you have to use with younger siblings all the time.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, you're contractually obligated.

Lauren: Yeah, so I guess they also fit in with the Annoying Youngest Sibling theme.

Gretchen: I mean, older siblings – I feel like I should admit as an oldest sibling – can also, presumably, be annoying.

Lauren: I wouldn't know!

Gretchen: The other ones that I really like are questions like "Why is Darcy such a jerk?"

Lauren: I love that it's just like there's no question that he is a jerk, because we're getting straight to understanding the reason for it.

Gretchen: Yeah, or, like, at the end of the book – spoiler alert – when Lizzie finally gets engaged to Darcy –

Lauren: Whaaat!

Gretchen: "Why did you get engaged Darcy when he's such a jerk?"

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: "Why would you want to get engaged to such a jerk?" presupposes that he's still acting in his, like, jerky behaviour from the beginning of the book.

Lauren: Yeah. I think of "why" questions as, like, if presupposition is about bringing baggage in, then using a "why" question is about bringing really space-efficient baggage? Like you just fit so much baggage in so efficiently with a question presupposition.

Gretchen: I think the most epic example of that that I found when I was researching this was a study from one of those, like, Psychology Today kind of journals, you know, pop science things, and the question that they had in their headline was "Why do people want to eat babies?"

Lauren: Now, you messaged this to me with no context.

Gretchen: I'm sorry!

Lauren: And I really did not know how to answer that.

Gretchen: Sorry! I feel like I need to clear up for the record that I do not want to eat babies!

Lauren: It's funny in retrospect now that I know that you were sending it to me for the episode, but why do people write headlines like "Why do people want to eat babies?"

Gretchen: I mean, it got our attention!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Unfortunately, I tried to click on the study, and the link was from ages ago and it doesn't work anymore.

Lauren: Oh no, so we'll never know! We'll never know.

Gretchen: So we'll never know. I think this refers to when you have a baby – people do say this – like, "Oh, I just want to, like, omnomnom it all the way up!" and they kind of, like, nibble on it, but not with your teeth?!

Lauren: Oh, right.

Gretchen: I've seen people do this with babies.

Lauren: Yeah, okay.

Gretchen: But not in like a consuming-eat sort of way, just in like a "making the mouth movements at" sort of way.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I hope this is the case, because I don't want to discover some sort of, like, weird thing that apparently is so well-known you can put it in a headline.

Lauren: So the examples we've been giving might give you the impression that there's just a specific set of words that we use to construct presuppositions. And that's true, we have a Wikipedia article that has a list of words that trigger presupposition in this way, but it's not just specific words. It's also words in particular contexts.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favourite – and by "favourite" I mean least favourite – examples of this is when certain parents, disproportionately male parents, get referred to as "babysitting" when they're taking care of their own children.

Lauren: Oh, this happened when – and I'm not gonna link to any of them, because I refuse to do any of them dignity – but there was a massive furore because when Serena Williams went back to playing tennis, her husband sat by the court looking after their child while she did her job.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: And everyone was like, "Oh, it's so cute! He's babysitting while she goes back..." But it's like he's not babysitting, it's his own freakin' kid, what do you mean?

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: "Babysitting" presupposes that you're looking after someone else's child, usually for some kind of financial gain.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. And if it's your own child, like, hopefully your partner isn't paying you to look after your own child, that would be –

Lauren: That would be your own personal arrangement, whatever.

Gretchen: But generally it's the case that people are taking care of their own children as co-parents and, you know, it gets referred to as babysitting.

Lauren: Yeah. So in this case it's this word, babysitting, but used in a particular context presupposes something that doesn't quite gel with it.

Gretchen: Yeah. The other example that we encounter a lot for this is when certain varieties of English, or varieties of a particular language, get referred to as "having an accent," or "losing an accent," or "accented," or "accent-less," which presupposes that there is some variety of English that isn't an accent. Everything's an accent.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There isn't one neutral version of English that is the zero centre.

Lauren: Even though our default assumption is that we're the ones that don't have an accent. Gretchen, you have an accent, but I don't.

Gretchen: No, no, I'm the one that doesn't have an accent, you have an accent.

Lauren: Ahh, what a pickle we've put ourselves in!

Gretchen: I really enjoy describing – partly because you can sometimes do this to play with people's expectations, like if you're talking to somebody and you can tell that they think of themselves as, you know, "Oh, I've got this very standard American accent or British accent" to be like, "No, no, you're the accented one. Canadian English is just the normal one, I don't know what you're talking about."

Lauren: Yeah, kind of flip their presupposition back on them.

Gretchen: Yeah! But at the same time, I know that the accent that I have within Canadian English is considered "less accented" than other varieties, so I don't wanna do that when it's not flipping the script.

Lauren: We found some more great examples in the wild of presuppositions, but I'll let you decide which one you want to share first.

Gretchen: So, the way that I found these is I did a search on Twitter for "presupposition" and I filtered it by only people that I follow? And I went back, like, eight years to all these linguists that didn't know that their tweets from, like, 2011 –

Lauren: Were gonna be used as –

Gretchen: Where they were like, "Huh, look at this example of a presupposition!" Because it turns out I haven't blogged about this very much.

Lauren: So thank you to linguists of Twitter.

Gretchen: Thank you to linguists of Twitter. Thanks to Lynne Murphy, who tweeted not so long ago an example which went "Which Americanisms make you wince?" This is from a British newspaper, which presupposes that some Americanisms make you wince, or similar examples like "What are your linguistic pet peeves?" or "Which words should be banished?" presupposes that some words should be banished and that people have linguistic pet peeves, when this is also something that is not necessary and is not something that should be presupposed.

Lauren: Emily Bender on Twitter shared a quote and then kind of deconstructed the presupposition in it. The quote was: "Given that ours is a scientific discipline, you must be careful to ground your argument in previous research." And Emily Bender's like, "Well, do they imagine that the disciplines outside the sciences don't ground their research in previous work?"

Gretchen: Ooh!

Lauren: That, like, anything that's not a hard science just fabricates things anew every time without any reference to what goes ahead?

Gretchen: Time doesn't exist except for science-science!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I don't know what you're talking about. The only area that has time is science. Humanities and social sciences just exist in this non-time-bound sphere.

Lauren: I feel like this is a good time to send people back to the episode about existing in time as a human.

Gretchen: That's true, we did a solstice episode about existing in time. Possibly one of my favourite examples, which comes from a non-linguist, saying, "As his name is not Biggest Bird, we are to understand that Sesame Street is home to at least one, perhaps more, truly immense, unseen birds."

Lauren: I feel like so much of our discussion so far has been, like, wow, look at all this extra baggage you get and you don't realise it, and I feel like this person is just trying to shove more baggage in than is possible with this example.

Gretchen: This is the equivalent of, like, sitting on your suitcase, trying to jam it close.

Lauren: How much more presupposition can I try and pretend is in this name?

Gretchen: I mean, I think there's a genuine example beyond the facetious example where if you say something is bigger, it's implying that it's also not the biggest.

Lauren: So, like, "something's bigger than Texas" doesn't presuppose that there could be something that is even bigger again.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it's a stretch, but it's a funny stretch. Or a more mundane example from Sherry Yong Chen on Twitter where she posted a photo of "Welcome Back" on this sign of a neighbourhood pub? Which was clearly trying to presuppose that you had already been there, you know, so that they could welcome you back as like a "we're part of a neighbourhood" sort of thing.

Lauren: And I think it's worth taking – like, we've been giving some very constructed examples and I think the reason that people keep coming back to the "present king of France" example, et cetera, is that they're very clean and clinical and easy to dissect what's happening. But the reality is we use presupposition to get through conversation every day of our lives.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Lauren: You know, if we're talking about Emily Bender, you presuppose that that is the Emily Bender that we both know, or that will be locate-able in the show notes of the show, and if I had to say, every time, "Emily Bender, who's a computational linguist, who you may know from Twitter," like, that's just gonna get a very tedious conversation.

Gretchen: Like, a person that I know who is a person!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Who's alive!

Lauren: And if I had to stop you every time and be like, "Whoa, you have a sister?" Like, that's gonna get tedious.

Gretchen: Yeah, normally we're pretty seamless about this, especially introducing random family members, or introducing, you know, if I say, "Oh, I can't chat with you right now, I've got to go pick up my dog from the vet," you can accept that even if you don't know that I have a dog (I don't have a dog). But this is the example.

Lauren: I was like, "You have a dog?! This is news to me, Gretchen!"

Gretchen: You've been to my place, you've seen I don't have a dog!

Lauren: Yeah. But presupposition works in a way that it's like, conversation is busy. The fact that I have a dog is not the important thing, it's the fact that I can't talk to you right now, that's the important thing, so let's just go with it.

Gretchen: Yeah, you just kind of quietly update your mental ledger for which bits of baggage are being hung on to.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: A really interesting example of this comes from a Language Log post from a couple years ago by Julie Sedivy, and she talks about boasting through presuppositions?

Lauren: Mmm!

Gretchen: And she gives the example of a politician who was trying to find a way to integrate into his conversation, like, "Look, I created 7 million jobs!" without saying "I've created 7 million jobs and you all need to know about it."

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And eventually what the advisers came to was to do that boast through presuppositions. So saying something like, "The 7 million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find educated people to fill them. That's why I want to create a tax reduction for college tuition to help kids go to college to take those jobs."

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And so you get the 7 million jobs in there, that we've created, but you don't have to say, "We've created 7 million jobs! You should definitely believe us when we say this."

Lauren: And it gives it, like, solidity, 'cause you're not jamming it in as new information, you're treating it – and the sneaky thing about presuppositions is that they're in that part of the sentence that we treat as old information or existing information.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. So in the comments on that post, there's a woman saying that she's found this to be really effective for introducing people to the idea that she's a lesbian, because she just says, you know, "my wife." "Oh, my wife would kill me if I watched that new episode of Torchwood without her! Have you seen it?" And then people just have to add the "my wife" to the background information, and she finds it's less confrontational, makes for an easier conversation, than saying "I have a wife, how do you feel about that?"

Lauren: Yep, very handy.

Gretchen: Yeah, so presuppositions can communicate things about social norms as well. And one really interesting example of how we seamlessly update our information via presuppositions comes from forensic linguistics, actually.

Lauren: Oh, that's cool!

Gretchen: Yeah! So this is when you use linguistics in a courtroom to determine how people can give evidence and be asked questions and all sorts of things. And in this particular example – so it's a study by a memory scientist called Elizabeth Loftus – they show people videos of car crashes, and then they'd ask them questions about what they'd seen. Sometimes they'd ask them questions in two stages, or they'd ask them certain questions that had presuppositions in them. So they asked them, "Do you remember seeing the stop sign?" people would be like, "Yeah!" or "Sure, maybe." They answer "yes" at a higher rate than the people who are asked "Do you remember seeing a stop sign?" which is not a presupposition.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: There is an updated version of the study that was recently done in French by a linguist who I know named Elizabeth Allyn Smith at the University of Quebec at Montreal. And so she made a video and played it for Montrealers which again, you know, showed a robbery. So she had them fill out a questionnaire. The first questionnaire was things like, "Did you see a trash can?" or "the yellow trash can" or "the green trash can." And the trash can was actually yellow.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: And then a week later she had them come in and say, "What colour was the trash can?" and they could select green or yellow.

Lauren: Uh-huh.

Gretchen: And so in the cases where – so sometimes they got no extra presupposition information, sometimes they got the correct presupposition information, and sometimes they got incorrect presupposition information.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And she found that people would give the incorrect answer! They'd say it was green when it was actually yellow when they'd had this type of presupposition, but they did so at slightly different rates than the English speakers did in the same studies.

Lauren: Huh!

Gretchen: So they were less likely to be influenced when you added true information, but they were more likely to be influenced when you added false information.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Than the English-speakers. And of course there's a bunch of stuff that could lead to this, and I think she's planning follow-up studies to figure out exactly which factors affected this, it might have been French or English, it might have been other differences in the paradigm of the study. But think about, like, some of this can even differ cross-linguistically how much you update the information that you think is in the world based on a presupposition.

Lauren: Which has massive implications for how people are cross-examined in court, right?

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Lauren: Like if you squeeze a whole bunch of presuppositions into questions, you could potentially confuse people's ideas of what happened.

Gretchen: And if you feed someone false information in presuppositions and they agree to it, and then they give false answers later and you can prove that they gave false answers, you can use that to discredit a witness.

Lauren: Mmm. That's... mean.

Gretchen: Who maybe was just doing what we do in conversation all the time.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get scarves with the International Phonetic Alphabet or tree diagrams on them and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include memes and poetry, the semantics of sandwiches, and conlangs. And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can't afford to pledge, that is okay too, we also really appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistant is Celine. And our music is by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 15: Talking and thinking about time

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 15: Talking and thinking about time. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 15 shownotes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we're talking about how we talk about time.

Lauren: But first, we have very exciting news for 2018, which is: twice the number of full episodes of Lingthusiasm every month!

Gretchen: So, up to this stage, we've been doing Patreon bonus episodes, which are sometimes a little bit shorter, one of them is a text chat episode, and sometimes they're cut bits from the show – now we actually have enough support on Patreon to do full-length bonus episodes. So that means two Lingthusiasm episodes a month for people who support us on Patreon. We are really excited to have grown this far in this short amount of time.

Lauren: We'll still have free episodes every month through the main channel, but we'll also have another full-length episode, which means you get more bang for your Patreon buck.

Gretchen: Yeah! So, thanks to everyone who has brought us there so far and it is not too late to start listening to these and all the previous Patreon episodes as well! We also released Lingthusiasm merch last month – IPA scarves, T-shirts and mugs and bags that say "Not judging your grammar, just analysing it", and Lingthusiasm stickers. And they have been very popular, we have been very much enjoying seeing people's photos of them and stories about who they got them for, so feel free to keep sending us those. We're excited to see what you end up doing with them!

Lauren: We were so excited when we put this – especially with the scarves and the "Not judging your grammar" – yeah, we were so excited when we were putting this together and it's been so nice to actually be able to share it with everyone and everyone else also getting really excited about it.

Gretchen: And we're really excited to see some of that gear and some of our listeners at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in a few weeks in January. So, we'll hopefully see some of you there!

Lauren: Our current Patreon episode to round out the year is a question and answer session that we did at our Montreal live show. So if you want to know what it's like to have the opportunity to ask us some questions, if you want to relive the live show experience, that is available on the Patreon now!

Gretchen: It had a really good energy, people asked really good questions. And it was really fun to have that kind of more back-and-forth than we normally get to do in the episodes. So you can check that out and all the previous bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: There's a quote that circulates around on the internet, one of those ones where the original author is lost to time, that for me sums up I think a lot of what we're going to cover in the episode today, which is, "You are a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust."

Gretchen: Hmm. That is both weird and cool.

Lauren: And I really like this quote because for me, it takes something that we take for granted, our lived experience of how we move through the world, and it kind of just unhinges that for a second and makes you reflect on how really weird human bodies and human social interaction is. And I feel like a lot when I teach linguistics classes, a lot of my class is just me going, "Look at this really obvious thing you've done your whole life, think about how weird it is for a moment, think about how weird it is that we actually communicate with each other functionally."

Gretchen: I think a lot of the times when we're talking about linguistics, we end up talking about the "meat suit" part of, like, this is what your tongue is doing. Just think for a second about the fact that you have a tongue! It's pretty weird! Or this is what your vocal cords are doing, or the weird flaps of skin and the rest of your throat are doing, or the, you know, neurons that you can't see. And there's there's a lot of physical aspects to language that says, okay, well, spoken languages tend to have certain kinds of similarities because that's just how the human vocal tract is designed. Or sign languages have certain kinds of similarities because that's what your hands can do. Like, there aren't any sign languages that require you to stand on your hands. Or spoken languages that require you to, like, bite your tongue to make the word, because humans don't want to do that! And I think the part that we often miss is that in addition to being in meat-coated skeletons, we're also on a planet. We're on the same planet. And some of our experiences as speakers of any of the languages on this planet have certain kinds of similarities with each other because of that planet, and a lot of those are related to time.

Lauren: And so that is our topic for today. We're gonna talk about talking about and thinking about how time works.

Gretchen: So Happy New Year's, Earthlings! We're gonna talk about time.

Lauren: We are being a bit end-of- year, just-after-first-anniversary reflective here, but we think it's relevant all year round.

Gretchen: Yeah! And, you know, one of the big things is that we're on a big ball of rocks and water and we have this sun in the sky, and so languages have words for day and night, and mark the passage of time with days and with years, because those are things that all different human societies have observed. And we have a moon, which gives us things like months. And there are roughly twelve of them in a year, so twelve is this important number for different measurements of time.

Lauren: I didn't really think about how important twelve was for time until we started listing places where it crops up! So it crops up, obviously – we talk about twelve-hour cycles in the day, and we have 24 hours, so that's two sets of twelve there.

Gretchen: We have things like twelve signs of the zodiac, or twelve months in a given year. And we also have other types of time-related things that are divided up into twelves, like the minutes and the hours on a clock get divided. So an hour gets divided into sixty parts, which is, you know, divisible by twelve. And then a minute gets divided into sixty parts, and so I looked up – because I was thinking, you know, why is it that a second is called the same as, you know, the "first, second, third, fourth"? And that's not actually –

Lauren: Is it a coincidence? I had always assumed it was.

Gretchen: No! No! It's not a coincidence! I kind of vaguely assumed it was a coincidence. But actually, in medieval Latin – and this is according to Etymonline, which is great – they divided the hours into various kinds of small parts. And the first part of the hour was called the "pars minuta prima", or the first small part. And "minuta" there is related to, like, "minute" or "miniature."

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: But it just means small. And so that's where a minute comes from. And that's the first small part. And then the pars minuta secunda –

Lauren: Ahh, I see where this is going!

Gretchen: – is the second small part! And that's the second.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Which is another sixtieth. And there actually used to be a term for a sixtieth of a second –

Lauren: Right...

Gretchen: – what we would now use a millisecond for, which was called a tierce, or a third, which is the third small part, which is yet another sixtieth of a second.

Lauren: Ahh. Like, seconds are so simple and salient to me, having grown up with them, that a tierce, like a third, just sounds so weird? But a millisecond is completely fine. You can see the modern decimal system of influence –

Gretchen: Modern decimal system kind of encroaching on the second! Yeah!

Lauren: Wow, imagine if we still measured things in thir... thirds?

Gretchen: Thirds!

Lauren: Thirds.

Gretchen: Or tierces, if you want to be Latin-y about it.

Lauren: Tierces! Yeah.

Gretchen: But, I mean, we could have ended up – you know, we have milliseconds now. The French Revolution, which was one of the things that introduced the metric system, also tried to introduce a ten-day week instead of a seven-day week.

Lauren: Ah, yeah, I heard about this. There's a great Twitter account that just tweets out whatever day it is in the old French revolutionary calendar.

Gretchen: Oh, that's great. Yeah, they named them all after, like, agrarian things, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, there have been attempts to do that, but for some reason the seven-day week and – I guess the nice thing is is that if you divide a 28-day month, which is kind of a lunar month, into four parts, you get this seven-day week, even though there's no other reason to use seven because it's this weird prime number.

Lauren: And a ten-day week, it's a long time to the weekend.

Gretchen: But if you have a three-day weekend, maybe?

Lauren: Like, you're never gonna win people over. I would rather get a two-day weekend after five days than a three-day weekend after seven.

Gretchen: I don't remember exactly how they gave the days off, maybe they had one halfway through? So it would be like three and then one and then three and then... how do you do math? What's left? Two more?

Lauren: I'm not a French revolutionary, I'm sorry.

Gretchen: Well...

Lauren: We'll have a link in the show notes page.

Gretchen: So, there's all these different ways of slicing and dicing time and yet we've also ended up with this very weird calendar system that has all of these artefacts in it, like the fact that September, which has "sept" in it, which means seven, is actually not the seventh month, it's the ninth month. And October, which has "oct", meaning eighth, and it is actually the tenth month, and so on and so forth, because January, February didn't really use to be a thing, and so if you started counting at March, they work out. But yeah, there's lots of weird things about weird artefacts that get snuck into our time-counting systems. The other really cool thing about time – so, this is a study about children called "Learning the Language of Time: Children's acquisition of duration words."

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And it's by Katharine Tillman and David Barner, and they noticed, or people have noticed, that kids start using time-related words around the age of two or three, even though they have no idea how clocks work for like several more years.

Lauren: I would say definitely several more years, yep.

Gretchen: Until like eight or nine.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So what do they mean if they're saying the word minute, or if they're saying the word hour, if they don't actually know what a clock means?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And so they got dozens of three- and six-year-olds in the lab and they asked them to compare several different pairs of durations. So their example was, "Farmer Brown jumped for a minute, Captain Blue jumped for an hour. Who jumped more?"

Lauren: Uh-huh.

Gretchen: And they also use seconds, days, weeks, months, and years. And by age four, the children tended to get more of these questions right than you'd expect if they were just guessing. And as they got older they got better and better at that.

Lauren: So they know an hour is longer. They may not be able to tell you exactly how long.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Hmm!

Gretchen: But then! They asked them things like, "Farmer Brown jumped for three minutes, Captain Blue jumped for two hours. Who jumped more?" And adults are like, yeah, this is still really obvious, and the kids were like, I don't... I don't know?

Lauren: Wow. Stumped them! That's like, oh, yeah, as an adult, you're like, this is so painfully obvious, how can you not get this.

Gretchen: Like, why are you asking this? But this is why we have science, right, so you're not just like, this is so obvious. But yeah, so kids get thrown by this: well, it's three minutes, but it's two hours, like what... what... what are you gonna do? Whereas we know that an hour is an order of magnitude larger than a minute, it doesn't matter if you just add one.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And kids also do this type of things for numbers and colours. They have these kinds of general concepts of them before they have a very good idea of the specific details. So a kid might be able to use a word like hundred or thousand, probably – this is me inferring from their study – but they're not actually counting all them, they just see a lot of cookies and be like, "Wow! There's a hundred cookies!" And there's actually twenty. But they have the sense that a hundred is a lot.

Lauren: I'd still be happy with twenty cookies.

Gretchen: You know, so would I. But, you know, counting is a thing.

Lauren: Yeah, and so we have the kind of general semantics. And it's that thing, like, we do it as adult speakers as well, right. Like, we say, you know, I'll often message you and I'll be like, "I'll be online in two minutes!" And you can expect me any time within the next one to ten minutes.

Gretchen: Yeah, oh yeah, and if you're ten minutes there I'm not like, oh, you're eight minutes behind, it's like, ah yeah, that was kind of in the order of magnitude.

Lauren: I've started the stopwatch!

Gretchen: Especially if you think about how parents or adults talk about time to kids, it's like, "Yes, yes, yes, I promise, we're gonna go in a minute!" And then like twenty minutes later the parent's like, "I guess we're going now!"

Lauren: Yeah, it is very confusing to learn to navigate this.

Gretchen: Yeah, "You can watch TV in a minute!" and it's actually like, you know... Or like, "In an hour!" and it's actually three hours or it's actually half an hour. I think parents know that kids don't really understand those those times, and they're often not very precise about them with kids because it's just easier to give a general impression. But I think the classic way that I remember counting time when I was a kid was with sleeps. So you would say things like, "Three more sleeps until we're gonna go visit your grandparents!" And that was three more days, but somehow it was easier to count sleeps.

Lauren: I think there are only like four or five sleeps until Christmas when this episode comes out?

Gretchen: There you go!

Lauren: Depending which time zone you're in.

Gretchen: Depending on when you listen to it. Maybe they're listening to it like a year from now.

Lauren: You can only listen to this episode on any given 21st of December.

Gretchen: So, yeah, there's like three more sleeps! French also has this word, but they don't use the normal word for sleep, they use a baby talk word, which is "dodo". So you can say, like, "Trois dodos!" And that means three more sleeps because you're using the baby talk register.

Lauren: That's cute! I mean, I guess sleep, A Sleep, is a weird... like, I think I only use it with children.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: Use sleep as a noun?

Gretchen: I mean, I think you can say like, "I slept the sleep of the just" or something if you want to be more formal.

Lauren: Yeah, but not to a three-year-old! The other thing I've always found really hard to get my head around with time is that different cultures obviously have different times that they celebrate the new year, that the concept of a new year and counting years is completely arbitrary. And in Nepal there are about five different ethnic groups that have five different dates that they measure New Year's on.

Gretchen: Oh, that's exciting.

Lauren: It's always so amazing! It's like this thing that you think is this really important thing, and then you discover that other people, for other people your new year means nothing and they've got their own thing going on.

Gretchen: Yeah, and it's interesting how the year itself is so universal, but the time when you when you pick it is so arbitrary. Whereas something like a day, like we all have the same kinds of dawns and sunsets, because that's built in, but for a new year, sometimes people go for a solstice or an equinox, sometimes people go for a lunar calendar, where the years don't actually quite match up because you're caring more about the months – you know, there's lots of different types of years.

Lauren: There's also a lot of cultural variation in how people conceptualise where they are in time and how time happens. And this is more or less a really elaborate culture-wide metaphor that different cultures can have. So when you hear "metaphor" you might think of, like, school comprehension classes where you've learnt that, like, "the sun is a big yellow balloon" is a metaphor and "the sun is like a big yellow balloon" is a simile and both of them are equating something with another property. And that is true and you can use them as a very specific literary device, and in those cases the more novel, the better. But we also have these metaphors that are really pervasive in how we see the world and our place in them.

Gretchen: And they're so ingrained that you don't even think about them as metaphors, they're just how things are.

Lauren: No, so we really have to think about ourselves as souls in meat-covered skeletons on a bowl of rocks hurtling through space. And this kind of area of semantic – it's really a kind of a property of semantics and cognitive linguistics – is probably best encapsulated, or kind of kicked off through a work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. So a lot of the work in this area is inspired by them and their book "Metaphors We Live By," because they're so pervasive. So, for example, we have a lot of things like "last year is behind us," "we can move forward," "I can't wait until Christmas," like, "Christmas is coming up really quickly" are all –

Gretchen: So, time can move quickly in a way that's kind of weird. I think even just saying like, "Oh, I'm looking forward to when we're gonna do this," that's like, the future is ahead of us, the past is behind us. Or, like, "let's just put that behind us," meaning let's just forget about it.

Lauren: Yeah. So we have an orientation where the future is ahead and the past is behind us. And so we have two slightly different ways of thinking about this in English. We can say, like, "I just have to get to September and then I can go on holiday" and so we're moving through space towards September or the future or whatever is happening, and then –

Gretchen: Hmm, okay.

Lauren: But we have a slightly different one where like, "Christmas has come up so quickly!" where we're kind of stationary and time is flowing past us. But what's common to both of those is the future is –

Gretchen: Like, "I can't believe we've arrived at December already."

Lauren: Yep. But future, pretty safely anchored in front of us. Whereas there are other cultures, and the most famous one is Aymara, which is an Aymaran language of South America – so with Aymara, the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. And if you think about it, it makes a kind of sense, because we know what happened in the past. You know, I know what happened to me yesterday. I am not psychic and I don't know what's gonna happen to me tomorrow. So it makes sense that the future is in the part of your vision where you can't see and you don't know what's there, but you can look out over your life and where you've come from as you've travelled through. So it actually, like, it's a really robust logic and it's totally the opposite metaphor, but it's encoded in their language the way our way of talking about time is encoded. Another common one that's often talked about is, especially in various Chinese languages where you have a vertical orientation of time, where the past is above and the future is below. And that's partly the the writing system that motivates that, and we have, even though it's not in our speech, we often see in our gesture, not only do we have this forward- backward space orientation, but we have a left-to-right orientation. So if you think about plotting out everything you have to do in the next couple of days on a timeline, then you're more likely to put events earlier on the left and events later on the right.

Gretchen: Right, so, okay, I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do that.

Lauren: Sometimes we have these metaphors that are so deep in our consciousness they don't even show up in our speech but they show up in the way that we orient ourselves.

Gretchen: But if we were using a right-to-left writing system like Arabic or Hebrew, we would probably plot out things on a timeline in the other direction?

Lauren: Yeah, there's been so little research that's really nailed a lot of this down. Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive psychologist who's done some work on Chinese and English monolinguals and bilinguals, and she's found that, especially with Mandarin speakers, you can get them thinking vertically or horizontally depending on how you prime them before you do the experiment, which is cool.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Lauren: So there's both long-term, like it's very hard for us to think about time forward and backward, but you can also prime people to think about these metaphors in more short-term ways as well.

Gretchen: And people often use, you know, even just an arrow going from left to right to indicate things about the future.

Lauren: Yeah, so Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign logo, which was very unpopular at the time, and I wrote about it and what the arrow was doing in the H as it pointed to the right. And also FedEx has that little optical illusion arrow in the logo.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah!

Lauren: And if you look at it, they would never have done that logo if the writing was such that it went from right to left, because that wouldn't be indicating kind of future-y dynamic forwardness.

Gretchen: Yeah. Oh that's kind of like – so email programs do this, right, if you have, like, the reply arrow has this kind of circle back pointing to the left, and the forward arrow has it going towards the right. And those are just arrows, like, your email contacts don't exist in time and space, but they're using those arrows to kind of transmit those ideas.

Lauren: Yep. So these metaphors are really pervasive in how we talk and think about time.

Gretchen: So FedEx doesn't want to make you think that they're gonna run off with your package and take it back to the factory.

Lauren: FedEx your package, just comes back to you every time.

Gretchen: And that's what would happen if they used the arrow in the other direction.

Lauren: Yeah, that would be... that would be a not-good... And, you know, it's – I've written some stuff about emoji direction. So, they're oriented so they make sense in terms of Japanese word order.

Gretchen: Mm!

Lauren: But in terms of English word order it makes it look like people aren't moving forward from left to right and so they're not moving forward in time. And English speakers get really irritated by that. So the vehicles and the people walking all point from right to left. And we interpret that as like they're going backwards.

Gretchen: Oh, okay. Whereas if you spoke Japanese, because that language is subject- object-verb and then you want to put the verb at the end of the sentence so that you can be like, yeah, this refers back to the thing that was at the beginning.

Lauren: Yeah, so in that language it's pointing the right way, but for English speakers it doesn't gel with our sense of things moving forward. And so I love this way because you really, you know, time is so hard to get our hands on that we have to use whatever strategy we can and these metaphors are a really nice way to do that, but we really take them for granted. Sometimes you're just like oh, wow, yeah, that's how we... that's how we move through the world!

Gretchen: Yeah! Another thing that I take for granted a lot is that, you know, time is this abstract concept, but for some of us, and I'm one of them, we actually have this kind of intuitive way of visualising time. So there's a phenomenon known as synaesthesia, which is when you have kind of cross-sensory perception. So the classic example of synaesthesia is grapheme colour synaesthesia, which means that certain letters or numbers have particular colours associated with them, and I have that as well and we'll probably talk about that in some other episode, but in this particular context I want to talk about time- space synaesthesia a little bit, because this is actually one of these kind of – it's less talked about and it's a lot more common I think than people were realising, that a lot of people have instinctive visual metaphors, a kind of a mental image or an image in your mind's eye, of where different times of day are, where different days of the week are, where different months of the year are, hours in the day. So...

Lauren: Hmm! Yeah, I definitely haven't heard of that as much as I've heard of colour letter/grapheme synaesthesia.

Gretchen: Yeah, the grapheme one, I mean, it's easier to visualise because you could just put that stuff in different colours, whereas the – you know, I think I've looked at some of the diagrams that come with the studies and I'm like, "That looks really weird!" But also I know I have this thing, mine just looks different from that. So the classic example that you generally see in time-space synaesthesia studies is – so, I think most time-space synaesthetes visualise time as a circle. Which kind of makes sense, because all of our time things, like hours in the day, months of the year, they repeat and they're cyclic around each other.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And the classic one that you see in the visualisations is that someone will be standing in the centre of this big ring. And in the ring are the different months of the year, in order, and the one that's in front of the person will be the current month. So let's say you're looking at December and you're like, this is the month that we're in right now, and then beside it will be January 'cause you're flipping over to the next year, and you'll just keep going around. And it'll kind of move in front of you as time progresses.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And some people have it in kind of a bit of an elliptical shape, like it's not just generally a perfect circle, it's not like a hula hoop.

Lauren: Hmm!

Gretchen: It's this kind of elliptical shape, and sometimes it's tilted a bit, sometimes there are colours involved... This is this kind of thing that people have. For me, I have it as a loop, but I have it as a up-down loop that circles around in the back.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: So rather than like the hula hoop thing –

Lauren: So you're not standing in the middle of it.

Gretchen: I'm not standing in the middle of it, I'm looking at it. It's kind of like if I was going to take my watch off and hold it in front of me so I could see the face of it, then that would loop behind itself as well.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Except it's bigger than that. And it doesn't have a watch, it doesn't have a clock face on it. And I have the same mental loop for both hours of the day and months of the year. So midnight is where January is.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: And it goes through. And noon is around where June is, and it goes through – like, midnight and January are at the top and then it kind of loops in the back very quickly and it just kind of goes around there. So, I was trying to look for this visualisation that I'd seen before of the months around the person, and I ended up on this article that was trying to describe this. And it was saying that, oh, people who have time-space synaesthesia, they're like Time Lords! And they have all these...! And I just... you know, I don't have magical powers here, people.

Lauren: Do you use it mentally when – if you're like, okay, I have to do this thing in September, so I have four months to do it, like, is...?

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean I use it in – like, I do use it to kind of keep track of where I am, going about my day, or knowing when something is, or "how soon is that," "how far is that." Like, "this feels far away," "this feels close by." I use it for that. And I did notice – so I was in Hawaii in March this year. And I left Montreal in the cold and then Hawaii has these beautiful, balmy temperatures, obviously. And I noticed that I was in the wrong spot in my mental calendar? And I felt like I was in July, because that's what the weather was like, even though I was in March? So I had a really hard time calculating times for several weeks afterwards, because I just – my body had decided that I was in July now. Like, my brain had somehow decided that I was in July now and I was really not. It's kind of like a macro version of – you know that thing where you have this sense that it's Tuesday but it's actually Thursday?

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: And you don't know why it feels like a Tuesday, but it feels like a Tuesday, and there's a way that Tuesday feels?

Lauren: That, for a year.

Gretchen: I had that for like several months, 'cause I got really thrown off.

Lauren: Oh, how disconcerting.

Gretchen: It was pretty bad. Now that it's getting cold here again, it's better, I'm like, it's definitely winter now. But it really messed me up, yeah! So, yeah, it's like, I'm not a Time Lord, my apartment is not bigger on the inside...

Lauren: How disappointing.

Gretchen: I know, I tried, but they don't sell TARDIS apartments.

Lauren: It'd be very convenient.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Do you find that you assume other people are kind of visualising time in this way as well, or do you find that it clashes with those other cultural metaphors about time?

Gretchen: Um, I just kind of take it for granted, like, I don't really think about it very often, it's just there? It's kind of like you don't think about how what your mother looks like, you just know. Or like –

Lauren: You don't think about the fact that you're a meat-puppet skeleton.

Gretchen: You don't think about the fact that you're a meat puppet in space! Sometimes I do see calendars that for some inexplicable reason will put their earlier times at the bottom. So there's this website that I've been visiting a lot lately which tells you when the sunset and sunrise times are for your location – because I'm really counting down the days to when we can start moving out of this darkness, and I'd like my sun to start rising again at, like, earlier than four o'clock – and for some inexplicable reason, this sunset website, it starts its midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., at the bottom and its evening at the top.

Lauren: That is very confusing.

Gretchen: And that just throws me every single time, and I don't know why they're doing it! But yeah, that really messes me up. But I think that would mess most people up, because –

Lauren: That would definitely mess me up.

Gretchen: Because if you're using an agenda or something, all of our metaphors at, like, later in the day is at the bottom?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So I don't know what these people are – maybe they have synaesthesia and that's how their synaesthesia works! And they were like, "Finally! I could make this thing the way I like it!" That's my best guess. But I think one of the things when I think about being a ghost in a meat suit, meat skeleton, is that there's a certain amount of similarity that linguistics has to another hobby that I've been taking up in the recent couple years, which is stargazing.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: And before I started stargazing, you know, I would go outside at night and I'd look up at the stars and be like, wow, there's stars, that's nice!

Lauren: Yeah. They're there.

Gretchen: They're there! Look, pretty! Sometimes there's a moon! And, you know, I knew one or two constellations, but if I couldn't find those, if Orion wasn't up, then I was just like, oh, there's stars. And now that I've been stargazing for over a year and I know what most of the constellations are and how they move through the sky at different hours of the day and different times of the year, and I have names associated with them, I go outside and I look at the same sky and what I see there is different. Because all of the individual pieces have meaning now and have associations with them and have patterns that I can see. And obviously the sky hasn't changed, I've changed. But in many cases, language is kind of like all those stars. We're surrounded by it all the time, you hear it all the time, you see it, it's there, but being able to look at language like a linguist looks at language is... now you have words, and you have frameworks that you can put in, here's what all these sounds are. And they're not just a bath of sounds, they're constellations. So you have this way of making sense of all of this stuff that you're seeing and you're experiencing it and putting it into some sort of context. I think for me that's one of the things that's really magical about linguistics. And stargazing!

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can also get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include a live Q&A, the semantics of sandwiches, language games, and hyper-correction. And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron! If you can't afford to pledge, that is also okay, we really also appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their lives.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire and our editorial producer is Emily. Our music is by the Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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