When we got numbers, things really started to happen.
How do other languages handle numbers? How do pre-linguistic children conceptualise them? And how did the development of numbers influence our development as humans?
We’re talking to anthropological linguist and author Caleb Everett on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlPromo
Last Sunday was Grammar Day, and the American Copy Editors Society had a Grammar limerick contest. Some of them were corkers. Daniel reads the best ones out to Rewi, ahead of the show.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/17391683
Animation
by the Mystery Animator
Full interview
Here’s the full audio of Daniel’s chat with Caleb Everett about his book Numbers and the Making of Us. We talk about people without numbers, what numeric child cognition might be like, and how culture influences counting and vice versa. There’s also something about yam pyramids.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/17350938
Cutting Room Floor
Ben is glad Fringe is over — it brings an end to the condition known as Fringe FOMO.
Does ridicule work to change minds? Or is it better to keep it positive? The team talks it over.
It all started when Daniel snapped his fingers to mark off the different parts of the show. (You can see clicks on the waveform.) Then Ben and Daniel started a game to see who could click first. It’s driving Kylie bananas.
But at least they can talk about what films they want to win an Oscar — or don’t want to win.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/cutting-room-316-17511087
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Show notes
Best Hot Takes From the ‘Change My Mind’ Campus Sign Meme
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/memes/best-hot-takes-change-my-mind-campus-sign-meme
How to change someone’s mind, according to science
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/10/how-to-change-someones-mind-according-to-science/
Martin, R. A. (2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. Burlington, MA: Academic Press.
https://archive.org/details/psychologyofhumo00martrich
Tan, et al.: Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01103v1.pdf
Study: Rational arguments and ridicule can both reduce belief in conspiracy theories
http://www.psypost.org/2016/12/study-rational-arguments-ridicule-can-reduce-belief-conspiracy-theories-46597
Orosz: Changing Conspiracy Beliefs through Rationality and Ridiculing
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
No laughing matter, yet humor inspires climate change activism
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-humor-climate.html
Everett: Numbers and the Making of Us
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674504431
The Dozenal Society of Great Britain
http://www.dozenalsociety.org.uk
12 Mind Blowing Number Systems From Other Languages
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31879/12-mind-blowing-number-systems-other-languages
The Number System of Ndom
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/ndom.html
Does Australia have a ‘zombie economy’ that is at risk of a crash?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-01/australias-zombie-economy-sleepwalking-into-danger-gfc-china/9492868
Beyond the Zombie Economy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/austerity-media/johnna-montgomerie/beyond-zombie-economy
Why Zombies Are Taking Over the Economy
https://www.cnbc.com/id/45032576
What is the origin of the word ‘zombie’?
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-zombie
Best Picture Flub Boosts Interest in 2018 Oscar Telecast (EXCLUSIVE)
http://variety.com/2018/film/news/oscar-poll-best-picture-flub-1202716280/
We were there: How the worst flub in Oscar history went down
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2018/02/28/we-were-there-how-worst-flub-oscar-history-went-down/377305002/
The Word Detective: Flub, et al.
http://www.word-detective.com/2007/06/flub-et-al/
Oscars 2018: What did Frances McDormand mean by ‘inclusion rider’?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-05/oscars-2018-what-did-frances-mcdormand-mean-by-inclusion-rider/9511956
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Talk the Talk, RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language. For the next hour, we’re going to be bringing you language news, language and cognition, and some great music. Maybe we’ll even hear from you. My name’s Daniel Midgley. I’m here with Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Good morning.
DANIEL: And Kylie Sturgess.
KYLIE: G’day, everyone.
DANIEL: On this episode, we’re talking about numbers and how they contribute to the way we think. How do other languages handle their number systems? How do pre-linguistic children conceive numbers? You might think they’re straightforward — but don’t count on it — on this episode of Talk the Talk.
BEN: Hey, everyone.
DANIEL: Hi.
KYLIE: Hello.
BEN: Why don’t we catch up on what’s been going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past?
DANIEL: Has anyone seen this meme going around? There’s a guy who sits at a table sort of thing. He’s a conservative dude. So he’s got the sign that says “Male privilege is a myth. Change my mind” at a university. Have you seen this guy?
BEN: I have not seen this meme.
DANIEL: Okay, this is a meme only a couple of weeks old.
BEN: What a provocateur!
DANIEL: I know, right? Really edgy. So the internet went nuts and photoshopped lots of things for him.
KYLIE: Oo!
DANIEL: Here, I printed some of these off for you. Go ahead, read some.
BEN: “Pineapple goes on pizza. Change my mind.”
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: “Pop tarts are ravioli. Change my mind.” That’s bloody dangerous thinking.
DANIEL: They need to listen to our sandwich episode.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
KYLIE: “Pluto is not a planet. Change my mind.” It’s got Calvin from ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ with a sign saying “Bats are bugs. Change my mind.” That’s the kind of thing that’ll get him sent to the corner at school, as I recall.
DANIEL: There was also one where someone had photoshopped Tommy Wiseau from ‘The Room’ and it said “I did not hit her. I did not. Change my mind.”
KYLIE: [LAUGHS] Oh, hi Mark.
DANIEL: This got me thinking: how do you change someone’s mind?
BEN: Aw, it’s so hard!
DANIEL: You can’t really, can you?
BEN: It’s so hard. What in our evolutionary history led us to the position of going, “Oh! My understanding of the known universe is super fluid and changes all the time”?
KYLIE: Mine definitely did. If I fall in love with a person, oh yeah! I will be willing to change my mind in order to fit in with that person. I am such a sucker for the heart.
BEN: Are you talking about you? Or just humans?
KYLIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that works for me and I don’t know if that works for anyone else out there, if they’ve…
BEN: Absolutely not!
KYLIE: …had the experience where they’ve fallen in love with someone, and realised that they’ve had a particular viewpoint, it’s led them to reflect upon it because they respect the person. They say, “Oh, you know… I want to have shared values and experiences,” and it’s led them to think, “Well, actually, yeah, I think I have changed my opinion.”
BEN: I think you have a drastically different response to a lot of people I know, for whom the literal exact opposite thing happens!
KYLIE: Well, the conflict leads to building up the relationship.
BEN: Absolutely! To the point of like, “Yeah, we agree on most things, except for this one minor thing. Well, I definitely definitely think you’re wrong.”
DANIEL: But how about this: I seem to remember someone — when they deconverted from their religion, It was because they looked at people who were doing science, and they just found out they respected the way those people thought a lot more. And it was kind of instrumental to changing their mind.
BEN: You know what I hate? Nachos. Change my mind.
DANIEL: Okay, now I don’t know if I can change your mind because I don’t think that you can just walk up to somebody and change their mind on something.
BEN: Nachos are amazing. It’s going to be pretty easy. Come on. Damn! I’m already halfway there.
DANIEL: I remember this old saying: A man convinced against his will is of the same mind still.
BEN: Ah, I like that.
DANIEL: I don’t think you can change somebody’s mind against their will, but if you can find a way in, then maybe you can do it. So let me ask a question: what do you think are some good techniques?
BEN: To back-door into people’s psychology?
DANIEL: Is it reason… just giving good information?
BEN: No, absolutely not! Oh, my god! No! Like, don’t get me wrong, humanists. Like, reason is amazing. It has a terrible success rate!
DANIEL: Yeah, terrible track record. If anything… we’ve talked about research where, if you give somebody information that they disagree with, the backfire effect makes them believe the wrong thing harder.
KYLIE: Yeah. It’s actually multifaceted, and you have to change your approach, according to the situation that you’re facing. There are some people out there who are never going to be convinced.
BEN: Mhm.
KYLIE: But you might be able to create little hooks that can create cracks in the surface on occasion.
BEN: Okay.
KYLIE: For example, the work I admire of science communicators, Susan Stocklmayer and Léonie Rennie. There’s a couple of things that can be hooks. First of all, you’re reflecting the values. You’re looking at each other and seeing for shared norms. So for example, you and I might disagree on stuff, but we discover that we have an intense concern about benefits to family. We might be very concerned about profit to society or personal profit. We share that.
BEN: Sure.
KYLIE: We just have a different approach to it.
DANIEL: So, common ground.
KYLIE: Yeah. You structure your message to arouse curiosity. Interest, with elements of surprise and discrepancy, and we do that in our show all the time, for example, when we’re talking about controversial issues — like, for example, grammar rules, like we were doing last week! We said, “Okay, let’s have a look… you know, what makes us curious?” We have a clear and simple narrative. And finally audience interaction. You’re not just commanding your presentation and being aware of it. You structure and design your presentation ahead of time.
DANIEL: I ran across some old research that I thought I would just run through. This was about the Reddit CMV, or change my view, where people say, “I think that nachos suck. Change my view.”
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: The thing about this subreddit is that if the person actually does change their view, then they say so.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And they get a delta, meaning change. So they were able to look at the ones where someone changed their mind and where they didn’t, and what they did.
BEN: What the commonalities were across the mind changes, and so on and so forth.
DANIEL: So here is just the quick version. When a lot of people tried to change a person’s mind, it happened more often.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Bandwagon effect. Conversational turn taking is good, but if there’s like five back-and-forths, it’s probably not going to happen.
BEN: It’s… ah, okay, so contrary to my, like, home-brew approach, long comment threads: not so great.
DANIEL: Not so great.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Using different words than the original posts do. That means you’re bringing in new ideas.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Longer replies, and arguments that use calmer language are more convincing.
BEN: Man, I love me a comment, when you expand comments on a thing and each comment has like three or four paragraphs. I’m like, “Oooh, we’ve hit flavour country now!” That’s always a good thread because no one who is angry and BLAGHMBLAGH!!! writes four paragraphs. Right? Ever.
DANIEL: Here’s another strategy that seems to work according to this research: hedging. If you use a softer lead-in like, “It seems to be the case that this works.”
BEN: “There is some evidence that would suggest” kind of thing. Yeah, right.
DANIEL: It makes you not look like a hardened ideologue.
KYLIE: “Some people might say” is something I always use.
DANIEL: So that’s where the research was until this new piece of work by Christopher Skurka of Cornell University, published recently in the Journal of Communication. They made videos about climate change, and they used three different videos: one that was funny, one that was ominous, and one that was informative. Now, Ben, we’ve already said that informative… ha! probably the worst strategy!
BEN: LOL people hate knowledge!
DANIEL: Is it better to make them laugh or is better to scare ’em? What’s your view here?
BEN: I really want to say ‘laugh’ obviously, because I like the lolz. But I actually have a feeling — I think the data will show that laughing is infinitely more effective than fear, but I’m really interested to know exactly how limiting humour is. Right? Because there’s… I have a feeling that research in the not-too-distant future is going to show us that it is more effective, but that it glass-ceilings like a mother. Right? Like it’s just like, “Yeah, it’s working really g—[BMMF] and it cannot go past a certain point. But… am I right? Is humour more effective?
DANIEL: What they found was that humour was more effective for college-age adults between eighteen and twenty-four.
KYLIE: Yeah, age!
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay — it turns out the making stoners laugh is more effective.
DANIEL: Who knew?
BEN: Wow, stop the presses!
DANIEL: However, fear worked for everybody.
BEN: Ah! Interesting.
KYLIE: It also has to be strategic as well, and this is something I’ve noticed within my classes. Research from Marter from 2007 said that less recalled and less power to motivate further engagement. You remember the lesson was funny. You’re less likely to remember the content.
BEN: This is the glass ceiling I was talking about.
KYLIE: That Ben — he’s a funny teacher! What did you learn in class today? Don’t know, but he’s freakin’ funny!
BEN: I always found that with the Daily Show, as well. Like, it was so insightfully cutting. But if you really thought back to the funny show you just watched and the information that you would want to retain to try and convince other people in the general public about why the Republican Party was terrible or whatever… it’s not there.
DANIEL: Yeah, but you’re hoping for information, and that’s not the thing that convinces. What seems to happen is that if you can get somebody to laugh with you, then you bring them into your group.
BEN: “With you”, though. And making people laugh with you is actually super hard.
DANIEL: Okay, fair enough but if you can get somebody on side…
BEN: Or scare the shit out of them!
DANIEL: Then they’re on your side.
BEN: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
DANIEL: So what have we learned here?
BEN: Changing people’s minds is super tough.
DANIEL: There are a lot of factors and it’s complicated.
KYLIE: It’s going to be multifaceted and you’re going have to change your context and approach, according to what the need is. Talking to someone who’s a conspiracy theorist is going to be different to talking to the five-year-old who says, “I will never touch vegetables ever again.”
DANIEL: Remember also, though, you’re not always trying to convince the committed, hardened opponent. You’re also trying to convince the other people who are watching.
BEN: That’s true.
DANIEL: Try to stay positive where appropriate. It’s not always appropriate. And try to build relationships.
BEN: Sounds hard. We should take a track.
KYLIE: Something friendly!
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. Let’s do. And this one is AM and Shaun Hill with ‘Persuasion’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
BEN: If you are just tuning in to Talk the Talk, RTR’s show about linguistics, the science of language, this week we’re talkin’ numbers.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about numbers before. We know that there are people and languages that don’t use them. And then we know that there are also languages where they don’t use the typical sort of base-ten system.
BEN: Now Daniel, if a person just heard the phrase “there are people and languages who don’t use numbers”, and their mind is now going [HEAD ASPLODY NOISE], where can they go to catch up on that little revelatory nugget?
DANIEL: They can go to Episode 256 numbers, where we talk about a lot of different languages that are anumeric, and also that use quite different systems besides base ten. Numbers seem really straightforward and it may seem strange to deal with languages that have nothing but vague and nonspecific quantifiers, but actually we all have experience with this. For example, how many is several?
BEN: It’s greater than five and less than eight.
DANIEL: How do you know this?
BEN: Because I talk to people about this all the time!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You WHAT?
BEN: I do.
KYLIE: Well done!
BEN: A couple, a few, several, some — I have worked through this with a lot of people.
KYLIE: This is starting to sound like Terry Pratchett and the trolls — yeah, many, many, some, lots.
DANIEL: Hang on, I’m getting this down: a few, several…. I know a couple; couple’s easy, but…
BEN: You would think a couple is easy, wouldn’t you?
DANIEL: I would.
BEN: You would think that. I know people who definitely use ‘a couple’ to mean three or four.
KYLIE: Really! Not two.
BEN: Mhm.
KYLIE: Wow.
DANIEL: So, if you say “I’m part of a couple…”
BEN: Yeah, no, obviously, but I mean we know that the world ‘bank’ has like fifty bajillion senses, right? So it’s not like ‘couple’ has to mean ‘two’ because ‘a couple of people’, or ‘people who are in a couple’. Just that linguistic… you know, ‘a couple of people’, and ‘people who are a couple’ — that creates a different image in my head.
DANIEL: It’s different: “We had a couple of drinks”.
BEN: Yes! Yep.
DANIEL: Right? which could be anywhere from six…
KYLIE: One each! And that’s it. “Oh, so you had one drink.” “No!”
BEN: That actually would be the only time that ‘a couple’ and ‘several’ could be broadly interchangeable, is Australian drinking culture.
DANIEL: Kylie, do you have any difference in your mind between ‘a few’ and ‘several’? Any sense of this?
KYLIE: Few and several…
BEN: A few is three or four for me, and when you get to five, five’s a bit murky. When you get to five, you’re into ‘several’ territory.
KYLIE: I think I agree with that.
DANIEL: Isn’t that funny, though. We think of ourselves as very precise in English, but then we also have, sitting on top of that, this range of vague non-numerical quantifiers. I mean, we haven’t even gotten into things like ‘a lot of’, ‘loads of’, ‘oodles of’…
BEN: Even just cooking: A pinch.
DANIEL: When I was a kid, I thought that ‘several’ was like ‘seven’, for etymological reasons.
BEN: Yeah, and I mean, it’s not like the dumbest thing in the world to think, is it? Seven, several.
DANIEL: It seems that the word ‘several’ actually comes not from seven or anything like that but from latin separ, which is also where we get the word ‘separate’. A bunch of discrete units, I guess.
BEN: Interesting.
KYLIE: So you’re able to distinguish it as separate.
BEN: But we know how not-at-all-relevant the root word can potentially be.
DANIEL: That’s true.
BEN: It could have meant ‘horse’ once upon a time, and now it just means ‘a bunch of stuff’.
DANIEL: Well, I had the chance to talk to somebody who knows a lot about numbers. It’s Caleb Everett. He’s a cognitive scientist, or perhaps we should say an anthropological linguist, at the University of Miami. You might remember him because we talked about his work a bunch of times on climate and sounds.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: He’s also written a book called “Numbers and the Making of Us.” He’s uniquely capable in this area because, when his father Dan Everett was working with the Pirahã in the Amazon and learning their language, he was a kid. He was running around with the other kids learning Pirahã. So he’s got a lot of experience.
BEN: Having a great time.
DANIEL: And they don’t have any numbers. They have maybe quantities, like ‘some’ and then ‘some more’. And that’s really weird for me because, as I explained to Dr Everett, as a kid, numbers were the first thing…
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Like, “What’s your name? My name is Daniel. How old are you?”
BEN: “How old are you? I am three.”
DANIEL: “I’m this many.”
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s like the first thing you know. So I asked Caleb Everett for an analogy. How could I understand what this is like?
CALEB EVERETT: The truth is I don’t know, and I don’t think any of us, even those people that have done field work on Pirahã, like my parents or other people that have — you know, other missionaries had lived there for a long time or my siblings and I were kids in the village —
I think even to us, it’s still a really puzzling thing. Right? Because, you see, as I mentioned in the book, you know, you can see these people excelling in doing things that you don’t know how to do, or at least I didn’t know how to do, and — you know, outfishing me for instance, or doing things in their their native ecology that they’re really good at. But then, in some basic tasks of distinguishing quantities, you see that they are not doing so well. And that’s a really puzzling thing, and it is I think for us impossible to really think of life without numbers, or to really totally grasp that because, as you just pointed out with your own personal anecdote, this is something that we do from such an early age, right? It’s not just something that we learn in school. It’s not just something that we learn, you know, before we get to school from teachers and so forth. This is something that’s sort of inculcated in our minds from a really early age, and it sort of shapes our identity too, because “how old are you” is one of the fundamental things about your identity, and it’s one of the fundamental things that you ask kids from a really early age. So I’m not totally convinced that we can totally grasp what it’s like not to have numbers.
But yet if we look at populations like the Pirahã and a few other populations in the world, we see that it’s not a fundamentally human thing, right? And from the archaeological record and so forth, the evidence suggests that, you know, numbers haven’t always been around, right? That’s not really that shocking. Language hadn’t always been around, so of course numbers haven’t always been around either. So this is not something that’s just sort of inherent in the in the human condition.
DANIEL: Okay, so numbers are kind of a cultural thing, and they’re also kind of a new thing. When are we talking about?
CALEB: Yeah, there it’s a little speculative, but what we can do is — and I do in the book — is look at the archaeological record and say, okay, looking at this piece of evidence, we can be pretty confident that humans had numbers then, right? Or that at least some populations had numbers then. So I’ll give you one example. There’s a reindeer antler that dates back over ten thousand years that was found by some colleagues here in my department at the University of Miami, and the reindeer antler seems to have been used as a calendar, right? I mean, in a very basic sense where there are twenty-nine lines, and you can tell that people were cycling back and counting over these twenty-nine lines, probably presumably because they were counting the days in the lunar cycle. Right? To do that… that ability to sort of precisely recognise and symbolically demonstrate twenty-nine things, that doesn’t seem to be something that anumeric populations are capable of. We see that experimentally today. So we’re pretty confident that populations like that had numbers, and then when we see artifacts like that in the archaeological record, people had numbers. So there’s some evidence of that in Africa going back over forty thousand years. But the truth is we don’t really know. There’s some evidence I discuss in the book from the Blombos Cave in South Africa that I think suggests pretty tantalisingly that people had numbers there maybe ninety thousand years ago. But again, that’s admittedly a more speculative thing. We can’t discern definitively, but it’s fair to say we’ve had them for tens of thousands of years. But not all populations, and that’s one of the key things. Even today some populations lack numbers. So I imagine that numbers, once they’re developed and refined in a particular culture, they spread across cultures really easily and very quickly because they’re very useful technology. And we see that even today, that numbers spread very quickly and there are a lot of economic pressures to adopt numbers. But that doesn’t change the fact that for the bulk of our history as a species, we probably did not have numbers.
DANIEL: And the same thing seems to apply to writing. You know, something that’s so incredibly useful that it just spreads. But there is a bit of a connection between numbers and writing. I even talk in my classes about how numbers maybe led to the development of writing. Like, the first things written down were probably numbers. Have I got that right?
CALEB: Yeah, yeah, and… well, I’m glad to hear someone thinking along the same lines, because I say that in the book and it’s not something… you know, I’ve seen that one or two places, and then I’ve seen some sort of speculative responses. But I agree with you completely, because when we look at the few places that writing developed — you know, we say it was invented, but I think that’s a bit of a misnomer — where writing developed gradually, we see that in all these cases, whether you’re talking about Central America or Mesopotamia or the Far East, you see that numbers were pretty critical to the first examples of writing that we have. And I discuss in the book some reasons why I think that numbers might have led to the invention of writing, or I should say helped lead to the development of writing systems.
DANIEL: Because you’ve got to count stuff for, like, business purposes, and then from there it’s writing quantities, to maybe thinking about writing other stuff, I guess.
CALEB: Yeah, and I think we see this really clearly in Mesopotamia in the archaeological record, where the oldest sort of symbolic tokens that are the precursors to writing were quantitative tokens that were used to denote quantities of things that were traded, you know, or quantities of things like beer. And so out of those symbolic denotations of quantities, we gradually go from this three-dimensional token-based representation of quantities to two-dimensional representations of quantities and other items that were being denoted by the quantities during trade. And then eventually, it sort of develops into two-dimensional writing in clay that includes not just quantities but lots of other symbols and that eventually becomes phonetic, and through a long series of accidents basically is the writing system that we have today, and developed into many other writing systems also.
DANIEL: Dr Caleb Everett, anthropological linguist and author of ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’.
BEN: I think more fancy-pants researcher types should say, “And through a series of accidents, led to the writing system we have today.”
DANIEL: “And it involved beer.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The title of the book I think is well-chosen: ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’ because, gosh, you go from counting and then to writing and then from there… wow!
BEN: I have a radical proposition to throw forward.
DANIEL: I like your radical propositions.
BEN: What if we converted our entire numerical system to base twelve?
DANIEL: That’s pretty radical.
BEN: Mhm. Here’s my thinking.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Right? Half of twelve.
DANIEL: I’m going to say six.
BEN: Good. Right?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: A third of twelve.
DANIEL: Ahh, I see where you’re going with this. It’s four.
BEN: Quarter of twelve?
DANIEL: Yep. You take two six packs and you can split it up with any number of friends.
BEN: AAAAA — This is the thing, right? Like, if we had a base-twelve system, we would get rid of all of this dumb recurring nonsense. Right? Like fractions would just work way better.
KYLIE: So you’re going to be a member of the Dozenal Society.
BEN: Is this a thing?
KYLIE: This is a thing.
BEN: WHAAAT? What?
KYLIE: It is indeed!
BEN: Did I accidentally find tinfoil-hat people?
KYLIE: You have found your people, Ben!
BEN: YAAAYYY!
KYLIE: The Dozenal Society advocates ditching the base-ten system we use for counting, in favor of a base-twelve system.
BEN: I can’t believe I got…!
KYLIE: Yeah!
DANIEL: There are some like-minded souls.
BEN: Oh, my goodness.
DANIEL: People as sick as you are.
BEN: Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
KYLIE: Uh, shout out to any of the Dozenal Society who might be tuning in!
BEN: There’s a good chance that they listen to us.
KYLIE: Ben’s on your team.
DANIEL: High-six to you.
KYLIE: High-six, yes.
DANIEL: Tell you what, let’s take a track, and then keep going with our chat with Dr Everett.
BEN: I got my favorite funky number representation coming up. And it’s just super weird.
DANIEL: Great.
BEN: And you know who it is, don’t you?
DANIEL: It’s the French?
BEN: It’s the French.
DANIEL: I knew it. Hey, if you got any questions about anything you hear, why don’t you get those to us? 9260 9210, you’ll get me in the studio.
BEN: You can also feel free to share any funky number goodness that you know from any languages you might speak. talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au. Email it through to us.
KYLIE: And hit us up on social media. You can find us on Facebook or on Twitter: @talkrtr.
DANIEL: Let’s listen to Severed Heads with ‘Three Doors Down’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
BEN: We are talking about numbers this week on Talk the Talk. It’s not the first numbers show we’ve done, but this time we’re digging into the archaeological? the evolutionary history, and how essential numbers are to us… to being.
DANIEL: We’ve been speaking with Dr Caleb Everett, who’s written a book called ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’. Now, let’s just have a second where we talk through some of our favorite numerical systems. I’m kind of partial to English with its base ten, but I’m aware that not everyone does it the same way. Kylie, what you got?
KYLIE: Here’s one that I quite like: Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in Mexico. Something called a vigesimal system — base twenty. Why might a base-twenty system come about? Fingers and toes.
DANIEL: So that’s Tzotzil; what else?
KYLIE: There’s another one: Oksapmin? Base twenty-seven body part counting. They’re from New Guinea.
BEN: Whaaat?
KYLIE: And I’ve got a picture here. The words for numbers of the words for the twenty-seven body parts they use for counting. So it starts with the thumb of one hand.
BEN: Yup.
KYLIE: It goes up to your nose, and then down the other side the body to the pinky to the other hand. So you got…
BEN: I’m looking at this diagram and I’m looking at thumb, forefinger, other finger, finger, finger, finger…
KYLIE: One is thumb, six is dopa, twelve is nata, sixteen is tan-nata, the tip on the other side, all the way down to twenty-seven: your pinky on the other side.
DANIEL: Wow. I am aware also that lots of Australian Aboriginal languages use a system like this. Body part counting. It’s not true that they lack numbers. They have a lot of numbers, but they just use body parts.
BEN: It makes a fair bit of sense if you aren’t people who like yummy down on writing things down. Right? Like, what you got? Well, I’ve always got my body on me. So it makes a lot of sense. Here’s my favorite! This is how French works. Sixty seven. Sixty eight. Sixty nine. …Sixty ten. Sixty eleven. Sixty twelve. Sixty thirteen. That continues for a while until you get sixty sixteen. Cool. It’s following an internal logic. So sixty sixteen, sixty ten seven!
DANIEL: Mmm.
BEN: Wait — we’re not done yet though. Sixty ten eight. Sixty ten nine. Four twenties!
DANIEL and KYLIE: Yay!
BEN: What?! Four twenties! When was twenty involved? What is even? I don’t understand!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Like, I get it — in the sense that I don’t at all get it — but I respect the fact that it’s allowed to be like, weird as heck to my cultural understanding.
KYLIE: There’s a whole bunch of languages in Papua New Guinea, for example, which uses different bases. Bukiyip uses base three and base four together, so depending on what you’re counting. So coconuts, days, and fish: base three.
BEN: Damn.
KYLIE: Betel nuts, bananas, and shields: base four.
BEN: Woah, that sounds complex.
KYLIE: Yeah, imagine doing the groceries and you got different… oh, god… you know. Don’t put the bananas and the coconuts together — you get trouble.
DANIEL: That may seem strange, but there’s another language called English that uses base ten system for some things, but a base sixty for our time units.
KYLIE: Yes! Time is irritating.
BEN: Yeah, no, time is super dumb. Time has been wrong forever.
DANIEL: It’s not wrong.
BEN: It IS wrong. It is wrong — look, but…
DANIEL: Then stop using it.
BEN: Look, okay: the French, who I just spent ages bagging out, gifted the world the metric system. But I ask you this. Why did you turn a blind eye to time, Frenchies? Why was that left off the…
DANIEL: Too hard.
BEN: Milliliter? Cubic centimeter? Right? Gram. Beautiful!
DANIEL: Thing of beauty.
BEN: It’s like the greatest thing ever. Could you not — could you not have just chucked a hundred somethings in a day. Was it that hard? Was it that bloody hard?
DANIEL: What else we got, Kylie?
KYLIE: Ndom uses base six, which is another language of Papua New Guinea, or senary number system. It has basic words for six, eighteen, and thirty-six, and other numbers are built with reference to those.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Now I can understand ten. I can understand twenty. I can even kind of understand fifteen a little bit. But six was a mystery.
BEN: Six is hard, isn’t it? because like the…
DANIEL: What’s there six of?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I think we found out.
BEN and KYLIE: Ooo!
DANIEL: In my chat with Dr Caleb Everett who’s an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami. He’s written a book called ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’. I wanted to ask him about Ndom. What was up with that?
CALEB EVERETT: Yeah, those are actually more unusual, those languages in New Guinea that have the senary based systems. These are actually a little harder to wrap our brains around, I think, because base sixty, it’s actually been argued it still comes back to our hands, right? So, if you take your four fingers on one hand and you have those three lines on each finger, as your palm faces you…
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
CALEB: …that’s twelve. And then you have five fingers on the other hand, and twelve times five is sixty. And there’s been some strong suggestions that sort of multiplicative property of our fingers led to finger-counting systems that led to base sixty.
DANIEL: Wow.
CALEB: But, so a lot of the system can be reduced, sort of, to our fingers. But in the base-six systems of New Guinea, that doesn’t seem to be the case, right? It doen’t seem to have anything to do with our fingers, and their… I think in some cases, for instance, it relates to how yams are stored in groups of six. And so it’s a very specific thing about the culture that’s leading to arithmetic being done in a certain way that seems very unfamiliar to us. There are some other really interesting examples, I think. You know, in Amazonia, for instance, where a lot of the unusual cases crop up, there are some languages where they’re very limited numerically, but the numbers that they do have are based on references to siblings, right? if memory serves correctly. So three is “without a partner”, four is “with a partner” — or that’s part of the modifier that goes with the number term. And so a linguist by the name of Patience Epps has documented this for a couple of languages — she and a few others — and to me that’s another example of the really fascinating system.
DANIEL: Why would you store yams in groups of six? Is this like a yam pyramid or something?
CALEB: You’ve got me there! My knowledge of yam storage is too modest to be able to answer that question.
DANIEL: No, but I totally get that because, you know, you put three down on the bottom, put two on top of that. Because they’re kind of long, and they roll around, so you could just, like, you can put three down, put two on top of that, and then one. Yam pyramid!
CALEB: Yeah, I never thought of that!
DANIEL: You can’t do that with potatoes. You could do with carrots.
CALEB: Good point, yeah, yeah! So, something inherent about the… Anyway, you see something about the culture of the region is impacting, you know, how they get this unique number system.
DANIEL: Let’s go back to babies. You’ve mentioned in the book work that shows that very small babies — actually they have some quantitative skills. My daughter’s six months old, going on seven. Surely there’s not a lot going on for her number-wise. But what are quantities like for her at this age?
CALEB: Um, fuzzy, I think the research suggests, right? So I would agree with the way you put it. There’s not a lot for her going on numbers-wise. But quantity-wise there is, and this is one of the distinctions I try to make in the book, and I’m happy to see some other cognitive scientists are also making these days, which is: there’s a distinction between recognising quantities in a fuzzy way, and having numbers to precisely represent quantities, to having numbers like three, four, five, and six. So your daughter presumably does not have any recognition of the words for one, two, three, four, or five or the precise quantities that they represent. However, in certain experimental contexts, if your daughter is like most infants, then she will be able to… she will stare longer, for instance, at four dots on a screen if she has four syllables played for her repetitively. So that’s one experiment that was done fairly recently, right? So for a couple of dozen infants, they played syllables, audio files of a particular quantity, say twelve or four, and they played them over and over and over. And then they presented the infants with dots on a screen, either four or twelve, and they saw a sort of… that there was this pattern. Actually it wasn’t “sort of” — it was a pretty neat pattern in how the infant stared, where they tended to stare longer at the quantity that matched the quantity of what they had heard. Which is interesting in a couple of different ways. That shows, not just that infants seem to be picking up on these quantities at least in rough ways, but they’re also matching them across modalities. So they’re recognising that a quantity in something that they hear can be similar in terms of quantity to something that they see. So I suspect that these kinds of properties are at work with your daughter, if she perceives the quantities around her. But the key point, to me anyway, is that even though we have these things at a really early age, these abilities, they’re quite fuzzy, you know. Four from twelve — yeah, that’s quantity differentiation, but that’s pretty rough stuff, right? That’s not going to get us very far, you know, in a math class or something. But after we acquire numbers, we see this with kids way down the road at three, four, and five years old. Then they start to make these precise quantitative distinctions. But what’s interesting is that it’s actually a pretty painstaking process that takes years, recognising basic numbers and learning numbers. But I think because so many — like you pointed out earlier, when you were three and four, saying “I’m three”, or “I’m four” — when you’re doing that at such an early age, and you’re having that ingrained in your mind, it’s almost… it’s hard to remember times before you learn numbers, right? But nevertheless, they were there and they’re ahead of your daughter, where she has to go through that process of matching these words that she hears to precise quantities, and realising that they match to precise quantities. And there are a couple of stages that kids go through as they get to that point, but it’s not a really straightforward easy process. It’s not just a matter of learning, “Oh, ‘four’ goes with what in my head is four.” It’s not just a matter of labeling concepts. It’s a matter, as — I borrow this phrase from another linguist — it’s a matter of confecting labels. So you have these labels around you. You don’t really know what they mean, and you have to sort of fill them in, rather than just label things that are already in your head.
DANIEL: Yeah, and in fact the names for numbers are already around her. Like, we do things like, you know, “Okay, here we go…” — when I lift her off the changing table — “One, two, three!” And she knows that when she hears ‘three’, something happens.
CALEB: Exactly!
DANIEL: But there’s no way that she’s actually connecting that to any quantities in her head or anything.
CALEB: No, but she’s realising, even with that kind of stimulus, that there’s a sequential pattern. And the reason I say ‘exactly’ is that, you know, kids learn numbers kind of like they learn letters. So my son, who’s now almost nine — I remember when he was, I think it was around two or three, he was learning “one two three four five six seven eight nine ten”. But like all kids at that age, he just knew these were words that came in a predictable pattern, right? In a predictable order. And kids at some point make this realisation that psychologists refer to as the successor principle, where they recognise that, “Oh, four isn’t just something that comes after three. Four is one more than the thing that comes before it. And five is one more than that thing.” And this is a transformative thing in the thought of kids and of humans. But it’s a stage I would suggest that we don’t go through — at least not predictably — if we don’t have numbers around us and if we’re not, like your daughter, constantly being spoon-fed numbers.
DANIEL: Dr Caleb Everett of the University of Miami and author of the book ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’.
BEN: Good job spoon-feeding your daughter numbers, Daniel.
KYLIE: Well done.
DANIEL: I spoon-feed her a lot of things these days, actually.
KYLIE: Does it end up on the well most of the time?
DANIEL: Yes, it does.
BEN: I did not know there was numerical soup as well as alphabet soup.
DANIEL: But it really does go through how numbers contributed to us as a society, but also how it makes up the furniture of our cognition.
KYLIE: I’m just astounded that anyone manages to tackle that subject and not be completely and utterly bamboozled and overwhelmed, because numbers is such a huge topic. And being able to dig back into the past and develop: “Okay, well, where did this come from?” and the news that, well, it’s not as necessary as you thought. We ended up developing this over time, and it’s changed our minds and how we see things. It’s just fascinating.
DANIEL: These categories don’t preexist.
KYLIE: Yes!
DANIEL: We had to construct them, and when we do that, we do it according to certain strategies. And sometimes we don’t have the same strategy. And that’s why different languages do it differently. So you just sort of stand in awe and look at these systems that we’ve created.
BEN: And then sometimes look at French, and just hold our heads in our hands going, “What are you doing, friends?”
DANIEL: The book is ‘Numbers and the Making of Us’, and it’s available from Harvard University Press. This was part of a much much longer interview with Dr Everett and if you want to hear that, head over to our Patreon page, and you can hear the entire thing even now.
BEN: And so many other juicy tidbits of extended interviews that Daniel has done, because he likes pestering people with a microphone.
DANIEL: It really does work. It’s amazing.
BEN: Hey, why don’t we take a track, and then on the other side we’ll come back, and it will be Word of the Week time.
DANIEL: Great. Let’s listen to Eleventeen Eston with Indian Blue on our RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
BEN: [VARIOUS NOISES: CLIMBING. GRAPPLING HOOK. MORE CLIMBING. DUSTING OFF OF CLOTHING. KEY CODE ENTERED. DOOR OPENING] Word of the Week.
KYLIE: You’d better clean that up after you’ve made that. I mean, really! It’s a mess!
DANIEL: The sound effects are impressive.
BEN: I just wanted to see if I… and you know what? A bunch of listeners are like, “I have no idea what just happened there.” I’m hoping the narrative was clear.
DANIEL: I think I know why you did that.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s talk about a few words that are going around in economic language.
BEN: Aaay! Economics is my favorite!
DANIEL: It is?
BEN: Absolutely! I love econs, man!
KYLIE: [GROANS] It terrifies me! This is not a subject I’m into.
BEN: HOW? could you not be interested in the things that make us make the decisions that we do?
DANIEL: And here’s a term that arose last week. The zombie economy.
BEN: Mmm — it’s interesting, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Have you heard this one?
KYLIE: No.
BEN: I have.
KYLIE: Really? Okay.
DANIEL: What do you know about it?
BEN: The zombie economy is the thing that I’ve only seen headlines about. I haven’t actually done reading on this yet. But from what I saw, the zombie economy is sort of… the things that are happening within our sort of broad economic system that have no human impetus at all.
DANIEL: ‘Zombie economy’ can mean a couple of different things. Here’s how I imagine it, from what I’ve read. In a normal economy, people make stuff and people buy stuff, and then that results in productivity and trade.
BEN: This is like Keynes’ idea of how economy works, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, I mean, it’s very basic, right?
BEN: Back when people worked in factories.
DANIEL: Okay. But now we are seeing a situation where there’s a lot of debt. Debt is driving the economy, and a lot of economic behavior is actually just sort of propping up this mountain of debt. And banks are sort of going on interest payments, instead of on productivity.
BEN: So, debt has been essential to our economy forever.
DANIEL: You’ve got to have debt. If you don’t have debt — like, nobody has the money to build a factory.
BEN: Yeah, and mitigating risk via debt has been a thing that has existed since, like, the Dutch East India Company and all that kind of stuff. But where we find ourselves now is this exponential growth of financial instruments that have nothing to do with the creation of anything, as far as I can tell.
DANIEL: That’s the zombie economy. There’s another term here and it’s a ‘zombie bank’. A bank with actually negative net worth. It’s not solvent but is able to continue [ZOMBIE GROAN] because the government is propping it up.
KYLIE: Makes me concerned if there’s such a thing as a zombie country. A country that’s so overwhelmingly in debt that there’s just no product that will benefit.
DANIEL: Well, this is the concern. That Australia might be heading into a ‘zombie economy’ phase, as people take on too much debt.
BEN: We’ve got an incredibly high ratio of household debt, don’t we, globally speaking?
DANIEL: We do. It’s something like two hundred percent of GDP. That’s for households.
BEN: That’s huge. That’s massive.
KYLIE: I haven’t even finished watching the box set of ‘Walking Dead’ yet. How am I going to know how to act if the whole country becomes a zombie?
BEN: Bikes. The answer to all shuffle zombies is bikes, you guys. They’re quiet, they go faster than a zombie, and you expend less energy. Like, it’s really not challenging.
DANIEL: Also, the bicycle can’t be picked up and used by a zombie because they shamble too much.
BEN: And guess what? Only mode of transport you can pick up and carry if you need to.
DANIEL: What’s the deal with zombies? What is their allure in pop culture?
BEN: I think it’s tied into the mechanisation of war, from World War One onwards. Right? So we really just made destruction, like, a complete inevitability. We wiped entire demographics out of the bulge. And I think the zombie kind of represents that. It’s this growing dangerous thing. It might not necessarily be actively attacking at any given moment, but you just know that it’s coming and that you will definitely die.
KYLIE: And it’s a good philosophical concept to talk about as well, you know. Is this human? Can we consider ourselves living?
BEN: That is definitely what Romero was doing when he was making these films, is making a deep philosophical question!
KYLIE: I think it’s more ‘Shaun of the Dead’, where at the end of it: Can I still play PS4 with my mate, if he’s a zombie? Gling! Yes, you can. Here we go!
DANIEL: Well, I remember reading that, when those actors are working on ‘Night of the Living Dead’, in between takes they would talk about what was going on in politics at the time, and it was McCarthyism, and how this creeping dread was sort of seizing everything. So I think maybe zombies speak to a kind of existential…
BEN: …ennui, maybe.
DANIEL: Yeah, or…
KYLIE: Monsters are great for that sort of cultural meme, cultural…
BEN: But zombies are a very different kind of monster, because every other monster is an active threat. Right? Like a werewolf prowls the town. It’s a traditional bad guy, right? Frankenstein’s monster, in pop culture at least, is like a big scary, like, heavy-hitting thing. Whereas zombies aren’t like that at all. Zombies are the things that would, like, just be in closets and a horde of them will just be like around the corner.
KYLIE: Digging out from under the ground. Here we go! Dig, dig, dig.
BEN: Yeah. Like, you don’t have to worry about like the alien in from the Aliens franchise. You just have to constantly worry all the time about this ever-present malaise that might get you.
DANIEL: And that’s very political for our times. Just the way that we talk about zombie memes that just never die. And the way that we feel this medium-level unease. And it’s kind of agentless. You know, zombies are villains, but they’re not… they have no agency.
BEN: Exactly.
KYLIE: There’s apathy. What happens if you just end up going with the dead herd? You have no control of your future.
BEN: And there’s also something far more terrifying, I think, about completely benign trauma and horror. The zombie is not scary because it wants to rip you open and eat you alive. The zombie is scary because it’s going to do it, just because it is.
DANIEL: And it’s always coming.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
KYLIE: And you can become one.
DANIEL: And you can become one.
KYLIE: And so can your loved ones.
DANIEL: That’s political, too. I mean, we’ve all had to watch somebody we know suddenly revealing themselves to be not who we thought they were. Let’s wrap it up, though, with one more word. You know the Oscars were held just recently.
BEN: Of course.
DANIEL: Remember last year?
BEN: ‘La La Land’ and ‘Moonlight’?
DANIEL: Yeah, a bit of a mistake by — well, it wasn’t BY Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. They were just given the wrong card by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
KYLIE: Those darn accountants! Weren’t paying attention. They were too busy getting selfies backstage, I think it was.
DANIEL: Really?
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
KYLIE: I’ll find the exact account if you want.
DANIEL: The word that keeps coming up in connection with this is ‘flub’.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Flub.
DANIEL: Flub.
BEN: It’s a bit of a flub!
DANIEL: I thought that was a great word.
BEN: I like that! It’s like… it’s like a less snooty faux pas.
DANIEL: Or a slightly more frumpy mistake.
BEN: Yeah! Okay, I like that. Like, there’s a higher level of penalty than a faux pas. But it’s not a full-blown mistake in the, like, stakes sense. Like ‘Moonlight’ still got their Oscar, right? It was just… you know what it is? A flub trades in awkwardness.
DANIEL: Hey, yeah! It’s an awkward mistake.
BEN: Like… the stakes are low, the awkwidity is high.
[LAUGHTER]
KYLIE: What a nice way of putting it.
DANIEL: I tried to look up the origin of ‘flub’, but I could not find anything.
BEN: Ooo!
KYLIE: Really?
DANIEL: The trail goes cold.
BEN: Where?
DANIEL: Well, we know that it goes back to the 1920s. But everything that I’ve seen just says “orig. uncert.”.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: It could be that it is imitative. Like, imagine that you’re trying to catch something big and rubbery, or a giant fish. That might be the sound that it makes. FLUB! And there are other words that are kind of flubby, like…
BEN: Could it be onomatopoeic?
DANIEL: That’s the idea. Or maybe not onomatopoeia, but something called sound symbolism. We’ve talked about this before, where words that start with gl-, they tend to glisten and gleam and glow. They all cluster around a set of meanings. Or things that start with sl- in English. They are slippery or slimy, sometimes sleazy. So words… we just have this feeling like sl- means that. And so we might have a sense that fl- means something awkward and mistaken — or like, what other words with fl-?.
BEN: Flubber.
DANIEL: Flubber, an invented word, as well.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Sometimes you might feel flummoxed.
BEN: Flummoxed… uh…
KYLIE: Flabby.
BEN: A floozy.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. And sometimes if you make a good mistake it was a fluke.
BEN: Yeah, that’s true.
DANIEL: So this fl- thing might be an example of sound symbolism. Perhaps we’ll never know. However if you’re a shlub, don’t make a flub.
BEN: Hey, if you’ve got any questions for Daniel, be sure to drop him a line. You can send him an email at talkthetalk@RTRFM.com.au.
DANIEL: Why don’t you give me a phone call? 9260 9210.
KYLIE: Hit us up on social media. It’s @talkrtr on twitter, or our fabulous Facebook page where you can find all the information, all the notes, all the extras that we do. Just hit us up.
DANIEL: But now, let’s hear Aphex Twin with ‘Flim’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: There was one term that broke in between recording the show with Ben and Kylie and today. During the Oscars, Frances McDormand finished her speech by saying “I have two words for you: inclusion rider.” Which meant that everybody had to go ahead and search for what it was. It’s a clause in an actor’s contract that says that if you want to retain the actor, the cast and crew has to be diverse. And you can specify: fifty percent diversity in the casting, fifty percent diversity in the crew. And this is something that I think we might need in a business like Hollywood or anywhere else really — maybe in music — where so few directors are African-American or Asian. This is something that could happen.
DANIEL: I want to take you behind the scenes on my own process when I’m deciding who… whom to interview. I look at the last few people that I’ve interviewed and I say, “Okay, am I getting a fifty-fifty ratio?” And if it starts to look a little bit dude-heavy, then I ask myself, “Why is that? Why am I interviewing so many men? Do I think that men are better linguists?” Well, no, I certainly don’t think that. Then why does my interviewing choice seem to show that? And so then I decide that it’s time to, you know, even things out a little bit and be a little more inclusive. Now, I notice that I have not played a song by a single female artist on this show. I’m going to end that. I’m going to shoot for fifty-fifty. I want you to hold me to that. Okay, so ‘inclusion writer’: our other word of the week.
DANIEL: Noisy Andrew gave me a call, talking about the dozenal system — base twelve instead of base ten — and he says that actually it still works in the building trade. If you buy gyprock sheets or plywood sheets, it’s going to be some multiple of twelve, like twelve hundred by twenty four hundred. And that just makes things easier for building folks. In fact, it used to be before decimalisation, Andrew tells me, that houses were kind of modeled on three hundreds. If you have three hundred centimeters or whatever, then it makes it easy to divide by twenty, or twelve, or a hundred, or thirty, or whatever. Three hundred is just a wonderful sort of number, and that’s the way it used to be. How sad that that’s not continued. Thanks, Andrew, for that little insight.
DANIEL: I would just like to thank Dr Caleb Everett for that great interview about numbers. Check out the book if you’re interested. And I would just like to exhort you to check out what we’re doing on Facebook, if you’d like great linguistic tidbits. And of course, we’re doing great things on Patreon. Keep listening because Matt is going to be doing the Out to Lunch show. New music, and that’s going to be a lot of fun. Thanks for listening, and until next time keep talking.
[OUTRO]
BEN: This has been an RTRFM podcast. RTRFM is an independent community radio station that relies on listeners for financial support. You can subscribe online at rtrfm.com.au/subscribe.
KYLIE: Our theme song is by Ah Trees, and you can check out their music on ahtrees.com, and everywhere good music is sold.
DANIEL: We’re on Twitter @talkrtr, send us an email: talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au, and if you’d like to get lots of extra linguistic goodies, then like us on Facebook or check out our Patreon page. You can always find out whatever we’re up to by heading to talkthetalkpodcast.com
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
