We get mail. From you. And today, we’re answering your questions.
How has jazz influenced our language? And what if you like language diversity, but you’re not too keen on how it’s used?
Daniel and Kylie answer them all on this episode of Talk the Talk.
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Show notes
The conjugation of the English verb speak
http://www.majstro.com/Web/Majstro/taleninfo/CompEng/onregww_speak.php?gebrTaal=eng
Omniglot: Numbers in Welsh
https://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/welsh.htm
Wikipedia: Welsh numerals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_numerals
BBC: Welsh at Home
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/welshathome/textversion/nw_e_bedroom_clock_time1.shtml
Auslan Signbank: Six
http://www.auslan.org.au/dictionary/words/six-1.html
World Wide Words: Jazz
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jaz1.htm
Where Did ‘Jazz,’ the Word, Come From? Follow a Trail of Clues, in Deep Dive with Lewis Porter
http://wbgo.org/post/where-did-jazz-word-come-follow-trail-clues-deep-dive-lewis-porter#stream/0
The baseball origin of ‘jazz’
https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/04/06/jazz-baseball/
Etymonline: jazz (n.)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jazz
Agta puzzle
http://lingclub.mycpanel.princeton.edu/challenge/agta.php
Italian profanity
http://www.scuolitalia.com/1/wiki/profanity.htm
Meaning is use: Wittgenstein on the limits of language
https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/meaning-is-use-wittgenstein-on-the-limits-of-language/
Wikipedia: Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender
No more middots: French PM clamps down on gender-neutral language
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/no-more-middots-french-pm-clamps-down-on-gender-neutral-language
French language watchdogs say ‘non’ to gender-neutral style
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/03/french-language-watchdogs-say-non-to-gender-neutral-style
Déclaration de l’Académie française sur l’écriture dite “inclusive
http://www.academie-francaise.fr/actualites/declaration-de-lacademie-francaise-sur-lecriture-dite-inclusive
Germans try to get their tongues around gender-neutral language
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/24/germans-get-tongues-around-gender-neutral-language
Could Germany get a gender-neutral national anthem?
http://www.dw.com/en/could-germany-get-a-gender-neutral-national-anthem/a-42823170
Germany’s gender-neutral anthem alternative met with resistance
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43285299
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 questions, and some great music. Maybe we’ll even hear from you. My name’s Daniel Midgley. I’m here with Kylie Sturgess.
KYLIE: G’day, everyone.
DANIEL: We get mail. From you. And today we’re answering all your questions. How has jazz influenced our language? And what if you like language diversity, but you’re not too keen on how that language is used? We’ll get to them all on this episode of Talk the Talk.
DANIEL: Kylie, how’s it going?
KYLIE: It’s going wonderfully. It is fabulous to see so many people enthusiastic about the show, and who are just jumping up and down going, “Oh! Have you thought about…” or “That episode was fascinating” or “I disagree with you, and I have to be heard,” and here’s your chance.
DANIEL: We are without our Ben today.
KYLIE: Aw.
DANIEL: But we are with you, so let’s get to some of these questions.
KYLIE: Let’s do it.
DANIEL: Alek starts out: “How should I pronounce ‘event’?” Well, I just did.
KYLIE: Well done. That was the easiest question ever!
DANIEL: But actually it’s not because this is…
KYLIE: Eee-vent?
DANIEL: This is one of the hard ones. Yeah, you could say [i] as in ‘beat’: event. How else?
KYLIE: EV-unt?
DANIEL: Well, you’ve got to put the stress on the rights syl-LA-ble, right?
KYLIE: Oh.
DANIEL: You could say ‘event’ like with an [ɛ], as in ‘red’.
KYLIE: Oh.
DANIEL: You could say ‘event’ with an [ɪ], as in ‘bit’. Or you could even say an [ə] sound, as in ‘uh-vent’.
KYLIE: Uh-vent.
DANIEL: Event.
KYLIE: Uh-vehhh… I’m never going to look at this word the same way again.
DANIEL: Right? This is what happens with linguistics madness. You think that you know how to pronounce a word and then somebody asks you a simple question: How do you pronounce that word? And suddenly you have no idea how you pronounce that word. This is what I call linguistics madness, and when you’re studying phonology, you do a lot of it. Your roommates come home and they find you on the couch going ‘ev… uhv… eevent.”
KYLIE: And they say, “I thought you were going to go to the gig.” “Don’t get me started!”
DANIEL: “No, it’s not a gig, it’s an ee-vent… it’s an uh-vent… it’s an oh-vent.” Pretty soon you’re defending weird stuff, like you’re saying “No, I know that I say it ‘oh-vent’, I swear to you.” Sometimes it depends on the surrounding words, like ‘th[i] event sounds better than th[ə] event.
KYLIE: Mhm.
DANIEL: What’s going on? Well, I will bet you dollars to donuts, Alek, that if you look this up in the Macquarie Dictionary, they will use a little beast called a schwa (ə). Are you familiar with schwa?
KYLIE: Yeah, it’s one of those nice curly ones that we have spoken about before when we’re talking about symbols that seem to pop up everywhere in dictionaries, and we’re not actually aware we’re using them when we talk.
DANIEL: Right. Well, it’s kind of like an upside-down letter . That’s what it looks like: a lowercase upside-down. And it has the sound of ‘uh’. But not the ‘uh’ as in ‘hut’. It’s the ‘uh’ as in ‘event’. Did that sound the same to you?
KYLIE: Hu…t… uh… I sound like someone about to practice for the opera.
DANIEL: That’s how I know that you’re doing it right.
KYLIE: Oh.
DANIEL: So there’s a difference between the ‘uh’ in ‘hut’ and the ‘uh’ in ‘about’, even though they sound quite similar to me. The difference is stress. When you say ‘hut’, the stress falls on that syllable. “I’ll just be in my hut.”
KYLIE: Hut.
DANIEL: Whereas when you say ‘about’, where’s the stress?
KYLIE: A…bout… It’s on the ’bout’. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s the thing about the schwa: it’s never stressed.
KYLIE: Oh!
DANIEL: Right. So how do you say the first sound in ‘event’? Well, you could say that [ivɛnt] or [ɪvɛnt] or [ɛvɛnt] if you want to. But usually I think what we’ll find is we probably just say [əvɛnt] with our good friend the schwa.
KYLIE: Oh, cool! I learned something new.
DANIEL: And if you want to check it out in a corpus, you should check out youglish.com. In fact, I really recommend that everybody try it out. You can type in a word or a phrase and it will take you to every YouTube video…
KYLIE: Brilliant!
DANIEL: …that has that word in its annotations. And it takes you to that spot! So you can just listen to two hundred people saying ‘event’, and you can just tick off… I’m going to do this with ‘gif’ or ‘jif’. I’m going to see how people actually say it. But it’s a good tool for people who are learning English. It’s a good tool for people who are trying to figure out just how in the world you say a word. So youglish.com. Recommended.
KYLIE: How do you spell ‘youglish’? Here we are.
DANIEL: It’s English, but it’s you. So Y O U glish dot com. Next one! Bill by email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au. He says “Listened to Ben and Daniel’s discussion of ‘shooketh’.” You weren’t there for this episode. Have you heard this term?
KYLIE: N… oh… No.
DANIEL: ‘I was shooketh’, which means I was shocked, I was surprised. It’s a word that is coming up in the world. Bill continues: “I wondered if they realise it’s a play on the AAVE ‘shook’ (I.e., ‘shaken’). It became popular to say things like, ‘I just realised that Jack on “This Is Us” is Jess from “Gilmore Girls” and I AM SHOOK.’ Then people began saying ‘shooketh,’ which is a pretty fascinating fusion of AAVE and pseudo-archaism. Now that I think about it, ‘shooketh’ is slyly subversive because it elevates a ‘nonstandard’ English word (‘shook’ as past-perfect) to the level of highfalutin Shakespearean language. Anyway, enjoyed the show as always.”
KYLIE: Adding an -eth at the end of….
DANIEL: Isn’t that funny? Of course, that isn’t actually how you would have used -eth. Let’s use ‘speak’ as an example: I speak. Thou speakest. He, she, or it speaketh. So you wouldn’t have used it on ‘shook’. But it’s a funny way of using archaic language to be funny.
KYLIE: Hm!
DANIEL: That’s what it is. Thanks, Bill, for that email. Wolf of the Wisp asks us: “Has the meaning of ‘sanction’ completely flipped? If so, where, when, and how?” Kylie, what do you know about the word ‘sanction’?
KYLIE: What we’re looking at here is an interesting phenomenon called contronyms: words that can mean two different things, two opposites at the same time!
DANIEL: It’s weird, isn’t it.
KYLIE: And I never knew this before, until Wolf of the Wisp brought it up, and I went, “Oh, bloomin’ heck! I actually know a lot of these, and I never realised it before.”
DANIEL: Okay, well, what other ones do you know?
KYLIE: Well, how about if I give you a quiz, and people who are listening can play along as well.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
KYLIE: Number one: this is a word that means “to offer advice” or “to obtain it”.
DANIEL: The word is ‘counsel’.
KYLIE: ‘Consult’.
DANIEL: Oh, dang! Okay.
KYLIE: ‘To add fine particles’ or ‘to remove them’.
DANIEL: Ah, I do know this one. This one is ‘to dust’.
KYLIE: Yes.
DANIEL: You can dust the furniture, which could mean you remove the dust, or you put the dust on.
KYLIE: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, one for me.
KYLIE: This is a word that means ‘completed’ or ‘ended or destroyed’. So, in one way it’s something that is completed, or it is to completely destroy something.
DANIEL: Ah, it’s ‘finished’.
KYLIE: Yes.
DANIEL: Yes! Two for me.
KYLIE: Number four: This is when you can read something thoroughly, or you can glance at it.
DANIEL: Is it ‘peruse’?
KYLIE: ‘Scan’.
DANIEL: Oh! Very good. Okay. Didn’t get that one.
KYLIE: Number five: ‘visible’, as in stars showing in the sky, or ‘invisible’, in reference to lights.
DANIEL: I got no idea.
KYLIE: ‘Out’. The stars are out, or the lights are off.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s so good. My gosh.
KYLIE: Wonderful contronyms.
DANIEL: Well, I can think of one contronym, and it is ‘literally’.
KYLIE: Yes!
DANIEL: It’s not exactly a contronym, but you know, there are two senses. One is it means ‘exactly that’, and the other one means… it means ‘approximately that’. And you know, people are unaware that they use words like ‘sanction’ and ‘dust’ and even ‘fine’, right? Which means ‘super super good’, but it also means, eh, just ‘okay’.
KYLIE: Yeah, ordinary weather. It’s fine.
DANIEL: It’s fine! So why do people pick on ‘literally’ so much? I don’t know. I have a feeling that it’s one of those peeves that people hand around. Anyway, what’s the deal with ‘sanction’? Which one came first? Well, the ‘sanction’ meaning ‘to permit’, ‘to authorise’ dates from 1797, and to ‘impose sanctions’ comes only from 1956.
KYLIE: Wow, that’s a big gap!
DANIEL: But they both share a sense of ‘something being permitted’ or ‘the law asserting itself’ in some way. So that’s what’s going on there. Whew! So contronyms, or Janus words. Love those things.
KYLIE: It’s something new that I learned, so thank you so much Wolf of the Wisp for bringing that to our attention. And yeah, ‘sanction’ not only flipped, but there’s lots of flipping going on out there.
DANIEL: Well, let’s listen to a track, and this one is the one where Father John Misty is being a jerk about the word ‘literally’. This one is ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
KYLIE: This is a Mailbag episode. We’re going through the questions that you have about language, linguistics, all kinds of things. It’s amazing what people come up with after listening to our episodes, or questions that have never occurred to anyone here before, and you just want to have them answered. Let’s give it a shot.
DANIEL: Zoe listened to our numbers episode recently, the one with Caleb Everett. We were talking on that episode about base-six systems. You know, we use a base-ten system because we have ten fingers. Some people use a base-six system, and I thought it had to do with yam pyramids — three yams on the bottom, two yams on top of that, and then a little yam on top.
KYLIE: I’ve no idea where you came up with that, but it sounds so cute that I was like, “Yeah, okay, fine. Yams.”
DANIEL: I’m a freakin’ genius, that’s where I came up with it. Zoe says, “About base six, I have an alternate theory to the yam pyramids. My dad was super excited about this when I was a kid. He said that base six was super sensible because you counted one two three four five on the fingers of one hand, and the other hand became tens — that is, you count the number of groups using six using the other hand’s fingers. So this way, you can count to thirty five only using two hands. All your fingers become five lots of six, plus five. That makes base six way more useful for counting than base ten. Where he learned this, I don’t know, but it seems more logical than yam pyramids to me. Then again, how many things are based on logic rather than being wacky cultural artifacts cough cough French numbers.”
KYLIE: It kind of reminds me of the tradition of using your knuckles to remember the months of the year. Have you ever tried that?
DANIEL: I have tried that! You tell me. Go ahead.
KYLIE: What you do is: you have counting the months on your knuckles and the grooves between your knuckles. Leave out your thumb knuckle. Every month that lands on the knuckle is thirty-one days, but every month it lands on a groove between the knuckles is thirty days — or twenty-eight for February.
DANIEL: I love this one. So I’ve got my fist up here, and I’m counting my first finger. It’s got a knuckle, right? So that’s January. And then I put my finger in the valley between my two fingers — that’s February.
KYLIE: Yep.
DANIEL: Knuckle is March. Valley is April. Knuckle… And the knuckles are long months, and the valleys are short months. That’s awesome.
KYLIE: Yeah, it works. Yeah.
DANIEL: You know what it reminds me of: It reminds me of the Chisanbop method of counting.
KYLIE: Oh, what’s that?
DANIEL: Well, I take my right hand and I use my fingers to count one two three four, and then for five, I put all those fingers away and stick out my thumb.
KYLIE: We also see this in Auslan, as well. This is six.
DANIEL: The thumb is six?
KYLIE: Yeah. You shake the hand and the thumb is six.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Well, for this one, thumb is five, and then for six, I just add another finger — five plus one. Seven eight nine — nine is all my fingers together. And then my left hand is for tens. So…
KYLIE: See if you can keep track of them.
DANIEL: So if I have four fingers and four fingers, that’s forty-four.
KYLIE: Yep.
DANIEL: If I have all my fingers out, that’s ninety-nine, because the the left thumb is fifty. And that’s how I count to ninety-nine on my fingers.
KYLIE: Cool.
DANIEL: Let’s see. Oh, Simon says, “Hi, guys. I’m just listening to your episode about numbers. Very interesting. Welsh has an interesting counting system, well two systems actually. One is vigesimal and the other is decimal.” Apparently the vigesimal system, which we’re going to describe, is the old kind and the decimal is the new kind. “So sixteen is…” and I’m not going to try the Welsh. Sorry about this. Sixteen is one on fifteen. Seventeen is two on fifteen. Eighteen is two nines — wow! And then twenty is twenty. But if you do it the new way, sixteen is one ten six. Seventeen is one ten seven. And so on. So thirty nine in the old school is four on fifteen on twenty — add ’em up — but now it’s three ten nine, which makes sense. And ninety nine is — get ready — four on fifteen on… four twenties!
KYLIE: I’m so glad Ben’s not here; he’d be freaking out.
DANIEL: He would be! But it does let us know that this four-twenties thing is not unique to French. It’s a strategy that other people have hit on. But if you’re being modern and everything, then it’s just nine ten nine. And Simon that sent us this is Simon Ager. He’s the guy behind omniglot.com! I love that website. It’s got information on all the writing systems that all humans use, even fictional ones.
KYLIE: Really!
DANIEL: Yeah.
KYLIE: Oh, Simon, that’s a lot of work!
DANIEL: It is! It’s an amazing site. And I have recommended to my students many times, and I’m recommending it to you: omniglot.com. Actually, when Simon sent his message, I got a little funny.
KYLIE: I can imagine! This is such a cool site. Well done, Simon!
DANIEL: It’s great. Paul says, “In one of your recent episodes, you touched on the rule against beginning sentences with conjunctions like ‘and’ or ‘but’.” You’ve heard this one, haven’t you? Don’t begin a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’?
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: “It got me thinking: one of the correct ways to use a conjunction is to introduce an independent clause.” Ohh, terminology alert; don’t worry — I’ll make this all clear. “But I struggle to actually perceive any semantic difference between this correct use and the incorrect one. Is there a difference?” All right, Kylie, what do you know about conjunctions?
KYLIE: Oh, dear. Just don’t use them. All the time.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] But can you tell me what one is?
KYLIE: It’s essentially a joining word.
DANIEL: A joining word, like ‘and’, right? So I can say ‘I got up AND I went to school.’ I’m joining those two sentences with ‘and’, right?
KYLIE: Dah di dah di dah di dah, BUT do di do di do di do di do.
DANIEL: Right. Now there’s two kinds of conjunctions that I want to talk about. You got coordinating conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘but’, and the way I remember them is by the acronym FANBOYS: For, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. All right? And you can go ahead and begin a sentence with those all you want. It’s no big deal. Even the crankiest crusty just fustiest old grammar police say that that’s probably okay. In fact, I’m looking at the transcripts of our shows, and I’m noticing that especially our interview guests frequently — in fact, more often than not — use conjunctions to start a sentence. The coordinating kind. But there’s another kind.
KYLIE: Okay.
DANIEL: There’s the subordinating kind. And these are things like ‘because’ or ‘when’ or ‘if’. So, for example: “If the phone rings, I’ll answer it.” Right? Now, it’s okay to begin a sentence that way, or “Because…”
KYLIE: “Because I said so!”
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’s probably what you don’t want to do.
KYLIE: Oh!
DANIEL: The reason you don’t want to do that is because what you’ve done is you’ve taken “I said so”, which could stand on its own, and you’ve added a ‘because’ to it, and what that ‘because’ does is: it turns it into a thing that can’t stand by itself. It turns it into a dependent clause: “Because I said so.” Okay, now you could say it all by itself if you’re talking to somebody and they say. “Why?” “Because I said so!” Okay, there’s an implied thing. But the current wisdom is: it’s probably not a good idea to leave a dependent clause helpless all by itself. And one way to do that is to start with ‘because’. Now that’s not a very good rule — don’t start a sentence with ‘because’ — in fact, I remember getting this advice as a kid because I did the thing where I left… I wrote, “Because I think the leaves are pretty.” And the teacher said, “Try not to start a sentence with ‘because’.” That was bad advice. It’s okay to start a sense with ‘because’, like “Because I missed my plane, I didn’t get to my appointment.” That’s fine. The advice should be: don’t leave dependent clauses out there on their own. Put them with something else. “Because I think leaves are neat, I decided to collect them in my closet.”
KYLIE: Well, that makes sense.
DANIEL: Yeah. Thanks, Paul. Well, I feel quite becaused out. So let’s take a track, and this one is ‘Because Before 2’ by Ulf Lohmann on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
KYLIE: You’re listening to Talk the Talk, the language and linguistics show that is now open to all kinds of questions and comments about previous episodes, and even a few new comments about things that you think we should investigate. So now’s your chance to be a part of the Mailbag. We’ve got it open.
DANIEL: Here’s one from James via Facebook. “Have you done any research into how jazz music has infiltrated our vernacular?”
KYLIE: I was one of the door people — I’m not gonna use the b-word to describe myself — but I was one of the door people for the International Jazz Festival a couple of years ago and I got to hear some amazing jazz.
DANIEL: Cool.
KYLIE: And I never realised how much of the vernacular I was familiar with. Do you know about Lindy Hopping, for example?
DANIEL: I’ve heard of the Lindy Hop.
KYLIE: Lindy Hopping. It’s a kind of rock ‘n’ roll rockabilly dance style that is quite popular.
DANIEL: Named after Charles Lindbergh?
KYLIE: Yep, hopping across the Atlantic. And anyone out there who is a Lindy Hopper, g’day! I’m a ballroom dancer myself, and it is an amazing style of dance. And it very much draws upon the jazz music era. Hipster, or hepcat, referring to aficionados of jazz.
DANIEL: That one’s interesting because ‘hip’ and ‘hep’ were both popular at different times. I remember this this lyric from a Blossom Dearie song: “I’m hip / I’m in step / When it was hip to be hep, I was hep.”
KYLIE: And now ‘hipster’ seems to mean something completely different as well.
DANIEL: But that all goes back to that time period.
KYLIE: Yes, absolutely.
DANIEL: Before we go too much farther, we need to acknowledge where this comes from.
KYLIE: Yes.
DANIEL: This comes from the language and the slang that was used around Harlem in New York City at the turn of the last century. We’re pulling a lot of this from the Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com. We support them on Patreon, and I think you should too.
KYLIE: Mmm.
DANIEL: But what about the word ‘jazz’ itself?
KYLIE: Oh! Good question.
DANIEL: I got a quiz for you. Does it come from baseball, from music, from perfume, or from sex?
KYLIE: I am tending towards the latter! Simply because it sounds like the sort of thing that might… is it about sex?
DANIEL: Well, the word ‘jazz’ did actually mean that. “They were jazzing it,” right? Which meant they were having sex. But that was a later usage. That one was acquired later. It’s not where it comes from.
KYLIE: Okay.
DANIEL: And there was also a word ‘jasm’, which was a slang term going back to the 1860s, which means ‘pep’ or ‘energy’.
KYLIE: Right.
DANIEL: And don’t forget there’s also ‘jism’. That was an older word and that didn’t mean semen, you know, at first it meant vitality and virility. But it wasn’t used as slang for seminal fluid until later. So we’ll just wipe jism off the table.
KYLIE: Oh, thank you for that. Thanks.
DANIEL: But it turns out it comes from baseball.
KYLIE: Oh, really?
DANIEL: This was not a Black American term. This was a White American term.
KYLIE: Wow.
DANIEL: Very surprising. So here’s what happened. About 1912, baseball’s Pacific Coast League had a pitcher, Ben Henderson, and he invented a pitch that he called the jazz ball. And he said, “I call it the jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” Like nobody can hit it. It’s a wobbly pitch. And so he was using that term in 1912, and so that got popular. And baseball writers were using that all through 1913.
KYLIE: Mmm.
DANIEL: Then, musicians picked it up, especially a band leader called Art Hickman. And his band started calling their music jazz. And then they traveled all over the place and spread that. And so you saw the baseball references to jazz about 1913, and the musical references to jazz around 1915, a little bit later. There’s all kinds of stories about how ‘jazz’ the word got to be, but that’s the best research we’ve got, and if you want to follow those sources down the rabbit hole head over to our blog talkthetalkpodcast.com. They’ll all be there.
KYLIE: And now it’s opening up a whole new question: how much baseball vernacular has infiltrated American language. That’s going to have to be a question for another time.
DANIEL: Oh, no! Have to do that one later.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Great question. Thanks so much, James. We’ve got Heron sending us an email. “Hi, there, Kylie, Daniel and Ben! As a language enthusiast, I have been listening to your podcast for quite a time now. Well, trying to be brief, I believe ‘Sounds of awesome’ — which was a phrase that annoyed you at one point — ‘Is it enough to podium’ and the other examples of zero derivation you gave are all totally acceptable.”
KYLIE: Incorrect! End of show. Thank you! Goodbye.
DANIEL: Aaa! Stop it, Kylie! Heron says, “The point of language is to communicate that is to get your message across and be understood. Many people believe these are grammatically wrong sentences only because the categorisation we humans invented to create rules to language.” I agree with this, actually.
KYLIE: In fact, this is one of the big messages that we come up with on the show all the time.
DANIEL: That communication is the thing?
KYLIE: Yeah, but how you use it and — getting back to the jazz analogy — how it can improvise and develop and evolve over time.
DANIEL: I always like to give my students an exercise. I give them some data in a language called Agta of the Philippines. They have to look at some data and figure out how the language works. You know, like if you have ‘beetle’ how do you say ‘a little beetle’. So they have to invent a hypothesis to explain how the language works, and if their hypothesis is wrong — if it doesn’t match what people actually say — then they have to change it, right? Now, that is a sensible approach. But when it comes to English we throw all that stuff out the window, and if we invent some kind of grammar rule that doesn’t explain what people actually do, then we say that people are wrong and my hypothesis is right.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Right? So I do agree that communication is very important and it takes me back to Wittgenstein. You’re a philosopher sort of person. You like Wittgenstein.
KYLIE: Good old Humpty Dumpty. It means what I want it to mean.
DANIEL: Exactly, right? But Wittgenstein pointed out that in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: When people say things, that’s what the word — in a community of speakers, that’s what it means. So I agree with you, Heron. I think that’s some really good points.
KYLIE: Even though ‘Sounds of Awesome’ is dreadful!
DANIEL: Do you know what we’re calling this episode?
KYLIE: No.
DANIEL: Mailbag of Awesome.
KYLIE: Oh, go away!
DANIEL: Toby says, “Being a native English speaker, and having learned to speak Spanish fluently, I can totally see and appreciate the advantages of not recycling nouns as verbs.” You know, we say “I like this” but then we can turn around to make it a noun like ‘like’.
KYLIE: Mmm.
DANIEL: “In Spanish this never occurs.”
KYLIE: Wow.
DANIEL: Strong claim. “Therefore, one must first of all learn way more verbs and understand them better. I’m not sure of the implications of this neurologically but it does make speech more emotive and dynamic, as the same words don’t pop up all the time.” Well, Toby, I got to say that, while they do tend to alter words a little bit, like you know, ‘hablar’ is ‘to speak’ and then you could say ‘el habla’ — that’s the speech of someone. I’ve got to say that we sometimes do turn around and say ‘Me gusta tu hablar.’ I like your speaking or your ‘to speak’. So it does happen a little bit. Toby, thanks for that email. Hey, I think we need to take a track, and since we’re talking about zero derivation, let’s listen to Fazerdaze with ‘Zero’ on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
KYLIE: You’re listening to Talk the Talk. It’s Kylie here with Daniel, and we’re waiting to hear what you have to say, and get those answers to you.
DANIEL: We had a recent episode about Mother Language Day and Alessio has hit us up on Facebook. “Hi, guys! Happy Mother Language Day! I wanted to ask a question related to your second language learning chat. Why not include the national — Australian in your case — sign language or Aboriginal languages — again in the case of Australia — in the curriculum, instead of a foreign language? I think that would be politically feasible, and especially in the case of sign language probably have a very good reception on the wider political spectrum.”
KYLIE: I think that’s a great idea. What you have to recognise is that there’s many Indigenous languages in this country. So I would be wary of just choosing one.
DANIEL: Ah. Well, how about the local one?
KYLIE: The local one sounds great. I learned sign language for a short time at TAFE in order to get an understanding about Auslan, and I think this is extremely useful as well. And yeah, as far as I’m concerned, if you have a passion for a language, or an interest in a language, or you can see how you can support a language — particularly one that has relevance to your particular community — yeah, go for it! Why not?
DANIEL: I think we have to be super careful though. I love the idea of learning a language, like the local Aboriginal language, because we all should know something about the language where we’re at, and it has a lot to do with place names and there’s a lot of history back there. I think we need to make sure that this is done with the approval of the people to whom the language pertains.
KYLIE: Definitely.
DANIEL: I can tell you that I might feel a little bit funny if I really applied myself and learned lots and lots of Noongar, and then I became a better speaker of Noongar than some people who actually are Noongar. I feel like I would feel that’s funny.
KYLIE: I think that we would have to find and support the educators of these languages out there.
DANIEL: Now that I love.
KYLIE: Yeah, and I know that there are more and more examples of using technology in order to encourage people to use… like apps. These days it’s a lot easier — particularly for Auslan — to actually visually see it rather than going through a paper dictionary in order to find out signs.
DANIEL: I love the idea of hiring loads of Aboriginal language consultants or Auslan teachers for schools. I think that would just be brilliant. I just would like to be careful about it. And I don’t want the story here to become “they took everything and came back for the language, too.” Right?
KYLIE: Yeah, and I also know that there’s many people out there going, “Oh, geez, we’ve got a crowded curriculum already. How many languages…?” So, yeah, it’s going to be a bit more of an issue than just: Hey, let’s just do it. But the spirit of it: absolutely on board with that.
DANIEL: Nicola says, “Hello, Talk the Talk. It’s been more than a year I’ve been following the podcast, and every time you talk about the positive sides of linguistic diversity and dying languages, I can’t help thinking about a language I’m not a native speaker of, but I can understand and translate from: Venetian, the language. Even though here we call it a dialect of the Veneto region of Italy. I am recently having mixed feelings about its decrease in use in the last thirty to forty years. I’ve always seen it as the language of old people, of the bigot, the sexist, the racist, and the homophobic.”
KYLIE: Oh.
DANIEL: “I know that if someone’s speaking Veneto, especially the younger, there’s a much higher chance I’ll be hearing someone talking about pussy (an extremely common conversation topic), telling people of color to go back to their home country, and so on. Even understanding it’s a mere correlation, probably subject to a frequency bias, I couldn’t help thinking that if this is the way my peers, the native speakers, use this language to communicate — well, it’s not a great loss.” What do you think, Kylie?
KYLIE: I think that’s incredibly sad.
DANIEL: Me too.
KYLIE: It’s a real shame to see the language being used in that fashion, but I also wonder if this is not also a great opportunity. I’m thinking about how when I attended — back in my university days! — I attended a class on Renaissance Italy and modern Italian language. And it was mostly about culture and history. I didn’t pick up Italian at all. Quite frankly, I’m sorry it was mostly about literature works and historical works. But one of the things that the teacher pointed out that she was part quite proud of: she said that Italian rap at the time was undergoing a huge transformation, and they were having more and more musicians using the rap form which they knew was often incredibly sexist or homophobic or aggressive and about battling.
DANIEL: Had connotations of toughness.
KYLIE: Yeah, yeah, and very male-dominated. They were using the rap music to challenge the crime families.
DANIEL: Interesting.
KYLIE: And they were saying, you know, don’t be involved in crime. Stand up for yourself. If you see violence in community, report it. And they were using Italian rap music in order to do that.
DANIEL: That’s kind of awesome.
KYLIE: And I think that might be something that could be a solution here. Start seeing if we can encourage the language use in such a way to challenge those stereotypes. Is that something that you think might be possible?
DANIEL: I like that idea. I was thinking also… you know, I was thinking about the Italian elections just last week, where far-right parties and anti-immigration parties were doing unfortunately really well. And I was thinking, you know, people are just saying this kind of stuff to each other in Veneto, all right?
KYLIE: It’s not an uncommon problem unfortunately, even in Australia.
DANIEL: Nicola also says, “I just realised: I forgot the one thing that people from Veneto do even more than using racial slurs: Cursing against God or saints with an incredible variability and creativity.” So here are some slurs, some religious-based swears, in Veneto. You could say ‘Porco Dio’. Dio is god, and porco… God is a pig. You could even say ‘God is a dog.’ ‘Dio cane.’ That’s the kind of thing that you would just say under your breath sometimes. Wow! ‘Dio sorcio’: God is a rat.
KYLIE: See, I see amazing passion in that kind of language!
DANIEL: Oh, and by the way, the anatomical reference that Nicola was mentioning is probably ‘mona’ which means literally a vagina, but it’s also “What an idiot.” That kind of thing. So that’s your Italian swearing for the day. Well, I think we need to take a track and you’re going to make me find some Italian rap, aren’t you?
KYLIE: Oh yeah, you bet!
DANIEL: But I don’t understand it.
KYLIE: That’s okay; just get down with the beats.
DANIEL: Okay, well, we’re going all the way back to 1992 for this one. This is the song where Frankie Hi-nrg MC took on the Mafia. This one is Fight da Faida on RTRFM 92.1.
[MUSIC]
KYLIE: You’re listening to Talk the Talk with Daniel and myself. We’re hopping into our Mailbag episode, answering the questions and queries that you have about the show, and even some things we haven’t tackled on the show, and you think we should.
DANIEL: Ryan on Twitter says, “Have you done a show about gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender?” You know that languages have grammatical gender, right? Like the table is female, or….
KYLIE: Mm!
DANIEL: Yeah. He says “I feel like any movement toward widespread acceptance has the potential to fundamentally change the language. Could such a change even happen that quickly?” How much do you think language can change? Can it do it?
KYLIE: Change is always going to be gradual though, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Mmm.
KYLIE: It’s going to be something that has to have community acceptance. It’s not just a matter of putting up signs and posters everywhere, or popping a new dictionary into the children’s hands.
DANIEL: Long term, any kind of change is on the table, but change of that magnitude — like, if you want to see how well change has been accepted in gender and language, let’s take a look at things that we’ve already talked about.
KYLIE: Yeah.
DANIEL: We had a chat with Sophie Richard, our French correspondent. She mentioned that people are putting dots in words that were gendered. So for example, if you have a male friend, that’s an ‘ami’. But if you have a female friend, you have to stick a letter on the end: ‘amie’. It sounds the same, but looks different. And if you have all male friends, that’s ‘amis’. But if you have all female friends, then it’s ‘amies’. And so what people have started doing is they started sticking dots in there. Bullets. Option-8 on your Mac keyboard. So it would look like ‘ami•e•s’. And that’s how you include all your male friends and all your female friends, and it’s like I’m not specifying.
KYLIE: Mmm.
DANIEL: Well, the Academie Française, since that episode aired, they have come down hard on this usage.
KYLIE: [GASPS] Ohh…
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
KYLIE: I shouldn’t be surprised, but still something in me is cringing like, “Oh, in trouble!”
DANIEL: Yeah, they said it creates “confusion which borders on illegibility and a “disunited language”. It said that “the French language is now in deadly danger”…
KYLIE: Oh, dear!
DANIEL: Yeah, and that such usage was “an aberration”. So they’re not fans. And because the Academie Française holds some degree of authority in the minds of French speakers, this means that this kind of inclusive language — even just this, even just to this extent — is going to have an uphill climb. Took a look at German. Looks like German is doing the same kind of thing. Just recently, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner for Germany said that the national anthem’s lyrics be made gender neutral. Instead of Fatherland, it could be changed to Homeland. And the Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Yeah, no, I think the current lyrics are fine.”
KYLIE: Oh!
DANIEL: Here’s what I think. It seems like everyone hates language change. And a lot of people aren’t too keen on equality of men and women. A lot of other people think that equality of men and women is a pretty good idea, but language isn’t a good way to do it. So that’s kind of where it’s at.
KYLIE: What about Spanish? Is there hope?
DANIEL: Spanish is interesting. The letter is working its way into words. Instead of latino or latina you got latinx. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but I know it when I see it in writing. There’s also other ways of doing this, like compañeros or compañeras — people are writing compañerxs. Or they’re also using the @ symbol, because you know, the difference between a male compañero and a compañera is that one is an and one is an . Well, if you use the @ symbol — shift-2 — you got an and an there together.
KYLIE: Oh, cool.
DANIEL: And so, people are using that as well. But again, other people don’t like it. They say, “What are you doing? You’re tampering with language.” And this is something that has to be taken into account. This can hamper adoption of a thing. So.
KYLIE: Man.
DANIEL: I don’t see a lot of change happening. If it does happen, it’s not going to happen because people say “Let’s change language,” because that almost never works. It’s going to be gradual that they relinquish the gender.
KYLIE: It’s a lot tougher than you you might think. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, people hang on to that stuff. Ryan, thanks so much for your question, and I would just like to thank everybody who had a question. There were some we didn’t get to, but we will try to answer those in due course. Gee, we got through a lot of questions, didn’t we?
KYLIE: We have so many people sending in their questions. And there’s so many people I know who probably have even more burning questions on their mind right now. Here’s what you can do: you can hit us up on social media. We’re on Twitter as @talkrtr. We’ve got an amazing Facebook page, where many of these questions are coming in.
DANIEL: You can also get us an email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au. We love to hear from you. Thanks for listening and to get us to the news, let’s hear Em Burroughs with her track ‘Boy’ on RTRFM 92.1. 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]
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