135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)

0:00What are we going to do with you, Midgley? Honestly. Yeah. I know what you're going to do with me. You're going to do a show. That's what you're going to do. Game on. Okay. Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language.

0:31I'm Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. First up, it's linguist friend and esteemed colleague, Hedvig. Hi, Hedvig. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? Swell. Not ready for that.

0:47And educator, friend, and my podcast mate for 15 years, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.

0:57Daniel. How does that make you feel? Permission to wither on the vine, please. Let's all move on. You know, what's coming up on this episode, one of the areas that I've been fascinated with is when we think something should be one way, but under certain conditions, our brain tells us it's a different way. And we see this in optical illusions. Do you have a favorite optical illusion, Ben? Um, I mean, it's hard to go past a good Escher, right? Like, like OG optical bro. I went to the Escher Museum in Danhagen.

1:29Oh, cool, man. It's very cool. And they have like a little interactive thing where you can take pictures where there's like rooms set up to make optical illusions so you can go with your buddy and like... Did you get caught on the stairs just infinitely going upwards? They don't have the stairs, but they have like the room that's like, it looks like you're standing next to each other, but you're actually very far apart and one looks tiny. Oh, yeah, the Lord of the Rings effect. Oh, the forced perspective of... As you can also call it, yeah, yeah. I'm a huge fan of the checker shadow illusion, even now. That's my choice, yeah.

2:00But I do like a good rotating snake. Would we say that we're going back in time now, magic eye counts as optical illusions? Why not? Because that stuff always, I realize it's very hokey and very gimmicky, but there is a part of me that has maintained a kind of fascination with it because of like the brain hack nature of it. Like if you do just the right thing with the focal distance, an image appears. That was always really fun. It is cool. And I'm really good at it. I just go back with my eyes and I just, I can see them very closely.

2:32Well, this is what happens in optical illusions, but we see this in language too. There are cases when the grammar of the language kind of works one way, but under certain conditions, our brains tell us something else should be happening. And these are linguistic illusions. So when we see linguistic illusions, we find that a number of things are going on. By the way, Ben, did it sound strange when I just said a number of things are going on? No. Should it have? Does it sound better if I say a number of things is going on?

3:05This is one of the ones where my brain doesn't care. Yeah. Don't care. Yeah. My brain is like, no difference. Like if you had said one and not the other and then one and not the other, I would be like, you said the same thing twice. That's strange. Why would you say the same thing twice? Now, according to the prescriptive rule, you would say a number of things is going on because it is a number of things. One number of things is going on. Right. For some reason, saying a number of things are going on sounds okay.

3:37Sounds better, doesn't it? I mean, I feel like I can answer that question why it's okay. Because whilst the grammar, if interpreted literally, would suggest that it is a specified number, the way it is used is an unspecified number. When we say a number of things, very few people are thinking like 11, 11 things. It's like they mean some, a few, several. So, conceptually, some plural number could be going on. Exactly. But Benjamin, it sounds a bit like you're mixing specified, unspecified and singular and plural because they're not the same thing.

4:15Okay. Fair enough. Because a number, the number, it doesn't matter as long as it's singular, right? Yeah. So, a number of things, in terms of usage, I still would put forward as an unspecified, amorphous kind of thing. I always explain this by saying that the word things is plural and because it's really close to the is or the are, it's kind of like pulling it over to plural. Interesting. Yeah. So, that's a linguistic illusion. And today, we're going to be talking with Dr. Dan Parker of Ohio State, the university.

4:46He's written a book, Linguistic Illusions, and we're going to be talking about them. Spoiler alert, my mind gets blown. Will he pierce the veil of illusions, Daniel? We might get to step behind the curtain and find out what's really going on. Take that, wizard. Besides the entertainment value, I also really enjoy talking to Dan because I think that these kinds of cases can also reveal more like foundational truths or knowledge about how language works generally. So, this is like a good way of like setting up experiments to learn things about language, more than just sort of coffee table entertainment.

5:22And learn things we will. I'd like to say a big thank you to our latest patrons. New at the supporter level, it's Lance. Woo! And at the friend level, Emma and Susa K with a yearly membership. Our newest free patrons, Adam W, C41V, Bodil, Sneaky Lemur, sneaking back into our mentions. Nice to see you. And Leon, you know, we love our patrons. We have a great time on the Discord. We share photos and words. We get ideas from you. And we hope that we take up a little bit of your day in a pleasant way.

5:56I want you to come and join us. If you're not a patron, it can be as little as a buck a month or even free. Just come see us at patreon.com slash becauselangpod. I think that one of our newest patrons would appreciate me saying that I suspect that this name is Bodil. Bodil. Bodil. Yeah. This is a familiar name to you. That is it? That is a name from Svenska? It's a Scandi name. It occurs all over Scandis. Oh, thank you. Bodil is probably a woman, I would guess.

6:27Hello, Bodil, and welcome. What's going on in linguistic news, Daniel? This one was sent to us by Flaviano, who says, my name is Flaviano Matos from Brazil. Hi, Flaviano. Hi. And I have always listened to the podcast since the times of Talk the Talk. Oh, that's pretty good. As we've established in the opening of this episode, that's a really fucking long time ago. Yep, it's been a while, and they're still there. It may interest you the news that a federal prosecutor is seeking 10 million Brazilian

7:01real, just shy of US 2 million, in damages from the main TV broadcaster in Brazil, TV Globo. Over the pronunciation of the word, Hecordia. I'm not a Portuguese speaker, so I hope I'm doing okay there. Hecordia. On that channel, presenters and newscasters have always pronounced the word as Hecordia. Did you notice how I normally I said it with the second syllable? Hecordia. That is, to a non-Portuguese speaker, and let's assume that you're doing an okay job at

7:35this, that is a subtle difference. It's a stress shift, so it would be the difference between, like, a record and a recorder. Here's what's going on. Many Portuguese speakers say Hecordia on the second syllable, second syllable. Okay. Whereas sports folks in that are saying when somebody sets a world record, they say it's a Hecordia with the stress on the first syllable. Oh, okay. It's only the stress shifting, but the question is, how on earth is this a lawsuit?

8:10A $2 million lawsuit. Okay. Let's... I haven't read ahead, Ben. We should guess what we think it is. Yeah. What's behind this? My first question is, Brazil speaks Brazilian Portuguese. Another place that speaks Portuguese is Portugal. Maybe it's a... They're trying to be too much like the colonizers' mainland Portugal variety of Portuguese. So maybe it's like anti-European Portuguese. That's my guess. Okay. I was actually going to go in the exact opposite direction.

8:40I was going to guess that it's like old biddies in Australia getting up in arms about people not saying appreciate or something like that and are saying appreciate instead. So it's like some old guard entity who's just like, no, the language of the colonizer must be maintained because that's how we know that the rich people are good and the good people are rich. Right. Okay. Well, I think what's really happening here is you might have guessed that hecorde, R-E-C-O-R-D-E, is a loan word from English.

9:12Okay. It's spelled with no accent mark and that means that according to Portuguese rules, which I barely understand, but I assume they're kind of like Spanish. This is a good linguistic basis. Yeah, sure. Why not? The penultimate syllable, the second to last syllable, usually gets the stress unless there's an accent mark somewhere else, in which case put it where the accent mark is. There's no accent mark. So there's a tension here because many people would say that word hecorde, but people who

9:42know the word from English would be tempted to put the stress on the English way and say hecorde. Okay. So this is like a hiding on English thing. Maybe, but also there's something else. And that is that sometimes the word is said hecorde and sometimes it's just, hecorde. Oh. Which means that the stress would go there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh, there's a lot of things going on. But hecorde would be even more English-like, right? It would be, wouldn't it? And we're suing each other for, what is the basis of the loss?

10:16Yeah, what are the damages here? Yeah, what are we doing? Well, Flaviano sent a copy of the document in Portuguese, the legal document, which has been translated automatically. Here we go. The Brazilian Federal Prosecutor's Office in Minas Gerais has sued Globo for the incorrect pronunciation of the word hecorde record. The lawsuit was filed by Prosecutor Kleber Estacioneves, who is asking the broadcaster to pay 10 million Brazilian reals for, here it is, quote, damage to the intangible cultural

10:50heritage of the Portuguese language. Oh, dear. Right. Okay. So this is some Académie Française. Yeah, that's what I'm picking up here. It really is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's more. According to the prosecutor, quote, when a nationwide broadcaster repeatedly and systematically propagates a pronunciation error known as a prosodic error. See how they dress it up a little bit there? I'll continue. It violates.

11:19Violates. The collective right of society to access programming with an educational and informative purpose. How? How are people going to know how this word is pronounced? That is. If everyone's saying it wrong on the public broadcaster. That is a big woof. That is. So, honestly, I reckon this would be, the Australian version of this, if we were to see it, would be someone taking the ABC to court because a presenter said, yeah, nah, at some point.

11:49Like, this, for me, is that. Or learnings. Saying the word learnings. I suspect that what would come up in Australia is more Americanisms. That fits the vibe a little bit more, I think. So, if there was something that is a very American thing to do and Australian broadcasters thought of doing it, it would feel like an affront to Australian national identity or something like that. But even that's a bit weird, right? Because Daniel and Hedwig, actually, because you've both had to write in official academic like published ways.

12:20Yeah. So, we, most Australian style guides do not agree on whether program is two M's and an E or whether the words should have a Z or an S in the various words that have Z's or S's and, you know, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. Yeah. So, like, we, even we are just kind of like, moo.

12:38Yeah. It's not something you'd haul somebody to the court over, is it? I mean, really. No, it might feel different because Brazil and the U.S., which I'm taking as like this supposed pollutant origin, that's a different relationship than Australia, U.S., I think. I suppose that's true. I would be really interested to hear from any Brazilian Portuguese speaker listeners who could tell us a little bit more about the breadth of, shall we say, like accent diversity within

13:11Brazil, because just from a purely looking out in perspective, I would imagine it would be tremendous, right? Like, Brazil is huge. It's got massively divergent populations of people in like all sorts of different ways and spaces and places and means and income and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would imagine there's heaps of different like versions of Brazilian Portuguese. So that's a really great point. If you want to hear some Brazilian Portuguese, I can recommend the Oscars winner for at least one reward, The Secret Agent.

13:42I haven't seen it yet. I'm so excited to, though. I really want to see it. Have you seen it? I've seen it. I think it's good. Okay. There's some, all of the movies that are nominated for everything are too long, but Secret Agent was also a bit too long, but that's just all of them at this point. Thank you, Flaviano. Flaviano, I was very interested in that, and it's good to know that other people are weird about language, not just English speakers. So thanks. Our next story is from Diego. Good old Diego. I have a Quiznight question for you.

14:13Ooh. What are the most common languages of the world by number of speakers? Oh, we've dug into this recently, didn't we? Well, yes. So it should be Mandarin, Spanish or English, and now we're getting into the tricky ones. So it depends on if we merge Hindi and Urdu. They should be pretty high. Japanese is higher than you think. Russian is higher than you think. I just want the top five. Okay.

14:44Hold on. Top five. I'm going to take a stab. Mandarin, Spanish, English. Oh, spoken. First and second. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Now, this is the problem, right? This is the problem with that kind of list. Okay. So Ben, why don't you get us going here? So the way that you phrased the question in terms of total number of speakers, which would include second, third, however many languages down the line. How do we define fluency? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. I'm going to guess that two languages that Hedwig didn't mention are probably higher than

15:16we would think, which would be Arabic and French. Okay. I'm thinking both Arabic and French will sit quite high because, you know, in one case, hashtag colonizer. And in another case, there's just fuck loads of places to speak Arabic.

15:31With Arabic, we have the same quote unquote problem as to do with Chinese, Hindi, Urdu. Oh, okay. Yeah, right. That's like, so Egyptian Arabic, I believe is the largest first language speaker Arabic variety, but Iraqi, Syrian, there's a lot of Arabics. And then a lot of them similar to like German in Austria and Switzerland, a lot of people learn so-called standard Arabic as school. Yeah. And then, yeah. Okay. I think Mandarin obviously goes on the list.

16:02I think Hindi goes on the list. I think English goes on the list and then I'm chucking Arabic and French at the end. Okay. So here's, and by the way, I hate getting this question at quiz nights because there's like, it's such a difficult question. Let's all observe Daniel lose all friends in one night. I know, right? Because I don't know what list they used. I don't know how reliable. And then I say, well, this is a complicated question. And then when I get it wrong, they look at me like, you had one job, Midgley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always just ask, like, I ask the quiz master, like, just tell me what, what, what webpage

16:36did you, like, what, wait, is this Business Insider or is it like at the log? Like, what did you get this from? What'd you use? Just tell me that. Yeah. Well, depending on what we count as a language, yes, you're absolutely right. Hedwig Arabic is not exactly a language. It's like a macro family, like Chinese. But a pretty good estimation, if you count first and second speakers, is English up the top because so many second language speakers. Next, Mandarin. Then Spanish.

17:09Okay. Tons of countries. And then you'd have French and Arabic. Okay. But here's the story. Used to be you'd say Arabic and French. Arabic at number four, French at number five. But now French has pulled ahead and passed Arabic to become world's fourth most spoken language, according to what you count as a language, what you count as a speaker, what you count as fluency, and so on. Hmm. So, French has overtaken Arabic, according to a report from the International Organization

17:42of Francophonie.

17:48You don't say. Alliance Francaise has made them a little survey. Yeah. Almond milk consumption booming, says International Organization for the Promotion of Almond Milk. Yeah. It's important to remember that French is spoken in a lot of former French colonies, but also other places. Am I right in that Morocco was never officially colonized by France? Good question. Not sure. Good question.

18:18They do speak French, though, which suggests that they are. And then also, do we, and this is another, I know you alluded to this earlier, but like, at what point does it stop being a regionalization dialect of French and start being a Creole that is functionally indecipherable to French speakers, like mainland French speakers? Well, let's check the claim. I wanted to know if these numbers sounded right. So, for Arabic, Wikipedia has 380 million, depending on what you count as Arabic, still lower than

18:50the claim to 396 million for French. And a correction to what I said earlier, I just looked it up. So, Morocco has been a French protectorate for about 40 years. Ah, okay. Very good. We will never colonize. Oh, cool. We will protect you, though, and you don't get a say in it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull some quotes from the article, at least. It seems that people in France only make up 66 million of the total. By 2050, French is expected to be spoken by 590 million people, quote, nine out of 10 of

19:22whom will live in Africa, says Louise Mouchikouamo, who is the secretary general of the International Organization of Francophonie. She says, the future of French will no longer be shaped in Paris, but rather in Abidjan, Beirut, Brussels, Dakar, Kinshasa, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, Tunis, or Yaoundé. For any French learners out there, I can really recommend West African French. If you're learning French, I find it easier.

19:53My mom has some friends from Côte d'Ivoire, and I've listened to West African French, and it's much... Hedvig, for those listening to the podcast, Hedvig just did chef kiss motion. It's much, I don't want to go for it to say better, but I think it is more easier to pass and to hear word differences and stuff like that than in, like, European, French, French. Well, there's an interesting point that's coming out, I think, and that is that we've been talking about how Arabic is not just one thing.

20:25There are multiple varieties of Arabic, but French isn't one thing either. There's a ton of them. Maybe one day we'll classify it as a macro language. Ooh, that'd be fun. Boy, wouldn't the Academy love that. And it never was one, you could argue, as well. So it's like... Yeah, exactly. It's like a bunch of kids going into a trench coat, and then we're, like, ripping away the trench coat, and like, there's a bunch of children in here. We're French. Always was. Well, a big happy International Francophonie Day to all who celebrate. That was on the 20th of March, and thanks, Diego, for that story.

20:57All right. Next story. This one's about inference. Hey, Ben. I want to ask you a question. Okay. Actually, Hedwig, this one's for you, too. So this happened tonight, and I asked if I could share this story, and my neighbor said yes. Our neighbors were planning on coming over for a visit. Getting ready. We were making some pizza. Actually, my partner was making some pizza, which she's very good at. But I got this text. Here's the text. Hi, Daniel. Okay if we head over after our daughter has cleaned her room?

21:28Question mark? Mm-hmm. Hmm. What's going on? Are you supposed to know when the daughter... Is there, like, oh, she always cleans her room at three o'clock? I think I get what they're saying here. I would have... Here's how I would interpret this text, had I been the recipient of it. Mm-hmm. So I translated in my head to, hey, Daniel, we will be over in the next 15 to 30 minutes. Is that okay? Question mark. Okay. I got something else. Okay.

21:58I thought it was unusual that they mentioned her cleaning her room. I thought that was kind of funny. Wouldn't you just expect her to say, okay, if we come over in about 15 minutes? Yeah. Oh, yeah, that doesn't make heaps of sense to me. Why would he bring that up? But Daniel and Ben, you both have kids and parents, parents be weird. Parents be overstimulated, overwhelmed, do weird. Okay. So maybe he threw that in because he wasn't in control, sort of, in some sense. Couldn't help himself.

22:30Yeah. Or was he doing an implication? There's a lot about people that doesn't really make that much sense to me. And so if someone goes, oh, we'll be over after my daughter cleans her room, that's weird. But if they'd said, we'll be over in like 45 minutes, my brain would be like, that's weird. That's too long. Like there's all sorts of weird. And I just kind of put it all in the big, people are kind of weird bucket, I guess. Like it's got to be quite weird to sit outside of the acceptable weird parameters, I find.

23:00And I kind of sometimes secretly wish that there was like a little rule manual that everyone just followed and didn't have to talk to each other or you could just like, anyway, let's not talk about that. That's not Northern European of you at all. Anyway, but is it possible that the parent in question was trying to get Daniel to participate in a thing about his daughter? Because like, for example, I went to a theme park where the staff were handing out chocolate coins and I winked at the waitress and I said, oh, is it the case that if my nephews eat their

23:36dinner, they might get a chocolate coin, you know? And she was like, oh no, they can have one right now. And gave them chocolate coins right away. And I was like, didn't get it, didn't pick it up. You were trying to rope in the person to get them to eat. I thought it was going to be Daniel saying that you can't come over until you've cleaned your room. Oh, that's exactly what I thought. Maybe there's some foot dragging on the room and he's like, now you, Daniel says that you can come over, but only after you've cleaned your room, right?

24:08So I'm going to text Daniel and I'm going to say, hey, after she's cleaned it. And when they came over, I said, is that what was going on? Which he confirmed was in fact the case. Nice going epic. Do you know, here's how Ben Ainslie is weird. I would resent that a little bit. Okay. Yeah. It's like, don't rope me into this. This is not about me. I'm not in this. I'd be sitting there being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you fucking knock. How come I'm now suddenly the person who's like laying it out for- I'm the bad guy here.

24:38I'm just pleased that like, Ben, how many children do you have? How many children do I have? Zero. Exactly zero. Yeah. And I got it. The non-parent worked it out. That's true. That's true. Well, we're always making and interpreting inferences, but how do we interpret them? And usually in a linguistics class, like the ones that we've all taught, except Ben, we go to Grice's maxims, like relevance. Like my daughter says, dad, I want food.

25:08And I say, I've just sat down, which sounds like a total non sequitur. But because we assume relevance, we say, oh, he's doing a thing where he's explaining. I can read between the lines and I can say, dad's just sat down. That's why he's not going to get me any food. Dang it. Yeah. This is like something that a former guest on our show, Steve Levinson, has written a lot about, which is like how people work this out. And so the Gricean maxims are four maxims that were made up a long time ago. Some people use other versions of it or newer ones.

25:40But basically the rules, the informal rules that we use to sort of derive what's in there, which can be really hard and also can be very culture specific. Like sometimes you're in a culture and someone says something, you're like, I don't understand how that follows from that. And then someone says, oh, it's because, don't you know?

25:58Inference is complicated. It is. Well, this is work from Dr. Sammy Floyd of Sarah Lawrence University and a team published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

26:11They wanted to know if this ability to do inference was one skill or was it a lot of different skills. The way that they decided to work this was not by sticking people in fMRI machines and having them answer questions. Instead, they gave people lots and lots of examples of inferences to figure out, lots of question-answer stuff, and seeing if they could work out the meaning. Like maybe one of the utterances would have like a different intonation, like, oh, I wanted the red one. And the implication there is the one you gave me was wrong or something.

26:45Or maybe connecting the dots would require somebody to be good at knowing stuff. Maybe somebody would be good at doing all of these, in which case you could infer that they all used the same one skill. Or maybe some people were good at some of the inferences, but maybe not good at the others, implying that this would hinge on different skills. What's your guess? I'm thinking different. Okay. I'm scrolling through the paper to see what kind of participants they had.

27:16I'm looking for the answer. No, I'm looking for what kind of people were in it. It was 400 people doing tasks. In English. Good point. Thank you. I'm assuming. I think it's a bunch of different skills. I think that the knowing things is going to be really helpful because if you don't know what things mean, it's hard to connect the dots. Yeah, but you've got to have like real-world knowledge as well, right?

27:47Yeah, to a certain level, you do have to have that. Okay. I struggle sometimes with inferences because I think that like everything is possible.

27:58Oh, you've got to know what's unlikely. Like everything's possible, but only a few things are likely. Yes. And I'm very, I'm bad at, I think everything, I think a lot of things that other people, things are unlikely. Like the thing I've told before when someone talked about a submarine, but they were talking about a boat. I've done this one before. Like someone said boat, but they meant, I heard you boat and I thought they're talking about a submarine. But apparently it's very unlikely that private people own submarines, but I don't know that. What?

28:31That would make interpreting that rather difficult. That was such a great insight into your brain for a second. That's so wonderful. Like, what do you mean? Is that not a thing many people have? Like just private submarines? Well, as we know, Hedwig grew up in a very privileged environment where submarine ownership was pretty high among the two. I've been on a retired submarine for a 40-year party when I was a kid. I have. Okay. There we have it. First of all, who your parents knew as a 40-year-old that was renting out a fucking retired U-boat type shit?

29:04He wasn't allowed to go underwater. That doesn't matter. It's still cool as hell. I know, right? That is awesome, hey? That's wicked. Anyway, so for working out the emphasis, there has to be some level of knowledge about what's likely and unlikely. Like, you have to not be me. And then you also have to, like, be able to work out, like, logical combinations of things. And those feels like at least two different skills, quote-unquote. Yes. So it's not one skill. It's got to be me. Okay. Okay. Well, that's what the team found. They found three different skills.

29:36You could collapse all the different talents you need into three different skills. Here they are. Number one, understanding social conventions. Oh, dear. I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. So, for example, if I say, Ben, you're coming in hot, you know what I mean, right? You know that I'm doing a thing, and it's a request. It's not just a simple description. Yeah. The second thing they found was you had to understand intonation patterns, like, I want the red one. The third thing was making causal inferences based on world knowledge.

30:12Here's one of the tests they used to measure that one.

30:15Sometimes a truck drives by the house. The dishes start to rattle. Do these sentences form a coherent story? Yes. How did you know that? I lived next to a railroad, and the house shook every time the train went past. I was about to say exactly the same thing. I lived on a major trucking route, and we would have things rattle off the table. There you go. That's a piece of real-world knowledge that you needed to know to establish the coherence of the start of that story.

30:47So, three different skills. I like this because it helps us to get to the specific mechanisms that we use to unwind inferences and read between the lines. I guessed multiple straight out of the gate just because language is really weird and tricky, and it uses heaps of different parts of the brain. So, I was like, well, it probably is the same thing. It's not all general knowledge. There's this anthropologist from the 60s and 70s called Edward Hall. There's also a guy called Hofstetter who have done these theories about that cultures can differ in how much they expect the other person to be doing the inference work.

31:23The theory goes that there are some cultures where the person who's speaking assumes that they have very little shared knowledge with the other person and is likely to sort of state a lot of basic things. But in some cultures, you can think of it as like a trade-off. Like, it's either more the hearer or the speaker. Now, naturally, saying anything broadly about cultures is a gross oversimplification. Every situation is going to be different. A teacher in a classroom talking to students, a parent talking to a child, two people who have been married for 50 years.

31:54These are all different interactions. But the idea was to sort of help actually part of the American diplomatic service and military personnel station abroad to sort of understand that just because you know French doesn't mean you understand French conversational pragmatics. Right. So the idea was that, for example, that Americans might be more on one way and other cultures on another. Would this track to like high context and low context stuff? Like if you're a high context coach? Yeah. Okay. So high context and low context comes from Edward Hall's work.

32:26That's the original. Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, there's a really cool piece in Medium that someone wrote on like an overview of Hall's work. And I'm very interested in this, both on a personal level and on a like professional research level. I've submitted one, two research applications that have gotten rejected doing work on this kind of topic. That's all right. Most applications get rejected. So it's just par for the course. But the idea is sort of that, yeah, people might have different cultural expectations.

32:58The problem is that if you come from a place where you do spell out a lot of things and you talk to someone who's not used to it, that person might feel themselves getting like, you know, over-explained, treated like they're an idiot. You're getting over the head with your meaning. Yeah. Like, of course I know that dishes rattle when a truck drives by because of the vibrations in the ground. Why are you telling me that? Whereas the opposite can also occur when someone is like assuming shared knowledge that isn't there. And they say like, I have no idea what this person is talking about. They mentioned trucks and then dishes.

33:29I don't know what's going on. And then the other person thinks, man, this person's thick. Oh my gosh, I have to spell everything out for them. Yeah. So for me, thinking about that has sort of helped some interactions I've had. Like, I'm like, ah, this person expects this. I should do this more. What I tend to do, because that's just how I'm wired, is I just tell people, I might say a lot of things that you already know. It's not because, like, I know that you don't know them. It's just because I deal with a lot of uncertainty all the time and I assume very little as a basis.

34:03That's cool. That's great that you sort of background it like that. That's really adaptive.

34:10Well, yeah. I don't know if it is. The more tired I get, the less social flair I have. I'll just say that. Aw. Sounds normal. Yeah. Probably normal. And that's the news. And now it's time for Related or Not. Our theme comes from Hugh. Related or Not.

34:31Related or Not.

34:35Related or Not.

34:38Related or Not.

34:41I like it. I think we're getting further away from copyright infringement, which I think is good. All right. This one comes from Tigertronia on the Discord. Here we go. Shrew, the animal. Yep. Oh, okay. Shit. Paper pass. And shrewd, having keen judgment. Okay. Mm-hmm. Interesting. You know, these little animals are pretty canny, I gotta say. And that's it. Only those two. Just those two. Okay. I have a fun fact about elephant shrews.

35:12Oh. Please. I was about to. Okay. Are we going to say the same one? No. I was going to tell you a completely different fact about shrews. And it's not about menstruation. We've each got a fact. We're taking it in turn. Hedwig first, me next, and then Daniel. A lot of mammals don't menstruate like humans do. A bunch of the primates, I think, do. But, like, other animals don't. Like, there's something else they call estrocycle that, like, dogs have, which also includes bleeding. But that's not the same as menstruation. That's actually a kind of opposite thing. They're more fertile while it's happening.

35:43But elephant shrews do menstruate like humans. So whenever I see them in the zoo, I see these little tiny little animals, and I look at them, and I'm like, you and me. Or you and me, sister, doing it together. Isn't it, like, every nine days or something? How quick is their cycle? They do live shorter lives, though, so maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I know their tracks. All right. Okay, my shrew fact is if you have never looked at the skeleton of a hero shrew, a shrew that is a hero.

36:18Googling. You should do so now. Be warned. It is approaching kind of semi-body horror how drastically different their skeletons are than any other mammal you have ever seen. Okay. Oh. Oh, I'm looking at the pictures now of a hero shrew skeleton. Yes. And, I mean, it looks like a tiny, like, dragon or something like that. Right. So, what you're seeing, that weird conglomeration of, like, armor-looking stuff running down its back, that is its spinal column.

36:54That interlocking network of, like, reinforced plates is its spine. Wow. I just saw the skeleton from another angle. Now I'm seeing it from above, so I can see the spine. And that is crazy. So, the hero shrew gets its name because you can stand on one. With your full weight on one foot, and it will survive that experience. Wow. Have you ever seen a skeleton of a snake?

37:24Yes.

37:26Not the same. I would note, snake and shrew, quite distant relatives on the animal tree. Yeah, but you get parallel evolution solving similar niche problems, like hyenas and dogs with similar jaws, etc. Well, thank you for those shrew facts. I feel like we've all gotten shrewd. Yes. Nature corner. Shrew and shrewd. I'm going with unrelated. Okay. Any reason? I think that the temptation of the ED being the explanation for shrew turning into shrewd, like shrewed, is too juicy.

38:08It's too tasty. It's too easy. I think that instead, that D has a different genesis, and we've morphed down to shrewd over, like, we've lost some stuff along the way. Okay, okay. I like what you're thinking. Hevig, what do you think? I would like to ask whether the Shakespeare play, Taming of the Shrew, has any bearing here, because that is a sort of smart and not very attractive woman, right?

38:43Is that what a shrew is? A shrewish woman. Yes. Is that what that is? So we use shrew to describe, like, sort of homely women. Who act in ways that we don't like. Yeah. Yes. Are they also too smart for their own good? Yeah. So it was like a word that we would use to describe women who had the audacity of wanting to be people with agency and that sort of thing. Right. Which sounds similar to being shrewd. That's true. I think the female thing, the Taming of the Shrew, shrew, is a shrewd woman.

39:19And all Billy Shake Shake, he did make up a few words. This is a thing he did. Yeah. I'm going to say they're related, because I think, yeah, I think, I don't know. I have a vibe. Maybe he was trying to make a funny thing about taming, because taming is something you do to animals. So maybe he was making a funny point about, like, shrew being an animal and a woman. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I'm just about positive that shrew the animal and shrew the shrewish woman are related. But I also do think that shrewd is in there.

39:50I just went by, I looked at the beginning of the word. I thought, sh and an er, and I just thought, those two sounds, that's just too coincidental. So I'm saying related. Okay. The answer, they are related. Ah, boom. So, shrew probably comes from some Proto-Germanic root, scraw, going back to Proto-Indo-European, screw to cut or some kind of cutting tool and then apply to the animal. Shrewd, for its part, Edom Online says, and Oxford concurs, probably like a bunch of words

40:27that we used, that we just added ED to. Like, if you have something that looks like a crab, it's crabbed. If you have someone that follows someone like a dog, they are dogged. And if you have someone who is like a witch, they are? Add an ED. Witched. Ewitched. Witched. Witched? Bitched. Wicked. Oh. Oh, my God. We were so... How about that? We were so failing. So, this was part of a pattern that was being used. And shrew and shrewd, very much related.

40:58Damn it. The juicy thing was exactly the thing. I hate it when that happens. I just dangled it right in front of you like a piece of meat before a shrew. And I walked past it being like, that's a trap. Thanks to Tigertronia for that one. Now, this one's from Cameron via email. Hello, becauselanguage.com. How quaint. Cameron says, hi, I had another related or not inspired by my current anatomy of speech class. What do we know about the anatomy of speech? What kind of things do we use? First of all, question for the dummies in the podcast.

41:33Are we talking about anatomy in the human sense of the word? So, literally like the articulators and the resonators and that sort of thing? Okay. Yep. I think that they're going to ask about... Okay. So, there could be labia. Okay. Oh, no. Labia and lips. Interesting. Labia and lips and other labias. And, okay, what else could they be asking about? Glottis and glott other things that mean like wordy things. There's all kinds of tantalizing things going on right there.

42:03We've already talked about uvuli, I think, before. Oh, oh, oh. I've got it. I've got it. I think I've got it. Mm-hmm. Willem. Is it glottis and guttural? Oh, interesting. Those are all tasty, but not where Cameron was going. Okay. We have a bone called the hyoid bone. And it's a free-floating bone, not connected to anything. It doesn't. But it's thought that it helps us to speak. It's right near our chin. So, Cameron asks, are genio, like the geniohyoid muscle, meaning chin, genius, and genie related?

42:42Thank you, Cameron. I thought perhaps genial could go in there. Interesting. I was going with ingenious, so I'm going to chuck on ingenious. Now, to keep it simple, we're going to step through this pairwise, step by step, and see who manages to make it to the end. Okay. Okay. So, it's a knockout round. Okay. Question. The first one. Please spell it for me, please.

43:06Geniohyoid. G-E-N-I-O. H-Y-O. Okay. Okay. H-Y-O-I-D. Geniohyoid. Okay. So, the first pair, genius and ingenious. I say yes. I think they're related. Yeah. I'm going with yes on that one as well. Yeah. I'm going with yes. Also, fun fact about ingenious, I'm not that good at spelling always, and I type really fast, and very often when I want to spell indigenous, I spell ingenious instead.

43:36That's good. That's a nice one. Ingenious. That would be so, that's such a good save, right? Like, if you're going to talk about, like, indigenous researcher, Samantha Schmarmanar, ingenious researcher, Samantha Schmarmanar. Like, you're doing great. They're both good. They're both good. Ingenious languages of Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Ingenious languages. We all said yes, and we're all correct. The two of them are related. Starting off soft, I notice. We know about the root gen. It means give birth or beget.

44:07That's where we get words like our genes. Generate. Generation. What else? Genos. Genesis. Genealogy. And, yes, indigenous. And, of course, genius. So, ingenious uses the gen root, and it means of good natural capacity, full of intellect, and innate qualities. Okay. Second round. Okay. Genius and ingenious, they're both related. And a genie. No. Unrelated. Because that's from jinn.

44:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've played too much Dungeons and Dragons. Jinn, it's like pre-Islamic era Arabic peninsula stuff, I think. Hang on, is Arabic proto-indo-European? No. Nope. It's Afro-Osiatic. Okay, then I'm going a hard no, then. People borrow stuff, though, so that doesn't help, but I don't think this is one of them. Yeah, and sometimes things grow together. If they have a slight similarity, they grow together more. Okay. Genius and ingenious, plus genie, all three related.

45:10Get the fuck out of here. What the fuck? Yep. Okay, explain to me how jinn has tracked that. Well, first of all, jinn is Arabic, but when we found the word jinn, we just repurposed the word genie and kind of lumped them together, because we thought this thing's like that thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on. So jinn and genie aren't related, is what you're telling me. Jinn and genie are not related. Correct. What the fuck? What? How is that possible? Okay, let's take it back to the beginning.

45:41I mentioned that genius went back to the jinn root. Turns out the real path has an interesting bend to it. Latin, a genius, doesn't mean a smart person. It means a guardian deity or spirit, which you sort of get when you're born. It guides you through your life and then takes you to the other side when you're done. And so if you're a genius, it's because you have a genie that inspires you. Like literally a guardian spirit. Okay.

46:11Wait. So we've been using the word genie for a lot longer than we've had the loan word jinn, or we encountered Arabic and found out about jinns in their folklore. And so we already had the word genie. It sounded a bit like jinn. And the creature in the folklore was a bit like the genie we had. So we just used it. Yep. We started out with genius and that meant the little being. And then we started applying that to a person who has a really good genie.

46:43And when we found jinn, then we sort of used genie for that. That blows my mind. I literally just thought we encountered the word jinn and we were like, well, you can't put a D and a J next to each other. So we better call it something else. And then we just did the best we could with genie. Okay. Last round. Now let's add to this, the prefix genio, as in the genio hyoid bone. I thought, yeah, why not? It's something having to do with your head, which means like being smart. So I said, yes. I reckon this is where we fall off the wagon.

47:14There's got to be a point where we fall off the wagon. Well, Ben, we play this game a lot. Sometimes it's a double jumper. Inside baseball. Yep. Okay. So let's just think about the actual words instead. That doesn't always help us that much because the words are pretty short by this time. So we have like gen. Not a lot to go on. I mean, actually, yes, I think they are related because the bone we are hypothesizing, like to the best of our knowledge, the bone is used in the generation of sound and language. So it would make a lot of sense that we're using like a genio kind of prefix there if we

47:46accept that gen is genesis and generate and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Yes. But I feel like things have to do with birth should be like groin area. What? Sorry. Unless you're born with a good brain. Unless you're born with innate qualities. I need help. This isn't brain. I think we've just had a thing where you've assumed that everyone has a submarine. Could you help me on your mental path for just a second? Everyone has a submarine. He was telling us it's got to do with birth, right? Well, I heard it as creation, right?

48:20More than like just like outright human mammalian birth. Okay. All right. Ben and I are saying yes. I'm going to say no because I am contrarian. And at this point, I have no clue what's going on. The genie-gin thing fucking threw me. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm seed in my past here. The answer given by my sources, Edam Online plus the Oxford English Dictionary, not related, but I have questions.

48:52Oxford says this goes back to a different place. Ancient Greek, genion, meaning chin. In fact, you can see how genion and chin are kind of related. This goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, genu, meaning your chin or your jawbone. Now, this is different from what we've been seeing with genius. It's genae. You can hear the difference genu and genae. And my sources are saying, well, these are different Proto-Indo-European roots. Dang, they sound kind of similar to me, but I'm calling this one for now, not related.

49:25Yes.