142: If This Be Magic (with Daniel Hahn)

0:00Let's say it all together. Sudoku, sudoku, sudoku, sudoku, sudoku. Sedakugudaguhu, wah! Dosokada. Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language.

0:32I'm Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. Back from his trip to distant parts, it's Ben Ainsley. Hey, Ben. Hello. It was hot and dusty and I saw a dingo. Wow. Nice. Ben, I'm going to generate a Shakespearean insult for you from the Shakespeare Insult Generator. Link in the show notes. Ready? Nice. My loins are girded. Thou puking, half-faced giglet.

1:03That's you. Do we think puke was of the era? Oh, yes. Mewling and puking in their nurse's arms. Man for all seasons. That's fascinating. I thought I fully associated puke with like Valley Girl 80s, like surfer lingo. That whole thing was puke for me. Yeah, I'm going to puke. Well, it's gotten a new life, but it's certainly a Shakespearean. And the word giglet appears in Cymbeline. It is a whore-like person or someone who's fickle or giddy.

1:36Related to giggle. Hmm. Not sure. Perhaps the whore's giggle? Oh, I don't like even saying that word. Perhaps the sex worker's giggle? I'm not sure. Now that I've insulted you in a very untimely fashion, it's linguist and researcher Hedvig Hrgaard. Hi, Hedvig. Hi. I'm excited now. What am I going to get? Thou lumpish, rump-faced, whey-face. I feel like face twice is not very good. Yeah, I have notes.

2:07Sorry, it was whey-face. So I know what whey is. That's like the thing that's involved in dairy production. Yes, I imagine that it means you're very well-fed. And I should also point out that rump-faced doesn't appear in Shakespeare. It's rump-fed. That's in Macbeth. You've been fed on rump, which is the nicest meat. And so you're probably well-fed, pretty healthy-looking. But hang on, why would that be an insult? Well, because people think that being fat is bad. Because you're coddled. You've been pampered. Oh, you're spoiled. You've had a bone with a silver spoon, etc., etc.

2:42And an insult for me. Ben, would you read this one? Go ahead, hit me. Oh, wow. This is another thing that I thought was a lot newer than it was.

2:51Thou saucy, beef-witted bugbear. Oh, fire upon thee, sir. Fire. Saucy's interesting, isn't it? I mean, yeah. Is this still the same thing? I'm seeing so much here that I thought is contemporary. Saucy is just like, whoo, that seems very modern. And bugbear from D&D, I had no idea it went back this far. Not to get all evolutionary linguistics, but it's just a couple hundred years ago.

3:20Bugbear appears for the first time in 1552. There we go. So that's definitely Shakespearean. And I will say also saucy. This is where we get sassy. You could say, I don't want none of your sass. Or you could say, I don't want none of your sauce. And it's the same thing. Isn't that cool? And it is related to sauces that you would put on food. Yeah, because they're spicy and interesting. Now, when you break down a single word like that, you can begin to see the difficulty in translating Shakespeare. And that's very much what this episode is about.

3:53I recently had a chat with translator Daniel Hahn. He's written a book, If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. It's a fascinating look at how different translators have handled the time, the words, and the culture of Shakespeare. And that's coming up. That sounds very cool. That's really cool because Shakespeare has a lot of sort of like folky, vulgar content, right? Definitely. And you got to hit that with the same punch and wench just isn't like as on top of mind anymore, right?

4:28So that's very fascinating. Very much looking forward to that. That reminds me of the TV show Deadwood, which if, uh, it's, it's quite old now, but if people are unfamiliar, was set in the, in a, in a sort of a mining town in the West during the gold rush. But they wanted to make it really realistic. But when looking at that language that was actually being used, which at the time was very provocative and like edgy, things like consarnet and that sort of stuff were like genuinely really quite shocking. But, but, but when they were doing it contemporarily, everyone just sounded like Yosemite Sam. So they, so they had to use like C bombs and mother, mother effer and all that kind of stuff because they, they wanted it to hit, but nothing from then hit. And I feel like Shakespeare's probably got a similar thing going on, right?

5:15You're exactly right. I mean, this is the problem with translation. Do you keep it true to the time, but miss out on the intent? There's a bunch of competing needs and which ones do you go for and which ones don't you? I mean, just Ben, as you pointed out the word whore, which was thrown around quite a lot in Shakespeare's day. Well, we no longer find that acceptable. It's much more transgressive. Whereas in Shakespeare's writing might not have been. So I think we're seeing a lot of challenges already. It's just five minutes into the episode about how Shakespeare gets handled. It's not straightforward.

5:52The other thing that's happening in this episode is that instead of doing news and words of the week, like we usually do, I thought we would take the chance to knock off some of the mailbag questions that have been gathering up for a long time. And we haven't done one of those for quite a bit. My goodness. I can't believe I'm going to say this, Daniel. Mark this down in the annals of our personal history. What do you mean there's no word of the week? Yeah. Well, I was kind of sick of word of the week because the two things that I had were explosive diarrhea and low T. All right. And I'm just like, I'm going to go back to avoiding Americans again. I swear to Zeus.

6:30All right. All right. Fair enough. I'll allow it. But geez, Louise, you've successfully got me hooked on the heroin, Daniel. So don't leave me jonesing for too long. Okay. No H this time. It's all mailbag. Okay. Just like to say a huge thanks to our patrons for supporting the show, being on the discord, having interactions with us and sending us ideas. Or, you know, if you're just listening and lending support that way, that's great too. We're happy to have you supporting the show in any capacity. And let's give a welcome to our newest patrons. Ben, would you want to take this one?

7:02We have, at the listener level, Sammy with an I, at the friend level, Daniel Q, and our newest free patrons, which we love just as much as all the others, Jessica J, Julia, Paula, and Shannon B. Welcome one and all. That's right. You free patrons. We love you just as much as if you actually gave us some money. Daniel says that with a smirk. I genuinely mean that because even at this level, fuck the man, you guys.

7:33Exactly. Okay. So here's the first question. It's about the number game where you have to put a different number one through nine in each row, column, and box. It's the game you play on airplanes before takeoff because there's nothing else to do. Ben, how do you say the name of that game? Oh, no. I always forget. Okay. Full disclosure, I don't play this game and I never really got into it. And I always forget what the actual way to pronounce it is. So I always have to look at the word. And now in our show notes, you fuck. You've gazumped me because you've spelt it both goddamn ways.

8:10I didn't want to, you know. I believe it's Sudoku. Okay. Hedwig, how do you say this thing? I think I would vary it. Sudoku, I think sometimes I might do a bit more like, I'm playing Sudoku. I think I would do like a sort of mid thing. Well, it sounds like you're saying Sudoku the whole time. Yeah, but it's not like an ooh. It's like a little bit front. I'm being petty. I'm not doing an ah, I think. I think.

8:43Is it a schwa? Is it a schwa? Sudoku? Yeah, because it's more like a schwa. Yeah, exactly. It's like whatever. Look, that's very English. You know, we often schwa the unstressed syllables. Instead of saying Sudoku, we say Sudoku. Yeah. But Tigertronia on our Discord says, This random question, as I listened to the most recent episode, why is it so common for people to pronounce Sudoku as Sudoku? Now, my sister, I always thought she was a one-off because she said Sudoku.

9:15Oh, wow. That's a new one. Well, she also used to say Reese's Pieces for the chocolate peanut butter candy. I was wondering how common this is. Now, I'm aware that there is an episode of Bluey, the keepy-uppy episode. You know the one? I do. So, Bandit, the dad, pretends that Bingo is a newspaper. So, he's picked her up and he's reading her. That's so that she can't help Bluey play the balloon game where you don't let the balloon fall on the ground.

9:45He plops her down in front of Bluey, newspaper Bingo, and he says, Just don't do the Sudoku. Sudoku? Wow. How about that? Sudoku. And I hear people say this all the time. It's a triple U, Sudoku. Sudoku. Well, hang on. It's what we have here, a case of, like, vowel harmony. Like, people are like, I just want to do the same vowel all the way through. Okay, well, hang on. It's not the same vowel because the first vowel is a schwa. We got three vowels. The first one's a schwa, suh. It's an uh sound.

10:19Oh, okay. Uh, right? And we do that all the time when we don't stress a syllable. Then there's four different possibilities with the do and the ku, right? You can say doku. You can say duko. You can say doko or duku. So we've been hearing people say sudoku. So you know what I did? I went to YouGlish, and that's the website where you can type in a word, and it will take you to every video on YouTube that has that word in the annotations. It'll take you right to that spot.

10:50I listened to the first 50 examples. There were hundreds. It's a video word engram viewer, essentially. It really is. It's amazing if you want to hear a whole bunch of people pronouncing things. And so, sudoku, which is, I guess, the real name. 41 people said that. Sudu-ko, two people. Sudu-ko, one person. Sudu-ku, four. So it's not insignificant. But why do we think this word is prone to variation? Hedwig, you say vowel harmony. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, please?

11:24Vowel harmony is where you have more than two vowels in a word, and they start influencing each other sort of through sometimes the consonants. So even though there's a consonant in between them, they're affecting each other and usually becoming more alike. That's why it's harmony. So you can get this in change over time where, like, you have a word, you add a suffix, the suffix has a vowel in it, and they start affecting each other. You can get this in a more, like, systematic way, like how you get in some languages in the Afro-Asiatic language family.

11:58But it's just one of the ways that humans try to make it easier to pronounce things. And sort of staying in the same position is sort of probably less effort. And if the meaning gets across anyway, if it's sufficiently disambiguated, it's kind of fine. And what we're talking about here also are two vowels that actually are quite close in the vowel space. So you could glide into them. It's not unbelievable. That's right. And also, now we're in an area of linguistics called phonotactics. When we borrow a word from a different language, we will often change it if it contains sounds or combinations of sounds that we don't use. The thing that confused me, though, is that there's nothing in the word sudoku that violates English phonotactics. So there must be something a little funky about it that makes us English it in a weird way, contrary to its spelling.

12:52What is the Japanese pronunciation, I guess? Sudoku. And it's got an u at the beginning. So I do believe that the first syllable is the one that gets the stress. Japanese listeners straighten me out if I'm wrong. I'm wondering if, is there any relation here or is there any potential for regionalization of how different kinds of English have gone with this word in the sense that I think about, I often, I don't know why I often think about this, but I often sit and think about like, I know Australians and Americans say different brand names in different ways.

13:25Like, like, why is it Nissan or Nissan, Porsche or Porsche, even, even names for like, um, Oregano or Oregano, you know, like we, we have elected to put stresses in different places. Celica versus Celica. Yeah. Sometimes there's like patterns in those variations, but sometimes there's also maybe just like an innovation that spread in Australia and just took over all of Australia and didn't get to the U.S. It's just network effects, like nothing to do really about like Australian English itself.

13:59But you could imagine that different pronunciations of Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, now I'm getting all Sudoku, yeah. Yeah. Semantic satiation has taken place. But it's three syllables. And if you get a S, D and K in there and you have a mid or a back vowel, I think everyone's going to understand you. Probably. Well, I decided to take a look at other words in English because I thought that maybe there was a pattern. So see if you can spot it. These are three syllable words that are consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, not E, but some other vowel.

14:35Here we go. Potato. Now, that's not a problem. Nobody says patutu. You know, there's, that's, nobody changes that. Daniel, famously there is a song about this. Yeah. And it's wrong because nobody says potato. Nobody says potato. You can have tomato, tomato, but nobody says potato. I'm calling the whole thing off. Okay. Zing. I know that in Swedish you can say potat, which is similar to potato. Interesting. Here's some more. Cabana.

15:06Or cabana. Bikini. Canola. Casino. Libido. They're all borrowings. They are. You'll notice that the first syllable is always a schwa. Casino. And then the other two, I mean, they don't merge. Nobody says casoni. But that's because those vowels are pretty different from each other. You know, libido. Yeah. Or they're just the same, like pajama or piñata. Or bikini. But for sudoku, the second and third vowels are really similar. So I think there's a strong temptation to merge them, bring them closer.

15:39So I think what's going on here is, like you say, Hedwig, vowel harmony to make those close sounds, ooh and oh, just a bit more similar, make it easy to say, doesn't cost anything, doesn't hurt comprehension. And people are just picking differently which one is taking over the other. That's right. For reasons I don't know.

15:58Thanks, Tigertronia, for that question. Next one. This is from Hannah via email. I am curious to hear what Hedwig says about ingressive speech, as it pops up mainly in Scandinavian countries, though also in Ireland. Now, I'm going to play a video for you here. Okay. Where does it go? A bird it is. Only a shell. You have a lot of apartments. Oh, yes? Yeah. Yeah. You have lots? Yeah. Very strong northern lights. Uh-huh.

16:29Most in Troms, but in Norway. No, in Hattal also. Did you hear those examples of ingressive, just a sharp intake of breath? What was going on there? Yeah. So, ingressive is when you, so normally when you speak, you use air from your lungs to push air out of your speech apparatus and you shape the different jiggly bits differently to make different sounds. And you have a little closure mechanism, a glottis, that like can push things, stop things

16:59and vibrate. And that's how you get voicing and singing and all these things. And when you sing, you also do extra weird stuff. But normally, yeah, it's air from the lungs getting out into the surrounding world. Ingressives are when you are using the opposite effect. You're breathing in and you're using the apparatus backwards, which is kind of quite different. And I don't know why people do it. I also don't think it's as unique as people think it is. I think it actually happens probably in lots of places. It's, you probably even know people that might say like, yeah, or just, you know, you're

17:34in a hurry. Maybe, maybe you're very busy or something. You might do it. I don't know why people do it. It's, I guess it saves. It's possible. And it's just one of the things that we can do. So we do it sometimes. Yeah. You can't do it for very long. You'll notice quickly. Like Ben, try to say like, think of a long thing or go to a random webpage and find something that you can read out loud. I already know how this works because I've, I, I tried to learn how to whistle inwards and I noticed that there is like considerably less ability going in than coming out.

18:09But, um, okay, here. Why would that be? How strange. Oh, I found a Swedish newspaper I can read. Oh, there you go. Let's see how far I get. And then let's see how far you get. Oh, okay. Hold on. I'll, you go and I'll pull up something. That's about as far as I can get. That's, that was not very far. Okay. No. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. It's freaky. This is, this is from a silly web comic. Um, okay. I got to go all the way out first. That's important. Yeah. This is a carrot cake.

18:42We're going to get it in the cubes and we're going to put it in balls and cover with milk. Oh, you sound like Zardoz, the Macintosh voice. Similar length, I'd say. Yeah. I think we must be breathing in a lot faster than we can breathe out. I can keep the air, you know, focused and let a little trickle out when I egress the air, but not when I ingress. Yeah. It does help. I think that we spent our entire lives practicing how to do this bit. And we're just now trying the other way. And also the main problem is has to do with pressure.

19:15When we are pushing air out of our lungs, we have a pressure in our lungs and we use our glottis to build up pressure and we use our mouth to build up pressure. Whereas when we're breathing it in, we're just relying on the airflow, creating enough friction to get things happening. We can't. But it's like suction, right? We're using a suction pump when we're breathing in essentially. But we have much fewer like mechanisms in that direction to help us make it. I mean, maybe some people can, you can probably train it up. It's probably like, you know, Mongolian throat. Oh, Mongolian, you know, the thing when you, the throat singing, they do it, right?

19:50Do they? Well, I don't know about that. I think that's more like harmonics where they're doing something funky with aggressive air. They're not, it's not ingressing. I do remember how, when I was teaching in Vietnam, I was doing a unit for a bunch of English teachers, Vietnamese English teachers, and they did something funny with the letter B when they were speaking English. And by the way, these were not novice English speakers. These were good teachers. But even good teachers who are learners have funny little bits that they still do, funny

20:22little habits. Quirks. And their funny little habit was the B. They would say, instead of having a boat, they would have a boat. I was like, what is going on with that? It's ingressive B. Vietnamese has it. Yeah. And they kept it for their English. Hannah says, all the best from one of your biggest fans. Hannah, Watertown, MA, USA. Thanks, Hannah. That's great. And just to wrap this bracket up, this one's from Finn via email. Hi, love your show.

20:52Before reading the rest of this email, what do you think? Like, I am nonplussed means, I am nonplussed. Oh, I've never thought about this before. What does it mean to you, Ben? So, in the language of the youth, I would describe nonplussed as nonch. To be nonplussed about something. Do we not know nonch? Enchalant. Yeah. Oh, yes. Come on, Daniel. Sorry, I failed to recognize clipping when it presented itself to me.

21:23Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nonch. Yeah, so I've always understood nonplussed to be a version of that. To be like, I'm indifferent. I don't care either way. Like, it's fine. Yeah, me too. Like, non-shock, non-surprised. Yeah. The answer that you'll get from many dictionaries is, someone did a thing and I was confused about it. I was puzzled. I was perplexed. Now, the reason we get the word is because it comes from French nonplussed. No more.

21:53Someone's done something and you've come to a standstill. An impasse. From the 1500s. Okay. I, so old. Okay. So old. Finn continues. It doesn't mean not impressed. Even though it looks and sounds and seems like it should, I like to ask people what they think it means and I almost never get the right answer. So most people collectively agree on an incorrect definition. I think it's a very interesting example of language changing and of the difference between the etymology slash dictionary definition versus common use.

22:27Just wanted to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you, Finn. Let's think of some cases where we have what's called bridging contexts, where both interpretations sort of lend themselves as possible. So like the original meaning supposedly is like you're confused and now we think that it could mean you're indifferent. So in both of those cases, you're not active. You know what I mean? You're not like shouting or like doing something. So if you didn't get more context and someone says something that was supposed to get a reaction

23:02and someone said, oh, and they were nonplussed and they meant they were confused, but you looked at them and saw that they had a slightly blankish face, you might think they're indifferent. Yeah. Okay. It's just a little creep. The one that I always think of in that way is ironic. The word ironic in the 1800s, if you said that you were speaking ironically, what you really meant was you were speaking sarcastically. That's what we would mean. I said it ironically. It means I was just being sarcastic.

23:34But now ironic seems to have meant something a little different, like appropriately, exactly the wrong way. Or you tried to do a thing and you paradoxically achieved the opposite of what you tried to do and that was ironic or something. We need to talk about Alanis Morissette here. Yeah. Don't you think? So, yeah, that's a good example of a sort of a unifying sense for those two senses of the words. I wonder if, because my example that I have of this same phenomenon also is to do with

24:04a word that means, that has come to be interpreted to mean indifferent. So my example here is ambivalence. So what do you think ambivalent means? Like, if you say you're ambivalent, Hedwig, what do you mean? Well, that I'm not sure which option to pick. Like, do you want to have pasta or hamburgers? And I say, I'm ambivalent. I don't know which one I should choose. Okay. Daniel? You probably know the right answer here. No, I don't. But the way I feel about ambivalent is like, well, I feel one way about it, but I also

24:35kind of feel the other way about it. Not that I'm trying to choose between two things, but that I'm feeling two different ways about one thing. So Daniel's, um, Daniel's interpretation is the dictionarily correct thing. It literally just means to hold two competing emotions within you simultaneously. But in my case, I am holding two opinions. So like I have both, I want pizza and I don't want pizza because I want hamburger. So you both kind of landed in the right zone. Lots and lots and lots of people just interpret ambivalence to be indifference though.

25:07So people will use it to, to mean I don't care. Um, this is interesting because I was going over an academic article I'm writing and I was thinking about using the term ambiguous and I realized that's not actually what I want because ambiguous to me would mean that a word had two meanings and it's unclear for the receiver which meaning it is intended. Sounds good to me. Whereas what I wanted was the utterance doesn't contain enough information, which is not the

25:40same as actually ambiguity. Ambiguity would mean there is information, but I don't know which one it is. Whereas what I wanted is almost insufficient. It's an insufficient word. Yes, exactly. Like the, the statement was not specific enough, which is different. Now I'm thinking about disinterested, which dictionarily means you don't have a stake in the matter. But now people use disinterested to mean uninterested. You don't really care either way, which I guess is kind of the same. You can really see how these words creep along.

26:11Sure. Yeah. Let's just finish up. I found, uh, Merriam-Webster is on the case with nonplussed. There's a link in the show notes. They say, um, that nonplussed had its confused or at an impasse definition. And then it says, for the next 300 and some years, nonpluss remained on the straight and narrow, avoiding the temptations of demon rum and semantic drift. And as a result of this, managed to keep its meaning remarkably unchanged. And then, in the early 20th century, some people began to use nonpluss to mean unruffled,

26:45unconcerned. And ever since then, the word just hasn't been the same. Hmm. Need to track down these people. Yeah. Be sure to tell them off so that they'll stop it. You can head this thing off. It's not too late. Let's get the time mishing. Thanks, Finn, for your question. Now, it's time for Related or Not. Let's hear that theme from Hugh. This is the original Hugh theme with Ben's voice. Related or not.

27:12Related or not.

27:15Related or not.

27:19Related or not. The closest I will ever come to rock god status. I'm usually kind of anti-guitars, but that was good. What, just in life generally? I often think that electric guitars are inserted in places where they're not wanted. Okay. So, you've got a thing, like, in the same way that, like, saxophones were just wild in the, like, 80s and 90s in a whole bunch of songs that they didn't need to be in. Oh, yeah.

27:49Your thing is, like, the guitar is that now, is today's saxophone. I already, when I was quite young, I felt this way, because my dad liked a lot of rock music that had a lot of guitars in it, and I was, like, not having any of this. But I enjoyed that. Hugh, for the record, I enjoyed that. You get to pass. That was good and appropriate. All right. Gee, Ben, you might have a finite Sabbath number now. Oh, yeah. Let's do it. Okay. This first one is from Janika via Speakpipe. Hello, lovely, because-language-istas.

28:22I have a suggestion for related or not. There are several words. The first is pooch, as in the dog. The second is pouch, as in the thing with the hole. The third is pocket.

28:46Self-explanatory. Mm-hmm. The fourth is poach, as in the eggs.

28:55And the last is poach, as in steal the rabbits. Yeah. Thanks, Janika. This is a big one. Yeah, there's a lot here. I think we're going to have to take this pair-wise and see where it breaks. So, let's start out with pouch and pocket. Related or not? Related. Yeah, I'm feeling related.

29:22I think so, too. I think these are doublets. I think they're probably French. I feel like the et is a diminutive. Oh, yeah, like a pouch et. Can I ask a question? Sure. I frequently buy, like, ready meals in pouches. Hmm. And when I write it down in my shopping list, and also when I wrote it down here, I always second-guess myself on the first vowel if it's supposed to be spelled with an O or with an A. And I think it's supposed to spell with an O.

29:53Yeah. But, Ben, can you please say this word? Pouch. That is an A. That's just an A. You can't go around here. You know what I've just realized, actually? We should probably chuck another one in there. I'm sorry to add to the list, Daniel. Oh, no. Yeah. Paunch. Oh. Paunch? Gosh. Paunch is like a- A little belly. A belly that men typically get as they get older. Oh. Anyway, anyway, anyway. Sorry.

30:23I'm just- No, I'm ignoring that. Yeah, yeah. We all think that these are related, and they are. Okay. Pouch comes from Old French poche, which means a purse, or a poke. Hmm. Poke. Like a pig in a poke. In Modern French, poche also means pocket. Okay. Okay. C'est de pâtes d'aloir avec de poche. Pocket goes back to Anglo-Norman pocket, and then to Old North French poc, which is bag. So, they both come from a French word meaning bag, which sounded like poc or poche or something

30:56like that. Mm-hmm. Okay. Next one. Let's go with poach the eggs and poach to steal. Hey, if you want to make poached eggs, you have to steal them first. For the record, poaching is when you hunt illegally, right? Correct. Yes. You don't go into like a farm and steal a rabbit and keep it alive. That's not poaching. Oh, you could- No, I think you could probably call that poaching as well. No, but you would eat the rabbit. You wouldn't take it home for a pet, and that's not poaching. Oh, so when Peter liberates rabbits, they're not poaching, yeah.

31:28Yeah, that I would say we would not use the word poaching for. Got it. You're hunting them, yeah. So, my idea is when you poach an egg, you have to put them into like a little pocket. Oh, that's true. Hmm. Okay. And you can pocket things is another word for stealing.

31:47That's true. Oh, Hedwig on fire. Hmm. Okay. Interesting. So, I'm going to say poached, poached, related, and they're all related. I don't know about the dog one, though. I'm leaving that up to later discussion. We'll come to that in round three. I was actually going to say poach and poach. I'm struggling to come up with the through line here. Unless you, like, unless all of the animals that were stolen got, like, boiled as a form of cooking. I'm struggling to see the connection between the things.

32:20So, I think it's, I'm going to go with unrelated. Related, because I'm just, I'm not backing my own intelligence on this one. I said related because the sound of the word, I know it's a short word, but I just feel like going back that far with a word so short, oh, it's probably part of this constellation in a way that I don't understand. So, I'm going related. Answer. Sorry, Ben. These are related. Okay. Now, the poach to steal, the related sense here is you're poking yourself into someone's

32:51property, probably. Okay. Oh, poking us and poking your head up. Sort of, yes. And to poach eggs, as you say, Hedwig, it's really to just put them in a pocket, because maybe, like, you're either putting it in an enclosure or the white of the egg becomes a pocket for the yolk or something like that. Now, I know this is going to come across as me being really defensive about losing, but to poke your head up in someone's pocket, what?

33:24How is that related? The problem is what he said earlier. He said that pouch and pocket both come from French poche, which meant both bag and poking. That's our problem. Right. Okay. And how that word means both of those two things, we can start to write about. Wait, but then, hang on. Does that then mean, like, are we, if I may be so bold, I know we always get, like, rules lawyer on this stuff, but what's it called when we have the same word that means two entirely

33:57different things? Well, do we think that they're related or not? Because we use different... Well, but that's what I'm saying. Like, do we think the original word for poking and bag were related just because it was the same word? Because we have words in English that are the same word, but mean entirely different things. So, if we think they're unrelated, we call them homonyms or homophones because they're spelled and or pronounced the same way. So, bank of a river and bank where you put your money, I believe, are not related. They just happen to be the same.

34:27Or are they? Am I wrong? No, they secretly are. They both, the bank is a raised area where you do your money stuff and the river bank is a raised area and they both are related to bench. But is every sense of bank related? Every single one? Yes. Because there's a fuckload of them. The noun. There's 10 in WordNet. That's a tilted bit of the road and that is a raised area. There's a bunch of switches, a bank of switches, and that is a raised sort of thing.

34:58They all share that. Oh, okay. All right. Okay. But, so let me just take this as round three. Okay. Here's where things stand. We've seen that pouch and pocket go back to a word that's kind of like poke, a kind of bag, and poach, the eggs and the stealing, go somehow back to poke to jab or to thrust or insert. Are they the same poke, the bag form and the jabbing or prodding form? Do you think they're the same?

35:28This is the problem because what I was thinking, when you pocket something, like, when you're reaching for something into a bag, you're sticking your hand in. Ah. Put your hand in. And if it's one of those, what if it's one of those, like, its own antonym kind of a thing, you know? Like, both being the thing that encloses and the act of sticking something into something enclosed. Into the closure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Well, she just tickled herself pink.

36:00She is. Check her out. Okay. The answer for this one could be related, but maybe not. This one is very murky. To poke someone, to jab someone, goes back to a Proto-Germanic root, pook. And from there, we just don't know. A poke like a bag, the OED says, goes back to a different word, meaning poke a dagger. Because you poke somebody with a dagger, I suppose. But if you go to Edom Online, the Online Edomology Dictionary, they say all of them are probably

36:32from Proto-Germanic pook. So, sources differ. We just don't know. Let's move on, though. And now this fucking dog. To pooch. Yeah. Related to any? Do you think, Hedwig, it sounds like you're feeling like pooch is out in space all by itself. Yeah. That's what I thought. I don't like. Yeah. Ben? Well, I mean, at this point, I just need to steer into the skid and I need to be the one, the discordant voice in this little thing. And God damn it, I'll be wrong again.

37:02But I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with belated. I cannot even begin to articulate why or how. Let me, let me think. Can I come up with any sort of a thing? Because, Hedwig, I've got to be, I've got to be honest, you've been like swinging for the fucking bleachers with identifying all of the different ways that this like, you're like the person with the red string on the cork board on this sheet. Like, fuck. You can put a dog into a bag. Yep. You can put it into a pocket. I don't know if you should.

37:29Well, if it's a very, you know, nice. People used to transport small animals around in bags, right? And maybe, maybe I know we used to treat dogs really badly back in the times that we're talking about. And maybe you would, you would kick or poke like the curs on the street all the time or something like that. So like a pooch was a, was a thing you would just like hit with a stick to get away from your tannery or something. I don't know. Ben, I'm so sorry. You're wrong again. Pooch is not related to any. Well, the answer is no one knows, but probably not. My guess connected to nothing is it's related to puppy, which is related to a doll.

38:05But I, but I really do not know. So thanks, Johnica. That was a tricky one, but what an interesting walk around some words with unexpected connections. This one is one from Eleanor on Patreon who asks, caddy, like a container or a case. You could have a tea caddy. You could have a shower caddy. And says Eleanor, I also just learned that a golf push caddy is a thing. Oh yeah. Which also is the name for the person, right? Yeah.

38:35And then the caddy, the person who carries a golfer's clubs. Yeah. Well, oh, okay. This seems like it's going to be a very short one. That shouldn't be related. That's just a case of like something that's next to something. And we. It's the carrying is the related sense. The only other sense of caddy that I know is the American slang for Cadillacs. Cadillacs and I'm maybe Cadillac sponsored a golf tournament once and they all like, and

39:07they call them caddy. That's the only possible funky little thing I could come up with. They do drive around in little cars. No, I'm thinking. No, I'm thinking. Cadillac's not related. Sure. Yeah. I don't think that I'm, I'm pulling a very long ball on that one. I think this is fully related. It's a thing that carries a thing. I think it's totally related. I can't see how it's not. Yeah. I think they're just next to each other. They don't even need to both be carrying things. They're just. But the caddy person is carrying the caddy bag and therefore.

39:39We call it the caddy. It just jumps. Simple. Simple. Because, and you know, Daniel, this is your fault for bringing this up. There is nothing in this world. I hate more than golf. So, uh, it, it behooves me to acknowledge that, uh, golf second only possibly to sailing and terms of a sport is the most ridiculous elite snooty and up yourself possible enterprise a person can play. So of course, of course, the people who are hiring human beings to carry their shit.

40:12Cause they're lazy fat fucks who don't know what to do about themselves would call it the name of the thing, the little human is dragging around. We all do that. Like they're not even there. That's not even derogatory. Like things being next to each other dump all the time. I was just imagining like, what if you had like, like a parrot, like a scary movie where you could see all the word meanings jumping around?

40:35Like all those parasites? That's horrifying. Yeah. I don't want that at all. I want that. Okay. So it sounds like we all think that's related and like really obviously related. Yeah. Not related. But get the fuck out of here. Fuck off. Who's this person? Unexpectedly not related. All right. Let's hear it. The shower caddy, the thing that carries things, comes from Malay. Katty, a unit of weight equal to a measure of tea. The meaning jumped to the container. It was sometimes spelled katty, C-A-T-T-Y.

41:05The caddy who carries the clubs is a form of the French word cadet, a student military officer. I mean, the one thing I will say is I'm satisfied that the true answer for how the golf caddy got its name only further makes those pompous assholes look like total dweebs. Oh, yes. Get the cadets down here to carry the clubs.

41:33Oh, surely if a world leader likes golf a lot, they're an okay person. Come on. So much hate in my heart. Well done, Eleanor, of like, yeah, Malay and French are different. Because sometimes we have like, this word comes from like French or Italian and it's like... This one's coming, by the way, from Dr. Hedwig Huirgaard. French and Malay, different.

42:00I mean, maybe all English is ultimately related. They're all spoken by humans. Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. But... Not related and it's not even close. By the way, is a cad related to a caddy? Oh, like a fast and loose person. Yes, a cad and a bounder. Yeah, I guess so. Like a cadet, right? Like a young, untrustworthy male. Cat. Cad. You, sir, are a cad. Wow. Ben says yes. I reckon it comes from cadet.

42:31Yeah, I reckon it comes from cadet. It comes from cadet. Cadet. It's just a shortening. Any time the explanation is young men being dickheads could lead to this word. It's like, well, that's probably the answer. Oh, that's what it is. Thanks, Eleanor. And finally, one from Benjamin with background noise via SpeakPipe. Hi, Tim. I'm Benjamin. I'm a speaker of British English based in Paris. And I'm a big fan of the show. And we're related or not for you.

43:02In US English, the musical note with four little tails is called a 64th note. But in British English, there's a hemi, demo, semi-quaver. He uses a half of a half of a half of a quaver. Hemi, demo, semi-quaver. Hemi, demo, and semi. They all rhyme. They all mean the same thing. So are they related? Thank you.

43:28Okay. What do you think? Hemi, demo, and semi. Can we just, because I couldn't quite make it out. Could we also recover what the American version of this is? A 64th note. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very short. Very short. Yeah, I'm guessing this is a real, like, metal jazz sort of application. There are classical works where you got to just run that thing. I learned a new word with Demi the other day. Demigirl.

43:58Demigirl? I do not notice. It's like... Half a girl. Sort of, my understanding is, like, a gender identity where you're like, yeah, I'm mostly a girl. Cool. So, like, the fem genderization version of monogamish and heteroflexible. Ah. I like it. No, I think it's just, like, most of the times I feel like a girl. Sometimes I feel, like, a bit non-binary or something. Yeah, that's what I mean. So, like, monogamish is like, I'm mostly monogamous, but every now and then there is something else. Yeah.

44:28Yeah. Anyway, I just learned that word, demigirl. I thought it was pretty good. There you go. Okay. Hemi, demi, semi. All Greek, I'm going to say. And we also have hemispheia, demi as in, like, half, and we have semi as in semifinals, which are very apropos right now, which are the thing before the final. So, and I think that's the same as, like, it would be the same as, like, saying a half final, a semifinal, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why they don't say demi, um, final, because I thought demi also meant-

45:02It could be a demigod. That's where I mostly hear it.

45:07Demigod. Hercules is a demigod. He's a half god. Correct. Mm. Correct. Jesus Christ was a demigod. S and D. Surprisingly close in the phonetic system. Just one is fricative and one is a stop. They're not that far apart. S and D. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So. Hmm. Hemi, though. Hemisphere. This is a good one. Are they all related? For my money, right, would we say that micro and macro would be related? Oh, that's interesting.

45:38Yeah. Don't know, why are you doing this? My question here is, if you've got words that are structurally similar, but have just one letter that's different, and they semantically, like if we were playing semantle, you would be getting like twos and threes, or no, what's the high score in semantle? I think we're really talking about genetic relation here. You know what? I've come around to the way that you guys have been thinking. So what I'll try to do in future puzzles is not say, are they related or not?

46:11But in what way are they related? Is it genetic? Is it transmitted across? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did it grow together later? I'll try to be more specific about that as we go. But now let's stick to Hemi, Demi, and Semi. So one possibility is that they are all related, and that the Hemi depends on what's coming after or before. So like when this Hemi thing is paired with such and such a word, you get semi, when it's paired with such and such a word, but it's like a phonological thing and not a meaning thing. If it's that, I would argue they're all related.

46:43Okay. I can't think of a Demi-se thing. Like there's Hemi-sphere and there's Semi-circle. So already we're in trouble. It could also just have been like that in Greek and then it's all the patterns get lost. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess that they are all related and the differentiation was deliberate because of instances exactly like this musical note where people felt like they needed to further halve or delineate something that had already been halved or delineated.

47:17So they didn't want to go Hemi-Hemi something. So they were like Semi-Hemi and then Semi-Hemi-Demi. Um, so I reckon they're all related and people like one of them is probably the oldest one and then some other ones came along later specifically to be able to do exactly what this note does. I think Hemi and Semi are related. We have seen how H in Greek turned to S in English or Latin, like hepta and septa meaning seven or herpetology is the thing when you study.

47:52Serpents. Serpents. Mm-hmm. So I think H and S is very plausible. I just think that Demi is its own thing. I think it's probably related to Dua, two, because when you split something in two, that's half. So I think D is on its own. Demi is its own thing. Okay. I got a nine. Hedwig, what did you think? All related? All related. So the answer is, I was right on the division, but not the meaning. Oh. So both Semi and Hemi are from Proto-Indo-European root Semi, which means half, semi.

48:25Demi doesn't come from two, but from Latin, dimidius, which means a half. The D is dis, meaning a part. The medius just means in the middle. It's cut apart in the middle. Okay, okay, okay, okay. There we go. I'll allow it. But then over time, it's some sort of analogous thing has happened so that they're more alike. Yes, I think you're right. I think it would be fair to say that Demi is growing closer to Hemi and Semi based on that model. So is that related?

48:55Well, in one sense, yes. And in another sense, no. Clearly Hemi and Semi are more related in that way. Thank you, Benjamin. And thanks to Hugh for that theme song. If you want to send us your related or nots, we are being inundated. With lots of great related or not clues here. And if you want to send us one of those, please do. And also, we'll take a jingle. If you got one, just send that to hello at becauselanguage.com or get in touch with us on the socials. And keep using SpeakPipe because it's so cool to hear your voices. We're here with Daniel Hahn, translator and author of If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art

49:41of Shakespeare in Translation. Daniel, thanks so much for coming and being on the show. Thanks for having me on. Great to be here. So you're a translator. What does a translator do?

49:54I'm glad you asked that because it's a more complicated question than I think it suggests. The short answer is I translate things between languages. But the slightly longer answer is I try to translate every aspect of the things that I'm translating between languages. So I think it's easy to assume maybe that translation is about meaning, or at least is only about meaning. You know, you figure out what something means in language X, and then you figure out how to say it in language Y.

50:25And that's part of it. But because writing isn't only about meaning, translating is also not just about meaning. So I'm thinking about the translation of the time writing in a quite multidimensional way. So I'm trying to figure out how to keep everything, change everything, because, you know, all the words are going. The way I think of it is, you know, when I'm translating a novel, I'm trying to produce a book that is exactly the same, except for all the words. But like other than the words, all of which I'm changing, every other part of the thing I

50:59would like to preserve somehow. That's amazing. Keep everything the same, except every single word. Well, maybe not every single word. Pretty much, though. That's the idea, right? So I'm starting with, you know, 60,000 words in Portuguese, and I'm making something which is 58,000 or 62,000 words in English. All of the words will be different, except, you know, the character names, usually, but not always. But it has to be the same, not just in, like, the general plot, but in the feel and in the

51:33register and in the rhythm and the pace of it and the way the characters sound different from each other. All those things that make up writing make up translation, which is a kind of writing. But of course, you can't keep everything the same, because language being what it is, everything has shades of meaning and differences in culture. So I guess you've got to keep everything the same as long as that is relevant. You've got to keep relevant things the same. You've got to keep relevant things the same, and it means that you're often making a determination.

52:04You're often going, like, I could preserve this double meaning, but if I keep the double meaning, I end up losing something else. So it's often about making choices and deciding what to prioritize. But it's also about taking advantage of the things that your language will allow, the language you're translating into will allow. So it's not just thinking, well, unfortunately, I have to lose a little bit here because English won't do all 17 things that this word in French does. But it's also going, well, actually, what does my language allow me to do?

52:37Where can I take opportunities, just like the original language did as well? So yes, it's about making choices and, in one sense, compromises. But it's also about taking opportunities, which I think is part of the fun. Do you mind if I ask, which languages do you have command over when you're translating? So I translate mostly from Portuguese and Spanish. I do a bit from French also. I have little snippets of other things, but those are the ones I don't speak particularly

53:08well, but I read very comfortably and with sort of nuance, you know. English is the only language I can write well, I think, I hope. And so I translate in one direction. I translate from languages that I can read into a language I can write. I want to focus on Spanish because it's the one language that I also know very well out of those, although I have some command over French. What does Spanish let you do that English doesn't? What's it good for? Spanish has, for example, the fact that Spanish is a gendered language.

53:41And so it means that every noun is going to have a gender and every adjective is going to have a gender if it agrees with a noun. That conveys information that in English we don't always convey. Spanish can use verbs without pronouns, which we cannot do in English. So if you're trying to create ambiguity, I translated a novel a few years ago, a Chilean novel, which begins with a line of dialogue that is, in Spanish it's no ha comido, which

54:14either means she hasn't eaten or he hasn't eaten. And in Spanish the ambiguity is deliberate. In English it's very hard to create a phrase that makes it, that keeps that thing, that keeps that thing open. Spanish has at least two different ways of saying you, the pronoun you, which we don't in modern English. Shakespeare did, two hundred, four hundred years ago. It's true. You know, he could say, thou and you, and we just say you, you, you, you, whether it's one person or many, formal or informal.

54:45And to Spanish you can make those kind of determinations. And one of the things that was fun about working on this, this book I've just done about Shakespeare translations was thinking about what are the particularities of individual languages, so Spanish as you ask, but also then becoming aware of, alongside that, what are the things that make English different, which I think we kind of don't notice in the same way that Spanish speakers probably don't think about, oh my God, how great that we have two different verbs for to be in Spanish, which we don't in English. Spanish differentiates between ser and estar, one being kind of essential and one being

55:21transient or circumstantial, you know. Yes. But you kind of don't notice that, I think, in whichever language you happen to swim in normally yourself. I love a couple of verbs in Spanish that we just don't seem to have. You have to circumlocute your way around them in English, but one of them is estrenar, to wear something for the first time, and the other one, one of our patrons on Discord pointed out that there's a verb in Spanish, calzar, to wear shoes. I just love that there's a verb for to wear shoes specifically.

55:54And it's a verb to wear shoes, which still requires you to say shoes. It's just the verb. It's just to wear, because you calzar zapatos. You still have to calzar something. So it means to wear in the sense of shoes. It doesn't mean the whole of two-ass shoes, but they differentiate between the wearing of different things, just as they differentiate between different kinds of being and so on. By the way, how did you solve that problem of no ha comido? I'm just trying to guess what I would do, and I would say something like, hasn't eaten.

56:27I mean, you can go with they haven't eaten, but... You can, which, and increasingly today, I think people would notice that. You could do what you suggest. You could start with, you could basically drop the pronoun and make it more informal. I think, if I remember rightly, I, because we kind of come into the middle of a bit of dialogue anyway, I think I just dropped the first line entirely and began with the second line, which was something like, what do you mean? Hasn't eaten anything? And, and actually, which, which brings you in, you know, one and a half seconds later in

57:01the scene, but it preserves the thing which is important. There are at least two characters about whom that sentence would be, could be relevant. One of the characters in the novel does kind of care work with elderly people, so she visits them in their homes and looks after them. And there are two different people about whom she could be saying, you know, they haven't eaten, she hasn't eaten, he hasn't eaten.

57:27But in that case, I'm not thinking like, what do the words mean and just translate them? I'm thinking, what is the moment, right? What is happening in this conversation? And how do I create a thing that has that effect, that gives the effect of coming into the middle of a conversation with a bit of, with a line of dialogue that you as a reader are supposed to go, oh, wait a second, I'm not sure where we are at this moment. That uncertainty is deliberate, and therefore, you try to maintain that. And that means that you have to not only understand, I think this is going to be relevant for our

58:00discussion of Shakespeare, you have to not only understand English and Spanish, but you've got to understand the source material. So, you've got to understand the novel that you're translating. I mean, really deeply. Yeah, absolutely. You have to have a sense of what are the sorts of things that matter to the writer. In the case of that particular novel, it's a book called Never Did the Fire by a Chilean writer called Díamela Eltit, and she plays with ambiguity all the time. She's very interested in this. And ambiguity, which is, I think, the hardest thing to translate, is a thing that I had to

58:33be aware of. It wasn't just that she's being careless. It's not that she didn't notice and isn't, and is just being kind of carelessly imprecise. It's a feature of this novel. It's a feature of what she's interested about these characters' lives. And therefore, it is not a trivial thing. It's not just a cosmetic thing. It's a thing that is essential to a reader's experience of the novel. It's about what the reader gets from it.

59:00Now, it's one thing to deeply understand the work of a writer who has written in our century. But understanding Shakespeare at this distance is a very different task, and I think a much more difficult task, because we're dealing with a lot of different dimensions here. Things that Shakespeare would have understood may not be available to us now. And English has changed, and culture has changed. So, this is a much trickier task, it seems.

59:30It is in lots of ways. One of the advantages you have if you translate Shakespeare, which I would have loved to have had with some of the contemporary rights I translate, is there are previous translations, there are annotated editions, there are 400 years of people thinking about them in scholarship and trying to understand. And so there is a distance, but there is also research you can do. There is stuff to explain things. There are people you can talk to, you know. You can't email him a list of questions, which I do with my authors, though

1:00:02wouldn't that be fun? But there is a scholarship around it, if that's a useful thing for you to have. But certainly, as you say, because the language has changed, English, in the last 400 years, and because culture has changed, there are some things that are more difficult for a translator to understand, just as they are sometimes difficult for an English-language audience to understand. One of the things that I think is very pleasing about Shakespeare translations is that often the things that have got lost, or at least become slightly obscured to us as an English-language

1:00:36audience, will be brought much closer to an audience experiencing Shakespeare in a translation that was produced five minutes ago. There's a kind of distance, some of that distance gets closed in translation. And so there's a closeness to Shakespeare that we, I say slightly flippantly in the book, that we English speakers are the only people who are kind of stuck with 400-year-old Shakespeare. And I don't exactly mean that, but I kind of do. There's something about that distance that requires that we do

1:01:06work a little bit harder. I mean, the rewards are great, but we do have to work a little bit harder to enjoy and understand, or at least to understand, let's say, Shakespeare in English. And that distance sometimes gets closed in translation. It's nearer to you in translation. Well, maybe now is the right time to talk about translating Shakespeare into contemporary English, because there was a time back in the days when our show was called Talk the Talk that we followed

1:01:41the efforts of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. They commissioned an update of all 39 plays, and they had playwrights do it. They didn't have linguists or scholars doing it. And we had the chance to interview some of the playwrights and ask them the choices that they made. But it was interesting because the brief that they received was just change the language, don't set it in fascist Italy or something like that. But a lot of playwrights really did go with it. And the response was

1:02:17interesting. A lot of people felt like it was dumbing down Shakespeare or they called it Hamlet for dummies, which I guess is not a surprising reaction because many people feel kind of that way. about Shakespeare. What's your feeling about that? I understand that reaction. I think there are some people for whom it's sort of a sacred text. Right? There are certain, you know, you sort of don't touch it. And I've had interesting conversations

1:02:48with people who translate Shakespeare into other languages. I mentioned to one translator a production I'd seen of the Henry IV plays in which literally five or six words had been changed in ways that I thought were well done. And this translator said to me that his response was just, oh God, which I thought was interesting given that he'd changed all the words. I would find it difficult to change a few words while simultaneously be very comfortable with the

1:03:20idea of replacing all of them and replacing every word with Tamil words or Polish words or whatever it is. So I don't have a sort of principle argument against translating into modern English. I think the Oregon series was an interesting one. I read a couple of them, the play on series.

1:03:41And I read deliberately that, I won't say which plays they were, but I'll tell you that it was, I read the play that I knew best and the play that I knew least well. And the play that I knew least well, I thought the version worked very well. And the play that I knew best, I thought worked didn't well, which is inevitable because I was comparing it because it was always going to be something compared to what Shakespeare was doing. And Shakespeare, it will not surprise you to know, I think is quite good. But I did, when I was working on the book, look at quite a lot of modern rewritings of Shakespeare

1:04:18plays in English, some of which were explicitly sort of for dummies, some of which are said, you know, these are things that are designed to be easy. And I was slightly disappointed and I find it hard even to think about those as translations in one sense. They're useful, you know, Shakespeare made easy is useful. If the thing that you want is the meaning of the words, right? If you are satisfied with, what does this line mean? Well, it means in the, you know,

1:04:48barest sense, the following, then it's useful. But I don't think that is the point of Shakespeare. And I also don't think that's the point of translation. As I said at the beginning, I want translation to capture, for something to deserve to be called a translation, you know, my standards are very high and I want it to be trying to do more than just replicating meaning. And so if Shakespeare is, you know, messing with the rhythm of a line, or doing something with the sounds of words, or whatever it might be, which is having a really

1:05:22particular effect, something that ignores that and just tells you what each of these words and sequence means, I think is a useful crib maybe. And if you, you know, I could see for some people the value of that. Um, but I don't think that's what translation is. And so what I, what I did like in one respect about the, the Oregon series, the ones I read at least was that they're attempting to make something coherent, right? They're attempting to make something that works and that has like, you know, the characters actually have voices. Um, I saw a production of, I saw a kind of South London hip

1:05:59hop, Romeo and Juliet, um, which I thought was great. Um, because even though, yes, it was translating Shakespeare into modern English, it was translating it into a really particular modern English. And the characters had really particular voices and it was using the resources of the languages was playing on words in a way that we happen to be able to now that they happen not to be able to 400 years ago. It was treating, you know, South London English as a coherent language and making something that is dynamic. Um, in the same way that you would make something dynamic in

1:06:34Polish or Greek or whatever it might be, but it's not something that is simply going, how can I, uh, simplify. I'm, I'm kind of keen on clarifying, not simplifying. If you see the distinction, how, if you just simplify, if you just take the meaning, um, and lose everything else, which Shakespeare is doing, then I'm not sure why we don't just read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Okay. So the sense I'm getting here is that we're, we're trying to preserve something beyond the

1:07:08words. And you've mentioned like characterization and the feeling of the time and the experience of going to see Shakespeare, which is its own thing. What else am I missing here? What else is there when you subtract all the words? It's like, it's like John Cage's 433, where you subtract all the music and see what's left. When you subtract all the words, what else is there that I haven't mentioned? I don't think it's quite about subtracting the words, but I think it's about, it's about not thinking only of the meaning because the words have lots of properties, right? Every word

1:07:40has a certain number of syllables and the sound and things that are echoes and associations and hard consonants or soft content of big vowels or short vowels, you know, um, and so the words are doing things that are not just what the dictionary says that they're doing. So if I can give you an example, there's a, I think it's in the book, the moment at the beginning of Hamlet, near the beginning of Hamlet, a lot of this scene has been happening in ambic pentameter. So Shakespeare sets up this regular pattern, which broadly speaking is going de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum,

1:08:14de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum. And then Hamlet sees his father's ghost and his first line is, angels and ministers of grace defend us. And angels does not go de-dum, because we don't say angels, angels and ministers of grace. Shakespeare breaks the pattern. He says, angels, he hit that first syllable really hard. Um, and so as an actor, you get a bit of a jolt saying it and as an audience, you get a bit of a jolt hearing it. As a translator, I would want

1:08:45you to translate angels and ministers differently from the way you would translate, say, uh, angelic ministers of grace because angelic ministers of grace goes de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, because the jolt is part of it. The jolt, like the meaning of those two things is the same, just as the meaning of to be or not to be, that is the question, is the same as the meaning of being or not being, this is the issue. But you would translate them differently because they have different numbers of syllables and they have different kinds of sounds. And so it's not exactly about disregarding

1:09:20the words, but it's about thinking of the words as being quite, because Shakespeare is like this, being quite kinetic. You know, the fact that there is a cluster of hard syllables in the middle of a word. It's not just because that was the first word you reach for, it's because you want this word to have a particular effect that's coming out of the mouth of an actor and therefore an audience is responding to it. And so again, as a translator, you're thinking about how to do something that keeps all of those dimensions, or as many as you can, as possible. And so you are thinking

1:09:53about the words very much, but you're thinking about the words and what they're doing and not only the words and what they mean. If I can give another example, there's a moment in Julius Caesar where Antony says, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers. And that last word, butchers, he could have said enemies with these somethings, you know, there are lots of words I could have put there, with our enemies, with your enemies.

1:10:26But butchers has this really ugly cluster of, you know, sounds in the middle. And when you're translating, one of the things you might want to prioritize, maybe more than meaning, is giving an actor a word that they can spit at the end of that line, a word that they can really use to show contempt with. And so maybe you translate that word into something that doesn't exactly mean the same as butchers,

1:10:57but feels the same, so that an actor can do with it what an English language actor can do with the word butchers. Because at that point, the sound of the word becomes relevant. You mention lots of other things in the book, like you even get down to the level of punctuation. You had this quote, punctuate the translation, don't translate the punctuation. What did you mean by that? Yeah, it's the thing that we think about as translators all the time. I think it's easy to assume, because I'm interested in, you know, the pace of my translations as compared to the pace of the

1:11:32original, say, that I should therefore have long sentences when they have long sentences, and put commas in where they put commas in, and pause where they pause, which is true up to a point. I'm kind of following, to some extent, the shape of a paragraph, or even the shape of a sentence. But we also use punctuation differently in different languages. We have different rules, and we have different amounts of freedom. English has certain rules about where it uses commas, say, but it also has quite a lot of freedom. In that sentence, I just said, I could have put

1:12:06commas in various places, or done the whole thing without commas. You can't hear them because I am pausing wherever I choose to pause. But I could transcribe that sentence with commas in a number of different sort of optional places. And so what I think that that little phrase means, and it's the thing that we, as I say, we talk about as translators all the time, is not just thinking there's a commas, so I have to put a comma, there's a period, so I have to put a period. You kind of do your translation, and then you punctuate it for the effect you want. Which will be partly for, you

1:12:42know, following the rules of your language, but also using punctuation to give information to your reader, to suggest pauses. And in the case of someone like Shakespeare, it's to give information to your actor. The Danish translator whom I interviewed, Neil Sprinter, an amazing translator, said that he uses what he described as not grammatical punctuation, but expressive punctuation.

1:13:10So he's punctuating as though he were kind of adorning a musical score, basically. And it is indicating pausing and indicating breaths and that sort of thing, which is part of how we sometimes use commas in English, but it's not the whole thing. And so it's about, again, coming back to this idea of using the language you're translating into, using whatever resources it has, the constraints it has, and the opportunities it has, to sort of optimize the effect. And this means sometimes doing the same thing as we have the same punctuation as the English source would use, and sometimes

1:13:45doing completely different things, entirely different things, in order to create the same effect. Okay. So we've kind of been talking about the choices that a translator has to make, about Shakespeare's form. So we have Shakespeare coming to us, sometimes he rhymes, sometimes he doesn't, sometimes he breaks into or out of rhyme. Sometimes he uses a certain meter, sometimes he doesn't. And you've got to choose whether and how you're going to do that in the language that you're

1:14:17translating that in. I mean, there are lots of things, and they come down to form, and they come down, again, to what are the things that happen to be the characteristics of English as opposed to characteristics of other languages. Things like form, you kind of have to decide up front. There's like a policy decision. Am I going to use verse when Shakespeare uses verse, or am I not? And if I do, will it be something like ambient pentameter or whatever? So those are the kind of things you have to decide up front. Why wouldn't you use verse when Shakespeare uses verse? Well, you might make a determination, as some people do, that the things that you would have to lose

1:14:50by fixing something in verse would outweigh the things that you would gain if you did it differently. Verse forms also work differently in different languages. English is a stress-timed language. There are other languages like French where you can't use a pentameter. You can use a ten-syllable line if you want, but the stress doesn't work in the same way. And the tradition you're working in isn't the same. But one of the reasons you would want to have verse, perhaps, is so that you can sometimes break from verse and have prose. One of the reasons to have rhyme is so

1:15:23that sometimes you aren't rhyming. That a lot of the time you're creating effect by juxtaposition. Shakespeare uses big Latinate words so that you notice the small Anglo-Saxon words, and vice versa. A lot of the time you have these things that are the possibilities that Shakespeare's working with, and he's using everything and setting things off against each other. He's using, you know, little, rounder, monosyllabic words, and then longer words so that you notice the transition, for example. And as a translator, you want to do everything. You want to give the sense of it

1:15:58being a 400-year-old thing, while also not being a weird, archaic, 400-year-old thing. It's difficult translation, turns out. Who knew, right? Yeah, right. Well, then let's get into the next area that we're kind of touching on. We've mentioned keeping it true to Shakespeare's form, his rhyme and meter. There's also keeping it true to English. And you've mentioned that, yeah, English does certain things, it feels a certain way, it acts a certain way, and other languages just won't do that. So sometimes you can keep it close to English, and sometimes you have to venture farther away.

1:16:29So I think that's absolutely right. And I think what you then find yourself doing is thinking about effect. You sort of almost retrofit. You think, what is the effect that's being created here? And what are the tools that I have in my language to create this effect? So I mentioned that English has Anglo-Saxon, Germanic words, and also Latinate words, and Shakespeare plays between them, and they create a particular effect. The Latinate ones tend to seem higher register, and so on. If you're translating into Turkish, which is not made up of a mix of Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and

1:17:03Latinate words, you have a problem. But on the other hand, in Turkish, you do have Ottoman words, like pre-Ottoman words, as I understand it. And so there is a way of conveying a kind of heightened, older, you know, words that will be recognisable, but not necessarily used anymore. And there are ways of creating an effect. The translator I talked to, Emine Ihan was doing a bit of Richard III, and Queen Margaret comes in, and Queen Margaret sort of appears in the play from another age. And so Emine gave her more, you know, more Ottoman words.

1:17:38So there are things that the language allows you to do, because every language can do register, and every language can do economy, and every language can do whatever, humour, etc., etc. But they do it in different ways. They do economy, we do it with monosyllables, quite a lot in English, and they will do it with other things. But you're thinking about what is the effect of this thing? What is the effect in the moment when an actor comes on stage and says something, and it makes the audience, you know, stand up straighter, or cry, or laugh,

1:18:10or something? And now we think, well, what are the things that I can do with Swahili or Italian that will create, that will make the audience laugh, or whatever it is? People often ask me, what's the hardest language to learn? And I've got a number of answers for this, but probably one of the most basic answers is that the hardest language for you to learn is going to be the one that's farthest away from you. So, you know, I can learn Spanish and French fairly

1:18:42easily, Thai would be tougher. Is there a hardest language to translate Shakespeare into? I mean, I think partly your answer to the previous question is exactly right. I think there are some languages that are much closer to English. And that doesn't mean that it's easy to translate Shakespeare, but it means that there are certain things that you can keep the same. There are certain, maybe a sentence structure will be roughly the same. Word order at a kind of sentence level in Spanish is not wildly different from English. You know, you can start, I can start

1:19:15translating a Spanish sentence into English, not knowing how the sentence ends. I can just do kind of unit by unit and get to the end and I'll have to kind of tweak it at the end. But basically the structure will be the same. This is not true if you're working with Turkish. This is not true if you're working with most languages of Asia. And so it just requires slightly more acrobatics, I think,

1:19:41because you can't transpose things in the same sorts of units. But there's also the difficulty of of kind of cultural familiarity, which is in some cases much bigger that if you're translating Romeo and Juliet, it's useful for it to be into a language that resembles English. But it's also useful to be into a language whose speakers will understand something about Christianity and pilgrims. And, you know, the first scene where Romeo and Juliet had their first conversation where they meet, they're talking

1:20:13about pilgrims and palmers and those sorts of things. And this requires not only there being a word in your language for a pilgrim, it also requires people having an understanding of the concept and why this is important in this moment. So there is a kind of cultural distance. You know, we have in English today, we have a kind of chronological difference. Other languages will have linguistic differences, but also cultural ones.

1:20:43Well, I suppose then we're to the next area. And so the first one was stay true to Shakespeare's form or don't. The second one was stay true to Shakespeare's English or don't. And then the third one, I guess, is stay true to Shakespeare's time and culture, which, as you say, with the pilgrim example, just poses its own challenges. And you've got lots of examples there in the book where a translator has just had to say, the cultural anchor points are kind of missing here or not as obvious. What do I do?

1:21:15So one of the difficulties is, if you are translating Shakespeare into another language to be published published in the equivalent of like the Penguin classic series of complete Shakespeare, whatever, it wouldn't matter hugely because you put in footnotes or endnotes or whatever it might be. You expand things, you put in material to help the reader. This doesn't work when you're on the stage. This doesn't work. You cannot, you know, pause a production and say, you know, something, something as big as the bed of ware in England.

1:21:49Ladies and gentlemen, let me just explain something very quickly. If you weren't sure what the bed of ware was, it's a very large bed, which is now currently in the Victorian Albert Museum in London. And you can't do that. So whatever you do has to be contained in, this is one of the problems of translating the theatre, of course, it has to be contained within however many syllables you're giving your actor to speak. If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage. And on the page in the very specific bit in the dialogue, rather than in the 60 pages of endnotes or whatever. And so what you're doing as a translator is partly you're deciding,

1:22:22you know, which bits of this stuff actually matter. Because that line I just quoted about the great bed of ware in England, like most people in an English audience wouldn't know that either. And probably it's fine. And you can tell from the context that it's a big thing. You know, write something, a piece of paper, even if the piece of paper were as big as the great bed of ware in England. It's a big thing. It's clearly a big thing that's probably enough. It's nice to have a footnote because it's an interesting, you know, there's an interesting story there if you want to look for it, but you don't absolutely need it.

1:22:52But there are certainly some things which a translator might feel inclined just slightly to tweak the meaning of. One example I quite liked, I talked to a few translators who'd done some of the sonnets. And if you think about, so probably Shakespeare's most famous sonnet, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. The first problem we have there is that I talked to a few translators who said that summer isn't very nice where we are. Like if summer is 45, 50 degrees, this is not like the compliment you think it is.

1:23:28So summer's day is translated into a day of spring in several translations. There is a Bengali translation, there is an Arabic translation that says a day of spring. And therefore it's not saying to the reader you're going to have to imagine yourself in London in the 1590s where summer is a nice thing. We're going to account for the fact that here in Tokyo everyone hates summer and complains about summer because it's oppressive and stuffy and hot. And so we're going to just call it spring. But the sonnet then goes on, rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, which is true in the hemisphere where I am,

1:24:06but it's not true in the hemisphere where you are. Because actually springy things are not happening in May in the southern hemisphere. And so I talked to a Maori translator in Eltaro, New Zealand, who had

1:24:23done several Shakespeare plays, an amazing woman called Te Helmiata Mason, who was thinking like, what do I do with that line? Do I just assume that my readers will figure it out, that we're talking about spring in May, and we'll just figure out that we're talking about somewhere where this is the thing where May is where spring happens. We are kind of used to it. We're kind of used to it. But if we're trying to introduce this quote-unquote difficult new writer to people who may not be very exposed to him, do we need this extra complication? Do we say

1:24:56the darling bud of November, or whatever rhymes with it, you know? In her case, what she did was something which was quite subtle and very nice, which is basically like the first buds of spring or something. I can't remember the exact phrase, but it was the Maori phrase for something like the first buds of spring. It's basically what Shakespeare is saying, but it's not adding that little bit of friction, that little bit of interference. But yes, it's always a challenge for a translator. You're not going to say, you know, I'm translating this into Polish and therefore

1:25:26Romeo and Juliet are no longer going to be in Verona. They're now going to be in Krakow. But there will be things in it, though of course this happens in production all the time, but you said, you know, a play now set in fascist Italy or whatever. But you are often thinking about little bits of kind of unwelcome interference. And I think especially with a writer like Shakespeare, who on the one hand is incredibly famous and familiar and established, but also you want him to be available to new people. This is why we translate. We translate in order that new people

1:25:57can get access to something. And you then don't want to add more difficulty than you need to, I think. You also mentioned this sentence. This translator is definitely having fun, which I reckon is sometimes the main thing. And I liked that a lot because, you know, having fun is important. I like to have fun. Does a fun translation mean better quality? Often. I think a fun translation... I mentioned earlier the idea of a translator kind of using

1:26:30the opportunities of their language. And so doing things that their language happens to allow. Taking opportunities that their language happens to allow. And I think that's a very liberating and a very enjoyable thing. And will usually produce something that is kind of maximizing the effect of it. So just a little example. There's a moment in Midsummer Night's Dream in the Pyramus and Thisbe, play within a play at the end, where Pyramus says, I fear my Thisbe's promise is forgot.

1:27:04And the German translation by Frank Gunther is something like, my German is not very good, so apologies to anyone listening who knows German. The German translation is something like, Wer gisst mich Thisbe? Was ist hier die Frage? Which means, has Thisbe forgotten me? That is the question. Oh, nice callback. And that is the question, specifically from a particular famous translation of Hamlet into German. And as you say, it's a callback. But Shakespeare couldn't do it because it wouldn't

1:27:39have been a callback in Shakespeare's day. It would have been a call forward in Shakespeare's day, because he hadn't written Hamlet at this point. The German translator is doing something that Shakespeare couldn't do. Midsummer Night's Dream was written in the mid-1590s. Hamlet was written a few years later. Shakespeare didn't have this thing that he could play with. The German translator had this opportunity and obviously thought, that'd be fun. People will like that. This is a scene. This is a comic scene. It's a very silly scene. It's a scene in which everyone looks a bit foolish. It's all, you know, it's supposed to be,

1:28:13you know, we're going to maximize humor here. Why would I not take this opportunity that the the translation allows me? Sure, it's not in Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes opportunities that English and 1594 happen to allow him. I was thinking about that scene and the one line that I keep remembering is that Pyramus thinks that Thisbe has been eaten by a lion and he says, Shakespeare has it, this lion hath here deflowered my dear. And I think it was meant to be devoured,

1:28:48but he uses the word deflowered, which seems to me to be a bit of an opportunity for anyone who wants to throw in a double entendre in their language. And there are, there are lots of good examples of that in the book. Totally. And actually that example. So there are lots of places in mental night's theme where characters also use, especially those characters that the mechanicals who do the play use one word, but really meaning another using odious, meaning odors use paramour when they really

1:29:19mean paragon, that sort of thing that that happens quite a lot. And so it's in keeping. And so you create something that has kind of character coherence all the way through. Um, yeah, lion here, deflowered my dear, which is no, no, which was that something is stained that lived, that loved, that like that looked with cheer. It's also, it's supposed to be, it's like really bad writing. It's supposed to be bad writing. And as a translator, you want to make something that is clearly, you know, clunky and over rhymed and over alliterated and that sort of thing. It's I love it. It's one of my

1:29:53favorite things. Was it fun writing this book? Because there are definitely parts where you seem to have a fun time and play with it a lot. Oh, so much fun. It was so much fun. I got to watch Shakespeare. I got to try to understand how languages work. I got to try and understand how English works despite having, you know, I'm 52 years old. I've been living in English my whole life, but I haven't had to think about some of the mechanics and I'm quite nerdy like that. Uh, like, I think a lot of readers discover they are nerdy when you have conversations about

1:30:23monosyllables with them. Um, but also maybe the most fun, but was I got to go around and talk to these amazing translators who've, you know, I interviewed, I don't know, 13, 14, 15 people who'd been translating Shakespeare into Swahili or Tiri Omari or Adam Nandesti in Hungarian or, you know, anyway, over and over and over. And it becomes a conversation about, uh, uh, kind of about how language works. You know, we're talking specifically about

1:30:53this Turkish translation of Macbeth, but we're really talking about how it is we deploy our language to make something happen in the person who is consuming it. And that is for, uh, for someone who is a little bit nerdy about writing and language. That is, I mean, that was a treat. All right, then what did you learn about how English works? And you can make this about Shakespeare's English, or you can make it about English in general, if you want to. I mentioned, I've mentioned monosyllables a few times because I love this bit. I think other

1:31:27people would assume if they didn't know very much about Shakespeare, that he's probably, uh, you know, he's using big words and it's kind of poetic and it's old language and it's difficult and, you know, it's all going to be big five syllable words, you know. And one of the things that's amazing about Shakespeare, and this is completely a factor of how English works, is that a lot of the time in moments of high drama, we get incredibly simple language, language which anybody who knows English would understand today, made up of very, very short words made up of monosyllables. And the example I use

1:32:01in the book, one of the examples I use in the book is the moment at the end of King Lear and King Lear comes on stage and his daughter is dead and it is the worst thing anyone can imagine. It's an unbearable thing to watch. And he doesn't say this, you know, massive speech with very long words and flashy, poetic, Latin language, you know. His last speech begins, And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

1:32:32and thou no breath at all? Thou come no more. 30 syllables, 30 words, it's all incredibly simple. Like this is the, this is the, the essential thing. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? It couldn't be starker. And Shakespeare does this all the time. He does incredible things with monosyllables, but also he then sets them off against the bigger words,

1:33:02or the latinal words, or the higher register words. And that happens to be as a result of English having, you know, streams of vocabulary that come from lots of places, but these two in particular. But also it comes from Shakespeare using everything that English has got. And so he uses monosyllables for economy, for simplicity. If you're a translator, you have to do this in completely different ways. But I found, you know, things that seem incredibly simple to us in English, you know, monosyllables in

1:33:34English. Man, god, time, war, peace, life, death, love, hand, heart, like lots of the big words that we use a lot in writing Shakespeare plays, which are not necessarily monosyllables in other languages. They usually aren't. They're usually much bigger words. Um, not many of those are monosyllables in Spanish, certainly. Any of them? Pas, peace is demonstrable. But certainly very few of them.

1:34:04And so you discover by looking at, you know, what are the mechanisms that Shakespeare uses for writing? What are the tools he has? Because he puts pressure on English. He makes, you know, he uses all of the things that English will allow him to do. That also draws your attention to the things that English happens to allow. The fact that English happens to be made up of these components, which therefore are the things that Shakespeare uses to make you cry at the end of King Lear. I guess we need to talk for a second about generative AI, how, um, machine translation,

1:34:40large language models, uh, stolen data. It's changing the game. What do you see happening now? And, uh, what do you expect to happen in the future? I'm glad you mentioned the stolen data. That's relevant. Um, translations done out of large language models. It's certainly it's better than it was a few years ago. Uh, it improved rapidly a few years ago. I think the pace of improvement for obvious reasons slowed, but it has improved. Um, it's improved because it's using, you know, my translations and the translations of my friends and, uh, every interesting piece of writing by any novelist it can find,

1:35:16you know, it's, it's feeding on these things, obviously. Um, I'm assuming that

1:35:22one month into publication, the book that I spent two years writing is in a machine somewhere being, you know, uh, having it's, it's organs harvested as it were. Um, I, I, there are things that I worry about about where we are and where we're going, which are not actually to do with what get more generative AI can do, but much more to do with what the claims people make about it, because I don't feel like we are yet at the point where for something that is, that is

1:35:52multi-dimensional in a way that Shakespeare is, but not, doesn't have to be Shakespeare. Who's a kind of an extreme example. Um, I don't feel like, uh, generative AI can produce the kind of translations I would want to put my name to, or at least it couldn't do it without the sort of detailed prompt that it can only get from someone who frankly could be doing the translation themselves because they would need to know exactly what they're looking at, exactly what they're prioritizing at each moment. You know, it can work as a very useful thesaurus, you know, it can give you 10 different options,

1:36:22but you would need to know what the source text is doing to know which of those 10 is the one you want because you're making a determination as a sensitive reader of that source text. So my concern is not that even in the languages where the, where the quality is best, which is annoyingly the languages I translate from really, you know, it's obviously the Spanish and French translation will be much better than lots of others into English. My concern is not that it can do what I can do. Uh, my concern is that the difference, which is smaller than it was,

1:36:53uh, might not matter to people enough. I'm not worried. I think the way I put in the book, you have, I kind of put a sort of, we have to kind of pretend to put numbers on it. Imagine it can do 80% of what I can do rather than a hundred percent of what I can do. That's a made up number, but let's call it 80. The question for me isn't, will it, you know, is it just behind me? Will it make up the next 20%? My question is given that it's cheaper than I am and quicker than I am,

1:37:24um, are there people who might be publishers, who might be readers who look at it and go, eh, 80% is fine. That's, that's my worry more than, more than that, the gap being bridged anytime soon. Okay. So then how do we get people to care about translation, the human side? I mean, weirdly, I, I, I, I discovered at the end of writing my book that that was what my book was about. I, I, I have a, there was a, there was a little chapter about AI at the end of it, which is

1:37:57in quite general, I wrote a chapter about AI for the book, uh, and then had to throw it away five minutes later because it was already out of date. This is the way. Which is completely the way. So there is a short chapter at the end of the book about it in sort of principle terms and, and talking about my concerns and, and obviously there are many uses for it, many opportunities coming from it. Um, but I had an interesting conversation with one of my editors who said, you know, are you sure you need a chapter about AI because isn't the whole book like this is a book about

1:38:31like how clever people are. It's about human ingenuity and about human creativity and human expression. And I don't think you, I mean, I, at least I hope you wouldn't read a chapter in which I say, this is the, these are the cool things Shakespeare does with a monosyllable and look how Emine Ayhan did it in Turkish and look how JC Niela did in Swahili. And aren't these people, aren't these people brilliant? Isn't this an amazing thing that they've done? I don't think you read that

1:39:01and go, yeah, it's fine. Shame about the humans. Wouldn't it be nice if we can just save some time and do it all with machines? Like the, the humanity is the point of, of art. I think, um,

1:39:15speed and cheapness is not the point of it saying this to the friend the other day. I, all of us who, you know, uh, uh, readers know that experience of, you know, you read a novel and it's just amazing. And you want to kind of grab passersby on the street and say, you know, grab them by the collar and say, you must read this. I have never, and nor have you, you know, grabbed a friend and said, you absolutely must read this novel. It was, it was written so quickly. Like, this is not a factor, right? This is not, this is not a, it's a

1:39:49factor in the making of money, not in the making of art. It's a factor in capitalism. It's not a factor in, in the, the, the writing or translating of a Shakespeare play. And so the book ends up being, though I, I'm not explicit about this until very in passing at the end, I feel like it ends up being an argument for, for humans of whom, you know, species of which I am fond. And the reason we have art, the reason we make it and the reason we consume it. The book is If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. We are talking

1:40:26with the author, Daniel Hahn. Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us about your work. Thank you. Such a pleasure talking to you.

1:40:39And now to some more questions. This one's from James on our Discord, who says, I'd love to know if anyone has any evidence that painting instructions on the road or in a parking lot backwards, is it all helpful? Do you know what James means? I don't. Imagine that you have something on three lines and it says, you know, ped-exing, meaning pedestrian crossing. Should they paint it so that the ped is near you? After all, that is the first element. Ped-exing. Or should they paint it

1:41:13with the ped away from you so that as you see the whole thing, you see the whole thing? Not writing it backwards. Jogging forwards, unfortunately, means reading bottom to up is our problem. Mm-hmm. See, I'm not sure I agree with that. I think you need to write things in the line order that we would see them on a page. So start at the top line, even if it is further away, but there is a way to account for the facts that things that are further away are smaller.

1:41:47Like we've known the fix for this for quite a long time. You just, you do the opposite of the Star Wars crawl at the start of Star Wars, right? So instead of the stuff getting narrower as it heads to the top of the screen, it does the opposite. It starts quite narrow and it gets much, much bigger. So by the time the bottom line that is closest to you is legible to you, the other two lines, which are bigger, are also legible. And you can just read the whole thing the way a person normally reads anything. Or when I say a person, an English speaking person who reads from like left to right

1:42:22and top to bottom. How many lines do you think you can sustain this? Three. No more than three. I would argue if you have anything that needs to be written on a road and you haven't been able to boil it down to three lines, you need a fucking sign, mate. That's what signs are for. Yeah. Very good. I think James had noticed the XKCD cartoon, link in the show notes. It says, highway engineers think I read backwards, except that the text is reversed bottom to top. So I did a lot of work on this. I wanted to find out what were the regulations on this.

1:42:55Hmm. That's interesting. I found the US Federal Highway Administration. We'll have a link on that in the show notes as well. It's the manual on uniform traffic control devices. This is the revision 1st of December, 2025. It says under section 3B21, if a pavement marking word message consists of more than one line of information. It should read, in the direction of travel, the first word of the message should be nearest to the road user. Them's the rules.

1:43:26Is that, yeah, but them's the American rules, Daniel. I'll note that this is actually quite rare in Australia, first of all. Like, I'm actually really struggling to think of many instances where words are written on the road pavement itself. But in the CBD, because there's a couple of like, um, tight turns and a few other things, there's, uh, there's markings on the road that will say like city with an arrow to say, if you're in this lane, you're going to end up in the city. Oh, that's right. And R-side drive for riverside drive. Yeah. And so R-side drive or R-side DVE is,

1:44:04is written the way it would be on a page with R-side at the top furthest away from the driver and then drive underneath it. But I wonder if there's no rule about it because perhaps the rule is at all costs, try and avoid doing this. Cause it is actually a very bad way to put information to drivers. I would argue. You've got a lot of compromises here. If there's traffic, you can't fucking see it anyway. Right. And often this stuff is happening where there is traffic. If you're traveling at any kind of speed, even if you've made it really, really big, you're also likely to

1:44:36not be able to see it very well. I just think we don't do it very much here. R- But the question is, is it backed up by research? Is it really the best thing to do? R- Yeah. R- This is work from Jose El Tapia from Universitat de Valencia, Spain, and a team published in Transportation Research, Part F, Traffic Psychology and Behavior. This is from the July, 2026 issue. So it's hot off the presses. We had to wait for this until the research was in. R- The article is called, When Words Split on the Road, Recognition Costs of a Cross-Line,

1:45:09Destination Name Order in Pavement Markings. They did an experiment where they put people through simulated traffic on a video screen. It looked like a road. And then in some cases it didn't. They did both conditions. And they had names of cities printed on the road as if you wanted to navigate there like Riverside Drive or whatever. R- Sure. R- They were looking specifically at split names on the road. Sometimes they would give people real names of cities like Barcelona. And sometimes they would have Barca close to you and Lona farther

1:45:42away. Or sometimes they would have Barca farther away and Lona closer to you. And sometimes they would give people plausible fake names of cities like Cal Bezola, which isn't a real place, but it looks like it could be. The test subjects had to press the letter M as soon as they could tell whether it was a real city or not. So they could have seen three things, a fake name, Lona Barca or Barcelona, which was quicker. So they found that the people who got the regular text,

1:46:15not the upside down text. So for example, Barca would be farther away from you and Lona would be closer the way that Ben likes and the way that the American regulations don't allow. When it was like that, people recognized the names of cities about a fifth of a second faster, two tenths about of a second faster, which is kind of a lot at high speed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was about to say this is one of the few instances of human cognition where those

1:46:45kind of fractions of time actually do make a huge difference. It does. If you're traveling at 120 kilometers per hour, that's about seven meters, which could be the difference between disaster and not. They say, put differently, non-canonical ordering, that is to say, the one that makes sense if you just read the whole thing straight on, effectively reduces the time and distance over which a driver could acquire and integrate the destination information before action is taken. So according to this research, inverted writing

1:47:16doesn't help and actually slows down reaction times. Just to gazump myself and undercut my own argument, I wonder if you did this study in America where everyone is accustomed to reading it backwards, if you would not actually be able to replicate this because then everyone is now like working against their mental muscle memory. Oh, maybe. And maybe if you just see the whole thing flash, you know, it doesn't matter whether you see ped-exing or exing-ped. Oh, you Americans, you're so wonky.

1:47:47Thanks, James. This one's from Jen via email. Hello, you lovely lot. Thank you, as always, for such an entertaining and edifying podcast. If you haven't already, would you consider taking an academic dive into the stir ending? Recently, I looked up the etymology of poll-stir, wondering why you would have a feminine suffix. And there seems to be some debate about the gendered nature of these agent nouns. Wondered if you learned folk had some insight. Sending appreciation from Scotland. Jen. Thanks, Jen. I didn't know that it had a gendered. I thought

1:48:22it just meant agent-y thing. So like, someone who does polls is a pollster. But it also just mean, like, enthusiastically, right? Like. Like what? Like, like they're like. I think it's time to pull out those minimal pairs. Can you think of something where it's an er and a stir and it feels different depending? Well, could you say a poll-er? A poll-er. Yeah, someone who does polls. It's a poll-er. I thought about that and I thought, you know, that sounds like a really weak syllable and er needs

1:48:56help. Consider also hipster. You couldn't call that person a hipper because the er suffix, yeah, it means someone who does something. But it also is the comparative, like I'm hipper than you. So that would be confusing. Yeah, but you have heifer. No, hipster. Yeah, I know. I'm just saying it's not always seen as weak because heifer exists. Oh, yeah. Okay. So heifer, yeah. Is this one of these things where it's always going to be er unless it is like an ugly, like, unless the word doesn't work?

1:49:29And so that's what the s-t-e-r comes from. Because I'm thinking of holster, can't be hol-er. Oh, right. Teamster, can't be team-er. So I'm just wondering if it's just stir is what we have to use when the, like, there's too many vowels and it just sounds ugly. I think so, but also it feels a bit different. Like, you could have both. You could have a joker and you could have a jokester. So what's the difference? Do you get a different feel from those?

1:50:00Like, a youngster has to be a stir. You couldn't have them be a younger. That's confusing. Well, but that's because we've got a word, younger, which already means something else. Yeah, that's right. Which isn't always a barrier, but sometimes. My, yeah, my sense is that we use stir as a, like, like, stir is the, the same as like, G in fridge, I guess. You know what I mean? No, the D in fridge. Sorry, my bad. The D in fridge. Yeah. Like, if you said, if you had a dog and the dog was really barky, would you say that, man, that dog is a real... You would never say barkster, would you?

1:50:34Well, if you did, would it feel different from barker? That dog's a real barker. That dog's a real barkster. What's the difference? No, I would just, I did, I would think you're just, like, having a small episode of some kind. Like, I would be like, why are you using language bad? Stop it. Do you think I would be, like, being funny, kinda? Yeah, like, like almost being deliberately like, like, look how hilariously, almost right, I said this word. Hmm. I feel like stir is for nefarious things, like a prankster or a jokester. Yeah, but what about things like,

1:51:06like holster and teamster and that sort of stuff? What's a teamster again? Uh, it's an American word for someone who works in the trucking industry, I think. It's like a banker is somebody who banks, but I remember during the Occupy movement, people referred to them as banksters, and it just felt like they were, like, evil. That's just because of gangster. Yeah, exactly. Ah, there we go. There we go. Nefarious again. Gangster we have because ganger just wouldn't work. It doesn't, it doesn't work in our mouth. Yeah. Well, here's the history behind the stir suffix. Okay.

1:51:39It used to be gendered in Old English. Er was the masculine form and stir was the feminine form. Oh, okay. But sometimes the genderedness has been a little bit weak, like with spinster. Spinning was making thread. And a spinster was a woman who did it, or sometimes a man who did it. And you can actually find references to a spinstress because apparently stir wasn't gendered enough, and people added the S to help get the message across. I took a look through a big word list for words that end in stir

1:52:12just to see if I could find any words that leaned feminine. And spinster was it. That really, literally was the only one left that is really gendered. We have S as the suffix now. You know, pink panther-ess is pink panther-ess. Oh, right. She's not pink panster. I just heard you use the word S and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's just a plural.

1:52:36Well, I was referring to the pop singer, pink panther-ess. Hey, what's a male seamstress called? A tailor. Not a seamer? Seamstress. A seamer? I was, I was, just because I've been getting into sewing, I was thinking about this because I felt weird telling people that I was getting into tailoring because it has this air of like, oh, look how incredible and amazing. Do you know what I mean? Like it's... You should never button the top. Is it the bottom or the top button? I forget.

1:53:08You never do the bottom button. This stuff about women and men's zippers and buttons are so confusing to me because I have discovered I have so many mixed gendered clothes that I'm just like, I can't go by what I wear because, I mean, I have so many shirts that I have discovered apparently are men's shirts. So the upshot is, stir has been gendered but it's been weaker or stronger at different times and now it's virtually evaporated from the scene. We use S for that. Oh, Jen continues. Also, after hearing Ben's... Pause. Pause, Daniel. Pause. Hold on. Hold on, Daniel.

1:53:40Yes? Because I've read this and I need to warn Hedwig what's coming up. There is some... I've read it. Okay. I did not mean to do Stolen Valor here. I'm pretty sure I talked about the fact that you put me onto this. So the fact that she's thanking me... We forgive Jen. Ben, Ben. We've got another reader of the book series we're madly in love with. Okay. Jen has forgiven all sins. Okay. Okay. I was just... I just wanted you... I wanted to make sure that you weren't looking at me being like, you motherfucker. No, I'm not. That's fine.

1:54:11Nobody knows what we're talking about. So I'm going to read it. Jen continues. Also, after hearing Ben's impassioned promotion of The Steerswoman... Okay. So Hedwig's impassioned promotion of The Steerswoman as well. Both. I bought the series for my husband who is very excited to read it. So many thanks for the recommendation. Did you know that I finished the first book too? I'm getting... I'm starting on The Outlander's secret. Yeah. I feel like there's people right now, we are missing a golden opportunity to do an impassioned

1:54:42advocacy for The Steerswoman again in this moment. So, Hedwig, so that the next person thanks you, do you want to do a quick bit? The Steerswoman series is four books written by Rosemary Kirsten, and they are all very good, I think, and Ben likes them too. And are you too? I actually read all of them with my book club recently, and they're very nice. They're about a woman who is sort of living in a medieval fantasy-ish world and is a very like, sort of like a proto-scientist, and sort of a little bit like an anthropologist as well.

1:55:15And she's going around trying to figure out this mystery, and it spans four different books, and they're all very engaging and fun. And Rosemary Kirsten is also active on Twitter and Blue Sky, so I sometimes like tweet at her, and she responds, and I'm like, Oh my gosh! And however, warning, she has written four books, and there's supposed to be more books. She hasn't finished it yet. Mm. My one sentence, Sel, is like, what if librarians were some of the most respected and revered people in society and got to go around having adventures of learning? And if you're

1:55:51not into that as a story idea, I don't know what to fucking say to you. Yeah. Great series. Really enjoying it. Thanks you guys for putting me onto it. And Jen, thanks for sending that to us. Thanks to everybody for those comments. Ben Hedwig, did you enjoy sort of dropping a mailbag right in the middle of a big old episode? That was fun, wasn't it? I do. When we do questions, can we still have words of the week? Well, maybe. But now let's do a comment. This one's from Allison via SpeakPipe. Allison is the one who put us on to Suey. I thought it was a hog call, and I really don't. I'm beginning

1:56:24to think maybe it's really not. Let's hear what Allison says. This is her follow-up. Hi, Daniel, Hedwig, and Ben. It's Allison from Nova Scotia. And I don't really know which of the different explanations for Suey that you proposed sounds right. I'm hopefully going to check with my class. And if so, I will check in with you tomorrow. But there was one thing I wanted to note to note is that, Daniel, you were saying it's Suey, but the stress is more on the first

1:57:02syllable when my students say it. It's more Suey. So I don't know if that impacts your analysis at all, but I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for all you do. Bye. I'm now far less certain than I was. What are you thinking? Well, I was quite convinced that it was going to be the soccer thing, like the Sue. But the way that Allison is pronouncing it is unlike anything I've heard my kids say. So this might just be a

1:57:36complete Nova Scotia regionalization. I don't know. The mystery deepens. We're going to get to the bottom of it. That's what we're here for. Thanks, Allison. Well, Allison, like, please report back. Tell us what the youth have told you. Big thanks also to our guest, Daniel Hahn. Thanks to everybody who gave us questions. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you great patrons for keeping us afloat. Salute. Because Language people, lovers, fans, confidants, we would love for you to do a couple of things for

1:58:09us. We would love for you to follow us. We are at BecauseLanguage.com on blue sky and at BecauseLangPod, just about anywhere else you could possibly find us. You can send us ideas, news, and words. You can do it on SpeakPipe, which I don't know if you've been paying attention in this episode, but a bunch of people are bringing in their voices and it's pretty cool. Or if you are positively ancient, perhaps you play golf, you might want to use email, hello at BecauseLanguage.com. You can also tell a friend about us or leave a review in the place that you consume your podcast.

1:58:41Sure, it could be Apple Podcasts, it could be Stitcher, it could be, uh, boo, what's that one that we, um, the, anyway, it could be any of them. You could just leave us a review. That'd be really great. You could become a patron. You get stuff depending on your level. There's live shows, one coming up very soon. Bonus episodes, mail outs, shout outs, discord access, join the party. It's all fun. We get your support and that helps us in lots of ways. Helps keep us in staples and supplies, software, subscriptions, keeps the regular episodes free for everybody. We would just like to give a quick shout out to our patrons at the supporter level. Hedvig, this time I decided

1:59:16to use your suggestion. Remember what that was? Wait, wait. So I have been for the past like two minutes studying this list. Yes. Trying to determine what you've done. So it's almost alphabetical. Yep. Almost. Except at the end. Do you remember your suggestion from last time? No.

1:59:38Daniel, one whole show ago, are you mad? I know, it must have been a long time ago. Steve taught me a new saying, which I think is really dumb, but he said, uh, you can say, I've slept since then. Okay. I'm going to use that. This is the timeline of when letters joined the Latin alphabet. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. So you got A, B, C, D, E, F, H, most of the first half of the alphabet and then Q, R, S, T, V, and X. Then the next one was G. That was the next one that came up.

2:00:12So that goes at the end. And then Y and Z appeared in the classical Latin period. In the Renaissance, we started getting J, U, and then finally W. So if we took all the letters, we stuck them in alphabetical order according to when they ended the alphabet. That's alphabetical order now. And so I just took everyone's names and alphabetized them straight. That means you're going to get punished for U, W, J, Y, Z, and G a little bit. Here we go. It's Aldo, Amanita, Amir, Amy, Andy B,

2:00:45Andy from Logophilius, Aria Flame, Aisha, Becky, Ben, you are here, unsurprisingly. Kenny Archer, Chris L, Colleen, I am in this spot. Daryl, Diego, Elias, Faux Frenchy, Fiona, Hedwig, you're over here, Helen, Ignacio, Iztin, Kathy, Keith, Kevin, Christopher, Lance, Larry, Linguistic Chaos, Lord Mortis, Lissa, Lucy, Luis, Manu, Martha, Meredith, Mignon, Molly D,

2:01:19Nastrin, Nikolai, Nigel, Tim, Farrowcat, Rosh, Renee, Roger, Rosemary, Sam, Sonic Snatchhog, Stan, Steele, Sidney, Tony, Zachary, now things get weird, Grammarian, Yavod, John Troy, James, Joanna, John K., Whitney, and Wolfdog. Thanks to all of our patrons. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Koppiano, who also performs with Ryan Vino and

2:01:53Didion's Bible. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. Because Language.

2:02:00Pew, pew. Steve knew about the hemi-semi-demi-quaver, but he thought they were all three related, so he's as dumb slash smart as me. You just led him down the garden path, you nasty... Of course I did, yeah. I mean, as much as I was led down, you know? Yeah, true.