McWhorter, John - Language A To Z Guidebook PDF

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Language A to Z
Course Guidebook
Professor John McWhorter
Columbia University
Professor John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western

civilization, and American studies as an Associate Professor
of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University and is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University.
Professor McWhorter is the author of Our Magnificent
Bastard Tongue: Untold Stories in the History of English
and What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could
Be. He also has written on race and cultural issues and
has appeared on such television shows as Meet the Press,
Politically Incorrect, and The Colbert Report.
Professor Photo: Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph.com.

Cover Image: Orla/Shutterstock.
Course No. 2291 2013 The Teaching Company.
PB2291A
Guidebook
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The Teaching Company.
John McWhorter, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English
and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
rofessor John McWhorter teaches linguistics,

Western civilization, and American studies
as an Associate Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University
and is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1993, taught
at Cornell University, and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley. His academic specialties are language
change and language contact.
Professor McWhorter is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural
History of Languageabout how the worlds languages arise, change,
and mixand Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and
Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care. More recently, he is the
author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: Untold Stories in the History
of English and What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be. He
also has written a book on dialects and Black English, The Word on the
Street; four books on Creole languages; and an academic linguistics book
entitled Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard
Language Grammars. He has produced three previous Great Courses: Story
of Human Language; Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language;
and Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage.
Beyond his work in linguistics, Professor McWhorter is the author of
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America; Authentically Black:
Essays for the Black Silent Majority; Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis
in Black America; and All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Cant Save Black
America. He appears regularly on Bloggingheads.com and has written on
race and cultural issues for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New
York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal,
i
the Los Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, Ebony, and Vibe. He has
provided commentaries for All Things Considered and has appeared on Meet
the Press, Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, The Colbert Report, Book
TVs In Depth (on C-SPAN2), Talk of the Nation, TODAY, Good Morning
America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Fresh Air.
ii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography.............................................................................i
Course Scope......................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
Lecture 1
A for Aramaic3
Lecture 2
B for Baby Mama10
Lecture 3
C for Compounds16
Lecture 4
D for Double Negatives22
Lecture 5
E for Etymology28
Lecture 6
F for First Words34
Lecture 7
G for Greek Alphabet41
Lecture 8
H for Hobbits48
Lecture 9
I for Island55
Lecture 10
J for Jamaican61
iii
Table of Contents
Lecture 11
K for Ket67
Lecture 12
L for Like74
Lecture 13
M for Maltese80
Lecture 14
N for Native American English86
Lecture 15
O for Oldsters in Cartoons92
Lecture 16
P for Plurals, Q for Quiz99
Lecture 17
R for R-Lessness105
Lecture 18
S for She112
Lecture 19
T for Tone118
Lecture 20
U for Understand124
Lecture 21
V for Vocabulary130
Lecture 22
W for Whats Up, Doc?136
Lecture 23
X for !X, Y for Yiddish142
iv
Table of Contents
Lecture 24
Z for Zed148
Supplemental Material
Bibliography153
Typographical Conventions
This guidebook uses the following typographical conventions:
vi
Italics are used for words cited as words (rather than used
functionally; e.g., The word ginormous is a combination of gigantic
and enormous) and foreign-language words.
Single quotation marks are used for meanings of words (e.g., Wife
meant woman in Old English).
Double quotation marks are used for pronunciations of words (e.g.,

often versus offen) and words used in a special sense (e.g., The
secret lives of words are fascinating).
Slashes are used to indicate sounds (e.g., /b/).
Language A to Z
Scope:
his course takes each letter of the alphabet as an occasion to explore

one aspect of language around the worldnot languages around
the world. Some of the entries are about individual languages such
as Aramaic and Maltese, but most are about general concepts such as
vocabulary, tones, and double negatives; a single pronoun like she; and even
expressions such as baby mama and Whats Up, Doc? Throughout the
course, you will gain an introduction to the linguists perspective on what
people speak, how they speak it, and why.
Something underlying many of the lectures is the fact that writing is a
representation of speech rather than what language really is, despite that
the permanence and controllability of writing have always lent an illusion
none of us can be immune to that language beyond the page is unformed
or preliminary. The very concept of writing was slow in coming in human
history, and the specific idea of an alphabet, with a symbol for each sound
in a language, occurred only once, in the Middle East. Yet the idea that
what is written is a language and what is not is a dialect turns out not
to correspond to complexity or nuance in the ways one would expect; in this
course, you will see how such notions fare in the face of how languages are
distributed in Europe below the radar, or an unwritten language spoken by
only hundreds in Siberia.
The course will also show that language is a highly diverse thing,
independently of any traits of the cultures that speak them. Languages can
either be highly telegraphic or almost obsessively attendant to nuances of
experience. On one hand, in many, one usually doesnt indicate whether
something is plural or singular; in others, there is no way to mark tense;
and others have no plural pronouns. On the other hand, there are languages
where almost all plural forms are irregular like children and geese in English,
all verbs are irregular, and there are as many as eight or nine genders
that a noun can be a member of. The English speakers sense of grammar
is actually but one of endless variations on how people communicateand
1
in that vein, the course will also show that English is a more fascinating
system than we are often told, in terms of how we know to put the accent on
loud in loudspeaker but to put it on speak in mentioning someone who is a
loud speaker.
Then, while those variations in themselves are largely random, differences
between the ways that segments of society talk can be indexed to
sociohistorical factors in ways that reveal subconscious aspects of
psychology and even teach us about ancient human migrations otherwise
lost to history. Seemingly minor things, such as the way people of a certain
age sometimes shape a certain vowel or pronounce r, can be tied to societal
shifts that the people themselves may not even be consciously attending to.
Aspects of a languages vocabulary or its sounds can be tied to migrations
and takeovers otherwise only vaguely alluded to in folktales, if at all, as we
see regarding the click languages of Africa and some deeply obscure ones
of Indonesia.
Scope
This course will seek to answer the questions that people often pose to
linguists and lend a sense of why linguists give the answers that they do.
A for Aramaic
Lecture 1
e will never know how Middle Easterners 2,500 years ago would
have felt about todays world. However, we can be quite sure that
to them, the idea of Arabic being an official language in over 25
countries would sound as counterintuitive as a sitcom built around Mary Ann
from Gilligans Island would be to us. But 2,500 years ago, Arabic was an
also-ran, an obscure tongue spoken by obscure nomads. The star language
of the worldwas Aramaic.
Aramaic Language
Aramaic had been the star language of the world since the 7th
century B.C., but today, its easy to know nothing about Aramaic
beyond that Jesus Christ spoke it, and many only picked that up
in 2004 when Mel Gibson had dialogue in Passion of the Christ
rendered in the language. Yet Aramaic lives on, quietly but fiercely
la Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard.

Aramaic is spoken by Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.

Adherents of all three of those religions have had occasion to adopt
Aramaic, because it was available for use in the Middle East long
before Christianity or Islam even existed.
Today, in its Middle Eastern homeland, Aramaic is just a few stipples

on the language map, spoken by ever fewer in small communities
scattered across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. However, there are
more Aramaic speakers in the United States, Armenia, and Georgia.
The current situation for Aramaic is ironically similar to its beginnings

amidst desert nomads. In legend, they were the descendants of Aram,
Shem of the Bibles son. They conquered Damascus and much else in
Upper Mesopotamia, and by the 9th century B.C., they ruled Babylon,
as the Chaldeans of Biblical fame. Thats why Chaldean is another
term for Aramaic as seen in the older books.
3
WeFt/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Lecture 1: A for Aramaic
Aramaic is spoken in Syria, which is why you will often see the language
referred to as Syriac.
Aramaic is one of the languages of the small but mighty Semitic

family, whose modern stars are Arabic and Hebrew. But there was
a time when both of them were obscure third bananas, with Arabic
not even written, while Aramaic was on its way to glory.
Ironically, the glory came in the wake of defeat. When the Assyrians
took over Babylon in the endless game of musical chairs of ancient
Middle Eastern geopolitics, they deported Aramaic-speaking
conquerees to distant corners of the empire, such as Egypt. This
spread Aramaic far and wide, and soon people were learning it from
the cradle throughout the Fertile Crescent.
This included Jews. Here was the beginning of Hebrews long

period of exile, used only in writing until it was revived as a spoken
language starting in the late 19th century. You would have been
laughed out of any Babylonian cocktail party if you told people
that one day ice cream and stockings and iPads were going to be
sold in Hebrewwith all anachronism-related adjustments made,
of courseand this is why portions of the Bible were written in
Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

That didnt seem as queerly bifurcated to the writers as it seems to

us, as the two languages are about as akin as Spanish and Italian.
In the book of Daniel, at a point when the Chaldeans are being
spoken to, the text casually switches into Aramaic for the next five
chapters. Its odd, as if in Don Quixote, Cervantes had casually
switched into Italian to narrate the tale of the Florentine nobleman.
But this is why religious education for Jews includes, even today,
training in Aramaic. Some of the Jews who once spoke Aramaic
were the Samaritans of the Bible, in fact, and Samaritan was one of
the dialects of Aramaic at the time.
What put the final stamp on Aramaics international status was when
the next winner of musical chairs, the Persians, had no interest in
imposing their language upon their subjects. Instead, they recruited
Aramaic as their own administrative language for an empire that
stretched from Greece through Central Asia. King Darius would
dictate a letter to a faraway subordinate in Persian, and a scribe
would translate it into Aramaic; then, upon delivery, a scribe would
translate the letter from Aramaic into the local language.
This is what Daniel was being trained for as a captive under King
Nebuchadnezzar, and the skill was rather awesome, as Aramaic is
not user-friendly. It can put words through magnificent contortions
when putting them together.
For example, in Hebrew, he is hu, opened is patakh, and it is oto.

To say He opened it, you just say the three of them one by one: hu
patakh oto. But if you want to say opened it in one modern dialect
of Aramaic, its different. Opened is ifthakh, and it is e, but to put
them together, you cant just say ifthakhe. You have to swallow the
i and then make th and the a in ifthakh switch places. So, you get
fathkh-e. Its like more musical chairs, with the i as the loser.
5
One thing we can see in this is that ease has nothing to do with why
a language comes to rule the world. The king of hill before Aramaic
had been its Middle Eastern relative Akkadianwhat the Aramaic
speakers were kicked out in in Babylonia. But Akkadian is built just
like Aramaic, even though for a time, people were taking it up by
the millions.
Arabic was the next language of this brood to become the lingua
franca of the Middle East and beyond, and anyone who has
struggled to learn much Arabic beyond just cracking the challenge
of learning how to sound out its letters knows that Arabic is no
party for the newbie.
Complicated Languages
Then, meanwhile, from the final centuries before Christ until as
late as the 11th century, Greek was the language that ruled Eurasia.
Ancient Greek stretched from points in Spain across the Middle
East and eastward through what is today Pakistan and into India.
However, few would consider learning Greek anything close to
a breeze, groaning as it is with cases, declensions, conjugations,
gender on its nouns, and so much on everything else.
In fact, the only thing more counterintuitive than how widely Greek
was once spoken is how common it was even among ordinary
Americans until the 20th century to actually master Ancient Greek
in school.
In addition to Latin and Russian, Aramaic was one more baroquely

complicated language that became a universal one. One indication
of how studly it used to be is that its alphabet was the source of
most of the writing systems of Asia today other than the Chinese
one. Both the Hebrew and Arabic writing systemswhich arent
technically alphabets because they dont always indicate vowels
are children of Aramaics.
Then, the system spread as far as India and Southeast Asia, such
that the scripts you see in Burma, Cambodia, and elsewhere are,
if you look closely, yet more variations on a way of writing that

emerged somewhere far, far away, where there are camels and
languages spoken that have nothing whatsoever to do with pad thai
or sitars.

But it wasnt to last. In many places, Aramaic gave way to Greek

after the victories of a certain Alexander over the Persians. In
the Middle East, Arabic eased Aramaic aside with the spread of
Islam. We can see it happening in the writings of the Nabataeans,
an ancient Middle Eastern group with a penchant for chiseling
announcements into rock faces.
Like everybody who was anybody in Canaan at the time, the

Nabataeans first wrote in Aramaic. But soon, there were Arabic
words sprinkled in like chocolate chips. Before long, they were
writing in a kind of Aramaic/Arabic love childand, eventually,
in Arabic.
Its tempting to suppose that its the fate of all globe-straddling

languages to meet Aramaics fate eventually. After all, so many
have. However, the big lingua francas of old lost their mojo before
widespread printing and literacy. Aramaic replaced Akkadian
because after a while, more people spoke it; people kept writing in
Akkadian for much longer, but there werent very many of them,
and most people couldnt read.
It was pretty easy for Aramaic to gradually creep into writing

after a while. Latin lost ground first because it developed into new
languages across Europe. That was easier when reading was so rare
that language was experienced mostly orally, with no sense of what
was on pages as proper. In France, for example, it wasnt so much
that Latin died as that it became French, which itself was Europes
lingua franca for quite a while.
French lost that status because of geopolitical power shifts, and

today we hear rumors that English is about to lose its global status
to Chinese. Certainly, any human being who seeks education,
7
influence, or power should be learning Mandarinright? Actually,

not really. While the growing economic power of China is clear,
language dominance is about culture and technology as much
as money.
English came to reign at a time when three things had happened:

print, widespread literacy, and eventually an omnipresent media.
All of these make a worlds lingua franca more drillingly present
in minds the world over than was ever possible before. It creates a
deeply ingrained sense of what is normalarbitrary, ultimately, but
hard to shake.
As such, English will remain the international language of choice

for the same reason keyboards retain the ungainly QWERTY
configurationit got there first. China may well run the world of
the future, but it will likely do so in English.
The world has long known empires that ran things in the language
of the conquered people. King Darius was quite content to run
the Persian Empire in Aramaic; he relegated Persian itself to
announcements chipped onto the sides of mountains. Genghis Khan
and his Mongols ruled China for decades in the 13th century with
no interest in spreading their language, happily leaving Chinese
in place.
While today, reports of Aramaics total eclipse are greatly

exaggerated, on life support would be a fair assessment. There
are Aramaic-speaking churches in Teaneck and Paramus, New
Jersey, for example, but young people there learn the language less
and less, while in the Near East, Arabic continues to eat away at the
language just as it did on Nabataean tombstones.
Its as if by the year 3000 English was spoken only in a few

neighborhoods in the Bronx and Londons East End, with rumors
of a few elderly speakers somewhere in New Zealand. These
things happen. Today, Akkadian is spoken neither in Paramus nor
anywhere else. Nevertheless, there is still something poignant in a
language that was once a sign of sophistication across the vastest

empire the world had ever known being today the one out of the
worlds 6,000 most readily associated with Mel Gibson.
Suggested Reading
Jastrow, The Neo-Aramaic Languages.
Ostler, Empires of the World.
Questions to Consider
1. Do you think Americans are currently well advised to learn Chinese?
Why or why not?
2. Is it a good thing that English is something of a universal language, or
would it be better if the worlds languages stayed purer and werent

influenced so much by English?
B for Baby Mama

Lecture 2
n 2008, Tina Fey starred in a movie called Baby Mama, whose title
referred not to an infant giving birth, not a mama who happened to be
but a baby, but a babys mother. The term has become established as a
reference to the mother of ones child who one is no longer married to. It
seems to have become officialized in 2000, when the rap group Outkast had
a megahit called Ms. Jackson that was dedicated to all the baby mamas
mamas. It is a vernacular term, mostly associated with Black Americans.
People also use baby daddy, with the corresponding meaning, and oddly,
these words teach us valuable things about language in the United States.
Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama
Black English
Check out the origin of baby mama and baby daddy online and
youll find that even the Oxford English Dictionary has fallen for
a tasty notion that the source is Jamaican patois. And indeed, in
casual speech in Jamaica, there is a term baby-mother.
10
However, the chance that a random locution from the Caribbean

becomes common coin in black America is infinitesimal. Sure,
Jamaicans are around, but black Americans arent any more in the
habit of picking up their lingo than other Americans have been
embracing the latest slang from Toronto.
In fact, baby mama and baby daddy are not just isolated expressions.
They are examples of grammar of what linguists refer to as African
American Vernacular English, Black English, or (since the 1990s)
Ebonicsand it existed long before rap music.
It isnt the cartoon speech of minstrels, but often we are taught

to go from dismissing minstrelese to supposing that there is no
way of speaking that is local to black people, and that isnt quite
right either.
Some suppose, understandably, that black speech is simply

Southern, and there are similarities, but youd know the difference
on the phone even if the person were reading from a phone book.
That has, basically, been proven: Most blacks and whites can
immediately identify even Southerners
race on the phone.
There is a particular collection of sound

and sentence patterns that are typical of
black Americans. To put it more precisely,
most black Americans use the dialect to
at least some extent. Some use it in full
bloom most of the time. Others dip in and
out of it as the occasion demands.
For some black Americans, the dialect

is mainly just a matter of what in other
contexts we call peoples accents. Accent
is another way of saying sound, so while Langston Hughes (1902
1967) was an American
we dont think of black Americans poet who used Ebonics
as having accents in English the way in his poetry.
French people or Chinese people do,
most black Americans do color their vowels and enunciate some
consonants in certain ways that are subtly different from the way
most white Americans do.
That means that white and black people tend to speak English with
different accentsthat is, you could also put it that whites are the
ones with the accent. Everybody speaking any language speaks
with a different accent than other speakers.
When were dealing with things beyond accent, with whole

sentence structures, one thing that defines Black English is doing
without the possessive s, but not just when talking about parentage,
as in expressions like baby mamait goes far beyond that.
11
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-92598.
In her book, Lisa Green, a linguist at the University of

Massachusetts at Amherst, describes Black English just like
someone might describe Dutch or Klingon, and she gives the basics
on Black English and possessive marking: Sometime Rolanda bed
dont be made up. Thats the church responsibility.
In the 1980s, the bawdy black comedian Robin Harris was doing
comedy routines about a naughty brood of children, and the routines
were laced with the catchphrase Dem Bebe kids!not Bebes, but
Bebeand black audiences spontaneously recognized that way of
putting it as local and real.
A black person saying baby mama is simply rendering babys

mama with the rules of Black English instead of Standard English.
They are expressing the possessive relation in the same way as
legions of languages worldwide that have no possessive marker. In
Indonesian, mother is ibu, baby is bayi, and mother of baby is ibu
bayi (mother baby).
Languages differ in how they handle their haves. The French

speaker says Il a vuHe has seento express not what we would
say as He has seen, but as the simple past, He saw. In Vulgar Latin,
that same He has seen would have been used to mean He will see.
Black English has its own different take on have, and its quite
systematic. There are black people all over America using had
today just like black people were during the Ford administration,
because it is grammar.
The Origins of an Alternative Grammar

One might ask, though, where black Americans picked up this
alternate kind of grammar. Leaving off the possessive s is regular,
but really, it can seem like its just regularly lazy. If leaving off the
s is grammar, then what kind of lineage does it have? Among who
else, anywhere, was this grammar something regular?
12
Part of the answer is England, of all places. Remember the

indentured servants from schoolroom history lessons who worked
alongside slaves on Southern plantations? Well, it wasnt elite Brits
who wound up laboring in the Alabama cotton fields: Slaves worked
alongside folks speaking rural brands of English quite unlike that
of Henry Higgins. According to a rumor that gets around, those
indentured servants are supposed to have been talking like Falstaff
or one of the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights Dream.
You may have picked up the idea that there are parts of the South
where Shakespearean English is still spoken, which is such a
pleasure to hear about even though, really, imagine driving off into
some tiny town in Virginia and being greeted at the gas station in
Elizabethan English. How? If nobody talks like that in England
anymore, why would they still be doing it in North Carolina?
If we want to know just where this Southern English came from

that Black English was an offshoot from, we do know that roughly,
the coastal South, sometimes called the Lower Souththat is, the
Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texaswas settled
by people from southern and southwestern England, while the
Upper South, which is the Appalachians and corresponds roughly
to what we might stereotypically associate with Lil Abner and a
certain execrable sitcom of the 1960s with a catchy theme song
involving banjos, was settled by people from northern England,
Ireland, and Scotland.
The truth is that attempts to show actual parallels between the

English of those regions and the Englishes of these two regions
of the South have never worked in any major way. In the end, all
speech is always morphing along era by era for reasons of its own.
Language is like one of those lava lamps from the 1970s: It just
ooches and squinches away forever, not going in any direction in
particular and certainly not for any reason. Its essence is, quite
simply, that it moves.
13

14
A lot of what we now hear as Southern seems to have only

really gotten started after the Civil War, for example, long after the
England connection was an antique matter. The dialect was still
ooching along like that lava, and where it happened to have ooched
by then is what we happen to be hearing now. As hard as it is to
believe, before the 19th century, travelers in the South from England
often mentioned how elegant Southern English wasnot quaint
or accented.
But the larger fact that England was where it started holds up,
and that means that Black English started there to a large extent,
too. Even today, you might hear someone in Yorkshire say among
friends My sister husband rather than My sisters husband. In court
transcriptions of statements by London prisoners in the 16th and
17th centuries, lower-class folk regularly say things like Goldwell
wiffe instead of Goldwells wife and Barlowe owne brother instead
of Barlowes own brother. Many of these people were due for
transportation to plantations in Virginia and beyond. Baby mama
wasnt long in coming.
Besides that, if you were trying to learn English really fast, and only
from hearing people talk and imitating them, cant you imagine that
even when they were using the possessive s all nice and tidythat
while you were sorting out things like the past tense of see being
saw and the plural of man being menyou might find yourself
leaving off persnickety things like that s?
Adults learning languages around the world round the corners a bit
in situations like this, just as we do when we are getting pretty good
at French or Spanish but still dont command the little stuff.
In Spanish, there is an annoying little a that is used before a person

when its an object: l bes AnitaHe kissed Anitais wrong; you
have to say l bes a Anita, even though a is supposed to mean
to. You dont kiss to people! Anybody who has spoken good
schoolchild Spanish should admit that they dont always wangle
those little as. Africans in South Carolina approached possessive
s the same way. Its not that they never used itjust not always. It
became an option rather than a rule.

Baby mama, then, is a symptom of the birth of Ebonics as a mashup of assorted British regional dialects, seasoned by a sprinkle of
streamlining that any language could benefit from. In English, the
plural of lamb used to be lambru. Arent you glad it isnt now?
Black English has been going its own way now for a good while.
It has its own cadence. But the basics are largely what they always
were, and when people say baby mama, theyre channeling Bob
Crachit more than Bob Marley.
Suggested Reading
Green, African American English.
Nagle and Sanders, eds., English in the Southern United States.
1. Black English is simpler Standard English, but Standard English is
simpler Old English. Is there an argument that Standard English is,
therefore, bad grammar? Why or why not?
2. What aspect of French or Spanish have you found hardest to learn, and
would you think of it as an improvement in the language if that feature

somehow vanished?
15
C for Compounds
Lecture 3
ussian has enough noun and verb endings to sink a boat. But it
doesnt seem like Russian people ever even think about that.
Taiwanese tones are complicated, but people who have grown up in
Taiwanese-speaking households just think of it as something they speak with
their parents and not as being especially difficult. The way we really express
the future in Englishby using willis very subtle and very complicated,
but we walk around doing it as easily as we breathe.
Lecture 3: C for Compounds
Making New Nouns

In all of us, grammar is used mostly below the level of
consciousness. That includes one way that English speakers make
new nouns. Its something a foreigner would consider slightly
bizarre, but we do it every day without a thought.
16
On the one hand, English uses suffixes like -ment and -ation to
make nounsfor example, govern to government and dispute to
disputation. But on the other hand, those suffixes dont always
work: How would you make the verb recall into a noun? Theres no
recallment or recallation. Thats where things go below the radar;
you make recall into a noun by shifting the accent backward and
saying RE-call. It is interesting that you wouldnt say re-CALL.
But its not just that one word; its a process. Its the same with
how we can rebel against something and become a RE-bel or
record something to create a RE-cord. These arent just one-offs.
There is a piece of grammar that we all have deep in our brains
according to what we know now, it wouldnt be surprising to find
it in the temporal lobe somewhere and possibly on the left side
that changes a words part of speech with the strange little move of
putting the accent up front.
Basically, we apply this accent shift when something becomes

a thing; in that way, weve been putting it in that idiom. If you
see a bird that happens to be black, then you say you saw a black
BIRD. But if you see the particular kind of bird called a blackbird,
then you pronounce it BLACKbird. That is, blackbirds are a
thing, while black birds are just birds of a dull color that make us
wish they were parakeets.
To dabble just a bit in some terminology, black BIRD is an

adjective followed by a noun, while BLACKbird is called a
compound. So, compounds are something that happens over time;
the accent shifts as the novelty fades. If you saw a vat of purple
cream, youd point to that purple CREAM. However, the staple
dessert is pronounced ICE cream, but at first, it was pronounced
ice CREAM.
We create new compounds all the time without thinking about it:
bank scam, Burger King, cost control, point guard. Compounds
are one of the meat-and-potatoes elements of speaking English.
Imagine trying to explain to a foreigner who is learning English
why we say a rocky ROAD and call a street Maple ROAD
but say ACCESS road instead of access ROAD. Its because
access road is so conventionalized a concept that it is a compound,
a new word despite its spelling as two.
On spelling, by the way, one must beware; it can only help us so

much in identifying compounds. Often, you can tell a compound
from just a two-word concept by the way we spell it. A black board,
two words, is a plank of ebony hue, but a blackboard, one word, is
what you write with chalk on.
But spelling is conservative, and it has a way of trotting a few yards

behind whether something has become a compound or not. That
means we dont write icecream as one word and probably never will.
In the same way, there can be a white HOUSE somewhere, but

then theres the WHITE House, which, because its a thing, has
17
the accent shift. Its a compound, but it most likely will never be
written as one word. Writing can only shed a flickery light on what
a compound is; you know it not from what we scratch on paper, but
what comes out of our mouths.

In any case, the joy of compounds is that you can watch them
happening all the time within your actual life. We missed seeing
how -ed became the marker of the past by a long shot, and well
never know what it was like to hear God Be With You fuse into
Goodbye as Shakespeare practically did. But compounds? Just cock
your ear to the language and you find new ones everywhere.
Examining Colloquial English

One way we can get a look at this is in what is now a six-decade
archive of our television heritage, where we can get a good dose
of colloquialor relatively colloquialEnglish since World War
II. Sit through a certain amount of old television and you can hear
these accent shifts creating terms we use casually today, without
knowing that if we traveled just a few decades back in time, they
would make us sound a little peculiar.
18
Take one episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1973.
The characters order Chinese food. However, even as late as the
Watergate era, theyre calling it Chinese FOOD instead of the
way we say it now, ChiNESE food.
But its not that those actors talked funny; Mary Tyler Moore
and Valerie Harper talk just like other Americans. It was because
Chinese food wasnt a thing yet, and therefore, it wasnt a
compound for all American English speakers. It was still a little
exotic. People didnt usually have woks at home, and we were still
a more steak-and-potatoes country.
Today, it is almost certain that those same actors, in casual

conversation, say ChiNESE food just like the rest of us; they
have moved along with the language. That episode captures them,
and English, in a Polaroid snapshot of an earlier stage.
For us today, then, ChiNESE food is like BLACKbirds. Just

like a blackbird is something more specific than a bird that is black,
and ice cream is something more specific than cream with ice cubes
mixed in, when we say Chinese food, we mean something more
specific than food the way they make it in China. We mean a
thing, so to speaknamely, Chinese food as prepared in America
for Americans and often ordered as takeout.
If you think about it, if you do want to refer to cuisine as prepared

and eaten in China, you more likely say Chinese FOOD, just like
those characters in loud colors and broad collars on Mary Tyler
Moore 40 years ago.
Knowing how compounds work, you can even know how people
pronounced things in the past without hearing it. Ethnic food is a
useful example again. On one episode of The Honeymooners in
1956, Alice talks about making a PIZZA pie, as people still said
then; however, it was already shortening to just pizza, which she
says a few minutes later.
If you watch television commercials from the 1950s, you can find
people in black and white gleefully indulging in repulsive-sounding
substances represented as bringing pizza home in a can, and they
pronounce it as pizza PIE, just like today we would say nectarine
PIE because for some reason, nectarine pie isnt a thing.
In the 1990s, we became familiar with the term repeated stress

syndrome, pronounced repeated STRESS syndrome. But now,
its such an established term that it is no longer the adjective
REPEATED and the noun STRESS, but a compound. And
that means that the accent has to do the switch backward, to the
REPEATED. With a little trimming, it becomes rePEAT stress.
After a while in a compound, the second part can get so muffled

amidst all the noise we put on the first part that we can forget
what the second part even meant. We can imagine a gentle man,
but thats not what a gentleman exactly is. Is the state of Maryland
19
20
But it was this accent backshift process that created the word
originally that now feels like its just one thing instead of two.
Sometimes, spelling has completely caught up with spoken reality,
and we really cant have any idea how central compounding was to
the words we use every day.
You might think that if a rosy is a cute lil rose and a piggy is a cute
lil pig, then a daisy is a cute lildaze? A daisy is not a kind of
daze, especially because really theres no such thing as a daze. The
word daisy started as days eye.
Linguists dont know everything. Sometimes languages just throw

things at you that dont make senseor at least not yet. There
are compounding cases like that.
We say Maple ROAD, and we
say Maple LANE (not MAPLE
Lane or MAPLE road), but we
do say MAPLE Street (not Maple
STREET). Nobody knows why the
street cases are treated like Chinese
food and ice cream while the road
and lane cases just stay the way
they are.
The foundational linguist Antoine

Meillet explained language as a
system where everything holds
together. More useful is another
pioneering linguists observation:
Edward Sapir wrote in 1921 that all
grammars leak. They do, or else wed
be saying PENNY Lane instead of
American linguist Edward

Sapir (18841939) was
one of the founders of
ethnolinguistics, which is
the study of language in
the context of culture.
Pimbrils/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
really Marys land, or are we just saying basically the same thing as
Marilyn Monroes first name but spelling it differently? Today, the
land part just hangs there deadits a mumbled little lin. Think
about breakfast: What fast do you think of yourself as breaking?
Penny LANE, and the Beatles lyric wouldnt scan properly with
the music, and theyd have had to write the song about something
else, like maybe a woman named Penny Lane, in which case they
could have said Penny LANE.

One way we make new words in English is to shift a words accent

backward, and the result is the difference like the one between a
loud SPEAKER and a LOUDspeaker, which is quite another
thing. Its why anyone knows that you worry about BLOWback,
even though if something comes toward you that youd rather not
deal with, you blow it BACKnot BLOW it back.
Armed with this subconscious knowledge, you dont even need to

wonder how people were pronounging the term air conditioning
before it was universal. In fact, the next time youre talking to
someone in their 80s or older, ask them whether people used to say
air conDITioning. Theyll wonder how you knew.
Suggested Reading
Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language.
1. Why do some people say GREEN beans, with the accent on green
rather than beans?
2. How did people once say Broadway, and how do we know?
21
D for Double Negatives

Lecture 4
here was a lot of nifty negativity in English back in the old days
meaning that there were all kinds of ways to express not-ness
that nowadays we dont get to play around with. There were special
negative versions of some verbs. So, you could have, or if you didnt have,
you naved. Somebody was, or if they werent, then somebody nas. So, in Old
English, to say I have ships, you said Ic hbbe scipu, and to say I dont have
ships, you could say Ic nbbe scipu. This carried on into Middle English:
There was no man anywhere so virtuous was There nas no man nowhere
so vertuous.
Lecture 4: D for Double Negatives
Creating Negatives
French makes a sentence negative by putting a pair of headphones
on the verb: ne before and pas afterward. I dont walk is Je NE
marche PAS. If youve ever thought that was kind of swell, then
you wouldve liked early English, where things were the same
way: ne before and nought after. He doesnt speak was He NE
speketh NAWT.
22
After a while, the NE wore away, and we were left with just the
NAWT, which is exactly like what has happened in French the way
its actually spoken, where to sound like a person instead of a book,
for a long time now, people have been dropping the NE and just
leaving the PAS.
As you can see from the way you could say no nought, early
English reveled in double negatives. Think about the following
sentence: There nas no man nowhere so vertuous. These days,
were told that a sentence like that is wrong. It would have to be
There was no man so virtuous anywhere. After all, two negatives
make a positive, dont they? So if you say I dont see nothing, then
that means that nothing is not what you see and that, therefore, you
must see something.
Its one thing to be able to work out that two negatives technically
could be taken to indicate a positive, but its a mental trick
one that requires the same kind of mental bending as it does to
comprehend that the world must not be flat or that bikes stay up
when we ride them.
In the grand scheme of things, its a pretty glum accusation to level

at humanity. Yes, humanity, because double negatives are perfectly
legal in most of the languages of the worldand there are 6,000
of them!
I dont see anything is I dont see nothing in French (Je ne vois

rien), Italian (Non vedo niente), Russian (Ja ne vizhu nichto), etc.
Around the world, some of the only places that have languages
where double negatives are illegal besides English-speaking ones
are parts of northern EuropeGerman and Dutch dont like double
negatives eitherand then some languages that barely anybody
has ever heard of in Mexico (such as Nahuatl), plus one language
spoken in the Caucasus Mountains.
Even in English,
German, and Dutch,
once you step outside
of
the
standard
dialect, the colloquial
dialects are full of
double negatives
just like most of
the languages of
the world. In fact,
double negatives are
legal in every dialect
of English except the
standard one, and
Standard English is
one of hundreds of
EDUCA33E/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury

Tales, is known for using double negatives
extensively in his writing.
23
Englishes. Double negatives are fine in English overall; its just that
something is up with one of the dialects.
24
It was different not so long ago. In Old English and Middle English,
doubling the negative just meant doubling the force of the denial. It
was a way to spice up the chili. Ic ne con singan was I cant sing. Ic
ne con noht singan was literally I cant sing nothing, and it meant I
cant sing a thing!
Sometimes, Old English scribes would copy a document using just

single negation and revise it by doubling the negatives because
it felt more proper. Even Shakespeare rolled around in double
negatives, and not just the sweatier characters. In As You Like It,
Celia seems like she would at most perspire occasionally, not sweat,
and yet there she is cooing I cannot go no further. In the play, shes
supposed to be rather elegant, a touch of Anne Hathaway. But
because of the pox on double negatives since her day, in that line, to
us she sounds like a rapper.
So what happened? The way the story is often told, it was a certain
grammarian of the late 18th century named Robert Lowth. He was
a bishop and scholar, and he wrote A Short Introduction to English
Grammar to fashion a standard form of writing English. It played
a central role in what kinds of things are considered bad grammar
today. Lowth certainly did declare that two negatives make a positive.
However, this story is an oversimplification. The truth is that Lowth

was only casting in stone something that had been happening in his
circles for a good 200 years. In the 1500s, in London, writerly sorts
of the social elite started using the any words (such as anywhere or
anything, for example) instead of double negation. We even know
that it was mostly men doing this, not women.
We dont know why people started doing this and probably never
will. No one happened to write about it at the time; they just started
doing it. It seems to have been almost a sort of fad or an affectation.
Such things happen; theyre happening now.
The Any Fad

These days, there is a certain naked noun tic percolating into
American Englishfor example, using epic fail instead of epic
failure. Why this, and why now? All we know is that these things
happenedjust like I dont see anything as a substitute for I dont
see nothing. For a while, there was even an anywhen: Today, we
say I didnt go ever, but at some point, you could say I didnt
go anywhen.

Under normal circumstances, this would have just been something

odd that some people were doing somewhere, but the London
elite had special prestige, and their version of English made it
into print more than anyone elses. There were people like Robert
Lowth writing in it. And to them, as far as they were concerned, if
there was going to be an official kind of English, it might as well
be theirs.
As a result, two negatives make a positive, and I dont see nothing

is wrong. Were so used to that now; I dont see anything feels like
a perfectly normal sentence. But its odd if you stop and think about
it a little.
The any fad didnt qualify as an improvement over the double

negative tradition. In fact, using the any system is kind of unnatural
in the grand scheme of things. We get used to it, just like we read
Moby Dick and pretend to like winter. But we have to be taught
that double negatives are wrong and illogical, because they dont
feel that way to us at first, as childrenor even as newcomers to
English, because the language a foreigner grew up with almost
always has double negatives in it.
Even though we cant help processing double negatives as slangy,

because we only hear them in colloquial kinds of English, deep
down to speak English means hearing double negatives as genuine
and warm. Instead of Aint No Mountain High Enough, would
you really want to hear a song called There Isnt Any Mountain
High Enough? It wouldnt even scan with the melody.
25

26
Its a funny thing. Overall, the things that happen to have been
declared as Standard English tend to be a little odd, a little rare, a
little unnatural. Standard always seems to be things that none of
the dozens of other dialects do, and often the standard things are
even rare as languages go worldwide.
Normal languages dont have the same word for you in the singular
and the plural. Older English didnt either; there was thou in the
singular and you for the plural. And thats the way it still is in
plenty of regional dialects in England today. But only in that weird
standard did you creep into the singular and make a nest. If you
speak Hindi, then to you this feels normal; theres one language that
happens to do it the English way.
Its almost as if somebody back in the 1600s and 1700s was actively
trying to make Standard English kind of difficult, something you
have to wrap your head around instead of just lying back and
speaking it. Theres even something to be said for the possibility
that this elite class were setting themselves off from the hoi polloi
by adopting these peculiar wrinkles of grammar.
Part of being a person of any class is having a way of talking that

is local to your group, and to people like Robert Lowth and his set,
things like I dont see anything and singular you may have felt like
a kind of in-group lingo. This doesnt have to have been conscious;
such things rarely are. But it would have had massive effects. At the
end of the day, none of this means that we can make speeches and
write prose with double negatives and expect to be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, the rest of English has continued to go on its merry

way. Standard English means we say not I dont go no more but I
dont go anymore. But beyond the printed page, where the Robert
Lowths arent listening, even anymore itself has slipped away from
the dock.
Listen closely to someone from the band of states that runs roughly
from Pennsylvania west to about Utah, and youll catch sentences
like Pantyhose are so expensive anymore that I just stopped

wearing them or Thats still the custom there anymore. If you didnt
grow up with it, it sounds weirdbut you understand it. And thats
all language is about: understanding.
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
, The Fight for English.
1. If double negatives arent actually unclear, then are there still reasons
for teaching people out of using them, and what are they?
2. Would it improve the quality of the song I Aint Got Nobody if it were
reworded as I Dont Have Anybody? Or, do I Aint Got Nobody and

I Dont Have Anybody truly have the same meaning?
27
E for Etymology
Lecture 5
eny, meeny, miny, moe. Weve all said it or at least heard it. Children
use it to pick someone to do something, or be it, and sometimes
adults even use it. But where does it come from? Whats an eeny? Or
a meeny? Certainly, this meeny isnt supposed to be an unpleasant person. In
fact, where eeny, meeny, miny, moe comes from has something to teach us
about etymologywhat it is, what it isnt, and why linguists dont talk about
it as much as the public seems to wish we did.
Lecture 5: E for Etymology
Counting Words
The words five, finger, fist, foist, pentagon, Pentecost, and
quintessence can all be traced back to one word for fivepnkwe
in one language spoken by nomads who migrated from the south of
what is today the Ukraine, about 8,000 years ago.
28
Those people migrated both far to the west and far to the east,
and their language was the source of what became most of the
languages that are spoken today in Europe, Iran, and India. You can
compare all of those languages words for the same things and work
backward to tell what the word was in that original language.
Linguists call it Proto-Indo-European, and archaeologists have

recently identified the remains of their society. They liked their
horses, and their metalwork was worth a look and then some. They
didnt have writing, but they certainly talked, and we can know
all of these millennia later that their word for five was pnkwe and
that thats why we English speakers call our fingers fingers and our
quintessences quintessences.
We can even know that Proto-Indo-European mothers taught

their children how to count by saying something like oino, dwo,
trei, kwetwer, pnkwe. Oino went on to become inch, among many
other words. Dwo became quite a few words, and a couple of them
iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe originated in Great Britain, where shepherds used the
sequence of words to count their sheep.
were twilight and biscuit. Trei not only became three, but today its
hiding out in words like contest and sitar. Kwetwer became trapeze.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is all about sheep in Great Britain. There,
in rural places especially until recently, there were special numbers
that people usedactually, not just with sheep, but for counting in
games and such.
Interestingly, these numbers are clearly from the languages that

were spoken in what is now known as the United Kingdom before
English got there. These languages are called Celtic, and one of the
living ones is Welsh.
Because the counting numbers are apparently ancient, and Welsh

has been going its own way like any language for a very long
time, the correspondence isnt perfect. However, in the counting
numbers, four, five, and ten are pedera, pump, and dig. In Welsh,
the same numbers are pedwar, pump, and deg.
29

30
The counting numbers come from what were regular numbers for
the Celts who lived in the area before the Angles and Saxons and
Jutes took over in the 5th century. And that brings us to eeny, meeny,
miny, moe.
In the counting numbers, one, two, three, four is aina, peina,

para, pedera. Lets zero in on aina, peina: Imagine saying
those two fast, the way we tend to say numbers in sequence
onetwothreefourfive!and, especially, imagine that so much
time has gone by that you dont even know that these numbers
come from a different language, that you never see them written
down and they start mashing together.
It would be a short step from aina, peina to aina, maina (because

p and m are both lip sounds), and then why not ainy, meiny? Now,
three and four in the counting numbers are para and pedera,
which are not like miny and moe. But then, para and pedera both
begin with p like peina, so youd expect people just reciting them
reflexively to turn those ps into ms, too, so it isnt an accident that
its meeny, m-iny, m-oe.
Its a lot like that call kids use in games: Olly, olly, oxen free!
Nobody knows what it means, but apparently, it started as
something like Calling all the outs in free, meaning that everybody
in the game who was deemed out is now allowed to come out.
But now, people just howl it out as if it were Turkish, which it
might as well be. Imagine the same thing happening to aina, peina,
para, pederamaking it all rhyme and match and come out easily.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is pretty normal.
Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock is a cute

nursery rhyme, and its fun to say, but what is hickory, dickory,
dock? Consider that there were rurals in the Welsh area long ago
who were counting eight, nine, ten with the words hovera, dovera,
dick. Now imagine saying that over and over again for a thousand
years without knowing what it meant, and hickory, dickory, dock is
almost inevitable.
The Origin of Words

Usually, a word traces back to some other word a long time ago
that meant something pretty similar. So, where does the word tree
come from? Old English had a word treo that meant tree, and that
came from a word that was used by people somewhere in the south
of what is today the Ukraine. They didnt say tree; they said deru,
which meant oak.

First it was oak, now its treeone doesnt run out and shout that
one through the streets. However, if you hang around etymologies
long enough, you do find plenty of cases that, even if they arent
as exotic as the hickory, dickory ones, are more involved than oaks
starting to be called trees, and they also teach us larger lessons
about what languages are like.
For example, quaint is something we now associate with Jane

Austen or saying something like Goodness me! Quaint started
out meaning clever, crafty. This was in the 1200s when English
was still Middle instead of Modern.
As time went by, there was a sense that if quaint meant clever,
then you could easily use it to refer to things that were cleverly
made, like clothesin the same way that Americans used to talk
about someone looking smart in their fancy duds. But one thing
leads to another.
If youre looking well turned out, you, in general, just may be kind
of pretty. Or at least youre looking better than you did before you
put that stuff on. If youre all gussied up, you might even have a
certain air of fanciness about youfanciness, or even affectation.
So as time goes by, the word quaint might start having a meaning
of, basically, all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask
me. Thats what the word meant into the 1700s.
But suppose youre a young person listening to adults referring

to certain dresses, carriages, ways of talking, foods, and so on as
quaint in that meaning. The adults mean it as a kind of qualified
31
praise, but to you, what they are praising is old fashioned. To you,
its all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask me, but
its from the old days, so really its kind of cute in a charmingly
dismissible kind of way. That is exactly what quaint means now.
That happened step by step.
32
Over time, the meanings of words change constantly, and thats a

harder thing to swallow when we can feel it happening. However,
unless we wouldnt want words to have changed into the ones that
we use the way we use them today, then logically we have to accept
the changes that are happening now.
Were taught that the right meaning is of the word literally is

word for word: He didnt mean it literally. Were supposed to
pull our hair out when people use literally to convey emphasis, as
in They got literally no help. And watch out when somebody uses
literally to intensify something that is itself a figurative concept.
The American people literally stood on the brink of a new
Depressionno, people werent standing on some actual brink, so
they couldnt have been literally doing it in any sense.
But people have been using literally in these wrong ways a long
time. John Dryden in the 17th century was already doing it, and
then Jane Austen, Thackeray, and so on. Doesnt that suggest that
its less that literally is being misused than that its meaning has
changed, just like quaints did? This is a clue that literally is just
doing what comes naturally.
Actually started out meaning referring to action, but today, we

say Actually, thats not true, and we dont mean That isnt true in
referring to action, which would make no real sense. Or, who hears
you say Surely hell get here and pictures someone arriving with a
glow of sureness? In addition, very started out meaning true. But
imagine some pundit of old saying that its wrong to say very red
because that would mean truly red, and that that would imply that
redness all by itself is somehow untrue.
Literally once did mean word for word, but its added a new wing
that conveys emphasis. In any language, people are always seeking
new ways of spicing up their statements, and literally has just
followed the noble tradition that actually, surely, and very have,
with no one batting an eye.
So, if nice started out meaning stupidand it didand silly started

out meaning blessed, and obnoxious used to mean vulnerable,
then its okay for literally to now mean really, especially because
really itself first meant in the actual world, so no one would have
said Im really tired unless they meant to make it maximally clear
that their fatigue was embodying itself here and now on our terra
firma instead of in the fifth dimension.
Another word that came from that pnkwe word was punch (not
the fist kind, but the drink). Pnkwe meant five, and while some
people were spreading it into Europe, others were taking it to India.
When pnkwe got there, it became panch, and punch originally had
five ingedientssugar, spice, lemon juice, water, and alcoholso
people called it five, but for them, that meant calling it punch, and
the English brought that home with them.
Suggested Reading
Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology.
Liberman, Word Origins and How We Know Them.
1. What will you say the next time someone mentions that people misuse
the word literally? Do you now agree or disagree with that sentiment?
2. What is the etymology of your first name?
33
F for First Words

Lecture 6
here have been experiments now and then where misled individuals
have tried to determine what language is born within us by shielding
babies from speech and trying to see what they came up with.
According to Herodotus, an Egyptian king tried it and traced one word in
the babbling he heard to a language spoken in Turkey. Then, James IV of
Scotland had two babies raised by a deaf woman, and some people somehow
had the idea that what the kids were speaking was Hebrew. Most people
intuit that what the kids were speaking in cases like these was nothing.
Lecture 6: F for First Words
Baby Sounds
There are various cases of children not exposed to language until
they were sevenor even in their 20sand none of them were
discovered prattling away in Turkish, Hebrew, or anything else.
Rather, the language that humanity seems to share is limited to
exactly two words, the ones any parents have heard: mama and papa.
34
Why those words? Really, it just comes down to anatomy. The /ah/
sound results from just pushing air out of a semi-open mouth. The
first consonants children make are the ones that come most easily.
Just thinking about your lips and teeth for a minute, you can imagine
that /mm/ will be one of the first sounds any baby will make by just
buzzing through the lips, while /p/ will come naturally if the baby
is going /ah/ and then stops the airflow for a second with his or
her lips: /ahhhpahhh/. A /b/ sound is a variation on the same sound.
Then, babies might stop the airflow by putting their tongue on the
ridge behind their teeth, and if they do, then theyre making either
a /t/ or a /d/.
Often, its the /m/-type sound that comes first, and hence, ma. If the
mother hears this and responds to it, then there is a link between a
sound and an entity. Then, babies have a way of doubling syllables,
and they find it easier to understand doubled syllables. So between

them and the mother, ma will become mama.
Once the /p/ or /t/ or /d/ comes, then the other parent will just as
naturally become papa or dadaor tata (tateh means father in
Yiddish). In addition, one of the few languages in the world without
double negatives besides Standard English is Nahuatl, and father is
ta in Nahuatl.
It is remarkable, even when we understand this origin scenario

for mama and papa, how extremely common words exactly like
that are among the 6,000 languages of the world. Latin had mater
and pater.
The African language Luo is vastly unlike English in all ways. For
one thing, every plural is irregular. Imagine if the plural of cup was
cop and the plural of door was goor and the plural of cucumber was
cucuhhhhmberthats what Luo is really like. However, mother
and father are mama
and baba.
Many people from

India in America
speak Tamil; ask them
how to say mommy
and daddy and theyll
tell you amma and
appa.
Greenlandic
Eskimo people say
anaana and ataataq.
These are different,
but also not different.
Fuse/Thinkstock.
In Tamil, which is spoken by many people

from India in America, the words meaning
mommy and daddy are amma and
appa, respectively.
The Start of Language

Linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg claim to have
reconstructed some of the first words of the world by comparing
all of them. The word for finger would have been tik. The word
35
for water would have been akwa. Most linguists dismiss this work.
Even tracing the words in Indo-European is chancy: We will never
actually hear or read what the actual words were, and professionals
have been fighting for almost 200 years now on details.
36
To trace even further back, you have to compare Proto-IndoEuropeanwhich is already full of question marks itselfwith
other reconstructed protolanguages like the one that would have
given birth to languages like Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic,
the one that would have given birth to Chinese and Tibetan and
hundreds of other languages, and so on. By then, the signal is so
weak that its impossible to be really confident.
Most linguists who specialize in this kind of thing think we cant

know anything about language before about 10,000 years ago.
Ruhlen has later done work that suggests that we can know a few
things about languages perhaps about 50,000 years backbut just
a few things, and even by then, there were thousands of languages
already. What were the first words? Were still in the dark.
To an extent, our languages are about imitation. And a language

can be more about imitation than English. We have our pow, bang,
zoom words, but in Japanese, for example, there are so many words
like this that directly imitate sounds that knowing them is part of
expressing yourself in any real way.
For example, the Japanese word for the sound a dog makes is
wanwan. The word for baggy is dabudabu; the word for tinkle
is chirinchirin. To express that something kept on going, like a
cucumber plant that takes over the yard, the word gungun is used.
Even in English, there are sounds that any native speaker associates
with certain concepts. In words like gleam, glimmer, glitter,
glance, glint, glow, glamour, and glimpse, notice how /gl/ seems to
symbolize a flashing of light, or the perception of one.
Think about how even the word glory feels to native English
speakerseven though it technically doesnt have anything to do
with a flash going off. Part of why we cherish the word is because
the /gl/ at the beginning makes it feel like a pretty light is going off
or something is glowing.
There are plenty of sounds like that in English. For example,

in words like slink, slime, slither, slug, and sloppy, /sl/ means
lowly, faintly moist, and icky. Or, certainly it isnt an accident
that crash, smash, crush, slash, and splash all end in /sh/: To an
English speaker, /sh/ at the end of a word means breakage or at least
crushing or splashing.
The vowels get into the act, too. All over the world, high, tight
sounds like /ee/ and /ih/ correspond to small things, while /ah/ and
/oh/ correspond to big onesfor example, teeny weeny, little, slim
as opposed to large, broad, vast.
There is a tribe in South America called the Huambisa, and in their

language, one bird is called a chunchuikit while there is a fish called
a mauts. A group of American students was given these two words
and asked to guess which one was a bird and which one was a fish;
98 percent of them guessed that a chunchuikit was a bird and a
mauts was a fish.
Greatbut we still have a problem. For one thing, languages have

thousands upon thousands of words. Even once weve covered the
ones that are imitative and the ones that sound like this or that in
vaguer ways, and then we toss in mama and papa for good measure,
there are still an awful lot of words left. Plus, theres how you put
them together; you cant just throw them around in any old order.
And there are pesky things like how we use do in English: Do you
know him? I do not know him. When we use do in that way, it
doesnt even mean anything. Where do you get words that not only
dont sound like anything but dont even mean anything?
37

38
Some linguists think that language began about 80,000 years

ago; others see 150,000 as much more likely. But we will never
hear those ancient speakers, and they didnt write. So we have to
guessintelligently, but still guess.
One interesting stab is an idea, from anthropologist Dean Falk, that

language started with mothers cooing and playing patty-cake with
their infants. Falk is interested in what linguists call motherese
that high-pitched, slow mode we go into when talking to babies.
Its a human universal, not a Western middle-class conceit as we
might think. There isnt a culture on the planet where children are
not spoken to in that way.
Falk points out that babies become desperate when deprived of

contact, just like primate babies, but that this would have been a
problem for early hominids because foraging requires putting baby
down for a spell. Suppose motherese emerged as a way of soothing
babies in face-to-face interaction without having to be touching
them directly.
Falk hypothesizes that motherese started as soundswe imagine

lots of /ee/ and /ih/ and repetitionand then evolved from sounds
into statements of increasing complexity, with language as the
end result.
Out of the countless blobs of speech an infant comes up with after

mama and papa, how and why would one of them be selected to
mean go out or want? And how do you then get to a full and
complicated sentence, such as the following: Look how he already
cant jump even halfway over that wall they put up?
There are theories that music was the key to languageand we

kind of hope that this is true. It seems plausible. Many languages
are spoken with tones, such as Chinese, where the little syllable ma
can mean horse, mother, scold, or hemp depending on what
pitch you say it on.
Motherese has that musical quality, and mothers sing to their babies,
and babies seem to like singingso it makes sense that maybe
language started from people imitating something like animal calls.
This is archaeologist Steven Mithens idea.
Suppose cavemen watched a pack of wolves hunting down an elk,

and they started saying ruffRUFFruff among themselves when
they gathered to hunt. After a while, ruffRUFFruff would come to
mean Lets hunt. Imagine that after a while, there is a good bunch
of these calls. Linguist Alison Murray has fleshed things out here.
Imagine if for when you wanted to tell someone to give something

to a woman, there was a warble tebima and that there was another
warble for when you wanted to tell someone to share something
with a woman, kumapi. Tebima and kumapi wouldnt be words or
sentences, but just calls, like ruffRUFFruff.
But suppose a smart person noticed that both calls had -ma in
them and abstracted that -ma could be taken to mean just her.
This would be the birth of a word. And then imagine if humans
abstracted lots of words like this and then started combining them
to express whole thoughtsmaybe, for example, something like
ma ruff to mean she hunts.
Theories like these are clever and intriguing but ultimately dont
quite prove anything. However, they genuinely are currently the
state of the art in our attempts to figure out how language started,
because its a tough nut to crack. Attempts have been percolating
for over 150 years, and todays attempts tend to fall into categories
that were established long, long ago.
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.
Falk, Finding Our Tongues.
39
1. If you made up a language, what would the first 25 words you
constructed be?
2. What was the first sentence, or approximation of a sentence, that your
child uttered, and did it contain any of the words you just listed?
40
G for Greek Alphabet

Lecture 7
ts easy to miss how deeply peculiar an alphabet isnot the alphabet,

as in the Roman one we are most familiar with, but any alphabet. We
take it so much for granted that on a certain level, we think of language
as actually being words written out according to the way they sound. Try to
hear someone say already and not think of the word spelled out, floating in
the air. But this is actually a highly exceptional way of being human.
The First Writing
Writing in general was only invented in about 3500 B.C., about
5,500 years ago, and that first writing was based on picturesthe
hieroglyphics we see on ancient Egyptian monuments that make
us halfway suppose that ancient Egyptians walked around in that
weird angular pose that they drew people in. Alphabet was invented
later, in about 2000 B.C.

This means that if humanity had existed for 24 hours, alphabetic

writing came along at about 11:15 PM. Before about 11:07 PM,
when hieroglyphics had been invented, for human beings, language
was something you spoke, something that came out of your mouth.
Once it was said, it was gone. When someone said already, you
didnt imagine it written because there was no writing.
Alphabet, in particular, permeates our sense of what it is to be

alive in ways wed never think of. For example, what in the world
is the ABCs? We sing a song to the melody otherwise associated
with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that is composed of all of the
sounds in our languageor most of them. There are actually 26
letters for about 44 sounds, which is why the letter I can stand for
/ih/ in bit, /igh/ in nice, /ee/ in antique, etc.
The song is not only a song of the sounds, but also the special
names we have for the sounds, and it is always sung in a certain
41
Lecture 7: G for Greek Alphabet
order. The alphabet is a truly odd thing, and as such, it took a while
for humans to come upon.
42
Imagine that youre a person from the time before writing, and
you decide to invent a way of transcribing language onto bark or
papyrus or bones or whatever is around. What would your first
approach be? If you think about it, the last thing youd come up
with is working out a separate symbol for each individual sound
in your language. Its not what people around the world have been
inclined to do, and it isnt what happened.
The first writing consisted of exactly what any of us would come up

with almost immediately if we had never known alphabet: pictures.
Thats what Egyptian hieroglyphics wereabout 700 pictures.
It became more involved than that, just as it would if we messed
around with our own picture system for a while. But in the end, it
was a system with two main qualities: It was beautiful, and it was
clumsy. Its hard to learn 700 of anything, much less muck around
with rebuses.
Its almost as if the Egyptians knew it, too, because amidst all of this
magnificent mess were symbols that were used just for individual
sounds. In hieroglyphics, these were used for clarification,
though. Youd add a consonant or two to remind the reader what
the general shape of the word was that the pictures were meant to
correspond to.
So, to write carve, you could take the symbol that meant wood
and the symbol that meant knife, add the symbols that meant h
and t, and the reader would know that you meant the word hti
for carve.
Thats all cute, but it was a trick, almost a game. This was an elitist
system mastered by carvers in service to the rulers. It trickled
down in a rather simplified form for writing in ink and for business
purposesthis was the hieratic script.
But even so, there were 700 symbols, plus all the folderol. Anybody
watching this being done who didnt have writing would still barely
be able to help wanting to import it, but also perhaps streamline it
so that people could wrap their heads around it who had more on
their plates than sitting around scribing elegantly.
Suppose, for example, you were one of the people Egyptians

imported as workers or one of the foremen. Now and then, theyd
write things down. Often, it was on the face of rocks. Around
2000 B.C., one of these workers on the Sinai Peninsula had the
idea of a version of the hieroglyphic system based only on the part
about having symbols for soundsspecifically, the sounds of the
languages the workers spoke. They were from across the Red Sea
and spoke Semitic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
Egyptian was something quite different. Suppose hieroglyphics had

a symbol for snakethe word for snake in Semitic was roughly
nahashuso in this new system, that snake symbol became the
symbol for the letter N.
Take a little over 20 of these, and you had the first alphabet (sort
of). Actually, our workers only developed symbols for consonants.
It seemed like enough to them. You can put yourself in their heads:
No one has ever heard of an alphabet; all anyone knows is this
hieroglyphic thing that looks more like a Jackson Pollock painting
than a writing system.
So, now were writing things so you can perceive the basic sound of
language from the writing. For example, the writing of the sequence
y cn prcv th bsc snd f lngg frm th wrtng is a much better sight
than pictures of branches and knives to mean carve. Today, Arabic
and Hebrew are still written pretty much that way.
Some other Semitic speakers picked up this system, including

the Phoenicians. These were Middle Eastern people on the coast
of the Mediterranean. They got around quite a bit, and probably
43
somewhere on Cyprus in the 8th century B.C., the Greeks from

across the pond picked up the Phoenician writing system.

As it happened, Phoenician had some letters that Greek didnt

need. In Phoenician, the glottal stop/uht/was an important
sound, while in Greek, it was basically just what happened if you
got punched in the stomach. So the Greeks took the Phoenicians A
symbol, which they used for /uht/, and used it for their vowel /ah/.
Phoenician was overall a pretty guttural affair, like Arabic is

today. They had not only an /h/ sound but also a /kh/ sound. The
Greeks took the Phoenicians /kh/ symbol and made it into /h/, and
meanwhile, they took the Phoenicians /h/ symbol, which looked
like a backward E, and made it into E.
The Invention of the Alphabet

The Greeks invented the alphabet. They were the first people to
hit on the real thinga symbol for every sound. Eventually, the
Romans picked it up, too, which is why English speakers use it. It
was a magnificent invention. An alphabet is the most democratic
kind of writing system. Its also the easiest kind to learn.
44
Hieroglyphics meant mastering 700 symbols plus how theyre used.

Today, its not fair to say that Chinese includes 60,000 symbols
because nobody is expected to know all of those. However, you do
need to know a few thousand to be a basically literate personplus
how to write them and the awesomely random ways they are used.
Many writing systems today go by syllable instead, and that makes

sense, because when you ask nonliterate people what the parts of
words are, their most spontaneous sense of the parts is the syllables,
not the isolated sounds. After all, thats how we hear languageas
syllables in sequence.
But even those kinds of systems mean you need about 70 symbols;
an alphabet will be fine with about 30 or 35. An alphabet makes it
easier to foster universal literacy. However, ultimately, the alphabet
At Delphi, written records from the ancient Greeks have been found etched
into rocks.
remains a very odd thing: a transcription of language based not at

all on pictures but only written representations of sounds that in real
life go by very quickly. As an odd thing, the alphabet only settled
into consciousness in the way that were used tovery slowly.

For example, we think of writing as sequences not just of sounds

or just of syllables, but of individual words. The Greeks didnt: It
was written with no spaces between the words. The idea was that
you read writing aloud, and that way, you would feel where the
words were. The writers were still thinking of language as a string
of sound.
The alphabet was handy because you could write down that string
of sound, as is. They knew, intellectually, that the string was
composed of separate words. All humans have a sense that there
are distinct words. But the Greeks also knew that the words, in real
speech, dont have spaces between them. So why would the Greeks
write with spaces?
45
Were used to the idea that in a reference book, things will be

arranged in alphabetical order. But look at a medieval book
and youll usually find that theyre great with putting things
under particular letters and arranging those piles, so to speak, in
alphabetical order. But, within a particular letter, everything is just
thrown in with no order.
The reason they didnt do alphabetical order is because if things

to write on are expensive, if you think about it, how do you put
a thousand things written on assorted sheets of whatever into
alphabetical order based on the second letter? The first letter is
easy; in English, there would be 26 piles. But what about a thousand
things all starting with the same letter? Youd need note cards, but
before paper is common and cheap, whos going to make note
cards out of leather or vellum or whatever the fashionable medium
happened to be at the time?
The capacity for language that were probably genetically specified

for is an oral one. Just like we arent genetically specified to
drive, although many of us do it every day, we have no genetic
endowment for readingin fact, it damages our eyesand no
genetic endowment for writing, which is hard on the hands.
Suggested Reading
Baron, Alphabet to Email.
Sacks, Letter Perfect.
1. If an alphabet is more efficient and easier to learn than a picture-
based writing system, then are there arguments in favor of the Chinese
maintaining their system nevertheless, or would it be advisable for them
to switch to an alphabetic writing system?
46
2. Penmanship is said to be on the decline. Is there value in being able to

render alphabetic symbols in the modern world, as opposed to typing
and understanding them?
47
H for Hobbits
Lecture 8
his lecture is about hobbitswhat they can show us about how

linguistics is a kind of science. From the outside, it easily seems
like what linguists do is either to indicate what ways of speaking are
wrong or to catalog the etymologies of words. However, this is not what
linguists do. When people ask linguists what they do, the answer that they
are trained to give is study language scientifically, but that doesnt really
help. What does that mean?
Lecture 8: H for Hobbits
The Disappearance of Prefixes and Suffixes

The languages of Indonesia and the South Seas to the east of the
island of New Guinea are a family, and it is hugecontaining about
a thousand languages. A few languages in this family, called the
Austronesian family, dont have any prefixes or suffixes.
48
However, Austronesian languages arent supposed to be naked.

Many of them have a kind of active-passive fetish where you have
to mark that all over the place with prefixes. Other ones get very,
very picky about whether something is transitive or intransitive;
you have to use some suffix for that. Theres always something.
There are plenty of languages in the world that dont use prefixes or
suffixes much, including Chinese. But the place to find languages
like that is not down in Indonesia and the South Seas. In this case,
a tiny cluster of languages is sitting there contrasting bizarrely with
hundreds and hundreds of their relatives right around them.
Austronesian languages were all born from a grandfather language

that had prefixes and suffixes, and when that language branched out
into a thousand new ones, they all carried that family trait along
except this little gang. Where did the prefixes and suffixes go?
Theres no actual documented way that people just junk the way the
grammars of their languages work for no reason. Something drops
here and there, sure; for example, English speakers are slowly
letting go of whom. But languages dont just strip entirely.
An Austronesian language with no prefixes and suffixes just doesnt

make sense. Why just those languages? Why there? It is interesting
that there was the island of Flores, where right around this time,
skeletons of little people were found. Its pretty much agreed
now that these little hobbit people, as they have been called, were a
different species of Homo: Homo floresiensis.
While the skeletons date back 13,000 years, there are legends
among the people who live there now of little people living with
modern humans, who had some kind of language of their own and
could repeat back in modern peoples language.
The legends suggest that these little people were still around as
recently as just a few centuries ago, and the descriptions of the
FunkMonk/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0.
In 2003, evidence of Homo floresiensis was discovered on Flores Island, Indonesia.

49
people are detailed, even to the point that people explicitly set them
apart from just fantastical spiritsthey have plenty of them that
they talk about, tooso that we can tell that there really were such
people on Flores.
50
This seemed just perfect. The reason these Flores languages

are so strangely simplified is because they were taken up as a
second language by these little people, and they simplified it. We
streamline a lot of the hard stuff when we learn French and Spanish
in the classroomwe make it easierand thats exactly what these
Flores languages are like, compared to the ones around them.
It seems that the little people were gradually incorporated into the
modern human society over time; probably, they were subordinated
in some way. It would have meant that modern human kids were
hearing the little peoples version of the language as much as the
real one.
For example, Afrikaans in South Africa is a simplified version of

Dutch. Dutch colonists took on Africansas a matter of fact, they
were the ones who speak click languagesas herders and nurses,
and their children often heard the nursemaids Dutch as much
as their parents Dutch. Pretty soon, this new kind of Dutch was
everyones everyday language, and Afrikaans was born.
Its even why English is kind of easy. Vikings came and dumbed
down Old English when they married English-speaking women
and exposed their kids to bad English. Wouldnt that be the perfect
explanation for how these languages got to be the way they are?
It seemed likely that the reason these Flores languagesnamed

Keo, Ngada, Rongga, Ende, Nage, and Manggaraididnt have any
prefixes or suffixes was because of interspecies contact. However,
unfortunately, all recollections of the little people record that
they lived apart from Homo sapiens and that they were processed
as freakish.
This would mean that there would be no reason for them to learn
sapiens languages to any significant extentand that there would
certainly be no reason for sapiens to start talking like the hobbits.
Thats what we would need to explain why the Flores languages
took it all off the way they did: nonnative people speaking
them wrong and then being imitated. But why would anybody
imitate how the hobbits talked if they were never around and
considered repulsive?
However, the problem is still that languages do not just strip naked.
Basically, its clear that at some point, adults must have come to
Flores and learned the local languages only partially and left them
changed forever. But who?
Written history cant help much. Flores societies were oral ones
without writing until they encountered the West starting in the
1500s, and even after that, European observers had no real interest
in chronicling population movements between it and other islands.
And as for archaeology, it hasnt gone far on Flores yet; what we
know about the hobbits even existing is a lot of it.
Clues in the Languages

In cases like this where things happened without being written
down, linguists look for clues in the languages themselves. If
Flores languages were picked up by adults at some point, then what
evidence might there be, other than the nakedness, that might tell us
something more specific about what happened?

There are two very odd things about the vocabularies of these
Flores languages. First of all, the words in these languages are too
alike. Even when languages are related, theyre different. French
and Spanish are closely related, but you have to take classes in each
one separately; nobody would say that Spanish is a kind of French.
The reason is that both languages have been evolving separately
for about 2,000 years now. There are new words in each language,
new sounds in each language, and new kinds of grammar in each
language. Separate languages never stay the same.
51

52
But the Flores languages seem almost as if theyve been resisting

that. For example, another clump of related languages in the area
in the islands once known as the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, are
close relatives, but theyve been sitting as separate languages for
about 3,500 years, longer than even French and Spanish. So, theyre
similarbut different.
The words for come in five of these languages are tawae, kawae,
maa, ma, ama. The words for fish in each of them is yano, iane,
vuut, ian, sia. This is what even closely related languages are like.
Fish in French, Spanish, and Italian is poisson, pescado, pesce,
respectivelysimilar, but different.
But in Flores, so often the same kinds of words are similarbut

similar. In four of them, the words for come are mai, mai, mai,
mai. The words for fish is ika, ika, ika, ika. Why are they so
much the same when Flores was settled 3,500 years ago, too? What
froze them?
Its as if no time even went by, or its as if somebody brought a

single word for come and a single word for fish to Flores
recently, and the word is now used in different languages, but there
hasnt been enough time yet for it to split into different renditions.
The only reason a word stays the same forever is when there hasnt
been enough time for forever.
Another thing we would expect if a language was overrun by

people who grew up with another one is that these people would
sprinkle their rendition of the Flores language with a lot of words of
their own. Making do with their crummy Old English, the Vikings
plugged so many of their Old Norse words into it that we can barely
get through a sentence without them: get, they, wrong, take, anger,
bag, low, club, knife.
The words in the Flores languages that seem so mysteriously

frozen also match ones in a language from another island nearby.
Its a language of Sulawesi. It was called Celebes on old maps,

and its shaped like a four-legged starfish. Theres one language
spoken there called Tukang Besi. Its one of a thousand variations
on Austronesian.

Words from language to language are very different, yet in Tukang

Besi, the words look weirdly like the Flores ones. Come is mai
and fish is ika. There are countless languages spoken on Sulawesi,
and in them, there is no parallel like this to Flores. Only this Tukang
Besi language looks just like the Flores ones.
Tukang Besi is spoken not just anywhere on Sulawesi, but down

on the tip of one of the starfish legs, and that leg is just above little
Flores. Tukang Besi almost looks like it wants to take off for Flores.
And the way things look, something like that must have happened
in the recent past.
If the Flores languages are both naked and full of words from
another language, then presumably adult speakers of that language
invaded Flores and learned the local languages badly, spraying
it with words from home and shaving off the pesky prefixes and
endings. Then, just like the Vikings in England and the nursemaids
in South Africa, they passed their rendition on to future generations,
resulting in the Austronesian languages without prefixes
and suffixes.
This time, the history and the folklore help us out. From the 1600s
to the 1700s, a Sulawesi kingdom ruled one half of Flores. Then,
folklore among Flores groups is full of tales of origin in Sulawesi,
as opposed to the countless other islands in the area.
It would be more fun if it were the hobbits who did it. And research
is continuing on them. If archaeologists find evidence that the
hobbits actually did live peacefully among Homo sapiens, then
there is still the possibility that the hobbits are the reason for the
changes in the Austronesian languages.
53
Suggested Reading
Forth, Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia.
McWhorter, What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be.
1. Slavic languages like Russian and Polish have very similar grammars.
However, one of them, Bulgarian, is the only one without case markers
on nouns. What does this tell us about the history of the language?
2. Icelandic has a great many noun and verb endings. English has very few,
comparatively. Both are offshoots of the same original language, ProtoGermanic. How could we know that one of them has been spoken on a
remotely located island and the other one has not been, just on the basis
of this difference in the number of endings?
54
I for Island
Lecture 9
he word island offers part of the answer to a question often asked:

Why is English spelling such a mess? It isnt as messy as it can seem.
According to some estimates, its only about a quarter of English
words that arent spelled in a predictable way, and its been calculated that
only about three percent of Englishs words are so irregular in their spelling
that you just have to learn them by rote. Alas, however, those hundreds of
words tend to be the ones most commonly usedhence, the mess.
Digital Vision/Thinkstock.
Pronunciation and the Great Vowel Shift

The story of the word island started with the grandfather language
Proto-Indo-European. In that language, the word for water was
akwa. In some languages, that word didnt change much, so today,
in Italian its acqua. In other ones, it changed quite a bit, so in
The story of how the word island came to be spelled the way it is represents the
strange path of metamorphosis of some English words.
55
Lecture 9: I for Island
French, that same akwa word became just one vowel, /oh/, although
its written eau, because Frenchs spelling is scary as well.
56
English treated that word a lot like French: It got a lot shorter and
uglier than it did in Italian. Namely, in Old English, akwa had
become a word, eeg. That doesnt sound much like our word water
today, and thats because that was a separate word that started in
Proto-Indo-European as wed. In Russian, that same root became
vodka, while in Irish, it became the word that English borrowed
as whiskeyboth of those alcoholic beverages are named after
just water.
Old English had this other word eeg, and the word for island was
eegland. By Middle English, the g had dropped out, and we had
a smoother word: iland. Then, some very smart, cultured people
had the idea that iland must be a messed up version of the word
isle; they thought eeland was missing an sthat lazy people had
stopped bothering to pronounce it.
However, isle was a completely different word that had been

borrowed from French. It had come from the Latin word insula,
with nothing to do with the word eegland that had developed in
England. But what these smart people knew was what they saw on
the page, and that was this s in isle that wasnt there in a word that
meant the same thing, eeland. So they stuck that s back in there,
and its sitting there today.
What is the b in doubt doing there? The original Latin word for
doubt was dubitare, and certain sorts decided that our word had to at
least have that b in there in writing, so here we are. The same thing
happened with debt. If it isnt pronounced deh-butts, then why is
the b there? It is because of the Latin word debitus, of course. Latin
is so cool that our spellings must reflect itor at least thats how
the educated sort tended to feel back then.
Furthermore, there shouldnt be a gh in delight. These same types

stuck in the gh because they thought delight had something to do
with light because delight lights you up. In addition, foreign

shouldnt have a g in it. We dont say faregan now, and no one
ever did. Its just that some persnickety person thought that foreign
was supposed to be spelled like the word reign. Rhyme is so hard
to spell mostly because of the hruh-HIGHmand its another
bionic letter, so to speak; they only stuck that in out of a sense that
rhyme was supposed to be like rhythm.

Part of why spelling is hard for English speakers is because of a

quaint notion pedants used to have that Latin and Greek were Gods
languages of a sort. Another problem is that English underwent a
huge change in how its vowels are pronounced, after a great many
words had been set down on paper in a certain way, and habit meant
that nobody ever got around to bringing the words forward into
how they are actually pronounced now.
In the 1300s and 1400s, a lot of this sort of thing was happening
in English. For example, the word made should be pronounced
MAH-deh from what you see on paper. In fact, in medieval times,
the word sounded like MAH-deh when it was first spelled. But
then came the Great Vowel Shift, and gradually, /ah/ became /ay/.
So, MAH-deh became MAY-deh. Then, that final e dropped off
over time; sounds at the ends of words have a way of doing that.
Henceforth, MAYD.
Humans get stuck in their habits. When words are used a lot, people
keep them the way they are, even if they dont make sense. Its why
the plural of common words like man and woman is irregularmen
and womenbut not of words like credenza and watercolor. We
use some words so much that we dont stop to think about how to
fix them up.
After the Great Vowel Shift, a word like feet was pronounced feet
even though it had first been spelled when the word was fate.
Mice started out as mees, but now we dont even stop to think as
to why its pronounced mighs.
57
Spelling and Pronunciation

Why is English spelling such a catastrophe? First, it is because
people added letters based on Latin. Sometimes, weve even started
pronouncing them: Soldier started out as sojure. Somebody stuck
in the l because of Latin, and now we actually have to say souljrrrr. Then, the Great Vowel Shift happened, leaving legions of
words basically spelled wrong forever.
58
During the Renaissance, English picked up a lot of words from

French, Latin, and Greek. The problem was that those words were
spelled in ways that didnt make sense in English, or were new to
English, and now we just have to deal with it.
For example, why cant we just spell gazette without the final te? We
never said gah-ZET-uh the way the French do. In English, though,
the extra te is just a nuisance (which is pronounced nwee-SOHNS).
Why isnt the second s a c in idiosyncrasy? That is because its from

Greek. Whats a SIGH-stem? Why is the y not an i in the word
system? The reason is because Greek wouldnt like it. It would be the
ehpi-tome of barbarity to get rid of that y. Epitome is Greek, too.
Sometimes, weird things happened for reasons that are just plain
silly. For example, the word some is not pronounced soam, so
whats with the o? Shouldnt it be spelled the same way as sum, as
in addition? It used to be.
Nobody started out with the word suhm and wrote it with an o
just for kicks. It was spelled with a u. However, in Middle English,
the shape of the letters scribes wrote in meant that sometimes that u
could be confused with the m that followed itit would get a little
lost. So, they decided to just use an o instead for legibility. So, here
we are today with soam.
It was the same with come; it was koom in Old English, but it
started being spelled coam later to help out those scribes. Monk,
tongue, and worm all have that story: an o that makes no sense,
jammed in eons and eons ago to make it easier for a few people to
read in a script that today no one has even heard of.

The saddest thing about the whole situation is that it has a way of
making us make it even worse. If the words dont keep up with
the way theyre pronounced, then our natural tendency is to try to
keep pronouncing them the way theyre written, especially because
writing has a way of seeming like what language really is. So, hs
tend to drop off of words. Americans are more familiar with this
from our sense of British English.
If spelling kept up with the way words are pronounced, then we

would have ospital, umble, and umornot hospital, humble, and
humor. There was a time when the hs on those words were all but
gone among all kinds of people. But after a while, an idea set in that
you were supposed to pronounce that h because it was on paper and
thats what language is, isnt it?
But you just know that there will be some inconsistency that sets in.
Thats what happened to us across the Atlantic with the word herb.
In England, its pronounced herb with the /h/, but in the United
States, we drop the /h/ and pronounce it erb. Because we keep the
h everywhere else, like on hospital, the spelling of the word herb
alone becomes nonsensical.
People are divided on often. Many pronounce the t because its

there. In writing, it is. But if you pronounce the t in off-TEN,
then by that measure, you also have to pronounce the t in whistle
(wiss-tulling). Nobody says liss-ten up or talks about how the
dew is glis-tening on the grass. Instead, we just end up with an
off-ten hang-up.
English would be better off with a spelling system that actually

corresponded consistently to the way words are pronounced. And
it sounds dreamy, indeed. In countries where spelling makes sense,
such as Spain and Finland, theres no such thing as a spelling bee
because theres nothing difficult about spelling.
59
But it never happens for English, and its partly because of that
inherent conservatism in all of us about certain things. What a
phonetic spelling system would look like is the pronunciation
symbols that you see in dictionaries, with all those epsilons and
upside-down letters and a and e run together. Would you really
want to read anything written in that? No matter how tired we are of
often and living after the Great Vowel Shift, how much do we really
want to give up the spelling that weve known our whole lives?
Unfortunately, were stuck with what weve got. At least it makes

the history of many words interesting, though. When we say the
word island, who knew that the eye part started out as a word
for water?
Suggested Reading
Crystal, Spell It Out.
1. Do you pronounce the t in often? If so, why not also the t in whistle?
2. The Chicago Tribune started spelling some words more logically in the
1930s, which meant actual headlines such as Rookie Goalie Scores

6th Hocky Shutout. The practice was dropped officially in the 1970s.
Should it have continued?
60
J for Jamaican
Lecture 10
he language of casual speech in much of Jamaica shows us how vast

the linguistic repertoire of many people around the world is compared
to the typical Americans. This refers not just to the fact that its so
common for people to be bilingual or multilingual, although that is true.
Rather, even within one language, the one language people speak in many
places is just so much bigger than American English by itself.
Jamaican Patois
Jamaican patois developed in the 1600s when African slaves
learned English fast, and the result was a hybrid between English
and African languages. Its more English than African, but its a
lot further from Standard English than Black English is. Still, with
experience one learns.

Swedes and Norwegians can have a conversation, and yet Swedish

and Norwegian are considered different languages, while at the
same time, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese are as different as
French and Spanish, but they are both considered Chinese. Where
you draw the line between language and dialect is a matter of
politics and culture; its hazy, and there are no real answers.
Patois can be seen as a kind of English, but it is an English with a

very touchy reputation in Jamaica. Jamaican patois teaches us two
things. One lesson is that so many peoples language repertoire is
vaster than we might think. The second lesson is that another reason
its easy to miss this is that the people themselves often labor under
the same ideas about whether languages are good and bad that
we do.
Along the lines of the first point, Jamaican patois is not only
something different from Standard English itself, but patois is
several different variations. The way its spoken among the poorest
61
Lecture 10: J for Jamaican

62
Most people can shift between

these different varieties depending
on who theyre talking to and what
theyre trying to say. So, in the
deepest kind of patois, to say I
gave him, you say Me bin gii am.
The bin is the past marker; there is
no gave, and there is no difference
between I and meme takes care
of everything. This is an English
that works more like an African
language than a European one, in
many ways.
Then, in that middle-range way of

speaking, I gave him is Ah did give
he. The did instead of bin to do the
past isnt random; its a different
piece of grammar. Then, theres
the he instead of him. This is very
regular, just different from English
as we know it.
Avda/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0.
people with the least education is very different grammatically from

the way its spoken by working-class and middle-class people.
Bob Marley (19451981), a

Jamaican singer-songwriter,
talked in a thick Jamaican
patois.
So, Jamaicans who speak patois can slide up and down this scale of
varieties. They are using basically three different grammars, or at
least two, all while speaking English just as we speak English. They
have a larger English, in other words.
There isnt anything specifically Caribbean about this, of course.

You run into it in many of the languages of the world. The way it
actually feels is that youre a linguist trying to just get down how
the language works, and you find that when you ask people how to
say something, you get five different answers, or you walk around
and hear people saying the same thing in completely different ways.
Socially Determined Levels of Language

Experiencing that in the Caribbean, the untutored observer might
reasonably just think the whole language is an unstructured mess,
but actually, its a matter of socially determined levels of language,
and this gets even more elaborate in some places. Its especially
common in South and Southeast Asia, for example.

In Java, even basic words are different depending on whether

you are speaking high, middle, or lowand thats really an
oversimplification, as there are really five levels depending on how
you count it. The way to wrap your head around what it is to be a
Javanese person speaking Javanese is to think about how we say eat
in English. On one hand, we can say dine if the occasion demands
it, or maybe sup. Then theres, of course, eat, and then theres
munching or chowing down. Those are the three levels of eating.
In Javanese, though, its words in general that are like this. There
really are three different words for eat, depending on whether
youre at a wedding, talking to your pal, or speaking to a little
childor a child talking to an elder and using the elevated forms,
or a rich person talking to a peasant and using the child forms, or
to be more respectful the middle ones. Its a whole repertoire that
people use in different ways, and the customs also change with
the times.
For example, you in high language is pandjenengan. In middle

language, its sampjan. In the low language, that all people learn
as kids, its kow. In addition, rice at a wedding is samenika. Rice at
your apartment is saniki. Rice all over your babys bib is saiki.
To be Javanese is to negotiate all of this without thinking much

about it. With English, we say went back or came back in casual
English; returned is for writing and formal situations. To speak
English is to subconsciously know that return is not a casual word
when youre talking about the action of coming back. What one
actually says is coming back.
63
To the Javanese, subconscious awareness of subtleties like that

permeates the whole language, instead of being just a matter of
certain words like return, or kids versus children, or parcel versus
package, or veggies versus vegetables.
Quite often around the world, among the people who speak a
language so much larger than American English, there is a sense
that the rendition of the language that you dont use at weddings,
the one that isnt associated with prestige, is bad, or not the
real language.
Thats certainly true of Jamaican patois. In the same way as Black

English is commonly dismissed as gutter talk in the United States,
it can be almost chilling to read the way many educated Jamaicans
look at patois. One newspaper column once read: They have no
language as they stubbornly refuse to master Standard English. A
terrible creole is spoken in Jamaica, admired by some visitors who
immediately try to speak it, not realizing that it is an infectious
short-hand more ruthless than quicksand. Or someone else might
say, The slackness and anarchy of patois reflects in itself the
slackness and anarchy of our society in general. We are as we speak
and we speak as we are.
Yet they are talking about a way of speaking that has been carefully
described in whole books, and many of the books are only about
one corner of the grammatical structure. Patois is as structured and
nuanced as any way of talking, but because its associated with lack
of education, its very hard for people not to assume that the way
of speaking itself is broken, or inadequatewhereas a Martian
encountering patois instead of the English of Connecticut would
have as hard a time mastering the local lingo as he would have in
New Haven.
Evaluating Speech Varieties

Its easier to see how arbitrary the way we evaluate speech varieties
is when we are completely unfamiliar with the language. For
example, the language Sinhalese is spoken on the island of Sri
64
Lanka, and its a close relative of Hindi. Twelve million people

speak Sinhalese, and theyre lucky theyve been doing it since they
were toddlers because its hard.

There are different endings you use on a verb to express not just
present and past, but doing something for real, on purpose, and by
accident. The nouns have case markers just like they do in Latin.
There are all kinds of things you have to actually express that in
English we just leave to context. For example, if you see something,
in Sinhalese you have to indicate that seeing is something that
happens to you instead of something you impose on something else.
However, in real life, this language is thought of as not the real

language. That is, this Sinhalese, even though all Sinhalese speakers
use it, of all social classes and educational levels, is thought
of as unworthy of public discourse or the printed page, only fit
for talking.
The real language is considered to be Literary Sinhalese. But

Literary Sinhalese might as well be a different language from the
everyday one. Almost no one can speak it comfortably without
writing out what they want to say beforehand. The basic words
are different in that Javanese way. The grammar is different in that
same way that you get different grammars within patois.
The literary language is something that was preserved in amber,

much like the spelling of so many English words was. It was the
way it was back in 800 A.D. and was protected from the changes
that created the spoken language over time.
It was only in the 1700s that Literary Sinhalese was resurrected for
schools and the public, and it was actually for an understandable
reason. The antique dialect was felt as a badge of pride in the face
of colonization by the Portuguese and the Dutch.
Naturally, the written word started working its magic, and soon
there was the idea that the way Sinhalese is actually spoken
65
is not the real language. Thats as if we told newspaper

editorialists to write in the language of Beowulf if they wanted to be
taken seriously.

In broad view, though, apart from subjective on-the-ground

attitudinal judgments, there is simply a great deal to know in
speaking Sinhalese, or Javanese, or Jamaican patois. A language
can be different from English not only in how it is put together,
but also in the sheer amount of diversity within it indexed to subtle
grades of socioeconomics, who one is talking to, and what tone one
wants to strike at any given time.
Suggested Reading
Roberts, West Indians and Their Language.
1. What is the difference between curse and cuss? Is cuss, in your mind,
a real word? Do you associate it with a particular group of people or
kind of people? Think similarly about burst and bust.
2. The way Indonesian is actually spoken casually is different from standard
Indonesian in much the same way as Jamaican patois is different from

English, or low Javanese is different from high. Spoken Indonesian
is typically thought of, with a wink, as not the real language. After this
lecture, what would your assessment of spoken Indonesian be?
66
K for Ket
Lecture 11
his lecture introduces one of the worlds 6,000 languages that people
are highly unlikely to hear about beyond where its spoken. What we
expect is different from the realitythe reason for that is different
from what wed think it wasand its implications for the future of the
languages of the world is one part unpleasant and one part encouraging. All
told, this language has much to tell us. This language is called Ket.
An Elaborately Complex Language
Today, Ket is spoken by just a couple of hundred people in Siberia.
Even in its heyday, it probably was usually only spoken by a few
thousand at a time at most. Thats a communitybut thats tiny
compared to the 125 million who speak Japanese or even the 5.5
million who speak Hebrew.

Ket is spoken by people who were traditionally nomads. They

hunted and fished. Today, they live by a river. They were a
patrilineal group with shamans. Their language was an oral one, not
a written one. Only when Soviet academics started committing it
to paper did Ket become something people could look at on paper.
Based on all this, we might quite justifiably suppose that Ket

would be a pretty easy language as languages go. The people led
lives that didnt change much from century to century until they
were incorporated by Russia, starting in the 1600s. They lived
on the land. There was no such thing as a dictionary; words were
something people used, every day, and kept in their heads that way.
The encyclopedia was the shamans, not a line of books. This was a
nonliterate culture. How hard did the language need to be?
In fact, Ket is so breathtakingly complicated that only recently have

linguists even begun to figure out how the verb conjugations work.
Even now, not everything is quite clear. This language, spoken by
67
Lecture 11: K for Ket
people we might have a guilty sense of as simpler than Westerners,

is extremely elaborate.

In Italian, vengo means I come, and vado means I go. What

means I in those words? Even if you dont know Italianand
even if you dont know Spanish, either, where the way things work
the same way may have given you a heads-upits hardly a brain
teaser that the part of these words that means I is that -o hanging
on the end.
In Ket, I come is diksivs, and I go is batn. What part means I?

It is very difficult to tell, and Ket is like this more often than it isnt.
In diksivs, the I part is di-, and in batn, its b-. This is a language
with two completely different ways of indicating I. Some verbs use
one while some use another, and you just have to know.
In English, we handle that run is now and ran is the past. The a
alone means past. But imagine if ran alone meant I ran and ram
meant he ran and rap meant you ranand then if ram meant he
ran and dram meant he might have run. Then, imagine if verbs
not only worked like that, where each little sound had a meaning,
but most verbs werent short like that but long like defibrillate, with
each sound meaning some tiny part of what youre trying to say.
Thats Ket.
Plus, Ket has tones like Chinese. And it has eleven cases and crazy
genders like European languages: Trees are male, thumbs are
female, and body parts are neuter.
Compared to Ket, English is a childs game. But why would a

language ever be so complicated? Really, most languages are
like this. Kets a little extreme, but its hardly surprising. The real
question is why English is not that complicated.
The Growth of Languages

Languages are like kudzu. They growhungrily, ceaselessly,
rampantlyinto every available space. A language will sprout
68
ways of separating things into meaningless genders, step by step.

Or, somebody will start pronouncing something in some slightly
different little way, and randomly it will catch on, and a few
hundred years later, theres a whole new sound in the language.

The only thing that stops kudzu is some disturbance, such as a

spray. In the same way, the only thing that can stop a language from
moseying along in the Ket direction is when a lot of adults start
learning it and messing it upand that, and only that, is when you
get an easier language. So it isnt that languages are complicated
because the complication corresponds to the reality of the speakers.
Languages are like Ket because they cant help it anymore than
kudzu can help growing. This is because speaking is largely
subconscious and fast. Anything thats subconscious and quick
is ripe for habit forming, for mission creep. Once something gets
started, it has a way of hanging around and settling ineven when
the language was doing just fine without it.
The only reason languages can get away with being as complicated
as Ket is because they are picked up by children. Childrens brains
are plastic to an extent we adults can barely even conceive of. But
what this means is that especially with a language like Ket, once
even a single generation grows up without living in it, its almost
inevitable that no generation ever will again.
After the teen years, the ability to learn a language well ossifies,
and even to the extent that we might learn to wangle a certain
ability in a language as adults, what are the chances that wed use
it within the spontaneous intimacy of talking with our offspring?
Pretty much none.
The sad fact is that fewer and fewer people are speaking Ket
anymore. Russia actively sought to dilute the Kets culture, and
between that and the effect today of globalization and the media,
the typical Kets main language is now Russian. Its getting harder
and harder to find really fluent speakers under a certain age.
69
Struthious Bandersnatch/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
In the 1600s, the Ket people were incorporated by Russia, changing Ket culture
and language.
70
Kets story is a common one around the world. For example,

there were about 300 very different languages spoken by Native
Americans before Europeans came. Today, all but a handful of them
are in variations on the Ket situation; most people who speak them
are old, and young people arent being raised in the languages.
There are programs that try to revive these languages, because they
are badges of cultural identity. Some groups have classes. In others,
there are master-apprentice programs, where elders teach younger
people the ancestral language in a home setting. One reads about
such efforts in the media frequently, and there are now quite a few
books calling attention to how many of the worlds languages are
on the brink of disappearing. By one estimate, only 600 of the
current 6,000 will exist in 100 years.
But something that has to be considered is that Native American

languages were usually spoken by small groups and not learned
very much by grown-ups. So, they were kudzu languagesthat
is, normal. To take a random example, in the Salinan language in
California, theres no regular way to make a plural, just like in the
African language Luo. Every noun is like men and geese. House is
tam; houses is temhal. Dog is khuch; dogs is khosten. And this is
how it is for all nouns.
But this means that past childhood, learning these languages is

really tough. English speakers have a hard enough time putting
Spanish adjectives after the nounel sombrero blanco, the hat
whiteor dealing with those genders (why is the hat masculine?).
New Speakers of Languages

Its not always the most popular thing to say, but really, the chances
that elaborate languages can be learned by busy adults is pretty
slim. At least, they cant be learned completely. Hebrew was the
grand success story; it was brought from the page back to full life.
However, that was a unique situation where, first of all, there was
a religious imperative, and besides that, people speaking different
languages were brought to one location where a new language had
a highly practical purpose. Most importantly, the language was also
transmitted to children on kibbutzes.

Conditions like that cant be reproduced for thousands of languages

today, but all this means is that we can alter our sense of what it is
to know a language. As we move on, many languages can live,
but it will be in a different form than when they were being passed
on to children. Even today, there are people around the world, or
sometimes even in our own backyards, who speak six or seven
languages, but they dont claim to speak all of them equally well.
Its rare that the conditions of a human life lead someone to live for
several years as a young person in seven languages.
Therefore, in a new world, there will be languages that exist as

abbreviations of what they once were, but that doesnt mean that the
71
languages wont be meaningfully alive. Anecdotally, this is already

effectively whats going on with some of the languages that have
been revived more successfully, such as Irish Gaelic and Maori.

Their new speakers, using the languages in cultural activities and

even in the media to an extent, nevertheless use English much
more. They are rarely speaking the language in as full a form as
their ancestors didyet no one would suppose that this invalidates
the effort.
But in light of this, its important that languages like this at least
be recorded as they are. Why should we care if those languages
die? One reason is that often, the people whose grandparents speak
them want to hold on to them in some way. If they cant speak
them conversationally anymore, at least we can use the Western
advantage of writing, and now electronic resources, to record what
the languages were.
Plus, you never know what a language can teach us. For example,
just like Russian and English dont seem much alike but they both
trace back to that Proto-Indo-European language, Ket turns out to
be related to the Navajo language spoken across the Pacific in the
American Southwest. Ket helps prove that Native Americans came
to North America across the Bering Strait from Siberia. Ket, then,
teaches us not only what languages are like, but also what they can
show us about where people came from.
Suggested Reading
Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices.
Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Typology.
72
1. Do you know someone who learned a new language as an adult and
learned it very well? Are you yourself such a person? What led to
the success?
2. If you speak a language other than English natively, what is the hard part
of that language, that youre glad you dont have to master consciously?
73
L for Like
Lecture 12
his lecture is dedicated to something linguists get asked about quite

a bit. Its actually a very interesting issue, but the general trend is to
think of it as simply a nuisance. The subject of this lecture is like
not like as in That cat looks just like my cat, not in the dictionary entry sense,
but like the way its used by younger people, peppering seemingly every
utterance with an air of the tentative.
Lecture 12: L for Like
The Evolution of Like

When we talk about modern like, what we really mean is two
versions. One of them is used to quote things: She was like, Dont
even talk about it, and I was like Why is he bald anyway? Both
of these actually make a certain amount of sense. What they are is a
highly ritualized kind of acting. The literal meaning is of someone
depicting the air of someone, with that air consisting in part of what
they saidperfectly sensible in itself.
74
Presumably, the way the expression started was with people

actually launching into an imitation of the person, complete with
what they were saying. Then, as this settled in as a habit, the acting
part started bleaching away and just left behind quoting what the
person was saying.
The step is so short from acting like a person to just quoting him
or her that people take it in other languages; its very natural for
quoting to involve a kind of acting that becomes so much a habit
that a word like like becomes a piece of grammar.
In English, one way like is used is as a quotative marker. For

example, that is a quotative marker when we say, She said that it
was raining. But any language has a bunch, and colloquial English
now has like, too. The quotative like is just language doing what it
does. But this quotative like doesnt seem quite real nevertheless.
We associate it with young people and, therefore, with acne, back

seats, and gossip.
We certainly feel the same way about the other like: the (like)
hesitation (like) you dont really want to own (like) what you say
like. But, all that means is that the new likes are new, so the people
who use them arent old yet.
Many people think of like as something people shed when they get
older, and theres something to that, but next time youre at a loose
end, listen to some people around 40 and notice how many likes
they still use. As hard as this is to imagine, in about 40 more years,
there are going to be white-haired people on walkers sprinkling
their conversations with like.
Its true that there once was an America where people didnt use
like in these two ways, no matter how young they were. The new
likes didnt pop up out of nowhere in 1980, despite the idea that it
started with Valley girlspeak.
The new like started long before

thatbut not that long. Its hard to
be too declarative about such things.
We assume that gum-popping, tipsy
flappers at parties in the 1920s
werent saying like, but not a single
recording exists of people talking at
one of those parties. For linguists,
reconstructing casual speech is
always a challenge, because we
have to use fragmentary sources.
Those can be useful, though. No old

novel depicts anyone using like in
that way, and you assume that if it
were known as something that stuck
Helwik/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
It is believed that Valley

girlspeak became officially
popular as a result of the song
Valley Girl by Frank Zappa.
75
out about how young people talk, then somebody would have used
it for colorbut no one does.

However, we tend to forget that like in the modern sense actually

starts with the beatniks. For example, Shaggy, the hippie character
on the television show Scooby Doo, says things like the following:
Like, lets get out of here, Scoob.
The beatnik like was used by a certain sort, to a certain extent. But
theres a difference between Like, wow, man and like used by
young people of all sorts all over the countryand often several
times per utterance. Like took off at a certain point in the 1970s and
far beyond that one usage as a quotative particle.
The other like is something else. You say, This is like the best
party Ive ever been at, and what you do with the like is cast your
assertion in an air of as if. You imply that you are offering the
statement as a possibility rather than a reality. You do that as a way
of not coming on too strong. Its a softener.
For example, you say, You have to, like, push harder to someone
you dont want to command too explicitly. You imply that you want
them to do this pushing harder at a kind of removelike pushing
harder. You dont mean it literally, though; youre conveying an
attitude. In that, like is part of what is very much an ordinary part of
human speech.
Pragmatic Particles
Language starts with the words. Linguists call that the lexicon.
Then, there are the sounds; you have to know how to make them
and put them together. Thats called phonology. Then, there are the
prefixes and the suffixes that turn a word into another one, or even
the accent shifting that makes compounds. That, the business of
making words, is called morphology. Then, you have to know how
to put the words together: I walk, but I do not walk and Do
you walk?where you shift you to behind the do. All of that kind
of thing is what linguists call syntax.
76
But theres another level, and without it, youre not really talking.
Its little words that convey how you feel about what youre saying.
Even is one of themnot in its literal meaning, but in one youd
never think to teach anybody, because it just happens.
For example, They had a picnic is a different sentence than They

even had a picnic, which conveys that the having of the picnic was
somehow counter to expectation. Not only did they start spending
time outside, but they even had a picnic. Thats as much a part of
language as suffixes and do.
Just like words like just: They decided not to cater; they just had
a picnic. In the sentence Actually, we had a picnic, what does
actually mean? It does not mean in actuality because you wouldnt
say, They had a picnic in realityhow else would they have it?
When words are used like this, linguists have a name for what
realm of language were in. Unfortunately, its a clumsy, vague, and
opaque term (in other words, jargon). We call it pragmatics.
Like is pragmatics. Its what we call a pragmatic particle. In that

hedging that it does, it conveys our attitude toward what were
saying. All languages have pragmatic particles. In German, for
example, their word for even has a different pragmatic function.
You say, Stay there evenBleib eben dortand that means
Well, then, stay there! It conveys what we mostly express with a
melody in English.
While languages are always full of pragmatic particles, ones that

are used to say things like This is, like, the best party Ive ever
been at are not just business as usual. All languages have ways of
hedging a statement if necessary, just like English always has. For
example, people have been saying you know a lot for a long time,
but not in the way young people use like now.
The new like-like-like-like-like is something special. It seems to be

a symptom of the general informal tilt in American culture since
the 1960s. Part of that is a commitment to toleration and openness
77
to alternate opinions, and even a disinclination to firm assertion.

Teachers have noticed an increase in those attitudes in students over
the past decades, and theres no reason that it wouldnt be reflected
in language to some extent.
78
When a hedge word becomes as prevalent and reflexive as like has,

theres an argument that its more than a matter of chance, although
a great deal of how a language changes is, indeed, a matter of
chance. Theres no reason we are more likely to say dived and
snuck today than dove and sneaked, as people were more likely to
say a hundred years ago.
However, if there has been a change in general attitude of this kind,

it hasnt only been in America. The new like isnt something you
always find in languages spoken in rain forests or deserts or the
like, but in fact, equivalents to like are found all over Europe in
modern times.
In French, they use genre in the same way as like: Je suis genre
rarement nerv means Im, like, not nervous much. In Spanish,
Italian, and Portuguese, people are using tipo, or type, in the same
way, and there are other examples.
It would seem, then, that its in Western societies in general that

people since the 1970s have taken a certain linguistic politeness to
a new level. Because all languages have their pragmatic level, we
cant spray for likes. Its here to stay.
However, there is no problem in suggesting to young people that in

situations where they need to speak persuasively, or with authority,
there are three things they should teach themselves to suppress for
the duration: saying um, using upTALK, and repeating like-likelike-like-like. It may be a piece of grammar, but there are times
when you might want to sound like you mean what youre saying.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing.
1. People seem more irritated by the hedging usage of like than of you
know. Why might that be?
2. Could the hedging quality of todays like be seen as a kind of politeness,

rather than insecurity or lack of conviction?
79
M for Maltese
Lecture 13
alta is a nation that consists essentially of three main islands. Its

in the Mediterranean Sea, with Sicily to the north and the North
African coast down below. Malta is in the European Union. What
do they speak in Malta? A natural guess is that they speak Maltese, and that
guess is correct. But whats Maltese? What languages is it related to? You
never hear about a Romance language called Maltese, but you also cant
quite imagine that what they speak in Malta is an African language either,
because it is a European country.
Lecture 13: M for Maltese
What Is Maltese?
Maltese is a kind of Arabic. Its the only Arabic variety that is
an official language within the European Union. But its a very
interesting kind of Arabic, because geography matters. On the one
hand, Arabic speakers of course once had geopolitical sway in
Europe, as far westward as Spain, and therefore it isnt completely
surprising that at least one remnant survives of how far Arabic once
spread. But then, there is Sicily up to the north.
80
It mattered. Half of Malteses vocabulary is Italian. Thats so much

that when you see signs in it or learn a little of it, its almost easy
to think that its actually a very peculiar kind of Italian, rather
than a variation on what the Quran in written in. Even learning
the alphabet can be a highly Italian experience in Maltese: Angel
is anlu, balloon is ballun, key is avetta, flower is fjura, and ice
cream is elat.
Arabs took over Malta from Byzantines in 870 and established

Arabic as the local language. They were only in control for about
200 years, and after that, the Normans took over, and the language
they did it with was Italian. The result was a lot like what happened
to English when a different brand of Norman took over England
Hemera/Thinkstock.
People from Malta, an island located in the Mediterranean Sea, speak Maltese, a
kind of Arabic.
after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Arabic stayed in place, but it

breathed in an awful lot of Italian.

Arabic did stay in place. The actual grammar of Maltesein terms

of how you create new words with prefixes and suffixes and other
bells and whistles, and in terms of the syntax, or how you put the
words togetheris very much Arabic, just like the other kinds
of Arabic spoken in the Middle East. It just doesnt happen to be
called Arabic.
However, its easy to declare that Maltese is Arabic because of the

way its grammar works. Thats linguistics tradition: The essence of
the language is the grammar, while the words are just clothes. But
ordinary people dont always think that way. Languages are spoken
by real people with real histories and real feelings.
81

82
Many Jamaicans can speak in a way that English speakers cannot

make heads or tails of, yet they see themselves as speaking English.
For a long time, Italy had an investment in classifying Maltese
as a kind of Italian. After all, half of its vocabulary is Italianso
much so that if you know a Romance language, you can make your
way through a lot of things written in Maltese, especially since its
written, like a European language, in the Roman alphabet.
Its far from insane to think of a language like Maltese as a really

different kind of Italian rather than a really different kind of Arabic.
Linguistics has its ways, but what Maltese shows us is that the idea
of distinct languages in the world doesnt jibe with the reality.
Any map of languages that shows one language spoken in one area
and another language spoken in another area is almost always an
idealization. In real life, what we think of as a language is a spread
of variations on a theme, some of those variations so influenced by
some other language that classifying it as one thing or another is
basically impossible.
Whats the difference between a language and a dialect? The real

answer is that the concepts themselves are illusions. The real
question is: What makes us think of something as a language or
a dialect?
One thing is just plain geopolitics and historical tradition. For

example, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are variations on the
same language. People who speak them can have conservations
with one another. As long as you keep things pretty simple and dont
talk too fast, a Dane can get along just fine in Sweden or Norway.
The closest an American English speaker would come to this might
be getting along in parts of Jamaica or rural Scotland.
Are Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian languages or dialects?

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden certainly think of them as
languagesseparate languages. Each language corresponds to a
nation, and the nations have separate and sometimes antagonistic
histories. So even though a Dane doesnt take Swedish lessons but

instead goes to Sweden and adjusts, these are officially different
languages, just as English and Portuguese are.

However, on the other hand, writing determines a lot of how we feel

about what is a language and what is a dialect. Serbs and Croats,
frankly, speak the same language. There are differences, of course.
There are clear historical reasons why many Serbs and Croats think
of themselves as speaking different languages, but one suspects
that the notion is much easier to uphold for the simple reason that
Serbian is written in Cyrillic while Croatian is written in the same
Roman alphabet that we use for English. The writing systems look
so different, and they have such resonant historical connotations,
that its easy to suppose that the speech varieties in question are
different languages.
Languages versus Dialects

Writing exerts a powerful hold on us; in its majestic permanence,
its easy to think of it as what language actually is. So writing
alone can make things languages. But it can also make
them dialects.

For example, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese are always

considered dialects of Chinese. However, Mandarin and Cantonese
are as different as Spanish and Italianor even more different.
Taiwanese is even further afield from them. The Chinese dialects
are really what we would characterize as separate languages.
However, because Chinese writing has symbols for words

rather than soundsand because even though these languages
are different, they are still closely related and have very similar
grammars and word orderyou can write all eight of these
languages with the same writing. A written sentence of Chinese can
be read out in all eight of those languages.
83

84
Thats neat, but it also has everything to do with why anyone would
think of Mandarin and Cantonese as variations on the same thing.
They look the same on paper, and thats the only way we really
see language. Writing can make languages look like languages,
and it can make languages look like dialects, independently of
the reality in terms of what the languages are like in relation to
one another.
So whats a language, and whats a dialect? Something else that

muddies up the whole notion is that languages, or dialects, have
a way of running together like finger paints. Its the smudges
that language maps cant show. For example, take the Romance
languages. In France, there is French. But in the south, in home
situations, there are varieties called Occitan. For all intents and
purposes, this is what many of us learn about as Provenal, the
language of the troubadours.
It isnt precisely unknown to the outside world that there is some

different kind of Romance language spoken in the south of
France: langue douil versus langue doc, where langue douil is in
the north and langue doc is in the south.
But what doesnt get around is that this kind of speech spreads
beyond France. It hops through the Alps and alights in parts of Italy
and Switzerland. Those kinds, which shade into one another as you
move along, arent called Occitan anymoretheyre something
else. It has different names used by its speakers in various places.
Some people call their stripe of it Romand; others call their stripe of
it Savoyard. Linguists call it Franco-Provenal.
Franco-Provenal is French slowly becoming Italian. The western

kinds seem like French; the eastern ones seem like Italian. In
French, the word meaning sing is chanter. In Italian, it is cantare.
Doesnt it seem like somewhere there would be some language that
split the difference between the two, spoken somewhere between
them? There is. In Franco-Provenal, you get chantar.
In reality, there are no such things as languages and dialects.

The words are too caught up in history, psychology, and notions
about writing to make any coherent sense, even though in real life
we cannot help using them according to categories. Really, there
are just different ways of talking, shading into one another across
vast areas, crisscrossing cultures as often as not.
Even Maltese harbors more messiness, in that much of the Italian

in it is actually Sicilian. Sicilian is considered a dialect of Italian
because Sicily is part of Italy, but really, Sicilian is as different from
the Italian of Florence as Spanish is from Portuguese. There are
those who will tell you outright that it is a different language from
Italian, and supposedly it is. And its a beautiful language, even
though it isnt written much. Maybe its better to just say that its
beautiful, like Maltese and Swedish and Serbo-Croatian and Ket.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, The Power of Babel.
1. If you learned Bulgarian, you could use it to get around in Macedonia
with almost no problems. Yet Macedonia is a country of its own, and its
inhabitants are not enthusiastic to be told that they speak a dialect of
Bulgarian. If you had to decide what Macedonian is, where would
it fall?
2. Do you, or does someone you know, speak something you have been
inclined to think of as a dialect? What were the grounds for that
classification?
85
N for Native American English

Lecture 14
f you like old movies, then one thing that takes getting used to is the way
Native Americans are portrayed as speaking English. People who grew
up watching The Lone Ranger on television, or even Looney Tunes, will
be familiar with the old shtick. Native Americansor Indians, as they were
called and still often arespoke a pidgin English. Tonto, from The Lone
Ranger, said things like Me no like-um that man, kemosabe; he heap big
villain. And for some reason, there was an idea that all Native American
men spoke in deep voices. That was on one level a stereotypical convention
of an earlier era. However, so often, stereotypes have some basis in fact.
Lecture 14: N for Native American English
Native American Speak

The Injun talk so familiar from old movies and cartoons actually
existed in a form not unlike Tontos laconic lingo in The Lone
Ranger. Linguists have found ample evidence of it in thoroughly
respectful documents, starting in the 1600s when English speakers
encountered Native Americans.
86
Its hardly a surprise in itself that when Native Americans first met
white men, they did not learn actual English. Around the world,
probably since the beginning of humanity, when groups meet for
occasional purposes of trade, theres no reason to actually learn
to speak each others languagesespecially because its really
hard for adults to learn new languages anyway. So, business is
conducted in a stripped-down version of one of the languages, or
even a mishmash of both.
This is what linguists call a pidgin, composed of maybe a few

hundred words, if that, with barely any grammar. It isnt a real
language; its a tool. But it can be a very handy one, because it
allows people to communicate who otherwise would be stuck
making up a sign language.
In terms of speech, from the Native American side, it is actually

recorded by people with no interest in making fun of anybody that
Native Americans said things, in talking about navigating water,
like That make hard paddlum through, holdem canoe, or praising
someone, saying, Heap good Indian, hunt buffalo and deer.
Linguists have given a name to this pidgin (which, of course, its

actual users did not use): American Indian Pidgin English. Why
would a Native American in the 1600s or even 1700s have even
wanted to learn to speak English fluently? They had their own
languages that they used in their own thriving societies.
When sickly, desperate English folk first hit North America,

wouldnt it have behooved them to attempt the local language
instead of expecting the Native Americans to learn theirs? In fact,
behoove them it did, at first. And because the hundreds of languages
the locals in North America spoke were complex just as English is,
they created pidgin versions of Native American languages.
Over time, power relations between whites and the Native

Americans changed across the country. Disease and warfare took
their toll. Then, there were indeed actual attempts at extermination,
and too often, these succeeded or came close.
Native Americans started to become dependent on Europeans. Soon,

they were taking a stab at Englishnot living in it at first. They
neither needed nor wanted to sound like John Smith. And as often
as not, the John Smiths spoke to them and all Native Americans in
the pidgin. The result: American Indian Pidgin English.
Its oddly familiar to us. We search in vain for evidence of ugh

meaning hello, or any account of the deep, uninflected voice.
However, whites actually did spread words like squaw for woman
and papoose for child throughout America east of the Rockies.
Those words started in one Native American language out of the
hundreds: the Narragansett one of Rhode Island.
87

88
Henry David Thoreau, who was well known as a studious and

sympathetic chronicler of the unfamiliar, was one of many who got
down on paper that -um
that we understandably
suppose today to be
a joke. In The Maine
Woods, he describes how
a Native American he
knew generally added the
syllable um to his words
when he could, as padlum,
etc.; e.g. Sometimes I
lookum side-hill.
After a time, for better

or for worse, most
Native Americans were
being raised primarily The Lenni Lenape people, who William
in English and were Penn interacted with when he created
no more likely to say Pennsylvania, speak Munsee, or, in
English, Delaware.
padlum canoe than
a white man from Boston. Meanwhile, even if Tonto started at
the pidgin stage, he would have been long past it by the time we
encountered him in The Lone Ranger tales.
But in the broad view, American Indian Pidgin English was just
one example of something that happens to languages worldwide.
Sometimes, they leave footprints in regular English. For example,
the Chinese were highly resistant to trade with whites for a very long
time, and therefore, you can imagine that to the extent that they let
it happen in pieces with England in the 1600s, they wouldnt have
started learning actual English. Instead, they learned just enough to
get their business taken care of.
The word businessor, as it came out when the Chinese said

it, pidginis where the word pidgin comes from. Two other
TheLateDentarthurdent/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
expressions from Chinese Pidgin English were long time no see

and having a look-see.
Pidgin as the Beginning of a Language
But whats really interesting is when a pidgin is the beginning of a
language. It happens sometimes. For example, when people from
England first got to Australia, the English they used with the people
living there was a lot like American Indian Pidgin English and
Chinese Pidgin English. Then, that way of talking was spread to
other colonial encounters.

After a while, Germans were using it in Samoa and New Guinea

with people from the area who they conscripted into doing
plantation work in the 1800s after actual slavery had been abolished.
The workers came from countless islands and parts of New Guinea
and spoke vastly different languages natively.
The work arrangements were duplicitous and brutal, but

linguistically, there was a strange kind of benefit that came out of it
all: When these workers went home, there was a new way of talking
that they all knew and that they could use among themselves,
despite not knowing each others languages. They would even use
it with speakers of their own languages as a kind of badge of having
gone through the work experience.
Pretty soon, places like New Guinea had a new lingua franca that
even kids started learning. And when a pidgin starts being used this
muchused like a real languageit becomes one. Real people
need real language.
In the islands where laborers were conscripted, that language was

called Tok Pisin. Pisin refers to business, just like the Chinese
Pidgin English word pidgin. So Tok Pisin means talk business, or
business talk. But today, its much more than that. New Guinea
does government business in Tok Pisin. New Guinea is one of the
most linguistically diverse spots on the planet, and Tok Pisin gives
people a way of bridging the language gap.
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90
In Tok Pisin, you can say Mitupela bai boilim wata. Slowly, thats
Me two fellow by-and-by boil-him water. Me two fellow is we,
and not just we, but if you mean we two and not you. If you
meant me and you, youd say you me fellow, or yumipela. If
you meant we three and not you, it would be me three fellow.
You can imagine how complicated pronouns get in Tok Pisin.
Then, when you say bai boilim wata, bai started as by and by and
now is the way you say will. Then theres boilim wata, just like
the paddlum canoe in American Indian Pidgin English. That -im is
the way you would put it in a lot of the languages that the people
who created Tok Pisin spoke, so here it is today.
There are flavors of this language spoken in other parts of the area.
Its a double-edged sword, though. On the one hand, the people
there have a lingua franca they didnt have before. But on the other
hand, that lingua franca feels cool. Its used in the media and
in education and allows you to get beyond your village. And that
means that it threatens the existence of the original languages.
Lets say that two people from different villages speaking different
languages get married and have kids. The couple talk to each other
in Tok Pisin. Many couples in the village do that, and thats what
the kids grow up hearing. To the kids, the local language starts to
feel like the other thing, very in-group and maybe even backward.
Tok Pisin becomes the real languageespecially because thats
what they see on paper.
Its a problem. Luckily, it doesnt always come out this way. Take
the way of speaking English known in Hawaii as pidgin. It isnt
one, actually; it is a full language just like Black English or Tok
Pisin is. But it started as a pidgin, and the name stuck.
Another place where slavery was recreated under a different

arrangement in the late 1800s was Hawaii. There were sugar
plantations, and starting at the turn of the 20th century, pineapple
time started. The overseers were Portuguese, while the workers

were mostly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino.

These were adults learning English under conditions where there

was a great deal else to think about, and thus, they created a pidgin
English. Their kids were sent to school in actual English, so pidgin
English wasnt all they heard. However, these kids had a kind of
bifurcated identity. School and white people were one thing, and that
was for English. But then, home was their parents and their home
languages, and part of that meant the pidgin. So the first generation of
children in this new Hawaii expanded the pidgin into a full language
just like Tok Pisin while also speaking actual English.
Today, to be a Hawaiian is often to speak two things: The pidgin

is a language born anew in the early 20th century, and then theres
English itself. Predictably, a common idea is that the new language
is bad, doesnt have any grammar, and so on; in reality, the
pidgin, which linguists call Hawaiian Creole English, is as much
a structured way of talking as English itself, just different.
Suggested Reading
Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles.
Simonson, Pidgin to da Max.
1. Have you ever known someone who lived in a language for decades but
never spoke it very well? It can happen. What was the reason the person
you know never got very far in learning the new language?
2. Have you ever had to speak a language you didnt know much of, for a
long time or very often? How far did you get, and what determined how
far you got?
91
O for Oldsters in Cartoons

Lecture 15
ou can learn a lot about how language works from extremely

unexpected places. Looney Tunes is one of them. You can get a lot
from them about how language can differ in the city as opposed
to the country, for exampleand not just that it does, but why. Theres an
old Bugs Bunny cartoon of 1944, The Old Grey Hare, that has Bugs and
Elmer Fudd as old men going through their usual antics but with canes,
gray beards, spectacles, and the shakes. But these arent the only indications
that they have reached their twilight years. Bugs, as an oldster, talks in a
hillbilly accent.
Lecture 15: O for Oldsters in Cartoons
The City/Country Split

When Bugs Bunny was young, he spoke in a Brooklyn/Bronx mix.
So, why would he have shifted into a moonshine dialect as he got
older? The people who made the cartoon surely werent thinking
much about it, but we can assume that they showed Mel Blanc, the
voice artist, pictures of the old versions of the characters, and Blanc
tried out an old gold prospector kind of voice, and they liked the
sound of it.
92
This was no random occurrence at the Looney Tunes factory. In

1949, they did a parody of the Little Red Riding Hood tale called
The Windblown Hare, which is technically a takeoff on The Three
Little Pigs, but they squeeze a piece of the Little Red Riding Hood
story in there.
Theres a part where the Wolf kicks Granny out of her house.
Bugs talks like Bugs, and the Wolf talks like Bluto in the Popeye
cartoons, but for some reason, Granny, living in the same place they
do, talks like she grew up in the fastnesses of West Virginia. As the
wolf shoves Granny out of the house, she yells, Land sakes, Wolfy,
aintcha gonna eat me? and then Cant a body get her shawl tied?
Older people might speak differently than younger people, but their way of
speaking was grossly exaggerated in old television and movies.
Why are old people rustic? One sees this kind of thing again and
again in pop culture of that era. Old people sound like the Beverly
Hillbillies even when the people around them use mainstream,
standard American.
This kind of thing was so common in American pop culture before

1950 that people got a sense of the contours of hillbilly dialectin
caricatured form, to be surefrom these depictions of old people in
cartoons and movies.
Often, older people do speak differently than younger people, and

it can be for all kinds of reasons. For example, the idea in old pop
culture that old people talk country wasnt just a comedy writers
ticit reflected a demographic reality. The 1930 Census was the
first one that showed more Americans living in cities than in the
country. Until then, for Americans, rural life was the default. The
city was the challenging, debauched setting depicted in tragic
novels by Theodore Dreiser. The country was the real America.
93
Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street in 1920 about Carol Kennicott

finding little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, boring and was celebrated
for writing about America itself. Things are different now. The
notion of the city as unhealthy for ones morals is antique. We pity
urban residents dealt a bad hand, but we hardly think theyd be
better off in a Minnesota farming town.
But for Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Americas transition

from a rural nation to an urban one was as recent as the Internet is to
us. We can presume that it was common that old people had grown
up in the country but had moved to cities to raise their kidsor
that their kids had moved to cities and come to talk differently, or
certainly their kids did.
Therefore, it would have struck an intuitive chord to American

audiences for age to be indexed with a backwoods accent in
shorthand style. For American urbanites in 1935, as often as not,
Granny did sound more country than you did. Today, though, that
tipping point is long, long tipped. We do not spontaneously sense
a person past 60 living in Philadelphia or Chicago as talking like
Dolly Parton or Jeff Foxworthy.
Marthas Vineyard
The city/country distinction can manifest itself in different ways,
depending on local conditions. Sometimes its about who you
want to be, even though youre not even trying to be itat least
not linguistically.
94
A notorious example was Marthas Vineyard in the 1960s, as studied

by William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania. Marthas
Vineyard is an island off of Massachusetts. Its home to local
whites, Portuguese people, and some Native American descendants.
Youd hardly know that much beyond where the island is because
most of us know it for its reputation as a summer vacation spot.
In the 1960s, if you hung around Marthas Vineyard enough and

were listening to peoples vowels, then youd notice that here and
there, people would say luh-eet instead of light and buh-eet

instead of bite. This happened not only on the /igh/ sound, but
also the /ow/ sound in house. It might be more like huh-oos. Out
would be uh-oot.

This was just something sprinkled around on some words, not

others. Sometimes in a word people would do itsometimes not.
One day, someone might say, Turn out the luh-eet, and the next
day, the same person might say, Turn out the light while youre
at it.
These pronunciations were sprinkled around, lightly, not enough

that anybody would even notice. At least thats the way it was with
most people. If you were old, it was like thatso light on the ground
that no one would think of it as the way anybody talked, old or
not. It was like that with young people. Just like the old people,
they just sounded like they were Yankees from Massachusetts.
But there was something going on with just a certain group. Labov
classified this group as people 30 to 45that specific. The people
in that age group were luh-eeting and huh-oosing all over the
place. For them, it was uh-ee and uh-oo for almost every word
those sounds were in, instead of popping more in some words than
others. For them, it was almost all the time instead of just some of
the timejust them, the people grown up but not yet middle aged.
And there was something contemporary about this, too. In the

1930s, linguists called dialect geographers had come through
to record peoples sounds. And when they had been at Marthas
Vineyard, everybody was holding way off on the uh-ee and uhoo regardless of age. Yet in the 1960s, there was this spike in
people in their 30s and early 40s.
It turned out to be about the vacationersand modernity. The

vacationers were there octupling the population every summer. In
terms of modernity, you could see it on television. It was tempting.
Young people were leaving more than they ever had before.
95

96
And it meant that if you stayed, you were making a statement. You
were being loyal to where you grew up. If you were in your 30s or
early 40s, then that was just the time of life when you were pretty
much settled down. You had staked your claim; you werent going
to be making any grand transformations after that. So, you stayed
even if you werent going to get rich.
Sentiments like that have a way of percolating into the way you
talk. People in their 30s and 40s created a new, stronger version of
the local accent as part of their stronger devotion to the island. Old
people were set in their ways. Young people werent sure what they
were going to do yet, so they didnt adopt strong local accents.
In other places, the way you can know that a person is an urban sort
is when he or she knows how to wiggle his or her uvula. The uvula
is that weird thing hanging down from the back of your mouth,
and it can be used to make speech sounds, just as the lips and the
teeth can.
The classic example is what we think of as an r in French,

the French r. It actually isnt an r at all in terms of where we
produce what we normally think of as an rthat is, the tongue. The
supposed French r is actually the same kind of sound as an s or a v
or a th, except what gets blown past isnt the palate or the teeth, but
the uvula.
The only reason we think of that as an r is because its used in

French where there actually used to be an r. French came from
Latin, and nobody was trilling their uvula in ancient Rome. So the
uvular business must have come in later, and it didsometime in
the 18th century. Thats when grammarians describing French start
mentioning that way of pronouncing it.
After a while, the uvular r was spread throughout northern France,

Belgium, Switzerland, and southwestern Germany. But other places
tell little stories. For one thing, today, the uvular r is taking over in
southern France, but even today, there are old people there who still
do the Spanish-style trill (like the one found in perr-r-o). That

shows that until not long ago, that kind of trillwhat we think of as
a real r, because it iswas universal in southern France.

In a situation where nobody has been doing much moving, the

way older people talk is generally a clue to what speech was like
universally before, just as on Marthas Vineyard the old people in
the 1960s showed that the uh-ee kind of vowel was once much
less widespread than it became.
Then, sometimes, speech is the way it is because people have been

moving. The r in Israeli Hebrew today is uvularnot really an r.
Thats because uvular r had taken over Yiddish along with other
developments from German, and Yiddish speakers were highly
influential amidst the revival of Hebrew from the page back into a
spoken language. So, we have no indication that Biblical Hebrew
was spoken with French-style rs, and the reason people are using
them today in Tel Aviv is because it was imported from Europe.
But in other places, uvular shows another city/country split,

but with a twist that there is still no complete explanation for. In
Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Germany beyond the
southwest, uvular r is only common in citiesCopenhagen, the
Hague, Oslo, Cologne, Berlin, Kristiansandnot the charming
little burgs beyond the capitals and other urban centers.
But cities arent laid out next to each other; somehow, pronouncing
r in a brand new way hops the countryside and takes root only in
urban areas. It would appear that somewhere along the line, a certain
stratum of Europeans decided that uvular r sounds sophisticated
and took it up into their casual speech.
Its odd enough that this happened. Remember, speech is

subconscious; imagine something so subtle happening not just to
one person but to a whole urban clique. But then, people saying
uh-ee instead of igh on Marthas Vineyard was the same kind
of thingit just happens. But here, it meant that the people out in
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the country did not pick it up and that, therefore, the linguistic map
for uvular r looks like somebody sprinkled it over much of Europe
from on high like little candy bars.
Suggested Reading
Labov, Language in the Inner City.
, The Social Stratification of English.
1. Where you grew up, do older people (roughly, 60 or older) speak
differently from younger people, and if so, why?
2. Would you say that you sound differently now than at an earlier stage of
your life? Your slang has likely changedbut would someone imitate
you differently now than they would have 30 years ago? What would
the difference be?
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P for Plurals, Q for Quiz

Lecture 16
e think of language as being for something, and it is

communicatingbut from that, its natural to think that the way
our language is built is for something, too. But its staggering to
find out how very much of what we say every day and think of as central
to how any rational human being would express themselves is in fact just a
jolly accident. So very much of what we do when we talk is decoration.
Plural Marking
One of the main languages in Sudan in Africaactually, in what is
now the nation of South Sudanis called Dinka. As languages of the
area goes, its a big one: It has about 2.5 million speakers. However,
thats fewer people than live in Chicago, and the language is rarely
committed to paper. Its an indigenous language, and one might
suppose that it would not need to be as complex grammatically as, for
example, Russian or Greek. But it is, in fact, as complex as them
more, really, as is usually the case with small languages.

A quick slice of it is about plurals. In English, to make a plural,

you add s: cats, dogs, houses. Its technically a little more involved
than that, but thats the heart of it, except that there are a handful of
irregular plurals like children. There did used to be more.
If you have two feet, then why dont you read two beek instead of
books? In Old English, you did. And just like more than one child is
children, more than one lamb was lambru. You fried up your eggru,
and people talked not about breads but breadru.
Sometimes it was like sheep is today, where to make a plural you

dont do anything (one sheep, two sheep). In Old English, it was one
house, two house. But then the Vikings had their way with English
and were down to just s. But the Vikings didnt get to Sudan, so
things are quite different with Dinka.
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Lecture 16: P for Plurals, Q for Quiz

100
In Dinka, one singular-plural pair is bing (cup) to biiing

(cups)three /ee/s instead of one. So, how do you make a plural in
Dinka? It looks like you triplicate the vowel, which is weird, to us,
but not really difficult. In an alternate universe, you can conceive of
an English where the way to say cups was cuhhhps.
But then, how do you make the word for plant, waal, into a plural?
It already has two /ah/s, and you can kind of tell its not going to be
waaaaaal. Nobody would have time to talk about plants. Rather,
waal becomes walyou shorten the vowel. Its hard to know
why biiing has three /ee/s but then while chief is bang, chiefs is
baang with just two /ah/s. How do you know whether to duplicate
or triplicate?
Maybe theres some light at the end of the tunnel with words like
the one for hippo. One hippo is a roow, but several hippos are
root. That looks more normal. Maybe the regular rule is that
you make a plural with -t just like you use -s in English, and those
first few are just weird exceptions like mice for mouse.
However, girl is nya and girls is nyiir. Theres no pattern where

you make plurals with t; the hippo word was one more exception.
Plus, with nya to nyiir, the vowel completely changes, too.
And that vowel thing happens a lot: One thistle is tiil while more
than one are tjeel. Sometimes its about melody: One palm fruit
is tuuk, said on a low tone. Say it in a flutier way, and thats the
plural version.
So, whats the rule for making a plural in Dinka? There isnt one!
You just have to know. Its as if all nouns in English were like goose
and geese or man and men. In fact, in Dinka, man is mooc while
men is rooor, and woman is tiik while women is djaaar.
Just how children manage to pick this up is not the easiest thing
to figure out. In any case, millions of people speak this language
with ease every day. And to them, the idea that a language doesnt
have regular plurals is normal, especially because thats the way
languages of this whole group work, including the Fur language of

the people in Darfur.

To them, encountering languages where you make a plural by doing

the same little thing to all words, or even most of them, is whats
strange. They dont know that the way plurals are in their language
is a quirk, an accident, not the way language normally is.
But normal to English speakers is to have something like -s for

plural. We learn a language and wonder how to make the plural and
wait for some suffix. Maybe it will come in two or three different
flavorslike in Italian, where masculine nouns take /ee/ in the
plural and feminine ones take /ay/but something like that.
There are quite a few languages in the world that just dont care
how many of things there are. They are especially common in East
and Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. Chinese is typical
of this kind of language. When you speak Chinese, you mark things
as plural only when youre being highly explicit and usually when
its a person. Otherwise, plurality is just left to context; theres no
plural marking.
Japanese is like that, too. There is a plural marker, a word tachi, but
its a mark of the goofy English speaker to tack tachi on to everything
that there is more than one of. Tachi is for people, basically.
Marking things as plural because there is more than one of them is

not normal. Its common, but in the general sense, its especially
European languages and a lot of ones in Africa that are really strict
about it. Plural marking is a tic, an obsessive-compulsive disorder
that a language might wend its way into.
Its almost impossible not to think, at this point, that these

differences have something to do with culture. Because language
is a tool for communication, then surely, Dinka must have no
regular plurals for a reason, and Chinese must have barely any
101
There are languages with no way of situating verbs in time: no past

tense, no future tense. All of that is left to context. Chinese is close
to this. For one thing, there is nothing you could call a future tense
at all; you get it from the context.
That means that the whole battery of verb conjugations were so

familiar with in European languages, and even our collection of
verbs with irregular pasts like saw for see and ran for run, are just
accidents. European languages are hung up on tense. As much as
learning that kind of thing is the main meal in learning one of those
languages, a language can get along quite well with none of it at all.
plural marking for a reason. But pretty quickly, you can see that that
doesnt quite add up. Clearly, its not about what people are like.
Languages are like tartans, which are randomly elaborate patterns that become
symbolic of certain groupsnot because certain colors and stripes correspond
to those groups in some logical and elemental way, but because tartans will
come out in all kinds of patterns.
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There are other languages where the pronouns are first person,
second person, and third personbut theres no difference between
singular and plural. Its a little easier for an English speaker to wrap
their head around that than for many people, actually. For example,
you can refer to one person or seven million. But now imagine if
the word he could refer to one person or seven million, and then
imagine if I could also mean we.
There are plenty of languages that exist that are like that. Having
just one pronoun for everything would make communication a little
tricky. But a difference between first person singular and first person
plural is not necessary for living life. Context usually makes it quite
clear whether you mean me or us, and if you mean us, you can
just say something like my family or my crowd and move on.
The story is that a great deal of grammatical machinery is just junk,

in the endor, to use a more sanguine word, decoration. There are
languages all over the world that do without gendered nouns, plural
markings, adjectives, and so much more.
The Origins of Quiz

One day, in 1791, a theatre owner in Dublin made a bet with
somebody that he could create a word in 24 hours. He hired some
little street urchins to paint the word quiz on walls all over the city,
and people assumed that it meant a test of some kind, and thats
how quiz was born.

Thats a cute little story, but its almost too good to be true. Really,
there are two words quiz. When we use it in quizzical, it means
odd, and people were calling an odd person a quiz some years
before the Dublin story is supposed to have happened. So that
pretty much renders that tale a myth.
Then, there is the use of quiz to mean to test somebody. Now, that
could have morphed from the weirdo meaningsomebody odd is
something that has to be figured outbut there are hints that this
usage came from elsewhere. Some have said that its from the Latin
103
Qui es? meaning Who are you? and was the way you opened an
oral exam in Latin way back when. And the first time its used to
mean to give a test in writing, its actually spelled quies, so maybe
it started this way.

That seems forced, though. Stranger things have happened, but

there has also always been an English word quiset in rural dialects
in Britain that means to question. And it may well have had some
relationship to the quis in inquisitive, which English had taken
from French.
This word was so well established in southern England by the 19th

century that people were changing it in whimsical ways, the way
people do with words that are really theirs. All over England, people
had a way of tacking ss to the front of words. For example, babies
could scrawl instead of crawl, and people could slounge just as they
could lounge. In Devon, you could be squizzed as easily as quizzed.
The best bet is that quiz is from quiset, borrowed from French. But
almost certainly, the cute story about the theatre owner is better
theatre than etymology.
Suggested Reading
McWhorter, What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be.
, Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language.
1. In English, we can say both people (an irregular plural) and persons. If
a foreigner asked which to use when, what would your advice be? Then,
try the difference between fish and fishes (as in He sleeps with the fishes
or The Seven Fishes).
2. Have you ever made up a word and had it catch on?

104
R for R-Lessness
Lecture 17
hy are people doing that? people often ask linguists. Why

do people say birfday instead of birthday? Why are
people saying Yeah, right? What people are often waiting
for is a concrete reason, along the lines of people seeking some kind of a
goal. After all, much of the time, when we do something, its for a reason,
so its plausible to think that language changes because people are doing
something on purpose. However, the weird thing about language is that to
such a large extent, we do it subconsciously. This lecture will give you a
panoramic sense of that by zeroing in on just one letterrin our lives.
In the Northeast
There is always so very much that we do when we speak that we
arent aware of, even when it connects to something as elemental as
our sense of place in the world and what kind of image we would
like to present.

Ror, more precisely, the disappearance of rshows this

beautifully, over time, across oceans and across classes, races, and
much else. In British English, the name Carter comes out as Cahtuh. If youre thinking about writing, which we cant help, then we
figure that somewhere in there the British are saying the r. But they
arent; spelling, as so often, is way behind spoken reality. In a lot of
British English, r after a vowel is gone: not or-der but aw-duh
and not cor-ner but caw-nuh.
So, why did the British start leaving off their rs? We know that it
wasnt deliberate. We also know that rs are fragile in all languages.
They have a way of taking many formsa tr-r-ill here, morphing
into a uvular buzz there. So when rs are hanging around on the
ends of syllables, a linguist is ready for them to start acting up, just
like if vowels are hanging around on the ends of words and not
105
106
So thats why British went r-less. It started in the 17th century,

and at first, grammarians thought it sounded ridiculous. You can get
a sense today of how r-lessness felt at first, in that it created pairs
of words that refer essentially to the same things, such as burst and
bust, curse and cuss, girl and gal, parcel and passel. The r-less one
is always slangier: bust, cuss, gals, passel. Way back when, they
were processed that way because they were thought of as sloppy
pronunciations of the other words.
But before long, the accent we now associate with Downton Abbey
was considered normal, and it was other British accents with their
rs that were considered provincial. That shows how arbitrary our
judgments of what sounds good in language are.
In the United States, there is

r-lessness all over the place, or
there used to be. First, think about
the way people talk in old movies.
Why did someone like Bette
Davisexclaiming Petuh! The
lettuh!sound almost British,
such that American actors back
then could play Brits without even
altering their accents? Second
is vernacular New Yawk or
Joisey; think of Jackie Gleason
as Ralph Kramden (Naw-ton!) or
even Alan Reeds take on the same
thing as Fred Flintstone (Bahney!). Third is Southernersfor
example, Blanche DuBois in A
Streetcar Named Desire: Ah
have always depended on the
kahndness of stran-juhs. Finally,
Lobo512/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Lecture 17: R for R-Lessness
pronounced with an accent, then you just know they are going to
wither and die someday.
Bette Davis, who had a

starchy upbringing in Lowell,
Massachusetts, had an almost
British-sounding accent.
in black English, one does not talk about someone having flavor
as opposed to flava. All of these are r-less.

There are many reasons for this r-lessness, and they dont have a
whole lot to do with what people were doing internationally. First,
from early on, in America, upper-crust English was r-less in New
York and Boston, specificallynot in the other big Northeastern
metropolis, Philadelphia.
Its very hard to tell just why and how people spoke in specific
places hundreds of years ago; no one was paying much attention,
there was no such thing as linguistics, and you couldnt record
anything. But from what we can tell, there were two possible
reasons for r-lessness in those two cities. One does involve a
certain amount of deliberateness: It is thought that upper-crust
New Yorkers and Bostonians were imitating British people out of
a sense of social inferiority. Its possible; only into the 20th century
did cultured Americans let go of a sense that true civilization was
across the Atlantic.
Then, upper-class Bostonians did come from exactly the parts of

England where r-lessness was most common: Kent, Essex and East
Anglia. That would mean that at least Boston Brahmins were r-less
simply because British people were, and they didnt know any other
way to be.
But then we get to the r-lessness of the humbler people, which

covers the New York area and also the Yankee accent in New
England in general. We actually have neat indications that ordinary
people in New England were already r-less as far back as the
1600s; at this time, when spelling wasnt as jelled as it is now, town
records often indicated how people actually said things.
So, what happened to rs in New England? Supposedly, workingclass people in these areas imitated upper-class ones. However,
usually, the way people talk reflects in-group solidarity, and in
fact, linguists have in general discovered almost no cases where
107
poor people imitate rich peoples talk. If anything, its the other
way around.

This explanation for r-lessness has been passed down forever

without being revised to account for what researchers now know
about how language works. Really, what we can almost certainly
assume is that English went r-less in some places in America for the
same reason it did in some places in Britain: Its just one of the rolls
of the dice that might come up when rs are vulnerable hanging out
on the ends of syllables.
In the South
In the South, historically, r-lessness is most associated with
Charleston in South Carolina, and there is even a strain of
thought that traces that r-lessness to England. However, there was
something else about Charleston that distinguished it from other
Eastern citiesincluding ones like Philadelphia, where r-lessness
didnt happenand that was that it was a principal place of entry
for slaves from the Caribbean and Africa and was surrounded for
a radius of hundreds of miles by plantations. And beyond this, of
course, was the plantation South in general.
108
Quite often in languages, the way you build a syllable is with

a consonant and a vowel, without then capping the syllable with
another consonant. So, in English, we have words like fiishhh.
Japanese words go suuu-shiii and ma-guuu-rohhhconsonant,
vowel, consonant, vowel. In Japanese, theres no such word
as corrrr-nrrrr.
The African languages that slaves brought to the New World are
this kind, for the most part, so slaves often rendered English in
an accent that was more Japanese than European. One of the first
things to go was rs after vowels.
The descendants of the slaves, todays Black Americans, speak

English quite fully. However, there are some calling cards from
the beginnings in Black English, and the r-lessness is one of them.
Hence, flava instead of flavor. So, why do black people say

brotha instead of brother? Its ultimately because thats a lot
like someone would say it who grew up speaking Kikongo or
Mende or other languages few Americans have heard of.

So, black people are r-less not because they have something against
pronouncing whats on the page, but because their ancestors spoke
r-less languages.
To get back to the South in general, surely its not an accident that
whites are r-less exactly where African slaves were most common.
With white children on plantations often being raised by black
slave women or servants and poor whites and blacks often working
side by side, the relationship between black and white speech
in the plantation South was more intimate than it can be easy to
imagine today.
In the South, it went both ways: Black speech got some things from
white speech, too. But r-lessness in the South started in West African
villages and wound up in Tennessee Williams. So Southerners are
r-less not because its hot where they live, but because they took it
in from black people.
The Time Factor

Take all of those reasons why somebody is r-less, and then theres
the time factor. William Labov, who did the Marthas Vineyard
study, did another foundational study of r-lessness in the 1960s in
New York.

Time had been that the fancy New Yorker was as r-less as a
Londonian. The handiest way to get a peek at it today is in not just
old movies but ancient ones, early talkies where people are standing
around in drawing rooms sounding, frankly, almost ridiculous to
our ears.
But things were changing in the 1960s. R-lessness had come to

be seen as silly sounding in America. The working-class kind was
109
associated with tawkin like dis, and people started to avoid it as

much as they could, at least when they felt on so to speak, such
as professionally.
110
Meanwhile, the upper-class kind came to sound a tad affected.

World War II and the patriotic mood associated with it had
something to do with this, its thought. The whole story has yet to
be told, but what we do know is that after the war, Northeastern
America did start talking differently when it came to r-lessness.
Labov investigated three department stores: a tony one, Saks; a

middle-class one, Macys; and a discount one, Kleins. He checked
to see what things were on the fourth floor and then had students go
in and ask salespeople for an item on that floorto get them to say
fourth floorbecause that would get them to show whether they
were r-less or not: fourth floor versus foo-uth floo-uh.
Labov found that in the 1960s, people were less r-less the more
upper-crust the storemore New Yawkese at Kleins than at
Macys and more there than at Saks. But there was nuance in it, too.
Generally, older people were more likely to be r-less, the old way.
But at Macys, older people were more r-full.
Middle-class status meant a stronger consciousness of linguistic

self-presentation, believe it or not, including perhaps a sense that
you had control over where you were going in life. The snooty Saks
people had already gotten there; the Kleins people figured it wasnt
going to happen. No one said this, mind you, or even knew it, but
the pattern was unmistakable.
So why did the older Macys clerk in New York in 1964 use more
rs after vowels than the younger ones? Obviously, theres no
answer if were waiting to hear that old Mrs. Bainbridge carefully
pastes those rs in because she wants to sound classybecause she
didnt even know she was doing it. But she was.
The lesson for today, then, is that the reason people sound the way
they do almost never traces to them doing something or meaning
something in a deliberate way. Language, to a large extent, just
happens, for all kinds of reasons. However, there are exceptions.
Suggested Reading
Labov, Language in the Inner City.
1. A hundred years ago, to imitate a rich person, one would speak in a
certain highfalutin way. Note that today, that wouldnt make sense.
How would you imitate the way a modern rich person speaks? Why, in
your opinion, has this changed?
2. It has been said that whatever British people are saying sounds like
Shakespeare because of the accentat least, the more formal-sounding

British people. Earlier Americans such as Bette Davis and Franklin D.
Roosevelt sounded more like British people than any American now
does. Did they, in your opinion, sound smart or just stiff and strange?
(Or neither?)
111
S for She
Lecture 18
ld English had a problem, and in this lecture, youre going to learn

how it solved itbut then didnt. It was all about pronouns, and it
gives us a precious look at what a language is over time, as opposed
to right now. We are often told that language changes, and the first thing that
comes to mind is slang, or how your grandparents might talk differently than
you do. But language changes also to the very depths of its being, in what
we think of as a normal sentence. It changes too slowly to process within a
single life, but there are wrenching transformations over many lives.
Lecture 18: S for She
Third Person Pronouns

Old Englishs problem was that the third person pronouns were all
starting to sound alike. He and she were becoming the same word.
Plus, they was becoming that same word, too. He was hay, and
she was hay-uhnot shay or even shay-uh, as we might
think. Then, there had also been separate male and female words
for they. But now, for men, they was hyaya lot like he was
hayand then the they for women was hay-uh again.
112
To take how these words would likely be pronounced now, imagine

if he and she were he and he-uh, and then the words for they
were hyee and he-uh. This doesnt sound like any English we
know, and English speakers back then seemed to see a problem,
because they fixed this.
First, there was creating she. We will probably never know exactly
what happened to create she. There was no ancient English word
shay or the like; it really was that weird little word hay-uh. So
where did she come from?
Basically, in some parts of England, hay-uh blended into being

pronounced heu, sounding kind of French, rhyming with their
word for fear, peur. Then, as happens a lot as languages rattle
along, a j-ness slipped in, and people were saying hjeu. Then,
in some places, hjeu could be pronounced hjoha lot like
we would prefer to say it now if it were up to us. Meanwhile, the
j-ness creates a whispery sound, and over generations, people start
making that sound as an shjoh, hsjoh, sjoh, shohand
after a while, the word was sho.
At the same time, in some other
areas, the disaster outright
happened; he and she were
the same word he. You see it
in manuscripts, where a lady
is referred to as hay. Before
long, people started saying
shay instead of hay. Almost
certainly, they picked this up
from people from the areas where
the word had become sho; they
mixed show and hay and
got shay. Soon, shay was
pronounced shee, and disaster
was averted.
Then there was the they The epic poem Beowulf, written
in Old English, is often taught
problem; hyay and hay-uh today in American schools to
just wouldnt do. However, the show how English has evolved.
Scandinavians invaded starting
in the 8th century, and as much of a nuisance as they were in many
ways, their third person plural pronouns were just fine. They
certainly didnt sound just like their he and she.
The Vikings had a way of marrying women and raising bairns and
such, and their weird English became what English was after a
while. Their third person plural pronoun was theyno more hyay
and hay-uh. They probably had a way of sprinkling they into their
English because Englishs crunch of hay-ish little words felt so
vague and inadequate.
EugeneZelenk/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
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At this point, we see English cleaning things up, making a she

where there was none before, letting strangers insert their own
pronoun when ours is no longer doing its job. One thing we see in
a case like this is that when clarity is really under threat, languages
have a way of cleaning themselves up.
Humans have a probably innate urge to communicate, and we make

sure our language lets us do it. If its getting to the point that he, she,
and they are all assorted variations on hyayyhy, then certainly that
cant last forever. Or can it? What about some other weird things
that were happening to Englishs pronouns at the same time?
For example, while English dutifully cleaned things up in the

third person, it let the second person fall to pieces. First, there was
thou for one person and you for two people. Then, after a while,
people started saying you to one person to be polite. That seems
normal enough because we learn European languages where thats
been common foreverFrench has vous, Russian has vy, and so
onbut there was still thou. You used thou with friends, with
kids, with animals, to be condescending. It was tidy; it was like a
normal language.
For some reason, English took you and ran with it in a way that
other European languages usually didnt. Even you itself had been
pushing it. Originally, it was ye as a subjectthink Hear ye!
and you was the object. But around the Tudor period, people started
just yanking you into serving all purposes.
But at the same time, thou and you start falling together. Sometimes
you see people using you to be formal and thou to be mean, and
sometimes the alternation seems pretty random. But after a while,
all there is is you, for both singular and plural, subject and object.
To an Old English speaker, that would sound like baby talk, but its
all we have in even the most elegant of English.
Thou hangs around in some parts of England, but rural ones that are
located way out. For the most part, English is as ambiguous in the
you realm as it was starting to be in the he, she, and they realm
and nobody bats an eye.
Pronouns in Various Languages
Quite a few European languages have a word that refers to people
in a generic sense. Spanishs Se habla espaol is the most familiar
example: se means you in the sense of one. In French, this is
on. In German, its man: Hier spricht man Deutsch means One
speaks German here. In Old English, it was man, too: To say,
Its said in books in Old English, you said Man cw in bocum.
The man didnt mean man; it meant one, just like the se in Se
habla espaol.

After the 1300s, people just stopped using man that way, instead
just jamming you in there. So today, we say, You have to be
careful with these big corporations. You is both underdifferentiated
and overworked.
If we approach this problem with English as a matter of repair,

and we think about how we took they from the Vikings so that we
could have a better third person pronoun, then theres a problem
in that it was probably also the Vikings who deprived us of a se
habla impersonal pronoun.
Just like they comes from Old Norse, in Old Norse, as it happens,
they barely used their version of monn. They had it, but for some
reason, they didnt much like it; theyd just dump it and not even
bother to plug anything else in. For Old Norse is spoken here,
they would have had something like Speaks Old Norse hereno
pronoun. But if people used to that learned English, what was going
to happen to monn? Out it went, with nobody thinking about
issues of repair or emergency. And were okay.
Linguists try to be scientific. In a case like this, were looking for

a way of seeing things like this that works for everything, instead
of just case by case. Along those lines, the general story we see in
English pronouns is the same one we see with plurals around the
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world; all languages go along with much, much more than human
beings actually need to communicate. Within our own languages,
everything feels so natural and ordinary that we figure its necessary.
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What happened with English pronouns shows that languages

are conservative, to an extent. English did step in to preserve a
difference between he, she, and they. We all like things to stay the
way they are, to an extent, and speakers of a language naturally
step in here and there.
However, we cant say that it did this because English would have
fallen apart otherwise, because not long afterward, it allowed us
to get to the point where you stands for one, two, three, or eight
billion people.
For a while, there were even places where he and she were the
same word hay, and it was like that for generations. Yet we dont
imagine those poor people in the East Midlands running around
saying, I do wish we could make a difference between a lad and
a lady. They made dojust as people do all over the world today
who have a pronoun that means both he and she.
In the grand scheme of things, what English did about the third
person problem was the exception, not the rule. The rule was
English just letting things flake off that were cute enough, but
not necessary to being a language. No language just dumps all its
verbs. Some languages drift down to having almost strangely few
sounds, sometimes as few as eight or nine, but when that happens,
on average, words tend to get longer so that you have more material
to make things sound different with.
A language can lose an awful lot and stay a languageespecially

because at the same time, languages are always sprouting brand
new things. But in the meantime, what we know as a language on
the page is just one snapshot of a language in the midst of eternally
losing and gaining at the same time.
Suggested Reading
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
1. Does the fact that English has no difference between you one and
you all ever create confusion as you try to communicate, and if so,
if you could wave a magic wand, would you make you all standard
rather than colloquial?
2. One often hears sentences like Who all is coming? Why do people
append that allis it redundant or handy?
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T for Tone
Lecture 19
he purpose of this lecture on tones is less about revealing what tones

tell us about something else or something larger than it is about giving
you a sense of what tones are like in languages and what they do. Its
a very dense subject, but its something that the general public rarely gets
much of when linguists share information. Importantly, tone languages teach
us that there is amazing variety in the ways that exist of being a language.
Lecture 19: T for Tone
Tone and Pitch

In English, were used to words being different according to
consonants and vowels. For example, the difference between
pat and bat is that one begins with p and one begins with b. The
difference between a flying kind of mouse-ish thing (bat) and a
piece of metal that you put in a horses mouth (bit)very different
thingsis conveyed by just the difference between the /ae/ and
the /ih/.
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But in about half of the worlds languages, words are different in

meaning because of more than just consonants and vowels. In them,
the pitch you utter a syllable on can make meaning differences, too.
Linguists call the pitches tones.
The classic example is Mandarin Chinese, which has four different

tones. The little syllable ma can mean different things depending on
the toneand not different as in a different tone of expression.
Its not ma! for impatience and ma? for asking a question and a
downward-tone ma-a-a for sadnessalthough, the fact that we
do all of those naturally shows how natural it is to speak with tones.
Its just a matter of what you do with them.
Ma on a high tone means mother. Say it with a falling tone, and it

means scold. Say it with a swooping-up tone, and it means hemp
or rough or coarse. Then, if you say it with a kind of gentle

bouncema-a-ait means horse.

Thats just ma. Its like that with every syllable in the language. Any
Mandarin Chinese name or word you hear in English is incomplete,
in that the syllable can mean countless different things depending
on the pitch: Deng Xiaoping, feng shui, and so on. Speak Mandarin
on a monotone and you basically are saying nothing. Use the wrong
tones and obviously you risk saying all kinds of funny things, such
as mixing up someones mother and a horse.
Mandarin is just one tone language, though; many, many languages

work this way, and even more so. For example, depending on how
you count it, in the Hmong language, spoken in China and parts of
Southeast Asia, there are seven tones a syllable can be uttered on,
making completely different meanings.
If you say po in a falling-down tone, it means female. If you say

po in a swooping-up tone, it means throw. If you say po in a tone
that is high throughout, it means like a ball. If you say po in a
tone that is in the middle throughout, it means pancreas. If you say
po in a tone that is low throughout, it means thorn. If you say po
in a cutoff tone, it means to see. If you say po in a breathy tone,
it means paternal grandmother. (The syllable meaning maternal
grandmother is some other syllable, with some specific tone.)
Technically, breathiness isnt a pitch; its a texture. In fact, in many

languages, its the difference between breathy and not breathy
that makes a meaning difference, too. Or, more precisely, in many
languages its the difference between breathy versus creaky that
makes a difference.
The tones themselves can also even be grammar. In English, we

use suffixes to situate verbs in time. But in other languages, you do
it with pitch. In one African language called Edo, if you say EEma, it means I am showing, but if you say ee-MA, it means
I showed.
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There are tonal languages all over the world, but they tend to cluster.
Theres Chinese, and that means all eight or so of the languages
that are called Chinese dialects, and that covers a lot of land.
Cantonese has six tones while Taiwanese has about seven or eight.
Tones are very common in Southeast Asia. In a language of Burma,

Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam, usually it will either have
tones or that breathy-creaky trick, or often a combination of the two,
like Hmong. Tones are also the order of the day in African below
the Sahara. If you know a black African from somewhere other
than Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, chances are their language
has tones.
The Beginning of Tone Languages

Why do those languages have tones while other ones dont? So
often, languages arent the way they are for reasons per se. For
example, if so many tone languages are spoken in Southeast Asia
and Subsaharan Africa, then maybe it has something to do with the
equator, so tones are useful for when its hot. After all, its true that
the other main cluster of tone languages is in Mexico. Actually,
tone is about chance; it happens by accident. Its rather marvelous,
actually. Tone is like the Cheshire Cats smileit sticks around
when the rest has fallen away.
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Note that /b/ and /p/ are really variations on the same sound. Dont
think about where they fall in that random thing called the alphabet;
think about how they feel in your mouth. /B/ is just doing /p/ with
a kind of tympani punch. Now, imagine saying boke and poke.
(Pretend that a boke is another word for ginger snap.) If you
measure somebody just talking, theres a tendency to say a word on
a lower pitch if it starts with b than if it starts with p.
Suppose that because /b/ and /p/ are really the same sound, they
actually become the same. That sort of thing happens all the time.
Suppose that this happened with boke and poke and that the /b/ and
/p/ both became /p/. Then, you just have poke and poke, so now
poke means both ginger snap and giving somebody a little jab.
But it doesntbecause weve always pronounced boke and poke

with different tones, where boke is pronounced lower and poke is
pronounced higher. We didnt care before; we didnt even notice.
But once its poke and poke, then if you listen closely, the tone
difference is still there. Thats how tone happens. In that language
now, the lower-tone poke means ginger snap and the higher-tone
poke means little jab.
Boke and poke are actually words in a Southeast Asian

language called Khmu. Languages are really bundles of dialects,
and even though almost nobody has heard of Khmu any more than
about two feet from where people speak it, it actually has many
dialects. Lay them end to end, and on one end, theres one where
bok means not ginger snap but cut down a tree, while pok means
take a bite.
Then, in another dialect, theres no different between /b/ and /p/, so

the lower-tone pok means cut down a tree while the higher-tone
pok means take a bite. Then, theres one dialect in between these
two where the higher-tone pok also means take a bite, but cut
down a tree is the breathy po-ohhk.
Whats even more fun is that in many languages, the tones play
against the accent. You have to both put the accent on the right
syllable, and then you also have to get the tones right. Swedish,
for example, has tone. Thats the reason for the grand old Swedish
accent with Swedes in old movies saying things like Ive got To do
THE diSHES.
Theres a word in Swedish, tomten, that means both gnome and

the garden with the accent on the first syllable: TOM-ten.
The way to make the difference is to add tone. If you have both
the accent and a high tone on the first syllable, then tomten means
gnome. But you can also say it with the accent on the first syllable
but the high tone on the second syllable, tom-TEN. So the accent
and the pitch are operating separately.
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Monkey Business/Thinkstock.
Children who grow up learning Chinese are at an advantage for having perfect
pitch because of the nature of the language, which is tonal.
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Tone feels as natural to people who grow up with it as consonants

and vowels feel to speakers of languages like English. It can also be
tough to learn past a certain age. For example, it seems impossible
for an English speaker to get as good at even halfway speaking
Chinese as it is for an English speaker to wrangle some German or
Italian. You have to hear the tones in use, constantly, to get the hang
of it.
Tones lead to a question that is often asked, which is whether

speaking a tone language makes people better singers. The answer
to that seems to be no, in the basic sense. There is no evidence that
growing up speaking Chinese will give a person a leg up on being
able to render the melody of a particular song.
However, it has become pretty clear that growing up tonal does

make people more likely to have perfect pitch. That is, some people
can name the pitch of a note without using a piano or anything else.
In the American world, thats something you encounter now and
then, and it seems to be a matter of genetics more than anything.

Good musicians can learn to approximate it, but the eight-year-old
kids who can just do it are simply dear little freaks.

If you grow up in China or Vietnam or the like, the nature of the

language gives you a leg up on having perfect pitch. Its because the
languages are spoken with perfect pitch. You can measure someone
saying, for example, the falling-tone ma for scold in Mandarin
Chinese one day, and then if you measure the person saying it
two days later, he or she will spontaneously say it on the exact
same pitch.
This isnt taught; it just is. This is what a brain can do if bathed in
a tone-language environment from birth. As such, a person finds
it easier to identify a B-flat pitch out of nothing, because they are
pitching their speech out of nothing day in and day out.
Suggested Reading
Fallows, Dreaming in Chinese.
1. To give yourself a sense of what it would feel like to speak a tone
language, see how many ways you can say someones name to convey
different attitudes, expectations, etc.
2. In your experience, are people with musical talent better at learning

new languages?
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U for Understand
Lecture 20
ften, its impossible to say that something new people are doing
with language is for a concrete reason, other than that it is the nature
of human language to morph along, with new habits emerging and
old ones falling away. However, there are certainly cases where something
is happening in a language, such as English, for an identifiable reasonnot
one that people are consciously thinking of, but a reason that makes sense,
that shows that there is a basic coherence in communication despite what a
magnificent mess a language is in so many ways.
Lecture 20: U for Understand
Turning Verbs into Nouns

The humble word understand gives us an entre into understanding
something that many people find annoying about English these
days. However, it isnt going away, and its really kind of cool if
you break it down. The trend in question is the business of turning
bare verbs into nouns, instead of using an already existing noun that
has a nice suffix on it.
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For example, take the popular term epic fail. Whats a fail? We
think of fail as a verb, and there is no such thing as a fail. Rather,
what happened to the noun failure? It would be one thing if this
were just an isolated expression, but its actually part of a trend.
There are people now saying, Lets focus on the build, instead
of using the word construction. Others use Whats the ask? in
reference to someone quoting a priceask, instead of request, for
example. People sometimes note that a person offered an interesting
solve, or people do a reveal instead of a revelation. Have we
no suffixes?
The truth is that people are doing this out of a quest for order.
In terms of feel, it is indeed slangy and a tad dramatic; there is a
fundamental tendency among humans to seek a certain extravagance
in speech. Something was once nifty, then keen, then groovy, then
cool, then wicked, awesome, rad, and so on. Cool beans, people
even saythe expressions dont even have to make sensebut the
point is the novelty, the weirdness.

But in doing things like that, the drama is also centered on

something very logical, which stewards of language should
actually see as language maintenance. To understand it, lets use the
word understand.
Obviously, under and stand came together and created not a term
about standing under things, but a whole new word that refers to
comprehension. And that process is one way that languages are
always building new things while other ones wear away. Some
sounds fall away, such as the silent /e/ at the end of words. Some
words disappear, as whom clearly wants to if we would only let it.
However, at the same time, words stick together to make new

ones. More specifically, words stick together and one of the words
becomes a prefix or a suffix. Prefixes and suffixes have to come
from somewhere, after all; they emerge gradually, from what starts
as a word. You can see this plainly in understand: Under can be a
preposition by itself, but its also a prefix, in words like underrate
and undergo and understand. But with any prefix or suffix, you can
assume that it started as a word.
Take -dom, as in freedom and wisdom. It started as a separate

word that meant judgment or, by extension, condition. That
word actually still exists, but its meaning has drifted over time
its doom. At first, you could use two words, free and dom, and
that meant a free condition. But over time, when dom was said
together with other words so often in that way, it gradually became
a part of other words instead of a word of its own.
The story of fail and solve and such begins with things like that, the
building of new words. Now, we get closer to what fail and solve
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are about in that these fusions have a way of drifting from what
they started out as meaning.

Kingdom, for example, doesnt refer to the condition of being a

king, but something specific about that conditionthe area of land
that the king has under his authority. If we really want to refer to
the condition of being a king, we say something like kingliness
or regality.
Often, things go a lot further than that. For example, transmission

refers to transmitting things, but it also refers to that car part thats
so expensive to fix. We know intellectually that something in there
is transmitted, but when we say transmission in that meaning, we
are not thinking about the act of transmitting; we are thinking about
a car part.
So, words come together to make new ones, but then the words
go idiomatic on you. This is the same kind of process that occurs
with compounds, such as blackbird. With compounds, words come
together and neither of them becomes a prefix or a suffix, but the
meaning of the two together becomes more specific than the literal
meaning. A blackbird is a certain species of black bird.
Idiom Creation
Idiom creation is useful in itself, because it creates new words just
like the initial snapping together of words does. What else would we
call a transmission in a car? Whatever it was, it would come from
some words that originally meant something else, like budgetbuster.
You certainly wouldnt call it a buzmetzka or a glingbork. In
addition, however the word understand started, and linguists
actually dont know, it did give us a word for comprehending.
Comprehension itself came from Latin; before that, English had its
own local understand. It had to come from somewhere.

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However, then we get to epic fail and Whats the ask? We think
to ourselves, What about failure? It means more in English as we
speak it than the act of failing. It has connotations. One thinks not
just of something as simple and bland as something intended but

not achieved, but of the failing happening in a context of urgent
expectation that there would be success, with the failing implying a
judgment over an entire enterprise or a life.

Failure has idiomatized some, as words will always do. So, if you
want a noun to indicate something not working out in a less loaded,
more literal, cleaner way than failure, then one way is to wipe the
moss off of failure and just say fail. You can get away with it in
English because in this language, its normal for nouns and verbs
to both be bare: You can copy a copy; you can view a view. So, you
can fail, and thereby have experienced a fail. Its creative, and its
based on a quest for clean, direct expression.
In the same way, then, there is a difference between what people

mean by an ask and what a request is. Request is loaded: Its more
than a requesting; it carries an implication of politeness and, if you
think about it, a suggestion that the thing being asked is appropriate
and ought to be granted. If what you really want to convey is
someone just asking, then one way is to coin an ask.
The reveal makes perfect sense. Revelation doesnt refer only to the
revealing of something; its undergone a certain idiomatization. We
associate revelation with long-standing secrets. We also associate it
with concepts rather than things, such as Watergate. If you want to
refer to an act of revealing without all of the static, then how about
reveal? Its an impulse to go back to the basics.
Fail and solve and ask and the rest exist because people are seeking
to clear away the idiomized connotations that words accrete over
time, in order to express direct, undecorated concepts. Its the same
impulse that traditional grammarians consider healthy in other
contexts: directness and clarity over implication and ambiguity.
Oddly, the dudes and dudettes using these words this way today are
in a way feeling the same way about English as some of the stuffy
old grammarians of the 1800s did. If youre at a loose end, it can be
127
fun surveying the notions some of these men and women with three
names had about what was right and what was wrong.
128
As it happens, making new words by gluing them together became

more common in the 1800s than it had been before, and there were
people who didnt like it. And one reason they didnt like it was
because they didnt like how when you put two words together,
the result isnt quite the combination of the two meanings, but
something a little off.
We like to think that things mean what they say they mean. The
word understand has never made senseyou arent standing under
anythingso technically, it should be deemed not an English
word. But if we banned it, wed deprive ourselves of a glimmer of
insight it gives into ancient Germanic people.
There has been a certain amount of new work on just how

understand emerged as an idiom from the elements under and
stand. It would appear that under could also mean something more
like among or between in early English. Then, from what we
can see from the various words for understandlike verstehen
in German, which if we had the word in English anymore would
now come out as forstandamong speakers of Old English and
early German and languages related to them, there was an idea that
standing in front of things, or among things, was a way of coming
to comprehend what they were about.
Usually, languages were familiar with approach understanding

with roots that mean take or grasp. (Note that we can even say
to grasp a concept.) Latin and the Romance languages have words
related to comprehension, where the -hension is the same root as
the one in apprehend, or taking. Russian also uses a take word
for understanding. But for Old English speakers, understanding
started as not grabbing, but standing among, and maybe even under,
until insight came.
Suggested Reading
Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English.
1. Failed Flee Across Ice a sign reads. What motivates someone to write
flee rather than flight?
2. We know that idioms like kick the bucket are just expressions. But can
we say that verb-particles like turn up (as in to appear after being thought
lost) and make up (as in to reconcile) are just expressions, too?
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V for Vocabulary
Lecture 21
eople often wonder whether some languages have bigger vocabularies

than others. We are often taught that English has the biggest vocabulary
and that we should be proud of that. Its fun to be proud, and whether
or not some languages are bigger than others is an interesting question.
The problem is that when you try to give it a real answer, that answer turns
out to be highly elusive. In fact, the question as to whether English has a
bigger vocabulary than other languages ends up being as ethereal as the
question of what the difference between a language and a dialect is.
Lecture 21: V for Vocabulary
Vocabulary Words
One of the main problems with the question of whether some
languages have a bigger vocabulary than others is deciding what a
word exactly is. We think we know: apple, already, parsimonious,
bubble, rhinoceros. But its harder than that. Is spoons a different
word from spoon? Probably not. What about when verbs are
irregular? Is has a different word from have? Wed have to decide.
An is a form of a; is it a separate word?
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Then, what happens when we put words together? Makeup, as in

mascara and such, is obviously a word. But what about make up,
as in reconciling after an argument? We might say its two words,
make and up, but together, the two words have become an idiom.
Making up is not in any literal sense a matter of making anything
upward, after all. So, even if make up is made of two items, is it a
word in the same way that drink or climb is? People will differ here.
Many will pick up on this as a way to show that English has so

many words. For example, if reconcile is a word and make up
has the same meaning, then how can we subtract make up from
our count of words and instead call it an expression, when the
expression means the same thing as something else that happens to
be composed of a single word? Then, what about make up as in to
apply makeup? If makeup is a word, then why isnt making up, of

your face, a word, too? Make up also means to fabricate something;
isnt that another word?

But things get hairier in other cases like this. For example, the pair
of words pick up has over a dozen meanings. You never think about
that; people learning English do, though. And with all of those
meanings, can we really just say that all English has is two words
pick and up? But, how do we decide which of these combinations
are words and which are just variations on one another? It gets into
the fuzzy language-dialect kind of distinction again. English has
hundreds of these constructions with verbs and little particles like
up and out.
Then theres the problem of what a language even is. Take Arabic,
a language that its speakers and fans often celebrate as being big
like English in terms of vocabulary. In fact, Arabic as a term really
refers to several distinct languages. The Modern Standard Arabic
of the printed page and formal contexts is as different from what an
Arab speaks casually as Latin is from Italian, and then the casual
Arabic of a Moroccan is as different from the casual Arabic of a
Syrian as Italian is from French.
Just as with Chinese, the general feeling is that all of these are
dialects of the language Arabic because of the shared cultural
heritage and the fact that almost all Arabics are written with the
same system, with a major exception being Maltese Arabic.
Yet the Moroccan Arabic speaker learns standard Arabic in school,

prays from the Quran, and makes use of standard words and even
grammar within his or her own utterances depending on what he
or she is doing and who he or she is talking to. How do we decide,
then, which words are Standard Arabic and which are Moroccan?
How big is the Arabic vocabulary? One could come up with a

massive count, based on the fact that Arabic is really several
speech varieties so different as to be mutually unintelligiblethat
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is, different languages, as we think of most naturally. But to most

of us, that wouldnt feel meaningfully comparable to counting the
number of words in Polish, or even English.
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Slang is words. Just because they smell like socks doesnt mean
they dont qualify for the count, after all. But most slang comes and
goes. Does it count? Do we count the slang of all parts of society?
How far back do we want to go? Back in the day, one way of
making fun of classical music was to call it longhair music. The
expression is now antique. Does it belong in a dictionary? And, did
it belong in a dictionary 50 years ago?
What about slang like diss? This one looks like its here to stay;
some slang is sticky for some reason. So maybe that one can squeak
into the dictionary and be considered a real wordbut what about
people who would object that we already have disrespect and that
the word is improper?
Figuring out just what words are and which ones we want to count
is so slippery when you think about what the entirety of a language
is that the whole question as to whose is bigger more or less falls
apart. Some people will tell you that Englishs magic bullet is that
it has borrowed so many words, from Old Norse, Scandinavian,
French, Latin, and Greek especially.
But even this tends to be misportrayed. For one thing, in borrowing

all of those words, English let go of an awful lot of the original
ones. Theres a reason we have to learn Anglo-Saxon as a different
language, more like German than English.
Plus, English isnt as unique with its borrowed words as we

generally told. Languages the world over have been exchanging
words rampantly forever. Over half of Japaneses words are from
Chinese, and it now eagerly inhales English words. Almost half of
Urdus words are Persian and Arabic. Albanian is about 60 percent
Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, and Macedonian.
Persian, Vietnamese, Turkish, and the hundreds of indigenous

languages in Australia all have deeply bastard vocabularies.

In terms of that kind of mixture, English is less distinct than just

well documented and well publicized. When you have occasion to
really dig into the history of just about any language where that
history is known, you almost have to be ready to wade into some
soporifically dense lore on just where this word came from and that
one and how dead scholars differed sharply on where these two
came from and why.
No one has compiled a German

or Spanish or French dictionary
and found themselves hitting
a limit, unable to match the
Oxford English Dictionarys
tally. Plus, there are massive
multivolume dictionaries of
plenty of languages, but English
speakers dont see much of
them because theyre mainly
used by speakers of those other
languages. No one has ever
done a systematic tally of the
number of words in all of them
as compared to the Oxford
English Dictionary.
Blurpeace/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Dictionaries and Thesauruses

Does English have more words than other languages? Well, what
about the size of dictionaries? One thing we cant deny is that the
Oxford English dictionary has well over 600,000 entries. But then,
lexicography has always happened to have been a particularly
strong tradition among Anglophones, starting with efforts in
England tracing back to the 17th century.
Sir James Murray (18371915)

was a Scottish lexicographer
who edited the Oxford English
Dictionary.
133

134
A related idea you might encounter is that thesauruses are almost

unknown for languages other than English, meaning that they
just dont have as many synonyms to tease apart. But this is more
a matter of cultural preference. Truthfully, thesauruses tend to be
among the books more visually than practically significant in the
home. One could certainly compile thesauruses based on other
languages.
Part of what it means for there to be a rich lexicographical tradition

in English is that the Oxford English Dictionary harbors an awful
lot of words so obscure that no one would ever use them except as
a party trick, and theres a question as to whether such words really
qualify as words. This is why its really kind of a non-question as to
whether English has the biggest vocabulary in the world. Certainly,
the fact that it has been spoken in so many different places has
meant that there is a lot of Englishbut then thats also true of
Spanish and French, and just think what a vast territory Russian has
been spoken over.
However, one might still wonder: Taking account of all of the

questions and fuzzy categories, generally, could you put together
a dictionary of 600,000 words for every language in the world? To
that question, there is an answer, and its no.
The whole discussion about vocabulary size takes place about

written languages, and only about 100 languages worldwide are
written in any serious way. All of the others are oral languages,
whose earlier stages are lost to history; we can only surmise about
them using intelligent guesswork, of the kind that lets us know what
the Proto-Indo-European language was like, for example.
And that means that for most languages, there is no such thing
as a book that gathers centuries of words, used and obsolete, and
presents them as part of the language in an abstractified sense. In
any language, words come and words go. If the language is English,
somebody probably gets it down on paper, and as such, it continues
to have a kind of existence, because we can experience it forever.
But if its most languages, then when the word goes out of fashion
and stops being used, then, ultimately, its gone. In most languages,
the vocabulary is what its speakers can actually retain in their heads
for living use. Naturally, that is not 600,000 words.
Sometimes you read that small languages have only a few thousand
words. However, that isnt written on high anywhere either, and
its a little low. We get closer to the truth from dictionaries written
by people who have devoted a whole career to the language or
much of it and have consulted a good number of native speakers.
Dictionaries like that tend to have about 20,000 or 25,000 words.
Given that its all but impossible for even these sources to be
absolutely complete, we can say that unwritten, indigenous
languages generally have a few tens of thousands of what we
would intuitively think of as words. That is, they have the number
of words that humans need to express themselves with both clarity
and nuance, plus artistically when necessary. In terms of whether
some small languages have bigger vocabularies than other small
languages, we have to figure out what a word is first.
Suggested Reading
Bryson, The Mother Tongue.
Winchester, The Professor and the Madman.
1. One is often offered opportunities to increase ones vocabulary. That
activity is unheard of in a typical small, indigenous community where
it is assumed that normal adults know the words they need to know.
Have you ever found it advantageous to acquire words you didnt know
before? What was the advantage?
2. Explain what epistemological means. Just try. Some people say that they
know how to use it but cant explain what it means.
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W for Whats Up, Doc?

Lecture 22
The Progression of Slang

Think about just one thing about Bugs Bunnys speech, his
catchphrase Whats up, Doc? To be an American is to be so used
to that line that we rarely have occasion to stop and wonder its
origins. To us, it came from Bugs Bunny, but what about before him,
especially because he
was created by artists
and writers and does
not actually exist.
Nobody says, Whats
up, Doc? now unless
theyre imitating Bugs
Bunny. So where did
the Looney Tunes folks
get it?

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The director of the first One of the most famous cartoon characters
Bugs Bunny cartoon, from the Looney Tunes series is Bugs
Bunny, who has many catchphrases,
Tex Avery, explained including Whats up, Doc?
that
Whats
Up,
Doc? was Texas slang in the 1920s; specifically, among young
people, there was a Doc expression that was used as slang. Today,
that is utterly forgotten.
Coentor/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Lecture 22: W for Whats Up, Doc?
n this lecture, taking a page from the issue of whether slang counts as
vocabulary, you will take a closer look at slang and its place in what
a language is. People wonder about slang. Often, they wonder whether
there is more of it now than there once was. They wonder why we seem to
use so much more profanity than we used to. These are real issues, and one
way to get a grasp of it isof all thingsBugs Bunny.
We now know that teenagers in Texas back then had slang, and we
can be quite sure that Doc wasnt somehow the only bit of slang
they ever came up with. They were young people spending lots of
time together, as derisive and jolly as modern teens are. So, they
had slanglots of it. Its just that no one had any reason to write it
down. Plus, we cant hear them; there was no reason for ordinary
people to be recorded speaking casually in the 1920s.
But we can know that for some years in the 1920s, some of them
were saying, Whats up, Doc? as a greeting, and meaning it
straight, because the expression was new and Bugs Bunny didnt
exist. So, we dont know what the slang among Texas teens was in
the 1920s, except for the word Doc, but we know they had it, and
by extension, we know that teens all over the country had their own
varieties, differing from place to place but always there.
Definitions of what slang is differ. However, we can make do with

a basic idea that most definitions circle around. Slang is language
of low social level (i.e., language that would seem out of place in a
formal context) that stands in for a normal, vanilla way of putting
somethingsuch as How are you? in the case of Whats up,
Doc?and is usually of temporary duration (slang comes and
goes, like fashions and fads).
Slang is eternally being refreshed, because of that eternal human

quest for verbal extravagance. Because that extravagance is central
to how people talk, slang is universal; in all languages, below the
radar, people are making up colorful ways of saying things and
watching them catch on. In other words, slang is everywhereand
always has been.
In that slang is informal, part of its essence is that it is generated by

subgroups to mark their sense of identity, and from that, it follows
that younger people are especially fertile with it. They have a way
of chafing at boundaries, testing their wings, and cherishing their
in-group memberships to a fervent degree.
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However, in all times among all humans as far as we know, there

have always been young people. Also, groups hardly have to be
young, and even among older people, its hard to find a person
whose vocabulary consists only of words that have existed since
time immemorial. Everybody was young once, and you dont stop
wanting to play with language just because youve reproduced.
Yet it can feel like we live in slangier times. If we were asked to

think of a major difference between how people talk now and how
they used to, for many or most of us the first thing that would come
to mind is that we are more vernacular in the way we talk. That
impression is on to somethingbut not that human nature has
changed, which it would have to have if slang werent part of the
warp and woof of life way back when as well as right here now. The
times are slangier, but only partly in that more of us use it more.
Its also that we hear more of it than we used to, whether we want
to or not.
Slang in the Past

Most of us sense that there were certain people in the past who had
a lot of slang. Flappers in the 1920s are known to have had a slang,
but then we associate them with what was then a fresh, new way of
being and involving a lot of alcohol, jazzy music, and whatnot.
138
Another kind of slang is used as a crafty and vaguely sinister ingroup affair, such as among thieves. The classic example is the
rhyming slang that Cockney criminals used, where apples and
pears stands for stairs, and it means that you can just say apples
and people know you mean stairs.
The book Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang,

University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence is full of slang by young,
fashionable men from the late 1700s and early 1800s. So, the kinds
of young men in those strange original illustrations of books by
Dickens and George Eliot, with the ruffles and canes, used slang
enough that it stood out.
In other books, you can get a peek at the kind of slang that American
undergrads were using. In the late 1800s, at Williams College,
the jocular word for toilet was lem. At the same time, they were
calling it a minor at Harvard.
Words and phrases for being intoxicated include drunk, plastered,

sozzled, three sheets to the wind, stewed to the gills, bombed,
blitzed, and so on. At Cornell in the late 1800s, if one was what they
called comfortably intoxicated, one was full, whereas if one was
what they called salubriously intoxicated, one was corned.
At Stanford in the middle decades of the previous century, the way

you addressed or referred to a female student in a slangy way was
as a dolly. Today, the cheerleaders at Stanford are called the Dollies,
and thats the only remnant of what was once a term of address.
The old days were full of slang. Much of whats different today
is that slang is aired publicly in a way that would be considered
unthinkable before. Much of the slang from the past never met the
page, or it did only once in someones attempt at a lexicon of what
they called vulgar terms or colloquialisms, and then disappeared
forever. However, we are a much less formal culture than we once
were in terms of dress, dance style, mannerisms, mores, cultural
tastes, and therefore, of course, language.
Part of the new informality is that we dont shed the ways of

speaking we had when we were younger when we grow up. Notice
that the very idea of growing up feels a little scary and even oldfashioned to many of us today, and talking young means talking
slang. So that means that there can be more usage of slang today
even if there isnt more of it.
But there has also been a profound change in our linguistic

environment. When The Catcher in the Rye came out in 1951,
Holden Caulfields use of so much slang such as crummy and phony
was novel. But even then, Holden was censored in a way; guys like
139
him were using some terms that the era of I Love Lucy and I Like
Ike just wasnt ready for.
140
Today in books, thoughas well as on television, in movies, and

in popular musicpeople using his kind of language, except with
a whole lot more slang as well as profanity, is ordinary. In the
late 1800s, the only way you heard what young men were calling
toilets was to spend time with them. Today, those men are depicting
themselves using those words in every other movie or television
show or song one hears. Slang is everywhere.
Texting is giving us new examples of both the ubiquity of slang

and its greater stickiness today, going beyond youthspeak into just
everyspeak. We often hear that in texting, LOL means laugh out
loud or laughing out loud, but it hasnt really meant that for a
very long time now. Text exchanges often drip with these LOLs the
way normal writing drips with commas. Lets face itno mentally
composed human beings spend their entire lives immersed in
ceaseless hilarity. The LOLs must mean something else.
And they do. Today, although nobody would put it in just such a
wayand, in fact, journalists are already doing pieces where
they claim that LOL means just about anythingit actually has a
function: It signals basic empathy between texters. What began as
signifying laughter morphed into a little piece of stuff that eases
tension and creates a sense of equality.
LOL is informal (it wont be making its way into any new
constitutions or legal documents), stands in for something else (in
this case, all of the nervous laughing and standing on one foot and
looking into the distance that we do in live conversation to keep
things light), and is associated with young people. That is, were in
slang world.
However, theres no reason to think that people using LOL now

are going to mysteriously stop doing it once they have their own
401Ks. LOL is probably permanent slang, like diss for disrespect
and dude for my good fellow among modern male persons.

Overall, though, the slang that feels so much more us now than
them then is not as new as it feels.
Suggested Reading
Partridge, ed., A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
1. What is an expression that was part of the warp and woof of speech
when you were growing up that ended up going by the wayside? Would
you put it in a dictionary?
2. Are terms we use with children, such as doggie and tummy, slang? If
not, what are they? Should they be in a dictionary, or are they not really
wordsand if not, why?
141
X for !X, Y for Yiddish

Lecture 23
!X
is a language with clicks in it, and the exclamation point

stands for a click. When you say the name of the language,
!X, the first sound is a click combined with the /kh/ sound in
Bach. Then, you say oh-ong. There are two os in sequence: One of them
has a high tone, and the other one is nasal, like the word bon for good in
French. This is all very interesting, and thats just the name of the language!
Lecture 23: X for !X, Y for Yiddish
!X

142
!X is one of a whole group of click languages, called the Khoisan

family. Depending on where you draw the line between language
and dialect, which is a pretty arbitrary business, there are about
a dozen of these languages or three dozen. Theyre spoken in the
southern part of Africa, by people who were once called Bushmen
and Hottentots, although those terms are now inappropriate.
The languages are some of the most fascinating on the planet in a

great many ways, and one of them is that click languages may well
have been the first languages in existence. Figuring out whether
they were has been an interesting kind of detective story.
!X has more sounds than any other language. There are about
164 consonants in one dialect of !X, and of them, 111 of them are
clicks. Some of them make you suck in; other ones make you push
out. Sometimes, there are ones that make you do a kiss.
The clicks arent just decorations. They arent only used in names,
or words for noises or animals, or to ask people to come toward
you. They are actual sounds, just like the regular consonants.
In fact, words are more likely to start with a click than a regular
consonant. In addition to clicks, !X has tones, like Chinese, and
creaky sounds, like the ones found in Southeast Asia.
Clearly, this is a very hard language for foreigners to learn. It

even does some damage to its native speakers; click-language
speakers have a bump on their larynx that comes from spending
their lives doing these clicks.
The grammar is tough in many
ways, too: !X has a lot of the
crazy plurals that are in Dinka,
the ones like child and children
where you just have to know.
We know from a language that

is as complicated as these click
languages that adults have rarely
had to learn them. Life is hard
enough without having to master
111 different ways of clicking
your tongue; if adults had been
learning these languages, theyd
be much easier.
Khoisan
Afro-Asiatic
Nilo-Saharan
Niger-Congo A
Niger-Congo B (Bantu)
Austronesian
!X is one of a group of
languages known as Khoisan
languages, which are spoken
mainly in southern Africa.
Where did the clicks come from? That question is what starts us
down the road of identifying these languages as the first ones. The
clicks arent something that just happens in languages in other
places. Some languages spoken near the click languages have
inherited some clicks over time, and thats why languages like
Xhosa and Zulu have some clicks.
Otherwise, the only other language on the planet that has been
known to have clicks was a language spoken during initiation
ceremonies by one single group of Australian aboriginal people.
What happened in southern Africa? The question is so difficult that
some people have found it easier to turn the whole issue upside
downsuppose the click languages were the first human language,
and then what happened after that is that the clicks got lost as
humans moved elsewhere.
143
Mark Dingemanse/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5.

144
Of course, that still technically leaves the question as to how the

clicks started, but if were talking about the first language, then
just maybe the clicks came before speech. Even today, some clicklanguage speakers use only clicks when theyre hunting. Perhaps
speech grew out of that, giving us a way to imagine how you get a
language with clicks in it.
But this account only works if at first there isnt a language. Why
would you have a language, then start clicking at animals, and then
start using those clicks while youre saying something to another
person? And if by chance you were that sort of person, why would
people start imitating you? So, if the clicks were first, then it would
have been among people who didnt have language yet. Today,
there are no languageless people, so this would have had to be the
first languageright?
Its now established that modern humans emerged in Africa, so

at least we have the right continent. In addition, there is some
interesting work being done on the genetic side of the question.
Technically, in addition to the click language in Australia, there are
a few click languages spoken separate from the others, in Tanzania.
One would surmise that they are related to the more southerly clicklanguage speakers, and indeed, archaeological evidence shows
that click-language speakers were once more widespread and that
only later did another group, called the Bantu, migrate downward
and cover the territory and leave the click-language speakers as
speckles on the map. That means the two click languages stranded
up in Tanzania are remnants of a time when the click language area
was continuous.
If you compare the DNA of those Tanzanians and the other clicklanguage speakers, you do find a relationship. However, these
days, researchers can go from groups DNA to measure how much
time has passed since the groups started splitting off and becoming
different people with different languages. One study of that kind has
shown that the click-language speakers started becoming different
groups about 70,000 years ago, which is exactly when humans

started migrating out of Africa.

So it could be that those first humans were clicking. And if you

compare all of the click languages, theres one more line of
evidence that suggests that these people have been doing their thing
for a very, very long time.
There are three kinds of languages that belong to the family called
Khoisan, and technically, other than the clicks, these languages are
very, very different. The ones in the south, like !X, have the crazy
plurals. The ones in the middle are like Chinese, with no prefixes
and suffixes and lots of tone. Then, the ones in the north have
nine genders.
It is possible that these three kinds of languages represent three

completely different families of language, where the clicks just
spread across them like a weed, through endless millennia of
intermarriages where kids grew up hearing two languages and
mixed them together. That happens in the world.
However, chances are that these three groups of language do trace

back to a single one. Most people studying the question think so.
But whats clear is that these three groups must have separated a
very, very long time ago. Africans DNA is more diverse than
other humans; because they were the first people, their DNA has
been randomly morphing for the longest time. Language can tell a
similar story, and it seems to be telling it with the click languages.
But in the end, a sadder story the click languages are telling is
about extinction. There is a very real possibility that none of these
languages will be spoken a hundred years from nowor, at most,
just one. Several of them have gone extinct over the past century,
and many of them are disappearing so fast that theres a question
as to whether researchers will even get to them in time to describe
how they work.
145
As with Ket, there are people who ask why we should care about a
language dying, and languages like !X give a useful answer, in that
its so difficult and peculiar that essentially only natives can do it in
any real way. These days, only a few thousand people speak !X. It
would be especially unfortunate if we couldnt even get languages
like this down on paper and on recordings so that we can at least
know what they were likeand figure out more about where they
came from and what they can tell us about the human story.
Yiddish
Yiddish is that odd story about the death of a language that isnt
dying at all. Yiddish is a Germanic language. In the classificational
sense, it is a dialect of German with a heavy overlay of words
from Hebrew and Slavic languages, because of the history of the
Jewish people who have spoken it. That history is also much of
why it is considered a separate language from German; as always,
what decides these things is based on humanity, not formulas.
Generally, Yiddish to German is Maltese to Arabic, where Maltese
has a massive load of Italian vocabulary, but when you scrape the
surface, you see Arabic underneath.
146
On a regular basis, the media tells us that Yiddish is living on

borrowed time. The market for literature in the language is always
shrinking. And although there are students learning the language in
college and a healthy number of activities and programs seeking to
preserve it, there are those who say that the very existence of efforts
like those means that the language will never truly live again.
Once theres a revival movement, its already dead, some say.
Frankly, theres a lot of truth in that statementbut not when its
about Yiddish.
What about the hundreds of thousands of people who use Yiddish

as an everyday language in the home decade after decadethat
is, namely, Hasidic Jews? For example, there is a Hasidic town in
New York State called Kiryas Joel, in which 90 percent of the over
13,000 people there speak Yiddish in the home. And they tend to
have huge families; that is, kids are being raised with Yiddish.
There are about 150,000 Americans alone speaking Yiddish in the

homenot in some class, not in a summer program, not for fun.
There are about 20,000 more people doing that in Canada and many
more in other places.
Whence the idea, then, that Yiddish is dying? Its that old sense that
language is in print instead of in the mouth. From there, its natural
to feel like a language doesnt really exist unless it is thriving on
the page. But thats an illusion due to the invention of print just
several centuries ago. There are about 5,900 languages that are only
spoken, yet surely we cant tell their speakers that the languages
they learn on their mommies knees arent real.
So, Yiddish isnt dying in the least. There would seem to be a notion
that if it is only being spoken casually in homes then it is not alive,
but this is nonsensical. A dying language is a Native American
language that is now spoken only by people in late middle age or
older, that youngsters of the culture only know some words ofthat
is, most Native American languages or the Aboriginal languages
in Australia. A dying language is Ket, now spoken by only a few
hundred people.
Suggested Reading
Rosten and Bush, The New Joys of Yiddish.
Thomas, The Harmless People.
1. Can you say !X? Just do it a few times (perhaps wipe your nose and
mouth), and through this alone, savor the marvel of linguistic diversity.
2. Some Yiddish advocates might object that if a language isnt being
written, it isnt a language. What might your response to that be now?

Do these advocates have a point, perhaps, in that the language used to
be written more?
147
Z for Zed
Lecture 24
Lecture 24: Z for Zed

148
In the Greek alphabet, what started as hieroglyphic symbols for

things were transformed into a small collection of alphabetic letters,
based on the first sound of certain objects. For example, nahashu
was snake in Egyptian; hence, workers took the symbol for that and
had it mean n.
The Phoenicians took

this up and showed it
to the world. For them,
one of the letters was
called zayin, and it
probably meant axe.
One way we know that
is that at that time, the
symbol was actually
what we would now
see as a capital I. If
One of the letters that the Phoenicians
you think about it, the used was called zayin, and its symbol
uncharitably oriented looks like the capital letter I in English.
person could endeavor
to strike someone with an I, which would be handier for the
purpose than trying to flay someone with a D, for example.
Marsyas/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
e sense the letter z as an odd letter. Its at the end of the alphabet.
Its associated with the sound of bees flying, which we sense as
vaguely threatening. But in fact, z is more a part of us than we
think. It is quite different from what it seems, and the reason is that eternally
tricky difference between language on the page versus language in the
mouth. A grammarian got it right in 1582 when he said that z is a consonant
much heard amongst us, and seldom seen.
However, for the Phoenicians, zayin wasnt something vaguely

sinister to tack on to the end of the line. They made it the seventh
letter; to them, the /zz/ sound was perfectly natural, perfectly
common, and therefore quite plausibly situated where today we
put g.
The Greeks liked it, too. But for a reason well never know, they got
the name wrong. The Phoenicians had another letter called tsade,
for the sound /ts/. Maybe the Greeks tripped up on how similar /ts/
and /z/ are, but all we know is that they picked up that I and called
it zeta, from tsade, instead of zayin. In Phoenicians close relative
Hebrew, Americans to this day learn about the z letter zayin, but
fraternities use the Greek Z letter, zeta, in their names.
Still, to the Greeks, misnamed or not, the /z/ sound wasnt odd or
other at all. Rather, thats how the Romans felt about it when they
picked up the Greek alphabet, and there was a reason: Latin didnt
have a /z/ sound itself.
For the Romans, /z/ was just a sound that popped up in the words
they borrowed from Greek. So at first, they didnt even bother to
bring it at all. But time passed, and they liked borrowing those
words. They never gave them back, so they needed a z around. But
not in spot seven getting in the way; z was special, so the Romans
stuck it onto the end.
Old English didnt have a z eitheror, it didnt seem like z was a

real sound. Letters that seem separate because of where they are
in the alphabet are often related pairs. For example, b is really a
kind of p. If you roll z and s around in your mouth, youll be able to
feel that z and s have the same relationship as b and p: z is an s with
a little more belly in it.
In Old English, there were really both s and z, but only s was
written; z was something that happened, sometimes, to what
was written as s. What was written as s turned to a z when it was
between two vowels.
149

150
For example, the word rise, even now, is spelled with an s, but what
we say is a z. If we said it with an s, wed be saying rice, which
we arent and shouldnt. Thats how it was in Old English, too: the
word for rise was ree-san, but the way it was pronounced was
ree-zan. To speak the language was to know that subconsciously.
But under that way of thinking, /z/ wasnt a real sound; it was just
something that happened to the letter s sometimes. You didnt need
to write z; it was just something you did. But you did it all the time.
But how would the Anglo-Saxons write words that began with z,
like zone and zealous? Would they really write them with an s and
just expect people to know to pronounce them as a z? The answer
is that there were no such words in Old English. Words that started
with z were borrowed later from French and Greek.
The addition of these new words meant that English needed an actual
written z now, and in the Middle Ages, English started using the letter
zbut only so much. By the Middle Ages, certain spelling conventions
had settled in, and nobody was interested in going back and sticking zs
in everywhere where what was written as s was actually pronounced as
z. So we kept spelling rise the way it has always been spelled, with an
incoherent s to confuse children until the end of time.
Even now, the English hold on to the old tradition a little more than
we do; they spell words like analyze with an s (analyse), so you just
have to know that its really pronounced as a z. In America, Noah
Webster undertook spelling reforms in the early 19th century, and
while theres much to be said about what did and didnt work and
why, when it comes to Webster, we have to give it to him for giving
poor z a little more air to breathe.
Generally, z is the first letter of words that tend to be a little weird,

a little new: zinc, Zoloft, zygote. This is why to us, z seems kind of
odd, while to Phoenicians and Greeks, it was perfectly normal.
It even seems not to quite know what its name is. The Brits still
call it zed. That makes senseits how zeta would come out in
English after being chewed up forever. But what, then, is this zee
business that seems to so normal to us? That started as an alternate
in Britain, actually. The French had a tradition of naming letters by
their sound plus an /ee/ or an /ay/: beee, deee, and so on. So,
according to the pattern, the proper name for zed was zee.

The two were in competition in England, and they were in America,

too, for a good while. Even in the 1800s, you could still hear zed in
the South; a lot of that seems to have depended on how one felt about
England. But what seems to have tipped the scales was the massively
influential books of Mr. Webster. He didnt like the idea that America
was an offshoot of England, so naturally, along with teaching us to
spell analyze with a z, he liked zee, and today, so do we.
But what about the shape? First it was like an I, but it was the kind
of I you could use as a weapon, so imagine the top and bottom
strokes a touch on the long side. Now, imagine writing that over
and over again. Wouldnt you start doing it all in one continuous
stroketop, zip down and to the left, bottomso that you made
the whole thing without even having to lift your pen? The Greeks
started doing that after a while, and thats the Z we know today.
But theres one more place z sits hiding in plain sight. The plural
marker in English is sas in wallz, doorz, kidz, blobz, pigz,
dayz, hedgez, judgez, and kissez? Note that we dont say
walls and bridges. All of those are more cases where the printed
page makes us think about an s when really were saying a z.
And those words arent exceptions; theyre the norm. Its only after
some sounds that we actually say s for the plural: cats, caps,
ducks. But most of the time, youll notice that the plural marker
is pronounced as a z.
A Martian listening to English and taking it down to figure out

how it workedlistening, not readingwould write down that the
plural marker in English is z and sometimes s, certainly not that it
was somehow really s even though people usually say it as z.
151
People like Noah Webster missed things like that, but theyre just
as real as the /z/ sound in analyze. A lot more of what we hear and
see around us as language is real, as opposed to something else,
something more an approximation of language than language itself.
According to what the powers that be teach us, only a certain few
languages are real, and theyre mostly from Europe. If pressed,
we might throw in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew,
Persian, and probably Hindi. But thats because we think of them
as languages written down a lot. According to that metric, and
we breathe this in without even being able to think about it, other
languages are just dialects.
Even in a real language, the sense among its speakers is that

countless people arent doing it right. Talking to people all over
the world about language, you can start to feel like language is
like the rock that Sisyphus was rolling up that hill but never quite
making it. Apparently, almost every human on the planet is either
speaking something primitive or speaking something wrong. But
that view of things is both gloomy and, we can be glad, inaccurate.
Suggested Reading
Robinson, The Story of Writing.
Sacks, Letter Perfect.
1. Just as we utter the /z/ sound much more than we are always aware,
spoken reality reveals some letters as rather useless. X could just as
easily be written as ks or z. If we could stop time and wake everyone
up afterward in a mental state open to serious novelty, would you pull x
from our alphabet, or retain it because it would make it easier to engage
older texts?
152
Bibliography
Bailey, Richard. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1996. This book, pitched to general readers as well as
scholars, gives thorough (but not compulsive) coverage of what English was
like two centuries ago, and taken together, it gives invaluable perspective
on the arbitrariness of what is considered proper speech from one era to
another, revealing English as, like all languages, a vast smudge of variations
on a theme.
Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email. London: Routledge, 2000. Baron
lays out a linguists perspective on what the new kinds of writing we do
on computer keyboards heralds in terms of the future of English. (Preview:
There is no pending disaster.) Baron wrote before texting had become
mainstream and before Twitter existed. However, her basic approach extends
easily to such genres, and newer books that address them will rarely surpass
Barons degree of insight and context.
Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. New
York: William Morrow and Co., 1990. Unsurpassed as a jolly, often laughout-loud trip through the history of English, still probably Americas favorite
source on the subject after almost 25 years at this writing.
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997. An invaluable encyclopedia, lavishly
illustrated, on anything one might want to know about language and
languages. This (starting with an earlier edition) has been at arms length
from my desk for almost 20 years now, and anyone who wants to know what
linguists do if they arent translators or grammar mavens will find the answer
and then some in this book.
. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995. A magnificent, almost imposingly rich
trip through English past and present in all of its facets, with a richness of
153
coverage and arrangement that make it still invaluable despite the Internet
that has come into existence since its first edition. Captures between two
covers a magnificent volume of information, much of it otherwise hard
to access.
. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Linguists anti-prescriptivist
stance summarized in a pointed yet temperate tone in a single book, well
keyed to the world we live in today.
. Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling. London:
Profile Books, 2012. Leave it to the preternaturally prolific Crystal to pen
a book addressing the question as to why English spelling is such a mess.
There are a number of reasons, all neatly addressed in this readable and
authoritative book.
Durkin, Philip. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009. A readable guide to the science of etymology,
perhaps most enjoyable just for all of the often counterintuitive word
histories it contains. Most etymology books are, despite the best of intentions,
monotonous reading after a whileone word after another. This book, with
chapters arranged according to separate subjects, problems, and approaches,
avoids that pitfall.
Bibliography
Falk, Dean. Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of
Language. New York: Basic Books, 2009. This is one of many attempts
to solve the language origin question, and like all of them, leaves as many
questions as answers. However, Falks presentation is extremely insightful,
as well as readable, and has always struck me as the most intriguing of the
more accessible speculations (as opposed to ones such as that language
emerged when early humans gossiped while grooming one another).
Fallows, Deborah. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love
and Language. New York: Walker & Company, 2011. Few people get around
to writing about what it was like to learn a foreign language, and almost none
address at any length the special task an Indo-European language speaker
faces in learning a tonal language. Fallows actually devotes a compact
154
memoir to that issue, with useful observations on the difficulties of learning,

in general, a language with fundamental structures so unlike ours, as well as
where the problems intersect with cultural differences. This is the handiest
source I know on getting a sense of what a tonal language is like beyond
elementary observations such as mine.
Forth, Gregory. Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia. London:
Routledge, 2008. Who knew there would be an actual book about the
folkloric conceptions of hobbit people among groups on a certain few
deeply obscure islands in Indonesia? Yet such a book exists, and those
interested in the Homo floresiensis controversy will find this anthropological
study fascinating.
Green, Lisa J. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. This is the one single-volume
grammatical analysis of Black English today, making a case, in itself, that
the dialect is not simply bad grammar. Otherwise, grammatical analysis of
Black English is largely found in academic journals and anthologies, in the
form of treatments of single constructions at a time. The book includes some
cultural coverage.
Jastrow, Otto. The Neo-Aramaic Languages. In The Semitic Languages,
edited by Robert Hetzron, p. 334377. London: Routledge, 1997. This is a
more academic source than one is usually to include in a bibliography of this
kind, but it is the only accessible source known to me on the grammar of
modern Aramaic, as opposed to just the wordsand in Roman rather than
Aramaic script. Likely more detail than youll need, but if you like Arabic
and Hebrew and want a look at another one of their brood, here is where
to go.
Labov, William. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1972. This remains the summary statement about
variation in language, consisting of various foundational studies by Labov
in the 1960s. It also remains timely in addressing the speech of inner-city
blacks. Its no accident its still in print almost 40 years after its appearance.
155
. The Social Stratification of English. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2006. This second edition of a book originally published
in 1966 preserves a detailed account of Labrovs research project and
adds a summary statement of the progress of this kind of inquiry in the
decades since.
Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins and How We Know Them: Etymology for
Everyone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Libermans exploration
of etymologies benefits from a wry, erudite sense of humor and an awesome
command of European languages. He gives a sense of how challenging it is
to recover the origins of many of even the most ordinary words of English,
while also showing what is really needed to arrive at answers where they
exist. This book can serve as a calling card for something even handier in
these times, Libermans weekly blog at Oxford University Press website.
McWhorter, John H. Doing Our Own Thing. New York: Gotham Books,
2003. An anthropological description of a shift in American language culture
over the 20th century from a sense that public language should be highly
formalized to one seeking to bring public language closer to the norms of
casual speech. Beware the mistake many made when it was published of
expecting a rant against the publics bad grammar, which it is not.
Bibliography
. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English. New

York: Gotham Books, 2008. This book describes the Celtic grammatical
infusion that English underwent, followed by the simplification of its
grammar by Scandinavian invaders. The thrust is that the history of English
is more interesting than the fact that it has a mixed vocabulary. Prescriptivism
and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that grammar shapes the way we think)
are engaged along the way.
. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Human Language. New
York: HarperCollins, 2001. A reader-friendly survey of what has happened
when the worlds languages have proliferated and then met one another, with
excessive digressionary footnotes about the authors hobbyist predilections
and neuroses. Anyone who agrees with the excessive assessment should
have seen the first draft!
156
. What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be. New York:
Gotham Books, 2011. Normal languages are the ones learned by few
adults and spoken by small numbers of people, which have complexified to
a massive degree over the millennia. In this light, English and other big
languages are the abnormal ones, sanded down by adult learners over time.
This book shows what normal languages are like, with the goal of creating
a view of English as something more than a collection of rules too often
broken.
. Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014. The claim that a languages grammar makes
its speakers see the world in a particular way is very popular with the media
and general public, despite that academic studies confirm only imperceptibly
slight differences in cognition caused by such language differences. This
book explores the gap between academic and public perceptions on this
issue and offers that it is more empirical, as well as fruitful and respectful
of indigenous groups, to focus on what languages show people to have
in common.
Nagle, Stephen, and Sara L. Sanders, eds. English in the Southern United
States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. While this is an
anthology of academic articles, most of them are accessible to the layperson,
and this is an excellent source for those interested in current views (as
opposed to the rather antique ones outlined in many classic sources) on the
origins of Southern English and its relationship to black American speech.
Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices: the Extinction of
the Worlds Languages. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A sober
political argument for the preservation of indigenous languages, focused on
practicalities as well as ideology. There are now quite a few books sounding
the alarm about language extinction, but this one will be most compelling to
the skeptic, even the skeptic who remains one regardless.
Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the World: A Language History of the World.
New York: Harper Collins, 2005. I have never been sure how many people
would be up for actually reading this cornucopia of information on leading
languages of antiquity and their fates into modern times; Ostler lays on so
157
much data that one almost wishes he had written a reference book. However,
one can also essentially use this as such, in which case it is an invaluable
collection of information on language history, of a kind often alluded to
in other sources without elucidation (i.e., What exactly were Akkadian,
Babylonian, Aramaic, Luvian, Sumerian, Elamite, etc., and what happened
to them?).
Partridge, Eric, ed. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1963. This book, commonly referred to by writers on slang,
profanity, and their history, is available in the typical university library and
brings together information from various renditions of a source dating back
to the 18th century. Here one can see how copious and vibrant slang was for
people centuries removed from us.
Pyles, Thomas. The Origins and Development of the English Language.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964. This is my favorite breadand-butter guide to the history of English over time, in that it focuses as
much on grammar as on words, in language accessible to all. Its no longer
in print but is so common in libraries (and among used books, etc.) that I feel
confident including it here.
Bibliography
Roberts, Peter A. West Indians and Their Language. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988. There are strangely few books for the general
public on creole languages. This one is the most ideologically neutral and
informative one, giving a thorough introduction to languages like Jamaican
patois and, by extension, all creoles born in plantation contexts. To be
maximally responsible, I should mention Derek Bickertons spirited Bastard
Tongues; however, to term this book ideologically slanted and empirically
controversial would be an understatement.
Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
This is the prettiest of the available primers on how writing emerged and
evolved; a treatment of the subject needs illustrations, and this book has
those in colora child would enjoy just paging through it. Plus, Robinson
covers the subject just enough for those disinclined to academic obsession, a
danger in books on this subject, in which it is easy to lay on a tad too many
descriptions of yet another variation on, for example, the letter a.
158
Rosten, Leo, and Lawrence Bush. The New Joys of Yiddish. New York:
Harmony, 2003. Rostens original edition of this book has been a jolly classic
for decades, focused mostly on Yiddish words and expressions and their
expression of the culture. Some have been less than happy with Lawrence
Bushs modernization, which incorporates aspects of modernity, including
political views, and thus becomes somewhat less cozy than the original.
However, outsiders would be deprived of a crucial aspect of the Yiddish
story without coverage of the new revival movements of recent times, and
this book lends a fine introduction to these.
Sacks, David. Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from
A to Z. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. This is an engagingly written and
scientifically scrupulous coverage of, actually, the birth of writing, in which
articles on each of the letters are the main course but only one part of the
books message. To learn about the history of a letter, start hereor use the
whole book as a way to inhale the invention of the alphabet without feeling
like youre in school.
Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. New York: St.
Martins Press, 1997. Of the various textbooks on pidgins and creoles, this
is the clearest, most up to date, and most worldwide in its orientation. Run,
dont walkthis one made me decide not to write one of my own.
Simonson, Douglas (Peppo). Pidgin to da Max. Honolulu: The Bess
Press, 1981. A jocular illustrated glossary of the creole English of Hawaii,
focusing on colorful vocabulary but giving a good sense of a creole as a
living variety.
Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. The Harmless People. New York: Vintage,
1989. This is an esteemed description of life among the people who speak
click languages, lending a larger perspective than mere grammatical
description of the world that has harbored such languages and the threats to
its continued existence.
Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic
Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. This book neatly puts
forth the thesis now increasingly influential among linguists that languages are
159
more complex when adults have rarely learned them, carefully distinguishing
this insight from the broader fact that cultural factors overall can also influence
languages to an extent. Trudgill has a gift for being concise yet complete, such
that his book is the most readable of the increasing number of explorations of
this thesis.
Bibliography
Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder,

Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York:
HarperCollins, 1999. This bestseller perfectly gets across, amidst its framing
by a murder mystery, what was involved in compiling anything approaching
a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. One comes away not
only entertained, but also perhaps aware that dictionaries cannot be taken
as authoritative in the sense that we often would like to, for the simple
reason that they are written by human beings with biasesas well as in
that languages are such vast things. One is also left, however, in awe of the
compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary and any other substantial ones in
any language.
160

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Pure intellectual stimulation that can be popped into

Passionate, erudite, living legend lecturers. Academias

Professor John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western

Professor Photo: Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph.com.

THE GREAT COURSES

Copyright The Teaching Company, 2013

Printed in the United States of America

John McWhorter, Ph.D.

rofessor John McWhorter teaches linguistics,

Double quotation marks are used for pronunciations of words (e.g.,

Slashes are used to indicate sounds (e.g., /b/).

his course takes each letter of the alphabet as an occasion to explore

Aramaic is spoken by Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.

Today, in its Middle Eastern homeland, Aramaic is just a few stipples

The current situation for Aramaic is ironically similar to its beginnings

WeFt/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

Lecture 1: A for Aramaic

Aramaic is one of the languages of the small but mighty Semitic

This included Jews. Here was the beginning of Hebrews long

That didnt seem as queerly bifurcated to the writers as it seems to

For example, in Hebrew, he is hu, opened is patakh, and it is oto.

Lecture 1: A for Aramaic

In addition to Latin and Russian, Aramaic was one more baroquely

if you look closely, yet more variations on a way of writing that

But it wasnt to last. In many places, Aramaic gave way to Greek

Like everybody who was anybody in Canaan at the time, the

Its tempting to suppose that its the fate of all globe-straddling

It was pretty easy for Aramaic to gradually creep into writing

French lost that status because of geopolitical power shifts, and

Lecture 1: A for Aramaic

influence, or power should be learning Mandarinright? Actually,

English came to reign at a time when three things had happened:

As such, English will remain the international language of choice

While today, reports of Aramaics total eclipse are greatly

Its as if by the year 3000 English was spoken only in a few

language that was once a sign of sophistication across the vastest

2. Is it a good thing that English is something of a universal language, or

would it be better if the worlds languages stayed purer and werent

B for Baby Mama

Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama

However, the chance that a random locution from the Caribbean

It isnt the cartoon speech of minstrels, but often we are taught

Some suppose, understandably, that black speech is simply

There is a particular collection of sound

For some black Americans, the dialect

When were dealing with things beyond accent, with whole

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-92598.

Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama

In her book, Lisa Green, a linguist at the University of

A black person saying baby mama is simply rendering babys

Languages differ in how they handle their haves. The French

The Origins of an Alternative Grammar

Part of the answer is England, of all places. Remember the

If we want to know just where this Southern English came from

The truth is that attempts to show actual parallels between the

Lecture 2: B for Baby Mama

A lot of what we now hear as Southern seems to have only

In Spanish, there is an annoying little a that is used before a person

would you think of it as an improvement in the language if that feature

Lecture 3: C for Compounds

Making New Nouns

Basically, we apply this accent shift when something becomes