SARAH: Do you shout at your phone while listening to Linguistics After Dark? Come shout at us in person at our live show at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th-17th. We'll be taking live questions and live rebuttals. Find out more at crossingscon.org. ELI: Hey, everybody, a little note before our episode begins. Our Linguistics Thing of the Day, spoilers, is swearing, so obviously in that section, there's a lot of swearing. However, it kind of carries on throughout the rest of the episode. So if you're listening with somebody who maybe doesn't want to hear a bunch of swear words, maybe listen to this first or give this one a skip. Alright, on to the episode. [Intro music] SARAH: Hi, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark. I'm Sarah. JENNY: I'm Jenny. ELI: And I'm Eli. If you've got a question about language and you want experts to answer it without having done any research whatsoever, we are your podcast. SARAH: Settle in, grab a snack or a drink, and enjoy. ELI: How's it going, Sarah? SARAH: Pretty good. Hopefully our listeners won't have noticed this, but we did take a couple months off in recording. I've had a bit of a summer vacation. How are you? ELI: I'm doing great. I am a new dad, which is one of the reasons why we took— SARAH: Congratulations. ELI: Thank you. It's one of the reasons why we took a couple of months off. And I am super enjoying it. It's really, it's just a fantastic experience. SARAH: Excellent. ELI: Really, it's, there's so, so much every day, and it's, that's like new and wonderful and exciting. And, you know, there's, like, downsides and all of that stuff, but it all just goes away when you like, look at your son, and he smiles at you, and then you're like, “Okay, I guess it's fine.” SARAH: [laughs] Not to mention your longitudinal language acquisition project. ELI: I was going to say, I want to give a shout out to Lingthusiasm, AKA the world's largest linguistics podcast, for having a baby onesie that says “daddy's little longitudinal linguistics acquisition project,” which I knew I was going to get immediately after we figured out, you know, all of the initial stuff. So that's, that's been great. I also got the “not criticizing your language, just acquiring it” for— SARAH: Oh, excellent. ELI: —you know, when, when the one year mark comes around and we start getting single words. SARAH: Excellent. Well, I look forward to hearing stories about that. ELI: I am sure that it will bleed into, into the podcast. What have you been doing with your summer vacation? SARAH: My husband and I are slowly collecting all of the US states and all of the MLB ballparks. ELI: Nice. SARAH: So we just got home from a trip out to California and Arizona, which—I had been to Arizona as, like, a three-year-old, so I kind of didn't count that, and he'd never been, so we checked that off and then we got the Dodgers, the Angels, the Padres, and the Diamondbacks. ELI: Wow. SARAH: So it's a very successful trip. ELI: So, so far, what's your favorite baseball park? SARAH: Diamondbacks, hands down. It's a retractable roof dome because it's Arizona and you cannot do outdoor things— ELI: Sure, yeah. SARAH: —during baseball season. But like the whole first floor concourse, you can see the field while you're doing stuff. It has excellent sight lines from everywhere. And even though it's obviously—I think it's like sixteen years old, maybe—it's like, it's a modern park, but not as modern as you would think, but it's like very classic brick and built up on the inside. ELI: Oh, is it from the like the modern renaissance when they started building parks inside cities again and— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —then at street level and that kind of thing. SARAH: Yeah. Yeah, it just, it was a really, really wonderful—I think the way my husband described it was “it was built by people who like baseball, for people who like baseball.” ELI: Ah, that's so good. SARAH: Go there if you can to see a game. That's, that's my thing. What are you drinking today? ELI: So I'm going to show this to you on video. You can see this bottle has no label, SARAH: Ahh. ELI: Because I made this beer myself. SARAH: Congrats. ELI: This is just done fermenting. So the rest of them are in the fridge cold-conditioning. And this is a golden ale and I have not tried it yet. SARAH: Alright. JENNY: Exciting. ELI: So I'm going to open it here while recording. Hopefully it's good. [sound of cap opening] SARAH: Ah, nice little sound. ELI: All right. SARAH: Hey. ELI: I don't have a fridge to lock our stuff in, and so I wanted something that was nice and easy to drink during the summer. And that's exactly what I wanted. And actually, a listener of the podcast helped me bottle this beer, so shout out to Jeannie, who is also my mother-in-law, who's basically up for any kitchen adventure, which is very cool, but even though she does not drink, she happened to be over on Bottling Day and helped bottle and cap about half of these beer bottles. SARAH: Wow. ELI: How about you? What are you drinking? SARAH: A cocktail that I made up, which is gin and amareno cherries and blueberry lemon seltzer. ELI: Nice. Maraschino cherries? SARAH: I think they're called Amareno. It's like maraschino, but even fancier. They're delicious. ELI: Ohh, are they the ones in syrup? The dark— SARAH: Yeah, the really dark colored ones in syrup. My friend got me some for my birthday, which was lovely, and then, I afterward discovered that I also have a jar of very high quality maraschino cherries, and so I am now on a mission to make as many beverages and desserts with preserved cherries as I can, because we have so many. I'm sorry, they're not called Amareno cherries. They are called Luxardo, the original Maraschino cherries, but they are indeed the very dark ones with the syrup. ELI: Oh, yeah, with the syrup. Yeah. Well, enough about our summer vacation and our drinks and cherries. Although, you know, I guess this is not Cherries After Dark. It's Linguistics After Dark. We should learn a language thing of the day. Sarah, do you have a Language Thing of the Day for us? SARAH: I do. And funnily enough, I just stopped myself from using this thing a minute ago, but the thing is swearing. I guess I haven't quite broken my school year habit of filtering out as many F-bombs as I can. ELI: I am amazed that you could do this as somebody who is newly a parent and realizing that eventually I am going to have to figure it out. Right now, we're still in the, like, “It's okay, he doesn't understand.” I am going to have a lot more respect for you over the next couple of months as I try to filter these out of my speech. SARAH: I do have to say, I have a wonderful mentor in this regard, which is my high school Latin teacher—who I feel like I've told the story before—but he steadfastly refused to swear or even use words adjacent to swearing, or religious words at all. There was “C-word” and “E-word” and “overpass” for Christmas, Easter, and Passover. And there was “urin” for “virgin”—oh yeah, nothing about sex either. “Shaft” rather than “screw,” which I think is worse, actually. And my particular favorite—this is the one I've actually adopted. There are actually two of his that I thought were very good. One is he would just say “badword.” JENNY: Is that where you got that? ELI: Yes, I have heard you say that. SARAH: That's where I got that. “Badword it” was a thing and I fully adopted that one. And the other one that I don't use as much, but I really enjoyed was “fraggle rock.” ELI: Ah yeah, that's a good one. “Shaft” is worse. SARAH: It just is. ELI: It's worse than just saying “screw.” SARAH: It really is. ELI: Also, how do you… I feel like it would be tough to—I don't know, I've never taken a Latin class. I feel like it would be tough to teach Latin without the word “virgin,” somehow. SARAH: Yes, so we replace it with “maiden” most of the time, which is fine. ELI: Gotcha. SARAH: Or “urin” if he was feeling particularly weird. Also “assonance,” which is a figure of speech we had to call “urinance.” Well, we didn't. He did. We would all just use the normal words, then he would do his thing. ELI: There is such a thing as going too far. JENNY: Yeah. SARAH: There is, but it became like a part of his personality where we were all just like, “Yeah, you're over the top and that's fine.” To the point where one year, I think it was my husband's year actually, when they did senior pranks, one of the pranks was to clean his room because he—not to put you on blast, Mr. White, but he did not have a super tidy classroom. ELI: Mr. White, if you're listening, we're just going to go through a laundry list of your teaching sins right now. SARAH: No, no, he was wonderful, but the prank was to clean his room for him. And then they wrote “virgin” in chalk all over the blackboard and then in masking tape all over the floor in like a gajillion point font. It was fantastic. And obviously he took up the tape and he washed the whiteboard, but he did leave the room in the new way they put up the desks. He left it that way forever because it actually was better than what he used to have. ELI: So it was a secret strategy. He just needed his students to get so angry at how messy the room was that they just went in and reorganized it for him. SARAH: [laughs] Yes, pretty much. ELI: It was a great strategy if you don't care. SARAH: Yeah, exactly. Anyway— ELI: So we're talking about avoiding swearing? SARAH: No, we're talking about actually swearing. ELI: Fuck yeah. SARAH: Fuck yeah. It's interesting because one of the reasons that we do try to avoid it in so many situations is because it's seen as rude or coarse or inappropriate. Pick your favorite negative trait. It's not something that you do in polite company or around children. And that is true, but it's also undergoing a really interesting shift right now, and the shift is that because swearing isn't used in polite, formal company, people use it more to show that they're being casual, that they're being friendly, to invite a sense of camaraderie, because if I'm comfortable enough to swear around you, then that's good and we're friends. ELI: So this, this makes a lot of sense to me. I have been in a number of workplaces where one of the first things that somebody told me was “it's okay to swear here.” as a specific way to say “we’re not a stuck up company, we're not a—you know, we don't stand on ceremony, everybody's real casual here.” That that's—that is one of the one of the things that people sort of go to immediately. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I think that this is interesting because swearing has a lot of different functions. You know, it is often an intensifier, or I have seen a study—and I guess we're gonna have to throw this in the show notes—that if you are allowed to swear when you get hurt, the perceived level of the pain goes down. And there's also I mean, it's, it is expressing things that are often, take a lot of circumlocution to say in other ways, right? SARAH: Mhm. ELI: But I also, I think like you've gotten right to the point of it, which is like swearing only occurs in certain registers. And so if you want to indicate that you're in a particular register, right? And I think also, at least in American society, swearing indicates a kind of, like, maturity or ability to have earned the right to use those words or that kind of thing, which, have a lot of feelings about. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: You know, I think it's not just, oh, this is a bad word and can be swapped out one-to-one with some other word, right? Like it does not feel the same to say “fraggle rock.” SARAH: Yeah. ELI: It does not. I mean, you tell me, does it feel the same to say “badword” instead of the swear word that you were gonna say? SARAH: No? I mean, it is funny—you've actually commented before that I use some of my replacement swears in the same sentence where I will actually just say “fuck,” and like it is very natural to me, you know, “Oh, fucking sugar biscuits.” And [laughs] and it's, like, ridiculous, but some of those words have just fully put themselves into my vocabulary that way. ELI: Mm. I think you had mentioned that swearing is becoming more widely acceptable, and I wonder if part of it is this like, there is much more informal communication happening now. And I wonder if that is kind of creating more situations where swearing is in bounds or where people don't quite know where they want to draw the line. And so they don't end up, kind of, policing this as much. SARAH: When you say more informal, you mean a greater quantity or a greater degree of informality? ELI: I think a greater quantity. SARAH: Yeah, I would agree with that. I don't police swearing in my classroom very much. I guess my sort of baseline is like—actually, we've even talked about this a little bit, I think within the faculty at my school, as we're trying to, like, navigate this with students. But what we sort of, at least some of us, have landed on is like, if you are swearing for emphasis with friends, and I overhear it, I'm probably gonna let it go. If you're swearing at somebody, if you're using that language in order to be hurtful, then the same way that I would call you out for just telling someone they're stupid, I'm gonna say, you know, don't call them a fucking idiot. But yeah, I'm not a super formal person anyway. And I also just have a limited amount of energy that I can spend on managing other people's behavior. And that's just a battle I’ve chosen not to fight most of the time. ELI: I wonder if part of that is a growing awareness of the idea that there are different roles for swearing, right? SARAH: Mhm. ELI: If I say that something is big, really big, fucking huge, right? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Like, that's a high, really intense intensifier. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: And in some ways, that does not get across the same thing as saying it was really, really, really huge or super huge— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —or that kind of thing. I think, you know, if you're going to talk about, “Oh, what were you doing over lunch?” “Oh, you know, me and my friends, we were just bitching about this thing.” Like, that's not the same as venting. It's not the same as chatting. It has a different, a different connotation, just like all other synonyms do. And so I think what I want the approach to be, at least for me—now that I have an obligation to have an approach—has been to talk about sort of acceptable uses or appropriate usages versus develop the judgment. When do you pull these out? When do you not pull these out? That kind of thing. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I wonder if this also is a little similar to the euphemism treadmill—not in that it's the swear words are euphemisms, but that this is *a* treadmill where a number of these usages stop having the impact that they used to have. SARAH: Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about that too, because I was just thinking, as you were talking about, I have a few friends and a few students who don't swear. And that's not because they have any objection to swearing, per se. It's just not part of their vocabulary. And so they just don't. ELI: Sure. SARAH: And yet I know that they know the words. And so if I were to hear one of those people actually swear, I would be turned up to like 15 on the panic level, instantly, right? ELI: [laughs] SARAH: Whereas if you said the same word, I would be like, yep, it's Tuesday, like whatever. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: You sort of lose—not a register in the sense of, like, language style—but like a level— ELI: The scale gets compressed. SARAH: A scale, the scale gets compressed. Like one of my former roommates' response to anything going wrong is “fuck.” It could be that she stubbed her toe, it could be that she just got fired. Like same, same level. It's the same word. And it is difficult when I'm like, “Okay, but how upset are you?” Like I need to— ELI: Yeah. SARAH: And there's not a more distressing word than that. So I'm like, I need you to pick some smaller words to use for things like stubbing your toe. ELI: Well, you know— SARAH: Because it's very hard to read. ELI: There's sort of like the flip side of that is like somebody doing something out of character is like serious business, you know? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: So you had mentioned this for somebody who doesn't swear at all, if they pull out a swear word, you're like, “Oh my gosh, something is really going on,” but I think if somebody who swears a lot or whose first reaction to something is “Ah, fuck!” then them not reacting in that way to something— SARAH: That’s true, that’s true. ELI: —is, you're like, “Ooh, that's, oh no, something is really, is really wrong here.” Something being out of character for somebody sort of where they normally float. And I feel like people often have a default register that, you know, if you're not sure what you're going to approach a social situation with, some people tend to be a little more formal, some people tend to be a little more informal, but everyone's also got their idiolect, they've got stuff that they will say and won't say, you know, I know some people who will say some swear words and not others or, you know, parents, and Mr. White apparently, who will go really far, you know. When I was growing up, my parents didn't want me to say the word “suck” as in “this sucks,” because they thought that that was terrible, and I didn't understand because I had actually never encountered it in the sexual meaning that led to saying “this sucks,” SARAH: Oh, I was 20-something years old before I figured out that that's where that came from. ELI: So I had no idea why it was off limits. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I do think this is interesting, because it's a nice segue into, like, categories of words that are used for swear words? SARAH: Yep, I was just going to bring that up. I feel like there's this number that goes around, that's either like three, four, or five types of words are classified as swear words? In my 20-second web search before we started recording, I didn't actually find the list. And I feel like this is something we've talked about before too, where it's like religious things, body parts— ELI: Religious things, sexual things, and body fluids— SARAH: Yeah, yeah. ELI: Essentially bodily functions. SARAH: And I could have sworn there was a fourth one that maybe doesn't exist in English, but can't think of it. ELI: Well, oh, it's interesting, I was about to say, I don't think of English having a religious swear category, but I guess, “damn”— SARAH: “Damn,” “hell.” ELI: —which is almost not a swear. SARAH: Yeah, like those are— ELI: “Hell,” which is, I guess. SARAH: —those are much less-bad words now than they I feel like used to be. ELI: Yeah, but French has them all over, especially Québécois. SARAH: Oh, yeah. ELI: Yeah, I think that there are a couple other categories. I think it's all about sort of what has been attested. Like, you know, I think there's also, there’s a connotation— SARAH: Oh, family members. Family members is definitely one of them. ELI: Oh, really? SARAH: “Son of a bitch,” “motherfucker.” ELI: Oh, yeah, okay, that's fair. It's really tempting to, like, draw a line between what are the categories of words that— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —some language uses as swears and what did this—that, and I don't believe it. I don't think it's a real— SARAH: I don't think there's clearly delineated categories. But I do think it's interesting that, like, there is— ELI: You get discrepancies. SARAH: —a tendency across lots of languages to be like sexual acts / body parts, bodily functions. Why did we decide that all of those were good ways to express anger, rather than joy? ELI: Yeah. You know, I would bet that it has more to do with taboo subjects— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —than it has to do with—I mean, I guess that's wrapped up in values and so on and so forth. But to me, that's more sociology than it is linguistics. SARAH: Yeah, the thing that did come up while I was looking for this, though, was a really nice list of terms for functions of swearing. The particular paper I pulled up lists six of these, I guess. So there's cursing, which I feel like is where we get “damn” in English a lot, where if you take it very literally, right, like, “damn it” or “hell with it, let this terrible thing happen to this person.” “Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow,” all that jazz. ELI: Exactly. Yeah. SARAH: There's abuse, which overlaps with that a lot, I think, but it's basically, you know, “You're a piece of shit.” And then expletive, which is so funny, because I feel like that word has started to shift in meaning just to mean a swear word, but dramatically, an expletive is just anything that fills a gap without substantial meaning of its own. So if we say, “It is raining,” the “it” is technically an expletive. “There is a puddle over there,” “there” is an expletive. “It's fucking big,” right? It's not “having sex big.” That makes no sense. ELI: It's “I have a blank here and I need, I need something with intensity to put in this blank that does not bring other connotations— SARAH: Exactly. ELI: —on its own.” SARAH: And then they list denunciation, like expressing hatred of something. ELI: I could see it maybe as like a social status-lowering kind of a thing, but I feel like without, you know, a lot of this stuff is probably fuzzy categories— SARAH: Yeah, yeah, definitely. ELI: You know, one of the things about swear words is that they're really wuggable. SARAH: Yes. ELI: And they often are used in many different parts of speech, they fit into many different categories and that the meaning of them changes depending on what category they're in. SARAH: Yup, yup. ELI: And so I would not be surprised if even the same swear word in a couple of different contexts ends up having a multiple of these like groups. SARAH: Yeah, yeah. And then the last two that they suggest are fulmination, which I love because it starts with F-U-L like full. But “fulmin” means “thunder,” so fulmination is when you are threatening someone, like [roars]. I don't, I don't, I can't actually come up with an example. ELI: What a good word. Fulmination. SARAH: It's just a good word. It refers to “the purpose of threatening something or someone violently.” I guess that's the “fuck you with a rusty spork.” And then objurgation, which— ELI: There’s a word I’ve never heard before. SARAH: —is an incredible word I've never heard before, which refers to “vehement decrial or criticism of something,” which also feels very overlapping with denunciation. ELI: Sure. SARAH: I think that's interesting because there's like— ELI: Or you could say… SARAH: I feel like we use “curse” and “expletive” a lot just to cover “taboo words,” but I do think there's definitely a difference between like, “Fuck you, I hope your life sucks,” or “Fuck, that really hurt.” ELI: I do think it's interesting the way that we label these words. There's expletives, there's curses, and there's swear words, which, what are you swearing when you use these words? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Like, I actually can't think of a swear word in English that binds you to a vow. SARAH: That and the cursing both go back more to the religious aspects, where it's like— ELI: Oh, so it's something like not— SARAH: You know, “God strike me down if I break this oath,” you know. ELI: Yeah, okay, and then you get minced oaths— SARAH: And then it— ELI: —and then you get substitutes for that, and then you like—Yeah, okay, that makes sense to me. SARAH: —blah, blah, blah. Profanity, I know we've talked about before, meaning “outside the temple,” like words you can use in common spaces. Vulgar, meaning “of the commoners.” ELI: Right, meaning “of the common people,” yeah. SARAH: Which, I just think it's hilarious that we've told this lie to ourselves for a billion generations that like, the upper class doesn't use nasty language. JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Oh, of course they wouldn't. They have—right, yeah, no. SARAH: Like that’s just—like they might not do it in *public.* ELI: Well, yes, only the vulgar, the common people, would ever swear in public. SARAH: And then you look at the, from the modern lens we were just talking about of, like, swearing becoming more appropriate and more accepted in public, because we've all just decided to be chill. ELI: Yeah. [laughs] SARAH: And it's like, oh, so what you're saying is that the commoners for ages have just been chill. ELI: It's one thing that the upper crust can never be, is chill. All right, well, I think that's, that's all there is to say on swearing. We've covered every aspect of the topic. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: Yup. ELI: No, there's tons more. There's a famous linguistics paper, which we didn't even touch on, that is about the word “fuck.” There is—I actually think there might be a linguistics journal out there that is all about research into expletives and that kind of thing. They may have like, only had one issue, but I do recall that. SARAH: Mhm. ELI: There's a lot more out there. But yeah, thanks for taking us through that, Sarah. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Shall we move on to real language questions, submitted by real listeners? SARAH: We shall. Probably with fewer swear words, but no promise. JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Yeah. Well, if you want to send us a question, you can email it in text to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or you can send us an audio recording of you speaking your question aloud—with swear words or without—audio is especially handy for phonology questions and accent questions. SARAH: First up, Peter George asks via email, “After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife’s friends that my accent sounds “British” to them. I think that’s ridiculous, but I’m wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are “British-sounding.” Incidentally, I don’t think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lot of them say that I do (I don’t drop ‘r’s for example).” ELI: Well, this is a question I feel like our podcast is in a particular place to be able to answer. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Well, first of all, nobody has an accent, or everybody has an accent, right? Of course, you don't have an accent to yourself. Of course you have an accent to everyone else. SARAH: Well, he said he doesn’t think he has the Boston-y accent, not that he doesn't have any accent. ELI: But which Boston accent? SARAH: I mean, there's the stereotypical. ELI: I mean, I guess there's a Boston Brahmin accent. There's the like, what is it? There's like a Southie accent, isn't there? There's like— SARAH: What was the first one you said? ELI: The Boston Brahmin accent, which is basically almost entirely eliminated at this point, but occasionally, you do hear people with— SARAH: I don't recognize that one. ELI: Like, this is like 100 years ago, but they were like a very high society group. And they had a noticeable accent. SARAH: I mean, I assume what Peter's talking about is like the Car Talk accent. ELI: Oh, yeah. “Pahk the cah, Hahvahd Yahd” kind of thing. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: That kind of thing, yep. SARAH: Which is really fading, even among native Bostonians, unless you are several generations from here, or from Southie, or some of the really, like locally entrenched places. ELI: I have noticed that. I think it's very funny. Every once in a while, I will encounter somebody with a really thick version of that accent and it just slaps me across the face. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I did—Oh, man, the very first time that I ever visited Boston, I walked off the train and into a crosswalk and a police officer said something to me in the thickest Boston accent, and I was just like, “Oh, man, it's real. It's like actually here.” [JENNY and SARAH laugh] ELI: And then proceeded to encounter nobody with that for basically the rest of the week I was in Boston. So I think I mean, the flip side of this is there's a Chicago accent, but again, it's pretty particular. You know, you get a lot of people from the South side who keep it, you get a lot of people who have been there for generations who have it. And I think it, it leaks a little bit. So I actually think this might be what's going on with Peter, right? Because I do not have—I mean, I have *a* Chicago or Chicagoland accent, because that's where my accent is from. But I don't have *the* Chicago accent, except there's little bits here and there. There's “frunchroom,” there's “gratch,” which are both, you know, saying those things with voiceless versions of things that would otherwise be voiced, right? Or if you're talking about going to a grocery store, you might go to “Jool’s,” like, it's those kinds of things can leak in, even if it's not consistent everywhere, even if it's not sort of like a wholesale, you know, the whole accent package. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: You know. SARAH: You get a little à la carte. ELI: Exactly. SARAH: Yep. ELI: So I wonder if that's what's happening here. I don't necessarily think there's a dropped R thing—although there might be some occasionally in some words that have kind of fossilized like that, or ossified like that, but I wonder if the vowel qualities are slightly different or consonant qualities are slightly different, and it's giving the impression of the whole accent, even though if Peter went back to Boston, people would be like, “What are you talking about?” SARAH: I feel like the, the dropped Rs or the non-rhotic accent is stereotypical of Boston and some parts of New England. In fact—I wish my husband was here for me to ask, because he has a really good sense for this, but—apparently there's like a grid, like a two axis plane in New England, where Northern and Southern New England fall on one side or the other, one thing, and Eastern and Western New England fall on one side or the other of the dropped Rs, or I could have that backwards, so if you look at Rs, and you look at this one vowel quality thing that I don't remember, I think— ELI: It's probably some merger or something like that. SARAH: Yeah—you can, you can get like a quadrant of New England that the person is from, if they have one of the old accents. ELI: I think, just thinking about it—and hey, this is Linguistics After Dark— SARAH: Yeah, research? What research? ELI: —so I'm going right off the top of my head, I… thinking about it and thinking about the folks that I know, my guess is going to be, you've got a non-rhotic south and a rhotic north, cuz I'm thinking about Mainers and like Vermonters— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —that I know, and I don't know any Mainers and Vermonters that are non-rhotic. SARAH: Yeah, that checks out. ELI: And I think maybe the East-West thing might be a pin/pen merger? SARAH: Could be. ELI: There's something in the back of my head that's saying pin/pen is a Northeastern thing. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Because the pin/pen merger is like, entirely weird to me. I don't understand how you—I mean, like, I know how you would merge those vowels, but like— SARAH: But like, yeah, no, I— ELI: But like, how, what are you doing? SARAH: Right, right? Well— ELI: Sorry to anyone who has the pin/pen merger. SARAH: —like you were saying about the little à la carte thing, I don't have that merger, except in the name of the state that's south of Kentucky, because it's Kentucky [ˈkɛn.tʌˌki], but it's Tennessee [ˌtin.əˈsiː]. ELI: Ah, well. SARAH: Because I learned—because I spent time in college with somebody from there, who pronounces it Tennessee [ˌtin.əˈsiː]. ELI: Ah, so maybe pin-pen is more that area of… SARAH: I mean, it's in a lot of places, but the, the dropped R is very characteristic of this part of the world. And it's also very characteristic of a lot of parts of Britain, ELI: Yes. SARAH: And so I can understand why his confusion is “I don't drop my Rs; that's what I think of as characteristic of British, so why do they think I sound British?” But like you say, there's also all kinds of vowel things that move all over the place. For instance, compared to Chicago—I mean, I grew up in Cleveland, which is not Chicago—but it's going to have more similar vowels than it does to Boston, and I think I've said this before too—but my name is pronounced completely different by people who grew up in New England. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: Again, on the sort of à la carte thing, I have learned to pronounce my name Sarah ['sæːrə], in the New Englandy way, to make myself better understood. ELI: God, that’s so weird. SARAH: I hate it. I hate it. ELI: It's weird. SARAH: But I mean—I don't hate it, it's whatever, but it is weird. But I've learned to do that intentionally so that I'm more understandable, especially like over the phone, and so I can imagine that for some reason, that type of outlook—I'm trying to think “Sarah, Sarah ['sæːrə], ['sæːrə],” I don't know, that—I could see that sounding British. ELI: Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, is Britain is pretty famous for having a different accent every village, right? SARAH: It’s— ELI: I mean, that's less and less true these days, but I think— SARAH: It’s still remarkably true. ELI: It's still remarkably true. You know, instead of being able to pinpoint what village somebody is from, you can pinpoint what county someone's from, basically. Probably smaller than that. SARAH: Which is still bonkers to someone from North America, but— JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Yeah, I… Britain, you are tiny. Get it together. Anyway, I—this is totally off topic, but I saw an image the other day that overlaid the Great Lakes onto France, and the Great Lake—the surface area of the Great Lakes is about equal to the surface area of France. SARAH: My God. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: That's wild. I have a fun Great Lakes tangent later, also. ELI: I mean, do it now. Why not? SARAH: Okay, cool. ELI: This is our podcast, we can do whatever we want. SARAH: [laughs] I'm going to spare the whole backstory, but a student of mine wanted to know how to say Michigan in Latin. And as one does, I just went to the Latin-language Wikipedia page for Michigan. ELI: [laughs] SARAH: Because that's the best way to find neologisms. ELI: So some 13 year old who's taken Latin has decided to make a Michigan Latin webpage, and that's now the word for Michigan? SARAH: No, no, I'm pretty sure that this was coined by an actual classicist. It was, it was the— ELI: I thought you were going to say an actual Michiganer. SARAH: [laughs] So the student was looking for Lake Michigan. It was Lacus Michiganus, which is perfectly cromulent. JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Sure. SARAH: But this led us to a, finding out what the word “Michigan” meant. Because obviously in the first paragraph of Wikipedia, no matter what language you're in, it's going to tell you what it means, and that took us to all of the Great Lakes. So. ELI: Oh, yeah. SARAH: You have— ELI: Because Michigan means— SARAH: Well, what do you know Michigan to mean? ELI: Well, I'm pretty sure “Michigan” means “Giant Fuck-Off Lake.” SARAH: Correct. ELI: Pretty sure all of the rest of the Indigenous names for the Great Lakes just mean “Giant Fuck-Off Lake.” SARAH: Not quite all of them, but you have “Erie” and “Ontario,” which are just two different language names for the same group of people that live there. ELI: Sure. SARAH: So you have Lake “This Person” or—Lake “These People” and Lake “Also Those People.” And then you have Lake Michigan, which is like “Big Lake,” and Lake Huron, which is like “Big Lake,” and then you have Lake Superior, which is just “Lake Bigger.” JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Yes. SARAH: So I guess when we call them the Great Lakes, it is really pretty literal. ELI: Yes, exactly. Also, sorry, Lake Champlain, you're not invited. SARAH: Nooo. ELI: That's the official stance of this podcast. SARAH: [laughs] We got to add that to the website. All vowels are the same. ELI: Our official stances. [laughs] SARAH: Lake Champlain is not invited. ELI: Only half of these are about linguistics. Anyway, going back— SARAH: [laughs] Anyway— JENNY: I mean, one of our very first, one of our very first official stances was “We don’t take stances on international politics.” SARAH: Oh! Still true. ELI: Yeah, well, this is not international politics. This is national politics and— SARAH: [laughs] This is domestic geography. JENNY: I wasn’t saying it was a contradiction, I'm just saying that this is perfectly in keeping with our established pattern. SARAH: Yeah, that's true. That's true. ELI: So every village in the UK has its own accent. And of course, there's a wonderful tapestry and a gradient and all of that stuff. But I think you can probably find some vowel qualities that have bubbled their way up, not necessarily to RP, but to probably a few major accents that get represented in the stuff that then gets exported over here. SARAH: Yup. ELI: I'm assuming that Peter's in-laws are not actually British. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: So I'm assuming that they are, you know, watching Doctor Who or Mock the Week or Mitchell and Webb or I don't know, Great British Bake-Off or whatever, you know, it is, and so they're looking at Northern accents, Geordie accents, and London and all of that stuff. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: And I would not be surprised if it ended up being vowel quality or if you had some, you know, leftover almost non-rhotic— SARAH: Yeah. ELI: —like semi-rhotic stuff that just tweaks over the line. And also, it's possible your in-laws don't really know what a British accent sounds like. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: [laughs] That's true., there may just be that, “Well, you don't really sound Boston, but you also don't sound like us. Obviously, the only other alternative— SARAH and ELI: —is British.” ELI: I mean, look, I've got a whole tangent here about how New England secretly is really into the England thing, but apparently— SARAH: I mean, have you looked at the map? Is it a secret? JENNY: [laughs] ELI: It is not a secret. But apparently, we don't take stances on international politics here. SARAH: [laughs] JENNY: I'm pretty sure it was you who said that first. ELI: That’s true. JENNY: If you want to take it back, technically it's probably up to you. ELI: [laughs] We'll have to consult the Linguistics After Dark Council. SARAH: [laughs] It’s where we all meet with our swords. JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Yeah. The secret council of forty actual linguists with swords. SARAH: [laughs] All right. Well, I think that kind of wraps that question up. I'm sorry it didn't have a more satisfying answer. ELI: I actually think we did a pretty satisfying answer on that one. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: I feel like, I don't know, this kind of thing comes up a lot. And then you get into the, like, people say that the Appalachian accent is the old British accent, which is not true, like, not even close. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: We're not going to touch that one. That's like Eskimo-snow levels of not-true. All right, let's move on to question two, though. Bex asks via email, “In a previous episode, you mentioned Linear B—” I think “you” is specifically Sarah here— JENNY: It is. SARAH: Probably. ELI: “---you mentioned Linear B being a syllabary, and that Linear A *might* be. How do we know this? And what is cool about this? What are fun things that we should know?” I love that this question ends with, “What is cool about this?” Thank you. SARAH: [laughs] ELI: You understood, understand why we're here. SARAH: Okay. Well, the first thing I have to say is that 99% of what I'm about to say comes from a book called The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, and you should read it, Bex, and also everyone listening. It's a fantastic—sidebar to say that my mom got me that book and the book Talking Hands— ELI: Talking Hands. SARAH: —for, I think, my birthday and Christmas in the same year without realizing they were both by Margalit Fox, because this woman just happens to have written her first book about the development of sign language in a remote tribe in Israel, and the decipherment of Linear B in Ancient Greek, which are both extremely up my alley. Since then, she's also written a book about Arthur Conan Doyle's career as an actual crime solver after having written Sherlock Holmes, which is super up my alley, and some English spies escaping from an Ottoman prisoner-of-war camp during World War 1 by using Ouija boards— JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Nice. SARAH: —and I desperately want to meet this woman, because apparently we have the exact same special interests. Anyway, all of them are very good books, you should read them. Linear B and Linear A are both writing systems that were discovered on or near the island of Knossos, near Greece, where we believe the ancient kingdoms of Mycenae and Minoa to have been. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you when those kingdoms existed other than like the 1000 BCE plus. So like a long, long-ass time ago. ELI: Just as a note, I would love to read a history textbook that was just like “The Minoan Civilization (A Long Ass Time Ago).” SARAH: [laughs] Linear A and Linear B are two of the oldest writing systems that have been discovered. I feel like I should know whether they predate cuneiform or not, but I don't. I also don't remember why they're called “Linear,” except that I think possibly, like cuneiform, they involve a lot of straight lines. ELI: That is what I understand. SARAH: I know that they do have some curves in them, but probably less than later alphabets do. ELI: But they're also, to be clear, not related to cuneiform at all. SARAH: No, no. I just remember learning in like middle school that cuneiform was *The* Oldest Writing System™, and then I found out that that was a lie. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: Anyway, these went untranslated, unintelligible for ages, because the thing with some of these other really ancient scripts, the thing that enabled us to crack them was finding things like the Rosetta Stone that had multilingual versions of a message, so hieroglyphs were completely unintelligible for centuries between the last person who understood them dying and the Rosetta Stone being discovered, and then with a lot of work, people were able to match up the Greek and Latin—right? those were the two languages? ELI: No, it's Greek and Demotic. SARAH: Demotic, right. ELI: Demotic being a less formal script for writing a later version of the same language that hieroglyphs… SARAH: Right, right, right. So the Rosetta Stone had the same message in hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek, and they were able to take a lot of work and piece that all together and figure out what the hieroglyphs meant, and then from there, what they sounded like and what they represented, which is a whole other really cool story that I'm not getting into. We didn't have that for the Linear scripts from Knossos, and that made it, surprisingly, very difficult to figure out what the hell they said. ELI: Also, it's not like we had tons and tons of these scripts either. SARAH: No. ELI: Because the more of a script that you have, the easier it is to try to find some context and be able to dig into it that way, but if I recall, Linear B, we don't have a lot, and Linear A, we have like two tablets or something. SARAH: Yeah, I don't remember the numbers, but it is quite minimal, especially compared to hieroglyphs, because if there's one thing that the hieroglyph-era Egyptians did, it was build a lot of stuff and write on it extensively. ELI: [laughs] SARAH: The Minoan and Mycenaean people just didn't. But as these things were being dug up and discovered, they were all being logged, and all of the characters actually have a number that is given to them, and so for the characters that we still haven't determined what they mean or what they sound like, they have, like, a number that's been assigned to them by… whoever was in charge of… numbering them. They also all have Unicode codes, which is fun. ELI: Well, of course, got to be able to write your website in Linear A, even if you don't know what that website says. [JENNY and SARAH laugh] SARAH: Exactly. Really got to confuse some future archaeologists. ELI: This should not be taken as a swipe at Unicode, by the way. I love that Unicode has all kinds of stuff in it. SARAH: Oh, me too, me too, it's great. I'm actually now obsessed with the idea of some archaeologist in like 50 million years being like, “Why was the script used once in like 3000 BC and then once in 2000 AD and then never again?” ELI: I mean, yeah, you're going to talk about that, you talk about Multiocular O, ꙮ, which appears in *one* place in *one* text, and because of that, has to have a code point in Unicode. SARAH: Right, and, well, and because of that became a meme. ELI: Oh, yeah, of course. SARAH: And then, and then some poor archaeologists being like, “Why did this mean something?” ELI: [laughs] SARAH: It doesn't—literally its meaning is that it doesn't mean anything. We just think it looks cool. ELI: It's just an O! It's just a cool O! SARAH: What did—a few episodes ago, Severo said, “I don't care if it's right, I just want it to look pretty in LaTeX.” JENNY: [laughs] ELI: I mean, hey… SARAH: I don't care if it means something, I just want Unicode for my cool looking glyphs. ELI: There's a whole dingbat section just for you. JENNY: Also, I don't know about you guys, but Multiocular O has absolutely taken on a specific meaning with people I know, which is, it's the eyes emoji, but more, and weirder. SARAH: I like that, I like that. JENNY: Because there's more eyes. ELI: Yeah, I dig that, especially if you can't do custom emoji so that you get the eyeses emoji. SARAH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they spent forever trying to figure out what these scripts did, got nowhere, and finally, a couple people, whose names I don't remember, and I'm so tempted to look them up, but I'm not doing research. The British guy's name was Michael something, and the American's name was Alice something. ELI: I’d buy that. Also, that does sound right. SARAH: I don’t know why I know their first names and not their last names, but here we are. There was also a second British guy, and I don't remember his name either. Sorry, dude. Part of what Margalit Fox wrote about in her book was the fact that Alice-what's-her-name, had for some reason kept a lot of her research, like, unpublishable, for quite a long time after her death. And then after some number of years, the university she worked for was allowed to publish it. And so then once it was published, Margalit Fox wrote one of the first books telling the whole story, because the two British people had been very public about their research the whole time, and the American, for whatever reason, was like, “I'm not finished yet, so I don't want to publish it yet,” but then she died without finishing it. And then eventually it got published, and so we understood the picture much better, because the British guys did not do this on their own, they were in correspondence with this American scholar for basically the whole time they all worked on it, she just never got around to actually publishing her portion of it until someone did on her behalf years later. SARAH: But anyway, the reason we know that Linear B is a syllabary is because whatever they were finally able to use to crack this code showed that it was writing Ancient Greek. And I don't remember exactly what that was, but Greek, you might know, has an alphabet, and that means that it's not actually well-suited to being written in a syllabary. Think about when English words are transliterated into Japanese. You get all kinds of extraneous vowels because the Japanese syllabary is not set up to handle syllables that end in a consonant or consonant clusters, where you have multiple consonants in row. Part of what made Linear B difficult to read in the first place was that it was doing that. So if you could imagine discovering like, I mean, it wouldn't have been the corpus of Shakespeare, because like we said, this is an incredibly small amount of text, but if you could imagine finding even a list of people's grocery receipts, or—not receipts, grocery lists, let's say—all in English, but all written in katakana, it would take a while. ELI: Yeah, that’d be—I mean, first you have to guess that it's that. Although I am given to understand that in the ancient world, this was like pretty common, that you would write a language in a different script, just because that was the script that, like, *you* used. And like whatever language you were using, you would just use your script— SARAH: Sure. ELI: —and do the best that you could. There's a lot of this with Semitic scripts, you know, Hebrew and Aramaic, and that kind of thing, where it's just kind of like, “yeah, these are different languages, but…” And even using Hebrew to write Greek, and Greek to write Hebrew. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: And that kind of thing, where it's like, yeah, the language in this, we think of those as being so intertwined. And in a lot of places, they're intertwined because they were designed for each other or they evolved for each other. But also, that's not 100% true, it's actually often not true. But then you also get people who are just like, “I am going to write this in the way that people who *can* read can use this to sound out the words and then go, ‘oh, that's in Greek. I know that. That’s fine.’” SARAH: I mean, to go back to the Japanese comparison, right? Like, romaji exists. If you really want to, you can write Japanese in Latin characters. You shouldn't, for a number of reasons, but you can. ELI: Yes. SARAH: Particularly, like you say, if you want to make it readable to people who can read the Latin alphabet. So, if you were to come across a whole bunch of romaji in a place where the English alphabet has never been used, how are you going to guess that it's Japanese? ELI: Right. SARAH: And if you were to come across a whole list of English in katakana, in a place where katakana is never used, how are you going to guess it's English? I don't remember—this is part of not doing research—and it's been many years actually since Bex sent that question. I don't remember how they solved that to begin with, but the fact is that they did. And we can see in the way the Greek words are being transliterated into Linear B that they have some of these extremist vowels, some of these other things that show us that it is a syllabary rather than an alphabet. I think you even see this in Japanese too. Like, if you take the English name Mass. Ave. which is the name locally for Massachusetts Avenue—and the only thing I could think of that fit my phonetic needs—you might transcribe that into Japanese as MA-SA-VU, where the SA in the middle becomes its own syllable, because Japanese doesn't have a syllable ending S. And yeah, you could say MA-SU-A-VU, but you don't have to. ELI: And it actually, you can sometimes see, like a time split in terms of what that strategy is. I think, you are probably, it is going to depend on the era in which the word was imported— SARAH: Oh, interesting. ELI: —as to how it got ossified, right? For words that are not kind of nonce-transliterations. So you do sometimes get that word break, and then sometimes you don't. And if you're an English speaker, you're stuck there wondering what the heck this word is and then it, it— SARAH: Right, if you see it spelled, you're like, “What is ma-su-a-vu?” but then if you say it, you're like, “Oh, mas’-av, oh, okay, I got you.” I guess what stumped people for a long time with Linear B was that they did a ton of bleeding over word boundaries when they had those consonant-ending vowel-starting syllables, they would just move the consonant to the next syllable— ELI: Because why not? SARAH: —instead of adding an extra vowel, because why not? It took people a long time to figure out where the word breaks actually were because they were being written the way we speak. And the thing is, we think that we speak with spaces between words? We don't. That is a whole mirage that your brain puts on for you after you learn how to read. ELI: I think that there is also, there's a little difference in here, which is like, they were using the Linear script to write Greek, not Greek loaned into Minoan or Mycenaean. SARAH: Right, right. ELI: And so it wasn't like, “oh, this is a Greek loan word, so we're going to, you know, put it into the phonetics that we have and then use our syllabary for that,” I think it was, you know, it was like, “okay, what's the best way to use the letters that we have to write this Greek?” SARAH: Right. And that's part of why it's so hard to find a comparison with, like, English and Japanese, because I'm thinking in terms of individual phrases, which is not what they're doing, they're trying to write a whole sentence, a whole list, a whole paragraph. Because we were able to figure that out, because we're able to see where the sound breaks are compared to the word breaks, we are very confident that Linear B is a syllabary and that it was being used for Greek purely because it's what was available, and a better suited script for Greek had not been learned by the scribes yet. This suggests to us that the language being spoken at the time other than Greek was probably more consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, the way that Japanese is. I don't think we know enough about that language to say anything more than that. It is not *unlikely* that Linear A—which if I recall correctly is a bit older than Linear B—might be that language, and therefore Linear A has a decent chance of also being a syllabary. SARAH: But if deciphering a script you don't know for a language you do know is difficult, deciphering a script you don't know for a language you don't know is just about impossible, hence the value of the Rosetta Stone and things of that nature. Also Linear B has quite a number of logographs in addition to its syllabary, so again kind of like Japanese, it has what you would call kanji in addition to kana, and it is unclear how much of Linear A would be syllabic or would be logographic. And if it turns out to be even more logographic than Linear B, then we are probably in even worse shape at being able to ever decipher it—at least in terms of pronunciation—that might actually make it easier to decipher in terms of meaning. Who knows, but as far as I'm aware we don't have enough of it or enough context to really go one way or the other. ELI: It also seems likely to me that it would be more logographic because if you are transliterating another language you're probably not often using your logographic inventory to do that, you're probably just going for the sounds, as much as you can. Using the Japanese analogy, you do occasionally see this like there is a kanji that is pronounced “tobacco” because it's *really* old and it was back when they said “Well, this is a thing, it should have a kanji, here you go” and it's just pronounced—I mean, it means tobacco, right, it's just pronounced that way, but like, that just doesn't happen anymore. That seems likely to me that if it, if there is a logographic component and Linear A is the underlying language that it's meant to be used with, that you would probably have more of logographic content. SARAH: Mhm. I think—and again I haven't looked at this in a while—I feel like there's also an aspect of the Linear B logographs where they were used alongside the syllabics, not quite in the way that kanji would be, but more like kanji with, what is it, Ruby text? Like— ELI: Yeah, furigana. SARAH: The furigana, yeah, that sits above the kanji to tell you how to say it, except the other way around. Here is a pronounce—like a syllabic pronunciation of the word, and here's a kanji next to it that tells you what the heck those sounds mean. ELI: So this does also occasionally, very occasionally happen in Japanese, a lot of times you'll have, sometimes Latin text and then it will have a kanji next to it or it will have some hiragana next to it or something that's meant to tell you what it means or sometimes in like fantasy or sci-fi or that kind of thing, if they're going to use katakana to like use like a futuristic word or like a proper noun within the setting that doesn't mean anything, they'll put kanji or they'll put a native Japanese word next to it in furigana or Ruby text to be like, “This is what this means, we're just Neil Stevenson-ing ourselves into using a weird word for it.” SARAH: That's… Man, I think that's actually really cool, like English sci-fi— ELI: I love it! SARAH: It's great, English sci-fi would have like a footnote or a glossary at the back— ELI: Right. SARAH: —and Japanese is just like, “No, we have like a standard built-in function in our script for, ‘Here's a word you don't know and here's what it either means or how to say it depending on what we think you don't know.’” JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Fun fact, web developers, Ruby text is extremely well supported and does not have to be used with Japanese. SARAH: So true. ELI: You can use Ruby text on any text. Go have fun. SARAH: My god, we need to bring that to English more. ELI: I know, I know. SARAH: Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say about Linear A and B. They're super interesting and you should definitely read more about how the code was cracked because it's like a really, really interesting history and story of scholarship. ELI: I wonder if—do you know if it started with proper nouns? Because I know that that is how they used the Rosetta Stone for hieroglyphs, is, they started with proper nouns, which nicely in hieroglyphs are outlined, literally outlined with cartouches. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: But they could figure out that that sounding out proper nouns and so they were able to go from there. SARAH: I have no idea. I do know that Unicode appears to have uppercase and lowercase versions of some of the Linear A and B characters. I have no idea if those correspond to proper nouns or not. I also know that some of the characters were, like, not completely the same from tablet to tablet or from, you know, word to word. And at some point, somebody kind of decided like “oh, these are just— ELI: This is one glyph. SARAH: —a handwriting variance of the same glyph and these are actually separate things.” No, I don't—man, it's been so long since I've read that book. I don't remember. ELI: Cool. That was awesome. SARAH: All right. Well, let's move on to our last question, which comes from Dalton Sparks, also via email, who says, “On the topic of syntactic ambiguity, I was wondering if there are different languages and grammar systems that are better at mitigating ambiguity compared to English. How do they do it and clarify things as to avoid overlap?” ELI: So the answer is yes, there are different languages and different grammar systems that are better at mitigating *syntactic* ambiguity than English is. But it's useful just to think about ambiguity as sort of like a law of conservation of ambiguity. SARAH: [laughs] ELI: If your language has more syntactic ambiguity, there will be less ambiguity in other places, and if you have a grammar that makes it less likely to have syntactic ambiguity, you'll have ambiguity in other places. You may have a reduced phonetic set and so you've got a lot more homophones, you may have other ways where that kind of ambiguity comes in. You know, you might have phrases that kind of mean a bunch of different things based on context and that kind of thing. Talking strictly about syntactic ambiguity, yeah. The biggest thing that I can think of, English really ought to have audible cases. And English *used* to have audible cases, and it no longer does. And because of that, a lot of our—except for in very specific cases—because of that, a lot of our case marking and argument marking and that kind of thing is based on word order. But word order can be messed up in a bunch of different ways. You can front phrases, you can do cleft sentences, you can embed clauses, you can, you know, throw as many auxiliaries in there as you want, like, you know, you could do a bunch of adjuncts, all of that stuff. And so you do get a lot of places where there can be syntactic ambiguity. ELI: In languages that, for example, have much stronger case marking, or that have a much stricter word order, or even don't have a stricter word order but have a lot stronger conventions around word order and so it's a lot clearer when you're breaking it, I think you have a lot less of a chance of having a garden path sentence, that kind of thing. The other thing about English is that you get a lot of registers of English, where that ambiguity can be even more apparent. So stuff like Headline English, which, like, shortens a bunch of words or uses a lot of, like, short verbs to be verbs that you wouldn't normally use if you were writing a whole sentence out. Those kinds of things add to the possibility of getting a crash blossom or garden path sentence, or something like that. Oh, and also, English's propensity for zero derivation also means that you often are not quite sure what part of speech a word is until you've heard the rest of the sentence. And a lot of the sort of standard syntactic ambiguities, you know, “the old man the boat,” and “the horse race past the barn fell,” and all of that stuff, rely on that kind of category confusion, as opposed to maybe a case confusion or something like that. SARAH: Yeah, I do feel like this question—I don't remember when it was sent in, I feel like it probably came in before we did a lot of our previous conversations about ambiguity—but I know we've talked about the fact that language as a whole is this balance game between the speaker and the listener, as general terms, you know, signer or writer, whatever, that every language makes choices about what's going to be ambiguous and what's going to be spelled out, because to remove ambiguity at all points puts an enormous onus on the speaker, and to give zero shits about it puts an enormous onus on the listener, and you got to land somewhere in the middle for communication to be viable. ELI: Yeah, you can speak entirely without redundancy, but it takes much longer, and you know, you have to circumlocute a lot. Yeah, you're absolutely right, we have this, this balancing game, but also a lot of times something that seems ambiguous when you have just written it on a piece of paper, and you're like, “look at this example sentence, isn't this ambiguous?” Like nine times out of ten in an actual conversation, there's no way that it would be ambiguous. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: You know, even the like off readings of like “time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana,” like, in a context where I mean there is an animal called a “time fly,” and they devour arrows, you know, fruit in general soars through the air much in the way that a banana does as a prototype, like you can—and sometimes it's fun *to*—come up with scenarios where you would say that, and without, you know, based on both the context and also your prosody, the listener would understand exactly what you mean, even if the words written down would probably have a different default interpretation. SARAH: Yeah, and that's, I think we've also talked before about how, because a lot of ambiguity is resolved by prosody and tone of voice, then how do we convey that in writing, and how do we resolve those ambiguities in a world where more and more of our conversation is taking place via text rather than speech? ELI: Which you see with, like, asterisks to indicate emphasis on a word or underscores around a word to indicate emphasis, or even just all caps, or you know, tilde, asterisk, sparkles, and that kind of thing. SARAH: Yup. And occasionally, rewording things. ELI: Right. SARAH: And sometimes, you know, in long form writing that can be more difficult, but in real time—if that's by text or by out loud conversation—I mean earlier in today's episode, you said that we're seeing more informal speech, and English uses the same word for more in quantity and also more in degree, and so I said, “Which one do you mean?” and you clarified it and we moved on. ELI: Or even you send the text and you read it on your screen and go, “oh, shit, I meant XYZ.” SARAH: Right, you're like, there's more of it. ELI: Right. SARAH: You have a chance to either repair it yourself or have somebody ask if they're confused. ELI: I do want to go back because I did a little bit of an overview of this and kind of talk about the fact that there, as it relates to syntax in particular—before you get to prosody and before you get to intonation and that kind of thing—usually you're talking about word order, and you're talking about casing or particles or grouping words into phrases and then marking them as some kind of argument or relation to verbs and other phrases in the sentence, which is mostly casing, but also there's all kinds of other stuff that that could be. And so I think, Dalton, you asked like, “how do languages do it and how do they clarify things?” And some languages go in one direction, some go in another, but I think, Sarah, to your point, you can almost see a trade-off where languages that have more specific particles in case marking and a lot more, sort of, of these endings tend to have a lot freer word order. Even if there's a default word order, it doesn't mean anything as much if you change the word order up, right? Like it doesn't necessarily mean that you're trying to emphasize something or… you could just be, like, having fun or that's how you wanted to say it that day or that kind of thing. And if you have a stricter word order, then you're not going to see as much of this specific casing and also I think you're going to see changing the word order does create an emphasis or something where you're signaling the listener to pay attention to something weird going on in the sentence. SARAH: Yeah. That's one of the things I've thought a lot about because Latin has pretty strong cacing and verb morphology. And it definitely has a default word order, but is very free with it, particularly in poetry, but even in prose, and it actually uses that *for* emphasis. So the fact that you *can* grammatically say “the dog bit the man” or “the man the dog bit,” and not have that actually change who bit who, but which part you want to emphasize. Whereas—I don't speak German, but I am given to understand that although German also has strong casing, you can't move shit around at all. I don't know if that's true, I don't speak German. But it is also true that English doesn't have the exact same word order rules that Latin does, and it's certainly more strict about it. But with prosody or with commas used appropriately, you can say “it was the dog, the man bit,” or “it was the dog that bit the man.” And like topicalize or emphasize things you want to do. But again, in English, we have to add in “it was” to like do that in a really clear way. I don't know, I don't know I'm going with that other than I think you're right, but I don't think it's quite as one-to-one. ELI: It's not, for sure. I mean, every language is going to have its own balance. And I think part of that is because that syntactic ambiguity choice exists within the wider world of how does your language decide to spend its specificity points, basically? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: Where are you going to be definitely understood? Like what can you not mess with? And then where are the places where, you know, things are going to need to be worked out, and it's okay because, you know, language, language exists with people talking to each other. Language does not exist within, you know, some sort of Platonic realm. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: And so you can always talk about it. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: There's actually a second part to this question or a kind of follow-up thought. Dalton said they wondered about this while they were thinking about Natural Language Processing and how it must be a nightmare to work around ambiguous wording and leaps in logic that humans have internalized, for machines. ELI: I mean, yeah. SARAH: Which, I would say, yeah. ELI: Yes, this is a problem for natural language processing. It's a big problem, although it's not a huge problem, I think I would say. I don't think that it's necessarily like leaps in logic that humans have internalized. I think it's that we have some stuff that's built into our linguistic apparatus that kind of gives us the rails that we need to help with this. And then again, there's the idea that like natural language processing is just an input. It's not a conversation. You have a text or you have some speech to text that's happened, and then a machine is trying to process that, but it's not a conversation, right? And for the same reason, ambiguity is much more of an issue when you're like reading a paper or a textbook or something else where you can't have that interactive process, and you have to kind of think about it. But there's also, the other side of this is, if somebody is saying something to you, one of the things that you're doing naturally is trying to get ahead of them to complete the sentence, right? Like there's a number of games or a number of sort of experiments where you say all of a sentence except for the last… SARAH: …word. ELI: Right. And very often, somebody, another person, can finish that sentence without any problem. And so you do, as you get down to the end of a sentence, you do narrow those possibilities that even if at the end, you only have a few of them, you know, if you are talking about NLP, you're also probably working with a database that helps you sort of say like, “Well, the topic was this, and it would be weird to have a sentence that was off-topic. So it's probably this word or this interpretation,” or “I've got, you know, a number of candidate structures, and here, you know, is what I'm going to do with it.” So there are ways around it. I mean, you're right, it is a problem, but I think a lot of that problem probably has more to do with the inability to have a conversation about it in a way that, you know, in a way that helps resolve the ambiguity, as opposed to just being an ingestion. SARAH: The other thing is that it takes time, it takes effort, but machines can learn those same beliefs and logic. I actually had a job right out of college, where my whole job was connecting noun phrases to each other that meant the same thing. So that included proper nouns and pronouns. That included metonymy, where “the White House” means the same thing as “Washington DC” means the same thing as “the American government” means the same thing as “the Trump administration”—not necessarily in all contexts, but in the context of this one paper. I would connect all those dots and I would tell the machine, “Actually, all those things are the same thing.” Yeah, I mean, my job as a human was literally to tell the computer, “We as humans make these connections, you should learn to do that too.” Are they going to get that right 100% of the time? Of course not. But let's be real, neither do humans. And so over time, more training and more input, we can give them the better they will be at making those leaps of logic. And until they reach actual human level proficiency, we can laugh at them. And all of the other silly mistakes that they make. ELI: Yeah, those sorts of semantic connections as well are part of a machine learning approach that is different, by the way, than the ones that ChatGPT and similar LLMs use. That's sort of, what you're talking about is a more explicit, discoverable set of connections between these, these things. SARAH: Well, and— ELI: And it’s not the way that ChatGPT works— SARAH: Right. ELI: —just to say it out in front of… SARAH: Of course. And like humans do when they learn language, some of it is just your absorption and drawing their own connections the way that ChatGPT does, and some of it is an adult sitting you down and saying, “actually, these two things are different,” or “actually, these two things are the same.” You know, probably as we go forward, there's a combination of the sort of learn-it-yourself, and then when we discover that chat GPT and similar models are failing in one particular aspect, at least to me, the next obvious step would be “hey, Computer, here's how to do that better”—sidebar, whole other conversation about whether people will do the logical thing with their tool. You know, there's, there's room to include both this explicit training and this throw piles of data at the robot and see what it does— ELI: Yeah, exactly. SARAH: —in the same way that we do with humans. ELI: I also want to put a note here about English. I guess I'd call it English supremacy in research, right? A lot of this natural language processing research is going to be done with texts in English and with inputs in English. And so, yeah, when you're talking about what is the ambiguity that these NLP programs have to worry about, it's going to be a lot of this syntactic ambiguity, word order and structure ambiguity, that kind of thing. But again, if you're going to do NLP in another language, that may not be an issue, and the issue instead might be, okay, well, the first word of this sentence was a homophone that’s got five different words that it could be and I got to hang on to those until I get to the end of the sentence and figure out… oh, there's a verb here, okay, which of these five nouns is probably the thing that's doing the verb, right? And so you still, you don't get away from this, but I think people focus a lot on this as an issue for an NLP, but that's an outgrowth of the fact that most of this research is being done with English as the input. SARAH: Yeah. And the fact that so much of the English—particularly I would say the speech-to-text, like the phonetic aspect of the English—NLP has come *miles* since it started. ELI: Oh, it's amazing. SARAH: Like, the number of times that I have had to actually correct speech-to-text, in terms of “it heard the wrong homophone” is like, almost none, unless I'm using somebody's name, in which case I'm not expecting it to get it right anyway. And so yeah, if we've solved the phonetic problems, then of course, syntactic ambiguity is going to be the next problem to solve. And the fact that English has more of that than phonetic ambiguity on the whole, maybe, question mark, asterisk, do your own research. But yeah— ELI: Do your own research, because we're not gonna. SARAH: Exactly. But again, in other languages, the balance of phonetic to syntactic ambiguity and the stage we're at developing that technology is going to be different. And I know only this tiny bit about NLP in English, I don't really know anything about it in other languages at all. So I can't really speak. ELI: This was an awesome question, Dalton. Thank you for sending it in. SARAH: Yes. Having wrapped that up, Eli, will you tell us about our puzzler from last podcast? ELI: Yes, absolutely. So last podcast, our puzzler was short and sweet. “What comes next in this sequence? Seven, eight, five, five, three, four, four.” So, as you all know, it's been a couple of months since we've recorded. I never figured out this puzzler. And I think Sarah said—did you say you forgot the answer? SARAH: I don't know if I ever knew it. Because I looked back on our outline, and I believe what we said was we are asking the audience and also us what comes next in this sequence. [laughs] ELI: But before we started recording, Jenny pipes up and goes, “I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this,” and then she also hinted to us that the sequence could keep going, which I think is an important hint. SARAH: Yeah. So it's not that there's just one element missing, but it's like a recursive or—a potentially further pattern. So, my initial thought was like, how many letters are in the name of each number? JENNY: [laughs] ELI: Yeah, I went two. SARAH: That doesn't work. ELI: And it doesn't work backwards either. How many letters are in the names of letters or colors or other typical sequences of things? ELI: You know, the other thing that is very tough about this puzzler is the repeated numbers. So you have seven, eight, five, five, three, four, four. SARAH: Uh-huh. ELI: So, you know, it made me think it's the number of letters in a thing, or it's, you know, the number of words in a set of sentences, or something like that. The three is really interesting. If it's number of letters in a word, you know, that's probably a “the” or “and,” or something like that. But also, if the sequence can go on forever, it can't be something limited, right? So it can't be like letters in the names of the planets or something like that. SARAH: Yeah. Although I guess Jenny didn't say it goes on forever. ELI: Jenny, could you continue the sequence forever? JENNY: No. ELI: Good catch. JENNY: Mm-hm. SARAH: Okay. So, but it's not planets because Venus is not eight letters. I don't know how long Mercury, Mercury is seven, but Venus is not eight. Colors don't make any sense. Letters of the alphabet don't make any sense. Eli, did you have something you worked on here? ELI: I did not. I thought that it was a number of letters in number names backwards, because I think it's possible that this is a backwards thing. Also, oh, yep, there's a smile from Jenny. I feel like it might be close to that. JENNY: I've been smiling this whole time, I've been smiling this whole time. SARAH: That's true, she has. Four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, but nine doesn't have eight letters. That's not right. ELI: Right, exactly. SARAH: [laughs] I'm really stumped on this. ELI: I'm also super stumped. JENNY: Do you want a hint? SARAH: Jenny, do you have? Yes, please. JENNY: I made the connection kind of by accident, looking at the outline shortly after we recorded our last episode, thinking about how we knew Eli's kid would be born soon. SARAH: Ohhh. SARAH: I'm trying to be as indirect as I can, but… ELI: Got it. SARAH: Yep, yep, yep, yep. Got it, got it, got it, got it. JENNY: Sorry, was that too direct? SARAH: Okay. No, that was good. That was perfect. So the next number should be six? ELI: The next number should be six, I believe. SARAH: Excellent. ELI: Yep. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: Okay. ELI: That, just, can't see it in the podcast, but Sarah just counted the letters on her hand. I guess that that's a spoiler for the answer. And it reminded me—this is totally off-topic—it reminded me of a post that was like, “Ah, so you're going to get into fiber arts. You have to do two things. First, you have to ask yourself, do I know how to count? And second, you have to come to terms with the answer being no.” SARAH: [laughs] No. JENNY: Yeah. ELI: So yeah, the next number is six. SARAH: And... ELI: And then after that is nine, I believe. And then seven. SARAH: Yeah. ELI: And then eight. And then I think, also eight. And then that's it. JENNY: That sounds right. SARAH: Yeah, all right. ELI: Or, well, or, it goes to seven. SARAH: Or it goes back, yeah. JENNY: That's the thing. Like, you asked if it could go on forever. And I mean, like, yeah, but it's just the sequence starting over again. SARAH: Right. ELI: All right. So we can stop beating around the bush. We have now actually discovered the answer is six because the next thing in the sequence is August. These are “number of letters in the names of the months in English.” SARAH: Nice. ELI: So if that was your answer and you figured it out. Good job. You beat us at our own puzzler. SARAH: You sure did. Again, a shout out to the GCHQ for publishing a bunch of puzzlers during COVID. And apparently they also do a puzzler for a Christmas card every year. I don't know when they started this, but we have a whole new puzzler repository to pull from. So stay tuned for that. ELI: That's awesome. I want to give a shout-out, by the way, to a site called Minute Cryptic. So I am a cryptic crossword fan, except that I'm terrible at them. And Minute Cryptic is a cryptic crossword clue per day—you know, Wordle style, basically—and has a really great set of instructions on how to like parse and break down a cryptic clue, and then a good hint system where the first hint that it gives you will take the clue and label: this part is the definition, this part tells you what to do with it, this part is the fodder while still not telling you what the answer is. So you can still work it out. SARAH: Ohh, I'm really into that because I've tried a couple cryptic crosswords and gotten like one out of fifty clues and then given up. ELI: Yeah. SARAH: So, I could go for some practice there. ELI: I think it's really—we'll put it in the show notes—but it's really been fantastic. I have felt great about getting them because I like the idea of cryptic crosswords. But if you do the London Times Cryptic, you have to be a high-class sailor from the 1800s in order to know all the abbreviations and stuff. Anyway, Minute Cryptic, we'll put a link in the show notes. SARAH: Excellent. ELI: Sarah, you want to tell us about our new puzzler for this week? SARAH: I would love to. This one is also pretty short and sweet. What do the English words “uncopyrightable” and “dermatoglyphics” have in common? ELI: So I happen to know this right off the bat. So, I'm out. JENNY: [laughs] SARAH: Fair enough. It is one of those ones where you might figure it out and then just have that knowledge rent free in your brain for the rest of your life. ELI: I mean, what can I say? I literally am part of a podcast that is about language. SARAH: Yup. ELI: Word nerdery abounds. SARAH: Word nerdery sure does. ELI: All right. Well, that's it for this episode. Thanks for listening, everybody. SARAH: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Luca, probably? Maybe we have a new editor by now. I don't know. Question wrangling is done by Jenny, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is Covert Affair by Kevin McLeod. ELI: Our show is entirely listener supported. You can help us by visiting patreon.com/emfozzing, E-M-F-O-Z-Z-I-N-G and by telling your friends about us. Ratings on iTunes and other podcast services help as well. SARAH: Every episode we thank our patrons and reviewers. Today we want to say thanks to these awesome patrons: Benjamin, Kali, Bryton, Jason, Bex, and Dre. We also want to thank Elijah for commenting on YouTube and everyone who has participated in our Instagram YouTube polls. Engagement, comments and reviews really help get the show in front of more listeners and we appreciate it. ELI: Find all our episodes and show notes online at linguisticsafterdark.com or on all your favorite podcast directories and send those questions, text or audio to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com. You can reach us on all the usual socials @LxADpodcast. SARAH: And until next time, if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you fucking are. [beep] ELI: My cat wandered into the room and started meowing because of course I'm on a video call. [beep] SARAH: Nope, I'm gonna try that again. [beep] ELI: If you weren't consciously aware of the tongue in your mouth, now you fucking are. [JENNY and SARAH laugh] ELI: Now the fuck you are. [beep] ELI: They call me two-take Eli. [beep] SARAH: I'm gonna… just… waste time for a second. [beep] ELI: Sorry, Lake Champlain, you are not invited. That's an official stance of this podcast. [beep] SARAH: Fucking sugar biscuits.