Why do we speak the way we do? Is it something we learn or is it part of our DNA? Linguist Daniel Hieber studies the world’s languages. We talk linguistics, the first languages, the great vowel shift, race and language and the only real curse word left. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Letters of the Alphabet.

Daniel Hieber: 02:15ish

Pointless: 49:13ish

Top 5: 01:06:45

https://www.tiktok.com/@linguisticdiscovery (Daniel Hieber TikTok)

https://LinguisticDiscovery.com (Daniel Hieber Website)

https://twitter.com/LingDiscovery (Daniel Hieber Twitter)

Interview with Linguist Daniel Hieber

Nick VinZant 0:12

Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, the past, present and future of language and the alphabet, best letters,

Daniel Hieber 0:24

there are patterns that occur in language that you may not even realize most of what, you know, when you know how to speak a language, you don't know that, you know, it's very subconscious, people have been trying to manage language for as long as there's been language. Like if you go back to Latin times, there's people complaining about how the young people speak. And it's because language is constantly changing. And so people are trying to impose their particular ideas about how society should be through language. But then over time, those endings dropped out, and you're left with that vowel change. So what was originally foot became fed, and that became feet. And once the Great Vowel Shift happened,

Nick VinZant 1:05

I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So our first guest is an expert in the world's languages, where they came from, what certain words originally meant, and sounded like, and why it is that we talk the way that we do. Because it turns out that there are so many things that we do, that we don't even realize we're doing. And there's big questions about, is this something that we have learned? Or is this a fundamental part of who we are our DNA? This is linguist, Daniel Heber, quick note, because we talk about some things that, at least for me, that I had never thought of. There were parts of this interview that I had to kind of go back and listen to, again, to really realize what some of the things he talks about, mean, what is linguistics?

Daniel Hieber 2:16

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Scientific means that we approach language like any other natural phenomenon, language is something that you can describe, you can study, there are rules to it. And I'm not just talking like grammatical rules, there are like, there are patterns that occur in language that you may not even realize most of what, you know, when you know how to speak a language. You don't know that, you know, it's very subconscious. So we as linguist try to make that subconscious conscious. We try and figure out like, what are those underlying patterns you're not even aware of?

Nick VinZant 2:50

What are the things that I don't know that I don't know about language?

Daniel Hieber 2:54

Really easy example is how to do plurals in English. If you have saved a little toy, and this toy is called a wog. Just imagine it looks like a blue peep, for example, like, you know, candy, the peeps. Yeah. So you've got one blog, what do you call it when you have two of them? Words? Right, exactly. And if you notice, the way you pronounce that plural, is, it's actually a little bit more of a Z sound than an s sound. So if you put it in a sentence, it becomes really apparent. So you can say, like the lugs are running, you don't say the lugs are running? Right?

Nick VinZant 3:29

Like flow? Like I have multiple floors. And yeah,

Daniel Hieber 3:33

exactly. Perfect. Yeah, precisely. And so there's, there's a rule that there's actually three different forms of the plural. In English, there's the you pronounce that as an s after what we call voiceless consonants where your voice box isn't vibrating. And so that's after like a P, T, or k. So you say cats, but after a voiced consonant, where your vocal folds are vibrating, you pronounce it as Z, say dogs. And then there's a third variation of it, which happens after what we call Sibilance. So after like an S, or a Z, or a schwa sound, and so that will get you I always use fishes as an example. But people get mad at me about that one, because they don't think fishes is a real world word it is it's the plural. It's when you have multiple species of fish, but any other word that ends in like a Z or an S, would do this. So it mazes and so if you notice, we stick a vowel on there. You don't say maize, you say maize is and so that's a rule about how you form plurals in English that every native speaker of English knows without even knowing that they know

Nick VinZant 4:36

it. So where do we get that from then we just learned from watching other people or talking to other people,

Daniel Hieber 4:42

almost everything we learn about language we learn long before we get to school, we just learn it in the home. So by the time you get to school and people start yelling at you for doing grammar wrong, there, it's too late. You already learned how to speak the dialect you're gonna speak for pretty much the rest of your life. Most people's language doesn't really change too much. After early childhood,

Nick VinZant 5:02

you mean we can't even like if, okay, so for example, like I've bashed it into my head to say, it's going well, rather than it's going good, but we totally

Daniel Hieber 5:11

roll that somebody made up and shoved down your throat.

Nick VinZant 5:15

That's what it means when I've looked at most language or most grammar. I'm like, somebody just made this up. It's not like some fundamental law of the universe, like gravity exists, right? Yeah. Like, what, why do we get these things? Is it really just somebody you know, like, Benjamin Newton back in 1700, decided that you know what, that that's a coma, there's

Daniel Hieber 5:34

honestly, sometimes that is exactly what happens. So a really good example of this was Daniel Webster, he was trying to make a kind of more Americanized version of English for Americans. So he instituted a lot of spelling reforms. He instituted a lot of vocabulary, suggestions, and real and people really tried to impose that on children and so on. Sometimes it works. But for the most part, it doesn't, because language isn't something that you can manage from the top down. It's something that is it's a complex adaptive system. It's like the economy or something. It's something that, you know, emerges from all these conversations and interactions people have. But there are there are those rules, though, that you're talking about as though it's like, it's not, you know, like the law of gravity. It's just that those rules are more conventions. And those rules are things like the plurals I was talking about,

Nick VinZant 6:22

is that because that's just the best way to do it, or like, our brain works like this. And the only thing I could think, like put the noun first, like, that's how our brain works. Like, where does it come from?

Daniel Hieber 6:36

Yeah, it's a whole bunch of different competing factors. And in fact, this is one of the very fundamental debates in linguistics, they're kind of two camps in linguistics. One is called the generator vist camp. And they're the ones that think that there is a core part of grammar that is actually genetically inherited. So for example, like the idea that subjects should go first is something that they think is core to all languages and even in languages, that the subject doesn't appear first, the subject of your second or last or something like that. They say that underlying the, it's a subject first language, where and then there's the functionalist, which is a camp that I sit in. And we see that language is something that is shaped by all of the different cognitive skills that we have going on at once. So it's shaped by our ability to read people's intentions, our ability to have, you know, a complex, hierarchical representation of ideas, limitations on cognition, also, the fact that like, when you're talking about something, you you have to talk about something in time, and so you tend to have to put the topic first. So, about 60% of the world's languages follow a subject, object, verb, word order. So you would say like, the the dog, the man, that would be the equivalent of an English of the dog with the man. But English doesn't do that English is subject, verb object. So English is a minority pattern. And so the question is, why 60% of the world's languages, why not all of them, and their other language ends match. So you're wearing a Pacific Northwest shirt, there's a language in the Pacific North northwest called Machame, north, which always puts the verb first. And whatever you're talking about, whether it's like a noun, quote, or a verb that turned it into a verb, and they put that first the verb is always the topic. So

Nick VinZant 8:23

would that be like the difference between I am moving versus moving? I am.

Daniel Hieber 8:28

Yeah. Or it gets even crazier with neutral north. So if you wanted to say like, I am a man, there's literally you take the the net of the stem, that means man, and you turn it into a verb. So it's literally like I am Manning. Does

Nick VinZant 8:41

this matter, though? As long as you're speaking to the same group of people? Right, right, learn

Daniel Hieber 8:48

the conventions of language, right? So and what, unfortunately, a lot of people think, though, is that was that we do all share exactly the same way of speaking. And the fact is, is that language is incredibly diverse, like, this notion of like standard English is really kind of a myth. Nobody actually speaks Standard English. We all speak, everybody speaks a dialect. If you give people a map of the United States, or whatever country and you say draw the dialect areas, they'll draw a bunch of different regions and the label them and there'll always be one region that they label that they wind up calling normal, or average or standard. And sure enough, it'll be the region that they're from.

Nick VinZant 9:29

I guess, I always just thought of languages that like different languages all worked the same way. It's just that instead of saying cat, I said, Gato and Spanish, but they fundamentally work differently.

Daniel Hieber 9:41

Oh, incredibly. So I mean, there's so much diversity in the world's languages. I'll just give you like a tiny hint of some of the differences. So one of my favorites is a Navajo. There are 13 different verbs for any action having to do with handling an object or or an object being put or placed somewhere or giving or taking an object, depending on the shape and size of the object. So if I wanted to say that this pen is sitting there, I would say, Sit T. But if I wanted to say that this piece of piece of paper is sitting here, I would say, so, if I wanted to say that this kind of roundish thing is sitting here, I would say, Ah,

Nick VinZant 10:27

how does something like that come about? Because to me like, well, that's a waste of time, like, why did we figure out, you know what I mean? But like we curated 13 different words for this, but how does something like that evolve? Where people would have so many different ways to basically talk about something that doesn't seem necessary? Like no, get the bigger one?

Daniel Hieber 10:47

Right? So the the fact is, is that language isn't really logical, it really has nothing to do with kind of what's efficient, except that people are always trying to make language more efficient. It's sometimes it's just kind of random, like what occurs in one language versus, versus another.

Nick VinZant 11:04

Do we know what was kind of the first one?

Daniel Hieber 11:07

No, and that is matter of fact, that was such a controversial question, that the French Academy banned all discussion of the origins of language for about 100 years, because people were getting into such bickering fights about it, and academia, we have a better and better idea today, we, we still don't know the timeframe, it could be anywhere from like 100,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago, that it evolved. And, and we can't, we can't reconstruct that far back in history, we can reconstruct older languages based on present ones we can, we can literally look at modern day languages, compare them. And using evidence from those languages, wind the clock back and figure out what the earlier versions of these languages used to look like without having any written record of them. So and we can confirm this, because if you take like Italian and Spanish, and French and compare them, and do this process, use these techniques we have, and you wind the clock back and you reconstruct them, or what earlier language they all seem to come from, you reconstruct Latin. And then of course, we have lots of documents in Latin. And we can confirm that that works. So but we can only do that back to like, the farthest back, we've really been able to do that with certainty is probably in the order of like six, maybe 8000 years. So if language evolved 40 or 100,000 years ago, there's no way we're getting to it.

Nick VinZant 12:28

The farthest back we can get is essentially Latin, in

Daniel Hieber 12:32

fact we can get is what's called proto indo European, so less so proto indo European was this group of languages that evolved probably in the Caucasus around Anatolia, Sumerian, kind of Eastern Europe. But there's some, some debate about that. And they spread and evolved into the Indo Aryan languages in India. And so that includes Hindi, and then it evolved into Sans, and also Sanskrit over in India. And then in Europe, it evolved into the Celtic languages. So that's, you know, that's going to be modern Irish, and some of the, like the gaelic languages in France before the Romans took over. And then it also evolved into Latin and Greek. So English and Hindi are related. They're all part of this huge family of languages called indo European. It's like 200, some languages, at least, that all descend from this one proto language, and it's just branched out and spread out over time.

Nick VinZant 13:25

Is there any holdovers that we can like trace directly to that, like we call a book a book, because

Daniel Hieber 13:31

we call a book of work because it originally, so it's related to the word Beach, there's this common process, a sound change process and the world's languages where a K sound will become like a chest sound, or a schwa sound. It's called dumb palletization. And so originally, it was related to the word beach because books were made from beach trees. And so those two words go all the way back, I believe, all the way to the proto indo European word for beech tree, I believe.

Nick VinZant 14:00

If you have an answer to this, I would be amazed. Do we have any idea like what the first like, what was the first word that we ever figured out? Like, oh, that's though, the first word we found, I would imagine it'd be like fire.

Daniel Hieber 14:14

Well, you know, it's interesting you say that, because there is this notion of core vocabulary vocabulary that is more resistant to change. And for awhile, it was really speculative. But they recently did some great work actually figuring out like looking at a bunch of languages and which words were least likely to change over time. And we now have that list. And sure enough fires on it. And one of them one of those kind of core words is fire out other words, I believe, like, mom and milk and water, like land, earth, I think are other good examples of that. So now there's this idea of like, those are the words you kind of want to look for in a language. I don't know exactly. Which length which words they were able to reconstruct first. I believe it was 1786. That was the first time that William James was able to kind of hypothesize that all these languages were related. And that really sparked Modern Linguistics, people started becoming very interested in how languages change. And because of that, they had to figure out how languages work in order to understand how they can change. So it really was this kind of Modern Renaissance and language study.

Nick VinZant 15:16

Looking back on it, are you surprised at how similar they are? Or that, I guess, do we have more or less than you would think that we would have

Daniel Hieber 15:25

I'm, it's more, because if you think about it, like this one would have started as just like one community, like maybe one nomadic tribe, that and probably the reason they were successful is because they were one of the first communities to get horse technology. And we know, like, we can reconstruct words for like cart and horse all the way back to proto indo European. And also, other things like we know, we can reconstruct the word for be like honeybees in particular. And at the time, honeybees were not spread around the world. And so that helped us pinpoint exactly where we think the Indo Europeans came from. But so yeah, they they would have just been one community that was very successful and sort of spreading over time. And then also, they might like, they might have conquered their way through Europe. But it might have also been the case that their culture, what you know, they were successful trading culture, and they were able to spread a lot of their language through multilingualism. And people learned it. So we're, you know, we're not 100% sure how it spread. But yeah, the fact that you went from one community to hundreds of different languages, like is always kind of amazing. The other thing that amazes me. So if you look at biological species, there are a lot of parallels between biological species and languages. And with biological species, the majority of the species on the planet that have ever lived, are now extinct, they're gone. It's like 90% of all this species on the planet are gone. So throughout history, all the way back to the dinosaurs and whatnot. And language is kind of like that, too. Except that, you know, all of the languages we have today descended from original languages and things. But specifically in terms of the vocabulary. If you you can take like one word from indo European, like, if you took the word for one, there are, I think, in the case of one, there's at least maybe 100 words in English, that originally derived from the word for one. So for example, the word a and an, that used to be one you used to say, like, I saw one man, but you didn't pronounce it one at the time, at the time, prime time, it was pronounced en en, man. And eventually, that n started dropping out before consonant so became our man. Now, that's just one example the word 11. The word 11 literally meant one leftover. So it was originally it was on layover in and the layover and is related to a word for left to like to leave to leave or leave behind. And on in front of it was originally one. So there's, like, I think about 100 words, at least, that come from just this one proto indo European root, and English. And so you're thinking like, why does it seem like everything just goes back to this one word? Well, it's because a lot of the vocabulary that used to exist in these languages has fallen out of use. And so just this tiny percent of like, tiny proportion of proto indo European and now accounts for all of the vocabulary of all of these hundreds of languages, it's like this was the successful vocabulary, in a sense, that kind of made it through history.

Nick VinZant 18:31

Is there any kind of a timeframe? Or you could say, like, alright, well, we know that every 100 years or 500 years or 1000 years, this language will be completely different, even though it is the same language, like I'm thinking of English, right? And I went back to 1700 and be like, That's English. Like yeah,

Daniel Hieber 18:48

it's not if you go back to old English, it's it's unrecognizable. The Lord's Prayer and Old English sounds like follow the UI have to set out and health and I'm, like, you've like no one understands that it's totally different. Old English had all sorts of cool, like suffixes and prefixes that we don't have anymore used to have like 10 Different forms of every now and depending on whether it was the subject of the object, or the indirect object, and we lost all that says, like, totally changed. There was this one linguist, more Swadesh was very famous, and he had that exact same question. And he thought that you could kind of time how long it took languages to evolve and how far back languages separated from each other by comparing their their core vocabulary. And so this is called glottal chronology and it's totally kind of debunked. Now we it just turns out you can't really do that. So like if you look at Icelandic Icelandic grammar hasn't really changed much in the past 1000 years. So pronunciation definitely has. But like a lot of the grammatical constructions are pretty much the same. Whereas English you know, English has been through all sorts of contact with other people and borrowing and things so English is complete. We changed, it looks nothing like it did 1000 years ago. So the pace of change for these two languages is totally different. So we can't really like predict how quickly they change all of the top most frequent words in English or Germanic origin. But the top 1000 most frequent words of English, most of them are actually from French or Latin because we borrowed those words. So it's, it's kind of interesting that the core vocabulary has stayed, like, like true to English origins, you know, true to the Germanic origins of English. And then everything else has been all those borrowing. So 60% of English vocabulary is from French or Latin.

Nick VinZant 20:36

So how does this like process work in the sense that all right, so you'd have this initial language? And then let's just say one guy and his family go over the mountains?

Daniel Hieber 20:48

Yep. And that's called the accurate? That's basically

Nick VinZant 20:51

right. But like, how does it go from like, alright, this guy who went over the mountains, he's now decided that I'm going to call cat Gato. Right? And that, how does that then, trend become a whole new language over time, we're like, nope, they've now changed the names for so many things that it is now a new language entirely.

Daniel Hieber 21:15

So oftentimes, it's not even so much about changing the words for things. So that obviously is a big factor. But the things that people really have a lot of trouble with, over time, wind up being sound changes, so cat, and Gato is a great example. So those two words are related to each other. If you think about a que sound like in, I know, we spell it with a C, but it's a K sound for cat. And you think about a g sound for Gato, both of those sounds are pronounced in the same part of your throat and the back of your throat there and the vieler.

Nick VinZant 21:44

Yeah, I can actually feel it in the same place. Now I think about it.

Daniel Hieber 21:48

And the only difference between those, like we were talking about earlier is the different whether your vocal folds are vibrating. And so what happened is in Spanish speakers just started for some reason or another voicing vibrating the vocal folds to that continent. And it probably just started as like a subtle variation. You know, some people just kind of did it as like a, like slight accent thing. And it just kind of drifted like a lot of language is just kind of random drift in that direction. And then, or it's other, but other times, there'll be like reasons and pressures for it. So in a lot of languages, if you have a voiceless sound like a t between two vowels, it will become voiced. So like the, in Spanish, the ending Oddo, a do so like, you know, I've lado spoken that D I believe was originally a t. And then it became voice because it was sitting between two vowels. So sometimes there are pressures, like if you're voicing your vocal folds on both on either side of a sound, there's more pressure for that sound to also be voiced in the middle to and you can understand, like, why that would happen. But sometimes it's just kind of random. There's this great thing in English, that's called the Great Vowel Shift. It's quite the adventure English went on. And if you if you turn your head, and you imagine, I'm going to keep speaking this way, to the extent that I can't, if you turn your head and you imagine, like a side profile of your face, right? Where you pronounce the vowels depends on where your tongue is in the mouth. So you can kind of picture this kind of like, sort of trapezoidal area in the mouth for your pronounced different sounds right? So English started slowly shifting where we pronounced vowels in the mouth. So the word book, for example, used to be bulk. And that's why we spell it to this day with two O's. But over time, that vowel shifted, and as your tongue started moving up in the mouth, and was book instead, or sorry, no, not one, that one actually centered. So but what and what was interesting is, when these vowels change, they started moving into the space of other vowels. And so those vowels had to move. And so this is what's called the chain shift all of these vowels, like all of the vowels in English, where we pronounced them in the mouth just kind of rotated. And this is called the Great Vowel Shift. And the really, like pretty, I don't know, I think it's kind of hilarious thing about this. Is this happened right after English spelling kind of got standardized. So we the printing press comes in the 1400s. We start printing books, printers start having standard spellings for words, for maybe the first time ever, they start standardizing this stuff, and then the Great Vowel Shift Happens and screws it all up.

Nick VinZant 24:25

Is that why all of our words look alike? But that's not the way that I would think that we say it. So we essentially say words differently than what they actually are read

Daniel Hieber 24:35

and write. Yeah, other languages have a much clearer correspondence between the letter and the sound. But English and it's not arbitrary in English, but there's just a lot more complexity in English to that correspondence.

Nick VinZant 24:48

So the Oh thing use Can you do that? What like what were the main vowels

Daniel Hieber 24:53

so it used to be pronounced like they were spelled. So book was Bo Can, feet was fit. And so actually, here's a good example. So foot and feet. The reason why we have a weird plural for some of those nouns is because English used to have like I was talking about different endings on nouns to indicate what a noun was doing in the sentence. So whether it was the subject of the sentence or the object, whatever. And sometimes that ending on the noun would be like an e sound. And that ending on the noun would start affecting the sounds before it. So the plural of foot used to be foot, but it was 40 with an E at the end of it. And speakers started kind of anticipating that E and it started affecting that vowel before it so became 50. But then over time, those endings dropped out, and you're left with that vowel change. So what was originally for two became fed. And that became fi and once the Great Vowel Shift happened.

Nick VinZant 26:02

But we would we recognize it right? Like if you came from 800. And you've like, fed, what, what are you saying? Right? That's feed now it's feed now dude, like get with that? Give it a Yeah. This is how language is right.

Daniel Hieber 26:17

And so now you have the the reason we consider Old English and Middle English and modern English to be we have separate labels for them, is because they're not mutually intelligible. If you were to jump back to the Great Vowel Shift are right before you wouldn't, you'd have to learn the language like a second language.

Nick VinZant 26:34

Are you ready for some harder slash listeners submitted question? Yeah, absolutely, of course, hardest language to learn, easiest language to learn.

Daniel Hieber 26:43

Yeah, I'll give the disappointing answer. It really depends on the language you already speak. If you speak in Indo European language, and you want to learn another indo European language, it's a lot easier than if you speak in Indo European language, and you want to learn Navajo. tonal languages are hard for some people, other people the very easy they pick up on so tone is just pitch. It's just melody, just like in a song. But there's so there's one important principle that all linguists really abide by, which is that no language is really any more complex or simple than others, like certain parts, certain features of languages can be more complex, but they're usually balanced out by simplicity and other areas.

Nick VinZant 27:22

It's so it's like, what's an example of a tonal language,

Daniel Hieber 27:26

Mandarin is the famous example. So Chinese is, I believe, a five five tone system. So there's this famous example of the word Ma, which I believe you say with like a high tone is horse a mA. And if it's like a rising tone, it means mother. So you want to be careful not to confuse those, and there's like four other ones for it as well. But Navajo is a tonal language. And that one's simple. It just has a high tone, and a low tone. So every every vowel is either a high pitch or a low pitch. So the way you say hello, and Navajo is yacht day, and you can hear my that kind of elevated pitch. It's like yeah, it's like high level. There's a lot of languages in Africa, Bantu languages, like related to Swahili that are tonal. And yeah, it's just a matter of kind of the melody on the words.

Nick VinZant 28:15

Most Efficient language, and I think what they mean by that is like, what language can you say the most? Without saying the most eye? Is that one that you like? Oh, that one's? They got right to it.

Daniel Hieber 28:26

Yeah, well, so it's actually kind of interesting. Some of the stuff that you were suggesting earlier, might not be very efficient in language, actually, is really efficient, because it packages a ton of information. Like if you take a verb and Navajo, there's so much information in there about the position, the location, the direction, the the kind of makeup of the action, whether it was a habitual or a static thing that happened once like all that's packed into this one word, and you just can communicate it very efficiently that way. Yeah,

Nick VinZant 28:56

that's, that's interesting. Okay, I may ask this question or make this point terribly. But I've always feel felt like language is inherently confusing, because what one person thinks something means isn't actually what it might mean, or what the other person thinks that it means. So for example, I always think of the word like decimate, well, it was decimated, right? But that literally means reduced by a power of like, 10%. Exactly. So it's not decimated, if it's destroyed,

Daniel Hieber 29:23

well, so this is, so this is very natural language change, like so the the historical meaning of a word is not necessarily the current meaning of a word, right? So no, very, very few people unless you've got you know, you've had the chance to learn this fun fact, realize that decimate used to mean 1/10 of it's related to decimal and things like that. So what happens is, you start using a word for a kind of metaphorically or figuratively, and over time that use become so common that people start learning the figurative use of the word As the literal use of the word, and that's what happened with decimate, and like literal, exactly, literally, is now becoming figuratively. And here's the cool thing about literally literal, the meaning that everyone says is the literal meaning of literally today used to be it's figurative meaning literally originally meant by the letter or having to do with letters or writing. And over time that became figuratively used to mean like, you know, like exactly as said, and then now we're changing it again, to actually mean figuratively, I mean, the reverse.

Nick VinZant 30:38

So we just keep switching it around a little

Daniel Hieber 30:41

common, that's language change that happens to everything.

Nick VinZant 30:45

What is it? Like? Is there any examples that you can think of, in which a language didn't have a word for something?

Daniel Hieber 30:52

Oh, sure, all the time. Um, the important thing to kind of realize with that, though, is is doesn't really matter. So a lot of languages don't have distinct words for green and blue. Does that mean that those speakers can't understand the difference between green and blue? No, of course they can. And it's a matter of fact, Russian has separate words for light blue, and dark blue. But, you know, or does that mean that Russian speaker like that English speakers can't understand the difference between light blue and dark blue? Of course we can. Russian speakers might be able to understand it a little bit more quickly, and might be able to pick up on those color distinctions a little more efficiently than English speakers, because they've got a lot of practice at it. But it doesn't constrain your ability to think about the things a certain way

Nick VinZant 31:38

without kind of getting into the pole, political aspects of it and things like this, but simply from a linguistic standpoint, when we look at kind of gender and language, right, we're now folks which used to be fol, X, fo, folk s, right? Like Folk is now fol x in some cases. Right. Right. We're we're kind of changing words, based on gender. And I think everybody knows what we're talking about, like, from a linguistic standpoint, does that have any precedents in history? And is what is this kind of mean for us moving forward? I

Daniel Hieber 32:13

guess. Yeah. So boy, all sorts of great stuff to talk about with this. So for starters, that is mostly just a spelling convention that people are trying to adopt in that particular case with folks, it doesn't really affect the pronunciation much. However, there are certainly other cases where people are advocating for, like substantive changes to English grammar. So for the singular day, a lot of people are advocating for a singular day. And or in Spanish is a big issue, talking about lateen x, right? So Spanish nouns all end an O or a depending on if they're masculine or feminine. And so people are suggesting that they change those endings to always be an x. So it's gender neutral. And that requires like changing the grammar of the language. So a couple of things to be said to that. First off, it's really hard to do that. If you remember I mentioned earlier, that language is not something that can be managed from the top down. So people have been trying to manage language for as long as there's been language. Like, if you go back to Latin times, there's people complaining about how the young people speak. And it's because language is constantly changing. And so people are trying to impose their particular ideas about how society shouldn't be through language. When people have ideas about language, it's almost never about language, it's always about something else. It's always about like a group of people or some idea about society. So they've been trying to manage language for centuries and centuries. And it just, it's unfortunately not really possible. And even in cases where it's, you know, people are very well intentioned with something, it can be really cognitively difficult to get someone to use, singular they have for like a definite reference to a person, because that's just it for most speakers of English, that's ungrammatical. Now, there's an important distinction to be made there. We do use singular they all the time in English, as my fact singular A is older than singular you the word you used to be plural, and it became singular over time. And there have been records in English and people using they for singular longer than people have been using you for singular, which is pretty cool. But the the important difference there is that people are using they for the singular when it's an indefinite or unspecified person. But when you use they for a specific person whose identity you know, that's when it's ungrammatical. People are like they it just kind of your your grammar, like breaks for a second you're like, Wait, who Wait, who's the who's the day? Who are we talking about? And takes a second to realize like, oh, it's that singular person. So for most people, some people this isn't true, but for most people, it's still On ungrammatical to use they for definite specific person, but English is heading there. And I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years that was totally normal, and no one even thought twice about it.

Nick VinZant 35:11

He's right. It's kind of one of those things that like, old man yelling at cloud that kind of ideas like, Look, man, it's changing whether you like it or not. In the long run, it doesn't matter. It's not like civilization is going to collapse. Because we've decided to, we've got we've gone through this kind of changes all the time. Exactly. Um, this is kind of, I don't even know if this might be along the similar lines. And this, so I'll use this example to try to so when I think of like, the word bitch now, for example, is this the best one I could think of? Or the first one they think, like, in my, when I was growing up, bitch was a woman. I don't think of bitches a woman at all, I think of bitches. Like is what I say to one of my straight male friends. What are like, Hey, let's go out. Right, right. And they say, No, I don't want to like, Oh, you've been a bit like, does language change in real time with that? Like, what do you think about when a word doesn't mean? What maybe it meant five years ago, or 10 years ago?

Daniel Hieber 36:11

Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes this change can happen really quickly. A good example of this is actually the word friend. So friend used to not be a verb until about 2006, seven when Facebook came around. And now and now it's a verb, but it's a verb with a very specific meaning. It means to add someone as a connection on social media. Like you don't you don't say like, oh, I friended someone at the bar. That sounds a little weird, right? Like, like people, maybe it's, I wouldn't be surprised if that was more accepted in 1020 years. But for the most part, it's like it's got this specific meaning. But yeah, that was like overnight, you know, verb, suddenly, we find like, before Facebook came along, people would have said, No, friend isn't a verb, you have to say be friend, but now friend and be friend are two totally different things. They mean different things. And so and now friend is a verb has entered the language overnight, like within a year, and that that is incredibly quick for language change. It takes normally a generation.

Nick VinZant 37:07

Is there any language that you look at and say that is nothing like any other what is what I guess is the most unique language

Daniel Hieber 37:14

I am, I almost every week, I encountered something in language that I did not think was possible, or just as unique and remarkable and diverse about language. So one that kind of recently, really struck me was when I was working on my dissertation on my dissertation talks about new tungnath language in the Pacific Northwest. And this language has an entire set of like hundreds of suffixes. And the suffixes aren't like a plural suffix, or like a present tense suffix or anything like that. These suffixes are what would be like full words in English. So you would add a suffix. Like, there's a suffix for two. So you would say, like, you know, to have the stem man, and then you'd put the suffix for two on the end of it like the number two. And then you would turn it into a verb, you'd have a verb suffix. And so it would literally be a verb meaning to be two men.

Nick VinZant 38:11

Is there an age where we don't learn? Is there really like an age where like, you look, it's too late.

Daniel Hieber 38:17

Okay, so it becomes a lot harder after puberty, it's called the they talk about the critical period. So if you don't learn your first language, whether that's, you know, sign language or spoken language, if you don't learn your first language, what before you hit puberty, while you're in that critical period, you're probably going to never learn language. So and there are cases of this. Unfortunately, there are very unfortunate cases where you might have children who were deaf, and so the parents didn't realize that they weren't getting any language input. And they weren't learning until it was like too late. And so they were very delayed in their language acquisition. There's cases of feral children. So maybe this isn't an example of a feral child. But there's this really unfortunate case of a girl named Jeannie, who was basically locked in a room by her father until she was a teenager. And when she finally got out, she, she was never really able to learn language. She was very, very emotionally expressive. And people can tell like just how tuned in emotionally she was. But she could never pick up language after that. And there's a famous case of the they call them the wild boy of Abba Yone I believe in France, he was found in 1799. And he had been living in the woods by himself up until he was like 13, then he never learned language either. But if you have exposure, when you're young, then you can learn language throughout the rest of your life. And it is a little harder after puberty to learn languages as an adult. But recent research is actually suggesting that it's not as impossible as previously, maybe people have thought so people used to think like, oh, once you're an adult, you'll never learn a language as well as you do when you're a child. And for the most part, that's true, but the reason might not be because we're like cognitively incapable of it. It seems like the reason is really just more a matter of time.

Nick VinZant 40:05

We get other shit. Yeah, right

Daniel Hieber 40:06

and your kid, all you're doing all day is sitting around being a little language sponge like you'll learn and like 50 words a day. Whereas an adult, we actually realize now that adults are also learning a lot of vocabulary very quickly. So lately, we've been kind of re reassessing our existing beliefs about what we thought, like adult language learning was like, but it's still very possible.

Nick VinZant 40:27

What is your favorite curse word? Ah, I,

Daniel Hieber 40:32

you know, I probably go the current myself, just because I feel like it's one of the current curse words, but still has a good bit of oomph behind it.

Nick VinZant 40:41

Oh, that is true.

Daniel Hieber 40:43

Like, you can throw in fuck casually fucks been around since like, forever, like 1400. Like they we have documentation on fuck going way, way, way back. And that's such a fun word because it gets used as nouns and verbs and adjectives, like you can do whatever you fuckin want to do with fact, like, it's a great word. But it's undergone what we call semantic bleaching, it basically no longer has that same kind of pragmatic that it used to. So that one is just like, if you're going to, if you're going to really curse, and you want to curse to actually, like, have a little bit of that shock value, I think constant way to go.

Nick VinZant 41:16

That is true. Like if somebody if I'm in a restaurant or public place, and somebody says, fuck, I'm not paying any attention. But if somebody says can't, like, I'm snapping my head around, like, oh, it's gone down. Something is about something is about to happen. Um, what is your favorite word in any language like this is a great word.

Daniel Hieber 41:41

The words that really interest me are the ones that have like just illustrate the beautiful complexity of the language that they're being spoken on. So the language I work the most with is a language called Chitty macho, and it's the one spoken in Louisiana. It's a Native American language. And I just so there's, I know that seems strange, but it's there's a lot of words that are whole verbs. And but they get used as a noun. So it's the word for bridge. The word for bridge and Chitty Macia is they usually cross it. And so this whole verbal construction has got habitual suffix in there, it's got a plural suffix. It's got an intransitive suffix to tell you that it's like a verb that only has one actor, and it's kind of instrumental on it to say that, you know, it's like you're doing it with the bridge. It's all of these things, like packed into this one word. But it doesn't mean that like nobody uses it to mean cross. They use it to mean bridge. And this is something that happens with a lot of languages like a Navajo the word for chair is literally you sit up there on it. And the or like in Cayuga, the word for horse is it hauls logs. And so recently, these are become some of my kind of favorite examples of words and Native American languages that you know the verbs, they're actually verbs, but people have come to use them as nouns and they no longer you're gonna realize that they started as verbs a lot of times

Nick VinZant 43:09

when we when he looked at right, like language and race, what's kind of the big controversy in that?

Daniel Hieber 43:13

Well, like I said earlier, when people have attitudes and ideas about language, it's never about the language itself. There's never any linguistic basis to these ideas, these attitudes, it's always about some preconceived notion they have about the people that they see as speaking that way. So, and for a lot of people, you will let something slide with groups that you, you know, have no no issue with, and you will raise it as being ungrammatical or non standard for other groups. So a question I can ask on Tiktok all the time, is why the black people say x instead of ask. So this is a really revealing question, because first off, it's not the case that just black people say this. That's a very common feature, a lot of white dialects as well. So they're like, especially in southern English, you'll hear people say x all the time. So the real question is why when you hear that, that way of pronouncing it coming from white person, do you kind of let that slide and not think twice about it? But when you hear a black person saying it, suddenly you're like, oh, that sounds ungrammatical.

Nick VinZant 44:23

That is true, right? Like, you can't say that x is ungrammatical, and then say y'all in the next

Daniel Hieber 44:29

great example. Yeah, well, and the cursor thing is from a linguistic perspective, like y'all and x are both perfectly grammatical constructions. As a matter of fact, the pronunciation X has been around in English for as long as the pronunciation ask has been, they used to be there used to be all sorts of variation in the spelling between those two, up until I think like the 1800s. And at that point, people started standardizing the spelling on ask but the pronunciation never went away. It's just that that spelling got standardized. So those two pronunciations have been our around for ages, y'all is the reason y'all came about is because remember that plural you became singular. And so we need a new ways of talking about plural you. And so English depending on your dialect to develop, like six different ways of saying plural, you you guys, y'all Yen's uns it is it's something that a lot of people don't think about like, like language kind of winds up being one of the last bastions of acceptable discrimination, a lot of people that are out there, you know, really being advocates for social justice and like being anti discrimination will nonetheless like judge people very harshly on the way they speak. Even though linguistically there's there's no basis for that y'all is just as good of a plural pronoun as you guys is, there's it's just that one dialect has more prestige associated with it than another, linguistically, they're the same. Every dialect is as rule governed, and as well structured and irregular as any other.

Nick VinZant 45:56

Like, this isn't some fundamental law of the universe, like you're not doing it wrong, you're doing a difference, actually. Yeah. And if you think somebody is doing it wrong, it's basically just based around your own right upbringing and moral comp. Yep.

Daniel Hieber 46:08

And so like, I love using this example, because it so a lot of people will criticize African American English, certain dialects as being, you know, Lazy, Lazy English or ungrammatical or broken English or something like that. But if you actually go take a scientific approach to studying the rules of African American English dialects, you start seeing this beautiful grammatical complexity and this really well rule governed system. So a really popular example is, in stint in kind of mainstream Standard English, we have two present tenses, we have a present simple of like I Iran, and the present progressive I am running. So we have two different types of present tense, a lot of varieties of African American English have three or four different present tenses. And that will be the difference between a simple a progressive, and habitual. So it's the difference between he run, he be running and he running. And those all mean slightly different things. And if you're trying to speak that dialect, and you use the habitual one to not mean something, a bit like not refer to habitual action, you're speaking that dialect incorrectly, you're speaking on grammatically, you're not following the rules of that dialect. So it's, it's a rule governed system. It's like every bit as structured as any other dialect, it's just that the roles are different.

Nick VinZant 47:29

That is really true. I've always found that fascinating. When you look back in history, and it's never what someone is doing, it's always who is doing now, it's always the way that it is, um, what's kind of coming up next for you? Well, I

Daniel Hieber 47:43

just recently finished a postdoc at the University of Alberta here in Canada. So I was doing research with the plains Cree community, we were making an online dictionary, like an intelligent dictionary that would recognize all the forms of words and Korean. And so I've just finished that position. And now I'm working full time with the chinny moto tribe in Louisiana. And we are making a modern dictionary and grammar of the language so that they can revitalize the language again, which for them, they're super, super excited about this because their last speaker died in 1940. And so we are working from archival materials that a linguist he recorded 120 stories, he made some wax cylinder recordings, he did all this documentation. Back in the 30s. During the Great Depression, he sat, he was sitting in the middle of the bayou of Louisiana, with his notebook. And during the Great Depression as a grad student, it's like documenting this language. And then in the 90s, the tribe like learned about these materials, they didn't know they existed, they thought their language was completely gone, they would never hear it again. And they found these materials. And we started a language revitalization project. And so now they're working to teach the language to the kids in schools and again, and so that's I'm super excited to be working with them full time on that now.