McWhorter, John - Language A to Z Guidebook.pdf

7/25/2019 McWhorter, John - Language A to Z Guidebook.pdf

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LinguisticsLiterature& Language

Professor John McWhorter

Language A to Z


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i

John McWhorter, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Englishand Comparative Literature

Columbia University

Professor John McWhorter teaches linguistics,

Western civilization, and American studies

as an Associate Professor of English and

Comparative Literature at Columbia University

and is a contributing editor at The New Republic.He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1993, taught

at Cornell University, and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at the

University of California, Berkeley. His academic specialties are language

change and language contact.

Professor McWhorter is the author of The Power of Babel: A NaturalHistory of Languageabout how the worlds languages arise, change,and mixand Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and

Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care. More recently, he is theauthor of Our Magnicent Bastard Tongue: Untold Stories in the History

of Englishand What Language Is, What It Isnt, and What It Could Be. Healso has written a book on dialects and Black English, The Word on theStreet; four books on Creole languages; and an academic linguistics bookentitledLanguage Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard

Language Grammars. He has produced three previous Great Courses: Story

of Human Language; Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language;andMyths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage.

Beyond his work in linguistics, Professor McWhorter is the author of

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America; Authentically Black:Essays for the Black Silent Majority; Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisisin Black America; and All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Cant Save Black

America. He appears regularly on Bloggingheads.com and has written on

race and cultural issues for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The NewYork Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal,


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theLos Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, Ebony, and Vibe. He hasprovided commentaries forAll Things Consideredand has appeared onMeetthe Press, Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, The Colbert Report, BookTVs In Depth (on C-SPAN2), Talk of the Nation, TODAY, Good Morning

America,The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,andFresh Air.


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Table of Contents

LECTURE GUIDES

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography ............................................................................ i

Course Scope .....................................................................................1

LECTURE 1

A for Aramaic ......................................................................................3

LECTURE 2

B for Baby Mama ..............................................................................10

LECTURE 3

C for Compounds .............................................................................16

LECTURE 4D for Double Negatives ....................................................................22

LECTURE 5

E for Etymology ................................................................................28

LECTURE 6

F for First Words ...............................................................................34

LECTURE 7G for Greek Alphabet ........................................................................41

LECTURE 8

H for Hobbits.....................................................................................48

LECTURE 9

I for Island .........................................................................................55

LECTURE 10J for Jamaican ..................................................................................61


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Table of Contents

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LECTURE 11

K for Ket............................................................................................67

LECTURE 12

L for Like ...........................................................................................74

LECTURE 13

M for Maltese ....................................................................................80

LECTURE 14N for Native American English ..........................................................86

LECTURE 15

O for Oldsters in Cartoons ................................................................92

LECTURE 16

P for Plurals, Q for Quiz ....................................................................99

LECTURE 17R for R-Lessness ............................................................................105

LECTURE 18

S for She.........................................................................................112

LECTURE 19

T for Tone .......................................................................................118

LECTURE 20U for Understand ............................................................................124

LECTURE 21

V for Vocabulary .............................................................................130

LECTURE 22

W for Whats Up, Doc? ...................................................................136

LECTURE 23X for !X, Y for Yiddish .................................................................142


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Table of Contents

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LECTURE 24

Z for Zed .........................................................................................148

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Bibliography ....................................................................................153


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Typographical Conventions

This guidebook uses the following typographical conventions:

Italics are used or words cited as words (rather than usedunctionally; e.g., Te word ginormousis a combination o giganticand enormous) and oreign-language words.

Single quotation marks are used or meanings o words (e.g., Wifemeant woman in Old English).

Double quotation marks are used or pronunciations o words (e.g.,ofen versus offen) and words used in a special sense (e.g., Tesecret lives o words are ascinating).

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


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Language A to Z

Scope:

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

one aspect of language around the worldnot languages around

the world. Some of the entries are about individual languages such

as Aramaic and Maltese, but most are about general concepts such as

vocabulary, tones, and double negatives; a single pronoun likeshe; and evenexpressions such as baby mama and Whats Up, Doc? Throughout the

course, you will gain an introduction to the linguists perspective on what

people speak, how they speak it, and why.

Something underlying many of the lectures is the fact that writing is a

representation of speech rather than what language really is, despite that

the permanence and controllability of writing have always lent an illusion

none of us can be immune to that language beyond the page is unformed

or preliminary. The very concept of writing was slow in coming in human

history, and the specic idea of an alphabet, with a symbol for each sound

in a language, occurred only once, in the Middle East. Yet the idea that

what is written is a language and what is not is a dialect turns out not

to correspond to complexity or nuance in the ways one would expect; in this

course, you will see how such notions fare in the face of how languages are

distributed in Europe below the radar, or an unwritten language spoken by

only hundreds in Siberia.

The course will also show that language is a highly diverse thing,independently of any traits of the cultures that speak them. Languages can

either be highly telegraphic or almost obsessively attendant to nuances of

experience. On one hand, in many, one usually doesnt indicate whether

something is plural or singular; in others, there is no way to mark tense;

and others have no plural pronouns. On the other hand, there are languages

where almost all plural forms are irregular like childrenandgeesein English,all verbs are irregular, and there are as many as eight or nine genders

that a noun can be a member of. The English speakers sense of grammaris actually but one of endless variations on how people communicateand


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in that vein, the course will also show that English is a more fascinating

system than we are often told, in terms of how we know to put the accent on

loudin loudspeakerbut to put it onspeakin mentioning someone who is aloud speaker.

Then, while those variations in themselves are largely random, differences

between the ways that segments of society talk can be indexed to

sociohistorical factors in ways that reveal subconscious aspects of

psychology and even teach us about ancient human migrations otherwise

lost to history. Seemingly minor things, such as the way people of a certain

age sometimes shape a certain vowel or pronounce r, can be tied to societalshifts that the people themselves may not even be consciously attending to.

Aspects of a languages vocabulary or its sounds can be tied to migrations

and takeovers otherwise only vaguely alluded to in folktales, if at all, as we

see regarding the click languages of Africa and some deeply obscure ones

of Indonesia.

This course will seek to answer the questions that people often pose tolinguists and lend a sense of why linguists give the answers that they do.


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A for Aramaic

Lecture 1

We will never know how Middle Easterners 2,500 years ago would

have felt about todays world. However, we can be quite sure that

to them, the idea of Arabic being an ofcial language in over 25

countries would sound as counterintuitive as a sitcom built around Mary Ann

from Gilligans Islandwould be to us. But 2,500 years ago, Arabic was analso-ran, an obscure tongue spoken by obscure nomads. The star language

of the worldwas Aramaic.

Aramaic Language

Aramaic had been the star language of the world since the 7th

century B.C., but today, its easy to know nothing about Aramaic

beyond that Jesus Christ spoke it, and many only picked that up

in 2004 when Mel Gibson had dialogue in Passion of the Christrendered in the language. Yet Aramaic lives on, quietly but ercely

la Norma Desmond in the lm Sunset Boulevard.

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

Adherents of all three of those religions have had occasion to adopt

Aramaic, because it was available for use in the Middle East long

before Christianity or Islam even existed.

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

on the language map, spoken by ever fewer in small communitiesscattered across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. However, there are

more Aramaic speakers in the United States, Armenia, and Georgia.

The current situation for Aramaic is ironically similar to its beginnings

amidst desert nomads. In legend, they were the descendants of Aram,

Shem of the Bibles son. They conquered Damascus and much else in

Upper Mesopotamia, and by the 9thcentury B.C., they ruled Babylon,

as the Chaldeans of Biblical fame. Thats why Chaldean is anotherterm for Aramaic as seen in the older books.


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Lecture1:AforAramaic

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

family, whose modern stars are Arabic and Hebrew. But there was

a time when both of them were obscure third bananas, with Arabic

not even written, while Aramaic was on its way to glory.

Ironically, the glory came in the wake of defeat. When the Assyrians

took over Babylon in the endless game of musical chairs of ancientMiddle Eastern geopolitics, they deported Aramaic-speaking

conquerees to distant corners of the empire, such as Egypt. This

spread Aramaic far and wide, and soon people were learning it from

the cradle throughout the Fertile Crescent.

This included Jews. Here was the beginning of Hebrews long

period of exile, used only in writing until it was revived as a spoken

language starting in the late 19th century. You would have beenlaughed out of any Babylonian cocktail party if you told people

Aramaic is spoken in Syria, which is why you will often see the language

referred to as Syriac.

WeFt/WikimediaCommons/P

ublicDomain.


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that one day ice cream and stockings and iPads were going to be

sold in Hebrewwith all anachronism-related adjustments made,

of courseand this is why portions of the Bible were written in

Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

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

us, as the two languages are about as akin as Spanish and Italian.

In the book of Daniel, at a point when the Chaldeans are being

spoken to, the text casually switches into Aramaic for the next ve

chapters. Its odd, as if in Don Quixote, Cervantes had casuallyswitched into Italian to narrate the tale of the Florentine nobleman.

But this is why religious education for Jews includes, even today,

training in Aramaic. Some of the Jews who once spoke Aramaic

were the Samaritans of the Bible, in fact, and Samaritan was one of

the dialects of Aramaic at the time.

What put the nal stamp on Aramaics international status was when

the next winner of musical chairs, the Persians, had no interest in

imposing their language upon their subjects. Instead, they recruited

Aramaic as their own administrative language for an empire that

stretched from Greece through Central Asia. King Darius would

dictate a letter to a faraway subordinate in Persian, and a scribe

would translate it into Aramaic; then, upon delivery, a scribe would

translate the letter from Aramaic into the local language.

This is what Daniel was being trained for as a captive under King

Nebuchadnezzar, and the skill was rather awesome, as Aramaic is

not user-friendly. It can put words through magnicent contortionswhen putting them together.

For example, in Hebrew, heis hu, openedispatakh, and itis oto.To sayHe opened it, you just say the three of them one by one: hu

patakh oto. But if you want to say opened it in one modern dialectof Aramaic, its different. Openedis ifthakh, and itis e, but to putthem together, you cant just say ifthakhe. You have to swallow the

iand then make thand the ain ifthakhswitch places. So, you getfathkh-e. Its like more musical chairs, with the ias the loser.


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One thing we can see in this is that ease has nothing to do with why

a language comes to rule the world. The king of hill before Aramaic

had been its Middle Eastern relative Akkadianwhat the Aramaic

speakers were kicked out in in Babylonia. But Akkadian is built just

like Aramaic, even though for a time, people were taking it up bythe millions.

Arabic was the next language of this brood to become the lingua

franca of the Middle East and beyond, and anyone who has

struggled to learn much Arabic beyond just cracking the challenge

of learning how to sound out its letters knows that Arabic is no

party for the newbie.

Complicated Languages

Then, meanwhile, from the nal centuries before Christ until as

late as the 11thcentury, Greek was the language that ruled Eurasia.

Ancient Greek stretched from points in Spain across the Middle

East and eastward through what is today Pakistan and into India.

However, few would consider learning Greek anything close to

a breeze, groaning as it is with cases, declensions, conjugations,

gender on its nouns, and so much on everything else.

In fact, the only thing more counterintuitive than how widely Greek

was once spoken is how common it was even among ordinary

Americans until the 20thcentury to actually master Ancient Greek

in school.

In addition to Latin and Russian, Aramaic was one more baroquelycomplicated language that became a universal one. One indication

of how studly it used to be is that its alphabet was the source of

most of the writing systems of Asia today other than the Chinese

one. Both the Hebrew and Arabic writing systemswhich arent

technically alphabets because they dont always indicate vowels

are children of Aramaics.

Then, the system spread as far as India and Southeast Asia, suchthat the scripts you see in Burma, Cambodia, and elsewhere are,


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

emerged somewhere far, far away, where there are camels and

languages spoken that have nothing whatsoever to do with pad thai

or sitars.

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

after the victories of a certain Alexander over the Persians. In

the Middle East, Arabic eased Aramaic aside with the spread of

Islam. We can see it happening in the writings of the Nabataeans,

an ancient Middle Eastern group with a penchant for chiseling

announcements into rock faces.

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

Nabataeans rst wrote in Aramaic. But soon, there were Arabic

words sprinkled in like chocolate chips. Before long, they were

writing in a kind of Aramaic/Arabic love childand, eventually,

in Arabic.

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

languages to meet Aramaics fate eventually. After all, so many

have. However, the big lingua francas of old lost their mojo before

widespread printing and literacy. Aramaic replaced Akkadian

because after a while, more people spoke it; people kept writing in

Akkadian for much longer, but there werent very many of them,

and most people couldnt read.

It was pretty easy for Aramaic to gradually creep into writing

after a while. Latin lost ground rst because it developed into newlanguages across Europe. That was easier when reading was so rare

that language was experienced mostly orally, with no sense of what

was on pages as proper. In France, for example, it wasnt so much

that Latin died as that it became French, which itself was Europes

lingua franca for quite a while.

French lost that status because of geopolitical power shifts, and

today we hear rumors that English is about to lose its global statusto Chinese. Certainly, any human being who seeks education,


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inuence, or power should be learning Mandarinright? Actually,

not really. While the growing economic power of China is clear,

language dominance is about culture and technology as much

as money.

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

print, widespread literacy, and eventually an omnipresent media.

All of these make a worlds lingua franca more drillingly present

in minds the world over than was ever possible before. It creates a

deeply ingrained sense of what is normalarbitrary, ultimately, but

hard to shake.

As such, English will remain the international language of choice

for the same reason keyboards retain the ungainly QWERTY

congurationit got there rst. China may well run the world of

the future, but it will likely do so in English.

The world has long known empires that ran things in the language

of the conquered people. King Darius was quite content to run

the Persian Empire in Aramaic; he relegated Persian itself to

announcements chipped onto the sides of mountains. Genghis Khan

and his Mongols ruled China for decades in the 13thcentury with

no interest in spreading their language, happily leaving Chinese

in place.

While today, reports of Aramaics total eclipse are greatly

exaggerated, on life support would be a fair assessment. There

are Aramaic-speaking churches in Teaneck and Paramus, NewJersey, for example, but young people there learn the language less

and less, while in the Near East, Arabic continues to eat away at the

language just as it did on Nabataean tombstones.

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

neighborhoods in the Bronx and Londons East End, with rumors

of a few elderly speakers somewhere in New Zealand. These

things happen. Today, Akkadian is spoken neither in Paramus noranywhere else. Nevertheless, there is still something poignant in a


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language that was once a sign of sophistication across the vastest

empire the world had ever known being today the one out of the

worlds 6,000 most readily associated with Mel Gibson.

Jastrow, The Neo-Aramaic Languages.

Ostler,Empires of the World.

1. Do you think Americans are currently well advised to learn Chinese?Why or why not?

2. Is it a good thing that English is something of a universal language, orwould it be better if the worlds languages stayed purer and werent

inuenced so much by English?

Suggested Reading

Questions to Consider


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Lecture2:BforBabyMam

a

B for Baby Mama

Lecture 2

In 2008, Tina Fey starred in a movie called Baby Mama, whose titlereferred not to an infant giving birth, not a mama who happened to be

but a baby, but a babys mother. The term has become established as a

reference to the mother of ones child who one is no longer married to. It

seems to have become ofcialized in 2000, when the rap group Outkast had

a megahit called Ms. Jackson that was dedicated to all the baby mamas

mamas. It is a vernacular term, mostly associated with Black Americans.

People also use baby daddy, with the corresponding meaning, and oddly,these words teach us valuable things about language in the United States.

Black English

Check out the origin of baby mama and baby daddy online andyoull nd that even the Oxford English Dictionary has fallen for

a tasty notion that the source is Jamaican patois. And indeed, in

casual speech in Jamaica, there is a term baby-mother.

However, the chance that a random locution from the Caribbean

becomes common coin in black America is innitesimal. Sure,

Jamaicans are around, but black Americans arent any more in the

habit of picking up their lingo than other Americans have been

embracing the latest slang from Toronto.

In fact,baby mamaand baby daddyare not just isolated expressions.They are examples of grammar of what linguists refer to as African

American Vernacular English, Black English, or (since the 1990s)

Ebonicsand it existed long before rap music.

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

to go from dismissing minstrelese to supposing that there is no

way of speaking that is local to black people, and that isnt quite

right either.


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Some suppose, understandably, that black speech is simply

Southern, and there are similarities, but youd know the difference

on the phone even if the person were reading from a phone book.

That has, basically, been proven: Most blacks and whites can

immediately identify even Southernersrace on the phone.

There is a particular collection of sound

and sentence patterns that are typical of

black Americans. To put it more precisely,

most black Americans use the dialect to

at least some extent. Some use it in full

bloom most of the time. Others dip in and

out of it as the occasion demands.

For some black Americans, the dialect

is mainly just a matter of what in other

contexts we call peoples accents. Accent

is another way of saying sound, so while

we dont think of black Americans

as having accents in English the way

French people or Chinese people do,

most black Americans do color their vowels and enunciate some

consonants in certain ways that are subtly different from the way

most white Americans do.

That means that white and black people tend to speak English with

different accentsthat is, you could also put it that whites are theones with the accent. Everybody speaking any language speaks

with a different accent than other speakers.

When were dealing with things beyond accent, with whole

sentence structures, one thing that denes Black English is doing

without the possessive s, but not just when talking about parentage,as in expressions like baby mamait goes far beyond that.

Langston Hughes (1902

1967) was an American

poet who used Ebonicsin his poetry.

LibraryofCongressPrintsandPhotographsDivision,LC-USZ62-92598.


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a

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

Massachusetts at Amherst, describes Black English just like

someone might describe Dutch or Klingon, and she gives the basics

on Black English and possessive marking: Sometime Rolanda bed

dont be made up. Thats the church responsibility.

In the 1980s, the bawdy black comedian Robin Harris was doing

comedy routines about a naughty brood of children, and the routines

were laced with the catchphrase Dem Bebe kids!notBebes, butBebeand black audiences spontaneously recognized that way ofputting it as local and real.

A black person saying baby mama is simply rendering babysmamawith the rules of Black English instead of Standard English.They are expressing the possessive relation in the same way as

legions of languages worldwide that have no possessive marker. In

Indonesian, motheris ibu, babyis bayi, and mother of babyis ibubayi(mother baby).

Languages differ in how they handle their haves. The Frenchspeaker saysIl a vuHe has seento express not what we wouldsay asHe has seen, but as the simple past,He saw. In Vulgar Latin,that sameHe has seenwould have been used to mean He will see.

Black English has its own different take on have, and its quitesystematic. There are black people all over America using hadtoday just like black people were during the Ford administration,

because it is grammar.

The Origins of an Alternative Grammar

One might ask, though, where black Americans picked up this

alternate kind of grammar. Leaving off the possessive sis regular,but really, it can seem like its just regularly lazy. If leaving off the

sis grammar, then what kind of lineage does it have? Among whoelse, anywhere, was this grammar something regular?


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

indentured servants from schoolroom history lessons who worked

alongside slaves on Southern plantations? Well, it wasnt elite Brits

who wound up laboring in the Alabama cotton elds: Slaves worked

alongside folks speaking rural brands of English quite unlike thatof Henry Higgins. According to a rumor that gets around, those

indentured servants are supposed to have been talking like Falstaff

or one of the Mechanicals inA Midsummer Nights Dream.

You may have picked up the idea that there are parts of the South

where Shakespearean English is still spoken, which is such a

pleasure to hear about even though, really, imagine driving off into

some tiny town in Virginia and being greeted at the gas station in

Elizabethan English. How? If nobody talks like that in England

anymore, why would they still be doing it in North Carolina?

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

that Black English was an offshoot from, we do know that roughly,

the coastal South, sometimes called the Lower Souththat is, the

Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texaswas settled

by people from southern and southwestern England, while the

Upper South, which is the Appalachians and corresponds roughly

to what we might stereotypically associate with Lil Abner and a

certain execrable sitcom of the 1960s with a catchy theme song

involving banjos, was settled by people from northern England,

Ireland, and Scotland.

The truth is that attempts to show actual parallels between theEnglish of those regions and the Englishes of these two regions

of the South have never worked in any major way. In the end, all

speech is always morphing along era by era for reasons of its own.

Language is like one of those lava lamps from the 1970s: It just

ooches and squinches away forever, not going in any direction in

particular and certainly not for any reason. Its essence is, quite

simply, that it moves.


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a

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

really gotten started after the Civil War, for example, long after the

England connection was an antique matter. The dialect was still

ooching along like that lava, and where it happened to have ooched

by then is what we happen to be hearing now. As hard as it is tobelieve, before the 19thcentury, travelers in the South from England

often mentioned how elegant Southern English wasnot quaint

or accented.

But the larger fact that England was where it started holds up,

and that means that Black English started there to a large extent,

too. Even today, you might hear someone in Yorkshire say among

friendsMy sister husbandrather thanMy sisters husband. In courttranscriptions of statements by London prisoners in the 16th and

17th centuries, lower-class folk regularly say things like Goldwellwiffeinstead of Goldwells wifeandBarlowe owne brotherinsteadof Barlowes own brother. Many of these people were due fortransportation to plantations in Virginia and beyond. Baby mamawasnt long in coming.

Besides that, if you were trying to learn English really fast, and only

from hearing people talk and imitating them, cant you imagine that

even when they were using the possessive sall nice and tidythatwhile you were sorting out things like the past tense of seebeing

saw and the plural of man being menyou might nd yourselfleaving off persnickety things like that s?

Adults learning languages around the world round the corners a bitin situations like this, just as we do when we are getting pretty good

at French or Spanish but still dont command the little stuff.

In Spanish, there is an annoying little athat is used before a personwhen its an object:l bes AnitaHe kissed Anitais wrong; youhave to say l bes a Anita, even though a is supposed to meanto. You dont kiss to people! Anybody who has spoken good

schoolchild Spanish should admit that they dont always wanglethose little as. Africans in South Carolina approached possessive


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sthe same way. Its not that they never used itjust not always. Itbecame an option rather than a rule.

Baby mama, then, is a symptom of the birth of Ebonics as a mash-

up of assorted British regional dialects, seasoned by a sprinkle ofstreamlining that any language could benet from. In English, the

plural of lambused to be lambru. Arent you glad it isnt now?

Black English has been going its own way now for a good while.

It has its own cadence. But the basics are largely what they always

were, and when people say baby mama, theyre channeling BobCrachit more than Bob Marley.

Green,African American English.

Nagle and Sanders, eds.,English in the Southern United States.

1. Black English is simpler Standard English, but Standard English issimpler Old English. Is there an argument that Standard English is,

therefore, bad grammar? Why or why not?

2. What aspect of French or Spanish have you found hardest to learn, andwould you think of it as an improvement in the language if that feature

somehow vanished?

Suggested Reading



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Lecture3:CforCompound

s

C for Compounds

Lecture 3

Russian has enough noun and verb endings to sink a boat. But it

doesnt seem like Russian people ever even think about that.

Taiwanese tones are complicated, but people who have grown up in

Taiwanese-speaking households just think of it as something they speak with

their parents and not as being especially difcult. The way we really express

the future in Englishby using willis very subtle and very complicated,but we walk around doing it as easily as we breathe.

Making New Nouns

In all of us, grammar is used mostly below the level of

consciousness. That includes one way that English speakers make

new nouns. Its something a foreigner would consider slightly

bizarre, but we do it every day without a thought.

On the one hand, English uses sufxes like -ment and -ation tomake nounsfor example, govern to government and dispute todisputation. But on the other hand, those sufxes dont alwayswork: How would you make the verb recallinto a noun? Theres norecallmentor recallation. Thats where things go below the radar;you make recall into a noun by shifting the accent backward andsaying RE-call. It is interesting that you wouldnt sayre-CALL.

But its not just that one word; its a process. Its the same withhow we can rebel against something and become a RE-bel or

record something to create a RE-cord. These arent just one-offs.

There is a piece of grammar that we all have deep in our brains

according to what we know now, it wouldnt be surprising to nd

it in the temporal lobe somewhere and possibly on the left side

that changes a words part of speech with the strange little move of

putting the accent up front.


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Basically, we apply this accent shift when something becomes

a thing; in that way, weve been putting it in that idiom. If you

see a bird that happens to be black, then you say you saw a black

BIRD. But if you see the particular kind of bird called a blackbird,

then you pronounce it BLACKbird. That is, blackbirds are athing, while black birds are just birds of a dull color that make us

wish they were parakeets.

To dabble just a bit in some terminology, black BIRD is an

adjective followed by a noun, while BLACKbird is called a

compound. So, compounds are something that happens over time;the accent shifts as the novelty fades. If you saw a vat of purple

cream, youd point to that purple CREAM. However, the staple

dessert is pronounced ICE cream, but at rst, it was pronounced

ice CREAM.

We create new compounds all the time without thinking about it:

bank scam, Burger King, cost control, point guard. Compoundsare one of the meat-and-potatoes elements of speaking English.

Imagine trying to explain to a foreigner who is learning English

why we say a rocky ROAD and call a street Maple ROAD

but say ACCESS road instead of access ROAD. Its because

access roadis so conventionalized a concept that it is a compound,a new word despite its spelling as two.

On spelling, by the way, one must beware; it can only help us so

much in identifying compounds. Often, you can tell a compound

from just a two-word concept by the way we spell it. A black board,two words, is a plank of ebony hue, but a blackboard, one word, iswhat you write with chalk on.

But spelling is conservative, and it has a way of trotting a few yards

behind whether something has become a compound or not. That

means we dont write icecreamas one word and probably never will.

In the same way, there can be a white HOUSE somewhere, butthen theres the WHITE House, which, because its a thing, has


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s

the accent shift. Its a compound, but it most likely will never be

written as one word. Writing can only shed a ickery light on what

a compound is; you know it not from what we scratch on paper, but

what comes out of our mouths.

In any case, the joy of compounds is that you can watch them

happening all the time within your actual life. We missed seeing

how -edbecame the marker of the past by a long shot, and wellnever know what it was like to hear God Be With You fuse intoGoodbyeas Shakespeare practically did. But compounds? Just cockyour ear to the language and you nd new ones everywhere.

Examining Colloquial English

One way we can get a look at this is in what is now a six-decade

archive of our television heritage, where we can get a good dose

of colloquialor relatively colloquialEnglish since World War

II. Sit through a certain amount of old television and you can hear

these accent shifts creating terms we use casually today, without

knowing that if we traveled just a few decades back in time, they

would make us sound a little peculiar.

Take one episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1973.The characters order Chinese food. However, even as late as the

Watergate era, theyre calling it Chinese FOOD instead of the

way we say it now, ChiNESE food.

But its not that those actors talked funny; Mary Tyler Moore

and Valerie Harper talk just like other Americans. It was becauseChinese food wasnt a thing yet, and therefore, it wasnt a

compound for all American English speakers. It was still a littleexotic. People didnt usually have woks at home, and we were still

a more steak-and-potatoes country.

Today, it is almost certain that those same actors, in casual

conversation, say ChiNESE food just like the rest of us; they

have moved along with the language. That episode captures them,and English, in a Polaroid snapshot of an earlier stage.


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For us today, then, ChiNESE food is like BLACKbirds. Just

like a blackbird is something more specic than a bird that is black,

and ice cream is something more specic than cream with ice cubes

mixed in, when we say Chinese food, we mean something more

specic than food the way they make it in China. We mean athing, so to speaknamely, Chinese food as prepared in America

for Americans and often ordered as takeout.

If you think about it, if you do want to refer to cuisine as prepared

and eaten in China, you more likely say Chinese FOOD, just like

those characters in loud colors and broad collars on Mary TylerMoore40 years ago.

Knowing how compounds work, you can even know how people

pronounced things in the past without hearing it. Ethnic food is a

useful example again. On one episode of The Honeymooners in1956, Alice talks about making a PIZZA pie, as people still said

then; however, it was already shortening to just pizza, which shesays a few minutes later.

If you watch television commercials from the 1950s, you can nd

people in black and white gleefully indulging in repulsive-sounding

substances represented as bringing pizza home in a can, and they

pronounce it as pizza PIE, just like today we would say nectarine

PIE because for some reason, nectarine pie isnt a thing.

In the 1990s, we became familiar with the term repeated stress

syndrome, pronounced repeated STRESS syndrome. But now,its such an established term that it is no longer the adjective

REPEATED and the noun STRESS, but a compound. And

that means that the accent has to do the switch backward, to the

REPEATED. With a little trimming, it becomes rePEAT stress.

After a while in a compound, the second part can get so mufed

amidst all the noise we put on the rst part that we can forget

what the second part even meant. We can imagine a gentle man,but thats not what agentlemanexactly is. Is the state ofMaryland


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s

reallyMarys land, or are we just saying basically the same thing asMarilyn Monroes rst name but spelling it differently? Today, the

land part just hangs there deadits a mumbled little lin. Think

about breakfast: Whatfastdo you think of yourself as breaking?

But it was this accent backshift process that created the word

originally that now feels like its just one thing instead of two.

Sometimes, spelling has completelycaught up with spoken reality,and we really cant have any idea how central compounding was to

the words we use every day.

You might think that if a rosy is a cute lil rose and a piggy is a cute

lil pig, then a daisy is a cute lildaze? A daisy is not a kind of

daze, especially because really theres no such thing as a daze. The

word daisystarted as days eye.

Linguists dont know everything. Sometimes languages just throw

things at you that dont make senseor at least not yet. There

are compounding cases like that.

We say Maple ROAD, and we

say Maple LANE (not MAPLE

Lane or MAPLE road), but we

do say MAPLE Street (not Maple

STREET). Nobody knows why the

street cases are treated like Chinesefood and ice creamwhile the roadand lane cases just stay the way

they are.

The foundational linguist Antoine

Meillet explained language as a

system where everything holds

together. More useful is another

pioneering linguists observation:

Edward Sapir wrote in 1921 that all

grammars leak. They do, or else wedbe saying PENNY Lane instead of

American linguist Edward

Sapir (18841939) was

one of the founders of

ethnolinguistics, which is

the study of language in

the context of culture.

Pimbrils/WikimediaCommons/PublicDomain.


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Penny LANE, and the Beatles lyric wouldnt scan properly with

the music, and theyd have had to write the song about something

else, like maybe a woman named Penny Lane, in which case they

couldhave said Penny LANE.

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

backward, and the result is the difference like the one between a

loud SPEAKER and a LOUDspeaker, which is quite another

thing. Its why anyone knows that you worry about BLOWback,

even though if something comes toward you that youd rather not

deal with, you blow it BACKnot BLOW it back.

Armed with this subconscious knowledge, you dont even need to

wonder how people were pronounging the term air conditioningbefore it was universal. In fact, the next time youre talking to

someone in their 80s or older, ask them whether people used to say

air conDITioning. Theyll wonder how you knew.

Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language.

1. Why do some people say GREEN beans, with the accent on green

rather than beans?

2. How did people once sayBroadway, and how do we know?

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Lecture4:DforDoubleNegatives

D for Double Negatives

Lecture 4

There was a lot of nifty negativity in English back in the old days

meaning that there were all kinds of ways to express not-ness

that nowadays we dont get to play around with. There were special

negative versions of some verbs. So, you could have, or if you didnt have,you naved. Somebody was, or if they werent, then somebody nas. So, in OldEnglish, to sayI have ships, you saidIc hbbe scipu, and to sayI dont have

ships, you could say Ic nbbe scipu. This carried on into Middle English:

There was no man anywhere so virtuous was There nas no man nowhereso vertuous.

Creating Negatives

French makes a sentence negative by putting a pair of headphones

on the verb: ne before and pas afterward. I dont walk is Je NEmarche PAS. If youve ever thought that was kind of swell, thenyou wouldve liked early English, where things were the same

way: ne before and nought after. He doesnt speak was He NEspeketh NAWT.

After a while, the NEwore away, and we were left with just theNAWT, which is exactly like what has happened in French the wayits actually spoken, where to sound like a person instead of a book,

for a long time now, people have been dropping the NE and just

leaving thePAS.

As you can see from the way you could say no nought, earlyEnglish reveled in double negatives. Think about the following

sentence: There nas no man nowhere so vertuous. These days,were told that a sentence like that is wrong. It would have to be

There was no man so virtuous anywhere. After all, two negativesmake a positive, dont they? So if you sayI dont see nothing, then

that means that nothing is not what you see and that, therefore, youmust see something.


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Its one thing to be able to work out that two negatives technically

could be taken to indicate a positive, but its a mental trick

one that requires the same kind of mental bending as it does to

comprehend that the world must not be at or that bikes stay up

when we ride them.

In the grand scheme of things, its a pretty glum accusation to level

at humanity. Yes, humanity, because double negatives are perfectly

legal in most of the languages of the worldand there are 6,000

of them!

I dont see anything is I dont see nothing in French (Je ne vois

rien), Italian (Non vedo niente), Russian (Ja ne vizhu nichto), etc.Around the world, some of the only places that have languages

where double negatives are illegal besides English-speaking ones

are parts of northern EuropeGerman and Dutch dont like double

negatives eitherand then some languages that barely anybody

has ever heard of in Mexico (such as Nahuatl), plus one language

spoken in the Caucasus Mountains.

Even in English,

German, and Dutch,

once you step outside

of the standard

dialect, the colloquial

dialects are full of

double negatives

just like most ofthe languages of

the world. In fact,

double negatives are

legal in every dialect

of English except the

standard one, and

Standard English is

one of hundreds of

Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury

Tales, is known for using double negatives

extensively in his writing.

EDUCA33E/WikimediaCom

mons/PublicDomain.


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Englishes. Double negatives are ne in English overall; its just that

something is up with one of the dialects.

It was different not so long ago. In Old English and Middle English,

doubling the negative just meant doubling the force of the denial. Itwas a way to spice up the chili.Ic ne con singanwasI cant sing.Icne con noht singan was literallyI cant sing nothing, and it meant Icant sing a thing!

Sometimes, Old English scribes would copy a document using just

single negation and revise it by doubling the negatives because

it felt more proper. Even Shakespeare rolled around in double

negatives, and not just the sweatier characters. In As You Like It,Celia seems like she would at most perspire occasionally, not sweat,

and yet there she is cooingI cannot go no further. In the play, shessupposed to be rather elegant, a touch of Anne Hathaway. But

because of the pox on double negatives since her day, in that line, to

us she sounds like a rapper.

So what happened? The way the story is often told, it was a certain

grammarian of the late 18th century named Robert Lowth. He was

a bishop and scholar, and he wrote A Short Introduction to EnglishGrammar to fashion a standard form of writing English. It playeda central role in what kinds of things are considered bad grammar

today. Lowth certainly did declare that two negatives make a positive.

However, this story is an oversimplication. The truth is that Lowth

was only casting in stone something that had been happening in hiscircles for a good 200 years. In the 1500s, in London, writerly sorts

of the social elite started using the anywords (such as anywhereoranything, for example) instead of double negation. We even knowthat it was mostly men doing this, not women.

We dont know why people started doing this and probably never

will. No one happened to write about it at the time; they just started

doing it. It seems to have been almost a sort of fad or an affectation.Such things happen; theyre happening now.


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The AnyFad

These days, there is a certain naked noun tic percolating into

American Englishfor example, using epic fail instead of epicfailure. Why this, and why now? All we know is that these things

happenedjust likeI dont see anythingas a substitute for I dontsee nothing. For a while, there was even an anywhen: Today, wesay I didnt go ever, but at some point, you could say I didnt

go anywhen.

Under normal circumstances, this would have just been something

odd that some people were doing somewhere, but the London

elite had special prestige, and their version of English made it

into print more than anyone elses. There were people like Robert

Lowth writing in it. And to them, as far as they were concerned, if

there was going to be an ofcial kind of English, it might as well

be theirs.

As a result, two negatives make a positive, and I dont see nothingis wrong. Were so used to that now; I dont see anythingfeels likea perfectly normal sentence. But its odd if you stop and think about

it a little.

The any fad didnt qualify as an improvement over the doublenegative tradition. In fact, using the anysystem is kind of unnaturalin the grand scheme of things. We get used to it, just like we read

Moby Dick and pretend to like winter. But we have to be taughtthat double negatives are wrong and illogical, because they dont

feel that way to us at rst, as childrenor even as newcomers toEnglish, because the language a foreigner grew up with almost

always has double negatives in it.

Even though we cant help processing double negatives as slangy,

because we only hear them in colloquial kinds of English, deep

down to speak English means hearing double negatives as genuine

and warm. Instead of Aint No Mountain High Enough, would

you really want to hear a song called There Isnt Any MountainHigh Enough? It wouldnt even scan with the melody.


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Its a funny thing. Overall, the things that happen to have been

declared as Standard English tend to be a little odd, a little rare, a

little unnatural. Standard always seems to be things that none of

the dozens of other dialects do, and often the standard things are

even rare as languages go worldwide.

Normal languages dont have the same word foryouin the singularand the plural. Older English didnt either; there was thou in thesingular and you for the plural. And thats the way it still is in

plenty of regional dialects in England today. But only in that weird

standard didyoucreep into the singular and make a nest. If youspeak Hindi, then to you this feels normal; theres one language that

happens to do it the English way.

Its almost as if somebody back in the 1600s and 1700s was actively

trying to make Standard English kind of difcult, something you

have to wrap your head around instead of just lying back and

speaking it. Theres even something to be said for the possibility

that this elite class were setting themselves off from the hoi polloi

by adopting these peculiar wrinkles of grammar.

Part of being a person of any class is having a way of talking that

is local to your group, and to people like Robert Lowth and his set,

things likeI dont see anythingand singularyoumay have felt likea kind of in-group lingo. This doesnt have to have been conscious;

such things rarely are. But it would have had massive effects. At the

end of the day, none of this means that we can make speeches and

write prose with double negatives and expect to be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, the rest of English has continued to go on its merry

way. Standard English means we say not I dont go no morebutIdont go anymore. But beyond the printed page, where the RobertLowths arent listening, even anymoreitself has slipped away fromthe dock.

Listen closely to someone from the band of states that runs roughlyfrom Pennsylvania west to about Utah, and youll catch sentences


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like Pantyhose are so expensive anymore that I just stoppedwearing themor Thats still the custom there anymore. If you didntgrow up with it, it sounds weirdbut you understand it. And thats

all language is about: understanding.

Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

, The Fight for English.

1. If double negatives arent actually unclear, then are there still reasonsfor teaching people out of using them, and what are they?

2. Would it improve the quality of the song I Aint Got Nobody if it werereworded as I Dont Have Anybody? Or, do I Aint Got Nobody and

I Dont Have Anybody truly have the same meaning?

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Lecture5:EforEtymology

E for Etymology

Lecture 5

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Weve all said it or at least heard it. Childrenuse it to pick someone to do something, or be it, and sometimes

adults even use it. But where does it come from? Whats an eeny? Ora meeny? Certainly, this meenyisnt supposed to be an unpleasant person. Infact, where eeny, meeny, miny, moecomes from has something to teach usabout etymologywhat it is, what it isnt, and why linguists dont talk about

it as much as the public seems to wish we did.

Counting Words

The words ve, nger, st, foist, pentagon, Pentecost, andquintessencecan all be traced back to one word forvepnkwein one language spoken by nomads who migrated from the south of

what is today the Ukraine, about 8,000 years ago.

Those people migrated both far to the west and far to the east,

and their language was the source of what became most of the

languages that are spoken today in Europe, Iran, and India. You can

compare all of those languages words for the same things and work

backward to tell what the word was in that original language.

Linguists call it Proto-Indo-European, and archaeologists have

recently identied the remains of their society. They liked their

horses, and their metalwork was worth a look and then some. Theydidnt have writing, but they certainly talked, and we can know

all of these millennia later that their word for vewaspnkweandthat thats why we English speakers call our ngersngersand our

quintessences quintessences.

We can even know that Proto-Indo-European mothers taught

their children how to count by saying something like oino, dwo,

trei, kwetwer,pnkwe. Oinowent on to become inch, among manyother words.Dwobecame quite a few words, and a couple of them


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were twilightand biscuit. Treinot only became three, but today itshiding out in words like contestandsitar.Kwetwerbecame trapeze.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moeis all about sheep in Great Britain. There,in rural places especially until recently, there were special numbers

that people usedactually, not just with sheep, but for counting in

games and such.

Interestingly, these numbers are clearly from the languages thatwere spoken in what is now known as the United Kingdom before

English got there. These languages are called Celtic, and one of the

living ones is Welsh.

Because the counting numbers are apparently ancient, and Welsh

has been going its own way like any language for a very long

time, the correspondence isnt perfect. However, in the counting

numbers, four, ve, and tenare pedera, pump, and dig. In Welsh,the same numbers arepedwar,pump, and deg.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moeoriginated in Great Britain, where shepherds used the

sequence of words to count their sheep.

iStockphoto/Thinksto

ck.


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The counting numbers come from what were regular numbers for

the Celts who lived in the area before the Angles and Saxons and

Jutes took over in the 5thcentury. And that brings us to eeny, meeny,miny, moe.

In the counting numbers, one, two, three, four is aina, peina,para, pedera. Lets zero in on aina, peina: Imagine sayingthose two fast, the way we tend to say numbers in sequence

onetwothreefourve!and, especially, imagine that so much

time has gone by that you dont even know that these numbers

come from a different language, that you never see them written

down and they start mashing together.

It would be a short step from aina, peinato aina, maina(becausepand mare both lip sounds), and then why not ainy, meiny? Now,three and four in the counting numbers are para and pedera,which are not like minyand moe. But then, paraand pederaboth

begin with plikepeina, so youd expect people just reciting themreexively to turn thoseps into ms, too, so it isnt an accident thatits meeny, m-iny, m-oe.

Its a lot like that call kids use in games: Olly, olly, oxen free!Nobody knows what it means, but apparently, it started as

something like Calling all the outs in free, meaning that everybodyin the game who was deemed out is now allowed to come out.

But now, people just howl it out as if it were Turkish, which it

might as well be. Imagine the same thing happening to aina,peina,

para,pederamaking it all rhyme and match and come out easily.Eeny, meeny, miny, moeis pretty normal.

Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock is a cutenursery rhyme, and its fun to say, but what is hickory, dickory,dock? Consider that there were rurals in the Welsh area long agowho were counting eight, nine, tenwith the words hovera, dovera,dick. Now imagine saying that over and over again for a thousand

years without knowing what it meant, and hickory, dickory, dockisalmost inevitable.


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The Origin of Words

Usually, a word traces back to some other word a long time ago

that meant something pretty similar. So, where does the word treecome from? Old English had a word treothat meant tree, and that

came from a word that was used by people somewhere in the southof what is today the Ukraine. They didnt say tree; they said deru,which meant oak.

First it was oak, now its treeone doesnt run out and shout that

one through the streets. However, if you hang around etymologies

long enough, you do nd plenty of cases that, even if they arent

as exotic as the hickory,dickoryones, are more involved than oaksstarting to be called trees, and they also teach us larger lessons

about what languages are like.

For example, quaint is something we now associate with JaneAusten or saying something like Goodness me! Quaint startedout meaning clever, crafty. This was in the 1200s when English

was still Middle instead of Modern.

As time went by, there was a sense that if quaintmeant clever,then you could easily use it to refer to things that were cleverly

made, like clothesin the same way that Americans used to talk

about someone looking smart in their fancy duds. But one thingleads to another.

If youre looking well turned out, you, in general, just may be kind

of pretty. Or at least youre looking better than you did before youput that stuff on. If youre all gussied up, you might even have a

certain air of fanciness about youfanciness, or even affectation.

So as time goes by, the word quaintmight start having a meaningof, basically, all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask

me. Thats what the word meant into the 1700s.

But suppose youre a young person listening to adults referring

to certain dresses, carriages, ways of talking, foods, and so on asquaint in that meaning. The adults mean it as a kind of qualied


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praise, but to you, what they are praising is old fashioned. To you,

its all dolled up and maybe a little too much if you ask me, but

its from the old days, so really its kind of cute in a charmingly

dismissible kind of way. That is exactly what quaintmeans now.

That happened step by step.

Over time, the meanings of words change constantly, and thats a

harder thing to swallow when we can feel it happening. However,

unless we wouldnt want words to have changed into the ones that

we use the way we use them today, then logically we have to accept

the changes that are happening now.

Were taught that the right meaning is of the word literally isword for word: He didnt mean it literally. Were supposed to

pull our hair out when people use literallyto convey emphasis, asin They got literally no help. And watch out when somebody usesliterally to intensify something that is itself a gurative concept.The American people literally stood on the brink of a new

Depressionno, people werent standing on some actual brink, so

they couldnt have been literally doing it in any sense.

But people have been using literallyin these wrong ways a longtime. John Dryden in the 17th century was already doing it, and

then Jane Austen, Thackeray, and so on. Doesnt that suggest that

its less that literally is being misused than that its meaning haschanged, just like quaints did? This is a clue that literally is justdoing what comes naturally.

Actually started out meaning referring to action, but today, wesayActually, thats not true, and we dont mean That isnt true inreferring to action, which would make no real sense. Or, who hears

you say Surely hell get hereand pictures someone arriving with aglow of sureness? In addition, very started out meaning true. Butimagine some pundit of old saying that its wrong to say very red

because that would mean truly red, and that that would imply that

redness all by itself is somehow untrue.


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Literallyonce did mean word for word, but its added a new wingthat conveys emphasis. In any language, people are always seeking

new ways of spicing up their statements, and literally has justfollowed the noble tradition that actually, surely, and very have,

with no one batting an eye.

So, if nicestarted out meaning stupidand it didandsillystartedout meaning blessed, and obnoxious used to mean vulnerable,then its okay for literallyto now mean really, especially becausereallyitself rst meant in the actual world, so no one would havesaid Im really tired unless they meant to make it maximally clear

that their fatigue was embodying itself here and now on our terra

rma instead of in the fth dimension.

Another word that came from that pnkwe word was punch (notthe st kind, but the drink). Pnkwemeant ve, and while some

people were spreading it into Europe, others were taking it to India.

Whenpnkwegot there, it becamepanch, and punch originally hadve ingedientssugar, spice, lemon juice, water, and alcoholso

people called itve, but for them, that meant calling itpunch, andthe English brought that home with them.

Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology.

Liberman, Word Origins and How We Know Them.

1. What will you say the next time someone mentions that people misusethe word literally? Do you now agree or disagree with that sentiment?

2. What is the etymology of your rst name?

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Lecture6:FforFirstWords

F for First Words

Lecture 6

There have been experiments now and then where misled individuals

have tried to determine what language is born within us by shielding

babies from speech and trying to see what they came up with.

According to Herodotus, an Egyptian king tried it and traced one word in

the babbling he heard to a language spoken in Turkey. Then, James IV of

Scotland had two babies raised by a deaf woman, and some people somehow

had the idea that what the kids were speaking was Hebrew. Most people

intuit that what the kids were speaking in cases like these was nothing.

Baby Sounds

There are various cases of children not exposed to language until

they were sevenor even in their 20sand none of them were

discovered prattling away in Turkish, Hebrew, or anything else.

Rather, the language that humanity seems to share is limited to

exactly two words, the ones any parents have heard: mamaandpapa.

Why those words? Really, it just comes down to anatomy. The /ah/

sound results from just pushing air out of a semi-open mouth. The

rst consonants children make are the ones that come most easily.

Just thinking about your lips and teeth for a minute, you can imagine

that /mm/ will be one of the rst sounds any baby will make by just

buzzing through the lips, while /p/ will come naturally if the babyis going /ah/ and then stops the airow for a second with his or

her lips: /ahhhpahhh/. A /b/ sound is a variation on the same sound.

Then, babies might stop the airow by putting their tongue on the

ridge behind their teeth, and if they do, then theyre making either

a /t/ or a /d/.

Often, its the /m/-type sound that comes rst, and hence, ma. If the

mother hears this and responds to it, then there is a link between asound and an entity. Then, babies have a way of doubling syllables,


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and they nd it easier to understand doubled syllables. So between

them and the mother, mawill become mama.

Once the /p/ or /t/ or /d/ comes, then the other parent will just as

naturally become papa or dadaor tata (tatehmeans father inYiddish). In addition, one of the few languages in the world without

double negatives besides Standard English is Nahuatl, andfatheristain Nahuatl.

It is remarkable, even when we understand this origin scenario

for mama and papa, how extremely common words exactly likethat are among the 6,000 languages of the world. Latin had materandpater.

The African language Luo is vastly unlike English in all ways. For

one thing, every plural is irregular. Imagine if the plural of cupwascopand the plural of doorwasgoorand the plural of cucumberwascucuhhhhmberthats what Luo is really like. However, motherand father are mamaand baba.

Many people from

India in America

speak Tamil; ask them

how to say mommyand daddyand theylltell you amma and

appa. GreenlandicEskimo people say

anaana and ataataq.These are different,

but also not different.

The Start of Language

Linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg claim to have

reconstructed some of the rst words of the world by comparingall of them. The word for nger would have been tik. The word

In Tamil, which is spoken by many people

from India in America, the words meaning

mommy and daddy are ammaand

appa, respectively.

Fuse/Thinkstock.


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for waterwould have been akwa. Most linguists dismiss this work.Even tracing the words in Indo-European is chancy: We will never

actually hear or read what the actual words were, and professionals

have been ghting for almost 200 years now on details.

To trace even further back, you have to compare Proto-Indo-

Europeanwhich is already full of question marks itselfwith

other reconstructed protolanguages like the one that would have

given birth to languages like Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic,

the one that would have given birth to Chinese and Tibetan and

hundreds of other languages, and so on. By then, the signal is so

weak that its impossible to be really condent.

Most linguists who specialize in this kind of thing think we cant

know anything about language before about 10,000 years ago.

Ruhlen has later done work that suggests that we can know a few

things about languages perhaps about 50,000 years backbut just

a few things, and even by then, there were thousands of languages

already. What were the rst words? Were still in the dark.

To an extent, our languages are about imitation. And a language

can be more about imitation than English. We have ourpow, bang,zoomwords, but in Japanese, for example, there are so many wordslike this that directly imitate sounds that knowing them is part of

expressing yourself in any real way.

For example, the Japanese word for the sound a dog makes is

wanwan. The word for baggy is dabudabu; the word for tinkleis chirinchirin. To express that something kept on going, like acucumber plant that takes over the yard, the wordgungun is used.

Even in English, there are sounds that any native speaker associates

with certain concepts. In words like gleam, glimmer, glitter,glance,glint,glow,glamour, andglimpse, notice how /gl/ seems tosymbolize a ashing of light, or the perception of one.


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Think about how even the word glory feels to native Englishspeakerseven though it technically doesnt have anything to do

with a ash going off. Part of why we cherish the word is because

the /gl/ at the beginning makes it feel like a pretty light is going off

or something isglowing.

There are plenty of sounds like that in English. For example,

in words like slink, slime, slither, slug, and sloppy, /sl/ meanslowly, faintly moist, and icky. Or, certainly it isnt an accident

that crash, smash, crush, slash, and splash all end in /sh/: To anEnglish speaker, /sh/ at the end of a word means breakage or at least

crushing or splashing.

The vowels get into the act, too. All over the world, high, tight

sounds like /ee/ and /ih/ correspond to small things, while /ah/ and

/oh/ correspond to big onesfor example, teeny weeny, little,slimas opposed to large, broad, vast.

There is a tribe in South America called the Huambisa, and in their

language, one bird is called a chunchukitwhile there is a sh calleda muts. A group of American students was given these two wordsand asked to guess which one was a bird and which one was a sh;

98 percent of them guessed that a chunchukit was a bird and amutswas a sh.

Greatbut we still have a problem. For one thing, languages have

thousands upon thousands of words. Even once weve covered the

ones that are imitative and the ones that sound like this or that invaguer ways, and then we toss in mamaandpapafor good measure,there are still an awful lot of words left. Plus, theres how you put

them together; you cant just throw them around in any old order.

And there are pesky things like how we use doin English:Doyouknow him? I do not know him. When we use do in that way, itdoesnt even mean anything. Where do you get words that not only

dont sound like anything but dont even mean anything?


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Some linguists think that language began about 80,000 years

ago; others see 150,000 as much more likely. But we will never

hear those ancient speakers, and they didnt write. So we have to

guessintelligently, but still guess.

One interesting stab is an idea, from anthropologist Dean Falk, that

language started with mothers cooing and playing patty-cake with

their infants. Falk is interested in what linguists call motherese

that high-pitched, slow mode we go into when talking to babies.

Its a human universal, not a Western middle-class conceit as we

might think. There isnt a culture on the planet where children are

not spoken to in that way.

Falk points out that babies become desperate when deprived of

contact, just like primate babies, but that this would have been a

problem for early hominids because foraging requires putting baby

down for a spell. Suppose motherese emerged as a way of soothing

babies in face-to-face interaction without having to be touching

them directly.

Falk hypothesizes that motherese started as soundswe imagine

lots of /ee/ and /ih/ and repetitionand then evolved from sounds

into statements of increasing complexity, with language as the

end result.

Out of the countless blobs of speech an infant comes up with after

mamaand papa, how and why would one of them be selected to

mean go out or want? And how do you then get to a full andcomplicated sentence, such as the following:Look how he alreadycant jump even halfway over that wall they put up?

There are theories that music was the key to languageand we

kind of hope that this is true. It seems plausible. Many languages

are spoken with tones, such as Chinese, where the little syllable macan mean horse, mother, scold, or hemp depending on what

pitch you say it on.


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Motherese has that musical quality, and mothers sing to their babies,

and babies seem to like singingso it makes sense that maybe

language started from people imitating something like animal calls.

This is archaeologist Steven Mithens idea.

Suppose cavemen watched a pack of wolves hunting down an elk,

and they started saying ruffRUFFruff among themselves when

they gathered to hunt. After a while, ruffRUFFruffwould come to

meanLets hunt. Imagine that after a while, there is a good bunchof these calls. Linguist Alison Murray has eshed things out here.

Imagine if for when you wanted to tell someone to give something

to a woman, there was a warble tebima and that there was anotherwarble for when you wanted to tell someone to share something

with a woman, kumapi.Tebimaand kumapiwouldnt be words orsentences, but just calls, like ruffRUFFruff.

But suppose a smart person noticed that both calls had -ma inthem and abstracted that -ma could be taken to mean just her.This would be the birth of a word. And then imagine if humans

abstracted lots of words like this and then started combining them

to express whole thoughtsmaybe, for example, something like

ma ruffto mean she hunts.

Theories like these are clever and intriguing but ultimately dont

quite prove anything. However, they genuinely are currently the

state of the art in our attempts to gure out how language started,

because its a tough nut to crack. Attempts have been percolatingfor over 150 years, and todays attempts tend to fall into categories

that were established long, long ago.

Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.

Falk,Finding Our Tongues.

Suggested Reading


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1. If you made up a language, what would the rst 25 words youconstructed be?

2. What was the rst sentence, or approximation of a sentence, that yourchild uttered, and did it contain any of the words you just listed?



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G for Greek Alphabet

Lecture 7

Its easy to miss how deeply peculiar an alphabet isnot the alphabet,

as in the Roman one we are most familiar with, but any alphabet. We

take it so much for granted that on a certain level, we think of language

as actually being words written out according to the way they sound. Try to

hear someone say alreadyand not think of the word spelled out, oating inthe air. But this is actually a highly exceptional way of being human.

The First Writing

Writing in general was only invented in about 3500 B.C., about

5,500 years ago, and that rst writing was based on picturesthe

hieroglyphics we see on ancient Egyptian monuments that make

us halfway suppose that ancient Egyptians walked around in that

weird angular pose that they drew people in. Alphabet was invented

later, in about 2000 B.C.

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

writing came along at about 11:15 PM. Before about 11:07 PM,

when hieroglyphics had been invented, for human beings, language

was something you spoke, something that came out of your mouth.

Once it was said, it was gone. When someone said already, youdidnt imagine it written because there was no writing.

Alphabet, in particular, permeates our sense of what it is to bealive in ways wed never think of. For example, what in the world

is the ABCs? We sing a song to the melody otherwise associated

with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that is composed of all of the

sounds in our languageor most of them. There are actually 26

letters for about 44 sounds, which is why the letter I can stand for

/ih/ in bit, /igh/ in nice, /ee/ in antique, etc.

The song is not only a song of the sounds, but also the specialnames we have for the sounds, and it is always sung in a certain


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Lecture7:GforGreekAlphabet

order. The alphabet is a truly odd thing, and as such, it took a while

for humans to come upon.

Imagine that youre a person from the time before writing, and

you decide to invent a way of transcribing language onto bark orpapyrus or bones or whatever is around. What would your rst

approach be? If you think about it, the last thing youd come up

with is working out a separate symbol for each individual sound

in your language. Its not what people around the world have been

inclined to do, and it isnt what happened.

The rst writing consisted of exactly what any of us would come up

with almost immediately if we had never known alphabet: pictures.

Thats what Egyptian hieroglyphics wereabout 700 pictures.

It became more involved than that, just as it would if we messed

around with our own picture system for a while. But in the end, it

was a system with two main qualities: It was beautiful, and it was

clumsy. Its hard to learn 700 of anything, much less muck around

with rebuses.

Its almost as if the Egyptians knew it, too, because amidst all of this

magnicent mess were symbols that were used just for individual

sounds. In hieroglyphics, these were used for clarication,

though. Youd add a consonant or two to remind the reader what

the general shape of the word was that the pictures were meant to

correspond to.

So, to write carve, you could take the symbol that meant woodand the symbol that meant knife, add the symbols that meant h

and t, and the reader would know that you meant the word htifor carve.

Thats all cute, but it was a trick, almost a game. This was an elitist

system mastered by carvers in service to the rulers. It trickled

down in a rather simplied form for writing in ink and for business

purposesthis was the hieratic script.


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But even so, there were 700 symbols, plus all the folderol. Anybody

watching this being done who didnt have writing would still barely

be able to help wanting to import it, but also perhaps streamline it

so that people could wrap their heads around it who had more on

their plates than sitting around scribing elegantly.

Suppose, for example, you were one of the people Egyptians

imported as workers or one of the foremen. Now and then, theyd

write things down. Often, it was on the face of rocks. Around

2000 B.C., one of these workers on the Sinai Peninsula had the

idea of a version of the hieroglyphic system based only on the part

about having symbols for soundsspecically, the sounds of the

languages the workers spoke. They were from across the Red Sea

and spoke Semitic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Egyptian was something quite different. Suppose hieroglyphics had

a symbol for snakethe word for snake in Semitic was roughly

nahashuso in this new system, that snake symbol became thesymbol for the letter N.

Take a little over 20 of these, and you had the rst alphabet (sort

of). Actually, our workers only developed symbols for consonants.

It seemed like enough to them. You can put yourself in their heads:

No one has ever heard of an alphabet; all anyone knows is this

hieroglyphic thing that looks more like a Jackson Pollock painting

than a writing system.

So, now were writing things so you can perceive the basic sound oflanguage from the writing. For example, the writing of the sequence

y cn prcv th bsc snd f lngg frm th wrtng is a much better sight

than pictures of branches and knives to mean carve. Today, Arabic

and Hebrew are still written pretty much that way.

Some other Semitic speakers picked up this system, including

the Phoenicians. These were Middle Eastern people on the coast

of the Mediterranean. They got around quite a bit, and probably


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Lecture7:GforGreekAlphabet

somewhere on Cyprus in the 8th century B.C., the Greeks from

across the pond picked up the Phoenician writing system.

As it happened, Phoenician had some letters that Greek didnt

need. In Phoenician, the glottal stop/uht/was an importantsound, while in Greek, it was basically just what happened if you

got punched in the stomach. So the Greeks took the Phoenicians A

symbol, which they used for /uht/, and used it for their vowel /ah/.

Phoenician was overall a pretty guttural affair, like Arabic is

today. They had not only an /h/ sound but also a /kh/ sound. The

Greeks took the Phoenicians /kh/ symbol and made it into /h/, and

meanwhile, they took the Phoenicians /h/ symbol, which looked

like a backward E, and made it into E.

The Invention of the Alphabet

The Greeks invented the alphabet. They were the rst people to

hit on the real thinga symbol for every sound. Eventually, the

Romans picked it up, too, which is why English speakers use it. It

was a magnicent invention. An alphabet is the most democratic

kind of writing system. Its also the easiest kind to learn.

Hieroglyphics meant mastering 700 symbols plus how theyre used.

Today, its not fair to say that Chinese includes 60,000 symbols

because nobody is expected to know all of those. However, you do

need to know a few thousand to be a basically literate personplus

how to write them and the awesomely random ways they are used.

Many writing systems today go by syllable instead, and that makes

sense, because when you ask nonliterate people what the parts of

words are, their most spontaneous sense of the par

McWhorter, John - Language A to Z Guidebook.pdf

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