141: Why Q Needs U (with Danny Bate and Caitlin M. Green)

0:00Are we waiting for Ben at all? Nope. He's in the Kimberly region. That's why I'm here. I'm Ben. Hi. It's me, Ben. Hi. Caitlin is being Ben. Yay! I don't have that energy that he brings. I'm so sorry. I can't do that. Eh. See, it gives me a little bit of license to sort of, I'm not a good Ben, but sometimes I'm funny. Bring the whimsy. All right, here we go.

0:30Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name's Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. First up, linguist and researcher Hedvig Hurgard. Hedvig, your name uses a special letter.

1:02It's an A with a ring on it. It's the ring A. Do you have any feelings about that?

1:08Um, well, I feel like it's one of the easier non sort of English Latin alphabet letters. So I get a bit annoyed when people are like, I can't find it on the keyboard. And I'm like, you can just like Google A with a dot and you can copy paste it, man. It's not that hard. For anybody who does keyboard stuff, the ring A is option A. If you do an option A or option capital A, you'll be able to get that. On your machine and your keyboard layout.

1:39Are you using a Zerity? No, I'm using a Swedish keyboard. I especially request to get one everywhere I am. Oh, let's let's see that thing. Oh, wow. Is it just to the right of P? Uh-huh. Neat. And it's esteemed co-host not only of our show, but also of the podcast Half the Answer with Trent R. Nelson. It's Caitlin M. Green. Caitlin, hello. Hi. Do you have any feelings whatsoever about any letters of the alphabet? I feel that they're all beautiful and that I would like to use every single one at some

2:12point in my life if I can get the chance. And I also do love a touchscreen keyboard because then you just hold the A and it'll give you every possible A you could ever hope to see and you just select. It's the best. Some that you will never use. Right. Well, unless you're me because I have a goal. So does that include all the Latin character set? Just like everything? Yeah, all of it. If it's in an alphabet, I want it. I'm not committing to characters. My letter thing is when I was younger, I always wished my name had an R and it doesn't.

2:46I just liked R and I didn't have one. My friend Eric had one, but I didn't. And I just thought the letter R is such a cool letter. And yeah, I was always envious. I'm so sorry that didn't happen for you, Darniel. Yeah, exactly. We can squeeze one in. Daniel Midler. Okay. Yeah, but then you get rid of the Y and Ys are kind of cool for different reasons. In fact, I learned about Ys and Rs and the history of all these letters because I checked out a book called YQ Needs You by Danny Bate.

3:17And it's a great book. And I had a chat with linguist and author, Dr. Danny Bate. He has a podcast, you know, it's called A Language I Love Is. He's written a book about the greatest invention in all human history, arguably, the alphabet. In our case, it's the Roman alphabet. There are others, but the book is YQ Needs You. That chat is coming up. You know, we get a lot of ideas for the show from the folks on our Discord. They are sharing links and ideas. They're even giving feedback on, like, designs that I'm making for the annual mail out.

3:49Yes, already. I'm on top of it. Our Discord is like a nerdy community that you, yes, you, can belong to. And that is just one benefit of becoming a patron. There are many others. I'd also like to add that if you do join the Discord and you make suggestions, so I also make suggestions. And Daniel usually doesn't pick mine. He picks everyone else's things but mine. I don't know if that's good or bad. Either it means I have bad taste or everyone else has very good taste. I do a lot of yours when I notice them.

4:21It's not meant to be a comment on you. It's just that sometimes I don't get high enough up the feed because it's a busy place. You know, there's a lot of stuff flying around. But you know what? When Hedvig drops a news item or a story or a word, I esteem that highly.

4:39Okay. All right. A big welcome to our newest supporters on Patreon. Our newest person at the supporter level is Daryl with a gift membership. Ooh, I wonder from who? Did you know that you could do that? You could just gift somebody a membership, whether they want to or not. They're a patron now. That's really cute. I feel like podcast listeners overall, I don't know, Caitlin, if you're like this as well, but when there's a podcast you really like, you want to tell everyone to listen to it. And if you gift memberships, I feel like that's even stronger. You're like, no, I need you to hear this podcast so badly.

5:11I paid money for you to do so. Yeah. We have a new person also at the listener level, that's Josh, and we have a number of people at the free tier as well. That's Emily Kutlu, Apple Tater Ghoul, Matthew M, Empress Dace, and Breezy. Welcome. Breezy, that's with sparkle emoji on either side. Yeah, not just a regular Breezy. That's right. Deluxe Breezy. With extra Breeze. Well, thanks to everybody who supports the show. We couldn't do this show without you.

5:42So, shall we get into the news? Yes. This one was suggested by Ignacio and Diego on our Discord. There was a bit of a viral moment at the World Cup involving language. Did anyone catch it? Yes. If I say yes, will you believe that I watch sports?

6:00I don't normally watch sports, but I did marry into a family that likes football a lot, so I do try to keep up to date. And I follow the, so it's currently the Men's World Cup in football is going on, the national competition in the US, Canada, and Mexico right now. And a lot of the players don't speak English or speak more things than just English. And for every team, there is a set of sort of official languages that they speak. My understanding is that the press conferences, FIFA had provided translators in some languages,

6:34but then sometimes the players would just be able to speak even more languages that were on their sheet. And funnily enough, one of those more languages was just Spanish, which feels like a kind of obvious one that a lot of people would know. Also, the competition is partially played in Mexico, so not that weird that there would be Spanish language press at these events. And sometimes the players and the journalists wanted to speak Spanish to each other, but someone had to be like, hold on, we didn't get a Spanish translator, which feels like they could have

7:05figured out also just because Mexico is a co-organizer and also not that hard to fix in post. I don't know. The press conference was with Vinicius Junior, Ashraf Hakimi, and Frank Edejong started speaking Spanish, but they were halted by the FIFA official. I noticed, do you notice how they seemed really surprised? They even said, es un poco raro, which means that's a little bit weird. This doesn't happen much. They pointed out that the three of them were perfectly able to converse in Spanish, but

7:35they were stopped. So the reason that they were stopped, and I got this from a TikTok video by Sofia Smith-Gaylor, who's a really good follow, and we might see her popping up at some point. The matches didn't happen in any of the Mexican host cities, so that was one reason why. Allegedly, it wasn't eligible. The teams weren't from any Spanish-speaking countries, and the players themselves were not deemed to have Spanish as their primary language. And so they were stopped, and people noticed, and people commented on it, and enough people

8:09were, well, people were a bit miffed. There was miffage. And so the miffery was so miffful that FIFA walked it back and announced the translation services. Those will now be offered. For a lot of more events, right? They're still not going to provide translation for every other possible combination, right? I think their usual rubrics will be still upheld.

8:40But I think Spanish will get a little bit more translation coverage than it had before, which is good, because when you have the chance to converse in a language you know well or a language you prefer, you just get a better conversation. More languages is more good. Oh, well done. I also thought it was interesting that just, couldn't they just have, like, why do there need to be, like, simultaneous translation at the time? Why not just fix it in post?

9:10Unless they thought that there could be something offensive going on? Like, journalists would ask, like, an inappropriate question if FIFA would want to censor? Having control, I know, is probably important. Something like that, I would suspect. Because otherwise you could just let them talk and then put subtitles on later. Yeah, that's right. Thanks to Ignacio and Diego for that story. Now let's move on to some research. I've been thinking a lot about forgetting. Is there anything good about forgetting? Usually I hate forgetting.

9:41It annoys me. Walk into a room, can't remember what I was there for. Have to go back. Like, then I remember. It's increasingly a presence in my life, forgetting. As I continue through my lifespan. Yeah. I think I forget more than I used to. And I think that my kids don't help, right? Because being distracted does not exactly help you remember things. And so I'll walk into a room and then somebody will be like, mom, mom, mom.

10:12And then now I have no idea why I'm in that room other than to escape those voices that are going, mom, mom, mom. They're at the age where they can open their own snacks. So I don't know what they need me for exactly. Could it have a cognitive function? Like a positive benefit? So is forgetting, like physically in the brain, is forgetting like synapses getting less connected? I mean, I want to say that, yes, knowledge is represented by the position and strength of the synapses in your brain.

10:46But I'm not aware of just how closely that goes. We tend to have this layperson's understanding of brain space as being like computer space that you just you could like wipe clean and then it's available. And that's why we have jokes. Like, I don't know why I have, you know, every single word of every single Disney song like in my brain forever. But I can't remember like the quadratic formula or like what the name is of the person who checks out my groceries at the grocery store.

11:17Or like, you know, I would so much rather sort of reassign that space. But that's not really right, you know, about about brains. We are not computers, it turns out. Maybe if you forget something that you learned that wasn't correct and you you learn the thing again, maybe you have a chance at learning the correct thing. Is that a good part of forgetting? That would make sense. I mean, if information can drop off the back eventually, not counting 80s lyrics, which is basically everything that's going on up here.

11:52Yeah. Then it gives you a chance for. I think I would prefer that to all the Disney that's in here. Why? Disney's awesome. You don't know how much crap Disney has pumped out over the last decade, OK? If you had preschool and elementary school kids in your house, you would agree with me because you would be walking around your house singing under your breath all of the words to the songs from Descendants 4, Rise of Red, OK? Oh, I see. Nobody needs that in their life.

12:24It's not all Lila Mestich, Moana and Hercules and Mulan. Exactly. I'm not just walking around thinking about how far I'll go, OK? I'm thinking about how the queen's not very friendly. That's for sure. Inspiring? No. All right. Well, I do happen to have young ones at home, but the thing is they don't do movies. That goes double for wish. So. Oh, don't get me started on wish. Not doing that. Well, this story is about large language models, and they just keep on teaching us about language, especially language acquisition.

13:00So there's a new study that I wanted to touch on. This is work from Abhishek Thama of the University of Amsterdam and Misha Heilbronn from the, oh, no, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Ah, got another Max Planck story. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's it. I can't stay away. I know. There's a lot of us. This is published in Transactions of the ACL, the Association for Computational Linguistics. This concerns baby LM. Do we know what baby LM is? Now, Daniel, you know that I do my very best to not learn about LLMs.

13:34It hurts my brain. I know. And I'd rather, I guess I'd rather watch Descendants 4 Rise of Red. Good job on our last episode, by the way, with that in mind. Oh, thank you. I did my very best. If this is part of a body of research that uses large language models or language models in general as a proxy for how humans work, which we know is like of limited success, there's a lot of assumptions and prerequisites that you need to spell out and make sure are fulfilled.

14:06I mean, so the basic research that says that like you can learn grammar from just the frequency of input a baby makes. That one, I'm like, yeah, that kind of makes sense that you can detect structure. But for like further cognitive tests, I'm not sure large language models are a good proxy for the human brain. So I'm going to guess that a baby language model, because that's what it is, right? Baby language model is somehow a proxy for babies.

14:37And we're using them as little experimental subjects to see how babies learn things. And somehow they're forgetting things. Well, let's just start from the top. One thing that large language models have taught us is that it's possible to learn, to do, grammatical, linguistic output with stats alone from observation. You don't have to be a human to learn grammar, contra Chomsky. But then you can argue, well, of course it could pick up patterns in language.

15:08You gave it trillions of words, more than any human could ever observe or memorize. What about the poverty of the stimulus? I'm always saying this. That's right. Okay, so let's give it only as much data as a human baby could reasonably be exposed to. And when language models are given only that much input, do they learn? Answer, yes, they do. Quite well. Not up to human level on many tasks, but very close and getting better.

15:38So, for this research, they used a baby LM training set, but they also introduced a way of making it forget. Because computers just hold everything in memory. They don't have to forget. So they induced memory decay. They called it memory decay, and they made it so the data would drop off the back. They say, fleeting memory transformers, a simple modification of the transformer architecture that adds a memory decay to the self-attention operation to simulate human-like forgetting.

16:13Hmm. Now, they say that it actually does very well. It is able to do a good job of learning. In fact, it outperforms baby language models that don't have a memory decay. But, they say, only when the memory decay is combined with an, here's a term, echoic memory buffer, which perfectly retains three to seven words. I'm looking at the paper, and I'm trying to figure out what languages they are trained on.

16:45Because, for example, if it is the German, then... Because, so far, I'm having a bit of a Bender rule problem, where I'm just struggling to find out what language the material is in. I can see that it is open subtitles, childese, which I know exist for non-English. Yeah. Yeah, the Baby Babel LM project has data for lots of languages. For anyone who doesn't know what the Bender rule is, Dr. Emily Bender had a thing where she would go to papers and say, excuse me, what language were you using?

17:18Because everyone just acts like English is the only language that exists or is worth doing research in. And they would say, it was done in English. And she'd be like, thank you. Yeah. You say that. Good to know. You tell us. I constantly forget that as well. By the way, the Baby LM task is not like a data set. There are many different kinds of corpora that you can use, but it's sort of human-level likelihood of exposure. So, chucking out the bit that you're not learning that much from and just keeping the most informative, distinctive bits is helping you learn more things.

17:51It's interesting that forgetting would be good. But I can see why forgetting some things would be good. There are a couple of reasons. I mean, it means that rare elements can drop off the back because they don't get repeated. But common ones that you hear over and over again, those work their way into sort of abstraction level. And you can get them. Like, there's a bunch of words I learned for the GRE that I can't remember what they mean anymore because they haven't ever come up again, right? Yeah. Rare items can be forgotten and you can save memory and learn more efficiently.

18:25But we're not randomly forgetting. So, it's not the value of randomly forgetting. You know, I think that it makes sense that forgetting isn't harmful to language learning because language has been sculpted by brains that forget. I mean, I've pointed out that human language is the way it is because of our cognitive limitations. Like, we have attentional issues, we get confused, we get bored, we get tired, we have memory limitations. And so, we have to do language in a way that makes sense for human brains with all of our, you know, all of our weirdnesses.

19:01So, this kind of shows that language is the way it is because of forgetting. I mean, that's weird to me because I always thought that language learning was, like, just bulk memory. But, no, forgetting isn't harmful and, in fact, in some cases can help. I guess once you've done some abstraction, then you can remember the abstraction, but you don't necessarily have to have all of the exemplars in it, right? That's a really good point. And they point this out in the article. It makes sure that we abstract. Like, if we can't remember the words directly, then we have to get some kind of representation.

19:33And I don't know what that would be. Like, maybe the overall meaning or maybe noun, verb, adjective sort of things. Yeah, what word type it is. So, maybe forgetting helps us to abstract. Children's memory is really impressive in my anecdotal experience where, like, my kids can remember where something got left way better than I can. You know, like, the last time they saw something, they know where it was. Because they're quite young, you know, they haven't started not caring about that kind of thing. And, like, words that they've heard once or twice, they can remember the meaning of it.

20:05You know, I have a rising second grader, and so she's being introduced to sort of more advanced books with words that she hasn't encountered before. And if I ask her later, what was that word? She still has it in there somehow. I feel like our memory is really good in funny little ways. Hedvig, you've mentioned this, but I've just experienced this. I'm driving in the car, I'm listening to a podcast, I get home. Now I want to listen to the rest of it. Oh, shoot. It reset, lost my bookmark, and now I'm back to zero. Where was I in that podcast?

20:36No, I've heard this. I can see where I was when I heard that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And songs. I know where I was. If there's like, yeah, I can remember where I was when I heard the song before, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a scent that I use when I read a particular book, and now when I smell that scent, I just get a full Prost. Scent? Like, I'm, yeah, reading the book. Nice. So, like Anastasia with the peppermint oil on the carpet, right?

21:07We all remember. No. The children's animated film, Anastasia. I think of Prost and the cake, but I bet that's the same thing, right? Yes. Finally, this one from Elias. He's Elias Leitmogger now. Remember how he said that we could turn all of his letters into Leit numbers? And he did better than everybody else in that reading. So, he's now, he's Elias Leitmogger now. Oh, no, God. Yep. This one's about Bluey.

21:37How deep do we roll in the Bluey sphere? Oh, extremely deep. I would say, yeah, I would say encyclopedic knowledge at this point. So, we live in the United States, which means that if we want to watch the episode called Dad Baby, we got to fire up the YouTube because it's not on Disney Plus. But we'll do it because Dad Baby rocks. I don't personally have children around me who watch Bluey, but I have, through osmosis of everyone else loving Bluey so much, I have acquired some knowledge about Bluey, and I've

22:08tried to push it on various children in my surroundings because it seems good. So, it's an Australian cartoon. It's a great show. Similar-ish in age span to, like, Peppa Pig, but Australian and very cute. It's been said that Bluey is so that the young ones can learn and so that the old ones can heal, which I always liked. And also learn, actually, honestly, because there's a lot that those parents do that can help you get through your day, like buying into the games, you know, committing to the

22:42bit, having a good, like, letting the unimportant stuff go a little bit so that the kids can have an experience, you know. Joining their play enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. As you listen to this, dear listener, probably early July 2026, it's NAIDOC week. Now, in Australia, NAIDOC stands for National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee, in which we celebrate the history, culture, and achievements of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. And it seems that for NAIDOC week, five episodes of the TV show

23:15Bluey are being translated into the Yolngu language of the top end, Northern Territory. There are five episodes that are being dubbed into Yolngu Mafa, and they are, here they are, The Creek. The Creek is beautiful. The Creek is lovely. The Beach, Sleepy Time, of course. That's easy. There's not that much language in that one. It's mostly holst. Well, if you really want to do no language, just go with rain. Anyway. Oh, true. Yeah. Granddad and Rug Island.

23:47Oh, Rug Island is so good. I notice that those episodes take place mostly outdoors. And they have a lot of intergenerational, like, sort of negotiation, right, of like, what's a grown-up, what's a kid, what are dads for, what is the role of an adult child in a parent's life? Yeah, Rug Island especially. Oh, my gosh. Is Granddad the one where Granddad's trying to avoid a medical procedure? Yeah, Chili's chasing him around outside.

24:17Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, like, really interesting sort of, like, family dynamics in that one. Hmm. I agree. And connection to the land and places. Because, yeah, he has to go back to the place that he's from kind of to feel safe and in control, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, Yolngu is spoken in the top end of Australia. It's the most northern bit of the northern territory of Australia. Not the pointy bit, but the big square bit. And Yolngu isn't one language. It's about six. And they each have different varieties. It's kind of

24:52complicated. But all up, Yolngu has about just a bit under 5,000 speakers. And having materials like Bluey will help young people, I think, have a connection to the language. So, congratulations to Yolngu for joining the Bluey Club. Let's do more. Hooray! If you want to have adults, I was going to say adult content. That sounds wrong. There's a great film by Werner Herzog called Where the Green Ants Dream. And there's some Yolngu

25:23spoken in there. They pretend that it's, like, a super small language that no one understands, but it's, like, a language spoken by, like, thousands of people in Australia. But if you want to hear Yolngu in a non-children's movie, I can really recommend the movie Where the Green Ants Dream. It's very good. Cool. Thanks, Elias, for that story. All right. It's time for Related or Not. Let's hear our theme. I'm nervous. Caitlin, are you psychologically preparing yourself? I saw that. Yeah, I am. I'm doing my deep breathing. Don't worry. You don't have to replicate your perfect score from a couple of episodes

25:59ago. I mean, I've already failed since then. So, yeah, I'm going to, I have to let go of that. You've got nothing to prove. You're fine. I still have my certificate on the wall. Like, I'm not putting, I'm not taking that down, but. I sent a certificate. I'm coming over. And I'm going to rip it off the wall, depending on how you do. I said you were welcome to stay here anytime. I didn't mean that. I gave this to you. I can take it away. I'm putting an alarm on it. You can't have it. Cold dead hands, my friend. It is guarded

26:29by skeleton. What are you going to do? You're right. It is, isn't it? Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's just, let's just take, take a step back here. It's cool. Let's listen to Joe. Let's listen to Joe.

27:09Isn't that lovely? Thank you, Cho. That's very nice. I feel like that a lot. I feel like I'm in the 90s, and we're all very emotionally close now, so that's nice. Music brings us together, and then related or not, tears us apart. So let's do our first one. This one is from Pete via Speakpipe. Hello. I'm wondering if prodigy and prodigal, as in the prodigal son,

27:39etymologically related. Thank you. Thank you, Pete. Tell me what you know about the prodigal son. What is this story? It's a biblical story about a man who has two sons, and one of them stays home and is very good, and the other one goes out into the world and commits loss of sins and comes home and gets embraced by his father, and the other son gets jealous because Jesus loves a sinner that he can forgive more than someone who never sinned, which I always found. What is the lesson that we're supposed to learn from that?

28:12I think, like in LLM, I stopped paying attention partway through, and I don't remember exactly what. Was I supposed to be wild for a while and then come back? Did I make a mistake by being the first son? You're supposed to have a rum springer. Yes. I was supposed to sow my wild oats. If the assumption is that there is that, what's the non-prodigal son called? The other guy. Him. Okay. If the assumption is that there actually are no non-prodigal sons, that everyone's a sinner,

28:44then it kind of whatever. Yes. Then I guess it's just, if you get more love, the more you sin, then it gets worse, because then like serial killers who find God in prison are like closer to Jesus than ones who just like committed robbery. I don't know. Christians don't let me know how it works. Yeah. I'm sure we'll get lots and lots of explanations, but the son who stayed home and was not wasteful, he's like, why are you giving him a feast with the fatted calf? You never even

29:14did that for me. And the dad says, okay, look, your brother was lost, but now he's found. Now he's found. He's lost his income, but you've still got yours. So, you know, just chill. I was, yeah, my only real thought was like, hey, you have eaten a meal here every single day since the day of your birth. Like you have been getting fed and sheltered and getting the like gradual daily dose of paternal love from me that you get by living here. He has had none of it for this much time. So we're doing it big, a whole, you know, all at once so that he can get all of that,

29:49you know, it's, it's been accruing in an account somewhere and now we're paying it out. Maybe it's just a story. Maybe it's just a story. That makes sense. I don't know. Okay, fine, Daniel, but aren't they all? So is, so is granddad. So is the creek. So is sleepy time, you know, but still cry. So here are our words, prodigy and prodigal. I'm adding to this prodigious, prodigy, prodigal and prodigious. What does the last word mean?

30:21If you have prodigious output, it means you've output a lot of stuff. Lots. Yeah. Hedwig publishes prodigiously. Not right. I'm sure. Quantity, young expert, weird kid. Missing one of them. The problem is that like prod means like poke. That's what my problem is. I do not know that that's a part of this equation. I'm pretty sure, this is just me. I'm pretty sure that the pro is the same. Something like

30:52forward. I'm kind of interested in the didge. What is the didge? I'm realizing now that I have no idea what the didge is. It's not finger, is it? Didge it? I think some of it might be. I think it might be related to dexterousness, maybe. Hmm. Dexterity. Okay. Interesting. Let me go first. I'm going to say prodigy and prodigious are related because you have outstanding output from an early age. I think prodigal is probably

31:23its own thing. I'm going to say that they're all related and that they're all things that you like point at that are outstanding. Interesting. Pointing. Okay. Were you still thinking of prod bark? Yeah, you got to get your fingers in there somehow. I'm thinking the digit. Oh, the digit. Prodigit. Moving the finger forward, right? Yep. Okay. Okay. Caitlin. I do feel pretty confident that prodigious and prodigy are related because

31:54they're about like exemplary or like, um, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Something like notable output or notable achievement. Prodigal, prodigal. Okay. I'm going to just say not related. Okay. Sounds like you and me, we both have the same answer and we're both right. Prodigal is the odd one out. It was truly 50 50 for me. It was like when the waiter comes up to the table and is like, are you ready to order? And you're like, once you fix your icy stare

32:25on me, I will be, but you just have to put me under the pressure. Okay. The chicken. I want the chicken. I don't even want chicken. I'm vegetarian. Okay. So we do have Latin pro, which is forward. Here's the surprise. The didge was not a didge. It was an edge. According to Edim online, it's something like idgium, a suffix or word of unknown origin. We don't,

32:55we just don't know what it is for prodigy. Um, but I suppose it's interesting that the duh was there because saying that someone is a pro-idgy was just too hard. You want to interrupt that. So prodigious is related to prodigy for reasons I mentioned. Prodigal, different. This one's from Latin prodigus, which means wasteful. Prodigal son doesn't mean the son that comes back home guiltily. It means wasteful. There was even a verb to prodige, which meant to squander. Now you seeded a hint in your discussion of the story because you talked

33:29about waste, which I didn't remember as being a part of the story, but, uh, it turns out to be a key part of the story. He wasted his inheritance in riotous living in the King James version. So let's break it down. The pro is forward here. The idge is not idge or didge. It's adge from Latin agere, to set in motion or to do or to drive. So you're taking all your stuff and you're driving it forth pro edge away from you. Hi everybody. It's editing Daniel from the future.

34:04Just drop it in to say, I know that the online etymology dictionary lists Latin agere to do as a possible edemon for both prodigy and prodigal, but it was a perhaps I didn't feel like it was strong enough. So not enough to get the point back to the show. All right. That's number one. Thanks to Pete for that one. Now let's go to one from Robert S. who says, a quick related or not that a friend and I came up with that we thought would be fun. Device, like a device that you use. Vice, like the tool, a grippy thing. And then vice. But what is

34:40the vice? It's the thing that you, you stick something in there and then you'd wind it and wind it and wind it and that clamps it down tight. That's a vice. I'm going to go and do a little Google. And then a vice, like a behavior that is not. It's a clamp. Yeah. Yeah. You, uh, and you turn the crank and it comes together. That's the one. So when people say they're in a vice, they're caught. Oh, I'm learning. We're all learning. They're being squeezed. I learned two new words today. Okay. Well, that's the third one of vice, like smoking and drinking and so on.

35:10Okay. Okay. I'm going to put vice, sin, vice, tool. Okay. We can do that. As like a synonym. Yeah. Yep. Gee, we're getting a lot of sin and biblical stuff here going on. Okay. So our three words are device, vice, the tool, and vice, the sin. Let's take this pair wise and see where it breaks. So let's start with vice, the tool, and vice, the sin. Related or not? If you think of a sin as something that has you in its grips, right? It traps you. It doesn't let

35:44you go. It doesn't let you act the way that you wish you would act. I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking this one's related because something might seem like a tool at first, but then you lean on it too heavily and it becomes something bad. What once were tools are now vices. Yeah. Now you're trapped in its vice like that. That's true. But also you need coping mechanisms. So it's not like... No judging. It's good if they don't become toxic. We are not on this podcast saying things like ever imbibing alcohol or using a drug is wrong. We're saying that if it is ruining

36:19your life, then it might be something to work on. And it's okay that you need help because your brain is not helping you right now. I feel like vice in that sense is like the little cousin of sin. It's like a smaller... Because you can say like, oh, what's your... I don't know. What's your poison? What's your drink? What's your vice? You can say like, oh, I like to crochet until my hens hurt. Yeah. I don't know. That's not a very good one. That's me right now. I'm like,

36:50I can't stop. I feel sometimes I'm like, oh, do I have a problem? Like a crochet problem? Because like there's a line on my finger where the yarn goes that doesn't go away. I feel like maybe I'm doing something. Yeah. My posture is getting worse because I'm like hunched over the project. I just made a decision never to start. That's much safer. You're... Budget will also thank you because you just keep buying yarn. Just more and more yarn.

37:20Just yarn forever. Hanging out of the yarn barn. Every new project requires a couple new skeins. You know, I don't have exactly the color I want. Better go to the craft store. It's not good. But yeah, your vices could be things like crocheting or watching reality television or like too many chocolate covered pretzels. Like it doesn't have to be things that are considered like actual sins. Mine is crusade kings. So what are we saying? I think they're related. We're all saying related. Yeah, I think vice, the tool, and vice, the small sin are related. Yeah.

37:52The behavior. Then we're all wrong because they are not related.

37:57I think changes. Curses. Shit. Vice, the bad thing, like saying shit, is from Latin, then vitium or vicium, some kind of defect or offense or imperfection, came to us from French about 1300. Vice, the tool, I think I might have done better on this if I remembered that this one is sometimes spelled vice with an S. V-I-S-E. And I even almost wrote it that way.

38:25Comes from Latin. This is cool. This comes from Latin vitis, meaning a vine. Now, can you figure out the relationship between a vine and the tool thing where you crank it up and grab the clamp? Like a creeping vine? Have you ever been to a vineyard? Yeah, right. They hang on to things. Yeah. They twist. They twirl. They make a little lasso until they hit something and then they go around it, right? Yep. Yeah. In a process called figmatropism. What is that

38:56kind of photography? The time-lapse footage of a vine curling around stuff is so fun. I can watch that forever. Maybe that's my advice. So yeah, that which winds is a grabby thing. You crank that handle and clamp it. Okay. Round two. Let's redeem ourselves. Is device related to either of those or not? Is it a vine or is it a defect? I think neither, right? I mean... Is it a clampy thing? Device. Yeah. I mean, I could see how a device would be a tool. Yeah, exactly. But

39:32now you said the thing about the vine stuff, which... Mm-hmm. But at what point did this become? And also there's device, the verb, like to device a plan. I was going to ask if that's related, actually. Yeah. Devise. Is a device something that you devise? I was thinking of divisive. So I thought, hmm, is it related to divide? Oh, shit. That's interesting. Yeah. I think not. But isn't that advice as inside? Kaylee, I don't know about you, but the longer

40:04we play this game, the less I'm like, should I get my linguistics PhD diploma revoked? Like, I just... What makes it worse is that... Maybe it's the wrong certificate I have to return. I know that a lot of, like, linguists that I know and respect listen to the show, and I happen to know that, you know, being good at English etymology is not, you know, what my expertise is supposed to be in. But they're all going to be equally not good at this game, okay? So we can just, like, let's just

40:35hold that in our hearts and, like, keep it close. Okay, here's the new question. Is device related to divisive devise to devise a plan or both? I'm going to say it is related to devise a plan. I think it's some kind of, like, cause-effect relationship that we're, like... But not divisive? We're just going to tweak it a little. No, not divisive. Stop trying to make divisive happen, Gretchen. 100% agree with Keith, and stop trying to make divisive happen. It's not going to happen,

41:07Gretchen. I got news. Divisive just happened. Here's what's going on. It's not related to vice or vice, but it is related to divisive. So here's what happens. They both come from Latin dis apart and videre, to separate. And a device continues that sense of separation. Here's how it works. First, a device was a plan to bequeath or to separate an inheritance into portions. There's

41:43that separation. We're separating things. And then it was any kind of plan or contrivance. And then it was any kind of tool. So all three of those words, device, divide, devise, they are all from the same word. It's going to be unbearable from now on. It's terrible. Can I make a request, Daniel? What? In future, starting with this episode, perhaps, when you're finishing up and doing things,

42:14could you make a little, like, social media five by five little, like, all the words and then, like, lines between them? And, like, they're crossed out or, like, use whatever metaphors you want for, like, are not connected. Because I feel like we talk about this so much and I talk myself into circles. So what happens is after we record, I go and tell Steve, oh, what do you think? Device, vice, blah, blah, blah. And then he says something and then he asks me what the answer is. And I'm like, uh, I believe everything and nothing.

42:52Okay, that's a good idea. That would be, that would help people to remember. Yeah. And you could make, like, one version without the lines. And then when you, like, flick to the right, there's the version with the lines. So you could actually test yourself. Wow. Okay. Well, let's, let's put that in the ideas, Ben. A big thank you to Robert. Robert. Last one, one from Ash, who says, thought of this when I was wondering if the let diminutive, you know, like piglet or cutlet, I guess, whether that let diminutive implied

43:25another form. Here are the words. Gauntlet, as in to throw down the gauntlet. Gauntlet, the armored glove. Gaunt, meaning thin. You're looking very gaunt today. And I'm going to add to run the gauntlet. That's one that I'm adding just for me. And Ash says, very much enjoying the show. All right. So we got gaunt, gauntlet, the glove, gauntlet, throw down the

43:59gauntlet as a challenge and then run the gauntlet. Hmm. Oh, throw down the gauntlet as a challenge. Isn't that just your glove? That's what you're doing? I think it's the glove. Why would you throw a metal glove? Aren't they expensive? I imagine so. I challenge you, clank. But they're also tough, famously. Oh, true. Or it just means glove and you guys just, we've just got hung up on the metal one. Right. Yeah. It could just be like a softer glove. Okay. So this is, this is where French helps because gaunt, G-A-N-T, that's a glove. It is. Yes. Spanish

44:35guantes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But then how does that become like skinny and tall and lanky and whatever else gauntlet is? Why does it have a let on it? Gauntlet, c'est un petit gaunt, c'est trop petit pour toi. Yeah. It's so old. I think gaunt is different. Sorry, gaunt means like a person who's like tall and slim, right? Gaunt, I think just, just unhealthily thin, right? You don't have to be tall. You can be looking gaunt if you're not a tall person.

45:05Why? What are you getting ahead of? What's this giving for you? Well, I get confused between gaunt and lanky, I think. Mm-hmm. I think you can be lanky and still give the appearance of like good health, right? You can just be like, that person's body just wants to be that way. Mm-hmm. Oh, but gaunt is like unhealthily slim. Things, yeah, something's wrong. You're sick or you're not eating enough or something is happening. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So how is that related to gloves? Yeah. Yeah, probably not. Skinny fingers. That's what I said. I said gaunt is its own thing. You look like a finger from a glove. You're looking gaunt.

45:42Yeah. Oh, that's not, that's not the worst guess I've ever heard. Okay. There's been worse ones probably from me. Okay. In that case, do we all think that gaunt is unrelated? I'm going to say yeah. Okay. Uh, we are all correct. Gaunt is unrelated. It just means thin. There is this old Norse gaunt, a thin stick, which also is a tall, thin man. Now that leaves us with three gauntlets. And I will tell you that one of them is the odd one out. Is it the glove?

46:17Is it running the gauntlet? Or is it throwing down the gauntlet? One of them's not related. I mean, if throwing down the gauntlet isn't about a glove, I'm going to freak out. Yeah, exactly. So it has to be the running the race that is unrelated, but I read so many of those like Arthurian novels for children that like as a kid, that if I got this wrong, I have to reexamine my entire life. I do not wish to do that. Therefore, I will not choose that option.

46:49Yeah. I can't, I can't go all the way back there. So you both think that running the gauntlet is the, the odd one out? I mean, I kind of thought they all were related, but I'm going to say that. Sure. Yeah. Me too. If I had to pick one. Okay. If you had to pick one. Well, you are correct. The one that's unrelated is running the gauntlet. People really did throw down these metal gloves as a challenge. Well, cause you can't slap someone across the face with a metal glove. That would be death.

47:19I challenge you. You can't be like, I demand satisfaction. Clunk. That's not going to work.

47:26You've already won right there. You did it. Yeah. You blindsided them. Yeah. And now I have it cause you're on the ground. Ow. You hurt me. The word gauntlet that you run was originally a different word. It was gantlop. Gantlop. And it comes from Swedish. Help me out, Hedvig. Loping around. Uh, lop is, uh, um, uh, like a, a race, a, um, like a marathon is a kind of lop. It's a, it's a race course. It's a race. Yeah. Uh, and gant, I don't, so does

48:01that have to do with the sticks? No, it's gatta. Oh yeah. Gantlop. Yeah. Oh, gauntlet is gantlop. That's crazy. Where'd you add an N? Um, hang on. What is gatta? What gatta is street. Okay. So it's, uh, or I've got street or lane. So it's a lane course, a gauntlet. The N was just epithesis. Like, uh, you know, you have a message. Who sends a message? Who brings the message to you? Messenger. Oh, the messenger. Ah, the messager.

48:36The messenger. But for some reason it just sounded better for us to call it a messenger and stick an N. And if you're going along a passage, what are you? You're a passenger. I hadn't thought of that one. That's a good one. That's how the Swedish gantlop became a gauntlet. It was influenced by that unrelated word. It's an acorn. This was cool. There's a little false etymology that got stuck in the OED from 1656, not long after the word started being used. Here's what they said. Gantlop, in parentheses, Gantlop, a punishment of soldiers first invented

49:14at Gant and therefore so-called. It wasn't invented in Gant. It came from Swedish. That's fun. That's what happens. Like a kangarooism. So gaunt unrelated, running the gauntlet, unrelated. Thanks a lot, Ash. Thanks also to Joe for that theme song. If you'd like to send us an item or a jingle for related or not, get them to us all the usual ways. On BlueSky, we're at BecauseLanguage.com or send us an email, hello at BecauseLanguage.com.

49:51We are here with Dr. Danny Bate, linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is and the author of Why Q Needs You, A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them. Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. As a long-time listener of BecauseLanguage, this is a little surreal and just very lovely. So thank you. Oh, pshaw. Now, for anybody not familiar with your podcast, what kinds of things have you talked about? Yeah, so, I mean, reaching around for something to podcast a few years ago, very much motivated

50:28by the decline of a particular social network that I miss. I miss its glory days very much. I was really just wanting to get into something else, some other expression of linguistic goodness, and I hit on podcasting. And what I decided that I can do best or better is interview people. So A Language I Love Is has an unchanging format. Every episode, I interview one guest about a language that they love and know about. So I asked them three questions, as well as a kind of general language biography. What is your relationship? What's something you love about

51:01this language? And what do you want the listeners to know about this language? Three seasons so far, and a fourth season when I regain the energy soon. Nice. Yeah, okay. It's true, you know. Avoiding burnout is something that we all sort of have to work at. And also, like, choosing what our goals are. We look at ourselves and we say, am I doing what I want to do here? Am I achieving some good? How do you evaluate your podcast? Oh, that's hard to say, because I suppose in this game, it's always about faking it until you make

51:34it and projecting strength. That's what I do all day. But of course, I'd love to moan and gripe and grumble about how much work it takes and how it is quite tiring. And I think, unlike with the first and second series, I crossed the finish line of the third series, tired, really quite tired and thinking that this podcast is, I haven't made it any easier for myself. I haven't found a way to slot the process of making this better into my life. So yeah, it's not all sunny. I'll say it that way.

52:09The guests are brilliant. The interviews are great. But the editing, uploading is taxing and it's never got any easier. It can be that way. Okay, so I did have a read of why Q needs you. One of the contentions is that the alphabet is the greatest invention in... Sorry, did I dream that? That's in there, right? Or is it in the promotional materials? Did you make that claim? No, I don't make that claim. I'm a linguist. I've never made a grand claim in my life. I'm going to make that claim. My question to you, Danny, is the alphabet the greatest invention

52:43in human history? And I mean human history. I don't mean like we're not talking sexual reproduction or something like that. Sure, sure. I think I can agree with you with a slight modification, which is just to expand the alphabet to writing in general. I think writing is incredible and amazing and also underappreciated because we're so good at it that it fits very unobtrusively into our lives, which is so literate and so good at the business of reading and writing. And within that incredible achievement, the alphabet

53:16gets to take a huge share of the glory. I just make that modification because the alphabet is not all writing. It's a family tree of writing, a tradition that is awesome, but not the totality of all human writing, if that makes sense. Well, yes. And we realize that there are other kinds of writing systems. There's logographic writing systems. There are abjads, where you only do the consonants and not the vowels. You've got syllabaries, some of which are very nice. You know, I've always been a fan of the

53:48semantic determinatives wherever they appear. But you know what? I look at the alphabet and I say, having vowels and consonants seems to confer some distinct advantages. Or maybe not. Maybe we don't need vowels. Maybe consonants are just enough. I mean, maybe it offers a little bit of compactness, an increase in information density. Maybe I'm questioning my alphabetic bias. See, this is what happens. You get into the subject and it's awesome and rich. And before

54:24you know it, all of your values are gone and you've no idea what's true and what's not. That's just standard linguistics procedure. It happens in every sub-discipline of our beloved field. Take my sort of home within academic linguistics, which is syntax. Very quickly, you lose all conception of what a good grammatical sentence is in your language. It just happens. It's a health hazard. So no bother about that. Maybe that's healthy. Maybe it's good to be less certain. There you go. See, I mean, I like that view very much. I hope it's true because I'm feeling very uncertain about everything in linguistics. And I'm sort of okay with that. It just goes along with

55:00the territory. So take, for example, the alphabet. It's really a matter of what are you trying to write down? What kind of language are you trying to write down? And different ways of writing will suit different languages. First off, are you trying to write down speech? There are other modalities of language. Of course, the big one being sign language, which to my knowledge, no sign language as yet has an associated, unique way of being expressed in writing. Writing is very much privileged sounds. So with that as the kind of the big picture, that's the first kind of decision

55:35you have to make. What are you writing down, speech or sign? Secondly, within speech, what is your spoken language? What is it like? If you have few vowels in your phonological inventory, you don't have to write them. And that's very true in the history of the alphabet. If you have loads, you probably should, especially when the vowels could make a difference between one word and another. Of course, you can take this to an extreme and look at English, which has way more vowels than it has vowel letters. But that's a different matter altogether. It just all depends on your speech.

56:08Yeah. And I think that's going to come up as a theme as we talk about the alphabet here. However, there is one thing that I'm certain about, and that is that the direction of writing known as bustrophedon is terrible. Let's talk about bustrophedon. All right. So it means as the ox plows, the boost is, it's bossy, it's the cow, and it's the way that the cow plows. So you start out on one side of the page, you go all the way to the margin, and then you just drop it down. But then

56:43instead of going back to the beginning of the next line, you just start heading the other way, until you get back to the margin, you start to that, drop it down a line, or maybe you just go in a spiral. Spiral like that. It's terrible. Everybody in the world looked at that method of writing, of putting characters together and said, we're not doing that. That's not what we're doing. We'll go top to bottom. We'll go left to right. We'll go right to left. We might even go bottom to top, but we're not doing that. Well, there you go. There is a reason why

57:14it's not really survived. For context, we have it in the history of the alphabet. Early Semitic writers, so people speaking Semitic languages in the Middle East, hugely important in the history of the alphabet. I think we have a couple of examples of this, but not many, and then a lot more examples of them from ancient Greece and ancient Italy. It doesn't survive. It doesn't survive because there is something a little bit more practical about just starting each line in a very consistent way in the same place. That being said, these are

57:47examples of languages that have tried it and not liked it, ultimately. I think there is one particular writing system that hasn't tried it, but should and could benefit from it, which is Braille. Braille very much could benefit from a system where your finger does not leave the thread of writing because you're reading it in that direction. If you are blind and you are having to go back to the start of the line, the line in Braille, well, where is it? You will struggle.

58:19You cannot see it. So actually, Booster Fieden could make a comeback. Just throwing that out there. That's an interesting idea, although I will say that if you are doing Booster Fieden and you start in the middle of the page, you will have to feel around a little bit to determine what the direction is for that particular line. But you've incepted the idea for me. I'm now feeling less certain about that. So that's good. Feeling less certain. Another theme. Very good. But by the way, this is just reminding me of, as a child, my parents had a gigantic encyclopedia set. And at the beginning

58:54of every letter, it had the letter, but it also had, and I think this is why I was a linguist. I just loved these pictures of how it looked in Greek, in Hebrew, in Etruscan, in Phoenician. Boy, oh boy, all of these writing systems. And I loved it. But I also noticed that these characters, you know, they started out a certain way, and then at some point they flipped. I think that Gimel, the G, doesn't that start at one certain way and then flips?

59:27There's just two things going on here. One of which is that we today, us, you know, scholars who are trying to write about these scripts, will have to make a decision. What was the dominant direction of writing? And therefore, what direction do we put our letters in? So an encyclopedia might have to mix and match. So the Etruscans overall tended to prefer right to left, whereas Latin overall just tended to prefer left to right, and that's what English still uses to this day. So there is a variation

59:59in the overall direction of writing. In addition to that, individual letters have also flipped and they've, you know, been mirrored horizontally, mirrored vertically, because there's just such diversity at the history of the alphabet. The letters fundamentally don't come with a direction of writing. There's nothing intrinsically directioned about them. This is a matter of consensus and a matter of habit, and we arrive in certain directions, whereas other branches of this family tree of writing settle on letters positioned in another way. So it's a big mishmash,

1:00:34and when you look into the alphabet's history, especially the early centuries or the first couple of millennia up to, let's say, I don't know, the year 1 AD by Christian Reckoning, there's a tremendous amount of diversity, and any poor scholar who wanders into this has to somehow summarize this delightful variation somehow. So is it not the case that the letters flipped at the same time as people said, we're not going right to left, we're going left to right? There wasn't a, I mean, was there a relationship there, or was it just there was heaps of churn, and it was all flipping?

1:01:08There was a lot of flipping going on. Yes, I like it. It's all flipping. I like to say that they flip the script, which works really well. It's hard to sort of explain these things, because again, if you poke around into, say, the front and back of a letter, if you poke around into it, these intuitions just disappear, because you think, okay, what is particularly back about the stalk of a capital D as opposed to the bulge of a capital D? I think we might do a little bit of maybe anthropomorphizing,

1:01:42where we're sort of thinking, okay, that's maybe the face and this is the back, but letters don't have faces and backs, they're abstract symbols. So it's all a bit mixed, and you've got to separate out two things. Vaguely how a letter is positioned with respect to the top, the sides, and the bottom of whatever medium you're writing on, and how it's positioned with respect to other letters, and we see variation in both of those aspects. So you might find a letter that is flipped from

1:02:13our perspective, but it's just a matter of variation, where the Greeks at this point in time are quite comfortable writing in one way, then another way, and booster feed, and why not? Sometimes, though, you find examples where we must say, actually, with respect to everything else on the page, this individual letter is indeed backwards. But what is backwards at the end of the day? It's all in flux. It just settles via consensus. It's a gigantic crowdsourced experiment. I like that. I got a comment from a young listener recently on a different show that I do. They asked,

1:02:47why are some letters more common than others? And I thought, oh, that's a seemingly obvious question, but when you try to answer it, it's not at all intuitive. My answer was, it's not weird that letters occur with differing frequencies. What would be weird is if they all occurred with the same frequency. That would be very unusual, because we use some sounds more than others. We use vowels more than others, and we use some sounds less frequently, so naturally, they would just show up less. But like, why is Z and Q so uncommon? And not coincidentally, they appear at the end of

1:03:25the alphabet as well. Yes, absolutely. I mean, why are some letters more common than others? So that somebody can win at Scrabble, I guess, ultimately. No, you've got- You have to be winners. You have to be winners. You've got a couple of things going on. So if your writing system, such as the alphabet, is fundamentally based on sounds, it's all about representing the key sounds of your language, then as you correctly say, you're going to have some sounds that are just more common than others. These may be a product of sound change. This may be a

1:04:00product of what are the loan words in your language. This may be a product of maybe sound change is creating new phonemes, which are finely recognised and given their own sound, but they're quite limited. So naturally, speech is going to have a say. But there's a couple of other factors. I really cannot give a straightforward answer with anything with the history of the alphabet. One would be that you have letters coming in at later dates. So there are letters that could well be used for different purposes, but their sort of later date leads to a marginal status, which means that they're not

1:04:34used everywhere that phonologically they could be. So I think a great example of this is Zed. All of the sort of alphabets of Western Europe, including English, have had a very lukewarm relationship with Zed because the Romans only acquire it or reacquire it to spell Greek words. So it's very limited to just Greek words. And consequently, it's not there in words that have a sound like nose and surprise or even all those plurals like dogs, where really it's a voiced

1:05:05sound. So that's an additional factor where it's not just about speech. It's about the usage of the alphabet. And lastly, letters removed, maybe one kind of one step removed from the straightforward phonemic principle can be given new functions. So if you take something like E and H in English through kind of chants, it's certainly not there in older stages of the alphabet, but kind of through the needs of writers and readers, these have been selected as the workhorses of English spelling.

1:05:37E allows us to spell more vowel sounds, as in all your diphthongs in like, I don't know, late and athlete and things like that. And H allows us to spell more consonants, as in TH, CH, SH, sounds of English that weren't there in the Latin speech of the Romans. So they don't get given their own letter in the alphabet. And we've just had to kind of make do somehow. So there are multiple factors going into why E reigns supreme among the letters and Q and Z languish at the bottom of the

1:06:12scrabble bag. It's interesting that you mentioned H because we noticed, or sorry, H. I've got children who are H-ers and I grew up an H-er. So H dropping rears its head again. But H really got pressed into service for a lot of digraphs. And you mentioned this in the book as well, that you got P-H-T-H-C-H-S-H-W-H, which is another interesting case. Why was H chosen? Oh, and by the way, even more if we're talking about Gwelga, I understand you studied old Irish and we just had a show recently about Irish

1:06:49and how there used to be a B with a little dot. And then after a while they said, we're not doing the dot, we're doing, what are we going to do? We got to use something else. Oh, H is just sitting there. Let's use that. And so now you've got a lot of H's. What is it about H that makes it so useful into this context? Is that it doesn't seem to be anything? It's just a puff of air. And so we can go ahead and pick it up and use it and it won't harm anything. Is that what's going on? Yeah. So I think that that is the absolute root of this whole story. It's a ginormous collection of

1:07:23facts and languages and contributions. So many of which, of course, are confusingly present together in English spelling. But at the heart of it, if I could identify one original sort of prime mover in this whole story of H, it is exactly what you just said, that H is barely something and so often it becomes nothing. The sound drops out. I mean, phoneticians struggle to classify H as a consonant. It's just this kind of breathy voice. And that individual sound, let's just call it a consonant

1:07:55for simplicity's sake. That can just drop off. So this happened in ancient Greece, where one particular dialect became an H-less dialect, the Ionian dialect. And consequently, the letter for H, heita, is reassigned to a vowel and it becomes eta or eta. This looks like an H and it's basically because there was a letter going spare. This happens to this day in so many circumstances and dialects of English, most famously the London Cockney English, dropping their H's across the

1:08:25board. And it happened also in late Latin, where we can see, I love this, we can see in kind of non-standard inscriptions and texts from the Roman Empire that people are dropping their H's in Latin. There's this pronouncing, whereas once they would have said habeo, I have, they're starting to say things like habeo. And this will, of course, become French E as in G or Italian O, right? You know, E or O. So this is being dropped. And this time and time again, not for a single reason,

1:08:58but maybe for the same phonetic principle, this frees up H to be put to new purposes. And it's partnered up with other letters to spell aspirated sounds. So this is what the Romans are doing with P-H, T-H, and C-H, because they're trying to spell Greek aspirated sounds. And from this practice, we get things like photo and theatre and stomach orchestra. These are all from Greek, ultimately. Then you have in the post-Roman period, the Middle Ages, obviously the best period of history, you have T-H and C-H, where people are just, they're really grappling with the fact that Latin has just

1:09:35not given their language, be it Irish or English or some kind of other kind of Germanic, or even Old French. It's not given them enough letters. And H is there. H is there for the taking, because they're not using it for anything else. So it's time and time again, for different reasons, which I think there's no need for me to go into, H, it's the hero that we need in our time of phonetic trouble. And often because it's a letter going spare. The hero that we need. The hero. Yeah, exactly. The hero. It just keeps dropping out. It keeps dropping out. And then you get American English with herbal instead of herbal. And it was

1:10:11just a function of how fashionable H-dropping was and who was using it and who took what away with them as they went. Exactly. Exactly. This is why spelling reform is so difficult, because you could have a perfectly phonetic one-to-one relationship, and then the sound would change, and there goes your perfect system. It's never going to stick around. Unless, unless you're one of these languages where they go ahead and update the spelling every once in a while. But that's not English. We tend to do it not by committee,

1:10:43but by just over time. Do you have any thoughts on spelling reform? Does it need to happen? It's garbage, isn't it? There's a reason why nobody wants to do it. Yeah. I have many thoughts about spelling reform. Oh, okay. Let's get spicy. No, no, no, no, no. The thoughts are all in conflict with one another. And actually, in the book, I refuse to give a definite opinion on this. I just say we should always be open to it, and by being open to it, acknowledging all the problems that come along

1:11:15with it. This is exactly this principle. It's actually one of the principles why people, significant people in the history of English, have refused to engage in some sort of thorough reform. So one of my personal heroes, Dr. Samuel Johnson, living in the 18th century, he actually says in the preface, I think, preface or introduction to his dictionary, if I update the spelling, it's only going to change in a 200 years time, which is correct and also the wrong attitude. Because yes, it's going to keep changing, but also you've got to keep updating it. You've got to keep on top of

1:11:48this, as people do where I live in the Czech Republic. There is a society that still just about has the social currency and power, the means to update spelling if need be. It doesn't happen very often. We don't all kind of wait every Christmas or what are the new letters going to be? It doesn't work like that. But it is something that we should be open to. Reform doesn't have to be wholesale. It can be on a micro scale, little oddities, absurdities that are there for reasons

1:12:19and for principles that are no longer ours. So basically, everything in English spelling is there for a reason. It just may not be a good reason or a modern reason anymore. So things like the B in debt and doubt or the H in ghost, they're there because of other languages and people's priorities in the past, we could get rid of them. And I think we should be open to that. Spelling mistakes are so often phonemically accurate, organic mini reforms. And of course,

1:12:52in our society, we uphold the standard so strictly that you'll say, absolutely not. How dare you even think about that, despite also claiming to have a phonemic spelling system? How dare you drop the H ghost? Or if your predictive text will correct it for you or your word processor will give you the red squiggly line of doom, things like that. So all of these things are going on, but the wholesale reform is nonetheless really, really challenging. You have to answer two big questions if you're going

1:13:24to try and reform a language like English. The first question is, who are you? That's it. So do you have the prestige, the power? Do you have international cooperation? Are you part of a committee that people are going to listen to? Are you in touch with the technology? Are you in touch with the mood and the social atmosphere? Are you recognising that there is a general appetite for spelling reform? If there isn't, then no one's going to listen to you and people are just going to say, well, you know, well, I'm not going to do it. So that's hugely important. And arguably,

1:13:56such a single person or body of people just doesn't exist in the English writing world. And then secondly, the equally big question, who's English? So American English? Well, why not? It's the most prestigious. It's the most dominant in the world today. Well, then you'll annoy all the other English speaking countries. So you have to answer these two big questions. And I cannot see this current situation changing without big societal and geopolitical shifts. I think that's what it would take to dislodge standard spelling from its current position.

1:14:30It's just much easier instead to just spell things the old way and let everybody work it out wherever they are. Some people are going to have an R that they won't say. Some people are going to have H's that they don't say, but we will just read right through them. And that's how it goes. Yeah. With that in mind, though, you mentioned how doubt and debt came to us from French without the B. No B. And then, and this is the story that I always tell in my classes, then Latinizers, people who thought Latin was just the coolest language, they said,

1:15:05hey, Latin had dubitum and debitum. Let's stick that B back in. And so there it was. I'm still wondering how they got everybody to believe them. Because we've commented, we're talking here about how difficult it is to, to get things to happen, to get spelling change to happen. And yet somehow a bunch of hoity-toity Latinizers managed to do scores of words, absolutely scads. How do they manage it? I guess they had the prestige and it was the moment.

1:15:39This is it. This is just it. They were the intellectual top dogs. So if you are operating in, what would this be, the 15th century, I think we first start to get the examples with the re-added B in debt and doubt, or it really tends to be the 15th century. It's no coincidence that this is also the era of the printing press. So people are reading more, people are spreading different languages around Europe more, and people are just gaining access to more Latin and more Greek and things like that than you'd previously had in the Middle Ages. And of course, we have the

1:16:11Renaissance ongoing and things like that. And who are you who's writing English at this particular time? You could well be somebody at court, because English has become, again, a language of the court by this century. You could be somebody in the church. It's returned to ecclesiastical circles in Britain, or indeed somebody at one of the great universities. There's a couple in England, some really good ones in Scotland as well. And these people are the people who are going to be setting the standard. If you want to write proper, you're going to write like these intellectual

1:16:46heavyweights of the English writing sphere, because that's good. That's cool. I still emulate to this day standard English spelling. I don't just set off on my own. I spell like other people spell. I spell like the Oxford English Dictionary and the professors who've taught me spell. We're all connected in a network of influence and consideration and identity as well. And the 15th century was absolutely no different, maybe on a much smaller scale, because we don't have mass literacy yet.

1:17:17But nonetheless, you've got people who are able to set the tone of English spelling. And these people really like Latin. They really like Latin. I cannot stress how this is not like, oh yes, I read a bit of Latin the other day. This is, I am going to go down the hall to my colleague and speak to him, and it will be a him, in Latin. This is, I know, I am going to translate English poems into Latin or Latin poems into English. So much of Western European history is like a big

1:17:48wave of Latin and Roman-ness that I think only peaks and crashes and ebbs out in maybe the end of the 19th century. Up until that point, we're all just a group of intellectuals pretending that we're Romans. They really had their moment. They saw their chance and they took it. They did? Yeah. You know, it's not just be also. There's another change that the Latinizers made that I want to focus on, because I'm noticing it over and over again. I'm noticing it in questions I get, and I'm noticing it in Related or Nots that we do, and it's L. The letter L dropped out of a lot of

1:18:27words in French, because L does that, right? Just takes off, goes for a walk, right? Walk, talk. You know, you've got salmon. You've got almonds. Although maybe you do say almond. Maybe there's a continuum. But words like falcon came to us without the L. People stuck it back in. Words like vault and fault, people stuck it back in. Solder, you know, that metal stuff that you use on a circuit board. In American English that I used to speak, it was solder. What's going on? Well, people stuck the