142: If This Be Magic (with Daniel Hahn)

0:00Let's say it all together. Sudoku, sudoku, sudoku, sudoku, sudoku. Sedakugudaguhu, wah! Dosokada. Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language.

0:32I'm Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. Back from his trip to distant parts, it's Ben Ainsley. Hey, Ben. Hello. It was hot and dusty and I saw a dingo. Wow. Nice. Ben, I'm going to generate a Shakespearean insult for you from the Shakespeare Insult Generator. Link in the show notes. Ready? Nice. My loins are girded. Thou puking, half-faced giglet.

1:03That's you. Do we think puke was of the era? Oh, yes. Mewling and puking in their nurse's arms. Man for all seasons. That's fascinating. I thought I fully associated puke with like Valley Girl 80s, like surfer lingo. That whole thing was puke for me. Yeah, I'm going to puke. Well, it's gotten a new life, but it's certainly a Shakespearean. And the word giglet appears in Cymbeline. It is a whore-like person or someone who's fickle or giddy.

1:36Related to giggle. Hmm. Not sure. Perhaps the whore's giggle? Oh, I don't like even saying that word. Perhaps the sex worker's giggle? I'm not sure. Now that I've insulted you in a very untimely fashion, it's linguist and researcher Hedvig Hrgaard. Hi, Hedvig. Hi. I'm excited now. What am I going to get? Thou lumpish, rump-faced, whey-face. I feel like face twice is not very good. Yeah, I have notes.

2:07Sorry, it was whey-face. So I know what whey is. That's like the thing that's involved in dairy production. Yes, I imagine that it means you're very well-fed. And I should also point out that rump-faced doesn't appear in Shakespeare. It's rump-fed. That's in Macbeth. You've been fed on rump, which is the nicest meat. And so you're probably well-fed, pretty healthy-looking. But hang on, why would that be an insult? Well, because people think that being fat is bad. Because you're coddled. You've been pampered. Oh, you're spoiled. You've had a bone with a silver spoon, etc., etc.

2:42And an insult for me. Ben, would you read this one? Go ahead, hit me. Oh, wow. This is another thing that I thought was a lot newer than it was.

2:51Thou saucy, beef-witted bugbear. Oh, fire upon thee, sir. Fire. Saucy's interesting, isn't it? I mean, yeah. Is this still the same thing? I'm seeing so much here that I thought is contemporary. Saucy is just like, whoo, that seems very modern. And bugbear from D&D, I had no idea it went back this far. Not to get all evolutionary linguistics, but it's just a couple hundred years ago.

3:20Bugbear appears for the first time in 1552. There we go. So that's definitely Shakespearean. And I will say also saucy. This is where we get sassy. You could say, I don't want none of your sass. Or you could say, I don't want none of your sauce. And it's the same thing. Isn't that cool? And it is related to sauces that you would put on food. Yeah, because they're spicy and interesting. Now, when you break down a single word like that, you can begin to see the difficulty in translating Shakespeare. And that's very much what this episode is about.

3:53I recently had a chat with translator Daniel Hahn. He's written a book, If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. It's a fascinating look at how different translators have handled the time, the words, and the culture of Shakespeare. And that's coming up. That sounds very cool. That's really cool because Shakespeare has a lot of sort of like folky, vulgar content, right? Definitely. And you got to hit that with the same punch and wench just isn't like as on top of mind anymore, right?

4:28So that's very fascinating. Very much looking forward to that. That reminds me of the TV show Deadwood, which if, uh, it's, it's quite old now, but if people are unfamiliar, was set in the, in a, in a sort of a mining town in the West during the gold rush. But they wanted to make it really realistic. But when looking at that language that was actually being used, which at the time was very provocative and like edgy, things like consarnet and that sort of stuff were like genuinely really quite shocking. But, but, but when they were doing it contemporarily, everyone just sounded like Yosemite Sam. So they, so they had to use like C bombs and mother, mother effer and all that kind of stuff because they, they wanted it to hit, but nothing from then hit. And I feel like Shakespeare's probably got a similar thing going on, right?

5:15You're exactly right. I mean, this is the problem with translation. Do you keep it true to the time, but miss out on the intent? There's a bunch of competing needs and which ones do you go for and which ones don't you? I mean, just Ben, as you pointed out the word whore, which was thrown around quite a lot in Shakespeare's day. Well, we no longer find that acceptable. It's much more transgressive. Whereas in Shakespeare's writing might not have been. So I think we're seeing a lot of challenges already. It's just five minutes into the episode about how Shakespeare gets handled. It's not straightforward.

5:52The other thing that's happening in this episode is that instead of doing news and words of the week, like we usually do, I thought we would take the chance to knock off some of the mailbag questions that have been gathering up for a long time. And we haven't done one of those for quite a bit. My goodness. I can't believe I'm going to say this, Daniel. Mark this down in the annals of our personal history. What do you mean there's no word of the week? Yeah. Well, I was kind of sick of word of the week because the two things that I had were explosive diarrhea and low T. All right. And I'm just like, I'm going to go back to avoiding Americans again. I swear to Zeus.

6:30All right. All right. Fair enough. I'll allow it. But geez, Louise, you've successfully got me hooked on the heroin, Daniel. So don't leave me jonesing for too long. Okay. No H this time. It's all mailbag. Okay. Just like to say a huge thanks to our patrons for supporting the show, being on the discord, having interactions with us and sending us ideas. Or, you know, if you're just listening and lending support that way, that's great too. We're happy to have you supporting the show in any capacity. And let's give a welcome to our newest patrons. Ben, would you want to take this one?

7:02We have, at the listener level, Sammy with an I, at the friend level, Daniel Q, and our newest free patrons, which we love just as much as all the others, Jessica J, Julia, Paula, and Shannon B. Welcome one and all. That's right. You free patrons. We love you just as much as if you actually gave us some money. Daniel says that with a smirk. I genuinely mean that because even at this level, fuck the man, you guys.

7:33Exactly. Okay. So here's the first question. It's about the number game where you have to put a different number one through nine in each row, column, and box. It's the game you play on airplanes before takeoff because there's nothing else to do. Ben, how do you say the name of that game? Oh, no. I always forget. Okay. Full disclosure, I don't play this game and I never really got into it. And I always forget what the actual way to pronounce it is. So I always have to look at the word. And now in our show notes, you fuck. You've gazumped me because you've spelt it both goddamn ways.

8:10I didn't want to, you know. I believe it's Sudoku. Okay. Hedwig, how do you say this thing? I think I would vary it. Sudoku, I think sometimes I might do a bit more like, I'm playing Sudoku. I think I would do like a sort of mid thing. Well, it sounds like you're saying Sudoku the whole time. Yeah, but it's not like an ooh. It's like a little bit front. I'm being petty. I'm not doing an ah, I think. I think.

8:43Is it a schwa? Is it a schwa? Sudoku? Yeah, because it's more like a schwa. Yeah, exactly. It's like whatever. Look, that's very English. You know, we often schwa the unstressed syllables. Instead of saying Sudoku, we say Sudoku. Yeah. But Tigertronia on our Discord says, This random question, as I listened to the most recent episode, why is it so common for people to pronounce Sudoku as Sudoku? Now, my sister, I always thought she was a one-off because she said Sudoku.

9:15Oh, wow. That's a new one. Well, she also used to say Reese's Pieces for the chocolate peanut butter candy. I was wondering how common this is. Now, I'm aware that there is an episode of Bluey, the keepy-uppy episode. You know the one? I do. So, Bandit, the dad, pretends that Bingo is a newspaper. So, he's picked her up and he's reading her. That's so that she can't help Bluey play the balloon game where you don't let the balloon fall on the ground.

9:45He plops her down in front of Bluey, newspaper Bingo, and he says, Just don't do the Sudoku. Sudoku? Wow. How about that? Sudoku. And I hear people say this all the time. It's a triple U, Sudoku. Sudoku. Well, hang on. It's what we have here, a case of, like, vowel harmony. Like, people are like, I just want to do the same vowel all the way through. Okay, well, hang on. It's not the same vowel because the first vowel is a schwa. We got three vowels. The first one's a schwa, suh. It's an uh sound.

10:19Oh, okay. Uh, right? And we do that all the time when we don't stress a syllable. Then there's four different possibilities with the do and the ku, right? You can say doku. You can say duko. You can say doko or duku. So we've been hearing people say sudoku. So you know what I did? I went to YouGlish, and that's the website where you can type in a word, and it will take you to every video on YouTube that has that word in the annotations. It'll take you right to that spot.

10:50I listened to the first 50 examples. There were hundreds. It's a video word engram viewer, essentially. It really is. It's amazing if you want to hear a whole bunch of people pronouncing things. And so, sudoku, which is, I guess, the real name. 41 people said that. Sudu-ko, two people. Sudu-ko, one person. Sudu-ku, four. So it's not insignificant. But why do we think this word is prone to variation? Hedwig, you say vowel harmony. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, please?

11:24Vowel harmony is where you have more than two vowels in a word, and they start influencing each other sort of through sometimes the consonants. So even though there's a consonant in between them, they're affecting each other and usually becoming more alike. That's why it's harmony. So you can get this in change over time where, like, you have a word, you add a suffix, the suffix has a vowel in it, and they start affecting each other. You can get this in a more, like, systematic way, like how you get in some languages in the Afro-Asiatic language family.

11:58But it's just one of the ways that humans try to make it easier to pronounce things. And sort of staying in the same position is sort of probably less effort. And if the meaning gets across anyway, if it's sufficiently disambiguated, it's kind of fine. And what we're talking about here also are two vowels that actually are quite close in the vowel space. So you could glide into them. It's not unbelievable. That's right. And also, now we're in an area of linguistics called phonotactics. When we borrow a word from a different language, we will often change it if it contains sounds or combinations of sounds that we don't use. The thing that confused me, though, is that there's nothing in the word sudoku that violates English phonotactics. So there must be something a little funky about it that makes us English it in a weird way, contrary to its spelling.

12:52What is the Japanese pronunciation, I guess? Sudoku. And it's got an u at the beginning. So I do believe that the first syllable is the one that gets the stress. Japanese listeners straighten me out if I'm wrong. I'm wondering if, is there any relation here or is there any potential for regionalization of how different kinds of English have gone with this word in the sense that I think about, I often, I don't know why I often think about this, but I often sit and think about like, I know Australians and Americans say different brand names in different ways.

13:25Like, like, why is it Nissan or Nissan, Porsche or Porsche, even, even names for like, um, Oregano or Oregano, you know, like we, we have elected to put stresses in different places. Celica versus Celica. Yeah. Sometimes there's like patterns in those variations, but sometimes there's also maybe just like an innovation that spread in Australia and just took over all of Australia and didn't get to the U.S. It's just network effects, like nothing to do really about like Australian English itself.

13:59But you could imagine that different pronunciations of Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, now I'm getting all Sudoku, yeah. Yeah. Semantic satiation has taken place. But it's three syllables. And if you get a S, D and K in there and you have a mid or a back vowel, I think everyone's going to understand you. Probably. Well, I decided to take a look at other words in English because I thought that maybe there was a pattern. So see if you can spot it. These are three syllable words that are consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, not E, but some other vowel.

14:35Here we go. Potato. Now, that's not a problem. Nobody says patutu. You know, there's, that's, nobody changes that. Daniel, famously there is a song about this. Yeah. And it's wrong because nobody says potato. Nobody says potato. You can have tomato, tomato, but nobody says potato. I'm calling the whole thing off. Okay. Zing. I know that in Swedish you can say potat, which is similar to potato. Interesting. Here's some more. Cabana.

15:06Or cabana. Bikini. Canola. Casino. Libido. They're all borrowings. They are. You'll notice that the first syllable is always a schwa. Casino. And then the other two, I mean, they don't merge. Nobody says casoni. But that's because those vowels are pretty different from each other. You know, libido. Yeah. Or they're just the same, like pajama or piñata. Or bikini. But for sudoku, the second and third vowels are really similar. So I think there's a strong temptation to merge them, bring them closer.

15:39So I think what's going on here is, like you say, Hedwig, vowel harmony to make those close sounds, ooh and oh, just a bit more similar, make it easy to say, doesn't cost anything, doesn't hurt comprehension. And people are just picking differently which one is taking over the other. That's right. For reasons I don't know.

15:58Thanks, Tigertronia, for that question. Next one. This is from Hannah via email. I am curious to hear what Hedwig says about ingressive speech, as it pops up mainly in Scandinavian countries, though also in Ireland. Now, I'm going to play a video for you here. Okay. Where does it go? A bird it is. Only a shell. You have a lot of apartments. Oh, yes? Yeah. Yeah. You have lots? Yeah. Very strong northern lights. Uh-huh.

16:29Most in Troms, but in Norway. No, in Hattal also. Did you hear those examples of ingressive, just a sharp intake of breath? What was going on there? Yeah. So, ingressive is when you, so normally when you speak, you use air from your lungs to push air out of your speech apparatus and you shape the different jiggly bits differently to make different sounds. And you have a little closure mechanism, a glottis, that like can push things, stop things

16:59and vibrate. And that's how you get voicing and singing and all these things. And when you sing, you also do extra weird stuff. But normally, yeah, it's air from the lungs getting out into the surrounding world. Ingressives are when you are using the opposite effect. You're breathing in and you're using the apparatus backwards, which is kind of quite different. And I don't know why people do it. I also don't think it's as unique as people think it is. I think it actually happens probably in lots of places. It's, you probably even know people that might say like, yeah, or just, you know, you're

17:34in a hurry. Maybe, maybe you're very busy or something. You might do it. I don't know why people do it. It's, I guess it saves. It's possible. And it's just one of the things that we can do. So we do it sometimes. Yeah. You can't do it for very long. You'll notice quickly. Like Ben, try to say like, think of a long thing or go to a random webpage and find something that you can read out loud. I already know how this works because I've, I, I tried to learn how to whistle inwards and I noticed that there is like considerably less ability going in than coming out.

18:09But, um, okay, here. Why would that be? How strange. Oh, I found a Swedish newspaper I can read. Oh, there you go. Let's see how far I get. And then let's see how far you get. Oh, okay. Hold on. I'll, you go and I'll pull up something. That's about as far as I can get. That's, that was not very far. Okay. No. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. It's freaky. This is, this is from a silly web comic. Um, okay. I got to go all the way out first. That's important. Yeah. This is a carrot cake.

18:42We're going to get it in the cubes and we're going to put it in balls and cover with milk. Oh, you sound like Zardoz, the Macintosh voice. Similar length, I'd say. Yeah. I think we must be breathing in a lot faster than we can breathe out. I can keep the air, you know, focused and let a little trickle out when I egress the air, but not when I ingress. Yeah. It does help. I think that we spent our entire lives practicing how to do this bit. And we're just now trying the other way. And also the main problem is has to do with pressure.

19:15When we are pushing air out of our lungs, we have a pressure in our lungs and we use our glottis to build up pressure and we use our mouth to build up pressure. Whereas when we're breathing it in, we're just relying on the airflow, creating enough friction to get things happening. We can't. But it's like suction, right? We're using a suction pump when we're breathing in essentially. But we have much fewer like mechanisms in that direction to help us make it. I mean, maybe some people can, you can probably train it up. It's probably like, you know, Mongolian throat. Oh, Mongolian, you know, the thing when you, the throat singing, they do it, right?

19:50Do they? Well, I don't know about that. I think that's more like harmonics where they're doing something funky with aggressive air. They're not, it's not ingressing. I do remember how, when I was teaching in Vietnam, I was doing a unit for a bunch of English teachers, Vietnamese English teachers, and they did something funny with the letter B when they were speaking English. And by the way, these were not novice English speakers. These were good teachers. But even good teachers who are learners have funny little bits that they still do, funny

20:22little habits. Quirks. And their funny little habit was the B. They would say, instead of having a boat, they would have a boat. I was like, what is going on with that? It's ingressive B. Vietnamese has it. Yeah. And they kept it for their English. Hannah says, all the best from one of your biggest fans. Hannah, Watertown, MA, USA. Thanks, Hannah. That's great. And just to wrap this bracket up, this one's from Finn via email. Hi, love your show.

20:52Before reading the rest of this email, what do you think? Like, I am nonplussed means, I am nonplussed. Oh, I've never thought about this before. What does it mean to you, Ben? So, in the language of the youth, I would describe nonplussed as nonch. To be nonplussed about something. Do we not know nonch? Enchalant. Yeah. Oh, yes. Come on, Daniel. Sorry, I failed to recognize clipping when it presented itself to me.

21:23Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nonch. Yeah, so I've always understood nonplussed to be a version of that. To be like, I'm indifferent. I don't care either way. Like, it's fine. Yeah, me too. Like, non-shock, non-surprised. Yeah. The answer that you'll get from many dictionaries is, someone did a thing and I was confused about it. I was puzzled. I was perplexed. Now, the reason we get the word is because it comes from French nonplussed. No more.

21:53Someone's done something and you've come to a standstill. An impasse. From the 1500s. Okay. I, so old. Okay. So old. Finn continues. It doesn't mean not impressed. Even though it looks and sounds and seems like it should, I like to ask people what they think it means and I almost never get the right answer. So most people collectively agree on an incorrect definition. I think it's a very interesting example of language changing and of the difference between the etymology slash dictionary definition versus common use.

22:27Just wanted to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you, Finn. Let's think of some cases where we have what's called bridging contexts, where both interpretations sort of lend themselves as possible. So like the original meaning supposedly is like you're confused and now we think that it could mean you're indifferent. So in both of those cases, you're not active. You know what I mean? You're not like shouting or like doing something. So if you didn't get more context and someone says something that was supposed to get a reaction

23:02and someone said, oh, and they were nonplussed and they meant they were confused, but you looked at them and saw that they had a slightly blankish face, you might think they're indifferent. Yeah. Okay. It's just a little creep. The one that I always think of in that way is ironic. The word ironic in the 1800s, if you said that you were speaking ironically, what you really meant was you were speaking sarcastically. That's what we would mean. I said it ironically. It means I was just being sarcastic.

23:34But now ironic seems to have meant something a little different, like appropriately, exactly the wrong way. Or you tried to do a thing and you paradoxically achieved the opposite of what you tried to do and that was ironic or something. We need to talk about Alanis Morissette here. Yeah. Don't you think? So, yeah, that's a good example of a sort of a unifying sense for those two senses of the words. I wonder if, because my example that I have of this same phenomenon also is to do with

24:04a word that means, that has come to be interpreted to mean indifferent. So my example here is ambivalence. So what do you think ambivalent means? Like, if you say you're ambivalent, Hedwig, what do you mean? Well, that I'm not sure which option to pick. Like, do you want to have pasta or hamburgers? And I say, I'm ambivalent. I don't know which one I should choose. Okay. Daniel? You probably know the right answer here. No, I don't. But the way I feel about ambivalent is like, well, I feel one way about it, but I also

24:35kind of feel the other way about it. Not that I'm trying to choose between two things, but that I'm feeling two different ways about one thing. So Daniel's, um, Daniel's interpretation is the dictionarily correct thing. It literally just means to hold two competing emotions within you simultaneously. But in my case, I am holding two opinions. So like I have both, I want pizza and I don't want pizza because I want hamburger. So you both kind of landed in the right zone. Lots and lots and lots of people just interpret ambivalence to be indifference though.

25:07So people will use it to, to mean I don't care. Um, this is interesting because I was going over an academic article I'm writing and I was thinking about using the term ambiguous and I realized that's not actually what I want because ambiguous to me would mean that a word had two meanings and it's unclear for the receiver which meaning it is intended. Sounds good to me. Whereas what I wanted was the utterance doesn't contain enough information, which is not the

25:40same as actually ambiguity. Ambiguity would mean there is information, but I don't know which one it is. Whereas what I wanted is almost insufficient. It's an insufficient word. Yes, exactly. Like the, the statement was not specific enough, which is different. Now I'm thinking about disinterested, which dictionarily means you don't have a stake in the matter. But now people use disinterested to mean uninterested. You don't really care either way, which I guess is kind of the same. You can really see how these words creep along.

26:11Sure. Yeah. Let's just finish up. I found, uh, Merriam-Webster is on the case with nonplussed. There's a link in the show notes. They say, um, that nonplussed had its confused or at an impasse definition. And then it says, for the next 300 and some years, nonpluss remained on the straight and narrow, avoiding the temptations of demon rum and semantic drift. And as a result of this, managed to keep its meaning remarkably unchanged. And then, in the early 20th century, some people began to use nonpluss to mean unruffled,

26:45unconcerned. And ever since then, the word just hasn't been the same. Hmm. Need to track down these people. Yeah. Be sure to tell them off so that they'll stop it. You can head this thing off. It's not too late. Let's get the time mishing. Thanks, Finn, for your question. Now, it's time for Related or Not. Let's hear that theme from Hugh. This is the original Hugh theme with Ben's voice. Related or not.

27:12Related or not.

27:15Related or not.

27:19Related or not. The closest I will ever come to rock god status. I'm usually kind of anti-guitars, but that was good. What, just in life generally? I often think that electric guitars are inserted in places where they're not wanted. Okay. So, you've got a thing, like, in the same way that, like, saxophones were just wild in the, like, 80s and 90s in a whole bunch of songs that they didn't need to be in. Oh, yeah.

27:49Your thing is, like, the guitar is that now, is today's saxophone. I already, when I was quite young, I felt this way, because my dad liked a lot of rock music that had a lot of guitars in it, and I was, like, not having any of this. But I enjoyed that. Hugh, for the record, I enjoyed that. You get to pass. That was good and appropriate. All right. Gee, Ben, you might have a finite Sabbath number now. Oh, yeah. Let's do it. Okay. This first one is from Janika via Speakpipe. Hello, lovely, because-language-istas.

28:22I have a suggestion for related or not. There are several words. The first is pooch, as in the dog. The second is pouch, as in the thing with the hole. The third is pocket.

28:46Self-explanatory. Mm-hmm. The fourth is poach, as in the eggs.

28:55And the last is poach, as in steal the rabbits. Yeah. Thanks, Janika. This is a big one. Yeah, there's a lot here. I think we're going to have to take this pair-wise and see where it breaks. So, let's start out with pouch and pocket. Related or not? Related. Yeah, I'm feeling related.

29:22I think so, too. I think these are doublets. I think they're probably French. I feel like the et is a diminutive. Oh, yeah, like a pouch et. Can I ask a question? Sure. I frequently buy, like, ready meals in pouches. Hmm. And when I write it down in my shopping list, and also when I wrote it down here, I always second-guess myself on the first vowel if it's supposed to be spelled with an O or with an A. And I think it's supposed to spell with an O.

29:53Yeah. But, Ben, can you please say this word? Pouch. That is an A. That's just an A. You can't go around here. You know what I've just realized, actually? We should probably chuck another one in there. I'm sorry to add to the list, Daniel. Oh, no. Yeah. Paunch. Oh. Paunch? Gosh. Paunch is like a- A little belly. A belly that men typically get as they get older. Oh. Anyway, anyway, anyway. Sorry.

30:23I'm just- No, I'm ignoring that. Yeah, yeah. We all think that these are related, and they are. Okay. Pouch comes from Old French poche, which means a purse, or a poke. Hmm. Poke. Like a pig in a poke. In Modern French, poche also means pocket. Okay. Okay. C'est de pâtes d'aloir avec de poche. Pocket goes back to Anglo-Norman pocket, and then to Old North French poc, which is bag. So, they both come from a French word meaning bag, which sounded like poc or poche or something

30:56like that. Mm-hmm. Okay. Next one. Let's go with poach the eggs and poach to steal. Hey, if you want to make poached eggs, you have to steal them first. For the record, poaching is when you hunt illegally, right? Correct. Yes. You don't go into like a farm and steal a rabbit and keep it alive. That's not poaching. Oh, you could- No, I think you could probably call that poaching as well. No, but you would eat the rabbit. You wouldn't take it home for a pet, and that's not poaching. Oh, so when Peter liberates rabbits, they're not poaching, yeah.

31:28Yeah, that I would say we would not use the word poaching for. Got it. You're hunting them, yeah. So, my idea is when you poach an egg, you have to put them into like a little pocket. Oh, that's true. Hmm. Okay. And you can pocket things is another word for stealing.

31:47That's true. Oh, Hedwig on fire. Hmm. Okay. Interesting. So, I'm going to say poached, poached, related, and they're all related. I don't know about the dog one, though. I'm leaving that up to later discussion. We'll come to that in round three. I was actually going to say poach and poach. I'm struggling to come up with the through line here. Unless you, like, unless all of the animals that were stolen got, like, boiled as a form of cooking. I'm struggling to see the connection between the things.

32:20So, I think it's, I'm going to go with unrelated. Related, because I'm just, I'm not backing my own intelligence on this one. I said related because the sound of the word, I know it's a short word, but I just feel like going back that far with a word so short, oh, it's probably part of this constellation in a way that I don't understand. So, I'm going related. Answer. Sorry, Ben. These are related. Okay. Now, the poach to steal, the related sense here is you're poking yourself into someone's

32:51property, probably. Okay. Oh, poking us and poking your head up. Sort of, yes. And to poach eggs, as you say, Hedwig, it's really to just put them in a pocket, because maybe, like, you're either putting it in an enclosure or the white of the egg becomes a pocket for the yolk or something like that. Now, I know this is going to come across as me being really defensive about losing, but to poke your head up in someone's pocket, what?

33:24How is that related? The problem is what he said earlier. He said that pouch and pocket both come from French poche, which meant both bag and poking. That's our problem. Right. Okay. And how that word means both of those two things, we can start to write about. Wait, but then, hang on. Does that then mean, like, are we, if I may be so bold, I know we always get, like, rules lawyer on this stuff, but what's it called when we have the same word that means two entirely

33:57different things? Well, do we think that they're related or not? Because we use different... Well, but that's what I'm saying. Like, do we think the original word for poking and bag were related just because it was the same word? Because we have words in English that are the same word, but mean entirely different things. So, if we think they're unrelated, we call them homonyms or homophones because they're spelled and or pronounced the same way. So, bank of a river and bank where you put your money, I believe, are not related. They just happen to be the same.

34:27Or are they? Am I wrong? No, they secretly are. They both, the bank is a raised area where you do your money stuff and the river bank is a raised area and they both are related to bench. But is every sense of bank related? Every single one? Yes. Because there's a fuckload of them. The noun. There's 10 in WordNet. That's a tilted bit of the road and that is a raised area. There's a bunch of switches, a bank of switches, and that is a raised sort of thing.

34:58They all share that. Oh, okay. All right. Okay. But, so let me just take this as round three. Okay. Here's where things stand. We've seen that pouch and pocket go back to a word that's kind of like poke, a kind of bag, and poach, the eggs and the stealing, go somehow back to poke to jab or to thrust or insert. Are they the same poke, the bag form and the jabbing or prodding form? Do you think they're the same?

35:28This is the problem because what I was thinking, when you pocket something, like, when you're reaching for something into a bag, you're sticking your hand in. Ah. Put your hand in. And if it's one of those, what if it's one of those, like, its own antonym kind of a thing, you know? Like, both being the thing that encloses and the act of sticking something into something enclosed. Into the closure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Well, she just tickled herself pink.

36:00She is. Check her out. Okay. The answer for this one could be related, but maybe not. This one is very murky. To poke someone, to jab someone, goes back to a Proto-Germanic root, pook. And from there, we just don't know. A poke like a bag, the OED says, goes back to a different word, meaning poke a dagger. Because you poke somebody with a dagger, I suppose. But if you go to Edom Online, the Online Edomology Dictionary, they say all of them are probably

36:32from Proto-Germanic pook. So, sources differ. We just don't know. Let's move on, though. And now this fucking dog. To pooch. Yeah. Related to any? Do you think, Hedwig, it sounds like you're feeling like pooch is out in space all by itself. Yeah. That's what I thought. I don't like. Yeah. Ben? Well, I mean, at this point, I just need to steer into the skid and I need to be the one, the discordant voice in this little thing. And God damn it, I'll be wrong again.

37:02But I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with belated. I cannot even begin to articulate why or how. Let me, let me think. Can I come up with any sort of a thing? Because, Hedwig, I've got to be, I've got to be honest, you've been like swinging for the fucking bleachers with identifying all of the different ways that this like, you're like the person with the red string on the cork board on this sheet. Like, fuck. You can put a dog into a bag. Yep. You can put it into a pocket. I don't know if you should.

37:29Well, if it's a very, you know, nice. People used to transport small animals around in bags, right? And maybe, maybe I know we used to treat dogs really badly back in the times that we're talking about. And maybe you would, you would kick or poke like the curs on the street all the time or something like that. So like a pooch was a, was a thing you would just like hit with a stick to get away from your tannery or something. I don't know. Ben, I'm so sorry. You're wrong again. Pooch is not related to any. Well, the answer is no one knows, but probably not. My guess connected to nothing is it's related to puppy, which is related to a doll.

38:05But I, but I really do not know. So thanks, Johnica. That was a tricky one, but what an interesting walk around some words with unexpected connections. This one is one from Eleanor on Patreon who asks, caddy, like a container or a case. You could have a tea caddy. You could have a shower caddy. And says Eleanor, I also just learned that a golf push caddy is a thing. Oh yeah. Which also is the name for the person, right? Yeah.

38:35And then the caddy, the person who carries a golfer's clubs. Yeah. Well, oh, okay. This seems like it's going to be a very short one. That shouldn't be related. That's just a case of like something that's next to something. And we. It's the carrying is the related sense. The only other sense of caddy that I know is the American slang for Cadillacs. Cadillacs and I'm maybe Cadillac sponsored a golf tournament once and they all like, and

39:07they call them caddy. That's the only possible funky little thing I could come up with. They do drive around in little cars. No, I'm thinking. No, I'm thinking. Cadillac's not related. Sure. Yeah. I don't think that I'm, I'm pulling a very long ball on that one. I think this is fully related. It's a thing that carries a thing. I think it's totally related. I can't see how it's not. Yeah. I think they're just next to each other. They don't even need to both be carrying things. They're just. But the caddy person is carrying the caddy bag and therefore.

39:39We call it the caddy. It just jumps. Simple. Simple. Because, and you know, Daniel, this is your fault for bringing this up. There is nothing in this world. I hate more than golf. So, uh, it, it behooves me to acknowledge that, uh, golf second only possibly to sailing and terms of a sport is the most ridiculous elite snooty and up yourself possible enterprise a person can play. So of course, of course, the people who are hiring human beings to carry their shit.

40:12Cause they're lazy fat fucks who don't know what to do about themselves would call it the name of the thing, the little human is dragging around. We all do that. Like they're not even there. That's not even derogatory. Like things being next to each other dump all the time. I was just imagining like, what if you had like, like a parrot, like a scary movie where you could see all the word meanings jumping around?

40:35Like all those parasites? That's horrifying. Yeah. I don't want that at all. I want that. Okay. So it sounds like we all think that's related and like really obviously related. Yeah. Not related. But get the fuck out of here. Fuck off. Who's this person? Unexpectedly not related. All right. Let's hear it. The shower caddy, the thing that carries things, comes from Malay. Katty, a unit of weight equal to a measure of tea. The meaning jumped to the container. It was sometimes spelled katty, C-A-T-T-Y.

41:05The caddy who carries the clubs is a form of the French word cadet, a student military officer. I mean, the one thing I will say is I'm satisfied that the true answer for how the golf caddy got its name only further makes those pompous assholes look like total dweebs. Oh, yes. Get the cadets down here to carry the clubs.

41:33Oh, surely if a world leader likes golf a lot, they're an okay person. Come on. So much hate in my heart. Well done, Eleanor, of like, yeah, Malay and French are different. Because sometimes we have like, this word comes from like French or Italian and it's like... This one's coming, by the way, from Dr. Hedwig Huirgaard. French and Malay, different.

42:00I mean, maybe all English is ultimately related. They're all spoken by humans. Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. But... Not related and it's not even close. By the way, is a cad related to a caddy? Oh, like a fast and loose person. Yes, a cad and a bounder. Yeah, I guess so. Like a cadet, right? Like a young, untrustworthy male. Cat. Cad. You, sir, are a cad. Wow. Ben says yes. I reckon it comes from cadet.

42:31Yeah, I reckon it comes from cadet. It comes from cadet. Cadet. It's just a shortening. Any time the explanation is young men being dickheads could lead to this word. It's like, well, that's probably the answer. Oh, that's what it is. Thanks, Eleanor. And finally, one from Benjamin with background noise via SpeakPipe. Hi, Tim. I'm Benjamin. I'm a speaker of British English based in Paris. And I'm a big fan of the show. And we're related or not for you.

43:02In US English, the musical note with four little tails is called a 64th note. But in British English, there's a hemi, demo, semi-quaver. He uses a half of a half of a half of a quaver. Hemi, demo, semi-quaver. Hemi, demo, and semi. They all rhyme. They all mean the same thing. So are they related? Thank you.

43:28Okay. What do you think? Hemi, demo, and semi. Can we just, because I couldn't quite make it out. Could we also recover what the American version of this is? A 64th note. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very short. Very short. Yeah, I'm guessing this is a real, like, metal jazz sort of application. There are classical works where you got to just run that thing. I learned a new word with Demi the other day. Demigirl.

43:58Demigirl? I do not notice. It's like... Half a girl. Sort of, my understanding is, like, a gender identity where you're like, yeah, I'm mostly a girl. Cool. So, like, the fem genderization version of monogamish and heteroflexible. Ah. I like it. No, I think it's just, like, most of the times I feel like a girl. Sometimes I feel, like, a bit non-binary or something. Yeah, that's what I mean. So, like, monogamish is like, I'm mostly monogamous, but every now and then there is something else. Yeah.

44:28Yeah. Anyway, I just learned that word, demigirl. I thought it was pretty good. There you go. Okay. Hemi, demi, semi. All Greek, I'm going to say. And we also have hemispheia, demi as in, like, half, and we have semi as in semifinals, which are very apropos right now, which are the thing before the final. So, and I think that's the same as, like, it would be the same as, like, saying a half final, a semifinal, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why they don't say demi, um, final, because I thought demi also meant-

45:02It could be a demigod. That's where I mostly hear it.

45:07Demigod. Hercules is a demigod. He's a half god. Correct. Mm. Correct. Jesus Christ was a demigod. S and D. Surprisingly close in the phonetic system. Just one is fricative and one is a stop. They're not that far apart. S and D. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So. Hmm. Hemi, though. Hemisphere. This is a good one. Are they all related? For my money, right, would we say that micro and macro would be related? Oh, that's interesting.

45:38Yeah. Don't know, why are you doing this? My question here is, if you've got words that are structurally similar, but have just one letter that's different, and they semantically, like if we were playing semantle, you would be getting like twos and threes, or no, what's the high score in semantle? I think we're really talking about genetic relation here. You know what? I've come around to the way that you guys have been thinking. So what I'll try to do in future puzzles is not say, are they related or not?

46:11But in what way are they related? Is it genetic? Is it transmitted across? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did it grow together later? I'll try to be more specific about that as we go. But now let's stick to Hemi, Demi, and Semi. So one possibility is that they are all related, and that the Hemi depends on what's coming after or before. So like when this Hemi thing is paired with such and such a word, you get semi, when it's paired with such and such a word, but it's like a phonological thing and not a meaning thing. If it's that, I would argue they're all related.

46:43Okay. I can't think of a Demi-se thing. Like there's Hemi-sphere and there's Semi-circle. So already we're in trouble. It could also just have been like that in Greek and then it's all the patterns get lost. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess that they are all related and the differentiation was deliberate because of instances exactly like this musical note where people felt like they needed to further halve or delineate something that had already been halved or delineated.

47:17So they didn't want to go Hemi-Hemi something. So they were like Semi-Hemi and then Semi-Hemi-Demi. Um, so I reckon they're all related and people like one of them is probably the oldest one and then some other ones came along later specifically to be able to do exactly what this note does. I think Hemi and Semi are related. We have seen how H in Greek turned to S in English or Latin, like hepta and septa meaning seven or herpetology is the thing when you study.

47:52Serpents. Serpents. Mm-hmm. So I think H and S is very plausible. I just think that Demi is its own thing. I think it's probably related to Dua, two, because when you split something in two, that's half. So I think D is on its own. Demi is its own thing. Okay. I got a nine. Hedwig, what did you think? All related? All related. So the answer is, I was right on the division, but not the meaning. Oh. So both Semi and Hemi are from Proto-Indo-European root Semi, which means half, semi.

48:25Demi doesn't come from two, but from Latin, dimidius, which means a half. The D is dis, meaning a part. The medius just means in the middle. It's cut apart in the middle. Okay, okay, okay, okay. There we go. I'll allow it. But then over time, it's some sort of analogous thing has happened so that they're more alike. Yes, I think you're right. I think it would be fair to say that Demi is growing closer to Hemi and Semi based on that model. So is that related?

48:55Well, in one sense, yes. And in another sense, no. Clearly Hemi and Semi are more related in that way. Thank you, Benjamin. And thanks to Hugh for that theme song. If you want to send us your related or nots, we are being inundated. With lots of great related or not clues here. And if you want to send us one of those, please do. And also, we'll take a jingle. If you got one, just send that to hello at becauselanguage.com or get in touch with us on the socials. And keep using SpeakPipe because it's so cool to hear your voices. We're here with Daniel Hahn, translator and author of If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art

49:41of Shakespeare in Translation. Daniel, thanks so much for coming and being on the show. Thanks for having me on. Great to be here. So you're a translator. What does a translator do?

49:54I'm glad you asked that because it's a more complicated question than I think it suggests. The short answer is I translate things between languages. But the slightly longer answer is I try to translate every aspect of the things that I'm translating between languages. So I think it's easy to assume maybe that translation is about meaning, or at least is only about meaning. You know, you figure out what something means in language X, and then you figure out how to say it in language Y.

50:25And that's part of it. But because writing isn't only about meaning, translating is also not just about meaning. So I'm thinking about the translation of the time writing in a quite multidimensional way. So I'm trying to figure out how to keep everything, change everything, because, you know, all the words are going. The way I think of it is, you know, when I'm translating a novel, I'm trying to produce a book that is exactly the same, except for all the words. But like other than the words, all of which I'm changing, every other part of the thing I

50:59would like to preserve somehow. That's amazing. Keep everything the same, except every single word. Well, maybe not every single word. Pretty much, though. That's the idea, right? So I'm starting with, you know, 60,000 words in Portuguese, and I'm making something which is 58,000 or 62,000 words in English. All of the words will be different, except, you know, the character names, usually, but not always. But it has to be the same, not just in, like, the general plot, but in the feel and in the

51:33register and in the rhythm and the pace of it and the way the characters sound different from each other. All those things that make up writing make up translation, which is a kind of writing. But of course, you can't keep everything the same, because language being what it is, everything has shades of meaning and differences in culture. So I guess you've got to keep everything the same as long as that is relevant. You've got to keep relevant things the same. You've got to keep relevant things the same, and it means that you're often making a determination.

52:04You're often going, like, I could preserve this double meaning, but if I keep the double meaning, I end up losing something else. So it's often about making choices and deciding what to prioritize. But it's also about taking advantage of the things that your language will allow, the language you're translating into will allow. So it's not just thinking, well, unfortunately, I have to lose a little bit here because English won't do all 17 things that this word in French does. But it's also going, well, actually, what does my language allow me to do?

52:37Where can I take opportunities, just like the original language did as well? So yes, it's about making choices and, in one sense, compromises. But it's also about taking opportunities, which I think is part of the fun. Do you mind if I ask, which languages do you have command over when you're translating? So I translate mostly from Portuguese and Spanish. I do a bit from French also. I have little snippets of other things, but those are the ones I don't speak particularly

53:08well, but I read very comfortably and with sort of nuance, you know. English is the only language I can write well, I think, I hope. And so I translate in one direction. I translate from languages that I can read into a language I can write. I want to focus on Spanish because it's the one language that I also know very well out of those, although I have some command over French. What does Spanish let you do that English doesn't? What's it good for? Spanish has, for example, the fact that Spanish is a gendered language.

53:41And so it means that every noun is going to have a gender and every adjective is going to have a gender if it agrees with a noun. That conveys information that in English we don't always convey. Spanish can use verbs without pronouns, which we cannot do in English. So if you're trying to create ambiguity, I translated a novel a few years ago, a Chilean novel, which begins with a line of dialogue that is, in Spanish it's no ha comido, which

54:14either means she hasn't eaten or he hasn't eaten. And in Spanish the ambiguity is deliberate. In English it's very hard to create a phrase that makes it, that keeps that thing, that keeps that thing open. Spanish has at least two different ways of saying you, the pronoun you, which we don't in modern English. Shakespeare did, two hundred, four hundred years ago. It's true. You know, he could say, thou and you, and we just say you, you, you, you, whether it's one person or many, formal or informal.

54:45And to Spanish you can make those kind of determinations. And one of the things that was fun about working on this, this book I've just done about Shakespeare translations was thinking about what are the particularities of individual languages, so Spanish as you ask, but also then becoming aware of, alongside that, what are the things