The Linguistics Iceberg Explained

Language, it's what I'm using to talk to you right now. The thoughts I have in my brain are being transferred to your brain because I'm making mouth sounds that you interpret as symbols of meaning.

Today, I'll be flipping things in on themselves and using language to talk about language itself. I'm sure you're familiar with the iceberg format. I'll be talking about a bunch of different topics, and as the video goes on, those topics become increasingly obscure and strange. Let's go.

Octopi: The Unbearable Agony of Referring to Octopus in the Plural

I'm a firm believer that every single English speaker has had a conversation like this. "Yeah, man, so I was at the aquarium, and there were a bunch of octopuses." Or is it octopi? That doesn't sound right either. Who cares? It turns out that the "quote-unquote" correct pluralized form is indeed octopuses. This is just one example of how weird and inconsistent plurals can be in the English language.

The reason this happens has to do with where the words come from. Octopus comes from Greek, rather than Latin. And in Greek, they would pluralize it to octopodes. Instead of doing that, English takes the Greek word and gives it a more familiar English inflection: octopuses.

One of my favorite examples of weird English plurals is what happens when you use the plural rule of one word on another. You have one ox, you have many oxen. You have one fox, so you must therefore have many foxen. But no, you have many foxes. I tend to prefer foxen, though.

French Silent Letters

102 take two. Ah, the French. Champagne. Ah, the French. The wine, the cheese, the baguettes, and the excessive use of silent letters. Here's a particularly egregious example that a Tumblr user pointed out. No language should be mocked other than French.

"Birds" is "oiseaux" in French. No letter is pronounced the way it should, and there are seven of them. It's pronounced "wazo." And yes, I will die mad about it. "Walzo" hits every vowel in the French alphabet and manages to only be pronounced with two goddamn syllables.

Dearest creature in creation, there's a famous poem called "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité, which is basically just a long rant making fun of bizarre quirks in English spelling. Here are some passages:

"Dearest creature in creation,

Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse.

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Susie, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear,

So shall I. Oh, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet.

Make my coat look new, dear, so it

Just compare. Heart, beard, and herd,

Dies and diet, lord and word.

Now I surely will not plague you

With such words as vague and ague,

But be careful how you speak,

Say: break, steak, but bleak and streak."

Tower of Babel

The Hebrew Babel contains a story called the Tower of Bible. Wait, the other way around. Supposedly, the story explains why people speak different languages around the world. In the beginning, all of humanity was united in one language. They traveled east to Shinar in South Mesopotamia, where they built a city. The city contained a tall tower stretching to the top of the sky. Yahweh saw this tower and was a bit mad about it because he figured that it was just a clever attempt to avoid a second flood. In retaliation, he decided to discombobulate their language so they couldn't understand each other and then scattered everybody around the world.

Duolingo

Duolingo, the edtech app with a cute owl logo designed to help people learn languages. Seems like that's a strictly good thing, right? Well, the problem with learning languages with apps like these is that their primary focus isn't actually to teach you the language. As with any other tech company, the goal is to keep you on the app as long as possible. It doesn't give you any lessons on grammatical rules or structures, and instead, it uses a system where you answer quizzes and repeat patterns until the penny drops and you eventually get it.

Generally, when you teach people a second language, you actually show them the grammatical structures first before jumping into examples and tests, so that the learner doesn't have to magically figure it out through trial and error. If you really want to pick up a second language, taking a proper course or studying in a more traditional way with books is probably going to be a much better use of your time. Even watching a foreign film with subtitles is probably better than Duolingo.

I will say, though, that Duolingo might be useful as a supplementary tool alongside real studying, or maybe you're in a situation where you learned a second language a while ago and just need a refresher. There's not much else to say about this topic aside from some mildly funny memes about how the Duolingo owl is an abusive teacher, constantly threatening its users to learn languages.

Omelette du Fromage

This is a reference to a meme from the Cartoon Network show Dexter's Lab. In one episode, Dexter is studying for a French test last minute by learning while he sleeps. The recording ends up skipping and repeating the phrase "omelette du fromage" over and over all night.

So when he wakes up, that's all he can say in French. The phrase means "cheese omelette."

Pig Latin

If you were ever a child who had recess, you're probably familiar with this language game. It involves transforming words by moving the first consonant to the end and adding "ay." The goal is usually to be able to speak in a kind of code language adults supposedly can't understand. So it's kids only, no adults allowed. Unbeknownst to the kids, those adults probably did the exact same thing when they were younger and can understand absolutely everything they say. Time is a flat circle.

Here's an example: "Like and subscribe" would turn into "Iclay andyay obscribesay."

Say, funnily enough, this fake language actually follows some structural rules. The easiest words to translate start with consonant sounds. "Coffee" becomes "offeecay." Some other words start with a single sound that is formed by multiple consonants, or a consonant cluster, if you will. So the entire sound is shifted. "Squid" becomes "id-squay." And finally, some words start with vowels, so you just add "way" or "yay" at the end. "Andya."

In 2003, they actually did an analysis of Pig Latin at the Linguistic Society of America. They ended up finding variation in dialects across different communities of school kids, which is kind of interesting.

Hardest and Easiest Language

A language being easy or hard to learn is pretty subjective and really depends on the languages you speak to begin with. But humans are stubborn and really love to rank things. In a series of tiers, the Foreign Service Institute in the U.S. created a list to rank how long it usually takes to learn different languages as an English speaker. By "learn," they mean reaching a specific competency level in speaking and reading, so it's still sort of objective.

These languages are the easiest and take 23 to 24 weeks to learn. The easiest of all of these is apparently Spanish, according to data from the language learning platform Basu. Next, German is in a category of its own, taking 30 weeks. Then we have Indonesian, Malaysian, and Swahili, which each take 36 weeks. And then we have a colossal list for Category 4, which takes 44 weeks and includes mostly Eastern European languages. And finally, we have Category 5, taking 88 weeks to learn, and includes Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

The hardest of these is likely Mandarin, which has over 10,000 characters. You only really need to know about 3,000 of them to be considered fluent, but that's still quite a lot. Mandarin is also what's known as a tonal language, where the specific tone of your speech changes the meaning of a word. We have a bit of that in English, like rising intonation when we ask questions. For example, the word "ma" in Mandarin can mean mom, numb, horse, or to curse, depending on your tone.

American Monolingualism

The pervasive meme of the ignorant American, sheltered monolinguals who refused to learn any language besides English. "Speak American, God dang it!" and so forth. A New York Times article from 2012 actually challenged this assumption by looking into how the U.S. census actually works. Since 1980, the census question about language asked, "Does this person speak a language other than English at home?" As of 2009, about 20% of Americans answered yes to this, which seems kind of low. But the article argues that this data is misleading, since asking what someone speaks at home is not necessarily the same as asking whether someone can speak more than one language.

In general, I'm a fluent French speaker, thanks to the Canadian French immersion program I was part of in school, but I've only ever spoken English at home. Loads of people probably have similar circumstances, like learning a second language for work, soldiers who might have learned some Arabic while abroad, or even Duolingo users.

The European Commission census from 2006 had a 56% multilingual rate, but their question was, "Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue?" which is quite a bit more broad. So purely based on this data, we can't say for sure if Americans really are more likely to be monolingual than the rest of the world.

Faux Cyrillic

Cyrillic script is a collection of characters used in various languages in this area of the world. Some of the characters look pretty cool, so sometimes people substitute them for similar-looking letters in Latin script. This is called faux Cyrillic, and graphic designers often use it to give off a Soviet vibe. Some versions of Tetris were spelled like this, with a backwards "R" to remind people about the game's Russian origins. The movie Borat was also sometimes stylized like this, with an "A" swapped out for Cyrillic.

Quick Brown Fox

If you're familiar with downloading fonts, you've probably heard the following sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This sentence contains every letter in the alphabet. When you're installing a new font on your computer, Windows will preview the font for you with this sentence to give you an idea of what all the letters look like. Old-school typewriting handbooks and instruction manuals also often used it as a typing exercise. Microsoft Word also used to have a command to auto-type the sentence, presumably to use it as a font preview.

This kind of sentence is called a pangram, and there are a few others: "Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex." "How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!" "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." I think the quick brown fox one is the easiest to remember, though, which is probably why it took off.

German Is Angry

There are a lot of memes about German being a sort of inherently angry-sounding language. Science, science. I think it's fair to say that a big reason for this is that a lot of people's first impressions of the German language is old footage of Hitler's shouting angry speeches in school. Most non-German people never watch kid shows in German or relaxing nature documentaries narrated in German, so their only exposure to it is the terrifying ramblings of a brutal tyrant. That would definitely sour the reputation of that language in your mind.

The phonetics of the German language also might help explain why it might sound harsh. Fricatives, like the sounds in these clips, are used quite a lot. Sounds might come off as abrasive because they involve creating a lot of friction in the mouth, and these sounds also don't appear in English. So, no, German isn't inherently angry. It just sounds that way because of the associations we have and the lack of familiarity with some of its sounds.

Very Long German Words

Along with sounding angry, German also has the reputation of having hilariously long words. The reason for this is pretty simple: a lot of the time, German words are just combinations of nouns stuck together. In English, we usually cluster nouns together as modifiers, like "business computing solution" or "online real-time cloud data management view" or "massively multiplayer online role-playing game." But in German, there are never any spaces between the words in this structure. They're all treated as one word, like "bodyguard" or "doghouse." In English, the word for glove is "handshaw" or "hand shoe."

The longest German word is 63 characters. In fact, this word is so long that it automatically shifted to the next line in the script document I'm writing right now. The word refers to a food safety law that existed in 2013, and it's basically a full phrase mashed together in one word: "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz." Compare that to one of the longest English words, "antidisestablishmentarianism," sitting in only 28 characters and referring to the opposition to the separation of church and state. Separating the church and state is disestablishment, and someone advocating for that position is a disestablishmentarian. So being opposed to them makes you a believer in anti-disestablishmentarianism.

This entry is also an excuse to mention some of the funny German words I've encountered: "Geburtenkontrollpille" (birth control pills), "Kabelsalat" (cable salad, directly translates to "cable salad" and refers to the familiar mess of tangled cables that you might find under your desk), "Zahnfleisch" (tooth meat, is your gums), "Türsteher" (door stander, is a bouncer), "Sonntagsangst" (Sunday anxiety, a strange feeling of restless boredom when there's nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon), "Sitzpinkler" (a man who sits down to pee and has the connotation of a wimp), "Backpfeifengesicht" (a face that's in need of a fist, or in other words, a punchable face), and no list like this is complete without "Schadenfreude" (taking pleasure in the misfortune of others).

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

This is a reference to an absurdly long village name in Wales, the second longest in the world, in fact, behind this place in New Zealand. I won't attempt to pronounce it and instead, I'll show you this viral clip from 2015 of a weatherman pronouncing it perfectly: "With cloudy skies but in the sunshine in Northwest Wales, it's Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. The temperature got to 21 Celsius, or 70 Fahrenheit."

Ampersand Origin

I'm a big fan of the Ampersand, mostly because it's very satisfying to write out, much like the treble clef, which was my favorite part of music class in elementary school because my alto sax technique was pretty weak. The symbol itself originated with Roman cursive. Later, during the Renaissance, the Ampersand as we might recognize it today was born to denote "et," which means "and" in Latin and Romance languages like French and Italian.

For a long time, the English alphabet actually included the Ampersand as the 27th letter, and it was taught to children in school. This is actually where the term "Ampersand" comes from. Students were taught to end the ABC's rhyme with "X, Y, Z, and per se, and," which was often slurred to "Ampersand" by bored children struggling to pay attention in class.

Untranslatable Words

People seem to really love the idea that some foreign words don't have any equivalent in English. It's a compelling idea that other languages have ordinary words for concepts that are so otherworldly to us that we couldn't even understand them if we tried. It reinforces this appealing idea that the world is so mysterious that it's impenetrable to our understanding.

A common example of this is "utepils," which is supposedly a Norwegian word for sitting outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. It's a charming thought that they would have an entire word dedicated to this. "Wow, this really seems to reveal something about their laid-back culture and priorities." But alas, it's not even a verb; it's a compound noun of "ute" (outside) and "pils" (beer), so it just means "an outside beer," which is a lot less evocative.

Another one is "sgriob," a Gaelic word for the itchiness of anticipation on your upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. The fact that there's a whole word for this in Gaelic, well, in English we need a full phrase to describe it, surely shows us something about the Gaelic way of life. They must be such whiskey enthusiasts since they have full-on words to describe the minutia of the whiskey experience. Unfortunately, the dictionary definition is much less specific and just means "a scratch or a scrape."

The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum actually wrote a brutal response to this myth of untranslatable words: "I happen to know a one-syllable word, 'turd,' for a piece of excrement shaped by its expulsion from the anal sphincter, but that doesn't reveal a lot about my ways and priorities. It is a completely meaningless and useless random factoid about the lexicon of the language I happen to grow up speaking. That lexicon also contains 'scrum,' 'buttercup,' 'ogre,' 'bong,' and 'thorium.' If you try to form an impression of my ways and priorities from such things, you're a [ __ ]!"

But it's not all entirely fake. The word "saudade" is often described as untranslatable by Portuguese speakers and means a nostalgic feeling of missing someone or something you love. It may be true that English doesn't have a single word for this concept, but we also have "homesickness," which communicates a similar sentiment. And even then, the idea of the word is getting at can still be translated to any language. No concept is truly unique to any particular language.

Ghoti Vs. Sauce

The greatest of all time, recently covered this in one of his shorts. This is a perfectly pronounceable way of spelling "fish." You take the "gh" sound from "enough" or "tough," then you add the "o" sound from "women," and finally, the "ti" sound from "nation" or "motion." Put it all together, and you get "fish." This meme also made an appearance in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: "ghoti" smells "fish." As with most of Finnegans Wake, it's pretty much impenetrable if you don't know the reference.

Esperanto

Language barriers. There are a lot of spoken languages around the world, and most people only speak one or two of them. This can lead to problems, particularly before Google Translate existed. In 1887, a man by the name of L.L. Zamenhof tried to fix this by inventing an entirely new language: Esperanto, which translates into English as "one who hopes." Zamenhof was a major language enjoyer; he spoke Russian, German, French, Polish, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. He was frustrated with cultural divides, racism, and nationalism and wanted to aspire towards a society with world peace where everybody could live and communicate together in harmony. That was his hope with Esperanto, that it would act as a universal second language that world leaders could use to communicate in a neutral tongue without the help of translators or relying on one party to speak the other party's language. If everyone could speak Esperanto, anyone could communicate with anyone else.

Initially, things were looking pretty good, and it was almost selected as the official language for the League of Nations, but it ultimately lost by one vote. Unfortunately, you could probably tell already that Zamenhof's dreams never came true, since chances are you don't speak Esperanto as a second language.

Esperanto ended up getting brutally oppressed in Nazi Germany, Spain, and the Soviet Union. Mein Kampf actually specifically describes Esperanto as a threat that could be used as part of a Jewish conspiracy. Esperanto speakers were killed during the Holocaust, including Zamenhof's family in the concentration camps. There were instances of prisoners teaching each other Esperanto and telling the guards that they were just speaking Italian. The Nazis were cool with that since they were allied with Italy, but they were also too dumb to realize that it wasn't actually Italian.

These days, Esperanto is still kicking, with somewhere around 2 million people around the world who know how to speak it. Even though it ultimately failed in its mission, I think Esperanto would have been pretty cool if it took off, and Zamenhof's original goal was noble, to say the least.

100 Words for Snow

You might have heard a fun fact before that Northern indigenous groups have a hundred different words for snow. These groups are sometimes called Eskimo, but that's often considered a pejorative, so terms like Inuit or Yupik people are often used instead. The origin of this idea traces back to work by the anthropologist Franz Boas in the early 20th century. Franz never actually counted the amount of words they had for snow. It turns out that their languages have about the same amount of root words that refer to snow as English, with root words for snowflakes, normal snow, slush, blizzard, drift, and a few others.

Instead, what Franz pointed out was that their language structures allowed them to generate way more single words related to snow compared to English. Some linguists around this time took this as evidence for the idea that the vocabulary of a given language is directly connected to the speaker's worldview and way of life, which is known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which will come up again later.

Over the years, these findings started to become sensationalized, with the number of words increasing over time and culminating in an article from The New York Times from 1984 describing a tribe that distinguishes a hundred types of snow. But this is misleading, and the specific numbers are totally made up. Their language follows a root word structure, so there are nearly infinite different words that you can conceivably generate related to snow or any other root word, for that matter.

According to research in 2003, there was a blog post on Uncle Jasper's Gallimaufry, which went on to become a popular meme among Facebook Boomers. This is the meme: "According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter what word order the letters in a word are. The only important thing is that the first and last letters are in the right place. The rest can be a total mess, and you can still read it without a problem. This is because we do not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole." The meme spread quickly across other blogs, Live Journals, and a website called Language Hat, with some people creating versions in French and Portuguese as well. I wasn't able to find any source on this from the University of Cambridge, but there is a paper from the University of Edinburgh from early 2003 that might have been the inspiration.

Click Consonants

Some languages in Africa, as well as some Aboriginal languages in Northern Australia, include very rare click consonants. They might sound very strange when you first hear them, since very few languages in the world contain these sounds. In my language, I will say English does have the dental click sound in one instance: "tsk." We also have the lateral click that we use sometimes when we're frustrated. These types of uses are a bit different, though, since they're used on their own as interjections, similar to "huh," "um," "ouch," or "wow." Whereas in the African languages that use clicks, they often use them at the start of a full word.

Army and a Navy

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." This is a witty phrase attributed to the sociolinguist Max Weinreich, who supposedly heard it from a student at one of his lectures. Dialects are basically particular types of speech that can be distinguished from one another based on different vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation. Basically, what this quote is getting at is that the difference between a dialect and a fully-fledged language is totally arbitrary and mostly has to do with the circumstances of governments and social conditions.

Newspeak

Okay, this is literally 1984. But seriously, this term does come from the George Orwell novel that I'm sure all of you have read. That's why it's so high on the iceberg. In the book, the totalitarian government created a new language for the citizens to speak, which heavily restricts vocabulary with the goal of limiting what people can talk about, including things like self-expression, self-determination, or even nuance. The ultimate goal of this system is to prevent people from having any kind of subversive ideas that might disrupt the state.

Rosetta Stone

The year is 1799, and you're a French officer fighting under Napoleon in Egypt and Syria to defend your people's trade interests or whatever. You spot a stone slab with a bunch of inscriptions on the side, and you figure that it might be important. So you go tell your general, Jacques-François Menou, who happens to be stationed in the port city of Rosetta. It turned out that those inscriptions were in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic, and ancient Greek. So this rock, which went on to be called the Rosetta Stone, could allow scholars to decipher hieroglyphics for the first time since we could still understand ancient Greek. Up until that time, most people figured that each hieroglyphic symbol was associated with a full concept, making it ideographic. But nowadays, most linguists believe that's unlikely. The Rosetta Stone is believed to have been part of the temple for their inland around 392 A.D. The Roman Emperor ordered all non-Christian temples to be closed. That temple was probably destroyed, and its pieces were used as building materials.

I now welcome you to the one and only segment in this video: Weird Sentences.

[Music]

This is a Chinese poem from the 1930s titled "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den." Outside of some variation in tone, every single word in the poem is pronounced "shi." It was written by a linguist, surprise, surprise, to demonstrate that although it is perfectly grammatical and coherent, it is impossible to understand when spoken aloud. The literal translation is: "The story of Mr. Shi eating lions."

"James, while John had had "had," had "had had." "Had had" had a better effect on the teacher."

The following sentence is grammatically correct: "James, while John had had "had," had "had had." "Had had" had a better effect on the teacher." As you might expect, this is incomprehensible without someone explaining it. So here's the deal: there are two guys, James and John. Their English teacher asks them to write a sentence about a man who came down with a cold in the past. John writes, "The man had a cold," and James writes, "The man had had a cold." The teacher preferred James' answer and marked his as correct. Here's the sentence again with some punctuation and emphasis: "James, while John had had "had," had "had had." "Had had" had had had had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher."

One thing this sentence shows us, aside from English being weird sometimes, is that there's a big difference between using a word ("I had a coffee") and mentioning a word ("I used the word 'had' in the previous sentence"). And also, punctuation is important.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Noam Chomsky, the guy introducing all the topics in this video through the power of AI voice synthesis, famously said, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." He came up with this sentence to show that you can construct a perfectly grammatical sentence that is also completely meaningless. That is, it has no intelligible semantic content. The subject of the sentence has two adjectives, "colorless" and "green," which already contradict each other, right off the bat. And these adjectives are attributes of "ideas," and it doesn't really make sense for an idea to have a color in the first place. Next, the predicate "sleep furiously" is odd, too, since the adverb "furiously" doesn't really fit conceptually with the verb "to sleep," and supposedly this is an activity that ideas are engaging in. But since ideas are abstract, it makes no sense to describe them as sleeping or being furious. If you instead wrote it as "furiously sleep ideas green colorless," it's no longer grammatical either. This can help us make sense of the difference between syntax (how words and morphemes fit together to form phrases and sentences) and semantics (the way that language is connected to meaning or truth). Chomsky's sentence is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

Now, you're not going to believe this, but once again, this is a perfectly grammatical sentence. It was first created by William Rappaport in 1972 and takes advantage of the different kinds of meanings of the word "buffalo." The first two meanings are pretty familiar: it's a synonym for bison, and it's also a city in New York. But a lesser-known meaning is that it's also a verb that means to bully, confuse, or intimidate. So what does it mean? Well, there's an extremely confusing diagram on the Wikipedia page, so I'll explain it using simple colors: Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in the community, also happen to intimidate other bison in the community. Or, in other words: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Also, "buffalo" isn't the only word you can use to make these kinds of bewildering sentences. As long as the word is both a plural noun and a plural form of a transitive verb, you can use it as well. For example, "die," "ice," "fish," "right," and "smelt" all work as well.

Gendered Articles vs. The

English has words like "the" and "a" called articles. This is a like button. This is the subscribe button. Articles in English are gender-neutral. But some languages, like French, German, Spanish, and loads of others, have gendered articles. Let's talk about French, since that's the one I know best. The gender that words have in French follows some loose rules, usually having to do with the way the word ends, but it's still pretty arbitrary. For example, trees are masculine, and tables are feminine ("la table"). Countries that end in "e" are feminine, like "la France" or "la Chine." But countries that end in a different vowel or consonant are masculine, like "le Canada" or "le Japon." If you're a native speaker of these languages, this isn't really something you think about, since it all comes naturally to you. Of course, trees are boys and tables are girls. But if you're learning it as a second language, like I did with French, it's a bit of a headache trying to remember which inanimate objects are male or female.

Code Switching

Code switching is a phenomenon where you change the way you speak depending on the context you find yourself in, which can involve speaking different languages entirely, different dialects, different accents, or with different grammar and vocabulary. A famous example of this is Black people switching between Standard English and African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE.

A quick aside about this: people often talk about this style of English as incorrect or ungrammatical. Negation might sound like "He didn't go nowhere" or "She don't have nothing," where a double negative doesn't cancel out but instead reinforces the negative, and similar to some non-English languages. Copulas or contractions are sometimes dropped, like "She my mother" instead of "She's my mother" or "She is my mother." AAVE also has an entire tense that Standard English doesn't have: the habitual "be." "He'd be working out" doesn't translate to "He is working out"; it means something like "He is in the habit of working out regularly," even if he isn't actively working out right now. That sentence communicates that it's something he does. It's important to recognize that this is a perfectly legitimate way of speaking English and shouldn't be considered incorrect. It follows its own internally consistent grammatical rules and structures, exactly like Standard English does. This will come up later when I talk about linguistic descriptivism versus prescriptivism.

Okay, now back to code switching. Often, when AAVE speakers are in school, their teachers expect them to speak and write in Standard English. So, as a solution to this, they develop a sophisticated system of code switching, where they continue to speak AAVE to friends, parents, or community members and switch to Standard English at school or during job interviews. An interesting consequence of this is that the challenge of developing this skill offers the same kind of advantages that bilingual people get by learning a second language, like better critical thinking skills or executive function boosters.

Boustrophedon

Are weebs in the audience? Probably familiar with the fact that you read manga backwards, from right to left, since that's how Japanese is written. But what if I told you there was a style of writing that was both forwards and backwards at the same time? That's boustrophedon. Each line of text alternates between normal and reversed, but the reversed part isn't even just right to left; it's fully mirrored. This style of writing was used for a while in ancient Greece but fell out of fashion during the Hellenistic period.

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

It's up here. I alluded to this earlier when I was talking about the myth of a hundred words for snow. This hypothesis suggests that our experience of the world is connected to the language we speak. The strongest version of this idea is that language literally determines the types of thoughts we can think, but most linguists generally don't accept that version. These days, a weaker version states that language just influences the concepts we use and therefore the way we talk about things. You might be familiar with the concept of "Schadenfreude," that I mentioned earlier, taking pleasure at the misfortune of others. But you might not talk about that idea as regularly as a German speaker, where their language has a whole word for it.

A study by Boroditsky in 2011 looked at languages that have gendered articles, like the ones I mentioned earlier. Spanish and German both have gendered language, but the gender of objects varies. They asked speakers of each language to describe various objects, and it turned out that they were more likely to talk about those objects in ways that were consistent with the gendered article of their language. So this shows that the gender system of a language might be connected with how the speakers perceive objects, which is evidence of language impacting the way we interpret the world. But it's also important to mention that Boroditsky's study has been heavily criticized, and the strong conclusions she drew from the studies don't exactly follow the evidence. The conclusions barely make sense when you consider some weird examples, like that "vagina" is masculine in French and "beard" is feminine in Spanish. Gendered articles generally have more to do with the structure and sound of the words than they do with the properties of the concept being intrinsically masculine or feminine.

Descriptivism and Prescriptivism

This dichotomy represents two different attitudes with respect to language. On the one side, we have prescriptivists, who really love following rules and laws and think that there are correct and incorrect ways of using language. This is often the attitude of teachers or newspaper publishers. Here are some examples of their Draconian rules: contractions like "can't" or "don't" are not proper English; double negatives like "I don't disagree" are not proper English; this one is really annoying since it often communicates an entirely different meaning—not disagreeing is not the same as agreeing; and famously, that a sentence should never end in a preposition. If someone asks you, "Which streaming service did you watch Succession on?" that is seen as incorrect, and instead, you should say, "On which streaming service did you watch Succession?" All of these examples might not be appropriate in formal writing, but that doesn't make them incorrect uses of English by any means.

On the other side, we have descriptivism, which is the dominant approach in academic linguistics. Instead of fixating on how language should be spoken, they instead focus on how language speakers actually use language in real life. Here's an argument you might have encountered in a conversation with someone who insists on being pedantic: You might say, "You've read less books than me." His face then turns smug, and he says, "Um, actually, I have read fewer books than you. It's like having less money and fewer dollars." But if that person were less annoying, they would realize that people use "less" all the time in these contexts, so this phrasing is completely legitimate, and they also know exactly what you're trying to say.

Great Vowel Shift

At some point between the 1400s and 1700s, the way that English speakers pronounced vowel sounds gradually changed. Here are some examples of how things shifted:

* "Mart" -> "met" -> "mate"

* "Met" -> "meet"

* "Alt" -> "out"

* "Beat" -> "bait" -> "bite"

There are a couple of theories for why this happened. It might have been because a lot of people migrated to South England from the eastern and central areas after the Black Death, so different dialects clashed with each other. The pretentious London natives wanted to make sure they sounded different from the immigrants by adjusting the way they talk. It also could have been because the wars England had with France at the time might have caused English speakers to overcorrect by changing their pronunciation to sound less French.

Bhutanese Passport

In 2015, there was an argument in the Wikipedia editing section about an audio recording for the page "Bhutanese passport." Someone wrote, "The sound file is ridiculous for this reason. It has become a meme, albeit a minor one, and the source of much humor. The file should be removed until a more appropriate one could be sourced." Someone replied, "LOL, that was so funny, I actually lulled so effing hard, ha! Here's what it sounded like: 'What's your name? Is passed by. I bought one is passport, as I thought. German, which authorizes out of our facilities travel.'"

Later, someone replied and called this criticism racist due to the accent of the speaker in the recording. "Removing this audio file only encourages racism. You don't like it because it doesn't sound like your English dialect. English is a multicultural language, and Wikimedia is a multicultural place where all dialects can co-exist. If this is removed, it would only aid in the destruction of Wikipedia ideals. It would only be replaced with something that sounds more white, but have no change in content. And now we are at the point where any change in content would only be added so that this file can be changed. This is racism, and I won't stand for it."

Someone wrote back saying, "This is no racism. The guy reading it sounds drunk." Which was met with, "Maybe he has a disability, you don't know. Removing is discrimination." There was a long back and forth with people arguing whether they should keep the original recording or add a new one. One person argued that the reader claimed to be a native Bhutanese, which resulted in the accent, but admitted that the sound quality and bizarre auto-tune sound was pretty bad. One person said, "I can't hear any problem with it. Sounds fine to me." Someone else said, "Strong keep, purely for the historical value of the audio. And this talk page will eventually get its own mention in the troll article. Much LOLs. The sound file is a Bhutanese national treasure, and we will not have you committing this erasure of their culture."

After a difficult 40 seconds on YouTube, I was able to find an example of a man and woman from Bhutan speaking English with what must be a Bhutan accent, and here it is: "Tiny little kingdom here is huge and a massive India and Bhutan. Our population is approximately around 700,000 people." The accent in the file sounds nothing like the accent in this video. The file, to me, sounds like A) extremely poor quality and/or intentional use of effects, and B) like someone mocking Asian accents. If this is legitimately the way this person sounds, then keep it regardless of how it sounds to other people, and I will feel awful for having said all this. But until that is verified, this seems extremely fishy and possibly racist to me, especially compared to that YouTube video. Extremely strong keep.

Wii U

"Wii U." Here comes the fun police. Eventually, in March of 2015, the fun police arrived, and it was replaced with a new recording.

Proto-Indo-European

In the 19th century, linguists made a huge breakthrough. They were comparing sounds and words in different languages and theorized the existence of a very old, unwritten language that they called Proto-Indo-European. It turns out that all kinds of languages from English to German to Russian to Danish and loads of others all descended from Proto-Indo-European as their common ancestor.

The word "bear" is particularly interesting. For languages that descended from PIE, most of these languages have a word for it, but it varies quite a lot compared to most words. Supposedly, speaking about bears was considered taboo in some cultures, but not in others. In Latin, "bear" is "ursus," related to the constellation Ursa Major, which contains the Big Dipper. The French word is "ours," which derives from this too. Other PIE languages also follow a similar origin.

But this pattern doesn't apply to Germanic languages like English and German, Slavic languages like Russian or Polish, or Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian. English is "bear," obviously. German is "Bär." Dutch is "beer," and in Danish and Swedish, it's "Björn." All of these derive from the PIE word for "brown," "bher." Ancient people in these areas in the north tended to encounter bears more often but didn't use the common name. Instead, they called it something to the effect of "the brown one."

As for the Slavic languages, bears are called "medved" in both Russian and Czech. For these languages, it means something like "the one who eats honey." Some linguists speculate that in these cultures, using the actual word "bear" was taboo and shouldn't be said explicitly. Why? Well, we're not exactly sure. Perhaps they believed that speaking the bear's name out loud would summon them, so they used a Voldemort-like "he who must not be named" substitute. All we can say for sure is that ancient cultures in Northern Indo-European areas did not have the same cozy impression of bears that Celestial Seasonings do in their sleepy time tea illustration.

Speaking of tea, humans have been drinking this delicious leaf water for thousands of years, and it was originally introduced in China. In fact, tea is the most consumed drink in the world, second only to water. The Chinese word for tea is "chá." The English word "tea" traces back to the Dutch, who got some tea from Southeast Asia and had picked up the pronunciation from Min Chinese. We call some types of tea "chai tea" because the "cha" pronunciation had moved to Persia, where it added the Persian suffix "-yi."

Critical Period Hypothesis

The critical period hypothesis is the idea that the first few years of our lives are extremely important for developing language. If you make it to five years old without being exposed to language, you're basically out of luck, and it would be almost impossible to learn how to speak successfully. A famous piece of evidence for this is Genie, a tragic story that I talked about in my psychological experiment iceberg video. The story is a bummer, so I'll save you the details here. Basically, Genie was prevented from speaking or hearing language for many years and missed her critical period, and so she struggled with language for the rest of her life.

Another example of evidence has to do with deaf people. Deaf people who were never taught sign language as children are never able to learn it as successfully as those who learned it at a young age. Even if they use it daily for as long as 30 years, they missed the critical period.

Voynich Manuscript

This is an interesting mystery. Sometime in the 17th century, a manuscript turned up. The earliest known owner was a man by the name of George Baresch, an alchemist and antique collector. The weird part is that it's handwritten in a completely unknown script known as Voynichese. Carbon dating has shown that it was originally created sometime in the early 15th century. It contains a bunch of strange drawings of plants, astrological signs, and surreal imagery. These kinds of drawings were pretty normal for manuscripts written around this time, but for some strange reason, none of the plants depicted are actually real. The book changed hands multiple times. Some of the owners believed it had some kind of magic powers. What is this? Why does this exist? This is magic powers. It eventually came to light after Wilfred Voynich presented it publicly in 1915.

Everybody from linguists to World War II codebreakers have attempted to figure out what the manuscript says, but none of them have been successful outside of identifying the alphabet. Another weird aspect is it seems completely legit as a genuine language, with the same words and phrases repeating in patterns that are statistically similar to real languages. The writing itself is also in totally steady cursive, which shows that the writer probably didn't have to stop and consult a translation system or codebook. Some people have suspected that it was a hoax, including Voynich himself, but the carbon dating definitively proves it came from the 1400s. Some other people believe it's a very early example of a constructed artificial language. There are some wacky theories too, that it came from Leonardo da Vinci or that it was created by aliens. What do you think the deal with this manuscript is? Leave a comment down below.

Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a constructed language, or conlang, as the community likes to call them. It was created in 2001 by the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang. Out of all the constructed languages, this one is probably the most popular. It's known for being very minimalistic and has less than 200 words. To actually describe anything complicated, you need to break it down into much simpler terms. Sonja Lang wrote, "If English is a thick novel, then Toki Pona is a haiku."

The reason this language was created and why it's used is also pretty interesting. It's almost a philosophical language. Sonja Lang developed it during a period of depression and used Toki Pona to help her through it. Its simplicity was designed to help you concentrate on the simple things in life. As you work through communicating complex ideas by breaking them down into simpler ideas, you realize the underlying simplicity of what you initially thought was complicated. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is tied to this too, which was that idea I mentioned that language affects the way we interface with the world. The structure Toki Pona supposedly influences us to think more positively. If you want to learn more, I would recommend the video series about Toki Pona by the fantastic YouTuber Ian Masali.

"This is a wug. This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two wugs." This is a test created in 1958 by John Berko Gleason to look at how children acquire plural rules in language. Importantly, "wug" is not a real word, so they aren't testing whether children heard how someone else formed that plural. The child...

is forced to infer how the plural should sound, showing that they understand a basic, more underlying rule. It turns out that even really young kids are able to produce these kinds of plurals for pseudo-words, which demonstrates that they're establishing a general structure for how language works without someone explicitly teaching it to them.

If kids are really, really young, they can do this with real words but not pseudo-words, so children first start by memorizing plurals before understanding the general pattern.

The popularity of the Wug Test has also resulted in some memes. The logo for r/Linguistics is also a Wug. The Wug had a surge of interest recently after a company started selling Wug merch without Gleason's permission. Gleason replied on Twitter, suggesting that people buy Wug merch from her website instead. The company had originally claimed that the design was public domain, and Gleason disagreed. This ultimately resulted in a long legal battle full of drama. If you're interested, I've linked this Medium article documenting the whole thing in the description.

Cockney Rhyming Slang: Have you ever wondered where the expression "blowing a raspberry" comes from? It turns out that it's connected to the Cockney accent in England, mostly in the East End of London, which has an absolutely ridiculous slang. It basically involves replacing a word with two words where the last word rhymes with the word you're actually trying to say, and then usually leaving out the rhyming word.

So, unless we intend to do this job in Reno, we're in Bonnie Barney Rubble trouble. So if you want a nice cold beverage from the fridge, you might ask for a Brittany, since Britney Spears rhymes with beers. If you're calling for your buddy, you might say, "Hey China," since China plate rhymes with mate. If someone isn't telling you the truth, that's porkies, since Pork Pies rhymes with lies. If you're out late at night with the boys and have to return to your spouse at home, you say, "I gotta get back to the trouble," since trouble and strife rhymes with wife. If you're admiring your friend's new chain, you tell them, "Nice Tom," since Tomfoolery rhymes with jewelry.

So how about blowing a raspberry? Well, raspberry tart rhymes with fart.

I can't understand your accent. Some of them are even more complicated than this. Someone might call their butt their heiress. The original rhyme was bottle and glass to rhyme with ass, but then bottle was rhymed with Aristotle to get heiress.

Pirahã: Pirahã is one of the most interesting languages of all time. It's spoken by an indigenous group of about 700 people living in the Brazilian jungle. The first notable fact is that it only has eight consonants and three vowels, making it one of the most simple sound systems out of any known language. It also has some of the rarest sounds, one of which sounds like blowing a raspberry. But the limited set of sounds isn't a problem, since it incorporates a lot of different tones that allow it to be sung, hummed, or whistled in conversation.

And here's the big one: Pirahã doesn't have any words for numbers. It does have words for vague quantities like "a small size or amount," or "a bit of a larger size or amount," and "a bunch." So how do they count? Well, some anthropological evidence seems to suggest that they simply don't.

At one point, their counting skills were put to a test. Objects like batteries were placed on a table in a line, and the Pirahã were asked to make a second line just like the first. This was no problem for them. Then, a line of objects was created again, hidden from view, and they were asked to do the same thing. They were able to do it accurately if there were only two or three objects in the set, but anything above that resulted in a lot of mistakes. This indicates that they aren't precisely counting at all during this task, and instead, they're just kind of visually estimating it. So presumably, counting was never super important for the Pirahã, so they never ended up developing it. Research from MIT indicates the Pirahã may be the only culture on Earth without any numeracy. Peter I don't have numbers because they don't need them. They survive just fine without them. In a way, this seems like a pretty comfy way to live. They aren't concerned about their bank balance, their follower count, their heart rate, or how many calories they've eaten. If they were watching a sports game, they wouldn't care about the score; they'd just sit back and enjoy the game.

Volapük: Volapük is a constructed language that was created a few years before Esperanto, but for very different reasons. Zamenhof had a dream that an international language would bring people together and help strive towards World Peace. But Volapük's creator, Johann Martin Schleyer, had a dream where God specifically told him that his destiny was to create an international language. Yes, the actual reason was that it was revealed to him in a dream. He was a Catholic priest, too, so he decided to go for it.

It picked up some steam for a while, but slowly started to fade after Esperanto dropped. By 1890, the community was stuck in fighting, mostly because Schleyer refused to allow anyone other than himself to create new words. Loads of sub-languages were created, like Novbino, Balta, Bopal, Spaline, Dil, and Orba, but they were almost immediately forgotten. These days, Volapük is basically dead, with only around 20 speakers worldwide. Funnily enough, in Esperanto, the word "volapükagio," a reference to this language, means "nonsense."

Lorem Ipsum: Origin: If you've ever done any graphic design or web development before, you're probably familiar with this famous placeholder text. Designers use it so that they can get a sense of what large blocks of text will look like on screen without needing to have any actual content. The text itself comes from *De finibus bonorum et malorum*, a Socratic dialogue from 45 BCE by Cicero. But the version you see today was changed; words were swapped out, deleted, and added, so the final version doesn't actually make any sense in Latin. The first bit, "Lorem ipsum," was originally "dolorem ipsum," meaning "pain itself," which is probably a relatable phrase if you're trying to center a div element on a web page.

I think this one was included because it just sounds funny. It's a fruit dish from Denmark that means "red porridge with cream." This is a Hawaiian Christmas song that was famously recorded by Bing Crosby. Since the Hawaiian language doesn't use the same sounds as English, the pronunciation had to be approximated. In particular, the "r" and "s" sounds had to be adjusted, so "Merry Christmas" became "Mele Kalikimaka."

Grizzly Gore Spurs: This one is just a meme about a difficult-to-pronounce Eastern European name.

Hopi Time: Once again, we're brought back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In the 1940s, Whorf was working on his linguistic theories and studying a language from the Hopi people, a Native American group in Arizona. It seemed to him that their language was missing a key feature: they didn't seem to have any words or grammar related to time. He concluded that they have no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate out of a future through the present into a past. If this was true, this would be fantastic news for his hypothesis, since it shows a direct connection between their language and their view of the world.

It was a bit too good to be true, though, and it was later proven wrong by Ekkehart Malotzky, who ended up finding tons of examples of words and grammar in the Hopi language that involved relations across time. The issue was that while the tense system in English emphasizes past and non-past, the Hopi language is oriented towards future and non-future. The myth still lives on, though, with smug new-agers saying that westerners are too obsessed with time, always carrying a watch to keep track of it, meanwhile, "The virtuous Hopi people just go with the flow, man."

Kiki/Buba: If you've seen my video on the philosophy of color, you're already familiar with this. If I show you these two shapes, which one would you call Kiki and which one would you call Buba? Strangely enough, almost everyone who has asked this question, no matter their cultural heritage or language, calls the spiky shape Kiki and the bulbous shape Buba. Some languages seem to resist this effect, though, like Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, and Romanian. In these cases, there always seems to be a good reason, though. Romanian already has a word that sounds like "booba" and it refers to a kind of sharp pain, which might remind them more of the spiky shape. Turkish has a word for babies and other cute things, so this might not fit quite right with the spiky shape. And in Mandarin Chinese, the syllables in "buba" and "kiki" aren't really found in the language, so both words might just sound weird.

There are a few ideas for why this phenomenon might be happening. It could just be related to the way our mouths move when we say each word. When we say "buba," our mouth is forced to be more rounded, whereas when we say "kiki," it's more angular.

A more wild speculation has to do with the way we evolved and how sound tends to travel. If you're in a cave with a really smooth interior surface, sounds [echo]. If you're in a cave with a bunch of stalactites and rough surfaces, sounds are probably a lot thinner and tinny. This kind of primordial association might be connected to the Buba/Kiki thing. This phenomenon is really interesting for linguists, since it seems to show that the words we use for things are not entirely arbitrary. There might be some connection between the sound of the word and the thing itself.

Ye Olde Tavern: "Ye Olde Tavern," "Ye Olde Shop." These whimsical phrases evoke a quaint medieval village, before the times of strip malls, parking lots, and concrete hellscapes. But it turns out Old English wasn't actually like this at all. "Old" with an "e" on the end wasn't really used much until the 19th century. Instead, it was often spelled in ways like this: "ald." And in older forms of English, an "e" was often stuck at the end of words, so "olde" was used to hearken back to that tradition. And "ye" has even less basis in history. It's meant to be a translation of "the" and comes from the Old English word spelled like this: "þe." But that first character isn't a "y" sound; it's a thorn character that's pronounced like "th." When this guy introduced the printing press to England in 1474, it didn't have a thorn character, so "y" was substituted in its place. Over time, this switcheroo was forgotten. Once we started writing "th," so "ye" is often remembered as an early version of "the."

Loglan: In the 50s, the sci-fi author and sociologist Dr. James Cooke Brown constructed a language called Loglan and based it on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytic philosophers. The language was designed so that statements were as unambiguous and clear as possible. His hope was that if he trained people to speak Loglan, he might turn them into more logical thinkers, which might have been a strong piece of evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As is the case with most constructed languages, the community of speakers is pretty niche, and there are probably fewer than 100 people in the world that use Loglan in some capacity.

Pigeons and Creole Languages: Language is one of the most diverse and complex human characteristics, which makes it really interesting to study. But it also creates a problem: oftentimes, we have to talk to people that don't speak the same language as us. Without Esperanto or Google Translate, that's where pigeons come in. Pigeons are basically what happens when you smash two different languages together. It's a simplified combination of the vocabulary of each language that usually ditches all the complicated grammar on either side. These kinds of languages emerged quite a lot when European settlers started to trade with other communities of people. There have also been instances where pigeons start to develop even further. In Haiti, a pigeon emerged between French colonists and enslaved Africans on the plantations, and over the years, it eventually transformed into one of Haiti's official languages, Haitian Creole.

Folk Etymologies: During Napoleon's invasion of Germany, he was served a meal with rye bread. He hated it so much that he called it "pain de Nicole," or "bread for Nicole," Nicole being the name of his horse. Over time, this eventually turned into "Pumpernickel." But here's the thing: none of this actually happened. This is an example of a folk etymology: a nice story told over a drink with friends that explains where a word originated. Generally, the actual etymology is a bit less exciting. In Pumpernickel's case, it came from the German word "pumpern" (to break wind) and "nickel" (for rascal). So even this origin doesn't seem very kind to this particular type of bread.

Another example is the word "crap," which supposedly came from Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the toilet. It turns out that Crapper did have a toilet business, but both toilets and the word "crap" existed long before he was born.

Emoji is another interesting case. You might think that it's related to the word "emoticon," but they actually developed totally independently. Emoticon is a portmanteau of "emotion" and "icon," but Emoji comes from a Japanese portmanteau of "e" (picture) and "moji" (character).

There's also "hamburger." Naturally, you might think this is a combination of "ham" and "burger," but this doesn't really make sense, since most hamburgers are made of beef. Some have speculated, well, actually, it comes from the German city Hamburg, but strangely, there isn't any evidence that this dish originated in Hamburg at all.

The last one I'll mention here involves the Queen of Scots, Mary. When she was sick at one point, her maid had said, "Marie malade" (meaning "Mary is sick"), so then she was brought preserved fruit to brighten her spirits, hence "marmalade." But once again, the real story is a bit less evocative. It actually comes from the Portuguese word "marmelada," referring to a kind of jam.

Silbo Gomero: On one of the Canary Islands in Spain, speakers there can communicate in a variation of Spanish composed entirely of whistling. The reason this language emerged is because this island is full of huge ravines and valleys, so by whistling in this way, you could communicate over distances up to five kilometers, since the sound echoes through the surfaces of the terrain. This type of whistling language was originally used by the Guanches, the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, and was picked up by the Spanish settlers.

Ceceo: If you've ever heard someone from Spain speaking Spanish, you may have noticed that it sounds a bit different compared to Latin America. This has been referred to as the "Spanish lisp." "Ceceo" literally means "lisp." They tend to pronounce the letter "z" and "c" as a "th" sound if it comes before "e" or "i," while most other Spanish speakers use an "s" sound (e.g., "cielo" versus "thielo").

There's also a widespread myth for why this happened. The story goes that a Spanish king once had a lisp, and his fragile ego resulted in him declaring that the entire population ought to speak like he does. But this doesn't make any sense, since the lisp only applies situationally. They don't say "ethania," they say "España." And also, the "th" sound develops centuries after the reign of the king with the lisp, Peter of Castile. It turns out that the southern Spanish speakers didn't tend to use this pronunciation, and that was the variation of Spanish that was passed on to Latin America. So it was just the natural evolutionary process of language, where different systems of pronunciation emerged in different speaking communities.

Kurgan Hypothesis: So, if all these languages descended from the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European language, where did that language come from? In the 1950s, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas had an idea about this. She figured that a group of herders in the grasslands of modern-day Ukraine were the original speakers of PIE. These folks had domesticated the horse and developed early forms of chariots, which seemed to have helped them expand. DNA studies from human bones around this time showed that these people's genes had replaced above three-quarters of the human gene pool in Europe. So, as the theory goes, this cultural expansion explains why their Proto-Indo-European language became so influential to all the other languages in this region.

Waseigo: We all know that English is top dog when it comes to clout on the world stage, which leads to tons of languages around the world borrowing English words. Waseigo is the Japanese version of this. Here are some interesting examples I found:

* Corn dog is コーンドッグ (kōndoggu)

* Alcohol is アルコール (arukōru)

* A collab or collaboration is コラボ (korabo)

* Other YouTubers, feel free to hit me up if you want to do one.

* Hamburger is ハンバーガー (hanbāgā)

* Hip-hop is ヒップホップ (hippuhoppu)

* Keyboard is キーボード (kībōdo)

* Skateboard is スケートボード (sukētobōdo)

* Twitter is ツイッター (tsuittā)

Here's one you might recognize: Family Computer (ファミリーコンピュータ, Famirī Konpyūta) - this was the original name of the NES in Japan. Another one is Pokémon (ポケモン) from Pocket Monster.

Some of these terms are portmanteaus or phrases that don't exist in English in the first place and are described as pseudo loan words.

* This comes from "cunning" and is often used in the context of cheating on tests.

* This one comes from "handle keeper," meaning designated driver, with the "handle" referring to the steering wheel.

These loan words are also often used for slang to speak about taboo topics:

* For love hotel (ラブホテル, rabu hoteru)

* For car sex (カーセックス, kā sekkusu)

* For happy ending (ハッピーエンド, happī endo)

I think this one goes without saying.

Schleicher's Fable: So, at this point in the video, we know that Proto-Indo-European was pretty important for how a lot of languages look today, and we also have a general idea of where it probably came from. But what did it actually look like? Well, in 1868, the linguist August Schleicher reconstructed a full text from Proto-Indo-European known as "The Sheep and the Horses." This is what it looks like:

Wolf Taboo: The word "wolf" in English can be traced back to the word "wīlkas" from Proto-Indo-European, which was then shifted to "wálpaz" in the Germanic languages, and then "wolf." This led to the Icelandic word "úlfr," the word "ulv" in Danish and Norwegian, "wolf" with a "u" in Old English, in modern German, and finally "wolf." But in Swedish, this pattern is broken. Despite being a descendant of Proto-Indo-European in the Germanic tree, they use the word "varg." This comes from the Norse word "vargr," an outcast of society for murder or oath-breaking. This word also exists in other descendants of PIE, like "vrag" (for enemy) in Russian or "warg" in Old English, which Tolkien used for the wolf monsters in *The Lord of the Rings*. Similar to the bear taboo, this is likely the result of a tradition where wolves were seen as dangerous enemies, so we ought not to speak their name to avoid summoning them.

As for the taboo in Latin specifically, "wīlkwos" was shifted to "wīlpo" in Germanic, which was reversed to form "lupo," resulting in the Latin word "lupus" for wolf. This is interesting because it only involves shifting the word around rather than creating an entirely new word.

This guy, Chuck, on a Linguistics blog in 1998, speculated: "I deduced it for some reason the old Indo-Europeans were more respectful of the bear than the wolf, though they didn't diss the wolf either."

Rex Dewas: Square: This one was a little tricky to track down, since Googling the term only returns results related to Shrek. I couldn't figure out why this was happening until I realized that the first word is an anagram of "Shrek," and this green fella is so entrenched in culture that even anagrams of his name summon him. It actually seems to be in reference to another piece of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. It's gone through a few iterations over the years as our understanding of PIE has improved. This is what it looks like:

This is an Italian song from 1972 with lyrics that are completely gibberish. It was written to sound like American English from the perspective of someone who doesn't speak the language. Listening to it as an English speaker feels like you're having a stroke because it really does sound like English, but the only decipherable words are "all right" \[Music] "the boss died." The songwriter, Adriano Celentano, talked about his goals with the song in an interview with NPR. The dialogue is interpreted by a translator: "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, since I like American slang, which for a singer is much easier to sing than to sing in Italian, I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything. So, to make a comparison, it's like what happened at the Tower of Babel. Everyone wanted to go towards the sky, and they were punished because God confused all the languages, and no one understood each other anymore. This is the reason why I wrote the song." This song also went on to become a major hit all over Europe, topping the charts in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but as expected, it wasn't a major hit in America.

Migration Theory: Edward Sapir, one half of Sapir-Whorf, had a theory about the best way to figure out where a language originated. His method was simple: find the area where that language has the most diversity. If one region has tons of different accents and dialects that vary considerably, it's safe to assume that the language probably originated there, rather than somewhere with a more homogeneous speaking population, which is presumably the result of migration.

As an example, let's go back to the Spanish lisp I talked about earlier. Some areas in Northern Spain had the lisp, whereas speakers in the South didn't tend to have it. When the southern Spanish people migrated to Latin America, they brought over their lack of lisp, and now that speaking population is a lot more homogeneous. If all the data you have is the higher level of diversity in Spain compared to America, the migration theory would correctly tell you that the language originated in that area. This theory isn't a hundred percent guaranteed to work, though. Imagine a situation where linguistic diversity is completely wiped out by other people migrating in, so even if the language originated there, it might end up having less diversity than other regions.

Russian Blue: The Russian language actually has two separate terms for blue: "goluboy" for light blue and "siniy" for dark blue. This isn't the same as the niche terms we have in English like "cyan blue" or "navy blue"; they're actually basic color terms like "green" or "purple." This scenario was pretty exciting for scientists because it provided a perfect opportunity to test out the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They asked Russian speakers to indicate whether two shades of blue were different or the same as fast as they could. It turns out that they were much faster when they were presented with "goluboy" and "siniy" rather than two shades of "goluboy" or two shades of "siniy." Whereas English speakers didn't demonstrate the same advantage as the Russians in telling these shades apart.

Then they added a twist. They wanted to see if this effect was happening specifically because of their language speeding up their perception. They asked the participants to perform a verbal task at the same time, with the idea that it would make it harder to use a language to help with their perception speed, and they were right. This completely eliminated the reaction time advantage that the Russian speakers had. Then they also had them do a spatial task as well to make sure that language was really the factor at play, and the reaction time advantage remained. So all of this is pretty good evidence for the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the structure of language seems to be directly affecting the way we perceive and interact with the world.

Deus: Deals: After the ancient Roman god of the skies, Jupiter, also the name of this planet, was originally pronounced something like "Jupiter." This word can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European term "diwós ph₂tḗr" or "Sky Father." Funnily enough, the analogous Greek God Zeus also comes from the "deus" part of this. The original Proto-Indo-European "skydaddy" was a major figure in the ancient mythology of PIE culture and was associated with daylight, the sky, and was all-seeing. So divinity being associated with the sky or the day, as well as being male and paternal, is a very, very old idea. But the conception of this God as the number one guy, like Zeus or Jupiter, along with its association with storms and lightning, seems to be exclusive to the later conceptions in Mediterranean areas.

Above R: If you've ever seen the movie *Good Will Hunting*, you've probably noticed that people from Boston often don't pronounce their "r's." "My voice know what the best part of my day is." The same is true in some areas of England, where most speakers in the South don't pronounce the "r" in words like "park," but speakers in the North and West do.

In 1966, the linguist William Labov looked into this, specifically in which cases the "r" is pronounced before pauses or consonants. He did a bit of unconventional science to test this out. He went to a bunch of different department stores in New York City, each notoriously frequented by different social classes of people. He went up to random people and asked them, "Hey there, where are the women's shoes?" or "What floor is this?" expecting the answer "fourth floor." It turned out that staff at the higher-end stores were more likely to pronounce the "r" ("fourth floor"), whereas staff at the lower-end stores were more likely to leave it out ("fourth floor"). Oh.

Foreign Accent Syndrome: In 1942, a Norwegian woman, Astrid, presenting to the emergency room with a strange condition. She had spontaneously acquired a foreign accent that made her sound German or French. Two years previously, she had been hit with shrapnel during a raid in World War II, which was the likely cause of her neural problems. Unfortunately, this accent didn't give her the best reputation, since the Nazis were occupying Norway, and her German-sounding voice made people think she was a spy. Astrid's story is an example of Foreign Accent Syndrome, and there have been over 100 other case studies about it.

In 2013, there was an instance of this that went viral. An Australian woman, Leanne Rowe, started sounding French after she was in a car accident. "It makes me so angry because I am Australian, I am not French." The cognitive scientist Lindsay Nichols argued that this was the result of changes in the pronunciation of vowels. The brain damage affected the way her jaw, lips, and tongue were situated. When someone is speaking in a non-native language, they often have to make changes in the ways their mouth muscles move and are situated, and the accident, in this case, resulted in that same kind of adjustment. So this woman didn't spontaneously develop a French accent, but instead, the accent's effect on language production resulted in a way of speaking that reminded people of a French accent.

Etymology of Okay: Is Unknown: So what's the deal with "okay"? The word is actually a lot newer than you might expect. The first known use of "okay" comes from a joke article in the *Boston Morning Post* from 1839, where "OK" was an abbreviation of "oll korrect." The context for this was that it was oddly fashionable in the early 19th century to deliberately misspell things and use them as acronyms: "no go" becomes "no-go" (or "KG"), "all right" becomes "ol' right" (or "OW"), and "all correct" becomes "oll korrect" (or "OK").

For a long time, people speculated about the linguistic origin of "OK," suggesting Latin, Greek, Scottish, French, or other origins. One idea is that it came from the Choctaw word "okeh," which Andrew Jackson supposedly started using after hanging out with members of a Choctaw tribe. Even Woodrow Wilson believed this and often wrote "O.K." with an "h" on official papers because he claimed that "OK" was incorrect. This seems to be a myth, though, and I also couldn't find any translations of "okeh" in online Choctaw dictionaries.

Generative Grammar: Generative grammar is the approach to language that looks at how it's structured. You've got all the different sounds we use (phonology), how individual words work (morphology), how sentences and phrases are built (syntax), and what the sentence actually means (semantics). Generative grammar is also often associated with the idea that human language is structured around a deeper pattern in our mind that determines how language is formed. The strongest version of this theory is Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, which is the idea that everyone is born with this basic language faculty in our mind. There are limits on what types of grammar are possible for a human language, since all language structure is based on this deeper faculty, so they all must share certain properties. For example, no matter what language you grow up speaking, your brain already knows general patterns about how things like nouns and verbs are supposed to work; you just need to learn the specific meaning of the nouns and verbs in your native language. Some stuff still varies, like whether adjectives come before or after nouns, which you still have to learn, but the basic structure is already present. There are a number of different arguments for and against Universal Grammar, but I'll be talking a bit more about this later.

Koko the Gorilla: Koko the gorilla might be the most famous gorilla in the world, second only to Harambe. She met the likes of Robin Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, and William Shatner. In 1972, the San Francisco Zoo started to teach Koko sign language when she was only one year old, and after two years, she was moved to Stanford, where they started to rigorously train her for eight and a half hours a day. In 1979, they published a study about Koko in the journal *Word*, and it was peer-reviewed. The results were staggering: Koko was able to use complex sign combinations, which indicated sophisticated cognition. She was also supposedly able to sign about objects that weren't currently present in her surroundings, a type of language use called displacement. She also signed "good sign" to another gorilla learning sign language, which is an example of metalanguage (using language to speak about language itself). Also, they claimed that she often used language deceptively, intentionally signing statements that she knew to be false, basically lying.

Unfortunately, though, the study has been widely criticized. Most researchers agree that Koko never actually understood the meaning of the signs she used, and she was basically just making gestures in order to get food, so it was all just complicated operant conditioning rather than full-on language learning. And beyond that, a lot of critics pointed out that all of Koko's signing was interpreted by the handler, who may have been attributing meaningful sign combinations to completely meaningless gestures in order to make it look like the Koko project was successful.

This whole Koko scenario is reminiscent of the Clever Hans case in the early 20th century. The horse known as Clever Hans was taken from town to town, and his owner showed people how Hans could do math, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and loads of other fancy tasks. Hans would answer every question by tapping his hoof a bunch of times, but in reality, Hans couldn't actually do any of this. It turns out Hans was actually just responding to very subtle body language cues from the trainer, and the trainer didn't even realize that they were doing them.

Mabarin: Sometime in the 1960s, in the Atherton Tablelands rainforests in Australia, the linguist Robert M. W. Dixon was studying the Aboriginal languages of Australia and discovered something really strange. He came across this guy, Albert Bennett, who spoke Mabarin (a now-extinct language) and started asking him to translate basic words. One of the first words he asked was "dog," and Bennett replied, "dog." Dixon was confused and thought that Bennett didn't understand the question, or maybe he didn't know how to actually speak this language at all. But surprisingly, the Mabarin word for dog was actually "dog" and was pronounced in almost the exact same way. Now, you might look at this story and think that Mabarin and English must be related in some way, but there's no historical evidence for this. It's entirely a coincidence, and a pretty weird one, too.

Biang: Beyond that, out of all the writing systems currently used in the world, Chinese characters are the oldest, and compared to Latin script, it seems really complicated. Out of all the characters, though, one of them is thought to be the single most complicated character to write. The traditional character for "biáng" takes 58 different strokes to write. If you're less efficient with your writing, it might even take you more strokes to write it, but hey, different strokes for different folks. The word itself refers to a type of noodle. The origin of the character is also a mystery. An article in *China Daily* claims that it's an onomatopoeia that comes from the sound it makes when the chef bangs the dough into noodles on the table. There's also an urban legend about a student who wrote down the "biáng" character on his bill at a noodle restaurant to get out of paying, and he had totally made it up.

Solresol: Russell, a lot of the constructed languages I've talked about here, like Esperanto, create a lot of their vocabulary and grammar based on other languages that already exist. But this language is different. Solresol is based on music. In 1827, the violinist and music teacher François Sudre built Solresol out of the familiar "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do" syllables. The words are built by combining these syllables together, but since there were so few of them, things could get really complicated, really fast. So Sudre decided to cap it to five-syllable words. If you have good pitch, you can even sing the language based on the notes of each syllable, but you could also just speak it normally. In France, Sudre brought his work to the public, and the press covered it extensively. Even Victor Hugo seemed to think it was a really cool project. He had spent over three decades working on this language, but after he died, it faded into obscurity. It's had a bit of a resurgence recently, though, with the internet and the rise of the constructed language community.

Singapore Stone: In 1819, near the Singapore River, some laborers going through the jungle found a large slab of sandstone with some inscriptions on the side. The writing is in Kawi script, and it also has some Sanskrit words in there. By the time it was found, the people who lived on the island couldn't understand what it said, and to this day, linguists still haven't fully deciphered it. The stone is believed to be from the 10th to the 14th century.

The stone itself, and its physical location, also seemed to be related to a Malay legend: the strongman Badang. The story goes that he was a slave working to clear a forest. While fishing in the Singapore River, he managed to catch a genie who agreed to grant him one wish. But Dang asked to be the strongest man of all time, since he figured that that would help him be a better slave, since he could clear the trees faster. Not a bad wish by any means, but given his circumstances, I could definitely think of a better one. In any case, he became very strong and was able to uproot trees effortlessly. Over time, his feats of strength caught the attention of the king, who ended up appointing him the commander of the army. The king of India also reached out and sent a strong man of his own to the Malay archipelago to compete in a competition to see who was stronger. The competition involved lifting a large rock. The other strong man was able to hoist it up before letting it fall, but Badang picked it up no problem and threw it towards the Singapore River. As the legend goes, this was the Singapore Stone.

Now, let's return to more modern times. A few decades after the stone turned up, the British colonized the area and ended up blowing up the Singapore Stone to make room for a fort they wanted to build. Now, only a small fragment remains.

Gallehus Horns: Here's another artifact for you. In 1639, a Golden Horn turned up in Denmark with some runic inscriptions on it. And then about a hundred years passed. In 1734, they found a very similar Golden Horn. It was about 15 meters away from the first one, but it took them a hundred years to find it. The horns were created around 400 AD, and the runic inscriptions look something like this: "Ek Hlewagastir holtijaz horna tawido." It translates from Norse to "I, Hlewagastir, son of Holt, made the horn." This is one of the earliest examples of a full sentence in these kinds of runes, and it's also the earliest preserved line of alliteration with the three "H"s.

In 1802, the horns were stolen by some goldsmith guy who broke into the storage area with forged keys and melted them down for gold to sell. Fortunately, people had made drawings of them, so replicas were made. That didn't stop the thieves, though. About 200 years later, in 1993, the copies were stolen and then promptly thrown away into a nearby forest and recovered by authorities. And then again in 2007, silver copies were stolen from a different museum but recovered again a few days later. It seems the lesson here is that reverence for ancient artifacts can always be thwarted by coveting precious metals.

Anglish: Imagine you had such contempt for the French that you spoke a version of English with none of the vocabulary that was borrowed from French. That's Anglish. In 1966, the term was coined by Paul Jennings in the British satirical magazine *Punch* as part of a series on the 900th anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England. "Anglish is the language we should have had if the Normans had been defeated at Hastings." That's an "again say" from one of the articles. Oh, sorry, "again say" is Anglish for "quote." "That's just one like thing of how we have to shift certain common words to miss using anything from the French." Speaking Anglish is pretty hard since a pretty huge chunk of English words don't come from Germanic.

It turns out that English is actually part of a pretty long-standing attitude of linguistic purism. Even some famous writers had this attitude and tried to avoid using foreign words in English prose. Charles Dickens would sometimes use a kind of Anglish, using "gleeman" instead of "musician," "sicker" instead of "certainly," or "end say" for "conclusion." In politics, in the English language, George Orwell also criticized the usage of borrowed words and seemed to think that they were too pretentious: "Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like 'expedite,' 'ameliorate,' 'predict,' 'extraneous,' 'deracinated,' 'clandestine,' 'subaquius,' and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposites." Winston Churchill's speech-writing technique also involved using primarily Germanic words with as few syllables as possible to make his speeches punchier and easier to understand.

This whole attitude can be traced back to the famous Inkhorn Controversy in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. At the time, tons of words from Latin and French were starting to get used, mostly by academics. Some people thought that this was great and English was being revitalized with all these new words to express new things, but other people thought that it was just pretentious garbage. One of the main purists was Sir John Cheke, who wrote, "I am of opinion that our tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues." But eventually, this debate slowly came to an end. We kept a lot of terms like "impede," but not others like "expeed," which we now use in "expedient" and "expedite." All of this was basically just a development of English during the Renaissance that was a little more fast-paced than usual. There's nothing anybody can do to slow down the evolution of language, no matter how much they hate the French.

Universal Mom and Dad: It makes sense why the words we use for our parents in English is pretty similar to "mama" and "papa" in French, "mama" and "babo" in Italian, and "mama" and "papa" in Norwegian, since all of these languages trace back to Proto-Indo-European. But other languages also have similar-sounding words, too. Swahili has "mama" and "baba." Tagalog in the Philippines has "nanay" and "tatay," and even Mandarin has "mama" and "baba." So what's going on here? How do all these completely disconnected languages all have such similar words for our moms and dads?

It actually has to do with how babies start to learn to talk. The early linguist Roman Jacobson figured out that if you're a baby and randomly babbling, the easiest vowel to make is "ah," because you don't have to put your tongue or lips in any particular shape; you just open your mouth and make noise. And naturally, if you're gonna switch things up, the first thing you'll try to do is close the lips, leading to an "m" sound. Together, that forms "mama." The next step, once you get a bit more creative with your baby mouth, is to put your lips together and blow out a puff of air, leading to a sound like "pa." So naturally, since you spend most of the time as a baby with your mom, "mama" is attributed to the mother, and "papa," the more sophisticated version that you learn later, is attributed to your dad.

Glossolalia: Glossolalia is also known as "speaking in tongues," which itself is also known as a great album by the Talking Heads. It basically involves uttering utter gibberish that sounds like real speech but doesn't mean anything. It's been used as a religious practice, notably in Pentecostalism, to achieve a direct experience with God. This tongue-speaking was widely analyzed by the U of T linguist William Samarin in 1972. It turns out that this kind of speech is pretty similar to human language: it has an accent, a rhythm, an intonation, and even pauses to break up speech into individual words. The sounds the speaker uses also tend to be the sounds found in their native language. But despite all those similarities, none of this makes glossolalia a full-on language, since there's no structure to what any of the sounds mean.

Dord: Dord (noun, physics and chemistry): abbreviation for density. This definition was included in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1934, but "dord" isn't actually a real word. The story of how this happened is also kind of funny. The chemistry editor for the dictionary had sent in a slip of paper to include an abbreviation for density. It looked like this: "D or d = density." The intended meaning here was that the letter "D" (capitalized or uncapitalized) could be an abbreviation for density. But the person submitting definitions read "D or d" as a full word, "dord," and this wasn't caught by proofreaders. Five years after it was published, an editor noticed that this word didn't have any etymology and realized it was a mistake, so it was taken out.

Ithkuil: "Thank you. It's cool. Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal." That's what John Kajada told *The New Yorker* in an article about the language he constructed in 2004. He set up a web page titled "Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language," and I have to say, it's pretty cool. This webpage was huge, though; it was nearly 160,000 words describing the grammar, vocabulary, and structure of the language. The goal of the language was pretty similar to Loglan: to create a perfect language that lent itself to logical thinking, emphasized brevity and expressing thoughts, and avoided ambiguity as much as possible. The logical part is cool enough, but the way it's able to collapse long ideas into bite-sized pieces is astonishing. This sentence: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point" turns into this: "characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things" is a single adjective. This. The language, which started to blow up when a Russian magazine *Computerra* wrote an article about it and talked about the language's similarities to a fictional language in the sci-fi novella *Gulf* written by Robert Hyland in 1949. The novella involves this highly advanced society who speak a language called "speed talk," which condenses entire sentences into single words. This allows them to communicate more efficiently and eventually conquer the world. This type of language is also reminiscent of Chinese. When westerners were first exposed to it, they were really excited about the idea that each character signified a full concept rather than just a sound. After the philosopher Leibniz heard about this, he speculated about a kind of futuristic language that followed this type of system with universal characters representing concepts, in the same way that Arabic numerals represent quantities. He wrote, "This writing would be a kind of general algebra and calculus of reason, so that instead of disputing, we can say that we calculate."

In 2008, Ithkuil was given the Smiley Award for the best invented language of the year by David J. Peterson, the president of the Language Creation Society and the inventor of Dothraki, the fictional language used in *Game of Thrones*. But the thing with Ithkuil is that it was never actually meant to be spoken. The word "Ithkuil" means "hypothetical representation of a language." John was trying to create something that could show what language could be, conveying deeper levels of meaning as efficiently as possible. So, given that there aren't really any active speakers of Ithkuil, one linguist wrote that "it has an assumption of efficiency that isn't really efficient given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff, but the parts that are successful are really non-trivial." This may be an impossible language, but if you think of it as a conceptual art project, I think it's fascinating.

Basque-Icelandic Pidgin: Best Icelandic Pidgin: Sometime in the early 17th century, on an island near Iceland, a group of Basque speakers from an area near Spain and France were hanging out to do some whaling, and they made contact with some of the Icelandic fishermen. They interacted with them for a while, and eventually, a pidgin formed, combining aspects of each of their languages. Most of the phrases they used, as you might expect, related to whaling and fishing, like "If Christ and Mary would give..."

Me a whale, I would give you the tail, along with more everyday expressions like this, which would translate into "I will give you sponge cake and cider." You might be wondering why Basque people had traveled so far to go whaling. It turns out that they had actually been wailing since the Middle Ages and were one of the first groups of people to do it for profit.

But as time went on, other cultures started hunting whales and took up most of their territory, so the Basques spread out to places like Newfoundland and Iceland, where there was less competition. The situation was pretty good for both parties for a while. The Icelandic people didn't really actively hunt whales and mostly just took the meat and bones from whales who had already washed up on the beach. So the Basques came in, provided fresher meat that they had hunted, and even paid taxes.

But this didn't last too long. In 1615, a group of Basque Whalers got shipwrecked and stranded on the coast for a full winter. They ran out of food and resorted to stealing from the Icelandic people to survive. But the Icelandics didn't take too well to this, so the Basques were massacred. Iceland even had a law that made it totally legal to kill Basques on sight, and that law was only repealed in 2015.

Butterfly refers to their poop. The etymology of butterfly isn't fully known. One suggestion is that it comes from the buttery yellow color of the common sulfur butterfly. Another idea comes from the old German name "butter liquor" (butter liquor and milk thief), since people in the Middle Ages might have believed that butterflies went around stealing milk and butter. And here's the funny one: Old Dutch has the term "bother sheet" or "butter [ __ ]". This is in reference to the bright yellow poop called meconium the butterflies produce after they undergo metamorphosis.

See from glyph, a copy of the book of Psalms from 1429, written in Cyrillic script, contained this phrase: "many eyed seraphim." The character of interest here is this one that looks like a bunch of eyes and might be triggering your trypophobia. Funnily enough, this obscure character is actually included in Unicode. This was done in 2007 when a group of Slavic medieval scholars pushed to have a bunch of Cyrillic characters added. This character was only one of a few different variations of the ocular 'o', which were all included at once. Even though this specific character only ever appeared once, it was part of this larger group of characters that were fairly common, so they figured they'd throw this one in too.

Zirconian: If you visit the Paramila village in Greece, you'll hear people speaking a rare type of Greek called Sakonika. It's a 3,000-year-old language and descends from the Greek city-state of Sparta. These days, it's very rare to find people speaking it, even among Zirconians. Only about 2,000 people speak it, most of whom also speak Greek, since that's the official language of the region. It has a pretty similar alphabet to modern or ancient Greek, but it uses a lot more phonetic letters and has a fairly different structure and pronunciation. It's different enough that modern Greek speakers wouldn't be able to understand it at all. Because of how few people speak this language and the fact that most of them are pretty old, Zirconian is classified as a critically endangered language.

Proto-World: The Proto-World, or the proto-human language, is the idea that every single language in the world descended from one single original language. The basic argument is that all humans around the world have the capacity to learn any language. Presumably, earlier humans had this ability too, so languages today must trace back to some period of time where only one language was spoken and spread out and diversified over time.

This isn't entirely cut and dry, though, since it is possible that ancient humans had the capacity to use language, but language still hadn't developed yet. So the linguistic ability came before language development. Or maybe language started and stopped a bunch of different times throughout human history, meaning that it could start fresh independently in two different isolated human communities. In this case, there could be proto-language 1, proto-language 2, proto-language 3, and so on. We don't know for sure, though, and there's no direct evidence for either of these options.

Some linguists have even gone as far as to speculate what this proto-language might have sounded like by comparing loads of different languages around the world. If only we had invented writing tens of thousands of years earlier than we did, then maybe we'd actually know for sure.

Linear B: In 1900, some clay tablets turned up in Crete, and nobody could figure out what they said. It came to be known as Linear B and remained a mystery until 1952, when the British architect and amateur linguist Michael Ventress finally cracked it. Naturally, he got all the credit, but as with a lot of scientific achievements, there was a woman behind it all who got little to no credit. She was a classicist from the U.S., Alice Kober, and before Michael ever took a shot at cracking Linear B, she was busy working hard on it and making progress. It was she who was working hundreds of hours with a slide rule, sitting at her dinner table, a cigarette burning at her elbow, pouring over the few published inscriptions, looking and looking for patterns. Rather than trying to make any wild speculations, she meticulously recorded the frequency of every symbol and their position in words. This was long before computers, so she stored all the information on index cards made of scrap paper that she held in cigarette cartons.

Ventress started to build on this work too, and they even met each other at one point in Oxford. They didn't exactly hit it off, though. It seemed like she underestimated him because he wasn't an academically trained linguist, and he underestimated her because she was a woman. Kober was on the precipice of a huge discovery and started to notice patterns with the way that groups of symbols started and ended. But right before the major breakthrough happened, she fell ill and died suddenly in 1950.

Ventress picked up where she left off and eventually cracked Linear B. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be an old form of ancient Greek. Ventress did mention Kober's contributions thoroughly in his work, though, and fully acknowledged her contributions, so she got some credit too. Except at the time, nobody actually cared, and he ended up getting all the credit for himself.

Linear B as a term also raises the question: what about Linear A? It turns out there is a slab of script that was found in the same area. A lot less of it survived, though, and as of today, it hasn't been deciphered.

Innateness: This is something I've touched on a bit already when I was talking about generative grammar. This is the idea that language is pre-programmed into our brains when we're born. We don't pop out of our mothers speaking English or Mandarin, but we do pop out with some vague pre-existing understanding of how language generally works. Before this, people like B.F. Skinner, the rat button guy, put forward the idea that language learning is basically just a process of conditioning and reinforcement. We watch someone point to a dog and say "dog," and then later we point to a dog and say "dog," and someone tells us, "Good job, that is a dog, nice." This was all tied to his general psychological theory of behaviorism, that saw the human mind as a basic input-output system.

Later on, Noam Chomsky brutally annihilated Skinner's arguments. He pointed out that when you actually look at how children learn language, they don't learn from people telling them that they use the right word or grammar. They learn by watching TV or listening to other people talk around them. Children can also construct sentences that they've never heard before. The way language is used is a lot more complicated than "You used the right sentence there, nice," or "You didn't use the right sentence there, what are you doing?" It seems unlikely that language learning is similar to a rat learning to press a button to get food.

This new idea from Chomsky was pretty huge at the time, since the dominant view was that basically all forms of learning were reinforcement-based. Psychologists couldn't continue to look at the mind as a black box, only focusing on input and output. They had to try to understand what was actually going on inside the black box.

Another interesting piece of evidence for innateness came up more recently. You might remember earlier when I talked about pidgins, hodgepodge languages built out of combinations of two existing languages to allow two communities to communicate, and how they can transform into creoles over time. When children learn those pidgins as their native language, Steven Pinker has argued that this creolization is only possible because the innate language structures these children have allows them to add complexity to the pidgins and slowly develop them into fully fledged languages. This isn't just the kids learning how to communicate with people using their pidgins, but it's them taking that pidgin and applying the linguistic universals they're born with.

It's important to mention that language innateness has been criticized as well. Some have argued that the fact that languages all have similar structures is perfectly normal, and we shouldn't have to appeal to an underlying mental structure to account for it.

English is a pidgin: There are two things I think this entry might be referring to. The first is a theory about how English came about. When you look at Old English and Middle English, they're really different. It could be that all the French influence that followed the Norman Conquest of England resulted in a creolization process that smushed together the two languages, which eventually developed into Modern English. But some scholars have also argued that this smushing together was a lot less comprehensive than originally thought, and it was basically just some borrowing of words rather than a full-on adjustment of morphology and syntax, and that the other Germanic languages experienced similar innovations around the same time.

The other possible meaning of this entry is that the meme maker is doing a bit. The entry might be suggesting that English is a pidgin in that it's the way people communicate with each other when they have no language in common. Antonio Gramsci talked about how language was always tied to the enlargement of the governing class, the relationships between the governing groups and the national popular mass, and the fight over cultural hegemony. If language is a war, it looks like English is winning, with about 1.5 billion speakers and accounting for 60% of internet content. Loads of modern words that come from English are co-opted by other languages, sometimes begrudgingly, like French people starting to refer to "le week-end." In Europe, nearly every student studies English at some point. In France, specifically, young students are required to study one of eight foreign languages, and 90% of them choose English. In Tunisia, employees who know how to speak fluent English earn 5% more, and in Iraq, they earn 200% more. When world leaders speak to each other, English is often the common language, even if neither of them speak it as their native tongue. So, against all odds, English, with its wealth of exceptions, bizarre characteristics, and frankly weird sound, it has become the great equalizer in politics and culture.

Stoned Ape Theory: This is the ultimate Joe Rogan idea. It checks all the boxes: wild speculation, vaguely scientific sounding, psychedelics, and apes. It comes from Terence McKenna, who was an outspoken advocate for responsible psychedelic use and held lectures discussing mysticism, philosophy, and insights from the psychedelic experience. He was a pretty big deal in the '80s and '90s counterculture scene in California, and his lectures have blown up on YouTube after his death.

One of his more bizarre ideas is the so-called stoned ape theory. He speculated that ancient humans who tracked cattle herds while hunting probably ended up ingesting magic mushrooms that grow on cow dung. The reason they decided to eat the revolting stuff was because it would have improved visual acuity to help with hunting. In larger doses, it would increase energy and help with social bonding, and all this stuff would have been evolutionarily useful. The trips they experienced on these drugs also might have accelerated their cultural evolution, giving rise to early forms of religion and spirituality, the arts, and most important, certainly, language.

Generally, this idea isn't widely accepted, but there are parts of it that might be plausible. It's totally conceivable that early humans consumed psychedelic drugs, and those experiences might have impacted their culture. But the strong version of the stoned ape theory goes as far as to say that this psychedelic use altered the actual genetics of the early humans and directly caused the beginning of language, which seems unlikely. I didn't find it persuasive, and in fact, if you press Terence McKenna, he didn't find it entirely persuasive. It's a very, it was an interesting speculation. It's kind of a mind game. I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and and and and create new ideas, new memes, um, and might contribute to language, um, but how does it get into the genes? I see psychedelics as having had a profound effect at the level of cultural evolution, that there are lots of interesting innovations that people who had psychedelic experience introduced to our culture.

Sun Language: A bizarre take on the whole proto-world original language question came from an unlikely place: Turkish ultra-nationalists. The Sun Language is a pseudo-linguistic, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-theory from Turkey around the mid-1930s that basically states that the first human language started in Turkey. The rationale has to do with the idea that all languages started out as hieroglyphics and script in the Sumerian civilization. The Turkish linguists believed that the Sumerian culture had Turkish origins, so therefore Turkey was the cradle of language. The first president of Turkey was a big supporter of this theory, and given his influence, was able to popularize the idea. This was politically convenient too, since it really aligned with the whole "Turkey number one" thing.

As the story goes, primitive humans in Turkey were so struck by the effects of the sun, they built their spirituality around a sun deity. As they developed language, the first word they assigned was "ag" for the sun, and from there, the rest of language was built. Some linguists have suggested that this whole theory was basically just political cope at the time. The Turkish language had a bunch of loanwords from Arabic and Persian that the authorities were trying to get rid of, but the public didn't seem to be adopting their new Turkish replacements. So if they just assumed that all languages ended up starting in Turkey, these loanwords could still be considered Turkish in a way, so they could still maintain this nationalist vibe without having to change the language.

Eden Island: This one is pretty wacky. In the early 2000s, an amateur linguist posted a number of long, sprawling web pages with bizarre ramblings about his linguistic theories. The whole project was apparently a hobby he took up during retirement. He never studied linguistics or philology at all. In fact, he had a B.A. in forestry. He wrote, "Now, why would someone with formal training in forest and land administration, surveying, aerial photo interpretation, wildlife suppression, forest ecology, botany, etc., venture into fields as remote as linguistics, Homeric studies, Ogham inscription translation, pre-Christian religion, and archaeology? Because here was obviously a wide-open and interesting field of study which for centuries had attracted many non-academic outsiders who made great contributions to the science they chose to work on."

So notably, he believed that the Basque language was the one and only original language, and the whole idea of how languages work according to other linguists is total [ __ ]. For him, every language besides Basque is fake and was invented by the Benedictine monks. He suggested that people weren't buying the whole Tower of Babel story, since everyone around only spoke Basque, so the monks invented a bunch of other languages and spread them around the world so that the myth made sense. "It was in Babel that the Lord confused the language of all the Earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the Earth." Could all the Indo-European languages be the product of highly skilled religious linguists? It may be hard to believe, but that is exactly what happened.

There have been a few forum threads of people laughing at this guy's crazy theories and some of his made-up Basque etymologies. One person wrote, "Nyland, a self-taught philologist, was just a crazy man playing with esoteric concepts and absurd phonological correspondences. For instance, this etymology of 'doctor' that traces back to Basque words that mean 'a bloody injury come quickly'." I'd highly recommend spending some time scrolling through this guy's webpage or some of the forum threads about him if you find this as funny as I do.

Italian Gestures: From Romans, one of the defining features of Italian culture is the widespread use of hand gestures alongside speech. The origin of the unique use of hand gestures in Italy is still an open question, but some scholars have speculated that it comes from the Romans, who used what's called chironomia, a system of hand gestures to communicate. Here are some examples of some of the basic ones that you can add to your repertoire if you want to role-play as The Godfather or a fancy Italian chef:

* Pinched fingers pointing up means "What?" or "What do you mean?"

* Prayer hands means "Please" or "Could you do this for me?"

* The "okay" hand is perfect.

* Kissing all your fingers and extending your arm away means "Delicious."

* Putting your index and middle finger in a V shape and bringing it to your mouth means "To ask for a cigarette."

* And now this one, you got to be careful with: Bend your arm in an L shape with your fist pointing up and slap your bicep as you raise your arm up. This means "[ __ ] you" and is similar to giving the finger.

Curse of 39: Humans love patterns. Patterns are great. Always need patterns. Can never have enough patterns. We always need to be making arbitrary associations between concepts. It's very important. One such association is in Afghanistan with the number 39. Evolution: Can you give me pattern-seeking brain to avoid predators? Yes. Actually develops arbitrary association between the number 39, curse, shame, and prostitution. People caught with a 39 on their license plate are met with other drivers flashing their lights, honking their horns, and pointing at them. People have even started painting over their license plates to change the 9 to an 8. Traffic commission workers are receiving bribes of upwards of $230 to issue different plates, and people trying to sell cars with a 39 plate have to discount it by $2,000. Selling an apartment with unit number 39 is also pretty much impossible.

It's unclear exactly why this association emerged, but it seems to be having very real consequences. One suggestion is that it comes from an infamous Afghan pimp who went by the name "39" since his car had a 39 plate and he lived in apartment number 39. But that story could be totally fake, and it could just be flat-out corruption. Police officials might have spread this myth so they can get bribes to have people's plate names changed, and car dealers might have been in on this too, since they could buy 39-plate cars at a discount, change the plates, and then resell for a profit.

Codex Seraphinianus: I present you with this bizarre illustration of a procreating couple who slowly animorph into a crocodile. This is from the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, which has been appreciated by literary giants like Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Italo Calvino. It basically consists of a bunch of general encyclopedic topics like flora and fauna, physics and chemistry, machines and gizmos, history, culture, and other things, but all in a super surreal style. Luigi started on this project in the '70s and, as this Insider article reads, was possibly under the influence of psychedelics or otherworldly forces. Originally, Luigi wanted this book to be published completely anonymously because he was fascinated with the Voynich Manuscript and its mysterious origins, but eventually, he compromised, and it was published under the name Seraphinianus to give his own name a Latin-sounding mystique.

The relevant part of this bewildering work is that it's written in a completely imaginary language. The script looks familiar to Western writing, being read in left-to-right rows with uppercase and lowercase letters. In 2009, Luigi claimed that the writing in the Codex doesn't actually have any meaning at all, and his goal was to create that childlike sense you get when you look at text as a small child that you can't understand, but you assume that adults know what it means.

Nicaraguan Sign Language: When you look at sign languages around the world, a lot of them are related to each other in these large families, but Nicaraguan Sign Language is an exception. It developed almost entirely in isolation. Deaf children in Nicaragua were generally isolated from the other kids and were never taught writing or signing. So in 1977, when a school for the deaf opened up, the kids ended up inventing a language of their own, with later generations building on what they learned from the older kids.

Linguists were absolutely stoked about this language when they heard about it, since it's a rare example of an entirely new language developing from the beginning. Linguists have been stuck analyzing creoles, combinations of two existing languages, but they've never been able to witness something this unique. In particular, they were really excited about the fact that it was children creating the language rather than adults. Things like verb agreement and grammar conventions emerged naturally without anyone teaching the kids about it beforehand. All of this can be seen as proof of the whole language innateness thing, since these kids seem to have that built-in understanding of language structure.

Xshonwa: The final word in the musical guide, an encyclopedia of classical music, which sat underneath the "zimbal" (the German word for symbol), it was defined as "xshonwa Shah" (Maori drum Fife). Conclusion: It turns out that this word isn't real at all. It's totally made up of pure fiction. It's fiction, a total fabrication. It might have been a tongue-in-cheek joke with the translation of "conclusion" as the final word in the encyclopedia. As it turns out, Maori doesn't have the kind of consonant clusters found in this word, like two Zs followed by an X, or even an S or SH sound. Maori dictionaries do actually have words for "drum" and "conclusion," but they look nothing like "xshonwa."

Disc: A strange disc was discovered in a basement cell in Crete by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in 1908 (different Luigi from last time, though). The disc is pretty interesting, and there are loads of wild ideas of what it says. Some think it's an astronomical calendar, an ancient computer, a board game, or even pre-Homeric poetry. It's also believed to be the very first printed document in the world, existing over 3,000 years before the Gutenberg Bible. It's absolutely clear that the characters on the disc were punched or stamped in rather than individually carved out. This is weird for a couple of reasons: Why was this printed when basically every other document at the time was manually inscribed? Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform were inscribed in stone or clay, and Linear A and B, which were found in the same area, were inscribed as well. This could mean that printing was invented at one point and then disappeared for thousands of years before being invented again.

But there's something a little suspicious about this disc. Nobody wants to actually check to see how old it is. The mystique surrounding the disc made it a national icon in Greece and the main attraction at a museum. Some scholars have requested to get it thermoluminescence tested to figure out how old it is, but the Greek authorities keep denying them. This raises a question: Is this all just a big hoax that was made up in 1908? As of now, linguists have still tried to decipher the disc, but progress is looking grim. They did determine that it's probably structured similarly to Linear A and B, where each sign represents a full syllable, since there are 45 different kinds of characters, and that's way bigger than any alphabet where characters represent individual vowels or consonants. But there isn't much text to work with, given how many characters there are, which means they won't be able to decode it without more samples from around this time. It would be pretty cool if the Greek authorities let them test its age to see if the linguists are just wasting their time, but for now, it remains a mystery.

Swedish Yes Sound: The Swedish word for yes is "ja," but in some northern communities, they use a sound that makes you think they're gasping for air. "Hå" means yes. That's it. That's the entire entry. Now you know.

Indian Welsh: As the story goes, in 1170, the ruler of a kingdom in what is now Wales died, and his sons engaged in an epic King Lear-type succession battle that resulted in a civil war. One of his sons, Madog (what's up, my dog?), thought all the fighting was too annoying and decided to leave. He sailed west and ended up finding America, where he built a settlement with some of his crew and then promptly left. So, according to this story, it wasn't Christopher Columbus and the Spanish who took credit for "discovering" the land that indigenous people in North America already inhabited, but it was actually the Welsh.

In the 17th century, there were a lot of rumors about encounters with these so-called Welsh Indians. They usually involved the Welshman being taken prisoner by indigenous Americans and set up to be executed. At this point, the Welshman would start protesting or praying in Welsh, and his captors would recognize that he's speaking the same language as them and decide to release him. Centuries later, once the British explorers had arrived, they decided to investigate to see if the stories of the Welsh Indians were true. In 1791, this guy wrote, "Words in common use on different parts of the continent, which are very near or undeniably Welsh in both sound and sense, could not happen by chance, and they could not be derived from any Europeans but from the ancient Britons."

Some of this ended up ringing true. Both languages have the words "bara" for bread and "croeso" for welcome. But these folks conveniently ignored the fact that almost every single other word had an unrecognizable translation. Part of the reason these rumors started is simple racism. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that "uneducated travelers were apt to regard every Indian language as gibberish and so compared it with some known languages such as Welsh, Basque, Hebrew, or Finnish, that was also gibberish to them." Everyone wanted the credit for being the brave explorers who discovered America, venturing into lands never before touched by humans. But instead, it was actually the indigenous people of that land who traveled there from Siberia long before these explorers ventured anywhere. But unfortunately for them, the Europeans stormed in, slaughtered a bunch of them, systematically worked to destroy their culture, and claimed it as their own.

Helicopter Hieroglyph: This Egyptian hieroglyph is part of a carving in an ancient temple and looks suspiciously like a helicopter. Were the ancient Egyptians a lot more technologically advanced than we thought? Did people travel back in time and tell them about modern flying vehicles? Did aliens make contact with them? Unfortunately not. The real reason is a lot less fun. It turns out that this stone had actually been reused. Initially, it said, "He who repulses the nine." Years later, it was filled in and recarved to say, "He who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries." The plaster they used to fill it had eroded away over the past three thousand or so years, so both the inscriptions are partly visible simultaneously, which resulted in this strange helicopter shape, which isn't an actual Egyptian hieroglyph at all.

Katakana Hebrew: A little-known fact is that an ancient Hebrew tribe actually sailed all the way to Japan and influenced their writing system. Just look at all these similarities in their characters. Except none of this actually happened. It's fiction. It's widely believed that Katakana is based on Chinese Kanji and was developed over a thousand years ago by Japanese monks to annotate Chinese Buddhist texts. The characters in this image are a very tiny subset of Japanese characters that just happen to look similar to some Hebrew characters.

Proto-Indo-European Nine: In Proto-Indo-European, "nine" is "newn," which is pretty similar to the word "new." There's an interesting theory for why this might be the case. Some linguists suspect that early Proto-Europeans counted with eight fingers, leaving out the thumbs. So when they get to nine, they needed a new set of fingers, which explains why this word is similar to "new."

Neanderthal Language: It turns out that the Neanderthals had a hyoid bone. This thing in their necks that is one of the main structures humans use to produce speech. In computer modeling studies, it's shown that they use it in a similar way to how we do. For non-human primates that can't talk, their hyoid bone is situated differently, so it isn't in the proper position to make vocalizations like speech possible. Now, this doesn't definitively prove that Neanderthals used language, but it does show that they definitely might have, and that fact alone is pretty fascinating. Language is often seen as one of the defining features of humanity. It's what makes us human, but this might suggest that it's not unique to us.

Learn Languages While Sleeping: Really works. As dumb as it sounds, there is some evidence showing that you can help your language learning by listening to tapes while you sleep. Some Swiss researchers had a group of German-speaking participants and gave them a bunch of Dutch words to learn. At 10 PM one night, they split them up into two groups. The first group was told to go to sleep, while the other group stayed awake, and all of them listened to audio of the word pairs they learned. At 2 AM, everybody was tested to see how many words they could remember. It turned out that the group that slept ended up remembering significantly more words.

It's important to remember, though, that this only works because they were exposed to the words already when they were awake. If you put on an audiobook in Spanish while you sleep without doing any work when you're awake, you're probably not going to wake up speaking fluent Spanish, especially if the record skips. I'm saving the money though, because I'm planning a trip to Spain, so I bought an album that teaches you the language. You put the album on, you put headphones on, you learn a language while you're sleeping. During the night, the record skipped. I get up the next day, I could only stutter in Spanish.

This has been the Linguistics Iceberg. I'd like to thank the Reddit user Dragon\_Ore for creating this Iceberg meme. If you had this video on for background noise and you're now scrambling to find something else to quiet your thoughts, I'd recommend checking out my other Iceberg videos on philosophy and psychological experiments. Thank you for watching or listening. Have a great rest of your day.