Transcription
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! 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 wazo in French. No letter is pronounced the way it should, and there are seven of them. It's pronounced wazzo, and yes, I will die mad about it. Wazo 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, core, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Susie, busy, make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear an 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, dyes 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 Babel—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 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.
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 and yay obscribe."
Funnily enough, this fake language actually follows some structural rules. The easiest words to translate start with consonant sounds. Coffee becomes "officay."
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 "idquay."
Finally, some words start with vowels, so you just add "way" or "yay" at the end, like "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. 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 refuse 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 percent 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 percent 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."
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! 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 watched 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 "handschuh" 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: "B labeling supervision tasks transfer law."
Compare that to one of the longest English words, "anti-disestablishmentarianism," 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. Birth control pills are called "Auntie baby pinzalat," which directly translates to "cable salad" and refers to the familiar mess of tangled cables that you might find under your desk.
"San fleisch" or "tooth meat" is your gums, or "doorstander" is a bouncer. A strange feeling of restless boredom when there's nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon.
A man who sits down to pee and has the connotation of a wimp. A face that's in need of a fist, or in other words, a punchable face.
And no list like this is complete without taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.
Land fairpole gwengil gogerich were under Abul anti-cilia Gogo. 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 RAF Mona. Just up the road from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the temperature got to 21 Celsius at 70 in 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 "skroib," 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 frame of ways 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 Jeffrey 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.
Gotti Vsauce. 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 "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce: "G H O T I smells fish." As with most of "Finnegan's 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
Like this, it translates from Norse to "I his name 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, but recovered by authorities.
Then again, in 2007, a silver copy was 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.
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 English. 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.
English 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 English 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 "gleiman" 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. Unnecessary words like "expedite," "ameliorate," "predict," "extraneous," "deracinated," "clandestine," "subaquius," and hundreds of others constantly gained ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.
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 the 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 are 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 "nanae" and "Tate," 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.
Naturally, if you're gonna switch things up, the first thing you'll try to do is close the lips, leading to an "um" 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."
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 is a noun in physics and chemistry, an 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" can 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.
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 "Ithquill: 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 expressed thoughts while avoiding 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: "And the phrase 'characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things' is a single adjective."
This language started to blow up when a Russian magazine, Computera, 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, Ithquill was given the Smiley Award for the best invented language of the year by David 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 Ithquill is that it was never actually meant to be spoken. The word "Ithquill" 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 Ithquill, 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. Best Icelandic pigeon.
Sometime in the early 17th century, at 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 pigeon 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 whaling 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 dib," "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 that 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 tripophobia.
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 "Sakonica." 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 clear-cut, 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 Ventris 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 Cober, and before Michael ever took a shot at cracking Linear B, she was busy working hard on 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. Ventris 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.
Cober 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.
Ventris picked up where she left off and eventually cracked Linear B. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be an old form of ancient Greek. Ventris did mention Cober's contributions thoroughly in his stuff, 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 pigeons, 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 pigeons as their native language, Stephen Pinker has argued that this creolization is only possible because the innate language structures these children have allow them to add complexity to the pigeons and slowly develop them into fully fledged languages.
This isn't just the kids learning how to communicate with people using their pigeons, but it's them taking that pigeon 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 pigeon. 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 pigeon 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 percent 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 "luwakisma."
In Europe, nearly every single student studies English at some point. In France, specifically, young students are required to study one of eight foreign languages, and ninety percent of them choose English.
In Tunisia, employees who know how to speak fluent English earn five percent more, and in Iraq, they earn 200 percent more. When world leaders speak to each other, English is often the common language, even if neither of them speaks it as their native tongue.
So against all odds, English, with its wealth of exceptions, bizarre characteristics, and frankly weird sound, 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 importantly, 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 either. It's a very interesting speculation. It's kind of a mind game. I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and create new ideas, new memes, and might contribute to language.
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 experiences introduced to our culture.
Sign 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 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 nationalist "Turkey number one" thing.
As the story goes, primitive humans in Turkey were so struck by the effects of the sun that they built 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 loan words 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 loan words 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 BA 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, Irish 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.
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 mean "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 gotta 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. We always need patterns. We 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 give you a pattern-seeking brain to avoid predators. Yes, actually, it develops arbitrary associations 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 two hundred and thirty dollars to issue different plates, and people trying to sell cars with a 39 plate have to discount it by two thousand dollars. 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 Serafinianus 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 language 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.
Sean. The final word in the musical guide, an encyclopedia of classical music, which sat underneath the zimbal, the German word for symbol, 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, a pure fiction. 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 Z's followed by an X or even an "sh" sound. Maori dictionaries do actually have words for drum and conclusion, but they look nothing like "or Shah."
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 disk, 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 "Shah," but in some northern communities, they use a sound that makes you think they're gasping for air.
Foreign. That 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 "crowso" 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 Elliott Morrison 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.
Foreign 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 and new in Proto-Indo-European, nine is "noon," 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 has been shown that they used 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. It 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.