Lingthusiasm

Gretchen: So that we can go into them each in enough depth, and also so we can maybe preserve some material for future episodes. We’re gonna talk about three animals – bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales.

Lauren: Okay. We’ve all had a chance, hopefully, to interact with at least one of these animals.

Gretchen: I have definitely interacted with at least one of dogs, bonobos, and sperm whales.

Lauren: I am here to tell you all about a very particular bonobo called Kanzi, who I – recently reading a textbook he was described as a “bonobo celebrity.”

Gretchen: He’s certainly the only bonobo I know by name.

Lauren: He was a male bonobo. He lived from 1980 to 2025, so a cusp-y Gen X-Millennial.

Gretchen: I feel like he was really very famous when I was first getting into linguistics. I read a number of pop linguistic treatments of Kanzi. I’m curious to know how well they stack up.

Lauren: What makes him so compelling is that he wasn’t intended to be one of the bonobos that they trained to use human-mediated communication to talk to humans. He was just hanging out with his adoptive mom Matata when he was really young where she would be being taught this communication system, and he just started using it. Really from an early age giving the sense that he’s doing what human children do, which is just acquiring from the environment how to use language.

Gretchen: Because there was a whole fad, which has kind of faded now (maybe because it didn’t turn out quite as well as people were hoping) of trying to teach various kinds of apes – you know, Koko the gorilla is famous among this series as well –

Lauren: Another celebrity primate, absolutely.

Gretchen: – various celebrity primates to try to communicate in various systems. Since great apes don’t have the same type of vocal tract as humans do, they can’t shape humans sounds, but their hands can do many of the things that human hands can do. There were attempts to teach them sign languages. They were attempts to teach them to communicate with symbolic boards as well.

Lauren: And Kanzi used a combo of these. I definitely agree. He’s at the end of this trend that started in the mid-20th Century. He’s probably the peak and the end of this research being driven where we force primates to communicate on our terms. He used some signs that were adapted from ASL, but he also used these symbols on a board called “lexigrams.” These he would learn the symbol, and it would be sometimes attached to a synthetic voice so that he could press the button, and it would vocalise the word that was attached to that symbol. I actually have a lexigram for you to look at here.

Gretchen: Ooo, yeah.

Lauren: And a screenshot of the board. I chose an aesthetic one.

Gretchen: Yeah, let me see if I can figure out what it might mean or describe what it does.

Lauren: Sure. You describe what it looks like and then have a go.

Gretchen: I’m seeing a symbol that’s a circle with a straight vertical line going all the way through and spilling out at the edges and then horizontally through the circle there’s sort of a wave, like maybe a sine wave or something similar to that that goes through horizontally along the middle. If I had to guess, I would say maybe they want this to indicate – well, it looks kind of like a Pokéball, but that’s probably not what they wanted the bonobo to communicate. Maybe that’s a speech wave or a thought wave?

Lauren: This is the lexigram for “juice.”

Gretchen: Juice? Oh. It doesn’t look like the juice emoji at all.

Lauren: No. Like human language, it’s pretty arbitrary in the relationship between form and meaning. There is some structure to this set of symbols. Red is for things like food and drink. Blue is for activities. Purple is for animate beings like humans and bonobos.

Gretchen: Who even knows if bonobos have the same ontology that humans have. The colour system is helping the humans, but do we know that they distinguish between actions and foods or something in that systematic way?

Lauren: But this juice, like all the best lexigrams, looks like a really great album cover.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, yeah. This could definitely be some sort of Total Eclipse of the Heart situation, especially from the era.

Lauren: This particular set of visual communication that was designed to be used with primates like Kanzi is known as “Yerkish.” I didn’t realise it had a name until I did this research. It’s named after Robert M. Yerkes, who founded the lab where Kanzi spent his time.

Gretchen: Well, I guess it makes sense that Yerkish should be named after a guy named Yerkes. I was hoping for a more exciting etymology, but okay, yeah.

Lauren: “Yerkish” sounds way more metal than it looks as a set of images.

Gretchen: How did Kanzi do at using these symbols? It was sort of a press-a-button-and-play-a-sound symbol, but the buttons were visually identifiable.

Lauren: I mean, I think the challenge with the research on Kanzi, as with many of these primates, is there’s only one of him (so only a finite number of people can work with him). That work is labour. He needs to rest. There’s a finite amount of research; there’s a finite number of people who can do that research. A lot of the debate has been around how much is it people scaffolding him into communicating the way they want him to even if it’s not consciously, how much of it is people who are communicating with him kind of projecting their own desired outcome on the communication. This has been a problem with a lot of this 20th Century primates-who-sign, primates-who-use-symbols type of communication. It does seem like he had a pretty good understanding of these 350 Yerkish symbols and supposedly could understand many spoken English words. Based on trial, apparently, he could identify symbols correctly like 89-95% of the time. That is very cool.

Gretchen: That’s like you show him an apple, and he presses the symbol for “apple.”

Lauren: Yeah, there did seem to be some, like, he could combine them to make slightly more complicated meanings, but there didn’t appear to be any evidence of the kind of grammatical structure – like all those little, small words that we have in English that do all the grammatical heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Words like “and” and “of” and “the” or endings like “-ing” and “-ed” and plural and stuff like that. All languages have something like this whether they do it as short, individual words or whether they do it as prefixes and suffixes. Languages have grammar. That’s one of things we’ve found in all the human languages we’ve encountered. It’s something that we don’t find in the bonobos.

Lauren: I really, really need to stress this point, just so we have a reason to read one of my favourite Bluesky posts ever.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: This is an entirely fictional, not true account of Koko the gorilla and a researcher.

Gretchen: This is Koko fanfiction. It’s not a real thing.

Lauren: This is Koko fanfiction, but it captures what it feels like to read this research where you have these primates communicating without function words and researchers attempting to create a translatable structure out of it.

Gretchen: Shall we each take a part?

Lauren: I’m happy to take Koko because I put this upon us. “Koko – Birkin bag – practical Koko possession bag.”

Gretchen: Then the researcher says, “No, Koko, you can’t have a Birkin bag.”

Lauren: “Good Birkin. Good Koko. Give beautiful Koko deserve gorilla.”

Gretchen: “Koko, we simply can’t afford a Birkin bag. It is an unjustifiable expense.”

Lauren: “Jealousy professor.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: This one gets me every time.

Lauren: Every time. That’s what it feels like, genuinely, to read this research and what it feels like to see this gap between chimp communication and human full grammatical function.

Gretchen: Even this is something that has been constructed to have what a human sees as a punchline. Either the snippets that we get repeated for us have been excerpted from a larger context in which maybe the gorilla goes on – or the bonobo or whatever – goes on to say something else that makes it less punchline-y, or the human has put in some sort of narrative to, again, give it more actual structure than what the whole dataset of what the great ape is trying to communicate.

Lauren: But also, just to stress, that was an entirely fictional account. What I think is really exciting is – we’ve seen this dwindling of this particular kind of research, and what we’re seeing instead is this really exciting growth of research where we’re seeing primates and great apes all researched on their own communicative terms rather than forcing them to communicate with humans or through human technology. There’s lots of work from great researchers like Cat Hobaiter where the researchers spend lots of time, they collect lots of video footage that they can then get independent verification to see how apes communicate with each other. That’s showing some really interesting properties that seem to be this core set of gesture that exist across gorillas and across apes and across potentially one of the substructures that then went on to contribute to human language.

Gretchen: That’s really neat because I feel like I’ve also used gesture to communicate with humans and sometimes, you know, with dogs and other species, when I don’t share a language in common with them. There’re some gestures like, “I’m not being threatening right now,” or “I’m happy,” or this kind of thing that can cross communication barriers. Maybe that’s something we can also share to some extent with our cousins the great apes.

Lauren: There’s some great projects they’ve done where they’ve collected citizen science like, “What do you think this gesture means?” type feedback from humans who are just watching these video interactions. As a human, though, you’re always gesturing with the knowledge that this other human has a language. You might be stacking gestures together in a way that presumes language. What I find really interesting about chimp communication – there was this great paper where they observed some multi-gesture structures –

Gretchen: Ooo, that sounds so sophisticated!

Lauren: These weren’t the sophisticated chimps. These were younger chimps who hadn’t learnt yet what was the most effective way to communicate. It’s a good plot twist.

Gretchen: Plot twist: the chimp gestures share some features of human gestures, and we could maybe guess what they mean at a rate higher than chance, but then they’re not doing that human thing of doing sequences, which is what we really see in human language.

Lauren: Yeah, they’re just like, younger chimps are figuring out what’s gonna work, and the older chimps are like, “Here’s how you do it.” Nice and efficient.

Gretchen: Here’s the one gesture you need.

Lauren: This is why I think it’s really exciting to not force them into our technology and our attempts for what makes communication.

Gretchen: The next animal that we wanna talk about is dogs. I think dogs have a really interesting connection with the chimp research and the gorilla research and the great ape research because, on the one hand, we can’t teach dogs to sign because they don’t have opposable thumbs for it, but they are already found in so many human homes and have a whole lot of evolutionary practice at understanding and being understood by humans even with very different anatomy. But there have recently been a couple famous button dogs on social media who –

Lauren: Button dogs?

Gretchen: Ah, their humans post these videos of the dogs pressing buttons with their paws or their noses that speak words out loud, and then the human ends up telling a story or attributing something to the dog’s intentionality about pressing these buttons.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: These buttons were first developed for humans who have language disorders like aphasia. They can press these buttons in order to communicate.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, assisted communication is absolutely a valid communication tool that humans can use.

Gretchen: Exactly. When humans use it, we us it in ways that are structured, that are complex, that use things like function words and question words, and that use the full end of the spectrum. Often, an assisted communication tool will have both some buttons for frequent words but also a way to type in extra words that weren’t in the system to give humans that sort of open-endedness to communicate their thoughts. The dog system’s generally much simpler. They have just a few buttons. They may be larger for the dog to be able to press them. They record a voice of the human saying a word. A few of the famous dogs are Bunny, who is a sheepadoodle –

Lauren: Great dog name.

Gretchen: Yeah. And Stella, who is another –

Lauren: Classic dog name.

Gretchen: There are a lot of these dogs at this point. Apologies if we don’t cite your favourite. One such example is a female labrador named Copper, who has a video that’s titled “Cool…Mad” and presents this story about, apparently, the dog being upset about losing access to the pool. It opens with a shot of the dog calmly sitting there. The trainer’s voice says, “Hey, Cop, what do you want?” The dog sluggishly presses the pool button. The trainer responds, “I know. Your pool is broken. I’m so sorry.” The trainer asks, “Copper want to play?” The dog presses the “Mad” button, then looks away from the camera.

Lauren: This dog has impeccable comedic timing.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a paper that analyses some of this communication, which we’re gonna link to. There’s a few things there that are a little bit suspicious if you know dogs, one of which is that the – we know what an angry dog looks like, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: An angry dog is growling. Their hackles are up. All this sort of stuff. The dog presses this “Mad” button, but otherwise, the dog has a steady posture, slow movements, that don’t covey a sense of anger or agitation. So, pressing the “Mad” button is great comedic timing from a human perspective but doesn’t necessarily follow that the dog is communicating even something we know dogs can communicate like, “I’m angry,” or “I’m agitated,” or “I’m upset.” If you have a dog or you’re familiar with dogs, you know that a dog can communicate like, “Back off, I’m annoyed,” and that’s not quite what’s happening here?

Lauren: So, what is happening?

Gretchen: What seems to be happening is that humans love to tell a story.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: And that our impression of what the dog’s communicating is being shaped by both the human who’s behind the camera and then also the human who’s choosing how to edit and post these videos. Not just specifically for this one video but probably for the videos in general, we don’t know how many videos get recorded that don’t have a funny comedic thing happening at the end that make them worth posting. You can train pigeons to hit buttons.

Lauren: Yeah? Tell me more.

Gretchen: And you have a left button and a right button, right. You can train pigeons to do certain types of combinations of left-right-left-right or even you have to only reward left and right patterns of pecks that had not occurred in some previous number of opportunities. So, the pigeons might only be rewarded, get a little bit of food, if the pattern of responses have not been seen in the last five peck sequences. They’re able to do that. They can produce these variable patterns.

Lauren: Okay. What you’re saying is I could get a pigeon to reply to my text messages for me.

Gretchen: Well, maybe. If you give a pigeon a bunch of buttons that say a bunch of English words, and they press them in a whole bunch of random orders because you’re encouraging them to do lots of different orders, one of those, which could be the only video you put on TikTok, might say, “Hey, Gretchen, I don’t wanna record today. I’m mad.” If you give the pigeon the right number of buttons, and you get – it’s the million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare sort of thing. You can eventually get something that looks like a sentence.

Lauren: But it’s also because humans love to read meaning into human symbols. We’re not asking the dog to design this. It’s all human words.

Gretchen: In some ways, I think of the buttons as less of a prosthetic device for the animals and more a prosthetic device for the humans because humans love to interpret language. It’s pretty well-known that you can teach a dog to ring a bell – maybe for a certain cue. I’ve known dogs who had learned to ring a bell when they wanted to go outside to go to the potty kind of thing. You can teach a dog to do that. A dog can communicate with dog body language that they wanna play or that they’re tired or that they want some food or water. They can go over to their food bowl and make some plaintive eyes at you. If you teach them to press a button to communicate the same thing, they can.

Lauren: Again, linguists are never disputing that dogs are communicating with humans. We’re doing some kind of communication. We’re just very fussy about when that crosses over into language. If ringing a bell and pressing a button that says, “Release me from my torment,” does the same thing, that’s probably not language.

Gretchen: Right. I think that at this point there is quite a bit of scepticism. I really enjoyed some of the comments on the dog training subreddit about this type of research because I think people who know dogs are pretty aware of what dogs can and can’t communicate. People were saying, okay, it’s useful for these types of things, like “I wanna go out,” “I want some food,” this kind of thing, but there’s a lot of scepticism on this thread (there’s a lot of scepticism, I think, in general) that the dog is really communicating, like, “I’m mad about the pool being closed,” or “Why is this thing happening,” or these more complicated questions that we don’t necessarily think dogs can really put sequences together in complex sorts of ways.

Lauren: Also, dogs have so many communication skills. Their ability to follow human gaze and use gaze to direct humans is something that is not found among other canines. It’s actually a weirdly complicated skill to know that if someone extends their hand or extends a finger, you don’t look at that – I’m so obsessed with pointing and this imaginary line that we project out into the world.

Gretchen: The fact that we can do the fake out fetch with the dogs where you pretend to throw the object, and you don’t throw it, and the dog is trying to go there and then is confused when it’s not there – that’s very advanced that dogs can follow our movement to try to end up at a trajectory. That’s something to really appreciate about dogs in their own terms.

Lauren: When you break down communication into all these different skills, and you can be like, there’s this thing – we really struggle to get gorillas and chimpanzees to engage with pointing. They are in our genetic lineage, and they can’t do this thing that dogs can do that is unique within their genetic lineage. Putting together this more complicated puzzle tells a more interesting story.

Gretchen: The thing about the buttons is, again, some of the dog trainer comments were like, “I tried to use the buttons, but I found that it was better for me to just pay attention to the dog’s actual body language because when I was paying too much attention to the buttons, I was ignoring the ways the dog was already communicating with me.” The buttons tend to be quite large. They stay at home. If you’re taking the dog to the park or all of the other many places you can take the dog, they don’t necessarily have the buttons. At that point, you’re still trying to communicate with their body language, their whimpers, their howls, their barks, all of the ways that dogs do communicate with us. Many dogs have learned how to understand certain human words like, “Hey, do you wanna go for a walk?”

Lauren: Gretchen, that’s very mean to people who are maybe listening with their dogs present.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I’m sorry if I just trolled you dog. But one of the cool things about how ubiquitous dogs are and how these buttons have become really popular is that there’s a citizen science dog communication project that has enrolled over 10,000 dogs and –

Lauren: Ten thousand?

Gretchen: Yeah! And seven hundred cats from 47 countries across every continent except Antarctica. You can still sign up for it. It’s still running. They have been trying to figure out how these buttons are being used, what processes people use to try to train their dogs to use them, and can you put the dogs through some tasks with the researchers on the camera to monitor how they’re doing them. So far, they don’t have a ton of results yet. They do try to find, you know, “Do the dogs have any language strings?”

Lauren: That’s putting together multiple buttons to potentially communicate something more complicated.

Gretchen: Right. One dog had apparently being pressing “water” and “bone” in a sequence to request ice –

Lauren: Oh, that’s very cute.

Gretchen: – up until the owner acquired an “ice” button, and the dog abandoned this phrase. That’s kind of cute. Again, I wonder how much of this is prosthetic technology for the humans, right, because if the humans use “water bone,” even if the dog has just done that arbitrarily, and rewards the dog with “Oh yeah, here’s some ice, you like ice,” and then the next time the dog is like, “Oh, maybe I press Button 1 and Button 3 to request ice even if they don’t have an actual understanding of the meaning of those buttons in a combinatorial way.

Lauren: I guess the idea of having the multiple cameras and having the researchers join for some of the interaction is to avoid one of my favourite phenomena in human-animal communication, which is the Clever Hans effect. Clever Hans was a horse in Germany in the early 1900s. In fact, I’ve never thought about this before, but of course, he was German, so his name wasn’t “Clever Hans” it was “Der Kluge Hans.” Hans drew massive crowds for solving mathematical puzzles by beating his hoof on the ground for the correct answer. He could do all kinds of operations. Very clever horse. Except, this researcher, Oskar Pfungst, figured out that what was happening is that his trainer and other people subconsciously were letting Hans know when he should stop tapping. They were like, all leaning in, and then when he got up to the number of hoof beats, they’d all step back and subtly let him know to stop tapping. They didn’t even realise they were doing this.

Gretchen: So, not like, obviously leaning in and out, but they would just sort of relax a little bit.

Lauren: Whatever subtle cues – this horse wasn’t a maths genius. It was a human body language genius.

Gretchen: Which is itself kind of interesting, right?

Lauren: In itself an amazing skill.

Gretchen: Because horses have also co-evolved with humans to be able to interpret what we’re doing with our eye gaze and our posture and the rest of our bodies. It’s just not quite the same as being able to do long division.

Lauren: And so, this was such a scandal. Hans was such a celebrity that this has become known as the “Clever Hans effect” when you are giving an animal or a research participant in general (human animal or non-human animal) – you’re giving them some kind of subtle indicator of whether they are performing the experiment correctly.

Gretchen: The kind of thing you wanna do to prevent that is ask the question from behind a screen, maybe, where the horse or the dog or whatever can’t see you, or ask a question that neither the asker nor anyone in the room knows the answer to. Because otherwise we know dogs can track our eye gaze. If we’re looking at the button that would be the funniest punchline to what the dog could be quote-unquote “saying,” they could be following that eye gaze and being like, “Well, my human really likes it when I press this button. I’m gonna do that because I like to please my human.”

Lauren: Which is why it’s so great they’re doing this big citizen science project.

Gretchen: Yeah. What they’ve learned so far is that “now” is a favourite dog word, whereas owners generally preferred “later.” It’s not simply that whichever buttons the owner presses more frequently are also gonna be pressed more frequently by the dogs.

Lauren: That’s nifty.

Gretchen: But also, this is a real sick burn – dogs communicate “love” to their owners far less frequently than their owners do to them.

Lauren: Aw, poor dog owners.

Gretchen: Which I don’t necessarily think means your dog doesn’t love you! I think it means that maybe the abstract concept of love as expressed by a button is less well-communicated by a dog than the dog wanting to come sit by you and all these other ways that dogs express being excited to see you and these types of things.

Lauren: Again, I think your observation that it’s probably better to communicate on the dog’s terms is really gonna pay off on that one.

Gretchen: Yeah. They have been trying a few more complicated controlled experimental tests. A researcher wearing noise-cancelling headphones presses a button on the dog’s sound board, which is covered by a plain coloured sticker, so the researcher doesn’t know what one they’re pressing, and that allows the dog a full minute to respond to the press. The researcher provides no feedback. The owners say a word or press a button on the dog sound board while wearing sunglasses, so you can’t see the eye gaze.

Lauren: Scientifically rigorous and very cool.

Gretchen: We should show things like dogs being more likely to move toward the door after the “outside” button is pressed than when the “food” button is pressed. Something like that, right. But they’re still working on actually getting those results. There’s another trial that they’re doing where there’s literally 24/7 cameras at multiple angles in the house facing the dog communication board at a bunch of other angles. I don’t know who’s willing to wire up their whole house to be live-streaming data to researchers on the internet, but like, thanks for contributing to science. And then the next study they’re trying to investigate is whether dogs can generalise an action label. If they have a button that says, “Help,” or something like “help” that they’ve observed in situations like the owner retrieving a ball that rolled under the couch, would they also produce that button when they’re faced with a locked food container, which is a novel context that could still require help.

Lauren: Again, this more sophisticated trying to see if they can do something closer to human language around generalisation.

Gretchen: Right, which might not necessarily mean that they have a symbolic meaning attached to “help,” but at least that they can generalise it across certain types of contexts. It’s certainly way more data than you can get off trying to do with chimpanzees, and maybe we’ll learn a few things.

Lauren: Our final animal – there’s no button boards; there’s no symbols. We’re gonna look at sperm whales as our third example where instead of us giving them a technological medium to communicate with, we are using our technology to understand how sperm whales are communicating with each other, which we don’t know a lot about. In fact, it was only in 1957 we learnt that sperm whales even made sound.

Gretchen: Oh, whoa, that’s so recent!

Lauren: The first report in Nature –

Gretchen: That’s less a hundred years ago that we even knew that they made the whale songs. I thought we’ve always known about whale songs.

Lauren: We’ve known about whale songs, but sperm whales in particular, in 1957, there’s this Nature report where they’re like, “Oh, well, this makes sense of urban-legend type stories,” but they were like, “Oh, we spent an hour hanging out near five sperm whales. At first, we thought there was some kind of problem on the ship. But once we figured that out, the whales were in plain sight. There was just this sound like a grating groan or like a hammering sound as well.” They were like, “Unfortunately, phonographic equipment was not available.” This is 1957, guys. What, do you think we carry sound equipment all the time?

Gretchen: [Laughs] So, instead, they had this description of like, “It reminded some of a rusty hinge creaking.”

Lauren: They had to go very poetic to capture it in the absence of a recording.

Gretchen: But now we have recordings.

Lauren: We do have recordings of their sequences of clicks, which are called “codas.” A lot of very interesting work is currently being done by a team with a project that is called Project CETI (C-E-T-I).

Gretchen: This reminds me of a different project SETI (S-E-T-I), which is about extraterrestrial intelligence searching.

Lauren: Yes, SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. These folk have made a great pun. They’ve called it CETI as in “cetacean,” which is the family that sperm whales are in. They refer to themselves as doing “intra-terrestrial” research.

Gretchen: What have we found? What sort of technology are we using?

Lauren: We’ve found so far that we need to invest a lot in waterproof robotics and drones and high-quality waterproof microphones.

Gretchen: That sounds useful, yes.

Lauren: A lot of their early work has just been literally developing their field kit to capture video and audio recordings of sperm whale communication and interaction. They refer to it a lot as “communication,” which I think is correct.

Gretchen: I really respect that choice.

Lauren: They do occasionally talk about “translating,” and I’m just like, oof, I think, you know, you got to do what the funding dollars call you to do, but I don’t think we’re really gonna translate, but we might learn something about the structure of whale communication.

Gretchen: I didn’t realise before we started looking into it for this episode how very behind we are in terms of understanding whales compared to understanding more accessible animals like birds and even chimps and dogs where we have many more centuries of awareness of the kinds of communication that they’re doing.

Lauren: Right. One of the big studies this team has done is that they recorded a birth within one of the sperm whale pods that they research. There were 11 members of this pod of sperm whales who were present and participated in the birth.

Gretchen: That’s so cool. Even if they aren’t necessarily just the whale’s mother or even related to the whale.

Lauren: It’s the whole community that were there. And, you know, as a bit of a midwifery geek, I love a family-assisted home birth. I think that’s really beautiful. I don’t think I would record my own birth to use in research, but I’m glad these whales were able to share this moment with us.

Gretchen: We have tons of data of what human births look like at this point. As someone who’s a fan of Call the Midwife, I really wanna see the whale sequel that’s maybe called Call of the Midwife – Call of the “Mid-Whale.”

Lauren: [Laughs] So, this research has these – like all the whales line up along the same axis to support the birthing mother whale and support the baby when it comes out. Obviously, that’s all very interesting from a social dynamic perspective. We don’t really know a lot about the social dynamics of sperm whales. But what’s also really interesting is they have three-and-a-half hours of audio. They used machine learning and computational methods to help them extract 5,731 of those coda clicks, so they could analyse them.

Gretchen: That’s like clusters of clicks or sequences of clicks.

Lauren: And so, you see these changes in the rate at which these codas are produced and the structure of them across the birth. They were longer in duration during the birth. Those sequences shortened after the birth was complete.

Gretchen: Hm, it seems to be related to something.

Lauren: There’s this great homogeneity and similarity in vocal style at any point except just before and during the birth. There’s heaps of the variability that comes in at that point. We have no idea why any of this is happening but just that there is this variation, and we now have both the recording equipment and then the computer technology to analyse it is so cool.

Gretchen: And that we have the context of what’s going on because there’s video as well of what’s going on at the same time, so we can maybe map that onto something. But this is the first time we’ve witnessed a sperm whale birth in recorded form. We have one point of data, which is a very rich point of data, but we don’t have a million births or even a hundred or a thousand births to compare it with from other sperm whales. Maybe we’ll have some in the future.

Lauren: The team have also been doing this really cool work where they look at the acoustic properties of these clicks, and they use spectrograms, which we’ve met before in acoustic phonetics.

Gretchen: Well, that’s fun (because they do have sounds).

Lauren: They do have sounds. When they look at these sounds – these are very quick. You’re slowing them down. But when you slow them down, and you look at those formant bands within the spectrogram, and you read them just like you read human spectrograms, they identify what they call R and E coda clicks because they have properties more like an R vowel in English or an E vowel in English.

Gretchen: Huh, this reminds me – people also use spectrograms to analyse bird song. With birdsong we know things like, “Okay, this is a particular bird’s courtship call,” or “This is a particular bird’s warning call,” or we have certain types of categories for things. Do we know anything like this for the whales yet?

Lauren: No, we’re literally at like, “Did you know these clicks aren’t even all the same?”

Gretchen: Oh, boy, okay. We’ve got a long way to go before we even understand as much about whale song as we do about birdsong.

Lauren: There’s like, individual whales have their own unique timing. Some click faster. Some click slower. It’s not just this one homogenous thing. There is lots of variation. There’s lots of things that are clearly happening, and we are just beginning to collect enough recordings to see what that variation is. Whether we will get towards the whale acoustic model or WAM, which is their attempt to move towards something –

Gretchen: That’s a great acronym.

Lauren: So good. They want to move towards what they’re calling a “translative model” of vocalisations. Whether that will actually happen or whether the like, we’re translating whales is just a bit of funding, advertising, like, either way, the whales are doing interesting things. It’s exciting that they are finally getting data. I’m so glad that we’re starting this on the whale’s terms, and we’re not gonna make (hopefully) the same mistakes we made with primates of trying to get them to communicate on our terms.

Gretchen: There’s no plans to create giant, floatable button boards, and try to get the whales to press them with their noses – that’s not on the horizon because we’ve realised it’s better to study animals in their own terms in terms of the communication systems.

Lauren: Thankfully, yes.

Gretchen: I think that one of the things that trying to communicate with animals and use technology reminds us is all of the different kinds of relationships we can try to have and that we can really wish we were able to have when it comes to animals and trying to find ways of doing that that try to understand the animals on their own terms and treat them in ways that are ethical for what the animal actually is and how they have a relationship with humans (or don’t want a relationship with humans), while avoiding trying to make them into circus shows, like the Clever Hans effect or these things where you train the animals to just perform that they don’t really understand what they’re doing.

Lauren: Social media reels are the new circus.

Gretchen: Yeah. And creating some sort of catchy sound bite that can be shared for entertainment speaks, I think, to this desire of humans to feel like we’re not alone and that we can communicate in interesting and meaningful ways with animals, which sometimes things like recording technology can really help but also using our own senses as fellow animals can help us avoid getting distracted by the flashy technology-driven ways of communicating.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our retro-style Gavagai rabbit shirts, totes, and scarves – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

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Gretchen: Or as the bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales have not yet managed to say – stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

Gretchen: Not the language of power in some ways.

Julie: Not the language of power. At the time that we arrived in Canada, immigrants still had the choice in Quebec to send their kids to English school or French school. Almost everybody sent their kids to English school because that was the language that would give you the greatest opportunities. And then the language laws came into effect very soon after we arrived.

Gretchen: These are the Quebec language laws that say, first of all, if you’re an immigrant to Canada, if neither of your parents was educated in English in Canada (this very specific codicil for the English minority in Quebec), then you have to be sent to French school because the idea that is French is and should be the language of Quebec, and that there’s something to be defended there.

Julie: Exactly. My family (my siblings and I) were educated in English. I did one year of school in French just because I hated the English school I was in, so I just decided, “Oh, let’s see if the French school is any better,” and it was. That was a wonderful experience. But for the most part French, for me, was the language that I spoke with friends. It was a social language. It was a fun language. I still sink into it as the language where I just relax. It’s sort of like kicking off your shoes, putting on your pyjamas, that is Quebec French for me.

Gretchen: I noticed – we were at a café before this – and you were talking to people in French in the café, like, totally switching back and forth between the two, as I also do, and as a lot of people in Montreal do, even though you don’t live in Montreal anymore.

Julie: Well, to me, being in Montreal is the opportunity to speak French and to experience the pleasure of speaking French. I really do just almost get a bodily sensation of “Ah” when I get to speak French. I use it wherever possible, even when they speak English back to me because they detect that that’s not my strongest language. I really push back and wanna continue in French.

Gretchen: So, you took an intro linguistics course, fell in love, and decided to become a linguistics professor. It’s that easy, right? [Laughs]

Julie: Not on the spot. It was more like a seduction, I think, into linguistics.

Gretchen: Linguistics had to buy you dinner first. [Laughter]

Julie: It very quickly bought me dinner and then some. It was a pretty short courtship. I did switch my major rather quickly, I think, after that first linguistics course. Certainly, by my second or third year, I had the feeling that this was something I was continue in, and go to grad school, and wanna study.

Gretchen: How did your particular area of linguistics court you?

Julie: Oh, yes, so psycholinguistics is what drew me. You know, it’s so interesting to me to think of psycholinguistics as a sub-branch of linguistics because, in many ways, I think of all linguistics as being part of what we’re doing in our minds with language, of course, but the specific sub-field of psycholinguistics tends to be very experimental in its approach. It’s the process of designing studies to investigate: how is it that we learn language; how is it that we produce language; how do we understand it? I think what drew me is that that was the area where you could see language in action in real time. That, I think, is very interesting to me because it lays bare some of the vulnerabilities of language. A lot of how we determine how we process language psychologically is by looking at “Where does it fail? Where does it fall apart?” and that gives us a sense of “What memory limitations are we working with? What are some of the computational things that are going on in our minds as we process language?” By looking at the points where, if we stress language, where can it break a little bit?

Gretchen: Do you have an example of one of those types of failures you try to get people to do in the lab?

Julie: Sure. At the time, there was a lot of focus on the problem of ambiguity. One thing that you learn very quickly when you look at language in real time is that we can only experience language in small slices of time. Acoustically, the sentence unfolds, and what has been produced a moment ago is gone, and you can only recover it through memory. You’re trying to constantly keep in memory the parts that are no longer present in time, trying to anticipate what’s coming. In a sense, you’re playing this game between memory and anticipation and prediction. What that means is that there’s tremendous room for ambiguity that is temporary. It will get resolved. But even at the level of a syllable – so if I say the syllable “can,” well, that can continue as “cantankerous,” “candle,” “Canada,” “cancer,” any one of many, many words. It turns out that people are very quickly trying to predict or make guesses as to what is unfolding at that moment.

Gretchen: If you bring people into a lab, you have them look at a little computer screen, or maybe they’re doing some sort of eye-tracking, so you can see what they’re looking at, or you can put a little brainwave cap on their head, so you can try to see which areas of their brain are producing more electricity, which is thoughts, and then you play them “CANdle” or “CANdy” or “CANada,” and you have pictures of a Canadian flag and a candle and a candy or something on the screen, and then you can see where they’re looking and what they’re thinking when they’re doing that.

Julie: Exactly. Eye-tracking is a really elegant method to study that. It gives us a sense of how people are projecting sound onto meaning very quickly. Another way that ambiguity rears its – I’m not gonna say “ugly” head because I think it’s a rather interesting head.

Gretchen: I think ambiguity is very beautiful. It’s so cool that things can mean so many different things, and yet, we mostly do understand each other.

Julie: Exactly. That’s what I found absolutely riveting. You also see it at the level of sentences. If you can have a sentence like, “John saw the man with…,” and it can continue as “with the blue coat,” or “John saw the man with binoculars.” Those are two very different structures underlying that first part of the sentence. You don’t necessarily know how that’s gonna continue. These kinds of sentences we call very poetically “garden path sentences” because you might think that they’re proceeding in one direction, and then suddenly you’re yanked off the path that you’re on, and you realise, “Whoops, that hit a wall, and now I have to retrace another line.” That can also give us a lot of information about “What information are people taking in? What are they considering from context? What are they basing their predictions and expectations on?” and from that, develop very intricate models of how language comprehension works.

Gretchen: You can bring people into the lab and give them a sentence like – one of the classics I always love for garden path sentences is “The horse raced past the barn fell,” which you go, okay, “The horse raced past the barn,” that’s a normal sentence, and then, what’s this “fell” doing? You have to go back and retrace your steps and go, “Oh, it’s the horse who was raced” or “that was raced past the barn,” that horse fell. You can, again, do eye tracking and see where do people’s eyes jump back to the earlier portion of a sentence to say, “Oh, I’m reinterpreting this now.”

Julie: That’s right. Or you can just see “How long are people spending time reading a surprising continuation of a sentence?”

Gretchen: Versus an expected one.

Julie: Versus an expected one, exactly. Then you can tweak aspects of the context and see, “Now, can we make the same sentence less surprising if we set up a particular context, or we fiddle with the verb of the sentence?” These are some of the ways that we have used to build our theories.

Gretchen: So, you were doing psycholinguistics. You were a professor at Brown University in the US. And then now you’re a writer. How did that come about?

Julie: Well, yeah, so I guess that ambition of being a writer never fully left me. It was a little bit sidelined or supressed. You know, I always had the thought that after I got tenure, I would then be able to write other books – not necessarily the books that you write as a researcher. Well, that’s delusional – at least it was for me. Maybe there’re people who can do that, but I’m someone who works quite slowly in both of those streams. I take a lot of time to think about experiments and design them. I also take a very long time to think about books and write them. For me, it was just not something I could do in parallel.

Gretchen: There’s a lot of stuff like, you know, marking papers and doing all of that administrative work of being a professor, which is a lot to do.

Julie: And running a lab is like running a small business. If you have a full-time lab manager, as I did, then all of a sudden people’s livelihoods depend on you getting the next grant. There’s that kind of pressure and sense of responsibility. I just felt that I could not, in good conscience, come in and out of that lab work if I decided I wanted to flit off for a couple of years and write a book. You have graduate students to whom you’re responsible as well. It came down to a choice. The tipping point was going on sabbatical for a year and realising that, hmm, there was still this draw of wanting to write and sort of prompted a whole re-evaluation of my life. I started gradually transforming myself into the kind of writer that could write the books that I wanted to.

Gretchen: How did you take that first step out to writing things beyond textbooks or research monographs?

Julie: What happened is that on sabbatical I was working on a book that I was co-writing with Greg Carlson on language and advertising. This came out of a class that we had jointly developed when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester. We decided we would write this up as a book for a general audience. That just put me into the pleasure of writing. It was a little bit of a gateway book for me. The book is now quite dated.

Gretchen: This was Sold On Language.

Julie: This is Sold On Language. It also revealed to me that I still had a long way to go to build up the kinds of skills that I wanted to have as a really serious writer.

Gretchen: How did you go about building up that skill?

Julie: Writing short pieces for various magazines and outlets. Writing a lot of unpublished poetry, actually. Because that put me in a very different skillset, being very attuned to language sound, language structure, a different process of working with language that also tapped into something a little bit more intuitive, yeah, that was really focused on the aesthetics of language. That was very important to me as a writer.

Gretchen: One of the things that I noticed about your first book that I read, which was Memory Speaks, which is a book that we talked about in an earlier episode about language policy, which we’ll link to, was that your writing was very beautiful. I’m really interested to hear that you had this step of like, “I’m gonna go away and write a whole bunch of poetry to develop that aesthetic sense of language in addition to the linguistic analytical sense.”

Julie: Exactly. Scientific writing trains you in a particular style that serves the purpose of scientific writing, but it is different from literary writing. Literary writing values very highly a feeling of embodiment, a subjective point of view, where scientific writing tends to shy away from that, tends toward abstraction. As scientists, we are trained to be very abstract thinkers. I think we forget how bizarre that is as a way of moving through the world and using language. I had to learn to disengage from that and learn the skillset of writers who are more grounded in experience, in observation, in detail. I think a big part of my process was to also negotiate between the two because my writing does deal with scientific subjects as well. There are sometimes good reasons why you wanna be sceptical of a literary style of writing to get certain points across.

Gretchen: This is one of the things that I notice about both of the books of yours that I’ve read – Memory Speaks and, the new one, Linguaphile – is that you have this genre of writing that’s partially memoir, where it’s personal experience, and then also partially scientific where it’s like, “Oh, and here’s this study,” but the studies feel very well integrated into the personal experience, and the personal experience very well integrated into the studies. There’s this back and forth that I’m never getting whiplash between the two.

Julie: I’m so happy to hear you say that because it took me a long time to figure out. When I first started trying to fuse those things together, it felt a little bit like I was creating a Frankenstein thing where if I launched into describing a study, I would just slip into that more scientific style of language. Creating a piece so that the seams didn’t show as much was definitely part of the process for me.

Gretchen: This is also one of the things that I grappled with when I was writing Because Internet where because I was writing about a genre of language, informal writing, that’s often denigrated, I wanted to show, rather than just tell, that it can still be beautiful. It can still be creative and expressive and really interesting and engaging. That meant that my writing had to be beautiful if I was gonna write in something approaching that style.

Julie: Yes. And energetic. That is one of the things that Because Internet has, I think, so well is that energy and spontaneity that comes through in the language that you’re writing about.

Gretchen: Which is something that I wrote ten drafts of to sound this spontaneous, you know?

Julie: I know. I know. [Laughter]

Gretchen: The writing process aspect – and when I was reading Linguaphile, which is the new book that you wrote, about language throughout the lifespan, both language and childhood and adulthood and old age and loss and things like that, I noticed that I was very like – the chapters were just running very smoothly through my fingers, through my eyes, and I was just propelled on to continue reading it and didn’t feel like I was getting bogged down or dragged back at any point, which is one of the things that’s very tricky both in memoir because the individual details of one person’s life –

Julie: Can be boring. [Laughter]

Gretchen: I wanna say it diplomatically, but like, it’s really easy to write something that is of interest to you and your friends and family and not super interesting to people who don’t know you because that’s a fail state of memoir. And then the fail state of scientific writing is, okay, here’s a whole bunch of details of jargon or too many studies or this type of thing and trying to take this bird’s eye view of what’s interesting about both of these topics that are sometimes hard to write about in an interesting way.

Julie: Exactly. In a way, I think, fusing the two helped me avoid the pitfalls of each one a little bit because the choices about what details to include from the memoir side are driven by “How do they fit in with the themes I wanted to explore from the psycholinguistic side?” The process of writing Linguaphile was quite unusual for me. It was a little bit different from other work. I basically started with I think 12 chapters in each one. I just conceived of as, at the beginning, a bucket that I would start with some psycholinguistic concept that began with early infancy and went through the lifespan. The first chapter, for instance, deals with infant speech perception – how do infants begin to break into this river of sound and pull out some of the patterns of sound and identify where word boundaries are? That was the starting concept, and then that constrains what I choose from the memoir side, so that you’re not just rambling on into the things that are fun for you to remember but may be not useful for the literary project you’re undertaking.

Gretchen: I felt very held by the book in terms of what it was doing. I also found that, at a more granular level, your writing’s very beautiful. I wanted to ask you about that. As a linguist, what does “beauty” in writing or in language look like for you?

Julie: I feel that it just really enriches my experience of it. I wanna tell you what happened to me one time when I was a young professor teaching linguistics. I had a student come up to me after class and say, “Thanks for this lecture, but I will be dropping the class because I’m a poet,” she said, “and I’m not interested in dissecting language this way.” That was all that she said. I was really taken aback because, for me, that had not been my experience that somehow it diminished my sense of creativity with the language or appreciation for its beauty. If anything, it enhanced it. Once you know how intricate language is from the inside, I feel that you are just more attuned to things like the mouth-feel of words. You’ve studied how they’re shaped in the articulatory tract. You have a sense of which sounds the mind clumps together as being more similar than others. This is very useful material for a poet, I think, to have that understanding of the sound space and which sounds are more distant than others. Understanding how sentences are put together gave me a sense of how you can create patterns and then create a sense of surprise, a little twist, or create balanced sentences.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about an artist, a sculpture, a Michelangelo-type sculptor, studying human anatomy because if you know the way the muscles are arranged below the skin, you can create these incredibly human, life-like sculptures or drawings or sketches or things like that because you’ve actually examined, from life, in this more detailed way, whereas if you’re saying, “Oh, I can only do things from an impressionistic perspective, and knowing the names of the muscles or knowing how they’re arranged in this particular way, that spoils it because I’ve attacked it too scientifically,” I mean, obviously, I agree with you because I’m also a linguist that having this more detailed understanding of what things are similar to other things or what things are different from other things means that you’re able to manipulate those things more precisely or be aware of why something is or isn’t working in the aesthetic sense you’re aiming for.

Julie: Absolutely. And it also extends your toolkit. One of the things that you come across if you’re studying syntax, for instance, you come across a lot of really unusual constructions because your job as a linguist is to explain, “Hm, why can we say X, and we can’t say Y?” That just gives you an awareness of the range of structures that are out there in language, whereas, day-to-day, we tend to use a much narrower set in our regular lives. I also am struck by how visual artists often study the visual perception system. They’ll study how colour perception works or how perception of perspective works and use that as something that informs their work. Understanding how garden path sentences work allows you to avoid clunky sentences that might derail the reader in ways that are not pleasant, that create a sense of “Wait, what?” – a disorienting feeling that is not nice, that’s not achieving anything that you wanna achieve as a writer.

Gretchen: I find that one of the things that I often end up doing when I’m revising a text or when I’m editing someone else’s text is saying, okay, so you’ve listed three things here. You’ve said, “This is this. This is this. And this is something else.” The things that you’ve listed, one of them is a noun, one of them is a verb, and one of them is something else – a prepositional phrase or something like this. It would be easier for the reader if we listed three nouns or three verbs or three prepositional phrases or three things that were more syntactically similar to each other because then we can keep the same syntax, keep the same grammatical construction the whole way through. You don’t notice necessarily, impressionistically, when you’re reading something. You’re like, “Ah, good, this person has listed three nouns in parallel, and that’s what makes this easy to read.” But you notice the absence of it, and you’re like, “Ooo, this – eh, I don’t quite know what’s going on this sentence. It’s kind of clunky. It’s slowing me down in a way that I don’t understand,” which, to go back to doing eye tracking studies and saying, “Okay, when do people back track? When do people slow down? What makes them slow down?” Oh, I can actually have an answer to that.

Julie: Exactly. In fact, often, when I am editing my work or someone else’s work, I have an intuitive sense of exactly what the eye is likely to be doing in that particular sentence because I’ve conducted a number of experiments.

Gretchen: Have you ever done any eye tracking studies on your own works, or are these two different areas of your life?

Julie: These are two different areas. I do not have a portable eye tracker in my home.

Gretchen: They’re pretty expensive.

Julie: To get accuracy by the character – well, you know, actually, there might be simple programmes that you could – you know what? I’m gonna – now that you mention this, I’m gonna actually look to see whether those tools are cheap enough to advocate for use for writers. It would be so cool to use that in a writing workshop and to demonstrate to people, “Here is your original sentence. And here is what the eye is doing. And, oops, here’s a little wrinkle.”

Gretchen: “Here’s the part where the reader got slowed down or back tracked or didn’t quite know what was” – and maybe, in some cases, you want to create the effect of the reader slowing down or back tracking or something if you’re trying to make them have a particular type of experience. Anything is good or bad depending on what your goals are in that context.

Julie: You can also see if people are spending a bit of time at the end of a sentence, absorbing it. That’s often a signal of some complexity happening. Sometimes you want that complexity. You want to mark a sentence as being weighty or important in some way. Actually, this is my new thing. I am now going to do eye tracking for writers and editors.

Gretchen: Because, like, smartphone cameras are pretty cheap these days. Maybe you could hook this up to your phone and just do this. So, we’ve talked about stuff being easy to follow or not at the level of the sentence, but there’s also a level of beauty at the word level or word choice level. I find that one of the things that I have found helpful with my linguistics training is that I often have a sense for many words – not necessarily like, “Ooo, linguistics taught me all of the etymologies,” because, sadly, that is a misconception, but I do often have a sense for a word of whether it’s more likely to be Germanic or Latinate. When I’m trying to make a sentence less convoluted, less overwhelming to process, I can say, “Oh, this sentence has a lot of Latinate vocabulary in it. Maybe if I made some of these words more Germanic, it would be easier for people to understand. Or if I’m trying to make something sound more sophisticated, I can say, “Oh, I’m using a lot of Germanic words, what if I use some more Latinate ones here? And then it might sound more abstract or more fancy or more complicated – more sophisticated.”

Julie: One side effect of that, too, is that then you’re launching into a different phonology, right, so that the Latinate words are often less clustering of consonants, often more syllables involved.

Gretchen: More vowels in relation to the consonants, this type of thing. But you also pointed to, in Linguaphile, specific sound trends that make some words sound more or less beautiful at a general aesthetic level. I think we could do a little experiment perhaps where you can read me some words and let me see which ones I think are more beautiful. And then anyone listening to this episode can see whether your impressions of the aesthetics of them agree or disagree with mine.

Julie: All right, Gretchen, let’s see what you think of these words. I’m gonna read the list, and then you tell me which one is the most beautiful to start. “Luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.”

Gretchen: “Zoo” as in “zoological gardens”?

Julie: Yes, that one. “Zoo.”

Gretchen: Okay, so we have “luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous” –

Julie: “Pulchritude.”

Gretchen: “Pulchritude” and “zoo.” I’m feeling like “liminal” and “tremulous” are really towards the top of my list. “Luggage” and “pulchritude” – it’s sort of ironic because “pulchritude” means “beauty,” but it’s such a hideous word. Like, oh man.

Julie: That’s why nobody uses it anymore. There’s this clash of meaning and sound, I think.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s very obscure. Like, it’s satisfying to know, but it’s terrible. Then the middle two are – what am I left with? – “zoo” and –

Julie: “Withstand.”

Gretchen: “Withstand.” Yeah, those are towards the middle. Between “liminal” and “tremulous,” I would say slight edge towards “tremulous” I think. “Tremulous” above “liminal.” Between “zoo” and “withstand,” hmm, they both are sort of middling words. I think maybe I’m gonna go with “zoo.” And then between “luggage” and “pulchritude,” they’re both real clunky words. I think “luggage” is slightly less terrible, less hideous, than “pulchritude.”

Julie: And notice that “clunky” is a clunky-sounding word.

Gretchen: From a sound level – from a phonetic level – “pulchritude” and “luggage” and “clunky,” they all have /k/s and /g/s in them.

Julie: Yeah, and that back consonant /ʌ/.

Gretchen: And that /ʌ/ vowel.

Julie: Which we get in “ugly” and “muck” and lots of words that are really unpleasant.

Gretchen: /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/. Okay.

Julie: Ugh.

Gretchen: Ugh. All right. So, there’s a vowel-consonant thing. I also feel like the uglier words maybe had more consonants in them.

Julie: Yeah, they tend to bunch up the consonants, which is not really great for my native language because Czech is well known for piling consonants together.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, I think in the context of a language as a whole, how ubiquitous do we think these aesthetic judgements are?

Julie: You know, there’s really not that much study of them. I think it’s a relatively new area of study. There’re definitely some patterns that seem to hold across languages, some sounds that seem to evoke similar concepts across languages. The /i/ vowel is associated with delicate things, light things –

Gretchen: Small things.

Julie: Small things – exactly. Whereas the /oʊ/ and /ʌ/ sounds tend to evoke some heft.

Gretchen: Larger things. And so, if we think that small things are cute, then maybe there’s an association there. And then I had “liminal” and “tremulous,” which both seem very beautiful. What do we have there?

Julie: The L and M sounds are known to be pleasing, which may explain a little bit the title of my book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love.

Gretchen: The “Live, Laugh, Love” of language books, unfortunately, perhaps.

Julie: Perhaps. I guess it’s not accidental that those make their way into titles – among other reasons, of course. But it is a little bit of a puzzle as to why these judgements of beauty seem to be somewhat stable. We don’t really have a good sense of why that is or what function that’s serving.

Gretchen: To be fair, L, M, you know, some sort of /k/ /g/ sound, like – /oʊ/ – these are all very common in basically every language. These are all very common sounds that are found in a lot of places.

Julie: But they’re not necessarily THE most common sounds.

Gretchen: There is, to some degree, that language aesthetic judgements are also very much wrapped up in our judgements of who’s the type of person who speaks that language. A lot of the stereotypes that English speakers have about German as a language feel like they’re leftover World War II propaganda to me. Because English speakers don’t think the same things about Dutch or French, which have many of the same sounds.

Julie: That’s right. In fact, to me, German is a very beautiful language. I guess I have very early associations. It was one of the earliest languages I was exposed to. I find it quite lovely. I never understood what people were talking about when they described as “guttural” and “full of abruptness and ugliness.” I think it’s a very mellifluous language.

Gretchen: I think it is as well. For me, languages that have a lot of sounds that are produced without the vocal folds vibrating – voiceless sounds like T and K as compared to voiced sounds like /b/ and /m/ and /g/ have a certain lightness to them that’s reflected in voicing versus not voicing. German has these devoiced consonants at the end of words that make it sound very light to me.

Julie: That’s a good observation.

Gretchen: I had this observation between Finnish and Estonian. Finnish has a lot more voiceless consonants than Estonian does. Otherwise, they’re very related. I had this aesthetic sense that Finnish felt lighter to me than Estonian. I don’t understand either of those languages, but I was visiting those countries, and I had this interesting aesthetic judgment that you get about languages you don’t understand.

Julie: That’s interesting. One place where there have been some studies that look at the links between sounds and feelings or meanings is in studies of brand names. You make up a word for a product, and you say, “Which sounds lighter: ‘zive’ or ‘sive’?”, these kinds of binary distinctions. Turns out that people do have some judgments that they make about lightness, weight, speed, as well. You would name a sports car with a fricative and maybe an SUV vehicle with a plosive.

Gretchen: And then it seems faster or slower or larger, more impressive. One of the things I think about a lot when it comes to writing advice is that a lot of times when you read books about like, “Here’s how to write,” from someone who’s a famous writer, but doesn’t have any training in analysing language, they’ll give advice that they then contradict themselves. You see writing advice books saying things like, “Avoid the passive,” and then in the very next sentence, they’ll use a passive. There’s a temptation to maybe say, “Okay, well, there’s no point in writing advice at all.” People should just read a lot and absorb whatever they can and do it all at this sort of “Well, don’t think about it too hard” level – just consume a bunch of aesthetically pleasing language, whatever that means to you, and then you’ll naturally produce it. As linguists, I find that a little bit unsatisfying because, surely, we can actually analyse language, and we can actually analyse, okay, what’s going on in this sentence that makes people feel bored or makes people feel excited or interested. How can you balance this?

Julie: I think there’s a whole industry waiting to launch that is basically trained linguists who are also writers who can put those things together. I think a lot of traditional writing advice really reflects either folk wisdom about writing that people have absorbed that they don’t necessarily follow or the aesthetic preferences of the writer themselves, which, you know, okay, that’s fine, that’s one style of writing, but it’s not necessarily the only way to write effectively or beautifully. But for sure, I would give writers advice along the lines of “Use syntax that doesn’t unpleasantly or without purpose create processing difficulty or a processing hitch.” If you’re gonna introduce complexity into the sentence, it should be doing some work for you, so either creating a delightful surprise or detour from expectation that is pleasant as opposed to unpleasant or maybe shifting the focus of intention on a particular portion of the sentence. For example, the passive is wonderful for this. You use it as a device for putting forward into that spotlight of the sentence the thing that you want someone to focus on.

Gretchen: If we say, as an example of the passive, I could say, “I interviewed Julie Sedivy on Lingthusiasm,” and then in the passive, it would be, “Julie Sedivy was interviewed on Lingthusiasm.” Maybe I’m not even in this sentence. Or maybe I’m backgrounded. Depending on who is the focus of the conversation, who’s writing the post on social media, I might say, “I interviewed you,” but you might say, “I was interviewed,” depending on who we wanna – we wanna focus on ourselves or what we’re trying to highlight in the rest of the paragraph or something like that. It can be a very effective way of keeping the topic consistent across every sentence.

Julie: Exactly. And then there are manipulations of the sentence that you can use to really create unusual structures that do really wonderfully interesting things. One sentence that comes to mind – I’m not gonna remember the author of the sentence, but I love the sentence. The sentence is “‘Vermin,’ he called his critics.” That has a very different feel than “He called his critics ‘vermin’.”

Gretchen: It’s getting your attention. It’s a slightly more unusual structure. As you said, it’s not as common to say, like, “vermin,” and then you don’t know what’s happening after that.

Julie: Yeah. That’s an example of complexity that’s doing some clear work that is goal-directed. That’s one piece of advice. Along with that just comes lots of exposure to different structures that you might use and a sense of awareness of what is useful complexity, what’s not useful complexity. I think you could teach a whole segment of a course on that concept alone.

Gretchen: One of the other things that I’ve found has been useful from my linguistics training is when – especially when writing is a negotiation. Edited is a negotiation between you and sometimes multiple editors or proofreaders – people who are trying to help you make the writing the most of what it can be. To be able to communicate about the things that are in the sentences, it’s helpful to know the names for them. Even though you can write very intuitively without knowing what the names for things are, when you want to then communicate with someone else about that, it’s helpful to have this shared vocabulary. I’ve had some really fantastic editing experiences with helping to refine, okay, I don’t think you’re actually making this point as clearly as you want to be type of things, but also sometimes where an editor will say, “Okay, I think this is correct” or “This is not correct, here.” My linguistics training gives me the confidence to push back against that sometimes and say, “Well, if I was doing it this way, I would be trying to create this effect. If I was doing it this way, I’d be trying to create that effect, and so I think the comma needs to stay because I’m trying to do this particular thing,” rather than saying like, “Oh, well, you must know better, therefore, I need to immediately say yes to whatever edits someone else is making.

Julie: Exactly. And that’s a reflection of the fact that many editors – most – the vast majority of editors do not have training in linguistics. Again, a regrettable situation. [Laughter] They often rely on rules of thumb or consistency, right, this bugaboo of consistency. I often have editors try to do things like “eliminate needless words,” which is one of those rules that you’re supposed to follow.

Gretchen: But if the word really is needless, like, what is “needless”?

Julie: Well, that’s just it. And it can vary within the same structure. To give a couple of examples, let’s say we have a sentence like, “Marisa said the prize was funded by dirty money.” If I wrote, “Marisa said that the prize was funded by dirty money,” we can drop the “that” and quite happily say, “Marisa said the prize was funded by dirty money.” That’s a needless word. We can eliminate that. But now, let’s suppose the sentence was “Marisa claimed the prize was funded by dirty money.”

Gretchen: Eh, because then Marisa could be claiming the prize for herself – not making a claim about the prize – and “that” really helps us disambiguate there.

Julie: Exactly. You run into one of those garden path walls there if you don’t have the disambiguating word “that.” “That” is actually doing a fair bit of work.

Gretchen: If you’ve got this relatively simplistic heuristic that “that” is always unnecessary, you’re going through, and you’re just trying to cut all the “thats.” I think that’s where rules like “Don’t use the passive” come from. Because there is a style of writing that can be a little bit overwrought that uses unnecessarily formal or convoluted sentence structures, some of which are passives and some of which are other things. You could say as a heuristic, you know, “Every time you use the passive, think about whether it’s really necessary,” which gets boiled down into “Never use the passive.”

Julie: And because people don’t have a sense of – think about whether it’s necessary. They don’t have the tools for thinking about, “Okay, is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it doing what I want?” That’s where linguistics can really come in and fill that gap, I think.

Gretchen: One of the things that I remember finding so, so interesting when I was first learning linguistics was to be like, “Wow, languages can do this? Languages can do this?” There are so many different ways of being a person who uses language than I had realised before I was exposed to it from a linguistics perspective.

Julie: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Gretchen: Like, even thinking, okay, there’re all these sounds that can exist in languages, but there’s not an infinite list. Linguists have made a list of them, and that’s the number of sounds that we’re aware of. Or sign languages have a fully-fledged grammar and different ways of relating to each other. Or there’re some languages where the verb goes at the end of the sentence or other languages where it goes at the beginning. There’s more ways that language can be than just the languages that I’d previously been exposed to.

Julie: Right, yeah, the variety of ways of expressing a thought. Absolutely. It’s fascinating. Especially if you start working with those wonderful problem sets from non-Indo-European languages. And yet, they’re constrained. There are some kinds of things that languages don’t seem to do that seem to place some boundaries around what it means to be a human being who tries to encode thoughts in this linear format of sound.

Gretchen: Yeah, it sometimes brings me this sense of awe to experience, “Oh, the reason why we say this word in this particular way is actually based on the constraints of the shape of the human mouth.” It’s not some sort of abstract principle. It’s actually that it’s harder to move your tongue that way.

Julie: Or constraints of human memory. These are the syntactic options available to you, but we don’t get outside of that because we just can’t hold certain types of things in working memory.

Gretchen: This brings us to our last question, which I think we’re already getting towards, which is, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Julie: In a way, looking at the range of languages gives us a sense of the limits of being human – you know, how far we can stretch those varieties and also where those limits reach an end. To me, linguistics is very much about the science of us. It’s about how – not just the possibilities that language form can take, but also, the ways in which we negotiate meaning when we encounter failures of language. The points at which they break, or we haven’t expressed our thoughts clearly – what kinds of psychological mechanisms can come to our rescue so that we can still understand each other despite the, for example, rife ambiguity that’s there in language or the fact that we often express our thoughts very incompletely. We’re often filling in the blanks between each other’s sentences to give added depth and meaning. It’s really a study for how this form that we use interacts with other aspects of being human.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get access to transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get access to scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like bold bouba and kiki designs on a range of totes, shirts, mugs, and scarves – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can follow our guest, Julie Sedivy, at juliesedivy.com or by the same name on Bluesky. Her books are called Memory Speaks and Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. We’ll link to an excerpt.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, or our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the plot twist in our chat with Kory Stamper (about her book True Color) and the linguistics of idioms. We also have a bonus episode chat with Lauren and Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about making linguistics podcasts.

Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Or leave us a nice review, like this one from Stirling Silver, who said, “Love this podcast. Interesting topics explained well. Perfectly pitched to its audience. It’s not too academic nor over-explained. The delivery is so friendly. It’s as if I’m hanging out with friends. My only complaint is I want more frequent episodes.”

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Julie: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

Lauren: We have a whole episode on communicating with aliens who have completely different ways of doing language, but this episode isn’t about trying to communicate with the emu aliens.

Gretchen: Instead, the thing that’s very enticing about this particular book is the survey crew of humans.

Lauren: Which is made up of this really diverse set of cultures. They deliberately recruit people from different human cultures to expand, I guess, the range of how useful they’ll be in interacting with aliens.

Gretchen: The ironic thing is for a deliberately recruited and trained cross-cultural group is they are so bad at cross-cultural communication.

Lauren: Yeah. And then there’s this one character who arrives who’s a Hellspark who’s basically from this culture where their whole deal is cross-cultural communication.

Gretchen: Is it “Hell’s park” or “Hell spark”?

Lauren: This book has really fun language play in that this is a deliberate joke that’s overtly discussed in the book. It could be either “Hell’s park” or “Hell spark.” The Hellspark humans seem to play this up for their own amusement and consistently alternate their pronunciation.

Gretchen: Random fluctuation is absolutely how human languages work. Being incredibly consistent about AB AB AB is not really how human communication works. That’s a fun little detail that makes it more alien to me. But the thing that made me want your take on this book the most, Lauren, was that the cross-cultural miscommunication was a lot about how people interact with each other in physical space not just outer space – so how people sit with respect to each other in a room or how close they stand in conversation. The term that this book uses for this phenomenon is “proxemics,” which looks sort of familiar to me from linguistics terms like “morpheme” and “phoneme,” but a “proxeme” isn’t a word I’d ever heard before. This seems not exactly gesture but kind of like gesture. Have you heard of “proxemics”? Is it a real thing in linguistics somewhere?

Lauren: Yeah. Figuring out what is polite or comfortable in terms of how close you can physically stand near people, how you face each other or don’t face each other in conversation, is absolutely part of the larger way that we structure interacting with people. It is a real piece of communication terminology that she’s taken into the book, which I love.

Gretchen: I've definitely experienced the feeling of having a conversation with someone who’s continually advancing on me because their personal bubble is smaller than mine or where they’re sort of standing awkwardly distantly away from me because my personal bubble is small than theirs. It felt very real that like, “Oh, this is great. Someone has actually studied this.”

Lauren: We might also interact with someone who really enjoys sitting side-by-side and not making eye contact, or you might have people who really prefer their conversations to be really front onto each other. There’s lots of ways we can arrange ourselves in space. A lot of this has been looked at in the cultural anthropology literature. I knew about this term, but Janet Kagen specifically gives a shoutout (I love it when authors do this) to an anthropologist who specifically coined the concept of proxemics, Edward T. Hall, who is someone I hadn’t really read before and went down a little Edward T. Hall rabbit hole – a “rabbit hall.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] That’s a joke that only works in your accent not mine. I loved the author’s note at the end. Janet Kagan, alas, is no longer with us. This book came out in the ’80s. But we do have her author’s note at the end where she’s like, “Yeah, I was very influenced by Edward T. Hall. Proxemics comes from this real literature.” And I was like, “Yes!” Lauren, do you know this literature? What does Hall say about proxemics?

Lauren: He was really interested in a really expansive idea of proxemics. He was interested in face-to-face communication but also how people structured the physical, built environment. He hung out with architects as much as anthropologists and linguists. He had this really expansive view. He had this real sense of there being this really strong cross-cultural variation. He trained as an anthropologist in the United States of America. He worked in a number of Native American communities. And then in World War II he served in the US army in Europe and the Philippines. He’s known for noticing a few things that vary across cultures, whether that’s the way people relate to each other in space, the way different cultures relate to time and concepts like punctuality, and he also talks a lot about how we can take a structural approach to researching these differences. By making those differences more apparent, we can learn them and try to overcome them as we interact across cultures, which, if anyone’s read one of those like, how to do business-type books, this is such a common trope now that we need to understand people from different cultures, but in the second half of the 20th Century, this became a new thing to consider and actively study.

Gretchen: This is the guy that pre-dates what I think of as the tired business cliché about the Japanese. He’s predating that and coming up with this stuff that wasn’t as cliché when he was observing it.

Lauren: Yeah, he has a book called Hidden Differences: Doing Business With the Japanese in the post-war US-Japan trade relationship where you had these two very different cultures, and people trying to conduct business. This whole trope kind of started with this military-trained anthropologist who then spent a lot of time working with the United States Foreign Service institute training diplomats and then, subsequently, training business people.

Gretchen: I feel like maybe there was less global popular culture or this idea that maybe Western people have watched some anime or read some manga or less of this overlap, so that maybe some of the some of the stuff was less familiar at the time.

Lauren: We take our much different cultures – and the general population from different cultures get to interact thanks to modern transportation and modern airplanes, so yeah, this was really fulfilling that. It is wonderful. The other thing that I really appreciate about Edward T. Hall is that a lot of his writing was for a general audience. I can absolutely see how Janet Kagan would’ve read his books and just been able to really be inspired for them because he really did this great, accessible writing in the late ’50s through to the 1990s. Perhaps one thing that has shifted from that earlier work to today is that it was really predicated on “This is how all American English speakers stand when they’re talking to each other,” or “This is how all American English speakers think about punctuality and timeliness when it comes to meeting people,” and then it’s like, “Now, we will discuss the Japanese. Everyone in the Philippines.”

Gretchen: I don’t wanna brag here, Lauren, but I’ve known quite a few Americans in my time. And what I would say is they have differing approaches to punctuality depending on themselves as individuals. Presumably, this is also true for Japanese people, of whom I’ve known several but not quite as many as Americans.

Lauren: You are definitely zeroing in on one of the, I think, challenges and limitations – and a lot of his work, at a very high level, you may be inclined to be like, “Ah, yes, there must be differences here,” and when you zero in, it becomes a lot harder to actually pin down those differences.

Gretchen: I was thinking about this when reading Hellspark because I’ve definitely experienced these sorts of communication breakdowns that are described in the book. There’s a few examples of like, oh, this person is accidentally approaching this other person from the direction that leads them to be perceived as a threat rather than as a friend, or like this one person is from this culture where they wear really elaborately-painted toenails and things like that, and another person’s from a culture where the feet are very taboo and need to be covered all the time. They’re in this tension. I was thinking about a time when I was talking with someone in a professional context, and this woman kept touching my thigh in a way that I am not typically familiar with being in a professional context. She wasn’t flirting with me. It was just like, “We’re having an engaged, professional conversation. The way that I’m gonna demonstrate that is that I’m gonna do this.”

Lauren: Were you seated really close to each other?

Gretchen: We were seated on the same bench. She didn’t have to reach around a table. That would’ve been kind of awkward. She was just sort of engaged. The way that some people might touch your arm – I think she might’ve started with the arm and kept going with the thigh. She was my mom’s age. There wasn’t the dynamic that –

Lauren: I just wanna double check she wasn’t flirting with you. That’s not the vibe you got.

Gretchen: Really that was not anything about the rest of the vibe that I got. Eventually, I was like, “Okay, well, I guess if we’re in touching-thighs-shows-that-we’re-engaging culture, I’ll do this back because maybe you also like this.” I did it back even though I wouldn’t normally do so. There I’m passing the Hellspark test of like, “Can I adjust my behaviour on the fly?” She seemed quite engaged. We did not go on a date. She did not interpret this as me flirting back. It was just a like, “Oh, we’re having this engaged conversation.” Nothing about this person’s particular background – I have met other people from her background, and they were not inveterate thigh-touchers. I can’t say that this was – this was a cultural difference at some level, but it wasn’t a cultural difference in this reductive, like, oh she’s from a certain place, she must be doing it in this particular context.

Lauren: But it’s also a really good illustrator of how often we arrange ourselves in relation to other people in a really not conscious way. She was just like, “We’re having a friendly conversation.” This wasn’t a like, “This is a professional-but-friendly relationship, and so I’m going to move into the five centimetre zone instead of the 20 centimetre zone that I would stay in for a professional-but-non-friendly conversation.” She’s not doing that consciously.

Gretchen: No. I was doing a certain amount of it consciously where I was like, “Oh, I guess this is what we’re doing. I will mirror back to you whatever you’re doing.” I do think that people potentially have the ability to adjust our behaviour on the fly more to each other than this (I wanna emphasize science fictional) book that is deliberately exaggerating a fictional premise. Not to critique this science fiction book for being science fiction.

Lauren: The characters do display a remarkable lack of insight, but we’ve all possibly been there as well. It’s very obvious when your cultural norms are being infringed on without necessarily being aware of when other people’s are being infringed.

Gretchen: And that sometimes what you need to do in response isn’t as clear as reciprocally also touching someone’s thigh. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I need to not approach this person from the left,” which I’m not gonna know if some culture has left-approachment taboos.

Lauren: I do have to say I just love how much this Hellspark character really just felt like an avatar for this concept from anthropology but also how much she absolutely just feels wish fulfilment for anyone who has been in a social situation where they are second guessing how they should interact with people.

Gretchen: Definitely a wish fulfilment character for socially awkward people. You’re like, “Oh, what if I could just decode and perfectly replicate other people’s body language and then we would totally all get along, and everyone would be my friend.”

Lauren: And very much treated as “This is a fixed code. As soon as I am exactly the distance away from someone that their cultural script expects, they will immediately start being relaxed around me, and they won’t know why” It’s just like, I don’t think – it would be nice if proxemics existed in this strict, almost grammatical way, but I don’t think they do.

Gretchen: And none of the other people were bi-cultural or culturally fluid at all. They’ve been on this planet for so long with sometimes no one else or only one other person from their culture, and they haven’t adapted to each other’s norms at all, and yet they’re immediately able to do that as soon as someone points out to them why they need proxemics and what to do overtly and that that they weren’t doing any of that adaptation spontaneously. I love when a very specific academic concept is taken all the way to its full extreme in a fictional context, particularly when it’s a theory I haven’t encountered before. I wish more people would run with concepts like this and take inspiration from specific academic concepts.

Lauren: Is this the very unsubtle point where I point out we have a whole episode about the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity, and how much it pops up in science fiction and other genre?

Gretchen: Yeah, and so many people have already done Sapir-Whorf. Pick a new theory to take to its extreme. Please. This is why this was so great.

Lauren: And cite your academic sources. We love it.

Gretchen: Even if those academic sources get more discredited later than they were in the ’80s when the book was written, it’s still a fascinating introduction to the academic topic that introduced me to something.

Lauren: The vibe I got from anthropologists is that Hall is very much a product of his time. He had some interesting ideas and certainly is considered to be one of the fathers of the field of intercultural communication, which is now a massive area across linguistics and anthropology. I couldn’t find anything particularly dubious about him beyond your usual white-guy-in-the-middle-of-the-20th-Century. Intercultural communication has definitely moved on to be a lot more nuanced as has anthropology.

Gretchen: I got to go to the Canadian Anthropology Society conference last year when it happened to be in Montreal and very much noticed this “Oh, we’re gonna consider this one particular culture on its own terms. Someone else is gonna consider this other particular culture.” I remember a fun presentation about someone doing anthropology on the roles and enactions of people playing a D&D game – like a role playing game, like Dungeons & Dragons – and how the players enact specific character roles, or the saying that they’re going to do something is effectively the doing of it because you’re doing this imagination thing. You’re not doing a LARP where you’re actually physically having the swordfight.

Lauren: And just to be clear – that D&D game wasn’t being used as representative of the entirety of North America or Canada or even west coast Anglo-sphere Canadians.

Gretchen: Or even all D&D players. It was really being considered as an example of what these particular players were doing and what maybe has generalised ability to other players of role playing games but not exactly as avatars for their entire culture the way that like, “Oh, we analysed a few businessmen in a boardroom, and now they’re avatars of their entire culture” – was sort of the initial trap that this was falling into.

Lauren: You see this a lot more with studies in anthropology or in linguistics. You’re looking at a much more specific community of people rather than this whole – the entirety of Japan or “Everyone in North America does this.”

Gretchen: I will say that there’s been some more specifically-grounded-in-particular-fictional-communities types of science fiction in the ’80s as well. I’m thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which is very much written from the point of view of an anthropologist in a particular community and has this very rich description of that one particular community. But I also feel like I’ve been seeing this in some recent fiction as well that I wanna talk about in conversation with this.

Lauren: Excellent. Does this mean we can talk about What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed?

Gretchen: I really enjoyed What We Are Seeking and made you read it. I think it’s got some really fun parallels to Hellspark. It’s also set on a planet where some people have been trying to figure out how to communicate with some aliens.

Lauren: These aliens are more like free-roaming cactus people rather than hyper intelligent emus.

Gretchen: Yes, indeed. But the thing that I found most compelling, again, was the communication between different cultures of humans again. The viewpoint character is coming from a culture that views the broader settler community as in thrall to a barbaric custom called “marriage.”

Lauren: Ew.

Gretchen: [Laughs] And instead is coming from a cultural background that reminded me of a group of people called the Mosuo in China, who have this type of matrilineal household structure where women can have lovers but ultimately children are raised by the mother and the mother’s brothers, and the fathers are involved in raising the children of their own sisters. There’s less of a – it’s not a patriarchal or patrilineal society or organised around a marriage; it’s organised around a matriarch and her daughters and her sons and the children of those daughters.

Lauren: This culturally isolated man who is in this fictional world is trying to navigate this society where he doesn’t have his matrilineal house that he’s affiliated to because he’s in this new environment and all of the cultural challenges for him that spill out from that. I will say, as a classic sci fi trope, Cameron Reed has done this great thing where she’s taken the absolute tiniest kernel of matrilineal household and just dialled everything up to 20.

Gretchen: I don’t wanna say that this is at all an accurate reflection of what the Mosuo are like just that there is a real world culture that, at some level, provides a germ of where this science fictional concept is taking something and running with the implications in a direction that enriches the story rather than trying to be grounded in that one culture.

Lauren: I think it’s a really important development in a lot of the most interesting recent science fiction and fantasy that does this is that you’re coming from the perspective of that cultural outsider rather than a book like Hellspark where that character is very North America coded or very Anglo-sphere coded.

Gretchen: The Hellspark character is very much the cultural insider who’s the insider to all of the cultures rather than having her own particular point of view that’s finding everything else just as unfamiliar. I think another recent book that does this in a different way is To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.

Lauren: It’s on my reading list. My entire recommendations list is pretty much made up of things that Gretchen recommends to me.

Gretchen: Look, I know you’ve got less time to read than me, and I wanna make sure you only read the best.

Lauren: I appreciate your curation.

Gretchen: [Laughs] This one is set on Earth in an alternate history where there’s a young Indigenous girl in colonial America who bonds with a dragon – also there’s dragons.

Lauren: Ooo, they’re our highly sentient, opaque-to-us intelligence.

Gretchen: Well, the author in an interview points out that the dragons aren’t sorts of people, they’re sorts of animals. They have this emotional bond with people, and you can tell them to do things like, “Go there,” the way you could with a dog that you’re bonded to, but some dragons in some contexts are really like, they communicate in full sentences, and that’s not what the dragons are doing in this particular story, but they’re still this sort of “other” that makes the plot happen where the humans are interacting in particular levels. This main character who’s from a community – is in southern New England sort of Rhode Island/Massachusetts area – and speaks an Algonquin language has to go to a colonial boarding school in order to learn how to train her dragon quote-unquote “properly,” so it doesn’t get taken from her by the colonial authority. You get this Indigenous perspective on colonialism but as a way of making that colonial world feel just as unfamiliar to the reader as it does to the protagonist. This is an alt history where, basically, the Roman Empire and Christianity never happened.

Lauren: Huh, so who was our European hegemon then?

Gretchen: Well, they’re still from the island of Britain, but they are sort of like the-Danelaw-happened-the-whole-way-through. They’re influenced by a Viking culture into England. All of the names for chemistry and stuff that she’s learning are based on this Anglish/Anglo-Saxon roots rather than Latin and Greek terminology.

Lauren: Excellent. So, we also get that feeling of being a bit of a cultural outsider.

Gretchen: Exactly. You get that double levelled outsider-ness and coming to understand the other people who are also, in various way, outsider-ed from this society, and how they form alliances, and what they’re trying to do in the world.

Lauren: How does this tie into the other books we’ve been talking about?

Gretchen: I think that it’s more specifically grounded in a particular culture, although I checked some interviews with Moniquill Blackgoose to see if she intended the protagonist to be from a specific existing Indigenous culture or one that was influenced by her own background but wasn’t a specific named one, and it was definitely more the second one that it was influenced, she says, “A lot of the time it was weird for me because I am from Rhode Island, and the Algonquin language kind of seeps into the things that are named.” It’s got this sort of influence, but it’s not intended to be (I think) a one-to-one mapping because it is this fantasy setting. But that’s going one step further in terms of being grounded in the very specific sense of place and people and relationships that’s also showing cultural differences. What she says in an interview is that one of her goals was to get readers to comprehend how fundamentally different the European or colonialist perceptions of the world are from the Indigenous perceptions. I think it fits with this theme of cross-cultural communication and putting characters into friction as a way of having readers inhabit different kinds of ways of being in the world.

Lauren: One of the reasons I’m excited to get to this book on my reading list is because it actually makes overt this theme of people coming into a space that’s not theirs and this coloniser frontier theme overt in a way that it’s not in a lot of non-fiction history and the kind of fiction of meeting aliens or new peoples.

Gretchen: When we were researching this episode, I came across a post on the Reactor website by Jo Walton, who’s a friend of the podcast, called “A wish for something different at the frontier,” which is about how there’s actually quite a lot of books that are somewhat like the books we’ve been talking about where you have a tiny group of humans on a planet trying to figure out whether they can communicate with the aliens and eventually arriving at something that resembles greater understanding and how those books are influenced by the American frontier colonial history but with the Indigenous people cast in the role of aliens. To have a book that’s saying, “No, this is explicitly about an Indigenous worldview,” is, I think, interesting in conversation with that broader history within the genre.

Lauren: Hellspark and What We Are Seeking and To Shape A Dragon’s Breath all have these big, looming, alien, unknown presences, and finding these out and discovering more throughout the narrative is what is the big driving plot. But what really drives things forward and what really helps us see these characters is the way they relate to other humans from different cultures.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that draws people to linguistics and also to anthropology is this desire that if we could analyse the systems and the people that are around us more closely and with more engaged and curious attention, we might ultimately be able to communicate with each other more deeply and more respectfully and in a way that shows how much we truly want to appreciate and get to know each other.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – and to vastly expand your reading list – go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like the very apropos “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it” bags and notebooks – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes from the last nine years to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, children’s oral culture in things like shipping rhymes and counting chants, and an extended chat with Kory Stamper about the colourful spoilers in her book True Color.

Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or leave us a nice review, like this one from Notcharizard, who said, “I really like – and this sounds obvious given the name – how enthusiastic the presenters are! It makes me so happy when they get excited about what they’re talking about, because it makes me get very enthusiastic too! I also really like how they don’t assume a lot of knowledge, so I can understand what they’re talking about because they always explain.”

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

Claire: It sure is. The way I do that is by having other people who’re experts to tell me the stuff. But we start today, we wanted to make some acknowledgements though. I’ll let you take this away.

Lauren: [Laughs] Thanks, Claire. I want to acknowledge that this recording is taking place for me on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Those lands were never ceded. The Kulin peoples live across the area that we now know as Melbourne and its outer surrounds today. I want to pay my respects to any Indigenous people listening. To be completely honest, you can look at the content notes for this episode. It’s gonna involve a lot of coloniser bullshit, so just as a heads up on that. My acknowledgement to any other Indigenous people who have been subjected to colonisation who are listening to this episode as well because, man, these people are maniacs. I do also wanna let you know that almost all of this story has nothing to do with Melbourne or Victoria or Kulin country. A lot of what we’re talking about today has taken place in Western Australia and a lot in South Australia in the Northern Territory. That’s important because Australia is incredibly diverse in terms of Indigenous peoples and their cultures and their languages. It is the longest continuing culture in the world. We have records back to 60,000 years ago. At the time of settlers arriving and white people coming to Australia, there were over 400 distinct language groups. So, an incredibly diverse country. I’m gonna be talking about a different part of it to where I’m from today.

Claire: This is a very important thing. We don’t always do things like land acknowledgements on the show, but it’s a very important thing for, particularly, the person that we’re talking about. There is a particular approach being taken here that we wanted to make sure we were really thoughtful about from the jump, so that you know we’re thinking about these things as we’re making it. I’m trying to be a little bit better – at least on my show. I think you guys do this better than we do. I’m trying to be better on TGS about being more open about the back end and how we approach and think about and formulate the show. I think you guys do a really excellent job with that. I encourage everyone listening to this, if you want the opposite side of this coin – enthusiasm and really, really thoughtful scholarship – to go listen to Lingthusiasm because they’re really great. I’m very excited about this episode because I have been listening to Lauren’s show (and Gretchen’s show) for a while. It’s really cool to get to do this.

Lauren: [Laughs] Well, I’m really excited because doing this let me know about your show. I’ve since been listening. I love academically informed content. I’m not a historian, as you’ve correctly identified for me. I am a linguist. I’m not even a linguist who mostly works in Australia. A lot of my research is either with English or other languages, or a lot of my work has been with Tibetan languages in Nepal, which is a whole other historical and social context. But this person I wanna talk about today – shall we get into it? Because she’s pretty wild. I came to her in – there are some academics who just finish a PhD and wander straight into a research fellowship or a tenure track job. I can hear in your laughter, Claire, that that was not you.

Claire: I was working at a store.

Lauren: It took me about a year, a year and a half, to get my first research fellowship. In that year and a half, I had these colleagues who kept trying to find work for me, but they were always these, like, “I’ve got 40 hours of research project” here, “I’ve got one day as a research officer.” And I’m so grateful to all of those colleagues for keeping me employed and housed in this great period of uncertainty. One of these colleagues was Nick Thieberger at the University of Melbourne, who was like, “I have this big project. I’ve got these pages and pages of PDFs that I’ve just scanned. I need as many people as I can to help me check that the scans look okay, that everything’s there, that they’re properly labelled and named.” These are over 20,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts and 4,000 pages of typed wordlists. These were all this massive survey of Indigenous languages of western, southern, and central Australia that were collected in the early 1900s. They were collected by (or kind of managed by) this lady named Daisy Bates. I was just like, “What is this project, and what was this woman doing in the early 1900s?” This is an astonishing amount of data. All of these Indigenous languages – for some of these languages, it’s the only record we have left of them. It was just astonishing. I’d never heard of Daisy Bates. I didn’t know this massive collection of data existed. It had just sat in the National Library of Australia for years. People knew it was there. But until Nick had this big project to digitise it in a project called “Digital Daisy Bates,” it had just sat there. Probably should at this point say, “If the name Daisy Bates rings a bell, and you’re American, we’re talking about different Daisys.”

Claire: Oh, yeah, to be clear, there are two Daisy Bates when you google “Daisy Bates.” We’re not talking about the civil rights activist. We’re not – she rocks.

Lauren: Okay, good, because I was just like, “I don’t know if she sucks. I don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole. She seems great.”

Claire: On this show, I think I’m happy to come out and say we’re openly pro-desegregation of Arkansas schools in the mid-century American period. We like integration, and we like Daisy Bates.

Lauren: Good Daisy Bates.

Claire: But the one that we’re talking about is not that one. That one was not moonlighting as an Irish-Australian linguist.

Lauren: Very busy – Irish-Australian linguist 50 years earlier.

Claire: We haven’t gotten there quite yet, but it’s going to my previous thesis (that I have engaged with a little bit on the show) which is that white people in Australia in the late-19th-early-20th Century were up to some stuff across the board.

Lauren: We will talk a little bit about why the social context permitted, in fact encouraged, that kind of behaviour. I probably sound terrible now because I’m just like, “This amazing collection is some of the only recorded information we have about some of these languages and some speakers.” She also spent 30 years living in the desert living alongside especially the Aṉangu community in the middle of South Australia, literally giving them her own food, the clothes that she had. At this point, I always feel like I’m kind of losing the plot a little bit where it’s just like, “Is this really a guy who sucks?” Just like coming on here to hate on Mother Teresa energy. At one point, when I was preparing for this – because I did this work well over a decade ago now. I was like, “Maybe she’s not that bad. Maybe I just made up that I thought she was terrible.” And then I went back and was like, “No, no, it’s fine. We can talk about her. She was pretty terrible.”

Claire: I mean, I’ve got some crazy news for you, which is that Mother Teresa, also kind of bad as it turns out.

Lauren: Okay, great. I should’ve seen that coming.

Claire: Wild news. Everyone on this show turns out to be a little bit bad. But this is part of it, actually, so I’m glad that you brought that up early that part of it is the contributions are why we know about people. Often the methods by which they make those contributions or the other people in their lives or the way they position themselves while making those contributions don’t necessarily take away from the contributions themselves, but they need to be added into the record when we think about how all of this knowledge is generated, right, and who is at the centre of its generation is actually quite important to understanding the story of that knowledge. When we think about Daisy Bates, if people are not familiar with her, which many people will not be –

Lauren: Most Australians, even. I think she had a real moment in the 1970s. Since then, she’s just been (for good reason, actually) just let be. She was born in 1859 in Ireland. The problem with detangling her history is that there’s a lot of like, “She was born Margaret Dwyer. By the time she came to Australia, she was Daisy May O’Dwyer.” Her Wikipedia page is a thing of beauty because it tells her story as she tells it, and then down the bottom there’s a whole section of like, where the bullshit is. Thank you to the Wikipedia editor who did that. I’m just gonna tell a version of her story and not worry too much about the inconsistences because I used to think they were important that she was such a liar, and I actually don’t think it’s that important anymore.

Claire: I mean, it also goes to something we talk about on the show a lot which is that part of the difficulty of understanding people’s legacies is that they engage in these myth-making practices while they’re alive.

Lauren: Oh, she was so good at that.

Claire: Part of the difficulty is the fact that their legacy is, in part, self-made. Yeah, it’s totally okay to be like, “We’re gonna go with what we’ve got, but who knows if it’s real.”

Lauren: At age 23 in the 1880s, she lies and says she’s 21 so she can meet the criteria for this Irish-people-come-to-Australia-for-free because they’re trying to bring over all these working class white people to create the white Australia that they think should be created. She works in Queensland and New South Wales as a governess. While she’s there, she gets married three different times. Never divorces – which apparently this was pretty common. People would just get married again because divorce was so hard to come by. She marries – her first marriage. For Australians, this will be wild. This is the surprise crossover you did not expect. In 1884, she marries Breaker Morant, who is a mythologised Australian hero poet who actually did war crimes in the Boer War and was one of the last Australians to be executed by the British. Absolute – that guy sucks, for sure. They got married (briefly). He didn’t pay for the marriage license and shirked off on her. That marriage ended. In 1885, she marries Jack Bates, hence Daisy Bates. At some point, that marriage isn’t going well because she expected a lot of him, and he was just a dude droving horses and droving cattle and would disappear.

Claire: Classic Australian stuff.

Lauren: Just classic, classic Australian stuff. At some point, they’re not really together, and an old flame named Ernest C. Baglehole comes to Sydney.

Claire: Sorry?

Lauren: Yeah, for real, his name is Baglehole. For a long time, I was really distressed that that marriage didn’t survive, and it wasn’t known as “the Baglehole collection.”

Claire: She could’ve been Daisy Baglehole.

Lauren: She could’ve been Daisy Baglehole. It appears that he’s a guy she knew from Ireland (maybe). He was in Sydney because he was working on the ships. They kind of had a relationship for a while. Daisy burnt all of her correspondence and all of her dairies shortly before her death. Piecing all of this together and whether she felt like any of these marriages were more real or if this was just the way one kind led a more casually promiscuous life in the 1880s it’s very hard to say. She was definitely a bigamist – “trigamist”? I guess you can be “trigamous” –

Claire: “Trigamous.” Polygamous.

Lauren: Sure. She was apparently a very charming mega-flirt. Everyone talks about her being very charismatic. I think that charisma links through to her later life. With Jack, she had a son. She didn’t seem that into being a mum, apparently. She had a baby, and she’s like, “Well, no one told me that was gonna hurt,” and swore off sex for the rest of her life (according to her narrative).

Claire: Look, I get it. I have not given birth, but I understand the implications of this, and I get if that’s what someone chooses to do afterwards.

Lauren: If you didn’t have a heads up on that, like, golly golly. She didn’t seem that into her son. She sent him off to boarding school and to live with her extended family. He doesn’t appear in the story that much. I think it’s an oversimplification to just be like, “She wasn’t maternal. There was something wrong with her,” but she really didn’t seem to be into parenting. In the 1890s, like 1894, her son was primary school age, her relationship wasn’t working out. She went to London. She was like, “I have to go home. I’m feeling homesick,” and became a Fleet Street journalist. For a while, she was working on this newspaper about psychics and mediums. She’s not a fan.

Claire: Look, she and I agree – [laughs]

Lauren: She doesn’t seem to be super into the woo woo. She seems like quite a rationalist. But she gets this really great apprenticeship in journalism and writing for public audiences. This is where the relationship between reality and not reality becomes a lot harder to pin down. In 1899, she comes back to Australia. She comes to Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia, saying that she has a commission from The Times of London to write a story about how Indigenous Australians are being ill-treated. This does not appear to be true. It’s possible that she talked to someone at The Times who said, “Sure, you can send a letter to the editor if you want,” and then by the time she got to Australia, this had evolved into a full-blown story. From here on out, she starts talking about Jack as her “late husband.” He is not dead. She’s like, “I mentally divorced him. He’s dead to me.”

Claire: “A conscious uncoupling.” Isn’t that what people were calling that for a little while – the Gweneth Paltrow –

Lauren: It’s a very powerful manifestation of – she’s like, “Naw, he’s my late husband.” The other two never get mentioned again in her lifetime. In fact, it wasn’t until historians started looking in the 1970s that they put together the Breaker Morant story. She’s very circumspect about her life unless it suits her story. She’s a great self-publicist. We’re gonna see that a lot for the rest of this.

Claire: What is the context of what Australia – what settler and Indigenous relationships – what is this looking like at this moment when she comes back and is like, “I’m here to write”?

Lauren: In 1899, Australia is two years off being a federated commonwealth where we still have the British head of state as our head of state, and we have a governor general who acts for the King. It’s so cringe to even say it out loud.

Claire: I lived in New Zealand for a year, and I still do not understand what the deal is over there.

Lauren: Technically, the King is not meant to interfere in the running of Australia, but there was some extreme bullshit in the 1970s where some dudes who sucked definitely had some royal interference in our government. We are a couple of years off being federated – a little bit like the US, I guess, where the east coast – the colonies were established there first, and then white occupation – it didn’t quite go across the country because across the country, right in the middle, there’s a great big bit known as the Nullarbor because there is “null arbour,” “no trees.” It’s very hard to impose a Western way of living on that part of Australia. There were some train lines that were built to get people east to west, but in general, sea travel was the way to get around the country. They created a whole new legal illusion to allow white people to feel okay about occupying Australia. They invented this thing called “terra nullius,” where they’re like, “There aren’t people living here.” And then when everyone was like, “What about all those people living here?” They were like, “They’re not people-people because they’re not doing the kind of agriculture or house-building that we do. Because they’re different, they’re not right. That will allow us to take the land because we’re using it in a good European way.” That wasn’t overturned as a legal framework until the second half of the 20th Century, like, well into the 1980s.

Claire: If I’m thinking about my understanding terra nullius, it’s a way of thinking that a land that is “uncultivated” in the concept of Western cultivation of land is, therefore, unoccupied land. It really relates – or it ties the relationship of peoples to their use of space. This is something we see repeatedly in history, but it’s an immensely harmful thing because it enables you to say some people aren’t people or, like you’ve said, they’re not people in the right way. You get this doctrine that allows people to be treated closer to animals or just features of a landscape which you are now trying to cultivate rather than human beings with rights and dignity and desires and agency.

Lauren: The academic part of me wants to “Well, actually” them with like, there are really great examples of very elaborate aquaculture and eel traps. Bruce Pascoe has done a lot of work on traditional grain farming that doesn’t look anything like Western grain framing because they’re very different grains. It wasn’t about proving that they were really occupying the land because that wasn’t the point. The point was to create this nonsense framework.

Claire: What happens when you push back against that is implicitly you are saying that there’s something of worth that you need to argue with to begin with. To be like, “Well, they are actually occupying the land in the European way.” We don’t need to acknowledge the argument in the first place.

Lauren: Indigenous Australians weren’t even counted as people until 1967 when we had a referendum. They couldn’t get passports. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t do all the things that everyone else living in the country could. When I say Daisy Bates was outraged about how they were being treated, there was this straight up abuse and neglect. There were also a lot of Aboriginal people essentially in slavery-adjacent conditions. They were working for people where they really wouldn’t be being paid. There were lots of really dire circumstances. It’s not that she wanted them to be able to live rich and free lives, it’s that she straight up thought and wrote in her book like, this is a dying race, and we are just being nice to them while what she saw as the inevitable played out. Her work in the 1910s and the 1900s with – it seems like the government was already sending out this survey for people to collect words from different languages. It was already being sent out to pastoralists and police stations. It seems like she was the one who collated it all and would often – this is the one bit that I find really relatable about her – she’d get these surveys back, and she’s like, “This person did a terrible job. They’re missing a whole bunch of words. This is sloppy work.” She’d travel around western Australia pinning people down, finishing the forms, collecting data for herself to build this really comprehensive – I mean, relatively comprehensive. It would actually just be better if we had people continue to speak their languages, but then again, the self-aggrandising and the strong personal narrative where she would talk about being able to speak over 100 different languages. It’s just like, “I am sceptical.”

Claire: I dunno about that. Especially because part of this is she’s a sort of self-styled anthropologist, self-styled linguist person. It’s not to say that one can’t learn lots of things without specific extensive training. But.

Lauren: In her defence, anthropology didn’t actually super technically exist – certainly in Australia and certainly not in a way that women were allowed in to the academic community. There’s a really great book by Eleanor Hogan where she talks a little bit about the ethno-mania of this era. It really ties into this empire nonsense where people were just trying to collect everything for the empire. That included people and their customs and their languages. She was really a person of her time. The fact that it was a little bit odd that she was a woman – normally, this was men doing this work. After that time with the Western Australian government, she moved to Ooldea, which, no one’s ever heard of it. It’s literally not a place anymore. It was a stop on the train line across from east to west. She lived there for over 16 years with the Aṉangu people who lived near the sidings because their way of life had been completely disrupted by the train bringing Western practices, bringing in Western foods that upset their natural ecology, draining the water soak that was nearby, so there wasn’t fresh water that people could access easily. And then you had this train that brought these people through for them to trade with. By 1919 she’s in her 50s. She’s there until her 70s. People start then bringing her in for care and heading out – she leaves again, and she never really settles down well into her 80s. Eleanor Hogan has this amazing book. It’s one of the more recent publications about Daisy Bates where she looks at her relationship with a travelling journalist named Ernestine Hill, who seems pretty cool. She was travelling around in the 1930s. She came to Ooldea to talk to Daisy Bates and published a couple of articles about Daisy Bates’ time in the desert in that community. A thing she regrets is that she published this story that Daisy Bates had about cannibalism among Indigenous Australians, which, like, again, I kind of thought, “Ah, maybe she just said that one time.” No, she went on about it all the time, which is not only unsubstantiated but like, seems pretty actively refuted by evidence at the time. This is why I think Daisy Bates sucks specifically because lots of people weren’t great, but lots of people at the time were just like, “We don’t think this is true.” There was very little evidence. One time she sent some bones to the South Australia Museum, and they’re like, “This is a cat. You’ve sent us cat bones. Chill, lady.” This narrative of cannibal natives is such a classic bullshit trope. There’s a really great book by Larissa Behrendt, who’s an Indigenous lawyer and scholar looking at this narrative of cannibalism in a different context in Queensland, but I think it’s part of this recurring trope of using it to make other cultures scarier and othering them.

Claire: Absolutely. We have lots of examples of this. Particularly in spaces where there’s rapid colonial expansion, we see cannibalism being used, for example, in our Christopher Columbus episode, we talk about cannibalism as this trope that’s being used against people in the Americas. What’s actually happening in these spaces is more often we see much more intense violence and things like torture coming from the colonising side against the Indigenous people. The things that they’re being accused of doing more often are closer to things that are being done to them in this moment. It’s a way – I think you’re totally right – of othering people and saying, “Well, they’re doing something we find unconscionable,” in order to distract from the fact that we are, in fact, doing something unconscionable to them.

Lauren: It’s just such a bingo card.

Claire: I mean, it really is. Everything you’ve said about Daisy Bates so far reminds me of an episode that I highly recommend people listen to, actually, in conjunction with this which was with Rhiannon Garth Jones on late-19th-early-20th Century orientalists in places like Iran and Iraq where they’re doing the same thing. They’re like, “Oh, we’re paying attention to the art, to the language. We’re translating their poetry,” to show that they are this backwards place, and we’re taking this, and we’re sending it back to the imperial court. We’re sending it back to the governments that we work for or the journals that we work for in, in these cases, the UK (at this point) or Ireland, saying, “We’re sending this back there,” in order then justify, actually, the actions that are being taken in these spaces, these incredibly violent things that are happening there. There’s one of these women named Gertrude Bell in Iran who’s doing almost the same thing that Daisy Bates is doing – which I find fascinating that they’re both women who’re like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna go far away from home where I can be this thing that I couldn’t necessarily be back there and be a girl boss in the wild.” Gertrude Bell, for example, was doing the same thing in Iran where she’s like, “Well, I live out in the desert with these people. I really understand their way of life.”

Lauren: I think it’s really important that they are women for this narrative. She was given a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – a CBE – in 1934 for this incredibly paternalistic – but it’s the maternal spin of this woman in the desert looking after her – she talks about “her natives.” This is a term that got used at the time that doesn’t get used in Australia as much. The thing I haven’t stressed enough (possibly) is whatever image you’ve had of her you have to – she’s actually this incredibly tiny woman dressed as Mary Poppins. She’s in full Edwardian governess gear. She never gives this up. She really understood the power of the personal brand before celebrity was a thing. Clearly, an incredibly strong and resilient woman out in incredibly hot, arid conditions in full Edwardian boned corset. That was not comfortable. But there was something really compelling to people about this woman and this tension between this incredibly edge-of-civilisation (as it was conceptualised) place but while completely from another era and completely refined and all this decorum.

Claire: You’re able to be photographed, for example, in this case, around people who are dressed for the environment that they’re in and be able to be like, “Look at how civilised I am. Look at who I am, especially this maternal feeling that I have towards them – not my own son – but these people that I have.”

Lauren: She talked about just her presence would be a “civilising influence,” and you’re just like, “Wow. What a mindset.”

Claire: For sure. I think that’s visible when you look into some of these things. In the research I did ahead of time, I was thinking about this dying race thing that you brought up earlier, this idea that her research follows this narrative that assumes these Indigenous cultures are inevitably disappearing, like this is an evitable disappearance, and she’s doing this pastoral thing to help them as they are in cultural hospice where she’s like, “The most I can do is catalogue all of this. Look at how wonderful I am for doing that and how much I love you for that,” instead of being like, “Ah, this is a living, evolving society that I can help to thrive and grow and work against” –

Lauren: We’ve just stuck a giant stick in the gears of this society. We’ve completely ruptured it. And then we’re surprised that it’s a ruptured society. Wow.

Claire: You’d be like, “This society is dying. Who knows what killed it,” which is a wild formulation for this.

Lauren: In 1939 she publishes her book called The Passing of the Aborigines – just in case you weren’t entirely sure that she thought this was a doomed society.

Claire: And not a word we’re using that much anymore. Am I right on – because some of these things differ across countries and spaces. I don’t think we’re using that word, right, so much.

Lauren: “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are pretty – different groups, have different preferences. There’s a bunch of sub-preferences. We also distinguish the Torres Strait Islands right at the top of Queensland. Some groups will prefer, like, “Koori” is a very New South Wales/Victoria term. We sometimes talk about “First Nations.” I know that’s a very North American way of talking about things. But, no, “Aborigines” – it has a real 1938 vibe to it.

Claire: It does. Especially because it starts, usually, with “the” beforehand. Anything we say, like, “the race,” we have a problem, often.

Lauren: I think it’s just worth flagging she was a big fan of removing children who had an Aboriginal mother and a white father from their family context, a process that happened for many, many decades in Australia and is a major intergenerational trauma that we now refer to as the “Stolen Generations.” She would alert the authorities to these children who she felt needed to be taken away from their families.

Claire: I was gonna ask what you meant by her being a fan or a proponent of this. I thought you were gonna say, “Oh, she was in legislation.” No, she was like, “Let’s call the police.” That’s wild. I’m sorry. That’s so far beyond what I thought you were gonna say. I’m not laughing like “Ha ha.” I’m laughing like, “That’s appalling.”

Lauren: Absolutely valid shock response to that behaviour.

Claire: It has the vibe of being like, “Ah, there’s someone in the attic. Let’s call the Gestapo.” I study Nazis, so that’s where my brain is immediately going. This is a type of a person who thinks they’re doing something for a good reason, but the thing they’re doing is abjectly terrible and pretty much anyone can see that.

Lauren: Also, just another sub-thread of why this guy sucks is Eleanor Hogan’s book is all about this relationship between Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, who wrote those initial articles with her. Daisy Bates had been publishing in newspapers. It’s how she had supported herself while living in Ooldea and all these other remote places. Her prose was becoming increasingly not of the era. She was this 75-year-old Victorian lady. Ernestine wrote those couple of articles with her and then, essentially, co-wrote the book with her (which started as a series of newspaper articles – became the whole book), and Daisy Bates gives her no credit. She refers to her briefly at some point as her “typist.”

Claire: The academic, the scholar in me is even more – I don’t like this woman at all. I already didn’t.

Lauren: No, but she had this absolute sense of self-importance. Ernestine Hill – very famous in Australia in the early 20th Century for her prose. It is a horrific book in terms of content, but there’s quite a bit that’s quite well written, and it’s very engaging, and it’s rollocking, and it’s like, “Oh, that does – that makes complete sense. That explains why that book was so well-regarded.” It was considered a bestseller. It was pretty much basically in print until the mid-1970s. My copy is from a re-print in 1966. She not only responded to but actively fed in the public imagination this narrative that’s still absolutely harms Australia’s understanding of itself until today. I haven’t really thought about Daisy in the decade or so since I last did a little bit of work on her, and as I said, I don’t necessarily research in Australia, but now that I work in Australia, and I teach in Australia, for me, returning to this story is part of an ongoing process I’m trying to engage in in educating myself, doing better by my discipline and by my students to understand the historical context of Australia and drawing a line directly between the kind of narratives Daisy Bates engaged in and the kind of things that especially non-recent migrants and non-Indigenous Australians need to really unpack. We still have massively high rates of Indigenous incarceration. The Stolen Generations is considered historical, but we still take a massive number of children out of their family context into the foster home system every year. That’s still just perpetuating this kind of attitude towards Indigenous Australians.

Claire: I’ve been thinking about the best moment to bring this up. When you talked about her not properly crediting one of her collaborators, I have a question about linguistics in general and how the field works in relation to her. When I was doing research, I started to feel like the way that Daisy Bates is talking about people who she is ostensibly working with or getting information from, she’s treating them like subjects and informants rather than as collaborators in this project that she’s working on.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: Does the field now do a better job, do you think, of crediting the people that you’re learning from as collaborators in your learning? Is that more normal?

Lauren: There’s definitely a lot to reflect on in Daisy Bates work, not only in my understanding of Australia’s colonial history but also in linguistic colonial history. My summary would be that individuals are better at thinking about their relationship with the people that they’re working with. As a field, I think we generally would love to see more and try to encourage more people to work with their own languages to change that power relationship. Institutionally, I think, institutions are just so slow moving, it’s hard to always necessarily have that play out in a more fully-fledged form if that makes sense. I think individuals are better at crediting, making people visible – not always. I had this project with colleagues where we looked at the genre of descriptive grammar writing. This is where you write about the full grammar of a language not just word lists like Daisy Bates did. It’s like, even 10, 20 years ago, a shocking number of grammars were written where it’s like, “I don’t know the names of the people you spoke to. That feels like a bit of a problem.” There were some grammars where we were like, “Does it count that they talk about some people in the acknowledgements as ‘making visible’ the work those people did?” No.

Claire: This is so wild to me because our fields are so different, obviously, in many different respects, but you could not get away with that in history. The whole thing is the source. The whole thing in history is who is saying something.

Lauren: I think the PhD grammars we looked at were doing better. I think the genre moves so slowly, and the researchers are doing better. The other thing that I think really has caused me to reflect a lot in this narrative is that the field that I work in, which is documenting and describing languages, we talk about it a lot as “endangered language documentation.” There’s been this whole reckoning in the last – kind of since I’ve been a graduate student – so in the last 15 years, there’s been this reckoning with “What does it mean when we’re calling these languages ‘endangered’?” Because it is this encroachment of larger languages, you know, English being the obvious global example, but in China, it’s Mandarin. In Nepal, where I work, Nepali is the language of state education. These languages are endangered. The problem is that we have this incentive as academics trying to fund the work that we’re doing of talking up the endangerment and how – we never talk about what is endangering them.

Claire: I was gonna say that sounds like the passive voice to me. Even “impearled” is better than “endangered” in my mind because “endangered,” to me, is like, the way we talk about species or something where some environmental change has just happened rather than this being not a naturally occurring phenomenon and, instead, an utterly man made one.

Lauren: The economic and the social incentives, if you’re trying to do work that’s important, you still end up in this trap of talking about or exoticising this language. There’s maybe an unfair stereotype of a bit of a “Well, how many speakers does your language have?” Like, “The language I work with” and the “my language” is the same vibes as Daisy Bates’ “my natives.” The really difficult thing about reading about Daisy Bates – just absolutely really problematic discourses, but it’s still discourses we are trying to unpack and step away from even today.

Claire: I mean, there’s so much here that I find fascinating in that how well do you feel like Australia has reckoned with this really awful past? My feeling on America is: bad. Reckoning with this? Bad. I’m curious what your view on how Australia has dealt with this, and how this has helped to shape Australia’s understanding of itself, like what your feelings regarding these things are, or how you’re reading them as someone who is thinking through a lot of this stuff – even not from a scholarly perspective but just from thinking and teaching in this space.

Lauren: The data that I will bring to this is that in 2023 our government brought forward a national referendum (we don’t do these very often). We wanted to change the constitution to include an Indigenous voice to parliament. This was framed as a way of actually listening to Indigenous people, letting them lead policy that related to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians make up about 4% of the Australian population, but the majority of larger Indigenous communities are still in remote South Australia, Northern Territory, and Western Australia. This Indigenous voice referendum was supposed to be a way to provide structural acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians. Due to a confluence of conservative media and conservative politicians campaigning against this idea (but also, I think, because a lot of Australians haven’t acknowledged this history), the referendum was voted down pretty much 60-40 across Australia.

Claire: What.

Lauren: Yeah.

Claire: I’m saying, “What,” as though that’s not what would happen in the US right now, too, like what we would do here.

Lauren: This is a classic case of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US have a lot of overlapping history. It’s very interesting that I feel like each of us point to the other and we’re like, “But you’re doing better, right? You can’t be doing worse than here.” Often, when I talk with North American colleagues, they’re like, “But you guys have got it sorted out, right?” It’s just like, “Ugh, I wish.”

Claire: You know, what is funny is that when I was living in New Zealand it was always like, “Well, Australia’s worse.” They would be like, “Oh, we have some problems. You should look at what they’re doing in Australia.” Because I worked for the New Zealand government when I was working there. It’s funny because there it was the opposite where they were like, “Well, at least we’re not Australia.”

Lauren: I’m happy to give New Zealand that for sure. That’s what’s happening on a national level. It just created this massive flashpoint for people to be really racist – overtly, publicly. What a lot of Indigenous Australians have asked for – and I couldn’t find a single person saying anything nice about Daisy Bates who was Indigenous. They’re possibly out there. I’m sure she had some personal relationships. But in terms of what Indigenous Australians want – again, this is not everyone – but we have something called the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” from 2017 in which they lay out very clearly the challenges Indigenous Australians are facing, the rich diversity of Indigenous culture, but also that what they are asking for is truth-telling, treaty, and a voice. I think, in some ways, putting that referendum for a voice ahead of the truth-telling really didn’t help because a lot of people aren’t receptive to the truth at this time. In Victoria, we have gone through a truth-telling process with the Europe Justice Commission in which our premier stood up and was just like, “Ugh, I didn’t quite realise that those massacres happened or the effect that this has all had.” It was just like, “This is progress.” From the work from the Europe Justice Commission, a treaty was signed in 2025 in Victoria which is a step towards the formation of a voice that is framed around a mutually shared set of agreements and expectations. Things are happening, but this pernicious narrative – I was just listening to a podcast episode the other day with Sue-Anne Hunter, who’s our new National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children [and Young People]. She was just like, “Our kids are still really dehumanised.” I was just like, “Absolutely a direct line between what Daisy Bates was doing and the challenges that Sue-Anne Hunter articulates.” You’re just like, “Ugh, so much work still to be done.”

Claire: I mean, even the word “voice” I find very interesting here in this context. Thinking about Daisy Bates and the idea of “We want a voice” because there’s also this person who’s going around being like, “Well, actually, what we can do is erase the people who speak the words that I am collecting. We can just divorce the words from the people who use them,” or “the grammar from the people who use it,” etc., “We can separate these, and we can preserve just the word and not the voice that speaks it. Not the person as a collaborator. They’re an informant. They don’t have a voice.” I just find the word “voice” really interesting in this context, too, because even being like, “Well, we want not just a say but representation when we get to say something or ask for something. We want actual representation,” I find fascinating. And the fact that it’s still like, “No. You should be represented in some way, but you aren’t the person who gets to represent you,” fits with Daisy Bates’ approach to all of this. Because I was also finding things within her personal narrative, right, she’s saying that the Indigenous people she’s working with, she’s saying that they’re calling her “grandmother” and that they have this sweet, familial relationship to her.

Lauren: Which is probably because she was just handing them food stuffs that they needed.

Claire: Also, maybe it’s a situation where every old lady who’s hanging out with you is called “grandmother,” the way that I would call anybody an “auntie” or something here. There’s something here where she’s also like, “Ah, they see me as their mother. I can impose this thing on them. I can take away their voice. I can control their language.” All of this creates a worldview that I don’t think is gone – it sounds like from what you’re saying.

Lauren: Yeah. She definitely had in the 1960s and ’70s – there was a lot of repressing some of her more eccentric behaviour. It was a less complicated story about her. A lot of the early response to her work in the 1960s and the 1970s, obviously her time spent in Ooldea with the Aṉangu people was central to the hero myth and the media narrative. A lot of the response was really positive. Elizabeth Salter’s 1971 biography, you probably get the vibe of the hero myth from the fact that it’s called “the great white queen of the Never Never.”

Claire: That’s wild.

Lauren: There were plays. There’s paintings. She is kind of mythologised because she’s so iconic in this long black skirt and this rigid jacket. She wears this hat and veil. She had this umbrella that she used everywhere because it was so sunny.

Claire: She’s got a CBE. She’s basically like the queen.

Lauren: And you know that she wore it all the time. I think she was definitely not motivated by religious feeling, but empire was the religion.

Claire: Absolutely.

Lauren: Julia Blackburn’s 2012 book called Daisy Bates in the Desert is a (I would say) fascinating choice to try your first-person biographical account. Given how hard I find it to get into the head of Daisy Bates, I would personally not try that.

Claire: I found the Smithsonian article they talk about these people who Daisy meets, and they say in this Blackburn book that they are “naked, smiling, and glistening in the sunshine.” Something about that, to me, smacks so incredibly much of this orientalist worldview. Part of why I’m thinking about this is because I taught orientalism in my class on Thursday, so it’s the most recent thing that I’ve taught in class. It’s one of those things that whenever I teach my students, like, once you understand this, you’re gonna start seeing it everywhere. It’s everywhere. I think what’s fascinating – and many other people have made this argument much better than me – there is no untangling of this imperial orientalist thing in the East in terms of spaces like the Middle East and this same gaze within the Australian context because they’re still saying there is some far away, static, unchanging, even dying because they’re unchanging, race that are beautiful. And they’re more naked than us. They’re more free. They’re more primitive than us. It gets re-inscribed over and over and over again. Then someone can write a book decades later and still do the same thing without realising that what’s animating this is this view of this unchanging, barbaric, East, basically, or this island other nation. It’s so wild to me that you could write that not that long ago and still be doing it.

Lauren: And I think there’s something really hard to get your head around with Daisy Bates where you’re like, promiscuous, polygamous, and then there’s prim and proper, but just motivated by her own self-interest.

Claire: Whatever she wants to do, she can do. This is so fascinating. I feel like it’s one of these episodes where I emerge being like, “I’m gonna be thinking about this for a while afterwards,” because it really does have some resonances with present cultures that I – some episodes I’m like, “Yeah, obvious. Draw a line. Whatever.” And then other episodes it’s like, “Oh, this one’s gonna stick with me. It’s gonna be one where I notice it a bunch after this.”

Lauren: When you were like, “Who do you wanna talk about?” I was like, “Ah, all these years later, she’s still with me.”

Claire: Well, hopefully this will help you to feel like you have said your piece on this and been like, “I want to go on the record and say that this woman has been haunting me, and I don’t like her.”

Lauren: It’s been really good to revisit her and my complicated feelings about her and about white ladies blundering into places that they do not need to be.

Claire: I mean, again, this is one where we can say someone did useful, interesting scholarship – I think they did it the wrong way, and some of the other stuff they were doing while conducting this study had really bad long-term negative effects, so it’s good to be able to complicate things in that way. We should be doing this in public, which is the point of this podcast.

Lauren: You can visit the Digital Daisy Bates project. You can see all those beautiful pages and pages of manuscripts. The way that the website has been set up, it is set up as a map so that you can bring up a particular word and see what that word was in each of the Indigenous languages geographically. Or you can look at a particular language or the words of a particular speaker. It’s just such a great digital humanities project in bringing 90 archive boxes full of thousands and thousands of pages of manuscript into something that we can interact with as a living collection today.

Claire: We’ll make sure to link that below for people because it’s important that people are still using this scholarship but that they’re engaging with it with a critical view. We want this to still be used. Please go look at it and please check it out and do some exploration, but also, when you’re doing it, think about where and how these things are being produced and who gets named and not named in their production. That’s what we want.

Lauren: And why are these the only records that we have of some of these languages and some of these speakers.

Claire: Definitely. I think this is a good place to end now that we’ve given people a little bit of a call to action. Thank you so much for this. I’m so happy that we were able to make this happen and have this conversation. It’s given me a lot to think about.

Lauren: Thanks, Claire. This has been more fun and cheaper than therapy.

Claire: [Laughs] It usually is on the show. This is gonna go out as a collaborative post on Patreon. For people who are listening on our respective feeds elsewhere, it will be there, too. Both of our podcasts will be linked everywhere below if anybody wants to check out Lauren’s – or from Lauren’s show if they want to check out mine. Thank you to everyone who’s listening to this. Remember, if you encounter someone in Australia in history in the end-of-the-19th-beginning-of-the-20th Century, you should be suspicious of them. [Laughter]

Lauren: Get the full story.

Claire: Get the full story.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like the “Ask me about linguistics” badges and t-shirts – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram. My blog AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. You can follow our guest, Claire Aubin, and listen to her podcast about more historical guys who sucked at ThisGuySucked.com. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the second part of our chat with Kory Stamper about her book True Color and a conversation about childlore including skipping games and childhood rhymes.

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Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

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