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.

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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!

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