#yolmo

Gretchen: What’s an example of that?

Lauren: Okay. I wrote my PhD thesis about some parts of the grammar of a language called “Yolmo.” I worked with a variety that’s spoken in an area of Nepal called Lamjung, so that’s known as “Lamjung Yolmo.” The other variety is just called “Yolmo” because that’s where the Lamjung people migrated from. But it’s also known thanks to some savvy branding in the ’70s as “Helambu Sherpa.” It’s not related to the Sherpa near Everest at all, directly, but they wanted to get associated with the trekking tourism, so they took that name as an outside name for a while. That’s already, like, three names for what is really one language.

Gretchen: And you’ve also worked on a language called “Syuba.”

Lauren: Well, that’s true. But Syuba is actually closely related to these varieties of Yolmo. It’s spoken in an area called “Ramechhap,” but it’s not called “Ramechhap Yolmo.” They’ve only just returned to asking people to call them “Syuba.” Before, they were called “Kagate,” which is seen as a little bit of an unpleasant name. They don’t like it anymore. It’s like the Nepali word/name for them. Again, there’s two or three different possible names for this group of people who speak this particular language.

Gretchen: These are all names that’re used for them in English. Do they call themselves these names in the language itself?

Lauren: Syuba speakers call themselves “Syuba.” They’ve asked other people to. But actually, when you talk to people, and you’re talking about language, they just refer to it as “tam,” which is the word for “language.” In fact, it’s the word for “language” in a lot of different Tibetan varieties. A lot of people will just refer to what they speak as “tam” or “language.” Just another name to potentially throw in there.

Gretchen: I remember when I was first reading about the different language work that you were doing on your blog being like, “Wait, how many languages does this person speak?” because I think the language names were in the process of changing, and so it looked like you had written something about Kagate and also something about Syuba, but those were actually the same language.

Lauren: It’s a constantly evolving situation. I will always, always defer to the communities I work with as to what they wish to be called but also keeping track of this history is really interesting as you see the relationship between different groups of people evolve and change. We’re kind of at one or two languages, and I’ve already got six or eight names going on here. Our whiteboard is gonna get very complicated very quickly.

Gretchen: Well, that’s the interesting level of complexity because, like how humans sometimes have multiple names on different types of pieces of identification or at different periods of their lives, languages can also go through several different names. It’s even more complicated because there are generally multiple members of the community; sometimes they’ll have different opinions.

Lauren: Sometimes, those opinions are tied up with really interesting or really complicated or really difficult histories. We can’t just pin a single label to a group of people that speak a particular language.

Gretchen: Another thing that can make language-naming complicated is, depending on how one tries to draw the boundaries between, okay, these two communities are speaking the same language, they’re speaking varieties of one language, or they’re speaking languages that we’re gonna call “different,” which also factors into a lot of political- and community-level and linguistic decision making.

Lauren: We have a very Western perspective on what we think a group of people or a collection of language-speakers should be. There’s this really great paper that was recently published about language-naming practices in Indigenous Australia from Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer, and Murray Garde. They looked at how the social attitudes towards language and ownership of language and relationships between peoples creates this really different approach to how to think about names of languages. In Australia, what is really important is the connection between language and a particular land and the geographic relationship that exists there, and therefore, who has the right to speak a language, who has the right to speak a language in a particular place or at a particular time, is a very different attitude to what we might have as, say, “I’m an English speaker. You can be an English speaker, too. We all speak English wherever we go.”

Gretchen: Both of us live in countries that have this history of colonisation where English isn’t originally tied to either of the lands that we’re occupying.

Lauren: The authors in this paper spend a lot of time talking through the example of “Bininj Kunwok,” which is a language from the northern part of Australia, which exists as a language name. It’s a language name people recognise. There’s a grammar and a dictionary. The name itself is, in these languages, the word for “person,” “bininj,” and “kunwok,” “speech,” so a bit like Yolmo with “tam” – similar elements coming into the language name there.

Gretchen: This is like, “the people’s language,” or something like that?

Lauren: Yeah. “The people who speak this language” kind of thing. People are very happy to use this term and come together as a group to work, say, on a dictionary project or some language materials, but actually, there’re many, many groups within that cluster of Bininj Kunwok that have their own name for their own variety of the language, who have names for all the other varieties, who don’t see themselves as necessarily speaking the same language because they’re not necessarily from the same part of the country. This creates this different relationship to where the language boundary is in the name compared to, say, English, where we see ourselves as all speaking just English.

Gretchen: So, this is sort of language name as a political alliance or federation of languages. I mean, actually, now that I’m saying this, I don’t know how dissimilar this is to using English to refer to all of the different varieties of English around the world in the sense that they have certain alliances when it comes to, especially, written material but also a lot of local differences on the ground that sometimes get erased by thinking of them all as having a common, standardised written form.

Lauren: Absolutely. I think the situation when we zoom in on any particular context is always more nuanced. This paper really goes into a lot of the context and the nuance of how we’ve come to have these language groups and these language names in Australia that can sometimes simplify a really complex social dynamic or a social history.

Gretchen: One of the other things I enjoyed about this paper was from the references portion at the beginning talking about how a language often gains wider public acknowledgement through “artefactualisation,” such as the creation of a dictionary or grammar, that makes for sort of a birth certificate of a language, as distinct from the language itself. Like, here it’s got its driver’s license. We’re using this driver’s license as a form of quote-unquote “neutral” ID to prove that a person exists when, actually, not all humans have equal access to documentation like driver’s licenses and birth certificates. There’re other things that a driver’s license, especially, signify in addition to being an ID marker. Not everyone can drive or is gonna be able to learn to drive or is physically able to drive. The idea that dictionaries and grammars get treated as evidence that a language exists, even when they have these very different relationships to different groups of language speakers or language signers, that’s a metaphor that carries through.

Lauren: Again, we’re trying to use language names as a way to pin things down, but when we actually zoom in, the situation is always a lot more nuanced. Just like we can get distracted sometimes by the fact that people share a name, not all languages that appear to have very similar names are necessarily part of the same family of languages. One that always tricked me up when I started working in Nepal is that we have “Nepali Bhasa” and “Nepal Bhasa.”

Gretchen: As someone who doesn’t know anything about Nepal, this really sounds very similar, yes. “Nepali Bhasa” and “Nepal Bhasa.”

Lauren: “Nepali Bhasa” is the Indo-Aryan language that’s the national language of Nepal. It’s very closely related to Hindi. “Nepal Bhasa” is the Newar languages that are the original languages of the Kathmandu Valley, so that’s the capital of Nepal.

Gretchen: So, they’re not part of this broader Indo-European language family that Hindi and Nepal belong to?

Lauren: No, they’re actually part of the Tibeto-Burman family. They’re part of a completely different family. They were in the Kathmandu Valley before the Indo-Aryan speakers came in to make it the capital of an even bigger country, which is what we now know as the country of Nepal today.

Gretchen: “Bhasa” sort of sounds like another language term, which is “Bhasa Indonesia,” the Indonesian language, or “Bahasa Malaya,” the Malay language.

Lauren: Yeah, that /basa/ or /bhasa/ is an old Sanskrit word for “language,” and so it pops up all over the place even for languages that aren’t related to each other.

Gretchen: This is great. I just learned a word that means “language” in a whole bunch of languages that’ve been influenced by Sanskrit.

Lauren: Yeah, we’re definitely collecting words for “language” in this episode as much as we’re collecting language names. It comes part and parcel with the territory.

Gretchen: This does tell us something about the relationships of these languages to each other which is, I guess, they were all influenced by Sanskrit at some level even if they have many other differences between them.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: Another group of languages with very similar names that have a shared history even if not necessarily a shared linguistic trajectory is the group of creole languages.

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: When I say, “creole,” what’s the first creole language that you think of?

Lauren: Um, “Kriol,” spelt K-R-I-O-L, which is a language of Australia, especially up across the Northern Territory in Western Australia, heading towards Bininj Kunwok country. It’s a creole of the English that came in but also from across the local languages around there, around the Roper River area, but it’s also spread to other parts of Australia as well. That’s the first creole that comes to mind for me. What about for you?

Gretchen: I think the first creole language that I think of is Haitian Creole, which is also often referred to just as “Kreyòl,” but in this case spelled K-R-E-Y-O-L with an accent on the O. This is the language of Haiti which is descended from French. It’s also spoken in the context of displacement and colonisation and having a bunch of people losing some connections with their linguistic roots, but they don’t have a common ancestor except insofar as English and French have a common ancestor. They just have this common history of being this contact language in terms of what “creole” refers to.

Lauren: I find it so fascinating that this word “creole” has this long history and in certain places has become attached to particular languages that arise in these situations. And in other places it refers to maybe the people or the food from the area. “Creole” pops up in a lot of places where you’ve seen French or English colonisation.

Gretchen: There’re also creoles that are extended to other languages that aren’t linked to colonisation. There’s Portuguese-based creoles, Dutch-based creoles, German-based creoles, Spanish-based creoles, Arabic-, Malay-based creoles. There’s a variety of places you could have a creole. Many of them, but not all of them, are linked to the Transatlantic slave trade and forced displacement of people from a location. You had a variety of people from different linguistic backgrounds mixing – not with their consent – and making this combination language with a language they had in common was the colonial language but also bringing in influences from their various mother tongues.

Lauren: Obviously, the Transatlantic slave trade wasn’t relevant to Australia, which is not near the Atlantic Ocean, but similar factors around displacement and the bringing in of English as a dominant language of trade and commerce in people’s lives. We also have Yumplatok in Australia, which is a creole language of the part of Northern Queensland that heads up into Papua New Guinea.

Gretchen: And Tok Pisin is another creole language – and English-derived creole – of Papua New Guinea, which isn’t referred to by the name of “Creole,” like many of them are.

Lauren: But the “tok” in both of those is from English “talk.” Once again, another-language-vibe name as part of the name of a language there.

Gretchen: Another language that came about because of contact and colonialisation with a bit of a different history is Michif or Metis in Canada, which arose from French fur traders marrying local Cree women. Their kids spoke this language that has a combination of French and Cree using Cree verbs, which are a really interesting and complex system that have lots of prefixes and suffixes. Cree is an Algonquian language, and this is characteristic of Algonquian languages. And then French nouns, which are also sort of the more complex bit of French grammar where French nouns have all of this grammatical gender going on. These kids decided to learn the most featurally rich bits of both of their parents’ languages.

Lauren: Amazing that these children made this language out of the complicated verbs and the complicated nouns. But it also has two names, you said, Metis or Michif.

Gretchen: Yeah. The name of this people and this language is Metis or Michif, which comes from a local pronunciation variant of the word “métis,” which is from a French word that means “mixed,” but it doesn’t refer to any type of linguistic mixing where you could have two parents from different language backgrounds. It refers to this particular mixing that happened in this particular historical context.

Lauren: That makes sense that the language name takes on this specific meaning and refers to this specific linguistic context.

Gretchen: I think with language names, sometimes something that comes up with a language name is its etymology, you know, “This comes from a particular language,” or “This comes from a particular meaning,” but also etymology isn’t destiny when it comes to language names.

Lauren: Yeah. I always find it really fun to say, “Ooo, this part of the language name comes from the word for ‘language’” or the word for “talk” or the word for “people.” But a language is so much more than the literal parts of its name.

Gretchen: I guess the other point is etymology is an interesting thing to learn about, but what’s important is respecting the wishes of the community that has that particular language. One of the things that I’ve been following is names of Bantu languages because a lot of them seem to come in pairs. Sometimes you see “Swahili” in a list. Sometimes you see “Kiswahili.” Sometimes you see “Zulu.” Sometimes you see “Isizulu.” Sometimes you see “Sotho” and “Sesotho” or “Tswana” and “Setswana.,” “Congo” and “Kikongo.” A lot of these language names seem to come in pairs like that where one of them has this prefix that’s something like /ki-/ or /si-/ or /t͡ʃi-/.

Lauren: I know that Setswana is spoken in Botswana, and Sesotho is spoken in Lesotho. They’re all connected somehow. This marking of something is a language by the use of a prefix is something that happens across these languages. They’re all part of the Bantu language family.

Gretchen: Right. And Bantu languages are known for having prefixes that mark lots of things. I dunno if it’s settled whether in English people are more likely to use the language prefix to refer to the language or not. It seems to sometimes vary per language. I mostly see people talking about “Kinyarwanda,” the language of Rwanda, which includes the prefix, but I also often hear people talking about “Zulu” rather than “Isizulu” without the prefix. I don’t know if there’s a consensus across different groups here, or if it’s something that varies more locally.

Lauren: I guess that just kind of works how an “-ish” or and “-ese” suffix works in English. We have “-ish” suffixes like “English” and “Danish” and “Irish.”

Gretchen: Yeah, or “-ese” suffixes like “Japanese,” “Cantonese,” “Portuguese.” These can also get applied to novel contexts to refer to the concept of a language in general – something like “Simlish,” the language of the Sims.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. Or “Legalese.”

Gretchen: Or “Journalese.”

Lauren: I guess there is an older tendency to refer to “Nepali” as “Nepalese” as a language. Now, you are more likely to see it written as “Nepali,” so taking their preference for the name as it’s pronounced closer to their own use of the name rather than this English suffixised form.

Gretchen: Sometimes the move closer towards how a community identifies themself happens at the morphological level where the suffix or the prefix changes as well.

Lauren: This distinction between what a group of people refer to their own language as and how a language is referred to by people outside of the group is often quite different as we’ve discussed with a few examples so far.

Gretchen: I think the first example that I learned of names for languages being really different in the language versus from other people who speak the language was in German, which in French, which I was learning very early, is “Allemand.” and then in German itself, is “Deutsch.” All three of these were really different from each other.

Lauren: In Italian it’s “Tedesco,” and in Polish it’s “Niemiecki.” These are all very different.

Gretchen: These are all very different. Something like “English” to “Anglais” in French, I was like, yeah, I sort of see how that happens. You hold it loosely and see how it’s similar. But “German” to “Deutsch” to Allemand” to –

Lauren: “Niemiecki” to “Tedesco.”

Gretchen: These all sound really different to each other.

Lauren: Part of this is that Germany as a country and German as a unified language is a relatively recent construction in Western and European history, so each of these groups were using names for whatever the German closest to them was and have kept those names as Germany unified.

Gretchen: Right. There’s different Germanic tribes or Germanic peoples that were referred to by different names in different areas. The broader name for this phenomenon of the name of a language inside its own group and outside of its own group is a contrast between the “endonym,” the name inside, and the “exonym,” the name from outside.

Lauren: The “-nym” part there being “name” and “endo-” and “exo-” being a contrasting pair.

Gretchen: Right. That’s “-nym” as in “pseudonym” or “synonym.”

Lauren: “Antonym.”

Gretchen: “Endonym” and “exonym” being themselves antonyms.

Lauren: Indeed. “Endo-” and “exo-” pop up in a whole variety of other places as well. We have “exoplanets” which are planets outside of our solar system.

Gretchen: Does this mean that planets inside our solar system are technically “endoplanets”?

Lauren: Hmm, maybe technically, yeah, just like we have “exoskeletons” like lobsters or Super Mecha Warriors.

Gretchen: Wait, so we could also have “endoskeletons,” which is what humans have which is a skeleton inside our body?

Lauren: Yeah, I’m gonna start referring to it as my “endoskeleton” now.

Gretchen: I think it’s funny because “endo-” and “exo-” are so clearly opposites. But “endo-” is familiar to me less from “endoplanets” and more from words like “endocrine system,” which is your hormones.

Lauren: Ah, I guess that is that “endo-”.

Gretchen: I looked up whether there is also an “exocrine system.”

Lauren: Is there?

Gretchen: Yeah. The endocrine system are the stuff that gets secreted inside your body and the exocrine system is all the stuff that you secrete outside your body, like sweat and saliva and mucus.

Lauren: I guess also in medicine we have “endoscopes,” which is when you use a camera in an orifice of your body to look at some internal part of your body.

Gretchen: This is like when you’d put a camera down your throat to look at your vocal cords.

Lauren: Yeah. I guess an “exoscope” is just any normal camera you take a selfie with because it’s looking at the outside of your body.

Gretchen: Great. I’m gonna refer to my normal camera as an “exoscope” now.

Lauren: An “endonym” is the name that we have in our own language for our language, and an “exonym” is the name that we have for a language of some other group of people.

Gretchen: To go back to the German example, “Deutsch” is the endonym, and then “Tedesco” and “Allemand” and “German” and “Niemiecki” are all exonyms for “German” coming from the perspective of various other languages.

Lauren: We’ve seen some recurring motifs already in terms of endonyms, people using words like “talk” or “language” or “people” for reference to their own language, but there’re also lots of different types of exonyms as well.

Gretchen: Sometimes, when a community wants to change the name of their language, that sometimes means replacing certain exonyms that other communities are using for their language with something that’s closer to the endonym of how they’re referring to themselves, which is especially important if this particular community hasn’t had a lot of self-determination in the first place. I don’t think I know any Germans who are like, “Yeah, no, English speakers need to refer to us as ‘Deutsch’,” but that’s a reflection of German social status, which is not the same if you’re from a language where there’s been this long history of colonisation.

Lauren: One type of exonym that can sometimes be easy to spot in the wild is when the name for the language as an exonym is very similar to their own endonym. For example, we call Italian, “Italian,” and in Italian it is “Italiano.”

Gretchen: Right, which is really similar. Sometimes, it’s just the languages don’t have quite the same sounds. The vowels in Italian are gonna be different from the vowels in English, and so “Italian” versus “Italiano” is produced with slightly different vowels even though the spelling is quite similar.

Lauren: These are cognate because it’s the same word just pronounced in each of the respective languages. Sometimes, these cognates can be a little bit more hidden.

Gretchen: Yeah. Like, “Tedesco” in Italian is actually from the same origin as the German word “Deutsch.” It also gives us the English “Teutonic.”

Lauren: Ah, right.

Gretchen: It’s just that those words ended up with diverging trajectories in those languages. One place where you have a lot of adaptation for pronunciation differences is if the languages have different modalities. If you have a sign language, and you wanna refer to it in a spoken language, you need a spoken name to refer to it and vice versa, you need a signed name to refer to a spoken language.

Lauren: I think this is why a lot of signed languages end up having acronym-type names, so “American Sign Language,” “ASL,” “British Sign Language,” “BSL,” because there isn’t a direct way to take the cognate from the signed language into the spoken language.

Gretchen: Actually, that raises a question for me which is “Auslan” which has, I think, a relatively straightforward etymology, “Australia” and “language,” but it doesn’t have that acronymic thing. I guess it would just be “ASL” for “Australian Sign Language” which would be confusing. Do you know how that came about?

Lauren: In the 1970s and ’80s when Trevor Johnston started working on Auslan, it already had a name in Auslan. It has its own sign. But Trevor Johnston needed a way to refer to it in English as well. He actually took inspiration from what was happening in America at the time, which is that what we now know as ASL was also being quite commonly referred to as “Ameslan” – so a blend instead of an acronym.

Gretchen: Of like, “American Sign Language” – oh, the S there is for “sign.” “Ameslan.” Okay.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, the S in “Auslan” is also for “sign” rather than “Aus” as in “Australia.

Lauren: It’s a bit of both. And I think that’s why it’s really stood the test of time because it really has a very word feel. As you said, it also would have to compete with “ASL” for recognition in that three-letter acronym approach. “Auslan” has stood the test of time in a way that “Ameslan” hasn’t.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. I think that when I think of other linguistic varieties that have acronymic names, I think of accents and dialects and varieties that’ve been named in the last, maybe, century or so.

Lauren: Acronym-ing is a very 20th Century approach, for sure.

Gretchen: 20th and 21st, I guess. Things like “MLE,” “Multicultural London English,” or “RP,” “Received Pronunciation,” or “AAVE,” “AAE,” “AAL,” which is “African American Vernacular English,” “African American English,” “African American Language,” depending on how you wanna name it – these are all very acronymic names for things that have been named comparatively recently, whereas some of the older English varieties, I’m thinking things like “Cockney,” which is associated with the working class in London’s East End, or like “Scouse” in Liverpool, these have names that aren’t acronymic. These are varieties that have been named for a longer period of time.

Lauren: It’s interesting how the way that we talk about different languages and different varieties reflects larger trends in approaches to naming things.

Gretchen: Another way that language names can come about is by doing a more direct or a partial translation of the name for the language in the language. An example of this is “Light Walpiri,” which is a mixed language of Australia that has Indigenous Walpiri language, Kriol, and Standard Australian English as its parent languages. The name “Light Walpiri,” which I’d encountered in a few contexts because it made some news when the linguist named Carmel O’Shannessy was documenting it initially, I was interested to read in one of the papers that the name comes from “Walpiri rampaku,” which literally means in Walpiri “light Walpiri.” She as a linguist decided to translate part of the name into English while keeping the connection with how people were referring to it in the language – or possibly speakers were doing that, but it has this connection to how people were talking about it without being a direct reflection of it.

Lauren: So, that exonym that is the way that I know the language is a direct translation of their endonym for it within Walpiri. Interesting. I never knew the history of “Light Walpiri.”

Gretchen: I was wondering why “light,” and that seems to be why.

Lauren: Sometimes, the exonym that we use in one language was borrowed as the exonym from another language. So, we didn’t borrow someone’s endonym or own way of talking about their language, we borrowed it from, maybe, their neighbours.

Gretchen: This is really common in the North American Indigenous context. There are loads and loads of examples. One of them is the name “Navajo,” which comes from a Tewa word, which is another Indigenous language spoken nearby, “navahu,” which combines the word “nava,” meaning field, and “hu,” meaning “valley,” to mean “large field.” It was borrowed from Tewa into Spanish to refer to a particular place, and then later into English for the people and their language. But the name that the people themselves use is Diné, which also means “people,” with the language known as “Diné bizaad” or “people’s language,” or sometimes “Naabeehó bizaad,” but “Naabeehó” is this adaptation of the word “Navajo” because there’s not actually any V in Diné.

Lauren: Always a bit of giveaway when the exonym has sounds in it that don’t exist in the language it’s referring to.

Gretchen: Really big one. In this case, “field” and “valley,” that’s got a relatively neutral valence. It’s not the name in their own language, but it’s not a particularly bad thing to be people in a field or a valley. But a lot of these names from neighbours are sometimes pretty pejorative.

Lauren: That is definitely a large theme in exonyms, especially when it’s not the group itself that got to determine how they were referred to by outsiders. It’s part of why Kagate speakers moved to calling themselves “Syuba” even though both of those names refer to their previous occupation as paper-makers, which was seen as not a very aspirational career in the social hierarchy of Nepal. They’ve taken a lot more pride in their own word for that name rather than for the Nepali word which has more immediate negative connotations for Nepali speakers. It took me a long time to make the connection between the Slavic language family and the word that we have from originally Greek and then Latin into modern languages as “slave.” These two words are actually cognate with each other.

Gretchen: Oh boy. Okay. Is there a sense of which one arouse first?

Lauren: I felt like I got conflicting and slightly-confusing-and-lost-to-history stories depending on the etymological dictionary I looked up but definitely seemed to be pretty cognate, and it says something about the social status of speakers of those languages within, definitely, the Roman Empire.

Gretchen: That’s for sure a thing. This is also really common when it comes to Indigenous languages that a lot of their names are pejoratives. I’m not necessarily sure that I wanna repeat a whole bunch of pejoratives of what the names are. People are trying to bury them. I think my go-to example that’s comparatively a relatively mild pejorative is the name “Maliseet,” which is a language spoken around Eastern Canada and North-Eastern United States, also sometimes called “Passamaquoddy.” I grew up with that just being the name for the language, but then I learned later that this actually comes from a name by the Mi’kmaq people, who are another Indigenous group that’s slightly further east in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and around there, who were encountered by Europeans slightly earlier. They were asked, “Who lives over there?”, and gave the name “Maliseet,” which means, “They speak slowly.”

Lauren: Charming.

Gretchen: Sort of makes some sense when you think of, they speak related languages, maybe if they’re talking to each other, they’re trying to come to some understanding and speak slowly to each other. But it’s not super flattering, and it’s a word that people have understandably been moving away from in more recent years.

Lauren: I mean, I only know it as “Passamaquoddy,” so it’s an indication that the exonym that’s now in use is the one that the Passamaquoddy actually prefer.

Gretchen: There’s another exonym which I, unfortunately, haven’t been able to find a good pronunciation guide of online that begins with a W and translates as meaning, “people of the bright river” or “of the shining river.” There’s still several different endonyms that this is under discussion for, but this is one case of very, very many, some of which are much more insulting.

Lauren: It gives you a sense of the history of power dynamics in general.

Gretchen: There’s an interesting case of miscommunication when it comes to the Mi’kmaq language itself because this was a case where a First Nations people and European people were encountering each other mutually for the first time in what’s now Eastern Canada. The name “Mi’kmaq” is an exonym which literally means in Mi’kmaq “my friends and family” or “my kin friends,” so it implicitly in the answer to “Who lives around here?”, well, it’s like, “My friends and family live around here.”

Lauren: Wonderfully literal.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, which, fair enough, really. The endonym is “Lnu,” “Lnu’i’sit,” “the people’s language.” But since the exonym isn’t insulting and the endonym sounds a lot like a related Indigenous language that’s spoken a little further north, “Inu,” at the moment, the exonym is still in use in English because it’s still a word in the language and has this history. Conversely, the name in Mi’kmaq for “French,” the French people and the French language, is “Wenju” or “Wenjuwi’sit,” which is “He or she speaks French,” which literally translates to something like, “Who are they?”

Lauren: That is amazing. So, these French people turned up, and they’re like, “Who are they?”

Gretchen: Basically, yeah. It’s got this sort of interestingly mutual miscommunication, whereas the Mi’kmaq word for “English” is “Agase’wit,” “He or she speaks English,” which is clearly borrowed from French, so you can see the contact via French. But when it comes to the paired miscommunication, I find it an interesting story of contact.

Lauren: I always find power dynamics are really interesting for who is centred as the default speaker or what is centred as the default language.

Gretchen: When it comes to the colonial context those languages are often named after the country they were originally spoken in. But I was at a conference a while back, and I met a linguist from Brazil and said, “Oh, you speak Portuguese,” and he said, “Well, you know, I like to call it ‘European Brazilian’.”

Lauren: That’s amazing. Especially considering there are far more Brazilian speakers of Portuguese than there are those in Europe who speak Portuguese.

Gretchen: Yeah. And it sort of raises the question of could you generalise this in other contexts.

Lauren: Do you think that maybe I should start telling people that in the UK they speak “protipodean” Australian?

Gretchen: Oh god, it’s like “antipodean” but “protipodean” Australian. You know what? I’ll buy it.

Lauren: I’m gonna start trying to get grants to document protipodean Australian so we can go back and hang out with people in the UK.

Gretchen: I look forward to seeing the Reviewer 2 comments on that application, thank you.

Lauren: Maybe at some point in the future, languages like Brazilian Portuguese will find new ways of talking about themselves or asking to be referred to. Jokes aside, language names are in flux, and they tell us a lot about history, but they’re not set in stone. We can change the way we refer to languages.

Gretchen: Right. Linguists have this responsibility, if someone’s in charge of making the types of documentation that make a language visible to bureaucratic infrastructure to be very thoughtful in talking with multiple people about how that language name is decided.

Lauren: I think we all have a responsibility to keep in mind that language names can change and can have complicated histories. The thing we can do is always respect the choices of the people who speak those languages when it comes to the names they’re given.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” stickers, and aesthetic IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Lauren: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include outtakes from our interviews with Randall Munroe, Kat Gupta, and Lucy Maddox, an episode about stylised ye-olde-time-y English, and children learning languages. Plus, on February 18th or 19th, 2023, depending on your time zone, you can join us for a patron-exclusive liveshow featuring special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod, to talk about language and gender. 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.

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

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

Lauren: Obviously.

Gretchen: Because she knows everything.

Lauren: Because she knows everything – yeah.

Gretchen: Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it, but I saw the packaging for it.” I knew that he’d gotten it. Or I could say, “No. I didn’t see it, but he left his old one in his room while he was at Quidditch practice, so I inferred that he must’ve gotten a new one.”

Lauren: Right. And in this case, your evidence is not as direct. You haven’t got absolute proof. He may have just decided his was broken and he was gonna borrow a spare one.

Gretchen: Right. Or maybe he got sick or something. Something could have definitely come up. Or I could be even less certain and say, “No. But I read it in the tea leaves,” or, “I saw it in a dream.”

Lauren: You must be very good at divination.

Gretchen: What can I say? It’s one of my many talents. Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it, but Harry gets a new broom every year – or every book – and so I’ve inferred that he must be getting a new one as well this year.”

Lauren: Right – based on kind of inferred evidence of habitual reality.

Gretchen: Yeah. Normally, he gets a new broomstick. Harry got a new broomstick again.

Lauren: All of these are different sources of evidence. You have different evidence to show that you believe this claim to be true. But you don’t necessarily say that overtly. When people gossip, they do that all the time. All the time someone will be like “Omg! This thing happened.” And you’ll be like “Oh, my god! Did you see that happen?” And then they’ll be like “Uh, no. I just heard about it.”

Gretchen: Yeah. “Did you know that this person’s been stealing all of the cookies from the cookie jar?” Like “Wait, no, did you see them?” “No, but they had crumbs on their shirt.” “Oh! Maybe that was this person.”

Lauren: Guilty.

Gretchen: Guilty as charged. I saw them sneaking out of the room with a suspicious look on their face. I like this Harry Potter example because it sets up a world where we can have this kind of gossip and we can make these kinds of inferences. But we do this all the time.

Lauren: And when we do give more evidence, when we explain how we know it, like in all of those examples, in English we just have to add an extra phrase or some extra words. But this isn’t the case for all languages. There are some languages where it’s actually part of the grammatical system. You have to choose a grammatical form that explains how you know the information in the sentence that you’re saying.

Gretchen: In the same way that, in English, we need to choose a time when something happened anytime you say something. I can’t just say, “Harry get a new broomstick,” to mean, “He got one,” or “He will get one,” or “He has one now,” “He is getting one currently.” I have to pick between which of those kinds of getting he wants to. But in some languages, while you can specify the time by using words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “recently” or “a long time ago,” you don’t have to. In English, you have to specify when something happened.

Lauren: It would be a bit like if we got a new suffix on a verb like “got.” So, it’s something like “Harry got-saw a new broomstick” or “Harry got-heard a new broomstick.” And you have to use that.

Gretchen: That could mean, “I saw that he got it” or “I heard that he got it.”

Lauren: Yeah. It’s not a particularly attractive – I feel like we could definitely find a nicer way of putting that into our grammar if we wanted to, but that’s a very crude example.

Gretchen: I feel like I’d like to make some sort of shortened version of “apparently” because I think I use “apparently” a lot for like “I’m not really confident about the source of this evidence.”

Lauren: “Harry got-apps.”

Gretchen: Yeah. Like “per” – “Harry per-got a new broomstick,” which could short for “apparently” or something.

Lauren: I like that you’re putting it as a prefix instead of a suffix.

Gretchen: I don’t think we have enough prefixes, grammatically, in English. I want some more prefixes.

Lauren: No, you’re right.

Gretchen: I don’t think that’s how grammar works, but it’s okay.

Lauren: So, it can be a prefix. It can be a suffix. It could be a completely different form of the verb. In some languages, they’re particles. But they’re part of the grammar instead of being a word that you choose. This happens across – the most inflated claim I’ve heard is that 25% of the world’s languages have some form of grammatical evidentiality.

Gretchen: Wow!

Lauren: A lot of those languages are very small language families and groups spoken in the Amazon, and in the Tibetan area, across Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans – are kind of the four big areas people talk about. But you also find quite a few languages from North America. Very occasional languages in, say, Australia also have at least one grammatical evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. I don’t think I speak any languages that have evidential markers. But the European languages don’t have to have them and those are most of the languages that I speak.

Lauren: No. They’re missing out, those European languages.

Gretchen: You’ve done some research on evidentials, right?

Lauren: That is correct. My PhD thesis was all about evidentials in a Tibetan language spoken in Nepal called Yolmo. I was interested in understanding what different types of options they had for evidentiality but also how people choose to use them strategically in conversations – so how people use them in that kind of gossipy context. Tibetan languages are interesting because, as well as all those categories we talked about in terms of the evidence for Harry’s new broomstick, there’s also an evidential form that Harry could use if he got a new broomstick.

Gretchen: “I got a new broomstick myself (I know it because it happened to me)?”

Lauren: Yeah. He wouldn’t have to use something like “I saw myself get a new broomstick.” That would be quite unusual.

Gretchen: It would be kind of weird – yeah.

Lauren: And in fact, he can use it. But if he used the form that’s the equivalent of “I saw it,” it would be kind of like an English form of “Oh, I see I have a new broomstick!” It’s new information. It’s a bit unexpected.

Gretchen: Could you do that in something like “Harry got me a new broomstick”? And so I’m directly involved in this – I can see that he got it for me?

Lauren: Yeah. Because it’s an event you participated in. In some Tibetan languages it’s really specific who you’re allowed to talk about using this form. It’s a bit more flexible in Yolmo. But it means that people have these options between something that they perceive either by sight or taste or smell or something that they know from their personal experience. There’s also a form that you can use if you’re less certain, which is less about evidence and more about just how certain you are. And one of my favourites, which is not used that often, but it’s one that’s like “information that is so obvious everybody knows it.”

Gretchen: Like “It’s daytime” or something?

Lauren: “Harry Potter is a wizard.”

Gretchen: Right. Okay. Everyone knows this. They don’t have to say, “J.K. Rowling told me that Harry Potter is a wizard.”

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the examples that I got from people are things like “sugar is sweet,” “lemons are sour.”

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: Just, like, “This is such obvious, general facts about the world.”

Gretchen: Or, “This is the town we live in.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Everyone knows we’re in this town.

Lauren: But even then, that’s not a kind of – I don’t wanna say the “universal” because that’s a dangerous word – but…

Gretchen: It’s not self-evident?

Lauren: It’s not as self-evident as something like “Tea is tasty,” which is taken as a generally given fact. They also have a little particle that you can use to say that something is reported from somewhere else. And that’s just “ló.” When it comes to telling stories, when you’ve heard stuff from people, it would just be so efficient if you could just have a little “ló” at the end when you’re telling gossip.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because then you know this is still the story and you know that you’re not taking credit for knowing it yourself directly.

Lauren: Yeah. You’re just passing on the gossip. So, those are the forms that I was looking at. I was looking at how people used them in things like reporting stories from other people but also in how you ask questions.

Gretchen: How do you use evidentials to ask questions?

Lauren: It varies across different languages. Sometimes, you just use a base form or a neutral form or a question form. But in Tibetan languages, you use the form of the evidential that you think someone is gonna answer with. So, if I was gonna ask you, “Did Harry get a new broom?” if you went to Quidditch practice a lot, I might ask you using the one for “Did you see this directly?” “Did you see Harry got a new broom?”

Gretchen: Right. Whereas, otherwise you might say, “Did you hear whether Harry got a new broom?” or “Did you hear that Harry got a new broom?” “Do you think that…?” “Can you infer that…?”

Lauren: Yeah. Or it’s that time of year where Harry always breaks his broom and someone buys him a new one, I might use the “Did Harry get a new broom as per the standard pattern of behaviour?”

Gretchen: Right. I mean, you can kind of do this if you really want to in English. You can say, “Do you suppose Harry got a new broom again?” or “Do you reckon Harry got a new broom?” But it’s not obligatory – yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. The important thing about evidentials is not that it’s impossible to do this in English, it’s just because it’s baked into the grammar –

Gretchen: Right. You have to do it.

Lauren: – it crops up all the time. The cool thing is, because you have to use the evidential that you think someone’s gonna use in their answer, you basically have to do this kind of context-reading prediction of what evidence you think they’re gonna have, or what would be the best evidence to have for asking a particular question and getting particular information.

Gretchen: You end up taking on their perspective of “What do I assume that this person likely knows?” or “How do I assume that this person gets their information?”

Lauren: Yeah. And the person doesn’t have to answer – if they don’t have that level of evidence, they’ll reply with something else. But it’s a nifty interactional trick if you think about it.

Gretchen: Do you have to use the one that’s the most certain of the pieces of evidence that you think they have?

Lauren: No, you use the one that you think is the best fit.

Gretchen: The most likely – okay.

Lauren: Yeah. Certainty is complex because for a lot of things you might think that having direct – that direct “I saw” evidence is the best. But there are some situations where it would be rude to presume that I have that direct evidence. So, for example, if someone asked me if you were hungry – they said, “Is Gretchen hungry?” – it would actually be rude for them to ask if I had direct evidence because the only direct evidence you have is your personal feeling of hunger. They would ask me using the reported-speech form or the less-direct form.

Gretchen: Like “Did Gretchen tell you she was hungry?” or “Do you infer Gretchen is probably hungry because you know it’s been five hours since she ate?”

Lauren: We have this idea that more direct evidence is good. It was interesting when we were building that list of examples, you were ordering them instinctively in a way that you saw as more-evidence, and more certain, and more direct from “I saw it” to –

Gretchen: Yeah. Whereas, you’re the one that’s done the evidential literature, and I was like “I just feel like these should go in an order.”

Lauren: That order pretty much matches up with what a lot of the literature says in terms of a hierarchy of evidence being better or higher-quality or something. But if you actually look at the interactional choices people make when they’re chatting, sometimes it’s better that you don’t use something that’s more certain or more direct because it’s rude or presumptive.

Gretchen: Yeah. Can you use this type of thing to be polite as well? If I say, “I wonder if you could possibly open the window?” it’s not that I’m actually wondering about your ability to open the window, it’s more that I’m trying to make an indirect request. Can you use evidentials like that?

Lauren: There’s definitely times where it’s more appropriate to ask questions or to state things using more-direct evidence and there are times where it’s better to state things using less-direct evidence. And in that case, politeness does come into it.

Gretchen: This seems like the kind of question that people probably ask is “Well, if you have evidentials, does that mean that people can’t lie?” But surely people could use an evidential they don’t actually have evidence for if they wanna lie, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I guess, you could potentially try and send people off track by using an inferred evidential when you actually witness something or vice versa. People can definitely use them. Just because they mark the source of evidence doesn’t mean you have to always use the one that you definitely have evidence for.

Gretchen: If I say that I saw you stealing the cookies from me, that doesn’t actually mean that I actually saw it, it just means that I’m saying that I saw it.

Lauren: Yeah. Or there’s an anecdote in my thesis where I talk about going to a wedding with a bunch of people when I was doing field work. As they were going around servicing – at a wedding you traditionally – like any wedding across the world, it’s the do you want the chicken or the fish? You feed people a lot of meat. And you feed them a lot of booze. And it’s a big party. And one of the women, who was being very silly and joking around, and whenever they came around would say, “She eats meat,” and would use the reported form to suggest that I had said that I eat meat. They’re like, “Oh, yeah. She eats meat. Oh, yeah, she drinks heaps,” which as a teetotaling vegetarian – they know I’m a teetotaling vegetarian because they find it very funny. So, putting these words in my mouth was a big, hilarious joke for them. But they didn’t honestly believe that I’d said that.

Gretchen: Right, right, right. They were using that to make fun of you, as you do.

Lauren: Yeah. The other really nifty example I have is there was a time where I agreed to something by nodding my head, which everyone understood. And then later someone was like “Oh, she said ‘Yes’” – reported speech.

Gretchen: Right. Whereas, the literal word you said wasn’t “Yes,” but…

Lauren: It’s not a verbatim, court of law, “This is exactly that you said.” It’s a general intent reporting.

Gretchen: Are there cognitive effects of having evidentials? Do people remember source of information better or something?

Lauren: I still personally haven’t seen a study that really convinces me of that. But there’s some really cute studies in children and how children acquire evidentiality. They’ve done this in Turkish and Tibetan, and the general indication is children can start using them relatively young, from like 3 or 4 years of age, but often when they’re really young, they haven’t entirely figured out what the evidentials are doing in terms of what they’re marking. They tend to use them to indicate that they’re more or less certain. Certainty is definitely tied up in things. If you saw Harry had a new broomstick, you would feel more certain about it than if there was some rubbish outside.

Gretchen: The packaging or whatever.

Lauren: The kind of – in the corridor. Because that packaging could technically belong to someone else even if no one else really rides broomsticks in that dormitory. But then, just because you have that direct evidence, it could still be wrong. Harry could be borrowing someone else’s new broomstick. The literature on evidentiality often mentions that certainty is an inferred part of using particular evidentials, but it doesn’t have to be. Children tend to latch onto this certainty idea when they first start using them and then they kind of refine what they’re doing with them.

Gretchen: That’s so cute. It reminds me of how children acquire numbers and time durations and stuff.

Lauren: Ah, yeah. We talked about that in our time episode.

Gretchen: Yeah. We talked about that children know that an hour is longer than a minute, but they don’t know that one hour is longer than two minutes because maybe that’s more.

Lauren: Two is a bigger number than one.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or three minutes might be longer than two hours because – oh, god. I dunno! They have some sense of the magnitudes, but they don’t have exact computations to get them.

Lauren: Because children see their parents and other adult users of the languages using these evidentials in situations that seem more certain because it’s right there. That’s how they start using them.

Gretchen: And children are often missing out on the type of social information that we’ve acquired to be like “Well, actually I can infer this because I have this social information about what the package looks like that this comes in,” or “I know who knows who’s talked to who,” or something like that. Children are often missing this social information sometimes.

Lauren: That’s a lot to keep in your head even as an adult.

Gretchen: How does a language start getting evidentials? Where do they tend to come from? Are they other words that get shortened, or are they words that formally meant something to do with time or something else, or where does evidentiality come from in a language?

Lauren: One of the really great things about studying evidentiality in the Tibetan languages is that Tibetan has a pretty comparable literary history to English. It’s also unsurprising, then, that it has a similarly monstrous relationship between letters and sounds as English does.

Gretchen: The older the writing system, the less logical it is. It’s just true.

Lauren: So many silent letters. And so that’s really handy because we can see in old, written Tibetan from 800, 900 years ago that there weren’t these evidential forms. There were some older forms that have acquired evidential meaning. In other languages where we have the ability to trace it because of a literary history or because related languages have a similar form without evidentials meaning, one of the very common things that happens is a word that means something like “see” or “perceive” becomes – and especially for the reporting of speech evidence, a word that meant “say” or “talk” – becomes the grammatical form.

Gretchen: Right. Okay. That makes sense.

Lauren: For example, the Yolmo form is “ló” – that is from an older form that meant “to say.” And then a new verb that means “to say” has come into the language.

Gretchen: Kind of like how we might talk about hearsay evidence, which literally comes from the words “hear” and “say” and becomes an adjective instead.

Lauren: Yeah. That’s a really great example. A lot of the time it is taking from other words. And then sometimes, for example, the form that means that you know something from your own personal experience in Tibetan languages – the personal, the ego evidential – was a neutral, just general, good-old copula, but because these other forms came in, it created this paradigm that one got pushed there and that meaning was created for it.

Gretchen: Because it was like “Well, this used to be the normal way of saying something, but then if you don’t say ‘hear’ or ‘tell’ or ‘see,’ then the neutral one becomes the really strong form’”?

Lauren: It takes on that, yeah, very specific meaning.

Gretchen: There’s regions that tend to have evidentials in the Amazon, and Tibetan languages, Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans, are these because there’s a bunch of related languages in these areas that have evidential markers or do they spread from one language to another even if they aren’t necessarily related historically?

Lauren: There’s a few things that happen. One thing is that evidentiality does seem to be one of those things that goes across language families pretty well. If your neighbours are speaking an unrelated language but you speak it because you live in a multilingual society, which as we know is the norm across the world, you might be like, “Ah, that’s a really handy thing. I’m gonna borrow that into our language.” There are some really nice examples of borrowing across languages. Sometimes, it’s a form. We know that by Middle Tibetan a lot of these evidentials were starting to come into place and so a lot of the modern Tibetan languages spoken across Tibet, and India, and Nepal kind of have evidentiality because of this historic relationship.

Gretchen: And they borrow the specific words – or they borrow the idea of it but use their words – or some combination thereof?

Lauren: Yeah. Some of them it’s an evolution from an older language that had evidentiality. For some of them it’s contact that relates to it. But also we know that languages can develop evidentiality relatively quickly. It’s something once you kind of start with that category – so we’ve seen families where it evolves multiple times in different languages in the area. One reason that’s given for this as a hypothetical is that evidentiality tends to arise in small communities where people care about keeping track of information and knowledge and ownership of knowledge.

Gretchen: Right. I guess that makes sense, especially if you’re asking someone, “Have you seen this?” or “Have you heard this?” you don’t know what to expect from that person, which requires a lot of prior context. Whereas, if you interact with a lot of strangers, you don’t necessarily have that context for everybody.

Lauren: Yeah. And you’re very concerned about not intruding on someone’s knowledge or marking out very clearly how you know things, so you don’t make assumptions about people’s knowledge and what they know and what they don’t know. Some people have hypothesised that’s why it occurs a lot in smaller languages – even though it’s 25% of the world’s languages that have evidentials, it tends to not be those bigger languages because by the time you get to being a larger language where lots of people who are strangers are interacting, they don’t care as much about knowledge state and ownership of knowledge.

Gretchen: So, if you’re English or Mandarin or Arabic or something, you’re like, “Well, there’s lots of people who speak these. They’re spoken in big metropolises. You can’t have every shopkeeper know what everyone’s interior state is when they’re coming in to buy bread,” or something?

Lauren: Yeah. I think it can kind of explain why it happens in smaller languages, but I also feel like it’s shortchanging the potential of large languages. Tibetan is not a small language. It’s spoken by millions of people. It has a long, written tradition. So, I think it’s not the whole picture.

Gretchen: And because they seem to spread from language to language, that also suggests that maybe they’re easier to adopt. My favourite theory of evidentiality – which I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’d like to believe it a lot – is that we’re developing a system of evidentiality using acronyms on the internet.

Lauren: Oh, okay! Share your theory with me.

Gretchen: I’m not committed to this theory, but I like the idea of it. And maybe someday it’ll be true. I think the example that I’m gonna use – because it’s a theory that I talked about on Tumblr five years ago and I still think it has some potential. The Tumblr-appropriate example that I had was “They’d make a terrible couple” because people talk about shipping a lot on Tumblr. I think you can say this with varying degrees of certainty or belief or emotion or knowledge or something. I don’t know if they quite qualify as evidentials because none of them mean, “I heard that…” or “I saw that…” but you can say something like “Tbh, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Imo, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Iirc, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Omg, they’d make a terrible couple.” This at least adds something – “To be honest” or “In my opinion” or “If I recall correctly” or “Oh my god.” This at least adds some sort of flavor to this. Again, this is very hypothetical theory and I’m not sure if it’s a real…

Lauren: Well, they’re definitely adding epistemics, so that’s more about the certainty stuff we were talking about. But certainty could be a gateway to evidence if we continue to use them.

Gretchen: Okay. So, we’re like the toddler version of evidentials where we’re putting certainty on?

Lauren: Potentially. This is potentially a gateway to evidence.

Gretchen: I like this.

Lauren: We just need to create a bunch of acronyms that are like “Isy” – “I saw yesterday.”

Gretchen: “Iht” – “I hear that.”

Lauren: Yeah. That’s a good one.

Gretchen: I don’t know if these are gonna catch on – “Ist” – “I see that.”

Lauren: “Itt” – “I think that.”

Gretchen: “Iit” – “I infer that”?

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, there’s “Til,” “Today I learned,” but that doesn’t commit to the source of the information.

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: Hmm. Okay. We’ve got some ways to go before internet acronyms become evidentials.

Lauren: I feel like we have a potential grammatical spot ripe for potential evidential development. I personally think we have another rich source of evidentials on the internet, which is something we all take for granted as a basic piece of architecture on the internet, but a hyperlink is, really, a lot of the time used to provide evidence for something you say – especially in journalistic use of hyperlinks.

Gretchen: Oh! I think I like this.

Lauren: If you say something like, “These two celebrities were seen out yesterday, but they’d make a terrible couple,” and it might link to something that’s an article that says why they’d make a terrible couple. That’s your evidence right there.

Gretchen: Or you can do the extra-strong version of that, which is “They’d make a terrible couple” but each of those words is linked separately to a different article.

Lauren: More evidence is stronger.

Gretchen: That’s like, I have four pieces of evidence – five pieces of evidence – one per word. Or “This company has been involved in many scandals,” and each of those words is separately linked to a scandal. And you just see that, and you don’t have to click on those, and you’re like “I know there have been a lot of scandals.”

Lauren: Or even if it’s just linked once, you feel more comfortable. I never click on hyperlinks in news stories, but I feel more assured that the journalist has evidence for things.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think I sometimes do this, especially if I’m making some sort of statement, maybe, that’s not as much of an opinion. But if I’m saying something like “Evidentials are a type of grammatical marker blah blah blah,” and I link the word “evidentials” to the Wikipedia article on evidentials, I’m like “Okay. I’ve done my due diligence. If someone wants to find out more information, they can.” You don’t just have to believe me. You can go look it up on Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s not the same because it does actually provide all that context. An evidential form just kind of lets people know what the status of the evidence is. But I think it’s interesting how we relate to them as online content.

Gretchen: That’s very interesting. You could argue that the academic citation is maybe another kind of evidential in that case because if I wanna say, “Evidentials are found in 25% of the world’s languages. Gawne (2015) says this” – I don’t know if you say it.

Lauren: Actually, you would cite “Aikhenvald 2004” but… Yes, you’re correct.

Gretchen: Okay. So, “(Aikhenvald 2004) Evidentials are found in 25% of the world’s languages,” and then even if I don’t actually go read Aikhenvald 2004, I know that this has been asserted in conjunction with that person.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s the “I have read that” evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, once you know about evidentials, I feel like you start noticing them everywhere.

Lauren: I definitely notice in English gossip. I’m always like “But how do you know that?” I’m always looking for them. Or I always notice when people do explicitly mark them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Once I started learning about them, I noticed myself saying “apparently” a lot because I wasn’t going to commit to the source of that. I noticed evidentials recently – or the English non-grammaticalised type of evidentials – in this book called The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie.

Lauren: Which is a great book. I read it on your recommendation and enjoyed it so much.

Gretchen: Excellent! The conceit of this book – this book is narrated by a tower, which is also a god. Anyway, it’s fantasy. And the thing about the magic system in this world is that if the object gods in this world say something, it has to be true because if it’s not true, then they will be automatically required to use their power to make it true.

Lauren: This is definitely a world where you don’t wanna lie with an evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. And if that’s not possible, then the god dies.

Lauren: Awks.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s not a world where you have this strict “You can’t lie,” it’s like “You can lie, but you’re in trouble if you do.” The human characters can lie, but the magical characters use speaking to create their magic. If you wanna make something true, you can just speak it true, which is kind of cool. But you also have to be very careful when you’re telling stories or something to qualify how you know something.

Lauren: Because you don’t wanna accidentally have not enough evidence and make something true.

Gretchen: Exactly. You don’t wanna accidentally say something that’s too ambitious, you know? So, this character spends a lot of time – the tower narrating the story, sometimes the tower will say, “This is a story I have been told. Here’s this blah blah blah story story.” With that frame, then they don’t have to do that much hedging.

Lauren: You know what? This is world that would be ripe for evidentials.

Gretchen: Exactly. It would be so much more economic because then they wouldn’t have to do all of this hedging in longer form, they could just add it onto the verb and there you go. Sometimes, they ask things in terms of questions rather than saying, “You found this strange?” – because they address specific other characters – “You found this strange?” or “You must’ve found this strange?”

Lauren: That’s making a lot of presumptions.

Gretchen: Because they don’t know whether the other character found it strange – yeah. Instead, they can ask it as a question, “Was it strange for you to hear this?” In the mind of reader, it’s like, “Okay. Well, it was probably strange.” But in terms of what the character’s actually asserting it shows up as, “Okay. You’re not asserting it because now it’s a question.”

Lauren: I would love to see this book translated into Tibetan.

Gretchen: Great! How do we make that happen? If you too would like to imagine what The Raven Tower might be like if the evidentials were more explicitly spelled out, I also did a live Tweet with some snippets from the book. You can follow along with that. We’ll link to that.

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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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA and esoteric symbol scarves, ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include animal communication, internet linguistics, and linguistic accommodation. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is Ancient Cities by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

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