Bonus: Livestream Q&A from LingFest23
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Aven: [00:00:00] Hi, everybody. This is a special bonus episode. We thought we would take the audio from the live stream that we did on the YouTube channel and put it up as a bonus. We won't, it seems, manage an episode of the normal podcast for February. Which is, things happened that derailed us a bit. So we wanted to give you this instead.
One thing, however, the audio isn't amazing. Uh, we didn't use the same microphone and. It's not great. So apologies for that. It's completely understandable. That just doesn't sound great. So. This is questions and answers. The questions we were asked by. People watching the live stream, uh, people who had said stuff in ahead of time.
And I think it's interesting information and I hope you find it enjoyable. But we will be back with a new episode in March. I promise. And in [00:01:00] the meantime, thanks for listening.
Aven: There we go. And I believe we are live
Hello everyone. I apologize right away for the quality of my voice cause I have a cold and I feel like my head is a block of stuff that is gooey. I won't say the word cause. It's an icky word.
Mark: Yeah, we've both been fighting off a cold over the past week. And have also been talking all week due to the LingComm conference.
Mm-hmm. . So our voices are
Aven: a little strained, a little rough, but welcome to the Alliterative/Endless Knot LingFest Q&A Live stream. Is that everything? ? Yeah. Say hi in the chat if you're here and you wanna say hi we'll probably give it a moment for people to in before we get really started. And I'm going to drink my ginger and lemon tea
I know I promised cocktails, but I'm not up for cocktails right now.
Mark: I have a Tom [00:02:00] Collins, so it's cocktail, but you know, it's a tall drink. It's largely just
Aven: soda water, so might be possibly, cause it's only 1:00 PM here, so it's a bit early for the cocktail.
Mark: soda and lemon juice. So, it's probably good for my, lots of vitamin C
Aven: exactly.
Mark: And some Old Tom Gin,
Aven: of course.
So what we're gonna be doing, we have some questions that people asked us already, and we're going to start off by answering some of those. But if you have other questions that you wanna ask, pop them in the chat.
If you just wanna say hi. If you have any follow ups to whatever we discuss. This is just it's an opportunity to chat about and nerd, about out, about anything that we have any expertise on and some things that we don't have much expertise about.
So we had a good suggestion for starting off, which was from rayyankhan, maybe, 343 on YouTube. Anyway a question which said we should start by introducing ourselves and talking about the [00:03:00] origins of our names, which is a good idea. So we'll start with that. So, Mark, do you wanna tell, say your name and explain where it's from?
Mark: Well, my first name is a well-known etymology. So Mark from the the Roman name Marcus which, you know, common wisdom holds that it is connected to the God Mars. And that seems like probably true. But the complication comes in you know, in terms of where the God name Mars comes from.
So we think of Mars as the. The God of war, the Roman God of war, who became sort of associated with the Greek Ares, but originally Mars was not a God of war. It seems. He may have been originally a God of thunder. In any case, the the name seems to come from pre Roman, from some pre Roman God.
It could be an an Etruscan God. So of course, the Etruscans were you know a powerhouse on [00:04:00] the on the, in the region of Italy before the, the rise of Roman power.
Aven: Roman influence. And whenever there's a word in Latin that we don't know the origins. Or a word or anything to do with religion.
Immediately they say, oh, it's probably Etruscan. It's a good get outta jail free card. Cuz we don't actually know Etruscan, we haven't, we only know a few words of it and we don't know much about it's, so, it's an, oh, it's probably Etruscan. Yeah.
Mark: So there, there was a Roman an Etruscan God Mars. So it could be from that God.
As I said originally Mars himself seems to come from in Indo-European God of thunder. So from the same God that also produced Thor the, the the Norse God, Thor. And so things got kind of shifted around in terms of the associations and so forth. Another possibility is that Mars, the name comes from the stem * [00:05:00] ma-vor-, again, we don't really know where it comes from but there is an earlier form Mavoars related to the Oscan.
Oscan is another Italic language related to, to Latin. So Oskin MAs, so I mean, we can sort of piece together what the name sort of sounded like what it might have been before, but it's all very uncertain. Yeah. And
Aven: it's important to say also that Mars, the God. Might have been a god of thunder, but also seems to have been a God of agriculture, or at least most of his early rights at Rome are actually to do with agricultural and spring planting.
And that's why March, March is the God Mars' month, which is a spring month. It also then becomes a, the thinking goes though it's not, none of this is, none of this is more than speculation, frankly. But the thinking goes that because March was also the, in which the campaigning season began. That's when, because in the ancient world or in certainly [00:06:00] early Rome fighting was a cyclical thing.
You did it that you went in the spring, you fought over the summer, and you came back in time for harvest. And so it's because it was the beginning of the spring campaign season. Over time, March became associated with the beginning of going out to war. And so Mars, as the God of that time, became associated with war.
And that that's, but all of this happens before we have written records, so. It's hard to tell, but there's traces definitely of him as an agricultural, infertility God in Roman ritual. So that doesn't seem to be like,
Mark: so the next part then is my last name. So Sundaram, it's an Indian name. And it comes from the word sun or sunam.
So which means glad, joyous, delightful. And that d gets added in. It has nothing to do with the etymology. So Sunar becomes sundar. It's just a, an intrusive letter. as, as linguists term, these things, it seems, makes sound very
Aven: rude, but [00:07:00] it's just, it's for ease of speech, right? Like, cause it's easier to say and it makes us clearer.
The syllables clear.
Mark: So this is. From Hindi, from from Sanskrit. This is an indoeuropean route. And so that soon part, the first part of that word comes from Essu which is which means good. And it is actually an extension of an even simpler, more basic Indo-European group S, which is the ver to B.
So I mean, that's where we get the word is from. So to be and then to be good is the sort of progression of that. The second part of that word, nara comes from the in, well, it means man and it comes from the pro into European meaning man, and its most ba basic sense. It probably had something like vigorous, vital, strong, the kind of qualities associated with masculinity.
And from that route that's related to, for instance, the, and all those andro words.
Aven: Androgyny. [00:08:00] Androgyny. Well, that's a weird one to suppose. Androcentric. Yeah, actually, actually that's a good place to pause because there was a question, or Swedish and Polymath, who turns out his name, Marcus brought up, you asked about, you mentioned Alexander, and that's a good place to stick that in because that and air on Alexander, is that word?
Andras and Air Andras. So in Greek, so it's, Alexander is from Greek and, and. The word for man that comes from this route in Greek is an air in the nominative and the stem is, and Andra. So in the all the other cases, it's Andra, so an air Andros. And that in Alexander, the Alex is warding off for protecting.
So Alexandros is the water of the protector of man either a man who protects or someone who protects men. So it can work either way. And so you get, it is a very common wor name in Greek. So Paris, for instance, in the Trojan War, his other name, [00:09:00] in fact, the name by which he's called most often in the Iliad is Alexandra.
Because he's the man who, you know, protects the city. Obviously he, it's in that case, it's basically an ironic name as many names in myth are because he is the one who brings the downfall of the city. He's the destroyer of the city. His birth is by a dream that his mother has, that she gives birth to a torch that burns down the city.
So him being called Alexandra could be called sort of an effort to, to ward off what, what his birth, the omen of his birth. So anyway, so Alexander, but we know Alexander, and the reason becomes such a hugely widespread name in the modern world is of course Alexander the Great who was notable as really the opposite of a protector of men.
He was a destroyer of many, many men, but I suppose he may have decided that he was protecting some of them. Anyway, so that's connected to, there's the, and there, there is same route as in Una. Mm-hmm. Nara.
Mark: [00:10:00] So sue an Nair or sun means literally, you know, good man, right?
Aven: So your war, like, good man,
I say nothing. I, hi everyone. Alright, so that's Mark's name and my name, Aven McMaster. I'm less visible on the, on the oh, my head is so full of the video side of things. It's the video side of things. Thank you. It is a bad moment. Though if you listen to the podcast, you're used to me and my name is a little bit odd in that my first name, AEN is not typically a name.
There are more people now with the first name Aen. It's starting to grow, but I mean, it's extremely rare. So I'll tell you the origin of where it comes from as a name for me, and then a bit about what the, in as much as there is a source for the name. I'm named after the mountain avens, which is a flower that grows in the Rockies elsewhere as well.
But in the Rockies, my parents used to go hiking there and they [00:11:00] liked the flower and my mom had a dream about them anyway, and my parents were hippies in the seventies, so they named me after a flower. And so that my name IAven without the s on the end. So that's what I'm named after. That flower is, the Latin name is the Dryas OctaPetela.
So it's from the Dryad Family, dryas Family, which is named after the from Greek Myths and the octopetala, that just means it has eight petals. Excuse me, as I said, vaguely the name. As it's hard to say because the name of a flower is not etymologies as much as some others, but it's just a common name.
But it probably comes from the Celtic root ab, which means water or river. So it's probably cognate, unsurprisingly to the word Avon, like the river. In Stratford upon Avon. And there's some other Celtic, there's a fair number of Celtic water words that have that ab or ab [00:12:00] prefix. There's also a word in French Aven, which is a cave formed, the kind of pothole cave that's formed by water seeping down and causing, sort of undercutting the, the ground so that you get these sort of direct the kinds of caves that you would drop into rather than climb into.
And that's an avan and it seems to be associated with that Celtic word. So that's as close as I can get to an origin for that name. But my last name, McMaster, is pretty straightforward. Mick is the patron prefix, Mick or Mac. Those are just two spellings of the same one. They come from the Celtic they come from the Celtic word ma or the root macco, which is son.
So it's just very literally son. And as a son of the father that word you see in, in Welsh map so you an app. So you'll find in Welsh names you'll find app or map as a, a prefix or as a separable prefix that's used to, to the same thing. And [00:13:00] it performs the same. It has the same function as the O in like O'Leary or something like that where it's is of just from, which again, is a patron and there's patronymics.
You get this kind of thing in, in What is it? What's the Russian petrona vitch, the, the suffix bitch, like Petrovich is just son of Peter. So that is a name that, a name formation, a last name formation that comes from the period when people were still just saying so-and-so son of so-and-so. And then it at some point becomes fixed as a name and master.
So it means son of the master and master in that context almost certainly means teacher master comes from the Latin Magister, which is the same word that gives us magistrates. So in general it just means bigger one, one with more power because it's from the adjective from Magus, which is the adjective or Adver Moore, the comparative form of, of well, of, we get Mauss and Maxima so that the [00:14:00] comparative and the, and the superlative, and they come from the root, the proto endo, European root meg, which just means great.
So Magus means bigger or greater and the or more. And Maggie Stair is one with more power. One who's in front, one who's the leader. We get magistrate from it. But it also was the term that was used to mean a teacher, especially in the Middle Ages. So it becomes the sort of standard term for teacher. So what gives us the master's degree, you know, become a master of something, or school master, a school master, all of those.
The form master is somewhat influenced by macer or what becomes the French Me, which is the same word that comes from the same root, but developed slightly differently in pronunciation. And so it then influenced the English, what was the word to, to help the G dropout and have it become master. So McMaster means son of the teacher.
And then, so at some point in the past, some family member was a teacher and then somebody else got that name. But it as you, [00:15:00] I'm sure. No, McMaster is a very common name and it's all over the place. Ironically, I am the child of a teacher. My father was a teacher college teacher, and also ironically, also McMaster is definitely a Scottish name, but, and my father is Scottish, was born in Scotland, but his father was born in Plymouth and was English.
So the McMaster comes from the English side of the family. While my grandmother's name is an extremely common English name, even though she was Scottish and born in Scotland. So, you know, the everyone's like, oh, McMaster, that must be because you're Scottish. I'm like, yes, but also no, because that's not where that name came from, but that's okay.
So anyway, so that's mine. I'm. Watery child of the teacher, I guess. a watery flower child of the teacher. Oh, thank you Topher . I very much appreciate that. That is extremely kind. Mark, do you wanna answer the first question? Topher has opinions this question while I [00:16:00] make a note of Robert's question to come back to.
Mark: Right? Okay. So Tora says enjoy the 12 days of Christmas videos. How does your production process differ from your short form versus long form content? So the I mean, so there's the, the very technical side of the way we, we film it, the short form content is all directly to camera. Whereas the long form content, we, we always have a little introduction directly to camera.
But in terms of how it's produced I record just an audio only voiceover for the majority of the video and then animate to, to produce the visuals. Whereas the the short form, since it's done directly to camera, we've experimented with a few different ways of how to get that.
But we what we've settled on is kind of the same way that we record the little intros to you know, to the longer videos. So it's done to camera with an iPad serving as a teleprompter.
Aven: And I think the other piece is that they're both scripted, obviously, [00:17:00] and we've been written before.
The short ones come, we're drawing them from the etymologies that Mark has been doing as tweets for a few years now. So we've been drawing them, so they're already written. They're and mean. Then we just put them, you know, edit them so that they're gonna come in under a minute. Because right now that's the, the like limitation on a short and then just, you know, do them straight.
They are just etymologies as you know, with very occasionally an extra fact. Those are very easy comparatively to produce. Right. Mark just has to, they, they come about originally because you come up mm-hmm. mostly. You just think of one. Either you see an interesting pair or you think of one word and then find some interesting related word that is surprising and, and write it from there.
So we've got a whole backlog of those. The reason we started doing them is because they're very quick to do so. Like we can. They're already written. We edited them briefly. We recorded a batch, and then I do them on my phone and put in the, the words, the, the actual visuals in them. I know it's extremely bare bones and not [00:18:00] very cool, but then I'm not very cool and not very good at it, so good.
The contrast to that is the long videos, which take a lot of work as evidenced by the fact we did not manage a long video last year, , which is a first not something we're particularly proud of. We
Mark: got some in between length
Aven: ones. Yeah, we got some short ones, but none of the big ones because those ones take a huge amount of research and then writing and then rewriting and editing, and then finding all the images and then animating, animating them.
Well putting, putting it into, to the. Sort of one document that has, or the one thing, that image that has all of those images in putting in all the writing, animating that, doing the voiceover, cutting the voiceover to editing it to, to the appropriate, so all the mistakes out. Then matching those editing, audit, editing the videos so that it matches to the audio and then putting that out.
And that is a huge [00:19:00] thing. And due to life, essentially, we just haven't, you haven't really got past the research. You just into the writing finally on the thing you've been working on
Mark: for Yeah, about a third of the way into this,
Aven: to a script. Yeah. So there is a script that he's been working on since last.
Christmas. Mm-hmm. . And that we're, you could, you can say what it's, I think we, yeah,
Mark: it's another in the series of cocktail at moment. Yeah.
Aven: So it's gonna be another cocktail, but it just takes a long time to do the research and these days Mark finds so much interesting research that then the more interesting research he finds, the longer the script, the longer the script, the longer all the other pieces of the process are.
And so we started doing the shorts, partly because YouTube is really pushing shorts, but also because it felt really bad not to be putting out material. But there was really, they don't really delay the production of the longer one because Mike doesn't have to write a research or write anything new.
It just takes half an hour to do a batch of filming. And then I do the production on it, and I can't [00:20:00] do anything to help him with the other video until he gets further with it anyway. So it doesn't we're not, it's not that we are doing the shorts now, and that's why we're not doing the longer one.
Because we haven't got along when we're doing the shorts. is the way it's working. Oh. And
Mark: specifically for the 12 days of Christmas shorts tho those came, they're, they're sort of excerpted and modified from a long, a longer video that we did ages in the ages and ages ago. So that's, that's where those specifically come from.
Yeah.
Aven: Yeah. And we may do some other themed ones like that around other events or something if they come up. Next time the Olympics are, we have a whole bunch of Olympics ones, for instance. Yes. But there's no Olympics right now, so we can't do this. So thank you very much for your contribution and y our question Robert.
I don't know the answer to that question. I dutifully just wrote it down, but I don't actually know. . Oh, what, the Asian are Asian names, like European names and having professional titles in them?
Mark: I don't, I can speak a little bit [00:21:00] about South Asian traditions. I don't think, I don't know how much of a role professional names play into it, but it is a patron.
So your last name, which is actually your first name. The family name. The family name. The family name is derived from your father's name. Right. And so with every generation that family name changes it's of course now been interrupted in my case. So my last name is indeed from my father's given name.
But I have now passed down my last name to my children as their last
Aven: name. So, yeah. And your father, your father really was the one who started that by, by taking Isa Westernizing, his name. Yeah. When he immigrated to, in England, actually. Mm-hmm. . And taking the name that came. Second. Second in the way that it was written in his own culture language and saying, okay, well we'll just call that my second name, my last name, and then sort of the nickname or the name of his became his first name.
Mm-hmm. . [00:22:00] And that was the name he, we knew him by, but his family still all called him by what we call his last name. Yeah. And that was his first name. It was confusing, but now it's just been fossilized as last name. Yeah. Yeah. So that won't, won't happen anymore, but, so, and I, yeah. I don't know about professional names in other, in other cultures, unfortunately, no.
I don't know how, how that works. If anyone in the comments does, I'd be interested to know.
Oh, goodness. Again, apologies for the voices and the hearty amount of cold that is coming through . Fortunately, you can't catch through. We are all still socially distanced. And it's not covid tested multiple times. It's just a cold that the entire family has had. Alright, well as I said, if you have any other questions, please do keep putting them in the chat.
But we will go back to one of the other questions that was asked. This one comes from a Paton subscriber, Daniel Dar Dariel. Sorry, of course I knew that. I just can't [00:23:00] see that far away. And this is a multi-part question that I might not, I don't know, do you wanna read out the whole question or do you wanna just answer it and explain it?
It's a question about how the early old English and Scandinavian languages interacted and how that affected English as simplification of grammar in particular with reference to gender or radical gender. Correct. So do you wanna, so,
Mark: Well he starts off starts off with you know, kind of reviewing the sort of common common wisdom in terms of how grammatical gender disappeared from English.
Basically because the old English and old Norse are both Germanic languages, so they're fairly similar. They've got the same basic vocabulary in terms of the roots of the words but the endings are all different. So they found because of heavy Scandinavian settlement particularly in the north of England there was a lot of intermixing of populations, intermarriage and so forth.
And so they found it was easier to communicate if. [00:24:00] Stop paying attention to the endings and just use the roots of the words to communicate. Cause those were pretty similar. And therefore the endings kind of disappeared from the language cuz no one was using 'em anymore. And as a result of that, since there were no endings left there was nothing to clearly indicate grammatical gender.
And so once you have nothing indicating it, you kind of forget it. . And that's, that is exactly, you know, how it happened. You know, it was old English was already, you know, gradually losing those inflections, those endings anyways. But the the arrival of Norse on the scene really accelerated that process.
And, you know, that did lead to the disappearance of Gram gender. So That's absolutely true.
Aven: Dariel goes on to ask about Did how much old English and old Norse differed in what gender various words were? Well, like did they have different genders for the same word? Is that one of the reasons it was conflict or were they the same gender but different endings?
Yeah, so it, it's,
Mark: it's the second. So [00:25:00] they genuinely agreed in gender because those words are coming from the same proto Germanic stock of vocabulary. And so unless there was something, some reason for the gender of a word to flip or something as it you know, developed over time you know, they, they're, they, they're gonna be the same gender.
Most of the time, I'm not gonna say that. There were no differences. There probably were a few differences that creed in here and there. But you know, for the most part they had the, you know, the same word had the same gender in the two languages. But what was really different is what the endings looked like.
And so just to kind of demonstrate this I'm gonna tell you the forms of an old English and old Norse word, or the two sort of cognate words, the, the word stone which in old English was and in Old Norse was stain. Now in old English, there's no ending. It's, it's just s t a n in old Norse.
In the, and this is the nominative singular form, as it were. It's s t i n and then another N [00:26:00] is the. Now they sound pretty similar. So that wouldn't have caused too much difficulty. Then in the accusative, singular, they would've both been the same. No ending. So just, or stain single. And there the also looks pretty st similar.
So in English it's with an EF ending, whereas in Old Norse it stains with an S ending. So pretty similar. Then it gets a little more different in what's called the date of singular form. So in old English it's with an E and in old Norse it's stainy with an i radically different, but it is a different ending.
Then it gets even more different when you get to the plurals. So in Old English, the nominative and accusative plurals and in as donas for both the Nominat and the accusative. Plural. And indeed that's where our modern English plural s comes from comes from this ass ending. The a kinda just disappeared and we've just left with the s in [00:27:00] modern English.
Now in Old Norse. The Nominat plural is Stan ar so that's quite a bit different. And then in in Old Norse, the accusative plural has a different ending. So you'll, you know, as I said, it's as for both the nominate and accusative plural in old English, in Old Norse, the no plural and the accusative plural are, are different.
So whereas it's Steinar and the Nominat, it's Stein in the, in the, sorry, the accusative quote.
Aven: Is everyone keeping up with this? Yeah. Without having it written out in front of you. Like I've got it written out and I still can't follow it, but. Obviously the important point here is that there are differences.
Yes. No quizzes. We don't have a quiz at the end.
Mark: well, and then the rest of the plurals, they actually are the same. The ending is a for both. And Steven in. Right. So I mean the, and this is one of the ones where they're relatively similar. But you'll see that there's some key differences that could lead to confusion, [00:28:00] especially when you get an ending. That means, that looks identical, but means a different thing in the other language. That can cause a lot of confusion.
And it's almost worse having the endings similar, but not the same. You know, anyone who has you know, been trying to learn a second language can probably attest to that. You know, the, the problems when you have. Two things in, in, in your two languages that are similar but not quite the same, and you get them confused all the time.
So, and, and, and that's just one example of one paradigm across all the different grammatical forms, all kinds of, you know, little differences and, and, and things here and there. So, you know, it, it led to you know, confusion and so hence the, the dropping of those endings and the loss of grammatical gender.
And once you dropped the endings, you know, there isn't an easy way to tell gender unless you include an another word that agrees with the noun. So originally you would have the definite article or you would
Aven: have an article of an article
Mark: of some sort [00:29:00] that would have endings that could tell.
You know what form of the noun you're dealing with though in in old English originally you didn't have to include an article. It was optional. And in fact, what becomes modern english's definite article, the originally meant it had a little more force than that. It meant really is that and so you don't go around saying that stone all the time, right?
You, you, you know, unless you're trying to call attention to it, you just say the stone. Stan so, you know, it wasn't required early on in old English. It gradually becomes required as old English becomes early middle English, and it becomes more like our, our definite article. But by that point, the definite article forms were becoming less and less distinct and tilt the point where now you use the for everything, right?
Yeah. You use just the one form and it doesn't tell you anything. So you can't rely on that for
Aven: help. And once you start to substantially not have indicators of what gender things are, then you aren't, you know, your next generation isn't learning them [00:30:00] as gendered noun. Mm-hmm. . And once you aren't learning them as gendered nouns, they no longer have gender.
Cause it only has gender as long as there's a need to, as long as there's a requirement in the language to indicate that gender. So that's gone. It's gone.
Mark: And just as a little footnote to that, you use the example milk, those happen to both be feminine. I check. Just to, to see. So yeah. Old English milk and old so they're both feminine forms in, in the languages.
Aven: And then another question was, did old English and old have two gram radical genders or three like modern German does today?
Mark: So the support Germanic had three masculine, feminine and neuter. English, you know? And so those three you know, survived into old English and eventually by modern English grammatical is, gender is lost completely in Swedish and Danish.
So old Morris had the three at all three like modern German. But in Sweden and Danish, the masculine and feminine genders merged into what's called the [00:31:00] common gender. So that's the gender for human beings for living. It's sort of inanimate in the sense. So masculine, feminine merged into common gender, but they kept the neuter.
And so Swedish and Danish have two genders. And modern Icelandic preserves the three masculine, feminine, and neu.
Aven: And then did the influence of French on English in middle English, did that affect genders? Yeah, yeah. Middle English have diploma gender.
Mark: Yeah. So that certainly was you know, helpful that it was already on the way out.
By the time French started to have an influence with that, that system of radical gender was already beginning to break down. And so, yeah, that made it, that made it easy for the French words just to come in and you don't have to think about grammatic gender cause they weren't really paying that close attention to it anymore
Aven: anyways.
And by that point, English and French do differ on the gender of most nouns. They do. Oh, not both, but many, many. Like, there's no, [00:32:00] there's no particular pattern to which ones. Like there is no, there's, there's no real common reason that they would have the same gender, so they do or don't in a kind of random way.
So that would've just tasted that like sun
Mark: and moon in, in in French is masculine. LA is feminine. But it's the reverse in old English. Mm-hmm. in old English, sun is feminine and moon is
Aven: masculine. Yeah. So, so that would've happened. And so they basically, I mean, there were genders in early middle English, but not by late middle English, basically.
Like, that was, that was the end of it. Yeah. Yeah. So they, so those
Mark: three genders just survive into middle English, into early middle English. You can still see you know, texts, preserving that. But there are, at that point, there's very few places where you know, it's really distinctly shown. And so it disappears pretty quickly after that.
So by the time you get any significant amount of middle English being written, it sort of reemerges as a [00:33:00] literary language in, you know, the 14th century. By then, you know, the grammatical gender is is gone. So
Aven: we've got little except of course, in pronouns. Except in
Mark: pronouns. Yeah. Yeah. But for now and well, it, it essentially.
I shouldn't say it, it, what happens is grammatical gender gives way to natural gender's. Really what happens
Aven: there, right? Cause we still have actor, actress, and, you know, things like that. The nouns. Nouns can be gendered by changing their endings. Director direct tricks. I mean, we, we, not that that's a very common one, but there are these different ways.
But only when there's, we only do that now when we're matching up the natural gender of the person described as opposed to grammatical gender, which doesn't, which obviously, since it applies to inanimate things, is not about gender. Delia actually, sorry. Excuse me. Sorry. I wanted to just say to Tora has opinions just for the record, we prepare the long, I mean the short stuff is fine too.[00:34:00]
We are not in any way stopping doing the longer form stuff. We do wanna do more of it. We would like to get this one done and then like get another one done this year. You know, we we enjoy it as well. That is the core of what we wanna be doing. The other place, of course, if you're interested, podcast, if you don't already listen to our podcast, not that it's the same, but it is long , so we want long form stuff.
It's an hour to an hour and a half usually.
Mark: But no, there definitely will be some more longer videos coming on this year. So one, hopefully fairly soon, as I say I'm, well, well on the way to writing that script. So,
Aven: Then there's another question. Do you have an opinion on if English had developed differently, if the enormous hadn't won in 10 66 and maybe, I guess, what it might have done?
That's a bit of a big what if, but
Mark: yeah, I mean, yeah, it, it's hard to say. I don't think would've made enormous amount of. Historical difference. It would obviously be a huge linguistic difference. So the language would've, you know, been more like the [00:35:00] other Germanic languages. It would've been, you know, fairly close to languages like
Aven: Dutch.
Dutch, Dutch, Dutch and Friesian writer, the mm-hmm. , the closest ones on the continent. Yeah. I mean, the huge amount of vocabulary that came from French is the biggest thing. Mm-hmm. that would've been different. It was already losing its gender. It was already becoming all about syntax rather than mm-hmm.
word ending. So that probably, I mean, it might have been, it was accelerated, but it would've I'm sure gone that direction anyway. But what would've been mainly different. So syntax wouldn't have changed all that much? No,
Mark: no. It, yeah. I mean, what the changes that were happening in the syntax were already happening.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah. And the contact with Latin and other, those, you know, at those other languages would've continued to sort of have that. Effect that kind of, you know, people would've still tried to write like Cicero sometimes in English, and that would've affected the way we use clauses. And, and that kind of, you know the the amount of embedded clauses and relative clauses and dependent clauses in general that English uses now is a [00:36:00] lot more than they did in the past.
But I think that comes more out of classical attempts to write like classical writers Yeah. Than it does outta French. Yeah. Specifically. And in French, it also comes out of trying to be like classical writers. So I think that probably still would've happened. Mm-hmm. . But the vocabulary, obviously we would still have picked up Latinate world, so, and we would continue to do so, but not in anything like the rate.
Right. Like many, many synonyms we have for things where we have a French version and an English version, we wouldn't have that French version. So yeah, it would be the vocabulary. Yeah. Ivan points out that it's not just humans, of course, that we still gender, but animals where it's relevant like lion and lions or Yeah.
Mare and stallion or whatever. That one's not of course ending, that's a simple different word. But yeah, we, but it's still natural gender in the sense that if we feel like there's actually a meaningful difference in the gender of the, of, and that that matters, we'll use an ending to, to, to note that.
Or at [00:37:00] least did. We don't have stone and stone, right? Cause we don't care that the stone is feminine or masculine. We do not think of stones as feminine or masculine. So, yeah. Northern Chi maybe someone like, like modern Scott. Yeah, that's, that's
Mark: a good, good comparison actually, because modern Scotts is not derived from English.
Modern Scotts comes from old English, and it, it, you know, divided off
Aven: very early. Now it still has a lot of French influence. It does still have French influence, but that's because of specific historic connections, not, not. Conquest, but strong historic connections between Scotland and France. Due to complicated un-English sentiment, mostly
That's why like Mary Queen of Scotts and the French were very connected and things like that. But Scott does preserve not nearly as much as English does. Yeah, yeah.
Mark: But Scott does preserve a bunch of old English vocabulary. Mm-hmm. that has disappeared from English. Right. So yeah, looking at modern Scotts is, is probably a really good place to, to see, get a bit of a glimpse at what it might be like.
A
Aven: bit. And just to be clear, I know you know that, [00:38:00] but Scott's not Gaelic, which is separate. It's a Celtic language. So modern Scott's is also not just Scott's dialect of English, which there is also a Scottish dialect of English. Yeah. There's Scottish English, there's Scott
Mark: and there's Gaelic. Yeah.
Aven: Those are three separate things.
So it's a little complicated. Are there books and language that you would suggest to read? This actually matches up with another question. We, we, we had asked about what, what resources? Well, I'm just trying to find the person who actually asked it. Yeah. Jacob Karsky asked If we could share some of the tools that we found useful and trustworthy when, when we're asking about, like, is this word related to that word, for instance?
So
Mark: in terms of reference reference sources you know, the big one is of course the Oxford English Dictionary. So it's available online by subscription. Yeah. Okay. Have to pay or many public libraries have access to it. Most university libraries have access to it. Most , not ours. It does still, I, [00:39:00] and won
that
Aven: one, but they almost
Mark: did.
So, you know, you can access that. That's, that's the sort of prime one to look at. Another online one is the American Heritage Dictionary. So the the link for that is ah dictionary.com. And it's particularly useful because it has an appendix with the pro into European groups in it. And so if you really wanna, you know, dig deep in, in etymology, that's a, you know, a, a useful thing.
And there is. Book version of that, that appendix this is in fact expanded from that American Heritage dictionary appendix. So there's more in here than is on the, than is in the online version or the version that you get in a American Heritage
Aven: Dictionary. That's the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots Groups.
Mark: Watkins, very
Aven: basic tale.
Mark: So for, for English, [00:40:00] etymology for English you know, for the pro European roots for English words. Anyways, this is you know, kind of the best place to turn. There are of course more complete dictionaries for Indo-European. But they're you know, they're big and very technical.
Mm-hmm. And well, the standard one is written in German. So corny. Is the
Aven: Sta still corny? Pick Corny Is that one? Two things. One, I think the original question was also partly about like when learning multiple languages. Hmm. If you wanna say like, is this Spanish word related to that French word?
Do you have a good way of doing that kind of work? Especially I guess within European languages? Cause that's, you know, we know much more about European languages than non European languages.
Mark: This is one that I picked up that does a good job of that. So it's Indo-European Cognate Dictionary by Fiona McPherson.
And so what it has is it's got indexes of. Whole bunch of different languages in the Indoeuropean family. And so you can look up, you know, whatever word you [00:41:00] want in, in one language, and then it will refer you to what the indoeuropean root is. And then when you look up the indoeuropean root, it then gives you grouped by language, all the words coming from that route.
Oh, that's really cool. So that does exactly what you're asking for. So it's a really, it's a good one for. Cross,
Aven: cross, cross language. Yeah. For no European language. European we don't have a lot of suggestions for your, you know, is Hungarian this related to finish that, that one you're on your own for.
Sorry. . Then, but I think Robert I don't know what, what specifically you're looking for those reference works in terms of books on language. There's been a bunch coming out recently that you might wanna find, like friends and things. Well,
Mark: one in particular we interviewed the author recently on the podcast.
Paul Anthony Jones put out a book that covers like all the kind of basic questions that you might have about linguistics and language. And it's called What, why
Aven: is this a question? Question? Why is this a question? And it's the [00:42:00] question is read English you never thought to ask sort of idea.
And Paul Anthony Jones is the guy who does haggard Hawks on Twitter and elsewhere if you, if you know him and So that's a fun, it's a fun, it's, it goes into enough depth that if you do already know some basic stuff, you're still gonna learn things. We learned things from it, but at the same time, it's written very much for a non-specialist.
So if you are just interested in language, but don't know that much about, you know, terminology and things it's really good. So that definitely
Mark: recommend. Yeah, I would recommend that if, if you want a general, you know mm-hmm. Book about language and, and you know, not specifically focusing on one particular area, if you want something general about language, that's an excellent starting
Aven: place.
So, yeah. I mean, there's lots of other just books about language that are great. David Crystal has good books. Yeah. Anything by
Mark: David Crystal.
Aven: There's a book that we, i, I was recently re reminded of that's about very specifically about inter language. Because Internet by Gretchen McCullough is a favorite of ours.
It's about sort of, What the internet has and hasn't [00:43:00] done to the English language and how communication on the internet is different than it's in other aura. There's work works by, I'm just trying to think of people we've talked to recently about language. Well, grace Tierney has some books.
Grace Tierney on Etymology. She has the books, words, the Viking Gave, Vikings gave us words, the C gave us, she's working on more. So those are some good books. I don't know some of the other sort of more textbooky ones. If you wanna, well, if you're,
Mark: If you want a book specifically about etymology there's a book by Anato Lieberman called
Aven: called
Mark: Word Origins and how we Know them, I think. Okay. The title. And so it sort of explains, well, how, how do people do etymology. So it's it's kinda fun. Mm-hmm.
Aven: and there's a recommendation in the chat
Mark: Erica's book. Yeah.
Aven: Highly irregular. Mm-hmm. . We're also just about to do an interview with a book that's going to be coming out soon with, [00:44:00] no, we're gonna do the interview with the author.
The book is about to come out soon in April. A book called like, literally Dude, which is with a socio linguist about the kinds of things people live to, what we could, what we can learn, or the, I think the subtitles something like the Good that can Come from Bad English or something like that. And it's about the sorts of things that tend to be stigmatized as bad English and what they.
What they, why they exist and what they, where they come from. I haven't actually read past the introduction yet cause we're interviewing her on Thursday and I haven't had, I just got the PDFs yesterday, so I can't tell you much more than that. But it looks good so far. And so keep your, you know, stay tuned.
That will come, the book will come out at the end of April, but our interview will come out in May. So if you're interested in that. Some more questions in the chat. One, it's more technical. What about the word child, where it came from? So Scott says Baron, which is the Germanic word, where does, or a
Mark: Germanic word child is
Aven: also Germanic.
So is it related to kin in like kind Bear? [00:45:00] I don't know about that,
Mark: but top of my head
Aven: I'm not. Okay. He'll look that up while I see what else there is in the chat. Unicorn, Danny. Yeah. As Ivan says, Latin had three genders. And that's why basically all the romance languages have some variety of genders.
They've mostly simplified down to two, but not all of them. And that's the basic thing. You know, everything was, every single noun had to have a gender. There are a few common gender nouns and a few exceptions that work in strange ways, but every noun had a gender. Gender simply meant what kind of ending it took.
What kind of system of ending? So, Germanic languages also had that proto window. European had at least three genders. The comp Yeah. Discussion about what the genders were. And so that's what you get. And some languages drop them and some of them don't. Yes. S I agree entirely. It's a, it's a, it's a.
Like it's a charming, sounds a [00:46:00] little, I'm not sure if charming sounds like the biggest compliment, but I do mean it that way. Like it's a, it's a well-written, interesting, amusing book. So, and it's an easy read. Mm-hmm. . So, yeah.
Mark: So interestingly child, we don't know where it comes from. It's, it's an old English, but we don't, there's no other cognate in any other Germanic language.
We can sort of recreate what we think it would've looked like in Proma. But there's no clear related word to it. So bit of a mystery. So, good question. So not related to
Aven: Right. Wood Perfect by Susie Den. Yep. Mm-hmm. . Yep. Su dent's books are always fun. She has, she has books a little older. Some of her books are, she has books about the like I'm not sure what it's called, but it's books about.
Trade words, words that are specific to certain in groups, especially in professional groups, like the words that London cavies were used and the words that should build you know, the Army uses and things like that. So she's fun. Mm-hmm. ? I mean, words about language are a big, a big category. There's a [00:47:00] lot of them are more sort of like, here's a list of, like, Paul Anthony Jones has a bunch of, here's a list of entrusting words and where they come from and why they're interesting.
Or here's a list of just funny words. He has, he, he specializes in weird, often obsolete words and that sound funny or are interesting, but there's also lots of words. And then there's the kinds of books about like how language works Yeah. And why it works the way it does. Yeah. Okay. So the. Other questions if there are some questions. So that was tools. Oh, the other thing that I should just say is if you go to our website, alliterative.net, there is a page of I think it's called Sources and Credits. And on that there's a, a link to general linguistic sources. And if you go there, it has like all of the reference fors that you've mentioned are on there.
Is that one listed on there? Maybe not that one. You should add that one. Cause I think that's a new, new one. But list the, the general sources that Mark uses for the sort of entomological side most of the time. So there's a big long [00:48:00] list both of online and books and articles and things like that that he uses on a regular basis.
So that's almost a good place to. All right, Arten 1971. You asked a question in a YouTube comment that just as a sort of discussion question, so I'm gonna put it to Mark. You can only choose one area of linguistics to study or discuss for the rest of your life. And your choices are either morphology or semantics.
Which would you choose and why? I mean,
Mark: probably semantics just because it kind of goes on forever. Morphology can be interesting. I, you know, it's funny because my opinions of these have changed over the years. When I was a grad student probably the one I was least interested in was the phonology side.
And, and yet now looking at sound changes is one of my most favorite areas of linguistics. So you know, these things can change, but probably, probably semantics. I mean, . In fact, I've done way more with syntax than, you know, in terms of professional work. Mm-hmm. Than I have with any of these.
[00:49:00] I mean, that's really what my you know, graduate work focused on mostly. And so but I would say probably semantics. There's a lot of different ways to approach semantics and a lot of different you know, kind of theoretical ways of thinking about it.
Aven: So, and your interest in cognitive linguistics, cognitive fit best with semantics?
Yeah. In general. You know, interest in semantics fields and, and while etymology is lots about sound, sound changes and morphology that also, you know, you spend a lot of time on semantic changes. Mm-hmm. semantic developments, especially in the videos. Yeah. So I'm not gonna answer the question cause I'm not linguist, so I don't feel I have to, and also it would have to be semantics cause I know it's a little bit morphology.
So it's sort of a simple question for me. Yeah. There was another question that we don't have an answer to, so I'm just gonna quickly say it was from Trig was about, it was about asl and Wasco really the first person to recognize ASL is a distinct language.
Mark: I mean, the only kind of answer that I can give [00:50:00] is that you know, it, it depends what, what you mean.
You know, the first person to, to recognize this because there was remember the exact name of it, but there was assigned language used by indigenous people in North America that. Was not only useful, you know, for people who were hearing impaired but was used as a lingua franca between people who spoke different languages but could use the same signed language.
So obviously they had some sense that it was, you know, its own thing. And that must have been, you know, long before Europeans were in North America, so.
Aven: Yeah. But I mean, a, so that's the question was about ASL specifically, I dunno, but in terms of were there people before who recognized signed languages as signed languages?
That's, that's a different question. And really the short answers, neither us know very much, but sign languages, so we would've just Googled it. Mm-hmm. and no, we wouldn't have come up with anything better than you can get through Googling. Sorry. Now this question in the chat about whether either of us has ever been involved in a language maintenance or revival project.
And [00:51:00] again, short answer is no. I'm aware of and sort of know of people around us doing that. So we live in Northern Ontario and the local indigenous language is Anishnabe here, and there is Anishnabe language teaching going on at the university that I used to work at. And the mark still works at, though not as much teaching as they used to be because they fired that set of teachers.
So but I believe there is still some language teaching that's going on there, and that is it's a maintenance that, that, that language never disappeared. But it's, it's not a revival, it's a language maintenance, but it is also you know, an attempt to strengthen because of course of. Intense efforts put in by the Canadian government to make the language disappear.
So that is one that is going on around us. And for instance, we have a colleague who worked on an anub dictionary mm-hmm. That is very important for that kind of work. We did mean to have her on the podcast before our university in imploded and she retired. And I'm not sure [00:52:00] how easy it would be to do now.
Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Well don't worry Louis. It wasn't only, or Louie, I'm sorry. Dunno, which it was not only the linguistics department, it was all of the humanities. And in fact, it wasn't the linguistics department that didn't even exist didn't already didn't exist. It was, but the term modern
Mark: languages department.
Go
Aven: on. Yeah. But it was also the indigenous studies, all of the indigenous studies, studies programs, which is what it was taught under that was canned as well as classics, which is mine, which is why I lost my job. And Women's studies and the whole slew religious studies philosophy. Yeah. And what else?
Oh, also math and physics, because we are an engineering school, so why would you need a math in a physics department? The physics department had recently produced a Nobel Prize winner the year before, or a Nobel Prize been awarded to there. But, you know, anyway not that that's something we're a little bitter about or anything.
look up Lareen University, if you'd like to hear the whole sort story declared insolvency in Canada, 10 full-time faculty in cut 69 programs. So [00:53:00] anyway, it was fun. You'd think I, so I, I said at the time, oh, well maybe this will mean that I have more time to devote to this project. And then we immediately ceased to put anything out
So no, looking for an entire new job and career takes up some time post actual and emotional time and that kind of, Seeled me a bit. . So,
Mark: but in terms of language revival and maintenance we did do a podcast episode, oh. Yeah. That focused on scripts, on alphabets, on the, the maintenance and revival of of, you know, endangered writing systems.
Mm-hmm. ,
Aven: that was fairly recently. So if you're interested in, in that and you haven't heard that episode, I think it's two episodes ago, three episodes ago, something like that. Mm-hmm. On endangered and endangered alphabets and that was really interesting. So, no, we haven't either of us worked specifically in done that work, but of course we're, we know of and are connected to other people.
We also just recently we're on a panel, well, at Lin which this is in connection with, at Lin Income. We were on a panel with someone [00:54:00] who's done a podcast called Tongue Unbroken, which is about language in Alaska, Alaskan languages, indigenous languages, and lots of different elements of the sort of political and linguistic and social world of, of Alaskan indigenous languages.
The last episode, which is the only one I managed to listen to so far, but is about the fight to get indigenous languages of Alaska declared official languages of Alaska, which they won. But it's a really interesting sort of first person duration with the host and two other people who were involved in getting, getting the bill passed about the sort of process of doing it.
And it was totally fascinating. So anyway, that's just again, I'm, when we are, we're hoping maybe to have him on. I don't know, the podcast, we have so many people we wanna interview on the podcast and we only really have this ability to put out one episode a month. And we also wanna do other things that aren't interviews.
And so we just have this ever-growing list of people and not enough time to do it. If, if I had the money to [00:55:00] pay somebody to edit them, we would just be interviewing someone every week, as far as I'm concerned, until we ran out of these fascinating people we know. But yeah. Excuse me,
Mark: excuse. Sorry. So, yeah, so we haven't we haven't worked on language revival or maintenance, but we're interested in the topic. And, you know, we're always game to house pro it . Yeah. And so yeah, we're always game to, to talk about it on the podcast with experts who do that work. Yeah. Cause
Aven: it's, it's something that we can't, you can't just get into on a whim.
You really have to be connected communities who are doing it before you make any efforts. . right, one more question that we had from before. I won't just go with this one. It was exciting because it isn't, it, it it's something that I'm, well, I did the answer to, I was gonna say that I know about my answers mostly gonna be, I don't actually know about it, but it was from Tim Hammack who on Patreon who said, I recently read that the Romans [00:56:00] knew of Shiva and Equa equated Shiva with Dion dese.
I assume this happened before Constantine. So do we know if they knew of any of the other Panion? Do they know were there connections with the sort of farther east than Par? Basically what, what from the Far East did or did not influence the ancient world linguistically or otherwise? And this is not something I know a lot about but.
That connection between Shima and dese? As far as I can tell, I, it was a reasonably quick research. I didn't go really, really in depth to it as far as I can tell that connection was not made in the ancient world, or at least not by the sources. We have. We have a few sources. So the obvious thing is diagnosis was said to have visited India.
So in his myth, he was said to have visited and conquered India. So that's in the Greek, you know, early Greek sources. We have what they mean by India, what they mean by diagnosis, visited [00:57:00] it, it's all left. Sort of all that means is he comes back with panthers and leopards in his retina and she's exotic, right?
And it was, it used to be said, oh, that means the diocese comes from the east. And the, the Greeks always sort of talked about him as this foreign God, but in fact we have his name in linear B tablets from the Masonian period as clearly connected to making offerings. So he is clearly as old as any of the other Greek dad that we have evidence for.
That doesn't mean he didn't come from the east originally, but I mean as Aphid seems to have, but certainly he's not a newer or more recently introduced foreign God that said the connection between him and Shiva, which there is scholarly discussion of that, but doesn't seem to have been done in the ancient world.
And the.[00:58:00]
So there's one. So there's one author in 1979 wrote this book, sheese and French, and then Daniel Daniel Lou and I, he seems to be refer to all the time. So there's like, I found a website that sort of goes over the evidence for this connection that's called DESE and shva.wordpress.com. And it has good, good citations.
So there's lots of parallels. They both are associated with wild animals and spotted animals that's both are associated with the Lingham or PHUs. It's a prominent element of the worship of both cities. Certain kinds of ecstatic and celebrations connections to fertility, other elements of their story that are, that have connect.
So it may well be that they're connected, but probably if so, more from, you know, Indo-European and larger trends or, you know, they, they're [00:59:00] parallel or maybe they're from the same source a long time ago, but that does not seem to have been recognized in the ancient world. We have one author in the ancient world in the Roman period who's a Greek who says that there was a connection between DESE and an Indian God of Misa, because that's what dias means.
It means God of Nisa. Nisa was name in myth, was the name of the mountain that he was sheltered in as a baby. But that mountain is located in a hundred different places. Like every different place says, oh, this is Mount Isa, or says, but Mount Isa always means it's almost outside of wherever you are.
So wherever you are, Mount Issa is far away. And so at a certain point it starts getting located in India, but that doesn't connect in to Shiv Shiva particularly. So, There doesn't seem to be an ancient recognition of that particular connection. If there is a connection. It wasn't recognized in the Asian world in terms of other, I also couldn't find any particular evidence that the Romans knew of other Hindu gods in the Hindu pantheon.
But [01:00:00] that's not to say they didn't, because there certainly was contact between the Indian world and the Indians of continent and the Roman world. And in fact there had been con contact, of course, in the Greek East between the northern India and Pakistan, and Alexander had, you know, conquered that part of the Persian empire and had con had contact.
And there's this area that's known as Ghar, which was a Greco Bactrian and Greco Perian and gre Ino Perian series of kingdoms where there's something called Greco Buddhism, which is a. It's the place where the first images of the Buddha come from. The first time that the Buddha is represented sculpturally because of the tra, the Greek tradition of representing God's sculpturally, which was not at that point an Indian tradition.
I gather from the from the sources. So if they knew of Indian gods and Pantheon, it would be Buddhist rather than Hindu. It seems most likely because most of the connections seem to have been, other [01:01:00] connections seem to have been with Buddhist groups. There are. Various evidences of contact. We know that Augustus apparently received ambassadors from some kingdoms in northern England India, and also from Tamala areas of Southern India.
There's evidence that CLA was in contact with the Sri Lankan court and there's definite evidence, both historical and lots of archeological evidence, that there was both direct and indirect trading between India and Rome. So direct like Roman merchants actually sailing to Sri Lanka and to other places like that.
And to other parts of the, in India. Not always the parts that are closest because it has to do with the wind and current, what was easiest to reach. So in fact, it was easier to reach Southern India in some ways than it was to reach Northern India just because of things I don't understand about the ocean.
But there was connection and there seems some people suggest that there were in fact groups of Buddhist living in Alexandria around [01:02:00] the beginning of the Roman Empire. So if there was influence from India on a language. So I don't know of any particular linguistic influence on Latin. I, there may be, but I can't, I couldn't find anything if there was cultural influence.
Probably Buddhism, not Hinduism. And there are arguments that the stories of the birth of the Buddha influence the stories of the birth of Jesus. Now that is a fairly controversial point, but it is not impossible because of these points of contact that. And Alexandria as one of the places where sort of early Christianity was forming.
Its stories certainly is a place that there could have been contact because Alexandria was a big trading hub. So that's a lot of, I'm not sure, but it is really interesting. I mean, there are, there are caches of Roman coins that have been found in various places in India. There's Indian materials certainly that make it to Rome and, and well past Rome as well, of course, pearls and [01:03:00] silk and spices being the most important trade items.
So that's, that's everything I can say about that. And Louis, or Louis, sorry. If you are interested in that, I will write, I will just check his name and I will write, well, it's the Unbroken Tongue is, sorry. Tongue Unbroken is the podcast. If you look that up, you'll be able to find the name of the person if you're interested in finding it.
All right. I think that was all of our. Previous questions that we were asked ahead of time. Mm-hmm. . So are there any other questions or comments or discussion anybody else wants to contribute and chat?
Mark: And again apologies for not having done livestream, livestream in so long. We quite enjoyed the last time we, we did one. We just never got around to, to doing one again. So,
Aven: and we meant to do one to celebrate because we'd been marking sort of numbers of subscribers on the videos. And we hit 40,000 and we meant to do one for 40,000 and.
Didn't. [01:04:00] So I guess this is also a celebration of hitting 40,000 subscribers, . There's a lot of things we've been meaning to do and haven't in the last couple years and all I can, all I can do to excuse to point to the general state of the world and also to the specific transitions that we've been going through ourselves.
It's been a a up and down kind of last little while. I now have a nine to five job, for instance, which is a whole new thing I have to figure out how to deal with, which I'm sure is not, does not make anybody else feel a nine to five job, feel very sorry for me, but just a different rhythm
Mark: with Jackson Crawford. Yeah, that would be fun. That would definitely
Aven: be fun. We've talked about it. Mm-hmm. and you also talked about having him on the podcast. . Yeah. Well that would probably be the way to, if we did that, then once we made that connection, we could. Yep. Yeah. We've been a little reluctant to try to do, given how terribly we've been doing it, keeping up with our own videos.
We've been reluctant [01:05:00] to propose colabs because we don't wanna, you know, disappoint somebody else by not following through. So we sort of wanted to be a little more back on a level getting things done better. Basically we wanted to be doing, be more productive before we clapped, but yeah. So, well, I'll make sure he is on our list.
Mm-hmm. . We've got the next two months, three months sorted, but after that it's open.
I'm taking notes.
Thanks Louie. So Seymour cut the bread with the knife, and Seymour used the knife to cut the bread. Are we familiar with that debate? I don't know. The debate, I mean, is is it between which of those is clearer? And those are just two ways of saying the same thing, so I don't think I know that the specific debate you're referencing.
Thanks organics, really appreciate you being hanging here and hanging out. We Oh, have fun in playing Jess . Yeah. Yeah. We will probably be [01:06:00] ending fairly soon just because I am losing my ability to speak and we've been going for more than an hour, but just, you know, wanna edit before people are done.
I don't know if anyone here who's still here was at Ling income or went to any of that. I don't know if that's something that other people, I mean, you have to be doing linguistics communication for it to be interesting. But if there was anyone who was there and I hope you enjoyed it. We had a really good time hanging out with other linguistics communicators and finding out what sorts of things people are trying to do and in what venues and using what platforms and with what purposes.
Oh, I see, okay.
Mark: Yeah. Whether the underlying form Alright, the same. I mean, you know, I guess that comes down to a kind of Chomsky question. You know how much of language is sort of underlying structures and how much of it I, you know, I kind of, [01:07:00] I'm more on the behavioralist side of things. And I think even Choky himself is not so committed to you know, deep structures and categories anymore, either
So it's just the hardline Cho who are more high hardline than Choky himself. Who would, you know, see these things as the same structure, I guess? Well, because
Aven: I mean, they're both, they're, the question is you're, I mean, both of them are, are doing an an A of a memes or a date of a me or whatever.
Mm-hmm. Like they're doing the knife is the memes. Mm-hmm. by which the thing is done, doesn't matter whether you say, but technically seem more cut the bread with the knife. You've got a mm-hmm. what would be in Latin mean, that doesn't mean it's an in English, but it's sort of an title used. Whereas. He Seymour used the knife to cut the bread.
You've got, technically it's a, it's an accusative, right? He used the knife. Mm-hmm. . And so, but they're both doing the same thing in sentence. So the end result is that the knife is the the means [01:08:00] by which the thing is done. So it doesn't matter if it's an ab of a means or an accusative in a ver in a verbal friend phrase, are they really equivalent or not as a structure?
That sounds like the sort of thing that true linguists discussed. And I don't so leave it mark. But yeah, so I think that's, yeah, that's a, those are the kinds of things that they're, like the numbers of angels that condense on the pin of a, a head, head of a Questions that can be entertaining, but don't necessarily get you much further in your understanding.
Do you miss modal particles in English? I.
Mark: We still have modals by modal particles. What are you specifically referring to?
Aven: Can't miss 'em if you don't Ha, if you never had 'em.
I, I know of modal particles if, if it's the same thing as they're thinking of. [01:09:00] I know. So Greek, yeah. Greek is where they have particles at the wahoo with a lot of mo, and that is what they are. They're brutality, express mortality. And boy oh boy. I mean, well, I was gonna say I don't miss them because they're so annoying, but that's actually probably not true.
Okay. Oh yeah. Okay. So yeah. So that's basically the same thing.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. . I mean, we've got all kinds of, you know, little ways different language. So I guess it depends on you know, it is that question. What is the connection between what you see on the surface level and what you see going on below the surface?
You know, English has lots of ways to express modalities, stress modalities. You know, we don't use the same particles in the way that, that German does. Mm-hmm. .
Aven: Well, and, and it, it is true that a certain number of the ways that English does it are disfavored in standard English. Yeah.
So that there's a lot of the modality that we're actually quite good at expressing in spoken English and in dialects of English that aren't really necessarily that [01:10:00] dialectal, but dialect, No, that's a worded philosophy. I don't know. I'm losing my ability to dialect. I'm, I'm losing my ability to language here.
The, so, you know, like, like, like for instance mm-hmm. , which is one of those things we use to express certain kinds of modality all the time but is not considered, or, you know, or,
Mark: you know. Yeah. And I think those are used functionally like particles. Really.
Aven: Mm-hmm. . Cause they obviously don't have the Lexi mm-hmm.
meaning that they theoretically would Yeah. But, but that's what I mean that, but they're, you know mm-hmm. , they're just preferred in formal writing. Formal writing, but also even informal speech to the extent that people, you know, that this book that's coming up that we're gonna be interviewing her about is all about people's dislike of such things and other things like non-standard verb formations like I'm a bee doing or something.
You know, I'm a, I'm a gonna, or I'm, I'm gonna do something. [01:11:00] Means something different than I'm going to, or whatever, right? Like there's a lot of like the Irish, he's after coming to dinner mm-hmm. , which doesn't mean the same as he is coming to dinner. Those are two different things, but one of those is, you know, a dialect, but really what it is doing is expressing a certain kind of modality.
So I think there's a lot of what are seen as informal in English and what I don't know, because I don't know German well enough, is to what extent things like and stuff like that are verbal but not, you know, discouraged in formal written or to what extent they're considered part of formal language. So for instance, in Greek, ancient Greek which is what I know it from, those particles are absolutely common in formal, both poetic and prosaic sources.
So it is, Not at all seen as a part of spoken language that shouldn't be in your written language. Like they're, it's filled with them all the, the s and the, and like [01:12:00] in fact they're required, they're, to a certain degree if you're gonna use a subjunctive or optative, you have to use the UN particle or whatever.
So there's these various things that are absolutely not discouraged. Whereas in English, I think a lot of them are these days. Mm-hmm. . And I think that might be because Latin doesn't have that many of them. Mm-hmm. those kind of ones, or at least written Latin goodness knows what they was in spoken language, Latin.
But in written Latin, we don't have the same time types of particles that Greek does. Therefore, if we have it in English, it must be wrong. Right. The old story of, of English grammar. Anyway, that's just not off the top of my head. I don't know anything but the formal study that. That a lot of that,
Mark: that work gets done by people working on pragmatics and discourse analysis.
Yeah. Because it is, you know, a lot more common to do that sort of thing in spoken language and English. So, you know, that's where you do [01:13:00] find those sorts of discussions and certainly in old English there were, what to my mind were you know, a lot of you call them cms, but like seeming overuse of, you know, little words that you don't, strictly speaking need to have there for the meaning of You know, the, the, the strict, the strict sense of, of, of the sentence.
But you find them used a lot in certain kinds of narrative texts. And so my theory is that they're, they're performing you know, discourse functions, Right. They're
Aven: pragmatic. Yeah.
Mark: And giving you Yeah. Modal, like high, you know, foregrounding certain materials, certain certain parts of the, of the, you know, the text of the, of the discourse.
And, you know, doing those sorts of things.
Aven: Well, I think maybe it's about time for us to wrap up. Mm-hmm. . Unless there's any last questions, I just wanna say thank you to everybody for dropping by. We really appreciate [01:14:00] it. We also appreciate your interest in. And the videos in general. Again, we apologize for how long it's taking us to get out.
More of them. We are working on it, I promise. It is a continued thing and don't worry, the little ones are not stopping us from doing the long ones. Cause I always feel like some people might be feeling that. They are in, in parallel. But we are working on stuff. I don't think Mark is drawing out the current one so that he has more excuses to drink the cocktail that he's writing about , but it's a small possibility that that's what's going on.
So I'll make sure to keep it, keep an eye on him. But we really do, are very, very grateful for your interest and your presence here. And we hope to keep producing more material and nerding out about language and other related things. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. Thanks everyone, and we'll see you on the YouTubes
Mark: Thanks.
All right. Bye-bye. Bye.