Language encapsulates every part of a culture, from its history of ideas to the way its speakers perceive reality itself. And according to linguistics expert Arika Okrent, author of "In the Land of Invented Languages," even "made-up" languages like Klingon and Esperanto serve an important purpose. She joins the Curiosity Podcast to discuss the field of linguistics and why we say what we say. In addition to her first-level certification in Klingon, Arika Okrent's education includes an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet, the world's only university for the deaf, and a joint PhD from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. Additional resources discussed: "In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language" Arika Okrent's website Lingua Francas, Pidgins, and Creoles Development and Use of the Klingon Language "J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography" "The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 6)" "The Treason of Isengard: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Two (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 7)" "The War of the Ring: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 8)" The Klingon Language Institute's annual conference, qep'a' The Whorfian time warp: Representing duration through the language hourglass The Whites of Our Eyes (New York Times) Qapla' Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Language encapsulates every part of a culture, from its history of ideas to the way its speakers perceive reality itself. And according to linguistics expert Arika Okrent, author of "In the Land of Invented Languages," even "made-up" languages like Klingon and Esperanto serve an important purpose. She joins the Curiosity Podcast to discuss the field of linguistics and why we say what we say.
In addition to her first-level certification in Klingon, Arika Okrent's education includes an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet, the world's only university for the deaf, and a joint PhD from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago.
Additional resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/klingon-and-esperanto-are-important-languages-too
CODY GOUGH: I am curious. Why is the study of linguistics so important?
ARIKA OKRENT: I mean, a language is an encapsulated history of so much. It's a history of ideas of how you conceive of things, how you've traveled around geography. And it's all in there. In the structures and in the words, you can trace everything back and see where it came from. And those things are valuable, and people should place value on that.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough from the award winning curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer. And this week, we're curious about invented languages.
CODY GOUGH: Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: Welcome back to the Curiosity Podcast.
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CODY GOUGH: Today, we talk to author and linguistics expert Arika Okrent. Where have I heard that name before?
ASHLEY HAMER: We've written about her research on curiosity.com. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, and she's an expert in made up languages.
CODY GOUGH: Esperanto and Klingon might sound like fun and games, but all language serves a purpose even when it isn't spoken out loud.
ARIKA OKRENT: We use language all the time. We're immersed in it to the point where we hardly notice what it is. We get a sense of it in school, some elements of what the structure is like, why things mean what they mean, how they mean. But the stuff you learn in school has more to do with making sure you know the protocol, the rules that will indicate to society that you are educated.
And those rules are different than the rules that linguists look at. Linguists study language as if it's rock formation or sea animals, things that are just out there in nature. Look at this. What is it? How does it work? How does it relate to its environment? How does it relate to other things?
Without any judgment about what it should be, which is more about that's the rules you learn in school the way most people think about what is language. How should I look at it? What does it mean? Has more to do with that idea of what it should be.
CODY GOUGH: That's really interesting. So you almost study it like a preexisting concrete phenomenon that's in the planet?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, it's out there. It's something that humans do. And we want to know why they do it, how they do it, what they do with it.
So it's going to include things like mistakes, what we would classify in the school mode as mistakes or dialects, things that you wouldn't necessarily teach in a school or that you might even say, don't do this, or this is bad, or have some societal judgment about-- linguists want to say, oh, cool why do you people say it that way or mix that up? So you can discover things you might not be expecting to discover if you already know what it's supposed to be.
CODY GOUGH: That particularly is interesting to me because language is changing pretty much all the time, right?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Now, I know there are some people who consider language really set, and these are the rules you should follow. They shouldn't change. And there's others who say language evolves. Does that fall under linguistics or is that more of a different area of study?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, it will fall under linguistics in the sense that it's a human behavior. So linguists want to know-- social linguistics, that's a subdivision of linguistics, the study of how language works in society. And part of that will be how it's passed from one generation to the other or why people say things because of their social station or their-- where they grew up.
Things like that are all related to how and why people say the things they say. I studied sign language linguistics originally. So I was interested in sign language because to me it was amazing that, wait a second. When you don't even have sound, you don't even have voice. You have a sign language.
And I read about it. And it said, yeah, you have words. You have grammar. You have morphemes. You have phonology. You have all the same structural parts of language, but you don't need to have it in spoken words. You can also have it in sign words.
Wait a second. How does that work? What does that even mean? What does phonology mean if you don't have sounds? So I started studying linguistics at Gallaudet University, a deaf university in DC where we learned all the basics of linguistics.
But our model, the way we learned it was through sign language. So every example was a sign language example. Let's talk about negation. Here's how you do it in American Sign Language. Let's talk about this process of metathesis or something like that.
Here's how it works in American Sign Language. And so for me what that did was separate linguistics or those structural ideas, the components of language from any physical manifestation of language. They exist regardless of it's speaking or signing.
CODY GOUGH: That brings up two questions for me. First, I thought your sign language was kind of a universal language. I didn't realize how many different types are there.
ARIKA OKRENT: Every local community will have its own sign language. So American Sign Language is completely different from British sign language because of the history of how it came to be. American Sign Language began out of communities where there was a high percentage of genetic deafness. So you have 10 people in your village that are deaf.
They'll start gesturing and form a system. And there were enough-- those people came together. They formed the first American deaf school in Connecticut. So those people came from various places in the country, came together, develop their system more just by interacting with each other, kind of like a pidgin at first or creole type language.
ASHLEY HAMER: Time for some quick definitions. Pidgin, that's p-i-d-g-i-n, and creole are both examples of a lingua franca, which is a language used to help people communicate when they don't share a native language. It's kind of a stopgap, a temporary bridge between two different cultures that have to interact.
Pidgin is a lingua franca that doesn't have any native speakers. It's basically the first attempt at building that bridge. Creole is a lingua franca that has gotten some native speakers. Maybe two pidgin speakers got together had a baby and touted to speak the new language.
Creole is a pidgin with staying power. One cool example of a pidgin people are speaking right now is the language astronauts speak on the International Space Station. English is the official language of the ISS, but Russian is the official language you use in the Soyuz spacecraft that gets you to the ISS.
Everybody has to learn both languages. But in daily conversation, they try to use the other person's native language to be polite. The result, a weird mix of English and Russian that some have dubbed Runglish, or space creole. You can learn more about it on curiosity.com.
ARIKA OKRENT: And the next generation came in and learned and became more structured. And the teachers that they had at these schools had been imported from France where they had developed a system there. So there was this French sign language influence on American Sign Language. But that had nothing to do with Britain where they were doing something different.
And therefore, American Sign Language has a lot closer to French sign language than British sign language. You'd think, well, two countries speak English. They should have the same sign language, but they don't because the sign language is separate from the spoken language.
CODY GOUGH: Fascinating.
ARIKA OKRENT: [CHUCKLES]. So we're off on a very different topic here.
CODY GOUGH: Well, but it evolves just the way language evolves, right? Because English is a kind of a mishmash of many different languages, lots of different influences. And so sign language is the same way even, though, it's not even spoken. I mean, that's pretty interesting.
ARIKA OKRENT: Though, it's different in Australian Sign Language. Even in Canada, they have a Canadian Sign Language. There's also a Québecois sign language. So it overlaps a little bit with national boundaries or linguistic boundaries. But it more has to do with what's the base community and why are they a community of deaf people. And that'll be the basis for that's why they share this sign language.
ASHLEY HAMER: By the way, if you know someone who's part of the deaf community, you can totally share this podcast with them. All of our episodes feature full written transcripts that anyone can follow in real time at gretta.com/curiosity.
CODY GOUGH: Now, you wrote the book In the Land of Invented Languages. The full title is a lot longer, right? What's the full title?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, let's see. Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, and Loglan Lovers.
CODY GOUGH: So you have spent a lot of time with invented languages, particularly Esperanto because it's the most widely spoken.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're going to be talking about a few different invented languages in this episode. So here's a quick primer on them. Esperanto was invented in 1887 by a Polish doctor named LL Zamenhof who wanted to help unite the many languages his neighbors spoke under one they could all share.
He set out to create a language that would be easy to learn, which is why Esperanto has no more than 16 rules. And it's entirely phonetic, that is, every letter is always pronounced the same way. Here's how you greet someone in Esperanto. [ESPERANTO].
Klingon is a language developed for an aggressive hot tempered warrior species of the same name for the Star Trek Universe. The actors who played them spoke English when they were introduced on television in the '60s. But the producers of Star Trek III-- The Search for Spock, hired professional linguist Dr. Marc Okrand, no relation to Arika, to actually create a Klingon language. He published that language in 1985 in the Klingon dictionary, which sold more than 300,000 copies. Here's how you greet someone in Klingon. [KLINGON].
Dothraki is a language developed for the Game of Thrones TV series. Linguist David J. Peterson came up with it for the show along with Valyrian language based on phrases George RR Martin included in his book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Here's how you greet someone in Dothraki. [DOTHRAKI]. And in the super peppy Valyrian language, you greet someone using a phrase that literally translates to all men must die, [VALYRIAN]
CODY GOUGH: Are you more interested in made up languages than you are in dead languages and why?
ARIKA OKRENT: I wouldn't say I'm more interested in them. But I'm interested in any language that has a living community. And Esperanto, Klingon, now Dothraki from Game of Thrones, these languages have actually acquired living communities, people who study, who learn them, write their own poetry or wedding vows or whatever they want in them.
And that to me is very, very interesting because it's so unlikely-- it's hard enough to convince people in Ireland to speak Irish, their heritage language, to think that people could pick up Klingon out of their own free will. It's very unlikely. Over and over again in history, people have tried to engineer language behavior-- speak this way, don't speak that way, say this, don't say that.
And it never works. You can't engineer a language from the top down, but you can from the bottom up. If people are inspired to do it, they'll do it. And if they have a chance to grow a community and they can, it's interesting to see how and why that happens.
CODY GOUGH: I've read a little bit about the background of Lord of the Rings. I've just started reading Lord of the Rings. And my understanding was JRR Tolkien was pretty obsessive about perfecting Elvish as its own kind of living, breathing language.
ASHLEY HAMER: You'll notice that Cody says "Elfish" and Arika says "Elvish." That's not a mistake. A lot of ink has been spilled over the correct spelling and pronunciation of the word. Writer Douglas A. Anderson wrote in 2004 that in the publication of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, author JRR Tolkien experienced, quote, "what became for him a continual problem, printer's errors and compositor mistakes, including well intentioned corrections of his sometimes idiosyncratic usage," unquote.
These corrections included changing "dwarves" to "dwarfs," "Elvish" to "Elfish" and "Elvin" to "Elfin." The publishing history of The Lord of the Rings is extremely complicated. So if you want to dive down that rabbit hole, then you should check out JRR Tolkien, a descriptive bibliography or the 12 volume series The History of Middle Earth. Links to both of those are in the show notes.
CODY GOUGH: How do you think that's different then the development of Klingon? How do you compare and contrast those?
ARIKA OKRENT: The Elvish is very much not living in the same way that Klingon is because the author died. And the fans are so purist about it that they will not allow you to extend any further than what's somewhere in the canon. So this makes it very difficult for Elvish to live because if you try to make up your own dialogue or, well, he never gave us a word for this. I'm going to do this.
Oh, no, you're in big trouble. You have to go-- the only authority is what Tolkien has written. And so it's hard to go any further. They hired a Tolkienist linguist to write dialogue for the Lord of the Rings movie because they had to figure out how to say the lines that they wanted to say. He knows what he's doing. He knows the language about as well as anybody could, all the material. And he's still got a lot of flack for going a bit beyond, what's in the text.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ARIKA OKRENT: So yeah, it's a bit-- so that makes those languages a bit stuck even, though, they're very-- they're fleshed out and full of life within the world that they describe on paper. It's hard to bring it into this world, into modern life because the fans are so careful about it and stingy about doing anything beyond what the master hath written.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, wow. I mean, in Klingon, at least you have presumably words for a computer or in-- in Middle Earth, they didn't really have a whole lot of technology. There's no words for automobile or anything like that.
ARIKA OKRENT: No, but then the Klingon-- they're serious about canon too. And they won't make up their own words. They'll only use words that are in the show Universe or the creator, Marc Okrand, who is still alive and who still occasionally gives out new words, which the Klingonist get together and request every year. Their Klingon Language Convention it can grow from there.
ASHLEY HAMER: The annual conference of the Klingon Language Institute is held in Chicago every summer. But you have to be a member. Hey, you've got time.
ARIKA OKRENT: But Klingon is also a language with a word building apparatus. So you can add endings to a route to form new words without making up anything yourself.
CODY GOUGH: Nice.
I know we've talked about some of the, I guess, made up languages. That seems almost a disrespectful term to call it made up invented languages. Maybe to give it some more respect.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, but it's-- now, the term is constructed language. There's a whole community of conlangers, they're called, so constructed languages.
CODY GOUGH: All right, great. So we've talked about some constructed languages, but let's kind of maybe take a couple of steps back and zoom out into linguistics as a whole. Language has a very strong influence on the way that we think. Is that something you've written about and studied a lot?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, it's something that I have thought about a lot. It's a little bit of a controversial question. It seems very natural. But linguists have resisted it a lot because we don't like the idea that, oh, the reason the Chinese are this way is because their language doesn't have hypotheticals. Or people use that idea to say things about human thought.
And what I like to say is that we don't want to have the view that your language determines how it's possible for you to think. But I do think it's true. And this is a less controversial way of putting it that the language you speak sets down habits, which channel your thought in certain directions.
And you are not in a prison of a language. You can think in ways that you might look at the language and say, oh, well, they obviously can't think this way because they don't have this word. That's not true.
I can say, oh, look, German has this word schadenfreude, and I could explain it to you and you understand it. It's not like, I can't think that way because I don't have that word. You can think that way. It just takes me more words to talk about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Research has shown, though, that the language you speak can have a small impact on the way you think about the world. For example, when we talk about time in English, we refer to it by length-- life is short, that was a long day. Swedish does this too. But in Spanish, people refer to time by size or volume. There is much time, [SPANISH], or little time, [SPANISH].
In a 2017 study, researchers asked Swedish speakers and Spanish speakers to watch two videos and estimate how much time had passed after watching them. One video was of a container filling up with liquid. The other was of a line growing longer. Each speaker read the instructions and answered the questions in their native language.
When they watched the container fill up, Swedish speakers had no problem estimating how much time it took, but Spanish speakers estimated that it had taken more time than it actually did. For the line, the opposite was true. Spanish speakers didn't have an issue. But Swedish speakers thought it took longer.
The researchers repeated the experiment with people who spoke both languages. And the same thing happened depending on which language they use to take the test. The language you speak really can change your perception of time.
ARIKA OKRENT: What it might mean, though, or I do think it means is that your culture places an importance on it. If you have a word in the language, it's because the culture of that language for some reason places importance on that thing.
CODY GOUGH: And there are languages with 20 or 30 different words for love, let's say. And English has comparatively few. Does that mean that we love people less?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, that's the sort of-- no, it doesn't. It means that there's more cultural importance placed on making finer distinctions between different types of love perhaps. People use the snow example for this all the time. So the Eskimo words for snow because they need to have more words for snow.
But English has hundreds of words for snow too. If you're a skier, you have just as many words for snow. Or if you're an Arctic explorer, your professional jargon will have as many distinctions as you need. And every jargon has the words that it needs.
And if you say, oh, look, how many words for pipes plumbers have? You're not surprised. It's not, wow, they must have a really different way of looking at the world. You say, oh, well, they must need that for what they do. They have a cultural importance.
CODY GOUGH: It's utilitarian a lot of times.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, you make the words you need, and you make the distinctions you need. It's always fun for me to discover in other professions or hobbies that I don't know about that they have distinctions between words that I would never even think of.
So I was on a jury for a dental case, and one of the people they interviewed was an expert in dental radiography. And he was very insistent on not calling them X-rays. It's like the X-ray is the process. The thing that they throw out at you when you're in the machine it's called a radiograph.
The picture is a radiograph. The rays are X-rays. And I never thought, oh, when I would-- I call it an X-ray because the distinction doesn't make a difference to me but to him it made a difference because he's in a-- he's in a space where it does make a difference.
CODY GOUGH: Now, I'm thinking about when we talked about how certain languages might sound whiny or angry or snobby or however that is. Take Klingon, for example. That sounds like a pretty angry, aggressive languages, right? And that's somewhat objective.
I think most people around the world might think that. Do you find that the way people perceive other languages is pretty uniform? Like, does kind of everybody think the Americans might sound one way or kind of everybody think maybe the German language is on the harsh end?
ARIKA OKRENT: This hasn't been studied very much. There as a field of study called linguistic attitude is studied. The old 18th century German linguists talked about this [GERMAN] speech feel. Like, every language has a sort of a soul or speech feel to it.
Definitely, once you have a description of it and then people say, yeah, yeah, French does sound really romantic, and then that links up with your image of the French guy, Pepé Le Pew, or whatever. It links up to all sorts of other cultural indicators that keep that idea going. Whereas if you had instead these cultural images of French dockworkers swearing at each other or something, they'd still be doing it in French, but you might not think it sounded so romantic.
CODY GOUGH: And I don't want people to think I'm picking on German. I actually took German lessons for a couple of months last year. And, I think, the German language is beautiful. So--
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, I mean, if you listen to those leaders, this German romantic poetry and if you go into it that way instead of Hogan's Heroes, then you--
[LAUGHTER]
--then you might have a different attitude about it.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: That's a good example, a very good example.
ARIKA OKRENT: I'm glad you know what Hogan's Heroes is. As I said that, I was like, wow, it really dates me.
CODY GOUGH: No, I know Hogan's Heroes.
ARIKA OKRENT: OK.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, great show. I used to watch it when I was little, so I enjoyed that.
ASHLEY HAMER: I didn't know what Hogan's Heroes is, so I had to look it up. It was an American TV show that ran from 1965 to 1971 and chronicled the hijinks of a group of Allied soldiers in a Nazi POW Camp. You can probably understand why it wasn't the best portrayal of the German language. Anyway, it garnered 12 Emmy nominations and two wins in its six year run. And I watched it a bit on YouTube. It's really funny.
CODY GOUGH: How many languages do you speak or are you familiar with some of?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, I like to say I can BS in a lot of languages. I've taken a semester of everything. But I'm pretty good with Portuguese. I did a semester abroad in Brazil. I spent a year in Hungary. And I speak Hungarian and American Sign Language. My sign-- so just the three most important languages.
[LAUGHTER]
But, yeah, I took a semester of Swedish and a semester of Chinese and a semester of Italian. And I can read German with a dictionary and all that kind of thing, though.
CODY GOUGH: Why does the language die?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, the people die. The language dies with the speakers who speak it. I mean, we see it every day, the smaller languages that have six or seven old speakers left. And once the speakers are gone, the language is gone.
Then, I guess, the question is why are there so few speakers left of this particular language? And usually it has to do with these days with sort of global economic pressures or colonial pressures. So why did all the native languages of Americas why are they dying out? Well, you know--
CODY GOUGH: It just surprises me when I think of Latin. I mean, that was a big deal.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah. Well, It didn't really die out. It just turned into Spanish and French and Romanian and the other Romance languages. So Latin lives as a living language, but it splintered and it changed. And it changed enough between different places that they became incomprehensible to each other.
People do speak Latin in the church. And there's a kind of liturgical language that's kept alive. But in terms of robust living language, Latin didn't die so much as evolve into different languages because the people were separated from each other for long enough that they were no longer all participating in the same way in the language change.
CODY GOUGH: Right, and that's happened with Chinese and Japanese?
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, it happens with every language. So, yeah, Chinese is various languages that are totally mutually incomprehensible to each other. But the educated literary language is Mandarin. And if you're going to learn Chinese, you're probably going to learn Mandarin. And that at one time was Latin.
So all these languages were splintering off. But if you were going to go to university, you learned this one form of Latin. And that's one way of keeping a language going after it's started to splinter off. If it's got some status, then it's got a longer shelf life.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I think, of my days playing Dungeons and Dragons. And there's high born and low born are two separate languages. And one might look that at face value and think, well, that's kind of archaic. Maybe seems that way. But that's a legitimate thing and--
ASHLEY HAMER: We have a great example of high born and low born language right here in English. Ever wonder why we call the animals cow, pig sheep, and deer, but we call them meat, beef, pork, mutton, and venison? That dates way back to 1066 when the French speaking Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in England.
During their rule, these guys introduced more than 10,000 French words into English. And because they were the ruling class, most of these words referred to fancy or government related topics, stuff like crown, castle, parliament, justice, and banquet. So while farmers kept talking about their animals in English, once those animals were put on a fancy plate their names became French. Cow became "boeuf," pig became "porc," sheep became "mouton," and deer became "venaison."
CODY GOUGH: Do you think that some of these constructed languages are maybe partially an attempt to kind of level that playing field and maybe have language just be a little less of a gateway towards the social hierarchy?
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, I mean, that was the idea of Esperanto. It was we could all learn English or French. It was the 19th century. French was pretty powerful. German was the language of science. But that wasn't fair.
So if a Polish person and a Italian person have to learn German to participate in some chemical society, they're on equal ground with each other. They both had to learn another language in order to do what they want to do. But they are not on equal ground with the German speaker because he got to learn it from birth.
And it was more-- I'm using as German example-- but it was really a reaction to English at the time. And now talked about with mostly in terms of English. English is a global language. And when people say we should learn Esperanto, people say, why? We have English.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]
ARIKA OKRENT: And the Esperanto's answer is that, well, it's not fair because all these people got to learn English from birth. And all these people didn't. And therefore, it's not a level playing ground. If we talk about Esperanto, we all have to go to it from somewhere else, which means it's a little bit more effort, but we all have to make that effort. And that makes it fair.
The idea was never like, let's make Esperanto and have it take over every language in the world, and then we won't have other languages more, only have one world language. It was never that. It was everyone keep their language, enjoy your language, use your language, revel in your language, but also have this other language. That's where we go for a level playing field.
CODY GOUGH: How do you feel about Google Translate and the technology that's bridging all these gaps? Do you think that's-- how do you think that's affecting linguistics?
ARIKA OKRENT: It is sort of sad for the profession of translation, which is a very important profession. And is still a very important profession. But people think they don't need it anymore because they can just put it in a Google Translate and get what they need.
And there's lots of examples of when that fails and how you really do need a human to mediate these things. And also, it only works well for certain languages. So you can get great translation between French and English, but that's because of human depends on a vast resource of human translated material.
The whole Canadian Parliament has everything in French and English. A machine can learn statistically from that giant database how to translate between French and English, but it can't do that for Swedish and Igbo or something.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, in your linguistic studies you're often studying kind of where things are now. There's so much history involved and how we got to where we are today. Where are your limits with that history? I mean, are you studying these words and these languages and you say, OK, well, here's where it came from for the last 6,000 years? Are you more focused on more recent developments?
ARIKA OKRENT: Either way. I mean, there's only so far back you can go before it gets very, very murky. In a couple of decades, you can see big changes that people completely forget about, so people that hate this jargon words like, oh, why do people say gifted and leverage our whatever?
People get really annoyed with these coinages that they see are new, but they don't realize that only a few decades ago, people were saying that about other words that we're totally used to now. So the word contact, for example. Contact we use it as a verb. I'll contact you tomorrow. Did you make contact with him? That used to be seen as a gross violation of everything proper. That it was a noun.
Contact is a noun. You can say I will make contact with you. You can't say I will contact you. It's not a verb. It's a noun, kind of the way people see impact now. You don't impact something. You have an impact. It's a noun not a verb.
Interview used to be that. You could not say I interviewed him. You had to say I had an interview. And people would get so mad about this and write articles letters to the editor. I can't believe what our language is coming to. It's being destroyed. But then we all got used to it. And the ones that people hate now will get used to too.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, for sure. And Google and Googling-- and has it been particularly hard do you think for linguists over the last 20 years with the rise of the internet and just zillions of words being made up all the time?
ARIKA OKRENT: It's great because it's so easy to track. You used to have to dig through archives and look for-- look in newspaper articles and ads. When was the first time they used this, and how did it grow and how did it spread?
Now, you can do studies that show over this past two years on Twitter, this word was only used in New Jersey, and now it's used in Colorado. You can see it happening in study as it's happening, which means there's a lot more information to look at, but it's also easier to look at as a big dynamic process as it happens.
CODY GOUGH: I guess that would be a lot easier when you can Google the words.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah. When did people first use this? Well, let's do a Google search.
CODY GOUGH: Perfect, I love it. Well, our final segment is the curiosity challenge. And hopefully, I can teach you something, or you can just show off how much you know if you didn't-- and if you do already know this.
So on curiosity.com, we wrote researchers found that children in higher income families will hear a lot more words than children in families on welfare by the time they're three years old. Do you know how many more words-- and this is multiple choice. So is it 30,000 words, 300,000 words, 3 million words, or 30 million words? Researchers found that just in general, not unique words but how many more words.
ARIKA OKRENT: Shear is the key there.
CODY GOUGH: Yes, shear words, just a word spoken. 30,000, 300,000, 3 million, or 30 million?
ARIKA OKRENT: I'm going to say 300,000.
CODY GOUGH: It is actually 30 million.
ARIKA OKRENT: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: It's fascinating. By age three, low income children have heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their wealthier peers. They can actually see the word gap in brain scans. And it can have big impacts on their development later and their vocabulary later. So, yeah, saying things is good. And part of this could have to do with the parents reading to their children and just exposing them to more words. So, young parents--
ARIKA OKRENT: Keep talking.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, talk to your kids. Words are very important for a child's brain development. And I believe you brought a question for me as well.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yes, I was thinking about, oh, what could-- sort of outside my area. And I was thinking about this-- I took a trip this summer to South Dakota. I did a camping trip in a camper across South Dakota. And I got to go on a buffalo safari in Custer State Park.
And I learned a lot about buffalos. It was a really great tour. I highly recommend the buffalo safari if you're over there on Western South Dakota. But I learned that what we call buffalo can be anything, can be kind of a mix of cattle and bison. Or there's some-- been a lot of inbreeding in history.
But there is a sort of-- our pure American bison is our American animal. And there is a herd in South Dakota of genetically pure American bison, which was restored in the 20th century after many of the bison died up. So this herd of pure genetic bison all descend from buffalo or bison born in two places. One of them is Yellowstone. What's the other place?
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ARIKA OKRENT: [CHUCKLES].
CODY GOUGH: So this is kind of the traditionally considered pure American bison?
ARIKA OKRENT: Bison, not mixed with cattle or any other breeds. They're the bison that were originally here.
CODY GOUGH: OK, one is from Yellowstone. I would imagine it would be somewhere around either Kansas or Oklahoma or somewhere. I'm going to say Kansas City.
ARIKA OKRENT: Well, it is a city, which is kind of surprising. But even more surprising, it's New York city specifically the Bronx. [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: What?
ARIKA OKRENT: [CHUCKLES]. I know. These purebred buffalo come from the Bronx. In the early 1900 and 1905, I think, it was-- the American Bison Society was founded at the Bronx zoo. And they bred bison. And the bison born from this program were then transported out to South Dakota to start this bison preserve.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
That is a fantastic piece of trivia.
ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah, I know. That was the first thing I learned on that tour.
CODY GOUGH: I absolutely love that question. If people want to find your book, that's called In the Land of Invented Languages. We'll link to that in the show notes, of course. And thanks so much for joining me. We appreciate it.
ARIKA OKRENT: Thank you.
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ASHLEY HAMER: We're getting our extra credit questions from somewhere new, you. We get a lot of questions from our readers and listeners. And we thought it would be fun to answer them on the show. Ready?
This one is from [? Kat ?] [? Draper. ?] [? Kat ?] asks, why did we evolve with the whites of our eyes showing? Keep listening to hear the answer.
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CODY GOUGH: Have you ever been listening to the Curiosity Podcast and wanted to share a clip on Facebook or Twitter? Well, here's some super exciting news. Now you can thanks to gretta.com. That's g-r-e-t-t-a. You can stream our podcast on gretta.co/curiosity, and their podcast player will follow along with a written transcript of each episode while you listen.
When you hear a clip you want to share, just find it and click Share. Gretta will build you a video for you to share with your friends so that you can help spread the word about our podcast. Again, that's gretta.com/curiosity. And drop us a line to let us know what you think of this super cool news service.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ready for the extra credit answer? Again, [? Kat ?] asked, why did we evolve with the whites of our eyes showing? This is a great question, [? Kat. ?] Humans are the only primates that have the white part of their eyes visible.
There's an idea in science called the cooperative eye hypothesis that says we evolve to show the whites of our eyes because it makes it easier for other humans to know what we are looking at. And that made it easier to cooperate. The ability to follow someone's gaze opens up all sorts of expressive possibilities.
Nervous glances say someone might be lying. A quick look at a rock nearby tells you they might be hiding something there. And then keeping an eye on someone else lets you know you probably shouldn't trust that person. All of that may have helped us get along better than our primate ancestors did. Thanks for your question, [? Kat. ?]
If you have a question, email us at podcast@curiosity.com and make sure to include your name and where you're from. We might answer your question on a future show.
CODY GOUGH: For the Curiosity Podcast, I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. See you next time.
CODY GOUGH: And as the Klingons say, [KLINGON].
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SPEAKER 2: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.