[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] let's start with
Linguistics I've read that the Estonian language has 14 case endings eight dialects 117 subdialects and the core population of speakers is only a bit over a million now why is Estonian so complicated what a wonderful opening question it's 16 cases actually and the reason is that Estonia is like the size
of New Jersey it might be the size of Trenton and so it's a very small group of people and very few people have ever had any reason I can't believe this the first question to learn Estonian as a second language and if you try you fail and so as a result it gets more and more
complicated more and more ingrown whereas Finnish which is a sister language to Estonian is actually kind of easy it's easy Estonian so Estonian is a small language that's almost never learned by adults and therefore almost never screwed up that is why it is so complicated and does that shape the
nation of Estonia in any way or politics in Estonia it has very little to do with the Estonian soul from what I've known of the maybe one and a half estonians that I've known but it just does mean that whenever you hear an Estonian speak their language you should realize that they're doing something that it's hard
to believe anyone could do while also walking or breathing or metabolizing if having a complicated language is a social cost why don't we just abolish all irregular verbs so I understand the word go but somehow that becomes went and yes there's German venden and vendit and all that but why
don't we just do away with them all and low our transactions cost we should we should get rid of all that mess but the truth is language vastly overshoots what's necessary and it's hard to feel that partly because we all speak our own language and partly because most of us at least speak English with as languages
go is relatively streamlined and so you feel like well basic concepts basic words and you know think thought but how bad does it get most languages vastly overshoot anything that's necessary not only to just common sense but to nuanced communication and it's just because they
can it's amazing what a toddler's head can get its mind around and by the time anybody's old enough to realize that they're speaking Estonian it's too late to fix it I'm going to get in trouble for that but therefore yeah it' be nice if language were more efficient because
it would be easier to learn other people's languages Etc but it'll never happen because languages are like cats they're always crawling in and getting dirty or stung or something like that and here we are but you've argued against the notion of a standard English yet if you ever try to take a taxi cab
say in India one ends up really quite longing for some kind of Standard English that if English were simpler it'd be easier to speak to your taxi driver in India or say Trinidad why be opposed to a standard English then if you think languages end up too complicated oh no no no I'm not opposed
to a standard English but I wouldn't want it to be English because frankly I find English rather ugly if you think about the sounds of this language a e uh those are the sorts of sounds that you have to learn your way out of when you learn a language like Italian there should be an international language that
really is Dingdong easy to learn and it wouldn't be one that was like d numbed down English it would be something that would be hard to recognize by any of us as a language but that you could pick up in about a month that's what we need because to tell you the truth as far as
Standard English as normal as this thing that we're speaking feels and I mean yeah to me this is the language of God if God existed this is it but actually more Indians speak it at this point if a martian came down normal English would be that and this would be just some dialect and so what I want is for
colloquial IND Ian to be the world's universal language because actually that is the closest thing to an ideal language I have ever encountered there were no cabs where I was it was just little mopeds but you could get along why is the grammar of Malay so much more complicated than that of Indonesia
though the areas the cultures religions languages are closely related well actually the truth is that he know this is this is fun this is not what I was expecting Malay and Indian as languages go are delightfully streamlined actually Indonesian is one of those languages
where not to get too wonky no ablo oblas ablo you don't have to deal with any of that mess but then unlike most languages that don't hit you with that no God damn tones so you don't have ablo oblas ablah and no M you just have a language it's wonderful and then once it's colloquial
it's just this beautiful thing it's human language as she should be spoke now anywhere else you go in Indonesia all of a sudden everything gets normal but Malay Indonesian it was a linga Franca for 2,000 years it's been shaven of the nonsense it's a beautiful thing which new pigeon languages will we see
today and why you know what it's interesting pigeons and cre are interesting in that you can have a whole sub career where you write books about them and go to conferences about them Etc I don't know who I'm talking about but Creole languages were usually born amidst barbarity and so for example it
was a plantation language that arose when slaves were brought somewhere and couldn't go home Hawaiian pigeon is actually a creole where because you couldn't use slaves anymore you brought people from all corners of the earth to help harvest the pineapples starting in
the 1890s that sort of thing is not good so there aren't many new Creole languages emerging at this point but to tell you the truth and it's interesting there's a little debate about this going on right now in a tiny corner of linguistics that somebody has somehow pushed me into and I kid you not with
how Petty academics can be there are a couple of linguistic academics who personally dislike me because of some theories that I've had about the nature of colloquial Indonesian speech but it is the way that most people in Indonesia use language and it is it's not a pigeon
but it's a creole language it's language born a new and made better that is spoken by a great many people you and I are not going to speak it the truth is the universal language for Better or For Worse and mostly worse is this that we're doing right here English is that universal language and I think it's
going to stay that way it would be nice for me to say and one day it's going to be Mandarin but it's not because Mandarin's too hard so English is where unfortunately it just is but if a rapid inflow of new speakers predicts the evolution of a pigeon language and there are so many people having learned
English quite recently won't then English become a kind of pigeon and what where speaking will be archaic say in 30 years time you want that I I wish I could tell well no one wants that so the idea is there's no one in this room new people coming in and they're going to
make the language streamlined like colloquial Indonesia that has been said more times in this interview but the thing is English is going to stay the way it is because we have literacy once you have widespread education and literacy the pull of the written word makes it so that it's harder for a
language to be streamlined in that way otherwise yeah English would be getting simplified over the generations why does Chinese grammar seem to be so simple you get in trouble for that Chinese grammar is relatively simple if we're talking about Mandarin Chinese and that's
relative because once you dig in there are all sorts of things you know Mandarin has gender you know it's not called that but you have to use a little word with each noun and often it doesn't make any sense there are all sorts of things about Mandarin that are nasty and then of course the tones which if you're
not born to tones are really difficult but Mandarin is one of a handful of languages where geopolitical developments meant that for a while as many people were probably learning it as a second language as a first and it's funny all the evidence that shows that that's what was happening about 4 or
4500 years ago in China and it meant that a language that was originally normal and in this case it would have been a language with lots of ablo oblas ablah became one with much less of that so Mandarin is one of those streamlined languages if the world loses most of it
say 6,000 languages right now which it will is that a social loss should we be concerned about that should we celebrate you know that's a tough one too and here's my real answer my answer is not going to be that each language is a window into the souls of its speakers because frankly that idea is
surprisingly dangerous despite all of its attractions because for any cool thing you can say about a language there's something uncool you can say about it and you have to saddle the speakers with that as well but the way that you be a different culture the way that you have yourself as an entity as
separate from others is to have your own code and it doesn't matter how the code is built it doesn't matter what the shape of the words are but if everybody just speaks what we're speaking now or what's really going to happen is it's going to be this Portuguese Vietnamese Mandarin you know about 25 other
languages and then several hundred will be the minority languages and all the rest won't exist it means there really is less cultural diversity because it's harder to be a culture if you don't have your own code what is interesting about the language Sara Makin this is delightful okay so that's
from Sir for those of you the sorts of things I'm usually asked this is great sarakin okay here's what happens let's say that you're in South America you're up on the Northern Edge and it's 1660 something and it is an English Plantation Colony you bring in Africans to work there they speak two languages
for whatever it's worth they're called fongbe and Kongo some others but they don't really play much of a part so you have slaves speaking those the English leave the place and the Dutch come in there's a trade and so New Amsterdam becomes New York suram goes from the
English to the Dutch we here don't care about the suram power but that was a trade so now the Dutch are running it so you've got English and Dutch then some Portuguese Jewish slave owners come in from Brazil That's this whole other story of wandering Jews they probably bring slaves with them so 350 years
later what is spoken by the slaves there who were lucky enough to escape into the rainforest and were never caught that is what sarachin is so they have their own language and it's been studied by many people I am one of a great many but it's fascinating because it's a mixture of
all these languages then it's got other stuff that it does all by itself and it's tonal so it's it's absolutely fascinating here here's a very basic question let's say immersion is not possible how should an adult study a foreign language it's hard um sleep with somebody or frankly
or you know what there there are two things that in my experience work one of them is sleep with somebody the other one I'm going to plug something because it really works it's called gloss and it doesn't really get out there it starts you at intermediate I.E which is about exactly as far as any of those other
methods there can possibly take you no matter what they say you'll be conversing like a native in no time no you'll know some scatterings of this and that and once you finish that you go to glossa and you have intermediate sentences that are very idiomatic poured into your ear all day long however much
you want it and by the end of it you're at roughly Upper Intermediate and so that's something you can do but immersion after a while is what you have to do unless you are very very close to some individual who will tolerate listening to you sound bad for years other than that you have to be immersed
hither or thither wither why are these words mostly gone from English but not German because of those Vikings these Viking ings came it started in 787 and they started coming to England and pretending they wanted to do good and they never went away and the genetic evidence tells us they were all men not
all but mostly and so they married English-speaking women and that meant that they're speaking Old Norse they're trying to learn Old English they were over 17 therefore they didn't do it well so they were speaking crappy Old English there's no such thing as newspaper
there's no such thing as school there's really no such thing as education all there is is talk so you are a little girl or a little boy you're growing up with Mom speaking ba wolf and Dad speaking this sort of broken English and maybe you liked dad better every third
person in England talked that way pretty soon people were speaking what we speaking now we're speaking shitty Old English that's how it happened one of those things it was just this General Cascade of the complexities that filtered away is it hither and thither and wither became archaic instead of
current so we speak a very shall we say streamlined Germanic language every society has status markers clothes are one speech is another is it a problem how much speech has become a status marker should we somehow try to cut back on that I don't know Tyler I think um speech expresses our full range of
humanity and to the extent that any society unless they're only three people has some sort of status marking some sense of hierarchy at least the sense of what's formal and what's not speech has to reflect it and it can seem as if all of the way we do that with language is an add-on to basic
grammatical things like you know whether the Moon is a girl and a boat is a boy or whether something's in the past or the future but the formality is is key I kind of like that part we need to think of it as grammar rather than as some sort of frill but say you're hiring
people for a for-profit Enterprise and you want Talent can you do better in essence by at the margin disregarding how they talk and hiring the ones who will be more talented but they're overlooked by the rest of the market where in which direction is the bias yeah that's a tough one because a person can be
brilliant not to mention kind and flexible and artistically sensitive but if there's certain things about their vowels if there are certain things about their consonants if there are certain Expressions they use then they seem lesser because we've got that bread into our bones to read them that way I think
a part of Enlightenment can be to learn to read over that and that's difficult but I don't think it's impossible and I think that in many ways the tenor of our times makes it more possible than it would have been in say 1955 you learn to listen through an accent I think there are harder things
to do than that I don't think we'll ever be perfect at it but I would rather teach people that than try to eliminate all of those markers one one one task would be easier than the other I think are there any Americans today who have truly good command of proper English who actually speak
well I've I know serious question no I I I know where you're going and I want to give a a real answer to be a language person to be somebody who has mucked around with a bunch of different grammars of languages and who to and stent studies non-standard grammar that's not actually
my academic subject I play that person on TV but you look at different ways that English has spoken and you know also probably growing up black and hearing people speaking a very non-standard dialect who you don't yet have any reason to suppose or doing anything wrong all of those things I
hear almost everybody as articulate and I don't mean that in the wide-eyed forced way that it sounds there are some people who don't speak well I know some where I will say to people who I've primed if you notice that you know she never really quite rubs a noun and a verb together and you know I am capable
you know or there are people we can think of who really are stunningly inarticulate for the public positions that they're in it does whoever could it it does exist but I hear such wonderful things just standing at the post office in the way that somebody will put the most humble
thing I remember about 15 years ago even something had happened where somebody had done something arrogant and a cousin of mine said something like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah did you see this and I said well yeah I imagine that he might have meant that and she said yeah there's some of that
and that yeah there's some of that and that's the first time I ever heard that expression yeah there's some of that I've used it ever sense that was very well put I liked that nobody would have called that person articulate but but I was just thinking that's a little bit of
the art of the language that I hadn't happened to have that is an honest answer some people don't talk well but it's rare now some people are just hyper articulate but what I hear in life is that sounded good to me and it's often a slob I've read articles suggesting that Regional accents within the United
States are becoming stronger not weaker can that possibly be true who said that slate it's on slate I'm may be skeptical but that's why I'm asking you I can imagine someone saying that and their reasons that they would no Regional accents are not the way they used to be um if you could go
back in a time machine say 75 years ago the way a New Englander sounded was radically different from the way somebody sounded in Atlanta the way somebody in Atlanta sounded was unlike today not the way somebody in Raleigh or somebody in Washington DC sounded but radio is what first started erasing
those differences and then when education got better especially after the GI Bill there are differences in today's American English but you have to dig to find a lot of them Beyond cute little things like soda and pop they surprise people whereas a hundred years ago you wouldn't have had to surprise
anybody by showing that somebody from Colorado didn't sound like somebody from Minneapolis no things are coming together they'll never come completely together because still people talk more to people they live near and spend time with than they do with others but no
dialects are not diverging unless once again I've missed something because I am a little bit overstretched but in this case I I doubt it does black English say soda or pop or does it depend where you are depends on where you are because black people widespread I have never seen a dialect
map that measured that for black people specifically I know where I would look for it and I can come back to you with it but I suspect that it would follow the rest of the country when will Shakespeare require a translation today because and you know we know the drill oh it's just poetry oh you have to let
it just roll over you oh it's better when the people are British oh you really need you've got to have a good director oh you just don't want to reach up and do the work etc none of no no it's that every 10th word and especially late Shakespeare means something different
than what we think it means and it goes by and you're a little confused if somebody says generous and you think they mean magnanimous and they mean Noble the line doesn't make any sense and you go uhuh and then about 10 lines later somebody says wit and what they really mean is knowledge and you're
wondering why the line was funny when it what what and so you're confused again after that happens about 10 times frankly you're bored and I mean if you're seeing it in real time for the first time now if you've read it fine now some people would say and I think that this is a legitimate answer
everybody should be expected to have read a Shakespeare play before they see it in which case it's okay and i' I've done that but even as you know nerdy obsessive me if I haven't read it or I haven't read it in a while I will openly admit that especially with Shakespeare
after about his first 10 minutes if I go and see a production live even if the people are British and even if I've had coffee I don't know what the hell any of those people are saying and it's because the words don't mean what they used to now I've gotten in trouble with some people for that but
frankly if we sat through King leer and we hadn't read it for about 10 years I'm sorry no you do not understand what they're saying so I think that we need translations Conrad spoke I'm G to put in a word for Conrad spoke and I'm going to make sure he listens to this he's done not translations not like yoyoyo
Mario or something like that it's not it's not that it's that you take each one of those little words that doesn't make any sense you know somebody says a Haggard and you're thinking a saggy faed what and they mean a falcon well then just put in damn Falcon and then you can
go on if you do that then all of a sudden McBeth is like being at the glass managerie like you have to listen and you might get lost every now and then but you're actually seeing a play and you don't have to have read it before translate Shakespeare last week please here's a very emotional question what do
you think of the 1996 reforms to German spelling I mean does the word stop really need twps should there be such formal reforms nobody cared no it was people did that it doesn't seem to have really solved any problems but maybe there was a lull in the geopolitical
developments there at the time I don't remember but no it's things like that usually are about the concerns of a certain small number of people in American English are love letters dead no no um no not at all talk about what's articulate it happens in texting I mean I'm old enough to remember the love
letter there was something about it but you never quite had enough of them and suppose they got wet whereas with texting it's very sexy and it's a love letter and texting and this is not just cuz I did that Ted Talk 400 years ago texting can be very articulate it's interesting you can read about the
texting of people who do not have the benefit of any particular education almost every time they put their thumb to that pad they're creating some kind of poetry so no the love letter is not dead it's just that the kids are doing in a different way and I don't I don't really I don't really mind I don't mind
let's say I interview a job candidate using Skype or Zoom rather than face Toof face how is that different linguistically how should I adjust what should I expect that's different you mean if they're not actually there in the room right but I see them on the screen I think that's fine I you think
it's just as good it helps bring the world together do I need to be in the room with the person watching what they do with their legs getting a vague sense of whatever their rolence happens to be all of these people have showed up right yeah and to tell you the truth all of
that to me is a distraction I'd rather just hear their voice I mean frankly I despise Skype you're sitting there you look bad and it always cuts out and yet your whole life these days is about you want a Skype and I'm thinking yeah it's going to cut out and we're both going to
look bad but I would rather just hear the person maybe that's because I'm kind of linguis centric I'm not sure what you're what you're getting at there so you like radio as a mode of processing information there's nothing to see so you'd have a ra a telephone call with a job candidate rather than Skype give me
the voice I don't I don't want to see it yeah yeah I'll take I'll take the voice radio was better with Media Radio is easier than TV you have to put stuff on and put a microphone yeah yeah I'd rather just hear it but that's because I like language that's probably just my Quirk it's clear that most people like
looking up one another's noses and watching the screen cut out and I can't claim that I'm somehow more advanced but take me back to the teleop phone frankly now I do have a few questions about race but tradition here is we do a round of overrated versus underrated so I toss
out a name or a thing and you tell me if it's overrated or underrated okay you want this to be honest it's up to you okay Andrew Weber oh [Laughter] god oh it's a tragedy and I know that there are fans out there there are people who think of aita as their porgi and best and I do understand that there
are people who really really like Jesus Christ Superstar I understand that no one will ever ask me about this in public in he is um a very thin Talent who got very lucky he has a terrible sense of lyricists he does his job he's not offensive but he doesn't have anything that I would call genius
Richard Rogers could sit down and write a tune drunk and having yelled at somebody sometime in the 50s and had more of a melodic gift than Lloyd Weber has ever come up with more than about seven times and when he comes up with a good Melody he often doesn't even have the decency to write a bridge to the
song a very thin Talent whenever I think of him I think he may an awful lot of money and he's still making it based on a thin Talent some people get lucky now tell us what you really think uh Harold Arland this is the best interview ever Harold Arland um who wrote Stormy
Weather and a lot of other songs that sound like that never really got lucky on Broadway he was kind of a white black man a lot of his songs were too advanced for the time I have a friend Alex I know you'll be listening to this you'll like this part Alex will give me a sheet by
Harold arand from the' 40s that almost seems like Ravel and we'll always say this was too advanced for the time then we'll go on about our business he was um he was great he was a sad man he had certain problems that I think kept him from producing as much as he could have but he did really great music and his
sheets are very pianistic it's always fun playing Harold arand songs because you can tell he really had a say in how they were written out so yeah Harold arand that's an artist and look what happens to him he ends up dying miserable and he's this footnote where most of us don't know who he is where
Andrew Lloyd Weber is coming out of your faucet in the morning it's a tough it's a tough life we live Tyler God New York City subway overrated or underrated oh goodness gracious I am sick relative to reputation oh the New York subway it gets worse and worse and it's not it was
worse two years ago but just in terms of what the experience is like with the lateness with the layers of obnoxiousness that you have to put up with it's truly exhausting it has me actually thinking of either moving to a small town or just never coming out of my house again no the New York subway
it's um it's an American Tragedy and I'm surprised at the romance that a lot of people find in it I'm beginning to sound like a kagin you know and it it's because I I am so there you go Rogers and Hart yes now Rogers and Hart are in there writing these songs and frankly Hart was um very very very
drunk and so it gets to the point where you can tell that the Rhymes aren't quite working sometimes he really he had a problem and it kept their work from advancing to quite the artistic level that you would have wanted and then Hart basically just Peters out and Rogers has
to move on to the other one but Rogers and Hart their work is like you know what it's like it's like the fruer and more interesting flavors of Jello-O like you can have cherry jello and you don't care and you know you were probably in some facility somewhere but you can have watermelon Jello-O you can have Peach
Jell-O you can have the the finer jell they make a grape Jell-O that tastes like grape soda that's good stuff or like a good chili or a good jambalaya when Rogers and Hart were really going say in Pal Joey or the boys from Syracuse here's one for the Nerds heads up ones like that good good stuff I've
collected it all what is the most underrated biography the great one by William Henry III of Jackie gleon is the most touching biography I've ever read of a monstrous but rather sad person who has that Ralph cramed in childhood and becomes famous and can't quite handle it hurts a lot of
people if you ask me this and I'm a big biography fan so I'm trying to go over everything but that's one that I've actually read more than once so I can't say the power broker because everybody reads that but ones that just kind of came and went that one really killed me
and then last year one of Ouija you you always see the photographs Ouija some person laying on the pavement you think yeah Ouija he was short okay no there was more to Ouija than that and banana says biography last year of Ouija and I'm not just pushing this cuz I happen to be on the national book critic Circle
that's over but that was a really good book that I suspect is going to get lost amidst some glossier biographies if someone says oh Paul Simon Bob Dylan they're just the new version of the old American song book they're not even new anymore of course but is that crazy is
there always an American song book every era now it's Tor Swift or was there a unique American song book and those conditions can never be recreated again again I think I know your answer but please tell us no there really there is an answer to that one here's the real answer the Great American song book is
overrated as art goes as much as I love it that was partly a marketing concept to help Advance the sales of LPS once that happened at the end of the 40s and as wonderful as The Melodies are boy am I going to catch it for this but I'm sorry you people who are going to write me you know it's true The
Melodies are Absol absolutely wonderful the harmonies are spectacular the lyrics can be very good but they are a very limited theme all of the moon June Love Stuff why does it always have to be about love we're so used to that just like we're used to cartoon characters being about 3 feet tall and wearing
gloves you don't think that that's not the only way a cartoon character could be why do the songs always have to be about I loved you but you didn't love me Cole Porter could have done so much more interesting work if he didn't live when he did I say that as a great lover of
the form these days if you talk about say Paul Simon frankly the music is different it's less structured than what Harold Aran did but he writes frankly about very often more interesting things Stormy Weather frankly that's that's good poem but Paul Simon richer I think Dylan richer than Oscar Hammerstein for
example it's just that where's the balance now Taylor Swift That's generated kind of the poppy stuff which which has its place there is lemon jello but in terms in terms of the song book to say that Porter did something that no one has done better since I it's narrow because he couldn't write about anything
interesting today you can write about more interesting things but the music is mostly all about the beat and so where do you find the good middle ground Steely Dan I don't know why is it that gerswin misfired on race and porgi and Bess and Jerome Kar and Cho arguably did
not he knows this one too no one ask me these things um I don't think George gwiin misfired on race and porgi and best because he went down to gulla country he went down to daughters daughters of the dust and he did what we would today call getting down with those people and gerswin was a genius and the
music that he wrote was some of the best music ever composed by another human being and you feel guilty saying that because a black person didn't write it he had more training than Duke Ellington and so at the time he happened to be able to do it Duke who I adore couldn't
have pulled that off Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein they do Showboat Showboat is towering as well I know people on Facebook who are in tears about the 1988 recording of showboat in the original orchestrations and I remember feeling the same way at the time Showboat though is thinner art than
porgi and best it's got wonderful things in it but in the original Showboat Queen was played by a white woman in blackface it was a show of its time so I love Showboat but Kar was like Porter he did what he did very well but he was no Arin he was a songwriter that's what he did so no I
like porgi and best better porgi and best to me is is a human being I mean there are times when if life isn't going well I will put on the Houston Opera production of porin and lay down on a couch and just sit there and listen and lose myself in somebody having created something where you wonder where it came
from Showboat to me is is not that if the Hungarian State Opera wants to put on an all-white performance of porgi and Bess should we find that disturbing and do you personally find it disturbing personally no um I know a lot of people would feel differently and I think the
better question would be if it was say an Opera Company in Utah or Massachusetts are we going to get to the point where there can be a white Raisin in the Sun and it's but even to me that that's weird right Hungarian State Opera the government is ethn nationalist to some degree Oh you mean Hungary now
Hungary now oh I thought you meant just Europeans no the Hungarian State Opera I believe they did in fact put on an all-white version of borgian Bess was highly controversial it's been done in Germany actually and before there were many people who said much about it I
remember thinking I'm glad they're hearing this music and who who were they going to get to sing the parts and if anything in a certain day that should be allowed I don't know if I have the answer as to when that day would be you mean Hungary now and what do we few years ago what do we think Hungary now
is making of it I would venture to say that I imagine there's an artistic community in Hungary who are quite separate from whatever developments are going on among certain people with their fists in the air electing the wrong people yes it would be disturbing if we're talking about the equivalent of
Nazi Germany but um I don't know the artistic terrain of Hungary enough to know exactly who it was who was doing this but what's the intuition that allows us to differentiate the fact we're not Disturbed when gers and a white man writes borgi and B MH but when an all-white or nearly all-white cast
puts it on then it bothers us what's the difference in those cases I increasingly don't know because I think we're at a point where we're just beginning to see and I know I'm ahead of time a little bit here which is unusual for me but the Browning of American culture since
roughly 1995 is such that a lot of young white people today are more in touch with Black Culture black speech black ways of singing black ways of moving than they would have been when for example I was a child and I'm fully aware of the existence of racism fully however that does not Bell what I just said such that
it seems to me take it another couple of generations afterward and to say that if there was an M if there was an Adele if there were people of this kind can we really not have a white person playing a black person with it having a different meaning than it did when Tess Gardella
was up on stage playing Queenie in 1927 I think we have to get there and I can see it already and maybe the children of today's children it'll start peeping through cuz we're not really past race until that can be and I think we're in a strange place where there is a great
love for Blackness that coexists with a great hatred for other aspects of Blackness now it could be that it just stays that way forever however if it did that would be the first time in human history that things were that static I think that even when it comes to race in America things can move and so that
would be one symptom of it today should there be material reparations for African-Americans no I don't think so because I think there already were and some of it worked and some of it didn't it wasn't called reparations but what happened in the 1960s starting with what was called affirmative action also a
story never told about the expansion of wellfare in the late 60s with especially black women in mind was reparations the community reinvestment Act of 1977 was reparations so much has been reparations some of it worked some of it didn't it already happened but I here that today
those things somehow don't count and you talk about how you have to move along in time that things evolve and I don't want to be Aur margin I've said recently but was there too much of those like why is where we are right now exactly the right margin if some of the ones we triy
didn't work and someone says let's do a bit more why stick with where we are now because what would make it better I mean if let's for example there's affirmative action and in most places it's not going to go away completely and so do we need need more affirmative action when to
overdo affirmative action has so many documented problems or with welfare reform do you want more of welfare or do you want welfare programs that concentrate more on helping usher people and I mean in a real way into work which is not something anybody would call reparations it do is not symbolic
reparations right if someone said well it's almost insulting to think of welfare as symbolic reparations for African-Americans because welfare is for everyone so there were reparations to African-American victims of Tuskegee in 2015 Chicago gave reparations to African-Americans who were tortured by
the police sure so we've done those and if someone says well let's do a bit more like why stop here what would it do is is my question and I was going to say I'm not against this if there's an if but if you were going to give for example these payments to anybody who counts as black and there are people who
have come up with a metric for figuring that out as messy a question as it is and so you get some money in the bank all evidence is that one that would not change the lives of Black America to any significant degree and more to the point once that happened Tyler this is the
hardest thing that could happen in two weeks those checks would go out I'd get one you know and I'd probably give it to somebody else but i' I'm black thank you for this money for somebody who went through things who I never knew thank you I don't really want that but I know
many black people would feel differently but once that happened I think that we're in an ideological place in our society where before the ink was dry on those checks the fashionable thing to say among our best and brightest black writers would be they'd better not think that they can just write us off with a
check and on t-shirts it would be well on t-shirts there would be memes going around and gifs going around saying reparations is just a beginning not an end it wouldn't Sol any problems the people who are agitating for it now would be just as angry just as indignant
and it's not because I'm saying that they line their pockets or that it's their career to be angry but I think that it is a um it is a psychosocial position to feel that way about race that doesn't go away on the basis of anything in the real world having changed but if there could be that kind
of reparations and there could be an agre among the black punditocracy and the yell ocracy and the twittery that it was going to matter that we're going to do this we're going to have the checks and maybe a few other things and then we're going to admit that something happened
then I'd get behind it because life isn't perfect and I'd come up with something to do with that check I guess it would put one of my daughters through college or something but I can't see that happening and I'm I would not wish to get behind extra reparations that would not be accepted as significant
with people telling me that I was unsophisticated for thinking that it was so that's my position about reparations as you know there are some well-known black male conservatives Thomas soell would be one well known at George Mason why are there so few openly conservative black women gosh I don't
know and that is something I've talked about with my friend Coleman Hughes I don't know why it's always guys you know there sometimes you start ticking off a list Glenn Lowry and I on blogging heads often tick off the list of people and everybody's a guy there are some women and what's interesting about the women
is that for a reason I don't know they never wind up on the list as in they don't they they don't end up doing it for 25 years for 30 years they don't get fostered by by the circuit I can name some people I'll name one of them who I enjoyed a lot 10 15 years ago star
Parker and she was there she was around but but for some reason I'm not sure what the reason is that a non-male person is not on that list it's a short list but still I don't know let me give you an argument tell me if you agree or not the first claim is that racism is now becoming a larger problem again we
live in an age of nimi where it's very expensive to buy into good neighborhoods in a way it was not before we live in an age of algorithms arguably we live in an age where family background matters more so injustices from the past may be more persistent and even though people's
intentions toward other races may not be worse possibly they're better but that still racism in Practical terms today is a larger problem than it was say in the 1990s true or false false why because one you have to think about what we mean by racism and it seems that you can creep from it being about personal bias to
being about societal discrepancies which could be traced to racism but there's a difference between tracing it to personal biases and an assumption that the discrepancy means that the racism exists and leaving it abstract as to what we mean by the racism and I worry that that latter version is what's often
meant and more the point even if what you were saying were true and I'm not saying that it's not but let's say that that were true the question is how decisive the effect is and I would say that we tend to suppose and I'm not sure what the answer to this is I really am
not sure what the answer to this is we tend to suppose that conditions in a certain post-industrial Society starting in the late 20th century after the death of Christ that particular time then going into the early 21st century that somehow conditions them then made it
uniquely impossible for a certain group the descendants of several Generations past of African slaves to succeed that their problems had to have been due to something that we call racism with the implication that is discrimination with the idea being that if it wasn't discrimination then just the fact that
there was the discrepancy means that there was racism and if somebody puts it that way you give them the national book award I'm not quite sure what the justification for that view is I know that the problems that Black America has are not black America's fault and I've tried to write about that
it's not that somebody's lazy it's not that somebody's a poverty pimp it's not somebody's lining their pockets it's a complex cocktail of sociohistorical factors that have put it in this place but to say that racism is the main problem and not the main problem but that the decisive problem that it's
becoming worse because objective conditions are worse even if intentions are as they were or possibly slightly better suppose it was I feel that black people are underestimated with and I'm not saying that this is your claim but with any implication that because of that perhaps
Actuarial fact that's the reason that boys are shooting one another in the face in a schoolyard in the summer in Chicago or that that is why when in New York you hear that there were three people stabbed in a certain neighborhood you don't even have to wonder what color the people were and you don't hear about
that ever happening in certain other neighborhoods it's more complicated so yes I can accept that but I don't think that that's what we should think of when we try to figure out how to solve the problems because if we say that we want to get rid of the racism it seems that we don't know how how to do that and so
that would mean that nothing can happen at all putting a race aside if you just had to say in which year were economic opportunities for lower inome Americans best mhm is your answer 2020 or is it some other year I wouldn't oh certainly there's a problem with that now but the
question is and this will be a question for you how do other groups deal with it and so is the idea that because the opportunities on that score so low right now that it creates a uniquely dire circumstance when other groups of people are somehow making the best which is not
good of the worst or am I Mis understanding your question no no you're you're understanding it yeah but it does seem relative Mobility used to be higher for low-income individuals of many races in this country uh therefore to the extent opportunity is restricted today that may fall asymmetrically on some
racial groups rather than others well it would have to fall asymmetrically on some group and you would assume that it would probably be the descendants of African slaves but the question is is what happened starting in the late 60s the only way that it could have gone and
one social scientists started telling us that that's the way it was going to go starting in the late 60s when the big keyword was automation Etc unfortunately just when people got really comfortable with for example the de-industrialization hypothesis a massive influx of immigrants from the
Caribbean and Africa started coming into American cities and not living glorious lives but showing that there was something you could do and that doesn't mean that black Americans are somehow worse that this was black Americans fault once again it was a it was a series of cocktails but if you've got I
mean for example here we are in Washington DC the person who drove me here was Ethiopian I notice whenever I come to DC the person who drives me somewhere in a cab is black they're often black American now that's probably not the greatest job in the world it's not as good as that job in the tire
plant 50 years ago but there were things one could do the issue is why so many people back then got lost and so I take your point but the result didn't have to be what happened starting roughly in the early 80s for our final segment I have a few questions on what I call the John
mcarter production function what's that well you'll see did going to a quaker High School make an impact on you and if so what was it it was hard the homework was hard um it it was it was a private school it was rigorous made me je is because most of the kids there were Jewish that was really the impact but it
was hard you have to you have to work hard it's why do I feel like there's something stuck in my throat on that because I'm not saying anything about quakerism friend select school was a wonderful place I'm sure some people from it will hear me saying this but friend select school from 1977 to
1981 I learned some things about the nuclear freeze and about being a peaceful person but frankly I was a hormonal teenager and what I learned was that geometry was hard and not what rashash Shana and seder are so yes I I became Jewish and I learned homework and
I played the cello what did you learn from your mom being a social worker oh now there's one not what most people would think um my mother was I never heard her put it this way but my mother was a leftist she was a social work teacher she taught a course which I sincer cly believe was called racism 101
starting in the early '70s and I learned the de-industrialization hypothesis from her I learned how racism can be covert from her including how to watch out for it among those Jewish kids I went to school with whole nine yards you know I I learned it all from her it's part of
why I try to put myself in the head of her equivalent today when thinking why do some black people disagree with me about this that and the other and I think well how would Mom have put it it's time for me to stop saying this because I think it's gotten to the point that people do know 10
years ago I would say actually I'm a liberal and people would just throw pumpkins and watermelons now you know maybe I'll get one peach or something like that because what I am is I'm a cranky liberal I am not a republican I have never been a conservative but mom taught me quote unquote the right way to
think she she taught me what that side was I think that um she was too pessimistic but then again she grew up in the Deep South in the 40s and 50s I would have come out of that deeply pessimistic too but yeah I learned the left catechism from her I can always hear it in my head and almost all of it
was correct but my sense is where do you go from that and that's easier for me to think of having grown up Jewish in the 70s as opposed to having participated in sidin in the 50s and 60s what did you learn from your father as a university administrator Ator dad was complicated
nothing as a university administrator except that now and then he knew this kid who would this kid he was probably 30 who would program Looney Tunes that you couldn't see on TV his name was Todd and that was the only way that you could see like black and white Looney Tunes
censored Looney Tunes with minstral caricatures in them and things like that and that's stuck with me because now I've seen almost every Looney Tune it's one of these ridiculous things that I collect and do like the jello it is one of the joys of my life my little girls are now watching them and learning the
titles because that's what I am that's part of my identity other than that though what dad taught me was music really he was um it's hard to say this now imagine Bill Cosby before the like back when imagine Bill Cosby as we knew him before that was the demeanor he was that same age he wore those same
sweaters and he could play every musical instrument and he taught me that you know I I teach um a music history class at Columbia to avoid boredom and about every third thing I find dad taught me that you know kind of clinking his bourbon he'd say well that's a pedal Point that's a pickery third you should
be able to play a boogie wogie bottom with your left hand play it play it can't you play it that sort of thing so I learned that from him but no I didn't learn much about University Administration from from him as a child how does living in Jackson Heights Queens ape your current
worldview Jackson Heights is this wonderful kind of quietly kept secret it is one of the most diverse spots on Earth there are hundreds of languages spoken in Jackson Heights you can get just about any food except good Korean fried chicken and I'll bet that's coming 10 minutes from now um it is equally
divided between people from all over the world world or at least most parts of the world and then sort of NPR two kids overeducated people such as me so you've really got everything in the world and there's a KFC and a Denny's so you're talking about real diversity as opposed
to just Tibetan food and stuff like that so it is a wonderful wonderful neighborhood there just isn't enough um isn't enough parking but nothing's perfect and you know I can walk to LaGuardia on a on a clear day I can walk to LaGuardia it's a pleasure what characteristics or attributes to your
very best linguistic students have in common how do you spot Linguistics Talent linguists will think of me as shallow for this but it's the ones who can enjoy both Russian and Chinese I always tell them there are two kinds of languages there's English which is kind of in between and whatever and then
there's the kind with the oblo o plus ablah but enough to give you a stroke Russian and then there are the tonal ones which give you a stroke for a different reason the ones that can do both are that then also the ones who there's no time for this but the question of the difference between a
phon and an alfone and so for example I can say bottle or I can say bottle now if I say bottle you all think of it as a kind of a te so uh in American English is an alfone of te of tenen whereas a if I say Bobble that's a different word from bottle so B and T in English are
phones real sounds T and are just variations on one another they're alfon so that distinction takes like three weeks to get through and some people never get it to watch a student learn what a Phim is you see the light bulb go over their head then you think she's one one of them and so that's always nice so
phones Russian and Chinese how is linguistics Talent first spotted in you a Latin teacher um she was British and that was not common in my life at the time I was in college took Latin CU all my friends were taking Latin and I didn't know I was that good at it and she said oh John
it's your calling it's your calling you've got to do it and I didn't really know I didn't know what it was but I thought well if she says it and she's British then I must it must be my calling so I went on and so yeah it was it was then it was then although actually there was a guy then later in
college I asked this linguist his name was Tom you ought to be ashamed of himself you had to handle bar mustache you out there Tom and I said I want to be a linguist and he said well no it's all been done it's all been figured out and that derailed me for about three years godamn you Tom but it was it was
that British lady and finally you have a very well-known podcast called lexicon Valley which of course I recommend to everyone I do too what do you learn doing that podcast how does it fit into your own program for self- advancement of your own understanding it the truth
is what I put into that given how quickly I throw together the episodes It's not that I learn from it it's me wanting to teach the audience the stuff that I like because Linguistics to me is toys so it's a matter of what's fun this week let's do it like the last one I did
I had been thinking about genes not dungar but like DNA genes and language and how what the two can say about one another so I just thought well let's do the show about that and so that's the one that's dropping the day after we are are taping tonight it's really just giving the audience my toys now some of
it is how do you get it across to an audience that doesn't want to be taken too far into the weeds and teaching in general helps you with that but really for me it it's just here's my toy box let's just jump in John mcer thank you very much thank you for questions we have two mics one on each side of the room and I have
questions on the iPad these are questions for John questions not statements if you start making a speech I will cut you off first question please hi uh I wanted to ask about your experience in the late '90s in the culture War that seems to be something we're living through again today I see a
lot of parallels and in particular I'll tell you I was a Duke at the time and I got to know your work through great black conservative Kenny Williams who was on The Faculty uh in the English Department was pretty much the only conservative in the English Department and one of really the only people who
defended the idea of the author against the deconstructionism that was regn a Duke she was a great admirer of yours and I'd just like to hear your thoughts about the the deconstructionist moment the attack on on the idea of author ship the those views of language how you saw
them in the culture wars at the time when you were involved in the debate over ionics and how you see them playing out today that's a very interesting question you're going a little beyond what Linguistics usually dwells on as opposed to philosophy of language and so that was never anything that was going
on within any Department that I was part of the ibonus controversy was less about authorship than about an oppressed group of people making a claim about education and where your Allegiance lay depending on your your politics and that was that was the beginning of me in the media and
that's beginning to seem so abstract that for me the reason I'm sitting here is probably because I was on the wrong side of the ionics debate because I said the reason that black kids are having trouble in school is because of Home lives and neighborhood problems and not
the difference between isn't and ain't on the page and I had no idea that anybody was going to consider that the wrong thing to say but it was considered disloyal and so it got me attention for about five minutes which I hadn't expected but to tell you the truth to go out of my bwick to the extent that
people are beginning gradually to be allowed to read books for aesthetic pleasure again in literature departments and although it's just a squeak from what I've heard I'd say that that's a good thing but no one ever asked me to toss my hat in on that linguist study grammar rather than the literacy code is
that the answer that you wanted or am I missing something well I was partly I also just wanted to hear your thoughts on the the culture wars r large I mean today our fights are not really about politics they're they're about a deeper cultural thing that that you were part
of in the 90s the ionics debate was was part of that Kenny Williams stuck out not just because of her views on on authorship but because of her views about culture and and the way in which it was weaponized the left won that War I think that anybody who comes up now is immersed in a set of assumptions where
if they're going to go against them they're going against an Orthodoxy to an extent that somebody 35 years ago would be less likely to feel and so although there are always a diversity of opinions I think that what was called the culture wars back then has been won by the left
in terms of a certain Orthodoxy a certain set of ideas that you're considered to at least have to Grapple with and this is within the rarified world of the university and colleg town I think that elsewhere there's particularly a push back against it now especially over the past 10 years but in
terms of what I sense as your world and the one that I have maybe six of my toes in I think that it's not even a war at this point next question over here what's your opinion on people's who perhaps come from rural areas you can probably hear my voice spoke originally a fairly archaic accent one of the ones
that is considered dead by most people should they try to smooth them particularly if they have aspirations to move to the big city do well in their careers Etc the way you talk is not ancient it's just it's just different and so there was this and then something went this
way and then another tributary went that way so to have that that kind of accent there's nothing ancient about it it's just alternate from for example however I'm talking right now and to tell you the truth it's funny don't take this wrong but you're asking that question as if it was 50 years ago the idea that you
might want to take elocution lessons to be honest it's part of these culture wars to be honest the way that you speak today is a plus it makes you distinctive There Is For Better or For Worse a Cult of authenticity which can be good and bad but people will listen to you more
and I think you would elicit more sympathy with the accent that you have and your facial expression suggests that you're really surprised to hear this from me but no I would love to speak the way the way you speak unless I'm unless I'm missing something it gives you a calling card no iPad question you want a
simple universal language why not espiranto [Laughter] oh you want and then he just walks away please if you want to say something else sure uh just briefly I think the biggest issue for me is most people find it a little jarring people assume I'm one of many things and it can become sort of
this much like this talk ways of derailing conversation it it could be overly distinctive and almost trivializing I think that's where I come from I see what you mean especially since there aspects of that in my own life yeah it can get old when you don't talk the way people expect you to talk
yes that's that's definitely true if you want my impression I would think you're from the Netherlands frankly I'm actually from rural Virginia um but I've been I've had a professor who just blurted Dutch at me once and I in a frightened Panic quickly doted away Espero archaic um espiranto is cute
Esperanto is um it's Italian dumb down and me parolas esparon lingon any language nerd you know curled up with it before they could date but Esperanto is not easy to somebody from China and so zamenhof had you know the blinkered world view that he had because that's the view that someone like him
had to have at the time but esperano is just Italian made easy with some other stuff thrown in espiranto verbs if you grow up really almost anywhere else on Earth are a nightmare like zanoff is assuming that a language has to have things like he had seen the book when he
went to the store languages often leave that Nuance to context so espiranto is a fun toy of all of the artificial languages it is the handiest mean that volapuk for example the other one that was really popular somebody made up an artificial language that was hard and so why would you bother esperano is great
but um the international language unfortunately is the English lingo and I think we're just kind of stuck with it next question there used to be a theory that uh language controlled thought a lot of us encounter that in 1984 you and others have said that's probably not the
case uh and it only affects maybe things on the very margin so where is that margin is it just trivial things or for example just to take one example do sort of political brandings like say saying someone is pro-life instead of anti-abortion does that influence inuence the way people reason or or not
reason about subjects like that does that influence real opinions and real outcomes terminology can help move a debate along but the problem is just that if there were negative associations that you were trying to wave Away by changing the terminology the negative associations are just like gats and they
will settle back down on whatever new term you come up with and so you know pro life pro-choice those are very clever terms and you know we've gotten a bead on them we know we know what they mean that's what's always going to happen and so language affects thought in sweet little
ways that you can tease out by hooking wires up to somebody's head and showing that they have some tiny distinction you know Russian has two words for blue and one of them means light blue and one of them doesn't and you can do an experiment that shows that Russians are
infinitly more sensitive to noticing when the blue Shades from one blue to another is that a world viw I certainly hope not but terminology yeah you can move things along but you have to realize that you're going to have to keep on renewing the terms it's thought that you have to change not the language
next question I was wondering what advice you'd give to Young African-Americans today you've clearly been through a lot of culture War stuff right you're a veteran it can often feel like there's this strong downward pressure on African-Americans and you feel like you're the last in a long
marathon and there's a baton being handed off to you and if you slow down you might drop it and you might waste four centuries of hard work now obviously you want to be intentional you want to be a smart rational person but that pressure of that baton is always at your back and so I want to know what you
would say even to your daughters right who are growing up in a time when you know people like Rosa Park seem like ancient dinosaurs but they were only around a few decades ago right yeah it's funny my older daughter the other day said very innocently she's eight she's because of school activity she said I'm
getting tired of Martin Luther King and so I took her aside and I said do you actually know what he did and they had actually taught her pretty well but I could tell that to her that was like listening to something about you know the French and Indian War it's 400 years
ago you know this is my real answer people talk about singing well no they people don't always talk about this but they should if you're trying to hit a high note one way that you hit the high note is you look up at it and you go ah and you think of it as as an effort if you have
a really high note what a good singer does is Imagine themselves looking down on it that's how you hit a high note like that in the same way if you're thinking of being black as a burden and I don't know what your personal circumstances are but often you're taught that you're working against all
of this flak from the outside because people are leveling microaggressions at you Etc and you know they they are but as far as I'm concerned and I think this is the way someone thought before about 50 or 60 years ago talk about the culture wars and how you can forget that
you're making assumptions rather than dealing with truth is that if somebody throws a little something like that at you you look down on it and if anybody tells you that that makes you arrogant well then frankly I guess it does but keep being arrogant because I have never understood the idea that some person
calls me and I'm supposed to fall down crying and run to the diversity coordinator because that hurt me when frankly it didn't and really I'm better than the person who said that that's the way I always felt and somewhere past 30 I realized oh that's supposed to make me cry and so I inculcate that in anybody I
know because it's the way I always felt and to be honest with the way both of my daugh daughters act they're going to hear this one day the way both of them act I can tell that I'm not even going to have to teach them the idea is if anybody gives you any of that well that
they messed up and you have a lot to live for and life is never perfect and think about the good dinner we're having tonight and that's not that's not a bromide be a little snobbish don't let people tell you that you're supposed to bend yourself down to the insults that other people lob at you especially when
they're subtle an abstract you're you're you're better you're just better and I know that that's not what I'm supposed to be saying to you as a 54 year old person with a certain responsibility but I think I'm right and I guess that means that I'm arrogant but then again I think
that in that sense most black people were arrogant in about 1950 be like old people next question um my question is about official top- down control of language I can think of two examples one being the French Academy and their very strict regulation unofficial of the French
language and the second is Korea where Korean language was written in Chinese characters for a very long time and that was used by the aristocracy to keep the population literate and consolidate power so what is the effect of that kind of control on the development of a language and I guess creativity or
innovation or the culture in a larger like macro sense that's interesting I'll just say very quickly exerting control on language from the top is hard and it almost never works in a real way with the exception of but for example in terms of Blackboard grammar rules the only one in
English that has really ever worked is the one that says say Billy and I went to the store rather than Billy and me almost everybody in this room probably has mastered saying Billy and I except when you're you know drunk or something like that and that's because that's become this matter of shame but
otherwise all those rules that we learn are things that everybody breaks all the time and it never really changes now Korea is interesting if you're talking about having an utterly opaque writing system that doesn't fit the language is structure meaningfully at all that's
going to exert a certain downward pressure on the ability of the masses to express themselves in writing and therefore you're not going to have creativity from down below that anybody is going to record because nobody can write but even there it's surprising in that the Chinese writing system um and
like the Korean came up you know King SE Jong came up with this perfect writing system that now is the Envy of the world the Chinese writing system I say as a great lover of Mandarin Chinese I've been working for the past five years on this and it's at the point that I can walk by a sign and get most of it and
Pat myself on the back because I decided I'm going to learn that because I can tell that they don't want me to learn it and so that is why but the Chinese writing system is an utter hair raising ridiculous indefensible nightmare utter nightmare created basically for scribes to use among
themselves it's all like this running joke and yet what's interesting is that Ordinary People do use it it's amazing what toddlers can take in it's amazing what a populace of people can do you're at a Chinese restaurant and the waiter doing this that that guy knows thousands
of these things so it's amazing what people can do but you don't want to overdo it and have Korean written in Chinese that was frankly if I may insult your country but it was 600 years ago that was barbaric but it's amazing what people can make do with iPad question Miles Davis is porgi and Bess what do
you think well Miles Davis is a great artist in a way of distilling into a single statement great and sometimes needless complexity I love what he did with porgi and best but with porgi and best I like the original better just because it's a God but still it's a wonderful thing one plays it it's
part of one's life you can play it while you're making dinner you can play it while you're making a lot of things so yeah it's nice but I always go to the full thing when it comes to porgi and Bets Miles Davis in general yes he's represented about seven times in and it's the Houston Opera version you
prefer yeah and that's that's becoming a fdy dudy thing I mean there are people who actually you know Glen Etc but I want the one where I I was 10 I was 10 and as unsentimental as I am now saw that production mom dragged me by the hair and at the end of it I was sobbing
like a baby which is not what I do because I was so touched so I want the recording of that for arbitrary sentimental reasons last two questions one on each side yes uh you mentioned from my understanding that Mandarin or pigeon being like these simplified maybe trade or International languages to some
EX ENT MH I was wondering if there are any similarities with maybe sign languages for maybe example like American Indian trade languages to linguist study sign languages and are there principal components like alones or phones alaton Alon Alon alaton I like that sounds like a doop group yes sign
languages are studied I was just in Israel working with a group on that just actually a few weeks ago yes they are new languages and so they grow up just like pigeons and Crees like first you have a pigeon one and then it becomes a creole that is a real language and you can see how the language
develops more and more complex things they do have phones they do have Alo tones and it's a very interesting analysis because what you see is people using their hands and you think well the one thing that they don't seem to have a sound but you do have the equivalent of
that they are complex they have have all the stuff that regular languages have and so actually Tyler you asked about Crees and I remember you were talking about if new ones were being born and I knew there was something I wasn't saying sign languages being born are that happening and there there're many of
them being born for some reason in Asia in particular yes and so they're actually a very interesting new language Genesis story last question have you done research in Al language family especially in Mongolian because it's a the structure Wise It's a lot different than Latin Greek or any other East Asian
language and if you have done so can you share some of your findings this is amazing so a great last question it really is yeah let's close out with the Mongolian languages and they're influence on Chinese and there's a whole story Mongolian languages are cool in that if
one were going to learn a language one would rather learn one of the Mongolian Lang languages then say French or Spanish because they have a way of keeping their meanings nicely separate this suffix means that this suffix means that this suffix means that and so they're elegant in that way Mongolian
gets fun in that there are hybrid languages spoken B for John some dialect of Mandarin some dialect of Tibetan and Tibetan is really like 30 different languages and then some Mongolian language all have a train wreck and they create this mixture language that nobody's ever heard of outside of the
village that has happened a lot if by any chance you were Mongolian this happens with for example the bow on variety and so there's that then the other thing about Mongolian is that you can be a Mongolian speaker and run China for a long time or a language or a language related to Mongolian and it can
have no real effect on the system at all because they didn't really talk to the population but the fact is Chinese has existed in relationship to many Mongolian speaking people up in the north for a long time so a lot of the things that make Chinese hard are because it's mixed
with Mongolian and you end up having this sort of hybrid system so that's the Mongolian Story of All Things John has written at least 20 books they're on Amazon again his podcast is called lexicon Valley or just Google John mcquater podcast lexicon Valley and again big hand for John thank
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