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Transcript Episode 95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about our default assumptions for learning new words – whether as kids, in a classroom, or while travelling. But first, we have new merch.

Gretchen: We have three new designs for merch. First off, we have some t-shirts, stickers, and badges, buttons, pins, whatever you call them, that say, “Ask me about linguistics.” They look like one of those classic, red “Hello, my name is” stickers only with “linguistics” instead of you name for those times when you’re maybe at a conference or an event or going about your life, and you want people to know that they can skip the small talk with you and talk directly about linguistics with you.

Lauren: We also have t-shirts that say, “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” which is not untrue.

Gretchen: This is a classic kind of sentence in linguistics more commonly found as “More people have been to Russia than I have,” but that was less funny and self-referential on a t-shirt. These are called the “comparative illusion,” which is when the first time you read that sentence with the comparative in it – “More people have been to Russia than I have” – you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. Wait. Hang on. What does that even mean?” That’s the illusion part. The illusion is that it makes sense. If you think about it longer, then it doesn’t make sense.

Lauren: It doesn’t make sense.

Gretchen: If you wear a shirt that says this – or a hat, or you carry around a mug or a sticker or a tote bag – that says these things with, of course, the word “shirt” swapped out for the relevant object – because we know how to do that – then people might do a double-take when they see it. You can confuse people, which sounds fun.

Lauren: This t-shirt is available in an old school typewriter-looking font. All of our shirt options are there on Redbubble with a range of different cuts and colours. We have relaxed-fitted classic t-shirts as well as hoodies, zip hoodies, and tank tops.

Gretchen: We have a secret third design, which we will be talking about later this episode – dun dun dun.

Lauren: Mm, suspense and mysteries.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is about the word “do” in English, and why it’s weird compared to basically every other language, and how this only started happening in the past few hundred years.

Lauren: To listen to this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Plus, patrons got to find out about this new merch a few weeks ago. If you become a patron now, you’ll be the first to find out about future new merch and other behind-the-scenes updates. And you get to hang out on the Lingthusiasm Discord server to chat with other linguistics fans. Plus, of course, getting a whole bunch of bonus episodes and just helping us continue making the show for you.

[Music]

Lauren: I want you to imagine you’re visiting a place where you don’t speak the language. You’re standing in a field with one of your new friends. It’s a lovely day. You’re enjoying the scenery. And a rabbit scurries by. That person you’re standing with says, “Gavagai.” What do you think they are referring to?

Gretchen: I wanna say that they’re talking about the rabbit. This is a word that means “rabbit,” probably, in whatever that language is.

Lauren: Possibly.

Gretchen: But, in principle, it could mean a lot of other things as well. It could mean “scurrying” or “creature,” “animal,” or, as the philosopher V. W. O. Quine said, “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts,” which is just a very bizarre mental image.

Lauren: This is indeed a classic linguistic thought experiment from the philosopher V. W. O. Quine.

Gretchen: It’s also found in philosophy of language as well as linguistics. The philosophers sometimes also talk about this anecdote from a more philosophical perspective. The thing that’s exciting to me about it as a linguist is that it’s this pretty good approximation and distillation of the kind of challenge that you have when you’re trying to figure out some words in another language, and you don’t have someone or a book that can do some translation for you. You’re just like, “Well, here’s this word that’s been said in this context. What do I think it refers to?”

Lauren: I also appreciate how this one little thought experiment, interactional moment, set Quine on a philosophical train of thought that took up an entire book. Quine’s 1960 book Word and Object takes this thought experiment as its starting point to tease apart a lot of the issues around how we make and share meaning, especially across languages.

Gretchen: He’s got 200-plus pages of pretty dense philosophical argument around this idea of how we make and share meaning, and that this initial moment – we have some biases as humans towards what we think people are likely to be referring to when they give us a word randomly like that.

Lauren: And some systematic ways we can go about confirming whether our hypotheses and biases are correct there.

Gretchen: Right. We might be wrong. This might be a particular species of rabbit. This could be a young rabbit, an old rabbit, a male rabbit, a female rabbit. There could be more that we’re not aware of in this particular context, but it gives us this start. We tend to assume that words refer to whole objects in this particular way and not just the rabbit’s ears.

Lauren: The Gavagai thought experiment has almost gone from thought experiment to fairy tale in linguistics and philosophy. I feel like it’s a story that we tell and share. It’s always “gavagai.” It’s always a rabbit. It’s become immortalised in this way.

Gretchen: “Gavagai” is such a catchy name. He’s just a little guy. It’s this cute rabbit.

Lauren: Quine did some great branding there.

Gretchen: We decided to make some merch that has this great woodcut-type sketch of a rabbit with the caption “Gavagai” and “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts” from our artist, Lucy Maddox.

Lauren: Fun fact about the quote that we put on the t-shirt. “Lo, an un-detached rabbit part” is something that I always was told as part of the story of Gavagai.

Gretchen: Me, too, yeah. Is that not what he said?

Lauren: Going back to Word and Object, he never quite used that combination of words in reference to Gavagai. He did say, “Lo, a rabbit,” or “It could mean ‘un-detached rabbit part’,” but he never used this particular combination of words. It’s kind of become part of us perpetuating the folk story rather than us directly and specifically referencing Quine.

Gretchen: I think because “Lo” has this old time-y feeling to it, and also that “un-detached rabbit part” is such a weird and memorable concept, that, yeah, I guess people must’ve just shoved them together in memory because I could’ve sworn that’s how I was taught it. Fascinating. This is our tribute to the folk tale aspect of Gavagai. Also, because it’s very catchy, and it’s a fun little name.

Lauren: This is our third item of merch that we have available now. It’s incredibly cute. We have it in a range of colours. It looks amazing on different coloured t-shirts. We’re so happy to get to continue the story of Gavagai.

Gretchen: It’s got this whole retro-futurism Vaporwave aesthetic if you combine the colours in particular combinations, or you can get this very traditional woodblock look depending on which colour combination you pick. I think it’s really fun as both historical and also modern.

Lauren: I think there’s always been something charming about it being a rabbit.

Gretchen: There’re other linguistic experiments that also involve rabbits. We’ve talked about how Bill Labov, who’s a famous sociolinguist, did a rabbit experiment with some children where they were feeling shy, and so he had them talk to a rabbit instead of to an experimenter. There’s a nice tradition of rabbits in linguistics. Gavagai is also available on children’s t-shirts and onesies if you have a kid who you want to dress up as a famous linguistic thought experiment.

Lauren: Speaking of kids, I feel like a kid would be very chill with just having a rabbit pointed out with “gavagai” because they have to make sense of the world as they’re living in it. Children tend to have this assumption that you are referring to a whole object. You’re not just referring to the ears of the rabbit, but you’re referring to the whole rabbit at once.

Gretchen: Yeah. This is called the “whole object assumption,” and it comes up quite a bit when people are analysing child language acquisition. How do kids learn so many words so fast? Part of it is because they’re often making these sorts of assumptions, which are sometimes wrong, about the generalisability of the words that they’re learning. They’re often at this particular object level of “rabbit” or “truck” rather than “wheels” or “ears” or “yellow” or “fuzzy” or “animal,” which are both more or less levels of granularity as applied to the object. They’re often doing it at this object level.

Lauren: I feel like language learning apps and textbooks also sit at the whole object bias level as well. They also make use of this.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m taking an ASL class at the moment, and the textbook that we’re using, which I’m told is a very popular textbook, called Signing Naturally, it does this thing where it’s trying not to imply that ASL signs have these direct translations into English words. It’s trying to get you to consider them as meanings themselves that may not correspond directly with other languages because it’s its own language. Sometimes, it’ll give several possible English translations – English words or phrases to translate a sign – and sometimes, wherever it’s possible, it’ll give pictures instead. For example, for clothing, you’ll have a drawing of a dress, but it’s a drawing of a particular dress that has a colour and a style to it. Then you have to make this generalisation in your head of “That’s a dress, and I’m probably meant to assume that this is the sign for the concept of dresses in general and not be overly narrow on the specific style of dress or overly general on this could be any article of clothing.” Or they’ll give a photo of a dog, and you’re supposed to conclude, okay, this is a sign for “dog” in general not “Fido the dog,” or “golden retriever,” or “mammal.”

Lauren: It would be very impressive and counter-intuitive if you learnt the word for “dalmatian” before “dog,” or they just went through and being like, “The only dog you’ll ever need to refer to is Snuggles here.”

Gretchen: Dalmatians, apparently, are often d/Deaf, so there’s a whole section about dalmatians in this textbook.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: This is also based on your level of awareness of the granularity that humans tend to communicate at with pictures. This is not uncommon for language textbooks and apps that they’re trying to avoid translation, which is all very well, but instead, they’re doing this baked-in level of assumption about what this one picture corresponds to which is inevitably less general than a word because the word “dog” refers to the whole class of dogs, but a picture of a dog necessarily has to be a specific dog that looks a particular way. I mean, alternatively, they could give you a whole bunch of different pictures of different kinds of dogs and refer to them all as “dog,” which is more like what a baby has because they’re learning the language and the whole world, but in practice, it does work pretty effectively to rely on this type of assumption. This thought experiment can tell us about why.

Lauren: I also like that Quine chose a nice, almost textbook animal. It’s a small, independent – if you don’t have rabbits in your ecosystem, you probably have some other small, scurrying, possibly mammalian creature that you can substitute in. It’s a nice in-the-real-world object, but not all of us walk in and start looking at random animals passing by. If you’re starting to do, say, linguistic fieldwork in a language you don’t know much about, the question is always “Where do you start?”

Gretchen: When I’ve taken classes where you bring in a speaker of a language that nobody in the class knows anything about, there’s often a grad student in a different department at the university who’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do this side job. Sounds fun.” We’ve often started with greetings, which is polite, and then sometimes with some verbs. But we have this shared classroom context, which is also artificial.

Lauren: Sometimes, you just want to get a sense of the kind of way that words sound and the way the language feels. One really common way of getting a sense of the language is to collect a wordlist, so using a shared language and asking someone to translate common words into their language.

Gretchen: The wordlist thing is such an interesting puzzle because if you’re thinking about, okay, I wanna compare several different languages or compare this language to other languages that’ve had people do documentation on them, you wanna try to collect a very similar wordlist across different languages. Also, languages arise in different cultural contexts, and they say different things. What one language might have words for might not be the same as another language. How do you pick a set of words that languages are really likely to have in common?

Lauren: The good news is you don’t have to do that work. There is a list. Much like Gavagai is a meme, I feel like the Swadesh List is a bit of linguistics meme in the language documentation world. This is a standardised list of common vocabulary that people will often collect for a language that they’re documenting.

Gretchen: This is a list that’s named after a language named Morris Swadesh, by the way. When I first encountered it as a grad student, I was like, “Ooo, what does it mean to ‘swadesh’ something?” and it just means to name it after a guy.

Lauren: I thought it was an acronym. I was like, “Yeah, ‘W’ probably stands for ‘words’,” and it just kind of didn’t flesh it out. We could retronym it.

Gretchen: The thing about Swadesh Lists is reading through them is this fun experience. There’s many Swadesh lists because people can’t agree, obviously, on what the most basic words should be or how many of them there are. I think Swadesh’s first list was 100 words, and then there’s a 207-word version.

Lauren: Why the seven? That’s what I’ve always wanted to know.

Gretchen: There was this 100-word list. Then someone else came up with this 200-word list. But the 100-word list actually had seven words that were on it that weren’t on the 200-word list. They got merged together with these extra seven words.

Lauren: I’ve always wondered where those seven words came from because it made it sound very intentional and scientific.

Gretchen: Absolutely not.

Lauren: Just to be very clear, the Swadesh List is like, Morris Swadesh, who was a brilliant linguist, but he came up with this list based on his intuitions about what were words that were likely to be existent in as many of the world’s languages as possible while also being independent of cultural influences.

Gretchen: I think we should just read this – at least the 100-word list, which is shorter.

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: People can click through to the longer 207-word list if you wanna see what the expansion pack looks like. Let’s start with our 100 starter Pokémon Swadesh list and maybe give a bit of commentary about the list. They’re very handily grouped – at least this list that I have is grouped into topics. We have words related to the here and now.

Lauren: “I,” “you, “we,” “this,” “that,” “who,” “what.” This is the classic order that I have done Swadesh Lists in, absolutely.

Gretchen: Then there’s some versions of the list that split “you” into “you (singular)” and “you (plural)” because, of course, English merges those, but most languages don’t. Then we have words related to quantity or amount.

Lauren: “Not,” “all,” “many,” “one,” “two,” “big,” “long,” “small.”

Gretchen: And then a few words related to people.

Lauren: “Woman,” “man,” “person.”

Gretchen: And animals.

Lauren: “Fish,” “bird,” “dog,” “louse.”

Gretchen: The four animals.

Lauren: I mean, the absolute irritation of living your life with lice, I can see how he would’ve put this on the list.

Gretchen: Lice are truly a ubiquitous part of the human experience, unfortunately. Then we have a section of words that are related to parts of plants.

Lauren: “Tree,” “seed,” “leaf,” “root,” “bark.”

Gretchen: There’s a clarification that this is “bark of tree” not “bark of dog.”

Lauren: But also because the next word on the list is “skin” as in “[person]” because tree bark and human skin can actually be the same word in a lot of languages, so they just wanna really clarify.

Gretchen: Then there’s a bunch of words related to internal parts of the body.

Lauren: “Skin,” “flesh,” “blood,” “bone,” “grease,” “egg,” “horn” – I think we’re moving beyond humans here – “tail,” “feather” – oh, we’re back to humans – we’ve got “hair,” “head,” “ear,” “eye,” “nose,” “mouth,” “tooth,” “tongue,” “claw,” “foot,” “knee,” “hand,” “belly,” “neck,” “breast,” “heart,” “liver.” We’ve gone all the way through the body.

Gretchen: A sort of interesting assortment of words related to body parts both of humans and animals and also plants – like “seed” and “leaf.” Then we’ve got a bunch of verbs related to actions the human body can do.

Lauren: “Drink,” “eat,” “bite,” “see,” “hear,” “know,” “sleep,” “die,” “kill,” “swim,” “fly,” “walk,” “come,” “lie,” “sit,” “stand,” “give,” “say.”

Gretchen: Then we’ve got some words related to natural weather-y phenomena.

Lauren: “Sun,” “moon,” “star,” “water,” “rain,” “stone,” “sand” – that’s beyond weather. We’re just into nature now. “Earth,” “soil,” specifically, “cloud” – “not fog,” it says – “smoke.”

Gretchen: You can get a sense of human activities.

Lauren: “Fire,” “ashes,” “burn,” “path.”

Gretchen: Also “mountain” in this set. It’s hard to break them up into groups because they follow this trajectory of “burn,” “path,” “mountain.” I can write this short story.

Lauren: Again, very clearly “not hill.”

Gretchen: Also, English alphabetical order is almost guaranteed not to be alphabetical order in any other language, so this is not gonna help at all.

Lauren: It is actually a good flow, and it’s really nice to have them semantic and not in some random alphabetical order when you’re talking to people because they’re gonna be thinking of “smoke” more easily if you’ve just said “cloud” than if you’ve just said “small.”

Gretchen: There’s a selection of colours. Our basic colour list has five colours.

Lauren: “Red,” “green,” “yellow,” “white,” “black.”

Gretchen: Yeah. That’s a choice. After “black” comes “night,” which, again, semantically related.

Lauren: Also true.

Gretchen: Then we’ve got a few adjective-y things.

Lauren: “Hot,” “cold” – both of those specifically of weather – “full,” “new,” “good,” “round,” “dry.”

Gretchen: Then just finally, all by itself with no real semantic category-ness –

Lauren: “Name.”

Gretchen: – which, you know, is an important word, but yeah.

Lauren: Swadesh is there with 99 words, and he’s just like, “Ah, that’s a really good one. Got to get that in.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: These are concepts that he thinks are ubiquitous to the human experience, which may or may not be the case. Not everyone lies in places where there are mountains or where there’s enough water to swim in. There certainly are some aspects of these that you could definitely dispute. But it’s kind of fun to be like, “Yeah, we all have the moon. That’s neat.”

Lauren: And it’s always been a sense of like, “This is just a list not because it is necessarily objectively the most universalisable set of words,” but it’s just like, “Look, I think this is a pretty good list.” And everyone’s been like, “It’s pretty good. It does the job. We get 100 words, and we can start comparing languages.” I’ve definitely done this with a whole bunch of different dialects and, as I’m going through, being like, “Oh, these people have kept a final K on these words. That’s interesting.” It does the job, and we’re all pretty realistic about that.

Gretchen: There’re lots of people who’ve proposed alternative versions of Swadesh lists, including Swadesh himself who proposed several different versions because there’s this sense that this is an evolving thing. But like, names for parts of the body – that makes sense. The longer list, we’re not gonna read all 207, but it has more verbs on it. It has more kinship terms, so it’s got “mother,” “father,” “wife,” “husband,” some of these kinship terms. It’s just got more of everything. You can expand it in various directions. Something that I think is really neat about the Swadesh lists is because they’re this thing that has this cultural history of being collected in a lot of different places, you can try to do these very large-scale analyses comparing a whole bunch of languages because, for many of them, something like a Swadesh List exists, whereas a list that had a whole bunch of more culturally specific items on there – so there’s not a lot of food on this list other than “fish” and like –

Lauren: “Liver.”

Gretchen: – “leaf” and “bark.” Because with food, you could run into this problem of like, well, okay, in this part of the world, we wanna have “rice” on the list, and in this part of the world, we wanna have “corn” on the list, and in this part of the world, we wanna have “potatoes,” we wanna have “wheat,” or we wanna have something else for your staple starch, which is really culturally important but changes depending on where you are.

Lauren: In the corner of the world that I work in with the Sino-Tibetan language family, there is actually an area-specific set of word lists that are much more culturally specific and were created by a team looking at, specifically, the relationship between all the languages in this big family. You do get a lot more words that, if I were just translating them into English, would be “rice,” but you have, like, “rice as it is growing on the rice plant,” and then you have “unhusked rice,” and then you have “husked, uncooked rice,” and “cooked rice” – all of these things we just translate as “rice” as like, non-agricultural English speakers who eat rice as one of many different staple carbs, but much more of that cultural specificity that Swadesh was actually trying to avoid with this list of 100 words.

Gretchen: But I have so many different words for ways that I can eat potatoes.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: Or bread. They could be French fries. They could be chips. They could be mashed and baked. And it can be a baguette or a loaf. But yeah, there are different levels of cultural specificity. I also find it interesting that there was another linguist who came up with a Swadesh list for signed languages. Because if you do this traditional Swadesh list for a signed language, a lot of sign languages use fairly similar ways of expressing pronouns like “I” and “you” because you can use pointing, and body parts because you can point to the body part or otherwise indicate it some way.

Lauren: You’ve got them right there.

Gretchen: So, if you compare signed languages, and your list contains one third body parts – which this 100 Swadesh list is at least a quarter body parts – you might be like, “Yeah, they’re all totally so related because they all indicate the eye by pointing to the eye.” He was like, “Look, we’ve got to have a list that’s not like that for comparing sign languages that has other words on it because otherwise you’re gonna overestimate this relationship. The first 10 words on James Woodward’s sign language Swadesh List – they are in alphabetical order, which, you know, gives you a sense of the spread – are “all,” “animal,” “bad,” “because,” “bird,” “black,” “blood,” “child,” “count,” and “day.” Again, fairly cross-cultural concepts but not as many body parts.

Lauren: That’s cool. I didn’t know there was a sign-specific list.

Gretchen: It’s neat to think about the different types of relationships that a Swadesh List can be trying to express.

Lauren: One of the things I always find interesting about the Gavagai thought experiment is that there is this assumption that you’re talking about the rabbit and not the moving because some languages will place more emphasis on the movement of animals as a way of describing and distinguishing them. You see in the Swadesh list as well we have some basic noun things, and we have some basic verb action items in that list. I have occasionally had to double check and act out some of those actions to make sure we’re definitely talking about the same thing. One example of specific verbs that I often think about is Nick Evans’ description of verbs for different kinds of macropods hopping in the Kunwinjku language, which is spoken in The Top End in Arnhem Land in Australia.

Gretchen: Macropods are things like kangaroos and wallabies?

Lauren: Things like kangaroos and wallabies. There’s a whole world of different hopping creatures of this type in Australia. You also have wallaroos and pademelons in different parts of Australia – and many different types of kangaroo.

Gretchen: This is really an area about which I know very little about the flora and fauna.

Lauren: Yeah, in the way that in doing the Gavagai merch, I learnt there’re so many more different types of rabbit than the pet bunnies and the random wild rabbits that were released into Australia by white settlers.

Gretchen: Okay, I’m learning some things about animals.

Lauren: There’re different verbs to describe “the hopping of.”

Gretchen: In English, if I was talking about kangaroos – and, I guess, wallabies and wallaroos sort of look like smaller versions of them – I would just say, “The kangaroo hops,” and “The wallaby hops,” “The wallaroo hops.” I would describe these animals differently using the name of the animal and describe their action as being essentially the same thing.

Lauren: Yeah. Whereas in Kunwinjku, you have a different verb for if you’re talking about the hopping of a black wallaroo compared to an agile wallaby. For the antilopine wallaby, you have different verbs depending on whether it’s a male or a female hopping.

Gretchen: Wow.

Lauren: What’s really nifty about this is that sometimes it is actually easier to identify the difference between some of these macropods based on the way that they hop rather than just looking at the animal itself.

Gretchen: Oh, I guess because if most of the time when you’re seeing them, they’re in motion, then it’s really the movement that’s telling you what the different species is.

Lauren: You have all of this cultural knowledge – like when you start unpacking what “gavagai” means, who knows what kind of cultural knowledge might be tied up in that. Before, we were just talking about, like, whether it’s male or female, but there could be all kinds of things about the particular breed of rabbit. You can tell from the way that it scurries. Or it could be one of those snowshoe hares in North America.

Gretchen: You mean the ones that change colour and turn white in the winter to match the snow and then brown in the summer to match the ground?

Lauren: Yeah. It could be that you see a rabbit with your friend, and then six months later, they say, “Gavagai,” again, and you’re like, “Oh, so brown and white rabbits,” but no, it’s only the snowshoe hare specifically that is brown at one time of year and white at the other time of year. You are never going to get that kind of knowledge from just your first interaction with a language and its speakers and the world in which they live. That’s gonna come with way more engagement.

Gretchen: I think the other nice thing about the Gavagai story is it reminds us to be curious and humble about our first attempt at figuring out the meaning of a word and realise that there can always be more going on with a word than is apparent at first glance.

Lauren: And that just because you don’t immediately have some scientific classification for what you’re doing doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have knowledge and value included in that.

Gretchen: This is one of the things that gets me about – you know these things that go around on social media occasionally where like, “There’s no such thing as a fish. ‘Fish’ is not a scientific category. It is a category of humans who went like, ‘Yeah, little swimmy thing. That’s a fish’.”

Lauren: Yeah. In the way that people get very exercised about whether something is a fruit or not.

Gretchen: And there are so many more items in the world for which this is true once you start digging into it. There’s this Tumblr thread about how not only is “fish” not real but also “trees.” There is a convergent evolution of “Make the plant tall.”

Lauren: I do like the person who centres with like, “Oh, you thought fish were a problem. Have I got news for you about lizards.” And you’re just like, “Ah, this is actually a thing for everything.”

Gretchen: “Trees” aren’t a whole coherent taxonomic strategy, it’s just that being a tree is like becoming a crab. It’s like when a plant wants to become tall, it trees itself. Like palm trees and evergreen trees are not related to each other. There’s a whole bunch of bushes and other plants in between them that are more closely related.

Lauren: I think this is why lexicography and making dictionaries and writing dictionary entries and making sense of the relationships between different meanings of a word is as much an art as a science. You can have all these objective facts about rabbits or about lizards or about fish, but at the end of the day, it’s like, “How are people actually using this word?” You have to pay attention to that.

Gretchen: And the fun part is that linguists similarly don’t have a coherent taxonomic definition for what a word is.

Lauren: It’s true.

Gretchen: Because there are folk meanings that things have where you’re like, “Well, I know what a tree is good enough, which is, it’s a tall plant.” That’s fine. Or “I know what a word is good enough. I’ve said some.” But the borderline of like “Is ‘can’t’ one word or two words?” or “Is ‘twenty-one’ one word or two words” – this gets a little bit messier. It’s actually okay. Because actually all the words work like this where you have some examples that are really clear cut, and some examples that are fuzzier, and we’re just really good at dealing with these fuzzy examples.

Lauren: I really love going from that first Gavagai moment to spending a lot of time with a language as a learner or as someone describing the language, and then coming back to those early notes that you make, and going, “Ah.”

Gretchen: “I was so wrong.”

Lauren: Or I just happened to be talking to someone who used the more formal word for “hand,” and everyone else just uses this other word. Or it turned out I thought that was the specific word for this thing, but it’s just a more general word.

Gretchen: Or that’s a word that people say, like “thingamajig” when they don’t actually know what it’s called, and I thought it was the actual word for this thing.

Lauren: Yes. It turns out that I thought we were both talking about the verb “to flap your wings and fly,” but they just gave me the word for the little insect. That was a bit embarrassing. I’m glad we fixed that one up.

Gretchen: That’s one of the challenges with trying to learn a language by translating a list is that it can give you this one foothold into “Here are some things, maybe, that are going on,” but also you don’t get that full nuanced take, and you’re reliant on nuances in the translating language, which – as in the case of English where we don’t necessarily make a distinction between a singular “you” and a plural “you” – may introduce some really weird complications when you’re going into another language.

Lauren: Well, ignoring the word “nuance” there, I think if we’re not going to use a word list, we should go fully and completely and 100% in the opposite direction. And that opposite direction is monolingual – only using the language of the people that you’re working with – full, monolingual language learning, language documentation.

Gretchen: I’ve never done this because I’ve only ever been in environments where people were multilingual, but I have seen a demonstration of this at a linguistics conference. The demonstration was also pretty artificial. They got a linguist who was used to doing this, and they got somebody who worked at the university – in some other job probably – who also spoke a language that the linguist didn’t speak, and they said, “Okay” – you and I were doing this, Lauren. We definitely share English in common, but we could probably do a monolingual fieldwork situation where you spoke Nepali the whole time, and I spoke – you don’t speak much French, right? I could just speak French.

Lauren: I could learn. I could do fieldwork on you as a French speaker, and I could do it through Nepali so that everyone in the audience had the experience of not sharing a language with either of us.

Gretchen: Right. I probably wouldn’t be a great choice for this because you would probably want somebody who’s moved here from France, but if you and a friend have different languages, you can try this for yourself where you don’t speak any of the languages you have in common, and you see what you can figure out about each other. One of the things that I noticed about this demonstration is that it focused very much on the physical at the beginning. I don’t know how much the speaker was briefed ahead of time, but the linguist had some objects, like some sticks and some rocks, because I think they were very much trying to simulate this like, “You’ve shown up somewhere, and you don’t know what objects are gonna have in common culturally, so you’ve got to rely on things in nature.” I remember that the linguist did like, okay, if I hold up one stick, what are you gonna say? If I hold up two sticks, what are you gonna say? If I hold up three sticks –

Lauren: Oh, the reckon the difference between those might give us some early numbers and/or plural marking.

Gretchen: Exactly. Then if I hold up this stick, and I drop it, maybe I’m gonna get a verb, but it might not be a verb, right?

Lauren: But if I have “stick” and a verb, suddenly I can start figuring out the order that words go in in a sentence.

Gretchen: Right. Then if I have two sticks, and I drop them, do I get a different verb? If I take a rock, and two rocks, and then I drop the rocks – you can start getting some things that you can compare. You’re still dealing with very physical, tangible objects, but yeah, the idea is that maybe you can figure out at least some things about the language. What does it do for number? What does it do for nouns and verbs? And then slowly build up into acting out more and more complicated scenarios. You know, you have the linguist running around on the stage and being like, “Okay, well, maybe you’ll give me a word that means ‘running,’ or maybe it’ll mean ‘walking,’ or maybe it’ll mean ‘movement’.” You’re not quite sure. But you can try to get to this position.

Lauren: I do think Quine would be super happy to know, though, that we’re doing everything really – we’re really thinking about words, aren’t we? We’re collecting words for some items and some actions, and we’re really trying to figure out how to mediate our experience of those things through words.

Gretchen: I was wondering when I was sitting there watching one, like, “How much of this is the participant getting briefed ahead of time?” Because I wouldn’t wanna do a demo on a stage unless someone told me what they were trying to do. There were 100 people watching this. How much of these assumptions around if I hold something up, am I asking for the name of it? Or what am I asking for? I was having my own indeterminacy of translation moment of like, “How much can we rely on what I’m assuming the translation’s gonna be actually is what the person’s saying?” If you were doing fieldwork on French on me, and you have a stick, and you drop it – French doesn’t have one single word that means “drop.” It has a two-word fixed expression that means, basically, “let fall,” which is used in contexts where I would use “drop.” But you would have no way of knowing that this is actually a two-word phrase; that this is just what people say in this context.

Lauren: I might come back later when I’ve accidentally fallen over, and you’re like, “Are you okay? You fell.” And I’ll be like, “Ah-ha! I can put these two ideas together.” But again, I think this is the difference between going from knowing nothing about a language to, at the end of an hour, you can figure out a lot, but that’s still just a fraction.

Gretchen: And then you can spend the rest of your life figuring out what – yeah.

Lauren: And I do love, like, Quine spends multiple pages early on in his Gavagai thought experiment being like, “Okay, once you’ve got ‘gavagai,’ and you’re pretty sure it’s ‘rabbit,’ but you’re gonna spend all this time figuring out if it’s ‘rabbit’ or not, and you’re probably gonna wanna learn pretty early on words for ‘yes’ or affirmation or agreement or ‘no.’ But how are you gonna know what they are? You can’t rely on gestures.” I do appreciate that Quine was aware that a headshake and a head nod can mean very different things in different cultures.

Gretchen: Absolutely they can mean different things in different cultures.

Lauren: You can’t get ahead of yourself on any of this. You have to collaboratively build this dynamic relationship with people while you’re figuring things out.

Gretchen: I think that’s the thing about the artificiality of the monolingual fieldwork being a demonstration that happened at a conference and not something that I really know a lot of people who’ve done. That’s that it highlights this, in many ways, very underprepared linguist who’s not very community centric, right.

Lauren: “But I did get some sticks before I got here.”

Gretchen: “I just picked up this stick. I didn’t do any attempt to try to find a speaker who lived closer by to me who was bilingual in a language that I already spoke. I didn’t have any attempt to try and make contact with the community and ask them if they wanted someone to come in and take up all their time and do this.” It’s not a “I’m gonna try to figure out some things about my own language” as somebody who’s potentially from that community trying to interface with the literature. It’s got this very colonial “I’m gonna go off and do some exploring” vibes.

Lauren: I mean, Quine’s thought experiment – he does a very good job of not giving you too much context. I’m pretty sure he’s using the word “native” in a general 1960s way where you talk about someone being “native” in French, but like, that is a part of the context that has not aged greatly. Ideally, you would be seeing more people documenting their own languages and working with their own communities and not having to do this kind of outsider-coming-in fieldwork.

Gretchen: This very presumptive fieldwork that you’re gonna rock up in a village, and they’re gonna have nothing better to do than talk to you.

Lauren: About pointing out rabbits.

Gretchen: Yeah. Maybe they’ve got their own interests and agendas, and that’s not something that’s on the radar of this. Yet, I think that there’s still a joy in realising that we can transcend communication barriers or differences and that – despite the many, many cultural differences – can figure out what each other means because we do have some default assumptions.

Lauren: I mean, this is what I love about the Gavagai moment, and I think this is why I really wanted to see Gav brought to life as a little scurrying bunny because in that moment in Quine’s thought experiment, humans are really good at managing this relationship between ourselves, and that humans are actually very good at existing in a shared, multi-lingual world.

Gretchen: We can go from that fragmentary understanding that we all have as kids or that we may have as visitors and people in contact with people that we don’t share a language with for so many reasons to making sets of shared assumptions and, ultimately, getting into the position where we can use our existing language to understand yet more language and deliver those sorts of explanations to each other or have those sorts of arguments about what a tree is or what a fish is or what a fruit is to gain that deeper connection and understanding of the culture and nuances of language in general.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new Gavagai rabbits on scarves, shirts, and more; “Ask me about linguistics” as a sticker, a shirt, a pin; and “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” or substitute “bag,” “hat,” etc. – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the history of “do” in English, comparatives and superlatives, and linguistic mix-ups like spoonerisms, Mondegreens, and eggcorns. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

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

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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