990. Have you ever wondered why English doesn't have gender like Spanish and French? Which languages are the hardest to learn (and why)? And why a Q is always followed by a U? We have the answers to those questions and more this week from Paul Anthony Jones, author of "Why is this a question?"
990. Have you ever wondered why English doesn't have gender like Spanish and French? Which languages are the hardest to learn (and why)? And why a Q is always followed by a U? We have the answers to those questions and more this week from Paul Anthony Jones, author of "Why is this a question?"
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Paul Anthony Jones, who is an author and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He runs the popular Twitter account Haggard Hawks that posts fascinating language facts, and we are here today to talk about his ninth book, “Why Is This a Question?” Paul, thank you so much for being here today.
Paul: Oh, my pleasure, honestly, thank you so much for asking me.
Mignon: Yeah. I can’t believe I haven’t had you on before. Your book, “Why Is This a Question?” has quickly become one of my favorite language books of all time. One of the signs in my house of a good nonfiction book is how much I read out loud to my husband. And he has heard a lot about your book.
The other night, I was downstairs reading, and he was heading upstairs to go to bed, and I was like, "Wait, wait, no, I have to tell you this one other thing."
Paul: That's good, that's a good review. I'll take that. It's starting to annoy people. Yeah, that's a new level of enjoyment.
Mignon: I'm accosting people and reading to them from your book. So, and that's really what we're doing here today, actually."
Paul: Yeah, yeah.
Mignon: Accosting people and making them listen to facts from your book. And there are so many fascinating facts from your book. We are going to touch on just a few. There are so many more, everyone listening. And I love the way you've organized it with "Why Is This a Question?"
Because so many things, you know, I did know about language, but I didn't know the "why" behind them coming into your book. So the first one is, why do so many languages have grammatical gender, and why doesn't English?
Paul: When I first started to put the book together, I used this cork board behind me, actually. And I wrote all the questions that I had milling around in my head. I wrote them all down on index cards and organized them all up here, going, right, this one needs to go before this one, and this one, we can get rid of that one, and this one can have a chapter to itself.
And that one, about grammatical gender, was the first one that I put up, and I was determined to put it in there at some point. It was the only one that never came down off the board at some point. Because I can remember thinking about this when I was 11, and I started studying French for the first time at, like, high school, at secondary school over here.
And thinking, why does it have this extra feature in French that we don't have in English? And I'd never really come across it ever. I've studied linguistics now for what, 20 years, 25 years, and I never actually stumbled across the answer. So I knew that I wanted to use this, use the opportunity of putting this book together to look at it.
And it goes back so much further than you think it does. It goes right back to the real roots of European language. In terms of languages like French and Spanish, of course, there are other languages that aren't part of this family. But right back to what's called Proto-Indo-European, which is the real kind of ancestor language of pretty much everything from English, Irish, Icelandic, Portuguese on one side, right the way across to the languages of India and Nepal and stuff on the other.
So you've got this huge swathe of the world that all comes from this one ancestral language that was once spoken kind of around the Black Sea. And that language used to have not grammatical gender in the way that languages do today, but it used to divide its nouns up into animate and inanimate. So living things and non-living things.
And they were kind of a little bit fast and loose with those designations. So the living section wasn't just things that it was alive. It was things that were seen as sort of vital and non-stationary. So things like a river and thunder, and lightning and things like that. That would be dealt with on the animate side.
And the inanimate side would be mountains and things like that. Some words, water had two forms. There was an animate water, which was things like floods and rivers and the sea. And there was an inanimate water, which was just the liquid, the fluid, the thing that you might have in a container. So there are different versions of some.
Yeah. But they had this distinction. They had this idea of this thing and this thing. These two kind of separate sections. And as that language broke down and the people who spoke it moved around and their languages evolved and changed and kind of turned into the massive patchwork of languages that we've got today, the rules that kind of dictated how those words were dealt with, we're talking what, 4,000 years ago?
5,000, 6,000 years ago? The rules that dictated those kind of distinctions back then, slowly morphed into the rules that dictate, you know, the fact that bathrooms are masculine, or whatever it might be, in the languages that we have today. It's switched around a bit, the idea of calling them male and female, masculine and feminine, that's something that's a bit unique to really just the Romance languages alongside a few others around the world. That comes from, that's a little bit complicated, probably not, I could go on for about an hour about why, the way that distinction came from, so I won't. But there are other things going on that, underneath the surface of the grammar that dealt with why these animate and inanimate sections be turned into masculine and feminine.
It didn't in every language, but it did so in a lot of the European languages. The flip side of that, then, of course, is, well, why doesn't English do that? Well, the answer is that we used to. We did have those distinctions. If you go back to Old English, you'll see masculine and feminine words, and we used to deal with words in that way, grammatically.
We also had a neuter gender at one point, like German does. The kind of main crux of the matter, in terms of the history of English, was 1066, was the Norman Conquest, when suddenly you've got English speakers and French speakers. Norman French speakers tried to get along vaguely using a little bit of Latin along the way as well.
And one of the things that had to happen was that the language had to simplify. We had to get rid of all the things that we don't really use and that we don't really need in order to make these two groups of people who don't really speak the same language get along and kind of form a language that way.
And gender was just one of the things that we threw overboard. It was just one of the complexities that we didn't really need anymore. There are other things going on. There are other complexities that we got rid of. But that's one of the reasons, certainly a large part of why English got rid of gender, what, 1,200 years ago, not that long ago, in the 1200s.
Or there or thereabouts, certainly in Middle English. So, we had it and then we lost it because of something that happened to our language. Other languages have maintained it. Some languages have made it more complicated. There are multiple genders in lots of languages. We're starting to see other languages across Europe starting to get rid of it a little bit as well.
It's starting to happen a bit in Dutch, Swedish, Danish are starting to sort of siphon off gender a little bit out of their grammars. It's going to be a long process; I don't know whether it'll ever complete. But yeah, that's one of the reasons that English doesn't have it anymore. Other languages are sort of going that way.
And other ones have held onto it. It's all to do with that distinction that was being made, what, about 4,000 years ago.
Mignon: I find it makes a language a little bit harder to learn when you have to also learn the gender of the nouns, but so what purpose do people think that, like, having gender serves in terms of a language? Does it make it easier or harder to communicate when a language has those noun classes? That's a good point. Yeah. Originally that it would have been really useful to divide things up into that animate and inanimate kind of section. So that example of water. If you need to talk about the distinction between a pot of water and a flood, using one word kind of doesn't help it. So if you can just divide things up into sections that make sense, then it sort of helps you get a little bit of a head start about the context, the semantic context of what you're talking about.
Paul: There is an argument that that now is borne through today in terms of language cognition. So if you say, for instance, I don't know what's a good example in French. So we say, "un chat, le chat." "Cat" is masculine. If you say "un" or "le," the French for "a" or "le," as soon as the brain of the person that you're talking to hears that word, they know that the next word is going to be masculine.
So, it can instantly ditch half of its vocabulary. It speeds up that access process of going, "Right, well, it's not going to be a feminine word that comes next, so I can forget about those words. I'm only going to be searching in this side of the dictionary," almost that kind of idea.
And the more genders you have, and the more complex that system is, the more of those words that you can jettison. This is happening in split-split-split seconds, of course, because that's how fast your brain works. So there is an idea that maybe retaining gender in that way speeds up language cognition speeds up language access and language retrieval in your brain.
I'm not sure how much I sign up to that idea, to be perfectly honest, because the advantage that that would give you is absolutely minuscule, to be perfectly honest. And the speed that the brain already works at, and the speed that people talk at in conversation., I don't know how likely that theory is.
It's actually, I think, more complex languages that have lots and lots of different genders and lots and lots of different classes that the answer kind of probably lies in. There are languages in the Amazon that have hundreds and hundreds of different noun classes. There's a language, I think called Merana that has something like 300, so far beyond masculine and feminine.
The nouns in that language are divided up into things that have a single hole in them, things that have been deliberately flattened. And so, words that fit into those kinds of categories are dealt with differently in the grammar. What that gives you the advantage of doing is kind of attuning a whole conversation grammatically.
So if you're talking about one thing that's been deliberately flattened, and someone happens to wander over and joins the conversation, they're going to know, "Oh, that's the vague kind of sound of this conversation. So it must be, we must be talking about, you know, that bit of metal over there" or whatever it might be.
So languages that have more genders allow that kind of spoken language to become more attuned. If all of the words and all of the word endings match that one subject and that one kind of group of words, then you can imagine that eventually everything becomes sort of harmonized, and then you start talking about something else from a different gender category, and the language becomes harmonized in a different way. So you can signal and signpost these changes of subjects in the grammar.
I think that's probably a more likely explanation. It doesn't quite work with just two genders, but in more complex languages, it certainly does. So there's maybe an element of that kind of conversational harmony almost.
Mignon: Are they still ... do linguists still call them gender when they aren't just masculine and feminine, but they're like animate and inanimate?
Paul: It's interesting because we're used to the idea of masculine and feminine being called gender, but gender in terms of language is really closer to genre. It's just a class. It's just a category of things that you're putting them in. They just kind of ended up being called masculine and feminine. That's a very long story to do with grammatical categories and things. Some people will use gender and class (noun class) interchangeably, which I think is probably the norm now. There is a sort of marginal distinction between the two of them, but yeah, I don't think it matters too much. There certainly isn't 350 different genders and shades of masculine and feminine words in these Amazonian languages. They're just different classes of words.
Mignon: And this is so interesting. It leads us into the next thing that really jumped out at me in the book is, I love the chapter, "Which is the hardest language to learn?" And I wanted to sort of add in there "and why it's not English."
Paul: Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's one of the ones I wrote this book during lockdown, and that was one of the last chapters that I put up on the corkboard because during lockdown when everyone was losing their mind and had all this time on their hands, everyone started learning a language. It was like everyone needed a new hobby.
Mignon: I did.
Paul: Yeah.
I did. I took on German for the first time. So that was, yeah, I just jumped into that, and everyone was downloading all these apps and all the rest of it. So all these articles were turning up online asking this question, saying what's the hardest language to learn, what's the easiest language to learn, what's the fastest way to learn a language, all these kinds of things.
And I was reading them, and people were sending them to me, and they were, I was getting really annoyed, because it was almost like no one was answering it the right way, because I think the only way that you can answer that is to address the idea of difficulty, what it actually means when you say that a language is quote-unquote difficult.
And all of these blogs are going, "Oh, the most difficult one is Japanese" or whatever it might be, you know. Just kind of picking a language that seems the most polar opposite to English and in the vaguest way possible. And I just don't think that that's the right way to do it. So in the book, I kind of explore what it is that makes it difficult.
And there are lots of different ways that you can approach that. Oddly enough, you know, I say that it isn't English that's the hardest language to learn. That's one of the reasons why so many people speak it. But if the thing that you have a problem with, which I do, is memory, I'm terrible at remembering words and names and things, English is actually probably pretty difficult, because we have more words than many other languages.
It's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words. We also have a huge amount of dialectal variation. So, you know, I have a Geordie accent, I guess, a Northeastern English accent. I'm just about as different as it's possible to be from, I don't know, a Scouse accent, from a Southern American accent, whatever it might be.
But we all speak the same language, and English speakers can all understand each other. If you're having to learn English from the outside, the way that I talk is going to be different from the way that you've learned and the way that an Australian person talks and the way that a South African person talks.
So there are other languages that don't have that kind of complexity as well. So there are elements that you can kind of go, "Well, actually yeah, English is quite hard." But the flip side of that is that there are parts of it that are really simple. We've already said we don't have gender, so you don't have to, you don't have that complexity.
Our grammar is quite straightforward in a lot of ways in terms of our syntax. We tend to put sentences in a really predictable order. We don't have any case system like Latin does, or German does, whatever it might be. So, in some ways we're very, very difficult, and in others we're really, really easy.
And you can say the same about Japanese, which was the conclusion that these blogs were coming to. Japanese has a really simple, straightforward grammar as well. It has a really simple syllable structure. It's all very vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant. Has a small number of sounds. Overall, English has something like, I think, 45 different sounds in our phonology, depending on your accent.
Japanese, I'm sure someone will correct me, but I think it only has about 20, 25, something like that. So there's another element of, "Well, yeah, Japanese is really complicated because have you seen it written down?" But if you look, it has no irregular verbs, things like this. If you look at the sort of nuts and bolts of the language, this other side of it is, "Well, actually, you know, that's quite easy to learn. That bit isn't too bad. I can imagine actually picking that up."
And there are other ways of looking at this, you know, in terms of grammar, in terms of not just phonology, but in terms of spelling system, how predictable languages are that way. There are languages, Thai, for instance, has lots and lots of different registers. So that there is a completely different form of Thai that's only used when you're talking to or talking about the royal family of Thailand. But yeah, that's another level of kind of complexity from the outside looking in, it's sort of like, "Well, why on earth complicate things by throwing that at it?"
So it depends sort of which one of these levels you're looking at, is it words, is it grammar, is it sound, is it the structure of the language, is it the speed that people talk, is it the syntax, the way that the sentences are strung together, whatever it might be? What is it that you find the most difficult? And the only way that, at the end of all of that, that you can kind of conclude it is to go, "Well, it's the idea of difficulty itself."
Because if a language were too difficult, then people would change it, it would evolve, it would go some different way. And if what you're doing is, to other people, unusual, to you it's the most normal thing in the world. There's nothing difficult about, for instance, English. English has two different TH sounds.
We can tell the difference between "thigh," like a thigh bone or a thigh muscle, and "thy," the old pronoun. That's two completely different THs. We know instantly whether it's "thigh" or "thy." But, it's only, I think, about 10 percent of world languages make the same distinction. So an awful lot of people who are learning English make the same TH sound for both of those words, can't pick up on that distinction, take a long time to learn that distinction, get an ear from it, sometimes never get an ear for it, and never pick up on it.
To us, most normal thing in the world, to someone who's learning English, a real difficulty, a real problem, a real kind of thing that you need to get drummed into your mind and get drummed into your head. So, it all comes down to the idea of difficulty.
Mignon: Fascinating. Wonderful. Well, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsor, but when we come back, we're going to talk about what's up with the letter Q and about gestures and their role in language.
And we're back. I'm here with Paul Anthony Jones, the author of "Why Is This a Question?" — a fabulous new language book. Paul, tell us about the letter Q. I was reading your book, and I was surprised there was a whole chapter about the letter Q, but then I was fascinated by the letter Q after you were finished.
Paul: Yeah, it's interesting. It's the only kind of, only letter in the alphabet that we have a sort of rule dictating when and where you can use it. And you learn it straight away that Q always has to have a U going after it. And again, that's one of those, one of the subjects in the book that I really knew from the beginning that I wanted to deal with.
But the other thing about that is that you have to kind of, in order to answer that properly, you need to go a little bit behind that, and a little bit behind, and a little bit behind, because the answer to why that has a U after it all the time in English takes us back to Etruscan, which is a Greek-influenced language that was spoken in the southern portion of ancient Italy really. So we took our alphabet from the Romans, the Romans took theirs from the Etruscans. The Etruscans came over from mainland Greece, the Greeks took their alphabet from the Phoenicians, the Phoenicians, what, four and a half thousand years ago or something, were using an alphabet that was at least partly based on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
So everyone through the course of history is desperately trying to make these different symbols work in their language and sort of hammering them into place along the way. And the Etruscans ended up in the middle of this great sort of alphabetical melee. They ended up with a letter called qoppa, Q-O-P-P-A, which looked a little bit like a modern letter Q.
It was a circle with a vertical line running down out the bottom of it. But they had two other letters … they ended up with two other letters in their alphabet that had vaguely a sort of a “kuh” sound, a kind of hard K sound. And one of them became C, one of them became K, and the other one became Q, this qoppa one.
So, a rule emerged that the C equivalent was used before A and E sounds, so vaguely those. The K equivalent was used before I and O sounds, and the Q, the qoppa sound, was used before a U sound, an “uh” sound, a kind of guttural vowel. That was their rule in the Etruscans. The Romans played around with that a little bit more, and of course, in the north of Europe, we were completely oblivious to all of this going on because we were still using runes in the Germanic language.
So we had a completely different writing system. Again, Latin sort of starts to get poured out all across Europe. The Norman Conquest takes place. So over in English, we started, over in England, we started using Latin letters instead of runes. But where we had a “qu” sound, where we might expect a Q today, was originally a C and a W.
We used it much more, kind of phonetically. We just used the letters that we had to do what we needed to do. Across in France,
Mignon: So “queen,” like, queen was C-W-E-N, right?
Paul: Yeah. Yeah. It was very much sort of, you know, write it as it's said. But then after the Norman Conquest, you suddenly had all these French speaking, Norman French speaking scribes came across and started working in England, and they had a completely different set of rules about how you write down different sounds.
And their rule for that “qu” sound was to use this ancient qoppa, this ancient Etruscan letter that had been handed across to the Romans and then dished out through Latin. So they had this convention of Q always being followed by a U. So they used that convention where Old English as it was had a C and a W.
So we've got these two weird disparate influences. You've got Old English and all of its Germanic words. Suddenly, having it kind of be hammered into the template of what Norman French scribes learning Latin letters based on the Etruscan alphabet, which is based on Greek and everything else that came before it.
So, and somehow, the outcome of all of that has been that we've got this spelling rule that seems completely immutable in English now. The Q always has to have a U after it. And it used to be so much simpler. It used to be just C and W. And now we've got this French kind of import that's kind of getting handed around all of our words.
Mignon: Yeah. It just blew my mind that English didn't have a Q until the French conquered England.
Like I had no idea. That's amazing.
Paul: And what you have in Middle English as well is this odd sort of period where both of them are being used. Middle English is a real melting pot. So you find some, you can tell almost whether the scribe who's written a document is French or is English in terms of tuition, in terms of what system that they've learned. Depending on which one of those they kind of try to use in their writing.
Mignon: That's amazing. So, we're going to finish up today by talking about gestures, which may not seem like a language thing.
But, that's one of the fascinating things is that it actually really is. And you know, one of the just fascinating tidbits is that we use gesture. We use our hands when we talk, even when people can't see us.
So tell us more about that.
Paul: Yeah, it's interesting you said that it's not part of language, because again, it's one of these things I'd never studied. So I wrote down on my board when I was brainstorming this book, I wrote down, “Why do we move our hands when we talk?” And I didn't know the answer. I didn't know anything about it.
Paul: It's coming from a field called paralanguage or paralinguistics, which sort of deals with anything and everything alongside linguistics that colors kind of what we're saying, but that isn't words, and that isn't grammar, and that isn't phonology. So it's things like eye movements and body language and proximity between people, all of these things that can change what you're saying.
And again, I had no idea about hand movements. I don't know what I always get really self-conscious when I talk about this. Yeah, because I don't know what to do. But again, I kind of had no idea about what this was. So I had to take a real deep dive into it, and I didn't even know that there are different kinds of gestures, and we employ them in different ways.
There are things called co-speech beats, or motor gestures, which is where you just move your hand with the most forceful part of what you're talking. It's a very metrical kind of way of talking, which makes you seem much more forceful.
We have what are called metaphoric gestures, which is where you move to something that's, you'll see people do this a lot when they talk about what used to happen and what happens now, they'll move from one side of their body to the other.
There's nothing that you can do to kind of mime that time doesn't look like anything, so you can't form a picture of it. You can't mime it with your hands. So it's sort of this metaphor of movement in some way shape or form. You'll see people doing this. So there's all sorts of different kinds of gestures.
What's interesting, as you say, is that is where we, where we employ them. And the fact that we do employ them, even when we're not doing them for anyone else, this has been proved in experiments. And you'll see it sometime, you can even test this out at home, the kind of power of gesture. If you get someone to describe how their house is laid out or what their route to work is or something, while keeping their hands in their pockets.
It drives them mad! There's something physical in our speech that really always wants to come out. And what we're starting to discover, through experimentation with this, is that we think some of these gestures might be actually involved in language retrieval. So, what we do physically when we say certain words or try to access certain words, it almost speeds up that process.
We associate the word and its meaning in our head with something that happens, with something that happens to us physically, with something that feels a certain way. And there's been some very strange experiments done about this. There was one, I think it was Columbia University in the 1990s. There was an experiment where people were literally strapped into an armchair and made to have a conversation.
And two things happened in this experiment. One is that people's facial expressions went wild. So there was still this thing trying to get out physically. If you can't move your head and you can't move your arms and legs, something still tries to come out and that, you know, people will be opening their mouths wider and staring around the room and their eyebrows will be up.
So there's something still trying to come out. What also happened was that people made more mistakes. And the words that they stumbled on and the words that they jumbled up were words to do with things like spatial awareness, physical activity, movement, sport, games, things like that. Those are the words that people were making the most mistakes with.
And that kind of gives this theory of actually, you know, the ability to move when we talk about the location of things, the position of things, the movement of things, the trajectory of things helps us to, to put those thoughts and to put those ideas into words. This is very early days. That research, as I say, was only done about 20, 30 years ago or something like that.
And the entire idea of gesture analysis is not even a century old. I mean, linguistics as a science isn't even that old. So we're still really only scratching the surface of how deep this might go, especially in terms of language access and things like that. But the more that we find out about it, the more extraordinary it is.
Mignon: Yeah, and I think one of the most useful tips that I took away is that if you're learning a language, there was a study that you're more likely to remember a word if you associate it with a gesture. So I'm going to try that now. The words I'm having trouble remembering, there's a couple of verbs I just always forget.
I'm going to assign them a gesture now and see if that helps me remember them in the future in Spanish.
Paul: Apparently so, yeah. It's been shown in studies that it really does help. Yeah. I mean, you never know. You never know.
Mignon: It can't hurt, right?
Paul: Yeah, exactly.
Mignon: All right. Well the book again is “Why Is This a Question?” You know, you sent me the pdf, and I'm actually going to go out and buy the physical book because I want to put it on my bookshelf and just look at it and remember how much I liked it when I'm just in my office. So that's how much I really loved this book.
I just can't recommend it highly enough for anyone who loves language. Where can people find you online?
Paul: Yeah. You can find everything at haggardhawks.com or @haggardhawks on Twitter or X or what it still gets called. Me, personally, all my links will be on there as well. You can go to paulanthonyjones.com and all the books and things will be on there. I'm hoping that we'll have an American edition of the book out soon.
I don't know, we'll see.
Mignon: Oh, what does that mean? Can I not get it in America?
Paul: It's available, yeah, it is available. You can buy it online, and it should hopefully be in some stores, yeah. But we're still thrashing out in America. If there's any publishers listening in the States, yeah, by all means, kind of get in touch.
Mignon: Yeah, it's a great book. Get in touch. So, would that be like, you’d make it. What does it mean to make an American version then?
Paul: Yeah. So, it's all to do, oh, it's very boring and very long. It's all to do with contract rights and things. So yeah, it is available. It's definitely available in the States, but yeah, there isn't a separate US edition yet, which would be lovely. I'd love to see it get a full release in the States. It'd be amazing.
Mignon: Excellent. Well, I just want to make sure I can get it and, and my listeners can get it.
Paul: Yeah, definitely.
Mignon: Selfish. I just want it. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks again, Paul. We really appreciate you being here today. It was a fabulous book and a fabulous conversation.
Paul: Oh, a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Have you ever wondered by English doesn't have gender like Spanish and French? Which languages are the hardest to learn (and why)? And why a Q is always followed by a U? We have the answers to those questions and more this week from Paul Anthony Jones, author of "Why is this a question?" I hope you enjoyed our conversation. I'll be back on Tuesday with a fun regular show about the words we use for dogs and more! Have a great weekend. That's all. Thanks for listening.