June 8, 2026 • 53 mins
How can we use 26 symbols to capture everything in the cosmos of human experience? Where do our written symbols in English come from? What ancient ghosts are still hiding inside the letters you read every day? Does learning to read reconfigure the circuitry of your brain? Does dyslexia reveal how unnatural reading really is? And could AI freeze the evolution of language for the first time in history? Today we dive into the alphabet with linguist Danny Bate, who’s just written a book on the surprising history of every letter.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Why do things the brain does so well become invisible,
like walking or playing tennis? Or what we'll talk about today,
the reading and writing of language. Where do our twenty
six written symbols in English come from and how do
they capture everything in the cosmos of human experience? What
(00:20):
ancient ghosts are still hiding inside the letters that you
read every day? For example? Does the letter A contain
the shape of a cow from four thousand years ago?
Does learning to read reconfigure the circuitry of your brain?
And how does dyslexia reveal how unnatural reading really is?
(00:42):
And could ai freeze the evolution of language for the
first time in history. Today we're diving into the alphabet
with linguist Danny Bate, who's just written a book on
the surprising history of every letter. Welcome to innner Cosmos
with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and
(01:03):
in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound
universe to understand why and how our lives look the
way they do. The really wild thing about the brain
(01:29):
is that the things the brain does best are the
things we don't even notice. For example, walking is a
tremendously complex symphony of coordinating all your muscles at just
the right times. But once we learn how to do
it after years of trying, then we lose access to
how we even do it because it gets burned down
(01:52):
into the unconscious brain. Same with riding a bicycle. There
was a time when you had to try and try
and pay attention to how you're tilting and moving your
arms and how to hit the brakes. But once you
get it, then you're not even consciously aware anymore that
you're doing it. Or take swinging a tennis racket. It's
a tremendously complex series of movements, but once you learn
(02:16):
how to do it, you can't describe it anymore. If
I say to you, wow, you serve so well, how
exactly do you do that? You really don't have conscious
access to explain it to me. Now, this is a
general theme about the brain that I wrote about in
my book Incognito. The brain gets really good at tasks
that you do a lot of training on, and it
(02:36):
relies on a lot of conscious attention at first, but
eventually the brain burns those tasks down into the circuitry,
and what you get out of that is speed, and
energy efficiency. What you lose is conscious access. Now, the
great American psychologist William James in eighteen ninety realized that
(02:57):
there were many things we couldn't actually see. He suggested
that we coax these things into the light by a
simple mental exercise. Try to make, as he put it,
the natural seems strange by asking the why of any
instinctive human act. So here's what he wrote in his
(03:18):
Principles of Psychology, read by the actor sean judge.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Why do we smile when pleased and not scowl? Why
are we unable to talk to a crowd as we
talk to a single friend. Why does a particular maiden
turn our wits so upside down? The common man can
only say, of course we smile. Of course our heart
palpitates at the side of the crowd. Of course we
(03:42):
love the maiden, that beautiful soul, clad in that perfect form,
so palpably and fragrantly made for all eternity to be loved.
And so probably does each animal feel about the particular
things it tends to in the presence of particular objects.
To the lion, it is the lioness which is made
to be loved. To the bear, the she bear. To
(04:06):
the broody hand, the notion would probably seem monstrous that
there should be a creature in the world to whom
a nest full of eggs was not the utterly fascinating
and precious, and never to be too much sat upon
an object which it is to her. Thus we may
be sure that, however mysterious some animal's instincts may appear
to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
So I've always been fascinated by all the things we
do that are invisible to us, whether by learning or
by instinct. Because we don't spend any time thinking about
those things, they just seem totally natural, and therefore become
part of the background of our reality. And one thing
I've always been fascinated with is all the invisible details
(04:51):
of our language, whether spoken or written. You drop into
the world, and in your first few years you're exposed
to lots of likelanguage, and you start babbling, and eventually
you get better and better at coordinating your breath and
the position of your tongue and the shape of your lips,
and you are able to make sequences of sound really rapidly,
(05:15):
and these travel over a little distance by compressing and
expanding the air molecules, and you can transmit some kind
of meaning to another human this way, but you can't
transmit meaning to any human. It only works with a
human who happens to share your particular mapping of sounds
(05:35):
to meanings. Just go to any other country in the
world where you don't speak the language, and you can
detect how arbitrary this whole thing is, how any sound
can mean any concept. So next time you're in a
foreign country, just watch someone at a cafe. They are
regaling their friends with some sort of story, and everyone
(05:57):
is transfixed, or they're gasping, or they're laughing. And if
you don't speak that language, the whole sequence of sounds
is a total mystery to you. But here's the point
I'm making. If it's your language, then the whole very
complicated process of making sounds and interpreting them is totally
transparent to you. Right now, you're listening to my voice,
(06:19):
and presumably you're not thinking about all these rapid individual
sounds that I'm cooking up. Instead, you're just enjoying the meaning,
and you remain unaware of the lower level mechanics. And
this is especially evident in written language. When you skim
over the squiggles on a page of written text, if
(06:40):
it's a language that you read, it's hard to appreciate
that you're even looking at random squiggles, because it's hard
to shake off the fact that they carry meaning. But
all you need to do is look at some written
language that you are unfamiliar with, especially one with a
totally different alphabet, or one that uses different symbols for words,
(07:00):
and you can appreciate just how arbitrary the mapping is
between some squiggle and some meaning. So in this context,
one thing I'm obsessed with is alphabets and spellings, because
these are things that we have to struggle to learn
as little kids, and then they become fully invisible to us.
We pass our eyes over a page of a novel
(07:24):
and the meaning just floats right off and we laugh
or cry, but we rarely, if ever, pay attention to
the details of the symbols themselves. So to really illustrate
how weird all of this is and how deep it goes,
today we're going to talk with linguist Danny Bait about
the English alphabet, which, like every alphabet, represents a compressed
(07:47):
history of civilization. It's so rare that we would ever
stop to wonder why each letter looks the shape it does,
or why English has all these bizarre spellings like K
in the word kneecap or night in shining armor even
though the K makes no sound, or why we have
an H in ghost, or why there's a T in
(08:10):
the word listen, or one hundred other examples that Danny
has written about in his new book, Why Q Needs You.
I remember tripping on each of those questions as a
kid learning the language, but past the age of six
or seven, we totally forget to ask those questions anymore.
So Danny joins us here today to take us on
(08:31):
a dive into the unfathomable depths of the English alphabet,
that invisible thing that our brains spend so much time with,
but we rarely stop to appreciate. Here's my conversation with
linguist Danny Bait. The alphabet has become so successful that
(08:51):
it's essentially invisible. Why do we fail to notice it
every time we're reading a sentence?
Speaker 3 (08:55):
I think it is partly it's a victim of its
own success, and I think it's partly because it is optimized.
It's writing in general, and the alphabet specifically is well
optimized for writing down language and for reading and writing
these two separate processes. In addition to that, we learn
it when we're in our infancy, we learn it when
we're at elementary school, and frankly, I think this is
(09:17):
a factor we don't have much else going on at
that particular point in our lives. If we had to
learn it as busy twenty or thirteen year olds trying
to hold down a career, then maybe it would fit
a little bit more obtrusively into our lives.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
If you had to explain the alphabet to someone who
had never encountered writing or the concept of writing, what
would seem the most astonishing about it?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I suppose it would be that as a system, it
has very few ingredients we managed to create or manage
to write down all of language. I mean, of course,
there are some things that go along with speech that
maybe don't have an associated word or a letter or
something like that, like I don't know, coughing and sneezing
and all the involuntary sounds that we make while we speak.
(09:59):
But nonetheless, the words of our language do get written
down really successfully with in the case of English, twenty
six ish ingredients. Of course, you know you may want
to dispute that number. You might have maybe like what
do we do with ampersand and plus and slash and
things like that in punctuation, But you know, twenty six
letters to write down this incredible cosmos of human language,
(10:23):
I think is extremely impressive.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So the thing about writing from a biology point of
view is it's so new. It's just appeared in the
last nanosecond of biological time. What was the great cognitive
leap from pictures of things to symbols for sounds.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It's a couple of leaps. It's a couple of maybe
moments of creation. When I talk about the alphabet, I
don't want people to get the impression that I'm trying
to talk about all human writing. You have maybe a
handful of super successful traditions of writing, like big family
trees that are unrelated to one another, and go back
to a particular moment of creation. And I should say
(11:03):
there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing down concepts and taking
meaning as the primary basis for your writing system. That
was the basis for Egyptian hieroglyphs. That was the basis
for even something of ancient but very successful system like
kurkqun air form. Chinese characters as well, they have a
phonetic component, but nonetheless they take meaning and things as
(11:28):
their primary thing that you're trying to write down. And
yet in certain points in human history people have realized
that if you are going to take the number of
things and concepts and bits of grammar and give each
one its own character, it's really going to increase the
number of characters. So if you can hone in on
something that can express the same information but with fewer symbols,
(11:50):
you may be onto a winner. You may be onto
something that's maybe not intrinsically better, but might spread more quickly,
might have mass appeal. What you can do is with speech,
it tends to be made up of a subset of
sounds a spoken language across the world. Basically, no spoken
language uses all the sounds that we humans can make. Instead,
(12:11):
it's a subset, and if you base your writing system
on that subset, then that's a cognative leap. That's a
great moment of creation.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The way you structure your book is lovely. Each letter
in the English alphabet gets a chapter of its own.
Give us an example of a letter whose shape still
carries a ghost of its ancient origin.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Oh, lovely, it's going to sound very boring, maybe a
little bit basic to your lovely listeners, But it has
to be A. And I will explain why A is
the primal letter. It has of this great status at
the beginning of our alphabet. It's the thing that kicks
the whole alphabet off, and yet, by sheer luck, it
does also, as you say nicely put, it contain a
(12:54):
little bit of a ghost of what that symbol originally
used to be, how it started out. I mentioned already
things like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs, at least in the
visual medium in writing, are the forerunner of our own alphabet.
I don't think it's fair to say that it's a
straightforward development of hieroglyphs. It's a definite break that gets
(13:15):
us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to our alphabets. What seems to
happen is that basically a population of non Egyptians within Egypt,
ancient Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, take these existing already very
ancient symbols and rather than maintain them for their current
quite sophisticated different purposes, streamline the whole thing. So now
(13:35):
it's one of these symbols for one sound, specifically one
consonant of their non Egyptian language. And I mentioned hieroglyphs.
That's key because to begin with, they are just straightforward
imitations or replications of hieroglyphs. They look like things. They
look like hands, and they look like eyes and animals
and tools that you might find in your house beside
(13:57):
the nile. And A perhaps best of all, the letters
of that original set has firstly survived, but secondly preserves
a little bit of that ghost in that the thing
it used to look like was the head of a cow,
head of cattle. And if you turn a capital a
capital letter is older than lower case ones. I think
we have intuition generally about that because they're more different
(14:18):
from one another. But if you turn upside down, the
kind of horns of the cow and the mouth of
the cow, it's the point and the legs of a
capital A just rotated. Everything else has changed, but there's
a little bit of a ghost of that cow still
in capital A.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Excellent and just before we go on, give us a
sense about uppercase versus lowercase letters and how we ended
up with that of course.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Yeah, So basically, these hiroglyphs are pictograms is a nicer
alternative word for that. They look like things. But quite
quickly as the alphabet catches on, still very much within
the shadow of older systems like hieroglyphs and Cunea forms,
it spreads its way sort of around the Mediterranean over
the centuries in a sort of vaguely anti clockwise motion,
(15:00):
so it makes its way up the coast of the
Middle East, eastern Mediterranean, makes a leap over to Greece.
From Greece, it makes the leap over to Italy, and
all the while the letters are changing, especially in that
first part of the journey. They're being used. And if
you are i don't know, inscribing some sort of document
or letter that you need to send on you know,
(15:20):
something like please help the Assyrians are coming. You don't
have time to write down the full cow's head or
the full you know, praising man or various other complex sites.
So they get simplified. The letters are reduced in their
complexity as symbols, and that's kind of the general picture
as the alphabet makes its way up the coast of
(15:41):
the Mediterranean. By the time it lands in the hands
of the Phoenicians, great people living in what is today Lebanon,
the symbols are really quite abstract. They don't look like
things anymore. They really do look like letters. But crucially,
by the time it lands in Rome, so it arrives
in ancient Italy at say round about thee seven hundred BC,
(16:01):
literacy just massively takes off. It massively takes hold and
kind of alternative uses, alternative ways of writing. Who are
you writing to? What are you writing on? Different uses
for the letters emerge, and one of these is a
kind of cursive and that cursive will become lowercase letters.
They're very simple, they're very fluid, they're much easier to
write and connect up. They're very well suited to small
(16:24):
documents like a personal letter as opposed to your capital letters,
which you use for fancy things like public inscriptions. And
from that status, eventually lowercase will kind of upper and
lower case will kind of solidifys as two different systems.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So just before we get back to some big picture stuff,
so let's take a few other letters as example. So
tell us about this strange name dob and what that
reveals about the mismatch between writing and speech.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh, I like that. I like that very much. I
think W, out of all the letters, is the historian's
friend because it wears its history on its sleeve. It's
a double you to begin with. But crucially, if any
of your listeners might know French or Spanish or other
languages that originate in Western Europe, they may instead call
it duble, a double V. And the fact that there's
(17:12):
a disagreement over the name tells us basically about the
alphabet's post classical, post antique history, that things like W
will emerge after the Romans, and also the split between
you and V will eventually solidify. That takes centuries for
those two letters to be thought of as separate letters.
And crucially, that split happens after the creation of the
(17:35):
letter W. Hence the disagreement over the name. And it's
necessary because of the fall of Rome. You have all
these barbarians speaking Germanic languages and they have this work
sound in their language. I say barbarians, you know, the
English emerge from this time period, and they have all
these names and words that need a letter, like war,
so you slowly see it emerge in the post Roman
(17:57):
or post classical words. I just like as well that
in more recent history, W is a bit of a disruptor.
I'll throw some words at you. How would you pronounce
David A n D and that word there a n
D and fantastic h A n D and excellent two
odd of two s A n D, sand w A
(18:20):
n D one wand wand for you wand for me
slightly different vowels because of British and American English. And
you'll notice this with say, I don't know arm harm
warm warm in American English. You'll notice this in something
like war, in a word like swan which doesn't sound
like swan. So W the sound behind that letters is
(18:40):
a disruptive one. And that's a recent thing. Shakespeare wouldn't
have said this. Shakespeare would have said he rhymes words
like glass with w was, So that's glass and wass
for Shakespeare. That's a recent thing.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And that makes a good segue into the title of
your book, is why Q needs you? So tell us
about that? How do letters carry all linguistic arrangements into
the present.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Oh that's so well put. I really like that formulation
because on the one hand, you have this present factor,
which is that these letters are intended to represent sounds,
but they don't exist in a vacuum. They're all caught
up in each other. They're all caught up in their
society and the culture and the people who happen to
be using them, and their identity and their biases and
(19:35):
so on and so on. So we still use QU
because the Romans used it. This is something that really
the English language gets after the very fateful year ten
sixty six, when you have the Battle of Hastings and
England is conquered, or if you're a Norman, it's rightly
taken by a Norman army under William the Conqueror, and
they they're trading on the prestige of Rome. So on
(19:58):
the one hand, of course QU does spell a sequence
of English sounds, but we could spell this with CW
or kW or Q on its own. We continue to
use QU because the Romans did, and Roman casts an
extremely long shadow specifically why those two letters need each other.
That goes back to basically the Romans receiving far more
(20:21):
letters than they need. They get, as they say this
ancient already ancient system from the Greeks. The Greeks got it,
the Phoenicians and back all the way round to Egypt.
And you know, by the time it lands in the
hands of the Romans, it's been used and adapted in
such a way that the letters C, K and Q
and now all just they're all standing for the same sound,
(20:42):
a kind of sound, a hard K. Something's got to go.
The Romans are ruthless. They're quite happy to prune letters
from the ancient alphabet. K is basically chucked out. That's gone.
And consequently, languages that descend from the Romans Latin, like
French or Spanish, don't really use K. They continue that
preference to this day. But Q can stay because of
(21:04):
a slight sort of mental phonological difference in the way
that they sort out sounds. Their Latin language has a
sound like quu, and that's separate from kut. We might
not think so in English, but the Romans certainly thought so.
And because quot is separate from kut's but with the
CEA it can keep it so un spelling, which is qu.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Here's a question about English spelling, because it's famously irregular.
Do you feel like it's fair to call it an
inefficient system or is that the wrong frame? Is there
a rule? Are there rules underneath the chaos?
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, so there are definitely rules. It doesn't seem that
way to everybody, and my heart goes out to people,
especially adult learners, who just have to get on with
this system that seems crazy and chaotic, and of course
nowadays you need to learn it. It's one of the
world's lingua francas. But nonetheless there are so many rules
going in under the surface, and you can criticize English
(22:02):
only from a certain point of view. At that point
of view is a good one, which is that you
should have the kind of golden ratio, the phonemic ratio
of one key sound to one letter. That's the whole
basis behind the alphabet. And if that's your measuring stick,
then yeah, sure, the English spelling system is not up
to snuff, like it's struggling in that regard, but for
(22:24):
various reasons, many of them unconscious, many of them conscious decisions.
New alternative rules and principles can work under the surface.
They can emerge, and they've emerged over the history of English.
If you wind back the clock back to the old
English period, so that's not Shakespeare, that's like Alfred the Great.
This is before the year let's say, eleven hundred AD.
(22:46):
Old English spelling is really phonemic. It works really well.
Many things have changed since then and the letters have
adapted with them. So take for example, magic E. It's
very distinctive English. It's that kind of silent e which
turns pop into the pope or fat into fate. And
it is distinctive to English, but it works. It really
(23:07):
works as an alternative system of spelling. So over time
differences can creep in, and if you adopt a broader perspective,
especially a broader perspective on how we read, it doesn't
seem so bad. That's probably the strongest thing I can
say about it. It doesn't seem so bad.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So why do we spell, you know, like I know
with a silent K, or I spell psychology with a
silent P. At the beginning all of these things that
we preserving history at the expense of children's brains and
time it takes to learn the stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yes, you've hit the man on the head. That's exactly it.
We're preserving history. These letters were once pronounced, and in
some cases they've been the letters have very much earned
their keep in English. So the know the start of
knowledge was once pronounced. If you go back to the
days of say Jeffrey Chaucer, the poet writing around the
(24:03):
year fourteen hundred, we know really that he is pronouncing
the k at the start of no and knowledge because
he alliterates it in his poetry. So Jeffrey Chaucer will
write something like the king kneeling, whereas I would say
the king kneeling. So he's alliterating these words because they
begin with the same sound, and the spelling with that
(24:26):
sound makes it long enough to kind of make the
cut to make it into standard English spelling, and then
drops out from speech, so the spelling is sort of frozen.
It reflects an older pronunciation of English, and we haven't
taken that step. So as you say, it's reflecting history
with something like psychology, though that is our or say
(24:47):
Europe's love for Greek, these silent pes have never been
pronounced in English, with the exception of a couple of
sort of hardcore fans of Greek in the sort of
the turn of the twentieth century. The founder of the
Oxford English Dictionary was sort of led a personal movement
to say things like psychology didn't catch on. But so
(25:08):
that is not a case of something falling silent within English.
That's something that is pronounced in another language that English
is very uncomfortable for the sound patterns of English, and
consequently we don't pronounce it.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Is there some hidden benefit to English spellings conservatism for example?
Is there something that preserves the relationships here between the
words and the roots and the meanings by having these fossils,
or is it disadvantageous that we hold onto everything.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yes, I think that's so well said. It is something
that I have got on my little soapbox and talked about.
If we are to reform spelling, if we let's say
we're going to make it totally phonemic, let's bring everything
back to a sort of one to one basis of
sound to letter. Great. I'll just add that when we
embark on this incredible reform, this massive international project, it
(25:56):
may well happen someday there will be some babies that
get thrown out with the bathwater. Because there are many things.
Many alternative systems are systems to do with understanding words,
recognizing words, making etymological connections between words that are preserved
in the medium of writing. So take for example, know
(26:19):
that for me on its own is no with a
diff thong, a kind of double vowel at the end.
In the word knowledge, it's an oh, it's a short vowel,
And in a word like acknowledge, suddenly the k comes
back into pronunciation. So you've got three letters pronounced differently
in three words. But at least in the medium of writing,
(26:40):
I can kind of recognize that as a reader, at
least in the medium of reading, as a unit of meaning,
as a sort of chunk of lexical information, meaning basically
that I know all these words have in common by
sheer happenstance. That's not a million miles away from need writing,
where you fundamentally or recognizing chunks of meaning. And that's
(27:05):
kind of how we read English nowadays, especially adult readers.
So people who've been online at least as long as
I have, you may have seen those kind of sharable
images and it's like an English sentence something like, you know,
if you can read this, and all the letters apart
from the very first one are kind of scrambled, so
you know, if you can read this, then you are
a genius or something like that, and genius is spelled
(27:27):
I don't know GNI something like that. You can read
it because your brain, especially after that infancy stage of
learning to master this system of writing, you're not simply
accepting sequences of sounds and assigning them and forming a
sound word out of them. You're recognizing chunks of meaning.
(27:48):
And that business is that alternative approach to reading, and
indeed also the etymological connections that uniting words that may
have different pronunciations. I don't know in a word like autumn,
I mean I say autumn, I know it's full over
the United States, but autumn has a silent n. It
reappears an autumnal take away the end, and you might
(28:09):
lose the connection between those words. So there's a principle
of reading and as a principle of etymology, that we
would lose if we updated our spelling.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Are there cognitive costs to learning? You know, what's called
a deep orthography like English, as opposed to a transparent
spelling system like you find in Italian, where each letter
maps onto a sound cleanly and you know exactly how
something is pronounced. What you're mentioning about the historical benefits
we get. Are there cognitive costs to it?
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah, I would expect so. I would expect so, and
we would expect to see differences as students or young
pupils are learning these two systems that Italian learners will
have a better time.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's exactly right. It's much harder work for an English
speller to learn than it is for an Italian spellers.
So I always wonder about this thing whether it makes
sense to hang on to the fossils of language because
of the benefits we get of the history the alphabet,
as you so wonderfully exposed in your book. You know,
it carries all kinds of history and the way we
(29:12):
spell words. But maybe it's not worth it. Let me
ask you this, If you were in charge of redoing
the spelling in the English language, would you do it
and would it be difficult to get people to agree
on it.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
I would enjoy the responsibility for a day and then resign.
It's a huge task, and it's something that I am
personally open to. I don't want your listeners to come
away with the impression that I'm sort of flip flopping
around on this issue. Your listeners might think, hang on,
he's just praised you know this etymological, historical spelling, and
now he's talking about reform, but it genuinely it's a
(29:51):
difficult question. We will lose things and we will gain
things with reform. Let's say we're all on board. We're
all on board for some sort reform, and maybe this
could happen. I really believe that this is a matter
of language, but also maybe geopolitics when some sort of
upset knocks English off its high position in the world,
(30:12):
and afterwards, you know, the different countries that speak English
can maybe have a frank conversation about, Okay, what we're
going to do with our spelling now, maybe taking it
to the national level rather than leaving it at the
international level as it currently is. So we're all on board,
what are we going to do? Basically, if you're going
to reform spelling, you're going to have to have a
very honest conversation and you're going to have to answer
(30:32):
two really big questions. So firstly, who are you? This
is not a soul searching question, it's literally who are you?
In terms of prestige means, technology, power, influence? Are people
going to listen to you? Are you somebody that can
reach people via a particular medium such as the Internet
or printed materials. Do you have governments on site? In addition,
(30:55):
are you respected? Are you some greater paragon of learning?
We have them, but they tend to be on a
kind of national level within different English speaking countries. And accrucially,
are people going to listen to you? I can propose
a reform spelling for you right now, and your listeners go,
thanks very much, I'm not going to use it. So
that's the first question. Secondly, then who's English? Whose English
(31:19):
are going to be? Because English speech, if we're going
to bring it back to speech, is seriously disunited. Speech
change is in a way that can lead to new languages.
Eventually has happened over the course of history. That's happened
with Latin, eventually becomes French and Spanish and Italian and Romanian.
And it's constantly, always and never going to happen with English.
(31:42):
You know, for as long as we keep communicating and
talking with each other, that will slow down the rate
of change. But all of our accents are kind of
straining at the leash to become new languages. We'll talk
about American I speak, American I speak Australian. I speak
Indian something like that, but our standard spelling is keeping
it all together for the time being. If you're going
(32:03):
to reform that spelling, which one of these English is?
Which is it American English? Well, sure it's the most prestigious.
It's the one with the most power, and I think
I think it's the one with the most speakers. Sure,
but you're going to annoy it a heck of a
lot of people in Britain on Australia if you do that,
because we will insist that the h in herb needs
to be there. There's a lot of strong feelings about this.
(32:24):
So these are two ginormous questions, and the current global
situation I don't think allows an answer, a satisfactory answer
to both of them.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Okay, let's shift over to the brain now. So you know,
reading feels totally natural to us once we learned, but
as I said, it's so biologically recent. What does literacy
ask the brain to repurpose?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
So I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about
this topic, but they're very amateurish. I have a vague
sense that, as you say, writing, it comes later, and
that's that laterness of writing is twofold. That's not only
lateness within human history and human development, but also there's
a lateness within our personal development in well it comes
(33:10):
after speech, or if your death, it comes after signing.
So there is a kind of lag and I think
that does point to some of the foundations of reading
and writing, which involves the brain, involves of course the eyes,
It involves your hands as well all sorts of motor
movements involved in the business of writing, which makes it
(33:34):
separate from speech. We don't tend to use our hands
to signify so much in speech, despite my wild gesticulating
I do that, but because of at least the original
dependency of writing on speech. My intuition or my perhaps
prediction is that on some level it does use the
same parts of the brain. The information is coming to
(33:56):
that part of the brain via a different route, namely
the eyes. But there is a fundamental linguistic connection in
on neurology. And that is about as much as I
feel I can say, what do you think? What do
you think about that?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, that's exactly right. There's an area in the brain
in humans called the visual word form area on the
left side of the brain typically, and it is essentially,
after you've learned speech, this is allowing you to take
visual marks on a page and translate them into as
though somebody were saying it. So so you're right. It's
(34:33):
allowing you to look at the marks and say, oh,
what would it sound like if this were coming out
of somebody's mouth. And people can get damage to that
area and then they can no longer, you know, read
words on a page. It doesn't make sense to them anymore.
They're no longer able to translate that into what it
would sound like. Let me ask you another brain question here, Dan,
What's interesting about the way that writing trains a brain
(34:56):
that this happens slightly differently. If you're learning a let's say,
the English alphabet versus a what's called a logographic writing
system in Chinese, where each ideogram stands for a word.
When you're looking in English versus Chinese, the brain is
asked to solve slightly different computational problems. The difference is
(35:18):
that in alphabet trains the brain to hear speech as
divisible into these tiny sequential sound units, while a logographic
system like Chinese trains the brain to rapidly recognize these
visual symbolic patterns that are tied to meaning, and so
(35:39):
you know, they're just there's slightly different ways of solving
the same problem.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
What do you then think from You know, as much
as neurology can tell us at the moment that then
actually speech, different kinds of speech, different writing systems of
the world. They're just working differently. They are being sent
to different parts of the brain.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
That's exactly right, and I want to emphasize that in
the end, what your brain is trying to do, it's
locked in silence and darkness. It's trying to just gather meaning.
And so whether you're doing it phonemically sounding something out,
or you're looking at pictures like hieroglyphics or Chinese letters
or whatever, it is, what you're trying to get to
(36:15):
is the same endpoint, which is, Okay, what is this
sign trying to tell me? What is this book? What's
the story? But yes, there are measurable differences in how
the brain goes about that. I'll just give you another example.
Some colleagues of mind at Berkeley did a study a
few years ago where they looked at what happens when
you read a book versus you listen to the audio book,
(36:37):
and I think a lot of people had predictions that
we'd see really different signals going on in the brain,
but it turns out it's really similar. Obviously, when you're
listening to an audiobook, you're activating the auditory cortex, when
you're reading, you're activating the visual cortex, and so on.
But fundamentally, what the brain cares about is the meaning,
(36:58):
and so all of that ends up in this same place.
And when you're reading the story and the guys out
on the ship and the woman is doing this and that, like,
all that looks the same in the brain. So once
you're past the initial levels, what the brain cares about
is what is happening in the story.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
So different processes, different roots in the brain, but all
ultimately targeting the same.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Place exactly right.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Interesting, and one of the few things I can contribute
to any sort of discussion of the brain is that
I would also expect that it wouldn't be a straightforward
binary logographic versus phonemic course, Let's, you know, use more
Layman's terms, meaning based versus sound based, or I would
imagine that there would be diversity even within those categories,
(37:41):
because within the field and the history of the alphabet.
You have different writing systems that incode different sounds, or
maybe not all the sounds. You have alphabet in a
narrower sense is the one that encodes all phonemic sounds,
all the key sounds of your languagewels and consonants. But
(38:01):
you also have scripts that leave vowels implied or just
not written at all. So this is the foundation actually
of our own alphabet. Vowels are kind of a later edition,
and that vowel a state is really the foundation of say,
Hebrew and Arabic writing. Of course, there are ways of
writing vowels in Hebrew and Arabic. They could be repurposing
(38:22):
consonant letters or adding additional marks. I think they're called
nickeld in Hebrew. But the basis is consonants only, and
you are as the reader therefore inferring, you're inferring vowels,
you're supplying them. You're kind of vowel part of your
let's say, your speech center of the brain is maybe
(38:45):
doing a little bit more work in going okay, well,
we've got the sort of skeleton of this word, and
what does this match? What could this be? I'm going
to use context and I'm going to use sequence of
consonants to go, Aha, we have a winner. It's this,
and the vowels get slotted in. We have a complete
meaningful word and it gets passed on down the conveyor
belt somehow. So just expect there's diversity even within phonological
(39:07):
systems as well.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I'm really fascinated by this question of whether spelling reforms
are doomed. And you brought up some you know, some
complexities about this, but let me ask a general question. Now,
what point does a spelling become wrong rather than merely
non standard?
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Hm. This is the thing our standard spelling today in English,
the thing that's you know, predictive text and your word
processor of choice guides you to has this veneer of inevitability.
But it's it's a mirage, it's an illusion. Standard spelling
is actually a matter of consensus, and the consensus is
(39:56):
reinforced by technology. If you go back in time of call,
there are highly prestigious forms of spelling, but people just
aren't able to impress one particular standard way. You don't
have the printing press or you don't have the computers
to really tell people how to spell. You know, it
goes beyond technology also goes into education systems. Obviously, as
(40:18):
particular way of spelling, it was going to get a
huge boost and become the standard when it has a
full government behind it, which you know, which happens not
just in the case of English. It's kind of a mirage,
and it works by it works by consensus, and it
also becomes another kind of feedback loop. We agree on
the standard, we put it in our dictionaries, and we
(40:39):
put it into our technology, and then our dictionaries and
our technology tell us this is the standards, and we
believe them, and we go, aha, this is a wrong spelling.
But that's really something that emerges slowly, and if you
were to go back to earlier periods in the history
of writing, early in the history of English, the idea
of standard spelling of right and wrong is just not there.
(41:01):
That's good, that's bad, that's prestigious, that's not prestigious. But
there's not a single standard. That's I kind oft stress
how modernist thing it is, because the modern world has
made it possible.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
You know. On the side, I'm an amateur genealogist and
I love studying family trees, and it's the same thing
with the spelling of surnames. Those were incredibly fluid essentially
until record keeping very recently, essentially following Napoleon seventeen eighty nine,
when you know, governments needed to keep records for taxation purposes.
(41:31):
And then especially with the advent of typewriters and then computers,
then the spelling of surnames got nailed down in a
way that they never were before. So here's my question
to you. So you know, in the same way that
computers in spell check nudged us towards standardized spelling, what
(41:51):
is generative AI nudging us towards What changes when the
new tools start correcting the user and make normal versions
of sentences.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I really appreciate this question. When you look at those
historical documents when you do your family genealogy, you'll have
a sense, you'll have a feeling of when this document
is from based on the way the letters are used,
the way it's spelled, and you can kind of gain
vibes from a historical writing in And I believe My
point is, I believe our era today in which we
(42:23):
you and I are speaking, will be no different. It
will have its own feel, and one part of that
feel will be the triumph of the standard, the triumph
perhaps the rise before the fall. I don't know. I
don't know what happens next in the future, but there
will be a real sense of an all victorious standard spelling.
While English accents to continue to go in different directions
(42:46):
and continue to diverge, and AI will form a part
of that. Spelling is always tied to the circumstances of
its time, which naturally includes technology. You know, spelling. We
can see the effects on spelling when the printing press
is set up, and when AI gets set up is
absolutely no different as well. I think what we will
see is a real devotion to the standards. There will
(43:11):
be almost no question, no experimentation with spelling. All possible variation,
some of it which may be better, is in phonemically
better make more sense, will be just you know, cut
off at the base, you know, plucks before it can
even blossom, a real sense of you know, even with
us started spelling today, small spelling mistakes can creep in.
(43:34):
Let's wind back the clock to the pre AI age.
Let's go about twenty years or something like that. Even
with all the access to all the dictionaries in your
classrooms or I don't know all the printed media according
to the standard spelling, mistakes and possibly spelling corrections and
improvements could still creep in. But by giving so much
(43:54):
of our writing and our production of writing over to AI,
we have no possibility for those new innovations to creep in.
We will say, do this, and AI will do it
for us. And AI is not going to update spelling.
AI thinks is going to give us only the standard
spelling that we want. There's going to be no natural
development as there would be if it's only us humans
(44:16):
doing the writing, and instead we are offloading our thinking
but also our writing variation and fluidity over to the machine,
where it'll just stop, at least for the future, at
least for the you know, foreseeable future.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
I wonder if AI could ever help us to do
a real language reform. I'm not sure what that would
look like, but you know, if the AI sort of
takes it on in the same way that you said,
who is doing it? Is it somebody with enough power
and influence? Maybe if you know, open AI and Claude
and all the others said all right, look, we're standardizing
(44:53):
this because it is going to lock down. Now that
we're using AI, all of the evolution and variation is
going to get locked down right now. You know, maybe
it's an opportunity to say, let's just clean it up
while we're doing it.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Absolutely, I'd only add to that that there's an additional
ingredient that might lead to success, which is prestige. These
companies are extraordinarily prestigious their company, they're their Their product
which they make is very much you know, flavor of
a month. At the moment, it's it's the big thing,
and it might not have success for linguistic reasons because
(45:28):
of what I just outlined. You know, the problem of
it still doesn't solve the problem of who's English. But nonetheless,
the prestige could be the thing that carries the day
as people are on board with the AI train and
are you know, I feel it very much has a
kind of cultural cachet that other media don't at the
moment that I would predict would be the thing that
(45:50):
allows it to reform spelling.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
What do you hope everyone will look at differently about
the alphabet after hearing this conversation, It would.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Be the alphabet it's just not fixed. It is not fixed.
There is not a single feature of the alphabet that
does not show change and development over history, as the
alphabet spreads out from that early point in time and
passes through different languages and different people's different hands. So
this may you know, This pertains to the direction of
(46:21):
the letters, what sound they stand for, the way that
they're drawn. Obviously the upper and lower case difference comes in,
and I think lower case letters are very much the
dominant ones today. The only thing really that I can
say has remained the same is that fundamental principle of
one sound for one letter. That's the thing that kind
(46:41):
of gives us an alphabet. That's when we can say
the alphabet's born back in four thousand years ago. Everything
else is in flux, and I find that very hardening.
I suppose as a historical linguist by heart, I'm not
scared of flux, and we are not bound to follow
the spelling of the past. Yes, our sputting is very fixed.
(47:03):
Yes the standard is so strong, but if we want
to make changes we can. Every generation has had that right,
and we are no difference. The fact that the alphabet
is influx and will continue to be in flux after
we're dead and gone. I find very encouraging because we
can put our own stamp on it.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
That was linguist Danny Bates talking about his new book
Why Q Needs You. I just want to mention two
more important things about written language. The first is a
common misunderstanding that I sometimes see about whether the human
brain has evolved some dedicated module for reading written language.
The answer is no, because reading is far too recent
(47:46):
in evolutionary history. The first writing systems appear about five
thousand years ago, and the first alphabets were about four
thousand years ago, so that is way too fast for
the brain to evolve any kind of new module. Instead,
and even more amazingly, literacy recruits and reorganizes other neural
(48:09):
machinery that has evolved for other purposes. So, for example,
it repurposes parts of the visual system that evolves for
recognizing objects like shapes or faces, or tracks in the mud,
or tools or other patterns. When you learn to read,
you're training this circuitry to become exquisitely sensitive to culturally
(48:33):
invented marks on a page. And then reading also recruits
auditory and language systems. You have to learn to map
these visual symbols onto the sounds of speech. So literacy
requires the brain to fuse together all these different systems
for vision and speech and motor planning and attention and
memory into this new coordinated network. And this is an
(48:57):
example of what my colleague Stanislau calls neuronal recycling, which
means that ancient neural hardware gets co opted for totally
new cultural purposes. Okay, I also want to mention one
more deep question about written language, which is why in
most Semitic languages the writing goes from right to left,
(49:22):
but descendants of the Greek alphabet like English go left
to right. Now, that might seem like just some arbitrary question,
but some decades ago people theorized that this might have
to do with a detail of the brain. This was
mostly proposed by a scholar named Da Kirschov in a
book he wrote called The Alphabet and the Brain, and
(49:42):
his proposal depends on a few linked claims. The main
thing is that Semitic writing systems like Phoenician or Hebrew
only encoded consonants, and the readers had to figure out
the vowels from the context. The idea is that that
requires the brain to do sort of holy stick processing
with a lot of influence of context, which Da Kirschov
(50:04):
said associated these more strongly with right hemisphere processing. By contrast,
the Greek alphabet explicitly encoded vowels, and that promoted finer
breakdown into the sounds of the letters and analyzing the
exact sequence, and the idea is that these were associated
(50:25):
more strongly with left hemisphere language systems. Now, why does
the direction that you write the text matter? In theory,
it's because visual input from the right side of the
visual field projects to the left hemisphere and the left
visual field projects to the right hemisphere. So Da Kirschov
suggested that if you read left to right, that continuously
(50:50):
moves upcoming text into the right visual field, so it's
better for feeding language information directly into the left hemisphere.
So just to summarize, is that the idea was that
an alphabet that's really explicit about every sound, like early
Greek was, might be more efficient when you read it
from left to right, and hence the Greek swapping of directions. Now,
(51:15):
I want to give a caveat here. Writing direction varies
a lot across cultures, So if there was something about
hemispheric efficiency that strongly determined the writing direction, we'd probably
expect more convergence around the globe, But across cultures, written
languages vary a lot. Some are left rights, some are
(51:35):
right left, Some go up or down, some go back
and forth, and they all function fine. So that probably
weakens the claim of a biologically optimal direction. It may
be that the direction of the language has mostly to
do with cultural lock in. In other words, once the
civilization accumulates archives and religious texts and scribes and bureaucracy,
(51:59):
than whatever they started doing it first kind of gets
locked in. Think of this like the way that we
have quirty keyboards, which are a totally suboptimal layout for
a keyboard, but once it gets locked in, then it's
really hard to change. But I wanted to mention this
issue about the brain and the direction of writing. I
don't think it can be the full story, but it's
(52:20):
a fascinating potential link between ancient history and modern science.
So let's wrap up the fact that we have languages
that go in all directions. Fundamentally, what it should make
us appreciate is the fact that human brains can internalize
almost any symbolic convention at all. And back to the
(52:41):
theme that started this episode, whatever we internalize. Although it's
a massively complex system that encapsulates thousands of years of
migration and empire and trade and politics, the really stunning
part is that the brain trains on language so deeply that,
under normal circumstances, it becomes totally invisible to us unless
(53:05):
we choose to start paying attention. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out
Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
(53:27):
and this is Inner Cosmos.
Why do things the brain does so well become invisible,
like walking or playing tennis? Or what we'll talk about today,
the reading and writing of language. Where do our twenty
six written symbols in English come from and how do
they capture everything in the cosmos of human experience? What
(00:20):
ancient ghosts are still hiding inside the letters that you
read every day? For example? Does the letter A contain
the shape of a cow from four thousand years ago?
Does learning to read reconfigure the circuitry of your brain?
And how does dyslexia reveal how unnatural reading really is?
(00:42):
And could ai freeze the evolution of language for the
first time in history. Today we're diving into the alphabet
with linguist Danny Bate, who's just written a book on
the surprising history of every letter. Welcome to innner Cosmos
with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and
(01:03):
in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound
universe to understand why and how our lives look the
way they do. The really wild thing about the brain
(01:29):
is that the things the brain does best are the
things we don't even notice. For example, walking is a
tremendously complex symphony of coordinating all your muscles at just
the right times. But once we learn how to do
it after years of trying, then we lose access to
how we even do it because it gets burned down
(01:52):
into the unconscious brain. Same with riding a bicycle. There
was a time when you had to try and try
and pay attention to how you're tilting and moving your
arms and how to hit the brakes. But once you
get it, then you're not even consciously aware anymore that
you're doing it. Or take swinging a tennis racket. It's
a tremendously complex series of movements, but once you learn
(02:16):
how to do it, you can't describe it anymore. If
I say to you, wow, you serve so well, how
exactly do you do that? You really don't have conscious
access to explain it to me. Now, this is a
general theme about the brain that I wrote about in
my book Incognito. The brain gets really good at tasks
that you do a lot of training on, and it
(02:36):
relies on a lot of conscious attention at first, but
eventually the brain burns those tasks down into the circuitry,
and what you get out of that is speed, and
energy efficiency. What you lose is conscious access. Now, the
great American psychologist William James in eighteen ninety realized that
(02:57):
there were many things we couldn't actually see. He suggested
that we coax these things into the light by a
simple mental exercise. Try to make, as he put it,
the natural seems strange by asking the why of any
instinctive human act. So here's what he wrote in his
(03:18):
Principles of Psychology, read by the actor sean judge.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Why do we smile when pleased and not scowl? Why
are we unable to talk to a crowd as we
talk to a single friend. Why does a particular maiden
turn our wits so upside down? The common man can
only say, of course we smile. Of course our heart
palpitates at the side of the crowd. Of course we
(03:42):
love the maiden, that beautiful soul, clad in that perfect form,
so palpably and fragrantly made for all eternity to be loved.
And so probably does each animal feel about the particular
things it tends to in the presence of particular objects.
To the lion, it is the lioness which is made
to be loved. To the bear, the she bear. To
(04:06):
the broody hand, the notion would probably seem monstrous that
there should be a creature in the world to whom
a nest full of eggs was not the utterly fascinating
and precious, and never to be too much sat upon
an object which it is to her. Thus we may
be sure that, however mysterious some animal's instincts may appear
to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
So I've always been fascinated by all the things we
do that are invisible to us, whether by learning or
by instinct. Because we don't spend any time thinking about
those things, they just seem totally natural, and therefore become
part of the background of our reality. And one thing
I've always been fascinated with is all the invisible details
(04:51):
of our language, whether spoken or written. You drop into
the world, and in your first few years you're exposed
to lots of likelanguage, and you start babbling, and eventually
you get better and better at coordinating your breath and
the position of your tongue and the shape of your lips,
and you are able to make sequences of sound really rapidly,
(05:15):
and these travel over a little distance by compressing and
expanding the air molecules, and you can transmit some kind
of meaning to another human this way, but you can't
transmit meaning to any human. It only works with a
human who happens to share your particular mapping of sounds
(05:35):
to meanings. Just go to any other country in the
world where you don't speak the language, and you can
detect how arbitrary this whole thing is, how any sound
can mean any concept. So next time you're in a
foreign country, just watch someone at a cafe. They are
regaling their friends with some sort of story, and everyone
(05:57):
is transfixed, or they're gasping, or they're laughing. And if
you don't speak that language, the whole sequence of sounds
is a total mystery to you. But here's the point
I'm making. If it's your language, then the whole very
complicated process of making sounds and interpreting them is totally
transparent to you. Right now, you're listening to my voice,
(06:19):
and presumably you're not thinking about all these rapid individual
sounds that I'm cooking up. Instead, you're just enjoying the meaning,
and you remain unaware of the lower level mechanics. And
this is especially evident in written language. When you skim
over the squiggles on a page of written text, if
(06:40):
it's a language that you read, it's hard to appreciate
that you're even looking at random squiggles, because it's hard
to shake off the fact that they carry meaning. But
all you need to do is look at some written
language that you are unfamiliar with, especially one with a
totally different alphabet, or one that uses different symbols for words,
(07:00):
and you can appreciate just how arbitrary the mapping is
between some squiggle and some meaning. So in this context,
one thing I'm obsessed with is alphabets and spellings, because
these are things that we have to struggle to learn
as little kids, and then they become fully invisible to us.
We pass our eyes over a page of a novel
(07:24):
and the meaning just floats right off and we laugh
or cry, but we rarely, if ever, pay attention to
the details of the symbols themselves. So to really illustrate
how weird all of this is and how deep it goes,
today we're going to talk with linguist Danny Bait about
the English alphabet, which, like every alphabet, represents a compressed
(07:47):
history of civilization. It's so rare that we would ever
stop to wonder why each letter looks the shape it does,
or why English has all these bizarre spellings like K
in the word kneecap or night in shining armor even
though the K makes no sound, or why we have
an H in ghost, or why there's a T in
(08:10):
the word listen, or one hundred other examples that Danny
has written about in his new book, Why Q Needs You.
I remember tripping on each of those questions as a
kid learning the language, but past the age of six
or seven, we totally forget to ask those questions anymore.
So Danny joins us here today to take us on
(08:31):
a dive into the unfathomable depths of the English alphabet,
that invisible thing that our brains spend so much time with,
but we rarely stop to appreciate. Here's my conversation with
linguist Danny Bait. The alphabet has become so successful that
(08:51):
it's essentially invisible. Why do we fail to notice it
every time we're reading a sentence?
Speaker 3 (08:55):
I think it is partly it's a victim of its
own success, and I think it's partly because it is optimized.
It's writing in general, and the alphabet specifically is well
optimized for writing down language and for reading and writing
these two separate processes. In addition to that, we learn
it when we're in our infancy, we learn it when
we're at elementary school, and frankly, I think this is
(09:17):
a factor we don't have much else going on at
that particular point in our lives. If we had to
learn it as busy twenty or thirteen year olds trying
to hold down a career, then maybe it would fit
a little bit more obtrusively into our lives.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
If you had to explain the alphabet to someone who
had never encountered writing or the concept of writing, what
would seem the most astonishing about it?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I suppose it would be that as a system, it
has very few ingredients we managed to create or manage
to write down all of language. I mean, of course,
there are some things that go along with speech that
maybe don't have an associated word or a letter or
something like that, like I don't know, coughing and sneezing
and all the involuntary sounds that we make while we speak.
(09:59):
But nonetheless, the words of our language do get written
down really successfully with in the case of English, twenty
six ish ingredients. Of course, you know you may want
to dispute that number. You might have maybe like what
do we do with ampersand and plus and slash and
things like that in punctuation, But you know, twenty six
letters to write down this incredible cosmos of human language,
(10:23):
I think is extremely impressive.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
So the thing about writing from a biology point of
view is it's so new. It's just appeared in the
last nanosecond of biological time. What was the great cognitive
leap from pictures of things to symbols for sounds.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It's a couple of leaps. It's a couple of maybe
moments of creation. When I talk about the alphabet, I
don't want people to get the impression that I'm trying
to talk about all human writing. You have maybe a
handful of super successful traditions of writing, like big family
trees that are unrelated to one another, and go back
to a particular moment of creation. And I should say
(11:03):
there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing down concepts and taking
meaning as the primary basis for your writing system. That
was the basis for Egyptian hieroglyphs. That was the basis
for even something of ancient but very successful system like
kurkqun air form. Chinese characters as well, they have a
phonetic component, but nonetheless they take meaning and things as
(11:28):
their primary thing that you're trying to write down. And
yet in certain points in human history people have realized
that if you are going to take the number of
things and concepts and bits of grammar and give each
one its own character, it's really going to increase the
number of characters. So if you can hone in on
something that can express the same information but with fewer symbols,
(11:50):
you may be onto a winner. You may be onto
something that's maybe not intrinsically better, but might spread more quickly,
might have mass appeal. What you can do is with speech,
it tends to be made up of a subset of
sounds a spoken language across the world. Basically, no spoken
language uses all the sounds that we humans can make. Instead,
(12:11):
it's a subset, and if you base your writing system
on that subset, then that's a cognative leap. That's a
great moment of creation.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The way you structure your book is lovely. Each letter
in the English alphabet gets a chapter of its own.
Give us an example of a letter whose shape still
carries a ghost of its ancient origin.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Oh, lovely, it's going to sound very boring, maybe a
little bit basic to your lovely listeners, But it has
to be A. And I will explain why A is
the primal letter. It has of this great status at
the beginning of our alphabet. It's the thing that kicks
the whole alphabet off, and yet, by sheer luck, it
does also, as you say nicely put, it contain a
(12:54):
little bit of a ghost of what that symbol originally
used to be, how it started out. I mentioned already
things like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs, at least in the
visual medium in writing, are the forerunner of our own alphabet.
I don't think it's fair to say that it's a
straightforward development of hieroglyphs. It's a definite break that gets
(13:15):
us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to our alphabets. What seems to
happen is that basically a population of non Egyptians within Egypt,
ancient Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, take these existing already very
ancient symbols and rather than maintain them for their current
quite sophisticated different purposes, streamline the whole thing. So now
(13:35):
it's one of these symbols for one sound, specifically one
consonant of their non Egyptian language. And I mentioned hieroglyphs.
That's key because to begin with, they are just straightforward
imitations or replications of hieroglyphs. They look like things. They
look like hands, and they look like eyes and animals
and tools that you might find in your house beside
(13:57):
the nile. And A perhaps best of all, the letters
of that original set has firstly survived, but secondly preserves
a little bit of that ghost in that the thing
it used to look like was the head of a cow,
head of cattle. And if you turn a capital a
capital letter is older than lower case ones. I think
we have intuition generally about that because they're more different
(14:18):
from one another. But if you turn upside down, the
kind of horns of the cow and the mouth of
the cow, it's the point and the legs of a
capital A just rotated. Everything else has changed, but there's
a little bit of a ghost of that cow still
in capital A.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Excellent and just before we go on, give us a
sense about uppercase versus lowercase letters and how we ended
up with that of course.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Yeah, So basically, these hiroglyphs are pictograms is a nicer
alternative word for that. They look like things. But quite
quickly as the alphabet catches on, still very much within
the shadow of older systems like hieroglyphs and Cunea forms,
it spreads its way sort of around the Mediterranean over
the centuries in a sort of vaguely anti clockwise motion,
(15:00):
so it makes its way up the coast of the
Middle East, eastern Mediterranean, makes a leap over to Greece.
From Greece, it makes the leap over to Italy, and
all the while the letters are changing, especially in that
first part of the journey. They're being used. And if
you are i don't know, inscribing some sort of document
or letter that you need to send on you know,
(15:20):
something like please help the Assyrians are coming. You don't
have time to write down the full cow's head or
the full you know, praising man or various other complex sites.
So they get simplified. The letters are reduced in their
complexity as symbols, and that's kind of the general picture
as the alphabet makes its way up the coast of
(15:41):
the Mediterranean. By the time it lands in the hands
of the Phoenicians, great people living in what is today Lebanon,
the symbols are really quite abstract. They don't look like
things anymore. They really do look like letters. But crucially,
by the time it lands in Rome, so it arrives
in ancient Italy at say round about thee seven hundred BC,
(16:01):
literacy just massively takes off. It massively takes hold and
kind of alternative uses, alternative ways of writing. Who are
you writing to? What are you writing on? Different uses
for the letters emerge, and one of these is a
kind of cursive and that cursive will become lowercase letters.
They're very simple, they're very fluid, they're much easier to
write and connect up. They're very well suited to small
(16:24):
documents like a personal letter as opposed to your capital letters,
which you use for fancy things like public inscriptions. And
from that status, eventually lowercase will kind of upper and
lower case will kind of solidifys as two different systems.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So just before we get back to some big picture stuff,
so let's take a few other letters as example. So
tell us about this strange name dob and what that
reveals about the mismatch between writing and speech.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh, I like that. I like that very much. I
think W, out of all the letters, is the historian's
friend because it wears its history on its sleeve. It's
a double you to begin with. But crucially, if any
of your listeners might know French or Spanish or other
languages that originate in Western Europe, they may instead call
it duble, a double V. And the fact that there's
(17:12):
a disagreement over the name tells us basically about the
alphabet's post classical, post antique history, that things like W
will emerge after the Romans, and also the split between
you and V will eventually solidify. That takes centuries for
those two letters to be thought of as separate letters.
And crucially, that split happens after the creation of the
(17:35):
letter W. Hence the disagreement over the name. And it's
necessary because of the fall of Rome. You have all
these barbarians speaking Germanic languages and they have this work
sound in their language. I say barbarians, you know, the
English emerge from this time period, and they have all
these names and words that need a letter, like war,
so you slowly see it emerge in the post Roman
(17:57):
or post classical words. I just like as well that
in more recent history, W is a bit of a disruptor.
I'll throw some words at you. How would you pronounce
David A n D and that word there a n
D and fantastic h A n D and excellent two
odd of two s A n D, sand w A
(18:20):
n D one wand wand for you wand for me
slightly different vowels because of British and American English. And
you'll notice this with say, I don't know arm harm
warm warm in American English. You'll notice this in something
like war, in a word like swan which doesn't sound
like swan. So W the sound behind that letters is
(18:40):
a disruptive one. And that's a recent thing. Shakespeare wouldn't
have said this. Shakespeare would have said he rhymes words
like glass with w was, So that's glass and wass
for Shakespeare. That's a recent thing.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And that makes a good segue into the title of
your book, is why Q needs you? So tell us
about that? How do letters carry all linguistic arrangements into
the present.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Oh that's so well put. I really like that formulation
because on the one hand, you have this present factor,
which is that these letters are intended to represent sounds,
but they don't exist in a vacuum. They're all caught
up in each other. They're all caught up in their
society and the culture and the people who happen to
be using them, and their identity and their biases and
(19:35):
so on and so on. So we still use QU
because the Romans used it. This is something that really
the English language gets after the very fateful year ten
sixty six, when you have the Battle of Hastings and
England is conquered, or if you're a Norman, it's rightly
taken by a Norman army under William the Conqueror, and
they they're trading on the prestige of Rome. So on
(19:58):
the one hand, of course QU does spell a sequence
of English sounds, but we could spell this with CW
or kW or Q on its own. We continue to
use QU because the Romans did, and Roman casts an
extremely long shadow specifically why those two letters need each other.
That goes back to basically the Romans receiving far more
(20:21):
letters than they need. They get, as they say this
ancient already ancient system from the Greeks. The Greeks got it,
the Phoenicians and back all the way round to Egypt.
And you know, by the time it lands in the
hands of the Romans, it's been used and adapted in
such a way that the letters C, K and Q
and now all just they're all standing for the same sound,
(20:42):
a kind of sound, a hard K. Something's got to go.
The Romans are ruthless. They're quite happy to prune letters
from the ancient alphabet. K is basically chucked out. That's gone.
And consequently, languages that descend from the Romans Latin, like
French or Spanish, don't really use K. They continue that
preference to this day. But Q can stay because of
(21:04):
a slight sort of mental phonological difference in the way
that they sort out sounds. Their Latin language has a
sound like quu, and that's separate from kut. We might
not think so in English, but the Romans certainly thought so.
And because quot is separate from kut's but with the
CEA it can keep it so un spelling, which is qu.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Here's a question about English spelling, because it's famously irregular.
Do you feel like it's fair to call it an
inefficient system or is that the wrong frame? Is there
a rule? Are there rules underneath the chaos?
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, so there are definitely rules. It doesn't seem that
way to everybody, and my heart goes out to people,
especially adult learners, who just have to get on with
this system that seems crazy and chaotic, and of course
nowadays you need to learn it. It's one of the
world's lingua francas. But nonetheless there are so many rules
going in under the surface, and you can criticize English
(22:02):
only from a certain point of view. At that point
of view is a good one, which is that you
should have the kind of golden ratio, the phonemic ratio
of one key sound to one letter. That's the whole
basis behind the alphabet. And if that's your measuring stick,
then yeah, sure, the English spelling system is not up
to snuff, like it's struggling in that regard, but for
(22:24):
various reasons, many of them unconscious, many of them conscious decisions.
New alternative rules and principles can work under the surface.
They can emerge, and they've emerged over the history of English.
If you wind back the clock back to the old
English period, so that's not Shakespeare, that's like Alfred the Great.
This is before the year let's say, eleven hundred AD.
(22:46):
Old English spelling is really phonemic. It works really well.
Many things have changed since then and the letters have
adapted with them. So take for example, magic E. It's
very distinctive English. It's that kind of silent e which
turns pop into the pope or fat into fate. And
it is distinctive to English, but it works. It really
(23:07):
works as an alternative system of spelling. So over time
differences can creep in, and if you adopt a broader perspective,
especially a broader perspective on how we read, it doesn't
seem so bad. That's probably the strongest thing I can
say about it. It doesn't seem so bad.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So why do we spell, you know, like I know
with a silent K, or I spell psychology with a
silent P. At the beginning all of these things that
we preserving history at the expense of children's brains and
time it takes to learn the stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yes, you've hit the man on the head. That's exactly it.
We're preserving history. These letters were once pronounced, and in
some cases they've been the letters have very much earned
their keep in English. So the know the start of
knowledge was once pronounced. If you go back to the
days of say Jeffrey Chaucer, the poet writing around the
(24:03):
year fourteen hundred, we know really that he is pronouncing
the k at the start of no and knowledge because
he alliterates it in his poetry. So Jeffrey Chaucer will
write something like the king kneeling, whereas I would say
the king kneeling. So he's alliterating these words because they
begin with the same sound, and the spelling with that
(24:26):
sound makes it long enough to kind of make the
cut to make it into standard English spelling, and then
drops out from speech, so the spelling is sort of frozen.
It reflects an older pronunciation of English, and we haven't
taken that step. So as you say, it's reflecting history
with something like psychology, though that is our or say
(24:47):
Europe's love for Greek, these silent pes have never been
pronounced in English, with the exception of a couple of
sort of hardcore fans of Greek in the sort of
the turn of the twentieth century. The founder of the
Oxford English Dictionary was sort of led a personal movement
to say things like psychology didn't catch on. But so
(25:08):
that is not a case of something falling silent within English.
That's something that is pronounced in another language that English
is very uncomfortable for the sound patterns of English, and
consequently we don't pronounce it.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Is there some hidden benefit to English spellings conservatism for example?
Is there something that preserves the relationships here between the
words and the roots and the meanings by having these fossils,
or is it disadvantageous that we hold onto everything.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yes, I think that's so well said. It is something
that I have got on my little soapbox and talked about.
If we are to reform spelling, if we let's say
we're going to make it totally phonemic, let's bring everything
back to a sort of one to one basis of
sound to letter. Great. I'll just add that when we
embark on this incredible reform, this massive international project, it
(25:56):
may well happen someday there will be some babies that
get thrown out with the bathwater. Because there are many things.
Many alternative systems are systems to do with understanding words,
recognizing words, making etymological connections between words that are preserved
in the medium of writing. So take for example, know
(26:19):
that for me on its own is no with a
diff thong, a kind of double vowel at the end.
In the word knowledge, it's an oh, it's a short vowel,
And in a word like acknowledge, suddenly the k comes
back into pronunciation. So you've got three letters pronounced differently
in three words. But at least in the medium of writing,
(26:40):
I can kind of recognize that as a reader, at
least in the medium of reading, as a unit of meaning,
as a sort of chunk of lexical information, meaning basically
that I know all these words have in common by
sheer happenstance. That's not a million miles away from need writing,
where you fundamentally or recognizing chunks of meaning. And that's
(27:05):
kind of how we read English nowadays, especially adult readers.
So people who've been online at least as long as
I have, you may have seen those kind of sharable
images and it's like an English sentence something like, you know,
if you can read this, and all the letters apart
from the very first one are kind of scrambled, so
you know, if you can read this, then you are
a genius or something like that, and genius is spelled
(27:27):
I don't know GNI something like that. You can read
it because your brain, especially after that infancy stage of
learning to master this system of writing, you're not simply
accepting sequences of sounds and assigning them and forming a
sound word out of them. You're recognizing chunks of meaning.
(27:48):
And that business is that alternative approach to reading, and
indeed also the etymological connections that uniting words that may
have different pronunciations. I don't know in a word like autumn,
I mean I say autumn, I know it's full over
the United States, but autumn has a silent n. It
reappears an autumnal take away the end, and you might
(28:09):
lose the connection between those words. So there's a principle
of reading and as a principle of etymology, that we
would lose if we updated our spelling.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Are there cognitive costs to learning? You know, what's called
a deep orthography like English, as opposed to a transparent
spelling system like you find in Italian, where each letter
maps onto a sound cleanly and you know exactly how
something is pronounced. What you're mentioning about the historical benefits
we get. Are there cognitive costs to it?
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah, I would expect so. I would expect so, and
we would expect to see differences as students or young
pupils are learning these two systems that Italian learners will
have a better time.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's exactly right. It's much harder work for an English
speller to learn than it is for an Italian spellers.
So I always wonder about this thing whether it makes
sense to hang on to the fossils of language because
of the benefits we get of the history the alphabet,
as you so wonderfully exposed in your book. You know,
it carries all kinds of history and the way we
(29:12):
spell words. But maybe it's not worth it. Let me
ask you this, If you were in charge of redoing
the spelling in the English language, would you do it
and would it be difficult to get people to agree
on it.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
I would enjoy the responsibility for a day and then resign.
It's a huge task, and it's something that I am
personally open to. I don't want your listeners to come
away with the impression that I'm sort of flip flopping
around on this issue. Your listeners might think, hang on,
he's just praised you know this etymological, historical spelling, and
now he's talking about reform, but it genuinely it's a
(29:51):
difficult question. We will lose things and we will gain
things with reform. Let's say we're all on board. We're
all on board for some sort reform, and maybe this
could happen. I really believe that this is a matter
of language, but also maybe geopolitics when some sort of
upset knocks English off its high position in the world,
(30:12):
and afterwards, you know, the different countries that speak English
can maybe have a frank conversation about, Okay, what we're
going to do with our spelling now, maybe taking it
to the national level rather than leaving it at the
international level as it currently is. So we're all on board,
what are we going to do? Basically, if you're going
to reform spelling, you're going to have to have a
very honest conversation and you're going to have to answer
(30:32):
two really big questions. So firstly, who are you? This
is not a soul searching question, it's literally who are you?
In terms of prestige means, technology, power, influence? Are people
going to listen to you? Are you somebody that can
reach people via a particular medium such as the Internet
or printed materials. Do you have governments on site? In addition,
(30:55):
are you respected? Are you some greater paragon of learning?
We have them, but they tend to be on a
kind of national level within different English speaking countries. And accrucially,
are people going to listen to you? I can propose
a reform spelling for you right now, and your listeners go,
thanks very much, I'm not going to use it. So
that's the first question. Secondly, then who's English? Whose English
(31:19):
are going to be? Because English speech, if we're going
to bring it back to speech, is seriously disunited. Speech
change is in a way that can lead to new languages.
Eventually has happened over the course of history. That's happened
with Latin, eventually becomes French and Spanish and Italian and Romanian.
And it's constantly, always and never going to happen with English.
(31:42):
You know, for as long as we keep communicating and
talking with each other, that will slow down the rate
of change. But all of our accents are kind of
straining at the leash to become new languages. We'll talk
about American I speak, American I speak Australian. I speak
Indian something like that, but our standard spelling is keeping
it all together for the time being. If you're going
(32:03):
to reform that spelling, which one of these English is?
Which is it American English? Well, sure it's the most prestigious.
It's the one with the most power, and I think
I think it's the one with the most speakers. Sure,
but you're going to annoy it a heck of a
lot of people in Britain on Australia if you do that,
because we will insist that the h in herb needs
to be there. There's a lot of strong feelings about this.
(32:24):
So these are two ginormous questions, and the current global
situation I don't think allows an answer, a satisfactory answer
to both of them.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Okay, let's shift over to the brain now. So you know,
reading feels totally natural to us once we learned, but
as I said, it's so biologically recent. What does literacy
ask the brain to repurpose?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
So I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about
this topic, but they're very amateurish. I have a vague
sense that, as you say, writing, it comes later, and
that's that laterness of writing is twofold. That's not only
lateness within human history and human development, but also there's
a lateness within our personal development in well it comes
(33:10):
after speech, or if your death, it comes after signing.
So there is a kind of lag and I think
that does point to some of the foundations of reading
and writing, which involves the brain, involves of course the eyes,
It involves your hands as well all sorts of motor
movements involved in the business of writing, which makes it
(33:34):
separate from speech. We don't tend to use our hands
to signify so much in speech, despite my wild gesticulating
I do that, but because of at least the original
dependency of writing on speech. My intuition or my perhaps
prediction is that on some level it does use the
same parts of the brain. The information is coming to
(33:56):
that part of the brain via a different route, namely
the eyes. But there is a fundamental linguistic connection in
on neurology. And that is about as much as I
feel I can say, what do you think? What do
you think about that?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, that's exactly right. There's an area in the brain
in humans called the visual word form area on the
left side of the brain typically, and it is essentially,
after you've learned speech, this is allowing you to take
visual marks on a page and translate them into as
though somebody were saying it. So so you're right. It's
(34:33):
allowing you to look at the marks and say, oh,
what would it sound like if this were coming out
of somebody's mouth. And people can get damage to that
area and then they can no longer, you know, read
words on a page. It doesn't make sense to them anymore.
They're no longer able to translate that into what it
would sound like. Let me ask you another brain question here, Dan,
What's interesting about the way that writing trains a brain
(34:56):
that this happens slightly differently. If you're learning a let's say,
the English alphabet versus a what's called a logographic writing
system in Chinese, where each ideogram stands for a word.
When you're looking in English versus Chinese, the brain is
asked to solve slightly different computational problems. The difference is
(35:18):
that in alphabet trains the brain to hear speech as
divisible into these tiny sequential sound units, while a logographic
system like Chinese trains the brain to rapidly recognize these
visual symbolic patterns that are tied to meaning, and so
(35:39):
you know, they're just there's slightly different ways of solving
the same problem.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
What do you then think from You know, as much
as neurology can tell us at the moment that then
actually speech, different kinds of speech, different writing systems of
the world. They're just working differently. They are being sent
to different parts of the brain.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
That's exactly right, and I want to emphasize that in
the end, what your brain is trying to do, it's
locked in silence and darkness. It's trying to just gather meaning.
And so whether you're doing it phonemically sounding something out,
or you're looking at pictures like hieroglyphics or Chinese letters
or whatever, it is, what you're trying to get to
(36:15):
is the same endpoint, which is, Okay, what is this
sign trying to tell me? What is this book? What's
the story? But yes, there are measurable differences in how
the brain goes about that. I'll just give you another example.
Some colleagues of mind at Berkeley did a study a
few years ago where they looked at what happens when
you read a book versus you listen to the audio book,
(36:37):
and I think a lot of people had predictions that
we'd see really different signals going on in the brain,
but it turns out it's really similar. Obviously, when you're
listening to an audiobook, you're activating the auditory cortex, when
you're reading, you're activating the visual cortex, and so on.
But fundamentally, what the brain cares about is the meaning,
(36:58):
and so all of that ends up in this same place.
And when you're reading the story and the guys out
on the ship and the woman is doing this and that, like,
all that looks the same in the brain. So once
you're past the initial levels, what the brain cares about
is what is happening in the story.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
So different processes, different roots in the brain, but all
ultimately targeting the same.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Place exactly right.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Interesting, and one of the few things I can contribute
to any sort of discussion of the brain is that
I would also expect that it wouldn't be a straightforward
binary logographic versus phonemic course, Let's, you know, use more
Layman's terms, meaning based versus sound based, or I would
imagine that there would be diversity even within those categories,
(37:41):
because within the field and the history of the alphabet.
You have different writing systems that incode different sounds, or
maybe not all the sounds. You have alphabet in a
narrower sense is the one that encodes all phonemic sounds,
all the key sounds of your languagewels and consonants. But
(38:01):
you also have scripts that leave vowels implied or just
not written at all. So this is the foundation actually
of our own alphabet. Vowels are kind of a later edition,
and that vowel a state is really the foundation of say,
Hebrew and Arabic writing. Of course, there are ways of
writing vowels in Hebrew and Arabic. They could be repurposing
(38:22):
consonant letters or adding additional marks. I think they're called
nickeld in Hebrew. But the basis is consonants only, and
you are as the reader therefore inferring, you're inferring vowels,
you're supplying them. You're kind of vowel part of your
let's say, your speech center of the brain is maybe
(38:45):
doing a little bit more work in going okay, well,
we've got the sort of skeleton of this word, and
what does this match? What could this be? I'm going
to use context and I'm going to use sequence of
consonants to go, Aha, we have a winner. It's this,
and the vowels get slotted in. We have a complete
meaningful word and it gets passed on down the conveyor
belt somehow. So just expect there's diversity even within phonological
(39:07):
systems as well.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I'm really fascinated by this question of whether spelling reforms
are doomed. And you brought up some you know, some
complexities about this, but let me ask a general question. Now,
what point does a spelling become wrong rather than merely
non standard?
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Hm. This is the thing our standard spelling today in English,
the thing that's you know, predictive text and your word
processor of choice guides you to has this veneer of inevitability.
But it's it's a mirage, it's an illusion. Standard spelling
is actually a matter of consensus, and the consensus is
(39:56):
reinforced by technology. If you go back in time of call,
there are highly prestigious forms of spelling, but people just
aren't able to impress one particular standard way. You don't
have the printing press or you don't have the computers
to really tell people how to spell. You know, it
goes beyond technology also goes into education systems. Obviously, as
(40:18):
particular way of spelling, it was going to get a
huge boost and become the standard when it has a
full government behind it, which you know, which happens not
just in the case of English. It's kind of a mirage,
and it works by it works by consensus, and it
also becomes another kind of feedback loop. We agree on
the standard, we put it in our dictionaries, and we
(40:39):
put it into our technology, and then our dictionaries and
our technology tell us this is the standards, and we
believe them, and we go, aha, this is a wrong spelling.
But that's really something that emerges slowly, and if you
were to go back to earlier periods in the history
of writing, early in the history of English, the idea
of standard spelling of right and wrong is just not there.
(41:01):
That's good, that's bad, that's prestigious, that's not prestigious. But
there's not a single standard. That's I kind oft stress
how modernist thing it is, because the modern world has
made it possible.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
You know. On the side, I'm an amateur genealogist and
I love studying family trees, and it's the same thing
with the spelling of surnames. Those were incredibly fluid essentially
until record keeping very recently, essentially following Napoleon seventeen eighty nine,
when you know, governments needed to keep records for taxation purposes.
(41:31):
And then especially with the advent of typewriters and then computers,
then the spelling of surnames got nailed down in a
way that they never were before. So here's my question
to you. So you know, in the same way that
computers in spell check nudged us towards standardized spelling, what
(41:51):
is generative AI nudging us towards What changes when the
new tools start correcting the user and make normal versions
of sentences.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I really appreciate this question. When you look at those
historical documents when you do your family genealogy, you'll have
a sense, you'll have a feeling of when this document
is from based on the way the letters are used,
the way it's spelled, and you can kind of gain
vibes from a historical writing in And I believe My
point is, I believe our era today in which we
(42:23):
you and I are speaking, will be no different. It
will have its own feel, and one part of that
feel will be the triumph of the standard, the triumph
perhaps the rise before the fall. I don't know. I
don't know what happens next in the future, but there
will be a real sense of an all victorious standard spelling.
While English accents to continue to go in different directions
(42:46):
and continue to diverge, and AI will form a part
of that. Spelling is always tied to the circumstances of
its time, which naturally includes technology. You know, spelling. We
can see the effects on spelling when the printing press
is set up, and when AI gets set up is
absolutely no different as well. I think what we will
see is a real devotion to the standards. There will
(43:11):
be almost no question, no experimentation with spelling. All possible variation,
some of it which may be better, is in phonemically
better make more sense, will be just you know, cut
off at the base, you know, plucks before it can
even blossom, a real sense of you know, even with
us started spelling today, small spelling mistakes can creep in.
(43:34):
Let's wind back the clock to the pre AI age.
Let's go about twenty years or something like that. Even
with all the access to all the dictionaries in your
classrooms or I don't know all the printed media according
to the standard spelling, mistakes and possibly spelling corrections and
improvements could still creep in. But by giving so much
(43:54):
of our writing and our production of writing over to AI,
we have no possibility for those new innovations to creep in.
We will say, do this, and AI will do it
for us. And AI is not going to update spelling.
AI thinks is going to give us only the standard
spelling that we want. There's going to be no natural
development as there would be if it's only us humans
(44:16):
doing the writing, and instead we are offloading our thinking
but also our writing variation and fluidity over to the machine,
where it'll just stop, at least for the future, at
least for the you know, foreseeable future.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
I wonder if AI could ever help us to do
a real language reform. I'm not sure what that would
look like, but you know, if the AI sort of
takes it on in the same way that you said,
who is doing it? Is it somebody with enough power
and influence? Maybe if you know, open AI and Claude
and all the others said all right, look, we're standardizing
(44:53):
this because it is going to lock down. Now that
we're using AI, all of the evolution and variation is
going to get locked down right now. You know, maybe
it's an opportunity to say, let's just clean it up
while we're doing it.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Absolutely, I'd only add to that that there's an additional
ingredient that might lead to success, which is prestige. These
companies are extraordinarily prestigious their company, they're their Their product
which they make is very much you know, flavor of
a month. At the moment, it's it's the big thing,
and it might not have success for linguistic reasons because
(45:28):
of what I just outlined. You know, the problem of
it still doesn't solve the problem of who's English. But nonetheless,
the prestige could be the thing that carries the day
as people are on board with the AI train and
are you know, I feel it very much has a
kind of cultural cachet that other media don't at the
moment that I would predict would be the thing that
(45:50):
allows it to reform spelling.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
What do you hope everyone will look at differently about
the alphabet after hearing this conversation, It would.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Be the alphabet it's just not fixed. It is not fixed.
There is not a single feature of the alphabet that
does not show change and development over history, as the
alphabet spreads out from that early point in time and
passes through different languages and different people's different hands. So
this may you know, This pertains to the direction of
(46:21):
the letters, what sound they stand for, the way that
they're drawn. Obviously the upper and lower case difference comes in,
and I think lower case letters are very much the
dominant ones today. The only thing really that I can
say has remained the same is that fundamental principle of
one sound for one letter. That's the thing that kind
(46:41):
of gives us an alphabet. That's when we can say
the alphabet's born back in four thousand years ago. Everything
else is in flux, and I find that very hardening.
I suppose as a historical linguist by heart, I'm not
scared of flux, and we are not bound to follow
the spelling of the past. Yes, our sputting is very fixed.
(47:03):
Yes the standard is so strong, but if we want
to make changes we can. Every generation has had that right,
and we are no difference. The fact that the alphabet
is influx and will continue to be in flux after
we're dead and gone. I find very encouraging because we
can put our own stamp on it.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
That was linguist Danny Bates talking about his new book
Why Q Needs You. I just want to mention two
more important things about written language. The first is a
common misunderstanding that I sometimes see about whether the human
brain has evolved some dedicated module for reading written language.
The answer is no, because reading is far too recent
(47:46):
in evolutionary history. The first writing systems appear about five
thousand years ago, and the first alphabets were about four
thousand years ago, so that is way too fast for
the brain to evolve any kind of new module. Instead,
and even more amazingly, literacy recruits and reorganizes other neural
(48:09):
machinery that has evolved for other purposes. So, for example,
it repurposes parts of the visual system that evolves for
recognizing objects like shapes or faces, or tracks in the mud,
or tools or other patterns. When you learn to read,
you're training this circuitry to become exquisitely sensitive to culturally
(48:33):
invented marks on a page. And then reading also recruits
auditory and language systems. You have to learn to map
these visual symbols onto the sounds of speech. So literacy
requires the brain to fuse together all these different systems
for vision and speech and motor planning and attention and
memory into this new coordinated network. And this is an
(48:57):
example of what my colleague Stanislau calls neuronal recycling, which
means that ancient neural hardware gets co opted for totally
new cultural purposes. Okay, I also want to mention one
more deep question about written language, which is why in
most Semitic languages the writing goes from right to left,
(49:22):
but descendants of the Greek alphabet like English go left
to right. Now, that might seem like just some arbitrary question,
but some decades ago people theorized that this might have
to do with a detail of the brain. This was
mostly proposed by a scholar named Da Kirschov in a
book he wrote called The Alphabet and the Brain, and
(49:42):
his proposal depends on a few linked claims. The main
thing is that Semitic writing systems like Phoenician or Hebrew
only encoded consonants, and the readers had to figure out
the vowels from the context. The idea is that that
requires the brain to do sort of holy stick processing
with a lot of influence of context, which Da Kirschov
(50:04):
said associated these more strongly with right hemisphere processing. By contrast,
the Greek alphabet explicitly encoded vowels, and that promoted finer
breakdown into the sounds of the letters and analyzing the
exact sequence, and the idea is that these were associated
(50:25):
more strongly with left hemisphere language systems. Now, why does
the direction that you write the text matter? In theory,
it's because visual input from the right side of the
visual field projects to the left hemisphere and the left
visual field projects to the right hemisphere. So Da Kirschov
suggested that if you read left to right, that continuously
(50:50):
moves upcoming text into the right visual field, so it's
better for feeding language information directly into the left hemisphere.
So just to summarize, is that the idea was that
an alphabet that's really explicit about every sound, like early
Greek was, might be more efficient when you read it
from left to right, and hence the Greek swapping of directions. Now,
(51:15):
I want to give a caveat here. Writing direction varies
a lot across cultures, So if there was something about
hemispheric efficiency that strongly determined the writing direction, we'd probably
expect more convergence around the globe, But across cultures, written
languages vary a lot. Some are left rights, some are
(51:35):
right left, Some go up or down, some go back
and forth, and they all function fine. So that probably
weakens the claim of a biologically optimal direction. It may
be that the direction of the language has mostly to
do with cultural lock in. In other words, once the
civilization accumulates archives and religious texts and scribes and bureaucracy,
(51:59):
than whatever they started doing it first kind of gets
locked in. Think of this like the way that we
have quirty keyboards, which are a totally suboptimal layout for
a keyboard, but once it gets locked in, then it's
really hard to change. But I wanted to mention this
issue about the brain and the direction of writing. I
don't think it can be the full story, but it's
(52:20):
a fascinating potential link between ancient history and modern science.
So let's wrap up the fact that we have languages
that go in all directions. Fundamentally, what it should make
us appreciate is the fact that human brains can internalize
almost any symbolic convention at all. And back to the
(52:41):
theme that started this episode, whatever we internalize. Although it's
a massively complex system that encapsulates thousands of years of
migration and empire and trade and politics, the really stunning
part is that the brain trains on language so deeply that,
under normal circumstances, it becomes totally invisible to us unless
(53:05):
we choose to start paying attention. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out
Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
(53:27):
and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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