Megan: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast of linguistic discrimination. I’m Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan: Carrie, it was snowing here today. I know.
Carrie: That is amazing.
Megan: It’s really pretty. When it snows, it doesn’t stick but it’s still beautiful when it comes down. Sometimes it does stick, but this wasn’t one of those times, but yeah snow in the desert.
Carrie: I enjoy when it snows and actually there’s probably totally fine because it’s not going to mess that anything up really. The problem with snow is that here, especially in Vancouver we just don’t have the infrastructure for it, so it just shuts the entire city down.
Megan: Because you get proper snow, you get actual snow and it sticks.
Carrie: It sticks. If it doesn’t stick, then it’s fine, and that happens too. If it doesn’t stick it does nothing, it’s fine, but when it sticks it’s like what? Three centimeters or something?
Megan: Tiny.
Carrie: Which is like basically an inch, and it shut down the city.
Megan: Really.
Carrie: The rest of Canada’s mocks us, but we don’t have the infrastructure. Anyway, you’re not going to have like a million plows for the a week or so that it snows here.
Megan: Right, yeah. We don’t have to worry about that, we’d have to worry about that if we ever got that much snow, we don’t get that much snow.
Carrie: Yeah. You would struggle, and then the other part I don’t like is when it turns slushy and gross and it gets dirty.
Megan: Gets really dirty.
Carrie: When it first falls, it’s so pretty and it gets so quiet. .
Megan: Yeah, exactly.
Carrie: Anyway, so got another article from Diego Diaz, and this is about a name change in for Powell River.
Megan: Powell River is where?
Carrie: It’s in British Colbia. Powell River is up the coast from Vancouver. I think you take 2 ferries to get there, so it’s a pretty small place, so Powell River is considering maybe changing its name, and the First Nations there like their territory, they’re called Tla’amin, and back in 2021, they agreed to form a joint working group to start considering maybe changing the community’s name.
Megan: The community’s name.
Carrie: Well, Powell River. Powell River is named after this dude named called Israel Wood Powell, and he was BC’s first Indian Affairs superintendent, so you can understand why Tla’amin nation might want a different name.
Megan: Yes. I absolutely 100% understand why they want a different name.
Carrie: They’re trying to think of new names and some counselor from Powell River has kind of made up a place name and he thought it probably sounded like it could be from this first nations language, but it’s not, so he says step one, are you in favor of a name change? Yes or no? That’s simple. You don’t convolute it with Wakawana or whatever name comes out of Tla’amin.
Megan: That’s the made up name.
Carrie: That’s a made up name. It does not sound that much like a Salish language. Yeah, that would be Salish. Yeah Salish, so first of all it doesn’t sound Salish. It just sounds completely mocking.
Megan: Yeah. Why wouldn’t you just use the language of the community, simple as that.
Carrie: Well, he doesn’t, why would he? He’s just saying he could have, I guess chosen a name that might have been put forward. Although, I don’t know if any of the names have been put forward yet. He’s just making something up because he’s lazy and racist.
Megan: Yeah. It seems like something an American politician would do.
Carrie: Oh yeah. Well, we have those types here too. Especially small town BC. Oh my god, small town BC can be incredibly racist. Some of the worst racism I’ve ever seen.
Megan: Really? I just always expect you all to be a little bit better than us, but you’re still just human.
Carrie: We’re all just humans, and our politics hasn’t been completely warped yet, although the conservative party is now run by… he’s kind of a weenie, but he is also very dangerous, so fascist adjacent.
Megan: Oh yeah, but not fascist.
Carrie: Well, I just say that because he hasn’t had power yet.
Megan: Sure. Okay, so what did the community, does the community have a name that they want?
Carrie: I don’t see anyone’s in this particular article. I don’t know, actually. Let’s see if I can find anything. I don’t see anything. Well, okay. I can’t find anything for the town, but they changed the Powell River Regional District named to Qathet Regional District, and Qathet means people working together.
Megan: Oh, that’s beautiful. Yeah, and that’s an actual word from the language of the community.
Carrie: Yes,
Megan: Yes.That’s what it seems so simple to me to do something like that.
Carrie: Yeah, and my guess is there is a place named either right where Powell River is or nearby that was used and could be reused now, but I don’t actually know what it would be, so I don’t know the Comox language is related to Squamish, but I don’t know it that well, so I don’t know what the place names what were there, but my guess is that’s what they’re considering, now instead this jackass has to kind of hijack the conversation with his…
Megan: Yeah. With a fake word that he thinks sounds indigenous or whatever. What an asshole. You don’t have to be that asshole. You don’t have to be.
Carrie: You really, really don’t.
Megan: I hope it works out for them in that asshole. I don’t know.
Carrie: Oh, it probably will. It probably will. There’s a lot of work going on right now in BC to try to meet the obligations of UNDRIP, the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. They’re trying to change systems, so you can actually use the characters that are used in different indigenous languages, like the [inaudible] and Squamish, so things are changing but there’s still jackasses
Megan: There’s still jackasses out there and there always will be, unfortunately.
Carrie: Right. We just got to try and sideline them as much as possible.
Megan: Exactly.
Carrie: Don’t vote for jackasses.
Megan: Yes. 2024 and beyond. Oh, well, we have a cool episode for you today.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s really cool. I always enjoy talking about what, what language would look like, and we have some really interesting points from our guest.
Megan: Yes, so hope you enjoy.
Carrie: All right. We’re really excited today to have Dr. Sherry Wells Jensen, who is a professor in the Department of English and coordinator of the minor in linguistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Along with various aspects of issues pertaining to study or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Her research interests include phonetic, braille language preservation, TESOL, language creation, and disability studies. She serves on the board of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence or METI, and she’s also the new Barack s Bloomberg NASA/ Library of Congress chair in Astrobiology Exploration and Scientific Innovation.
The reason why we have her team today is because she also wrote a chapter in the new book Xeno Linguistics Towards the Science of Extraterrestrial Language, and the chapter is called Cognition, Sensory Input and Linguistics, A Possible Language for Blind Aliens, so welcome.
Megan: Yeah, welcome.
Sheri: Much fun to be here. I’m so excited.
Megan: We’re so excited too.
Carrie: Thank you for coming.
Megan: The first question, why did you want to write this chapter?
Carrie: Oh, the thing with doing Xeno linguistics is all of it is fun. You don’t wake up in the morning and go, “Ah, hell, I have to go to the aliens.”
Carrie: It’s true.
Megan: All of it’s fun and all of it’s a mystery, and every time I do anything in this field, it’s a surprise to me, sort of how it comes out, and the cool thing about Xeno linguistics also is everything’s on the table. There’s nothing that you can’t do because we have in the terms of how many alien languages we actually have to study. Exactly as far as I know, 0, so it’s not Polynesian, and you’re like, “Oh, I think I’ll study this today. I’ll thirty these existent verbs.” We have no idea which is glorious, and the other thing about Xeno linguistics, because we have an n of exactly 0 languages, we can think about what linguistics is really good for and why other with it in the first place in kind of the barest most fundamental way.
One of the reasons we do linguistics is so that we can figure out how to be better human beings, and be nicer to each other and figure out kind of trying to use the discipline that we have studied so hard to master in ways that will make the world better, and that’s why linguistics… okay, it is about aliens when we get one, and it’s about what the possibilities are, and then it’s about sort of how can we think about language in ways that will improve our situation here on earth, and so since there’s all kinds of myths and nonsense about what blind humans are like, it’s kind of a [inaudible]
I can think about what this language might be like if there were such a language, and then I can also think about, well, and while I’m explaining that, can I also explain some other things? Can I also do a little reality checking about disability and blind people and language and all that kind of good stuff?
Megan: Yeah, so along those lines, why did you want to write about blind aliens?
Sheri: Okay, so I’m a blind person, partly because there’s some cool possibilities, so one of the things we try to do is you sort of set up like you make a scenario, and then you run it and you go, “Well, what would the language be like?” What would the language be like if you were an octopus would that change in any way? And so if you were a blind alien, you would probably want a language that’s a little more information rich or communicating people so the first thing to eliminate is all this over there, over here, here are all the didactics that are nonsense and trash and are really not information at all.
People all the time are like, “It’s over there.” I’m like, “Okay. That means it’s distant from you and from me, but that’s all the information you’ve given me.” Wouldn’t it be cool if you could say it’s over there? And that would be some kind of information rich thing, like you might incorporate into the didactics how far ish or what direction ish, or if it’s something you are touching or if it’s something the other person is touching, or if it’s big and dangerous. There’s all kinds of in extra information you could pack into those didactics.
People are going to just look over there and see what it is, but if you can’t look over there and see what it is, then why not convey more information about it? If I know what it is and I want to tell you about it, you put it in the didactics, why not ?
Megan: Yeah, and some languages do more of that kind of information packing into didactics than English, but I still found it really interesting all the possibilities that you had thought of that. Of course me as a sighted person, would never even consider, because we do use visual information as much as we possibly can, and so we kind of don’t have to consider these things, so I found that that section really interesting.
Sheri: Yeah why say what’s apparent to both people, so reflected in our language is the fact that we only need one word as a didactics or 2, or if you’re lucky you get maybe 4 in a language, so kind of if you were studying our language from the alien perspective, you might think, oh, well there’s a lot of shared information going on here because they’re not saying everything, and why not? You want to make your language as easy to use as possible, so there’s no reason for me say what I’m talking about over there, exactly how far or what shape it is, or who used to own it or anything like that, because as soon as you direct the attention, then it’s shared information.
Carrie: I will say there are languages with many, many more didactics than 4 like Blackfoot. It’s hundreds.
Sheri: Hundreds? Wow.
Carrie: Yeah. There are languages that do use more information or stuff. More information in. English is pretty impoverished, and there’re just there certain things that I just wouldn’t even have considered.
Megan: Blackfoot, even with its hundreds of didactics would it still be favoring the sighted with the information packing that is in it.
Carrie: Yeah. Almost certainly.
Sheri: I’m like on my way right now to go Google Blackfoot didactics because that sounds cool.
Carrie: Yeah, so what is it about Xeno linguistics that allows us to think about language in a different way?
Sheri: I think we get to start from 0, we get to imagine everything and we get to think about what about our world is reflected in our language? And then if you had a different world, how would that change it? You also get to start thinking about the relationship between language and thought and what are the sort of games you can play in Xeno Linguistics, is you sort of go through the design features and language and go, “Well, what if that one isn’t?” Or “What if that one’s twice?” Or “What if that one’s more important?” Because we’ve got this delightful end of 0, we can play in any way that we want to play, and it’s a really good exercise in unthinking yourself, so I think everything I say could be wrong is a really good way to start a scientific investigation.
Carrie: Yeah. I really enjoyed that. How at the very end of your chapter, you’re just like, all this could be wrong, and I just made me chuckle and I was like, yes that’s exactly the humility we should all have.
Megan: We should, but with all of this that could be wrong, you’re still making educated guesses as a linguist.
Sheri: Right, because you’ve got to start somewhere and we don’t know if we’re getting a radio signal from another planet, it could be happening right now. Or maybe it won’t happen at all, so we just don’t know, and so it makes sense to kind of get prepared, let’s think about it a little bit and let’s get ready for the crushing blow to our egos when we can’t understand it, and let’s get ready to play. Let’s get ready to take all the assumptions that we have about what things are like and like blast them down one by one so that we can really try to solve a problem in a way that is useful, and because we’re trying to solve a problem that no one’s ever solved before.
Carrie: That’s true.
Sheri: Start playing so that when we do get a language, if we ever do get a language, we’re not just like, oh my God, what’s this, what do we do? Oh no, it’s not French, it’s not Dutch. What is it? What do we know?
Carrie:This is interesting because I brought this up yesterday with someone. This person asked me, oh, what did you think about arrival? And yeah. Now I should ask you, what did you think about arrival?
Megan: Carrie I was just thinking the exact same question.
Sheri: [inaudible] to get me. I am ready. Let’s go. I loved it. I thought it was… the whole thing about how learning the language changed the way your brain worked as far as I can tell, no, probably not, but the field work in there I thought was awesome, they just sort of skipped through the weeks of making no progress in being wrong. They sort of made that part disappear.
Carrie: Yeah because that’s I guess interesting to watch.
Megan: Movie Magic.
Carrie: Yeah. I also really loved it. I thought it was great, and yeah of course it wouldn’t really change the way we think, but I don’t care because it is science fiction and like, it was an exploration of what if it happened? Like what if that could happen to your brain?
Sheri: No, it’s alien. My [inaudible] that couldn’t happen is probably a problem, so I should be a little more open-minded go, “Well, what if it could happen?”
Carrie: Exactly.
Sheri: It’s way outside of my understanding of what language is like, but that’s always what I say my point is. Is that we have to forget, not forget people but be willing to throw out any individual piece of what we know. It’s all possible to burn down. We should be able to burn down any piece of it when it suddenly becomes useless to us.
Megan: Yes, exactly, and it’s just such a beautiful story, obviously very sad, but very beautiful, and I don’t know, I really like it and I also like the short story that it was based on too.
Sheri: Yeah. Well I just love that movie so much. It is. I’m not a movie goer. It’s hard to convince me to get up and go to a movie, but I own that one. I play it. That and Apollo 13 are my 2 go-to movies.
Carrie: Yeah. You really are a space geek.
Megan: Yeah. You’re a total space geek. Well, are there any sci-fi TV shows that you consume that you do consume for research?
Sheri: Oh, I’m a Treki. I can’t help it.
Megan: Okay. Perfect, but I should have guessed.
Sheri: Actually, I got to consult 1 episode.
Sheri: Oh, oh, really?
Sheri: Almost died from joy, it was amazing. They wanted an alien language that was really, really alien, and so we tried, we did our best, but it was so amazing. It was so much fun, so I am hopelessly a Treki.
Megan: Yeah. I also love Trek. That would’ve been my dream job actually to somehow work on Star Trek when I was a teenager particularly.
Sheri: I know 12-year-old me died. Really, just loaded. It was so much fun.
Carrie: I almost feel terrible over here saying that I’ve never seen it?
Sheri: What?
Carrie: I kow.
Megan: You’ve never seen any Trek ever.
Carrie: I’ve never seen any Star Trek ever.
Megan: How?
Carrie: I do not know. My parents weren’t into it. My friends at the time, different times in my lives weren’t watching it at that time. I don’t know. I just missed it.
Sheri: Isn’t there some kind of linguist obligatory thing where you have to at least know some things about Klingon? Don’t we all have?
Megan: That’s true, and yeah that’s why I’m such a terrible linguist. I’m just kidding, but I probably need to watch some Star Trek after this maybe I will be so inspired. There’s so much to consume. I don’t even know. Oh boy. It actually seems kind of overwhelming, so besides Trek, are there any other shows, list linguistics in a way that makes sense to you?
Sheri: Let’s see, who has time for TV anymore. I read a lot of science fiction, but I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’m very into the Becky Chambers books, the Wayfarers series. There’s a lot of really cool linguistics in her books. Also there’s a lot of gender positivity stuff and lots of disability positive stuff in her books.
Carrie: Oh, nice.
Sheri: Just people living together, and it’s kind of that Star Trek optimism, but with less phasers and less things blow up, which is us.
Carrie: Oh, that’s cool. Yeah. We kind of need some more optimism in our lives.
Sheri: We do.
Megan: We definitely do. Definitely.
Carrie: How did you get interested in Xeno Linguistics in the first place?
Sheri: Oh my God. It’s because I wanted to be an astronomer when I was a kid, and I was quietly, no one ever said no you can’t do that, but people are just kind of, oh, we have to braille this math book for you, and that’s kind of a pain in the ass. They’re not really going to say that to you out loud, but I can read the room. A blind girl growing up in kind of rural Michigan, people are like, “It’s nice that you’re smart, but how about psychology? How about something that’s not too sciencey? That’s a lot of work for everybody else.” And so I kind of put it on the back burner, not worried about it and when I got my tenure track job at Bowling Green, my department chair came into my office and I was like, “Ooh, that’s the chair.”
You know how you are when you’re so excited, so anxious not to wreck stuff, and so he said, “Well, what would you like to teach this summer, your first summer on your job? And I said, “I would like to teach a class about alien languages thinking, astronomy, linguistics.” And instead of laughing like I thought he would, he said, “Okay.” And I was like, “Oh shit.” So then I had to run prepare the class, which was huge fun, and then if you’re a linguist, you can do things like, how would I design a radio signal? How would I make a code that could be understandable when you don’t share any language or any experience or like the heck with the blind alien, you don’t even have the same world.
You just have a radio signal. How would you make that understandable to aliens? And so that stuff, and then the rest is like this weird magical realism fantasy that happened to me, I guess
Megan: Is that what you spend most of your time on these days as Xeno Linguistics?
Sheri: No, not really. Well, actually I get to do more astrobiology stuff now. Ability and space, so one of the claims in the Seti literature that I read frequently was that any race capable of technology and building a radio telescope would have definitely some analog of human visual perception, and I’m like, “WTF friends, no blind aliens.” So I started down this path, and then I also started thinking about, well, what if you were real human? Can, what about disabled humans? Could we go to space? And what would you do if you get halfway to Mars and somebody acquires a disability, someone gets hurt or something.
What I do mostly now I get to do cool astrobiology things. I’m very lucky.
Carrie: That’s really cool. What is astrobiology?Like what are you doing?
Sheri: What am I doing? I think, depending on who I’m talking to, I will say things like I do human factors in space exploration. Right. How, if and why and when to modify the designs of spacecraft so that disabled people can get up into space and use them, so I write and talk and lecture about that. I do things about particularly because I really like my blind aliens. My friend Josh Neely says that the word for blind aliens, we must call them the brailiens[?]
Carrie: Oh, I love it. Yeah.
Megan: That’s really cool.
Sheri: It’s a little bit silly, but then I just have to get over it in music because it’s really good so like what would their course of science be like if you. If human science started with astronomy, medicine, and math brailiens[?] aren’t going to know they’re stars. It’s just not even going to be there, and if there’s a moon they’d have to infer the presence of the moon by the tides, I guess, but why would they ever invent a moon? Why would they do that? It would take a long time for them to figure out there was, and so what would the development of their science be like? What would they do first?
What would they do second? If you’re not going to watch the stars and sort of track their movements and you can’t, once you throw a ball, you’re not tracking the path of the ball through the air, so you’re not [inaudible], so what would you do? So that’s another thing I do is I talk about science, which makes me get to talk about access to STEM fields for all kinds of disabled kids, and that’s a lot of fun. Do very much noun phrases anymore to be honest.
Megan: Sound like you do. That’s okay because you’re doing other things in relation to linguistics, and all of that. You still get to be a linguist at the same time.
Sheri: Yes, and I still do teach the noun phrases thing, so I get to teach.
Carrie: Yes, so what you’re really doing is you’re bringing disability studies into these areas that haven’t really considered these kind of questions of access before.
Sheri: That’s right. I get to do all the fun things. I get to do language, I get to do outer space. I get to do a little bit of helping a little bit of advocacy for STEM education for disabled kids. Tenure is a beautiful thing that’s what I’ve got to say. Really. I get to do all these things because I’m not worried about getting tenure anymore, so I can play.
Carrie: Yes, so what other considerations? You talked a little bit about it, so there’s a this blind alien society that does a bunch of things differently, so how else would it affect language besides the didactics?
Sheri: The easy stuff is the stuff they wouldn’t have. First off we have to get not too worried about it, because blind humans can talk to sighted humans that usually go, so we’re not worried and a blind person can learn a human language, so we’re talking about what if you untethered the blind speakers from the human, from the sighted speakers, in which direction would things go? So if you think about problems that could use more help, if you’ve ever tried to move a couch, there’s lots of gesturing and like take your end and the other end move it. No, not that way. There’s all kinds of horrible lack of communication that goes on. Things like what about like evidentials? So if I tell you something, it might be super good to know if I know it because it’s in my hand. If I know it because it was in my hand yesterday.
If I know it because I know somebody else told me, I feel like you could imagine a scenario where because I’m never looking at you, I don’t have confirmation about your body and your place by looking, maybe I’m going to develop a larger set of evidentials so that I can communicate why I know these things, and maybe there’s some issues about what kind of information is available to you and to me, and how we know it that could use, I don’t know strengthening clarification more detail more [inaudible]
Carrie: Yeah because even with sighted people, I think that we can say that we saw something, but did we see it yesterday? Or there’s still more clarification that could even be used for sighted people in this instance.
Sheri: For sure, and it’s not necessary. Like none of it’s necessary. You could be able, you could have a blind society and they could speak English and everything would be fine, but the part of the purpose of explorations like this is, well, how could it be better though? What could we bring to it by flicking some levers and by changing a little bit of the scenario? And then think, well, what would you really like to have? What would be nice? What would be fun to have? What would be useful?
Carrie: Right, and do you consider this from the perspective of how you might communicate with other blind people?
Sheri: Yeah, so the thing is maybe, but we’d all have to agree that we’re just going to go off the rails and try new things, but you get [inaudible] and their language is kind of indistinguishable from a roomful side of people right now. There’s some lexical items that we might use that other people don’t use. We can say things like people talk about like a T intersection which means a 1 line coming together and intersecting, or not intersecting. Stopping it across line, but we can use the shapes of braille dots and braille letters, so like if I have my chairs in a G shape, that means it’s a 2 by 2 matrix. It’s a square of 2.
Megan: Oh, very cool.
Sheri: If I’m in a band and we’re performing and we’re a trio, we might stand in the O shape, which basically means a triangle to guys in front and 1 guy slightly back, and so I don’t have to say 2 guys in front and one guy slightly back. I can say, “Well, they’re standing in an O.”
Carrie: Wow. I never knew this. This is so cool.
Megan: Yeah, and so helpful to have that.
Sheri: It’s not necessary, but things like if you leave a 6 oh braille is a matrix of 2 by 3 by three dots, so if I have a six pack of beverages in my refrigerator, they can say, “Well, is there any left?” And I could say, “Well, there’s an M of pop left.” Which means that there’s 3 of them, but it tells you exactly which ones have been used and which ones have not.
Carrie: Wow, blowing my mind.
Sheri: It’s not necessary, but it’s cool.
Carrie: Right. It’s very cool.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I feels like I’m missing out on something, it’s really great.
Sheri: Look at the braille letter shapes and the braille contraction. The braille shapes are super useful. It’s useful but only like in the subculture.
Carrie: Right. It’s definitely not useful to me, but it still feels so cool and like I’m missing a piece of something.
Sheri: Yeah, and I can say like, so I’ve got my chairs, maybe I want to move the chairs and they’re in a square like that, but I want to move 2 of them back, and I could say, take those 2 back chairs and move each one and make a new parallel line, but I could say that or I could just say, take that G and make it into an X.
Carrie: Wow. That’s so great.
Megan: Did you implement any of this when you were considering how blind aliens would speak to each other?
Sheri: That is like a small scale example, but you could blow that up. You could make it not just a 2 by 2 matrix. You could have words for configurations of objects in space that are much like, I have just one word for it. I particularly wish we had words for… I’m just thinking of this now. Like words for configurations of chairs and there’s a big room and there’s all the chairs. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had one word that meant, oh, there’s three blocks of chairs and 2 aisles down the middle. Why do we have to say all that? I’m tired. Yeah. Tired. Can’t I just have one word?
Megan: I think about that all the time. How it would be nice to have one word for just scramble of words that I have to say to explain one thing absolutely, so when you’re making your own language, you’re thinking about alien language, you can consider that. You can make one word for these things.
Sheri: You can. You can do anything you want because it’s just an extension of what we can do, but we have some words that are specific like that, but mostly we we’re lacking a lot of cool words that we could have.
Carrie: Yeah for sure.
Megan: It’s true. You also talk a little bit about how like there’d be things that exist in human languages, because most humans are cited that would be lacking in a language that blind aliens spoke. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Sheri: Yeah. Just not very many of them, and forgive me, but they’re replaceable with cooler things, so we’ve got way the hell too many words for color, but because color all these words for… so wipe all those out, think of the brain space. You’d say wipe all those color words gone. Like replace them with qualities of sound or characteristics of echo or word for the difference between the sound like in my little studio here which is a relatively small room, versus if I go out into the larger room in the basement that the quality of the sound changes, and you can tell you’re in a larger room.
Why do I have to go [inaudible] need one word for that, so lots of lexical areas that are relatively undeveloped in human languages that you could just expand all kinds of ways.
Carrie: It is analogous to how we’ve expanded on color as sighted people.
Sheri: Yeah. Way too many.
Megan: It’s true.
Carrie: Eggshell white versus, I don’t know different white.
Megan: Gallery white.
Sheri: You think the brain space that you use to contain those things.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s true. Although I don’t think I have used it as much as some other people because they’re definitely people who spend a lot more time thinking about color than I do. Some artists, designers, those type designers. Yeah.
Sheri: Yeah, all kinds of shades and details that are summable in one word, and that’s nice, that’s nice for them. I’m not mad about it, but I feel like we could do that in other domains too.
Megan: Yeah. When you mentioned something about like the different instruments having different types of sounds, I was like, oh yeah, that is true, and we don’t have a word for that at all, and why don’t we because like music is a pretty developed field and people do talk a lot about it, but this is something that’s completely lacking.
Sheri: It is because we say it’s a difference in timur[?], but then beyond that we’re like, well, what difference?
Megan: Yeah. Right. I don’t even know.
Carrie: You have to be a musician to kind of understand it when you talk about it that way, so whether there be like some lay person way of understanding those sounds and you don’t have to be a musician to understand.
Sheri: Yeah. Can’t have a word for that. I really wish I could. I want one.
Carrie: Well you could invent one and see if it takes off.
Sheri: [inaudible] that to my intro linguistics class. Let’s invent a word and see if we can make it, see if we can win. Let’s see if we can spread it, and it’s funny, I put it on the final exam and then it’s over.
Carrie: Do you hope that your chapter cited linguists are reading this, would be more thoughtful about what it is to be blind and what that means for the field?
Sheri: That’s always in there a little bit for me, is that I write the obligatory stuff that I think is slightly boring, but maybe the most helpful things like that blind kids learn language at the same rate as sighted kids.
Carrie: Yep. They do.
Sheri: Actually there’s some really cool research about how even if you’re congenitally blind and you’ve never seen color, your use of color terms in your language is indistinguishable from sighted. People find people never seen red will still say red hot, and people will still use words like blisten and glimmer and all that kind of thing. People will still use them even though you don’t know. Maybe that’s an empty lexical category for some blind people, but like some of those words, I don’t quite know what they mean, but I use them all the time and I use them when I write. We often use words that we don’t know what they mean. We just use them.
Megan: Yeah, it’s true.
Carrie: That is definitely true.
Sheri: It’s part of the equation. You do kind of hope that we can kind of dispel some myths along the way, and thinking about taking people on a little journey where we talk about how the blind people would do science and things like that. Maybe, maybe, maybe next time I’m standing on a street corner, I will get less, someone will go, “Oh my, I read this one article about this blind aliens and think we’re smelting metal and that was really cool, so maybe let that person be and figure they can cross the street without my interference, because I read about blind people smelting metal or flying through space or doing all these other cool things, so maybe I could think twice before I underestimate the next disabled person I meet.”
I don’t know. It’s a dream. Yeah.
Carrie: It’s a good dream.
Megan: It’s a good dream.
Carrie: It’s a very nice dream. One worthy of having for sure, so how does thinking about alien languages help us understand human languages? I think you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I feel like we can talk a little bit more deeply about it.
Sheri: I think anytime you blast out of a system and try to look at it from another perspective, it’s helpful but what is essential? So we can talk about what’s innate and we’ll never solve. Well maybe we’ll someday solve that problem I have no idea, but what is innate and what is necessary? Is it just some kind of hierarchical structure that’s necessary? Is that it? Is there just some kind of recursion that’s necessary? Look, what do we really have to have to have a language? Do we always have to have verbs? Do we always have to have nouns?
What can you get away with eliminating just to see if you could still build a language that way, and I think it’s always good to take things apart, and I think Xeno linguistics it’s another impetus for what can I do without, what can I take apart? Why did I make it this way in the first place? Is there a way of rethinking this? Which is always kind [inaudible]
Carrie: Yeah. I don’t think people think of language in that way. Like you can take it apart and put it back together and that kind of thing as if it were Legos or some other thing, but it is something that you can’t do that with, especially in this kind of thinking, these thought exercises that you’d do with Xeno linguistics.
Sheri: Right, and then you can run different scenarios, so I ran a scenario with the blind aliens, but what if we had a three armed alien? Like would that change anything? If you really ran with, oh, they’ve got their tripods. Would that influence, would that necessarily influence anything? It wouldn’t have to but what if it did? Because the blind aliens could speak one of the human languages because because we know that side of people’s language, it’s all just our language, but if you coupled it and just let it run would be 3. Probably that whole left right front back thing would have to change in some ways, and again maybe we would want to go and I don’t know, we’d want to go with some kind of different directional system like some languages do where it’s used cardinal directions or something.
What if you had 3 arms? If you were a tripod, how would you orient yourself in space? And then how would you talk about that? Don’t know.
Carrie: I don’t know.
Megan: Me neither, but I can’t.
Sheri: If you were swimming around then you’d have to talk about up and down in different ways than we talk about up and down.
Megan: We can only experience things from our own standpoint I guess. It’s nice to be reminded of other standpoints.
Sheri: Well if nothing else on exercise, you play the game, let’s keep everything but change 1 factor and then play it out and see if it makes a difference. See what comes of it, and I just think that that kind of intellectual humility where you’re like, well I don’t really know what this is going to do, but let’s go play. Let’s go try it. It’s just in general a good thing because if you get in the habit of doing that, then you could even do it with relationships or like what if you say, what did you mean? Oh, what have you meant this thing? Let’s get in the habit of just exploring all the possibilities.
Megan: Oh, I love that.
Carrie: Me too. That’s beautiful. This intellectual humility we should all have. Is there a favorite constructed language for an alien species in our vast pop culture?
Sheri: I have to like Klingon because you have to. Klingonist they’re fun people. They like to goof around. They just all seem like nice people to me. I don’t know that I have another one that I like more than Klingon.
Megan: Oh, that’s cool. Klingons a good choice.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s classic.
Sheri: In my intro linguistics I used to make people invent languages, and so I have some there that I really like. One kid made up the language that vending machines speak.
Carrie: Oh, that’s amazing.
Sheri: This was so cool. He tried to listen to the noises because he decided it was going to be acoustic because they can’t really move in very many ways, but they do make lots of noises, so he like legit tried to figure out what kinds of roars and thumps and moans and sliding noises, freak-ish things and stop-ish things that the vending machines made, and then he tried to build around, like make those into words. It was really cool.
Megan: That’s amazing.
Carrie: That’s so creative. I love that. Yeah. I taught constructed languages one time and the students were just so creative, and I will never forget that class. It was my favorite.
Sheri: So much fun, so much fun.
Carrie: So much fun. One of my students had created a language of the dead, and so everything had to be whispered
Megan: Oh my gosh, that’s so cool.
Carrie: So great.
Sheri: Another one of my favorite is someone made up a Dante language, well all about the levels of hell, and so everything had to have nine. Everything had to have nine, everything’s. There was nine tenses, there was nine. There were nine this for the…
Carrie: I love it.
Megan: Oh my God, what a nerd. I love it so much.
Sheri: Then there was like, well what can they talk about and what can’t they talk about, so any word that had to do with hope or light or freedom was not [inaudible] it was really fun.
Carrie: That was the taboo. The taboo stuff that they couldn’t talk about. I love it. Would there be any taboo stuff or the blind aliens?
Sheri: Okay, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how they would do science. The sequence of science for sure, so maybe thermodynamics before like the motion of objects in space, and then eventually when your technology gets pretty high, I think the differences kind of might disappear, we might get our self-driving cars as part of the blind aliens, we would have the whole self-driving car thing done early. Like that would be taboo, and I sort of I feel like misrepresentation. I feel like lying to be a taboo. That would be a safety issue, so big hole in the middle of our brailiens[?]t town, and you don’t say it or you tell people it’s in a different place or about it and you don’t say like, I feel socio culturally the other brailiens[?] would have the right to eat you alive. Like you cannot.
Megan: Yeah. You got to be a good citizen, a good community member.
Sheri: They don’t have to be nice to each other, but I feel like lying would be taboo.
Megan: Yeah, that makes sense absolutely. Oh, what a fun thing to think about.
Carrie: Yeah, so have you written about these brailiens[?] and they’re smelting and all this? You talked about that, so do you have like a whole set of papers on around this brailiens?
Sheri: I have a whole set of papers. My head around this for sure. I wrote one that’s still sort of struggling for a… it’s in a book that hasn’t come out yet, but it’s my favorite keynote know to give, like Kim wants me to come speak, can I tell you more about the brailiens? Can we talk about brailiens[?] and their science? Can we do that? Can we talk about like smelt use? That’s the thing I always want to talk to people about because so much fun, and how, like how would you do something super dangerous like smelting?
How would you start that out? How would you go from I’ve got to keep this fire. Once I get fire I’ve got to keep it safe because you can’t goof around and just make a sloppy fire, because get away from you, so you’ve got to really super prepare your fire pit and then make sure it’s all set before you put the fire in so you don’t burn your village down, and at the same time you don’t necessarily need lamps in your house, so there’d be less Chicago fires, No one’s going to kick over a lamp because you don’t have a lamp, but you might burn down your house because you’ve got a fire in there for heat, but you wouldn’t have to have these super dangerous.
People do this crazy ass thing where they carry open flame around, and if you don’t have to do that, then that makes your whole situation safer.
Megan: That is true. Things I would never have thought of. I love it. This is such a fun exercise. Yeah.
Carrie: This is so fun. Expanding my brain in my mind. All of it. Both of the things
Sheri: Yeah, and the whole thing about it is, it’s not just this one direction, like this is the direction I went because why not? But like take any human factor and vary it and then you’ve got a whole new scenario to play out.
Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s a really worthwhile thought exercise for sure for all of us. Is there anything that we didn’t ask you that you would’ve loved for us to ask or something to bring up that you didn’t get to bring up?
Sheri: For me, it’s all about kind of making intellectual humility, fun and about making our ability to go new places and think new thoughts and just to get in the habit of that, and I feel like once that’s your habit, if it could ever become your habit, I don’t know that it’s my habit, but if it could become my habit, like we’d be nicer to each other. You’d be like, oh what really was that? I think you can descend into a really dark place where you second guess yourself all the time in a bad way, but a little bit of healthy, oh wait, I could be wrong. Is probably good for us.
Carrie: Yes. It’s important.
Megan: Absolutely. It’s so important. That’s a lovely message to end on. What do you think Carrie?
Carrie: Yeah. I thought it was really great. Thank you so much for talking about your brailiens. I love it.
Sheri: Thank you so much. I’m geek and vocal
Carrie: We always say to our listeners one final message. Don’t be an asshole.
Megan: Don’t be an asshole.
Sheri: Don’t be an asshole.
Carrie: Thank you so much.
Megan: Yeah, thank you you.
Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, the music by Nick Granon. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at vocal fries pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.
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The Vocal Fries Pod 