YouSaid · the spoken record

John McWhorter

lines on the record: 91
first: 2020-03-11
most recent: 2020-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Richer, I think. Dylan richer than Oscar Hammerstein, for example. It's just that where's the balance? Now Taylor Swift, that's generated kind of cynthy poppy stuff which has its place. There is lemon jello. But in terms of the songbook to say that Porter did something that no one has done better since, it's narrow because he couldn't write about anything interesting. Today you can write about more interesting things, but the music is mostly all about the beat. And so where do you find the good middle ground, Steely, Dan? I don't know.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah boy am I gonna catch it for this, but I'm sorry you people who are gonna write me, you know it's true. The melodies are absolutely wonderful the harmonies are spectacular the lyrics can be very good but they are a very limited theme all of the moon June love stuff Why does it always have to be about love? We're so used to that just like we're used to cartoon characters being about three feet tall and wearing gloves You don't think that that's not the only way a cartoon character could be why do the songs always have to be about I loved you but you didn't love me Cole Porter could have done so much more interesting work if he didn't live when he did I say that as a great lover of the form these days if you talk about say Paul Simon frankly the music is different It's less structured than what Harold Ireland did but he writes frankly about very often more interesting things stormy weather frankly that's good poem but Paul Simon”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is an answer to that one. Here's the real answer the great American songbook is overrated as art goes. As much as I love it, that was partly a marketing concept to help advance the sales of LPs once that happened at the end of the forties, and as wonderful as the melodies are”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Great One by William Henry III of Jackie Gleason is the most touching biography I've ever read of a monstrous but rather sad person who has that Ralph Cramden childhood and becomes famous and can't quite handle it hurts a lot of people. If you ask me this, and I'm a big biography fan, so I'm trying to go over everything. But that's one that I've actually read more than once. So I can't say the power broker because everybody reads that, but ones that just kind of came and went. That one really killed me. And then last year, one of Ouija. You always see the photographs, Ouija, some person laying on the pavement. You think, yeah, Ouija, he was short. Okay. No, there was more to Ouija than that. And Banana says biography last year of Ouija. And I'm not just pushing this because I have...”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a good chili or a good jambalaya when Rogers and Hart were really going, saying Pal Joey or the boys from Syracuse or here's one for the nerds, heads up, ones like that. Good, good stuff, I've collected it all.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Now Rogers and Hart are in there writing these songs, and frankly Hart was very, very, very drunk. And so it gets to the point where you can tell that the rhymes aren't quite working sometimes. He really had a problem. And it kept their work from advancing to quite the artistic level that you would have wanted and then Hart basically just peters out and Rogers has to move on to the other one. But Rogers and Hart, their work is like, you know what it's like? It's like the fruitier and more interesting flavors of jello. Like you can have cherry jello and you don't care and you were probably in some facility somewhere, but you can have watermelon jello. You can have peach jello. You can have the finer jellos. They make a great jello that tastes like grape soda. That's good stuff.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the New York subway it gets worse and worse. And it's not, it was worse two years ago, but just in terms of what the experience is like with the lateness, with the layers of obnoxiousness that you have to put up with, it's truly exhausting. It has me actually thinking of either moving to a small town or just never coming out of my house again. Now, the New York subway, it's an American tragedy, and I'm surprised at the romance that a lot of people find in it. I'm beginning to sound like a curmudgeon. You know, and it's because I am. So there you go.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know who he is where Andrew Lloyd Weber is coming out of your faucet in the morning. It's a tough, it's a tough life we lived, Tyler.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the best interview ever. Harold Harlan, who wrote Stormy Weather and a lot of other songs that sound like that, never really got lucky on Broadway. He was kind of a white black man. A lot of his songs were too advanced for the time. I have a friend, Alex, I know you'll be listening to this. You'll like this part. Alex will give me a sheet by Harold Arlen from the forties that almost seems like Revell, and will always say this was too advanced for the time, and we'll go on about our business. He was great. He was a sad man. He had certain problems that I think kept him from producing as much as he could have, but he did really great music, and his sheets are very pianistic. It's always fun playing Harold Arlen's songs because you can tell he really had a say in how they were written out. So yeah, Harold Arlen, that's an artist. And look what happens to him. He ends up dying miserable and he's this footnote where most of us don't know.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh Oh, it's a tragedy. And I know that there are fans out there, there are people who think of Evita as their Porgy and Bess, and I do understand that. There are people who really, really like Jesus Christ superstar. I understand that. No one will ever ask me about this in public income. He is a very thin talent who got very lucky. He has a terrible sense of lyricists. He does his job. He's not offensive, but he doesn't have anything that I would call genius. Richard Rogers could sit down and write a tune drunk and having yelled at somebody sometime in the fifties and had more of a melodic gift than Lloyd Weber has ever come up with more than about seven times, and when he comes up with a good melody, he often doesn't even have the decency to write a bridge to the song, a very thin talent. Whenever I think of him, I think he made an awful lot of money and he's still...”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, the voice. I don't want to see it. Yeah, yeah, I'll take the voice. Radio was better with media. Radio is easier than TV. You have to put stuff on him, put a microphone. Yeah, yeah, I'd rather just hear it. But that's because I like language. That's probably just my quirk. It's clear that most people like looking up one another's noses and watching the screen cutout. And I can't claim that I'm somehow more advanced, but take me back to the teleophone, frankly.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and to tell you the truth, all of that to me is a distraction. I'd rather just hear their voice. I mean, frankly, I despise Skype. You're sitting there, you look bad, and it always cuts out. And yet your whole life these days is about, you want a Skype? And I'm thinking, yeah, it's going to cut out, and we're both going to look bad. But I would rather just hear the person. Maybe that's because I'm kind of linguistic. I'm not sure what you're getting at.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps bring the world together. Do I need to be in the room with the person watching what they do with their legs, getting a vague sense of whatever their redolence happens to be?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, not at all. Talk about what's articulate. It happens in texting. I mean, I'm old enough to remember the love letter. There was something about it, but you never quite had enough of them, and suppose they got wet. Whereas with texting, it's very sexy, and it's a love letter, and texting, and this is not just because I did that TED talk 400 years ago, texting can be very articulate. It's interesting. You can read about the texting of people who do not have the benefit of any particular education. Almost every time they put their thumb to that pad, they're creating some kind of poetry. So no, the love letter is not dead. It's just that...”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, He all did that. It doesn't seem to have really solved any problems, but maybe there was a lull in the geopolitical developments there at the time. I don't remember. But no, things like that usually are about the concerns of a certain small number of people.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's that you take each one of those little words that doesn't make any sense. You know, somebody says a haggard and you're thinking, a saggy-faced what? And they mean a falcon. Well, just put in damned falcon. And then you can go on. If you do that, then all of a sudden, Macbeth is like being at the glass menagerie. Like you have to listen, and you might get lost every now and then, but you're actually seeing a play and you don't have to have read it before. Translate Shakespeare last week, please.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even as nerdy, obsessive me, if I haven't read it or I haven't read it in a while, I will openly admit that especially with Shakespeare after about his first ten minutes, if I go and see a production live, even if the people are British and even if I've had coffee, I don't know what the hell any of those people are saying. And it's because the words don't mean what they used to. Now, I've gotten in trouble with some people for that, but frankly, if we sat through King Lear and we hadn't read it for about 10 years, I'm sorry, no, you do not understand what they're saying. So I think that we need translations. Conrad spoke. I'm going to put in a word for Conrad spoke, and I'm going to make sure he listens to this. He's done, not translations, not like yo-yo, yo, Meracutio or something like that. It's not that.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, because And we know the drill. Oh, it's just poetry. Oh, you have to let it just roll over you. Oh, it's better when the people are British. Oh, you really need... Got to have a good director. Oh, you just don't want to reach up and do the work, et cetera. None of, no, no. It's that every tenth word, and especially late Shakespeare, means something different than what we think it means. And it goes by, and you're a little confused if somebody says generous and you think they mean magnanimous and they mean noble, the line doesn't make any sense. And you go, huh? And then about ten lines later, somebody says wit and what they really mean is knowledge, and you're wondering why the line was funny when it what? And so you're confused again. After that happens about ten times, frankly, you're bored. And I mean if you're seeing it in real time for the first time. Now if you've read it, fine. Now some people would say, and I think that this is a legitimate answer, everybody should be expected to have read a Shakespeare play before they see it, in which case it's okay. And I've done that.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on where you are because black people are white. Widespread I have never seen a dialect map that measured that for black people specifically, I know where I would look for it, and I can come back to you with it, but I suspect that it would follow the rest of the country.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“than they do with others. But no dialects are not diverging unless, once again, I've missed something because I am a little bit overstretched, but in this case I doubt it.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can imagine someone saying that in their reasons that they would no, regional accents are not the way they used to be. If you could go back in a time machine, say 75 years ago, the way a New Englander sounded was radically different from the way somebody sounded in Atlanta, the way somebody in Atlanta sounded was, unlike today, not the way somebody in Raleigh or somebody in Washington, D.C. sounded. But radio is what first started erasing those differences. And then when education got better, especially after the GI bill, there are differences in today's American English, but you have to dig to find a lot of them beyond cute little things like soda and pop. They surprise people. Whereas 100 years ago, you wouldn't have had to surprise anybody by showing that somebody from Colorado didn't sound like somebody from Minneapolis. No, things are coming together. They'll never come completely together because still people talk more to people they live near and spend time with.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inarticulate for the public positions that they're in. It does. It does exist, but I hear such wonderful things just standing at the post office in the way that somebody will put the most humble thing. I remember about fifteen years ago even, something had happened where somebody had done something arrogant. And a cousin of mine said something like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Did you see this? And I said, well, yeah, I imagine that he might have meant that. And she said, yeah, there's some of that. And that's some of that, and that's the first time I ever heard that expression. Yeah, there's some of that. I've used it ever since. That was very well put. I liked that. Nobody would have called that person articulate, but I was just thinking that's a little bit of the art of the language that I hadn't happened to have. That is an honest answer. Some people don't talk well, but it's rare. Now, some people are just hyper articulate, but what I hear in life is that sounded good to me. And it's often a slob.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I know where you're going, and I want to give a real answer. To be a language person, to be somebody who has mucked around with a bunch of different grammars of languages and who to an extent studies non-standard grammar, that's not actually my academic subject. I play that person on TV, but you look at different ways that English has spoken. And also probably growing up black and hearing people speaking a very non-standard dialect who you don't yet have any reason to suppose are doing anything wrong. All of those things, I hear almost everybody as articulate, and I don't mean that in the wide-eyed, forced way that it sounds. There are some people who don't speak well. I know some where I will say to people who I've primed, you noticed that, you know, she never really quite rubs a noun in a verb together. I am capable, or there are people we can think of who really are stunningly.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a tough one because a person can be brilliant not to mention kind and flexible and artistically sensitive, but if there's certain things about their vowels, if there's certain things about their consonants, if there are certain expressions they use, then they seem lesser because we've got that bread into our bones to read them that way. I think a part of enlightenment can be to learn to And that's difficult, but I don't think it's impossible. And I think that in many ways the tenor of our times makes it more possible than it would have been in say nineteen fifty five. You learn to listen through an accent. I think there are harder things to do than that. I don't think we'll ever be perfect at it, but I would rather teach people that than try to eliminate all of those markers. One task would be easier than the other, I think.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, Tyler, I think speech expresses our full range of humanity, and to the extent that any society, unless there are only three people, has some sort of status marking, some sense of hierarchy, at least a sense of what's formal and what's not. Speech has to reflect it, and it can seem as if all of the way we do that with language is an add-on to basic grammatical things like, you know, whether the moon is a girl and a boat is a boy, or whether something's in the past or the future. But the formality is key. I kind of like that part. We need to think of it as grammar rather than as some sort of frill.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complexities that filtered away, is it hither and thither and wither became archaic instead of current, so we speak a very, shall we say, streamlined Germanic language?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of those Vikings. These Vikings came. It started in 787 and they started coming to England and pretending they wanted to do good, and they never went away, and the genetic evidence tells us they were all men, not all, but mostly. And so they married English speaking women, and that meant that they're speaking Old Norse, they're trying to learn old English, they were over seventeen, therefore they didn't do it well. So they were speaking crappy old English. There's no such thing as newspaper. There's no such thing as school. There's really no such thing as education. All there is is talk. So you are a little girl or a little boy. You're growing up with mom speaking Beowulf. And dad speaking this sort of broken English. And maybe you liked dad better. Every third person in England talked that way pretty soon. People were speaking what we're speaking now. We're speaking shitty old English. That's how it happened. One of those things, it was just this general cascade of the”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sleep with somebody or Frankly. Or... You know what? There are two things that in my experience work. One of them is sleep with somebody. The other one I'm going to plug something because it really works. It's called Glossica and it doesn't really get out there. It starts you at intermediate, i.e., which is about exactly as far as any of those other methods there can possibly take you no matter what they say. You'll be conversing like a native in no time. No, you'll know some scatterings of this and that. And once you finish that, you go to Glossica and you have intermediate sentences that are very idiomatic, poured into your ear all day long, however much you want it. And by the end of it, you're at roughly upper intermediate. Immersion after a while is what you have to do unless you are very, very close to some individual who will tolerate listening to you sound bad for years. Other than that, you have to be immersed.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“spoken by the slaves there who were lucky enough to escape into the rainforest and were never caught. That is what Saramachin is. So they have their own language, and it's been studied by many people. I am one of a great many, but it's fascinating because it's a mixture of all these languages, then it's got other stuff that it does all by itself, and its tonal. So it's absolutely fascinating.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is delightful. Okay. So that's from ANA. Sorts of things I'm usually asked. This is great. Saramachin, okay, here's what happens: let's say that you're in South America, you're up on the northern edge, and it's 1660 something. And it is an English plantation colony. You bring in Africans to work there. They speak two languages for whatever it's worth. They're called Fongbe and Kikongo, some others, but they don't really play much of a part. So you have slaves speaking those. The English leave the place, and the Dutch come in. There's a trade, and so New Amsterdam becomes New York, Suriname goes from the English to the Dutch. We here don't care about the Suriname power, but that was a trade. So now the Dutch are running it. So you've got English and Dutch, then some Portuguese Jewish slave owners come in from Brazil. That's this whole other story of wandering Jews. They probably bring slaves with them. So 350 years later, what is spoken?”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's a tough one too. And here's my real answer. My answer is not going to be that each language is a window into the souls of its speakers, because frankly, that idea is surprisingly dangerous despite all of its attractions, because for any cool thing you can say about a language, there's something uncool you can say about it, and you have to saddle the speakers with that as well. But the way that you be a different culture, the way that you have yourself as an entity as separate from others, is to have your own code. And it doesn't matter how the code is built, it doesn't matter what the shape of the words are. But if everybody just speaks what we're speaking now, or what's really going to happen is it's going to be this, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, you know, about 25 other languages, and then several hundred will be the minority languages, and all the rest won't exist. It means there really is less cultural.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could get in trouble for that. Chinese grammar is relatively simple if we're talking about Mandarin Chinese, and that's relative because once you dig in, there are all sorts of things. Mandarin has gender. It's not called that, but you have to use a little word with each noun, and often it doesn't make any sense. There are all sorts of things about Mandarin that are nasty. And then, of course, the tones, which if you're not born to tones, are really difficult. But Mandarin is one of a handful of languages where geopolitical developments meant that for a while as many people were probably learning it as a second language, as a first, and it's funny all the evidence that shows that that's what was happening about four or forty five hundred years ago in China. And it meant that a language that was originally normal, and in this case it would have been a language with lots of obloas, obla, became one with much less of that. So Mandarin is one of those.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming in and they're going to make the language streamlined like colloquial Indonesia. That has been said more times in this interview. But the thing is, English is going to stay the way it is because we have literacy. Once you have widespread education and literacy, the pull of the written word makes it so that it's harder for a language to be streamlined in that way.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academics who personally dislike me because of some theories that I've had about the nature of colloquial Indonesian speech, but it is The way that most people in Indonesia use language, and it is, it's not a pigeon, but it's a Creole language. It's language born anew and made better, that is spoken by a great many people. You and I are not going to speak it. The truth is the universal language for better or for worse and mostly worse is this that we're doing right here. English is that universal language, and I think it's going to stay that way. It would be nice for me to say, and one day it's going to be Mandarin, but it's not because Mandarin's too hard. So English is where, unfortunately, it just is.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what it's interesting. Pigeons and creoles are interesting in that you can have a whole sub-career where you write books about them and go to conferences about them, etc. I don't know who I'm talking about. But Creole languages were usually born amidst barbarity. And so, for example, it was a plantation language that arose when slaves were brought somewhere and couldn't go home. Hawaiian pigeon is actually a Creole where because you couldn't use slaves anymore, you brought people from all corners of the earth to help harvest the pineapples starting in the 1890s. That sort of thing is not good. So there aren't many new Creole languages emerging at this point. But to tell you the truth, and it's interesting, there's a little debate about this going on right now in a tiny corner of linguistics that somebody has somehow pushed me into. And I kid you not with how petty academics can be. There are a couple of linguistic”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is fun. Is not what I was expecting. Malay and Indonesian as languages go are delightfully streamlined, actually. Indonesian is one of those languages where not to get too wonky, no oblas, obla. You don't have to deal with any of that mess. But then, unlike most languages that don't hit you with that, no goddamn tones. So you don't have obloas obla and no ma, you just have a language. It's wonderful. And then once it's colloquial, it's just this beautiful thing. It's human language as she should be spoke. Now anywhere else you go in Indonesia, all of a sudden everything gets normal. But Malay, Indonesian, it was a lingua franca for 2,000 years. It's been shaven of the nonsense. It's a beautiful thing.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indonesian to be the world's universal language because actually that is the closest thing to an ideal language I have ever encountered. There were no cabs where I was. It was just little mopeds. But you could get along.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, no, no, I'm not opposed to a standard English, but I wouldn't want it to be English because frankly, I find English rather ugly. If you think about the sounds of this language, eh, those are the sorts of sounds that you have to learn your way out of when you learn a language like Italian. There should be an international language that really is ding dong easy to learn, and it wouldn't be one that was like dumbed down English. It would be something that would be hard to recognize by any of us as a language, but that you could pick up in about a month. That's what we need. Because to tell you the truth, as far as standard English, as normal as this thing that we're speaking feels, and I mean, to me, this is the language of God. If God existed, this is it. But actually, more Indians speak it. At this point, if a Martian came down, normal English would be that, and this would be just some dialect. And so what I want is for colloquial”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should. We should get rid of all that mess. But the truth is language vastly overshoots what's necessary. And it's hard to feel that partly because we all speak our own language and partly because most of us at least speak English, which as languages go is relatively streamlined. And so you feel like, well, basic concepts, basic words, and think thought, but how bad does it get? Most languages vastly overshoot anything that's necessary, not only to just common sense, but to nuanced communication. And it's just because they can. It's amazing what a toddler's head can get its mind around. And by the time anybody's old enough to realize that they're speaking Estonian, it's too late to fix it. I'm going to get in trouble for that. But therefore, yeah, it'd be nice if language were more efficient because it would be easier to learn other people's languages, et cetera, but it'll never happen because”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has very little to do with the Estonian soul from what I've known of the maybe one and a half Estonians that I've known, but it just does mean that whenever you hear an Estonian speak their language you should realize that they're doing something that it's hard to believe anyone could do while also walking or breathing or metabolizing.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a wonderful opening question. It's 16 cases actually. And the reason is that Estonia is like the size of New Jersey. It might be the size of Trenton. And so it's a very small group of people. And very few people have ever had any reason. I can't believe this is the first question to learn Estonian as a second language. And if you try, you fail. And so as a result, it gets more and more complicated, more and more ingrown. Whereas Finnish, which is a sister language to Estonian, is actually kind of easy. It's easy Estonian. So Estonian is a small language that's almost never learned by adults and therefore almost never screwed up. That is why it is so complicated.”
2020-03-11 · Conversations with Tyler · John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source