Linguistics Behind the Scenes

Transcripts

Trailer: Welcome to Linguistics Behind the Scenes!

Christina: Hi! I’m Christina. I’m a professor of English and Digital Linguistics.

Dominic: And I'm Dominic! I'm a language enthusiast.

Christina: And this is Linguistics Behind the Scenes.

Dominic: What you always wanted to know about language and how to explore it.

Christina: In this podcast, we’re going to explore topics like...

Dominic: How has Star Wars impacted the English language?

Christina: How many words are there for talking about being drunk?

Dominic: What about the language of comic books?

Christina: And many, many more!

Dominic: Christina, what makes this podcast unique?

Christina: That it’s got you and me in it, of course.

Dominic: Of course! And we are linguistics nerds, and we're going to pick the topics in linguistics research that our audience might find funny, interesting, or surprising.

Christina: Yes! And you’re going to get a behind-the-scenes tour of research projects and I’ll tell you all the interesting stories that happened in the background.

Dominic: I can't wait! So make sure to stay tuned right here and join us for new episodes as they become available.

Christina: We look forward to you joining us on Linguistics Behind the Scenes!

Episode 1: How has Star Wars changed the English language?

Dominic: Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural episode of our podcast.

Christina: I'm Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. I'm a professor of English and Digital Linguistics from Germany, and I'm very excited about almost everything that has got to do with language.

Dominic: And I'm Dominic Piazza. I'm a language enthusiast with a background in international relations from the United States, and I'm also very excited to talk to you about all my favorite aspects of linguistics and language.

Christina: And in addition, you're going to get a behind-the-scenes tour of research in digital linguistics, in English linguistics, in all kinds of research that has got to do with language, and we're very happy to show you around and show you the things that you may not get to see or hear anywhere else.

Dominic: Indeed, we couldn't be happier. This is just one of our favorite subjects to talk about. And Christina, how are you today?

Christina: I'm fine. And you?

Dominic: I'm doing pretty well. You know, I've been playing this new Indiana Jones game and I must say, I find him quite inspirational, right? He speaks so many languages with this really deep knowledge, and he travels all around the world to solve these mysteries, and yeah, I want to be like him.

Christina: Yeah, he's really cool, even though some archaeologists might say he destroys a bit too much, too many archaeological remains in the process of actually finding treasures. But of course, it's lots of fun and I have to say, I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan. And he also inspired my own app Bridge of Knowledge, which I will talk about in another installment of this podcast.

Dominic: You're probably right. I suppose it wouldn't be a good action movie without the cave collapsing in on him every single time he finds the special artifact. But you're right, it might be a little bit too destructive for modern sensibilities. But you know, Indiana Jones is a George Lucas production, and George Lucas likes to do a lot with language. He has another very famous movie series, one might say, Star Wars, which has aliens and all sorts of different species and language. And Christina, I think you recently did some research on the language of Star Wars.

Christina: Yeah, I did, because I'm a huge Star Wars fan myself. I actually motivated myself to study for my A-levels by allowing me to have some Star Wars stickers every now and then.

Dominic: Oh that's wonderful, Star Wars stickers. That's wonderful. I'm also a very big fan and actually, I'd like to know, the age-old question: Which order do you think the films should be watched in? Do you think you should watch them in release order or do you think you should watch them in the numbered order?

Christina: Well, I'm personally a huge fan of the middle trilogy, the original Skywalker trilogy. So I would start with part four, then part five, then part six, then part seven, eight, nine, which I really enjoy very much as well. And then, end with one, two, three. What about you?

Dominic: I think I'm inclined to agree with you, and I think the prequels are more enjoyable when you know everything that happens later. But you know, on the subject of order and how we structure things, putting the back in the front or the front in the back, there's a certain character who speaks in a very unique manner, yeah? Yoda. What do you think of Yoda?

Christina: I think Yoda is fascinating. People quote Yoda all the time and very often, when people use an unusual sentence structure, they refer to Yoda.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah, or Yoda speak, Yoda talk. And, you know, Star Wars is such an absolute behemoth of pop culture that it's really fascinating, the way it's permeated our mainstream culture.

Christina: Absolutely, and even our language. I mean, if you think about words like Jedi, Lightsaber, Yoda, Padawan, or even the expression to the dark side, they are very often used in contexts that have nothing to do with Star Wars. And that is what my research was about.

Dominic: Wow.

Christina: Yeah, it's cool. Have you ever been using these words in any ways that are probably not directly making an allusion to the films themselves?

Dominic: Oh, certainly, absolutely. I mean, especially when it comes to the dark side, I kind of figured that maybe this phrase already existed in English and that maybe George Lucas just drew inspiration from that.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, the dark side, the light side, so this idea of darkness being related to evil and of the light being related to something positive. I mean that has been around for ages. I mean, it's a very traditional idea. And it's an idea, it's a metaphor, which also makes sense if you think about it, because when it's dark, it's more difficult for you to do things, you know, you might bump into objects, you know, so it's obvious why it's better if there is light. So, it really makes sense. But in this idea of kind of moving to the Dark Side, behaving in a way that is less moral than you behaved before – this is something which was apparently influenced by the Star Wars franchise, because I looked at texts from different years, so at a historical corpus of English. And I noticed that before Star Wars, “to the dark side” wasn't really used in that sense very much. So the references that you have before that time with the “to” in front of it, well, they rarely carry that idea of immorality. It's more like “going to the dark side of the house” and things like that.

Dominic: Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. So okay, it certainly seems here that Star Wars popularized, or may have even spawned, this specific kind of usage of it, and people are kind of using it in their general language without specifically referencing the movies. Because I know, I think, that's one of the really key distinctions here that when you're referencing something kind of on purpose, it's not really the same as sort of using the language almost generically.

Christina: Yes, I mean, very often if you think about movies, as you call them, or films, as I sometimes call them, if you think about that, then very often if you quote something, if you have a language reference in some way or another, then it is because you really want to allude to that film. So, if I might say something like "May the Force be with you,” then I'm very obviously referring to Star Wars in some way or another, and it's relatively rarely the case that you just have individual words that become part of the English language that actually come from a film. One of the exceptions is Mini-Me, and I really like the word Mini-Me, because, I don't know, have you got an idea where that comes from?

Dominic: Oh, goodness. No, I don't.

Christina: Have you ever watched the Austin Powers films?

Dominic: Ah, I haven't, but I'm very familiar with them.

Christina: Yeah, because there’s someone, he's called Dr. Evil. and he's got a clone. And that clone looks very much like him, just small. He's even wearing the same clothes and trying to behave in every way like Dr. Evil himself. And, so that's the Mini-Me, that's where that comes from. But interestingly, when people are using the word Mini-Me now, they're not using it in that sense. They're actually using it in a fashion context. So you might talk about a woman who is dressed in a particular way wearing a particular dress and accompanying accessories, and she's just dressed like her daughter, and the daughter is then her Mini-Me. And people who are talking about that, well, they will presumably not be aware of the fact that this comes originally from a reference to Dr. Evil's clone.

Dominic: Oh, wow, okay. Yes. We might even call that, when you wear matching outfits, we might call it twinning. Actually, there's a really great word in Japanese, wasei-eigo, which is Japanese-created English, English that they've created, but that English speakers don't say, and it's pea-rukku, which means “pair look”. And so maybe this pair look would be a little bit of a Mini-Me when you wear matching outfits.

Christina: Aw, it's so sweet, I love that. It's so cool that you speak Japanese.

Dominic: Oh, yes, and sometimes Japanese reminds me a little bit of Yoda because it has a different sentence structure, a different word order. It's subject-object-verb, so the verb comes at the end, which German does sometimes, but not in all cases. Japanese does it in all cases, and so sometimes you kind of have to reprogram your brain to kind of express ideas in a way that may not seem natural to an English speaker.

Christina: Yeah. You mentioned German and there, it's true, we have that, but it's just in a subordinate clause. So usually in a main clause, this is not the case. So, I could say, okay, it's not the standard, it's just like, yeah, special cases, subordinate clauses. But of course, these are also quite common. So, to give you an example, “Weil ich Linguistik liebe” you know, “Because I linguistics love.” Yeah, so you wouldn't say “Because I love linguistics,” but “Because I linguistics love.” But of course, this is something which you would use after an introductory part of the sentence, which makes it clear that this is a special one, a subordinate one. So, for example, “I'm doing this podcast because I love linguistics”.

Dominic: Yes, exactly. And in Japanese, I think you would have to essentially say, “I love linguistics, so I'm doing this podcast,” essentially. So everything has to be kind of structured differently. But, yeah, you're right, when it comes to German and the linguistic classification, we might say that it's subject-verb-object, but with a significant asterisk. That's a little bit of a joke in the language learning community. So, people are using these words in the English language, but how often, how frequently, do they actually use them?

Christina: I would say more often than I expected. I mean, I didn't check on every word, so, I mean, there's some words like “TIE fighter” that probably are less frequently used. But at least, if you look at those words that are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love, by the way, one of my favorite dictionaries. So the word “Jedi,” the word Jedi is used, let me think, once every four million words. Now, what does that mean? I wanted to make sure that I knew if that was a lot or not. And so I checked in the same corpus, and I found that other words with a similar frequency were “dizzy,” so when you're dizzy, when you're nauseous. And also the word “jewel,” like jewelry, rings that you’re wearing. So, I was really surprised that Jedi is as common as these two words, which are very general language words.

Dominic: That really puts it in perspective.

Christina: Yeah, definitely.

Dominic: To do this research, you said you used a corpus, you used corpora. What is that tool? How does that work?

Christina: So, a corpus is a collection of texts, a digital collection of texts. You could think about it like having lots of Word documents on a computer, and you just search them. So it’s a bit like a Google search.

Dominic: Oh yeah, like Control-F.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. And so the nice thing, actually, is that in contrast to a Google search where you get those different hits underneath each other with a bit of context, there are special tools like AntConc, for example, which is produced by Laurence Anthony. That's, yeah, why it's called AntConc–Anthony Concordancer.

Dominic: Oh nice, it’s one of those syllabic abbreviations. Those are very popular in languages like Russian. They love syllabic abbreviations. Nice.

Christina: Yeah, and also in the east of Germany, by the way, you find a lot of syllabic abbreviations.

Dominic: Oh, very nice.

Christina: So in Chemnitz, for example, you find, yeah, different local institutions like the Rawema-Gebäude, which is a building where the syllables also refer to, well, to the full expression. Which I can't reproduce here, but I know it's one of those, yeah, syllabic abbreviations.

Dominic: Oh, that’s cool.

Christina: But in any case, so that concordancing tool is very, very helpful, and it's also free, by the way. So anyone interested in it could just use it. And so this concordancing tool allows you to search for certain words or also patterns in a text. So you might look for the word, yeah, “side” or the two words “dark side,” and then you just try to see what comes in front of it, or “to the dark side.” So that's what I did. So I searched for “to the dark side” and then I tried to see, okay, what occurs to the left of it, for example. And then you just sort it. That's the nice thing. So you get it neatly underneath each other, and by sorting those different hits that you find, you can get an overview of what types of context a certain word or expression occurs in. That's extremely helpful if you try to form generalizations about language, which we linguists try to do all the time.

Dominic: Yeah, very cool. So it's a lot more powerful than just a simple Control-F. These are some really granular tools that you have here. That is awesome. So we've established that there's this difference between maybe trying to specifically reference the movies and maybe using these words, this language, kind of more generically, without specifically referencing Star Wars. And it's this latter category which we might say is more interesting. So when it comes to kind of references versus innovation, what did you find there?

Christina: I've found that, actually, there's a lot of innovative uses of words from Star Wars in the English language. So among the examples that I looked at, I found that over a third are actually contexts where Star Wars is only mildly alluded to, if at all. So, for example, someone might be called a “finance Jedi,” or in the context of dating, someone might tell another person, “This is how it's done, young Padawan,” you know? And so, obviously, I mean, there is this allusion to Star Wars, but you don't necessarily have to think about Star Wars while using it in that context because it's got nothing to do with the films themselves. And so here a word like “Padawan” is used in the sense of an apprentice or a person who you are showing the ropes to, basically. And, yeah, you often get that. Also, I mean, “Yoda” is used in the meaning of a mentor, so sometimes people talk about wanting to meet “their Yoda.” And if you talk about wanting to meet “your Yoda,” well, the use of “your” here already implies that it's a more general meaning, and that it's not just the person or the character of Yoda, but this idea of a mentor.

Dominic: Oh, that's excellent. Well, I would very much like to become a language Jedi. For now, I might remain a Padawan, but we'll see if the Force is with me.

Christina: Oh, probably you already are.

Dominic: Aw, thank you. What initially gave you the idea to investigate this?

Christina: Actually, one of my students. I was teaching a translation class and we were translating a text about Dickens World, which is a theme park. I think it closed in the meantime and I mean, what would you imagine a theme park about Dickens to be like, Dominic? What would you expect?

Dominic: I would imagine it would be themed around A Tale of Two Cities and many of his famous works.

Christina: And of course, if you think about the kind of general attitude, the general spirit of the theme park, apparently it was relatively dark. And so, in the text they said that it felt like “Disney turned to the dark side.” And then my student asked me when we were translating this, “Do you think this is a reference to Star Wars?” And I said, “Could be, but I'm not a hundred percent sure about that.” And that got me thinking about Star Wars as a potentially interesting topic for linguistic research, and then I tried to see if there's other words, expressions, that might have entered the English language in the meantime. And I really liked this idea, because if you think about the Star Wars films, what really makes that universe special is that it's a used universe. So it's not all shiny science fiction, but, yeah, the different spaceships et cetera, they’re all very used. And so you're trying to kind of transmit this idea of this is familiar in a certain way. And so, I quite like this idea that therefore it's relatively easy for those Star Wars words, at least to a certain extent, to enter our universe and somehow it feels familiar.

Dominic: Well, it's a long time ago.

Christina: In a galaxy far, far away.

Dominic: Yes, and this is so cool because, you know, Star Wars, pop culture, entertainment, you know, it's so cool that it actually has some very real scientific merit for these types of investigations, these types of scientific inquiries. I think this is totally fascinating.

Christina: Absolutely, and I mean, if you think about science fiction, sometimes inventions that were just shown in science fiction films in the end became reality, you know. So, it's not just interesting from the linguistic perspective, but of course, also from the perspective of inspiration. I think quite a lot of researchers actually do take inspiration from science fiction when they're developing, yeah, new devices, for example.

Dominic: Well, Star Wars is certainly hugely successful, but we know that not everyone has seen the movies. Sometimes it can be very surprising if you meet someone who hasn't seen any of the movies. You kind of wonder, “Oh my gosh, where have you been? It's such a huge part of our culture.” So, what did you find? Do people actually have to know the Star Wars movies, or have to have seen the Star Wars movies to be using this type of language?

Christina: Not necessarily. I mean, there are some people who haven't watched the Star Wars films, but they still know what a Jedi is. Actually, I asked my mother, because I know she didn't watch the Star Wars films, and I asked her, “By the way, do you know what a Jedi is?” And she said, “Of course I do.” And I said, “Well, I just wanted to ask because I know you didn't watch the films,” but she did. And the same applies to some friends of mine, because the interesting thing about lightsabers, for example, is that they don't just exist as an idea. They also exist in the real world. There's quite a lot of children who are playing with lightsaber toys. And some children that I know had some lightsaber toys at home, and then I asked the parents if they were also Star Wars fans, and then they revealed to me that they had never watched any of the Star Wars films. And I was really surprised. So obviously they just found the toy attractive. And then, I mean, people have those toys and they talk about them and they don't mention it's a toy, but they just talk about their lightsaber. And there's even people out there who do lightsaber dueling as a kind of sport. And so there's different mentions of that in the corpora that I looked at. So that's actually quite fun. Yeah, so you don't necessarily have to have watched Star Wars to talk about it.

Dominic: Oh my goodness, yes. When I was younger, I was obsessed with those lightsaber duels and the fan films that I would see on YouTube. I even tried to put together some myself. So that is really fascinating. That really speaks to the really significant impact that Star Wars has had on our culture. I mean, it's kind of become a part of, almost, the collective human story now. Almost like the fairy tales of yore.

Christina: Absolutely. I entirely agree. And I mean, if you think about the narrative structures, then you will notice that the narrative structures that underlie Star Wars are very similar to those in fairy tales. But of course, fairy tales are a different story, and I hope to tell that one another time.

Dominic: Yes. Well, Christina, may the Force be with you. I think that we’re just about out of time for today's episode. Probably going to wrap things up. But this was a totally fascinating discussion. I'm so happy we got to sit down and talk about this today.

Christina: Yeah, I tremendously enjoyed this too. And to our audience, I hope so did you. So, stay curious. Have fun with language.

Dominic: And join us next time behind the scenes of English linguistics.

Episode 2: Does English have an infinite number of words for drunkenness?

Dominic: Hello everyone and welcome back! Thanks for joining us today for another chat about linguistics and language and all of our favorite elements of what goes into what we say and how we do it. Christina, how are you doing?

Christina: I'm fine. I'm so excited as well! It's great to be back!

Dominic: Yeah, I certainly agree. I certainly agree. And you know, as an American in Germany, it's been a really incredible cultural experience, observing German culture, observing all of the important things in German society, German language. And certainly a very famously important element of German culture is alcohol, usually specifically beer, although as I've learned, Germany also produces wine. White wine, right? White wine. If you want red wine, go to maybe Italy or France, but German white wine is considered quite good.

Christina: Oh, yeah, it's excellent. There's very, very good white wine in different regions, for example, in Franconia. Also in other areas like the Moselle, yeah. So we've got good wine, but I think that at the world level, we're more famous for beer.

Dominic: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I attended Oktoberfest, which is world-famous, attracts visitors from all over. And certainly it seems to me like maybe there's a large number of maybe idioms or metaphors or expressions in German that involve beer or alcohol in some way. What do you think?

Christina: Yeah, I suppose, yes. I would need to think about that, but of course, I mean, if I think about beer festivals, I mean, we say things like Prost and Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit, which means like ‘Cheers to coziness.’ I mean, Gemütlichkeit is one of those words that people find hard to translate, but it's this idea of, ‘hey, isn't it great that we are all together here drinking alcohol’, which, of course, can be dangerous in many respects, as we all know. But, yeah, I would say it forms part of German culture and of many cultures, if you can say so, in the whole world. And I mean, people are having fun with alcohol and provided that it stays at that level, they may also talk about it in a fun way.

Dominic: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, on the subject of language and alcohol, something I often went into with my German friends is that in English, when it comes to sparkling wine, we often refer to it generically as champagne. It doesn't matter if it comes from the Champagne or [c1] the Champagne region of France, but of course, my European friends, my German friends insist you can't call it champagne. Champagne is strictly from Champagne and I think the European Union has strict laws governing this. They take it very seriously.

Christina: Oh, yeah. It's very serious. Yeah, no, you mustn't call it champagne unless it's really from the Champagne. Otherwise, you would call it Sekt, for example, here in Germany, and British people may call it bubbly. At least that's what we used to call it when I studied there.

Dominic: Ah, fascinating, fascinating. Yeah, perhaps we're just not so strict about it. But you know, when it comes to alcohol, we have many, many words for alcohol and the conditions of being inebriated or intoxicated in the English language and in many languages around the world. And Christina, I think actually recently you did some research on all of the various words we have for the state of being drunk.

Christina: Well, I wouldn't claim to have done research on all of the words because there are so many different words that you can use to talk about being drunk in English. But my colleague and friend Peter Uhrig and myself, we carried out a study in which we tried to see how you can talk about being drunk in English, indeed.

Dominic: And what gave you the idea for this? I imagine you were sipping on a drink one day and then it struck you, “Hm, maybe there's some linguistic merit to this, maybe I should investigate this.”

Christina: Actually, that's exactly what happened. I was actually at a conference, which was an inauguration of a center on construction grammar, and we had had some bubbly. I was sitting listening to a conference paper, and I was in a, well, I don't want to say I was tipsy because I just sipped on that, you know, so all very decent. But still, I think this is what ultimately gave me the idea: “Oh, wait a moment! Are there any links between drunkenness and construction grammar?” And then it hit me that I had actually watched a routine, a comedy routine by Michael McIntyre, who's a very, very famous British comedian. Do you know him?

Dominic: Yes, I'm familiar with him because of you. Because you told me you're quite fond of some of his comedy routines.

Christina: Yeah, I’m a huge fan. And so one of my favorite routines by him is when he talks about, well, he claims that as a British person, or particularly a posh British person, you can use any English word to mean ‘drunk’, and he gives some very convincing examples. He says things like, “Yesterday I was totally car-parked.” “I was utterly pajamaed.” And a few more of that type. And of course, the audience laughs and they find that funny. But well, among the words that he mentions, like wellied, trousered, et cetera, which sound like complete nonsense to a person from Germany who hasn't heard those before, actually, those are recorded in dictionaries. So they are part of the word stock or vocabulary of the English language. Yeah, so the question is, why? I mean, why are there all these interesting words and how many are there? And is it possible to actually really do what he says? Peter Uhrig and I set out to determine just that.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, this is a very fun subject because, you know, drinking and getting drunk, hopefully, it’s usually a lighthearted and fun activity, at least we hope. And so, you might not imagine there's maybe scientific merit to investigating this sort of language, but there really is, and it's really fascinating because you found that there is, at its basis, this structure for the state of being drunk, right, which is: “to be or get, and then an intensifying modifier, and then a word ending in -ed”. And I have certainly found that this is true. You can substitute anything in there. “I'm getting totally grozzled.” “I'm getting totally wobbled.” “I'm getting totally rattled.” And in general, I think people will understand what you're trying to say. It's very playful, but, you know, if you're saying those things to your friends, it means you're probably in a playful mood. And so, you know, it's tolerated and it's understood.

Christina: Yeah, and I think, of course, the context plays a very important role, obviously, not the sentence, but also the larger context, I would argue. But, indeed, I mean, it's very interesting because, as you just said, it's got its merits because it might seem like a very lighthearted topic, but if you think about it, there's something which we can learn about how human cognition also works. So, construction grammar is a very interesting approach because what construction grammar tells us is that part of the meaning of words or, like, of what we say is actually also in the grammar, in the context.

Dominic: Christina, how many words did you find, how many “drunkonyms” as you call them, did you find?

Christina: Yeah, I mean, we used the word drunkonyms, which was used in the literature before. I mean, there wasn't a large amount of literature, but, yeah, so we actually found 546 drunkonyms, but that was just a list that we compiled from different resources. So, what we did is we searched the Oxford English Dictionary for adjectives that contained either drunk or intoxicated in their definition. And then we tried to see whether these actually referred to being drunk. And we also made sure that in our list, we didn't have any words that contained drunk itself because that's not what we were looking for, so not drunky or martin-drunk, et cetera. And then we combined that with some word lists that were partly generated by users. So we found them on the internet, so the BBC, for instance. They had a show about alcohol in some way or another. And then people voted on drunkonyms. And so we also integrated that list into that list of drunkonyms and also some words from a few other resources. So, it's all in the article, which, by the way, can be read on the internet. It’s accessible, and that list of 546 drunkonyms is also there. But of course, that's not all that there is to it. There’s many, many more. So other people have talked about 900 or even 3,000 drunkonyms. And I mean, if we take seriously what Michael McIntyre said and what our research also suggests, you can basically use any word to express that idea of being drunk. And I think that's the most important takeaway: that actually what was possibly meant as a joke, to some extent, can be taken seriously. So probably that's a very German thing to do, to take jokes and try to see if they might be correct or not. But I was actually very happy to see that this is actually possible and it really testifies to the immense creativity of the English language and its speakers.

Dominic: Immense creativity, certainly. Certainly. And to our listeners, I really hope that you'll take a look at this research paper because, in the appendix, Christina and her co-author attached the full list of drunkonyms that they found, and I must say, this is an extremely entertaining list of words. I mean, I was just laughing all the way through. This is a wonderful, wonderful list of words that I encourage everyone to read if you’re in need of some levity. And of course, certainly fascinating also from a scientific perspective, of course, some of them might be archaic, as was pointed out. Some of them might not be in use, but, even so, it's a very fun list of words to read. …And so you also said in terms of resources you used, you were looking at different dictionaries and, were you looking at, like, the Urban Dictionary or anything like that?

Christina: I also looked at the Urban Dictionary, or we did, but that was rather to see whether the words in Michael McIntyre's comedy routine were already in use at the time that he performed it. But we didn't really integrate words from the Urban Dictionary into the list. So I suppose that there's even many, many more out there. And I mean, what you just said about like being archaic and mentioning the Urban Dictionary. I mean, the Urban Dictionary is a wonderful resource if you're looking for contemporary slang because very often, I mean, when there's a new word and you don't know what it means, and it's obviously a slang word from the context in which you encounter it, then it's very nice to take a look at the Urban Dictionary.

Dominic: The Urban Dictionary, which is a certifiably kind of unserious, lighthearted place, I would say. It's a good place for a laugh, but it can genuinely be a useful resource if you're trying to learn about slang because slang moves very, very fast, often faster than dictionaries can keep up. And dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary, like Merriam-Webster, and so many others, they do incorporate slang periodically, but not as fast as the Urban Dictionary, which can basically capture it almost on day one. And I'm wondering if, as we talked about, slang moves so fast and there are so many of these drunkonyms in English, you know, many of them seem kind of like playful slang to me. Do you think that maybe one of the reasons we have so many of these drunkonyms is because they're so closely related to slang?

Christina: What I would say is that these drunkonyms are used in informal contexts. They're used in lighthearted contexts. When people are having conversations about their achievements regarding their alcohol intake on the previous day or what they intend to achieve on that particular day. And these are contexts which, well, are the contexts in which you might also use slang, but then again, I mean, it's a matter of definition, whether you say, okay, this is still just an informal word or this is a slang word. But in any case, yeah, I think they're not words that you would tend to use in a university essay or in an essay at school or in a newspaper article, except if you're writing about them. And that's why, well, I had the pleasure of writing many of these words in the article that Peter and I did together. So yeah, it was very interesting. And I learned a lot. I mean, I learned so many new words that I had no idea existed, you know, trollied, rat- arsed. I mean, there's so many colorful expressions that you can use to talk about drunkenness. It’s quite amazing!

Dominic: Oh, yeah, and many of them are often very abstract or very abstracted from the original meaning. There's quite a distance. You almost could argue that many of them are maybe euphemisms or they're euphemistic. They are abstract on purpose.

Christina: Yes, I would think so. Definitely. Because if you think particularly about those examples that Michael McIntyre gives, like gazeboed, I mean, what does drunkenness have to do with a gazebo? Nothing, you know. Or pajamaed? Okay, probably you put on the pajamas because you're tired after drinking, which is what happens to me. That's why I drink very little actually. But yeah, there’s a distance between that base that you have that you attach the -ed ending to, which turns it into a drunkonym like trollied, et cetera, wellied, whatever, and the meaning of drunkenness. And I think it's that distance that creates humor, and that's a very typical thing that you have a certain indirectness. You know, indirectness forces the listener to establish the link themselves between that word that they might never have heard before and the meaning of being drunk. And so, I think that's what creates the whole fun of it. And that's something which, I would say, particularly the English are very famous for. And there’s different other means of being indirect, which are also exploited to talk about drunkenness. For example, Cockney rhyming slang. I don't know. Is this something that you also have in the United States?

Dominic: Not to my knowledge, not to my knowledge. It's very distinctly British, and I think we admire it for that reason.

Christina: Yeah, I love it too. I mean, we don't have that in German either, but so the idea here in Cockney rhyming slang is that you have, yeah, a meaning, like in this case, that would not be drunk, but it would be pissed usually. And then you look for a word that rhymes with it. For example, you could take the name of the composer, Liszt, yeah? And then what you do is you find another word that is related to that composer's name. So let's take another composer's name, for example, Brahms, and then we say “Brahms and Liszt”, so that's a pair that rhymes with pissed. And then we can just replace Brahms with pissed and then say, “I was totally Brahms.”

Dominic: The closest analog I can think of to that is maybe Pig Latin, right? Or “Ig-pay Atin-lay”. But that’s something that young school children do, and something I only remember young school children doing, but it's this fun little structure or pattern that children might use because they want to speak in code to each other. And it almost sounds like a different language, but of course, it's just English, but with things scrambled. That's kind of the closest thing I can think of.

Christina: Can you give me an example?

Dominic: Oh, yeah, “Ig-pay Atin-lay”. Basically, you take the first letter of the word and then you move it to the end and attach “-ay.” So, yeah, a dictionary would be an “Ictionary-day,” or slang would be “Lang-say,” or something like that. And so, yeah, it's just been scrambled around with this specific structure, and children will use it with each other because it’s fun and they like the idea of speaking in code to each other or maybe speaking in a different language. Of course, it isn't really a different language, but if you're not familiar with it, and you don't know how to decode it, well, it's almost a bit like a secret code or a secret language.

Christina: Definitely. I think I would have loved that too as a child, but I didn't know it.

Dominic: Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe we need to bring it back. I mean, maybe we could investigate that at a later time. But, Christina, here at Linguistics Behind the Scenes, we are all about dispelling myths, and one maybe sort of leading popular theory for why there may be so many drunkonyms in English is that it's because the English drink a lot, or they drink more than others, and it is very reminiscent, as you mentioned in your paper, it's reminiscent of this kind of popular myth that some indigenous languages around the world have more words for certain weather conditions like snow because they come from a particularly snowy climate or snowy geography. And the evidence for that doesn't always back it up. So, have you investigated this about English consumption of alcohol?

Christina: Well, I suppose that's something that one might believe. I mean, if there are many words in a language, it's because you need them somehow, or because they're culturally relevant. But, well, if you look at statistics, it’s not the English that drink most. I think it's actually the Germans, but we don't talk so much about being drunk, and at least not in a humorous way, you know? So, I’m not sure about the latest statistics, but in any case, I think that, well, people drink alcohol in many places all over the world. But at least to my knowledge and in the languages that I speak, no other language is as creative regarding the use of words for being drunk. And so I think that's a special achievement of the English language and its speakers. And it's got nothing to do with the actual consumption. I think it's more about the, well, attitudes towards talking about it. And I would say that fascination for playing with language, which I like so much about English.

Dominic: Oh, I certainly like it too. I certainly like it too. But for now, I think that's the end of it, Christina. I think we've had a very fun time discussing drunkonyms and words for alcohol. And of course, this by no means serves as an endorsement of drinking alcohol, but we can all agree throughout human history it's had a very important place in many societies around the world, and investigating it from a linguistic perspective, I think, bears some really fascinating and very entertaining results.

Christina: Definitely. Yeah, I also had lots of fun, and I hope so did our audience. So stay curious and have fun with language!

Dominic: And join us next time behind the scenes of English linguistics!

Episode 3: How can we keep Holocaust survivors’ voices alive?

Dominic: Hello everyone, welcome back. We're so happy to be back here with you and talking about linguistics and everything else that we find fascinating about the world of language.

Christina: Yeah, and there are so many things that one can talk about in the world of linguistics. So Dominic, what have you been up to lately?

Dominic: Well, I'm currently busy living in Europe, which I must say is quite an experience. You know, personally, I love history and Europe is an old place to say the least. I often get teased as the American, right? Our country is so young and perhaps our perception of time and what constitutes as old is a bit different than maybe how other people around from other parts of the world might think of it. So I love being surrounded by so much history. And Christina, you know, you grew up here in Europe. What's it like for you being surrounded by all this history?

Christina: I suppose it's normal for me because I've been living here most of my life and so I just go into different cities and I see old buildings and it's normal for me. Actually, it's unusual for me if I go to a city and it's not very, very old. Like when I go to the United States or to Australia, for example, because you don't go that far back in terms of the cities that you see, but obviously, of course, the cultural heritage goes much further back.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You see it in the cities and the architecture. I mean, in America, we do have old places, but probably not much older than maybe 200 or 300 years old. You know, if something's 100 years old an American says, “Oh my gosh, it’s so long ago,” but to a European, you know, 100 years ago was just yesterday. And my European friends have been really surprised when I show them maps of American cities and everything is designed in grids, right? Because, well, probably most of our cities are pretty young, and they were probably planned to a large extent, whereas in Europe, everything just kind of developed sort of naturally and haphazardly with no specific plan.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. So when I go to places as a tourist, I expect that I just need to find the cathedral or main church somewhere. And then I will be able to find my way around the most interesting part of the city center because all of the most exciting old buildings should be located there. And, so there are a few cities where it's different. So you also have such a grid-like structure in the city of Mannheim in Germany. But otherwise, most of the places that you go to in Europe have grown like that. And I really like going to different places and doing sightseeing and exploring new cities and their history and seeing all those old buildings that are very special and different from what I have in my own region. So, yeah, I’m very fond of that.

Dominic: Oh, I totally agree. Yeah, I realized here in Europe it quickly became almost a personal trope for me that it feels like in most European towns and cities, usually the nicest building in the town is the church, right? There's one big church, one big central church oftentimes, and it's often very, very beautiful. It seems to be a common theme to me. But I think what's really cool about Europe is how kind of old meets new. You know, you'll see all of these cities where you'll have these historical areas that are really, really well preserved, but at the same time, you'll have something brand new right next to it, and so you'll just be surrounded by things that are extremely old, but also just kind of living your normal, daily modern life, and new things are still being developed. And I just think it's really beautiful. It's really beautiful the way that you synthesize together old and new.

Christina: Yeah, I really like that very much, too. I have to say I care very much about old buildings, and I'm also a fan of preserving traditions. I mean, not all traditions necessarily. I mean, there’s also some that are really good to go. But otherwise, I think it's very important to make sure that you can conserve those things that matter to the region where you come from and to preserve them for future generations.

Dominic: Yeah, very well said, Christina, very well said. I absolutely agree. Historical preservation is very, very important to me, and there's a lot of history to preserve in Europe and around the world, and of course, being in Germany, I'd say probably the biggest historical subject that people think about is World War II, and there's a lot of really important history to preserve here related to World War II and the Holocaust. And Christina, I think you've been involved in a project related to historical preservation in this way.

Christina: Yeah, that's right, because, as I just said, I mean, I really care about preservation of history, in all its different facets. And also when it comes to World War II, I mean, everyone knows that the Germans played a really, really bad role there. And of course, I feel the responsibility as a person from Germany to ensure that future generations remember this and that they don't repeat the same mistakes that were committed in the past. And the horrible things that happened during the Holocaust in particular. So with that project, I'm part of a larger project, together with my team – of course, there's always a team behind all the things that I do. So even when I say, okay, “I did this,” I mean, it usually means I did this as part of a team, a great team. And so what we want to do is conserve the testimonies and memories of Holocaust survivors. And um, we use modern technologies to make them available to a general audience. So that users can interact with those memories and try to find something meaningful and relevant in what those people have to say about the horrible things that happened to them in the past, which we mustn't forget.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. And I totally love this because, yeah, we talked about history in Europe. There's also a lot of living history in terms of the people who are still alive today, who lived through some of these incredibly significant historical events. And especially when it comes to Holocaust survivors, I believe most of those who survive today are getting to be really quite old. And so I think it's so important that we preserve these memories because, you know, the thing about memories is, well, unless you write them down or preserve them in some way. Well, when the person passes, they are lost, and so I think it's so cool that you're involved in this kind of high-tech project for historical preservation. And I believe your project centered around a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor named Abba Naor.

Christina: Yeah, that's right. So Abba Naor is a very, very special person. He's getting close to 100 years now, and he's fascinating, very, very impressive. And I've had the pleasure of meeting him for real several times, which really was always wonderful. And the last time that I met him, he was driving around in a car with more than 90 years of age, you know, and we met and talked about the project and how we are trying to make his memories available to the whole world by translating them into English. And yeah, that was absolutely fascinating. And the great thing is that he goes to schools in different places in Germany and shares his memories with the children there, which is wonderful. But as you just said, I mean, yeah, I mean, he’s getting close to 100 years now, and in the future, it will be much more difficult for children to profit directly from Holocaust survivors that tell their stories in schools that can share first-hand experiences with them and tell them about all the atrocities that happened to them and show them that this is really something which must never ever happen again.

Dominic: Yeah, absolutely. And this particular figure, Abba Naor, is a really fascinating man. He's lived an incredibly interesting life. He's lived a very long life. He's had time to live a very interesting life. But of course, he was a Holocaust survivor, sent to a concentration camp, survived the death marches. And then after the war ended up living all around the world, moving to Israel, actually working for the Israeli government for the Israeli secret service, the title of his autobiography is I Sang for the SS: My Path from the Ghetto to the Israeli Secret Service, which I think is a very striking title. He's also run restaurants and businesses and he's lived part-time in Munich, actually, and he's done a lot of work in Munich, so he’s a fascinating character.

Christina: Absolutely. That's why it's so important to conserve his memories for the future, and he has a lot to tell.

Dominic: Well, yeah, I would certainly think so, considering he's lived such a long and fascinating life. I would think that you could just interview him endlessly for hours, and it would be so fascinating. But of course, it might not be so accessible to have such a long interview, and so I think what they did with this project was they captured all of his testimony, and then they used this technology to actually make it interactive and accessible.

Christina: Yeah, that's right. So Abba Naor was asked about 1,000 questions, and he was filmed with the latest digital equipment. So equipment which is also made to record 3D films. So, yeah, yeah, that was really very impressive. And so you can actually get a life-sized Abba Naor projection of the German version. And yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And you can ask him all kinds of questions and follow-up questions in natural language, which is really, really cool. So, you just phrase your question, you speak it into a device, into the microphone, and then you will see a video of him answering. And the great thing about this is that you still get the impression that he's really talking to you because in between you have short bits of film in which he's waiting for someone to ask him a question. So it's very, very authentic and natural. And when I showed this to people, they asked me, “Oh, is he really sitting there waiting for me?” And I was, “No, no, this is really just a kind of video chatbot, but it seems so real”. And so, what will happen is that, yeah, he will reply to the question. Then it's wonderful because it means that you can basically ask him anything. The technology will actually match what the users ask with the videos when there is an answer for that.

Dominic: Yeah, wow. This is a really incredible deployment of technology. I mean, I'm quite the history geek. So maybe that's why I'm so excited about it, but you know, there's maybe like a little kind of small talk, kind of funny piece of small talk, a question you might ask someone, which is “If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be?” Which I think is a very, very difficult question. It would be very hard for me to answer that and pick a single person. It could be a person who's long gone, someone who lived long ago, or maybe someone who’s still alive—doesn't matter. But I think it's a really fascinating question. And so kind of through this technology, you're preserving this person, you're preserving their memory, hopefully for generations to come, so that at any point in the future, you can sit down and have this conversation with Abba Naor about his life. So in a way, it's no longer a hypothetical. It's something that kind of today and in the future you might actually be able to do.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. At least that's the idea behind the project, that it's possible to continue learning from Abba Naor’s experience also in the future. And so this project, Learning with Digital Testimonies, I mean, the original is actually in German. So Abba Naor originally answered those 1,000 questions in German. And when I first heard about this project from my colleague, Anja Ballis, at LMU Munich, I was absolutely fascinated and I said, “Wow, this is wonderful, but I think it would be great to share this with the whole world.” And, yeah, “So why don't we make an English version of it?” And that's the part where my team and I came in. And so we translated a selection of the questions into English and then subtitled the videos in such a way that now people can also ask the questions in English. And then get an answer in German, but with English subtitles so that they can understand it.

Dominic: Oh, I love that. So, yeah, definitely making it more accessible for a wider audience. And, yeah, translation is an art form, right? Really an art form. Maybe it’s a lot harder than people might expect. It's not always so direct. There's a lot of creative choice that has to go into it. I'm actually a really big fan of Japanese animation, anime, which involves a lot of translation, right? Whether you prefer the dub or the sub. Usually I prefer subtitles. But there's debate within the community of people who want the translations to be more direct because they think a direct translation is more authentic, but well, I think I might disagree with them. I understand the sentiment, but I actually think a direct translation doesn't always really capture the exact idea or essence of what you're trying to say. But I've never professionally translated anything. So, Christina, can you tell me about the translation process, about what it's like to translate?

Christina: So what we did is, first of all, we had to get a transcript of what Abba Naor actually said in German, because we needed a text to work with for the translation. And then Julie Winter, who's a professional translator, Antonia Friebel, my PhD student, who's working on this project for her PhD thesis, and myself, we translated this, or rather Julie Winter provided a first translation into English, and then we discussed this. And we devised different principles that we wanted to follow regarding the translation. So we really wanted to make sure that the translation was as close as possible to the original. So we really tried to use the same metaphors if possible, the same sentence structure, wherever possible, except, of course, if it was idiomatic. So we really wanted it to sound like good English, and that's what we had that English native speaker for. Abba Naor is not a native speaker of German, so when he speaks, he speaks in a way that might be different from standard English in some respects. For example, like when you are using a preposition in a way that is not commonly used in one particular variety of English, for example, as a British person, I would say at the weekend, and it might sound strange to have on the weekend, but that's correct in American English, isn't it, Dominic?

Dominic: Yeah, that's right. To me, at the weekend sounds strange. Almost sounds like a mistake, but it’s regional.

Christina: Yeah, that's the thing. So sometimes there's variance. So it’s possible to say things in one way or another, but it doesn't sound so idiomatic. And in some cases, it might also be that there's, for example, simply a preposition that you wouldn't otherwise use in German. And we wanted to make sure that the translation had correct English throughout, and that's particularly important, because when Abba Naor speaks, he has his very own way of speaking German, which is absolutely lovely. So, I think he's charming when he talks, and you can hear his voice, and he's transmitting all of those emotions. And so, all of this comes together as something natural that characterizes him. But when you just have the letters one after another in the subtitles and you have something that is not grammatically correct according to standard grammar, it just looks wrong, and it makes him appear in an unfavorable light. And this is something we definitely wanted to avoid.

Dominic: Oh, yes, certainly I agree. That's one of the nuances of translating, that perhaps if you really, really wanted to capture the way Germans might hear it, then you could maybe replicate the non-standard speech in English. But as you said, it probably would not be favorable, right? And the reader might not even understand that that's what you're trying to capture. They might just think that it's just very poorly written subtitles or a very poorly done translation. So I absolutely see what you're saying. Did Abba Naor have any input about the translations?

Christina: Yes, so he did. In the beginning of the project, we actually made a translation of his reply to the question how he maintained the will to survive. And yeah, that's a tough one, definitely. And that's also one of the questions that I think are crucial here, one of the essential ones. And what he said is “Leben ist eine feine Sache” and we translated that as “Life is great.” And so we produced some subtitling and showed that to him as a little mock-up, together with a few other things, and he really liked what we did. So I was so relieved to see that he was happy with what we were doing, because, of course, that is crucial. And, but then he said, “Hmm, yeah, but couldn't you also say ‘Life is a gift?’” And then we said, “Ooh, that's even better. That's beautiful. Well, if you think ‘Life is a gift’ would be a good translation of that… If that is what you want to express, then, of course, ‘Life is a gift’ shall be the official translation.” So that is the one sentence where Abba Naor had his say and we even made a little recording of him saying, “Life is a gift,” and that was so charming and made us all so very, very happy.

Dominic: Oh, that's very sweet. And of course, not an exact translation of what he said, right? I suppose you could say “Life is a gift” in German more directly, but he felt that that translation captured the spirit of what he wanted to say. And so that's translation. That’s translation. That's what really makes it an art form. I was very surprised when I went to an opera here in Germany and I thought, “Well, you know, the opera will be in German. I won’t understand what they're saying, but it's okay because there are other parts of an opera that you can admire aside from understanding the lyrics.” But I was very surprised to find that at this opera house there was a screen at the top of the stage that had English and German subtitles, very surprised, so I was able to read the subtitles, and actually, because English and German were side by side and I'm learning German, I actually found myself looking at the German a lot and comparing the German to the English, and I could see many instances when they took liberty with the translation and I found it quite curious.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, in some cases, you need to do that because otherwise it won't fit, you know, that's one of the problems about subtitling, that you have to squeeze things into a particular time frame, basically. But yeah, and in operas in addition, and also in our project, I mean, you might want to make sure that people really understand everything, and then you probably want to make sure that the vocabulary is not too difficult. So, I mean, particularly in older operas, you might get some vocabulary that is probably hard to understand and you might have to use a very rare word. So this is also something that we tried to do in our translation project. We wanted to make sure that everyone in the world could understand Abba Naor’s message as well as possible, and so we tried to make it as easy to understand as possible. So there was, for example, one case where he was talking about how he was treated by the SS and he said, that, well, “They weren't exactly being treated with kid gloves.” So that's the translation that Julie Winter first suggested. And I think that's a wonderful way of expressing this idea, but at the same time we felt that this was really hard to understand. It's an expression that probably only advanced learners of English will understand. And so in the end we went for something simpler.

Dominic: Yeah, wow, yet another example. So this whole process is so important and so interesting. Our world is very international, but our world kind of runs on translation. And so hearing about all these different accommodations and things you need to make when handling the translation process is so interesting, and we didn't even get into dubs, right? Because I would think when you're translating for a dub, it's even more restrictive. You have to be even more creative and kind of abstract the translation because you need to translate the dialogue in a manner that fits the timing of the words being spoken on screen. So that sounds like an even more difficult process to me.

Christina: Yeah, I would say so, too. I think that's even more difficult definitely. And of course, you need to make sure that people don't move their mouth and not say anything, but it's even worse when you hear something being said, but there's no mouth movement. But, of course, in Germany, most films are dubbed, which is really very helpful for children in particular, but with Abba Naor’s testimony, we didn't want to do that. So that was a very, very clear decision because we just wanted to make it possible for audiences to also hear him speak in his very own characteristic, humorous way. I mean, you wouldn't believe that listening to the memories of a Holocaust survivor could also be entertaining and fun and an experience that doesn't only make you sad, but it's just like, it's so nice to listen to him. And we just wanted to share that with the world as well and at the same time make it possible for everyone to understand the content, and that's why we selected subtitles.

Dominic: Yeah, that was something that actually took a little bit of getting used to when I came here to Europe because, when it comes to like voiceover dubbed content, because, you know, coming from the U.S., well, a very large share of international media is in English, so we can just watch it as it is. But when we do watch foreign films or foreign media, I would argue in my personal experience, we almost always opt for subtitles instead of dubbing, pretty much always from what I've seen. So when I came to Europe and I saw lots of dubs and voiceovers on TV and in the movie theater, it seemed to me that Europeans are totally used to it because they grew up watching media with dubs and voiceover.

Christina: Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's the way that films are usually shown on TV in the cinema. It's the most normal thing for me to actually watch dubbed films. What about you, Dominic? What do you feel like when you watch dubbed films?

Dominic: Ah, well, personally not such a fan, at least when it comes to live action media. When watching live action media with a dub, I don't know. There's kind of like a strange disconnect or dissonance because I know the voice doesn't belong to that person, and also I know that the words don't quite match the lips. So maybe I'm not such a fan.

Christina: Yeah, I can completely relate to that feeling, but on the other hand, it's quite convenient, particularly for younger audiences. But, with the chatbot it was really so important to us to make Abba Naor’s memories available in a way that is as authentic as possible that we, well, felt it was important to actually have subtitling rather than dubbing. And of course, it's also easier to make and it's more accessible anyway. That's why, by the way, it's also possible to interact with the testimony in different ways. So what users can do is that on their mobile or on their computer, they can just talk into the microphone of their device. And then Abba Naor will answer. Or you can also type in the text. That's also possible. And there’s a third thing that I really, really like about our English version that the German version doesn't have. And that is that you get a suggestion of three questions that you can simply tap on or click on, and then you will get an answer to that question. So that kind of disturbs the immersion a tiny little bit, but at the same time, we feel it's really helpful because not everyone might come up with many questions, and that way you can get ideas of what might be a good question to ask him.

Dominic: Such a cool project. I love the way this is mixing kind of linguistics and technology and history, all my favorite things. And your project that you're working on, I think you're not the only ones in the world who are doing this type of digital testimony work, the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles is also working on preserving digital testimonies using some similar technology.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they have a large collection of digital testimonies.

Dominic: Yeah, and they certainly have some famous backing, right? The Shoah Foundation was founded by Stephen Spielberg, actually, a year after he made Schindler’s List, which is a fantastic film. Have you seen it?

Christina: Yeah, I have. Actually, my whole school went to the cinema together and it really left a mark on us, I would say. I mean, definitely on me.

Dominic: I would say it left a mark on me, too. The use of color in that film is incredible because, of course, the film was made in the 1990s, and yet almost all of it takes place in black and white, which is used for this very powerful, creative artistic effect.

Christina: Yeah, I really admire that film. And so this going to the cinema, that was part of the Holocaust education that we have in German schools. So one of the things that you usually do is you also go to see a concentration camp. So in my case, that was Dachau, and going there and seeing those places where people were killed and the chimneys and well, and seeing the names of people on those boards, people who have the same name or share a birthday with you or other things. I mean, that's really tough and it makes you realize that we're actually talking about humans who have a lot in common with you and who were killed there on purpose, you know. I would say it was quite effective. I mean, it was with regard to me, but I think my whole class at the time, well, was really, very, very impressed. What about you, Dominic? Is there something like Holocaust education in United States schools?

Dominic: Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, you know, education in the United States is kind of highly variable depending on where you live because it's controlled a lot by the state governments and the local governments. But I grew up in California where I think the education and the history education is very strong. And so, of course, we spend a lot of time from elementary school, middle school, and high school, learning about the Holocaust and World War II. I also remember meeting a Holocaust survivor at one point because we do have some of them. We have some of them. And of course, I remember very distinctly reading The Diary of Anne Frank. We had to do that in middle school and that really left an impression on me because, well, I think she was a young girl, right? She was only maybe 12 or 13 at the time. And of course, when I was reading the book in middle school, I was also just about that same age. And so it made it a lot easier for me to kind of put myself in her shoes and to imagine that I'm in her situation. And it really drove home just how unpleasant and horrible it really was. So this type of education, this type of history education is really important, I think. It makes an impact.

Christina: Definitely. Yeah. I entirely agree. Reading Anne Frank's diary also made a very big impression on me when I was a teenager. I think it's mainly, yeah, because the diary tells her life story from her perspective, just like Abba Naor tells his story either personally in schools or through the chatbot, basically. And I think that's something that goes much more to my heart and possibly also to other people's hearts than if you just hear abstract figures. I mean, even if these are very, very large and you hear how many people were killed, still, I mean, knowing that there's this one individual person and hearing how exactly they suffered from the unjust situation at the time. These are things that really, yeah, convey very, very strongly that this mustn't happen again, yeah.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, absolutely. When you capture these testimonies and you make them accessible, it really humanizes those who have been dehumanized. And like you said, it allows you to connect with them to see that you probably have a lot in common with them, after all, right? And I think that's really important today because, well, today, people are maybe very quick to talk about what makes us different from each other and our differences make us unique. Differences are not necessarily a bad thing, but I think we probably have so much more in common.

Christina: Yeah, definitely. So Dominic, if you had the opportunity to ask a Holocaust survivor a question or several questions, what is it that you would actually like to ask them?

Dominic: Oh, yeah. It would be hard to narrow it down. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, of course, just asking them the basics about their experiences during the Holocaust. But I think maybe one that sticks out in particular to me is, you know, these people have lived very long lives. They've seen the world change. The world has changed a lot in the last century or so, not least in terms of technology, but also in terms of politics and society. You know, almost everyone alive today are people who were not alive during World War II, we’re kind of several generations past now. So I would love to ask them their perspective on how the world has changed, kind of what their outlook is, and how they remain optimistic.

Christina: Yeah, I think these are very beautiful questions, and I think you can actually also do that with the Abba Naor chatbot, probably more so with the German one because it's got more questions, 1,000, but I think we also have a question on that in the English version. There we had to actually narrow it down to about 200 questions in order to make it feasible. And it was really difficult to select the questions because we wanted to select questions that we hoped would be relevant for the users. So to ensure that, we asked different people, we did a little survey. Then came up with about 200 questions we felt were particularly important.

Dominic: Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Well, I know you've said that as a German, you felt a very personal interest and connection to this project. But as a linguist, what really got you interested in it? And how did you kind of deploy your linguistic expertise here?

Christina: Yeah, that's a really good question because this is probably the least linguistic project I've worked on simply because it matters to me due to the content. But of course, it's also interesting from a linguistic perspective. So during the translation process, there were many interesting things that came up, for example, how particles are used. So particles are small words that we use in German just like that to emphasize things. But then I'm not sure if they always have a purpose and then it's very hard to determine how to translate them into English. So in German, we might say something like, “Du kannst doch nicht einfach gehen,” which means “You can't simply leave,” but the doch there, it doesn't really have much meaning. But somehow it's something people would naturally add to make it sound German. And then the question was always how to translate these small words like doch, aber, et cetera. So you could say things like, after all, et cetera. But I don't know, like how do you feel about those particles? Have you encountered them? I suppose they must be driving you crazy, Dominic.

Dominic: Oh goodness. Well, when it comes to particles, actually, the first thing I think of is Japanese, because particles are an extremely important foundational part of Japanese and a fundamental part of every Japanese sentence, right? Essentially, they were explained to me that they're sort of like topic markers or things like that. They serve a very grammatical function. But uh yeah, particles in German can also be quite a bit tricky. Yeah, all of these little details that make German one of the trickier European languages, but not the trickiest, but yeah.

Christina: But it's good to hear that other languages have that too and also drive learners crazy. But yeah, we wanted to make sure that we don't unnecessarily translate those particles when they don't make an important contribution because otherwise they would have made the sentences more complicated. So that was nice.

Dominic: Yeah, and I would certainly think that another major difficulty, another major hurdle is that there are just so many different ways of phrasing things, of phrasing the same thing.

Christina: Yeah, and that's the interesting thing about language, that very often we have different ways of expressing the same idea. And this is also crucial when it comes to the chatbot because someone who wants to ask Abba Naor a question like “Where are you from?” might not necessarily use exactly the form in which the question was asked and which is the form in which we enter that into the system, into the technology that matches the questions and the answers. And for that reason, it was very important for us to determine different ways of expressing the same idea in a question. So instead of “Where are you from?,” you might also ask, “What's your hometown?” or “Where were you born?” We have to expect users from all over the world to express these ideas in slightly different ways. And that's why we tried to find as many variants as possible and our student assistant, Ahmad, was really crucial in that.

Dominic: Yeah, and I think this is part of what really makes it feel so natural because I think maybe, well, computers these days are becoming so extremely smart, especially with artificial intelligence, but maybe we've all been there in the past, where if you don't ask the computer exactly what it's been prepared to answer in exactly the way it needs, then it might not understand you. And so, yeah, you're accounting for that, essentially. You don't need to phrase things exactly as they were asked. You can phrase them differently and you can still have a chat.

Christina: Exactly. Yeah. So by setting the threshold in a different way, you can allow for more variation and that will allow more users to then actually come up with the correct answer for their question, hopefully. Of course, with 200 question-answers pairs, the virtual Abba Naor chatbot will not be able to reply to all questions, but we hoped the most relevant ones. And everything that you will see there is authentic, recorded material. So none of it was generated. So, well, you might think, “Okay, wouldn't it be great to have artificial intelligence to provide even more answers by just using the material that we have and then make it generate answers that are likely to be Abba Naor’s answers?” We decided not to do that because it's so important to us to really conserve the testimony as it is and to conserve other's memories as they are and make those available to users in the future.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Well, and this idea of taking kind of this digital testimony and combining it with artificial intelligence tools, at least some of the modern, large language models, this almost reminds me of like a digital afterlife. If you could feed all of this to an AI and then have it respond as the person. But actually, this idea was done on an episode of Black Mirror, if you're familiar with it, it's a British science fiction show that often dips into dystopia most of the time, and so well over a decade ago, they had an episode about if you have a loved one who's passed away, you feed all of their social media into an AI, and then the AI allows you to talk with them from beyond the grave. Of course, it's just a computer imitating them. And that's kind of the problem with these AI tools, right? It's mostly an imitation. They have a tendency to hallucinate maybe sometimes, to fabricate things completely. So we want to make sure that things stay authentic.

Christina: Yeah, we're also academics, we’re scholars. We want to conserve this just like you quote from a book, you want to make sure, well, that it remains the same. And of course, we feel the responsibility to really handle this sensitive data with the utmost care so as to make it available to future generations, in the way that it was given to us, but with the technical means that make it explorable for others.

Dominic: Yes, and when it comes to conversations with AI and computers in general, the old school test is called the Turing test, right? Which is very simple. Just basically, when you're talking to a computer, can you tell that you're talking to a computer and not a real person? And I think these modern AIs are really good at sounding like real people. But of course, with this project that you were involved with, you know that it's pre-recorded, that these are pre-recorded messages. So how do you make it feel natural? Can you have a natural conversation in this context?

Christina: Yeah, that's a good point. Of course, with only 200 questions, it will never be possible to have a conversation like with a real person or even with a chatbot that just generates language as you go along in the conversation. But I have to say that it's surprisingly authentic. So I can share my own experience with you. So at the inaugural event at which the interactive digital testimony was presented, I was in a kind of 3D cinema and we were wearing 3D glasses and I had the opportunity to ask the virtual Abba Naor a question by using a microphone, a device. And then the virtual Abba Naor replied to me. And then when I walked out of that cinema, actually the real Abba Naor walked past me, and I looked him into the eyes and I noticed he didn't recognize me, and it felt like, “Why is he not recognizing me? We just had a conversation,” and that was in spite of the fact that I was extremely aware that I had been talking to his chatbot so to speak. So that really showed me that it works better than you might expect. And even the smaller version, the version that is not 3D, we're so used now to having video calls with people either in a browser or on a mobile, that it feels very, very real. So I've had people next to me who actually asked me, “Oh, is that the real Abba Naor?” And I said, “No, it's really just a chatbot. You can ask him any question.” And people actually also sometimes feel guilty asking him questions that might distress him because they don't want to be rude to the elderly gentleman that they see. And so it's quite impressive.

Dominic: That's a very, very sweet story and yes, certainly very inspiring. But this is so cool, so Christina, if people want to engage with this tool, this project, where is it available? How do they do that?

Christina: It's available online. We have a website for the project, which you can find in our links. And there you will find both the German testimony and the English testimony and for the English one, well, you just click on it and it's there. It's free for you to use and we're very happy for people to use it, to share it with others. And to ask Abba Naor the questions that they would like to know more about in order to learn from him about the things he experienced.

Dominic: Very nice. I think I'll check that out. And of course, a very fascinating discussion about some of these AI tools and how they're changing language and the way we speak. But I think that would probably be a good subject for another day. So, Christina, thank you so much for sharing all of this with me. It was so wonderful to talk with you at this beautiful little convergence of linguistics and history and technology. This was just a totally fascinating discussion today and I think we covered a lot. So, yeah, thank you.

Christina: Thank you as well, Dominic. I really enjoyed our conversation and I was so happy that I was able to share this topic that I really care about with you and also with our audience. So to everyone out there, stay curious, have fun with language.

Dominic: And join us next time behind the scenes of English linguistics.

Episode 4: The language of comics 

Dominic: Hi, Christina.

Christina: Hi, Dominic. Great to be back.

Dominic: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And actually, I'm back in more ways than one. I just got back from a vacation to Rome, and well, last time we were talking about history in Europe and old architecture, yeah. Rome is a great place for that. But while I was there, I had some downtime, and I saw a new Marvel movie. I'm quite a fan.

Christina: Oh, excellent.

Dominic: Do you like comic books? Do you like superheroes?

Christina: Oh, I love comics! I also like superheroes, but I think I'm actually more into the kind of traditional comic books and also cartoons. But I also like some superheroes, like Superman.

Dominic: Oh, you like Superman. Very nice, very nice. So more of a DC person, maybe, you know, DC versus Marvel. Yeah, I like DC. I like Batman, but I'm probably more of a Marvel fan. Maybe if I really had to pick a favorite. I think it might be Spider-Man.

Christina: Oh, I really like Spider-Man, too.

Dominic: And did you grow up reading comic books?

Christina: Yeah, I grew up reading comic books and going to the library every week to get as many comic books as I could. I was only allowed to borrow seven comic books, which was not very much for me at the time. And I actually already started reading them on the way home.

Dominic: Alright. Yeah. I mean, comics today are absolutely like part of our mainstream culture, right? I mean, especially with the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s I’d say totally acceptable and celebrated today to enjoy comic books and comic book heroes. But in the past, maybe there was a bit of a stigma. It wasn't so accepted.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, if you think about Germany in the 1950s or 1960s, people were very critical of comic books at the time. They thought that they were harmful to children, that they would make them dumb, you know, with that deficient language in the comic books and things like that. But now, I would say that, yeah, comics are very widely accepted in Germany as well. And we have huge events like the Comic-Salon in Erlangen every two years where people from, I would say, all over the world meet to get an idea of the latest comic books. And there’s also prizes for comic artists and things like that. It’s a wonderful event and I can very strongly recommend going there.

Dominic: Oh, yes. Comic book conventions are incredible. Of course, in the U.S., we have the San Diego Comic-Con and the New York Comic Con, but also in Germany, you have the biggest gaming and comic convention in the entire world, it’s called Gamescom. It's held every single year in Cologne. I have been there. It’s amazing. The convention center is so massive. It's like the size of a city and there are so many attendees. I think like hundreds of thousands of attendees, it looks like ants almost. So clearly today it’s huge and it's really, really wonderful to see, especially for those of us who have been fans of these properties since we were young.

Christina: So, Dominic, what kind of comics do you prefer?

Dominic: Well, for the most part, I've probably read Japanese comics known as manga, quite famous around the world, and manga are then often adapted into anime, Japanese cartoons, and actually I think almost all anime are adapted from manga. And the interesting thing about manga is that because Japanese traditionally is written in the opposite direction of Western languages, like English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, when these Japanese comic books are translated into other languages like English, they preserve this opposite orientation of the book, which is to say that when you pick up a manga, you open the book the opposite way. The back is the front, and you read it in kind of the opposite direction, so to speak, of like an English-language, Western language comic book. And I think it gives it a really unique, kind of strange look.

Christina: That's so cool. I mean, I'm not so much into manga, so I know more about the traditional comics like the Belgian ones. But yeah, like, the Franco-Belgian School. So, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix. And of course, I'm a huge Disney comic fan, I have to say. But these all follow the kind of standard reading direction you would expect. So, what's that like in a manga? So, you open it at the back, and then you kind of, if you've got text on a page, where do you start? So, does that go from right to left then? And bottom-up? How does that work on the page?

Dominic: Yeah, in terms of the direction of your eyes, right? Because comics, you have to look at the images kind of in a certain order as the story is told. Yeah, it also goes in the opposite direction. But when you read manga, you get used to it. And, Japanese comic books are full of onomatopoeia, which I think is a hallmark of comics, right? Bam! Boom! Wham! Pow! In Western comics as well, I really, really like onomatopoeia.

Christina: Me, too. I think onomatopoeia are beautiful. And then in comics, I mean, very often they're even written in a way that represents the idea. When you've got a Wham!, very often it's in huge capitals that are possibly even red and yellow, and you have a bold line around it. So, yeah, it's quite nice how onomatopoeia represents sounds in comics. But then, of course, it's necessary because otherwise, how should you represent them, you know? The surrounding landscape is represented visually. And of course, the text is usually in speech bubbles, but what do you do with those sounds otherwise? I think it's great because otherwise everything would be silent in comics.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Onomatopoeia are very important to comic books because, well, it's a book. It's silent. You need to have some way of kind of visually and textually illustrating the different sounds going on to the reader, and onomatopoeia across different languages are really fascinating. We have lots of words in the English language and others, which are imitative, right? They imitate real-world sounds, so it goes back quite a bit. In Japanese, they're very famous for having an extremely large repertoire of hundreds of onomatopoeia, even representing things that don't make any particular sound at all.

Christina: Like?

Dominic: Oh, my gosh, I mean they have onomatopoeia for like the concept of silence, which – silence is silent. It doesn't make a sound. Or onomatopoeia for something being fluffy or for a surface being smooth. These are concepts, not really sounds. And my gosh, they have so many, it's an incredible kind of unique function of the Japanese language. But Christina, how does onomatopoeia compare in German, for example?

Christina: Well, in German, we also have onomatopoeia. I mean, we have onomatopoeia like, for example, klatschen, which means ‘to clap’, you know? I think it sounds a bit like the noise that you make when you clap. Or, for example, we have got klappern, which means ‘to rattle’. But there are also others, for example, like Hatschi. I mean, like when we sneeze, we say hatschi. In English, it's achoo. Which is nice because it's a bit different, isn't it? So that's conventionalized. That's something very interesting, I think. You might believe that onomatopoeia should be the same in all languages, but then they aren't, which is very interesting, for example, when it comes to the kinds of sounds that animals make. For example, in German, if you have a cock or a rooster making some noise, they're going to say kikeriki. What would you say to that?

Dominic: Cock-a-doodle-do.

Christina: Which is so different, isn't it? And one that I really don't know, like in German, if you have a bee, it goes like summ, summ. What noise does a bee make in English?

Dominic: Bzzz, bzzz.

Christina: Ah, oh yeah, right. Like a B and then many Zs in one row, right?

Dominic: Yes, it’s buzzing. I would think the word buzz is also imitative. I would think so.

Christina: I would think so, too. And it's quite interesting. I mean, in comics, you very often have a sequence of the letter zed or zee that expresses this idea of snoring, which I think is strange. But I mean, if people snore, it doesn't sound like zzz at all.

Dominic: And then we have a phrase which is to catch some Zs, right? To catch some Zs is to get some sleep.

Christina: Oh, I didn't know that.

Dominic: But certainly I would think that that came from this visual convention of using Zs to represent sleeping. So it came full circle in a way.

Christina: That's so sweet. I love that when things come full circle and in the end, you have a new construction in the language.

Dominic: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. And Christina, you kind of took the words right out of my mouth when you brought up animal sounds, because I love animal sounds and comparing them across different languages, how different groups of people around the world can hear the same animal, make the same sound, but then represent it differently, right? So, for example, the cat, right? To me, a cat goes meow, in many languages, it's meow or something to that effect. In Japanese, it's nyan. Quite a bit different. Or when a dog barks, I would say it goes woof woof.

Christina: In German, it says wau wau.

Dominic: Wow, see, that's quite different.

Christina: Yeah, and in Spanish, it's guau guau.

Dominic: Oh, I like that. In Japanese, it's wan wan.

Christina: Oh, I like that. Sounds similar to the cat sound though.

Dominic: Oh, almost in a way, yeah, almost in a way.

Christina: Wasn't that nan nan?

Dominic: Nyan nyan.

Christina: Nyan nyan. Nyan nyan and wan wan. Interesting. It seems to create a kind of proximity between the animals.

Dominic: Oh, that's a good theory. Well, I would at least hope that the cow can unify us all, right? The cow goes moo, right?

Christina: Yeah, I think so. In German, it's also muh. I mean, as far as I know, it should be moo in many languages.

Dominic: Thank goodness.

Christina: Yeah, that's the fun thing about the onomatopoeia, that you would believe it's the same in different languages, but it's not. It's just a matter of convention like everything else in language. It's closer to the kind of, yeah, real thing that you observe in the world, but even so, there is this kind of conventionalization that is so important throughout language. And so that also means that with regard to comics, you will have different kinds of onomatopoeia in comics from different languages. And I mean, we talked about the superhero comics earlier, so obviously, United States in English, but then there is this very, very strong tradition, of course, to have comics in French, from France, from Belgium, for example, so there’s Asterix and Obelix. I don't know if they're famous in the United States as well, are they?

Dominic: Ah, sadly, I wouldn't say so. I know about them because I learned about them in French class. But if it weren't for French class, I don't think I've ever seen them anywhere.

Christina: That's very interesting. Like, for me, from a European perspective, I mean, they're everywhere, you can't imagine comics without Asterix and Obelix somehow. But of course, um, there are many more. There's also Spirou and Fantasio, for example, in France. There’s Marsupilami, which is a, yeah, that's an interesting little animal from Palombia, which is a made-up country in South America. And, there’s so many different comics, yeah, I mean I can't mention them all here, but probably it's also interesting for you to know that in spite of the criticism regarding comics in Germany, I mean in the meantime, we have a vibrant comic scene and, for example, slightly older comics. We have the Ottifanten by a famous comedian, Otto Waalkes, which I enjoyed reading very much as a child. And, we have famous comic artists like Flix, for example, who produces wonderful graphic novels, and also very, very funny cartoony stuff. It’s fantastic, and Joscha Sauer, one of my favorite cartoonists. So there are plenty of interesting things in German, too.

Dominic: Oh, very nice. I'm so happy to hear that because, yeah, European comics are mostly a gap in my knowledge, for the most part. Of course, American comics we associate mostly with superheroes, but it's not just superheroes. I'm a very big fan of Calvin and Hobbes, for example.

Christina: Oh, I love them!

Dominic: I know, so cute. And even with the rise of the internet, it gave rise to the web comic, right? A brand new form of comic. So XKCD.

Christina: Oh, I love XKCD!

Dominic: There's an XKCD for everything, as they say.

Christina: Yes, and there’s also XKCDs about linguistics. I actually have a beautiful XKCD comic hanging on my office door. It's about linguistics, about the Tower of Babel, and you have different people who built this tower and then God wants to make them a present because they built that beautiful tower and asks them, “Hmm, I mean, what kind of things do you actually like about the world?” And then one of them says, “Hmm, words are actually quite cool.” And then God says, “Oh, great, I'm going to give you many, many different languages with different grammars, different words.” And then the others go like, “Oh, no, we should not have brought a linguist.” And I really like that one, for example.

Dominic: Oh, excellent. I love that. I’m happy to hear that. Yeah, you know, comics, we think of them as a very visual medium because they're full of art, a lot of artwork. But of course, we shouldn't forget they're also full of tons of text, not just the onomatopoeia, but the dialogue, which is a very, very crucial part of comic books. And so because they're full of all this text and language, that means that we can study them from a linguistic perspective. So, when it comes to the text itself, it seems to me the American convention is to write the dialogue and the text in all caps. I thought maybe this was for legibility, that it's easier to read something written in all caps, but apparently that might not be so. Maybe it's because it looks punchy and it grabs your attention.

Christina: Yeah, it's really a good question. I think there are studies out there showing that it's actually easier to read texts when they are in lower case mixed with upper case. But if you think about the early comics, I mean, they started off as comic strips, as cartoons in newspapers. And I mean, the paper quality was not so good. So that is sometimes used as an explanation, why it kind of started in all caps. But I also have the impression that the traditions differ here. If I'm not mistaken, I think French comics sometimes also use all caps, but in any case, they use hand lettering, whereas in German comics, we use, yeah, just printed fonts mixing upper and lower case, just as you would find them in any kind of other book. And of course, that changes the kind of quality, the visual quality of the comic as well.

Dominic: Oh, okay, very nice. Yeah. And certainly evidence to that effect of that perhaps it's easier to read a mix of lower case and upper case letters is that, well, like most languages, a lot of the kind of standardized conventions came about with the advent of the printing press and kind of mass media, printed material. And I read somewhere that the German convention of capitalizing all of the nouns, which to English speakers and probably French speakers and Spanish speakers looks quite strange, but the German convention of capitalizing all the nouns came about with the printing press, that printers at the time thought that when you capitalize all the nouns, it enhances the legibility.

Christina: Yeah, could be. But the interesting thing is that they did the same thing with English, if I'm not mistaken. And then actually, they got rid of that again in English, but it remained in German.

Dominic: Yeah, that would certainly seem so to me. Like every good U.S. history student, I've read the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, written in the 18th century, of course, and they capitalize all the nouns, and it looks really, really bizarre to modern eyes. So I think you're right.

Christina: Yeah, and I mean, in German, they also capitalized other words apart from the nouns, but in the end, it seems that the nouns are the ones that remained. And that kind of characterizes present-day German, you know, but yeah, so, I mean, there are reasons for doing it and reasons for not doing it. And in the end, well, that's just a matter of taste, I suppose.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, style and taste. Well, comic books and well, maybe perhaps text and writing in general is all about style. And so Christina, talking about linguistics, I think at one point in time, you've actually done some linguistics research on comics.

Christina: Yeah, I did. That's a nice thing about linguistics, that it allows you to do research on the things that you love, and I love comics.

Dominic: Yeah, and I think, well, at least until now, the research was only available in German. So what can you tell us about your research? What was the core focus? What were you looking at?

Christina: I was interested to see whether the language of comics is actually easier than the language that we find elsewhere. Because if you think about those critical attitudes towards comics in Germany in the past, it was mainly about comics being too simplistic in their language and using onomatopoeia and things like that. And so I was just wondering whether this potential simplicity could be exploited as a means of studying languages more easily. And so what I tried to do is actually find out if, yeah, if the language in comics is easier.

Dominic: Well, that certainly seems like a good research question to me, right? Because well if you think comic books are for children, then you would assume they use simplified language, but, of course, those of us who enjoy comics know that some of them can be quite mature and tell quite mature stories. So what did you look for? How did you evaluate this?

Christina: What I tried to do is I tried to compile a little corpus, a collection of texts from comics, but that was very special because usually when you collect material from different types of text, you just basically copy-paste texts into a document. But that was not possible there because I first had to find out in what forms language occurs in comics, what I will accept, what I will integrate, and what not. And then I had to type that all manually into a document. And that was a lot of work, so that corpus isn't terribly long, but I still tried to kind of make it as representative as possible.

Dominic: So how did you go about making it balanced? That sounds kind of challenging.

Christina: Yeah, it is. So what I did is I tried to see what kind of text inside the world of comics I wanted to integrate. So I wanted to have popular comics that are very famous. So I decided to go for superhero comics. So I used some Batman comics and Superman comics, but I also wanted to include Disney comics, which I feel are very important as part of the English-speaking comic world. And since I really love comic strips, I also wanted to include some Calvin and Hobbes and some Peanuts because they have been running for such a long time. And in addition, I thought it would be interesting to also include some cartoons. So even if cartoons just consist of a single image, by contrast to comics which are sequential, which means that you have various panels one after another, well, I still thought that there's enough similarity here to the other types of comic. And I also included The Far Side. I don't know if you know that.

Dominic: I do. I do. And actually, the Peanuts have a very, very special place in my heart because my hometown in California is actually where Charles Schulz lived. The author, the creator of the Peanuts, it has a very strong association with him. His family is there. There's a museum there, and all around my home county, you can find statues of the various Peanuts characters, and you can take pictures with them. So, yeah, we even have an ice rink called Snoopy's Home Ice, and it's all decorated with Snoopy. I think it's actually owned and funded by the Schulz family. So, yeah, I’m happy to see the Peanuts represented here.

Christina: Oh, that's wonderful. I didn't know that. Fantastic. Yeah. So I thought they should definitely be in there. But of course, when you make a corpus, you try to select those particular bits of text that you use by chance. So for the Peanuts, I thought it might be a good idea to use those strips from the first of January. But then I noticed that, well, if you do that, it's all the time about the new year. And, since I wanted to have more varied topics, I decided to just select the 15th of January instead. And for the other comics, what I tried to do is to just pick those pages that ended in a zero, and I had just selected all the text from there.

Dominic: Okay. So that's how you were able to kind of standardize this, to kind of scientifically control it, essentially, for your evaluation here. Okay, very nice. So we've covered things like onomatopoeia, but what other ways does language occur in comics?

Christina: Yeah, there’s many different ways how it can actually occur. So I think onomatopoeia are so important because they stand out, but otherwise, of course, you have the speech bubbles or speech balloons, as you might possibly call them, in which we have the dialogue of the different characters who are speaking in the comics. And then we usually also have some boxes that contain the narrative.

Dominic: Oh yeah, you're right. If it's in a box, you're right. It's like it’s narration outside of the story. You're right.

Christina: Exactly. And it's not something you would think of. So usually you would probably think of the onomatopoeia and the speech bubbles, because that is so characteristic. But of course, there's also the narrative. And there's yet another type of language in the comics that we also integrated, and that is language in the environment, because you might have writing on a shop window, for example, or you might have a newspaper with important news or a name on a doorbell, and all of these, well, I also included that.

Dominic: Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, and the speech bubble, the humble speech bubble, it’s fascinating to me how this has become a convention that I would say is now universally understood. If you look at older comics, it seemed to me that if there was dialogue, essentially you would have the picture and then they would write the dialogue underneath the comic almost like a caption. So I would think that the speech bubble originated in comic books or was at least popularized there. And also, you know that if the speech bubble looks maybe less rounded and more like kind of a poofy sort of cloud, then you know it probably represents a character's thoughts and not what they're saying out loud. So I love this stuff.

Christina: Yeah, me too. And it’s wonderful because of course, the thought bubble represents the thoughts, and sometimes you also get a speech bubble with icicles on it, and then it shows that someone is speaking in a very cold voice. I love all these things, which are very visual, but of course, at the same time, that means that when I just typed the text into my corpus, it looked terribly boring because you just have the very, very plain text, and without the context, you notice, well, the comics, they really live from this interaction between the image and the word.

Dominic: Yeah, that's true. The text and visuals really kind of synthesize in a way that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. And when you kind of abstract it and just pull the text from it, a lot of the meaning is lost.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. And that's what makes comics so similar to, well, the real world, because you also have the surroundings of the dialogue. And I think that's also what makes them easier for people to understand. But if you take all of that away and just look at the language, is the thing that remains, is that actually easier than what you find in other types of text? So, yeah, the question is how can you measure that? Yeah, so in linguistics, what we try to do is we try to find measures that can be used as a stand-in for something else. And if you think about how difficult a text is, of course, that could be due to the words that occur in it. So it could be that the words, for example, are very rare. And if they're very rare, they will usually be more difficult because people who speak a language will usually tend to learn the more frequent words earlier. So, that's one thing, one way of looking at it. And of course, you can also look at how complex the structures in the language are. So, for example, the sentences, how long are the individual sentences? We can just try and find where we have full stops or periods, and other punctuation marks like question marks, exclamation marks, and then just divide all the text into sentences and count how many words are in those sentences.

Dominic: Yeah, that would certainly make sense to me. Well, especially because the language in comic books is mostly dialogue, right? It's almost all dialogue, I would think. And dialogue, you know, we don’t – we speak in fragments. We don't speak perfectly grammatically correct. We don't have to. It's acceptable. And so if the entire narrative is told through dialogue, then I can understand how that would kind of change the form of the language that you're studying.

Christina: Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, in spoken language, we just expect the language to be less complex than, for example, an academic research article, simply because we have certain constraints on processing. When we talk, we have to memorize the things, or plan ahead what we're going to say. And of course, that's why spoken language is typically not as complicated. But beyond the sentence level, I mean, you can also just look at the word level and see how long the words are. You can just see, for example, what number of syllables they contain or how many letters they are composed of.

Dominic: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I saw a meme recently comparing English-language children's comics to German-language children's comics, and the German-language comics had some very tremendously long words, which, of course, to non-German speakers looks very funny to us, because the longer the word, the more difficult we would assume it is to understand, especially for a young child.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing, that actually the length and the frequency go hand in hand, so that different studies show exactly that. So if a word is very short, it's very likely to be easier and more frequent. And if it's long, it's likelier to be less frequent. And so that's why, well, what you can do is you can use things like the word length, which is something that is very straightforward. And then that also gives you already information about how commonly used a word is. And that’s fantastic. So there are some formulae, some, yeah, indices that you can use. So, readability indices. And, I just used one of these, the so-called Smog index. And, to that end, I just used the information that I got from my material, inserted it into the formula and then checked, well, how difficult the language actually is. And the question is what does the result mean? Because of course, in the end you get a certain number. And, in that particular case, it means how many years of, yeah, schooling you basically need to have in order to understand a text.

Dominic: A reading level. Okay, wow, Christina. So, I understand what you were looking for and I think I understand how you did it, how you measured it. What were your results? What did you find in the end?

Christina: Well, to some extent, I found the things that I expected. So, the sentences in the comics were actually relatively short, so a bit over six words. But then, of course, you should consider that I also counted onomatopoeia, and these are usually outside a sentence, so a Wham! just occurs on its own, and that will count as a single-word sentence. So, of course, that actually, yeah, reduces the figures. Most of the sentences have up to eight words or a bit shorter than that, but there are also some very, very long ones. So I actually found a number of sentences that had between 16 and 19 words, and one with 38 words in Batman, which was quite impressive.

Dominic: Okay. I could imagine perhaps a villain or an antagonist going on a monologue, right? About their evil aims, perhaps.

Christina: That's actually the thing, that very often it's the villains that use more formal language and more complicated sentences. Lex Luther in particular in Superman. So he said something about that, “Superman's carelessness with his special abilities has resulted in the clearance of almost every bank vault in the city and the hospitalization of half the special crimes unit,” which is really a lot to process, you know? It's not something you would naturally say in a dialogue. So that really characterizes him.

Dominic: Oh, so speaking in an advanced manner makes you sound evil?

Christina: Probably I shouldn't say that. No, but sometimes this is used as a characterizing means in certain types of film, actually.

Dominic: Yeah, certainly makes sense to me. Wow, Christina, that is really cool. This is really cool research. I like this.

Christina: Yeah, and I also found that if you look at the text, how difficult the texts as such are, then you find that they are not very difficult. They are at level six, which counts as low literate. So the Disney comics in particular, they were relatively low regarding the level, which means that they're very easy to understand. And Superman was very clearly above the others, which kind of is very fitting, you know, because Superman can also fly. So you have almost nine, and it's very close to the kind of level that you would be expected to have to read Reader’s Digest.

Dominic: Okay. Yeah, and that would be in line with, well, I would assume that Disney comics are probably targeting a younger audience than maybe superhero comics, right? Sometimes some very dark things happen in superhero comics, so you probably want to have maybe a teenage or a young adult audience. So that certainly makes sense to me.

Christina: Yeah, I entirely agree. That's what you would expect, and that's also what I found. But on the other hand, I was also surprised because I really like The Far Side by Gary Larson, and I think it's sometimes quite difficult. For example, there's one about a bird on the phone telling the children, “Will you kids shut up? I'll regurgitate something later.” And I mean, that's really complicated. I mean, it's hard vocabulary. So I thought, okay, for that reason, it might be that these are more difficult to understand. But then the academic vocabulary that you occasionally encounter there is counterbalanced by the surrounding words and the short sentences. So in the end, it's not as difficult as I had expected. So I was also surprised by my results.

Dominic: And that's the best type of research to do, right? It’s great to be surprised by your results.

Christina: Yeah, yeah. And one other thing that, well, I'm not sure if it surprised me or not, but I also wanted to check how common onomatopoeia actually are, because a lot of talk about comics revolves around onomatopoeia. And so I actually annotated these in my corpus. And I found that only about three to four percent of the words in the comics were onomatopoeia, but people still sometimes believe there's a lot more. And that's probably because they are rare elsewhere, you know. And they're also very characteristic and they stand out visually, with a special form, with a special shape, with color, et cetera.

Dominic: Yeah, no, that certainly makes sense to me, because onomatopoeia are so characteristic of comic books, from the outside, you might get the false impression that it comprises a great deal of the text in comic books, and then, yes, from the outside, you might think that certainly the language of comic books must not be very intellectual. But in reality, it's only a very small percentage.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. And that's the nice thing about it. And it also means that the other things that you find there will mainly be dialogue and a bit of narrative. So I think that for that reason, comics can be strongly recommended to learners of the language because they've got everything that you need in order to learn new vocabulary. You've got the context that is provided by the image. You have relatively short sentences most of the time. And, well, quite a lot of the words are also high-frequency words like elsewhere, not all of them, actually less than I expected, but still, I would say that altogether, if you look at the language of comics, it's comparatively easy. And for that reason, well, it's always a good idea to read comics when you're learning a language.

Dominic: Oh yeah, I’ve actually bought before a bilingual manga, English–Japanese bilingual manga, where it has the dialogue. It has the text in both languages. Specifically for learners, of course. So yeah, I agree. Not only is it a good way to learn, it's a fun way to learn languages.

Christina: Absolutely. Yes.

Dominic: So Christina, over the course of our conversation here, something that's occurred to me is that, you know, when we speak, language does not exist in isolation, right? It exists in the context of, well, the person's expressions, their tone, their volume, the environment. That's why it's kind of a problem in writing that in writing there is no tone. So you can be misinterpreted if you're maybe trying to joke or you're trying to be sarcastic, just plain text, plain writing looks very, very serious. And so we have to kind of add things to the writing to kind of convey tone and emotion, notably emoticons or emojis. Sort of emojis are kind of adding a visual back to the text almost kind of like a comic in a way, right? It shows you that visuals and language really go hand in hand.

Christina: Yeah, I think emojis are very, very helpful because they can transmit those facial expressions or the intonation that usually comes with language and, yeah, make it more difficult for people to misinterpret what you're saying, because otherwise, something that is meant as a joke might come across as very harsh.

Dominic: Yeah, and well, much like comic books, I think emojis were once regarded as quite juvenile, but I think they're becoming increasingly acceptable. I see them all over LinkedIn, for example, which is a social media platform, but it's supposed to be kind of a more serious one, although I think it'll be a long time before we see emojis in a scientific paper or in a newspaper article.

Christina: Yeah, but you do see them in linguistics papers because there's actually linguistics research about emoji.

Dominic: Oh, nice. Yes, and well, some people have joked that emojis are the new hieroglyphics, but actually hieroglyphics are highly relevant to comics because in a way, they were kind of one of the first visual representations of actions and language.

Christina: I think I need to contradict you there, Dominic. Because what about cave paintings?

Dominic: Oh, yeah, you got me there. Cave paintings definitely are an extremely early visual representation of action. But I would think the hieroglyphics were more of kind of a standardized writing system.

Christina: Yeah, I suppose I can agree to that.

Dominic: Yeah, but it's fascinating the way these things differ across different regions of the world, different areas. I mean, like I told you, when it comes to Europe, for example, European comics pretty much are a gap in my knowledge, aside from Asterix and Tintin, maybe, really a gap in my knowledge. So I'm going to try to see if I can read some more German comics while I'm here in Germany.

Christina: That's definitely a good idea. You could probably try Nicht Lustig by Joscha Sauer, even though that's more of a cartoon, but it's very nice. Black humor, but in a child-friendly way, I would argue.

Dominic: Dark humor in a child-friendly way. Interesting. I would think that's a contradiction in terms. Okay, very German, it sounds like.

Christina: Yeah, and I mean, if you think about comics, somehow we kind of also made Disney comics our own in a certain way, thanks to a very, very influential person called Erika Fuchs. So she was the translator of the Carl Barks Disney comics into German. And there's even a museum that was actually set up in her memory, the Museum for Comics and Language Art in Schwarzenbach an der Saale. And there you can get an idea of, well, the very important contribution that she made to making those comics available to a German-speaking audience, but at the same time she also influenced the German language.

Dominic: Oh, wow, okay. Yeah, gosh, I know nothing about this. Can you tell me more?

Christina: Yeah, so um if you think about the German language, then, for example, the infinitive usually ends in -en. So, for example, if you have seufzen, which means ‘to sigh’, in the end, the -en marks the infinitive. But in the comics, actually Erika Fuchs, she used the form without the ending. So seufz, yeah, which means sigh, as you would see it in a comic. And this is called the Inflektiv, or sometimes also the Erikativ in her memory, because this is something that was new, you know, or in any case, which is very strongly associated with her because thanks to her translations, this is something that became standard in German comic language.

Dominic: Yeah, wow. That is a direct impact on the language. And it reverberated kind of throughout the rest of the German language?

Christina: Well, I would say that whenever you want to speak like in a comic, then you would just do that. But otherwise, you don't use them. And that's the thing. So it's very characteristic of comic language. So in that sense, it kind of had an impact on the register of comics in German. And she is also the person who's responsible for the names that we use in German when we talk about the Disney characters for example, I mean, Donald Duck stays the same, but Scrooge McDuck is called Onkel Dagobert, so ‘Uncle Dagobert’, which is a name. And for example, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Donald's nephews, they're called Tick, Trick and Track. Completely different. And the interesting thing is that, I mean, she did a wonderful job because she also used different language to characterize the different persons in the comics. So, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, in German, they also use youth language. For example, the youth language of the respective time, or, for example, Uncle Scrooge uses very elaborate language. And it's quite interesting that actually, in contrast to what those critics argued in the past, she included a lot of quotes from traditional German poetry, from international classics, et cetera. So, there's actually a lot of allusions that you can find in the language of the comics. And so that way, you can actually learn something about culture in all its respects, also from a linguistic perspective, by reading the translations by Erika Fuchs and the people who came after her and did things in her tradition.

Dominic: Oh, that's so cool. This is all new to me. Thanks, Christina. I have to check this out. It sounds really fascinating.

Christina: Yeah. And another thing, by the way, that she also did is she sometimes Germanized things. So, she wasn't so keen at translating American cultural habits. And, for example, in the museum, you will find that there's one panel where they say something like “Bring us a lot of hamburgers and hot dogs,” and she translates that as “sausages” into German, because that's the thing that you would have in German.

Dominic: Yeah, localization, a very, very critical part of translation, I would say. If you translate without localizing, it might not necessarily be as effective. Yeah, totally. For example, at least the leading example I can think of is that in Japan, they have this animal called a tanuki, and you could call it a raccoon dog. It's more like a dog or a fox, but it has fur that looks like a raccoon. And so often when that's localized into English, they just call it a raccoon because English speakers wouldn't know what this animal is because it doesn't exist in English-speaking countries. But of course, it's kind of wrong to call it a raccoon. It's not a raccoon. It's a completely different animal. It's kind of more like a canine-type animal. But that's kind of part of the localization, you want to make the translation effective. You don't want to confuse the readers.

Christina: Exactly. And at the time, you might have confused them by mentioning things like donuts, for example, which were not so commonly known. And I mean, now, of course, it's different with globalization, with the internet. I mean, you know a lot more about other cultures. But at the time, of course, I think it made more sense to have that localization. And that's why Duckburg is also called Entenhausen, for example.

Dominic: Oh, that's awesome. Very nice. Well, Christina, today's conversation was really, really fun. I enjoyed it a lot. I think we did a good job of covering a really wide range of topics when it comes to comics and language. So, yeah, this was awesome.

Christina: Yeah, I also had so much fun, and I mean there's more to come because I carried out even more research on comics. So, everyone out there, stay tuned, stay curious, have fun with language.

Dominic: And join us next time on Linguistics Behind the Scenes.

Episode 5: Should we name prehistoric skeletons?

Dominic: Hey, Christina, it's good to be back.

Christina: Here we are back again.

Dominic: Christina, what's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Christina: Ooh, Shakespeare. I love that! Yeah, I mean, he's right, isn't he? Shakespeare as a linguist, because what he's telling us is that the form that we use in order to refer to something, to some object, is not necessarily related to the content. And, I really love that quote. I actually use it in my lecture sometimes.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Shakespeare was a man of many talents. He wore many hats. It's particularly impressive, considering I think he had quite a humble background as a person. But, you know, he makes a very good point that the words we use to describe things, sure, you can trace back their etymology. You can go all the way back to Latin, to Greek, to Proto-Indo-European, and these early languages. But ultimately, why we use a certain sound to describe something, it was an arbitrary decision that some early humans made at some point.

Christina: Yeah. Earlier or later in that process.

Dominic: Yeah, and why? Well, yeah, we don't really know. Some people think it might be imitative. Maybe that's for some words, but we don't really know. And this is kind of at this nexus of linguistics and archaeology, that when you go back far enough, well, there's a lack of written history. There's a lot we don't know about what people used to be called, what they used to call things, we just have to guess.

Christina: Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's really difficult to know how exactly people might have used language in the very, very distant past, but we can be quite confident that they did use language, because they achieved quite a lot of things already. At least the remains that we see – cave paintings or also, for example, that they managed to go by boat to certain islands, which tells us that there must have been some kind of joint effort among humans – and in order to coordinate that, you need language. So we can assume that language has been around for quite a while.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, we humans, we are social creatures. Actually, our ability to organize ourselves and work together socially, I would say really is our strength, right? We are more powerful and capable together than any one individual is. And certainly I don't think we're made to fight each other. Our teeth aren't very sharp, our nails aren't very sharp. We have to create weapons in order to fight each other because we don't have any real natural weapons. So, clearly, humans must have been communicating for a long time, and the parts of the brain that deal with speech are very crucial.

Christina: Yeah, definitely. I mean, speech really is something that characterizes humans. It's something which you only find in humans in this degree of complexity. I mean, you have communication among animals, too, but if you think about human speech, I mean, we can talk about what happened in the past. We can talk about what we think might happen in the future or in places that are far away, and we can even make up stories. And, all of that, of course, is quite special. So we're not restricted to the here and now. So language gives us wings to fly away.

Dominic: Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, the debate, is animal communication language? In my experience, linguistic students really like that question, and they really like to talk about it. Some of them are very passionate in arguing that animal communication is language, but nevertheless, we can all agree that for humans and animals, communication in one form or another is very, very critical.

Christina: Yeah, definitely. Communication is so important. And, I mean, it's also very important among animals. I mean, they also have their cries for warning each other and also for mating and all kinds of things. But of course, if we think about humans, I mean, there’s a few things that we do with language that are quite special. So, for example, we use language a lot to establish social links between people, which is something very nice. So, that's what I really like about language. And as a linguist, there's something that we can also do with language, and that is use language to talk about language. So, it's self-referential. That's really very special, too.

Dominic: Yes, in modern parlance, we might say it's meta, very meta. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and certainly something that's really human about language and communication is that we humans, we give each other names. Maybe animals do it too, but certainly I can't understand it if they do. But we humans very explicitly give each other names, and it's critical to our identity, to our history, to our society, to our culture. Names are really everything. And so, yeah, I think we can reasonably assume that early humans probably had names too.

Christina: I would think so in any case. I mean, if you think about how important names are for, yeah, what you just said, for identity formation and to know who you are referring to in a group, for that reason, I mean, I would say we have good reason to assume that also, in prehistory, people already used some kind of names or some way of referring to individuals, but we can't tell because we don't have any writing from that time. For that reason, we have to do what we very often do when we think about the past. We assume that things that are true at the moment and that we observe in present times, that they have always been the case. And of course, sometimes that's quite dangerous because a lot of the traditions that you would believe have been around for centuries and things like that actually are far more recent once you start doing research about them. But, something like names, I would actually expect that to be very, very old already, indeed.

Dominic: Yeah, certainly they must have had names in some form or some kind of unique identifier for calling each other, I would think. It's almost impossible to organize your society without that because you have to be able to tell each other apart. But, you know, that's kind of the problem when we're finding old, early human remains from, my gosh, not just thousands of years ago, but maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago, maybe millions of years ago. We don't know what they were called. We don't know what they were named. We don't have any records for that. So, Christina, how does that work in archaeology when they find human remains?

Christina: Well, when archaeologists find human remains from the past, sometimes they have some kind of information about the name. For example, in ancient Egypt, you might find a mummy with some indication of the name, but in Europe, very often, you will find human remains in places where you don't have any inscriptions. And at the time they weren't really using writing yet. So there is no way of knowing what their names were.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. I mean, you would probably only be able to identify remains if they were the remains of royalty or perhaps someone really famous. So yeah, like Egyptian pharaohs, that would make sense. But everybody else, it's probably not recorded in history. And especially if it's prehistory, nothing is recorded at all because there is no writing. So what do you do in that case?

Christina: What archaeologists usually do then is that they just use some kind of ID, which is based on the place where they found the human remains. So, for example, “Haunstetten, Unterer Talweg, grave 34, number two”. Haunstetten would be the place name, Unterer Talweg, that would be the road where it was found, and then you get the grave and the number of the individual skeleton, and that will be the “name” quote-unquote. That's all that is traditionally used to identify the different skeletons and other humans’ remains.

Dominic: Okay, so there's a formula. It sounds like there is a formula here for creating these names.

Christina: Yeah, a formula, but then what do you get? You get a number, basically. And that's the thing. I mean, we talked so much about names being something that is so important for human identity, and here we have numbers to talk about people. And of course, this is something that dehumanizes them. Now, of course, one could argue that to a certain extent, prehistorical human remains aren't people in the strictest sense anymore, that they are objects. But then the question is, do you want to argue like that? The law in Germany, in any case, would argue like that. But then, of course, here we're still talking about someone who lived in the past, you know, and I have to say, I don't like the idea of just using numbers to talk about people.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. And when it comes to giving numbers to people instead of names, well, something we learned from Abba Naor, who is a Holocaust survivor, we spoke about him on a previous episode. He goes around and talks about his experiences during the Holocaust. And I think it's well known that the Nazis would assign numbers to the Jewish inmates in the concentration camps, and that was a deliberate effort to dehumanize them. And unfortunately, I think it's very effective. So yeah, if we can avoid that, it would be nice with these human remains, maybe not to refer to them with numbers, but to refer to them with something a little bit more humanizing and personifying.

Christina: Yeah, that’s what I also thought. And that's what two archaeologists also thought that I cooperated with in a project in which we carried out research about exactly that question, namely, Philipp Stockhammer and Kerstin Hofmann. And what we wanted to find out was whether it would be a good idea to give names to archaeological human remains in addition to those IDs, which are, of course, necessary for archaeologists, because they have to store the bones somewhere. They have to be able to refer to them in a systematic way. So I completely understand why archaeologists would like to have such a system, but we all felt that it would be a very interesting question to ask. So, is it a good idea to give names in addition to that? Or maybe not, because there are also some problems that are attached to that.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, well, you know, hey, we modern humans are the same, aren't we? We all have names, but then I think we all have a national ID number, don't we? Which is used for identifying us in a database where you have to organize and catalog. So, yeah, it makes sense to have a numerical identifier alongside your name. So I totally get that. So wow, you actually worked on this. You actually worked on kind of this convergence of linguistics and archaeology. So how did you go about this? What challenges did you encounter?

Christina: We thought it would be a good idea to do a survey to just ask, you know, the general population or general audience, but also some archaeologists and some linguists, how they feel about this topic. Because on the one hand, of course, we might want to use names because names have a lot of advantages, but then there’s also some problems. So if we give names to remains from the past, we kind of make them our own in a certain way. So who's got the right to name those human remains, you know? Because, people used to have a name in the past. So is it okay to give them yet another name? There’s quite a lot of things that we wanted to find out, how people felt about that. And so we did a survey and we sent it out to everyone we knew. So we just tried to spread it as widely as possible, but in the end, it was still amazing because we had exactly the same number of archaeologists and linguists, namely, 99 each. And then we had a roughly similar share of people who are neither of these, which is very nice because that way you get three different perspectives on this same question, one from specialists from archaeology, the other one from specialists in the field of naming, so to speak, and the other one from a general audience.

Dominic: Oh, wow, that sounds very interdisciplinary. That's how I like it. You know, nothing exists in isolation. It's good to kind of harmonize our different viewpoints and our different expertise.

Christina: Yeah, definitely. And I have to say in that survey, we were very grateful that so many different people participated altogether. It was over 400 people, 462, even, who started filling in the questionnaire. And in the end, 319 completed it. And I have to say I'm so grateful to all those people because the questionnaire contains a lot of questions that are really, really boring to answer, and I'll tell you more in a moment why. But, so I’m very glad that they went through this. And at the same time, of course, this also means that they cared about that question, and that was very nice. And, so we noticed that this is really a question that people had very strong feelings about. And in the replies that we got, some of them were highly emotional. So yeah, that was a very interesting experience across the boundaries of archaeology and linguistics.

Dominic: Okay. Very nice. And so you had a very successful survey, it sounds like. So how did people respond? What did they say?

Christina: It was very interesting because when we asked them if they liked the current system, the majority, so 65% actually said they were happy with the current system. But then in another question, we asked them if they thought it would be a good idea to give additional names, and 68% replied, “Yes, that would be a good idea.” And we asked them, “Would that be problematic or unproblematic?” And 66% said, “It would be unproblematic.” So on the one hand, they said, “It's fine as it is,” but on the other hand, they said, “Oh, yeah, we think it's a good idea to change it.” This really makes it a bit difficult in that sense. So we can say there's no clear mandate in one direction or the other.

Dominic: Oh yeah, it’s a coin flip.

Christina: Yeah. And the interesting thing, by the way, was that the archaeologists were a bit more skeptical than the average, which makes sense because they would be the ones who would have to implement the changes in a system that they already know. Whereas the linguists were clearly more enthusiastic than the average, because linguists like names and creating words and things like that. So obviously there was a bias there too. But altogether, if you throw it all together, well, that's the result that we got. So it was not very clear. But so the question, should we give the bones a name? Well, it's a kind of “Yeah, would be nice.” But not absolutely clear. And then we also wanted to know about the next step, namely, if we do that, how can we go about it? How can we give them a name? What would you do? I mean, if you found human remains, if you were responsible for giving them a name, Dominic, what would you possibly do?

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, first and foremost, I might try to identify whether the remains are male or female. I think that's something archaeologists typically do, although, as I understand, it's not always obvious, especially considering the condition of the remains, how much you have available, what you know about the people from that time period, and what have you. Then, well, the easiest naming scheme would just be to name it the first thing that comes to mind, but that could quickly become a problem, right? Because there might be a researcher in another part of the world who may have discovered something and they just so happened to coincidentally give it the exact same name. And now, do we have a duplicate? We have two archaeological remains with the same name. That would create confusion. So I would probably want something more systematic and more formulaic so that it allows me to kind of coordinate with researchers around the world so that we're not naming things the same thing and creating confusion.

Christina: Yeah, I think that's an interesting idea. Though, of course, with these ID numbers, you would have exactly that. So even if you had two remains that have exactly the same name, then, still, you could identify which is which based on their ID number. But of course, other things, I mean, like, might also be problematic. I mean, if you say you just pick a name that comes to mind, most likely it's a modern name. So it could, for example, be a name like “Christina.” And the question is, would you want to do that? And obviously no, because, I mean, you know, inside the name, you can see there’s certain meaning parts like the meaning of ‘Christian’, which the name is based on, which occurred after that person lived. So it would be very strange somehow to do that, I suppose. And the same thing if you used, for example, other names that might have certain ethnical associations, you know, it's difficult. So, if we use names that are used in the present, then we will carry over the associations of those names to the past. And that's why we thought it would be a good idea to, yeah, create a naming scheme that would allow archaeologists to avoid exactly that.

Dominic: That's true. It would be anachronistic. Naturally, it would be anachronistic if you give it a modern name, although it can certainly be recognizable to me just as an outsider to the field of archaeology. I'm very familiar with the early human remains of Lucy, although I actually don't think she was a human. She was a protohuman, an ancestor to a human. And I'm very familiar with that. It's just always stuck in my memory. I probably learned about it in school at some point as a child. And I believe that that name derived from, I think the researchers were very much enjoying the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Either it was popular at the time or they just so happened to enjoy it. But yeah, that is a modern name being applied to human remains from like three million years ago.

Christina: Yeah, Lucy is such a famous case, definitely. Another very, very famous human find is Ötzi. So that's also a name that many people know in Germany, but possibly also in the whole world. Do you know about the Iceman?

Dominic: The Iceman, yeah.

Christina: Yeah, that’s how he was first referred to. So it's a male mummy that was found in a glacier in the Ötztaler Alpen, so in the Alps, in 1991. And so what they did or what actually one person, one reader of a newspaper actually suggested is that he should be called Ötzi. So using the first syllable of the place, the Ötz-taler Alpen, and then adding the -i in the end, which is a kind of endearing suffix. And, the interesting thing is that this was very quickly adopted. So in the beginning, the newspapers, for example, talked about “the dead body”, “the find”, “the Iceman”. And, the interesting thing is that then they started to talk about “Ötzi”, and once they did that, actually, they talked more about the human behind those bones. They were more interested in the narrative and less so in the, let's say, more physical aspects of the objects that they found on the glacier, so to speak. And, I think that's very interesting. So once we have a name, we think more about the person behind it.

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Well, it's really interesting to hear that Ötzi was a formulaic creation because it kind of sounds like it could be a name. Sounds like it would be a name, maybe from that part of the world, perhaps, and you're absolutely right when you personify them with this name, it has a really strong effect. Like, yeah, when I think of Lucy, she's almost like a celebrity, but when in reality, I think she was just one of many, right? But yeah, you're absolutely right.

Christina: And I mean, if you say that that Ötzi to you sounds like a name, that's exactly what we thought as well. I mean “Ötz-i,” people have known that, it's a kind of pattern that seems to be quite common. So actually with newer finds, this pattern was also used. So there's also “Ardi,” there's “Bernie,” there's “Ippsi,” there's “Kilti.” So in in many different places, when human remains were found, actually, or protohuman remains, what was done actually is that people used the first syllable of the place name and then an -i in the end, and that was basically the expression, the name that was used to refer to that human who lived there a long time ago.

Dominic: Yeah, wow. How cool. Well, I think it works. It sounds like a good naming scheme to me.

Christina: It, it is, but on the other hand, it's also a bit problematic because of course, “Ötzi” is unique, so it could also be a bit like a trade name, so in a certain way you're kind of distancing yourself as well from that person, that human who lived. And of course, if you think about the -i in the end, I mean, that's the kind of, yeah, suffix that you use to express endearment. And this is something that the participants of our study were very critical about. So we had a lot of people who said, “Oh, it's not okay to use that because you don't know each other well, at least someone like Ötzi, they don't know you,” you know? “So you have no right to use some markers of familiarity that you would otherwise use with friends, with people you know very well.”

Dominic: Ah, I see. Yeah, well, first of all, how you said the name is unique. You know, it's interesting how when it comes to names, we have kind of a stock of names in every language. We have a stock of names that are considered like established names, and they're acceptable. And then if you try to innovate or create a new name, socially, sometimes you might face a stigma, right? You might face pushback, like, “Oh my gosh, like that's a made-up name,” you know, “what were the parents thinking? Oh, they're trying to make the child special by giving them a completely unique name to make them stand out.” But this idea of a ‘made-up name’ is really kind of funny because if we really think about it, all names are made up, or they were made up at some point in time. It's just that enough time passed, enough people had that name that it became acceptable. So I definitely hear what you're saying there. And yeah, with the -i ending to make it endearing, yeah, we do have a lot of names, nicknames, Bobby, Joey, with animals, you have a doggie or a kitty. It does make it very endearing. You're right. But I'm not necessarily sure if it's a problem.

Christina: No, I don't think it's necessarily a problem, but it's something we wanted to test. I mean, to what extent is that the best way of producing a name? In addition, I mean, if you think about it, if you have various finds in the same place, you could still just create one name because you just have one suffix that you could add in the end. And so, what we actually wanted to try out is whether it would also be possible to create more names, but in a way that is slightly similar, because usually it's a good idea to try and keep things similar to what has been done before, because then the system becomes more acceptable. And so this “Ötz-i” naming system seems to be almost automatic when you have new finds somewhere, this is what archaeologists will do. And so what we did is we tried out whether it's a good idea to use some element, usually the first syllable, from the place name, where the human remains were found, and then combine that with different affixes, with different endings that are used to create names in German.

Dominic: Yeah, I hear what you're saying. If you're trying to establish a new norm, then you want to be consistent about it. But so give me some examples. What were some of the examples you came up with for these names?

Christina: The interesting thing is that in German, it's possible to see that names end in particular ways. And that is because historically, that is an ending that was attached. So that's a kind of word formation. And we used that by just using those final parts and attaching them to the first syllable of the place name. And that's how for the name Haunstetten, you get Haun, and then we created new names like Hauna, Hauner, Haunle, Haunsa, or Haunwin, and that gave us a long list of different names, potential names for human remains from the past.

Dominic: Yeah, nice. That's compelling. I mean, I'm kind of an outsider here, but those sound like real names to me. What did other people think?

Christina: The interesting thing is that in our survey, people also thought so. So, we had 35 names altogether, and out of these, 27 were rated as possible names for humans. And, the interesting thing is that quite a lot of these also received the highest possible rating in terms of, “Sounds like a familiar name. I don't know this, but I think it sounds familiar somehow.” And I mean, this really encouraged us to say, okay, well, apparently these names could be used because they fulfill the criterion of sounding like a human name. But at the same time, what you mention, namely, that you need to make sure that it's the correct sex, for example, we also tested that. So, I'm not sure what it's like in English, but in German, in any case, it's very often possible to guess a person's gender from their name ending. Is that the same in English?

Dominic: Oh, maybe there are some of them. Maybe there are some of them, yeah. If it ends in an -a, then it's probably a feminine name like Alexandra or Roberta or something along those lines. Anna, things like that.

Christina: And, we also have that in German. So the -a ending, I mean, that would be the most typical one for females, but actually that also corresponds to other vowels. So, usually when you have a German name that ends in a vowel, then it tends to be female. And when you have a German name that ends in a consonant, it tends to be male. And, that's quite interesting because we wanted to see whether people also perceived it like that and also what to do in those cases where for some reason or another, you didn't want to pick any of those two categories. And so, we also asked people to rate whether they felt that the name was rather for all genders or appropriate for males only or only for females. And they had to do the same thing with those 35 names. That's why I think they had a tough time, because we repeatedly asked them questions about all those names and they had to indicate that.

Dominic: Oh, names, names, names. Yeah, it's interesting with the sort of customary distinctions between male and female names. It's often you have to have a very firm grasp of the culture or the language for it to occur to you intuitively. So, for example, one time I had a Japanese friend and I showed her maybe the 100 most common male and female names in English. And I asked her, guess which gender this name is? Guess if it's usually a male or female name. And in general, unless she could remember a figure or a person she knew who had that name, in general, she couldn't really reliably guess which gender the name was. And that's okay because, hey, if I was looking at Japanese names and I had to guess the gender, in most cases I probably would not be able to reliably know which one is which, but a native speaker would naturally know what sounds like what. So how did it go in this study? How did it go with that?

Christina: Yeah, exactly as expected. So most of the participants were native speakers. And so they also classified the names according to the system that they know intuitively without being aware of it. And in spite of the fact that we had this neutral option where we said, “Okay, this is a good name for all genders,” in three-quarters of the names, there were gender-specific associations, which means that obviously when you use such a newly created name, it's important to keep that in mind as well.

Dominic: Okay, wow. So this whole thing is a lot more complicated than I thought. But also, I really admire the attention to detail here. And so kind of the core where we kind of started with, this was kind of the level of respect that we pay to these human remains, whether it's considered respectful or rude to give it a name at all, to give it a specific type of name and things like that. So how did that dimension play into it? How did people kind of regard the politeness or rudeness of these different names?

Christina: Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And that's one that I was also particularly interested in. And so the question is, how do you test this respectfulness? So what we did is we thought that age could be a good stand-in for that. Because if you think about how you as an adult usually talk to other adults or to children, we thought it might be a good idea to ask people, “Is this a name that you would use for adults and children or for adults only or for children only?” And that way we hoped to get an idea of whether people assumed that, well, some would be more respectful than others. And it turns out that this actually worked very well because there were three names that were rated as, “Yeah, these are really just good names for children,” and these were Haunchen, Haunlein and Haunichen, and all of them diminutives. And in addition, I mean, I mentioned Hauni earlier, and some people really got highly emotional about it saying, okay, “This is disrespectful.” And we actually found that here, people were very divided between two views. So slightly more than half of all participants said it's appropriate for all ages, and 47 percent said it's only for children. And so for that reason, well, it's not entirely clear. And the interesting thing is that in the end, we asked people to also tell us what their favorite name was, and many of them said, it's Hauni. So it seems to be a kind of love-hate relationship. So this pattern of “Ötz-i” seems to be very, very strong in people. So it was a very clear winner in spite of the fact that it's problematic.

Dominic: Yeah, how funny is that? From the outset people did not really like these kinds of more diminutive and endearing names, but then in the end, they kind of demonstrated a preference for it. It's a bit contradictory, but yeah, quite funny. And almost in a way, it reminds me of pet names, and when I say pet names, I mean the actual names for our pets, although pet names are also names we can give each other as people, and how typically we give our pets funny names, endearing names, names that you wouldn't give a person. But you can give your pets human names, and I find it immensely funny because it just sounds so serious, you know, “I need to go home and feed Robert,” or “I need to take Elizabeth for a walk.” It just sounds so extremely funny to give them these very serious human names. And you know what? It really personifies them in a way.

Christina: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It emphasizes that they're individuals and that they have a personality. So that's absolutely right.

Dominic: Yeah, a personality. It’s got the word “person” in it. Not only people can have personalities.

Christina: Yeah. And I mean, with regard to the human bones, to the human remains, of course, this is very important because, of course, in the past, they were living beings, but now there's just the bones left, basically. And so I think this is also a very interesting aspect. And I think that's also why our naming system is quite good, because we have a combination in our minds on the one hand of Ötzi as someone who tried to cross the Alps, but then died, and at the same time of a mummy lying in a glass case, in a museum, and also that idea of a reconstruction. So it's these different levels. And that's why I think our names are quite good, because they combine the non-human place name with elements of human names. And so it's a kind of conceptual blending.

Dominic: Yeah, I like that a lot, because when it comes to these old remains, you know, often they are so extremely old that, you know, you might just see it as a collection of bones, and you might forget that it really was a living person, a living being at one point. And so whatever we can do to humanize them or to restore some of that quality by giving them a real name, I think that's a worthwhile endeavor.

Christina: Definitely, particularly since the latest methods in archaeology allow us to find out so much more about humans from the past. Yeah, for example, we know what teeth form at what age, and so based on where you live, the plants will grow in the earth, and the minerals from the earth will enter your body through the plants or through the drinking water, and then they get stored inside your teeth, and then archaeologists can see whether you moved from one place to another one during the childhood and the early teens when the different teeth formed, which is quite exciting, or, for example, it's possible now to carry out genetic analyses, and these help to see the family relations between different skeletons from the same region. So there's a lot of information now, which makes the humans from the past reemerge as personalities in their own right, and to talk about them properly, of course, we need names somehow, and that's, well, what we hope to provide with our study.

Dominic: Yeah, unlocking their secrets. Oh my goodness. This is brilliant, fascinating work. Things like these. It's why I have so much respect for archaeologists and the other types of researchers who deal with this because yeah, I mean, to be able to analyze these things and then draw these different conclusions based on the evidence available, evidence which is often very old and not always in perfect condition, I think is very impressive. When it comes to names, my understanding is that, well, what we might call “family names”, or in British English, they might call “surnames”, in American English we call it a “last name”. As I understand it, for a lot of history, the only people afforded family names were royalty or aristocracy, and they weren't really afforded to the masses until things became a bit more egalitarian. Kind of in the time before we really had established family names, I think people usually would use the place they’re from, right? I mean, the best example is Leonardo da Vinci. To the uninitiated, they might think his family name is “da Vinci.” Why wouldn't you? But if you actually know the origins of that, you know that it just means “from Vinci.” It's “Leonardo from Vinci.” That's the place he was from. In a way, that means he didn't really have a family name, right? Not really. It would be like “Dominic of America” or “Christina of Germany,” right? It's used to differentiate you, but it's not really a unique family name. So this idea of using the place as the name is not completely foreign.

Christina: Yeah, that's also the reason why we thought it would be such a good idea to use the place names, because there is tradition, also in German, to derive surnames, family names, from place names. For example, if someone comes from Altenburg, you would call them Altenburger, and that's a family name that still exists. So there’s also different family names still around in Germany that work like that. So it's a very natural thing to do.

Dominic: Yeah, and these words describing a person and where they're from. Well, they're called demonyms. Think of demo- like demo-graphics, demography describes people and places. And probably a favorite would be a person from the city of Hamburg in Germany is a “Hamburger.” That is not a coincidence. I believe they say it was maybe German migrants in the United States, probably who had hailed from Hamburg, who invented the sandwich with meat between the buns. But I don't think people immediately know that it's connected to Hamburg. And then, of course, you get creations like a cheeseburger, which is fantastic. And so, yeah, I actually have a friend from Hamburg. He says he is a professional Hamburger.

Christina: Oh, that's really, really sweet. Yeah, so places are really important in establishing identity. And I think that's why it's also a good idea to use that for the creation of these names for the historical human remains. And if you think about it, what kind of meaning would you like to give the name, the invented name, the newly created name for prehistoric human remains? How much do we know about those people that might also have been relevant to them somehow? And, if you think about that, then you will notice that the place where we found them will definitely have been relevant, because it's where they died. Probably they also lived there. But in any case, they have an important relation to that place. And for that reason, I think that makes sense. So if my body was found in a very distant future and people had to make up a name for me, I suppose it would be okay if it was the place name plus an ending that expresses that I'm a human, because it's a human name ending. So I think this is a respectful way of trying to go about the creation of such individual, such unique names for humans. And that's why I really like the place names.

Dominic: You know, Christina? Yeah, you're right. When I think about that, you know, you might not know my name, but you at least know where I'm from, and where I was from was an important part of my identity. So I don't mind that. I don't mind being called by where I'm from. So yeah, I suppose in the absence of knowing the actual name of the person, yeah, it's not a bad alternative.

Christina: Absolutely.

Dominic: Yeah, wow, Christina. Today's discussion was incredibly thought-provoking. I mean, names and identity, archaeology, human remains, history, what's in a name, as we started with. I mean, yeah, totally captivating and enlightening. I really enjoyed it.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. And it shows you how wide linguistics is. I mean, in applied linguistics, we don't just help improve dictionaries. We don't just get ideas of what can be done in teaching language, but here, in the interaction with archaeologists, we actually tried to provide some system that can hopefully help people in the future when they want to select names for human remains.

Dominic: Yeah, dispelling maybe myths about what linguistics is and what linguists do. That's what we're all about.

Christina: Exactly. So stay curious. Have fun with language.

Dominic: And join us next time on Linguistics Behind the Scenes.