Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. I don't
know about you, but I feel like I learn a new word all the time,
even though I've been an English speaker my whole life! Some
researchers estimate there are roughly 1 million words in the
English language, so there's no way I will ever be able to know
every single one of them, but it's a fun goal to have. Did you
know new words get invented all the time? I bet there are words
you use with your friends that didn't exist when the adults
around you were growing up, and there are words our grandparents
or great great grandparents used that you may never even hear
because they're no longer popular. Lots of people describe
languages as living or alive. Now, they're not technically
alive, but they seem kind of that way, because they change
all the time. Our guest for today's show is someone who
studies words and how we use them. Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a
sociolinguist, and she hosts the PBS show Otherwords, all about
words and sounds. When we started talking to Erica for
this episode, I needed to ask her for a word definition before
we even got into the interview, because I wasn't sure exactly
what a sociolinguist does.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So linguistics is the study of
language, and sociolinguistics is the study of language related
to who we are as people, so like where we're from, or who we
spend time with, or even what other languages that we speak.
Jane: Erica says there are lots of different ways to study
languages and things to study within the field of linguistics.
Some linguists are really interested in the sounds we
make, and others study the meaning behind words. Some
linguists specialize in languages that used to be spoken
a long, long time ago. Erica says she decided to pursue
sociolinguistics because she's interested in what's happening
in the world around us here and now.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: I like talking to people. That's why
I'm here today, and it's cool to think about what's actually
happening. So why is it that I speak differently than you based
on any number of factors, like where we're from, or who we
spend most of our time with, or things like that.
Jane: Okay, we have a lot of words questions and language
questions from kids. So I'm gonna get out of the way and
jump right in.
Maya: My name is Maya. I'm eight years old, and I live in
Fairfield, California. Who invented the English language?
West: I'm West. I'm seven years old. I live in Arcadia,
California. Where did the English alphabet originally come
from?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So the English language doesn't just
have one inventor, the way that things like popsicles or
earmuffs or trampolines do, which were all invented by kids,
by the way.
Jane: Whoa.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Yeah, it developed over thousands and
thousands of years. So what we're speaking right now is
called Modern English. But before that, came Middle English
and Old English, which didn't really sound like English that
we speak today at all. I took an Old English class, and it was
like learning a whole completely new foreign language. But
language is like, it's changing all the time. So I would say, if
you speak English, you can be an inventor of some parts of
English.
Jane: Yeah, I don't think of this as Modern English. I think
of what we're doing as like, super wicked cool English, no
cap.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: And we're like, oh, cringe.
Jane: So where did the alphabet that we use come from?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So the alphabet has its origins
actually in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were...
those were pictures. So they would carve or draw pictures
that might be like a jar, that would talk about jars or there'd
be some animal, there'd be that animal, right? So Semitic
workers in ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago came up with an
alphabetic script that was kind of adapted from hieroglyphics in
order to write down their language, and that then
developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is how we got
the name alphabet, which is from the first two letters. So Aleph
meant ox, and Bet meant house, and it doesn't mean ox house or
house ox now, but that's where we get the letters from. And
then the Phoenicians brought their alphabet to Greece, and
then it spread to Italy and inspired the Latin alphabet. So
English itself used to be written in a Runic alphabet
called the Futhorc until the 600s, like not 1600s but 600s,
when it became replaced by the Latin alphabet. And then after
some... there's some adjustments, like removing the
letters thorn and eth, which were the "th" sounds. And maybe
you've seen stores called like Ye Olde Candy Shoppe.
Jane: Uh huh.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: That that y comes from the eth. So really,
it would have been pronounced The Old Candy Shop.
Jane: Oh, really? So it wasn't "Ye" old. It was "the" old.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Yeah, it just, it sounds fun and cute
now, but it comes from the eth. So they, you know, they removed
those letters and they added some new ones, like u and j. So
beforehand, v and u were kind of... or v was used for both u
and for v, and i was used for both j and for i. So now there's
one of each. So we ended up with our 26 letter alphabet.
Jane: And there are other languages that use the same
alphabet as English.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Correct. So Spanish, for example, uses the
same alphabet, although they also have an n with a little
tilde over it, called an enye.
Jane: Right. And Welsh has a double L that's pronounced by
blowing air through the edges of your mouth, which is very fun.
So, so we have some different letters, even if we're using the
same alphabets for some different languages, but then
some languages use totally different styles of writing and
alphabets.
name
Hugo: My name is Hugo. I come from Hong Kong but I'm living in
London. I'm 6 years old. Why is the words that we use now the
words that we use now?
Jane: Why are the words we use now the words we use now? So
nobody invented the English language. We can all be
inventors. But why do... we how do we have the words that we all
know how to say and share?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: That's a really good question, and it's
kind of hard to answer, but I have an idea. So words are
really powerful. They can make us feel sad or happy, hurt or
excited, bummed out or on top of the world, right? And we get to
choose what words we use, right? I say, use your words. So
through these choices that we make every day with the words
that we decide to speak or to write or to sign, we build
friendships and connections with the world around us. And if
you've ever heard a baby copy what a grown up says, you know
that we like to repeat things. So the words that we use now are
the ones that have been repeated over and over and over and over
and over and over and over and over and over again. So some
words have been lost to history, and we don't even know what we
don't even know, but the words you know and say now are what
you've learned or been taught that's been passed down from
someone else.
Jane: Where did the words we use now mostly come from? Do they
come from other languages, or were they sort of invented by
English speakers over time?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Yes... to both of those things. So a lot
of the words in English were borrowed from dozens of other
languages. So many of them, like the word coffee comes from
Arabic. French influences, you have German influences, you
have... so many ones. And also we invent them. So when we're
thinking of a lot of slang terms, they sometimes get
invented by somebody. So like the word "okay," which may be
one of the most common words or popular words in the world, I
don't know, lots of languages say okay, is thought to come
from a kind of a joke. It was in a newspaper in Boston, and it
stood for all correct, but it was like, O, L, L, correct, K,
O, R, R, E, C, T, because they were trying to make a joke. And
it kind of stuck after there was a presidential candidate who was
from, I think it's from, from the area of Kinderhook, and they
called him Old Kinderhook, and said, Old Kinderhook is okay.
There was a whole thing about that becoming this big, popular
word, and now, long time later, we use the word "okay" all the
time.
Jane: I had no idea, even though I really do say "okay" all the
time. Also, just in case it wasn't clear because you're
listening and not seeing things written out, all correct would
be spelled A, L, L, C O, R, R, E, C T, not O, L, L, K, O, R, R,
E, C T. So the joke was that it's obviously not all correct,
if you can't even spell "correct" correctly.
Hakeem: Hi, my name is Hakeem. I live in Chicago, Illinois. I'm
eight years old. Why do words spell the way they are?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Well, words in English are spelled all sorts
of wonky, different ways. Fun fact, the spelling bee is an
English thing. They don't typically have spelling bees in
other languages because their languages are not spelled so
wonky the way that ours is.
Jane: Do you know what a spelling bee is? It's a
competition where someone says a word and you have to spell it
correctly without being able to look at it. We did an episode A
while back with a National Spelling Bee competitor. We'll
link to it in our show notes today. But if you speak a
language where it's less confusing how things are
spelled, there's not much need for a spelling bee competition.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Exactly, exactly. Sounded out right? But
in English, it isn't, isn't quite so simple. So I think that
this is kind of two questions in one. So words are spelled the
way that they are because someone put them in a dictionary
and claimed that is the correct way for them to be spelled. And
we all just went along with that. So before we had reliable
dictionaries, people spelled things any which way that fell
right to them, and maybe even spelled the same word different
ways every time they wrote it. There was no right way to write
it. But now, spellings have been standardized thanks to the
dictionary. But I think this question is also asking, how did
we get things to be the way that they are? So if you ask me, I
think English spelling is kind of a mess, and it's been that
way from the very beginning. So to explain that, we'll kind of
need a mini alphabet history lesson. So Old English, as we
mentioned earlier, was a Germanic language spoken by
Anglo-Saxons in what is now England. And like I said, it's
not anything like the English we speak today in the 21st century.
So old English, some people say, some experts say, was spoken,
let's say in the 400s to the 1100s and they used the Runic
alphabet known as the Futhorc. So in the 600s, the Latin
missionaries came in and replaced the Futhorc with the
Latin alphabet. But the Latin alphabet wasn't designed for a
Germanic language, and there were sounds that Anglo-Saxons
used that didn't exist in Latin. So they had to improvise. And
things got even more complicated when the French invaded English
in 1066, and changed a lot of English spelling to make it more
familiar for their French readers. So English spelling was
a jumble of Germanic, Latin and French rules. And then came the
Great Vowel Shift, where lots of pronunciations changed, so like
the Ooh sound became Ow, so "hoos" and "hoond" became
"house" and "hound".
Jane: Historians are not sure exactly why or how the Great
Vowel Shift happened, but it happened gradually between the
years of 1400 and 1700. So it took many, many generations of
people. It wasn't like your adult said to you, "Could you
please get the "hoond" into the "hoose?" And you were like,
"Huh? What are you talking about? I can't even understand
you. Do you mean get the hound into the house?" "Hooned" or
hound being a kind of dog, by the way.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: And then there's even more. The printing
press came about right in the middle of all these
pronunciation changes. So printers would spell things as
they saw fit, adding extra letters or changing spelling so
that the words would reflect their history. So for example,
the word "dumb" ends with a B, which you can't really hear. So
some printers started mistakenly adding a B to the end of words
like "crumb" and "numb," which is an error that we call
hyper-correction. So it's like more than correct. It's so
correct that it's actually wrong. And words from Latin like
"sign" and "doubt" had letters that were added in to remind
readers where they came from, "signum" and "dubutary."
Jane: And then we still use that today, kind of because it got
put into dictionaries and into books by printing presses, which
were pretty new. And why don't we just drop the dumb B from
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: I think it makes a lot of sense to have
"dumb?"
things be spelled the way that they sound. But we are people of
convention. We just stick with the things that we know,
apparently, when it comes to writing. It would be a big... it
would be a big shift to change things for everybody across the
world. So we're kind of, it seems stuck where we are.
Etta: My name is Etta, and I'm five years old, and I live in
Germany. Why is English so hard to learn?
Isaac: Hi, my name is Isaac, and I'm nine years old, and I'm from
Kamloops, BC. Why is the English language so complicated?
Right.
Jane: English is difficult, I think, because there are so many
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So it's complicated, because English is
exceptions to every single rule. Think of the spelling rule like
I before E, except after C, or when sounded as A as a neighbor,
and way, that's a lot of exceptions just for one little
not just invented
rule, and that doesn't even cover how you spell the word
"weird," right?
Grayson: My name is Grayson. I live in St Louis, Missouri. I'm
nine years old. Why do different countries have different
accents?
Jane: Why do different countries have different accents? And Jack
in Ireland notes, you know, even people in the same country but
different parts of the country can have different accents. So
let's take English, but I think this is true in many languages.
How can we speak the same language but have different
accents and different ways we pronounce words?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Well, first things first, we all have
accents, every single one of us. Some accents will make it clear
where you're from or what languages you speak, or who your
friends are. Even if everybody around you sounds pretty
similar, you still have an accent. You just all have the
same accent, right? So to answer the question, if we're talking
about someone, let's say from a non-English speaking country,
speaking English and having a foreign accent, that's because
the sounds that make up each language are different. So for
example, in Spanish, there are five vowels and there are five
vowel sounds: a, e, i, o, u, which are ah, eh, e, o and oo.
In English, we have the same vowels: a, e, i, o, u and
sometimes y, but between 15 and 20 different ways of pronouncing
those vowels, depending on where you're from. So when we're
babies, we can hear all the different sounds that make up
every language in the world, hundreds of different sounds. So
when we're babies, we can hear all the differences. But we
learn to focus on only the ones that are in the language that we
are learning to speak, because our brain doesn't have room or
time for every single sound in every single language, right? So
if you only learned five vowel sounds growing up, you might
have a tough time not only pronouncing a bunch of different
sounds, more sounds than you're used to, but also hearing the
difference between them. And now, accents within the same
country or within the same general area or same language
come from how you spend your time. Where do you live? Who do
you spend time with? Usually, accents develop when there are
separations between people. So maybe you live in the US and you
say "tomato" and... or you live in the UK, or Australians say
"tomahto." There is a whole ocean of distance between those
places, and there are lots of different social groups too,
even in the same area, who can develop different accents. So
sometimes, when you're talking with someone who has an accent
that's really different from yours, you might even
accidentally start copying their accent, and that is called
speech accommodation, so you're accommodating towards what they
sound like.
Jane: We just talked about differences in pronunciation,
like "tomato" and "tomahto." But sometimes we have different
words for the same thing, depending on where we live, even
though we speak the same language. You might throw things
away in the trash can in the US, but the rubbish bin in the UK!
Or enjoy soccer in the United States, but find that it's
called football elsewhere. We have an episode all about that,
too, by the way. Check out our show notes if you want to hear
it. Here's another example.
Natalie: My name is Natalie. I'm 11 years old, and I live in
Rutherford, New Jersey. Why are some people in England say
biscuits while we say cookies?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So for me, English biscuits and US cookies
aren't exactly the same kind of thing. They are very similar.
I'd say like the cookie part of an Oreo is a biscuit. So Oreos
could be like a chocolate sandwich biscuit, but chocolate
chip cookies, like fresh out of the oven, those are definitely
not biscuits. So we say "cookie" because of the Dutch word
"koekje," meaning little cake. And there was a lot of Dutch
influence in New Amsterdam, which is now New York. So that's
where we got cookie from. "Biscuit" comes from the Latin
"biscoctus" meaning twice-cooked. So originally,
biscuits were a really, really, really hard bread. Because they
didn't go bad very easily, soldiers would carry them around
for a super long time, and they'd dip them in water or soup
or whatever was around to soften them up. And it was a good
source of fuel. But that's really about it. Probably didn't
taste very good, the texture... It's not a snack that I'm
excited about. Eventually, when sugar became more common, they
started to get tastier. So in the middle of the day, before
lunch was invented -- because it was invented, at one point --
people would have tea and biscuits to tide them over until
supper. That's kind of a long answer, but the short answer to
the question of, why do we say different things in different
Jane: Okay, I think it's time for a little cookie break. Or
places is because we have different influences around us.
So like how we got cookie from Dutch, it didn't used to be as
should it be a biscuit break? Or if you're in Australia, a break
easy to communicate with people far, far away, so sometimes we'd
end up with different names for the same things.
for some bickies? When we come back, why do we have silent
letters? And my favorite, if more than one tooth is teeth and
more than one goose is geese, what do we call more than one
the English language? Speaking of spelling, you know what makes
moose? Meese? Stay with us.
spelling a word extra confusing? Silent letters.
Wesley: My name is Wesley, and I'm five years old, and I live
in Chicago. Why do words have silent letters?
Madelief: My name is Madelief from Brisbane, Australia. I'm
eight years old. Why do some words like "knife" have silent
letters?
Annabelle: My name's Annabelle. I'm eight years old, and I live
in Utah. Why does the word "island" have an S in it that is
silent?
Jane: Wesley, Madelief and Annabelle have all noticed that
there are words in English with silent letters. What's the deal
with silent letters?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: They are tricky. That's why we have those
spelling bees, right? So a lot of the silent letters are thanks
to the Great Vowel Shift, which happened hundreds and hundreds
of years ago. So some words used to have two syllables, but with
the shift, they lost their second half. So "name-ah" and
"lik-eh" became "name" and "like." We spell those with the
e still, the e at the end that kind of represents that. That's
the silent E, right? Other consonant sounds faded away as
well. So "dum-b," like, with a b sound became "dumb" without the
b sound. "Ni-ght" and "li-ght" became "night" and "light."
"K-nife" and "k-night" became "knife" and "knight." And some
scholars wanted to update the spelling to match the new
pronunciation, but the printing press kind of helped lock in
those outdated spellings. And specifically the s in "island,"
that's an example of hypercorrection, as we mentioned
before. So the word "Isle," i, s, l, e, had the s added because
it came from the Latin word "insula," which has an s in it,
but "island" is from the Old English "ieland": i with a long
bar over it, e, l, a, n, d, and people thought they were
related, so they added the s.
Jane: So why did we get rid of those sounds, though? Why don't
we still say "name-ah?" Why do we say "name" instead? I mean, I
see how the letter just kind of stuck around. But why did we
change the way we say it?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Hmm, I don't know if I have an exact
answer for that, but think of when you're speaking quickly,
like things fall away. You might drop a couple syllables or
sounds here and there just because you're speaking quickly.
Or maybe other words will get mixed in with there. So for
example, the word "apron" used to be "napron." So you know how,
when you spell things that start with a vowel, you have to have
an "an" in the article beforehand, instead of just "a,"
you have "an." So it used to be "a napron," and now it's "an
apron," or the word "newt," like the salamander kind of creature
used to be "ewt," and it was "an ewt" and now it became "a newt."
Jane: So a lot of the way we speak, it's just to make it
easier for us when we're saying the words, even if the spelling
then becomes more complicated when we write it.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Yes, exactly.
Sydney: My name is Sydney. I'm 10. I live in Rutland, Vermont.
Why some words sound like other words, like "bare" and "bear."
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: So, words that sound the same but are
spelled differently are a type of homonym called a homophone.
So we end up with homophones mostly through sound merging. So
for example, the words "meat" and "meet." So m, e, e, e, t
used to be pronounced like "mate," almost, and m,e,a,t was
"met." And now they're pronounced the exact same way.
Just "meet." And f o, u r used to rhyme with "tour," and
f,o,r,e used to be two syllables, so "for-e," and now
they're both pronounced "four." So holophones can also occur
when words are barred into English from different origins.
For example, the word "tire," the sleepy version has potential
Germanic roots, while the wheel version comes from French.
Jane: Even though those in American English are spelled the
same.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Exactly, there's a Y in the other.
Jane: Yeah, in British English, tire that you use on your car is
t, y, r, e. Here's another tricky thing in the English
language. When words go from singular,meaning one, to
plural, meaning two or three or five or more, we generally add
an -s or an -es s to the end of the word. Like, "cow" becomes
"cows," "fox" becomes "foxes," "horse" becomes "horses." But of
course, there are exceptions to this rule.
Grace: Hi, my name is Grace. I'm 10 years old. I live in Rocky
Mountain House, Canada. Does everything that ends with -us,
like "octopus" or "cactus," could end with -i, like "cacti"
or "cactuses?" I know about "cactus" and "octopus," but I'm
looking for like anything that has those.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Hmm. So the answer is, nope! In Latin, the
-us words end with an -i, so which gives us octopi. However,
it is a Latinized version of the Greek word octopus and we
borrowed it into English. And generally, when we borrow words,
which we do all the time, we make it plural as an English
word. So in addition to "octopi," we can also say
"octopuses" as an acceptable form of the plural. "Cacti" can
also be "cactuses," even though it sounds more, sometimes more
like fancy to say "cacti." Some words like "radius" and
"alumnus" do get an -i at the end, and they are never said
"alumnus" is or "radiuses." You know, "radii" and "alumni,"
right? But some words that end in -us never get to see an -i.
I've never heard of "boni" and "campi" because those are
actually "bonuses" in "campuses." There's always
exceptions to every rule.
Jane: So if you're trying to figure out, if you know a word
and you don't know how to say many of them, how are you
supposed to guess? If you don't know whether it's "bonuses" or
"boni" or "octopuses" or "octopi," how do you figure it
out?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: My rule of thumb, if I didn't, if I don't
know how to pluralize something in English, is just to add that
s sound at the end, because most words do end in -s. And of
course, sometimes it'll be like -es or maybe it sounds like a z
sound, but it's that general s or z sound at the end of it,
like dog, dogs, bonus, bonuses. There may be times when you're
less grammatically correct, but I think that's okay. It's okay
to be creative with your language, too. So I err on the
side of adding the s sound at the end of all the words.
Jane: People will probably know what you're trying to say.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: They'll know what you're talking about,
yeah. And if they feel the need to correct you, that's okay,
too.
Jane: Speaking of plurals...
Oliver: My name is Oliver. I'm eight years old, and I live in
North Carolina, Raleigh. If two tooth is "teeth" and if two
goose is "geese," then why is two moose not "meese?"
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: That'd be kind of fun if they were
"meese." They're kind of big, though. I feel like "meese"
sounds like like a small thing instead of like a big, huge
animal, right? So the reason why is because "tooth" and "goose"
are words with Germanic origins. So the word "goose" comes to us
from Old English where the plural of goose was "geese." And
that's because of some sound changes over time that led from
"gooses" to "geeses" to "geese," which we say now. But anyway,
the reason why we don't say "meese" is because the word
"moose" doesn't have Germanic origins. It was borrowed into
English sometime around the 1600s from a Native American
language in the Algonquin family, likely either
Narragansett or Abenaki, which were spoken in what is now the
northeastern region of the United States, New England. So
the plurals are different because they have different
origins.
Jane: So Erica, is it actually helpful if you don't come from a
family or a culture where you already speak multiple
languages, to learn some other languages, so you can start to
see how these words in English even come together?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Absolutely, I think of being able to speak
multiple languages as kind of a superpower. I... English is my
primary language. It's the one that I'm the best at, but I've
spent some time studying Mandarin and studying Spanish,
and it's definitely helped me see the world in different ways.
There's different ways of of explaining things in different
languages. Some languages have words that we don't have in
English that describe certain feelings that we might really
know but don't have words for. Like, there's a word
"kuchisabishii" in Japanese. It's like, when your mouth is
bored, like you're eating because you're not really
hungry. You're not eating because you're hungry, but
you're eating because your mouth, or your mouth is lonely,
not bored. Your mouth is lonely and it needs something to occupy
it. And there's tons of other words that kind of explain fun,
interesting experiences that we have as people, but we just
don't have one word for in English. So if you learn other
languages, you get to know that. You also get to experience more
of the world, and sometimes it helps you with learning your
primary language too.
David: Hi, my name is David. I am five and a half. I live in
Thousand Oaks. Why do 11 and 12 not end in the word "teen?"
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Well, if they did, then we wouldn't be
able to call 11 and 12 year olds "preteens". But this seems like
another two-part question. So why is t-e-e-n not part of those
numbers, which I do have an answer for. And then why did the
people who came up with the number names do it that way,
which I have... I can make an educated guess for. So "eleven"
and "twelve" come from the Old English "endleofan" and "twelf,"
which even further back were "an" plus "lif," so "an-lif"and
"twe-lif" which is one "lif" and two "lif." But scholars aren't
exactly sure what "lif" means. One theory, because we don't
always know. Sometimes it's in the past and it's gone. One
theory is that it means left over. So like one left after 10
and two left after 10. So teen was just a form of 10. You know,
you can see how they kind of sound alike. So like you say,
teen, teen teen, teen, teen teen, teen, teen, teen, teen
might, might eventually get to 10. There was other variations
too, but that was just one of them. So 13 and up were just
three-teen, four-teen, or 3-10, 4-10, 5-10, right? But why were
they different? Why weren't they like the "an-lif," "twe-lif?"
Why wasn't it just three "lif," four "lif," right? It's hard to
know for sure. We don't have a for sure, for sure answer, but
back a long time ago, there wasn't much reason to talk about
more than 10 of something. You have, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, several,
many, just have a lot of things. So if it's more than the numbers
that you count, it's just a lot, right? But most of us have 10
fingers, right? So it's easy to count to 10 on your fingers and
maybe your toes, if you prefer sometimes you need just a little
bit more than the ones on your fingers. So you would say, ah, a
little more than 10, eleven. "An-lif," or 12, "twe-lif." And
we got so used to that. So even when we needed to count up to
3-10, and 4-10, and 5-10, the pronunciation of 11 and 12
stuck.
Jane: Huh? But we're not sure about that.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: We're not sure exactly why 3-10, 4-10,
5-10, is exactly that way. But the guess is that we... or why
1-10 and 2-10 didn't end up it's probably because they were, they
were like that before, and we just stuck with what we knew.
Jane: So do you think if suddenly all the kids listening
today decided together we're gonna change it and we're gonna
start calling 11 "one teen" and we're gonna start calling 12
"two teen." And so it's like, how old are you? I'm "two teen,"
and next year I'll be thirteen. Do you think we could change the
English language?
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Absolutely, it would take a long time,
perhaps, or like a big amount of kids doing, deciding to do
this. But it could definitely happen, because language is
always changing. You might even notice it when you hear some
slang that you're like so over at this point, like, if I try to
use any Gen Alpha slang, they're like, I'm just gonna sound super
Ohio, right? That sounds so embarrassing. So all of our
listeners here get to decide what happens next, where our
language is going. You don't need to come up with things or
try to make changes. They're gonna happen naturally. But if
you wanted to make "one teen" and "two teen" be the next cool
thing, by all means, absolutely do it, and we'll see if it
actually sticks.
Jane: The truth is, every single day, new words get invented. For
those of us listening who are adults, that means we sometimes
get confused when you, kids, tell us something using a slang
word you and your friends use. But on the flip side, the really
cool thing is, you, kids, are the ones at the forefront of
language change.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky: Y'all are the ones who are doing the big
thing. So I'd say, keep it up, and I'm excited to see where you
take it next, like what innovations and cool, new, fun,
weird, awesome things y'all come up with.
Jane: If you were to invent a new word, what would it be? I'd
like to invent a word that describes the feeling when you
love something or someone so much that you wish you could
just squish yourself together with them and become one being.
Like how two water droplets pushed together blob into one
big water droplet. What would the word be for that? Send us a
video of what word you would invent and what it would mean,
and we'll put it on our Instagram page. Thanks to
sociolinguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky for answering so many
of our questions today. If you found this episode fascinating,
you should check out the show she hosts on PBS called
Otherwords. Otherwords investigates fun, interesting
and sometimes totally strange things about language. You can
find it on YouTube and at pbs.org. We'll link to it in our
show notes for this episode, as well. As always, if you have a
question about anything, have an adult record you asking it on a
smartphone using an app like voice memos, then have them
email the file to questions@butwykids.org. But Why
is produced by Melody Bodette, Sarah Baik and me, Jane Lindholm
at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Our video
producer is Joey Palumbo, and our theme music is by Luke
Reynolds. If you like our show, please have your adults help you
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We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then,
stay curious.