Jesse Gates
Description: Jesse Gates is a Post-Doc at Nankai University studying Linguistics. His work focuses on Trans-Himalayan languages, particularly Horpa languages such as Stau, looking at both static and evolutionary linguistics. In this episode we explore the complexities of linguistics, from phonetics & morphology to anthropological studies of social structures & language use. Jesse Gates underscores how a deep understanding of linguistics can serve as a systematic framework for language acquisition broadly and enhance one’s appreciation for the interconnectedness of language & society.
Websites:
Publications:
Verbal Triplication Morphology in Stau
Resources:
Show Notes:
[0:00] Introduction
[2:42] Discovering Nankai University
[2:55] What is Linguistics?
[4:13] Anthropological Linguistics
[5:44] Evolving Focus in Linguistics
[7:26] Conducting Linguistic Research
[10:10] Classifying World Languages
[12:47] Diverse Language Families
[15:52] Typological Language Classification
[20:02] Linguistic Insight in Language Learning
[22:27] Understanding Language and Culture
[23:23] Tibetan Dining Etiquette
[25:24] Sino-Tibetan Language Classification
[29:35] Focus on Sino-Tibetan and Jaronic Languages
[29:40] Origin of Interest in Sino-Tibetan Languages
[30:46] Exploring China's Diverse Ethnic Groups
[30:50] Diversity in Languages
[37:08] Fascination with Dao Language
[44:16] Linguistic Attraction and Adventure
[49:34] Insights into Uvular Fricatives
[55:51] Impact of Human Expansion on Languages
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Professor Jesse Gates. Thank you for coming on today.
Jesse:
[0:04] Thank you, guys.
Keller:
[0:05] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your background. What got you interested in linguistics and how you got to Nankai University?
Jesse:
[0:12] Yeah, well, I'll try to summarize it a little bit here. But basically, I was interested in languages from my teenage years, and I started studying Chinese when I was 15. And as I studied I just found it to be so different from any of the languages that I'd studied before Spanish a little bit of French ancient Greek you know it was not an Indo-European language which is something I discovered later and the structure was different first of all the tone system was something totally new to me and later I'd find out that actually most Most languages in the world have tones, but it was just all so new. And then you had the written system, which is yet another thing, and that was so complex. And so I really enjoyed Chinese, and I ended up winning a scholarship to study right here in Chengdu at Sichuan University as an undergrad, kind of like you guys studying abroad for a couple of years. Years and I was able to not just study Chinese, but also study Chinese history and a little bit of linguistics. But I actually had no idea still about what linguistics was. I was just interested in languages.
Jesse:
[1:29] And as I met people in the city who were actually linguists, they were like, well, you should, you know, think about this as a career. And there's a lot of research to be done in China. And so I started to look into the different languages that were in China. And it turns out that China isn't just about Chinese. There's about 500 other languages that are spoken here. Now, again, it's less than 10% of the population speaks these languages. So, of course, it would be easy to seem like they're hidden, that they're not there, but they are there. And so, I started going around Sichuan province, collecting language data, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I just was interested. And so, I just take my recorder and talk to people who spoke different languages and then i was encouraged to go and get some basic linguistic training which i did and then that led into doing a master's program which i did at trinity western university in canada and later on i ended up doing a phd in paris at the university of paris, After I finished my PhD there, you know, I started looking for a job and where actually it was even in the midst of while I was still writing my dissertation,
Jesse:
[2:38] found a job at Nankai University and I thought this would be a great way to be back in China. This was during the pandemic and I was like, okay, this would be a wonderful opportunity to continue my research here.
Jesse:
[2:50] And so Nankai hired me and I'm really grateful to be working for them. It's been a great setup.
Brent:
[2:56] Yeah, that's great. So what is linguistics?
Jesse:
[2:59] Yeah, well, basically it's just the study, the science of language. Trying to understand from a scientific point of view, what is language? So, one of the fundamental things that we study is the structure of language, going from the very sounds themselves, which is called phonetics, all the way to big, long paragraphs, which is more discourse studies. But in between all of that, you have how are the sounds actually organized from the perception of the speakers, and that's called phonology. And that is where we usually can see the written scripts for these languages. It's all based on usually, to some degree, the phonology of the language, how speakers conceive of the sounds of the language. And then how are words put together? That's morphology. And syntax, how does the whole sentence, you know, in a phrase, a clause, how are those things put together? And then also meaning, what is the semantics? And how is language used?
Jesse:
[4:09] So, those are the major branches or subfields of linguistics.
Keller:
[4:13] And then within that, what's anthropologic linguistics?
Jesse:
[4:16] Yeah, so I like to think that really all linguistics is anthropological linguistics. But really, nowadays there's a lot of different variations on linguistics. But originally, when linguistics first started back about 150 years ago, linguists were very interested not only in the languages themselves, like the structure I just talked about, but also something about the culture of the people. And the assumption was that if you know something about the language you can know something more about the culture but also if you know something about the culture it might tell you something about the language and so that there's this really close relationship between language and culture.
Jesse:
[5:00] So, yeah, so that's basically anthropological linguistics is the study of both the anthropology, how does the society of this people function, how is it put together, how do people relate to each other in, say, marriages, or do they get married or not? Whatnot, what is their economy like, what foods do they grow, what clothes do they wear, those types of things. We talked a little bit about ethnobotany just a few moments ago. That would also fall into this kind of category. So, it's more broad in many ways than just looking at, say, syntax and, you know, trying to figure out how
Jesse:
[5:42] noun phrases and verb phrases work. So, So, we do that too, and I do that as well, but I try to combine that with also an eye on the culture, the general culture as well.
Brent:
[5:53] Would you say that's common for most linguists?
Jesse:
[5:56] It used to be. It was more common like about 100 years ago, and you'll probably have heard of people like Franz Boas, who was basically one of the founders of anthropology. He was also a linguist, so he created dictionaries, grammars. Of native languages, of Native American languages. And yeah, so it was far more common in the past, but there's a whole branch now basically in many universities they'll actually have in anthropology, they'll have anthropological linguistics, or in linguistics they'll have linguistic anthropology. And so they will often incorporate aspects, but it's become more and more common now, I think, in most universities to focus primarily on, you know, syntax or phonetics. And a lot of the phonetics has been moving, you know, more towards using technology to, you know, like, almost like more like physics in a lot of ways, because that's what sound is, you know, it's physical waves. And so, and then also psycholinguistics, which is studying more like psychology.
Jesse:
[7:13] And then there's also the whole emphasis on gender and sociolinguistics as well, which gender, race, and those other issues come into play.
Keller:
[7:27] So, what are some of the ways that linguistic research is conducted, given that there are so many subfields that you could go into?
Jesse:
[7:33] Right. So, I'll just come at it, first of all, from my experience. What I also could call the type of work that I do is descriptive linguistics. So, what we're interested in is really describing a language thoroughly. So an example of that is usually in some sort of reference grammar so we would go in to a language perhaps there's been no work done on this language before or maybe there has been some and really just sit with a speaker of that language record like you're recording me today and then take what's written or spoken and transcribe that now it's really easy with english we can do that automatically but with these languages that haven't been studied before we haven't gotten to the point yet that computers can just do that for us automatically. Hopefully that will happen soon. But part of the problem is because we need to first figure out what are the actual sounds that are being made and what are the distinctions between the different words and different parts of speech and grammar. So that has to be done first and that can happen. Technology does help because, of course, we can put that into databases that then automatically find these different.
Jesse:
[8:51] Chunks. And after we've done that, transcribed it, you need to put underneath it a gloss. And a gloss is basically either a short translation, like a one-word translation, or if it's a grammatical part of speech, just a little abbreviation for that part of speech or the grammatical function. And then a translation of that so that we can remember what it is. And then after you have a corpus of this data, you can comb through it and look for the patterns that you need to be able to describe. So the first thing you need to do is figure out all the sound distinctions in the language. How many different sounds does a speaker of that language distinguish?
Jesse:
[9:32] And then analyze that and categorize that and write that up. And then go through words, how are words built? How are the sentences built? And basically go through that and describe it. And what we like to do is basically describe it in a typological way. So we're looking at not just how does the language do it itself, but what would it be like if we looked a little broader within the family of languages? How are things described in the family of languages? Are there similarities? Are there differences? And then also across the world, what are the similarities
Jesse:
[10:07] maybe in languages all around the world? So that our work becomes relevant, say, to a linguist that's working on a language in timbuktu as well yeah.
Brent:
[10:19] So i think going off of that like how do you like classify the languages that exist in the world what are the different families of languages and kind of like the family tree if if you will.
Jesse:
[10:30] Sure so um there's different um hypotheses on this and i should say a lot of what's interesting about linguistics i find interesting is that it's still a relatively relatively recent science, and there's still a lot of controversy and there's still a lot of unknowns. I mean, we could say that about every field, It feels like certain fields like physics and chemistry and biology have kind of some rough research agendas that are pretty clear. Linguistics is still probably, maybe as a science, we're still pre, you know, maybe we're still at the level of when people believed in phlogistine or whatever.
Jesse:
[11:09] So hopefully we're becoming more scientific. But in terms of number of families, I'm just saying that as a disclaimer, because there's probably between 120 to 150 different families of languages. And so what we mean by that is if you were able to compare one of those families, you would find enough similarities to be able to reconstruct what the great-great-grandmother of those languages was. And all of the little daughters and their families that branch off from that would look different. So there's something Something like 120 to 150 of those. And some of the big ones are like Sino-Tibetan is the largest in terms of number of speakers. There's, or actually, Indo-European would be the largest in terms of number of speakers. That includes languages like Russian and English and Spanish and French. And then you have Sino-Tibetan, which majority of the speakers are probably Mandarin, speakers Mandarin Chinese. Chinese, but then there's another 200 or so languages that are within Sino-Tibetan. You have languages in the Nilo-Saharan group, which is spoken in Africa.
Jesse:
[12:23] Bantu languages are a famous group of languages there. Swahili would be an example of that. Afro-Asiatic languages, Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are a part of that, as well as what's spoken in Ethiopia and Amharic. You have the, sorry, that was the Niger, that was the.
Jesse:
[12:47] Um that was afro-asiatic i think i said nilo saharic saharan um had bantu that would be wrong that would be the niger congo languages i'm not sure if i i said that correctly but anyways there's also nilo saharic it's another group um there's an interesting couple interesting ones like the papuan languages are all they're just one group okay they're not related as far as we know not related to anything else many of the language families of those 120 or 150 are north american American and South American language families. So when you guys get a chance to go to South America, interview a linguist down there and see what that's all about. But most linguists would say that a lot of those language families aren't related actually to one like great grandmother, that they all are separate somehow, which raises a lot of interesting questions. But the biggest issue behind that is that we can only go so far back with linguistics. So we can maybe only go back about 10,000 years in our reconstructions. After that, things become very fuzzy because we just can't prove anything. There's nothing to really get to proving that. So those are some of the major ones. Yeah, I don't know if you have any other questions about that.
Keller:
[14:05] Within that are there different ways to think about those classifications like for the indo-european i think most people most of our audience list generally understands what those languages look and sound like and then for like the mandarin that's tonal are there other like classifications within that are like identifiers identifiers for languages yeah.
Jesse:
[14:24] So there's typological identification so i just gave what's called a historical or a genetic classification i should be careful with the word genetic. We use the word genetic in linguistics a little differently than in biology. When we talk about genetics, we're not talking about that this is some language is somehow in people's genes and passed on from one generation to the next. If a kid is born in China, but their parents are some Caucasian, originally Caucasian people, they will end up speaking Chinese if they're interacting with Chinese people. So it's not, I'm not saying that is passed on that way. But we talk about genetics in terms of the actual language forms.
Jesse:
[15:03] If the forms show what we would call cognacy, so they have enough similarities that they can be, that we can develop correspondences between several different words, and several different sound patterns, several different structures of the language, then you can talk about genetics. But you can also talk about language relatedness in terms of typology. So, you could talk about, well, what are all the tone languages in the world? And let's look at all of the languages that have tone. Or what are all the languages in the world that have some sort of gender marking? Like in the, you know, Spanish with male-female gender marking or in Russian with male-female gender marking. Or let's say we're going to look at complementation in languages of the world or relative clauses.
Jesse:
[15:53] What languages have that? So, you can classify languages in a lot of different ways based on kind of these general patterns that you find in the languages as well.
Brent:
[16:02] Would gender marking be like the Indo-European? Is that like specific?
Jesse:
[16:07] It's a very common one in Indo-European languages. It's not necessarily exclusive.
Brent:
[16:13] Though.
Jesse:
[16:13] There are languages spoken in different parts of the world that also have some sort of like gender marking. And actually, gender marking in general is what we would call as a kind of noun classification. So in Bantu languages, not only do they mark the gender, but they have these other classifiers if things are long or if things are short, they might have a classification marker for that.
Brent:
[16:38] Will that be similar to like different measure words in Chinese?
Jesse:
[16:41] Yes, and that's also very good, yeah. So in Chinese, we have a whole stack of things called measure words. Books you have a certain measure word for that and and some of the categories get a little bit blurred you know between uh what what should go in this uh this category yeah.
Keller:
[17:00] How can a deeper study into linguistics help people learn a language because i think for most people especially people in america when they learn a language they're more learning vocab focused for conversation and they're not really looking at the phonetics of the language or the the more nitty-gritty breakdown down? Have you seen any benefit in your own life after studying linguistics, learning languages after that?
Jesse:
[17:23] Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things is it kind of, it's not that to learn languages you have to be a linguist, but it's helpful to have some of these categories because it kind of, it makes the languages less exotic in a way. You have a way of basically having categories that you can put different parts of the language into, which could be very helpful. So I found like for learning Chinese, before I learned Chinese, I didn't realize that there was no voicing distinction in initial consonants in the language, that the only distinction is made is between aspiration and unvoiced sounds. So what that means is our larynx makes, when we're speaking, our larynx can tighten and the folds, the vocal folds can tighten and when that tightens and air goes through those folds it makes just like a drum or you know guitar string it's gonna make a voiced sound. So the difference between like ba and, And so, that's hard to hear the differences in that voicing. But Chinese actually doesn't have that.
Brent:
[18:43] Except for nasals.
Jesse:
[18:44] So, nasal sounds like na or ma, those are going to be voiced, but the other consonants that come before the vowel are not voiced. So, the main distinction there is an aspiration, which is a puff of air that comes. So, the difference between like ta and da. And so, yeah, so that was an interesting kind of insight that actually maybe it didn't make me that much better of a Chinese speaker. But I think it improved maybe just the way I sounded, that it was more acceptable. The sound that I was producing was more acceptable to Chinese speakers. After that. So, yeah, I think there's also other ways that you can use linguistics. The more you know about these different categories, I feel like the more you can really master the language. Again, you don't have to do serious research on the language. I think the idea would be just use what linguists have produced. Hopefully, they can produce it in a way, and we've been trying to produce things in a way That can also be accessible to the public. And you can use those things to basically help you to master the language.
Brent:
[20:03] And then could you really speak a bit about how understanding the language helps you better understand the people and the culture?
Jesse:
[20:10] Sure. I think, for example, well, I'll just give one example from the style language. When we first started studying the style language, I say we because there was some other, colleagues of mine that were doing some description also of the language, we noticed that there's these prefixes that occur, and actually they occur in all jaronic languages. There's five of them. There's re, which means up. There's no, which means down. And then there was ge and re, and we couldn't figure out what ge and re were. And so, they're directional prefixes, orientational prefixes we knew they had something to do with motion or orientation and they go before the verb and we were studying this for a long time we had a lot of different hypotheses but it wasn't until we actually went to the language area and started to interact with people in their own environment not in Chengdu not somewhere else but in their own environment that we noticed that the way that the, um, the rivers, uh, run in, in the, um.
Jesse:
[21:18] In the Stau area, go from the northwest to the southeast. And then there's another river that goes from the southeast to the northwest. And they both kind of come together and there's a confluence of these rivers and then they flow to the south. And those two rivers actually comprise one valley. So, we originally thought, okay, so, this Ge must mean that up the river.
Jesse:
[21:50] But then we were like, but then that would go opposite to the river that's coming down, you know, because you have these two rivers that are coming together. So, that doesn't make sense. And Ge must be downriver, but then it's going to also go against the river once you get far enough down the valley. So, we started thinking about it, and then we're like, oh, it's just the valley itself, that it's actually the north, one is northwest and one is southeast. And you can just see that by looking at the valley. And that's basically our best hypothesis right now. Those prefixes also have other functions as well.
Jesse:
[22:25] But I won't go into the details of that. But that is something to do, I guess, not so much with just the culture, but also just knowing the geography of where the people are um there's a lot of other things um for example the kinds of foods that they eat um it's it's really hard to um i guess talk much about you know um verbs about eating without knowing something about like the foods that they eat and like why why would they have why would they classify different verbs for that in the way that they do or, you know, the way that they organize their household, that that has something also to do with the different vocabulary that they choose. So, yeah, anyways.
Keller:
[23:12] Could you go a little bit further into detail on the dining stuff too? Because I think you've published a whole paper on the dining etiquette, right?
Jesse:
[23:19] Yes, yeah. And that was a fun paper to do, Tibetan Dining Etiquette. And actually, what i looked at there was there was this video post that one of the speakers of the language, posted and this doesn't happen very often so because stow is a minority language and not only a minority language but a minority of a minority language so that, most people know about tibetan that's a big well-known um language in china.
Jesse:
[23:45] But it is still classified as a minority language. Stout doesn't even get classification. So when I saw this post, I immediately was interested because I was like, okay, that's cool that people are actually using their own language to post stuff online.
Jesse:
[24:01] And as I started studying this, I was like, oh, this is all about like how you should eat, like how it's proper, how you should sit at the table, how you shouldn't smack with your mouth, that sort of thing. But there was a certain section that I couldn't understand, and that whole section was actually in Tibetan, not just in style, but in this Tibetan, which is another language. And I realized that this was an interesting phenomena of what we call code mixing, where you take two different languages and you can use them in the same sentence or in the same conversation and going back and forth. And so this speaker was doing this kind of code mixing, but he was appealing to an old Tibetan scripture that talks about manners and how you should behave at a dinner table and that sort of thing. So I thought this was interesting. I thought it also could show something about how Stow speakers would read a Tibetan script. And so this kind of showed some of the sound changes that have happened in the language, how words are borrowed into the language, that sort of thing. So, I think it would be really hard to make any observations on those types of things if I wasn't also interested in the culture. If I was only interested in just the sentences, I wouldn't really be able to interact with this kind of text or this post that was put online.
Brent:
[25:25] Yeah. And so, where does like style fall in the breakdown of the senior Tibetan languages?
Jesse:
[25:32] Oh, yes. That's a good question, but I just need a little bit of water.
Brent:
[25:35] Yeah, no worries. Okay. And then also to add on to that like what is the sinu stand for oh.
Jesse:
[25:47] Sino okay yeah yeah yeah sino is uh is a weird word but it means uh chinese basically um synodic sino i think it was borrowed into french first and so that somehow we got that into english that way but basically it's saying um chinese and tibetan but it encompasses sino tibetan encompasses much more than that. So, it's a huge language family.
Jesse:
[26:13] So, if you break it down, you have the Sinitic languages, so the more like the Chinese, so you have a number of Chinese languages, five major ones like Cantonese and Mandarin, and then you have the Tibetan languages, and we can say those are actually languages, not just one language, because they don't understand each other. If you take a Tibetan from Sichuan, in certain parts of Sichuan, they don't automatically understand the person in Lhasa unless they've had contact for a while. And you have languages in northern India, what are often called the Saul languages. There's also Karanti. The Kukichin languages, which are more in Bangladesh and Burma or Myanmar. You have Karenic languages, which are also spoken in Thailand and Myanmar. Lolo Burmese, which is the Yi languages. There's a bunch of those spoken in like Yunnan province and southern China. And then you have like Jiarongic languages or the Changic languages. These are all still in progress in terms of how they're all related to each other. So, there's many different theories. But Stao belongs to the Jiarongic group and more specifically to West Jiarongic.
Brent:
[27:30] And then under that.
Jesse:
[27:31] There's a group of languages called Horpa. And so, that's how it fits in. And Jiarong is just a really fascinating group of languages because it has very rich morphology. So in Chinese, as you've probably studied a little bit of Chinese, you know that there's basically no morphology. You have a syllable and you have, you know, sometimes two syllables, maybe at the most three or four. Usually those are some sort of word for a country that's, you know, it's a borrowing.
Brent:
[28:01] Yeah.
Jesse:
[28:01] Like putao ya which is uh you know three syllables and means portugal but it's a compound of putao which is grape and ya which is teeth so it becomes one um one just a bunch of sounds to sound something like portugal so um chinese doesn't have uh tense you know you you can say i i eat um and it means i ate yesterday i i'm eating today and i'm eating tomorrow well gyroic languages have a very rich morphology so that you can put prefixes, you can put suffixes, it can tell you something about the time that the verb, the action took place. It can tell you something about who said the sentence in terms of, that's called evidentiality. So it's like giving you a testimony that I heard about this, or actually I saw this. You can make that distinction on the verb. You can also have verb agreement, just like a lot of Indo-European languages as well, which is different. Chinese doesn't have verb agreement. Tibetan doesn't actually have verb agreement. So this is one kind of unique feature of the Jaronic languages.
Jesse:
[29:12] So that's all saying that it's very possible that Jaronic has preserved these features. Instead of innovating them, making them into new features, these are all, or most of them, are old features that go back to the very beginning some 7,000 years ago for Sino-Tibetan.
Jesse:
[29:32] So that's a theory at least, one of our theories that we have.
Keller:
[29:36] So, why did you decide to focus on Sino-Tibetan languages and in particular, Jironic languages?
Jesse:
[29:40] Yeah, well, it's kind of by chance. I mean, as a lot of these things are, I became, as I said, I became interested in China and won this scholarship to come here. And it happens to be that, you know, I was looking through, I shouldn't say it's completely by chance, because I was looking for interesting places that were relatively under-researched. So, even though I I didn't know much about linguistics. I was fascinated with why are there so many different groups of people in China besides just Chinese people? Like, how did that happen? You know, and I think that led me to like reading National Geographic articles that had some of these language groups. And as I started to delve into, you know, the sources for this, I found out about the Jiarongic languages and how little research had actually been done at that time, about 20 years ago on these languages and so i started you know asking different people about languages and as i grew an interest in linguistics i also grew an interest in these languages,
Jesse:
[30:44] kind of simultaneously could.
Keller:
[30:46] You give us a little bit more background on the diversity of the different like
Keller:
[30:49] types of groups that live in china.
Jesse:
[30:51] Sure so um, Yeah, some of the diversity includes languages like Chinese, which is monosyllabic, as I've said earlier, languages like Jiarongic, which are what we call agglutinating or polysyllabic. You have languages like Lolo Burmese that are also more monosyllabic, but also have different variation. You also have languages outside of Sino-Tibetan. So, Sino-Tibetan is one big group, but we have a hypothesis that early there were other groups in China, and some of those you can still see. So, there's the Austronesian languages, which you no longer see in China mainland, but you see it in China-Taiwan. So, you can see in some parts of Taiwan, there's some Austronesian languages, which are actually related to the Austronesian languages that are spoken. It's the largest family in terms of geographic distribution. So, Austronesian is spoken all the way from the Easter Islands, New Guinea, well, there are some Austronesian languages on Papua New Guinea, not many, but in New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii.
Jesse:
[32:14] All the way to Madagascar. So there's uh there's the malagasy language is actually an austronesian language that has an ancestor that goes all the way back to china that's crazy through and it came through um borneo so because if you look at the malagasy language and you look at the language of borneo there's just too many similarities to uh to actually um.
Jesse:
[32:43] To say it's just a complete coincidence yeah it must have come from from the area so those are the polynesian languages um so and then you have um thai kadai or kra dai languages which are now mostly spoken in thailand you know thai is a famous one but then there's also um the chuang languages in china so those are actually related to thai you have also um some others like like the Hmong Mien languages, Monk Mer as well, a little bit. And so, all these different groups are quite different from each other. But there's been some convergence. You can see that. So, tone being one of them, there seems to be a spread somehow of tone throughout the languages in the region. A lot of borrowed words. You can see words that are very similar to each other. I should have mentioned earlier, too, when we were talking about language families, you have some very interesting things like Japanese, not spoken in China, but it's, it really, we can't connect it to any other language groups in the world. It's like its own language family. And it, I mean, people have made hypotheses about all of these as being connected to each other somehow, you know, going back to the Tower of Babel. But we can't really be sure about that in terms of just linguistics, pure linguistics.
Brent:
[34:11] Are some of the characters very similar or the same in Japanese and Chinese?
Jesse:
[34:15] Yes. And the reason for that is because Japanese borrowed what they call now kanji, which was the original writing system of the Japanese language. So after they borrowed, so for years and years, I guess there was no writing system. And then they borrowed this in, I think, somewhere in the Tang Dynasty, I believe, which would have been the 7th or 8th centuries A.D. And later from that developed, you know, the other two writing systems, Katakana and Hiragana. And I can't remember which one. One of them is used just for borrowings, like basically loan words. And then the other one is used for just everyday writing. writing, but they still use all three. So, you'll see that, like, I was in Japan and I noticed, oh, there's the woman's restroom and there's the man's, the men's restroom. And, you know, because they use the Chinese characters for that.
Brent:
[35:13] Oh, okay, yeah. So, but linguistically, you can't really trace it back.
Jesse:
[35:19] Yeah, in terms of the actual, so, the way we classify languages as linguistics, as linguists, is based on... The um the sounds of the language the what's spoken the spoken language not just the sounds because sign languages are also involved um and just as important and uh so the really the structure of the language as it's being used um writing we see as a byproduct of that original structure um how.
Brent:
[35:46] Many sign languages are there.
Jesse:
[35:47] Oh that i don't know i'm not a sign language expert but there are far more than you might imagine. It's surprising. So the famous one is ASL, American Sign Language, but there's a Japanese Sign Language. In China, there's several different sign languages. And all of these sign languages emerged quite naturally as groups of deaf people got together and basically figured out ways of communication. Which so that makes sense that there would be different types certainly of languages that way and.
Brent:
[36:23] Then getting back to like your research around like the style language how did you find that language specifically.
Jesse:
[36:30] Yeah well that actually has an interesting story um i had um been traveling so my earlier research was in language intelligibility i noticed you had a question there that we can get to later. And I was trying to figure out the differences between the languages just based on what people understood of each other. And so I'd go around and play recordings for people and they would try to listen and try to say they understood this much or what have you. And then I'd make divisions based on that. As I was doing that, I came across this Dao language.
Jesse:
[37:08] And I had an experience where I was with a friend and we were welcomed by just a very nice man who, you know, he also wanted us to stay at his guest house. It was part of his home was his guest house. So we stayed there, but he was just really welcoming. And I found their houses quite different than one of the things, different than other Jiarongic houses. He had this really beautiful big house and beautiful gardens. They seemed to really care about their flowers. And there was something that just seemed kind of magical about them to me. And I don't know, I can't fully explain it.
Jesse:
[37:49] And we had a really good conversation and we kept in touch. I'm still friends with this guy, And, I don't know, there's something specific that I can't really explain that just drew me to these people and their language. And I think part of it, too, was the adventure of nobody had really studied this language before. So, since then, actually, what's interesting is, not just because of myself, but other linguists, it's kind of a zeitgeist or something that has just come through. And now the Jairongic languages might be one of the most well-described groups of languages in Sino-Tibetan, whereas 20 years ago, it was one of the least described groups of languages. So, there was something, like, this was pioneering, this was new, this was adventurous, nobody's working on this, somebody was working on another couple of Jairongic languages, and I was like, well, I don't want to work on those, so I'm going to work on this one. And I would also have to say part of the magic too is just the structure of the language itself, that it had interesting features. I didn't want to work on Chinese or some synodic language where it didn't have rich verbal morphology. There was something about verbs that I enjoy, something about putting lots of different pieces onto a verb and trying to figure out the puzzle is interesting to me.
Jesse:
[39:11] I didn't want to work on a language in Indo-European that had already been well described so it had been a number a number of different things i think that really attracted me but it's hard to put it put it fully into words um yeah yeah how.
Keller:
[39:24] Would you describe the style language to a lay person like are there any languages from you would consider like the common languages that are sound similar for.
Jesse:
[39:33] Yeah similar yeah for sure i think like um the uh the russian language i think uh could be very similar uh to stow in some ways because of the consonant clusters So Stau is known for having rich consonants. There's 44 consonants in the language and eight vowels. So it has a large inventory of sounds. And that's similar to Russian. Russian doesn't have as large a range, consonant inventory, but it does combine, you know, a lot of consonants together, like for hello. So, you get these consonant cluster combinations. I would say the vowels are similar to French in that they're very pure, like they're not, at least the dialects that I've worked with, they're monophthongs. In other words, they're just a single vowel, not like two vowels put together, like English is notorious for that. I think in terms of structure, I find the whole verb agreement structure is similar to say like Spanish, maybe like French to some degree as well.
Brent:
[40:49] On that, like what is verb agreement?
Jesse:
[40:51] Yes. Okay. Verb agreement is whenever you have a different person. So, if it's first person, i if it's second person you or third person he she it um the verb will change based on that person so give an example from style if i was just to use the intransitive verb go and i say i go i would say na shang okay but if it's you who are it was going then i would say ni the shin shin so the shin.
Brent:
[41:22] It becomes from shang to shin. If he's going, then it's shi.
Jesse:
[41:26] So the vowel will change based on the person.
Brent:
[41:33] The conjugation?
Jesse:
[41:34] Yeah, it's a kind of conjugation pattern. But it's not the only conjugation pattern because there's also number involved too. So number includes if it's plural or if it's singular. and then also is it in the past tense, is it in the present or perfective or imperfective.
Brent:
[41:56] These kinds of things as well also go on to the vert to make that change.
Keller:
[42:01] Nick, could you give us some other examples, too? Do you have a favorite sentence or phrase that you learned?
Jesse:
[42:06] Okay, well, I mean, I have a few. I have actually, I, well, okay. So, if you want to say, where are you going? You say, nilorishen, nilorishen. If you want to say, like, have you had breakfast yet? Nizhgashazamanengi. and if you want to say goodbye you say gacha yeah and it's interesting in the in the language there's also a language culture thing if you are greeting somebody and this is common in many Sino-Tibetan languages languages all over Asia actually is to if you see a person you don't have a word usually just for hello or good afternoon or something like that like we would say but we have uh words about just or or sentences that ask you know what are you doing right now what are you doing right now and a common response would be.
Jesse:
[43:04] I'm going to play um that would be you know even if you're not or even if you're you're doing something serious you might just reply that way just to uh get kind of get the person off your back, so to speak. There might be other things you could ask, like you could ask, have you eaten yet, is a common one. You know, it's amanengi. Are you tired? Actually, a common one for the afternoon. So, in the morning, actually, there's a morning greeting that's interesting. It's neicha. And okay, so neicha is interesting because there's a lot that's going on with this greeting, ne-cha. When you're saying ne-cha, so the unconjugated verb is cha, which means comfortable, okay? Now, when it gets the ne in front of it, where it's actually ne, if the ne, it was just ne, ne-cha would mean comfortable. Is comfortable, kind of like it's comfortable. But by changing that from ne to ne, it's actually a question. Ne cha. Okay. Now the response is ne cha ne cha.
Jesse:
[44:12] So you say, so you respond by saying.
Brent:
[44:16] I'm comfortable. And are you comfortable? Ne cha ne cha.
Jesse:
[44:22] And then the response to that by the first speaker would be ne cha mo. And with the mo kind of being like a polite, like I'm finishing this now, we can move on. And it's interesting because that whole pattern, why are we saying comfortable? Why are we saying, are you comfortable in the morning? Because the full question is, moga ngure ne cha? Last night, was your bed comfortable? Which means, did you have a good sleep you know are you in other words but you don't think about that when you're saying when you're saying these sentences this is all become what we would call grammaticalized it's no longer salient in the the mind of the speaker of what you're actually doing you're just going through kind of a ritual um greeting so just like how are you doing like we don't necessarily sit down and think about oh well how am i doing am i depressed or am i really happy you know you you just respond and so that's a similar thing with these um this with style language that you you talk about um you use these things but they don't necessarily mean some you need some deep answers so like in the afternoon you would ask are you tired uh and the answer could be like you might be completely haggard completely you know you just you had enough that day but you would respond in a way like no i'm not i'm not tired um it's that sort of thing.
Brent:
[45:48] Those are great examples. A lot of fun. And, In the combining of different languages, how many languages will mostly Stao speakers speak?
Jesse:
[45:57] Yeah, that's a great question because really these days, and I mean in the 20th century all the way through until now in the 21st century, there's really no language groups that are completely isolated. So, Stao speakers speak Chinese. They also speak usually some form of Tibetan. And more and more, we see that the language for the young people is disappearing. So it's unfortunate. Now, there are still young people that speak this language. So if there's young people that still speak it now, and I've seen them speaking it with each other, even really youngsters like three, four years old, you know, that I could assume that they'll probably still be speaking it until their 80s. So that means the language will at least be around for another 80 years.
Jesse:
[46:44] So that's encouraging for us who are still working on this language and want to document it well. Um and but um you know that could be that those people will actually teach their kids the language it's possible so it could be around for another 160 years or so beyond that it's it's hard to say but most likely it won't be i mean it just seems like the trend around the world in terms of languages is that languages are disappearing which actually makes our job even more urgent as linguists that, you know, I think it's just like biodiversity, unless we document the biodiversity that exists now, I mean, how are we gonna be able to learn about that or study it in the future if there's no documentation on those things? And so part of linguistics, the goal of linguistics, I think, is to really preserve scientific data that can be then, you know, looked at in the future and may actually offer some insights into the human mind and what it means to be a human.
Keller:
[47:44] And for the research that you did with the style, were you doing the interviews with a mix of Mandarin and style? Like, how were you going about that with the language gap?
Jesse:
[47:53] Yeah, definitely. So, one of the benefits of multilingualism is that I could start at the very beginning by just using Chinese. And so, we had a common point.
Jesse:
[48:02] In the past, a lot of linguists had to go into areas like in Papua New Guinea where there wasn't a common language. And so, you'd kind of have to make gestures and use objects to learn the language. And but i did do some of that too because it's helpful sometimes to approach it almost from a completely monolingual point of view because you're not as biased um you get different results depending on what language you're kind of working with to study the language um and so that's that's an interesting thing because it just adds another layer of variability.
Jesse:
[48:34] Um and so i started off using mostly chinese and you know eliciting data getting like a word list so going through like 2,000 common words and writing them down. But later I would get texts and I would ask them to record some texts. I actually have a text here. I wanted to read some of it because I know you guys wanted to hear some more of the language. But I would record a text like this and then basically try to immerse myself by just listening to that text over and over again and trying to repeat it and even tell the story myself in my own words or exactly as as the speaker had done. And that gave me a lot of structure. Actually, that's a great recommendation, for people who are trying to learn another language is try memorizing big chunks of text. Because you can learn like a ton about the language without trying to memorize the grammatical rules. And so it becomes more intuitive that way. Or learn like your own life story, learn how to tell that in another language. So this is called the Trickster Rabbit.
Jesse:
[49:34] Chige ghanaa ga dungu sangaraa, vadaa maazaa ga duji sangaraa, chige dabde zei gwa vadaa maazaa gnei, luga dahi sangaraa, ti luna asnisni veke luda shidaa nguga, nguga unzu sangaraa.
Jesse:
[50:19] And I thought that's fun on a number of levels. One is, we were talking about how stout might be similar to other languages. Well, you have this, what we call a uvular fricative. So, you have this sound, and that's, I guess, everyone knows what your uvulum is, right? It's that little bit of flesh that hangs at the back of your throat.
Jesse:
[50:38] And if you allow some friction from your lungs to pass over that, you can make this kind of sound, kind of like you're gargling. And there's a voiced one and there's a voiceless one in stout. So you have a and you have a and that first word for a long ago is this word so you have this so in french you also have this uvular fricative so you know is so anytime you see a an r in a word for road who is um is you you use basically a very similar sound as that um and one of my favorite insults is in this story at the very end um the so this is about a rabbit and so the rabbit and a boy and their interaction. And there's this boy and it also involves his mom as well in terms of his mom tells him to go out to this field and collect barley every day. And he goes and he sees this rabbit every day at this field. And the rabbit keeps stealing the grain, keeps stealing the wheat and the barley that's in this field. And every day, the rabbit would go up on this rock, and on top of the rock, he would yell at the boy, go eat poop. So that's one of the words here, .
Jesse:
[51:58] Which means eat poop. So now you know an insult in the Stow language as well. It's interesting, there's something universal about fecal matter and insults that seems to be a human universal.
Keller:
[52:14] Is there anything else you want to highlight about the Stout language?
Jesse:
[52:18] Well, I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
Brent:
[52:24] Or about the Stout people?
Jesse:
[52:26] Oh, you know, one interesting thing is we have a hypothesis that they're related to an ancient group of people in a language that's no longer spoken, but left a writing system. Do you guys know what language that might be?
Jesse:
[52:46] Okay there's a language called tangut it's also called xixia so if you study chinese history there's a brief period in the 11th and 12th centuries right before the mongol invasion in fact they were wiped out by the mongolians there's a brief moment in history where there was a strong dynasty so it's about 200 years i mean to me that's significant period of time and this people were called the tanguts the xixia and they had they developed their own writing system and it's probably the most complex writing system ever invented so you guys should look it up sometime um you can see that it has some connection to chinese like they were trying to copy chinese but they decided to add like 15 more strokes to each character oh my god um so it's a linguist actually didn't know this existed like somehow this got lost to history uh it was buried in Inner Mongolia and the documents were buried in Inner Mongolia in the deserts as well as Ningxia and also in Gansu province, you probably know about Dunhuang, which is a famous archaeological discovery where many texts from ancient times were kept and collected in an ancient Buddhist library.
Jesse:
[54:01] And they found these texts and linguists in the early 20th century decided to start deciphering these. And as they deciphered them, they used a number of different methods, but they basically figured out what the sound systems were like, or the sound system was like for the language.
Jesse:
[54:16] And as we've done research comparing it with different, so we're trying to figure out, now, where does this fit in? Like, who do they actually, they're not Chinese, they're not Tibetan. And as we've looked at these languages in Sichuan, the Chang'e languages, and in particular, the Jiarong languages, linguists have started scratching their heads and saying, this looks very, very similar. And so our hypothesis now is that the Stao are actually related to this Tangut people.
Brent:
[54:39] The Tangut people probably started out somewhere in northern Sichuan, migrated into Ningxia and started their empire. And at that time.
Jesse:
[54:47] When those languages broke off, which could have been about 3,000 years ago, that the Stao language was also breaking off at that But you can see many features that are the same and aren't found in other branches of Sino-Tibetan.
Keller:
[55:06] Do you think we're coming to like a extinction point for a lot of languages because of globalization? Are there other causes that are, you know, making the younger generation less appealed to learn those new languages?
Jesse:
[55:17] Yeah, I mean, I think, like, it's interesting connection with Tangut because you think about, now, what about Tangut? So, say they never found the documents for Tangut, we wouldn't even know that language existed.
Jesse:
[55:29] So, it makes you think how much of this has actually gone on throughout history. So I would say, yes, the global trend with globalization does cause language distinction, but it's not globalization's fault. It's just a natural cause of human expansion, which started 70,000 years ago, right?
Jesse:
[55:48] And that happened. And so we think about species extinction. Well, you know, a lot of the species extinction began 70,000 years ago, like a lot of the large mammals were wiped out by human expansion across the globe. So I think languages inevitably get swallowed up in what happens with human expansion. Now, I'm not trying to make this the morally right thing that somehow, you know, this is so great that this has happened. I'm just kind of saying this is, in some ways, it's very unfortunate, you know, that it happens. But it's hard to imagine a scenario where you would have as much human expansion as we've had, maybe blame it on agriculture.
Jesse:
[56:37] But you would have as much human expansion as we've had without losing both biodiversity and cultural diversity. And, you know, there were probably many different types of hominid groups, many different types of, you know, human-like species that existed that might have had communication systems similar to the languages we have. We have no way of knowing that, like, if Neanderthals really did have some sort of language or not.
Jesse:
[57:08] And and so it it makes it very and very interesting thing like would it be possible given the brain structures you're a student of neurobiology so you know this more than i do but would it even be possible for a neanderthal brain to even learn a human language just like it seems very impossible for really a chimpanzee to to learn a human language so um yeah the i don't know if there's really other causes besides just human expansion and you know interaction that you know as we've our population has just grown um you can't keep humans in one spot they're going to, interact they're going to travel all over the world they're going to decide who they're going to marry and that's going to bring changes to language and culture yeah.
Keller:
[57:58] And then one more kind of question about the languages before we start to wrap up. Do you have any advice to researchers that are interested in studying linguistics and that will likely be spending a lot of time with rural communities on how to build relationships there and not just kind of come in as an outside researcher, as a foreign entity, but someone that's there to learn with them and provide something back to them?
Jesse:
[58:22] Yeah, that's great because really that's one of the reasons why I'm also in linguistics is because of the human aspect of it. Like, I find it more interesting than being in a lab. I find it an opportunity to learn about many different people. I could maybe say that my profession really is a full-time explorer and traveler, and I just kind of do linguistics on the side. And so meeting meeting new people is a huge part of it so just being you know trying to be a kind person trying to be somebody that's open to learning about new things and trying to be humble in terms of like maybe you don't always see the world the way that it is like maybe you see it from your own point of view but there might be other ways of looking at the world.
Jesse:
[59:14] That could be valid and could be challenging. And to be able to, yeah, just be friendly and interact with people on an everyday life scale. And then in terms of giving back, I think, you know, in linguistics, the fundamental thing, I think, for these communities that we're doing is we're providing a way that they will be known to the world and also, that they'll be known to their children and to their posterity. So, you know, I didn't have somebody that came and interviewed my grandmother before she died, and so I have some records of her, but I don't have, you know, that much. So, this is kind of an opportunity that we're giving to people to be able to, you know, remember their own people and to be able to look back on the past and and be able to say, hey, we had a story, you know, this is, we were like this in the past, and this is what we are like now, um, to kind of give, you know, meaning, bring, bring some meaning, um, I think to, to that, um, to the human experience. And, um.
Jesse:
[1:00:21] So I think they're contributing in the sense that they're contributing this amazing, rich data. Like, it's incredible. The way we talk with each other every day and we just take for granted is actually a very highly complex thing. It's a highly complex phenomena. And they're showing their little bit of the human experience and their little contribution is super valuable. And so, just expressing that to them, showing them how that's important. And then also being available to help with, you know, basic things. So, making, just being a friend. Like, I think that's the main thing, not so much like, you know, trying to do some sort of development per se, but saying, hey, you know, do you have some sort of needs? Is there something I can help out with? And being available that way. So, that's what I've tried to do in my work. I've also tried to encourage education in the language so that they can, some of the people from that language group could go on and do a degree in linguistics themselves and end up producing even better grammar of style than I could ever produce. And so just to be encouraging of that, like encouraging of the local people to, yeah, do some serious scientific research of their own language and culture. Yeah, I think that's about it. I don't know if there was something else.
Brent:
[1:01:43] No, we covered a lot of great things today, a lot of good cultural insights, a lot of good insights into the diversity of this region of the world. Is there anything else you want to add or help people? I think it's everything.
Jesse:
[1:01:55] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:01:56] I'm sure there's more.
Jesse:
[1:01:57] But I can't think of anything right now.
Brent:
[1:02:00] Well, perfect. Thank you for coming on today.
Jesse:
[1:02:02] Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Thank you for your time.