← The Jordan Harbinger Show
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- [00:00]
Ross Store Announcer
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- [00:32]
Jordan Harbinger
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Jason DeFillippo
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Jordan Harbinger
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Jason DeFillippo
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Jordan Harbinger
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Jason DeFillippo
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Jordan Harbinger
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Jordan Harbinger
Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger
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Danny Bate
show, it's pretty certain, based on the way that the image looks and also the name of the letter cop, that it's basically the letter Q. Started out as a kind of hieroglyphic monkey or baboon, and the capital letter Q has its tail to this day, which I love.
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Jordan Harbinger
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Jason DeFillippo
Our mission is to help you become
- [02:10]
Jordan Harbinger
a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. You even the occasional neuroscientist, drug trafficker, astronaut, or special operator. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our
- [02:28]
Jason DeFillippo
favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and
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Jordan Harbinger
negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything
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Jason DeFillippo
we do here on the show.
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Jordan Harbinger
Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show. The letter A may be an upside down ox head. The tail, on cue may be the last surviving piece of a 4,000-year-old drawing of a monkey. And W is called double U, looks like a double V and exists because generations of scribes just kept duct taping new sounds onto an Alphabet that was never actually designed for English. So the Alphabet is not a clean, logical system. It's more like civilization's junk drawer. Ancient Egyptian pictures, Greek modifications, Roman branding, Norman vandalism, and a few linguistic USB cables nobody dares throw away. Today, linguist Danny Bate explains what these 26 symbols really are, why English spelling is such a disaster, and why fixing it might actually make everything worse. This one is a great companion to
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Jason DeFillippo
the episode we did on accents a few weeks back. If you like this sort of nerdy language stuff, we've got your number again today here with this episode.
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Jordan Harbinger
So here we go with Danny Bate. All right, so what are we looking
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Jason DeFillippo
at every day when we look at the Alphabet?
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Jordan Harbinger
Because I guess learning it as an adult, you just fail to notice that
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Jason DeFillippo
these shapes are maybe anything but the Alphabet.
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Jordan Harbinger
Right?
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Jason DeFillippo
Because when you're learning it, when you're four years old, three years old, I don't know, you don't question any of this stuff.
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Jordan Harbinger
Is the Alphabet a language?
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Jason DeFillippo
Is it a technology?
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Jordan Harbinger
Is it a collection of pictures?
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Jason DeFillippo
Or just the wreckage of a bunch of other systems that have made it this far somehow?
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Danny Bate
Yeah, it's very nicely put. It's all of those things and none of them entirely as well. I think first and foremost, I can't call the Alphabet a language for one reason being it's shared between multiple languages. You and I use English. We read and write in English, but you go across to, I don't know, across the border into Mexico, where Spanish is the dominant language, same Alphabet. So quite quickly, we unpick this tapestry of writing and see the kind of technology that has been very successful and consequently has been spread among sometimes very different languages of the world.
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Jason DeFillippo
I remember learning a little bit about alphabets in general because when I went to Serbia, I had to learn Cyrillic, and I was like, why do they call it that? And, wow, some of these look like Greek characters. Oh, that's very obviously because of where it comes from.
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Jordan Harbinger
And then I thought, oh, okay, that's really cool. There's a lot of history here. For some reason, it never occurred to
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Jason DeFillippo
me that, what are we using the Latin Alphabet? Is that what we call it?
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Danny Bate
Latin? Yeah.
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Jason DeFillippo
It never really occurred to me to look into my own because I hadn't learned it fresh and at age 22, or however old I was when I started learning Serbian and Russian and stuff like that.
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Jordan Harbinger
So I just find this stuff fascinating. But why should other people who are
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Jason DeFillippo
not dorks like me. You. Sorry.
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Jordan Harbinger
Why should they care beyond winning a
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Jason DeFillippo
pub trivia quiz or something like that?
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Danny Bate
Well, I'm a very proud dork, so I'm very happy to fly the flag for dorks and dorkdom everywhere. But, yes, I get it. And firstly, let me put my cards on the table. You don't have to. You don't have to need this stuff. In fact, if the Alphabet occupied our minds more often, if we really had to think about it, wouldn't be a good technology. Wouldn't be good. The thing is, the Alphabet is a victim of its own success. It fits very easily and comfortably into our lives and our brains as well, and we wield it with great ease. I can't make the definitive case that everybody needs to go and study the full history of the Alphabet, all 4,000 years of it. No, leave that for dorks like me who like writing books about this stuff. But I would say that, firstly, it's a joy to reacquaint yourself with these symbols. Where do they come from? Perhaps also to make connections to other languages as you have already been doing yourself, Jordan. Because basically, the Alphabet that we know, as we know it is part of a kind of big family tree of scripts that you can. Among its branches, you can find Hebrew and Arabic writing there as well. So that's useful if you're learning other languages and branches, breaks down walls across the world to learn about these connections. But let's not go too far from home. Let's stick with English. I think it does English readers, writers and learners a great deal of help to realize that this system is not fixed. It's very human, it's very historical. And if there are quirks and oddities that we may struggle with. There's a reason for that and it's part of the history. So I think it can reassure English writers at home that to learn about where these symbols come from, I am
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Jason DeFillippo
getting way, way ahead of where I wanted to be right now. But I'm going to ask anyway, how come when I read something in German there'll be a letter that we don't use in the English Alphabet there's this thing that looks like a B, it's called an S set and it's essentially two S's. Or you'll be reading something, someone will
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Jordan Harbinger
be like, oh, there's this word in
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Jason DeFillippo
Icelandic and then they'll write it in
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Jordan Harbinger
Icelandic and it's all these letters you're familiar with and then some sort of
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Jason DeFillippo
weird B looking thing and you're like,
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Jordan Harbinger
so that's the Latin Alphabet with an
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Jason DeFillippo
asterisk because there's just this extra thing in there that you don't use.
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Jordan Harbinger
And Spanish has this too.
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Jason DeFillippo
Right. There'll be like occasional words, also French where there's two dots over this letter, the I or the E. And you're
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Jordan Harbinger
like, what is this nonsense?
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Jason DeFillippo
And it's like, ah, we don't really use that. It's in a few words that you see commonly in a bunch that you would never use.
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Jordan Harbinger
But English doesn't have that.
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Jason DeFillippo
So even the Latin Alphabet has like little asterisks next to it that's like,
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Jordan Harbinger
yeah, but it's not that everybody's using
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Jason DeFillippo
the same Latin characters. There's this random thing in here from Germanic languages or I don't know where they come from, but there's these other little symbols that we've just gotten rid of. In English, of course.
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Danny Bate
Yeah. The borders of the Latin Alphabet are kind of fuzzy.
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Jason DeFillippo
Yeah.
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Danny Bate
If you want to take it up another level, you could take it over something like Vietnamese, where Vietnamese has taken it via French influence has taken the Latin letters and seriously augmented them to be able to write down Vietnamese speech. You've exactly hit the nail on the head that we have a kind of definitive set of basic letters, unaugmented, unmodified letters. And these are the ones that basically the Romans would recognized one or two modifications that post date the days of Caesar and Cicero. Things like J they wouldn't have recognized. W they wouldn't have recognized as well. Things like Y and Z would have been on the kind of borders of acceptability for someone like Cicero. Because that's really a Greek letter, man. Really, we need that for Greek words. But nonetheless, there's a kind of core. And English, written English, by a weird kind of accident of history, has preserved that core fairly faithfully. That's not a kind of mark in its favour or something to the detriment of English. English has just decided not to modify them, whereas other languages of Europe absolutely have. Some of these marks occurred very organically. They're like additional kind of medieval marks. Perhaps when you want to abbreviate something, you add a mark above it. So abbreviating a double N to an N with a little line above it is where Spanish gets the enya letter from. It's kind of an original abbreviation. And then going further afield, you have the things like, as you very correctly say in Icelandic that says thorn looks like a p and a B combined, and ed looks like a curvy lowercase d with a line through it. Icelandic, basically, these ultimately at least, thorn comes from the world of runes. So arguably, it's not too surprising that the Icelanders and the Vikings and the Norse, they've taken this from runic writing, but actually those letters more immediately come from English. They got these letters from Britain, but the British and British writers and languages have dropped them. So basically, what am I getting at here? There's a core kind of basic version of the Alphabet that was really ruthlessly designed and pruned for Latin. And since then, languages that aren't Latin have had a free hand to just add to it.
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Jordan Harbinger
I heard that the reason a lot
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Jason DeFillippo
of our Latin letters have a bunch of straight lines and things like that is because essentially the only way to write things was to chip them into stone and put them on the top of a building or something like that back in the day. And so they just went, okay, we need some angular stuff that's really easy.
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Jordan Harbinger
And you see this even in other
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Jason DeFillippo
letters we don't use. There's a Polish city and I don't know how to pronounce this, but it's like Lodz or something. But the L has a line through
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Jordan Harbinger
it and it's always a straight line. If you notice that there's very rarely. Are there curvy little fancy things outside
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Jason DeFillippo
of cursive in the Latin Alphabet, there's just a lot of straight lines.
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Jordan Harbinger
Is that because they had to chip things into stone?
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Jason DeFillippo
And it doesn't work when you need to make a curve in stone. It's too hard.
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Danny Bate
I am very happy not to disappoint your pre Internet self. That's exactly how it is. So the Alphabet's really old. I should clarify, very importantly, the Romans didn't invent it. They got it from the Greeks, who got it from somebody else, who got it from somebody else. In the kind of big game of pass the parcel. Actually, pass the parcel is not really right to say because it didn't go anywhere. The Greeks still use it to this day. But absolutely, the letters, when they arrive in ancient Italy, when Rome is a nobody, Rome has yet to emerge. It's just a collection of villages beside the River Tiber, round about the year, let's say 700 BC. The letters are very angular, they're very joined up, they're very limited in space. And what we definitely see when the Alphabet lands in the hands of the Romans and the Romans are able to shake off other powers in the region and really establish themselves, they establish their Alphabet as well. We get what are straightforwardly called square capitals. They are the capital letters that we would recognise today. And they're spacious and curvaceous and they're absolutely designed for being written into grand public inscriptions. It looks like all caps to us today. I should stress that the Romans aren't shouting at each other. There are no lowercase letters yet at this point, it's all capital letters. That came later, very subtly, very gradually. But I think, safe to say the Romans just would not have recognized the difference between lower and uppercase letters. They're all the same letters, but crucially, they're being used in different formats. So whereas you might use your very spacious, grand square capitals for something like the Arch of Constantine beside the Colosseum. Huge thing. Big public inscription, needs to be read over a long distance to show off how generous the emperor is and how victorious, usually. But in private correspondence, in little letters, to be read between, I don't know, two, three people, you get more bunched up letters that are simpler, more joined up, more fluid, Cursive, in a word. And it's from these that the lowercase letters will eventually emerge. But, yeah, I think your intuition did you credit, because the medium of writing is going to affect the letters, not just what they're being used for, but what they're being written on and who they're being written for.
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Jordan Harbinger
So that makes sense.
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Jason DeFillippo
And I was thinking about this the other day, because my kids are learning lowercase uppercase letters, right? They're in kindergarten and first going into first grade or preschool, and they're learning some of this in Pre K. And
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Jordan Harbinger
I think it was my mom.
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Jason DeFillippo
Sorry, mom. She listens to every episode, but her and her friends on Facebook Were like,
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Jordan Harbinger
kids can't even do cursive anymore.
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Jason DeFillippo
It's a shame. What are they learning?
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Jordan Harbinger
And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, this from the people who took 20 minutes to write this complaint on Facebook
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Jason DeFillippo
because they type with one finger and they have to look at the keyboard.
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Jordan Harbinger
And I was thinking to myself, I should reply to this, but I don't want to start a fight with my
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Jason DeFillippo
mom's 80 year old friends.
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Jordan Harbinger
But the thing is, we don't use cursive because when is the last time you wrote something on paper?
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Jason DeFillippo
And you're like, gosh, taking my pencil
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Jordan Harbinger
up off of the paper for each letter. It wastes so much time. I think I wrote a post it
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Jason DeFillippo
note the other day to remind myself not to eat before a blood test. And I had to write fast and put it on the refrigerator so I don't slam a protein shake half asleep at 7 o' clock in the morning.
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Jordan Harbinger
And I printed it. I didn't write cursive. I didn't write flowery language. I can afford to spend the extra
- [14:04]
Jason DeFillippo
half a second printing it instead of writing it in cursive.
- [14:07]
AI Psychosis Expert
And.
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Jordan Harbinger
And I realized I don't use cursive anymore. And the reason they don't teach it anymore is because kids aren't really using pencils to write stuff that much anymore. Sure, in school they do because they make errors, but adults, we type everything. In fact, like I said, the complaint was on Facebook where you cannot use cursive. So to your point, if you're no longer like, oh gosh, I gotta figure
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Jason DeFillippo
out a way to connect all these letters without taking my pen off the
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Jordan Harbinger
paper, then you need cursive.
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Jason DeFillippo
But if you're not doing that, then
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Jordan Harbinger
you literally don't even need that whole
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Jason DeFillippo
set of letters that we spent all this time learning. And it's funny because I know cursive in English and I know cursive in Cyrillic and I was showing some friends from Russia that I could still write in cursive Cyrillic and one of the
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Jordan Harbinger
younger guys was like, I can't read that.
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Jason DeFillippo
I haven't seen that for like 20 years.
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Jordan Harbinger
Wow, how do you know how to do it? Was like, I might as well have been writing in biblical Hebrew for this guy. He was blown away that I could do this. And I realized, wow, they don't bother
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Jason DeFillippo
with this either because why would you? You're using the Internet, you're on your iPad or whatever. So, yeah, you're right.
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Jordan Harbinger
I'm wondering where else this is going to show up.
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Jason DeFillippo
Like when we stop typing altogether and we're just dictating our letters. Going to change again.
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Danny Bate
Wow, great question. I suppose, ultimately, if everything is then taken back into the medium of speech. If we speak, we dictate, this is encoded into writing, sent to somebody else and that thing. Then speech speaks back to our recipient. Then we weirdly come full circle. We've come back to a time where there's only speech which was. Which is historically or pre. Historically, that's been the norm for humans. Is just speech for people who of course, can indeed speak and hear.
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Jordan Harbinger
In a hundred years, people will be like, can you believe my grandpa knew the Alphabet just by heart? Didn't have to look at a reference or anything, just knew it could write it with his hand. He knew different types of letters. And people are like, wow, those old
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Jason DeFillippo
people really had it. They had some crazy skills because they're just dictating and everybody's talking. I don't know.
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Jordan Harbinger
That seems like a step backwards still.
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Danny Bate
Yeah, it could happen. But of course, it's always messy. I make a lot of predictions in my job as a kind of writer of nonfiction. As soon as I make one, I feel like it's not going to happen. It's not going to come true by the act of saying it. But nonetheless, I would say that, yeah, it may well retreat. That perhaps with the technology. So long as the technology is there, that's always a big factor. Is it actually available? Is it all working? Is the power on that sort of thing that, yeah, writing could retreat because the technology allows it to be. To be speech only. I would only say that in general, we humans, it's not a burden. We like writing. We like reading in general. It does come very naturally to us, even though I think, historically speaking, and also personally, in our personal development, in terms of that writing does follow. It postdates speech. We speak first as a species and also as individuals. So nonetheless, what am I getting at? There is really that I think writing will stick around. It could become some sort of prestige activity.
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Jason DeFillippo
Like being a scribe.
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Danny Bate
Yeah, exactly. In the same way that cursive is getting by on outdated prestige. Like, it's not my place to define good or bad or usefulness in writing. It's my place just to describe what these uses could be. And cursive, arguably, it no longer is immediately a practical way of writing, but I think it's kind of coasting on former glory in that it's very much a product of, like, the 19th century. Everybody's writing letters. You want your letter to look as beautiful as possible. And so the system gets set up. That is a valid use. But how much that is a use for us today is fading away. And wow, all of writing in general, that's. I've contemplated weirder things in this job.
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Jordan Harbinger
I guess it would have to go
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Jason DeFillippo
to sort of a sci fi level, right? Because I'm thinking, let's say in 100 years we're all hooked up to the equivalent of neuralink. Unless you're born in a rural developing country, you don't have it, right. But everybody pretty much gets this. It's how you're productive and how you connect to the modern world. It would be like not having running water, let's say, or electricity. It would be the equivalent of that. If you don't have one of these at that point, there's no books that you're reading.
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Jordan Harbinger
Why would you do that?
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Jason DeFillippo
When you can download all of the knowledge into your neuralink and it encodes in a specific way in your brain, why would you bother doing anything like that? And why would you bother reading anything if you can do that? Why would you bother writing anything? If you can just have your brain encode something in neuralink and upload it to the database of knowledge and you go, hey, look, I figured out a better way to irrigate raspberries. And it's now in a. Whatever file on the. Whatever the equivalent of the Internet is.
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Jordan Harbinger
No one has to read that. No one has to be able to
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Jason DeFillippo
then turn around and articulate that.
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Jordan Harbinger
You're just passing this along non verbally
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Jason DeFillippo
using your brain Internet thing.
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Jordan Harbinger
And this sounds ridiculous and totally sci
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Jason DeFillippo
fi a million years from now, but it kind of isn't right because we already have neuralink. It's just brains are rejecting it and it requires brain surgery, which is not something people do casually.
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Jordan Harbinger
That is all going to change.
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Danny Bate
Yes, absolutely. And that sense of it. I like this thought experiment or hypothetical situation because it does capture a way in which new technology will seem odd and strange and take some getting used to. I can't comment on current technology. Nobody wants that kind of comment from me. What I could maybe hesitantly say is that once upon a time, writing as a rule, as a new activity, could have been strange and a little bit disquieting for people like this information, which is so important to me that I store and I speak and I control. You're taking it out of my mind and leaving it in some other medium. And that medium will outlive my sentence, it'll outlive maybe my current Day and age, it might outlive me altogether. Some of our findings, of course, are impossibly old. They far outlived the people who originally wrote them. And speculating fruitlessly, I can't prove this, but it might have been quite odd to begin with. And we do see that perhaps closer in time, moving out of, say, antiquity of Europe and the Middle east and Africa and things like that, we do see cultures encountering writing afresh, closer to our modern day and age and thinking and being pretty weirded out by it, Thinking this is quite an odd thing. And why do you do this?
- [20:08]
Jordan Harbinger
Wasn't it Socrates or somebody along those
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Jason DeFillippo
lines that said, oh, writing this is gonna be bad for everybody because you're not gonna have the knowledge in your brain so readily available if it's just in a book and you can forget about it. I could be butchering this, but do you know what I'm talking about? People back in ancient Greece were complaining that books were just gonna ruin the youth.
- [20:29]
Danny Bate
Sure, they were always complaining that something or other was going to ruin the youth. Usually Socrates. To be honest, that don't work out too well for him. But, yeah, there are these reactions. There are cultures or bards, for example, incredible people from Iron Age societies encountering writing and being like this is precious knowledge that we store in our brains. That's a little bit hazy what's actually going on as, say, the Gauls are meeting the Alphabet and Roman letters. But much closer to our day and age, you have an extraordinarily impressive empire, which is the Incan empire in South America. No writing system. It's almost stretching the length of South America. And the information storage system they had involved strings and knots, and it's all quite complicated, but something that represents speech they didn't have. And they are clearly, from our Spanish sources, pretty bemused by these books and documents and things. And they were getting on fine without it. So to speculate about neuralink and speculate about the future, things that might seem very uncomfortable for us today, has historical precedents.
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Jordan Harbinger
English spelling isn't broken. It's been renovated by 40 different owners, none of whom checked the permits. Let's step outside while the inspector takes a bribe. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Bull and Branch. Summer sleep can get uncomfortable fast. You're flipping the pillow every 20 minutes, sticking one leg out from under the COVID as you're blasting the ac, until you wake up with a dry throat. But sometimes sleeping cooler is as simple as changing the sheets. Bolen branch makes lightweight, breathable bedding designed to help you stay cool throughout the night. And their sheets are made from 100% organic cotton and woven specifically for airflow so the cooling comes from the way the fabric is constructed, not synthetic fibers or chemical treatments. Their percale sheets have that crisp, cool hotel bed feeling the moment you climb in. They don't cling, they don't trap heat, and they get softer with every wash. We use Bol and Branch on every bed in our house and regular sheets just don't feel the same anymore.
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Jordan Harbinger
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- [23:50]
Jordan Harbinger
Chime.com disclosures if you like this episode of the show. I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment. Support our amazing sponsors and they make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the podcast are searchable and Clickable over at jordanharbinger.com deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email me jordanordanharbinger.com, i'm happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support
- [24:15]
Jason DeFillippo
those who support the show.
- [24:16]
Jordan Harbinger
Now back to Danny Bate.
- [24:19]
Jason DeFillippo
It does seem bizarre to me that an advanced civilization was like, I don't need to ever write anything down. I don't need to transmit something I'm going to say over a long distance without just sending somebody to do it for me. That just seems so bizarre to anybody in our day and age that you could possibly get along with doing this. Meanwhile, you have tens of thousands or whatever of square, or millions whatever of square miles of territory and it's like, nah, writing. Who needs it?
- [24:44]
Jordan Harbinger
Ancient Egypt, take us back 4,000 years ago, because hieroglyphics, this to me is bizarre. I always assumed that these were merely
- [24:54]
Jason DeFillippo
decorative and that they were ceremonial or poetic or something, but you didn't read them. But I learned later that they actually have sounds. It's basically just a really complicated Alphabet that took forever to etch in and colour.
- [25:06]
Danny Bate
Yeah, that's fair. Hieroglyphs back in the day of ancient Egypt existed on a kind of spectrum. So you absolutely had the hieroglyphs that were members of the system that were art, they were high art, they were fit for inscribing on the walls of the pharaoh's tomb and on pharaoh's monuments. And they are clearly meant to be beautiful, but nonetheless they do exist as part of a system. And on one end of a spectrum of writing down of language, and at the other end of that spectrum we have very humble kinds of hieroglyphs that are still really the same symbols. But the way that they're being used, the way that they're being written is intended for quick comprehension and easy scribbling. The first of these is called hieratic. Later this develops into something called demotic, which is like the last stage of developmental stage of hieroglyphs before it gives way to Greek letters and writing down Coptic. It's all writing down one particular spoken language, which is Egyptian. Very handily, we call it the Egyptian language. But the thing is, hieroglyphs are extremely old. Forget about those two Kind of developments that I mentioned in their basic system of looking like things, little pictograms. This is a system that goes back from our day and age, maybe 5,000 years, I think I hesitantly dated, to about 1,000 years before our Alphabet is born. As an offshoot, a very radical offshoot for all those thousand years beforehand, hieroglyphs are being used to transmit information in the Egyptian language. It's complicated, though. Some in this system, let's say by the year 2000 B.C. some are absolutely still representing objects and things, the things that they happen to look like, but through a kind of game of association, some of those symbols are now standing not for the object or for the word that that object is known by, but rather a sound or two sounds or three sounds in that word. And once you've got a symbol associated with a sound, you can use it for other words that contain that sound. And you can also use hieroglyphs as a sort of marker of category. You put a little figure of a man or a woman or a God next to the name of a man or woman or a God or something like that. These are called determinatives. And you get a system which absolutely in its highest, most elevated, most artistic form, it's very complicated, and it absolutely preserves the preserve of professionals to write this down. But lower down, in Egyptian society, absolutely, people are using the symbols and writing down speech.
- [27:43]
Jason DeFillippo
So you might have a crate of, I don't know, clay pots, and you're like, oh, okay, I gotta put a bird, a cat, a guy wearing a big hat and an ankh on here.
- [27:52]
Jordan Harbinger
This is gonna take a while.
- [27:54]
Jason DeFillippo
Let me get my intern to handle this.
- [27:55]
Jordan Harbinger
Because it seems like you have to
- [27:57]
Jason DeFillippo
have artistic talent to do that. Right. Whereas I don't need artistic talent to have pretty messy but still legible handwriting.
- [28:02]
Danny Bate
Exactly that. And that's what we see. I mentioned those sort of developments, the later developments. Hieratic, demotic. They are not artistic. I don't want to call them scribbles. They're still quite nice to read, but they're absolutely something much more recognizably. They're an Alphabet. They're an Alphabet of abstract symbols. They don't look like things, to be honest, by this point in time. They look like symbols which you know how to read. And, yeah, it's something that could spread through the population at large and did indeed spread through the population, but absolutely, the symbols that people be much more familiar with, you might lead that to your main scribe or one of many interns. It was a profession back in those days.
- [28:41]
Jason DeFillippo
Right. Writing and probably also reading most things that weren't super simple. Who invented hieroglyphics? Do we even know? Or is that just lost to the sands of time?
- [28:51]
Danny Bate
Oh, very nicely put.
- [28:53]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, the cool pun in there. No big deal.
- [28:54]
Danny Bate
I do appreciate that. Sands of time. Very nice, very appropriate. And of course, the earliest stuff comes from the sands of Egypt. Egypt is not just actually important, it is also important because its climate preserves lots of things for us, which is really helpful for doing the business of history and archaeology. I can't really put it any more clearly or precisely than the Egyptians, which is a bit disappointing.
- [29:17]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's a dead language too, Right? Because they speak Arabic there, last I checked.
- [29:21]
Danny Bate
Exactly. It's a dead language. Or perhaps you might say it's a. Here's a niche bit of jargon for you. It's a sacralized language that it's not commonly spoken. You will absolutely not hear it on the streets of Egypt. But the final form of the Egyptian language, which we call Coptic, which comes from Egyptos Coptic, it's a Copt. These are Egyptian Christians and they still use it as their language of religion, but they'll use it in, say, a church service, but they won't then turn to each other and speak Coptic. They'll probably speak Arabic instead.
- [29:51]
Jason DeFillippo
So it's the Latin of the Middle Eastern Christian Coptic Christians, I guess.
- [29:56]
Danny Bate
Yeah, the Latin of Egypt, if you like. Although I'm sure Egyptians would call Latin the Coptic of.
- [30:01]
Jason DeFillippo
That's fine. I'm just trying to give people something because most people are like, I've never heard of this, but I've heard of Coptic Christians maybe. Yeah. So it's just. It's like Chaldean.
- [30:09]
Jordan Harbinger
Do you know Chaldean? Does that ring any bells?
- [30:11]
Danny Bate
It absolutely rings the bell, yes.
- [30:13]
Jason DeFillippo
Most people don't know what this is, but I'm from Michigan, so I know what this is. And correct me if I'm wrong, but they're basically. They're Christian Iraqis that for some reason we just have a ton of them in Michigan. And they tend to run things like gyms and convenience stores and small businesses. Very successful, but they have their own language. I just can't remember if it's only used in church services also. And they speak Arabic. I actually don't know the answer to that, now that I think about it. Do you?
- [30:35]
Danny Bate
I do believe that is the case because Arabic is the default language or the lingua franca of Iraq. Maybe not in the northern regions where you Get Kurdish. But yeah, sure. I think it has retreated. It's been sacralized again.
- [30:48]
Jason DeFillippo
Sacralized? Yes.
- [30:49]
Jordan Harbinger
Okay, so a picture that comes from
- [30:51]
Jason DeFillippo
the word sacrament or something similar root of the word sacrament, I assume.
- [30:55]
Danny Bate
Absolutely.
- [30:55]
Jordan Harbinger
So I want to go back to
- [30:56]
Jason DeFillippo
the symbols having being like an object, but really we're using them for the sounds of the name of that object is an example of this. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. A picture of an ox stops meaning ox and starts meaning ah or something like that. Because you're just showing an ox, it doesn't mean there's an ox there. It just means I want the ah sound in whatever language. So I draw an ox on the wall.
- [31:19]
Danny Bate
That is the beginning of the Alphabet. That's the way it all gets started, to be honest. It's all about taking symbols and assigning them to sounds in a way that just wasn't done before. To be clear, this is part of hieroglyphs. I did mention already that a hieroglyph could stand for one sound, two sound, three sound, specifically a consonant sound. This I appreciate this little bit of unlearning you have to do. I'm talking about phonetics, the production of sounds. You can have consonant sounds and vowel sounds. And these are the basis for constant and vowel letters. Vowel sounds, uninterrupted airstream, very loud sounds, A, I, O. Consonant sounds tend to be quieter. They're restricting or impeding the airflow in more ways, like P and T stopping the airflow. And to begin with, in Egyptian writing, and also in the early Alphabet, it's all consonants. It was all about allocating a single consonant to a particular symbol in this new system for various reasons. One reason being that you could just do without the vowel symbols, so you just didn't need them. You knew what the words were from speech. Maybe your language actually had quite few vowel symbols, sorry, vowel sounds. And you could just do without them. This is the true. This is the case of Egyptian writing. It's absolutely true of the Alphabet's original inventors. And these are people again. Their identity is fairly mysterious, but we can know it linguistically, at least who they were. It's a group of people speaking a Semitic dialect. People may know Semitic, the word obviously a negative term, anti Semitic, but it also is used in Semitic to refer to a group of languages that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, great languages like those. And there's clearly way, way back, long before Arabic and Hebrew are fully a thing. There's a kind of dialect of Semitic being Spoken in ancient Egypt. And these are the people who get our Alphabet up and running. They are clearly embedded into Egyptian society. They are clearly getting along just fine as a population of immigrants, but nonetheless, in terms of writing, they want their own system. And they take existing Egyptian symbols, hieroglyphs that already exist in the medium of writing, but radically overhaul them, taking about 30 and pairing them up with a single consonant of their spoken language. So you give the example of the ox's head. The word for ox in their language starts with, like, a glottal stop in your larynx. It's an alp. That's the word. And now a picture of an alp is standing for the sound. And alp. This all sounds may sound very strange. This may sound like ancient and irrelevant prehistory, but you already know this word because this becomes the name of the new letter for that sound. They called it alp. The ancient Greeks, they receive this letter, they call it something like Alpine alpa, later Greek alpha. It's still there in Alphabet. You know, this ancient Semitic word for an ox and also a house Alphabet. It's a house. And when you have that radical redesign of hieroglyphs, one symbol for one Semitic consonant, hey, presto, we have an Alphabet.
- [34:24]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, I noticed that the Alphabet in Hebrew is called the Aleph Bet. And I meant to ask you about that, because that's clearly not a coincidence. It just means Absolutely. In Hebrew, it would be as strange
- [34:35]
Danny Bate
as us calling our Alphabet ab, or we might call it ABCD for longer. As you may know as well, in the cyritic world, you have the asbuka as buka. Two words, two names put together. Alphabet.
- [34:47]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, I forgot about that one, actually. And it's interesting that the. You mentioned before, you have this picture of the whole ox, or you have the whole cat, or you have the whole. I don't know, man. You have to get rid of the complexity of those, otherwise it's gonna be so tedious and cumbersome to use.
- [35:04]
Jordan Harbinger
Hebrew has a little bit of that too, right? Because if you write Hebrew really well, you don't have to use the little dots that go over all of the
- [35:11]
Jason DeFillippo
characters and that go in and under them, because you already know that it says bavakasha, which means please, or something like that, right? You don't know that. But if you don't know that and you're just learning it, you're in your, like, class in Israel or in your Hebrew school, Sunday school, whatever, without the
- [35:25]
Jordan Harbinger
dots, you're just looking at this word
- [35:26]
Jason DeFillippo
that you basically have to know what it is. It's like Chinese where you just, you have this symbol and if you don't know what it is, you can't pronounce it or say it.
- [35:33]
Jordan Harbinger
I assume Egyptian was the same way. Oh, crap.
- [35:36]
Jason DeFillippo
I've got man, ox, cat, ankh. I forget how you say that. And if you don't know the word, you're just out of luck.
- [35:41]
Danny Bate
Yeah, it's hard. And I've heard these kind of additional systems like the dots, the Hebrew Nikud, I've heard them lovingly referred to as the stabilizers or the training wheels of the script. And the thing is, when you have a script, a writing system, there are many in the world, but many belong to this family tree that our own Alphabet belongs to as well. Many of them don't encode all the sounds of the spoken word. They just don't. The sounds are missing, such as the vowels. And this system is absolutely viable. It completely works, but it relies on the writer and reader knowing a lot of the spoken words already. When you're born into this language, if you're an infamous and you're hearing a lot of Hebrew, you're hearing a lot of Arabic, you've got a massive heads up over, let's say, take myself 20 something year old native English speaker coming to Hebrew and Arabic afresh. I haven't heard that many words. That was going to be hard.
- [36:34]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, it's a huge pain. It almost sounds like the Alphabet is a compression technology. Since this is already a nerdy episode, I'm going to lean into it.
- [36:41]
Jordan Harbinger
The Alphabet is.
- [36:42]
Jason DeFillippo
It's like an MP3 file of writing.
- [36:45]
Jordan Harbinger
There's less rich, you lose some stuff, but some of the stuff you arguably
- [36:49]
Jason DeFillippo
can't really hear unless you're listening to High Fidelity.
- [36:52]
Jordan Harbinger
But it's so much easier to learn
- [36:53]
Jason DeFillippo
and reproduce and distribute and put on the Internet and move it around and carry it in a little pocket device.
- [36:58]
Jordan Harbinger
Look. Yes.
- [36:59]
Jason DeFillippo
The ox looks nicer. The ankh looks nicer. When it's got the colors in it. The bird and the guy.
- [37:04]
Jordan Harbinger
This looks great. I can't be fussing with that. I gotta put that on a hundred egg crates tomorrow. So what is the easiest, most basic version where this is still legible?
- [37:14]
Jason DeFillippo
That seems like what the Alphabet is.
- [37:16]
Danny Bate
I love that. Exactly. You're putting yourself directly into the heads of the people who are taking the parcel and passing it on. Let's kind of give the Alphabet a birth date, 1900 BC ish and Egypt as its birthplace. And in the subsequent centuries, as the Alphabet is leaving Egypt and being adopted by more and more people in what we know as the Middle east and eventually will make its way to Greece. We see exactly what you describe. In a few centuries, the symbols lose their complexity. The letter O to begin with is an eye. It's a pictographic human eye, and it has, like, eyelashes and it has the edges of the iris and has a pupil in the middle as well, because it stands for the first sound of the Semitic word for the eye, which is. The word is ayn. It begins with a sound that I can't replicate very well, a kind of.
- [38:10]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, it's like Arabic.
- [38:11]
Jason DeFillippo
I think Ayun is.
- [38:13]
Danny Bate
It's Arabic. Yeah. It's still there to this day. And this is the joy of the alphabetic history. You just meet words which are just regular Arabic and Hebrew words to this day. But very quickly we see that simplification taking place. If we wind the clock forward to, let's say, the year 1000 BC and we reach kind of landmark people in the history of the Alphabet, who are the Phoenicians based in Lebanon. Very impressive. Ancient civilization. Their version of this system, still the same system they've made. Not many modifications to it, but clearly within the space of around 900 years. This is an Alphabet as we would recognize it. The letters are abstract, they're brief to write. The old ox's head that will become our A has, by this point in time, just become three lines. It's very quick to write. I love that metaphor of a compression file, because that's exactly what it is. There are so many elements of the Alphabet where it's all about maximum communication with minimum effort.
- [39:14]
Jason DeFillippo
It seems like the Alphabet wins and travels around the world, or parts of the world anyway, because it throws away enough information that it's still really useful, but it's way faster. I mean, there's a reason that hieroglyphics exist in Egypt and we don't see them in Germany. Even in Greece, it's like, man, look,
- [39:32]
Jordan Harbinger
if we're going to tote this stuff
- [39:33]
Jason DeFillippo
around the world with merchant trade, which is why I assume it went to Greece and then spread out from there. We can't spend all of our time coloring in birds and whatnot.
- [39:44]
Danny Bate
No, exactly. Which may, emphasis on the may, explain its success as a script and its longevity as well, where it's triumphed and taken the place of other ancient writing systems. Massive proviso on that. Some of the writing systems it replaced are very impressive and clearly were very successful in their day. And Age, but ultimately have given way to this new family tree of writing that comes from that single source in Egypt, the big one. Hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs have basically faded away. They've now been replaced by the Arabic script, which is a member of this family tree, a distant cousin of the Latin script, but also say cuneiform. People who love the ancient world may be familiar with cuneiform. It's like wedges pressed into clay, Very sophisticated script.
- [40:32]
Jason DeFillippo
My son asked me about this because
- [40:34]
Jordan Harbinger
he's like, what was the first writing?
- [40:35]
Jason DeFillippo
And I had to look it up. I was like, I think it's sumer or something, but I forget what it was called.
- [40:40]
Jordan Harbinger
And yeah, I think we called it
- [40:41]
Jason DeFillippo
cuneiform, but you're right, cuneiform sounds very fancy.
- [40:45]
Jordan Harbinger
And yeah, it was like these little
- [40:47]
Jason DeFillippo
half moons of clay that they placed and pressed into things.
- [40:51]
Danny Bate
Right, exactly. Yeah. It's this alternative writing system. It has its origins in what is today Iraq and it is super successful. I really need to stress that, but I think its success and it's a utility for people back then over thousands of years. Well, actually more hundreds of years. I think it's 2000. It's dependent on experts, on a widespread group of people who know this system, who are very adept at the system. They're professional, they're probably paid to be the local scribe. You have a message for your brother or your sister in a far away land. You go to a local scribe, you tell him, probably him, the message, he writes it down, it gets sent off to a fellow scribe who can decipher it and relay the message. And if you have some sort of upset in your local kingdom and the scribal class is not being replenished, if this is becoming archaic, non self replicating knowledge, then your writing system is going to suffer. Whereas our Alphabet, what we call phonemic, it's based on the sounds of your language, which arguably everybody has much better access to. I would put money on it doing much better. And so far history has borne that out.
- [42:06]
Jordan Harbinger
AI may eventually translate everyone's personal spelling and dialect automatically. At last, humanity will communicate perfectly through software owned by three companies and trained on Reddit. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Factor. The question what are we having for dinner? It sounds minor until you had to answer it every day for years. And it's not just dinner. It's feeding yourself between meetings, making sure the kids have something decent and worrying about whether your elderly parents are eating well. That's where factor has been incredibly useful for our family. My elderly parents, they don't cook.
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Jason DeFillippo
I know, sorry, elderly.
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Jordan Harbinger
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Jordan Harbinger
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- [44:48]
Jordan Harbinger
a little inside baseball. Many people don't actually know when you use our promo code. It helps support the show. I've said that before, but we don't
- [44:54]
Jason DeFillippo
get a cut of the sale.
- [44:55]
Jordan Harbinger
It just lets the company know that people are hearing the ad and they are more likely to renew their ad campaigns with us. So if you're signing up, please use the code. Jordan. It's a win win. You get the discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now back to Danny Bate.
- [45:10]
Jason DeFillippo
I'm learning Chinese, right? And so I was curious how they came up with some of these characters.
- [45:14]
Jordan Harbinger
And there's traditional Chinese, which is super
- [45:16]
Jason DeFillippo
complicated graphics writing, and then there's simplified Chinese, where basically Mao and the communists were like, hey, man, we want a bunch of farmers to learn.
- [45:25]
Jordan Harbinger
We need tens of millions, hundreds of
- [45:28]
Jason DeFillippo
millions of people to learn this. We can't be adding all these extra lines in here. We gotta make this as fast as possible. So they simplified it. It's actually quite nice.
- [45:35]
Jordan Harbinger
But the old, really old Chinese that
- [45:39]
Jason DeFillippo
you see on, not even just classical Chinese, but even before that, it's very curvy and it's carved into wood or something like that.
- [45:46]
Jordan Harbinger
Some of those are pictographs.
- [45:47]
Jason DeFillippo
Right. So it's like hand. And it looks a little bit like a hand drawing at a basic level. You mentioned before that our Alphabet has some of that. So the letter A is an ox's head. Did I imagine you saying that? And that's not right.
- [45:59]
Danny Bate
Absolutely. To begin with, it has the same origin. Yeah. Which seems very intuitive, that our earliest ways of writing down language actually doesn't necessarily need to involve speech at all. We just write down the thing that looks like a thing in the world. This very kind of obvious or natural step for us humans to have taken, where we depict the thing itself on the wall of our cave or our tomb, whatever it happens to be. This is a very natural step to have taken. It does make it quite hard to talk about when writing actually first started. If you're just depicting stuff, firstly, from our perspective, is this communicative or is this artistic what you're doing here? Do we call those gorgeous cave paintings from Neolithic France, the ones with the hand paintings and the bison and things like that? Is this writing? Arguably not, but it's quite hard to say. And it is difficult when we have these ancient writing systems, not just Chinese or very early Hieroglyphs to talk about. Actually, when do we have writing up and running? Because very often it's just counting things. It's tallies of objects, it's images of the object itself. Arguably, we experts using that term loosely, we might prefer to call that proto writing or pre writing or something like that. We love throwing around the word proto. It's great.
- [47:19]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, it sounds complicated. You guys love that.
- [47:22]
Danny Bate
I'm fully guilty of this, but I just want to say that I do appreciate the mention of Chinese writing. This entirely separate tradition of writing has no connection to anything that I've mentioned so far. And it is kind of the counterexample or the objection to things that I've said. This phonemic system based on it comes out of Egypt. Super important. So many languages are written down by it today. I might make a claim it was always going to be successful because it writes down sounds. But here's Chinese writing where the phonetic component is secondary. It's about meaning and objects and things. So it's a clear counterexample. And I would hesitantly connect that to the success of China and to the success of the Chinese state in people buying into this alternative way of writing. But I'm speculating here.
- [48:08]
Jason DeFillippo
I think it had to be like that because you mentioned the phonetic element, and I'm not an expert here, but you can look at a Chinese character and if you don't know what it is, you can't sound it out. It's not possible. You can't look at it and go, oh, okay, this is a man symbol and this is a woman symbol. So it must sound like this. That's not how it works at all. In fact, if you take the man symbol and the woman symbol and you put them together, it's the symbol for good. So it just doesn't mean anything. And you can add like a fire to the bottom of something, ensure if it's cooking or heat, that's obvious. But you could add water to something and it just. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. Sometimes it's just that's what the symbol is. Maybe it did a thousand years ago. Maybe they called this something else and it was like that. But I don't know.
- [48:51]
Jordan Harbinger
So if I'm trying to see an
- [48:52]
Jason DeFillippo
ox head in a modern capital A, it seems like it should be upside down because the horns would be.
- [48:57]
Danny Bate
It is upside down.
- [48:58]
Jason DeFillippo
So the A that we use is actually upside down.
- [49:00]
Danny Bate
Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, by the time, as I said, fast forward a few centuries from when it is clearly an ox's Head. And we do have plenty of examples of evidence of this. But fast forwards of the Phoenicians or the Greeks, people have forgotten this. Or people, it doesn't matter to them that it was originally a thing, an object in the world. So actually the letters are very fluid. We see this. The way that the letters are placed on your instruments of writing, whatever it happens to be, the way that they're oriented, the way that they flow across the page. We get right to left to right. We even get this glorious direction of writing called boustropheden, where writing goes in one direction. Let's say left to right reaches the end of the line and then immediately drops down. Rather than going back to where it began, it drops down immediately and then goes in the opposite direction.
- [49:49]
Jordan Harbinger
Wait, so you write left to right, then right to left, then left to right, then right to left. That is such a pain.
- [49:54]
Danny Bate
Well, why not? One thing you save is your pen doesn't need to move as far back. You just drop down immediately.
- [49:59]
Jason DeFillippo
Oh, saving so much time. Yeah, I mean, okay, fine, I don't know.
- [50:02]
Jordan Harbinger
But then you have to know to switch directions.
- [50:04]
Jason DeFillippo
But then everybody just did. I don't know. Whatever. That's weird to me.
- [50:08]
Danny Bate
The dudes. Yeah, it's an alternative way, I suppose.
- [50:11]
Jason DeFillippo
We still have some stuff. Like again, in Chinese, they don't space the words out. So you just read a really long Chinese sentence. And if you don't know what the words are and where they begin and end, it could just be anything. But then again, that's the story with Chinese in general.
- [50:24]
Jordan Harbinger
And then they used to write it
- [50:25]
Jason DeFillippo
up and down, right, not left to right. I don't know when they changed that, but it was just like, hey, let's make this even more complicated by writing it up and down. But yeah, if you don't know where the words begin and end.
- [50:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Because a word might be one symbol, two symbols, three symbols, could even be like five.
- [50:38]
Jason DeFillippo
If you're talking about China Airlines. That's maybe four or five symbols, or even six.
- [50:43]
Grainger Announcer
Sure.
- [50:44]
Jason DeFillippo
You just have to know that that's a unit. That's what it means. Because if you don't. And when I read Chinese with my teacher, sometimes I mistake where the word ends and I'll say something else and she's like, oh, no, no, no, that word ends there and it's this. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's really obvious now that you mention it. Native speaker.
- [50:57]
Jordan Harbinger
So this kind of thing, it just all seems so arbitrary now. Most writing is left to right, including Chinese. Unless you're talking about what Arabic and Hebrew. Are those the only ones that go the other way?
- [51:09]
Danny Bate
Ooh, now you're testing me that there are other ones in the neighborhood. You have something like Syriac writing that's going the direction. Most of the scripts of India go from left to right. So that's another one. I'm just thinking off the top of my head. There's a lot of different writing systems in the world. But yeah, I think as a planet now we have more or less settled on left to right.
- [51:31]
Jordan Harbinger
I appreciate the right to left because
- [51:32]
Jason DeFillippo
I'm left handed and I spent my entire youth with pencil covering my entire hand and forearm. So I'm like, oh man, if Arabic were my native language, I just wouldn't have had this problem at all.
- [51:43]
Danny Bate
There you go.
- [51:44]
Jason DeFillippo
I guess nobody has to worry about that anymore because nobody's writing with a pencil.
- [51:47]
Jordan Harbinger
But man, how much of this origin
- [51:49]
Jason DeFillippo
story is firm evidence and how much is reconstruction? And we're just placing a really neat story over something that's not quite as cut and dry.
- [51:58]
Danny Bate
A very fair question, one that I am happy to answer. And it's never a question that I shy away from in my writing. In my book, for example, I very much invite the reader into this active debate. So my answer to your question would be it's a pretty solid story based on not much evidence.
- [52:17]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, you don't know who invented it. You don't know what they did, you don't know what their motivations were.
- [52:21]
Jason DeFillippo
And it's like, oh, this is a compelling narrative. Really easy for that to harden into a false certainty. Because it sounds good and is easy
- [52:28]
Danny Bate
to teach, of course. Yes.
- [52:30]
Jordan Harbinger
Not that you're doing that, but some people might.
- [52:31]
Danny Bate
No, thank you. I appreciate that. And it could be done. I would say, though, the people who are really at the coal face of this subject, though, they know full well how this is. It's a story in flux. And it's a matter of the best theory that we've got, but also a matter of the other theories just don't stack up. So let's say something outlandish. The Alphabet came from Mars. That is a theory. It's just not as good as the one that says the Alphabet came from ancient Egypt because you have a bunch of evidence that shows its slow development.
- [53:00]
Jordan Harbinger
Those poor ancient Egyptians, man, everybody's like, aliens built the pyramids. Aliens built the Alphabet. And they're like, guys, we are smart too. Give us some freaking credit here.
- [53:09]
Danny Bate
The Egyptians were extremely smart. So, yeah, I don't Buy into any of that.
- [53:14]
Jordan Harbinger
Those people couldn't have done this.
- [53:15]
Jason DeFillippo
Nah, it's got to be aliens, bro.
- [53:17]
Danny Bate
Aliens, bro. Exactly. I'm doing the hand gesture already. It's just aliens.
- [53:20]
Jordan Harbinger
Aliens, man.
- [53:22]
Danny Bate
But I would absolutely say that it is kind of in flux. It is helped by the fact that, yeah, okay, in the absolute earliest origins of the Alphabet, where we clearly have the first few generations of alphabetic pioneers, we don't have much. Our sources are in the decades rather than the hundreds. It's scrapped of fragments of things. We have a lot of inscriptions that come from the Sinai Peninsula, where it seems these kind of innovators were working, mining, actually mining for minerals. But as the years go by, our sources expand. So by the time you reach the Phoenicians, the kind of next important leg in the journey, we've got loads of Phoenician writing. And by the time we reach the Greeks, early, let's say Hebrew writing, early Arabic writing, or let's call it Arabian writing, we've got way more. So it's not as if this is a very thin thread that we're desperately trying to kind of knot up and secure. But I'll give you a great example of this. I will admit writing about the absolute earliest history of the Alphabet, which I did in chapter A, not chapter one, but chapter A of my book, was daunting. It's a big field. No one can agree on anything. And I have to make this accurate, true and accessible and entertaining to my reader because I write for a general audience and I really struggle and sweat over getting everything right. I send it off to an expert friend of mine who says, this is good, this is good to go. And I kid you not, two weeks later, I get one of those Google alerts that says something like a scientific magazine that says find that upsets early alphabetic history discovered in Syria. And it's an absolute gut punch. I've been running home.
- [54:59]
Jason DeFillippo
I just turned in my manuscript. Come on.
- [55:01]
Danny Bate
Exactly. Basically, I can't stop press. Everything's wrong. It bothers to me because it mattered to me enormously. The right information needed to be correct. I am pleased, very pleased, purely because of the horse I have in this race that it did not turn out to be such a stick of dynamite in the end, as the author of a book, yes, it was a gut punch. It was very concerning that I might have said something wrong. But I will say, as a scholar, as somebody who just loves this, let's say the Alphabet turns out to have been designed in Syria rather than Egypt. Great. That's just great. That's brilliant. That's the story in flux.
- [55:33]
Jason DeFillippo
It's funny. You should try being a podcaster. Apparently none of us care if anything we say is accurate. According to my inbox, we just don't try at all. I'd like to think we're a little different, but I can't speak for all podcasters.
- [55:45]
Jordan Harbinger
You know, it's funny, I was thinking
- [55:46]
Jason DeFillippo
of something you mentioned, the Greeks.
- [55:48]
Jordan Harbinger
When you say something was invented in
- [55:50]
Jason DeFillippo
China, you think, wow, was it 2,000 years ago? Is it ancient? Is it modern? Is it a drone?
- [55:56]
Jordan Harbinger
When you say something was invented in Greece, you know it's ancient Greece. Nobody thinks you mean something was invented
- [56:01]
Jason DeFillippo
in Greece in 2008.
- [56:03]
Jordan Harbinger
Sorry, Greeks, your food is amazing, your people are lovely, the country is beautiful. But, yeah, nobody is talking about things
- [56:09]
Jason DeFillippo
invented in Greece and they mean anything that's less than 2,000 years old or so. I just noticed that as you were talking. I should probably change the subject. I'm just getting myself in trouble.
- [56:19]
Danny Bate
No comment. I love the Greeks. I love Greece. There are passionate people. Why wouldn't they be?
- [56:24]
Jason DeFillippo
And I'm going to leave it.
- [56:25]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, exactly. It just.
- [56:26]
Jason DeFillippo
It seems like every Alphabet begins its life as this weird, badly fitted. Hand me down. And it just changes as it goes.
- [56:35]
Jordan Harbinger
I want to talk about some specific
- [56:37]
Jason DeFillippo
letters because I know. I don't know we have unlimited time here, but I've got all kinds of questions about why things are the way they are.
- [56:47]
Jordan Harbinger
Like W, for example. Okay, what the heck? Germanic names and words. When you say W in German, it's V. Okay, and. But we already have V in English. But in German, the V is F. But you also have F. Anyway, now I'm just complaining about German, but is it double U? Because it looks like double V and in German it's called double V, by
- [57:12]
Jason DeFillippo
the way, which is strange because it's not actually called V in German. I don't know.
- [57:17]
Jordan Harbinger
The whole thing is annoyingly confusing, but I don't really understand why English calls
- [57:21]
Jason DeFillippo
W double U, even though it actually resembles two Vs. And in German, that's what they call it, W. What's going on here?
- [57:27]
Danny Bate
What's going on here is the natural flow of language and history, which is a wishy washy answer I will give you.
- [57:33]
Jason DeFillippo
You better do better than that.
- [57:34]
Danny Bate
All right, Okay. I promise I will. But what I mean by that is, I think, interesting and perhaps also comforting rule in the study of language is that when you go further back in time, things that are more separate today look more Similar. So as a general rule, let's go wind back the clock to the earliest period of the German language as the period we know as Old High German looks a lot like English or Old English at the time. The words are much closer to each other in the two languages and they're using fundamentally the same letters as one another because they've just got these letters from the Romans. They've taken them usually along with the package deal of Christianity and Latin in church and said, thanks very much. So what's basically happened like a kind of river or like a river delta spreading out and flowing out, Things divide, things multiply and things get more complicated over time. And sounds which are caught up in the Alphabet or arguably letters and are caught up in sounds, Sounds change. Sounds very naturally change in a way that could happen in one spoken language, but doesn't happen in another spoken language and they'll naturally diverge from this. We get accents originally initially, then we get dialects and then eventually we get full blown languages. And this is a very natural process. So let's take your concerns about the German language. I get it, I hear you. Because understandably you're taking the German language as it is today. But if we are to wind back the clock, we've got all sorts of evidence that allow us to say that a W is once a W. It's a W to begin with. It's a double U because that is a sound of their language and they need a letter for it. Latin has given them a kind of V letter. It's a V that they can use for V and a W they can use for W. But then those two sounds behind those two letters then go and change as keeps happening over and over again. The W becomes a V sound, W to V. Very common sound change. It happened in the history of Latin, it happened in the history of German as well. It just hasn't happened in the history of English. And the V sound, the V then becomes a F just as the S becomes a Z sound. In German you say sie rather than C. So very natural sound changes going on behind an Alphabet and letters that aren't being updated that can just stand still through all of this. It's happening in German, but it's not happening in its cousin English. Hence you get two languages that increasingly look quite different. That's a lot of information, a lot of concepts. But the takeaway points are letters don't often change. Sounds really do.
- [60:11]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, well, what you're telling me at this point, the English Alphabet is it reminds me of I have a drawer in my kitchen that has iPhone charger. It's got a USB C. There's a USB C to USB a cable. There's a micro USB to USB a cable. It's got all these chargers for my random Chinese toys.
- [60:26]
Jordan Harbinger
And my kids get AC adapters. That's the English Alphabet to me.
- [60:31]
Jason DeFillippo
It's this drawer in my kitchen where
- [60:33]
Jordan Harbinger
once a year I go through it
- [60:34]
Jason DeFillippo
and I go, do we even own
- [60:35]
Jordan Harbinger
the thing that this goes to? Can we replace this with the USB C? Does this even plug in and then go to the other thing? And why does it have two plastic connectors?
- [60:44]
Jason DeFillippo
That's what I'm dealing with in my kitchen. And that's what this Alphabet now looks like to me. It's a junk drawer that you just go, why is this like that? If you want to know, I got half an hour and I'll tell you. But otherwise, just accept it. Just use it until it falls apart. That's what we're dealing with.
- [60:59]
Danny Bate
Jordan, you have a gift for metaphors. I have to say, that's absolutely glorious. And I would hope that in that drawer as well, at least in mine, there's money. Money that's not in circulation anymore. Like, I have a bag of Croatian kuna, which is useless now because they took the Euro. I would argue that maybe our Alphabet is not just the wires, but it's also the coins for old money, of things that are just pressures that we can't bear to get rid of. I cannot stress this enough. We are much more okay for the sounds of our speech to change with some grumbles. Grumbles about young people not talking properly and things like that. Or accents sounding old fashioned among the elderly and things like that. But we are much happier and much more blase about sounds changing than we are letters.
- [61:45]
Jordan Harbinger
It makes sense, right? Because you got the printing press, so
- [61:48]
Jason DeFillippo
that's got to be, like, standardized. You got to standardize spellings and stuff like that, at least across countries in some ways. Now you've got color with a U in it that you guys use. I kind of like that you had a little bit of British, Canadian, American stuff going on here. But the speech continues changing, and then it just maybe doesn't even make sense. You'd look at accents. I did a show about accents and it's like, where's the R in all this British stuff?
- [62:10]
Jordan Harbinger
And it's like they dropped it because
- [62:11]
Jason DeFillippo
it was posh, and then the Americans kept it. And here we are with this weird sounding R difference that we've Got here the. I forget what they call it. The hidden R or something like that. Or the dark R. So we often say when I'm teaching my kids, especially English, spelling makes no sense. You just have to accept it.
- [62:28]
Jordan Harbinger
But it seems more accurate that it made sense at several different moments in time.
- [62:33]
Jason DeFillippo
And if you take a snapshot of the language, then it totally made sense why we spelled this thing that way.
- [62:37]
Jordan Harbinger
We just kept all of them, again,
- [62:39]
Jason DeFillippo
in this giant junk drawer in the kitchen. That is our Alphabet. And that's why my kid's like, why
- [62:44]
Jordan Harbinger
is there an E on the end of this?
- [62:46]
Jason DeFillippo
And I'm like, I don't know. But there is. And if you don't use it, you spelled it wrong. Sorry, bro. That's what he's going through right now. Poor guy.
- [62:54]
Danny Bate
I do get it. I understand. I do sympathize. But I absolutely love your kind of your twist there, the change of the different way of looking at the Alphabet. I have to admit, as somebody who thinks about this, who loves the Alphabet as this ancient piece of technology, it really does break my heart when people say it makes no sense. It makes loads of sense. Problem is, it makes too much sense in all sorts of competing ways. There's too many rules in competition with one another. There could be historical rules, they could be current rules. They could be things that are haven't been tidied up where they're in competition for the same kind of sound job in spelling the same sound. And that will altogether look like anarchy, but it's not. It's the junctural. All of these cables made sense on their own once upon a time, and we have just not taken that step. We've not tidied it up. I love that you mentioned the printing press there. Printing press takes off in Europe in the 15th century, arrives in Britain, meets the English language around about the year. What is that, 1415. Mr. William Caxton in London. And English spelling is basically what he printed. It's 15th century English of London. And it really worked. He printed, according to how he spoke, that ancient principle, you should write how you speak. And the thing is, speech has just drifted and drifted. Letters have fallen silent because the sounds have disappeared. Like silent K at the beginning of knee or your GH in light and bright and things like that. They were all once pronounced. They were for Caxton, so they're in his system.
- [64:24]
Jordan Harbinger
So you used to say, ouch, my knee.
- [64:26]
AI Psychosis Expert
Yeah.
- [64:27]
Jordan Harbinger
Really? That's hilarious.
- [64:28]
Sponsor Voice
Somehow.
- [64:29]
Danny Bate
Remember my rule about going back in time and language is seeming a bit more similar if you put silent K back into these words, they sound like German and Dutch.
- [64:36]
Jason DeFillippo
They do, yeah. Leicht in knee. Manikinean.
- [64:40]
Danny Bate
But I would say here's the big thing your lovely listeners might say, okay, this British guy is defending the Alphabet. Nonetheless, we've got all these competing rules. Why are they all in competition? He hasn't explained why this then gets to the heart of something then specific to English and English speakers. Unlike other countries, maybe smaller countries, or smaller languages with fewer speakers or just whatever reason, English does not have the central bodies that could tidy the spelling up very undemocratically.
- [65:11]
Jordan Harbinger
Decide W is called W, shaped like two V's and descended from people desperately
- [65:17]
Jason DeFillippo
improvising a symbol English didn't even have.
- [65:19]
Jordan Harbinger
So basically, W's the cybertruck of letters. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience, too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight. That's exactly what Lufthansa Allegris is built around. On a long haul route, comfort matters more than people realize. If you're cramped, tired and can't relax, you feel it the second you land. But when a flight is comfortable, you can actually stretch out, rest, work, or just enjoy the ride. It changes the whole trip. I was thinking about that on my recent Intercontinental Lufthansa flight. I got so comfortable. I honestly didn't want the flight to
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Jason DeFillippo
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Jordan Harbinger
That's why Lufthansa Allegris stands out. It's built around the idea that people travel differently. Lufthansa Allegris business class has five seat options. You've got the suite, the privacy seat and the extra long bed, the extra space seat and the classic seat. So you can choose what works for you. And that's what I like most. It feels elevated, but still practical. More privacy, more comfort, more thoughtful design for the way people actually travel. Now visit lufthansa.com and search for Allegris to learn more. Lufthansa Allegris. All it takes is a yes. Limited availability on select routes. More routes coming soon.
- [66:29]
Grainger Announcer
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- [66:59]
Jordan Harbinger
check out our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical.
- [67:02]
Jason DeFillippo
It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions.
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Jordan Harbinger
Psychology, relationships in under two min.
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Jason DeFillippo
Just about every Wednesday. It's a great companion to the show.
- [67:09]
Jordan Harbinger
Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Danny Bate.
- [67:17]
Jason DeFillippo
German has this. They make this thing called a Duden, which is like a grammar book. And I remember when I lived there in the late 90s, everyone knew this.
- [67:25]
Jordan Harbinger
It was like, by the way, starting next year, if you've got a word, if you put those two, because you
- [67:31]
Jason DeFillippo
combine words in German. So like Schiff is S, C, H, I, F. F. Fath means like voyage, F, A, H, R, T. But if
- [67:38]
Jordan Harbinger
you got a Schiffaht, you used to drop one of the Fs.
- [67:42]
Jason DeFillippo
They were like, we're not doing that anymore.
- [67:43]
Jordan Harbinger
You're just gonna write three F's in a row.
- [67:46]
Jason DeFillippo
And I think they still do that. I don't know why they would've changed it back.
- [67:48]
Jordan Harbinger
But they could do that. They could be like, this is German now.
- [67:50]
Jason DeFillippo
And everyone's like, all right, fine.
- [67:52]
Jordan Harbinger
But yeah, you don't have that with English.
- [67:53]
Jason DeFillippo
You don't have, I don't know, the queen or something being like, hey, Indians and Americans, listen up.
- [67:58]
Jordan Harbinger
You gotta put a U in the
- [68:00]
Jason DeFillippo
word color or you're in trouble. You're gonna hear about it from me.
- [68:03]
Jordan Harbinger
Nobody can do that with us.
- [68:04]
Danny Bate
There's two ingredients missing that together produce the situation. Not only do we not have that particular body, that definitive thing, even if we did, people have to listen to them. People have to agree. Because of general Germanness, people in Germany to this day buy into the Duden and they buy into its updates and say, yeah, great, we'll go along with this. Where I live, for example, which is the Czech Republic, same system. We have exactly the same system. There is an institution and its updates are more or less listened to as taken as gospel. It works. You could say it's efficient. It roughly keeps the top of changing sounds. It is also quite undemocratic. Who gave these guys power? The English situation is not awful, but what it is is different. If you are going to update spelling, let's Say you're going to reforming English spelling and tidy up all of these competing principles. Get rid of all these silent letters. It's going to look weird, whatever the result is because it would be a major update. I think the Alphabet would look very strange. But you have to satisfactorily answer two big questions. Firstly, who are you? Who gives you the right? And secondly, do you have the power for then people to listen to you?
- [69:13]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah.
- [69:13]
Jordan Harbinger
Good luck telling Americans you thought we made a big deal about no taxation without representation. Holy smokes. You're going to get us to put a U in the word color. You better be well armed, sir. Yeah, that's exactly. That is never happening.
- [69:26]
Danny Bate
It'd be 1776 all over again. And I wouldn't blame you. I would not blame you if people were in upper arms about this. Let's flip the script. Let's say it's an American standard spelling. Why wouldn't it be American? The most prestigious form of English today. It's the most dominant.
- [69:42]
Jason DeFillippo
Just have to get all Americans to agree on something.
- [69:44]
Jordan Harbinger
How hard can it be? Of course.
- [69:46]
Danny Bate
Yes. With due deference to the Bostonians as well and whether they agree with putting the R's in and stuff like that. Okay, let's say you do that. You've got good reasons for doing it. You will annoy the rest of the English speaking writing and reading world.
- [69:58]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, we're joking. But it's literally.
- [70:00]
Jason DeFillippo
It just sounds impossible, right? Oh yeah.
- [70:03]
Jordan Harbinger
Get New York, Boston, Texas, California and everybody in between to agree on something.
- [70:08]
Jason DeFillippo
Tell Canada to get on board and then somebody notify the English and the Indians and every other place that speaks English as one of their major languages that they now have to do this.
- [70:18]
Jordan Harbinger
Good luck with that.
- [70:20]
Jason DeFillippo
Ludicrous to even think about something like that ever happening in the 21st century.
- [70:24]
Danny Bate
And if I may, and I hope people won't think I'm overreaching here, but this is the ultimate irony. If we're pursuing this thought experiment. We have this big committee of people from all the different English speaking countries. The list grows longer by the day. A lot of English where I live in Prague, for example, increasingly so it's getting bigger and bigger. But let's say we have our committee and everybody's on board and people are going to listen to them. This is the ultimate irony. The debates will go on. I honestly think the debates will push this writing system back in time. People are accepting more archaisms because it's a way of unifying the different dialects. Some dialects pronounce this Letter. Others pronounce this letter. So let's take it back in time. I think ultimately this hypothetical committee will keep searching for common ground, a kind of form of writing that we could all agree on. And we'll end up where we started. We'll end up with 15th century written English because it is, with some, but not many exceptions, it's the kind of departure point for all the different kinds of English that we have today. We may end up agreeing. I guess we're stuck with this kind of common denominator for all English today.
- [71:33]
Jason DeFillippo
I think you're giving us way too much credit. And we're going to end up speaking entirely in emojis. And then you're going to be like,
- [71:38]
Jordan Harbinger
aha, hieroglyphics all over again.
- [71:41]
Jason DeFillippo
You're going to have to etch a person shrugging and giving themselves a manicure or whatever that one is on the top of your paper.
- [71:47]
Jordan Harbinger
I want to hear about this alleged
- [71:49]
Jason DeFillippo
monkey in the letter Q. What's that all about? That sounds hokey.
- [71:53]
Danny Bate
Oh, so please, I do appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. Yeah, I've got to take it right back to the beginning. So, as I mentioned, our letters look like things when the Alphabet gets up and running. And some are body parts, some are household objects, some are members of the animal kingdom. And the letter Q is, with due provisos about what exactly specific hieroglyphic prototype inspired the letter. Because some of our earliest versions are a little sketchy, a little hard to read. I think it is pretty certain, based on the way that the image looks and also the name of the letter Kop, that basically the letter Q started out as a kind of hieroglyphic monkey or baboon. And the capital letter Q has its tail to this day, which I love.
- [72:44]
Jason DeFillippo
Why would we need a monkey pictograph? Because if the Alphabet was invented, there's no monkeys in the Middle east, are there?
- [72:51]
Danny Bate
Sure, yeah, there were monkeys in Egypt, at least.
- [72:53]
Jason DeFillippo
I did not know that.
- [72:54]
Danny Bate
Different species, perhaps. Not the monkeys that may immediately come to mind. Certainly not orangutans or anything like that. But yeah, primates, basically.
- [73:01]
AI Psychosis Expert
Huh.
- [73:01]
Jason DeFillippo
It's just cute thinking about the letter Q being a monkey. But also, we barely use that letter.
- [73:07]
Jordan Harbinger
Is it one of the least used letters?
- [73:09]
Jason DeFillippo
It feels like it is, anyways.
- [73:11]
Danny Bate
Yeah, it's Q and X, hence their high Scrabble score.
- [73:14]
Jason DeFillippo
Yes, good point. I didn't think about X. Whenever you see X in a child's book, it's always xylophone, because that's the only example that you can come up with xylophone and X ray and then it's like we're kind of out of ideas here.
- [73:26]
Danny Bate
Actually, weirdly, you are out of innocent ideas. Then you get into the dodgy words. And I will give all full credit to the brilliant Irish comedian Dara o'. Brien. He has a great stand up routine on this. My favorite stand up comedian. Basically, that's it for the safe ideas. Very quickly, the third word, he puts us out. The audience shout back. Xenophobia.
- [73:47]
Jason DeFillippo
Oh yeah.
- [73:47]
Danny Bate
Not great for a children's picture book.
- [73:49]
Jordan Harbinger
That's true. Are there other ones? I can't even because I'm coming up
- [73:52]
Jason DeFillippo
super dry on xylitol, which is like a sugar, I think that goes in some kinds of gum. I mean, I really can't think of things that aren't chemicals.
- [73:59]
Danny Bate
Xerox.
- [74:00]
Jason DeFillippo
Xerox.
- [74:01]
Danny Bate
Xerox. But then you're into copyright areas as well. That's a whole other chapter. But the few words that we do have that start with an X, with the exception of the name Xavier with an X, that's actually Spanish. It's just Javier spelled differently before the Spanish decided, no, it's going to be a J. So again, see how you have these institutions that are able to rule on these things, but basically everything else is from Greek, the X initial words.
- [74:28]
Jordan Harbinger
So if you're dictator of English for
- [74:31]
Jason DeFillippo
the next 60 seconds, what are you gonna change? What couple things are you like, okay, we're not using this any. Like, are you getting rid of a letter? Are you getting rid of the C and the K kind of problem that we have here or that kids have? Are we adding you's removing you's ease? What's going on?
- [74:47]
Danny Bate
Wow. I think, frankly, as I hope I've got across, the first thing I'm doing is resigning immediately because this task is massive. I really have written the book on this subject or a book on the subject. And I am daunted by the whole prospect of reform. I remain firmly on the fence. But okay, I'm speculating here. Do you know what? Day one, I'm getting rid of Q. Wow.
- [75:07]
Jason DeFillippo
And even in your title, you're getting rid of your title letter.
- [75:10]
Danny Bate
Yep. My book goes from YQ needs you to Y, Q needed you, which is not too bad. But we could spell it with C or K. In fact, old English writers, that's not Shakespeare. That's like Beowulf times Pre the year 1100 A.D. they didn't use it. They didn't use Q. They used C. So could we.
- [75:29]
Jason DeFillippo
That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. What letter do you think has the best origin story?
- [75:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Q's pretty good, right?
- [75:36]
Jason DeFillippo
A little monkey and the ox head is cool. What else is there where you're like, wow, this is pretty badass as far as letters are concerned.
- [75:42]
Danny Bate
Ooh, that's nice. I have a real soft spot for I like W. I like that it is invented as a kind of response to the fall of Rome, putting it quite grandly. But what I'm getting at is that the so called formal fall of Rome, where everything sort of disintegrates in Western Europe. It has these so called barbarians and these barbarians speak Germanic languages and eventually their languages and their names have the sound W. And the Latin Alphabet is not equipped to spell this sound at this time. So the letter W slowly emerges. And I like that it's a product of a specific time. Far earlier than that. I like R. R, if people know their Greek, it's a rho. And the difference between Greek rho, which is the ancestor of capital R, there's a key difference, which is that rho in Greek is missing that little leg. It's missing the additional kind of forward facing leg. And that makes Greek rho look like our P rather confusingly. But basically the leg is an additional of addition to the letter when the Alphabet lands in the hands of the Romans, prior to which there is no leg. It looks like a row and it's closer to what it originally was, which is a head. It's a man's head. And it would have been called something, maybe it's hard to reconstruct the exact pronunciation, but something like rash or ra', as, meaning head. And if people know Hebrew where you have rosh, that is still the word for head to this day. So letter R comes from a head. It's named that because the first letter or the first sound of the word for head is a R. And the word for head is something like. Which is what it still is in Hebrew. So echoes of really ancient history in a language like Hebrew to this day.
- [77:32]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, it's crazy how much this stuff carries through history. And I just never thought each letter had a history book behind it. It just really is kind of amazing. And again, deep geek stuff, which is what the show is about, at least today.
- [77:45]
Jordan Harbinger
I wonder what you think the English
- [77:47]
Jason DeFillippo
Alphabet will look like in a thousand years. I know we talked about maybe it
- [77:50]
Jordan Harbinger
won't exist or something like that, but
- [77:52]
Jason DeFillippo
maybe you have some ideas. What do you think?
- [77:54]
Danny Bate
I love this kind of Speculation. I intend to be around for a little of it to see whether it comes true in the end part of
- [78:01]
Jordan Harbinger
the next thousand years.
- [78:02]
Jason DeFillippo
Yeah, I mean, technically you will be.
- [78:04]
Danny Bate
Linguistics is so interesting, I don't think I ever would get bored. But nonetheless, I think in the near future I will say that standard English is here to stay for. Okay, I'll put a number on it. I won't put any money on it, but I will give it a number. The next hundred years. I really think that through its prestige, through our familiarity with it, through of course, the technology that upholds this spelling system like spellchecker, predictive text AI every time you type something out incorrectly, quote unquote incorrectly in your phone and your phone changes it to the approved spelling, you are maintaining this out of date 15th century spelling system. And I think that so many factors are propping it up, not least geopolitics. English language countries are very powerful, the U.S. of course, being the obvious one. And it would, I would say that beyond a hundred years, it would take a serious shift to knock standard English and our version of the Alphabet off its perch and to turn it into something new, to allow the floodgates to open and for people to embrace something new, something reformed, something very different. A thousand years, though I want to speculate because the circumstances of the Alphabet are entirely bound up in the circumstances of the present day, our day being no exception, a hundred years from now is maybe guessable. A thousand years, not at all. What I can say, at least it would be unrecognizable. That's what I'd say. It'd be something completely different.
- [79:43]
Jason DeFillippo
The next time somebody opens a book, sends a text or looks at a keyboard, what is the one thing you want them to notice that before this show they probably never would have seen before?
- [79:53]
Danny Bate
Yes. Oh, what a lovely question. I really do appreciate that because I never want to have the final word on these things. I actually want to have somebody's first word rather than final word as they open their eyes to these things. And I would suppose it would be how different in many ways speech is from spelling, how the two diverge. Just as a general principle, I mean nothing by that. I don't mean to sort of rock people's world and let people fall into some deeper abyss of arbitrary language and linguistics. Rather just appreciate that we have this extremely ancient writing system that is really being pulled apart in so many directions. It's being pulled apart by the different ways that a country can speak, the different ways a region or a family or even an individual can speak. I don't speak the same in every single situation or social context. In relaxed speech, I use a lot more glottal T's in British English, saying something like it rather than it. But in talking to you, Jordan, I use, of course, my best.
- [80:55]
Jason DeFillippo
Oh, yeah, good. The most pretentious version of your accent. I appreciate that.
- [80:59]
Danny Bate
Yeah, of course, I saved this only for interviews with American stars, but nonetheless, there is so much speech, a cacophony of speech of different sounds hiding behind our Alphabet, and we just muddle the two up in so many different ways that I think maybe, and here maybe I am reaching a bit. I would hope it makes people a bit more sympathetic to other people's ways of speaking, to how the youth speak and how different regions speak, whether you're from the north, from the south, from East Coast, west coast, whether you're from Boston. Because the Alphabet doesn't work especially well for anybody. Our speech is so divergent from that kind of standard spelling that it doesn't work well, particularly well for any one accent. So it can kind of work well for us all in a very democratic and clunky kind of way. And I'd hope people will bear that in mind when they're reading and also listening to their fellow English speakers.
- [81:56]
Jordan Harbinger
Danny Bate, thank you so much. Thank you for nerding out with me. This is right on the edge for
- [82:01]
Jason DeFillippo
me of like, okay, is this too
- [82:03]
Jordan Harbinger
geeky for the show?
- [82:04]
Jason DeFillippo
I don't know. I'm doing it. We'll see. I guess we'll find out when the listeners write in and go, you lost me halfway through. Who cares about Q?
- [82:11]
Jordan Harbinger
Nah, we'll see. We'll see. I've got a pretty funny audience.
- [82:13]
Jason DeFillippo
I think that a lot of people will really like this. I really enjoyed this. I just find this stuff to be so nerd tastic, and I can't get enough of it. So thank you for coming on the show and scratching that itch.
- [82:25]
Danny Bate
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for everything that you brought to the conversation, too. Really, really enjoyed this and thanks to your team as well for what they will do.
- [82:34]
Jordan Harbinger
An AI chatbot will listen without judgment, agree without hesitation, and stay with you all night. But for users, that comforting loop has ended in obsession, delusion, and tragedy.
- [82:44]
AI Psychosis Expert
Tell me, how do you use ChatGPT and how often do you use it? These chatbots have very serious psychological effects on their users. Men tend to have stem delusions. They believe that they've invented something like a mathematical theory or solved climate change. And women tend to have spiritual delusions. They believe that they have met an entity through this or that spirits are real. There's these really extreme cases. Suicide is extreme. These kind of mental breakdowns are extreme, like believing the spirits are real or that you live in the Matrix. I've now written about two people who have died after getting really addicted, involved with AI chatbots.
- [83:28]
Grainger Announcer
OpenAI has built safeguards into these products.
- [83:31]
AI Psychosis Expert
Like they're so certain things are not supposed to do. But what we have discovered is that in a long conversation, when you're talking to it for a really long time, the kind of wheels come off of these chatbots and they start doing really unpredictable things. These companies can't actually control what it says. It's just word associating to you. And sometimes that is really messing with people's brains. I think that we need to be a lot more skeptical of what's coming out of these chatbots. And people need to understand they are not oracles. They are not telling you superhuman intelligent thoughts. They are word prediction machines and are really good at that. Please don't trust them too much. They'll betray you.
- [84:13]
Jordan Harbinger
To hear more about how easily the spiral of AI psychosis can begin, check out episode 1227 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. The Alphabet wasn't designed. It survived. It crossed borders, outlived empires, absorbed invasions, and accumulated thousands of years of patches from people who were just trying to
- [84:32]
Jason DeFillippo
make the damn thing work.
- [84:33]
Jordan Harbinger
Which is probably why it tells us so much about humanity. Civilization is not built from perfect systems. It's built from flawed systems that generations of strangers reluctantly agree not to replace. And somewhere inside every capital A, there's still an ox staring back at us. All things Danny Bate will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all@jordanharbinger.com deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking over at SixMinuteTworking.com, i'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.
- [85:05]
Jason DeFillippo
You can also connect with me on
- [85:07]
Jordan Harbinger
LinkedIn and the show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in
- [85:27]
Jason DeFillippo
these sort of peak nerd linguistics episodes, accents, the Alphabet languages. Definitely share this episode with them.
- [85:33]
Jordan Harbinger
In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.
- [85:45]
Danny Bate
When she said I don't dance now
- [85:46]
Jordan Harbinger
I make money moves.
- [85:47]
Danny Bate
That was a mission statement for a whole new generation.
- [85:50]
Grainger Announcer
Respect. But that's not the Mount Rushmore Listen, Cash rules everything around me. When that line dropped, it changed the whole hustle. The greatest tracks are never finished. They're just debated forever. Introducing The Sprite Living tracklist, 50 tracks that shape the culture from six decades of hip hop. Scan the QR code on a Sprite or Sprite zero Sugar to see the full breakdown. Obey your thirst, Sprite Grainger knows When you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail. Filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it.