From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, I'm in a closet, and this week I would like to make an exception.

What I mean by that is that usually I like to maintain the little fiction that this show

comes from, an actual valley called Lexicon Valley, where everything is always happy, and

that's why the show is not usually particularly topical.

But obviously there are certain things going on right now around the world that really

if I didn't address it in any way, I wouldn't be doing my job, a lot of you have been asking.

And so I'm going to devote this episode to the COVID-19 virus and its implications for

language, what it can teach us about language.

The truth is the topic is not as juicy as you might think, nevertheless it does deserve

to be addressed.

You know where I'm going to start with a street myth that's been going around, people

keep asking me about this, and I figure this is as good a place as any to address it.

And this is the idea that, and some of you have probably already seen this, that Japan

has had less of a problem with the virus than the United States because of something about

the language.

Oh, we love things like this.

When things like this pan out, it is absolutely delicious.

In this case, you can see a video that shows that Japanese consonants have less of a puff

than their equivalents in English.

And so we say, Puh, Japanese has something more like Puh.

That means to put it in technical terms, Japanese aspiration on consonants is weaker than

...