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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and you know,

this is my 75th show. No, I don't believe either that I've done it that many times, but this is the 75th.

We're getting towards 100. And you know, if it's my 75th, then I want it to be one of those shows that's all about me,

sort of. Although what that means is it'll be a bit about how linguistics, or at least some,

linguistics works, and you're going to get a sense of it from just visiting the recesses

of my unfortunate mind.

Now, you want to know what I mean by that?

Well, let's just jump right into it.

Bobby Short is going to tell us how we're going to do it

by singing us a Cole Porter song from 1930 called Let's Fly Away.

Let's Fly Away. Let's Fly Away and find the land that's warm and tropic, where prohibition's not the topic,

or the live long day.

Let's fly away and find the land that's so provincial. We'll never hear what Walter

Winchell might be forced to say. So where are we going to fly? Well, I'm going to sneak in through the back

door another introduction to a language family here. Not completely, but we've

done a lot of, well, Indo-European, and then we did our Semitic show. Well, you know, another

language family is called Austronesian. And these are the languages spoken in, really, to give you a

sense of it, let's think about those islands off of Southeast Asia.

So, for example, Indonesian is an Austronesian language, but then go further up, fly further up, along with Bobby Short.

Languages of the Philippines, the one you're most likely to have heard of.

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