John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason)
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2020
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a guess: John McWhorter. A prominent academic linguist, he's also highly regarded for his podcast and popular writings across countless books and articles where often displays a deep knowledge in topics beyond his academic training.
John joined Tyler to discuss why he thinks that colloquial Indonesian should be the world's universal language, the barbaric circumstances that gave rise to Creole languages, the reason Mandarin won't overtake English as the lingua franca, how the Vikings shaped modern English, the racial politics of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, the decline of American regional accents, why Shakespeare needs an English translation, Harold Arlen vs. Andrew Lloyd Webber, whether reparations for African-Americans is a good idea, how living in Jackson Heights shapes his worldview, what he learned from his mother and father, why good linguistics students enjoy both Russian and Chinese, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded February 17th, 2020
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:08.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:12.5 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:15.2 | And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit |
| 0:20.4 | ConversationsWithT Tyler.com. |
| 0:30.0 | Let's start with linguistics. |
| 0:34.6 | I've read that the Estonian language has 14 case endings, 8 dialects, 117 sub-diallects, |
| 0:42.6 | and the core population of speakers is only a bit over a million. |
| 0:45.8 | Now, why is Estonian so complicated? |
| 0:48.0 | What a wonderful opening question. |
| 0:50.8 | It's 16 cases, actually. |
| 0:53.2 | The reason is that Estonia is like the size of New Jersey. |
| 0:59.1 | It might be the size of Trenton. |
| 1:01.5 | And so it's a very small group of people. |
| 1:05.1 | And very few people have ever had any reason. |
| 1:07.2 | I can't believe this is the first question. |
| 1:08.9 | To learn Estonian as a second language, and if you try, you fail. |
| 1:13.6 | And so as a result, it gets more and more complicated, more and more ingrown, whereas |
| 1:17.8 | Finnish, which is a sister language to Estonian, is actually kind of easy. |
| 1:23.0 | It's easy Estonian. |
| 1:24.0 | So Estonian is a small language that's almost never learned by adults, and therefore almost |
| 1:30.7 | never screwed up. |
... |
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