This is KZU.

This is KZSU, Stanford.

Entitled opinions coming to you from the womb of the great cosmic serpent, wherein our revels begin.

In the beginning was the word, yet the word did not come first.

There is always an earlier, more sacred and auroral hour to the dawn, and there is always something that comes

before the beginning, before birth, before the coagulations of meaning.

Here's a quote to get us underway.

By the time a newborn emerges into the cool air, its mind flares with recognition when it hears the language that flowed outside the flesh walls that cradled it.

In the womb, infants have absorbed the click-clack of the rhythms of their mother tongue, its cadences and rising falling motifs, its predilection for herding consonants together,

or for spacing them out as sparse counterpoints to the airiness of vowels.

It is then, and in the months to follow,

that an infant and her native language come to possess each other,

before naming, before meaning, before there is even a notion that sound bears the burden of meaning.

Those sentences come from a recently published book titled Linguophile, A Life of Language Love,

whose author joins me today to talk about the connections between language and love,

language and music, language and self, and of course, language and meaning.

Julie Sedavie is an acclaimed writer and linguist whose work ranges from the scientific to the literary and everything in between.

I'll mention two of her previous books. Memory speaks on losing and reclaiming language and self,

and an introduction to psycholinguistics. Sedevi has taught linguistics and psychology of Brown University and the University of Calgary,

and now she joins us here on Entitled Opinions. Julie, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Robert. It's a pleasure to be here.

Your new book, Linguophile, has three parts, childhood, maturity and loss.

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