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This is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and oh, what is that? Oh,

it's the sands of time. We're listening to Kismet. That's 1953. I like it very much. I sense that

a lot of people who like this kind of music don't care much about Kismet,

but it's one of my favorite things in the world.

And listen to The Sands of Time.

This is Richard Kiley sing.

Wise men come ever promising the riddle of life to know.

Wise men come,

Aw, but over the sands, the silent sands of time.

Why am I playing that?

Because to me, in a very kitschy way, that says what we call the Middle East. And, you know, let's start with the alphabet.

Not intuitive, writing with an alphabet. As intuitive as it seems to us, because we grew up using one, most of us, who are here, I imagine, would say that. But actually, in terms of writing, how you write your language, it is not

intuitive to human beings at all to come up with a system where you have a symbol corresponding

to isolated sounds. That's not how any writing system begins. If you think about it, if you

developed a writing system, then what you would start with is pictures. You would draw a picture of the sun, draw a picture of a woman. But then the next thing is not to immediately go from that to ABC, D, EFG. If you ask people who are unlettered, so to speak, people where their language hasn't been written yet and they

don't have much experience with writing. If you ask them how they divide up the bits of their

language, spontaneously, they do it by syllables. So if they've got a word like peccatory boost,

they're not going to say, well, it's PECA-C-A. They'll say it's peccatory.

...