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

I'm John McWhorter.

I teach linguistics at Columbia University, and you know what I want to do this week is to address the four questions.

And no, despite the fact that we're in the high holidays, I don't mean those Manishtana four questions.

I mean four questions that I often get in the proverbial mail

from people who are asking about things having to do with language and linguistics.

There are these four things that come again and again and again.

And yes, I got one of them last week, which got me thinking about this,

where the person is writing, expecting a certain answer, which is fine, and I can't help

thinking that, one, that answer happens not to be available, and two, the actual answer is in a way

more interesting than what the person was expecting.

It's these four things that come up again and again.

Since, you know, we're on the topic of the high holidays, let's think about something that goes on in Hebrew.

I get a question that's related to this a lot.

Hebrew, which is a good Semitic language, so I might as well be talking about

Arabic or Aramaic, but let's make it Hebrew. Hebrew has really cool verbs, and the way they work

...