Ep157 "Where Did the Letter "A" Come From?" with Danny Bate

0:00Speaker 1:Why do things the brain does so well become invisible, like walking or playing tennis? Or what we'll talk about today, the reading and writing of language. Where do our twenty six written symbols in English come from and how do they capture everything in the cosmos of human experience? What ancient ghosts are still hiding inside the letters that you read every day? For example? Does the letter A contain the shape of a cow from four thousand years ago?

0:33Speaker 1:Does learning to read reconfigure the circuitry of your brain? And how does dyslexia reveal how unnatural reading really is? And could ai freeze the evolution of language for the first time in history. Today we're diving into the alphabet with linguist Danny Bate, who's just written a book on the surprising history of every letter. Welcome to innner Cosmos with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. The really wild thing about the brain is that the things the brain does best are the things we don't even notice. For example, walking is a tremendously complex symphony of coordinating all your muscles at just the right times. But once we learn how to do it after years of trying, then we lose access to how we even do it because it gets burned down into the unconscious brain. Same with riding a bicycle. There was a time when you had to try and try and pay attention to how you're tilting and moving your arms and how to hit the brakes. But once you get it, then you're not even consciously aware anymore that

2:08Speaker 1:you're doing it. Or take swinging a tennis racket. It's a tremendously complex series of movements, but once you learn how to do it, you can't describe it anymore. If I say to you, wow, you serve so well, how exactly do you do that? You really don't have conscious access to explain it to me. Now, this is a general theme about the brain that I wrote about in my book Incognito. The brain gets really good at tasks that you do a lot of training on, and it relies on a lot of conscious attention at first, but eventually the brain burns those tasks down into the circuitry, and what you get out of that is speed, and energy efficiency. What you lose is conscious access. Now, the great American psychologist William James in eighteen ninety realized that there were many things we couldn't actually see. He suggested that we coax these things into the light by a simple mental exercise. Try to make, as he put it, the natural seems strange by asking the why of any instinctive human act. So here's what he wrote in his Principles of Psychology, read by the actor sean judge.

3:22Speaker 2:Why do we smile when pleased and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend. Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside down? The common man can only say, of course we smile. Of course our heart palpitates at the side of the crowd. Of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul, clad in that perfect form, so palpably and fragrantly made for all eternity to be loved. And so probably does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to in the presence of particular objects.

4:00Speaker 2:To the lion, it is the lioness which is made to be loved. To the bear, the she bear. To the broody hand, the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nest full of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious, and never to be too much sat upon an object which it is to her. Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animal's instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.

4:30Speaker 1:So I've always been fascinated by all the things we do that are invisible to us, whether by learning or by instinct. Because we don't spend any time thinking about those things, they just seem totally natural, and therefore become part of the background of our reality. And one thing I've always been fascinated with is all the invisible details of our language, whether spoken or written. You drop into the world, and in your first few years you're exposed to lots of likelanguage, and you start babbling, and eventually you get better and better at coordinating your breath and the position of your tongue and the shape of your lips, and you are able to make sequences of sound really rapidly, and these travel over a little distance by compressing and expanding the air molecules, and you can transmit some kind of meaning to another human this way, but you can't transmit meaning to any human. It only works with a human who happens to share your particular mapping of sounds to meanings. Just go to any other country in the world where you don't speak the language, and you can detect how arbitrary this whole thing is, how any sound

5:46Speaker 1:can mean any concept. So next time you're in a foreign country, just watch someone at a cafe. They are regaling their friends with some sort of story, and everyone is transfixed, or they're gasping, or they're laughing. And if you don't speak that language, the whole sequence of sounds is a total mystery to you. But here's the point I'm making. If it's your language, then the whole very complicated process of making sounds and interpreting them is totally transparent to you. Right now, you're listening to my voice, and presumably you're not thinking about all these rapid individual sounds that I'm cooking up. Instead, you're just enjoying the meaning, and you remain unaware of the lower level mechanics. And this is especially evident in written language. When you skim over the squiggles on a page of written text, if it's a language that you read, it's hard to appreciate that you're even looking at random squiggles, because it's hard to shake off the fact that they carry meaning. But all you need to do is look at some written language that you are unfamiliar with, especially one with a

6:55Speaker 1:totally different alphabet, or one that uses different symbols for words, and you can appreciate just how arbitrary the mapping is between some squiggle and some meaning. So in this context, one thing I'm obsessed with is alphabets and spellings, because these are things that we have to struggle to learn as little kids, and then they become fully invisible to us. We pass our eyes over a page of a novel and the meaning just floats right off and we laugh or cry, but we rarely, if ever, pay attention to the details of the symbols themselves. So to really illustrate how weird all of this is and how deep it goes, today we're going to talk with linguist Danny Bait about the English alphabet, which, like every alphabet, represents a compressed history of civilization. It's so rare that we would ever stop to wonder why each letter looks the shape it does, or why English has all these bizarre spellings like K in the word kneecap or night in shining armor even though the K makes no sound, or why we have an H in ghost, or why there's a T in the word listen, or one hundred other examples that Danny

8:14Speaker 1:has written about in his new book, Why Q Needs You. I remember tripping on each of those questions as a kid learning the language, but past the age of six or seven, we totally forget to ask those questions anymore. So Danny joins us here today to take us on a dive into the unfathomable depths of the English alphabet, that invisible thing that our brains spend so much time with, but we rarely stop to appreciate. Here's my conversation with linguist Danny Bait. The alphabet has become so successful that it's essentially invisible. Why do we fail to notice it every time we're reading a sentence?

8:55Speaker 3:I think it is partly it's a victim of its own success, and I think it's partly because it is optimized. It's writing in general, and the alphabet specifically is well optimized for writing down language and for reading and writing these two separate processes. In addition to that, we learn it when we're in our infancy, we learn it when we're at elementary school, and frankly, I think this is a factor we don't have much else going on at that particular point in our lives. If we had to learn it as busy twenty or thirteen year olds trying to hold down a career, then maybe it would fit a little bit more obtrusively into our lives.

9:30Speaker 1:If you had to explain the alphabet to someone who had never encountered writing or the concept of writing, what would seem the most astonishing about it?

9:38Speaker 3:I suppose it would be that as a system, it has very few ingredients we managed to create or manage to write down all of language. I mean, of course, there are some things that go along with speech that maybe don't have an associated word or a letter or something like that, like I don't know, coughing and sneezing and all the involuntary sounds that we make while we speak. But nonetheless, the words of our language do get written down really successfully with in the case of English, twenty six ish ingredients. Of course, you know you may want to dispute that number. You might have maybe like what do we do with ampersand and plus and slash and things like that in punctuation, But you know, twenty six letters to write down this incredible cosmos of human language, I think is extremely impressive.

10:25Speaker 1:So the thing about writing from a biology point of view is it's so new. It's just appeared in the last nanosecond of biological time. What was the great cognitive leap from pictures of things to symbols for sounds.

10:42Speaker 3:It's a couple of leaps. It's a couple of maybe moments of creation. When I talk about the alphabet, I don't want people to get the impression that I'm trying to talk about all human writing. You have maybe a handful of super successful traditions of writing, like big family trees that are unrelated to one another, and go back to a particular moment of creation. And I should say there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing down concepts and taking meaning as the primary basis for your writing system. That was the basis for Egyptian hieroglyphs. That was the basis for even something of ancient but very successful system like kurkqun air form. Chinese characters as well, they have a phonetic component, but nonetheless they take meaning and things as their primary thing that you're trying to write down. And yet in certain points in human history people have realized that if you are going to take the number of things and concepts and bits of grammar and give each one its own character, it's really going to increase the number of characters. So if you can hone in on something that can express the same information but with fewer symbols,

11:50Speaker 3:you may be onto a winner. You may be onto something that's maybe not intrinsically better, but might spread more quickly, might have mass appeal. What you can do is with speech, it tends to be made up of a subset of sounds a spoken language across the world. Basically, no spoken language uses all the sounds that we humans can make. Instead, it's a subset, and if you base your writing system on that subset, then that's a cognative leap. That's a great moment of creation.

12:17Speaker 1:The way you structure your book is lovely. Each letter in the English alphabet gets a chapter of its own. Give us an example of a letter whose shape still carries a ghost of its ancient origin.

12:31Speaker 3:Oh, lovely, it's going to sound very boring, maybe a little bit basic to your lovely listeners, But it has to be A. And I will explain why A is the primal letter. It has of this great status at the beginning of our alphabet. It's the thing that kicks the whole alphabet off, and yet, by sheer luck, it does also, as you say nicely put, it contain a little bit of a ghost of what that symbol originally used to be, how it started out. I mentioned already things like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs, at least in the visual medium in writing, are the forerunner of our own alphabet.

13:10Speaker 3:I don't think it's fair to say that it's a straightforward development of hieroglyphs. It's a definite break that gets us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to our alphabets. What seems to happen is that basically a population of non Egyptians within Egypt, ancient Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, take these existing already very ancient symbols and rather than maintain them for their current quite sophisticated different purposes, streamline the whole thing. So now it's one of these symbols for one sound, specifically one consonant of their non Egyptian language. And I mentioned hieroglyphs.

13:44Speaker 3:That's key because to begin with, they are just straightforward imitations or replications of hieroglyphs. They look like things. They look like hands, and they look like eyes and animals and tools that you might find in your house beside the nile. And A perhaps best of all, the letters of that original set has firstly survived, but secondly preserves a little bit of that ghost in that the thing it used to look like was the head of a cow, head of cattle. And if you turn a capital a capital letter is older than lower case ones. I think we have intuition generally about that because they're more different from one another. But if you turn upside down, the kind of horns of the cow and the mouth of the cow, it's the point and the legs of a capital A just rotated. Everything else has changed, but there's a little bit of a ghost of that cow still in capital A.

14:33Speaker 1:Excellent and just before we go on, give us a sense about uppercase versus lowercase letters and how we ended up with that of course.

14:39Speaker 3:Yeah, So basically, these hiroglyphs are pictograms is a nicer alternative word for that. They look like things. But quite quickly as the alphabet catches on, still very much within the shadow of older systems like hieroglyphs and Cunea forms, it spreads its way sort of around the Mediterranean over the centuries in a sort of vaguely anti clockwise motion, so it makes its way up the coast of the Middle East, eastern Mediterranean, makes a leap over to Greece.

15:06Speaker 3:From Greece, it makes the leap over to Italy, and all the while the letters are changing, especially in that first part of the journey. They're being used. And if you are i don't know, inscribing some sort of document or letter that you need to send on you know, something like please help the Assyrians are coming. You don't have time to write down the full cow's head or the full you know, praising man or various other complex sites. So they get simplified. The letters are reduced in their complexity as symbols, and that's kind of the general picture as the alphabet makes its way up the coast of the Mediterranean. By the time it lands in the hands of the Phoenicians, great people living in what is today Lebanon, the symbols are really quite abstract. They don't look like things anymore. They really do look like letters. But crucially, by the time it lands in Rome, so it arrives in ancient Italy at say round about thee seven hundred BC, literacy just massively takes off. It massively takes hold and kind of alternative uses, alternative ways of writing. Who are you writing to? What are you writing on? Different uses

16:11Speaker 3:for the letters emerge, and one of these is a kind of cursive and that cursive will become lowercase letters. They're very simple, they're very fluid, they're much easier to write and connect up. They're very well suited to small documents like a personal letter as opposed to your capital letters, which you use for fancy things like public inscriptions. And from that status, eventually lowercase will kind of upper and lower case will kind of solidifys as two different systems.

16:38Speaker 1:So just before we get back to some big picture stuff, so let's take a few other letters as example. So tell us about this strange name dob and what that reveals about the mismatch between writing and speech.

16:50Speaker 3:Oh, I like that. I like that very much. I think W, out of all the letters, is the historian's friend because it wears its history on its sleeve. It's a double you to begin with. But crucially, if any of your listeners might know French or Spanish or other languages that originate in Western Europe, they may instead call it duble, a double V. And the fact that there's a disagreement over the name tells us basically about the alphabet's post classical, post antique history, that things like W will emerge after the Romans, and also the split between you and V will eventually solidify. That takes centuries for those two letters to be thought of as separate letters.

17:31Speaker 3:And crucially, that split happens after the creation of the letter W. Hence the disagreement over the name. And it's necessary because of the fall of Rome. You have all these barbarians speaking Germanic languages and they have this work sound in their language. I say barbarians, you know, the English emerge from this time period, and they have all these names and words that need a letter, like war, so you slowly see it emerge in the post Roman or post classical words. I just like as well that in more recent history, W is a bit of a disruptor.

18:03Speaker 3:I'll throw some words at you. How would you pronounce David A n D and that word there a n D and fantastic h A n D and excellent two odd of two s A n D, sand w A n D one wand wand for you wand for me slightly different vowels because of British and American English. And you'll notice this with say, I don't know arm harm warm warm in American English. You'll notice this in something like war, in a word like swan which doesn't sound like swan. So W the sound behind that letters is a disruptive one. And that's a recent thing. Shakespeare wouldn't have said this. Shakespeare would have said he rhymes words like glass with w was, So that's glass and wass for Shakespeare. That's a recent thing.

19:01Speaker 1:And that makes a good segue into the title of your book, is why Q needs you? So tell us about that? How do letters carry all linguistic arrangements into the present.

19:14Speaker 3:Oh that's so well put. I really like that formulation because on the one hand, you have this present factor, which is that these letters are intended to represent sounds, but they don't exist in a vacuum. They're all caught up in each other. They're all caught up in their society and the culture and the people who happen to be using them, and their identity and their biases and so on and so on. So we still use QU because the Romans used it. This is something that really the English language gets after the very fateful year ten sixty six, when you have the Battle of Hastings and England is conquered, or if you're a Norman, it's rightly taken by a Norman army under William the Conqueror, and they they're trading on the prestige of Rome. So on the one hand, of course QU does spell a sequence of English sounds, but we could spell this with CW or kW or Q on its own. We continue to use QU because the Romans did, and Roman casts an extremely long shadow specifically why those two letters need each other.

20:17Speaker 3:That goes back to basically the Romans receiving far more letters than they need. They get, as they say this ancient already ancient system from the Greeks. The Greeks got it, the Phoenicians and back all the way round to Egypt. And you know, by the time it lands in the hands of the Romans, it's been used and adapted in such a way that the letters C, K and Q and now all just they're all standing for the same sound, a kind of sound, a hard K. Something's got to go.

20:45Speaker 3:The Romans are ruthless. They're quite happy to prune letters from the ancient alphabet. K is basically chucked out. That's gone. And consequently, languages that descend from the Romans Latin, like French or Spanish, don't really use K. They continue that preference to this day. But Q can stay because of a slight sort of mental phonological difference in the way that they sort out sounds. Their Latin language has a sound like quu, and that's separate from kut. We might not think so in English, but the Romans certainly thought so.

21:18Speaker 3:And because quot is separate from kut's but with the CEA it can keep it so un spelling, which is qu.

21:24Speaker 1:Here's a question about English spelling, because it's famously irregular. Do you feel like it's fair to call it an inefficient system or is that the wrong frame? Is there a rule? Are there rules underneath the chaos?

21:39Speaker 3:Yeah, so there are definitely rules. It doesn't seem that way to everybody, and my heart goes out to people, especially adult learners, who just have to get on with this system that seems crazy and chaotic, and of course nowadays you need to learn it. It's one of the world's lingua francas. But nonetheless there are so many rules going in under the surface, and you can criticize English only from a certain point of view. At that point of view is a good one, which is that you should have the kind of golden ratio, the phonemic ratio of one key sound to one letter. That's the whole basis behind the alphabet. And if that's your measuring stick, then yeah, sure, the English spelling system is not up to snuff, like it's struggling in that regard, but for various reasons, many of them unconscious, many of them conscious decisions.

22:31Speaker 3:New alternative rules and principles can work under the surface. They can emerge, and they've emerged over the history of English. If you wind back the clock back to the old English period, so that's not Shakespeare, that's like Alfred the Great. This is before the year let's say, eleven hundred AD. Old English spelling is really phonemic. It works really well. Many things have changed since then and the letters have adapted with them. So take for example, magic E. It's very distinctive English. It's that kind of silent e which turns pop into the pope or fat into fate. And it is distinctive to English, but it works. It really works as an alternative system of spelling. So over time differences can creep in, and if you adopt a broader perspective, especially a broader perspective on how we read, it doesn't seem so bad. That's probably the strongest thing I can say about it. It doesn't seem so bad.

23:25Speaker 1:So why do we spell, you know, like I know with a silent K, or I spell psychology with a silent P. At the beginning all of these things that we preserving history at the expense of children's brains and time it takes to learn the stuff.

23:42Speaker 3:Yes, you've hit the man on the head. That's exactly it. We're preserving history. These letters were once pronounced, and in some cases they've been the letters have very much earned their keep in English. So the know the start of knowledge was once pronounced. If you go back to the days of say Jeffrey Chaucer, the poet writing around the year fourteen hundred, we know really that he is pronouncing the k at the start of no and knowledge because he alliterates it in his poetry. So Jeffrey Chaucer will write something like the king kneeling, whereas I would say the king kneeling. So he's alliterating these words because they begin with the same sound, and the spelling with that sound makes it long enough to kind of make the cut to make it into standard English spelling, and then drops out from speech, so the spelling is sort of frozen.

24:36Speaker 3:It reflects an older pronunciation of English, and we haven't taken that step. So as you say, it's reflecting history with something like psychology, though that is our or say Europe's love for Greek, these silent pes have never been pronounced in English, with the exception of a couple of sort of hardcore fans of Greek in the sort of the turn of the twentieth century. The founder of the Oxford English Dictionary was sort of led a personal movement to say things like psychology didn't catch on. But so that is not a case of something falling silent within English.

25:11Speaker 3:That's something that is pronounced in another language that English is very uncomfortable for the sound patterns of English, and consequently we don't pronounce it.

25:20Speaker 1:Is there some hidden benefit to English spellings conservatism for example? Is there something that preserves the relationships here between the words and the roots and the meanings by having these fossils, or is it disadvantageous that we hold onto everything.

25:36Speaker 3:Yes, I think that's so well said. It is something that I have got on my little soapbox and talked about. If we are to reform spelling, if we let's say we're going to make it totally phonemic, let's bring everything back to a sort of one to one basis of sound to letter. Great. I'll just add that when we embark on this incredible reform, this massive international project, it may well happen someday there will be some babies that get thrown out with the bathwater. Because there are many things.

26:04Speaker 3:Many alternative systems are systems to do with understanding words, recognizing words, making etymological connections between words that are preserved in the medium of writing. So take for example, know that for me on its own is no with a diff thong, a kind of double vowel at the end. In the word knowledge, it's an oh, it's a short vowel, And in a word like acknowledge, suddenly the k comes back into pronunciation. So you've got three letters pronounced differently in three words. But at least in the medium of writing, I can kind of recognize that as a reader, at least in the medium of reading, as a unit of meaning, as a sort of chunk of lexical information, meaning basically that I know all these words have in common by sheer happenstance. That's not a million miles away from need writing, where you fundamentally or recognizing chunks of meaning. And that's kind of how we read English nowadays, especially adult readers.

27:09Speaker 3:So people who've been online at least as long as I have, you may have seen those kind of sharable images and it's like an English sentence something like, you know, if you can read this, and all the letters apart from the very first one are kind of scrambled, so you know, if you can read this, then you are a genius or something like that, and genius is spelled I don't know GNI something like that. You can read it because your brain, especially after that infancy stage of learning to master this system of writing, you're not simply accepting sequences of sounds and assigning them and forming a sound word out of them. You're recognizing chunks of meaning.

27:48Speaker 3:And that business is that alternative approach to reading, and indeed also the etymological connections that uniting words that may have different pronunciations. I don't know in a word like autumn, I mean I say autumn, I know it's full over the United States, but autumn has a silent n. It reappears an autumnal take away the end, and you might lose the connection between those words. So there's a principle of reading and as a principle of etymology, that we would lose if we updated our spelling.

28:16Speaker 1:Are there cognitive costs to learning? You know, what's called a deep orthography like English, as opposed to a transparent spelling system like you find in Italian, where each letter maps onto a sound cleanly and you know exactly how something is pronounced. What you're mentioning about the historical benefits we get. Are there cognitive costs to it?

28:38Speaker 3:Yeah, I would expect so. I would expect so, and we would expect to see differences as students or young pupils are learning these two systems that Italian learners will have a better time.

28:50Speaker 1:That's exactly right. It's much harder work for an English speller to learn than it is for an Italian spellers. So I always wonder about this thing whether it makes sense to hang on to the fossils of language because of the benefits we get of the history the alphabet, as you so wonderfully exposed in your book. You know, it carries all kinds of history and the way we spell words. But maybe it's not worth it. Let me ask you this, If you were in charge of redoing the spelling in the English language, would you do it and would it be difficult to get people to agree on it.

29:29Speaker 3:I would enjoy the responsibility for a day and then resign. It's a huge task, and it's something that I am personally open to. I don't want your listeners to come away with the impression that I'm sort of flip flopping around on this issue. Your listeners might think, hang on, he's just praised you know this etymological, historical spelling, and now he's talking about reform, but it genuinely it's a difficult question. We will lose things and we will gain things with reform. Let's say we're all on board. We're all on board for some sort reform, and maybe this could happen. I really believe that this is a matter of language, but also maybe geopolitics when some sort of upset knocks English off its high position in the world, and afterwards, you know, the different countries that speak English can maybe have a frank conversation about, Okay, what we're going to do with our spelling now, maybe taking it to the national level rather than leaving it at the international level as it currently is. So we're all on board, what are we going to do? Basically, if you're going to reform spelling, you're going to have to have a

30:30Speaker 3:very honest conversation and you're going to have to answer two really big questions. So firstly, who are you? This is not a soul searching question, it's literally who are you? In terms of prestige means, technology, power, influence? Are people going to listen to you? Are you somebody that can reach people via a particular medium such as the Internet or printed materials. Do you have governments on site? In addition, are you respected? Are you some greater paragon of learning?

31:00Speaker 3:We have them, but they tend to be on a kind of national level within different English speaking countries. And accrucially, are people going to listen to you? I can propose a reform spelling for you right now, and your listeners go, thanks very much, I'm not going to use it. So that's the first question. Secondly, then who's English? Whose English are going to be? Because English speech, if we're going to bring it back to speech, is seriously disunited. Speech change is in a way that can lead to new languages.

31:29Speaker 3:Eventually has happened over the course of history. That's happened with Latin, eventually becomes French and Spanish and Italian and Romanian. And it's constantly, always and never going to happen with English. You know, for as long as we keep communicating and talking with each other, that will slow down the rate of change. But all of our accents are kind of straining at the leash to become new languages. We'll talk about American I speak, American I speak Australian. I speak Indian something like that, but our standard spelling is keeping it all together for the time being. If you're going to reform that spelling, which one of these English is?

32:06Speaker 3:Which is it American English? Well, sure it's the most prestigious. It's the one with the most power, and I think I think it's the one with the most speakers. Sure, but you're going to annoy it a heck of a lot of people in Britain on Australia if you do that, because we will insist that the h in herb needs to be there. There's a lot of strong feelings about this. So these are two ginormous questions, and the current global situation I don't think allows an answer, a satisfactory answer to both of them.

32:34Speaker 1:Okay, let's shift over to the brain now. So you know, reading feels totally natural to us once we learned, but as I said, it's so biologically recent. What does literacy ask the brain to repurpose?

32:47Speaker 3:So I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this topic, but they're very amateurish. I have a vague sense that, as you say, writing, it comes later, and that's that laterness of writing is twofold. That's not only lateness within human history and human development, but also there's a lateness within our personal development in well it comes after speech, or if your death, it comes after signing. So there is a kind of lag and I think that does point to some of the foundations of reading and writing, which involves the brain, involves of course the eyes, It involves your hands as well all sorts of motor movements involved in the business of writing, which makes it separate from speech. We don't tend to use our hands to signify so much in speech, despite my wild gesticulating I do that, but because of at least the original dependency of writing on speech. My intuition or my perhaps prediction is that on some level it does use the same parts of the brain. The information is coming to that part of the brain via a different route, namely the eyes. But there is a fundamental linguistic connection in

34:04Speaker 3:on neurology. And that is about as much as I feel I can say, what do you think? What do you think about that?

34:11Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right. There's an area in the brain in humans called the visual word form area on the left side of the brain typically, and it is essentially, after you've learned speech, this is allowing you to take visual marks on a page and translate them into as though somebody were saying it. So so you're right. It's allowing you to look at the marks and say, oh, what would it sound like if this were coming out of somebody's mouth. And people can get damage to that area and then they can no longer, you know, read words on a page. It doesn't make sense to them anymore.

34:47Speaker 1:They're no longer able to translate that into what it would sound like. Let me ask you another brain question here, Dan, What's interesting about the way that writing trains a brain that this happens slightly differently. If you're learning a let's say, the English alphabet versus a what's called a logographic writing system in Chinese, where each ideogram stands for a word. When you're looking in English versus Chinese, the brain is asked to solve slightly different computational problems. The difference is that in alphabet trains the brain to hear speech as divisible into these tiny sequential sound units, while a logographic system like Chinese trains the brain to rapidly recognize these visual symbolic patterns that are tied to meaning, and so you know, they're just there's slightly different ways of solving the same problem.

35:42Speaker 3:What do you then think from You know, as much as neurology can tell us at the moment that then actually speech, different kinds of speech, different writing systems of the world. They're just working differently. They are being sent to different parts of the brain.

35:55Speaker 1:That's exactly right, and I want to emphasize that in the end, what your brain is trying to do, it's locked in silence and darkness. It's trying to just gather meaning. And so whether you're doing it phonemically sounding something out, or you're looking at pictures like hieroglyphics or Chinese letters or whatever, it is, what you're trying to get to is the same endpoint, which is, Okay, what is this sign trying to tell me? What is this book? What's the story? But yes, there are measurable differences in how the brain goes about that. I'll just give you another example.

36:28Speaker 1:Some colleagues of mind at Berkeley did a study a few years ago where they looked at what happens when you read a book versus you listen to the audio book, and I think a lot of people had predictions that we'd see really different signals going on in the brain, but it turns out it's really similar. Obviously, when you're listening to an audiobook, you're activating the auditory cortex, when you're reading, you're activating the visual cortex, and so on.

36:54Speaker 1:But fundamentally, what the brain cares about is the meaning, and so all of that ends up in this same place. And when you're reading the story and the guys out on the ship and the woman is doing this and that, like, all that looks the same in the brain. So once you're past the initial levels, what the brain cares about is what is happening in the story.

37:15Speaker 3:So different processes, different roots in the brain, but all ultimately targeting the same.

37:19Speaker 1:Place exactly right.

37:21Speaker 3:Interesting, and one of the few things I can contribute to any sort of discussion of the brain is that I would also expect that it wouldn't be a straightforward binary logographic versus phonemic course, Let's, you know, use more Layman's terms, meaning based versus sound based, or I would imagine that there would be diversity even within those categories, because within the field and the history of the alphabet. You have different writing systems that incode different sounds, or maybe not all the sounds. You have alphabet in a narrower sense is the one that encodes all phonemic sounds, all the key sounds of your languagewels and consonants. But you also have scripts that leave vowels implied or just not written at all. So this is the foundation actually of our own alphabet. Vowels are kind of a later edition, and that vowel a state is really the foundation of say, Hebrew and Arabic writing. Of course, there are ways of writing vowels in Hebrew and Arabic. They could be repurposing consonant letters or adding additional marks. I think they're called nickeld in Hebrew. But the basis is consonants only, and

38:31Speaker 3:you are as the reader therefore inferring, you're inferring vowels, you're supplying them. You're kind of vowel part of your let's say, your speech center of the brain is maybe doing a little bit more work in going okay, well, we've got the sort of skeleton of this word, and what does this match? What could this be? I'm going to use context and I'm going to use sequence of consonants to go, Aha, we have a winner. It's this, and the vowels get slotted in. We have a complete meaningful word and it gets passed on down the conveyor belt somehow. So just expect there's diversity even within phonological systems as well.

39:18Speaker 1:I'm really fascinated by this question of whether spelling reforms are doomed. And you brought up some you know, some complexities about this, but let me ask a general question. Now, what point does a spelling become wrong rather than merely non standard?

39:34Speaker 3:Hm. This is the thing our standard spelling today in English, the thing that's you know, predictive text and your word processor of choice guides you to has this veneer of inevitability. But it's it's a mirage, it's an illusion. Standard spelling is actually a matter of consensus, and the consensus is reinforced by technology. If you go back in time of call, there are highly prestigious forms of spelling, but people just aren't able to impress one particular standard way. You don't have the printing press or you don't have the computers to really tell people how to spell. You know, it goes beyond technology also goes into education systems. Obviously, as particular way of spelling, it was going to get a huge boost and become the standard when it has a full government behind it, which you know, which happens not just in the case of English. It's kind of a mirage, and it works by it works by consensus, and it also becomes another kind of feedback loop. We agree on the standard, we put it in our dictionaries, and we put it into our technology, and then our dictionaries and our technology tell us this is the standards, and we

40:44Speaker 3:believe them, and we go, aha, this is a wrong spelling. But that's really something that emerges slowly, and if you were to go back to earlier periods in the history of writing, early in the history of English, the idea of standard spelling of right and wrong is just not there. That's good, that's bad, that's prestigious, that's not prestigious. But there's not a single standard. That's I kind oft stress how modernist thing it is, because the modern world has made it possible.

41:11Speaker 1:You know. On the side, I'm an amateur genealogist and I love studying family trees, and it's the same thing with the spelling of surnames. Those were incredibly fluid essentially until record keeping very recently, essentially following Napoleon seventeen eighty nine, when you know, governments needed to keep records for taxation purposes. And then especially with the advent of typewriters and then computers, then the spelling of surnames got nailed down in a way that they never were before. So here's my question to you. So you know, in the same way that computers in spell check nudged us towards standardized spelling, what is generative AI nudging us towards What changes when the new tools start correcting the user and make normal versions of sentences.

42:03Speaker 3:I really appreciate this question. When you look at those historical documents when you do your family genealogy, you'll have a sense, you'll have a feeling of when this document is from based on the way the letters are used, the way it's spelled, and you can kind of gain vibes from a historical writing in And I believe My point is, I believe our era today in which we you and I are speaking, will be no different. It will have its own feel, and one part of that feel will be the triumph of the standard, the triumph perhaps the rise before the fall. I don't know. I don't know what happens next in the future, but there will be a real sense of an all victorious standard spelling.

42:43Speaker 3:While English accents to continue to go in different directions and continue to diverge, and AI will form a part of that. Spelling is always tied to the circumstances of its time, which naturally includes technology. You know, spelling. We can see the effects on spelling when the printing press is set up, and when AI gets set up is absolutely no different as well. I think what we will see is a real devotion to the standards. There will be almost no question, no experimentation with spelling. All possible variation, some of it which may be better, is in phonemically better make more sense, will be just you know, cut off at the base, you know, plucks before it can even blossom, a real sense of you know, even with us started spelling today, small spelling mistakes can creep in.

43:34Speaker 3:Let's wind back the clock to the pre AI age. Let's go about twenty years or something like that. Even with all the access to all the dictionaries in your classrooms or I don't know all the printed media according to the standard spelling, mistakes and possibly spelling corrections and improvements could still creep in. But by giving so much of our writing and our production of writing over to AI, we have no possibility for those new innovations to creep in.

44:03Speaker 3:We will say, do this, and AI will do it for us. And AI is not going to update spelling. AI thinks is going to give us only the standard spelling that we want. There's going to be no natural development as there would be if it's only us humans doing the writing, and instead we are offloading our thinking but also our writing variation and fluidity over to the machine, where it'll just stop, at least for the future, at least for the you know, foreseeable future.

44:31Speaker 1:I wonder if AI could ever help us to do a real language reform. I'm not sure what that would look like, but you know, if the AI sort of takes it on in the same way that you said, who is doing it? Is it somebody with enough power and influence? Maybe if you know, open AI and Claude and all the others said all right, look, we're standardizing this because it is going to lock down. Now that we're using AI, all of the evolution and variation is going to get locked down right now. You know, maybe it's an opportunity to say, let's just clean it up while we're doing it.

45:08Speaker 3:Absolutely, I'd only add to that that there's an additional ingredient that might lead to success, which is prestige. These companies are extraordinarily prestigious their company, they're their Their product which they make is very much you know, flavor of a month. At the moment, it's it's the big thing, and it might not have success for linguistic reasons because of what I just outlined. You know, the problem of it still doesn't solve the problem of who's English. But nonetheless, the prestige could be the thing that carries the day as people are on board with the AI train and are you know, I feel it very much has a kind of cultural cachet that other media don't at the moment that I would predict would be the thing that allows it to reform spelling.

45:52Speaker 1:What do you hope everyone will look at differently about the alphabet after hearing this conversation, It would.

45:59Speaker 3:Be the alphabet it's just not fixed. It is not fixed. There is not a single feature of the alphabet that does not show change and development over history, as the alphabet spreads out from that early point in time and passes through different languages and different people's different hands. So this may you know, This pertains to the direction of the letters, what sound they stand for, the way that they're drawn. Obviously the upper and lower case difference comes in, and I think lower case letters are very much the dominant ones today. The only thing really that I can say has remained the same is that fundamental principle of one sound for one letter. That's the thing that kind of gives us an alphabet. That's when we can say the alphabet's born back in four thousand years ago. Everything else is in flux, and I find that very hardening.

46:51Speaker 3:I suppose as a historical linguist by heart, I'm not scared of flux, and we are not bound to follow the spelling of the past. Yes, our sputting is very fixed. Yes the standard is so strong, but if we want to make changes we can. Every generation has had that right, and we are no difference. The fact that the alphabet is influx and will continue to be in flux after we're dead and gone. I find very encouraging because we can put our own stamp on it.

47:23Speaker 1:That was linguist Danny Bates talking about his new book Why Q Needs You. I just want to mention two more important things about written language. The first is a common misunderstanding that I sometimes see about whether the human brain has evolved some dedicated module for reading written language. The answer is no, because reading is far too recent in evolutionary history. The first writing systems appear about five thousand years ago, and the first alphabets were about four thousand years ago, so that is way too fast for the brain to evolve any kind of new module. Instead, and even more amazingly, literacy recruits and reorganizes other neural machinery that has evolved for other purposes. So, for example, it repurposes parts of the visual system that evolves for recognizing objects like shapes or faces, or tracks in the mud, or tools or other patterns. When you learn to read, you're training this circuitry to become exquisitely sensitive to culturally invented marks on a page. And then reading also recruits auditory and language systems. You have to learn to map these visual symbols onto the sounds of speech. So literacy

48:45Speaker 1:requires the brain to fuse together all these different systems for vision and speech and motor planning and attention and memory into this new coordinated network. And this is an example of what my colleague Stanislau calls neuronal recycling, which means that ancient neural hardware gets co opted for totally new cultural purposes. Okay, I also want to mention one more deep question about written language, which is why in most Semitic languages the writing goes from right to left, but descendants of the Greek alphabet like English go left to right. Now, that might seem like just some arbitrary question, but some decades ago people theorized that this might have to do with a detail of the brain. This was mostly proposed by a scholar named Da Kirschov in a book he wrote called The Alphabet and the Brain, and his proposal depends on a few linked claims. The main thing is that Semitic writing systems like Phoenician or Hebrew only encoded consonants, and the readers had to figure out the vowels from the context. The idea is that that requires the brain to do sort of holy stick processing

50:01Speaker 1:with a lot of influence of context, which Da Kirschov said associated these more strongly with right hemisphere processing. By contrast, the Greek alphabet explicitly encoded vowels, and that promoted finer breakdown into the sounds of the letters and analyzing the exact sequence, and the idea is that these were associated more strongly with left hemisphere language systems. Now, why does the direction that you write the text matter? In theory, it's because visual input from the right side of the visual field projects to the left hemisphere and the left visual field projects to the right hemisphere. So Da Kirschov suggested that if you read left to right, that continuously moves upcoming text into the right visual field, so it's better for feeding language information directly into the left hemisphere.

50:59Speaker 1:So just to summarize, is that the idea was that an alphabet that's really explicit about every sound, like early Greek was, might be more efficient when you read it from left to right, and hence the Greek swapping of directions. Now, I want to give a caveat here. Writing direction varies a lot across cultures, So if there was something about hemispheric efficiency that strongly determined the writing direction, we'd probably expect more convergence around the globe, But across cultures, written languages vary a lot. Some are left rights, some are right left, Some go up or down, some go back and forth, and they all function fine. So that probably weakens the claim of a biologically optimal direction. It may be that the direction of the language has mostly to do with cultural lock in. In other words, once the civilization accumulates archives and religious texts and scribes and bureaucracy, than whatever they started doing it first kind of gets locked in. Think of this like the way that we have quirty keyboards, which are a totally suboptimal layout for a keyboard, but once it gets locked in, then it's

52:13Speaker 1:really hard to change. But I wanted to mention this issue about the brain and the direction of writing. I don't think it can be the full story, but it's a fascinating potential link between ancient history and modern science. So let's wrap up the fact that we have languages that go in all directions. Fundamentally, what it should make us appreciate is the fact that human brains can internalize almost any symbolic convention at all. And back to the theme that started this episode, whatever we internalize. Although it's a massively complex system that encapsulates thousands of years of migration and empire and trade and politics, the really stunning part is that the brain trains on language so deeply that, under normal circumstances, it becomes totally invisible to us unless we choose to start paying attention. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.

53:17Speaker 1:Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.