Babel Fry's Planet Word

Hello.

You know, just saying that one word is one of the most complex and extraordinary operations we know.

70 muscles and half a billion brain cells go into it.

What's more, pretty much anyone who can speak English over the age of two

can do it without even having to think.

The story of language is surely one of the greatest stories we have.

In this series, I'm going to explore language

in all its amazing complexity, variety and ingenuity.

Our species perhaps could live together without language

but it wouldn't be what we call the human species.

'I'm going to try to understand how we learn it,

'how we write it...'

Oh, my goodness. This is magical!

'..how we sometimes lose it...'

Oh, my Lord!

'..how it defines us to the very core of our being...'

Ba, ba-ba-da-ba! Ra-ba-dum-bum-ba-dum.

'..why it can make us laugh and cry and tear our hair out

'or inspire us.'

To sleep...no more.

'It's what I treasure above all else.

'It is what makes me ME.'

In this programme, I'm going to take you on a journey

to find out why we are the only species to have developed

this miraculous gift of language.

We'll see the individual miracle of how we acquire language at an early age...

..and celebrate language as one of the most marvellous tools humanity has.

A continual process of innovation and creation.

HE SPEAKS KLINGON

That really hurts, actually.

To begin my exploration of language,

I've come here to north-east Africa,

close to where our species first evolved.

There are around 7,000 languages in use on our planet today,

some spoken by a mere handful of people, others by more than a billion.

It's a surprisingly short time - only about 50,000 years -

since mankind graduated from uggs and grunts and growls

into a linguistic flowering.

TRANSLATION:

These are the Turkana, a pastoral nomad tribe

who are about as far away from me and my tribe as you could find.

But one thing that I do share with them is language.

Turkana is as sophisticated and complicated a tongue

as ancient Greek, and although I can't understand a word,

it actually works much the same as English does.

THEY GIGGLE

There are nouns to name things,

adjectives to describe them

and verbs to explain

what you can do with them.

THEY SING IN TURKANA

Every language provides an amazingly rich and adaptable set of tools

that mankind shares the world over -

and which every Turkana child imbibes with their mother's milk.

And how old is a baby when they start to speak?

THEY SPEAK IN TURKANA

Two years?

Yeah, two years.

That means winter, summer. Winter, summer.

-I see, winter, summer. Two winters, two summers.

-Yeah.

Those are the first words. "Father, mother." It's the same everywhere.

What's really amazing is that these children,

even the smallest of them, within a very short space of time

are able to grasp the full complexities and all the phonetics

and all the metaphors and all the remarkable depths that the Turkana language is capable of.

It's no more effort for them to acquire a full language

than it is for them to grow hair.

It just happens,

and yet it's the most complex piece of brain processing

that we know of on the planet.

It's a kind of miracle.

Miracle. You are a miracle.

All over the world,

from the cradle of man in East Africa to a hutong in China,

this same miraculous process takes place over the course of just a few years.

THEY BABBLE

This is Ruby, who lives in London.

Ruby.

Ruby is 15 months old and over the next year,

we'll be tracking her development from umms and ahs to recognisable speech.

Say "ta".

But how do we learn language?

And what exactly is the difference between language and communication?

After all, the natural world is an absolute cacophony of communication.

Birds singing to greet the dawn,

meerkats whistling to each other to warn off predators.

Elephants trumpeting to attract a mate,

dolphins clicking to point out food.

The closer you get to us humans on the evolutionary tree,

the more sophisticated their communication seems to become.

Monkeys have a whole grammar of whoops, howls and calls

that signal everything from fear to joy to love.

But it's still a long way from this to language as our species knows it.

It's not that we haven't looked for an amazing talking ape,

it's just that so far we haven't found one.

It's so closely related and yet so completely different.

I think it is language that's the thing that's most different about us.

If I trained hard, I probably could bounce from tree to tree,

but you could train all your life and you could never say,

"Betty had a bit of bitter butter, put it in her batter and made her batter bitter,

"then took a bit of better butter and put it in her bitter batter and made her bitter batter better."

If you could, you'd be the wonder of the age.

So how did we manage to develop language,

when other primates have not?

I've come to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig,

where they study a number of large primates.

I'm here to meet one of the world's foremost evolutionary linguists,

Michael Tomasello.

There's a general assumption that we all have

that language is one of the things that separates human beings from all other animals,

but that maybe animals like the great apes, our closest relatives, with whom we share so much DNA,

are sort of on a continuum on the way to language.

That maybe they can be taught language.

Does your research show that any of this is likely?

Well, in evolution, everything is on a continuum

but they're a pretty far step away on that continuum, I would say.

So their vocalisations are pretty hard wired

and before you can get to something like language,

you have to be able to produce sounds when you want to and not when you don't.

So, if food is coming, they make this noise

or if a predator is coming, they make that noise.

They're very much tied to their emotions.

The vocalisations go with emotional states.

If they're frightened, they scream.

If they're excited about food, they hoot.

If they're grieving someone after a long time,

they give a kind of submissive pant-grunt.

And so their vocalisations are fairly stereotypical,

with only a little bit of flexibility.

Well, no-one can doubt that animals communicate.

You can see our closest cousins here - primates like us -

communicating like Billy-o in all kinds of ways.

But I don't think we can call that language.

One of the problems they face - even sophisticated primates -

is that they simply don't have the mechanical apparatus necessary for speech.

They don't have the control over breathing,

the complex facial muscles that allow such extraordinary sounds

that we can make, and I'm making now,

though goodness knows, they can try and compensate.

Nor do they have the larynx or vocal cords in the right position for speech,

but they can make signs.

Maybe sign language is possible amongst primates. That's worth thinking about, surely. Eh?

You can't JUST fart, surely. That's better!

Since the 1960s, there have been numerous attempts to do just that -

trying to teach apes language using sign language.

Perhaps the most famous of these experiments

was conducted at Columbia University, where a chimpanzee,

cheekily named Nim Chimpsky -

a pun on the great linguist Noam Chomsky -

was brought up like a human child

in an attempt to mirror a human child's linguistic development.

Nim became quite adept at signing,

but never grasped how to use grammar.

Around the same time, a three-year-old chimp named Lana

was the subject of an experiment in Atlanta.

-REPORTER:

-Lana lives in a transparent plastic cage with a computer.

She operates the machine through a language of symbols.

The symbols have to be pressed in a specific order for the desired result to be achieved.

"Please, machine, give piece of apple, full stop."

Although this communication seems sophisticated,

it's not using language in the way that we do.

Chimps have the ability to construct very basic sentences,

but they don't initiate conversations.

There is no linguistic creativity.

"Please, machine, give chocolate, full stop."

They're doing it only to request things.

They're doing it imperatively,

or in response to some demand from them,

and not with one another in their natural state.

Pointing, for them, is not about sharing information as much as it is about getting what you want.

So, what is your best guess, based on your research,

as to how human beings separated?

Why and when they acquired this difference,

this ability to project their personality on to their fellows,

to co-operate and use language as a social, co-operative medium

in a way quite different from others?

I think the initial step was that we ended up

having to collaborate in order to produce food.

Something in the ecology changed that meant

that we had to put our heads together to be able to acquire food.

Working together towards a common goal

means we have to be co-operative in sharing the food at the end,

we have to co-ordinate our movements when we do that

and it puts pressure on for communication,

because I think the first major function of uniquely human communication

was to co-ordinate collaborative activities.

For simpler types of hunting, gestures and grunts may suffice -

but the pursuit of more elusive quarry demanded a more complex system of communication.

When the ancestors of these Wauja of the Xingu River in Brazil

first decided to hunt some alligators,

the whole village needed to work together to catch their prey.

So, somewhere along the line,

cries and grunts turned into words and sentences.

Clearer communication brought other benefits.

Increased efficiency created more free time to spend together as a community.

As language blossomed, experiences could be shared and stories told.

TRANSLATION:

So language gave us the power to hunt ever more efficiently and with greater co-operation,

but it also granted us completely unseen new benefits.

We were able to talk about the past

and to project our lives into the future.

This transmission of knowledge across the generations

is what gave us, ultimately, civilisation itself.

Language became the foundation of human society and culture

and for me, thinking about it, using it, playing with it,

has always been one of the greatest passions of my life.

-To you, language is more than a means of communication?

-Of course it is, of course it is,

of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother,

my sister, my whore, my mistress, my checkout girl.

Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square,

or handy freshen-up wipette.

Language is the breath of God.

If our changing environment first forced us to learn language,

what did that language then do to us?

Did it change us physiologically?

Elsewhere in Leipzig's Max Planck Institute,

leading geneticist Dr Wolfgang Enard is unravelling the mysteries of the human genome.

His work is providing some tantalising clues

as to how our brains became hard-wired for language.

Wolfgang, one of the most important things that science can discover is where speech comes from.

Where this extraordinary ability of human beings to have evolved

and to process language - the thing that marks us out perhaps more than

anything else from other animals - where it comes from.

There are all kinds of theories, but a recent addition to those theories

has been this mysterious two-letter gene difference

that you and your colleagues have discovered.

-Can you tell me about it? It's called FOXPT - is that right?

-FOXP2.

Yes, that's how gene names are. They are strange letters and numbers.

FOXP2 is currently the biggest foot we have in this door.

What the genetic make-up is and how we evolved language and how speech, at least, functions.

The FOXP2 gene is what's called a forkhead box protein,

found on human chromosome 7.

All mammals have it and, in fact,

there are only two amino acids different between ours and the chimps'

and just three between us and mice.

Its connection to language was realised when it was discovered

that humans with a mutation in the gene can have extreme speech disorders.

We need to somehow study that and the clue to that -

or the only possibility we really have to study that - is to look in mice.

If you can make mice that have the human version of the FOXP2 gene,

and then see how they compare to a normal mouse. Litter mates.

-These are pups that have the gene in?

-Yes.

So they... They carry the human version of FOXP2.

Mice can have litters every few months,

so the study effectively follows an evolutionary process on fast forward.

By closely monitoring these little creatures' squeals and squeaks,

Enard is already spotting some small but significant changes.

They have some sudden features, especially in their brain,

but also in their vocalisation.

Really?

Slight differences and we hope these slight differences give us some clue

to where and what actually changed in human FOXP2 evolution.

And you would hope, of course, to discover not just new sound waves

or new frequencies at which they're communicating,

but maybe even an effect in the communication,

which is to say quicker mating or passing of news of food,

or who knows? Or is that being far too optimistic about the possibilities?

I think that would be asking too much. The mouse would not start talking.

-They're not going from squeaking to speaking.

-They're still a mouse.

-Exactly.

So sadly, despite the fact that Enard's test subjects have been dubbed "the singing mice,"

there doesn't seem to be any chance they will evolve into something like these old friends.

# We will wash it, we will splosh it

# Bring the bucket and mop, mop, mop

# We will dust it, we will brush it

# We will polish its top, top, top

# We will polish its top, top, top. #

-Do you think FOXP2 has more secrets to give up for you?

-Absolutely.

I mean, er, we understand so little in terms of what it really does

because, after all, the brain is a pretty complex organ.

How certain molecular changes relate to physiological changes

in the brain, behavioural changes, it is a hard problem.

'Of course, scientifically appealing and revealing as it might be,

'to experiment with FOXP2 on primates would be ethically unthinkable.

'But that hasn't stopped us imagining what communicating with our closest cousins might be like.'

-Getting the hang of it. Mind the banisters, son.

-I can't hold it, Dad.

Don't worry, son. I've shifted more pianos than you've had hot dinners.

Coo-ee. Coo-ee, Mr Shifter. Light refreshment?

-Thank you most kindly, madam.

-Oh, my!

One way of shifting it.

-Dad, do you know the piano's on my foot?

-You hum it, son, I'll play it.

Human.

Chimp.

Mm... Mouse.

And...

human.

If only it were that simple.

But we are, it seems, beginning to unlock some of the mystery.

A few misplaced atoms on chromosome 7 was probably part of it,

causing some improved communication during hunting,

which led to a better diet so that those who had the gene had more children.

But exactly when and where humankind first started to speak,

we'll never know.

But we certainly did learn to speak and, frankly, ever since then,

we've never shut up.

As haven't you, I notice. Yes.

But absolutely none of that would have been possible without this exquisite thing -

this glorious three pounds of mushy grey matter

which differentiates us from all other animals.

The human brain.

With this cauliflower-walnut-like mass containing something like 100 billion neurons,

we're able to think our thoughts, dream our dreams,

dredge the memory banks, to translate them into words

and then get our bodies actually to speak them.

The strange thing is, we know more about the origins and workings of the universe

than we do about the human brain.

It's mankind's final frontier.

'So what do we actually know about this language-producing machine between our ears?

'I'm off to have a delve into my own brain.

'At the University College London Centre for Neuroimaging,

'psychologists, brain boxes and neurolinguists

'have the very latest kit to look into the grey matter.'

-Ah, this looks like a little office.

-Control room.

It's through there, right? Oh, yes.

Yes, I've seen these on House and things like that.

'Dr Joe Devlin and Professor Cathy Price are clinical psycholinguists,

'whose work is focused on how language works in the brain -

'specialising in how strokes affect language ability.'

OK.

'They're going to have my brain scanned by MRI,

'the magnetic resonance imaging technique that allows scientists

'to see which parts of the brain are working, lighting up areas which are being stimulated -

'in this case, while I'm speaking.'

Magnetic resonance imaging.

It's what I'm undergoing even as I speak.

An extraordinary technology which allows one to view

areas of the brain and the activity which they undergo

when performing certain tasks,

such as this rather self-reflexive one of describing MRI.

'Professor Price has now analysed my scan results.'

This is your brain here and this is a model of the brain,

where we've superimposed a summary of the activations during different conditions.

It doesn't matter where the human being is brought up

or how they have learned to communicate.

The same set of regions are involved.

It's like looking at bodies.

They're all made up of the same components.

Anyone who learns to play the piano will be taught to do it

the same way, to use the same set of instruments.

'When it comes to understanding exactly how our brains work in the language process,

'we are still in the neurological equivalent of the dark ages.

'But looking at the images, I can't help but wonder at how much of my brain is involved in it.

'Is my grey matter saturated with language?'

Language uses most of our brain

because it is integrating all of our sensory sources,

all the different types of memory that we can have

and then co-ordinating how we respond to it.

And then everything we do is then monitored by language,

so language then becomes an integral part of our human nature.

'I do feel that language is what I am,

'so what happened to the writer Robert McCrum

'is just the sort of thing I would fear most.

'15 years ago, a stroke left Robert unable to walk or talk.

'Language lived on inside him, but he could not express it.'

-I had what's called a right-side haemorrhagic infarct.

-Goodness me.

Which is quite a bad one,

and I was paralysed all the way down my left side.

The right goes to left in the brain,

so I was paralysed and couldn't stand or do anything.

I was completely poleaxed. The stroke took place in what's called the basal ganglia.

It's very deep in the brain. But I did have language, and never lost...

I couldn't speak, cos my mouth was all...

-So the language was in your head?

-The language was in my head but the face was frozen, or half-frozen.

There was a nervous two or three months

-when I wasn't sure what I was going to get back.

-Right.

'As Robert recuperated, his brain did an extraordinary thing.

'New parts of it took over to replace the burnt-out ones.

'It rewired itself.

'And although it's not quite as easy as before,

'Robert is now able once again physically to verbalise his thoughts.

'It's now believed that somewhere between 50 and 80% of the brain

'is involved in language processes.'

Gradually, it's got better.

Even now, when I'm speaking to you I still have to make an effort.

-There's a greater amount of conscious production?

-Absolutely.

So it's like someone who has to walk by remembering how to use...

Have to remember to articulate clearly and not to speak too quickly

and I have a slight - you probably didn't get this or see this -

but there's probably a slight stammer, particularly if I'm nervous.

Tiny things.

So language is clearly integral to being human.

It's hard-wired into us at a genetic level,

utilising every part of the brain.

Indeed, the brain will rewire itself just to keep us speaking.

But how intrinsic - how automatic - is language?

Is it like eating and sleeping or is it, to some extent, a learned skill?

It's really a kind of nature-versus-nurture question.

The kind of question that has beguiled and fascinated scientists and philosophers since time began.

It's not often that nature affords us an opportunity to investigate.

In the midst of the craziness of the French Revolution,

a young boy was discovered in the forests of the south-eastern Massif Central,

one of the wildest and least inhabited regions in Europe.

It appeared that the boy had been living alone,

and like an animal, for some years.

Feral children have fascinated philosophers for centuries,

offering a window into human nature untainted by society's strictures.

And in doing so, revealing how language might be formed.

Finding a real-life feral child was nothing short of sensational.

He was captured and ended up in Paris

under the care of the innovative doctor Jean Marc Itard,

who was working at the recently established Institute for Deaf Mutes.

The boy, whom they named Victor,

having experienced almost nothing of society and no education,

was considered something of a blank slate.

Victor?

Tu veux un peu de lait? Du lait?

Most significantly, he was unable to speak, suggesting that language

is not just genetic - it needs to be learned from others.

Doucement, doucement. Pas si vite, pas si vite.

For the next five years, Itard devoted himself to Victor.

He taught him how to eat, how to use the toilet,

how to restrain his animal urges,

in particular with the female inmates once he had reached puberty.

And of course, how to speak French.

Victor, Victor.

Va chercher la plume.

Va chercher la plume.

Victor's vocal cords, like any muscle unused to exercise, needed training.

Just as a baby learns to babble,

so Victor started to learn to articulate sounds.

Mar...

Mar-teau. Mar-teau. Mar-teau.

..teau.

Tres bien. Prends le pomme de terre.

Doucement, doucement. Pas si vite.

Le retrouve. Fort, comme ca. Direct. Encore.

Despite remaining in Itard's care until his death aged 42,

Victor never learned to talk.

The reasons why were never established.

Perhaps it was a congenital defect or psychological trauma,

or perhaps Victor simply started to learn too late.

Oui. Tres bien, tres bien.

The trouble is, cases like Victor make for messy scientific study

because, by definition, with all feral children their backgrounds are unclear.

What seems certain is that there is a window for language acquisition,

which closes round about early puberty.

Then it's much more difficult to acquire language.

Of course we do, as we often learn foreign languages

but, as most of us can testify,

it becomes a lot more difficult as the brain loses plasticity.

One thing, though, is certain - by the age of five,

most of us will have acquired the gift of language.

To study this magical process, Dr Deb Roy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

had cameras installed throughout his house.

For three years, Dr Roy filmed his son as he began to talk.

WOMAN: OK, water. Water.

Dr Roy's son was right on schedule.

At first, he spoke in simple phonemes -

the "wahs" and "gahs".

By 18 months, he had progressed to words and phrases.

After 24 months, like most other children,

he was acquiring ten new words a day.

And how is Ruby, the little girl we met earlier in the film,

how is she doing?

Hello.

RUBY: Come in.

HE LAUGHS

-Who's that? Who said that noise?

-Poo.

RUBY SPEAKS IN DISTANCE

It's a mixture of melody...

RUBY CONTINUES

HE LAUGHS

-I've a horrible feeling my first word might even have been "sorry".

-Baby's chair.

-Baby's chair.

-Baby chair.

Baby chair. That's exactly right.

There is the baby's chair and both the babies are on the chair now.

Today is actually her second birthday, so quite literally she is two.

And she's not your first child.

So you've had the opportunity to observe children learning,

acquiring - as I believe the technical phrase is - language before.

-Yes.

-And I suppose you are probably more relaxed by the time it's the third one.

Well, yes, and also it's more funny,

because you kind of make it more of a laugh rather than...

With your first, you're slightly watching what everyone else's kids are doing -

to see when their language is coming, is mine advanced, is mine behind?

Whereas with this one, it doesn't matter.

You know it will come whenever she's ready.

And she's got her siblings to help her.

Well, yes, and to be quite annoying.

Because they are always trying to get her to say all the bad stuff.

Of course they are.

Which is great, but it means she's not necessarily learning the words you want her to learn.

My apple, thank you.

-Apple.

-Apple. Exactly.

'From here on in, Ruby's vocabulary grows day by day.'

SHE CHUCKLES Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Hello.

Hello.

SHE BLOWS A RASPBERRY

-I...

-I...

-..am...

-..am...

-..a...

-..a...

-..banana.

-..bana-nana.

What is your name?

Mary.

No, what is your name?

Ruby.

Yes! Well done.

-What is your name?

-Ruby.

'It's wonderful watching Ruby starting to speak.'

'I want to know more about how children manage this miraculous process,

'so I've come to see a bit of a hero of mine -

'the renowned academic and author, Professor Steven Pinker.'

I wondered if you could explain to me what current thinking might be about language acquisition.

Presumably, it needs society, it needs encouraging.

Language, at a bare minimum, needs words,

and the words have to be the same words that everyone else is using.

If you had your own private language,

even if it were possible for language to spring up out of the brain, it would be useless.

No-one would know or understand a word you're saying.

So the child has to be attuned to the words that are floating around

in the linguistic environment.

There also has to be some kind of talent in the child's brain

that allows them not just to parrot back the exact words and sentences they've heard,

it would be upsetting if that's what your child did.

We expect children, from the beginning, to compose their own sentences.

To abstract the rules of combination, the rules of grammar,

so that they can talk about new events and new thoughts

and take the familiar words but rearrange them in new sentences.

'What's really amazing is that with this gift of grammar,

'we can go beyond forming our own simple sentences

'and begin to be creative with language.'

Even a young child can come up with a sentence

that has never been uttered in the history of their language?

Right from the beginning, from the time at which children first start putting words together,

some of those combinations are clearly from their own creativity.

An example - a child whose hands were covered with jam

and wanted mother to wash them.

Mother washed off the jam and the child said, "All gone, sticky."

That doesn't correspond to any adult English sentence,

but the child had those two words and had the formula that put them in that order

to express the idea of the passing of a state.

Imagine a piano keyboard.

88 keys, only 88, and yet hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies

are being composed on hundreds of keyboards every day in Dorset alone.

-LAUGHTER

-Our language, tiger,

our language, hundreds of thousands of available words,

frillions of legitimate new ideas,

so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before

in the history of human communication.

Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter,

or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.

LAUGHTER

Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order.

A unique child delivered of a unique mother.

CHILDREN CHATTER

A path-breaking way of investigating how children instinctively use grammar was created in 1958

by a pioneering psycholinguist, who I've come to meet today -

Jean Berko Gleason.

-Hello.

-This is Twyla.

Twyla. One of my favourites names.

-Twyla is a famous woman. How old are you, Twyla?

-Four-and-a-half.

-Four-and-a-half! A good age.

-OK, Twyla, er, hi.

-Hi.

I'm going to show you some pictures, OK?

'It's called the Wug test and Jean still uses the original cards she designed half a century ago.'

-This is a Wug.

-'They show that even with nonsense words they've never heard before,

'children can use grammatical rules that they've somehow absorbed.'

-What are they? You tell me.

-Wugs.

-Say that louder.

-Wugs.

-Wugs is great.

Very good.

OK.

This is a man who knows how to bing. He is binging. He did the same thing yesterday.

What did he do yesterday? Yesterday, he...?

-Binged.

-Binged. Very nice.

-Yes.

-Here is a man who knows how to zib.

So what is he doing? He is...?

Zib...

-Zibbing.

-Zibbing!

-Zibbing!

-Very good.

What would you call a man whose job is to zib?

He has to do it every day, his job is to zib. So he is a...?

-Zibber.

-Mmm!

Very, very, very good.

Is there evidence as to how many times a child who's right in the flush of language acquisition

needs to hear someone not correct them, exactly...

They say, "I think that..." "Oh, you thought it, did you?"

But the amount of speech that parents provide for their kids at home,

before they get to school, is crucial,

absolutely crucial. All the research has shown that hearing a lot of language,

and getting the opportunity to talk in different ways,

really is the kind of insurance you would want for your kids to be successful.

So actually trying to coach them, or correct them,

-is irrelevant in your estimation?

-I think so.

I think coaching... But, reading the books and talking to them

and listening to what they say, and giving them

the opportunity to engage in different kinds of linguistic experiences,

in other words, having them tell you what they did, narrative,

but having them describe something.

A lot of different genres that kids might be able to engage in,

that is a wonderful thing for young kids.

Wherever people congregate, they talk, they use language

to affirm, to reaffirm, to confirm, to reassure, to amuse, to beguile,

to delight, because language itself seems to fascinate and delight us.

So much so that perhaps over 400 conlangs, constructed languages,

have been made up, usually out of idealism, like Esperanto, I suppose is the most famous.

Sometimes, languages are made up for more amusing reasons.

ACTORS SHOUTING

HE SPEAKS KLINGON

'One of the newest languages on the planet is Klingon,

'named after the eponymous Star Trek species.'

'My guest appearance in the Klingon version of Shakespeare's Hamlet

'is not one of my proudest theatrical moments.'

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

That really hurts, actually.

LAUGHTER

'Backstage, before the performance,

I chatted to a level 4 Klingon speaker, the highest you can be.

'D'Armond Speers is a computational linguist who took the unusual step

'of teaching his son Klingon as his first language.'

We had a lot of fun. We would play language games,

so I would say things to him like... HE SPEAKS KLINGON

He would point to my cheek - where's my cheek?

I would say... HE SPEAKS KLINGON

-..and he would point to his nose.

-Wow.

One day, we were playing on the carpet in the living room

and I had his bottle that he would drink from.

We didn't have a word for bottle, diaper, we didn't have a word for, you know, high chair.

-Domestic things. They're not domestic people, the Klingons.

-I had words for shuttlecraft,

and phaser and transporter ionisation unit - I didn't have "bottle".

So we were using the word for bottle that is a drinking vessel.

And I said to him one day... We had this game, "This or that".

And so I said to him... HE SPEAKS KLINGON

So I used the word for bottle, I used it with a suffix,

I used it in a sentence.

I didn't point at it, look at it, I didn't do anything like that.

And this two-year old kid, baby, toddler,

started crawling over to the bottle and grabbed the bottle.

At that moment, I knew this was working. He was learning this language. It was very exciting.

SHE GROANS

HE SPEAKS KLINGON

LAUGHTER

One of the other things we did was we had a lullaby that we would sing every night.

The Klingon imperial anthem. HE LAUGHS

HE SPEAKS TITLE IN KLINGON "May The Empire Endure.

And we sang it as a lullaby.

I'm so picturing this baby in a Pooh Bear onesie,

-singing the Klingon Empire song.

-Absolutely right.

There were things like that and he was learning to count and he was learning colours,

and he was learning words.

But as he went from two-and-a-half to three years old, he stopped.

He stopped being interested,

he stopped enjoying doing it with me as much.

I would say something in Klingon and he would say it back in English,

-and I would try to encourage him.

-Ooh...

-He started to resist it.

And it was fun and interesting. When it stopped being fun and interesting, I stopped doing it.

SHE SPEAKS KLINGON

'Klingon was little use to D'Armond's son in communicating with the outside world

'and that is the key factor in whether a language survives and flourishes, or dies.'

'One of the most enduringly practical forms of communication

'is sign language for the deaf.'

Surprise.

Shock.

'Since the first form of it was codified in Paris in 1760,

'over 200 different versions have evolved.'

'But can we really call this a language?'

TRANSLATION: Hello. My name is Claudia. And I am from Germany.

TRANSLATION: Hello. I'm Ian. And I'm from New Hampshire.

Hello. I'm Janice and I'm from Oklahoma.

And we're the Little Theatre Of The Deaf.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

So, Janice, perhaps you can ask Ian and Claudia to explain to me,

in all my ignorance,

why sign language is more than just gestures, and why it is a complete language.

TRANSLATION: Sign language really is part of language because...

we can't hear, but we can communicate.

It's a visual language.

Instead of hearing it and depending on our ears,

we sign it and we depend on our eyes.

We don't just make up signs, there are actual words that have pictures and meaning and structure,

sentence structure and concepts.

Everything is involved so that it's clear and understandable communication.

And Claudia, you're German.

In Germany, is there a...is there a Deutsche Zeichensprache?

Go on, say that!

-Deutsche Zeichensprache.

-She doesn't interpret German!

I'm only kidding. But is there a Germanic sign language

that's different from French or Italian, let alone American?

Yes, it's very different.

Just as the writing is different in every language.

So an Italian signer would not be able to understand a German signer?

-No.

-No.

It's very interesting.

One afternoon, there was a large wolf that waited in a dark forest...

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

..for a little girl to come along.

Finally, a little girl did come along

and she was carrying a basket of food.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

Are you...

'How do you agree on a sign?

'Does it spread very quickly?'

That this is going to be the sign for Barack Obama, for example?

TRANSLATION: Really, it starts with a big name, like Obama.

Typically, there's an agreement and it just sort of develops

with...

with big deaf...politicians.

No? P... Population.

What is Barack Obama, for example?

Right. And can you give me the derivation of that?

Where would that have come from? Is it BO,

or is it... It's not the letters "B" and "O", is it?

-It's "O".

-"O".

-Something about the flag.

-Ah, right.

-Emphasise the "O" and then, like, the flag, the American flag.

-I see.

-Obama.

Ask Claudia this, not meaning to be offensive but it's interesting, because as a German,

there may be a different sign for Adolf Hitler

from one that we might use in the rest of the world, for example.

He is one of the most famous images...

I guess, if you were British, you'd just do the moustache.

-What's the American sign?

-Yeah. The moustache, exactly.

That's what I thought. And in German?

Normally, it's the same but I have...

Um...

Some people sign...

like a combination of how...

And the salute, hidden into... Yes. Very interesting.

OK, Madonna.

I don't want to sign that one.

That's interesting, is that like pointy breasts?

There. You see. Exactly.

That's what's so wonderful about sign languages,

you can do things that incorporate the character and the reputation of the person,

not just the dull spelling of their name. It can be witty.

TRANSLATION: I agree with that.

-And deaf tend to put more of the spirit in the language.

-Yeah.

So that they get a reaction... "OK."

It has a good effect.

SHE SCREAMS

When she opened the door, all the girls saw

that there someone in bed with the nightcap and a nightgown on.

But she had approached no nearer than 25 feet

when she realised it was not her grandmother,

but the wolf.

For even in a nightcap, a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother

than the MGM lion looks like Calvin Coolidge.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

So, she reached into her basket,

pulled out an automatic

And shot the wolf dead.

LAUGHTER

Moral -

it's not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The question of how thought and language came about in the human race

is one of central concern, so it's hardly surprising we've spent thousands of years

thinking and speaking about it.

The biblical account suggests Adam and Eve spoke a prelapsarian language,

a single language of paradise.

And then came the Tower of Babel

and thousands of languages were unleashed upon the planet,

and we were all doomed to crawl on its surface for eternity,

misunderstanding each other.

Not surprisingly, people became obsessed with the idea

of what that primary language of Adam and Eve's was,

even if it was only a metaphor. What did mankind first speak?

'The Old Testament Babel myth doesn't quite do it for me,

'but, 250 years ago, one of the greatest of linguistic forensic discoveries

'was unearthed here by two brothers.'

This is the famous Leipzig Christmas market,

and it all looks rather a fairy tale.

It's quite appropriate, because aside from being remembered for JS Bach,

Leipzig is also remembered for the Brothers Grimm,

progenitors of some of the best loved fairy tales Europe ever produced.

Also, and perhaps you may not know this, the Brothers Grimm

were responsible for founding the signs of linguistics,

what the Germans call philology, tracing back to the very roots, the languages of the world.

Professor Wolfgang Klein is a philologist and psycholinguistic,

currently working on Grimm's original documents.

I suppose Jacob's greatest contribution is called Grimm's Law, or Rask's-Grimm's Law?

That's true, both terms exist, actually.

What people noticed, actually began to notice systematically,

let me say the second half of the 18th century,

is there are many similarities and correspondences between languages.

They discovered there are similar words in languages, as remote as Sanskrit and Greek,

and then the Germanic languages.

-Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language?

-True. Absolutely true.

There is huge distance and still words sometimes sound surprisingly similar.

It's not just accidental. Sometimes the similarities are completely accidental, but not in that case.

'Grimm's Law, as it became known,

'showed how the consonants of different Indo-European languages relate to each other.'

'For example, there's a relationship between words beginning with "P" in Sanskrit, Latin or Greek,

'and "F" in Germanic languages, including English.

'So "pater" in Latin becomes "father" in English.

'This single language - proto-Indo-European, or PIE - the root to over 2,000,

'is thought to have been spoken more than 5,000 years ago

'in the Steppes of Southern Russia.

'As tribes migrated through Europe and Asia,

'PIE split into a number of dialects, and these, in time, developed into separate languages.'

PIE isn't the first language that humanity spoke,

but is the first of which we have evidence.

This English that we speak that you are very kindly speaking as fluently as anybody can, frankly,

it seems so natural to us and it seems so separate.

It seems so different from German, from French,

certainly different from Danish.

Yeah. It is.

Any of these languages and Persian languages,

and yet, with this common ancestor. It's quite extraordinary.

Do you think in some sense it's necessary for mankind to have so many languages?

-Well...

-Why Babel? Why did it happen?

First of all, it's beautiful and I wonder

whether this argument, biology, is not also a romantic argument.

I really would like to see the evidence that it is necessary,

but it's beautiful to have many species.

Beautiful not to have just one type of cat, but many types of cats.

In that sense, that argument also applies to languages.

Beautiful to see all of this. The Romans said "varietas delectat".

They have many things that are beautiful here.

What would you regard as the thing about language

that keeps you getting up every morning and being excited about your job?

I mean, everything, what makes human beings human, is based on language.

Our species perhaps could live together without a language,

but then it wouldn't be what we call the human species.

Whatever we know, whatever we have done over the centuries

is based on language, on languages and language.

Some would argue that the 6,000-plus languages we speak on the planet

are structurally just one primal human tongue.

What's amazing is how quickly language evolves

according to how quickly children can develop slang

or how quickly culture and technology demands.

There's a constant practicality about the way

we use language, as well as a deep beauty.

One thing's for certain, language will never stay still.

Mummy! Mummy!

'And finally, aged two and three months,

'Ruby is chatting away in complete sentences with her siblings.

'She understands more than she says and, over the next year, her vocabulary will explode.'

'Some children, perhaps Ruby will be one of them,

'do not stop at learning one language.

'And there are plenty of others to choose from.

'There are currently 194 member states

'belonging to the United Nations,

'with over 6,000 languages spoken in them.'

They are saying these demonstrators are followers of Bin Laden

and I ask him is the six-month-old baby who was killed

a follower of Bin Laden, also?

'Maybe many of our species' troubles could be avoided

'if we understood each other better.

'Would having one world language, be it Esperanto, English

'or, to be utterly neutral and possibly perverse, Klingon,

'even be an advantage?

'Perhaps in world forums like here in the UN Security Council,

'which is currently in session discussing the Libyan crisis,

'it would. But then it would also put Zahar out of the job.'

-How many working languages are there?

-Two. English and French.

-So that's it?

-Just English and French.

-For the working languages.

-I see.

-Then there are official languages.

-Six of them.

-Only six?

-Yes.

The official languages are English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese

and Arabic, which is the most recent addition to the official languages.

SHE TRANSLATES FROM ENGLISH

That is rather wonderful, watching you translate simultaneously,

it seems like an extraordinary thing, like a conductor being able to read a music score.

It's incredible the human brain can do this.

I look down here and it's almost like a living symbol of the Tower of Babel,

of the fact that mankind split into so many languages.

Do you sometimes think the world would be better if everybody spoke Esperanto?

No, there is a beauty to languages,

each and every language has its own beauty, its own music,

its own imagery, its way of expressing the sentiments

and the nature of the people who speak that language.

It would be a loss if that language did not exist.

I am very much in favour of the Tower of Babel.

This building where the General Assembly of the United Nations meet

perhaps symbolises more than any other what happened to humankind after Babel.

Thousands of voices upraised in different mutually incomprehensible tongues,

trying to comprehend each other, trying to understand,

trying to build some sort of peace out of the wreckage of the 20th century.

Well, they sort of solved the problem by reducing

all those languages to the six working languages of the UN.

And, that way, people do understand each other.

They understand how they think, perhaps, they understand how they communicate

and a little of the history of each language.

But languages do so much more than that.

Languages, in many respects, defined our identities, who we are.

And that's what I'll be looking at next time.

Four times 14.

'From Kenya to Israel,

'Ireland to Oxytown, Newcastle to Barnsley...'

'..I'll be looking at how our 6,000-plus languages and myriad accents

'are threatened with extinction as the global village becomes a reality.'

Subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing by Red Bee Media

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