676. David Crystal Interview: Let's Talk - How English Conversation Works

right david it's lovely to talk to you it's an absolute pleasure actually a real treat yeah they'd like to be back with you luke yeah um so how's the lockdown been for you this is something i've been asking my guests obviously in recent months how's the lock but down treated you well actually not that very much differently from pre lockdown and i hope post lockdown you know i spend most of my life writing books and uh it's a lonely profession you sit in front of your computer like i'm doing now and you right away and hope for the best um and then so i've been just carrying on doing that sort of thing the big difference of course is no travel um and i do an awful lot of talks in schools to literary festivals especially when a book comes out but generally and that's all gone or at least not gone so much as replaced by online occasionally so i've been quite busy with new online stuff and learned an awful lot about zoom conversations for instance i didn't know before but otherwise we've had a fairly placid lockdown here in wales the the virus hasn't been as as horrible as it has in some other places so and we've been lucky and our son is home living with us and he's been doing all the shopping you know the domestic side has been lovely that's good that's good but um so that your new book which is which was published earlier this month is called let's talk how english conversation works so what have you discovered then how do conversations work it's a huge question you've written a whole book on it but uh yeah i'm kind of wondering how where we can start but uh yeah how do they work there are two sides to this one is that when drawing people's attention to the things that they do every day and they don't realize what the rules are underneath those things so you you take an absolutely everyday thing like a greeting saying hello or saying good morning or saying goodbye and saying good night and you say you know i'm going to teach these to students or just tell people about them what's the difference and they say well there is no difference you say good morning in the morning you say good night at night time that's the end of it but when you actually analyze the difference you find that there are some very subtle but very important distinctions for example you say good morning to somebody only once if i meet you in the corridor luke i say morning luke you say morning david five minutes later i see you again i don't say morning luke a second time that would feel very very odd and indeed if i said it inadvertently i might apologize and say oh sorry i've said good morning to you already haven't i but at night time if i'm leaving you and i leave your office and say good night luke you say good night or i forget something i go back in and i pick it up i say good night luke good night good night good night good night don't say it 10 times it doesn't matter yeah it's the same with hello and goodbye now most people because i checked this out when i was lecturing on the subject i'd say to people do you know what the difference is in terms of good morning nobody knows i mean they know instinctively but they don't know intellectually yeah so that's one kind of finding that i tried to present the other kind is to knock down some of the myths about conversation that are very widespread what are some examples well interruptions you know interruptions get a very bad press anybody listening to this or watching this types interruptions into google or somewhere up come the style guides which will say things like you should never interrupt interrupt is bad it's impolite it's terrible avoid it at all costs well of course there are some circumstances where to interrupt would be um would be impolite if you're having a very serious conversation and it's on a very formal subject matter and you're in full flow then an interruption is likely to be uh considered poor poor form but in the kind of informal domestic everyday interactions that i was analyzing interruptions are all the time people are always chipping in and they're chipping in for positive reasons they're saying oh yeah because what you just said i remember i have an example exactly like that go on yeah and people respond positively to this and say as it were say in their minds thank you very much for that interruption it's helped me actually shape what i was saying and perhaps even prompt me to go off in a new direction which i hadn't thought of before so almost all the interruptions that i found in the data and there were hundreds of them almost all of them well i think there's just one or two where somebody got a bit sniffy uh almost all of them were were positive things they helped the conversation to flow along and people responded very positively to them so that's the kind of thing i mean when i say you know you're breaking down a myth yeah yeah it's it's fascinating there are lots and lots of sort of uh uh kind of like moments where you've pulled back the curtain on conversations and kind of like show us what is really going on do you find that people i i think i probably asked you this last time but it's always something that strikes me whenever i read your work is that sense that um let's say lay people who are people who aren't linguists do get very passionate about language and they all that people are very opinionated about it um um i mean do you never take an opinion on um on language doesn't does nothing ever kind of trigger you in terms of the way people use language does nothing ever irritate you because for example if i talk to my family as i was this weekend the subject of language always comes up and it's usually someone complaining about how you know people do this people say that and it annoys them it's always a complaint isn't it it's never yeah that's true yeah lots of complaints i mean oh i may give you an example later on but anyway i'm curious to see if do you ever get bothered by the way people use language yes i mean i'm human as well as being a linguist so i've got my likes and dislikes the difference between being a linguist and being a pedant as it were is that parents try to make the rest of the world speak like them or share their attitudes whereas linguists whether they like the usage that they've observed or dislike it they're not in the business of going out and saying well you should like it as well or you should dislike it as well that's the difference between descriptivism and and a prescriptive approach to things so in that sense no i've never um been bothered about another usage which i uh which i don't share um or i might even dislike but what i want to do as a linguist is explain it try and work out why there is this difference where does it come from is it a regional thing is it a social thing what is going on there's only one occasion one type of occasion when as even as a my my as it were dislike as a as a human being um influence is the way in which i would operate as a linguist and it's this when people who are professionals in language lose their professionalism and don't use the language in the way that they should be doing having been trained supposedly to do it right now an example you're in a railway station or a ferry boat and actually uh i'll take the ferryboat example because i'll tell you why in a minute and you're hearing the safety instructions being read out and they're being read so fast that you can't understand them they're just the guy has read it a thousand times so it's getting a little bit of a little bit of a bit of it and you're thinking sorry hold on hold on slow down will you slow down these important uh and when somebody is professionally using language in the public domain and you can't understand it because of some casualness or carelessness or whatever you like about the language then this is where the human being and the linguist come together you've got to say to these people look you're using language wrongly in terms of the audience for which the language is intended yeah and i choose the ferry example because um stenner ferries many years ago were getting so many complaints about the use of announcements so they actually employed me for a week to go in and train the announcers and the interesting thing was this luke that the complaints largely said i can't understand the announcement because of the regional accent that the person the speaker has got and it's true that there were people giving the speech from liverpool and from poland and all over the place but that wasn't the reason at all it was simply that they were speaking too fast that was the only reason when they slowed down and took breaths and paced themselves the fact that there was a regional accent was neither here nor there poor old regional accents that they get penalized for all sorts of things that actually have nothing to do with them at all so that's the that's the main category and you know you can generalize it it's not just public announcements people often react in this way to announcers on the radio who forget themselves for a moment and and say things like um that was symphony number three and you think sorry by who by who by who and the the the composer is lost because for whatever reason the the announcer has turned away from the microphone or or they've lowered their voice too much yeah so that's another example of professionalism gone wrong i see i see um going back to the subject of conversations again um what about this conversation that we're having now is this is this uh a normal conversation no it isn't and this is a big thing i have a chapter on this in the book but it was a chapter that was written before bzed as it were before zoom the uh the thing is most people now over the last few months have had many zoom conversations and at the end they feel tired yeah especially if it's gone on a while now why and it's because it's not a normal conversation so first question what are the features that make a conversation normal and successful and the primary one and i talk about this a lot in the book is that there is a thing called simultaneous feedback now simultaneous feedback is when you're talking to somebody and the other person your listener isn't staying quiet they're saying things like uh-huh yeah yeah yeah yeah oh no really oh yes yeah and so on that is critical to the success of a face-to-face conversation i can't it's in this conversation even then interrupting is difficult on zoom i try you know if i want to chip in with something it sort of can break things up and it's all stuck like that and also the technology sometimes if i make a noise and i'm recording the audio for this obviously if i make a noise it can cut out your voice so if just me going um means that suddenly three words of yours have been lost that's exactly right and also there's the phenomenon of lag so that depending on where we are and how the technology is doing your might appear a couple of seconds later by which time i've done another 10 or 15 syllables and i'm getting a positive reaction or a negative one to something that i said so much so long ago and this can be very off-putting so on the whole once people learn about zoom and also by the way in radio broadcasts where a good interviewer will not be going all the time people learn to shut up and as soon as they do that then your poor speaker is suddenly on his or her own so i'm now speaking to you and i've no idea why i'm speaking whether you're agreeing with what i'm saying or disagreeing with it um whether you've got a if i were faced face-to-face with you um i'd see from your face maybe a gesture and maybe and of course the occasional noise that you're giving me feedback you're saying yeah that's good david keep going keep going keep going oh you're saying oh hang on a minute david hang on a second now i will pick up on that and either alter my behavior alter my conversation or stop and ask you what the question problem is or whatever it might be now none of that is there routinely on zoom so you are on or in any of these media interactions so you're on your own you're always on as they say and as a result and this is quite tiring so that if you're having this kind of conversation and it goes on for longer than you know half an hour perhaps maybe less for some people more for others uh after a while you're thinking gosh how am i doing oh dear is this conversation ever going to end and and it really is very tricky and the more people there are the worse it gets so if you're in gallery view for instance on zoom yeah and you're talking to a group as i did the other day with a group of school children in a school somewhere and there were 15 faces in front of me um now it's worse because i can't look at them all um i can't interact with them all have no idea whether they are enjoying what they're hearing their faces are basically blank or distracted you know somebody is in their house and they disappear suddenly and go off for a cup of tea or something like this which doesn't happen in a normal classroom so a group situation is even more difficult to stage manage as a speaker than a one-to-one so for all these reasons uh an online interaction is somewhat artificial even though some of us are getting quite competent at handling it yeah they're in zoom there are reactions i suppose you've explored all these things but uh you do have the option to give a reaction so if i do this now i'm going to put it on gallery view which the recording should show if i i can give a thumbs up or an applause emoji so if i give the thumbs up you end up with that but um i did that in conversation with my brother i think recently on zoom while recording a podcast and i gave him a thumbs up and he was like what's that massive hand so it's not quite as smooth as normal no it's tricky because there are all kinds of interferences i mean you might leave it up for too long um so the point where you were approving and i then make another point for which you disapprove or want to you know distinguish it and the thumbs up is still there you've got in other words it's like like playing the piano almost you've got to be able to handle all these technological things i imagine there are virtuosi um zoomists out there uh but most of us don't have that kind of facility so anything artificial like that is could could be a good feature but it's tricky to use them well um many i have many things to ask you david um so conversations in english versus conversations in different cultures have you ever had any difficult moments during conversations with people from other cultures yeah all the time and this also warrants a chapter in the book but it could be a whole book actually and i hope somebody will write a whole book and by cultural differences i don't just mean regional cultural differences i mean cultural differences because of age because of gender because of ethnicity as well as because of region and sometimes of course all these things come together in one place or another so i give a couple of examples in the book but but really it's a it's a whole new book to write so for example um the use of silence varies enormously doesn't it from one part of the world to the other some people some some cultures revel in silence it's a positive thing uh in a british culture silence is somewhat awkward if there's a silence in a conversation people want to fill it and so they will say as quickly as possible something to get so that the silence doesn't last for too long in some other parts of the world if there's a silence it means nobody has anything to say so that's fine let's just stay silent until somebody thinks of something to say now it takes a lot of getting used to i had real trouble with this when i first went to japan for instance yeah it's a very good example of a culture that values silence and reflectiveness in a way that you know i just don't see very often over here um and the very first time that i encountered this i did not know what to do you know i i felt had i had i said something wrong um why has everybody suddenly gone silent i'd made a point um and then i sort of intervened with myself and and and people sort of ignored it and gradually i learned of course and as a linguist i was able to talk about this to other colleagues in japan and they told me you see and so i learn um from people who have analyzed the situation in that country so there's that and then there's of course the the topic of content um what should you talk about what should you not talk about in a particular culture there are conventions everywhere the weather is usually a fairly safe topic for most places i don't know whether there's any culture in the world which doesn't talk about the weather at some point there might be i don't know i've never had a trouble with that um but i remember one example um where uh we had some um foreign foreign students come to the house and what do you do when you go to somebody's house you you compliment the host don't you on whatever it is on the decor or something like that yeah but you don't ask what they cost but in this part of the world and i can't remember now honestly can't remember which it was um it is a matter of um [Music] praise yeah to ask the person how something how much something cost because when you give the response it shows um you know class and and all the rest of it yeah i'm doing very well you know and this is stasis it's it's a status thing yeah but you know and so there was the curtains and said you know so how much did these curtains cost sorry i don't know i mean these are very fine curtains they must be very very fine curtains indeed not how much do they cost so you know there are things like that which you get get used to or you have to learn unfortunately there are some books around which i always try to read before going to a country which say you know discover our country and they will tell you some of the things you should do and some of the things you shouldn't do they're invaluable yeah absolutely absolutely um what about men and women do men and women do conversations differently because because apparently men are from mars and women are female from venus right yeah i i give that rather short shrift in the book i have a few paragraphs on it um the basic answer is no uh there might be a few you know the tradition has been and when conversations were first being analyzed there was this view that oh for instance you know men interrupt more than women do and things like that um but as as time has gone by we've realized that this is just a huge oversimplification there are so many factors involved the subject matter the context the type of audience all sorts of things and to try and reduce these to a simple gender opposition is just absurd yeah so um yes it's it's good to recognize that there are some trends which can affect some people of a different different gender um you know certain words that might turn up rather more frequently in one gender rather than the other but as soon as you try to make these into anything hard and fast like a mars venus situation breaks down very very quickly and that's sort of the message i convey in the book it's not my message it's a message that i've derived from all the people who have specialized in gender studies over the last 20 years or so yeah yeah yeah uh what about talking to animals is it possible to have a conversation with an animal most certainly is i have a section in the book called what's it called now does it take two to make a conversation um and the answer is yes but it doesn't necessarily mean that the other party in the conversation is going to reply to you in the way that a human being would and there are lots of examples animals are one thing anybody who owns a dog or a cat or whatever it might be knows very well that if you have a conversation that the dog sort of is listening and will react in some ways and you interpret those responses and as if it were human um the classic example of course is talking to your plants any plant owner that i've ever encountered and we have one in this house uh talks regularly to their plants um and the plant just smiles back and that doesn't seem to make any difference the conversation continues and i did read a piece of scientific research once which showed that because the carbon dioxide coming out of the mouth is going to the plant it's actually helping the plant grow yeah that's that's what i understood that actually talking to your plants is good for the plants because exactly you you kind of breathe carbon dioxide i like it yeah apparent apparently but you know there are lots of situations and of course the ultimate case you talk to yourself um so i go into the broom cupboard and stand on a broom and it comes up and hits me here and i have a conversation with the broom it's not a very polite conversation but i tell it off and i give it a good telling off and and then the other thing i've asked lots of people do you have a conversation in your head about whatever so you're going to an interview or something like this and so you sort of think through the kinds of questions and answers you might get or you just report reporting to somebody a conversation you had the other day i'm gonna i'm gonna tell um jane all about this uh about the conversation i just had with fred and in your head is going through you're going through this conversation you actually sort of think it through before actually speaking it out later if you ever did speak it out at the talk yeah and everybody thinks oh it's just me well it turns out that it isn't just me i don't know whether everybody does this but everybody i've asked has admitted to doing it sometimes yeah i i talk out loud to myself all the time uh i don't i'm not shy about admitting it because it's one of those things one of those bits of advice that uh english teachers like to give to their students which is you know speak out loud in english and there's nothing wrong with it you know you're not it doesn't mean you're crazy or anything it's totally fine to kind of just you know waffle away in english to yourself but i yeah i do it all the time i actually really enjoy it and it's fun to talk in different accents and things in different situations it's a lot of fun yeah and things you wouldn't things you wouldn't dare do perhaps uh in a dialogue situation yes that's exactly true i mean weirdly talking on a podcast is pretty odd when it's just me on my own because i essentially i'm just in a room on my own and i have to imagine that there are people out there listening to it you know and well this is like radio broadcasting i used to a lot of radio broadcasting when i first did it i asked the producer you know how how do how do i do this and i got some wonderful advice from some of these very experienced radio producers and they said david you're in a room talking to your wife your husband your friend your mother whatever yeah and that's who you're talking to shut your eyes and you're just talking to her or him and that's what it is that's all you need to know of course you're reading a script or whatever but that's all you're talking to you're in a sitting room somewhere that's it and that's what one has to do i i think yeah and interestingly when you're writing a book um at least this is what i try to do i try to imagine the same thing i never send a book to press without having ready to loud to myself um to make sure it flows smoothly um and if it doesn't there's something wrong with the writing and in any case you know just like now you're asking me a question i'm giving you the response i could if i had the book here open it up and read the response to the question assuming it has been in the book um and i would hope that the way in which i would read the response would be not two different colloquialisms aside you know and informality aside from the way i'm talking to you now that's very interesting because your writing does definitely come across like that it's very very readable it's not sort of overly complex it's really really pleasant to read well thank you because that is very much what i've tried to do my my entire life and this isn't just a matter of gift incidentally though that must play a part in it uh it's also a matter of linguistics because when you study the language the language of informal conversation or the language of anything you realize that there are certain types of structure which are going to cause complications as a to a listener or to a reader which to avoid would be a very good thing now what sort of thing do i mean well the fact that if you're writing and certainly when you're speaking if you do an analysis of of hours and thousand hours you find that on the whole subjects are short before the verb and the length of a sentence is concentrated after the verb most of the time when we're talking to each other and this is especially the case in conversation the sentence or the clause begins so i verb did something or other or my friend verb did something or other the length is after the verb now if you do it the other way around if you put the length of a sentence before the verb it immediately gets difficult to understand or more difficult to process as it were and it's more difficult to read so for example and there are of course some very famous politicians who do this kind of thing all the time much to our irritation here we go are you ready yeah my friends the party that i belong to now the party that i've been with for many many years the party that i love deeply and one which i think is a party that you and all you listening to me now will value more and you're thinking come on get on with it what's this about get to the verb please i need a verb yeah that kind of long thing is disturbing and not only in speech but in in writing too now terms of language learning language teaching go to a textbook teaching people about reading early readers and ask the question if it's an early reader and the language is to be as easy as possible to process then you would expect the sentences to have a short subject before the verb go look because what you find is that in an awful lot of cases the subject is quite long so the big bad wolf with the awful teeth went yeah well i'm sorry that's already longer than an average five six year old is going to be able to process the poor kid is already trying to decode the written language having difficulty there and now on top of that you're giving him a long grammatical subject it's gonna get heavy in there and you can actually test this out uh we're in psycho linguistics now yeah test this out and show that comprehension is not so good when the sentence subjects get long so don't front load the sentences don't def that's perfect way of expressing it don't front load the sentences for for early learners or i guess the same thing would apply to early adult learners as as well you know keep the sentences as natural as possible by keeping the subjects short now how on earth how on earth are you so prolific uh david you've written so many books you just keep coming out with them what's the secret um well the secret is is to marry somebody who is a wonderful partner and who is also a writer that helps enormously um no it's very true there's no secret first of all you have to have the time and have the time you have to have a job that allows you to have that time when i was full-time at the university uh back in the 60s and 70s and early 80s i did manage to get a few books out in the summer vacations and things like that but not really uh the job was just too complicated as it still is of course you know all the admin all the bureaucracy all the teaching you have to do but all those things if you're a researcher and a writer then it's not that they get in the way because they actually fuel what it is you're going to be writing about but they don't give you very much time so i left remember i left the full-time university world in 1984 and became independent uh for that very reason i discovered that well it wasn't a discovery i know i knew that ever since a teenager but what i wanted to be was a writer i started writing when i was in my teens in fiction as it happened um and i always wanted to be a full-time writer and therefore by implication lecturer and broadcaster and what have you but the writing was the thing that's all i ever wanted to do and the university world was getting in the way of it so i left it i mean you know fingers crossed is it going to work no salary suddenly it was a tricky moment but it worked out well and most of the books that you're hinting at in your question have been written since that time okay so we've been talking about uh let's talk um how english conversation works which is the new book but uh in our emails it you told me that actually there's another book you've come out with another one as well since writing this one during the lockdown i think you wrote another one oh yes can you tell us about that lockdown does strange things to people i mean what it did for me you see was because i was no longer taking see last year i did 200 days out of the house traveling around the country and around the world doing talks and things suddenly all those talks have disappeared so how do you fill that time well if you're a writer you're right now i'd actually got a draft of something that i had to go at a while back which i brought to fruition during lock time and to see the context for this before i explain what it is um that i had an ambition as a teenager which i developed earlier on and this was i would love to write make a contribution to not necessarily to publish but to write in every genre yeah um and academically of course the genres are as we all know you know articles reviews essays textbooks course books things like that but in literature as well um i wanted to write short stories i wanted to write plays i wanted to write poems i wanted to write novels and so on and i did the short stories i did the plays i did the poems uh sometimes they've come out in books sometimes they haven't that doesn't matter the point is i did them i've never done a novel and the reason i never did a novel was because i got told off for trying once really who was that commissioned to write one yeah and i had to go at a draft and sent it in and the commissioning editor said david you don't know how to write a novel i said why not and they said because you don't describe your characters i said what do you want to describe the characters for i mean you know it's how they talk to each other is the saying no said the fella i need to know i need to know how how your characters look and i said can't you just tell i mean you see i got confused i've been writing plays where you don't have to say what the characters look like because the actor does that for you if you make a film script you don't have to say except perhaps it as part of a brief because the actors will do it but in a novel you have to say and i wasn't very good at this i had to go at it it was awful and that was years ago and i thought i'm never going to be a novelist so this time i'm going to have another go and actually it isn't a novel so much as a novella in that it's quite short but uh it's a it's especially a spy thriller it's called the encyclopedia codes i call it a pseudo autobiographical uh novella because it's based on real life experiences that i had here in this very room when we were editing the cambridge encyclopedia the general encyclopedia not the language ones back in the 1980s and it's based on that the thought might be that people use the encyclopedia to spy and what would happen if they did and so i developed a scenario where that actually happened and as a result of this the first line of the novella reads i was responsible for the breakup of the soviet union because of the way things developed and i'm rather proud of that but did it happen well you have to buy the book find out ah and there was me about to ask you which part of that was true you were responsible that's the thing you're gonna have to decide for yourself for one two three now here's any more can you give us any more at all or do we have to wait for the book because they're you know out already i mean this is the amazing thing no publisher is going to be interested in david crystal writing a novel come on uh i mean i'm it's not i'm not that in that world you know and publishers only want bestsellers so i knew that if i approached a conventional publisher they just wouldn't be interested so for the first time i've explored kindle direct publishing and amazon paperback direct publishing and i have to say it is amazing i finished this book uh three weeks ago we're talking in the last week of july uh hilary and i my wife who's also a book designer and so on and things like that uh she designed the cover we uploaded it to kindle and then amazon two weeks ago uh it came out three days later and is on the amazon site right now and people have been buying it and uh i i haven't had a copy yet but people who have have bought this have sent me pictures holding it up yeah you know from submitting the manuscript to having a book copy in your hand within three days it's unbelievable they printed that quickly equality is excellent you know so i i i have avoided um you know amazon publishing because i'm never having had a need to go there but when you come acro when you're doing something and you know it's not going to interest mainstream publishing i've made a discovery here and i'm i have to say i'm i'm terribly terribly impressed so it's out i can't show it to you because i haven't had a copy through myself yet i've ordered one i'm curious though i don't know if you if you're going to be willing to share it with us but this isn't there an anecdote that the book i've seen on amazon you know you have the look inside option and i can see the first few pages and you start by telling an anecdote about a time when you were going to be a guest speaker at an event and that seems to be when it all kicked off but i i'm you know i'm intrigued obviously that's the point uh but how much of this anecdote can you share with us how much can you tell us before we actually get the book well you can read that if you go uh type david crystal encyclopedia codes into amazon you can go there and you can look inside the book and you'll see the first few pages indeed because i checked it out because i've never done this before and i wanted to see what happened um and indeed the it just went you see it was when we were sending the first edition of the big encyclopedia huge thing i'll show you hold on a second this big thing you see yeah the cambridge and something cambridge encyclopedia and we were editing it for the first time uh putting it together for the first time in 1989. um so with the project remember i left the university in 84 got this job as editor in 86 and the first volume was coming out in 1989 or 19 staff so we were putting this thing to bed and 1989 is not a good year to be writing an encyclopedia because everything is changing the berlin wall is coming down you know the soviet union is shortly going to break up into pieces thanks to everything is happening all over the world and we're trying to put it into an encyclopedia so the first edition comes out in 89 the second corrected uh updated edition in 1990 another one in 1991 and i was asked to give a lecture to the royal institution uh in london where they have a thing called a friday evening lecture and invite people in to talk about whatever science technology in my case encyclopedia writing so i told them some of the stories about uh how it is that um you try and keep an encyclopedia up to date and it's very difficult because people aren't talking about it when the soviet union was about to break up and we didn't know if it was i had a deadline so i would ring up the embassies and say excuse me soviet union are you going to break up in the next few days and they would say who are you you know why do you want to know no all is well there is to be no breakup of soviet union and all this to say so we would do this always check with the embassies and things of that kind i ring up the foreign office and they say the same thing no dear boy you know soviet rule is not going to break up in the next no no no don't worry about it you can put it in your encyclopedia all of this is going uh but then i hear just as we're going to press the news that there is going to be in place of the soviet union a commonwealth of independent states cis and i do some digging and some inquiring and find out that yes indeed this is likely to happen it's not necessarily going to happen but it is likely to happen which countries are going to be in there i find out as much as i can about it now the question is i have to send my uh copy off to the publisher next monday the book will come out in six months time by which time will there or won't there be a commonwealth of independent states if i put it in and there isn't the book will be laughter if i don't put it in and there is the book will be laughed at what do i do so i decide to write an entry on the commonwealth of independent states this is all fact this happened yeah and andrew kind of economic independent states and i put it in and off it goes to cambridge fingers crossed eventually of course there is but at that time we did not know so you had to make a prediction pretty much a prediction place a bet sort of thing i had to basically say the soviet union is going to disappear and the commonwealth of independent states will appear because it says so in the encyclopedia right now that's what happened so then i started to think in terms of the novella hey the encyclopedia manuscript arrives in cambridge where there is a mole and the cambridge guy thinks what does crystal know he's obviously got an insight into something that's going on here otherwise it wouldn't be in cambridge encyclopedia yeah he knows something about what's happening i'd better get in touch with all the nations around that are not wanting the soviet union to fragment and let them know that crystal is unto us and that's where the novel starts uh so then they come after you in some some some manner i suppose they most certainly do wow great there is a chase and there is a gunfight and there is all sorts of things happening it's great fun it sounds sounds so entertaining i'm going to look forward to reading it it's really good um i i want to ask you some other things um before before i let you go that's one of those things that people say isn't it at the end of a conversation i'll let you go now before i let you go i mean i i'm i'm really interested in jokes and in humor and stuff uh in on my podcast i often do stuff about that i do stand up myself and i was thinking have you ever written about jokes in english have you written about the place of humor in the language i'm also curious to know if and this this is a this is one of those terrible questions which contains lots of questions all at the same time i can't be brief for some reason i'm also curious to see if you've ever considered doing comedy because because of the kind of humor that i notice in your work and because of the way that you observe things sometimes i think that you would look at the world in the same way that a standard comedian would look at the world observing it and then sort of telling us what you've observed yours is from the point of view of linguistics and telling people how language works and you know observing pointing out things the comedian kind of does the same thing but presents it for for laughs but anyway um um what is my question well no i mean you you've made the point and the point and the response is i would be horrified if and i if i gave a lecture and it didn't have some laughs in it um consciously controlled laughs i mean not inadvertent ones yeah yeah design always try to build humor uh into the lecture even if it's on the most serious of topics and if it's not humor in in the sense of satirical humor it's so it's more sympathetic humor because you can tell uh stories that make people laugh even about the most serious of subjects like language death for instance there are some lovely funny stories about uh that that arise out of the horrible situation of a language dying um and there's no reason why you shouldn't reflect the reality of the communities from which these stories come so long as the overall message retains its impact and its seriousness and so on but most of the talks that i give are not that serious in that sense and it's dead easy to introduce an element of humor if if you're talking about accents for instance and dialects or prescriptivism or grammar you know whatever it might be yeah i mean a lecture on grammar without a few jokes in it is a disaster in your mind i think many teachers would feel exactly the same thing so uh i don't see that much difference indeed between uh being a stand-up and and being a lecturer lecturers are stand-ups after after all for the most part um so when it comes to analyzing humor in this kind of way uh i have done a bit of that that there are some sections in the cambridge encyclopedia of the english language which basically on the language of humor language of jokes and things of that kind i never really never ever researched it myself very much oh except in the context of language acquisition child language acquisition where the interesting research question was when do children first start telling jokes as it were and what sort of jokes do they tell um and what are the linguistic issues that will prevent a child from appreciating the source of a joke so any of you out there who have got children in the five year to seven year old range will have had this experience especially if there are older children than the family the older child comes in for example and and tells a joke or is watching the television and laughs at a joke and the younger child says why was that funny what was that what's funny about that and the older kid gets crossed because yeah well don't be silly because it was funny you know and the little round breaks out because between five and seven there is a very important development the notion of a riddle is one that is opaque to five-year-olds seven-year-olds are starting to understand what riddles are and how they play with words and how their two meanings and puns things like that five-year-olds on the whole find puns impossible to interpret seven-year-olds are beginning to interpret them fine so that's the kind of developmental thing that one looks at and and explores and sees what sort of things going on so i looked at that but there are some people specialized in this of course yeah yeah what about jokes um i suppose if you haven't looked at it yet i don't know if you're able to comment on it really but uh what's the point of jokes what do you think about that well it's it's part of a bigger issue what is the function of language now look language up in in a dictionary and it will say the function of language is to communicate ideas fine all right there's a lot of that that's what we're doing now that misses out a second function of language which is to express identity which is what accents and dialects are all about that misses out on the third primary function of language which is to have fun to enjoy it for itself and humor is part of that now this is in a sense the most important function of language because it is the very first from the moment a child is born it encounters language play i wrote a whole book at once called language play you can see it it's available on my website yeah and that starts at birth because when a baby is born the baby doesn't come into a world of second language teaching you know hello baby you are a baby this is your mother that is a wall you are in a hospital this is a when you're just born unless you're my daughter in which case it's the case that's all anyway yeah i know later on yeah yeah second year language darling don't touch that plug that's dangerous that's the hot tap don't touch the hot tub that's second year parent child language no first year parent child language goes something like this oh you lovely little you had a gorgeous baba yes you are you are you are gorgeous and so on and so forth and when you analyze pear and child language in the first year of life what you find is that most of it is playful not explicitly baby talk like that but at baby talk elements come in all the time and the aim is to have the child enjoy the language encounter the language experience it goes all the way through the first year of life and then diminishes as the second year teaching language comes in but it's always there so when people have been studying the language of humor what they notice is that what children laugh at or don't laugh at is always underpinning the actual language acquisition that expresses ideas and identity and all the rest of it two i've got a recording here of two three-year-olds playing together two three-year-old girls uh um they've got little animals and one is saying mine's got wings yours hasn't and the other says no mine's got no windows and the other one says no windows and jingles and zingos and dingos and the other one says the windy rose and windy rose and dinghy rose and they're all having a great time they're not laughing at each other but they are enjoying the humor of language play and this is always there and you and i do the same sort of thing yeah so you know if neither of us were stand-ups as it were nonetheless when we're having a conversation in the book i talk a lot about this people are always playing with language putting on silly voices you know adopting a strange accent to make a joke whatever it might be yeah absolutely humorous really so it is a it's a third important underlying principle i think i think sorry humor is is a part of this um everybody enjoys language play or plays with language for themselves now some of the listeners and viewers here might say but i'm sorry david i i don't i i don't make silly voices i i don't adopt silly accents and things like that so what are you going to say to that well i in return i say ah but you play with language in a different way then do you do crossword puzzles do you play scrabble and suddenly you realize these are ways of playing with language as well for enjoying language play and they can generate laughs or they may not but it's the enjoyment is the thing and that's why you tell the joke not necessarily to get a laugh although it's nice if it happens but people enjoy the encounter they've had with you um and go away thinking i really enjoyed that yeah yeah i wonder if uh i mean you know you're not a teacher per se but uh a language teacher but um i wonder if sort of adding humor doing looking at jokes in the language learning classroom or language learning scenario is a good move i'm always wondering this because i feel compelled to do it for i'm not sure why but it just well probably because i just enjoy you know enjoy it but i wonder if it is useful to incorporate jokes and humor into the language learning environment well i think it is if jokes and humor are part of the environment of the language that the person is learning now i suppose all cultures have some sort of jokey humorous element but some more than others and some don't let it come to the surface so much so it would depend on the language i think depending on the culture but in our culture uh it is a very important feature as i've tried to explain in the language acquisition context yeah and what i would say is that um it's a bit like child language acquisition second language learning isn't it and some of course people in your world have tried to draw a specific parallel between first language and second language acquisition well just in the same way as a seven-year-old can't use his humor uses jokes which a five-year-old can't understand i imagine analogously there would be certain types of jokes which a learner who had reached a certain level would not be able to understand simply because the language is too complicated uh for that sort of access so one of the things i would do if i was uh researching this in your world and i suppose some people have is i take all the jokes and all the riddles and everything and i grade them you know as a syllabus of of humor on which jokes are going to be easy to understand and which jokes are going to be more difficult for whatever reason it might be to do with the the vocabulary might do the grammatical construction might be a an international contrast it might be a uh a pun based on a pronunciation it might be a spelling joke after all it could be any of these things and some are going to be easy and some are going to be hard and there's going to be a spectrum i don't know whether anybody's done this but it'd be nice if they did there was a um a study i'm not sure how serious it was in on various levels there was a study done by richard wiseman i don't know if you're familiar with him um and he they did a study called laugh lab where they asked people to um contribute jokes and this was on the internet it was across you know various cultures from different countries people contributed jokes in english and then the jokes were graded and so on and voted on and the one that received the most votes was it was interesting because there was no pun involved in it not really there wasn't really a homophone or anything like that in there and it didn't have any specific cultural references and that seemed to be the one that you know metal you know the the center of the venn diagram was the one that everyone was able to get basically yeah everybody was able to relate to it oh that's lovely if you can find some examples like that but the vast majority of course are not going to be like that that as it were is the easy case yeah the tricky ones are the ones where there is some cultural or linguistic i'll give you an example um you know a difficult one because the word that it's the point of the joke is difficult yeah it's in every seven-year-old book of jokes when is a door not a door answer when it's a jar now because the word ajar aj a r is not in any list of the most frequently occurring words in english very few foreign learners would know that word and so the joke would go over their heads as indeed it goes over the heads of any seven-year-old even you know that's a joke that perhaps a ten-year-old might get or something of that sort so that's what i mean if you if you look at the words this is one way of grading in vocabulary you you take the frequency lists and all the things that are routine in the second language world and you look at the jokes that's one corpus you've got the jokes in another corpus and then you see well where does a jar fit what's down there whereas another joke uses easy puns and that's up there you could do the same sort of thing for grammar uh pronunciation and so on i imagine very interesting very interesting indeed i just have two more things to ask you before i let you go [Laughter] one of the questions i often get from my listeners is about the subject of raising bilingual kids i just thought i'd you know see what you had to say about this so the i'm going to try and boil it down as much as i can let's so that the the issue is should uh the parents speak english to their kids even if the parents don't have english as a first language so let's say uh the parents are living in a country where english isn't the first language uh neither of the parents speak english as a first language maybe they're intermediate upper intermediate or something like that and they want their child to to grow up you know speaking english should the parents speak english to the child even if they aren't proficient in english the most important principle in all multilingualism with acquisition is be natural the home is a natural place uh if the parent in one scenario one parent speaks one language the other parent speaks the other language question that arises which language should we use answer use both if it's natural to use both if there is one language for the home use that if there are two languages in the home and the kid is encountering these two languages not just between parents but with grandparents around or people who help in the house or whatever it might be or out in the street expose let the child develop remember from the point of view of the child yeah the child does the young child we're talking about now up to the age of about three and a half okay the child does not know they are different languages all the child knows is that dad speaks one way mum speaks another way and now she's speaking in another way again well i mean that's life that's fine you know and and the kid doesn't know that there's a pronunciation problem in the english that's being used by the mother or by the father or what have you if there is or if there's a grammatical error you know pretty precocious two-year-old to say oh father you know that preposition in israel you know no only in the fourth year of life do children realize that there are such things as different languages they start to name those languages and start to trade one language off against the other there are many studies on this now uh this sort of scenario where it's bedtime french-speaking mother german-speaking father german speaking father comes up to the kid and says in german it's bedtime and the kid says in french i don't speak german you see that kind of kid realizes that there are two languages tries to trade one off against the other for whatever reason so it's fourth year of life club before that everything is up for grabs the kid is amazing i mean this is the thing about young children that they have this immensely flexible language learning device as it used to be called perhaps still is in some places um and uh they just assimilate whatever is around them they mix them up of course well that's natural as well there's nothing wrong with that they'll sort it all out eventually especially beginning in the fourth year and realize oh those things go with the french thing i'm called those things go with the german thing that it's called and so on oh i see and those things go with the english thing that's called so first of all i wouldn't worry be natural second point the situation you outline is very very common around the world extremely common because of the incidence of um multicultural language uh multicultural marriages or partnerships or whatever you call them these days so i'm now thinking of a scenario that i encountered in the emirates where i met a german industrialist and oil man who had met and married a lady from malaya malaysia he spoke german she spoke malay the only language they had in common was second language english and they spoke respectively because i heard them both in a very you know non british american kind of way yeah uh the the malay lady had a very syllable timed rhythm for instance the german guy couldn't stay th to save his life you know that sort of thing to save his life they are chattering quite happily away to each other this is the language of the home yeah and the kid is now growing up learning english as a second language as its mother tongue wow you see because it is no other english what kind of english is that going to be well it's going to be a very different kind of variety from what you'd expect in a monolingual uh native speaker type of situation now that kid is not alone because that kid goes to a crash uh where everybody else is in the same boat well everybody but you know there are lots of other kids who are also being brought up in english by parents where english is not the first language now i have no idea how many kids in the world are in this position but we are talking a lot yeah and so i don't i mean i would love to see a study of a kid who begins that way or kids who begin that way and in fact how are they what are they in five years time in 10 years time when they get to school and they start to learn standard english and all the things that they'll learn there to what extent will their native command of the english be the same as the standard english they're now encountering will it be different yeah it's a lovely research domain here and again i don't know of anything written on it but then i'm not a specialist in that so there may be something there i just i wonder yeah i guess um just speculating about it i could i could imagine that it would be easier for that child who's been learning english as a second language from their parents who speak it as a second language that it would be easier for them to make the transition to this standard english that they would be exposed to later than it would be if they had had no uh exposure to english at all so because you know people i guess the question is is it worth um talking to my child in english when my english is not quote unquote perfect or quote unquote native or not like yours luke or whatever it is that would be yes yes it is yeah because even though there may be some inverted commas errors that translate that transmit um an awful lot of the time the vocabulary for instance and so on is probably likely to be to be pretty accurate you know and the pronunciation is not going to be too far away and in any case we mustn't just talk about parents here because these days how do you avoid english um as you go out into the streets or watch the television or listen to pop music or go on to the internet and so on now i know we're talking here mainly about slightly older children but i've come across kids who are fluent in internet speak as it were they're you know video games and things of this kind and they're picking up all kinds of english from all over the place and you know the there is more instinctive awareness of english around than i think we sometimes give credit for okay so i guess for that listener or those listeners who've asked me that question the answer would be yes go ahead well abs absolutely you know it happens all the time we have to hear in wales only only now we're talking about welsh um where somebody is not a very good world speaker but nonetheless wants to wants the kid to have some experience of welsh so they introduce as much welsh into their everyday life as they possibly can when they're going down the street and they see a welsh sign they articulate it to the child and things like that so the kid is on a career track towards welshness even though the parents are only going to help them a little way along that road yeah a little ways better than nothing oh it's absolutely in my view yeah um final question and i i sort of have my reservations about asking this to you mainly because it's based on a conversation i had with my brother at the weekend i talked to you earlier about how people find certain things in language to be annoying i just wanted to see what you think about this i hope he doesn't i hope he doesn't mind me asking you this i did say i think i better ask david crystal about this and he was like oh so we'll see how he feels about about me asking you this so yes we were talking about something that irritates him okay so here's the situation he's in a shop okay um and uh he's paying for his shopping he wants to pay by card he ends up saying can i pay by card and the shop assistant says of course in a way that suggests that it's obvious that he can pay by card or that he didn't really need to ask for permission to pay by card but my brother finds it annoying that the person goes yeah of course um so i said to him well you know you did just say can i pay by card and his problem is that he can't think of an alternative to can i pay by card he doesn't want to say i'm going to pay by card because as far as he's concerned that is too direct and makes him sound a bit arrogant so i wasn't we weren't unable we weren't able to conclude the conversation and i just want to know what you think about this i don't know if you've got an answer to this um but what do you think about this situation could i pick a card of [Music] you know could uh is is less ambiguous in in many ways we're talking here about a a a classic ambiguity in modal auxiliaries yeah um and can uh is famous for its two meanings um can in the sense of be able to and can in the sense of permission and i don't know whether how many of my our listeners and viewers will ever have had the experience of being in a primary school um where the kid says can i go to the toilet and the teacher says david may i go to the toilet and they attempt to get the child to replace the word can with the word may and this is a you know a classic politeness um strategy which sometimes has worked and sometimes hasn't because can retains its ambiguity so whenever you say can about something um there is always a context usually resolves this of course perfectly clearly um but the ambiguity is always there uh can i can i ride my bike uh well i don't know have you learned to ride i mean this could be the basis of a good joke you see yeah that guy where where the person deliberately takes the other meaning um out of the situation right so the person who is um responding in the supermarket is taking one meaning out of it whereas the speaker is presenting a different meaning don't you think and the only way out of this is to avoid the auxiliary altogether um go for the conditional form which is less ambiguous you know could i could i pay that card which is less ambiguous than can i pay back yeah yeah um or you know use a different construction if it's if it's really irritating i mean isn't that the principle if you find something irritating you avoid it i suppose so yeah i'm just i i right now i just thought maybe he should just say card okay i think that's probably what he needs to say lift the card and go card okay that's probably good that's probably yeah well you know this is a this is a strategy that i did come across once a jokey classroom session where um i was observing not giving it where the people are getting real problems with with tag questions uh and how a tag question should relate in auxiliary verbs you know i'm going anti you're going aren't you she's going isn't she and so on and so forth in real trouble with this yeah so in the end the teacher says all you've got to do is go say in it i'm going you're going in she's going in it all the problems all the problems or if you don't want in it you know just i'm going eh you're going hey she's going hey so maybe this is a situation where you avoid it and uh yeah i think i think breaking the breaking down the sentence to the absolute bare minimum is probably okay in this scenario well the less you say the less you're likely to be misinterpreted ancient tradition it goes against the principle of language teaching somehow though yes i think so um well david thank you so much for talking to me and my audience again um on my podcast it's been a pleasure and uh i look forward to uncovering the mystery of the encyclopedia codes i hope you enjoy it i hope people enjoy them these books indeed and well thank you for your interest and hope people have enjoyed this conversation too thank you you

Channel: Luke's English Podcast

Views: 88,483

Keywords: learn, learning, english, lesson, lessons, luke, podcast, luke's, vocabulary, native, speaker, interviews, listening, pronunciation, british, accent, london

Id: -YZiWvdQ76Q

Length: 73min 25sec (4405 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020