Remembered this video because I'm writing a story about a person fetching up in a completely alien culture and having to learn the language. It's fascinating to watch.
Very interesting to see a (fairly?) realistic demo of this ... I´ve always wondered how it was done. But as the lady explained at the end, maybe a stick is not a good object. Even in English you could get ´stick´ ´twig´ ´branch´ ´wood´ or even maybe ´bark´. And of course the local equivalent of ´damned if I know!´ :-)
Interesting and addictive method! But Come on, how patient a linguist has to be!! I could not take my eyes off the screen for the first twenty minutes. The intelligence and disposition for learning that Daniel shows, inspire us when facing a task.
Thanks! No wonder the sentence structure was so similar to Vietnamese, plus there were tones. The half syllables also made me think it was southeast Asian.
Ken should have written a book with observations on the Monolingual Method. Dan has made some academic contributions. But someone needs to turn this into a full-blown paradigm of research. It's a beautiful intersection between descriptive, documentary Linguistics on the one hand and Second Language Acquisition on the other. If nobody has by the time I get my first postdoc, I will!
@@littlesnowflakepunk855 The tonal framework he used in this video is not very accurate in describing East/Southeast Asian tonal languages, as many of them have very complicated tonal patterns. Hmong language has one of the most complicated tonal patterns in the world, some have more than 8 tones. A more accurate tonal framework is the tone letter/numeral system, first developed by Yuen Ren Chao with 5 levels (1-low to 5-high), and a tone can be described as the combination of numbers, for example 55, 51, 312, 42, etc. Anyway, he has done an excellent job in showing us how a top-level linguist should do his work!
The demo focuses on concrete objects, how do you learn more abstract concepts like: abstract, concept, object, what, why, when, time, focus, demo, more, etc...
The overall point isn't necessarily to learn how you say "two sticks fell" in the new language. He starts off with concrete objects because there is less ambiguity and room for error than asking about more complex concepts. His main initial objective is to deconstruct the language and understand how it works using simple examples. Once he has a better grasp he can start asking about more complex constructs.
the same way you learn about complex terminology in a language where you only know basic vocabulary - talk about them in terms of simpler concepts and concrete examples, and as you develop more understanding of the language you’ll be able to figure out more nuances.
He is writing phonetically what the speaker says. Also he is learning the simplest things to gain vocabulary and start noticing the language's syntax and grammar.
Damn, I was right! As soon as I heard her say the word for "I" I thought "this is either Hmong, or closely related to it." And he's right, they are tones, not pitch :)
Some of the words of that language are very similar to Chinese, like "to hit" = "dao" and chinese "da", and also banana sounds similar. It makes sense because that is a vietnamese language, so there are cognates. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, I'm just guessing. Is it just me or is she using retroflexes?
In China it would be classified within Sino-Tibetan languages, but outside it would be classified as Miao-Yao or Hmong-Mien independently. It's only categorize this way because of politics, but Hmong-Mien is differently it's own language by history, culture, and structure. Yes it does have Chinese vocabulary, but that is because Hmong-Mien has influence Chinese greatly just as it has vice versa. Many Old Chinese words finds its root in Hmong-Mien as it should since the history of the Hmong-Mien people in China is longer than the Han Chinese people. But that's a different topic. It's clear that Hmong-Mien can stand by itself, but do it fit into its own or other language family is based on view of politics.
Hmong languages are spoken on both sides of the China/Southeast Asia borders so they have a lot of borrowings for Chinese. I would guess the lady's heritage is from Laos where the amount of Chinese influence is less. Most minority languages in China are just bursting with Chinese loanwords. If you're a language nerd and visit a minority area of China, try to find a dictionary of a minority language in a bookshop and you'll see.
great presentation, and the point at the end that most Piraha men are bisexual and then the other point the ones who he considered definitely homosexual speaking like women just blew my mind... So important in understanding human and gender relationships beyond patriarchal western society... is there any more studies about this?
@@flaviospadavecchia5126 The second language that members of the community are most likely to know, not necessarily a related language. For example, Basque is a language isolate, but I think most Basque speakers also know Spanish.
If she knew English, it means she can read the words he is writing and easily guide him so he is on the right track. I don't understand how this is monolingual when they have a shared language
I see your point, since she can kinda understand what he’s trying to ask. It’s still very cool and it works, however it works even better when the person you’re asking knows what you want
He wasn't writing with Hmong graphology: he was using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Therefore, the same methodology could be applied to any language regardless of how its speakers write it.
This was not using the latin alphabet but the IPA: international phonetic alphabet, which is a scientific resource to be as precise as posible. It uses exactly one character for each sound. Anyone else who knows the alphabet can then later recinstruct the sound exactly.
@@astaiannymph Not quite. IPA is usually used either phonemically, in which there will be one or several standard to use for a given language; or phonetically, in which you decide how much detail to go into with diacritical marks.
The IPA was made to teach French pronunciation to English students, IIRC. It makes sense that it was based on the Latin alphabet. I guess if it had been made to teach Bulgarian or Russian pronunciation, it would have been based on Cyrillic. Lucky for those of us who are slow reading Cyrillic that it's based on Latin.
Interesting. Though... By the time you have a native speaker collaborating this willingly in a lecture theatre at a western university, you might as well just do proper linguistics, instead of using props, and guessing everything about the language from scratch, and not treat your informants like passive bystanders. Wonder what Quine would say about this. Haha.
It's artificial, but it's a demonstration. That's why he's speaking to her in Pirahã: he wants to use a language she doesn't know, to simulate what it would be like the field. She does know English as you see at the end. (I assume she's an immigrant; one of the students(?) is her daughter apparently)
@@andrew348 No, it didn’t. I understand perfectly well. I’m just saying demonstrating fieldwork like this is a bit like demonstrating how to hike by using a car.
This is just amazing to see how you can learn a language on your own with absolutely no external help, just interaction with native speakers.
this is the default setting for humans ie how children learn their first language
@@christopherfreeman5663True… But children also get special instruction!!
Remembered this video because I'm writing a story about a person fetching up in a completely alien culture and having to learn the language. It's fascinating to watch.
Very interesting to see a (fairly?) realistic demo of this ... I´ve always wondered how it was done. But as the lady explained at the end, maybe a stick is not a good object. Even in English you could get ´stick´ ´twig´ ´branch´ ´wood´ or even maybe ´bark´. And of course the local equivalent of ´damned if I know!´ :-)
Interesting and addictive method! But Come on, how patient a linguist has to be!! I could not take my eyes off the screen for the first twenty minutes. The intelligence and disposition for learning that Daniel shows, inspire us when facing a task.
This guy wins charades every time
If anyone is interested, she is speaking Hmong.
It's irrelevant to the presentation, but it was bugging me.
Thanks for that. It was bugging me, too.
Thanks! No wonder the sentence structure was so similar to Vietnamese, plus there were tones. The half syllables also made me think it was southeast Asian.
Ken should have written a book with observations on the Monolingual Method. Dan has made some academic contributions. But someone needs to turn this into a full-blown paradigm of research. It's a beautiful intersection between descriptive, documentary Linguistics on the one hand and Second Language Acquisition on the other. If nobody has by the time I get my first postdoc, I will!
looking forward to it!
This made me look up the phonemic inventory of Hmong and holy fuck.
What the fuck are lateralized consonants
@@dirtyyy7668 It means Chinese linguists don't want to admit consonant clusters exist.
this is fascinating
Impressive and very exciting, even when is just two people talking :D
How does he distinguish tones? It's very difficult! He's really a well-trained linguist!
The native language he has worked with for 30 years (Piraha) is tonal.
Piraha is highly tonal, to the point where it can be spoken quite accurately without any vowels or consonants, just by humming or whistling.
@@littlesnowflakepunk855 The tonal framework he used in this video is not very accurate in describing East/Southeast Asian tonal languages, as many of them have very complicated tonal patterns. Hmong language has one of the most complicated tonal patterns in the world, some have more than 8 tones. A more accurate tonal framework is the tone letter/numeral system, first developed by Yuen Ren Chao with 5 levels (1-low to 5-high), and a tone can be described as the combination of numbers, for example 55, 51, 312, 42, etc. Anyway, he has done an excellent job in showing us how a top-level linguist should do his work!
Wow, this was a great demonstration. Thank you!
I'm enthralled by this
This man is amazing.
I'm always finding something new (to me) and amazing on this website.
Very nice talk. Enjoyed watching the method and listening to the stories.
They didn't offer her a chair to sit on or anything?! :(
she was an alien lol
Kindun chuka: means hell no, dude!
This amazing!!!
I agree. It's interesting to watch someone learning a language from scratch...
The demo focuses on concrete objects, how do you learn more abstract concepts like: abstract, concept, object, what, why, when, time, focus, demo, more, etc...
context and repetition I guess, takes a lot of time anyway
The overall point isn't necessarily to learn how you say "two sticks fell" in the new language. He starts off with concrete objects because there is less ambiguity and room for error than asking about more complex concepts. His main initial objective is to deconstruct the language and understand how it works using simple examples. Once he has a better grasp he can start asking about more complex constructs.
the same way you learn about complex terminology in a language where you only know basic vocabulary - talk about them in terms of simpler concepts and concrete examples, and as you develop more understanding of the language you’ll be able to figure out more nuances.
This is AMAZING.
NativLang sent me
@King George V same
same
I regulary search for Dan Everett on the googles and it never brought me to this gold before!
Hoho, me too
Samee
Great Show!
I live in a place with a lot of Mandarin speakers. Might try to get some of them to let me do this with them.
I'm gonna try this in VRCHAT with Chinese speakers... Also google translate might help as well.
Google translate in Hmong looked so different from the phonetic transcription.
I only read his book for an intro linguistics class. What does all this mean?
He is writing phonetically what the speaker says. Also he is learning the simplest things to gain vocabulary and start noticing the language's syntax and grammar.
What language was the woman speaking?
+Rick Dunkley later during Q&A it is mentioned that it is hmong
+Pamela Rouse Thank you :)
Damn, I was right! As soon as I heard her say the word for "I" I thought "this is either Hmong, or closely related to it." And he's right, they are tones, not pitch :)
Does anybody know which Hmong it is? There's two main ones in the American diaspora and bunch more in Asia. The ones in China are also named "Miao".
@@andrewdunbar828 I think it's White Hmong:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:White_Hmong_Swadesh_list
I am happy to have recognized the language to be Hmong. My second guess was Lao, but I nailed it with the first guess! :)))
wow, that looks quite tough
Start is 4:45
this is so amazinggggggg
Who came here after reading Scott Young's book"ultralearing"
Me
@@ashrafulalsabit4970 the reply is by a "random guy"
boy, that´s so funny xD
What's crazy is I've been a long time fan of Everett, watched this just a few months before I read that book. So surprised to see it there :)
This will help me with my research. Thank You!!
Arrival
Vaya, cierto! La movie!
what does (2p) means?
2nd person (you), both singular and plural.
2nd Person
Second person. When he first wrote (2p) under "throw" at 17:40, he thought it might've meant "you throw" or "you threw".
*YOUUUUUUUU*
Some of the words of that language are very similar to Chinese, like "to hit" = "dao" and chinese "da", and also banana sounds similar. It makes sense because that is a vietnamese language, so there are cognates. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, I'm just guessing.
Is it just me or is she using retroflexes?
seriekekomo haven't really heard any retroflexes yet, but definitely sounds very Chinese-esque
seriekekomo at the 23rd Minute is the retroflexes you were talking about!
In China it would be classified within Sino-Tibetan languages, but outside it would be classified as Miao-Yao or Hmong-Mien independently. It's only categorize this way because of politics, but Hmong-Mien is differently it's own language by history, culture, and structure. Yes it does have Chinese vocabulary, but that is because Hmong-Mien has influence Chinese greatly just as it has vice versa. Many Old Chinese words finds its root in Hmong-Mien as it should since the history of the Hmong-Mien people in China is longer than the Han Chinese people. But that's a different topic. It's clear that Hmong-Mien can stand by itself, but do it fit into its own or other language family is based on view of politics.
Hmong languages are spoken on both sides of the China/Southeast Asia borders so they have a lot of borrowings for Chinese. I would guess the lady's heritage is from Laos where the amount of Chinese influence is less. Most minority languages in China are just bursting with Chinese loanwords. If you're a language nerd and visit a minority area of China, try to find a dictionary of a minority language in a bookshop and you'll see.
Vietnamese and Chinese are from two completely different families, so those similarities are _borrowings_ not cognates
Hmong?
great presentation, and the point at the end that most Piraha men are bisexual and then the other point the ones who he considered definitely homosexual speaking like women just blew my mind... So important in understanding human and gender relationships beyond patriarchal western society... is there any more studies about this?
It almost sounded to me like he was saying a couple phrases in Piraha to her in the first 12 minutes at least. Huh.
That's because he was!
What if the native speaker is not that patient?
Then you might have another problem all together.
Now SIL does the opposite of Pike: people learn the macro language before they go for the minority language
What if it's a language isolate?
@@flaviospadavecchia5126 non sequitur, you didn't understand what I said
@@christopheclugston you mean in case of a colonial language?
@@flaviospadavecchia5126 The second language that members of the community are most likely to know, not necessarily a related language. For example, Basque is a language isolate, but I think most Basque speakers also know Spanish.
@@christopheclugstonIt means you didn't communicate your ideas right, dumbass.
Kuu's on first?
14:20
46:00
@6:05
Came here from the Lingthusiasm podcast
Here thanks to NativLang!
Now try that with Klingon.
who's here after the Ultra learning book?
Am I the only one who was bothered that he never said thanks to the woman when she was done?
He did.
43:15
If she knew English, it means she can read the words he is writing and easily guide him so he is on the right track. I don't understand how this is monolingual when they have a shared language
The thing is, she wasn’t actively speaking English during the study, so it didn’t matter. She wasn’t supposed to be helping him, so she didn’t.
I see your point, since she can kinda understand what he’s trying to ask. It’s still very cool and it works, however it works even better when the person you’re asking knows what you want
They have a shared language for practicality, but for demonstration purposes they avoided using it
He wasn't writing English on the blackboard.
@@andrew348 He was; he was writing IPA and guesses at translations
the coffing is very annoying
okay now do it in a logographic language
I don't see how that would change anything, as that's a property of the written language, not the spoken language
He wasn't writing with Hmong graphology: he was using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Therefore, the same methodology could be applied to any language regardless of how its speakers write it.
Now, this was amazing but it would have been a few time easier using Cyrillic alphabet as it is more phonetic and easier to use than the Lathin
This was not using the latin alphabet but the IPA: international phonetic alphabet, which is a scientific resource to be as precise as posible. It uses exactly one character for each sound. Anyone else who knows the alphabet can then later recinstruct the sound exactly.
@@astaiannymph Not quite. IPA is usually used either phonemically, in which there will be one or several standard to use for a given language; or phonetically, in which you decide how much detail to go into with diacritical marks.
The IPA was made to teach French pronunciation to English students, IIRC. It makes sense that it was based on the Latin alphabet. I guess if it had been made to teach Bulgarian or Russian pronunciation, it would have been based on Cyrillic. Lucky for those of us who are slow reading Cyrillic that it's based on Latin.
"Cyrillic alphabet is more phonetic!" folks when they have to transcribe [kũ²³ tow²² ɟæm⁴² pæ³⁵]
Interesting. Though... By the time you have a native speaker collaborating this willingly in a lecture theatre at a western university, you might as well just do proper linguistics, instead of using props, and guessing everything about the language from scratch, and not treat your informants like passive bystanders. Wonder what Quine would say about this. Haha.
The point is that this is a demonstration of what you would do in the field.
It's artificial, but it's a demonstration. That's why he's speaking to her in Pirahã: he wants to use a language she doesn't know, to simulate what it would be like the field. She does know English as you see at the end. (I assume she's an immigrant; one of the students(?) is her daughter apparently)
The purpose of this went right over his head....
@@andrew348 No, it didn’t. I understand perfectly well. I’m just saying demonstrating fieldwork like this is a bit like demonstrating how to hike by using a car.
49:02