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Episode 84 Language before language episode artwork

Feb 23, 2023

Episode 84 Language before language

from Structured Visions Hosted by Jodie Clark

Where’s home? What’s your first language? What was your language before your first language? Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home. The story I read in this episode is ‘Poor Magellan’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com. Connect with me … Continue reading Episode 84 Language before language

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Episode 84 Language before language

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Hello, and welcome to episode 84 of Structure, Vision is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here. If you are new to the podcast, welcome, I'm thrilled that you're here.

If you're coming back, I'm so glad you've come back. Thank you so much. I'm a linguist at Sheffield Helen University in the UK, and I'm also a fiction writer, and in both my linguistics research and in my fiction, I explore this idea about the intimacy embedded in the structure of language, and I love to use the fiction as a way of being extra exploratory about that, really pursuing that line and thinking of the imaginative possibilities. And in this podcast, I use this as a space to really just think things through and imagine, and imagine how our world could shift with a few shifts in perception, and specifically shifts in perception about our place in the world and our sense of self and our sense of other, because I believe that language offers this amazing opportunity to structure the self and to see ourselves as in relation with others, whether those are other beings, whether that's the Earth itself, whether there's the other beings that are on the Earth, etc.

So thanks so much for coming with me on this, and I always like to ask a couple of questions at the beginning of the episode, and for you to ponder over as I go on and on so that you've got something that you're kind of thinking about and maybe digesting or absorbing or wondering about or being curious about, that you can kind of bounce off whatever it is that I'm saying. And so I've got three questions for you today, and the first question is, where's home? And the second question is, what's your first language, and if you have more than one first language, then we'll adjust that to what are your first languages. Number two is what's your first language?

And number three is designed to be a little bit like a Zen colon. It's supposed to be like that Zen colon. Show me your face before the face you had before your parents were born, the kind of original face going. Anyway, the question of three is, what was your language before your first language?

Okay? So the first one is where's home? Question of one where it's home? Question of two what's your first language?

And question number three, what was your language before your first language? So you can ponder on all of those, you can ponder on one of those, you can sort of have them of circulating through your mind as we go through. But those are the questions. So let's start with where's home.

So you might have instantly had an answer to that. Like if we were talking right now live, and I asked you where's home, there's a whole bunch of assumptions going on there. One of them is that, I don't know where your home is. And two, that it's a place that you can explain to me.

And then it might be the type of thing that you get asked, like in a situation where, you know, you say something like, oh, not used to having this type of noodle. We don't have noodles like this at home. And someone says, oh, where's home? Or if you're like me and you live somewhere where your accent sounds a little out of place, people might hear your accent and they might think, oh, where's home?

And so then you orient your response to what you think made them ask the question perhaps. But mostly what I want to focus on now is, what answer do you give? So in some cases, you might simply give the name of, like, depending how far away you live from where the conversation is taking place. Or sometimes the conversation takes place virtually, right?

So maybe you would orient it to where the person who's leading the conversation, who asks the question where they are. So if you're in a Zoom call and that person is in Thailand, and you are in California, you might say, oh, home for me is California. That's where I'm coming in from that type of thing. So you might name a place.

And the kind of breadth of the place, or how specific you get probably has to do with how close you are geographically to the person you're talking to. Now, if your home is in the same country as the place that you're speaking, or the same county, or the same state, or something like that, then you might give the name of your town, or your village, or your city. And that person might not know where that is. Maybe they haven't heard that before.

And so that might be the point where you can sort of orient that to them. And what you would probably do is say something like, where's home? OK, well, home for me is north of Leicester. Something like that.

So you might say, oh, or you might say, name your town. You might say, oh, it's about 10 miles east of here. And so you might orient to a kind of shared concept of a map with a grid with the cardinal directions on it. And at that point, you might say, OK, oh, I live about 20 miles northwest of here, or maybe 20 miles northwest of the closest sort of reference point for everybody, 20 miles northwest of Manchester, or something like that.

And so at that point, when you're orienting people, you're asking them to put a map in their frame of reference. And you're asking them to orient to the cardinal points. Now, let's think about this person maybe being a little bit annoying. Let's say you're in the same room as the person and they want to know where home is.

But it's not enough for you to say that it's 15 miles northwest of here. They want you to actually drive you to their home. And so you're like, OK, why not? I'll drive you to my home.

OK, it's a completely derived situation you wouldn't do it. We need to think safety versus et cetera. Nevertheless, OK, for whatever reason, you're driving this person to your home. And let's imagine they're being really annoying and need to step along the way.

They're asking, where's home? Where's home? Where's home? And so let's imagine, like you might still say, oh, it's about, now it's about 10 miles northwest of here.

And then as you get closer and closer in, chances are you'll stop using the cardinal points. And you might say things like, it's just two more miles down this road. It's just up there on the right. Our house is just to the left of that, you know, you're tree, something like that.

And what you'll notice is you get closer and closer to the house. You rely less on the cardinal points. And you start focusing in on a sort of more focused frame of reference. And then let's imagine a situation where you actually, when are you there?

When are you at home? OK, so imagine you pull up to the house. And you're like, there it is. That's home.

And maybe they're still asking the question, where's home? Where's home? So at what point are you there? Like, do you take them inside the house?

And you say, OK, this is it. This is home. Home is here. And what if they keep asking, where's home?

Like, how much more home can you get? And so I guess now I'm asking the question of, what are we conceiving of as home? And if someone was annoyingly not satisfied with you saying home is here, do you go further and further in? And let's imagine at this point, you realize, oh, the person that you've given home with you is some kind of, you know, it turns out it was a co-hand.

It was a master who's trying to get you to understand the concept of home. And do you go further and further into your point to yourself? And what does it mean to point to yourself? I mean, maybe at first you put your arms out and you say, this is home.

Like, I am surrounded by these walls. This bit is my home. So I'm sort of, you can't see me, but I'm sort of moving my hands around as if to say everything within this space that I'm describing with my arms is my home. And they keep saying, where, where, where, where, where is it?

Do I move further in with my hand? Do I eventually move forward and put my hands like on my own body? So I put them on my heart or on my chest. So I say, here, here is home.

And does it feel like that? So does it feel like there's a moment where there's a kind of centralized space that feels like a home, that feels like it's a kind of center of the self? And is that what we were moving to? Like, where do I live?

Where is myself? And does it end up feeling like it's some inner part of me that feels like it's within the body or encompassed by the body? At which point is the body the home? Or is my sense of who I am my home?

And what am I gesturing to when I say home? And if that's the case, then wherever we originally had the conversation, I didn't even have to drive the person. I could have just said here, here is my home, and I could have put my hands in my heart. And that actually, if that exercise was a colon, that isn't the answer to the colon.

That's just a way of conceptualizing the notion of home and what does it mean? What actually feels like home? Often we associate the term home as having some kind of positive welcoming connotation. Oh, it's good to be home.

You know, driving home for Christmas. I'll be home for Christmas. Home is where I want to be. Home is where the heart is.

And does it feel good there? Does it feel safe there? Do I feel welcome there? And how center am I in that experience?

And is that an experience that is connected only to the thing that I call my house or my hometown? Or what's familiar to me? Or is it portable? Can I take it outside of my house?

And if we're going to be singing songs about how home has positive connotations, it doesn't always have positive connotations, because there's the song that Morrissey sings. I think the song is called There's a Light That Never Goes Out, where he says, take me out tonight. Because please don't drop me home, because it's not my home. It's their home, and I'm welcome no more.

So home can, in as much as it can be welcoming, can also be a traumatic thing. Like the notion of home is a place where I am not welcome, where I do not want to be taking anywhere but home. And so what is it? Where are the boundaries of the home?

And again, how portable is it? And can you create a new home somewhere else? OK, so hopefully you're not thinking about those things. Now, the second question was, what's your first language?

And maybe your first language is your only language. Maybe you'd experiment with other languages. Maybe you're living in a place where you speak your first language, maybe in your home, but you speak a different language outside of your home. And the question is, what language does language, does your first language feel like your home?

Or maybe it's a case that you live in a country where you always speak your second language. But when you quote unquote go home, you speak your first language. So maybe you live in Algeria. And when you come home, let's say to Canada, you speak your home language in Canada, whether that's French, or whether that's English, or whether that's a different language.

But in Algeria, you only speak Arabic. So when you go back home, you speak your first language. Now, it doesn't have to be a language either. It could also be like a variety of the language.

So maybe if you're like me, the variety that you speak in your day-to-day life, the accent that you use, and possibly the dialect that you use in your day-to-day life, might not be your first accent or your first dialect. So my accent is not my first accent. If you see what I mean, it's an unnamed accent now, but it's a kind of tempered accent. But it had been tempered way before I moved to Britain from the US.

I must have at some point made an attempt to speak a more standard version of an American accent well before I moved abroad. And so that question is, when you go to a place where you hear an accent that you used to speak with, does that feel like home? And does that have a welcoming quality to you? Does it feel, does there a kind of reminiscent?

Or does it feel isolating or alienating in the way that maybe you went and moved away from that particular accent or dialect or that type of thing? And you wanted to do something else and experience a new type of selfhood? And how much does your first accent and your first dialect, how much of that is connected to your sense of self and your sense of home and how much of your sense of home connected with yourself? So I guess I'm trying to make this connection between language and home and to acknowledge that one's first language and one's first home can have a quality of welcoming, but it can also have a quality of alienation.

And that's the case in my exploring of language itself. It has this amazing quality to wrap around people, to create selves and to hold them, hold space for the self and to hold people in relation or hold the self in relation to other selves in a potentially productive and progressive and loving way. But it also and is more frequently the case, unfortunately, that language divides. It divides us from ourselves.

It divides us from each other and it creates antagonism rather than integration and rather than connection. And I wanted to explore those ideas with a notion of home and the first language. I know in my experience when I have lived in, well, I guess the only place I ever lived where I didn't speak English was when I lived in France, when I lived in Paris and in Strasbourg. And it did very much feel like it was, it never felt like home to me to speak French, my French got better and better and better, and then I moved to Britain and now it's pretty bad.

But when I lived in Strasbourg, it was fluent, not native speaker fluent, but fluent. And it didn't matter how good I got at it. It didn't feel like home. And what happened is I developed this kind of like affinity for my first language, I probably wouldn't have had if I hadn't lived in a country where that wasn't the language.

Like I had this real bond with English, I felt this real connection with the English language. I felt sort of embraced or held by the English language. So like after a day of interacting in French to return home, which is interesting because I didn't live with anybody. But there was a sense of I would return home to my apartment and it was like an English zone then, like I could mostly think in English and sometimes I'd watch television in English and maybe I'd bring someone on the telephone and talk to them in English.

And it felt like a coming home after kind of putting on some other sense of some other self when I was speaking in French. And interestingly, while I lived in Strasburg, I thought it would be fun to learn some German. And it was fun to learn some German, but I remember walking outside the classroom and I thought this is so interesting. There was one day where I was doing my best to speak German and I walked outside the classroom, the German classroom and then I started speaking French.

And that felt like this enormous kind of relief, that kind of like, okay, finally I can take my shoes off or whatever it is, let my hair down. Finally I can speak French. And I thought that was interesting. That kind of like the French was the more familiar language.

So there was a kind of, I had clearly realized I was familiar enough with the French that it felt more like a home language than it had before. So language, home, belonging, safety, selfhood, the boundaries of the self, these are the things that we were kind of thinking about. This is, that's sort of orient us to the conversation today. And then we move on to the third question.

What was your language before your first language? Okay, so as with any type of co-end, perhaps it's best to answer that question first as if it weren't a co-end, as if it were a question that we could answer with our rational brains and with our thinking processes and with our dual minds. And we could answer that question from research in infant speech perception. Okay, so you think, okay, as a newborn baby, you did not yet have language.

You were a kind of squirming bundle of joy and people were talking to you, but you probably weren't talking back, right? And if they presented you with a newspaper, you probably weren't able to read it. And if you were listening to the radio, you probably weren't understanding it. Now I say that, but they've done some, they've realized in the field of child language acquisition there's been enormous advances over the years.

It used to be that the research was only focused on what's called production. So you start paying attention to kind of the child babbling and the child's first words and that type of thing, but then more sophisticated studies allowed them to see scientists to see or linguists to see what children infants could perceive before they could produce anything. And if you've got children, you're probably very aware, they know they can hear and understand so much more than they can actually say. Interestingly, that often happens with a foreign language.

You can understand it and then when you try to say something, your contribution is sometimes falls a little flat. And so imagine as a baby, it's like I've got so many interesting things to say that my production's gonna fall a little flat. But what you might be familiar with is study, which is to recognize that when you speak a language, you as a kind of adult speaker of a language are probably only able to recognize the phonemes of the language you speak. So if you speak English, that's only 44 phonemes.

If you speak Arabic, it's about 34. If it's French, it's about 36. And so you might hear all of these other, and phonemes, I mean the sounds of the language like in English we got a tte, and French there isn't a rut, there's a hu, you know how to do that. And so you might hear other sounds and you might be able to distinguish other sounds, but for the most part, you can really only distinguish the phonemes that are in language.

And so if someone plays for you, for instance, a phoneme in Russian, you might, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a phoneme in English. And this is one of the reasons why learning a language isn't analogized because it's a little bit tricky because it's not just that it's hard to pronounce the different sounds of the other languages, actually hard to perceive them, you know, to perceive the difference between an an an an an an an an Russian, then there's two different phonemes in Russian and non-English, so it's hard to actually hear those differences. But research shows that when babies are born and they do the perception tests, babies can recognize the distinctions between all the phonemes in all the human languages, in all the world. So that's about 800 phonemes, 600 consonants and 200 vowels.

They can tell the difference between them. And like I said, they do that through these various perception tests. So as a newborn baby, you can perceive, as a newborn baby, you were able to perceive 800 phonemes. And now if you are an English speaker, probably about 44.

If we ask ourselves the question, what was your language before your first language? Well, it was wide and it was expansive and it was all encompassing, right? And it's, and that's, I realize that this is just in relation to the, the New Make System of the language, not necessarily to its meaning system and system tactical system, but we'll just focus on the phonemes for now. And we'll realize that with language acquisition, speaking of language is not really about acquiring, right?

It's not about, oh, okay, this child, we need to make sure this child can hear and produce these 44 phonemes. No, it's about we need to make sure that this child drops about 756 of the phonemes that it knows. We need to make sure that it drops all of those so it can just focus in on these 44 phonemes. And so interestingly, language acquisition might be said to be not so much about acquiring or gaining and more dropping stuff.

And I'm simplifying. And again, I'm only focusing on phonemes. But this is called Perceptual Narrowing or Perceptual Reorganization. So part of the process of learning a language is training the brain to not perceive what it can perceive.

So what was your language before your first language? It was why, it was welcoming, it was encompassing. It was enormous, it was diverse. And then it went narrow, it went focused, right?

So think now about when you went home. So when you took your friend who was being annoying and kept asking you where home was, and it started out being sort of north of the place. So when you were asking them to look on a map and depending on where in the world you were, maybe you were looking at a globe or maybe you were just looking at a map of the country. And then as you drove them closer and closer and closer, you were narrowing.

You were kind of doing Perceptual narrowing. And there's something that happens in your language when you do that narrowing. So let's just go back to what your first language was. And when I asked you what your first language was, I'm guessing for most of you listening, that your first language was English, but I'd be thrilled if for some of you it was a different language.

But I'd be willing to bet that your first language wasn't Google Yineter. This Google Yineter is an Australian not original language. And I'm guessing that's not your first language. If it is, I would love for you to be in touch with me and tell me where your home is.

It's the traditional language of the Google Yineter people of our North Queensland. And there's only about 1400 Google Yineter people and only about half of them speak the language and most of them are elders. So that means we're probably less than a generation away from more first language speakers of the Yineter. The reason I bring this language up is because if Google Yineter were your first language and I asked you where's home and you started off by saying 20 miles north of here, what would have happened, consequently, is really interesting.

So even as we got closer and closer and closer to your house, you'd still be orienting to where your house was according to the cardinal points. So if you took a left and then a right, I mean, south of here is east of here. And then even when you pulled the car up to the house, you'd say, it's east, the house is just there east of us. And then even if your annoying friend is like, oh, let's go inside your house and you go inside your house and you say, oh, okay, well, if you're asking about my bedroom, my bedroom is south of here.

Even inside the house, if you speak Google Yineter, you're still orienting to cardinal reference points. And this, in order to understand this, interesting phenomenon, we need to think about something called frames of reference in language. This is the idea that different languages have different coordinate systems or different frames of reference. And this is just, as you can imagine, how you express the location of something in relation to something else.

So there's three types. Now English actually does use all three types. These are called relative intrinsic and absolute. And so relative is relative to sort of me as a speaker.

So I might say, let's not have a standing in front of my house and you go next again. I say, oh, that's my house, my house is the left of your house. And when you use something like left or right, it's relative because A, one thing is relative to the other thing, my house is to the left of yours. But it's also relative to where we are positioned.

Because if we were on the other side of the house, I would be saying my house is to the right of yours. So it's relative to each other and they're also relative to the self. He's expressing it. So that's a relative frame of reference.

And yeah, we sometimes use that. There's also intrinsic frame of reference. So that would be something like me saying, my house is to the back of your house. There's the back of your house.

And or it's in front of your house, whichever one it is. And the thing about the intrinsic frame of reference is that isn't going to change. It's not relative. If we move to the back or move to the front, we move to the left or whatever, we turn around.

If my house is to the back of your house, it's always to the back of your house. And the reason that's the case is because we're thinking of houses as having sort of stable fronts and backs. Like a house that has a front door, that door is always in a particular location, and the back door is always in the particular location. Now, that, you know, different cultures might have different ways of perceiving which part is the front and which part is the back.

And it's not just the front and the back. It could also be like the nose of the airplane is like the front. It's always the front and the front. Or the apex of the thing.

It's, we have to think of things as having, you know, fronts and backs and faces and door soles and that type of thing. And so they're intrinsic, meaning they're intrinsic to the thing you're describing. The front of the house is always the front of the house. And so that's one frame of reference.

And then the final one is the absolute frame of reference. And that's like something that just doesn't change at all. It's oriented to stable positions on the planet. So with your unitary, it's oriented their frame of reference is cardinal points, you know, north, southeast, west and all the variations in between.

But other places, it might be things like uphill downhill or it might be close to the river far from the river. So the referencing sort of stable fixed points on the topography or the geography of the place. And the interesting thing about Googoo-Gimitary is that it's the topography or the geography of the whole planet, right? Because the reference points are according to the whole planet.

They're oriented to the whole Earth. And again, we use those in English. Yeah, my house is about five miles north of yours. My house is to the back of yours.

We use all of them in English, but Googoo-Yimitary, they only use absolute. And in English, it depends on how far away you are. So, you know, Canada is north of the US, US is north of Mexico. But my pencil, I don't normally describe my pencil as being north of my mug of tea, right?

My pencil is to the left of my mug of tea or it's in front of my mug of tea or something like that. So in English, it shifts. Our frame of reference shifts depending on how kind of home didn't we are, how focused in we are in a particular space. Whereas in Googoo-Yimitary, it doesn't shift.

It's always absolute. So you would say, my pencil is to the north of my mug of tea, which means that Googoo-Yimitary speakers always, at every moment of speaking, they've got the cardinal points nailed, which you know what I mean? It's like standing the place where you are in alphas, north would not be a difficult dance for somebody in Googoo-Yimitary. They've got that as part of their conceptual system, because it's also part of their language system.

And if you think about it in the same way, we always had access, English speakers, and any speaker who uses left right always has access, once you've learned it, to which is the left side and which is the right side in relation to the self. So this kind of more relative oriented frame of reference, language systems have access to relation to the self, whereas a place like Googoo-Yimitary might have a frame of reference that's more oriented towards the earth. And I wonder about this when we were thinking about this business of what feels like home, and how far in can you go, and what is it that makes you even potentially perceive the sense that the self is close to the body, that the self is potentially inside the body, or maybe surrounding the body, or maybe concurrent with the body, or can deal with the body, what was that part of a perceptual narrowing, that sort of conceptual system, that way of understanding the self and the way of understanding the home? Is that part of the quote unquote acquiring of a language?

Is it a narrowing? Is it a closing down of a vast array of knowledge? So I want to just explore this with you with some fiction. I write flash fiction pieces that I put up on my blog at grammarfordreamers.com, and I always get the ideas for the fiction by finding some aspect of language that I didn't know.

So it's easy to find them, you just look for certain things, and you google it, and you do some research, and you find it. I'm just thrilled that language is my fascination, because I will never know it all, because there are too many languages. And it's not about knowing the language, it's about knowing the various systems within the languages, and it's about just noticing new things all the time, and new elements of linguistic structure, and new elements of use, and new ways of thinking about it. Anyway, I'm glad language is my thing.

I hope you have a thing that inspires you as much. But in any case, that business about the bb unit or language and that business of the absolute frame of reference was the thing that inspired me to write the piece that I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com, and the piece is called Poor Magellan. So I'd like to read it to you, it's only short. Poor Magellan, until it is circumnavigated, a planet has no soul.

Hearing this is a surprise. Many things are a surprise. In chronological order, number one, I died. Number two, there's an idea.

In the afterlife, three, in the afterlife, you get to talk to the wisest being you can think of, like some kind of drunken thought experiment. Four, the wisest being I could think of was the Earth. Five, Magellan gave her a soul? Whose Magellan the Earth asks?

After a primorphize, she looks a little like me when I was alive, a reckless wrinkled woman with unruly white tentacles for hair. We weren't speaking English, but the Earth's language. Number six, the Earth has her own language. In my afterlife, I am fluent in the Earth's language.

I tell her, Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who sailed around the world in the 1500s. This abuses her. She tosses out the names of all the beings that have been tracing her latitudes and longitudes long before human explorers, but alone Portuguese ones, came into existence. Butterflies, tuna, sea turtles, geese, willed beasts.

Number eight, all the migratory animals speak the Earth's language? Her mirth had my naivety has grown more unruly than her hair, which flails snake-like with a belly-deep force of her laughter. The Earth's language is remarkably economical. Somehow I learned the errors of my thinking before she's had to voice them.

Number nine, the migratory animals created the Earth's language. Number 10, a language is a description of the contours of the self. I realize now my own contours are dissolving. I think of poor Magellan and the phrases in the Portuguese language that built his ship, his journey, his self.

So there's the story. If you want to have a look at it, you can go to grammarfordreamers.com and it's on there. And I just wanted to explore that idea that the language that you had before your first language, maybe it was the Earth's language. Maybe a language, this is something that I love to play with so much, that I've convinced myself of it, which is that human language is only one kind of language, that all of the information structures that make up the Earth and all of the things that grow out of it and all of the things that don't necessarily grow, but all of these are information structures and they are in constant communication and in intimacy with each other.

And they are expansive and they are welcoming and they are growing and learning and changing and evolving. And the human language is like an outgrowth of that. And that learning the human language is not a process of acquiring something new, but of narrowing, closing down, forgetting what we once knew when we actually spoke the Earth's language. And this idea that there remains a human language that has access to the contours of the Earth, meaning a frame of reference that's oriented to the Earth itself and not oriented to the self, the human self, makes me think about that relationship between the Earth's self and the human self.

So this idea that a language just is a description of the self. What if the Earth's longitudes and latitudes were the kind of embracing linguistic contours of the Earth's self and what if they are traced by the migratory animals? So what if, and with the human, the sense of the human self, what if it is the human language that produces the contours of the self? So when you're a child and you are learning what we are now calling your first language, but maybe not your first language and your carer, the person who is holding you and bringing you into the social world and bringing you into the coordinate system of the human language, what they're doing is enveloping you in selfhood, with every phoneme of that first language.

It's selfhood, selfhood, selfhood, and saying you are, you are, you are, I am, you are, I am. And this kind of constant interplay where the language creates the self and the self is connected to the person speaking language, the family, the environment. And then eventually separate from the family and the environment and also from the planet. So when I was asking before, how portable is your home when you leave your house, when you leave your environment, does your home travel with you?

Well, yourself travels with you. And that's the quality of language, right? The language that envelopes you says, ah, I'm myself regardless of whether I'm in this house, whether I'm 20 miles away from your city, whether I'm far away from where I grew up, whether my feet are even on the earth, whether my thoughts are no your miles away, I am still myself. That's a quality of human language.

Whereas perhaps if we only spoke the earth's language, if that was the only perceptual, if that was the only type of language we were perceiving. And when I say the only language meaning, we never narrowed ourselves down to only speak human language, then maybe the whole earth would contribute to our sense of self. Maybe it would be welcoming and expansive. So that's what I'm exploring today.

That's what I'm thinking about. I'm so glad that you were willing to make it this far and at least entertain some of these possibilities by allowing me to voice them. I really appreciate you being here. If you'd like to know more about me and what I do, you can go for grammar2grammerfordreamers.com slash connect.

There's a place there to sign up for my monthly newsletter. You can get a copy of the first screenplay, and only screenplay I've ever written. And if you want to follow me on the socials, Instagram at grammar4dreamers, Facebook grammar4dreamers and Twitter at Jodie Clark. Link out.

The podcast comes up and wants to make you subscribe to it. You'll know instantly that it's there. If you haven't listened and you enjoy it, I would be really happy if you would give a rating and a review. And I'll talk to you next time.

Thanks again. Bye.

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This episode was published on February 23, 2023.

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