Episode 98 Linguistic singularities

Hello, and welcome to episode 98 of Structure Engines. Structure Engines is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about language, selfhood, and social structure. My name is Duri Clark, and I'm very grateful that you are listening today. You are very welcome here.

Just a few words about me if you're new to the podcast, and thank you so much for coming, and if you're not new, thanks so much for coming back. I am a senior lecturer in linguistics at Sheffield Health and University in the UK, and I also write fiction about linguistics at grammarfordreamers.com. I use this podcast to explore some of my more out-there ideas about language, and if I'm honest, I use most of my writing to explore some of my more out-there ideas about language. It's one of the reasons that I've ranched off into fiction, and I'd like to write about selfhood and intimacy and the limits of personhood, and particularly how studying the intricacies of language can help us apprehend some of that stuff, or marvel at it or wonder at it, get curious about it.

So again, I'm really grateful that you're here, and gives me a nice platform to be able to explore some of this stuff. If you have been listening to the podcast and if you've been enjoying it and you want to have a look at some of the other stuff I do, head over to Jodie Clark.com and check out some stuff there. There are some courses there available on grammar and creative writing. Courses unlike stuff you'll get anywhere else.

So if you've already done those courses, I'm thrilled, and if you haven't done them yet, then I'm thrilled that you have the opportunity. Okay, so I always like to start the podcast episode off with a couple of questions so that there's something that your mind is puzzling over while you're listening to the things that my mind has been puzzling over for however many days I've been puzzling about these things, which is usually the whole month. I published the podcast, so I dropped the podcast once a month. So the questions for you to puzzle over for the next 50 minutes or so is first of all, just have a little look around where you are, just kind of look, maybe you're in a room, maybe you're outside, maybe you're looking through a window like I am, maybe you're doing the washing up like I do when I was in other people's podcasts, maybe you're on the bus or the train or in your car.

And answer this if you're in the car, this question might not be a safe question to answer. Otherwise, you probably can answer it, which is how many things can you see right now? How many things can you see right now? So asking you to do some counting.

How many things can you see? And it's probably going to be a pretty high number if you're not completely flunked by the question. So, you know, if you need to pause and do a tally, if you're welcome to pause and come back. Or if you want to just simply wonder a little bit about why I'm asking that question, feel free to just keep listening.

The second question has a little bit more grammar flair. This is what's the difference between singular and plural? And if I've designed these questions in the way that I wanted to design them, then the first question will feel the fuddling and perhaps impossible to answer, unless you have a take on it that I'd love to know about. And the second question I'm thinking is going to be pretty easy to answer.

That's the way I designed them. You might have had a different experience of them. So let's start with the first one. How many things can you see right now?

So as I said, this is a counting exercise. This is you looking around you and counting things. And counting is often something that we associate with the objective external world. There's a world, the world is made of things and we count the things.

And I'm just remembering every math class that I did like in primary school. We had to sort of, when you solved a problem, especially how these word problems, I know what a kid still do these, which is like, you know, Jim has four apples and Tony has three apples and how many apples do they have together? If Tony took all the ticks, all the gyms, apples, whatever. And you always had to answer the question.

It was not just a number. You always have to put the units. You have to, whatever the answer was, 10 apples. You had to make sure you put the word apples.

And if you didn't, you got it wrong. So, and it was like, look, this is to tell you kids that counting is something that we're doing out in the world. It's not just something that happens in our head. It's about things in the world.

They solve real problems out there in the world. But when I asked you to count the things in your world, you probably came up with a set of questions. Like, which things do you want me to count? You know, I mean, you need some kind of unit of assessment there.

If you like, you need some kind of thing to count. You know, are we counting apples or are we counting oranges? Are we counting pieces of fruit? And so what we're discovering is that there's a parameter that needs to be in place if we actually do counting.

And we're going to talk about how this parameter is not as objective as maybe it initially might seem. So I'm just going to start by giving you an objective example. So, you know, imagine this kind of like, yes, in game that people do and it's often to raise money or to do a pool, a betting pool, this type of thing. You stick a bunch of gumballs or some type of candy.

You stick them in a clear jar. And you ask people to guess how many gumballs are in the jar. And there is a correct answer. Unlike the question I asked you, how many things do you see?

Because the same person, a different person could be looking at the same thing you were looking at and they divide the world up differently. So they've got a different set of things. But the gumballs in the jar, there isn't answer. We can be satisfied that there's an answer.

And whether or not we have a decent way of looking at that jar and figuring out the answer, maybe we sort of use our intuition, maybe we use something logical and rational. Like, you know, we measure them with our eyes and we figure out what the volume would be or maybe we can measure it with, you know, figure out the circumference and the volume and the depth and all those things and figure out how many gumballs there would be in there. So we can be the treat as a guessing exercise or we can treat it as a maths problem. But there's an answer.

It's that somebody could take all, you know, in order to find the answer, so they could take all the gumballs out and count them one by one and get somebody else to check their work, you know, or you could weigh each of the gumballs and then weigh the whole jar and subtract the amount the jar is and divide and all that kind of stuff. In any case, it's a maths problem and there's lots of ways in which maths solves problems in our everyday world, right? So we don't want to act like maths is contingent or that maths is socially constructed. Except that it kind of is and it's not the maths itself, it's the language.

Okay, so if we think about the gumball game or the gumball task, we have to decide. It's a set of agreements. We have to all agree about how we're defining our terms and the notion of defining our terms isn't we're in the world of human language to define terms means we're in the human language and we specifically have to ask questions like what counts as a gumball. So if I live in a culture where gumballs are round green minty things and I've got a jar, a glass jar full of some round green minty things and some round red cherry things and some round red orange flavor things, then only the green ones count as gumballs, right?

So it's something what counts as we decide, we identify our terms, we describe those terms, we delineate, and we do that with language, right? We sort of set up a little linguistic contract between us. Now, if you're looking at the world around you and you're trying to count the world, the things in the world, the world doesn't give you the answer if you see what I mean because that answer is not written in the world. It's the language that gives you the answer if there's an answer to be found.

So for instance, if I say look around you and tell me how many trees you see, then it's the language that tells us that we're going to be counting trees and I mean you know what counts as trees? Does a seedling count as a tree? You know, what point does one tree become two trees? If they have two trunks, but the same root system, are they one tree or two trees?

And this has to do with the way we define the labels we put on things and the constraints we put on them. Another example when I look at my room, I'm in the podcast studio, which also doubles as a place where we dry our wet clothes and also the place where I store all of my wool for knitting. So I'm looking at two big baskets of wool. I'm thinking about knitting, I thought I was going to get done, which I have got a lot of knitting done, but I have lots of extra wool if you're a nitter you'll understand.

But I could say, okay, I'm counting things, I'm counting my two baskets of wool and then my answer then is two. Or should I be counting the balls of wool inside the baskets? So then I'd be counting the balls and then you would say, okay, well, what counts as a ball? Does it have to be like a certain amount of wool?

Does it have to still be rolled up in a ball? Like I'm wearing a cardigan that I knitted and I know that it's made up of 16 balls of wool. So just do I count that 16 with the other balls? And all of this ridiculous stuff is to say that it's through language that we make those decisions and not it's not only just that we're communicating these decisions to each other, but the structure of language is drawing the line around the distinctions that enable us to do something like count.

The world doesn't offer us those without language. So I'm not saying that the world doesn't exist. I'm saying that the distinctions that language provides are not offered us from the world. There might be some overlaps, but they don't come objectively from the world.

So this is something that a lot of linguists have spoken about where they are sort of going against this objective as paradigm, right? This assumption that the world that our language describes are a world. And it doesn't really according to the folks who go against the objective is paradigm. It constructs a version of the world, but it isn't the world and it doesn't describe the world.

So Wallace Reed says that people often see language as a mirror of nature, a vehicle for expression of objective truth, right? And his book, Verb, and noun number in English. So he's exploring some of the real nitty-gritty of English. I love this book.

He's exploring some of the nitty-gritty of English. And he's sort of saying, let's look at all the ways these things are contingent. Let's look at all the ways these things could be differently understood. It's not as objective as you might think.

Things like singular plural, things that you count. None of it is objective. He says, when he was talking about this objective is paradigm, he says, in that view, the referential function of language is taken to be primary. Words are more mere labels for pre-existing features of an external objective reality.

And he's going against that view. So rather than understanding words as labeling things, he's saying words create categories. And categorizing is a social thing. It isn't a world thing.

It's not a natural thing. I guess it's a better way of putting it. So again, he's participating in a lineage of linguists and language theorists and philosophers of language who are arguing against this objective is paradigm. And some of the ones we've spoken about on the podcast, some of these authors who've gone against this objective is paradigm.

There are many. But some of the ones we've spoken about are like Ferdinand de Sussure, who's written about semiotics. He's written about, you might have heard terms like signified and sign for him. Sperber and Wilson, we've spoken about Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.

He spoke relevant. I've spoken about it a few times, many times probably in the history of this podcast. Lakeoff spoke on categorization within fire and dangerous things. That book is a very long, expansive, rational argument against this objective as paradigm.

And it's a fascinating discussion about how human beings categorize in some of the ways in which they do it. So all of the authors I just mentioned have these really clear rational arguments for this disjuncture between language and the world. So language is just not a clear filter of reality. It's not simply a way of labeling reality.

Now, my perspective is that I align with that, but I also have a kind of less rational way of looking at these things. So the things that I explore in this podcast and that I explore in my fiction aren't things that I get at through rational argument. It's more speculative. So I'm not necessarily looking for rational proofs for things.

Also a bit mystical. And by that what I mean is I'm playing with the idea that not only is language not referential, but it's also constrictive, restrictive. It keeps humans who use language, whose worlds are structured by language, that is most humans, almost all humans. It keeps them from experiencing aspects of the world that go beyond language.

And language keeps us most of the time from seeing those or experiencing those. And so we're looking at the world through this veil of language, sometimes I call it the lens of language, but veil might be a better metaphor. And it restricts what we can see. And it doesn't mean that we can't access other parts of that world, but language will do its best to keep it from coming through to us.

And that's a perspective. If I'm saying, you know, rationality is within the realm of language. So if I'm saying that there's a world beyond language and there's a world beyond rationality, we can't gather through rational argument. We have to gather through some kind of experience, either through some kind of belief or experience.

And I spoke about that sort of way of apprehending other things, like when I was talking about language in the afterlife, I think that was episode 94 of structure vision. So how might we understand something like an afterlife or how might we understand sort of a world beyond the everyday? Then in episode 95, your name without language, I put it in terms of the world reality being multi-dimensional and language is one of those dimensions. And so as human beings, we live in all of the dimensions, but language is the smallest, most reductive.

It's the one-dimensional experience. And so it's like the tiniest. It's the smallest we're being reduced. And because so much of our lives are mediated or is mediated through language, then we're trying to fit ourselves into this tiny little dimension, which is keeping us from seeing the rest of it.

So let's explore this a little bit more. And to do this, I'm going to ask the second question or re-ask the second question, which is, what's the difference between singular and plural? So this was designed to be an easy answer. I don't know if we're going to unpick it and unpack it, but I was expecting people in their minds to simply say singular means one and plural means more than one.

Now, if you might have said, if you're linguist, savvy, you might have said that singular is one and plural is other than one because we often use plural morphemes for things like zero or there's negative one. I have negative 10 pounds in the bank or something like that. So you might have said other than one more than more than other than, you might have said other than one rather than more than one, in which case, congratulations on having that slight nuance there. But singular is one, plural is more than one.

It's perfectly fine. It's a great response. It's also true. And it feels quite like studying after we've just done this long rampage about there being all these other dimensions.

It can feel quite steady and you can maybe picture the number one as being singular and then you can imagine your mathematical signifier that says more than, which is that sort of sideways V with the bigger bit on the left is more than one means plural. So it feels nice and studying and objectively true in all those types of things. But singular and plural are in the realm of grammar, not in the realm of the world or nature or reality or however you want to describe it. So counting is in the realm of language and also singular and plural are in the realm of language.

So we're going to come upon contingencies. We're going to come upon wiggly wobbliness. We're going to come upon different ways of seeing things. And the way we can look at that is I'm going to ask you another question.

I'm going to seek another one in there, which is carrots. Is carrots singular or plural? Or are carrots singular and plural depending on your answer? Might the verb might change.

And so with that chances are you might have thought carrots is plural because it's got that at the end. And so our S is whether we express them as a or an is. That is that's normally the morphological marker of plural and a noun, which you're really mostly familiar with. So we would, but you answered the question based on my language.

So I had a word that you recognized, carrot, I put a so at the end of it and you recognize those two more themes, carrot meaning a long pointy orange vegetable root vegetable and so meaning more than one. Or other than one. And so that's how you figured it out. I didn't show you any carrots.

I just asked you and so you figured it out linguistically. So now I'm going to get you to imagine the carrots. So what are you, what are you looking at? What are you seeing in your mind's eye?

What do your carrots look like? So here's a couple of possibilities. Maybe you're seeing some of these long pointed orange root vegetables. Maybe you're seeing a bunch of them.

Maybe you're seeing sort of like they've just come out of the earth in the garden or maybe you're seeing them in a bag or maybe they're laid out on your kitchen counter or something like that. And you're seeing more than one of these round pointy things. Now just, if you, that's what you're looking at, that's just the root. Pull one of the roots away in your mind.

Put the rest of them aside, stick them back in the fridge or write your story of your carrots. Just have one in front of you and look at that and ask yourself whether that one carrot could ever be plural. So could that one long pointed orange root vegetable ever be plural? And the answer is yeah.

And the way you do that is just chop it up. Chop it up, steam it if you want. Stick it on your dinner plate and have somebody ask you what you're eating and you'll say anything carrots. Even if you're only eating one carrot, if it's chopped up you're going to say carrots.

I puzzle, I make myself carrots every single day and I always puzzle over the fact. It makes me laugh. I get pulled out one carrot and chop it up. Normally I'm not even having a whole carrot.

I take half a carrot and I say look there's a whole singular plural thing gets me every time. You probably have other things that are more interesting than that but excite you but that's the thing that excites me. And it's interesting because the singular plural thing has to do with our perspective on the carrot. It has nothing to do with the objective reality of the carrot or it doesn't have to do with the non-linguistic reality of the carrot up.

Which there is a non-linguistic reality of the carrot. You know we can taste the carrot, we can feel the carrot, we can see the carrot, you know the carrot has some kind of resonance. But it's the that our perspective on the carrot is I think that determines whether it's singular and plural. So if we're eating it the way we eat peas which are plural, eating is all chopped up and pea-like.

Then we say it's plural. If we're eating it the way we eat a banana, you know where you've kind of peeled the banana and eat the whole banana, then the one carrot is one carrot, it's singular. Or also if you mash it and you're eating it the way you might eat oatmeal then in some ways it's kind of neither singular or plural. It's something called non-count or mass.

So in the grammar that I most like to use which is called systemic functional grammar, the distinction is not made between singular and plural. It's made between plural and not plural. And then with not plural you can either have singular or mass nouns. So mass nouns are things that aren't countable linguistically.

So do things like oatmeal or porridge in Britain. You don't say I have two porridges, you say I have some porridge. You don't say I have some porridge, you say I have some porridge and similarly with butter, I have some butter, you don't say I have some butters. Unless you're referring to different types of butter unless a different story.

So you might actually, if you have some mashed carrot, you might make it a mass noun and you might say I'm eating mash. I'm eating carrot mash or mashed carrot, right? In which case you won't put the S on regardless of how many carrots you use and how many carrots you mashed. And I just geeked out on this, I looked at that, I was like do people actually call it mashed carrot?

Because you don't, you call it mashed potatoes usually, but I think you can also call it mashed. But anyway, Britain was just called it mash and then I'm having some mash and then you treat it like a non-count noun or a mass noun. A mash noun. Anyway, like I'm saying I geeked out on this, I looked it up on Wikipedia and I found a site, I found a site on mashed carrot and it's called mashed carrot.

But they also talk about mashed carrots. So they alternate between whether they're treating it as a counter and non-count. So they say things like mashed carrot is a dish, right? Non-count, non-plural.

And then later, in the couple of sentences later, mashed carrots may be served as a side dish, right? So then you have it as plural. So anyway, all of that to say, thank you for allowing me to kind of geek out about carrots for a moment. All of that to say plurality, plural-ness, at least linguistically is in the eye of the beholder.

Your relationship to the carrot, the way you're thinking about the carrot, the way you're conceptualizing the carrot determines its plurality. And so I often talk about how I see languages away as structuring information and that there's lots of different ways of structuring information. Therefore, there are lots of languages, not just human languages, right? I've talked about how the Earth has its own languages, or its own language.

I talked about that, I think in episode 90 something recently anyway. It's called the Earth's Language. And so human language has a unique way of structuring information and that is through the principle of selfhood. Selfhood is the structuring principle of human language according to my perspective.

So human language orients itself and re-orients itself to perspectives, points of view, focal points, and all of that is about selfhood. All of that presumes individual perspectives that can be negotiated and shared in conversation or in interaction. And so language presumes the self, it presumes a point of view, it presumes a point of reference, it presumes a perspective. And language constructs it, language presumes it, and language is structured around it.

And if we can see it with something as simple as singular and plural, we're going to find it in a lot of places. And what I love to do is really look at this thing that we more or less take for granted, which is that everybody has a self. And I like to look at that through the intricacies of grammar to see how this particular principle of selfhood has been organized in our ways of living linguistically, which is pretty much all the time how we live. So the grammatical phenomenon we've been looking at so far is something called grammatical number.

Okay, so we're making a distinction between the numbers in maths and the numbers in grammar, okay? Because grammatical number has a particular flavor, and I'm going to share it with you, speaking of flavor, in relation to two sentences. The sentences are that carrot looks delicious, singular, and the second one is plural. Those carrots look delicious.

And what we realize here is that almost every word in that sentence signifies something about, indicates something or encodes something about plurality. So each sentence has four words. The word classes of each are determiner, noun, verb, and adjective. That is the determiner, and it looks as the verb and adjective, delicious as the adjective.

And grammatical number shows up in almost every word. So in the first sentence we say that, carrot looks delicious, and that is a determiner that tells us that whatever we're determining is singular, and in the second one, it tells us that it's plural, right? So plurality right there or grammatical number right there. And then now we've already discussed this.

The first one doesn't have a s'u, and the second one does have a s'u, carrot versus carrots. And so the plural indicating more fume, inflection, more fume, or suffix, if you like, is indicated in the noun. And then we look to the verb, and that has grammatical number as well, or it indicates grammatical numbers. So if we say that, carrot, then we put looks.

So we have the s'u, inflection for present tense for a singular subject. So for that carrot looks, we know we've got a singular subject, and for those carrots look without the s, we know we've got a plural subject. So the noun takes the s, and the verb doesn't take the s. And then the final word is an adjective, and that one doesn't change.

One word in our four word sentence that doesn't change, but if we were speaking French, it would change. Or it would change in the written form of French, it wouldn't change in the oral form of French. So in written French, you would say, in the first instance, the singular one, set kart, a laire de lissus. And in the second one, you'd say, se kart, a laire de lissus.

And interestingly, in the spoken version, it's only the first word, the determiner that shifts, but in the written version, the determiner shifts, the noun shifts, it's got an s on the plural version that doesn't get pronounced. Oh, it's also the verb that shifts, so it's a, for a laire, for the singular, an ole, ole, s, look, ole, for the plural. And then dillissus, in the singular doesn't have an s, and dillissus, in the plural, does have an s. It doesn't really work in a podcast, I apologize, because there's a lot of letters that don't get pronounced in French.

But in any case, it's the grammar, these changes, these sort of inflectional changes, or these lexical changes, to the determiner that nouns the verbs and sometimes the adjectives. It's making a distinction, it's the grammar that's making a distinction between one and one. Now, the interesting thing about that is, it doesn't make a distinction beyond that. So our number system allows us to think more precisely.

So we can talk about one carrot, two carrots, three carrots, four carrots, up to infinity carrots, right? But our grammar doesn't make, at least in English, doesn't make the distinction, it just makes a distinction one, or other than one, or more than one. So, a super medical number is kind of very simple, compared to maths numbers. So if we say that one carrot looks delicious, and we check in a maths number in there, and then we say those two carrots look delicious, so we see that we change from that to those, we change from carrot to carrots, we change from looks to look.

But then when we go from those two carrots look delicious to those three carrots look delicious, everything has changed except for the numbers two and three, which means our grammar doesn't really care about whether it's two or three, all it cares about is whether it's singular or one or more than one. That's all it cares about the grammar. Now, the other languages care a little more about how many we're actually talking about, so lots and lots of languages do the English thing, which is we care about one or more than one. But other languages care about whether there's one, two, or more than two, and some languages care about whether it's one, two, three, or more than three.

And there's other languages that care about whether it's one, two, three, and then some, and then a lot. So it gets a little bit more precise after three, but it doesn't really know languages that I know of. I mean, I know that I've looked up, seems to go sort of to a precise number above three. So just to give you a few examples, you can have with your dual languages, so languages that have dual number, so they'll have a way of expressing singular in their grammar.

But then, for instance, in their noun, they have an inflection that says there's precisely two of these things, so they'll have singular dual and then plural. So, Alutic and Alaskan language has something called obligatory duals. So if you're saying two things, you have to use the inflection that indicates two things, not you can't use plural, you've got to use dual. And then there's something called a faculty dual, which means it's optional.

So if you see two things, you can either use the dual inflections, or you can use plural, and it depends on which is more relevant to whatever you're talking about. So if modern Arabic dialects do this, Homeric Greek does this faculty to dual optional. Comanche does it. Comanche has some interesting grammatical principles on this, such as with a dual, if you see two people, you have to use the dual grammatical form, the dual number.

So it's obligatory for humans. If you see two other animate nouns, so it could be birds or fish, then you get to choose whether you're going to use the dual or the plural. For inanimate nouns, you can use the dual, but it's really rare to do that. And just to give you a flavor of what that would look like, I'm remembering way, way back when I was a kid watching this film with Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda called on Golden Pond.

Early 80s, I watched this film with my parents, and something about the dialogue, there's a particular line of dialogue that struck me as a kid, which just shows you how I was a grammar geekie even then, where Katherine Hepburn turns to her, well, the actress turns to the character who's played by Katherine Hepburn turns to her grumpy partner, who's played by Henry Fonda, and she says, oh, lovely couple in the woods. And Henry Fonda, who's really grumpy, grumpy says, couple of people. And she says, no, a couple of people, of course a couple of people. And so what's happening there is that we've got a little bit of duality or that dual number written into some of our lexical items, like couple.

And when she's using the word couple on its own, we would normally, if we're just using the word couple, and we're not putting the noun in there, like a couple of something, if we just say a couple, normally we're talking about people, although sometimes we might also talk about, you know, anim objects, like, oh, those two swans make a lovely couple. So our notion of couple is similar to the way that Kanachi do dual. Okay. Another way of doing grammatical number is trial, so where you make a distinction between singular, dual, or trial.

So if you've got, so an example would be the Awa language of Papua New Guinea. So if they want to talk about one dog, then it's, yeah, which I might be pronouncing wrong, because I don't speak the language I've been relying on the work by loving and loving who wrote a grammar of Awa in 1973. In any case, so what's in their work is, Aya, so Iyay, and then suffix there means one dog, and then Ayatade means two dogs, Ayatade means three dogs. And Ayatade means more than three dogs.

So they've got specific ways of talking about one, two, three, and then plural, more than three. And then other languages like the Lenaka language of Vanatwa, it marks singular dual trial and plural not just for the nouns, but also for the verbs. So it's pretty deeply embedded in their syntactical structures. And then finally, pockal languages.

This is fantastic. So this is an example of where you can have singular, dual, pockal, and plural. And pockal means a few. So singular, like with dog, Iyay, makata.

And that's singular for plural, two dogs, sorry, for dual, two dogs, makata, karo. And then rather than doing three dogs, you do a few dogs, makata na, and that's pockal. And so a few doesn't have to mean three, it can mean sort of in the same way that we might use a few meaning around three. And then plural means makata, plural would be makata tangung, which means significantly more.

The difference we didn't know a few in a lot, I guess. So anyway, this is fascinating to look at how languages differ to see the way these structural principles act. The key thing is that the way that we conceive of singular plural is dependent upon the way our languages are structured. And I was curious to know there's all these interesting differences and we can get a little bit obsessive about how interesting, and does this mean that people from Papua New Guinea think any different way than people from Alabama?

And that's something called linguistic relativism and that's the zapar word hypothesis if you've ever heard of that. And just in case I'm curious, that's not the kind of linguistics I do, it's not so much about people who speak different languages think differently. For me, it's all humans are constrained by human languages regardless of what that language is, and all human languages restrict us from seeing the other dimensions of reality. I just want to throw that in case you're wondering about zapar worth.

So I'm curious to know what do all human languages have in common in relation to grammatical number? And, you know, we've talked about how some make a grammatical distinction between one, two, three, or one, two, and a few and many. And what do they all have in common? And from this kind of non-exhausted, non-exhausted tour of languages around the globe, looking at some rather remote languages, some endangered languages, it does look like there's two common features, like I say it's non-exhausted, I'm massively relying on other people's grammars, and I've not done this research myself.

But it seems like no language has a grammatical number system that encodes precise numbers above three. So in terms of their actual syntax, numbers above three have to be expressed in terms of actual numbers, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. But more importantly from my perspective, there isn't any language that doesn't have a way of saying singular. So singularity, the notion of one, seems to be a structuring aspect of all languages.

There's no language that just does dual trial, pockle, plural, or just as plural. Every language has a way of syntactically encoding singular. And in some ways, I'm fascinated by that idea, but in some ways, if you accept the stuff that I say about language, it's not necessarily surprising. I mean, in episode 95, your name without language, I said we don't refer to anything.

Language doesn't point to things in the world, but draws a line around things in the world. So you can think about this in relation to your counter, and you're looking around in the world, and you're like, well, what things am I counting? And you might have actually been kind of like mentally drawing lines around things. Like, okay, do I look at the window?

Is that one thing? Okay, I wonder right now. Or do I look at the three window panes, in which case I'm drawing three lines rather than one. So language draws lines around things, and the line that language draws creates a singleness or singularity.

So if I'm looking at my window, which has three parts, it's the line that language draws that makes the distinction between the one, the window, and then the ones within that, the panes. Right? It's a language that does that. And we can explore that even further when I say how many things can you see right now, and that is an impossible question to answer.

But if I say, look at just one thing and tell me what it is, you'll be able to do that, because language makes that easy for you, because language is oriented to the one, the singular. Look at one thing. I'm looking at a house, right? That's one thing, looking through the window at a house.

And now I'm going to look at a brick on that house. Or I'm going to look at the neighbors' Venetian blinds, and now I'm going to look at one, I don't know what they're called, but one metal strip from the Venetian blinds, right? Maybe that's one blind, I don't know. But I can very easily look at the world around me and draw lines around the things that count as one thing.

I can even do it with something as an epivol. I'm looking at clouds right now. I can point to individual clouds, even though they're all just masses of water vapor. I know that, but I can still point to it.

I can say to look at that cloud. So language draws lines, and that creates a singularity. So if language is a way of structuring information, and human language structures information according to a particular organizing principle, the organizing principle of human language is the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects, self, and we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar.

And when we look at grammatical number, the structure there is singularity. All human languages are the way of expressing singular. And not only can we draw lines around things, but we're also drawing lines around selves. Now, selves can be singular or plural, which we know from grammatical person.

You can have first person singular, I, or first person plural, we. But because we know that no language allows for plural without singular, we know that every language is making a distinction between one and more than one. So we know that our language is orienting us toward the individual self and potentially collections of individual selves, but each individual self with its own point of view. So we can explore this in relation to how this works in the human world.

Right? So I'm going to share with you a story that I wrote, which is a rewrite of the Snow White story. It's called Ferris. And I've just published this recently on my Grammar for Dreamers blog.

It's a very small story and it's from the perspective of the mirror that the Queen is looking into. So it's very small. I'm just going to read it to you now. Ferris.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Not this again. Who's the fairest? Let me interrupt.

Fer is not a great-able adjective. Something's either fair or not fair. It's not a sliding scale. So you can stop with your superlative forms.

Who is the most beautiful? Oh, please. Now your couplet doesn't even scan. And saying fair to mean beautiful is so 16th century.

But while we're here, my Queen, let's take a moment to discuss the perils of talking into mirrors. Ask Alice. Ask the fools who summoned Candyman. There's a reason they're called looking glasses, not talking glasses.

When you talk to a mirror, you're speaking to language itself. Everything gets meta. Everything comes out backward. Out, backward, everything comes.

Who's the fairest? We're back to Ferris now. Let me make this easy for you. The girl who sells posies at the market, she's fair.

Your sister the Duchess, she's fairer than the posie-seller. And you, my superlative Queen, are the fairest of these three. Who's the fairest of them all? What is it about superlatives?

It's never enough to be better than two. When there's three, there's a multitude. When there's a multitude, there's the one. The best.

The most. The greatest. Who's the fairest? I heard you the first time most half-list of hygens.

How I break it to you. There will always be someone who's prettier than you. Go forth and destroy them with your poisoned words. So here in this story, thanks for listening to it with me, in this story I'm exploring the different ways that number shows up beyond just the sympatric systems that I already mentioned, and they show up in these comparative and superlative adjectives.

We've got this Queen, and she's asking who's the fairest, and the way we've often been taught about EST suffixes is that they indicate superlative. And so here we've got grammatical number again, and in English this time we actually have the notion of more than two. So when we look at who's fairer, we normally are comparing two different people. So that notion of the two or the dual is written into that comparative aspect, that comparative morphine, the comparative suffix.

When we have S, who's the fairest, then that is effectively more than two. Now the mirror, who's annoyed, and if you think about it, the mirror is simply reflecting. So when we look into a mirror, and the mirror says that when you look into the mirror you're looking at the language itself, and that's the way I like to think of language because when you look into a mirror you think you're getting a clear picture, and what do you look at? You tend to look at yourself.

And so I think this is what happens with language. We look out and we think that we're getting a clear perspective, but what we're really seeing is our own self projected back to us. And that's why I wanted to compare language to looking at the mirror. And again, when it comes back to us I'm unrestricted because we can only see what we see when we're looking into it and what we tend to see as ourselves.

Anyway, back to these adjectives, then I mentioned that that is not a gradable adjective, so this is the notion of whether something can be more or less something dead is not a gradable adjective, you can't be more or less dead, although in the princess bride, people are mostly dead. But in any case, the point here is the number bit, the comparison, and the superlative. And so when the mirror tries to restrict her to kind of a tri- a trio, a trio, a trio system, or there's just three, she's not happy with I'm just fairer than two other people. I'm just the fairest of three people.

She wants to be the fairest of them all. And so what the mirror points to is this movement from one, then two, singular, dual, to plural, all of them. And often the human sort of perspective, the human way of seeing the singular is, you have to be distinctive out of all of the people. You've got to be the best.

This is not all of human experience, not everyone is always all the time going to experience it, but it's a pretty familiar one, and it's one that we can see in the language. So that notion of where there's three, there's a multitude, this is the number system of moving singular plural, or dual plural, and no way of being specific beyond that, where there's a multitude, there's the one, and that's where our superlative comes in, that idea that to stand out, to be singular, you have to be the best. And when we really look at that, and we can see how language restricts our experience of singularity, by forcing us to understand singular in relation to plural, and then how do you stand out in relation to that, then we can see how selfhood is potentially an oppressive experience, because singularity means that two people can't be at the top, or they can't be the most. So what I would recommend that we do when we're exploring this aspect of selfhood and language is to reimagine it, and to think in terms of singularity without needing to be at the top of some kind of hierarchy, without needing to distinguish the singular from the plural, but instead to celebrate all of the different singularities that language actually allows us to see.

So with the sort of, you imagine you look out at a crowd, and you think, who's going to be the one that stands out from the crowd, language and your perspective gives you the opportunity to see each person in the crowd as a singular self, and to imagine the possibilities that each singularity can be reimagined, re-shaped, and that each shape can bring us something new. So language can be impressive, and language can also offer us many, many new things, and it is a singular experience, to be experiencing a world through human language. And thank you for experiencing this podcast with me. If you enjoyed it, then please do subscribe to it, and if you would like to learn more about me, JodieClark.com.

You can find links to my fiction, including Experiment and Ferris. Links to my book Refreshing Grammar. You can sign up to be on the waiting list for the Refreshing Grammar course, which will be coming out in the autumn, and you can also join my grammar for jubers' newsletter, JodieClark.com. And thanks for watching.