>> what is bully pulpit books? >> we publish books on religion, a book on bob dylan and his spiritual background, and we try to operate in that atmosphere of where the -- in that sphere of where the three intersect. >> what's your background? >> i'm formerly with cnn, and i'm a film producer. >> mark joseph, this is the book, "wildcard: the promise and peril of sarah palin." >> up next on booktv, linguist john mcwho ther argues languages are open to growth by continuous usage. mr. mcwhorter reports only 200 languages are written. this is about 30 minutes. >> thank you for coming, everyone. i'm going to start by reading briefly from the book. this is from the beginning of the book, and this is a book

where i hope that we can look at language in a happier way than we're off trained to -- we're often trained to. so this is a happy book, and this is how it starts out. introduction. page through a grand old book on what was once known as natural history as we all so often do, and you'll find that almost all drawings of marine life are rendered from the perspective of someone standing on the shore. there'll be some fish bobbing out around in the waves, but clams, squid, see athem innies will be lying on the beach or artfully positioned on conveniently-placed rock formations or even just dangling from the margins of the picture. this is a standard procedure in illustration until past the middle of the 19th century. wouldn't it seem more natural to draw a squid swimming in the

water, springy, fierce and alert instead of piewt rifying on a rock? but then what was natural to someone in 1840, even if they were a naturalist? one thing that wasn't natch -- national was imagining an underwater scene. people back then didn't have the technology to ever be underwater for very long and certainly not being able to see much while making a stab at it. there were no diving bells or submarines. you might hold your breath and dive under for a look, but water is often muddy, and it's hard to see through it. plus you can only hold your breath for so long, and certainly not long enough to get a peep a mile down. in england it was only in the 1850s that people started to get a sense of what aquatic creatures looked like in life, such that illustrators began drawing underwater marine scenes. before this, as modern as the

british were in so many ways, even those with advanced educations, three names and salad forks had no way of picturing undersea life in the jacques cousteau style that's second nature to us. you had to see them that way. and in many ways quite often to be a linguist is to feel like you're underwater in 1840 while everybody else is up on the beach laying jelly fish out onto rocks. it's because so much about language is so hard to see or hear. from what is easy to see and hear, we learn there are languages and in many parts of the world there are assorted dialects. and these dialects are, in some sense, lessen than language. part of the difference is that a language is a collection of words. english has enough words to fill a do you have stop like the oxford english dictionary. some dialect out there in the

rain forest doesn't and, therefore, qualifies something different as, well, a language language. and then there's the writing issue. if a language isn't fixed on the page, then surely we suppose it has not achieved its full power. it's just a dialect, in other words. because of this it becomes natural that if asked which was more complex, french or the language of a tiny group in new guinea, most people would immediately suppose the answer was french, a developed language after all. the truth, however, begins with the observation that if you thought french's two genders were annoying, imagine having to deal with 100 jenlders. down underwater what we see is a world with 6,000 languages, period, whether or not they ever see the printed page and even if their vocabularies number in the tens of thousands. if anything, the language is a little subordinary or special as

we -- typically the rock star ones like english and french and mandarin chinese. but who knowses? we will never learn the language, besides we're too busy attending to notions about our own language such as that one of the greatest flaws of the an lo phone is a propensity use the language illogically. we're taught that it's sensible, tiny, english is shot through with random inconsistencies. richard letterer has heightened the festivity -- via excerpts that get around from his crazy english book along the lines of if we conceive a conception and receive at a reception or why don't we grieve aggression? there's no egg in eggplant and no ham in hamburger.

this stuff is the tip of the iceberg of nonsensicality in accomplish. underwater you can see the rest, but we humans are territorial. don't even get most of us started on what happens when language is mixed together. spanish, full of english words is spanglish reviled as many and thought of as an issue by others. and there was even a time when more than a few had a serious problem with english having taken on so many words from french and latin. after all, a real language is pure. here's what it feels like to be underwater. one reads a perfectly pleasant newspaper article about people in the mountains, a patch of a region home to several dozen languages. the one closest to famous is georgian. one of the other ones spoken only by about 1200 people in a few villages is called for our purposes archie. and what do we learn about archie? only that it's a language of unknown origin, otherwise the

article about archie people and nearby caucasian language-speaking groups tell about one another. i'm not waiting for a newspaper writer to give a linguistic lesson about archie, but on the language that reigns, it's hard not to feel like something has happened when a language like this is flagged in passing. attention must be paid if not in the article, then somewhere that unknown origin business, for example, with the quiet implication as a kinless sort of thing archie is all alone, as unclass bl as it is unknown. less than something, a dialect, perhaps. to be sure, if idea is that a language's origins must be on paper, then archie is lost, indeed. it's been a spoken language rather than a written one like but about 200 of the world's 6,000 languages. but paper isn't the only way to

tell where a language came from. a group of similar languages such as french, spanish, italian, portuguese and romanian begin with one language which splits off into several when populations become separated. linguists could compare the word and deduce what the word was in the parent language. now, we know that method works pretty well in cases where even the parent language was written down for posterity. for example, hand is -- mano in spanish. no linguist is surprised based on comparative reconstruction that the latin word for hand is manos. in the same way, chi is one of -- archie is a pass el of kittens. if word for tongue is -- [inaudible] in archie and -- [inaudible] in chech yang and --

[inaudible] then linguists can use all of those words and roll back the tape and see that the original word in the parent language was -- [inaudible] even though that language was never written down. so it's not of unknown origin at all, it has kin sprung from a language spoken probably about 6,000 years ago. if anything, it's a better known origin than most of us are as people. most of us have no record of our ancestors further back four or five generations. the world is bursting with language families of this kind whose ancestral languages can be reconstructed in the same way as the caucasian word above. that's enough from the book. anyway, the book starts out like that, and that is just the introduction. and what the point of the book is, is to show that there is a world of wonders out there linguistically because it's hard to get a sense of because we

don't encounter a lot of those languages. but it's really as amazing as the variety of flora and fauna out there. and once we realize that there are 6,000 truly fierce languages out there instead of there being maybe 100 languages and then a whole bunch of dialects, then we're in a position to understand a lot of things about english that are harder to understand if we think that english is a normal language. so just by way of preview, oneover the main point -- one of the main points of the book is that if you go to a place where about 2,000 people are speaking the language, you've never heard of it nor has anybody else, it's never been written down, then an understandable idea might be that that must be a language this' less sophisticated in some way than japanese or spanish or some language that's spoken by people with tall buildings and airplanes and the new yorker, etc.

[laughter] that is a natural sense that you might have, and it's actually the opposite. if you see a language that's unknown spoken by people who are outside of what we might call civilization, be prepared for the grammar of it to be so complicated that you can't believe that human beings actually speak it while walking at the same time. [laughter] it's english that is a little ding dong compared to languages like those. [laughter] because of english's history which is a rather unique one that is shared with just a few languages in the world. when adults have to learn a language a lot, it changes it forever, and it makes it less -- they were busy, and they did not learn old english well. and as a result, they knocked the cases to pieces, they tore

up the conjugation, they spoke it the way we would speak old english if we to learn it very quickly. and as a result old english became what we're speaking, this strangely genderless language, what other language have you learned where that's all there is? [laughter] that was because of the vikings. and as a result, here we are today. there are some languages like that. persian is another one that's like that. i talk in the book about how i encountered persian -- when a persian-speaking man was caught in the rain, this was about 15 years ago. it's an apartment complex, and it started raining so hard. it was really like something out of a movie. so he, for some reason, was caught in it. so i let him in, and, you know, he's 106 and i, at the time, was about 22. we had nothing to talk about. and so i figured, well, he

clearly speaks something, so i said, we're going to use language. what do you speak? he said, pirg. we started going through persian grammar. it was oddly elementary. i didn't know anything about persian at the time, but i've learned a lot of adult learned it, hence, it became the english of its group. par toe was its relative. it's a nightmare. there are various languages like that. if you realize that languages are only easy by accident and that normal languages are actually very difficult, then you notice that languages in in the normal state are extremely irregular. so we worry when english doesn't make perfect sense, and we don't like that people confuse lie and lay, and people say fewer books less than they say less books. but then if you look at a real language like, say, navajo, there's no such thing as a regular verb. you start to learn it, you think, well, there must be a

pattern, so you learn one verb. there's the pattern. then you learn another verb, and it's nothing like that one. and you figure, okay, there must be two conjugation classes. and the third verb is nothing like the other two, and you figure, well, there are three. and a couple days later you've got 17 verbs, and you figure how many conjugation dallass are there -- classes are there? it's just a completely irregular verbal system. babies learn this and because they can, that's what the language is like. so if you look around the world, what you see is that there are countless languages, 6,000 is the typical count, and that some of them are rather streamlined and rather user-friendly. they tend to be spoken by a lot of people, and, therefore, i'm speaking one of them. but most of them are hideously, marvelously, fascinatingly complex. and it's a lot of what linguists

actually do for a living. and they're full of irregularity, even the ones that we my might not have grammar because they don't have endings and prefixes actually are every bit as complex as ancient greek and the other languages that we think of as language languages. and in addition the book is finally about something that's really easy to miss. language is what you say, it's not what you write. and so when you think about what language really is, it's not that. it's not this scribbled kind of flintstone-style approximation of how we talk that's put on pappy us are. that's something that only happened about 5500 years ago. language started at least 80,000 years ago, probably if you ask me 150,000 years ago. so writing with a laterally add-on, if language had only existed for 24 hours, writing came along at 11:07 p.m. and so what language is talk.

of all the 6,000 languages, 5,800 are only ever spoken. and so to think of writing as what language is, is to dismiss all of these others as somehow not real when as i try to discuss in the book, with joke, these languages are very much real, very complex. they are awesome thicks just like -- things just like notre dame or giant squid or anything else that's complicated and seems like it might hurt you if you get too close to it. so this book, "what language is," which is right here and what it isn't and what it could be is, basically, just designed to usher you into how wonderful the world of language is as opposed to the view that we often have of it which is that there are a few languages and then a bunch of dialects. and, basically, the main thing there is to think about in terms of language is most people don't speak it properly. i find that a very glum way of

look at things. and so this is my happy book, and i'd be happy to take questions. thank you. [applause] >> um, is there a reason -- [inaudible] >> usually not. [laughter] >> i shouldn't have started that way. >> it's okay. >> are the more complicated languages, were people less inclined to write them down because they were more complicated? is. >> no, no, no. no, that's actually an interesting idea. a language can be one of those hideously complicated languages, and depending on its history, it can be very much written down. any slavic language, for example. those languages stayed the way they were until the advent of printing and widespread literacy. to start from the ground up with, say, russian and actually get somewhere and not be living

with or married to a russian or live anything russia is -- living in russia is awesomely difficult. i have often -- i still as somebody who studies russian as a hobby and never quite gets there, i still quietly think it's a hoax and nobody actually speaks the language. [laughter] yet it is written, and russian is the ease is si one of the other slavic languages. try to learn polish, you'll have a stroke. so a language can be very complex when written down. languages get complex, oddly enough, because babies can learn them that way. it's like the snowball rolling down the mountain. a baby can take anything in, and by the time they lose that capacity, it's too late, they're already speaking polish, and that's just goes on generation after generation. [laughter] it's a marvelous thing. it amazes me to hear toddlers speaking languages that are extremely complicated and not realizing they have bested me already, but that's just the way

it is. [laughter] ma'am. >> um, what about the idea that, um, you lose a language, you lose a culture? >> you do, yeah. a language is a big part of a culture. not everything. and i hesitate to stress that too much because we are losing languages at a rapid rate, and as a linguist i'm supposed to say this we're fixing that, but to be honest, i'm not sure how much that can be fixed. i think we need to document languages. keeping the smaller ones spoken and alive over generations is really hard with globalization. and so when a language dies, a lot of a people's culture dies. but i think we need to look at the fact that you can have a culture that's different from the mainstream while speaking the mainstream's language because we're going to see more and more of that. so, for example, let's say you're a native american, you have lost touch with choctaw or

navajo, and let's say that the language has died, and it's very hard to bring a language up from the page. it only happens very occasionally. i wonder if we want to tell that person you, therefore, are not navajo or choctaw even though the language is gone? but that's not the happiest news. and, unfortunately, there is a calculation made, and i hope this isn't true, that in 100 years there will not be 6,000 languages, but 600. and it's also been said that a language dies every two weeks. and so, for example, one language that i feature in this book is this marvelous thing called ket. and it's ket. it's got this short name. its grammar is so complex that professional linguists didn't figure out how the verbs worked until about 15 years ago just because it look like there's no sense in it at all. and to the extent there is, it's more like some rules of thumb, and you can barely believe

people speak it. and officially 3,000 people speak ket, but there was an article i read recently. it's about 500. and that sort of thing is difficult to reverse. so, yes, unfortunately, that is true about culture. i'm going to choose a person who's not a woman, and that is -- i'm going to switch it. sir. [laughter] >> let me ask if you're, say you're an ex-pat, soldier, maybe even a tourist -- >> uh-huh. >> and you want to use language to breakthrough cultural barriers, you know, how can you -- because it's so hard to learn a language. what are, how can you, how can you get at it? and is it an effective tool? is. >> how do you do it? >> yeah. >> it is an effective tool. i it varies with the culture. but if you can even speak it badly, then you've made a major accomplishment. it's a god send that rosetta stone has a pashto set, i'm sure

there's a reason for that. but the truth is this terms of learning a foreign language where there's nobody in your home who speaks it and you're not going to be there, i know of only one way that really kind of works, and i always mention this. there are these little books called, um, take the word assimilate and take off the ate. they're belgian. so here they're rather expensive, but at least their easier -- can they're easier to get than they used to be. in spanish, spanish without toil which is the awkward translation. without toil. but it really -- they're not known that much in america, but if you sit down for 20 minutes a day with -- i call them the magic books. i've given this to countless, unwilling people. [laughter] you just sit down for 20 minutes and they've got your exercises, i learned to speak confident, horrid german from this book. [laughter] you know, you're kind of approximating the cases, and you

come out of it. and this is the kind of compliment you get, genuine compliment. the first time i went to germany, i was eating, and i'm joking with the waitress. i probably sounded like a chimpanzee. and one guy said you speak german better than i've ever heard anybody speak german who doesn't speak german. [laughter] that's pretty good. and it's with a little magic books. and they've got a wide variety. i suggest that. unfortunately, they haven't gotten to pashto. so you'll have to use rosetta stone which is pretty good, but it's not as good as the magic books. that's now going to be on tv and the people are going to be insulted. sir. the sir who is in this position. [laughter] >> [inaudible]

i wonder about the relationship between -- [inaudible] >> i'll repeat it. go ahead. >> do people think differently who speak different languages, is it something cognitive that changes with -- [laughter] >> that is very controversial in the linguistics, and i'll give you the sort of muffin answer. >> [inaudible] >> the question is, do languages make people think differently? and so if you speak one language, does that make you look at the world with a different set of glasses than if you speak another language? i would love it if that were true, and many linguists and anthropologists would say that, yes, if you speak korean, then you see the world differently than if you speak french because the grammar is different, and the vocabulary divides things up differently. in korean if you put a videocassette which is now about as antique -- but if you put a

videocassette into a box that's a different kind of putting than if you put a candlestick into a holder. that's the muffin answer. the real -- muffin meaning comfy. [laughter] my personal feeling, and this is just me, and it's not my sub, sub area, but i've thought about it to a certain extent, is that the current research on that shows that your language's grammar does make you think of things in slightly different ways. that can be shown experimentally. but i don't think it's the ways that we would think of as very interesting or much fun. so, for example, french has gender, and it's been shown that if you do an experiment with french people and you ask them whether if a table were a cartoon character, it would speak with a high voice or low voice, french people are somewhat more likely than english speakers that it would speak with a low voice which

seems to correlate with the fact that table is feminine. now, that's good, okay. but if you know any french people, they're not walking around thinking that tables don't shave and are feminine. [laughter] so i don't know how interested i am in the fact that the french person i know is a little more apt that a table talks like this. [laughter] it isn't that -- there are many things like that where these small things are shown. if i were a psychologist, i would find those things more interesting. as a linguist and a person watching this debate, i don't believe the idea. but there are people who have been studying this thing harder than me who would tell you they do. so this is just me. that's my genuine answer, which is no, but that's just me. um, gosh. >> [inaudible] what would you say about african languages nowadays? >> what about 'em? >> what happens in africa? [laughter] >> well, a lot of things.

africa is home to, it's always fun when somebody asks a question like that. there are many language families in africa, and so social it's nn that there's one family with variations, there are a whole bunch. i can't think of a single one thing to say about african languages except that a great many of them -- because they're spoken by small groups -- are impressive in some ways. so you have the click languages. and languages have clicks in them. the clicks are not express e. you don't use them to call a leopard. the clicks are just like our b, d and l. so that's with them, most of them endangered. then you have other languages that nobody's ever heard of. talk about all the things that have happened in africa. darfur, the languages those people speak, no rule for the plural. every noun has us own more, and you just have to know every single one, so there's no s. everything is like child,

children, lamp, shelf, it's just everything is different. [laughter] and then there are semitic languages in africa, the ones that are related to arabic and hebrew including ethiopian languages, so those languages if you know some arabic or hebrew and you're at an ethiopian restaurant, one way you can have fun is mention some words from arabic or hebrew, and the waiter or waitress will say that's like my word for -- so that's my winging on it on what language is like in africa. [laughter] >> we have time for one last question. >> um, someone else is going to have to pick that person because i don't know how to do that. okay. >> [inaudible] i was curious about how is it that dialects have fewer words than, as you were saying, proper languages? >> uh-huh. what do you mean? >> well, i mean, wouldn't there

be the same number roughly, or is that just sort of a general rule? >> do you mean that languages that are spoken by small indigenous groups would have a smaller vocabulary than english? >> um, yeah, i suppose. how is that? >> i think what you're referring to is that let's say that english has 170,000 words, and you're not supposed to say what that number is. is saw shimmy an english word? i don't know. is a different word from was? i don't care. but if you look at the oxford dictionary and you go one, two, three, it's 170,000 word words. it is true that if you look at one of these isolated indigenous language, they do not have 170,000. how many is hard to say because you're not one of those people. the person who compiled the word list was somebody from michigan

or dusseldorf, they didn't get all of them. it's probably some tens of thousands. but the fact of the matter is that even within the tens of thousands, you've got your synonyms, you've got your shades of meaning, and a lot of what are considered words in english aren't. and so, for example, we have the word ruthless. if you look in the oed, there's a word ruth, and not referring to your great aunt, but there's a word ruth that means mercy. it's not a word. it just happens to be in there because somebody put it there. but that's not a word in a real sense. if you subtracted them and you talk about how many words the typical english-speaking college graduate knows, then you get closer to that 30,000, 40,000. so it's that way. but certainly the larger developed languages do have larger vocabularies partly because you can catch them all in amber in these big dictionaries. and also words for us, um, they

don't go out of style because you can capture them in dictionary whereas in an indigenous culture, there'll be a word that's used for hundreds and hundreds of years, it's not used and dropped. that doesn't happen with us, it stays in the dictionary. so i think that's the answer to the question. >> i think that's it. >> is that it? >> so we can give a round to of applause to the author. [applause] >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. here's a list of we've-selling conservative -- best-selling conservative books according to conservative book club.com.

>> for more conservative bestsellers go to conservativebookclub.com. >> sam brower, who's warren jeffs? >> warren jeffs is the self-proclaimed prophet of the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints. he followed his, in his father's footsteps who was the prophet before him, um, and kind of, um, took that religion and its idiosyncrasies to new levels and new heights. >> and what do you mean by that? >> um, their, they practice polygamy for one things -- >> legally? >> it's illegal in all 50 states. >> it's now illegal? >> >> it's illegal in all 50

states. >> in utah too? >> in utah as well. and because of that, i think as an outcropping of that there's this caste system of marrying underage little girls. kind of a reward system that's been going on now, well, when warren came into power in 2002, it just started mushrooming and getting worse and worse and worse. >> now, when you say he came into power, how did he come into power? >> his -- when warren was a young man, he was kind of a, this odd duck. but he was his father's, um, favorite son. he was, his father took a shine to him, and his father had dozens of sons, but he took a shine the warren.

and warren was made headmaster of their private school system and managed the worm his way into a position of leadership next to his father. and when his father started becoming ill when he was old, started having a series of strokes. and warren was able to kind of maneuver himself into a position of power sort of like a medieval power struggle. he was able to move himself in to where when his father died, he was the gatekeeper for his father, and just made himself the new prophet. >> where is warren jeffs now? >> warren jeffs is in jail in el dorado, texas. he's, for the past four years, he's been moving around from one prison to another prison to another prison. he was convicted in utah of being an accomplice to rape.

that conviction was overturned on a technicality in utah by the utah supreme court which was, in my opinion, a shameful decision that should never have happened -- >> it was on jury instruction, correct? >> it was the epitome of a bad ruling, i guess. it was a jury instruction that, um, that the jurors didn't even understand. a lawyer would understand it, perhaps, but the jurors had no clue that anything was wrong. but the overturned on that technicality, and then he went to arizona. and arizona, his attorneys fought it for years in arizona, and after about two years finally the victims grew tired of it, and the prosecutors grew tired of it, and he had charges waiting for him in texas that

were more serious than the arizona charges. and so he was extradited to texas, and that's where he's at now, is in texas, awaiting charges on very serious thereonny charges of child abuse. >> sam brower, what is the fundamentalist church of latter-day saints, and what's its connection, if any, to the lds church? >> well, it's -- nowadays there's absolutely no connection to the lds church. it's, at the turn of the century it was an offshoot from the mainstream lds church. there was a group of people that when polygamy was outlawed and banned in the lds church that felt like that was something that they didn't want to participate in and, actually, it was a small, this small group of people that left the religion and were excommunicated, and from there, um, it just started

growing, you know, bits and pieces at a time. until it's become what it has now. it's become thoroughly corrupt, and it's just, in my opinion, it's an organized crime syndicate, you know? that specializes in child abuse and underage marriages. >> um, how many followers? >> there's between 10 and 15,000 followers in the flds. it's hard to put an exact number on it because there's, they keep very poor records purposely, they have their own doctors, they have their own clinics where children are born, they shy away from hospitals because that's where records are kept, and that's where they can be discovered, and their secrets can be discovered. so they stay away from mainstream hospitals. they've set up their own hospitals and doctors and resources, mid wives for giving

birth and, actually, when there was a raid in texas, they found birth certificates that were in various stages of being filled out. some were filled out, some were partially filled out, and some were just blank so that they could fill in names and dates that suited them. so their records are not very good, some are bogus, and so it's really hard to put a number on how many exactly there are, but they're all over the country. >> mr. brower, how did you get to write "prophet's prey," what's your involvement with the fundamentalist church of the latter-day saints? >> um, i became involved originally as a private investigator who had, um, actually taken a case involving one of the flds members who