people don't realize how me tracks the lead on the internet and have the dots connect when put together. when i put together a profile of the person i'm looking at, it's kind of different from a personal profile like one on one because everybody acts different and did you think different on the internet. that'll change and how that differs from as it would, that's the difference was the internet has put together for us. i've always been surprised that, you know, not a better attempt to conceal or proxy ip addresses. sure, some do, but the ones that don't, that's just better for me. >> as an iraqi veteran i want to say thank you for what you did. to know sammy of my fellow soldiers you would've say. you spoke about hurdles learning arabic. i myself have tried to learn the

language. but more importantly in my interaction with the air people, the islamic faith play so much of a part with every aspect. can you talk more about creating legitimacy and developing relationships with these islamists, with their faith? >> sure. you are right. i mean, everything, you know, it relates to the koran and decided in purpose and what they are doing and justification as well. so, when, when i put it together and creating an identity i pick a particular tribe and then figure out exactly what the aspects and attributes are for those and how going to play those out. i usually, earlier, i would pick ones that i was more familiar with and try and make it one of the larger tribes. i mean, there's a way for me to not be known. one of the things that people don't get, and it's hard to understand is exactly how important it is that their faith

plays into everything that they do. so in communicating and doing any kind of communications back and forth, that is key to doing the proper greetings to the proper, whatever you're doing. all of that plays into the legitimacy that you ultimately want to portray. >> any other comments or questions? thank you, sharon. >> thank you. we do have copies of "the unexpected patriot" and available in the lobby. she will be glad to sign them here in this room. if you'd like to purchase them and bring them into an continue conversations with her one on one, that would be welcome. thank you for your kind attention. [applause] >> to find out more about author shannen rossmiller, visit our website.

>> is there a nonfiction author a book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> up next on booktv, john mcwhorter argues that languages are not rigid constructions but rather open to growth by continuous usage. mr. mcwhorter reports only 200 of the work 6000 languages are written. this is about 30 minutes. >> thank you for coming everybody. 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 -- that we can look at language and a happier way than we are often trained to. a happy boy. this is how it starts out.

introduction. page to a granville book on what was once known as natural history, as we also often do, and you will find that almost all drawings of marine life are rendered from the perspective of someone standing on the shore. there will be some fish bobbing around out in the waves, and maybe some flying fish doing what they do. but squid, sea enemies and such will be lying on the beach or artfully position on conveniently placed rock formation, or even just dangling from the margins in the picture. this is standard procedure in illustration until the middle of the 19th century. it will look nice enough but wouldn't it seem more natural to draw squids swimming in water, springing, fears and alert instead of putrefying on iraq? but then what was natural to someone? even if they were naturals. one thing that wasn't natural, if you think about it was

imagining what an underwater scene look like for a simple reason. people back then didn't have the technology to ever be under water for very long. and certainly not be able to see much while making a stab at it. there were no diving bells or submarines. you might take a deep breath, hold your nose and dive under for a look, but water is muddy and it's hard to see through it when it is moving, plus you can only hold your breath for so long. and certainly not long enough to plunge a mile down to get a peep at anglerfish is in such. in england it was only after a home aquarium meeting in 1850s that people started to get a sense of what aquatic creatures look like in life. such that illustrates begin drawing underwater marine scenes. before this as modern as the british were in so many ways, even those with advanced education, three names, salad forks, had no way of picturing undersea life and the shock cousteau style that is second nature to us. to start thinking of sea creatures that way you have to

see them that way. in many ways quite often to be a linguist is to feel like you're underwater in 1840 what everyone else is up on the beach laying jellyfish out on rocks. it's because so much about language is so hard to see or hear. so from what it is easy to see and hear, we learned that their languages and in many parts of the world you are a tieless. in these dialects are somewhat less than languages, part of the difference was seen to to the fact that as one typically supposes, a line which is a clash of words. english has enough words to fill a doorstop like the oxford english dictionary. some dialect out there in the rain forest doesn't and, therefore, qualifies as something different from a language language. and then there's the writing issue. if the link which is a fix on the page concerned we suppose it has not achieved its full power,

it's just a dialect. because of this it becomes natural that if french or the language of a tiny group in new guinea, most people would suppose the french was a development language after all. the truth ever begins with the observation that if you thought french is to gingers were unknown, imagine having to deal with 100 gingers. down underwater what we see is a world with 6000 by, the. whether or not to ever see the printed page and even if their vocabulary is number only in the tens of thousands in anything, the languages are a little sun the ordinary or a little special as we might designate a certain can gently untested sort of person, typically the rockstar ones like english and french and mandarin chinese but he would know. will never meet, much less have any reason to learn the language.

we are too busy attending to other notions about our own language such as one of the greatest flaws of the anglophone is to use the language to logically. we are taught a language is sinful, tied, such we treat it as an oddity. richard letter has heightened the festivity quotient of me in e-mail inbox but excerpts that get around from his crazy english book of on the lines of why are the same or if we conceive at conception and receive at a reception to why don't we grieve a correction our observations such as this new egg in eggplant and no ham in hamburger. this stuff is the tip of an iceberg of nonsense account in english, underwater you can see the rest but we humans are to russia. not to mention territorial or don't even get most of the start and what happens when language is mixed together.

english words as spanglish, reviled by many and thought of as an issue by others. there's even a time when more than if you have a safe problem with english having taken on so many words from french and latin. after all, the real language is pure. here's what it feels like to be underwater. one reads a perfectly pleasant newspaper article about people in the caucasus mountain, a patch of the region home to several dozen languages. the one closest to famous is jordan. one of the other ones mentioned in the article, spoken only by about 1200 people in a few villages is called for our purposes, archie. in the article what do we learned about archie? only it is a language of unknown origin. otherwise the article is about archie people and nearby caucasian language speaking groups that tell about one another. i met waiting for a newspaper writer together and acoustics lesson about archie. but given on the beach perspective on language, it's

hard not to feel like something has happened when a language like this is flagged in passing especially, attention must be paid if not in the article but somewhere, that unknown origin business for example, with the quite implication, archie is all alone, on classical as it is unknown outside of a life less than something, a dialect perhaps. to be sure, if the idea that a language's origins must be on paper, and archie is lost in the. it's been a spoken language rather than a written one like all but about 200 of the world 6000 languages. the paper isn't the only way to tell where a language came from. a group of similar language such as french, spanish, italian, portuguese and romanian begin is one language which splits off into several when populations become separated over time.

linguist can compare the word for something and related language and deduce what the word was in the parent language. then we know that method works pretty well in cases where even the parent language it was written down for posterity. for example, and -- no linguist is surprised based on the technique of what's called comparative reconstruction that the latin word for hand. in the same way archie is one, a language family called for whatever it is worth, northeast caucasian. if the word for tom diaz mosque in archie, which is, i've met -- and so on the linguist can use all of those words and roll back the tape and see that the original word in the parent language, even though that language never written down. so archie is not of unknown origin at all.

it has canned lunch and -- it has kin. most of us have no records of her ancestors further back than four or five generations. and certainly couldn't reconstruct them from our dna down our relatives. the world is bursting with language families of this kind whose ancestral linkages could be reconstructed in the same way as the dedication were above. that's enough from the book. the book starts out like that, and that is just the introduction. and what's the point of the book is to show that there is a world of wonders out there linguistically that it's hard to get a sense of because we don't know what people are saying and we don't encounter a lot of that. that it really is amazing as the variety of flora and fauna out there. and once we realized that there are 6000 truly fierce languages out there instead of there being

many 100 languages and 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, one of the main points of the book is that if you go to a place where about 2000 people are speaking a language, you've never heard of it, nor has anybody else, never been written down, then understandable idea might be that that must be a language that is less sophisticated in some way and japanese or spanish or some lame which a spoken about people with tall buildings and airplanes, "the new yorker," et cetera. that is a natural sense that you might have. and it's the opposite. if you see a language that is unknown spoken by people are outside what we might call civilization. he 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] its english that is a little ding dong compared to languages like those. because english history which is a rather unique one that is shared with just a few in the world. when adults have to learn that language, it changes it forever and it makes it less like archie. that's what happened to english. english was learned by a lot of vikings starting in seven a.d. there were no books for them. there was no school. they just heard it. they were vikings, busy and they did not learn holding as well. and as result they knocked the cases to people. they spoke at the way we would speak old english if we have to learn it very quickly on the fly and nobody taught it to us and nobody corrected us. and as we sell gold in which became what we are speaking, this strangely genderless language, this language were

your paradigm in the presence is walk, walk, walk. what a delay which everyone for that's all there is? was because of the vikings did this. and as result he we are today. there's some languages like that. i talk in the book about how i encountered persians are persian speaking man who was caught in the rain about 15 years ago. it's an apartment complex and it started raining so hard pictures like something out of a movie. and so he for some reason was caught in it and so i let him in, and he's 106 and i at the time was about 20 to. with nothing to talk about. so i figured welcome a 30 speak something. so i figured will use language. what do you? >> he said person. so we started going to persian grammar. it was oddly elementary for a language. and i didn't anything about persian at the time, but i've heard since the persian was a

language of empire. a lot of adults learned and he became the english of its crew. pasta is its relative. version is different. and then if you realize that languages are only easy by accident and that normally which images are actually very difficult, then you notice that languages 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, light and light, and people say fewer looks less than they say less books. but then if you look at a real language like, say, not know, there's no such thing as a regular verb. you start to learn and think there must be a pattern. so you learn one per. you think there's the pattern and then you are another bird and it's nothing like that one and you figure there must be two like spanish with the our. and third firm is nothing like the other two and you figure then there are three.

that a couple days later you've got 17 verbs and they don't do anything like one another. you figure how many classes are there? pretty soon you've learned hundreds of birds and none of them are anything like, it's just a complete the irregular verbal system. baby soreness 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. 6000 is the typical count. and that some of them are rather streamlined and with a user-friendly. they tend to be spoken by a lot of people. at tentatively which is about empire and, therefore, i am speaking with them. but most of them are hideously marvelously fascinating complex. and it's a lot of what linguists actually do for a living. and they are full of a regular jury even the ones that we think might not have grammar because they don't have intense and prefixes actually are every bit as complex as ancient greek and as a languages that we think of as language languages.

and in addition the book is finally about something that is 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 is put on pirates. that's something that only happened about 5500 years ago. language started at least 80,000 years ago, probably if you asked the, 150,000 years ago. writing was a laterally and on. if language it only existed for 24 hours, writing came along at 11:07 p.m. and so what language is used talk. of all the 6000 languages, 5800 are only ever spoken. so to think of riding as what language is used to dismiss all of these others as somehow not real when i tried to discuss in the book, these languages are

very much real, very complex. they are awesome things just like notre dame or the giant squid, or like anything else that is complicated and seems like it might hurt you if you get too close to it. and so this book, "what language is" which is right here, and what it isn't, and what it could become 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 there are few languages and a bunch of dialects. and basically the main thing that there is to think about insurance of language is that most people don't speak it properly. i find that a very glum way of looking at things. i wanted there to be a happier way of looking at things. so this is my happy book, and i'd be happy to take questions. thank you. [applause]

>> is there a reason -- >> usually not. last night. >> -- [laughter] >> the more competent languages were people less inclined to write them down because they were more complicated? >> no, no, no. that's an interesting idea. i language can be one of those hideously complicated languages, and depending on its history can be very much written down. any slavic language for example, those languages stay the way they are until the advent of printing and widespread literacy. to start from the ground up with say, russian and get somewhere and not be living with or married to a russian or living in russia is awesomely difficult. i have often, i still, someone who studies russian as a hobby and never quite gets there, i still quietly think it is a hoax and nobody actually speaks the

language of. [laughter] and yet it is written. russian is the easy one of the slavic languages. tried to learn polish, you'll have a stroke. so of language can be very complex when written down. languages get complex oddly enough because babies confront 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 is today, they are speaking polish and it just goes on generation after generation. it's a marvelous thing. it amazes me to hear poplars speaking languages that are extremely complicated and not realizing that they have bested me already. but that's just the way it is. >> what about the idea that you lose a leg which, you lose a culture? >> you do. yeah, a language is a big part of 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 we are 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 is really hard with globalization. and so when a language dies, a lot of, a lot of the people's culture dies. but i think we need to look at the fact that you can have a culture that is different from the mainstream while speaking to mainstream language because we will see more and more of that. so for example, let's say you're a native american, and you have lost touch with sean scott or novel and blessed the language died. very hard to bring a language and it it all happens very occasionally. i wonder if you want to tell that person you therefore are not najoe.

that's not the happiest news. and enforcing there's a calculation made and i hope this isn't true. that in 100 years there will not be 6000 languages but 600. and it's also been said that language dies every two weeks. and so for example, when language that i featured in this book is this marvelous thing called kept. ket. its grammar is so complex linguist didn't figure out what the birds were until a 15 years ago just because it looks like there's no sense in it at all. to the extent it is it's more like summer also, and you can barely believe people speak it. and especially 3000 people speak ket but there was an article that i read recently. it's about 500, and that's where thing is difficult to reverse. so yes, unfortunately that is true about coulter.

>> i'm going to choose a person that is not a woman and i'm going to switch it. >> let me ask, a soldier on meeting the tourist, and you want to use language to break the cultural barriers. because it's so hard to learn only which, how can you get at it? is it an effective tool for? >> how do you do it? it is an effective tool. it varies in a culture, but if you can even speak it badly, then you've made a major accomplishment. it's a godsend that rosetta stone has a pashtun. i'm secure there is a reason for that. but the truth is in 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's these little books

called, take the word assimila assimilate, they are dealt to do so here they are rather expensive. they are easier to get than they used to be because of the internet. and english they are called spanish without toil which is an awkward translation. so without toil. but it really, and they're not know that much in america, but if you said that for 20 minutes a day, i call the magic books. i didn't -- i've given them as presents to countless unwilling people. sit down for 20 minutes, they got these exercises. i learned to speak confident horrid german from this book. you're kind of approximate 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 was joking with the waitress. i probably sound like a chimpanzee. one guy next to me said used a

german better than i've ever heard anyone speak german who doesn't speak german. that's pretty good. [laughter] and it's with the little magic books. they've got a wide variety. so i suggest that. enforcement haven't gotten too pushtan so you have to rosetta stone. allen of untv and the rosetta stone people will be insulted. but that's the magic book. [inaudible] i'll repeat it. go ahead. [inaudible]

>> that is very controversial in linguistics, and i'll give you the sort of muffin answer. >> and to repeat the question? >> the question is to languages make people think different. so if you speak one language, does that make you look at the work with a different set of classes than if you speak another language. i would love it if that were true, and many linguist and anthropologist would say that yes, if you speak korean, that you see the world differently than if you speak french because of the grammar is different and the vocabulary defines things up differently. in korean if you put up a video cassette which is now about anti, but if you put it it to you can set into a box that's a different kind of putting that if you put a candlestick into a holder. and so that means the korean see pope see putting different than the french. that's the muffin answer. the real, muffin meaning -- my

personal feeling, this is just me and it's not my sub sub area. i thought about a certain extent, is that the current research on that shows that your language is grammar, does make you think of things in slightly different ways. that can be shown experimentally but i don't think it is the ways we would think of as very interesting or much fun. so for example, french has a gender and it's been shown that if you do an experiment with french people, and you ask them whether it's the table were a cartoon character, it would speak with a height or a low voice, french people are somewhat more likely than english speakers to say that it would speak with a high voice which seemed to correlate with the fact that it is feminine. now, is that good? okay. but i think if you know any french people they are not walking around thinking that tables don't shave and our feminine. so i don't know how interested i am in the fact that the french person i know is a little more

apt to think that a table talks like this. [laughter] there were many things like that where these small things -- if i were a psychologist i would find those things more interesting. as a linguist and as a person watching this debate, i don't believe in the glasses idea. but there are people have been studying this sort of thing harder than me who would tell you that they do. so this is just me. that's my genuine answer which is no, but that's just me. gosh -- >> what would you say about -- [inaudible] spent what about them? [inaudible] [laughter] >> a lot of things. africana is home, it's always fun when some as a question like that. there are many languages in africa. and so it's not even that there's one family with variations. there's a whole bunch. i can't think of