Pargi and Bess

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Miles Davis is a great artist in a way of distilling into a single statement great and sometimes needless complexity. Mongolian languages are cool in that if one were going to learn a language, one would rather learn one of the Mongolian languages than say French or Spanish because they have a way of keeping their meanings nicely separate. Have you done research in Aztec language family? It's a structure wise, it's a lot different than Latin, Greek or any other East Asian language. Are there principal components like aliphones or phonemes, alatones? I don't know. Aliphones. John Mcicon has written at least 20 books on Amazon called Lexicon Valley

Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a guess: John McWhorter. A prominent academic linguist, he’s also highly regarded for his podcast and popular writings across countless books and articles where often displays a deep knowledge in topics beyond his academic training.

John joined Tyler to discuss why he thinks that colloquial Indonesian should be the world's universal language, the barbaric circumstances that gave rise to Creole languages, the reason Mandarin won't overtake English as the lingua franca, how the Vikings shaped modern English, the racial politics of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, the decline of American regional accents, why Shakespeare needs an English translation, Harold Arlen vs. Andrew Lloyd Webber, whether reparations for African-Americans is a good idea, how living in Jackson Heights shapes his worldview, what he learned from his mother and father, why good linguistics students enjoy both Russian and Chinese, and more.

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Recorded February 17th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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