Transcript Episode 108: Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about documenting Grassfields languages in Cameroon. But first, Lingthusiasm has more than 20 interview episodes. You can find them all together on our topics page where we have a category for interviews specifically. Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics to find those. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons with a few interviews in there as well.
Our latest bonus episode is one of those interviews. We talk with one of the translators of Because Internet about the particular challenges of translating a book about internet linguistics, like how to translate the Lolcat bible into Spanish when this meme never existed in Spanish in the first place – a problem which Miguel solves brilliantly. You can listen to Gretchen’s chat with Dr. Miguel Sanchez Ibañez, who is a linguist and lecturer at Valladolid University, on Patreon, and you can read Because Internet in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Links in the show notes. Patrons get access to bonus episodes and help keep the show running ad-free. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Lauren: Professor Pius Akumbu is a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and Cultures of Africa Lab) in Paris, France. Professor Akumbu has done documentation work on a wide variety of topics from lexical tone to traditional stories and also founded a school in his home village to ensure that children have access to primary education in their own language – Babanki, also known as Kejom. Welcome to Lingthusiasm, Professor Akumbu.
Pius: Thank you for having me, Lauren. It’s my pleasure to be invited to your programme.
Lauren: How did you get into linguistics?
Pius: I think the best answer is that I got into linguistics by chance. Like many people in many parts of the world, I had no idea what linguistics was when I completed high school. I went to the university. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Yeah, of course, the orientation before that wasn’t there, so I had to find my way through. Then, as I was wondering what to do, I had some friends who had already decided on one of them, whose name I can mention, Enow Cecilia, had already joined the linguistics department. We met on campus, and she was like, “Oh, come try and see!” I went to that class.
Lauren: What an excellent chance.
Pius: To date, I still really appreciate that I had this opportunity. Of course, when I went there, I had some very nice professors.
Lauren: That always makes it a lot easier.
Pius: When I talk about this, I like to mention Professor Mutaka (Professor Ngessimo Mutaka) who was someone – I wanted to be like him. As a linguistics professor, he was wonderful. I really enjoyed his classes. I was like, “Wow, if someday I can be able to do what he’s doing, I would really be happy.” I also had a professor, Pius Tamanji (maybe because we had the same first name), but he was great. I just felt like, “Oh, if someday I can really do linguistics.” Just before I started my PhD, I had contact with SIL Cameroon. It’s a strong linguistics group. They do a lot of work on Cameroonian languages. I got close to people there. Someone like Robert Hedinger, who was really supportive and who encouraged me a lot, who even funded my field trip for my PhD.
Lauren: Amazing.
Pius: Individual funding. He just made this happen. He trusted what I was doing and really wanted to encourage me. He did this. I really appreciate what he did. There was also Ginger Boyd who is at SIL who supported my work. I really found myself enjoying linguistics. I was encouraged to keep on.
Lauren: You had some influential friends, some influential professors, and then some influential mentors and supporters as well.
Pius: Exactly. I would say that.
Lauren: It takes all these people to encourage you, especially going through to something like a PhD. You really need that community’s worth of support.
Pius: I mean, without the funding from Robert Hedinger or the support from Ginger Boyd, I don’t think I would have continued in linguistics because if I couldn’t fund my field trips, there was no way I could much. This kind of support really encouraged me. Then I had no excuses. I had to move on. That’s how I was able to do a PhD on a Bantu language, on a narrow Bantu language, which wasn’t a language I was familiar with in any way. I needed to go to the field. With the support I got around me, I was able to do it. My supervisor, Professor Mutaka, was just wonderful.
Lauren: Excellent. It’s really wonderful when people get inspired and want to continue in linguistics. It’s really frustrating that sometimes the barriers are just really practical things like having funding to go on a field trip. It’s so great to hear that there were people who were able to make that happen for you.
Pius: That’s true. At the time, I was studying, I mean, I was doing my PhD, basically, it was hard. I mean, this was close to 30 years ago. It was hard to find funding for PhD work in Cameroon, in Africa in general. It was much more difficult, nearly impossible. This was really a privilege that I got close to Robert Hedinger and Steve Anderson, Ginger Boyd, all these people – Keith and Mary Beavon. I mean, I like to mention these names because I’ll always be grateful to these people.
Lauren: Again, a really good demonstration that even though your PhD has your name on it, it comes with, really, so many people that contribute. I’m really obsessed with reading the acknowledgements sections of PhDs because there’s always so many wonderful stories in there.
Pius: I wrote in my PhD that “If I have seen further than others” – I was referring to people I was doing my PhD with whom I managed to finish before them – I said if I have seen further than others, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Of course, I was borrowing this statement. But this was true. Without those giants, I couldn’t have seen further.
Lauren: The cliches are a cliché for a reason. It sounds like a cliché, and then you’re like, “No, I really couldn’t have done this without all of those people.” After doing your undergraduate linguistics, moving through and continuing to work onto a PhD, after all of that, and going to a field site where you didn’t know people, only after all of that did you turn around and think about the chance to work on your own language. What was it like deciding to move from being a linguist coming into a community and then thinking about documenting your own language?
Pius: I think it was a good policy that the department of linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1 had at the time to ask students not to work on their language because it helped us to have field experience. This was frustrating at the time, but it was a good thing. After my PhD, of course, I said, okay, now I have the degree in linguistics, and my language is under described. At that point, there were just two very important articles by Larry Hyman. There was one on Babanki tonology, which was in 1979, and then another one on the Babanki noun class system in 1980. There were just these two influential works. Here I am 20 years later, and I can do things on my language. Why not?
Lauren: What great company, Larry Hyman is an incredibly famous linguist who’s worked on so many languages, and yours as well.
Pius: At that point, say, 2001 or so, I had some challenges. I emailed Larry Hyman, you know, I knew the name, this famous name, and I had read some of his work, and I just took the chance to email him. I wasn’t really expecting that such a person would reply to my email. But a few minutes later, I got a reply.
Lauren: Amazing.
Pius: Yeah. It was like, “Oh, okay.” Then I could discuss my work with him. He just opened up to me. Each time I would turn to him, he would respond immediately. It has just been wonderful. We’ve collaborated a lot. He hosted me in Berkeley for over a year. I said, well – Larry, again, he has told me once that I’m moving around with a whole lot of phonology of Babanki, and I should be the one working on this language.
Lauren: Indeed. How it is working on a language where you can consult your own intuitions rather than being the outsider having to ask other people?
Pius: Of course, having my own intuitions has always been very, very helpful. I don’t rely on me completely. I shouldn’t. I don’t. Because, of course, I’m not describing my speech, I’m trying to describe the speech of many people in the community. I always try to rely on what I gather from several speakers of the language. In that effort I see, of course, I know some of the language, but not like I can say I would rely on myself entirely. I always depend on data from the community, from as many people as I can get. But of course, my judgments are always helpful, and in many cases, they are either confirmed or adjusted, modified, by what I get from other people. Every language has variation. The way I speak is not necessarily the way everyone speaks. All of this – one has to only put together by collecting data from several people. But of course, I have that advantage. I have an idea of what I expect from other speakers, and usually it’s either confirmed or sometimes there’re modifications that are needed or other views that are considered.
Lauren: Has there been any time where your own introspection and thinking about your own judgments has surprised you, where you’ve gone, “Ah, I didn’t think that about Babanki, and here it is”?
Pius: Of course. There’ve been many occasions like that, many times where what I know I don’t hear other people say exactly that. It’s like, “Oh, is this many some influence I’ve had by being in contact with some other languages?” I’ve lived out of the community for a long time myself. Sometimes, there are things that surprise me. But those are the things I go looking for. That’s why we get data, we collect data from several sources, from several people. If I find things that are not exactly like I thought, yeah. There are things I don’t know, of course. Depending on what register of the language one is in, language is used for different purposes in different – sometimes one speaker is not exposed to all the different domains of use of a language.
Lauren: Absolutely. I remember a friend telling me that he was so confident in his Spanish, and then they had a baby. He was a Spanish second language speaker, had moved to Spain, and then when he and his wife had a baby, he realised he didn’t know any child-related Spanish. He had to ask what everyone else was just like, “Well, we were children. We grew up with other children. This register, this way of talking to children, this way of talking about children, how can you not know it?” Even someone who is highly bilingual or multilingual there’ll be domains where you might be able to speak with a better vocabulary. I mean, my vocabulary in English about architecture is terrible. If you’re an English second language speaker who’s a trained architect, that’s one register you’re gonna do much better than me in. You have been documenting –
Pius: One example I could give you – I mean, I tried to study the language of certain rituals, maybe birth celebrations, childbirth ceremonies. There are several things within these rituals that there’s no way I could ever know. Even some songs, I could hear some words, but, you know, the songs carry meaning which go beyond the words one hears. There’s something more about those words that one can only get by getting closer to the women who sing those songs.
Lauren: For some registers, it’s about who is allowed to participate in the register. Even whether you’re an insider or an outsider to the community, that’s a secondary consideration to whether you’re an insider to these particular rituals.
Pius: Exactly. Right.
Lauren: Can we talk about the time you staged a wedding? Because this is a really great example of you trying to capture this traditional speech ritual.
Pius: Well, of course, I would’ve loved to have a natural wedding happen.
Lauren: Were you trying to set up all the young couples? Were you trying to match make people and get them married? [Laughs]
Pius: No, no, no, no, no. I wouldn’t do that, no, no, no. There’s, no, far away from that. The point was this is already something that is endangered. Many people don’t do traditional weddings in the community. But people remember what used to be done. There wasn’t anyone – I waited throughout a full year. I was looking out to a traditional wedding in the community, and I never got information about any. But people remember these things, and so I had to bring people together and just ask somebody – two people to play the role of bride and groom. Then we did this through. It wasn’t – in fact, these people were related, so there was no chance of them ever getting married, but it was just for us to go through the process. It wasn’t any attempt to get people together. A linguist can’t play that role.
Lauren: Sorry, I was joking about that. Linguists are willing to do a lot for fieldwork, but not that much. How long is a traditional Babanki marriage ritual or wedding ritual?
Pius: There’re so many aspects of it. It can extend over a long period of time. There’re parts that could be done and parts done later. It’s not like everything must be done on the same day. It can take quite a while. Unless we went into the details – which would take us a lot of time.
Lauren: That’s totally fine. I mean, I’ve been to Western weddings that have been 10 minutes long, and I’ve been to Western weddings that’ve been two hours long.
Pius: If you are talking about the ceremony where if it’s just that ceremony, it happens – well, traditionally, there’s no point where the husband and wife are brought together. Families gather and take decisions about the bride price. Much of the day is preparing food and eating. Then at some point, the bride is escorted to the home of the groom. Then there is more celebration.
Lauren: As there should be.
Pius: Then people go their way. There’s no exchange of rings. There’s really no – well, the only point where the bride and the groom come together is at the home of the bride when the parents of the bride have to verify whether the bride is actually interested in the groom. There is a way to check.
Lauren: I like that step. That sounds good, yeah.
Pius: They will give her palm wine. If she drinks and hands it over to the groom, then it means she accepts to marry him.
Lauren: It’s really important to document these rituals because these are the kind of things that are often some of the earliest things that can get lost in a language. People might speak Babanki day-to-day, but if no one’s doing a traditional marriage ceremony, documenting it means you do have a record for the future if people are interested.
Pius: That’s right. Even now, those who try to do something close, even the dressing is no longer the same because it’s influenced by either Nigerian cultures or even the Western cultures. Good to document. It was really nice to stage this, what we did to stage that, and try to have something that looks like what used to happen.
Lauren: Did people enjoy participating? Was that nostalgic for some of the participants?
Pius: I think it was. I think it was. I’ve heard people who did actually one traditional wedding after that based on this. We have a record of it. It was made by someone else because I wasn’t there at this point.
Lauren: How do people feel about having a Babanki speaker as someone documenting Babanki language and culture?
Pius: Well, I think for many people I used to – because I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while, right, so many people know me, remember – because there’re some elite in the community, so people are used to what I do. People, I think, appreciate it. People like the fact that I’m trying to safeguard parts of their culture. I think I hear lots of good things people say about what I’m doing. Sometimes, I think people accept it easily. I don’t have any trouble getting people to accept to be recorded. If I’m there to record things, people just say, “Oh, yeah, go ahead.” But of course, I have to tell them why I’m doing the recording, what I need it for, where it will end and so on. I’ve not really got in a situation where someone says, “No, I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to be recorded.”
Lauren: Are there any younger Babanki people that’ve become interested in linguistics through your work?
Pius: So far, I dunno if someone has started doing linguistics because of me. I don’t know that yet. Nobody has told me they are doing linguistics because of me. I don’t know maybe they are. But there’re younger Babanki people who study linguistics. There are.
Lauren: There are? That’s great. Are they also working in topics related to Babanki or other topics?
Pius: They also work on Babanki, yeah, the young people also work on Babanki.
Lauren: Great. So, it’s no longer just you and Larry Hyman.
Pius: No, no, no, no, there’re many more.
Lauren: Wonderful. What are some of the things (other than traditional registers), what are some of the features of Babanki that you find fascinating to tell other people about?
Pius: I think, yeah, when I think of what is fascinating about not just Babanki but the wider Bantu, Grassfields Bantu languages in general, I think of, maybe, at least two things. There could be many more, but I think one of the things is that Babanki is a noun class language, which is something we find across Grassfields and especially Bantu where nouns in each language are grouped up into different sets. Linguists have called these “classes.” Usually, the way to determine how a language belongs to one class or another is to look at the concord system. You look at how a language is used with other nominal modifiers, say, like adjectives or demonstratives and so on. If you take a Babanki noun like, let’s say, “fə̀nyì” – “fə̀nyì” is the word for “knife.” You take another noun, say, “kə̀káŋ” which is like a dish, and to see if these belong together or not, I could try to put a demonstrative or a possessive or some other modifier together with this noun. If I say “fə̀nyín ə̄fwóm,” “This is my knife,” and if I say, “kə̀káŋ ə̄kóm” –
Lauren: Oh, they’re not the same.
Pius: “This is my dish.” I see that the /f/ which I find in “fwam” is not the same like the /k/ which I find in “kom.” This does mean that these two nouns cannot be in the same class because if I had several nouns like “fə̀nyín," fə̀nyì," fə̀sés,” /f/-everything, every modifier would also have a /f/ If I had those with /k/ prefix, all the other modifiers would have a /k/. The chances that all nouns that have the same class marker like a prefix would all belong together. If they all take the same modifier, then I know, okay, they form one class as opposed to these other ones that belong to another class. Babanki has about 12 different classes of nouns. Typical Bantu languages have somewhere over 20 classes for nouns. This is one thing that Babanki has. There’re some languages in the area that have reduced their noun class system, some that have lost it, so that maybe you have two or three classes in a language.
Lauren: Which is closer to what European language speakers might recognise in, say, French with the masculine and the feminine and the neuter. You only have a small number of classes.
Pius: Yeah. Also, these languages – Babanki and Grassfields Bantu – they are tone languages, which is, I think, something also fascinating because in a tone language, you just change your pitch, you can maintain the same consonants and vowels in a word, and change your pitch, and then you have a different meaning. In Babanki, for example, depending on whether I raise my voice and my pitch and say, [higher tone] “ə̀ndòŋ,” or I lower it and say, [lower tone] “ə̀ndòŋ,” then I have two different words. [Higher tone] “Èndòŋ” is the word for “cup,” and [lower tone] “ə̀ndòŋ” is “potato.” Just changing my pitch, and then I have different words. This is tone. What also makes tone very fascinating to me in these languages, especially in Grassfields is that – so there’re lots of floating tones.
Lauren: Floating tones.
Pius: Of course, each tone has its bare unit. There’s a tone-bearing unit. What carries that tone? In many cases, the vowels. Sometimes, also there’re nasals, which maybe be syllabic. It happens that a tone-bearing unit can be lost. Maybe you see for some languages, some languages don’t like to have two vowels next to each other across morphemes. If two vowels come together, and one of them is lost – however, the tones are more stable. The vowel can be lost but the tone remains.
Lauren: “Floating” because it’s lost the vowel that its attached to.
Pius: Yeah, because it’s lost the vowel that it’s attached to. In Grassfields, in particular, many words started out as two syllables, so many words were disyllabic. And then one of the syllables has been lost over time. But that’s just the segment that is lost, the vowel, but the tones have remained.
Lauren: What happens to them?
Pius: As soon as you try to combine a word that has a floating tone with another word, then you can see the effect of this floating tone on the neighbouring segment, on the neighbouring word. One of the things that is very common is down step. If there is a floating low tone, and then you add a high tone after it, usually that high tone is lowered – the level of that high tone is lowered compared to the height of the preceding high tone so that you have something like [high tone to low tone] “dang da,” not [high tone, high tone] “Dang Da.” The second high is lowered. Then you wonder, well, how come you put a high tone next to another high tone and the second high tone is lower? You look into the history of the language, and you see, ah, there was a vowel here, it was lost, and this tone floats, and that’s why the second high is lowered. There are floating tones all over the place in Grassfields Bantu.
Lauren: If you say that first word in isolation, you only hear the high tone, and it’s not until you put it next to another word that that floating extra tone appears and influences the next word.
Pius: Because a floating there is there, it’s part of the underlying form of the word, it’s there. If you have two words, which are all high, and you say each one by itself, and you hear a normal high tone, and when you put them together, then one is lower, usually the second is lower than the first, then this suggests that there is a floating tone after the first, which then causes the tone of the second to be lowered.
Lauren: You have to figure out all these floating tones by looking at all of the words in context.
Pius: By putting things in context, yeah. There could be other reasons why things change, but usually, floating tones are responsible for lots of tone changes in Grassfields Bantu.
Lauren: So sneaky. How many tones is Babanki said to have?
Pius: This is why people study these languages. This is why linguists have work to do. It’s sometimes not just straightforward. Right now, we think that there is a high tone – we are sure; we agree that there is a high tone and a low tone. But sometimes we have also contour tones. There is a tone that begins low and ends high – that’s a rising tone – and another that begins high and ends low, a falling tone. These have been analysed as a combination of two tones – the high and the low, or the low and the high. We see this very easily. As I said, there’re words that started out with two syllables, and now, there is just one syllable. The one syllable that is left either carries the two tones or carries just one and the other one floats. But also, we find a few words that you can’t argue that – wait, two syllables at the beginning. There’re very few words that really seem to have rising tones of their own. But these kinds of exceptional tones are not sufficient proof to say that the language has contour tones because, you know, for typological reasons, we know that many African languages do not have contour tones. Unlike Ancient Chinese languages, right, unlike that we know have contour tones as units.
Lauren: That’s where the scholarly debate happens around the contour tones.
Pius: Yeah. One has to go through an analysis to determine what the tones of a language are.
Lauren: Does tone have a grammatical function in Babanki?
Pius: Not exactly in Babanki. There are languages where you can clearly see tone has grammatical function. Maybe you have just a change of tone, and maybe, say, that leads to a change of tense. But there are tonal morphemes in Babanki. The imperative, if I wanted to express the imperative in Babanki, I know that I have to use a high tone. Even a verb that is – so a verb like “come,” which is [low tone] “ vì”, which is low, [low tone] “ vì,” which is “come,” if I needed to order someone to come, I would say [high tone] “ vì.” I would add a high tone to “ vì.” There are instances like this. The progressive marking, it’s not really tonal, but tone plays, in a way –
Lauren: In Asian tone languages, those tones are almost always just for word distinction, whereas in Babanki you have a little bit of this, and in some other languages with tone, it takes on a whole bunch of functions. Does Babanki have a writing system that’s commonly used?
Pius: There is an orthography that I have proposed in 2008, so this was a while ago. “Commonly used” – maybe too much to say because Babanki remains largely a spoken language. It remains oral.
Lauren: Like the majority of the world’s languages.
Pius: Like the majority of the world’s languages, Babanki remains just an oral language. Many people don’t – we don’t normally read or write the language. There is a New Testament Bible that has been translated into the language. I think it’s read in some churches, but by a very few people who have learned to read. Writing remains something really far off for people because Babanki is not a language that is used in the school system very much. It’s something I’ve been trying to encourage, but it meets its challenges because the language of education is English. People don’t – there is really no motivation for people to invest in learning to read and write Babanki.
Lauren: Understandable.
Pius: The writing system is there. It’s the system that was used in the Bible translation. It’s that orthography that was used. But beyond that, not many people are writing the language.
Lauren: It’s totally understandable when there are those external pressures. When English is the standard medium of education, it’s understandable that people prioritise that. But you have been putting work into trying to change that and setting up a school for Babanki. How has that project been going?
Pius: Well, the project, it took off, but quickly met challenges with the break out of war in the area. By 2018 there was already active fighting in the Babanki area. It’s been slow. Sometimes, kids come to the school for a few weeks during a whole year, sometimes a few months. It hasn’t been consistent. It’s even hard to determine whether this project has been successful or not. At some point, the project became just to allow children to have some education in English because, I mean, this is – times are hard. When times are hard, you just think of survival strategies. The project of really ensuring that children learn only in Babanki for the first three years and then transition to learning in English has not been fully implemented. This is beyond what we can control while hoping that the crisis is eventually brought to an end and then we move on from there. So far, it’s been six full years of war. So sad. Unfortunately, it’s one of those crises in the world that has not received attention because, of course, Cameroon is not an important oil-producing country.
Lauren: It’s also a good reminder that we can have all the evidence about what makes for good education and, in situations where we’re striving for even basic safety of children, obviously, those higher ideals have to hit some pretty pragmatic reality.
Pius: I remain optimistic, hopeful – well, I’ve been optimistic for six years. Maybe a little more patience. But I think there will be an end to it at some point. There’ll be an end to the war at some point.
Lauren: These foundations are really important for what comes next in the story of Cameroon and the story of Babanki.
Pius: Yeah.
Lauren: Can you tell us a little bit about Grassfields languages in general? This is a subgroup of Bantu languages. The Bantu family is a massive family that spreads right across the centre of the continent of Africa, and then the Grassfields languages are mostly centred on Cameroon.
Pius: The Grassfields languages are mostly spoken in the northwest and west regions of Cameroon. There are spillovers into Nigeria, across the border, because some of these languages are on that border.
Lauren: Funnily enough, languages don’t follow the boundaries of countries that appeared long after they started being spoken.
Pius: Especially in the case of Grassfields because there is research that has pointed to the fact that Bantu languages must have originated from the Grassfields area. We think that Grassfields is where things all started for the Bantu family. Then the migrations began, and they moved way down and eventually down to southern Africa.
Lauren: All the way east and south down the continent.
Pius: There is a hypothesis that it all started from that northwestern part of Cameroon around there. It seems like while the movement happened, those Bantu languages have kept this robust noun class system I mentioned earlier, whereas the Grassfields languages from where it originated have come to have fewer of the classes. Of course, both groups have noun classes. The only reason why Grassfields languages are not treated as Bantu is because of these few differences that we find particularly in the noun class system. There’ve been appellations like “Semi-Bantu,” you know, for “Grassfields.” These are “sister languages,” one would say.
Lauren: I always find it interesting when you look at language family groups, and some of the names, they feel a little bit judgment even if they’re not judgmental. There’s a class called “Bantoid,” which is like, “Eh, it has the shape of a Bantu language,” and I’m sure that made sense to the people who were creating this. There’s a category in the area I work in the Tibeto-Burman languages called “Himalayish,” which is just like, “Eh, it kind of goes there.” These weird little traditions.
Pius: This terminology is, of course, those who started linguistics – it’s a European thing. Those who did this work at this time, I think, they did their best. The technology is fine. These are things – we just need research to modify this terminology if we are able to – it’s our responsibility now, if we’re not satisfied with certain terminologies, to use scientific evidence to say, no, we prefer this name, this one, and this is happening across the African continent. There’s a lot of shift in terminology. Of course, we are still using “Bantoid” for now. This is what describes these languages that are not clearly Bantu. Nobody has said they should not change. I think we have the responsibility to do research and propose other labels for these languages.
Lauren: There’s always more work to be done.
Pius: There is more to do.
Lauren: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?
Pius: I think it’s good for people to know – I mean, many people know this, but still, several people don’t know that linguistics is the study of language. It’s not learning to speak several languages, but rather we are learning to understand how languages work, how languages function, how languages relate with one another and things like that. People usually think because we study linguistics, therefore, we speak several languages. There are linguists who speak several languages. Great. But the object is not learning to speak languages but rather just learning to understand how the languages work and to try to describe them. Also, fundamentally about language endangerment, language revitalisation, I think, personally, that this is something that we should all be concerned about because languages carry a lot of information about our cultures, about our history, about our people. It’s a matter of right for people, it’s a fundamental right, it’s a fundamental linguistic right that people should continue using the language, people should preserve the language and promote it and transmit it to the generations that come after them. Every language should have a “chance,” so to say. We have seen in many places where people go back to their ancestral links through the means of language. Those who still have the opportunity to keep these links should keep them rather than lose them now and then struggle in the future or future generations struggle to reconstruct and to find what their roots are. There’re many parts of Africa, for example, where people still speak their languages, but they are gradually losing them. I always, if I have a way to encourage people to multiply their efforts and continue to use their language and to transmit it to the children and the children’s children, this is better than letting it die out losing the languages and then for the generations in the future to struggle to come back to where we would’ve abandoned them right now. People should protect this right to their languages and cultures, I would say.
Lauren: Thank you so much for chatting with us today, Professor Pius Akumbu.
Pius: Thank you so much, Lauren. Thank you. It was really a pleasure.
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new jazzy logo T-shirt and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Links to Gretchen’s social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com, her blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and her book about internet language (translated into Spanish now) is called Because Internet.
Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and are the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistics landscapes, gesture in science fiction and fantasy, and an interview with Dr. Miguel Sanchez Ibañez about translating Because Internet into Spanish, which you can buy now. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.
Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Pius: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I was gonna try to keep my mouth shut, but I can't. I just can't. I have to go on another Aki rant because I feel like I'm going to explode. It's about this scene:
This drives me insane and I'm putting this under a readmore. Expect incoherent screaming, all ye who enter here.
Ok. Ok. I have so many issues with this scene. Specifically, with the way it develops later, when Aki's busy trying to figure out how to save a child from being swept up by a storm:
And I just. Look, I think the fact that I already wrote a fic that basically completely turns Aki's reaction here on its head should basically tell you everything. But! But. Allow me to defend why I think this whole scene is one big heap of horseshit, with a bit of analysis of canon and actual evidence to back up my claims and shit.
The thing is, I have seen people give this scene a charitable read. I've seen people be happy for Aki to enjoy freedom from the psychic powers that have given her so much trouble in her life. And the thing is, if this were season one or season two Aki, I would be completely on board with that take. Unfortunately, this scene is preceded by the pre-WRGP arc. But more on that below.
Moreover, I can make an educated guess about what they were going for here (in terms of messaging, because this is a kids' show at the end of the day and messaging is something you have to be properly concerned with when it comes to these). I can imagine it running somewhere along the lines of "you don't need special powers to be a hero". Or even "you can grow past the hurt and/or the mistakes in your life and still become a good person or even a hero". And really, I wish I could believe that take. It's just. The writing simply doesn't add up. I wish it did, but it doesn't.
This is where we get back to the pre-WRGP arc. And not just that, actually, but the timeskip between the dark signers and pre-WRGP arc, too. Because the thing is, the last time we have seen Aki in anguish about her powers on-screen by the time the episodes above (108-109) arrive was during the DS arc, during the duel with her father, which happened during episodes 40-41. 40. to. 41. This was over sixty episodes ago at this point. And after that, that's it. As far as the DS arc is concerned, Aki's conflict about her powers is resolved the second she controls them for the first time when her father tries to interfere in her second duel against Yusei.
(Yeah, remember this moment? That was literally the last time we saw Aki in conflict with her powers.)
And I know some people would argue "but what about the dark signer duel with Misty?". And yes, I get it. Misty does accuse her of having murdered her brother with her powers and Aki gets incredibly (understandably) upset about it. But the thing is, we know that's fake, and during the duel, Aki knows that, too. She goes as far as insisting that there were no casualties at the duel where Misty thinks Toby died.
(Yes, I have screenshot proof for literally every dumb little thing in this show, why do you ask?)
It's only after Misty keeps pushing and backing her into a corner during their duel (and literally gaslighting her) that she begins to believe Misty's version of the events. Which is why this doesn't "count" as Aki being in conflict with her powers the way her second duel with Yusei does. At least not to me, feel free to debate me over this if you wanna.
Okay, but what am I driving at here? Fair question. Let me hop back to after the dark signers' defeat.
So, we know there's a half-year timeskip between the DS and the pre-WRGP arc (which was allegedly enough for NDC to connect the city and Satellite, deal with all the social issues that entailed, and also build a giant duel network, which I will never believe but I digress). Unfortunately, what exactly our main characters did during that timeskip is never addressed, it's just kind of there to segway immediately into the WRGP setup. So the only thing we can do is guess at what they got up to based on where they are as people by the time we get back to them during the start of the pre-WRGP arc. So where's Aki at when we see her again after the dark signers' defeat then?
Oh, she's attending duel academy again now! That's nice. So that probably means the student body isn't scared shitless of her anymore and she's not being ostracised anymore.
Wow, she's an exceptional student! That means she must be a really good duellist. So she got the hang of her powers, then?
...Ah.
Do you start to see my problem? Past the DS arc, we are not being given any indication that Aki is still struggling with her powers or still resents them or herself like she used to. You could be forgiven for thinking that she's healed in the meantime. She's fine. She has accepted herself and can now use her powers safely. Which makes her later claiming "she no longer needs that cursed power" a bit... hmmm. And another thing. The fact that she refers to it as "cursed" rubs me the wrong way. After the defeat of the dark signers, she literally never does that even a single time before the moment in the hospital during the storm. (I'd post all the screenshots to prove it here but for one, tumblr doesn't allow it, and for two, I hope you'll believe I did my due diligence without it.)
And it just irks me. If the powers are still a "curse" to Aki by episodes 108-109, why give us the moment above?
And why give us this moment, where she saves Sherry, Yusei, and herself with those powers?
And why give us this moment, where she literally uses her powers at a public event to protect people, and is evidently not cussed out as a witch for it? Neither of these moments do anything to indicate that Aki still hates her powers. They don't indicate that she sees them as a "beast of burden" or necessary evil of a sort, either. On the contrary, I don't think it would be too out there to claim all these moments make her look rather badass. Like a small celebration of "hey, now she can finally use these powers for cool and not evil things!".
Yet, somehow, we still end up with episodes 108-109, where the writers expect the audience to buy that Aki was secretly still hoping she might eventually be rid of these powers after all. And maybe this would be easier to swallow if there weren't also the fact that they later literally go back on it to add to this confusing mess. Because the thing is, we all know the finale scene after the three-way duel with Sherry where Aki protects them with her powers (which have suddenly reappeared, aha!) again and also finds out she can use these powers to heal. So not only is the framing of Aki suddenly being glad to have lost her powers extremely weird, it's also temporary anyway!
So my question is. What was the point. What was the point of all this if the writers ended up going back on it anyway? Because I want to believe there's a reasonable, charitable explanation that also makes sense with what they show us in terms of Aki's characterisation past the DS arc, but if there is, I cannot for the life of me find it. If anything, this whole thing feels like it completely contradicts itself.
First, they tie up Aki's conflict with her powers with a neat bow after she manages not to hurt her father anymore. Then, they launch into the pre-WRGP arc and blatantly tell us that she can now control them. No questions asked. Indisputable fact, and we get nothing that contradicts that, either. Then, we get a bunch of setup showing her using her powers, too, and what's more, we get other significant players in the cast taking notice of it, too, as though it might become relevant. Because Sherry isn't the only one who gets curious about Aki's powers.
(I will never understand how Placido's hood works together with his horn-thingies and have stopped trying at this point.)
The literal, central antagonists of season 3-4 also take notice of it. Like that means something. Like it'll come up again later. But, well. We know it doesn't.
Instead, she suddenly loses her powers out of nowhere (and we are never given a reason for it, either, which does nothing to make this writing decision seem anymore understandable). And, look. The thing that upsets me most about this isn't even the fact that it feels a little inconsistent with Aki's character post DS arc. If that were the only problem, I could still suspend my disbelief far enough to go along with the idea that she secretly still hated her powers quietly in the background and wanted them gone anyway. What really pisses me off is that it reeks of zero setup and knee-jerk decisions in the writing room ten miles against the wind. If they wanted us to believe Aki's glad to be rid of her powers, why give absolutely no indication that she's at odds with them past episode 41 anymore? Why let her state outright that she can now control them? Why show her on several occasions using them to her own and other people's benefit, the way a hero would? And if her powers are supposed to vanish and it's supposed to make sense, why is there no reason for it? They already used cyborg timetravel at that point, they could have literally come up with any nonsense related to that and it would have probably made at least more sense than just letting her powers vanish for no reason at all. Also, if the message behind all this is supposed to be either of the things I mentioned way above—if the idea the audience is supposed to be getting is either "you don't need special powers to be a hero" or "your past and/or your mistakes don't define you and you can heal and grow past them"—why reintroduce the powers, which, in this reading, would be a symbol of Aki's pain, of her mistakes and her dreaded past, at the very end, during the finale, then? It just doesn't add up, and it frustrates me to no end.
The writers wanted to make the moment Aki realises she can help people (well, one person, a child) without her powers seem triumphant so bad, but every time I watch it, it just completely falls flat for me. This isn't a triumph, this is a hot mess of bad writing decisions. All I'm saying is, if they wanted me to buy that Aki would be happy about losing her powers here, they were missing a hefty amount of setup and also shouldn't actually have given them back to her during the finale (no, not even as healing powers).
Moreover... I'll freely admit I also have a personal problem with this scene. I've seen this show and these episodes several times by now, and during my last rewatch and my current one, something about this scene has been creeping up on me, and I think I've figured out what that is now. So I talked about the possible message behind this scene already, and the reading I've given so far was fairly forgiving. But the thing is, there is another reading that has occurred to me that I can't unsee anymore. As much as you could make a valid case that this scene is trying to say that people don't need to be special to be heroes and save others, that past mistakes don't define us, and yadda yadda, there's also a much, much less pleasant way to interpret this scene: "You're better off if you don't stand out." And I'll freely admit, this interpretation probably occurs to me specifically because I was considered a "weird kid" at school, singled out by bullies, and avoided by "popular" kids (take a wild guess why I relate to Aki so much!). And over the years, you learn to downplay that "weirdness" because you become desperate to be accepted by someone, anyone. And given everything the show gives us about Aki's relationship with her powers, it'd make sense that this idea would be buried somewhere in her head, too. It's better not to stand out. Don't be weird. Sand down your edges so there's no chance people could get upset about them. You're better off being whatever everyone else considers "normal" than being whoever you are. It doesn't matter if this is a part of who you are, just become someone else. Someone who's easier to accept. Who's easier to love. You don't need your "weirdness".
You don't need this cursed power.
You know, the "cursed power" that Aki had from the beginning of the show, that was a part of her for years, and that the show didn't give any indication could vanish. The power that we were led to believe would just be there forever, because it was simply a part of Aki, not a conscious thing she (or the narrative) could choose. The power that we were, for all intents and purposes, led to believe she had mastered and maybe even accepted along the way. But sure, let's get rid of that. It's better if she's """normal""". And more convenient for the writers, too! After all, if she doesn't have powers anymore, they can't cause plotholes (of which the WRGP already has enough) and can't possibly give Aki any more badass moments, which makes it that much easier to sideline her. And let's package this weird, shittily set-up moment in a message about how she's better off without her powers anyway. She's happy! It makes complete sense that she's happy. She's finally normal like everyone else. Ignore the way people who might relate to the character could possibly interpret this moment differently. And ignore how none of the writing surrounding this moment makes sense.
...Sigh.
Okay, I think I've let off enough steam. I just. Yeah. I'm sorry, but I cannot for the life of me view this scene in a favourable way and watching it today made me want to chew glass tbh. My only solace is that they went back on this trainwreck writing decision in the finale. Which, really, just makes this whole mess really, really pointless, doesn't it?
For anyone who stuck around this long, thanks for reading. Sorry if this got extra-rant-y. Idk man, I just think “it’s worth the effort to accept yourself as you are, even with all the bits you might not like at first” would have been a better message than whatever this turned out to be.
I really appreciated the way you all discussed that explinarions of mental illness and substance abuse can help us understand the hurtful behaviors of the people we love and help alleviate some of our own internal guilt around that behavior. I hope you don’t mind if I share a personal antidote but years and years ago, Jess, you responded to a question and included the phrase “mental illness is an explanation not an excuse” and that phrase has stuck with me for years. My younger sibling has had almost a decade long struggle with mental illness and substance abuse (but she is almost 3 years sober and I couldn’t be more proud) and there have been lots of traumatic moments, some even got violent, but that phrase has stuck with me, and helped me understand her and helped relieve me of the guilt of “well I should have done more, I should have been a better big sister”. So in a way, thank you. And thank y’all for covering these tough issues with the necessary grace (no pun intended) and sensitivity.
Hey, it's Jessica. This is such a lovely thing to read. I remember that conversation and it's really touching to me that it meant something to you and you found it beneficial! That means a lot.
I don't usually reveal specific things we discuss in the episode but for reference, I talked about whether Marius's statement was an excuse or an explanation and I mentioned how in group therapy we had a session where one of the group was talking about severe abuse they experienced in childhood from their parents. Our therapist asked what she thought her parents were thinking, why they acted that way. And someone else in the group, understandably, got upset because she said we shouldn't be asking people to empathise with abusers. Our therapist responded that it wasn't about empathising, it was about understanding. Because people who have been traumatised often carry feelings of guilt and shame - and confusion and hurt etc - and so can blame themselves or be left with a lot of unanswered questions. Our therapist explained that it's only when you start to consider why someone behaved the way they did that you can accept that it wasn't your fault. You can begin to understand what was their issue and their baggage, and separate it from how you view yourself and the situation. I'm not as good at explaining it as the therapist but I'm so glad conversations like this are helpful. I'm also really glad your sister is doing well! That's a huge achievement!
My inbox at @duchessofostergotlands is open if you need anything (that goes for anyone in a similar position). I've been thinking a lot about this topic recently as my grandparents - who hurt me very much - have died (my grandfather) and had a massive stroke so they have no memory and limited brain function (my grandmother). Questions about forgiveness and blame and guilt have been on my mind. So people are more than welcome to reach out.
