From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter, and I want to get into something this time that you might not think of,
and you certainly wouldn't think of as taking us anywhere interesting, but actually it does.
I'm going to start small, and then I'm going to try to go big.
It's going to be one of those shows we're going to...
jump all over the world, various languages, kind of old school, me-hosted lexicon valley.
And that is, you're learning a language and you might be thinking, well, how to say apple?
Good, there's going to be some word.
But then it gets harder when you're dealing with what you might think of as the little words.
And so, for example, how do you say two in a language?
I don't mean one, two, three, four, because once again, that's easy.
There'll be some word for two.
But no, two as in T-O.
I'm going to school.
How do you say to?
You think you're just going to learn how to do it.
And if it's a romance language, well, ah, or something like that.
But is it like that worldwide?
And you know, the fact is that it isn't.
To-ness, and not T-W-O, but T-O, is much more complicated than we think.