#Olmec Bark

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘No such thing as the oldest language. 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]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about old languages. But first, our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes with three of our interviews from this year.

Gretchen: We had deleted scenes from our liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod about language and gender. We talked about reflexive pronouns, multiple pronouns in fiction, and talking about people who use multiple pronoun sets.

Lauren: We also have an excerpt from our interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez about Basque because it’s famous among linguists for having ergativity.

Gretchen: We wanted to know “What do Basque people themselves think about ergativity?” It turns out, there are jokes and cartoons about it, which Itxaso was able to share with us.

Lauren: Amazing and charming.

Gretchen: Finally, we have an excerpt from my conversation with authors Ada Palmer and Jo Walton about swearing in science fiction and fantasy. This excerpt talks about acronyms both of the swear-y and non-swear-y kind.

Lauren: You can get this bonus episode as well as a whole bunch more at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Also, yeah, maybe this is a good time to remember that we have over 80 bonus episodes.

Lauren: We have bonus episodes about the time a researcher smuggled a bunny into a classroom to do linguistics on children.

Gretchen: We also have a bonus episode about “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and more phrases that contain all the letters of the alphabet – plus, what people do with phrases like this in languages that don’t have alphabets.

Lauren: We also have an entire bonus episode that’s just about the linguistics of numbers.

Gretchen: If you wish you had more lingthusiasm episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help us keep making this podcast long into the future, we really appreciate everyone who becomes a patron.

Lauren: You can find all of that at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hey, Lauren, I’ve got big news.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: Did you know I’m from the oldest family lineage in the world?

Lauren: Wow! You sound like you are part of some prestigious, ancient, royal – I can only assume royal with that level of knowledge about your family lineage.

Gretchen: Well, you know, I have some family members who are really into genealogy. I’ve been looking at some family trees. And I have come to the conclusion that my family is the oldest family in the world.

Lauren: You know, I have grandparents, and they have grandparents, and I assume they had grandparents, and I guess my family goes all the way back as well. We didn’t come out of nowhere. I might not know all their names. I don’t think we were ever rulers of any nation state as far as I’m aware. But I dunno if you are from the oldest family lineage because I think everyone is.

Gretchen: Well, this is not a mutually exclusive statement. I can be from the oldest family lineage, and you can be from the oldest family lineage, and everyone listening to this podcast can be all from the oldest family lineage in the world because we’re all descended from the earliest humans.

Lauren: This is a good point.

Gretchen: Psych!

Lauren: I think it’s definitely worth remembering the difference between the very fact that we are all from the same humans – and the difference between that and knowing names of specific individuals back to a certain point.

Gretchen: I should clarify – I am not royalty. I do not actually know the names all the way back because at a certain point writing stops existing and, at some point before that, people stopped recording my ancestors. I don’t know when it stops.

Lauren: But there’s definitely a tradition in certain royal families and stuff of being able to claim that you can trace your family back to, you know, maybe –

Gretchen: Like Apollo or something.

Lauren: Oh, gosh, like, mythical characters, okay. I was thinking of just tracing them back a thousand years, but I guess –

Gretchen: Tracing them back to Adam and Eve or tracing them back to Helen of Troy or Apollo or these sorts of things. I feel like – at least I’ve heard of this. I think that talking about human ancestral lineages helps us make sense of the types of claims that people also make about languages being the oldest language.

Lauren: I feel like I’ve heard this before – different languages making claim to being the oldest language.

Gretchen: I’ve heard it quite a lot. I did a bit of research, and I looked up a list of some languages that people have claimed to be the oldest.

Lauren: Okay, what did you find?

Gretchen: A lot of things that can’t all be true at the same time.

Lauren: Or can all be true because all languages are descended from some early human capacity for human language.

Gretchen: Right. There’s different geographical hot spots, you know, people making claims about Egyptian, about Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese, Aramaic, Farsi, Tamil, Korean, Basque – speaking of Basque episodes. Sometimes, people look at reconstructed languages like Proto-Indo-European, which is, you know, the old thing that the modern-day Indo-European Languages are descended from. But part of the issue here is that, at least for spoken languages – and we’re gonna get to sign languages – but at least for spoken languages, babies can’t raise themselves.

Lauren: Unfortunately, I, personally, have to say after the last few years.

Gretchen: Deeply inconveniently –

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: – for adult sleep schedules. If you have a baby with typical hearing, and they’re being raised in a community or even by one person, they’re gonna acquire language from the people that are raising it.

Lauren: Absolutely – in much the same way we all have people giving us genetic input, we also have people giving us linguistic input and continuing on that transmission of human language.

Gretchen: Exactly. When the languages claim to be “old,” that’s often more of a political claim or a religious claim or a heritage claim than it is a linguistic claim because we think that languages probably have a common ancestor. Certainly, all languages are learnable by all humans. If you raise a baby in a given environment, they’ll grow up with the language that’s around them. The human capacity for language seems to be common across all of us. We just don’t know what that tens-of-thousands-year-old early language looked like.

Lauren: In much the same way we lose track of earlier ancestors when we get earlier than written records. We talked about this in the reconstructing old languages episode that there’s just a point where you can’t go back further because there’s just not enough information to say exactly how Proto-Indo-European might have, at some earlier point, been related to, say, the Sino-Tibetan languages or the Niger-Congo family.

Gretchen: Right. We also talked about this in the writing systems episode where writing systems had been invented about 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 years ago, but human language probably emerged sometime between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago, which is so much older. That’s 10-times-to-30-times older than that. We don’t know because sounds and signs leave impressions on the air waves that vanish very quickly and don’t leave fossils until writing starts being developed much later.

Lauren: Very inconvenient.

Gretchen: Absolutely the first thing I would do with a time machine.

Lauren: All of those languages that you mentioned as people laying claim to them being the oldest, they come from all kinds of different language families. Although, I have to say, a very Indo-European, Western skew there, which probably reflects the corners of the internet that you have access to.

Gretchen: This reflects the people that are making claims like this on the English-speaking internet that I’m looking at and the modern-day nation states and religious traditions and cultural traditions that are making claims to certain types of legitimacy via having access to old texts or having access to uninterrupted transmission of stories and legends and mythologies that give them those sorts of claims. There’s no reason to think that a whole bunch of languages on the North and South American continents are not also equally old as all the other languages, but people aren’t doing nation state building with them, and so they don’t tend to show up on those lists.

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of nation state building, a lot of religion happening there as well. I think about how yoga is – I love a bit of yoga, and I think it’s really lovely that all the yoga terms are still given to you in this older Sanskritic language, but it definitely is done sometimes with this claim to legitimacy and prestige in the same way that having something in Latin for the Catholic Church gives that same kind of vibe.

Gretchen: I think about this scene from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding where you have the daughter, who’s the one that’s getting married. She’s in the car as a teen with her parents. It’s this scene where the parents are being a bit cringe-y in the way that teens often experience their parents to be. The dad is saying, “Name a word. I will tell you how it comes from Greek,” because he’s got this big Greek pride thing going.

Lauren: This a classic Greek-American migrant pride happening.

Gretchen: Right. He says, “arachnophobia,” and he’s explaining how the roots come from Greek, and that one’s true. Then the daughter’s friend, who’s in the back seat, is rolling her eyes and saying, “Well, what about ‘kimono’?”

Lauren: Ah, “kimono” the Japanese robe?

Gretchen: Yes. The Dad’s like, “Oh, no, it’s from Greek. Here’s this connection that I have found.”

Lauren: I like his linguistic ad-libbing skills.

Gretchen: It’s certainly a great improvisational performance skill. The movie is clearly designed to put the viewer in sympathy with the young girls in the back seat who are teasing him, and the daughter’s face-palming at this claim, which is one of the reasons why it’s one of my favourite examples of people making up fake etymologies in media because you don’t leave the movie thinking, “Oh, I never realised ‘kimono’ was from Greek.” You leave that movie being like, “Ah, here’s this dad who has over-exaggerated pride in his heritage that doesn’t allow for other people’s heritage to also have words that come from them.” It’s a claim that he's making for personal reasons and for heritage reasons that doesn’t have linguistic founding, but none of these claims have linguistic founding.

Lauren: The dad has come kind of close to a linguistic truth though, which is that linguists talk about languages having features that can be either conservative or innovative. Modern Greek has a lot of the same sound features as Ancient Greek, which is probably helped by that consistent writing system. A writing system definitely helps transmission stay stable because you can point back to older texts. English has probably slowed down a lot in its change because of the writing system as well.

Gretchen: Genuinely, English has borrowed a lot of words from Greek – as well as a lot of other languages that are not Greek. This gets to both Greek and Sanskrit and Chinese having these eras that are talked about as “classical” or as “old,” which is an era that the present-day people, or some slightly earlier group of people, looked back on and thought, “Yeah, those people were doing some cool stuff. We’re gonna call it ‘classical’ because we liked it in history.”

Lauren: I do love the idea that Chaucer had no idea that he was moving on from Old English to Middle English because there wasn’t a Modern English yet.

Gretchen: How could you describe yourself as “Middle English” – that’s sort of like the “late-stage capitalism” that implies that we’re towards the end of something. Like, we don’t know, folks.

Lauren: I don’t think English always does self-deprecating well. English has a lot of belief in its superiority as a language. I think we can say that about the ideology behind English. But I do love that English didn’t go for “Classical English.” Imagine if we said Beowulf was written in “Classical English.”

Gretchen: We could have, yeah. We could have.

Lauren: We just went with, “Ah, that’s old. I don’t understand it. It’s got cases. It’s got all these extra affixes. It’s old. It’s a bit stuffy.”

Gretchen: That may have been because they were comparing it already to Classical Latin and Classical Greek, which was even more antique. The English speakers were looking elsewhere for their golden age. I don’t think people often claim that English is the oldest language because English speakers are seeing the history of their society located in this Greco-Latin tradition.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that’s a good explanation for it. I do wonder if maybe the attitude that we now have towards Shakespearean English, if maybe that will become “Classical English” when we’re a bit further on, and Shakespeare becomes even less accessible.

Gretchen: Right. And if Shakespeare becomes the text that everyone is referring to because it’s this quote-unquote “classic” text but calling something a “classical era” reflects on the subsequent era and what they thought about the older one more so than the era itself.

Lauren: Having this ability to distinguish between an “old” or a “classical” and a “modern” version of a language requires that writing tradition, whereas the majority of human languages, for the majority of human history, have happily existed and transmitted knowledge without a writing system. These writing systems make us very focused on pinning down. I super appreciate the website Glottolog, which catalogues languages and all the names they’re known by. We have a lot of languages that are “classical,” like “Classical Chinese” or “Classical Quechua.” We have some “early” – so “Early Irish.”

Gretchen: I think I’ve also heard of “Old Irish.”

Lauren: We have “Old Chinese” and “Old Japanese” in Glottolog, but I’ve definitely also heard them referred to as “classical,” so slightly different vibes there. Of course, you have things like “Ancient Hebrew,” which, older than old, very prestigious. I particularly like the precision with which some names get given to different languages over time. Glottolog has an “Old Modern Welsh,” which is nice and specific. I particularly appreciate the “Imperial-Middle-Modern Aramaic.”

Gretchen: “Imperial-Middle-Modern Aramaic.” That also gets to languages being named and being spread through empire and conquest and wars, which is also part of that historical tradition that people look back to.

Lauren: For sure. That’s part of the narrative building around languages. A lot of what is maintained about a language is religious documents or documents of imperial rule. That means that that imperial form might have been a particular register. Imagine if all that we had about English was the tax forms that we have.

Gretchen: Oh, god, that would be really boring.

Lauren: You would have a very different idea of what English is compared to how it’s spoken day-to-day. That’s what makes this understanding of old languages just from a written record really challenging.

Gretchen: When I think about trying to understand the history of languages just from the written record, I’m reminded of this classic joke – I dunno if you’ve heard this one – where you’re walking down the street one night, and you see someone standing under a streetlight looking at their feet and trying to search for something. You go, “Oh, what are you looking for?” And the person says, “Oh, my contact lens. It fell out. I’m trying to find it.” And you say, “Oh, did you lose it under the streetlight?” And the person goes, “No, I lost it a block over that way, but there’s no streetlight there, so it’s much easier to search here.”

Lauren: [Laughs] Hmm.

Gretchen: I guess this is a joke that doesn’t work so well now that everyone has phones with flashlights on them, and contact lenses have improved their technology and don’t pop out spontaneously like that. But when we’re looking for the history of language, it’s like looking under the streetlight because that’s where it’s easy to look. It’s not actually doing a random sample of all of the bits of history – many of which are just lost to us.

Lauren: Indeed. I like thinking about the imperial languages and the classical languages because sometimes we do get written records that help give us a glimpse into just how ordinary people were going about living their lives.

Gretchen: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, can we talk about the clay tablet?

Lauren: We can absolutely talk about the clay tablet that I know what you mean because you’re talking about the complaint to Ea-nāṣir, which is a clay tablet that’s written in Akkadian cuneiform. It’s considered to be the world’s oldest known written complaint.

Gretchen: This is from a customer named Nanni who’s complaining about the quality of the copper ingots that was received.

Lauren: The thing that I love about this is that there is this complaint, but also, they’re pretty sure they found Ea-nāṣir’s house because there are other complaints about the quality of the copper in this residence.

Gretchen: We really think we know who’s at fault here.

Lauren: Yeah. It seems like he was just a provider of adequate quality copper, and people really needed to go to a better place to get a better quality of copper.

Gretchen: Cuneiform is also this interesting example of searching under the streetlight for the contact lens because the language Sumerian was written in cuneiform, and then later, Akkadian, which is a Semitic language related to modern-day Arabic and Hebrew, and Hittite, which is an Indo-European language related to English and Sanskrit and a bunch of other languages. They were all using this system of stamping the ends of reeds in these pointy triangle shapes onto clay blocks. Do you know what happens to clay blocks when they’re in a house, and the house burns down?

Lauren: They just get fired and made more resilient.

Gretchen: They get made incredibly durable. If people were writing on parchment or in textiles – like in fabrics or cords or strings or on leather or wood – most of those don’t get preserved the same way because you expose them to water, and they start rotting.

Lauren: And they don’t do great with fire.

Gretchen: They really don’t do great with fire. Animals will eat them. Clay has none of these problems. We don’t even know if we know what all of the ancient writing systems are because the ones that have survived are the ones on clay or stone.

Lauren: I was so charmed when I learnt about Latin curse tablets, which are very similar to the complaints to Ea-nāṣir. These are small bits of lead that people could scratch a curse or a wish onto, and then they would throw them into some kind of sacred water. They found, like, 130 of these at Bath in Britian, but they appear to have popped up all over the Roman Empire. It’s just like these tiny insights into the pettiness of humanity as opposed to the great works of literature, or we’ve talked about how the Rosetta Stone was in these three official languages and was all about a declaration about taxation.

Gretchen: But instead, you can have “This curse is on Gaius because he stole my dog” sort of thing.

Lauren: “I have given to the goddess Sulis the six silver coins which I have lost. It is for the goddess to extract them from the names written below” – and then just lists people who owe this person cash.

Gretchen: That’s petty. I like it.

Lauren: Yeah, so annoyed.

Gretchen: I actually read a romance novel called Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall, which was set in Bath and used the ancient Bath curse tablets as a plot point.

Lauren: So charming.

Gretchen: If anyone wants to read curse tablets and also “romantasy” I think is what we’re calling the genre now.

Lauren: I feel like Jane Austen would’ve included curse tablets if she knew about them.

Gretchen: I think she was no stranger to pettiness. It’s very convenient that they wrote their curses on lead tablets, which is such an incredibly durable format. Imagine if they’d written them on cloth, and then we’d never have them for posterity.

Lauren: I feel sad for all the human pettiness that we’ve lost access to.

Gretchen: Two other old writing systems that we have access to because of the durability of the materials they were written on are oracle bone script, which is the ancestor to Chinese – another writing system that we think developed from scratch because we can see it developing thousands of years ago.

Lauren: Oracle bones written on I believe turtle bones and turtle shells.

Gretchen: Yes, hence the “bone” part – also very durable material and also used for religious purposes.

Lauren: My sympathy and thanks to the turtles.

Gretchen: Indeed. Then the early Mesoamerican writing systems, of which the oldest one is the Olmec writing system, which were written on ceramics. They show representations of drawings of things that look like a codex-shaped book made out of bark which, obviously, we don’t have. We just have ceramic drawings of the bark. Come on!

Lauren: Oh, no!

Gretchen: Ah, it’s so close!

Lauren: How cruel to point out that we’re missing information.

Gretchen: You thought you were mad about the Library of Alexandria burning down. Wait until you hear about the Olmec bark.

Lauren: Yeah, ah, that really gets you and just is a reminder of how much we can’t say about the history of human language because of what we don’t have a record of.

Gretchen: Well, you know, before we do a whole episode about things that we don’t know – because much as we can make fun of searching for the contact lens under the streetlight, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: What’s something else that people sometimes mean when they say a language is “old”?

Lauren: Well, this goes back to that conservative idea that some languages just have conservative features that haven’t changed as much. A language that has a lot of sound changes we might call very “innovative,” or they’ve “innovated” a new way of doing the tense on the verbs. You can trace it back to an older form of the language, but it looks very different at this point in time.

Gretchen: I think the example that I’m most familiar with this is Icelandic versus English. In the last thousand years or so, English has had a lot of contact from things like the Norman Conquest, which introduced a lot of French words to English, compared to Icelandic, which has had less of that. Icelanders have an easier time reading something like their sagas, which are 800 and more years old, than English speakers have reading texts like Chaucer, which are about the same age but have had a lot more linguistic changes happening because of more contact in English over the years.

Lauren: That’s one of the things that linguists who look at when a language tends to be more innovative and change, it tends to be during these periods of contact. It tends to be during periods of invasion. English had the French come up from the south, repeated Viking incursions from all around the coast. They all had an impact on the language. I find it really interesting. Icelanders are really proud of how conservative the language is and that they still can read these older stories. I think in some ways English has created this story for itself where it’s really proud of the fact that it is this language that continues to take influences from places and is really innovative. These are just part of the story that a language can tell about itself and the speakers can tell about it.

Gretchen: I think that there are reasons to be proud of any language that don’t have to rely on age as the sole arbiter of legitimacy. In some cases, it’s that rupture with the past that people use as a point of pride. I’m thinking of Haitian Creole, for example, which is descended from French. You can hear that French influence. When I’ve heard people speaking Haitian Creole, it almost sounds like they’re speaking a French dialect that I don’t quite know. But the writing system is very different. It’s much more phonetic than French is. The word for “me” in Haitian Creole is “mwa,” and it’s written M-W-A. The word for “me” in Modern French is “moi,” pronounced the same way but written M-O-I.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: It used to be pronounced /moɪ/. This is why you get “roy” and /ʁwa/ for “king” and stuff like this, hence the spelling. But the sound changes happened in French. When the Haitian speakers were deciding how to write their language down, they were like, “No, we’re gonna have a phonetic system. We don’t need to be beholden to the French system. We’re gonna have something that establishes our identity as something that’s distinct from French.”

Lauren: For anyone who’s tried to learn the French spelling, especially those endings that are still in the writing system but not in the pronunciation system, I think it’s fair to say French has gone through a number of sound innovations, even if it might be more conservative in other features of the grammar.

Gretchen: It’s very conservative in the writing system, but the sounds have changed a lot.

Lauren: It’s interesting you bring up Haitian Creole because creoles are the result of this intense contact between two or more languages. They often get labelled as being “new,” which is kind of the flip side of this discourse around “old” languages.

Gretchen: That’s controversial in linguistics whether to consider creoles “new” or to consider them older. What they definitely have is children being raised by people who also already had some amount of language. Babies can’t raise themselves. But they do have this situation where their speakers were prevented from learning how to read and write, learning how to access the formal varieties of language, often very violently and through horrible circumstances. A lot of creoles came about because of the slave trade, because of historical systems of oppression. The language transmission was not the same as if you were learning it from parents who’d been educated in the language, but they were still learning from people who had access to the language. There’s been a bit of a swing in creole studies more recently to say, “What if we don’t consider these completely new? What if we think about the ancestral features that they have in common with the languages they’re descended from?” which you can readily trace as well.

Lauren: Thinking in terms of which features are innovative rather than the whole language as being new. Maybe it has a very innovative way of doing the noun structure, but it still has a lot of the features of the two different – or multiple different – languages in terms of sounds, and so taking apart the different linguistic elements and not just focusing on the whole thing as being “new” or “old” and trying to apply these labels that don’t actually account for what’s happening.

Gretchen: It can be kind of exoticising to creoles to say, “Oh, these are completely different from all of the other ways that languages have gotten transmitted,” when what’s also going on is kids in a community who were exposed to a bunch of languages or a bunch of different linguistic inputs at a time making sense of that and coming up with, collaboratively, something with the other kids in the community that is different from what people were speaking before but still has that ancestral link.

Lauren: There are contexts in which children are raised without that access to language transmission. That is when a d/Deaf child is born into a hearing and spoken language family context, which means that they’re not getting that language.

Gretchen: Generally, the child and the parents and the family and community members do end up with some amount of ways of communicating based on the existing gestures that people do alongside a spoken language and elaborating on them, making them more complex, because you are trying to communicate somehow. There are linguistic studies about this, right?

Lauren: Ideally, in an ideal world, if you’re a d/Deaf child, you would want to have access to signed language input through, ideally, your family but also your wider educational context. Some d/Deaf children do get hearing aids. They are useful but not a perfect replication of the hearing child experience. That’s a possibility. There are some contexts where children have just developed this communication system with their hearing family in their own home context. These are known as “home sign.” There have been examples of this, and they have been studied. One of the most famous examples that has been described in a lot of detail is the example of David and his family. Susan Goldin-Meadow and her collaborators over the years have done a lot of work looking at the way David and, especially, his mother communicate with each other.

Gretchen: This is a really tough situation. I think these studies started in the early ’90s. Hopefully, people know better now and can give their d/Deaf kids access to a sign language, but given that this happened, what can we learn from the situation?

Lauren: Goldin-Meadow definitely started publishing about this in the early ’80s. So, David – who I will forever think of as a 7-to-10-year-old child – is actually a GenX-er who, if he had kids himself, they’re undergraduates now.

Gretchen: Okay. It’s good to put famous children from studies in perspective.

Lauren: Because they are – it’s like the Shirley Temple phenomenon, right. David, in my mind, is always just this kid who’s learning to communicate with his mom, but he’s a fully-grown, tax-paying adult now.

Gretchen: What was he doing when he was communicating with his mom in this immortalised-in-amber childhood years?

Lauren: What was really interesting from a thinking-about-this-human-capacity-for-language-and-communication perspective is that his mother and the family developed this way of communicating with him that grew out of their typical gestures and context and a lot of showing each other stuff.

Gretchen: Pointing to things and so on.

Lauren: Pointing – so useful in all languages and all contexts. What they found was that David was creating systematic order out of the gestures that he was getting. So, he had more systematic structure in terms of the hand shape that he was using – he created these hand shape structures and these individual signs that his mom would also use but not as consistently as him. It’s actually the child taking this really idiosyncratic, raw gesture material from his mom. Gestures in spoken language context tend to be a bit more freeform and unstructured than, say, something like a signed language, which uses the same hands but in a very different way. He wasn’t doing something that was a fully structured language, but it had more structure than what he was being given.

Gretchen: His brain was really starved for linguistic input, and he was trying to extract as many linguistic vitamins and minerals as he could from this incomplete gestural system that he was being given as the closest approximation of language. Obviously, we do wish that David, who was raised in the US I think –

Lauren: I think.

Gretchen: – had just been given access to ASL, which lots of people already were using in the US and could’ve happened where he would’ve gotten the fully-fledged, healthy balanced diet of lots of linguistic input from lots of people, but the child brain seems to want to reconstruct language out of whatever is available to it.

Lauren: This type of system, which is often called “home sign,” is not the same as a fully-fledged sign language. Children often don’t have the same level of linguistic structure. They obviously can’t communicate with people outside of the home context who don’t know the signs that they’ve created with the family. I think it’s also worth pointing out that it is more structured than you would expect it to be from the input. We’ve seen when you take children from these emerging structures, and you bring enough d/Deaf people together, you actually get a real blossoming of a full linguistic system.

Gretchen: The most famous example of this is in Nicaragua in the 1980s, where a bunch of d/Deaf children were brought together at a school for the first time. The school wasn’t trying to teach them a signed language; they were trying to do an oralist method of education, which is [grumbles] – about which the less said, the better – but the kids themselves were coming in with their home sign systems and developing them further in contact with each other. When the next generation of kids showed up, and they had access to this combined home sign system, they really turned it into a full-fledged sign language, which is now – Nicaraguan Sign Language is the national sign language in Nicaragua. These types of languages are some good candidates for “youngest” language, even if we don’t know what the “oldest” language looked like.

Lauren: The amazing thing about Nicaraguan Sign Language is there were linguists on the ground pretty much from the beginning of the school in 1980s. There is a documentation of how this language has evolved. It was the older signers coming in, communicating with the younger children coming to the school, who then created more of the structure – so being a bit like David but in this really rich communicative and linguistic environment and building this structure into the language.

Gretchen: It seems to take those two generations of linguistic input. That feels very reassuring to me which is that language is so robust that even if we lose all of our writing systems, and we lose all of our memory of writing systems, and we lose access to the memory of what language looks – like, suddenly we all wake up with amnesia or something – we would rediscover this. Even though they wouldn’t be the same languages, we’d put something back together and still be able to talk to each other.

Lauren: We know this because Nicaraguan Sign Language is not the only example we have of a recently developed language that has emerged. The Nicaraguan Sign Language is a school-based sign, but we also have what are known as “village-based” sign systems, which is where there might be a d/Deaf family, or a number of d/Deaf families in the village – or a very high percentage of d/Deaf population – and a sign language emerges that the whole village, d/Deaf and hearing, use to communicate. It’s usually “village” because it is these smaller communities where people gather and live together and have to communicate with each other all the time.

Gretchen: And if you have an island or somewhere in the mountains or somewhere were there’s a high degree of genetic d/Deafness because there’s a relatively high degree of isolation, you can have a third of the village be d/Deaf, in which case, everybody in that village is learning signs from each other at a young age. I think the famous example of that that I’ve heard of relatively nearby is Martha’s Vineyard in the US, which is an island, I think. It has a village sign language.

Lauren: Lynn Hou talked about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in the interview she did with us, which is in a tribal group in a desert in southern Israel.

Gretchen: There’s also Kata Kolok, which is also know as Benkala Sign Language or Balinese Sign Language, which is a village sign language indigenous to two neighbouring villages in northern Bali, Indonesia. Similar situations there.

Lauren: We see this robustness of language and these “young” languages but building on this underlying human tendency to want to create linguistic structure when you bring enough people who can communicate together.

Gretchen: A really interesting example that I’ve encountered recently of what it’s like to suddenly have at least access in terms of format or modality to language, even if you don’t know what everything means yet, is in the book True Biz by Sara Novic, which is set at a school for the d/Deaf. One of the main characters is a d/Deaf girl whose cochlear implants have been malfunctioning, and so she hasn’t been raised with access to a sign language, but suddenly, she’s in this school now and is learning ASL and trying to get her cochlear implants to still work but, in the meantime, is suddenly immersed in this environment where she has full access to language instead of this piecemeal access via attempting to lip read or attempting to use these implants that haven’t been working very well for her. The author is d/Deaf and talks about a variety of different types of experiences that people can have in that context.

Lauren: I really appreciated how this book made the most of the written format to occasionally just not give you what another character was saying, and so you get this experience of being the young protagonist in the book suddenly like, “I’m only getting half of this sentence. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s very stressful.”

Gretchen: Because there’s just a bunch of blank spaces. There were also some places where there were drawings of words that were being talked about or worksheets that she was seeing with line diagrams of different signs. Despite the fact that it’s a book that’s in written English trying to convey ASL, which is not English and doesn’t have a standard way of being written, I think it’s doing a really interesting job of trying to convey that experience.

Lauren: That lack of writing system for signed languages means that a lot of the history of signing in human language history has been lost to us. There have been different signing communities at different times in history. It’s probably been a very common way of humans doing language, but we just don’t know because it’s not in the streetlight of the written record.

Gretchen: Right. We don’t even know if the first language – the “oldest” language – was a spoken language or a signed language. People have come up with arguments for both things. We just don’t know.

Lauren: Which in some ways I find very relaxing instead of constantly trying to make cases for which language is the “oldest” or which is the “newest,” you can just let go of those debates because they are all, at the end of the day, unproveable. You can just enjoy the variety of human language without it being a competition.

Gretchen: A language doesn’t have to be the oldest language or even the newest language in order to be cool. Languages are great. All languages are interesting and valid, and people should have the right to have access to them when they want them. By listening to this episode, you’re participating in part of that chain of human language transmission that stretches beyond anyone’s written record or recorded record or video record. You’re still part of it.

[Music]

Gretchen: 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 at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all of the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA symbols, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I blog as AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna 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 can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include fun interview excerpts, an interview about swearing with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, and our very special linguistics advice episode where you asked questions, and we answered them. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: 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, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[voidbears-oc-stash]

Waffle: *hisses!* MEOW! *they jump into the Void droid once it stumbles by and starts ATTACKING the grubs! swatting them like a cat! VERY angy! they also bark at the grubs! you'd ALSO swear the kid's getting BIGGER!? and a silent but ever growing LOUDER cracking sound can be heard from'em? Notebuster- ya might wanna- uh GET INVOLVED- *

Notebuster pries Waffle off of The Voiddroid before saying, in his real voice, "Let me handle this."

Firefly moves out of the way so Notebuster can observe and help more properly

Pester, thankfully, was unharmed. They look at Notebuster and, in the tiniest voice you can imagine, says "please don't hurt me. I'm aware!"

Notebuster pats Pester with a single finger, before summoning a small pink void crystal to put all the non-sapient Hitchhiker Grubs on, plucking them off of Olmec and Stinger, and making sure Aych didn't have any extras on her. After it is all settled, Notebuster gets a better look at Pester. "I heard all Void Fauna had a chance of Hyperintelligence, but I did not realize it extended to even the bugs." his speaker spoke for him.

"I didn't either till they begged me to not pluck them off at my stop near the carnivorous fields." Aych admits

Pester says nothing and just goes back to being comfy in Aych's head feathers.

"Intriguing." Notebuster's screen spoke. "I think I can keep these others as pets. Mom would like having some home around. It would be too dangerous to put a pink void crystal back into the void nowadays, anyways."

[tlatollotl]

why does the Popol Vuh claims that the Olmec came to Mexico in “ships of bark”, is it lying?

I’m curious about your source of information. Where in the Popol Vuh does it say the Olmec came to Mexico in ships of bark? Or that they traveled from the east?

Literal version,

http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PV-Literal.pdf

More narrative version,

http://www.personal.psu.edu/abl128/PopolVu/PopolVuh.pdf

Perhaps you are thinking of instead their oral history saying their ancestors, Maya not Olmec, came from a city to the east. But that means they were coming from Yucatan and crossing the sea near the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. And their ancestors would not have been so ancient. They were likely people from Chichen Itza or Mayapan.

[glopratchet]

retirement-home

Undergrowth seeking The sun is setting, and the sky is beginning to turn orange as it begins to set in your eyes shelter from the rain Lightpoles of light shine through the trees, illuminating the ground below Lightpoles of light shine through the trees, Construction drama all around Accustomed to the shadows, willow adepts hold hands in a circle, chanting Robert chats with Féval père Construction drama all around Green-skinned bodyguards adorned in leather and denim stand on either side of the gourmand saurus, his pupils dilated… Let's just get to it! Green-skinned bodyguards adorned in leather and denim stand on either side of the gourmand saurus, Bandages dirtied with mud and blood The gnome seems pale Conscious, if just barely Bandages dirtied with mud and blood Monitors beep alarms His fists ball up as a jolt of lightning runs through his body "Where am I? "Naledi Monitors beep alarms Vaccine enters the patient's body through his veins Your nostrils flare, smelling the thick scent of diesel, grease and rubber Vaccine enters the patient's body through his veins Shocktroops prepare grenades as a leutnant barks orders at them Shocktroops prepare grenades as a leutnant barks orders at them Pharmaceuticals Midrim Limited, owned by the Regime and helmed by Captain Rimanika Pharmaceuticals Midrim Limited, High-roller midbite owners, books and casinos owned by the Regime High-roller midbite owners, Lizards gamblers and thrill-seekers from all over Confederacy space Lizards, Gorazel and his blood-manipulating magic Miguel ineptly fumbles with trigger, as you teach him the ways of warfare Gorazel and his blood-manipulating magic Cyber-surgeon Professor Mberupekwe Mbara works tirelessly on the wounded Nurses and orderlies taking small breaks from the chaos overtake the hospital Cyber-surgeon Professor Mberupekwe Mbara works tirelessly on the wounded Lieutenant Krozer is here! Agent walking slowly over to the pot of coffee, pouring some for him and you "Boss Agent walking slowly over to the pot of coffee, Borders, barriers, segregations Agent stretching turning back to the room Big L salute; you return it "The Moonracer was a success! Agent stretching, Blood baths The blood seeping from his chest to the cracks in the concrete floor General Ecker's last stand Bloodbaths Agent caregiving Sedated forever, locked in a coffin of steel and glass Naked but for plastic curtains separating them Dog -eared copies of Green Genetics | The Choice of Progress, and Why Monarchy is Evil propped up in their hands Dog-eared copies of Green Genetics | The Choice of Progress, Agent cheese-making Abomination, barely even human NASA stickers still visible, turquoise and dull yellow against the rusted metal exterior of the machine Agent roving His head rises, as if sticking his neck out Will you approve or decline his offer? Cyclone of emotions in a heartbeat Lion's roar burning a whole through everything Agent well-being His mighty paw clutching an Uzi short shotgun Albino cobra, hood fully expanded as it prepares to strike Agent coping Pulse quickening as adrenaline surges, burning through you Do you recognize these feelings? Agent catalyzing Blackness, pierced by the wailing of a mother Young soldiers scramble, dropping their food to draw their various firearms Agent landscaping His groan is a presage of the pain you're about to unleash upon him Sergeant peers through the periscope, whistles Agent mistreating Something clatters to the floor The stare of wounded soldier, waiting for the final blow The sickening crunch of splintering bones Agent diagnosing Seeing the world through a foggy camera lens Invaders, enslavers, slaughterers Agent stroking Soldier stiffening as the electricity tears through him Agent portraying Urgency so thick you can taste it, adrenaline pumping into your veins Everyone thinks you're a monster, because that's what I wanted Agent evoking Night-sky, lit up by the blast You miss the battlefield Agent photographing Explosion of emotions from the dying soldier Agent handicapping Sergeant bellows, high-caliber bullets tearing through the air Agent joking A gurgling laugh escapes your own throat as the knife cleaves through his frontal armor Agent giving orders Agent brushing off excess dirt One foot after the other, none of them stepping too harshly Aloof and unaffected by the future Sundowning setting apocalypse into slow motion Agent acediology The soldier's finger pulls the trigger, but the gun fails to fire Sanitation of body and soul Synapses in the brain misfiring, leading to sleep Colossus rising; fortress of solitude The smell of fresh blood and vomit churning in your gut Regression into infantile fantasy as a shield from bloodshed Community-dwelling tribal warfare Epinephrin rushes, adrenaline pulsing Great gear overflowing from bookbags and lockers, assault rifle peeking out the top Muckety-mucks hoping that your psych eval comes back positive Shuffling of papers and murmuring of hushed voices Bare mattress and worn-down carpet Ribbon-cutting for the new healing wing Helicopter blades whirring overhead Anxiety burning in your chest, despite the smiles you put on Balloons and mini-birthday cakes under halogen lights, a celebration of fifteen years since the Cure Sensawunda! Grooming Torn-out page of the Kama Sutra, hidden behind a biology book and attire for your next pageant Skinnys the newest substance replacing alcohol and tobacco A blue card, redeemable for one cured child's organs Counseling sessions to discuss death, over and over again Motherload of narcotics and psychotropic drugs seized by Delta Company Never-ending remorse, shaking hands Eating contests and wet T-shirt contests, barf bags at the ready Your system cleansed of toxins, feeling invigorated Whisky-joint -basketball-throwdown! Dwelling in darkness as your world crumbles around you Terrorist organizations pledging alliance, chaotic guerrilla strikes and bombings Sodbuster besieged by nightmares of bloody, doomed civil war CSI sorting through the wreckage, pointing fingers Sleeping Fortress America, gateway to the world the sleep of the righteous, night after night Your personnel records expurgated for reasons of national security Mini-chainsaw carved from a battered hunk of meat, abandoned A torrent of memories and birth identifications 26 undergraduates, dead and taken off line Astryl sifts through evidence and admonishes you A spent casing rolling under a bookcase The family silver, tarnished Toothpaste and nail clippers, procured at the last ration station Fighting over a cracked compact mirror Shambles that was once an infant, swollen several times natural size CSI measures every cubit and indices every blackboard scrawl Wet-nurse standing before you, blubber pouring from eye sockets like tears Towering, irate figure promising freedom in flesh and machinery beating in unison Chatters chmidtchild mp3 plays faintly while in your pocket Hegemony and valor bleeding into the unknown Passageways twist and turn as you hunt, quietly Rot increases as putrid steam billows into frigid air Admission collected to raise hitman Body buried two thousand feet below Rotting, empty eye socket watches you with a mixture of hope and lust Weakness-magnets each pulling in a different direction, tearing the collective apart from within Homelike prison, built to hold the worst that humanity has to offer Mausoleum awaits, made from the destruction of your aspirations Cafffeine -fueled hyper-articulate poetry from shouting voices and violence The only certainty Gerontologist calm and collected as you lie in wait Sitting in your drafty crypt as rot spreads, eating at hopes and dreams Tumblebleeds yourself away, forever stumbling forward into the future The vague threat of terrorism franctically expended to fill time and distract Cognizance truncated by drugs injected at birth Consciousness smashed to bits against the grinding wheels of this atrocious hamster wheel Gusts of bloodthirsty elation in battle The distant echo of gunfire somewhere outside of this citadel Life-prolonging machine breathing for you in bursts A sewer connecting one locus of despair to the other Surgeries leaving you disfigured and without certain organs Mild satisfaction brought on by contribution of articles to sub-standard news organ Sports and reality shows to forget your sorrows, if only for a moment Addled brains desperately searching for truth, wisdom, decency Mousehole to escape when craggy reality becomes too much to bear Immortal ruler of fables and nursery rhymes Resurrection ists stripping the flesh from your bones for money The disease spreading rampantly, claiming youthful lives Harmonica haunting you through the prison corridors All trials leading back to the supernatural Detached shoulder pulsating microphone stand, choir of shrieks and howls Mattresses embroidered with nursery rhymes, sweet lullabies for the wicked Booty in bottles of shine and bags of pdevices Blood-soaked urchin armies waging gangland warfare over crackhouses Rusted-out trash barrel fires and rats the size of ponies Rotting meat smell of dead bodies left uncovered in the streets Phosphorus searchlights ripping through your being Alleys and allies twisting in an eccentric patterns, never straight for more than a few cubits Automaton driven to find the killer of his beloved Selma Hellfire and brimstone preachers bringing morality to the masses Megalomaniac al omnipotent entity demanding sacrifice after sacrifice The ghostly echo of the apocalypse in bottomless silos Dust to dust, pain to pain, doom to doom Eternal life seems like nothing more than a fever dream now Patriots raving in a static-ridden anarchy Heaven's goblins, led by the fiddler and the lean man Adrenaline -charged duels and gunfights along dead-end streets Grease-stained gambling and long, lingering bartabs Conquistadors hacking and flaming their way through jungles Olmec colossal heads commandeered by Jolly Ranchers and liquor Gangrenous and necrotic plague victims emitting the smell of rot and mildew Anxiety-relieving pills to avoid the toxicity of Mankind Forever! Faucet dripping, wall crumbling, the sounds of the night Sidewalks carved into and stepped pyramids for the peasants Prophecy foretold of the coming goblin and fanatic followers Zombie hordes bottle-necked by lack of open doors Triangulation of the blood, splattered brains, and rusted-out metal Pirates jettisoning stolen treasure into the depths Preachings of the end of days to doomed desert travelers A dead man and his broken slaver Cataclysmic beams of lightning crashing down from the heavens Corrosion eating away at all metals save for one Rebel alliances exploding within themselves Soapbox oratory drawing all eyes to one man Bloated King feasting on the misery of his subjects Moisture Oily machinery, water buffaloes, and steaming rice paddies clumps silently in the darkness Sermons prophesying the Day of the Dead and All Souls' Rotten, rusted-out hulks of abandoned machinery Lobotomize the rabid, pot-smoking college students Skeletal pirates prowling the night in search of plunder and rum Delivery rooms for freshly killed virgins and babies Toothbrushes being given away for free with student IDs Bleach-white political propaganda exhorting the virtues of community Talisman swelling with power and striking terror into all Bleeding-edge technology much more efficient than it should be Making candy bars out of human flesh Stinky skin conditioners and vomiting hair tonics Stacks of ludicrously cheap VHS tapes A language that, while vitally important, nobody speaks Insecticide miners and natural poison barrels Ancient, decaying albums full of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Bob Marley Oozes and oozes of all types Eternal stains on hotel carpets Life and death decided by rusted dice Newspapers overflowing with conspiracy theories and scandals Lacquer cabinets cascading over with rum bottles Static-laden, monotonous radio broadcasters Diplomats scrambling for crumbs Slick-talking, well-read merchants pontificating on high culture Jocks and preps in backwards hats beating the crap out of goths Obsolete mines and anachronistic technologies Eskiminzins melting Greenland's ice caps Grave robbers pilfering priceless cadavers for medical research Physique gyms pumping man-musk Obsequious Elvin slaves functioning as doctors Ken-doll politicians spewing empty promises Garden-variety chemical-resistant weeds A colony of subterranean mole people Burrowing owlbears tearing through the soil Chemicals from a bygone age destroying the state of things Alsation-trained debt collectors Designers pumping out "new" clothing every year Complacent monks devoting their lives to an unattainable end Anatomy books used by future doctors Kooky 14-year-old leaders taking over the reins of power Ancient government overthrown in a popular revolution Populations of the future spreading to and inhabiting other planets Armadillo-like future robots armed with lasers and other weapons of mass destruction Coffee -flavored coffee Tabloid newspapers with photographs and moving pictures A foreign language that sounds vaguely French Hoppers skittering about Stank-hole criminals hiding away with their ill-gotten loot Sealed reliquaries containing the bones of saints Livers mooth and shiny robot butlers incapable of independent thought Cowardly "soldiers" using ricin-filled bullets Nobility hiring mercenaries to fight their wars for them Sand-filled hourglasses constantly running out Vicinity -enforcement licenses that keep you always nearby Automated tellers constantly loaning you money that you must pay back with interest Vitamins found only in the intestines of humans Grading people for social norms, beauty, and other variables Silent sports with no fans Scorpions and vultures literally fought to the death Helpless slaves in thrall to fat masters Former citizens building communities up from nothing Watermelons that actually melt inside you Dumpster -diving universities for the poor and destitute Prisons filling with both criminals and political opponents Bravado -loaded mercenaries attempting to recapture lost territory Silently suffocating hotel guests Dune buggies full of different types of the undead Librarians marching for work arrangement reform Apocalypse-weave guns stuffed with holy water bullets Trees were extremely rare before the event Occupations concerning themselves only with business and money Spit-and-polish military coups Scamps and vagabonds eking out an existence through thievery Psychopathic laughter issuing constantly from a person's mouth Super-soldiers made with oil and other biological matter Protests over dead refugees from the war Distributed battle armor of the type you currently wear Teetotaler ghettos spawning intolerance on both sides Highly vented helmets trickling clouds of poison gas Zoologist savages attempting to re-mold humans into new shapes and sizes Many undead werewolves with a taste for human flesh snacks Lizard-on-a-stick Galaxy far, far away Endoskeleton and useless attachments such as wings and shark teeth Bagpipes full of infectious black mold spores Bullying protests targeting video game studios Phenotype -altering illnesses altering lupine sydnrome Tiny toy hunting knives carve "V" for victory symbols Moreauvian stumbles into a mundane trap Kleptomaniac youth exposing their treasures Toxic foam pool cleaner When it comes to entering the earth on must do it very precisly and carefully You need to enter the air at a precise speed and angle so that you don't get burned up in the atmosphere or skip out into space to your destruction If you return too fast or too steeply bad things will happen If you pause too long in outer space, your body will absorb enough solar energy to burn you up when you next descend If impact is to shallow then back you go back into space to be frozen preserved and released half a millennium before others of your kind Too deep and the brutal forces will crush your life away The three requirements deceleration heating accuracy of landing or impact Most of your descent is burn monotony You will need to float the egg in some liquid so you will need to find some liquid that is the same as egg so you can select the best and choose the one that do not flow the liquid However, everything is possible, you can refill of "fuel" The container will need to be rigid to make sure that the walls do not flex or the egg could bang on the walls of the container and crack and if you place a shell inside then this could bounce or deform with pressure and scratch the egg on roughness of inner surface An egg can withstand between 20 to 30 gs before cracking so the landing should not be an issue from that perspective This is why you have kept this as plan B You start saying some thing "how much further should reach the outer layers soon don't want to rush things too much though Straining your neck looking up you try to see the sky Sort of like day dreaming or some thing You start to wonder what your landing will be like Some say hitting water is like landing on solid ground

[tas-ss7a]

The Brutal History of Ball Game by Steven

This is Steven and here is a new blog. And today I will be talking a lot lot and lot about an ball game. Don’t worry! It is not too boring so be excited. Anyway, this blog is going to tell you specifically about Mesoamerican ball game.

Opps, not the the pin ball game. Sadly :(

The harsh Ball Game of the Mesoamerican. So let get started! The Olmecs was the one who started this game around 1500 B.C. The Maya around A.D. 700, tweaked it. Finally the Aztecs around A.D. 1400, nailed it. So these are people or tribes are part of this region; we don’t have the Inca included though. So this is a game that need a very solid rubber ball that weigh about 10 pounds, 1 to 4 people on a team and they would play it on a stone court. And people need to wear protections like helmets, pads and thick belts. We are still not sure about the rules of this game but basically it’s just keep the ball from dropping to the ground with your hips. Almost like volleyball without nets. Would you think this ball is heavy and you have to don’t let the ball touch the ground? It will HURT a lot! So how did this game started? The Mesoamerican ball game began in an area where the Castilla elastica tree grew. There will be a milky-white latex that would be dripping by cutting a thin line in the bark. The liquid would drip out into a cup and be mixed with juice from a white morning glory flower to create a rubbery latex. Then it will shaped into a ball and hardened.

Now we understand how is this ball made, let move on to how this affect to these Mesoamerican life. It has been included in tombs and at religious shrines. The game was associated with prestige and social standing, and only the wealthy people can actually afford to play this game. So the Olmecs continue to play this game and then the Mayans start to added some more things in it. So first of all, they believe this game make the gods happy. If you lost in this game at that time, you will be DEAD! You will be sacrifice and normally they will cut off your head. This game can even replace a war that was about to start, instead of fighting in the war you can join this game. The Mayans also added a ring for anyone in the game to who wanted to get a bonus point.

The Aztecs was interested with all of these new things. They have many vases and sculptures show the death of the losing team. Some of The Spanish watch the game and I rather not to play this game. Because The Spanish reported that the game could cause tons of injuries. Deep swollen bruises, broken bones and even death when a player was hit in the head or an unprotected area by the heavy ball are examples of bad things it could happen to you. Now that very brutal and scary! Even though it has a lot injuries, we still have people playing this game in the world. A slightly less violent version of the game is called Ulama and it is played in Mexico.

The end of this blog is here BYE! Wait for more blogs.

[tas-ss7a]

The Ancient Maya Empire: It Flourished and Mysteriously Ended by Alyssa.

Hiiiiiiii, welcomeee backkk to anotherr blogg!! It's me, Alyssa :)) 

So... today im going to talk about The ancient of the Maya empire. This article is about the Maya empire flourished and mysteriously ended. Let’s get started!!! 

The Maya Empire was centered in what is now Guatemala. The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, writing, calendar-making and mathematics. They left behind an astonishing  amount of amazing artwork and architecture.

So as you guys may know or not know yet, Mesoamerica is a term used to describe Mexico and Central America before the Spanish conquered the region in the 16th century. The Maya civilization was one of the most dominant societies of Mesoamerica. It covered parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. The Maya lived in three separate sub-areas. They built the great stone cities and monuments that have fascinated explores and scholars worldwide. 

Maya farmers were very successful. The earliest Maya settlements date to around 1800 B.C, the beginning of what is called the Preclassic or Formative Period. They grew crops such as corn, beans, squash and cassava. The Maya borrowed a number of religious and cultural traits from the Olmec, including their number system and famous calendar. In addition to agriculture, the Preclassic Maya also displayed more advanced cultural traits.They built pyramids and cities and inscribed stone monuments. 

Religion played a big role in their society. The Classic Period began around A.D 250. It was the golden age of the Maya Empire. Classic Maya civilization grew to about 40 cities. The Maya population may have reached 2 million. Maya  cities were surrounded and supported by a large population of farmers. The Maya were deeply religious. They worshiped various gods related to nature. The classic Maya built many of their temples and palaces in a stepped pyramid shape. They were the first to use the number zero. They also developed a complex calendar based on 365 days. For the early paper and books, the Maya also made paper from tree bark and wrote in books made from this paper. The Maya took the advantage of the area’s many natural resources, including limestones, salt, and the volcanic rock obsidian for tools and weapons. 

Overall, for me, the Maya empire is a powerful empire because they developed lots of stuff that people use now like paper, books, calendars, tools, weapons and much more. The Maya didn't just disappear because several million descendants are still alive today. 

So that's all for today, see you guys in the next blog =))) byeeeeeeee